Sleuths

A Killing in Xanadu

The name of the place, like that of the principality in Coleridge’s Kublai Khan and of the newspaper tycoon’s estate in Citizen Kane, was Xanadu. “In Xanadu did Kublai Khan a stately pleasure-dome decree...” This one was neither a principality nor an estate, but you could call it a pleasure-dome — or rather, a whole series of pleasure-domes overlooking a rugged portion of California’s Big Sur seacoast, not all that far from the Hearst Castle. Which tied off one of the historical references because William Randolph Hearst was supposedly the model for the tycoon in Orson Welles’ classic film.

What it was, this particular Xanadu, was a resort playground for the wealthy Establishment. Eighteen-hole golf course, tennis and racquetball courts, Olympic-sized swimming pool, sauna and steam rooms, two restaurants, three bars, a disco nightclub, and forty or fifty rustic cottages nestled on craggy terrain among tall redwoods. And the tariff was a mere $1500 per week per person, not including meals, drinks, or gratuities.

Nice play if you can get it.

I couldn’t get it myself, but that was all right; it was not my idea of a vacation wonderland anyway. The reason I went down there on a windy Thursday in August was to pay a call on one of those who could get it — a San Francisco socialite named Lauren Speers. She was worth a few hundred thousand, all inherited money, and numbered politicians, actors, capitalists, and other influential types among her friends; she also had striking red hair and green eyes and was beautiful enough if you liked them forty and dissipated. I know all of that not because she was my client, but because the man who was my client, an attorney named Adam Brister, had told me so and shown me a color photograph. Ms. Speers and I had never laid eyes on each other. Ms. Speers’ money and I had never laid eyes on each other either, nor were we ever likely to.

Brister was no better acquainted with her than I was. He had been retained by one Vernon Inge of Oakland, who owned a car which he claimed La Speers had sideswiped with her Porsche in a hit-and-run accident a couple of weeks ago. The accident had rendered Inge a nasty whiplash that kept him from performing his job as a baker. Or so he and Brister alleged in a damage Suit against Speers.

The lawsuit was where I came in: I went to Xanadu to serve the lady with a court summons.

So much for the glamorous role of the private eye in modern society. No rich client, no smoky-hot liaison with a beautiful woman, no fat fee. Just two hundred bucks plus expenses to track down a woman who moved around more than the governor, hand her some papers, listen to abusive language — they always throw abusive language at you — and then steal away again into the real world.

But first I had to pass out of the real world, through the portals into Xanadu, and I did that at two-fifteen. A short entrance drive wound upward past part of the golf course, then among lush redwoods and giant ferns, and emerged into a parking area shaped like a bowl. Three-quarters of it was reserved for guest parking; the other quarter was taken up with rows of three-wheeled machines that looked like golf carts, with awnings over them done in pastel ice-cream colors. From what I had been able to find out about Xanadu, the carts were used by guests to get from one pleasure-dome to another, along a network of narrow and sometimes steep paths. Exercise was all well and good in its proper place — tennis court, swimming pool, disco — but the rich folk no doubt considered walking uphill a vulgarity.

Beyond where the carts were was a long slope, with a wide path cut into it and a set of stairs alongside that seemed more ornamental than functional. At the top of the slope, partially visible from below, were some of the resort buildings, all painted in pastel colors like the cart awnings. The muted sounds of people at play drifted down on the cool wind from the ocean.

I put my car into a slot marked Visitors Parking. A black guy in a starched white uniform came over to me as I got out. He was about my age, early fifties, with a lot of gray in his hair, and his name was Horace. Or so it said on the pocket of his uniform, in pink script like the sugar-writing on a birthday cake.

He looked at me and I looked at him. I was wearing my best suit, but my best suit was the kind the inhabitants of Xanadu wore to costume parties or gave away to the Salvation Army. But that was okay by Horace. Some people who work at fancy places like this get to be snobs in their own right; not him. His eyes said that I would never make it up that hill over yonder, not for more than a few minutes at a time, but then neither would he and the hell with it.

I let him see that I felt the same way and a faint smile turned one corner of his mouth. “Here on business?” he asked.

“Yes. I’m looking for Lauren Speers.”

“She’s out right now. Took her car a little past one.”

“Do you have any idea when she’ll be back?”

“Depends on how thirsty she gets, I suppose.”

“Pardon?”

“The lady drinks,” Horace said, and shrugged.

“You mean she’d been drinking before she left?”

