I went over as she started to pour and took both decanter and tumbler away from her. “No more liquor,” I said. “You’ve had plenty.”
Her eyes snapped at me, full of sudden savagery.
“You fat son of a bitch-how dare you! Give it back to me!”
“No,” I said, thinking: Fat son of a bitch. Yeah. I put my back to her and went down the hall into the bathroom. She came after me, calling me more names; clawed at my arm and hand while I emptied the gin into the washbasin. I yelled to Craig to get her off me, and he came and did that.
There was blood on the back of my hand where she’d scratched me. I washed it off, dabbed the scratch with iodine from the medicine cabinet. Speers was back on the chaise longue when I returned to the porch, Craig beside her looking nonplussed. She was shaking and she looked sick, shrunken, as if all her flesh had contracted inside her skin. But the fury was still alive in those green eyes, — they kept right on ripping away at me.
I asked her, “What happened here today?”
“Go to hell, “she said.
“Why did you kill Bernice Dolan?”
“Go to-What? My God, you don’t think I did it?”
“That’s how it looks.”
“But I didn’t, I couldn’t have …”
“You were drunk,” I said. “Maybe that explains it.”
“Of course I was drunk. But I don’t kill people when I’m drunk. I go straight to bed and sleep it off.”
“Except today, maybe.”
“I told you, you bastard, I didn’t kill her!”
“Look, lady, I’m tired of you calling me names. I don’t like it and I don’t want to listen to it anymore. Maybe you killed your secretary and maybe you didn’t. If you didn’t, then you’d better start acting like a human being. The way you’ve been carrying on, you look guilty as sin.”
She opened her mouth, shut it again. Some of the heat faded out of her eyes. “I didn’t do it,” she said, much calmer, much more convincing.
“All right. What did happen?”
“I don’t know. I heard the shot, I came out of the bedroom, and there she was all twisted and bloody, with the gun on the floor….”
“A.25 caliber Beretta. Your gun?”
“Yes. My gun.”
“Where do you usually keep it?”
“In the nightstand in my bedroom.”
“Did you take it out today for any reason?”
“No.”
“Did Bernice have it when you got back?”
A blank look. “Got back?”
“From wherever you went this afternoon.”
“Away from Xanadu? In my car?”
“Are you saying you don’t remember?”
“Okay, I have memory lapses sometimes when I’ve been drinking. Blackouts-an hour or two. But I don’t normally go out driving …”
The misery in her voice made her sound vulnerable, almost pathetic. I still didn’t like her much, but she was in a bad way-physically, emotion ally, and circumstantially-and she needed all the help she could get. Beginning with me. Maybe.
I said, “You normally come back here, is that right?”
“Yes. I thought that’s what I did today, after lunch. I remember starting back in the cart … but that’s all. Nothing else until I heard the shot and found Bernice.”
Out on the main path I heard the whirring of an oncoming cart. A short time later two middle-aged guys, both dressed in expensive summer suits, came running through the trees and up onto the porch. The taller of them, it developed, was Resident Director Mitchell; the other one, short and sporting a caterpillarlike mustache, was Xanadu’s chief of security.
The first thing they did was to go inside and gape at the body. When they came out again I explained what had happened so far as I knew it, and what I was doing in Xanadu in the first place. Speers did not react to the fact that I’d come to serve her with a subpoena. Death makes every other problem inconsequential.
She had begun to look even sicker; her skin had an unhealthy grayish tinge. When Mitchell and the security chief moved off the porch for a conference, she got up and hurried into the cottage. I went in after her, to make sure she didn’t touch anything or go for another stash of gin. But it was the bathroom she wanted this time; five seconds after she shut the door, retching sounds filtered out through it.
I stepped into her bedroom and took a turn around it without putting my hands on any of its surfaces. The bed was rumpled, and the rest of the room looked the same-scattered clothing, jars of cosmetics, bunches of dog-eared paperback books. There were also half a dozen framed photographs of well-groomed men, all of them signed with the word “love.”
The retching noises had stopped when I came out, and I could hear water running in the bathroom. I moved down to the other, smaller bedroom. Desk with an electric portable typewriter and a dictating machine on its top. No photographs and nothing much else on the furniture. No sign of a manuscript, either; that would be locked away somewhere, I thought.
The sliding closet door was ajar, so I put my head through the opening. The closet was empty except for two bulky suitcases. I nudged both with my foot and both seemed to be packed full.
Half a minute after I returned to the living room, Lauren Speers reappeared. When she saw me she ducked her head and said, “Don’t look at me, I look like hell.” But I looked at her anyway. I also blocked her way to the door.
Using my handkerchief, I took out the piece of notepaper I had found earlier and held it up where she could see what was written on it. “Do you have any idea what this is, Ms. Speers?” She started to reach for it, but I said, “No, don’t touch it. Just look.”
She looked. “I never saw it before,” she said.
“Is the handwriting familiar?”
“Yes. It’s Bernice’s.”
“From the looks of it, she was left-handed.”
“Yes, she was. If that matters.”
“The three names here-are they familiar?”
“Yes. James Huddleston is the former state attorney general. Edward Boyer and Samuel Rykman are both prominent businessmen.”
“Close friends of yours?”
Her mouth turned crooked. “Not anymore.”
“Why is that?”
“Because they’re bastards.”
“Oh?”
“And one is an out-and-out thief.”
“Which one?”
She shook her head-there was a feral gleam in her eyes now-and started past me. I let her go. Then I put the paper away again, followed her onto the porch.
The security chief had planted himself on the cottage path to wait for the county police; Craig was down there with him. The resident director had disappeared somewhere, probably to go do something about protecting Xanadu’s reputation. Nobody was paying any attention to me, so I went down and along a packed-earth path that skirted the far side of the cottage.
At the rear there were steps leading up onto the balcony. I climbed them and took a look at the strip of film I had noticed earlier, caught on a wood splinter through one of several small holes along its edge. It was the stiff and sturdy kind they use to make slides-the kind that wouldn’t bend easily under a weight laid on it edgewise.
I paced around for a time, looking at this and that. Then I stood still and stared down at the ocean spray boiling over the rocks below, not really seeing it, looking at some things inside my head instead. I was still doing that when more cart noises sounded out front, two or three carts this time, judging from the magnified whirring and whining. County cops, I thought. Nice timing, too.