Alan Taylor had had a hard time of it, after the untimely death of his wife and an almost-lost battle with the bottle. Now, he just about had it made again, with a good job. He was a perfect pigeon for a murder frame! Howard Jones, in Crime in a Changing Society, points out: "The amount of anxiety evoked by crime, and especially violent crime, is such that one is tempted to feel that its roots lie deep. We are, of course, bound to be impressed by striking examples of criminal behavior in our society, but why are such very strong feelings aroused in us? ... Most psychologists who study crime nowadays look for its causes in mental factors which lie outside the individual's control, and no one did more to encourage this than Sigmund Freud ... Everything we do, he contended, has a discoverable cause in the shape of a personal conflict or anxiety. Crime too has its origin in our personal emotional lives. And it is by our early family experience that our personalities have been shaped"
CHAPTER ONE
He was momentarily stunned with shock when he saw Nora alight from the taxi out front. Coming to any man wasn't Nora Connel's schtick, and his first reaction wasn't one of sex or sensuality. He thought instead, in panic, My God, I've been fired.
"Alan, darling," she said, when he opened the door for her. Beyond her, the neighborhood was enmeshed in sable soft dark of early evening.
He held the door open for her. She gave him a brief kiss on the chin, purposely missing his mouth. "So this is where you live, darling. How quaint."
She paused in the foyer, waiting for him to take her cape. Finally, he remembered. It wasn't easy to think around Nora, even in the office, because one's eyes wanted to widen to encompass the beauty of her sleek elegance, her exquisite breasts, her trim hips and precision turn of thigh, calf and ankle. What she was, was walking perfection.
He watched her looking around and knew she was faintly amused. This place wasn't much. It glittered with newness and with the odds and ends of his life with Caroline. It had all looked pretty ordinary until Nora walked in, but now he saw it was strewn, littered, untidy and inconsequential.
"I hope this is a pleasure trip," he said, trying to smile. He admitted he wasn't in the dedicated upper echelons where a man had to be to rate or interest a woman like Nora Connel.
He was thirty-one, tall, slender, in conservative slacks and a Banlon shirt he'd pulled on when he came in from a shouting fest with a neighbor in the alley. He felt sweaty. Nora liked men who looked like Cary Grant which he didn't men who belonged in the Cary Grant tax bracket, which he never would. He looked like what he was, an ordinary character, not good-looking, but attractive, and Caroline had told him he looked honest. He had wondered if this were a compliment. From Caroline, it was probably meant to be.
Nora would never say anything like that except in coolest ironic jest.
He also knew his face was sunken and carried the memory of recent unhappiness, disenchantment. Nora wouldn't care about this, either.
"A pleasure trip?" Nora said with a faint smile. "I hope so, too."
He invited her into the cluttered living room. He had not yet had time to remove the traces of his small dog. Tippy's pillow was where she'd liked it, near his reading chair, her toys marred the pattern of the carpeting. Music played softly, emanating from the stereo-FM, and tuned low.
She looked around for a place to sit, finally chose the couch. Her smooth, tailored skirt rode high above her knees, exposing the pale gold of upper legs, the warm curves. She appeared unaware of her skirt. She lay back and he drew his gaze upward to the smart, piled coiffure of red-gold hair, neat curve of brows above wide, almost protuberant off-green eyes. Her face was slender, with the high planes and narrow lines of a high-fashion model. Her nose was patrician. She had the most lovely shaped mouth he had ever seen. Her teeth were just less than glitteringly perfect, which made her appear slightly human to Alan.
He grinned, thinking about mussing up that coiffure, smearing the eye-liner, ripping away her dress to get at those bazooms. It didn't make much of a picture. It lacked reality. Strange, looking at Nora like this, you couldn't imagine her giving herself, or being taken, either. Maybe she didn't exist in the world of bed and wonderful sexual bouts, but lived only for the planes of high finance, fashion and jet-set activities.
He went on standing, uncomfortable. "Imagine meeting you here," he said, trying to smile. "What's a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?"
Nora patted the couch beside her. "Sit down, darling. I won't bite you. Not for a while, anyway. I never bite until after my third martini."
He recognized this as more than a casual order for refreshing stimulants, but he ignored it. He sat beside her. "After the rough day at the office," he said, "I'd have sworn I'd be the last person you could stand to look at."
"It's been rough ever since you submitted the first draft on that stupid TV script about the twenty-grand murder. One of the reasons I'm out here."
He drew a deep breath. "I'm surprised at your attitude toward that script, Nora."
"Why?"
"Because it doesn't seem important enough to matter."
She laughed, but the laugh had a chill in it for Alan, at least. "The little, unimportant things are the ones that trip you up, Angel get you fired by your clients, run your Neilsen ratings down, cost you your job."
Oh, oh, he thought, your job. Here it comes. "Sorry, Alan, but it just hasn't worked out. I know I got Duke and Thompson to hire you, but it didn't jell, darling. Sorry. But as of..."
"I'd submit another script, but we're working so close to deadline," he said, lamely.
"I know, doll. If there were time, I'd throw it out. But I want changes, even if you work up until rehearsals. It doesn't hit me. The great unwashed public isn't going to buy it."
He smiled. "Come on now, Nora. Don't tell me that your taste is in common with the unwashed!"
"I don't like the script." There was a whiplash in her voice. She was the boss suddenly, and her smile was almost filthy. One forgot the pert up-thrust of those boobies, the inviting sleekness of her thighs.
"I'm sorry. Throw it out."
"You know we can't. But a few simple changes. Why can't we discuss them?"
"You think we ought to?"
"What does that mean?"
He spread his hands. "It's just another script, Nora "
"Is it?" Her strange green eyes were fixed upon him as if she were trying to see what made him tick, what he'd eaten for breakfast, how long since he'd shaved. "Where'd you get the idea?"
He shrugged with that helpless feeling. She knew all this. He had the sense she was pushing him for reasons he couldn't compute.
"I got this idea from the same place I've been getting all my ideas for recent shows," he said. "At your suggestion, Nora, I'm using what unsolved files Los Angeles county will permit. I got this idea from that same file."
"You sound odd, Alan, when you discuss it."
"Odd?"
"Yes, you do. You appear to have an added interest in it "
"If I do, it's just my protective sense. I've put a lot of work into it."
And a lot of thought?" Her voice probed.
"Yes. And a lot of thought. So when you want to throw it out, if I get over-protective, that's the only reason."
"We're not going to throw it out, Alan. But it's not a very good murder case. It lacks everything. And that's a reason I'm here. I decided I didn't want to wait until tomorrow to find out what you like about it."
He got up and prowled the carpeting before her. "I'm sorry, Nora. If I ever had a reason for wanting to write this script, it's gone now."
She leaned forward. Her voice was chilled. "What's the matter with you, Alan?"
He tried to laugh. "Nora, I know I owe my job to you everything I've been able to do since Caroline died "
"Forget all that." Her voice cut across his. "I don't care about that brainwash. What's the matter with you, right now? What's on your mind?"
He tried to smile. "You mean besides sex?"
"I mean besides sex. You're acting odd, Alan, and I must know why."
"I can't tell you that."
Her face darkened. She said, "Why not?"
"Well, I don't know what you think, but it's even less important than the script changes. It's about Tippy."
"What?"
"My dog. The puppy. It belonged to Caroline. She was crazy about it. Then when Caroline died, I kept Tippy."
"Alan, have you been drinking?"
"No. But I've been in a kind of hellish neighborhood battle about Tippy. Remember I told you yesterday at lunch about my neighbor across the alley? Old man Sheram? How he hated Tippy and threatened to poison her. You said there had to be something good about anybody who hates a dog. But Tippy It didn't make sense that a man like Sheram would hate a little dog like that enough to kill her."
"What?"
"Well, that's it. Yesterday when you laughed at me, I saw how trivial the matter was. You said I was becoming an average suburbanite, fighting with my neighbors over my dog, commuting into L.A. to work. You said it was part of living out here in Island Groves if I could call it living."
"Yes. It didn't seem very urgent to me," Nora said, and her tone said it lacked urgency even now.
"But you were wrong. It was serious. This old character is violent-tempered. I think, too, he suffers hardening of the arteries, his brain lack oxygen. He's get on one subject and shrill like a parrot, until everybody hears him.
"That was bad enough. But then, today when I came home, I found Tippy. She'd been poisoned. The scene between Sheram and me out in the alley would have won both of us Emmy awards. I accused Sheram of poisoning Tippy. He shook violently, pointing to places in the garden where Tippy had dug. Neighbors came out to watch and cheer us on. I walked away. But not soon enough. I said things I shouldn't have said. I threatened to have old Sheram arrested."
She laughed at him. "Darling, you are all upset now. Look, your hands are shaking. Why don't you fix us a martini, and we'll relax? We can let the script go for the moment."
He drew a deep breath. "I don't have a drop of liquor in the house, Nora."
"For hell's sake, why not?"
"You know why not. I'd drink it if I did."
"That's normal usage," Nora said.
"For you. For normal users. Yes. Not for me. One drink and I'm I'd walk through glass for more. You know all that, Nora. I've stayed off the juice since I came to work at Duke & Thomson. The only way I can stay off it is to stay away from it."
"Ordinarily, doll, I'd applaud," Nora said, shifting on the couch. "But listening to your Odessey has me thirsty. Let's send out for gin and vermouth. I make a very dry martini. And I promise I'll limit your drinks."
He bit at his lip. She was his boss. She knew his recent past history. She was already bugged about the script he had turned in. He nodded, went to the phone, called the nearest package store, and asked for immediate delivery.
When he came back, Nora seemed more relaxed. She stood up. She came to him and stabbed him with those nipples. Her breasts gave and he felt himself sinking toward her. She kissed him, but kept it light.
"You know I came to dinner, don't you?"
"Oh, Lord. We'll have to go out somewhere."
"Don't you even have a couple of steaks in your freezer?"
"Sure, but "
"Let me get into something comfortable and I'll broil us steaks, and well stay in, and eat and drink and talk script."
Alan felt that this was the fitting climax to a strange day: an unexpected hooraw over a script, old Sheram's poisoning Tippy, his shouting at the guy in the alley, and now Nora's showing up here to cook for him.
It was as if the world had shifted just slightly off-axis.
"That sounds great," he heard himself saying. "I don't know what I have around here for you to put on that's more comfortable "
"You got an apron?"
"An apron?"
"I'm going to broil steaks, aren't I?"
"Oh, sure." He found one of Mrs. Miner's aprons in the kitchen. His housekeeper went in for utilitarian fabrics, but he chose the frilliest she owned.
Nora was standing at his bedroom door when he returned with the apron.
Something caught at Alan. He admitted what it was: pure old lust who had said the purest love is lust? Well, never mind who said it, Alan saw how true it was in that moment.
He held out the apron to her.
He looked at her, the superb breasts, the sleek belly, the rise at her thighs. He thought about the way she was ever cool, superior, always in command. He wanted her in bed, where he'd be in the saddle, in command. But he knew better.
He wasn't rich enough, VIP enough, or extraordinary enough to rouse the least mating instincts in Nora, if she had any. She'd never married. She was a woman who knew what she wanted, would do anything to get it.
Unfortunately, she would never want Alan Taylor.
She gave him a brief smile, closed the bedroom door. He went to the kitchen and took the steaks from the freezer. He placed them on the table. The doorbell rang and he went out and paid the delivery boy for the liquor.
The dinner components were lined up on the table when Nora entered the room, but Alan forgot them instantly.
Alan felt breathless with wonder and disbelief. He couldn't believe what he saw.
Nora wore only high-heeled slippers, bikini pants and bra, and the apron. This didn't make sense at all.
Alan wanted to grab her. He wanted to smash his mouth over hers, to feel the heat and goodness of those provocative lips. There was a creamy pinkness about her breasts and even her long legs, that persuaded you she'd stepped off a calendar by Vargas. He had never believed he would be permitted to see the spectacle taking place before his eyes.
He wanted to grab her, but he didn't move at all. He warned himself to play it cool because one fact was certain: This doll was playing with him, pushing him, and he didn't know why.
His breathing quickened as his gaze relished the thrust of breasts, the sleek rise of her buttocks. He was not ordinarily a wary or suspicious man. But he could not believe that she had come to him for this, even when she was, to all intents and purposes, naked for him.
There was a remote coldness about her even when she stood in bra and panties. He wasn't the only man at Duke & Thomson who had ravished this incredible body in fantasy, but he was one who had resigned himself to accepting it as mission impossible. Even now, staring at her nudity, it seemed unlikely.
"I'll fix drinks," Nora said after a moment.
He only nodded and didn't move.
She moved past him and gently clawed his cheek with her nails. "Alan, you're staring."
He groaned aloud. "What else?"
She gave him a faint, twisted smile and said, "Why, darling, how nice."
She fixed the martinis in a pitcher and Alan enjoyed the view until it became too painful to watch, and then he turned away. A sweet-hot ache battered at his loins by now.
She handed him a martini. He took it, astonished his fingers didn't tremble. He was proud of himself. Cary Grant never did it with more 'lan.
She laughed because he drank off his martini so quickly.
She took the glass from him and didn't offer him another. He felt the burn of the gin, bracing himself.
"I'll broil the steaks," Nora said.
"I don't think I could eat one," Alan said. What he meant was he was afraid he couldn't keep it on his stomach, the way he wanted her.
She laughed. "Of course you can. You'll feel better after we have a steak and salad."
Alan didn't answer, but he could have told her only one thing could restore him to sanity just now, and it wasn't a three-quarter-inch steak, medium.
The gin had mercifully lowered a film of gauze between Alan and the outside world, including Nora moving around the kitchen.
He came up behind her and planted his mouth at the soft nape of her neck. She laughed and shrugged him away. "You give me goose bumps," she said.
"You'd be surprised where I've got goose-bumps," he told her.
"No I wouldn't. You be a good boy. It's going to be a long evening."
He caught his breath slightly. He said, "Nora, why are you here?"
"What? I told you. The script-"
"No. What's the real reason? Are you sorry for me?"
She looked across her bare shoulder at him. "Why should I waste pity on a young, handsome, virile man like you?"
"I don't know. Maybe because I live out here in Island Grove, alone in the paradise for young marrieds. Maybe because I haven't had anyone since Caroline died." He winced slightly, thinking this wasn't strictly true. He'd had Connice. But he'd mistreated her from the depths of his self-pity and destructive drinking bouts, and he had driven her away. He couldn't count Connice. "Because I'm alone."
She laughed, placing their steaks on platters on the table alongside a tossed salad he hadn't seen her prepare. He felt anguish, knowing how liquor poisoned him. One drink, and everything changed, whole sections of time slipped past unnoticed.
She said, "Do I look the type who'd give a damn one way or another for some lesser human being?"
"You never have before."
"Well, what do I look like now?" She straightened before him and the gauze curtain burned away before his eyes. She squared her shoulders, pushing those barely-concealed boobs out toward him. Her creamy-pink body gleamed. He had never even imagined this quality of loveliness.
He said, "My God. My God."
"Not original, but expressive," she said. "I'm glad you're pleased. Come on and eat your steak before it gets cold."
Nora sat down and fell to eating as if she were fully clothed, in La Scandia during a crowded lunch hour, and as though ravenously hungry.
She chewed lustily. "I put my whole self into everything I do," she told him.
He sighed, watching her. The lights seemed caught on the inner curves of her breasts, pulling his gaze there.
He cut a slice of steak, and chewed at it without vigor or interest.
"Eat," she advised. "You'll need your strength."
Alan felt the heated rise of anticipation. There was no sense denying the obvious any more: Nora had come to him tonight. It didn't make sense. But here she was, and he was going to have her.
He pushed aside the steak, reached out for the pitcher of martinis. He poured himself a glass of the colorless liquid. He heard Nora's approving laughter.
She said, "You finally begin to believe, don't you? You know now why I'm here?"
He laughed. "Can't you chew any faster?"
"Drink your martini, darling. Don't rush me. I don't like to be rushed. There's plenty of time for everything we want everything."
He finished off his drink and reached out for another.
He was sorry he'd done it. The rest of the night lacked clarity. No matter what wondrous things Nora did for him, and she was a witch of wonder, he never fully responded because liquor is a depressant, not a stimulant.
He would have failed altogether, except that Nora herself was stimulant beyond belief.
Everything that happened to him was filtered through the occluding fog, but there were moments of brilliant dimensions.
She pushed away her plate and came around the table to him. She sank to her knees before him, and this alone was enough to unsettle him: few men had ever seen Nora Connel on her knees.
"You do want me, don't you, darling?"
"Oh, Lord!"
She pressed her face down upon him. "It's so hard to wait?"
"It's so hard," he said.
She laughed. "We don't have to wait any more, darling."
He removed that damned apron first. Then he lifted her in his arms. She was surprisingly light. Looking at her fully dressed, her coiffured hair piled high, you thought of her as a stately, remote woman. She was really small. She weighed hardly anything. He strode through the house with her and laid her down on his bed.
He leaned over her and unsnapped her bra. Things clouded over then, and he was afraid he was going to pass out. He cursed inwardly because he had drunk that martini. This naked body was intoxication enough for any man.
He pressed his mouth over her breast, sucking at the nipple. He heard her moan in pleasure. She cried out, "Oh, yes, darling, suck them. Suck them hard. Suck them for me, darling. I love it."
He nursed at her breasts and she pressed his face fiercely into their deep, luxurious softness.
Still nuzzling at her crimson nipples, he rolled her bikini panties down along her legs. She caught them, pulled them off and threw them away. He heard her kick off her shoes.
"And now darling it's your turn," she said. "Just yours. I want you naked, too. Lie down, and I'll undress you."
He toppled beside her on the bed, lying on his back. The ceiling swam strangely and her lovely face moved above him like something in an unreal vision. She took a long time undressing him because she loved him with her hands and lips as she removed each piece of his clothing.
She had not lied! Whatever she did, Nora did it with all her concentration. No wonder she was a top executive in a man's world. She knew how to get what she went after.
Alan grinned drunkenly, lying back, luxuriating, pleased and praising the gods that for some reason he couldn't fathom, it was he she was after at the moment.
At last his clothing was gone, and they were like Adam and Eve in the Garden. Only better, because Nora was the latest of the breed, an Eve of pizazz, knowledgeable, the ultimate.
She pushed him down and he saw her dimly above him. Her immaculate hair was mussed. This was almost as exciting for him as her nakedness; it was that unusual. He reached up, running his fingers through its rich texture.
Then he felt her come down slowly on him. He groaned and she whispered, breathless.
When she was upon him she would not permit him to move, and she moved only the muscles of her stomach and thighs.
He gasped aloud in delight at what she was doing to him. It was the most painful ecstasy he had ever endured.
And more than that, it was supersonic delight for her. Nobody had to tell him that she drove herself insane with what she was doing. It was clear enough.
He reached up, stroking her hallucinogenic breasts, crushing her nipples until she cried out, pleading for more.
"Oh, so wonderful," she breathed.
"How long can you stay?" he begged.
"All night."
"Only all night? Then let's not waste it."
"We won't ... waste it, darling! We won't ... waste any of it!"
She toppled forward upon him, wriggling her hips wildly, as if her body were infested by fire ants. She crushed her mouth over his and dug her fingers into him.
The shock of her sudden climax sent tremors through Alan and he stroked her bare flesh roughly while his tongue thrust far into her mouth.
She groaned and sagged upon him. She lay still for a long time, and he didn't move until desire drove him to thrust upward with his hips. He felt her rising again to a state of intense lust. She breathed raggedly, her fabled breasts quivering.
Allan rolled over upon her and she parted her long legs wide. Then with a sharp cry, she locked her ankles about his waist as if obeying his unspoken command.
"I've got you now," he gasped.
"Yes, darling, you've got me now!"
"I've got you where I want you."
"Yes. Show me. Show me. Show me!"
He showed her. He did not know if his long abstinence, his need, or his fantasies about her brought him to new heights, but he showed her. He thrust faster and faster, driving himself to her until she began to make mindless little noises and he knew she was reaching another crest, and this time he went with her. It was charged fission, it was the end of the world, it was Armageddon. It was good, truly good.
