Darkest Hour

by Nielsen, Helen

  “Where’s Leem now?” Simon asked.

  “I’ve got him stashed in a safe place. What’s your problem?”

  Simon took the locker key from his pocket and showed it to Keith. He told him about Vera’s letter, and then about his meeting upstairs with Whitey Sanders and Max Berlin. And then, pointing through the wide windows, he identified the occupants of the dark green Cougar.

  “The problem,” he explained, “is to get what Monterey put in the locker and clear the premises. Obviously, I couldn’t do it in my car. I hope you’re still carrying a gun.”

  “I am,” Keith answered, “and there’s a loaded sawed-off shotgun in the back seat of the Caddy. What’s the plan?”

  “I’ve had time to think about that while I waited here for you. There’s a service entrance back of the kitchen. I’ve been sitting here for a couple of hours watching delivery trucks go in and out. You cover the front entrance while I open the locker. When you see me head for the kitchen, go out and bring your car around the side of the building to the service entrance. With luck, we’ll be off the grounds before Berlin’s men realize I’m not coming back to my car.”

  “Will do,” Keith said. “Say, do we have time for a cup of coffee? I’ve been driving all afternoon.”

  Simon groaned. “No! And it’s bad for your nerves. Let’s make the break now while there’s still traffic in the waiting room. This airport is built like a fish bowl.”

  Simon left a nice tip for the waitress and paid his check while Keith strolled across the foyer to the front entrance. He saw Keith light a cigarette and strike the stance of a man waiting for a plane, and then Simon walked swiftly to the block of lockers and opened number 28. Inside was a small package about the size of a slender volume of poetry. It didn’t rattle or tick and it weighed about one pound. It was wrapped in brown mailing paper and tied with heavy cord, but there was no address or name or message of any kind. Simon slipped the package under his arm and closed the locker. Without looking back at Keith, he returned to the coffee shop and walked directly to the kitchen. When a waitress tried to stop him he said “special delivery” and kept walking. Minutes later he was in the service driveway and Keith’s Cadillac pulled up beside him with the door open. Simon leaped inside and slammed the door. Keith stepped on the accelerator and the big car roared down the exit route. As it merged with the highway traffic, Simon looked back. No one was following.

  “Reach down in the right-hand door pocket,” Keith directed.

  Simon reached into the pocket and pulled out a snub-nosed automatic.

  “Now put it in your coat pocket,” Keith said. “It’s loaded and the safety’s on.”

  “I never carry a gun,” Simon protested.

  “I know. You believe in talking your way out of trouble, but someday you’re going to get yourself in a corner where there’s no telephone and no Jack Keith to do your dirty work. Wake up, Simon. Civilized man went out of style with Adlai Stevenson. He may not return this side of Armageddon.”

  Simon didn’t reply. He pocketed the gun.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Under Hannah’s direction the old upstairs drawing room in The Mansion had been transformed into a projection room complete with red velvet drapes and gilt angels and mummer’s masks framing the proscenium. Through connections with old friends in the industry she was able to get copies of films almost as soon as they were released; but for this occasion she had used the connections to obtain several old Monterey classics, one of which was now reaching its predictable conclusion. North of Rio starring Monte Monterey and his wonder horse, Diablo. It was a standard bang-bang with a Latin flavor by courtesy of Western Costuming. After the required chase shot and shoot-out in the last reel, Monte rescued the distressed damsel, restored the besieged rancho to its rightful owner and rode off into the sunset to the accompaniment of jubilant guitars. Fade-out. House lights up.

  Hannah sat scowling at the blank screen as the heavy drapes drew together. “His films were always the same,” she said. “Monte never did a thing in all his years in the flicks except watch the camera angles, keep his teeth bright and outwit the villain.”

  “I thought the horse was good, too,” Keith remarked. “Simon, why don’t you get a popcorn machine for this room? It needs the common touch.”

  Simon and Keith had returned in time to catch the last reel. Hannah wouldn’t stop a film for anyone or anything short of the millennium. Nobody responded to Keith’s suggestion because Hannah was in a serious mood. She leaned forward on her cane as if to peer at some subliminal scene being played against the closed drapes.

