Sleep with Strangers

by Dolores Hitchens

  “What gave you this lead?”

  “The maid at Mrs. Wanderley’s home overheard a telephone conversation in which the dead woman surmised that another man, a man named Charlie Ott, was back of the deal.”

  “Why should Mrs. Wanderley care?” Pettis wondered, sitting more erect, his expression puzzled.

  “As I said, Mrs. Wanderley had become a heavy drinker. She’d also developed a dangerous temper. I think she had a previous grudge against Ott because of the failure of a real-estate deal. She was supposed to sell his duplex for him. She held a real-estate license, incidentally, though she didn’t appear to need the income. Ott’s place is all spruced up on the outside, as if he’d got it ready for sale. But the inside of the place is dusty, real dusty. I can’t help but think that Ott had made a secret sale, gypping Mrs. Wanderley out of her commission, and then relaxed on his housekeeping. If he had still expected to display the house, he’d have kept it neat inside as well as out.”

  Pettis gave him a quizzical look. “Let me get this straight. Mrs. Wanderley was already mad at Ott because of a trick, selling his duplex behind her back——”

  “Probably to someone she’d brought there,” Sader put in.

  “—and then later she decides Ott is behind Ajoukian’s buying the oil shares? Still, so what? Wasn’t the Cole woman getting a good price?”

  “I don’t know. I doubt if Mrs. Wanderley knew. Perhaps she mistook Margot Cole’s desire for secrecy for something else. For embarrassment at being cheated, for instance.” Sader rubbed a hand over his clipped head. “She wasn’t in a logical mood that Tuesday night.”

  Pettis stretched his legs. “Where does young Ajoukian come in?”

  “My one guess is that he took his father’s place, met Mrs. Wanderley to try to calm her down.”

  “He gets killed for this?”

  “They both got killed for something,” Sader said evenly.

  Pettis went back to Dan, questioning him about Ajoukian’s stay at the bar, then entered an objection. “How could she have known he’d be there then?”

  “She did a lot of drinking,” Dan said. “Maybe she’d met him previously over a highball. That bar isn’t as dark as some, but maybe he’d had a few and she didn’t look too bad, though thinking about his wife I don’t get it.”

  “It’s too much of a coincidence,” Sader protested. “I think she called the old man at home. He may have been feeling bad that day. He told her where to find his son.”

  Pettis looked at the two of them. “Speaking of coincidences, there’s one that hits me right in the gut every time I look at you two. I guess you know what it is. How come you were called in by two such different clients, in two different towns—counties, even—about two people nobody would dream had ever met? And who then turn up in one sump hole, dead together?”

  “I don’t know.” Sader was tense under the cop’s inimical scrutiny. He began to light a new cigarette. He noticed then that Dan, who was facing the open door, was smiling as if he were seeing someone he knew. Then a sudden frown bit its way between Dan’s brows.

  “Come on,” Pettis demanded. “Something gave you a lead. You say the Ajoukians called first, so I guess something they said gave you a lead to Mrs. Wanderley.”

  “We didn’t contact Miss Wanderley. She came to us,” Sader said. “I can’t explain offhand why our agency, out of approximately a dozen, was chosen by both the Ajoukians and by Miss Wanderley.” Sader had a hunch about it but didn’t feel like unraveling it all to Pettis. When he and Dan had first set up the agency, they had debated the type of advertisement to be inserted in the yellow pages of the telephone book. Dan wanted something bold and aggressive, socko as he’d put it; and Sader had fought him about it. Sader had explained that the value of a private detective lay mainly in the fact that he was private. Unobtrusiveness and discretion were the things most clients wanted. The ad as finally worked out emphasized that the firm of Sader and Scarborough carried out investigations quietly and adroitly. The print was small; the wording, Sader thought, gave off an aura of secretive shrewdness. He was thinking now to himself that secrecy and caution were the things both the Ajoukians and Kay Wanderley had been looking for. This was the logical reason both had come to them.

