How Like an Angel (16 page)

“She's never caused any trouble?”

“Oh no. She does her work well—in the prison library—and she teaches a couple of courses in bookkeeping.” To Quinn it was a nice piece of irony, but Mrs. Browning seemed unaware of it as she continued, “She has a natural talent for figures.”

“So I gathered.”

“I've frequently noticed that among women there is a cor­relation between mathematical ability and a lack of warmth and emotion. Miss Haywood is respected by the other inmates but she's not well liked and she has no special friends or con­fidantes. This must have been true of her before she was sent here because only one person comes to visit her, a brother, and his visits are anything but satisfactory.”

“In what sense?”

“Oh, she seems to look forward to them, yet she's upset for a long time afterwards. And by upset I don't mean the way she acted today. Miss Haywood withdraws, becomes com­pletely silent. It's as if she has so very much to say, to get off her chest, that she can't allow herself to begin.”

“She began today.”

“Yes, perhaps it's a breakthrough.” But Mrs. Browning's eyes were strained as if the silver lining they saw was very faint and far away. “There's another odd thing about Miss Haywood, at least it's odd to me when I consider her cir­cumstances: she's nearly forty, she has a prison record, she's without a husband and family to return to, she can hardly get another job in the only field she's trained in; in other words, her future appears pretty black, and she herself claims she's only waiting to die. Yet she takes extraordinarily good care of herself. She diets, and to diet in a place like this which has to serve a lot of cheap starchy food requires a great deal of will power. She exercises in her cell, half an hour in the morning, half an hour at night, and the eighteen dollars she's permitted to spend in the canteen every month—supplied by her brother—goes for vitamin pills instead of cigarettes and chewing gum. I can only presume that if she's waiting to die she's determined to die healthy. . . .”

TWELVE

Quinn spent the
night in San Felice, and by noon the follow­ing day he was back in Chicote. The weather had not im­proved during the week and neither had Chicote. It lay parched and prosperous under the relentless sun, a city of oil that needed water.

He checked in at the same motel downtown.

Mr. Frisby, on duty in the office, looked a little surprised. “My goodness, it's you again, Mr. Quinn.”

“Yes.”

“I'm glad you're not bearing a grudge about that little episode in your room a week ago. I've warned Grandpa to be more careful in the future, and it won't happen a second time, I can assure you.”

“No, I don't think it will.”

“Any luck yet with your story about O'Gorman?”

“Not much.”

Frisby leaned across the counter. “I wouldn't want this to get around—the sheriff's a friend of mine, sometimes he ap­points me special deputy—but in my opinion the case was bungled.”

“Why?”

“Civic pride, that's why. None of the authorities would admit we've got juvenile delinquency around here same as the big cities or, maybe even worse. Now according to my way of thinking, here's what happened: O'Gorman was on his way back to his office at the oil field when an earful of young punks spotted him and decided to have a little fun and games. They forced him right off the road. They did the same thing to me last year, I ended up in a ditch with two broken ribs and a concussion. Just kids they were, too, and with no motive at all except they wanted to raise hell. Some of the kids around here, especially on the ranches, learn to drive when they're ten, eleven years old. By the time they're sixteen they know everything about a car except how to behave in it. Well, I was luckier than O'Gorman. I ended up in a ditch, not a river.”

“Was there any evidence that O'Gorman was forced off the road?”

“A big dent in the left side of the bumper.”

“Surely the sheriff must have noticed it.”

“You bet he did,” Frisby said. “I pointed it out to him my­self. I was there when they pulled the car out of the river and the first thing I looked for were marks like were found on my car last year. That dent was in the very same spot and there was a faint trace of dark green paint in it. Maybe not enough to take any scrapings for scientific tests, but enough so you could see if you looked real close and knew exactly what to look for.”

Reliving the excitement had sent the blood rushing up into Frisby's face. It seemed to be increasing in size and getting ready to explode like a bright pink balloon. But even as Quinn watched, the balloon began diminishing and its color began fading.

“Everything was there to support my theory,” Frisby said with a sudden deep sigh. “Except for one thing.”

“And that was?”

“Martha O'Gorman.”

