Wrapping the towel around him, he opened a can of beef stew, heated it, and ate it out of the pot while he stood at the kitchen counter. He actually liked eating while standing up. Mad Crow had seen him do it once and could not resist ribbing him about it. Hey, cowboy, he said. Afraid your horse is going to run off if you sit down and eat with the gentry?
After eating, he checked the door and windows, then positioned the Colt within reach, lay on the sofa and closed his eyes.
When he awoke, it was fully dark and almost time to leave for Dex’s place. As he was getting dressed, the phone rang again.
“Hi.” It was Cassie.
“Hello, there.”
“I’ve just got a minute and thought I’d call, see how it went with Alden this morning.” Background noise threatened to wash out her words. He could hear people’s voices and vehicles. Then the loud, electric drone of a male voice intoning the name Bakersfield.
“I’m at the Greyhound depot,” she said, speaking up. “Waiting for a fare. He asked for me.” A hint of pride in her voice.
“I didn’t know you were so popular. You being new at this, and all.”
“You’d be surprised. I hand out a lot of cards, and sometimes people call later and say they want me. One of the other cabbies told me that’s where the good money is—the regulars. This guy tonight wants to go up to Santa Barbara, and he’s even offered to pay for gas. Maybe I’ll overnight up there. They say Santa Barbara’s a pretty town.”
“You’ll like it.” He told her about his conversation with Alden Richwine. When he had finished, she was silent for a moment, allowing the noise of the terminal to take over. The amplified voice came on again, speaking in well-shaped tones of San Luis Obispo, San Francisco, and other locales with mellifluous Spanish names.
“Have you talked to Madge, like I asked you?”
“No,” he said, slightly irritated. “What’s this about, anyway?”
“I’m not sure. The other night, we went down to Broadway, to that bar where we all saw Rose. Madge and I got to talking. We’ve talked a lot, but she was always sober. That night, though, I was buying, and she put it away. Seagram’s Five Crown on the rocks, one after the other. She can really hold it.”
“Cassie….”
“All right. Just listen. After her third or fourth, she started going on about Rose. And after a while, I could tell that the words weren’t Madge’s words, they were Rose’s.”
“What do you mean?”
“Do you know about Madge’s memory?”
“You mean the tricks she can do? Yeah. She brags about them.”
“They’re not really tricks. She can stash lots of things in her head, and then pull them out whenever she wants to. In the bar, what she pulled out was something Rose told her. The two of them had been drinking in that same place one time, and being there with me reminded her of it. I got the feeling that she had wanted to hide what Rose told her because it scared her. Only the Five Crown brought it out.”
“What did she say?” He checked his watch.
Cassie gave a sigh of frustration. “You know how drunks talk. It didn’t make sense to me. I wasn’t exactly sober myself, and I wasn’t in any shape to take notes. All I know is, she—Rose, I mean—was talking about a party.”
“A party.” He leaned forward on the couch, straining to pick up her words against the noise of the bus station.
“And Tess. And something about the lights. And a man in a tux. The next morning, I cussed myself out for not being able to pay better attention, maybe write it down. I asked Madge about it, and she looked at me like I was crazy. Said she didn’t know what I was talking about.”
“I’m going to have to leave pretty soon, Cassie. But I’ll have a talk with Madge.”
“I’ve got a feeling we’re getting close,” she said. “To whoever killed Rose. Do you feel it too?”
“Maybe,” he said, suddenly uncomfortable with her heightened interest. “But this is the time we need to be careful.” He felt the need to tell her about the attack on Doll and her ex-husband. “You’ve been a big help. I don’t want to see you take chances. Just last night—”
“I think that’s him,” she said suddenly.
“Who?”
“My fare. Got to go.” He heard the low roar of the terminal for a second longer, then nothing.
