“There’s no reason why they should want to see you at all.”
“Why not. I live here, don’t I.”
“Ethel, for God’s sake, don’t argue.”
“Who’s arguing,” Ethel said. But she went upstairs. When Willett swore, it meant that he was at the end of his rope and it was better to avoid him. Poor Willett. She wished she didn’t hate him so much. It would make life easier for both of them.
She opened Olive’s door, saw that the old lady was still sleeping, and went on to her own room. Here, curled up on the upholstered window seat, she watched the people below moving around the patio and the lawn, or standing in small tense groups near the lily pool. As the news spread the crowd grew. There must have been over fifty people already, but Ethel recognized only three of them: Ortega in animated conversation with a policeman, Willett wiping his forehead with a handkerchief, and Ada Murphy, the maid, just returned from town with a large bag of groceries which she clung to with both arms.
They all looked quite absurd, yet Ethel envied them. She would have liked to defy Willett and go down and mingle with the crowd, talk a little, listen a great deal, and experience that sense of excitement and comradeship which sudden death arouses in the living. But she didn’t have the energy to move until the old lady called her name.
“Ethel?”
“Coming.” She crossed the hall and opened the door.
The old lady’s eyes were open and glared like twin glass marbles among the pillows. Her voice was husky with sleep. “Have they found her yet?”
“Yes.”
“Have they found out who she is?”
“I don’t know. Willett wouldn’t let me stay down.”
“I hope everything will be all right.”
“Willett said it would be.”
“I’m hungry.”
“I’ll make your breakfast. Murphy’s back with the eggs.”
The old lady turned and coughed into her pillows. “I had a bad dream, a hell of a dream, but I feel pretty good now.”
To the very young people the name Rose French meant nothing. In the older ones — Captain Greer, Willett and the photographer from the local paper — it evoked a certain nostalgia and regret. Rose was part of the good old days, and the good old days were gone.
Whispers went around the crowd that Rose had been attacked, drowned, strangled, shot; but when Greer turned her over he found no marks of violence at all except for the abrasions on her nose and forehead where she had fallen on the flagstones. The dark areas around her neck and head were not bruises, Greer assured Willett; they were usually present in normal deaths. Rose did not look normal, though. Her mouth was open, the jaw loose, and her cheeks were sunken and grey as putty.
Identification was not immediate or positive. No one said, at the first sight of her, “That’s Rose French.” Greer found her purse underneath the body, and there were some letters in it, a Bank of America checkbook, a driver’s license that had expired seven years before, a religious pamphlet, and half a dozen penny postcards all of them addressed to Mr. Frank Clyde, 321 Montecito Street, La Mesa. There was no message written on any of them. Greer drew only one conclusion from the postcards, that Rose hadn’t expected to die. In his opinion, the cards plus the fact that the suitcase was packed for a trip, with several changes of clothing, toothbrush, aspirin tablets, comb, and a pint of bourbon wrapped carefully inside a pink boned corset, ruled out suicide. Obviously Rose was going somewhere. Perhaps she had taken a shortcut to the railway depot, which was only a quarter of a mile farther on, and coming upon this pleasant little garden, she had stopped to rest a while.
“Why here?” Willett kept saying. “Why in my garden? There are signs up, No Trespassing.”
“I don’t imagine a woman like Miss French would pay much attention to signs.” Greer had taken an instant dislike to Willett and was rather pleased that Rose, with a choice of gardens, had chosen Willett’s.
Greer was a large, quiet man whose face people could never remember. The most conspicuous thing about him was the broad-brimmed Stetson he wore, winter and summer, year after year. These hats were not uncommon in La Mesa. Quite a few men wore them — doctors, businessmen, brokers — as a sign that they lived on ranches out of town and had half a dozen lemon trees, a couple of avocados and a horse. Greer wore his because it was comfortable, kept the sun out of his eyes, and made people like Willett undervalue him as a hick.
“The least you could do is send all these people away.” Willett’s eyes were bloodshot and trickles of sweat slid down behind his ears and soaked into his hard, white collar. He seemed ready to pop his skin, like a sun-swollen tomato. “My mother’s a very sick woman. She can’t stand any excitement. Send all those people away.”
“I would if I had a couple of divisions of marines,” Greer said.
“You’re supposed to have some authority.”
“I have the authority but I haven’t the men. It’s impossible to keep people away from fires, accidents, murders—”
“Murders! Good God, you’re not implying that this woman was murdered?”
“I simply don’t know. I’m not a doctor.”
“But that would be terrible, terrible. My mother’s a very sick woman. This sort of thing might easily—”
“Mr. Goodfield, why don’t you go back to the house? I’ll talk to you later.”
It was noon before the last of the crowd disappeared and Ortega was left to survey the wreckage. The lawn was littered with cigarette butts and gum wrappers; orange peel floated in the lily pool; the bed of Marconi shastas was trampled into rubbish, and the flat of larkspur had been overturned and split down the middle as if a heavy man had used it to stand on to get a better view of Rose.
Ortega was in an agony of self-recrimination. He had been careless — it was the wrong time to set out larkspur — he should have waited till evening or a cloudy day. But no, he had not waited, and he had paid for his carelessness by finding a dead woman and having the daylights scared out of him and the shastas ruined.
His picture in the evening paper did little to console him. In the picture he was grinning (from sheer nervousness) and his family and friends told him it looked disgusting, him grinning like that when a lady just died.
3
There were two pictures of Rose in the paper. One Frank had seen before on the wall of Rose’s room, a glamorous still taken when Rose was about forty. The second was a scene from an early movie showing Rose virtuously resisting the advances of a sleek young man identified as Dwight Hamman, the second of her five husbands. Rose had mentioned only three of her husbands to Frank; the other two came as a surprise.
He experienced an even greater surprise when he read the account of her death. According to police estimates, Rose had died about noon on Monday.
He phoned Greer immediately, and after dinner he drove down to the white stone building that contained the police offices and the city jail. The grounds of the building were kept immaculate by a volunteer jail crew made up mostly of petty thieves, drunks and non-support cases. Frank knew a great many of these men, particularly the repeaters. Some had been referred to his office for help; others he had met at the meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous which were held once a week at the jail and which Frank attended sometimes for information.
Frank had known Greer for two years. There was a considerable difference of viewpoint between the two men and disagreement over techniques, but they were moderately friendly. Frank believed that Greer was a just man if not very bright, and Greer was willing to admit that the clinic occasionally did some good, however slight or impermanent.
Greer’s office was a big square room with dazzling fluorescent lights that gave everyone a prison pallor.