"This may strike you as a foolish question, but did you love her?"

"I'll give you a foolish answer, Mr. Archer. Of course I loved her. I loved her the way a doctor loves his patients, if he's any good. It's a love that's more maternal than erotic." He spread his large hands on his chest, and spoke from there: "I wanted to serve her. I didn't succeed too well."

I was silenced.

"And now, gentlemen, if you'll excuse me, I have hospital rounds in the morning." He swung his keys.

Alex said to me in the street: "Do you believe him?"

"Unless or until I have proof that he's lying. He's not telling all he knows but people seldom do, let alone doctors. I'd take his word ahead of Alice Jenks's."

He started to climb into his car, then turned back toward me, gesturing in the direction of the nursing home. Its plain rectangular faade loomed in the fog like a blockhouse, the visible part of an underground fortress.

"You think she's safe there, Mr. Archer?"

"Safer than she'd be on the streets, or in jail, or in a psycho ward with a police psychiatrist quizzing her."

"Or at her aunt's?"

"Or at her aunt's. Miss Jenks is one of these righteous women who doesn't let her left lobe know what her right lobe is doing. She's quite a tiger."

His eyes were still on the front of the nursing home.

Deep inside the building, the wild old voice I had heard that morning rose again. It faded like the cry of a seabird flying away, intermitted by wind.

"I wish I could stay with Dolly, and protect her," Alex said.

He was a good boy.

I broached the subject of money. He gave me most of the money in his wallet. I used it to buy an airline ticket to Chicago and return, and caught a late flight from International Airport.

chapter 19.

I left the toll road, which bypa.s.sed Bridgeton, and drove my rented car through the blocks of housing tracts on the outskirts of the city. I could see the clump of sawed-off skysc.r.a.pers in the business district ahead, and off to the left, across the whole south side, the factories. It was Sunday morning, and only one of their stacks was pouring smoke into the deep blue sky.

I stopped for gas at a service station and looked up Earl Hoffman's address in the telephone directory. When I asked the attendant how to get to Cherry Street, where Hoffman lived, he pointed in the general direction of the factories.

It was a middle-cla.s.s street of substantial two-story houses which had been touched but not destroyed by the blight that creeps outward from the centers of cities. Hoffman's house was of grimy white brick like the others, but the front porch had been painted within living memory. An old Chevrolet coup stood at the curb in front of it.

The doorbell didn't work. I knocked on the screen door. An old young man with more nose than chin opened the inner door and looked at me through the screen in a sad way.

"Mr. Haggerty?"

"Yes."

I told him my name and trade and where I was from. "I was with your wife--your ex-wife--shortly before she was killed."

"It's a dreadful thing."

He stood absently in the doorway, forgetting to ask me in. He had a frowzy sleepless look as if he'd been up most of the night. Though there was no gray on his head, white hairs glistened in his day-old beard. His small eyes had the kind of incandescence that goes with conscious suffering.

"May I come in, Mr. Haggerty?"

"I don't know if it's such a good idea. Earl's pretty broken up.

"I thought he and his daughter had been on the outs for a long time."

"They were. It only makes it harder for him, I think. When you're angry with someone you love, you always expect at the back of your mind there'll be a reconciliation some day. But now there will never be anything."

He was speaking for his father-in-law but also for himself. His empty hands moved aimlessly at his sides. The fingers of his right hand were stained dark yellow by nicotine.

"I'm sorry," I said, "that Mr. Hoffman isn't feeling well. I'm afraid I'll have to talk to him anyway. I didn't come from California for the ride."

"No. Obviously not. What is it you have to discuss with him?"

"His daughter's murder. He may be able to help me understand it."

"I thought it was already solved."

"It isn't."

"Has the girl student been cleared?"

"She's in process of being cleared," I said with deliberate vagueness. "You and I can go into all that later. Right now I'm very eager to talk to Hoffman."

"If you insist. I only hope you can get some sense out of him."

I saw what he meant when he took me through the house to "Earl's den," as Haggerty called it. It was furnished with a closed roll-top desk, an armchair, a studio couch. Through a haze compounded of whisky fumes and smoke I could see a big old man sprawled in orange pajamas on the couch, his head propped up by bolsters. A strong reading light shone on his stunned face. His eyes seemed out of focus, but he was holding a magazine with an orange cover that almost matched his pajamas. The wall above him was decorated with rifles and shotguns and hand guns.

"When I recall the loss of all my perished years," he said huskily.

Old cops didn't talk like that, and Earl Hoffman looked like no exception to the rule. His body was ma.s.sive, and could have belonged to a professional football player or a wrestler gone to pot. His nose had once been broken. He had a clipped gray head and a mouth like bent iron.

"That's beautiful poetry, Bert," the iron mouth said.

"I suppose it is."

"Who's your friend, Bert?"

"Mr. Archer, from California."

"California, eh? That's where my poor little Helen got knocked off."

He sobbed, or hiccuped, once. Then he swung himself onto the edge of the couch, letting his bare feet fall heavily to the floor.

