The Three Roads Read online

  He spent the half-hour to Glendale leaning forward in his seat, as if to communicate some of his momentum to the cab. His need to be sure of something, combined with his unwillingness to face days or weeks of waiting and hunting down blind trails, had already half convinced him that Burton Garth was the man who had killed Lorraine.

  The Cockalorum was half a block off East Broadway in the center of Glendale, a bar with a shiny new front of black-and-orange plastic. He told the taxi driver to wait.

  Yes, Mr. Garth was in, said the soft-voiced young man behind the bar. He was in his office at the back. Just a minute and he’d call him.

  “I’d like to talk to him in his office.”

  “Just as you say, sir. It’s the last door on the right, the one beside the little girls’ room.”

  The door of the office was partly open, and Bret knocked and stepped in. Garth was sitting behind a new steel desk that took up nearly half the floor space of the tiny cubicle. He was a bald-headed man in his forties, with a fleshy chin and neck that emphasized the sharpness of his nose and the smallness of his eyes. His sport coat was expensive and loud, matching the hysterical shrillness of his hand-painted sunset tie. Among drunks, morons, shills, prostitutes, and thieves, he might have passed for a man of distinction, so long as he had plenty of money in his pocket and spent it heavily. Bret hated him on sight, but that didn’t mean anything. The man looked much too cautious and sly to commit a passionate crime.

  “And what can I do for you, sir?” Garth said in a husky tenor.

  “It’s quite a story.”

  “Well, I’m pretty busy just now. If you’ll just tell me what it is you want, Mr.—?”

  “My name is Taylor. Lorraine Taylor was my wife.”

  “I don’t know the lady. Should I?” His eyes shifted nervously, spoiling the effect of his smile.

  Like all obvious bluffers Garth looked like a good subject for bluff. “I think you do,” Bret said. “You were seen on the street with her the night that she was murdered.”

  “There must be some mistake.” His voice was loud and firm, but he leaned across the desk and pushed the door shut. Bret felt a wave of mingled claustrophobia and loathing pass through his body. Had he come to the end already, shut up in a windowless cell with an aging tenor in a hand-painted tie?

  “Won’t you sit down, Mr. Taylor? I can’t imagine what you’re talking about, but I’d like to help you if I can. You say your wife was murdered?” He clicked his tongue irritatingly.

  “On the night of May 23 last, at approximately ten thirty. You were seen with her a short time before that. Do you deny it?”

  “Of course I deny it.” But he wasn’t so angry and outraged as he should have been. “Look here, Mr. Taylor, just what are you trying to pull? Is this a joke?”

  “It’s not the sort of thing I make jokes about. And you don’t seem particularly amused.”

  “Naturally I don’t think it’s funny when somebody comes in out of a blue sky and accuses me of being mixed up in a murder.” His face groped for a smile but was frustrated again by his little, frightened eyes. “I don’t even remember what I was doing on May 23.”

  “Yes you do. You were in the Golden Sunset Café that night. You asked my wife to let you take her home, and she refused. When she left, you followed her out and offered her a ride in your car.”

  “Somebody’s been shooting you a line, Taylor, telling you wild stories about me. Who’s been doing that?”

  “You’ll meet them in court,” Bret said with sober emphasis. So far the man had made no slip, not verbally at least, but he was almost certain now that Garth was hiding something. “I want you to come to the police with me and have your fingerprints compared with the fingerprints that were left in my house.”

  “Go to hell!” Garth cried, in a voice that was as much a yelp as a bark.

  “If you won’t go to them, they can come here.”

  The anger that swelled Garth’s face fizzled out like air from a leaking balloon. “Good God, man, you can’t do that! I got a wife and kids. I just started up a legitimate business here. You can’t bring the cops in on me like that for no reason.”

  “I had a wife too. Were you with her when she died?”

  “No, I wasn’t! Will you for God’s sake sit down and listen to me, Mr. Taylor? You can’t do this to me. I never wished any harm to you or your wife either. Will you sit down and let me tell you why you can’t bring the cops in on this? I made a lot of enemies when I dropped out of the racket, and there’s nothing they’d like better than to see me railroaded to the pen.”

