It was a slender woman, lying half on her side, half on her face, in a rumpled dress and something like a short white fur jacket.
Her loose hair hid her face. The telephone kept on shrilling.
COMMAGER dropped to one knee beside the woman, touched her and knew she was dead, turned her over by the shoulders and felt a stickiness on his hands. There was a slanting cut across her throat, black in the shadows.
“Well,” a voice inside Commager’s head said with insane calm, “if it isn’t Miss MacDonald!” He felt no pity for her at the moment and no real alarm, only a vast amazement.
He realized that the telephone had stopped ringing and clusters of thought burst suddenly and coherently into his awareness again. Somebody apparently thought he was here, at three-thirty in the morning—the same somebody might also suspect that Miss MacDonald was here and even in what condition. And the phone could have been dialed quite deliberately at that moment to bring Commager out of the hypnotized or doped trance, or whatever it was that somebody knew he was trapped in.
In which case, they might be wanting him to discover Ruth MacDonald’s body at about this time.
It would be better, he thought, not to get tangled up just now in wondering why anyone should want that to happen; or even whether, just possibly, it had been he himself who had cut Miss MacDonald’s brown throat.
What mattered was that, at this instant, somebody was expecting him to react as reasonably as a shocked and stunned man could react in such a situation.
The only really reasonable course of action open to him was to call the police promptly—wherefore, if his curiously calm assumption was correct, he would be primarily expected to do just that. It would be much less reasonable, though still not too unlikely, to carry that ghastly little body far off somewhere and lose it.
Or he could just walk out of here and leave Miss MacDonald on the floor, to be discovered by the store’s staff in the morning. That would be a stupid thing to do, but still something that might be expected of a sufficiently dazed and frightened man.
So he wouldn’t do any of those things! The hunch was strong in him that the best way to react just now was in a manner unreasonable beyond all calculation.
HE SHOVED Ruth MacDonald’s body aside and flicked on his cigarette lighter. On the floor were gummily smeared spots, but she had bled to death somewhere else before she had been dropped here!
Commager’s hands and clothes were clean, so it was very improbable that he had carried her in. The sensible thing, he thought, would be to clean up the few stains on the floor before he left, removing any obvious evidence that Miss MacDonald had been in the store at all.
Wherefore, he didn’t bother to do it.
Nor did he waste time wondering whether a half dozen tanks in the back part of the store had been lit when he came in here or not. There was a variety of possible reasons why someone might have left a light on over some of them.
He picked up the slender stiffening body on the floor and carried it to the front door.
The door was unlocked and his Hudson was at the curb. He shifted Miss MacDonald to one arm, locked the store door behind him, then placed her in the back seat of the car.
Even Wilshire Boulevard was a lonely street at this hour, but he saw several sets of headlights coming toward him as he got into the car and started it. As far as he could make out, there hadn’t been any blood spilled around inside the Hudson, either.
Twelve minutes later, he drove past the corner house he’d visited with Jean Bohart some time before ten in the evening. There was a light on in one of the rooms upstairs, which distinguished Herbert Hawkes’s home from any other house in sight. A few blocks away, a dog began to bark.
Dogs might be a problem, he thought.
COMMAGER parked the car a few hundred feet away and sat still for perhaps a minute, listening. The dog stopped barking. Headlights crossed an intersection a few blocks ahead of him.
He got out, lifted Miss MacDonald’s body out of the car and walked unhurriedly back to the corner house and over the stepping stones of the dichondra lawn to the side of the house. Here was a trellis, with a gate in it, half open.
Commager eased his burden sideways through the gate. In the half-light of early morning, he set Ruth MacDonald down under a bush—which partly concealed her—in about the same position in which he’d found her. He had a moment of pity to spare for her now.
But there was motion inside the house. Commager looked at the door that opened into this side garden. A vague sequence of motions; somebody walking quietly—but without any suggestion of stealth—was coming closer to the door. Commager stepped quietly up to the wall beside the door and flattened himself against the wall.
