“I hope so,“she said. “And I hope it’s good news.”
“Me too,” I said. “Me too.”
I spent the rest of the morning at the Hall of Justice, filling Russ Dancer in on the latest developments, asking him questions about Ivan Wade and Colodny and Meeker. He didn’t have anything new to tell me, except that Wade had begun experimenting with television scripting as early as 1949 and had also written an unsuccessful play. So there was no question that he had had the talent and the know-how to write the Evil by Gaslight screenplay.
Dancer was in better spirits than he had been on Sunday, even though I was careful not to build up his hopes. His faith in me was almost childlike. “You’ll get me out of here,” he said. “I know it; it’s just a matter of time. “You’re the best there is.”
Yeah.
Then I drove out to SFO, parked my car, took the overnight bag out of the trunk, and went in and bought myself a ticket. At 3:45 I was up in the friendly skies on my way to Tucson.
NINETEEN
The town of Wickstaff, Arizona, was one of those places plunked down in the middle of nowhere that make you wonder about their origins. There was nothing much surrounding it in any direction except rough terrain dominated by cacti, scrub brush, and eroded lava pinnacles-mile after mile of sun-blasted emptiness that stretched away to low, reddish foothills on three sides. Two roads cut through it north-south and east-west, both of them county-maintained and both two-lane blacktop; scattered here and there in its vicinity were a few hardscrabble ranches. And as far as I could tell, that was all there was. So why had it been created and nurtured in the first place? What had kept it alive when hundreds of others in the Southwest, including the fabled Tombstone, which was not all that far away and in a better geographical location, died natural deaths and became ghosts crumbling away into ruin or tourist bait?
On the outskirts was a sign that said, with evident civic pride, that the current population was the same as the date Wickstaff had been founded: 1897. I passed it, driving the cranky Duster I had rented in Tucson, a few minutes past noon on Wednesday. The temperature was in the nineties, but streaky clouds and heat haze gave the sky a whitish cast, made the sun look like a boiled egg, and kept the glare down outside. Inside, the air-conditioner whirred and clanked like an old Hoover vacuum cleaner and tunneled dust along with cool air through the vents.
I felt somewhat relieved to finally get where I’d been going. Twenty hours alone on an airplane, in a motel, driving back-country roads gives you too much time to think about things. Like Eberhardt and how marriages can go sour. And the murders, how they might have been committed. And Cybil Wade’s affair with Colodny. And Ivan Wade’s jealousy. And Kerry-mostly Kerry. I had lots of ideas, some of them good, some of them not so good, some of them unsettling; but on more than one level, it came right down to this: Was Ivan Wade guilty of murder or wasn’t he? Without knowing the answer to that, I could not resolve my situation with Kerry or convince the San Francisco cops that Russ Dancer was innocent.
But now here I was, welcome to Wickstaff, and I could start doing things instead of brooding about them. The first thing I could do was to find out where Colodny had lived when he wasn’t keeping house with a bunch of ghosts. The second thing after that was to find out how to get to Colodnyville.
Neither figured to be difficult, Wickstaff being as small as it was, and they weren’t. The town had a three-block main street, with about a third of the buildings of grandfatherly vintage, made out of adobe brick and sporting Western-style false fronts. One of these in the second block housed something called the Elite Cafe. I parked in front and went in there, on the theory that if anybody knows everybody in a small town, it’s the people who run a local eatery. It was a good theory in this case: a dour middle-aged waitress told me Colodny had boarded with a Mrs. Duncan on Quartz Street, turn right at the next corner, three blocks down, first house on your left. I also learned that word had found its way here from San Francisco about Colodny’s death; the waitress asked me if I was kin or a friend of his, and when I said no she said, “He was a mean old bastard,” and left it at that. Colodny, it seemed, had not been any better liked among the folks of Wickstaff than he had among the Pulpeteers.
I went out and got into the Duster and turned right at the next corner, drove three blocks down, and stopped again in front of the first house on my left. It was a big frame house, somewhat weathered, with a wide front porch that was shaded by paloverde trees. A Conestoga wagon wheel, painted white, had been imbedded in the patchy front lawn, and against it was propped a sign that said: Room for Rent. On the porch, in the shade, a fat woman in a straw hat sat in a wicker chair and peered out at me with kindled interest.
The walk from the car to the porch was maybe thirty yards, but I felt wet when I got there. The Arizona heat was something; so was that starched-looking sky. And so was the fat woman. She must have weighed three hundred pounds, and she had an angelic face, a voice that came out of a whiskey keg, a pair of raisinlike eyes that picked my pocket and counted the money in my wallet. The most interesting thing about her, though, was the fact that she didn’t sweat. She sat there in her chair, swaddled in heat, and her face was powder dry; she didn’t even look uncomfortable. It seemed unnatural somehow, particularly when I could feel myself dripping and simmering in front of her, like an ice cube on a hot stove.
“Hot day,” I said.
“Is it? Didn’t notice.”
“Are you Mrs. Duncan?”
“That’s me. It’s one-fifty per week, meals included.”
“What is?”
“The room. That’s why you’re here, isn’t it?”
“No, ma’am. Not exactly.”
She lost interest in me. She didn’t move, her expression didn’t change, but the light of avarice went out of her raisin eyes and was replaced by a dull glow of boredom. If it had not required too much effort, she might have yawned in my face. Or told me to go away. As it was she just sat still and watched me sweat.
“I’m here about Frank Colodny,” I said.
That didn’t interest her much either. “Policeman?”
“Private investigator, from San Francisco.”
“Is that a fact.”
“Yes, ma’am. Would you mind answering a few questions?”
“About Frank?”
“Yes, about Frank.”
“Don’t see why I should, if you’re not a cop.”
“It might help save a man’s life, Mrs. Duncan.”
“Whose life?”
“The man in San Francisco charged with killing Colodny,” I said. “I think he’s innocent and I’m trying to prove it.”
“If he’s been charged he must be guilty.”
“Not in this case. If you knew the facts-”
“I’m not interested,” she said.
We looked at each other. She was not going to give an inch, you could see that; she was a sweet old bitch. I rubbed sweat off my forehead with the back of one hand, and that made her mouth twitch in what might have been a smile. Then I dragged out my wallet and opened it and took out a five-dollar bill. That put the smile away, made the avarice reappear in her eyes-not much of it, just about five dollars’ worth.
“Answers,” I said. “Okay?”
She held out one flabby arm. I gave her the five and she made it disappear into the folds of her housedress. The greed-light disappeared with it. She was bored again, now that she had the money.
I asked her, “How long did Colodny board with you?”
“Six years, give or take.”
“Where did he live before that?”
“Place over on Cholla that burned down. Most of the time he lived out in the hills with his wife.”
“Wife? I didn’t know he was married.”
It wasn’t a question, so she didn’t say anything.
I said, “Where can I find her?”