77 Sunset Strip Read online

  He took an untidy swallow and got lost in his thoughts for a while. This time I didn’t try to steer him anywhere at all.

  “But why won’ she admit, huh, Bailey? Can’t live with a woman something like that between you. Can you now?”

  “Course not. Won’t she admit it?”

  He shook his head miserably. “Fact, she keeps yapping at me admit I did it myself. Can you beat that?” I said, trying to make it sound as casual as asking for a match, “And did you do it?”

  His eyes opened a little wider and almost focused on me. “Hell no, she did! Tha’s what I been trying to tell you. And I don’ care! If she’d only tell me!” He was shouting now. “If she just look at me and say, ‘Yes, I did it. For you.’ Then it—”

  He broke off abruptly as the door slammed open behind me. I turned to see Eilene standing there in what must have been her flimsiest She was glaring hotly across the room at Owen, her neck corded with tension, her fists clenched. And when she spoke the sound was like a file against an edge of glass: “You filthy coward. You filthy, lying, murdering coward. I could have killed him, Owen. For you. Now I wouldn’t walk across the room for you. Not if you were dying. I hope you hang for what you did!”

  She turned and went back to her stateroom, leaving Owen staring blankly at the empty darkness framed by the doorway. And she left me seeing the answer to everything, clearly, completely.

  It was mid-morning of the fifteenth day of the Skylark’s singular journey when Diamond Head hove into view.

  I found an American flag in the chartroom and took it up on deck. Owen was at the wheel. “I’m going to run it up,” I said. “Upside down, so we’ll get the quarantine officers out here before we hit port. Any objections, Captain?”

  “Nope.”

  I ran the flag up in distress signal position and Owen eyed the operation silently. “Is the gun still aboard,” I said, “or did you bury it with the captain?”

  “It’s aboard.”

  “Where?”

  “Wrapped in a sheet and put away.”

  “Wrapped . . . Brother, they’re going to love you. If there were ever any fingerprints, they’re gone now.” He made some kind of an answer to that, but I didn’t hear it. I had to talk to Betty and time was running out.

  It was to be my show from here on, but I can’t say that my heart was really in it. Glen Callister had hired me, had paid me five hundred honest dollars, and I hadn’t succeeded in talking myself out of the idea that

  I owed him something. Betty was the first step, and I was pretty sure she would also be the toughest.

  I found her in the lounge, sitting at the piano, running her fingers aimlessly over the keys.

  “Where’s Eilene?” I asked.

  “In her stateroom, I suppose.”

  I closed the door and sat down, waiting a moment in the hope that she would get it started. But she went on playing a simple, melancholy melody that she seemed to like.

  I said, “I’d like to talk to you a minute, Betty.”

  She let the melody fade off into nothing and turned to look at me without saying anything.

  “We’ll all be under arrest pretty soon. We’ll be asked to make statements. If they decide to raise a murder charge against one of us, we’ll all be over here for months. Do you know that?”

  “I suppose we will.”

  “What kind of a statement are you going to make?”

  “How do you mean? The truth, of course.”

  “What’s the truth? And I’m not waxing philosophical.”

  “Then why ask?”

  “Because I’d like to know what you think it is.”

  “That Dad knew one of them intended to kill him. That he told you so, and hired you to . . .”

  “But he didn’t.”

  “What?”

  “I said he didn’t.”

  “But the letter . . .”

  “There isn’t any letter.”

  She didn’t say anything.

  “Our friend Owen was threatening to lock me up. I just dreamed up the letter to cool him down.”

  “You’re not a detective?”

  “Yes, in California. I’m not licensed to play sleuth on the high seas.”

  She thought that over, and I could see that she didn’t like what it added up to. With an air of faint disgust, she said, “Do detectives post bonds? Big cash bonds?”

  “Yeah,” I said, “they do.”

  “And you’d forfeit it for operating outside California?”

  “Possibly.”

  “You’re a wonderful example of fine citizenship, aren’t you? You might lose a little money, so let’s fix it, let’s allow two corrupt, contemptible . . .”

  “Listen, Betty, this is the story I’m going, to tell: Your father hired me some time ago to find out if there was anything between his wife and Owen Madden. I found there wasn’t, and we became friends. That’s why I was on the trip—as a friend.”

  Betty stood up, staring at me with an expression compounded of cold contempt and fear. “And if you tell them that, and Eilene tells her story about the will, they—they might even—”

  “Yes, they might. But I can get Eilene to forget that story—at least that she told you about it. But you’ll have to forget what you think about Owen and her.” Slowly she crossed the room and sat down, not looking at me. “All this,” she whispered, “lying, conniving, just to avoid being held up on an island for a while, just to hold onto a grubby way of making a living.” She looked at me. “It’s funny how wrong you can be about people.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Well, I won’t do it. I know they were lovers. I’ve seen them together. I’ve seen her going down to the Skylark when Dad was out of town.”

  I came across the room and sat down beside her. “Okay, Betty, it’s a mess then—for all of us. We’ll all pay through the nose, but not one of us will ever pay the price they put on murder; there’s too much evidence against the three of you, and not half enough against one.”

