Sleep with Slander Read online

  If it was pretense on her part, what in hell was the motive behind it?

  Sader crushed out his cigarette and started the motor, pulled away from the curb, still thinking about it.

  The clouds broke and drifted away as he drove south. The sun came out. It was just past eleven when he reached the outskirts of Laguna, the brightest hour of the morning. He turned up the hill to Wanda’s place. The light off the sea was glassy. He parked, and walked through the courtyard, paused at the door to look back. The Oriental lantern still showed a light, there amidst the foliage; and then he noted that the light over the door was burning, too.

  Wanda hadn’t come home during the night, then.

  He went around to the kitchen and looked in at the window over the sink. He could see a big daffodil-yellow range and refrigerator, a lot of cupboards; but the dog wasn’t there to show his teeth. Sader whistled in through the screen, and then listened, but there was no answering tap of toenails on the linoleum. He rattled the doorknob, and there was still no answer.

  He looked around. Here in the breezeway he was out of sight of the neighbors. The slopes below had houses, and there was the traffic artery, but Sader decided to take the risk. “Here’s where I lose the seat of my pants, probably.” He took out a knife and jimmied the catch of the screen above the sink.

  Once inside, he crouched against the opened window and waited, fully expecting a big brown hunk of muscle and fangs to come running. When the house remained still, empty-sounding, he got down off the sink board and went into the dining alcove. The lights were burning in the living room beyond. The draperies were pulled, shutting out the sun; it looked much as he had glimpsed it on the night before.

  He crossed in front of the big Buddha, wondering as usual what quirk of mood, or what desire to be different, had made Wanda want it.

  The fireplace gave forth a miasma of ash, though there was little in it except some smudges on the clean brick. It looked to Sader as if something no bigger than a couple of sheets of writing paper had been burned between the andirons, then crushed into the hearth. He went on into the hall. Here was unexpected brightness. At the end of the hall a window swung open, screenless, giving a view of the sea below. The sea wind swept in, bringing a smell of salt air, a touch of cold. For some reason Sader felt immensely lonely at that moment. The house seemed dead, and he was quite alone in it.

  He opened the nearest door and there was the dog, perhaps the same dog that had snapped at him last night through the window. The dog was stretched out on a fluffy orange-colored bath mat and he was fine all the way from the tip of his tail to his collar. Something was wrong with his head. There was a bloody depression in the skull between his ears, and blood had run out upon the orange mat and even to the tiled floor.

  Sader bent over him. The dog’s head seemed to have been crushed by one heavy blow. As far as Sader could judge, it had happened right here. There was no indication the dog had been dragged injured or dying into the bathroom. Sader glanced into the shower cubicle, but it was clean and empty. He went back to the hall, but now he took out a handkerchief and wiped his prints off the knob of the bathroom door.

  He used the handkerchief to wrap the next doorknob he touched. He found himself in a kind of studio, a dabbler’s playroom. Here was a typewriter and a lot of paper on a desk, some books on how to become a writer, and across the room was a weaving loom, and next to it was an easel with a clean canvas in it. On a tiny table lay an array of oil paints. Pinned to the wall was a big astrological chart. An open window looked out in the same direction as the one in the hall, filling the room with sea glitter, and Sader felt that he had intruded into a place Wanda Nevins would never have wanted him to see.

  “She tried everything,” he said to himself, looking at it, remembering too the big Buddha that must be the souvenir of an excursion into Oriental philosophy. She had searched for herself here in this house, trying this and that, spending time and money in the search. He wondered what she had finally discovered.

  He backed out, leaving the door ajar, turned to another door near the end of the hall.

  She was in there.

  The bed was big and low, covered with a white satin spread. A light burned in a bracket on the wall. The windows were covered by white satin draperies. A big mirror over the dressing table reflected Sader’s figure as he walked forward.

