Sleep with Strangers

by Dolores Hitchens

  CHAPTER SIX

  SHE BEGAN to cry, rocking forward on the chair arm, the tendrils of blond hair escaping to fall on her neck. Sader watched her for a few minutes, waiting for her to regain control; in his mind he said some uncomplimentary things about Felicia Wanderley.

  Finally Kay wiped her eyes and lifted her head. “Will you phone them? I can’t. I . . . I couldn’t talk coherently.”

  “It should be a member of the family. What about Annie?”

  Kay controlled a spasm of sobbing. “Ask her. She’s upstairs.”

  He found Annie in a big bedroom upstairs. Through the open door he saw her at a dressing table, before a mirror as big as a moon. On the glass-topped surface where she was working stood a vast array of perfumes and lotions; below was a pleated skirt of gold taffeta. He went in. The bed stood at the right; it had a gold lace spread. Underfoot was the silkiness of the white velvet rug. “Is this Mrs. Wanderley’s room?”

  She turned, the dustcloth in her hand. “That’s right, sir.”

  “Do you mind if I glance through the closet?”

  The question seemed to shock her. “Oh, I’m sure you shouldn’t!”

  Sader yearned to see if there was a beaver coat among the other garments, but couldn’t tell this to Annie. Under Annie’s soft politeness was a whim of steel and a rigid sense of propriety. Sader explained why she should call the police and report the disappearance of Mrs. Wanderley. But when he had finished, Annie was shaking her head at him.

  “After all that child has gone through, there’ll be no police harassing her. And no scandal. Not if I can help it.”

  “You’re inviting a worse scandal. Hell will pop if something’s happened to Mrs. Wanderley, and her daughter appears to have covered up her absence.”

  “They can’t blame Miss Kay!”

  “They will blame her,” Sader said grimly. “They’ll be most suspicious of her. It will be something the papers can hop on, too. None of the stuff they print will be flattering to Kay or her mother.”

  Annie dropped the duster among the bottles. “Do you mean that you can’t handle the job?”

  “It’s not that. I’m not quitting. But I want my client, Kay Wanderley, protected. Don’t get the idea the police will swarm out here with sirens blowing. The missing-persons department does as good a job as it can, but the police don’t have the personnel to do much about a case like Mrs. Wanderley’s. They’ll take down the facts, put them on the teletype, make a few phone calls, and perhaps a detective might spend a half day talking to her friends.”

  Annie seemed reluctant to become reassured. “Miss Kay mustn’t be hounded. It’s not my place to gossip about my employer, but you should know a few things. Miss Kay has given up all her lovely friends, shut herself away, trying to keep other people from finding out about her unfortunate mother.”

  Sader nodded. Kay’s life must have been bleak these last few years, he thought. And the chore she’d set herself was a hopeless one. Gossip wasn’t to be downed nor outwitted. “Make the call,” he said to Annie.

  “Against my better judgment. But I’ll do it.”

  He found Kay waiting for him in the hall. “I forgot to tell you—Mr. Ott phoned late last night. He expressed his sympathy. Then he said he’d appreciate it if I kept my private detective off his back. Did you insult him?”

  “Not that I remember.” Sader offered the girl a cigarette; she shook her head. He lit one for himself. Some words spoken last night by Ott ran through his mind: You know how real-estate people are . . . afraid you and the buyer might get together without them. And add to that, he thought, Milton’s quote of Mrs. Wanderley’s remarks: you don’t come sneaking to rob somebody blind. You aren’t a skunk.

  Mrs. Wanderley’s buyer for Mr. Ott’s duplex hadn’t shown up. Had he interviewed Mr. Ott privately, had they made a deal to save the agent’s commission?

  Sader said, “Ott had a real-estate deal on with your mother. She was going to sell his place for him. Just how seriously did your mother take her business?”

  Kay’s gray eyes were a little puzzled. “She didn’t need the money.”

  “That’s not what I mean. How would she feel about being cheated out of a sale, the two principals getting together behind her back?”