  “I’m not interested in your prospects. I’m interested in the truth.”

  “The truth is what I’m telling you, Mr. Taylor.” His smooth brown pate was glistening like melting ice.

  “You haven’t told me anything yet.”

  “I’m an innocent man. You’ve got to see that. I wouldn’t commit a crime like that, Mr. Taylor. I’ve got a daughter of my own almost as old as she was.”

  Bret leaned heavily across the desk and looked down into the upturned face. “You said you didn’t know her.”

  “I knew her. Sure I knew her. I gave her a lift home that night. That doesn’t make me a murderer, does it, if I gave a girl a lift home? You’re a reasonable man, Mr. Taylor. I wouldn’t be telling you this if I was guilty, would I? I’m as innocent as you are. Why don’t you sit down?”

  Bret sat down in the room’s other chair, his knees squeezed uncomfortably against the end of the desk. Garth took a white silk handkerchief from his breast pocket and wiped his sweating face. “It’s hot in here,” he said hoarsely.

  “I’m getting tired of waiting.”

  “Yeah, sure. I’m not trying to stall you, Mr. Taylor.” He began to tell his story immediately, as if Bret had turned a dial. “I had no idea that the young lady was married, you’ve got to remember that. She was just a pretty girl I saw once or twice in the Golden Sunset Café, and I happened to get interested in her, in a perfectly innocent way. I was lonely—my wife and I aren’t too happy together, Mr. Taylor—and she looked as if she was, and I thought it would be nice if we could kind of get together. Companionship is all I had in mind, I’ll swear to that.”

  “You’ll be swearing to all of this. Go on.”

  “It’s quite true what you said, I was in the Golden Sunset on the night of May 23, and I happened to see her there. Frankly speaking, she was a little the worse for drink, and I became a little alarmed for her. The Golden Sunset is not a first-class restaurant, and some of its customers are unscrupulous, to say the least. Well, to make a long story short, I offered to take her home in my car. Being a married woman—only she didn’t tell me that—she quite naturally refused, and naturally I bowed myself out. It would’ve been better for me if I’d forgotten the whole thing right then and there, but I couldn’t, Mr. Taylor. I was worried about her and kept my eye on her. I told you I have a daughter of my own, going on eighteen. Mrs. Taylor couldn’t have been much older—”

  “Skip the paternal element,” Bret said harshly. “You don’t expect me to believe that.”

  The melting face congealed in hypocritical shock. “You don’t accuse me—?”

  “I said skip it. It turns my stomach.”

  Garth wiped his face again. Bret could see the wet discoloration spreading through the soft silk collar that encircled the fleshy neck. Perhaps the room was hot, but he himself felt cool and bloodless. His heart pounded in his chest like a dry stick on a drum head. “Go on,” he said.

  “Well, after a while I saw her go out. She was kind of unsteady on her legs, and I didn’t know if she’d be able to get home by herself. I followed her out and offered her a lift, and she accepted it. She didn’t complain about it, but I got the idea that she was feeling a bit sick. She was looking a bit under the weather. Anyway, I drove her straight home. The ride seemed to do her good, because when we reached the house she was looking much better. As a matter of fact, she graciously invited me to com
e in for a drink, and I, like a fool, accepted. When we were climbing the steps of the front porch a man came running out of the front door. Mrs. Taylor was a little ahead of me, and he pushed her out of the way and came at me. He was a big guy and terrifically strong. I tried to fight him off, but he sailed into me like a lunatic. He caught me off balance and knocked me backwards down the steps. When I tried to get up he jumped me again and knocked me down on the sidewalk. I’m no coward, Mr. Taylor, but I knew I was no match for him, so I ran out to my car and drove away.”

  “Why didn’t you call the police?”

  “I thought of doing that, but you see they’re not such very good friends of mine. And you’ve got to remember my position, Mr. Taylor. I was perfectly innocent, but you’d never get anybody to believe that. You don’t believe it yourself, and there’s my proof. I’m a married man, and in a way I had no right to be there. I thought this man was her husband. He came out of her house like I said, and besides, when he pushed her she said something that made me think it was her husband.”

