Sleep with Slander Read online

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  WHEN SADER entered the real estate office, the little round man behind the desk bounced up and offered a hand. Sader shook it. “Thanks for seeing me right away.”

  “Oh, that’s quite all right. Terrible thing, that young woman being killed like that. A brutal murder, according to the police. Horribly beaten, and—uh—here’s a chair. I’m not sure I have anything you want to know. As I told you on the phone, I handled the sale of the house. I saw Miss Nevins a time or two downtown in Laguna, before I moved down here to Dana Point. But as for knowing either of them—”

  The office was a small, portable building, painted white, set in the middle of a lot planted to ivy and blue verbena, flanked by signs extolling a group of new homes for sale. It all looked brisk and optimistic in spite of the gray sky.

  “You had an office in Laguna then?”

  “I handled the sale of the new homes on that side of the hill. Had an office there, about like this one. We had fifteen homes to sell and when they were gone I worked for a short time in a downtown office, and then came here.” While he talked, Mr. Evans walked to a window and adjusted the Venetian blinds to admit more light. He had an air of nervous energy, of fidgeting restlessness, in spite of the round plump frame. “They were very nice homes but the price was out of the usual range, and they moved slowly. Sold them all in the end, of course. The builder kept one for himself, top of the hill. I understand he’s in Europe now.”

  “I’d like to know everything you remember about the sale of the house to Mrs. Champlain.”

  Evans returned to his chair behind the desk, sat down, gave Sader a sharp glance. “Yes. Glad to help if possible. How did you find me, by the way?”

  “I checked with the County Building Department, found out who had built the house, called him—his housekeeper knew that you had sold those houses for him and where you were now. And you’re right, he’s in Europe.”

  Evans nodded. He had thin blond hair, through which his pink scalp gleamed. His fingers were round as a baby’s, twiddling at the edge of the desk. “You’re not a policeman?”

  “I’m a private investigator. I was working on a case in which I thought Miss Nevins might have information, and now that she’s dead I have to try to dig deeper, that’s all.”

  “This was at least two years ago, that Mrs. Champlain and Miss Nevins came to look at the property.” Evans hesitated, as if thinking perhaps that Sader hadn’t known of the length of time. “Mrs. Champlain was older, not a lot, but she had . . . well, what you’d call a mature air, compared to Miss Nevins.”

  Sader remembered Wanda’s smallness, the tossed black curls, the rose-petal skin and the tawny eyes, the voluptuous figure revealed by the skimpy playsuit. He made a bet with himself, Evans had spent most of the time looking at Wanda.

  Evans went on, “I remember, at the time of taking them through the house, how Mrs. Champlain studied the way the place was planned and built. And how Miss Nevins raved over the big colored bathtub, and how she could decorate the bedrooms, and how much room there was for clothes in the closets. She was like a kid.” He smiled, and the small twiddling fingers grew still as if they remembered some touch under them, perhaps the smoothness of Wanda’s arm. “Like a kid with a new toy.”

  “Did Miss Nevins discuss the financial end of the matter?”

  Evans thought it over, then shook his head. “No, she didn’t seem to care what the place was going to cost, nor what the down payment came to. Like I said, it was Mrs. Champlain who was practical. I talked terms to her. Funny, though, when the check came in the mail it had been signed by Miss Nevins.”

  “But the title was vested in Mrs. Champlain?”

  “That’s right.” Evans was frowning a little. “Now that Miss Nevins is dead, Mrs. Champlain will be moving in, I suppose.”

  “She’s been dead about six months.”

  “What?” Evans seemed astonished.

  “She went swimming off Catalina Island and disappeared.”

  “Well, now, isn’t that something!” Evans sat back in his chair, forgot to twiddle his fingers. “They’re both gone. Do you know who gets the house?”

  “I’m not enough of a legal eagle to know that,” Sader answered. “Mrs. Champlain left a little boy, a child it seems she had taken in without a formal adoption. What claim he’d have on what she left is problematical.”

  “She was a rich woman,” Evans said with conviction.

  “She gave that impression?”