  “People never give God credit for anything any more,” Dan said. “Do you realize how long those bodies may have lain hidden if we hadn’t stumbled on a connection between the two, a possible meeting up there on the Hill?”

  His tone was almost idle, Sader noted; and he was still staring out into the dark through the open doorway.

  Pettis outlined what he thought the chances of Divine intervention had been. He derided Sader and Scarborough as tools of heaven.

  “Oh, put it on a record,” Dan advised. “I’m so damned tired I can’t even think straight. Why don’t you let us go?”

  Pettis was now cold and distant, treating them like suspicious characters he’d caught prowling an alley. “Do you think your memories might improve after some sleep?”

  “I’ll ask Miss Wanderley why she came to us,” Sader offered.

  “Ask her why she didn’t report her mother missing,” Pettis advised, in a voice like flint. He got to his feet.

  “She did report her,” Sader insisted, also rising.

  “On your advice? And rather late, wasn’t it?” Pettis’s smile was thin, unforgiving. They walked out with his eyes on their backs.

  The rainy night smelled cold and lonesome. Sader turned up the collar of his coat. Down at the sump a single light burned like an accusing eye. Like one of Pettis’s eyes, Sader thought, mounted there to stare into their consciences. Pettis thought they were protecting their clients. It hadn’t occurred to him yet that they were fresh out of customers.

  The case of Perry Ajoukian was closed. The missing Mrs. Wanderley was found. Neither of them would ever be in good shape again, but they were at least accounted for. When had it been, if ever, Sader wondered, that he and Dan might have prevented the double murder?

  Never, he decided.

  There was no sense to these killings, excluding that of Mullens, who had died for his caution and his greed. Mullens had had information about something. He hadn’t said what, but Sader remembered, getting into his car, that there were two items missing so far. The fur coat and the gun.

  Maybe Mullens had known something about one of these.

  Or again, he just might have known what had happened to the vine beside the office door.

  Sader awoke with the sound of the shot ringing in his head.

  He pushed, fought instinctively against something coiled about him, only realizing in the next moment that he was still in bed, still wrapped in the bedclothes, and that he held the telephone in his right hand. He jerked the receiver back against his ear.

  While he listened his mind backtracked. Hazily he remembered the phone ringing, his taking the instrument off its cradle, then something worried and imperative—Dan’s voice telling him something he’d been too deep in sleep to catch. The effort to awake. Dan’s insistence, Dan’s strange anger. These he could half recall, though he had no memory of what Dan had said. Then there had been the shot, a jarring unmistakable sound in the receiver. He had jerked awake at last.

  He clicked on the bedside lamp and waited. At the other end of the wire he could hear muffled movement, cautious rustlings, and little bumps, as if someone were tidying up very quietly around a sleeping guest. Sader said, “Dan!” into the phone and the movement came to a halt. There was a final moment during which he heard breathing. Then the phone went dead.

  Sader wasted no time in jiggling the receiver. He dialed Dan’s home. After a couple of minutes Dan’s aunt answered, a ladylike elderly voice full of drowsy confusion. “Is Dan at home?” Sader lifted his wrist to look at his watch. It was three-fifteen.

  “Just a moment, please. I’ll bring him.” Sader knew the house; he heard her footsteps go down the hall, then slowly climb the stairs; and while he waited, his nerves crawled. When
she came back she was still confused. “Well, he doesn’t seem to have come in yet.”

  She was too polite to ask questions, though she must have known Sader’s voice. He was in too much of a hurry for explanations. He said, “Thanks,” and hung up, to lift the phone again at once and dial police headquarters. “Send somebody up to the office of Sader and Scarborough in the Warrant Building, will you? I think there may have been an accident there.” Sader was out of bed now, putting on clothes with one hand while he gave the desk officer his name, occupation, the number of the office and why he thought there might have been a gun fired.

