Where There's Smoke полностью

I reached her office at twelve-thirty, just as she was preparing to leave. I told her my name and identified myself as a working policeman investigating the possi­bility that her husband’s death had been something more than accidental. I was there to ask if anyone had made a ransom demand, but at the same time I couldn’t reveal that her husband’s corpse had been spirited away, so to speak. Abner Boone was, after all, my client. Inherent in our verbal agreement was the understanding that the Gibson family would never learn of the theft; if all went well (or badly, depending on how you looked at it), they’d simply arrive at the mortuary tomorrow morning and find a neatly dressed body waiting to be eulogized and buried.

“I can’t talk to you right now,” Rhoda said. “I’m in a dreadful hurry, Lieutenant, I hope you’ll excuse me.”

“Mrs. Gibson,” I said, “your husband—”

“I’m sorry,” she said, “but an antiques dealer called me not five minutes ago, and I’ve got to get there right away.”

“Where’s that?”

“Wilson Street,” she said.

“I’ll drive you over. We can talk on the way.”

“Well... all right,” she said. “But please let’s hurry.”

Rhoda Gibson was an attractive woman just this side of forty, her black hair cut in a shingle bob. Her eyes were brown, she wore no make-up. She was dressed in what I assumed to be her usual working garb—a pale-blue pants suit, a flowered-silk blouse under it, stock tie knotted into a bow at the throat, low-heeled blue patent shoes. She put on a light topcoat before we left the office, and we went downstairs and walked toward where I’d parked the Mercedes. As we drove crosstown, I asked her if she thought there might have been anything suspicious about her hus­band’s accident.

“Why would I think that?” she said.

“Your son seems to think so. He told me—”

“When did you talk to my son?”

“Earlier today.”

“Where?”

“Outside your house on Matthews Street. He was car­rying a pistol.”

“A pistol? Where on earth did he get a pistol?”

“They’re very easy to come by in this city. Or any city, for that matter. He’s very frightened, Mrs. Gibson. He thinks your husband was killed. And he thinks whoever did it isn’t quite finished yet. Are you frightened?”

“No. Why should I be?”

“Your son said—”

“I wouldn’t take anything he told you seriously.”

“Did some men come to your house and threaten your husband?”

“Yes, but that was par for the course. A week didn’t go by without someone demanding money from Tony.”

“Then you don’t believe those men had anything to do with his accident?”

“I don’t know,” Rhoda said. “And I don’t care. Would you like to know something? I’m glad he’s dead.”

She said this just as I parked in front of the antique shop. I pulled up the handbrake and turned on the seat to look at her. Her face was expressionless.

“Why are you glad?” I asked.

“I just am.”

“No reason?”

‘Two hundred of them,” she said, and opened the door on the curb side and got out of the car.

I looked at my watch. It was twenty minutes to one, and there was in the streets that sort of calm that can set­tle unexpectedly on the city at any hour of the day, exag­gerated by an afternoon clarity of light that gave a sharp-edged luminosity to people and things, as though they’d been frozen in still photographs taken by an expert photographer. We walked to the shop in silence. Rhoda pushed open the door, and a bell tinkled, and a tall, long-faced, lavender-haired woman came from the back of the shop and greeted her with an exuberant “Rhoda! You sure got here fast!”

“Have you still got the lamps?” Rhoda said.

She didn’t bother to introduce me, even though the woman with the tinted hair was studying me specula­tively. We were surrounded by expensive antiques—a Welsh dresser circa 1800, an Early American gate-leg table, an English carved-oak china cabinet, a set of early-nineteenth-century ladder-back chairs, a hand-pegged trestle table, a solid-cherry William and Mary highboy. In the midst of this musty clutter, Rhoda sud­denly looked cool and sleek—and deadly. My heart lurched just a trifle in disappointment. I don’t ordinar­ily believe in hunches. Hunches are for television cops. But then again, neither am I normally presented with a lady who tells me she has two hundred reasons for re­joicing over her husband’s death, a lady who doesn’t bother to mention to someone who greets her on a first-name basis that dear old Tony died in a car crash last night, a lady who inquires instead, “Have you still got the lamps?”