Killer in the Street (10 page)

“Hi, fella,” he said. “I went out to the cigarette machine and left my key in the room. Do you have a duplicate?”

The clerk grinned and nodded.

“Room number?” he asked.

“Room 227,” Kyle said.

The cabin to which Dee drove the little convertible was far from primitive. Sam Stevens did nothing on a small scale. His mountain home consisted of four bedrooms, two baths, a thirty-foot living room with a huge fireplace at one end, and a large and elaborately equipped kitchen in which Ramon Moreno was preparing a chili pie for dinner. Ramon, who was part Spanish and part Papago, performed deftly before the appreciative eyes of little Mike Walker. Ramon was one of Mike’s oldest and truest friends. They had known one another for all of two hours.

It was three o’clock before Dee reached the cabin. After leaving the house, she drove to the El Con shopping center to pick up some levis for Mike—and for Kyle, too, because he would never remember to bring a change of clothes. And Dee never drove fast—particularly not in the little car with the troublesome stick shift. She hoped to see the blue station wagon waiting for her at the cabin site, but Kyle hadn’t arrived. She wasn’t worried. Ramon had received a call from Sam telling him the Walkers were coming for a few days and that was reassurance enough. She busied herself unpacking while Mike attached himself to Sam’s caretaker. It was love at first sight.

“Ramon can hold snakes,” Mike announced proudly when Dee came into the kitchen. “He can carry them in his hands and over his shoulder.”

“That’s remarkable,” Dee said.

Ramon smiled his own dark, mysterious smile.

“Ramon isn’t afraid of anything in the world,” Mike added. “Not even snakes.”

“Snakes have a purpose,” Ramon said. “Nothing is created without a purpose. Some people use them in ceremonies of worship.”

“And they hold them in their hands, don’t they?” Mike demanded. “And the snakes don’t bite!”

Dee repressed a slight shudder. She wasn’t squeamish. Nobody could be married to Kyle Walker without developing a healthy set of nerves, but a nagging fear lived in the back of Dee’s mind—an “occupation housewife fear” that she was learning to live with if there were no excessive embellishments.

“Speaking of hands,” she remarked lightly, “how’s about getting yours washed before dinner, young man? And please stop talking about snakes. I’ll have nightmares!”

She left the gentle Ramon to escort Mike to the nearest lavatory and walked to the large windows that banked one side of the living room. Sam’s cabin was located below the snow line. A fringe of pines arched about the site on three sides, but the front approach was clear of any obstruction and afforded a wide view of the valley below. Now, at this hour of the day, the valley was a dull gold bowl across which stretched the tight line of black asphalt that was the road leading to the highway, and, as far as she could see, until everything dissolved in waves of lowland heat, there was no moving thing on the road. No automobile. No blue station wagon. She consulted her wristwatch. It was now after five and Kyle was a fast driver when traveling alone. The fear pricked at her nerve ends. Kyle had been delayed, she told herself. He hadn’t lied about coming to the cabin. It wouldn’t be like the nights he promised to come home and never made it.

She turned away from the windows. The living room was a huge vault of a room with a high-beamed ceiling and a massive stone fireplace that gave a sense of strength and casual luxury. The room was furnished with deep leather chairs, wide cushioned divans and heavy slab tables that seemed to grow up out of the quarry tile floor. It was a man’s room in a man’s house—but on one of the tables stood a silver-framed photograph of a lovely, mature woman that caught Dee’s interest. Sam Stevens had never mentioned his wife. From Kyle she had learned that Sam had been a widower for seven years. Sarah—”Mrs. Sam”—had come from one of the finer local families (some said she provided the nucleus for Sam’s fortune) and had married the young human dynamo thirty-five years before her death. According to local legend, Sam Stevens hung between life and suicide for a year after she was gone, and then suddenly buried his grief in a new burst of activity that swept him on to another fortune. He never remarried, and nobody expected him to remarry. It was like a fairy story. Once upon a time there were two lovers named Sam and Sarah Stevens …

She was a beautiful woman. She had a merry twinkle in her eyes that made Dee want to sit down and have a woman-to-woman talk.

