“What’s wrong with you?”
“Nothing.”
She took me by the chin and reached up and kissed me; it was a hot, sticky kiss, lipstick and booze and cigarette smell, kind of sickening and wonderful at the same time. Those soft, bruised lips of hers played my mouth like a cornet.
When the kiss was over, I said, “It’s just too soon, Di.”
“Too soon for us?”
“You don’t understand. I’m…I’m not ready. I’m trying to get over somebody.”
“Well, you know, my brother used to play rugby.”
“Really.”
“And he told me what a good coach always says.”
“What’s that?”
“Pick yourself up, get back into the game.”
She dropped to her knees and her hand slipped inside the front of my shorts and she took me out and held me. Stroked me. Kissed me.
“Oooo,” she said. “What a sign of good luck this trunk makes….”
“I…I’m not sure you should…”
“Shut up, Heller.” Stroking me. “I just love a man on the rebound.”
And then I was in her mouth. And then more of me was in her mouth, and she worked me, and worked me, and worked me some more….
Then I was panting like a winded runner, looking down at her and she was looking up at me smiling whitely, and it wasn’t her teeth.
She stood, smoothed her robe out primly, withdrew a handkerchief from a pocket and touched it to her lips, dabbing politely, as if she’d just finished a petit four.
Then she regarded me with amused eyes.
“They say once a woman does that for a man,” she said, “she owns him.”
I could hear the surf crashing out there. A bird cawing.
“Okay,” I said.
20
Under a cloudless midafternoon sky, on the patio balcony behind the ballroom at Shangri La, a pleasant-looking if intense middle-aged man in a tropical sport shirt, tan slacks and sandals knelt over a hairy coconut about the size of a man’s head, holding high above it, in one tight hand, a white fence picket, its pointed tip pointed down. Modestly handsome, with dark hair, a high, scholar’s forehead and round, wire-rimmed glasses, the slender figure seemed about to perform some strange native ritual, the picket poised like a spear about to strike.
And then with sudden, surprising force, it did strike-only the picket splintered, leaving the coconut intact, its hair barely mussed.
“You see!” Professor Leonard Keeler wore a triumphant little smile. He pushed his glasses up on his nose. “And I guarantee you the mastoid bone is stronger than that coconut’s shell.”
“Could any blunt instrument have caused those four wounds behind Sir Harry’s ear?” I asked. “What if a demented old miner Harry screwed over in the Klondike sneaked in, and took four swings with a pickax?”
Keeler, shaking his head no, said, “His whole damn skull would have shattered!”
Coconut in hand, he took a seat next to Erle Stanley Gardner at one of the wrought-iron tables with a view of the elephant fountain and the brilliantly colorful tropical garden that surrounded it. Tropical birds were calling; a humid breeze was whispering.
I had run into Gardner at Blackbeard’s pub, where I’d spent the morning chatting with several prosecution witnesses-Mrs. Clark and Mrs. Ainslie, as well as the American Freddie, Freddie Ceretta-who were sympathetic to the defense. All of them confirmed that they had been taken to Westbourne for questioning on the 9th of July, and all of them confirmed de Marigny’s assertion that he’d been taken upstairs by Melchen at eleven-thirty a.m., contradicting police testimony placing that time at three-thirty p.m.
This was good, to say the least: all I had to do now was talk to Colonel Lindop, which I intended to do later this afternoon. If Lindop confirmed Freddie’s time, we would not only cast doubt on that Chinese-screen fingerprint, but on Barker and Melchen themselves.
Wearing a Western shirt with a string tie, Gardner had sauntered up to me like a pudgy pint-sized gunfighter, surrounded by his three wholesomely pretty secretaries, the fresh-scrubbed trio of sisters to whom he dictated his daily columns as well as radio scripts and chapters in his current novel, in a suite over at the Royal Victoria. They were taking a lunch break, and I was alone in the booth, now.
“Girls, this is the dimestore detective I’ve been telling you about,” he growled good-naturedly. “Still ducking me, eh, Heller? Don’t you know every good Sherlock needs a Watson?”
“Which role do you see as yours?”
He had laughed in his gargling-razor-blades way, and I asked them to join me for lunch-I was already having the pub’s specialty, the Welsh rarebit.
“Thank you, son,” Gardner said, sliding into the booth next to me; the trio of smiling curly-haired girls squeezed in across from us, without a word. They were like mute Andrews Sisters.
After some food and chitchat, Gardner finally said, “Come on, Heller-give an old man a break.”
He probably had all of seven years on me.
But he pressed on: “Like the used-car salesman says, you can trust me…. Anything you say or do that you don’t want me to put in my articles, all you got to do is say so. Just don’t exclude me from the fun.”
“All right,” I said, pushing my plate of mostly eaten food aside. “How would you like to meet the inventor of the lie detector?”
His pop-eyed grin reminded me of a kid being offered his first peek behind the hootchy-kootchy show curtain.
And now Gardner-minus his “girls”-was spending the afternoon with me at Shangri La, as I got my first in-depth appraisal from Len Keeler on the evidence he’d been going over and the tests he’d been making.
Despite his relative youth, Keeler had indeed invented the polygraph, an improvement on a German device that measured changes in a suspect’s blood pressure; Len’s device also monitored respiration rate, pulse and the skin’s electrical conductivity during questioning.
“Do you know what mastoiditis is?” Keeler asked us.
Gardner and I were seated at the wrought-iron table, on which were a pitcher of limeade with glasses, the splintered picket, the coconut, and various death-scene photos, fanned out like a hand of cards. In Sir Harry’s case, a losing hand.
An old friend of mine via Eliot, Keeler-Director of the Chicago Crime Detection Lab at Northwestern University Law School-was more than just the top polygraph man in the country; he was also an authority on scientific crime detection in general. Including fingerprints….
But the subject now was the cluster of four wounds, which the prosecution claimed had been produced by a “blunt instrument.”
“To treat mastoiditis, a surgeon has to take a hammer and chisel to break through the thickness of bone,” Len told us, “and even then, the thinner bones around the mastoid would tend to shatter with the impact.”
“Then what could have produced those holes?”
He pushed his glasses up again. “A small-caliber gun…at the very largest, a.38, but not a.38 Special; more likely a.32.”
“Were there powder burns?” Gardner asked.
“Somebody played tic-tac-toe on the corpse with a blowtorch,” I said, “and you’re wondering if anybody noticed powder burns?”
“You can’t tell from these photos,” Keeler said, fanning them out some more. “Even so, smokeless powder doesn’t leave burns. As for these triangular entry wounds, bullets fired at close range tend to make larger, irregular holes because of escaping gases.”
I tapped a photo of Sir Harry and the four holes in his head. “Then these are gunshot wounds-no question?”
“No question,” Keeler said flatly.
Eyes narrowing with thought and Bahamian sunshine, Gardner said, “Might this old shyster offer the defense a piece of free legal advice?”
“Sure,” I said. “I’ll pass it along to Godfrey Higgs.”
“Don’t introduce this evidence,” Gardner said somberly. “If you do, the prosecution will shrug it off somehow, explain it away.”