Mark
“It could be a farewell note,” I said.
“No. I’m sure he’s gone to Tahoe. You’ll see.”
I dropped the subject, pending Arnie’s call. Some time went by. I sat in a straight-backed chair by the French doors. The dark sky was turning pale. House lights pierced the emerging hills, like random substitutes for the fading stars.
Isobel Blackwell sat with her head on her arms. She was as quiet as a sleeper, but I knew by the rhythm of her breathing that she was awake.
“There’s one thing I’d like to have clear,” I said to her back. “Is it possible that Mark killed Ronald Jaimet?”
She pretended not to hear me. I repeated the question in the same words and the same tone. She said without raising her head: “It isn’t possible. They were dear friends. Mark went to enormous trouble to bring Ronald down from the high country. He was almost dead from exhaustion when he got to Bishop. He needed medical attention himself.”
“That doesn’t prove anything about the accident. Was there any indication that it was a planned accident?”
She turned on me fiercely. “There was not. What are you trying to do to me?”
I wasn’t sure myself. There were obscure areas in the case, like blank spaces on a map. I wanted to fill them in. I also wanted to wean Isobel Blackwell away from her marriage before she went down the drain with it. I’d seen that happen to sensitive women who would rather die in a vaguely hopeful dream than live in the agonizing light of wakefulness.
I tried to tell her some of these things, but she cut me short.
“It’s quite impossible. I know how Ronald died, and I know how Mark felt about it. He was completely broken up, as I told you.”
“A murder can do that to a man. A first murder. Was Mark in love with you four years ago when Ronald died?”
“He most assuredly was not.”
“Can you be certain?”
“I can be very certain. He was infatuated with – a girl.”
“Dolly Stone?”
She nodded, slowly and dismally. “It wasn’t what you think, not at that time. It was more of a father-daughter thing, the kind of relationship he had with Harriet when she was younger. He brought Dolly gifts when he came to visit us, he took her for little outings. She called him uncle.”
“What happened on the little outings?”
“Nothing. Mark wouldn’t sink that low – not with a young girl.”
“You used the word ‘infatuated.’ ”
“I shouldn’t have. It was Ronald’s word really. He took a much stronger view of it than I did.”
“Ronald knew all about it then?”
“Oh yes. He was the one who put a stop to it.”
“How?”
“He talked to Mark. I wasn’t in on the proceedings, but I know they weren’t pleasant. However, their friendship survived.”
“But Ronald didn’t.”
She got to her feet blazing with anger. “You have a vile imagination and a vicious tongue.”
“That may be. We’re not talking about imaginary things. Did the Dolly issue come up shortly before Ronald’s death?”
“I refuse to discuss this any further.”
The telephone punctuated her refusal. It buzzed like a rattlesnake beside her; she started as though it was one. I walked around her and answered it.
“Arnie here, Lew. Blackwell didn’t turn up at the dragging operations. Sholto was there all day, and he says that Blackwell hasn’t been at the lodge since the middle of May. Got that?”
“Yes.”
“Get this. Harriet’s car has been spotted. It was found abandoned off the highway north of Malibu. We just got word from the CHP. What does that mean to you?”
“More driving. I’ll go out there and take a look at the car.”
“About Blackwell, what do we do if he shows up?”
“He won’t. But if he does, stay close to him.”
Arnie said with a strain of grievance in his voice: “It would help if I knew what the problem was.”
“Blackwell is a suspect in two known murders, two other possibles. The ones I know about for sure are Dolly Stone and Ralph Simpson. He’s probably armed and dangerous.”
Isobel Blackwell struck me on the shoulder with her fist and said: “No!”
“Are you all right, Lew?” Arnie’s voice had altered, become soothing, almost caressing. “You haven’t been sitting up all night with a bottle?”
“I’m sober as a judge, soberer than some. You ought to be getting official confirmation in the course of the day.”
I hung up before he could ask me questions I wasn’t ready to answer. Isobel Blackwell was looking at me strangely, as if I had created the situation and somehow made it real by telling Arnie about it. The light from the windows was cruel on her face.
“Has my husband’s car been found?”
“Harriet’s. I’m going out to Malibu to look at it.”
“Does it mean she’s alive?”
“I don’t know what it means.”
“You suspect Mark of killing Harriet, too.”
“We’d better not discuss what I suspect. I’ll be back. If your husband should come home, don’t tell him what’s been said here tonight.”
“He has a right to know–”
“Not from you, Mrs. Blackwell. We can’t predict how he’d react.”
“Mark would never injure me.”
But there was a questioning note in her voice, and her hand went to her throat. Her head moved from side to side in the collar of her fingers.
28
I DROVE OUT to Malibu through the chilly dawn. The zebra-striped hearse was still parked by the roadside at Zuma. The sight of it did nothing for me at all.
The HP dispatcher working the graveyard shift had an open paperback on the desk in front of him, and seemed to begrudge his answers to my questions. Harriet’s Buick Special was impounded in a local garage; it wouldn’t be available for inspection until the garage opened at eight.
“When was it picked up?”
“Last night, before I came on duty.”
“You came on at midnight?”
“That’s correct.”
His eyes kept straying downward to his book. He was a fat man with a frowzy unwed aura.
“Can you tell me where it was found?”
He consulted his records. “Side road off the highway about six miles north of here. According to the officer, the woman in the lunchroom said it was there all day. She got around to reporting it when she closed up for the night.”
“What lunchroom is that?”
“It’s one of those jumbo shrimp traps. You’ll see the sign on the right as you go north.”
He picked up his book. It had a picture on the cover of a man riding a horse into a kind of nuclear sunset.
I drove out of the straggling beachfront town and north on the highway to the jumbo shrimp place. It was the same establishment in which I had sat and drunk coffee long ago at the beginning of the case. Harriet’s car had been abandoned within a few hundred yards of her father’s beach house.
I turned left down the hill, nosed my car into the parking area, and parked at the railing beside a black Cadillac. The tide was high, and the sea brimmed up like blue mercury. Some pelicans were sailing far out over it, tiny within the amplitude of the sky.
The Cadillac had Blackwell’s name on the steering post. I walked along the gangway to his beach house. I was keenly aware of every sound and movement, my own, the thumping and shushing of the waves, the distant cry of a scavenger gull following the pelicans. Then my knocking on Blackwell’s door was the only sound.
Finally I let myself in with his key. Nothing had been changed in the high raftered room, except for what had been done to Campion’s painting. Someone had slashed it so that the morning sun came jaggedly through it like lightning in a cloud.