“Martinis. Starts in at eleven every morning, quits at one, sleeps until four. Then it’s Happy Hour. But not today. Today she decided to go out. If I’d seen her in time I’d have tried to talk her out of driving, but she was in that sports job of hers and gone before I even noticed her.”

“Must be nice to be rich,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said.

“Can you tell me which cottage is hers?”

“Number forty-one. Straight ahead past the swimming pool. Paths are all marked. Miss Dolan’ll likely be there if you want to wait at the cottage.”

“Who’s Miss Dolan?”

“Miss Speers’ secretary — Bernice Dolan. She’s writing a book, you know. Miss Speers, I mean.”

“No, I didn’t know. What kind of book?”

“All about her life. Ought to be pretty spicy.”

“From what I know about her, I guess it will be.”

“But I’ll never read it,” Horace said. “Bible, now, that’s much more interesting. If you know what I mean.”

I said I knew what he meant. And thanked him for his help. I did not offer him any money; if I had he would have been offended. He would take gratuities from the guests because that was part of his job, but it had already been established that he and I were social equals. And that made an exchange of money unseemly.

I climbed the stairs — I wouldn’t have driven one of those cute little carts even if it was allowed, which it wasn’t or Horace would have offered me one — and found my way to the swimming pool. You couldn’t have missed it; it was laid out between the two largest buildings, surrounded by a lot of bright green lawn and flagstone terracing, with a stone-faced outdoor bar at the near end. Twenty or thirty people in various stages of undress occupied the area. A few of them were in the pool, but most were sitting at wrought-iron tables, being served tall drinks by three white-jacketed waiters. None of the waiters, I noticed, was black.

Nobody paid any attention to me as I passed by, except for a hard-looking thirtyish blonde who undressed me with her eyes — women do it too, sometimes — and then put my clothes back on again and threw me out of her mental bedroom. Fiftyish gentlemen with shaggy looks and a beer belly were evidently not her type.

Past the pool area, where the trees began, were a pair of paths marked with redwood-burl signs. The one on the left, according to the sign, would take me to number 41, so I wandered off in that direction. And ten minutes later I was still wandering, uphill now, with 41 still nowhere in sight. I was beginning to realize that the fancy little carts were not such an affectation as I had first taken them to be.

I had passed three cottages so far — or the walks that led to three cottages. The buildings themselves were set back some distance from the main path, half-hidden by trees, and were all lavish chalet types with wide porches and pastel-colored wrought-iron trim. Unlike the stairs from the parking area, the wrought iron was just as functional as it was ornamental: the curved bars and scrollwork served as a kind of burglar proofing over the windows. Xanadu may have been a whimsical pleasure resort, but its rulers nonetheless had their defenses up.

Here in the woods it was much cooler, almost cold, because of the ocean breeze and because the afternoon sunlight penetrated only in dappled patches. I was wishing that I’d worn a coat over my suit when I came around a bend and glimpsed a fourth cottage through the redwoods. Another burl sign stood adjacent to the access path, and I could just make out the numerals 41 emblazoned on it.

I took a few more steps toward the sign. And from behind me, then, I heard a sound like that of a lawnmower magnified: one of the carts approaching. I moved off the path as the sound grew louder. A couple of seconds later the thing came around the curve at my back, going at an erratic clip, and shot past me. Inside was a red-haired woman wearing white. The cart veered over to number 41’s walk, skidded to a stop, and the redhead got out and hurried toward the cottage. The white garment she wore was a thin coat, buttoned up against the wind, and she had a big straw bag in her right hand; the long red hair streamed out behind her like a sheet of flame. The way she’d handled the cart indicated Ms. Lauren Speers was every bit as sloshed as Horace had led me to believe, but she carried herself on her feet pretty well. The serious drinker, male or female, learns how to walk if not drive in a straight line.

I called out to her but she either didn’t hear me or chose to ignore me: she kept on going without breaking stride or glancing in my direction. I ran the rest of the way to the cottage path, turned in along it. She was already on the porch by then, digging in her bag with her free hand; I could see her through a gap in the fronting screen of trees. She found a key and had it in the lock before I could open my mouth to call to her again. In the next second she was inside, with the door shut behind her.

Well, hell, I thought.

I stopped and spent thirty seconds or so catching my breath. Running uphill had never been one of my favorite activities, even when I was in good physical shape. Then I checked the papers Adam Brister had given me to serve. And then I started along the path again.

I was twenty yards from the porch, with most of the cottage visible ahead of me, when the gun went off.

