Annie stared at the bleached-blond head pressed so tightly against his chest and tried to understand. But Annie was free and independent and treated with respect. She lived in such a sane and well-ordered world that being beaten by a man was incomprehensible.
“Why didn’t you go to the police?” she asked. For God’s sake, Billy was a policeman. Hadn’t they even talked about it?
Mavis half turned in Billy’s arms. Tear-smeared eye shadow streaked her face. “Henry would kill me,” she said jerkily. “Then what would happen to Kevin? I can’t tell anybody! I got to get away. That’s what I got to do. I got to get so far away, he’ll never find us. That’s what I should have done that night, but it was so cold and Kevin was hurt.” She struggled in Billy’s embrace. “I got to get away.”
“Honey, honey, honey,” Billy crooned, holding her gently and trying to break into that circle of fear. “I won’t let him get you. I swear to God, honey, I won’t let him get you.” He looked over her head at Annie and nodded meaningfully at the door.
Annie hesitated, then rose and crossed the barren room. She opened the door and stepped out into the late afternoon sunshine.
Fragrance from an overgrown honeysuckle wafted on the breeze. The marsh stretched in glassy peace, gleaming a cheerful yellow from the wind-and tide-blown tussocks of cordgrass seeds. It was a lovely fall afternoon in the salt marsh, marred only by human misery.
Max built a steeple with his fingers. “On the face of it,” he said judiciously, “I don’t think there’s anything to worry about.” He managed a tight smile. He didn’t really like his visitor, there was no getting around it. It wasn’t that he was jealous, of course. But Alan Nichols was just a little too good-looking and a little too ready with his hands around somebody else’s wife.
“So you think I can relax, huh?” Alan leaned back with a sigh of relief. “Well, to tell you the truth, I thought maybe Ruth was making too much of it. I mean, what the hell. So her mother hasn’t called her yet! I guess Ruth has a goody-two-shoes picture of Betsy. And you know Betsy. She’s probably having a grand old time out there.” The lewd intent in Alan’s good-old-boy tone was unmistakable.
That surprised Max. Not because he would have expected better of Alan Nichols. He’d expect damn little from Alan Nichols. But because it didn’t fit Max’s mental image of Betsy Raines. Of course, he and Annie didn’t know Betsy well. However, the owner-manager of the Piping Plover Gallery was very active in the Broward’s Rock Merchants Association, and they’d visited with her at several meetings and seasonal parties. In her mid-forties, Betsy was a successful businesswoman. She had a good figure, a nice manner, and remarkably pretty red hair. There was nothing about her to suggest a woman on the prowl. Max raised a quizzical eyebrow.
Alan flushed and tugged at his ear. “Hell, I don’t mean to talk out of school. But I think Betsy likes to kick up her heels on business trips. You know, she’s still a good-looking woman, and a widow. I mean, what the hell, Jack? I mean, she wouldn’t be above picking up some guy in a bar. Maybe she’s shacked up somewhere for a day or two and just forgot to call Ruth.” Alan shrugged. “Hell, I don’t know.”
His tone implied he knew damn well, but was too much of a gentleman to say so.
Alan Nichols. Gentleman. His herringbone sports coat had a nifty red line in it which was picked up by the red silk tie knotted perfectly at the neck of an impeccable button-down, pinpoint Oxford cloth blue shirt. The effect was finished off with grey worsted slacks, sleek black tassel loafers, and a heavy silver ID bracelet. Probably stood in front of a three-way mirror and admired his ass after he dressed. Max was not impressed. What Annie saw in the curly-headed pretty boy was beyond his understanding.
Alan was beaming at Max now, in a perfectly good humor. “I’m damn glad I came over to talk to you. You’ve made me feel a lot better about it. It’s silly to push the panic button just cause somebody missed a call. But I couldn’t get through to the police here. That Cameron guy. And Ruth was so upset, I figured I better do something.”
Max decided to overlook the unspoken implication that something—i.e., Max—was better than nothing. Perversely, he decided not to offer further reassurances. He glanced down at his legal pad. According to Alan, his boss, Betsy Raines, took a Delta flight out of Savannah on Wednesday morning en route to San Francisco on a buying trip for the gallery. “Did you see Betsy Wednesday morning?”
