Would be darker than sin.

I read it aloud at breakfast. Phyllis saidshe envied the woman it had been written to. Arnie complained that hisscrambled eggs weren't moist. He was older than Phyllis, and it made himtouchy.

We decided after breakfast to leave JudsonFoley sitting for the present. If Dolly Kincaid were arrested and arraigned,Foley would make a fairly good surprise witness for the defense. Arnie drove meto the airport, where I caught a Pacific ffight to Los Angeles.

I picked up an L.A. paper at InternationalAirport, and found a brief account of the Haggerty killing in the SouthlandNews on an inside page. It informed me that the wife-slayer Thomas McGee,released from San Quentin earlier in the year, was being sought forquestioning. Dolly Kincaid wasn't mentioned.

chapter25

Around noon I walked into Jerry Marks'sstore-front office. His secretary told me that Monday was the day for theweekly criminal docket and Jerry had spent the morning in court. He wasprobably having lunch somewhere near the courthouse. Yes, Mr. Kincaid had gotin touch with Mr. Marks on Sunday, and retained him.

I found them together in the restaurantwhere Alex and I had lunched the day it began. Alex made room for me on hisside of the booth, facing the front. Business was roaring, and there was ashort lineup inside the front door.

"I'm glad the two of you gottogether," I said.

Alex produced one of his rare smiles."So am I. Mr. Marks has been wonderful."

Jerry flapped his hand in a depreciatingway. "Actually I haven't been able to do anything yet. I had another caseto dispose of this morning. I did make an attempt to pick Gil Stevens's brains,but he told me I'd better go to the transcript of the trial, which I plan to dothis afternoon. Mrs. Kincaid," he said, with a sidelong glance at Alex,"was just as uncommunicative as Stevens."

"You've talked to Dolly then?"

He lowered his voice. "I tried,yesterday. We've got to know where we stand before the police get to her."

"Is that going to happen?"

Jerry glanced around him at the courthousecrowd, and lowered his voice still further. "According to the grapevine,they were planning to make their move today, when they completed theirballistics tests. But something's holding them up. The Sheriff and the expertshe brought in are still down in the shooting gallery under thecourthouse."

"The bullet may be fragmented. Itoften is in head wounds. Or they may have shifted their main attention toanother suspect. I see in the paper they've put out an APB for ThomasMcGee."

"Yes, it was done yesterday. He's probably overthe Mexican border by now."

"Do you consider him a major suspect,Jerry?"

"I'll want to read that transcript before I forman opinion. Do you?"

It was a hard question. I was sparedhaving to answer it by a diversion. Two elderly ladies, one in serviceableblack and one in fashionable green, looked in through the glass front door.They saw the waiting queue and turned away. The one in black was Mrs. Hoffman,Helen's mother. The other was Luke Deloney's widow.

I excused myself and went Out after them.They had crossed the street in the middle of the block and were headeddowntown, moving through light and shadow under the giant yuccas that hedgedthe courthouse grounds. Though they seemed to keep up an incessantconversation, they walked together like strangers, out of step and out ofsympathy. Mrs. Deloney was much the older, but she had a horsewoman's stride.Mrs. Hoffman stubbed along on tired feet.

I stayed on the other side of the streetand followed them at a distance. My heart was thudding. Mrs. Deloney's arrivalin California confirmed my belief that her husband's murder and Helen's wereconnected, and that she knew it.

They walked two blocks to the main streetand went into the first restaurant they came to, a tourist trap with emptytables visible through its plate glass windows. There was an open-fronted cigarstore diagonally across the street. I looked over its display of paperbacks,bought a pack of cigarettes, and smoked three or four which I lit at theold-fashioned gas flame, and eventually bought a book about ancient Greekphilosophy. It had a chapter on Zeno which I read standing. The old ladies werea long time over lunch.

"Archer will never catch the old ladies," Isaid.

The man behind the counter cupped his ear. "Whatwas that?"

"I was thinking aloud."

"It's a free country. I like to talkto myself when I'm off work. In the store here it wouldn't beappropriate." He smiled over the word, and his gold teeth flashed likejewelry.

The old ladies came out of the restaurantand separated. Mrs. Hoffman limped south, toward her hotel. Mrs. Deloney strodein the opposite direction, moving rapidly now that she was unencumbered by hercompanion. From the distance you could have taken her for a young woman who hadunaccountably bleached her hair white.

She turned off the main street in thedirection of the courthouse, and halfway down the block disappeared into amodern concrete and glass building. "Law Offices of Stevens andOgilvy," said the brass sign beside the entrance. I walked on to the nextcorner, sat on a bench at a bus stop, and read in my new book about Heraclitus.All things flow like a river, he said; nothing abides. Parmenides, on the otherhand, believed that nothing ever changed, it only seemed to. Both viewsappealed to me.

A cab pulled up in front of the Stevensand Ogilvy office. Mrs. Deloney came out, and the cab took her away. I made anote of its license number before I went into the building.

It was a large office, and a working one.Typewriters were clacking in a row of cubicles behind the waiting room. A very

© Alexander Sviyash, 2009