Sader nodded. He took another long look at the uplifted face, the curve of the chin he’d memorized, the gray eyes to haunt his dreams. “Good-by.” He walked out of the café. He knew he’d never see her again.
There was a burst of green light on the eastern horizon and against it the outline of the Hill, its forest of rigs, was like that of a sleeping porcupine. Sader pulled himself into his car, started the motor, turned south to Seventh Street. He drove out Seventh, not too fast, hating now the errand he was on. He left Long Beach behind, came to open country, then to the neatly landscaped scraps of acreage where people bored with city life played at being farmers. The air was very fragrant out here. Someone had cut hay, and there was wood smoke on the breeze, some early riser—or somebody who hadn’t got around to going to bed—warming himself at a hearth, and in the distance a lot of roosters were crowing.
The Ajoukian lane was shadowy, the house unlit. Sader parked the car and walked over to ring the doorbell, and to wait. The nurse came finally, pinning her cap. She was a new nurse, since the old man had a sharp turnover in his help. She was small, stout, red-headed, and somehow made Sader think of a Peke. He said, “I’d like to see Mrs. Ajoukian.”
“At this hour?” Her voice was yappy, like a Peke’s, and her snub nose wriggled in suspicion. “My God, nobody’s up.”
“Well, you’re up. Tell her it’s Sader to see her.”
“Who are you? I mean, are you a relative, or someone close to the family? I’m asking on account of the old man. He’s very low.”
“You’re a girl after my own heart,” Sader complimented her, “and the first nurse I’ve ever met who actually passed out information about the patient. How long has he got?”
“Not very long.” She took the last of the pins out of her mouth, so she could talk plainly. Her voice got deeper, so some of the Peke impression vanished. “He’s had a stroke.”
“Can he talk?”
“A little. He’s not unconscious, just confused. He thinks he’s back in the past somewhere, raising hell about grocery bills. Then he cries some about a little girl dying.” She patted her hair around the rim of the starched cap, opened the door a little wider. “Shall I see if Mrs. Ajoukian wants to see you at this hour?”
“It was the general idea,” Sader commented. She left the door ajar, so Sader could look in at the hall, the glass brick, the tumbled greenery in the brick planters. He felt the dawn growing behind his back, a gray flood stealing up the sky. He wanted to sleep. He didn’t like to have to think about old Ajoukian, grieving for the daughter dead all these years.
When young Mrs. Ajoukian appeared, she was wearing a blue silk housecoat. For somebody who’d just been wakened, she seemed quite alert. She looked at Sader through the door and said, “Is it something important?”
“It’s about Dan.”
She stepped back, and he went in. The nurse said something about making coffee for all of them, and disappeared.
They faced each other there in the hall, with the wet smell from the planters filling the air, and somewhere outside a rooster crowing his head off. Sader thought that Mrs. Ajoukian knew at once what he’d come about. She was a woman of remarkable composure. Finally she asked, “Is your partner dead yet?”
“No. It seems he might not be going to die.”
“Has he talked to you?”
“A little.”
She nodded as if this confirmed some unspoken surmise. “Do you happen to have a cigarette?”
“Sure.” He offered his pack, she picked one out, he lit it for her. She smoked for a minute, thoughtfully, her eyes not on Sader’s face but on some point just past his shoulder. The loose pale hair shone under the hall lights. The curls on her shoulders, Sader thought, looked exactly like the spun-sugar candy they sold on the Pike.
“Why have you come here?” she asked. “Why not go to the police?”
“You were our client,” Sader answered. “It’s considered very bad for business to turn clients over to the cops.”
“But you’re fond of your partner, aren’t you?”
“He can be an aggravating guy.”
She shook her head. “No, that’s not it. You’re hoping I’ll make a break, try to run, give myself away. I might add that I called on Pettis late last night, just checking up on the progress of the case you understand, and he seemed awfully eager to know where you were. You and that Miss Wanderley.”
“There’s nothing you can do at this stage of the game,” Sader told her. “If you want to try to get away, I’ll hold off. They’ll be coming here eventually. You might have an hour or two.”