  “He always played the hero,” Hannah resumed, “and the hero was always virginal and victorious. It was a projection of the times. We were all young and pure. We could never compromise or lose. Now, what I’m trying to understand is how this classic matinee idol could become a brutal killer who could impale a man, still living, on a steel spike on the balcony of the Balboa Hotel.”

  “Are you suggesting that Monterey didn’t kill Kwan?” Simon asked.

  “No, I won’t go that far. I just maintain that it’s completely out of character. If Monte had run Kwan through with a fencing foil, or shot it out with him in the lobby of the hotel in one of those High Noon stalks, I could understand the murder. But Kwan wasn’t merely murdered; he was butchered. That kind of an act takes a streak of savagery.”

  “Or frustration?” Simon suggested.

  “Or revenge?” Keith asked.

  There was no answer to be found on the red velvet drapes, and so Hannah dropped her speculation and allowed Simon to fill her in on the events of the afternoon. Her eyes snapped with excitement when he mentioned meeting Max Berlin.

  “Oh, what a moment!” she cried. “I wish I could have been there! Is he as dynamic as he looks in his pictures? Is he electric?”

  “He’s a little skinny,” Simon said, “and he has a scar—appendix, I think. I don’t think his tan’s natural—”

  “Oh, I don’t mean that! But you’re a man; how would you know what I mean? Where did Whitey meet Berlin?”

  “In Tucson, apparently. Berlin told Whitey that he was looking for a location for a new spa. That would be a good opening to get Whitey to fly him to La Verde, wouldn’t it? No, don’t answer; just think about it. I can’t wait any longer to find out what’s in this package Jack helped me recover from a locker at the La Verde airport. We’ll get back to Max Berlin later.”

  Simon took a penknife from his pocket and slashed the cord. He removed the wrapper and found a second wrapper underneath. This one was the front page of a week-old San Diego daily with a photograph of a young G.I. bleeding profusely from the place where his right leg had been before he stepped on a Viet Cong land mine somewhere in Viet Nam. The newspaper seemed superfluous. Simon pushed it aside and took out the contents of the package: one slender hardcover notebook and a waterproof pouch that was filled with a fine white powder. He opened the pouch, sniffed the powder and touched a few grains to his tongue.

  “Heroin?” Keith suggested.

  “No,” Simon said. “I don’t know what it is.”

  “Let me taste it,” Keith said.

  Simon handed him the pouch. Keith tasted the powder but the response was negative. He could make no identification. “Try the notebook,” he suggested. “The explanation may be there.”

  The entries in the notebook, a type common to student use, were made in a fine, careful hand and totally incomprehensible. They were all in some kind of code that was profuse with chemistry symbols.

  “It must be Kwan’s work,” Simon reflected.

  “The substance in powder form may be Kwan’s work, too,” Hannah said.

  “Probably. But there must be a key somewhere. Why would Monterey have put this in the locker and mailed the key to Vera Raymond if it wasn’t important? Unless he took it for granted that she would turn it over to the police—”

  “Which you won’t,” Keith said.

  “I’m not so sure.�
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  “I am! I saw Lieutenant Franzen of the M.B.P.D. in the Balboa Hotel today. He had a go at the registration file and then went to the bar and had a talk with a saloonkeeper named Angus. I didn’t eavesdrop but I wouldn’t be surprised if you got a call from the lieutenant almost any time now. Let him catch you with this stuff and Duane Thompson will get your lawyerman shingle and hang it over his mantel like a stuffed trophy.”

  “So Franzen knows that I met Eve Necchi in San Diego,” Simon mused. “Being a good cop, he’s already connected her death to Kwan’s. Jack, baby, I see your point. I’m a little on the warm side with city hall right now.”

  “You might say that you’re out with the in group,” Keith agreed.

  “And we can’t fight city hall—or can we? Hannah, put on your best thinking cap and concentrate.”

  “On whom?”

