Free Gravedigger by Joseph Hansen Page B

make the stupid mistakes you’ve made. And what in the world is the use?”
    “If you did all that,” Dave said, “you don’t have anything to reproach yourself for. He’s a big boy now.” He sat down on another of the stingy chairs. A low table was between the chairs, on it a jug-shape terra-cotta lamp, old copies of Westways and Sunset magazines, a terra-cotta ashtray glazed blue inside. “What does the doctor say?”
    “That he’ll probably be all right.” She muttered it, rummaging in the big bag for tissues, wiping her eyes, blowing her nose. “But what’s to stop him trying it again? If life is so terrible for him?” A squeaky sob jerked out of her. She drew breath sharply, bit her lip, shook her head, squared her shoulders. “Did you find his father?”
    “No. I hoped Lyle could tell me where to do that.” Down the hallway, crockery and metal clashed. A bald, red-faced orderly in rumpled white brought trays out of rooms and dumped them into rubber bins on a trolley. Dave lit a cigarette. “Trio Foley brought him here. Where is she?”
    “Eating,” Anna Westover said flatly. “Every hour on the hour. It comforts her, I suppose. She feels terribly guilty, poor thing. She blames herself.”
    He had been mistaken in thinking the Pizza Hut was empty. She sat at a rear table whose shiny orange top, reflecting into her face, made the pimples stand out. A wheel of pizza lay in front of her, heaped with, as the white plastic letters of the sign over the counter put it, EVERYTHING . Three wedges of the pizza were already gone and she was choking down a fourth. Dave sat across from her.
    “Oh, God.” Her eyes opened behind the thick glasses.
    “I thought you were going to telephone me.”
    She gulped the mouthful of dough and sauce, cheese, sausage, anchovies. She drank from a big wax-paper cup of cola. Tomato sauce smeared her mouth and chin. She wiped them with a wadded fistful of paper napkins. She said, “I was afraid you’d frighten him.”
    “Why? I didn’t frighten you.”
    Her dimpled fingers fumbled loose another slice of pizza. She lifted it toward her mouth. He caught her wrist
    “Wait a minute with the eating, please? Tell me what happened. He’d been living up there at the camp, cooking and eating and getting along. Then you showed up, and he swallowed Seconals. Now, what’s it all about, Trio?”
    “I told him.” Her cry ricocheted off the shiny glass and plastic of the empty place. The blond boy and girl in uniform behind the counter stopped chatting and stared. “I went to make him leave there before you could find him but he didn’t want to. Then I did just what I was afraid you’d do. I didn’t mean to, but one thing led to another. Why had I come, and who were you, and what were you doing at the house, and why were you an insurance investigator, and—and—it all just came out, you know? About his father and his sister and the insurance and—” She couldn’t go on. She picked up the pizza wedge and stuffed her face with it and sat there with tears streaming down her face, chewing, chewing.
    “And then you ran away,” Dave said, “leaving him all by himself with the knowledge that either his sister had been horribly murdered, or his father was so rotten that he had tried to defraud the insurance people by pretending he believed that had happened. Good Christ, girl, you were the one who said he was fragile, who wanted to protect him.”
    “Stop it!” She clapped her hands to her ears. “Stop it!” She had to wriggle mightily to free her bulk from the cramped space between table and banquette, but she did it with surprising quickness, and was on her feet and running for the door, all jiggling two hundred pounds of her, wailing like a siren. Dave sighed, got up, walked after her.
    “Hey, mister, wait a minute.” It was the blond boy behind the counter, rosy-cheeked, maybe seventeen but brave. “What happened? What did you do to her?”
    “Gave her bad news,” Dave