Lynnie and Eunice were just walking up from the beach when I got back to The Vacationer: but they both greeted me with ten degrees of frost and went straight on past, murmuring that they guessed they would see me at dinner.
Slightly puzzled, shrugging, I carried my bag and the recorder up to my room, rewound the tape I had collected, and started it to run through while I took off my city suit and turned the air-conditioning to high.
Yola rang up, in great agitation. The houseboy answered, and went to tell Offen, who was still in bed. By great good fortune the houseboy neglected to go back to replace the downstairs receiver when Offen lifted the bedroom extension, and the bug in consequence had picked up the whole conversation.
‘I’ve had a call from the cops in Vegas...’
‘Don’t shout, Yola. I’m not deaf.’
She didn’t listen. ‘Some vandals have wrecked the house at Pitts.’ She really minded: there was grief as well as anger in her voice.
‘How do you mean, wrecked?’
‘They say everything in the house has been thrown on the floor, and flour and sugar and stuff have been tipped over everything. They want to know what’s been stolen, they want me or better Matt to go down there and deal with it... and I can’t, Uncle Bark, I simply can’t. We’ve got thirty-two people in, and I can’t possibly get away. Matt will have to go.’
‘But Matt...’
‘Sure,’ she wailed. ‘Do you think I don’t know? But he’ll have to. Those horses won’t die if he leaves them for a few hours. It’s much farther for me, I’d be away at least two days. It’s hopeless. Everything’s gone wrong since we took that damn Chrysalis.’
‘And if you remember,’ Culham James said tartly, ‘that was your and Matt’s idea. I always said it was too soon after the last one. You and Matt have been too greedy ever since you found out.’
‘Relatives ought to share their good luck, not to keep it to themselves.’
‘So you’re always saying.’
Nothing like a little blackmail to cement a family together, I thought in amusement. Offen had been happy with his half million a year, it seemed: but Matt and Yola, stumbling on the honey pot, had been in a hurry for more. Impulsive, ingenious, greedy Clives; if they had only been content with a share from Showman and Allyx, Offen would never had been found out.
Yola glossed over the longstanding squabble and returned to the current disaster. ‘I didn’t get Matt’s number. What is it?’
‘I haven’t got it here, it’s in my book downstairs...’
‘Well look, will you call him? Tell him to get right on over, the cops will be there waiting. Tell him to call me from there and tell me what gives... I can’t bear it if those bastards have stolen my mink wrap... and there’s all that money in the safe...’
‘Better face up to it that it’s gone,’ Offen said, with the tiniest trace of malice.
‘They might not have had time,’ Yola said. ‘The alarms go off when anyone goes in the den, and there isn’t supposed to be time for anyone to find the safe and open it before the cops get there. We paid enough for it...’
It had been their bad luck that by the merest chance I had left the den until last.
Yola disconnected, and after the twenty second gap on the tape, Uncle Bark called up Matt from the downstairs telephone. Matt’s comments were mostly inaudible though detectably explosive. He agreed to go to the house, but nothing Offen said gave any clue as to where Matt was at that moment. It appeared only that he was somewhere within a reasonable radius of Las Vegas, as he was going to be able to drive there, see to things at the house, and get back in time to feed the horses in the evening: which narrowed it down to somewhere in an area of roughly a hundred and fifty thousand square miles. A pocket handkerchief.
A brief telephone conversation of no interest followed and then, presumably in the afternoon, Offen had switched on his television set to watch a racing programme. As far as I could tell from spot checks, it had used up the whole of the rest of the four-hour playing time.
Sighing, I switched off, and went downstairs. Lynnie and Eunice, dressed in dazzling colours, were drinking daiquiris and watching the Pacific sunset. I got another cool welcome and monosyllabic replies to my inquiries about their day.
Finally Eunice said distantly, ‘Did you have a good time in San Francisco?’
I blinked. ‘Yes, thank you.’
They relapsed into a longer silence which was broken only by a waiter coming to tell me I was wanted on the telephone.
It was Walt.
‘Where are you?’ I said.
‘Las Vegas airport.’
‘How did it go?’
‘You can relax,’ he said comfortably. ‘The horses are on a small farm in a valley in Arizona, out beyond Kingman. We landed there and I asked around some. Seems the couple who own the farm don’t make much of a living, but last week they said a friend was giving them a trip to Miami, and a young fellow would be looking after the place while they were away.’
‘That’s great,’ I said with emphasis.
‘The paint made it easy. We heard him yelling blue murder when he saw it, but I guess it had dried on by then and he couldn’t get it off, because it was way past midday, and I’d begun to worry that he’d gone already and we hadn’t heard him or that they’d picked you up planting the bug... anyway, we took off when his engine started, and the yellow splash was easy to see from a height, just as you said. He went right through Las Vegas and out on to the Hoover Dam road and across into Arizona. I kept the binoculars on him and we never flew near enough for him to notice us, I’m certain of that. He went up a winding graded road into the hills south-east of Kingman, and that was it.’
‘You’ve done marvels.’
‘Oh, sure. It was simpler than we were prepared for, though. You could hear the bug pretty clearly through the helicopter’s headsets as high as two thousand feet, and we could have followed him in the dark if we’d had to, especially as he had his radio on for most of the way. We could hear music and news broadcasts now and then.’
‘Are you coming back tonight?’
‘Yeah, there’s a plane in a half hour from now. But it’ll be better than midnight when I get in.’
‘I’ll be awake,’ I said. ‘And just by the way, Walt, what did you tell Eunice and Lynnie I was doing in San Francisco?’
He cleared his throat. ‘I said you had some unfinished business there.’
‘What sort of business?’
‘Uh... like... er... female.’
‘Thanks,’ I said sarcastically. ‘You’re a right pal.’
Something very like a laugh lingered in my ear as I disconnected.
Chapter Fifteen
Lynnie and Eunice talked brightly to each other over dinner and I sat making plans for the next day and didn’t listen. Politely after coffee we parted for the night, and at eleven I drove out to Orpheus with a fresh reel for the receiver in the rocks, and brought back the one I had fitted earlier.
Walt came back into my room as I was running it through, and we both listened to Culham James Offen talking to Matt and then to Yola.
Yola was a better bet from our point of view, because her angry feminine voice scattered higher sound waves out of the receiver, and one could imagine Uncle Bark holding it inches away out of deference to his eardrums.