  “Whitey Sanders, for a starter. Can you conceive of Whitey as a killer?”

  “My God, no! Whitey was a ten-percenter before he got smart and filthy rich. He doesn’t need an outlet like that. He does his killing over double martinis.”

  “Not any more. Whitey’s a cola man now, and you know how you distrust total abstainers.”

  “But why dolly in on Whitey? You said he was trying to peddle some real estate.”

  “Somebody had to tell Berlin where to find Monterey. Who saw him in La Verde before he died? You, Buddy Jenks—”

  “You’re not going to drag that baby into this mess!”

  “Hannah, beloved, I have seen ‘babies’ younger and sweeter than your innocent Buddy who were deadlier than a plague. What do you know about Buddy anyway except that he blows a sweet trumpet? He may smoke marijuana, take LSD and shoot heroin on the side. Right now he’s shacked up with Bonnie Penny, the sex symbol from the Seville Inn who, as I recall, saw Monterey at the inn hours before he went to the Gateway.”

  “That makes three of us,” Hannah said.

  “It makes four if you count Alex Lacey, who sniffles while listening to other people’s telephone conversations.”

  “What about Vera Raymond?” Hannah countered. “You have only her word for it that she didn’t know who called Sam the night Kwan was killed, or that she didn’t know what the call was all about. And she did know that Sam was headed for Santa Monica the next day. She might have known why and that’s the reason Monte mailed the package to her.”

  Simon winced. Everybody has an ego. Simon would stack his male logic against Hannah’s intuition any day. Vera was a woman who loved a man, and Sam Goddard was the man—but that would only make her more vulnerable to a deal if Sam was in trouble. He didn’t doubt that she would have been beyond trading Monterey’s life for Sam’s good name if it was only a name on a tombstone. The simple fact remained that someone had reported Monterey’s presence in La Verde to Max Berlin and thereby ended his life.

  The notebook was maddening. He flicked through the pages again still searching for the illusive key. Jack Keith, who had been silent during the dialogue with Hannah, cleared his throat.

  “The old man, Charley Leem, told a hair-curling tale,” he said. “Maybe it’s just scuttlebutt, but he frequents the waterfront and he knew Berlin by rumor long before the boy got national coverage in the slicks. Berlin owns a yacht, you see. Anchors it in the harbor. Some while back one of the crew was washed overboard off the Baja coast. Officially the body was never recovered. He was a young college student named Delaney. Chemistry major.”

  “Chemistry again!” Hannah exclaimed.

  “Right. According to Leem the kid came up with something stronger than LSD—and deadlier. The job on the yacht was a summer fill-in, but the scuttlebutt is that he took it so he could contact Berlin. I guess he wanted backing. Well, I checked out the man-overboard story and it’s true, but the rest of the gossip has it that the Coast Guard did recover Delaney’s body—or whatever portion was left of it after the fishes got through with him. Leem swears he talked with one of the men who hauled the body aboard the cutter and he said the fish weren’t responsible for all the mutilation to the body. For one thing, the tongue had been cut out very professionally as if somebody aboard the yacht knew exactly what to do with a scalpel. If Leem isn’t hallucinating it seems we’re dealing with people who would classify impaling as a minor sport.”

  “Terror tactics,” Hannah murmured. “Simon, I told you that Max Berlin has a tough face.”

  “Or some waterfront gossips have sadistic imaginations,” Simon suggested. “Why does Leem think the Coast Guard never reported finding Delaney’s body if the story’s true?” he asked Keith.

  “I told you there was a freeze on information on Kwan past a certain point. Delaney might have been a federal agent.”

  “And Kwan?”

  “Your guess is as good as mine. What was Monterey trying to tell Vera Raymond? Get that answer and you’ve identified Kwan’s place in this operation. Let me take a look at that notebook.” Keith took the book from Simon’s hands and scanned the pages hurriedly. He checked each and every page until he reached the back cover and then exclaimed: “Hey, there are names lettered in the back of the book … four, five, six names.”

  “Let me see them.”

