Arthur reached into the trunk with his free hand and took … not the sack, but her overnight bag. He ignored the mcguffin.
“I’ll just bring this along,” she said, picking it up casually.
“That is your right and privilege, my dear.”
The trunk wouldn’t catch the first time she slammed it down, nor the second. Arthur had both hands full, so he couldn’t help. Finally, she wrestled it and locked it. The sack started to get wet. What was inside might be dangerous when wet.
A covered walkway kept some of the rain off. They went past the main building.
Lights were strung up, but several of the bulbs were dead. Darkness encroached. The cabins were originally in a square around a swimming pool, but — as Birdie had said — the cabins at the far edge were gone, leaving only stumps. Beyond, unseen, was the cliff. A crack ran through the concrete bottom of the pool. It could no longer hold water, though temporary puddles collected, swirling and eddying into the fissure. This was an empty pool you could drown in.
The hacienda would eventually wind up on the beach.
Her cabin was well away from the crumbling edge of the property. No immediate danger.
Arthur put her overnight bag down and unlocked Cabin Seventeen. He reached in and turned on the lights, holding the door open for her. She took her bag and walked across a squelching WELCOME mat. Arthur let his umbrella down and followed.
There were twin beds. No, two beds. One a single for a giant, the other a cot for a circus midget. Between them was a low table with a two-headed bedside lamp, a crystal ashtray that fit the definition of blunt instrument and a Gideon Bible open to the Flood.
Above the table was a picture in a heavy gilt frame. A chubby naked woman was being bothered from behind by a giant swan with human eyes.
“A classical subject,” Arthur commented. “Leda and Zeus. So earthy, the Gods of Greece.”
Other pictures hung around the room, less ornately framed, less immediately eye-catching. Slim, big-eyed women dressed in the style of the Roaring Twenties. Fringes and feathers.
“Do you recognize Mahmah? She was always photographed, at the height of her infamy.”
Jayne wasn’t even sure the pictures were all of the same woman. She couldn’t fit them over the Birdie who sat by the stove.
“The cabin has the full amenities, Miss Wobble. Through there …”
He indicated a closed door.
“Modern plumbing, a flush toilet, washbasins, a bathtub …”
“Shower?”
Arthur shrugged, non-committally.
“I could do with a long soak in a hot tub, after the rain and the drive …”
“I regret to inform you that … temporarily, there is no hot water. It seems one can have light but no hot water or hot water but no light, and after dark the need for illumination takes primacy … tomorrow morning, perhaps, after sun-up, something warm can be arranged.”
Jayne tried to live with the disappointment.
She wanted at least to get out of her wet clothes and towel off.
Arthur showed no sign of leaving. Did he expect a tip? His waterproof dripped on the rug. He strolled about, looking at the pictures.
“Once, Mahmah was a nymph, a naiad … now, she is a gorgon, a harpie … time can be so cruel, don’t you think, Miss Wobble? Though it is no more than she deserves, for was Mahmah not cruel when she had the chance … is she not still cruel, when she gets the opportunity?”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“Of course not. You are an innocent party in this situation … my m-m-mother deserves to die, don’t you think? And not naturally. No, that would not be just. She is a most exquisitely m-m-m-murderable personage.”
He had worked hard to overcome a stutter, but it slipped back.
“Shootable? Poisonable? Throttlable? Bludgeonable?”
Arthur’s fat-wreathed eyes came alive. He reminded Jayne of …
“Stabbable? Slashable? Beheadable? Deadable?”
His recitative was almost a tune. Dump-da-dumpity-dump-da-dump…
He broke off.
“Happy thoughts, Miss Wobble.”
“But morbid,” she ventured.
“Practical. What do you do for a living, Miss Wobble? Presuming that you do live …?”
Normally, she would say she was an actress — which was partially true. But that always prompted the same response. “Have I seen you in anything?” And that lead, if the enquirer was at all interesting, to “If you’ve watched most of my pictures, you’ve seen me in not much of anything at all …” Then, smiles, drinks, and a happy ending.
Now, she was a thief, a saboteur. She had to be careful. Arthur was not interesting, not in that way.
“I’m in motion pictures. Makeup girl.”
“An interesting expression. Makeup girl? What do you make up for?”
“Hard nights, mostly. Filling in the cracks so the camera doesn’t see.”
Arthur unbuttoned his slicker. He took it off and hung it on a coat-tree, as if it belonged there. She hadn’t invited him to stay.
“The camera sees all, though,” he said, pointing at one of the portrait pictures. A dramatic, Satanic pose — a big-eyed vamp resting her chin on her crossed wrists, under a stuffed goat head on a pentacle. Jayne thought she could see Birdie in this jazz-age sinner. The eyes were the same.
“The laughter is frozen and the rot shows through,” said Arthur. “The pleasure garden in spring is a family plot in autumn. Photography makes corpses of us all. Snatches little dead moments and pins them down for all eternity. You apply makeup to the dead, too.”
“Not me. I work with actresses.”
“Actresses should be dead, don’t you think? Mahmah once called herself an ‘actress,’ though she never set her dainty foot on a the boards. Stage fright, would you believe? Who would you wish dead, Miss Wobble?”
Men. Hitch.
“Me? Oh, no one. I say live and let live, you know. I like love stories. Not stories with murders.”
“All great love stories end in murder, though. Or could end in murder …”
He sat down in a cane armchair, crossing his stubby legs and settling his stomach into his lap.
His torso was like a big egg, with another big egg — his head — set on top of it. Soft-boiled, unshelled. If she had a knife, like the movie prop knife, could she cut into those eggs? Find the yolks still molten and trickling.
Arthur’s murder talk was getting to her.
“How would you like to murder my mother, Miss Scribble?”
That was like a stab to the chest.
“You couldn’t be traced. Not with your signature, your phony address …”
Phony. That stood out. A wrong word. American, not consistent with Arthur’s British manner of speaking.
“I can be counted on to give a most misleading description. You wouldn’t even be a woman. You’d be a man … a swarthy, horny-handed man … the type my mother is attracted to, but who are no good for her, no good for anyone … a man’s man, a man from the Isle of Man … a man with big hands, workman’s hands, neck-snapping, larynx-crushing hands. Afterwards, we would both be free …”
“Free?”
“Yes. I would be free of Mahmah, of this place. You would be freer, free of … of the constraints of petty Protestant morality.”
“I’m Catholic.”
“Well, easy to do it then! You sin on Saturday night and are washed clean Sunday morning … just take care not to die unshriven between the two sacraments. The sacraments of murder and confessional.”
“I don’t really like this, Mr. Hayslip. I’m not comfortable.”
“We’re just talking, Miss Alias … shooting the breeze, yarning away the night hours while the storm rages without … without what, I always think, without what?”