  “My God, she didn’t blink when I told her the down payment on the house was seventeen thousand. She just nodded, as if I’d said seventeen cents.”

  “This is important,” Sader added. “Did she give you the idea she meant to live there?”

  “She sure did.”

  “And yet the house was never occupied by anyone but Miss Nevins.”

  The real estate man pursed his mouth. He replaced his fingers at the edge of the desk, appeared to wait for the beginning of a beat, then slowly and thoughtfully twiddled his hands to and fro. Sader suddenly grinned. He had realized what the little real estate man was doing.

  “ ‘Rock of Ages?’ ” he suggested.

  Evans glanced from Sader down to his moving fingers, and after a moment of surprise, giggled. “Heh, heh. Imaginary piano. Don’t know where I ever picked up the habit. But . . . ‘Nearer, My God to Thee,’ wouldn’t you think? Or the other one they play so much at funerals. ‘End of a Perfect Day’?”

  “Did Mrs. Champlain give any hint, say anything at all, to explain why she didn’t move in after buying the place?”

  Evans paused in the midst of a great, imaginary musical chord. “Maybe they fell out over the good-looking fellow they had along.”

  “There was a man with them?”

  “Young. Too young for Mrs. Champlain, I’d think. But you never know. He looked like the kind who would be interested in anything if it had money with it. Hefty muscles. Deep tan. Miss Nevins called him cousin.”

  “Do you remember his name?”

  “Don’t know the name, but I remember where he lives. He rents that studio in the canyon—used to belong to that German sculptor. Eggenheim? Made religious statuary.” Evans appeared to struggle with his memory.

  “He made Buddhas, perhaps?”

  “Eggenheim made everything. Including some with six arms. You know—India? Then he copied some of the heads at Easter Island and set them up on the hill above the studio, and one of them fell on him and crushed his legs. He lives in a sanitarium. Sold the property, the new owner rents it out, You want the address?”

  “Very much.”

  Evans took a pencil from the desk and scribbled on the back of a business card.

  Sader sat quiet, watching the plump fingers on the pencil. The break had come so unexpectedly that he still hardly believed it. The tie-in was something he should have looked for, though. The big Buddha in Wanda’s living room wasn’t a souvenir of any interest in Oriental religion, but something to correspond with her décor, carted off from the disabled sculptor’s studio. He should have asked about it in town, tried to trace it.

  Evans flipped the card across the desk. “Take the canyon road from the beach. It’s a couple of miles, the studio sits in among some trees. You’ll see the stone heads on the hill when you turn off the road.”

  “Thanks a lot.”

  “I imagine the cops have already talked to this fellow, since he’s a relative of Miss Nevins.”

  “Perhaps they have.”

  Evans squinted up at Sader, who had risen. “Do you suppose the cops have a clue in this murder? They’ve spotted the fiend already?”

  Sader stood there arrested, the card in his hand. “What do you mean, fiend?”

  “From the stories you hear, it had to be a fiend,” Evans said firmly. “One of them kind.” He waggled his eyebrows.

  In any crime involving a girl as beautiful as Wanda, and as seductive, there was bound to be a rumor about a fiend, Sader thought. “It could be,” Sader
agreed. As he thanked Evans again for his information, he was thinking how lucky had been the impulse to hunt up a real estate man for information about the sale of the house. Only a man like Evans would know and remember the details of the studio’s rental.

  “You haven’t told me what kind of case you’re working on,” Evans said as Sader opened the door, “but I guess with you private-eye fellows, that has to be a secret, humh?”

  “I’m not working on the murder,” Sader told him. “In reality we don’t try it. It’s police work and they wouldn’t love us if we meddled. I’m looking for a missing person. A little boy. Mrs. Champlain didn’t have a kid with her, by any chance?”

  Evans shook his head. “Nary a sign. I wouldn’t have taken her for a mother, that’s for sure.”

  “What do you mean by that?”

  Evans gazed at him blankly. “Damned if I know. I guess I just expect a woman with kids—with even one kid—to have a stocking seam out of kelter. Or a petticoat hem showing.”

