He went to the window. Bruce had lain down again, flank against the small body of the boy. When he saw Sader at the window he got to his feet and stretched his neck and showed his teeth and Sader recognized it: first warning. This was the spot where the normally nosy person would fade away. Sader rattled the knob and Bruce looked at Ricky as if to say, Now stay here while I attend to business.
“Come and unlock the door,” Sader said.
Ricky got carefully to his feet, and he and the dog went through the routine again, the dog trying to stay between the child and the door and Ricky leading him past by his ears, evading him. But when Ricky put up a hand to touch the lock, the dog gave a hoarse savage bark and snapped at him. Ricky leaped in fright, and Sader thought, Well, this ends this idea.
Ricky stood there shaking, his face like chalk. Sader couldn’t think of anything to do next, outside of smashing the pane and luring the dog to attack him through the window. He hated to risk the noise.
Ricky suddenly calmed, as if in the emergency he knew he had to keep control. Slowly, talking meanwhile to the brute in his piping voice. Ricky slid off the top of his pajamas and dangled it at the dog. Bruce growled and seized the cloth in his teeth. His attitude was at once savage and playful, as if he’d been given a substitute to maul and meant to show what he could do. He pulled, and the pajamas tore, and he shifted his teeth with a snap, to get a better grip. Meanwhile Ricky was moving around so that his back was close to the door. He reached behind him, above his head, his hand out of Sader’s sight. But Sader heard the faint clatter of the moving lock. He saw something, too; he saw the dark scars of the beatings across Ricky’s back.
Sader had put down two of the chunks. Now he dropped the third, took off his coat, wrapped his left arm in it, picked up the lump of cement and edged his right foot into the slowly opening door. “Get away now, Ricky. He might bite you.”
Ricky dropped the pajamas and hurried to the middle of the room. Sader put his left arm across his face and throat, the coat trailing. Bruce dropped the torn pajamas, turned to look; the expression of surprise at Sader’s appearance was almost human, almost comical—except for the fangs. He jumped, he got his teeth into the coat. Sader felt the pressure all the way through to his injured wrist. He took a swipe at Bruce with the cement chunk, and the big dog weaved. The chunk slid off the loose skin of his big neck. Sader thought, Hell, this is old stuff to him, and I’m a goddam amateur.
The dog yanked, throwing all of his weight, and Sader was caught off balance and stumbled forward. The sill caught his foot, and he tripped. He heard Ricky yelling, but he was too busy to look; he had to keep that left arm up, to keep Bruce from getting at his throat. The big dog’s nose kept pressing closer, his breath hot in Sader’s face, and Sader knew that in another minute Bruce was going to let go of the wrapped arm and snap for the jugular vein. He got a better heft on the chunk of cement and took another lick, and this one got Bruce over the ear and made him growl, and that was all. The loose, slick-haired skin shed blows as if Sader was wielding a feather.
Sader saw what had to be done. He rolled on his back on the floor and spread his legs and when Bruce stepped in over him, he clamped his knees upward. Bruce grunted, and growled again, and let go of the arm and dived for Sader’s throat. Sader threw the coat upward, clamped it tight with both arms.
The dog’s body was like a jumping steel spring. Sader bumped around over the floor, barely hanging on. Then they got into a corner and because he could see where he was and Bruce couldn’t, Sader wedged the dog in half-under a carved chest, where he could work on him.
There was nothing about the job that made Sader feel good. It was a cold matter of kill or be killed. He pounded the dog’s skull through the coat, and when the big body quit jumping he had to give a couple of extra blows to be sure, and they were the ones he hated.
Then he stood up, weaving, feeling the sweat that had soaked him. He jerked his coat free; it was hot and heavy with the dog’s blood. He didn’t look at the beaten head. He said to Ricky, “Okay, let’s go.”
“Don’t I need a jacket?”
“We’d better get out of here. I’ve got a beach blanket in the back of my car.”
Ricky came over, hesitating a little, then put his hand shyly in Sader’s.
“Are you scared?” Sader asked, wondering what the kid felt about all of this, the dog beaten to death and him standing here soaked and shaking. But Ricky shook his head no.