“Nope. She had an early flight, so I wished her a good trip when we closed up Tuesday.”
“So far as you know, she made the flight?”
“Oh, sure.” Alan looked surprised. “I mean, she must have. Otherwise, she’d have called or come back to the island.”
Max wrote on his yellow pad. “Where’s she staying in San Francisco?”
Alan frowned. “Oh, hell. I just looked at the copy of her itinerary. I’ll have to check it at the shop and call you back. Some big-deal hotel in Frisco.”
Although he wasn’t a northern Californian, Max’s hackles rose at the “Frisco.” Laurel would stress that ignorance can’t be helped and should never be condemned. Bully for Laurel.
“Okay,” he said crisply. “You don’t remember which hotel, but you can call me back on that. Let’s see, she was going to stay five days. That means she should return Monday. Right?”
Alan slapped his knee in relief. “Sure. She’ll be back tomorrow. Hell, I’m sorry I even came over here and bothered you.” He started to rise.
He didn’t sound especially sorry. Max gave him a short stare. Alan would always have the right words, but he came across like a used-car salesman touting a Jaguar with a Chevrolet engine. However, he had been alarmed enough about his employer to come to Confidential Commissions. Max could almost hear Annie saying, “You didn’t check up on it? But Max, I really like Betsy.” He waved Alan back to his seat.
“I didn’t mean to imply we shouldn’t do a little checking. It should be easy to locate her. For one thing, who was she going to meet? We can call some of her expected contacts and trace her movements.”
“There I can’t help you,” Alan said regretfully. “I mean, it could have been anybody. An art dealer. A collector. All I know is, she took a bundle of cash with her and intended to come back with a Picasso. That’s all she told me.”
“Cash?”
Alan lounged in his chair. “Oh, that’s no big deal in the art business. A lot of people want cash on the barrel head—and no close questions asked about where a painting came from. You’d be surprised how many collectors’ll take a painting without provenance. Naw, that’s no big deal.”
Max knew contraband art was smuggled across borders every day. It might not be the ordinary course of business, as Alan implied, but there was a lot of cash dealing. In back rooms.
Alan was shaking his head. “Sorry I barged over here. But I didn’t know what the hell to do when Ruth called. You know Ruth?”
Max shook his head.
“She’s visited here a couple of times since I started to work for Betsy,” Alan said. “A real uptight gal. Pretty cute, but no fire. You know the kind, keeps her legs crossed all the time. And my God, what grown woman asks her mother to check in every time she makes a plane trip? That’s pretty neurotic, isn’t it?”
With the frequent near hits enjoyed by Americas airlines, which seemed a good deal more interested in being lean than safe, Max didn’t think Ruth’s anxiety was altogether unreasonable. If Alan didn’t like Ruth, Max decided he did.
“Do you have her phone number?”
“Ruth’s?” Alan looked like a lottery winner. “You mean you’ll call her? Get her off my back? Jesus, that’s swell of you, Max.”
Max managed not to snarl as they said good-bye, although it goddam well did not make his day to bring a joyous smile to Alan’s choirboy features.
He stared sourly at the telephone. But slowly his frown faded. The point was not Alan, but Betsy. Was she okay? Cheered, he rummaged in the bottom drawer for his Savannah directory and calle
d Delta. It took two long waits on hold and three call transfers, but he finally had the information. Mrs. Raines’s ticket had been used both from Savannah to Atlanta and Atlanta to San Francisco.
Immediately after he hung up, the phone rang and Alan was on the line with the hotel (the St. Francis) and Ruth Jenson’s telephone number in Kansas City.
Max ended up on hold with the St. Francis, too, but was finally rung through to Mrs. Raines’s room. He drew happy faces on his legal pad and wondered just how he should approach Betsy Raines when she answered. With a good-natured “Hey, we’ve got the distress flags out for you back here on the island”? He winced. Even to his uncritical ear that sounded asinine. How about, “Sorry to bother you, Betsy, but Ruth’s been worried about you.” Of course, he’d gloss over any possible reason for Betsy to have missed calling her daughter, such as a liaison forged in the hotel bar. He had a sudden clear memory of a Christmas party and Betsy Raines lifting her glass in a toast and the tree lights reflecting from her silver bracelets and red hair.
