Darkest Hour

by Nielsen, Helen

  Simon decided to change the subject. “Would you mind letting me see Sam’s study?” he asked. “It’s not morbid curiosity. I remember Sam’s paper and Hannah has told me so much about him.”

  The words came out right, and Vera Raymond seemed relieved to have something to do. She led him through a pair of French doors into the lanai room—a room cluttered with papers and books and old maps and news clippings hung on the wall. A wide, flat-topped desk faced the seaward windows; a pair of metal filing cabinets stood against one wall, and a narrow door opened into a small windowless room that had been partitioned off from the rest in one corner.

  “Sam’s darkroom,” Vera explained. “Sometimes he did free-lance picture stories.”

  There was no copy paper in the big electric typewriter on the desk, but Sam had been busy in the darkroom. Simon picked up a roll of exposed film and held it to the light. The frames were too small to pick up detail. The shots had been taken in a very poor light. Early morning light, he concluded. There were exterior shots of a building several stories high, and each shot was of a window with an ironwork balcony. A second strip of exposed film was even more confusing. It had been shot at an earlier hour when there was deeper contrast between the exterior and the lighted window, and in these shots someone appeared to be sitting or hanging from the railing.

  “Do you know how to make an enlargement?” Simon asked.

  “Not really,” Vera said. “I’ve only used the camera to shoot real estate properties we put on the market. Sam always developed them. What do you see?”

  “It’s what I don’t see that bothers me. Look at that first strip. What do you make of it?”

  Vera Raymond drew a pair of black-framed glasses from her jacket pocket and held the strip to the light. “It’s a building,” she said. “A large building. An apartment house or a hospital.”

  “Local?”

  “Lord, no! We don’t have anything that size in Enchanto! Look, there’s a garden or part of a garden in this shot. Maybe it’s a public building.”

  “Or a hotel?”

  She was interested. That was good. Perhaps if he could get her curious about Sam’s story, something to think about would help to hold back the memories.

  “Let’s have a go at the darkroom,” Simon suggested. “I want an enlargement of this other strip.”

  They moved into the darkroom and switched on the light. It was obvious that Sam had been busy before he took off on his last drive. The developing fluid was still in the pans, and a series of film strips and several enlargements were clothes-pinned to the drying line. Sam’s curiosity had been the same as Simon’s. It was the night shots that were enlarged in a series of blowups. In each enlargement the dark object on the railing became more clear.

  “My God!” Vera breathed. “It’s a man! He looks dead. Mr. Drake—”

  “Has anyone else been in this darkroom since Sam’s death?” Simon asked.

  “No, I’m sure not.”

  “Not the police? Not Whitey Sanders?”

  “No. The police telephoned and I went to the mortuary where the ambulance had taken Sam’s body. Whitey didn’t come to the house at all. We met at Willows’. What do you think this means?”

  “I don’t know. Sam’s story, I guess.”

  “A dead man?”

  “A dead man.”

  “But who is he? Why is he dead?”

  Simon didn’t answer. At the far end of the developing table he came across a pile of glossies Sam had never shot. They were old movie stills. Buildings with balconies and a romantic-looking male climbing or leaping up the wall. Long shots and closeups of Monte Monterey in his all-action prime.

  “What are those photos?” Vera demanded.

  It was too late to hide them. Simon let her look for herself.

  “Monte? Of course, Sam had a whole collection of stills of Monte and some of Lola. She left old albums when she died. Mr. Drake, this is weird. Sam was thinking of Monte and now Monte’s dead—” She removed her glasses and slipped them back into her pocket. Her fingers worked nervously at the buttons of the jacket. “Maybe I shouldn’t mention this, but in the last few years Sam was interested in ESP. He talked about Steve’s death a lot. Said he had a peculiar dream the night before he was reported killed in action in Korea.”

