Sleep with Strangers

by Dolores Hitchens

Sader’s body grew tense inside the concealing coat. He felt a sudden stillness from Mrs. Griffin at the table.

  “You know how a thing’ll flutter around in your head,” Milton apologized. “I kept trying to recall it. Well, Felicia read me the riot act for living off my pigs and living like one—she said—but there was something she added, she kept putting in, jabbing it at me. ‘At least you aren’t too dishonest. At least you don’t come sneaking to rob somebody blind. They know they’re just getting a silly pig on a slide and a penny prize. You aren’t a skunk.’ ” Milton’s sagging face turned a little pink. “She said a lot, all like that.”

  “That you’re honest,” Sader said slowly, trying to make something of it.

  “That I don’t cheat folks like some she knows,” Milton added in triumph.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  SADER MUST have shown that he wasn’t getting the significance out of this that Milton intended. Milton hurried on, “If you knew the family background, you’d know how unusual it was for Felicia to say anything good about me. Felicia was trained to look on me and my family like we was dirt. You haven’t asked why it is my name is Wanderley, though I’m Felicia’s cousin and Wanderley was her married name. I guess it didn’t occur to you to wonder.”

  “No, it didn’t,” Sader said, realizing the oddity.

  “In the little Kansas town where we were both born, there were just two families that counted, that owned much of anything. And they were interrelated a lot. There wasn’t anybody else there to marry, for those people with money.” He smiled a little with dry humor. “One family was the Wanderleys. The Coopers were the other. My mother and Felicia’s were Coopers, two sisters. Felicia’s mother went off to Chicago for a visit and married an outsider there, a real rich man. My mother stayed home and married a Wanderley. Out of all that money-crazy bunch, he was the one who was different.”

  Tina Griffin was looking over her shoulder at Milton. There was a moment of utter quiet, with no sound except the faint chuckle of engines in the distance, the drip outside from the eaves. Even the pigs were still. Sader wondered if they had gone to sleep.

  Milton went on, “The town called my father a no-good dreamer. I was crazy about him. I guess Mother was, too. We were awfully poor. Dad wrote poetry and Mother took in washing. It was a disgrace, people said. If she’d been a prostitute, they couldn’t have talked worse about her.”

  A fleeting smile, mixed with ironic pity, crossed Tina’s face.

  “I understand that Felicia Wanderley grew up here in Long Beach,” Sader said.

  “That’s right. Her folks moved away from our little town when she was four or five. I didn’t remember it, since I was only a baby. I’m younger’n Felicia by a few years. They had a house there, though, and they used to come back for a month or so in the summers. When I got old enough, they used to hire me for odd jobs. I guess Felicia’s mother, being my aunt, took pity on us. But once Felicia’s dad had me trimming a big tree in his back yard, and I put my weight on a rotten branch and fell. I landed pretty hard and hurt my neck. I’ve had headaches ever since.” And Milton rubbed the scrawny patch of hair in a way that Sader realized was a protest against pain. “Doctors never could do anything. Not that my folks could afford much along that line. What I always hated—Felicia’s dad knew about that tree. We found out later that the man who was supposed to trim it wouldn’t tackle it. Eaten out from the core, he said.”

  Milton’s tone was explanatory, seemingly without bitterness; but Sader wondered with a flash of interest just how deeply that old score rankled.

  Milton said, “When Felicia grew up she married into the Wanderley family—but she didn’t make the mistake my mother had. She got one with money, lots of money. But I knew she always hated it, that my name was the same then as hers. We were just trash in her eyes, Mother and Dad and me.” Milton shrugged as if it hadn’t mattered much to him. “When I came to Long Beach in 1949, she tried to make me stay with her and Kay, where she could keep an eye on me. But I had a little money, and I bought the pig concession.”

  Tina said softly, “You did the right thing, Milton. She had no business trying to run your life.”

  “It was the name,” Milton explained, as if defending his missing cousin. “She was always worried that her friends might connect her with me because of the name.”

