Obit Delayed (12 page)

NOBODY BUT THE POSTMAN and those unlucky enough to live there ever came down to the yellow dust streets at the edge of Mexican town. These streets possessed no historic architecture or scenic glory, but let a crime catch the fancy of the public and strange things happen. They were happening when Mitch parked his car as close as he could get to Virginia Wales’s house and made his way up the cracked and wavy sidewalk. Culture had come to Valley City. A mobile television unit was parked in front of the house and Virginia’s last abode was being given the full treatment. She would have loved that. Mitch could picture her coming to the door, flashing a big smile at the camera, and inviting all the spectators to come in to see for themselves how Virginia Wales had lived and died. She’d probably stack a few records on the player and mix up some drinks, because Virginia was the kind of gal who loved company and dreaded loneliness.

But the grave is a very lonely place.

Mitch stood apart from the crowd thinking these strange thoughts and wondering where they came from. It was Monday morning all over again, the same melancholy, the same depression. Laughing blondes shouldn’t die with bloody faces; they made Mitch sad. But here he was back again and all because a prowling boy had nudged a fact into prominence. If Virginia had been killed because of something in her possession it must still be at large. Why else would Dave Singer be searching?

He walked around to the rear and looked at the sagging screen on the broken hinge. The house was a cracker box sitting on a grassless square of earth, surrounded by similar cracker boxes on other grassless squares of earth. Next door stood one building a bit different; not so much in structure, although a small porch had been tacked on the front, but different in that a few flowers were blooming in beds around the foundation and a tiny patch of green grass reflected constant care and a landlord’s water rights. Mitch didn’t care for a conducted tour, so he left Virginia’s house to the educational facilities of the networks and went to call on Mamma Molina.

Mamma was watering a wilted rose bush at the front walk while keeping a wary eye on the proceedings down the street. When Mitch came into view she kept a wary eye on him, too.

“Mrs. Molina?” he inquired. (This was just for effect; he’d have known her anywhere after that coroner’s inquest.) “I believe you own that house next door.”

Mamma reached down and turned off the water. It was quite an operation considering her girth, and she was puffing as she straightened up again. “I own it,” she acknowledged. “You want to rent?”

“Frankly, no.”

“I know.” Mamma sighed. “All day long people come. They want to look at the house, they want to take pictures; but nobody wants to rent. Not that house. It has the mark of death on it.”

The woman sounded as if she’d just come from a session with her Ouija board, in which case she might feel talkative. “Terrible thing,” Mitch said, shaking his head. “First Virginia Wales and now, in all probability, her ex-husband. Did you know him, Mrs. Molina?”

“Frank Wales?” Mamma dropped the hose and wiped her hands on her apron. “He lived in that very house with Virginia, when he was home anyways. That’s no kind of marriage when the man is away working all the time and the woman stays home alone. Especially if she’s a pretty woman like Virginia.”

“Who doesn’t stay home,” Mitch added. “I imagine they had some real rows whenever he was here.”

“Not him. Not Frank Wales. A quieter, nicer man I never saw. I told Virginia she would be sorry getting a divorce, but she wanted her freedom. Freedom!” Mamma snorted and threw up her hands. “A fancy word for being all alone. It’s fun for a while, maybe, but all this running around gets old.”

“Even for Virginia?” Mitch asked.

Mamma grew thoughtful, never forgetting to keep her eyes on that house next door. “I think so,” she said at last. “She was always laughing and joking all the time, but lately not so much. I know how it is. Forty-seven years married and now I’m alone. The same house, the same neighbors, but sometimes now I think I hear noises and I look after the locks on the doors. Virginia, too.” The woman smiled in remembrance. “New locks, she wanted, and always before she couldn’t be bothered with any locks at all. I know how it is.”

Mitch was beginning to know, too. Worrying about the locks could mean a lot more than loneliness. It could mean, for instance, that Virginia had been troubled with housebreakers, but when he suggested the idea Mamma Molina shrugged. “She didn’t say nothing about that,” she said, “and she didn’t call the police. If somebody breaks in you call the police.”

