And kill once more (13 page)

"Surprised, Marty?"

"Why, no," I said. "I hardly ever step into my room without finding a half a dozen movie queens parked on the furniture. It's standard operating procedure." Then I grinned at her. "If my mouth seemed to hang open there for a while it must have been my adenoids."

She awarded me a smile. "I wanted to talk to you, Marty. I'm worried. Maybe being a man you haven't thought too much about it but George was murdered, you know, or at least we're reasonably sure he was, and Toland doesn't seem to be able to find out who's behind it. I'm getting scared." She tried a smile for size and it didn't fit. "A small chill is starting to creep up my spine."

"Maybe it's that dress," I said. I shook out a cigarette and found a match. "You don't go along with the obvious reason for Engle's death, then?"

"You mean—"

"I mean he was putting the bite on someone who bit back. One of us was paying him off and the tariff got too steep. You could borrow a line from industry and say that Engle priced himself right out of business. What else?" I watched her and tried to figure what kind of a curve she was pitching. I could see her being shrewd, or coy, or witty, or even outright sexy if the time was right, but there was one thing I couldn't see her being and that was scared. "You aren't getting paid for keeping still about anything, are you, Elsa?" I asked pointedly.

"Of course not, Marty." She said it half accusingly and those serious brown eyes caught my face and held on.

"Then why worry? Relax. Let Toland burn the midnight oil; he's paid for it."

She reached for an ashtray, flicked the gray off her

cigarette, and settled back on the arm of that chair. I took a quick look at my watch and stood up. Kate had mentioned a swim. She could be along any moment now and I didn't want to have her break in on this. She didn't own me, either body or soul, but she was paying for my time and it might complicate things if she thought I was giving the redhead a play. I took a thoughtful drag, then said, "As to who's behind it, Elsa, I guess your opinion will match the next one. If you count noses there are seven possibilities, which means that six of us who are clear must each regard every other member of the team as a possible killer. Only one out of the seven is sure who's guilty and he's not singing it from the rooftop. But I don't agree that Toland isn't getting along with his work. Me, I'm willing to believe he'll point the finger any moment now, but just for the pure hell of it, I'm trying to beat him to the draw. Mentally, that is. It's like sitting in an easy chair in your own living room, a highball in one hand and a smoke in the other, watching a TV quiz show, and trying to outguess some jerk who's standing there in front of nine hundred people. You guess, and when you miss no one is the wiser—you get it right and you feel good all evening." I looked at my watch again, obviously this time, and jerked a thumb toward the pool. I had to get Elsa out of here and the path seemed as good a place as any. "There's a little checking I wanted to do out here before dinner." I smiled. "You got nothing better to do, why not come along, if only for laughs?"

She stood up and dropped the lipstick-stained cigarette stub into the tray. "Sure, Marty. Just for kicks."

We circled the Engle plunge and walked along the narrow strip next to the Cypress trees, then down the flagstones toward the lower end of the grounds. It was like strolling through the park with your best girl on your

arm, except that the thoughts occupying my mind were a long way from romance. I had peddled her a bill of goods about Toland, made it sound as if he would reach into the bag and pull out the murderer any second now, but I wasn't quite sold on it myself. I was more than a little worried that the collar he'd get his hand on was the one around my neck.

We walked slowly, the redhead matching her pace to mine, and she asked a casual question about the beaches I'd worked and how many you have to haul out in a season as lifeguard and did many of them survive. I got the feeling she was filling in time, laying a smoke screen and before long she asked what I really knew about Kate Weston. I hedged, then changed the subject, but by the time we came to the bench under the jacaranda she'd worked it back to Kate again.

"About all I can tell you, Elsa, is what I said when the sheriff caught me off base this morning." I grinned. "I thought it was painfully obvious to all hands that I knew damn little about her."

"Come off it, Marty!" She laughed. "It's quite plain that you're more to her than hired help. It shows in her eyes. You can kid Toland, maybe, but any woman would be able to guess."