A key clicked in the lock. The door swung open. A big shape sauntered out.
Commager’s fist was cocked and he struck hard, slanting upward, for the side of the neck and the jaw. . .
He laid Herbert Hawkes down beside the body of Ruth MacDonald, one big arm draped across her shoulders.
Let the Guides figure that one out, he thought wearily. Not that they wouldn’t, of course, but he was going to continue to react unreasonably.
Twenty minutes later, he was in his apartment and sound asleep.
III
THE BEDSIDE phone buzzed waspishly. Commager hung for a moment between two levels of awareness. The blazing excitement of the fight was over, but he still hated to relinquish the wild, cold, clear loneliness of the blue—
The thin droning continued to ram at his eardrums. His eyes opened and he sat up, reaching for the telephone as he glanced at the clock beside it. 8:15.
“Alan? I think it worked! Ira had breakfast and drove off to the office, wrapped in deep thought. You were terrific, simply terrific! Just sitting there like a stone wall—
Commager blinked, trying to catch up with her. Jean Bohart had an athlete’s healthy contempt for lie-a-beds and felt no compunction about jolting them out of their torpor. She probably assumed he’d been up and around for the past two hours.
Then his waking memories suddenly flooded back. He sucked in a shocked breath.
“Eh?” She sounded startled.
“I didn’t say anything,” he managed. “Go ahead—”
He wouldn’t, he realized presently, have to ask Jean any leading questions. There was a nervous tension in her that, on occasion, found its outlet in a burst of one-way conversation and this was such an occasion. The Boharts had left the Hawkes home shortly before twelve, Ira apparently depressed by the negative results of the evening. The Reverend Knox had made a phone call somewhat earlier and had been picked up within a few minutes by an elderly woman who, in Jean’s phrasing, looked like a French bulldog.
“I think he was glad to get out of there!” she added.
COMMAGER didn’t comment on that. He himself had stayed on with the others. Ruth MacDonald, in Jean’s opinion, was making a pretty definite play for him by that time, while Paylar—“What’s her last name, anyway?”—had become withdrawn to the point of rudeness after Commager’s spectacular lack of reaction to her psychological games.
“I think she knew just what we were doing by then!” Jean’s voice held considerable satisfaction. “So did that Hawkes character. Did you know he’s the Herbert Hawkes who owned the Hawkes Chrysler Agency on Figueroa? Well, there’s something interesting about that—” Hawkes had sold out his business about eight months before and it was generally known that his reason had been an imminent nervous breakdown. “What do you make of that, Alan?”
Offhand, Commager admitted, he didn’t know what to make of it.
Well, Jean interrupted, she was convinced Hawkes had gone the way Ira would have gone if they hadn’t stopped him. “Those Guides have him hypnotized or something!” She laughed nervously. “Does it sound as if I’m getting too dramatic about it?”
“No,” he said, recalling his last glimpse of Hawkes and his horrid little companion much too vividly. “He doesn’t strike me as acti
ng like a man who’s been hypnotized, though. Not that I know much about that sort of thing.”
Jean was silent, thinking. “Did anything in particular develop between you and the MacDonald?” she asked suddenly. There was a strange sharpness in her tone.
Commager felt himself whiten. “No,” he said, “I just went home by and by.” He tried for a teasing “Are you jealous, little pal?” note. “Were you worrying about it?”
“She’s poison, that’s all!” Jean said sharply.
AFTER SHE hung up, Commager showered, shaved, dressed and breakfasted, with very little awareness of what he was doing. He was in a frame of mind he didn’t entirely understand himself; under a flow of decidedly unpleasant speculations was a layer of tingling, almost physical elation which, when he stopped to consider it, appeared a less than intelligent response to his present situation. But the realization didn’t seem to affect the feeling.
The feeling vanished abruptly when he dumped the clothes he’d been wearing the night before out of the laundry bag into which he had stuffed them, along with the blanket on which he’d laid Ruth MacDonald’s body in the car.
