Читать книгу And Kill Once More - Al Fray - Страница 5

THE WAITER brought two steaming cups, slid one in front of me, made a production of arranging the other for Kate and went reluctantly back to subdividing his pies. I offered sugar, tipped a half spoon into my own cup and gave it a slow round-and-round.

“That brings us to me, Kate,” I said quietly. “I haven’t asked to be invited either—but what about you? You’re a guest up there quite often, or so you say.” I made it sound like a question. Two blue eyes caught mine and held on, and when she spoke her voice asked for a small measure of confidence.

“Would I hire you to find out something I already know?”

I didn’t answer but I remembered a couple of years back a blonde babe pushing thirty, trim and wearing forty dollars worth of bathing suit, came down to the plunge in one of those swank Las Vegas hotel pools. I had the duty and this chick decided to take a few lessons. She started out by sputtering and thrashing the water and in half an hour I had her paddling across the pool. I was feeling real proud of myself until it crossed my mind that she’d learned just a little too fast and it came out later that this was one hell of a way from her first dip. There was something about her being on the 1948 Olympic swimming team and we had a good laugh over it in the bar later that evening. Looking across at Kate, I reminded myself not to bite down too hard on everything she handed out. It might not all be candy.

I sipped hot brown coffee and sifted a few possibilities, then leaned forward and swept salt and pepper shakers, the sugar bowl, ashtray, and napkin holder over to the wall. Except for our cups that cleared the table.

“Let’s dive in and get wet all the way, Kate,” I said. “You think something is off the beat up at the Engle ranch. Okay, we’ll start with what we have and see where it leads us. So far we’ve agreed that people don’t want to go up there but they do go and what’s more, they try to make believe they like it. But not you. Right? You’re not in the general setup.” I brought the sugar bowl back and put it in the center of the table. “That’s point one. Now what’s different about you? What sets you apart from the other guests?”

She drummed polished fingernails on the shiny table and thought it over. “I really don’t know. There doesn’t seem to be any place to start.”

“Who invites you, George or Sandy?”

“Sandy of course.”

“Well, does she know the other people or are they friends of his? I mean did she know them before they came up there?”

Kate’s eyes widened and for several seconds she stared at me. When she answered her voice was tense and I could see the glow of excitement rising in her face.

“I can’t be sure about Sandy, but I haven’t known a single one of them before George and Sandy moved up here. And for several years before she married we ran together quite a bit. They shouldn’t all be strangers to me, should they?”

I brought over the salt shaker and put it beside the sugar. “Another small point,” I grinned. “Maybe we’re going to get a yard or two here. How long have they had this desert hideaway?”

“Almost two years.”

“How often do you park your suitcase in their guest room?”

“Actually,” she laughed, “Sandy and I don’t stand on formal invitations. I drive up whenever I feel in the mood, maybe every six weeks or so, but not on a pre-arranged schedule. They have plenty of guest space and I just phone and say I’ll be there.”

“And you sometimes find a friend to bring?”

“No. This is the first time—but Sandy was more than glad to have me invite someone.”

I reached for the napkin holder. “Then there is this business about Sandy Engle not leaving the old homestead. What about that, Kate?”

“That’s the thing that really worries me, Marty. As I said, Sandy and I have been one-two for a lot of years. We traded school girl secrets in junior high and compared notes on dates when we were in Beverly Hills High School and all the rest. Same sorority at USC and I was the maid of honor when she and George went down the aisle three years ago and if there’s anyone in California that I know especially well it’s Sandy Engle. She’s a girl who likes to get around and always has. Yet in the two years that she and George have had their estate up in the canyon, she hasn’t left the grounds once. Not once—and I’ve got to know why.”

“You mean that literally. She’s never been outside the fence—if there is a fence, that is.”

“There’s a fence, and it isn’t locked but it might as well be as far as Sandy is concerned,” Kate said grimly.

I set the napkin holder down. “That’s good enough for point three until a better one comes along.” I grinned. “Who shops for the necessities like beer and mink coats and an occasional loaf of bread?”

Kate ground out her cigarette and searched my face with a puzzled eye. “You’re joking of course.” She smiled thinly. “Sandy has the mink all right, and the things that go with it, all except one. A mink coat isn’t of much use unless people see it and to see Sandy’s fur you have to drive up to the desert.”

