Duryea said, “Unfortunately, I’m not in a position to follow my private inclinations. I’m a public official engaged in rather a delicate matter. If she has her bathing suit, I’m going to have to crawl into a hole and pull the hole in after me. If she doesn’t, I’ll have to be tactful but insistent in my questions. I can hardly go around pulling people off yachts and accusing them of various crimes just because I have made a mistake in the pattern of a bathing suit.”
Milred said, “Come on, Gramps. Let’s go rescue him. After all, Gramps, you’re not a public official. If she gets too snooty, you can act the part of a lecherous old man, and make her think Frank is a paragon of virtue.”
Gramps said indignantly, “I don’t mind bein’ lecherous, but I ain’t agoin’ to be called old. I ain’t old. I’ve only been here a long time.”
Duryea, obviously somewhat embarrassed, piloted them into his private office, and introduced Milred. Miss Harpler, making the usual polite protestations of pleasure when introduced to Mrs. Duryea, added, “It’s really splendid of you to come, Mrs. Duryea. I suppose I shouldn’t have expressed doubt of your husband’s ability to concentrate on abstract problems while watching me change my clothes, but... well...”
“Oh, I know how it is,” Milred said. “Even county officials have their moments of being human — although perhaps you wouldn’t believe it. But you won’t need to worry. When I’m along, you’ll find that he is most discreet.”
Duryea said curtly, “And my wife’s grandfather, Mr. Wiggins.”
Joan Harpler gave him her hand. “Oh, your grandfather, too!” she said. “How nice! Really, Mr. Duryea, you are the soul of discretion. Two generations of chaperons! It will be a pleasure to model my suit for...”
“I didn’t ask you to model it,” Duryea interrupted.
“Oh, didn’t you? I thought you wanted me to put it on, and...”
“I wanted to see it on you to make certain that it fitted.”
“Dear, dear,” Joan Harpler said. “You’d really be surprised at how thoroughly painstaking the law enforcement officers are these days. And I have a party dress, Mr. Duryea, which isn’t quite right across the hips. Perhaps you’d care to look at that too?”
Duryea, flushing angrily, started to say something, when Gramps Wiggins beat him to the punch. “He’s purty busy,” he said, his eyes twinkling over the tops of his steel-rimmed glasses. “If you’re real anxious to show your hips to somebody, try me.”
She turned on him savagely. “I’m not anxious to show my hips. I ask only to be let alone. I had a very important dinner date this evening, and I’m being called on to sacrifice my time and convenience because the district attorney of Santa Delbarra is interested in the expression on the face of a seal on my bathing suit!”
“I know just how you feel,” Milred said suavely. “But do you know, Miss Harpler, my husband is a very determined man.”
“I suppose you found that out right after you were married,” Miss Harpler said.
Milred lowered her eyes demurely. “And as much as three or four weeks before,” she said.
Miss Harpler gave her a quick glance, then decided she had been outflanked. “Shall we go?” she asked.
They drove to her yacht. Miss Harpler asked icily, “I sup-pose I’ll be permitted to change in private.”
“Certainly.”
Milred said chidingly, “Frank, don’t you think that was rather a curt refusal?”
Miss Harpler flared. “I wasn’t inviting him to watch me change.”
“Oh,” Milred said in a tone which intimated she had some doubt on the subject. “He could, at least, have hesitated.”
Miss Harpler left them seated in the cabin, retired to the lower cabin, to emerge presently in a tight-fitting rubber bathing suit on which a succession of pelicans were shown soaring along the edges of breaking waves, with occasionally a pelican diving into the breakers. Smiling seals, their heads thrust up from the painted waters, smirked cynically.
Duryea said uncomfortably, “Thank you very much, Miss Harpler. That’s all.”
“Oh,” she said with surprise. “But I thought you wanted to look in the seals’ eyes, and investigate whether the pelicans were actually getting fish. Wasn’t that one of the important clues in solving your murder, Mr. Duryea?”
Gramps got up and walked over to her. “Yep,” he said, “gotta find out about that,” and he bent over, carefully adjusting his glasses.
She looked at him and said chidingly, “Such a fatherly looking man, too.”
“Yep,” Gramps announced, entirely unashamed. “Lots o’ times they call me Daddy. Just a minute now. Hold still, Miss Harpler. I ain’t goin’ to bite you:” He walked slowly around her, surveying the bathing suit.
“Satisfied?” she asked icily.
Gramps beamed down at her. “My curiosity is.”
She turned and marched from the room.
Milred said, “Well, that certainly fits her, Frank. You have to admit that.”
“Like a rubber glove,” Duryea said.
“And,” his wife pointed out, “don’t think she doesn’t know it. After all, Frank, you don’t need to be so embarrassed. It was bought for that purpose, you know.”
Chapter 25
Duryea pushed back his chair from the table, reached in his pocket for a cigar.
“Heard anything from Gramps?” Milred asked.
He clipped off the end of the cigar and said, “He’s probably out prowling. I suppose the comparative respectability of associating with us has been a strain, and he doesn’t intend to let it interfere with his weekly prowling.”
“Don’t underestimate my grandfather,” she said. “From the gossip which used to percolate through the Wiggins family and which I was considered too young and unsophisticated to hear about, I gather that Gramps has established a seven-day-a-week prowling record.”
Duryea said, “I wish he’d taken me with him. That damn bathing-suit business puts me in a most embarrassing position. I can’t get over the way...”
“Oh, forget it, Frank,” she said. “You just let that girl get your goat. She knew she had it, and was deriving a great deal of enjoyment from hearing it bleat.”
“She was really in the right.”
“Bosh! She couldn’t have stopped Gramps with a line like that, and she knew it.”
“Well,” Duryea said, looking at his watch, “if we can get started before your estimable grandfather returns from what-ever adventure is holding him at the moment, we can get to see a movie which isn’t a mystery.”
She laughed. “That’s an invitation?”
“Definitely.”
“I’ll put on my things,” she said, then paused by his chair, bent over and placed her lips to his. When she straightened, Duryea said, “That takes my mind off the events of the afternoon very nicely, thank you.”
“That,” she observed archly as she swept across the room, “was one of my objectives.”
Duryea settled back in his chair, lit a cigar, and had entirely recovered his good humor by the time he and Milred were ensconced in loge seats.
He was rudely dragged back to the responsibilities of his job some fifteen minutes later when an usher tapped him on the shoulder. “You’re wanted on the telephone, Mr. Duryea. They say it’s important.”
“Excuse me a minute, dear.”
She said, “I’ll go with you, Frank, if it should be anything really important and you have to go, I’ll...”
“I’ll see that the seats are held,” the usher promised.
Duryea went to the telephone booth, closeted himself within it, and Milred could see his face show surprise, then angry indignation.