  “I can see now what you mean by saying that praise from Mrs. Wanderley would be unusual,” Sader put in. “Obviously then on Tuesday night she was so angry over the activities of some other person that in comparison—and perhaps with a touch of guilty conscience—she felt your pig concession wasn’t too terrible after all.”

  Milton’s pale, confused gaze sharpened. “Yes, that’s what I was trying to say.”

  “She gave no other clue as to what had made her mad?”

  “No. Nothing. Just that I wasn’t as rotten as some.”

  Sader sat quiet, in thought. He remembered the moment when he had first seen Mrs. Wanderley’s photograph, the quick dislike, which he had been unable to quell. The picture had been full of a silly pretense; behind the unlined and yet somehow unyoung face, you sensed self-infatuation. You sensed also the years of dieting, of expensive beauty care. And yet, the result was ludicrous. That bee-stung mouth and fuzzy hair reminded him of nothing so much as movie stills of the vintage of 1920. He remembered vividly the pictures, cut from magazines, with which his older sister had plastered her bedroom walls. Somehow, Mrs. Wanderley had fallen in love with herself at the stage where, she had resembled Mary Miles Minter, and had never grown up.

  He pulled his thoughts back to more immediate questions. “How did she arrive? By taxi?”

  Milton nodded. “I guess so. I heard a car pull away just before she knocked. After she’d stormed at me about the pigs, and about people who were even worse than I was, she asked me to run her home again. I said if I did, the pigs were going to be in the back seat. I wasn’t going to take her all the way to Ocean Avenue and then have to come back here again before going to the Pike.”

  “What did she say to that?”

  Milton’s glance shifted uneasily. “She stomped out and slammed the door. When I left about fifteen minutes later, I didn’t see any sign of her. She wasn’t at the bus stop over on Cherry. Of course she could have hit it just right, got a bus as soon as she reached it. Didn’t she turn up at home okay?”

  “Apparently she got a ride, all right. At eleven o’clock she was at home and looked in on her daughter to tell her she was stepping out again.” Sader tried to weigh Milton’s worry. Was it honest confusion, anxiety? “So far as I can discover, she disappeared in the moment the door shut behind her.”

  “Did Kay tell you how drunk she was?”

  “Miss Wanderley told me her mother didn’t drink overly much.” Sader did not miss the look of irony that passed between Milton and the woman by the table. “I asked, because in any disappearance, it’s important to know if heavy drinking could be a factor. People who drink heavily black out, do things and have things done to them which sometimes bring a break with the past.”

  Their reactions interested Sader. Milton looked embarrassed, as if Felicia’s intemperance posed the same sort of problem to him that his pigs had to her. Tina Griffin looked remote, almost bored. She was probably a woman who held her liquor well, Sader thought; but she would be indulgent toward a friend who didn’t. The indulgence toward another wouldn’t have any pity or sentiment mixed up in it, just the recognition of realities.

  Milton said hesitantly, “Of course, something might have happened, something real bad. She might have got in a scrape. But she’d expect her money to get her out of it . . . the way she tried to fix that traffic summons.”

  “Four hours passed, or nearly, from the time she saw you until she spoke to Kay Wanderley about leaving. She could have sobered up on coffee and food by then.”

  “Yes, she could,” Milton said mildly.

  “It wouldn’t have been like her,” Tina put in. “I’ve been out with
Felicia many a night, and I know. She was fine, if she didn’t get off on some grievance. If something made her mad, it was like setting fire to a keg of kerosene. It had to burn itself out. Through many hours.” Tina came over to Milton, sat down on the arm of his chair. “You know what I mean. You’ve borne the brunt of those crazy moods more than anybody.”

  “You have to try to understand her side of it, though,” Milton said. “She was family-proud. And because she’d always had money, she couldn’t understand a lot of the ways other people used to get it. She said my pigs were filthy and I was gypping people with penny prizes. She just couldn’t get it through her head I had to do it to make a living.”

  Sader spent another half hour in conversation with Milton without turning up anything further of importance. The man seemed content, sunk into a rut of his own choosing. Felicia had been an annoyance down through the years, but he showed little resentment about this; and Sader judged that in his youth Milton had looked up to the pretty, spiteful girl and that the attitude of submission had never changed.

