“It’s miserable.”
“The people.”
“Uncouth.”
“The cuisine.”
“A starving dog would turn up his nose at this awful stuff. You know something? I’ll bet a dollar to a doughnut you’re working on a case.”
“I’m a betting man but I’m fresh out of doughnuts.”
“No, seriously, you really are here on a case, aren’t you?” Her blue-green eyes glistened behind the thick lenses of her spectacles. “There hasn’t been anything interesting happening lately so it has to be an old case.... Does it involve money, a lot of money?”
It was one question Quinn could answer without hesitation. “Nothing I do involves a lot of money, Miss de Vries. What did you have in mind?”
“Nothing.”
“So you’re going down to Los Angeles to find a job?”
“Yes.”
“Where’s your suitcase?”
“Suit—oh, I checked it. At the bus depot. So I wouldn’t have to carry it around. It’s heavy, since all my clothes are in it and everything. And it’s a terribly big suitcase in the first place.”
If she’d simply claimed to have checked the suitcase, he might have believed her, having no reason not to. But she’d elaborated too much, as though she’d been trying to make the suitcase real to herself as well as Quinn.
The waitress brought Quinn’s check.
“I must be going,” he said, rising. “Nice to have met you, Miss de Vries. And good luck in the big city.”
He paid the cashier and walked across the street to his motel. The garage belonging to the first unit was open. He stepped inside, watching the door of El Bocado café.
He didn’t have long to wait. Miss Wilhelmina de Vries came out, stood hesitantly on the curb, and looked up and down the street. A wind had started blowing, brisk but very warm, and she was attempting to hold down her skirt and her turban at the same rime. Modesty finally won out. She unwound the turban, which turned out to be a long blue scarf, and stuffed it into her purse. Under the street lamp her hair, released from its confinement, sprung up in all directions and shone in the light, the color of persimmons. She walked half a block down the street, climbed into a small dark sedan, and drove off.
Quinn had no chance to follow her. By the time he could get his own car out of the garage and on the road, she would be home, or at the bus depot or wherever else young ladies like Miss de Vries went after an unsuccessful attempt to pump information out of a stranger. She was, obviously, an amateur at the game, and the turban, and probably the spectacles, too, were a crude disguise. Quinn wondered why she’d bothered with a disguise when he didn’t even know her. Then he remembered sitting in John Ronda’s office at the Beacon and seeing through the glass partition the tops of three heads. One of them had had hair the color of persimmons.
All right, assume she was there, Quinn thought. Ronda had a loud, distinct voice, and the walls of his office were only six feet high. Miss de Vries could have overheard something of sufficient interest to her to make her assume a disguise and arrange a pick-up in the El Bocado café, maybe with the collaboration of the waitress. But exactly what had she heard? The only subject he and Ronda had discussed was the O’Gorman case, the details of which were common knowledge in Chicote, the evidence a matter of public record available to anyone.
Miss de Vries had made what could be construed as a reference to O’Gorman—”it has to be an old case”—and then practically nullified it by adding, “Does it involve a lot of money?” There was no money connected with the O’Gorman business except the two one-dollar bills O’Gorman was carrying when he left the house for the last time.
Ronda’s only mention of a subject unconnected with O’Gorman was his brief remark about a nice little lady embezzler caught with her fingers in the till. Quinn wondered what had happened to the nice little lady, and the money, and who else had been involved.
He crossed the driveway and went into the motel office to pick up his key. The night clerk, an old man with arthritis-swollen hands, looked up from the movie magazine he was reading. “Yes, sir?”
“The key to number seventeen, please.”
“Seventeen, yes, sir. Just a minute.” He shuffled over to the key rack. “Ingrid’s not about to make a go of it with Lars any more than Debbie will with Harry. And you can quote me.”
“Oh, I will,” Quinn said. “Daily.”
“What’s that number again?”
“Seventeen.”
“It’s not here.” The old man peered at Quinn over the top of his bifocals. “Why, I gave you number seventeen not more than an hour ago. You told me your name and gave me the license number of your car like it’s written right here in the book.”
“I wasn’t here an hour ago.”
“You must of been. I gave you the key. Only you had a hat on, a gray fedora, and you were wearing a topcoat. Maybe you been drinking and don’t remember? Liquor befogs the memory something fierce. They say Dean has trouble with his lines on account of belting too many.”
“At nine o’clock,” Quinn said wearily, “I turned my key in to the girl who was here in the office.”
“My granddaughter.”
“All right, your granddaughter. I haven’t been back since. Now, if you don’t mind, I want into my room, I’m tired.”
“Been carousing around, eh?”
“That’s right. Carousing around trying to forget Ingrid and Debbie. Now find your passkeys and let’s get going.”
Grumbling, the old man led the way outside and down the driveway. The air was still hot and dry, and not even the brisk wind could dispel the faint odor of oil that hung over the city.
Quinn said, “Pretty warm night for a hat and topcoat, isn’t it?”
“I ain’t wearing a hat and a topcoat.”
“The man you gave my key to was.”
“All that carousing’s befogged your memory.” They had reached the door of Quinn’s room and the old man let out a sudden cry of triumph. “Lookie here, will you? See, the key’s right in the lock where you left it. I told you. I gave it to you and you forgot about it. Now what do you think of that, eh?”
“Very little.”
“You traveling fellows get careless, belting the booze and all.”
There didn’t seem to be any way of convincing the old man he was wrong, so Quinn said good night and locked himself in the room.
It looked, at first glance, exactly the way he’d left it, the bed rumpled, the pillows propped against the headboard, the goosenecked lamp switched on. The two cardboard boxes containing Ronda’s file on O’Gorman were still on the desk. It was impossible for Quinn to tell whether anything had been removed from them. Even Ronda, who had collected the material, might find it difficult, since he probably hadn’t looked through it for years.
Quinn removed the lid from the first box. In a large manila envelope were the pictures of O’Gorman which Martha had given to Ronda: one formal photograph, obviously very old, since O’Gorman looked about twenty at the time; the rest snapshots, O’Gorman with the children, with a dog and cat, with Martha; O’Gorman changing a tire, standing beside a bicycle. In every case O’Gorman looked like a part of the background, and it was the dog and cat, the children, Martha, the bicycle, which seemed the real subjects of the pictures. Only the formal photograph showed O’Gorman’s face clearly. He’d been a handsome young man with curly black hair and large gentle eyes with a faint expression of bafflement in them, as though he found life puzzling and not quite what he’d been led to expect. It was the kind of face that would appeal to a lot of women, especially the ones who might think they could solve life’s puzzles for him and, motherlike, kiss away the hurts and bruises it inflicted.