“But she’ll be worried!”
Sader shot her a frowning glance. “She won’t even answer the phone. Pettis will pick up that receiver. He’ll hear your voice, he’ll trace the call, and where will you be?”
“I’m afraid of you,” she cried. “I want to go home!”
“Afraid of me?” He laughed incredulously. “Don’t you know what’s waiting for you back there?” The car crested a long rise, dipped into another empty vista exactly like the one they’d left. The traffic, week-end gamblers coming back to L.A. after a fling in Las Vegas, began to thicken heavily. “I’ve got a friend in Las Vegas who’ll cash a check for me,” Sader mused, thinking out loud. “We’re going to need money. I can leave him a power of attorney and he can sell my share of the business.”
“Don’t do that!”
“Why not?”
“This trip is meaningless, Mr. Sader. I didn’t kill anyone. I don’t have to run away! I’m sure Mr. Pettis has no suspicions of me.”
“He’s pretty cute that way,” Sader put in.
“No, I’m convinced he believed in my innocence. Why should I kill my mother? She was moody and difficult, yes; she had a sickness of the mind. But we don’t execute sick people.”
“It was the money,” Sader said firmly, out of his own belief.
“Mother’s money? There was plenty for both of us. My father’s will took care of me separately, anyway.”
There was no place to draw off the road so Sader just rolled to a stop where he was, in the right lane of traffic, and let the honking cars dart around him. “You don’t have to fool me, Kay. Get this straight. I’m not condemning you for what you did. Maybe you were a little crazy, too, from living with your boozy mother. She’d caused you to cut off all normal social life, to give up your friends, to live in dread of disgrace.”
When he had pulled up, alarm flared in her face and she retreated into the corner, flattening herself on the door. “Please. . . .”
He kept his hands on the wheel. “I’m not going to touch you. I’ll never touch you again unless you ask me to. Somewhere along the line we’d better get married, because of the legal aspects of the trip into Mexico. But you can call it a marriage of convenience. That’s what it will be.”
Her gray eyes were big, searching. After a minute she said, “Are you doing this because—because you think that you’re in love with me?” There was sudden softness in her tone; and something that Sader thought, with a flare of dread, might almost be pity.
Pity was one thing he couldn’t take. Deliberately he made his tone hard, amused. “Well, I hadn’t quite figured it as—love.”
Her face grew scarlet, she turned her head and the argument was over. She didn’t look at him again. The hours ticked away on the clock on the dash; the miles fled under the tires. The sun began to draw far down in the west; there was coolness in the air and shadows lay long on the bare floor of the desert.
He turned on the car radio. Jazz bumped out, hot, compelling. If Kay heard it—and she could scarcely have helped this—she responded by not so much as the twitch of a muscle.
. . . He’ll be big and strong
The man I love . . .
Sader punched a button, cutting off the sultry voice. There was news now. The news was about world-shaking things, armies marching, spies and secrets, elections, floods, famines. There was no mention of Long Beach, the town that had grown up from a village by the sea, a city with a hill in the middle of it, sprouting oil derricks like a forest of pins. There was no mention of murders, anywhere.
. . . He’ll be big and strong
The man I love . . .
Crazy. He’d punched the same station back again. Sader clicked off the radio. Kay said quietly, “Didn’t it occur to you that I might not want to marry you because there was somebody else?”
“Another man? No, I hadn’t thought of it.”
His clipped tone dismissed the subject. If Kay had had someone in love with her, he’d have been around during these last few days, during the search for her mother. Kay was trying to confuse him. She wanted to go back—funny kid—and get herself strapped into that chair in San Quentin’s gas chamber.
The lights of a big roadside restaurant began to glow bright through the dusk ahead. Sader said, “I’ve got to have some coffee. How about some dinner for you?”
“I’m not hungry, thank you.”
He pulled in under a neon archway to a graveled lot. This was Nevada. Through the big windows he could see a row of slot machines, some customers who couldn’t wait for Las Vegas putting in dimes and quarters, pulling the levers to the thump of the jukebox wailing a torch tune.
