The Chill (16 page)

I’d done a lot of pumping in my time, and I knew when it was being done to me. “I mean his general reaction. He wouldn’t have flown to Reno this morning, deans’ conference or no deans’ conference, if he had been really fond of Helen Haggerty. He’d be here in Pacific Point trying to find out who did her in.”

“You seem quite let down about it.

“I was looking for his help. He seemed genuinely concerned about Dolly Kincaid.”

“He is. We both are. In fact Roy asked me at breakfast to do what I could for the girl. But what can I do?” She displayed her crumpled hands, making a show of her helplessness.

Maria came in with my clinking highball, handed it to me unceremoniously, and asked her employer if there was anything else. There wasn’t. I sipped my drink, wondering if Mrs. Bradshaw was a client I could possibly handle, if she became my client. She had the money, all right. The diamonds winking at her throat would have bought my services for several years.

“You can hire me,” I said.

“Hire you?”

“If you really want to do something for Dolly, and not just sit there paying lip-service to the idea. Do you think we could get along?”

“I was getting along with men when you were in the cradle, Mr. Archer. Are you implying I can’t get along with people?”

“I seem to be the one who can’t. Alex Kincaid just fired me, with a strong assist from his father. They want no part of Dolly and her problems, now that the chips are down.”

Her black eyes flashed. “I saw through that boy immediately. He’s a mollycoddle.”

“I don’t have the resources to go on by myself. It isn’t good practice, anyway. I need somebody to back me, preferably somebody with local standing and—I’ll be frank—a substantial bank balance.”

“How much would it cost me?”

“It depends on how long the case goes on and how many ramifications develop. I get a hundred a day and expenses. Also I have a team of detectives in Reno working on a lead that may be a hot one.”

“A lead in Reno?”

“It originated here, last night.”

I told her about the man in the convertible which belonged to Mrs. Sally Burke, a woman with many boy friends. She leaned forward in her chair in mounting interest:

“Why aren’t the police working on that lead?”

“They may be. If they are, I don’t know about it. They seem to have settled for the idea that Dolly’s guilty and everything else is irrelevant. It’s simpler that way.”

“You don’t accept that idea?”

“No.”

“In spite of the gun they found in her bed?”

“You know about that, then.”

“Sheriff Crane showed it to me this morning. He wanted to know if I recognized it. Of course I didn’t. I abhor the very sight of guns myself. I’ve never permitted Roy to own a gun.”

“And you have no idea who owned that one?”

“No, but the Sheriff appeared to take it for granted that it was Dolly’s, and that it tied her to the murder.”

“We have no reason to think it was hers. If it was, the last place she’d put it would be under her own mattress. Her husband denies she did, and he was with her continuously once she got back to the gatehouse. There’s the further point that there’s no definite proof it’s the murder weapon.”

“Really?”

“Really. It will take ballistics tests, and they’re not scheduled until Monday. If my luck holds, I think I can throw more light on the situation by then.”

“Do you have a definite theory of your own, Mr. Archer?”

“I have an idea that the ramifications of this thing go far
back beyond Dolly. It wasn’t Dolly who threatened Miss Haggerty’s life. She would have recognized her voice, they were close friends. I think Dolly walked up to her house simply to ask her advice about whether to go back to her husband. She stumbled over the body and panicked. She’s still in panic.”

“Why?”

“I’m not prepared to explain it. I want to go into her background further. I also want to go into Miss Haggerty’s background.”

“That might be interesting,” she said, as if she was considering attending a double-feature movie. “How much is all this going to cost me?”

“I’ll keep it as low as I can. But it could mount up in the thousands, two or three or even four.”

“That’s rather an expensive penance.”

“Penance?”

“For all my selfishness, past and present and future. I’ll think about it, Mr. Archer.”

“How long do you need to think about it?”

“Call me tonight. Roy will be telephoning me around dinnertime—he telephones me every night when he’s away—and I couldn’t possibly give you an answer before I discuss it with him. We live on a tighter budget than you might think,” she said earnestly, fingering the diamonds at her throat.

