How Like an Angel (5 page)

As soon as he turned inland, at Ventura, he began to regret not waiting until night to make the trip. The bare hills, alter­nating with lemon and walnut groves, shimmered in the relent­less sun, and the air was so dry that the cigarettes he'd bought in San Felice snapped in two in his fingers. He tried to cool off by thinking of San Felice, the breeze from the ocean and the harbor dotted with sails, but the contrast only made him more uncomfortable and he stopped thinking entirely for a while, surrendering himself to the heat.

He reached Chicote at noon. Since his last visit the small city had changed, grown bigger but not up and certainly not better. Fringed by oil wells and inhabited by the people who lived off them, it lay flat and brown and hard like something a cook had forgotten to take out of the oven. Underprivileged trees grew stunted along streets dividing new housing tracts from old slums. Small children played in the dust and weeds of vacant lots, looking just as contented as the children playing in the clean white sand of the San Felice beaches. It was in the teen-agers that Quinn saw the uneasiness caused by a too quick and easy prosperity. They cruised aimlessly up and down the streets in brand new convertibles and ranch wagons. They stopped only at drive-in movies and drive-in malt shops and restaurants, keeping to their cars the way soldiers in enemy territory kept to their tanks.

Quinn bought what he needed at a drugstore and checked in at a motel near the center of town. Then he ate lunch in an air-conditioned café that was so cold he had to turn up the collar of his tweed jacket while he ate.

When he had finished he went to the phone booth at the rear of the café. Patrick O'Gorman was listed in the directory as living at 702 Olive Street.

So that's all there is to it, Quinn thought with a mixture of pleasure and disappointment. O'Gorman's still in Chicote and I've made a quick hundred and twenty dollars. I'll drive back to the Tower in the morning, give Sister Blessing the informa­tion, and then head for Reno.

It seemed very simple, and yet the simplicity of it worried Quinn. If this was all there was to it, why had Sister Blessing played it so close to the chest? Why hadn't she just asked Brother Crown to call O'Gorman from San Felice or look up his address in the out-of-town phone books stocked both by the public library and the main telephone office? Quinn couldn't believe that she hadn't thought of both these possibil­ities. She was, in her own words and by Quinn's own obser­vation, no fool. Yet she had paid a hundred and twenty dollars for information she could have got from a two-dollar phone call.

He put a dime in the slot and dialed O'Gorman's number.

A girl answered, breathlessly, as if she had raced somebody else to the phone. “This is the O'Gorman residence.”

“Is Mr. O'Gorman there, please?”

“Richard's not a mister,” the girl said with a giggle. “He's only twelve.”

“I meant your father.”

“My fath—? Just a minute.”

There was a scurry at the other end of the line, then a woman's voice, stilted and self-conscious: “To whom did you wish to speak?”

“Mr. Patrick O'Gorman.”

“I'm sorry, he's not—not here.”

“When do you expect him back?”

“I don't expect him back at all.”

“Perhaps you could tell me where I can reach him?”

“Mr. O'Gorman died five years ago,” the woman said and hung up.

THREE

Olive Street was
in a section of town that was beginning to show its age but still trying to preserve appearances. Seven-o-two was flanked by patches of well-kept lawn. In the middle of one a white oleander bloomed, and in the middle of the other stood an orange tree bearing both fruit and blossoms at the same time. A boy's bicycle leaned carelessly against the tree as if its owner had suddenly found something more interesting to do. The windows of the small stucco house were closed and the blinds drawn. Someone had recently hosed off the sidewalk and the porch. Little puddles steamed in the sun and disappeared even as Quinn watched.

The front door had an old-fashioned lion's-head knocker made of brass, newly polished. Reflected in it Quinn could see a tiny crooked reflection of himself. In a way it matched his own self-image.

The woman who answered the door was, like the house, small and neat and no longer young. Although her features were pretty and her figure still good, her face lacked any spark of interest or animation. It was as if, at some time during her life, she had stepped outside and had never been able to find her way back in.

Quinn said, “Mrs. O'Gorman?”

“Yes. But I'm not buying anything.”

She's not selling either,
Quinn thought. “I'm Joe Quinn. I used to know your husband.”

She didn't exactly unbend but she seemed faintly interested. “That was you on the telephone?”

“Yes. It was kind of a shock to me, suddenly hearing that he was dead. I came by to offer my condolences and apologize if my call upset you in any way.”

“Thank you. I'm sorry I hung up so abruptly. I wasn't sure whether it was a joke or not, or a piece of malice, having some­one ask for Patrick after all these years. Everyone in Chicote knows that Patrick's gone.”

Gone. Quinn registered the word and her hesitation before saying it.

“Where did you know my husband, Mr. Quinn?”

There was no safe reply to this but Quinn picked one he considered fairly safe. “Pat and I were in the service to­gether.”

“Oh. Well, come inside. I was just making some lemonade to have ready for the children when they get home.”

