She turned on him in a blubbering rage. He drew himself up tall and reached to snap his fingers under her nose. “Go back into the house. You are a disgrace to women, a disgrace to motherhood.”
“I’m not her mother, thank God.”
“Thank God,” he echoed, shaking his fist at her. She retreated like a schooner under full sail, menaced by a gunboat. The door closed on her. Salanda turned to me:
“I’m sorry, Mr. Archer. I have difficulties with my wife, I am ashamed to say it. I was an imbecile to marry again. I gained a senseless hulk of flesh, and lost my daughter. Old imbecile!” he denounced himself, wagging his great head sadly. “I married in hot blood. Sexual passion has always been my downfall. It runs in my family, this insane hunger for blondeness and stupidity and size.” He spread his arms in a wide and futile embrace on emptiness.
“Forget it.”
“If I could.” He came closer to examine my face. “You are injured, Mr. Archer. Your mouth is damaged. There is blood on your chin.”
“I was in a slight brawl.”
“On my account?”
“On my own. But I think it’s time you levelled with me.”
“Levelled with you?”
“Told me the truth. You knew who was shot last night, and who shot him, and why.”
He touched my arm, with a quick, tentative grace. “I have only one daughter, Mr. Archer, only the one child. It was my duty to defend her, as best as I could.”
“Defend her from what?”
“From shame, from the police, from prison.” He flung one arm out, indicating the whole range of human disaster. “I am a man of honor, Mr. Archer. But private honor stands higher with me than public honor. The man was abducting my daughter. She brought him here in the hope of being rescued. Her last hope.”
“I think that’s true. You should have told me this before.”
“I was alarmed, upset. I feared your intentions. Any minute the police were due to arrive.”
“But you had a right to shoot him. It wasn’t even a crime. The crime was his.”
“I didn’t know that then. The truth came out to me gradually. I feared that Ella was involved with him.” His flat black gaze sought my face and rested on it. “However, I did not shoot him, Mr. Archer. I was not even here at the time. I told you that this morning, and you may take my word for it.”
“Was Mrs. Salanda here?”
“No sir, she was not. Why should you ask me that?”
“Donny described the woman who checked in with the dead man. The description fits your wife.”
“Donny was lying. I told him to give a false description of the woman. Apparently he was unequal to the task of inventing one.”
“Can you prove that she was with you?”
“Certainly I can. We had reserved seats at the theatre. Those who sat around us can testify that the seats were not empty. Mrs. Salanda and I, we are not an inconspicuous couple.” He smiled wryly.
“Ella killed him then.”
He neither assented, nor denied it. “I was hoping that you were on my side, my side and Ella’s. Am I wrong?”
“I’ll have to talk to her, before I know myself. Where is she?”
“I do not know, Mr. Archer, sincerely I do not know. She went away this afternoon, after the policemen questioned her. They were suspicious, but we managed to soothe their suspicions. They did not know that she had just come home, from another life, and I did not tell them. Mabel wanted to tell them. I silenced her.” His white teeth clicked together.
“What about Donny?”
“They took him down to the station for questioning. He told them nothing damaging. Donny can appear very stupid when he wishes. He has the reputation of an idiot, but he is not so dumb. Donny has been with me for many years. He has a deep devotion for my daughter. I got him released tonight.”
“You should have taken my advice,” I said, “taken the police into your confidence. Nothing would have happened to you. The dead man was a mobster, and what he was doing amounts to kidnaping. Your daughter was a witness against his boss.”
“She told me that. I am glad that it is true. Ella has not always told me the truth. She has been a hard girl to bring up, without a good mother to set her an example. Where has she been these last six months, Mr. Archer?”
“Singing in a night club in Palm Springs. Her boss was a racketeer.”
“A racketeer?” His mouth and nose screwed up, as if he sniffed the odor of corruption.
“Where she was isn’t important, compared with where she is now. The boss is still after her. He hired me to look for her.”
Salanda regarded me with fear and dislike, as if the odor originated in me. “You let him hire you?”
“It was my best chance of getting out of his place alive. I’m not his boy, if that’s what you mean.”
“You ask me to believe you?”
“I’m telling you. Ella is in danger. As a matter of fact, we all are.” I didn’t tell him about the second black Cadillac. Gino would be driving it, wandering the night roads with a ready gun in his armpit and revenge corroding his heart.
“My daughter is aware of the danger,” he said. “She warned me of it.”
“She must have told you where she was going.”
“No. But she may be at the beach house. The house where Donny lives. I will come with you.”
“You stay here. Keep your doors locked. If any strangers show and start prowling the place, call the police.”
He bolted the door behind me as I went out. Yellow traffic lights cast wan reflections on the asphalt. Streams of cars went by to the north, to the south. To the west, where the sea lay, a great black emptiness opened under the stars. The beach house sat on its white margin, a little over a mile from the motel.
For the second time that day, I knocked on the warped kitchen door. There was light behind it, shining through the cracks. A shadow obscured the light.
“Who is it?” Donny said. Fear or some other emotion had filled his mouth with pebbles.
“You know me, Donny.”
The door groaned on its hinges. He gestured dumbly to me to come in, his face a white blur. When he turned his head, and the light from the living room caught his face, I saw that grief was the emotion that marked it. His eyes were swollen as if he had been crying. More than ever he resembled a dilapidated boy whose growing pains had never paid off in manhood.
“Anybody with you?”
Sounds of movement in the living room answered my question. I brushed him aside and went in. Ella Salanda was bent over an open suitcase on the camp cot. She straightened, her mouth thin, eyes wide and dark. The .38 automatic in her hand gleamed dully under the naked bulb suspended from the ceiling.
“I’m getting out of here,” she said, “and you’re not going to stop me.”
“I’m not sure I want to try. Where are you going, Fern?”
Donny spoke behind me, in his grief-thickened voice: “She’s going away from me. She promised to stay here if I did what she told me. She promised to be my girl—”
“Shut up, stupid.” Her voice cut like a lash, and Donny gasped as if the lash had been laid across his back.
“What did she tell you to do, Donny? Tell me just what you did.”
“When she checked in last night with the fella from Detroit. She made a sign I wasn’t to let on I knew her. Later on she left me a note. She wrote it with a lipstick on a piece of paper towel. I still got it hidden, in the kitchen.”
“What did she write in the note?”
He lingered behind me, fearful of the gun in the girl’s hand, more fearful of her anger.