“Perhaps someone telephoned you?”
“No one did, for the same reason.”
“I see.”
There was a long, awkward pause while he stared at his shoes, then he suddenly looked up. Meeting his eyes was like having a blow-lamp across my face.
“Well, thank you, signor,” he said, and got to his feet. “This is a complicated business. It is only by making inquiries and asking questions that we shall eventually arrive at the truth. I am sorry if I have taken up too much of your rime.”
“That’s okay,” I said, aware that my hands were clammy and my mouth was dry.
“If there is anything that I think you can help me with, I’ll be in touch with you again.” He moved to the door. Then he paused to look at me. “Is there anything you would wish to add? Anything that may have slipped your mind that might help me?”
“My mind’s not all that slippery.”
He stared at me.
“I don’t think you should treat this matter flippantly, signor. It is, after all, a murder investigation. Perhaps you will think about it. Some idea may occur to you.”
“Sure. If it does, I’ll call you.”
“I’d be glad if you would.”
He nodded and, opening the door, he went into the hall. I was feeling so shaken I didn’t trust myself to escort him to the front door. He found his own way out. When I heard the front door shut behind him, I stubbed out my cigarette and, getting to my feet, I walked over to the window.
I watched the traffic swirling around the Forum. There were a few dark clouds creeping up behind the stark outline of the Colosseum: a sure sign that it was going to be a wet night I saw Carlotti get into the police car and drive away.
I remained motionless, my mind crawling with alarm. I might have known Carlotti wouldn’t have missed the significance of the missing films. This was something I couldn’t keep from
Chalmers.
I had a sudden feeling of urgency. I had to find this mysterious X before Carlotti found me. I didn’t underrate him. Already he was getting too close to me for comfort.
The telephone snapped me out of my mood. I picked up the receiver. It was Gina.
“You said you would call me yesterday,” she said. “I’ve been waiting. What is happening, Ed?”
I did some quick thinking. I couldn’t confide my troubles to her now Carlotti had told me this was a murder case. She might get hooked in as an accessory if she knew I was Douglas Sherrard.
“I’m right up to my ears at me moment,” I said. “I’m on my way out. Give me a couple of days, and you’ll hear from me.”
“But, Ed… what was it you were going to tell me? Can’t we meet to-night?”
“I’m sorry, Gina, but not to-night. I can’t stop now. I’ll call you in a couple of days. So long for now,” and I hung up.
I waited a moment, then put a call through to New York. The operator said there was a twohour delay.
There was nothing for me to do but to sit down and mull over the information I had got from Matthews and to consider the threat that was beginning to develop from Carlotti. After a while I got tired of frightening myself and turned on the radio. Maria Meneghini Callas was giving a recital of Puccini’s songs. Her dark, exciting voice carried me out of my troubles for the next hour. She was in the middle of Sola perdma, Abbandonata, and making my hair stand on end, when the telephone bell rang and I had to cut her short.
Chalmers came on the line after only a two-minute delay. “What have you got?”
Even at that distance I could hear the iron in his voice.
“I’ve just had Carlotti here,” I said. “He’s now decided it looks like murder, and he’ll tell the coroner so.”
There was a pause, then Chalmers said, “How did he got on to it.”
I told him about the camera and the missing films. I told him how I had taken the camera, had found the scrap of film in it and how the camera had been stolen before I could hand it back to the police.
The news seemed to stun him, for he was hesitant when he began to talk again.
“What are you going to do, Dawson?”
“I’m trying to get a list of Helen’s men friends,” I said, and told him I had got an inquiry agency on the job. “Carlotti’s working on the same angle. He seems to think your daughter had a number of men friends.”
“If he tries to stir up a scandal about the girl, I’ll break him!” Chalmers snarled. “Keep in touch with me. I want to know what you’re doing… understand?”
I said I understood.
“And talk to this coroner fella. He promised me he’d fix this pregnancy business. I don’t want that to come out. Get tough with him, Dawson. Throw a scare into him!”
“If this turns out to be a murder case, Mr. Chalmers,” I said, “there’s nothing we can do about the verdict.”
“Don’t tell me what we can’t do!” he bawled. “Talk to this punk. Call me back to-morrow at this time.”
I said I would, and hung up.
I put a call through to coroner Maletti. When he came on the line I told him I had been talking to Chalmers, who was anxious to be assured that the arrangements he had made would stand. Maletti was full of oil and soft soap. Unless further evidence came to light, he said, il Signor Chalmers need not disturb himself about the verdict.
“You’ll be the one who’s disturbed if the verdict’s the wrong one,” I said, and slammed down the receiver.
By now it was dark and rain showed on the windows.
It was time, I decided as I went into my bedroom to get my raincoat, to pay a visit to the villa Palestra.
III
I left my car in the parking lot at the Stadium and walked up viale Paolo Veronese until I came to double wrought-iroN gates, set in an eight-foot high stone wall that surrounded the acre or so of garden in which the villa Palestra stood.
By now it was raining hard, and the long street was deserted. I pushed open one of the gates, moved into a dark driveway, screened by cypress trees and flowering shrubs.
