“He suspected it himself. He wrote me about his fear that the woman he wished to marry did not love him. I intend to speak to the woman.”
“It wouldn’t be a good idea,” I said. “Within the last four days she’s lost both her mother and her husband. Let her be, señora.”
She persisted stolidly. “I have lost more than her—than she. I wish to speak to her. I will pay you well to take me to her.”
“Sorry. I can’t do it.”
She rose abruptly. “Then you are wasting my time.”
She moved to the door and held it open for us. I was just as glad to go. I’d found out all I was likely to, really all I needed, and I wanted no part of her black money or the black mourning that went with it.
“You were pretty rough on her,” Bosch said in the elevator. “She seemed quite innocent and naïve to me.”
“She can afford to be. It’s pretty clear her husband’s the wheeler-dealer. He’s latched onto her and her money, and the U.S. government will never see a penny of it.”
“I don’t understand. What did you mean when you said Pedro was killed for his money? His mother certainly didn’t kill him.”
“No, and whoever did was probably unaware that the money had passed to her.”
“That leaves the field wide open, doesn’t it?”
But Allan Bosch was a sensitive man, and he may have intuited the direction my mind was moving in. When we stepped out of the elevator he said goodbye and started away like a sprinter.
“I haven’t finished with you, Allan.”
“Oh? I wasn’t much help, I’m afraid. I thought we’d have a chance to talk to the woman.”
“We had our chance. She gave out more than I thought she would. Now I want another chance to talk to you.”
I steered him into the bar and maneuvered him into the inside seat in a padded booth. He’d have to climb over me to get away.
I ordered a couple of gin-and-tonics. Bosch insisted on paying for his own.
“What is there left for us to talk about?” he said rather morosely.
“Love and money. And Professor Tappinger and his big mistake at Illinois. Why do you suppose he goes on paying for it twelve years after the event?”
“I have no idea.”
“He wouldn’t be repeating it, would he?”
“I don’t quite know what you’re getting at.” Bosch began to scratch the back of his head. “Taps is happily married. He has three children.”
“Children aren’t always a deterrent. In fact I’ve known men who turned against their children because the kids reminded them that they weren’t young themselves. As for the Tappingers’ marriage, it’s close to the breaking point. She’s a desperate woman.”
“Nonsense. Bess is a darling.”
“But not his darling,” I said. “I wonder if he’s found another darling among his students.”
“Of course not. He doesn’t fool around with students.”
“He did once, you tell me—”
“I shouldn’t have.”
“And it’s a pattern of behavior that tends to repeat itself. I’ve had some experience in my work with men and women who can’t grow up, and can’t bear to grow old. They keep trying to renew themselves with younger and younger partners.”
The young man’s face puckered in distaste. “All that may be true. It has nothing to do with Taps, and frankly I find the topic slightly disgusting.”
“It isn’t pleasant for me, either. I like Tappinger, and he’s treated me well. But sometimes we have to face up to unpleasant facts, even about people we like.”
“You’re not dealing in facts. You’re simply speculating on the basis of something that happened twelve years ago.”
“Are you sure it isn’t still going on? Seven years ago, you tell me, Tappinger brought a girl freshman here to see a play. Were there other students in the party?”
“I don’t believe so.”
“Is it common practice for a professor to bring a girl student, a freshman, sixty or seventy miles to see a play?”
“It could be. I don’t know. Anyway, Bess was with them.”
“Why didn’t you tell me that before?”
“I didn’t realize it was an issue,” he said with a trace of irony. “Professor Tappinger is not a sexual psychopath, you know. He doesn’t require twenty-four-hour-a-day chaperonage.”
“I hope he doesn’t. You say you talked to the girl. Did she have anything to say about Tappinger?”
“I don’t remember. It was a long time ago.”
“Did you see them together?”
“Yes. In fact the three of them came to my place for dinner and then we all went to the play.”
“How did Tappinger and the girl act toward each other?”
“They seemed to be fond of each other.” For a moment his face opened wide—he’d remembered something—and then it closed up tight. He half rose out of his chair. “Look here, I don’t know what you’re getting at—”
“Of course you know what I’m getting at. Did they behave like lovers?”
Bosch answered slowly and carefully: “I don’t quite get the implications of that question, Mr. Archer. And I don’t see its relevance to the present. After all, we’re talking about seven years ago.”
“There have been three murders in those seven years, all of them connected with Ginny Fablon. Her father and mother and husband have all been killed.”
“Good Lord, you’re not blaming Taps?”
“It’s too early to say. But you can be sure these questions are relevant. Were they lovers?”
“Bess seemed to believe they were. I thought she was imagining things at the time. Maybe she wasn’t, though.”
“Tell me what happened.”