* * *
On the way over to Dex’s place, he worried about Cassie, but he could think of no way to rein her in. Horn had met her father only briefly and recalled him as a moody white man who liked to drink. Now he knew the man was a wife-beater as well. He had no idea how many of the father’s dark impulses had been passed on to the daughter. But she certainly seemed to share a few of her uncle’s traits. At times, especially in his younger days, Joseph Mad Crow had shown a rash and intemperate side, gaining a reputation as a fist fighter and bar brawler. Pushed the wrong way, Cassie sometimes behaved as if she were his image.
Those worries, however, soon gave way to more immediate ones. He was going to ask Dex some hard and inescapable questions tonight, and he did not look forward to the answers.
It was only a little past eight-thirty when he pulled up in front of the Diggs house and parked. Dex’s Plymouth was in the driveway. Deciding to give them time to finish dinner, he rolled a smoke and made himself as comfortable as he could. With the ignition on auxiliary, he tried to find a listenable station, but most of the dial was infected with a low level of static. Must be that storm they’re talking about, he thought, the one that’s taking so long to show up. He managed to hear a few minutes’ worth of Jack Benny, but Rochester had most of the punch lines, and his throaty delivery was no match for the static. Dialing up a clear-channel station in New Orleans, he landed in the middle of what promised to be an endless commercial for Hadacol. He turned off the radio.
Why’d they call Hadacol Hadacol? he asked himself as he got out of the car, resurrecting a stale joke that always seemed good for a groan.
I don’t know. Why?
Hadacol it something.
He knocked, and Evelyn opened the front door. Although she smiled, she didn’t offer her cheek. Instead, she said, “He’s running some film. You can join him.” She went back to the kitchen, which emitted the lingering, pleasant scent of a home-cooked meal.
Horn opened the inside door to the garage and was met with the loud hum of the projector. Dex sat in one of the two soft chairs, wreathed in cigarette smoke, face sharply illuminated by the reflected light off the screen that covered most of the garage door.
“Hey there,” Dex said. “Come on in.”
As Horn stepped carefully inside and took the vacant seat, he looked up and was startled to see his own face, giant-size, staring back at him from the screen. The man on the screen wore a Stetson and his lips moved, but no words were heard.
“I’ve got the sound track turned off,” Dex said. “I like it better this way sometimes. Just me and the pictures.” His right hand rested on the arm of the chair, wrapped around a tumbler half full of dark liquid and a couple of ice cubes.
“What the hell are you watching?”
“Smoke on the Mountain. Don’t you recognize it?”
“Not hardly. I haven’t seen it since it came out. Haven’t you got a better way to spend your time than to watch—” He gestured at his own face.
“That big galoot? With all respect to his dramatic skills, he’s not the reason I’m watching.”
The scene cut to a closeup of Rose Galen. She was listening, wordlessly and intently, to Sierra Lane. Then her lips moved, and her face grew animated with the conviction of what she was saying.
“Most of the hacks at that Grade B movie factory don’t even bother to set up for closeups,” Diggs said, as if to himself. His words sounded lazy, almost slurred. “But it makes a difference.”
The scene cut to a two-shot of Horn and his leading lady. Then, a moment later, a long shot showed them quickly mounting their horses and riding off. In the next shot, the camer
a tracked them as they rode at a gallop, both leaning forward urgently in the saddle, their weight on the stirrups, hands loose on the reins, wind in their faces.
Fearful of what his father would no doubt call the sin of pride, Horn had always tried to avoid admiring anything about his own movies. But he felt his breath catch at the image on the screen. First his eyes were drawn to Raincloud, the gray horse carrying the cowboy, running at top speed as effortlessly as dust swirling across the prairie. Although it had been years, he could almost feel the horse under him. Then, before he could reject it, a memory pushed its way into his mind—the feel of the pistol bucking under his hand as he snuffed out the horse’s life in an act of mercy that hurt to this day. He focused on the two figures on horseback. One was a man he barely recognized. The other was Rose Galen, in the last film she would ever make.
“For somebody who started out barely knowing one end of a horse from another, she caught on pretty fast, didn’t she?” Horn said.
