“Where does he come from?”
“I wouldn’t know that,” she said. “He’s some kind of South American, I think. My employer made the mistake of giving him the combination to the safe. I warned him not to. So what happens? Mr. so-called Martel takes off with a fortune in bearer bonds, which Harry and me—and I are trying to get back.”
“Why not the police?”
She was ready with an answer. “My employer has a soft spot in his head for Mr. Martel. Also our business is highly confidential.”
“What is your business?”
“I’m not in a position to reveal that,” she said carefully. She shifted the position of her body, as if its substantiality and symmetry might divert my attention from the jerry-built flimsiness of her story. “My employer has sworn me to secrecy.”
“What’s his name?”
“You’d know his name if I could tell it to you. He’s a very important and well-heeled man in certain circles.”
“The lower circles of hell?”
“What?” But I think she heard me.
She pouted, and frowned a little with her thin painted-on eyebrows. She didn’t frown very hard because that gave girls wrinkles and besides I might kill her and she didn’t want to die with a frown on her lovely face.
“If you’d take me seriously and help to get that money back, etcetera, I’m sure my employer would reward you handsomely. I’d be grateful, too.”
“I’d have to know more about it,” such as what she meant by “etcetera.”
“Sure,” she said. “Naturally. Are you going to help me?”
“We’ll see. Have you given up on Harry?”
“I didn’t say that.”
But her green eyes were surprised. I think in her concentration on me and on her story—her late late movie story—she had forgotten Harry. The room provided roles for only two people. I guessed what mine would be if we stayed in it much longer. Her body was purring at me like a tiger, the proverbial kind of tiger which is dangerous to mount and even more dangerous to dismount.
“I’m worried about Harry,” I said. “Have you seen him today?”
She shook her head. Her hair flared out like fire. The wind, momentarily louder than the music, was whining at the window.
“He was talking about buying a gun this afternoon.”
“What for?” Gun talk seemed to frighten her basically.
“To use on Martel, I think. Martel gave him a bad time today. He ran him off with a gun and smashed his camera.” I produced the flattened camera from my pocket.
She brooded over it. “That camera cost me a hundred and fifty bucks. I ought to’ve known better than to trust Harry.”
“Maybe the picture bit wasn’t a good idea. Martel is allergic to cameras. What’s his real name, by the way?”
“I don’t know. He keeps using different names.” She changed the subject back to Harry: “You think Harry got hurt or something?”
“It’s possible. His car is parked on the boulevard about half a mile from here, with the key in it.”
She jerked herself upright. “Why didn’t you say so?”
“I just did.”
“Show it to me.”
She picked up her radio and bag, got her coat out of the closet, and put it on while we were waiting for the elevator. It may have been the noise of the elevator, or the radio, or some perpetual signal which her body sent out, but when she crossed the lobby with me all three of the sharpies were watching from the curtained doorway of the Samoa Room.
We drove along the boulevard. The rising wind buffeted the car. Out to sea I could make out occasional whitecaps. Faintly phosphorescent, they rose up like ghosts which were quickly swept backward into darkness. The woman peered out along the empty beaches. She turned up the window on the ocean side.
“Are you okay, Mrs. Hendricks?”
“I’m okay, but please don’t call me that.” She sounded younger and less sure of herself. “It makes me feel like a phony. Call me Kitty if you like.”
“You’re not Mrs. Hendricks?”
“Legally I am, but we haven’t been living together. Harry would have divorced me long ago, only he’s a practicing Catholic. And he has this crazy hope that I’ll come back to him.” She leaned forward to peer out of my side. “We’ve gone a half a mile. Where is his car?”
I couldn’t find it. She began to get nervous. I turned my car and found the hole in the hedge and the fire behind it, which had burned down rapidly to a few breathing coals among the ashes. The three wine-drinkers had blown, leaving their empty jug and the smell of spilled wine.
Kitty Hendricks called to me: “What are you doing? Is Harry there?”
“No.”
She came through the hedge. She still had her bag and radio looped over her wrist, and the radio was singing like a semidetached personality. She looked around her, hugging her coat to her body. There was nothing to see but the dying fire, the railroad tracks gleaming dully in the starlight, the trampled unlovely earth.
“Holy Mother,” Kitty said, “it hasn’t changed in twenty years.”
“You know this place?”
“I ought to. I was born about two blocks from here. On the other side of the tracks.” She added wryly: “Both sides of the tracks are the wrong side if you live close enough to them. The trains used to rattle the dishes in my mother’s kitchen.” She peered across the dark railroad yard. “For all I know my mother is still living there.”
“We could go and see.”
“No! I don’t have enough left to put up a front for her, too. I mean, let bygones be bygones.”
She made an unsettled movement toward the cypress hedge, as if the place might betray her into further candor. She could handle the dangers of a hotel room, but not the demands of the wild outer night.
Her feeling turned against me. “Why did you bring me here?”
“It was your idea.”
“But you said that Harry’s car—”
“Apparently it’s been stolen.”
