“That’s all there is. Who are they, anyway?”
“Paola and Francesca in middle life.”
“Paola and Francesca? They don’t sound much like foreigners to me. They sound like you and I. Besides, she called him Cully.”
I made no comment.
“Did this Cully knock off Ben?”
“I don’t know.”
“You said the tape would clue you in on who did it.”
“Did I?”
“You’re trying to con me. You know who they are.”
“Maybe. I don’t intend to tell you. One of them is dead. The other might as well be.”
“Which of them is dead?”
“The woman.”
Her eyes went dark. “But she sounded so alive!”
“She looks so dead.”
She took it as a personal threat. “Is everybody dying?”
I looked past her at our images in the glass. We were huddled together in a small lit space suspended in darkness over the long fall. “Sooner or later,” I said.
“How old was she?”
“Thirty-nine or forty.”
“What did she die of?”
“Life,” I said.
“Is that supposed to be a gag?”
“I’m feeling a little depleted.”
She sat in silence for a while, then rose and stretched, letting me see the weight of her breasts lifting under her muumuu. “So am I feeling depleted, if the truth be knownst. How about a little drinkie? I have some gin in the kitchen.”
The voices on the tape seemed to have excited her. Whatever her feelings were, they accentuated her beauty. Her eyes were like peepholes into starred purple darkness. I suspected that she could be had for the taking.
“Thanks. I have to be going.”
“But we need to talk about the money. I thought it would be nice if we talked about it over a drink like friends.”
“What money?”
“The money you’re going to pay me for the tape.”
“Oh. That.”
I stood up and took out my wallet and counted the money in it: two hundred and ninety-eight dollars. I separated out five fifties and handed them to her:
“Here’s two-fifty. That leaves me forty-eight bucks to get back to L.A.”
She crumpled the bills in her fist. “What are you trying to pull on me? Two hundred and fifty measly dollars! You’ll sell the tape for a hundred times that much.”
“I’m not planning to sell it.”
“What are you going to do with it?”
“Hang somebody.”
“You’re not going to try and hang me?” Her free hand embraced her not quite classic throat. “I thought you liked me.”
“I like you, and this is the proof. If I wanted to hang you, I could do it with a quick call to the Hall of Justice. Or I could simply take the damn thing away from you. Instead, I’m giving you all the ready cash I can spare.”
While she stood and watched me, I rewound the tape and took it off the machine and slipped it into my jacket pocket.
“What can I do with a measly two-fifty?” she said, hugging the crumpled bills to her chest.
“You can make a down payment on two funerals. Or you can buy a ticket out of here.”
“Going where?”
“I’m not a travel agent,” I said from the neighborhood of the door.
She followed me to it. “You’re a hard man, aren’t you? But I like you, I really do. Are you married?”
“No.”
“I don’t know what to do with myself. I don’t know where to go.” She leaned towards me with a lost expression, hoping to be found. “Where can I go?”
Her body tempted my hands, in spite of the drowned one floating behind my eyes; in spite of all the old numb burnmarks which bodies like hers had left on my nerve-ends.
Try Ephesus. I was in a bad mood, but I didn’t say it out loud.
Chapter 28
I got to Trevor in the morning. He was sitting propped up in bed in his blinded room. His hands lay quiet on the covers.
He raised one of them in a weak salute. “Archer. How are you?”
“How are you, Trevor?”
“Surviving, it appears. I have to apologize for falling by the wayside the other night. I suppose I should apologize, too, for giving you a mistaken identification. Though it was natural enough under the circumstances. Even Homer had trouble ascertaining that the dead woman was his wife.”
He was watching me with the ragged awareness of a poker player after an all-night game. I stood at the foot of the bed and matched his look. It was a high hospital bed, so that our eyes were almost on a level.
“You made a false and deliberately misleading identification, and I know why.”
He lifted his hands like twin burdens and dropped them on his shrouded thighs. “So it’s like that. You’ve been doing some fairly deep digging, have you?”
“Digging your grave. Do you want to talk about the mess you’ve made?”
“Nothing would give me greater pain.”
“Then I’ll do the talking. The doctor didn’t allow me much time with you, and we have a lot of ground to get over. In the evening of last November second you picked up a poker in Catherine Wycherly’s house in Atherton and beat her fatally. I expect she was desperate and on the point of blowing the whistle on you: your motive was to silence her. But she didn’t die right away. She lived long enough to tell Phoebe that her father was responsible for the crime.
“Phoebe naturally assumed that she meant Homer. She’s very fond of Homer, and in the shock of the event she decided to take the blame on her own shoulders. Her obvious purpose was to protect her father. Dr. Sherrill would probably have a more complicated explanation.”
“You’ve talked to Sherrill?”
“Yes, and I’ve talked to Phoebe. I also have a tape recording of a conversation in which you and Catherine Wycherly discussed the fact that Phoebe was your child. The tape was made the night Phoebe saw you and her mother together in a taxi in San Mateo. You may recall the occasion.”
“I should. It was the beginning of all this. It’s appropriate to have it recorded for posterity.” He looked at me from eyes like rotting ice. “Does Phoebe know I’m her father?”
“No. She never will if I can help it. She has a chance for happiness, or at least a little peace, and you’re not going to louse it up again. She’s been living in the hell you and her mother fixed for her – two months in the hands of blackmailers, taking your rap for you. She finally broke down a few days ago and told Ben Merriman what her mother had said before she died: that her father was the guilty one.
“It meant something different to Merriman from what it meant to Phoebe. Merriman had the tape, and knew who her father was. When he got back from Sacramento he phoned your office and made an appointment with you. He was loaded with the money that he’d extorted from Phoebe, but he saw the possibility of more – an annuity for the rest of his life, or at least the rest of yours. He told you to meet him in the house where you had killed Catherine. No doubt that was part of his plan to screw up the pressure on you.
“He screwed it up too tight, and you repeated your crime. You rode a commuter’s train down from the City, got off at the Atherton station, walked to the house and kept your appointment with Merriman, walked back to the Atherton station, boarded the next train and got off a few minutes later to meet your wife in Palo Alto. No wonder you were looking sick when she drove you home. You’re looking sicker now.”
Trevor winced against his pillows, and covered his face with his hands. He didn’t seem to be overcome with emotion. He simply didn’t want me looking at his naked face.
“That left Stanley Quillan. Stanley wasn’t as tough as Merriman, he wasn’t as smart, and he didn’t know as much. He must have known your name, though, and been aware of the contents of the tape. He made it, after all. When he needed getaway money, he called you. You gave him a bullet in the head. Was it Merriman’s gun you used?”