Kay nodded, her mouth pinched and trembling. “Yes. Tootsie annoyed Mother then. If she knew I wanted Mother to stay home, she’d try to keep her here.”
“So you figured your mother had killed the dog in a rage.”
The strain showed in Kay’s voice, suddenly thin, frightened. “I’m sure Mother wouldn’t intentionally harm the least creature. Your attitude about Mother has been wrong from the beginning. You’ve thought of her as an old . . . an old witch. . . .” She turned her face from him, unwilling for him to see her tears. When she could speak again, she went on. “What Mother was—I’ve told you. She had a world that she loved and it fell apart, and then she was lost. She was like a child alone in the dark.”
Sader looked at her, musing on the fact that Kay, who was so young, should feel so much pity for the aging, rebellious mother. She was an unusual daughter. Or, more likely, Mrs. Wanderley had been explicit about the things which had driven her to drink. He asked, “Was the dog out on the swing when I came here?”
Kay nodded. “Yes. After you left I called the pound and they came and got the body.”
“Then it was yesterday that you made up your mind the dog couldn’t be wished back to life. And perhaps you admitted finally to yourself that your mother might have killed the pet because it tried to keep her from leaving while you were calling to her to stay. You must have decided that your mother’s mood was more dangerous than you had guessed. That scared you.” He saw the flinching motion of her shoulders. “Where was Annie all this time?”
“She’d gone to bed early. I woke her when Mother ran out with the gun, and she put on a robe and looked out into the street and couldn’t see anyone. Afterward I decided Mother must have left by way of the terrace. That’s where she would have run into Tootsie, who might have tried to stop her by catching hold of her coat. Probably Mother took a swing at Tootsie, not really meaning—not even knowing—she’d hurt her.”
Sader grunted. “Well, I would have appreciated knowing about the dog and the gun at the beginning.”
“It doesn’t matter now, does it? The police have already convicted Mother of killing this young man, Ajoukian, and the other man in the office.” Kay’s hands twisted together on the lap of the red housecoat, her knuckles pulled white. “They’ve got it all figured out so neatly. Only—wait and see—it didn’t happen that way.”
The ringing of the telephone cut across her words. She hurried out, came back immediately. “The call is for you, Mr. Sader.” Sader gave her a crooked grin; she averted her eyes. “Use the phone in the reception nook at the end of the hall. It’s private there.” She sat down stiffly and crossed her ankles.
Dan was on the line, his voice thick, rattling words off in excitement. “My God, Papa, you’ve got news for the Wanderley babe! Her mother didn’t kill young Ajoukian. She’s innocent, in the clear like a bird.”
Sader said uneasily, “They’ve caught the murderer?”
“No. They found her. Right in that same sump we fished Ajoukian out of. What do you think of that?”
If Dan had been there, Sader would have hit him. As it was, the phone hung in his hand and he looked at the wall, while heat ran across his skin and the tendons twitched in his wrists. Finally he said dully, “What’s the set-up?”
“Both of them shot with a twenty-two, Pettis thinks. The cops are draining the sump to find the gun. They want Kay Wanderley back up here. They’re going after the Cole woman again, too.”
“She’s with Milton Wanderley.”
“Milton’s up here, having fits over his cousin.”
“Tell them I left Margot Cole waiting for Milton in his pig concession.” Sader hung up the phone and went down the hall to the living room and looked through the open door at the girl across the room. The red color of her housecoat seemed to swim up the wall like a flash of fire. He rubbed his eyes.
She looked up at him when he got close to her. “This you’ve got to believe: the purse there in the oil sump doesn’t mean Mother killed him.” She might as well have been speaking a foreign language; Sader just stared blankly. “Didn’t you hear me?”
He sat down in front of her on the chair that should have been holding someone important, and said, “They’ve just found your mother. You don’t owe me a thing. I didn’t complete the job.” He drew in his breath, a big breath that never seemed to end. He wanted to yawn, a reflex from strain.
“What did you say?”
He tried to imagine what had made him say the crazy thing about the fee. It was no time to think of money. It was a time to get across to her, gently but firmly, that she didn’t have to worry any more about her mother being out in the rain. Her mother had been waterproofed. He said slowly, “I wish this job were anyone’s but mine. They took your mother from the oil sump where we found Ajoukian earlier tonight.”
