Chapter Nineteen

On Saturday afternoon, Ames, Terrell, and the stony-faced Craig Finch sat at the kitchen table of the small house. Ada was there too. They were looking at what seemed, in this severe context, the highly inappropriate and garish pile of ladies’ frocks and underwear.

“Well?” asked her father coldly.

Ada shook her head dumbly, glancing miserably at the pile of clothes and then looking down at the table.

“Miss Finch, did Barney Watts say he would buy any clothes for you?” Ames asked.

Ada looked desperately at her father and then down again.

“Answer the bloody question!” her father thundered.

Looking frantically toward the door, Ada managed, “He said . . .”

“Don’t look for your mother to come and save you. She’s with your gran at the hospital. Now, what did that bastard say?”

Ames wished Finch wouldn’t browbeat his daughter, but he did not interfere, thinking perhaps he’d have no better luck himself with some gentler tactic. “Miss Finch?”

“He’d take care of everything, but—”

Finch jumped up, took up what clothes he could gather in his fist, and shook them in his daughter’s face. “So he was proposing to dress you up like a tart in this garbage? I don’t suppose you have any bloody idea what would have happened next, do you?”

Ames half stood. “Mr. Finch.” His voice was soothing, causing Finch to drop the clothes and sit down angrily. “Miss Finch, but what?”

“I already gave him some of my clothes. He told me to so I wouldn’t have to take anything but my schoolbooks so it wouldn’t look, uh, suspicious.” She stopped and looked miserably at her father.

“There will be plenty of suspicion to go around from now on,” her father said. “Have you finished, officers? Ada has her homework, which she’ll have lots of time to do because she won’t be leaving this house after school for the rest of her natural life!”

“Mr. Finch, can we have a word with you on your own?”

“Now what? Get up to your room,” Finch said to his daughter. He waited till she was out of the room and part- way up the steps and then turned back to the policemen. “What?”

“We understand you had a violent disagreement with Watts at your workplace. Is that true?” Ames asked.

“What of it?” Finch said truculently. “People get into arguments all the time.”

“Yes, but you were overheard to say something along the lines of ‘stay away from her’. It suggests that you knew he had designs on your daughter. So it shouldn’t have been such a big surprise that he might have been going to run away with her. Can you tell us where you were Tuesday afternoon?”

“I was home, sick.”

“Can anyone verify that?” Ames tried to keep his voice mild.

“My bloody wife can verify it. What the hell are you driving at? I didn’t do anything to him. Believe me, though, if he’d managed to get her away, I wouldn’t answer for my actions! I’m not surprised he’s dead!”

“Whew!” Terrell said, navigating down the narrow street after this stormy interview. “That poor kid. I used to think it would be fun to have a daughter, but I’m not so sure now. There’s just too much awful stuff that can happen to them. I’m inclined to believe him, by the way. Of course, his wife will just confirm he was sick at home.”

“And would a man with a short fuse like that go to all this trouble with poisoned handkerchiefs? He’d much more likely shoot him in a fit of rage. Still, he’s on our list. The question of the clothes is puzzling me. What do we have? According to her, the clothes weren’t for her, but maybe they were. Maybe her father was right: Finch intended to dress Ada up, try to make her look older so as not to arouse suspicion if they were planning to run away somewhere.”

“If Ada gave Watts her own clothes, where are they now?”

“Keep driving. Let’s stop at the train station and see if he kept another locker or something. I can’t imagine that he’d risk bringing a bunch of teenager’s clothes to his place of work, but they weren’t in the car or at his house. At least, Mrs. Watts didn’t mention them,” Ames said.

The foreman at the station shook his head. “Just the empty one you saw.”

Back at the police station, Terrell handed Sergeant O’Brien, the deskman, the keys to the car and said to Ames, “Look, sir, why don’t I pop out to the dress shops with this stuff and see if I can find out who bought it. I think it’s pretty obvious, but at least we could dot that i, as it were.”

Ames nodded, but he didn’t tell Terrell what he was going to spend the next hour doing because, he realized later in the file room, he was slightly embarrassed about it.

“Hello, darling,” Lane said, when her husband’s shadow loomed across her deck chair. There were two children splashing about in the pool while their mother sat on the edge with her feet in the water, calling out to them not to go to the deep end.

Darling took off his hat, pulled a nearby deck chair closer, and sat down. “I’ve heard a most extraordinary story,” he said.

“Do tell,” she said, smiling. The shade from her sun hat fell becomingly across her face, but he firmly ignored that.

