himself to you? I understand he was a very convincing guy.”
I held my anger. “There are other things. They can wait till you’ve done your phoning.”
With arrogant slowness, he took a cigar from his side pocket, asked the woman’s permission, bit off the end and dropped it in an ashtray, lit the cigar, blew out the match, puffed smoke in my direction. “When I need a door- knocker to tell me how to conduct my official work, I’ll send you a special-delivery letter.” He left the room, trailing cigar smoke; and came back from the hall immediately, holding Cathy Slocum by the arm. She twisted in his grasp. “Let me go, Mr. Knudson.”
He dropped her arm as if she had struck him. “I’m sorry, Cathy. I didn’t mean to be rough.”
She turned her back on him and moved toward the door, her low-heeled white fur slippers scuffing the rug. Wrapped in a pink quilted robe, with her gleaming hair brushed down her back, she looked like a child. Knudson watched her with a curious, helpless expression.
“Wait a minute, darling,” her mother said. “What are you doing up so late?”
Cathy stopped inside the door, but refused to turn. Her satin-covered shoulders were stiff and obstinate. “I was talking to father.”
“Is he still awake?”
“He couldn’t sleep, and I couldn’t either. We heard voices, and he sent me down to see who it was. Now may I go back to bed, please?”
“Of course you may, dear.”
“I’d like to ask Cathy a question,” I said. “Do you object, Mrs. Slocum?”
She raised her hand in a maternal gesture. “The poor girl’s had to answer so many questions. Can’t it wait until morning?”
“All it needs is a yes-or-no answer, and it’s a crucial question. Pat Reavis claimed her as an alibi.”
The girl turned in the doorway. “I’m not a child, mother. Of course I can answer a question.” She stood with her feet apart, her fists thrust deep into the pockets of her robe.
“All right, dear. As you wish.” I got the impression that the mother was the one who usually gave in.
I said to her: “Reavis claimed he came out here to see you last night. Was he with you before I found you in my car?”
“No. I haven’t seen him since that trouble in Quinto.”
“Is that all?” Knudson said.
“That’s all.”
“Come and kiss your mother goodnight,” Maude Slocum said.
The girl crossed the room with an unwilling awkwardness and kissed her mother on the cheek. The older woman’s arms moved up around her. The girl stepped out of them quickly, and away.
Knudson watched them as if he was unaware of the tension between them. He seemed to take a simple delight in the forced, loveless transaction of the kiss. He followed Cathy out of the room with a set smile on his face, the glowing cigar held cockily in the middle of the smile.
I sat down on the settee beside Maude Slocum: “Reavis is sewed up tight. I see what Knudson meant.”
“Are you still unsatisfied?” she asked me earnestly.
“Understand me, Reavis means nothing to me. It’s the total picture that bothers me: there are big gaps in it. For example. Do you know a man by the name of Walter Kilbourne?”
“More questions, Mr. Archer?” She reached for a silver cigarette box on the table beside her. Her hand, badly controlled, knocked the box to the floor. The cigarettes spilled out, and I started to pick them up.
“Don’t bother,” she said, “please don’t bother. It doesn’t matter. Things in general seem to be going to pieces. A few cigarettes on the floor are the least of my worries.”
I went on picking the cigarettes. “What is the greatest of your worries? Is it still that letter you gave me?”
“You ask so many questions. I wonder what it is that keep you asking them. A passion for justice, a passion for truth? You see, I’ve turned the tables on you.”
“I don’t know why you should bother to.” I set the full box on the table, lit her cigarette and one for myself.
She drew on it gratefully. Her answer was visible written in smoke on the air: “Because I don’t understand you. You have mind and presence enough for a better job, certainly one with more standing.”
“Like your friend Knudson’s? I worked in a municipal police department for five years, and then I quit. There were too many cases where the official version clashed with the facts I knew.”
“Ralph is honest. He’s been a policeman all his life, but he still has a decent conscience.”
“Two of them, probably. Most good policemen have a public conscience and a private conscience. I just have the private conscience; a poor thing, but my own.”
“I was right about you. You do have a passion for justice.” The deep eyes focused on mine and probed them, as if a passion for justice was something she could see and remember the shape of. Or a strange growth in a man that could be X-rayed out.
“I don’t know what justice is,” I said. “Truth interests me, though. Not general truth if there is any, but the truth of particular things. Who did what when why. Especially why. I wonder, for example, why you care whether I’m interested in justice. It could be an indirect way of asking me to drop out of this case.”
She was silent for a time. “No. It isn’t that. I have some regard for truth myself. I suppose it’s a woman’s regard: I want the truth if it doesn’t hurt too much. And I suppose I’m a little afraid of a man who cares strongly about something. You really care, don’t you, whether Reavis is innocent or guilty?”
“Doesn’t Knudson and his decent conscience?”
“He did, but I don’t know if he still does. There are a lot of things going on that I don’t understand.” That made two of us. “My esteemed husband, for instance, has retired to his room and refuses to emerge. He claims that he’ll spend the rest of his life in his room, like Marcel Proust.” Hatred flashed in the ocean-colored eyes and disappeared, like a shark-fin.
I crushed out my cigarette, which tasted acrid on an empty stomach. “This Marcel something-or-other, is he a friend of yours?”
“So now you’re going to play dumb again?”
“I might as well. It seems to be all the rage in this
“Ah, the letter. We’re back at the letter again.”
“Mrs. Slocum,” I said, “the letter wasn’t written about me. It was written about you. You hired me to find out who wrote it, remember?”
“So much has happened since, hasn’t it? It seems unimportant now.”
“Now that she’s dead?”
“Yes,” she answered calmly. “Now that she’s dead.”
“Has it occurred to you that the letter-writer and the murderer may be the same person?”
“It hadn’t. I can’t see any connection.”
“Neither can I. With co-operation, I might; if you’d tell me what you know about the relations between the people in this house.”
She raised her shoulders and let them fall in a gesture of weary resignation. “I can’t claim immunity to questioning on the grounds of extreme youth, like Cathy. I
“How long you’ve known Knudson, and how well.”
She gave me a second slow and probing look. “Just the last year or so, not at all intimately.”
“Yesterday you mentioned a friend of yours, by the name of Mildred Fleming. She might be able to tell me a different story. Or don’t you confide in your friends, either?”
She answered coldly: “I think you’re being insolent, Mr. Archer.”
“Very good, ma’am. We’ll play the game according to the formal rules. Unless you want to call it on account of insolence.”
“I haven’t decided about that. I’ll tell you one thing, though, I do know Walter Kilbourne. In fact, I saw him tonight.”
