Текст книги "The Blue Hammer"

Автор книги: Ross MacDonald

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Текущая страница: 8 (всего у книги 18 страниц)

^chapter

20

I locked the blue Ford and left it standing in the lane. Fred didn’t look fit to drive it, and if he had been I wouldn’t have trusted him not to run out on me. He climbed into my car like a poorly working automaton and sat with his head hanging on his blood-spotted chest.

He roused himself from his lethargy when I backed out onto the road: “Where are we going?”

“Down the mountain to talk to the sheriff.”

“No.”

He turned away from me and fumbled with the door latch on his side. I took hold of his collar and pulled him back into the middle of the seat.

“I don’t want to turn you in,” I said. “But that’s on condition that you answer some questions. I’ve come a long way to ask them.”

He answered after a thinking pause: “I’ve come a long way, too.”

“What for?”

Another pause. “To ask some questions.”

“This isn’t a word game, Fred. You’ll have to do better than that. Doris told me you took her parents’ painting and you admitted it to me.”

“I didn’t say I stole it.”

“You took it without their permission. What’s the difference?”

“I explained all that to you yesterday. I took the picture to see if I could authenticate it. I took it down to the art museum to compare it with their Chantrys. I left it there overnight and somebody stole it.”

“Stole it from the art museum?”

“Yes, sir. I should have locked it up, I admit that. But I left it in one of the open bins. I didn’t think anyone would notice it.”

“Who did notice it?”

“I have no way of knowing. I didn’t tell anyone. You’ve got to believe me.” He turned his dismayed face to me. “I’m not lying.”

“Then you were lying yesterday. You said the painting was stolen from your room at home.”

“I made a mistake,” he said. “I got confused. I was so upset I forgot about taking it down to the museum.”

“Is that your final story?”

“It’s the truth. I can’t change the truth.”

I didn’t believe him. We drove down the mountain in unfriendly silence. The repeated cry of a screech owl followed us.

“Why did you come to Arizona, Fred?”

He seemed to consider his answer, and finally said, “I wanted to trace the picture.”

“The one you took from the Biemeyers’ house?”

“Yes.” He hung his head.

“What makes you think it’s in Arizona?”

“I don’t think that. I mean, I don’t know whether it is or not. What I’m trying to find out is who painted it.”

“Didn’t Richard Chantry paint it?”

“I think so, but I don’t know when. And I don’t know who or where Richard Chantry is. I thought perhaps that Mildred Mead could tell me. Mr. Lashman says she was the model all right. But now she’s gone, too.”

“To California.”

Fred straightened up in his seat. “Where in California?”

“I don’t know. Maybe some of the local people can give us the information.”

Sheriff Brotherton was waiting in his car, which was parked in the lighted lot outside the substation. I parked beside it, and we all climbed out. Fred was watching me intently, wanting to hear what I would tell the authorities.

“Where’s the young lady?” the sheriff said.

“She decided to stay with the society overnight. Maybe longer.”

“I hope she knows what she’s doing. Are there any sisteren around?”

“I saw a few. This is Fred Johnson, Sheriff.”

Brotherton shook the younger man’s hand and looked closely into his face. “Did they attack you?”

“I took a swing at one of them. He took a swing at me.” Fred seemed proud of the incident. “That was about it.”

The sheriff seemed disappointed. “Don’t you want to lodge a complaint?”

Fred glanced at me. I gave him no sign, one way or the other.

“No,” he said to the sheriff.

“You better think it over. That nose of yours is still bleeding. While you’re here, you better go into the station and get Deputy Cameron to give you first aid.”

Fred moved toward the substation as if, once inside, he might never get out again.

When he was beyond hearing, I turned to the sheriff: “Did you know Mildred Mead well?”

His face was stony for a moment. His eyes glittered. “Better than you think.”

“Does that mean what I think it means?”

He smiled. “She was my first woman. That was around forty years ago, when I was just a kid. It was a great favor she did me. We’ve been friends ever since.”

“But you don’t know where she is now?”

“No. I’m kind of worried about Mildred. Her health isn’t the best, and she isn’t getting any younger. Mildred’s had a lot of hard blows in her life, too. I don’t like her going off by herself like this.” He gave me a long hard contemplative look. “Are you going back to California tomorrow?”

“I plan to.”

“I’d appreciate it if you’d look Mildred up, see how she’s doing.”

“California’s a big state, Sheriff.”

“I know that. But I can ask around, and see if anyone here has heard from her.”

“You said she went to California to stay with relatives.”