Moving silently, I walked up the drive, hunching my shoulders against the rain. Fifty yards of driveway brought me to a bend, and around the bend I caught sight of the villa, a small, twostorey affair with a Florentine overhanging roof, white stucca walls and big windows.
There was a light on in one of the tower rooms, but the rest of the villa was in darkness.
The neatly kept lawns that surrounded the villa offered no cover. I moved around its edge, keeping close to the shrubs until I was facing the window of the lighted room. The curtains hadn’t been drawn, and I could look into the room, which was only about thirty yards from where I stood.
The furnishing was modern: the room was large. I could see a girl standing by a table, occupied in looking through a black evening bag.
I assumed she was Myra Seta and looked closely at her. She was quite something to see. Around twenty-five or six, tallish with chestnut-coloured hair that reached to her shoulders, she was in a white evening dress that fitted her like a second skin, and then flared out just below her hips into a waterfall of tulle and glittering sequins.
After she had rearranged her bag, she picked up a mink stole and slung it carelessly over her shoulders. Then, pausing to light a cigarette, she crossed the room, flicked off the lights and left me looking, at an expanse of black glass that reflected the swiftly moving rainclouds and pointed cypress trees.
I waited.
After a minute or so, I saw the front door open and she came out, sheltering under a large umbrella.
She ran down the path to the garage. A light sprang up at she pushed open the double doors. I could see a white and bottle-green Cadillac in the garage, about the size of a trolley car. She got into the car, leaving the umbrella against the wall. I heard the engine start up, and she drove out, passing within tea yards of where I was crouching. The headlights of the car made a white glare of rain, grass and shrubs.
I remained where I was, listening. I heard the car st
op at the end of the drive, there was a long pause while she opened the gates, then the sound of the car door slamming, and the sound of the engine accelerating told me she had gone.
I remained where I was, looking towards the dark villa. I stayed motionless for several minutes. No light showed. I decided it was safe to explore. Turning up my collar against the rain, I walked around the villa. There were no lights to be seen in any of the rooms. I found a window unlatched on the ground floor. I eased it open, took out the flashlight I had brought with me and inspected a small, luxury kitchen beyond. I slid over the double sink and dropped noiselessly on to the riled floor. Closing the window, I made my way silently out of the kitchen, along a passage and into the hall.
A curved stairway on my left led to the upper rooms. I went up the stairs to a landing and inspected the four doors that faced me.
Turning the handle of the door that lay to the far right, I pushed the door open and looked in. This was obviously Myra’s room. There was a divan bed with a blood-red cover. The walls were of quilted grey satin. The furniture was silver. The carpet blood red. It was quite a room.
I nosed around without finding anything to interest me. There was a jewel box on the dressing-table. The contents would have made the most hardened burglar’s mouth water, but it left me cold. But it did tell me that she had plenty of money to burn or else she had a host of besotted admirers who were showering these baubles on her.
It wasn’t until I reached the last room, which appeared to be a spare bedroom, that I found what I had vaguely wondered I might find.
Against the wall were two suitcases. One of them lay on its side, open. In it were three of my best suits, three bottles of my favourite brand of whisky and my silver cigarette box. For a long moment I stood staring down at the suitcase, the beam of my flashlight unsteady. Then I knelt down and opened the second case. That too was full of the things that had been stolen from my apartment: everything was there except Helen’s camera.
Before I had time to consider the significance of this discovery, I heard a sound downstairs that made me practically jump out of my skin.
It was the kind of sound a hunter in the wilds of an African jungle who has been stalking some comparatively harmless animal hears that warns him a rogue elephant has arrived on the
scene.
The disturbance in this still, dark villa was of the violence of an earthquake.
There was a crash: someone had unlocked the front door and flung it open so that the door smashed against the wall.
Then a man’s voice bawled, “MYRA!”
When I was a kid, and back home, I had once been taken to a hog-calling contest. I had been tremendously impressed by the colossal volume of sound that had come from the leathery lungs of the hog callers. This sound that came up the stairs and reverberated around the dark, still room was as violent. It froze me, making the hairs on the nape of my neck stand up and making my heart skip a beat.
There was another crash that shook the house as the man below slammed the front door shut. Then the horrible, undisciplined voice yelled again: “MYRA!”
I recognized that voice. I had heard it on the telephone. Carlo had arrived!
Moving silently, I slid out of the bedroom. The lights were on in the hall. I went to the banister head and cautiously looked over. I couldn’t see anyone, but there were lights now on in the lounge.
Then the raucous voice began to sing.
It was the voice of a hooligan: a tuneless, obscenely loud, ruthlessly vulgar sound. You couldn’t call it a song: it was something out of the jungle: a sound that made me sweat.
I waited there because there was no way out of this villa except by way of the downstairs exits. So long as Carlo was there, I wasn’t taking any chances of showing myself.
I remained in the shadows, a foot away from the banisters where I couldn’t be seen. It was as well, for I suddenly saw the figure of a man standing in the lighted doorway of the lounge.
I edged back into the deeper shadows. It was the same broad-shouldered figure I had seen creeping around in the villa at Sorrento. I was sure of it.