He sagged upon her, but she would not release him. Finally she pulled away and they lay together on the rumpled sheet. For the moment he was finished, but he saw that she was already aroused again.
"Give me a few minutes," he pleaded.
"Don't worry, darling. I'll take care of everything."
And she did. She slid down to him, and catching his breath, Alan kneeled over her on the bed.
Gazing about the pink-fogged room, Alan felt the delights her mouth stirred through him. And he shivered, thinking this was a perfect way to use that perfect mouth.
She went wild, reaching for him, and making him ready had aroused her to a fevered pitch. Alan found it unbelievable that she should be so wild for it. He didn't stop to think about nonessentials, but dedicated himself to pleasing her.
He remembered vaguely about midnight she had gone away to the bathroom. Then she had brought drinks for them a small one for him, but it battered at his consciousness, anyhow.
The hours after midnight had an unreality about them that would remain forever clouded. He was like a sexual prodigy; he wanted her when he thought he was so dead he would never want any woman again. Any woman? Perhaps not. But Nora? She was here, and her heated mouth and her gyrating thighs incensed him, and he loved her in every manner he could think, remember, devise.
He tried to pace himself, but this was no good. One didn't pace himself with a partner like Nora. She knew too many varied ways of throwing everything out of gear. She lay quiescent for a few moments, and then rose to a state of near hysteria, the kind that took Alan along.
He fell away, finally, quivering with exhaustion. Dimly he watched her dress, wondering why she left him at this hour, and from what well of reserve she found the strength to mix them one last drink, call a taxi, and then go away, kissing him heatedly. This all must have happened. He was sure it did, but only because it was the logical sequence of events.
He sank into deep sleep, his mind still rattling around and around that same tormenting, unanswered question: thank the gods she came to me like this, but why? Why?
CHAPTER TWO
Nora had forgotten her bikini panties.
He found them while he dressed the next morning. The wadded, sheer under things were behind a chair where she'd tossed them in mindless desire last night.
Remembering put a tremor through him. The battering of his hangover intensified. He remembered working those panties down over her wriggling hips, the way she'd caught them, jerked them off and thrown them.
Though it hurt his face to do it, he smiled, thinking about the aloof Nora dressing and leaving here last night the smart, two-hundred-dollar original and nothing on under it.
Thinking about this, he felt better, more able to face the day ahead of him. Purposefully he kept old Sheram, the poisoning of the puppy, even the script changes, from his mind. It was as if life had abruptly shifted gears and he preferred to concentrate on the pleasant-the panties Nora left behind.
Dressed, he folded the panties and put them in his jacket pocket, thinking ahead to going into Nora's smartly elegant office and placing her panties on her desk blotter before her. It would be good to recall to Nora's mind some of the exciting delights he remembered from last night ...
Only it didn't work that way.
She came into his small cubicle at the advertising agency where he had his office. Duke & Thomson controlled one of the hottest TV series of the year, and he furnished many of the show's scripts, working at the agency rather than in the studio where the show rented space.
Nora liked to keep her firm grasp on everything connected with Duke & Thomson Advertising Agency, Los Angeles branch, accounts.
She carried the mimeoed copy of the script for "The Twenty Grand Murder." He recognized it without being told what it was.
Alan watched her approach across from his door. She seemed to absorb all light. Nice boobs, Alan thought, and told himself they were even lovelier bare. In his mind swirled a heated memory of that pink-creamed flesh, the bright nipples, the flat planes of her naked belly.
He wondered if she had on panties this morning.
He said, smiling, "Good morning."
Nora barely returned his greeting. He saw at once that the relationship was back where it had been between them: boss and vassal.
Alan exhaled heavily. He wasn't going to return those bikini panties to her, not here, not today.
She seemed to have put last night completely out of her mind. The fact that she'd been on her knees to him, that he had owned her body completely, that he had kneeled over her on that bed while she paid him deepest homage, that she had been unable to resist anything he wanted of her, had no meaning to her.
It was as if it never happened. Alan winced slightly. Maybe it never had. The whole world had gone screwy lately.
Nora tossed the script on his desk before him. "It won't do," she said. "As I told you last night." She said 'last night' without batting an eyelash, without revealing by tilt of arched brow or quiver of perfect lips that it had any meaning to her. "It won't wash. A man committing a murder for twenty-thousand dollars?"
"It's been done for less." Nora shook her smartly coiffured head. "Let's stand it in the window and see if it attracts flies," she said in the flat tone, completely impersonal, that she used when she would not be opposed. "Twenty thousand? Maybe that looks sizable to a TV script writer."
"It's more than I make in a year."
"Right now it is," Nora said. "You've been out of things."
Alan flinched. Nora didn't have to remind him that he had been out of things, that he'd still be out of them if Nora hadn't believed in him, and fought for him when the Duke & Thomson big brass could see only his record of drinking since Caroline's death.
"I don't want to fail you, Nora," he said in honest humility.
"Well, you are. The public isn't going to buy the murder, not the amount of money that motivated it, or the way it was done."
"It was a true case."
"That's the least essential point of all. You can't make people believe a man will commit murder for a lousy twenty grand with taxes what they are."
Alan stared across the desk at his incredibly lovely boss. Sure, Nora made three times twenty thousand a year, but not everybody who owned a TV set did.
"What do you think would be a fair amount?" He tried to keep the sarcasm from his voice.
"Why not a hundred grand? And why not just simply with a gun and not in a car over the side of a canyon?"
"A hundred thousand?" Alan felt helpless against her. "The guy he killed didn't have that kind of dough. The killer needed twenty grand to buy his way up in the world."
"A hundred grand would buy him even more, wouldn't it?" she challenged, watching him with unrelenting intensity.
"A hundred grand, Nora, and the world would have caved in on this guy. If he'd stolen that much he would never have gotten away with it. This thing's got to sound real and true."
She exhaled heavily. "I hope you won't be abstruse and artistic, friend." There was a deeper chill in Nora's voice. "Let's remember this is TV. Not art. You want to write art, okay. Not on my time. I want something the audience will believe. They won't swallow this."
Alan stood up. "Why can't you trust me, Nora? I know what I'm doing. The way it is, the story hangs together. Go ripping at the basement and the attic falls in."
"I trust you. I also know what I want. I don't want this particular story, told this way, when a few changes will charge it right up. Look, you give me good plots, action and bang. That's why I fought to get you in on this series. But I don't want something I can't believe. It bugs me. This script is full of holes. Either re-roof, doll, or get me a new story. I won't okay this one."
"Two days, Nora," Alan protested. "You okayed the outline."
"It smelled then, Alan. But I thought maybe you could give it a scent of roses. You didn't. Nobody would murder for twenty thousand, and if they did, they wouldn't stick around like your boy does. They'd try to run, to get away somewhere."
Alan felt weak against her. "Nora, I don't think you read it. You couldn't have read it. The murderer was going to stick there. He had to stay there. He was ambitious. The twenty grand would buy him what he wanted. It was his whole life, but he had to have the twenty grand."
Nora shook her head. "I'm out in the rain on this one, Alan. Cold. Wet. We don't want to part on a thing like this, do we?"
Alan jerked his head up. He stared at Nora. But it was like looking into icy-green, flat pools instead of her eyes. "Nora, you can't mean that."
Nora smiled suddenly and shrugged. "No. Of course not. But I want you to punch this up. My way. I'm the character you've got to please." She softened slightly. "You know how to please me, Alan. So let's see you do it in the daytime."
At six that night, Alan got tiredly off the bus at Island Groves. He should have bought a car, but he had hit bottom after Caroline's death, and though the Angelinos thought him queer, he delayed going in hock for a car until he had some sort of security which he certainly didn't have at the moment with Duke & Thomson.
He stared up at the gaudy sign: Island Groves Paradise for happy young marrieds.
It was all a mistake. He should never have tried to live out here in Island Groves with a dog and a housekeeper.
He walked into the miniature Spanish villa which was the offices of the Island Groves agent.
Tillinghast welcomed him warmly. The agent was a mound of circles: round pot belly, round shoulders, round head, a circle for a mouth and protuberant brown marbles for eyes.
"It's all fine, but I think you better put my place up for sale, Mr. Tillinghast. I know my equity isn't much, but it ought to bring me something."
"Oh, it will. It will. We've got lists of people wanting to come in out here. Won't have any trouble marketing your house. But I'm sorry to see you pull out. You going east? Changing jobs?"
"Think I'll sell the house, get an apartment down town. It was what I should have done." But there were two reasons why he'd bought this house out here when he latched on with Duke & Thomson: he'd wanted to start completely new, and he'd wanted someplace where Tippy would have room to bark.
Neither reason had any validity now. It was time he stopped fooling himself.
"I'll put it on the market," Tillinghast said. "If you're sure that's the way you want it."
He saw the police cars parked in front of his house as he rounded the corner of Summit Street. Instinct, the fact he'd been writing too many TV crime scripts, something clanged like high voltage warning systems inside his brain. He stopped walking.
He said, "Damn."
He stood undecided in the gray shadow of a new-foliaged eucalyptus. He looked around, chewing at his underlip. He let his briefcase rest against his leg.
It was almost six-thirty, almost dark, and there were lights glowing yellowly in most of the windows of the homes along Summit Street. like his, they were all newly built in a subdivision so recent the ink was still wet on the mortgages. Paradise for happy young marrieds. Bikes toppled discarded in drives, along the walks, against steps, skates lay like lethal anti-personnel mines in parkways, somebody had thrown a catcher's mitt on the grass. Kids were washing up, mothers were dealing out plates onto dining tables, fathers were skimming the newspapers. Everything normal, the way things went out here. But why cops in front of his house?
He stared at those black cars. His heartbeat increased, his stomach muscles tightened.
He turned and walked slowly back along the avenue toward the shopping center. Maybe if he stalled long enough, they'd go away.
The bulging briefcase bumped his leg. Far ahead, neon beckoned: Bar.
His mouth pulled sourly. That sign was like something from his past, bright and gaudy, laughing at him, calling him, knowing all the time he was coming back. As if he'd never escaped at all.
The roof of his mouth felt dry. He wanted a drink. Even knowing what it did to him, what it had done to him.
He scowled. When things go bad, they go all the way. When the devil gets on your tail, you can't run fast enough, and everybody knows what to do with the devil except him that's got him.
He remembered suddenly the way he had yelled at Sheram in the alley last night, threatening to have him arrested for killing Tippy.
Now he shook his head. He'd asked for it. Now Sheram had struck first, and the cops were waiting ...
It occurred to him that Caroline would have laughed to see him walking like this, making a big deal out of facing cops, a neighborhood squabble, even out of having a drink.
He shivered because he saw that Caroline would never have believed the things liquor had done to him, just as she'd have doubted he'd live out here alone.
Caroline had never known what could happen to him when the devil got him. She'd loved him and they'd married, been happy, and then she'd died suddenly. Maybe if she'd lived, he'd have gone on having a drink before dinner, getting high a couple of times a year, and he'd never have moved to Island Groves.
But Caroline was dead. They'd told her she could never have a baby. He'd bought Tippy for her because she needed something to love. Her death last year had blasted him to useless fragments.
He'd stopped working, stopped living, stopped shaving. He'd have stopped breathing but this was too easy. Six months of looking for the bottom of a bottle was a long time. He'd learned there was no bottom, no easy way to forget. And he'd hurt people in the depths of his despair. like Connice.
He paused outside the bar. He licked his tongue across his lips. He'd wanted a drink all day, after he and Nora had argued over that script.
He entered the lounge, saw a couple of men at the bar, a few unattached females, a bartender polishing glasses. He sat on a barstool with his case beside him.
"Why, hi there, Mr. Taylor."
Alan jerked his head up. He said, "Hi, Mr. Tillinghast."
The realtor smiled. "Got a lot on your mind, eh? Don't see you in here much. But I understand. Man doesn't put his lovely home on the market unless he has a lot on his mind."
"Yes." Alan drank a bourbon on the rocks.
"Lovely section out here," Tillinghast said.
"Garden spot of Southern California."
Alan tried to smile. He stared into his glass. Tillinghast's voice hacked at him, a kind of irritant. He was thinking he'd been a fool to come in here, letting the sight of cops give him an excuse to drink. He had work ahead of him tonight. The changes Nora wanted would mean a rewrite, with deadline less than two days ahead.
"Too bad you don't feel you can hold your place," the realtor said. "Prices going up. Few years, it'll bring triple what you paid."
Alan spilled a couple of drops of whiskey. He was aware that Tillinghast was watching narrowly. Alan got up. "See you, Mr. Tillinghast. I've a lot of work ahead of me."
Alan walked out, and this time hurried home in the gathering darkness. Settle with the cops, settle with Sheram, forget the whole matter. Tippy was dead. He had that script to rework. Only this was important.
He turned into his walk as though unaware of the two police cruisers. He kept walking until a man said, "Just a minute."
Alan stopped and turned. A tall, gray-haired man got out of the first cruiser. He crossed the parkway slowly, looking Alan over. "Your name Taylor? Alan Taylor?"
A squat, fat man got out of the cruiser and joined them. Alan saw that the second cruiser was empty.
"Around back," the squat man said. "Case you came in that way."
The tall man shook his head. "We'd lice to talk to you, Mr. Taylor." ' "What about?"
"About your neighbor." The detective glanced at a card in his hand. "Mr. Justin Sheram. You know him?"
"He lives across the alley. My dog dug in his yard. He poisoned the dog. We argued. I know I threatened to call the police, but I thought it over. Decided not to."
"You shoulda called us," the squat man said.
"Never mind, Renner," the tall cop said. "Why did you decide not to, Mr. Taylor?"
"It was a neighborhood hassle. I didn't want to get involved any further. Sorry to have caused you trouble. I'm not going to prefer any charges against
Mr. Sheram. I want to forget it."
"I'll bet you do," the squat man said.
"Looks like it won't be that easy, Mr. Taylor," the gray-haired detective said. "I'm Lt. Sevidge. County police. This is Sergeant Renner. We'd like for you to come across the alley with us to Mr. Sherarn's house. Okay?"
Alan said, "I'm busy. Why get involved with more arguments with the old man? Why can't we drop it?"
"Because Sheram is dead," Renner said. "Somebody shot him."
Alan stared first at Renner and then numbly moved his gaze to Sevidge. Their faces were cold. For the first time, despite all the murder scripts he'd written, he really knew how the cops looked at you when they talked murder.
"Shall we walk over there?" Sevidge said.
"What's it got to do with me?"
Renner's voice was sharp. "Go ahead. Play it dumb. This is what it's got to do with you. Sherarn's dead ... and we think you killed him."
Sherarn's body was sprawled out in the middle of his front room. A bullet had entered his brain through the back of his head. Sheram had been running away, scared. This was in the very tension in the way his body stiffened with rigor mortis.
The room was crowded with police, and the medical examiner. Sevidge and Renner stood on each side of Alan.
This house was new, like his own, but cluttered with old-fashioned furnishings.
"You about through?" Sevidge asked the room at large.
The fingerprint expert nodded. A photographer took a last angle shot of Sheram's body.
Sevidge spoke to the medic. "Any idea how long he's been dead?"
"Can't tell accurately until after the autopsy. Fd say he was killed some time before five a.m. this morning."
"Strange nobody missed him until this afternoon," Sevidge said.
A plainclothes detective said, "Nobody lived here with Sheram. He managed to quarrel with everybody in the nieghborhood. They wouldn't have found him when they did, but a delivery boy tried to collect for a package, looked through the window, and saw him."
Alan couldn't drag his gaze from the body of the man on the floor.
"Any prints?" Sevidge asked.
"Negative. The killer was pretty smart. Left no traces."
"How about outside?"
"We got one pretty good footprint where somebody stepped off the back step into the yard. The old man had the ground loosened, wet. The delivery boy left prints, but we located one that didn't belong to the kid. We made a good cast. We're checking it out"
"You figured the caliber of the murder gun yet."
"A .32."
"Every little bit helps," Renner said.
The police technicians prepared to leave. The medical examiner closed his kit and motioned to his assistants to remove the body.
Sevidge's voice clawed at Alan. "Anything you'd like to say, Mr. Taylor?"
Alan watched a newspaper reporter scribbling notes. He went sick. This was going to make all the newspapers. It was a mistake, but his name would be published. He sweated. Duke & Thomson would love that. They hadn't wanted to take a chance on him.
"You can make it a lot easier on all of us by cooperating," Renner said. "We can do this the hard way, Taylor. But I can tell you this. Make it tough on us, we make it tough on you."
Alan stared at the stout man. "I had no more reason for killing this man than you have."
"I don't know him," Renner said, shrugging. "But you knew him. You fought with him."
"We argued about his poisoning my dog. I wouldn't kill him over a thing like that."
Renner's voice mocked him. "But it does give you a reason, don't it?"
Sevidge said, "Renner may be jumping at conclusions, Mr. Taylor. But as he says, our preliminary investigations did cause us to wait for you. For instance, can you say where you were between three a.m. and five a.m. this morning?"
"I was at home. Asleep." Alan felt his heart sink. Sevidge and Renner exchanged knowing glances. He said, "Nobody was with me, so I can't prove I was there."
Sevidge's smile was cold as leftovers. "We'll let that go for now, Mr. Taylor. I just wanted to demonstrate to you that we did have reason to suspect you. Do you own a gun?"
"Yes."
"What caliber gun, Mr. Taylor?"
Alan hesitated, feeling his face growing hot. Caroline had been afraid of the dark in the weeks before her death. Alan had bought a gun. His voice sounded odd in his own ears. "A .32."
Renner snorted with a sharp intake of breath. Sevidge's face showed no reaction. Panic gripped at Alan.
Sevidge said, "Would you mind showing us the gun?"
"No. Of course not."
"Fine. No reason we can't clear up this whole business by getting answers to a few questions."
Rose Miner opened his front door for them. His housekeeper was dressed to leave, flowered hat on graying head, cheap coat buttoned about her opulent waist. Her eyes were red-rimmed and she sniffled. Obviously, cops had been questioning her.
She ignored the detectives. "I must talk to you, Mr. Taylor."
"In just a minute," Sevidge answered Rose before Alan could speak.
The stout woman trembled. Somebody had given her a bad time.
"Soon as I can, Mrs. Miner," Alan said.
"I'm late now, Mr. Taylor "
"We'll only take a moment of Mr. Taylor's time, Mrs. Miner," Sevidge said. He glanced at Alan. "Suppose you show us where your gun is, Mr. Taylor."
A third plainclothes detective joined them. He carried a wooden frame and in it was a quick-setting cast of a shoe print.
Alan said, "I keep the gun in my bedroom."
Alan had the disturbing sensation of walking through an alien place. He'd lived in this home five months, but suddenly it was strange, everything seemed unknown, unfamiliar.
They checked his bedroom. There wasn't a lot to see, double bed, dresser, mirror, typing table and his portable.
He went to the dresser and opened the top drawer. He kept collected trivia of his life there. Pictures, letters, programs from plays, and somewhere, his gun, wrapped in oily cloth.
He thrust papers aside, panic building in him. He tried to remember the last time he'd seen the gun. He couldn't remember. Had he moved it? He knew better. Once, weeks ago, he'd held it to get the heft and feel for a TV script. He remembered rewrapping the gun and replacing it in this drawer.
Renner was close against his side, peering over his shoulder.
Sevidge leaned against the foot of the bed, calmly watching.
Alan couldn't see the third detective, and he didn't want to turn around. His face was flushed, and he knew the panic would show in his eyes.
The gun was gone.
CHAPTER THREE
SEVIDGE's SOFT VOICE was NO LONGER apologetic.
"Maybe you left the gun in another room?"
"I kept it here," Alan said. "I never touched it."
"Maybe somebody stole it," Renner said, close at Alan's side. Sarcasm had the hacking edge of a dull ax.
Alan turned. "They must have." Renner laughed up at him. "Sure. Don't they always?"
"It's not here!" Alan's voice lashed at him.
"Sure it's not," Renner taunted. "Did you think it would be?"
