Sleuths (25 page)

So much for Herb Jackson, I thought then. Now I could start worrying about the red-haired man again.

What I had said about being afraid he'd drowned was a lie. But he was not a ghost and he had not pulled any magical vanishing act; he was still here, and I was pretty sure he was still alive. It was just that Jackson and I had overlooked something—and it had not occurred to me what it was until Jackson said there was nothing here except tule grass and shrubs and three trees. That was not quite true. There was something else on the islet, and it made one place we had failed to search; that was where the man had to be.

I went straight to it, hurrying, and when I got there I said my name again in a loud voice and added that I was a detective from San Francisco.

Then I said, "He's gone now; there's nobody around but me. You're safe."

Nothing happened for fifteen seconds. Then there were sounds and struggling movement, and I waded in quickly to help him with some careful lifting and pushing.

And there he was, burrowing free of a depression in the soft mud, out from under my rented skiff just above the waterline where I had beached the forward half of it.

When he was clear of the boat I released my grip on the gunwale and eased him up on his feet. He kept trying to talk, but he was in no shape for that yet; most of what he said was gibberish. I got him into the skiff, wrapped him in a square of canvas from the stern—he was shivering so badly you could almost hear his bones clicking together—and cleaned some of the mud off him. The area behind his right ear was pulpy and badly lacerated, but if he was lucky he didn't have anything worse than a concussion.

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.

T
he 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.