“Could I be such a monster, darling? Could you believe that of me, really?”
That narrow leather pouchpurse was in the chaise beside her hip. She made a futile grab for it as I took it quickly. It was new. I examined it and found a little area still moist near the bottom seam. The leather thongs were strong and sturdy. Holding it by the thongs, I felt the deadly heft and balance of it. It was like a sock with a rock in the toe. It was a skull smasher, wicked as a medieval flail. I opened the pouch top, reached in and fumbled past lipstick, little comb, cigarettes and matches, and pulled out a rabbit. It was carved of some dense gray stone, sitting hunched, ears laid back, crude, a lump about two-thirds the size of a baseball.
“There is the leg work with the gas stations, and there are the miracles of modern chemistry, Ullie. The tiny little blotch of blood on this, with maybe a sweet little tuft of hubby’s hair stuck thereon, scrubbed off nicely right there in Joanne’s bathroom. But a police lab can prove it was human blood hereon, though they can’t type it. And they can dismantle the plumbing and find traces in the drain in there. I imagine that after Ives and Patty you disposed of the bags. They’d have been a lot messier.”
“That’s a very old bunny,” she said. “It’s primitive folk art from Iceland.”
“Ullie, a good enough lawyer might be able to plead you sick and buy the experts to back him up. Age would be a consideration, of course. And beauty. Maybe you are sick. I don’t know. Perhaps it is just an egoism so intense other people don’t seem quite real to you. Murder wouldn’t seem real then either, I suppose.”
She tilted her head. “Vance cried and cried. He hugged me and said he would get me the best…” She stopped, gnawed her thumb knuckle, looked at me in a speculative way. The admission had been made, and I could not tell if it was inadvertent, or meant to look inadvertent. “You can understand, Travis. There’s such a thing as thinking of the best for everybody concerned. I’d very much like to have you take me home to Father. I know you would like each other, very much. He is very old-fashioned, you know. He would want me to wait a year. Waiting isn’t too hard, is it, when you’re sure?”
I bounced the bunny in the palm of my hand, dropped it back into the lethal sack, yanked the drawstring tight. I could not even tell if she knew what a desperate game she was playing. She sat up, reached and closed her warm strong hand around my wrist.
I was planning the words to tell her I was blowing the whistle when I heard the door behind me open slowly. I realized, as I turned, I had spent a long time with the bereaved widow, and Dana might be having problems keeping people out.
Dana stared in at us from the doorway. “Joanne has to…”
“I’m through here, honey,” I said. “Tell Glenn to phone the law. This eerie child killed all three of them, and she made so many mistakes it won’t be hard to…”
I had made the elementary mistake of taking my eyes off Ulka. When the pouch bag was ripped out of my hand, I did not bother to turn around and see what she was going to do with it. I dived to my left, away from the chaise, but bunny-rabbit still glanced off my skull and came down onto my shoulder, smashing the collarbone. I sprawled on the floor, with my ears roaring and with lights spangling my vision, absolutely unable to avoid a second and mortal crunching if she had taken time.
But a vagueness moved past me with tiger pace, and I made a stifled whimper which was supposed to be a roar of warning to Dana. As vision cleared, as I got onto my knees, I saw Dana go down flat and heavy and hopelessly limp, onto her face. I heard a distant shout of query and alarm. I began the slow crawl toward my woman.
Fifteen
I HADa pretty fair concussion, just enough so that I had blackouts, and they kept shining lights into my eyes, testing my reflexes, and giving me mental arithmetic to solve. My right arm, taped across my chest, felt leaden, and the smashed bone caused enough pain to keep them sticking needles into me. It made me groggy, and I kept asking about Dana. Miss Holtzer is in surgery. Miss Holtzer is still in surgery. Miss Holtzer is in the recovery room.
Then it was Sunday morning and I was told that Miss Holtzer was doing as well as could be expected. It is a dim phrase. Who sets up the expectations?
Glenn Barnweather arrived with a big solemn face, a hundred sighs, a sad shaking of the head, a rich smell of bourbon to tell me Ulka was dead. I already knew that, but I didn’t know how.
“She took off in the Corvette, northeast out 65 like a goddam road race, and they still can’t figure how she got past as many curves as she did. They put a roadblock up there in the straight, way beyond Sunflower, one car blocking the road, and she came down on it at, they estimate, a hundred and thirty or better. Tried to cut around it. Hit the gravel, skidded, hit a rock, went two hundred and fifty feet through the air, hit and bounced and went over a rim and down a thousand-foot slope, bouncing all the way, and the final couple of hundred feet on fire. Like you told the cops, McGee, she must have been crazed with grief. That’s right, isn’t it? Crazed with grief.”
“Out of her head completely. Maniacal strength. You’ve heard of that.”
“I’ve heard of that. And Diana Hollis turns into Dana Holtzer. What goes on, old buddy?”
“We have to try to protect a lady’s reputation, don’t we?”
“Oh, sure. Hell, what you do is your own business, I guess, but Jo is going to come in here and really blow her stack.”
“I guess she checked with the Divers.”
“And Mary West, who wouldn’t tell her a damned thing. So she’s steaming.”
“Glenn, how about you finding out just how Dana is. I would appreciate it very much.”
“Glad to do anything for an old buddy who tells me every little thing,” he said. He came back in a half hour. “She’s one sick gal, Trav. They spent six hours picking little bits of bone out of the front of her brain, right here. And I find out she works for Lysa Dean. That’s going to intrigue hell out of Jo. They say Dana’s going to be okay.” He stood up. “You’ll be able to see her by tomorrow.”
More officials visited me. I told my tale of hysterical violence again, the young bride crazed by her terrible loss.
Joanne came in. She was furious. After fifteen minutes she was merely resentful, reluctantly accepting the fact there must be some good reason why she’d never find out all she wanted to know. She was decent enough to do some errands for me, like telling The Hallmark to save the room for me, like getting a phone put in, like getting a resident neurosurgeon to come in and give me some straight answers on Dana.
He said she should take two months’ rest and recuperation before going back to work. I had passed my tests and would be released Monday, unless I acquired some new symptoms. He said not to worry about how she’d act on Monday when I could see her for a few minutes. She would be dazed and semiconscious still, and might not know me.
After he left I was planning to try to locate Lysa Dean, but she phoned me, putting one very nervous quaver in the switchboard operator’s voice. Lysa was terribly dramatic and terribly concerned about everything, full of elaborate reassurances about hospital bills, but shrewd enough to play the whole thing as though I was Dana’s dear friend who had accompanied her on her little vacation. She said she and her whole entourage would stop off on the way back to the Coast, but she couldn’t be sure exactly when they could manage it.
On Monday I got dressed and paid my bill and had five minutes with Dana. She was in an adhesive turban, face bloated, shiny, streaked with bruise marks, slits revealing dazed eyes, mouth cracked and puffy. She seemed to know me. She squeezed my hand. I could not understand her mumblings. The nurse stood by and called time on me and sent me away. I moved back into The Hallmark. On Tuesday I saw her three times, morning, afternoon, evening, ten minutes each time. She knew me, and her diction was better, but she was unaware of what had happened to her and seemed in no hurry to find out. She had a tendency to drop off and start snoring in the middle of a vague remark, but she did like her hand held.