Scattershot

TEN

There was one of those sudden electric silences. Both Craig and Lauren Speers were near enough to hear what I’d said; he stiffened and gaped at me, and she came up out of her chair on the porch. Craig’s face tried to arrange itself into an expression of innocent disbelief, but he was not much of an actor; if this had been a Hollywood screen test, he would have flunked it hands down.

He said, “What the hell kind of crazy accusation is that?” Which was better-more conviction- but in my ears it still sounded false.

His guilt was not so obvious to Orloff or any of the others. They kept looking from Craig to me as if trying to decide whom to believe. But I was on pretty firm ground; I would not have accused Craig publicly unless I thought so. The fear I’d felt earlier was gone. The Hornback murder still had me wrapped up in the middle, but this one, at least, was going to be resolved in a hurry.

The security guy said, “How could Joe be guilty? The balcony door and each of the windows are locked from the inside; you said so yourself. You also said there was no one else in the cottage except Ms. Speers and the dead woman when you broke in.”

“That’s right,” I said. “But Craig wasn’t in the cottage when he shot Bernice Dolan. And everything wasn’t locked up tight, either.”

Craig said, “Don’t listen to him, he doesn’t know what he’s talking about-”

“The living room smells of gin,” I said to the security guy. “You must have noticed that when you were in there, ft smelled just the same when I first went in. But if you fire a handgun in a closed room, you get the smell of cordite. No cordite odor means the gun was fired outside the room.”

“That’s true enough,” Orloff said. “Go on.”

“I’d been here less than ten minutes when Craig showed up. He claimed he’d come to keep a tennis date with Ms. Speers. But the parking lot attendant told me earlier that she drinks her lunch every day and then comes here to sleep it off until Happy Hour at four o’clock. People on that kind of heavy-drinking schedule don’t make dates to go play tennis at three.”

That also made sense to Orloff and the others; a couple of them cast sidelong glances at Craig.

“He said something else, too-much more damning. When I asked him if he knew the dead woman, he identified her as Bernice Dolan. Then he said, ‘Did Ms. Speers do that to her? Shoot her like that?’ But I didn’t say anything about hearing a gunshot until later, — and the way the body is crumpled on the rug, with one arm flung over the chest, all you can see is blood, not the type of wound. So how did he know she was shot? She could just as easily have been stabbed to death.”

There was not much bravado left in Craig; you could almost see him wilting, like an uprooted weed drying in the sun. “I assumed she was shot,” he said weakly. “I just… assumed it.”

Lauren Speers had come down off the porch and was staring at him. “Why?” she said. “For God’s sake, why?”

He shook his head at her. But I said. “For the money, that’s why. A hundred thousand dollars in extortion payoffs, at least some of which figures to be in his own cottage right now.”

That pushed Craig to the breaking point. He backpedaled a couple of steps and might have kept right on backing if one of the patrolmen hadn’t grabbed his arm.

Lauren Speers said, “I don’t understand. What extortion?”

“From those three men I asked you about a few minutes ago-Huddleston, Boyer, and Rykman. They figure prominently in the book you’re writing, don’t they? Large sections of it are devoted to them, sections that contain material either scandalous or criminal?”

“How do you know about that?”

“Craig told me; he was trying to make it seem like you had a motive for killing Bernice. And you told me when you said those three men were bastards and one of them was an out-and-out thief. This little piece of paper took care of the rest.”

I fished it out of my coat pocket again as I spoke, handed it to Orloff. He looked at it and then said, “What do all these numbers mean?”

“The first series after each name are page numbers-pages in the book manuscript, pages on which the most damaging material about that person appears. The numbers after the dash are the amounts extorted from each man.”

“Where did you get this?”

“It was on the floor between the couch and the coffee table. Right near where Ms. Speer’s bag was. I think that’s where it came from-out of the handbag.”

She said, “How could it have been in my bag?”

“Bernice put it there. While she was out impersonating you this afternoon.”

Now everybody looked bewildered. Except Craig, of course; he only looked trapped and sick, much sicker than Lauren Speers had earlier.

“Impersonating me?” she said.

“That’s right. Wearing a red wig and your white coat, and carrying your bag. You didn’t go anywhere after lunch except back here to bed; it was Bernice who took your Porsche and left Xanadu. And it was Bernice who passed me in the cart, Bernice I saw enter the cottage a couple of minutes before she was shot.”

The security guy asked. “How can you be sure about that?”

“Because Bernice was left-handed.”

“I don’t see-”

“Ms. Speers is right-handed,” I said. “I could tell that a while ago when she started to pour from a decanter into a glass-decanter in her right hand, glass in her left. But the woman who got out of the cart carried the straw bag in her right hand, and when she got to the cottage door she used her left hand to take out the key and to open the door.”

Lauren Speers looked at the lock of her red hair, as if to make sure it was real. “Why would Bernice impersonate me?”

“She and Craig were in on the extortion scheme together, and it was part of the plan. They must have worked it something like this. As your secretary she had access to your book manuscript, your personal stationery, your signature, and no doubt your file of incriminating letters and documents. She also had access to your personal belongings and your car keys, particularly from one to four in the afternoons while you were sleeping. And she’d have known from your records how to contact Huddleston and the other two.