It made a flat cracking sound in the stillness, muffled by the cottage walls but distinct enough to be unmistakable. I pulled up, stiffening, the hair turning bristly on my neck. There was no second shot, not in the three or four seconds I stood motionless and not when I finally went charging ahead onto the porch.

I swatted on the door a couple of times with the edge of my hand. Nothing happened inside. But after a space there was a low cry and a woman’s voice said querulously, “Bernice? Oh my God — Bernice!” I caught hold of the knob, turned it; it was locked. The hell with propriety, I thought, and stepped back a pace and slammed the bottom of my shoe against the latch just below the knob.

Metal screeched and wood splinters flew; the door burst open. And I was in a dark room with redwood walls, a beamed ceiling, a fireplace along one wall, rustic furniture scattered here and there. Off to the left was a dining area and a kitchen; off to the right was a short hallway that would lead to the bedrooms and the bath. There were two women in the room, one of them lying crumpled on a circular hooked rug near the fireplace, the other one standing near the entrance to the hallway. Equidistant between them, on the polished-wood floor at the rug’s perimeter, was a .25 caliber automatic.

The standing woman was Lauren Speers. She had shed the white coat — it was on a long couch with her straw bag — and she was wearing shorts and a halter, both of them white and brief, showing off a good deal of buttery tan skin. She stood without moving, staring down at the woman on the rug, the knuckles of one hand pressing her lips flat against her teeth. Her expression was one of bleary shock, as if she had too much liquor inside her to grasp the full meaning of what had happened here. Or to have registered my violent entrance. Even when I moved deeper into the room, over in front of her, she did not seem to know I was there.

I went for the gun first. You don’t leave a weapon lying around on the floor after somebody has just used it. I picked it up by the tip of the barrel — still warm — and dropped it into my coat pocket. Lauren Speers still didn’t move, still didn’t acknowledge my presence; her eyes were half-rolled up in their sockets. And I realized that she had fainted standing up, that it was only a matter of seconds before her legs gave out and she fell.

Before that could happen I put an arm around her waist and half-carried her to the nearest chair, put her into it. She was out, all right; her head lolled to one side. I could smell the sour odor of gin on her breath. The whole room smelled of gin, in fact, as if somebody had been using the stuff for disinfectant.

The woman on the rug was dead. I knew that even without checking for a pulse; had known it the instant I saw her wide-open eyes and the blood on her blouse beneath one twisted arm. She was in her late thirties, attractive in a regular-featured way, with short brown hair and a thin mouth. Wearing blouse, skirt, open-toed sandals.

Looking at her made my stomach feel queasy, filled me with a sense of revulsion and awe. It was the same reaction I always had to violent death, because it was such ugliness, such a waste. I swallowed against the taste of bile and turned away.

Lauren Speers was still sprawled where I’d put her in the chair, unmoving. I went past her, down the short hall, and looked into the two bedrooms and the bath. All three were empty. And the windows in all three were closed and locked; I could see that at a glance.

I came back out and looked into the kitchen. That was empty too. I started across to a set of sliding glass doors that led onto a rear balcony, but before I got there I noticed something on the floor between the couch and a burl coffee table — a piece of white paper folded lengthwise, lying there tent-fashion. I detoured over and used my handkerchief to pick it up.

It was a sheet of notepaper with six lines of writing in a neat, backslanted feminine hand: three names followed by three series of numbers. All of the names and numbers had heavy lines drawn through them, like items crossed off on a grocery list.

None of that meant anything to me. I put the paper into the same pocket with the gun, moved on to the sliding doors. They were securely locked, with one of those twist latches that are supposed to be impossible to force from outside. Adjacent was a wide dormer-style window split into vertical halves that fastened in the center, so you could open them inward on a hot day to let in the sea breeze. The halves were also locked — a simple bar-type catch on one that flipped over and fit inside a bracket on the other — and there was more of the wrought-iron burglar-proofing bolted over them on the outside.

I stood at the glass doors, looking out. From there you had an impressive view down a long rocky slope to where the Pacific roiled up foam in a secluded cove, framed on both sides by skyscraping redwoods. But it wasn’t the view that had my attention; it was what looked to be a strip of film about three inches in length that was caught on a railing splinter off to one side and fluttering in the wind. I debated whether or not to unlatch the doors and go out there for a closer look. I was still debating when somebody came clumping up onto the front porch.

