Sleuths

by Bill Pronzini

  While I was doing that he calmed down enough to be coherent, and the first thing he said was, "He tried to kill me. He tried to murder me."

  "I figured as much. What happened?"

  "We were in his boat; we'd just put in to the island because he said there was something wrong with the ignition. He asked me to take a look, so I pulled off my coat and leaned down under the wheel. Then my head seemed to explode. The next thing I knew, I was floundering in the south-side channel."

  "He hit you with that fishing rod of his, probably," I said. "The current carried you along after he dumped you overboard and the cold water brought you around. Why does he want you dead?"

  "It must be the insurance. We own a company in Sacramento and we have a partnership policy—double indemnity for accidental death. I knew Frank was in debt, but I never thought he'd go this far."

  "Frank? Then his name isn't Herb Jackson?"

  "No. It's Saunders, Frank Saunders. Mine's Rusty McGuinn." Irish, I thought. Like O'Farrell. That figures.

  I got out again to slide the skiff off the beach and into the slough. When I clambered back in, McGuinn said, "You knew he was after me, didn't you? That's why you didn't give me away when the two of you were together."

  "Not exactly." I started the engine and got us under way at a good clip upstream. "I didn't have any idea who you were or where you'd come from until I looked inside Jackson's—or Saunders'- boat. He told me he was alone and he'd put in after crayfish. But he was carrying one rod and there were two more casting outfits in the boat; you don't need all that stuff for crayfish; and no fisherman alone is likely to carry three outfits for any reason. There was a heavy sheepskin jacket there, too, draped over the seat; but he was already wearing a heavy mackinaw, and I remembered you only had on a short-sleeved jacket when you came out of the water. It all began to add up then. I talked him into leaving as soon as I could."

  "How did you do that?"

  "By telling him what he wanted to hear—that you must be dead."

  "But how did you know where I was hiding?"

  I explained how Saunders had triggered the answer for me. "I also tried to put myself in your place. You were hurt and scared; your first thought would be to get away as fast as possible. Which meant by boat, not by swimming. So it figured you hid nearby until I was far enough away and then slipped back to the skiff.

  "But this boat—like Saunders'—starts with a key, and I had it with me. You could have set yourself adrift, but then Saunders might have seen you and come chasing in his boat. In your condition it made sense you might burrow under the skiff, with a little space clear at one side so you could breathe."

  "Well, I owe you a debt," McGuinn said. "You saved my life."

  "Forget it," I said, a little ruefully. Because the truth was I had almost got him killed. I had told Saunders he was on the island and insisted on a two-man search party; and I had failed to tumble to who and what Saunders was until it was almost too late. If McGuinn hadn't been so well hidden, if we'd found him, Saunders would probably have jumped me and I might not have been able to handle him; McGuinn and I could both be dead now. I'm not a bad detective, usually; other times, though, I'm a near bust.

  The channel that led to Whiskey Island loomed ahead. Cheer up, I told myself—the important thing is that this time, 120 years after the first one, the red-haired Irish bludgeon victim is being brought out alive and the man who assaulted him is sure to wind up in prison. The ghost of O'Farrell, the Gold Rush miner, won't have any company when it goes prowling and swearing vengeance on those foggy nights in Dead Man's Slough.

  A Killing in Xanadu

  The name of the place, like that of the principality in Coleridge's Kublai Khan and of the newspaper tycoon's estate in Citizen Kane, was Xanadu. "In Xanadu did Kublai Khan a stately pleasure-dome decree . . ." This one was neither a principality nor an estate, but you could call it a pleasure-dome or rather, a whole series of pleasure-domes overlooking a rugged portion of California's Big Sur seacoast, not all that far from the Hearst Castle. Which tied off one of the historical references because William Randolph Hearst was supposedly the model for the tycoon in Orson Welles' classic film.

