I knew I had to go back and see Niki. It would be childish to stay away from her when she was the one who was most likely to give me some small clue as to why he was killed.
I took my rented car out of the hotel garage and headed for the Lime Ridge house.
Chapter 10
The pretty little maid let me in and asked me to wait for a moment. She hurried off and came back and said, “If you would come with me, sir?”
She led me through the house and out to a small flagstone terrace built into an L of the house. There was a low wide wall around the other two sides. Niki, in a scanty, two-piece, terry-cloth sunsuit of bright yellow lay on a rustic chaise longue upholstered in quilted white plastic. She was in the glare of the afternoon sunlight, her body glistening with oil, and her ink-black hair piled high. She was propped up on one elbow and she had taken off her sun glasses to smile at me.
“How nice, Gevan!”
I looked up the slope of the back lawn toward aspen and birch. “It’s nice here.”
“That door opens into the master bedroom, and whenever we could, we’d have breakfast out here. But it doesn’t catch the morning sun, so we couldn’t really use it often. I’ll show you the whole house sometime, Gevan.”
I heard myself murmuring that it would be nice. She put her sun glasses on and lay back. They were the kind that are mirrors. You cannot see the eyes of the wearer. It gave her a blinded look. There was some pink in her skin tone. She lay drowsy in the sun, oiled and relaxed, and it was too easy to stare at the arching lines of her, at warm perfections.
“Sure you’re not getting too much?” I asked, my voice harsh.
“Oh, I never burn.”
I sat on the low wall and lit a cigarette. The mirrored glasses gave me the odd feeling that she couldn’t see me. “Light two, dar — Gevan. How stupid! Almost calling you darling. The heat makes me feel so — very far away from myself.”
“I know that feeling.” I lit two cigarettes and took one to her. She lifted her chin a fraction of an inch and I put it between her lips. She inhaled deeply and took the cigarette from her lips. I sat on the wall again.
“Grief is such a funny thing, Gevan. It isn’t constant, as you’d think. It goes and comes. You forget for a little minute, and then it all comes back smashing you down.”
“I know.”
“Of course you would know, wouldn’t you. I can’t seem to open my mouth without sounding inane. I wish—”
“What do you wish, Niki?”
“This will sound even worse. I wish we hadn’t ever been — emotionally entangled. Then I could lean on you harder. The way it is, I feel — awkward and guilty.” The mirrored eyes reflected the deep blue of April sky.
I did not answer. She sighed audibly. “You hate me, don’t you, Gevan?”
I smiled at the blind lenses. “I was unique and irresistible. It never occurred to me that anybody could turn me down.”
“That is a very bitter smile.”
“Hurt pride.”
She sat up and inspected her long, lithe, sun-reddened legs, poked experimentally at her thigh and watched the white finger-mark slowly disappear, then lay back again, snapping her cigarette out over the low wall into the grass.
“We won’t get anywhere talking about it, I guess.” The sun had moved. An edge of roof shadow touched her shoulder. “Would you roll me out from the wall a little bit, please?”
The chaise longue had two wooden wheels at the head part, and handles at the foot part. I lifted the handles and pulled her out a bit, and knew she watched me through the mirrored lenses as I did so.
“Why don’t you take off your coat, Gevan? Your face is just dripping.”
“Good idea.” I took my coat off and rolled up the sleeves of my white shirt.
The lovely little amber-skinned maid came out onto the terrace, trim in a well-cut spring suit, demure in manner. “Excuse me, Mrs. Dean.”
“Oh, you’re ready to leave, Victoria?”
“Yes ma’am. I fixed a salad for you. It’s in a yellow bowl on the second shelf in wax paper, ma’am, and the dressing is in the bottle next to it. If you don’t need me earlier, I’ll be back about midnight, I guess.”
“Did your young man come for you? I didn’t hear him drive in.”
“He’s parked out there on the road, ma’am.”
“Please tell him again, Victoria, that when he comes to pick you up he’s to feel free to drive in.”
“I’ll tell him again, ma’am. Good-by, Mrs. Dean. Good-by, sir.”
After she left the terrace Niki said, “Victoria is a doll. She has two years of college, you know. She’s working for me for a year to save enough to go back in the fall. She wants to be a teacher. The two of us rattle around in this house. It’s so big. Yesterday I had her move from the servants’ quarters to one of the guest suites. It makes the house seem less empty. People seem to be putting gentle pressure on me to move out of here, Gevan, after what happened. But this is my home. I feel safe here.”
“It’s a lot of overhead to house one person.”
“The grounds? I share a gardener with the Delahays, my nearest neighbors. You can just see a bit of their roof through those poplars, Gevan, beyond that ridge. He’s due here again tomorrow. I suppose it is quite a lot for just one person. But if you force me to be vulgar, there is quite a lot of money to go with it, you know. I don’t think I’ll stay here forever. But I won’t leave for the sake of leaving. I’ll have to know where I’m going.”
“Don’t you always?”
“Did you come here just to be nasty?”
“I actually came to ask you about that night Ken was killed, Niki. I’ve read the newspaper accounts. They don’t say much.”
She remained silent to the point of rudeness, then said, “I guess you have the right to ask. I’ll have to give you some background on it, so you can understand just what that night was like.”
“I know I’m asking a lot.”
She stood up and adjusted a latch on the chaise so that the angled part folded down, turning it into a long cot. She picked up the bottle of sun oil from the floor and held it out to me and said, “It’s a long story, so be a useful listener, dear.”
I took the bottle of sun oil from her. She stretched out face down, her long legs angled toward the far side to make room for me to sit. She craned her hands back and unhooked the narrow strap of her halter. With one languid hand she put the mirrored sunglasses on the terrace stone, then sighed and snuggled into relaxation, her face turned away from me, her fingers laced above her head.
I tipped warm oil between her shoulder blades, and it ran down along the youthful indentation toward the small of her back. I caught it and began to spread it and work it into long brown silk of her, feeling the flat firm webs of muscle, the hidden ivory roundness of vertebrae, the clever flexing sheathing of scapula. She had piled her dark hair up out of the way, and the nape of her neck looked tender, girlish and vulnerable. There was a downy pattern of pale hair in the convexity of the small of her back, and the oil flattened it and darkened it.
“For the past six months or so, Gevan, we led the quiet life. I couldn’t say how much choice was involved. Yes, it was quiet. When you don’t return invitations, people eventually stop asking you. Our evenings were all... very much alike. He would come in sometime after seven. I don’t have to hide anything from you, Gevan. He would come home plastered. He was very owlish and solemn when he was drunk.”