Sleep with Slander Page 14

  Brent came to the doorway. His hands were empty. He looked tired. The wound over his eye had bled down his cheek. His eye was puffed. He said, “I thought you’d be gone by now, you damned meddler.”

  “Just tell me where the boy is and I’ll leave you alone.”

  Brent shook his head. “I don’t know where he is.”

  “Is that what you’re doing here—looking for some clue to his whereabouts?”

  “It’s none of your damned business what I’m doing.” Still, Sader thought, Brent looked a little uneasy, as if Sader had skirted the truth.

  “If you don’t kill that old man of yours,” Sader said, “he’s going to kill you. Not that it would be a great loss in either case. But you and him know a lot you’re not telling. Probably you borrowed a lot of money from Tina Champlain and then drowned her to keep from repaying the loan. But who could prove it? Wise up, why don’t you? I just want the kid.”

  Brent’s angry eyes moved across the windows, the view of the trees. In spite of the way the scrap had turned out, he had a puzzled, almost defeated look. “Do you really just want the boy?”

  “That’s what I keep trying to tell you.”

  “How much will you pay for him?”

  Into Sader’s mind flashed the figures of his bank balance, a little more than two hundred dollars. Two hundred and sixty-three, something like that. He knew what he could depend on from his partner Scarborough. About the same. “Five thousand. Maybe ten. It would depend on how soon we got the information.”

  Brent’s expression, as far as Sader could judge, was almost indifferent. He’s covering up, Sader thought, he doesn’t really know where Ricky is, he’s just talking to cover up whatever he came here to do, or he’s trying to think of some new place to look for whatever is supposed to be hidden here. He said, “Well, they might go as high as twenty thousand. I’d have to check first.”

  “Twenty thousand.” Brent seemed to consider it, weighing it against some other values, perhaps the resources of whoever had Ricky. “When would you know for sure?”

  Sader thought, What’s he up to? He’s pulling my leg, his mind’s on something else entirely. “We’d have to have some guarantee from you, some proof you know what you’re talking about. Look, you must have had to share Tina’s money with your old man, to keep his mouth shut. This would be yours, all yours.”

  Brent’s look, for an unguarded moment, was that of a man who hears a dangerous truth spoken aloud. They had gotten money out of Tina, then. The old man had claimed his share.

  Sader said, “You must want like hell to clear out and get away from your old man. He’s a mess, a drunk, and he’s dangerous. He takes pot shots at you when you have an argument, and then you have to beat him up. I guess when he’s pretty drunk he threatens to tell somebody about what really happened to Tina Champlain.”

  The shape of Brent’s cheeks flattened, his shoulders moved, and Sader knew he had goaded him about as much as he would take.

  “So this twenty thousand—even if it doesn’t look like much after what you got from Tina—this will still get you away from him and let you have a boatyard of sorts, all your own.”

  “You’re full of bull,” Brent said, but he wasn’t worked up about it. He was thinking again of whatever it was he had looked for here, and hadn’t found. “I’ll tell you what, though. About that money. Why don’t you come to my place in Wilmington and bring the cash? Later. Say around ten o’clock?”

  “I can try.”

  “That’s fine.”

  Sader knew in that moment that Brent had other plans entirely.

  “You’d better get out of here now, and don’t come back.”

  Sader went to the door. His left arm had begun to tingle and he could move his fingers. He went out into the afternoon sunlight, the glare burning hot under his eyelids, and he had a moment of sick staggering. Then he got his bearings. He climbed the knoll to the big stone heads that looked toward the far-off sea. When he got to the shadow of the first one, he sat down on the ground and shut his eyes. The earth whirled.

  He had to think, to figure this out. There was still a job to do. Not for money. Hell, no. He was above money. He was brave and noble, a private eye out of a TV series, doing it all for the love of it. He wasn’t working for old man Gibbings, who was a crud except for that outlandish streak of decency that made him want to find a starving kid. He wasn’t working for Mr. Gibbings’ no-longer-virgin daughter, because, hell, she didn’t even know a man named Sader existed. He wasn’t working for Ricky, because Ricky was a mirage. He was doing it . . . yes, dammit . . . because he was like a frog in a rut and there was only one way to hop. Sader wanted to laugh at this, but his head hurt.