Alan forced himself to relax. Get mad. This was just what they wanted him to do. He searched through the drawer again, thrusting papers aside. But he was nervous now, knowing he wasn't going to find it.
"Too bad," Sevidge said. "So much could have been cleared up if we could have run a check on your gun."
"Sure," Renner said in mock solicitude.
"It's got to be here somewhere." Alan jerked open other drawers. Everything was in place, shirts, handkerchiefs-only the gun was missing.
He straightened, taut "It's not here," he said again.
"Maybe it isn't this serious, Mr. Taylor," Sevidge said. "No sense getting excited."
Alan nodded. The gun had to be here.
Sevidge spoke loudly. "Mrs. Miner, would you come in here, please?"
Alan sighed. Why hadn't he thought of that? Women could straighten a room and you never found anything. Mrs. Miner was a tidy woman, always rearranging the furniture.
She came to the bedroom door, her face pale. She dabbed at her nose with her handkerchief.
Alan said, "Mrs. Miner, did you move my gun?"
"Your what?"
"Mrs. Miner, I had a gun, in this top drawer. You couldn't have put things away without seeing it."
Her voice was injured. "I never saw a gun, Mr. Taylor. If I had I couldn't have worked here ... I don't like guns, Mr. Taylor. I don't like being around them."
"Mrs. Miner, please. Try to remember. I kept it wrapped in an oil rag. Somebody took it. Somebody moved it"
"Are you saying I moved it?"
"Mrs. Miner, I'm only saying surely you must have seen it."
She shook her head. "I may have seen an oily cloth. Seems I did. I had no idea you kept a gun."
Sevidge said, "When was the last time you saw the oily cloth in this drawer, Mrs. Miner?"
She shook her head again. "It must have been weeks ago."
"But you didn't see it here today?"
She hesitated a long time. "No, sir. I didn't."
"Did you open this top drawer today?"
Her hesitation was even longer. Finally she nodded.
"But you didn't see the gun," Sevidge persisted.
"I didn't know he had a gun there."
"Did you see the cloth?"
"No. I can't remember seeing it."
"Thank you, Mrs. Miner." Sevidge let his gaze strike against Alan's. "You can see, can't you, Mr. Taylor, how this makes the whole thing a little different?"
Alan looked at the three detectives, frustrated. "But the gun was there. She must have moved it. She must have forgotten."
"I never forgot." Rose's voice flared. "I never touched it. I never knew a gun was there ... I'm late now, Mr. Taylor. My man don't like me coming home late. I must talk to you a moment. It's very important."
Sevidge said, "This is something you can't say in front of us, Mrs. Miner?"
Rose looked at the detectives, then at Alan. She tilted her chin. "It's nothing I can't say right out. It's just that I'm giving you notice, Mr. Taylor."
"Why?"
She glanced meaningly at the police again. "I'm sorry. I'm a respectable woman. I got to earn my living among respectable people. It won't help me none to have it known I worked in a house like this."
"Rose! What's wrong with this house? What's been wrong since you came to work here?"
She shook her head, miserable. "Nothing, Mr. Taylor. You've been a quiet man, and no trouble. I never suspected the least thing wrong. But now police cars parked out front all afternoon police ringing the doorbell, asking questions. You owning a gun. My man won't like any of this, Mr. Taylor. I dislike saying it, but respectable people can only get theirselves sullied by becoming involved with bad trouble."
Alan drew his hand across his mouth. "Mrs. Miner, it's all a mistake. The detectives are sure to find it was a robbery, something like that. It'll be straightened out as soon as we've had a chance to talk, as soon as I find my gun."
"I hope so," Rose said. "I hope everything turns out fine for you, Mr. Taylor. I'm sure when it's all settled, you'll have no trouble finding a woman to replace me."
She turned and walked out.
'You say you haven't touched your gun in weeks," Sevidge said. "Mind saying why you touched it when you did?"
"I was writing a TV script. Wanted to know what a gun weighed, how it felt in your hand. Weight was important to the script." Alan got the empty feeling they'd stopped listening. They stood blankly, waiting for him to talk himself out. He gestured. "I put it back in this drawer. I remember that."
"I'm sure the gun will turn up," Sevidge said.
The third detective said, "Mr. Taylor, you mind putting your foot in this cast?"
Alan's face flushed. He glanced at Sevidge. Sevidge elaborately ignored them.
The detective knelt, placed the quick-set mold on the floor. "Just place your foot in with no pressure."
Renner hunkered down beside the detective, but Sevidge gazed through the window as though he had no interest in the matter.
Alan placed his foot in the shoe imprint. His shoe fit almost exactly.
Renner said exultantly, "A real fit."
Alan jerked his leg away involuntarily.
Sevidge peered at the cast. "What about it, Grissom?"
Alan said, "I wear a size eight. Must be several million other men who wear a size eight shoe."
"Must be," Sevidge agreed. "Gives us quite a job, eh?" He turned to Grissom, hunkered over the mold. "How about other characteristics?"
The plainclothesman shook his head. "The shoe in the cast was run over on the inside. Mind lifting your foot another moment, Mr. Taylor?"
Alan lifted his shoe and Grissom inspected it closely.
"No," Grissom said. "These aren't the same. At least if Mr. Taylor made this print, he wasn't wearing these shoes."
Alan pulled his foot away. "I wasn't over there. I never shot anybody. I'm sure I'll find my gun."
Sevidge nodded. "Sure you will, Mr. Taylor. Meantime, come down to the station with us."
Alan met his gaze. "Are you arresting me?"
"No."
"We could, brother," Renner said. "Just some questions. We'd like you to make a statement."
"I've got a lot of work to do," Alan protested. "How long do you think I'll be there?"
"That's up to you," Sevidge said. "It would have been much easier if you'd found your gun. Too bad about that. But maybe you'll remember where you put it."
"Why drag me into this trouble?" Alan said.
"You're in no trouble yet, Mr. Taylor. We just want a statement from you. If we get any new leads, naturally we'll run them down. But at the moment, there are things with you that, well, they just don't add up."
"He could have been robbed," Alan insisted. "That happens. Somebody surprises a robber and gets killed."
Sevidge nodded. "Sure, it happens. We thought of that. Checked it out. Won't hold up. Sheram was comparatively a wealthy man. Kept cash and valuable negotiable bonds in his house, as well as his late wife's jewelry. So far as we can find, nothing is missing. Sheram's wallet was still in his pocket. And he wasn't going toward anyone when he was shot, Mr. Taylor. He was going away from them."
"He was running away," Renner said. "Sheram was scared, Taylor. He died scared."
Alan walked into the sheriff's branch office between Sevidge and Renner. Renner kept hacking at him, voice rasping and sarcastic.
They led him to the desk sergeant. Alan stood between them, sick with his feeling of helplessness. He looked around, finding in the drabness of this building his own sense of despair.
"You booking him, Lieutenant?" the desk sergeant asked.
Alan waited, tension mounting.
Sevidge shook his head. "Want to talk to him first."
"How long must I stay here?" Alan said.
"Well tell you," Renner said.
Sevidge led them along a corridor. The walls pressed in upon Alan. He felt a wild urge to turn and fight his way out of there. Every nerve in him screamed at him to run. You haven't a chance if you stay here. You're guilty, as far as they're concerned. Somehow, they'll prove you're guilty.
But if he ran, what was that? A fool's play. Admission of guilt. They'd see it as that, because how could you explain sudden terror in a narrow corridor where the walls closed in on you as you walked?
Sevidge opened an office door and snapped on a light.
He flopped behind his desk into a swivel chair and motioned Alan to sit down across from him. Renner sat in a chair against the wall.
"Why are you doing this?" Alan stared at Sevidge. "You have no proof at all that I killed that old man."
Renner's voice sawed at Alan's taut nerves. "Why don't you give us proof you didn't? Show us your gun."
Alan stared at Renner. "I can't find my gun here."
"So don't worry about it." Renner laughed. "Some of our boys will find it."
Alan started up from his chair, but stopped. "Are they going through my house?"
Sevidge leaned forward. "Why complain if you got nothing to hide? They might help you. If they find your gun and run a check, that would help you, wouldn't it?"
"How long are you going to keep me here?"
Sevidge shrugged. "That depends."
"If you're accusing me of murdering Sheram, do it. Then I can get a lawyer. There must be something I can do to prove I didn't kill him. I can't help myself sitting in this jail."
Sevidge moved some papers on his desk. "Relax, Mr. Taylor. You're here for questioning. That's all. If I book you at all I'll do that when I'm ready."
"Sure," Renner agreed. "Questioning. You ain't charged with nothing, nobody can holler about you being here. We know what we're doing, Taylor." He dry-washed his stubby hands. "This way, we can keep you a lot longer."
"You mean you can keep me without allowing me to talk to anybody?"
Sevidge gave him a gray smile. "Something like that."
The police technician carefully peeled the paraffin from Alan's hands. Alan sat on a high stool while Grissom tested the paraffin for signs of silver nitrate.
Sevidge said, voice low, "Don't worry, Mr. Taylor. Many offices have stopped using this test. They're calling it unreliable. You might have picked up the nitrate from some other source, or it may have remained in your pores several days."
Grissom looked up from his microscope. He shook his head. "Negative, boss. There's no sign of any silver nitrate in this paraffin."
For the first time since six o'clock that night, Alan felt a small surge of hope. If these men wouldn't believe him, maybe their own tests would exonerate him.
Sevidge's gray face tautened. A small muscle twitched in his squared jaw. Renner winced almost as though Grissom had struck him. Be careful, Grissom, Alan thought bitterly, you keep reporting the truth, even scientific truths, they'll have you back pounding a beat.
Alan said, "Looks like it won't be easy, after all. You're going to have to work to find Sherarn's killer."
Something glittered in Sevidge's pale eyes. Hackles rose across the nape of Alan's neck. This man would make a hellish enemy.
Sevidge's low voice was caustic. "This test doesn't prove you didn't fire that gun. It just proves you were maybe smarter than we figured." He straightened. "If you were smart enough to wear gloves, you better have been smart enough to destroy them, because I got the word for you. Silver nitrate will show in gloves just as it does in the pores of the skin."
Alan sat in the chair in the center of Sevidge's office. Sevidge hadn't spoken to him since they'd returned from the lab. There was no further show of calmness or concern. It was as if it were a personal affront that there had been no silver nitrate in the paraffin test.
On the way to the lab, Sevidge had been almost exuberant. Now he sat at his desk writing savagely, filling out his report on the murder of Justin Sheram.
Renner leaned against the wall, staring at Alan, and then at his black-nailed fingers, as though he'd never seen them before.
It was almost midnight. Six hours. Alan had had no supper. He thought about the rewrite he had to do. No sense worrying about that. When Duke & Thomson saw the morning papers, Alan Taylor would once more be among the unemployed.
A sudden knock at the door, and Alan trembled. Six hours, and his nerves were like bow strings.
Grissom entered the office, carrying the mold he'd cast in Sheram's back yard 'and a pair of canvas oxfords with thick composition soles.
Alan recognized the shoes. He also recognized the look of triumph on Grissom's face.
"What is it, Grissom?" Sevidge still hadn't forgiven the technician for his failure to find non-existent silver nitrate in that paraffin test.
"The boys found these shoes, Lieutenant, in Taylor's garage."
Tensions relaxed in Sevidge's face.
Grissom said, "We tested them in this mold. They fit exactly. What looked like a run-over heel was this thick sole that cat deeper in that loosened dirt."
"Is that the shoe?"
Grissom nodded. "This is the shoe, all right. It fits the mold, and all the characteristics match, even to the cut in the heel here."
Sevidge stood up and took the shoe. Alan stared at it, the grass stains, the dirt smears.
Sevidge nodded in satisfaction. "That's better."
"There's one more thing," Grissom said.
Sevidge's face showed something that resembled pleasure. "Yes?"
"The dirt on the shoes. It matches the sample taken from Sherarn's yard."
Sevidge held out the canvas shoes toward Alan. "These your shoes, Taylor?"
Alan nodded.
Grissom said, "We found them in his garage."
"They're shoes I wear working in the yard," Alan said. He had that helpless feeling that he was talking to himself. "I never wore them anywhere near Sherarn's."
Sevidge turned the shoe over. "How do you explain this dirt on them?"
"A frame-up?" Alan demanded. It was nothing he'd intended saying.
"Frame?" The words were whispered, as if ripped from Sevidge's insides. "You saying we framed this, Taylor?"
"I never wore those shoes near Sherarn's. I never went over there. Those are my shoes. But I wore them to work in my yard, that's all."
Sevidge smiled coldly. "Or did you wear them because the soles are composition, thick, quiet, the kind a man would wear when he steals into another man's house at four o'clock in the morning?"
CHAPTER FOUR
The preliminary hearing was conducted in a long, narrow room with the medical examiner presiding.
Alan slumped in a chair, sweating and rumpled after a night in a jail cell.
Shades were drawn against the sunlit spring morning. At the front of the room, where Alan sat between Sevidge and Renner, officials and technicians whispered and rustled papers and pictures. Most of the chairs were taken, but spectators spoke infrequently, watching Alan and the law officials.
The delivery boy was called first. His name was Peter Springle. He'd been sure, for some reason he couldn't give, that Mr. Sheram was at home. The boss had told him not to leave the packages without collecting for them. On the other hand, old Mr. Sheram had a bad temper and Peter had been afraid he'd get in trouble if he returned the packages. He'd looked through a window and saw Mr. Sheram sprawled on the floor. Sun flooding through the window showed Peter blood on the carpet under Mr. Sherarn's head.
Each of the police officers was called. Three uniformed patrolmen had questioned neighbors, all mentioned the violent argument in the alley between Mr. Sheram and Alan Taylor.
Carlos Wakefield was sixty-seven. He wore thick-lensed glasses, was a retired bookkeeper. He lived two houses east of Alan on Summit Street.
"Did you hear Mr. Sheram and Mr. Taylor argue?" Wakefield was asked.
"Yes. I was one of the first to see them in the alley the day before Mr. Sheram was killed. I was emptying garbage and heard voices. I saw Mr. Sheram waving his arms and shouting. There was always excitement when Sheram got angry. I walked down there. I hadn't been there long before most everybody in the neighborhood was standing in the alley, or leaning over fences, watching Sheram. He always put on quite a show."
"Do you know what the two men were arguing about?"
"Mr. Taylor accused Sheram of poisoning Mr. Taylor's dog, named Tippy. We all knew Sheram hated animals. Most dogs avoided his place, but that little dog of Mr. Taylor's was friendly with everybody. She'd stand and wag her stub of a tail even when Sheram threw things at her."
"Did Mr. Sheram admit poisoning the dog."
"Yes. He made no bones about it. Taylor told him that Tippy's death had been painful and agonizing. This seemed to please Sheram, and I could see Mr. Taylor getting madder."
"What did Mr. Taylor say to Mr. Sheram?" Wakefield frowned. "He said, 'I could kill you like that.'"
Alan stared at Wakefield. Surely Wakefield understood this was said in anger and despair. But as far as the people in this room was concerned, it was something said in deadly earnest, threatened, and executed.
Rose Miner took the chair before the presiding officer. She refused to meet Alan's gaze. She kept her eyes down, fixed on her locked fingers.
"What has been Mr. Taylor's condition as far as you're concerned in the three months you've worked for him, Mrs. Miner?"
"He was a moody man. His wife had been dead a year, but he didn't seem able to get over it. He was lonely. He worked hard, as though his work was all he had."
"You'd say he was emotionally upset?"
Rose hesitated. "You mean was he nervous? And like I said, moody? If that's what you mean, he was that."
"And had the dog been a pet of his wife's?"
"He told me she had been."
"And he attached great importance to the dog and its well-being?"
Mrs. Miner nodded. "Several times he told me he had bought the home in Island Groves so the dog would have a home. I thought it odd a man with no family or children would buy a house in a neighborhood full of children. He said he wanted a place where Tippy would be happy."
The police officers whispered together, the spectators nudged each other. This sounded odd, even in California.
Mr. Tillinghast sat in the witness chair and mopped his round forehead.
"Mr. Taylor came to my office that afternoon and told me he wanted to list his house for sale. He quoted a price substantially lower than the present market."
"Did he seem upset?"
"I could see he had a lot on his mind. Otherwise, he was calm. Thoughtful."
"Did you see him later?"
"Yes I walked over to the shopping center for refreshment." The spectators tittered. "Mr. Taylor came in. He ordered a drink, but now he did act upset, and he spilled his drink. Told me he had heavy work ahead of him. He seemed not even to listen when I talked to him."
Alan felt the sense of being helpless against what was happening as these people built at least a circumstantial case against him.
The woman who followed Tillinghast to the witness chair walked tight-kneed, tight-lipped.
Her name was Tess Simpson, and she lived in the house immediately west of Alan.
She was in her forties, and looked as if she'd been pickled in vinegar. When he thought about her at all, Alan considered her a Lesbian, and put her from his mind. Where the others had been retiring, almost unwilling to testify, Tess looked like a woman on a crusade.
"Tell us in your own words, Miss Simpson, what you saw about four a.m. night before last."
"Certainly. I'd lost my brother recently, and since his death I've not been sleeping well. That night I was unusually restless. I heard sounds in the yard and I was nervous. I got up to take sleeping pills my doctor prescribed. That was when I looked out my window.
"I noticed Mr. Taylor's light was burning. I don't know how long it had been burning. But I thought it an odd coincidence that both of us were unable to sleep. I looked at my clock and it was a few minutes past four ajn."
Alan stared at the Simpson woman. She was slack-jawed, slack-breasted. He remembered Sevidge's questioning him about his actions about four that morning. He'd told them he was asleep. He saw now that Renner had been about to throw the Simpson testimony at him, but Sevidge had stopped him.
Alan drew a deep breath. His gaze touched at the gray, imperturbable face of Sevidge. Sevidge had hoped he'd lie, waiting for him to trip himself, to help hang himself.
Sevidge felt he had a complete case against him.
Alan felt the irregular pound of his heart. It was as if the world had turned upside down. The hell of it was, he might have been awake at four a.m. He didn't know. It seemed Nora had left hours earlier. He'd passed out. He didn't remember getting up. But he knew bitterly that when he'd been drinking heavily a few months ago, he'd done things he could not later remember, and hated to believe he had done.
He shivered. Why should he have found sleep easy, even after Nora had gone away leaving him exhausted physically? Tippy was dead, the last thing he had of Caroline. The stupid argument with old Sheram had upset him.
He remembered ugly dreams, and sometime during that morning after Nora left him, he'd made up his mind to sell the house and move down town.
But he had no memory of getting out of his bed.
He recalled turning on no lights.
The hell of it was, he remembered nothing after Nora went away.
He looked around emptily. To the people in this room, it all added up to proof of murder.
Sevidge placed his coat carefully over the back of his chair. He stared across his desk at Alan.
"Now, suppose we have a nice long talk, Taylor," he said. "You heard what the police said, what the neighbors said. I think you're guilty. I'm tired of fooling with you. You killed that old man. I'm ready now for you to tell me how you did it."
Alan shook his head. "You haven't even told me why I'd kill him. I've lived thirty-one years. I'm reasonably intelligent. I've never killed anyone. What you have is a series of coincidences, and hearsay, and you're adding it up to suit yourself."
Renner leaned forward. "What about that gun, Taylor? What about that footprint?"
"I don't know!"
Renner snarled. "Why don't you get smart, Taylor? We're through babying you. You're accused of murder. We don't handle murderers gently."
"If I'm accused of murder, I want a lawyer."
"You'll get a lawyer when we tell you to get one."
"I want one now."
Sevidge stood before him. "The best way to get a lawyer is to talk to us first. We can keep you here as long as we like, Taylor. Nobody cares about you. Nobody but us. And we want the truth from you."
"I've told you that."
"Suppose you tell it to us again."
"Suppose you tell us where that gun is."
"Tell us why your shoe made a clear print in Sherarn's yard if you never wore it over there."
Alan stared at them. "Because I don't know! Because something is wrong. Something I don't understand."
