How Like an Angel

by Margaret Millar

  On the fourth afternoon Connelly was snoring on his bunk when Quinn went on deck with the binoculars. The Captain, a man named McBride, and two crewmen Quinn hadn’t seen be­fore had come aboard with their gear, and there was a great deal of quiet activity.

  “We get under way at midnight tomorrow,” McBride told Quinn. “There’s a 6.1 tide. Where’s Nimitz?”

  “Asleep.”

  “Good. We can get some work done. You coming with us, Quinn?”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Nimitz is dodging the enemy,” McBride said briskly. “My orders are top-secret. Also our friend has an engaging little habit of changing his mind in mid-channel.”

  “I like to know where I’m going.”

  “What does it matter? Come on along for the ride.”

  “Why the sudden burst of friendship, Captain?”

  “Friendship, hell,” McBride said. “I hate gin rummy. When you play with him, I don’t have to.”

  Quinn focused the binoculars on the Ruthie K. He couldn’t see anyone on board but a small skiff was tied up alongside that hadn’t been there on the previous days. After about fifteen minutes a woman in jeans and a T-shirt appeared on the bridge and hung what looked like a blanket over the railing. Then she disappeared again.

  Quinn approached Captain McBride. “If Connelly wakes up tell him I had to go ashore on an errand, will you?”

  “I just took a look at him. He’d sleep through a typhoon.”

  “That’s fine with me.”

  He went back to Jurgensen’s office, borrowed a skiff and rowed out to the Ruthie K. The woman was on deck, and the railing by this time was lined with sheets and blankets airing in the sun.

  Quinn said, “Mrs. Aguila?”

  She stared down at him suspiciously like an ordinary house­wife finding a salesman at her front door. Then she pushed back a strand of sun-bleached hair. “Yes. What do you want?”

  “I’m Joe Quinn. May I talk to you for a few minutes?”

  “What about?”

  “Your sister.”

  An expression of surprise crossed her face and disappeared. “I think not,” she said quietly. “I don’t discuss my sister with representatives of the press.”

  “I’m not a reporter, Mrs. Aguila, or an official. I’m a private citizen interested in your sister’s case. I know her parole hear­ing is coming up soon and the way things are she’s pretty sure to be turned down.”

  “Why? She’s paid her debt, she’s behaved herself. Why shouldn’t they give her another chance? And how did you find me? How did you know who I was?”

  “I’ll explain if you’ll let me come aboard.”

  “I haven’t much time,” she said brusquely. “There’s work to be done.”

  “I’ll try to be brief.”

  Mrs. Aguila watched him while he tied the skiff to the buoy and climbed awkwardly up the ladder. The boat was a far cry from the spit and polish of the Briny Belle but Quinn felt more at home on it. It was a working boat, not a plaything, and the deck glistened with fish scales instead of varnish, and Elsie and the Admiral wouldn’t have been caught dead in the cramped

  little galley.

  Quinn said, “Mrs. King, an associate of your brother, told me your married name and where you lived. I was in Chicote the other day talking to her and a few other people like Mar­tha O’Gorman. Do you remember Mrs. O’Gorman?

  “I never actually met her.”

  “What about her husband?”

  “What is this anyway?” Mrs. Aguila said sharply. “I thought you wanted to discuss my sister, Alberta. I’m not interested in the O’Gormans. If there’s a way I can help Alberta I’m willing to do it, naturally, but I don’t see how the O’Gormans come into it. All three of them lived in Chicote, that’s the only connection.”

  “Alberta was a bookkeeper. So, in a sense, was O’Gorman.”

  “And a few hundred other people.”

  “The difference is that nothing spectacular happened to the few hundred other people,” Quinn said. “And within a month both Alberta and O’Gorman met up with quite unusual fates.”

  “Within a month?” Mrs. Aguila repeated. “I’m afraid nor, Mr. Quinn. Alberta met up with her fate years and years be­fore that, when she first started tampering with the books. Not to mince words, she was stealing from the bank before Patrick O’Gorman even came to Chicote. God knows what made her do it. She didn’t need anything, she didn’t seem to want any­thing more than she had except possibly a husband and chil­dren, and she never mentioned even that. I often think back to the four of us, Alberta, George and Mother and I, eating our meals together, spending the evenings together, behaving like any ordinary family. And all that time, all those years, Alberta never gave the slightest hint that anything was wrong. When the crash came I was already married to Frank and living here in San Felice. One evening I went out to pick up the news­paper from the driveway and there it was on the front page, Alberta’s picture, the whole story. . . .” She turned her head away as if the memory of that day was too painful to face again.

  “Were you close to your sister, Mrs. Aguila?”

  “In a way. Some people have described Alberta as cold but she was always affectionate towards George and me in the sense that she liked to buy us things, arrange surprises for us. Oh, I realize now the money she was spending didn’t belong to her and that she was using it to try and purchase what she didn’t have: love. Poor Alberta, she reached out for love with one hand and pushed it away with the other.”

  “She had no serious romance?” Quinn said.

  “She had dates occasionally but men always seemed puzzled by Alberta. There were few repeats.”