  When he hung up he put on his shoes, buckled his belt, grabbed the coat off a chair, and headed out of the apartment. In about twelve minutes he slewed to the curb in front of his office. Everything was closed now. The street lights burned above deserted pavements wet with recent rain. As he ran toward the dark door of the building, a police car rounded the nearest corner: He didn’t wait. He entered the narrow vestibule, ran up the stairs. A light burned behind the glass of his office door.

  He tried the door, found it locked, took out his keys, cursed his hands because they trembled under nervous pressure. When he got the door open he rushed through into the inner office. Dan was there, lying on his desk, the fingers of his right hand touching the base of the phone.

  Sader walked quickly to stand beside him. He forced himself to look at Dan, to examine the wound in his face. It was ugly, just below the left eye. The remarkable thing was that Dan was still alive, that the labored breathing, clogged, fluttering, still went on. Dan’s flesh was warm, though his fingers felt slack and nerveless. Sader turned as the cops came in. “Will you get an ambulance? He just might have a chance.” Saying it, Sader didn’t believe it. There was too much blood. The bullet must be buried in Dan’s brain. He’d die without ever regaining consciousness. Soon, perhaps.

  One cop went down to call for an ambulance on his radio. The other one listened to Sader’s explanation. Sader told him—he suspected, not too coherently—about the Ajoukian and Wanderley affairs, Mullens’s murder, their conference on the Hill that night with Pettis.

  “We were through,” Sader concluded. “I don’t know what he was doing here.”

  “Maybe somebody asked him to meet them here.”

  “It’s possible. You can check with his aunt.” Then Sader remembered that Dan’s aunt had gone to call him from his room; she hadn’t known he wasn’t at home. “No, that isn’t it. He never did go home. He came here.” Sader took out cigarettes, offered the pack to the cop. The cop said he didn’t smoke. Sader lit a cigarette for himself, walked around, feeling the tendons jerk in his shoulders, the trembling in his wrists. Old drunks always shake, he jeered at himself inwardly. And Papa, you had your share. The urge to open Dan’s desk and get out Dan’s bottle ran through him like a whipsaw.

  He went out into the other room and had a drink from the water bottle in its stand, forcing himself to pause there afterward, to smoke slowly, to hold the cigarette rigidly steady. The cop told him not to touch anything, they’d have fingerprint men up here presently. Sader heard him through a fog of desire, the ache to relax his guard just this once, to throw liquor down himself until his nerves quit yammering.

  When the ambulance came he trailed it to the hospital. He tried to go in with Dan at the emergency entrance, but the nurses sent him around to the front. He waited in the big room filled with couches and lamps while the doctors upstairs worked on Dan. When he inquired at the desk, the receptionist informed him that Dan had gone into surgery.

  Sader paused in turning away. “Does a Mrs. Margot Cole work here?”

  “She’s off tonight,” the substitute explained.

  Sader rubbed the stubble of hair above his temple. Sure she was off—hadn’t he met her after midnight at Milton’s pig concession? He went back to the waiting room, aware that his thinking was slow and fuzzy. He wasn’t picking up the pieces quickly enough. He stood in the middle of the room, looking at nothing, aware only hazily of the surprised regard of a couple who were waiting, as he was, from some word from upstairs.

  Why couldn’t he remember what Dan had tried to tell him on the phone? Was there a block, a will to disbelieve? All that had stayed with him was Dan’s anger, words that hammered without penetrating.

  He went out into the lobby, found the telephone booth, shut himself in. He called Dan’s aunt, a hatred for the job like a bad taste in his mouth, and told her what had happened, how he’d come to call her earlier, where Dan was. He lied about what he thought Dan’s chances were, but she knew, anyway. She begged him to make the doctors keep Dan alive until she could see him.

  Sader went to the desk for more dimes, shut himself in the booth again, rang telephone numbers. Margot Cole didn’t answer; neither did Milton Wanderley. Charlie Ott’s line gave a busy signal. At the Ajoukians’, the nurse came on, sounding waspish, and told him neither Mrs. Ajoukian nor the old man were to be disturbed. Tina Griffin wasn’t listed in the book. Probably she lived in an apartment house, shared a house phone there. After a long hesitation, Sader put in a dime and dialed the Wanderley house.

