Маргарет Миллар - The Listening Walls

“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.