She backed away from me, stumbling on her heels, into the ragged black branches of the cypress. All I could see was the pale shape of her face and the glints of her eyes and mouth.
“There never was any car. What kind of a car was it?”
“A Cadillac.”
“Now I know you’re lying. Where would Harry get a Cadillac?”
“He probably took it off the lot. It’s an old one.”
She didn’t seem to be following me. I heard her breath coming more rapidly.
“There never was any car,” she whispered. “You’re from Vegas, aren’t you? And you brought me here to kill me.”
“That’s silly talk, Kitty.”
“Don’t you call me Kitty.” Her voice was taking on more childish cadences. Perhaps her mind was tracking on something that had happened years ago, between the trains rattling her mother’s dishes. “You conned me into coming to this place, and now you won’t let me go.”
“Go ahead. Go. Go-go.”
She only backed deeper into the cypress, like a nocturnal animal. Her radio was trilling from the darkness. A gust of her perfume reached me, mixed with the smells of diesel oil and wine and fire.
I saw in a red flash of insight how two people and a set of circumstances might collaborate in an unpredictable murder. Almost, I thought, she wanted to be murdered. She huddled among the shadows, whimpering:
“You stay away from me, I’ll tell my old man.”
“Get out of there, stupid.”
The scream for which she’d been tuning up came out. I reached for her blindly and got her by the waist and pulled her toward me. She gasped, and swung the radio at my head. It struck me a glancing blow and fell silent, as if the musical side of Kitty’s personality had died a violent death.
I let her go. She ran away gawkily on her high heels, across the multiple tracks, until she was no more than a scrambling shadow, a hurrying sound in the night.
chapter 13
ERIC MALKOVSKY’S STUDIO in the Village was on the direct route to Martel’s house. I stopped to see how he was getting on with his search. He had dust on his hands and fingerprints on his forehead, like a human clue.
“I almost gave up on you,” he said.
“I almost gave up on myself. Did you find any pictures of her?”
“Five. I may have more.”
He took me into the back of the shop and laid them out on a table like a poker hand. Four of them were pictures of Kitty, in a plain white bathing suit, taken at the Tennis Club pool. She stood and gazed romantically out to sea. She reclined erotically on a chaise longue. She posed dry on the diving board. Kitty had been a beautiful girl, but all four pictures were spoiled by her awkward staginess.
The fifth picture was different. Unposed and fully clothed in a sleeveless summer dress and a wide hat, she sat at a table with a drink at her elbow. A man’s hand with a square-cut diamond on it lay on the table beside her arm. The rest of him was cut off, but Kitty seemed to be smiling in his direction. Behind her I could see the patio wall of one of the Tennis Club cottages overgrown with bougainvillea.
“This is the one she liked.” Malkovsky showed me the notation on the back: six 4 × 6 copies @ 5.00—30.00. Pd. September 27, 1959. “She bought six copies, or her husband did. He was in the picture, too, but he made me crop it.”
“Why?”
“I remember he said something about beauty and the beast. He wasn’t that bad-looking but he was older, like I told you. And he’d taken some punishment in his time.”
“What was his name?”
“I don’t remember. I suppose I could check it out in the club records.”
“Tonight?”
“If Mrs. Strome lets me. But it’s getting awful late.”
“Don’t forget you’re on double time.”
He scratched at his hairline, and colored slightly. “Could I see a little of the money please?”
I looked at my watch. I had hired him roughly two hours ago. “How about fourteen dollars?”
“Fine. Incidentally,” he said with further scratching of his head, “if you want any of these pictures it’s only fair that you should pay me for them. Five dollars apiece.”
I gave him a twenty-dollar bill. “I’ll take the one she liked. I don’t suppose there’s any chance you could find the rest of it, the part you cropped off?”
“I might be able to find the negative.”
“For that I’ll pay higher.”
“How much higher?”
“It depends on what’s on it. Twenty dollars anyway.”
I left him rooting enthusiastically among the dusty cartons on his shelves, and drove back into the foothills. This was the direction the wind was coming from. It rushed down the canyons like a hot torrent, and roared in the brush around the Bagshaw house. I had to brace myself against it when I got out of the car.
The Bentley was gone from the courtyard. I tried the front door of the house. It was locked.
There was no light in the house, and no response of any kind to my repeated knocking. I went back into the studio in the Village. With a twenty-dollar glint in each eye Malkovsky showed me the negative of the picture of Kitty.
Beside her sat a man in a striped suit, which was wrinkled by his heavy shoulders and heavy thighs. He was almost bald, but compensating curly hair, white in the negative, sprouted up through his open shirt collar. His black smile had a loose, bland empty cheerfulness which his narrow white eyes annulled.
Behind him near the patio wall, and out of focus, was a mustached young man in a busboy’s jacket, holding a tray in his hands. He looked vaguely familiar: perhaps he was one of the servants I’ve seen around the club.
“I should have a name for these people,” Eric said. “Actually it’s just good luck that I found the negative.”
“We can check them out at the club, as you suggested. Do you remember anything more about the man? Were he and the woman married?”
“They certainly acted that way. She did, that is. He was in poor health, and she fussed over him quite a bit.”
