“Nearly six years ago somebody walked into my foreman’s house. Took a pistol off the wall and shot him to death. You saw the house outside there, it’s the small one just this side of the fork in the driveway—over there on the far side of the fountain. I was the only one here that night. I heard the shot. By the time I got outside there was a car going away and the lights were still burning in the windows over there. I went over to see what the trouble was. I didn’t recognize anything about the car, all I could see was the taillights going away. I went in and found him dead. I have no idea to this day who killed him.
“But it put me in a bad spot. Calisher had been having an affair with my wife, the woman who was my wife then. She’s married to Dwight Kendrick now but that’s neither here nor there. The point is I believe several people knew about this affair. I’d only found out about it a day or two previously. Now my own story was damned flimsy when you come right down to it. I was the only one there that night besides Calisher himself. I had the opportunity. I had the motive—it could have been demonstrated in court that I had just learned about him screwing my wife. I probably wouldn’t have been convicted, there was no direct evidence to prove that I’d killed him—how could there be if I didn’t kill him? But I was involved at the time in several very sensitive pending mergers and takeover bids and I simply couldn’t afford to have my name linked, even remotely, with a sordid crime like that. It would have been one of those tedious cases where a rich man bought himself off in spite of his guilt, you see what I mean? Nobody would have believed in my innocence and every damn one of those deals could have fallen through, not to mention the damage those rumors would have done to all my future dealings.
“I persuaded Joe Threepersons to get me off the spot. In the privacy of this room I’m ready to admit to you that I was guilty of suborning Joe to perjury and tampering with evidence and maybe half a dozen other crimes on that level. But I didn’t force Joe to do it, there was no extortion. I offered him a deal and he took it. I knew he would; I make it a point to know the character of the people who work for me.
“Now it may well be that whoever killed Ross Calisher decided he had a reason to kill Joe’s wife and boy but I wouldn’t know anything about that. All I’m sure of is. that if he’s gunning for me he’s gunning for the wrong man.”
3.
Watchman said, “A few minutes ago you told me in no uncertain terms that you weren’t the one who was paying his family off.”
“Well I’m not exactly retracting that. Let’s just say I plead nolo contendere. Suppose we drop that. It’s just a sideshow anyway.”
“There’s another item doesn’t ring true. You’re telling me your wife was having an affair with your foreman. That’s not the way I’ve heard it.”
“Then you’ve heard it wrong. If I wasn’t in a position to know, who was?”
“Your ex-wife,” Watchman murmured. “Kendrick’s wife.”
He watched for the effect and was rewarded. Rand didn’t move at all but somehow his look became the look of a man who was holding his arm before his face.
“So it just isn’t quite good enough,” Watchman told him.
“She’s a liar,” Rand murmured, but it was without conviction. “Naturally she’d try to slander me. She hates me. I think that was what attracted her to that slime of a lawyer in the first place. It was the thing they had in common, their hate for me.”
“When did she start seeing Kendrick?”
“When?”
Watchman just waited and finally Rand shrugged as if it didn’t matter. “I suppose it was around that same time.”
“Before or after the murder?”
“I didn’t find out about it until some time after the night I found Ross dead. It may have been going on for some time before that.”
“You’ve been divorced three or four times, haven’t you?”
“What of it?”
“How can you afford it? This is a community property state.”
“I learned, after the first one. They all signed quit-claims against any properties of mine. Before I married them they had to sign. Gwen came to me without much more than the clothes on her back and she left the same way. I sent her to Nevada to get the divorce. There’s no community property law up there.”
“That kind of quit-claim wouldn’t hold up in an Arizona court, would it?”
“What’s this supposed to be leading up to, Trooper?”
“I’m just wondering if maybe you weren’t alone here that night. Maybe your wife was here to.”
“She wasn’t. She was in Phoenix overnight, I believe. Or at least she said she was. She may have been, well, visiting some friend of hers.”
“Like Kendrick?”
“I doubt it but it’s possible.”
“I understand she’s not exactly a shrinking violet. She’d make a pretty tough antagonist in a fight, wouldn’t she?”
“What are you aiming at?”
“Maybe she wasn’t having an affair with Calisher. Maybe he wanted her to but she didn’t want any part of him. Maybe he tried something with her and she defended herself by shooting him. Then maybe you told her you’d cover up for it if she’d be a good girl and go away quietly and get the divorce without demanding half your belongings.”
Rand’s head tipped over a bit to one side. He smiled a little. ‘That’s pretty good. There’s no truth in it, but it’s pretty good. You want to try that one on the judge, see how he likes it?”
It was the wrong tack then. Somewhere back there Watchman had taken the right tack but he’d got away from it; he could see that in the way Rand had relaxed. It wasn’t a pose. Rand was almost anxious for him to continue along that line of reasoning and so Watchman dropped it. If push came to shove he’d find that Gwen Rand had a perfect alibi for the night of Calisher’s murder. Nothing short of that kind of insurance could make Rand this confident, not in the strained state of fear he was in right now.
He said, “Joe tells me you’ve got Harlan Natagee working for you.”
“Does he.” Rand contrived to maintain his attitude of amusement. “Now that’s pretty far out.”
“Since we’re in the privacy of this room, the way you keep pointing out, what about it?”
“What can I say? The only way Harlan Natagee would like to look at me is over the sights of a gun. He’s a rednecked tin pisspot agitator, he likes to blow things up just to hear the noise. I wouldn’t have dealings with that bastard if he was the last Indian alive. How could you trust an idiot like him? He’s most likely a little bit psychotic, you know.”
“I understand it was Harlan Natagee’s men who broke into Kendrick’s office and stole the files on the water-rights case.”
“It may well have been.”
“You’re the only one who could have benefited from the theft.”
“If that’s what you think then you don’t understand the workings of minds like Harlan Natagee’s. He’d do anything he could to discredit a lawyer, particularly a white lawyer. He wants to take it all back to the days of tomahawks and scalping knives.”
“What do you think of Kendrick? Personally.”
“I hate his guts.”
“Because he stole your own wife from under your nose?”
“No, not really. Kendrick’s the jealous type, I’m not. He was more jealous of her than I was, even back in those days when she was still my wife. I didn’t care if she wanted to amuse herself with trash but I think it bothered Kendrick that she still had to put up the front of being my wife. He couldn’t stand that. He talked her into getting the divorce even though she’d have been a lot better off financially if she’d stayed married to me. They could have gone on having their tawdry little fling in motel rooms.”
“And that didn’t bother you?”
“I’ve got better things to do than work myself into a fury over things like that. She hadn’t been much of a wife to me and I wasn’t sorry to get rid of her but I’d have let it ride if she’d been willing. She made a pretty good hostess, she always knew which fork to use and she kept a good eye on the house staff here.”