Nets to Catch the Wind

by Dolores Hitchens

  She went to the closet and put on a robe, and walked out into the living room. She looked at the car from the edge of the living-room window, kneeling on the couch. It looked just the same, the hum of the motor no louder, no softer, a faint vibration in the air.

  She rubbed at her eyes. They felt stiff and tired, the lids thick. She had cried brokenly when she had first understood that her husband was dead. Then afterward in the chief’s office she had raged dry-eyed, burning with fury. Home again, she had wept with frustration, with torn pride, with loneliness and the knowledge that nothing she had said had any weight or influence. The tears were gone now; she was through with crying. There were things to do.

  Like finding out about this car, for instance.

  She switched on the lights in the living room. There were cigarettes in a round box on the coffee table. She took one, lit it with a match. She heard the car door slam outside, then steps on the walk, the porch. The bell rang in the kitchen.

  Smoke rose from the cigarette between her fingers; she looked at it with distaste. All at once she knew who this would be, what the vigil in the car meant, why she was intended to waken at the sound of the idling motor. It wasn’t the police, watching her, nor was it any kind of danger. She glanced toward the door, half minded to turn out the light, ignore the summons, and go back to bed. She crushed out the cigarette in a dish. The doorbell rang again.

  She walked over to the light switch, touched it; then shrugged and reached instead for the door. She pulled it wide. “Who is it?”

  A man’s face looked in at her. “My name is Fogarty, Mrs. Luttrell. I’m a reporter.”

  She unhooked the screen. “Yes, I thought you would be.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  HE CAME in, walking with, a long-legged stride. He had red hair, red freckles, and an expression on his mouth as if he’d just bitten a nail in two and hadn’t liked the flavor. He was tough, Amy Luttrell decided. Tough and cynical and perhaps cruel. “I’ll have to beg your pardon, Mrs. Luttrell, for barging in on you at this hour and on this particular night.”

  “I know how reporters work.”

  He looked at her to see how she meant it, then glanced about as if for a place to put his hat. She didn’t help him. “I wanted to talk to you about your husband.”

  She nodded. “Before the others did—the ones who are giving me until daylight.”

  “Yeah.” He threw the hat on the couch and began to open his topcoat. “And I happened to be on the train too, which gave me a slight jump on the herd. I intend to keep it that way.”

  “Won’t you sit down?”

  He tossed his coat beside his hat, then went over and surprised her by taking a chair, a small straight chair. Amy Luttrell sat down on the couch. Fogarty said, “I was the first person in that compartment, outside of the conductor and a couple of passengers. I found that wad of dough your husband was carrying.”

  Amy Luttrell began lighting a new cigarette. “How do you want it? Human interest or documentary?”

  He chewed something—the edge of his tongue, perhaps. “I’ve gotten off on the wrong foot.”

  “You never had a right one, Mr. Fogarty.”

  “What’d you let me in for?”

  “I didn’t know who you were.”

  He brushed at the red hair, an untidy stubble. Then he laughed under his breath. “I see. You’re holding it against me—the fact that I found the money, that I tipped the press to something queer.”

  Amy said distinctly, “My husband carried no large sum of money.”

  “Twenty-seven hundred is chicken feed in some leagues. But you make it sound interesting.”

  “I’m sure that the truth is much more interesting than the stuff your paper is printing right now.”

  He stretched back, making the chair creak. “Okay, I’ll take you up on it. Let’s have the documentary.”

  She laid the cigarette carefully on the rim of the little crystal dish. “My husband never made a deal. He had no underworld connections. He was an honest officer. He went at his job with clean hands. There was just one thing about Tzegeti that interested him——”

  Fogarty’s brown eyes sharpened. “Yeah? Such as?”

  She didn’t explain. “He asked to be assigned to the job of escorting Tzegeti to the hearing in Sacramento. He said it was Tzegeti’s last chance. He left here yesterday with no plans beyond that of seeing that Tzegeti got to Sacramento and then completed the transfer to San Quentin. He seemed to feel that there was some need for caution, and I think that the trick which admitted the murderers to their compartment must have been a clever and simple one.”