  “What did she say?”

  “I forget exactly. Something like ‘Take your hands off me, you bastard!’ Anyway, she talked as if she knew him. I thought sure it was her husband or I wouldn’t have run out like that. And naturally I would’ve called the police. But I didn’t catch on that it wasn’t her husband until I read about it in the paper next day and found out that her husband was an officer in the Navy. This guy was in civilian clothes.”

  “What did he look like?”

  “He was big, like you, I told you that, and I think he was pretty well dressed. I think he was kind of good looking, but I didn’t get much of a look at his face. It was pretty dark, and everything happened too damn fast. One minute I was flat on my back on the sidewalk, and the next minute I was in my car and lamming out of there.”

  “It still seems funny you didn’t go to the police,” Bret said slowly.

  “I explained that. I thought it was her husband.”

  “But next day when you found out it wasn’t? When you read in the papers that she had been murdered?”

  “I couldn’t go to the cops,” Garth whined. “Say I told them about this guy and they couldn’t find him. Where would I be then? I’ll tell you: halfway to the San Quentin gas chamber for a murder I didn’t commit but couldn’t prove I didn’t.”

  “That’s where you are now, isn’t it? Are you sure this man that beat you up ever existed?”

  “For Christ’s sake!” Garth said wildly. “Look at this if you don’t believe me.” He pointed to a long white seam just below and parallel to his right eyebrow. “I almost lost my right eye where the guy socked me. Half of my eyelid was flapping loose, and I had a lump on the back of my head as big as a goose egg.”

  “I have scars too. They don’t prove anything.”

  “All right! All right! I’ll prove it to you. Come over to L.A. with me. Right now?”

  “What for?”

  “I can prove that I’m telling you the truth. My face was bleeding so bad after that guy hit me I went straight to the nearest doctor, and he put eight stitches in my eye. Maybe you know him. Dr. Ralston? He lives only two or three blocks from your house.”

  “I don’t. I never lived there. But we’ll go and see him. I’ve got a taxi waiting outside.”

  Garth stood up and took a pearl-gray fedora from the top of the safe in the corner behind him. Sitting behind his desk, he had given the impression of size, but when he stood up Bret could see that he was short and stout, a nervous little man whose legs were stiff with fright.

  Garth was jumpy and ill at ease in the taxi. He tried to start a conversation about his family, which Bret said nothing to encourage. When Garth finally subsided they rode in silence. Bret kept his face turned away from the other man and wearied his eyes with the monotony of the streets they were passing through. The houses were stucco or frame, one-storied almost without exception, sitting on narrow fifty- or sixty-foot lots that allowed room for a square of lawn in front and a clothesline and tiny garden at the back. The cramped houses, hardly more individual than a row of rabbit hutches, stretched under the noon sun in a cityscape of quiet resignation. Led on by the westering dream, he thought, the latter-day pioneers came from all over the country, all over the world, to homestead in the flat and empty finality of these streets.

  “Caesar Street,” Garth said suddenly. “Say, that’s your street. That’s your house there, isn’t it?”

  “Is it?” He twisted his head around and caught a glimpse through the rear window of the stucco bungalow Garth was pointing at. It looked like any other house he had never seen.

  Garth looked curiously into his face. “Don’t you know your own home?”

  “I told you I never lived in it. My wife bought it when I was at sea.” It occurred to him suddenly that he had seen the house before, the night Garth had been there. That night was still a blank to him. Everything he knew about it he knew at second hand, but that wasn’t Garth’s affair.

  “Anybody living there now?”

  “I don’t know.” But of course there wouldn’t be. “No, it’s empty.”

  “I thought I saw a dame in the back yard, but I guess it was the next house.”

  Soon afterward the driver let them out in front of a two-story frame house identified by a weather beaten wooden sign attached to the railing of the porch: “Homer L. Ralston, M.D.”