The name struck Quinn's ears like a discord he'd been ex­pecting to hear and was trying to avoid. “What about Mrs. O'Gorman?”

“Now I don't claim the lady was lying. What I've seen of her, she seems a nice, quiet-spoken young woman, not like some of these overpainted floozies you meet on the street.”

“What did Martha O'Gorman say about the dent in the bumper?”

“Said she'd put it there herself a week beforehand. She claimed she backed into a lamppost while she was trying to park on the left side of a one-way street. What street and what lamppost she couldn't remember, but everybody believed her.”

“Except you.”

“It seemed a peculiar thing to forget, to my mind.” Frisby glanced uneasily out of the window as if he half expected the sheriff to be lurking outside. “Let's suppose for a minute that I was right in thinking O'Gorman was forced off the road by another car, only this car contained not a bunch of juveniles but somebody who had reason to hate O'Gorman and want him dead. In that case Mrs. O'Gorman's story would make a pretty good cover-up, wouldn't it?”

“For herself?”

“Or a—well, a friend, say.”

“You mean a boyfriend?”

“Well, it happens every day,” Frisby said defensively. “Heck, I don't want to cast aspersions on an innocent woman, but what if she's not innocent? Think about that dent, Mr. Quinn. Why didn't she remember where she got it so her story could be checked?”

“There's a point in her favor you seem to have overlooked. The lampposts in Chicote are all dark green.”

“So were about fifteen percent of the cars that year.”

“How do you know that?”

“I did my own checking,” Frisby said. “For a whole month I kept track of the cars that came here. Out of nearly five hundred, over seventy of them were dark green.”

“You went to a lot of trouble to try and prove Mrs. O'Gorman was lying.”

Frisby's soft round face was swelling and getting pink again. “I
wasn't
trying to prove she was lying. I wanted to find out the truth, that's all. Why, I even went around examining lampposts on one-way streets to see if I could locate the one she hit, or said she hit.”

“Any luck?”

“They were all pretty beat-up, as a matter of fact. They were put in too close to the curbs. That was a long time ago, before somebody dreamed up those crazy tailfins.”

“So you proved nothing.”

“I proved,” Frisby said brusquely, “that fifteen percent of the cars on the road that year were dark green.”

From a drug store Quinn telephoned the hospital where Martha O'Gorman worked and was told that she had taken the day off because of illness. When he called her at home the O'Gorman boy said his mother was in bed with a migraine and couldn't come to the phone.

“Give her a message, will you please?”

“Sure thing.”

“Tell her Joe Quinn is staying at Frisby's Motel on Main Street. She can get in touch with me there if she wants to.”

She won't want to,
he thought, hanging up the phone.
O'Gorman's more real to her than I am. She's still waiting for him to walk in the door—or is she?

Or is she?
The little question with the big answer echoed and reechoed in his mind.

Martha O'Gorman called out from the bedroom, “Who was that on the phone, Richard? And don't yell, the windows are open. Come right in here and tell me.”

Richard came in and stood at the foot of the bed. The shades were drawn and the room was so dark his mother was merely a white shapeless lump. “He said his name was Joe Quinn and I was to tell you he was staying at Frisby's Motel on Main Street.”

“Are you—are you sure?”

“Yes.”

There was a long silence, and the lump on the bed remained motionless, but the boy could sense the tension in the air. “What's the matter, Mom?”

“Nothing.”

“You've been acting kind of funny lately. Are you worry­ing about money again?”

“No, we're doing fine.” Martha sat up suddenly and swung her legs over the side of the bed in an attempt at vivacity. The movement brought a spasm of pain to the entire left side of her head. Pressing her hand tight against her neck to lessen the pain, she said in a falsely cheerful voice, “As a matter of fact, my headache's much better. Perhaps we should do some­thing to celebrate.”

“That'd be great.”

“It's too late for me to go to work now and tomorrow's my day off and the next day's Sunday. We'd have time to take a little camping trip. Would you and Sally like that?”

“Gosh, yes. It'd be super.”

“All right, you get the sleeping bags out of the storeroom and tell Sally to start fixing some sandwiches. I'll pack the canned goods.”

