I passed an oval swimming pool, and found Edward Illman’s cottage, number twelve. Light streamed from its open French windows onto a flagstone terrace. A young woman in a narrow-waisted, billowing black gown lay on a chrome chaise at the edge of the light. With her arms hanging loose from her naked shoulders, she looked like an expensive French doll which somebody had accidentally dropped there. Her face was polished and plucked and painted, expressionless as a doll’s. But her eyes snapped open at the sound of my footsteps.
“Who goes there?” she said with a slight Martini accent. “Halt and give the password or I’ll shoot you dead with my atomic wonder-weapon.” She pointed a wavering finger at me and said: “Bing. Am I supposed to know you? I have a terrible memory for faces.”
“I have a terrible face for memories. Is Mr. Illman home?”
“Uh-huh. He’s in the shower. He’s always taking showers. I told him he’s got a scour-and-scrub neurosis, his mother was frightened by a washing machine.” Her laughter rang like cracked bells. “If it’s about business, you can tell me.”
“Are you his confidential secretary?”
“I was.” She sat up on the chaise, looked pleased with herself. “I’m his fiancée, at the moment.”
“Congratulations.”
“Uh-huh. He’s loaded.” Smiling to herself, she got to her feet. “Are you loaded?”
“Not so it gets in my way.”
She pointed her finger at me and said bing again and laughed, teetering on her four-inch heels. She started to fall forward on her face. I caught her under the armpits.
“Too bad,” she said to my chest. “I don’t think you have a terrible face for memories at all. You’re much prettier than old Teddy-bear.”
“Thanks. I’ll treasure the compliment.”
I set her down on the chaise, but her arms twined round my neck like smooth white snakes and her body arched against me. She clung to me like a drowning child. I had to use force to detach myself.
“What’s the matter?” she said with an up-and-under look. “You a fairy?”
A man appeared in the French windows, blotting out most of the light. In a white terry-cloth bathrobe, he had the shape and bulk of a Kodiak bear. The top of his head was as bald as an ostrich egg. He carried a chip on each shoulder, like epaulets.
“What goes on?”
“Your fiancée swooned, slightly.”
“Fiancée hell. I saw what happened.” Moving very quickly and lightly for a man of his age and weight, he pounced on the girl on the chaise and began to shake her. “Can’t you keep your hands off anything in pants?”
Her head bobbed back and forth. Her teeth clicked like castanets.
I put a rough hand on his shoulder. “Leave her be.”
He turned on me. “Who do you think you’re talking to?”
“Edward Illman, I presume.”
“And who are you?”
“The name is Archer. I’m looking into the matter of your wife’s disappearance.”
“I’m not married. And I have no intention of getting married. I’ve been burned once.” He looked down sideways at the girl. She peered up at him in silence, hugging her shoulders.
“Your ex-wife, then,” I said.
“Has something happened to Ethel?”
“I thought you might be able to tell me.”
“Where did you get that idea? Have you been talking to Clare?”
I nodded.
“Don’t believe her. She’s got a down on me, just like her sister. Because I had the misfortune to marry Ethel, they both think I’m fair game for anything they want to pull. I wouldn’t touch either one of them with an insulated pole. They’re a couple of hustlers, if you want the truth. They took me for sixty grand, and what did I get out of it but headaches?”
“I thought it was thirty.”
“Sixty,” he said, with the money light in his eyes. “Thirty in cash, and the house is worth another thirty, easily.”
I looked around the place, which must have cost him fifty dollars a day. Above the palms, the first few stars sparkled like solitaire diamonds.
“You seem to have some left.”
“Sure I have. But I work for my money. Ethel was strictly from nothing when I met her. She owned the clothes on her back and what was under them and that was all. So she gives me a bad time for three years and I pay off at the rate of twenty grand a year. I ask you, is that fair?”
“I hear you threatened to get it back from her.”
“You have been talking to Clare, eh? All right, so I threatened her. It didn’t mean a thing. I talk too much sometimes, and I have a bad temper.”
“I’d never have guessed.”
The girl said: “You hurt me, Teddy. I need another drink. Get me another drink, Teddy.”
“Get it yourself.”
She called him several bad names and wandered into the cottage, walking awkwardly like an animated doll.
He grasped my arm. “What’s the trouble about Ethel? You said she disappeared. You think something’s happened to her?”
I removed his hand. “She’s missing. Thirty thousand in cash is also missing. There are creeps in Vegas who would knock her off for one big bill, or less.”
“Didn’t she bank the money? She wouldn’t cash a draft for that amount and carry it around. She’s crazy, but not that way.”
“She banked it all right, on March fourteenth. Then she drew it all out again in the course of the following week. When did you send her the draft?”
“The twelfth or the thirteenth. That was the agreement. She got her final divorce on March eleventh.”
“And you haven’t seen her since?”
“I have not. Frieda has, though.”
“Frieda?”
“My secretary.” He jerked a thumb towards the cottage. “Frieda went over to the house last week to pick up some of my clothes I’d left behind. Ethel was there, and she was all right then. Apparently she’s taken up with another man.”
“Do you know his name?”
“No, and I couldn’t care less.”
“Do you have a picture of Ethel?”
“I did have some. I tore them up. She’s a well-stacked blonde, natural blonde. She looks very much like Clare, same coloring, but three or four years older. You should be able to get a picture from Clare. And while you’re at it, tell her for me she’s got a lot of gall setting the police on me. I’m a respectable businessman in this town.” He puffed out his chest under the bathrobe. It was thickly matted with brown hair, which was beginning to grizzle.
“No doubt,” I said. “Incidentally, I’m not the police. I run a private agency. My name is Archer.”
“So that’s how it is, eh?” The planes of his broad face gleamed angrily in the light. He cocked a fat red fist. “You come here pumping me. Get out, by God, or I’ll throw you out!”
“Calm down. I could break you in half.”
His face swelled with blood, and his eyes popped. He swung a roundhouse right at my head. I stepped inside of it and tied him up. “I said calm down, old man. You’ll break a vein.”
I pushed him off balance and released him. He sat down very suddenly on the chaise. Frieda was watching us from the edge of the terrace. She laughed so heartily that she spilled her drink.
Illman looked old and tired, and he was breathing raucously through his mouth. He didn’t try to get up. Frieda came over to me and leaned her weight on my arm. I could feel her small sharp breasts.
“Why didn’t you hit him,” she whispered, “when you had the chance? He’s always hitting other people.” Her voice rose. “Teddy-bear thinks he can get away with murder.”