or so who lived in Hillsborough with her son, a man in his thirties. The son was always home by midnight, but seldom before, and the mother wanted to know what he was doing with his evenings. It turned out he had been married for five years to an ex-waitress whom he maintained, with their three small children, in a row house in South San Francisco.
Arnie seemed to think that this was the end of the story.
'What happened to the people?' I asked him.
'The old lady fell in love with her grandchildren and put up with the daughter-in-law for their sake. They all lived happily ever after, on her money.'
'Too bad Bradshaw hasn't been married long enough to have any children.'
We drove in silence for a while. The road left the shore and tunneled among trees which enclosed it like sweet green coagulated night. I kept thinking about Bradshaw and his unsuspected masculinity.
'I'd like you to do some checking on Bradshaw, Arnie.'
'Has this marriage business escalated him into a suspect?'
'Not in my book. Not yet, anyway. But he did suppress the fact that he met Helen Haggerty in Reno last summer. I want to know exactly what he was doing here in the month of August. He told Judson Foley he was doing research at the University of Nevada, but that doesn't seem likely.'
'Why not?'
'He's got a doctorate from Harvard, and he'd normally do his research there or at Berkeley or Stanford. I want you to do some checking on Foley, too. Find out if you can why Foley was fired by the Solitaire Club.'
'That shouldn't be too hard. Their top security man is an old friend of mine.' He looked at his watch in the light from the dash. 'We could go by there now but he probably won't be on duty this late on a Sunday night.'
'Tomorrow will do.'
Phyllis was waiting for us with food and drink. We sat up in her kitchen foolishly late, getting mildly drunk on beer and shared memories and exhaustion. Eventually the conversation came full circle, back to Helen Haggerty and her death. At three o'clock in the morning I was reading aloud her translated poem in the _Bridgeton Blazer_ about the violins of the autumn winds.
'It's terribly sad,' Phyllis said. 'She must have been a remarkable young girl, even if it is only a translation.'
'That was her father's word for her. Remarkable. He's remarkable, too, in his own way.'
I tried to tell them about the tough old drunken heartbroken cop who had sired Helen. Suddenly it was half-past three and Phyllis was asleep with her head resting like a tousled dahlia among the bottles on the kitchen table. Arnie began gathering up the bottles, carefully, so as not to wake her unnecessarily soon.
Alone in their guest room I had one of those intuitions that come sometimes when you're very tired and emotionally stirred up. I became convinced that Hoffman had given me the _Blazer_ for a reason. There was something in it he wanted me to see.
I sat in my underwear on the edge of the open fresh-smelling bed and read the little magazine until my eyes crossed. I learned a good deal about student activities at Bridgeton City College twenty-two years ago, but nothing of any apparent consequence to my case.
I found another poem I liked, though. It was signed with the initials G.R.B., and it went:
If light were dark
And dark were light,
Moon a black hole
In the blaze of night,
A raven's wing
As bright as tin,
Then you, my love,
Would be darker than sin.
I read it aloud at breakfast. Phyllis said she envied the woman it had been written to. Arnie complained that his scrambled eggs weren't moist. He was older than Phyllis, and it made him touchy.
We decided after breakfast to leave Judson Foley sitting for the present. If Dolly Kincaid were arrested and arraigned, Foley would make a fairly good surprise witness for the defense. Arnie drove me to the airport, where I caught a Pacific ffight to Los Angeles.
I picked up an L.A. paper at International Airport, and found a brief account of the Haggerty killing in the Southland News on an inside page. It informed me that the wife-slayer Thomas McGee, released from San Quentin earlier in the year, was being sought for questioning. Dolly Kincaid wasn't mentioned.
chapter 25
Around noon I walked into Jerry Marks's store-front office. His secretary told me that Monday was the day for the weekly criminal docket and Jerry had spent the morning in court. He was probably having lunch somewhere near the courthouse. Yes, Mr. Kincaid had got in touch with Mr. Marks on Sunday, and retained him.
I found them together in the restaurant where Alex and I had lunched the day it began. Alex made room for me on his side of the booth, facing the front. Business was roaring, and there was a short lineup inside the front door.
'I'm glad the two of you got together,' I said.
Alex produced one of his rare smiles. 'So am I. Mr. Marks has been wonderful.'
Jerry flapped his hand in a depreciating way. 'Actually I haven't been able to do anything yet. I had another case to dispose of this morning. I did make an attempt to pick Gil Stevens's brains, but he told me I'd better go to the transcript of the trial, which I plan to do this afternoon. Mrs. Kincaid,' he said, with a sidelong glance at Alex, 'was just as uncommunicative as Stevens.'
'You've talked to Dolly then?'
He lowered his voice. 'I tried, yesterday. We've got to know where we stand before the police get to her.'
'Is that going to happen?'
Jerry glanced around him at the courthouse crowd, and lowered his voice still further. 'According to the grapevine, they were planning to make their move today, when they completed their ballistics tests. But something's holding them up. The Sheriff and the experts he brought in are still down in the shooting gallery under the courthouse.'
'The bullet may be fragmented. It often is in head wounds. Or they may have shifted their main attention to another suspect. I see in the paper they've put out an APB for Thomas McGee.'
'Yes, it was done yesterday. He's probably over the Mexican border by now.'
'Do you consider him a major suspect, Jerry?'
'I'll want to read that transcript before I form an opinion. Do you?'
It was a hard question. I was spared having to answer it by a diversion. Two elderly ladies, one in serviceable black and one in fashionable green, looked in through the glass front door. They saw the waiting queue and turned away. The one in black was Mrs. Hoffman, Helen's mother. The other was Luke Deloney's widow.
I excused myself and went Out after them. They had crossed the street in the middle of the block and were headed downtown, moving through light and shadow under the giant yuccas that hedged the courthouse grounds. Though they seemed to keep up an incessant conversation, they walked together like strangers, out of step and out of sympathy. Mrs. Deloney was much the older, but she had a horsewoman's stride. Mrs. Hoffman stubbed along on tired feet.
I stayed on the other side of the street and followed them at a distance. My heart was thudding. Mrs. Deloney's arrival in California confirmed my belief that her husband's murder and Helen's were connected, and that