  “And the murderers?”

  “The police will find them.”

  “Their motive?”

  “Not a disagreement over the price for delivering Tzegeti.”

  “What, then?”

  She bit her lip. “I don’t know.”

  “Something to do with Tzegeti’s trial? You followed that?”

  “Not closely.”

  “Did your husband believe that Tzegeti was what he claimed to be—just a gardener and janitor at the Picardy Club?”

  “He was obviously just that.”

  “And the guy he was supposed to have killed—Herman Schneider?”

  “Everyone knew what he was too,” Amy Luttrell said evenly.

  Fogarty shifted in the small chair; his legs were long—he folded them under, locked his heels on a rung. “You’ve got a nice little town here. Lomena. Plenty of room, uncrowded, not too far from the beaches. A lot of people don’t even realize it isn’t incorporated into L.A. proper. They just think it’s a section set aside by the city fathers for the running of poker parlors and bingo joints.”

  She sat a trifle straighter. “The fact that poker is run legally here doesn’t mean the police force is corrupt.”

  He widened his stare innocently. “I didn’t say that.”

  “You thought it.”

  “Now you begin to sound on the defensive. Was that the way Luttrell felt about it?”

  “No.”

  “What about Herman Schneider? He owned the Picardy. He was a big man here. Your husband must have known him. Did he?”

  “I suppose he must have.”

  Fogarty nodded slowly. “Everybody in his right mind knows that the gambling syndicate has its own private police force to keep members in line and to see that patrons make good their debts. I think these private cops—or goon-squad, if you’d rather—wanted to take care of Tzegeti in their own way. They were willing to pay your husband, within reason, for the privilege. Luttrell thought it was worth more than they were willing to pay.”

  She looked at Fogarty, a steady look. “It’s unfortunate that my husband isn’t here to answer you.” She felt tears crowding under the surface. A shivering started between her shoulder blades, the result of the long strain, frustration, anger.

  Fogarty’s glance shifted. He teetered on the chair. “What sense is there in it, then? What possible motive for the killings? Fear that Tzegeti might talk at the governor’s conference? Nah. Nuts. If Tzegeti wanted to talk, was able to talk, he’d have done it at the trial.”

  She forced her mind to follow what Fogarty said, wrenching it from grief and shock.

  Fogarty began to light a cigarette of his own. “The evidence against Tzegeti stunk. Even the district attorney knew it; he didn’t ask for the death penalty. It was a miracle that Tzegeti even got life, that the jury didn’t let him go. If he’d made any effort in his own behalf, the case against him would have collapsed. Believe me—I covered it and I know.”

  She remembered what her husband had told her. Tzegeti’s silence, his meekly withdrawn manner, had outraged Luttrell. A man had a right, a duty, to fight for his life. And Tzegeti had thrown that duty away.

  “So why kill the guy?” Fogarty went on. “If the motive wasn’t revenge, what was it? The case was tied up. His defense was flimsy, lies so weak a kid could have seen through them. His wife tried to testify, b
ut she couldn’t understand half what was being said, and by the time they had an interpreter for her, she was hysterical. No alibi—just Tzegeti’s word that he was at the rear of the club while Schneider was being bumped off in his office at the front.”

  Luttrell, too, hadn’t been satisfied. She remembered her husband at the breakfast table, reading the accounts of the trial. Tzegeti had been an obsession with him—a crazy foreigner who didn’t have sense enough to defend himself.

  “There was a rumor, never verified, that Tzegeti had a journal, a diary, hidden somewhere. Something he’d written down in gratitude, a record of his days since he’d been admitted here in the Displaced Persons quota.”

  Amy Luttrell shook her head. “I don’t remember anything like that.”

  “It didn’t come out at the trial. Tzegeti’s attorney spoke to me about it once—he suspected the press of having snitched it.”

  “And had you?”

  Fogarty grew redder under the red freckles. “And have a guy convicted because of suppressed evidence? What do you take us for?”

  She didn’t reply. She thought things over for a while. “Where did Tzegeti’s attorney think you’d gotten the journal?”

