The Inheritors (44 page)

I left him and went up in the private elevator to Spencer’s office. He was sitting behind his desk fresh from his Caribbean trip.

We shook hands. “How was your flight?” he asked, in his ever polite manner.

“Another plane ride,” I said. “And your vacation?”

“Fine,” he answered. “I’m thinking of buying a winter place down there for when I retire. I’m a little bored with Palm Beach.”

“Not a bad idea,” I said, sitting down opposite him.

“The directors have been calling me all morning about this suit of Dan Ritchie’s.”

“I’ve had the calls too.”

“I don’t know anything about Benjamin’s case,” he said. “But I’ve talked to Harley. He assures me that we have no legal liability in the matter.”

Harley Garrett was our general counsel. A staid, very conservative attorney.

“I’m not as concerned about the lawsuit as I am about Ritchie’s allegations,” he said. “Is there anything you know that I don’t?”

“Perhaps,” I said. I told him about my loan to Sam, secured by the stock.

He listened attentively without speaking until I finished. Then he nodded thoughtfully. “That wasn’t very wise,” he said.

I was a little surprised. The Sinclair I had met when I came to work here ten years ago would have exploded. “But my relationship with Sam had no bearing on the purchase of those films. Jack bought them without my knowledge. I only learned about it after the deal had been completed.”

“You’ll have to explain that to the board,” he said.

I got to my feet. “I intend to.”

The directors weren’t quite as calm about it as he had been. They began to drag up all the bugaboos. The FCC, the SEC, antitrust, and internal revenue. After a while they fell to wrangling among themselves as to the proper reply to make.

“Perhaps we should try to negotiate a settlement,” Harley said finally. “The publicity can’t help our image if we have to go into court.”

“I’m against it,” I said.

“You won’t be able to keep them from intimating that you personally approved the deal because you would profit from it due to your equity in Samarkand.”

“At the moment I have no equity in Samarkand,” I said. “I only hold the stock as security for a loan.”

“Do you think there’s any chance of his repaying the loan?” Harley asked.

“I haven’t the faintest idea.”

“Even the repayment can be misconstrued to your benefit,” he said. “I think we should settle. It doesn’t involve that much money.”

“No,” I said flatly. “It’s blackmail and I don’t like it. Once you open yourself to blackmail, you’ll find a thousand nonsense things like this coming up to haunt you.”

There was a silence around the table. I looked at Sinclair. His face was expressionless. The telephone next to me began to ring.

“Excuse me, gentlemen,” I said, picking it up.

Fogarty was on the line. “I wouldn’t disturb you, Mr. Gaunt,” she said. “But I have a Dr. Davis on the line from Santa Barbara, California. She says it’s an emergency.”

“Put her through,” I said. There was a click on the line. “Dr. Davis?”

“I’m afraid I have bad news, Mr. Gaunt,” she said. “The patient got away from us this morning.”

“How?” I asked.

“We don’t know,” she admitted. “When Mrs. Graham went to her room after breakfast, she was gone. We’ve made a thorough search of the grounds, but she’s not on them.” She paused for a moment. “Do you want us to notify the police?”

I thought for a moment. That was all we needed right now. I could see the headlines. “No,” I said. “Don’t do anything. I’ll catch the next plane out.”

I looked around the table. They had been talking among themselves while I had been on the telephone.

“I think we ought to put the matter to a vote,” Harley said. “I make a motion that we negotiate a settlement in the case of
Daniel Ritchie vs. Sinclair Broadcasting Corp
.,
Stephen Gaunt
,
et al
.”

I got to my feet and walked toward the door.

“Wait a minute, Steve,” Harley said. “I put a motion before the board. You have to vote on it.”

I stared down at him. “You vote on it,” I said. “I don’t give a damn.”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Dr. Davis was waiting in the terminal when the plane landed. She came toward me. “Your secretary gave me your flight number.”

“You didn’t have to come down. I would have come straight there.”

“I felt I should,” she said simply, looking straight at me. “Besides I have some information that might lead us to her.”

“You found out how she escaped?”

She shook her head. “No. But we do know she’s in Los Angeles.”