“That’s what she told me before she left. I didn’t know she had any relatives, there or anywhere else. Except for her son William.” Brotherton’s voice had dropped so low that he seemed to be talking to himself.

“And William was murdered in 1943,” I said.

The sheriff spat on the ground, and then withdrew into silence. I could hear the murmur of voices from the substation, and the screech owl’s cry high on the mountainside. It sounded like an old woman’s husky titter.

“You’ve been doing some research into Mildred’s life,” he said.

“Not really. She’s the subject of a painting that I was hired to recover. But the case keeps sliding off into other cases. Mostly disaster cases.”

“Give me a for-instance.”

“The disappearance of Richard Chantry. He dropped out of sight in California in 1950, and left behind some paintings which have made him famous.”

“I know that,” the sheriff said. “I knew him when he was a boy. He was the son of Felix Chantry, who was chief engineer of the mine in Copper City. Richard came back here after he got married. He and his young wife lived in the house up the mountain, and he started painting there. That was back in the early forties.”

“Before or after his half brother William was murdered?”

The sheriff walked away from me a few steps, then came back. “How did you know that William Mead was Richard Chantry’s half brother?”

“It came up in conversation.”

“You must have some pretty wide-ranging conversations.” He stood perfectly still for a moment. “You’re not suggesting that Richard Chantry murdered his half brother, William?”

“The suggestion is all yours, Sheriff. I didn’t even know about William’s death until today.”

“Then why are you so interested?”

“Murder always interests me. Last night in Santa Teresa there was another murder—also connected with the Chantry family. Did you ever hear of a man named Paul Grimes?”

“I knew him. He was Richard Chantry’s teacher. Grimes lived with him and his wife for quite some time. I never thought too much of Grimes. He lost his job at the Copper City high school and married a half-breed.” The sheriff averted his head and spat on the ground again.

“Don’t you want to know how he was murdered?”

“It doesn’t matter to me.” He seemed to have a supply of anger in him, which broke out at unexpected points. “Santa Teresa is way outside my territory.”

“He was beaten to death,” I said. “I understand that William Mead was also beaten to death. Two murders, in two different states, over thirty years apart, but the same m.o”

“You’re reaching,” he said, “with very little to go on.”

“Give me more, then. Was Paul Grimes living with the Chantrys when William Mead was killed?”

“He may have been. I think he was. That was back in 1943, during the war.”

“Why wasn’t Richard Chantry in uniform?”

“He was supposed to be working in the family’s copper mine. But I don’t think he ever went near it. He stayed at home with his pretty young wife and painted pretty pictures.”

“What about William?”

“He was in the army. He came here on leave to visit his brother. William was in uniform when he was killed.”

“Was Richard ever questioned about William’s death?”

The sheriff answered after some delay, and when he did answer he spoke with difficulty: “Not to my knowledge. I wasn’t in charge then, you understand. I was just a junior deputy.”

“Who conducted the investigation?”

“I did, for the most part. I was the one that found the body, not too far from here.” He pointed east toward the New Mexico desert. “Understand, we didn’t find him right away. He’d been dead for several days, and the varmints had been at him. There wasn’t much left of his face. We weren’t even sure that he’d been killed by human hands until we got the medical examiner out from Tucson. By that time it was too late to do much.”

“What would you have done if you’d had the chance?”

The sheriff became quite still again, as if he were listening to voices from the past that I couldn’t hear. His eyes were shadowed and remote.

Finally he said, with too much angry certainty, “I wouldn’t have done anything different. I don’t know what you’re trying to prove. I don’t know why I’m talking to you at all.”

“Because you’re an honest man, and you’re worried.”

“What am I worried about?”

“Mildred Mead, for one thing. You’re afraid that something has happened to her.”

He took a deep breath. “I don’t deny that.”

“And I think you’re still worried about that body you found in the desert.”

He looked at me sharply but made no other response. I said, “Are you certain that it was her son William’s body?”

“Absolutely certain.”

“Did you know him?”

“Not that well. But he was carrying his official papers. In addition to which, we brought Mildred out from Tucson. I was there when she made the identification.” He went into another of his silences.

“Did Mildred take the body back to Tucson with her?”

“She wanted to. But the army decided that after we got finished with it the body should go to Mead’s wife. We packed the poor remains into a sealed coffin and shipped them back to the wife in California. At first none of us knew he had a wife. He hadn’t been married very long. He married her after he entered the service, a friend of his told me.”

“Was this a local friend?”

