Scattershot

NINE

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.

Rykman 56 57 59 62 63 116 — I25 171 — I75-

25,

Boyer 214–231 235 239–247 255-25,000 Huddleston 178 180 205–211 360 415-420-50,

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 dead-bolt 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, peering out. From there you had an impressive view down a long rocky slope to where the Pacific rolled 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 appeared 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 racquet. 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 to Xanadu to see Lauren Speers on a business matter. Then I asked him, “Who would you be?”

“Joe Craig.” He seemed stunned, confused; his eyes kept shifting away from me to the body. “I work here-I’m one of the tennis pros.”

I gestured at the racquet in his hand. “Is that why you came by just now?”

“Yes. Ms. Speers and I had a three o’clock tennis lesson. My cottage is nearby, and I was going to ride down to the courts with her.”

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 Forty-one 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 guy, 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 immediately.

Craig had gone over to Lauren Speers and was down on one knee beside her, chafing one of her hands. “Maybe we should take her outside,” he said. “Let her have some air.”

That was a reasonable suggestion. 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’s 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.”

“Did you know her well?”

“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.”

“Such as?”

“I don’t know. But the book is 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 some editorial experience in Los Angeles 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 seem to matter to Ms. Speers; she said she was going to publish it anyway, if she had to pay for it herself. They were always arguing about it.”

“Why didn’t she just fire Bernice?”

“I guess she was afraid Bernice would Ago to some of the people mentioned in the book, out of spite or something, and stir up trouble.”

“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 having an effect. Speers made a low moaning sound, her eye lids 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.”

“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, the clink of glassware; 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,” I said. “You’ve had plenty.”

Her eyes snapped at me, full of sudden 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 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?”

“Go to hell, “she said.

“Why did you kill Bernice Dolan?”

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

“That’s how it looks.”

“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’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 your secretary 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.25 caliber Beretta. Your gun?”

“Yes. My gun.”

“Where do you usually keep it?”

“In the nightstand 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 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 normally 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, emotion ally, and circumstantially-and she needed all the help she could get. Beginning with me. Maybe.

I said, “You normally come back here, is that right?”

“Yes. I thought that’s what I did today, after lunch. I remember starting back in the cart … 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, short and sporting a caterpillarlike mustache, 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 so 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’d come to serve her with a subpoena. 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 much else 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.

Using 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?”

“Yes. James Huddleston is the former state attorney general. Edward Boyer and Samuel Rykman are both prominent businessmen.”

“Close friends of yours?”

Her mouth turned crooked. “Not anymore.”

“Why is that?”

“Because they’re bastards.”

“Oh?”

“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, 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 guy. I walked over and joined them.

The captain, whose name turned out to be Orloff, asked me, “You’re the private detective? The man who found the body?”

“That’s right.” I relinquished the.25 caliber Beretta, 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?” Orloff asked.

“Not exactly. I was in the vicinity before the shooting. I broke 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. But I wouldn’t have seen that if I’d been inside when it happened. Ms. Speers didn’t kill Bernice Dolan.”

“What? Then who did?”

“The man standing right over there,” I said. “Joe Craig.”