“Summation, Sergeant?”
“Who, me? Okay D. C. Ives was very shifty and clever and careful. But one night he forgot to be careful and one of his pigeons got to him. When Bogen heard his boss was dying, he used his own key to get in. He took the dirty pictures and the money and ran.”
“So that makes it a dead end for me, Sergeant.”
“Are you sure?”
“It was just a favor for a friend.”
Eleven
WE LEFT early Thursday morning and drove down to the city, to Lysa Dean’s canyon home, secluded behind an impressive pink wall. The staff was cut down to one Korean couple, maid and gardener. When he recognized Dana, he smiled broadly and unlocked the big metal gates for us. It was a hot day. The wall enclosed about one acre. A Mexican architect had done the house for her and the third husband. I guess you could call it Cuernavaca Aztec.
Dana showed me around. The plantings were splendid. The pool was drained. The dogs had been boarded. Walking through the silence of terrazzo, puffy white rugs, dark paneling removed from ancient churches, I counted five full-length oil portraits of the owner. And not one of an ex-husband.
Dana wanted to get different clothes. She showed me how she was set up. A small functional suite opposite the service area, with a rather stark bedroom, a large and luxurious bath, a small tidy office with a row of large gray filing cabinets, a battleship desk. There was a picture in the bedroom, Dana, younger, glowing, intense-holding the new baby in her arms. A young man with a homely, crooked, likable face was staring down at the child too, his arm around his wife.
She saw me glance at it and said, too imperatively, “Please wait for me out there in the office. This won’t take a minute.”
On an office shelf I saw bound, gold-lettered scripts for the Lysa Dean movies. Winds of Chance was among them. I took it down and opened it at random. It seemed highly improbable to me that anyone, living or dead, had ever said lines like that.
I put the script back on the shelf and paced restlessly. There were loose ends. A lot of them. But I could not see how they were pertinent to what I’d been asked to do. I couldn’t recover any of the money Lysa Dean had paid Ives.
It seemed reasonably evident that Bogen had gone into business for himself. His note to Lysa sounded as Starr had described him. He would have picked up a few crude lab techniques from Ives. If the police had been looking for him for three months without success, I didn’t have much chance of reaching out and picking him up.
We could fly east and catch Lysa in New York. Make a report. Working a complaint through normal police channels, we could get all there was in the files on Bogen. The people responsible for protecting the star could be alerted to watch for anybody who might be Bogen. If she insisted, maybe we could work out a way to trap him, using her as bait. With a little bit of judgment and a lot of luck, I had pushed it about as far as I could.
I could make a few guesses. Bogen had fled with a good piece of money and a whole stack of unpleasant pictures, and holed up, perhaps in Los Angeles. He’d fled on December 6th. Those pictures could seriously upset an already disturbed mind. It was highly unlikely that he could have lifted any neat little list of names and addresses. Maybe the pictures covered quite a few of Ives’ quiet ventures. If Bogen wanted to get cute with anyone, he would be restricted to those faces he could recognize. Maybe there were a few more celebrity faces in the stack.
What was the time sequence? In early January, a month after he fled Santa Rosita, he was out in Las Vegas leaving off the package for Lysa Dean at the desk at The Sands. The columns would have located her for him. No further contact in two months. Was he busy bugging some other famous people who had been captured by Ives’ sneaky lens? Was he waiting for Lysa Dean to come back to the Los Angeles area?
At any rate, it would be a comfort to her to know the kind of nut who was running around with pictures that could ruin her, to know his name and his appearance. She would have to decide what that much was worth. I’d dug a pretty good hole in the expense money.
Ives’ murderer was none of my business. The list of possibilities would have to be as long as my arm.
But I didn’t like the way this one was ending. And I couldn’t see Lysa Dean being ecstatic about it either.
Dana came out of her bedroom. She wore a pretty green outfit, and carried her repacked suitcase. She said, too cheerfully, “Are we ready?”
She seemed very tense. I went and took the suitcase from her. With a quaver in her cheerful voice, she said, “This place gets on my nerves. It never did before. I don’t know why. I feel as if I hardly know the Dana Holtzer who lives here. I expect her to come in and ask me who the hell I am.”
“Watch out for her. A very icy broad.”
She paused in the doorway to look at me, her expression at once vulnerable and wary. “Travis?”
“Yes, honey”
“I can’t take too much change. So please don’t. Things that get brittle… they break, you know.”
“I like you. That’s all it is.”
She nodded. “But we have laughed too much. Do you understand that?”
“I understand that. And you’ll be back in harness tonight.”
“That picture you saw in there. Did it explain anything?”
“I could have drawn it from memory before I even saw it. You don’t have to be explained to me. I don’t have to make adjustments with you and to you. Hell with it. Let’s go get on our airplane.” I tilted her chin up, kissed the corner of her mouth closest to the crooked tooth. A little peck, like cousins. So she smiled, and one tear spilled, and I followed her in flight, clackety-whack across terrazzo, green skirt whipping, powerful calves clenching, back very straight and head held high.
We had twenty minutes before they called the flight. Our gear was checked aboard. Early afternoon. I bought a paper. I was scanning it. The name jumped out at me from a small item on page one of the second section. Casino employee slain in Las Vegas. Patricia Davies bludgeoned at doorstep of trailer last night. Once married to sportsman Vance M’Gruder.
Without a word I pointed it out and handed it to Dana. She looked at me, her eyes wide. “I can’t pass that up,” I said. “It could be Sammy.”
“But… our luggage is…”
“Dana, you go on to New York. Take care of my stuff at the other end. I’ll check this out and be along.”
“But I’m supposed to stay with you.”
I took hold of her wrists and gave her a little shake. “You have to go to New York. You’re a big girl. I don’t have to draw diagrams for you. You and I have… run out of time.”
She held my gaze and her mouth made the shape of that word. Time. Without making a sound. The strength in her face was softened. And younger. “Thank you,” she said solemnly. “Thank you, Travis, for knowing when the time ran out.”
I released her, turning away, saying, “Your boss expects you. So go ahead.”
She murmured something about arranging my ticket, and went off into the throng. I watched her go, and for an instant had in my mind the grotesque and unworthy image of the time when you feel the tarpon pick up speed for that last, great, heart-busting leap, and see him go high and see him, right at the peak of it, give that final snap of his head that throws your lure back into your lap. The image wasn’t even accurate. I’d turned conservationist. I’d let the line go slack and said goodby.
I waited. And waited. Her flight was called. I went to the gate. I did not see her. I went to the airline desk. They checked the manifest for me. Slowly. Sir, the passenger canceled before flight time. I felt fear, worry, irritation. I had played the whole game too loosely, too confidently, and maybe somebody very fast and bright had moved out of the shadows.
I prowled the martian reaches of the terminal, searching for my girl in green. And found her, saw her through the glass front of a men’s shop. I went striding in. A clerk was helping her. She gave me a startled and guilty look, then swung all that vivid force of personality upon me, saying, “Darling, I told you I’d forget the shirt sizes. It’s such a damn nuisance losing luggage. Are these all right? Wash-and-wear, so we could make do with two, don’t you think? But what size, dear?”