She followed him, furious and relieved. The poor goop still didn’t catch on, she thought. But then men never noticed anything but women; men like Mac, that is. She turned a corner and ran into his arms.
“Come to popsy,” he grinned. “I’ve got all the dope.”
“Are you sure that’s all you’ve got?” Laurel coldly swept past him.
“And I thought you’d give me a gold star!”
“It’s no make-up off my skin, but as your spiritual adviser ― if you’re lining up future mothers of the race for the radioactive new world, pick specimens who look as if they can climb a tree. You’d have to send that one up on a breeches buoy.”
“What do you mean, is that all I’ve got? You saw me through the window. Could anything have been more antiseptic?”
“I saw you take down her phone number!”
“Shucks, gal. That was professional data. Here.” He picked Laurel up, dropped her into the Austin, and got in beside her. “They made up a line of men’s wallets in alligator leather last year, dyed three or four different colors. All the other colors sold but the green ― they only unloaded three of those. Two of the three greens were bought before Christmas, almost seven months ago, as gifts. One by a Broadway actor to be sent to his agent back in New York, the other by a studio executive for some bigshot French producer ― the shop mailed that one to Paris. The third and only other one they’ve sold is unaccounted for.”
“It would be,” said Laurel morosely, “seeing that that’s the one we’re interested in. How unaccounted for, Mac?”
“My cowgirl dug out the duplicate sales slip. It was a cash-and-carry and didn’t have the purchaser’s name on it.”
“What was the date?”
“This year. But what month this year, or what day of what month this year, sales slipshoweth not. The carbon slipped or something and the date was smudged.”
“Well, didn’t she remember what the purchaser looked like? That might tell us something.”
“It wasn’t my babe’s customer, because the initials of the salesgirl on the slip were of someone else.”
“Who? Didn’t you find out?”
“Sure I found out.”
“Then why didn’t you speak to her? Or were you too wrapped up in Miss Falsies?”
“Miss who? Say, I thought those were too good to be true. 1 couldn’t speak to the other gal. The other gal quit last week.”
“Didn’t you get her name and address?”
“I got her name, Lavis La Grange, but my babe says it wasn’t Lavis’s real name and she doesn’t know what Lavis’s real name is. Certainly not Lavis or La Grange. Her address is obsolete, because she decided she’d had enough of the glamorous Hollywood life and went back home. But when I asked my babe where Lavis’s home is, she couldn’t say. For all she knows it could be Labrador. And anyway, even if we could locate Lavis, my babe says she probably wouldn’t remember. My babe says Lavis has the brain of a barley seed.”
“So we can’t even fix the buyer’s sex,” said Laurel bitterly. “Some manhunters we are.”
“What do we do now, report to the Master?”
“You report to the Master, Mac. What’s there to report? He’ll probably know all this before the day’s out, anyway. I’m going home. You want me to drop you?”
“You’ve got more sex appeal. I’ll stick with you.”
Young Macgowan stuck with Laurel for the remainder of the day; technically, in fact, until the early hours of the next, for it was five minutes past two when she climbed down the rope ladder from the tree house to the floodlit clearing. He leaped after her and encircled her neck with his arm all the way to her front door.
“Sex fiends,” he said cheerfully.
“You’re doing all right,” said Laurel, who felt black and blue; but then she put her mouth up to be kissed, and he kissed it, and that was a mistake because it took her another fifteen minutes to get rid of him.
Laurel waited behind the closed door ten minutes longer to be sure the coast was clear.
Then she slipped out of her house and down to the road.
She had her flashlight and the little automatic was in her coat pocket.
Just before she got to the Priam driveway she turned off into the woods. Here she stopped to put a handkerchief over the lens of her flash. Then, directing the feeble beam to the ground, she made her way toward the Priam house.
Laurel was not feeling adventurous. She was feeling sick. It was the sickness not of fear but of self-appraisal. How did the heroines of fiction do it? The answer was, she decided, that they were heroines of fiction. In real life when a girl had to let a man make love to her in order to steal a key from him she was nothing but a tramp. Less than a tramp, because a tramp got something out of her trampery ― money, or an apartment, a few drinks, or even, although less likely, fun. It was a fairly forthright transaction. But she... she had had to pretend, all the while searching desperately for the key. The worst part of it was trying to dislike it. That damned Macgowan was so purely without guile and he made love so cheerfully ― and he was such a darling ― that the effort to hate him, it, and herself came off poorly. What a bitchy thing to do, Laurel moaned as her fingers tightened about the key in her pocket.
She stopped behind a French lilac bush. The house was dark. No light anywhere. She moved along the strip of lawn below the terrace.
Even then it wouldn’t have been so nasty if it hadn’t concerned his mother. How could Mac have lived with Delia all these years and remained blind to what she was? Why did Delia have to be his mother?
Laurel tried the front door carefully. It was locked, sure enough. She unlocked it with the key, silently thankful that the Priams kept no dogs. She closed the door just as carefully behind her. Wielding the handkerchief-covered flashlight for a moment, she oriented herself; then she snapped it off.
She crept upstairs close to the banisters.
On the landing she used the flash again. It was almost three o’clock.
The four bedroom doors were closed. There was no sound either from this floor or the floor above, where the chauffeur slept. Mrs. Guittierez and Muggs occupied two servants’ rooms off the kitchen downstairs.
Laurel tiptoed across the hall and put her ear against a door. Then, quickly and noiselessly, she opened the door and went into Delia Priam’s bedroom. How co-operative of Delia to go up to Santa Barbara, where she was visiting “some old Montecito friends” for the weekend. The cloth-of-gold tree of life spread over the bed immaculately. In whose bed was she sleeping tonight?
Laurel hooked the flash to the belt of her coat and began to open dresser drawers. It was the weirdest thing, rummaging through Delia’s things in the dead of night by the light of a sort of dark lantern. It didn’t matter that you weren’t there to take anything. What chiefly made a sneak thief was the technique. If Delia’s father, or the unspeakable Alfred, were to surprise her now... Laurel held on to the thought of the leaden, blue-lipped face of Leander Hill.
It was not in the dresser. She went into Delia’s clothes closet.
The scent Delia used was strong, and it mingled disagreeably with the chemical odor of mothproofing and the cedar lining of the walls. Delia’s perfume had no name. It had been created exclusively for her by a British Colonial manufacturer, a business associate of Roger Priam’s, after a two-week visit to the Priam house years before. Each Christmas thereafter Delia received a quart bottle of it from Bermuda. It was made from the essence of the passionflower. Laurel had once suggested sweetly to Delia that she name it Prophetic, but Delia had seemed not to think that very funny.
It was not in the closet. Laurel came out and shut the door, inhaling.