Читать книгу Reno Rendezvous - Leslie Ford - Страница 8

I must have gone to sleep the moment my head touched the pillow. Judy hadn’t been in her room, but I hadn’t expected she would be. The night was too clear and perfect to be closed in four small prosaic walls. Her car was gone from its place on the bridge over the river. I was glad she was with Cowboy Joe—with anybody, I thought as I turned off my light, but Kaye Gorman and Dex Cromwell and the gentleman known as Whitey.

The thought was still vaguely in my mind as I woke up. Without raising my head I could see the clock on the town hall across the Truckee beyond the River House, its hands dimly pointing to three. The light from the Riverside Hotel across the street went from yellow to rose to blue and back, lighting the night air half-a-dozen times before I realized that it was voices in the next room that had waked me. I didn’t in fact realize it until Judy spoke, her voice low and passionate and broken with tears.

“I’ll do as I please! You needn’t pretend you didn’t know she was coming here! You’re just trying to humiliate me—and I can’t bear it!”

I think I’ve never heard such poignant protest torn from any human throat. All the pent-up emotion of weeks was in it. The gallant little head was down . . . the storm they’d been goading her on to all afternoon had broken at last.

I heard the low tones of a man’s voice, and Judy again:

“Don’t you dare say you love me . . . when you know it’s her!”

I got out of bed and put on my dressing gown. Then I stopped. My first impulse had been to go in there—drawn by the real agony in those heartbroken sobs. But to go in, as I realized when I stopped to think, would only have made things worse. And it wouldn’t hurt her to quarrel with him, I thought—it would get it out of her system, at least—unless, of course, she woke up the whole hotel and got another notice in the gossip columns as a result.

I went to the desk and without a psychic twinge of any kind to warn me I did perhaps the most foolish thing I ever did in my life. I wrote a note saying, “Judy dear—If you two will stop this insane quarreling now, and resume at a more seasonable hour, you will please your devoted aunt who would very much like to get some sleep.” I then phoned for a bell boy, who came still in fancy dress at that ungodly hour, said “Will you kindly give this to Mrs. Bonner,” and went back to bed.

I couldn’t go to sleep, even though I heard Judy’s door slam and a long silence ensue. I lay there thinking, about Judy and Clem, and about Kaye Gorman. It didn’t make sense. Nobody who ever loved Judy could love that young woman with her bleached hair and the hard curve of her jaw from behind that melted into such a round baby face in front, and the blue eyes, wide and appealing when she wanted them to be and shrewd and cold as the devil when she wasn’t on guard. And Clem Bonner had loved Judy—I’d have staked my life on that.

I lay there for a long time; and then I reached for the phone without turning on the light, and called Clem Bonner’s apartment in New York. I’d tried to get in touch with him before I came out and hadn’t been able to, and it seemed to me that now it was still more imperative. He’d just be getting up. I waited. I didn’t quite know what I was going to say, except to tell him that Judy needed him, desperately, and that he couldn’t let her down. But I needn’t have bothered; I might as well have been talking to a stone wall.

“I’m sorry—Mr. Bonner has given orders not to be disturbed. I’ll tell him you called.”

And when I insisted, explaining that I was Mrs. Latham, Mrs. Bonner’s aunt, in Reno, and that I demanded he at least go and tell Mr. Bonner I was on the phone, the butler said “Very good, madam,” and then, a minute later, with the most infuriating imperturbability, “Mr. Bonner does not care to be disturbed, madam—good-bye.”

I stared into the dead phone completely dumbfounded, and then slammed it down. “The wretched young prig,” I thought angrily, “—she’s jolly well lucky to get rid of him!”

When I woke up again I rang for my breakfast and got up to the last peaceful day I knew for some time. Even then I should have recognized the calm as ominous . . . the sort that, as they say, precedes the storm. I finished my breakfast, bathed and got dressed. There was no sound from Judy’s room. While it was reasonable to presume that even the young have to sleep some time, I nevertheless had a vague tinge of uneasiness at her sleeping so long. The clock on the square spired tower of the Town Hall said 11:30 when I opened the connecting door and looked in.

She was lying on the sofa, still in her jodhpurs and riding shirt and shoes, her red-gold hair spreading a bright nimbus about her flushed lovely face where tear stains still showed. She was breathing as quietly and evenly as a child. My note was lying on the table.

I closed the door, took the DO NOT DISTURB sign off my dresser, hung it on her door, went down the hall and pressed the elevator bell.

The maid came heavily up the narrow stairs to the right of the elevator.

