A Match Made for Murder

by Iona Whishaw

  “Yes, but not from me, is my point.”

  Hidalgo shifted his behind on the wooden chair he used as his surveillance base across the road from the hotel. There was a field with a few scrawny cattle and some mesquite trees near the road that threw a little shade in the heat of the day. He hadn’t minded the job at first, especially when he got a glimpse of her, but he began to wonder why a man would put his wife to work on a racket like that.

  He sat up straight when a cab pulled up—not at the foot of the stairs up to the main entrance of the hotel but farther down, at the gate where the help went in and out. A young man in a nice suit got out and leaned into the car, saying something to the driver. The young man looked like an operator, Hidalgo thought. Maybe he was seeing one of the maids. A full ten minutes went by, and he was beginning to lose interest when the gate opened. He was startled to see that it was the young man ushering Meg Holden hurriedly out the gate and into the cab.

  Frowning, he watched the cab disappear in a cloud of dust and make the turn at the end of the road that would take them back to town. This was new. He pulled out his notebook and jotted down the time. Should he wait till they got back? He tried to imagine Mr. Griffin’s response. He’d be angry if he hadn’t followed through. On the other hand, maybe this was something to do with Mr. Griffin, someone he’d sent to fetch her, and therefore none of his business.

  James Griffin sat at his desk in a dark and cluttered office at the back of his restaurant. He’d come in through the front door, as he did every morning, just to revel in the size of the place when it was empty and quiet and be comforted by the redolence of stale cigarettes and liquor that spoke of the restaurant’s popularity. He lit up a Fonseca cigar and leaned back in his desk chair and contemplated the ceiling.

  He’d have to lie low for a bit and not move any money around—he’d have to lie low for a bit, period. He was pretty sure he’d closed the tap at the nursing home. His man on the inside had taken care of the other. The only fly in his ointment, really, was his wife. He always hated this part of the business—her being with someone else. Of course, she was loyal as loyal as could be and always glad to be back with him, and maybe he shouldn’t be going out to see her as much as he did. He was doing it more than he had in the past. He should stop. It was just making him mad.

  The knock on the door made him jump. “What?” he barked.

  Hidalgo came in and shuffled in front of the desk.

  “Spit it out,” Griffin said. “You have something to report?”

  Opening his notebook, Hidalgo began to read. “At two forty-five today, a cab pulled up to the back gate—that one you go to, sir. A young man in a white suit got out, entered, and approximately ten minutes later emerged with Mrs. Holden, your good wife, sir, and entered the cab. They drove east and then turned south at the corner.”

  “Come again?” Griffin said, leaning forward.

  “At two forty-five, a cab pulled up—”

  “I heard you, you moron!” Griffin shouted, standing up. He began to pace behind his desk, and then wheeled on his henchman. “It didn’t occur to you to jump in that car I provided and see where the hell they were going, I don’t suppose.”

  Hidalgo gulped. “I thought it might be something to do with you, you know, like you’d sent someone to pick her up.”

  “Is it likely I’d send an oily, overdressed gigolo to pick up my wife?”

  Hidalgo could think of no safe answer.

  “I’m surrounded by idiots! You go back out there, and you follow next time that happens. Got it?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Hidalgo drove back to the street around the corner from the hotel and parked, and then sat and lit a cigarette, relieved to be out of the storm front in his boss’s office. And there was a lot to think about. If the man in the white suit wasn’t one of Mr. Griffin’s men, who was he? He tried to remember what he’d seen between them in the brief period between her coming through the gate and getting into the cab. Was she running something on her own? He smiled briefly at the thought of Mr. Griffin getting bested at his own game by his own dame. He was aware that his admiration for her had been growing, just on the basis of her looks, but this thought of her on the make behind her husband’s back made him almost proud.