  She shook her head in puzzlement and disbelief, her eyes searching my face. “For the three of us,” she whispered, “maybe lying is worth it. But for you it’s cheap. It’s cheap and—and I don’t know. Is there a word for people like you, who can look at murder the way some people look at a traffic violation?”

  “Cheap will do until you think of a better word. The quarantine launch will be alongside any minute. Are you going to do it my way?”

  “Sorry, no.”

  “Baby, you just haven’t any choice. When I tell them I tailed those two and found there wasn’t anything between them, your story’s going to look like nothing but an alibi.”

  “I’ll take my chance.”

  “Then I’d better take the ace out of my sleeve. That rifle was fired from the forward hatch, just two feet from where you sleep. Do you think they’ll believe anyone else would go up there to do it?”

  “How do you know where it was fired from?”

  “The point is, I can establish that it was.”

  “You’d be lying, of course.”

  “No, Betty, I wouldn’t be.”

  “You—you think I killed him. You’ve thought so all along. Is that why you’re doing all this?”

  “We haven’t got time for reasons. I’ve got Eilene and Owen to tackle yet.”

  She didn’t seem to be listening. She stood up abruptly and said, “You—” and then decided to keep the idea to herself.

  “No, Betty. I didn’t kill him. Are you doing it my way?”

  “How many years do you get for perjury?” she asked harshly.

  “This isn’t perjury. You’ll be under arrest on suspicion of murder. Suspects have a right to say as little or as much as they think wise. If this case goes to the grand jury—and you’re lucky enough to be just a witness-then tell the truth. I intend to. But until then you’re going to make a statement that doesn’t implicate anyone, just as the rest of us will.”

  “What do I say?”

>   “Anything you like—as long as it isn’t about Eilene and Owen.”

  “I’ll tell you something very funny. I’m not doing it because you’ve frightened me. I’m doing it because I’ve still got the silly schoolgirl idea that you’re a nice guy, that you’ve got some decent reason for all this.”

  It took just ten minutes with Eilene to get her to see things my way, and with Owen it was less than five. I’m not sure if it was because he was tractable, or because the quarantine launch was coming up on our starboard bow.

  EIGHT

  The special representative in charge was a blond, pink-faced man named Holman. He wore a pleasant smile, a wrinkled seersucker suit, and a one-inch haircut. He was painfully polite, and when he spoke he chose each word as if he’d just coined it.

  His office was not in the regular government building but on the second floor of an ordinary office building not far from the harbor. Otherwise it was typical of every civil servant’s room from here to Nome. One plain desk, some wooden chairs, a bookcase, mud-brown linoleum, and a secretary who didn’t get her job through nature’s bounty, but from her place on a list.

  We sat in a half-circle in front of Holman’s desk and waited for him to get past the polite inconsequentials and down to the business at hand. The Skylark had been impounded and its four passengers were presumably under arrest, although the ugly word had not yet been so much as whispered. A Kona wind was blowing, and when Holman finished telling us what it was and apologizing for it he cleared his throat and said, in a new tone, “The quarantine officer advised me that one of you, acting as captain, reported this . . . murder aboard. Where was the ship when the death occurred?”

  Owen glanced briefly at me before he answered. “Eleven and a half days out of L.A. Harbor.”

  “Is the Skylark of American registry, Mr. Madden?”

  “Yes. I told the quarantine officer all this.”

  “I know. Well, there’s no question about jurisdiction, which means statements are in order. If you like, we can do it right here, together, or privately, if you prefer.”

  Nobody said anything.

  “What will it be?”

  Silence.

  “Well, if there’s no objection then, we’ll do it now. You were acting as captain, Mr. Madden?”

  Owen nodded.

  “Then I’d like to begin with you, please.”

  I glanced at the secretary. Her freshly sharpened pencil was poised over the pad like a spear-fisher waiting for the kill. It shot down swiftly and began to move when Holman asked his first question:

  “What was your relation to the deceased, Mr. Madden?”

  The whole thing took less than forty minutes, everyone answering questions readily and at length, but pointing no fingers, dropping no innuendoes along the way.

  When it was over Holman sat staring out his window while his secretary went over her notes.

  Holman asked of nobody in particular, “You say it was a fishing harness. He was strapped in?”

  “That’s right,” I answered.

  “And what side of the anchor was the rifle on? Between the anchor and the fishing seat?”

  Owen answered that one: “No, the other side of the anchor.”

  “Anchor lie flat on the deck?”

  “Yes.”

  Holman went back to his window, his eyes as clouded as the sky the day the squall hit us. Finally he turned back, looked at the four of us with a kind of well-mannered skepticism, and said, “If I’d known it was going to be like this, I wouldn’t have wasted our time. We’ll have to take individual statements, of course. Maybe some of you will feel free then to say what’s really on your minds. Frankly, I had supposed you all knew exactly what had happened, that it was an accident, or at most unpremeditated. I hope you all realize I’m forced to have a complaint filed in the District Court against all four of you—suspicion of murder—and to insist on prohibitive bail.”

