It was not Julian’s car and there was no way of knowing if he had been here yet. Sheffold waited a long ten minutes, listening to the ancient sound of the sea, and breathing clean salt air into his lungs. There was no other sound; nothing in that weirdly limited, dark world stirred.
Sheffold closed in on the car like a charging line-man, light and swift and practically noiseless. He came up on the driver’s side, big hands ready to jerk the door open and take advantage of any surprise. There was still no movement...
But the car wasn’t empty. The same heavy sense of dread Sheffold had experienced in Bannerman’s cottage closed in swiftly. And this time it was not imagination.
He was there, the same Harley Bannerman, handsome, aging, and characteristically marked about his mouth with lipstick. Without caution now, Sheffold turned on the ceiling light and his eyes were somber as he leaned into the ear to study Julian’s partner.
He’d been shot in the right temple slightly to one side about where a suicide would do the job. But there was no gun. There was an expression of utter astonishment frozen on his face. It might have been, Sheffold thought, that Bannerman had been shot from the side and had only a flash of warning that death was leaping at him.
He’d been shot in the act of being surprised. Living, there had been nothing left that could surprise him.
Sheffold touched the body. The warmth of it startled him. It was possible that only the crash and fall of the surf had hidden the sound of the shot from Sheffold’s hearing. Bannerman had been dead only minutes.
Sheffold straightened. As he did, he understood the sense of shock Bannerman had experienced. There was a sudden frantic rush as of great wings batting the night, and the sound of something swishing toward Sheffold’s head. There was no question of escaping the blow. He took it, giving with the force of it, hoping it would not knock him out.
For even then it did not occur to Sheffold that he was not a match for his assailant, as long as he retained consciousness. The blow drove him forward against the car, his forehead smashing the frame of the window, and it was that as much as anything that dissipated his wits and his reflexes, so that he never had a chance from there on. He heard, rather than felt, the blows thudding on his head, as if he’d pulled his awareness away, and his skull was as lifeless and impersonal as an artificial limb.
He was still hearing the crash of the weapon against his head long after consciousness had slipped away as effortlessly as his assailant. And even later, when he came back to full knowledge of his position, he could still hear it. Only then did he realize it was the methodical drum-beat of the surf he was hearing.
He was lying on the harsh, gritty earth beside the car. The night sky was still concealed by the overcast. Painfully he rose and looked, with eyes that were remote and brooding, at the lipstick that was smeared on the dead man’s cooling face...
Midnight. He’d been unconscious nearly an hour, and it had taken him the rest of the time to drive to Brentwood. Rhoda Richards answered the door after Sheffold had rung for nearly five minutes. She had not been asleep. She wore a satin housecoat that swept the floor. The startling green eyes were fixed and blank.
Sheffold pushed past her into the house. “Bannerman is dead,” he said flatly. “He’s in his car on a lonely stretch of road beyond Palos Verdes.”
“Yes,” she said, with utterly no life in her voice. “There was a news flash on the radio a few minutes ago.”
“I didn’t report it,” Sheffold said. “It was someone else. The police will really rock me for that. But there’s something phony about the whole situation.”
“Is there?” It was doubtful that she even heard him.
“A lot of little things are wrong,” he said, his voice harsh now. “But mostly because there was a woman involved. Bannerman had been kissing her only minutes before he was shot. You don’t make love to your kidnapper, you know.”
“I’m afraid I wouldn’t know for sure.” She was looking into a blank distance, disinterested.
Sheffold took her slender shoulders in his hands, shook her like a doll. “Don’t you understand what I’m telling you? Bannerman is dead!”
She looked at him as if seeing him for the first time. “Pantera was here. He came to see Malcolm.” She was talking in a hypnotic monotone. “He had pictures. He said they were Harley and me. It was a lie, of course. I know that — but what difference does it make?”
Sheffold was silent now. The weight of apprehension pulled at his stomach. His head ached dully, throbbing off beat to the grinding pain in his back.
“It was Harley all right. And some woman. Pantera claimed it was me, and Malcolm believed him.” She lifted dead eyes to look at him again. “He wanted to believe it.”
“What did he do?” Sheffold asked quietly.
“He went out. He got directions to Harley’s Canyon place and said he was going there to find out. He had to know.” She lifted her beautiful white hands in a gesture that would have been theatrical, except she was utterly unaware of it. “I don’t know whether he found anything or not. I suppose he did — a handkerchief, my cigarette case — it doesn’t matter.”
Sheffold’s face was tense. “What time did he leave and how long was he gone?”
“He left about nine,” she said wearily. “He got back twenty-minutes ago.”
“Did you leave?”
She shook her head. “I wasn’t out all evening. The servants will tell you that.”
Sheffold said, “If your husband was unaccounted for during the last three hours he might have killed Bannerman. I don’t know how he made contact—”
“You’d better go,” Rhoda said suddenly. “The police will be coming here soon.”
“I want to see your husband.”
“See him?” She laughed, a horrible insane laugh. “You fool. Don’t you understand yet? He’s dead. His precious family pride couldn’t stand the disgrace. He shot himself ten minutes ago.”
She was still laughing hysterically when Sheffold walked out.
Forty minutes later he pulled up in front of Alyce Rowland’s apartment. He didn’t have any hopes that she would still be there. But some woman had been in the murder car with Bannerman tonight and she was the only other possibility his aching brain could think of.
The front door wasn’t locked this time. A little tug of caution pulled at Sheffold as he charged in. The door should have been locked this late. A thick-bodied man with a long cigar in his mouth leaned against the newel post at the foot of the stairs. One hand was hidden in his side pocket; the other fell heavily on Sheffold’s arm. “Where you going, buddy?”
Sheffold stopped, and his face was rigid. “Take your hand off me,” he said in a low voice.
“You weren’t sort of going up to Apartment 21, were you maybe? I sort of wouldn’t, if I was you.”
“Why wouldn’t you, if you were me?” Sheffold asked softly.
The man grinned past his cigar. “Because Danny said I was sort of to keep an eye out for a big bouncer-type guy and if he did some buttin’ in I was to sort of discourage him.”
He made the mistake of bringing the gun out of his pocket. He had an earnest confidence in the persuasive power of a gun. A bulge in a side pocket could be anything. A gun was a gun. He never got it clear of the pocket. Sheffold hit him on the corner of the jaw with a fist that hadn’t moved a foot. There was a sound like rotten wood snapping. The man didn’t even stagger. The punch stiffened every muscle and joint and when he fell, it was like a bag of old bones collapsing to the floor within its own orbit.