And kill once more (17 page)

"Thanks, Fred," I said. There wasn't any use telling him that if he'd stayed in bed and kept his hands off the phone I'd have gotten the Engle woman put away and back to my own room unseen. Instead I asked about Martha and Tim and how they were enjoying the beach. He said fine and good-by and hung up, but I stood there with the silent phone in my hand and tried to figure a line that Widdle would swallow.

Finally I mumbled an "Uh-huh, I'll do that," and dropped the phone back on the cradle. "Widdle, you wanted to know what I was doing in Mrs. Engle's room. Well, there's no use kidding you. We had a little date— went into town for light refreshments. She took one or two over the limit. You can—"

"You weren't to leave, Bowman. Toland's orders were—"

"Toland ordered," I cut in, "that we weren't to skip out so's he'd have to hunt for us. That was yesterday. Tonight he said he didn't want you to hear any cars going down the driveway. Mrs. Engle and I are clear on both counts. I started to tell you that you can check if you like; the Cadillac will still be warm out there. Me, I'm hitting the sack. I'm bushed."

"I'll bet you are, Bowman," Widdle said, his voice a mixture of sourness and envy.

"Why, Robert Widdle!" I said in mock surprise. "Someone should take a scrub brush to that mind of yours."

Trekking back to my room, I turned on the lights, put an ear to the door, and listened. The muffled sounds of Widdle's footsteps followed my path and stopped just outside. Grinning, I whistled my way back and forth across the room a time or two, made a sound effects production out of brushing my teeth, then flushed the John, snapped off the lights and bounced the bed a little. Barefooted I crept back to the door and a bit later Widdle's stealthy footsteps receded down the hall. I wiggled tired toes back into my shoes, let myself out the back way, hurried around to the terrace and down toward the pool.

There couldn't be many places. Sandy had brought those papers out with her—there wasn't any other way. Toland went over the room. But Sandy Engle hadn't been caught with the envelopes so there had to be a plant. Out here. I found the blanket she had asked for and later folded up. It was on a deck chair near where she'd dropped it and I shook it out, then turned it over to be sure nothing was pinned to the other side. No luck.

The shaded patio swing. She had sobbed considerably while stretched out under her blanket. She could have been working those papers out of sight under the pad. I lifted it, didn't see anything, then flopped the pad onto

the grass and felt down behind the canvas back of the swing. No dice. Then I bent over the pad itself and worked along the seams. There was a slit in the canvas —short, maybe six inches—and it was more a tear like you'd make with a nail file or such. I slid a hand in and felt for the envelopes.

Nothing doing. Another two minutes of probing yielded nothing. I shoved the pad back in place and sat down. No use looking for another hiding place—the torn edge of the cloth showed new white threads; obviously the cut was made for the envelopes. Someone had aced me.

It was dark along the back walk. Very cautiously I went to each door in turn, my ear pressed hard against the thin part of the paneling as I strained for small sounds within. Cronk breathed rhythmically, steadily. I checked for several minutes. Elsa Doyle made no sound in her breathing, but waiting patiently, I heard the slight whisper of the sheets as she turned in bed.

I went on. It took most of a half hour to cover the guests and it was a half hour down the drain. Not a thing. I began to wonder about Kate and whether or not she had seen anyone in the vicinity of the pool during the evening. She had been there, diving for our boy Widdle, when I left and, after all, I had mentioned seeing her later.

Well, it was later all right, for sure—about twelve-thirty. I tapped softly on her door anyway. On the second round the window nearest the door slid up a scant two inches.

"Who's there?" Her whispered voice sounded low and clear and good to me.

"Marty. Later than I'd planned, but how's for a word or two. There have been developments, Kate."

The window closed silently and the door lock ticked

off a muffled click. I turned the knob carefully, kept it tight against the tumbler as I came through, and eased it shut. Kate pulled the blinds down and we risked the flare of a lighter, then sat on the bed and smoked as we brought each other up to date on the turn of events. Wid-die had stayed glued to his deck chair, Kate told me with a smile, and she had listened for the sound of her car but heard not a thing. Our only mark in passing was, she thought, a barely visible cloud of dust that rose here and there along the lower road but even this was almost lost in the evening twilight. When we were safely on our way she had showered and slipped into a robe, and had spent the balance of her time reading in bed, then snapped off the light and gone to sleep. At eleven.

