Severed Key

by Nielsen, Helen

  “You!” she gasped.

  “No hard feelings,” Travis said. “Besides, we can’t fight. We’re not married yet.”

  Nature had been generous with Nita. Long black hair hung loosely on her shoulders. Her eyes were large and sable brown and her dark skin had no need of cosmetics. She tossed her head angrily. “Yet!” she scoffed.

  “It’s in the air,” Travis said. “Romance! Can’t you feel it?” He grabbed for her waist but she quickly stepped aside. Shrugging, Travis dropped to one knee and placed the guitar on the sand. He poured coffee into one of the ceramic mugs Nita had taken out of the picnic basket and was dousing the cup with a stream of condensed milk when Bob, hair tousled and eyes blurred with sleep, stepped out of the van.

  “Hail the happy bridegroom!” Travis cried. “How was it, man? Any better with a piece of paper?”

  “Romance!” Nita scoffed. “I know all you ever think of!”

  “All you ever think of!” Travis retorted. “Girls don’t fool me. I’ve seen those magazines you read. What’s the matter, Bobby boy? You look hung over.”

  Bob grinned sheepishly. “Must be that cheap wine we drank after the wedding. How did you make out sleeping on the beach?”

  “I didn’t,” Travis said. “Yonder on lonely army blanket is where I spent the night. Nita took the sleeping bag and slept in front of the van. I guess she was afraid we might pull out and leave her.”

  “That was not what I was afraid of,” Nita said tightly. “How do you like your eggs—sunny side up or over?”

  “Sunny likes them over,” Bob answered.

  “Oh, wow! We can see who’s going to wear the jeans in this family,” Travis scoffed.

  “And I like them over,” Bob added.

  “There, you see? A perfect match. You can bet Dear Abbey never hears from either of you.” Travis gulped the coffee which was scalding hot, grimaced and managed another swallow. “Now, me, I have a problem.”

  “We know that,” Bob said. “You have mouth trouble. You talk too much.”

  “I have a problem,” Travis continued, “trying to convince this lovely lady that I’m serious. Zonked about her. Way out.”

  Bob winked and Nita smiled in return.

  “And what’s more important, that I’m a man of means—”

  “I said you talk too much!” Bob said sharply.

  “—and talent. Did you know that I’m a song writer, Nita? You didn’t? Well, don’t let that bother you because nobody else knows it yet—but they will! Listen, I pulled this one out of my head last night when I was fighting that crawly blanket.” He put down the cup of coffee and picked up the guitar. He strummed an introductory chord and began to sing:

  “Don’t know where I’m goin’

  Got no way to tell

  Am I goin’ up to heaven

  Am I headin’ straight for—

  Well, I’m movin’, movin’ movin’ movin’ on.”

  “Sounds like a calf I raised when I was a kid,” Bob said.

  “Sounds more like a bull,” Nita suggested.

  “Jealousy! That’s all it is. Jealousy!” Travis stalked down the beach kicking flurries of sand before him in mock anger as he walked. He looked back and saw Sunny, wearing faded jeans and a bikini top, emerge from the van and run to greet Bob. They embraced, wrestled playfully, and then Bob left her to help Nita with the breakfast and came down the beach to where Travis was watching the sea.

  “The girls want to stay over another day,” he said. “But I told them we had to get back to our jobs. We left that suitcase buried in the garage. If we stay away too long we might have prowlers.”

  “Now you’re beginning to think like a family man,” Travis said.

  “I don’t know about that. I’m beginning to think that money’s more trouble than it’s worth. And I don’t mean because I had to marry Sunny—that part’s a groove. But I worry about the money—especially when you start sounding off about what a man of means you are just to impress a chick.”

  “What did I say?” Travis howled. “Anyway, I have to do something. She turned puritan on me last night when I was hot as a pistol for her. Someday that chick’s going to get her neck broken.”

  “Forget it.”

  “Forget it? Listen, Roberto, give me another day—no, two or three hours with Nita and I’ll have her purring like a kitten.”

