We started back toward the inn, but Conchita left me before our clasped hands had achieved the same temperature. After a dozen steps she caromed off to join her husband in the corner pocket. Eddie was still under the tree, but he was sitting up now, staring at the lake.
The croquet game had broken up at last. Grace, apparently, was the sole survivor. She was standing in front of a clump of shrubs that hid the entrance to the bar. When she saw me alone, she sauntered down the path to meet me, just as nonchalant as though she hadn’t been looking for me. I had to be reciprocally surprised.
“Well, well,” I said. “You’ll catch cold without a Pennington around your neck. Where—?”
“What did she want?” Grace asked, taking me by the arm and heading me back into the garden.
“What did who want?” I asked, wide-eyed with false naïveté.
“Conchita,” Grace said. “What did Conchita want?”
“Oh, Conchita. I’m not sure. But I think she likes me.”
“I mean what else did she want?”
We were back among the dahlias and chrysanthemums. We sat down on the love seat Conchita and I had just left.
“Conchita’s worried about that broken recording,” I said. “She thinks it would have done a lot of damage if it had ever been played.”
“That’s certainly a brilliant and difficult deduction,” Grace said. “I can’t see how Conchita ever figured it out. She really had nothing to go on—except that somebody killed Norman to get possesion of the recording.”
“Conchita seems to think that Norman made the recording himself,” I said.
“Really,” Grace said. “I don’t suppose you remember, but that’s exactly the conclusion you reached about forty seconds after you found the first piece of the broken disc in the woods.”
I didn’t flinch. I just tucked in my chin a little.
“What did Conchita do before she decided to make a career of being Mrs. Westerford?” I asked.
“She was in radio.”
“Torch singer?”
“No. An engineer. She was a recording technician.”
“That’s a funny one,” I said. “She doesn’t impress me as being a second Edison, a third De Forest, or even a fourth Marconi.”
“What’s funny about it? During the war the army and navy grabbed every radio engineer with two legs and one eye. So while you were off making hay in Haymarket, the poor downtrodden radio industry had to put a lot of bored, pretty, and sometimes efficient young ladies to work at the control consoles and recording lathes. That’s where she met Eddie, of course.”
“And where did you meet her?”
“Through Norman,” Grace said. “She was pretty friendly with Norman.”
“Too friendly, do you think?”
Anybody but Eddie Westerford might think so.”
“Friendly enough so that Norman might ask Conchita for the address of a good but obscure recording studio, and that Conchita might give it to him?”
“Oh, yes.”
“I have an idea,” I said. “It’s too good to waste on McKay. He takes such a dim view of me that he goes out of his way to snafu any scrap of an idea I happen to drop in his lap. I think I’ll work on this one myself.”
“I’m sure you’ll be successful,” Grace said. “You just can’t help being irresistible to big, dark, brazen, extraverted hussies.”
Before I could muster a few well-chosen words to express my great chagrin at being always misunderstood, Henry Pennington barged into the scene. He approached the dahlia garden with such long, rapid strides that I was sure he must be the bearer of portentous tidings. Perhaps a revolt of the nuclear physicists had taken over the world from the bird-brained paleolithic statesmen who were messing it up. Or at least the murderer of Norman H. Norman had been apprehended.
“Grace dear, I must talk to you,” Pennington said. As usual, he ignored my presence. I had the feeling of being completely transparent, for when he happened to look in my direction, he looked through me, not at me. But I was somehow not cowed by his majesty.
“What’s the score now, Senator?” I asked. “Is McKay’s team still three laps behind?”
“Captain McKay and several of his men just drove off in the direction of Blue Falls after receiving a telephone call. I have no idea what progress they’re making.” Pennington managed to answer my question while still pretending he wasn’t talking to me. To complete the illusion, he put his arm around Grace’s shoulders and said, “Shall we go in for a bite of lunch, dear?”
Grace turned to me. “Will you join us, Jim?”
“Thanks,” I said. I had canceled the idea that Pennington was a bearer of tidings. “I’m not hungry. Those bacon and eggs will do me for a while.”
I watched the love birds go off toward the inn, but I didn’t feel particularly dejected. My idea had suddenly taken fire, and my mind was busy with a plan. There was nothing personal about my spontaneous resolve to crack this mystery myself, either. It wasn’t just a vindictive desire to put the finger on the man who had conked me on the head, nor was it an overweening urge to see justice done. I guess it was just the old fire-horse response to an alarm, a reaction from army routine and red tape, from forms in triplicate, directives, and the chain of command that required concurrence from theatre, AG, Army, Corps, and Divisional commanders before any project more complex than a movement of the bowels could be undertaken. Here was a story with missing pieces, a challenge to an old police reporter, an assignment that called for individual initiative and ingenuity, just like the old days. It was my first taste of civilian freedom, a taste that I had almost forgotten, and I relished it.
I sauntered over to the bar. McKay had abandoned his field headquarters, all right. There was nobody in the bar except a couple in a corner booth, giggling over two sickly pink cocktails, and Karl the barman. I planted my instep on the rail.
“Hi,” Karl said. “Another rye?”
“Beer,” I said. “A short one.”
“The beer ain’t very cold and it’s mostly foam,” Karl said. “I just tapped a fresh keg.”
“I’ll take a bottle, then.”
While Karl was uncapping the bottle, he gave me his big gold-and-ivory grin. “You can sure talk to ’em, pal,” he said. “Alma likes you. You must be a fast talker.”
