Sleep with Slander Read online

  He could see what was coming, now. They were going to end up as co-conspirators. He looked at her silhouette against the shoji screen and decided that he couldn’t have found a prettier conspirator anywhere. Her torso in the brown sun suit had all the classic curves in the right places. The black curls shone like satin. “I’ll have to talk it over with the attorneys. Then I’ll know just what chances the baby has under the will.” She didn’t glance at him but he sensed her taut attention. “I’d just like to see him, make sure of the identity, if you know where he is now.”

  “I’m not trying to give you the run-around, Mr. Sader, but only some assurance that the baby is due to get the money would make me tell you where he is.”

  The tone was half-mocking, and he wondered if he’d really fooled her.

  “This is what I’ll do,” she said. She turned. The big Buddha beside her lent her something foreign and enigmatic, a touch of mystery. “I’ll check up on the little boy and make sure he’s all right, that you’ll be able to see him when the terms of the inheritance are cleared up. You can be checking with your clients.”

  “Good enough.” Sader rose because he knew he wasn’t going to find out from her where Gibbings’ grandson was being kept . . . and perhaps abused.

  “Let’s try to get it for him,” she said, walking forward. She moved softly but she didn’t get very close. She was something you looked at but didn’t touch. “Let’s do all we can for the baby.”

  Her mind was on the money and she knew he knew it. The kid was a kind of humorist, Sader thought, knowing that he was up against a cunning and devious opponent.

  CHAPTER THREE

  SADER HAD a friend who worked the sports desk on the local paper. He got a pass from him to the newspaper morgue and looked up the account of the accident at Catalina in which Mrs. Champlain had died. The item was brief, and there had been apparently no follow-up, since the body had not been recovered. The owners of the boat were given as Ralph Perrine and his son, Brent. The address mentioned was in Wilmington.

  It was getting along toward five o’clock now, dinnertime, and Sader decided he might have a good chance of finding the Perrines at home. At a quarter of six he pulled up in front of the house, a big old-fashioned frame place with a neglected yard. Out back were the unfinished hulls of three boats, the clutter of an amateur boatyard. Sader parked and got out, tested the gate. It started to fall loose, and he caught it and propped it against the fence post; the hinge was rusted to uselessness and he judged that this was the common procedure on entering. He went up the broken walk to the porch. He didn’t have to knock. A tall man in shirt sleeves and work pants, gray-headed, stood inside the screen picking his teeth.

  “Mr. Perrine?”

  “Speaking.”

  Sader took out the I.D. and flashed it without any preliminary remarks. The man inside the screen door grunted. “We’re looking for a Mrs. Champlain and her son.”

  The air seemed to stiffen up, Sader thought. The other man opened the screen and tossed the toothpick out, and thereby had a better look at Sader. “She’s dead. I don’t know where the kid is.”

  “Do you mind if I ask you a few questions?”

  “What about?”

  “The relatives who might have taken the baby after her death.”

  He had pale gray eyes and they shone at Sader through the screen, and made Sader think of polished stones set in the tanned face. Perrine hesitated, not wanting Sader to come in. “Guess you’d better talk to my son. He knew her better’n I did.” He opened the screen and came out. He was husky in spite of being stooped, with big gnarled hands, and Sader decided that he was a man who had worked hard all his life. “My son’s out back. Come on.” He trotted down the steps, the porch shuddering, and turned at the side of the house toward the clutter at the rear.

  The smell of paint and of wood shavings was powerful. The man who turned to look at them was one of the best examples of the outdoor type Sader had ever seen. He was big. He wore a frayed T shirt and tight denims, and he filled them to muscular perfection. The face was square and masculine, the eyebrows dark and heavy, the hair crewcut over his well-shaped head, and he examined Sader with intelligent attention while his father explained that Sader wanted information about Mrs. Champlain’s adopted boy.

  “Are you a cop, Mr. Sader?” he asked quietly.

  “I’m a private investigator.”

  “And who’re you working for?”

  “A bunch of lawyers,” Sader said, trotting out the convenient half-truth. “There’s some money, an inheritance, involved. We didn’t know that Mrs. Champlain is dead; but since it’s true, we’d like to locate the boy.”

