“I assume she wants to get things shipshape in case anything happens to her.”
“She isn’t planning to kill herself?” Jean’s voice was thin and breathless.
“I sincerely hope not.”
“Then why does she want the guns?”
“She didn’t say. I’m simply trying to keep her happy. After all, she is my business partner.”
“Still I don’t think I should let you–”
“But she just called me.”
“I think I’ll call her back.”
“I wouldn’t do that.”
His voice had a threat in it. There was the scrape of feet and a woman’s gasp. I stepped into the doorway. Jean was sprawled on the black leather couch, white-faced and breathing hard. Kilpatrick was standing over her with the telephone receiver in his hands.
“Try someone your own size,” I said.
He moved as if he was going to attack me. I wanted him to, and perhaps he saw that. The color drained from his face, so that the broken veins stood out like abrasions.
He offered me a shameful little smile which didn’t change his reddened apprehensive eyes. “Jean and I had a little misunderstanding. Nothing serious.”
She got up, smoothing her skirt. “I think it’s serious. He pushed me down. He’s taking some of my mother-in-law’s things.”
She indicated the black briefcase standing beside the desk. I picked it up.
“I want that,” Kilpatrick said. “It belongs to me.”
“You may get it back eventually.”
He reached for it. I swung it away from his grasp. In the same movement I leaned my shoulder into him and walked him backward. He came up hard against the opposing wall and slouched there like a man hanging on a nail. I went over him for weapons, found none, and stepped back.
For a moment his face wore the look of terrible disappointment that I had surprised on it the day before. He was losing everything, and watching it go.
“I’m going to take this up with Sheriff Tremaine,” he said.
“I think you should. He’ll be interested in what you’ve been doing to Mrs. Broadhurst.”
“I’m her best friend, if you want the truth. I’ve been looking after her interests for many years.”
“She calls it bleeding her.”
He seemed surprised. “Did she say that?”
“She used the word. Don’t you like it?”
He was still against the wall. His reddish-brown hair was turning dark with sweat and falling over his high freckled forehead. He pushed it back with his fingers, carefully, as if a neat appearance might make all the difference.
“I’m disappointed in Elizabeth,” he said. “I thought she had more sense. And more gratitude. But that’s a woman for you.”
He gave me a tentative look to see if we could get together on an anti-feminist platform.
“No gratitude,” I said. “No gratitude to you for blackmailing her and cheating her out of her land. Women are terrible ingrates.”
He couldn’t stand the unfairness of my remarks. A bright bitterness entered his eyes and changed his mouth. “Anything I did was perfectly legal. That’s more than you can say for her. While she was telling you lies about me, I don’t suppose she mentioned what she did.”
“What did she do?”
I shouldn’t have asked the direct question. It reminded him to be discreet.
“I don’t believe I’ll answer that.”
“Then I’ll tell you. Mrs. Broadhurst shot her husband. You may have put her up to it. Certainly you had a hand in it.”
“That’s a lie.”
“Didn’t you tell her about Leo’s freighter bookings to Hawaii? Wasn’t that what sparked their final quarrel?”
His gaze came up to mine, then moved away sideways. “I thought he was planning to take my wife with him.”
“Your wife had already left you.”
“I was hoping she might come back to me.”
“If you could find a cat’s-paw to get rid of Leo?”
“I had no such intention,” he said.
“Didn’t you? You incited the Broadhursts’ quarrel. You watched the Mountain House that night to see what came of the quarrel. You witnessed the shot, or heard the sound of it. And when it failed to kill Leo, you finished him off with a knife.”
“I absolutely did not.”
“Somebody did. And you were there on the spot. You haven’t denied it.”
“I deny it now. I didn’t shoot him and I didn’t knife him.”
“Tell me what you did do.”
“I was an innocent bystander, that’s all.”
I laughed in his face, though I wasn’t feeling merry. I hated to see a man, even a man like Kilpatrick, go down the tubes. “Okay, innocent bystander. What happened then?”
“I think you know what happened. But I’m not going to say it. And if you’re as smart as you think you are, you’ll play along with me. Right now I want my briefcase.”
“You’ll have to take it away from me.”
He looked at me as if he was considering it. But he was running short of desire and hope. The aura of success had deserted him, and he was looking more and more like a loser.
He turned and went as far as the front door before he answered me. Just before he slammed it behind him, he called back:
“I’m going to have you run out of town.”
Jean came up to me, moving quietly with one hand out as if darkness had set in and the place was unfamiliar. “Are those things true?”
“What things?”
“The things that you were saying about Elizabeth.”
“I’m afraid they are.”
She took hold of my arm and let me feel her weight. “I can’t stand much more. How long is this going to go on?”
“I don’t think there is much more. Where’s Ronny?”
“He’s asleep. He wanted a nap.”
“Get him up and dressed. I’m going to drive you to Los Angeles.”
“Now?”
“The sooner the better.”
“But why?”
I had a number of reasons. I didn’t want to go into the main one, which was that I didn’t know what Kilpatrick might do next. I remembered the gun in his game room, and his apparent willingness to use it.
I took Jean to the big corner window and showed her what had happened to the creek. It had become a turbulent dark river, large enough to float fallen trees. Several of them had formed a natural dam which was backing up the water behind the house.
I could hear boulders rolling down the creekbed in the upper canyon. They made noises like bowling balls in an alley.
“The house may go this time,” I said.
“That isn’t the reason you want to take us south.”
“It’s one reason. You and Ronny will be safer there. And I have some things to attend to. I’m supposed to report to Captain Shipstad of the LAPD. There are certain advantages in working with him instead of the local law.”
Those advantages had become clearer in the last hour, and I decided to call Arnie now. I went into the study and dialed his office number.
His voice was cool and distant: “I expected you to get in touch with me before now.”
“Sorry. I had to go to Sausalito.”
“I hope you had a nice weekend,” he said in a flat Scandinavian tone.
“It wasn’t so nice. I turned up another murder. An old one.” I gave him the facts of Leo Broadhurst’s death.
“Let me get this straight,” he said. “You’re telling me that Broadhurst was killed by his wife?”
“She shot him, but the shot may not have killed him. He had a broken knife blade in his ribs. Of course she could have put the knife in him.”
“Could she have killed Albert Sweetner?”
“I don’t see how. Mrs. Broadhurst was in the Santa Teresa hospital Saturday night. It had to be someone else who did the Northridge killing.”