  “How do I know? He just wanted to know if we had it. We didn’t. He clammed up. We never heard another word.”

  “Perhaps Mrs. Tzegeti has the diary.”

  “Yeah. And maybe it’s written in Polack, or whatever. The stuff about the book was like the rest of the case. It got nowhere. Only Tzegeti was convicted, and some of Schneider’s strong-arm friends might have believed in that verdict and wanted a crack at him.”

  Her face was bleak, stiff. “They didn’t go through my husband.”

  Fogarty studied her as if seeking evasion in her, an evidence of lying, a lack of truth. Then he looked around the living room, the small room terrifically new and furnished with the bare essentials—a couch and chair, coffee table, lamps, the big rag rug that Amy had made herself. No pictures, no draperies. It was like a barracks. “If they did, you didn’t know it,” Fogarty granted.

  “I’m not a fool.”

  Fogarty stood up and reached for his hat and coat. “No, you’re not. But sometimes wanting to believe can blind us to the obvious. Why don’t you get in touch with old lady Tzegeti? She’s scared to death of cops and reporters, but you might have an angle.”

  Amy said frankly, “I do intend to see Mrs. Tzegeti. Not to pump her about any diary of her husband’s. I have something to tell her.”

  He waited by the door, and then saw that she didn’t intend to explain. He grinned briefly. “Did your husband work on the Herman Schneider murder, Mrs. Luttrell?”

  “This is a small town. The whole police force worked on it.”

  “I’ll bet I know what you’ve got for Mrs. Tzegeti.”

  “As long as you’re not sure, you can’t print it,” Amy said smoothly. “Good night, Mr. Fogarty.”

  He gave her a mock salute and walked out into the dark.

  She went into the kitchen. There was coffee in the percolator. She looked in at it; there seemed a greasy film on the liquid, a smell of staleness, a reminder of yesterday’s breakfast when she and her husband had been alone together in this small clean room. She dumped the coffee into the sink, ran clear water into the pot, filled it and put it on the stove. “I’m not going to cry any more,” she said half under her breath. “Not now, anyway. Later, when there’s time.” She took a pad of paper and a pencil out of a kitchen drawer and sat down at the breakfast table.

  She began to make a list of people she would see.

  The houses sat in a cluster at the end of a lane. There was something shabby, foreign, and different about them. The yards were not the sleekly groomed little spaces, lawn and geraniums and dusty-miller borders, that you found in town. They were bare, brushed to hardness, cut off from their neighbors by small hedgerows. The windows had a secretive expression, like eyes studying a stranger from under half-shut lids. Of course, Amy Luttrell told herself, I see it because I’m expecting it. I’m expecting something transplanted from Middle Europe, something a little queer and unpretty and persistently (even laboriously) different.

  She found the gate in the overgrown cobwebby cypress and went through. It was shabbier than the others, but there was evidence that Tzegeti had been a gardener. A plot of roses bloomed beside the house, and a cup-of-gold vine lay rampant on the porch roof. Two steps led up to the porch. There was no doorbell. A sort of knocker, a carved boar’s head, hung by a leather strap. Amy knocked and stepped back.

  The door didn’t open for some minutes. When it did open, it made no sound. Amy was startled to realize that for some moments she had looked at a face without seeing it, a young pinched face with enormous hostile eyes.

  “Is your mother at home?”

  No words, just a headshake. The door began to close. The eyes hadn’t left her face.

  “I’m Mrs. Luttrell. I have something important to tell your mother.”

  The head stopped shaking; the eyes grew blank, indrawn. She was almost as tall as Amy, perhaps fourteen or so, with dark hair drawn back into braids. Her features were sharp and delicate. She stood quiet for a minute, then spoke: “Are you the wife of the police officer?”

  Amy nodded. “Ask your mother if she’ll see me. It won’t take long.”

  The girl went away. Through the partly opened door Amy could see a corner of the shadowed room. There was a crucifix on the wall, a big one. Under it was a shelf with some roses in a glass, and a vigil light. Beyond the shelf, in the corner of the room, was a brand-new immaculate white washing machine. Together like that, it all looked nutty and foreign. Amy was aware of a touch of aversion.