Unless you’re hiding something you don’t want the police to find—but Mitch kept that thought to himself. The important thing at the moment was finding at least some corroboration for Frank Wales’s story that Virginia was afraid. Add fear to Dave Singer’s appearances at Pinky’s lunchroom, plus the puzzle of Pinky’s unlikely prosperity, and all kinds of interesting possibilities came to mind. Suddenly Mitch was very curious as to whether Dave Singer’s flashy convertible had ever been parked at Virginia’s door, but before he could frame the question Mamma Molina was trotting down the walk to shake a threatening fist at a boy who was allowing his dog to misuse her parkway lawn.

“Get away from here, you bad boy!” she shouted. “Ain’t you caused me enough trouble already? Go home!”

The boy nonchalantly pushed his dog into the gutter, but the concession didn’t satisfy Mamma. “You don’t live on this street,” she scolded. “Why don’t you stay on your own street?”

“I can stay on any street I want!” the boy retorted. “Streets belong to everybody!”

“Well, my house don’t belong to everybody! Break into my house again and you’ll be sorry!”

This was even more than Mitch had hoped for. He didn’t have to find the boy; the boy had found him. And the dog, an awkward, half-grown mongrel held in tow by a clothesline leash, really was Virginia’s. The boy had apparently won his dispute for possession.

“Isn’t that Virginia Wales’s dog?” Mitch asked, and the boy’s face turned dark with anger.

“Duke’s my dog!” he insisted. “He’s always been my dog!”

“Pay no attention to the boy,” Mrs. Molina broke in. “That’s Virginia’s dog, all right, and he knows good and well it is. He pestered me enough to get it after poor Virginia was murdered!”

“Because he was my dog! That’s why I pestered you. I told you that before.”

Whatever the boy had told Mrs. Molina he wasn’t going to waste time telling Mitch. That truck down the street might be interesting, but not enough to risk having his right to the dog challenged. “Hey, wait a minute!” Mitch yelled as both boy and dog took to their heels. But yelling only made them run the faster. “Darn that kid!” he fumed. “I wanted to talk to him. I wonder what he was up to in that house last night.”

“No good, you can be sure of that!” the woman declared. “He’s a bad one, that boy. Just like his brother. I only gave him the dog to get rid of him and now look, back already!”

By this time Mamma Molina was armed with a rake and busily repairing her damaged lawn, which gave Mitch a chance to speculate about that dog. It wasn’t more than six months old, and if Virginia had acquired the animal for protective purposes he might be able to put a starting-date on her fear. But when he put the idea before Mamma she shook her graying head.

“Virginia didn’t buy the dog,” she insisted. “It was the other one, the brother, he gave it to her. I don’t know but what it really was Jimmy’s dog the way he says. I wouldn’t put it past Mickey Degan to give away his little brother’s puppy just to make a hit with a girl.”

Now she stopped and rested a moment on the rake, completely unaware that Mitch was strangling on the words he finally sputtered. “Not Virginia!” he said.

“Sure, Virginia. He was crazy about her. She used to laugh about that. ‘Mamma,’ she’d say, ‘I don’t know whether I should go out with him or adopt him.’ To her it was a joke, everything a big joke.” The woman sighed and peered sadly at the house next door. “It don’t seem the same,” she mused. “Nobody laughs around here any more.”

It was a nice epitaph for Virginia but Mitch didn’t hear it. He was already sprinting down the street after a boy and his dog.

Mickey Degan’s life had been short but colorful. He’d been in enough police line-ups to be identified as a hoodlum, junior grade, and Mitch saw no reason to doubt Pinky’s allegation that a trade in marijuana was one of his pastimes. But to be even a small-time operator in Valley City Mickey had to get orders from the same source as Dave Singer, and that’s what made Mamma’s words so interesting. If Mickey had been one of Virginia’s suitors then a little light was showing in the darkness. Now Virginia’s shabby world might actually be linked to the chrome-and-plush model of Vince Costro’s.

Not being adept at climbing fences, Mitch had to cover a couple of blocks before intercepting Jimmy Degan at his own front door. Like all wise men of twelve Jimmy was coldly suspicious of strangers who followed him home.

“Aw right, so I’m Jimmy Degan,” he admitted under questioning. “What’s it to you?”

“I’m Mitch Gorman of the
Independent,”
Mitch responded brightly. “You’re the boy who found Frank Wales, aren’t you? I’d like your story for the paper.”

The psychology seemed right but the subject didn’t respond. Maybe Jimmy didn’t approve of newspapers. “I got to go in now,” he muttered.

“That was sure smart of you, looking in the one place the police never thought of looking. How did you know Wales would be there?”

