Orloff asked, “Why do you think Craig killed her?”
“The old double cross,” I said. “They’d collected all the extortion money; that’s evident from the way each of the three names is crossed out on that paper. Today was the last pickup, and I think they had it worked out that she would resign from Speer’s employ and Craig would resign from Xanadu and they’d go off somewhere together. Her closet is all cleaned out, and her bags are packed.”
“But Craig had other ideas?”
I nodded. “He knew when she was due back here, and he was waiting for her-outside on the rear balcony. When she let herself in he knocked on the window and gestured for her to open the two halves. After she did that he must have said something like, ‘Quick, lock the front door, take off the coat, and give me the wig and the money.’ She’d have thought there was some reason for the urgency, and she trusted him; so she did what he asked. And when she pulled the money out of the handbag she also pulled out the slip of paper. In her haste it fell to the floor, unnoticed.
“As soon as Craig had the wig and the money he took out the Beretta, which he’d swiped from Speer’s nightstand, and shot Bernice. And then threw the gun inside and pulled the halves of the window closed.”
“And locked them somehow from the outside,” the security guy said, “in the minute or two before you broke in? How could he do that?”
“It wasn’t all that difficult, considering the catch on those window halves is a bar type that flips over into a bracket. The gimmick he used was a thin but stiff strip of film. He lost it afterward without realizing it; you’ll find it still caught on a splinter on the balcony railing.
“The way he did it was to insert the filmstrip between the two halves and flip the catch over until it rested on the strip’s edge. Then he pulled the halves all the way closed, using his thumb and forefinger on the inner frames of each, and with his other hand he eased the strip downward until the catch dropped into the bracket. And then he withdrew the strip from the crack. With a little practice you could do the whole thing in thirty seconds.
“So far he had himself a perfect crime. He’d only have had to return to his cottage, get rid of the wig, stash the money, pick himself up a witness or two, and come back here and ‘find’ Speers locked up with the body. Under the circumstances he’d arranged, she would be the only one who could have committed the murder.
“What screwed him up was me showing up when I did. He heard me pounding on the door as he was working his trick with the filmstrip; he had just enough time to slip away into the woods before I broke in. But who was I? What had I seen and heard? The only way he could find out was to come back as soon as he’d dumped the wig and money. The fact that he showed up again in less than ten minutes means he didn’t dump them far away; they won’t be hard to find. There might even be a fingerprint on that filmstrip to nail your case down tight-”
Lauren Speers moved. Before anybody could stop her she charged over to where Craig was and slugged him in the face. Not a slap-a roundhouse shot with her closed fist. He staggered but didn’t go down. She went after him, using some of the words she had used on me earlier, and hit him again and tried to kick him here and there. It took Orloff, the security guy, and one of the patrolmen to pull her off.
It was another couple of hours before they let me leave Xanadu. During that time Orloff and his men found all the extortion money-$100,000 in cash-hidden in one of Craig’s bureau drawers; they also found the red wig in the garbage can behind his cottage. That was enough, along with my testimony, for them to place him under arrest on suspicion of homicide. From the looks of him, they’d have a full confession an hour after he was booked.
Just before I left I served Lauren Speers with the papers Brister had given me. She took them all right; she said it was the least she could do after I had practically saved her life. She also took one of my business cards and promised she would send me a check “as an appreciation,” but I doubted that she would. She was a lady too lost in alcohol and bitter memories, too involved in a quest for notoriety and revenge, to remember that sort of promise-running fast and going nowhere, as the comedian Fred Allen had once said, on a treadmill to oblivion.
I was too tired to want to drive all the way back to San Francisco, so I went up the coast as far as Big Sur and took a motel room for the night. I also bought myself a decent dinner in a place that overlooked the sea. Adam Brister would foot the bill for both as expense account items; I figured, after what had happened at Xanadu, that I was entitled.
Alone in my room, I tried to read one of the pulp magazines I keep in an overnight case with some toilet articles and a change of underwear, for motel stops such as this one. But I couldn’t concentrate. I kept thinking about Bernice Dolan lying there dead and bloody on the cottage floor, and about what her neighbor in the Cow Hollow apartment building had told me of Bernice’s passion for men and money. It was that passion, as much as Joe Craig, that had killed her. She had picked the wrong way to make herself rich, and the wrong man to share the wealth with. And the price she’d paid was as dear as they come.
I thought about Lauren Speers, too, and about Xanadu-the real one down the coast and the mythical one in the poem by Coleridge. “In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure-dome decree.” Places of idyllic beauty, in both cases. The stuff of dreams.
But they were not the same. The dreams in the one I had just visited were of tinsel and plastic and pastel colors; of beauty measured by wealth, happiness by material possessions. Some people could find fulfillment with those dreams and in that place. Others, like Lauren Speers and Bernice Dolan, were not so fortunate.
For them, the pleasure domes of Xanadu were the stuff of nightmares.
ELEVEN
I got back to San Francisco at one o’clock on Thursday afternoon. The weather had turned cold and foggy; the Transamerica pyramid and the rest of the high-rise buildings downtown were wrapped in streamers of mist. The whole city looked insubstantial, almost surreal, as if it, too, were a mythical principality-the stuff of dreams.
I drove straight to Drumm Street, found a parking place not far from my building, and went in to find out if there had been any calls in my absence. There had been, a whole slew of them. The first four turned out to be anonymous; in each case the thirty seconds of tape following my recorded message on the answering machine were blank. The last five calls had been from Eberhardt, Charles Kayabalian, Kerry, and reporters I didn’t know on both the Chronicle and the Examiner. None of them said what they wanted, just that I should get in touch right away; Kayabalian and Kerry both sounded grim.
Now what the hell was going on?
Kayabalian was the first one I called. He came on five seconds after I told his secretary who was on the line. “I was beginning to think you’d gone underground,” he said. “Where have you been?”
“Down the coast on a business matter. I just got back. What’s up?”
“Haven’t you read the paper?”
“Which paper?”
“This morning’s Chronicle.” “No. Listen, Charles, what-”
“Go out and buy a copy,” he said. “Read the story on page two. Then call me back.”
Worried now, I hustled out and bought a Chronicle from one of the newspaper vending machines down the block. On the way back, I opened up the news section to page two. And then stopped in the middle of the sidewalk, with fog and people swirling around me, and started to shake with rage.