And kill once more (7 page)

You could safely say that Elsa Doyle had a lot more sense then most good young starlets are supposed to possess. I was working on a way to drag her into our huddle when Toland came into the room.

"The coroner's taking Engle down for an autopsy. We'll call in the morning and it would help if one of you will sort of prepare Mrs. Engle so she'll be able to tell us whom she wants to handle the rites.

"So far we're going to say he drowned when a heart attack caught him in the pool. Strictly tentative. All of you have said you're here for the weekend, so I won't have to make you stay. It might look bad, though, if after planning to be here a couple of days you suddenly remember pressing business in the city. You get my point?"

He drew several nods and no objections. "Good. I'm glad you're cooperating. And I have one more detail. If no one has anything against it, I'd like to take prints.

When I phoned I had Ed—he's doing the coroner work for us this year—stop by my office and bring the works. So if you'll let me have your fingers here for a second—"

Toland had plenty of brains behind that weather-beaten face of his. He'd gone ahead on the assumption that no one would object and he hadn't exactly given anyone a chance to refuse. Twenty minutes later he said good night, reminded us that he hoped we'd all be a-round in the morning, and let himself out. There wasn't any good reason for starting the bickering over again. I had a few ideas myself, but there would be time enough later to go into the Pilcher-Cronk friendship. Instead I thought about the doctor and his quick and final judgment on Engle, and most of all I thought about the things he didn't do.

Those summers in the lifeguard tower, again. You pull someone out and go to work, but the call is sent and in short order you get equipment and a doctor on the scene. And he doesn't grab someone's wrist and say let's go home. Not by a long shot. You get activity, but good. From Cronk we got a performance that a first class boy scout would have been ashamed of. I rubbed my chin and thought about that a while, and then I looked at Kate.

"Let's get some air, shall we?" She stood up, but before I turned away I said to Cronk, "I hear there's a good moonlight view of the valley from one of these paths. Place called McBurney's point. You know where it is, Doc?"

"No."

That was short and final but I gave it one more boost. "I thought maybe being up here before you might be familiar with it. Doesn't it strike a chord?"

"No. Never heard of it and I'm certainly not going in search of it tonight, Bowman."

I nodded to Kate and we went toward the door. Bright moonlight falling on the hillside flooded the grounds and lit the concrete walk leading toward the plunge. We stopped some distance away and watched the gardener at work, and I glanced at my watch.

"Two o'clock, Kate. I guess you could say the staff here is well trained." She looked up at me and we went on toward the pool. It was empty now, and the Philippine, working in sneakers and faded denims was hosing down the bottom. A hazy vapor drifted up from the stream of water playing over blue tile and the film of brown melted away, swirled through the big stainless steel drainage grill and disappeared. We watched until he turned off the hose and went down the path to close the drain valve. A fresh supply of water began to splash into the clean pool. Kate took my arm and we walked on again.

"Marty, what do you think? I mean do you think George really had a heart attack?"

"Who can say?"

"In a way it looks bad. I went to the Gregory Agency and hired someone to come up here, and now George is dead. I know it would almost seem that I knew what was going to happen, but actually—"

"Sure," I said, and managed a reassuring pressure on her arm linked through mine.

After a while she said almost hesitantly, "Marty— did it appear to you that Dr. Cronk didn't really want to do anything for George? You tried, at least, but—"

"I know how it looks, Kate. But maybe the real reason Cronk didn't do something wasn't that he didn't want to."

"And?"

"The collection of people around this place puts a strain on your imagination, Kate. At least two of them

are as phoney as a lead life preserver."

"Cronk?" she asked.

"I don't know what his name is," I said slowly, "but if he's a doctor I'm Esther Williams. I'm sure that one of the reasons he didn't do anything for George is that he didn't know what to do. No shot for the heart. No attempt even to see if George was breathing. He didn't even seem to know that all accidental deaths have to be reported." I stopped and faced her. "And one more thing. McBurney's point went over his head like a full moon. Didn't register. But any first-year medical student would have tumbled to that one. In fact you don't have to study medicine. There must be a million people who have had their apendixes chopped out and most of them would remember McBurney's point. It isn't out here; it's on your tummy. Between the hip bone and the navel on the right side. It's the place they press when they're deciding whether or not you're a candidate for an incision. Like to see my operation?"