"Good girl, Kate. And you'll be glad to know that your work wasn't wasted. We found that Sandy, to use the doc's phrase, 'hasn't at present, and never has had spots or shadows on the lung.' She's clear."

"Marty, that must mean—"

"Yeah, it means a lot," I said. She was close to me now and I captured her hand. It wasn't exactly a major struggle and I felt her move slightly toward me. I laced fingers with her and said, "There's a twist to this deal we didn't know about until tonight." I told her about the X-rays and Sandy's reaction and how she reverted to what she must have been. There are some things you don't tell one lady about another, though, and I was careful to tread lightly past Sandy Engle's game of footsie and the rest. Instead I mentioned she had been holding out on us some way.

"We can find out in the morning, Marty," Kate whispered. "We'll see her when she's slept it off a while, and she'll let us help her. I'm sure she will."

"We'll try, Kate." I blew smoke rings and weighed how much more I should tell. So far I hadn't mentioned my

forage through that lounge pad outside. And there didn't seem to be any good reason for doing it now—we could let Sandy Engle give us her version of that later.

"Uh, Marty," Kate's voice said that there was an amused smile on her face but in the darkness I couldn't see, "you must have put up quite a battle for your honor tonight. Or did you?"

"Now, baby," I laughed, "you—"

"I used to know Sandy Engle pretty well, Marty. Before, I mean, and if George hasn't been—well, two years—"

"Katy, my girl," I cut in, "you are going to have to keep that pretty nose of yours out of other people's lives." Then I pulled her to me and kissed her hard on the mouth. Casually at first, but halfway through it began to develop into something strictly for keeps, something warm and tight and breathless and even a bit shaky. Being noble once in an evening is about all you can expect from a man and I'd taken care of that back on the road from Lancaster. This was definitely different.

It was after two when I reached down and swept my hand in a semicircle over the floor to locate my shoes. No luck, and I had to kneel and make a search. Under the fringe of bedspread hanging down my hand touched a shoe all right but it wasn't one I could have squeezed into. It was a high-heeled, open-toe pump and it was wet. I froze momentarily—Kate Weston had said she spent the night reading in her bed. Carefully I ran my fingers over the tiny shoe. Grass clippings, also wet. Those pumps had been out for some time and could hardly have beaten me into this room by long. They sure as hell hadn't been here since evening.

"Something wrong, Marty?"

"No." I found my footwear, kissed her good night, and a few minutes later I sat on the bed in my own room,

a cigarette in my hand, wondering about Kate Weston and her dew-soaked shoes and why she had lied to me. me. Now where in hell had she been?

Sixteen

It's hard to push something like that out of your mind. You get to believing a woman, sure she's leveling with you, and the awakening slaps you in the face with all the force of a nine-foot breaker. After a while I got restless and got up for a tour of the grounds and a little air.

Around the back walk and past the end of the building, then down toward the pool. It was almost empty now, the shallow water swirling through the sunken chrome drain cap in a great vortex. Across from me the silent Philippino laid out his hose and prepared to wash down the sides and bottom. For a fleeting moment my eye fastened on him as he bent over his gear and I tried to visualize him and his rarely seen wife as having a hand in this, then gave it up. Seeing the stoic way he went about his appointed tasks, I was sure that, unless it had been written into his list of duties, he could hardly have been involved. No way of being sure, of course, but a man has to play the percentages.

Turning away, I went across the terrace and through to the snack bar. Coffee, steaming hot with a half spoon of sugar to take the edge off, and nothing to eat. I smoked and waited for the coffee to cool a bit, then looked up as the door opened on the other side and Bob Widdle came in.

"Out late for a growing boy, aren't you, Widdle?" I asked soberly.

"Just sitting here reading. I heard you coming and

stepped through the door and waited to see what you were up to, Bowman."

"The eye that never sleeps—you're going to be a real detective before long. All you need is one of those double-billed caps. Damn handy, Widdle. Keeps people from telling whether you're coming or going."

Widdle didn't bat an eye. "You," he pointed out, "seem to be coming and going pretty often, Bowman. I thought you just went to bed."