“It didn’t amount to much. She got up and walked out in the middle of the play. We were all sitting together: Bess was between me and Taps and the girl was on his far side: and Bess suddenly got up and blundered out in the dark. I followed her. I thought she might be sick, and in fact she did lose her dinner in the parking lot. But it was more of a moral sickness than a physical one. She poured out a lot of stuff about Taps and the Fablon girl and how she was corrupting him—”
“She was corrupting him?”
“So Bess claimed. It’s one reason I didn’t take her too seriously. She was obviously pregnant at the time, and you know how women in that condition are sometimes crazily jealous. But possibly there was something in what she said. After all, Taps did fall for Bess when she was no older than the girl.” Bosch flushed darkly, like a man being choked. “I feel like a Judas, telling you all this.”
“What would that make Tappinger?”
Bosch sipped at his drink. “I see what you mean. He’s not exactly a Christ-figure. Still, it’s a long step from playing around with a pretty girl to murdering her parents. That’s unimaginable.”
“Murder usually is. Even murderers can’t imagine it, or they wouldn’t do it. What time did Tappinger visit you the other afternoon, Tuesday afternoon?”
“Four o’clock. He made an appointment, and he arrived on the button.”
“When did he make the appointment with you?”
“Less than an hour before he arrived. He phoned and asked me when I’d be available.”
“Where did he phone from?”
“He didn’t say.”
“What was his state of mind when he arrived?”
“You sound like a prosecuting attorney, Mr. Archer. But you’re not, and I don’t think I’ll answer that question, or any others.”
“Your friend Pedro was shot in Brentwood Tuesday afternoon. 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.”
chapter 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 her 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 l’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 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 had 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 that 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 Français 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 existed. I was supposed to get down on my knees and weep for the girl, I suppose.
“I did weep, off and on for a couple of weeks. Then I couldn’t stand it any longer. I called the girl’s father and told him about Taps. He disappeared within a day or two, and I blamed myself for his suicide. I decided I would never speak out about anything.” Again she seemed to be listening to her own words. Their meaning seeped into her eyes and spread like darkness. “Do you think my husband killed Mr. Fablon and Mrs. Fablon?”
“We’ll have to ask him, Bess.”
“You think he did, don’t you?” Even as she asked the question, she was nodding dolefully. “Her mother phoned here the other night.”
“Which night?”
“Monday. Wasn’t that the night she was shot?”
“You know it was. What did she say?”
“She asked for Taps, and he took the call in the house. I didn’t have a chance to listen in. Anyway, it didn’t amount to anything. He said he’d talk to her, and went out.”
“He left the house?”
“Yes.”
“What time?”
“It must have been quite late. I was on my way to bed. I was asleep when he came in.”
“Why didn’t you tell me this before?”
“I wanted to, yesterday morning. You didn’t give me a chance.” Her eyes were wide and blind, like a statue�
�s.
“Was anything else said on the phone this morning?”
“He said he loved her, that he had always loved her and always would. I said something into the phone then. It was a dirty word: it just came out. It seemed so terrible to me that he could speak like that to another woman with our three children sleeping in the house.
“I went out to the study in my nightgown. It was the first time I’d gone to him since little one was conceived—our last happy time.” She paused, listening, as if the three-year-old had cried out in his sleep. But the house was so quiet I could hear water dripping in the kitchen sink. “Since then our life has been like camping on ice, on lake ice. I did that once with Daddy in Wisconsin. You find yourself thinking of the ice as solid ground, though you know there’s deep dark water underneath.” She looked down at the worn rug under her feet, as if there were monsters swimming just below it. “I suppose in a way I was collaborating with them, wasn’t I? I don’t know why I did it, or why I felt as I did. It was my marriage, and she was breaking it up, but somehow I felt out of it. I was just a member of the wedding. I felt as if it wasn’t my life. My life hasn’t even started.”
We sat and listened to the dripping silence. “You were going to tell me what happened when you went out to the study early this morning.”
She shrugged. “I hate to think about it. Taps was sitting at his desk with the gun in his hand. He looked so thin and sharp-nosed, the way people look when they’re going to die. I was afraid he was going to shoot himself, and I went to him and asked him for the gun. It was almost an exact reversal of what happened the night that little one was conceived. And it was the same gun.”
“I don’t understand.”
She said: “I bought that gun to kill myself with four years ago. It was a secondhand revolver I found in a pawnshop. Taps had been out night after night with the girl, pretending to be tutoring, and I just couldn’t stand it any longer. I decided to destroy all three of us.”
“With the gun?”
“The gun was just for myself. Before I used it I called Mrs. Fablon and told her what I was going to do and why. She’d known of the affair, of course, but she didn’t know who the man was. She’d assumed that Taps was merely Ginny’s tutor, a kind of fatherly figure in the background.
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