“Does she hint that she’d like to break out? What does she offer as a reason for her exile?”

“Now that I think of it, she doesn’t let the subject come out in the open. She never talks about it or anything, just sits on the nest. Whenever I invite her to my place in Hollywood she makes some hasty excuse and turns to a different subject.” Kate looked down and her fingers twisted together nervously. They stopped and she looked up. “This may sound silly—but her eyes haven’t gotten the word, Marty. She wants to get away. I’m sure of it. Sure enough to have looked up the Gregory Agency in the yellow pages of the phone book. She couldn’t have changed, Marty. Not Sandy. Not that much. She’s—she’s somehow a prisoner, and yet—”

Across the counter the old fellow had finished dividing the pastry and was sliding the pieces into a mirrored display case. I caught his eye long enough to order a couple of more cups of coffee and went back to the chore at hand.

“You wouldn’t have gone this far without having come to a conclusion of some kind,” I said easily. “Coming to Gregory is costing you money. What have you decided?” She glanced up, then gave me a meaningful look and toyed with the spoon until our coffee refills spilled into the cups. When we were alone again she bit her lip and looked away.

“Some way George is keeping Sandy there. I mean I think he is and—”

“How could he?” I asked quickly.

“I don’t quite know. Still—if he isn’t, somebody is.”

It wasn’t much, and I said, “There’s a constitutional amendment against that sort of thing. If she’s being held against her will we’ll get her out.”

The blonde flashed me a dim smile that said she wasn’t completely sold. I wasn’t, either. I let the conversation wither while we went through the second cup of coffee, then dropped a half buck on the table and ushered her out to her expensive collection of chrome and gray leather. One thing for sure, if this was a gag someone had gone to a lot of trouble building it.

We eased out onto the highway and rolled north, the big car logging the miles pleasantly and silently. I went over the facts again and tried to get a foothold—not only on what she’d told me, but the small aura of involuntary information that clung to her and the rest of the setup. The one common denominator was money. Where there’s a lot of it, there’re usually people eager to get their hands on it. In this case that could get to include me.

And what about Sandy’s staying so close to the family circle? I thought about that and a different light fell across it, dim and obscure, yet perhaps touching on possibilities. If she didn’t leave, she wouldn’t be any place else—maybe she had a reason for staying at the ranch against her will. In short, Sandy Engle could be hiding up in these hills—I tossed a sidelong look at the blonde, wondering if the same thought had occurred to her.

The sun was beginning to make itself felt. I touched a button and rolled the rear windows down into their wells. It didn’t help. Then the blonde put a finger on the buttons on her side and rolled all of the windows back up. Tight. Then another button and somewhere a soft motor hummed to life and settled back down to near silence as it attained speed. The car began to cool. I blew a slow breath through rounded lips and shook my head.

“Let’s talk about money, Kate,” I said. “We peasants choose a new car now and then, something out of what is laughingly called the low price range but they’re still listed in the consumers’ guides. Also listed there, just to give us something to work for, are the class wagons and I seem to remember that the air-conditioning unit you just turned on is listed as an extra, available at something over six hundred bucks a copy. Now if you and the Engle woman were so buddy-buddy for humpteen years, she must have had a bit of scratch too. Tell me, how was she fixed before she married G.E. and what about him?”

She gave me a cool look and I guessed she was trying to decide whether or not I was being personal so I raised a business-like eyebrow and waited. “Sandy didn’t have a tremendous amount of money but I’m sure she didn’t have to count the pennies.”

“And George?”

“He has a business in L.A. Insurance. The subject hasn’t come up, of course, but I gather that he does rather well.”

“Wait a second,” I said quickly, my foot coming off the gas. “You mean he commutes to L.A. from here. Sixty miles each way every day?”

“No.” Kate touched a tongue to her red lips and looked across at me. “He’s what is commonly called ‘an older man’—that is, he’s probably a good twenty years older than Sandy. Maybe fifty-one or two. Naturally he has his affairs in smooth working order and only goes to the office a couple of mornings a week.”

“Oh,” I said, and tried to give it an understanding tone, but I wasn’t convinced. I put the gas back down and the car responded with instant vigor. I thought about some of the insurance agents I know. None of them can make a living in two days a week. Sure, a couple of them are doing all right but they open the office at nine and twelve hours later they’re out beating their gums in somebody’s parlor. Long hours. And Engle builds a mansion in the hills on part time work? Easy, Marty. There might be something here.