“Not fast, Karl,” I said. “Smooth. Did Alma tell you we’re engaged to be married?”
The hulking barman laughed with his bushy blond eyebrows, his pale blue eyes, and his spectacular bridge-work.
“You’re a card all right,” he said. “Alma thinks you’re a straight shooter. She thinks you’re on the level.”
“Why shouldn’t she?” I asked. “All I did was to steal her handbag, her war bonds and her lace step-ins.”
Again the bald-headed goliath was convulsed with laughter. “I’m not kidding,” he said. “Alma trusts you. She thinks maybe you’re the guy to make sure the lousy bum that killed Doc Norman gets his come-uppance. She’d like that. She thought Doc Norman was aces.”
“Including the ace of hearts?”
The laughter went out of the pale blue eyes. “I ain’t sure I know what you mean,” Karl said, and there were sharp, chilled-steel edges on each word. “But if you mean what I think you mean, you’re all wet. I said Alma liked. Doc Norman. That’s all.”
“Sometimes that’s plenty,” I said. “I was thinking back eight years—”
“You don’t have to think back at all,” Karl said. “I didn’t know Alma eight years ago, and her liking the doc don’t have to go back eight months even. He did her a big favor once, and she wants to pay him back some way, even if he’s dead.”
“How big a favor?” I asked.
“Well, maybe she didn’t think it was such a big favor at the time,” Karl said, studying his bar towel. “She seemed to think he was doing me a favor. She didn’t speak to me for a month.”
The giggling couple in the corner booth interrupted with imperative sounds of empty glasses. Karl went over to take their money. He made change and they went out. When he came back to the bar, I said, “So she didn’t speak to you for a month?”
“Yah,” Karl said. “She said I was the one who should do her a favor. Maybe she was right. She’s been pretty straight. Only I ain’t getting married before I got a place of my own. A little bar and grill with a kitchen in back, so we can make a restaurant too. I can cook like nobody’s business. I ain’t just a bartender. I explained all this to Alma, and she got Doc Norman to fix her up. He wouldn’t take a dime, either.”
“I can imagine that, from what I’ve heard of Norman,” I mused aloud. “I suppose he said he was doing a favor to the unborii generation.”
“He didn’t say nothing like that. He just said, ‘Forget it.’ Only Alma ain’t forgetting it. She’s grateful. She’d like to pay him back, even if he’s dead. She’d like to square things with his memory, if you know what I mean.”
“I think I know what you mean,” I said. “Why doesn’t Alma go to McKay with the dope, if she knows something?”
“I didn’t say she knows anything, did I?” Karl planted his elbows on the bar and glared at me. “I just said she wants to help if she can. I didn’t say she wants to commit suicide.”
“So she does know something?”
“Look. I don’t know if she knows anything or not. And I don’t want to know. I don’t carry much life insurance, and I ain’t taking out any extra policies just so McKay can keep his lousy job.”
“So it’s that hot?”
“Hot or cold, if Alma knows anything, she’d be a fool to spill it and stick her neck out, too. I told her so. But she still wants to talk to you when she gets a chance. No audience, though. Even if she don’t know anything, she can’t look like a stoolie, can she? Because Alma ain’t a stoolie. I’d smash her puss if she was.”
“But she wants to talk to me?”
“She did want to talk to you,” Karl said, emphasizing the past tense. “More beer?”
I nodded. “Have you changed her mind?”
An eye of foam winked from the top of the new bottle and a tear trickled down the side.
“She’ll probably give you a sign if she can get a minute with you on the Q.T. I dunno. What’s your percentage in this, anyhow?”
I told Karl that aside from the professional curiosity of an old reporter, I had no particular interest in the case—except to protect my own neck and that of my friend Grace Boyd. I said I didn’t think McKay had quite given up the idea that I had done away with Norman for sentimental reasons which involved Grace.
Karl seemed to give my statement some thought as he put a head on my glass of beer.
“Maybe I better let you look at Norman’s stuff,” he said at last. “The Doc stayed at the inn night before last, but he checked out before he started up the hill with that package under his arm. He left his bag here behind the bar.”
I knew I didn’t have to ask Karl if he’d told McKay about the bag, but I did anyhow.
“Nah,” the bartender replied. “He never asked me.”
Karl motioned with his bald head and I went behind the bar to examine a cheap canvas zipper bag.
“Take it in the can to open it,” Karl said. “McKay and his stooges may breeze in here again. If they do, I’ll bang on the door.”
I took the small bag into the lavatory, but it didn’t take me long to go through its contents. A cursory glance showed me that there was nothing in the collection of overnight articles to excite the nerve ends. However, I took a second and slower look at the two shirts—one clean, one dirty—some underwear and socks, shaving things, comb and brush, and handkerchiefs. There was a tube of toothpaste, but no toothbrush, a lack which puzzled me somewhat, although I could see no pertinent connection with the murder. I zipped the bag shut and took it back to Karl. He was still alone.
“Where do you suppose Norman left his toothbrush?” I asked.
Karl shrugged. “Maybe in Room 13,” he said. “That’s where he was night before last. Why don’t you go up and look in the bathroom. If there’s nobody in 13, the door won’t be locked.”
“How do you know?” I asked.
“They always leave the key on the inside of the door,” Karl said. “Room 13 is the ‘and wife’ room. Sometimes they rent it two-three times a night. I dunno how they happen to give it to Norman. What’s with the toothbrush?”
“I don’t know,” I said, “but I’ll take a look.”
I left the rest of my beer and started up to Room 13.