“No. He was an army buddy. I disremember his name—something like Wilson or Jackson. Anyway, he was very fond of Mead and he wangled a leave to come out here and talk to me about him. But he couldn’t tell me much, except that Mead had a wife and a baby boy in California. I wanted to go and see them, but the county wouldn’t put up the expense money for me. Mead’s army buddy got shipped out in a hurry, and I never saw him again, though later, after the war, he sent me a postcard from a vets’ hospital in California. One way and another, I never did make a case.” The sheriff sounded faintly apologetic.

“I don’t understand why Richard Chantry wasn’t questioned.”

“It’s simple enough. Richard was out of the state before the body was found. I made a real effort to have him brought back—you understand, I’m not saying he was guilty, in any way—but I couldn’t get any support from higher authorities. The Chantrys still had a lot of political power, and the Chantry name was kept out of the William Mead case. It wasn’t even publicized that Mildred Mead was his mother.”

“Was old Felix Chantry still alive in 1943?”

“No. He died the year before.”

“Who was running the copper mine?”

“A fellow named Biemeyer. He wasn’t the official head at the time, but he was making the decisions.”

“Including the one not to question Richard Chantry?”

“I wouldn’t know about that.”

His voice had changed. He had started to lie, or to withhold the truth. Like every sheriff in every county, he would have his political debts and his unspeakable secrets.

I wanted to ask him whom he was trying to protect, but decided not to. I was far out of my own territory, among people I didn’t know or entirely understand, and there was a sense of unexpended trouble in the air.

^chapter

21

The sheriff was leaning toward me slightly, almost as if he could overhear my thoughts. He was as still as a perching hawk, with some of a hawk’s poised threat.

“I’ve been open with you,” he said. “But you’ve been holding back on me. You haven’t even told me who you represent.”

“Biemeyer,” I said.

The sheriff smiled broadly without showing any teeth at all. “You’re kidding me.”

“No, I’m not. The girl is Biemeyer’s daughter.”

Without any obvious change, his smile turned into a grin of shock and alarm. He must have become aware that he was revealing himself. Like a hostile fist relaxing, his face smoothed itself out into blandness. Only his sharp gray eyes were hostile and watchful. He jerked a thumb toward the mountain behind him.

“The girl you left up there is Biemeyer’s daughter?”

“That’s right.”

“Don’t you know he’s majority owner of the copper mine?”

“He makes no secret of it,” I said.

“But why didn’t you tell me?”

It was a question I couldn’t answer easily. Perhaps I’d let myself imagine that Doris might possibly be better off in a world quite different from her parents’ world, at least for a while. But this world belonged to Biemeyer, too.

The sheriff was saying, “The copper mine is the biggest employer at this end of the state.”

“Okay, we’ll put the girl to work in the copper mine.”

He stiffened. “What in hell do you mean by that? Nobody said anything about putting her to work.”

“It was just a joke.”

“It’s not funny. We’ve got to get her out of that funny farm before some harm comes to her. My wife and I can put her up for the night. We have a nice spare room—it used to be our own daughter’s room. Let’s get going, eh?”

The sheriff left Fred in the deputy’s custody and drove me up the mountain in his official car. He parked it in the lane behind Fred’s old blue Ford. A dented white moon watched us over the mountain’s shoulder.

The big house in the canyon was dark and silent, its stillness hardly broken by a man’s random snore, a girl’s faint crying. The crying girl turned out to be Doris. She came to the door when I called her name. She had on a white flannelette nightgown that covered her like a tent from the neck down. Her eyes were wide and dark and her face was wet.

“Get your clothes on, honey,” the sheriff said. “We’re taking you out of this place.”

“But I like it here.”

“You wouldn’t like it if you stayed. This is no place for a girl like you, Miss Biemeyer.”

Her body stiffened and her chin came up. “You can’t make me leave.”

The leader had come up behind her, not too close. He didn’t speak. He seemed to be watching the sheriff with the detachment of a spectator at somebody else’s funeral.

“Don’t be like that, now, will you?” the sheriff said to Doris. “I’ve got a daughter of my own, I know how it is. We all like a little adventure. But then it comes time to get back to normal living.”

“I’m not normal,” she said.

“Don’t worry, you will be, honey. What you need is to find the right young man. The same thing happened to my girl. She went and lived in a commune in Seattle for a year. But then she came back and found Mr. Right, and they’ve got two children now and everybody’s happy.”

“I’m never going to have any children,” she said.