  He thought that he saw a flash of suspicion in Brent’s face, but if there had been, Brent covered it quickly. He laid down his paintbrush, took a pack of cigarettes from his pocket, then hesitated before lighting one. “Let’s get away from the paint. I’m always afraid of fire out here.” He moved perhaps a dozen feet, turned around, lighted the cigarette and inhaled the smoke. “After Tina died I lost contact with the people we’d known together. Anyway, I scarcely knew her relatives. I’d met a couple of aunts. An uncle once.”

  “Were they her relatives, or relatives of her dead husband?”

  “I never heard her mention anyone in her husband’s family. These people were her own relatives.”

  Mentally Sader filed it into the same category with something else he had already figured out: Gibbings would have investigated, on his own, anyone listed under the name of Champlain in the city directories or the phone books. The boy wouldn’t be with any of them. “Do you remember their names?”

  Brent went on puffing at the cigarette, and looking thoughtful, and finally he said, “I’ve got a letter in the house, one that Tina wrote me. There’s something in it about one of the aunts. Let’s go have a look.” He turned, walked past the jutting prow of an unfinished hull and headed for the rear door of the house, with the old man still mumbling a protest because he didn’t want Sader to get indoors. Sader moved along hurriedly.

  Since the day was dying outdoors, the house was dark. Brent snapped on the lights. The kitchen looked like the tail end of a wrecking party. There was a table covered with beer cans and chicken bones, curling rinds of pizzas and a snowflake pile where somebody had peeled some boiled eggs. The sink had dishes in it—not stacked; they looked as if they had been aimed at the sink from across the room. Mixed with china and pots were paper plates and wadded napkins. The chairs held stacks of old newspapers, with soiled shirts and other washables draped over their backs. Brent waved at it all in passing. “Don’t mind this. We don’t have time to keep house.”

  The old man whined louder, and Sader judged that this was what he wasn’t supposed to see. In the hall, Brent snapped on more lights and said, “Wait down here, I’ll find the letter and be right back,” and ran up the stairs to the second floor. The old man went on into another room, switched on a lamp. Sader could see the end of a stuffy green rug and a chair. The cushion in the chair had stuffing escaping, which was par for the course, Sader thought. The old man was grumbling in there, and Sader caught fragments about nosy interlopers, and why couldn’t people be allowed to keep their privacy.

  He heard Brent on the stairs and turned. Brent had stopped on the landing where the stairs turned. He had an open letter in his hand. He moved the sheets of paper so that light fell on them from the upper hall, and read what was written, then reread the page. He lowered the sheets and looked at Sader. Sader thought Brent wore an odd expression. He seemed jolted, stunned. Puzzled, too. All at once Sader’s uneasy intuition told him he wasn’t going to see that letter, and the apprehension and anger dried his mouth and throat. He swallowed. He wanted to go up after Brent Perrine, but that wouldn’t be any good. Brent had about twenty years on him, not to mention all that muscle. Sader stayed put and waited.

  He tried to sound casual. “Well, what’s it say?”

  Brent didn’t come down any farther. He rubbed
a free hand over his crewcut. He was shielding his eyes, but Sader could sense the air of surprise and of unbelief. Then Brent said, “Hell, this isn’t the right letter. I’ve made a mistake.” He turned quickly and with a gesture of tucking the letter out of Sader’s sight, he ran back up the stairs. When he didn’t come back in a couple of minutes, Sader went on into the living room.

  Ralph Perrine was taking a bottle of wine from under the lid of a phonograph cabinet. He frowned at Sader.

  “Go ahead,” Sader said, “don’t mind me.”

  Perrine tilted the quart of muscatel and took a lingering drink.

  Sader sat on the edge of the wrecked chair. “I understand that Mrs. Champlain was swimming off your boat when she was drowned.”

  Perrine wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. He returned the muscatel to the cabinet, closed the lid. He seemed suddenly gloomy. “That’s right, mister. It was a terrible thing, too. She was a young and pretty woman and she was sure sweet on my boy. I know Brent was fond of her, too. I was hoping they’d get married. She could of helped him, she could of bought a place where he could have his own boatyard, his own business. It just ruined it all, her drowning like that.”