"Do you know--did you know my little daughter Helen?"

"I knew her."

"Isn't that remarkable." He rose swaying and clasped my hands in both of his, using me to support him. "Helen was a remarkable girl. I've just been reading over one of her poems. Wrote it when she was just a teen-age girl at City College. Here, I'll show you."

He made a fairly elaborate search for the orange-covered magazine, which was lying in plain sight on the floor where he had dropped it. The name of it was the _Bridgeton Blazer_, and it looked like a school production.

Haggerty picked it up and handed it to him: "Please don't bother with it, Earl. Helen didn't write it anyway."

"Didn't write it? 'Course she wrote it. It's got her initials on it." Hoffman flipped through the pages. "See?"

"But she was only translating from Verlaine."

"Never heard of him." Hoffman turned to me, thrusting the magazine into my hands. "Here, read this. See what a remarkable gift poor little Helen had."

I read: When the violins Of the autumn winds Begin to sigh My heart is torn With their forlorn Monotony.

And when the hour Sounds from the tower I weep tears For I recall The loss of all My perished years.

And then I go With the winds that blow And carry me There and here Like a withered and sere Leaf from a tree.--H.H.

Hoffman looked at me with one of his unfocused eyes. "Isn't that beautiful poetry, Mr. Arthur?"

"Beautiful."

"I only wisht I understood it. Do you understand it?"

"I think so."

"Then keep it. Keep it in memory of poor little Helen."

"I couldn't do that."

"Sure you can. Keep it." He s.n.a.t.c.hed it out of my hands, rolled it up, and and thrust it into my jacket pocket, breathing whisky in my face.

"Keep it," Haggerty whispered at my shoulder. "You don't want to cross him."

"You heard him. You don't want to cross me."

Hoffman grinned loosely at me. He clenched his left fist, examined it for defects, then used it to strike himself on the chest. He walked on spraddled legs to the roll-top desk and opened it. There were botfies and a single smeared tumbler inside. He half-filled the tumbler from a fifth of bourbon and drank most of it down. His son-in-law said something under his breath, but made no move to stop him.

The heavy jolt squeezed sweat out on Hoffman's face. It seemed to sober him a litfie. His eyes focused on me.

"Have a drink?"

"All right. I'll take water and ice in mine, please." I didn't normally drink in the morning but this was an abnormal occasion.

"Get some ice and a gla.s.s, Bert. Mr. Arthur wants a drink. If you're too mucky-muck to drink with me, Mr. Arthur isn't."

"The name is Archer."

"Get _two_ gla.s.ses," he said with his foolish grin. "Mr. Archer wants a drink, too. Sit down," he said to me. "Take the load off your feet. Tell me about poor little Helen."

We sat on the couch. I filled him in quickly on the circ.u.mstances of the murder, including the threat that preceded it, and Helen's feeling that Bridgeton was catching up with her.

"What did she mean by that?" The lines of the grin were still in his face like clown marks but the grin had become a rictus.

"I've come a long way to see if you can help me answer that question."

"Me? Why come to me? I never knew what went on in her mind, she never _let_ me know. She was too bright for me." His mood swayed into heavy drunken self-pity. "I sweated and slaved to buy her an education like I never had, but she wouldn't give her poor old father the time of day."

"I understand you had a bad quarrel and she left borne."

"She told you, eh?"

I nodded. I had decided to keep Mrs. Hoffman out of it. He was the kind of man who wouldn't want his wife ahead of him in anything.

"She tell you the names she called me, crook and n.a.z.i, when all I was doing was my bounden duty? You're a cop, you know how a man feels when your own family undermines you." He peered at me sideways. "You are a cop, aren't you?"

"I have been."

"What do you do for a living now?"

"Private investigation."

"Who for?"

"A man named Kincaid, n.o.body you know. I knew your daughter slightly, and I have a personal interest in finding out who killed her. I think the answer may be here in Bridgeton."

"I don't see how. She never set foot in this town for twenty years, until last spring. She only came home then to tell her mother she was getting a divorce. From _him_." He gestured toward the back of the house, where I could hear ice being chipped.

"Did she do any talking to you?"

"I only saw her the once. She said h.e.l.lo-how-are-you and that was about it. She told her mother that she'd had it with Bert and her mother couldn't talk her out of it. Bert even followed her out to Reno to try and convince her to come back, but it was no go. He isn't enough of a man to hold a woman."

Hoffman finished his drink and set his tumbler down on the floor. He remained slumped forward for about a minute, and I was afraid he was going to get sick or pa.s.s out on me. But he came back up to a sitting position and muttered something about wanting to help me.

"Fine. Who was Luke Deloney?"

"Friend of mine. Big man in town back before the war. She told you about him, too, eh?"

"You could tell me more, Lieutenant. I hear you have a memory like an elephant."

"Did Helen say that?"

"Yes." The lie didn't cost me anything, not even a pang of conscience.