"We didn't wear that shoe over there, Taylor.
We didn't fight with Sheram." Sevidge's voice got soft again. "I'm not saying you didn't have reason to hate Sheram. Maybe you did. Maybe you hated him enough that you wanted to take your 32 and kill him."
Renner leaned closer. "Sure. What was it you told him? You wanted to see him suffer the way your dog had suffered?"
"I was angered. Upset."
"So. It built up all night. Right? Then you got up, put on crepe-sole shoes, went over there, got the old man up you argued some more and you killed him. What did you do with the gun, Taylor?"
Alan met his gaze levelly. "Somebody stole it. I don't know where it is."
"And your shoes? Somebody stole them? Wore them? And brought them back?"
"Yes."
"Make sense, man! You expect us to believe anything like that?"
"It's the truth!"
"All right, Taylor. Somebody else did it. Somebody hated you enough to do that to you. Who, Taylor? You tell us who and we'll arrest him. We'll bring him down here and we'll make him talk. If we have to use scalding enemas, we'll make him talk. Who is it?"
Alan shook his head. He scrubbed at his day-old beard. "I don't know. Nobody. Nobody would hate me that much."
"Right. But you'd bate that old man that much.
Get smart, Taylor. We haven't begun to get tough with you."
The telephone rang shrilly. Renner jerked his head up, face sweating, and glared at the instrument. Sevidge glanced over his shoulder toward it.
Alan saw then the violence in store for him. These men were going to get his confession, one way or another. The shrilling of the phone was like a physical intrusion, and they resented it.
Finally Sevidge leaned against his desk, lifted the receiver. "Sevidge."
Something happened to his face. He peered at Alan, eyes relentless.
Sevidge said, "Yes ... yes." He found pencil and pad on his desk, scribbled a message. "Who is this? What's your name? Hello ... Hello."
Sevidge replaced the receiver. He handed the scribbled message to Renner. "Get on this thing, right now."
"What about him?" Renner jerked his head toward Alan.
"Not now. If this ain't just a crank call, we can wrap this case up. Somebody called, said if we'd look near two elms in the wooded area at the end of Summit Street, we'd find something interesting in the Taylor case like a gun."
Renner's face flushed. He shrugged into his coat. "What do you think?"
"Might be a crank. Might be the gun." Sevidge stared down at Alan. "That where you hid the gun, Taylor? In the wooded place at the end of your street?"
"Real clever," Renner said in sarcasm, moving toward the door.
"Who called?" Alan asked.
"Whoever it was hung up before I asked the name. Muffled voice. Heard a coin drop. Call was from a pay booth."
Renner closed the door behind him.
Sevidge sighed expansively. "Suppose we just take you back to your cell, Taylor. Nothing we can do right now. You might just think about what's going to happen to you if Renner turns up that missing .32. You could have made it a lot easier on yourself."
Alan sat on the edge of his cot and stared at the floor of his cell. He had had some hope that the world would get back on axis, things would make sense again, that he would be cleared of this stupid charge. He no longer had such a hope. The future stretched ahead, terrifying, as if he'd fallen into space, into the unknown where nothing made sense, nothing had to make sense, and he was alone and helpless.
He clenched his fists between his knees. They wouldn't even permit him to call a lawyer until he gave them a confession. They called it a statement, but what they wanted was an admission of guilt. They weren't going to settle for less.
He was too confused to think clearly. Over and over through his mind, ran the charges the police and his neighbors made against him, the way his gun had been missing, the way his work shoes had fit that police-cast mold.
He got up and prowled to the bars. It was all wrong. Something was missing, the one element that would make it all clear, put reason into this insanity.
The doors were opened at the end of the cell block corridor.
They came toward him, striding swiftly, and he knew they were bringing doom with them. It was in their faces.
He could smell their triumph.
Renner walked up close to the cell. Renner's fat-jowled face was more sweaty than ever. His clothing showed stains. He had something in his hand. He thrust out his, arm, opening his palm.
Alan stared at his gun. He recognized it, knew it was his, even dirt-covered, as it was.
Renner's voice rasped. "This your gun?"
Alan nodded numbly.
None of them said anything. The two cops just looked at each other in smug satisfaction.
Alan went on staring at his gun, sickness welling up in the pit of his belly.
"When did you bury it?" Renner persisted.
Alan shook his head.
Sevidge's voice was hard and cold. "Let him alone. We got what we want. We'll run a test on this gun. If ballistics match the bullets, we won't need a statement anyhow."
They stared at him another few seconds. He was like an animal in a cage to them now, a killer animal.
They turned and walked away. Alan stood with his arms at his sides. He wanted to yell after them, to bring them back.
He didn't speak. What was there to say? They could prove the gun was his. Could he prove he hadn't buried it?
He felt a chill rack him. In that moment, he could have told them. They needn't run a ballistics test. Somehow he knew. His .32 had fired the shot that went into Sheram's brain. His gun. His bullet. His shoes.
He walked back to the cot. His legs felt too weak to support him. He wavered, staggering slightly. He sat down on the edge of the cot.
He was cold. The cell was cold, and the world was. In Sevidge's office, he had sworn somebody had stolen his gun and his shoes. He hadn't really believed it then. It had been too wild, too fantastic.
It wasn't wild now. It was fact. Someone had set out coldly and deliberately to frame him for murder. Why? Who? Who'd want him framed for murder?
He struck his forehead with the heel of his hand. He tried to find in his past anyone who'd hate him enough to do such a thing, someone who knew him, knew his dog, his neighbors, his emotional upset, his habits.
He had to do something. Somebody was framing him for murder, chopping him off at every step, and the frame was fitting, snug all around. He had to find out who was framing him and he had to do it fast.
CHAPTER FIVE
Alan stepped out of the police car. A patrolman and Detective Grissom stood on the walk, and Sevidge and Renner followed close behind him.
Alan straightened, staring at the field at the end of Summit Street. This was some of the last property remaining in Island Groves, and Realtor Tillinghast puffed out his round cheeks and called it an ideal building site and upped its price each morning.
The place was a wooded playground for the neighborhood children. Alan paused on the walk, surrounded by the law.
Sevidge said, "Where did you bury the gun?"
Alan met his gaze. They might frame him for Sherarn's murder but he wasn't going to make it easy for them. He said, "Where did you find it?"
"You best cooperate, Taylor," Renner said. "We can be tough or easy. It's up to you."
Alan exhaled, still looking at Sevidge. "You'll never be able to get me to say where I buried that gun. I don't know where you found it. I didn't bury it."
Renner swore, but Sevidge said, "We can let that go for now. What we came out here for, Taylor, is a reenactment. We want you to show us where you crossed your yard, how you got into Sheram's house the whole bit."
Alan shook his head helplessly. He didn't bother saying anything.
Sevidge touched his elbow, urging him along the street toward his house. They walked slowly, the patrolman and the three detectives surrounding him.
Neighbors came out of the houses to stare in silence at the small, tense parade.
Mothers sent smaller children inside. The bolder ones inched forward into the parkways. They leaned against cars, all staring at Alan. None of them spoke.
Alan sweated. He had the sudden feeling that he had turned a drab green, or sprouted horns. The eyes fixed on him were unblinking as if he were a creature from outer space.
The whole world had gone crazy.
Nothing made any sense, certainly not these ordinary people suddenly ostracizing him, forgetting that until a few days ago he had been one of them, living among them. This was no longer true. They peered at him as if he had two heads.
"All right," Sevidge said. "Through your yard."
Alan turned, walking across the grass of his yard. The house was closed, it already had an abandoned look. He felt nothing, no relation, no connection with this house like all the other houses on Summit Street. There was the flower bed he had cultivated.
And beyond was the pretty neighbor who had inspired him to work in his own yard because she worked in hers. She wore her everyday costume, bikini bra, skin-tight shorts. She was barefooted. Her red-tinted hair reached almost to her bare shoulders. Her bulbous breasts strained the fabric of that undersized halter. Her breasts were a peach-tinted brightness. She was some guy's wife some guy who had no idea just what he possessed. She was given everything beauty could bestow for that little while in eternity. She came out into her yard and the neighboring men ravished her in their thoughts, and until recently, Alan had been her chief ravisher. He had spoken to her only from a distance. She always gave him a smile that was sexy because everything she did was sexy. And now even that slight pleasure was gone.
She belonged to some distant past when he had lived in a sane world, peopled by other sane beings.
He stared at her for a moment now, but she seemed to blur in his vision, as if she were being whirled away crazily from him.
He saw Tess Simpson standing on her steps, tight-kneed, tight-lipped, her narrowed eyes stabbing at him. She was a Lesbian, he thought, what did he care about her?
He cared nothing for her, except that she had paved part of the way toward the gas chamber with her lies or perhaps to her, they were not lies. Maybe she believed everything she said. Or then again, maybe she simply hated men and never missed a chance to shaft one of them.
He sighed heavily and walked around the side of his house. The grass was looking shabby, weeds showing up in it.. He could not care.
He no longer existed in a world where such things mattered.
They reached the alley. Some child had carelessly thrown a bike against some garbage cans, dogs played on nearby lawns.
"All right," Sevidge said. "Hold it."
Alan stopped. He stared at the bike, only a few feet from him. Gazing at it made his heart beat faster. Wheels. A chance to run. Run? Where?
He stared at his hands locked together before him with handcuffs.
"We want a reenactment," Sevidge said. "We're prepared to stay here the rest of the day to get one. We don't get it, we come back tomorrow, start over."
He jerked' his head, stationing Renner and Grissom at the corners of the yard.
"Show us how you did it," Sevidge ordered.
"Impossible," Alan said. "I didn't kill him."
Sevidge's gray face showed his effort to control his rage. "We're staying right here, Taylor, until we get what we want." He jerked his head at the patrolman, who stepped forward and unlocked the handcuffs.
Alan stood massaging his wrists for a moment. He could hardly breathe. This was as near to freedom as he'd been since six o'clock the other night. Perhaps as near as he'd ever come again.
"You came across your yard," Sevidge said. "Then how did you get in his house? Where'd you go when you came across your yard?"
Alan breathed through his parted mouth. He moved his gaze across the neighboring yards. The one beyond Sheram's place was on an incline to the front street.
He closed his eyes for a moment, held his breath, trying to calm down.
"I'm waiting," Sevidge said.
"All right." Finally Alan nodded. He stared at Sevidge, "You won't have it any other way, will you?"
"That's right. I hope you're getting smart enough to see that."
"Sure," Alan said. It was like plotting out one of his TV scripts, only a million times more urgent because his life depended on it. "I came out of the kitchen. I saw the light over there in Miss Simpson's kitchen-"
He paused, seeing Sevidge nod, buying it. This was the way it had to be. Now they were getting somewhere.
"Then I ran across the alley and ducked behind these garbage cans here "
Alan lunged at the bike. He threw his leg over the seat, caught the handle bars and shoved off. He was pedaling before Sevidge or the others could react.
He turned hard right, going on the sharp incline that led across the yard to the street a hundred feet away.
He heard Sevidge yell behind him. Then they were all shouting at each other and people were yelling all along the alley.
Sevidge ran into the yard behind him. Sevidge yelled, "Stop!"
Alan bent lower over the bike handles, pedaling furiously.
The pistol cracked behind him, the shot going high, Sevidge's warning as required by police manuals. The next shot wasn't going high, and Alan felt a place burning in his back where Sevidge's bullet would enter.
He wheeled hard to the left, going around the front of the house as the second shot was fired. The bullet chewed away a corner of the building.
The yard sloped sharply downward to the walk and Alan held on, rolling down to it. He heard Sevidge and Renner shouting, heard them running across the yards back there.
He turned the bike hard left, going at full speed along the walk. At the first corner he turned again, going toward the freeway and the entrances to Island Groves.
He rode across a yard, went into an alley, rode along it, doubled back across another yard, going toward the shopping center and yet knowing this was the last place he wanted to show himself.
He pedaled as fast as he could. Breath burned in his throat but he was not conscious of being tired. He was too scared to think of being tired.
He went down an alley, across a yard, along a street. He swore inwardly because he had no goal.
There was nothing in his mind except the churning desire to escape from the nightmare behind him.
He was not running toward anything now, only running from those sirens that were croaking to life in the distance.
He went across another yard, and people were pausing, watching him in his frantic flight. Some of them even laughed and nodded at each other another California health nut trying to work up his own coronary.
He pedaled faster. Let them think what they liked, as long as they didn't try to stop him.
He whipped the bike across a yard, into an alley, across another yard and into a street.
He stared ahead of him, horror building in the pit of his taut-drawn belly. Dead end street.
He had run as far as he could. Along the street on one side were the Island Groves homes. On the other side was a four-foot chain-link fence, the high embankment, and above was the freeway.
He could not, for the moment, stop pedaling. Even when he no longer knew what to do, he still had to try to run.
He finally slammed on the brakes inches from the dead-end sign. He glanced wildly across his shoulder, sick with fear at what he would see.
For the moment, the street was empty behind him.
He caught the bike in both hands, hefted it, raised it and tossed it over the chain link fence. He set himself then and scrambled over the mesh wires, feeling them rip at his shirt, at the skin of his arms and hands.
He fell over beside the bike. For a moment, he stayed on his hands and knees, breathing savagely.
He took up the bike then and ran, pushing it beside him as he went up the steep enbankment to the thunderous mainstream of the freeway.
He looked over his shoulder. The police cars were not yet in sight.
Alan rolled the bicycle over the hump to the paved shoulder of the freeway. Cars whipped past him. His heart sank. He was in the outgoing stream of traffic.
All he could think was that he had to get into downtown Los Angeles. The suburbs were no place for a wanted man. If he found any safety, it would be as one more faceless individual in impersonal crowds.
Car horns blared as the inside-lane motorists woke up to a man's standing on the road shoulder with a bicycle. They yelled and swore at him. They whipped past, the wind in passage stinging his face.
Alan got on the bike. The backs of his legs ached now, the muscles stretched taut. He no longer cared about personal discomfort, physical pain.
He was free.
For the moment at least, he was away from Sevidge and Renner and those bars. If only he could find some place where he could be safe long enough to slow down and think he had to think ... He had stumbled into this nightmare world. He had to think his way out of it.
This was insane. He had escaped four cops, on a bicycle. He was riding the wrong way on the wild traffic pattern of the freeway.
He had nowhere to go, and yet he could not stop running.
And what made it crazier than anything else, he noticed for the first time that he was riding a girl's bicycle. No wonder horns wailed and people laughed and pointed...
Alan stood in the darkness across the street from Nora's apartment for a long time.
He refused to consider the morality of taking his woes, like mud on his shoes, to Nora. Right or wrong no longer had anything to do with it.
He was like a frightened fox with the hunters yelling in his ears.
The building was sleek and new. It was polished metal, glass and stone, looking almost as aloof and remote from the sweated everyday world as Nora herself.
He looked down at his trembling hands. His legs felt weak. He needed a place to rest, if just for a little while.
He glanced both ways along the night street. A woman walked a small dog. A car rolled along slowly in the darkness. A newspaper fluttered along, driven like a tumbleweed in the wind.
He stepped out of the shadows, straightened his shoulders, drew a deep breath and boldly crossed the street.
He could feel the courage seeping out of him like sawdust, before he reached the self-service elevator in the elegant lobby.
He stepped into the elevator and pressed the penthouse button. The cage closed on him and he glided smoothly upward.
Ascending, he sweated. Suppose she had company? What if she were not home?
He closed his jaws tautly, refusing to consider any of these alternatives. She had to be there. She had to be alone.
She was.
He rang the doorbell, and after what seemed an eternity, Nora opened the door.
She wore a sheer negligee and a transparent gown beneath it. Darkness was suggested at her thighs, the rise and thrust of her breasts were outlined against the fabric. Memory gorged up in him, and despite his fear and his weariness, he found himself recalling the wild delights in her arms, the glowing heat of her nakedness, the unbridled depths of her passions. He wanted her, in that sudden instant.
She didn't want him.
Her eyes darkened, and her face went pale. For a moment, he was afraid she was going to slam the door in his face.
She didn't, but it wasn't because she didn't want to.
"Good Lord, Nora," he whispered. "You don't believe that crap about me, do you? You don't believe
I'm a murderer?"
It took her some seconds to gain control over whatever was going on inside her, but she shook her head. "No. Of course not."
Alan wavered slightly, standing there.
She didn't ask him in. Her gaze moved over him, the sweated shirt, the chain-fence rips in his sleeves, the distracted look in his eyes.
"I know I look a wreck," he said.
"What are you doing here? What do you want?"
"Nora may I come in? Please?"
She hesitated, biting on her lip. Then she nodded and stepped back, holding the door open for him.
He walked past her into the white-on-white living room. It was the size of a tennis court, it seemed to him in his desperate weariness. It opened through double doors to a terrace that overlooked Los Angeles and the valley that stretched, multi-colored, to distant hills.
He looked about him, feeling more alien than ever. He had never been here before, but it looked in character. A motion-picture director would have designed this setting for a woman like Nora.
Only maybe there were no women like Nora.
He heard Nora close the door behind him. He had the wild urge to beg her to lock it, bar it, put furniture against it. Then he warned himself to relax. Nobody was going to look for him up here. Nora lived a world removed from the troubles he had been embroiled in.
She remained standing near the door. Her voice was cold. "You haven't told me yet what you want."
He turned slowly, staring at her. She was blurred before him. He had never been so tired. He was afraid he was going to fall.
"I know it's a hell of a thing for me to do to come here."
"Yes."
He winced as though she'd struck him. Then he saw the Los Angeles newspapers, the headlines about the murder, the escape, the pictures of Sheram sprawled on the floor of his living room.
"I had no right-"
"No."
"...after the position I put you in at Duke & Thomson."
"The hell with D & T," she said. She came toward him and he bit back the wild craving she stirred in him, the sight of that incomparable body, the memory of the way she could use it when she was roused, when she wanted to.
Clearly, at this moment, sex was the farthest thought from her mind.
"I couldn't think of anywhere to go," he said.
"Why did you think of me?" she inquired icily.
"Good Lord, Nora I was beat. Tired. Hungry. I had nowhere to go. Why shouldn't I think of you?"
Nora came close to him, peering at him in that odd, piercing way.
She scowled. "Are you suggesting there's some reason why I ought to help you, Alan?"
"What?"
"You suggest I'm obligated to take you in--. "
"Good Lord nothing of the kind. I need help, that's all."
"Is it?"
He shook his head, unable to believe she could remain so coldly impersonal, so aloof to his peril.
He said, "Forget it. I'll clear out. You're right, I shouldn't have come here. Sorry. Sorry I upset you."
She gazed at him, then turned, watching him go toward the door. Finally she said, her voice softening just slightly, "I was stunned to see you, Alan."
He paused. "I said it. I had no right coming here."
"Why did you?"
He turned. "I told you. I had nowhere to go. I was tired. Too scared to think, I guess."
"Did you have some idea I could help you?"
"If I did, you've destroyed it. Forget it."
"Why did you think I could help you?"
"I don't know. Maybe I figured they wouldn't look for me here not for a while. Maybe I needed a place to rest to stop long enough so I could think. I didn't kill that man, Nora. But nobody will believe me. I've got to think. I can't think when I'm running."
"Is that all you want?"
"What?"
"A place to rest a little while? Then you'll clear out?"
"Of course. You don't think T want to drag you into this mess, do you?"
"I don't know. I didn't know when I saw you standing outside my door looking like a wild man. I wasn't sure ... but I can tell you this, Alan I can't help you."
"All right."
"I've worked hard to get where I am. I'm at the top at D & T, but a scandal the sort of thing you're messed up in could ruin me. My job stays on the line, all the time. I have to be careful."
"And harboring fugitives isn't being careful."
"I can't do it, Alan. I can't take the chance."
He nodded. "All right. I won't ask anything of you. A drink maybe. Let me-lie down somewhere, just until I can catch my breath. Will you do that?"
She gazed at him a moment. "I'll do that much. No more, Alan. I'm sorry. Don't push it."
He looked at her as if he had never seen her before. Maybe he never had.
