“What’s it matter to you?” the cousin said suddenly, “What’re you sticking your nose in for?”
“When I want any remarks from you I’ll ask for them,” Sader said.
Tina Champlain walked stiff-legged to a kitchen chair and slid down into it. She clasped her hands in a sudden motion of frailty, with her gaze fixed on Sader; she seemed to wait in dread for him to go on.
Sader gave her a lopsided grin. “I’d say that the man you met in the mountains was somebody you didn’t care to see again. Maybe a kind of drifter, a hitchhiker, a tramp. Not even in the same class with your husband. But full of animal strength and vitality.”
She brushed at the hair that was matted with sweat at her temples. “He . . . he sufficed.”
“He provided you with a revenge against your inadequate husband,” Sader agreed. “And probably you had the idea you could take Ricky back, take your own child home again, without any onrush of guilty complexes. Only it didn’t work out that way. You had had, after all, a good religious upbringing, and then old man Perrine kept nosing at the relationship, reminding you how the boy resembled you, and when you looked at Ricky you began to see not him, but the man who had had you. You saw the face and the form of the man with whom you had betrayed your husband. You began to abuse the child—Mrs. Cecil remembered that he had begun to grow thin—and when you saw that the abuse was going to get out of control, you arranged the drowning. You paid a price, a good one, and the Perrines kept your secret.”
Wanda’s cousin must have thought that Sader’s attention was completely centered on the woman, for he chose that moment to act. The upswing was quick and venomous, the leather sap seemed to explode with menace under the glow of the overhead light, and Sader knew that the next moment this combination of muscle and nerve and shot-weighted sap was going to crush him to the floor and beat him to a pulp. But in that moment his gun splintered the quiet. The lifted brawny arm came down with a rush, there was still plenty of control, plenty of power, though in the instant before the sap struck Sader’s arm a strange light seemed to pass over the other man’s face, and there was shock in the depths of his pale eyes.
His knees shuddered together and locked, one above the other, the sap dropped to the floor, and then he tumbled down face first, grabbing at his midsection with a cry of rage and surprise.
She leaped off the chair like a cat. But the scream she gave didn’t resemble anything alive, it wasn’t even animal, it was a noise like a steel blade on stone, or an iron wheel being dragged along a track, or a flywheel that needed oil. She hit Sader in a flurry of fists and claws, and even in the midst of the buffeting he was aware of her scent, strong and clovelike. He tried to fend her off, tried to pry away her flailing and digging hands, and then something went wrong. The gun went off again, though he hadn’t meant it to.
She stepped back. One shoulder hung crooked and she was bent a little at the waist.
Sader stood there aghast, not believing it had happened.
She turned to look at the writhing man on the floor. “Jeffry?”
He was past listening to her. He was wrapped in his own torment, his own struggle to live. He was trying to hold life inside him by wrapping his arms so tightly across his middle that it couldn’t get away.
Her shoulder dropped a little farther and then her whole torso tilted, her throat relaxing and her face turned to the ceiling. The way her knees bent reminded Sader of the breaking of a straw. She fell to the floor and lay still. Sader dropped the gun on a chair and bent over her, trying to see where she was hit. The suit was a soft black wool, loosely woven, and the bullet had gone in without making a mark. He couldn’t believe at first that she was shot; the bullet had gone wild.
Then the bubbles began to come up with her breathing, and they were crimson. Sader bent closer. “Can you talk? There may not be much time left.”
She looked at him calmly. “Ricky. . . .”
“Ricky’s safe . . . beyond your ever getting again.”
The dark eyes flickered. “I loved him.” Sader grimaced, and she insisted. “But I did, I really did. He is a very lovable little boy. It was just . . . after a while, I couldn’t forget. I kept thinking about my husband, and then I found that I was seeing Ricky the way he saw him. Something left over from a dark and dirty secret.”
“What a horrible attitude to take toward your child.”
“Some days,” she whispered, “I let him call me Mother, and I loved him, I fed him.”
