We were down on the couch now and I could feel her breath beating against the back of my throat and her hand inside my shirt, touching my chest. But just before I was going down for the third time I took a look at her and she wasn’t expecting it. The cold, calculated expression in those wide grey eyes was like a smack in the face. I jerked away from her, stood up, and tried to get my breathing under control. We looked at each other for a long minute.
‘We must try that again when your husband has paid me off,’ I said in a voice that sounded like I had run a couple of miles uphill. ‘I’m a lot more enthusiastic when there are no strings tied to it. Let me see you to your car.’
She shifted her eyes from my face to the carpet, the half-smile flickered on, and her hands gripped her evening bag so tightly her knuckles showed white. She sat like that for perhaps ten seconds, then she got up.
‘All right,’ she said suddenly. ‘If he wants a divorce he can have it, but only on my terms, and it’ll cost him plenty. You can tell him it’s no use having me watched. I won’t be caught that easily, and you can tell him I only married him for what I could get out of him, and if I’d known he was going to be such a goddamn awful bore even his money wouldn’t have bought me.’ She didn’t raise her voice, and her anger and disappointment was nicely controlled. ‘You can tell him if he wants to watch someone he’d better start spying on that sour-faced bitch of a daughter of his. He’ll get a surprise.’ She laughed suddenly. ‘And as for you — you should warm up a little. You don’t know what you’re missing,’ and still laughing she went across the room, jerked back die curtains and took herself and her diamonds down the wooden steps into the darkness beyond.
V
The telephone bell, ringing like an hysterical fire alarm brought me out of a heavy sleep with a start that nearly capsized the bed.
I groped for the light switch, turned it on, and as I grabbed at the receiver I looked at my bedside clock. It was four minutes past three.
‘Is that you, Malloy?’ a voice barked in my ear. This is Mifflin, police headquarters. Sorry to wake you, but a guy’s just brought in a handbag that belongs to Dana Lewis. She’s one of your operators, isn’t she?’
‘You didn’t wake me up to tell me that, did you?’ I yelled.
‘Take it easy. We’ve called Miss Lewis but can’t get an answer. Besides, there’s something wrong. There are bloodstains on the sand near where the bag was found. At least that’s what the guy says. I’m going out there right away. I thought maybe you’d want to go with me.’
I woke up then.
‘Where was it found?’
‘On the sand dunes about a mile from your joint. I’ll be over in ten minutes, and I’ll pick you up.’
‘Right,’ I said, slammed down the receiver back on its cradle and scrambled out of bed.
By the time I had dressed I heard a car pull up outside the cabin. I snapped off the lights and ran down to the gate. Mifflin and two cops in uniform were waiting for mc in a big radio car.
Mifflin was a short stocky guy with a fiat, red battered face and a nose like a lump of putty. He was a good, tough cop, and we had worked together off and on for some time. I liked him and he didn’t exactly hate me, and whenever we could we helped each other. He opened the car door, and as soon as I was in, the driver sent the car jolting along the beach road.
‘It may be a false alarm,’ he said as I settled beside him, ‘but I thought you would want to be in on it. Maybe the guy’s talking through the back of his neck about bloodstains, but he seemed pretty definite about it.’
‘What was he doing out there at this hour?’
‘Snooping around. He’s quite a character in these parts. A guy named Owen Leadbetter. He’s a bit queer in the head. One of these nuts who spy on courting couples and makes out he’s bird watching. But he’s harmless enough. We know him well. He wouldn’t hurt a fly.’
I grunted. I wasn’t interested in flies.
‘Was Miss Lewis on a job?’ Mifflin asked.
‘Not to my knowledge,’ I said cautiously.
When I told Cerf I guaranteed secrecy I wasn’t fooling. I had made it a rule, no matter what happened, never to mention a client’s name without his permission.
‘We’re about there,’ the driver said suddenly. ‘He said the first line of sand dunes, didn’t lie?’
‘That’s right. Put on the searchlight, Jack, so we can see what we’re doing.’
The small but powerful beam of the auxiliary spotlight went on and lit up the stretch of sand dunes before us. It was a lonely, forlorn spot. Coarse, scrubby bushes grew out of the sand in big clumps. To our right, and in the distance, we could hear the sea beating on the reef, and there was a chilly wind that whipped up the sand every now and then into scurrying whirls.
We got out of the car.
‘You stick right here, Jack,’ Mifflin said to the driver. ‘If I shout, turn the light on me.’ He handed me a flashlight. ‘We’ll keep together. And you, Harry, you start looking to the right. We’ll go to the left.’
‘Why didn’t you bring Leadbetter with you?’ I asked as we tramped over the loose sand. ‘It would have saved time.’
‘I didn’t want to be bothered with him. You have no idea how that guy talks once he lets his clutch in. He’s marked the spot with a pile of stones. It shouldn’t be hard to find.’
It wasn’t. We found the pile of stones about a couple of hundred yards from the car.
Mifflin shouted to the driver, who focused the searchlight on the spot. We stood a little to one side and examined the ground. The sand had been trampled flat in places, but was too loose to hold footprints. Near the pile of stones was a patch of red. It looked like blood, and the flies seemed to like it and it gave me a hollow feeling. Dana was a fine kid. She and I had been pals for some time.
‘Looks as if someone’s been around,’ Mifflin said, pushing his hat to the back of his head. ‘The stuff’s no good for prints. That’s blood, Vic.’
‘Yeah,’ I said.
The other policeman, Harry, came over.
‘If she’s anywhere around she’ll be in there,’ he said, pointing with his nightstick to a large clump of shrubs. ‘There’s been a trail to that clump, but it’s been smoothed over.’
‘Let’s have a look,’ Mifflin said.
I stayed right where I was while the other two went across the sand and began to search among the shrubs. My mind was a blank as I watched their bright flashlight beams probing among the thick undergrowth.
Both of them suddenly stopped and I saw them bend down. I took out a cigarette, put it between my dry lips but forgot to light it. They remained bending for a minute or so. It seemed like a year to me. Then Mifflin straightened.
‘Hey, Vic,’ he called. His voice was sharp. ‘We’ve found her.’
I threw away the unlighted cigarette and walked stiff-legged across the sand and joined them.
In the hard glare of their flashlights she looked like a doll. She lay on her back, sand in her hair and eyes and mouth. She was as naked as the back of my hand, and the front of her skull was smashed in. Her hands were like claws, stiff in death, held before her face. From the look of her scratched, sand-smeared body she had been dragged along face down by her feet and dumped there the way you would dump a sack of garbage, and with as much feeling.
The stark horror on her face turned me cold.
Chapter Two
I
The grey dawn light was showing above the line of skyscrapers as I came out of Police Headquarters. It was five-fifty-five, and I felt low enough to walk under a duck’s tail.