Murder Queen High (5 page)

“It was,” John Henry said grimly. “But not so much of a shock as it was to find all our things had been searched.”

Mr. Trim sat down abruptly. “Searched! You mean somebody actually tampered with your personal belongings?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Oh, no!”

Sin said scornfully, “Oh, yes! We wouldn’t say so otherwise.”

“You see, Mr. Trim — whoever searched our stuff did it in a hurry. They didn’t try to be neat. Everything’s in a mess.”

“I could kill them!” Sin jounced down on the davenport viciously. “They broke my bottle of peppermint. Now all my lingerie smells like chewing gum. I don’t even think it’ll wash out.”

“I’m flabbergasted.” Trim fanned himself with his straw hat. “I’m more than flabbergasted.”

“Oh, well,” said John Henry moodily. He couldn’t keep angry long at a time. “It’s not as if we were surprised. Nothing surprises us any more.”

The tooth-paste representative stood up and said vigorously, “Something has to be done,” and walked around the room in a little circle. Then he sat down again. “This can’t be allowed to happen in a civilized community. After all, I’m responsible, you see. For the peppermint and everything.”

Sin fought against it, but she felt a trace of warmth for their unwanted aide. Maybe his bald head was solid rock, but he was sincerely trying to do his job. John Henry and she shouldn’t take everything out on him.

“Johnny, maybe you should tell Mr. Trim the whole story.”

Her husband’s head came up in surprise. “You think we should?”

“He might have an idea.”

“Well,” doubted John Henry. He regarded Trim’s anxious expression narrowly. Then he attacked the story, wandering back and forth in front of the other man, trying to remember everything that mattered. The wounded prowler, the robed waiter, the playing card queen, Barselou’s hostile attitude … Only when Conover got around to the shooting in the alley’s and Homer Anglin’s dying message did Trim squirm and commence puckering his forehead confusedly.

“You can understand why we feel more than just ordinary annoyance, can’t you?” Sin asked while her husband caught his breath.

Mr. Trim skinned colorless lips back over his discolored teeth and made clucking noises. “Say, I don’t know what to say,” he confessed.

“It’d make more sense if Anglin had given me something,” John Henry said. “But he didn’t. He just said, ‘You already got it’ and died. I didn’t get anything. There’s nothing in our luggage because we looked pretty carefully.”

“Except my peppermint,” Sin commented bitterly.

Trim reached over and laid his straw hat on the davenport beside Sin and folded his hands in his lap. “But somebody thinks Anglin gave you something, Mr. Conover,” he said owlishly.

John Henry showed impatience. “We figured that.”

“My point is that that is quite probably why Mr. Gayner was so willing to accommodate Miss Jordan. Moving your baggage would give him an excellent opportunity to search it.”

“I don’t get it,” admitted Sin. “Why should Mr. Gayner want to go through our things?”

“Because he was told to, Mrs. Conover.” Mr.Trim sat very straight and looked proud of himself. “You see, Mr. Gayner’s boss — in fact, the boss of most things in Azure — is Mr. Barselou. Mr. Barselou owns this very hotel.”

First, John Henry just grunted. Then he flung his arms wide like a soap-box orator and said, “Well, how do you like that!”

Sin pounded one small fist against Mr. Barselou’s davenport. “No wonder! But why?” Her tan face tied up in a knot of confusion. “Why?”

“Just more weight to your husband’s belief that Mr. Barselou is hip-deep in this business, whatever it is. And there’s no doubt that Mr. Barselou believes that you, in turn, are working against his interests.” Trim asked gently, benevolently, “Mr. and Mrs. Conover — answer me truthfully. Are you?”

“For heaven’s sake no!” said Sin and crossed her heart. “All we want is to be left alone.”

“Then,” said Mr. Trim relievedly, “I suggest we go to the police.”

“No!” The other two jumped at John Henry’s outburst and he flushed. “I mean, no. Maybe now that Barselou’s searched our stuff, he’s convinced we haven’t got what he’s after. Besides, I’d feel like a dope telling all this extra stuff to that police lieutenant now.”

“Mr. Lay didn’t like us particularly at the time.”

“I’d feel like a dope. I thought I was smart keeping some of this to myself — he’d give me life if I changed stories now.”

The Bry-Ter representative got out his ivory toothpick and worked on his teeth while he considered. “Say, that’s obstructing justice. But that’s not my department. I can see why you wouldn’t want to court trouble and I guess the police will find out this funny business by themselves.” He held up his toothpick brightly. “We’ll hire a private detective. The Company will — ”

Now Sin objected. “Johnny and I have just been married three years. We still like to be alone together. It’d scare me to death if somebody was tramping around the cottage all night. We want a chance to relax and enjoy this vacation.”