Her hands quivered on the arms of her chair. Her eyes didn’t falter but something new came into them, a depth of horror and outrage that stunned Sader. He said, “Shall I call Annie?”
He had to repeat the question before she replied. Then she said, “No. Don’t call her. I want to go up there. There must be some mistake.”
His mind cringed away from the sight that awaited her. He argued briefly. She told him, “Wait here. I’m going to get dressed.”
While she was out of the room, Sader walked around in it and looked at the nice well-dusted furniture and the subdued modern pictures on the walls and listened to the sudden burst of rain against the terrace doors. Out there in the rainy dark were the gay canvas chairs, the big swing, abandoned to the weather because the mistress of the house was dead.
He thought about Mrs. Wanderley, who had been the transplanted fruit of an old purse-proud Middle Western family, and who had reigned in a regulated society and in an ordered household like a queen. Some unpleasant things had happened to her. Her husband had died, she’d been lonely; and the town had been gorged by a new population to whom she hadn’t been anyone of importance. So she’d taken to drink and to rages she couldn’t control.
Still, he thought, the same widowhood, the same change in neighbors, must have overtaken many another middle-aged woman in the town. And most would seem to have adjusted, somehow. The facts spoke of a deep flaw in Mrs. Wanderley, a delayed adolescent craving for flattery and attention. Her reaction to changing times had been infantile in its greed, its lack of consideration for her child.
He thought of Kay, upstairs now, hurrying into her clothes, convinced that there was some mistake, that it couldn’t be her mother in the dregs of an old oil sump, stained and smeared and bloated, stinking. Sader beat a fist into his palm, over and over, trying to think of some way to keep her here. Give them time to clean the body, to take away the stench and the smear. Give Kay a few hours to gain composure.
Resolve hardened in him when he heard her quick steps in the hall.
She came in dressed in the neat blue wool dress, the fur jacket, the little velvet cap, which she had worn at the office. Under the small brim her hair was ragged. She’d made no attempt to put on make-up. “Shall we go?”
In her voice he heard the trembling of panic. “I guess so.” He walked toward her. “I could make an excuse for you, delay this awhile.”
“It isn’t necessary.” She waited for him, clutching her handbag, her face lifted a little as if that were the only way to keep her chin steady.
Sader nodded. “Keep the pose, please.” His fist came up in a short clipping blow that spun her head back. Her eyes were already glassy as she started to fold at the knees. Sader caught her. He held her at the waist and stripped off the hat and the jacket, dropped them to the floor, swung Kay up into his arms and headed for the hall. He went upstairs where he kicked on doors until Annie opened one.
The gray mouse looked ready to fight. “What’re you doing with her?” She sprang at him with claws.
“Smooth down. She wanted to see her mother’s body. I clipped her one. Show me where to put her. And keep her here, at least until mo
rning.”
Annie seemed ready to faint with shock and outrage. Then she slowly wobbled off up the hall. She had on a kind of nightgown that Sader would have sworn, offhand, hadn’t been sold since around 1890. Probably she sewed the atrocities at home in the room downstairs; certainly such objects were on display nowhere. She opened a bedroom door, swept through, turned down the covers of a wide white bed, stood glaring as if expecting some indecent trickery on his part. Sader put Kay down gently. Annie fussed over the girl, removed her shoes and loosened her collar. “How do I know you haven’t killed her?”
Sader replied, “She’s breathing. When she comes to, put an ice bag on her jaw, and give her some aspirin.”
He started out. Annie ran after him, her gown dragging around her toes. “Where did they find Mrs. Wanderley?”
“In an old oil sump on Signal Hill.”
Annie muttered distractedly under her breath, then gathered her wits to ask, “How long has she been dead?”
“I don’t know.” Striding down the hall, he was engrossed briefly with the puzzle. It seemed logical to think that Mrs. Wanderley and young Ajoukian had died together. She had been seen alive after dawn on Wednesday. How could the two have been murdered by daylight, thrown into the open sump without notice except from Mullens? And then an additional point nagged him. Mullens hadn’t seemed sufficiently dismayed to be hiding a double killing. Sader’s gaze grew bleak. At any rate, one thing was true. As Dan had said, Mrs. Wanderley had been cleared of the suspicion of murder—drunk, bad-tempered, or whatever, notwithstanding.
