Darkest Hour

by Nielsen, Helen

  “What are you drinking?” she asked without preface.

  “Old Rarity,” Simon answered.

  “Make it two, Angus,” the girl told the bartender.

  “My pleasure,” Simon said. “And I’ve never before known a bartender named Angus.”

  “My name is Eve,” the girl said.

  “I could have guessed,” Simon responded.

  She smiled briefly. “I don’t usually do this sort of thing,” she added, “but I get goose bumps when I think of going upstairs to bed alone.”

  Angus brought the girl’s drink in time to hear her remark. “Change your room,” he suggested.

  “I did change it. They moved me down to three-six-seven—exactly three floors below where it happened. Just the same, I get goose bumps. I keep thinking how—if I hadn’t taken those sleeping powders Sunday night—I might have heard the fight and called the desk. I could have saved that poor gook’s life.”

  “You’re guilt-prone,” Angus said. “You’ve got to get control. You can’t carry the whole world on your shoulders.”

  “Gook?” Simon echoed.

  Eve downed her Scotch like a dry sponge. “Kwan,” she said. “I heard you mention his name when nimble-fingers stopped to crack his knuckles. I had the room next door. I didn’t know anything happened until I heard cops stomping all over the gook’s balcony.”

  Angus filled up Eve’s glass again. She nodded and he also filled Simon’s. Eve shoved two dollars across the bar in payment. The emancipated woman was definitely in.

  “I wish you wouldn’t use that derogatory term,” Angus remarked. “Gook—Charley. Doesn’t show respect.”

  Eve stared at him over the rim of her glass. “I was married six years,” she said, “and it was for love. You should have heard some of the things my husband called me. Anyway, the poor gook’s dead and I feel responsible.”

  “It was just fate—Kismet,” Simon suggested.

  Now she turned the bland stare in his direction. “That’s a cop-out,” she protested. “I mean, suppose we all just turned away and washed our hands like Pompous Pilate?”

  “I think you mean Pontius Pilate,” Simon murmured.

  “That’s what I said. I mean, there’s been too much turning away. I think people should be more committed—more involved.”

  Angus poured Simon another Scotch and both men watched while Eve clawed a pair of bills out of her handbag in payment. He had lost track of time in this enlightened dialogue, but the pianist had now taken his break and a group of energetic young men in red satin shirts were approaching the instruments with aggressive expressions on their faces. The room would be getting noisier, and so Simon downed the drink and slid off the stool.

  “Where are you going?” Eve demanded.

  “Upstairs to my room and so to bed.”

  “What floor? What room number?”

  Simon found the room key in his pocket and examined it in the dim bar light. “Six-one-seven,” he said.

  “Oh, that’s awful! You’re just down the hall from six-six-seven, the death room!”

  “I’m not superstitious, and I’m a big boy now.”

  “So I noticed,” Eve said huskily. “Why don’t you stop by my room for a nightcap? I mean, I get goose bumps—”

  “Try a hot-water bottle,” Simon said.

  He left the girl pouting over the waste of two free Scotches and went back through the lobby to the elevators. The elderly couple had gone and the desk clerk was busy with some book work and didn’t look up when Simon walked past. It would have been easy for an unannounced visitor to gain access to Kwan’s room if he knew the room number. Simon entered the automatic elevator and rode up to the sixth floor. He unlocked the door and went inside. For a few moments he didn’t turn on the lights; he had to open the windows and step out on the balcony to get his bearings. He ran his hands along the top of the railing. Two spiked protrusions about eight feet apart marked the fastenings for extension rods to support an awning which had been removed for the winter season, and each protrusion terminated in a decorative iron spear. The spear wasn’t sharp to the touch, but a body forced or thrown against such an obstacle would certainly be pinned like a due bill on a letter file. Simon grimaced and returned to his room. He drew the blinds and switched on the light. It was a pleasant room, comfortably furnished. He undressed to his boxer shorts and hung his coat and trousers over a chair. Eve’s generosity had made him sleepy, and he decided to go straight to sleep. He crawled gratefully into bed and thought briefly of Eve and her goose bumps. If his business in San Diego required another night in the hotel it would be only gentlemanly to do something about them. He was engaged to Wanda—not married. Not yet, in spite of all Hannah’s campaigning. Not quite yet …

