Murder Queen High (7 page)

Faye winked elaborately at his surprised expression and spoke from behind her hand. “Better keep an eye on that bartender.” She had a lot of trouble with “bartender.”

John Henry sighed at the prospect of a drunken female on his hands in addition to everything else. Lay lifted his tall glass and said, “You better have one of these, Conover. They don’t disappear so fast.” He told the man behind the bar, “Draw a pale one, Herb.”

Faye drew herself up and faced the police officer. “Lieutenant, do you have a warrant for my arrest?” She lost her balance. Her piercing shriek brought heads around in the gambling hall as she toppled to the floor in a jumble of bar stools. Her pocketful of quarters jangled like another jackpot as they spewed across the small room. The crowd clustered around the roulette table went back to their game.

“Did you hurt yourself, Faye?” Henry asked, untangling the girl from the chrome-legged stools and helping her to her feet.

She was cooing happily to herself. “Play time,” she gurgled. “Push me again, Johnny.”

“I didn’t push you — ”

“Johnny! Where’s-my money? Where’s my money?” Both Faye’s hands scrambled in her dress pocket. “You stole it! I want a policeman!”

“For crying out loud, shut up!” said John Henry. “Your money’s on the floor.” He got down on his hands and knees and began scooping it up. When he rose, red-faced, Faye was spinning contentedly on a stool, touching up her lipstick whenever she faced the mirror.

Lay’s horsy grin was amused and mocking. He thrust out a long arm and handed a tall amber glass to the disgruntled young man. “Here. This’ll get you on your feet.”

Faye stopped shoveling quarters into her pocket. “I want to get on Johnny’s feet, too,” she announced and seized the glass for a long sip. “It tastes awful,” she declared and gave the beer to John Henry.

Lay gazed through the archway at the midday turbulence in the other room. “Yeah,” he said, as if continuing a conversation, “it’s illegal, all right, Conover. But in a hopped-up town like this there’s some things a cop has to keep his eyes closed about. It’s not as if it was my department.”

“Well, I don’t know,” John Henry doubted. “If people have passed a law — ”

“I know how you feel.” Lay consulted the circles of foam that swirled in his glass. “Compromises all the time. But if I got as rough as I’d like to around this burg, I’d be looking for a new badge. So I just do what I can.” He looked at John Henry and smiled sardonically. “Here’s to crime.” He raised his beer.

John Henry put his own glass down empty and remembered Faye. The black-haired girl was in the front row at the roulette table arguing with the polite croupier. “I better go see what’s happened to the problem child,” Conover said. Lay toasted him silently with dregs.

“What’s the trouble now, Faye?” he asked, elbowing up behind her.

“Johnny!” she squealed with delight. “I’m so glad you could come!”

“You brought me, remember?”

“This madman,” explained Faye, gesticulating at the croupier who had halted his roulette wheel. “He won’t let me play!”

John Henry raised his eyebrows questioningly. The croupier, a small dark man with a traditional thin mustache, put up slim and deprecating hands. “I have explained,” he said plaintively, “But madame will not listen. A house rule — she must use chips. Not quarter dollars.”

“Exactly,” crowed Faye. “Sock him in the nose, Johnny.”

The eyes of the crowd turned appraisingly on her selected champion. John Henry felt the blood coloring the back of his neck. He fastened determined fingers on Faye’s soft shoulder. “Come on!” he gritted and propelled her away from the table toward the door at the far end of the casino.

Faye was giggling happily. “He’s so strong,” she said to the people they passed. “You have no idea!”

No one was playing the slot machines. John Henry halted there and spun the girl sharply around to face him. Her eyes got enormous and she weaved back and forth, hinged only at the ankles. “Now snap out of it, Faye,” John Henry grated. He shook her gently. “I want a straight answer.”

Faye straightened. She tried to salute but John Henry kept his grip on her arms. “You had a reason for bringing me out here. What was it?” he insisted.

“Wanted company,” she crooned. “Faye’s all alone.”

“There’s more than that.”

Her eyes rolled from side to side as if she were watching a tennis match. Then her sleek braided head nodded slowly. “Gotta have words. Got something I wanna tell you,” she whispered.

“What is it?”

Faye Jordan looked around cautiously. “Too many people. Everybody’s listening.”

“Okay. We’ll go back to the car.” Still holding Faye’s left arm firmly, he opened the heavy door next to the slot machines and pushed her out into the dimness of the entrance hall. The closing door sliced off the light and the excited moan of conversation with one swift stroke. The mad pace of the juke box sifted through, but softly.

