Florida, or at least showed ‘em we could hold our own with ’em. We were always a little proud of him. He played some mighty good football at Georgia Tech. He was officer of a submarine that sank I don’t remember how many thousand tons of Japanese shipping in World War Two. After the war he went into the construction business in Miami—low-cost housing. Made a lot of money. They say he was worth pretty close to a million at one time. But the thing was he never seemed to lose touch like so many kids do when they go away and get successful. Even after his daddy died—he used to be principal of the high school—after he died and there weren’t any Langstons left around here at all, he used to come back and go duck-hunting and fishing and visit with people.”
“But what happened?” I asked. “Why did he retire and buy a motel? He was only forty-seven, wasn’t he?”
“That’s right. He got hit by several things all at once. There was a bad divorce, with a big property settlement—”
“Oh,” I said. “Then how long had he and the second Mrs. Langston been married when he was killed?”
“A little less than a year, I guess. Four or five months before they came up here and bought the motel.”
“What were the other things?” I asked.
“Health,” he replied. “And a business deal that went sour on him. He started a big tract development and then ran into a court wrangle over the title to part of the property. He lost it, and on top of the split-up of community property in the divorce thing it just about wiped him out. But mainly it was his health. He had a mild heart attack somewhere back in ‘fifty-four or -five, and then a pretty serious one, and the doctors told him he had to slow down or he’d be dead before he was fifty. So he came up here and bought the motel with what he had left. It would make him a living, and he could do the things he liked to do—hunt quail and fish for bass and root for the high-school football team in the fall. Then six months later he was butchered in cold blood, like slaughtering a pig. Sure there’s bitter feeling; why shouldn’t there be? Just knock his head in and take him down there to the river bottom and leave him so it’d look like an accident. It’d give you the horrors if you kept thinking about it. What kind of woman could that be, for the love of heaven?”
“Not what kind of woman,” I said. “What woman would be a little more to the point.”
The fragile and essentially gentle face went blank, as if he’d drawn a curtain behind it. I was used to it now. “Maybe they’ll never know,” he said, speaking to me from a great distance.
“What about insurance?” I asked. She said she didn’t have any money. “Who was the beneficiary? And was it ever paid?”
He nodded. “Fifty thousand, or something like that. To his daughter. It was paid, or is being paid, rather, into a trust fund. She’s only thirteen.”
“No other policies?”
“No. He couldn’t take out any more when he remarried. He was too poor a risk, with a history of two heart attacks.”
Then, where was the woman’s motive?” I asked. “It wasn’t money.”
“They don’t know who the woman was.” he explained carefully and precisely from behind the drawn blinds. “So naturally they don’t know what her motive was. They don’t know anything about her at all, except that she was with Strader.”
Which answered everything very neatly, I thought. It was a closed circuit, like two snakes swallowing each other: she was a tramp because she was with Strader, and she was with Strader because she was a tramp. How could you argue with that? I went out and dropped the envelope in a postbox and drove back to the motel. When I walked into the office Josie came out of the curtained doorway and said there had been a call for me some ten minutes ago.
“A woman?” I asked.
“Yes, suh. She say she would try again.”
“Thanks,” I said. “How is Mrs. Langston?”
“She’s still sleepin’ quiet.”
“Good,” I said. “You stay right here with her.”
I went across to the room and sat looking at the telephone, trying to make it ring. It was some twenty minutes before it did. When I picked it up, u feminine voice asked softly, “Mr. Chatham?”
“That’s right,”