  Simon slept. The day had been long and wearying. He slept fitfully, dreamed briefly of Vera Raymond standing alone at the windows of the lanai at Sam’s place and staring out at that great gray horizon where sea, sky and fog formed a curtain she would not see for her tears, and awakened with annoyance at the irritating sound of the jazz combo drifting up from the bar below. If the late N. B. Kwan had come to the Balboa for quiet in which to study and write, he should have complained to the management. Even with the windows closed, the sound was raucous in this wing of the building. Simon got out of bed and made certain the window was really closed, and when he turned back toward the bed enough of the drape remained open to cast a pale shaft of light across the room and onto the hall door. There was a sharper sound now than the music from below. A key was scratching in the lock. The door handle began to turn slowly.

  Simon reacted instantly. He shoved the extra pillow under the bedclothes and drew them up to the headboard. Anyone expecting to find a man asleep in bed would see just that without close inspection. By this time the door was beginning to open. Simon stepped behind it and tensed for action. The hall light swept slowly across the floor, and into it came a slight, hesitant shadow. Simon started to relax. His visitor was no assassin with a club; it was the fair Eve attired in a soft chiffon mini-nightgown and all her goose bumps. He was about to speak when she did an unexpected thing. She didn’t go to the figure in the bed. She looked at it and then went to his coat and pants hanging over the chair. She checked the pants pockets first and tossed the garment disdainfully aside. Then she picked up the coat and worked her way through to the inner pocket where she found a wallet of sufficient thickness to satisfy her sensitive touch. Her fingers were affectionately combing through a sheaf of ten-dollar bills when Simon stepped behind her and administered a smart slap to the lower southern area of the chiffon gown. Before she could cry out, he placed his other hand over her mouth.

  “Indian giver!” he whispered in her ear. “Take back your two dollars and get out before I call the house dick.”

  She made a strangling sound and then bit his hand. Simon was forced to let go. He slapped at her again but she wasn’t in range. She had whirled about and was staring at him in shocked horror.

  “You! You’re sneaky!” she gasped. “You’re supposed to be in bed!”

  “That’s my twin brother,” Simon said. “Take your two dollars.”

  For a second or so she did nothing but stare at him; then, slowly, understanding began to seep through her bewilderment. She looked inside the billfold. “Two dollars,” she whispered. “One—two—”

  “That’s it,” Simon said. “I’m glad to see you’ve been educated. Now give me the wallet like a good girl and get the hell out of my room.”

  She handed him the wallet. “But I didn’t come for that,” she protested.

  “I’ll bet you didn’t! Now, back to beddy-bye—” The third time he swung for the backside of the mini-nightgown was a direct hit. She gave a sharp squeal and bounced into the hall. Simon closed the door quickly and applied the safety lock. He replaced the wallet in his jacket pocket and got back into bed. At least the sound of the jazz had stopped; it must be after 2 A.M. He pushed the pillow used as a dummy aside and pulled up
the bedclothes, wondering where he had contracted a sudden rash of goose bumps.

  They just weren’t making hotel thieves the way they used to.