John Henry put the concealing drape back in place. Faye had prowled away down the long corridor, opening doors and peering inside curiously. He caught up with her and said loudly, “Now what — ”

She put a white forefinger across her lips. John Henry grimaced. The sudden change from glare to gloom made his head feel funny.

Faye opened the door to what appeared a combination library and den. Like the living room he had glimpsed on the way in, it was devoid of life.

“In here,” she whispered.

He followed her in. The room was stuffy. John Henry went across to the open window that broke the wall of books. No air at all seemed to enter the library.

Faye had closed the door and was peeking back into the hall through the keyhole.

“What are you looking for?” he asked. The carpet tilted a little while he focused on her. He reached for the desk to steady himself and it moved away. Faye got up and walked toward him.

John Henry squinted. She was walking up hill and she got farther away. Then there were two of her, a dozen, a whole roomful.

He couldn’t count Faye Jordan any more because all of her were performing a weird dance that glided around him, faster and faster. The last thing he heard was the chorus of Faye, giggling.

THE RADIO’S artful voice said, “This is KGB, San Diego’s Don Lee station. Stay tuned for the San Diego Scrapbook with Gloria Winke. A transcribed announcement.”

A tinkle of chords and a swing quartet broke into happy song.

Sin flung herself across the bed and plunged the room into silence with a vicious twist of the knob. She was still panting with fright. And exertion.

Their clothes were scattered haphazardly around the bedroom. The two big suitcases yawned toothless on the bed. Sin had locked herself in the cottage and was obeying Sagmon Robottom’s warning as quickly as possible. She gathered up an armful of lingerie and hurled it into the emptier suitcase.

When she picked up her husband’s brown dress shoes, her lip commenced to tremble. Where was John Henry? It wasn’t like him to dash off like that without a word unless — Sin’s heart thudded faster than ever — unless he had learned something about the murder. Why did he insist on getting mixed up in things that were none of his business?

Sin wrapped the shoes in tissue paper she had saved from the unpacking the night before. Surely nothing could have happened to him in a crowded resort like Azure. Yet he was so dumb sometimes about the most obvious things.

The shoe wrappings rustled as she laid the package on her stack of slips. She caught herself watching the redwood desk in the outer room — the desk that held the Eversharp and the cipher. There was always the police. Sin turned her back defiantly on the telephone. If she stared the police looking for John Henry and he was perfectly all right, he’d be angry about all the fuss. Nevertheless …

Sin was still pondering the question perturbedly when she heard a door close softly in the next cottage.

She got up off her knees from atop the suitcase, letting the straps slip free. That was Miss Jordan’s cottage next door and if she had come back then John Henry … Eagerly, she peeked through the slats of the window blind.

It was not John Henry who had pulled the blue door to gently behind him and paused on the porch of Cottage 15. It was Gayner, his cadaverous face peering cautiously up and down the line of silent cottages. Then he stepped off the porch and started walking quickly down the flagstone path back to the hotel.

Sin opened the front door to her own cottage and stepped outside. Gayner had already vanished around a turn. Without reason, Sin began to run, anxious not to lose sight of him. Gayner was a tangible link between her and the tangled web that might have enmeshed her husband again. The assistant manager certainly was privileged to inspect the cottages whenever he chose — but something furtive in Gayner’s manner warned her that this had been no official visit.

Gayner was just going through the glass doors into the Las Dunas lobby when Sin reached the sunken patio. She slowed her pace as she crossed through the gay umbrellas and lolling guests.

Somebody called her name behind her. Sin turned quickly, a hopeful smile beginning on her generous mouth. The smile aborted. It was Sagmon Robottom, his bronze face stern, sauntering toward her from the pool. Sin whirled and fled. “Mrs. Conover!” Robottom called again.

She rushed up the steps and into the lobby. Gayner had gone past his registration desk without pausing and was now going down the front steps and crossing the driveway. His walk was brisk and purposeful.

“You look like you’re in a hurry,” Thelma Loomis said in her semimasculine voice, as the two women dodged around each other at the front entrance.

“Thanks,” Sin said automatically and kept going. Mr. Trim was just getting out of the elevator. He lifted his straw hat high as if to beckon Sin closer. She gave him a tight smile and didn’t slacken pace. Vernon laboriously forced the glass door open for her.

Gayner’s brown-suited back was still in sight through the driveway border of palms and tamarisks. He was about fifty yards in the lead. This had been cut to twenty-five by the time the assistant manager reached Coachella Street. Sin loitered behind the concealing bole of a palm while Gayner looked up and down the peaceful street. Then he darted across and went hurriedly down the hill toward the center of town.