Her eyes were glazing. “You should have left him with whoever had him those first three years. Or given him to someone when you changed toward him. There are people everywhere who want children, who are dying to have children.” Sader slapped her cheek lightly and the eyes opened, but only for a moment. “You didn’t love him, ever. You hated him.”
Her lips fluttered with her breath. “Hate is . . . hate is the other side of the coin,” she said.
Sader rose to his feet. “Just stay there. I’m going to call a doctor.”
His shadow fell across her like a foretaste of dark.
By the time the doctor and the ambulance reached the house, Tina Champlain was dead. Jeffry, the cousin, was still alive and the doctor looked him over and decided that there was a chance he might make it. Sader had phoned Jackson in Santa Ana, and the Sheriff’s man wanted to question Jeffry about Wanda’s murder as soon as he got there, but the doctor wouldn’t let him.
The ambulance took away Tina’s body, the moaning man, and then Jackson sat down at the kitchen table and let Sader pour him a cup of coffee.
Sader prowled around until he located the dog, stuffed into a closet with some mops and cleaning paraphernalia, and let him out. The dog jumped around until Sader fed him. Then the parrot squawked and Sader had to take the black hood off the cage.
Over the coffee, Jackson growled at Sader, “You don’t look like much of a tomcat, but damned if you don’t have nine lives.”
“I know I’m lucky to be here,” Sader said, sitting down across the table. “Those two were pretty cute. They killed Wanda when she got too nosy, they were ready to kill me, too. They’d followed me here, some other time, and then tonight they set their trap and waited. It was just a fluke I heard the dog whine, I didn’t walk in here and meet that sap in the dark.”
Sader lighted a cigarette while he thought about it, remembering how sure he had been that the trap wouldn’t be laid at Scarborough’s place because no one knew he was living here.
Jackson too had lighted a cigarette, but now he crushed it out in a burst of anger. “I can’t believe she’d do all this, pretend to drown, and hide, and set up that hidden place you say she had in Laguna canyon, just to have her way with a kid.”
“I think Brent Perrine summed it up. He said she went overboard. She did just that. She let herself be swamped by emotions she couldn’t control. Remember the kind of girl she’d been, according to her aunt—a wild one. The neighbors gossiping. Then she was able to flaunt a respectable marriage to Champlain in their faces. He must have been quite a catch in her circle. And then at the end, there she was alone with her illegitimate child. And so she took out her rage and her shame in punishing Ricky.”
“Then all she felt for the kid was hate.”
“Oh, no. She did love Ricky, too. No doubt even while she was beating and starving him, there were times of tenderness. And then, remember this: she was the one who wrote the letter to Gibbings.”
Jackson jerked up his head and stared at Sader as if Sader were coming unstuck at the seams. “Now wait a minute—”
“Hell, she was the only one who could have done it.”
“But why—”
“In the midst of all that hell, she must have had some hope that somebody would stop her. It couldn’t have been fun, driven by emotions like hers, driven to do the things she did to the little boy. She had to have some hope of change, some chance of capture. And so she wrote the letter to the only person she figured had the money and the power to find
her. And she put in the deliberate lie, that the baby was Gibbings’ grandchild, so that he wouldn’t ever think it might be her. A devious trick, but reasonable when you understand what she was doing.”
“Wait. If she wanted to be caught, if she really wanted Ricky to be saved, then why have Jeffry murder Wanda? Why not let Wanda tell the truth to Gibbings?”
“Oh, Wanda didn’t intend to tell the truth to anybody. She wanted cash to keep her mouth shut. I’m sure that murdering her was Jeffry’s idea. He had moved in on Tina, was gradually acquiring almost complete control of her and her money. He knew that Wanda had shaken her down for about forty thousand to relocate Ricky, plus a down payment on the Laguna place. He didn’t intend for any more of the money to find its way to Wanda. No doubt in time he meant to get every dime that Tina had left. I think killing me was Jeffry’s idea, too. I didn’t see any sign of disappointment in Tina when she finally knew it was all over.”
