The shirt, he thought. That’s it, it’s the shirt that bothers me, the piece of cloth snagged on the hinge of the car door. On the stormiest night of the year why wasn’t O’Gorman wearing a jacket or a raincoat?
Ronda came back, carrying two cardboard boxes labeled simply Patrick O’Gorman. The boxes contained newspaper clippings, photographs, snapshots, copies of telegrams and letters to and from various police officials. Though most of them originated in California, Nevada and Arizona, others came from remote parts of the country and Mexico and Canada. The material was arranged in chronological order, but to go through it all would require considerable time and patience.
Quinn said, “May I borrow the file overnight?”
“What do you intend to do with it?”
“Take it to my motel and examine it. There are one or two points I’d like to go into more fully—the condition of the car, for instance. Was there a heater in it and was it switched on?”
“What’s that got to do with anything?”
“If the accident happened the way Mrs. O’Gorman believes it did, O’Gorman was driving around on the stormiest night of the year in his shirt sleeves.”
Ronda looked puzzled for a minute. “I don’t think anything was ever brought up concerning a heater in the car.”
“It should have been.”
“All right, take the stuff with you for tonight. Maybe you’ll come across some other little thing the rest of us missed.”
He sounded as if he felt the project was hopeless, and by eight o’clock that night Quinn was beginning to share the feeling. The facts in the case were meager, and the possibilities seemed endless.
Including infanticide, Quinn thought. Maybe Martha O’Gorman was getting pretty tired of her little boy, Patrick.
One item that especially interested Quinn was from a transcript of Martha O’Gorman’s testimony before the coroner’s jury: “It was about 8:30. The children were in bed sleeping and I was reading the newspaper. Patrick acted restless and worried, he couldn’t seem to settle down. Finally I asked him what was the matter and he told me he’d made a mistake that afternoon and wanted to go back to the field office to correct it before anyone discovered it. Patrick was so terribly conscientious about his work—please, I can’t go on. Please. Oh Lord, help me—”
Very touching, Quinn thought. But the fact remains, the children were asleep, and Martha and Patrick O’Gorman could have left the house together.
No evidence was brought out about a heater in the car, although the piece of wool flannel with the bloodstains on it was discussed at length. The blood type was the same as O’Gorman’s, and the flannel was part of a shirt O’Gorman frequently wore. Both Martha and two of O’Gorman’s fellow clerks identified it. It was a bright yellow and black plaid, of the Macleod tartan, and his co-workers had kidded O’Gorman about an Irishman wearing a Scotch tartan.
“All right,” Quinn said, addressing the blank wall. “Suppose I’m O’Gorman. I’m sick of being a little boy. I want to run away and see the world. But I can’t face up to Martha so I have to disappear. I arrange to be in an accident while I’m wearing a shirt that will be identified as mine by a lot of people. I choose the time carefully, when the river is high and it’s still raining. O.K., I rig the accident and the piece of flannel with my own blood on it. Then what? I’m left standing in my underwear in a heavy rainstorm three miles from town with only two bucks to my name. Great planning, O’Gorman, really great.”
By nine o’clock he was more than willing to believe in Ronda’s hitchhiking stranger.
Four
Quinn ate a late dinner at El Bocado, a bar and grill across the street from his motel. Entertainment facilities in Chicote were limited and the place was crowded to the doors with ranchers in ten-gallon Stetsons and oil workers in their field clothes. There weren’t many women: a few wives already worried at nine about driving home at twelve; a quartet of self-conscious girls celebrating a birthday and acting a good deal noisier than the two prostitutes at the bar; a prim-faced woman about thirty standing near the door. She wore a blue turban, horn-rimmed spectacles and no make-up. She looked as if she had entered the place thinking it was the YWCA, and was now trying to muster the courage to walk out.
She spoke briefly to one of the waitresses. The waitress glanced around the room, her eyes finally settling on Quinn.
She approached him without hesitation. “Would you mind sharing your table, mister? There’s a lady that has to eat before she catches the bus to L.A. Those bus stops serve lousy food.”
So did El Bocado, but Quinn said politely, “I don’t mind.” Then, to the woman in the turban, “Please sit down.”
“Thank you very much.”
She sat down opposite him as if she expected to find a bomb under the seat.
“This is very kind of you, sir.”
“Not at all.”
“It is, though.” She added, with an air of disdain, “In this town a lady never knows what to expect.”
“You don’t like Chicote?”
“Does anyone? I mean, it’s terribly uncouth. That’s why I’m leaving.”
She herself looked a bit too couth, Quinn decided. Some lipstick and a less severe hat that showed a little of her hair would have improved her. Even without them she was pretty, with the kind of earnest anemic prettiness Quinn associated with church choirs and amateur string quartets.
Over fish and chips and cole slaw, she told Quinn her name, Wilhelmina de Vries, her occupation, typist, her ambition, to be a private secretary to an important executive. Quinn told her his name, his occupation, security officer, and his ambition, to retire.
“A security officer,” she repeated. “You mean a policeman?”
“More or less.”
“Isn’t that simply fascinating? My goodness, are you here working on a case?”
“Let’s just say I’m having a little holiday.”
“No one comes to Chicote for a holiday. It’s the kind of place people are always trying to get out of, like me.”
“I’m interested in California history,” Quinn said. “Where towns like this got their names, for instance.”
She looked disappointed. “Oh, that’s easy. Some man came out here from Kentucky for his health in the late 1890’s. He was going to grow tobacco, fields and fields of the world’s finest tobacco for the world’s finest cigars. That’s what Chicote means, cigar. Only the tobacco didn’t grow, and the ranchers switched to cotton, which did. Then oil was discovered and that was the end of Chicote as an agricultural center. But here I am, doing all the talking, and you just sit there.” Her smile revealed a dimple in her left cheek. “Now it’s your turn. Where do you come from?”
“Reno.”
“What are you doing here?”
“Learning some California history,” Quinn said with considerable truth.
“That’s a funny way for a policeman to be spending his time.”
“Chacun à son gout, as they say in Hoboken.”
“How true,” she murmured. “Just as true here, I suppose, as it is in Hoboken.”
Although her face didn’t change expression, Quinn had a feeling that he was being kidded, and that, if Miss Wilhelmina de Vries sang in a church choir or played in a string quartet, some of the notes she produced would he intentionally off-key just for the hell of it.
“Please tell me really and truly and honestly,” she said, “why you’re visiting Chicote.”
“I like the climate.”