  It was a beautiful room, but Wanda didn’t match it. She had died hard, died fighting. She lay with her head hanging over the edge of the bed, and Sader took one good look at her, making sure of the fact of death, and then he didn’t look at her again.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  HE WENT into the living room and sat down on a chair and smoked a cigarette. There was some thinking to be done, a course of action to be planned. Some legal angles had to be considered, relating to his hanging onto his license.

  He wondered who represented the law on this particular hillside. The County Sheriff, probably, since it was north of the Laguna Beach city limits. He was certainly obligated, under the rules of his license, to co-operate with the Sheriff’s office in reporting the murder of Wanda Nevins.

  He had also a duty to a client, in this case old man Gibbings whom he found completely detestable. There was no way on earth, once the murder had been reported, to keep Gibbings’ name out of it. The newspapers would seize on him like a pack of wolves. The tissue of secrecy would be torn. But it wasn’t old man Gibbings that Sader found himself worrying about. He was remembering an elephant of a woman in red pants and green jersey blouse, with a painted face, who had described for him the only image he had of Kit Gibbings, sitting alone at a table at Hollywood Park and studying a racing form.

  And it was somehow this woman he had never met, with her nice white gloves and her pot of tea, and her fifty-dollar hat that she didn’t know was all wrong for her, it was this woman who slowly but surely tipped the scales for Sader.

  He got off the chair, disposed of the cigarette butt in the bathroom, then went through the house swiftly. He found, in the hollow shell of the Buddha’s backside, a locked steel box to which there seemed to be no key. He carried it into the kitchen, pried up the lid with a screwdriver.

  It was empty. Someone who had had a key had beat him to it. He wiped his prints off the steel surface, left it on the sink.

  In a hatbox on the top shelf of Wanda’s closet were some bankbooks, bank statements, and a sheaf of canceled checks snapped together with a rubber band. Sader laid the checks on the dressing table and separated them with a pencil tip. They represented mortgage and house utility payments, and checks drawn for cash. The bankbooks had been issued by two different banks, one in Laguna Beach and one in Los Angeles. The Los Angeles account showed a savings account balance of a little more than twenty-two thousand dollars. The Laguna Beach account was a small checking operation; it appeared from what Sader could figure that four or five hundred dollars had been withdrawn every few weeks from the savings account in L.A. and deposited in the Laguna Beach account to make the mortgage and other payments.

  The L.A. account had been started almost two years before with a single deposit of forty thousand dollars.

  Sader put the bankbooks and the checks back in the box, taking care not to leave prints, and returned the box to its shelf. He looked around for Wanda’s purse, found it on the dressing table, a big calfskin bag. Inside was a wallet, a new checkbook, and the usual cosmetics. In the wallet identification section were Wanda’s driver’s license and a charge card for an oil company. There were five ten-dollar bills and some loose change. The new checkbook showed no entries.

  Passing again through the living room, Sader paused at the fireplace. Something had been burned there, all right. A sheet or two of writing paper, perhaps. He noted that there was nothing else out of the ordinary to be noted. No disorder; Wanda hadn’t fought for her life here. She had been attacked and destroyed in the bedroom. The dog had been killed in the bathroom.

  One dog was missing.

  Sade
r removed his prints from the inner surfaces of the window, and from the sink board. Then he let himself out of the kitchen door, crossed the breezeway to a door that opened into Wanda’s garage. Inside in the gloom was a small blue sports car of foreign make, nothing remarkable about it except that in the glove compartment was a fifth of vodka, about half-full, a couple of paper cups with moisture in the bottoms.

  The only things stored here besides the car were some gardening tools, practically new, and some sacks of fertilizer. Sader stepped back into the breezeway, walked to his car, got into it and drove away slowly, trying to look as ordinary as possible. There were no faces in the windows of the house directly above. As far as he could tell, no one was paying any attention to him at all. It was a matter on which he simply had to take a chance, anyway.

  The neighbor up there, with his passion for privacy, might or might not remember for the police that a man had come inquiring if Miss Nevins had had a little boy about. It was remarkable to Sader what perverse tricks casual memory could play.