"Guess I broke training, coach. Couldn't sleep." He watched while I sipped the coffee, then went back to his magazine. Another one of those with a modern Samson flexing improbable biceps on the cover, and I thought idly that if he read much more of that stuff he'd be getting muscles in his teeth. I walked toward the door and said, "Going along to tuck me in, coach?"

He gave me a blank look and I went out and down the hall and shucked out of my clothes. I didn't even listen to see if Widdle had followed me. It wasn't important, somehow. Nothing seemed important except that Bowman had been so wrong about a blonde named Weston. I fell asleep trying to figure where she could have been that was so secretive that she had to peddle me a big greasy line about spending the evening with a good book.

Sunday morning started out in low gear and jumped to high in a hurry. It began with low clouds that skimmed the tops of the hills behind us and merged with gray vapor rising out of the upper storage tank. I looked out the back window for several minutes while collecting my thoughts from yesterday, then brushed my teeth, showered and shaved, combed, slipped into tan slacks and a green sport shirt and headed for breakfast. Bob Widdle, dark rings bearing silent witness that he had kept the night vigil and perhaps plowed through considerable

material on the care and maintainance of the human carcass, was just finishing his coffee. The only other member on hand was Cronk, and I gave out with a cheery, "Good morning." It reaped a modest harvest; a curt nod from Widdle and a grunt that could have been anything from, "Hello," to, "Go to hell," from Cronk. It was fairly evident that our conversation would be something less than sparkling and it hardly seemed worth the effort. I started on grapefruit and, when Widdle got up to leave, I tossed back that curt nod he had loaned me. Cronk was still at the table when I polished off my short stack, finished the coffee, and went in search of Kate.

She wasn't in her room but I found her reading by the pool, her smooth brown curves displayed in a filmy light blue nylon creation that probably cost—was very nice looking indeed. I made the last part of that observation out loud.

"Thanks, Marty. You've had breakfast?" I told her I had and asked if she was ready to make that social call on Sandy Engle. "I stopped by a few minutes ago, Marty. She isn't up, or at least she didn't answer. We'd better wait a while, I think."

"In comfort," I said, and dropped on a nearby lounge. It was refreshing to know we weren't going into any downcast-eyes and you-won't-respect-me-any-more routine. She folded the paper and we chatted about this and that; verbal sparring until it got around to those envelopes again. She hadn't the least doubt that we'd be able to talk Sandy Engle into making it a three-way partnership, a thing I wasn't at all sure of, but there was nothing to be gained in saying so. I didn't mention that it was highly unlikely that Sandy could produce them anyway now—that someone had raided the hiding place and carried off the loot. Or did she already know that? Maybe that dew on those tiny shoes of hers had been acquired

while Kate was digging out those white envelopes. Then she pointed up the walk behind me,

"Company, Marty."

Mrs. Pilcher was coming toward the pool, her fat fanny encased in a pink knitted suit, the like of which people of her beam shouldn't fool with in any way. Probably she had passed breakfast, a minor concession to that increasing weight, but she wasn't coming out to chat with us. We might have been part of the scenery, almost, because we rated no more than a cool glance. We kept our voices low enough not to bother her with our ideas and she must have gotten bored with the silence because she got up again, wandered around the pool to the far side, and went through the opening in the cypress and down the winding path of flagstone. About three minutes later we heard the scream.

I stared at Kate, then jumped to my feet and raced around the edge of the plunge and down the walk. At the second concrete park bench, the one against the jacar-anda tree, I saw them—the still screaming Mrs. Pilcher and, on the bench, her head tossed back against the tree, Sandy Engle. But it wasn't just a restful pose. Even as I sprinted toward them I caught the odd way her head had angled off and then the black wire ends sticking out behind the tree trunk.

I stopped, like you do while your mind takes in the picture in one quick flash. An old wire coat hanger had been straightened out, then slipped around her neck and the trunk of that jacaranda, pulled tight, hauling her slender white neck tight against the tree just above the top of the bench, and given a few hasty turns to keep it in place. Neat and sweet—no blood, no sound, no chance to work free. She must have—suddenly I scooted around behind the bench, grabbed the wire, whipped the ends around until the loop fell free, and vaulted over in