Jackson said, “Wait up, you said this was all reasonable when you knew what Tina Champlain was doing. Well, what was she doing?”
“Getting ready to die. In one way or another. Probably intending to take Ricky with her when she thought they’d both had enough of torment.”
Jackson rubbed the back of his neck as if something had touched him there, a cold breath that brought up the hairs of his scalp. “A psychiatrist would say that she was insane.”
Sader nodded. “I guess so.”
“Weren’t you stumped when you saw her, when you guessed who she was?”
“Oh, no,” Sader said, “I knew who she had to be. Ever since Ricky told me about the woman who had been keeping him. He started to say Mother, and then cut it off; she’d put a stop to that. Then he said that Jeffry called this woman ‘Mrs. Lasriss.’ And I tried to dig it out, it made me think of that minister, Twining, and something he’d called to mind. Out of the Bible, of course. Jeffry had been calling Tina ‘Mrs. Lazarus.’ Because she’d risen, so to speak, from the dead.”
“What a pair they made!”
“She was sick with a desire to die—but he wasn’t. I’ll bet when you look around in that canyon house, you find a big wad of cash. I gave some thought to the idea she might have spent most of her money trying to keep the little girl alive, but now I think not. I think after she paid Wanda, and bribed the Perrines, there was still a big chunk left. And it was there where Jeffry could keep an eye on it.”
Jackson was staring at Sader. “You’ve made quite a case. But it will take some proving. The Grand Jury’s apt to wonder if you didn’t get these two people out here and shoot them for some reason of your own.”
“Oh, hell, there’s still work to be done.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
SADER PHONED Twining early the next morning, explained what had happened, and asked if Twining would call the former pastor, Dr. Bell, at once. Then Sader drove into Long Beach to his office, and tried to catch up on some work. He knew that Jackson would be busy on the Laguna end.
Twining called within a half-hour. Dr. Bell would be flying out for the inquest.
“Dr. Bell knew all about Mrs. Champlain’s child,” Twining told Sader. “She went to Dr. Bell almost as soon as she knew that she was pregnant. She wanted him to help her persuade Champlain that they could keep the baby. Champlain was adamant. He was even thinking of divorcing her, though she swore to Dr. Bell that the pregnancy was due to a rape, that she had done nothing to encourage the man, didn’t know him, never expected to see him again. The way Dr. Bell put it was this: she had a quirk of being attracted to violent people.”
Remembering the crewcut cousin, Sader said, “She sure did.”
“Champlain said some pretty ugly things to her in front of Dr. Bell. Dr. Bell thinks they struck pretty deep.”
“They prepared the way for what happened to Ricky.”
“Yes. It was Dr. Bell’s suggestion, by the way, that led them to look for another baby. He still believes that if Champlain hadn’t died in that plane crash, and if the baby girl had lived, there would have been no trouble. But when all that happened, when she decided to break away from her old life and take Ricky back—he knew that she was headed for disaster. There was simply nothing he could do.”
“Perhaps if he hadn’t gone away—”
Twining’s voice was regretful. “She had long since refused to listen to anything he had to say.”
An hour later Jackson was on the line, telling Sader that they had picked up Brent Perrine at the Mexican border, and got the truth about Tina’s supposed drowning. There had been friction over the money Tina had paid them to keep their mouths shut, the old man wanted it for booze and Brent was blaming him now for his predicament. “He’s afraid we’re trying to pin Wanda Nevins’ murder on him. He keeps telling us he didn’t see Tina more than a couple of times after she sneaked away from their boat at Catalina. She’d taken up with some relative of Miss Nevins. Then he tried to give us a line that Tina had dropped from sight to avoid paying inheritance taxes on the money Champlain left her. But of course, when I told him we knew what she’d been up to, he admitted it. He said it gave him the creeps, knowing what she wanted with the little boy, and that he hunted for the kid in the canyon house, where he ran into you.”
