Gone. Quinn registered the word and her hesitation before saying it.
“Where did you know my husband, Mr. Quinn?”
There was no safe reply to this but Quinn picked one he considered fairly safe. “Pat and I were in the service together.”
“Oh. Well, come inside. I was just making some lemonade to have ready for the children when they get home.”
The front room was small and seemed smaller because of the wallpaper and carpeting. Mrs. O’Gorman’s taste—or perhaps O’Gorman’s—ran to roses, large red ones in the carpet, pink and white ones in the wallpaper. An air-conditioner, fitted into the side window, was whirring noisily but without much effect. The room was still hot.
“Please sit down, Mr. Quinn.”
“Thank you.”
“Now tell me about my husband.”
“I was hoping you’d tell me.”
“But that isn’t how it’s done, is it?” Mrs. O’Gorman said. “When a man comes to offer condolences to the widow of his old war buddy, reminiscences are usually called for, aren’t they? So please start reminiscing. You have my undivided attention.”
Quinn sat in an uneasy silence.
“Perhaps you’re the shy kind, Mr. Quinn, who needs a little help getting started. How about, ‘I’ll never forget the time that—’? Or you might prefer a more dramatic approach. For instance, the Germans were coming over the hill in swarms and you lay trapped inside your wrecked tank, injured, with only your good buddy Pat O’Gorman to look after you. You like that?”
Quinn shook his head. “Sorry, I never saw any Germans. Koreans, yes.”
“All right, switch locales. The scene changes to Korea. There’s not much sense in wasting that hill and the wrecked tank—”
“What’s on your mind, Mrs. O’Gorman?”
“What’s on yours?” she said with a small steely smile. “My husband was not in the service, and he never allowed anyone to call him Pat. So suppose you start all over, taking somewhat less liberty with the truth.”
“There isn’t any truth in this case, or very little. I never met your husband. I didn’t know he was dead. In fact, all I knew was his name and the fact that he lived here in Chicote at one time.”
“Then why are you here?”
“That’s a good question,” Quinn said, “I wish I could think of an equally good answer. The truth just isn’t plausible.”
“The listener is supposed to be the judge of plausibility. I’m listening.”
Quinn did some fast thinking. He had already disobeyed Sister Blessing’s orders not to try and contact O’Gorman. To bring her name into it now would serve no purpose. And ten chances to one Mrs. O’Gorman wouldn’t believe a word of it anyway, since the Brothers and Sisters of the Tower of Heaven didn’t make for a very convincing story. There was one possible way out: if O’Gorman’s death had taken place under peculiar circumstances (and Quinn remembered the way Mrs. O’Gorman had hesitated over the word “gone”) she might want to talk about it. And if she did the talking, he wouldn’t have to.
He said, “The fact is, I’m a detective, Mrs. O’Gorman.”
Her reaction was quicker and more intense than he had anticipated. “So they’re going to start in all over again, are they? I get a year or two of peace, I reach the point where I can walk down the street without people staring at me, feeling sorry for me, whispering about me. Now things will be right back where they were in the first place, newspaper headlines, silly men asking silly questions. My husband died by accident, can’t they get that through their thick skulls? He was not murdered, he did not commit suicide, he did not run away to begin a new life with a new identity. He was a devout and devoted man and I will not have his memory tarnished any further. As for you, I suggest you stick to tagging parked cars and picking up kids with expired bicycle licenses. There’s a bicycle in the front yard you can start with, it hasn’t had a license for two years. Now get out of here and don’t come back.”
Mrs. O’Gorman wasn’t a woman either to argue with or to try and charm. She was intelligent, forceful and embittered, and the combination was too much for Quinn. He left quickly and quietly.
Driving back to Main Street, he attempted to convince himself that his job was done except for the final step of reporting to Sister Blessing. O’Gorman had died by accident, his wife claimed. But what kind of accident? If the police had once suspected voluntary disappearance, it meant the body had never been found.
“My work is over,” he said aloud. “The whys and wheres and hows of O’Gorman’s death are none of my business. After five years the trail’s cold anyway. On to Reno.”
Thinking of Reno didn’t help erase O’Gorman from his mind. Part of Quinn’s job at the club, often a large part, was to be on the alert for men and women wanted by the police in other states and countries. Photographs, descriptions and Wanted circulars arrived daily and were posted for the security officers to study. A great many arrests were made quietly and quickly without interfering with a single spin of the roulette wheels. Quinn had once been told that more people wanted by the police were picked up in Reno and Las Vegas than in any other places in the country. The two cities were magnets for bank robbers and embezzlers, conmen and gangsters, any crook with a bank roll and a double-or-nothing urge.
Quinn parked his car in front of a cigar store and went in to buy a newspaper. The rack contained a variety, three from Los Angeles, two from San Francisco, a San Felice Daily Press, a Wall Street Journal, and a local weekly, The Chicote Beacon. Quinn bought a Beacon and turned to the editorial page. The paper was published on Eighth Avenue, and the publisher and editor was a man named John Harrison Ronda.
Ronda’s office was a cubicle surrounded by six-foot walls, the bottom-half wood paneling, the top-half plate glass. Standing, Ronda could see his whole staff, seated at his desk he could blot them all out. It was a convenient arrangement.
He was a tall, pleasant-faced, unhurried man in his fifties, with a deep resonant voice. “What can I do for you, Quinn?”
“I’ve just been talking to Patrick O’Gorman’s wife. Or shall we say, widow?”
“Widow.”
“Were you in Chicote when O’Gorman died?”
“Yes. Matter of fact I’d just used my last dime to buy this paper. It was in the red at the time and might still be there if the O’Gorman business hadn’t occurred. I had two big breaks within a month. First O’Gorman, and then three or four weeks later one of the local bank tellers, a nice little lady—why are some of the worst embezzlers such nice little ladies?—was caught with her fingers in the till. All ten of them. The Beacon’s circulation doubled within a year. Yes, I owe a lot to O’Gorman and I don’t mind admitting it. He was the ill wind that blew the wolf away from my door. So you’re a friend of his widow’s, are you?”
“No,” Quinn said cautiously. “Not exactly.”
“You’re sure?”
“I’m sure. She’s surer.”
Ronda seemed disappointed. “I’ve always kept hoping Martha O’Gorman would suddenly come up with a secret boyfriend. It would be a great thing if she married again, some nice man her own age.”
“Sorry, I don’t fit the picture. I’m older than I look and I have a vile temper.”
“All right, all right, I get the message. What I said still goes, though. Martha should remarry, stop living in the past. Every year O’Gorman seems to become more perfect in her eyes. I admit he was a good guy—a devoted husband, a loving father —but dead good guys are about the same as dead bad ones where the survivors are concerned. In fact, Martha would be better off now if she found out O’Gorman had been a first-class villain.”