He nodded several times.
“And for God’s sake, take it easy with him, Harlan. I don’t believe that he’s a commercial killer. But he could turn out to be a passional one.”
Lister had the virtue of punctuality, at least. At one minute to twelve, an old Buick sedan appeared from the direction of downtown Santa Monica. It pulled up at the curb a hundred feet short of the hotel entrance. Lister got out and locked his car. His beret and dark glasses gave him the look of a decadent Viking.
I was parked across the wide boulevard, facing in the wrong direction. As soon as Lister had entered the hotel, I U-turned and found a parking space a few cars behind the Buick. I got out for a closer look at it.
Its blue paint was faded and almost hidden by road grime. The fenders were crumpled. I peered through the dusty glass at the luggage on the back seat: a woman’s airplane set with the monogram MH, a man’s scuffed leather bag covered with European hotel labels and steamship stickers, a canvas haversack stuffed with oblong shapes which were probably books. A long object wrapped in brown paper leaned across the luggage. It had the shape of a spade.
I looked around. There were too many people on the street for me to do a windwing job.
Back in my own car, I made a note of the license number and waited. The blue glare from the sea, relayed by the chrome of passing cars, bothered my eyes. I put on a pair of sunglasses. A few minutes later, Lister appeared on the sidewalk, swaggering towards me. He had taken off his dark glasses, and his blue eyes seemed to be popping from white lids. He looked elated. I remembered what Schilling had said about his manic side, and wished I could see the lower part of his face, where danger often shows. Perhaps the beard had a purpose.
Lister got into the Buick and headed north. I trailed him through heavy noon traffic at a variable distance. He drove with artistic abandon, burning rubber at the Sunset stoplight. Six or eight miles north of it he turned off the highway, tires screeching again. I braked hard and took the turn onto gravel
The gravel road slanted steeply up a hillside. The Buick disappeared over the rim. I ate my way through its dust to the top and saw it a quarter-mile ahead, going fast. The road wound down into a small closed valley where a few ranch houses stood in cultivated fields. A tractor clung like a slow orange beetle to the far hillside. The air between was so still that the Buick’s dust hung like a colloid over the road. I ate another couple of miles of it, by way of lunch.
Beyond the third and last ranch house, a County sign announced: This is not a through road. A rusty mailbox sagged on a post beside it. I caught a glimpse of the faded stenciling on the mailbox. “Leonard Lister,” I thought it said.
The Buick was far ahead by now, spinning into the defile between two bluffs at the inner end of the valley. It spun out of sight. The road got worse, became a single dirt track rutted and eroded by the rains of many springs. At its narrowest point an old landslide almost blocked it.
I was so taken up with the road that I almost passed the house before I noticed it. It stood far back, at the end of a eucalyptus-shadowed lane. I saw the Buick, standing empty, through the trees; and I kept on going. When I was out of sight of the house I turned my car and left it with the doors locked.
I climbed through yellow mustard and purple lupine to a point from which I could look down on the house. It was a ruin. Its cracked stucco walls leaned crazily. Part of the tile roof had caved in. I guessed that it had been abandoned when water undermined its foundations. Rank geraniums rioted in the front yard, and wild oats stood fender-high around the Buick.
In the back yard, close against the wall of the house, a broad-backed man was digging a hole. The bright iron of his spade flashed now and then in the sun. I moved down the slope towards him. The hole was about six feet long by two feet wide. Lister’s head, when he paused to rest, cast a jut-jawed shadow at the foot of the stucco wall.
I sat down with the yellow mustard up to my eyes, and watched him work. After a while he took his shirt off. His heavy white shoulders were peppered with reddish freckles. The metal of his spade was losing its brightness. In an hour the hole was approximately four feet deep. Lister’s red hair was dark with sweat, and his arms were running with it. He stuck the spade into the pile of adobe he had dug, and went into the house.
I started down the hillside. A hen pheasant whirred up from under my feet. In the glazed stillness, its wings made a noise like a jato take-off. I watched the house but there was no response, no face at the broken windows. I stepped over the sagging wire fence and crossed the back yard.
The door hung open on what had been a back kitchen. Its floor was littered with broken plaster which crunched under my feet. Through the bare ribs of the ceiling daylight gleamed. The silence was finely stitched with a tiny tumult of insects. I thought I could hear the murmur of voices somewhere; then the sound of heavy footsteps moved towards me through the house.
I had my revolver ready. Lister came through the inner doorway, carrying a burlap bundle upright in his arms. His head was craned awkwardly sideways, watching his feet, and he failed to see me until I spoke.
“Hold it, gravedigger.”
His head came up, eyes wide and blue in the red sweat-streaked face. His reaction was incredibly quick and strong. Without losing a step he came forward, thrusting his bundle out at arm’s length into my face. I fired as I went down backwards with the burlap thing on top of me. I pushed it off. It was heavy and stiff, like refrigerated meat. One of Lister’s heels stamped down on my gun hand, the other came into my face. The daylight in the ceiling glimmered redly and died.
When my eyes blinked open, sunlight stabbed into them from the open door. One of my arms was numb, pinned under the thing in the burlap shroud. I disengaged myself from its embrace and sat up against the wall. The rumor of insects sounded in my head like small-arms fire between the heavy artillery of my pulse. I sat poised for a while between consciousness and unconsciousness. Then my vision cleared. I dabbed at my swollen face with my usable hand.
My revolver lay on the floor. I picked it up and spun the cylinder: its chambers had been emptied. Still sitting, I dragged the burlap bundle towards me and untied the twine that held its wrapping in place. Peeling the burlap down with a shaky hand, I saw a lock of black wavy hair stiff with blood.
I got up and unwrapped the body completely. It was the body of a woman who had been beautiful. Its beauty was marred by a depressed contusion which cut slantwise like a groove across the left temple. Bending close, I could also see a pair of purplish ovals on the front of the throat. Thumbprints. Her skin shone like ivory in the light from the doorway. I covered her with the burlap. Then I noticed that my wallet was lying open on the floor. Nothing seemed to be missing from it, but the photostat of my license was halfway out of its holder.
I went through the house. It was a strange place for a honeymoon, even for a honeymoon that ended in murder. There were no lights, and no furniture, with the exception of some patio furniture – canvas chairs and a redwood chaise with a ruptured pad – in what had been the living room. This room had a fairly weatherproof ceiling, and was clearly the one that Lister and his wife had occupied. There were traces of a recent fire in the fireplace: burned fragments of eucalyptus bark and a few scraps of scorched cloth. The ashes were not quite cold.
I crossed the room to the wooden chaise, noticing the marks of a woman’s heels in the dust on the floor. In the dust beside the chaise someone had written three words in long sloping script: Ora pro nobis. The meaning of the phrase came back to me across twenty years or more. Ora pro nobis. Pray for us. Now and in the hour of our death…