But she put on her clothes and went out to the sheriff’s car with him. I lingered behind with the leader. He stepped out onto the porch, moving rather uncertainly. In the light from the sky, his eyes and his white hair seemed faintly phosphorescent.

“She would have been welcome to stay with us.”

“For a price?”

“We all contribute as we can. We practice tithing, each paying according to his ability. My own contribution is largely spiritual. Some of us earn our keep at humbler tasks.”

“Where did you study theology?”

“In the world,” he said. “Benares, Camarillo, Lompoc. I admit I don’t have a degree. But I’ve done a great deal of counseling. I find myself able to help people. I could have helped Miss Biemeyer. I doubt that the sheriff can.” He reached out and touched my arm with his long thin hand. “I believe I could help you.”

“Help me do what?”

“Do nothing, perhaps.” He spread his arms wide in an actorish gesture. “You seem to be a man engaged in an endless battle, an endless search. Has it ever occurred to you that the search may be for yourself? And that the way to find yourself is to be still and silent, silent and still?” He dropped his arms to his sides.

I was tired enough to be taken by his questions, and to find myself repeating them in my mind. They were questions I had asked myself, though never in just those terms. Perhaps, after all, the truth I was looking for couldn’t be found in the world. You had to go up on a mountain and wait for it, or find it in yourself.

But even as I was taking a short-term lease on a piece of this thought, I was watching the lights of Copper City framed in the canyon mouth, and planning what I would do there in the morning.

“I don’t have any money.”

“Neither do I,” he said. “But there seems to be enough for everyone. Money is the least of our worries.”

“You’re lucky.”

He disregarded my irony. “I’m glad you see that. We’re very lucky indeed.”

“Where did you get the money to buy this place?”

“Some of our people have income.” The idea seemed to please him, and he smiled. “We may not go in for worldly show, but this isn’t exactly a poorhouse. Of course it isn’t all paid for.”

“I’m not surprised. I understand it cost you over a hundred thousand dollars.”

His smile faded. “Are you investigating us?”

“I have no interest in you at all, now that the girl is out of here.”

“We did her no harm,” he said quickly.

“I’m not suggesting you did.”

“But I suppose the sheriff will be bothering us now. Simply because we gave shelter to Biemeyer’s daughter.”

“I hope not. I’ll put in a word with him, if you like.”

“I would like, very much.” He relaxed visibly and then audibly, letting out a long sighing breath.

“In return for which,” I said, “you can do something for me.”

“What is it?” He was suspicious of me again.

“Help me to get in touch with Mildred Mead.”

He spread his hands, palms up. “I wouldn’t know how. I don’t have her address.”

“Aren’t you making payments to her for this house?”

“Not directly. Through the bank. I haven’t seen her since she went to California. That was several months ago.”

“Which bank is handling the account?”

“The Copper City branch of Southwestern Savings. They’ll tell you I’m not a swindler. I’m not, you know.”

I believed him, provisionally. But he had two voices. One of them belonged to a man who was reaching for a foothold in the spiritual world. The other voice, which I had just been listening to, belonged to a man who was buying a place in the actual world with other people’s money.

It was an unstable combination. He could end as a con man, or a radio preacher with a million listeners, or a bartender with a cure of souls in Fresno. Perhaps he had already been some of those things.

But I trusted him up to a point. I gave him the keys to the blue Ford and asked him to keep it for Fred, just in case Fred ever came back that way.

^chapter

22

We drove back down the mountain to the substation and found Fred sitting inside with the deputy. I couldn’t tell at first glance whether he was a prisoner or a patient. He had an adhesive bandage across the bridge of his nose and cotton stuffed up his nostrils. He looked like a permanent loser.

The sheriff, who was a small winner, went into the inner office to make a phone call. His voice was a smooth blend of confidence and respect. He was making arrangements to fly Doris home in a copper-company jet.

He lifted his head, flushed and bright-eyed, and offered me the receiver. “Mr. Biemeyer wants to talk to you.”

I didn’t really want to talk to Biemeyer, now or ever. But I took the receiver and said into it, “This is Archer.”

“I’ve been expecting to hear from you,” he said. “After all, I’m paying you good money.”

I didn’t remind him that his wife had paid me. “You’re hearing from me now.”

“Thanks to Sheriff Brotherton. I know how you private dicks operate. You let the men in uniform do the work and then you step in and take the credit.”

For a hotheaded instant, I was close to hanging up on Biemeyer. I had to remind myself that the case was far from over. The stolen painting was still missing. There were two unsolved murders, Paul Grimes’s and now William Mead’s.

