She gasped. Her hands fluttered at the neck of the gray dress. “I’d rather . . . really, I’d rather not——”
“His wasn’t the only murder in this affair, though I don’t expect you to be excited about those other people,” Sader said, to distract her. “It’s just that I—frankly, I’m in a hole. I can’t see any way out of it.”
She got her eyes fixed on him again. “Are you the man whose partner was shot this morning in an office downtown?”
“Yes. My partner, Dan Scarborough, is the man who got it.”
“Well . . .” Plainly, she hated letting him in to ask questions. She’d covered her grief decently, though putting it away had racked her; and she didn’t want to be broken down again.
“I won’t stay long,” Sader said.
“Come in, then.”
The parlor was old-fashioned, orderly, though full of a lot of knickknacks that Sader guessed had been gathered over a long period of years. Mrs. Mullens offered him a plush-covered chair whose mahogany armrests were carved into lions’ heads. He sat down, loosened his coat, crushed down the weariness that threatened to creep through him. “I’d like to know how much your son told you about the events of last Tuesday night.”
She folded her hands on her lap, pursed her lips thoughtfully. “What he was interested in was a car, Mr. Sader.”
Sader waited, seeing that she wanted to compose her ideas so that she could speak briefly and be rid of him.
“He came home at about ten o’clock Tuesday night. He was very tired. He had a late snack—he’d been home earlier, you see, for dinner—and then about ten forty-five he came out of his room and said he had to go back to the office.”
“He’d been working in his room?”
“I suppose so. He did have overtime hours near the end of the month. I was watching television when he left. I didn’t hear him come in. The next morning, at breakfast, he said a most peculiar thing.”
Sader crossed his knees, tried to relax, to concentrate upon what she was saying. He could imagine Mullens, looking at his mother across the breakfast table, across the good hearty food she had laid out for him.
“He asked my opinion, Mr. Sader. He asked if I would think it very wrong if he tried to raise cash from something he’d learned—something detrimental to a person who had a great deal of money.”
Sader thought, the two with money in this affair were Mrs. Wanderley and old Ajoukian. No one else he’d met in the case could be considered wealthy. No, wait——
She was speaking again. “I told him that such a proposition could only be considered as blackmail, that my need for expensive medical treatments didn’t change moral values.”
“I see. What did he decide?”
“He didn’t say. He was absent-minded Wednesday evening. Thursday and Friday he seemed to have something—some difficulty—on his mind. I didn’t ask about it. I’d raised him to be a good honest person; I couldn’t admit, even to myself, that he would stray from the principles I’d taught him.”
She turned her head, smoothed a doily on a table by her chair. The moment when Sader thought she must dissolve into tears dragged by; she looked at him again. “Friday night he was out very late. On Saturday morning he said he had work to do, a few hours to clear up some accounts. Before he went to the office he told me that there was a car hidden near here, in the garage of a house that is empty, for sale.”
“Did he give you the address?”
“Yes, he did, Mr. Sader, and I have told it to the police. But they have forbidden me to give the address to anyone else.”
A cold prickling stirred along Sader’s nerves. “That means they have a stake-out on the car. The police are waiting for someone to come for it.”
“The—the murderer?”
Sader nodded. “It’s a pretty good hunch, but I don’t think the murderer in this case will fall for it.”
She inched forward on her chair. “Whose car is it?”
“It belonged to one of the victims in the sump, the young man named Perry Ajoukian. The murderer obviously drove it away from the sump during the time your son was in the office Tuesday night. I think the murderer was hoping those bodies wouldn’t be found for quite a while, perhaps never.”
“But they’re getting rid of the old sumps on the Hill.”
“Maybe the murderer didn’t know about the cleanup campaign.” Sader moved a bit in the stiff old-fashioned chair, trying to favor the shoulder, which still throbbed from Ott’s blow. “I don’t think your son knew about those dead people, Mrs. Mullens. I don’t believe he deliberately withheld evidence of murder. He must have followed young Ajoukian’s car, seen it hidden in the vacated property, decided that something underhanded was going on.”
She nodded eagerly. “That could have been it.”
“He approached Ajoukian, Sr. They met and talked Friday night in the office. Did you know that?”
“No.”
“The father apparently didn’t think that the evidence—the car being where it was and whatever Mullens told him about its journey there—was worth what your son expected.”
Her pale old eyes flickered, brimmed with tears. “If my son did what you imply, if he tried to blackmail this man, he did it because of his loyalty to me. He did it because I need medical help, expensive help, so badly.” She rose, stood stiffly, and Sader knew that their talk was over.
He thanked her at the door. “I wish you might have known more,” he added. “You can never tell just what might trip them up.”
“I wish I knew who killed my son,” she said firmly. “Good-by, Mr. Sader and good luck.”
He went back to the car. He drove for almost thirty minutes before he was sure of the vacant house. He’d driven past twice, fast, noting the fuzzy lawn, advertising handbills on the porch, the real-estate sign on an iron peg near the steps. The house was about four blocks from Mullen’s home, almost in a direct line to the office. Somebody had acted quickly after the murder. Quickly and shrewdly. When a place was vacant, up for sale, nobody looked for a car in the garage.