“Aren’t they going to arrest Miss Wanderley?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Before they can charge me with murder,” she said rapidly, “they’ll have to figure out a motive. What did I gain? They’ll have to build a case—how I planned it all——”
“You didn’t,” Sader interrupted. “You followed your husband that night out of jealousy. Because he was hell on wheels with the girls. Because he was beginning to listen to his old man, to think that with all that money he was a fool to be tied down to you. His date in the bar didn’t come off. You probably peeped in now and then, saw him sitting alone. Perhaps you figured he was wise to you, was playing it smart. When it was around eleven he had a telephone call. It was Mrs. Wanderley, but you had no way of knowing that. The old man wanted Perry to meet her, to shut her up before she spoiled the deal to buy Mrs. Cole’s property.”
“You are a faker,” she murmured.
“I’m just figuring. You trailed Perry to the Hill, where he met Mrs. Wanderley. The woman was drunk and violent, and he was trying to quiet her down. To you, in your mood, it looked like passion.”
“Okay.” She nodded in irony. “What did I shoot them with?”
“Not with Mrs. Wanderley’s gun. It wasn’t loaded. You took it away with you, afterward, to confuse the picture. You took her coat, too, and remembering her hair done in a scarf, you got yourself up in similar garb to stage the scene with the cab driver.”
She laughed, richly, throatily, and under the lights her beauty seemed to blaze in triumph. She was gorgeous; he was never more conscious of it than at that moment, nor more conscious, too, of how cold her beauty left him.
“Meanwhile, you’d driven Perry’s car away, stumbled on a house for sale where the garage was empty——”
For the first time there was a crack, a split, in the brittle composure. For just an instant fright flickered in her eyes. It had to do with that house. Sader backtracked slowly. “Wait a minute. I see a possibility. You weren’t happy here under the thumb of old Ajoukian. You looked around for a place, hoping to coax your husband to move into it with you, to live alone where the old man couldn’t poison him against you. Close to the Hill, where he had business contacts. There might even be someone who remembers your looking at the place, some neighbor——”
The fright was naked, open, now. She licked her lips. She was like some lovely and poisonous flower getting ready to explode with venom.
“You still haven’t proved—the gun——” She tried to sneer again, but now her mouth was shaking.
“I guess I don’t know which gun——” Sader stopped talking. Behind her the inner door had opened and old Ajoukian stood there tottering. It wasn’t the sight of the crippled, emaciated figure that stunned Sader; it was what the old man held in his hand. A gun as bright, deadly, venomous, as the girl herself. “No—wait!”
“Why should I?” came the cracked, cackling voice. The girl started, color draining from her face; but she didn’t turn around to face her father-in-law. The old man went on, “I tried to make them hold her. I cooked up something, I thought if they got her in jail they’d get the truth out of her. Perry gone, in trouble maybe like Mullens thought—her fault. Now I know it all. The dirt she did my boy.” His hand rose, wobbled, and Sader dived for the floor.
The sound of the shot filled the passage. The greenery seemed to b
end under the report, and there was a popping noise from one of the glass bricks. For a minute Sader thought she’d gotten off without hurt. She looked at old Ajoukian. “You old devil. . . .” But now there was a seeping stain on her arm.
The old man fired again. And again. Then he leaned in the doorway and began to cry, a high grinding screech like an injured parrot’s. “This gun. This gun she used. Mine. To kill my son.” The cries went on and on, drowning the screams of the nurse who had come to look, then fled.
Sader crawled over to where she lay. Her eyes were open, though they were glazing. Sader didn’t think she saw him, that her words were meant for him. “I really didn’t dream she was that old.” He knew she meant Mrs. Wanderley. “She really was a good-looking woman.” It was a kind of apology to Perry for the natural mistake, Sader thought. Addressed to Perry, whom she ought to be seeing again before too long.
There was one last whisper. “I didn’t like that part—putting them in the oil.”
