“Gabrielle told you this?”
“She told me Miss Campbell was jealous of her. She didn’t have to tell me. I can see things for myself.”
“What did you see?”
“The dirty looks between them, all that spring. They were still friends in a way, you know how girls can be, but they didn’t like each other the way they used to. Then, right after it happened, right after the inquest, Miss Campbell took off for parts unknown.”
“But she came back.”
“More than a year later she came back, after it all died down. She was still very interested in the case, though. She asked me a lot of questions this last summer. She gave me a story that her and her sister Rina were going to write it up for a magazine, but I don’t think that was their interest.”
“What kind of questions did they ask?”
“I don’t know,” he said wearily. “Some of the ones you asked me, I guess. You’ve asked me about a million of them now.”
“Did you tell her about the earring?”
“Maybe I did. I don’t remember. Does it matter?” He pushed himself away from the wall, shuffled across the gallery, and looked up at the whitening sky. “I got to go home and get some sleep, Mr. Archer. I go back on duty at nine o’clock.”
“I thought you never got tired.”
“I get depressed. You stirred up a lot of things I want to forget. In fact, you’ve been giving me kind of a hard time.”
“I’m sorry. I’m tired, too. It’ll be worth it, though, if we can solve this murder.”
“Will it? Say you do, then what will happen?” His face was grim in the gray light, and his voice drew on old reserves of bitterness. “The same thing will happen that happened before. The cops will take over your case and seal it off and nothing will happen, nobody get arrested.”
“Is that what happened before?”
“I’m telling you it did. When Marfeld saw he couldn’t railroad me, he suddenly lost interest in the case. Well, I lost interest, too.”
“I can go higher than Marfeld if I have to.”
“What if you do? It’s too late for Gabrielle, too late for me. It was always too late for me.”
He turned on his heel and walked away. I said after him: “Can I drop you someplace?”
“I have my own car.”
Chapter 24
I SHOULD have handled it better. I walked to the end of the pool, the last man at the party, feeling that early-morning ebb of heart when the blood runs sluggish and cold. The fog had begun to blow out to sea. It foamed and poured in a slow cataract toward the obscure west. Black-marble patches of ocean showed through here and there.
I must have seen it and known what it was before I was conscious of it. It was a piece of black driftwood with a twist of root at one end, floating low in the water near the shore. It rode in slowly and discontinuously, pushed by a series of breaking waves. Its branches were very flexible for a log. A wave lodged it on the wet brown sand. It was a man in a dark, belted overcoat, lying face-down.
The gate in the fence was padlocked. I picked up a DO NOT RUN sign with a heavy concrete base and swung it at the padlock. The gate burst open. I went down the concrete steps and turned Carl Stern over onto his back. His forehead was deeply ridged where it had struck or been struck by a hard object. The wound in his throat gaped like a toothless mouth shouting silently.
I went to my car, remembering from my bottom-scratching days that there was a southward current along this shore, about a mile an hour. Just under three miles north of the Channel Club, a paved view-point for sightseers blistered our from the highway to the fenced edge of a bluff which overhung the sea. Stern’s rented sedan was parked with its heavy chrome front against the cable fence. Blood spotted the windshield and dashboard and the front seat. Blood stained the blade of the knife which lay on the floormat. It looked like Stern’s own knife.
I didn’t mess with any of it. I wanted no part of Stern’s death. I drove home on automatic pilot and went to bed. I dreamed about a man who lived by himself in a landscape of crumbling stones. He spent a great deal of his time, without much success, trying to reconstruct in his mind the monuments and the buildings of which the scattered stones were the only vestiges. He vaguely remembered some kind of oral tradition to the effect that a city had stood there once. And a still vaguer tradition: or perhaps it was a dream inside of the dream: that the people who had built the city, or their descendants, were coming back eventually to rebuild it. He wanted to be around when the work was done.
Chapter 25
MY ANSWERING service woke me at seven thirty. “Rise and shine, Mr. Archer!”
“Do I have to shine? I’m feeling kind of dim. I got to bed about an hour ago.”
“I haven’t been to bed yet. And, after all, you could have canceled your standing order.”
“I hereby cancel it, forever.” I was in one of those drained and chancy moods when everything seems either laughable or weepworthy, depending on the position you hold your head in. “Now hang the hell up and let me get back to sleep. This is cruel and unusual punishment.”
“My, but we’re in splendid spirits this morning!” Her secretarial instinct took over: “Wait now, don’t hang up. Couple of long-distance calls for you, both from Las Vegas. First at one forty, young lady, seemed very anxious to talk to you, but wouldn’t leave her name. She said she’d call back, but she never did. Got that? Second at three fifteen, Dr. Anthony Reeves, intern at the Memorial Hospital, said he was calling on behalf of a patient named George Wall, picked up at the airport with head injuries.”
“The Vegas airport?”
“Yes. Does that mean anything to you?”
It meant a surge of relief, followed by the realization that I was going to have to drag myself out to International Airport and crawl aboard a plane. “Make me a reservation, will you, Vera?”
“First plane to Vegas?”
“Right.”
“One other call, yesterday afternoon. Man named Mercero from the CRP, said the Jag was registered to Lance Leonard. Is that the actor that got himself shot last night?”
“It’s in the morning papers, eh?”
“Probably. I heard it on the radio.”
“What else did you hear?”
“That was all. It was just a flash bulletin.”
“No,” I said. “It wasn’t the same one. What did you say the name was again?”
“I forget.” She was a jewel among women.
Shortly before ten o’clock I was talking to Dr. Anthony Reeves in his room in the Southern Nevada Hospital. He’d had the night duty on Emergency, and had given George Wall a preliminary examination when George was brought in by the Sheriff’s men. They had found him wandering around McCarran Airfield in a confused condition. He had a fractured cheekbone, probably a brain concussion, and perhaps a fractured skull. George had to have absolute quiet for at least a week, and would probably be laid up for a month. He couldn’t see anyone.
It was no use arguing with young Dr. Reeves. Butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth. I went in search of a susceptible nurse, and eventually found a plump little redhead in an L.A. General cap who was impressed by an old Special Deputy badge I carried. On the strength of it, she led me to a semi-private room with a NO VISITORS sign on the door. George was the only occupant, and he was sleeping. I promised not to wake him.
The window shades were tightly drawn, and there was no light on in the room. It was so dim that I could barely make out George’s white-bandaged head against the pillow. I sat in an armchair between his bed and the empty one, and listened to the susurrus of his breathing. It was slow and steady. After a while I almost went to sleep myself.