“The man was wearing a plaid sport jacket?”
“Why — why yes. How did you know?”
“I saw him.”
“Were you in the Square too?”
“No. I saw him later.” The rest of a lifetime later.
“Who is — was he?”
“An acquaintance of your sister-in-law, I think.”
“You make that word ‘acquaintance’ sound dirty.”
“Do I? Well, let’s face it, Mrs. Brandon — when I dress for a job like this I don’t put on clean, white gloves.”
“You mean Amy and this man were...”
“Acquainted.”
“It still sounds dirty.”
“Maybe you’re just hearing it dirty,” Dodd said. “Amy and O’Donnell met in the bar of a Mexico City hotel. Amy’s gone, O’Donnell’s dead. Now you know as much about it as I do. For further information consult your local newspaper.”
“The papers. Oh God. This will be in all the papers. Gill will...”
Dodd didn’t want to be told what Gill would. He’d seen and heard enough of the man. He said brusquely, “Mrs. Brandon, when you met Kellogg at Lassiter’s at noon, did he mention his wife?”
“Yes. He said Amy would be coming back soon. By Thanksgiving or Christmas.”
“That’s not very soon.”
“Isn’t it? I guess that depends on your viewpoint.” She paused, as if she was trying to decide whether to tell him how she really felt about Amy. Then she said, “Do you think she’s coming back?”
“I’m beginning to wonder,” Dodd said, “if she ever went away.”
A kitchen knife wasn’t generally the kind of weapon used in a planned or premeditated murder. It was a weapon of emergency, seized upon suddenly in a moment of fury or fear. Fists were a man’s customary instruments of quick attack and defense. A woman’s were whatever happened to occur to her or to be handy. The knife may have been lying on the kitchen counter, ready to be picked up.
There were only five women involved in the case. One of them, Wilma Wyatt, was dead. The others were living, or presumed living: Miss Burton, Helene Brandon, the young woman with the bleached hair, and Amy herself. Of these four, only the young woman and Amy were definitely known to be acquainted with O’Donnell. But it was possible that Miss Burton had met him through Kellogg, and that even Helene Brandon, for all her protestations of innocence and ignorance, had known the dead man. Known him, and had reason to fear him. In that case, Helene’s blundering phone call to Kellogg’s house might not have been a blunder at all, but part of a plan with a triple purpose: to try and establish her own innocence, and to find out if the body had been discovered and identified, and to make sure that the girl with the bleached hair was brought into the case. Bringing in the girl would direct attention away from herself and her own still-obscure part in the affair.
But what possible connection, he wondered, could Helene Brandon have had with O’Donnell? And if there had been any connection, would she have freely admitted seeing O’Donnell in the Square?
No, he thought, it doesn’t make sense. The woman at the bottom of this is not Helene, it’s Amy. It all comes back to Amy — where did she go and why did she leave?
A wild idea rose to the surface of his consciousness like some improbable sea monster. Suppose Amy hadn’t left at all, suppose she’d been living in that house all the time, under cover, for reasons no one yet knew. Incredible as the theory seemed, it would account for a number of things: the dismissal of the maid, Gerda Lundquist; the removal of the little dog, Mack, who might have given Amy’s presence away; the letters, which had certainly been written by Amy, but not necessarily from a distance, perhaps right in her own bedroom.
Doors began opening in his mind, revealing rooms that were peopled with shadows and voiced with echoes. None of the shadows could be positively identified, and the echoes were like the nonsense syllables produced by a tape recording running backward. But in one corner of one room, a faceless woman sat at a desk, writing.
The telephone conversation with Helene Brandon continued.
“Mr. Dodd? Are you still...?”
“I’m here.”
“Listen to me. Please listen. There’s nothing to be gained by dragging me into this.”
“You have important evidence.”
“But I gave it to you. You have it now. That’s what counts, isn’t it — the evidence itself, not who tells it to the police. Can’t you keep me out of it? I’ll pay.”
“If I keep you out of it, I’ll be the one who ends up paying.”
“There must be ways.”
“Name one.”
She was silent a moment. He could hear her heavy, irregular breathing, as if thinking was to her a violent physical exercise.
“You,” she said finally, “you could have been the one who saw Rupert and the girl at Lassiter’s, at lunch time.”
“Maybe I could, except I ate my lunch out of a paper bag in my office.”
“Alone?”
“A couple of flies joined me for dessert.”
“Please, for heaven’s sake, be serious. You don’t know what this means to me and my family. My three children are all in school. They’re old enough to suffer from this, suffer terribly.”
“You can’t prevent their suffering. Their uncle is wanted for murder.”
“At least he’s not a blood relative. I am. I’m their mother. If I’m dragged into this, God help them.”
“O.K., O.K.,” Dodd said flatly. “So I saw Rupert and the girl at Lassiter’s. What was I doing there?”
“Having lunch.”
“My secretary knows damned well I took my lunch to work.”
“All right then, you were trailing Rupert — or is it tailing?”
“Either.”
“When the girl came into the picture you decided to tail her instead, so you did. She went to Union Square where she met...”
“How did she get to Union Square?”
“Took the Powell Street cable car.”
“Do you know that or are you making it up?”
“Making it up. But it sounds plausible, isn’t that what we’re aiming at? Besides, she entered the Square from Powell Street.”
“What time?”
“I don’t know, I sort of lost track of time. I was — thinking about Amy coming home. And other things.” She coughed, as if to warn herself not to step on dangerous ground. “I remember it started to rain, and the old men who were feeding the pigeons got up and left.”
“It started to rain about three o’clock.” He wouldn’t have noticed the time or the rain particularly, except that his secretary had come into his office to tell him in her own peculiar way, that she was going down to the drugstore to buy a bottle of cold pills. “Some people believe that rain cleanses and washes the air. But I happen to know for a fact that what it does is bring down all the viruses and bacteria from outer space, also Strontium 90. I suppose you don’t care about Strontium 90, but when your bones begin to decay inside you...”
“Three o’clock,” Helene said. “Yes, it must have been about that.”
“Where did she meet her friend in the plaid sport jacket?”
“I have no idea. It was simply a coincidence that I saw her again. I wasn’t following her or looking for her or anything. She just appeared.”
“O.K., that’s how I’ll have to play it, as a coincidence. The police don’t like coincidences, though.”
“Coincidences like that happen here all the time. In L.A. you can go downtown every day for a month and never meet a soul you’ve ever seen before. But here, the downtown’s so small I invariably meet someone I know when I go shopping or out to lunch. It’s sort of like a village in that respect.”