The noise brought me around. The front door was still open, and I watched it fill up with six feet of a youngish flaxen-haired guy dressed in tennis whites and carrying a covered racket. He said, “What’s going on here? Who are you?” Then he got to where he could see the body on the rug, and Lauren Speers unconscious in the chair, and he said, “Christ!” in an awed voice.

Right away, to avoid trouble, I told him my name, my profession, and the fact that I had come here to see Lauren Speers on a business matter, only to stumble on a homicide instead. He was Joe Craig, he said, one of Xanadu’s tennis professionals, and he had come over from his own staff cottage nearby to pick up Speers for a three o’clock tennis appointment. He seemed stunned, confused; his eyes kept shifting away from me to the body.

There was a telephone on another burl table beside the couch. I went to it and rang up the resort office. And spent five minutes and a lot of breath explaining three times to three different people that there had been a shooting in Number 41 and somebody was dead. None of the three wanted to believe it. A killing in Xanadu? Things like that just didn’t happen. The first one referred me to the second and the second to the third; the third, who said he was Resident Director Mitchell, maintained his disbelief for a good two minutes before a kind of horrified indignation took over and he promised to notify the county police right away.

Craig had gone over to Lauren Speers and was down on one knee beside her, chafing one of her hands without result. “Maybe we should take her outside,” he said. “Let her have some air.”

That was a good idea. I helped him get her up out of the chair, and as we hauled her across to the door I asked him, “Do you know the dead woman?”

“God, yes. Bernice Dolan, Ms. Speers’ secretary. Did Ms. Speers do that to her? Shoot her like that?”

“So it would seem.” On the porch we put her onto a wrought-iron chaise longue and Craig went after her hand again. “There’s nobody else here, the balcony doors and all the windows are locked from the inside, and I was down on the path with a clear look at the front door when it happened.”

He shook his head. “I knew they weren’t getting along,” he said, “but I never thought it would lead to anything like this.”

“How did you know they weren’t getting along?”

“Bernice told me. We dated a couple of times — nothing serious.” Another headshake. “I can’t believe she’s dead.”

“What was the trouble between them?”

“Well, Ms. Speers is writing a book — or rather, dictating one. All about some of the important people she’s known and some of the things she’s been mixed up in in the past. And full of scandalous material, apparently. She’d got her hands on all sorts of letters and documents and she quoted some of them at length. Bernice’d had editorial experience in New York and kept telling her she couldn’t do that because some of the material was criminal and most of it was libelous. But that didn’t matter to Ms. Speers; she said she was going to publish it anyway. They were always arguing about it.”

“Why didn’t she just fire Bernice?”

“I guess she was afraid Bernice would go to some of the people mentioned in the book, out of spite or something, and stir up trouble that’d affect publication.”

“Were their arguments ever violent?”

“I think so. Bernice was afraid of her. She’d have quit herself if she hadn’t needed the money.”

But even if Lauren Speers was prone to violence, I thought, why would she shoot her secretary no more than two minutes after returning from an after-lunch drive? That was how long it had been between the time I saw her go inside and the time the gun went off: two minutes maximum.

Craig’s hand-chafing was finally beginning to have an effect. La Speers made a low moaning sound, her eyelids fluttered and slid up, and she winced. Her stare was glassy and blank for three or four seconds; the pupils looked as if they were afloat in bloody milk. Then memory seemed to come back to her and her eyes focused, her body jerked as if an electrical current had passed through it.

“Oh my God!” she said. “Bernice!”

“Easy,” Craig said. “It’s all over now, Mrs. Speers.”

“Joe? What are you doing here?”

“Our tennis date, remember?”

“I don’t remember anything. Oh God, my head...” Then she saw me standing there. “Who’re you?”

We got it established who I was and more or less why I was present. She did not seem to care; she pushed herself off the chaise longue before I was done talking and went inside. She was none too steady on her feet, but when Craig tried to take her arm she smacked his hand away. One long look at the body produced a shudder and sent her rushing into the kitchen. I heard the banging of cupboard doors and the clink of glassware, and a few seconds later she came back with a cut-glass decanter in her right hand and an empty tumbler in her left. The decanter was full of something colorless that was probably gin.

I went over as she started to pour and took both decanter and tumbler away from her. “No more liquor. You’ve had plenty.”

Her eyes snapped at me, full of savagery. “You fat son of a bitch — how dare you! Give it back to me!”