“I went down to the Tucson police station, as you know, to tell Martinez and Galloway about Chela seeing Meg’s older male friend’s mug shot in the paper. Martinez took it seriously and Galloway pooh-poohed it. Then Galloway asked me to stay back for a word. Can you guess what that word was?”

“Haven’t the foggiest,” she said.

“He told me his wife had checked out of the hospital on her own and disappeared. He wondered, don’t you know, if she’d seemed all right to us on our little trip to the mission. I confess, I was stymied. For one thing I had to pretend I didn’t know she’d been in the hospital, and for another I wasn’t sure what confidences she could have shared that would be in any way connected to her later hospitalization and disappearance. Did she confide in you, perhaps while you two were sitting in the shade of the mission garden?”

“That’s interesting, because you know, there was a moment when I thought she might confide in me. In fact, I tried to encourage it, but she gave an artificial little laugh and brushed me off. I wasn’t very convinced. And when it comes down to it, I don’t think I was that surprised to learn he’d put her in the hospital.”

“I can’t tell you how little I enjoyed pretending I knew nothing about her disappearance from that hospital.”

Terrell trudged through a barrage of sleety rain to the three main dress shops in town and was relieved to have some luck at the third.

“Yes, those are from our shop. The dresses, I mean, not the underwear. It happens I do remember because I myself really liked that blue dress. I asked the lady who bought it if she was going on vacation and she said she was. She said they were driving down to California.”

“Do you remember her name or anything about her? Or the day they were purchased?”

“Oh.” The saleswoman stopped and frowned. “I’d have to go through my sales slips to find the exact date, but I would say within the last month? I didn’t get her name, but I do remember her. A pretty blonde with very curly hair. In her early thirties or late twenties perhaps, but quite young looking for all that. Yea high.” She held her hand up at Terrell’s chin level. “These are size 16 R. They were meant for quite a slender woman, which she was.”

“Eye colour?”

“Honestly, I couldn’t tell you. Dark green, brown. Not notably blue or anything.”

“Thank you. If you could give your sales slips a quick look and give me a call at the station, that would be helpful, thank you. Ask for Constable Terrell.”

“By the way, Constable, I can save you some trouble on that other purchase. It came from Grace’s down the end of the street, near the gas station, and it was bought the same day because the lady had a bag from there.”

Terrell smiled and tipped his hat as he left the shop, looking with a sigh at the two cold, wet blocks he’d have to traverse to get to the store.

“What are you looking for, Sergeant? I thought there were rats in here,” Sergeant O’Brien said, looking into the file room.

Ames was seated in front of a three-drawer filing cabinet. The records room was windowless and dusty. Sneezing explosively, Ames said, “I’m looking for what I’m pretty sure isn’t here: a file containing information about a young woman, a girl really, who might have come here to report an assault in probably late June of ’35.”

“Why shouldn’t it be there? We’ve always kept pretty good records.”

“Because it’s likely the girl was sent away with some harsh words from the officer she talked to. You know, blaming her for it, refusing to take it seriously.”

O’Brien, not one for standing, settled his bulk with a “humph” into a chair in front of the small table, which was the only other furniture in the room. “I can’t see that, can you? How young was she?”

“Sixteen.”

“Well, there you are then. A sixteen-year-old would have come in with a parent, and no parent would put up with the daughter being dismissed like that.”

Ames pulled another file folder out, opened it, scanned the pages, and tossed it back in, then turned to O’Brien. “That’s the thing, she didn’t come in with a parent. She didn’t want her parents to know. Were you here in ’35?”

“I was. The inspector wasn’t here yet. He came in ’36. Was it an old guy, do you know? Higgs retired that year. If it was him, I can see it. He was a tad old-fashioned, and didn’t much like keeping records, especially toward the end. And Sergeant Galloway was here then, but he left in ’37. Moved down south somewhere stateside because he didn’t like the cold. He was okay. A little full of himself but well liked. He used to play poker with a group of guys every week. Said that’s how he kept his ear to the ground. Took Darling under his wing.” He chuckled and pushed himself upright. “He did pretty well at cards, as I recall. Got a round at the bar out of him more than once. Anyway, I’ll give it a think, see if something comes to mind. Gotta get back to the desk. I suggest you come up for air soon. The dust in here will kill you. And I couldn’t swear to there being no rats here, either.”

O’Brien had just reached his desk when Terrell pushed the door open and removed his sodden hat, shaking it onto the doormat.

“Don’t you look like a drowned muskrat,” O’Brien commented, watching him peel off his rubber overshoes and gingerly hang his soaking raincoat on the coat rack.

