“Around the bend.”
I pulled up near a wrought iron gate that hung open between a pair of concrete columns, and debarked. I stuck my head through the window on the other side. “I’ll try not to be long,” I said.
“Be careful,” she said, and took my face between her palms and leaned towards me. It was supposed to be a simple kiss of encouragement. But something happened. Our lips met and the contact triggered a whole set of electrical impulses that went through me like a searing flame.
Call it chemistry, anything you like. Sometimes, rarely, it just happens this way. We were a pair of catalytic agents working on each other. The hunger must have been building up inside her for a long time, like a full head of steam in a boiler. A sob caught at her throat and there was a soft sighing exhalation. Her mouth opened on mine, our breaths intermingled, and her fingernails gouged into my shoulders and for a moment there I thought she was going to haul me right through the closed door into the car. Her body seemed to grow tense and I felt my knees grow wobbly.
And then I remembered Lester Britt, sitting up in his office chair, with that piece of steel sticking in his throat, and I broke her grip. It took a bit of doing, but I managed it.
“Not now,” I said shakily. “There’s work to be done.”
She leaned hack, her breathing erratic and shallow, her eyes smoldering, unwilling to trust her voice.
I took a long breath and touched her lightly on the cheek and walked past the wrought iron gates along a graveled drive. The building broke into view as I came around a bend. It was dark brown, turreted, solid as a fortress, its leaded panes glinting dully in the late afternoon sun. A heavy oaken door was closed and looked impregnable. There was no bell, no knocker, nothing but a pull cord, which I gave a hard tug.
The door opened wide enough to show me a female face as thin as a hatchet and just as sharp. She was a tall, muscular woman, forty or so, in a starched white nurse’s uniform. She was in the wrong profession. The milk of human kindness had long since curdled in her eyes.
“Yes?” Her voice was short and reedy. “What is it?”
“Dr. Vandam, please.”
“The doctor’s busy,” she said unpleasantly and started to close the door in my face.
But I had my foot in the doorway and she looked down at it, surprised. I put some steel into my voice. “Dr. Vandam,” I said. “Don’t make me ask you again. Where is he?”
She gave me a look of cold hostility, turned on her heel, and said abrasively, “This way.”
I followed her through a wide lobby and down an uncarpeted corridor to another oaken door. She knocked on this, opened it, and said, “This person wishes to see you, doctor. He practically forced his way in.”
Dr. Vandam stood up from behind his desk, a bony man with an angular face, aggrieved eyes, and a perpetually worried mouth. This was the expression he presented to the public. What went on behind it, I couldn’t even guess. “Come in, sir,” he said in a deceptively mild voice. “Come in and sit down.” He pulled a chair around so that the light would strike my face. “You mustn’t mind Miss Kirk,” he said. “We’re short-handed and she has to do most of the work.” He peered at me owlishly. “I don’t believe I’ve ever seen you before. Are you selling something?”
“Not exactly, doctor.” I had ignored the proffered chair. “I came to see one of your patients.”
“Yes?”
“Mrs. Paula Larsen.”
There was no visible change in his expression. “Are you a relative?”
“No, doctor.”
“Friend of the family?”
“No, doctor.”
He moved his shoulders patiently. “Then what is the purpose of your visit, if I may inquire? Mrs. Larsen is resting now. She had a touch of flu last month and she’s very weak.”
“I’d like to talk to her.”
He smiled patronizingly. “My dear fellow, we can’t allow just anyone to walk in and disturb our guests. Surely you realize that.”
I fished one of my cards out of my wallet and gave it to him. His lips moved as he read it. His eyes came up without any expression.
“I see,” he said. “You’re a lawyer. What, exactly, do you want, counselor? Who do you represent?”
“Mrs. Grace Denney. We want to find out if Mrs. Larsen is competent to handle her own affairs.”
He stroked his closed eyelids with infinite weariness. “Ah, yes. Mrs. Denney was here yesterday, but Mrs. Larsen refused to see her.” He shoved his chair back abruptly and came to his feet. “I think an interview can be managed. Suppose we just walk in on Mrs. Larsen. But please make it brief, counselor. Follow me.” His manner had turned crisp and businesslike.
A spiral staircase wound upward to the second floor. Our footsteps were absorbed on the well-padded broadloom. Dr. Vandam paused at the end of the corridor, opened a door, and walked in with a cheerful smile.
“Well, Mrs. Larsen, you’re looking chipper. How do you feel this afternoon?”
“Resting nicely, doctor. I—” She stopped when she noticed he was not alone and her faded eyes regarded me curiously.
I saw a small woman, very old, lying in a four poster, dwarfed by its hugeness. Her skin was wrinkled parchment and her hair was snow white. Only the porcelain dentures anchored to her gums kept her mouth from collapsing upon itself.
“I brought you a visitor,” Dr. Larsen said.
She searched my face, probing, trying to recollect if she knew me.
“How do you do, Mrs. Larsen,” I said. “I’m a friend of Grace’s.”
The gnarled fingers tightened on the coverlet and her withered lips contracted. “Then you’re no friend of mine,” she said.
“Grace would like very much to see you, Mrs. Larsen.”
“Well, I don’t want to see her. Why doesn’t she leave me alone and go back to California?”
I said quietly, “She’s divorcing Charles.”
Her eyes closed, as if the light hurt them. “Poor Charles. Grace must have made him very unhappy.”
“Please,” Dr. Vandam broke in firmly. “I’m sorry, but you can see that Mrs. Larsen is very tired. She needs rest and this excitement isn’t doing her any good.”
I smiled, first at him, then at her, and now I gave them both the shock of their lives.
“That’s too goddam bad about her,” I said unpleasantly. “Get up out of that bed, you old fraud. And get some clothes on, unless you want me to drag you down to Police Headquarters in your nightgown.”
Her mouth fell open. She gaped at me, dumbfounded, her eyes dark with apprehension and dismay. Dr. Vandam stood with his spine arched, his larynx paralyzed, speechless and staring. There were incoherent sounds in his throat that finally became words:
“What — what — what is the meaning of this?”
I was playing a hunch and I hoped I was right.
I said with acid precision, “Who do you think you’re kidding? This isn’t Mrs. Larsen. This woman is a phoney, a substitute, a ringer.”
His Adam’s apple bobbed erratically. “But Mrs. Larsen — where—”
“Dead, probably,” I said. “And kept a secret so this old bag could take her place.”
He seemed at a complete loss. “I–I don’t understand. Why?”
“In order to keep receiving those annuity payments. Five hundred smackers a week. Twenty-five thousand a year. It adds up, friend. If they could get away with it for only four years it’s a hundred grand.” I looked at her stonily. “Get up, lady. You won’t have long to spend in jail. You’re too old.”
But she wasn’t as old as she looked. She kicked her feet over the side of the bed and stood up, trembling and agitated. Her mouth was working and her quivering finger pointed at the doctor.
“He made me do it!” she shouted. “He hired me and asked me to play the part. I don’t know about any annuities. I don’t—”