Sleep with Strangers

by Dolores Hitchens

  “Hello, Mrs. Griffin,” said Sader calmly.

  His voice reached her and she seemed to pull out of shock, looking at him now in recognition. All expression left her face.

  “Is something the matter?” Sader asked.

  “Drive on and see for yourself.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  THE LITTLE office had in it besides the smell of almost rain and the miasma of oil, the dry bookish flavor of the opened ledgers. They were spread under the light, on the desk in the corner. The light shone on the clean white pages, the neat rows of figures, and on the man who had fallen from the chair and lay half under the desk with his legs folded beneath him. It was the bookkeeper, and he was dead. He was even a little cool to the touch. Sader put his finger tips on an outstretched hand, then drew them back. He went over to the office telephone on the counter, put a handkerchief on it to lift it, dialed the police.

  Mrs. Griffin came back after a while. She climbed the steps and came in, averting her face from the corner where the dead man lay. “Was it . . . a bullet?”

  “Looks like it,” said Sader. He leaned on the counter and began lighting a cigarette.

  “Give me one.”

  “Sorry. Forgot my manners.” He gave her a cigarette and lit it for her.

  She smoked for a minute. “Could it be suicide?”

  “I don’t see the gun, unless it’s under him. I don’t think he killed himself. I’m pretty sure he knew something about the disappearance of your friend.”

  Her face twitched; she rubbed her fingers across her lips. “Has he been dead quite a while?”

  “Yes. By the way, when you were in here, did you notice any smell of gunfire?”

  “No.”

  Sader waited, his eyes on hers; and some color came up into her pale cheeks. “The door was open when I came, the vines hanging as you saw them. I knocked. When nobody answered, I walked in. I—I lost control for a few minutes there.” She tried to smile. “You’ll say I’m crazy if I tell you why I came here.”

  “Maybe you came for the same reason I did,” Sader offered. “I thought the man might have seen Felicia Wanderley Tuesday night. He admitted he worked late now and then. And this office is about midway between Charlie Ott’s and Milton Wanderley’s places, and they’re two of the last people she had contact with.”

  She hesitated, then nodded. Sader wondered if she was glad of the logical story he had supplied, and whether he’d been a fool to supply it. “I’ve been running around asking questions. Not that I don’t think you’re doing a good job. Just . . . just playing a hunch.”

  “I haven’t gotten anywhere yet.”

  She tapped her cigarette into a tray on the counter. “You called the police?”

  “Yes.”

  “This—changes things, doesn’t it?”

  Sader’s stare was flat, searching. “How?”

  “Well, if he was murdered because he knew something about Felicia’s disappearance——”

  “I shouldn’t have said anything about that. I have no use for an operator who jumps to hasty conclusions.” Like Dan, gibed the inner voice. You didn’t like it because Dan thought there might be a connection between Mrs. Wanderley and young Ajoukian, and said so. Maybe you’re a little annoyed now, too, because of the way Kay looked at Dan in the office. Sader went restlessly to the door, looked out. The hanging vine was dried, full of dead leaves. He searched for something more, a shred of cloth, a torn wisp of hair, hoping that someone in flight had tangled here. But there was nothing. Behind him in the office Tina Griffin was speaking.

  “Felicia was on the rocks. I wondered if you’d found that out yet.”

  He turned in the doorway to face her. She looked more like the woman in the Starshine Bar now. Some color had come into her face, and her glance was composed, and under the surface lay the hint of ironic humor—summoned now perhaps with effort—that had intrigued him last night. “You’re so much younger than she, I can’t help being puzzled by your being such close friends.”

  The slanted eyes met his for a moment, then drifted away. “I felt sorry for her. We are two of a kind. Maybe in her I saw myself, come fifteen years. I was raised in this town as she was. We both had such good solid Middle Western families, we both were kept so close before we were married. We never saw the Pike, we never ran around with sailors.” She laughed briefly. “And then, most widows sleep alone—too long.”

  It was Sader who looked away, who felt embarrassment for her frankness.