"You picked the right word, Elsa. A guess, a wild shot, because I'm just a beach bum working from one season to the next and it would take two weeks of my pay to buy a set of tires for that Cad we drove up here in. She's a class lass and I'm just one of the boys from down on the sand, and any other interpretation you hang on us is strictly out of the dream pipe." I tapped the bottom of my pack and held it out to her, then fished out my lighter and snapped the flame alive. "Sit down, Red," I said. "It's my turn. I'd like to ask the questions for a while."

"Of course."

"What's the angle, kid?" I asked with a smile. "What are we trying to achieve at the moment?"

"I don't quite follow you."

"You're way ahead," I said softly. "I'm the boy who's trying to catch up. Why did you stop by my room? Why the questions? Where are we going?"

"You mean you think—"

"Look, Elsa. Let's not kid one another. Your name is in lights and you're on the way up. You need Marty Bowman in your life like you need an extra nose, yet you go out of your way to throw in with him. For a while, and for a reason. It has to be that way."

She gave me a thoughtful look, her deep brown eyes measuring every inch of my face. Then she came up with: "You have, I suppose, seen the rest of the male contingent in this asylum?"

"Pilcher and Cronk?" I grinned. "There's a lot of man divided up between those two."

"Enough suet for three ordinary men, Marty. You really shouldn't be proud to stand out in that kind of company, you know. I—like you. Put me down as a lover of brown-skinned blonds with muscle. There's your reason and as to the time, we're both too young to worry much about tomorrow. Right?"

"The tide must have changed on me," I said evenly. "I thought you were plenty worried a few minutes ago. You said so."

"Marty, you're being mean!" She pouted. "Couldn't we just talk for a while without jumping at each other's throats?"

"Maybe we can." I smiled. "You know, living as close to the movie industry as I do in L.A. I still don't know a hell of a lot about it. Like how some of you kids break in and all. You, for instance—where did you get a break

and how long had you been plugging at it before the door opened?"

She started to talk about her movie career then, and it gave me time to think about a few other things. But somewhere along the line I climbed back into the boat and began to pay strict attention to Elsa, because the words were striking a familiar chord. Like a record you've heard before, and it shouldn't have been—not when you talk about your own life. One day you see things one way and the next day differently—you're likely to accent certain things or alter the order, or omit incidents you stressed earlier. But some bit of business that you've learned by rote comes out the same every time, and from Elsa Doyle I was getting a replay of the recitation she'd given Toland. It reminded me of the brush salesman they used to tell about. He memorized his entire sales talk from start to finish. If someone interrupted his spiel and threw him off the track he had to go back out and rap on the door again and start from his opening sentence. Not that the red-headed bundle of curves sitting under the jacaranda tree was dull. You couldn't say that by any stretch of your imagination, but she was being careful to hew to the line, keeping her story straight.

When she finished I held out a hand. She took it, and I helped her up. We went slowly toward the pool again, our steps uneven as we followed the brown flagstones. Elsa managed to keep her fingers linked through mine and as we neared the opening in the row of cypress she held back, then faced me as I turned toward her.

"We've gotten to know each other ever so much better, Marty." She smiled. "But you haven't told me what you've uncovered so far. You were coming out here to find out something. What were you looking for?"

"Information," I said vaguely.

"About?"

"You," I said lightly, then took the edge off with a big round grin. "Just checking up."

She drew back and gave me a mild look. "That sounded like something said a little bit in jest and a whole lot in earnest, Marty," she said slowly. "You mean—"

She stopped then as footsteps sounded along the walk. Heavy steps. The tubby threesome came through the row of trees and walked past us. I gave a curt nod and it was not returned. In fact the only recognition I received was a slight uptilting of Mrs. Pilcher's nose as she passed, but the babe next to me made out a great deal better. Pilcher was sneaking sidelong glances at her underpinning as he closed on us and so was Cronk, and when they were fifty feet down the flagstone walk Dan Pilcher turned for a quick stern-view. I watched them go, my mind ticking off possible ways to wriggle off the hook with Elsa.

"Just kidding, of course." I let my eyes grow serious. "It's like Toland said. Someone slipped a towel around Engle's neck and sort of hampered his breathing for a while. The sheriff says it would have to have been a reasonably strong person and he's eliminated the girls. I'll go along with that—there isn't any reason to doubt it. Do you think so, Elsa?"