“Mrs. Sam,” she said aloud, “was it ever thus? Did you have to wait and wait for Sam and never know if he was going to come or not?”

But photographs don’t answer. Dee set it back on the table and looked for the telephone. She found it and put in a call to Kyle’s office. She waited. She counted seven rings before replacing the instrument, and by that time she was satisfied that Kyle was on his way. Suddenly, she felt gay. She remembered that Sam had a clever bar hidden away somewhere behind the wall paneling. She experimented until she found the right panel and then watched the bar swing out into the room. She found a martini pitcher and glasses. Kyle liked the glasses chilled. She put them into the refrigerator and then started to work on the martinis. It was a knack she hadn’t used for some time, and it was exciting to feel like a wife expecting to have cocktails with her husband again. A husband who might remember, so far from the mad whirl of his business world, to give her somewhat more than a dutiful kiss when he arrived. She completed the mixing and poured the first glass for herself. She needed something to unwind those taut nerves after an afternoon on the road with Mike.

The martini was perfect—just the way Kyle liked them. She began to feel mellow. She located Sam’s hi-fi concealed in an old Spanish chest and turned the volume loud enough to carry the music with her into the bedroom while she changed from capris to a simple, form-fitting sheath that would tell Kyle on sight how much she had missed him and wanted him back. When she was dressed, and her hair brushed, and her lipstick and false eyelashes properly applied, she returned to the kitchen and helped Ramon give Mike his dinner. The boy was tired after the drive, and there was no need to keep him up until Kyle appeared. When Mike’s dinner was completed, she saw him off to bed and then went back to the bar for a second martini.

At seven o’clock Ramon, wearing an immaculate white jacket over his levis, came in and asked when Mrs. Walker would like him to serve the dinner. Dee was startled. Kyle was a fast driver—he never spent more than an hour and a half driving from his office to the ranch. She found the telephone again and called the house in Tucson. There was no answer. Playing a wild hunch, she telephoned Sam’s house in the city and was told by the maid that Mr. Stevens was dining out with friends and—no, Mr. Walker hadn’t called. By the time that conversation was concluded, it was seven-fifteen and Dee knew, with a sudden and dread certainty, that he wasn’t coming at all. He had never meant to come. Call it intuition. Call it a woman’s sensitivity. Whatever it was, it was sharp and clear, and Dee lived with the knowledge until there was no trace of doubt.

Kyle had deliberately sent her to Sam’s cabin, and he wouldn’t come if she waited all night.

Dee returned to the bedroom and got a wrap and her handbag. She gave Ramon instructions to look after Mike, and then returned to the little English car. The sun had long since set. The valley was now softened with a mauve afterglow, and the last streaks of flame were fading from the sky. It was a long drive back to Tucson, but she had to learn why Kyle had lied.

On some nights Van Bryson had a late class at the university. In that event, the lights burned in his laboratory until ten or eleven. On other nights, he fought the monkey on his back, and that might require a wide itinerary and all of the hours up to and including dawn. Van thought too much, and genius doesn’t integrate well. He was a bystander in the strange world of Kyle and Sam. He was a man with an orchestra seat in a theater where the play was annihilation or extinction, and the suspense of the closing act was rough on his nervous system.

Van’s means of relaxation were various: small avant-garde bars where he could spend the chilly hours listening to a piano player with no expression on his face release his soul through the tips of his fingers; lonely roads leading up to unmarked Indian ruins where he could drive the battered but powerful truck he preferred to a chrome-trimmed status symbol and spend days at a time searching for pottery fragments among the missile bases. Then, too, there were the several apartments of the several women he knew who were versed in an ancient therapy. Of these independent ways, Dee was well aware, but on this night, with the moon riding high in the sky by the time she reached Van’s off-campus apartment, the gods were with her. Van’s light was burning. Van answered the doorbell personally.