He had handled her with some caution and he couldn’t discover marks on any of those articles now that seemed likely to incriminate him. But he had no doubt that a more competent investigation could reveal them.
The odd thing was that he still couldn’t get himself to worry about such an investigation! He had no logical basis for his belief that unless he himself announced the murder of the secretary of the Parapsychological Group of Long Beach, nobody else was going to take that step. He couldn’t even disprove that he hadn’t, somewhere along the line last night, dropped into sheer criminal lunacy.
But, so far, nobody had come pounding at his door to accuse him of murder. And Commager retained the irrationally obstinate conviction that nobody would.
He had an equally strong conviction that he had become the target of the relentless hostility of a group of people, of whose existence he hadn’t known until the day before—and that he wouldn’t know why until he discovered the reason for his loss of conscious memory in a period during which he had, to Jean Bohart’s discerning eyes, showed no noticeable change in behavior.
And, Commager decided finally, he’d better not let the lack of satisfactory conscious evidence for either certainty affect his actions just now.
HE MADE two appointments by telephone and left the apartment an hour after he’d been wakened. A few minutes later, he was at the store, which would open for business at ten o’clock.
Commager unlocked the door and strolled inside. The store’s staff had got there at nine and the floors, he noticed, had been thoroughly mopped. Nobody inquired whether he’d been in during the night, so it seemed he had guessed right in leaving the lights on over the big tanks.
He drove into Los Angeles then, to keep his first appointment, at Dr. Henry L. Warbutt’s Psychology Center.
Henry was a stout, white-haired, energetic little man with the dark melancholy eyes of one of the great apes. “Thirty minutes for free is all I can spare, even for orphans,” he informed Commager. “But you’re welcome to that, so come in and sit down, boy! Cup of tea, eh? What do you hear from the Boharts?”
Commager declined the tea, which was likely to be some nasty kind of disguised health-brew, and stated that the Boharts, when last heard from, had been doing fine. It wasn’t his first visit to the Center. Both of his parents had been dead before he was twelve and Henry, who was a relative on his father’s side, had been his legal guardian until he came of age.
“I want to find out what you know about a new local organization called the Guides,” Commager explained. “They’re on the metaphysical side, I’d say, but they seen to be doing some therapy work. They’re not listed in the telephone book.”
Henry looked slightly disturbed. “If you mean the Guides I’m thinking of, they’re not so new. How did you hear about them? Is Ira messing around with that outfit now?”
Commager told him briefly of last night’s earlier events, presenting Jean Bohart’s version of his own role in them, as if that were the way he recalled it himself.
HENRY became interested at that point. “Do you remember just what those exercises were that the woman put you through?”
When Commager had described them, he nodded. “They got those gimmicks from another group. I’ve used them myself now and then. Not on cash clients, of course, just as an experiment.
The idea is to divert your attention away from your body-ego, if you know what I mean. No? Well, then—”
He made a steeple of his hands and scowled at his fingertips. “Metaphysically, it’s sometimes used as a method to get you out of your physical body.” He waved his hands vaguely around. “Off you go into the astral plane or something!” He grinned. “Understand now?”
“More or less,” Commager said doubtfully. “Did you ever see it happen?”
“Eh? Oh, no! With me, they usually just go to sleep. Or else they get bored and won’t react at all, about like you did. There’s no therapeutic value in it that I know of. But probably no harm, either.”
“Would you say whether there’s any harm in the Guides?”
“Well,” said Henry thoughtfully, “they’re certainly one of the more interesting groups of our local psychological fauna. Personally, I wouldn’t go out of my way to antagonize them. Of course, Ira’s such a damn fool, you probably had to do something pretty obvious to discourage him. Fifteen or twenty years ago, the Guides were working principally with drugs, as far as I could make out at the time. I don’t know whether this is the same organization or not, but just lately—the last year or so—I’ve been hearing gossip about them again.”