Sader lifted the boy, carrying the stained coat so it didn’t touch him, and went to the door. He listened again for any sound of alarm, took a last look at the room. The carved, ornate Oriental stuff had been gathered from far places, but the effect was heavy; Sader decided he didn’t like it. Whether the sculptor, or Wanda’s cousin, or whoever—it had been a mistake.
He went out into the dark. The night felt cool on his wet skin He carried Ricky up the knoll, past the big heads, and Ricky said, “They’re awfully starey-eyed, aren’t they?” Sader agreed. The gaze of the big stone heads seemed to follow, boring holes in his back. He expected the sound of somebody following, couldn’t throw off the feeling of apprehension. When he got close to the big barnlike studio he found himself tiptoeing.
At the car, he put Ricky into the seat, then got the blanket out of the trunk, shook it well, wrapped it around the boy.
“What’s your name?” Ricky said suddenly.
“Sader.”
“Mr. Sader?”
“Why don’t you just call me Joe?”
“All right.”
Sader pulled out, turned in the canyon road and headed for the beach. He still couldn’t believe that it hadn’t been a trap, that he had actually found the boy and gotten him away. The while thing had the smell of a trap, and there was something more—the instincts he had learned to trust over the years. Somebody must know by now that Sader was operating. The murder of Wanda Nevins showed that. And if that somebody had felt that Sader was anywhere near the truth, his number was up. Up for action.
If the hillside cabin hadn’t been the spot where the trap was laid, there was an inevitable conclusion. The real trap was somewhere else.
Sader drove for a while, then glanced over at Ricky. The little boy had curled himself into the blanket and lay there sleeping. Looking at the tousled hair, Sader’s mouth tightened. One thing he’d make sure of before anything else happened—he’d make sure that Ricky was in safe hands, past the reach of those who had kept him.
The only lights that burned in Tiffany Square were those on the stone lampposts. They were lantern-shaped, with amber glass, and left everything farther away than three feet in darkness. Sader carried Ricky, still wrapped in the blanket. He went up the steps to Mr. Gibbings’ front door. He pulled the iron ring, and the bell clanged indoors. He waited, shifting the boy’s weight. His left arm hurt like hell.
Pretty soon there was the rattle of a chain, and the door opened a little bit. There was a dim light inside. He could make out Irene, in a white nightcap and a fuzzy black robe. “Who is it? My goodness, it’s you!” she said.
“It sure is, and I’ve got to see Mr. Gibbings.”
“I don’t believe he’s in to you now, sir.”
“Ask him if hell be in to Mrs. Champlain’s orphan.”
He had to repeat it before she got it straight. She went away without locking the door, simply leaving it on the chain, and Sader thought that it must prove that she trusted him a little. Ricky was getting heavy. Sader braced his arm against the lintel.
When she came back, she let the chain down and stepped back. “Mr. Gibbings hasn’t felt too well since you were here, and the doctor had put him to bed. He has to stay in it. Will you come this way, please?”
They went up the thick-carpeted old stairs to a wide second-floor hall. The walls were papered with red-and-gold wallpaper, and the runner was old and silky. She opened a door. A single light burned in the big room, and there was Gibbings in a huge bed, under a Turkey-red canopy. He looked fiercely
alive, as if something the doctor had said might have insulted him. He growled from under the white mustache: “Well, goddamit, come in as long as you’ve forced your way here!”
Sader resented the idea he could have browbeat Irene, but this was a time to be humble. He went in, carrying his burden. “I’ve found the little boy.”
“So I see. Irene, you can get out now. But stay close. We want you to take charge of the boy.” Gibbings hiked himself up on the mound of pillows. The mustaches took on a livelier angle. “Now. What’s this all about, Sader?”
Sader told him. He minimized the part about wrestling the dog, but Gibbings ran an eye over him and said, “Must have been a big brute. You were in a real scrap from the looks of it. You’re in your shirt sleeves. What’d he do with your coat?”
Sader told him what had happened to the coat. “I had to bring it along, I couldn’t leave it there.”
“You mean, there’s a cleaning bill?” Gibbings asked sarcastically.
“Look, I’m not asking for a damned thing for myself. No, not even for the fee. I want to put this kid down and let you look at him.”