Near the corner of Cahuilla Street, a block away from the Las Dunas, Gayner sidestepped suddenly and disappeared from sight. Sin’s pulse quickened but she made herself amble along in a tourist gait. If Gayner had realized he was being followed, she didn’t want to appear suspicious. She could just keep going downtown.

However, Gayner was apparently oblivious of his tracker. When she reached the spot where he’d faded from view, Sin found he’d merely angled sharply into a narrow alley. As she walked past, Gayner was twenty or thirty yards up the alley, opening the back door of one of the buildings.

The place looked familiar and it came to Sin why it should. Homer Anglin had died there. Gayner was letting himself quietly into the Ship of the Desert.

Gayner knocked on the door to Barselou’s office. There was no reply, and the beat of his knuckles echoed emptily throughout the big deserted restaurant. He glanced back over his shoulder. Down on the main floor stood nothing but white-clothed tables, a flock of immobile sheep stabled in chairs.

He opened the door partway and edged around it into the office. It too was forsaken. The desk had been swept clean of papers. The typewriter on the metal stand in the corner squatted like a hooded falcon. Only a meager amount of the early afternoon sunlight seeped in through the closed Venetian blinds.

Gayner sat down behind the desk in the swivel chair and stretched. He found a cigarette in the center drawer, rolled a match from his vest pocket and scratched it into flame on the sole of his shoe. Breathing out smoke, he pulled the telephone close to him on the desk.

The operator asked him to repeat the number. Then there was a humming of wires and then the measured cadence of the bell.

“Hello, there,” said Gayner finally. “Give me Mr. Barselou, please.” He took another long puff at the cigarette while he waited. “Oh — hello, Mr. Barselou. Gayner speaking.”

He listened heedfully, nodding his head in agreement.

“That’s what I wanted to tell you. I searched the Jordan girl’s cottage.” He listened briefly again. “No, sir. Nothing there. No, I’d swear to it.” A smile slid over Gayner’s pointed features. “Thanks, Mr. Barselou. I try to be thorough.” Then, anxiously, “Are you any closer to the Queen?”

The receiver rasped irritably. Gayner’s head bobbed up and down vigorously. “I understand that, Mr. Barselou. All the angles at my end are covered. We’ll find her yet.” The attentive listening again. Then, “All right, I’ll go through that one too. I’ll call you later, Mr. Barselou. Yes, sir. Goodbye.”

Gayner replaced the receiver and sat in the striped light, silently meditating. Then he neatly punched out the cigarette’s glowing stub against the rim of the metal wastebasket.

Sin peeked between the spines of a fan-shaped palm leaf. From her hiding place among the music racks on the bandstand, she watched Gayner come down the stairs from the second floor balcony and cross the the fiber tunnel that concealed the swinging kitchen doors. A moment later, she heard the faraway slam of the restaurant’s back door.

To be safe, she waited as long as she could and then let out her breath. A church hush lay over the Ship of the Desert. Both the water and lights of the neon waterfall were turned off for the day. She was all alone in the dead restaurant. Sin began to feel more foolish than nervous. She had followed Gayner here without trouble — but what next? She’d have a hard time explaining to anyone, even an unbiased judge, what exactly she was doing trespassing. For that matter, she didn’t even know herself.

Sin slipped down off the bandstand and tiptoed over to the twisted ironwork staircase that led to the balcony. Since she was trespassing anyway, she might as well make a good job of it. Wouldn’t John Henry be disgusted if she found out something important and he didn’t? Hugging the thought to her, Sin climbed the stairs, stepping carefully so her sandals wouldn’t scrape on the tile steps. At the top, she paused to listen. She heard nothing to keep her from opening the door to the office which Gayner had just quitted.

The leather-paneled room was melancholy in the scant bars of sunlight that fell across carpet and desk top. Cigarette smoke still hung in the air and a thin thread flowed upward from the wastebasket, silent evidence of Gayner’s recent presence. For some reason, the tobacco smoke gave Sin courage, adding a familiar note to the gloomy silence.

There was nothing interesting in sight, so Sin tried the desk drawers. They were unlocked. In the center drawer, under an open pack of cigarettes, was a sheaf of papers held together by a wire clip. She sat down in the big chair and liberated the sheets from the imprisoning clip.

The papers were all maps apparently of the area surrounding Azure, the Salton Sea and Borego Valley. The first one was labeled in ink: “Flood of 1849.” Penciled under this was the handwritten notation, “Very rough reconstruction — prob, inaccurate.” A large area of the drawing had been shaded, most of it lying south of Azure.