“It could be. Keep him on the fire about the murder and you might get more.”
But in the end it was Jeffry, the cousin, who cleared up the last details. He was in the hospital, undergoing his third transfusion, when he suddenly began to sink. The doctor called Jackson in at once, and the blond man confessed to killing Wanda.
Wanda had accepted the story of Tina’s drowning, until Sader had come asking questions. Then her curiosity had been stirred and she had done some snooping, and remembering her cousin’s liking for Tina, Wanda had followed him, had found out that Tina was alive and was living with Jeffry in the canyon house. Then Wanda had requested fifty thousand—for a start.
He had beaten her to death in her bedroom, had sapped one of the dogs. He had taken the other dog with him—it had always been friendly—and he thought that he and Tina could use a watchdog.
After Sader heard about it from Jackson, he tried to call Gibbings. Gibbings wasn’t in his office, and Irene at home said stiffly that Mr. Gibbings was out. This went on for almost a week, and Sader had begun to think of making a trip to Tiffany Square, when suddenly Gibbings phoned him. “Gibbings here. I’ve called about your fee,” he began without preamble. “I suppose you’ve added it all up and so on.”
“I’ve been thinking about it. I’ve decided there’s just one fee I want out of all this, and that is the care and raising of one Ricky Champlain, in a good home.”
The old man cackled, and Sader’s mind pictured him as he’d first seen him, iron-eyed and with those mettlesome mustaches, the tiny teeth and manner of a tyrant—and inside somewhere a core of decency and concern for a child that he had tried to cover up. “I knew you’d say that, dammit, I knew it!” Gibbings crowed. “But we’re way ahead of you here, Ricky’s got his own room, all new clothes and a bicycle, and my daughter hardly lets him out of her sight.”
“That’s a fair trade for her,” Sader said evenly.
It took the old man aback but only for a moment. “You’d say so. Anyway, we took Ricky to the best pediatrician in town, and he says the boy’s going to be fine. Just needs good food and plenty of rest, and somebody to keep an eye on him.”
Sader was yanking a cigarette from a pack with his free hand. “I don’t have to worry about Ricky any more.”
“No, sir, you don’t.” Gibbings hung up as Sader was getting the cigarette lighted.
This was the end of the affair, really the end—and then Sader thought of one more thing. He rummaged in the desk, found it, the baby’s mitten with its touch of pink. He had to dispose of this tag end. He had promised the woman at the baby shop to send it back. But now he shook his head at this idea.
Finally he typed up an envelope addressed to Kit Gibbings at her home, wrapped the mitten in a
sheet of typing paper and sealed it in the envelope, went downstairs to mail it.
He dropped it into the corner mailbox. When he turned, his eye fell on the entrance of a bar. There was a neon sign COCKTAILS and the green outline of a martini glass that tilted back and forth. Of course he wouldn’t go in for a drink. It was still early afternoon. Not only that, there was no use fooling himself about what would happen. He had no control. One drink would be the start of a drunk, and tomorrow’s hangover would be horrendous.
He ought to call Twining, come to think of it. Ministers were supposed to help you fight off such impulses.
But suddenly he craved to sit at a bar and look peacefully into a bar mirror, and find the taste of whiskey in his mouth, and think. To think deeply of all that had happened.
Most of the people who hired him were here today and gone tomorrow, a series of shadows with grimly personal puzzles for him to share. But in this thing, the people had been unforgettable.
He wanted to drink a toast to Wanda, for one. She had been gorgeous and thoroughly mercenary, and now she was dead.
He wanted to drink a toast to Tina, who had died twice.
He wanted to drink a toast to Ricky, because in his own way he had shown a supreme courage in the middle of hell.
Most of all he wanted to toast Kit Gibbings, who had been an unwed mother and who had lain down unnumbered nights to sleep with slander, and who had kept right on being a lady.
He went into the bar and slid upon the stool and said to the bald bartender, “Bourbon and soda. Better make it a triple.” The bartender nodded and put away his racing form.
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