I
DROVE UP UNDER
the dripping trees to Helen Haggerty’s place. Two deputies messing around outside the front door wouldn’t let me in or answer any questions. It was turning out to be a bad day.

I drifted over to the campus and into the Administration Building. I had some idea of talking to Laura Sutherland, the Dean of Women, but her office was locked. All the offices were locked. The building was deserted except for a white-headed man in blue jeans who was sweeping the corridor with a long-handled push-broom. He looked like Father Time, and I had a nightmare moment of thinking that he was sweeping Helen’s last vestiges away.

In a kind of defensive reflex I got out my notebook and looked up the name of the chairman of the modern languages department. Dr. Geisman. The old man with the push-broom knew where his office was:

“It’s in the new Humanity Building, down the line.” He pointed. “But he won’t be there on a Saturday afternoon.”

The old man was mistaken. I found Geisman in the department office on the first floor of the Humanities Building, sitting with a telephone receiver in one hand and a pencil in the other. I had seen him coming out of Bradshaw’s conference the day before, a heavy middle-aged man with thick spectacles imperfectly masking anxious little eyes.

“One moment,” he said to me; and into the telephone: “I’m sorry you can’t help us, Mrs. Bass. I realize you have your family responsibilities and of course the remuneration is not great for a special lecturer.”

He sounded foreign, though he had no accent. His voice was denatured, as if English was just another language he had learned.

“I am Dr. Geisman,” he said as he hung up and stroked out a name on the list in front of him. “Are you Dr. de Falla?”

“No. My name is Archer.”

“What are your qualifications? Do you have an advanced degree?”

“In the university of hard knocks.”

He didn’t respond to my smile. “A member of our faculty is defunct, as you must know, and I’ve had to give up my Saturday
to an attempt to find a replacement for her. If you expect me to take your application seriously—”

“I’m not applying for anything, doctor, except possibly a little information. I’m a private detective investigating Professor Haggerty’s death, and I’m interested in how she happened to land here.”

“I have no time to go into all that again. There are classes which must be met on Monday. If this Dr. de Falla doesn’t arrive, or proves impossible, I don’t know what to do.” He peered at his wristwatch. “I’m due at the Los Angeles airport at six-thirty.”

“You can spare five minutes, anybody can.”

“Very well. Five minutes.” He tapped the crystal of his watch. “You wish to know how Miss Haggerty came here? I can’t say, except that she appeared in my office one day and asked for a position. She had heard about Professor Farrand’s heart attack. This is our second emergency in a month.”

“Who told her about the heart attack?”

“I don’t know. Perhaps Dean Sutherland. She gave Dean Sutherland as a local reference. But it was common knowledge, it was in the paper.”

“Was she living here before she applied for a job with you?”

“I believe so. Yes, she was. She told me she already had a house. She liked the place, and wished to remain. She was very eager for the post. Frankly, I had some doubts about her. She had a master’s degree from Chicago but she wasn’t fully qualified. The school where she had been teaching, Maple Park, is not credentialed on our level. But Dean Sutherland told me she needed the position and I let her have it, unfortunately.”

“I understood she had a private income.”

He pursed his lips and shook his head. “Ladies with a private income don’t take on four sections of French and German, plus counseling duties, at a salary of less than five thousand dollars. Perhaps she meant her alimony. She told me she was
having difficulty collecting her alimony.” His spectacles glinted as he looked up. “You knew that she had been recently divorced?”

“I heard that. Do you know where her ex-husband is?”

“No. I had very few words with her at any time. Do you suspect him?”

“I have no reason to. But when a woman is killed you normally look for a man who had a motive to kill her. The local police have other ideas.”

“You don’t agree with them?”

“I’m keeping my mind open, doctor.”

“I see. They tell me one of our students is under suspicion.”

“So I hear. Do you know the girl?”

“No. She was registered for none of our departmental courses, fortunately.”

“Why ‘fortunately’?”

“She is psychoneurotic, they tell me.” His myopic eyes looked as vulnerable as open oysters under the thick lenses of his glasses. “If the administration employed proper screening procedures we would not have students of that sort on the campus, endangering our lives. But we are very backward here in some respects.” He tapped the crystal of his watch again. “You’ve had your five minutes.”