  He had expected Annie, but Kay came on the wire. She sounded infinitely weary, washed-out, and all he could think of was the way she’d looked when he had left her, pale and small against the pillows.

  He said, “This is Sader. I had to ask you a question.”

  “Yes, Mr. Sader. What is it?”

  “Did my partner, Dan Scarborough, call you anytime after midnight tonight?”

  “Not that late, no.” There was an empty moment, a pause as if she expected an explanation from Sader. “Is something the matter?”

  “He was shot in our office less than an hour ago.”

  She caught her breath. The small sound, full of fear, brought her suddenly closer in his mind, and he imagined the tousled hair, eyes heavy with sleep, the soft swell of her breasts in the V neck of the housecoat. “I’m—I’m dreadfully sorry. I don’t know what else to say, except that I’m sort of numb. Since I’ve known Mother is dead, nothing else seems to register. Nothing else matters at all.” Another pause. “Is he badly hurt?”

  Sader couldn’t have said why he suddenly knew that she expected him to tell her Dan was dead. The knowledge was there, as real as if he could hold it in his hand. He tried to force it from his mind. Then he argued with himself. Considering what had happened to her, why shouldn’t she take for granted that Dan’s injuries had already resulted in his death?

  “I don’t think he has much chance,” Sader answered finally.

  “Let me know when there’s something definite.”

  “Yes, I will.” Sader felt sweat on his palm against the phone. “I’m sorry for what happened at your house tonight. I did what I thought was best.”

  “Yes, I—I appreciate that. Good night, Mr. Sader.”

  “Good night.”

  He went back to the waiting room and propped himself into the corner of a couch, drowsed off into half sleep, half nightmare. He awoke once to find Dan’s aunt crying beside him; he took for granted that Dan was dying. But when he finally managed to rouse himself, after six, he learned at the desk that by some miracle Dan was still alive and might continue to live.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  IN THE gray light of the rainy dawn, Sader left the café on Pine Avenue and walked to his office in the Warrant Building. He went upstairs, found the door unlocked, was still frowning over this when he stopped at the inner doorway, seeing Pettis watching him across Dan’s desk.

  “Come in,” Pettis said. He had papers spread out on the desk. “I want you to go over this stuff with me. The Long Beach detectives say it was what your partner was working on when he was shot. It seems to be something you did.”

  Sader walked over to stand beside him. The spread-out sheets were the ones he had typed the evening before and concerned his visit to the field office, the encounter there with Tina Griffin and Pettis, the following interview at the Ajoukian place.r />
  Sader went to his own desk and sat down. “Yes, I wrote that last night.”

  “What was in it for Scarborough?”

  “I don’t know.” Sader made no attempt to punch through the fuzzy curtain in his brain. “When he telephoned me this morning, I was asleep. I was holding the phone when he was shot. The sound of the shot woke me. I can’t remember what he was saying just before that.”

  Pettis wasn’t pretending to be friendly, eager to believe. He looked irritable, sleep-hungry. “Okay. You’ve got some stuff here I didn’t know about. This Mrs. Griffin, recognizing Ajoukian at the office.”

  “I just surmised that. You can check it by confronting old Ajoukian with the woman—when the doctor says you can do it without endangering his health.”

  Some grim lines settled around Pettis’s mouth.

  Sader began to light a cigarette. “Have you talked to Mr. Ott?”

  “We did. He had some harsh things to say about you, Sader.”

  Sader smiled a little. “I tried to call him this morning, as soon as they got Dan to the hospital. His line seemed to be busy. I remembered that he might have left the phone off the cradle when he went out.”

  “You don’t like him, do you? Why do you keep trying to throw suspicion on him?”

  “He lied to me,” Sader said. “He gave me a long spiel about how he hated old Ajoukian. I think he was covering a deal—the deal Mrs. Wanderley got wind of.”