I moved across the room and sat beside her. “What does Ralph do for a living, Mrs. Simpson?”
“Anything he can get. He never finished high school, and that makes it tough. He’s a pretty good short-order cook, but he hated the hours. Same with bartending, which he did for a while. He’s had some good-paying houseboy jobs around the Peninsula. But he’s too proud for that kind of work. He hates to take orders from people. Maybe,” she added bitterly, “he’s too proud for any kind of work, and that’s why he ran out on me.”
“How long ago did he leave?”
“Two months ago, I told you that. He left here on the night of May eighteen. He just got back from Nevada that same day, and he took right off for Los Angeles. I think he only came home to try and talk me out of the car. But I told him he wasn’t going to leave me marooned without a car. So he finally broke down and took a bus. I drove him down to the bus station.”
“What was he planning to do in Los Angeles?”
“I don’t know. He told me this story, when he was trying to talk me out of the car, but I didn’t believe it. He said he was doing undercover work. I heard the same story from him before, when he was working in a drive-in on Camino Real. He claimed the cops were paying him to give them tips.”
“Tips about what?”
“Kids smoking reefers, stuff like that. I didn’t know whether to believe him or not. I thought maybe he was just talking to make himself feel important. He always wanted to be a cop himself.”
“But his record wouldn’t let him.”
“He has no record.”
“You said he had.”
“You must have been hearing things. Anyway, I’m getting tired. I’ve had enough of this.”
She rose in a sudden thrust of energy and stood by the door, inviting me to leave. I stayed where I was on the plastic chesterfield.
“You might as well leave,” she said. “It isn’t Ralph you saw in Malibu.”
“I’m not so sure of that.”
“You can take my word.”
“All right, I take your word.” It doesn’t pay to argue with a source of information. “But I’m still interested in Ralph. Aren’t you?”
“Naturally I am. I’m married to him. At least I’m supposed to be married to him. But I got a funny feeling, here.” Her left hand moved up her body to her breast. “I got a feeling he traded me in on a new model, and that’s the undercover work.”
“Do you know who the other woman might be?”
“No. I just got a feeling. Why would a man go away and not come back?”
I could think of various answers to that, but I didn’t see much point in spelling them out. “When Ralph took the bus south, did he say anything about going to Mexico?”
“Not to me he didn’t.”
“Has he ever been there?”
“I don’t think so. He would of told me if he had.”
“Did he ever talk about leaving the country?”
“Not lately. He used to talk about going back to Japan someday. He spent some time there in the Korean War. Wait a minute, though. He took his birth certificate with him, I think. That could mean he was planning to leave the States, couldn’t it?”
“It could. He took his birth certificate to Los Angeles?”
“I guess he did, but it was a couple of weeks before that he had me looking for it. It took me hours to find it. He wanted to take it along to Nevada with him. He said he needed it to apply for a job.”
“What kind of a job?”
“He didn’t say. He was probably stringing me, anyway.” She moved restlessly and stood over me. “You think he left the country?”
Before I could answer her, a telephone rang in another part of the house. She stiffened, and walked quickly out of the room. I heard her voice: “This is Vicky Simpson speaking.”
There was a long pause.
“I don’t believe it,” she said.
Another pause.
“It can’t be him,” she said. “He can’t be dead.”
I followed the fading sound of her voice into the kitchen. She was leaning on the yellow formica breakfast bar, holding the receiver away from her head as if it was a dangerous yellow bird. The pupils of her eyes had expanded and made her look blind.
“Who is it, Mrs. Simpson?”
Her lips moved, groping for words. “A caw – a policeman down south. He says Ralph is dead. He can’t be.”
“Let me talk to the man.”
She handed me the receiver. I said into the mouthpiece: “This is Lew Archer. I’m a licensed private detective working in co-operation with the Los Angeles District Attorney’s office.”
“We had a query from them this evening.” The man’s voice was slow and uncertain. “We had this body on our hands, unidentified. Their chief investigator called – fellow named Colton, maybe you know him.”
“I know him. Who am I talking to?”
“Leonard, Sergeant Wesley Leonard. I do the identification work for the sheriff’s department here in Citrus County. We use the L. A. facilities all the time, and we had already asked for their help on this body. Mr. Colton wanted to know if maybe it was this certain Ralph Simpson who is missing. We must have mislaid the original missing report,” he added apologetically, “or maybe we never got it in the first place.”
“It happens all the time.”
“Yeah. Anyway, we’re trying to get a positive identification. What’s the chances of Mrs. Simpson coming down here?”
“Pretty good, I think. Does the body fit the description?”
“It fits all right. Height and weight and coloring and estimated age, all the same.”
“How did he die?”
“That’s a little hard to say. He got pretty banged up when the bulldozer rooted him out.”
“A bulldozer rooted him out?”
“I’ll explain. They’re putting in this new freeway at the west end of town. Quite a few houses got condemned to the state, they were standing vacant you know, and this poor guy was buried in back of one of them. He wasn’t buried very deep. A ’dozer snagged him and brought him up when they razed the houses last week.”
“How long dead?”
“A couple of months, the doc thinks. It’s been dry, and he’s in pretty fair condition. The important thing is who he is. How soon can Mrs. Simpson get down here?”
“Tonight, if I can get her on a plane.”
“Swell. Ask for me at the courthouse in Citrus Junction. Sergeant Wesley Leonard.”
She said when I hung up: “Oh no you don’t, I’m staying here.”
She retreated across the kitchen, shocked and stumbling, and stood in a corner beside the refrigerator.
“Ralph may be dead, Vicky.”
“I don’t believe it. I don’t want to see him if he is.”
“Somebody has to identify him.”
“You identify him.”
“I don’t know him. You do.”
Her mascara had started to dissolve. She dashed murky tears from her eyes. “I don’t want to see him dead. I never saw anybody dead before.”
“Dead people won’t hurt you. It’s the live ones that hurt you.”
I touched her goosefleshed arm. She jerked it away from me.
“You’ll feel better if you have a drink,” I said. “Do you have anything to drink in the house?”
“I don’t drink.”
I opened a cupboard and found a glass and filled it at the tap. Some of it spilled down her chin. She scrubbed at it angrily with a dish towel.
“I don’t want to go. It’ll only make me sick.”
But after a while she agreed to get ready while I phoned the coastal airlines. There was room for us on a ten-thirty flight to Los Angeles. By midnight we were approaching Citrus Junction in the car I had left at International Airport.
The road was walled on each side by thick orange groves. It emerged into a desolate area rimmed with houses, where highway construction had been under way. Earth movers hulked in the darkness like sleeping saurians.