  “No!” Simon said sharply. “I think it’s just a coincidence. Don’t let your mind wander off on a kick like that. It was Sam’s story and he didn’t finish it. Maybe you and I can. Meanwhile, let me hold on to the film strips—they might help.” He ripped the enlargements off the line. “And now I hate to be an ungrateful guest,” he said, “but I really did have something other than coffee in mind when I suggested that drink. Why don’t we go somewhere for a steak and booze?”

  It was an awkward attempt at giving comfort, and he sensed that it wouldn’t work. Vera did let him walk her out of the darkroom and turn off the light behind them, and she let him lead her out of Sam’s study with the fragments of Sam’s life still strewed about so casually it seemed he had merely gone out for cigarettes. But when they reached the living room she balked. The light was fading now. A chill was in the air.

  “I’m going to light a fire,” she said. “It seems warmer than the gas furnace.”

  A fire was already laid in the fireplace over a gas jet that caught the flame of her match. As soon as the fire was started Simon knew she would never leave the house.

  “Maybe I could send out somewhere and have something delivered.”

  She shook her head. “There’s plenty of food in the house, and there’s bourbon at the bar if you like bourbon. It was really very kind of you to come, Mr. Drake. I do want you to remember me to Hannah and thank her for the flowers and for sending you.”

  It was as kind a brush as Simon had ever received, and he didn’t fight it. The rest of Sam Goddard’s burial day belonged to the woman who loved him. He was in the way.

  He left her standing before the fire and walked out to the Jaguar. He could pick up the steak and a drink somewhere on the highway to San Diego.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Vera Raymond was right about the fog. It crept in from the sea in the late afternoon and hung like a cloudy canopy over the small bay of Enchanto-by-the-Sea. It brought the dusk early and Simon was driving the black Jaguar with the lights on by the time he reached a roadside inn called Rocky Point, which was located about twenty miles south of Enchanto. The inn was situated, logically, on a rocky point with a bank of windows facing the ocean. Simon took a window booth and ordered a Scotch and a rare steak. On less foggy days the view must be spectacular, but today the sea was a continuation of the fog with a wild, white foam fringe laced about the black rocks. While the chef grilled the steak Simon took his Scotch to the telephone booth in the bar and called Hannah.

  “Simon, thank God you called,” she cried. “That beast you hired to protect the property won’t let Chester off the back porch.”

  “Good,” Simon said. “Chester is supposed to stay in the house with you while I’m away.”

  Chester was a Negro, an ex-collegiate wrestler with a Phi Beta Kappa key whom Hannah had found in the Marina Beach Department of Employment one day when she went searching for a cook. Chester couldn’t cook anything except spaghetti, which was not on Hannah’s diet, but could help her work out in the gymnasium and Hannah was still feminine enough, therefore vain enough, to prefer a good figure to a good cuisine.

  “When are you coming back?” she asked.

  “Not tonight.”

  “Why not?”

  He couldn’t answer that any more than he could tell her about the man with the wide-brimmed hat who had stood at the iron railing at the top of the stair well where Monterey died.

  “I met a friend of Sam Goddard’s at the funeral,” he said. “A man named Leem.”

  “Charley Leem?” Hannah exclaimed. “Is that old blackmailer still alive?”

  “You knew him too?”

  “Of course I knew him. He had one of
those Hollywood gossip columns in Sam’s paper back in the days when people could read and took their daily quota of dirt from the gossips.”

  “Why did you call him a blackmailer?”

  “Because that’s what he was. Why not? Everybody in Hollywood who was anybody, or who expected to be anybody, wanted to get mentioned in the columns. They offered all kinds of goodies in return for a few lines in print. Charley got his share of the goodies. Then a newspaper strike cut down his operation for a while and he had to move into publicity at one of the studios. It was rough. No more loot. What’s Charley doing now?”

  “He said he was working on a paper in San Diego, but he didn’t look prosperous…. Hannah, Whitey Sanders was at Goddard’s funeral.”

  “I thought he would be,” Hannah said. “Whitey’s got a strong father complex. Something left over from being an agent. How is Vera Raymond?”