  What it was, this particular Xanadu, was a resort playground for the wealthy Establishment. Eighteen-hole golf course, tennis and racquetball courts, Olympic-sized swimming pool, sauna and steam rooms, two restaurants, three bars, a disco nightclub, and forty or fifty rustic cottages nestled on craggy terrain among tall redwoods. And the tariff was a mere $1500 per week per person, not including meals, drinks, or gratuities.

  Nice play if you can get it.

  I couldn't get it myself, but that was all right; it was not my idea of a vacation wonderland anyway. The reason I went down there on a windy Thursday in August was to pay a call on one of those who could get it—a San Francisco socialite named Lauren Speers. She was worth a few hundred thousand, all inherited money, and numbered politicians, actors, capitalists, and other influential types among her friends; she also had striking red hair and green eyes and was beautiful enough if you liked them forty and dissipated. I know all of that not because she was my client, but because the man who was my client, an attorney named Adam Brister, had told me so and shown me a color photograph. Ms. Speers and I had never laid eyes on each other. Ms. Speers' money and I had never laid eyes on each other either, nor were we ever likely to.

  Brister was no better acquainted with her than I was. He had been retained by one Vernon Inge of Oakland, who owned a car which he claimed La Speers had sideswiped with her Porsche in a hit-and-run accident a couple of weeks ago. The accident had rendered Inge a nasty whiplash that kept him from performing his job as a baker. Or so he and Brister alleged in a damage Suit against Speers.

  The lawsuit was where I came in: I went to Xanadu to serve the lady with a court summons.

  So much for the glamorous role of the private eye in modern society. No rich client, no smoky-hot liaison with a beautiful woman, no fat fee. Just two hundred bucks plus expenses to track down a woman who moved around more than the governor, hand her some papers, listen to abusive language—they always throw abusive language at you—and then steal away again into the real world.

  But first I had to pass out of the real world, through the portals into Xanadu, and I did that at two-fifteen. A short entrance drive wound upward past part of the golf course, then among lush redwoods and giant ferns, and emerged into a parking area shaped like a bowl. Three-quarters of it was reserved for guest parking; the other quarter was taken up with rows of three-wheeled machines that looked like golf carts, with awnings over them done in pastel ice-cream colors. From what I had been able to find out about Xanadu, the carts were used by guests to get from one pleasure-dome to another, along a network of narrow and sometimes steep paths. Exercise was all well and good in its proper place—tennis court, swimming pool, disco—but the rich folk no doubt considered walking uphill a vulgarity.

  Beyond where the carts were was a long slope, with a wide path cut into it and a set of stairs alongside that seemed more ornamental than functional. At the top of the slope, partially visible from below, were some of the resort buildings, all painted in pastel colors like the cart awnings. The muted sounds of people at play drifted down on the cool wind from the ocean.

  I put my car into a slot marked Visitors Parking. A black guy in a starched white uniform came over to me as I got out. He was about my age, early fifties, with a lot of gray in his hair, and his name was Horace. Or so it said on the pocket of his uniform, in pink script like the sugar-writing on a birthday cake.

  He looked at me and I looked at him. I was wearing my best suit, but my best suit was the kind the inhabitants of Xanadu wore to costume parties or gave away to the Salvation Army. But that was okay by Horace. Some people who work at fancy places like this get to be snobs in their own right; not him. His eyes said that I would never make it up that hill over yonder, not for more than a few minutes at a time, but then neither would he and the hell
with it.

  I let him see that I felt the same way and a faint smile turned one corner of his mouth. "Here on business?" he asked.

  "Yes. I'm looking for Lauren Speers."

  "She's out right now. Took her car a little past one."

  "Do you have any idea when she'll be back?"

  "Depends on how thirsty she gets, I suppose."

  "Pardon?"

  "The lady drinks," Horace said, and shrugged.

  "You mean she'd been drinking before she left?"

  "Martinis. Starts in at eleven every morning, quits at one, sleeps until four. Then it's Happy Hour. But not today. Today she decided to go out. If I'd seen her in time I'd have tried to talk her out of driving, but she was in that sports job of hers and gone before I even noticed her."