  As he drove, he forced himself to reconsider the circumstances of Wanda’s death. Her clothes had been badly mauled, but she had been fully dressed when she had died. Nothing like the little tan sunsuit in which he had first seen her. She had had on a deep-green street dress. Torn at the neck, the sleeves ripped from the shoulders; but when it had been entire, the sort of dress she would have worn to go into the city.

  She’d had on sheer hose, high-heeled black pumps. Something nagged at this point, and then he remembered the calfskin bag. Wrong color. She wouldn’t have carried it wearing the black pumps, so it meant that the killer had caught her in the process of changing, that she hadn’t as yet transferred her personal clutter to whatever purse matched the shoes.

  Some time last night she had come home, had changed to go out again. Someone had ridden with her, sharing the vodka from the paper cups.

  An excuse had been made, the dog taken into the bathroom, to be disposed of with a single, silent blow. Then, leisurely perhaps, the murderer’s attention had been turned to the girl. She may have screamed once or twice—there were no near neighbors. The beating and general destruction must have taken some strength, and here Sader found himself thinking about the young husky type who had taken away Tina’s little boy.

  You could kill without that kind of brutality. Sader remembered his feeling that the young man had been hired, someone to act the part of a father; and for the first time he felt unsure of his hunch. The treatment described in the letter, the abuse practiced on the child, had the smack of what had been done to Wanda Nevins.

  Sader found himself glancing at his own hands on the wheel, wondering what had turned them so cold.

  He had no proof at all, and yet he was convinced that Wanda Nevins had been a blackmailer and that she had died in the practice of her job.

  When he got into Newport Beach he found a public phone booth and called Gibbings’ office. The receptionist was stilted and cool, and told him Mr. Gibbings had gone to lunch. It might have been the truth. He couldn’t get anything else out of her. From the same phone booth he called the Sheriff’s office and reported, anonymously, the death of Miss Nevins and the address of her home.

  From his office in Long Beach he called his attorney friend. “You’ve been engaged by Hale Gibbings to check up on a will. This involves the estate of a woman named Tina Champlain who drowned about six months ago at Catalina.”

  “Look, my God, you called me a couple of nights ago and I’ve already done a little checking and so far—”

  “You have been engaged by Mr. Gibbings to act as his attorney in this affair.”

  “Oh. It’s become an affair, has it?”

  “Mr. Gibbings was a friend of Mrs. Champlain’s. He decided to check up and make sure that her child was being cared for, and that he had inherited her estate, and so forth. I’ve been working for you on these angles.”

  “You have?” The lawyer’s tone was full of dry amusement.

  “It’s the best I can do,” Sader said. “I want a once-remove from Gibbings and this will have to serve.” It wouldn’t serve long, he reminded himself, if the cops went to work on Gibbings’ receptionist. She’d soon set them straight on who’d been storming in to see the old man.

  “You mean you’re trying to keep your client’s name out of something nasty,” the lawyer said, “and I’m going to be the buffer.” He waited for Sader to say something. “Can’t you let me know what I’m sticking my neck out for?”

  “If you don’t know it won’t worry you. Just keep on looking for some trace of Mrs. Champlain’s estate. Concentrate on that flight insurance.”

  “Let me know when you want out of jail.”

  “I’ll do that.”

  Sader settled himself to wait. If there was a lead from Wanda Nevins to him, either through an identification of his car by a neighbor, or through some remark made to someone by Wanda before her death, or through some memo in the house that he hadn’t located, he should be hearing about it pretty quickly. Otherwise he might be contacted days from now as the cops worked their way out into the fringes of possibilities, say through the Perrines—or perhaps never.

  At five o’clock he phoned Gibbings’ office again and was told that Mr. Gibbings had left for the day.