  “Maybe so, but not here. Today we’re going home.”

  “I’d like to stop in Tijuana a while on my way back.”

  “Man, your head is really O.D.! You’re not picking up any horse this trip. All we need is for you to get busted before we get that letter from Morry and take off for Brazil.”

  “Okay, okay. I won’t even pick up a little grass if you’re running that scared.”

  “I’m running that scared. And for all of our sakes, I hope you’re running that scared too.”

  And then Travis looked at him in that angry way he had the first time they talked about the money. “I’ll tell you how I’m running,” he said. “I figured it out while I was in ‘nam. It’s like everybody in the world is trying to prove he’s alive. Everybody is yelling, ‘I’m here! Look at me, I’m here!’ Only most of them stutter a little and never get the words out before they’re dead and somebody’s putting a stone over their grave that says, ‘He was here.’ Well, that ain’t going to happen to me. I am here and people are going to know it before I die. You better believe it! So don’t you talk about that money being trouble. There’s no way of getting out of this deal. No way!”

  The girls called down to them to come back to the fire and get their breakfasts, and Bob waved and yelled back that they were coming. It wasn’t much of a honeymoon but he planned to make up for that when they were in the clear with the money. Just how he would explain it to Sunny was a hurdle to take when he came to it.

  “Then it’s settled,” he said. “We start back right after breakfast and no stops on the way?”

  Travis shrugged. “Okay, man. I don’t hanker to get sent up to Q. That on-the-job training they give in making licence plates doesn’t have much of a future. Hey, you want to hear the rest of my song?” He strummed the guitar as they walked back to the fire and sang another stanza:

  “A preacher man in Dallas

  Said I ought to settle down

  Ought to prove myself a man

  With roots that go way down

  But ‘til the day they plant me

  Six feet under ground I’ll be movin’, movin’ movin’,

  Movin’ on—”

  He finished with a rebel yell and ran the rest of the way. He was a wild man, Bob thought, and there was no way of knowing what a wild man might do.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  A BRIGHT CONE of light focused on the silver screen at the far side of the room, and then the film began to roll through the projector. An incredibly lovely face, framed with luxurious blonde hair, appeared in an expertly lit close-up. Large, adoring eyes pondered a tube of name brand shampoo prominently displayed in a carefully manicured hand. Moist lips trembled as the sensuously husky voice proclaimed that this preparation alone was responsible for the sexual success that nature had made mandatory even if the actress chose to go bald. For a period of sixty seconds the young Nordic goddess turned her head, tossed the mane of shimmering hair and finally closed the thickly accented declamation with a smile calculated to send all impressionable teenagers sprinting to the nearest cosmetic counter.

  The film clip ended. The screen remained silver except for the fine whisp of smoke coiling up from a cigarette that made a tiny red glow in the shadows beyond the projector.

  “Play the nudie bit again, Chester,” Hannah directed.

  “You sound like a dirty old lady,” Chester said.

  “Don’t be silly! I merely want to get another look at the way she walks.”

  The next clip was a bath oil commercial. Discreetly lit and protected by a fine shim curtain, the same actress appeared, au naturel, at the edge of the rus
tic lily pond while the low-pitched background voice explained the therapeutic advantages of a new discovery distilled from the oil of rare mountain blossoms. There was no close-up in this commercial, but an almost total exposure of everything else.

  When the clip was finished, Chester asked: “Do you want the sauna bath bit again?”

  “No, that’s enough.”

  “Aw, let’s have it again. I like the part where she rolled in the snow and squealed. I’ll bet that scene sold saunas to people who don’t even have houses.”

  As the sauna commercial began to roll, a door opened behind the cigarette glow and a shaft of light fell momentarily across the screen. The door closed. Behind the accented tones of the voice of the actress came the unmistakeable crunch of dry crackers and the pungent aroma of pickled herring.

  “Sacrilege!” Chester cried.