“No, thanks,” added her husband. “We’ll leave well enough alone.”

“Well,” said Trim disappointedly, tucking away his inspirational toothpick, “if you just want to forget it …”

A little while after that he retrieved his straw hat, took quite a while bidding both the Conovers good night and finally left. Sin and John Henry undressed in silence. The smell of peppermint essence pervaded the bedroom and kept all their reflections on one lurid track. A circular track that ended where it began.

“You know, Sin,” John Henry mused as he buttoned his pajama top absently and gazed somewhere beyond the pink blossoms patterned into the wallpaper, “I was thinking about what you said earlier tonight. Who are we?”

She giggled. “Gee, we know, don’t we?”

“We don’t know who Barselou thinks we are. Sin, he’s fighting somebody he’s never seen — or he’d never have mistaken us for them.”

Rolling back the sleeves of her robe contemplatively, Sin said, “But poor Anglin knew we were wrong — after he saw you. What was he trying to deliver?”

“That’s over our heads.” He folded back the bedcovers in a neat triangle on each side. “But first Anglin tries to drop off his ‘it’ here and no luck. Then he tries to give it to Barselou — and gets stopped.”

“What did you do with my curlers?” Sin found them where she’d laid them on the ivory dresser. “Poor guy — trying so hard to peddle his something.”

John Henry stuffed his handkerchief under his pillow, lit a cigarette and sprawled on the bed. “But here he’s headed for Barselou — right at his back door — and bang! He gets delirious and thinks he’s given something to me. Why me?”

“Maybe he thought you were Barselou,” his wife said. “You’ve been putting on weight lately.”

“No,” said John Henry, pointedly ignoring her, “it was probably a mistake. You know, he’d seen me in the cottage when he was looking for somebody else. When he was shot, his subconscious mind — ”

“I had a philosophy prof at State that explained things like you do,” said Sin, gathering up her equipment. “And I got a D.”

Her husband chuckled. “Only because you were sexy-looking. You deserved an F. Anyway, mistake or not, Anglin decided to give it to me instead of Barselou.”

“That’d be swell — except that you didn’t get anything, you don’t know what you didn’t get and you don’t know where it is now.” She started for the bathroom. “We’ll leave well enough alone. You were the guy who said that.”

“Okay, okay. But I notice you’ve been thinking about it too.”

Sin paused with one hand on the doorknob. “Suppose Anglin came up the canyon counting the cottages instead of reading numbers. That’s what I’ve been thinking.”

“Suppose he did. It’s dark and it’d be easier than walking up on every front porch.”

“You know how some buildings and hotels don’t have any thirteenth floor? ‘Cause people are superstitious? So they just skip that number.”

“Wait a minute — I see what you mean, Sin — ”

“Uh-huh. I’ll bet there’s no Cottage 13.”

“Sure, that’s it! Clever girl, honey. That means if Anglin came along counting cottages — and got our old Cottage 15 — he was one number over.”

“See, Johnny? Anglin came into the fourteenth cottage. But he wanted Cottage 14. Now let’s drop it.”

John Henry swung his legs off the bed and sat up excitedly. “Hey, maybe Anglin was going to meet the girl here in 14. Anglin makes a mistake and comes to 15, instead. As soon as she finds it out — wait a minute! How’d she find it out?”

Sin sighed. “Does it matter?”

“Sure. After Anglin left, you had me turn the porch light on, Sin. She could have seen the blood next to the door where he put his hand. So she guesses her man has been there and insists on having the cottage he visited. Make sense?”

“I guess so.”

“She figures that Anglin left whatever he was to deliver in 15. So she wants to have the cottage and a good chance to look for it. Just in case, our stuff is searched, too.”

“Well, which side do you have your Miss Jordan on?” Sin asked. “Did she spill the peppermint or did Barselou’s Mr. Gayner? I’m lost.” She opened the bathroom door.

“You know, Sin,” said John Henry, pleasantly thoughtful, “I think it would be a smart thing if I tried to get chummy with the Jordan girl tomorrow and — ”

Sin stopped right where she was. “Oh, you do!”

“Well, I just thought that she could probably clear things up for me in about two minutes. That’s all.”

“I don’t doubt it. She looks like it, all right.”

“You jealous?” John Henry asked in pleased tones.