  “That’s against the law,” Kay said seriously. “I’ve heard Mother explain it. Once a client goes to an agent and the agent displays the properties, it’s illegal——”

  “Yes, I know that. But some people take the law rather lightly. How would she have reacted to such a situation?”

  “She’d have been very angry,” Kay said firmly.

  Sader studied the girl, wondering how much she would let him dig out of her about her mother’s drunken rages. Not much, he thought. The child was loyal to its parent. It was interesting to speculate, though, if Mrs. Wanderley had gone out Tuesday night waving a gun for Charlie Ott. “Well, I’ll be going. I have a couple of things to check. Why don’t you come down to my office around noon? My partner will be there. We’re going to hash over the cases we’re working on.”

  “You’re working on more than one case?”

  “No. He’s doing a job of his own. We go over the stuff together. Sometimes you develop a blind spot about some part of your job, or get off on a wrong track. I want to talk to him about your mother, and I’d like to have you there. You might think of something to add.”

  She rubbed her hands together as if they were cold, then tucked her arms across her bosom. “I can’t add anything.”

  “You might. Wear those earrings.” Sader smiled at her and let himself out at the front door.

  The dark sky was low overhead. There was a smell in the air as if rain was on its way again from the sea. Sader cast a glance at the heavy surf. Visibility was limited; not far from shore the sea and sky seemed to melt together in a watery union. He went to his car, got in. A heavy drop hit the windshield just as he put the key into the switch.

  He let the motor idle, sat there deep in thought. Why didn’t Kay Wanderley bring in the gaudy terrace furniture? It hadn’t been meant for stormy days. What had the thing been, the roll that had looked like bedding, under which he had glimpsed a patch of fur?

  I didn’t ask her, he thought, because whenever she got close to that door yesterday, whenever she looked out there, something in her froze with fear. I’m too soft. I ought to go back and make her tell me what scared her like that. He reached a hand for the key.

  Maybe I won’t have to pin her down, he told himself, and left the key where it was.

  He drove back to Cherry Avenue, up Cherry the long grade to the top of Signal Hill. Patches of low clouds lay here and there among the tops of the derricks. The smell of rain was almost stronger than the smell of oil. He turned slowly, searching for Milton Wanderley’s house.

  He saw it at last, down a slight slope. It looked very shabby in the dull gray light. He saw that on either side of the small porch, a tangle of geraniums, mixed with weeds, stretched to the corners of the house. In spite of the cold fall weather, there were a few straggly red blooms.

  He saw no houses near Milton’s. Two oil rigs backed up to what must be the rear property line, and some distance to the left were a couple of small tanks, painted with aluminum paint. It must have been there, Sader decided, that the water had been running last night.

  He didn’t turn off into the little road which led past Milton’s house. He parked nearer the rim of the Hill and got out and looked down the long slope to the beginnings of houses and lawns. The bare earth was crisscrossed by winding tracks that led to rigs and tanks. The few patches of wild grass were brown, dead, and here and there they’d been burned off to reduce the fire hazard around the rigs. Far below, among other houses, he suddenly noticed Ott’s duplex. Its fresh paint caused it to stand out brightly among the others. It was almost directly below, in a beeline from this spot. Of course no one could have made it by beeline, he thought, since there were precipitous banks, gullies, a maze of pipes.
<
br />   There was also an oil sump, near an old rig above Ott’s place. Not many of these were left, since drilling techniques had changed, the waste oil was carried away; and the old sumps were gradually being drained and filled. The surface of the oil gleamed under the pale light, black as obsidian.

  He made out a fence shutting in the sump. In the old days you heard of animals and birds falling into these things. Even kids. He felt a stirring of uneasy tension, remembering those stories. Remembering the woman who was missing, the gray-eyed girl alone in the house in Scotland Place.

  The stirring wouldn’t die down, so he turned on it to refute it. The smell of the uncovered oil would have warned Mrs. Wanderley. Drunk or sober, you don’t fall into an oil sump without difficulty. There were banks of earth, high ones, to retain the oil. You had to climb to get in.