“Mrs. Bonner is asleep,” I said. “Don’t do my room either, till she wakes up, please.”

She gave me a look that I suppose was long-suffering rather than malevolent, and plodded off down the hall. Halfway along she turned. “You’d better put something Western on,” she said. “They’ll arrest you. I’m from Chicago myself.”

She went on about her business, and I went on about mine.

It was hot and brilliant in Virginia Street. I turned right onto the bridge, and stood looking down into the clear shallow water of the Truckee. It was pleasant to see a stream crystal as God intended it to be, after the turgid muddy waters of the Potomac or the Susquehanna or the Mississippi. And then, just as I’d got there, I suddenly heard the clatter of cowbells and the honking of horns, and realized with a sickening feeling out of all keeping with the carnival air around me, and out of all proportion to the thing itself, that I was about to be stuck into that ridiculous travelling pen, and paraded through the streets, at a moment when I was in anything but a Mi-Carême mood.

I saw them coming, a couple of men in cowboy clothes; there was no use trying to run. And I loathe all horseplay of the sort . . . and to be caught right in the middle of it. . . . For a moment I hated Judy, and her parents, and the whole tawdry business.

Then suddenly, out of a perfectly clear sky, I saw a yellow kerchief with a bucking bronco on one corner stuck into my hand; and a familiar and most disgusted voice said:

“Here, ma’am, take this, and hang on to it. You ought to had sense enough to get one.”

My fingers closed gratefully and weakly on it as I stared up at Sergeant Phineas T. Buck, guard, philosopher and friend extraordinary to my friend Colonel John Primrose, 92nd Engineers, U. S. A., Retired. He was standing there beside me, his granite visage as expressionless yet bleak as the side of a canyon in December, his viscid gray eyes fixed on me with the fine enthusiasm of a dead fish. Sergeant Buck’s six-feet-three and two hundred and twenty pounds of bone and brawn, with his hard-bitten, lantern-jawed and always slightly menacing face on top of it, makes him an extraordinary figure at any time . . . but in Western clothes he was wonderful to behold. He wore cowboy pants—blue levis—and a bright orange satin shirt, and a waistcoat made of the brown-and-white-spotted skin of a calf, or something, and peculiarly fancy boots, and a wide leather belt with “RENO” studded on it in what he later referred to as stimulated rubies, and ten-gallon hat that would have held at least twenty. On it there was a gorgeous wide yellow silk band that said “Winnemucca Rodeo”—why, I never knew.

“Oh, thank you!” I gasped. Then, as I have nothing to say to Sergeant Buck that he’d care to hear, and as he would greatly prefer never to see me at all, much less speak to me, we just stood there while the Kangaroo Court, full of sheepish women in Eastern clothes, clattered by, respecting my Western insignia.

Sergeant Buck turned and spat precisely into the river.

“I expect we’ll be seeing you again, ma’am,” he said, out of one corner of his mouth. There was no mistaking how he felt about that inevitability.

“Well, I’m afraid so,” I said. He started off. I should have liked to ask him where Colonel Primrose was, but I didn’t dare. It so plainly would just have confirmed a deep-seated conviction that his chiefs freedom wasn’t worth a moment’s purchase, and that before he got away from Reno he’d be as firmly and irrevocably bound as the lassoed steer rolling in the dust on the corner of my yellow handkerchief.

Then I noticed that Sergeant Buck had stopped a step or so away from me, and I turned, wondering if it was conceivable that he was about to mention the Colonel of his own free will and volition.

He was not even thinking about me. He was staring straight ahead of him toward the Riverside Bar, the expression on his face quite indescribable.

I followed his gaze, and wasn’t surprised, much. Mrs. de Courcey, in her Pocahontas getup, her henna hair flaming in the sun, hat in hand, a brace of dachshunds on the leash, was holding up traffic crossing from the Hotel Washoe to the Riverside.

“Well, may I be a son of a . . . gun!” Sergeant Buck said slowly, out of the corner of his mouth.

He took off his mammoth hat, and mopped his brow with a red bandanna handkerchief.

Astonishing as Mrs. de Courcey was, I thought, she wasn’t so astonishing as all that. I started to say so, but Sergeant Buck silenced me.

“You got to excuse me, ma’am,” he said. “I been figuring it was you we come up here to see. But I guess I got him all wrong.”

“What are you talking about?” I demanded—in my innocent way having been figuring the same thing.

He jerked his head toward Mrs. de Courcey, whose dachshunds had got tangled up with the silver spurs on her Western boots.

“Her,” he said grimly. “She’s an old flame of the Colonel’s. He was drunk a week when she married de Courcey.”