  CHAPTER NINE

  In the morning Simon called downstairs and ordered a pot of coffee, two hard-boiled eggs and a city map. He had time to shave, shower and get into his trousers before the order was delivered, and then, because the sun was bright and warm, he moved out on the balcony for breakfast. The morning’s paper, purchased in the drugstore the previous evening, was still in the pocket of the Aquascutum. He found it and took it with him to the balcony. There was no further mention of N. B. Kwan in the journal. A bizarre murder without a sex angle was up against too much competition from the headlines for newsprint space. Simon checked the obituaries, but even in that terse recital of statistics Kwan was the corpse who wasn’t there. Simon poured another cup of coffee and tossed the paper aside. The courtyard was quiet so early in the morning. An occasional guest did exit from the auxiliary entrance and proceed toward the parking area, but so quickly was violence assimilated and forgotten that not one head turned to glance up toward the balcony from which Kwan had so undecorously hung just four mornings ago. By checking the door numbers in the hall, Simon had been able to identify the exact balcony on the sixth-floor level where the body was found. Now, by daylight, he became aware of something that must have impressed Sam Goddard when he took the photos from the yard below. A canopy supported by an ironwork trellis mounted the courtyard entrance to the hotel. An agile, stunt-oriented person could have easily scaled the trellis and gained a foothold on the outside water pipes that reached to the roof of the building, pausing, if he wished, at each balcony level on the way including the balcony where Kwan had died. It was, therefore, quite possible either to reach or escape from room 667 without passage through the lobby or even the hallways. Something of this sort must have inspired Sam Goddard to get out of his collection the old stills of Monte Monterey in action, and once he had reached that conclusion Simon was almost certain of the identity of Sam’s mysterious telephone caller of Sunday night. The person Sam knew and recognized by voice—the person he warned against running—must have been Monte Monterey. Now Monterey was dead, Sam was dead, and all Simon had to do to learn why Hannah had seen horror on Monterey’s face, and why somebody had felt impelled to plant a bomb in the Rolls, was to track down the big story Sam was chasing when his Porsche left the fogbound highway.

  The only ghost of a clue he had was Sam’s film strip. He went inside where his suit jacket and shirt were still draped over the side chair and located the wallet in the inside pocket. He fingered through the bills, checked all of the pockets and card containers and was faced with the fact that the film was gone. Completely gone. Not dropped to the floor; not dropped between the cushions of a chair. Just gone. That left only the conclusion that light-fingered Eve had copped it when she took back her two dollars. Being of a suspicious nature, Simon picked up the telephone and called the desk. He asked to be connected to room 367.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” the operator answered. “Room three-six-seven doesn’t answer.”

  “Try the coffee shop,” Simon suggested.

  On the far end of Simon’s telephone voices conferred, and then the room clerk came on with a terse announcement that the occupant of room 367 had checked out.

  “When?” Simon demanded.

  “Early this morning. A cab was called for her at two-thirty. She had to catch a plane.”

  Simon put down the telephone. Two-thirty was just thirty minutes after the jazz had stopped floating up from the bar, and that was about how long it would have taken a girl like Eve to pack after changing into something more suitable for travel than the mini-nightgown. Either her goose bumps were worse than he realized, or she had completed a mission—such as finding why Simon Drake was registered in the Balboa Hotel.

  Simon suddenly felt less than comfortable in his surroundings.

  He took the number from the masthead of the daily he had been reading and called the payroll department. He asked for Charles Leem and was told that no such person worked for the newspaper. He then called information and got the number of every news publication in the city and its immediate environs. Half an hour later he knew that Charley Leem had lied to Vera Raymond. He was not in the employ of any local paper. The press card on his old car and the tale he told could have been a cover story for a washed-out career. That left Simon with very few leads.

  • • •

  Simon paid a visit to the morgue. There he learned that Kwan’s body had been claimed by a next of kin, one James Wong, M.D., of El Centro, and subsequently removed to a local mortuary. Griffin and Sons was a small family establishment with a non-social-register clientele. Griffin was a bland, well-mannered chap who remembered N. B. Kwan well. He would, quite likely, never forget him.

  “It was such a challenge,” he said. “Kwan was badly beaten about the head and shoulders. Savagely beaten, I would say.”

  “With what kind of weapon?” Simon asked.

  “Oh, I’m not sure there was a weapon. Fists, backhand blows, karate. Yes. And then there was the wound in his back.”

  “From the spike in the railing.”

  “Right.”

  “But that wouldn’t show in the casket.”

  “There was no casket—actually. No real ceremony. The body was cremated after a ten-minute service in the chapel. Dr. Wong said that Kwan was an atheist and abhorred the barbarism of funerals. Barbarism! Honestly, Mr. Drake, I don’t know what the country is coming to with all these Communist propagandists about!”

  “Was Dr. Wong the only mourner?” Simon asked.