  "Must be nice to be rich," I said.

  "Yeah," he said.

  "Can you tell me which cottage is hers?"

  "Number forty-one. Straight ahead past the swimming pool. Paths are all marked. Miss Dolan'll likely be there if you want to wait at the cottage."

  "Who's Miss Dolan?"

  "Miss Speers' secretary—Bernice Dolan. She's writing a book, you know. Miss Speers, I mean."

  "No, I didn't know. What kind of book?"

  "All about her life. Ought to be pretty spicy."

  "From what I know about her, I guess it will be."

  "But I'll never read it," Horace said. "Bible, now, that's much more interesting. If you know what I mean."

  I said I knew what he meant. And thanked him for his help. I did not offer him any money; if I had he would have been offended. He would take gratuities from the guests because that was part of his job, but it had already been established that he and I were social equals. And that made an exchange of money unseemly.

  I climbed the stairs—I wouldn't have driven one of those cute little carts even if it was allowed, which it wasn't or Horace would have offered me one—and found my way to the swimming pool. You couldn't have missed it; it was laid out between the two largest buildings, surrounded by a lot of bright green lawn and flagstone terracing, with a stone-faced outdoor bar at the near end. Twenty or thirty people in various stages of undress occupied the area. A few of them were in the pool, but most were sitting at wrought-iron tables, being served tall drinks by three white-jacketed waiters. None of the waiters, I noticed, was black.

  Nobody paid any attention to me as I passed by, except for a hard-looking thirtyish blonde who undressed me with her eyes—women do it too, sometimes—and then put my clothes back on again and threw me out of her mental bedroom. Fiftyish gentlemen with shaggy looks and a beer belly were evidently not her type.

  Past the pool area, where the trees began, were a pair of paths marked with redwood-burl signs. The one on the left, according to the sign, would take me to number 41, so I wandered off in that direction. And ten minutes later I was still wandering, uphill now, with 41 still nowhere in sight. I was beginning to realize that the fancy little carts were not such an affectation as I had first taken them to be.

  I had passed three cottages so far—or the walks that led to three cottages. The buildings themselves were set back some distance from the main path, half-hidden by trees, and were all lavish chalet types with wide porches and pastel-colored wrought-iron trim. Unlike the stairs from the parking area, the wrought iron was just as functional as it was ornamental: the curved bars and scrollwork served as a kind of burglar proofing over the windows. Xanadu may have been a whimsical pleasure resort, but its rulers nonetheless had their defenses up.

  Here in the woods it was much cooler, almost cold, because of the ocean breeze and because the afternoon sunlight penetrated only in dappled patches. I was wishing that I'd worn a coat over my suit when I came around a bend and glimpsed a fourth cottage through the redwoods. Another burl sign stood adjacent to the access path, and I could just make out the numerals 41 emblazoned on it.

  I took a few more steps toward the sign. And from behind me, then, I heard a sound like that of a lawnmower magnified: one of the carts approaching. I moved off the path as the sound grew louder. A couple of seconds later the thing came around the curve at my back, going at an erratic clip, and shot past me. Inside was a red-haired woman wearing white. The cart veered over to number 41's walk, skidded to a stop, and the redhead got out and hurried toward the cottage. The white garment she wore was a thin coat, buttoned up against the wind, and she had a big straw bag in her right hand; the long red hair streamed out behind her like a sheet of flame. The way she'd handled the cart indicated Ms. Lauren Speers was every bit as sloshed as Horace had led me to believe, but she carried herself on her feet pretty well. The serious drinker, male or female, learns how to walk if not drive in a straight line.

  I called out to her but she either didn't hear me or chose to ignore me: she kept on going without breaking stride or glancing in my direction. I ran the rest of the way to the cottage path, turned in along it. She was already on the porch by then, digging in her bag with her free hand; I could see her through a gap in the fronting screen of trees. She found a key and had it in the lock before I could open my mouth to call to her again. In the next second she was inside, with the door shut behind her.