"You think—"

"I don't know what I think—except that Cronk is not a doctor. Now why he should pose as one up here is hard to say. Maybe the answer to that would simplify things a little."

We started walking again, not saying anything for a few yards. Then she asked quietly, "You said there were two phonies—who's the other?"

"Me," I said miserably. "I'm not a detective. You're stuck with something left over from amateur night, Kate. The details I handed to Toland are the McCoy. I'm a beach boy or a life guard or a drifter from pool to pool or whatever you want to call me but as a detective, this is my first time out."

She didn't blow a gasket like I half expected her to. Instead she looked straight ahead, her arm still loosely

through mine. I found my smokes, lit a pair, and passed one to her. She took it in silence and the ember glowed momentarily as she inhaled. When she blew the smoke out she said, "It beats me, Marty. Gregory's agency has a quarter-page ad in the phone book. Domestic, Marital, Criminal—every kind of service is listed. How come?"

"I've been trying to figure. The way it looks to me is that Gregory pegged this one as a blank, Kate. Maybe he saw you drive up in seven thousand dollars worth of chrome and gray leather, put it alongside your story about a wife being held on the ranch, and came up with much ado about nothing. He's a money-minded citizen, Kate. He wouldn't let a fee escape without a struggle."

"But what about his regular operators?"

"You were choosey. You had to have someone who would look right in that pool of Engle's. Gregory has a good staff all right, but some of them are older and some of them are fat and one I know carries his teeth in his pocket except when his feet are under a table. You didn't want anything like that; you'd made it pretty plain. So the big man remembered Marty Bowman who had asked for a job a couple of years before, and there it is."

"I seem to remember something about him writing checks to Bowman for twelve years," she said accusingly.

"I guess you do," I said, and told her about my brother Fred and how I was tied in with the agency. I finished with, "I'm not very proud of myself. I guess everything except the actual words was a lie, Kate."

We smoked in silence, our slow steps taking us a-long the tree-covered flagstone walk. The foliage was heavy enough to block most of the moonlight and had doubtlessly been set out to provide relief from the sun's heat during the day. At the end of the path we paused

beside the huge valve which emptied Engle's pool into the lower reservoir and I put a foot on the iron crank that served as a handle and looked across at Kate.

"Would you ask you what you're thinking if you were me?" I grinned.

In the half light I saw a smile work its way into her face. "I might."

"Good. I'll risk it. What's the word?"

"We got into this mess together. Let's dig in and see if we can't work it out between us, Marty."

"Thanks. Thanks for not putting it on the 'make the best of a bad bargain' level, Kate. And I hope you meant it, because I'm going to lay everything I can right out here in the open and start from there. You know the coin Toland keeps harping about? Well, I'm afraid that chick is coming home to roost. With us." Then I told her about the dollar and how it had been lifted from my dresser and planted on Engle. When I finished she took a deep breath.

"My God. Anything else?"

"No. Won't that do for a while?"

"I'd say it would. But who would want to implicate you. Why?"

"Probably it wasn't so much putting me in as it was getting somebody out," I said dryly. I turned my wrist up and shifted a bit until a shaft of moonlight filtering through the tree fell on the dial. "Almost three," I said. "And tomorrow could very well be a rough day. Shall we?" She ground out her smoke, I stepped on mine and we turned back toward the house. We passed a concrete park bench set under a tree and I thought Kate slowed a little. When we came to the next one she stopped.

"Maybe we'd better get aquainted all over again, Marty. I'm trying to figure you out."

"I'll help," I smiled. "I know the subject thoroughly." She sat down on the park bench and tilted her head

back, her long yellow hair touching the trunk of a jaca-randa tree. I parked beside her and said, "Shoot."

"Not a bad idea."