He parked in the block to the east and sized things up. He spotted the cops at once. One of them was trimming a hedge in a yard across the street from the vacant house. The new overalls gave it away; Pettis should be more careful, Sader thought dryly. The other cop was peddling an ice-cream cart. He went around and around the block. Business was terrible and if he’d been a real ice-cream man he’d have left in a hurry.
Sader started the car and drove slowly, looking at house numbers as if he might be a tourist. The cop trimming the hedge gave him a hard look. Sader waved to him cheerfully. On the sign by the steps he read, FOR SALE. Reasonable. Low down payment. Call agent. Then he saw the telephone number painted at the bottom of the sign and his foot hit the brake so hard he was almost cut in two by the wheel.
The motor conked out. The cop trimming the hedge waddled out into the street and stared in at him. “Something wrong, bud?”
“I’m looking for a place to rent,” Sader said feebly.
The cop motioned with his hedge clippers. “You wanna see that place over there?”
“It’s for sale,” Sader pointed out. “I said, rent.”
“They might rent it.” The cop waited, eager for Sader to show some interest in the watched house. Sader decided he was bored clipping the hedge and wanted other work for a change. Like twisting somebody’s arm to make him talk.
“Well, I could take down the telephone number.” Sader, with elaborate ceremony, took out one of his cards, turned it over, and wrote down the Wanderley telephone number, under the cop’s stare. “I don’t much care for the yard though. Looks neglected.”
“Just needs mowing.” The cop stepped back. He was hot inside the stiff new overalls, Sader thought, and disappointed now too because Sader hadn’t expressed a wish to prowl around the vacant house. “It’s all okay otherwise.”
“I might be back, after I’ve telephoned the agent.”
Sader drove away. G
rim thoughts boiled in his head. You could have coincidences all in a row, he told himself, and be surprised over them—but all at once there was one too many. As he had told Mrs. Mullens such a short while before, you never knew when you were going to trip them up.
There was a brisk sea wind stirring the trees along Scotland Place. The blue horizon at the end of the street was full of sparkle. It was a wonderful day for a walk on the beach, Sader thought, or a drive. Especially a drive. He left the car at the curb and walked to the Wanderley door and rang. When Annie came, all starched and full of manners, he said, “I’ve got to see her.”
Annie took him inside without a word.
Kay was arranging a bowl of flowers on a cabinet in the living room. She turned as Sader came in. She was pale, he noticed; but she was wearing the rhinestones. They glittered cheerfully in the light from the terrace windows.
“Hello, Mr. Sader.” She put down the tawny chrysanthemums, smoothed the waist of the dress she wore, soft green silk that fell in pleated folds. She looked awfully young in that instant. About fifteen, Sader thought.
He went close to her. The thought of the dead woman in the sump, of young Ajoukian as he’d seen him soaked in oil, Mullens on the floor of his office—these were dim now, far away. And his anger over Dan ran out like water from a sieve. You had to forgive someone as young, as beautiful, as this. “Get your hat and coat. You’re coming with me.”
For a moment she looked at him as if trying to read something in his face. Then she went quickly from the room. When she came back she wore the little fur jacket, the velvet hat. “Where are we going?”
“A ride.”
They were almost in Santa Ana before she began to be worried. “Are you sure it’s all this way from town?”
“What?” Sader turned at an intersection, headed northeast on a through boulevard, his mind on the miles ahead.
“The thing—whatever it is—you want me to see.”
He shot a look sidewise. “There’s nothing for you to see.”
“Then—why come out here?”
“Don’t you know?”
Her gloved hands tightened on her little purse. The soft mouth grew tense. “No, I can’t imagine what you’re talking about.”
“They found the car,” he said gently. “Ajoukian’s car, hidden the night of the murders. Don’t you see what that means? Your mother had the place listed. She’d be one of the few people who’d know right away where to go.”
“I guess I just don’t understand. Are you still accusing Mother of some part in the crime?”
Was this a game? “No, not any more.”
“Then—what is it?”
“You knew the places she was trying to sell, didn’t you?”
“Most of them.”
“Figure it out, then.”
Several miles slipped past under the tires. They entered a long road overhung with giant pepper trees, this side of San Bernardino. The afternoon sun threw leafy patterns and the car fled through them, as if through ghostly interlacing fingers. Finally she asked, “Is there some sort of danger?”
“You should know,” he said dryly.
He sensed the unwilling fear that shook her. “Because of—of what happened to Dan?”
“I don’t want to think about him.”
She touched his arm. “How do you know? How can you be sure?”
“About you? Well, the idea had flickered through my mind more than once. That business with the dog had a funny ring to it. And then the delay about hiring anyone to look for her. Who told you to come to us, anyway?”
“Annie. She looked in the telephone book at the listings of private detectives. She thought the whole plan was disgusting, but since I was determined to have somebody—well, she had the idea your names, Sader and Scarborough, sounded like gentlemen.”
“What a shock she must have got,” Sader muttered.
She touched his arm again. “Do you know who it is?”
The leafy patterns flickered on the windshield. “Who what is?”
“That—that I’m in danger from.”