“What kind of gossip?”
“WELL, YOU know a good many of the people who come into this Center for therapy are interested in metaphysics in one way or another,” Henry explained. “Some of them have been telling me lately that the Guides are the latest thing in a True Group. And a True Group, in their language, means chiefly that the people in it have some honest-to-goodness supernatural abilities and powers!”
He grimaced unhappily. “Another characteristic is that nobody else knows exactly who belongs to a True Group. In that way, your acquaintances seem to be living up to the legend.”
Commager said he’d been under the impression that the Guides dealt in parapsychology.
Henry nodded. “Well, they’d use that, too, of course! Depending on the class of client—” He hesitated briefly. “By and large, I’d say the Guides were a very good outfit for fairly normal citizens like you and the Boharts to stay away from!”
He’d also heard of the Reverend Wilson Knox and of the Temple of Antique Christianity, though not favorably.
“Knox has a crummy little sect back in one of the Hollywood canyons. They go in for Greek paganism. Strictly a screwball group.” He didn’t know anything of the Parapsychological Group of Long Beach. “You can’t keep up with all of them.”
IV
JULIUS SAVAGE was a lanky, sun-browned hypnotist who’d sometimes gone spear-fishing with Commager. On one such occasion—the last, if Julius had anything to say about it—Commager had been obliged to haul him half-drowned out of a kelp bed and thump him back into consciousness. Which made him the right man right now.
He clasped his hands behind his head, rocked himself back from his desk and looked first interested and then highly dubious, while Commager went on talking.
“You’re about as lousy a hypnotic subject as I am myself, Alan!” Julius protested finally. “I tried to put you under twice, remember? Anyway, how about sending you to my tame M.D. for a check-up first? Amnesia isn’t anything to—No?” He considered. “Well, how long ago did this happen?”
The fact that it had happened only the night before reassured him somewhat. So presently Commager was sitting in an armchair being informed that his eyelids were getting heavier and heavier.
An hour later, Julius said discouragedly,
“This isn’t getting us anywhere and I’ve got another appointment at two o’clock! How bad do you want that information, Alan?”
“It’s a matter of life and death!”
“Oh, hell!” said Julius. He went out of the room and came back with a small bottle, partly filled with a slightly oily, aromatic liquid. “I don’t use this often, but—By the way, with the possible exception of last night, did anyone else ever try to hypnotize you?”
“Ira Bohart did, the first time I met him,” Commager recalled. “It was at a party. No results.”
“We’ll make it two spoonfuls,” Julius decided.
TEN MINUTES later, Commager got into the blackness. The next time he consciously opened his eyes, it was past three in the afternoon. Julius, looking pale and exhausted, stood at the desk watching him. He’d loosened his tie and hung his jacket over the back of a chair. His hair was disheveled.
“Brother!” he remarked. “Well, we got something, Alan. I’ll play parts of it back to you.” He jerked his head at a gently burbling percolator on a mantel. “Cup of coffee there for you. Better have some.”
Commager sipped black coffee, yawned, and took note of the time. Too much of the day already was past, he thought uneasily; he wondered what the Guides had been doing meanwhile. “What happened to your appointments?”
“Canceled them,” Julius said, fiddling with the tape recorder. “They’ll keep.” He glanced around at Commager. “Here’s the first thing we got. Chronologically, it seems to fit in at the end of the period you can’t remember. Symbolism, but I’m curious. We’ll try it first.”
Commager listened. After a while, there were pricklings of memory. When Julius stopped the recorder, he remarked, “I had a dream this morning that seems to tie in with that.”
“Ah?” Julius looked professionally cautious. “Well, let’s hear about it.”
Commager hesitated. The dream seemed irrelevant and rather childish, like a fairy tale. He’d been flying around in a great open space, he began at last. And he’d been wondering why nobody else was up there with him, but he hadn’t felt particularly concerned about it. Then a hawk came swooping at him, trying to knock him out of the air.
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