  Impossible. . . . He was turning away when his attention was caught by the tiny office facing a dirt road. He looked down at it carefully. It was a drilling field office, probably. He couldn’t see any sign of life, but he got back into his car, returned to Cherry Avenue, drove down Cherry to a point opposite the military-academy grounds on the right. He turned left, through a fringe of neat houses with lawns around them, found himself on a semi-paved road that wound away among the rigs. He followed this until he came to the turnoff that led to the little office.

  It was made of rough siding, with a corrugated steel roof. He parked in the open space before the door. A sign under the eaves said Jenkins Drilling Company. Sader went up the wooden steps and looked in through the pane in the upper half of the door.

  The place was not deserted. A man in a green eyeshade was working on a set of books at a desk over by the windows. Sader rapped and walked in.

  The man looked up at him casually, then took off his glasses and put them on the open ledger before him. “Yes, sir, what can I do for you?”

  Sader took out his wallet and displayed his license. “I’m working on a missing-person case. I was wondering if by some chance anyone was here last Tuesday night.”

  The man rose slowly. He was slender, middle-sized, and looked as if he’d always worked indoors and without much exercise. “Tuesday? Let’s see. What date was that?” He frowned at a calendar on the wall.

  “It was the twenty-ninth,” Sader told him.

  “I always put in some extra time along toward the end of the month. I don’t know about last Tuesday, though.” The bookkeeper rubbed the side of his jaw. “Let me think.”

  Sader waited, leaning on the counter that divided the office and behind which were several desks and chairs, including the desk used by the bookkeeper.

  “Gosh. Tuesday.” The man went over to the calendar and studied it at close range as if it might tell him something. “I might have been here. I do usually put in extra time—I did last night.”

  Sader thought to himself that the man had an unusually poor memory. Tuesday was not so far away that nightwork should have been past recall. He said, “If you were here, would it have been as late as eleven?”

  “Oh, not hardly as late as that.”

  “Well, thanks, anyway——”

  The man interrupted by stepping quickly over to the counter. “What’s it all about? Who is this missing person?”

  “A woman.”

  The man frowned to himself again. “You think a woman was running around up here at eleven o’clock Tuesday night?” He went on looking puzzled for a minute or so, then all at once he grinned. “Oh, I get it. Necking, huh? Lovers’ quarrel, maybe?”

  “I don’t think so,” Sader said. “It doesn’t stack up like that from what I’ve learned so far.”

  “Who was she?”

  “I’m sorry, I can’t tell you that.”

  The bookkeeper blinked. “But you wanted me to give you any information I might have had.”

  “The family is eager not to have any publicity,” Sader explained, in as friendly a way as possible. “You can imagine how scandal starts and grows in anything like this. This woman was well to do, middle-aged, has a daughter.” To himself, Sader thought that once the papers were out that afternoon, this fellow would know it all anyway. He pretended a sudden change of heart. “Oh, well, you might as well see her picture.” He took out the snapshot Kay Wanderley had given him. It was a very clear print and showed Felicia Wanderley on the terrace in a pair of slacks and a sweater, her blond hair tugged by the wind.

  The bookkeeper whistled. “You call, her middle-aged? Man, you need glasses.”

  “She’s forty-seven, according to her daughter.”

  “Doesn’t look it. You know, there’s something sort of familiar about her. Looks like somebody I’ve seen . . . don’t know where.” He scratched the side of his neck. “Do you, suppose she wore a fur coat over that outfit?”

  Sader’s face grew cold and alert. “Why do you ask?”

  “Dunno.” The man’s nearsighted gaze remained blank. “Just occurred to me, you know; some women do. I think it looks crappy as hell, a fur coat over slacks that way, but they do it.”

  “You’ve seen her,” Sader said firmly. “Where?”

  “I tell you, I don’t know!” The man’s voice rose and his Adam’s-apple bobbed up and down. “You quit trying to pin something on me!”

  Sader controlled a sudden urge to mayhem. “There’s nothing to get excited about. We think she dropped out of sight for, some private reason and may be too embarrassed now to come home.”

  “I never saw her!” the bookkeeper cried loudly.

  Sader kept his tone soothing, confidential. “There are so many possibilities, so many crosscurrents in a case like this. I’ve been running around talking to her friends. It turns out that she drinks a bit now and then. That could turn into something.”