We both watched her disappear into the Riverside Bar.

“So that’s the way it is,” Sergeant Buck said, more grimly still. It was the first time I’d ever heard him use one of the Colonel’s pet phrases. The punctuation was his own; he turned and spat again into the Truckee. “Good-bye, ma’am,” he said.

I thought for a moment that it was another ruse in Sergeant Buck’s efforts to keep Colonel Primrose out of my designing hands. But watching him lumber down the street in his movie costume I realized that it wasn’t, and that a real and formidable danger had risen, now that Mrs. de Courcey was about to be a free woman again. I even felt a sudden glow of something like sympathy for Sergeant Buck—the situation, from his point of view, was certainly complicated. And then, for a moment, and in spite of the fact that the idea of my marrying Colonel Primrose has never been in anybody’s mind but Buck’s, I felt a twinge of—I suppose—just old-fashioned jealousy. We all, no doubt, have our little vanity.

I might have brooded longer on the wound mine had got if I hadn’t just then seen the hat check girl, Vicki, in her white riding breeches and black boots, coming across the bridge.

“Hello,” she said. “Have you seen Mr. Cromwell anywhere?”

“Not this morning,” I said.

“Where’s Mrs. Bonner?”

“She’s still asleep.”

“Have you seen Kaye Gorman?”

“No,” I said. “Isn’t it rather early for any of these people?—It’s just noon.”

She pointed a red-tipped finger at me and nodded soberly.

“I think you’ve got something there,” she said. She turned to say “Hi!” to a couple of men just getting in a car, and got in with them.

I crossed the street. A policeman, marking the front tires of cars along the curb with a piece of yellow chalk on a stick, had stopped at Judy’s open cream-colored roadster and was giving her a third ticket.

“I’ll get the keys and move this,” I said. “It’s owner’s still asleep.”

The cop grinned.

“The keys are in it,” he said. “You can put it on the side street there. It’ll be okay.”

At three o’clock Judy was still asleep. The sun was streaming in through the long open windows. I drew the curtains and tip-toed out, hoping she’d sleep on. But she didn’t. She woke up as I got to my door and sat up, looking around her, bewildered and slightly dazed.

“Gosh, I must have been asleep,” she said. She rubbed her eyes like a flushed sleepy child. I nodded. She sat there, staring ahead of her, her eyes gradually changing as reality focussed in her mind.

Suddenly she raised her eyes to mine. A sharp spasm of pity tore my heart. It didn’t seem possible that any twenty-one-year-old could hold such anguish.

“Call Clem for me—will you, Grace?” she said, unsteadily.

“You’d better do it yourself, darling,” I said. “I did call him, and was told he didn’t care to be disturbed.”

She stared at me with parted lips and stricken eyes.

“Did you tell him who you were?”

I nodded. “But I’ll call him again . . .”

“No, no!” she said quickly. “Never mind. It’s all right.”

She got up abruptly and stood by the window looking out. After a little she came back to the sofa, sat down and reached for a cigarette, and lighted it, without, I knew, the faintest awareness of what she was doing.

I picked up the phone. “Send Mrs. Bonner some coffee and bacon and eggs and toast immediately,” I said.

She got up and went over to the window again. I could see her slim shoulders quivering, her brown fists clenched. Then suddenly she came back to me.

“Oh, I can’t stand it, Grace!” she whispered. “I can’t stand it! Oh, what have I done . . . what have I done!”

She let her head sink on my shoulder, her arms tightly around me, and mine around her. At first I thought she was crying, but she wasn’t.

Then she galvanized into life at the jangle of the phone beside us. I looked at her sharply, completely dumbfounded at the change that came over her.

“Answer it, Grace,” she whispered. “Please—answer it!”

I picked it up, said “Hello,” and listened. I turned round to her.

“It’s Joe, at the ranch,” I said. “He wants to know if you’re coming out.”

She relaxed abruptly, and pushed her bright hair back from her forehead, pale even under its deep sun tan. God knows what she expected to hear. I had no idea . . . not then.

“Oh, yes!” she cried, almost hysterically. “Tell him of course I’m coming! Tell him I’ll be right out!”

And she dashed for the bath.

Which is how I happened to be in my room half an hour later when Colonel Primrose—apparently free for a moment from Mrs. de Courcey—telephoned and asked me to go for a ride with him . . . and how, what with one thing and another, we were taking our horses out of the paddock, a little after six, and trotting around the race track, a mile or so out of town.

“Buck said he saw you,” Colonel Primrose said.