  Into Sader’s memory popped the thing Mrs. Bowen had told him, that the aunt had seemed something of a hick; and he should have caught it then, he realized. In contrast to her niece, Mrs. Shawell was a hick. It had to be.

  “Mrs. Champlain was dressed pretty well, is that it?”

  “By golly, I’ve seen ‘em all in my business,” Evans declared, “and she was the slickest thing in a long spell.”

  “But not better than Miss Nevins?”

  “Miss Nevins was . . . well, I’d call her kind of cuddly,” Evans said with a hint of sly camaraderie. “You know, soft and cute, little black curls and dimples. Mrs. Champlain looked like those models you see in the fashion ads.”

  It wasn’t a thing anyone else had told him; but he knew that he hadn’t been asking about Tina Champlain, but about Gibbings’ daughter, and somehow he’d gotten the two confused. The things he’d learned about Kit Gibbings, the dowdy sense of style, the feeling of a loving and obedient and patient nature, he’d somehow transferred to the other woman. The more fool he, he thought. “What part did the man play in the buying of the house?”

  “Not a damned word.”

  “Well, thanks a lot for all you’ve told me.”

  “Ah, it wasn’t anything.”

  The last Sader saw of the real estate man, Evans was sitting with fingers poised, ready to strike an opening chord on the rim of the desk. Sader got into his car and headed north again. In downtown Laguna Beach he turned right into the canyon highway. The sea wind followed, funneling through the narrow cleft in the coastal hills. He heard it whistle against the window. In about two miles he found a six-foot redwood fence, much weathered, the name EGGENHEIM painted on a board above a mailbox. He parked the car and went to the gate, which sagged ajar. Inside was a wilderness of eucalyptus and shaggy palms. Half-hidden on the side of the hill above was what looked like a red barn. Sader went in, climbing the pathway among the trees. It was very quiet. The gray light made it all look kind of sleepy. There wasn’t even a bird chirping.

  The pathway circled the red building. On its north side a great expanse of glass tilted to the sky. Sader listened at the door, heard nothing. He opened it and looked in. The interior was a great barren room with a lot of unfinished sculpture and a smell of clay. At the far end Sader could see the stairs to a loft. He shut the door and looked around him. The pathway went on, winding among the trees toward the top of the hill. Sader climbed it.

  He came out below a bald knob where dead grasses quivered under the touch of breeze. Here and there, grotesque and enormous, were the heads the sculptor had erected; they faced toward the invisible Pacific. Not of stone; Sader saw that the tip of the nose was broken on one, that another had a great crack through the center of the forehead, in both cases exposing a framework of wire and lathe. Apparently Eggenheim had made them by erecting a frame and plastering it over with concrete—not as solid as the originals on Easter Island but still nothing you’d want to fall over on you, Sader thought.

  None of them—there were six in all—stood quite erect. Probably the effect of ages of settling into the earth was deliberate, Sader decided; but one was cocked at a sharper angle than the rest and he thought it might be the one that had crippled its creator, pushed half-erect after the accident. At any rate, Eggenheim couldn’t have asked for a more impressive nor a weirder monument. They were fantastic.

  Sader climbed on to the top of the knoll, where he could see the surrounding country. Invisible from the path he had climbed was a smaller building, also painted red, hidden among the trees on a far spur of the hill. A fainter path led down toward it.

  He started down, and then something warned him—a prickling sense of walking into the unknown. He couldn’t name the feeling. It was as old as time, older than the originals of the great stone heads above him on the knoll. He missed a step, though he didn’t pause. He kept his eyes on the windows. They were curtained; he couldn’t see through them. The path ended in a small flat graveled terrace. Sader put out a hand to knock.

  The door came open before he reached it. Brent Perrine looked at him and said, “What the hell are you doing here?” Then he caught Sader by the front of his coat and drew back his fist and slammed it at Sader’s head. Sader had only a moment to jerk aside.

  In the instant of ducking Sader glimpsed the big room beyond, the signs of search in it. The wind from Brent’s fist fanned his cheek. He brought up his clenched hands sharply to break Brent’s hold on his clothes, at the same time dropping right. Brent didn’t let go, and there was the sound of tearing cloth. Sader put a quick uppercut where it would do the most good. Brent was big and solid, but not fast in a fight. Perhaps he’d been using his old man for a sparring partner too long. He yanked his head back and shook it. Then he dragged Sader into the room.