Suddenly, Nora was no longer the girl who had flailed in violent nakedness on his bed. She was like one of those cold beings who peopled the nightmare in which he found himself.
She turned her face to him but he could not even see into her eyes.
He lay across the bed in Nora's guest room. She had turned back the spread, and he lay on the tinted-silk sheets, and this made it all more nightmarish. A few hours ago he'd lain in a prison cell now, a fugitive, he sank into sweet-scented silk sheets on a soft, deep mattress.
Nora had been kinder than he'd any reason to expect her to be. She was right. She owed him nothing. She had her reputation, her career to consider, and it was a felony to harbor known criminals. And he was a known criminal. She had the headlines to prove it.
She'd fed him cold chicken, potato salad, hot coffee and salt rye bread. He'd lain down across this unbelievably soft bed and she had brought a cool cloth, bathed his face.
She'd said, "Remember, Alan, I can't help you. No more than this."
"Yes."
"Rest, now."
"Thanks." He watched her above him, through a mist of weariness. He saw the way her breasts suspended over him like ripe fruit past readiness for plucking. He stared at the darkened triangle at her thighs.
She must have seen the lust in his face. She ignored it. She said, "I'll wake you in a few hours."
"All right."
"And when you leave this time, Alan, don't come back."
"All right, Nora."
"If you do, I'll call the police. I'll have to."
He forgot his rage of desire then, seeing the chilled figure, her eyes flat and empty of compassion, her face set against him.
She had closed one more door behind him, cutting him off forever from that world of sanity he once had known.
He shivered, chilled with a sense of cosmic loneliness in her warm apartment.
When she was gone he closed his eyes and tried to sleep. He felt the sting of tears. He had wanted her with such passion that night in his bed he was unable to forget. How could she close her mind to all that had happened between them, so easily and completely?
In her mind, it was dead it was gone, it had never happened at all.
He didn't know how long he'd lain there, dozing, waking, slipping into sleep, into a nightmare, and struggling up from it, like a man bursting from a drowning pool.
He heard the whisper of sound.
He opened his eyes, lying tense in the darkness. The apartment was unlighted. The bedroom door had barely opened.
He sighed as he recognized Nora's lovely form gliding through. No mistaking the elegance of that form.
She came toward the bed in the darkness. He said, "Is it time to go?"
"Not yet." She snapped on the bed lamp.
The rosy glow illuminated the room. But Alan was unable to pull his gaze from Nora's body.
She was naked. The quick urgency of her approach set him shivering with anticipation. He gazed at her loveliness, involuntarily reached out his hand, pushing his fingers to the heated dampness at her thighs.
She gasped with pleasure. She wanted no slow build-up. He did not know how long she had lain in that other room thinking about this, but she wanted it quickly, and for the moment, at least, she was unable to think about anything else.
"Wild," he whispered.
He held out his arms to her. She came down upon the bed to him.
Nora cried out his name in a breathless whimper and pressed her nude body upon his.
He kissed her and his hands were filled with the distilled heat of her thighs, the full beauty of her breasts. She wriggled slightly, adjusting her legs and fitting herself upon him.
Her hands moved between them, unbuttoning his shirt, removing his trousers, reaching for him. He heard her pleased sigh as her hand closed on him. She held him. Her fingers closed, moving, and her heated breath burned his cheek. "I want you," she whispered. "Now. Now."
He worked himself free of his shirt and trousers, pinned under the resilient swells and curves of her heated body. Then he closed his hands on the rise of her buttocks, clasping the sleek globes in his fingers until she shivered all over.
"Incredible," he whispered.
Her hands trembled in her anxiety to carry him to her, to fit herself to him. She lifted herself slightly, watching what she was doing with hungry eyes.
"Lord," he whispered.
"Is this what you want?"
"Lord, yes."
"It's worth everything, isn't it."
"Yes."
"Then do it, darling. Make it last make it last for both of us, angel forever. Oh, do it!"
It was amazing that she had forgotten the coldness with which she greeted him, the fear and the contempt for a man homeless, hated and in trouble. She gasped out words to him that had a fiery meaning, whispered in the heat of what they were doing. The words had no place in the vocabulary of the successful young career woman, but they were natural and right and exciting at this moment.
He thought wildly that at times like this the two times he had had Nora when she was a helpless lover that she was a woman who was created for this sort of thing and had to fight against it all the time.
She didn't fight against her most natural instincts now. She didn't care about anything except what he was doing to her. She was so tense that her leg muscles strained against her flesh, her toes were pointed, outstretched.
"Hurry!"
She clasped him to her on the bed. Churning excitement caught them up, whirling them as if they were in some violent vortex. She trembled, shivering as if shattered by the force of her passions.
She flailed her body uncontrollably. The bed-lamp flared like the sun. He thrust and she rolled her head back and forth in accompaniment with his working. They were lifted to a raging moment of sweet agony, and went spinning downward in wild fury.
Alan heard her gasp out her satisfaction, pleasure and delight.
Then she sagged away from him. He stared down at her naked body, sprawled on the bed. She was instantly asleep, exhausted. She had worked herself to such a pitch that she was overwhelmed by what happened to her.
He stayed bent over her for some moments on the bed, looking at her, remembering the swell of breasts, the warmth of thighs, with the sickening thought that he might never see her again like this.
He didn't disturb her. He got up slowly, the backs of his legs weak, and he dressed. Then he turned off the light and got out of there.
He was running again, only now he had no idea where he was going, broke and alone, and her door closed against him.
CHAPTER SIX
ALAN SIDLED CAUTIOUSLY THROUGH THE SHADOWS. The street was silent, in the hour before dawn. It seemed to him there was an eerie, waiting stillness he'd never known before.
No matter how softly he tried to tread, his footsteps were loud on the walk. It seemed to him his own heartbeats were fearfully noisy.
He thought bitterly it was too bad he was no longer writing crime scripts for TV. He could really put the truth into them now. Now, when it was too late, he knew how a frightened fugitive really felt, creeping through the darkness.
Something clicked in the deeper shadows, and Alan froze. He pressed against the wall as lights fizzed on, searchlights on police vans!
The lights raked the gutters, the walk, the doorways, zapping toward him like lethal rays.
It was as if his legs were made of inferior clay.
He was helpless to move from that approaching light, and he felt that if he moved, his clay legs would crumble to fragments.
For one instant it flashed through his mind that there was no reality in this. He was asleep. He was sprawled unconscious in fatigue on those silk sheets. He was dreaming this, the voices of the police in the dark, the lights, the patrol panel truck, the way his legs would no longer obey commands from his brain, the whole, futile bit.
"There he is!"
A policeman yelled it from an angle across the night street.
The sound of the patrolman's voice was the spur Alan needed to make him move.
The lights flicked at him, and he ran. His feet pounded the pavement. The glaring beam whirled faster now, pursuing him along the building fronts, striking doors, reflected in gray windows, crawling across jutting beams.
He and the light reached the corner of the alley in the same instant.
For that moment Alan stood lanced like a pinned bug in the center of that glaring light. It blinded him, and he trembled all over.
"Hold that! Don't move, or I'll shoot."
Alan shivered. He had to run. He had to stand rigid or they'd kill him.
There was a brilliant burst of rage inside him, and then the sense that it no longer mattered. He had tun as far as he could. It was over.
"Hold it!" They warned. He heard the panel truck's engine fire into life. The light was fixed on him. They were going to drive toward him.
He couldn't see, but nobody had to tell him they were coming with guns drawn.
He retreated a step, another. He was in the narrow alley. It was too small for the truck. This was the only thought his mind could contain.
He wheeled suddenly and ran. He heard the police shouting, the light being fixed along the passageway.
He angled sharply left into a larger alley, running as fast as he could. Ahead he saw an open street. In a few moments the police truck would wheel into this alley, and surely they'd radioed for reinforcements by then.
He slowed, looking around helplessly. Banked near the darkened entrance of a cafeteria were a dozen huge, galvanized garbage pails.
He looked once more both ways along the alley, then he lunged toward the shadows and the pails. As quietly as he could, he lifted a cover, eased himself inside, replaced the lid.
He crouched there in the humid, sick-sweet stench of garbage. He held his breath as long as he could. He felt his stomach churn.
He heard the police cars whip past in the alley, and then the shouting officers on foot, searching in every shadow and every cranny.
He hunkered in the garbage, waiting. They were out there a long time, but none of them opened the garbage pails.
He knew why. It never occurred to them that even a hunted man would lower himself into such vileness.
Alan shivered, thinking sourly that they were right. No man in his right senses would...
Alan looked at Connice Stewart and winced.
There was a look about Connice that had the impact of a karate chop. It wasn't the kind of remote loveliness of Nora. Connice was tall, fair and slender. Her long legs reminded one of long-stemmed roses, the expensive kind. She was shapely of ankle, calf, thigh and hips, and her body was olive-tanned. Her eyes were a violet blue, and vulnerable as hell, which was one reason why he winced. It had been months since he had seen her-and hurt her but he saw that Connice had not forgotten, not any of it.
It was late afternoon, and Connice had obviously just come in from work. She had slipped into Capri pants, a bulky sweater, and she was barefoot. He saw that her feet were lovely, too, with the high-arched insteps, the long, pink toes.
She held the door open, staring at him, and he saw the flash of memory, the flash of hurt, and the lingering color of her hatred. But she moved quickly, she grabbed his arm and drew him inside her apartment.
It was as he remembered it, as he'd left it, cluttered, and littered, the way he'd left Connice's life when he walked out on her. He had tried to tell her that Caroline was still in his mind, and he couldn't forget so quickly, and it wasn't fair to Connice to hang around under such conditions. But he had learned one thing: women never understood when you tried to tell them you didn't return their devotion, even when you said that though you wanted to, you couldn't
They didn't understand.
His face felt heated. There was more to it than that. He had hurt her badly. She had offered him everything, and in the drunken stupor in which he existed in those days, he misused her
And this was why he winced. Looking at Connice, he saw it was impossible to believe that anyone would hurt her, even under the influence of liquor.
Connice stared at him, and her pert nose quivered, assailed by the sick-sweet odor of garbage that clung to him all these hours later.
"You stink," she said. "Physically as well as personally. Where the hell have you been?"
"In a garbage can," he said.
"It figures. Everything finds its level, huh?"
"I know you hate me, Connice."
"Sure you do. But you just don't know how much I hate you. How deeply."
"I'm sorry about that."
"What do you want here?"
He spread his hands. "I don't know. I really don't. I walked all day. I had to stay away from people because I smelled so bad. I walked out here because I had to talk to you."
"Me? Why?"
"I don't know that, either. I only know that I'm in desperate trouble, and there has to be a reason."
She laughed coldly. "There is a reason. The reason is that God's in his heaven, and everybody gets his, sooner or later. I'd say you were overdue."
He drew the back of his hand across his eyes. "All right. I know you hate me. But do you hate me so bad you can't even talk to me?"
"I don't know what I could talk to you about, except hate."
He wavered slightly. The room wheeled and skidded before his eyes. He was afraid he was going to fall. He bit down hard on his underlip. He was damned if he'd fall. He wouldn't give her that satisfaction.
The concern showed in Connice's vulnerable eyes, even through the chilled mask she set against him.
She came forward, touched his arm. "You're sick."
"No. Just tired. I'm beat, Connice. Just let me sit down somewhere. Just a minute."
She looked around the cluttered apartment. She made a quick decision. "Go take a shower. Get out of those clothes. You left slacks and a Banlon shirt here once." Her eyes darkened. "I'll throw those things in the disposal, and I'll be glad to have you get the last of your belongings out of here."
He was too ill and too fatigued to argue with her. She pushed him gently through her frilly bathroom and into her bath. Stockings hung to dry, lotions and bottles stood open everywhere. Connice was a hellish housekeeper.
He undressed, his hands trembling. He dropped his soured clothing outside the bathroom door. He heard Connice making "yecch" sounds as she took them out and got rid of them.
He stepped under the shower, turned on the hot and cold taps full force.
The water almost knocked him down.
Alan leaned against the shower stall wall, trembling. He'd had no idea he was so tired, so weak. He had eaten only chicken and potato salad in Nora's apartment. That seemed three days ago, and he had not rested.
He felt the tensions in his body when he remembered what he had done in that guest-room bed. Everything but rest. He had been a pretty good swordsman, at that. Nora had fallen asleep, exhausted under him. Unwillingly, he remembered the rise of her breasts, the urgency in the persistent up-thrust of her hips to him, and the heated water of the shower was like tears streaming down his cheeks...
He turned off the water and stepped out. He smelled decent now, fresh, like the feminine soap that Connice used. He drew a deep breath, thinking it was the first full breathing he had done since he'd lowered himself into that garbage pail.
He scrubbed himself dry with one of the thick, large towels from a rack. He felt better, lusty with hunger, his belly churning with need for food and coffee. My kingdom for a hot cup of coffee, he thought, something to eat and twenty hours of sleep. Everything would look better then.
The door was cracked open and Connice dropped his pressed slacks and fresh banlon shirt on the tile flooring. "Sorry you never left any underwear around."
He pulled on the shirt and stepped into the slacks. She had placed an aged pair of his straw sandals just outside the bathroom door.
She was leaning against the headrest of her bed, watching him. Her face remained cold, set against him. Her hatred went deep, self-nourished all these months. He'd left her few pleasant memories.
"Now," she said, in exaggerated satisfaction, "when you go this time, there's nothing left of you around here."
"I'm sorry about all the hurt I caused you, Connice. I know I can't ever make it up to you."
"No." She straightened. "Come on. I fixed something for you to eat." She stood up and looked him over. "You can get by now. Buy a pair of dark glasses and you'll look like any other Sunset Strip creep."
"Gee-thanks, fella."
She braced her shoulders, as if squaring them against him, against feeling any emotion for him except the old hatred.
Alan smelled the coffee percolating as he came out of her bedroom. His stomach heaved. He was afraid he was going to be sick. He was so hungry he was afraid to try to eat.
She was looking at him oddly. "Just take it easy, friend. It's going to be all right."
He drew a deep breath and sat down across from her at the breakfast-nook table.
She had cooked bargain-ground hamburger, made a tossed salad, with instant-whip potatoes and tiny, garden peas. He remembered the elegance of his meal with Nora. It was another world, all right.
She poured coffee for him. He drank it slowly, the heat searing him all the way to his stomach. He was able to hang on to it. Gradually life returned to him, along with a little strength.
He said softly, "You know I'm wanted for murder."
She shrugged. "So what else is new?"
He winced. "I didn't hope you'd care, but I didn't do it. I've been framed."
"We hear that here in death row all the time, my boy. I'm innocent. I'm innocent. They all say that."
He did not smile. "God help them. I hope it's no truer than it is with me."
"Killing an old man over an argument about a dog. Boy, when you're drinking "
"That's just it. I wasn't drinking." He remembered he'd had a couple of drinks with Nora the night the old man was slain. He shook his head. "I went on the wagon, Connice, after I left you "
"I know that'll make your old, gray-haired mother happy "
" I knew the way I'd treated you was rotten, Connice. I knew I had to quit drinking."
Connice shrugged. "I listened to a Salvation Army sermon on the corner of Hollywood and Vine one night same music, same lyrics."
"All right. I hurt you. I tried to tell you I wasn't myself "
"I didn't even like whoever you were." She wrung her hands, "Oh, 'e was a Dr. Jekyll."
"All right. I cleared out."
"Only you didn't stay out. Why didn't you?"
"Why didn't you throw away my slacks, shirt and sandals?"
She laughed in his face. "Because you're no bigger than most men. I figured they might fit almost anyone who came along."
He sagged in the chair. "I knew you hated me, but you were right I just didn't know how deeply."
She shrugged, and watched him across the table. "I still want to know why you came back here. Don't you know the cops are as near as my phone?"
"Yes. I know that."
"Still think I'm a sucker, don't you? Take you in, wash you and feed you and dress you, and protect you."
"No. I didn't think that." He shook his head. "Maybe I hoped it. I knew I had to come here, because I need your help."
"My help!" The words lashed at him. "Why in the name of Rock Hudson should I help you?"
Alan spoke to the backs of his trembling hands. He whispered it, "Somebody's got to "
"Well, not me, Charley."
"I don't mean help like you think hiding me from the police, anything like that."
"Oh? There's some other kind? Not that I'm interested."
"Yes. I am being framed for the murder of old man Sheram, Connice." He told her about his shoes his gun, his bullet, everything used to make him look guilty. "Somebody even called and told them where to find the pistol."
"Don't look at me." Her voice was flat.
"Listen to me, Connice!"
"Oh, you mean you don't suspect me?"
"Stop hating me long enough just to help me think. I've got to think, Connice. Somebody hates me enough to frame me for murder, to tip off the police, to keep them after me. Who? I was with you in the worst time of my drinking after Caroline died "
"Yes. Real complimentary. Moved in soaking wet, and ran the moment you finally started to dry out."
"No sense trying to tell you I cleared out because it was best for you."
"No sense at all. You got tired of using me for a punching bag. You walked out. Simple. Real simple. Let's not busy it up with a lot of kind-sounding lies."
He gazed across the table at her. "Help me!" he begged. "What did I do those months? There were whole days that were lost to me. I could have wronged anybody. I don't know. What did I do?"
She sat for a long time. He saw she was going back over it, whether she wanted to or not.
Finally, Connice shook her head. "There was only me, Alan. You didn't run up against enough people to make any enemies. You were in no condition for it. Only me. I'm sure of that. I'm the only enemy you made all those months with me, you didn't need any others."
Alan caught her hand on the table. It was like ice. She let him hold it a moment, and then she jerked free.
"Don't come around here with your sweet words, and your confessions of guilt and your fine promises. It won't buy you anything."
"I never wanted to hurt you."
"You managed to do it without wanting to, then. I wanted so little, but you managed to deny me that. I tried to be good to you, only you wouldn't let me "
"Don't you understand jiet? I was out of my mind with grief and with whiskey. I'm sorry."
"Forget it. I hate you enough to frame you for murder." She laughed emptily. "I may have even thought about it. Killing you. Framing you for murder. Cutting your heart out. But I didn't. For just one reason. I wasn't smart enough. If I'd been smart, I'd have stayed away from you in the first place."
She gazed at him across the table. Her face contorted. Her eyes brimmed with tears. She tried to shake them away, her rich hair hobbling about her head. She was unable to stem the flow, and suddenly she was sobbing.
Alan came around the table. He caught her in his arms. He knelt on the floor and drew her down to him.
He had forgotten how slender she was! She was as fragile as some kind of rare Dresden china.
She tried to struggle free, but he held her, gently and yet firmly.
He cradled her in his arms. She gripped him with her fingers, pressed her face upon his chest, sobbing wildly.
He said nothing. He caressed the rich texture of her hair, smoothing it with the palm of his hand. Her tears burned his chest, her breath was hot through the shirt.
She clung to him and cried until there were no more tears. She was weak, exhausted then, and she lay against him, breathing helplessly.
He lifted her head slowly and kissed her on the mouth. He felt the shiver go through her body.
She reached up, cupping his head in her slim-fingered hand, holding her mouth to his as if she had thirsted for his kiss for a long, cruel time.
He held her for a long time. His hand slipped under her armpit and covered the taut rise of her breast. It was as natural as breathing. She did not protest. A quiver went through her and she relaxed upon him, letting him fondle her nipple.
They did not move from the floor beside the table. The glow of the lamps illumined them. He reached down, unhurriedly, caught her bulky sweater and lifted it over her head. Her hair toppled wildly, giving her the look of a wanton little girl.
She caught the sweater and threw it away from them. She wore no bra. Alan kissed her again and his hand caressed her urgently. She exhaled and hugged him tight. Her breasts were bright red, livid with the marks of his hands. It was as if she were on fire inside.
Alan unzipped her capri pants. She lifted her hips so he could roll them down along the long, scenic route of those legs. She kicked the pants away. He thumbed down her underpanties and she sighed again, raggedly.
She lay naked in his arms.
"Beautiful," he whispered. "You're so beautiful."
"Just don't talk."