“No,” I said, thinking: fat son of a bitch. Yeah. I put my back to her and went down the hall into the bathroom. She came after me, calling me more names; clawed at my arm and hand while I emptied the gin into the washbasin. I yelled to Craig to get her off me and he came and did that.

There was blood on the back of my right hand where she’d scratched me. I washed it off, dabbed the scratch with iodine from the medicine cabinet. Speers was back on the chaise longue when I returned to the porch, Craig beside her looking nonplussed. She was shaking and she looked sick, shrunken, as if all her flesh had contracted inside her skin. But the fury was still alive in those green eyes: They kept right on ripping away at me.

I asked her, “What happened here today, Ms. Speers?”

“Go to hell,” she said.

“Why did you kill your secretary?”

“Go to— What? My God, you don’t think I did that?”

“It looks that way.”

“But I didn’t, I couldn’t have...”

“You were drunk,” I said. “Maybe that explains it.”

“Of course I was drunk. But I don’t kill people when I’m drunk. I go straight to bed and sleep it off.”

“Except today, maybe.”

“I told you, you bastard, I didn’t kill her!”

“Look, lady,” I said, “I’m tired of you calling me names. I don’t like it and I don’t want to listen to it anymore. Maybe you killed Bernice Dolan and maybe you didn’t. If you didn’t, then you’d better start acting like a human being. The way you’ve been carrying on, you look guilty as sin.”

She opened her mouth, shut it again. Some of the heat faded out of her eyes. “I didn’t do it,” she said, much calmer, much more convincing.

“All right. What did happen?”

“I don’t know. I heard the shot, I came out of the bedroom, and there she was all twisted and bloody, with the gun on the floor...”

“A twenty-five caliber automatic. Your gun?”

“Yes. My gun.”

“Where do you usually keep it?”

“In the nightstand drawer in my bedroom.”

“Did you take it out today for any reason?”

“No.”

“Did Bernice have it when you got back?”

A blank look. “Got back?”

“From wherever it was you went this afternoon.”

“Away from Xanadu? In my car?”

“Are you saying you don’t remember?”

“Okay, I have memory lapses sometimes when I’ve been drinking. Blackouts — an hour or two. But I don’t usually go out driving...” The misery in her voice made her sound vulnerable, almost pathetic. I still didn’t like her much, but she was in a bad way — physically, emotionally, and circumstantially — and she needed all the help she could get. Beginning with me. Maybe. “I thought I came straight here after lunch. I remember starting back in the cars... but that’s all. Nothing else until I heard the shot and found Bernice.”

Out on the main path I heard the whirring of an oncoming cart. A short time later two middle-aged guys, both dressed in expensive summer suits, came running through the trees and up onto the porch. The taller of them, it developed, was Resident Director Mitchell; the other one was Xanadu’s chief of security. The first thing they did was to go inside and gape at the body. When they came out again I explained what had happened as far as I knew it, and what I was doing in Xanadu in the first place. Speers did not react to the fact that I was here to serve her with a court summons. Death makes every other problem inconsequential.

She had begun to look even sicker; her skin had an unhealthy grayish tinge. When Mitchell and the security chief moved off the porch for a conference she got up and hurried into the cottage. I went in after her to make sure she didn’t touch anything or go for another stash of gin. But it was the bathroom she wanted this time; five seconds after she shut the door, retching sounds filtered out through it.

I stepped into her bedroom and took a turn around it without putting my hands on any of its surfaces. The bed was rumpled and the rest of the room looked the same — scattered clothing, jars of cosmetics, bunches of dog-eared paperback books. There were also half a dozen framed photographs of well-groomed men, all of them signed with the word “love.”

The retching noises had stopped when I came out and I could hear water running in the bathroom. I moved down to the other, smaller bedroom. Desk with an electric portable typewriter and a dictating machine on its top. No photographs and nothing else much on the furniture. No sign of a manuscript, either; that would be locked away somewhere, I thought.

The sliding closet door was ajar, so I put my head through the opening. The closet was empty except for two bulky suitcases. I nudged both with my foot and both seemed to be packed full.

Half a minute after I returned to the living room, Lauren Speers reappeared. When she saw me she ducked her head and said, “Don’t look at me. I look like hell.” But I looked at her anyway. I also blocked her way to the door.

With my handkerchief I took out the piece of notepaper I had found earlier and held it up where she could see what was written on it. “Do you have any idea what this is, Ms. Speers?” She started to reach for it but I said, “No, don’t touch it. Just look.”

She looked. “I never saw it before,” she said.