  The one worry Milton seemed to have on his mind concerned his pigs. He got fond of them, and then they grew up and he had to get rid of them. He knew, of course, though he didn’t say so, that the pets ended up in the butcher shops as bacon, hams, and chops.

  Tina Griffin and Sader refused Milton’s offer to make them some tea and serve cookies. Sader drove Mrs. Griffin back to the Starshine Bar. There he shared another drink with her—his was limeade this time, hers was another waterball—and they parted amicably. Walking away, he thought to himself that she had expected him to ask her for a date.

  There was apparently no Mr. Griffin to be considered.

  Sader went home to his apartment, put away the car, let himself in with his key and shed the coat, then relaxed with a cigarette before getting into bed. It was a neat, plain, but comfortably furnished place. Sader had chosen the stuff himself, and the colors ran to brown and green.

  He thought about Mrs. Wanderley. He’d put in more than eight hours on the job already, and he felt himself possessed of only a few threads, nothing definite enough to be considered a lead. What he had heard from the bartender and from Tina Griffin concerning Mrs. Wanderley’s drinking dismayed him.

  When she was drinking she had a violent, unpredictable temper.

  She’d been drinking Tuesday night.

  He recalled Ott’s speaking of her disgust and disappointment when the client had failed to show up for a view of Ott’s house. Could this have triggered her into an alcoholic binge?

  Again the coincidence flickered through his thoughts, Ott’s knowing Ajoukian from years of drilling on the Hill. The stray item persisted, a nagging scrap, even as he prepared for bed.

  The morning was gray and cloudy, threatening to rain again any minute. Sader made coffee in his kitchenette, scorched some toast, boiled eggs. He had no illusions about his cookery. It was lousy.

  When he was through eating, he called Dan Scarborough. Dan lived at home with an elderly aunt. He didn’t like to get up early, and when his aunt finally got him on the wire he sounded sleepy, so Sader judged she’d had to roust him out of bed.

  “How was dinner?” Sader asked.

  “You’ll never find anything like it in that cafeteria,” Dan said. “Not to mention the likes of Mrs. Ajoukian bending over your shoulder with a bottle of vino.”

  “Anything new on young Ajoukian?”

  “I’m beginning to hope he never shows up.”

  “Snap out of it, Dan. He’s been gone since Tuesday, it isn’t looking good. When did they report him missing?”

  “To the sheriff’s office? Wednesday, A.M. Old Mr. Ajoukian took care of it. A sheriff’s deputy rode out from Santa Ana, took down details. He said he’d let them know if something came in. Old Ajoukian waited until Friday with high hopes for the cops to find his son, then began to inquire around about how the missing-persons department worked and found out that practically all the recoveries are people who walk in and announce they aren’t gone at all, they’ve just been over to Joe’s bar, or someplace.”

  “Yeah. They don’t have the personnel.”

  “Then it seems old Mr. Ajoukian got kind of panicked. He’d thought the whole Santa Ana sheriff’s office was in a frenzy searching for his boy, and the truth hit him hard.”

  “Well, the taxpayers get what they pay for.”

  “So they explained to him, I gather. He wanted to hire one of their cops, exclusively, and they told him there were such creatures as private detectives.”

  “How’d he pick us?”

  “He didn’t. He had some kind of fainting spell around that time and the son’s wife took over. She thought it was silly in the first place, she says, to contact the sheriff in Santa Ana, Orange County, when her husband had last been seen headed in the direction of Long Beach.”

  “Logical—but it doesn’t work that way,” Sader said.

  “No, I told her the report had to go in to local officers,” Dan continued. “Anyway, she took the phone book and opened to the detective-agency listings in the yellow pages and played eeny-meeny-miney-mo and came up with us.”

  “I think you’ll have to demand a photograph,” Sader said, after a minute. “The one the old man let you look at, if there’s no other. It seems logical now that Ajoukian didn’t get to the Hill. Why don’t you retrace his route into town and explore the bars on the way?”