The mere act of standing up was agonizing to her but she knew it had to be done. She had to get out of town. It was easier to face physical pain than it would be to face Quinn.

After lunch Quinn drove over to the office of the Haywood Realty Company. Earl Perkins, the young man he'd met be­fore, was talking on the telephone at the rear of the room. His facial contortions indicated that either his stomach was bother­ing him again or he was having trouble with a client.

Willie King sat behind her desk, elegant and cool in a silk sundress the same green as her eyes. She didn't seem overjoyed at Quinn's return. “Well, what are you doing back here?”

“I've grown very fond of Chicote.”

“Baloney. Nobody's fond of this place. We're just stuck here.”

“What's sticking you? George Haywood?”

She looked as if she wanted to get angry and couldn't quite make it. “Don't be silly. Haven't you heard about me and Earl Perkins? I'm madly in love with him. We're going to get married and live happily ever after, all three of us, Earl and I and his ulcer.”

“Sounds like a great future,” Quinn said. “For the ulcer.”

She flushed slightly and stared down at her hands. They were large and strong, and, except for the orange polish on the fingernails, they reminded Quinn of Sister Blessing's. “Go away and leave me alone, will you please? I have a head­ache.”

“This seems to be headache day for the ladies of Chicote.”

“I mean it. Just go away. I can't answer any of your ques­tions. I don't really know how I got into all this—this mess.”

“What mess, Willie?”

“Oh, everything.” She watched her hands wrestle each other as if they were separate entities over which she had no control. “Have you heard about Jenkinson's law? It says, everybody's crazy. Well, you can add Willie King's law, everything's a mess.”

“No exceptions?”

“I don't see any from where I sit.”

“Change seats,” Quinn said.

“I can't. It's too late.”

“What brought on all the gloom, Willie?”

“I don't know. The heat, maybe. Or the town.”

“It's the same heat you've had all summer in the same town.”

“I need a vacation, I guess. I'd like to take a trip some place where it's cold and foggy and rains every day. A couple of years ago I drove up to Seattle thinking that would be the right place. And you know what happened? When I got there Seattle was having the worst heat wave and the worst drought in its history.”

“Which goes to prove Willie King's law all over again?”

She stirred restlessly in her chair as if she was having a delayed reaction to Quinn's suggestion about changing seats. “You never give a straight or serious answer to anything, do you?”

“Not if I can help it. That's Quinn's law.”

“Break it for once and tell me why you've come back here?”

“To talk to George Haywood.”

“About what?”

“His visits to his sister Alberta in Tecolote prison.”

“Where on earth did you get a crazy idea like that?” she said impatiently. “You know perfectly well George broke off all connections with Alberta years ago. I told you.”

“What you tell me isn't necessarily the truth.”

“All right, so I've lied a little here and there, off and on, but not about that.”

“Maybe you didn't lie about it, Willie,” Quinn said. “But you were certainly misinformed. George goes to see his sister once a month.”

“I don't believe it. What reason would he have for pre­tending?”

“That's one of the questions I intend to ask him, right this afternoon if I can arrange it.”

“You can't.”

“Why not?”

She bent forward in the chair, her hands clasped tight against her stomach as if to ease the sharp pain of a cramp. “He's not here. He left the day before yesterday.”

“For where?”

“Hawaii. He's been having a bad time with bronchial asthma for the past couple of months and the doctor thought a change of climate would help.”

“How long will he be away?”

“I don't know. Everything happened so suddenly. He came into the office three days ago and out of the blue he an­nounced lie was flying to Hawaii the next morning for a vacation.”

“Did he ask you to make a reservation for him?”

“No. He said he'd made it himself.” She groped in her pocket for a handkerchief and held it against her forehead. “It was quite a—a shock. I had done a lot of planning—or dreaming I guess you'd call it—about George and me spend­ing our vacation together this year. Then suddenly I get the whammy, he's flying to Hawaii. Alone. Period.”

“So that's what's causing your glooms?”

“Well, at least he could have
said
something, sorry you're not coming along, Willie, some little thing like that. He didn't, though. I'm afraid. I'm afraid this is the end of the line.”