cottage that night and called the whole deal off. Leo and him had a big fight, and Fablon took quite a beating. Leo used to be terrible with his fists, even when he was sick. Fablon stumbled out of the cottage in bad shape. He lost his way in the dark and fell in the pool and drowned.'
'Did you see him?'
'Cervantes did.'
'He must have been lying. According to the chemical evidence, Fablon drowned in salt water. The pool is fresh.'
'Maybe it is now. It was salt in those days. I ought to know. I swam in it every day for two weeks.'
Her voice lingered on the memory. Maybe she was running into rainy days, and having to sell her jewelry. But she had spent two weeks in the Tennis Club sun.
'What did Cervantes have to say about it, Kitty?'
'He found Roy Fablon in the pool, and came and told Leo. It was a bad scene. Leo was committing a felony just by using his fists. When Fablon drowned it was technically murder. Cervantes suggested he could chuck the body in the sea and fake a suicide. He'd been sucking around Leo before, and this was his chance for an in. When we left town the next day or so, we took him along. Instead of sending the Fablon girl to school in Switzerland, Leo sent the Cervantes boy to college in Paris, France.
'I told Leo he was nuts. He said the reason he was a success was because he looked years ahead. He had a use for Cervantes, he said, and he knew he could trust him, after the Fablon business. That was one time he was wrong. As soon as Leo got sick this last time, Cervantes turned on him.'
Her voice deepened. 'It's funny about Leo. Everybody was afraid of him, including me. He was the big shot. But as soon as he got really sick, he was just a nothing man. A flunky like Cervantes could take him for everything he had.'
'At least it was a switch. How did Cervantes get hold of the money?'
'Leo turned it over to him, a piece at a time, over the last three-four years. Cervantes got some kind of a government job, and he could cross the border without being searched. He stashed the money someplace out of the country, maybe Switzerland, in one of those numbered bank accounts they have.'
I didn't think the money was in Switzerland. There were numbered accounts in Panama, too.
'What are you thinking?'
'I was wondering,' I said, 'if Mrs. Fablon was blackmailing Leo for killing her husband.'
'She was. She came to see him in Vegas after the body was found. She told him she protected him at the inquest, and the least he could do was help her out a little. He hated the hell to do it, but I think he sent her payments from then on.'
She paused, and looked at me sharply. 'I've told you everything I know about the Fablons. Are you going to try to trace that money for me?'
'I'm not saying no. Right now I have another client, and two other murders to work on.'
'There's no money in that, is there?'
'Money isn't the only thing in life.'
'That's what I used to think, until this. What are you, a do-gooder or something?'
'I wouldn't say so. I'm working at not being a do-badder.'
She gave me a puzzled look. 'I don't get you, Archer. What's your angle?'
'I like people, and I try to be of some service.'
'And that adds up to a life?'
'It makes life possible, anyway. Try it some time.'
'I did,' she said, 'with Harry. But he didn't have what it takes. I always get stuck with feebs and cripples.' She shrugged. 'I better see how Leo is doing.'
He was waiting patiently in the cross-hatched shadow of a latticework screen. His shirt and trousers were loose on his shrunken body. He blinked up at me when we approached him, as if I planned to hit him.
'Cowardy custard,' Kitty said cheerfully. 'This is my new boyfriend. He's going to find the money and take me on a trip around the world. And you want to know what's going to happen to you, you poor old clown? We'll put you in a ward in the country hospital. And nobody will ever come to see you.'
I walked out.
30
I DROVE BACK to Los Angeles. Stopped there for dinner during the twilight hour, and finished the trip to Montevista in the dark.
Vera answered the door of the Jamieson house. She was wearing her sunburst kimono, and her black air was loose on her shoulders. It wasn't that late. The household seemed to be going to pieces in a quiet way.
'He's out in the guest house,' she said, 'with her.'
Vera seemed to resent another woman on the premises.
The guest house was a white frame cottage at the rear of the garden. Light spilled from its half-shuttered windows, reviving the daytime colors of the flower beds around it. Sweet unidentifiable odors drifted in the air.
It seemed like a place for an idyll, instead of the sequel to a tragedy. Life was short and sweet, I thought, sweet and short.
Peter called out: 'Who is it?'
I told him, and he opened the door. He had on a bulky gray sweater and an open-collared white shirt, which revealed the flabby thickness of his neck. There was a rather peculiar gleam in his eye. It could have been pure innocent happiness, it could have been euphoria.
I had similar doubts about the girl in the bright chintz room behind him. She sat under a lamp with a book on her knee, perfectly calm and still in a black dress. She nodded to me, and that was all.
'Come in, won't you?'
'You come out.'
He stepped outside, leaving the door partly open. It was a warm night for May, and windless.
'What is it, Mr. Archer? I hate to leave her.'
'Even for a minute?'
'Even for a minute,' he said with a kind of pride.
'I have some findings to report, about her father's death. I doubt that she'll want to hear what I have to say. He wasn't a suicide. He may have died by accident.'
'I think Ginny will want to hear about it.'
Reluctantly I went in and told my story, slightly bowdlerized. Ginny took it more calmly than Peter. His foot kept thumping to a nervous rhythm. As if an uncontrolled part of him wanted to run away, even from a room with Ginny in it.
I said to her: 'I'm sorry to have to dig this up and throw it in your lap. You've had quite a lot thrown in your lap recently.'
'It's all right. It's over now.'
I hoped it was over. Her serenity bothered me. It was like the lifeless serenity of a statue.
'Do you want me to do anything about Mr. Ketchel?'
Peter waited for her to answer. She lifted her hands a few inches and dropped them on her book. 'What would be the point? You say he's a sick old man, hardly more than a vegetable. It's like one of the condign punishments in Dante. A big violent man turns into a helpless cripple.' She hesitated. 'Were he and my father fighting about me?'
'That was the general idea.'
'I don't understand,' Peter said.
She turned to him. 'Mr. Ketchel made a rough pass at me.'
'And you still don't want him punished?'
'Why should I? That was years ago. I'm not even the same person,' she added unsmilingly. 'Did you know we change completely, chemically speaking, every seven years' She seemed to take comfort in the thought.
'You're an angel,' he said. But he didn't go near her or touch her.
'There's a further possibility,' I said. 'Ketchel-Spillman may not have been responsible for your father's death after all. Somebody else may have found him wandering around the club grounds in a daze, and deliberately
