Bly cooks for me from time to time, a trauma for both of us but somehow a necessary element in our mating ritual. “I didn’t forget,” I promised. “Seven o’clock at her place, I know.”
“That’s correct.”
“Hold the other messages till I get back. I should be less than an hour.”
“Or possibly an eternity,” he said.
“How you lighten my day, Robinson,” I told him, and hung up, and drove on to Ross’s place, which from this side looked to be nothing but a weatherbeaten gray board fence hung with wrought iron numbers and a black iron mailbox. In a small break in the oncoming traffic I made the left turn and parked against that section of the gray fence I knew was actually the garage door.
No one answered my ring. The fact I was getting used to this didn’t mean I liked it. I rang several times while traffic whizzed and roared behind me, and the silence from the house continued.
Well, this time I could do something about it. It happens Ross had loaned me his beach house a few times, so I know about the key hidden in the hollowed-out space behind the wrought iron number 3, which swivels from the one screw in its top crossbar. I wanted to know if Ross was actually here. If he wasn’t, I wanted to look for some hint as to where he might be. And I suppose, if truth be told, I wanted to look at the scene of the crime.
The entrance door is fashioned to look like the rest of the fence, and the round black iron keyhole might even be, from a distance, a knot in the wood. I unlocked and opened, returned the key to its hiding place, and stepped through into the narrow gray-green space between the entrance and the actual house. Vertical boards on both sides hid the four-foot gap behind the fence, which Ross used for storage.
The house door, a more elaborate one with four small diamond-shaped windows in it, was also kept locked, but this key was practically in plain sight atop the doorframe. I went on in and, before shutting the door, stood on the first of the many white shag rugs with which Ross had strewn his house — not fur or wool, some washable fake — and called, “Hello? Ross? Anybody home?”
Did a floor creak? Was there movement somewhere ahead? I listened, and heard only silence.
The house was two stories high, or low. I had entered on the upper floor, which contained the bedrooms plus Ross’s office, with its own view of the ocean and its own small deck for when he needed actual sea air in order to gather his thoughts. Downstairs were the living room and kitchen and so on, with a wall of glass doors facing the sea and leading to the main deck, the width of the house, with broad bleacher-style plank stairs descending to the beach — or ocean, depending on whether the tide was in or out, the moon was full or new, the weather was malignant or benign. Also down on the lower floor, of course, was the murder scene.
It was with a conscious effort that I decided to look around upstairs first. If Ross were here, it would most likely be the office he was holed up in, and if he were away, the office would be the likeliest spot to find hints to where he might have gone. The murder scene could wait.
From the front door a broad hall with a skylight led forward past a couple of closed bedroom and bathroom doors to a wide opening in the right wall and then a double door at the end. The wide opening led to a free-form staircase which curved down and around into the living room. (It would have been just out of camera range to the left in that videotape.) The double doors led to the master bedroom, which led to Ross’s office, so that was the way I went, glancing down the stairs at the living room on the way by, opening the left-hand of the double-doors — the right was sort of a fake, fixed in place — and entering a cool dim bedroom with the shades drawn and a woman’s blouse and jeans tossed onto the king-size bed.
The brightest spot in the bedroom was the doorway in the right wall, leading to Ross’s office. I glanced at the clothing on the bed — could that possibly still be Delia West’s things, after all this time? — then walked diagonally across the floor toward that farther doorway. Movement seen in my peripheral vision was me in the gray-tinted wide mirror above the two dressers.
Ross’s office was also empty, though considerably more sloppy than the bedroom. One of the sliding glass doors out to the deck stood open; would he go away and leave it like that? Outside there, the gray Pacific idled away, out and out, under a pink and orange haze.
Ross’s desk was a U-shaped multilevel construct of his own design, which always reminded me of Habitat. Word-processor components, filing cabinets, an old black Remington manual office typewriter for both its nostalgic value and back-up use during blackouts, electric pencil sharpener, a madly complex telephone system, more gimmicks and machinery than the villain in a James Bond movie, and all of it covered with a messy mulch of paper — manuscripts, letters, magazines, memos, notes, postcards, reference books lying open, photostats, newspaper clippings, and who knows what all. I stood looking at it; in this jumble I hoped to find directions to Ross’s whereabouts?
A sound. A definite sound from behind me. The bedroom.
I turned, trying to be fast and silent at the same time, and bumped clangily into Ross’s desk chair, which rolled away to smack into a filing cabinet. So much for the element of surprise; I hurried back across the office and through the doorway into the dim bedroom.
Nobody. Nothing. No sound. And yet the room felt different, as though the dust molecules in the air still vibrated from someone’s recent passage.
To my left a pair of louvered doors fronted the closet. I went over there, listened, reached out to grasp both handles, and abruptly pulled the two doors open.
A girl wearing nothing but blue bikini panties lunged out at me with a knife, crying, “Get away from me!”
12
I got away from her, back-pedaling halfway across the room, holding my hands palm outward so she could see I wasn’t armed. “Don’t shoot, lady,” I said. “I’m friendly.”
The girl had come one quick catlike pace out of the closet, still pointing that blade at me, and now she looked sharply left and right, obviously searching for the rest of my gang. Then she stared at me again, and frowned. “I know you,” she said.
“Of course you do.” I tried an amiable grin, noticing that the knife wasn’t actually a knife at all but a long, shiny pair of scissors. Almost as effective a weapon, but making a messier cut. Still, I was relaxing, because I knew I was about to receive one of the few valuable fringe benefits of celebrity — instant recognition and trust.
“You’re— Wait a minute.” She shook her head. “You’re Packard.”
“I played Packard,” I corrected her, as I always do. “I myself am Sam Holt.”
“Ross — Ross wrote for your show.”
“Oh, I get it,” I said. “You’re...” Not Delia, that was the dead one. “Doreen. You’re Doreen.”
Her mouth twisted. “Mentioned me, did he? Some nice little locker-room gossip?”
That was irritating. “Last November,” I told her, “Ross said he’d had an argument with the girl he was living with. Her name was Doreen. He came here. He didn’t volunteer any more details about the relationship, and I hope you won’t either.”
She gave me a doubtful but cynical look. “Have I been put in my place?”
“I hope so. Will you put the weapon down?”
She looked at the scissors, as though surprised to see them, then tossed them onto the bed. Then she stared at the clothing lying there, down at herself, and cried, “My God, I’m naked!”
“I had noticed that.” Now that she was unarmed I felt it safe to move, and where I moved was toward the hall door. “Why don’t I go downstairs,” I said, “and you join me in a minute.”