Puzzled, I returned to my previous post, wondering if Mantz had managed to perfectly time it and leave his bedroom and climb in with Amy just as I was circling the house to switch windows.
But Mantz was apparently still in bed, the bedstand lamp aglow; I would have sworn, listening closely, I could hear the pages of his magazine being slowly turned.
And so back to the guest bedroom window I went, where a bedspring symphony was still in full sway. Two voices, emitting muffled, restrained but very audible grunts, groans, sighs, and cries, accompanied the squeaking springs. Snugged between bushes and the stucco exterior of the bungalow, poised at the edge of the blinds, my Speed Graphic and I waited for things to settle down, hoping a light would eventually go on and satisfy my professional, not to mention prurient, curiosity.
Finally a light clicked on.
Amy had reached for the bedstand lamp and filled the guest room (the yellow plaster walls of which were decorated with framed Mantz aviation movie stills) with a golden luster appropriate to the afterglow of a satisfying amorous event. She wore the maroon pajama top that Mantz had apparently loaned her, but the person next to her in bed wasn’t Mantz, rather a nude woman, or at least nude to the waist because that was where the sheet fell. The woman was voluptuous bordering on plump, her torso pale next to her dark-tanned leathery face and short black boyish hair.
Nonetheless, there were less pleasant things in the world to view, particularly for a lech like me, than a nude-to-the-waist Toni Lake.
I backed away from the window, and the bushes behind me rustled like the wings of startled birds. Afraid I might have given myself away, I ducked down, hiding under and within the shrubbery like the weasel I was.
Shaking, sweating despite the night’s coolness, I didn’t know what the hell to think. I felt ashamed that I’d intruded upon such a scene, even though my intrusion wasn’t known to my victims; and I felt sickened, not by Amy’s sexual perversion—I was never one to sit in judgment of other people’s sex lives, being primarily interested in my own—but at the thought that this special woman, toward whom I’d been developing ever-deepening feelings, some carnal, some not, was in a sense a stranger to me. She was not who I thought she was, and I would never be close to her.
It just doesn’t pay for a guy to fall in love with a lesbian.
Crouched there in the bushes, thoughts racing, I knew one thing for certain, and one thing only: I would take no candid photos of Amy and her friend Miss Lake. If that was what Putnam had been after, he’d have to find another sleazy private eye to do it. This sleazy private eye had had his fill.
So I left my nest under the bushes, and was skulking away from the house toward the sidewalk, when a car came moving down Valley Spring Lane, very slowly, and with its lights off. Finding this curious, I slipped behind a palm tree and watched as the car, a snazzy red and white Dusenberg convertible, drew up in front.
I recognized the car, because I’d seen it out at United Airport the day we’d arrived: it belonged to Myrtle Mantz, who had left on the train yesterday afternoon, to visit her mother in Dallas.
Only she hadn’t.
Myrtle Mantz was in Toluca Lake, driving the Dusenberg.
With the lights out.
She parked, got quietly out of the car. She was wearing a lime blouse and hunter-green slacks, her long red hair pinned up, and looked very pale in the ivory moonlight; she seemed to have no makeup on and her pretty face was immobile, her eyes glazed. She stood on the sidewalk and gazed at her house as if she were a ghost that had returned to haunt it.
She had something in her right hand that I couldn’t make out too well, but it might have been a gun….
I scurried to the back door, ready to shoulder it open but found it blessedly unlocked; I moved through the dark kitchen where the Frigidaire was purring, left my Speed Graphic on the table where the charts and maps were still spread out, and slipped through the hall and into the guest bedroom where the bedstand lamp was still on and Amy was in bed, pillows propped behind her, while Toni Lake was off to one side of the room, where she’d been getting dressed, in fact was pretty well back into her white blouse and brown jodhpurs.
Lake scowled at me, not appreciating this invasion one little bit, and Amy’s eyes were wide with surprise and the beginnings of indignation, but I didn’t let her say a word.
Instead I whispered, “Myrtle’s coming up the front walk with a gun. Go out the back way. Now!”
Amy scurried out of bed, grabbing her bathrobe, and Lake followed us out into the hall and through the kitchen, Amy getting into and belting the bathrobe as she went; I could hear the front door opening—Myrtle had opened it quietly, but I was listening for it, whereas Mantz wouldn’t be.
“You got a car?” I whispered to Lake.
She nodded.
“Get yourselves the hell away from here,” I said to them both, opening the back door for them. “Sleep somewhere else tonight.”
Amy frowned at me, as if she didn’t know whether she loved me or hated me, although now that I knew what I did about her, what was the difference?
Then they were gone, and I went over and stood hugging the Frigidaire and peeked past it down the hall, where Myrtle was going into Mantz’s bedroom.
And I got a good look this time: it was a gun all right, a .32 revolver, a Smith and Wesson maybe, just a little bitty thing that could fit in a handbag, but you still wouldn’t want to get shot in the eye with it.
I didn’t have a gun with me. My nine-millimeter was in my suitcase at Lowman’s Motor Court; I was not licensed to carry a firearm in the state of California and, besides, this was the kind of assignment where you packed a camera, not a pistol.
So armed only with my wits—no remarks, please—I sneaked down the uncarpeted hallway, which was empty now; she was in Mantz’s bedroom—actually, it was her bedroom, too, wasn’t it?
And from the hallway as I crept along, I could hear her saying, with a Southwestern lilt, “Where’s your angel, Paul?”
“What are you doing here?” His response registered surprise, but not fear; maybe she had the gun behind her back. “She’s in the guest bedroom, where do you think she is?”
Myrtle’s voice was musical as she said, “Look what I’ve got, Paul….”
I figured that gun wasn’t behind her back, now.
“Put that down, Red. You don’t…”
That was when I came in and grabbed her from behind, bear-hugging her, pinning her arms, flattening her fine breasts with my forearms, but she managed to fire the gun anyway, shattering the bedstand lamp even as Mantz dove out of bed, just under the bullet’s trajectory. The room was dark now, though some light filtered in from the hallway.
“Let me go!” she squealed, not knowing who had hold of her.
And Mantz came scrambling forward, his face tight with rage, and he belted her in the jaw with a fist, and she went limp, the gun clattering to the hardwood floor, where we were lucky it didn’t go off again.
“You didn’t have to do that,” I spat at him, easing the unconscious woman over to the bed, laying her out gently, there. I hadn’t been holding her like that so he could fucking slug her! Blood trailed from the corner of her mouth; even in this state, she was a lovely thing. Too bad when she got jealous she went around with a gun.
“She tried to shoot me!” Mantz said, understandably worked up, hopping around like a mustached monkey in his bare chest. “She’s lucky I didn’t knock her block off!…Where’s Amelia?”
“I got her and her pal out the back door,” I said, switching on the overhead light. “Your wife never saw them, or me. So we were never here, remember? In about two seconds, I’m slipping out, myself.”
“What should I do?”
“Call the cops.”
He frowned, calming down a little. “Do I have to?”