I went out of the fish room. The bedroom door was still shut. I went down below and cranked the wall telephone.
«This is the Wallace place at Westport,» I said. «There’s been an accident. We need a doctor and we’ll have to have the police. What can you do?»
The girl said: «I’ll try and get you a doctor, Mr. Wallace. It may take a little time though. There’s a town marshal at Westport. Will he do?»
«I suppose so,» I said and thanked her and hung up. There were points about a country telephone after all.
I lit another cigarette and sat down in one of the rustic rockers on the porch. In a little while there were steps and Mrs. Sype came out of the house. She stood a moment looking off down the hills, then she sat down in the other rocker beside me. Her dry eyes looked at me steadily.
«You’re a detective, I suppose,» she said slowly, diffidently.
«Yes, I represent the company that insured the Leander pearls.»
She looked off into the distance. «I thought he would have peace here,» she said. «That nobody would bother him any more. That this place would be a sort of sanctuary.»
«He ought not to have tried to keep the pearls.»
She turned her head, quickly this time. She looked blank now, then she looked scared.
I reached down in my pocket and got out the wadded handkerchief, opened it up on the palm of my hand. They lay there together on the white linen, two hundred grand worth of murder.
«He could have had his sanctuary,» I said. «Nobody wanted to take it away from him. But he wasn’t satisfied with that.»
She looked slowly, lingeringly at the pearls. Then her lips twitched: Her voice got hoarse.
«Poor Wally,» she said. «So you did find them. You’re pretty clever, you know. He killed dozens of fish before he learned how to do that trick.» She looked up into my face. A little wonder showed at the back of her eyes.
She said: «I always hated the idea. Do you remember the old Bible theory of the scapegoat?»
I shook my head, no.
«The animal on which the sins of a man were laid and then it was driven off into the wilderness. The fish were his scapegoat.»
She smiled at me. I didn’t smile back.
She said, still smiling faintly: «You see, he once had the pearls, the real ones, and suffering seemed to him to make them his. But he couldn’t have had any profit from them, even if he had found them again. It seems some landmark changed, while he was in prison, and he never could find the spot in Idaho where they were buried.»
An icy finger was moving slowly up and down my spine. I opened my mouth and something I supposed might be my voice said: «Huh?»
She reached a finger out and touched one of the pearls. I was still holding them out, as if my hand was a shelf nailed to the wall.
«So he got these,» she said. «In Seattle. They’re hollow, filled with white wax. I forget what they call the process. They look very fine. Of course I never saw any really valuable pearls.»
«What did he get them for?» I croaked.
«Don’t you see? They were his sin. He had to hide them in the wilderness, this wilderness. He hid them in the fish. And do you know —» she leaned towards me again and her eyes shone. She said very slowly, very earnestly: «Sometimes I think that in the very end, just the last year or so, he actually believed they were the real pearls he was hiding. Does all this mean anything to you?»
I looked down at my pearls. My hand and the handkerchief closed over them slowly.
I said: «I’m a plain man, Mrs. Sype. I guess the scapegoat idea is a bit over my head. I’d say he was just trying to kid himself a bit — like any healthy loser.»
She smiled again. She was handsome when she smiled. Then she shrugged quite lightly.
«Of course, you would see it that way. But me —» she spread her hands. «Oh, well, it doesn’t matter much now. May I have them for a keepsake?»
«Have them?»
«The — the phony pearls. Surely you don’t —»
I stood up. An old Ford roadster without a top was chugging up the hill. A man in it had a big star on his vest. The chatter of the motor was like the chatter of some old angry bald-headed ape in the zoo.
Mrs. Sype was standing beside me, with her hand half out, a thin, beseeching look on her face.
I grinned at her with sudden ferocity.
«Yeah, you were pretty good in there for a while,» I said. «I damn near fell for it. And was I cold down the back, lady! But you helped. ’Phony’ was a shade out of character for you. Your work with the Colt was fast and kind of ruthless. Most of all Sype’s last words queered it. ’The Moors, Hattie — the Moors.’ He wouldn’t have bothered with that if the stones had been ringers. And he wasn’t sappy enough to kid himself all the way.»
For a moment her face didn’t change at all. Then it did. Something horrible showed in her eyes. She put her lips out and spit at me. Then she slammed into the house.
I tucked twenty-five thousand dollars into my vest pocket. Twelve thousand five hundred for me and twelve thousand five hundred for Kathy Home. I could see her eyes when I brought her the check, and when she put it in the bank, to wait for Johnny to get paroled from Quentin.
The Ford had pulled up behind the other cars. The man driving spit over the side, yanked his emergency brake on, got out without using the door. He was a big fellow in shirt sleeves.
I went down the steps to meet him.
GUNS AT CYRANO’S
ONE
Ted Carmady liked the rain; liked the feel of it, the sound of it, the smell of it. He got out of his LaSalle coupe and stood for a while by the side entrance to the Carondelet, the high collar of his blue suede ulster tickling his ears, his hands in his pockets and a limp cigarette sputtering between his lips. Then he went in past the barbershop and the drugstore and the perfume shop with its rows of delicately lighted bottles, ranged like the ensemble in the finale of a Broadway musical.
He rounded a gold-veined pillar and got into an elevator with a cushioned floor.
«’Lo Albert. A swell rain. Nine.»
The slim tired-looking kid in pale blue and silver held a white-gloved hand against the closing doors, said: «Jeeze, you think I don’t know your floor, Mister Carmady?»
He shot the car up to nine without looking at his signal light, whooshed the doors open, then leaned suddenly against the cage and closed his eyes.
Carmady stopped on his way out, flicked a sharp glance from bright brown eyes. «What’s the matter, Albert? Sick?»
The boy worked a pale smile on his face. «I’m workin’ double shift. Corky’s sick. He’s got boils. I guess maybe I didn’t eat enough.»
The tall, brown-eyed man fished a crumpled five-spot out of his pocket, snapped it under the boy’s nose. The boy’s eyes bulged. He heaved upright.
«Jeeze, Mister Carmady. I didn’t mean —»
«Skip it, Albert. What’s a fin between pals? Eat some extra meals on me.»
He got out of the car and started along the corridor. Softly, under his breath, he said: «Sucker.»
The running man almost knocked him off his feet. He rounded the turn fast, lurched past Carmady’s shoulder, ran for the elevator.
«Down!» He slammed through the closing doors.
Carmady saw a white set face under a pulled-down hat that was wet with rain; two empty black eyes set very close. Eyes in which there was a peculiar stare he had seen before. A load of dope.
The car dropped like lead. Carmady looked at the place where it had been for a long moment, then he went on down the corridor and around the turn.