“One more question, doctor. Have you been in touch with Helen Haggerty’s family?”

“Yes, I phoned her mother early this morning. Dean Bradshaw asked me to perform that duty, though properly I should think it was his duty. The mother, Mrs. Hoffman, is flying out here and I have to meet her at the Los Angeles airport.”

“At six-thirty?”

He nodded dismally. “There seems to be no one else available. Both of our deans are out of town—”

“Dean Sutherland, too?”

“Dean Sutherland, too. They’ve gone off and left the whole business on my shoulders.” His glasses blurred with self-pity,
and he took them off to wipe them. “It’s foggy, and I can’t see to drive properly. My eyesight is so poor that without my glasses I can’t tell the difference between you and the Good Lord himself.”

“There isn’t much difference.”

He put on his glasses, saw that this was a joke, and emitted a short barking laugh.

“What plane is Mrs. Hoffman coming in on, doctor?”

“United, from Chicago. I promised to meet her at the United baggage counter.”

“Let me.”

“Are you serious?”

“It will give me a chance to talk to her. Where do you want me to bring her?”

“I reserved her a room at the Pacific Hotel. I could meet you there, at eight, say.”

“Fine.”

He got up and came around the desk and shook my hand vigorously. As I was leaving the building, a small, old man in a black hat and a greenish black cloak came sidling out of the fog. He had a dyed-looking black mustache, hectic black eyes, a wine flush on his hollow cheeks.

“Dr. de Falla?”

He nodded. I held the door for him. He swept off his hat and bowed.

“Merci beaucoup.”

His rubber-soled shoes made no more sound than a spider. I had another one of my little nightmare moments. This one was Doctor Death.

I
T WAS A SLOW DRIVE
up the coast but the fog lifted before I reached the airport, leaving a thickish twilight in the air. I parked my car at the United building. It was exactly six-twenty-five, according to the ticket the girl in the parking lot handed me. I crossed the road to the bright enormous building and found the baggage carrousel, besieged by travelers.

A woman who looked like a dried-up older Helen was standing on the edge of the crowd beside her suitcase. She had on a black dress under a black coat with a ratty fur collar, black hat, and black gloves.

Only her garish red hair was out of keeping with the occasion. Her eyes were swollen, and she seemed dazed, as if a part of her mind was still back in Illinois.

“Mrs. Hoffman?”

“Yes. I’m Mrs. Earl Hoffman.”

“My name is Archer. Your daughter’s department head, Dr. Geisman, asked me to pick you up.”

“That was nice of him,” she said with a poor vague smile. “And nice of you.”

I picked up her suitcase, which was small and light. “Would you like something to eat, or drink? There’s a pretty good restaurant here.”

“Oh no thanks. I had dinner on the plane. Swiss steak. It was a very interesting flight. I never flew in a jet before. But I wasn’t the least bit frightened.”

She didn’t know what she was. She stared around at the bright lights and the people. The muscles of her face were tensing up as if she might be getting ready to cry some more.
I got hold of her thin upper arm and hustled her out of there and across the road to my car. We circled the parking lot and got onto the freeway.

“They didn’t have this when I was here before. I’m glad you decided to meet me. I’d get lost,” she said in a lost voice.

“How long is it since you were here before?”

“Nearly twenty years. It was when Hoffman was in the Navy, he was a warrant officer in the Shore Patrol. They assigned him to San Diego and Helen had already run—left home, and I thought I might as well get the benefit of the travel. We lived in San Diego for over a year, and it was very nice.” I could hear her breathing as if she was struggling up to the rim of the present. She said carefully: “Pacific Point is quite near San Diego, isn’t it?”

“About fifty miles.”

“Is that right?” After another pause, she said: “Are you with the college?”

“I happen to be a detective.”

“Isn’t that interesting? My husband is a detective. He’s been on the Bridgeton force for thirty-four years. He’s due to retire next year. We’ve talked about retiring in California but this will probably turn him against it. He pretends not to care, but he cares. I think he cares just as much as I do.” Her voice floated along above the highway noises like a disembodied spirit talking to itself.