"I don't know." She grew thoughtful for a few seconds, then nodded in the direction Pilcher, his wife, and Cronk had disappeared. "They seem to be friends again, Marty. I wonder."

"In union there is strength, they say. Maybe they're sharpening the knife for Bowman." I took her arm then and piloted her through the cypress and around the edge of the pool. We walked slowly toward the house and I dropped Elsa in the main hallway, went on to my own room, slipped into a pair of trunks, and picked up a towel. When I got back to the pool, Kate Weston was just

draping her white terrycloth beach robe over the back of a deck chair.

"Busy day, little man?" she asked dryly. "Business," I said shortly. "Strictly business." "Nice, if you can get it—and it looks like you could." "Let's swim." I said, and cut into the blue warmth of Engle's fancy pool. I slid through the water and enjoyed the feel of it against my hands as I swam, felt its pressure along my body and legs. Catching the tile drain-trough on the far side, I turned and pushed off and stroked back to the edge where Kate stood, then looked up at her. She was tucking that beautiful blonde hair under the rim of a white rubber bathing cap and I hadn't seen this swim suit before. Two-piece, all white lastex—considerably more coverage than those bikini jobs but still brief enough to be plenty interesting. The upper part was one of those no-strap bras that depend a little on the cut of the cloth and a lot on the curve of the chassis to keep them in place. For diving there was an auxiliary neck band that tied behind.

It crossed my mind that it must have set her back about twenty clams, even wholesale, which would be the way she'd get it—then remembered that we people with half of all the money in the world don't put things in terms of what they cost. When she snapped the chin band in place she arched over my head and slipped through the surface with hardly a sound and very little splash. A true water fan, this blonde. I caught her as she turned to make the pool the long way and together we swam through the tepid water. We stopped momentarily under the diving board, then hit a mutual cadence as we stroked toward the shallow end, and in the forward glance you take just after you roll your head up to inhale, I saw that Toland's boy, Bob Widdle, had come down to keep an eye on things.

I grinned to myself. He hadn't come to pick up any

points on swimming. You didn't have to be a student of form to appreciate the tan loveliness poured into that two-piece swim suit Kate was wearing and Widdle was human—and maybe a year or two younger than Marty Bowman. Put him at the end of the twenties, a big boy with a likeable rural slant on life, and an open face.

Kate and I made half a dozen more lengths of the pool, thinking our own thoughts, yet matching stroke for stroke in a lazy, measured pace that was almost restful. I fell to drawing comparisons between my blonde and the carefully groomed redhead with a film career in the making. The one an upper-crust chick with money in the family—a fancy women's apparel shop in Hollywood and a Caddy to sport around in when she wasn't sitting at a desk in daddy's shop and giving orders to the help. The other, the starlet, obviously self-made and bucking her way up in the toughest competition the world can toss at a girl. Discounting part of her pitch as the usual maiarky the publicity department at the studio would grind out, there were still enough facts to tell you that Elsa Doyle was willing to battle her own way in the world. And able—looking back at our brief session together I got the feeling that she was cultivating Bowman for a reason. A fairly specific reason, it looked like, because she wouldn't have to work hard to impress her physical charms on a male. Nature had taken care of that. Maybe she thought that by hanging around she might stumble onto some little angle that could be exploited for publicity—she might even palm off a solution to Engle's death as her own and it would put her on page one for a week. It seemed logical, and then my grin broadened because I thought of something else. I had our Elsa pegged for the kind that was out to parlay sex into a career one way or another, and I hadn't the least doubt that, if a desirable role in some film were at stake,

our Elsa would indulge what Hollywood has come to know as the casting couch.

Well, hell. Marty Bowman could be talked into giving credit where credit wasn't due. Me, I don't need publicity.

Thirteen

Kate and I had the pool to ourselves, and for the better part of an hour we enjoyed it. We took a few from the springboard and when we tired of that, pulled a couple of green pads next to each other and let the afternoon sun spirit away the water in our bathing suits. Kate slipped off her rubber cap and shook that long golden hair over her shoulders, folded an elbow and rested her cheek on the back of her hand, then smiled across at me.