“Is the handwriting familiar?”

“Yes. It’s Bernice’s.”

“From the looks of it, she was left-handed.”

“Yes, she was. If that matters.”

“The three names here — are they familiar?”

“I think so. James Huddleston is the former state attorney general. Edward Boyer and Samuel Rykman are both prominent business people.”

“Close friends of yours?”

Her mouth turned crooked. “Not anymore.”

“Why is that?”

“Because they’re bastards. And one is an out-and-out thief.”

“Which one?”

She shook her head — there was a feral gleam in her eyes now — and started past me. I let her go. Then I put the paper away again and followed her onto the porch.

The security chief had planted himself on the cottage path to wait for the county police; Craig was down there with him. The Resident Director had disappeared somewhere, probably to go do something about protecting Xanadu’s reputation. Nobody was paying any attention to me, so I went down and along a packed-earth path that skirted the far side of the cottage.

At the rear there were steps leading up onto the balcony. I climbed them and took a look at the strip of film I had noticed earlier, caught on a wood splinter through one of several small holes along its edge. It was the stiff and sturdy kind they use to make slides — the kind that wouldn’t bend easily under a weight laid on it edgewise.

I paced around for a time, looking at this and that. Then I stood still and stared down at the ocean spray boiling over the rocks below, not really seeing it, looking at some things inside my head instead. I was still doing that when more cart noises sounded out front, two or three carts this time judging from the magnified whirring and whining. County cops, I thought. Nice timing, too.

When I came back around to the front, two uniformed patrolmen, a uniformed officer in captain’s braid, a civilian carrying a doctor’s satchel, and another civilian with photographic equipment and a field lab kit were being met by the security chief. I went over and joined them.

The captain, whose name was Orloff, asked me, “You’re the private detective, is that right? The man who found the body?”

“That’s right.” I relinquished the .25 automatic, saying that I had only handled it by the barrel. Not that it would have mattered if I had taken it by the grip. If there were any fingerprints on it, they would belong to Lauren Speers.

“It was just after the shooting that you arrived?”

“Not exactly,” I said, “I was in the vicinity before the shooting. I went inside after I heard the shot — not much more than a minute afterward.”

“So you didn’t actually see the woman shoot her secretary.”

“No,” I said. “But I wouldn’t have seen that if I’d been inside when it happened. Ms. Speers didn’t kill Bernice Dolan. The man right over there, Joe Craig, did that.”

There was one of those sudden electric silences. Both Craig and Lauren Speers were near enough to hear what I had 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 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 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 who to believe. The security guy said, “How could Joe be guilty? The balcony door and all 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 entered.”

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

Craig said, “Don’t listen to him, he doesn’t know what he’s saying—”

“The living room smells of gin,” I said to the security guy. “You must have noticed that when you were in there. It smelled just the same when I first entered. 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,” I said. “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 o’clock.

“Craig 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 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 and 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 and handed it to Orloff. “The first series of numbers after each name are page numbers — pages in the book manuscript 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. Speers’ 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 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 car and left Xanadu. And it was Bernice who passed me in the car, 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 said. “And Ms. Speers is right-handed; 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 car 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 a 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 probably 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 payoff. 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 doublecross,” 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 Ms. Speers’ 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. 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 complied he must have said something like, ‘Quick, lock the front door, take off the coat, and give me the wig and the money.’ She must 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 bag she also pulled out the slip of paper. In her haste it fell unnoticed to the floor.

“As soon as Craig had the wig and the money he took out the gun, which he’d swiped from Ms. Speers’ night-stand, and shot her. And then he 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?”

“Simply, considering the catch on those window halves is a bar type that flops 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 still find it caught on a splinter on the balcony railing. The way he did it was to insert the film strip between the two halves and flip the catch over until it rested on the strip’s edge. Next 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. 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. All he’d have had to do was 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’ Ms. 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 film strip; 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. And there might even be a fingerprint on that film strip 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 of 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 arrest him 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 court summons. She took it 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.

So I went back to San Francisco and the following day I collected my two hundred plus expenses from Adam Brister. And that night, instead of reading one of the pulp magazines I collect and admire, I read Coleridge’s Kubla Khan in a book from the public library. It was a pretty fine piece of work, all right, and so was his Xanadu. A place of idyllic beauty. The stuff of dreams.

The one at Big Sur was the stuff of dreams too — dreams 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, were not so fortunate.

For them, the pleasure-domes of Xanadu could be the stuff of nightmares.