to her lawyers about bail bond. The happy endings and the biggest oranges were the ones that California saved for export.
A short woman in a flame-colored blouse came through a plate-glass door that shut and locked itself behind her. Her short bobbed hair was blue-black and fitted her small head like a coat of Chinese lacquer. Her eyes, dark brown and experienced, carried a little luggage underneath.
I stood up and met her as she came toward me, her girdle-sheathed body moving with quick nervous energy. “Miss Fleming? I’m Archer.”
“Hello.” She gave me a firm cold hand. “I thought Al said your name was Armature.”
“He did.”
“I’m glad it isn’t. We had an assistant director called Mr. Organic once, but nobody could take him seriously. He changed his name to Goldfarb and did right well for himself.” Her rate of speech was a hundred words a minute, timed to the typewriter in her head. “Al also said Maude sent you, or is that another of his famous blunders?”
“He said that, but it isn’t exactly true.”
The smiling crinkle left her eyes, and they raked me up and down in a hard once-over. I was glad I’d changed to a fresh suit on the way from the Hall of Justice. In five or ten years she’d still remember the pattern of my tie, be able to pick my picture from a rogues’ gallery.
“Well,” she said with hostility, “you tell me what you’re selling and I’ll tell you how much I don’t want whatever it is. I’m busy, brother, you shouldn’t
“I sell my services.”
“Oh, no, not that!” She was a natural clown.
“I’m a private detective. I worked for Mrs. Slocum until last night.”
“Doing what?”
“Investigating. A certain matter.”
“It’s funny she didn’t tell me.” She was interested again. “I saw her at lunch the day before yesterday. What happened last night, she fire you?”
“No. She resigned.”
“I don’t get you.” But she understood the finality of my tone. Emotion flowed into her eyes as dark as ink.
“She committed suicide last night,” I said.
Mildred Fleming sat down suddenly, perched stiffly on the edge of a green plastic settee. “You’re kidding.”
“She’d dead all right.”
“Why in God’s name?” Some tears spilled out of her eyes and coursed down her cheeks, eroding the heavy makeup. She wiped them with a ball of crumpled Kleenex. “Excuse me. I happened to be pretty fond of the girl. Ever since high school.”
“I liked her too. It’s why I want to talk to you.”
She moved like a hummingbird, toward the outside door. “Come on across the street. I’ll buy you a coffee.”
The drugstore on the opposite corner contained everything a drugstore should except a pharmacy. Newspapers and magazines, motion picture projectors and pogo sticks, sunglasses and cosmetics and bathing suits, and twenty assorted specimens of human flotsam watching the door for a familiar face. There was a lunch bar at the rear, with booths along the wall, most of them empty in the afternoon lull.
Mildred Fleming slipped into one of the booths and held up two fingers to the waitress behind the counter. The waitress came running with two heavy mugs, and fussed over my companion.
“Silly girl,” she said when the waitress had bounced away. “She thinks I’ve got a pull. Nobody’s got a pull any more.” She leaned across the scarred table, sipping at her coffee. “Now tell me about poor Maude. Without coffee, I couldn’t take it.”
I had come to her for information, but first I told her what I thought was fit for her to know. What water had done to Olivia Slocum, what fire had done to Ryan, what strychnine had done to Maude. I left out Kilbourne and Mavis, and what they had done to each other.
She took it calmly, except that toward the end she needed her makeup more. She didn’t say a word, till I mentioned Knudson and the fact that he had run me out of town.
“You shouldn’t pay too much attention to what he said. I can imagine how he feels. I don’t know whether I should tell you this—”
“You don’t have to tell me. Knudson loved her, it was pretty obvious.”
I was probing for a gap in her defenses. Most good secretaries had an occupational weakness: they gathered inside information and after they had gathered it they had to tell it to somebody.
She was piqued. “If you know the whole story already, why come to me?”
“I know damn little. I don’t know who drowned Olivia Slocum or why Maude Slocum took strychnine. I came to you because you’re her closest friend. I figured you had a right to know what happened and that you’d want to help me get to the bottom of it.”
She was gratified. “I
“That’s Knudson’s theory, and most of the evidence supports it. I’ve taken an option on it, but I haven’t bought it yet.”
“You don’t think Maude—?” Her eyes shone blackly in the dim booth.
“I do not.”
“I’m glad you don’t. Anyone that knew her would tell you she couldn’t hurt anyone. She was a gentle creature, in spite of everything.”
“Everything?”
“Her whole damned messy life. Everything that made her want to suicide.”
“You know why she did then?”
“I guess I do, at that. She was crucified for fifteen years. She’s the one woman I’ve ever known that wanted to do the right thing and couldn’t make it. Everything about Maude was right except her life. She made a couple of mistakes that she couldn’t wipe out. I’ll tell you on one condition. Do you have a word of honor?”
“I have a word. I was an officer in the war, but the gentleman part didn’t take.”
The stern sharp glance raked me again. “I think I’d trust you as far as I would myself, no further. Give me your word that Cathy will never hear this, and that it won’t affect Cathy in any way.”
I guessed what she was going to tell me. “I can’t do that if other people know it.”
“Nobody but me,” she said. “And Knudson, of course, and maybe Knudson’s wife.”
“So Knudson has a wife.”
“He hasn’t lived with her for fifteen or sixteen years, but they’re still married, for keeps. She’ll never divorce him, no matter what he does. She hates him. I guess she hates everyone in the world. She’s going to be glad to hear that Maude killed herself.”
“You know the woman, do you?”
“Do I know her! I lived in her house for nearly a year, and I know her better than I want to. Eleanor Knudson is one of these hard righteous women who wouldn’t donate two pennies to close a dead man’s eyes. Maude lived there too, we were room-mates: that’s how the whole thing started. We were in our sophomore year at Berkeley.”
“Mrs. Knudson ran a boarding house in Berkeley?”
“A rooming house for girls. Her husband was a sergeant with the Oakland police. She was older than he was; I never figured out how she managed to hook him. Probably the usual landlady-roomer business: propinquity and maternal care and more propinquity. She had brains and she wasn’t bad-looking if you like the cold-steel type. Anyway, she and Ralph Knudson had been married for several years when we moved in.”
“You and Maude, you mean?”
“Yes. We’d taken our freshman year in the Teachers’ College in Santa Barbara, but we couldn’t stay there. We both had to work our way through school, and there wasn’t enough work in Santa Barbara. Maude’s father was a rancher in Ventura—that’s where we went to high school, in Ventura—but the depression had wiped him out. My