  He thought back to that moment of instant attack, when he had met Brent at the door, and a new idea came to him. Brent had been on edge, ready to jump anybody who came in, ready to defend himself with his fists. He had been expecting somebody all right, but it couldn’t have been Sader. Sader hadn’t known, until a brief time before, that the canyon place even existed. So Brent was nervous and jumpy because of somebody else, the real tenant of the place, Wanda’s cousin, the crewcut juvenile who had taken Ricky from Mrs. Cecil’s house.

  Whatever Brent had been looking for must be something worth the trouble if Crewcut came in and caught him. The only thing Brent had seemed interested in up to now was owning his own boatyard, which took money. Maybe more money than he’d already gotten out of Tina. Was there money here? Sader stared through the glaring light at the grove and the half-hidden house. He got to his feet, leaning against the concrete, the backside of the big stone head, with clumps of broken cement in the dirt at its base. He looked at the red house and worked his left arm, feeling life seep back into it, the fingers stinging and the wrist afire with pain. Then he heard the slam of a door. Brent would be coming along.

  He ran hurrying down the opposite side of the knoll to the gate, went out to his car, got into it and headed down the canyon road. At the intersection in Laguna Beach, he pulled in behind a service station and waited. Pretty soon Brent came down the canyon drive in an Olds sedan, black with a cream top, and headed north. Sader followed, fighting traffic to keep within sight of the other car. Brent kept up a pretty good clip but still he wasn’t exactly rushing to get there, and Sader got the idea he might be mulling things over, making plans as he drove.

  When they swept through Long Beach on Route 101 and headed for Wilmington, Sader knew where Brent was going. Now he wanted to get ahead of Brent, beat him to the house, but there didn’t seem to be a chance. He didn’t know of any short cuts. He was trying to figure out what he could do, when Brent suddenly pulled the Olds in to the curb in front of a liquor store. Sader roared by in a burst of traffic.

  He parked in the block behind the Perrine place and ran across the weedy lots to the back door. He knocked, waited. He thought he heard a grunt from upstairs, then a snore. He opened the kitchen door and went in, walked to the hall, listened again, then went softly up the stairs.

  There were no further sounds, except that the old house creaked a little. Sader went to the open door of the old man’s room. Unexpectedly there was the odor of fresh linen.

  Someone had put clean sheets on the old man’s bed, a case on the pillow, and there was a clean blanket folded at the foot. Ralph Perrine lay in the bed, in an atmosphere of almost hospital-like cleanness. Sader stepped close. Ralph Perrine was asleep. There were patches of adhesive bandages on the worst of the bruises. He breathed with a hoarse dragging sound, as if he had run a long way and had fallen down to die.

  Curiously, Sader put a hand down to touch the bare shoulder, but Ralph Perrine didn’t stir. Sader turned quickly to the hall. From outside and below was the sound of a car’s motor. He looked around and found a tiny room off the hall, which must have been built originally for a sewing closet; there were shelves at the back and an ironing board flapped up against the wall, and a long-ago smell of starch and cotton.

  He kept a quar
ter-inch crack to see through.

  Brent came up the stairs. Sader stepped back so quickly that he forgot to ease his weight, and a board creaked and for a minute he thought Brent would notice. But Brent had eyes only for the door of his father’s room.

  Sader could hear him walking around in there, then a sudden sharp order for the old man to wake up. “I’ve brought you a bottle of muscatel. Sit up and have some. I want to talk to you, and I want you to understand what I’m saying.”

  Sader couldn’t hear any reply from Ralph Perrine. There were slapping sounds then that made Sader flinch.

  “You damned dirty old wino! I hope you’re dying. I don’t give a damn any more.”

  There was a gurgling reply that died into mumbles.

  “I could have married her if it hadn’t been for you. A nice girl. And then it was too late. She’d gone overboard.”

  There were more slaps, then a scuffling noise as if the old man was trying to get away. Then he cried distinctly, “Brent! Brent, don’t!”