“Pettis.”
“But he’s a policeman!”
Sader glanced sidewise at her. She was so fresh, so achingly beautiful, it was all he could do to keep his hands on the wheel. Under his love and his desire for her burned other things—self-hatred, mostly—but these he crushed down. “Didn’t Pettis ask questions about that vacant house on the Hill?”
“The one Mother had listed to sell? Yes, he did. He asked for her account book, too, and he wanted to know how much I had kept track of what she did. In a business way.”
“And you got out of it?”
“Out of what?”
Sader jammed the wheel in a circle, whirling the car into a side road, a dirt track that led between alfalfa fields to a row of packing sheds in the distance. There was no sign of life near them; there was just the imperishable green of the alfalfa, a smell of mowing, the sunlight, the whisper of the pepper trees behind them. Sader turned in the seat as the car rolled to a stop, gripped Kay’s shoulders, pulled her close. She gasped as his lips closed over hers.
There was a welling of pressure, a pounding, in his head. He was rough, savage with her, because all that hatred, the despair worse than sickness, was suddenly directed against Kay, against her softness, her youth and fragrance. He tore at her lips as if he were tearing a net.
She tried to fight loose, and he sensed the scream bottled in her throat. He circled her neck with his arm, forcing her small head up so that their mouths still clung.
Time was a spiral, whirling down into disaster, an eternity of loathing for her and for himself; and inside that spiral, they were ageless, she was as old as he. Her sins had caught up with his years.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
AT HALF past three they were climbing the grade of Cajon Pass, beyond San Bernardino. The air blowing in through the car windows had lost the smell of the city, of cultivated gardens. In it were odors of sun-baked earth and scrubby sage and the far-off dusty pockets of the desert. Ahead lay the long straight asphalt streak to Las Vegas.
Kay sat as far from Sader as she could get. She looked small and huddled in her corner. The hat had fallen off during their struggle earlier and she hadn’t put it on again. Her bruised lips were puffed. She didn’t talk.
Beyond Cajon Pass, feeling the warmth, Sader pulled into a roadside stand, bought Cokes, removed his outer coat. She took the Coke when he put it in through the window. She drank it without looking at Sader.
“It’s going to be hot,” he said. “Take off your jacket.”
She didn’t move, so he opened the door and pulled the jacket off her shoulders, down over her arms. She moved the bottled drink from one hand to the other; otherwise she might not have known what Sader was doing. He folded the little coat, put it on the back seat.
“I’m sorry I was rough with you.”
She turned her head, not answering, not forgiving.
He said, “I’ll tell you what I have planned. We’ll go to Las Vegas, head north through Nevada, cut over and turn south and go into Mexico by way of El Paso. They’ll be looking for us at Tijuana and Mexicali. I think we’ll get by them as far east as El Paso.”
“Why are you doing this?”
“I guess you know my reasons now.”
“Please take me home, Mr. Sader.” She sounded like a child.
“I can’t. Pettis is wise by now. He’d have had some kind of watch on you. Some cop phoned in when you left with me. They know we headed out of town.” He took the empty bottles back into the damply air-conditioned café, returned to the car, turned again into the highway.
Some miles further she said in a strangled voice, “You think I killed my mother!”
The sun was behind them. Its warmth lay in the car like the purring presence of some animal. Sader opened his shirt collar. “I don’t care what you did. I don’t even worry because you shot Dan. Not any more.”
“I wouldn’t do such
things! I loved my mother. I thought Dan was one of the nicest people I’d ever met.”
“What you thought of them didn’t stand in your way.”
“You must be crazy!”
“Skip it. I don’t want to argue.” Mostly, he thought, I don’t want to have to run through it again, out loud, when I’ve tortured myself with it a hundred times since this trip began. All the reasons it had to be you——
Who could have impersonated Mrs. Wanderley well enough to clinch the later identification by the cab driver?
Whose guilt would have made Dan angry, as angry as he’d been on the phone, drumming words into Sader’s ears that Sader didn’t want to believe?
Who could have hurried home, smart enough to be there to answer a check up after Dan had been shot in the office?
Who had the motive?
Money could do a lot of things in this world. It could build you a castle, Sader told himself—or a dungeon. It could make you hungry for more. It could make you afraid of losing what you had, so that you were glad your wealthy mother no longer looked at men nor dallied with the idea of a second marriage. It could make you so suspicious that you killed when you found her alone with someone you took for a lover.
All of them straws, blowing in an inexorable wind. . . .
But the thing that completed it, tied it up tight, was Ajoukian’s car in the garage of the vacant house. The car had been hidden by someone in a hell of a rush, Sader figured—someone who had to get it away before its presence called attention to the sump. The person who moved it had known precisely where to go.
As Kay would have known. . . .
He looked at the buff-colored landscape ahead, the flat empty valley through which the highway was drawn taut as wire, the fringes of rocky hills on the horizon, the shimmering mist of heat. It would be like this all the way into Las Vegas, excepting the brief oases of the little towns. He settled himself for the grind.
She asked finally, “When we get to Las Vegas may I call Annie?”
“Of course you can’t. It would spoil everything.”
Sleep with Strangers Page 17