He killed the motor, took the keys with him. Inside was a big half-finished barnlike room, half of it given over to the slots and a covered crap table, the other half a soda fountain and lunch counter. He stepped up, asked for a carton of coffee to take with him.
The kid behind the counter, eighteen or so, towheaded, wearing a white apron too big for him, shook his head. “Sorry. All out of them. Give you a clean can if it has to go. Would that do?”
“Sure.”
The door opened behind Sader. There were three men at the other end of the counter and by the way they stared Sader knew that the newcomer must be Kay. The waiter, too, was eying the door. Sader turned around. She stood under the fan at the entry, and the stirring air caught her blond hair and twisted it. Sader hadn’t realized how tired she looked until now. She came over to the counter and said to the waiter, “Do you have a telephone?”
“Yes, miss. Booth’s back there.” He pointed to the corner behind the crap table.
“I’ll need some change.” She handed the waiter a five dollar bill.
“Excuse me while I get her some change,” the waiter said to Sader. The tone dismissed Sader’s desire for coffee as being of little importance to this lovely girl’s need for money with which to phone.
She walked to the booth. Sader followed her. She stepped into the cubicle, started to pull the door shut. Sader’s foot was in the way. “Please go away, Mr. Sader.”
“Give me a chance. Give me until Las Vegas. You can telephone Annie there, if you have to.”
“If you don’t take your foot out of the door, I’ll complain to the clerk. He’ll help me.”
Yes, the towheaded kid would probably lay down his life, Sader thought. He’d die for stirring blond hair, for big gray eyes, for a figure as softly rounded as a ripe peach. Sader took his foot away. He went back to the counter. The waiter brought a tin can with coffee in it, newspaper-wrapped to hold the heat, to protect the hands. Sader paid for the coffee, went out to the car. It was growing dark now. There was a definite chill in the air. On the desert it was like that, he remembered. Hot days, cold nights. He propped the coffee on the seat, shrugged into his coat. Then he got in behind the wheel, sipped coffee, waited.
She ran out of the café and the fright in her reached him, all the way across the dark lot. It was something animal-like, primitive, about the way she held her head, too high, and the goad that plunged her toward the car. He turned the key in the switch, tossed the coffee out in one move. She fumbled at the door on the other side, then fell in, fell against Sader, hung there frozen.
He didn’t try to drive. “What is it?”
“Annie.”
He tried to push her back, to see her face. “What do you mean?”
“The police have been in my house. They think I’m guilty. Annie knows. She told me to keep on going.”
It jarred. Sader couldn’t say why—the advice was exactly what he’d been giving Kay all afternoon, indirectly—but having someone else tell this girl to run was like the stroke of a file against a nerve.
He felt other things in that moment, too. He was aware of the pain in his shoulder, where Ott had chopped him with the cleaver. The arm had ached all afternoon, but he’d ignored it, forced usefulness from the almost nerveless hand. Now the pain surged back, along with a dragging sense of being old and exhausted.
He seemed drowning in a terrible tide which lashed from him the last vestiges of youth. Kay’s clinging arms, her young freshness, offered no foothold in that current. He’d been young once, yes; but that was over. It was really and finally over. The bitter truth was that he was now a tired man with gray in his hair, with the beginning of a stoop, and no amount of frenzy or cunning, no wishing, or of forcing his love upon the girl, could bring back that which had gone forever.
There must be a time like this in everyone’s life, he thought numbly. When all your illusions go down the drain. When you see at last what you have lost. When you reach out for someone like Kay and feel the barrier you never knew was there, the wall made of years.
He wanted to beat at something, to rip, to tear. Instead he pushed Kay gently away, closed the door behind her, reached for her jacket on the back seat, and fixed it across her shoulders. “You didn’t kill them.”
“No,” she whispered.
“Don’t be afraid, then. We’ll go into Las Vegas—it isn’t far now. I’ll do some telephoning. We’ll decide what to do.”
Her voice shook with the effort to control her fear. “I don’t want to go to Mexico.”