“Well, maybe just a little bit.”

“Don’t be a dope. You don’t have a thing to be jealous about and you know it.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” said his wife grudgingly. “Maybe you like that slinky type.”

“I like my women redheaded. With green eyes. And …” With both hands he traced a symmetrical outline in the air.

“Johnny, you’re terrible.” The click of the bathroom latch put a decisive end to the conversation. “Hey, how long you going to be in there?”

THE MORNING SUN sent golden rays like soft-tipped arrows, prodding the silent town to its feet, caressing the pale buildings, driving darkness slowly from the streets, invading the palm-shaded grounds of the hotel upon the hill.

Among the shadows of the chill morgue, the police surgeon stripped the sheet away from the slab and wrinkled his nose distastefully. In the tiny room next to his office, Lieutenant Lay sprawled on his back and snored. Barselou turned off his desk lamp as morning glow began to seep through the plate-glass window. He scowled again at the worn map on his desk and penciled a faint cross upon it. Odell slouched at the counter of the Tomahawk Drive-Inn, drinking his second cup of coffee of the day. Munching a piece of dry toast in the already-steaming kitchen of the Las Dunas, Vernon expected the worst: that some cottage would want room service. Upstairs, Sagmon Robottom commenced a short note to his wife, decided to do his setting up exercises instead. The portable typewriter in Thelma Loomis’ second floor room had been clattering for fifteen minutes. Gayner stood in the lobby and critically surveyed the tile floor, still needing its initial sweeping. Humming happily, Mr. Trim cleaned his teeth. In Cottage 15, Faye Jordan painted her toenails and waited for the phone to ring.

In Cottage 14, Sin pulled the covers tighter into her mussed red hair, dreaming she was being chased over foot-gripping sand dunes by a Queen of Diamonds. And John Henry Conover sneaked outdoors to see if there was a Cottage 13.

There was not.

Disconsolate, Vernon departed with the dirty dishes and the few remnants of breakfast. Sin returned to the living room a moment later, her hair brushed into a smooth pageboy that glinted like a ruby.

“Johnny, what are you doing?”

John Henry stopped peeking outdoors between slats of the Venetian blinds and spun hastily, his round face guilty. “Just — looking out,” was the best he could think of.

“What at?” Sin went to the window herself. “Oh!” She raised one stern eyebrow at her husband. The occupant of Cottage 15 was disappearing down the flagstone path toward the hotel. There was a great deal of pale skin which her white knitted bathing suit didn’t cover.

“Just checking up,” John Henry said lamely.

“Oh, yeah?”

“I heard her door slam and I was curious. Ever since you figured out that cottage number business — ”

“Now see here, John Henry — ”

John Henry sabotaged her objections. He seized her pliant body, bent it back across his arm, bit the tip of her nose gently and lifted her back to her feet. Sin came up laughing.

“What have you got in your pocket, anyway?” she wanted to know. Her hand plunged into the breast pocket of his dark-blue sport coat. “Oh,” she said, “here’s your pencil,” and dropped the Eversharp back into his pocket. Sin pivoted happily away from him, her full peasant skirt whirling about her bare legs. “What a wonderful place to be!” Then she stopped. “Honey, what’s the matter?”

John Henry’s grin had vanished. He put a slow hand into his breast pocket and pulled the pencil into view again. His forehead had corrugated into puzzled lines. “Funny,” he said.

“Johnny, is something wrong?”

He didn’t raise his eyes from the Eversharp. “This isn’t my pencil.”

“You sure?”

“Of course I’m sure. Never saw it before in my life.”

Sin laughed. “Well, I wouldn’t worry about it. You probably picked it up somewhere by mistake. Probably when we registered.”

He paid no attention. The pencil was an ordinary Eversharp, colored black and sea-green, with a gold point and a removable eraser. “That’s what he meant.”

“Who meant? What are you talking about?”

“Anglin. ‘You already got it.’ This is what I’ve got, Sin. Anglin stuck this in my pocket when he fell against me last night.”

His wife sobered. The sunshine filtering through the Venetian blinds wasn’t warm on her any more. “Let’s throw it away, Johnny.”

“No. Everything I said last night might be right. We should have guessed a pencil before. Remember? In his pockets, Anglin had something to write
on
but nothing to write
with.”

“Let’s just throw it away. We came up here to have fun.”

Ordinarily, John Henry would have given in to this typical wifely illogicality. But in his hand was Aladdin’s lamp, Long John Silver’s map, Ali Baba’s magic phrase. Strange excitement gripped him and he temporized. “Well — let’s just look at it a little first.” Sin sighed and lost.

