Find a Victim

Chapter 8

Bougainvillea Court was guarded by a pair of date palms which stood like unkempt sentries on either side of its entrance. When I left my car, a heavy-bodied rat crossed the sidewalk in front of me and scampered up one of the palm trunks. A pockmarked concrete cherub presided over a dry fountain in the center of the court. Each of the eight cottages surrounding it had a small front porch overgrown with purple-flowering bougainvillea. There were lights and music in most of them, but not in number three.

The door opened when I touched it. I switched on my pocket flashlight. The edge of the door was grooved and splintered around the lock. I stepped inside and closed it with my elbow. Six days missing, I thought, and sniffed instinctively for the smell of death. But all I could sense were the stale odors of life: old cigarette smoke, mixed drinks, heavy perfume, the musky indescribable odor of sex.

My light picked walls and furniture out of the darkness. There were brown Gauguin nudes on the walls and big-hatted Lautrec tarts in light wood frames; a false fireplace containing a cold gas heater, a small bookcase, spiffing paperbacks, a bird’s-eye maple secretary, a rattan portable bar, and a sectional davenport covered in zebra stripes, which looked both new and expensive.

The secretary was hanging open, the bolt of its flimsy lock bent out of shape. Its drawers were stuffed with papers and envelopes. The topmost envelope was addressed to Miss Anne Meyer in a masculine hand. It was empty.

A curtained archway led through a short hall to the bedroom and bathroom. The bedroom was small and feminine. The vanity and the Hollywood bed had yellow organdie skirts that matched the curtains. The closet was full of clothes – sports clothes, business suits, a couple of evening dresses, lightly scented with sachet.

It was impossible to tell if anything was missing, but there were gaps in the shoe-stand. The bed was carelessly made, and there was a rumpled depression on one side where someone had sat. A white-gold wristwatch studded with small diamonds lay on the bedside table.

There was nothing under the bed; nothing of special interest in the chest of drawers, except to underwear fetishists. Anne Meyer had spent a lot of money on underwear.

I entered the bathroom, closed the Venetian blind over the little high window, and switched on the light. Nylons were strung on the towel racks over the tub. I opened the medicine cabinet above the sink. It contained the usual clutter of bottles and boxes. One cardboard box half full of blue-banded capsules was prescribed: “To be taken when needed for rest and sleep.”

Shutting the mirrored door, I saw my face through the tiny snowstorm of toothpaste specks on the glass. My face was pale, my eyes narrow and hard with curiosity. I thought of the palm rat running in his shadow on the sidewalk. He lived by his wits in darkness, gnawed human leavings, listened behind walls for the sounds of danger. I liked the palm rat better when I thought of him, and myself less.

Radio music from the next cottage came loud and insistent through the closed and blinded window. Baby, won’t you please come home? There was no toothbrush in the holder beside the sink. I went back to the vanity in the bedroom. Certain things were missing that probably should have been there: lipstick, powder, face cream, eyebrow pencil. But there were tweezers and a razor.

I returned to the front room and went through the drawers of the secretary. There was nothing personal left in them, though bills and business letters were undisturbed. A half-used checkbook showed a balance of over nineteen hundred dollars. The last stub recorded a payment of one hundred and forty-three dollars and thirty cents to Mademoiselle Finery, on October 7, eight days ago.

The pigeonholes were stuffed with receipted bills, most of them for clothes and furniture. Again nothing personal. I was ready to give up when I found a folded envelope jammed into the back of one of the pigeonholes. It had been postmarked in San Diego nearly a year before. It contained a letter written in indelible pencil on both sides of a sheet of cheap hotel stationery. The letter was signed “Tony.”

I shut myself into the lighted bathroom to read it:

I read the letter twice, straining my eyes on its small illiterate scrawl. It was like looking through a dead man’s eyes, deciphering the smudged records of his memory.

When I opened the bathroom door, there had been a change in the cottage. A subtler sense than hearing felt something in the living-room, a breathing bulk solider than the darkness. I was vulnerable with the light at my back. The little hall and the doorless arch were like a shooting-gallery, with me the fixed target at the end of it.

I switched off the light and moved sideways toward the bedroom door, feeling for the doorframe with one spread hand. My other hand held the flash, ready to use as a light or as a club. I heard the rustling of the curtain in the arch six feet from me. Then the ceiling light in the hall went on with a click.

A gun was thrust past the gathered curtain at the side of the arch. It was a .45, but it was small in the hand that was holding it.

“Come out of there.”

I froze in the doorway, half of my body exposed. I could feel the line between safety and danger bisecting my center.

“Out of there with your hands up.” It was the sheriffs voice. “I’ll give you a count of three before I fire.” He began to count.

I dropped the flash in my pocket and raised my hands, stepping out of the friendly shadow. Church came through the arch. The crown of his Stetson brushed the curtain rod. He looked about seven feet tall.