“What was the matter with him?”
“I don’t know. He couldn’t move around much. He spent most of his time in his cottage or in the patio, playing cards.”
“Who did he play with?”
“Various people. Don’t get the idea that I saw much of the guy. The fact is, I avoided him.”
“Why?”
“He was a rough customer, sick or not. I didn’t like the way he talked to me, as if I was some kind of a flunky. I’m a professional man,” he asserted.
I knew how Eric felt. I was a semi-professional man myself. I gave him another twenty dollars, and we drove in separate cars to the club.
Ella opened up the records room behind the manager’s office, and Eric plunged in among the filing cabinets. He had a date to work from: Kitty’s pictures had been paid for on September 27, 1959.
I went back to the pavilion. The music was still going on, but the party had narrowed down to its hard core and shifted its main focus to the bar. It wasn’t late, as parties go, but in my absence most of the people had deteriorated, as if a sudden illness had fallen on them: manic-depressive psychosis, or a mild cerebral hemorrhage.
Only the bartender hadn’t changed at all. He made the drinks and served them and stood back from the party, watching it with his tarnished quicksilver eyes. I showed him the picture of Kitty, and the negative.
He held it up to the fluorescent light at the back of the bar. “Yeah, I remember the man and the girl. She came in here with him one night and tried to get tight on B and B—that’s all she knew about drinking—and she had a coughing fit. She had about four or five recruits patting her on the back at once and her husband started pushing them around. Me and Mr. Fablon got him calmed down, though.”
“How did Mr. Fablon get into the act?”
“He was with them.”
“They were friends of his?”
“I wouldn’t want to say that, exactly. He was just with them. They drifted in together. Maybe he liked the woman. She was a knockout, I’ll give her that.”
“Was Fablon a woman chaser?”
“You’re putting words into my mouth. He liked women. He didn’t chase ’em. Some of them chased him. But he’d have more sense than mess with that dame. Her husband was bad news.”
“Who is he, Marco?”
He shrugged. “I never saw him before or since, and I haven’t been sitting around waiting to hear from him. He was bad news, a blowtop, a muscle.”
“How did he get in?”
“He was staying here. Some of our members can’t say no when they get asked for a guest card. It would save me a lot of trouble if they could learn to say no.” He looked around the room with a kind of contemptuous tolerance. “Make you a drink?”
“No thanks.”
Marco leaned toward me across the bar. “Maybe I shouldn’t tell you this, but Mrs. Fablon was in here a little while ago.”
“So?”
“She asked the same question you did, whether I thought her husband committed suicide. She knew him and I were friends, like. I told her no, I didn’t think so.”
“What did she say?”
“She didn’t have a chance to say anything. Dr. Sylvester came into the bar and took her over. She wasn’t looking too good.”
“What do you mean?”
He moved his head in a quick negative gesture.
A woman came up and asked for a double scotch. She was behind me, and I didn’t recognize her changed voice until she spoke.
“My husband’s been drinking double scotches and I say what’s sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander and vice versa.”
“Okay, Mrs. Sylvester, if you say so.”
Marco laid down the photograph and the negative on the bartop and poured her a very meager double scotch. She reached past me with both hands and picked up both the drink and the picture of Kitty. “What’s this? I love
to look at pictures.”
“That’s mine,” I said.
Her whisky-stunned eyes didn’t seem to recognize me. “But you don’t mind if I look at it?” she said argumentatively. “That’s Mrs. Ketchel, isn’t it?”
“Who?”
“Mrs. Ketchel,” she said.
“A friend of yours?”
“Hardly.” She drew herself erect. Her bouffant hair was slipping down her forehead like a wig. “Her husband was one of my husband’s patients at one time. A doctor can’t pick and choose his patients, you know.”
“I share the problem.”
“Of course,” she said. “You’re the detective, aren’t you? What are you doing with a picture of Mrs. Ketchel?”
She waved it in my face. For a moment all the people at the bar were looking in our direction. I took the picture out of her hand and put it and the negative back in my pocket.
“You can trust me with your deep dark secrets,” she said. “I’m a doctor’s wife.”
I slid off my stool and drew her away from the bar to an empty table. “Where is Dr. Sylvester?”
“He drove Marietta Fablon home. She’s—she was not in a good way. But he’ll be back.”
“What’s the matter with Mrs. Fablon?”
“What isn’t?” she said lightly. “Marietta’s a friend of mine, one of the oldest friends I have in this town, but she’s certainly let herself go to pieces lately, physically and morally. I have no objection to people getting plastered—I’m slightly plastered myself, as a matter of fact, Mr. Arch—”
“Archer,” I said.
She went right on: “But Marietta came here really looped tonight. She walked in, if walking is the word, literally rubber-legged. George had to gather up the pieces and take her home. She’s getting to be more and more of a burden to George.”
“In what respect?”
“Morally and financially. She hasn’t paid her bill, of course, within living memory, and that’s all right, I suppose. She’s a friend, live and let live. But when it comes to scrounging more money from him, that’s too much.”
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