He turned the Eversharp over and over, while his brown eyes scrutinized its scratched surface. He gave an impatient grunt.

“What are you looking for, honey?”

John Henry took off the removable eraser and peered into the dark recesses of the cylinder. There seemed to be something wrapped tightly around the pencil’s lead cartridge. He probed for it with a forefinger, then borrowed one of Sin’s bobby pins. A couple of grunts later, he breathed out in satisfaction and pried a long narrow strip of tightly rolled paper from the interior of the pencil. “Well!” he announced happily.

“Quick, open it up! What is it?” Now the excitement had Sin too, and she crowded close against her husband’s shoulder.

The paper was oiled and the tight rolling made it hard to handle since it kept coiling up between John Henry’s fingers. The Conovers perused the column of writing on the paper strip and then looked at each other for an answer.

“What do you make out of that?” John Henry wanted to know.

“See?” Sin rejoined. Her point was that they didn’t know any more now than they had before and they should have thrown the pencil away to begin with.

The writing on the paper resembled mostly an incredibly long safe combination. “Is that what it is?” John Henry asked.

“That long?”

“What else could it be?”

Sin thought for a moment. “Theater seats?” It was her husband’s turn to laugh scornfully. She took the narrow strip of oiled paper from him and read it off slowly, carefully. “R-1. L-3. R-2. L-1. R-2. L-3. R-1. L-2. R-1. L-1. R-2. L-3. R-2. L-5. R-1. L-3. R-2. L-1. R-1.”

“Must be a code,” John Henry muttered. “R and L usually stand for right and left, but maybe this is a cipher.”

“I don’t know,” Sin admitted. Then she added, “I don’t want to know.”

John Henry wound up the oiled paper and replaced it in the barrel of the Eversharp. This done, he began to amble around the room, speculatively appraising the walls and furniture.

“What are you up to now?”

“Sin, what’s the most likely place to find a pencil?”

“I don’t know — in the desk, I guess.”

John Henry nodded. Sin could tell from the set of his mouth that his mind was made up about something. He pulled open the center drawer of the small redwood writing desk, deposited the Eversharp reverently in the pencil trough, and closed the drawer again. “Psychology,” he explained condescendingly: “The best place to hide anything is right under people’s noses. They never think to look in the obvious places.”

Sin remembered her own luck along this line in parlor games but said nothing. The sooner the pencil was stolen and gone, the better. “Hey, where you going, Johnny?”

“Back in a few minutes,” John Henry said from the doorway. “After all that’s happened, I want to grill this Jordan woman.”

“Johnny, you come back here!”

“I won’t be long — ”

“John Henry — I warn you — ”

“I know you’ll be reasonable, Sin.”

John Henry Conover closed the blue door in time to block the pillow hurled by his reasonable wife.

“Make it good,” Barselou gritted between his teeth to the plate-glass window. “Or make it funny. I’d like to laugh.”

Behind him, across the broad desk, Odell quailed in the leather chair and pounded a pudgy hand impotently against the armrest. “I didn’t shoot him!”

“If you hadn’t been in such a hurry with your gun last night, Anglin would have strolled right in here. We’d have a few right answers instead of a flock of wrong guesses.”

“I knew you’d take it this way,” muttered Odell miserably.

Barselou turned to consider him sarcastically. “You want a merit badge or something, fat boy? You not only kill off the goose but you make it so hot around here we can’t even look for the eggs.”

“I didn’t kill him,” the plump aide repeated wearily. “Maybe Conover did, I don’t know.”

“Sure — Conover’s got long arms. Reached around and shot Anglin in the back. Then he swallowed the gun.”

“They didn’t have to come alone. Maybe they brought some armor along. I tell you I saw somebody pull a gun down at the end of the alley.” Odell’s eyes were redder than ever and his round cheeks twitched. “Lay can tell you — that’s not my bullet in Anglin’s back.”

Barselou snorted. “Ask Lay — that’s your best yet. We’d all be in the gas chamber. They don’t call it anything but first degree when you plug a guy in the shoulder, chase him around all evening, then drill him through the back. And then this!” He yanked open a bottom drawer and lifted yards of gay cloth into view. It was the Arab burnoose. “You leave this lying in the alley. Didn’t want to make Lay guess at anything, did you? Lucky I found it instead.”

Odell wisely kept silent. After a moment while Barselou clenched and unclenched his big fists, he thought it safe to ask, “What do you want me to do now?”

