The Listening Walls (17 page)

He picked up the phone and called a number in Atherton.

A woman answered on the second ring. “This is the Brandon residence.”

“I'd like to speak to Mrs. Brandon, please.”

“Mrs. Brandon has retired for the night.”

“It's very important.”

“She's got a headache. I have orders not to dis—”

“Is that Miss Lundquist?”

“Why yes.”

Dodd oiled up his voice. “I'm a friend of Mr. Bran­don's. He's often spoken of you, Miss Lundquist.”

“He has? Well, my goodness.”

“My name is Dodd. I must talk to Mrs. Brandon. Tell her that, will you?”

“I guess, being as it's so important, she won't mind. Hold on.”

Dodd held on, cradling the phone between his shoul­der and his ear while he lit a cigarette. He could hear nothing from the other end, no whispers or sounds of movement. He thought the line was dead. Minutes passed, and he was on the point of hanging up when Helene Bran­don spoke suddenly and sharply in his ear: “Hello, who is this?”

“Elmer Dodd.”

“We're not acquainted.”

“We are, in a sense, Mrs. Brandon. We had a tele­phone conversation a couple of hours ago.”

“Is this your idea of a joke? I've never talked to you on the telephone or any other way.”

“I was at Kellogg's house when you called. Kellogg wasn't.”

After a brief pause, she said in a low, muffled voice, “Is my husband with you?”

“No.”

“Does he know—about my call?”

“I haven't told him. But he's going to find out. So is everybody else in Northern California when this hits the newspapers.”

“The newspapers? Why should the newspapers be in­terested in a private conversation between me and my brother-in-law, or what I thought was my brother-in-law? And why should you want to tell them?”

“I don't want to,” Dodd said. “I have to. I've got a li­cense to hang on to. I can't withhold evidence.”

“Evidence? Of what?”

“Brandon hasn't been in touch with you?”

“No. He's not home yet. I'm beginning to worry. He's never this late, I don't know where he can be.”

“He's still at Kellogg's house.”

“You shouldn't have left him alone with Rupert,” she said shrilly. “God knows what will happen.”

“Kellogg isn't there. He's skipped town, with the police on his tail.”

“Police? Why? Have they found—Amy?”

“Not Amy. A man, a stranger. He was murdered in Kellogg's house with a kitchen knife, sometime this afternoon.”

“Oh, my God! Rupert—Rupert . . .”

“I think Kellogg meant to get rid of the body. He started to clean up the mess but there was too much of it. He decided to leave town instead. So he picked up his dog, and his girlfriend, and left.”

“What girlfriend?”

“The one he lied to you about. You saw her in Lassi­ter's at noon.” Dodd paused. “What happened, Mrs. Brandon? Did you walk in unexpectedly and louse up the rendezvous?”

She didn't answer immediately. He thought she might be crying, but when she spoke again her voice was clear and crisp, with no evidence of tears. “She came in while I was talking to Rupert at the lunch counter. She was heading straight for him until he turned and stared at her. I'm not a mind reader, but I know there was a message in that look of his. Anyway, she bought a pack­age of cigarettes and left. When I asked Rupert about her, he said he'd never seen her before. I had a feeling then, that he was lying. I still have. But it's only a feeling, there's no evidence to back it up.”

“There might be. What did the girl look like? And how much of a girl was she, and how much of a woman?”

“Early twenties. Blond, quite pretty, a bit overweight. She looked ill at ease and uncomfortable, as if her clothes were too new and too tight. I thought at the time she was a girl from the country, used to doing a lot of out­side work. The tan she had wasn't the kind we get around these parts. It was more like the kind you see on the mi­grant workers who pick fruit and cotton on the ranches in the Valley.”

“A lot of the migrants are Mexican,” Dodd said.

“A lot are white too. They both end up with the same color skin.”

“You said her hair was blond?”

“Bleached.”

“By the sun or the bottle?”

“Even in the Valley the sun doesn't get that strong.”

“Have you any reason to believe the girl came from the Valley?”

“Her feet. They were very wide and flat, as if she was used to going barefoot.”

He didn't argue the point, but he knew that very few of the Valley pickers went barefoot if they could afford shoes. Under the noon sun the ground grew hot as a kiln.

“I saw her again later,” Helene said. “She walked through Union Square with a man about ten years older than she was. I thought he might be her brother. He had the same coloring, and they had the same general air about them, as if they were ill at ease in the city and didn't belong there. I'm pretty sure they were arguing about something, though I didn't overhear any actual words.”

“The man was wearing a plaid sport jacket?”

“Why—why yes. How did you know?”

“I saw him.”

“Were you in the Square too?”

“No. I saw him later.”
The rest of a lifetime later.

“Who is—was he?”

“An acquaintance of your sister-in-law, I think.”

“You make that word ‘acquaintance' sound dirty.”

“Do I? Well, let's face it, Mrs. Brandon—when I dress for a job like this I don't put on clean, white gloves.”

“You mean Amy and this man were . . .”

“Acquainted.”

“It still sounds dirty.”

“Maybe you're just hearing it dirty,” Dodd said. “Amy and O'Donnell met in the bar of a Mexico City hotel. Amy's gone, O'Donnell's dead. Now you know as much about it as I do. For further information consult your local newspaper.”

“The papers. Oh God. This will be in all the papers. Gill will . . .”