  The girl on the screen, having completed her verbal orgasm, rose from the sauna bench and plunged into a bank of synthetic snow squealing with sensual delight. The clip ended and Chester sighed.

  “Turn on the lights,” Hannah ordered. “We’ve been invaded.”

  “I hope it isn’t the vice squad,” Chester said.

  “If it is, run the latest newsreel of the atrocity of the day. I understand that war is rated G.”

  Chester touched the light switch and both he and Hannah turned towards the door against which Simon leaned, crackers and herring in one hand and an opened bottle of beer in the other. He had a wide grease stain across the front of his jacket, a purple bruise on one cheek and a black eye-patch over his left eye.

  “Let me guess,” Chester mused. “He has too much hair to be Moshe Dayan. It must be the guy who sells shirts.”

  Hannah plunged the smouldering cigarette into an ashtray and, using her cane for leverage, got up from a throne-like Victorian peacock chair. “Simon, you’ve been in a fight!” she cried. “And you lost!”

  Simon grinned. “Wrong—both times. I was almost mugged and it was a tie.”

  “Mugged? Where? By whom?”

  “In an underground garage. I don’t know who it was. The man got away.”

  “What happened to your eye?”

  “Nothing drastic. I took the edge of a blackjack on my left cheek and I have a beautiful shiner under this patch. Don’t ever get mugged in a major hotel. Management is so afraid of a law suit they turn every MD in the place loose on you. I kind of like the patch, though. It makes me look distinguished.” Simon drank from the beer bottle and nodded towards the screen across the room. “What’s been going on?” he asked. “An evening with the late Sigrid Thorsen?”

  “A command performance,” Chester said. “Right after we talked on the telephone this morning, Hannah came down from her bachelor-watching perch and sent me out to see an old flame in the commercial flick industry. It pays to have influential friends, Simon. I came back with three vintage Thorsens which have been yanked from circulation because the agency fears adverse public reaction now that the lady is dead. My own feeling is that fate dealt Sigrid a very nasty blow. She had a future.”

  “Also, a past,” Simon said.

  Hannah brightened. “The man’s been rolling in more than one kind of dirt. Give, Simon. Give!”

  “Not necessarily dirt,” Simon said, “—statistics. But I’ve been working all day and come home to a dinner of crackers and cold beer. There must be a steak down in the freezer somewhere, Chester.”

  “There is.”

  “Good. Take the chill off in the broiler while I shower and get into something clean, and then we’ll all sit down and play find the hidden faces. You haven’t heard from Jack Keith, have you?”

  “Not a whisper.”

  “The law?”

  “I still think the telephone’s tapped.”

  “You’re probably right.” Simon deposited the empty beer bottle next to Hannah’s ashtray and moved towards the door. “And don’t put that projector away,” he added. “I’d like to see that rolling-in-the-snow scene again myself.”

  Later, after dinner, Simon, in slacks and sweater, relaxed in Hannah’s sitting room, which was also the projection room, and related as much of his day’s work as he thought appropriate to tell. It was when he described his conversation with the detective in New York that Hannah became interested.

  “So Sigrid was involved with Juan Sandovar!” she exclaimed. “The Scandinavians have always had a weakness for Latins.”

  “Most girls do have a weakness for a man with a few hundred million,” Chester said. “But I thought she was going to marry Arne Lundberg—who probably never made more than $150 a week in his life.”

  Hannah smiled. “It does sound like an old movie script, doesn’t it? Beautiful girl spurns rich lover for the poor boy from back home. Actually, I’m sure it was the other way around. Deposed dictators and their heirs are like royalty. They never marry unless there’s a political advantage to the liaison. Sigrid probably needed a friendly shoulder to lean on when the affair began to cool.”

  “You’re both missing the point,” Simon said. “Don’t you get the picture? Sandovar—now you’ve got me calling him that—Sands had a flight reservation booked by a syndicate-owned travel agency. Sigrid, booked by the same agency, was making the same flight a week later. Sands cancelled and gave his ticket to Sigrid. Sands flew to Las Vegas instead of Los Angeles, but came on the same day Sigrid was due. Both had reservations—not together, by the way—at the same hotel.”

