“Please tell him I’ll be down in a few moments, Marian.”
She went down the hall to the bathroom and sponged her face with cold water until her color was better. There had been so pitifully few new clothes during the short years of marriage. But the few things she had were good, and she had given them care and attention. The night was cool. She put on a green knit dress, a yellow scarf as a turban, a short oyster-white corduroy coat. She went down the stairs with her head high.
“Not you,” Brock Ellison said. “I want that sick Mrs. Talbott.”
Marian stared at her petulantly. “I guess you must be feeling better.”
“I am, thank you.”
She went out with Brock, and he helped her into the gray coupe. He drove two blocks, turned down a narrow street, and parked beside the curb where maples made black shadows.
“Cigarette?” he asked.
“Please.”
He lit hers and his own, shook out the match. “I suppose you know I’ve been called off.”
“My brother-in-law told me.”
He slouched in the seat. “It happened today. I told myself I ought to be relieved. This is a nasty, unpleasant, unsatisfactory bit of work. I told myself I was well out of it. But it isn’t that easy. I’d like to go on with it.”
“I can’t pay you.”
“I assumed as much. You can owe me, if you want to.”
“It will be a long time before I can ever pay you.”
“That’s all right. It doesn’t matter.”
“Mr. Ellison, I don’t want charity. I’m tired of it, frankly.”
“And I’m tired of wondering why I don’t want to quit this case. I never work for free. Here is as close as I can come. I like your looks. I think you’re in a bad jam. Maybe chivalry is raising its ugly head.”
“Forty-dollar-a-day chivalry?”
“Okay. A forty-dollar-a-day mad infatuation. Or softness of the brain. I just know I want to complete the job.”
“What have you found out?”
“I only talk to clients. Are you a client?”
Her voice thickened. “Don’t tease me, Mr. Ellison. I can’t — seem—”
“Hey, now,” he said softly. “What goes here, Beth? What’s happened?”
She could no longer hold back the ugly sobs. “Both of them. They think I know where the money is. Everybody thinks that. I think they stopped helping me to see if maybe I’d go and get the money. Nobody trusts—”
She felt his arm across her shoulders, pulling her gently toward him. She resisted, and he forced her head down against his shoulder. “Get it over with,” he whispered.
She let the tears come. All of them. She had cried since regaining consciousness, but nothing like this. His arm around her and the harshness of the tweed against her face seemed to enable her to dig down to the very source of tears and find them all. She cried for all the lost years and hopeless dreams.
When at last the sobs became fewer and began to sound ridiculously like hiccups, she sat up and dug in her purse for a tissue. She wiped her eyes, blew her nose.
“Darn silly performance, Brock,” she said sternly. “Feel your shoulder. Did I get you sopping wet? I bet I did.”
“Felt good though, didn’t it?”
“Yes, darn it.”
“Made me feel masterful to have a woman crying on my shoulder.”
She laughed in a choked way. He said, “That’s the first laugh I’ve heard out of you, Beth. You know, there’s a look of humor in your face. How long since you’ve laughed?”
“Don’t make me feel sorry for myself again, or I’ll start all over.”
“Are you a client?”
“I... I guess I am.”
“Then I’ll tell you a story. A sad little story, Beth. All about Roger Talbott. You were right about him, in the beginning, back in the high-school days. A sober, industrious guy. They drafted him, and he looked like officer material. They sent him to OCS after he got out of basic. He was good with men. They gave him his little gold bar and sent him to India.”
“He was assigned to the Air Corps.”
“After he got to India. Right. He became the assistant to a Major Fineel with the Air Transport Command stationed in Calcutta. Fineel had something to do with the direction of aircraft maintenance. Fineel knew the East. He knew how easy it was to make money. That big, cheerful, gullible second lieutenant was a godsend to Fineel. I’m guessing some of this. I dug out the rest. Fineel kept sending Roger, on travel orders, up to China. Each time Roger went he carried a small box of what Fineel called ‘critical aircraft parts.’ Roger turned them over to a captain at the Fourteenth Air Force headquarters building near the Kunming airstrip. One day some CIC boys were waiting for him in Kunming. They took the box of aircraft parts away from him. Roger didn’t know what was up. He was arrested.”
“That doesn’t make sense!”
“It didn’t to Roger, either. Fineel was smuggling gold to a confederate in China, using Roger as an unwitting courier. There was a fat profit in smuggling those little gold bars from India to China. The Chinese Nationalists were upset about the gold smuggling. They put the heat on headquarters. Nobody was in any mood to listen to Roger, particularly after Fineel planted just enough currency in Roger’s quarters to make his lies that Roger had guilty knowledge of what he was doing look better. Fineel figured that the more people he could rope in, the smaller the sentences would be. It was done in a hurry. Within ten days Roger was on his way back, along with the others, under guard. He drew five years in Leavenworth and served almost four.”
“That’s hideous!” Beth said.
“Roger turned sour and bitter. He had one break. His conviction never hit the home-town papers. He was lucky this city is as big as it is. His mother was dead. He had no reason to write to anybody. He served his time. You see, society had given him the name. He decided to get out and have the game as well. Now I start really guessing. He made contacts in Leavenworth. Somebody, perhaps, needed a man with a respectable front. He got his orders. Go back to the home town. Get a job. Marry a girl. Sit tight. We’ll use you.”
“I... I can see how it fits, Brock. He was so bitter about the war and about the Army. He refused to use his rights under the GI Bill.”
“He didn’t have any rights. Not with a dishonorable discharge.”
“If I’d only known! If he’d told me, maybe I could have helped.”
“He didn’t want your help. He was helping himself.”
“How? What was he doing?”
“This is going to hurt. A lot, maybe.”
“Don’t you see I’ve got to know?”
He told her, omitting no detail. She did not interrupt. She sat with her hands clenched tightly. He finished the story, and she did not speak.
“Are you all right?”
“Just numb, I guess. Dope. A blonde ‘wife’ in Boston. Seamen and sealed envelopes. It’s a crazy sort of thing. I can’t make it apply to me.”
“If he’d lived, they would have jailed him. That girl would have made a positive identification. He was running, Beth. Running for cover.”
“Maybe he got tired of all the filthiness.”
“I don’t know if we’ll ever find out.”
“I must think he was sorry, that he was getting over a — a kind of sickness. I have to think he was ashamed.”
“Perhaps he would have been, if he’d lived, and if they’d caught him.—”
“Now, there is absolutely no evidence with which to jail you on a narcotics charge. The next best bet is to hammer you with the tax angle. If they hammer hard enough, the end result is the same. The business of the newspaper in the envelope indicates to me that Roger was double-crossing someone. You told me of his nervousness that night. It sounds as though he was in a running mood, and with good reason.”