  Simon drained his Scotch. Over the rim of the glass he could see the waiter approaching his table with the steak, and behind the waiter that mute gray blend of sea and sky and fog closing in against the glass like a shroud. From Sam’s Place the world would look bleak and empty, and even the firelight wouldn’t be warm enough.

  “Lonely,” he said, and made his good-bys.

  • • •

  When Simon thought of Vera Raymond he lost his appetite, so he stopped thinking of her, devoured the steak and two cups of black coffee and left the inn feeling better. The fog was turning misty, and he dug his Aquascutum out of the trunk before continuing southward. Slaughter Alley. Vera Raymond was right. When the fog closed in over the highway, death lurked at every turn. The headlights of the Jaguar bounced back in Simon’s eyes. He dug a pair of tinted driving glasses out of the glove compartment and kept the tachometer reading below 20 r.p.m.’s. On such a night three days ago Sam Goddard’s Porsche had rolled down this same highway on a mission that had given him the roll of film Simon now carried in his suit pocket. The following afternoon the little sports car had driven north on the same highway and terminated the journey as a heap of twisted metal at the bottom of a ravine. Simon stopped thinking about Vera Raymond, the woman, and concentrated on her story. Probably not more than eighteen hours had passed between those two events, and the reason Simon was driving to San Diego now was to crack the mystery of what had happened during that time. He knew the beginning of the story: the Balboa Hotel.

  The city emerged suddenly from the fog like a brightly lighted stage seen dimly through a mezzanine smoke screen. At his first opportunity Simon cut off the freeway and found a public telephone. The yellow pages gave him the location of the Balboa. He telephoned and an eager desk clerk informed him of available vacancies.

  “Do you have a courtyard?” Simon asked. “I’d like an inside room if it overlooks a courtyard.”

  The clerk assured him that the Balboa did indeed have a courtyard, and Simon reserved a room in the name of Simon Drake. Within twenty minutes the Jaguar reached the hotel—a seven-story building with an adjacent parking area and a side entrance reached by passing through a small courtyard. It was old and inviting, modernized to meet standards for comfort but still retaining the flavor of a more gracious age. Simon’s chief interest, as he strode toward the doorway, was the manner in which the hotel walls framed three sides of the courtyard showing, above the ground floor, a wide window with an iron grillwork railing at each room. Light from the dining room and entrance bathed the lower level, but, above the light line, only the occupied rooms showed in the darkness. His hunch was right. Sam Goddard’s photos could have been taken from this courtyard.

  It was Wednesday night and the bar and grill were quiet. The dining room had long since been vacated, and the lounge was empty except for a pair of die-hard octogenarians ensconced in a deep-cushioned lounge. Simon paid in advance and sent up a trial balloon.

  “I’m here on the recommendation of a friend,” he said. “I think he was registered here last Sunday. Maybe he’s still here. Sam Goddard?”

  It was a good chance that not more than a dozen of the people who had known Sam had bothered to read his obituary, and it was an even better chance that the desk clerk wasn’t among them. He showed no reaction to the sound of the name. He did check the registration file.

  “Goddard?” he repeated. “G-O-D-D-A-R-D … no, I don’t recall the name and there’s no such card in this week’s file.”

  Simon flashed a public-relations smile. “Guess I got my weeks confused,” he said. “About the room—do you have anything high enough to get away from the street sounds?”

  “Sixth floor all right, Mr. Drake?”

  “Perfect,” Simon said. “Where’s the nearest public library?”

  “Try the main branch—three blocks to your left as you go out the front entrance.”

  Simon thanked the clerk and accepted his key. He glanced at the clock over the registration desk and saw that it was only eight-fifteen. Sam Goddard hadn’t registered at the Balboa, but he had taken pictures from the courtyard if Simon wasn’t very much mistaken in his identification of balconies. The three-block walk would take only a few minutes, and back issues of the San Diego papers might provide a clue to what he was looking for. The fog was less dense away from the coastline, but something about the shadowed street caused him to turn up his coat collar protectively. He walked swiftly until he reached the easily identifiable library with its lights still glowing.

