The place smelled of grease. It was almost full of late Sunday lunchers seated in booths and at the U-shaped breakfast bar in the middle. Green himself was sitting on a stool behind the cash register counting money. He was counting it as if his life and his hope of heaven depended on the colored paper in his hands.
He looked up, smiling loosely and vaguely. “Yes, sir?” Then he recognized me. His face went through a quick series of transformations and settled for a kind of boozy shame. “I know I shouldn’t be here working on a day like this. But it keeps my mind off my troubles. Besides, they steal you blind if you don’t watch ’em. And I’ll be needing the money.”
“What for, Mr. Green?”
“The trial.” He spoke the word as if it gave him a bitter satisfaction.
“Whose trial?”
“Mine. I told the sheriff what the old guy said. And what I did. I know what I did. I shot him down like a dog, and I had no right to. I was crazy with my sorrow, you might say.”
He was less crazy now. The shame in his eyes was clearing. But the sorrow was still there in their depths, like stone at the bottom of a well.
“I’m glad you told the truth, Mr. Green.”
“So am I. It doesn’t help him, and it doesn’t bring Ginnie back. But at least I can live with myself.”
“Speaking of Ginnie,” I said. “Was she seeing quite a lot of Frank Connor?”
“Yeah. I guess you could say so. He came over to help her with her studies quite a few times. At the house, and at the library. He didn’t charge me any tuition, either.”
“That was nice of him. Was Ginnie fond of Connor?”
“Sure she was. She thought very highly of Mr. Connor.”
“Was she in love with him?”
“In love? Hell, I never thought of anything like that. Why?”
“Did she have dates with Connor?”
“Not to my knowledge,” he said. “If she did, she must have done it behind my back.” His eyes narrowed to two red swollen slits. “You think Frank Connor had something to do with her death?”
“It’s a possibility. Don’t go into a sweat now. You know where that gets you.”
“Don’t worry. But what about this Connor? Did you get something on him? I thought he was acting queer last night.”
“Queer in what way?”
“Well, he was pretty tight when he came to the house. I gave him a stiff snort, and that straightened him out for a while. But later on, down on the beach, he got almost hysterical. He was running around like a rooster with his head chopped off.”
“Is he a heavy drinker?”
“I wouldn’t know. I never saw him drink before last night at my house.” Green narrowed his eyes. “But he tossed down a triple bourbon like it was water. And remember this morning, he offered us a drink on the beach. A drink in the morning, that isn’t the usual thing, especially for a high school teacher.”
“I noticed that.”
“What else have you been noticing?”
“We won’t go into it now,” I said. “I don’t want to ruin a man unless and until I’m sure he’s got it coming.”
He sat on his stool with his head down. Thought moved murkily under his knitted brows. His glance fell on the money in his hands. He was counting tens.
“Listen, Mr. Archer. You’re working on this case on your own, aren’t you? For free?”
“So far.”
“So go to work for me. Nail Connor for me, and I’ll pay you whatever you ask.”
“Not so fast,” I said. “We don’t know that Connor is guilty. There are other possibilities.”
“Such as?”
“If I tell you, can I trust you not to go on a shooting spree?”
“Don’t worry,” he repeated. “I’ve had that.”
“Where’s your revolver?”
“I turned it in to Sheriff Pearsall. He asked for it.”
We were interrupted by a family group getting up from one of the booths. They gave Green their money and their sympathy. When they were out of hearing, I said:
“You mentioned that your daughter worked here in the restaurant for a while. Was Al Brocco working here at the same time?”
“Yeah. He’s been my night cook for six-seven years. Al is a darned good cook. He trained as a chef on the Italian line.” His slow mind, punchy with grief, did a double take. “You wouldn’t be saying that he messed around with Ginnie?”
“I’m asking you.”
“Shucks, Al is old enough to be her father. He’s all wrapped up in his own girls, Anita in particular. He worships the ground she walks on. She’s the mainspring of that family.”
“How did he get on with Ginnie?”
“Very well. They kidded back and forth. She was the only one who could ever make him smile. Al is a sad man, you know. He had a tragedy in his life.”
“His wife’s death?”
“It was worse than that,” Green said. “Al Brocco killed his wife with his own hand. He caught her with another man and put a knife in her.”
“And he’s walking around loose?”
“The other man was a Mex,” Green said in an explanatory way. “A wetback. He couldn’t even talk the English language. The town hardly blamed Al, the jury gave him manslaughter. But when he got out of the pen, the people at the Pink Flamingo wouldn’t give him his old job back – he used to be chef there. So I took him on. I felt sorry for his girls, I guess, and Al’s been a good worker. A man doesn’t do a thing like that twice, you know.”
He did another slow mental double take. His mouth hung open. I could see the gold in its corners.
“Let’s hope not.”
“Listen here,” he said. “You go to work for me, eh? You nail the guy, whoever he is. I’ll pay you. I’ll pay you now. How much do you want?”
I took a hundred dollars of his money and left him trying to comfort himself with the rest of it. The smell of grease stayed in my nostrils.
Connor’s house clung to the edge of a low bluff about halfway between the HP station and the mouth of the canyon where the thing had begun: a semi-cantilevered redwood cottage with a closed double garage fronting the highway. From the grapestake-fenced patio in the angle between the garage and the front door a flight of wooden steps climbed to the flat roof which was railed as a sun deck. A second set of steps descended the fifteen or twenty feet to the beach.
I tripped on a pair of garden shears crossing the patio to the garage window. I peered into the interior twilight. Two things inside interested me: a dismasted flattie sitting on a trailer, and a car. The sailboat interested me because its cordage resembled the white rope that had strangled Ginnie. The car interested me because it was an imported model, a low-slung Triumph two-seater.
I was planning to have a closer look at it when a woman’s voice screeked overhead like a gull’s:
“What do you think you’re doing?”
Mrs. Connor was leaning over the railing on the roof. Her hair was in curlers. She looked like a blond Gorgon. I smiled up at her, the way that Greek whose name I don’t remember must have smiled.
“Your husband invited me for a drink, remember? I don’t know whether he gave me a rain check or not.”
“He did not! Go away! My husband is sleeping!”
“Ssh. You’ll wake him up. You’ll wake up the people in Forest Lawn.”
She put her hand to her mouth. From the expression on her face she seemed to be biting her hand. She disappeared for a moment, and then came down the steps with a multicolored silk scarf over her curlers. The rest of her was sheathed in a white satin bathing suit. Against it her flesh looked like brown wood.
“You get out of here,” she said. “Or I shall call the police.”