The hotel operator broke in. “No answer. Do you wish to leave a message?”
“Yes. Ask Mrs. Raines to call her daughter, please.”
He’d done all he could do for now. His glance dropped to the bottom of the page and the telephone number of Betsy-Raines’s daughter, Ruth. Oh yeah, he’d better call her, tell her that Betsy had safely reached California. Then he would get back to work on the life and times of Jesse Penrick. Maybe he would yank the right string and it would lead directly to Ingrid.
He picked up the phone.
Annie welcomed the thick, heavy afternoon heat. She liked humidity, the sprinkle of sweat beading her face, the moist caress of the air. She passed the closed field kitchen, the odor of vegetable soup overborne by the scent of soap as Red Cross volunteers scoured their pots and pans. She’d missed lunch while talking to Adele Prescott and Mavis. Cabin 7 was next, but she had to have some sustenance and time to sift through what she’d learned. Dust rose in lazy spirals as she marched briskly along the grey dirt road. The sharp fragrance of the pines was as welcome as the shade from their silvery umbrella crowns. As the road curved, she left behind the muted activity of the search headquarters and glimpsed the shiny tin roof of Jerry’s Gas ’N Go, the two old-fashioned gas pumps, and a plate-glass window.
A window that overlooked the road, the road that was the only access by land to Nightingale Courts.
Annie broke into a trot.
A bell jangled as she pushed open the door to the combination country store and gas station. An enormous woman in a pink gingham dress sat on a high stool behind the cash register. She faced the window. The small, wooden-floored store was crammed with well-stocked shelves. Refrigerator cabinets lined one wall.
“Found Ingrid yet?” She had a high, sweet voice.
The clerk, Shirley May Foley, knew all about the murder, the search, and Annie.
But she shook her head regretfully when Annie asked if any cars had passed around midnight.
“Can’t help you there. Sure wish I could, but we close at eleven, and I was in kinda a hurry last night, so I can’t speak to after, say, eleven-twenty My boys, Beau and Bobby Joe, was coming to town to go huntin’ today with their pa. So I hurried home to get started bakin’. I can say we only had one car after ten last night, and it was a reglar. You can’t miss the lights—or the noise, either. That Webb man’s car went by about eleven.”
That confirmed Webb’s story, that he’d driven home from Parotti’s—Annie stiffened, like a dog on point. What was it Webb had said? Jesse had received a phone call and left about the same time. How long would it take for him to get to the Courts from the bar on his bike? Maybe five minutes. That meant Jessed arrived at his cabin around five or so minutes after eleven. Ingrid had called for help at midnight. Fifty-five minutes during which Jesse was murdered, then Ingrid was abducted. Ingrid had to have been removed in either a car or boat. It was unrealistic to think an abductor could carry her for any great distance. There had been so much noise and confusion last night that a resident abroad in a car could have returned unnoticed during the melee. As for a boat, Jesse’s was missing. Annie’s head whirled. The obvious inference, at least to Posey, was that Ingrid had escaped in it. But if the murderer had taken it, with Ingrid as a captor, didn’t that mean the murderer couldn’t be a resident of the Courts? If so, how had he returned? But he could have taken Ingrid in the boat to a hiding place and had either a car or bicycle waiting there. Annie wished she were better at chess or the kinds of thought problems that went: If one boat traverses two miles in three hours and a second boat, etc. She sighed.
Shirley May clucked sympathetically. “Sure sorry I can’t be more help.”
“You’re the only one here at night?” Annie asked.
The big woman nodded cheerfully. “I work from three to eleven. Course, we have a garage boy, changes oil, things like that, but he got off at five.”
“I don’t suppose,” Annie said with little hope, “that you saw anyone walking by around eleven?”
“Why, honey, anybody could slip among those pines, if they had a mind to.”
“How about a boat? Did you hear any boats?”
“Don’t hardly ever hear boats. You got to understand, the back storeroom’s between me and the sound.” Shirley May leaned forward, her triple chin resting on an ample bosom, her china-blue eyes wide. “They got any idea who’s behind all this?”