We were going around the half-mile track, my horse, a two-year-old named Dragonfly, shying at every post.

“He doesn’t approve of Reno. He thinks it’s a cesspool of iniquity.”

He cocked his head down, giving me an amused glance. He got a bullet in his neck at the Argonne, so that whenever he wants to turn his head he has to duck a little, which makes him look rather like a parrot. The impression is sustained by the way his dark eyes can contract and dilate, on occasion, with appalling shrewdness, behind the kindly twinkle that’s ordinarily there. It’s always there when he’s talking about his Sergeant Buck, who was with him in the Army and now lives with him in the old yellow brick house in Georgetown lived in by generations of Primroses, and manages him as if he were the heavyweight champion instead of a retired gentleman of independent means who’s turned a hobby into an amazingly lucrative profession.

“Well,” I said, “he’s finally discovered it’s not me that’s the triple threat, but Mrs. de Courcey.”

I grabbed the martingale as Dragonfly shied at the grain in the center field, agitated by a sudden gust of wind sweeping across the flat.

“Mary de Courcey is a very amusing woman,” Colonel Primrose said seriously. “She used to be a great beauty. I think she’s still remarkably handsome.”

“Oh, very,” I said. “—If it weren’t for her hair,” I added . . . but not out loud.

Colonel Primrose glanced at me. “You’ve got a nice seat,” he said.

We rode on. The sun dropped behind the bowl of dun-colored hills around us, a veil of purple and indigo and rose settled over them. The low grandstand with its banners and the neat rows of whitewashed stalls beyond the board fence might have been miles from Virginia Street and the Hotel Washoe.

“As a matter of fact,” he said after a while, “I’m glad Buck’s worried about Mary de Courcey.”

“Why?”

He looked around at me with a chuckle.

“You’ve heard about red herrings.”

“Are you sure it’s she that’s the red herring?” I asked, very stupidly.

We were going around the outside track then.

“I wish I thought it would make the least difference to you, my dear,” he said quietly.

Dragonfly shied at a branch of cotton wood that the wind blew from one of the big trees lining the board fence along the back lane, and shied again at a couple of bluebottles buzzing around his ear. I was so occupied keeping him in order, trying not to let Colonel Primrose see that his sudden seriousness had definitely startled me, and trying to assure myself at the same time that it was just the old Army habit of being gallant to a lady, that I didn’t notice the car parked by the fence where the track turns.

We cantered on in silence, past the old-fashioned hearse with its gold and black flambeaux and oval windows and black and gold fringed broadcloth fittings that had been abandoned there. Behind it was a couple of old carriages, abandoned like the hearse, and a sleigh with rusted runners. The door of the hearse creaked on its rusty hinges in the evening breeze.

I glanced at Colonel Primrose. He didn’t seem to have noticed the hearse, which was odd, as he always notices everything. I thought for a moment that he might still be thinking of Mary de Courcey—or me. But I was quite wrong. He was looking back the way we’d come, frowning a little. He drew his horse up, abruptly.

“Let’s go back this way, shall we?” he said.

He was curiously preoccupied, but I’ve long since learned quite unquestioning obedience when he suggests something. So I pulled Dragonfly around, and we cantered back the way we’d come. At the turn I pulled him down to a walk.

“These darn bluebottles!” I said.

Colonel Primrose was not interested in my problems. I doubted at first if he’d even heard me.

Then he said, “I noticed them,” very absently; and added, “I’d like a look at that car.”

We walked our horses over to it, Dragonfly protesting mildly, shaking his head, switching his tail.

And suddenly Colonel Primrose, a little ahead of me, said sharply, “Go back, Mrs. Latham! Here—take my horse. Go back to the fence.”

I stared at him, caught the reins he tossed me as he dismounted, pulled Dragonfly around and got the two of them back across the track. I got off, tied them both to the fence, and ran back. It was then that I noticed for the first time that the car was a handsome green coupé, custom-built, with New York license plates.

Colonel Primrose was standing there motionless, staring into the window.

A bluebottle buzzed back, and away. I crept quietly up beside Colonel Primrose and looked inside. Lying slumped down on the yellow leather seat—with blood dried in solid streaks and still in viscid pools on the white rubber floor—was the body of a man. There was a ragged hole in the right side of his throat.

I knew who it was even before my horror-stricken eyes escaped to touch, even for an instant, the lean brown face and staring sightless eyes of Dexter Cromwell.

Even then they didn’t rest there. They were riveted, as Colonel Primrose’s were, on the red-gold hairs caught under the man’s hand clutching the tortoise-shell wheel in the steely grasp of death. . . .