Dodd didn't want to be told what Gill would. He'd seen and heard enough of the man. He said brusquely, “Mrs. Brandon, when you met Kellogg at Lassiter's at noon, did he mention his wife?”

“Yes. He said Amy would be coming back soon. By Thanksgiving or Christmas.”

“That's not very soon.”

“Isn't it? I guess that depends on your viewpoint.” She paused, as if she was trying to decide whether to tell him how she really felt about Amy. Then she said, “Do you think she's coming back?”

“I'm beginning to wonder,” Dodd said, “if she ever went away.”

A kitchen knife wasn't generally the kind of weapon used in a planned or premeditated murder. It was a weapon of emergency, seized upon suddenly in a mo­ment of fury or fear. Fists were a man's customary instru­ments of quick attack and defense. A woman's were whatever happened to occur to her or to be handy. The knife may have been lying on the kitchen counter, ready to be picked up.

There were only five women involved in the case. One of them, Wilma Wyatt, was dead. The others were living, or presumed living: Miss Burton, Helene Brandon, the young woman with the bleached hair, and Amy herself. Of these four, only the young woman and Amy were definitely known to be acquainted with O'Donnell. But it was possible that Miss Burton had met him through Kellogg, and that even Helene Brandon, for all her pro­testations of innocence and ignorance, had known the dead man. Known him, and had reason to fear him. In that case, Helene's blundering phone call to Kellogg's house might not have been a blunder at all, but part of a plan with a triple purpose: to try and establish her own innocence, and to find out if the body had been discovered and identified, and to make sure that the girl with the bleached hair was brought into the case. Bringing in the girl would direct attention away from herself and her own still-obscure part in the affair.

But what possible connection, he wondered, could Helene Brandon have had with O'Donnell? And if there had been any connection, would she have freely admitted seeing O'Donnell in the Square?

No,
he thought,
it doesn't make sense. The woman at the bottom of this is not Helene, it's Amy. It all comes back to Amy—where did she go and why did she leave?

A wild idea rose to the surface of his consciousness like some improbable sea monster. Suppose Amy hadn't left at all, suppose she'd been living in that house all the time, under cover, for reasons no one yet knew. Incredible as the theory seemed, it would account for a number of things: the dismissal of the maid, Gerda Lundquist; the removal of the little dog, Mack, who might have given Amy's presence away; the letters, which had certainly been written by Amy, but not necessarily from a distance, perhaps right in her own bedroom.

Doors began opening in his mind, revealing rooms that were peopled with shadows and voiced with echoes. None of the shadows could be positively identified, and the echoes were like the nonsense syllables produced by a tape recording running backward. But in one corner of one room, a faceless woman sat at a desk, writing.

The telephone conversation with Helene Brandon con­tinued.

“Mr. Dodd? Are you still . . .?”

“I'm here.”

“Listen to me. Please listen. There's nothing to be gained by dragging me into this.”

“You have important evidence.”

“But I gave it to you.
You
have it now. That's what counts, isn't it—the evidence itself, not who tells it to the police. Can't you keep me out of it? I'll pay.”

“If I keep you out of it, I'll be the one who ends up paying.”

“There must be ways.”

“Name one.”

She was silent a moment. He could hear her heavy, ir­regular breathing, as if thinking was to her a violent phys­ical exercise.

“You,” she said finally, “you could have been the one who saw Rupert and the girl at Lassiter's, at lunch time.”

“Maybe I could, except I ate my lunch out of a paper bag in my office.”

“Alone?”

“A couple of flies joined me for dessert.”

“Please, for heaven's sake, be serious. You don't know what this means to me and my family. My three children are all in school. They're old enough to suffer from this, suffer terribly.”

“You can't prevent their suffering. Their uncle is wanted for murder.”

“At least he's not a blood relative. I am. I'm their mother. If I'm dragged into this, God help them.”

“O.K., O.K.,” Dodd said flatly. “So I saw Rupert and the girl at Lassiter's. What was I doing there?”

“Having lunch.”

“My secretary knows damned well I took my lunch to work.”

“All right then, you were trailing Rupert—or is it tail­ing?”

“Either.”

“When the girl came into the picture you decided to tail her instead, so you did. She went to Union Square where she met . . .”

“How did she get to Union Square?”

“Took the Powell Street cable car.”

“Do you know that or are you making it up?”

“Making it up. But it sounds plausible, isn't that what we're aiming at? Besides, she entered the Square from Powell Street.”

“What time?”

“I don't know, I sort of lost track of time. I was—think­ing about Amy coming home. And other things.” She coughed, as if to warn herself not to step on dangerous ground. “I remember it started to rain, and the old men who were feeding the pigeons got up and left.”

“It started to rain about three o'clock.” He wouldn't have noticed the time or the rain particularly, except that his secretary had come into his office to tell him in her own peculiar way, that she was going down to the drug­store to buy a bottle of cold pills.
“Some people believe that rain cleanses and washes the air. But I happen to know for a fact that what it does is bring down all the viruses and bacteria from outer space, also Strontium 90. I suppose you don't care about Strontium 90, but when your bones begin to decay inside you . . .”

“Three o'clock,” Helene said. “Yes, it must have been about that.”

“Where did she meet her friend in the plaid sport jacket?”

“I have no idea. It was simply a coincidence that I saw her again. I wasn't following her or looking for her or anything. She just appeared.”

“O.K., that's how I'll have to play it, as a coincidence. The police don't like coincidences, though.”