  Sader warded off another punch, felt his left arm go numb under it. He looked around. To his right was a spindly legged table, very ornate, very much not the kind of thing you’d expect in a woodland studio, and on it was a small Persian coffee jug of worked brass. Sader picked up the little jug in his right fist and aimed it at Brent; the rim of the heavy base caught Brent over the eye and laid the skin open. Blood spurted. Brent let out a yell of fury.

  He was heavy, as solid as hell under Sader’s light pummeling. Sader had had judo training years ago during the war, and he tried to get a hold on Brent, but now Brent had him pinned against the wall. The table had fallen and Brent had crushed it with splintery crackings.

  Sader tried to get the copper jug into position again, but Brent chopped at his wrist, and the jug went flying. The next blow hit Sader on the cheekbone and he had the eerie sensation of hearing his own skull creak, the teeth moving against his tongue, followed by a quick salty flavor of blood. For the first time Sader got the feeling he was going to come out second best. He kept the numb left arm up, protecting his chin, but Brent was close and fought like a cat, close-in, wearing him down.

  God, I’m getting old, Sader thought. He felt the fifty years sweep down on him, beating with blue lights behind his eyes, tearing the breath out of his lungs. He punched Brent on the collar bone, a blow no heftier than a fly’s.

  “By God, I’m plenty damned sick of you!” Brent grunted, and grabbed Sader’s head between his hands and shoved it hard against the wall, then yanked forward to slam back again. For Sader stars burst against the darkening room. He tried to knee the younger man, to jerk free again, and Brent kicked him, numbing an ankle. Then Brent picked him up bodily and threw him into a chair. It must have been something like the table, small and spindly, because he went down into it as if into a nest of collapsing straw. There was the smell of broken wood and he felt the prick of splinters through his clothes, into his flesh.

  He tried to extricate himself quickly, get to his feet.

  Brent came to him, stood there, took careful aim with his boot, smashed it toe-first into Sader’s face. A red glare burst in Sader’s right temple, flooding his sight. He crawled forward, groping, and Brent ki
cked again. There was a shock, starting near his left shoulder, that ran like a live electric wire, threading bone to bone, all the way down the numb arm to the fingertips, and jumping down his body from rib to rib.

  “I’ll teach you.” The words rolled through an enormous silence, while Sader lay on his face, clutching what was left of consciousness.

  There were three more kicks, three jars that shook him without pain, as if he stood somewhere outside his fallen body, immune to feeling. He lay in darkness, listening. He heard Brent walk around the room, he heard the rustle of paper and cloth, the clink of glassware, and he knew down there in the dim quiet that Brent was hunting for something.

  When enough of the haze had cleared away, when he could control the numbed body, Sader staggered to his feet. The fight must go on.

  It must go on because somewhere a kid waited, needing help, and in Sader’s rocked mind one thing was clear: it was up to him to find him.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  HE LOOKED around, squinting against the aching red haze, but Brent wasn’t in the room. Sader listened, heard the scrape of drawers on their runners, the growling monotone with which Brent greeted whatever he was looking at. Sader staggered clear of the wreck of the chair and the broken table. He went to a window, leaned there to suck in air. His ribs hurt. His left arm hung useless. One side of his head beat with a pulse like a roaring surf. No shaking dislodged it.

  He turned again to examine the room. Drawers hung open in all the cabinets, their contents littered the carpet, but still the picture was plain. Someone had traveled far and brought home treasures to furnish this place. There were ivory figurines and jade elephants, inlaid tables, lamps of worked brass like the little coffee jug, and the carpet was blue and silver, an old chaste pattern of Persian yarns. There were teakwood chests, plus a lot of the gilded and fragile kind of stuff that went with the table and chair that was broken.

  It had been brought from far away and put here, hidden away in this house in the grove, and Sader wondered if it belonged to the sculptor and if he had left it here for the tenant, or whether Wanda’s cousin could own it.