  She came closer, lifted her face. She wasn’t wearing the raincoat, but a brief jacket of tawny wool, a red knitted dress under it. Her head was bare, the black hair blown and silky. “I liked you last night. Today you’re like another man. You’re afraid of me.”

  “I find corpses a little unnerving. Or maybe I too have been sleeping alone too many nights.” He cupped her face between his hands, drew her lips up to his own, stopped with the first breath of contact. Come on, said the inner voice; who’re you waiting for? Kay Wanderley?

  The thin song of a siren lifted at the fringe of the Hill.

  She pulled back, went to a corner furthest from the dead man’s desk, sat down there on a chrome-and-leather chair. “It was a good try,” she said. “Maybe I’ll run into you again sometime, when you’re not working.”

  Sader went over and gave her another cigarette. “Tell me, did you come here some other time?”

  She nodded after a moment. “Last night. After you left me in the bar.”

  “How did that happen?”

  “I was just driving around. I saw a light in this office.”

  “Was the bookkeeper here?”

  “That man wasn’t here.” She flicked a glance toward the other side of the room. “The man who answered the door must have been the owner. He was awfully old and had on an expensive-looking suit. You know, you can tell good tailoring.” She smoked in silence for a moment or so. “When I kept knocking, the shade was pulled back and a man looked out through the glass and said the place was closed. And would I please go away? I went.”

  “Why did you come back now?”

  “Curiosity. There was something funny about the incident.” She wrinkled her narrow dark brows in a frown. “He didn’t give a damn what I wanted, what I had to say. How did he know there hadn’t been an accident out here, people were dying, I needed the phone? Or that one of his oil wells was on fire and about to blow up? He had no questions at all. He just took for granted I was a nuisance to be chased off the premises.”

  “How late was this?” Sader was pacing now, back and forth by the counter.

  “Oh, midnight by then, anyway.”

  “Did you notice a car parked in front?”

  “I saw the end of one, I thought, sticking out from behind the place.”

  Sader excused himself and went outside, walked the graveled path to the rear of the office where he found a Ford sitting with its nose to the wall. He looked in at the steering post. The slip was turned so that he could read only the name, George Mullens. The doors of the car were locked.

  Sader rubbed the graying hair over his temple, and thought about it. Mullens was obviously the bookkeeper, a quiet mousy type who might have entertained a secret itch like a yearning for fast ladies, or a love of horse racing. He’d had something to sell and he had wanted money so he had tried the market.

  The highest bidder paid off with Death.

  Sader thought wrathfully that there was no way to prove this, though it rolled through his mind with the clang of truth. There was another item on the first like a tail to a kite—his catching Mrs. Griffin running away. This was truth, too, as unprovable as the other: if he hadn’t blocked that road she’d have been gone and the threat of hell itself wouldn’t have wrung from her a confession that she had been here and found a dead man.

  He roamed out into the weedy slope behind the parking space and saw some distance away the earth embankment and wire fence closing in the sump hole. He went over to it. The wire fence was in
good shape, the embankment inside almost as high as his head. He was turning away when his glance skipped past the padlock and returned to it. He went to the gate and bent above the lock. It had looked all right at first glimpse because it had been hung carefully in place. Actually, it was broken.

  He took it from the gate, went inside, scrambled up the incline. The smell of oil was heavy in the moist, still air. The black surface of the pool, as smooth as glass, reflected the sky, the shapes of rigs nearby, and his own peering head. There were a couple of bubbles out in the middle and that was all.

  He left the enclosure, putting the lock back exactly as he had found it. Somebody was saving money, perhaps, or a pumper just hadn’t had time to put in for a new lock. Sader went back to the drilling office and met the police at the door.

  The man who interviewed Sader and Mrs. Griffin beside the steps of the office was about thirty, big, square-shouldered, dressed neatly and quietly in a dark blue suit. He had none of the characteristics usually associated with the police. His manner was mildly friendly, obliging, and he hid any tendency to display authority. He gave the impression of being eager to believe anything they wanted to tell him, so that he wouldn’t have to delay them too long.

