Sleuths (26 page)

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 gin 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

Huddleston 178 170 205-211 360-401 415-420—50,000.

None of that meant anything to me. I put the paper into the same pocket with the gun, moved on to the sliding doors. They were securely locked, with one of those twist latches that are supposed to be impossible to force from outside. Adjacent was a wide dormer-style window split into vertical halves that fastened in the center, so you could open them inward on a hot day to let in the sea breeze. The halves were also locked—a simple bar-type catch on one that flipped over and fit inside a bracket on the other—and there was more of the wrought-iron burglar-proofing bolted over them on the outside.

I stood at the glass doors, looking out. From there you had an impressive view down a long rocky slope to where the Pacific roiled up foam in a secluded cove, framed on both sides by skyscraping redwoods. But it wasn't the view that had my attention; it was what looked to be a strip of film about three inches in length that was caught on a railing splinter off to one side and fluttering in the wind. I debated whether or not to unlatch the doors and go out there for a closer look. I was still debating when somebody came clumping up onto the front porch.

The noise brought me around. The front door was still open, and I watched it fill up with six feet of a youngish flaxen-haired guy dressed in tennis whites and carrying a covered racket. He said, "What's going on here? Who are you?" Then he got to where he could see the body on the rug, and Lauren Speers unconscious in the chair, and he said, "Christ!" in an awed voice.

Right away, to avoid trouble, I told him my name, my profession, and the fact that I had come here to see Lauren Speers on a business matter, only to stumble on a homicide instead. He was Joe Craig, he said, one of Xanadu's tennis professionals, and he had come over from his own staff cottage nearby to pick up Speers for a three o'clock tennis appointment. He seemed stunned, confused; his eyes kept shifting away from me to the body.

There was a telephone on another burl table beside the couch. I went to it and rang up the resort office. And spent five minutes and a lot of breath explaining three times to three different people that there had been a shooting in Number 41 and somebody was dead. None of the three wanted to believe it. A killing in Xanadu? Things like that just didn't happen. The first one referred me to the second and the second to the third; the third, who said he was Resident Director Mitchell, maintained his disbelief for a good two minutes before a kind of horrified indignation took over and he promised to notify the county police right away.

Craig had gone over to Lauren Speers and was down on one knee beside her, chafing one of her hands without result. "Maybe we should take her outside," he said. "Let her have some air."

That was a good idea. I helped him get her up out of the chair, and as we hauled her across to the door I asked him, "Do you know the dead woman?"

"God, yes. Bernice Dolan, Ms. Speers' secretary. Did Ms. Speers do that to her? Shoot her like that?"

"So it would seem." On the porch we put her onto a wrought-iron chaise longue and Craig went after her hand again. "There's nobody else here, the balcony doors and all the windows are locked from the inside, and I was down on the path with a clear look at the front door when it happened."

He shook his head. "I knew they weren't getting along," he said, "but I never thought it would lead to anything like this."

"How did you know they weren't getting along?"

"Bernice told me. We dated a couple of times—nothing serious." Another headshake. "I can't believe she's dead."

"What was the trouble between them?"

"Well, Ms. Speers is writing a book—or rather, dictating one. All about some of the important people she's known and some of the things she's been mixed up in in the past. And full of scandalous material, apparently. She'd got her hands on all sorts of letters and documents and she quoted some of them at length. Bernice'd had editorial experience in New York and kept telling her she couldn't do that because some of the material was criminal and most of it was libelous. But that didn't matter to Ms. Speers; she said she was going to publish it anyway. They were always arguing about it."

"Why didn't she just fire Bernice?"

"I guess she was afraid Bernice would go to some of the people mentioned in the book, out of spite or something, and stir up trouble that'd affect publication."

"Were their arguments ever violent?"

"I think so. Bernice was afraid of her. She'd have quit herself if she hadn't needed the money."

But even if Lauren Speers was prone to violence, I thought, why would she shoot her secretary no more than two minutes after returning from an after-lunch drive? That was how long it had been between the time I saw her go inside and the time the gun went off: two minutes maximum.

Craig's hand-chafing was finally beginning to have an effect. La Speers made a low moaning sound, her eyelids fluttered and slid up, and she winced. Her stare was glassy and blank for three or four seconds; the pupils looked as if they were afloat in bloody milk. Then memory seemed to come back to her and her eyes focused, her body jerked as if an electrical current had passed through it.

"Oh my God!" she said. "Bernice!"

"Easy," Craig said. "It's all over now, Mrs. Speers."

"Joe? What are you doing here?"

"Our tennis date, remember?"

"I don't remember anything. Oh God, my head . . ." Then she saw me standing there. "Who're you?"

We got it established who I was and more or less why I was present. She did not seem to care; she pushed herself off the chaise longue before I was done talking and went inside. She was none too steady on her feet, but when Craig tried to take her arm she smacked his hand away. One long look at the body produced a shudder and sent her rushing into the kitchen. I heard the banging of cupboard doors and the clink of glassware, and a few seconds later she came back with a cut-glass decanter in her right hand and an empty tumbler in her left. The decanter was full of something colorless that was probably gin.

I went over as she started to pour and took both decanter and tumbler away from her. "No more liquor. You've had plenty."

Her eyes snapped at me, full of savagery. "You fat son of a bitch—how dare you! Give it back to me!"

"No," I said, thinking:
fat son of a bitch
. Yeah. I put my back to her and went down the hall into the bathroom. She came after me, calling me more names; clawed at my arm and hand while I emptied the gin into the washbasin. I yelled to Craig to get her off me and he came and did that.

There was blood on the back of my right hand where she'd scratched me. I washed it off, dabbed the scratch with iodine from the medicine cabinet. Speers was back on the chaise longue when I returned to the porch, Craig beside her looking nonplussed. She was shaking and she looked sick, shrunken, as if all her flesh had contracted inside her skin. But the fury was still alive in those green eyes: They kept right on ripping away at me.

I asked her, "What happened here today, Ms. Speers?"

"Go to hell," she said.

"Why did you kill your secretary?"