He nodded, kissing her again. He held her breast with one hand, moved the other downward. Her breathing was hard, loud when he touched her, moving his fingers vigorously.
She lay upon him, letting him play with her breasts and her thighs, her buttocks. Her hips began to quiver in a rising rhythm of the beginnings of lust.
She stretched out on the floor. He bent over her and took a breast in his mouth. He suckled it for a long time. Breathing strangely shallowly, Connice ran her hands through his hair, caressing his cheeks, his jaws, his mouth, his ears, the nape of his neck. Her hips were grinding faster now. She could barely wait.
"Lie back," he whispered. "Close your eyes." She obeyed.
His hands moved over her, swiftly, with fevered urgency, exploring her sweet flesh for the first time not numbed by whiskey. She was helpless to resist him, and she lay back, letting herself go. She abandoned herself completely to the overpowering delights he stirred inside her.
When he loved her thighs with his fingers, she went wild. He made circles, going faster and faster until she was crying out in helpless pleasure.
He felt her hand catch at his trousers, opening them, loosening them, clutching at them. He was ready. He throbbed with readiness.
"Now," he said.
But she pulled away from him then, and looked down at him, admiring him. He tried to push her down and mount her, but she delayed him for the moment. She had other ideas.
"What's the matter?" he said.
"I want to do something first," she said.
"What?"
She told him. She snuggled down upon him, and he felt her heart battering crazily. He said, "Oh."
"I've got to, honey," she said. "First."
"Why?"
"Because I want to. I've wanted to for so long. I dreamed about it sometimes, even when I hated you the most."
"Then do it."
"I'm going to," she said. "I love it. I really do." He lay back, his own breathing matching hers.
It seemed she was doing all the work, he was getting all the thrill, but this wasn't the way she acted. She wanted it. Lord, what a difference that makes, he thought, between the girls who do it not liking it, and those that do it just to please you. She liked it. She loved it. She made him love it.
He was afraid it was going to happen before either of them was ready. It was going to end too soon because she was unbridled in her frenzy.
He caught her and pulled her away. She whimpered, but stopped complaining when he came to her and thrust with all his strength.
Connice cried out as he worked hard, going faster and faster as she dug her nails into him, urging him on until neither of them could endure its ecstasy another second.
Sirens screamed, but they were heavenly sirens.
The lights flared up wildly, burst and exploded into fragments of brilliant hues.
He wasn't sure for a long time that the house hadn't burned to the ground, consuming them both...
"Oh, Alan."
He knelt over her and lifted her in his arms. Her long legs dangled. He couldn't remember where he'd heard that the long-legged girls were best, as long-stemmed roses were. She put her arms around him and he carried her in to her bed.
He laid her down across it and then knelt beside her. She reached for him, catching him, stroking.
"You're so fine I" she cried. "Lord, you're so fine."
"You make me good."
"You'd be good with with anybody. That's what's the matter with you. You're a devil. You were made to drive silly girls even sillier. Wild girls even wilder. Crazy girls even crazier. Oh, thank God for you!"
The very act of praising him excited Connice, and the thought of his wondrous performance stirred her again. She quivered on the bed, reaching for him. "I wish I knew everything," she whispered. "All tricks. Everything. I'd do everything for you. That's what I want to do."
He put his hand on her and she tilted her hips, making herself ready for him. He moved his hand on her, bringing her almost to a peak, making her tremble with desire. She clutched him to her, guiding him, closing her legs about his waist, working herself in fury. He felt the buildup begin anew in her and knew she was driving herself almost crazy, unable to pause now, even to breathe. He grinned, thinking this was the end of the line for Connice for the present, whether she believed it or not.
He could tell she did not believe it. She worked faster and faster beneath him, her whole body on fire and trembling with the incredible desire he awoke in her. It was going to last forever. This was all she wanted to do for the rest of her life.
Only it wasn't like that. She screamed out in agonized ecstasy, her whole body trembled and she sagged under him. She was fast asleep, snoring in exhaustion, in less than five minutes.
Alan lay beside her, letting his hands fondle her loveliness, bared to him in the vague bedroom light.
He was exhausted, at least his body was. Every muscle and fiber of his being screamed for the release of deep sleep. But his conscious mind would not let go. It couldn't. He kept remembering Sevidge and Renner, and the jail cell, and the nightmare he was running through.
It would be worse if they found him. If they got him again he could kiss freedom good-bye.
He envied Connice's being able to sleep. His eyes burned, but when he closed them for a few minutes they flew open, staring, frightened.
Connice had said he'd made no enemies during that lost time when only her kindliness had stood between him and complete ruin. Whole days and weeks of that time were lost to him. Connice would know better than anyone what had happened to him. He'd made no enemies during that time. If this were true, and he could recall no trespasses in the life he'd had with Caroline, there were no enemies back there. He'd been only a kid before he met and married Caroline.
He had to start somewhere, so the thing to do was to accept what Connice said. His enemy-whoever he was-had come along after he'd left Connice, since he'd tried to make a new life out there in Island Groves.
This didn't leave much. His wearied mind combed back through the immediate past, turning everything up even the least slight, some unintentional insult because people were so strange. But there was nothing.
What did this leave? The true crime stories he had been using as a basis for his TV scripts? Had some murderer,' still walking free, seen one of the scripts and somehow become convinced that the contrived ending he had dreamed up for it meant that he, Alan Taylor, had some inside information dangerous to that killer?
This could happen. People flip over fiction they see on TV, seeing it as some slur, or revelation, or slap at them. What if some guilty man had seen himself in one of those scripts seen himself play out the crime, and then seen himself trapped because of some mistake that Alan had planted into the script during the writing to make the law triumphant where it had not been in real life?
This meant that whoever it was had not only been clever enough to get away with that old, unsolved crime, but he had had to come close enough to Alan Taylor to learn his habits, the layout of his house, his neighborhood feud, where he hid his gun.
His mind touched at Rose Miner. For all her pious talk about working in a respectable environment, couldn't she be married, perhaps, to a man who had killed a man who used her to gain information about Alan Taylor?
Oh, come on now, Taylor. This is too jar out even for a TV script. And yet, was it? Any more fantastic that what had been happening these past days?
He sweated. He put this idea aside, trying to concentrate on other possible criminals. Tillinghast. the realtor? The fat man had fingered him good at the hearing. Why? What was Tillinghast's past? Or Tess Simpson? She'd been almost vindictive in her testimony against him. Even mild Old Man Wakefield. They all had pasts, didn't they? Who knew what fearful secret lay buried back there?
It was crazy.
Then he remembered a man who had called at the offices of D & T wanting to talk to him about the "Murder of the Bookie" script. The man had asked questions, learned where Alan had found the original case. The man had said, "You lay off the Festish story, friend. So you've made a script of it, a TV show of it. Now you forget it. You let everybody else forget it, you know what's good for you."
Alan sat up on the side of the bed. His face felt flushed. This wasn't much. It was nothing, less than nothing, but the death of the gambler what was his name? Ira Festish?
He got up quickly, dressed. His legs felt too weak to support him. He made coffee and drank two cups, black. Then he returned to the bedroom and trailed his hands over Connice's nakedness.
He bent over and kissed each pink nipple. She went on breathing deeply between her parted lips.
He gazed at her a moment, feeling sadness and excitement and something else, all at the same time, all directed toward the nude girl on that bed.
Then he turned quickly, and got out of there.
CHAPTER SEVEN
She held the massive door open for him. She said. "Hi Come on in."
Alan hesitated. "Don't you want to know who I am?"
She'd been drinking. She gave him a warmly boozy smile. "Why? You're a man, aren't you? That's the password, sign and countersign, friend. Come on in."
She kept smiling. He walked past her into the high-domed foyer. The house was high in the Beverly Hills. It sat a half-block from the street in manicured grounds, overlooking a canyon.
The bookie business had profited Ira Festish well. His widow was able to live in a style any woman would be pleased to become accustomed to.
He said, "Aren't you afraid to open your door to strange men?"
"Strange? A man would have to be pretty strange to upset me, hon."
Lila Festish wavered slightly. She burped, smiled and pressed her fingers delicately across her full-lipped mouth.
Alan studied her in some astonishment. Ira's widow was not what he'd anticipated from his research on that TV script.
She was aging, but she did it well. What she looked like was a maturing Mansfield, with a dawn pinkness about the bulbous breasts, revealed by the low cleavage of her wispy dress. There was a fullness about her hips, too, a wanton fieriness in her wide blue eyes. Her skin was flawless, like something renewed by special permission. There was a witchery about her. There was no denying this.
"I used to be in pictures," Lila said from left field possibly because he was staring at her. "Would you believe that?"
"Yes," he said, honestly. "I'd believe that, all right."
"It was a long time ago," she said, with a trace of sadness. "Longer than I'll tell you, Mr. What did you say your name was?"
Alan grinned. "You didn't give me time."
"Okay, handsome. You got time now. What's your monicker?" She laughed. "That's what Ira used to always say. Monicker. He talked like something out of Runyon. Maybe because he thought he ought to, him being a gambler and all. He was quite a gambler, Ira was."
"I knew him back east," Alan lied. He felt safe saying this, because he'd researched Ira Festish's life thoroughly for the TV script. He knew Ira had married Lila after he came west. "My name's Stew Miller."
"If you knew Ira back east, Stew, you're a hell of a lot older than you look."
"No. I was pretty young when I knew Mr. Festish. A kid. A runner."
"No kidding? A runner?" She smiled, pleased. "Come on in and belt a bundle with me. An old pal of Ira's. That's fine. I like talking about him, still, even if he has been dead three years come Christmas."
"He was carrying a Christmas tree home for you when they shot him," Alan said.
Her head jerked up. "How'd you know that?"
"Oh, we heard all that. Back east. Too bad they don't know who did it."
She looked around as if to be sure they were not overheard in her own home. "Don't worry, Stew, they're pretty sure who did it. Oh, not the actual gunning. That had to be some punk. But who paid for it. Only nobody can prove it. And them that can prove it they don't want to. Nobody cares that poor Ira is dead. Except me."
She poured straight bourbon over rocks in tall glasses. She handed him one. Her eyes were brimmed with tears.
He took the whiskey, watching her face. He said, "You're not kidding? Thev know who killed Ira? Who?"
She gave him a false laugh. "Oh, no, Stew. No, sir. I don't know you well enough. You might just be sent here by that certain guy just to see if I talk too much."
"I wasn't. I swear it."
"Sure you do. Only I wasn't born yesterday. I don't know you well enough, Stew, to talk about something that might end me up dead."
"I'd like to know."
"Sure you would."
He took a drink. "I mean that, Mrs. Festish "
"Lila. Call me Lila. I'm not that much older than you "
"You're not older than anybody. You're younger than any twenty-year-old-"
"Sure." She laughed. "Only I know more. But I don't talk about who killed Ira. I'd have to know you a lot better."
"How much better?"
"Well-" She flipped has collar and raked her nails on his neck. "You can't just walk in here off the street, and say you were an old friend of Ira's, and get me to talk about something like that. Oh, no. I'm not that drunk." She laughed. "I never have been that drunk. I never will be. Not ever. Never ever."
Lila looked soft, easy, pliable, but there was an undercoating of annealed metal, and Alan saw he'd get nowhere by pushing.
Still, it excited him to think that Lila knew who had ordered her husband slain, a man the law could not touch for lack of evidence. But such a man might want a nosy writer out of the way because he had come too uncomfortably close to the truth.
Somehow, he had to learn from Lila who that man was. Time entered into it, too.
She wavered across the deep carpeting to a divan, carrying her tall glass and a fresh bottle of bourbon. "Saves those long walks," she said.
She patted the divan beside her. "Come on, hon. Sit down by me, and we'll talk about Ira only not about who killed him. Okay?"
"Okay. But I came out here hoping to get in. I'd feel a lot safer knowing who Ira's enemies were."
She put her head back, laughing. "You expect me to tell you about all Ira Festish's enemies? Hon, what you think? That would take too long. Ira made book. He had connections in Vegas, Reno, Chicago, New York, Puerto Rico and London. He knew a lot of people, they gambled with him, and most of them lost. Some lost heavy. Some heavy losers are big haters."
"Sure," he said.
She turned her head, looking him over with heated interest. He let his own gaze travel over the monopolistic wealth of her body, too. The widow was a full-flushed beauty, something Ira must have sported like a three-carat diamond on his little finger.
"Ira must have .been proud of you," he said.
"Ira was proud. And better than that, Ira was a man that appreciated a woman like me. I don't mean just my looks. That was pretty easy to do, a lot of guys were always wanting to appreciate me for my body. But my mind. My quirks. And I got plenty of them. But I don't feel bad about that. I found out everybody's got quirks, when you get to know them. They lie about it, try to hide it, are hypocritical. But I didn't have to be. Not with, Ira. He understood me. Me, I always liked men. Not just one man, though there never was one that measured up to Ira for me. Ira was special. But a headshrinker told me I was a nymph. I got no reason to doubt him. He's a college brain. Me? What do I know? I like men. A lot of them. If that's a nymph, so I'm a nymph. Ira understood." He watched, waiting.
She drank deeply and smiled at him. "I bet you don't even understand that Ira understood me?"
He licked his lips. "You mean he didn't mind?"
"More than that. Ira helped me."
Alan drank, swallowing hard. "Maybe I don't understand that."
"Course you don't. Most men don't. Men are so stupid they think a woman has got to keep herself just for him, or she's no good, she can't belong to him. Ira knew better. Ira knew I belonged to him, but like some people have to gamble, I had to have fun with men.
"Maybe you think I wouldn't be like that, with Ira. I mean Ira was a swordsman, a real swordsman. You know what I mean?"
"I know what you mean."
"Ira could have satisfied me if any one man could have. Only no one man could. And that's what
Ira understood. Ira had what he wanted. Anytime, anywhere, all he wanted. We had no trouble about that."
"Until the day they killed him, Ira was a swordsman, a real man. He died ready to take me. I know. I saw it. He wanted me, even when he knew he was dying. It broke my heart, I can tell you.
"But Ira wasn't afraid of competition. I mean he was a pro. In gambling. In living. In swordsmanship. He knew what he was, and he didn't have to prove anything. When I'd let him know that some man got me all hot and excited, you know what Ira would do?"
"He'd get that guy for you."
Lila laughed, slapping his leg. "That's right. How many men you going to find like that, Stew?"
"Not very many."
"That's right. Not very many. None. The gentleman that rides me now, he'd blow up and explode if he thought any other guy touched me. And you know what? This guy's no good for me, or any dame. He thinks he is. But he's a nothing. He's jealous, and a nothing. He couldn't carry Ira Festish's Jockey shorts, I can tell you."
"You really loved Ira, didn't you?"
"I was a fortunate woman, Stew. I mean, I had this problem that men looked good to me. I'd see a man and something would happen, I'd want to go to bed with him. Fast, no fooling around. I could have been in bad trouble, except I was married to Ira."
"He must have been quite a guy."
"You don't know, Stew. You'll never know. What that Ira would do. He'd bring the newest man I wanted home say to dinner. Then he'd pretend to get a call. And he'd leave me alone with him."
She laughed, squirming on the couch, made uncomfortable by the urgency of her recollections.
"There are men in this town who had me that would just plain faint if they knew they were humping me in a lighted bedroom while Ira watched from the darkness."
"Ira liked to watch?"
"What's wrong with that? If Ira had been one of those nothings like my present gentleman is I'd of thought he was queer, watching me get my kicks. But not Ira. He was a man. He enjoyed me. He enjoyed me going wild. He enjoyed seeing the way I could drive men crazy. You think I didn't drive them crazy?"
"I believe it. I can close my eyes and hear them screaming through the house, right now."
She laughed, stroking his leg. "You're all right, Stew. I like you."
"I hoped you would."
"You're one of the ones I'd have told Ira to get for me," she said, a little breathlessly. "You know what Ira would have done?"
Alan shook his head. He was aware of her heated hand stroking higher and higher on the inside of his leg. It was as if fiery spiders were crawling along his flesh.
"Ira would have gotten friendlier with you.
Drank, with you. Found out what you liked a woman to do for you your special quirks. You know? Everybody's got them. Right."
"Yes."
"Then he'd tell me what you liked best. Then he'd bring you to dinner. Then he'd leave you alone with me and I'd give you what you wanted, and I'd get what I wanted, and Ira was a better man than any man I knew."
"You can't beat an arrangement like that."
"Yes you can. Ira could."
He stared at her. "What?"
"Ira did better than that for me. Ira brought five or six men to the house for a poker game, and drinking "
"And you."
"That's right. That's how I met my present gentleman. It used to get me so excited to see half a dozen men around. I'd go out of my skull. And out of my dress. It used to thrill me to my toes knowing I was getting six men all hot and wild at the same time. And I did."
"I'm sure you did."
"I'd drink though not as much as I let them think I did. Then I'd take off my clothes. They used to forget the cards then, I'll tell you. They used to tell Ira he ought not to let me do that. Some would tell him he wasn't much of a man, letting me carry on naked in front of them. But Ira just laughed. 'She's my doll', he'd tell them. 'Let her have her fun'. And none of them would stand off. They'd get drunker. I'd put on a show for them. Real burlesque, without the G-string. The men would get wilder and wilder. They'd take me in the bedroom, one at a time. Sometimes two of them would go with me at the same time. It got pretty weird, I can tell you. Couple of times, guys from Vegas brought dames, and the three of us women would put on shows for them. It got wilder than ever then, because the guys would join us in the shows. like I say, that's the way I met my present gentleman." Her voice sagged and she withdrew her hand from between his legs.
He was excited. She could look at him and see that she had stirred him plenty. It pleased her.
"But your present gentleman won't let you put on shows like that?"
"He'd kill me if he found out any man touched me. He's crazy. I tell you he's crazy. He knows what I used to do when Ira was alive. But you know what? He blames Ira for making me do all those things. He thinks he's saving me from what Ira used to force me to do." She shook her head. "And he's no good in bed. He's a fink."
"Why don't you get away from him?"
She looked at him pityingly. "Because I like to live in the style to which I've grown accustomed breathing"
"He'd kill you?"
"If I tried to leave him, he would. He's already told me that."
"You don't sound real happy."
"Should I? With a creep that watches to be sure I don't have fun?"
They were silent some moments, contemplating the strange vagaries of this life, the sneaky tricks destiny plays on us when we're not watching.
Alan saw that Lila was crying.
"Don't cry," he said.
"What have I got to laugh about? There are no more men like Ira, I can tell you."
"It would seem you'd want to talk about who killed him."
He felt her withdrawing, sensed the way the atmosphere had changed in the room. She gazed at him, not blinking. The expression in her ceramic-glaze eyes did not alter.
She tilted her head slightly. "I told you. I don't want to talk about it."
He nodded, letting that go for the moment.
When she saw he would not pursue the frightening subject she smiled again and wriggled lower on the divan. "Besides, hon, Ira is dead, and there is nothing we can do to help Ira. But we are alive ... you and I ... maybe there's a lot we could do for each other."
He poured fresh drinks for both of them and nodded. He said, "I'll buy that."
She giggled "You won't have to buy it, hon. You just hang on. This is Lila's day for giving out free samples. Would you like a free sample, Stew?"
He smiled, meeting her gaze. "You want to know the truth, Lila? That's the real reason I came out here from the east."
Her mouth parted, bright red and damp. She put her head back, laughing. "Just let me finish my drink."
She finished her drink. She tossed the glass over her head. She lay a moment looking at him, as if trying to read him, to decide what would most please him. Then she reached up and pulled the top of her dress down.
She licked her tongue across her red lips and smiled, lowering her eyes as if inviting his gaze to follow hers to the golden hillocks, tipped by twin ruby peaks.
"Beautiful," Alan said. He leaned forward and kissed each bright nipple. It didn't matter how many men Lila had had, it still thrilled her to be fondled like that. Her nipples came to erect attention, and she shivered in her pleasure.
"So nice," he said, suckling at the large breasts, pressing his face into the narrow vale between the steep inclines. She lifted her body, shoving her lovely breasts upward to him.
