Harvey pushed away his salmon salad, which he had barely disturbed, and gulped a second Martini. He called the waiter to order a third. His wife inhibited him with a barely perceptible shake of her head. The waiter slid away.
“This woman,” I said, “the woman he spent the night with. Who is she?”
“Glen told me hardly anything more than he told the court.” Harvey paused, half gagged by a lawyer’s instinctive reluctance to give away information, then forced himself to go on. “It seems he went straight from home to her house on the night of the shooting. He spent the night with her, from about eight-thirty until the following morning. Or so he claims.”
“Haven’t you checked his story?”
“How? He refused to say anything that might enable me to find her or identify her. It’s just another example of the obstacles he’s put in my way, trying to defend him.”
“Is this woman so important to his defense?”
“Crucial. Ruth was shot sometime around midnight. The p.m. established that through the stomach contents. And at that time, if he’s telling the truth, Glen was with a witness. Yet he won’t let me try to locate her, or have her subpoenaed. It took me hours of hammering at him to get him to testify about her at all, and I’m not sure that wasn’t a mistake. That miserable jury–” His voice trailed off. He was back in court fighting his uphill battle against the prejudices of a small elderly city.
And I was back on the pavement in front of the airport, listening to a woman’s urgent whisper: You’ll have to give me a yes or no. I’ve made up my mind to go by your decision.
Harvey was looking away across the captive water, fish-netted under elastic strands of light. Under the clear September sun I could see the spikes of gray in his hair, the deep small scars of strain around his mouth.
“If I could only lay my hands on the woman.” He seemed to be speaking to himself, until he looked at me from the corners of his eyes. “Who do you suppose she is?”
“How would I know?”
He leaned across the table confidentially. “Why be so cagey, Archer? I’ve let down my hair.”
“This particular hair doesn’t belong to me.”
I regretted the words before I had finished speaking them.
Harvey said, “When will you see her?”
“You’re jumping to conclusions again.”
“If I’m wrong, I’m sorry. If I’m right, give her a message for me. Tell her that Glen – I hate to have to say this, but he’s in jeopardy. If she likes him well enough to–”
“Please, Rod.” Rhea Harvey seemed genuinely offended. “There’s no need to be coarse.”
I said, “I’d like to talk to Cave before I do anything. I don’t know that it’s the same woman. Even if it is, he may have reasons of his own for keeping her under wraps.”
“You can probably have a few minutes with him in the courtroom.” He looked at his wristwatch and pushed his chair back violently. “We better get going. It’s twenty to two now.”
We went along the side of the pool, back toward the entrance. As we entered the vestibule, a woman was just coming in from the boulevard. She held the heavy plate-glass door for the little flaxen-haired girl who was trailing after her.
Then she glanced up and saw me. Her dark harlequin glasses flashed in the light reflected from the pool. Her face became disorganized behind the glasses. She turned on her heel and started out, but not before the child had smiled at me and said: “Hello. Are you coming for a ride?” Then she trotted out after her mother.
Harvey looked quizzically at his wife. “What’s the matter with the Kilpatrick woman?”
“She must be drunk. She didn’t even recognize us.”
“You know her, Mrs. Harvey?”
“As well as I care to.” Her eyes took on a set, glazed expression – the look of congealed virtue faced with its opposite. “I haven’t seen Janet Kilpatrick for months. She hasn’t been showing herself in public much since her divorce.”
Harvey edged closer and gripped my arm. “Would Mrs. Kilpatrick be the woman we were talking about?”
“Hardly.”
“They seemed to know you.”
I improvised. “I met them on the Daylight one day last month, coming down from Frisco. She got plastered, and I guess she didn’t want to recall the occasion.”
That seemed to satisfy him. But when I excused myself, on the grounds that I thought I’d stay for a swim in the pool, his blue ironic glance informed me that he wasn’t taken in.
The receptionist had inch-long scarlet fingernails and an air of contemptuous formality. Yes, Mrs. Kilpatrick was a member of the club. No, she wasn’t allowed to give out members’ addresses. She admitted grudgingly that there was a pay telephone in the bar.
The barroom was deserted except for the bartender, a slim white-coated man with emotional Mediterranean eyes. I found Mrs. Janet Kilpatrick in the telephone directory: her address was 1201 Coast Highway. I called a taxi, and ordered a beer from the bartender.
He was more communicative than the receptionist. Sure, he knew Glenway Cave. Every bartender in town knew Glenway Cave. The guy was sitting at this very bar the afternoon of the same day he murdered his wife.
“You think he murdered her?”
“Everybody else thinks so. They don’t spend all that money on a trial unless they got the goods on them. Anyway, look at the motive he had.”
“You mean the man she was running around with?”
“I mean two million bucks.” He had a delayed reaction. “What man is that?”
“Cave said in court this morning that his wife was going to divorce him and marry somebody else.”
“He did, eh? You a newspaperman by any chance?”
“A kind of one.” I subscribed to several newspapers.
“Well, you can tell the world that that’s a lot of baloney. I’ve seen quite a bit of Mrs. Cave around the club. She had her own little circle, see, and you can take it from me she never even looked at other guys. He was always the one with the roving eye. What can you expect, when a young fellow marries a lady that much older than him?” His faint accent lent flavor to the question. “The very day of the murder he was making a fast play for another dame, right here in front of me.”
“Who was she?”
“I wouldn’t want to name names. She was pretty far gone that afternoon, hardly knew what she was doing. And the poor lady’s got enough trouble as it is. Take it from me.”
I didn’t press him. A minute later a horn tooted in the street.
A few miles south of the city limits a blacktop lane led down from the highway to Mrs. Kilpatrick’s house. It was a big old-fashioned redwood cottage set among trees and flowers above a bone-white beach. The Cadillac was parked beside the vine-grown verandah, like something in a four-color advertisement. I asked my driver to wait, and knocked on the front door.
A small rectangular window was set into the door. It slid open, and a green eye gleamed like a flawed emerald through the aperture.
“You,” she said in a low voice. “You shouldn’t have come here.”
“I have some questions for you, Mrs. Kilpatrick. And maybe a couple of answers. May I come in?”
She sighed audibly. “If you must.” She unlocked the door and stood back to let me enter. “You will be quiet, won’t you? I’ve just put Janie to bed for her afternoon nap.”
There was a white silk scarf draped over her right hand, and under the silk a shape which contrasted oddly with her motherly concern – the shape of a small hand gun.
“You’d better put that thing away. You don’t need it, do you?”