The next map was no more explicit. The date was 1891. Again a portion of the map was shaded but Sin discovered by comparison that the area was slightly smaller than on the first map, and more oval.

The date on the third map was 1905-07 and it was titled: “Formation of S/S.” The familiar darkened area was present, but the topography was drawn in greater detail, with place names added. Sin recognized Highway 99 which they had followed north from Brawley to Azure. At the southern tip of the Santa Rosa Mountains, another and smaller section had been shaded, its vertical lines superimposed on the horizontal stripes of the larger expanse. A cross had been drawn in pencil at a spot in this area and a notation made.

The rest of the papers were heavier and glossier-aerial photographs of desert country on which she distinguished nothing familiar. She laid them aside and went back to the drawings with labels.

Sin squinted at the 1905-07 map in the brown light and then held it up to catch a little of the brightness filtering through the Venetian blinds.

Light, torrents of it, flooded the office. Sin shrieked and jumped up.

“Bad for your eyes, Mrs. Conover — reading in the dark,” Vernon lisped. He leaned sorrowfully in the doorway, his hand still on the light switch.

Sin swallowed and tried to say something. All that came out of her dry throat was a croak.

Vernon moved toward the desk. Sin backed away, her hands outstretched to ward him off. The maps floated to the carpet. “I’ll scream,” she whispered.

Vernon shook his head mournfully and Sin saw for the first time that he was pointing a gun at her — a short gray automatic that matched the lapels and trouser-stripes of his maroon uniform. “Don’t scream,” he said, looking the happiest that Sin had seen him. “Keep quiet and you might be all right.” He raised his voice. “All right.”

Gayner stepped through the open doorway and regarded their captive with chilly amusement. “I hope we didn’t give you too much of a shock, Mrs. Conover,” he said pleasantly. “But you can understand we had to take certain precautions. Vernon, I believe you may put away the gun. Mrs. Conover realizes that she’ll have to do as we say.”

Vernon appeared displeased as he slipped the automatic under the tail of his tunic into a hip pocket.

“What do you want from me?” Sin quavered, her eyes darting between the two. Her lips were trembling so that it was an effort to form the words.

Gayner said heartily, “That’s exactly what I was going to ask you. I’d be surprised if Mr. Barselou didn’t repeat the same question. Don’t make him repeat it too often.”

“Start thinking up a good answer,” Vernon advised her. “If you can.”

Gayner motioned Sin courteously toward the door. He followed her out of the office and down the wrought-iron staircase. The young bellboy threaded a path before them among the empty tables and pushed through the swinging doors into the kitchen. The hiss of hinges and their footsteps were the only noises.

No one had mentioned John Henry, Sin thought. Was that good or bad? Well, she’d soon know. This would certainly be a lesson to her. She stepped high over the scrubbed spot on the kitchen floor where Anglin’s body had lain last night. It might be the final lesson.

“Where’s the car?” asked Vernon. “I’ll bet we don’t have any keys.”

“The usual place. I have keys,” Gayner reassured him quietly. Before he opened the back door, “Now, Mrs. Conover, I needn’t warn you that screaming or running or any commotion at all will be utterly useless. And very foolish on your part, I assure you.”

They went out into the alley. Sin fought to grasp her dilemma. Here was not the terror of those frozen moments by the aviary when the white-haired savage had threatened her. The men walking on either side were not strangers. They were prosaic everyday persons — the assistant manager of her hotel and the bellhop who had brought her breakfast. Surely, Vernon in his ridiculous pillbox hat and overdecorated uniform couldn’t actually kill her with that gun he carried!

Sin thought hard and said, “Wait a minute.” The trio stopped. Gayner eyed her inquiringly.

Sin did her best to look tough and confidential at the same time. “Suppose,” she said, “I was to spill it to you torpedoes and not to Barselou.”

Vernon asked, puzzled, “What’s a torpedo?” Gayner said, “Yes?” encouragingly.

“Well — ” Sin groped for words. “If you got there first, you wouldn’t have to split with the big boy.” She hoped it meant more to them than it did to her.

“We certainly wouldn’t,” Gayner ruminated. “But, Mrs. Conover, can you give us the correct information?”

Sin nodded emphatically. “Play along with me and we’ll all wear diamonds.”

Vernon said, “I’m right for once.” A smile nearly encroached on his freckled features. Then he confronted the other man bitterly. “You’ll probably claim you’ve been thinking that all along.”