“I’m in the lobby now. Shall I come up?”
“I’ll come down.” He hesitated. “I have a visitor.”
I sat on a red plastic settee near the elevator door. The metal arrow above it turned from one to three and back to one. The door slid open. Harlan’s mother emerged, tinkling and casting vague glances around the lobby. She wore a greenish black cape over her sackcloth dress, which made her look like an old bird of ill omen.
She saw me and came forward, taking long skinny-legged strides in her flat sandals.
“Good morning, Mrs. Harlan.”
“My name is not Harlan,” she said severely. But she neglected to tell me what it was. “Are you following me, young man? I warn you–”
“You don’t have to. I came to see your son. I guess you did, too.”
“Yes, my son.” A black mood clawed her face downward. From its furrows her eyes glittered like wet black stones. “You look like a decent man. I know something of spiritual auras. It’s my study, my life work. And I’ll tell you, Mr. Whatsis, since you’re involved with Reginald, my son has an evil aura. He was a cold-hearted boy and he’s grown into a cold-hearted man. He won’t even help his own sister in her extremity.”
“Extremity?”
“Yes, she’s in very serious trouble. She wouldn’t tell me what it was. But I know my daughter–”
“When did you see her?”
“I haven’t seen her. She telephoned me last night, and she was desperate for money. Of course she knows I have none, I’ve been living off her bounty for ten years. She wanted me to intercede with Reginald. As I have done.” Her mouth closed like a pouch with a drawstring.
“He won’t open the family coffers?”
She shook her head, dislodging tears from the corners of her eyes. The arrow over the elevator door had turned to three and back again to one. Harlan stepped out. His mother gave him a sidelong glance and started away. She flapped across the lobby and out into the street, a bird of ill omen who had seen a more ominous bird.
Harlan came up to me with a tentative smile and an outstretched hand. His handshake was dead.
“I didn’t mean to be unpleasant last night. We Harlans are rather emotional.”
“Forget it, I’m not proud.”
He glanced at the sunlit door through which his mother had vanished. “Has she been filling you with fantasies? I ought to warn you, she’s not entirely sane.”
“Uh-huh. She told me that Maude needs money.”
“Lister does, at any rate.”
“How much money?”
“Five thousand dollars. He says he’s bringing Maude’s check for that amount. I’m to expedite payment by telephoning our bank in Chicago. It amounts to his asking me to cash the check.”
“Did you talk to your sister at all?”
“No. It’s one of the things that alarm me. Just one of them. He had a long involved explanation, to the effect that she’s not well enough to leave the house, and there’s no telephone where they’re staying.”
“He didn’t say where that was?”
“Absolutely not. He was most evasive. I tell you he means her no good, if she’s still alive–”
“Don’t jump to conclusions. The most important thing is to find out where she is. So handle him carefully. Accept what he says.”
“You don’t mean I should cash the check?” He spoke with great feeling, five thousand dollars’ worth of it.
“It’s your sister’s money, isn’t it? Maybe she does need it. She told your mother she did.”
“So Mother claims. But the old fool would lie for her. I suspect they’re in cahoots.”
“That I doubt.”
Harlan paid no attention. “How could Maude need the money? She took a thousand dollars with her last week.”
“Maybe they stopped off at Vegas.”
“Nonsense. Maude detests the very idea of gambling. She’s quite a frugal person, like myself. She couldn’t spend a thousand dollars in a week, unless the man is bleeding her.”
“Sure she could, on her honeymoon. This whole thing may not be as bad as you think. I’ve made some inquiries, and Lister has a fair reputation.” I decided that was stretching it, and added: “At least he isn’t totally bad.”
“Neither was Landru,” Harlan said darkly.
“We’ll see.” It was ten to twelve by the electric clock. “Don’t accuse him of anything. But tell him he’ll have to come back for the cash. I’ll wait outside and tail him when he comes out. You sit tight. I’ll get in touch with you when I find out where they’re holed up.”
He nodded several times.
“And for God’s sake, take it easy with him, Harlan. I don’t believe that he’s a commercial killer. But he could turn out to be a passional one.”
Lister had the virtue of punctuality, at least. At one minute to twelve, an old Buick sedan appeared from the direction of downtown Santa Monica. It pulled up at the curb a hundred feet short of the hotel entrance. Lister got out and locked his car. His beret and dark glasses gave him the look of a decadent Viking.
I was parked across the wide boulevard, facing in the wrong direction. As soon as Lister had entered the hotel, I U-turned and found a parking space a few cars behind the Buick. I got out for a closer look at it.
Its blue paint was faded and almost hidden by road grime. The fenders were crumpled. I peered through the dusty glass at the luggage on the back seat: a woman’s airplane set with the monogram MH, a man’s scuffed leather bag covered with European hotel labels and steamship stickers, a canvas haversack stuffed with oblong shapes which were probably books. A long object wrapped in brown paper leaned across the luggage. It had the shape of a spade.
I looked around. There were too many people on the street for me to do a wind-wing job.
Back in my own car, I made a note of the license number and waited. The blue glare from the sea, relayed by the chrome of passing cars, bothered my eyes. I put on a pair of sunglasses. A few minutes later, Lister appeared on the sidewalk, swaggering towards me. He had taken off his dark glasses, and his blue eyes seemed to be popping from white lids. He looked elated. I remembered what Schilling had said about his manic side, and wished I could see the lower part of his face, where danger often shows. Perhaps the beard had a purpose.
Lister got into the Buick and headed north. I trailed him through heavy noon traffic at a variable distance. He drove with artistic abandon, burning rubber at the Sunset stoplight. Six or eight miles north of it he turned off the highway, tires screeching again. I braked hard and took the turn onto gravel slowly.
The gravel road slanted steeply up a hillside. The Buick disappeared over the rim. I ate my way through its dust to the top and saw it a quarter-mile ahead, going fast. The road wound down into a small closed valley where a few ranch houses stood in cultivated fields. A tractor clung like a slow orange beetle to the far hillside. The air between was so still that the Buick’s dust hung like a colloid over the road. I ate another couple of miles of it, by way of lunch.
Beyond the third and last ranch house, a County sign announced: This is not a through road. A rusty mailbox sagged on a post beside it. I caught a glimpse of the faded stenciling on the mailbox. “Leonard Lister,” I thought it said.
The Buick was far ahead by now, spinning into the defile between two bluffs at the inner end of the valley. It spun out of sight. The road got worse, became a single dirt track rutted and eroded by the rains of many springs. At its narrowest point an old landslide almost blocked it.
I was so taken up with the road that I almost passed the house before I noticed it. It stood far back, at the end of a eucalyptus-shadowed lane. I saw the Buick, standing empty, through the trees; and I kept on going. When I was out of sight of the house I turned my car and left it with the doors locked.