“Come to think of it,” Sable said, “he certainly kept out of sight. He wouldn’t chauffeur for me, said he’d had bad luck with cars. But he may have wanted to avoid going to town. He never went to town.”
“He’s on his way there now,” I said. “How many people knew he was out here?”
“Just my wife and I. And you, of course. I can’t think offhand of anyone else.”
“Have you had visitors from out of town?”
“Not in the last few months. Alice has been having her ups and downs. It’s one reason I took Peter on out here. We’d lost our housekeeper, and I didn’t like to leave Alice by herself all day.”
“How is Mrs. Sable now?”
“Not so good, I’m afraid.”
“Did she see it happen?”
“I don’t believe so. But she heard the sounds of the struggle, and saw the car drive away. That was when she phoned me. When I got here, she was sitting on the doorstep in a half daze. I don’t know what it will do to her emotional state.”
“Any chance of my talking to her?”
“Not now, please. I’ve already spoken to Dr. Howell, and he told me to give her sedation. The Sheriff has agreed not to question her for the present. There’s a limit to what the human mind can endure.”
Sable might have been talking about himself. His shoulders drooped as he turned from the window. In the harsh sunlight his face was a grainy white, and puffy like boiled rice. In murder cases, there are usually more victims than one.
Sable must have read the look on my face. “This is an unsettling thing to me, too. It can’t conceivably relate to Alice and me. And yet it does, very deeply. Peter was a member of the household. I believe he was quite devoted to us, and he died in our front yard. That really brings it home.”
“What?”
“Timor mortis” he said. “The fear of death.”
“You say Culligan was a member of your household. I take it he slept in.”
“Yes, of course.”
“I’d like to have a look at his room.”
He took me across the court and through a utility room to a back bedroom. The room was furnished with a single bed, a chest of drawers, a chair, and a reading-lamp.
“I’ll just look in on Alice,” Sable said, and left me.
I went through Peter Culligan’s meager effects. The closet contained a pair of Levis, a couple of workshirts, boots, and a cheap blue suit which had been bought at a San Francisco department store. There was a Tanforan pari-mutuel stub in the outside breast pocket of the suit coat. A dirty comb and a safety razor lay on top of the chest of drawers. The drawers were practically empty: a couple of white shirts, a greasy blue tie, a T-shirt and a pair of floral shorts, socks and handkerchiefs, and a cardboard box containing a hundred shells for a .38-caliber automatic. Not quite a hundred: the box wasn’t full. No gun.
Culligan’s suitcase was under the bed. It was a limp old canvas affair, held together with straps, which looked as if it had been kicked around every bus station between Seattle and San Diego. I unstrapped it. The lock was broken, and it fell open. Its contents emitted a whiff of tobacco, sea water, sweat, and the subtler indescribable odor of masculine loneliness.
It contained a gray flannel shirt, a rough blue turtle-neck sweater, and other heavier work clothes. A broad-bladed fisherman’s knife had fish scales still clinging like faded sequins to the cork handle. A crumpled greenish tuxedo jacket was preserved as a memento from some more sophisticated past.
A union card issued in San Francisco in 1941 indicated that Culligan had been a paid-up active member of the defunct Marine Cooks’ Union. And there was a letter, addressed to Mr. Peter Culligan, General Delivery, Reno, Nevada. Culligan hadn’t been a loner all his life. The letter was written on pink notepaper in an unformed hand. It said:
Dear Pete,
Dear is not the word after all I suffered from you, which is all over now and I’m going to keep it that way. I hope you realize. Just so you do I’ll spell it out, you never realized a fact in your life until you got hit over the head with it. So here goes, no I don’t love you anymore. Looking back now I don’t see how I ever did love you, I was “infatuated.” When I think of all you made me suffer, the jobs you lost and the fights and the drinking and all. You certainly didn’t love me, so don’t try to “kid” me. No I’m not crying over “spilt milk.” I had only myself to blame for staying with you. You gave me fair warning plenty of times. What kind, of person you were. I must say you have your “guts” writing to me. I don’t know how you got hold of my address. Probably from one of your crooked cop friends, but they don’t scare me.
I am happily married to a wonderful man. He knows that I was married before. But he does not know about “us.” If you have any decency, stay away from me and don’t write any more letters. I’m warning you, don’t make trouble for me. I could make trouble for you, double trouble. Remember L. Bay.
Wishing you all success in your new life (I hope youre making as much money as you claim),
Marian
Mrs. Ronald S. Matheson (and bear it in mind). Me come back to you? Don’t ever give it another thought. Ronald is a very successful business exec! I wouldn’t rub it in, only you really put me through the “wringer” and you know it. No hard feelings on my part, just leave me alone, please.
The letter had no return address, but it was postmarked San Mateo, Calif. The date was indecipherable.
I put everything back and closed the suitcase and kicked it under the bed.
I went out into the court. In a room on the other side of it, a woman or an animal was moaning. Sable must have been watching for me. The sound became louder as he opened a sliding glass door, and was shut off as he closed it. He came toward me, his face tinged green by the reflected light from the foliage:
“Find anything significant?”
“He kept shells for an automatic in his drawer. I didn’t come across the automatic.”
“I didn’t know Peter had a gun.”
“Maybe he had, and sold it. Or it’s possible the killer took it away from him.”
“Anything else?”
“I have a tentative lead to his ex-wife, if you want me to explore his background.”
“Why not leave it to the police? Trask is very competent, and an old friend of mine into the bargain. I wouldn’t feel justified in taking you off the Galton case.”
“The Galton case doesn’t seem so very urgent.”
“Possibly not. Still, I think you should stay with it for the present. Was Cassie Hildreth any help?”
“Some. I can’t think of much more to be done around here. I was planning to drive to San Francisco.”
“You can take a plane. I wrote you a check for two hundred dollars, and I’ll give you a hundred in cash.” He handed me the check and the money. “If you need any more, don’t hesitate to call on me.”
“I won’t, but I’m afraid it’s money down the drain.”
Sable shrugged. He had worse problems. The moaning behind the glass door was louder, rising in peaks of sound which pierced my eardrums.
Chapter 7
I HATE coincidences. Aboard the plane, I spent a fruitless hour trying to work out possible connections between Maria Galton’s loss of her son and Peter Culligan’s loss of life. I had a delayed gestalt after I’d given up on the subject.
I was flipping through the smudged pages of Chisel, the little magazine that Cassie Hildreth had given me. Somebody named Chad Bolling was listed on the masthead as editor and publisher. He also had a poem in the magazine, “Elegy on the Death of Bix Beiderbecke.” It said that the inconsolable cornet would pipe Eurydice out of Boss Pluto’s smoke-filled basement. I liked it better than the poem about Luna.