“There’s credit enough for everybody,” I said. “We have your daughter and she’s in reasonably good shape. I gather she’ll be flying home tomorrow in one of your planes.”

“First thing in the morning. I was just finalizing the arrangement with Sheriff Brotherton.”

“Could you hold that plane until late morning or so? I have some things to do in Copper City, and I don’t think your daughter should travel unaccompanied.”

“I don’t like the delay,” he said. “Mrs. Biemeyer and I are very eager to see Doris.”

“May I speak to Mrs. Biemeyer?”

“I suppose you can,” he said reluctantly. “She’s right here.”

There was some indistinct palaver at the other end, and then Ruth Biemeyer’s voice came over the line. “Mr. Archer? I’m relieved to hear from you. Doris hasn’t been arrested, has she?”

“No. Neither has Fred. I want to bring them both home with me tomorrow on the company plane. But I may not be able to get out of here much before noon. Is that all right with you?”

“Yes.”

“Thanks very much. Good night, Mrs. Biemeyer.”

I hung up and told the sheriff that the plane would leave at noon tomorrow with me and Doris and Fred. Brotherton didn’t argue. My telephone conversation had invested me with some of the Biemeyer charisma.

On the strength of this, I put in a word for the people in Chantry Canyon, as I had promised, and offered to assume responsibility for Fred. The sheriff agreed. Doris, he said, would be spending the night at his house.

Fred and I checked into a double room in the motel. I needed a drink, but the store was closed and not even beer was available. I had no razor or toothbrush. I was as tired as sin.

But I sat on my bed and felt surprisingly good. The girl was safe. The boy was in my hands.

Fred had stretched out on his bed with his back to me. His shoulders moved spasmodically, and he made a repeated noise that sounded like hiccuping. I realized he was crying.

“What’s the matter, Fred?”

“You know what’s the matter. My career is over and done with. It never even started. I’ll lose my job at the museum. They’ll probably put me in jail, and you know what will happen to me then.” His voice was dulled by the cotton in his nose.

“Do you have a record?”

“No. Of course I don’t.” The idea seemed to shock him. “I’ve never been in trouble.”

“Then you should be able to stay out of jail.”

“Really?” He sat up and looked at me with wet red eyes.

“Unless there’s something that I don’t know about. I still don’t understand why you took the picture from the Biemeyer house.”

“I wanted to test it. I told you about that. Doris even suggested that I should take it. She was just as interested as I was.”

“Interested in what, exactly?”

“In whether it was a Chantry. I thought I could put my expertise to work on it.” He added in a muffled voice, “I wanted to show them that I was good for something.”

He sat up on the edge of the bed and put his feet on the floor. He was young for his age, in his thirties and still a boy, and foolish for a person of his intelligence. It seemed that the sad house on Olive Street hadn’t taught him much about the ways of the world.

Then I reminded myself that I mustn’t buy too much of Fred’s queer little story. After all, he was a self-admitted liar.

I said, “I’d like your expert opinion on that picture.”

“I’m not really an expert.”

“But you’re entitled to an informed opinion. As a close student of Chantry, do you think he painted the Biemeyer picture?”

“Yes, sir. I do. But my statement has to be qualified.”

“Go ahead and qualify it.”

“Well. It certainly doesn’t go back any twenty-five years. The paint is much too new, applied maybe as recently as this year. And the style has changed, of course. It naturally would. I think it’s Chantry’s style, his developed style, but I couldn’t swear to it unless I saw other late examples. You can’t base a theory or an opinion on a single work.”

Fred seemed to be talking as an expert, or at least an informed student. He sounded honest and for once forgetful of himself. I decided to ask him a harder question.

“Why did you say in the first place that the painting had been stolen from your house?”

“I don’t know. I must have been crazy.” He sat looking down at his dusty shoes. “I guess I was afraid to involve the museum.”

“In what way?”

“In any way. They’d fire me if they knew I’d taken the picture myself the way I did. Now they’ll fire me for sure. I have no future.”

“Everybody has a future, Fred.”

The words didn’t sound too encouraging, even to me. A lot of futures were disastrous, and Fred’s was beginning to look like one of those. He hung his head under the threat of it.

“The most foolish thing you did was to bring Doris with you.”

“I know. But she wanted to come along.”

“Why?”

“To see Mildred Mead if I found her. She was the main source of the trouble in Doris’s family, you know. I thought it might be a good idea if Doris could talk to her. You know?”

