or any others.'
'Your friend Pedro was shot in Brentwood Tuesday after noon. Your other friend, Tappinger, left Montevista around one. Between one and four he had time and opportunity to do the shooting, and come over to cover himself with you.'
'Cover himself' 'He used his visit to you to explain why he canceled his Tuesday afternoon classes and made the trip to Los Angeles.
Can he handle a gun?'
Bosch wouldn't answer me.
'He mentioned going to school under the G.I. Bill,' I said, 'which means that he was in some branch of the service. Can Tappinger use a gun?'
'He was in the infantry.'
Bosch hung his head, as if the mounting evidence was tending to prove his own guilt. 'When Taps was a boy of nineteen or twenty, he participated in the Liberation of Paris. He wasn't - he isn't a negligible man.'
'I never said he was. What was his mental state when he came to you Tuesday?'
'I'm no authority on mental states. He did seem very taut, and sort of embarrassed. Of course we hadn't seen each other for years. And he'd just got off the freeway. That San Berdoo Freeway is really tough ' He cut himself short.
'Taps seemed badly shaken, I can't deny that. He practically went into hysterics when I identified Pedro Domingo from the picture, and told him the basic facts about the boy.'
'What did he say?'
'He didn't say much of anything. He had what you might call a laughing fit. He seemed to think it was all a tremendous joke.'
33
BESS TAPPINGER came to the door with the three-year-old boy holding onto her skirt. She had on a torn and faded sleeveless cotton dress, as if she was dressing the part of an abandoned wife. Sweat ran down her face from under the cloth she had tied around her head. When she wiped her face with her forearm, I could see sweat glistening in her shaven armpit.
'Why didn't you tell me you were coming? I've been cleaning the house.'
'So I see.'
'Will you give me time to take a shower? I must look hideous.'
'As a matter of fact you look fine. But I didn't come for the view. Is your husband at home?'
'No. He isn't.'
Her voice was subdued.
'Is he at the college?'
'I don't know. Won't you come in? I'll make some coffee. And I'll get rid of little one. He hasn't had his nap.'
She led the protesting child away. When she came back, a long quarter of an hour later, she had bathed, changed her dress, and brushed her dark thick hair.
'I'm sorry to keep you waiting. I had to get cleaned up. Whenever I feel really bad, I get this passion for cleaning.'
She sat on the chesterfield beside me and let me smell how clean she was.
'What do you feel bad about?'
Suddenly, she thrust out her red lower lip. 'I don't feel like talking about it. I felt like talking yesterday, but you didn't.'
Abruptly she got to her feet and stood above me, handsome and still trembling with expectancy, as if the body that had got her into marriage might somehow get her out of it. 'You don't want to be bothered with me at all.'
'On the contrary, I'd like to go to bed with you right now.'
'Why don't you then?' She didn't move, but her body seemed to be more massively there.
'There's a child in the house, and a husband in the wings.'
'Taps wouldn't care. In fact I think he was trying to promote it.'
'Why would he do that?'
'He'd like to see me fall in love with another man-somebody to take me off his hands. He's in love with another girl. He has been for years.'
'Ginny Fablon.'
As if the name had loosened her knees, she sat down beside me again. 'You know about her then? How long have you known?'
'Just today.'
'I've known about it from the beginning.'
'So I've been told.'
She gave me a quick sidewise look. 'Have you discussed this with Taps?'
'Not yet. I just had lunch with Allan Bosch. He told me about a certain night seven years ago when he and you and your husband and Ginny went to a play together.'
She nodded. 'It was Sartre's No Exit. Did he tell you what I saw?'
'No. I don't believe he knew.'
'That's right, I didn't tell him. I couldn't bring myself to tell him, or anyone. And after a while the thing I saw didn't seem real anymore. It sort of merged with my memory of the play, which is about three people living in a kind of timeless psychological hell.
'I was sitting next to Taps in the near-dark and I heard him let out a little grunt, or sigh, almost as if he'd been hurt. I looked. She had her hand on his - on his upper leg. He was sighing with pleasure.
'I couldn't believe it, even though I saw it. It made me so sick I had to get out of the place. Allan Bosch came out after me. I don't remember exactly what I said to him. I've deliberately avoided seeing him since, for fear that he might ask me questions about Taps.'
'What were you afraid of?'
'I don't know. Yes, I do know, really. I was afraid if people found out that Taps had corrupted the girl, or been corrupted - I was afraid that he'd lose his job and any chance of a job. I'd seen what happened at Illinois, when Taps and I-' She caught herself. 'But you don't know about that.'
'Allan Bosch told me.'
'Allan is a terrible tattletale.'
But she seemed relieved not to have to tell me herself. 'I suppose I had some guilt left over from that. I almost felt as if Ginny Fablon was re-enacting me. It didn't make me hate her any less, but it tied my tongue. I seem to have spent the last seven years concealing my husband's love affair, even from myself. But I'm not going to do it after today.'
'What happened today?'
'Actually it happened early this morning, before dawn. She telephoned him here. He was sleeping in the study, as he has for years, and he took the call on the extension there. I listened in on the other phone. She was in a panic - a cold panic. She said that you were hounding her, and she couldn't keep up a front any longer, especially since she didn't know what had happened. Then she asked him if he killed her father and mother. He said of course not: the question was ridiculous: what motive would he have? She said because they knew about her baby, that he was the father.'
Bess has been speaking very rapidly. She paused now with her fingers at her lips, listening to what she'd said.
'Who told them, Bess?'
'I did. I held my tongue until September of the first year. That summer when my own baby was born, the girl dropped out of sight, I thought we were rid of her. But then she turned up again at the Cercle Francais icebreaker. Taps took her home that night - I think he was trying to keep her away from Cervantes. When he came back to the house we had a quarrel, as I told you. He had the gall to say I was interested in Cervantes in the same way he was interested in the girl. Then he told me about the abortion the girl had had to have. I was to blame, just because I