“You.” He came up close, pressing the muzzle of his gun into my solar plexus. “What do you think you’re doing?”

“My job.”

“What job is that?”

“Meyer hired me to look for his truck.”

“And you thought it was concealed here, in Miss Meyer’s bathroom?”

“He also hired me to look for his daughter.”

He pushed the gun deeper into the hollow below my ribs, and leaned on it. “Where is she, Archer?”

I tensed myself against the gun’s sharp pressure, against the sharper pressure of panic. Church’s eyes were wide and blank. The muscles were ridged and dimpling around his mouth. He looked ready to kill.

“I wouldn’t know where she is,” I said. “I suggest you ask Kerrigan.”

“What do you mean?”

“If you’ll drop the tough-cop kick I’ll tell you what I mean. Iron isn’t good for my stomach. Neither is lead.”

He pulled the gun away, looking down at it as if it was a separate entity that resisted his control. But he didn’t return it to its holster.

“What about Kerrigan?”

“He crops up all over the place. When Aquista was shot, Kerrigan was the nearest citizen. The truck was loaded with Kerrigan’s whisky. Now your sister-in-law turns up missing. She was Kerrigan’s employee, very likely his mistress. And that’s only the beginning.” I was tempted to go on and tell him about the conversation I’d eavesdropped on in Sammy’s Oriental Gardens. But I decided not to. It belonged to me.

Church pushed his hat back as if it constricted his thoughts. His hand stayed up, rubbing a spot on his temple: a grooved bluish-white scar, which might have been left there by a bullet-welt. He looked like a different man with his high forehead uncovered – a puzzled, sensitive man who wore the Western hat and the hard-nosed front as protective coloration. Or a man so deeply split that he didn’t know himself. The gun hung down forgotten in his other hand.

When he spoke, it was in an altered voice, shallow and flat: “I’ve already questioned Kerrigan. He has an alibi for the shooting.”

“His wife?”

“Her word is good enough for me. I’ve known Kate Kerrigan for a long time. I knew her father, the Judge. She’s a woman I trust completely.”

“A woman like that would lie for her husband.”

“Maybe. She isn’t lying. In any case, Kerrigan doesn’t need an alibi. He’s a respectable businessman.”

“How respectable?”

“I’m not talking about his private life. When you’ve got as much to lose as Kerrigan has, you don’t shoot truck-drivers on the public highway.”

“Not even for seventy grand? That’s a tremendous order of whisky, by the way. What does he do, take baths in it?”

“He sells it.”

“In his motor court?”

“Not if I can help it. He owns a bar on the other side of town. The Golden Slipper Supper Club, he calls it.”

“On Yanonali Street?”

“You get around.”

“What else has he got that I don’t know about – political pull?”

“I guess he has some, through his wife’s connections.”

I pressed the needle in a little further: “That wouldn’t be influencing you on the subject of Kerrigan?”

This time it struck a nerve. A pulse jerked under the reddening scar on his temple. “You’re kind of free with your questions.”

“I have to take my answers where I can find them.”

“Don’t forget who you’re talking to.”

“You keep it in the forefront of my thoughts.”

“You don’t quite grasp the situation,” he said. “I’m leaning over backwards. I can’t promise it will last. If you want trouble, I can lock you up for breaking in the front door.”

“I do a neater job than that. It was broken when I got here.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m sure. The place was burglarized, but not by an ordinary burglar. There’s an expensive wristwatch on the bedroom table. A burglar would have taken it. He wouldn’t have taken the other things that are missing.”

“What other things?”

“Personal stuff, toothbrush and so on. I think Anne Meyer went away for the weekend and didn’t come back when she expected to. Then somebody else broke in here and pried open her desk and removed various things, traces of her personal life: letters, address-book, telephone numbers–”

“You had no right to barge in here,” he said. “Even if you didn’t jimmy the door yourself, you’re breaking the law.”

“Your wife gave me permission to search the apartment.”

“What has she got to do with it?”

“Her sister is missing, she’s next of kin–”

“Where did you see her?”

“I drove her home from Meyer’s less than an hour ago.”

“Stay away from her, do you hear me?” he said in a rising voice. “Stay away from my house and my wife.”

“Maybe you better instruct your wife to stay away from me.”

I shouldn’t have said it. Anger shook and wrenched him. His gun swung up, and the barrel clipped my chin. My head snapped back against the wall. I heard plaster dropping down behind it. His tall figure blurred and swung sideways like a tree falling. My arm and shoulder struck the floor.

I got back onto my feet and wiped the blood from my chin with the back of my hand.

“You’ll probably regret this, sheriff.”

“Get out of here before I do something I’ll really regret.”

His long face slanting forward over the gun was like tortured bronze. His eyes were blind and empty.

I walked on remote legs to the open door. The radio music in the next cottage had been replaced by a manic voice asserting loudly that loneliness, fear, and unpopularity were things of the past, abolished by chlorophyll.