Читать книгу The Narrow Cell - Ronal Kayser - Страница 8

From the moment I saw La Jolla, beautiful Jewel by-the-sea, I knew this was where I wanted to end my days.— THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF CATHERINE HOPE.

Lieutenant Kenmore entered La Jolla with mingled feelings.

The physical distance from the Market Street headquarters was fifteen miles, and there was open country between, and a tidewater bay.

There was also a spiritual distance, and a sociological gulf.

La Jolla was fashionable, which San Diego was not. It bore the stamp of social distinction, which San Diego had not. Its name was a verbal coin that could be dropped with a quite satisfactory golden ring at a box in the New York Metropolitan, or passed across the glistening napery of an Astor Street dinner table.

La Jolla, as a resort, was only slightly less publicized than Palm Springs, Sun Valley, and Del Monte. There was generally one or another Hollywood personality registered at one or another of the La Jolla hotels; an ex-President of Mexico stopped there frequently, and so did the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

It was a place where people came to spend a six weeks’ vacation, and remained for the rest of their lives. It was an artists’ and writers’ colony (in a small way); and a retired Army-and-Navy officers’ colony (in a much larger way); and its population included a great many elderly, often wealthy and sometimes distinguished persons who had retired to spend their declining years in the Riviera-like climate.

La Jolla was cosmopolite; and it was provincial, was more a village than a suburb. And San Diego, just a little bit jealous on the first score, was also just a little bit scornful on the second.

But Lieutenant Kenmore’s mingled feelings had nothing to do with civic rivalry. His bias was personal and professional.

There had once been a murder in La Jolla, and he had ever since hoped devoutly there might never be another. It would be hard to say which aspect had been the more disagreeable:

—The cosmopolitan, with its resulting intense and even nationwide publicity?

—Or the provincial, climaxed by the descent of a delegation of villagers upon the mayor and city manager?

—Or the professional, the difficulty of solving a resort town crime which might have been committed by any one of scores of week-end casuals?

It had been just one hell of a hopeless mess from the start.

To John Kenmore, homicide detective, La Jolla meant a painful memory of the Catherine Hope Case.

He had got stalled by a USMC truck convoy crossing Pacific Boulevard. There had been a Marine Paratroop landing on the mesa during the afternoon, with simulated Commando raids at La Jolla and Linda Vista. It was eight o’clock when Kenmore reached the suburb; and La Jolla after dark was not at its scenic best.

The sidewalk eucalyptus and palm trunks melted in an overlying stratum of gloom. In the yards, the colors of bougainvillaea, poinsettia, and hibiscus were night-drowned. In the homes, house lights were confined within shrouds of window drapery.

The village veiled itself from the Pacific, whose other terminus was Japan. The sea—visible at every street-end—wore a veil of its own in the form of a fog bank beyond the kelp beds. The water had a nasty, blackened, and dense look. The surf struck with a note of menace, growling against the shore.

(On the night Catherine Hope died, the beaches had glittered with bonfires. A full moon was rising brilliantly, if she had lived to see it. And her scream—presumably she had screamed—was lost in the shrieks of wave-wetted grunion hunters.)

Nowadays, beach fires were prohibited. The only nocturnal strollers along the shore were military sentries with their formidable dogs. (And it was too cold for strolling, anyway. A frost-warning night.)

But La Jolla, if not at its scenic and climatic best, at any rate functioned at civic par. The civilian defense drill following on the heels of the mock Commando attack, Henry Bowling had mentioned was drawing to its conclusion.

At the street corners, Kenmore passed armbanded volunteers. In front of the public library, heavily bandaged “casualties’’ were being lifted into emergency, station wagon ambulances. The Martian apparition on the postoffice steps was a helmeted and gas-masked warden; he was erecting a placard that said Danger—Mustard, A trailer pump unit, manned by volunteers, was just now pulling away from the fire department’s sub-station.

John Kenmore, war duty officer, was by no means un« happy about La Jolla.

At the corner of Laguna Terrace and Toyon Street a street-lamp, its upper surface daubed with peeling dim-out paint, shed barely enough light to reveal the Bowling house rising from its maze of shrubbery beyond a head-high Laurustinus hedge.

Lieutenant Kenmore was, it appeared, expected. An air raid warden came to the curb and played his flashlight onto the vehicle’s official insignia.

“It’s around back. This way—the guesthouse.” There was a beard under the white-painted helmet, and Kenmore made out the vaguely familiar features of the La Jolla attorney, William Wyeland. “His air raid post, you know.”

Mr. Wyeland darted ahead on the double-quick.

From the corner, the Laurustinus hedge ran its impenetrably thick, bristling greenery along Toyon Street. On a small gate at the upper corner of the property appeared the red-and-white insignia of the wardens’ organization. Sector B, a placard announced. Henry R. Bowling, Senior Warden.

William Wyeland flung open the creaking gate, recalled his manners, and let Lieutenant Kenmore through first onto the flagged walk.

Branches of rhododendron and white-blooming es-callonia brushed Kenmore’s shoulder. To the right, he caught glimpses of a tennis court glimmering in the night with a faint, liquescent shine. Ahead, the boughs of a silk oak wept down their concealing leaves.

The big house, beyond the tennis court and the silk oak, offered a cream stucco exterior rising three storeys tall to the steep pitch of an English-style roof. A few glimmers of light, as coy as harem ladies, peeped around the carefully draped windows.

It was not a very imaginative house, but it was indubitably a solid one. It had cost a lot of money to build, and only a rich man could have afforded to live in it.

Kenmore emerged from under the silk oak boughs.

There was another light, this to his left, fanning from what was obviously the guesthouse doorway. The light fan touched the pyramidal form of sandbags enclosing a window. (Henry Bowling had his shelter, though not an excavated one.)

The light fan continued, and silhouetted a kneeling figure that genuflected in deep, prayerful attitudes.

Cadenced, the rhythmic movement suggested an anciently pagan rite.

Air raid warden Wyeland directed his flashbeam ahead. And the kneeling figure became merely a man practicing Schafer Method artificial respiration upon another who lay stretched on the grass.

This might have been an air raid drill incident.

But in the darkness a woman sobbed—a sound that smote the lieutenant’s ear tragically and feverishly, and gave his nerves a sharply tightening twist.

Kenmore snatched his companion’s flashlight and sprang forward.

The disc of light fell on the victim’s turned and averted features—the thickish features of Henry R. Bowling.

Bowling’s mouth gaped open. His face, suffused now with a mottled cherry blush had on it that peculiar expression which is most expressive of all, because it is no expression at all.

It was a look of wide, stunned-eyed, and utter vacuity.

“Good God!” thought Kenmore. “Good God!”

He knew, from the moment he saw Bowling’s face, the attempted resuscitation was so much wasted effort.

Henry Bowling was dead.