She wriggled on the couch, divesting herself of all her clothing. He watched her as she slipped off the fragile panties. She was getting heavy, but there was still the delightful Rubens quality about her. This was a lot of woman.
"Undress," she told him. "I get a bigger charge looking at men than they ever get looking at me. Men have got something to look at!"
He undressed, letting his slacks fall away, and pulling his Banlon shirt over his head. She laughed, saying, "Beautiful, beautiful. You really came prepared, didn't you? No underclothes at all. Did somebody tell you Ira's widow was a pushover?"
He just laughed. "I dreamed how it would be," he said. "I admit I've heard a lot about you."
This pleased her. She wanted to give him something special now, more than a good roll in the hay. She wanted him to see what she could do. She stood up, undulating slowly, letting her hips and her full breasts vibrate for him. She bent her knees and worked her hips frantically while holding the rest of her body immobile. There was nothing professional about it. Lila enjoyed it as much as he did. He saw she was watching herself in the tinted mirrors.
Seeing the way she moved those hips, the way she caressed her thighs, her hips, her breasts with her long slender fingers, stirred him deeply. He forgot in that instant how tired he was, how frightened and confused, living in a vortex of terror. For the moment, nothing existed except this hour and the strange dance she performed for him alone.
Every movement brought her nearer to him. Her tear-wet eyes were fixed on him, and she looked hungry for what she saw and she fell upon him, reaching for him, gasping her pleasure.
He held her, fondling her. He said. "Good Lord. You're quite a woman."
"Yes," she said. "I'm quite a woman."
"You really love it."
"I really love it"
"I'm glad."
"Are you?"
"Wouldn't have had it any other way."
"I was made for love. Do you believe that?"
"I know it."
"Now, for long days, I have no love at all. It gets pressed down in me. I get all tense. I feel like I'll explode."
"I want you to explode". Now. For me."
"Oh, I will. I know I will. I can tell already you're the best thing that's happened for me since Ira died, Stew."
"I'll try to be."
"No. No." She lifted her head. "Don't try to please me. Don't worry about pleasing me. That's the only time there's ever trouble when one partner worries about trying to please the other. Just please yourself. Use me, Stew, darling. Use my body, my whole body is for you to use. Do what pleases you, and don't worry about me. I'll love it. No matter what you do ... Only when you're ready say when, and I'll go with you. All you have to do is say when, and I'll go with you."
Lila was good and she was made for love. She had not lied about this. The naked goddess prostrated her bared body to him on the couch. The ruby nipples seemed to glitter on the gold hills of her breasts. Her rounded belly led down to the bright darkness between her shapely thighs.
She caught him, loving him with her fingers, testing him and squeezing as she guided him to her. She thrust upward to engulf him. Her legs closed on him, and her arms drew him down into the rich, pillowy loveliness of her breasts and belly and hips.
"Do it," she said. "Make yourself happy, Stew. Make yourself happy and you'll thrill me so I can't stand it."
He made himself happy. He had never encountered anyone quite like her. She not only loved sexing, she understood all of it and she knew what she was doing. She knew how to make a man happy, and drive him past happiness into a raging madness, and she knew how to go with him, urging him faster and faster.
He did not know how long before they reached that sublime height of unreason that he was aware they were not alone in the living room.
There was someone near them, another presence.
It made itself felt only vaguely, and he saw that Lila was aware of it, too, but like him, she was past caring. She could not stop now.
The man came nearer, walking slowly, stiffly, scarcely breathing. He was not trying to be cautious, not sneaking up on them. He was stunned by what he was seeing, speechless. He could scarcely breathe.
Lila was making gurgling noises in her throat, whimpering and whispering as she flailed those Ruben hips and tightened her legs.
Suddenly, it was over, and she sagged into the couch. For some moments, panting through parted lips, Alan stayed where he was, like the first man cradled in the arms of the goddess of lave.
The man stood over them, and gradually the occluding red fog cleared from Alan's mind.
He withdrew from Lila, hearing her faint whimpered protest, and then he toppled to the floor.
He stared at the brilliantly shined shoes, the sharply creased trousers. He reached out for his own slacks because he felt more vulnerable naked.
He slipped his legs into the slacks, caught up his shirt, and stood up, pulling up his pants at the same time. He zipped and buckled them, still not looking at the intruder.
He slipped his shirt over his head, and as he came through the emerging turtle, his eyes struck against those of the intruder and Alan caught his breath, struck with panic.
The man was small and slender and he looked like what he was part of someobdy's mob. His eyes were dark and chilled, his face lean, as if hewn from old bronze with a dull axe. His clothes were tailored, but there was something off-key about them, just as there was something off-key about him.
He gazed at Alan, and Alan saw that for the moment the man didn't recognize him, but there was no doubt in Alan's mind as to the identity of the lean, unsmiling hood. This was the cool cat who had pounced into D & T and warned him off the Ira Festish murder case.
CHAPTER EIGHT
LILA STIRRED HER NAKED BODY ON THE COUCH. She stared up at the tailored gunslick. She made no move to cover her bared breasts or the dark sable exposed at her thighs.
The man found his voice. He said, "What's going on here?"
Lila laughed at him. Her breasts bobbled with her laughter. She said, "Oh, come on now, Jeke. You know what's going on. I admit you don't know how to do it, but you do know it's done between men and women. That's not the way you like it, Jeke, but that's the best way there is."
Jeke's chiseled face darkened. "It won't get you nowhere to hack at me, Lila. What's Big Eddie going to say bout this about you doing this with this guy?"
Lila drew a deep breath. Watching them, Alan , knew who Big Eddie was. Lila had gotten this same defeated look in her face when she'd earlier mentioned her 'gentleman' to him.
Lila's voice was soft. "That's up to you, Jeke."
Jeke shifted his jacket on his shoulders. "You know that Big Eddie won't stand for you doubling him, Lila, not with nobody."
"He won't if he doesn't know about it, Jeke. Why does he have to know about it?"
Jeke waved his arm. "Because I got to tell him. You know that. Suppose I didn't tell him what I seen when I walked in here today?"
"Suppose you didn't, Jeke?"
"Suppose I didn't and he found it out some other way." Jeke shivered visibly at the very idea. He shook his head. "Oh, no, Lila. You know I got to tell him."
"He wouldn't like it if he knew you walked in here and saw me naked, Jeke. You know how funny Big Eddie is. He don't like you looking at me naked."
"Me? Looking at you? Why, you broad, you was humping this guy. I walked in and found you humping this guy. I wasn't sneaking around, seeing you naked."
Lila did not move from the couch. Her voice remained calm, but the steel showed beneath it. "Sure you weren't sneaking around to see me naked, Jeke. I know that. And you know that. But what about Big Eddie? If I tell him you were sneaking around to see me naked, he'll be sore at you, unless you tell him you don't like women, that you like men if he knew you liked other men, Jeke, Big Eddie would be sorer than ever, even sorer than he'd be with me for loving Stew here, because Big Eddie would be shocked at you liking other men. He wouldn't trust you any more."
"You got no reason to tell Big Eddie anything like that!"
"Haven't I, Jeke?"
Jeke hesitated, but his voice lowered slightly. "No. You got no call to tell him."
"But I know it's true, Jeke. I've known it for a long time. When you met some of your queens up here-right here in my house I never said anything. It was the only place you could be safe. I didn't tell Big Eddie."
He exhaled heavily. "No. You didn't tell him. But he might find this out "
"Not if you don't tell him, Jeke. Just like he won't find out about the flits you brought up here unless I tell him. You know Big Eddie. In spite of the fact that he's lived a long time and seen all kinds of things, he's kind of naive, kind of stupid is the word. He thinks men like only women, and women like only men. He'd be mighty upset to find out that somebody he trusts like he trusts you, Jeke, don't like normal things that Big Eddie thinks everybody ought to like."
"Okay. Okay. So I don't tell him what I seen when I walked in here."
"That's a sweet boy, Jeke."
"Get your clothes on," Jeke said.
She laughed at him. "Do I make you sick, seeing me naked like this, Jeke?"
He tilted his sharp-hewn chin. "It just don't do nothing to me, that's all. You seen one pony, you seen 'em all. I see better-looking dolls dancing practically naked in Vegas all the time."
Lila almost flared up at him, but she controlled herself. She had won one small victory and she decided to let it go at that.
"Why should I get dressed?" she said, "If you're going to be a sweet boy and not call Big Eddie."
"But that's it. I'm going to call him."
Watching them, Alan felt his stomach tighten. There was a tension in this room he did not comprehend.
Lila sat up straighter. "Why you going to call him?"
Jeke's dark face reddened. "You know I got to. Any of us catch anybody in this place no matter who it is we got to report it to Big Eddie. I don't say nothing about what the two of youse was doing, still I got to report that he is here."
"Why?"
"Oh, come on now, Lila, you know Big Eddie better than this. Big Eddie is like he's got eyes everywhere. Somebody might of seen this joe come in the grounds, or come in the house. If Big Eddie was to find out that this character was here, and I didn't report it "
He drew the side of his hand across his own throat in a quick, slashing gesture.
After a moment, Lila nodded. "Okay, you got to tell him Stew is here. But you say what you found us doing, and I fix you."
Jeke waved his arm impatiently. "I told you. What you and the guy was doing is between the three of us. In return from past favors from you. But still, I got to tell Big Eddie that the geek is here. You know I got to do that."
Alan found his voice. He said, "Well, I'm sorry to have caused this mix-up. I better blow."
Jeke heeled around, his voice rasping. "You stay where you are."
Big Eddie paced the carpeting of Lila's front room. He was tall and heavy-set and he looked prosperous. His hair was salt and pepper at the temples, graying and wavy, and thick. His brows were dark and his eyes were black. His high forehead and Roman nose was almost aristocratic-looking. But the cigar pulling his heavy-lipped mouth out of shape, the scarf at his throat, his tailored suit, proclaimed him gambler, quick-buck artist.
Fully dressed, with even a scarf about her own throat, Lila sat on the couch and watched Big Eddie pace. Every once in a while she gave him a little-girl smile from under lowered lids.
Jeke sat in a club chair, but he looked as if he were afraid the furnishings were wired to kill. He was less than comfortable. The two hoods who had accompanied Big Eddie into the house stood just inside the living room door. They looked sleepless.
Alan was allowed to stand between where Big Eddie paced and where the guards stood in the doorway.
Big Eddie said, "All right now. I want some answers. Here I am a busy man. You get me up here because we got some character sneaking in here to visit Lila "
"I told you one dozen times, Big Eddie," Lila said. "Stew didn't sneak in here. He come in polite and natural. like you and Freddy and Bugs did. Right in the front door."
"I don't like it you should interrupt me this way, Lila-honey, when I'm talking," Big Eddie said, controlling his impatience. "So he come in through the front door. That still don't tell me what I want to know. Who is he? What does he want here?"
"His name is Stew Miller."
They both looked at Alan, Big Eddie with some displeasure. "So, his name is Miller. What does he want here?"
"Well, my goodness, Big Eddie," Lila said. "If you'd just give me a chance, I could explain all that to you."
"So explain."
"It just ain't important," Lila said. "As you'll see once you know. It's all Jeke's fault for making a big thing out of Stew's visit. Jeke shouldn't have called you away from business, busy as you were and all."
Big Eddie made a sharp, downward gesture. "Jeke done just what he ought to have done. He's a good, loyal boy. I told them that they should call me when you have company up here. Don't you go blaming Jeke. Now what does this Miller want here?"
Lila smiled. "Well, you're going to feel all foolish-"
"So let me feel foolish."
"Stew is a boy that knew Ira back east "
"Back east? Ira was in charge of this territory out here for many years. This here boy don't look that old "
"He was a runner, a kid, back east when Ira was there." From her own fertile imagination Lila added embroidery. "He knew Ira's folks. He stopped by to see me because he was a friend to Ira, and Ira's folks, and he wanted to get in out here."
"He should not of come to you if he wanted to work for me," Big Eddie declared, glaring at Alan, but not yet addressing him. "Worst possible mistake."
Lila jumped up. Her face was pale. "Sure, it was his worst mistake. But how was he to know? How was he to know that you, Big Eddie, keep me like a virtuous prisoner right here in my own home that Ira built for me?"
Big Eddie waved his hand. "You know I do that just for your own good, your own protection."
"Yah!" She yelled at him suddenly. "For my own protection? For yours. You're scared to let anybody near me in solitude away from you or the boys. You're afraid of what I might say about you."
Big Eddie walked close to her. His fists were clenched hams against his legs, but his voice was the soft calm of logic "And what could I fear you'd say about me?"
Lila retreated, her voice lowering slightly. "Well, you know. We don't 'have to talk about it. You're scared of what I'll say of how Ira died. How he was killed and who ordered him killed."
Alan watched them. He moved his gaze to the hoods at the doorway. Freddy and Bugs stared with unconcealed curiosity at Lila and Big Eddie. They expected fireworks.
Alan's heartbeat increased. If there was a chance for him to clear out alive, this looked like the moment, while all interest was focused on the embattled pair.
Then his gaze struck against Jeke's.
Jeke was not watching Big Eddie and Lila. He was peering at Alan, and he was not blinking.
Something had happened to Jeke's face, and heart sinking, Alan saw that the hood had finally recognized him.
It was as if he could see into the thin man's mind. Jeke was remembering coming into D & T's Los Angeles office, entering the cubicle where Alan pounded out his TV scripts. He was seeing the way-he had advised Alan to forget the murder of Ira Festish. Only Alan had not forgotten. Alan had persisted. And Alan was here, humping Ira's widow, and talking to her, and using a fictitious name.
Jeke licked at his mouth. Jeke's eyes looked ill. Jeke saw there was a great deal more he had to say to Big Eddie.
Alan sagged, knowing he could not escape with Jeke watching him. Jeke was Big Eddie's loyal cohort.
"Is that what you think?" Big Eddie was saying to Lila. "How can you think that, Lila?"
"It's easy." Her voice rode over Big Eddie's shrilly.
"It's not true," Big Eddie said. "I want to protect you, Lila. From the vicious world that you don't really understand, no matter how wise you think you are, no matter how Ira mistreated you when he was alive "
"Ira treated me like a lady!" she screamed.
"Ira treated you like a whore," Big Eddie said sadly. "But you was too young, too innocent, to understand. And naturally, you done what he forced you to do because you was afraid of him "
"I wasn't never afraid of Ira! It's you I'm scared of. You and your crazy ideas!"
"What crazy ideas? I was raised by a good mother, that made me go to church. And I know what is right "
"Sure, robbing suckers, and killing people that get in your way, that's right "
"That just shows you know nothing of religion. What I do in business ain't got no relation to religion. I respect my mother, and I respect all women. And I know that men have got evil minds, and they are wild to rape poor, defenseless women. I want to protect you from men like that. That's the only reason I don't want people like this here Stew Miller coming in here alone. Sure, you're a good, pure woman, but he's got an evil mind. AH men have got evil minds."
"His name ain't Stew Miller," Jeke croaked, from the club chair.
For a moment, there was a charged silence and then both Lila and Big Eddie heeled around to gaze at Jeke.
Jeke looked ill.
Alan lifted his gaze and saw Lila staring at him. He could not hold her eyes, and his own sagged away.
"What you saying, Jeke?" Big Eddie demanded.
Jeke's face grayed out. "His name ain't Stew Miller. He ain't from back East. At least he wasn't no runner that knew Ira and Ira's people back there. His name is Alan Taylor. He's that TV writer guy that you sent me to call on when they was doing a TV show on how Ira was killed."
Big Eddie drew a deep breath into his barrel-like chest and he held it, staring at Alan.
But Alan wasn't looking at Big Eddie. He was watching Lila's face. It was as if somebody had struck her across the eyes. She peered at him as if she could not believe he would betray her like this.
Her damaged eyes moved over his face. It was as if she were saying, we had a good time, the kind of time I've not had with a man since Ira was killed, I was good to you, and I gave you all of me there was to give, and you're a fink. You're like Big Eddie and all the other finks in this world.
Alan wanted to say he was sorry to Lila, but he was afraid to say anything.
He saw in Big Eddie's steak-fed face that his life hung by a thread. It didn't seem to matter whether Big Eddie's hoods killed him, or he was executed by the law. Either way, time had run out for him. Still, if he could stay alive, there was always an unlikely chance he could clear himself of the murder charge.
Alan shivered, even doubting this. Nothing was going to work out right in this nightmare world into which he had been catapulted. No matter what he tried to do, he was shoved deeper and deeper into its labyrinths. The time in the jail when Sevidge and Renner would believe nothing he said, looked like the good old days, compared to this moment on this lower level where Big Eddie and his three hoods surrounded him, their faces void of any human compassion.
"Taylor?" Big Eddie tested the name on his tongue. He made a face. He peered at Alan. "Your name Taylor?"
Alan nodded.
"You ain't Steve Miller, from back east?"
"His name is Alan Taylor, all right," Jeke said. "I was sure I'd seen him somewhere. But there was so much jazzing around it took me all this time to figure it. He's Taylor. I went to see him that time, like you told me. I warned him away from the Ira Festish murder."
"Looks like you don't take kind, well-meant advice, Taylor," Big Eddie said.
Jeke said, "And that ain't all, boss."
"What else?" Big Eddie said without moving his gaze from Alan's face.
"Taylor is wanted for murder."
"What?" Big Eddie said it, shocked.
"That's right, boss," Jeke persisted. "He's the guy that got away from the cops on a bicycle a girl's bicycle."
"Yeah. I read that." Big Eddie laughed deeply in his chest. But there was no mirth in his laughter, at least none to be shared by Alan. "So this is the joe that got away from the cops." He leaned closer to Alan. He smelled of wine and cigars and cheap perfume. "What are you doing up here?"
Alan shook his head.
Jeke said, "This here is going to take some thinking, boss."
Big Eddie straightened. "Why?"
"Because why else would this character come up here when he was wanted by the police, hiding? He figured he'd hide up here, and that you'd protect him."
"From the cops? Me? He some kind of a nut?" Big Eddie said.
"That's it, boss. Don't you see? Remember, in that TV show this guy wrote? He had it that Ira was bumped off by a rival gambler, and that the gambler took over the territory after Ira was dead."
Lila laughed suddenly. "Yeah. I saw that. It was right too, Mr. Taylor "
"You shut up!" Big Eddie back-handed Lila across the face. She went sprawling back on the divan. She fell with her skirt high.
Big Eddie yelled at her. "Pull down your dress!"
Lila pulled down her dress to her knees, sitting up. The imprint of Big Eddie's paw was livid across her cheeks.
Big Eddie turned his back on her. "So what does that give him a right to come up here thinking I'll protect him?"
Jeke said, "Maybe he knows more than he let on that day I talked to him, boss. Maybe he thinks you'd be scared to turn him over to the cops."
"Yeah?" Big Eddie said. "Well, that's what we'll do. As soon as we've worked him over good, we'll turn him over to the cops."
Lila screeched at them. "I hope you do. And when you do I hope he tells on you. How you had Ira killed. How you took over his territory and his woman, and everything that was his. You posing as his best friend all the time, you finking hypocrite."
Big Eddie spoke smoothly. "I was Ira's best friend, Lila. You're wrong to think I had anything in this world to do with his demise. Why, the biggest flowers at Ira's funeral was from me. Personal. Just because the big boys decided I was to take over his territory out here--somebody had to run it after Ira was dead, Lila. Even you ought to understand that."
"I understand a lot more than you think I do, you fink."
"You're upset, Lila. I had nothing to do with Ira's death. I got his territory only because I was next in line."
"You got his wife, too," Lila raged at him. "Were you next in line there, too?"
Big Eddie looked pained. "Why, you know better than that, Lila. I respect womanhood. I wanted to protect Ira's widow."
"Ira was a man! Ira at least married me!"
"Why, Lila, you know I'd marry you. If I was free. But as long as my wife remains alive back east, you know I can't marry you. Would you want me kicked out of the church?"
Lila fell sobbing on the couch. Big Eddie stared at her a moment and then returned his attention to Alan.
"You want to tell me why you came here?"