  “You’re going to have a bath and get some clean clothes on. Then we’re going to take a trip. We’ll go down to Ensenada, go down the coast into Mexico, and we’ll fish, we’ll take some time out.”

  After a moment they came out, Brent almost carrying the old man, and went down the hall to the bathroom. Sader could hear water running, could hear the old man’s querulous mumbling. There was a sudden splash and a loud gasping yelp, and Brent said bitterly, “I ought to let you drown.”

  He left the old man in the tub and went back to the room, and Sader heard dresser drawers being opened and shut. When he went back into the bath, the old man whined, “Don’t always blame me because she went overboard. It didn’t have nothing to do with us.”

  “You wouldn’t keep your damned mouth shut,” Brent said, almost yelling. “You had to keep talking and talking, you couldn’t let it alone, how the kid looked like her. And then pretty soon she couldn’t take any more. And you did it!”

  “Look, we’re covered. How can that detective find anything?”

  “Dry yourself. Here’s a towel.”

  “Is he giving you trouble? Hell, he’s fifty and you’ve got it on him by twenty pounds. I learned you to fight.”

  “The only one I’d really like to beat up is you,” Brent said savagely.

  They came back down the hall, Brent guiding his father, who was buttoning the cuffs on a clean shirt. At the bedroom door the old man said, “I want a drink!”

  “I said I’d bought you a bottle.”

  “That cold water shocked hell out of me.”

  “It wasn’t cold.”

  Ralph Perrine sat down on the edge of his bed, rubbed the wet hair out of his eyes. “You got some money? You made a touch somewhere?”

  “I’ve got what I walked out of here with this morning.”

  Ralph Perrine was lifting the wine bottle to his lips. Brent turned away as if unwilling to look. “I’m going to pack some clothes.” He went out, leaving his father sitting there on the edge of the bed.

  Ralph Perrine looked cautiously at the doorway, then tilted the wine bottle—Sader had never seen such continuous swallowing. When he had finished drinking, he fell over on his side.

  From Brent’s room came the snap of a suitcase lock. Brent came into the hall carrying a brown bag, with a jacket over his arm. He stood for a long moment looking in at his father. Then he set the case down on the floor and went in to stand beside the bed. Sader saw him reach down, lift the bottle and stare at the level of its contents.

  “I used to give a damn,” Brent said, as if in surprise at himself. “I used to worry about what might happen to you and I guess that’s why I was going to take you with me now.”

  He stood for a moment waiting, and from the bed came a heavy snore. Brent suddenly tossed the bottle of wine onto the clean sheet. “It was a crazy idea. You’d find some way to ruin things, get us both in dutch.” He turned and went out, picked up the case, and ran downstairs. In another moment Sader heard the car start.

  When the car had backed, when the sound of the motor was gone, Sader went downstairs and located the phone, called Jackson’s office. “One of your suspects is headed for Mexico. Brent Perrine.” As he stood there in the musty living room, waiting to fill Jackson in on it, he wondered where Brent had parked his car when he had gone to the canyon house in Laguna. It must have been out of sight inside some shrubbery, Sader decided. “Yes, I ran into him earlier today,” Sader told Jackson. “I guess you know that Wanda Nevins had a cousin in Laguna. He answers the description of the man who took Tina Champlain’s little boy away after she died. I think it all ties in somewhere, that Brent knows what’s happened to the child. He might even have killed the girl. He’s money hungry, and she had some.”

  Jackson’s replies were guarded, so Sader figured he wasn’t alone, he was with somebody and didn’t want them to know he was sharing information with a private dick.

  “I ran into Perrine. He was searching the house where Wanda’s cousin lives. No one else was there.” Sader shifted the phone from his left hand; the arm ached.

  “We haven’t been able to locate the man who is Wanda Nevins’ relative,” Jackson said carefully. “If you have a description, we need it.”

  “He’s young, tanned, athletic in build. Drives a convertible and dresses pretty sharp. He was with Wanda Nevins and Mrs. Champlain when they bought the house at Laguna. The real estate agent thinks he was pretty good friends with Tina Champlain.”