There was a long, nerve-racking pause while Carlo remained motionless, his head cocked on one side as if he were listening.
I held my breath, my heart slamming against my ribs and I waited.
He moved slowly into the middle of the hall. Then he stopped, his hands on his hips, his long legs apart, facing the stairs.
The light from the overhead lamp fell fully on him. He was as Frenzi had described him: a bull-necked, blunt-featured, handsome animal He was wearing a black turtle neck sweater, black trousers, the ends of which were tucked into a pair of highly polished Mexican boots. He had a small gold ring in the lobe of his right ear, and he looked as big and as strong as a fighting bull.
For a long moment he stared up at the exact spot where I was standing. I was sure he couldn’t see me. I didn’t dare move in case the movement drew his attention to me.
Then suddenly he bawled, “Come on down or I’ll come up and fetch yah down!”
PART NINE
I
I came down.
There was nothing else I could do. There was no room up on the landing if it came to a fight and, besides, the only way out of the villa was down the stairs and out through the front door or one of the ground-floor windows.
I came down slowly.
I’m not exactly a pigmy, but I didn’t kid myself that I had much chance against this bull of a man. By the way he had moved from the lounge to the centre of the hall I knew he could be as fast as a streak of lightning once he got going.
When I reached half-way down the stairs I came into the full glare of the hall light, and I stopped so he could take a look at me.
He grinned, showing big, white even teeth.
“Hello, Mac,” he said. “Don’t think this is a surprise. I was right behind you all the way from your joint to this. Come on down. I’ve been waiting to have a talk with you.”
He took four paces back so he wouldn’t be too close to me when I reached the hall. I came down. If he went for me, I’d try to handle him, but I wasn’t starting anything — anyway, not just yet.
“Go in there and sit down,” he went on, jerking his thumb towards the lounge.
I went in there, chose a comfortable chair that faced the door and sat down. By now I had control of my nerves. I wondered what he was going to do. I doubted if he would call the police. I had only to show them my things upstairs for him to be in a worse jam than I.
He followed me into the lounge and sat on the arm of a big leather chair, facing me. He was still grinning. The zigzag scar on his face looked sharply white against the deep tan of his skin.
“Find your stuff up there?” he asked, taking out a pack of American cigarettes. He flicked one out, pasted it on his duck lower lip and set fire to it with a match he scratched alight with the thumb-nail. He looked like a shot from a Hollywood gangster movie when he did that.
“I found it,” I said. “What have you done with the camera?”
He blew smoke towards me.
“I’ll do the talking, Mac,” he said. “You listen and answer. How did you get on to this place?”
“A girl wrote the telephone number on her wall. It wasn’t difficult to get the address,” I said.
“Helen?”
“That’s right.”
He pulled a face.
“The dumb cluck.” He leaned forward. “What did the copper want with you this afternoon?”
I suddenly wasn’t scared of him any more. I told myself the hell with him. I wasn’t going to sit there and answer his questions.
“Why don’t you ask him?” I said.
“I’m asking you.” His smile went away. There was a sudden vicious look in his eyes. “Let’s get this straight. You don’t want me to get tough with you, do you?” He laid his hands on his knees so I could see them and slowly closed them into fists. They were sharp-knuckled, big fists that looked as if they
had been carved out of a hunk of mahogany. “I’ll tell you something: I like to hit a guy. When I hit him, he stays hit. Right now I want to talk to you, so don’t make me hit you. What did the copper say?”
I braced myself.
“Go ahead and ask him.”
I was half-way out of the chair by the time he reached me. I had been a mug to have sat in such a low chair. If I had sat on the arm as he had done I would have been more ready for his rush. He came across the space between us so fast I hadn’t a chance. He threw a left-hand towards my stomach that I managed to knock aside, but he was only making an opening for his right. I didn’t see it coming. I had a brief glimpse of his brown, snarling face and his gleaming teeth when something that felt like a club hammer slammed against the side of my jaw. The room exploded into a blinding flash of white light. I was only vaguely aware that I was falling, then black oblivion wiped out everything.
I came to the surface in about five or six minutes. I found myself spread out in the lounging chair with a sore jaw and a bead that pulsated like the breathing bag of a dentin’s gas equipment.
Carlo was sitting close to me. He kept slamming his balled-up fist into the palm of his hand as if he were itching to hang another bone crusher on my jaw.
I struggled into an upright position and looked at him, trying to get him into focus. That punch had taken a lot of steam out of me.
“Okay, Mac, don’t say I didn’t warn you. Now, let’s start again. The next time I hit you, I’ll bust your jaw. What did the copper want?”
I tested my teeth with the tip of my tongue. None of them seemed loose. I felt cold, and there was a rage growing in me that made me want to get to close quarters with this thug and maim him. But I wasn’t all that crazy in the head. Maybe I am big and fairly tough, but I know when I am out of my class. I wouldn’t mix things with Rocky Marciano: net because I’d be scared to, but because I know I wouldn’t stand a chance. I knew if it came to a fight, this bull of a man was too strong and much, much too fast for me.
You Find Him, I'll Fix Him Page 14
