Archer - The Chill Part 17

"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 gla.s.ses. "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 toqch 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 gla.s.ses 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 gla.s.ses I can't tell the difference between you and the Good Lord himself."

"There isn't much difference."

He put on his gla.s.ses, 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.

chapter 16.

It 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 ffight. 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 Sh.o.r.e Patrol. They a.s.signed 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.

"It's too bad he couldn't fly out with you today."

"He could have, if he'd wanted to. He could have taken time off. I think he was afraid he couldn't face it. And he has his blood pressure to consider." She hesitated again. "Are you investigating my daughter's murder?"

"Yes."

"Dr. Geisman said on the phone that you have a suspect, a young girl. What would make a student shoot one of her teachers? I never heard of such a thing."

"I don't think she did, Mrs. Hoffman."

"But Dr. Geisman said it was practically open and shut." The sorrow in her voice had changed into a kind of vengeful justice.

"That may be." I had no desire to argue with a potentially valuable witness. "I'm investigating other angles, and you may be able to help me."

"How is that?"

"Your daughter's life was threatened. She talked to me about it before she was shot. Somebody called her on the telephone. It was a voice she didn't recognize, but she said a strange thing about it. She said it sounded like the voice of Bridgeton."

"Bridgeton? That's where we live."

"I know that, Mrs. Hoffman. Helen said it was Bridgeton catching up with her. Do you have any idea what she meant?"

"She always hated Bridgeton. From the time that she was in high school she blamed it for everything that went wrong with her life. She couldn't wait to get out of Bridgeton."

"I understand she ran away from home."

"I wouldn't put it that way," although she almost had. "She only dropped out of sight for the one summer, and she was working all the time. She had a job with a newspaper in Chicago. Then she started in at the University, and she let me know where she was. It was just her father--" She cut this sentence off short. "I used to help her out of my housekeeping money until we went into the Navy."

"What was the trouble between her and her father?"

"It had to do with his professional work. At least that was what the final big battle was about."

"When Helen called him a crooked stormtrooper?"

She turned in the seat to look at me. "Helen told you that, eh? Are you--were you her boy friend or something like that?"

"We were friends." I found that I could say it with some conviction. We had spent a single angry hour together but her death had turned a light on it which hurt my eyes.

She leaned closer to study my face. "What else did she tell you?"

"There was murder involved in her quarrel with her father."

"That's a lie. I don't mean Helen was lying, but she was mistaken. The Deloney shooting was an accident pure and simple. If Helen thought she knew more about it than her father, she was dead wrong."

"Dead" and "wrong" were heavy words to lay on the dead. Her black-gloved hand flew up to her mouth. She rode for a while in hunched and fearful silence, a thin dry cricket of a woman who had lost her chirp.

"Tell me about the Deloney shooting, Mrs. Hoffman."

"I don't see the point of doing that. I never talk about my husband's cases. He doesn't like me to."

"But he isn't here."

"In a way he is. We've been together so long. Anyway it's all past history."

"History is always connected with the present. That case may have something to do with Helen's death."

"How could that be? It was twenty years ago, longer than that, and it didn't amount to anything at the time. The only reason it made an impression on Helen was that it happened in our apartment building. Mr. Deloney was cleaning a gun, and it went off and shot him, and that was the whole story."

"Are you sure?"

"Hoffman said so, and Hoffman doesn't lie." It sounded like an incantation which she had used before.

"What made Helen think he was lying?"

"Imagination pure and simple. She said she talked to a witness who saw somebody shoot Mr. Deloney, but I say she dreamed it. No witness ever turned up, and Hoffman said there couldn't have been a witness. Mr. Deloney was alone in the apartment when it happened. He tried to clean a loaded gun and shot himself in the face. Helen must have dreamed the other. She had a bit of a crush on Mr. Deloney. He was a good-looking man, and you know how young girls are."

"How old was she?"

"Nineteen. That was the summer she left home."

It was full dark now. Away off to the right the lights of Long Beach, where I had spent my own uneasy youth, were reflected like a dying red fire from the overcast.

"Who was Mr. Deloney?"

"Luke Deloney," she said. "He was a very successful contractor in Bridgeton and throughout the state. He owned our apartment building and other buildings in town. Mrs. Deloney still owns them. They're worth a lot more than they were then, and even then he was close to a millionaire."

"Deloney has a surviving widow?"

"Yes, but don't go jumping to conclusions. She was miles away, in their main house, when it happened. Sure there was a lot of talk in town, but she was as innocent as a newborn babe. She came from a very good family. She was one of the famous...o...b..rne sisters in Bridgeton."

"What were they famous for?"

"Their father was the U. S. Senator. I remember when I was in grade school, back before the World War One, they used to ride to hounds in red coats. But they were always very democratic."

"Good for them." I brought her back to the Deloney case. "You say Deloney was shot in the building where you had your own apartment?"

"Yes. We were in an apartment on the ground floor. We got it dirt cheap because we used to collect the rent for Mr. Deloney. He kept the roof apartment for himself. He used it for a kind of private office, and a place to throw parties for visiting firemen and so on. A lot of big men from the state house were friends of his. We used to see them coming and going," she said in a privileged way.

"And he shot himself in this penthouse apartment?"

"The gun shot him," she corrected me. "It was an accident."

"What sort of a man was Deloney?"

"He was a self-made man, I guess you'd say. He came from the same section of town Hoffman and I did, which is how we got the job collecting rent for him, and that helped, in the depression. The depression didn't faze Luke Deloney. He borrowed the money to start his own contracting business and came up fast on his own initiative, and married Senator Osborne's oldest daughter. There's no telling where he might have got to. He was only a young man of forty when he died."

"Helen was interested in him, you say?"