“We aren’t going to Mexico. I guess we never were. Funny.” He started the motor; the car crept out toward the road. The lights ahead were like a string of fireflies in the night. In less than an hour they should see the glow from Las Vegas. “Try to get some sleep.”
“No, I want to talk. Why were you so sure I’d murdered Mother?”
“For several reasons.” Leaning on the wheel, he rubbed the side of his head. The lights dazzled his eyes, there was a headache through his temples. “It seemed to stack up. The cab driver must by now have identified your mother as the woman he took out to Veterans’ Hospital Wednesday morning. If he hadn’t, if there was a question of imposture, it should have come out. It hasn’t. And yet, the way I figure, your mother was dead that Wednesday morning at five o’clock.”
“Do you think I resemble her that much?”
“I was surprised,” Sader said. He wished he’d drunk all the coffee, or had some aspirin with him.
“What was the purpose of all this?”
“Oh, I think the trip in the cab was supposed to draw attention from the Hill, from that sump. Just as hiding young Ajoukian’s car was meant to do.”
“What about the coat?”
“Thrown in later. The next night, perhaps.” He forced himself away from the wheel, tried to sit straight, think straight. “Of course, if the plan had succeeded, if your mother and young Ajoukian hadn’t been discovered for weeks——”
She was silent, hating, he knew, the picture conjured up by his words.
“Wait——” Catching the fugitive idea that haunted him was like chasing a goldfish. It darted, slithered away, and he was distracted by the flashing lights that stung his eyes, then poured on into the dark. “If the murderer’s plan had worked, the identification by the cab driver wouldn’t have meant anything. All he really remembered was a fur coat, a scarf, a woman who gave her name in the process of raising hell so he’d remember her. Without a corpse in good condition——”
“Please——”
He drove on in silence, exploring the possibilities. The killer couldn’t have expected young Ajoukian and Mrs. Wanderley to be found so quickly. If the bodies had remained hidden, if their fate had been merely a matter for speculation——
He let the picture fill itself in.
Among the people who knew these two, there would have been gradual changes. Those who loved them would have faced a slow encroachment of despair. Those to whom their absence meant advantage would have gradually moved more into the open.
With Felicia Wanderley gone, old Ajoukian’s purchase of the oil shares would have proceeded without notice. Ott would have received his cut. Ott’s duplex could admittedly have been sold and off the market. Milton would have had relief from her tirades about the pigs.
What about young Ajoukian?
Sader thought to himself that the situation might be complicated by factors of which he knew nothing; but from present knowledge Ajoukian, Jr.’s absence seemed to benefit nobody. His father had been frantic with worry—up until Sader’s final visit, when the old man was consoling himself with the thought that his bright boy could look after himself. The young widow had appeared at all times normally anxious, though finally not overcome with grief. Many people suffered deeply from loss without visible sign, and she could be one of them. Be fair to her, Sader reminded himself. It’s not everyone has to live with a cantankerous mummy, and a gorilla.
The appellation reminded Sader of something Dan had said at the beginning, that young Ajoukian was the type who might like to leap on women out of dark corners just for kicks. Dan had sized him up as having a brutal streak. Put that idea alongside the facts about Mrs. Wanderley, her violent and drunken mood on Tuesday night.
The only wonder was that they hadn’t killed each other.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
KAY WAS watching him from her corner. “What are you thinking about?”
“Young Ajoukian.” He took out cigarettes, offered Kay one, lit both with the lighter from the dash. “Dan worked on that angle. He has information I need.” The first call from Las Vegas, he told himself, would be to the hospital.
“If his car had been hidden where you say it was, in that house Mother had listed to sell, it could mean simply that the murderer was familiar with the neighborhood.”
“Yes, that must be it.”
She went on, her tone very serious. “If the murderer posed as Mother to the cab driver, it——”
“Wait a minute,” Sader interrupted. “Let’s don’t jump to that conclusion. The murderer may have had a friend. The friend may possibly have carried through the impersonation without realizing its import.”
“That’s asking a lot of friendship,” she protested. “I wouldn’t do a thing like that unless I knew its purpose.”