“She did indeed.” Diggs got up, switched off the projector, and turned on the overhead garage light, then reclaimed his seat. “Offer you anything?” he asked, tilting his glass suggestively.
“No, thanks.” Horn cleared his throat noisily. “I need to talk to you.”
“That’s what the good wife said.” Diggs looked at him expectantly.
“When we saw Doll Winter at the cemetery, she said Rose had told her a lot of things about you. For a while, I didn’t know what she meant, but I’ve learned a lot since then.”
“What have you learned, John Ray?” Diggs spoke casually, as if nothing could surprise him tonight.
“That you and Rose were involved, during the time you worked on that silent picture together. Then you told her it was over, and you said Evelyn was the reason. But that was apparently a lie, because you were taking up right then with Tess Shockley. You were pretty busy, weren’t you?”
After giving Diggs a second to respond to his sarcasm, Horn went on. “Before long, Tess was dead. She died in a house owned by Alden Richwine, a man you know.” Horn saw Diggs’ expression change briefly and almost imperceptibly at those words. “We’ve known for a while that Rose had something to do with that. But now I know she wasn’t the only one.
“It seems just the other day you were asking me if Rose and I had anything going on back when the three of us worked together. I have to laugh at that now—”
“I was curious, John Ray,” Diggs cut in. “I wanted to know about the two of you, but I wasn’t ready to talk about myself. I’m sorry I wasn’t more truthful with you.”
“More truthful? Dex, you either held back the truth or you flat-out lied to me about almost everything.”
“I told you how Tess died. I helped you find out about that.”
“Yeah. Maybe you knew it was only a matter of time before I got to that on my own, and you wanted to look helpful. But you left out a few details about Tess. For one, you were screwing her. Hell, you never even bothered to mention that she had a part in the last movie you made with Rose. You lied to me, Dex.”
Diggs knocked back another inch of his drink. His movements were becoming slower and more exaggerated. “Sorry to hurt your feelings,” he said harshly. “I had the best reason in the world to keep secrets, even from you. It was Evelyn. I was married to her when all this happened. She’s the best thing in my life, always has been. I had never been tempted to run around behind her back before then, and not since then. But during this time we’re talking about, I was so goddam full of myself…. I was the all-powerful director, the creator. Beautiful women looked to me for guidance, Rose and Tess admired me, and I…. Hell, I loved it. In terms of the work I was doing and the way I felt about myself, you could say that was the high point of my life back then. Before this stuff started getting to me.” He waggled his glass gently, sloshing the liquid inside.
“Evelyn was smart enough to know that something was going on back then, but we’ve never talked about it. We don’t need to. I’ve been a good husband to her ever since. If people learned about any of this, she’d be hurt. I wouldn’t want that to happen.”
“Dex, listen to me.” Horn leaned forward, hands on his knees, trying to make eye contact.
“We’re not just talking about you protecting your wife’s reputation. This goes way beyond that. When Tess died, you were there in that house. You were seen with Rose, not long before…it happened. You went upstairs with her.”
“I didn’t.”
“Another lie?”
“No. I never went upstairs. She asked me to go with her. Wanted to talk about us, she said. I told her it was too late. I may have been a little drunk—”
“Everybody in that house was drunk, Dex, on one thing or another. They all use the same excuse.”
“All I mean is I may have been too abrupt with her. Unkind, even. At any rate, I didn’t go with her.”
“I don’t believe you.”
Diggs’ shrug turned into an elaborate gesture that almost upset his whisky glass. “Go to hell, then. You know, I’ve always given you credit for being pretty smart. Not book-educated, mind you, and not always good at making choices for yourself. But basically smart. If you can’t hear the truth when it’s spoken, then I’ve been wrong about you.”
“Not as wrong as I’ve been about you. Did you kill Rose?”
Diggs showed no surprise. Maybe it was the whisky. He sat in silence for a while. Then: “I’ve never known anyone like Rose. Evelyn is the love of my life, but Rose…was unforgettable. I always regretted losing touch with her. And now that I know how she was living these last few years, I feel I should have done something.