  Keith was right. The same careful hand that had inscribed the hieroglyphics in the text had set down six surnames on the inside of the back cover: Van Brut, Wessler, Malvern, Robles, Severing and Di Miro. That was all. Names but no explanations. And yet two of the names seemed to stand out from the rest. “What do I know about Severing and Di Miro?” Simon asked. “What do I remember? Let’s go to my study and have a look-see.”

  They left the projection room and took the elevator downstairs. Before leaving the projection room Hannah got Chester on the intercom and ordered coffee and Drambuie served in the study. Chester, informally attired in sweat pants and shirt, arrived with the tray just as Simon had reached the “D” file. “Daniels, Denver versus Denver—oh, that was a juicy divorce! Dockmier Inc., Duncan—Wait a minute, what did I just say?”

  “Something about a juicy divorce,” Chester answered. “Who gets the cream?”

  “I do,” Keith volunteered.

  “Out of cream. You get half and half. I left it in the carton so it would be easier to put back in the refrigerator.”

  “The help is getting too uppity,” Hannah remarked. “Chester, get back to your chains.”

  Chester rolled his eyes in mock terror. “Oh, please, missy. I’se repentin’. Please, Missy Hannah—”

  “Knock it off,” Simon said, “I can’t think. Divorce. That’s it. The Mertons’ divorce settlement. There was some stock—three hundred shares of Severing and Di Miro Pharmaceutical and Mrs. Merton said, ‘You can keep the Rolls, the town house and the matched Afghans but keep your cotton-pickin’ paws off my Severing and Di Miro.’ Brad laughed about it at the post-interlocutory party. He was drunk so maybe he talked too much, but he implied the stock would soon be worthless because the company is under federal investigation and due for indictment for price fixing of drugs and quinine.” Simon fell silent. Nobody said anything while Keith poured half and half into his coffee cup and stirred it slowly in a circular motion. It was think time. After a few seconds Simon picked up the packet and tossed it to Chester. “What do you make of this stuff?” he demanded.

  Chester’s identification came up zeros. He shrugged.

  “Do you still go surfing with that laboratory technician from Dow?” Simon asked.

  “Since he refused to work on napalm—yes,” Chester said. “If it’s Ray Larkin you’re thinking of, that is.”

  “That’s who I’m thinking of. Ask him to run an analysis of this substance, will you? If it’s what I think it is we’ll know why Monterey got mad enough to drape Kwan over the spiked railing…. Tell me about brother Joe again, Hannah. Was he loved? Was he important to Monte?”

  “He was the sunrise and the sunset,” Hannah said.

  “And he died in the jungle. We don’t know how. Maybe like that kid in the pictur
e on the front page of the newspaper that was wrapped about this packet…. Ask your wave-shooting friend to work fast, Chester. Okay?”

  “Right,” Chester said.

  He took the packet and went out of the room. There was no need to tell him the analysis was confidential. Chester was a smart boy everywhere except in the kitchen. After the La Verde airport drink-in, Simon wasn’t up to another coffee. He watched Keith and Hannah drink theirs—watched Hannah, mostly. She used a small demitasse cup that was lined with twenty-one-karat gold and a tiny silver spoon with a red baked-enamel back.

  “How did Monterey live?” he asked her.

  “Graciously,” she said.

  “And expensively?”

  “Of course.”

  “It would have been a difficult life style to give up.”

  “I think it would have killed him.”

  “And so he went to South America and made films. He must have met Max Berlin there. I think he worked for Max Berlin. I believe the nice terminology is ‘public relations.” He could make a lot of compromises—we all do, but everybody has a breaking point…. What do you know about malaria?”

  “It’s uncomfortable,” Hannah said.

  “It’s one of the biggest killers in the world. In World War Two we ran into trouble in the Pacific theater. Quinine was scarce—most of it came from the battle area itself. Science came up with a substitute that was better than quinine, but in Viet Nam it hasn’t worked. The disease gets tougher, the cure weaker. Simultaneously, the price of quinine has shot up several hundred percent and a United States Senate investigating committee says an international cartel has cornered the quinine market.”