  “I know, Papa, I had it all laid out last night. I made them give me the picture.”

  “Meet me at the office around noon,” Sader said.

  “Sure. Did you find Mrs. Wanderley?”

  “Hair nor hide,” Sader grunted. “Good-by.”

  “See you,” said Dan cheerfully.

  A half hour later Sader went out to his garage and got his car, drove downtown and turned left on Ocean Avenue. He went on out past the big apartment hotels and the park, to the district where the old-fashioned mansions stood along the bluff, and so to Scotland Place. He parked in the narrow cul-de-sac of the street, walked to the white railing, looked down. A flight of cement steps angled back and forth, and below was the beach. The gray water was rough. There was no one in sight but a man leading a dog.

  He turned left and walked to Miss Wanderley’s big front door.

  She looked as if she had slept badly. The blond hair was swept back and up, but the hand which had put in the pins had trembled. There was no make-up, no rhinestones. She had on a pink cotton housecoat, inside which her figure was softly molded in voluptuous lines. “Do you have any news?” She asked it before Sader was even inside the door.

  He shook his head, and her face chilled. “I want to talk to you.” He waited for her to precede him to the living room.

  Instead she opened another door. “It’s more cheerful in here.” He saw what must be a sewing room. There was a chintz-cushioned wicker settee and two matching chairs. A big felt-covered table had patterns scattered on it, a portable sewing machine at one end. In a corner stood a dressmaker’s dummy. Sader studied it and decided that it must match Kay Wanderley’s measurements.

  “Sit down,” she said.

  Sader took the settee, she perched on one of the chairs. He said, “There is one point you’d better understand quite clearly. When a disappearance turns out to involve a felony, the police are pretty vexed about not having been told the person was gone.”

  Her throat worked. “What does that mean?”

  “If your mother is dead, they’re going to ask you why you didn’t report her absence.”

  “You—you think something terrible has happened to her, don’t you?”

  “The people I talked to yesterday and last night don’t seem to believe your mother would have walked out on her old life, on you, or on her wealth.”

  Kay’s gray eyes held a heavy, wretched expression. “No, I don’t think she would have, either. Unless——”

  “Unless, perhaps, in a drunken rage she’d done something she knew would get her into trouble s
he couldn’t buy her way out of?”

  Kay put her elbow on the arm of the wicker chair, laid her forehead on her palm. “She expected too much of money,” she said in a whisper.

  Sader asked conversationally, “How drunk was she at eleven o’clock?”

  “Pretty bad.”

  “Staggering?”

  “Unsteady.”

  “Just what were her exact words to you?”

  Kay looked at him miserably. “She wasn’t always like this. Vulgar. Before she began to drink heavily——”

  Sader cut in. “Wait a minute. You don’t have to beat around the bush. I’m not passing judgment on your mother. I’m hired to find her. That’s all. Now—what were her exact words when she looked in at you in that bathroom?”

  “I heard the latch click and looked back from where I stood washing hose in the basin. Mother was leaning in the doorway. She was dressed as I told you she was. In addition, she had a gun in her hand.”

  Sader stared at the girl as if she were crazy. What a thing to hold back until now!

  “She waved the gun around. She said, ‘I’m going up there and scare the son of a bitch out of his wits. That’ll teach him.’ ”

  “And you let her go?”

  “The gun was one my father had had for years. Long ago I disposed of all the ammunition for it.”

  The dutiful and frightened child, Sader thought, looking after Mama who just might take a notion to shoot up the town if she’d had enough to drink.

  “What else?” Sader asked.

  “I begged her to stay at home, to go to bed. Then I ran to get Annie to help me keep her here. That’s when she disappeared.”

  Sader thought about it. “You’re sure she didn’t have any bullets for the gun?”

  “I’m sure.”

  Of course, Sader thought, the man Mrs. Wanderley had gone to frighten wouldn’t know the gun was empty. He groaned to himself as the possibilities opened before him. Then suddenly he forced himself to snap out of it. He said to Kay Wanderley, “Go to the phone and call the police.”