  He picked up his phone, and two hours later I was making myself at home in one of the local houses of hesitation. I didn’t know where the others had been taken, but each of us had gone his own way.

  I was a government guest for just eight days, and I was visited by young Mr. Holman three times. Maybe I should say I was visited by young Mr. Holman twice and by old Mr. Holman once, because by the time that third visit rolled around he was an old and tired and harassed man, with blue circles under both eyes and a bad twitch in one of them.

  It came on the eighth day, that third visit, and he walked in with his shoulders hunched and his mouth pulled into a thin, dyspeptic line. He threw his brief case on my cot and fumbled out a cigarette. He said, “You’re going to have to change your story. I’m afraid I never did believe it. A man just doesn’t get friendly with a private detective he hires to tail his wife. But your story doesn’t check out anyway.”

  “There’s no way you could have checked my story and I know it.”

  “Is that so? Do you get paid to work, Bailey?”

  “Not enough, but I get paid.”

  “We had Callister’s bank account in Los Angeles gone over. No checks drawn to you, or to anyone else we could account for. Yet you’re supposed to have worked for him for six weeks.”

  “Don’t I detect a slight contradiction in your logic? You say a man doesn’t get friendly, et cetera. Then you say he didn’t hire me anyway. Which is it?”

  Holman didn’t answer that right off, but I could see that he was working on it.

  “Look,” I went on, “people don’t pay for my kind of work with checks. They pay cash. Callister paid cash.” I said it simply, like, a man pricking a large balloon with a very small pin. And Holman’s face showed me I had put the pin in the right place.

  After a while he said, “So I can’t persuade you to change your story.”

  “Sorry, I can’t do it.”

  “What if I tell you I intend to charge you with murder and have the bunch of you before the grand jury?”

  “I’d say you were making a big mistake.”

  He looked down at me, his left eye twitching a bit. He sat down and offered me a cigarette. I took it, lit it, and we sat some more in a kind of one-sided silence.

  “You’re right, of course,” he said hoarsely. “The boys in the U.S. Attorney’s office laughed in my face when I suggested we ask for an indictment against one of you. They wanted to know whose hat I was planning to pull the name out of.”

  “That’s tough. Does this thing make a difference in your job—how you stand?”

  “Why?”

  “Call it curiosity.”

  “No effect whatever,” he said emphatically. “I’m not a local politician, you know.”

  He went on mulling it over in gloomy silence, finally coming up with, “The girl inherits most of the dough, but everything indicates she didn’t even know it. The wife comes into a good hunk of cash under the community property laws of California, but she’d have done as well if she’d just divorced the guy. You and Madden I can’t figure any angle for at all, unless one of you had a yen for the wife. Any ideas on that?”

  “After eight days in pokey? Naturally.”

  “To hell with you, too.”

  And, after a little more of the same, he stood up and said, “Well, that’s that. You can go any time. The others will be released in an hour or two.”

  He walked over, opened the barred gate, and said, “You’ll be looking for a room. I’d recommend the St. James, considering the short notice.” He walked away, leaving the cell door open.

  I sat there looking at it and not wanting to get up and go out. It was far more pleasant just sitting back watching the gate swing slowly against its hinges, savoring the idea that I could walk out of there any time I wanted.

  NINE

  That evening I checked in at the St. James, a strictly marginal hostelry with a baroque exterior and a Grand Rapids-modern decor. They had a room all right, 506, with bath and a view of the beach. And as I went up in the grille-work elevator, I wondered i
f 506 didn’t also have a full complement of peepholes and midget microphones.

  It was a pleasant enough room, high-ceilinged, with a busy wall paper and a balcony. I wondered if Holman had recommended the St. James to the others. I walked over and picked up the phone.

  “This is Bailey in 506. If any reporters come asking about me, I’m not registered. I flew back to California.”

  “Reporters. Yes, sir.”

  “Has a Betty Callister registered yet?”

  “No, sir,” he said, without having to give it a second thought. “Eilene Callister is in 304.”

  “Thanks. If Miss Callister registers, will you ask her to call me?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  I hung up and wondered if there was any point in calling the Widow Callister. I decided there wasn’t and went out to find something to eat. I found it in a restaurant that claimed to be “The Most Magnificent Chinese Food Place in the World.” And it probably was, if you didn’t get lost in one of the yawning caves or water-logged rock gardens.

  The desk clerk handed me a note along with my key when I got back. The note said Miss Betty Callister had asked for me at nine-thirty.

  “Did she register here?”

  “Yes, room 414, but . . . He turned to glance at the key rack. “She’s out right now, with Mrs. Callister.”

  “Did Owen Madden check in?”

  He shook his head. He hadn’t had to check his register for that one either.

  I went upstairs and got under the shower, wondering if Owen had enough money on him to find a bed somewhere. I doubted it. The Skylark would be out of police hands by now, but I also doubted if Owen would sleep there.

  I was still wondering about it when I went to bed.

  I woke up feeling thirsty and hung-over and not in a mood for breakfast or for any of the other activities I had planned for the day. I got dressed and went out onto the balcony to wait for the phone to ring.