  The interior was large and well organized. One question at the information desk and he was directed upstairs to the newspaper and periodical room where the more recent editions of the local papers were racked neatly in chronological order. Sam Goddard had driven to San Diego on Sunday night: logically, therefore, it would be the late editions of Monday’s papers that might provide a clue to the story he was investigating. The warning bell for closing time had sounded before Simon found what he was searching for buried several pages deep in a one-column item.

  STUDENT SLAIN IN HOTEL MYSTERY

  The bizarre and brutal slaying of a guest at the Balboa Hotel is being investigated today by local authorities. The victim, N. B. Kwan, 26, a foreign-exchange student at the La Jolla campus of the University of California, was found early this morning on the balcony of his room at the downtown hotel. Kwan had been severely beaten and then impaled, alive, it is believed, on an iron spear of the balcony railing. Indications of a struggle within the room without evidence of theft suggest a vengeance killing. The deceased, who had registered at the hotel only the day before his body was discovered by a maid in an adjacent suite, had received no visitors, according to room clerk James Frame. He told Detective L. Prinz of the San Diego Police that Kwan had given instructions that he was not to be disturbed while preparing a required thesis. The body was removed to the morgue pending further investigation.

  • • •

  The warning bell having failed to stampede lingering patrons to the exits, a tactful librarian now ordered the gradual turning off of lights and Simon, with no pangs of conscience, took advantage of the situation to carefully tear the item from the page before replacing the newspaper in its rack.

  “If you’re in trouble it will be worse if you run—”

  That fragment of Sam Goddard’s telephone conversation overheard and repeated by Vera Raymond haunted Simon as he returned to the street. On the surface it was sound enough, and yet Goddard had failed to heed his own advice. He had run, run with a camera loaded with shots that would brighten the eyes and raise the temperature of the San Diego police force. Sam Goddard, Simon’s legal mind concluded, had risked a charge of criminal conspiracy in the pursuit of a story that must be bigger than the brief obit of N. B. Kwan indicated.

  • • •

  It was five minutes after nine when Simon reached the drugstore located two blocks from the Balboa. He purchased a toothbrush, toothpaste, razor and an evening newspaper, and then he stopped at the public phone booth to scrutinize the local directory. Leem wasn’t a common name, but he could find no Charles Leem—no
t even a C. Leem. It was possible that Sam Goddard’s ex-columnist had an unlisted telephone, but hardly likely that he had no telephone at all. Leem was the logical lead to more information on the hotel murder, but tomorrow was another day and Simon returned to the hotel with no more complicated plans than a quick shower and a good night’s sleep. But sounds from the direction of the bar indicated the employment of a pianist with a deep admiration for Jimmy Rowles. Simon appreciated good musical taste and knew that secrets unmentionable at the front desk might blossom into fluency in a more intimate locale.

  Once his eyes were accustomed to the darkness of the room, Simon understood why it had been so quiet earlier in the evening. It was off-season. A cluster of four were patronizing the piano bar, and one booth held two customers. The room was virtually empty; but the show must go on, and the cool pianist seemed oblivious to his lack of audience. Darkness did have its advantages. Behind him, on a small dais, were stacked the instruments of a brass and wind combo that would probably come on later. Simon took a stool at the bar, ordered a Scotch on the rocks and tried to talk football to a broad-shouldered bartender who turned out to be a Shakespearean actor moonlighting for the winter. He didn’t know a T formation from a point after touchdown, but he smelled cop when Simon mentioned the late Mr. Kwan. He froze like a fresh daiquiri.

  “Sorry, sir. I never met the gentleman.”

  “He didn’t come in for a drink?”

  “He came to write a thesis. I understand the kitchen sent up quite a few pots of tea. Do you want a refill, sir?”

  Simon said yes, and it was somewhere through the second drink that he noticed the two shadows vacate the booth. The taller one, male, left the bar and disappeared somewhere beyond the door to the lobby; the shorter one, female, attractive and attired in a stylish state of disrobe, came to the bar and perched on the stool next to Simon.