At the top of the stairs Annie plucked at his sleeve. “You took a lot on yourself, doing what you did just now.”
“Yes, I guess I did.”
“Well, no doubt you meant to save her a shock. I like a man who can act quickly. By the way, I have something to tell you.” She cocked her head, measuring him, perhaps trying to see if he deserved this confidence. “I overheard a telephone conversation of Mrs. Wanderley’s on the night she left here.”
The bleakness in Sader didn’t diminish. “This might have helped, sooner.”
“You know my position is a subordinate one in this household,” she said, watching him to see if he believed it. “A proper servant must keep her mouth shut. A gabbling maid is a curse to her calling.”
“My experience is so limited,” Sader complained.
She pursed her lips. “Mrs. Wanderley wanted to find someone named Ajoukian.”
“I gather you’ve read the late papers?”
“I subscribe to the London Times and to Punch,” she lectured gently. “They get here a bit late. The American press is so sensational and so full of politics.”
“You’re a funny little gal. Anyway, a young guy named Ajoukian was in the sump, dead, along with Mrs. Wanderley. She was sleeping, you might say, with a stranger. Or I had thought him a stranger until now. What did she want of Mr. Ajoukian?”
“She was quarreling with him, finally.”
“What about?”
Annie hesitated. “She wasn’t very coherent. At one point, though, I heard her mention Mr. Ott’s name. You know, the rather large seedy gentleman she’d known so long. She said something like, ‘I know Charlie Ott is mixed up in this somewhere.’ At this point I tactfully moved out of hearing.”
“It was the wrong time for tact.”
Annie’s glance implied that he lacked a sense of decency. “I didn’t intentionally hear what I did.”
Sader put a hand on the newel post, gazed thoughtfully down at the space below. “Charlie Ott. A very interesting fellow.”
Annie withheld comment. She’d called Ott a gentleman, but Sader sensed that this was a term loosely applied.
“Miss Wanderley has told me that when her mother left here Tuesday night, she was waving a gun and threatening to go ‘up there’—presumably to the Hill—and scare some unnamed character out of his wits. Would it have been logical for that character to have been Charlie Ott?” Sader put the question, then waited while Annie appeared to be figuring something in her head.
“Of course, Miss Wanderley told me the same thing,” Annie said carefully. “And I saw no reason to doubt this. But at the same time, I can’t quite believe that her mother’s anger over the business which concerned Mr. Ajoukian was murderous in its intensity.”
“Perhaps she thought of something more, some other transaction which involved Ott.”
Annie’s glance was cautious. “Of course it’s true, she had a contract with him to sell his property.”
“It’s what I was thinking of,” Sader told her.
“I can’t help you. I was in bed by the time she left. Miss Wanderley roused me to help her find her mother and keep her at home. I didn’t see Mrs. Wanderley at that time.”
Sader went down a couple of steps, then looked back at Annie. “Did you like her?”
There was no wavering in Annie’s gaze. “Very much.” She added nothing; her glance was chiding. Sader decided that he was expected to know why she had been devoted to Mrs. Wanderley. Well, he thought, perhaps he did, at that. Mrs. Wanderley must have shown her careful breeding in her sober moments. The patina left by wealth, security, and family pride wouldn’t have worn off quickly. He knew nothing of a life with servants but some instinct told him that Felicia Wanderley would have exploited the motherly instincts of this small gray woman, just as she had Kay’s capacity for understanding.
He let himself out into the rain. On the sidewalk he sheltered a match, lit a cigarette. Cars went by on the wide boulevard, a steady stream of yellow lights, singing tires. The big homes along the bluff were mostly quiet and dark. It was a very quiet neighborhood.
I shouldn’t come back here any more, Sader thought. I’m getting to feel at home in a crazy kind of way. I’m beginning to get the idea you could sit in one of these piles surrounded by your stuff, and feel as miserable as if you were broke. Maybe more so. It might be frustrating to have money and to find out it really wouldn’t buy just what you wanted.