He was sober. He held a highball glass in one hand, but it must have been his first drink of the evening and it was hardly touched. His hair was disheveled, which was a normal condition, and he had changed from the uniform classroom white shirt and tie to a Mexican hand-woven shirt-jacket that established his status as a typical tourist to the streets of Nogales.

He stared at Dee for several seconds before he spoke. “I don’t believe it. I’ve said my prayers like a good little boy ever since we met, but I never really expected an answer. You’ve actually come!”

“Van, be serious,” Dee scolded. “I’m looking for Kyle.”

“I knew it!” He bowed his head abjectly. “I knew it was too good to be true. But come in, anyway. There’s always room for one more.”

Van wasn’t alone. Dee was aware of that situation the moment she entered the apartment. It was a very ordinary three-room bachelor apartment, but Van’s bizarre taste and archeological collection made it unusual. He had picked up some quite good things, added a few paintings by the better local artists and furnished the place in a unique blend of Spanish antique and army surplus. Seated on a foam-rubber pad covered with a colorful Indian rug was a very young girl with large, round blue eyes and corn-colored hair that hung to her waist. She was attired in bright blue velvet trousers and bullfighter’s shirt and held cupped between her two slender hands a red cut-glass cup. Barely noticing Dee, she looked up at Van. “Darling,” she said, in a low, Southwestern drawl, “this heah drink is awful.”

“A Marguerite by any other name would still take the varnish off the furniture,” Van said. “It’s an acquired taste. Try it with a little salt on the back of your hand.”

“Why?” the girl asked.

“I’m not sure. Maybe you’ll catch the bluebird of happiness if you sprinkle it on his tail…. Sandra, this lady, my most welcome guest, is Mrs. Walker. Dee, this is Sandra. Sandra is one of my students. She has a 190 I.Q.—in the classroom. She doesn’t know it yet, but she’s just leaving. Sandra, honey, go home.”

Sandra appraised Dee with a glance. Her mind analyzed and categorized quickly.
Married. Old … nearly thirty. Worried. Peyton Place format
. Smothering a yawn, Sandra came to her feet. She stood five feet-seven in sandals. She stooped, gracefully, and deposited the red cut-glass cup on the coffee table. The cup had clear lettering that read: “Chicago Columbian Exposition—1893.”

Sandra smiled automatically like a life-size doll. “We’ll have to discuss the Clausewitz concept some other time,” she drawled. “Good night, Professor. Good night, Mrs. Watkins.”

“Walker,” Van corrected.

Sandra’s mechanical smile came again and she glided to the doorway. Van closed the door behind her and sighed. “Can I help it if I inspire young genius?” he asked.

“She’s too young for you,” Dee observed.

“I doubt that!” Van said. “I really do doubt that! Not too young for me, or for Napoleon, Don Juan or Trujillo the Younger. But that’s beside the point. Can I get you a drink?”

“I can’t stay for a drink. I’m looking for Kyle—”

“You said that when you came in.”

“—and I’ve already had my quota.”

“Well, I haven’t. Give me a chance to catch up.”

Van took a generous drag from the glass in his hand and waited for Dee to make her own explanation in her own way. She walked into the apartment and sat down on the divan. Seriously, as if it were a project of immense importance, she took some popcorn from a bowl on the coffee table and began to eat slowly. There was trouble in her eyes. She looked like a little girl afraid of growing up too quickly.

“Van,” she said at last, “what is Kyle doing?”

Van put down his glass. “What do you mean?”

“What is he doing to me and Mike? Why don’t we ever see him?”

“He’s trying to make a million dollars.”

“But we don’t need a million dollars! We need him! Van, I know you men have a grand thing about loyalty, but I have to know. Where is Kyle tonight?”

“Tonight? Am I supposed to know?”

“I hoped you would. You’re just about my last chance. He isn’t at the office, and he isn’t at home.”

“Then he must be with Sam.”

“No, he’s not! Sam’s out and Kyle hasn’t been to his house. Besides, he told Sam this afternoon that he was going up to the cabin. And this morning he practically ordered me to go up there with Mike. He promised to join us this evening, but he didn’t come. Van, I’m frightened. I have to know. Where is my husband?”