The front room was small and seemed smaller because of the wallpaper and carpeting. Mrs. O'Gorman's taste—or per­haps O'Gorman's—ran to roses, large red ones in the carpet, pink and white ones in the wallpaper. An air-conditioner, fitted into the side window, was whirring noisily but without much effect. The room was still hot.

“Please sit down, Mr. Quinn.”

“Thank you.”

“Now tell me about my husband.”

“I was hoping you'd tell me.”

“But that isn't how it's done, is it?” Mrs. O'Gorman said. “When a man comes to offer condolences to the widow of his old war buddy, reminiscences are usually called for, aren't they? So please start reminiscing. You have my undivided attention.”

Quinn sat in an uneasy silence.

“Perhaps you're the shy kind, Mr. Quinn, who needs a little help getting started. How about, ‘I'll never forget the time that—'? Or you might prefer a more dramatic approach. For instance, the Germans were coming over the hill in swarms and you lay trapped inside your wrecked tank, injured, with only your good buddy Pat O'Gorman to look after you. You like that?”

Quinn shook his head. “Sorry, I never saw any Germans. Koreans, yes.”

“All right, switch locales. The scene changes to Korea. There's not much sense in wasting that hill and the wrecked tank—”

“What's on your mind, Mrs. O'Gorman?”

“What's on yours?” she said with a small steely smile. “My husband was not in the service, and he never allowed any­one to call him Pat. So suppose you start all over, taking some­what less liberty with the truth.”

“There isn't any truth in this case, or very little. I never met your husband. I didn't know he was dead. In fact, all I knew was his name and the fact that he lived here in Chicote at one time.”

“Then why are you here?”

“That's a good question,” Quinn said, “I wish I could think of an equally good answer. The truth just isn't plausible.”

“The listener is supposed to be the judge of plausibility. I'm listening.”

Quinn did some fast thinking. He had already disobeyed Sister Blessing's orders not to try and contact O'Gorman. To bring her name into it now would serve no purpose. And ten chances to one Mrs. O'Gorman wouldn't believe a word of it anyway, since the Brothers and Sisters of the Tower of Heaven didn't make for a very convincing story. There was one possible way out: if O'Gorman's death had taken place under peculiar circumstances (and Quinn remembered the way Mrs. O'Gorman had hesitated over the word “gone”) she might want to talk about it. And if she did the talking, he wouldn't have to.

He said, “The fact is, I'm a detective, Mrs. O'Gorman.”

Her reaction was quicker and more intense than he had anticipated. “So they're going to start in all over again, are they? I get a year or two of peace, I reach the point where I can walk down the street without people staring at me, feeling sorry for me, whispering about me. Now things will be right back where they were in the first place, newspaper headlines, silly men asking silly questions. My husband died by accident, can't they get that through their thick skulls? He was
not
murdered, he did
not
commit suicide, he did
not
run away to begin a new life with a new identity. He was a devout and devoted man and I will not have his memory tarnished any further. As for you, I suggest you stick to tagging parked cars and picking up kids with expired bicycle licenses. There's a bicycle in the front yard you can start with, it hasn't had a license for two years. Now get out of here and don't come back.”

Mrs. O'Gorman wasn't a woman either to argue with or to try and charm. She was intelligent, forceful and embittered, and the combination was too much for Quinn. He left quickly and quietly.

Driving back to Main Street, he attempted to convince him­self that his job was done except for the final step of reporting to Sister Blessing. O'Gorman had died by accident, his wife claimed. But what kind of accident? If the police had once suspected voluntary disappearance, it meant the body had never been found.

“My work is over,” he said aloud. “The whys and wheres and hows of O'Gorman's death are none of my business. After five years the trail's cold anyway. On to Reno.”

Thinking of Reno didn't help erase O'Gorman from his mind. Part of Quinn's job at the club, often a large part, was to be on the alert for men and women wanted by the police in other states and countries. Photographs, descriptions and Wanted circulars arrived daily and were posted for the security officers to study. A great many arrests were made quietly and quickly without interfering with a single spin of the roulette wheels. Quinn had once been told that more people wanted by the police were picked up in Reno and Las Vegas than in any other places in the country. The two cities were magnets for bank robbers and embezzlers, conmen and gangsters, any crook with a bank roll and a double-or-nothing urge.

Quinn parked his car in front of a cigar store and went in to buy a newspaper. The rack contained a variety, three from Los Angeles, two from San Francisco, a San Felice
Daily Press,
a
Wall Street Journal,
and a local weekly,
The Chicote Beacon.
Quinn bought a
Beacon
and turned to the editorial page. The paper was published on Eighth Avenue, and the publisher and editor was a man named John Harrison Ronda.

Ronda's office was a cubicle surrounded by six-foot walls, the bottom-half wood paneling, the top-half plate glass. Stand­ing, Ronda could see his whole staff, seated at his desk he could blot them all out. It was a convenient arrangement.