  Before dinner, hotel management invited guests to watch the sunset from the roof of one of the buildings while staff served drinks. Darling and Lane, along with Ivy and Jack Renwick, stood looking west, holding martinis. The sky overhead seemed huge, and Lane could imagine the turning of the earth away from the sun. Bands of orange and gold stretched across the sky over the distant Tucson Mountains. As the sky darkened, the temperature dropped. Lane was glad of the cardigan she’d brought. She noticed some of the other women wearing shawls, elegantly slung across their shoulders. I must look into that, she thought.

  Ivy Renwick, like Lane, was wearing a cardigan. “I never tire of the sunsets here,” she said. “I mean, the sun goes down in Winnebago County, too, but it’s just not the same. Of course, I don’t usually have a martini in hand, either. I’m usually in an apron making Jack’s dinner!”

  “She makes a fine dinner, my Ivy,” Jack said, putting his arm around his wife’s shoulders. “I’m getting cold. What say?”

  “Yes, do let’s go down,” Lane said. “I’m famished, though I’ve done nothing all day but lie around.”

  “I love your accent,” Ivy said, as they came down the outside stairs to the poolside patio. “It’s very sophisticated.”

  At their table, the waiter startled Lane by taking up her napkin and placing it on her lap for her. She glanced at Darling, and then looked away, afraid she would laugh at his discomfiture.

  “Tell me, Fred, what do you do up in Canada?”

  “I’m a police inspector in our tiny little town. You?”

  Jack sat back and smiled. “I just got made president and chairman of my electronics company. I mean, it wasn’t meant to be mine, really, but when my dad died, he left me in charge. I just concluded a big contract with a local hotel that is adding a big convention centre.” He looked down, turning his fork over and over, and then sighed; he seemed to be considering his next words. “I’m lucky, I guess, but it’s sort of at my older brother’s expense. He was supposed to be the one to take over the company, but he came out of the war a little funny, and I guess Dad didn’t want to put him in charge. Honestly, I don’t know how to square it, in some ways. All my life he’s been the one. I was just going to go into engineering, maybe start a small firm of my own. The war changed everything.”

  “What about you?” Lane asked quietly, turning to Ivy, surprised by what looked like a momentary flash of . . . flash of what, anxiety perhaps, on Ivy’s face as she watched her husband talking. But it disappeared as she spoke.

  “Well, I’m obviously a housewife now, since we married, though in the war I taught wire communications. That’s how I met Jack originally; his dad’s company hired me to coordinate the communications offices. He was a nobody then. His dad believed in starting his sons on the factory floor.” She laughed suddenly, her face lighting up for a brief second.

  She seems content, Lane thought. Happy to give up everything she did before to be his wife. She wondered how Ivy could go from really important work to keeping house. But, of course, that was what women everywhere were doing. Would it be as simple as that for her? She and Darling had discussed their domestic arrangements. She was certain he would never ask this utter domesticity of her, but did one just slide into it? The husband goes off to work, the wife stays home to tend the house, the garden, the meals. Perhaps it had its compensations. Time alone, so one didn’t lose oneself completely, for example. The trouble was, she did miss it—not the war, exactly, or even the dubious thrill of jumping out of airplanes, but being useful. Offering her skills to help Darling and the police force solve some recent crimes had made her feel useful again. Would he leverage
his position as her husband to stop this sort of activity?

  Lane turned away from this disquieting line of thought, to find that Ivy had asked about what Lane did before she married.

  “I’m a writer, of sorts. I worked in an office during the war, of course, nothing clever like what you did.” Lane tried to sound dismissive to avoid any deeper questions.

  “Oh, you shouldn’t denigrate what you did. Every bit of war work helped, don’t you think? I taught men things they thought I had no business knowing. I saw them looking at each other with ‘who does this dame think she is?’ written all over their faces, but after a while, they paid attention, when they found they had to work hard to learn what I already knew. I had a degree in engineering, which is the reason I got that job at the factory. I could do what a man could do, but for cheaper. It’s why I got the war work as well. I had to break information into pieces that people without any college training could understand. The army let me stay on till the end, even though Jack and I were married.”