  The girl came back. “My mother is sick. She’s in bed.” The girl didn’t have more than the faintest shadow of an accent, and it was undefinable; she could have been anything, French, Spanish, German—or what Fogarty had said, Polack. She opened the door and stood back and Amy went inside. The place smelled of soap and the dim waxy burning of the vigil light. “In here, please.” She held aside a shabby curtain and Amy entered another room.

  The bed was as big as a boat, a monstrosity. If they hadn’t brought it with them from Europe—and that was improbable—they must have hunted over the junk stores of L.A. before locating such a relic. Mrs. Tzegeti was lying against a bunch of fat over-stuffed pillows, homemade—you knew somehow that they were cut and stuffed to a pattern she’d learned in another world. She looked little and shriveled, and Amy realized that she’d seen her someplace else.

  Mrs. Tzegeti lifted a hand. “Mrs. Luttrell?” Her fingers were dry in Amy’s. Dry and twitching, the fingers of a sick woman or a scared one. “My daughter will bring you a chair. You must forgive my lying in bed. I have sprained my back. It is very painful.” It also sounded like a lie, too careful, too apologetic, too defensive. She didn’t expect Amy to believe it. Her thick accent stumbled over the words, distorting them.

  Amy watched the girl as she brought the chair. There was no aura of fear, no cringing. The sickness of the mother had not communicated itself to the child.

  “I have a message for you,” Amy said, sitting down.

  The woman’s face jerked. “From—someone?”

  “From my husband.”

  The fear began to recede. “I don’t understand. I thought your husband died when mine did.”

  “I wanted you to know what he believed.”

  Mrs. Tzegeti’s skinny fingers plucked at the bedclothes. “The police were not cruel. They did not understand.” The words were a garbled mutter; Amy had to put them through a process of translation. She could understand now what Fogarty had meant about Mrs. Tzegeti’s troubles at the trial. No doubt the excitement, the peril of her husband, the presence of the police, had thickened the accent even further.

  “My husband always thought that Mr. Tzegeti was innocent. He wanted your husband to tell the truth at the hearing in Sacramento. There was much more to the case than the facts bro
ught out at the trial. Someone used your husband to cover his crime. The real murderer got away.”

  The woman in the bed was shaking.

  “In this country we do not like to convict people of crimes they did not do, and we do not build prisons to hold scapegoats. Your husband seemed unable, or unwilling, to talk in his own defense. But my husband believed in his innocence.”

  Mrs. Tzegeti’s eyes were brimming, her face twisted. She forced herself off the pillow. “You are good to come here. So good.”

  The girl had drawn close and was watching her mother.

  “Now you must go away,” said Mrs. Tzegeti. “You must forget about us. We will remember always, and pray for you. But you must never think of us again.” It was more than a plea; there was no weakness here. It was a command. Amy felt at a loss.

  “I came to help, too, if I could,” she offered. “Our husbands died together. We have at least one interest—vengeance.”

  The eyes facing her from the bed dulled, the lids slackening. “Nein,” whispered Mrs. Tzegeti. Then she made a motion as if to spit. “That word. I forget. No. Fredric is dead. He shall rest in that death. No vengeance will bring him back to us. We are among our people——” She moved her hand as if to indicate the cluster of little houses surrounding them. “We shall make the new life that was promised us.”

  A shadow seemed to have fallen across Mrs. Tzegeti’s face, and Amy was reminded all at once of what she knew of this family’s history as brought out in court—the years of living in concentration camps, the dirt, terror, agony, inhuman degradation of their lives as Europe’s unwanted ones.

  The girl brushed at her mother’s damp hair, a caressing touch.

  “I’m not willing to let my husband’s murder rest,” said Amy, “nor his murderer, if I can help it. Someone made it seem that my husband took money for a dirty job, that he betrayed everything he’d lived for, the years of being an honest and decent man. I’m going to clear up that smear. I’ll never quit until the truth comes out—or until I’m dead too.”