Her voice broke and then steadied. “What do you want to know? What can I tell you to help?”
It would be a good idea, said one of the deputies tactfully, if they could talk to her and her husband at the same time, to double-check little things and save everybody time and trouble.
“Roy. Yes, well, but he’s at his company’s Christmas party, and I don’t know when he’ll be back. You can’t just walk out on parties like that, or they get—” Mrs. Chenowyth stopped, looking amazed at herself.
Then maybe she would call him there? They really thought she should.
They looked at each other when she had disappeared into another room, and shrugged. Most crimes of violence were family connected, and the man in question was a stepfather. The Christmas tree shone at them while they waited. A number of bulbs, larger than the others, had “Ellie” and a year iced on them in silver.
Mrs. Chenowyth came back. “One of the officers, a vice-president, had too much to drink, and Roy’s driven him home. Please, let’s get on with this, I can’t bear—”
“What kind of car does your husband drive, m^’am?”
“A Volkswagen van,” said Mrs. Chenowyth, still clearly too much in shock to consider the implications of this question. “Ellie had no boyfriends who would do a thing like this, I’m sure of that. She was dating a very nice boy in the summer, but he’s gone into the army, in fact he’s in Korea. Since then she hasn’t really—”
“Color?”
“White,” said Mrs. Chenowyth with some indignation, and then, told that they were referring to the van, “Brown. Tan, rather.” Her eyes snapped wide open. “My God. You’re actually sitting there and thinking—”
The front door opened and Roy Chenowyth came in, a monumental ash-blond man well over six feet and topping two hundred pounds, and to all intents and purposes that was that.
Santa Fe had responded with the name and address of the car owner whose license number De La O had so assiduously written down while missing almost everything else, and the deputies proceeded there.
It was a battered, thick-walled old adobe structure converted to apartments, built around a center courtyard with a statue of Saint Francis and a leafless mulberry tree now twinkling with strings of tiny green and white lights. The tenants were evidently a lively lot: At close to midnight music came from a number of directions, along with an occasional flurry of stamping that sounded like flamenco.
James Jepp, a short columnar man in rubber sandals and a karate robe which looked businesslike, ushered them into a huge firelit room obviously, from its pair of daybeds and kitchen fenced off by a counter with bar stools, the whole apartment except for a closed door which must indicate the bathroom. After the tidily matched furniture and blameless carpeting of the house they had just left, the decor here—bare polished wood floor, tables which were really sawn-off logs, a vivid, fraying wall hanging, candlesticks in frivolous places, and a single lumpy armchair—struck both deputies as Early Flea Market.
Jepp’s companion, Beryl Green—she produced an ID card instantly and in silence, as if it were required of her often—was piquant-featured under her enormous Afro. She was also hostile and defensive,- somewhere along the line she had learned to fear and distrust the police.
She said that she hadn’t gotten a very good look at the man in the Speedy-Q when she went in to buy cigarettes because he and the clerk were at the dimly lit back of the store, sort of wrestling with each other. “I thought they were just, you know, fooling around.” Then the girl saw her and screamed and the man turned his head.
“I got the hell out of there,” said Beryl Green succinctly, gaze daring either deputy to challenge her.
You go mixing in things like that, you wake up dead.”
She couldn’t say whether the man was Spanish or Anglo. She only knew that he had dark hair and that he wasn’t a kid; given a choice of ages she said maybe twenty-five. Pressed further, she said with a reminiscent shudder that he was funny-looking, and seemed to regret that at once, inspecting a thumbnail in adamant silence.
She didn’t want to be involved; she might as well have said it aloud. James Jepp, who had remained silent throughout, stirred and said in a surprisingly rich deep voice, “You told me he looked like he had a stocking mask on.”
She turned her stiff frothy head and gave him a stare of strong resentment. “Did I? I don’t remember.”
A stocking mask flattened and distorted the features, and she agreed reluctantly and at last that she supposed this was what she had meant. As to the man’s clothes, she could only suggest a Levi jacket or something like it. Would she be able to identify him? Furious look at Jepp—there was clearly trouble brewing in this alliance —she guessed she could try, and gave her telephone number at work in case it should be necessary to contact her there.
Belatedly, one of the deputies asked if she had seen a knife or other weapon. She said a firm no, but it wasn’t an entirely trustworthy one under the circumstances.
Could De La O have imagined the knife, painting it in simply because there was a struggle going on between the man and the girl before she was forced into the van? As against that, he had been a capable observer in the matter of Jepp’s license plate, and a responsible citizen, going into the empty