  The bookkeeper licked his lips and regarded Sader with distrust. “I wasn’t here Tuesday night, I just remembered.”

  “Too bad.” Sader put away the picture; he noted that the man’s eyes followed it all the way into his wallet. “I’m just doing a job. I’m sorry you misunderstood what I meant.”

  “Somebody’ll get into trouble over her,” the bookkeeper prophesied, “and it isn’t going to be me. No, sir!”

  “Why do you think there might be trouble?”

  “How should I know? I read the papers. Some dame drops out of sight, catches up on her love life, or she’s got to sneak an abortion—then she comes back home and needs an excuse for where she’s been. So she makes up a yarn that she’s been kidnaped, and then some poor devil who never saw her before goes to jail for fifteen years. Hell, it happens all the time!”

  “Well, I don’t think those cases fit Mrs. Wanderley’s,” Sader pointed out, watching to see if the name registered. “I think, personally, she may have done something a little reckless and she’s waiting to see what will come of it.”

  “Like what?”

  “A fight with one of her friends. Or taking up with a stranger for the evening’ like that”

  “Drunk driving, maybe,” the bookkeeper offered gingerly.

  “No, she wasn’t out in her own car. I think she took a cab or a bus, but I can’t trace them.”

  The bookkeeper was silent, thinking. Then he said, “I took for granted you were a cop. But you’re not. What are you, a private dick?”

  Sader showed him his identification again. “You were too far away to read it.” He put one of his cards on the counter. “Keep this, will you? Call me if anything comes to mind.”

  “Sure, sure.” The bookkeeper picked up the card, glanced at it carelessly, thrust it into his shirt pocket. “You had me worried. But I guess a private dick, he sort of plays it close to the vest. Besides that, you can’t arrest anybody.”

  “No, I can’t.”

  The nearsighted gaze was still innocent, still surprised. “Do you suppose there’d be a reward for information about this woman?”

  Sader smiled a little. “How much do you want?”

  “I haven’t anything to sell, mister. I’m just ask
ing.”

  To himself Sader said, you know something. He leaned on the counter. “We’ll be fair.”

  “Who’s we?”

  “The daughter and myself.”

  The pale eyes wandered here and there, never quite meeting Sader’s. “If I remember anything, I’ll let you know.”

  “It isn’t anything you can tell me now?”

  “It isn’t anything—period,” said the bookkeeper. “I haven’t remembered it yet.” He went back to his desk, looked at Sader over his shoulder. “When I do, I’ll telephone.”

  Sader didn’t even say good-by. He turned on his heel and walked out. It was silly to let a character like this one get you down, he told himself. But he had always hated people who clung to petty secrets, who tried to figure an angle for themselves before letting go of the truth. Something in their conversation had given the bookkeeper a whiff of money; Sader judged it may have been the fact that he was a private investigator, that the daughter cared enough about handling the case quietly to have hired him. He’d told the clerk merely that the missing woman was well to do; he hadn’t said anything about Ocean Avenue or Scotland Place.

  On the other hand, the bookkeeper’s avarice may have been roused by the memory of a beaver coat. Mink, ermine, or sable would have been better, but as Kay Wanderley had said, her mother’s coat was an unusually good one. A little heavy for Southern California. But a practical and sturdy sort of fur. . . .

  And more suitable, perhaps, for wearing over slacks.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  WALKING TO his car, Sader took out his notebook and turned the pages to his copy of Mrs. Wanderley’s appointments. For Monday she’d written, Margot’s, drinks, 5. He flipped on past a couple of sheets. Kay had jotted down neatly, Mrs. Margot Cole, 3132 Redwood. The address, as Kay had mentioned, was on the Hill; but not on this side of it. This south side, facing the city and the sea, dropped sharply. To the north was a more gradual slope, much more thickly worked. Concentrated there along Cherry Avenue were the tool companies, the drilling contractors, the field offices of big outfits like Texaco and Standard, even a couple of small refineries. It was the business district of the Hill, and Redwood wasn’t over a block or two off Cherry.