finish it.
'She has,' he said. 'That's the trouble. As soon as people find out they turn against me. I suppose you'll be quitting too.'
'No. I'd like to see things get straightened out for you.'
'They'll never get straightened out. I'm hopeless.'
He was trying to lean his full moral weight on me. I didn't want any more of it than I had, and I tried to objectify the situation a little.
'My grandmother who lived in Martinez was a religious woman. She always said it was sinful to despair.'
He shook his head slowly. His eyes seemed to swing with the movement. A minute later he dashed for the kitchen sink and vomited.
While I was trying to clean it and him up, his father appeared in the doorway. He spoke across Peter as if he was deaf or moronic: 'Has my poor boy been eating again?'
'Lay off, Mr. Jamieson.'
'I don't know what you mean.'
He raised his pale hands as if to show what a gentle father he had been. 'I've been both father and mother to my son. I've had to be.'
Peter stood at the sink with his back to his father, unwilling to show his face. After a while his father drifted away again.
Attached to the great main kitchen, with its tiled counters and sinks and ovens, was a smaller outer kitchen like a glassed-in porch. I became aware of this outer kitchen because there was a noise at the door, a scrabbling and a snuffling which was nearer and more insistent than the banging noise.
'Do you have a dog out there?'
Peter shook his head. 'It may be a stray. Let it in. We'll give it a piece of goose.'
I turned on the light in the outer kitchen and opened the door. Marietta Fablon crawled in over the threshold. She rose to her knees. Her hands groped up my legs to my waist. There was blood like a dyer's error on her pink quilted breast. Her eyes were as wide and blind as silver coins.
'Shot me.'
I got down and held her. 'Who, Marietta?'
Her mouth worked. 'Lover-boy.'
The residue of her life came out with the words. I could feel it leave her body.
16
PETER APPEARED In the kitchen doorway. He didn't come into the outer kitchen. Death took up all the room.
'What did she say?'
'She said lover-boy shot her. Who would she mean by that?'
'Martel.'
It was an automatic response. 'Is she dead?'
I looked down at her. Death had made her small and dim, like something seen through the wrong end of a telescope.
'I'm afraid she is. You better call the county sheriff's office. Then tell your father.'
'Do I have to tell him? He'll find a way to blame me.'
'I'll tell him if you like.'
'No. I will.'
He crossed the kitchen purposefully.
I went out into the blowing dark and got the flashlight out of my car. A well-defined path led from the Jamieson garden to the Fablon house. I wondered if Peter's childish feet had worn it.
There were evidences that Marietta had crawled along the path all the way from her house: spots of blood and knee marks in the dirt. Her pink silk cap had fallen off where the path went through a gap in the boundary hedge. I left it.
Her front door was banging. I went in and found the study. It was dominated by an ornate nineteenth-century desk. I went through the drawers. There was no sign of Audrey Sylvester's love-letter to Fablon, but I found a letter that interested me just as much. It had been written to Mrs. Fablon by Ricardo Rosales, a Vice-President of the Bank of New Granada, Panama City, in March 18 of this year. It said in rather stilted English that the special account from which the Bank had paid her periodic sums of money had been exhausted, and no further instructions had been received concerning it. Under the rules and regulations of the bank it was regrettably not possible for them to name their principal.
In a bottom drawer I came across a framed photograph of a young Air Force second lieutenant who was almost certainly Roy Fablon. The glass was missing from the frame, and small half-moon-shaped pieces of the photograph had been clumsily punched out. It took me a minute to come to the conclusion that it had been pierced repeatedly by the sharp heel of a woman's shoe. I wondered if Marietta had stamped on her husband's picture recently.
In the same drawer I found a man's thin wristwatch with four Latin words engraved on the back: Mutuis animis arrant amantur. I didn't know Latin, but `arrant' meant something about love.
I looked at Fablon's picture again. To my instructed eyes his head was a cruel hollow-looking bronze. He had been dark and dashing, the kind of man a daughter could fall in love with. Though he had been handsome and Martel wasn't, I imagined I could see some resemblance between them, enough perhaps to account for Ginny's infatuation with Martel. I put the picture and the watch back in the drawer.
A light was burning in the sitting room where I had talked too Marietta, and listened to the grinding of her teeth. The cord of the pink telephone had been ripped out of the wall. There were spots of blood on the worn carpet. This was where her crawl had started.
I could hear a wailing in the distance now, louder than the wind and drearier. It was the sound of a siren, which nearly always came too late. I went outside leaving the light burning and the door banging behind me.
The Sheriffs men were in the Jamieson house before I got back to it. I had to explain who I was, and show them my Photostat and get Peter to vouch for me before they would let me into the house. They refused to let me go back into the kitchen.
Their failure to co-operate suited me reasonably well. I felt justified in holding back some of the results of my own investigation. But I turned them loose on Martel. By two o'clock the officer in charge, Inspector Harold Olsen, came into the drawing room where I was waiting and told me he'd put out an all-points alarm for Martel. He added: 'You can go home now, Mr. Archer.'
'I thought I'd stick around and talk to the coroner.'
'I'm the coroner,' Olsen said. 'I told my deputy, Dr Wills, not to bother coming out here tonight. He needed his rest. Why don't you go and get some rest, Mr. Archer? He moved ponderously towards me, a big slow stubborn Swede who liked his suggestions to be taken as orders. 'Relax and take it easy. We won't be getting autopsy results for a couple of days at least.'
'Why not?' I said without getting up from my chair.
'We never do, that's why.'
He was in charge here, and his slightly bulging eyes were watching me for any questioning of his power. He gave the impression that if he had to choose he would rather own a case than solve it. 'There's no hurry. She was shot in the chest; we know that now, probably through the lung. She bled to death internally.'
'I'm interested in how her husband died.'
'He was a suicide. You don't need Dr Wills to tell you that. I handled the case myself.'
Olsen was watching me more closely. He was sensitive to the possibility that I might question his findings, and already quivering in advance with a faint sense of outrage. 'It's a closed case.'
'Doesn't this kind of reopen it?'
'No. It don't.'
He was retreating angrily into bad grammar. 'Fablon committed suicide. He told his wife he was gonna, and he did it. There was no evidence of foul play.'
'I thought he was badly bunged up.'
