ox.”
“And he sat in his living room while a woman who never screamed was screaming bloody murder in front of his house? He did nothing?”
Mrs. Van Meter tossed her cigarette butt in the weedy lawn. She stood and opened her front door. With one foot inside her house, she turned back to Jack. “Write this down, Mr. Investigator,” she said. “Wilma Greene was a drunk and a whore. Whatever she got, she had it coming.”
Mrs. Van Meter slammed the door behind her.
Jack left the porch, struggling to banish the thoughts of committing the second murder at this address.
He spent the rest of the morning combing the neighborhood. He started referring to Wilma as Miss Greene, which allowed him to use his father’s license more freely, let the neighbors really examine his credentials. The other neighbors were housewives like Mrs. Van Meter, but they were friendlier. They invited Jack inside, offered him coffee or tea, filled him in on local gossip, and talked about each other. And they all had the same story that Mrs. Van Meter had. Wilma had fled into the street screaming. No one came out to help her. A few minutes later, she was dead. The police never investigated.
For a few months after the incident, the neighbors had talked among themselves. This was how they all came to tell the same story, more or less. They were suspicious. It was too coincidental that someone would slip in a bathtub on the same night she ran into the street screaming. But she was a drunk. They all agreed. And she was a whore. There was no doubt about that. That whole “widow” business was just something she told them for sympathy. Quietly, tacitly, they all seemed to get together and agree that, murder or not, it didn’t matter and she didn’t matter. They didn’t say much to anyone and no one came asking until Jack did.
Jack heard this story enough times to keep his hackles down when he heard them call Wilma a whore. He heard it enough to know the rage was coming and hold it back before it could show on his face. Since she appeared to be doing fifty-yard dashes from one side of her bungalow to the other, Jack hit every house on Newland within a hundred yards.
He spoke to his first man at the last house he visited. A fellow who introduced himself as Mr. Lemus. He bypassed the kitchen table and the living room couch and led Jack into a sunny back room. Three or four easels were scattered about the room, all with canvases starting to soak up paint but nowhere close to resembling anything anyone would consider done. The canvases leaning against the walls had enough paint on them to be called finished, but Jack had no idea whether or not they were good. The colors seemed too dull and metallic to him. He couldn’t make heads or tails of the shapes or what they were supposed to be a picture of. Sometimes, if he used his imagination, he could see something that might be an arm or a carburetor or a fighting cock. Mostly, they were just blocks and triangles and curves, pictographs in a language he hadn’t learned. He raised his eyebrows and nodded with each painting in a mimicry of a man impressed. He asked questions and filled in space with a number of noncommittal wows and isn’t-that-somethings.
After several minutes of this, Jack steered Lemus toward the business at hand: the night of July 14, 1944. Lemus laid out the neighborhood version of events. Jack listened and jotted notes like he hadn’t heard it a dozen times already that day. When Lemus finished, Jack said, “This Miss Greene must have been a horrible person.”
Lemus ran his fingers through the hair on his temples. He’d clearly used henna in it to hide the gray, but the henna was fading and the gray was resurfacing. “Not horrible, no.”
“But she was prostituting herself in this, what looks to be a nice, family neighborhood.”
“Well.” Lemus used his thumbnail to clean the paint from underneath his forefingernail. He looked down at his hands as he spoke. “She wasn’t a prostitute. She just had a lot of men over to her place.”
“And she had loud sex with them? Could you hear it throughout the neighborhood?”
“No.”
“Could you hear it at all?”
“No.”
“But it must have been every night, then?”
Lemus raised his eyes into a stare directed out his back windows. Jack gazed back there, also, caught sight of a jacaranda in full, purple bloom. He turned back to Lemus. Lemus took a few seconds to put his thoughts together. “Now that you mention it, I hadn’t seen men coming or going for several months before her death. Maybe six, seven months.” He picked at dry paint on his pants. “In fact, the more I think about it, the more I think that she only had men over a lot when she first moved in. There was a month or two there when she really cut loose. And after that, it would come in waves. She’d have a wild weekend, going nonstop, then nothing for weeks or months.”
“Do you remember when that was? When she first moved in?”
“It was right around the time I had a show over at El Alisal Gallery. I guess that would be sometime around February or March of ’43. Does that sound right?”
It sounded right. It would’ve been just about the time the Air Force had declared Jack dead. Right when Wilma was widowed. Jack flipped through his notes as if that information needed to be written down. “I think so,” he said.
Lemus kept staring at the jacaranda blooms, kept digging at paint. He was clearly working toward something in his mind. Jack gave him the time to think. This was something Jack’s father had never done during investigations. The old man would charge in, looking to bust heads. Manners and patience were never part of his game. You’d tell him what he wanted to hear or he’d crack you in the jaw. The problem with that, Jack realized as a young man and saw again and again when he worked with cops like that on the force, is that people only tell you what they think you want to hear. Jack could tell himself what he wanted to hear. He was investigating this business to learn what he needed to hear. So he let Lemus gaze and think.
Finally, Lemus came out with it. “I know I should have done something that night. I should have gone into the street and seen what the screaming was about. I should have tried to help.” Lemus squeezed his eyes tight and constricted his face, building a dam against whatever emotions were trying to flood his face. He held this for a few seconds. He took a deep breath.
Jack dug a handkerchief from his back pocket—a plain white cotton number—and passed it to Lemus. Lemus waved it off.
“You know she had a twin?” he asked.
“Yeah?” Jack stuffed his handkerchief back into his pocket.
“Birdy or something. I met her at one or two of Wilma’s parties. Sharp kid. Looked just like Wilma. She came around after Wilma died. Haunted the neighborhood for a week or two, asking questions, knocking on doors just like you’re doing. No one would talk to her.”
Jack scooted forward in his seat. This was new. None of the other neighbors mentioned Gertie. “Why not?” he asked.
“Best not to get involved, especially when people are getting killed.”
Jack shrugged. Part of him understood. If only he’d felt that way three years ago.… He tucked it away. “Why are you telling me about the twin now?”
“Just to let you know someone put a bullet in her for asking too many questions.”
“What?”
“I heard the bullet hit her cigarette tin, get deflected up, and then lodge in her collarbone. Who knows? I got the story from the local knitting circle. They’ve been known to stretch the truth.” Lemus stood and motioned back toward the front door. “Anyway, it doesn’t take a whole lot of gunshots before people start to learn what to say and what not to say.”
Jack nodded. As he shifted his weight to stand, he realized that his hand was inside his jacket and his fingers were grazing the grip of the Springfield again.