“Nothing,” Barselou snapped. “You’re dead on this job. Get out to my place and lay low till this blows over.”

“Okay.” The plump man squinted in weary relief and heaved himself to his feet. “I’m bushed from staying in the car all night.”

“Don’t think I got any sleep, either. Odell, we got to find what Anglin knew about the Queen. She’s too attractive to hide out forever.”

“I’ll wait for you to call me, chief,” Odell said.

Barselou watched his henchman trudge for the door and scowled after him. Too bad Odell had canceled out his own usefulness. Good tough boy — if he just wasn’t so quick on the trigger. But the Conovers would remember him. He wasn’t good to have around.

Barselou’s eyes pointed at the grain of the desk top, unfocused, analyzing. The Conovers. There had been nothing in their luggage, according to Gayner. Maybe it had been left in the first cottage — 15. They’d been pretty upset about being moved.

That girl — Faye Jordan — was in there now, but he’d better tell Gayner to search the place carefully. No use overlooking any angles.

Barselou picked up the phone and began to dial.

“My business sense must have gotten the better of my social graces,” apologized Mr. Trim. He put his straw hat back on his head and pulled it down tightly to keep as much sun from his scalp as possible.

Thelma Loomis sat at an umbrella-shaded table on the yellow tile bank of the swimming pool. She had been pretending to read the Sunday comic section while her eyes traveled a regular course between Dick Tracy and the silver-thatched Sagmon Robottom on the opposite bank.

“Perfectly all right,” she said unenthusiastically. “You’re not the first fellow to run from me.” From the corner of her eye, the Hollywood woman saw Mr. Trim’s gnarled hand close over the back of the other canvas chair at the table. Involuntarily, she groaned.

Trim said, “Thanks — I guess I will sit for a while.” Miss Loomis laid her funny paper on the metal table between them. Across the pool, Robottom idly kicked at blue water with his muscular legs while he talked gaily with a young girl in a white knit bathing suit.

The four of them were alone at the poll. Most of the hotel guests were Sunday morning sleepers. The Las Dunas swimming pool lay against the knee of a hill and had been expensively disguised as a small lake. A rough oval in shape, it was surrounded on three sides by the ubiquitous palm trees which were inset in the cement walk. Some of the fronds hung over the water. Like surrealist satires on the palms, gaudy beach umbrellas over round tables clustered along the banks of the pool.

Said Mr. Trim, “What are you watching him for?” Thelma Loomis moved her gaze hastily. “Curious,” she said. “I wanted to see how the old goat operated.” Her companion looked shocked. “He’s got quite a reputation around L.A.,” the writer explained gently. “Plus a wife.”

Trim’s “Ah!” could have meant anything. But he looked disapprovingly at the archaeologist and his brunette consort.

“That’s no relic he’s found there,” chuckled Miss Loomis.

The girl’s two-piece swim suit clung insistently to her rounded and enticing body. An inviting face crowned by braids of black hair was turned up attentively to Robottom’s. And he was putting his most charming foot forward. Even across the wide expanse of pool came the constant flash of blinding white teeth in the bronze aquiline face.

Then the silver-haired man got up lithely and fumbled in the pocket of his discarded beach robe.

“He’s giving her something!” exclaimed Trim. “Say, is it — a key?”

“Not so loud, for Pete’s sake,” said Thelma Loomis. Robottom handed the girl a little card that looked like a claim check. She tucked it in the waist of her suit so that the edge showed against her bare stomach. Then he said something and they both laughed.

Mr. Trim clucked a couple of times. “A lottery. Maybe that ticket was a chance on something.”

“You can say that again,” the blonde writer murmured.

Apparently unaware of his audience, the archaeologist stood on the edge of the pool and stretched. Cords of muscle rippled above swim trunks that had been chosen to match his browned skin. The girl had cradled her chin in one hand and was watching him admiringly. Robottom said something over his shoulder to her. Then he launched his long body into a perfect dive, cleaving the blue water.

Thelma Loomis watched the graceful display he made through the shimmering water as he arched his torso and sounded to the depths of the pool.

“Say!” whispered Trim, tapping at her hand. “Another married man!”

Miss Loomis quit wondering about the card and brought her sharp gaze up to the girl opposite. The brunette wasn’t appreciating Sagmon Robottom’s performance at all. Instead, she had her pert face turned to a stocky young man in gray trousers and blue sport coat who had strode purposefully from the direction of the guest cottages.