  Well, hell, I thought.

  I stopped and spent thirty seconds or so catching my breath. Running uphill had never been one of my favorite activities, even when I was in good physical shape. Then I checked the papers Adam Brister had given me to serve. And then I started along the path again.

  I was twenty yards from the porch, with most of the cottage visible ahead of me, when the gun went off.

  It made a flat cracking sound in the stillness, muffled by the cottage walls but distinct enough to be unmistakable. I pulled up, stiffening, the hair turning bristly on my neck. There was no second shot, not in the three or four seconds I stood motionless and not when I finally went charging ahead onto the porch.

  I swatted on the door a couple of times with the edge of my hand. Nothing happened inside. But after a space there was a low cry and a woman's voice said querulously, "Bernice? Oh my God—Bernice!" I caught hold of the knob, turned it; it was locked. The hell with propriety, I thought, and stepped back a pace and slammed the bottom of my shoe against the latch just below the knob.

  Metal screeched and wood splinters flew; the door burst open. And I was in a dark room with redwood walls, a beamed ceiling, a fireplace along one wall, rustic furniture scattered here and there. Off to the left was a dining area and a kitchen; off to the right was a short hallway that would lead to the bedrooms and the bath. There were two women in the room, one of them lying crumpled on a circular hooked rug near the fireplace, the other one standing near the entrance to the hallway. Equidistant between them, on the polished-wood floor at the rug's perimeter, was a .25 caliber automatic.

  The standing woman was Lauren Speers. She had shed the white coat—it was on a long couch with her straw bag—and she was wearing shorts and a halter, both of them white and brief, showing off a good deal of buttery tan skin. She stood without moving, staring down at the woman on the rug, the knuckles of one hand pressing her lips flat against her teeth. Her expression was one of bleary shock, as if she had too much liquor inside her to grasp the full meaning of what had happened here. Or to have registered my violent entrance. Even when I moved deeper into the room, over in front of her, she did not seem to know I was there.

  I went for the gun first. You don't leave a weapon lying around on the floor after somebody has just used it. I picked it up by the tip of the barrel—still warm—and dropped it into my coat pocket. Lauren Speers still didn't move, still didn't acknowledge my presence; her eyes were half-rolled up in their sockets. And I realized that she had fainted standing up, that it was only a matter of seconds before her legs gave out and she fell.

  Before that could happen I put an arm around her waist and half-carried her to the nearest chair, put her into it. She was out, all right; her head lolled to one side. I could smell the sour odor of g
in on her breath. The whole room smelled of gin, in fact, as if somebody had been using the stuff for disinfectant.

  The woman on the rug was dead. I knew that even without checking for a pulse; had known it the instant I saw her wide-open eyes and the blood on her blouse beneath one twisted arm. She was in her late thirties, attractive in a regular-featured way, with short brown hair and a thin mouth. Wearing blouse, skirt, open-toed sandals.

  Looking at her made my stomach feel queasy, filled me with a sense of revulsion and awe. It was the same reaction I always had to violent death, because it was such ugliness, such a waste. I swallowed against the taste of bile and turned away.

  Lauren Speers was still sprawled where I'd put her in the chair, unmoving. I went past her, down the short hall, and looked into the two bedrooms and the bath. All three were empty. And the windows in all three were closed and locked; I could see that at a glance.

  I came back out and looked into the kitchen. That was empty too. I started across to a set of sliding glass doors that led onto a rear balcony, but before I got there I noticed something on the floor between the couch and a burl coffee table—a piece of white paper folded lengthwise, lying there tent-fashion. I detoured over and used my handkerchief to pick it up.

  It was a sheet of notepaper with six lines of writing in a neat, backslanted feminine hand: three names followed by three series of numbers. All of the names and numbers had heavy lines drawn through them, like items crossed off on a grocery list.

  Rykman 56 57 59 62 63 116-125 171-175—25,000

  Boyer 214-231 235 239-247 255—25,000