  He reminded Sader of a hotel manager, or a cruise director, somebody whose power to order people around was submerged in a desire to keep them happy. He made Sader feel old and narrow-chested and dyspeptic.

  This guy was good, Sader told himself, and their stories had better be accurate.

  The officer smiled and put his hands in his pockets and told them his name was Pettis. He said this somewhat bashfully, but giving the idea that if they had any trouble at any time, it was a good name to remember and rely upon. “Lieutenant Pettis, to be accurate. But don’t let that impress you. Will you tell me how you happened to come and find this Mullens together?”

  Tina blurted, “I came first. I stumbled in on him and I . . . I panicked.”

  “Oh?” Pettis looked sympathetic. “Was this long before Mr. Sader came?”

  “A minute or so. I was leaving when he arrived.”

  “You had a common purpose here?” His glance betrayed, ever so slightly, that they had better not be wanting wells drilled.

  Sader told him briefly but clearly about Mrs. Wanderley’s disappearance, and about her relative above and her real-estate client below. Pettis made arcs of his eyebrows, looked innocently up toward Milton’s house and down toward Charlie Ott’s. “Do you mean this man in there, this Mullens, had something to do with the disappearance you’re working on?”

  “No. I’m explaining why we both happened to come here. Mrs. Griffin is a close friend of Mrs. Wanderley’s.”

  “You came here just because of the—the vicinity?”

  “That’s right,” Sader said. “Mullens told me earlier today that he knew nothing, however.”

  “You didn’t believe him?”

  Sader shrugged. “I didn’t believe, nor disbelieve. I had a photograph I wanted to show him.” He let Pettis presume that the picture was that of Mrs. Wanderley. “He’ll never identify it now, of course.”

  Pettis went back to the facts of Mrs. Griffin’s arrival. Either he was wary of following Sader’s lead into the Wanderley affair, or he figured the woman had more for him. Sader saw that Tina Griffin was frightened of the detective. She kept blinking her eyes and swallowing, and making nervous gestures with her hands. “Tell me,” said Pettis, oozing kindness, “just what you did, and what you first noticed, when you got here.”

  “I saw the vine,” she said, blurting it out as she had before. “It was all . . . all hung awry, as if somebody had hung on to it.”

  “You thought of someone hanging to it when you first saw it?”

  “No. Of course not. I just—I don’t know. I guess I thought the wind had blown it down.”

  Pettis looked thoughtfully and politely at the vine. “Wasn’t it that way before?”

  “No.”

  “Well, tell me about it.”

  She had to tell him then about coming late last night, and what had happened. Pettis spun a web of questions, but Sader thought she conducted herself well; he didn’t notice any obvious inconsistencies. She was, he noted, apt to harp a bit on the well-dressed appearance of the old man who had peeped at her through the door, and Sader got the notion she was covering something else, afraid she’d mention it if she didn’t concentrate on the good well-tailored suit and the expensive, highly shined shoes. When she mentioned these last, Pettis went up the steps and crossed into the office; and Sader groaned. She’d done herself proud up to now. Now she was ruined.

  But no, not quite. She seemed to jerk herself together. “I must have gotten confused. Of course I couldn’t see the man’s feet. He was close to the door, pulling aside the blind.” Pettis, inside, had just raised the blind on its roller from the halfway mark across the pane. When he heard Tina Griffin’s correction, he came out again quickly.

  “I wasn’t trying to catch you,” he said in a friendly manner.

  Like hell you weren’t, Sader said inwardly.

  “Sometimes it helps to experiment, to visualize clearly.” Pettis smiled at Tina, but she wasn’t able to smile back. She was scared, Sader knew, and she was intelligent enough to catch on that it wouldn’t do any good to try to hide her fear from this cop. “Now I’m going back inside, pull down the blind; and I want you to come and rap just as you did last night. And I want to stir your memory while we’re acting out this little scene.”

  “The old man must have been the owner here,” she stammered.