  “Do you miss it?” Lane asked.

  “I miss being part of something bigger, the camaraderie. I was happy to discover lots of men who were very accepting of my role, and those of other women. But now we’re thinking about a family.” Ivy tilted her head a little and looked momentarily distrait.

  “Oh! Are you . . .?” Lane leaned toward Ivy and dropped her voice.

  “Shhh. I haven’t told him yet,” Ivy said, giving her chin the slightest tilt toward her husband. “Not till I’m sure.” She looked down and then glanced at her husband with a look that seemed far from that of a happy mother-to-be.

  Dinner was brought out and the metal hoods ceremoniously lifted off their plates. After the appropriate exclamations of appreciation, Darling continued talking to Jack, and between her exchanges with Ivy, Lane could hear that they were discussing the older brother. She looked forward to hearing the full story from Darling later. She was surprised by how much the Renwicks talked about their personal lives. She could certainly not imagine any English person doing the same thing after having just met someone.

  “This is so good. It’s a treat to have someone cook for me!” Ivy said. “This is a real roast beef dinner!”

  “I’m lucky. Both my husband and I are a little short of culinary skills, so we are learning together. He makes a wonderful steak!”

  Ivy stopped her fork midway to her mouth and put it back on the plate, staring at Darling. “He cooks? But he’s a police inspector.”

  “I think it relaxes him,” Lane offered, now unsure about how uncommon her worldview might be.

  “Jack is a saint, honestly he is, but other than grilling a hot dog outside, I wouldn’t trust him near my kitchen!”

  Jack smiled and took his wife’s hand for a moment. “I’d be lousy, and that’s the truth. Anyway, like she said, I’m not allowed near the place!”

  “I don’t suppose you could produce a respectable dead body for me to practice my skills on?” Ashford Gillingham said, standing in the doorway of Ames’s office with a piece of paper.

  “I told you, Gilly. No wrongful deaths till the boss gets back. Anyway, Nelson’s a small town when all is said and done. People can’t be murdered every day of the week. We’d be a ghost town in no time. Anything?”

  “I picked up a couple of clear pads on the can,” he said. “Middle finger, maybe, and thumb. I hand them over to you and go back to cleaning out my files and lining my tools up neatly. Done my job. Yours is to see if you have any matches.”

  Ames sighed. “I don’t even have a matching crime on the records. I suspect this is a one-time thing. Miss Van Eyck thinks it was a man she had to put back in his place when he came to have his car worked on at their garage. I should go across and get his dabs and find out where he was between the hours of who the heck knows, but she doesn’t want it followed up on.”

  “Van Eyck. Isn’t that the name of the pretty blonde you turned up with at Darling’s wedding? I admire your optimism, Sergeant, I’ll say that! It’s convenient that there’s been an outbreak of crime on her garage door.”

  “Yes, thanks, Gilly. If there’s nothing else, I’ve got work to do.”

  “Try not to make a mess of this one, too,” Gilly said as a parting shot.

  Ames knew he didn’t mean the vandalism investigation, and he thought it an unfair characterization that he “made a mess” of his relationship with Violet Harding. He simply realized they weren’t suited, not that he was going to satisfy Gilly with an explanation, which, after all, he wasn’t entirely sure showed him off in a good light. Maybe he was being too choosy. How could anyone know right away what kind of person a girl was? What kind of person was Tina Van Eyck, for example? It wasn’t enough that her smile made his heart flutter. Her initial fury about the garage door showed some depth of anger that maybe ought to worry him, not to mention her sudden antagonism toward the police. Where had that come from? She had originally struck him as attractively confident and sure, but he worried she might not be that different from Violet, who had seemed always furious at him for something.

  “Are you sure you don’t mind? It’s almost the last time I’ll abandon you. I promised Galloway I’d go for a drive around his district. I’ll be back right after lunch, and we’ll go for a ride at that ranch up in the hills that he recommended.”