  “What do you mean, she could have helped him?”

  “She had all that money from her husband’s death. The insurance.” Perrine spoke as if Sader in his stupidity must have forgotten. “He had the regular life insurance, and then he took out some of that flight insurance before the plane took off. She was a rich woman, though you wouldn’t think it. She didn’t have no airs about her. I liked her for that.”

  Sader flinched. As soon as Gibbings had mentioned that Champlain had died on a flight, he should have thought of insurance.

  “Who has the money now?”

  “The child, I guess. Wouldn’t he inherit it?”

  Brother, brother. I really ought to have my head examined, Sader thought in anger. He listened for sounds of Brent’s coming down again, and heard nothing, and knew that Brent was up there with the letter, rereading that page of it, as clearly as if he had seen it.

  He thought of Gibbings. What kind of game was the old fox playing, pretending he didn’t want to reclaim the grandson now worth a fortune? “Did Mrs. Champlain ever say anything to you about making a will?”

  “Sure did.” Perrine sidled back to the old phonograph and his fingers twiddled on the lid. “She talked about it a lot. She was going to leave half of her money to Brent. Not that she thought anything would happen to her. None of us dreamed anything like that. I guess . . .” He yanked up the lid as if expecting Sader to make a protest. “I guess she forgot. Or she really meant to do it when they got married.”

  Sader watched while Perrine had another go at the muscatel. “How much of a search did you make for her body?”

  “We spent a week,” Perrine said promptly. “Brent just about didn’t get over it. I thought he’d get drowned hisself, he spent so much time in the water. She never came up, and he couldn’t find her.”

  “Anybody help?”

  “Plenty. Skin divers, the Coast Guard, a lot of the people who had boats at Catalina—they all hunted for her.”

  “What time of day was it? Was she swimming alone?”

  “We went over the night before, and Brent and I fished, and then he took her ashore to a hotel in Avalon. Next day we took out about noon. She and Brent were in the water and I was fishing when it happened. She just gave a kind of yell and went under. Just like that.” He snapped his gnarled fingers.

  “The water at Catalina is pretty clear. It’s a wonder you didn’t see her on the bottom.”

  “We were out in deep water. I used to wonder if it hadn’t been a shark got her. A million-to-one chance, according to those fellas who know all about fishes, but still—”

  “If a shark got her, you’d have seen the blood.”

  “Guess that’s right.”

  Sader tried to analyze the old man’s attitude, but on the surface he seemed genuinely puzzled and unhappy about what had happened to Tina Champlain.

  “It was early in the spring. Early for swimming, I mean.”

  “It sure was,” Perrine agreed. “I remember Brent complaining. She didn’t mind the cold as much. I’ve noticed it before—women don’t.”

  Sader heard a sound from the hall and looked around. Brent Perrine was standing in the doorway. He looked directly at Sader, a kind of look that Sader recognized—he was covering a lie with a stare—and said, “Well, that’s the limit. I can’t find that letter up there anywhere.”

  “Too bad. You don’t remember the aunt’s name?”

  “It was Sawyer, or something like it. Sawnell. No, that’s not it.”

  “Do you think she might have taken Mrs. Champlain’s little boy, after she was drowned?”

  “I don’t know. It’s possible, though this aunt was pretty well along in years. She was Mrs. Champlain’s father’s sister, his oldest sister. I remember that much.”

  “What about the uncle you met?”

  Brent shrugged. He had his eye on the lid of the phonograph, and old man Perrine was across the room from it, very innocent. Sader suddenly got the picture of what went on here, the young man holding down a job and trying in his spare time to make a start in the boat business, and the old man supposed to help by keeping the house going, and instead hitting the bottle. Brent had ambition and energy. The old man was burned out.

  “I don’t remember the uncle’s name. I don’t even remember if she mentioned it. I think she just said, ‘This is my Uncle Joe,’ or something like that. He was a tall old guy. A nice dresser. That’s all I remember about him.”