I knew. Like other lost and foolish souls, Fred had an urge to help people, to give them psychotherapy even if it wrecked them. When he was probably the one who needed it most. Watch it, I said to myself, or you’ll be trying to help Fred in that way. Take a look at your own life, Archer.

But I preferred not to. My chosen study was other men, hunted men in rented rooms, aging boys clutching at manhood before night fell and they grew suddenly old. If you were the therapist, how could you need therapy? If you were the hunter, you couldn’t be hunted. Or could you?

“Doris is having a hard time maintaining,” Fred said. “I’ve been trying to help her out of it.”

“By taking her on a long drive to nowhere?”

“She wanted to come. She insisted. I thought it was better than leaving her where she was, sitting in an apartment by herself and gobbling drugs.”

“You have a point.”

He managed to give me a quick shy smile that twitched and cowered in the shadow of his mustache. “Besides, you have to remember that this isn’t nowhere for Doris. She was born in Copper City and spent at least half of her life here in Arizona. This is home for her.”

“It hasn’t been a very happy homecoming.”

“No. She was terribly disappointed. I guess you can’t go home again, as Thomas Wolfe says.”

Remembering the gabled house where Fred lived with his father and mother, I wondered who would want to.

“Have you always lived in Santa Teresa?”

He was thoughtful for a moment. Then he said, “Since I was a little boy, we’ve lived in the same house on Olive Street. It wasn’t always the wreck that it is now. Mother kept it up much better—I used to help her—and we had roomers, nurses from the hospital and such.” He spoke as if having roomers was a privilege. “The best times were before my father came home from Canada.” Fred looked past me at my hunched shadow on the wall.

“What was your father doing in Canada?”

“Working at various jobs, mostly in British Columbia. He liked it then. I don’t think he and Mother got along too well, even in those days. I’ve realized since that he probably stayed away from her for that reason. But it was a bit rough on me. I don’t remember ever seeing my father until I was six or seven.”

“How old are you now, Fred?”

“Thirty-two,” he said reluctantly.

“You’ve had long enough to get over your father’s absence.”

“That isn’t what I meant at all.” He was flustered and angry, and disappointed in me. “I wasn’t offering him as an excuse.”

“I didn’t say you were.”

“As a matter of fact, he’s been a good father to me.” He thought this statement over, and amended it. “At least he was in those early days when he came back from Canada. Before he started drinking so hard. I really loved him in those days. Sometimes I think I still do, in spite of all the awful things he does.”

“What awful things?”

“He rants and roars and threatens Mother and smashes things and cries. He never does a stroke of work. He sits up there with his crazy hobbies and drinks cheap wine, and it’s all he’s good for.” His voice had coarsened, and rose and fell like an angry wife’s ululation. I wondered if Fred was unconsciously imitating his mother.

“Who brings him the wine?”

“Mother does. I don’t know why she does it, but she keeps on doing it. Sometimes,” he added in a voice that was almost too low to hear, “sometimes I think she does it in revenge.”

“Revenge for what?”

“For ruining himself and his life, and ruining her life. I’ve seen her stand and watch him staggering from wall to wall as if she took pleasure in seeing him degraded. At the same time, she’s his willing slave and buys him liquor. That’s another form of revenge—a subtle form. She’s a woman who refuses to be a full woman.”

Fred had surprised me. As he reached deeper into the life behind his present trouble, he lost his air of self-deprecating foolishness. His voice deepened. His thin and long-nosed boyish face almost supported his mustache. I began to feel faint stirrings of respect for him, and even hope.

“She’s a troubled woman,” I said.

“I know. They’re both troubled people. It’s really too bad they ever got together. Too bad for both of them. I believe my father once had the makings of a brilliant man, before he turned into a lush. Mother isn’t up to him mentally, of course, and I suppose she resents it, but she isn’t a negligible person. She’s a registered nurse and she’s kept up her profession and looked after my father, both at the same time. That took some doing.”

“Most people do what they have to.”

“She’s done a bit more than that. She’s been helping me through college. I don’t know how she makes the money stretch.”

“Does she have any extracurricular income?”

“Not since the last roomer left. That was some time ago.”

“And I heard last night that she lost her job at the hospital.”

“Not exactly. She gave it up.” Fred’s voice had risen, and lost its masculine timbre. “They made her a much better offer at the La Paloma nursing home.”

“That doesn’t sound very likely, Fred.”

“It’s true.” His voice rose higher, his eyes were too bright, his mustache was ragged. “Are you calling my mother a liar?”