v The woman on the rug was dead. I knew that even without checking for a pulse; had known it the instant I saw her wide-open eyes and the blood on her blouse beneath one twisted arm. She was in her late twenties, attractive in a regular-featured way, with short black hair and a Cupid’s-bow mouth. Wearing blouse, skirt, open-toed sandals.
I stood staring down at her, the way Speers had.
My stomach felt queasy; a mixture of revulsion and awe had taken a grip on my mind. It was the same reaction I always had to violent death, because it was such an ugliness, such a waste. But there was more to it than that in this case-a resentment of the vagaries of fate, and a kind of fear.
For the second time this week I had stumbled smack into the middle of a homicide.
NINE
Lauren Speers was still sprawled where I’d put her in the chair, unmoving. I went past her, down the short hall, and looked into the two bedrooms and the bath. All three were empty. And the windows in all three were closed and locked; I could see that at a glance.
I came back out and looked into the kitchen. That was empty, too. I started across to a set of sliding glass doors that led onto a rear balcony, but before I got there I noticed something on the floor between the couch and a burl coffee table- a piece of white paper folded lengthwise, lying there tent-fashion. I detoured over and used my handkerchief to pick it up.
It was a sheet of notepaper with six lines of writing in a neat, backslanted feminine hand: three names followed by three series of numbers. All of the names and numbers had heavy lines drawn through them, like items crossed off on a grocery list.
Rykman 56 57 59 62 63 116 — I25 171 — I75-
25,
Boyer 214–231 235 239–247 255-25,000 Huddleston 178 180 205–211 360 415-420-50,
None of that meant anything to me. I put the paper into the same pocket with the gun, moved on to the sliding doors. They were securely locked, with one of those dead-bolt latches that are supposed to be impossible to force from outside. Adjacent was a wide dormer-style window split into vertical halves that fastened in the center, so you could open them inward on a hot day to let in the sea breeze. The halves were also locked-a simple bar-type catch on one that flipped over and fit inside a bracket on the other- and there was more of the wrought-iron burglar proofing bolted over them on the outside.
I stood at the glass doors, peering out. From there you had an impressive view down a long rocky slope to where the Pacific rolled up foam in a secluded cove, framed on both sides by skyscraping redwoods. But it wasn’t the view that had my attention; it was what appeared to be a strip of film, about three inches in length, that was caught on a railing splinter off to one side and fluttering in the wind. I debated whether or not to unlatch the doors and go out there for a closer look. I was still debating when somebody came clumping up onto the front porch.
The noise brought me around. The front door was still open, and I watched it fill up with six feet of a youngish, flaxen-haired guy dressed in tennis whites and carrying a covered racquet. He said, “What’s going on here? Who are you?” Then he got to where he could see the body on the rug, and Lauren Speers unconscious in the chair, and he said, “Christ!” in an awed voice.
Right away, to avoid trouble, I told him my name, my profession, and the fact that I had come to Xanadu to see Lauren Speers on a business matter. Then I asked him, “Who would you be?”
“Joe Craig.” He seemed stunned, confused; his eyes kept shifting away from me to the body. “I work here-I’m one of the tennis pros.”
I gestured at the racquet in his hand. “Is that why you came by just now?”
“Yes. Ms. Speers and I had a three o’clock tennis lesson. My cottage is nearby, and I was going to ride down to the courts with her.”
There was a telephone on another burl table beside the couch. I went to it and rang up the resort office. And spent five minutes and a lot of breath explaining three times to three different people that there had been a shooting in Number Forty-one and somebody was dead. None of the three wanted to believe it. A killing in Xanadu? Things like that just didn’t happen. The first one referred me to the second, and the second to the third; the third guy, who said he was Resident Director Mitchell, maintained his disbelief for a good two minutes before a kind of horrified indignation took over and he promised to notify the county police immediately.
Craig had gone over to Lauren Speers and was down on one knee beside her, chafing one of her hands. “Maybe we should take her outside,” he said. “Let her have some air.”
That was a reasonable suggestion. I helped him get her up out of the chair, and as we hauled her across to the door I asked him, “Do you know the dead woman?”
“God, yes. Bernice Dolan, Ms. Speers’s secretary. Did Ms. Speers do that to her? Shoot her like that?”
“So it would seem.” On the porch we put her onto a wrought-iron chaise longue, and Craig went after her hand again. “There’s nobody else here, the balcony doors and all the windows are locked from the inside, and I was down on the path with a clear look at the front door when it happened.”
He shook his head. “I knew they weren’t getting along,” he said, “but I never thought it would lead to anything like this.”
“How did you know they weren’t getting along?”
“Bernice told me.”
“Did you know her well?”
“We dated a couple of times-nothing serious.” Another headshake. “I can’t believe she’s dead.”
“What was the trouble between them?”
“Well, Ms. Speers is writing a book. Or rather, dictating one. All about some of the important people she’s known and some of the things she’s been mixed up in, in the past.”
“Such as?”
“I don’t know. But the book is full of scandalous material, apparently. She’d got her hands on all sorts of letters and documents, and she quoted some of them at length. Bernice’d had some editorial experience in Los Angeles and kept telling her she couldn’t do that because some of the material was criminal and most of it was libelous. But that didn’t seem to matter to Ms. Speers; she said she was going to publish it anyway, if she had to pay for it herself. They were always arguing about it.”
“Why didn’t she just fire Bernice?”
“I guess she was afraid Bernice would Ago to some of the people mentioned in the book, out of spite or something, and stir up trouble.”
“Were their arguments ever violent?”
“I think so. Bernice was afraid of her. She’d have quit herself if she hadn’t needed the money.”
But even if Lauren Speers was prone to violence, I thought, why would she shoot her secretary no more than two minutes after returning from an after-lunch drive? That was how long it had been between the time I saw her go inside and the time the gun went off: two minutes, maximum.
Craig’s hand chafing was finally having an effect. Speers made a low moaning sound, her eye lids fluttered and slid up, and she winced. Her stare was glassy and blank for three or four seconds; the pupils looked as if they were afloat in bloody milk. Then memory seemed to come back to her and her eyes focused, her body jerked as if an electrical current had passed through it.
“Oh my God!” she said. “Bernice!”
“Easy,” Craig said. “It’s all over now.”
“Joe? What are you doing here?”
“Our tennis date, remember?”
“I don’t remember anything. Oh God, my head …” Then she saw me standing there. “Who’re you?”
We got it established who I was and more or less why I was present. She did not seem to care; she pushed herself off the chaise longue before I was done talking and went inside. She was none too steady on her feet, but when Craig tried to take her arm she smacked his hand away. One long look at the body produced a shudder and sent her rushing into the kitchen. I heard the banging of cupboard doors, the clink of glassware; a few seconds later she came back with a cut-glass decanter in her right hand and an empty tumbler in her left. The decanter was full of something colorless that was probably gin.