"What? What's eating you, kiddo? Change your mind?"

"No. Let's forget that for a while. Let's talk about you—and money."

"That won't take long. I haven't enough to run the conversation past one short breath."

She shook her head. "There it is again." She straightened up and turned toward me, her hand resting lightly on my arm. "Does everyone with a ten-dollar bill come under the heading of idle rich, Marty?" I frowned and she went on. "Maybe it's the car. Or an estate like this or—or a yacht, but there's something. Something big that you want pretty bad, Marty, and can't have. So everything you see is put in terms of what it cost. I— wish you wouldn't do that."

I didn't say anything and the next thing I knew a warm hand was creeping into mine. I tightened my fingers over hers and said, "For instance?"

"For instance 'seven thousand dollars worth of chrome and gray leather', Marty. Do you resent my owning that car?"

"Hell, no. It was just a remark, Kate."

"Sure. But it practically shouts your feelings."

"One crack. One mention of money and—"

"There have been others."

"Name one."

"Well, this afternoon Mrs. Pilcher was, as far as you were concerned, a pudgy character with a forty-dollar swim suit and a fifty-dollar corset. And before that there was the air-conditioning unit in my car. To me it's an appliance that cools the air; to you it was six hundred dollars. Why, Marty?"

She was right, of course. Looking back I could see I'd been stacking everything up against the pile of green-

backs it would take to buy it. I scraped around for an answer, and then I felt her other hand getting into the act. Soft fingers tracing the back of my hand holding hers.

"Maybe it's the pool," I said slowly, "and the fact that I never seem to get any closer to building one as the days roll past."

"Like Engle's?"

"No. No, a commercial venture, Kate." And then I told her about how I'd planned to set it up some day. She listened and I talked about drainage and locker facilities and a bar with a sliding front that would close it off while the youngsters were splashing around during the day but which would be a very cozy feature indeed for party rental in the evening. It was almost three-thirty when I looked at my watch and we started back toward the house.

"So you can see it'll take a lot of capital," I said. "A sizable investment. It's going to take Marty Bowman a long time to lay it away on a lifeguard's pay."

"There's always the bank, Marty. Have you tried any of them?"

"No," I said, and gave her a wry smile. "I've got sixty thousand stashed away in my account all right, only I've forgotten which bank it's in. Silly of me, wasn't it, but that's how careless we rich people get with our dough."

She shook her head. "Maybe I was wrong. Maybe you've been in the sun too long."

We came through the row of trees bordering the plunge. The pool was almost full now, and when I bent to scoop a handful of water it was quite warm. We walked in silence up to the house and around the back walk along the side toward the hill. At Kate's door we stopped.

Our eyes met and she disengaged her hand, whispered

a hasty good night, and was gone.

I slipped into my own place with as little noise as I could, washed my face, undressed and sat down on the bed. One thing—I felt a hell of a lot better being on the level for a change. And it would have been damned embarrassing to Kate if it came out that she'd hired a detective to investigate her host. Now there was a chance to hide that whole side of the picture, keep it all from coming to light. I smoked in silence until the hands of the clock pointed four, then put on a robe, and went quietly through the house to the snack bar. I drew a cup of coffee and sat down to listen. Not a sound. I lifted the receiver of the telephone and heard the reassuring buzz in my ear. Then I dialed long distance and put in a call to my own place in Santa Monica.

"I'll ring you back," the operator said cheerfully.

"No, thanks. I'll just hang on," I said. I didn't want the bell on this end to arouse anyone. After several minutes I heard the rhythmic muffled sound as the local operator on the other end plugged in my phone, and then a sleepy hello came over the wire.

Seven

"Fred? Marty." I said, my lips close to the mouthpiece "Come out of it, boy. There have been developments."

"Oh?" I heard him stifle a comfortable yawn. "What-samatter?"

I didn't want to stay on the phone all night and knowing Fred I decided that the first thing was to get him awake. "The gent who owns that estate the blonde and I are visiting is dead. Murdered, I think, or at least it looks that way. And dumped into the plunge."