  “And Sigrid didn’t tell her boyfriend of her change of plans,” Chester added.

  “Right. That’s what makes it all so interesting—that and the fact that Angie Cerva met Sandovar at the airport.”

  “Where Jack Keith spotted them,” Hannah said.

  “And his trouble began.”

  “I thought Keith’s trouble began when he received the letter from Stockholm.”

  “In a sense, you’re right. One of the last things Keith told me on the telephone was that he thought he knew who sent that letter. If he did find out that much it could explain the dead woman in his bed.”

  “A frame,” Chester suggested.

  “Or a warning.”

  “Maybe he killed her,” Hannah said dryly.

  She had a sheaf of stills in her lap—glossies of Sigrid Thorsen that Chester had dug up from the same source that delivered the film. She seemed more interested in them than the conversation—listening with one ear while she sipped her after-dinner Drambuie.

  “That stuff’s getting too strong for you,” Simon said tersely. “Keith’s no psycho. He would only kill in self-defence, and I’ve never known him to defend himself from an attractive woman. And even if he was involved in something we know nothing about—would such a resourceful guy strangle a woman and leave her in his own bed? Let’s give him credit for some instinct of self-preservation!”

  “You said ‘warning’,” Chester reminded. “A warning of what?”

  “Of what would happen to him if he didn’t drop the case. Of course, a police search for him is also an effective way of hampering his freedom of movement. If I only knew what he was on to, I might know where to look for him.”

  “No clues?” Hannah asked.

  “Two. Keith spotted two men at LAX who were watching Cerva when he met Sands. He said—still says—they were detectives. I feel sure they weren’t. I met them in San Diego and they’re both with the Atomic Energy Commission.”

  “Doesn’t the AEC have investigators?” Chester asked.

  “Of course it does. But why in the devil would they be interested in a syndicate banker—?” Simon paused, reflecting. “Costello,” he said, slowly, drawing out the name like an old memory beginning to surface through the confusion of time. “That’s what Keith said to the New York agent: ‘Maybe they pulled a Costello twist.’ I assumed he was referring to some case he’d worked on, but there’s no way of getting to his files with his apartment under police guard. Now it occurs to me that he may have been thinking about something quite differe
nt. If you two charming people can get along without me for a few minutes, I’m going to crack a book or two in my library.”

  “Cheers!” Chester cried. “Now I can look at the films again!”

  “Not without me!”

  Chagrined, Chester turned to Hannah. “Don’t you want to see them again?”

  Hannah shook her head. “Not necessary,” she said. “And I have some research work, too.” She shuffled the photos and made a terse judgement. “I think she’s wearing a wig.”

  “That sounds a little catty,” Simon said.

  “Of course it does. That’s one of the privileges of being, shall we say, mature? We have to get our fun some way.”

  “You were having plenty of fun this morning up on the balcony with those binoculars,” Chester said. “By the way, I’ve met the new neighbour and he could use a wig. He’s getting bald.”

  “Bald! That’s a cruel word, Chester. Mr Bernardi has a middle-aged natural, that’s all.”

  Simon went to the library and remained there for half an hour. When he returned to Hannah’s study, she was nowhere in sight and Chester was working with the projector.

  “Well?” Chester queried, “did you learn anything?”

  “Quite a bit,” Simon said. “Does the name Frank Costello mean anything to you?”

  “Of course it does. He’s one of the underworld biggies.”

  “That’s what the books say. It seems he made a lot of his early income smuggling gems. One of his lieutenants was killed in an airline crash years ago and scattered over half a million dollars’ worth of gems all over the desert. Now, as I read it, a ‘Costello twist’ could mean that Keith thought that seat reservation switch was planned. Angie Cerva is watched everywhere he goes, but he met Johnny Sands, or Sandovar, out in the open where everybody could see.”