“It will only take a couple of minutes.”
“Sorry. Tomorrow would be far more convenient. Come at about… eleven-thirty in the morning, please.”
He turned away and had gone two steps before I tried my hunch. “From talking to Rocko, I thought you’d be more cooperative, Bruce.”
He stopped in his tracks and turned very slowly. “To whom?”
“Walter Rockland.”
He moved closer to the gate and looked up at me, his head tilted, his lips sucked flat. He wore a coarse cotton hand-woven shirt, off-white, with full sleeves and silver buttons on the tight cuffs. He wore a yellow silk ascot, and snug lime-green slacks, and strap sandals the color of oiled walnut. He had brown-gray bangs, a slender tanned face, eyes of pale amber brown.
“Now where would you have encountered that creature?”
“If we could come in for a few moments.”
“What did he say about me?”
“I promise we won’t take too much of your time.”
He unlocked the gate. I followed Meyer in. Bundy locked the gate and told us to go straight ahead to the garden and he would be along in a few moments. He said he wanted to make the dressing and get the woman started on the main course. He told us to help ourselves to a drink.
There was a high wall around the small courtyard, a fountain in one corner. The courtyard was paved in a green stone, and the flowers and shrubs were in huge earthen pots. The furniture was of dark heavy wood upholstered in bright canvas. There were bright birds in bamboo cages.
I poured some of his Bengal gin onto ice. As Meyer fixed himself a whiskey soda he said, “From whence came that inspiration, Mr. McGoo?”
“I’d rather not try to find out. I might not get any more inspirations if I knew.”
I dug through the back of my wallet and found one of my Central General Insurance cards and showed it to Meyer so he would at least know who we were working for.
Bundy came into the courtyard carrying a glass of wine. He sat on a low stone bench and looked at me. It was a look familiar to any veteran poker player, when someone is debating whether or not you have the gall to check and raise.
“I think you’d better tell me, Mr. McGoo-”
“McGee.”
“Oh. Terribly sorry. McGee, then. Tell me when and where you saw Charles Rockland.”
“Walter Rockland.”
“Terribly sorry. Charles didn’t sound quite right, did it? Rocko suits him better than either, of course.”
“We just saw him in Mexico City the day before yesterday Mr. Bundy.”
“Really?”
“Just routine. After all, he did own the Chevy truck and camper that entered Mexico last January tenth, and Miss Bowie was one of the group. Miss Bowie, Miss Minda McLeen, Carl Sessions, and Jerome Nesta. He wrote to a friend in Miami and gave his Mexico City address. So we looked him up, of course.”
“Naturally. Part of your investigation. Go on.”
It was turning sour. You can take only so many chances. But when it does turn sour, at least you know at what point it started to go bad, and that can be useful. “Go on with what?”
“With what he said to you about me, of course.”
“Just that if you seemed uncooperative, to mention his name.”
He finished the wine, licked his finger, ran it around and around the edge of the wine glass until he created a thin, high musical note.
He smiled at me. It was a mocking and flirtatious smile. “Bullshit,” he said softly.
I smiled back. “At least I gave it a try, Bruce.”
“Dear fellow, little games of intrigue, little fabrics of deception, they’re too much a part of my scene. I had years of stage design in New York, and years of set design on the Coast. I’ll give you one little gold star for your forehead, though. You are a little more subtle than you look. Your type, all huge and hearty and outdoorsy, I expect just a kind of clumsy blundering about. Rocko, for example. Dear God, if at this stage of my life I hadn’t learned how to protect myself from anything any piece of rough trade could dream up, I’d be terribly vulnerable and innocent, wouldn’t I? Don’t you think you’d best leave now?”
“Never argue with the umpire. Come on, Meyer.”
He walked us out to the gate. As he unlocked it he said, “I suppose that if you are really what you claim to be, and you really want to know whether it was an accident or suicide, I’d think that that little brunette friend of the Bowie girl’s would give you the most clues. Actually, her father is clomping all over town trying to locate her. A perfectly dreadful, dreary man from one of those ghastly midwest states that begin with a vowel. Product of Kiwanis and Dale Carnegie, and once he affixes himself to you, you have to pry him off as if he were a fat little pilot fish.”
As I thanked him his two guests arrived, spectacularly, in a little custom Lotus Elan convertible in bubblegum pink with black upholstery. The woman came out from under the wheel, leggy, slender, tall, nimble, in light-blue linen sheath dress to midthigh, sleeveless. She had a wild and riotous ruff of wind-spilled lion-mane hair, high-heeled sandals and purse to match the car. For just an instant she was twenty-something, but then in the light across her face she was thirty-something, with a twenty odd body. The boy was in his early twenties, in white shirt open at the throat, crisp khakis, and a powder blue jacket that was a precise match with the lady’s dress. He was brick-red from the sun. His hair was cropped to a copper bristle. He had a sullen face, heavy features, and he moved with the indolent, indifferent grace and ease of one of the big hunting cats, or one of the many imitations of Brando.
“Brucey!” she cried in joyous greeting.
“Becky darling!” he cried.
Giving us a sidelong questing glance, she ran to embrace the host, saying in a British accent, “David had the most fascinating day at the dig. They came upon a whole pocket of tiny beads of bone and jade, and the poor darling had to spend practically the entire day on his knees in the bottom of a monstrous hole, brushing the dust away and picking them up with tweezers. He desperately needs a Iarge whiskey, don’t you, darling?”
The sunbaked boy grunted, and Bruce tried to wove them inside. We had gone a half dozen steps when Becky gave that upperclass commanding caw. “You! I say, you two! Wait up a moment! Bruce? Dearheart, why must one set of guests leave when the next arrives? Your house is rather small, I grant that. But not that small.”
I saw the way it might go, and came back as he murmured protestations to her. I said, “It really wasn’t a social call, ma’am. In fact we wouldn’t have even got inside the gate if I hadn’t tried a little doubletalk. But it only worked for a little while. Mr. Bundy called my bluff. So I don’t believe he’d be very happy about having us come back in as guests.”
She measured me with vivid emerald wicked-gleam-of-mischief eyes through the rough spill of the red-blond-gold-russet hair and made up her impulsive mind and cried, “Nonsense! We are just too terribly inbred around here. One says the same old things to the same old faces in the same old places year without end. Bruce, dear, these gentlemen would make it a more lively evening.”
“But Becky, they are insurance types, from Florida. And it’s all a very dull bit about the dead girl, the Bowie girl, and they know she traveled here with that Rockland boy. Apparently there was some sort of policy on the girl’s life.”
“But Brucey, what if they are insurance types? Does that mean we have to sit about talking about premiums? Let us widen our horizons a bit, dear.”