Gibbings had narrowed his eyes. “He looks starved.”
“He’s been beaten, too.”
Sader laid the sleeping child on the foot of the bed and he and old man Gibbings peeled back the blanket and looked at the scarred back.
“It proves that the letter wasn’t a lie,” Sader pointed out, “but then, you were always convinced it wasn’t. But more important—”
Ricky had stirred, was sitting up, rubbing his exhausted small fists into his eyes.
“—more important, does Ricky resemble Mrs. Champlain?”
Gibbings bent, squinting at Ricky, and Ricky drew back from the fierce white mustaches.
“By God. . . .” Gibbings began with enthusiasm, but his voice dwindled. “I started to say yes. It’s the coloring, the dark hair, the eyes.”
“The features?”
“You know—” Gibbings had curled his lips; his teeth showed. “—if she hadn’t had that husband with her, that respectable stiff-neck with his polite way and his fishy eye—”
Sader waited, wondering what piece of the puzzle might drop now.
“—I’d have said she could be a hell cat. There was that look about her.”
“Thanks,” said Sader dryly. “Can you have Irene take charge of Ricky now? Let him sleep, and then feed him, and then have a doctor look him over? I’ve got to go and see a man about a trap.”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
THE TRAP existed; Sader was as convinced of it as if he’d seen it planned. When Irene let him out the front door, he stopped there in the dark to light a cigarette, and he sensed the tentacles of other minds hunting for him, a feeling almost as tangible as the clinging of a spider’s web. He got into the car and drove back toward Long Beach, the need for sleep grainy and stinging in his eyes, and he tried to figure what they might be doing. If they looked for him in the phone book or the city directory they’d find the office address and the place where he lived, deserted now since he’d been taking care of Scarborough’s house.
It might be one of the two. Or it might be anywhere, some dark street, some place he might be expected to revisit—God knew why—or the hillside studio, though if the trap were there he couldn’t understand why it hadn’t sprung when he went for Ricky.
He drove to his apartment. It was dark. He went in and turned on the lights and looked around, and thought as usual what a lousy housekeeper he was. The mantel clock had run down, and the absence of its throaty ticking made the place seem dead. The tables were dusty. But there was no one waiting, not even in the broom closet, where a yellow-headed mop gave him a momentary start.
He thought to himself, they wouldn’t be at the office. Not now. There was no reason he should go there. And the answering service would give a caller Scarborough’s phone number but not the address; he’d be perfectly safe there. It was a time to go to bed. He closed the door and headed for Los Alamitos.
The tires crunched on the gravel drive, and Sader got out, shut the garage door and turned to the house. A jet went over on some night maneuver or other, shaking the ground he walked on. The airfield lights lit up the sky. Sader took out the key Scarborough had given him, went up the rear steps, fitted the key into the back door. And then, inside the house, the dog whined.
Sader stopped with his hand on the knob.
Every previous night that he’d come here the dog had barked when he had heard him on the porch, had jumped against the other side of the door, frantic with happiness that the substitute master had come at last and that he was to be fed and let out to run.
Sader stepped back to the edge of the porch and listened. The dog didn’t whine again. Sader whistled, sharply. Nothing answered but the silence.
Sader crossed the porch to the wall, stretched his arm, reinserted the key and turned it, yanked the door wide. There was still no further sound from the setter, but something came out. An odor, a hint of fragrance. Perfume. Sader put his mouth close to the doorway and said, “What have you got? A gun?”
He thought he could hear stifled laughter. There was more than one of them. Sader’s look was grim. He stepped off the porch without a sound, went out to the car. It was time to even the odds. He took the Police Positive out of the locked glove compartment, shut the compartment, went down the other side of the driveway where his feet made no sound on the grass, crossed the drive and went to the front door. He was hoping as he went that they hadn’t done anything to the dog. Scarborough was crazy about the setter.
He opened the door without a sound and slid in, stopped in the dark to get his bearings. He could make out the dim shapes of furniture, the blank aperture of the door opposite, the door leading to the hall and the stairs and the rear part of the house.