The boy hesitated, one foot on the bottom step. What was this guy trying to pull, anyway? Frank Wales was a murderer and Jimmy Degan wasn’t messing around with any murderer. “I didn’t know,” he insisted. “I wasn’t even looking for him.”

“Then what were you looking for?”

“A dog collar. Just a little old dog collar, and it belongs to Duke anyway.”

“Duke?” Mitch eyed the pup, a mongrel without a trace of lordly bearing. “You mean the dog your brother gave to Virginia Wales.”

“He’s my dog!” Jimmy said.

“Sure he is, and he needs a collar. How much does a good collar cost these days? A dollar, maybe?”

Psychology had its uses but currency was a lot more persuasive with a realist like Jimmy Degan. The billfold Mitch was holding in his hand began to make an impression.

“Two dollars?” he prodded.

“That collar Virginia bought him has a license on it,” Jimmy recalled.

“Plus two dollars for a license makes four dollars. Or do you still have to go in?”

Jimmy took his foot down off the step and eyed the four dollars hungrily. Nobody handed out money for nothing—he’d lived long enough to learn that much—but it didn’t hurt to listen.

“Why did Mickey give your dog to Virginia?” Mitch asked.

“So she’d like him, I guess. So she’d go out with him.”

“And did she go out with him?”

Jimmy hesitated, never taking his eyes from the bills in Mitch’s hand. “Sure,” he said at last, “she went out with him lotsa times. What of it?”

It was true, then. Mickey Degan and Virginia Wales, as queer a combination as Mitch could have imagined. A young punk like Mickey with his roaring hot-rod and exaggerated toughness—what could he offer a woman like Virginia Wales? Youth, of course, and laughter. A good time. Mitch was beginning to get the hang of it now. That shabby little shack a couple of blocks away didn’t stack up with Dave Singer and his expensive surroundings—it wasn’t even in Rita’s class. But Mickey Degan, yes. A kid from the same side of the tracks who liked music and dancing, and who would probably talk mighty big in the presence of what he considered a woman of the world. He might even have flashed a few samples of his stock in trade, or bragged about how it was brought across the border.

But Mitch was going to have to do his woolgathering elsewhere, because now the screen door was sighing open at the top of the steps and a woman’s voice caught him in the act of passing over that four dollars.

“Jimmy, what’s going on down there?”

Mitch looked up to find a thin-faced woman who might have been halfway pretty once upon a time glaring down at him. “Mrs. Degan?” he inquired.

“What do you want?” she demanded.

“I was just talking to your son about his discovery last night. I thought he deserved some kind of reward.” (That was to cover for the bills Jimmy was hastily stuffing into his jeans.)

“He’s already had a reward,” the woman announced ominously, “and he’ll get worse if he breaks into anybody’s house again! Are you from the police?”

That explained the fear in her eyes. Mrs. Degan had experienced her share of policemen on the doorstep when Mickey was alive. But Mitch wasn’t from the police and telling her that should have eased the tension instead of worsening it.

“Jimmy’s got nothing to say to the newspapers,” she insisted. “It’s hard enough to bring a boy up right without having him read about himself and get big ideas.”

“I see your point,” Mitch conceded, “and I certainly don’t want to cause trouble. It just seemed an interesting sidelight that Wales was found because of a dog collar.”

“Has he been talking about that collar again? Jimmy, get into the house this instant!” Mrs. Degan took a step forward, and Jimmy responded by taking to his heels, dog, four dollars, and all. “Do you see?” She sighed. “Do you see what I have to contend with? I’ve lost one boy. Do I have to lose Jimmy, too?”

The words cut deep when Mitch remembered that Mickey was a scant four weeks in his grave, but he hadn’t earned that early grave all by himself. “It’s possible,” he said grimly, “so long as certain elements in this town can get away with murder.”

Murder was a word with many uses. It could stop a conversation or open one, depending on the persons involved, and Mrs. Degan had learned by experience to watch out for hidden meanings. A strange man at the doorstep passing out money to her son and asking questions about Virginia Wales wasn’t likely to be merely passing the time of day. Reluctantly, she held open the door while Mitch ascended the steps into a tiny living-room that tried pitifully to be attractive without the benefit of funds. The cheap cretonne at the windows was meant to be gay, and the dime-store landscape over a slip-covered sofa probably constituted a major luxury.