  “What do you mean? Some kind of gigolo?”

  “Could be. He’s got some fancy furniture in his house. It cost money. Somebody’s.”

  Through the windows of the darkening room, Sader could see the twilight sky above the Palos Verdes hills. There was a sudden taste of exhaustion, as sharp as that of blood, in his mouth, and he was aware that he had taken a beating, that he hadn’t had any dinner, that he was so tired that he could have dropped where he stood to sleep.

  The phone trembled in his grip. He felt that he was alone in a room full of ghosts.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  WHEN HE had finished talking to Jackson, Sader went back upstairs. Ralph Perrine had turned over on his back, got his feet up on the sheets, and was snoring. Sader went across to Brent’s room. Even though Brent had packed hastily here a few moments ago, the room was still in order. Sader inspected the closet, where several suits hung, then looked through the dresser drawers. The impression he got was that not only was Brent a tidy, cleanly person but that he took care to keep little on hand concerning his personal life. There were very few personal souvenirs among his belongings.

  In what was there, Sader found a snapshot that he kept. It showed Brent and a small boy on the deck of a cabin cruiser. The boat was tied up at a dock somewhere—Sader thought that the background looked like Balboa—and in the near distance a woman in a bathing suit seemed just to have turned from the camera.

  There was no date, no notation of any kind on the back of the picture, and Sader had no way of being sure, but his hunch told him this was Tina’s little boy. Perhaps the woman in the background was Tina herself. He wished that she’d been facing the camera.

  He went downstairs and let himself out, closed the house and walked to his car. By now the Highway Patrol would have an eye out for Brent. Probably they’d collar him at the border, where explanations would be more obviously in order.

  Sader felt too rumpled, too grimy, and too bruised to face a crowd in a restaurant. He drove to a small neighborhood market and picked up some hamburger, some bread and butter, cheese and tomatoes, and went on out to Scarborough’s place in Los Alamitos. As he drove, he tormented himself with the memory of his neglect about calling the Reverend Twining. There might be news for him there.

  At the house the lonesome dog greeted him with jumps and barks, and the parrot raised hell in his cage because sometime during the day he had emptied his water cup and nobody had been here to refill it. Sader fed and watered the pair of them, then
tried to call Twining, but found the number busy. He went up and drew a tub of warm water and soaked himself. He inspected his left arm; a couple of tendons hurt like hell when he clenched his hand, and there were dark bruises above the wrist. I was lucky at that, Sader thought, I’m so damned out of condition and he was so cute. When he had toweled and put on a robe he went to the bathroom mirror and sized up his face. There was a puffed mark where Brent had caught him on the cheek. It wasn’t too bad.

  He went downstairs and fried the hamburger with onions, heated the buttered bread in the oven, sliced tomatoes. When he had eaten he began to feel sleepy.

  He went into the front room and sat down to smoke. Then he remembered the snapshot and went upstairs, got it out of his coat pocket, took it back down with him. He turned on a lamp and studied the picture.

  The age of the boy would be about right, five or so. He wasn’t big for his age, but there was a past-five maturity about him. He had dark eyes, dark hair, and even though Brent was tanned from exposure, the kid’s natural coloring was almost as dark. Remembering what old man Perrine had said, that Mrs. Champlain and the child resembled each other, Sader bent close to study the features. But the boy seemed, in the picture, to be a very ordinary-looking kid. If he resembled anyone, Sader thought, it was ten thousand other kids his age. Something hung from his neck on a string . . . a religious medal, perhaps. He was sitting hunched inside the curve of Brent’s arm, hugging his knees. On Brent’s features was a look of complete indifference. The child’s look was guarded.

  He was a scared kid, Sader thought, even then.

  Who had taken the snapshot? Brent’s old man? It could have been some passer-by who had obliged with the camera, or Tina herself, providing the woman in the snapshot hadn’t been Tina after all.

  The phone rang. Sader laid the snapshot on the table beneath the lamp, and answered. It was the Reverend Twining.

  “Mr. Sader? I’ve been trying to get you at your office. Your answering service gave me this number.”