  “These people live around here? Near L.A.?”

  “I think they do.”

  “What about mutual friends? Someone you knew while you and Tina Champlain were going together?”

  He had the feeling that Brent was withdrawing from these questions, that there was a secret he meant to guard. He wondered if it had something to do with that letter. Brent said, “There was one couple—they lived in West L.A. They were neighbors of hers at the time she’d been married to Champlain. But they moved East, I don’t know where.”

  “What about a girl named Wanda Nevins?”

  It startled Brent. He hadn’t expected it. He made a couple of false starts and then said, “She was a friend of Tina’s. I met her a couple of times. She was younger than Tina, Tina had helped her out of some kind of jam. I don’t think Tina saw much of her. It was just an . . . old acquaintance.”

  “Have you seen her since Mrs. Champlain’s death?”

  Brent hesitated, the awkward moment drawing out while he decided what to say about Wanda Nevins. “She came here once. She thought Tina might have left her some money, and she wanted to know what we knew about a will. We didn’t know anything. I don’t think Tina made one. I told her that, and she left, and I haven’t seen her since.”

  Sader made one last try. “Can you think of anything—anything at all—which might give a clue as to who has Mrs. Champlain’s little boy?”

  Brent and his father exchanged a glance. As far as Sader could tell they seemed honestly puzzled by the question. “I just don’t know,” Brent said at last. “When she went out with me she had a baby sitter come in. An older woman, a neighbor. But as for who’d have him now . . . I really just don’t know.”

  Sader drove down to Fisherman’s Wharf for a sea-food dinner. He had coffee first, trying to rouse himself from a sour feeling of let-down. The restaurant was clean and brightly lighted, smelled appetizingly of food, and from below the windows the moving surf gurgled around the pilings. It was pleasant, even sort of romantic, but nothing lifted his mood.

  He thought back through the day, wondering what he might have done differently. He’d had a nice trip down the coast to Laguna, an interesting sidelight on running a boatyard at home. The one thing he had learned which might make a difference, was that there was a lot of money involved. Gibbings hadn’t mentioned it, and he wanted t
o tell Gibbings while he could watch him.

  There was something inside the amorphous case, a hard core he couldn’t quite get a grip on. He tried to think of a comparison and remembered something his grandmother had said once, something about a flatiron inside a feather bed. There was a flatiron somewhere inside this thing but he couldn’t find it. He just knew that it was there. A booby trap.

  The waitress came with the fried shrimp and the Idaho baked potato and the creamed peas, and Sader picked up his fork, and then suddenly he remembered something out of the letter Gibbings had showed him, something about the child going hungry, half-starved. He laid down the fork.

  The blonde came tripping back with a small plate containing two fat chunks of hot corn bread, two pats of butter and strawberry jam. “Would you like your coffee warmed up, sir?”

  “No, thanks.”

  He began to eat, because not to would look silly and anyway it had to be paid for, but the zest was gone.

  Somewhere not too far away, somewhere in the coastal triangle, say between here and Santa Monica and draw the line east to Santa Anita track and back to the beach, somewhere in that chunk of city was a small child who was living a life of hell.

  He managed two and a half shrimps, and one chunk of corn bread, and had a final cup of coffee, black. Then he went back to the car.

  The night smelled of the sea. Out in the dark some ships rode at anchor. One of them must be Navy. A blinker began to wink against the dark, sending God knew what kind of important information, maybe, Sader thought, something about the admiral’s girl friend being late for their date and if she didn’t hurry he’d have to go on home to his wife.

  It was against Sader’s principles to work at night.

  He headed for the office.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  SADER KNEW one attorney with an insane habit of staying downtown nights to practice putting in his empty office. Sader rang him.

  He was hard to pin down as any lawyer is, talking back to Sader’s questions under a cloud of quibbling phrases, but in the end Sader got answers, of sorts. The lawyer also promised to check with somebody in the new L.A. County Courthouse and see if Mrs. Champlain’s will had been filed or steps taken to probate her estate. Six months was early for such action, he warned. The courts were crowded.