  “I’ll try to cope with just the pool and my book. I may even have a nap, since this place fairly cries out for afternoon napping. Or perhaps I’ll send Angela and the Armstrongs a postcard. Shall I send one to Ames signed by you?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. I’d never live it down, and neither would he.”

  “You’re quite sweet when you’re gruff. Have fun with Galloway, whom . . . well, never mind.” Lane put her straw hat on, pinned it, and looked for The Nine Tailors.

  “What?” asked Darling.

  “It’s nothing. It’s unfair, really, I shouldn’t judge on one meeting. I just don’t think I quite like the man. I thought, don’t you know, that he was being rude about his wife and she didn’t care for it.” She kissed him and swept out with her book and a towel.

  Darling stood at the front of the inn waiting for Galloway in something of a turmoil. For one, Lane in her red bathing suit with her straw hat tilted over her left eye was hard to abandon, but he also became aware of something about being married to Lane. He was used to forming judgements, usually, he told himself, quite accurate ones, but he now had an astute and intelligent wife to provide a new perspective. He realized he’d had a feeling about their evening at Paul Galloway’s home that he’d not been able to articulate, and Lane had just identified what he now saw to be true. As the police car pulled up and Galloway leaned over and called out to him to hop in, Darling wondered anew about his old colleague.

  The water in the turquoise-tiled pool stirred and eddied in bands of luminescent blue and gold in the late morning sun. Lane, soothed by its beauty and the quiet talking and laughing around her, rested her book on her stomach and closed her eyes. The warmth of the sun on her eyelids, the gentle cooing of the doves, and the lapping, fading sounds that accompany the drifting call of a nap by a pool sent her into a doze.

  Then two shots.

  When they came, it felt like they had come from inside her, from some dream that had been wiped away by its own sounds. A scream and the scattering of birds, all rising at once in a panic, brought her fully to life, and she leapt up, suddenly aware that those few people who had been by the pool when she’d gone to sleep had all but disappeared. One older woman on the opposite side of the pool was on her feet, clutching her towel against her chest and looking frantically around.

  “What was that?” the woman cried hoarsely.

  “Stay here,” Lane commanded. The scream seemed to have come from near the villa somewhere, and she ran around the hedge, toward the villa patio, wrapping her towel around her waist.

  The Bet
te Davis blonde, her hands over her mouth, her face white, was staring down at the body of Jack Renwick, lying flat on his back, his chest rent by the bullets that had mowed him down. Lane rushed to the woman and took her arms and shook her gently to get her to stop staring at the dead man and focus.

  “Run and get the office to call an ambulance and the police. Now!”

  Lane’s commanding tone seemed to bring the terrified woman around, and she stumbled toward the main building, sobbing. Lane knelt down and, stilling the turning of her stomach at the sight of the torn flesh and gory white shirt, felt Renwick’s neck for a pulse. A pointless gesture, she knew. He was dead. One of the bullets had certainly penetrated his heart. A man from the front desk barrelled toward the scene, shouting, “Oh my God! Oh my God!” He leaned forward and appeared about to try to do something with the body.

  “Don’t touch him, please,” Lane said firmly, reaching her hand out to block him. “The police will need him as he is.”

  The man, uncertain anyway, recoiled and looked helpless. The blond woman’s husband came out of the villa, bemused, woken from a nap, and demanded to know what all the racket was, then stopped, aghast at the scene before him.

  “You,” Lane commanded, looking at the blond woman’s husband, “can you get something from your room to cover him with?” She could have gone to her own room, right nearby, but she was reluctant to leave until the police arrived; she had learned during the war that it was better to keep people in shock busy.

  “How could this happen?” the distraught front-desk agent cried, wringing his hands. The blond woman stood frozen in the doorway of the main building, a handkerchief up to her nose, reluctant to come any closer. The old woman by the pool hovered uncertainly near the hedge, craning her neck to see what was happening. Other guests who had been sitting down to lunch had come out and pressed up behind the blonde.