Well, Perry had been a very handsome man, and putting him in the sump had been cruel to those good looks. She was a girl whose regrets would concern surface things, appearances, bodily decencies. She wouldn’t worry whether Perry, in those last few moments, had had time to repent the amours of an overfull existence. She’d worry about the oil, eating out his eyes . . .
The old man still had the gun, and there was no guarantee he wouldn’t use it again. Sader went out through the front door, around the rear to the garden shut in by ivy walls. The nurse was there. She was being sick into a bed of begonias.
“Excuse me. I’m easily upset.” She staggered wretchedly to a bench.
Sader said, “Is there a telephone in the kitchen?”
“You’d go in there!” she screamed.
“He’s pointed the other way.” Sader went into the kitchen, found the phone hidden behind a copper screen in the barbecue area, called Pettis. There wasn’t much to tell.
When he was through with the phone, Sader sat down on a bench by the barbecue table to wait. The house was silent. The beautiful, expensive house was as still as a tomb.
CHAPTER TWENTY
PETTIS WAS mad. He had a foot on the redwood bench, his cigar dribbled ashes on the barbecue table. “The cab driver didn’t identify Mrs. Wanderley positively as the woman he saw Wednesday morning. He said he hadn’t had a particularly good look at her face, with her busy kicking his shins and so on. One thing he was pretty positive about—the slacks were the wrong color. The woman in his cab had dark green slacks, almost black. Mrs. Wanderley’s, even stained with oil, were a brighter blue-green. I was getting ready to give him a look at the other women in the case when you took off with Miss Wanderley. What was I supposed to think?”
“Yeah, yeah.” Sader tried to rub the sand out of his eyes. “I just wish once you boys had rushed things a little. If you’d taken Mrs. Ajoukian in on suspicion she’d be alive now.”
“Alive for what?”
“Oh, time to think anyhow. To repent, perhaps. I don’t think she would have gotten the gas chamber. She was a gorgeous hunk of gal and her husband was beginning to neglect her. He’d been listening to his old man’s ideas, love ’em and leave ’em.”
“Well, give me the meat of it. What started you after her?”
“I wish I could say it was Mullens’s murder. That should have done it. Mullens had contacted old man Ajoukian, hinting his son was in trouble and had had to hide the car. I don’t know what had happened. Something seemed to make Mullens think of drunk driving. At least, it’s what he mentioned to me.”
“The car has a bent fender,” Pettis put in. “We didn’t have any report from another car, anyone being hit, so my guess is in the excitement she ran it into an embankment.”
Sader nodded. It fitted into the pattern. “Mullens must have thought that the car’s being hidden as it was meant something pretty embarrassing had happened. He glimpsed a woman in a fur coat and slacks, probably from a distance and at night, waited until the coast was clear and got the name and address off the car in the garage, thought it over, finally put the bee on old Ajoukian for a few thousand. Being on the Hill and in the oil game, he’d know the son’s reputation. The old man was too tightfisted to pay off right away, but he was plenty upset. Remember, it was the next day that he tried to kick me off the case. This was before he knew Mullens had been murdered.”
“You said that Mullens’s murder should have sent you after the girl. Why?”
“I knew yesterday that Mullens had been in touch with old Ajoukian. I should have remembered how scared Mullens got when he heard that a woman was missing. Mullens thought it over, began not to like the possibilities. It was only natural that after my visit he’d contact old Ajoukian again. But by then the old man was in a collapse with worry, and Mrs. Ajoukian would naturally take the call. Mullens let something slip, enough to let her see her danger. My guess is, he said to tell old Mr. Ajoukian their deal was off and he was going to the cops. That sump would almost surely have been investigated.”
“She made quick work of him,” Pettis growled. “But since all this didn’t flash through your mastermind, what did make you think of her?”
“Well, finally, it was what Dan said at the hospital.”
Obviously Pettis had heard of it long before Sader had. He’d picked those few words thoroughly apart. “Something about a week. And ankles, of all damn items.”