  “It’s a good thing I saw that sign,” Garth said. “I was bleeding like a pig, and the doc said a blow like that can kill a man sometimes.”

  A cardboard sign on the front door invited them to “Ring and Walk In.” The dingy waiting-room was lined with patients sitting stiffly under the cold eye of the nurse who presided at a table beside the door. She looked up as they entered.

  “Yes?”

  “We want to see the doctor,” Garth said.

  “The doctor is very busy. You’ll have to wait your turn.”

  “We didn’t come here for treatment,” Bret put in. “It’s a legal matter.”

  She shrugged her starched shoulders in fussy resignation. “Sit down, please. I’ll see what I can do when he finishes with his patient.”

  After a strained five minutes they were ushered into the consultation room. The doctor, a big, dull-faced man in his middle fifties, was sitting sideways at the desk.

  “What can I do for you gentlemen?” he said without rising.

  “You remember me, doctor?” Garth asked eagerly. “When you put some stitches in my eye last May?”

  The doctor regarded him for a moment. “Let’s see, you came in here after office hours, didn’t you?”

  “Yeah, that’s right. It was about—”

  Bret interrupted him: “Let the doctor remember for himself.”

  The doctor looked from one to the other through thick spectacles that made his brown eyes seem frog-like and suspicious. “You haven’t been having trouble with your eye, Mr.—?”

  “Garth. Burton Garth. No trouble at all, doc. My own doctor, that’s Clark over in Glendale, came to look at it a couple of times, and he took out the stitches—”

  The doctor cut him short. “If there’s nothing more, Mr. Garf, I have patients waiting.”

  “There is something more,” Bret said. “A crime was committed at a certain time last May 23. Garth claims he was in your office at that time.”

  The doctor took off his glasses and revealed his little, tired, old eyes. “You from the police?”

  “I’m investigating the matter privately. If you can check the time Garth was here?”

  “Don’t you remember when I came here, doc? You couldn’t forget that. I had blood all over my shirt.”

  “I remember you all right. I was just going to bed. Let me see, it must have been around ten o’clock at night.”

  “Would you swear to it?” Bret said.

  “I believe I would. Yes, I would. It was about ten o’clock.”

  “And the date?”

  The doctor turned
up the palms of his thick hands in a helpless gesture. “I hardly ever know what day of the week it is. But you can check my records.” He raised his voice and called: “Miss Davis.”

  A young nurse came in by the rear door. “Yes, doctor?”

  “Remember the night I called you back to help with this gentleman’s eye? Mr. Garth, is it?”

  “Do you remember what time the doctor called you?” Bret asked her.

  She turned up her eyes to the ceiling and stood still for a long moment. “Yeah,” she said at length. “It was a little after ten, maybe ten after. I paid special attention to the time because it was so late.”

  “Check the date in the files, Miss Davis. These gentlemen will be in the waiting-room.” The doctor waved away their thanks and pressed a buzzer under the desk.

  A few minutes later Miss Davis brought them a filing card that fixed May 23 as the date of Mr. Garth’s visit.

  “Well, that’s that,” Garth said as they left the house. With the pressure of fear removed, his personality was already beginning to expand obnoxiously. “Maybe next time you won’t be in so much of a hurry to accuse innocent parties.”

  “You’re lucky,” Bret said grimly. He was angered and humiliated by the fact that this corpulent little rat had picked up his wife on the street, even though it appeared that Garth had done no more than that. Garth was the kind of civilian that all servicemen hated, the man who stayed behind and made his pile out of the war; too old or sick to fight, but not too old or sick to pursue women and cuckold their absent husbands. But in this case Garth himself had been a victim. Bret’s mind shifted to the vague man who had knocked Garth down the steps.

  “Can you tell me anything more about this man? Did she call him a name or anything like that?”

  Garth turned and faced him beside the waiting taxi. “I don’t think so,” he said slowly. “I told you as much as I know. He was big and good looking and he had on pretty snappy clothes. Sport clothes, I guess you’d call them. I think he had light-colored hair, but it’s hard to tell at night. Look here, Mr. Taylor, I got to get back to my business.”