Annie wasn’t going to dignify Posey’s suspicions by repeating them, and Shirley May would hear all that soon enough. “Not really.”
“Well, I think I know. You just come here and look at this.”
She heaved her bulk off the high stool and presented a battleship-broad back to Annie as she moved heavily down the center aisle toward a door marked EMPLOYEES ONLY.
Annie followed into the storeroom and past cartons and crates to a back door and steps leading down to a patch of concrete.
The clerk pointed a fat finger at a small mess of ashes.
Annie looked at her in bewilderment.
“I think it’s a cult, that’s what I think. Now, nobody has no call to burn nothin’ here. And this mess wasn’t here Saturday night. But it was here this mornin’. I saw it first off, when I drove in. There’s my car.” She pointed just past the ashes to a rusted old Chevy.
Feeling it was expected, Annie crossed the oil-stained concrete and stared down at the remnants of a small blaze. Obviously, someone had set some brown paper afire. There was a curl or two that had survived and a dark stringy ash that might have been twine. She looked past the concrete. A dusty path led to a rickety pier that poked out through the marsh to deeper water.
It seemed to Annie quite an unlikely site for cult activities. “Well,” she gently suggested, “I don’t see why the, uh, cult would gather here—”
“If they didn’t want to fire this whole shoreline, they sure had to!” Shirley May disagreed aggressively. “This here’s the only patch of concrete till you get to town.”
Which was true. If it mattered.
“And everything’s dry as tinder right now, we had so little rain lately. Why, they didn’t have no other place, if they were from around here.”
Enthused, Shirley May found an empty box and upended it over the ash pile. “Maybe this’ll turn out to be real important. Now, you tell the search folks.”
They parted as firm friends, Annie purchasing a king-size (48 oz.) cherry-root-beer ripple delight and a Giant Baby Ruth, a prospective late lunch. As she strolled down the road, she decided a reasonable investigator couldn’t expect to strike the kind of conversational gold that always seemed to befall P.I.’s like Lew Archer and Cheney Hazzard. Rounding the bend, Nightingale Courts came into view. Madeleine Kurtz looked her way and began to wave energetically.
Max scowled and tapped his pen on the legal pad. “No, I didn’t get through to your mother. However, I left a message for her to call you, so I imagine you’ll be hearing from her later today.”
“You’re sure she reached San Francisco?” Ruth Jenson’s question was sharp.
“Yes, no doubt about it. Her plane ticket was used, and she checked into the St. Francis Wednesday morning.”
“I don’t understand it….”
Max could think of no tactful way to inquire whether Ruth’s mother had a penchant for picking up strange men for anonymous retreats. But her daughter would be the last to know, anyway.
“Perhaps she’s gotten involved—uh—with a client. Too busy to phone you. Or maybe she forgot. All of us forget things sometimes.”
“You don’t know my mother very well, do you?” The question wasn’t hostile, nor was the voice. In fact, Max rather liked Ruth Jenson’s voice. It was level, brisk, pleasant. She continued, and there was no hysteria, only a quiet conviction, “Something’s happened to her.”
“Oh, now, Mrs. Jenson, surely that’s leaping to conclusions unwarranted by—”
“No.” The simple negative had the finality of a dirt clod dropped on a coffin. “You see, my dad was killed in a plane crash.” A thin breath. “Ever afterward, Mother and I have always called each other whenever we had to fly. Oh, I know it’s crazy, but we had to know, had to know at once that the flight was safely past. I was out of town Wednesday, but I left on my answering machine. When I got home Thursday, I listened to my messages. Nothing from Mother. I called her house Friday, but there wasn’t any answer. I called the gallery and all Alan knew was that she left town Wednesday.”
“Maybe she thought she’d called,” Max offered. “Or your machine didn’t pick it up. Or she didn’t leave a message for some reason.”
“I appreciate your trying to find her, Mr. Darling.” He was being dismissed. “At least, I now know she reached San Francisco. I’ll call the police there. You see, I know something has happened—Mother is extremely responsible. She never breaks a promise. She wouldn’t make me worry—not if she could call. So, I’m certain she can’t call.” For the first time, he heard the ragged edge of tears.
Honeymoon With Murder Page 9