“How?”

“We work with a private detective agency that has been very helpful to us in cases like this. I put them on.”

She led the way to the cocktail lounge and stopped before a table in the far corner. The young man sitting there over a glass of beer got awkwardly to his feet.

“Nick Jones, Stephen Gaunt,” she said. “Nick is top man at the agency.”

He held out his hand. “Howdy, Mr. Gaunt,” he said with a distinctly western twang.

He looked like no private detective I ever imagined. But then, all the conditioning I ever had was from motion pictures and television.

He stood at least six foot four, string-bean thin. He wore a white, western cowboy hat, curled tightly at the sides, slanted low over his face, a nondescript work shirt under a dirty brown, fringed suede jacket, and faded Levis. He had long brown hair falling halfway down his neck and a long drooping moustache flowing along his lantern jaw. He looked like Buffalo Bill come to life.

“Mr. Jones,” I said.

“Yew cawl me Nick,” he drawled.

We sat down. Dr. Davis ordered a Scotch and water and I had my usual Scotch on the rocks.

“Tell Mr. Gaunt what you’ve found out,” she said.

The western accent suddenly disappeared. The tone was businesslike and professional. “We learned that the subject hitched a ride on a truck at eleven this morning on the Pacific Coast Highway. She left that truck in Santa Monica at a gas station near Sunset Boulevard and got another truck going into Los Angeles. We haven’t been able to locate that one yet so we don’t know where she got off.”

“How did you find out about the first truck?” I asked.

“Many of the big interstate haulers have two-way radios,” he said. “I spoke to the driver myself.”

“Did she have any money on her?”

Dr. Davis answered. “Not when she left. Everything’s still in the safe.”

“She’ll need money,” I said. “I never heard of a pusher who gave credit.”

“She has money,” Nick said flatly.

“How do you know?”

“She got it from the truck driver,” he said.

“Why the hell would he give her money?”

He looked at me without answering.

The waitress came back with our drinks. I swallowed half of mine in one gulp.

“You’ve got to understand,” Dr. Davis said sympathetically. “She’s a very sick girl.”

I didn’t speak.

“It’s ten thirty now,” the detective said. “On Friday nights, the Strip turns on by eleven o’clock. If she hasn’t made a contact yet, chances are she’ll be around there. I alerted some of my friends in the sheriff’s department to keep an unofficial eye out for her.”

“Good,” I said.

“Meanwhile it wouldn’t do no harm if we ambled over and sort of looked around ourselves.”

I finished my drink. “I’m ready when you are. I’ve got my car in the lot.”

“Okay,” the detective said. “I’ll be on the corner of Sunset and Clark when you get there.”

“I’ll go with you,” Dr. Davis said. “Nick’s isn’t exactly the most comfortable transportation I ever had.”

“It gets me around,” he said dryly. “Besides it’s just right for my image.”

I looked at him. It was the second time that day I had heard that word. The whole world was concerned with its image. But I didn’t know what he was talking about until I saw him get into his car and drive off.

It was a dark green Ford ranch wagon.

***

The Strip was that portion of Sunset Boulevard running through West Los Angeles, bound on the west by the City National Bank as it turned off toward Beverly Hills and on the east by Schwab’s Drugstore, just past Lytton Center. During the day it was a dreary street, lined mostly with old buildings filled with hamburger joints, nondescript shops, and an occasional new, towering office building. It served mainly as a conduit for the traffic between Beverly Hills and Hollywood.

At night, it was another story. Then it came to life with bright neon signs. Restaurants, discothéques blaring the sound out into the street. And more than anything else, the kids were there. Thousands of them. All shapes, sizes, ages, and colors, walking, talking, looking, or just standing around. The faintly sweet odor of pot hung like a miasma over them, and from their slowly moving patrol cars, the white crash-helmeted sheriff’s deputies watched them, praying each night that nothing would erupt and turn the street into a churning volcano.

He was standing under the Clark Street sign of Whisky A GoGo just where he said he would be. We started toward him, but he made a faint negative gesture of his head and began to walk away.