“No, sir, I did not kill her,” he said, glaring now at Horn, emphasizing each word. “I said the same thing to a certain ill-mannered police detective who came calling just the other day. Seems I’m on a list of suspects. I told him the truth, and he went on his way.”
Horn wondered at how quickly his old affection for Dexter Diggs could have vanished.
“I owe you a lot, Dex. For a while there, you were almost like a father. But if you killed Rose, I’ll make sure you pay for it.”
Diggs made no answer. “This is where you tell me I’m too old to go running around like the avenging cowboy of the plains, trying to do the sheriff’s job,” Horn said. “Alden Richwine told me that, except he used better words.”
He sat back in his chair, coolly studying the other man. “You’ve always been strong,” he mused. “You’re getting up there now, but you’re still pretty fit. You could have easily killed Rose. I just wonder if you could have taken on Lewis De Loach. Were you really out of town that night, like Evelyn said?”
“The policeman mentioned that incident too. I think you’re unbalanced.”
“Never mind. I wouldn’t expect you to tell me the truth anyway. One more question, and then I’ll leave you alone. Let’s say you did go into that bedroom. Why would you want to kill Tess? Were you already dumping her, the way you did Rose? Did she threaten to tell Evelyn? And did Rose offer to help you—”
“Get out.”
As Horn closed the door behind him, he heard the whir of the projector start up again.
Outside, he was about to start the engine when he saw Evelyn open the front door and come down the walkway. Leaning over toward the passenger side, he cranked down the window.
She wore a faded housecoat and slippers, and a scarf over what appeared to be a head full of curlers.
“Dex is sitting in there alone, drinking,” she said. “You’ve made him very unhappy. Why would you want to do that?”
“I don’t want to make anyone unhappy, Evelyn. I just want to find out who killed Rose Galen.”
“What does that have to do with him?”
Be careful, he told himself. “I just don’t think he’s telling me everything he knows.”
She hugged herself and shivered. “You’d better go inside,” he said.
“Not until you talk to me.”
“Then please
get in the car.” He reached over and opened the door for her, and she slid inside, still hugging herself. He started the engine and opened the heater vent.
She sat staring straight ahead. After a moment’s silence, she said, “I knew about Rose, of course.”
“He said you had probably guessed.”
“It didn’t take much guessing,” she said, laughing lightly, her face taut. “They were obvious about it. Later, I heard there was someone else. No name, just someone else. All of it hurt me, naturally. But somehow I knew Dex would never stray far and would always come back. And I was right.”
A faint snatch of music from the radio. It was Doris Day singing Sentimental Journey in front of Les Brown’s band. “I always loved that,” Evelyn murmured, turning up the volume a little. “It was one of those songs that told us the war was over and things would be getting better. Remember?”
“I remember the promise,” he said. “Not that it happened that way, at least not for everybody.”
“Maybe part of that’s your own fault,” she said. “Have you forgotten how close the two of you used to be? How much Dex helped you when you were starting out? How many meals you ate at our house? Do you remember how many people were ready to turn their backs on you when you went to prison? Dex wasn’t one of those. He couldn’t hire you, naturally, because he would have lost his own job. But it bothered him, and he never stopped being your friend.”
“Evelyn—”
“So here you come, stirring things up. How can he help you find out who killed Rose?”
“I asked him about a New Year’s Eve party twenty years ago,” he said, picking his words carefully. “Rose was there, and so was he. A young woman named Tess Shockley, who worked on the film with Rose that Dex directed, died that night.”
“I vaguely remember that,” Evelyn said. “It was in the papers, and Dex mentioned it to me.”
“Well, Rose may have had something to do with it.”
“No. That’s hard to believe, John Ray.”
“I know, but I’m afraid it’s true.”
“I’m sure Dex would help if he could. This party you asked him about—was it the one at Alden Richwine’s house?”
While I Disappear Page 27