“I feel like one. Is Sergeant Ames in?”

“He’s gone upstairs after spending a couple of happy hours in the file room getting dust up his nose. Police work, eh?”

Terrell smiled wanly and went up in search of Ames. He already knew that Ames wasn’t going to like hearing what he’d learned from the dress-shop expedition.

“Oh, my God,” Darling said, pushing his hand through his hair. “Can I not leave you alone for a minute?” He was again prey to very mixed feelings. On the one hand, he felt unabashed admiration for his wife’s unwavering sense of justice, and on the other, anxiety about what it would all mean.

“Darling, if you had seen her, you would not have hesitated. And after all, she asked for my help. And Chela helped me get hold of her brother. He used his own car so that the taxi couldn’t be traced, and he had a day off coming anyway. He was magnificent and wouldn’t take a cent.”

“Of course, you were right. Of course, you were. I just wish you’d told me ahead of time. I can just see my whole married life unfolding before me, with you bashing off to rescue the halt and the lame, leaving me in the dark.”

“I so nearly did tell you, but at the time I worried that you would be in the position of knowing and having to lie to Galloway. I don’t think you are all that comfortable with lying.”

“What worries me is that you are,” Darling said, taking her hand and looking at it despondently. He thought about her wartime career in intelligence. Surely a good deal of lying would have been required.

But Lane took both his hands and looked at him earnestly. “I am not. I have never lied to you about anything. And I never will. I thought you knew that.” She dropped his hands and looked away toward the children who had come out of the pool and were being rubbed down, shivering and laughing. She was immediately sorry she’d said it. It was too big, and it wasn’t fair because while she hadn’t lied, she’d kept him out. “I’m sorry. That was unfair. I did keep you out of it. I can see that it’s almost a form of lying.”

“That makes two of us. I’m sorry as well. I don’t imagine for a minute that you’d be comfortable lying, but I will admit, I don’t like being . . . maybe not trusted is a better way to look at it. I can even confess that in looking back on my conversation with Galloway, I am glad I didn’t know ahead of time. It would have made for an awful awkwardness. I think what I’m saying is that I do want to know before you go haring off on rescue missions, should this become a fixture of our marriage, and I want you to trust me to handle the outcomes.”

“I do love you,” she said, leaning in to kiss him gently. “Shall we go riding this afternoon? I’d love to see the city from up high again. It’s convincing me that we might even get a couple of horses when we get home. What do you think?”

“Well, yes to the ride this afternoon, certainly. I just have to show Miss Ruiz this photo. And you too for that matter. Does this look like the man we saw Meg Holden talking to on the street? I didn’t get a good enough look at his face. I think I was concentrating more on his grabbing her arm like that.”

Lane took the photo he’d pulled out of the manila envelope. “We were almost half a block away by the time I tumbled to the realization it was Meg Holden. Certainly the shape of the head looks right, but I don’t think I could swear to it in court. But Chela saw him very close up, so she’ll know for sure. Who is he?”

“He’s a bit of a local gangster, and if Mrs. Holden is very chummy with him, I suspect that means something.”

Galloway sat on the patio of his home, nursing his fourth scotch and waiting for Fernanda to cook his dinner. She’d looked disapprovingly at him when he’d ordered her to just bring the bottle and set it down on the table beside him, but then, she looked disapprovingly at him all the time. He should dismiss her. He looked at his watch. It was nearly eight and starting to get cold. She’d serve dinner and then go home. He could feel a wave of anxiety about being alone and pushed it aside. The Griffin situation had seemed in the bag. What was the meaning of Darling’s so-called information? It would, he was absolutely sure, come to nothing.

Galloway turned to the problem of his wife. He’d made up the name “Dahlia” when he was talking to Darling, but there must be a Dahlia of sorts somewhere who knew where she was—or was even hiding her. He started again to run through the people they knew at the club when Fernanda called.

“Señor jefe. It is on the table.”

Galloway got up, surprised at how light-headed he felt. He said nothing to the maid but shook his hand at her in a shooing motion when she asked if there was anything else. He listened until he heard the back door close, and only when he was sure she had left, did he turn to his dinner.

Priscilla would be back. He even felt half convinced that he’d been right when he told Darling that she was just waiting till she looked more like her old self. She couldn’t survive a second on her own, he knew that. She had no money for starters, and there wasn’t a single woman at the club who would risk her husband’s career by sheltering the wife of the assistant chief of police.

He was the assistant chief of police, dammit. He’d use good old police procedures to track her down. If it did turn out to be one of the women at the club, well, he’d see what ought to be done about that.