“So she and Craig wrote letters to each of them, on your stationery over your forged signature, demanding large sums of money to delete the material about them from your book and to return whatever documents concerned them; they prob ably also enclosed photocopies of the manuscript pages and the documents as proof. The idea was to keep themselves completely in the clear if the whole thing backfired. You’d get the blame in that case, not them.

“To maintain the illusion, Bernice had to pretend to be you when she collected the payoffs. I don’t know what sort of arrangements she and Craig made, but they wouldn’t have allowed any of the three men to deliver the money personally. An intermediary, maybe, someone who didn’t know you. Or maybe a prearranged drop site. In any event, Bernice always dressed as you at collection time.”

Orloff asked, “Why do you think Craig killed her?”

“The old double cross,” I said. “They’d collected all the extortion money; that’s evident from the way each of the three names is crossed out on that paper. Today was the last pickup, and I think they had it worked out that she would resign from Speer’s employ and Craig would resign from Xanadu and they’d go off somewhere together. Her closet is all cleaned out, and her bags are packed.”

“But Craig had other ideas?”

I nodded. “He knew when she was due back here, and he was waiting for her-outside on the rear balcony. When she let herself in he knocked on the window and gestured for her to open the two halves. After she did that he must have said something like, ‘Quick, lock the front door, take off the coat, and give me the wig and the money.’ She’d have thought there was some reason for the urgency, and she trusted him; so she did what he asked. And when she pulled the money out of the handbag she also pulled out the slip of paper. In her haste it fell to the floor, unnoticed.

“As soon as Craig had the wig and the money he took out the Beretta, which he’d swiped from Speer’s nightstand, and shot Bernice. And then threw the gun inside and pulled the halves of the window closed.”

“And locked them somehow from the outside,” the security guy said, “in the minute or two before you broke in? How could he do that?”

“It wasn’t all that difficult, considering the catch on those window halves is a bar type that flips over into a bracket. The gimmick he used was a thin but stiff strip of film. He lost it afterward without realizing it; you’ll find it still caught on a splinter on the balcony railing.

“The way he did it was to insert the filmstrip between the two halves and flip the catch over until it rested on the strip’s edge. Then he pulled the halves all the way closed, using his thumb and forefinger on the inner frames of each, and with his other hand he eased the strip downward until the catch dropped into the bracket. And then he withdrew the strip from the crack. With a little practice you could do the whole thing in thirty seconds.

“So far he had himself a perfect crime. He’d only have had to return to his cottage, get rid of the wig, stash the money, pick himself up a witness or two, and come back here and ‘find’ Speers locked up with the body. Under the circumstances he’d arranged, she would be the only one who could have committed the murder.

“What screwed him up was me showing up when I did. He heard me pounding on the door as he was working his trick with the filmstrip; he had just enough time to slip away into the woods before I broke in. But who was I? What had I seen and heard? The only way he could find out was to come back as soon as he’d dumped the wig and money. The fact that he showed up again in less than ten minutes means he didn’t dump them far away; they won’t be hard to find. There might even be a fingerprint on that filmstrip to nail your case down tight-”

Lauren Speers moved. Before anybody could stop her she charged over to where Craig was and slugged him in the face. Not a slap-a roundhouse shot with her closed fist. He staggered but didn’t go down. She went after him, using some of the words she had used on me earlier, and hit him again and tried to kick him here and there. It took Orloff, the security guy, and one of the patrolmen to pull her off.

It was another couple of hours before they let me leave Xanadu. During that time Orloff and his men found all the extortion money-$100,000 in cash-hidden in one of Craig’s bureau drawers; they also found the red wig in the garbage can behind his cottage. That was enough, along with my testimony, for them to place him under arrest on suspicion of homicide. From the looks of him, they’d have a full confession an hour after he was booked.

Just before I left I served Lauren Speers with the papers Brister had given me. She took them all right; she said it was the least she could do after I had practically saved her life. She also took one of my business cards and promised she would send me a check “as an appreciation,” but I doubted that she would. She was a lady too lost in alcohol and bitter memories, too involved in a quest for notoriety and revenge, to remember that sort of promise-running fast and going nowhere, as the comedian Fred Allen had once said, on a treadmill to oblivion.

I was too tired to want to drive all the way back to San Francisco, so I went up the coast as far as Big Sur and took a motel room for the night. I also bought myself a decent dinner in a place that overlooked the sea. Adam Brister would foot the bill for both as expense account items; I figured, after what had happened at Xanadu, that I was entitled.

Alone in my room, I tried to read one of the pulp magazines I keep in an overnight case with some toilet articles and a change of underwear, for motel stops such as this one. But I couldn’t concentrate. I kept thinking about Bernice Dolan lying there dead and bloody on the cottage floor, and about what her neighbor in the Cow Hollow apartment building had told me of Bernice’s passion for men and money. It was that passion, as much as Joe Craig, that had killed her. She had picked the wrong way to make herself rich, and the wrong man to share the wealth with. And the price she’d paid was as dear as they come.

I thought about Lauren Speers, too, and about Xanadu-the real one down the coast and the mythical one in the poem by Coleridge. “In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure-dome decree.” Places of idyllic beauty, in both cases. The stuff of dreams.

But they were not the same. The dreams in the one I had just visited were of tinsel and plastic and pastel colors; of beauty measured by wealth, happiness by material possessions. Some people could find fulfillment with those dreams and in that place. Others, like Lauren Speers and Bernice Dolan, were not so fortunate.

For them, the pleasure domes of Xanadu were the stuff of nightmares.