  “Oh, I know the owner,” Pettis said regretfully, “and he isn’t him. See the name on the sign there? Jenkins. Old friend of our police department.”

  Tina Griffin had turned white. She had an obvious reluctance to do what Pettis wanted, too much fear of the cop not to obey. Sader smiled at her, trying to buck her up, but she seemed dazed and didn’t appear to notice.

  Pettis went inside. There was a minute’s delay, a short time that seemed filled with a lot of muffled action within the office. Sader’s scalp turned prickly and he felt the tendons jump in his arms and shoulders. He had an old hand’s nose for trickery, and he was warned. For an instant he considered trying to warn the woman, even advising her not to do what Pettis had asked; but if they turned unco-operative they’d be under immediate suspicion. He forced himself to wait. Pettis’s voice, somewhat indistinct, came through the closed door. “All right, Mrs. Griffin. Come up to the pane and rap.”

  She went wobbling up the steps, knocked; but the pane remained blank to her waiting, frightened stare. All at once there was a clatter that made her start with fright. The blind flew up, striking the frame at the top and turning in its sprocket several times with the force of the released spring.

  Sader, below, grew cold with apprehension. Tina Griffin leaned toward the glass. She was rigid, teetering. He heard the slow hiss of her breath, the whimper as if with pain. Then she screamed and put her hands to her eyes and stumbled sidewise into the vine. She tangled there as if in a web, cried out, fought loose with a great scattering of dead leaves. With a face dead white, fixed, she fell down the steps into Sader’s arms.

  The door opened immediately. Pettis came down the steps at a run. Behind him, two ambulance attendants moved through the door with a covered stretcher. Pettis cried, “Gosh, I’m sorry! By accident she saw Mullens in there.”

  Sader grinned at him crookedly across Mrs. Griffin’s shoulder. Tina was muffling screams against his coat. “Sure. Just by accident the shade flew up like a bat out of hell, and by accident the guy holding the corpse’s feet had put down his end and the other one had lifted his, so Mullens was looking right out the door at a woman already scared out of her wits. I thought you were cleverer than that, Pettis.”

  Pettis’s smile grew thin. “You’re stretching the incident, Sader. I didn’t intend to frighten her. I do notice, though, that she fell into the vine. If it had been on the wall, she’d have torn it l
oose as it was when she claims she got here.”

  Sader arched an eyebrow. “I see what you mean to prove. The vine was torn by someone who fell away from the door in fright—probably from seeing Mullens murdered. Mullens dead was out of sight behind the counter. But that puts Mrs. Griffin outside——”

  “A witness,” Pettis agreed smoothly.

  Tina had caught the drift of the conversation. She wrenched herself from Sader’s hold. “You’re crazy. I found the man dead as I said I did. I didn’t break the damned vine.” All at once she was running toward her car at the edge of the paving. Sader tightened with expectation, but Pettis let her go.

  The ambulance was pulling out then, too; and there was almost a collision.

  Sader said, “Being a local cop, maybe you knew Mullens, too.”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “What kind of a guy was he?”

  Pettis hesitated, sorting perhaps such information as he cared to give. “A bachelor. Lived with his mother not far from here. Crazy about gardening and cats.”

  “What about horses and women?”

  Pettis stroked the line of his clean-shaven jaw. “I hadn’t heard. Why do you ask?”

  “He impressed me as having something to sell. For cash. I thought he might have had expensive tastes.”

  A flicker of recognition darted through Pettis’s eyes. “His mother needs an operation.”

  “I guess that could be it.” Sader lit a cigarette. “Do you want me any longer?”

  “I guess not. Keep in touch.” Pettis looked at the gray sky. “It’s going to rain some more.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  A BURST of rain swept the street in front of Charlie Ott’s duplex as Sader walked toward it. The wind was chilly But the air that stole from Ott’s house as he opened the door was too warm and too full of the smell of whiskey. Under the mop of fuzzy gray hair, Ott’s face was pink.

  “Sorry to bother you,” Sader said.

  “I don’t care if you’re sorry or not. Get off my porch,” said Ott. “I got nothing for you.”