He was a tall, pleasant-faced, unhurried man in his fifties, with a deep resonant voice. “What can I do for you, Quinn?”

“I've just been talking to Patrick O'Gorman's wife. Or shall we say, widow?”

“Widow.”

“Were you in Chicote when O'Gorman died?”

“Yes. Matter of fact I'd just used my last dime to buy this paper. It was in the red at the time and might still be there if the O'Gorman business hadn't occurred. I had two big breaks within a month. First O'Gorman, and then three or four weeks later one of the local bank tellers, a nice little lady—why are some of the worst embezzlers such nice little ladies?—was caught with her fingers in the till. All ten of them. The
Beacon's
circulation doubled within a year. Yes, I owe a lot to O'Gorman and I don't mind admitting it. He was the ill wind that blew the wolf away from my door. So you're a friend of his widow's, are you?”

“No,” Quinn said cautiously. “Not exactly.”

“You're sure?”

“I'm sure. She's surer.”

Ronda seemed disappointed. “I've always kept hoping Martha O'Gorman would suddenly come up with a secret boyfriend. It would be a great thing if she married again, some nice man her own age.”

“Sorry, I don't fit the picture. I'm older than I look and I have a vile temper.”

“All right, all right, I get the message. What I said still goes, though. Martha should remarry, stop living in the past. Every year O'Gorman seems to become more perfect in her eyes. I admit he was a good guy—a devoted husband, a loving father —but dead good guys are about the same as dead bad ones where the survivors are concerned. In fact, Martha would be better off now if she found out O'Gorman had been a first-class villain.”

“Perhaps that's still possible.”

“Not on your life,” Ronda said, shaking his head vigorously. “He was a gentle, timid man, the exact opposite of the fight­ing Irishman you hear about and maybe meet, though I never have myself. One of the things that drove the police crazy when they were on the murder kick was the fact that they couldn't find a single soul in Chicote who had a bad word to say about O'Gorman. No grudges, no peeves, no quarrels. If O'Gorman was done in—and there's no doubt of it, in my mind—it must have been by a stranger, probably a hitch­hiker he picked up.”

“Timid men don't usually go in for picking up hitch­hikers.”

“Well, he did. It was one of the few things he disagreed with Martha about. She thought it was a dangerous practice but that didn't stop him. Sympathy for the underdog was what motivated him. I guess he felt like an underdog himself.”

“Why?”

“Oh, he was never much of a success, financially or any other way. Martha had the guts and force in the family, which is a good thing because in the following years she really needed them. The insurance company held off settling O'Gor­man's policy for almost a year because his body wasn't found. Meanwhile Martha and the two children were penniless. She went back to work as a lab technician in the local hospital. She's still there.”

“You seem to know her well.”

“My wife's one of her close friends, they attended the same high school in Bakersfield. For a time there, when I had to print a lot of stuff about O'Gorman, things were cool between Martha and me. But she came to understanding that I was only doing my job. What's your interest in the case, Quinn?”

Quinn said something vague about his work in Reno in­volving missing persons. Ronda seemed satisfied. Or, if he wasn't, he pretended to be. He was a man who obviously en­joyed talking and welcomed an occasion for it.

“So he was murdered by a hitchhiker,” Quinn said. “Under what circumstances?”

“I can't remember every detail after such a time lapse but I can give you a general picture if you like.”

“I would.”

“It was the middle of February, nearly five and a half years ago. It had been a winter of big rains—most of the news I printed was rainfall statistics and stories on whose basement was flooded and whose backyard had been washed out. That year the Rattlesnake River, about three miles east of town, was running high. Now, and every summer, it's nothing but a dry ravine, so it's kind of hard to imagine what a torrent it was then. To make a long story short, O'Gorman's car crashed through the guardrail of the bridge and into the river. It was found a couple of days later when the flood subsided. A piece of cloth snagged on the door hinge had bloodstains on it, barely visible to the naked eye but quite clearly identified in the police lab. The blood was O'Gorman's type and the cloth was a piece of the shirt he'd been wearing when he left the house that night after dinner.”

“And the body?”

“A few miles farther on, the Rattlesnake River joins the Torcido, which is fed by mountain snow and lives up to its name. Torcido means angry, twisted, resentful, and that about describes it, especially that year. O'Gorman wasn't a big man. He could easily have been carried down the Rattlesnake River into the Torcido and never found again. That's what the police believed then and still believe. There's another possi­bility, that he was murdered in the car after a struggle which tore his shirt, and then buried some place. I myself go along with the river theory. O'Gorman picked up a hitchhiker— don't forget it was a stormy night and a soft-hearted man like O'Gorman wouldn't pass up anyone on the road—and the hitchhiker tried to rob him and O'Gorman put up a fight. I myself believe the man must have been a stranger in these parts and didn't realize the river was only temporary. He may have thought the car would never be found.”