I drove fast and tried to make my mind keep pace with the wheels. I didn’t have much to go on, but Engle just might be conducting some business at home that didn’t stand to be talked about, and that might explain the unwilling guests. In which case we might all be eventually embarrassed—even Sandy.

When I looked across at the girl I caught her giving me a thoughtful eye. With the windows closed and no breeze whipping through the car her long blonde hair fell almost to her shoulders and she sat against the gray leather with an easy grace you don’t run across very often. I wanted to reach over and pat her tan cheek and tell her everything was going to be all right and to stop worrying. But that wouldn’t have accomplished much and instead I decided to start a new chain of questions.

The blonde beat me to the punch, “Have you been with the Gregory Agency for quite a while, Marty?”

I let a frown work across my face but the question wasn’t exactly unexpected. I’d been thinking of an answer for a good thirty miles.

“Be careful you don’t trip over my long white beard,” I said, “because Gregory has been handing pay checks to Bowman for almost twelve years. Satisfied?” I finished with a dubious smile, and salved my conscience with the fact that I hadn’t told her a direct lie. I hadn’t said which Bowman.

“I didn’t mean it that way,” she laughed, and pinked a little “It’s just that you’re burned so brown and you—don’t exactly look like a detective.”

“Two questions—” I grinned—“and I’ll answer them both. As you can probably guess the hours are a little irregular. Some of the boys go fishing, some sleep; I pile up beach time. And a detective that looked like a detective couldn’t earn enough money to file an income tax report. The good ones look like bookkeepers or salesmen or carpenters.”

She touched a tongue to her lips again and a twinkle came into her eye. “I know one that looks like something you see down on Muscle Beach most any Sunday morning.”

“You pursue your hobby and I’ll keep mine,” I said. “This being a working day for me, though, it might be best if we slipped back to things a little closer to the business at hand. I was going to ask some more questions about the guests and our man George Engle. Feel like talking a while?”

As the big Caddy rolled over the highway I listened and tried to slide things into place. The George and Sandy marriage was definitely a going affair. He was older than she—a hell of a lot older—but Kate was sure they were quite the happy couple. Married three years ago, lived in the city for a while, then the sudden shift to the hills and sand. No explanations, just building a desert home in the bleak foothills edging the Mojave. A permanent setup, complete with pool and a dozen guest rooms.

Visits by many friends, both sexes, but of the old gang only Kate was invited. George ran the rest of the guest list. And his wife held down the fort with a vigilance hardly to be expected of a wife so young. Two years and not off of the grounds. Now Kate was worried.

A worried blonde with plenty of scratch in her handbag. Enough to roll her expensive hack down to the best agency in Hollywood and part with one of Boreland Gregory’s king-size retainers just to see what was keeping her little friend on the nest.

A few more miles and Kate called a turn. We wheeled left off of the highway and onto a narrow tarred road. We began to gain a little altitude. Tar pavement gave way to gravel but it was carefully graded and fairly wide. It wound into the opening of a canyon and started up at an even steeper angle. Hairpin turns and switchbacks. Then we saw it.

Almost on the ridge but not quite—low enough to let the hill break the wind. Rambling in the Southern California mode, and even from below you could see that it was something special in the way of desert mansions. It came in and out of sight as we rounded tight turns and changed direction, and when I pulled the Cad hard to the left and circled an embankment we rolled onto the concrete parking strip in front of a six-car garage. The cream and brown Pontiac belonging to Pilcher stood at one end of the apron and a black Lincoln was beside it. I eased the Cad to a stop, went around to the other side and held the door for Kate. For once I wasn’t looking at her.

“Nice layout, isn’t it?” She smiled.

I didn’t answer. Hers was the understatement of the morning and I couldn’t improve on it. Bright new concrete block had been painted a soft desert blue and while the area outlying from the block fence was brown and parched, inside everything was green and rich with life. A park. An estate which, had it not been so obviously new, might have been a holdover from the years when fabulously wealthy movie stars, in those lush years before heavy income tax, built great showplaces above Beverly Hills.

I blew a slow breath and reached for the bags, but a Philippino was hurrying toward us. I straightened again and had one more look at the Engle resort.

For a man who worked only a couple of mornings a week George Engle was doing right well.