  “How did she occupy her spare time?”

  “She did volunteer work and went to movies, lectures, con­certs.”

  “Alone?”

  “Usually. She didn’t seem to mind going places alone, al­though Mother always made a fuss about it. She considered it a reflection on her that Alberta didn’t have lots of friends and a busy social life. The truth is, Alberta didn’t want a social life.”

  “Didn’t want one, or despaired of her ability to get one?”

  “She showed no signs of despair. In fact, during my last year at home, she seemed quite contented. Not in the happy, fulfilled sense, but as if she’d resigned herself to her life and intended to make the best of it. She settled for spinsterhood is what it amounted to, I suppose.”

  “How old was she then?”

  “Thirty-two.”

  “Isn’t that a little early to settle for spinsterhood?” Quinn said.

  “Not to a woman like Alberta. She was always very realistic about herself. She didn’t dream, the way I did, of an ideal lover tooling up to the front door in a red convertible.” She laughed self-consciously and put her hand on the rail of the boat in a gesture that was both proud and protective. “I never thought I’d be happy in an old tub that smells of fish scales and mildew.”

  She paused as if she expected Quinn to contradict her, and Quinn obliged by stating that the Ruthie K was not an old tub but a fine seaworthy craft. “But to return to Alberta, Mrs. Aguila. In view of her years of embezzling, I can’t agree with your description of her as ‘realistic.’ She must have known that one day she’d be caught. Why didn’t she stop? Or run away while she had the chance?”

  “She may have wanted to be punished. This will sound funny to you, I guess, but Alberta had a very strict, stern conscience. She was highly moral in everything she did. If she made a promise she kept it, no matter how long it took or what lengths she had to go to. I remember when we got into trouble as children Alberta was the first to admit guilt and accept punishment. She had a lot more courage than I. She still has.”

  “Still has,” Quinn repeated. “Does that mean
you visit her in prison?”

  “Whenever I can, which isn’t often. Seven or eight rimes so far, I guess.”

  “Do you write to her?”

  “Once a month.”

  “And she writes back?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you have any of her letters, Mrs. Aguila?”

  “No,” she said, flushing. “I don’t keep them. None of my children can read yet, but they have older friends, and then there are baby-sitters and Frank’s relatives. I’m not ashamed of Alberta but for the children’s sake and Frank’s I don’t advertise the fact that she’s my sister. It wouldn’t do her any good.”

  “What kind of letters does she write?”

  “Brief, pleasant, polite. Exactly the kind I’d expect from her. She doesn’t seem unhappy. Her only complaint isn’t about the prison at all, it’s about George.”

  “Because she doesn’t hear from him?”

  Ruth Aguila stared up at Quinn, her mouth open a little in surprise. “What on earth gave you that idea?”

  “I understood that George, at the insistence of his mother, cut off all relations with Alberta.”

  “Who told you?”

  “John Ronda, the editor of the Chicote Beacon, and Mrs. King, who’s an associate of George’s.”

  “Well, I don’t know them so I can’t call them liars. But I never heard such nonsense in my life. George is utterly in­capable of turning his back on a member of his family. He’s absolutely devoted to Alberta. To him she’s not a woman nearly forty who’s been convicted of a major crime, she’s still the little sister he has to protect, see to it that she gets a square deal. I’m his little sister, too, but George knows I’m married and being looked after so I’m not really important to him anymore. It’s Alberta he adores and worries about and fusses over. Why should those two people have told you such a lie?”

  “I’m pretty sure,” Quinn said, “that they both believed it themselves.”

  “Why should they? Where would they get a story like that?”

  “Obviously from George, since they’re friends of his, Mrs. King a particularly close one.”

  Ruth Aguila’s protest was immediate and firm. “That’s really absurd. George wouldn’t deliberately make himself out to be a heel when the truth is he’s done everything possible for Alberta, more than she wants him to. That’s what she complains about in her letters. George’s visits every month distress her because he’s so emotional. He keeps trying to help her and she refuses. She says she’s old enough to carry her own burden and the sight of George’s suffering only aggravates hers. She’s told him she doesn’t want to see him, at least not so often, but he keeps right on going anyway.”

  “People in prison are usually very eager, pathetically eager, to have visitors.”

  “I repeat, Alberta is realistic. If seeing George’s suffering only aggravates her own, then it makes sense that she shouldn’t want him to visit her very often.”

  “It may make sense, in a way,” Quinn said. “But to me it sounds like the kind of explanation she might use to cover up the real one.”

  “And just what might the real one be?”

  “I don’t know. Perhaps she’s afraid George might break down the defenses she’s constructed in order to adjust to and accept her present environment. You said she doesn’t seem un­happy. Is that what you want to believe, Mrs. Aguila, or the truth?”

  “It happens to be both.”

  “Yet she spoke of her suffering,” Quinn said. “Is there such a thing as happy suffering?”

  “Yes. If you want punishment and are getting it. Or if you have something good to look forward to at the end of a bad time.”

  “Say, for instance, a large sum of money?”