Walking silently, Sader went into the hall. Here he again caught the scent of perfume, a subtle and musky fragrance, and he realized why it seemed so noticeable—the house smelled of its everyday occupants, Scarborough’s scrupulously clean little old aunt and Scarborough’s rum-and-maple pipe tobacco. Sader went to the kitchen doorway and looked though. The door he had yanked open still swung wide, and against the reflected glow outside he could see their figures, a man and a woman. Sader said, “Why don’t you put on the lights?”
They turned swiftly, and the woman gave a small cry.
Sader reached inside the door to click the switch.
The man was what he expected, husky and young, tanned, blond hair cut in a crewcut, dressed in brown slacks and a plaid tan jacket, very expensive looking. He had a leather sap in his hand, hanging by a leather thong. Sader looked at it and felt goose flesh growing along his arms. Without a doubt it was what had been used on Wanda Nevins.
He looked at the woman, dark and exotic, her eyes alive with fury. “Stupid of me to have thought you’d have a gun,” Sader said thoughtfully. “The only gun used so far in this thing was old man Perrine’s rifle. He took a pot shot at his son. They’ve been arguing over you . . . Mrs. Champlain.”
Her face convulsed.
“But of course, a gun isn’t, your way. You have your young friend here, who will do anything for money—even to disposing of a blackmailing cousin. By the way, when his time came, how were you going to get rid of him?”
“I’m not . . . I’m not Tina Champlain!”
“Should we test that statement?” Sader wondered. “Say, on someone like Mrs. Cecil?”
“You must be crazy.” She was actually laughing at him. “I’m Tina’s sister. I stepped in and took charge of her child when she drowned, and now I’m settling her estate. And there are . . . details that could be spoiled by someone meddling. Like you.” She paused; her eyes held Sader’s glitteringly and he saw what he was almost unwilling to see, that reason had left her, and he understood then what Brent Perrine had been angry about when he had said she’d gone overboard. She had—overboard into madness.
“Probably you do feel like a sister
of the woman you once were, or almost anyone except yourself,” Sader agreed. “You’ve changed, of course. There are things you do now that you must really not like to think about. Don’t like to believe are happening.” Sader threw a glance at the man. Under the blond crewcut the face had grown masklike with a look of concentration, and the right hand had moved a trifle. “If you lift that sap an inch I’ll shoot you right in the gut.”
The blond man licked his lips.
“I won’t let you get behind me as you did Wanda.”
There was taut silence between the three of them.
Sader turned to the woman. “Your husband loved you. He loved you a lot. Since his job took him all over the world, he gathered treasures for you and brought them home . . . all the stuff you have hidden in that canyon house at Laguna. But there was one thing he couldn’t give you. I imagine you demanded. You wanted a child, and he couldn’t provide.”
She tried to look away. For an instant Sader thought that she would come out of the nightmare, or dream, or obsession, or whatever had her in its grip. Her eyes grew gentle, the hard lines smoothed from around her mouth. But then the look faded.
He pressed on. “You were determined to have a child, and being the kind of woman you are, you tried to goad him by taunting. You made his life miserable, and your own. Things must have been about at the breaking point. And then something totally unexpected happened. You went to the mountain cabin near Tehachapi and there you ran into somebody—probably you’re telling yourself even yet that it was rape. I’ll bet it’s what you told Champlain. You found out you were pregnant and you made plans to keep the child, but he wouldn’t let you. You were moody and distraught, you dropped all your friends, but he made you go away anyway, go to a private sanitarium to have the baby. Your aunt knows this much.”
She made a harsh, breathy attempt to laugh at him again. “My aunt doesn’t know a damned thing about it.”
“She’s a good guesser. Let me try guessing, too. You had the baby and you let Wanda help you put it out for adoption, and then your husband let you take another baby in its place. A baby he could look at without being reminded of what you’d done to him.” Sader was studying her features under the bright overhead light. Under normal conditions she must be rather beautiful. The face was finely made, the dark eyes brilliant under thick lashes, the lips full. “You had the baby girl, and you tried to take up the old life again, the quiet respectable life as Champlain’s wife, but your heart wasn’t in it. Champlain’s death gave you the money and the baby’s death gave you the chance—for freedom.”
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