“No, you’ve got to put the two together. Weak ankles. Mrs. Ajoukian suffered from them, she was always turning her ankles on something. I noticed it, the few times we were together. Dan would have. He must have been staring at her legs right along.”
“So?” Pettis went to the sink, discarded the cigar there. “So what?”
“The vine.” Sader rubbed the muscles at the back of his neck, under his collar. They were tight as wire. “The torn vine, beside the office door. Someone fell into it about the time Mullen was murdered. Maybe a witness. Maybe someone peeping in at the door, as you thought.”
Pettis grinned briefly. Perhaps he was remembering his trick on Tina Griffin at the office.
“Or again,” Sader went on, “maybe the murderer fell there. I kept thinking of someone fat and awkward like Charlie Ott. But then I remembered that when you and Dan and I were having the late interview in the office, Dan sat facing the door, the dark. Someone was out there. I heard a footstep and was surprised that no one entered. My guess is it was Mrs. Ajoukian, just checking up generally, listening to what she could hear. Dan smiled at one point as if recognizing someone. He must have caught a glimpse of her, perhaps of that pale hair that always caught the light. But a minute later he looked grim. My guess—he saw the edge of the fallen vine. It occurred to him in that instant that Mrs. Ajoukian was the logical one to have stumbled there, turning an ankle in her hurry to get away from the man she had just murdered.”
Pettis swore. “Oh, such rot! It doesn’t mean a damned thing! Nobody ever got convicted on such flimsy stuff!”
“You’re so right. That’s why Dan kept his mouth shut to you about it. Probably he didn’t even mention it to Mrs. Ajoukian when she answered his call to come to the office. Remember the papers he had spread out, my notes about the interview with the Ajoukians? He was running a bluff, pretending to have found something in my report which had developed a lead to her.”
Pettis’s eyes had grown speculative, thoughtful. “Yes, it could be.”
“It’s the only explanation that fits. The papers were there for some reason, though we could never figure why. They were a fake, a trap. She must have arrived full of confidence that she could argue Dan out of his silly obsession. In case she couldn’t she had Mr. Ajoukian’s gun along.”
“She knew knew how to use it.”
“Plenty of practice by then. I still can’t figure how he’s alive, even going to live. I guess the first part of the interview between them wasn’t too unpleasant. Dan was thoroughly smitten with her and she’d have had to be blind not to notice. She probably tri
ed her wiles on him. He got mad though. Dan’s nerves were popping these last few days. While she was there he went all the way with the bluff, calling me to rave about what fools she’d made of us. Mostly he must have been mad because a beautiful gal had made such a sucker out of him.”
“Oh, hell, women are doing it all the time,” Pettis growled.
Dan opened his eyes and said huskily, “Hi there, Papa. I thought you were in Las Vegas.”
“It was just a rumor. Where’d you hear it?”
“I can’t imagine,” Dan whispered. “Someone must have told me in my sleep. How’s Mrs. Ajoukian?”
“She’s all right.”
“Don’t let them hurt her, Papa.”
“Do you want her to have years and years in prison?”
Dan began to act agitated. The nurse came forward, frowning. Sader said, “All right, all right. I won’t rile him.”
She went back to her chair by the window.
Dan began to breathe evenly again. “I guess you and the Wanderley babe are hitting it off, huh?”
“Oh, sure. I’m adopting her next week. She’s an orphan now, needs a father.”
Dan’s breathy whisper protested, “Don’t try to fool me. Lots of old boys marrying babes lately.”
“Those particular old boys had a few items like money and reputation lying around.”
Belligerently Dan tried to sit up. The nurse came tearing over with fire in her eye. Dan went on yelling while she tried to press his shoulders back to the pillow.
At the door, Sader thought, he’s going to be all right. Then he left. Going down in the hospital elevator, Sader felt worry slip from him. The suddenly relaxed feeling made him almost dizzy. He rubbed the close-cropped hair, grinning at the elevator girl, then threw back his head and walked out of the hospital entry in a glow of warmth. This was something to celebrate!
Sleep with Strangers Page 19