“Suppose the murderer had a hold over the woman——”
“You mean, you think the murderer is a man?”
“I haven’t any evidence, one way or another. I don’t think your mother and young Ajoukian stood precisely on the rim of that sump to argue about the sale of Mrs. Cole’s oil shares. Nearby—perhaps. It would have taken some strength to have dragged them up that embankment and pitched them in.”
“Mother was slender, almost frail.”
Sader turned briefly to glance at her, to rest his eyes from the spinning lights. She’d tucked her legs under her. The soft green silk was drawn tight across her slender knees. Above the deep V of her blouse, her throat had a creamy pallor. Sader said, “Ajoukian was young, well-built, husky. Six foot tall at least, judging by what I saw of him stretched on the embankment. Well-muscled shoulders. A bear of a fellow.” With a shock, Sader realized that his tone had been etched with envy.
“If you thought I killed him, and Mother, then you must have believed I could have tugged him up that bank, somehow.”
“It would have taken time.”
“But it wouldn’t have been impossible.”
“No, I guess it wouldn’t.”
The glow from Las Vegas’ Strip, the long arm of luxury casinos and hotels that reached out toward the migrating suckers from L.A., began to light up the sky ahead. Soon the car raced between neon-lit palaces, the Sands, Sahara, Flamingo, Last Frontier. Ahead was the whiter conflagration of the downtown district. Sader pulled into a service station, left the car by the pumps to be filled, went over to the telephone booth beside the station door. Kay followed him, as he previously had followed her. He left the door open, however. She stood listening while he put through the call to the hospital.
This was another nurse, softer-voiced, more co-operative. She said, “Yes, Mr. Sader—Mr. Scarborough did become conscious, though briefly. He’s resting easily now. He’s still in danger, of course, but Dr. Heffelmaier seems to think he’ll pull through.”
“Tha
t’s wonderful!” Sader was aware of sudden warm gratitude toward these people, unknown to him or to Dan, who’d given time and skill to saving Dan’s life. “I was wondering, though—did he say anything?”
“Dr. Heffelmaier seemed to think that what he said may have been meant for you. Considering the circumstances, you know.”
“And what was it?” Sader asked, burning with impatience.
“The little we are sure of is quite brief.” She seemed to be apologizing. “Mostly, Mr. Scarborough spoke incoherently. At one point his voice took on definite emphasis. He said, ‘I’m telling you—it’s the week. . . .’ ”
“The week?” Sader repeated.
“I took it to mean a length of time. Though there’s another meaning. And he added the words, slim ankles, a little later.”
“That was all?”
“I’m sorry. Yes.”
“Is anyone keeping a watch over him?” Sader asked suddenly. “I mean, in case of another attack——”
“There is a police officer at his door,” she said.
“Thank you.”
“You’re welcome, Mr. Sader.”
He stepped from the booth, lit a cigarette for Kay, for himself, tried to think it through. Over by the pumps, the car was getting its windshield cleaned, its oil checked. The traffic headed westward was a steadily thickening stream.
“What will you do now?” Kay wondered.
“Go back,” Sader told her.
“Have you found out something?”
“Yes, I guess so.” He took a long look at the glow of Las Vegas, the pool of light that dimmed the stars overhead. He’d had some crazy plans back there, he thought. Marrying Kay, taking her to Mexico. On what?
He turned his back on the town, on what it might have meant to him and now never could, and touched Kay’s elbow, guiding her to the car.
He left Kay in the rear booth of an all-night café on Atlantic. “Order something to eat. Take your time over it. In about an hour, go home in a cab. I’ll have it whipped by then—or never.”
Her gaze on Sader was calm, confident. You had to look close to see any sign of her being up all night. There were fine lines drawn around her eyes, but they’d be gone after an hour or so of steep. To Sader the bitter grainy itch of exhaustion seemed ground into his bones. Age, Papa, he thought, talking to himself in Dan’s voice. You’re getting old. He felt her hand, touching his softly. “Come to my house later,” she was saying.
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