  She looked down at the oil-stained water lapping at the Ruthie K’s gray hull. “The money’s all gone, Mr. Quinn. Some of it she gave away, most of it she gambled away. She told me in a letter that she used to spend weekends in Las Vegas when George and Mother thought she’d gone to Los Angeles or San Francisco to shop and see the shows. It’s funny, isn’t it?—Alberta is the last woman on earth I’d suspect of gam­bling.”

  “Las Vegas is full of the last women on earth anyone would suspect of gambling.”

  “It must be a very peculiar compulsion, especially when someone keeps losing week after week.”

  “When you keep losing,” Quinn said, “is when you don’t think of stopping.”

  Mrs. Aguila was shaking her head in sorrow. “To think of all the trouble she went to year after year to steal that money, and then all she did was throw it away—it doesn’t make sense to me, Mr. Quinn. Alberta never acted on impulse like that. She was a planner, a methodical, minute-by-minute planner. Everything she did was well thought out in advance, from her wardrobe budget to the route she drove to and from her office. Even a simple business like attending a movie, she conducted like a campaign. If the feature picture began at 7:30, dinner had to be served at exactly six, the dishes washed and put away by seven, and so on. It wasn’t much fun going any place with her because all the time she was doing one thing you could practically feel her planning the next move.”

  Quinn thought, She’s doing one thing now, staying in jail, what next move has she planned? If Ronda is correct, she won’t even be free for years.

  He said, “I understand that the mistake that tripped Al­berta up at the bank was a very trivial one.”

  “Yes.”

  “I recall another trivial mistake that had consequences even more drastic than Alberta’s did.”

  “What was it?”

  “The night O’Gorman disappeared he was on his way back to his office to correct a mistake he’d made during the day. Two bookkeepers, two trivial errors, two disastrous fates within a month in one small city. Add these to the fact that O’Gorman worked for George Haywood at one time and that he probably knew Alberta, at least by sight. Add still an­other fact, that when I went to Chicote to ask questions about O’Gorman, George’s curiosity was aroused to the extent that he broke into my motel room and searched it.”

  “You’d realize what a fantastic story that is if you knew George.”

  “I’m trying to know George,” Quinn said. “So far I haven’t had much of a chance.”

  “As for your other suspicions, and that’s all they are, you seem to forget that the authorities went into every possible angle when O’Gorman disappeared. There was hardly a per­son in Chicote who wasn’t questioned. George sent me every copy of the Beacon.”

  “Why?”

  “He thought I’d be interested since I came from Chicote and knew O’Gorman slightly.”

  “How much is slightly?”

  “I saw him in the office a couple of times. A good-looking man, though there was something effeminate about him that repelled me. Maybe that’s too strong a word but it’s how he affected me.”

  “That type can be very appealing to certain women,” Quinn said. “You told me you haven’t met Martha O’Gor­man.”

  “She was pointed out to me on the street once.”

  “By whom?”

  She hesitated for a moment. “George. He thought she was a very attractive woman and he wondered why she’d thrown herself away on a man like O’Gorman.”

  Quinn wondered, too, in spite of all the good things Martha O’Gorman had said about her marriage. “Was George inter­ested in her?”

  “I think he could have been if she hadn’t already been married. It’s a shame she was. George needed, and still needs, a wife. His own died when he was barely thirty. The longer he waits, the more he lives at home alone with Mother, the harder it will be for him to break away. I know how hard it is, I had to do it, break away or be broken.”

  It seemed to Quinn that whenever he turned another corner, he met up with George Haywood,
and that the connection be­tween the two cases, which he’d suspected from the beginning, was not Alberta Haywood as he’d once thought, but George. George and Martha O’Gorman, the respectable businessman and the grieving widow. And maybe the reason Martha hadn’t remarried had nothing to do with her devotion to O’Gorman’s memory; she was waiting for George to break away from his mother. That would make two of them, he thought. Martha O’Gorman and Willie King, and I wouldn’t bet a nickel on Willie’s chances.

  He said, “You’ve spoken of George’s loyalty to and fond­ness for his sister. Did it work both ways?”

  “Yes. Too much so.”

  “Too much?”

  Twin spots of color appeared on her cheeks and her hands gripped the railing tightly as if she were afraid of falling overboard. “I shouldn’t have said that, I guess. I mean, I’m no psychologist, I have no right to go around analyzing people. Only—well, I can’t help thinking George made a mistake going back home after his wife died. George used to be a warm, affectionate man who could give love and accept it—I mean real love, not the neurotic kind like my mother’s and Alberta’s. Perhaps it’s uncharitable of me to talk this way about them, and I probably wouldn’t do it if they’d acted decent about my marriage to Frank. That’s a long answer to a short question, isn’t it?

  “More briefly, yes, Alberta was very fond of George. With­out him around, her whole life might have been different, more satisfactory to her, so that she wouldn’t have had to steal and gamble, she’d have gotten married like any ordinary woman, I think George understands this, in a way, and is ridden by guilt because of it. And so he goes to visit her, and they watch each other suffer, and—oh, it’s such a rotten mess it makes me sick. I suppose what I’m trying to say is that I hate them. I hate all three of them. I don’t want Frank or my children to be forced to have anything to do with any of them.”