“Simon.”
“That’s nice. It’s—different, you know? Sexy.” She picked up her drink, watching me over the rim of the glass, and slugged down a good big swallow. “The way you came in, I thought you might be the wronged husband of some broad he’s shacking up with. But you said you didn’t know her name.”
“That’s right, I don’t.”
“So you’re not the wronged husband. Who are you?”
“Does it matter?” I said. “You’re sure you don’t know where I might find him?”
She shook her head, giving me a while-the-cat’s-away leer. Her upper body stirred, twisting toward me as she set the drink down; her nipples made hardened dents against the robe. When I didn’t react in keeping with the invitation she pouted with her mouth and looked down at her drink. “I’ll bet he’s keeping one of those cheap Mafia broads—some gangster’s gun moll. He’s thick as thieves with the mobsters, did you know that?”
“Yeah. I know that.”
“Why, I’ll bet you’re one of them.”
“One of what?”
“A hoodlum. Is that what you are?” She seemed more excited and pleased than alarmed. She laughed. “That would just serve him right, wouldn’t it?” Then, quickly, she shifted her seat and tugged at the cloth belt. Her garment came apart; the heavy breasts burst free. She touched her damp palm to my cheek and whispered, “I’m a woman, Simon. I need what every woman needs.”
“Right now,” I stated truthfully, “I feel like having sex about as much as I feel like having a cucumber sandwich.”
“In that case,” she said, undismayed, “I’ll just have to seduce you.” She gripped my shirt collar and pulled me close.
I extricated myself and stood up. She growled a hoarse obscenity and reached for her drink, and upended it defiantly. Her expression didn’t change. She said, “I drink a lot. Do you mind? It helps keep your guts in.” Her tongue was starting to thicken.
I said, “Tell me about him and the Mafia. You said he’s thick as thieves with them.”
“Did I?” Her head was slightly tilted. She put the burning cigarette in the corner of her mouth and it sent a thin slow jet of smoke past her half-shuttered eye. Squinting up at me, she said, “Who the hell are you, anyway?”
“An interested party.”
“You’re one of them. I knew it. A hoodlum. You want to find him so you can kill him.”
“Why should I want to kill him?”
“You know perfectly well.” She was glazed, mumbling in thickening syllables. “He told me he had some kind of—he called it a beef, against the Mafia. He said he had a lot of evidence against them and if he can’t straighten things out with them he’ll release some of it to the newspapers. He says it’s enough to blow the Mafia sky-high, and a lot of politicians with it.”
The stuff I had put in her drink, chloral hydrate from sleeping capsules, wasn’t supposed to act as a truth serum, but it seemed to be having that effect. Either that or the alcohol had entirely wiped out her inhibitions against disclosing dangerous secrets. Or maybe she was just getting revenge on him.
It didn’t matter any more; she crumpled slowly and lay inert. I straightened her out on the couch, tested her pulse, closed the bathrobe around her, and began to subject the house to a painstaking search.
The sun threw a last burst of light along the horizon. I emerged from the house empty-handed except for a key case I’d lifted from Sylvia’s purse. I used it to let myself into the garage, and spent ten minutes climbing rafters and seeking cubbyholes. Nothing. I went back to the house and put the keys back in her bag. Where else? His office, I supposed. Or the car he was driving—her car, she’d said. There was no question in my mind what kind of car it was. I’d never seen it but it had to be a Cadillac and it had to be pink
I left her on the couch, snoring, and let the lock click shut behind me when I went outside. In plum-colored dusk I drove up toward the foothills. I stopped once, to telephone Nancy’s house and talk to Joanne. I told her, in a voice so weary it alarmed her, that I was on a warm trail and would see her soon. “Don’t set fire to your hope chest just yet,” I said lamely, and hung up, and got back in the Jeep to climb the foothill street.
On the way up I paid no attention to the bright neon display on the flats below. It was fully dark by the time I drove across the deserted parking area, past the brightly lit windows of the expensive shops that were closed for the night but lighted against burglars. I didn’t park in front this time; I found the service road and drove around back, out along the narrow asphalt path that hugged the rim of the hill the way the mountain road hugged the cliff where Ed Behrenman had made his plunge. Quite a bit of light flowed up here from the illuminated city below.
The back door of a pharmacy had a neon sign that spattered and fizzed.
The pink Cadillac four-door sedan was parked at the end of the service road. I rolled the Jeep to a quiet stop behind it. The adrenalin pumping through my body made my hands shake.
I had to walk past the Cadillac to get to the back door of the place, but I was interrupted by the sight of the man slumped in the driver’s seat of the big car. I stopped, lifted the Beretta, and gingerly reached inside to shake him. It was Dr. Fred Brawley, but what the hell was he doing asleep in the Cadillac?
He wasn’t asleep. He was dead. When I touched him he pitched over on his right shoulder and didn’t move. I opened the door and examined him by the light of the dash and map lights. He had been shot in the back of the head by a bullet of sufficiently small caliber and low velocity to lodge in the skull; it had made no exit wound in front.
I felt sinking disgust and a coiling tension in my groin, the acid sense of failure. Somebody had beat me to him. Somebody else had found him out, killed him and taken the loot. I was right back where I’d started.
The corpse was still warm; he hadn’t been dead more than a few minutes. Maybe there was still a chance. I withdrew from the car, glancing into the back seat—a suitcase and an overcoat. I opened the suitcase: just clothes. Brawley had been traveling light.
The quadrangular medical office building had been locked up for the night, I supposed, but when I glanced up at the corner picture-window ten feet above my head I saw the wink of a small light traveling across the glass in reflection. Someone was inside Brawley’s office with a pencil flashlight. Blood pumping, I walked around the Cadillac to the back door of the building.
The metal door had been jimmied open; it stood slightly ajar. I pushed softly inside, taking the Beretta off safety and holding it at ready. As I climbed the stairs toward the upper floor—that was the ground floor if you entered from the front; the pitch of the hill made the difference—my nostrils detected the lingering firecracker scent of cordite sulfur.
The stairwell was dark. I went up on tiptoes. At the head of the stairs the door stood wide open, giving out into the long corridor. At the end of the hall I could see the faint reflections of the moving flashlight around the corner in the office. I went forward along the soundless carpet, gripping the Beretta, taut with the knowledge that if the man was still searching for it then he hadn’t found it.
I eased up to the open office door and slowly put my head around the jamb, and saw him.
He had his back to me. He was trying to get the safe open. He had tools; the pencil light was in his teeth and he was using both hands on the tools. The little electric drill was whining with the particular whine of a diamond bit. I had a drill like that; I use it on rocks.