  “No. That is, he wasn’t alone. Another gentleman was with him—an Occidental. I think Dr. Wong called him Berlin. Dr. Berlin.”

  “Medical?”

  “I couldn’t say. Wong, yes. He offered credentials for identification when he gave me a check for the expenses. There was some hesitation. I mean, it was drawn on an out-of-town bank. That was when the Occidental gentleman became impatient and paid the entire sum in cash. ‘Dr. Berlin,’ Wong said, ‘I can’t let you do this.’ But Berlin did do it, and I must say that he looked as if carrying large sums of cash was natural to him. Society doctor by the looks of him. Handsome man—and you should have seen his clothes. Theatrical.”

  “How theatrical?”

  “The cut. The flare. This fellow Berlin was a tall devil, slim, very blond. He wore a real expensive suit—black, with black shoes and a black tie and a star sapphire on his ring finger big enough to pay for a lifetime annuity. And you should have seen his hat! I’ve got a teen-age daughter who pestered me all summer for one of those Spanish don hats. You know—flat crown, wide, stiff brim.”

  Simon was instantly interested. “Black?” he asked.

  “Any color. Oh, you mean was Berlin’s hat black? Yes, it was. Black like all the rest of his clothes.”

  Simon thanked Mr. Griffin and left, anxious to be alone with his thoughts. There could be no mistake. The description of Dr. Berlin matched the shadowed figure he had seen standing at the top of the stair well at the place where Monterey had died. However fine the skein of circumstance, three violent deaths were being linked together. Simon needed time to ponder the morbid triangle.

  He drove west to the freeway and turned north on U.S. 5, and for the next thirty miles his foot didn’t leave the accelerator. At Enchanto-by-the-Sea he pulled off the highway at a franchise coffee shop and, over a cup of coffee, asked the waitress for the location of the nearest florist shop. A town that boasted a mortician must have a florist, and this was the day after Sam Goddard’s funeral when Vera Raymond must be beginning to feel pain through the void. Leaving the coffee shop, he noticed a dark green Cougar parked at the side of the building. Two men were in the front seat. The driver wore a turtleneck sweater and a light brown beard, and the second man’s face was buried behind a racing form. They might have been figuring the daily double at Del Mar, or they might have been
the same men in a similar sedan who were parked in the Willows’ guest parking lot during Goddard’s last rites. Simon watched them as he lighted a cigarette. The bearded man yawned and the other man turned a page of the racing form. They seemed completely indifferent to his presence, and so Simon climbed back into the XK-E and drove to the florist shop, where he ordered two dozen red roses to be delivered to Vera Raymond with his card attached and a note in his handwriting: If the crossing gets too rough call 655-8055 and ask for Simon.

  It was the unlisted number at The Mansion. Simon wasn’t sure what he could contribute to Vera’s suddenly bleak existence, but it might help her just to know that she was remembered. There was no Cougar in view when he returned to his car, and the rest of the drive back to Marina Beach was without incident except for a gnawing curiosity about the location of the spot where Sam Goddard’s Porsche had developed an aversion to the highway, and the uneasy fear that it might have been nudged. When Simon finally reached The Mansion high above Marina Beach, he found that Chester had established enough rapport with the watchdog to enable entry of the grounds on specific command. Chester relocked the gate and rode up to the house with Simon.

  “I still don’t trust that beast,” he complained. “I’m not sure he’s sure which side he’s on, and I don’t need protection anyhow. I got a government-issue carbine and a whole collection of medals for marksmanship!”

  “But you can’t bark worth a damn,” Simon said. “Where’s Hannah?”

  “Taking a bath.”

  Hannah’s bath was done in a décor of indecent opulence reminiscent of high-budget De Mille. Hannah had a theory. “It’s silly to create sexy, luxurious bathrooms for the young. They don’t need a boost. At my age I need all the illusion I can get.” And so Hannah’s bath was done in gold and pink velvet, with gold fixtures, a sunken white marble tub and a therapy attachment that churned clouds of sensuously perfumed foam amid which Hannah sat like a harem queen untouched by time or mundane affairs. Simon approached hesitantly through the steam.