He slid in behind the wheel of his car and turned the switch. A sudden unnatural tiredness ran through his body, and he felt a deep desire for sleep.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
THE AMBULANCE was waiting but Pettis delayed it while Sader looked at Mrs. Wanderley. The turned-back canvas showed stains of old, grainy oil. In the round beam of Pettis’s light the smeared features appeared hideously comic, the effect, Sader realized, of a grotesque impression of blackface. Mrs. Wanderley looked as if she had taken part in a minstrel show and had only half removed her make-up. Her clotted hair gave no hint of its blond color, nor was there any way of telling the tint of the cloth collar stuck against her throat.
“It’s her all right. She was wearing a beaver coat, though.” Sader tried to concentrate on checking details. The resemblance to Kay was unmistakable, something he hadn’t recognized from the snapshot, and under the circumstances, dreadful.
“We haven’t found the coat,” Pettis said. “Probably in there somewhere.” He nodded toward the sump in the dark distance where searchlights splintered the night. “We’ll get it.”
“There is a taxi driver you’d better get to look at her.” Sader explained their efforts to trace Mrs. Wanderley from Scotland Place, then their finding at last the cab driver who had taken her to the Veterans’ Hospital. “I don’t think he’d know her, though, in the shape she’s in. You’ll have to fix her up.” Sader paused until Pettis nodded in agreement. He wanted Mrs. Wanderley to look well for Kay. “Make sure she’s the woman he took out to the hospital.”
“Any reason you think she isn’t?”
“No. But it’s important to check.”
“Sure, I see that. What’s his name and company?” He clicked off the light, pulled the canvas into place. Sader told him who the cab driver was while a white-coated man closed the ambulance and drove away, the lights of the big car rocking as it crossed the ruts in the road.
Pettis led the way to the office, where lights burned, the d
oor stood open. In a chair against the counter sat Dan, smoking a cigarette. He waved wearily in greeting. Pettis said, “Now I have the two of you here, I’d like a statement of all you’ve done.”
Dan groaned, “I’m tired. It’s two o’clock in the morning. I want to go beddy-by. Why in hell can’t we at least go get some coffee?”
“I have to wait here.” Pettis pulled a couple of chairs from the desks behind the counter, arranged them so that he and Sader and Dan formed a close triangle. He sat down, smiled, assumed an air of inviting confidences. Sader remembered the pose from the previous interview, but it didn’t worry him as much this time. Pettis had proved fallible. His trick on Tina Griffin had backfired, frightening and angering her. She’d be a stubborn witness now.
Dan, trying to hurry the interview, began sketching his efforts to find young Ajoukian. “I guess you’ve interviewed his wife.”
“Yes, I have,” Pettis agreed.
“Well, you’ve got to admit that nobody in his right mind would abandon a babe like her at home to skip out for a date with Mrs. Wanderley.”
“I never met Mrs. Wanderley,” Pettis said, his glance cautious.
“She was forty-seven,” Sader put in. “Dan imagines her as hobbling around with a cane. According to her daughter, she didn’t look her age.”
“She had men friends?” Pettis asked.
“No—according to all witnesses but one, she’d lost interest in men.”
“You believed it?”
Sader shrugged. “I don’t know. She’d been drinking heavily for quite a while. Sometimes liquor cuts down on—other things.”
Pettis leaned back a little in his chair. “What was the connection then with young Ajoukian?”
Sader tried to marshal his ideas, and in the moment of silence then he caught a slight sound from outside. He thought of it at the time as a footstep and remembered Pettis’s men down at the sump and glanced toward the door, expecting one of them to come in. There were other noises, spatters of rain on the tin roof, the coughing of gasoline engines on rigs in the distance, and when the sound like a footstep was not repeated he dismissed the impression that someone was out there in the dark. “Such connection as we can prove seems very trivial. It started this way. Old Mr. Ajoukian wanted to buy some oil shares from a woman who has a home here on Signal Hill, a Mrs. Margot Cole. She works as a hospital receptionist. She’s getting a divorce, or at least apparently thought she might. The oil shares are probably community property. She wanted the sale kept quiet. She says she didn’t want a final break with her husband. Old Mr. Ajoukian also appears shy about discussing the deal, so he might have reasons of his own for secrecy. Perhaps the presence of a partner in the deal.”
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