'Who provided the tip?'
'It was anonymous-evidently some woman trying to stir up trouble. Mrs. Johnson's the kind who makes enemies. She got herself fired from the hospital, you know.'
'So she was telling me. You don't need my opinion, Captain, but I'll give it to you anyway. I think I gave you a bum steer on this search of the nursing homes. I'm not suggesting you call it off entirely. But I think it's time to concentrate your own energies on something else.'
Mackendrick was slow to answer. 'You mean Mrs. Chantry, don't you?'
'She seems to be at the center of this case.'
'We don't know that.'
'I think we do.'
'What you think isn't good enough, Archer. I can't move against that woman without enough evidence to sink her.'
XXXIII
I parked at the head of Mrs. Chantry's street and walked down to her house. Fog was crawling up the barranca behind it. On the hill above, the Biemeyers' place was full of cold light. But Mrs. Chantry's house was dark and still.
I knocked on the front door. I must have half expected to find her dead, or gone, because her immediate response took me by surprise.
As if she'd been waiting there all night, she said through the door, 'Who is that? Rico?'
I didn't answer her. We stood on opposite sides of the door in a long waiting silence. It was unevenly filled by the noise of the waves that mounted the beach like giant blundering footsteps and then slid back again.
'Who is that?' she said on a rising note.
'Archer.'
'Go away.'
'Should I go and get Captain Mackendrick?'
There was another silence, measured by the thumping, slumping footsteps of the sea. Then she unlocked the door and opened it.
There were no lights in the hallway or, so far as I could see, in the house. Against the interior darkness, her hair and her face were the same silvery color. She had on a high-necked dark dress, which suggested that she was a widow and made me wonder if she was.
'Come in if you must,' she said in a small cold voice.
I followed her into the main room where her party had been held. She switched on a floor lamp above an armchair and stood beside it waiting. We faced each other in dead silence. Her party had left no echoes in the room.
Finally she said, 'I know your type. You're one of these self-elected experts who can't keep his sharp little nose out of other people's business. You just can't bear to see them live their lives without your horning in, can you?'
She flushed, perhaps partly in anger. But what she was saying seemed to have other pressures behind it, too.
I said, 'You call this a life that you're living? Covering up a murder for a man you haven't seen in twenty-five years. Sleeping with a boy-man like Rico to keep him quiet.'
As if the lighting in the room had changed drastically, the color left her face and her eyes darkened.
'Nobody talks to me like that.'
'You might as well get used to it. When the D.A.'s men make their case in Superior Court, they won't be mincing their words.'
'The case will never get to court. There is no case.' But her eyes were strained and questioning, trying to see over the sharp edge of the present.
'Come off it, Mrs. Chantry. Twenty-five years ago, a man was killed in this house. I don't know who he was but you probably do. Rico buried him in the greenhouse. Tonight, with some help from you, he dug up his bones and put them in a weighted sack. Unfortunately for both of you, I caught him before he threw them in the sea. Do you want to know where they are now?'
She turned her face away. She didn't want to know. Suddenly, as if her legs had collapsed, she sat down in the armchair. She covered her face with her hands and appeared to be trying to cry.
I stood and listened to her painful noises. Handsome as she was, and deep in trouble, I couldn't feel much sympathy for her. She had built her life on a dead man's bones, and death had taken partial possession of her.
As if our minds had been tracking each other, she said, 'Where are the bones now?'
'Captain Mackendrick has them. He has your friend Rico, too. And Rico's been talking.'
She sat and absorbed the knowledge. It seemed to make her physically smaller. But the hard intelligence in her eyes didn't fade.
'I think I can handle Mackendrick. He's ambitious. I'm not so sure about you. But you do work for money, don't you?'
'I have all the money I need.'
She leaned forward, her ringed fists on her knees. 'I'm thinking about quite a lot of money. More than you can ever accumulate in a lifetime. Enough to retire on.'
'I like my work.'
She made a bitter face, and succeeded in looking quite ugly. She struck her knees with her fists. 'Don't play with me. I'm serious.'
'So am I. I don't want your money. But you could try bribing me with information.'
'Bribe you to do what, exactly?'
'Give you an even break if you've got one coming.'
'All you want to do is play God, right?'
'Not exactly. I would like to understand why a woman like you, with everything going for her, would try to cover up a lousy murder.'
'It wasn't a murder. It was an accident.'
'Who committed the accident?'
'You don't believe me, do you?'
'You haven't given me anything to believe, or not to believe. All I know is that you and Rico dug up a dead man's bones; then you sent Rico to sink them in the sea. That was a foolish thing to do, Mrs. Chantry. You should have left them underground in the greenhouse.'
'I don't think so. My mistake was getting Rico to handle it. I should have disposed of the body myself.'
'Whose body was it, Mrs. Chantry?'
She shook her head as if the past were swarming like bees around her. 'He was a stranger to me. He came to the house asking to see my husband. Richard shouldn't have seen him, and normally wouldn't have. But evidently the man's name meant something to him. He told Rico to send the man into his studio. And when I saw the man again, he was dead.'
'What was the dead man's name?'
'I don't remember.'
'Were you there when the dead man talked to Rico?'
'Yes, at least part of the time.'
'And later when Rico buried the body?'
'I knew what was being done. I didn't participate in the burial.'
'Rico said you ordered it.'
'I suppose I did, in a sense. I was relaying my husband's wish.'
'Where was your husband at the time of the burial?'
'He was in his studio, writing his farewell letter. It's a strange thing,' she added after a moment. 'He'd often spoken of taking off in that way. Dropping everything, starting a new, unencumbered life. And then the occasion came up, and he did just that.'
'Do you know where he went?'
'No. I haven't heard from him since. Neither has anyone else, to my knowledge.'
'Do you think he's dead?'
'I hope he isn't. He was-he is a great man, after all.'
She let herself cry a little. She seemed to be trying to regain lost emotional ground, rebuilding the Chantry myth with the materials that came to hand, partly old and partly new.
'Why did he kill the man in the brown suit?'
'I don't know that he did. It may have been an accident.'
'Did your husband claim it was an accident?'
'I don't know. We didn't talk about it. He wrote his letter and went.'
'You have no idea how or why the man was killed?'
'None whatever.'
'Your husband gave you no explanation at all?'
'No. Richard left in such a hurry there was no time for explanations.'
'That isn't the way I heard it, Mrs. Chantry. According to Rico, you and your husband and the man in the brown suit did some talking in the studio. What were you talking about?'
'I don't remember that,' she said.
'Rico does.'
'He's a liar.'
'Most men are, when they get into real trouble. So are most women.'
She was losing her self-assurance, and anger seemed to be taking its place again. 'Could you possibly spare me your generalizations? I've been through quite a lot in the last twenty-four hours and I don't have the strength to listen to a cheap private detective mouthing moral maxims.'
Her voice was high, and she looked tormented.
I said, 'You've been through quite a lot in the last twenty-five years. It'll go on and get worse unless you do something to end it.'