  The homes that faced each other across the lawns of Tiffany Square were Victorian monstrosities, mostly vine-covered brick. They had cost money, and they were old. The square was shut in with an ornate steel fence anchored to stone pillars. It was all very quiet, remote, and when Sader thought of living in it he was glad of some of the wilder portions of his youth.

  The Gibbings home occupied a corner of the square. The walk was mossy and the door overhung with vines. You pulled a handle in the middle of the door and the bell clanged right inside. Remembering the pebbled aluminum and orange glass of the Wilshire Boulevard offices, Sader decided that this house in Tiffany Square was where Gibbings really enjoyed himself.

  An ancient maid in black cotton and white organdy apron came to the door. She listened while Sader explained that he must see Mr. Gibbings right away. She said that she would see if Mr. Gibbings was in. She shut the door, having no illusions about Sader’s status in life.

  Gibbings himself came back. He didn’t look angry or put out because his hired man had invaded Tiffany Square. Sader thought he looked haunted. “Come in. This way. That’s all, Irene.”

  Irene peered critically at a hall table Sader was passing at the moment, as if he might be breathing dust onto it, and then removed herself. Sader followed old man Gibbings into a furnished mausoleum of a room, vast and shadowy. A small fire glowed in the enormous grate—just for looks; the place was warm to the point of mugginess. Gibbings indicated a chair for Sader and sat down facing it. “You’ve come here because Wanda has been murdered?”

  Sader had the feeling that sand had begun to slide under his feet. “How did you hear about it?”

  “The Sheriff’s office called me. They wanted to know when I had last seen her, and when I told them it had been several years, and that recently I had only contacted her by phone, they didn’t seem to believe it.”

  “They told you then that she was dead?”

  “I asked what had happened to her, and they said she’d been murdered. They expected some reaction, I think. A lot of protests, my saying I didn’t do it. All I did . . . I said I hadn’t known Miss Nevins well but that I wished them luck in finding her killer.”

  “What led them to you?”

  The haunted expression deepened in Gibbings’ face. “I didn’t ask. I suppose, because I knew somehow that something like this was inevitable. It was inevitable from the moment I knocked on your office door.”

  Sader was thinking of the effort he had made, the cover he had provided through the lawyer, and all for nothing now.

  Gibbings’ tone took on a dragging note. “It happened because you, Mr. Sader, are a bungler. You are inept. I provided you with a simple task and you preferred to c
omplicate it. You wished to involve my daughter, though she had no connection with it, and you apparently ran through the people surrounding Mrs. Champlain during her life . . . anyone with whom she’d had the least contact . . . without turning up any sort of a clue. It should be a simple matter to find a child, sir. He is a living organism, he’s not a piece of wood you can stick into a box and keep out of sight indefinitely. He has to eat and sleep and play and unless he’s been stuck in a cellar and forgotten and has died, there must be people who see him every day. And those people should be discoverable.”

  A bit of burning wood popped in the grate. Sader ran a finger around inside his collar.

  “I’m not accusing you of trying to shake me down,” old man Gibbings said. “You’re not in Miss Nevins’ class at all. Not clever enough. You’re just stupid and bungling.”

  “Thanks,” said Sader grimly.

  “You can give me my money back now, if you’ve a mind,” Gibbings offered.

  Sader looked at him, at the white mustache and the steel-colored eyes, the hunched posture like a hawk, and shook his head. “I never was working for you, Mr. Gibbings. I didn’t know it until a moment ago.”

  “And who, then—”

  “I’ve been working for your daughter.”

  Two triangles of angry color blotched the skin under Gibbings’ pouched eyes. “You are insolent, sir.”

  “I don’t mean to be. I’m as sincere as hell. I don’t know your daughter but I like her, Mr. Gibbings. She must be a lady in the best sense of the word. She’s got guts. It would take guts to live here with you and to see her own youth die away, and to have one little slip and to pay like hell and then to become an invalid, still shut up here. And not to become a well-known wheel-chair drunk in all the best bistros. And not to take an overdose of pills, or shoot herself.”