I walked up the empty main street and finally captured a nocturnal taxi-driver dozing at the wheel. He took me out Bath Street. It was a quiet residential street of one-story stucco and frame houses nestling bone-white among palms and oleanders and flowering yews. To the right the mountains seemed to rise straight up behind them against the dim moonlit sky.
The mountains and the moonlight, the tropical trees and houses, the warm sea-laden wind which came in through the open windows of the cab reminded me of Oahu. I had a moment of false recognition as if I were riding to see the already seen, to find the already found: Sue Sholto hanging like a grotesque vine against a briefly moonlit wall. I had an intuition that I was completing an obscure and fearful cycle, but I had no sense of what the fulfilment would be.
Laura Eaton at least wore no rope around her neck. She greeted me at her door, which opened six inches on a chain, with a .38 revolver in her hand.
I said: “It looks as if they got here before I did.”
“Put up your hands,” she said in a voice which might have been pleasant under other circumstances. When I had done so, she unhooked the chain. “Now step inside while I call the police. If you make a false move I’ll shoot you in the stomach.”
She was a tall woman in her late twenties. Her tawny hair was down her back, matching the tan wool bathrobe which she wore. Holding her .38 steadily in her right hand she patted my pockets and armpits. She seemed surprised to find no gun, and looked at me for a moment without speaking.
“You’re Laura Eaton, aren’t you?”
“Yes. Who are you?”
“My name is Sam Drake. My friends call me Sam and always pull a gun on me when I knock on their door. It’s a game we play.”
“My house was entered today. I don’t propose to have it entered again.”
“But I’ve already entered it. Look. Now call the police.”
She looked at me uncertainly. “Who are you anyway? Are you really in the Navy?”
“Do you know a man called Hatcher?”
“Rodney Hatcher?”
“I don’t know his first name. He comes from Kansas City.”
“That’s Rodney.”
“He died the night before last.”
“He died! Is that why you’ve come, to tell me?” She had forgotten her gun. I lowered my hands.
“That’s one reason. Point your gun away from my stomach, will you? It makes my stomach feel funny.”
She clicked the safety and dropped the gun on the chesterfield, where it fell with a soft thump that was soothing to my nerves. “Why did you come at this time of night?” she said.
“I just got here. I came as soon as I could.”
“Did Rodney send you? Tell me, what happened to Rodney?”
“He didn’t exactly send me. He wrote you a letter just before he died. I thought it might have some bearing on his death. I came to you to find out.”
“I haven’t had a letter from him for weeks. Not since he wrote me from Europe that he was coming home for reassignment. How did he die? Was he wounded?”
“Were you and he very close?”
“We were good friends. I’ve known him off and on for years. We went to school together in Kansas City. You needn’t pull any punches, if that’s what you mean.”
I told her briefly what had happened to Rodney Hatcher, not omitting my suspicions of Anderson and Gordon.
A few tears made shining tracks down her face, combining at the point of her chin to form a clinging drop of brine. She sat down on the edge of a chair and half turned away from me to use a handkerchief. “Poor Rodney,” she said in a deep soft voice. “It was a beastly way to die.”
“It was painless. You just go out like a light. I know from experience.”
“It was beastly for him.” She looked at me with fire and ice in her eyes. Her body was proud. I thought that Hatcher was lucky to have such a mourner. “He should have died in action. He should have died fighting.”
“Who broke into your house today?” I said after a pause. “There may be a connection between that and Rodney’s death.”
“Do you think so? Do you think perhaps he was looking for Rodney’s letter?”
“It seems very likely to me. Did you see what he looked like?”
“I didn’t see him very well. I’ll tell you what happened. This afternoon I ran over to Eva Raine’s for an hour or so – she’s a friend of mine who lives down the street.”
“Had your afternoon mail come yet?”
“No, it came when I was gone. I started home about three. When I was about half a block from home I saw this man come down off my verandah. I didn’t know then that he’d been in the house. I thought it was someone who had come to see me or father, so naturally I called to him and waved. He took one look at me over his shoulder and headed in the other direction, walking as fast as he could go.
“When I got home I found that the lock on my front door had been forced. The writing-desk had been ransacked and the bureaus and cupboards had been searched. I called the police and they said they’d hunt for him, but I haven’t heard from them since. As a matter of fact, nothing was missing. I left my purse in the house in plain sight, and nothing in it was taken.”
“You say your afternoon mail was there when you got home?”
“It was on the floor, right there.” She pointed to the front door, which opened directly on the living-room where we were sitting. I turned my head and noticed that the door had a letter-slot in it. I also noticed that she had left it ajar.
“From the fact that he searched the house it looks as if Rodney’s letter didn’t come in that mail,” I said. “It should be here tomorrow morning. It was mailed two days ago.”
“If that man comes back I’ll shoot him.” Her full defiant lips pushed out, and her wide eyes became tigerish.
“I believe you will. Did you get any idea at all of what he looked like?”
“He was tall. He looked quite broad. The very first moment I thought it was father, but then I realized that father couldn’t have gotten back from Phoenix so soon.”
“Did he have black hair?”
“I’m not sure–” In the midst of her sentence she suddenly became quite still. Even her mouth was immobilized half open.
“It wasn’t I, Mr. Drake, if that’s what you’re implying,” a man’s voice said from the direction of the door. I turned to see Gordon step quietly into the room with a contemptuously calm look in his black eyes.
I got up without haste and walked towards him. When I was near enough I dropped my right hand to the level of my knee and brought it up in an uppercut to the point of his long jaw. It was a sucker-punch, but he carried a gun. He went down with his back against the door, which slammed shut. Almost before he hit the floor there was a gun in his hand and I was looking into its round empty eye. The gun’s eye followed me as he rose to his feet.
“That was hardly a fair blow,” he said. His eyes were no longer calm. They were shining with malice. “I warned you to avoid violence, Mr. Drake.”
“I’ll show you a fair blow if you’ll lower that gun. Maybe I will anyway.”
“This gun is attuned to your aura, Mr. Drake. If you approach it it will go off.”
There was a slight click behind me and Laura Eaton said: “I have you covered. Drop that gun.”
Gordon’s eyes did not move from me but his whole body tightened.
“I’ll count to three before I shoot,” she said. “One.”
He turned the gun in his hand and handed it to me. “This is a ridiculous situation,” he said.