The war-whooping was still going on down in the alley. Mario stepped over to the window and watched the small boys who were now throwing sticks that were supposed to be flaming arrows. He wondered, as he stood there, if Frank Dutton could be mixed up in Hern’s murder.
Dutton was the only other important arrest that Mario had made. It was Dutton’s fourth arrest for picking pockets and he’d drawn a stiff sentence. There’d been hatred in his eyes when he left the police station for the trip to San Quentin. Hatred for Mario Giovani. Two nights ago Dutton and some others had escaped from Quentin. Was it possible that Dutton, wanting revenge, had—
For the first time, Mario really noticed the color of the war paint the six-year-olds had daubed on their tanned bodies. Orange. He turned and went back to the bedroom doorway where he’d stepped on a blob of color right after finding Hern’s body. The two shades matched — and it was the kind of lipstick Aggie used to wear.
Returning to the window, he shouted down: “Hello, there, fellows. What’re you supposed to be — Cherokees or Navajos?”
They stopped throwing sticks. One said: “Naw, we’re Indians!”
“Oh,” said Mario. “Where’d you get the paint?”
One of them held up a crushed brass tube. “Found this in the alley.”
“I’ll give you a quarter for it.”
The boys immediately forgot they were Indians and became financiers. “Cash?” one asked.
Mario tossed down the coin. The boys tossed up the brass tube. Stepping away from the window, Mario examined it. It was orange lipstick, all right, and the tube had been smashed, probably stepped on, explaining the stain on the rug.
He felt excitement pulling at him. The tube was evidence, damned important evidence. Hurriedly, he slipped into a conservative brown sport jacket, which concealed the holster at his hip, and went out the front door. He wasn’t sure, but there was a good chance now that Mario Giovani finally knew where he was going...
Rattling from rut to rut in his 1984 coupe, Mario kept thinking about the lipstick and a dark, warm California night about a month ago. He and Aggie had stood together on the outermost rim of Rainbow Pier, a tremendous bow of soft-colored lights which pushed out into the ocean south of Long Beach.
They’d held hands and watched the white manes of the waves breaking against the rocks below. He didn’t remember exactly what started it, but they began criticizing one another in fun. Blue eyes impish, Aggie said she absolutely couldn’t stand the green necktie he was wearing. She said it looked like a piece of anemic celery.
Mario laughed and said he didn’t like her orange lipstick because it was the same kind Vivian wore — and he didn’t think she should go around reminding him of former girl friends. So they had a little ceremony. Mario took off the tie and dropped it into the black waves. Aggie took the brass tube from her purse and tossed it in. And he’d spent the next ten minutes kissing off the rest of the orange lipstick.
He was sure Aggie hadn’t bought another one. So how had the orange lipstick got on the rug? Maybe Vivian would know. Maybe Vivian put it there.
Vivian lived in a small yellow-shuttered white cottage on East Tenth Street. A long ambulance and a black and white police car were parked in front. Mario slammed his old coupe against the curb and was stepping out before the wheels stopped rolling.
As he strode up the flagstone path, a man in a white jacket came out the front door — an ambulance attendant.
“Somebody sick in there?” asked Mario.
“Yeah,” said the attendant. “A crazy dame practically committed suicide.”
“Blonde?”
The attendant nodded and Mario hurried onto the porch. That crazy Vivian, he thought. Why in the hell would she want to kill herself?
He went through the open front door and into the living room. Standing in one corner, talking in low tones, were two patrolmen in blue serge and—
Vivian Mason.
Mario heard himself yell. “Vivian! But you — I thought it was you!”
She ran toward him. She was wearing a long, tomato-red negligee with lace froth at the wrists and throat. Her straight yellow hair was pinned back with gold buckles. Tears glistened wetly in her violet eyes as she tumbled against him, wrapping her arms around his neck.
“It’s Aggie!” she cried. “It was awful. There was a bottle of sleeping tablets in the medicine cabinet—”
Mario unstrapped Vivian’s hand from his neck and twisted around. As he bolted through the bedroom door, his blood seemed cold thin water in his veins.
His wife of four days was lying on the rumpled, unmade bed in the nightgown he’d given her for her birthday. Mario shouldered the attendant aside and bent over her.
“Aggie!” he whispered hoarsely. “Aggie!”
Her eyes were closed and droplets of perspiration clung to her dark eyelids. Her face was an oval as pale as paper. There was no color to her lips, but her long hair, unbrushed, was a tangle of brilliant gold fanning across the crumpled hump of the pillow.
She lay there as motionless as the blankets.
“Good lord!” Mario yelled at the attendant. “Is she all right?”
“I don’t know,” said the attendant, placing shiny instruments in a brown leather bag. “We pumped out her stomach...” He took Mario’s arm. “You keep out of here for a while. I’ll let you know when you can come back.”
Mario walked stiffly out to the living room. He dropped into the first chair that brushed his leg. The .38’s holster caught in the upholstery and pressed awkwardly against his hip but he hardly noticed it. Hands jammed across his face, he sat slumped forward.
After a while, he heard Vivian talking to the two patrolmen. Her voice was calm, but had a taut undertone.
“I’ve known Aggie for years,” Vivian said. “And her husband.”
She paused. “That’s him over there. He’s a policeman, too.”
“You say she phoned you last night?” asked one of the patrolmen.
“Yes. Around midnight. Mario had to work last night and she was afraid to stay by herself. So she asked if she could spend the night here with me and, of course, I said fine. When she came over she was terribly nervous, but I thought that was natural because she always was afraid when she was alone.”
“What about this business with the gun and the man she says she shot?”
Mario looked up sharply.
“I’m getting to that,” said Vivian. “She couldn’t sleep, so I fixed her a sleeping tablet. Then this morning she suddenly woke me up yelling about Bob Hern and how she’d shot him last night. She opened her purse and there was a gun in it and everything — and I, well, I just didn’t know what to do.”
The patrolman pointed to a gun lying on an end-table. “That gun?”
Vivian nodded her yellow head. Mario didn’t have to look twice to know it was the extra .38 he’d kept in the lower bureau drawer.
“She was hysterical,” added Vivian. “She kept crying that she’d killed Bob Hern because he was going to tell Mario that she and Bob were still — were still in love.”
Vivian was marching nervously up and down, the red hem of her negligee sweeping the rug. “I calmed her down,” she explained. “At least I thought I did. I went out to fix breakfast. When I went back to the bedroom, there was the empty bottle of tablets and I couldn’t wake her up. I even slapped her. And then I got scared and phoned the—”
The bedroom door was pulled back and the white-jacketed attendant crooked a forefinger at Mario. “You can come in.”
This time Aggie was awake.
Taking her moist hand in his, Mario said softly, “Thank God!”
“Hello...” whispered Aggie. “Gee, do I feel — funny.”
With a corner of the sheet, Mario blotted the perspiration from her forehead. He didn’t want to question her; he didn’t want to cause her any more pain — but he had to know.