He was an easy man to follow. He stood head and shoulders over the crowds. He seemed to know everyone there, kids as well as adults. Occasionally he stopped to talk to someone but it would only be for a moment, then he would walk on.

He went as far as the Gaiety Delicatessen on the 9000 block and then backtracked. “Nothing up here,” he whispered as he walked past us. “We’ll try down the other way.”

We waited until he had gone about twenty feet behind us before we turned back. He paused in front of Whisky. The music blared out into the night and the kids were lined up waiting their turn to get in. We paused in front of Sneaky Pete’s and watched him.

I looked up at the sign. There wasn’t any pleasure in recognizing that the group inside was the lead group on our rock show this week. He moved on and we trailed after him.

We wound up in front of the Body Shop, footsore and weary at two o’clock in the morning. He nodded toward a darkened building across the street and we followed him.

He stepped into the shadows. “The pushers aren’t out,” he said, his eyes hidden under the cowboy hat. “They’re all uptight and laying low. Something’s got them scared shitless, but I can’t find out what it is.”

“What do we do next?” I asked.

“I got a few places to go,” he said. “But you can’t come with me. Where can I contact you if I learn anything?”

I looked at Dr. Davis. “How about my place?”

She nodded.

I gave him the telephone number and he ducked out of the shadows into the street. We waited a few minutes to give him a start and then went back to my car.

***

“This is really lovely,” Dr. Davis said as we came down the stairs to the living room.

“I can use a drink,” I said, going to the bar.

“It wouldn’t hurt me a bit,” she said.

I made two Scotches and gave one to her. We drank silently. After a moment she walked over to the giant glass doors and looked out.

“Can we go outside for a moment?” she asked.

I pressed the buttons to roll back the doors. The night air was cool in the hills. It felt good. Down below us the lights twinkled. In the distance, almost level with our eyes, we could see the blinking and red lights of a plane on its approach to the airport.

“It’s so quiet up here,” she said.

“That’s why I built it. And yet, in five minutes you can be right in the center of the action.”

She looked at me. “Is that important to you?”

“I used to think so,” I answered. “Now I don’t know anymore.”

“Strange, how time alters our values,” she said. “When I graduated from medical school, I thought I knew everything. Now I realize how little I do know.”

“I think that’s part of growing up, Doctor.”

“I’m a little tired of hiding behind that title.”

“How do you like Doctor Girl?” I asked.

“I am a girl. You know that, don’t you?”

“You can’t miss it,” I said.

I don’t know how it happened but she was in my arms. Then it was like an atomic fire searing through us. We couldn’t wait to get at each other.

Our clothes made a trail up the stairs to the bedroom. We fell naked on the bed, tearing at each other like raging animals.

Then we exploded and fell backward on the bed, gasping for breath. We watched each other quietly for a long time; finally she spoke.

“That wasn’t very professional of me.”

“You came out from behind your title,” I said.

Her eyes fell for a moment. “Are you glad?”

“Yes,” I said.

She laughed and kissed me. “So am I.” She rolled away and got out of bed. She stopped at the bathroom door. “I could use a shower.”

I nodded.

She turned and went into the bathroom, closing the door behind her. A moment later, she was back. She held on to the frame of the door, her face white.

I stared at her.

“Do you have another bathroom?” she asked, in a faint voice. “I think I’m going to be sick.”

“Downstairs. Next to the bar.”

She ran across the room and I heard her naked feet on the steps. I got out of bed and went into the bathroom.

Darling Girl was there. Curled on her side in a fetal ball, her head on the floor between the toilet and the bathtub, her eyes open and staring, her right fingers touching the needle still in the crook of her left arm.

She had been there all the time we had been looking for her on the Strip, all the time we had been balling on the bed in the next room.

Now it all made sense. Where else did she have to go but home?

I heard the sound of the toilet flushing downstairs and went back into the bedroom. I picked up the telephone and called the police. Slowly I gave them the information they required and started to put down the receiver.

Suddenly I was angry. I slammed the receiver down, shattering the instrument. It fell to the floor, all the red and yellow and white and green and blue and purple wires running everywhere in and out of the tiny silver and brass screws like the threads in a mechanical brain.