Alan dampened his lips. Coming here had been like a shot in the dark, the hope that perhaps he might find who had framed him for Sherarn's murder. He saw that he had blundered into the solution of the Ira Festish murder, but that the truth had never been buried very deeply, even from the police. The police would have arrested Big Eddie for that murder, but legally, Big Eddie's hands were clean. He had not been within three hundred miles when Ira was killed. He had not pulled the trigger.
Alan sweated. He couldn't say this. He couldn't even let Big Eddie think he suspected it. Anyhow, Big Eddie had not killed old Sheram, framing Alan Taylor for the murder. It was not Big Eddie's kind of action.
Alan shook his head.
"I'm waiting," Big Eddie said. "And I ain't known far and near as a patient man. What are you doing out here?"
Alan said. "It's partly as Jeke says. I am hiding. I am running from the cops. But I just happened in here. How did I know it had anything to do with you?"
Big Eddie was not amused. "Some coincidence. You wrote about Ira's death. You just happened to come here to hide."
"That's the. truth," Alan lied. He felt as if he were wearing a polygraph that was lighting up brilliantly, tilt.
"It might be," Jeke said. "It just might be."
"But what if it ain't?" Big Eddie said. "I don't think he ought to get to the cops," Jeke said.
Big Eddie smiled. "Now you're making my kind of sense. If he knows more than he should, or if he don't, either way, once you boys work him over, he'll be scared to go to the cops, and he'll know better than to come around up here again."
Lila sat up. "Why don't you just let him go? He ain't hurt you."
"You stay out of this," Big Eddie said. "A woman like you. You don't understand about business. It's business that we show this guy what can happen to him, he ever mentions our name to the fuzz. Right, Jeke? You boys take him out of here. Work him over so he knows never to come near me or my Lila again."
Bugs and Freddy came forward from the doorway now. Alan sweated. He wanted to break and run toward those French windows. But he knew better. Big Eddie's boys would react faster than the police had in that alley, and they would shoot straighter.-likely they'd had more practice with firearms than the cops.
Alan's gaze touched at Lila's tear-stained face. She gave him a brief, stunning smile. He saw she had forgiven him for telling her his name was Stew Miller. He had lied to her, but the results had been nice, for both of them. She forgave him. And she was sorry about what was going to happen to him at the hands of Big Eddie's hoods but then, something like this had been happening to all her friends, ever since Ira died.
Freddy walked on one side of Alan, and the garlic-scented Bugs was close on the other. Jeke followed, and they did not speak until they entered a basement room which had been made over into a soundproof gymnasium.
Jeke closed the door after them. They stopped and for a moment they looked at Alan. Jeke slipped on a pair of brass knuckles.
Big Freddy came at him first, swiftly and angling in, a man who was calm, professional, thorough. Bugs lunged in as Alan turned to meet Freddy's attack.
He could feel the sweat falling along his ribs. It was icy cold. He didn't know how to protect himself from these professional thugs. He thought of all the fight scenes he had written for those damned TV shows, and the way the good guy always emerged victorious. Crap. It was so much crap. Good guys finished dead, almost as that great philosopher stated it.
There was no sense in yelling, or speaking at all. This would please them. They would get a boot from knowing they hurt him, and no one would hear his screaming, not from this sound proofed room.
There was no time to think, no time to set himself. They came at him like animals of prey, like clawed beasts coming in for the kill. He felt Freddy's fist catch him beside his head and then Bugs grunted, sinking his fist wrist deep under Alan's belt. The smell of garlic was the only thing that remained in Alan's consciousness.
He shoved them, running toward that door, burning with the pain in his groin and in his temple. Still, only half alive, he almost made it to the door. But Bugs caught him and yanked him back and he could feel himself overwhelmed by the smell of garlic. He was drowning in it.
The fists caught him in the side, in the kidney, in the groin, the solar plexus, the side of the head. He had never realized there were so many zones of agony. He staggered and went down to his knees, striking the floor hard. But they went on beating him, and when he was helpless to strike back, Jeke stepped forward and began hitting him in the face with the brass knuckles.
It didn't take very long, it just seemed a kind of bloody eternity. Alan tasted the salt in his own blood, the saltiness that came from the sea, where every living thing began.
Then it was as if he were drowning in that salt-tasting sea. And the sun was on the sea.
He never lost consciousness. This would have been too easy. After a while, he stopped feeling the individual blows. He knew they were hitting him.
They went on working him over, even when there was no longer any pleasure left in it for them.
He sank from his knees to the floor, and his blood smeared the polished surface, and he thought he could see his reflection in it, but this didn't make sense, because his eyes were battered and swollen shut.
Nothing made sense. He was being carried. He was a sack of potatoes across somebody's shoulder. Potatoes and garlic. He could still smell the garlic.
Then there was the sound of an automobile. The engine was smooth and distant, and he was aware he was riding in the car. He could see nothing. The ride, too, was eternal. It was like the sea coming in upon the shore and washing out again, now and forever. It went on even when you tired of watching it, even when God must have tired of watching it. The tide. The engine, the waves, the sound it made on the shore.
Alan lay still. The car bumped, but it took the bumps nicely, and it was a quiet engine. After eternity ended, the car stopped and hands caught him. He was dragged roughly from the floor of the car and his head struck the metal stripping on the door base, and struck the stones of some smelly alley. He did not move. He heard the car going away, like the receding waves from the shore.
For a long time, he remained unmoving. His brain sank in darkness, and light washed across it, and then there was darkness again.
He opened his eyes and looked up into her face.
Her? He forgot the pain, because Nora was bending over him and he could see her dimly. Only when he tried to speak her name, he saw that it was not Nora at all, it was Connice ... But it was not Connice after all. The twisted mouth belonged to Lila.
Alan forced his eyes wider and stared up into the face of an ancient crone. She bent closer over him, her breath hot with the stench of wine and antiquity. Her lined cheeks were sunken, her mouth toothless, her eyes already dead.
He saw he was in an alley somewhere, and he could hear cars racing past nearby, some busy thoroughfare at the end of the alley. Nearer were the stacks of garbage cans, the refuse of poverty. Big Eddie's thugs had worked him over and then transported him as far as they could across Los Angeles from the home in Beverly Hills and dumped him in an alley.
He stirred, trying to speak.
The old witch lunged upward when he moved, terrorized when she realized he wasn't dead. He saw she'd meant to steal anything from him she could find.
She screamed. Her screams rattled the cans in the alley.
"No," Alan said. "Don't scream. Police. You'll bring the police."
She backed away, screaming louder.
Alan forced himself to his feet. She was shaking with the horror that wracked her body. She screamed only every other try, her vocal chords almost paralyzed.
Alan saw in her rutted face how battered and nearly dead he looked. He leaned against the wall, trying to gather enough strength to move. He had to get out of there before her screams brought people, police.
He shoved past her, staggering along the alley. In the impossible distance, he saw the corner and the wide busy street. It was too far. He could not make it. He could not even think of a reason why he should make it. Big Eddie had fixed him. Where could he go, looking like this?
He toppled, almost falling at the end of the alley. He leaned against a building and watched the cars race past. Their swift movement nauseated him.
He looked around. This was a tattered rim of the sprawling city. The stores were rundown, most of them closed, webbed with dust. He saw this was partly in his favor. The people down here had seen battered men before.
A taxi was perched in a for-hire zone across the alley. The driver slumped under the wheel.
He stared at Alan's battered face, shocked, revulsed. "Good Lord what happened to you?"
"It's a long story," Alan said. He toppled into the back seat. "You wouldn't want to hear it."
"You get rolled in that alley?"
Alan nodded. This was a good story. He hoped the cab driver believed it. The driver said, "They worked you over. You're lucky to be alive."
"Yeah," Alan said. "I stink with luck."
He sank back against the seat, afraid he was going to pass out.
The driver's voice brought him out of it. "You want me to run you to the nearest police station, mister?"
"No ... Oh, no." Alan forced his voice to conceal his panic. He tried to think clearly. His mind wheeled and skidded like bats in a dark cave. He said, "No. Take me to " he paused, remembering Connice's address. She hated him. She had every right. He had no right at all to go near her like this, and yet he was too beat to think of anything else. He gave the cabbie her address and sank back, his eyes closed.
The car rattled west across town to Culver City. The cabbie stopped the car. Alan bit back his sickness. The driver said, "Here you are, mister."
Alan thanked him. He felt in his pocket, found a ten-dollar bill that one of Big Eddie's thugs had pushed there the sucker's eating money. The code of the gamblers, never leave a sucker broke. "Keep it," he said.
The driver looked at the ten-dollar bill. "Tell you what, mister. I'll get word to the cops. They'll be out here to see you. Maybe they can find the gays that worked you over."
Alan staggered. He sank to his knees on the walk. The cabbie stared at him as Alan dissolved into helpless laughter.
CHAPTER NINE
THE DRIVER LEAPED OUT OF THE CAB AND RAN around it to where Alan was crouched on the walk.
The cabbie bent over him. "Take it easy, mister. You're all right. You're home now, and I'll get the cops for you. Everything's going to be fine."
Alan was too beat to argue with him about it.
The cabbie lifted him. Alan stared through wavering fog at Connice's doorway. They moved unsteadily toward it.
The door was thrown open and Connice came running out into the morning sunlight. He heard her dismayed cry when she saw his bloodied face. He swore inwardly, wishing he had not come back here. Connice had every reason to hate him, and yet she cried out in agony at the sight of his pain. He couldn't figure women.
"Here let me help you," she said to the driver.
They supported Alan to the front door. "It's all right now," she said, "I can manage him now. We'll make it all right, thank you."
"Sure," the cabbie said. "I'll notify the cops for ou, ma'am."
"The cops?" Connice said.
"Sure. Somebody really worked him over. Maybe the cops can find out who done it."
"Oh, yes," Connice said. "I see. Well, you needn't call them. You've done enough. I'll call them right away. Thank you."
"Shouldn't wait too long," the driver said. "No sense giving them thugs a chance to clear out too far."
"Oh, no," Alan heard Connice assuring the driver. "I'll call right away."
She closed the front door and Alan toppled helplessly against it.
"Oh my God," Connice said. "What happened to you?"
She didn't wait for an answer. She supported him to the couch, let him down easily upon it. He heard her going away but did not open his eyes. It was not worth the effort. Then she returned and washed off the mud and caked blood. He felt the sting of antiseptic. "You don't look much better," she said, "but maybe you'll feel better now."
He sighed, nodding.
"They almost killed you," Connice said. He nodded. "They tried to. I fooled them." He sank into a deep sleep then, but after a moment came up, fighting, to consciousness. He was afraid to sleep. He cried out, "I've got to get out of here."
"You can't. You're in no condition to go anywhere."
"They'll find me."
"What do you mean? How did this happen to you?"
Eyes closed, he spoke slowly, tiredly. "When I left here, I thought I could find whoever framed me."
"What did you find out."
"Brass knuckles hurt."
"Oh, my poor darling. Lie still, you've got to rest."
"No. That cab driver. He'll report to the cops. I know he will."
"I talked him out of it."
"No. He'll do it. I know he will. You don't know my kind of luck. I've got to get out of here."
"Rest. You're terribly hurt. You've got to rest."
"Rest won't do me any good if the cops get me."
"Trust me, Alan. I won't let them in."
"Don't be crazy. You couldn't keep them out. It would be worse if you tried."
"Where would you go?"
This sane question stopped him, because he had no logical answer for it. Where would he go? He couldn't wander around town in these spattered, bloody clothes. He had nowhere to go. He had chased down the only lead that made sense. And here he was.
"What were you trying to prove?" he heard Connice ask. She sat on the couch beside him, but her voice seemed to come from some distant place.
"Prove? No. I figured maybe somebody that I wrote about in .those unsolved crimes I was doing for TV might have decided I knew too much. I remembered the hood that came to warn me off the Ira Festish case. I went there ... I don't think they were overjoyed to see me."
"You think the man who killed Festish--? "
"Framed me for Sherarn's murder? No. Not any more. I did at first, because it seemed to me that only those people had any idea who was being written about in those unsolved crime cases. And they knew because somebody in the police told them. I explained to the guy that we never left the murder case so anybody could recognize it. In the Festish case, we changed the locale from L.A. to New Orleans. Changed all the names. In most cases we changed the murderers if they were men in real life we made them women in the scripts, and vice versa-anything to disguise the stories."
"Lie still," Connice said. "I have one more pair of your slacks, and another shirt. You better change your clothes."
He caught her hand and pulled her to him. "You lied to me about being rid of me, didn't you?"
"That's none of your business."
"I'd loss you only it would hurt too much."
She pulled away. He heard her moving around in her bedroom. And then he heard something else. A car slammed into the curb out front. He didn't have to see it to know it was a police cruiser. He said, weakly, wanting to yell it: "Connice!"
She ran into the front room carrying a fresh pair of slacks and shirt. "What's the matter?"
Her doorbell chimed, striking them numb. They stood peering at each other. The sound seemed to reverberate forever.
Connice recovered first. She motioned him to silence, dp-toed to the window. She glanced through the tilted Venetian blinds and almost fell away from it.
She nodded, her face gray. It was the police.
Moving stealthily, Connice crossed the room. Carrying his fresh clothing, she caught his hand, motioning him through the kitchen.
Holding his breath, Alan followed. The bell rang again, the sound pursuing them. Connice caught up her handbag, going out of the rear of her apartment.
The sun lanced at Alan's battered face as they crossed to the lined parking area where Connice's Fiat roasted in the heat.
He toppled in beside her and she already had the engine started. She pulled out and turned in the alley, going toward downtown L.A.
Alan put his head back and closed his eyes. The wind burned his raw face. But it did not matter. He didn't believe they would get very far, but that didn't matter, either.
He was too tired to care.
Connice drove at the speed limit and whipped the small car around the larger ones, driving as if she knew where she was going.
The hotel near Fairfax had been built when southern California was dominated by the Spanish and Monterey influences. It was scabbed, the stucco peeling off its facade.
Connice pulled into its parking lot.
"Where are we?" Alan sat up.
"A hotel."
"They won't take us in, me looking like this."
"You go in the lobby rest room, change clothes, and put on these dark glasses. I'll register and get us a room."
Alan caught her arm. "You don't have to get mixed up in this, Connice, any deeper than you are."
"I know I don't. But unfortunately, I've been mixed up in everything that concerns you since the first time I saw you. It's not because I want to. It's like salmon going upstream. I can't help it."
He winced. He wanted to refuse to go with her any farther. She could let him out, get out of here. This was what she ought to do, but he was too sick. He had the thought of being alone in this nightmare.
"Come on," she said. "I'd only worry about you anyway. I might as well be with you."
He changed clothes in the hotel rest room, placed dark glasses over his eyes. He stared at his reflection in the mirror, and grimaced. He looked like six pounds of hamburger wearing dark glasses.
Connice awaited him just outside the rest room door. She swung a room key in her hand. He carried his soiled clothes wrapped in a bundle under his arm.
She laughed. "At least they can't say we don't have luggage."
He followed her up the dark stairs to the second floor. It smelled musty, old. She unlocked a door. "Come into my parlor, my pretty fly," she said.
Connice locked the door and set the lock. Alan glanced at it, thinking it would not restrain a growing child. The cops would follow them, rap on the door, and the door would cave in under the gentle tapping. He didn't say anything. It no longer mattered.
Connice put her arm around him and led him to the bed. He sat down on it, springs protesting.
"I never said it was Century City," she said.
"It's fine." He yawned, and yawning was agony.
Connice pushed him back, lifted his legs. "Go to sleep. Rest," she said. "No matter how long you've got, the rest will help you."
She loosened his sandals. He felt her massaging his feet. He said, "That's the only place they forgot to hit me."
"Rest," was all Connice said.
There was a lulling quiet in the room. Distant sounds of cars on the street, the lazy sounds of mid-morning only intensified the silence in here.
Connice stood up and Alan's eyes flew open.
She stared down at him. "What's the matter."
He spoke in panic. "Don't go away."
"Don't be crazy," she said. "Of course I won't."
He moved over on the bed. "Lie down with me."
"You've got to rest," she protested.
Alan laughed helplessly. "That's all I can do now.
But I'll do that better if you're close to me. It's the only way I can rest with you close to me."
Her voice caught slightly. "Why that's the nicest thing you ever said to me." Her tone lightened. "Come to think of it, it's the first nice thing you ever said to me."
He lifted his arms, holding them out to her. She hesitated a moment and then she came into his arms, lying close against him on the bed. He embraced her, feeling the sweetness of her firm breasts. She smelled good. It felt good to have her close. He yawned. He put his hand on her mound, moving his fingers, but fatigue struck him. He sagged into the mattress. He wanted to feel her thighs, her breasts, her loveliness, but he could not, and he was asleep.
It was dark when he woke up.
Connice was not beside him. He opened his eyes, and cried out, "Connice!"
"I'm here, darling. Right here." She was sitting in a rocking chair at the window, staring out into the street, watching the darkness settle over the valley.
She stood up and he saw that she was naked. The sight of her in the gray room went through him like an electric charge. He snapped on the light beside the bed. She protested. "Do you need the light?"
"You know I do," he said.
She stood beside the chair, letting him look at her nudity. He swung off the bed and stood up awkwardly and she came to him and pressed close and undressed him, one piece of clothing at a time. It didn't take long the shirt, the slacks, and then they pushed their bodies together, heated and naked.
He closed his arms around her. His hands tightened on the globes of her buttocks, squeezing. They both were breathing hard now.
"I've been watching you sleep," she whispered. "I got so hot I couldn't stand it. I wanted you so."
He didn't say anything.
"Come back to the bed," she said.
She danced him to the bed and they sank down upon it. The bed was heated with the warmth from his body. She shivered, pressing closer. She had not lied. She had been waiting for him, naked and urgent with lust. She kissed his mouth and one of her hands went down, holding him. He touched her quivering breast with the nipple so rigid it seemed it would break at his touch. It didn't. His fingers closed in the darkness at her thighs and he found she was on fire, hot with her need for him.
She lay pressed in beside him and she ran her hands over his body. He forgot the agony of the beating he'd absorbed. Her touch was light, and yet electric at the same time.
He watched her stroking him. He was standing, vibrantly ready for her. He moved his fingers faster, loving her, and she gasped aloud, wriggling her hips because she was crazy for him.
She pushed her legs wide apart, lifting them, without speaking, holding her body ready for him.
He came up, kneeling over her for a moment.
In a whisper, she gasped, "Oh, darling, please hurry."
He didn't speak. She caught him and when he was between her widespread legs, she guided him to her. He thrust and she gasped, pushing her head back and closing her eyes in ecstasy.
He came down hard upon her. She didn't speak. She kissed him and her hands caught his buttocks, thrusting him violently to her.
Then, holding him like that, she began to work her hips while he surrendered himself to the sweet, hot pleasure of her embrace. She was gasping for breath. She was driven wild and she was thinking of nothing but pleasing him.
Harder.
Faster. She drove herself insanely now because she had mounted to the passionate heights and she wanted to carry him with her. It had to be mutual, precise, together, it had to be perfect. She was gasping, fighting and working and thrusting to make it perfect for both of them. And she did.
The climax came, suddenly and frenziedly. He attained his goal at the exact moment she reached the apex of delight herself, both of them shaken with the furious violence of fulfillment. They trembled there for an instant in eternity, and then plunged downward into darkness. The agony of fatigue was sweet in him and he felt the heated pressure of her breasts, the dampness of her body locked upon his, and they sagged together in the unutterable sweetness of complete satisfaction.
They stayed like that, locked in each other's arms. Alan yawned, feeling the exhaustion sweep up through him, overwhelming him again. It was as if he had not rested at all. He thought with helpless laughter that he'd experienced more sexual bouts in these days since his trouble started than he had known for weeks at a time in his normal living. There had been times when he had been lonely, tense with need. Now he stayed tired all the time, and there always seemed another body waiting to be sated.
He sighed, maybe because troubled times heightened all fears, all pleasures, all delights. And he was thinking this as he drifted off again into warm sleep.
When he awoke again, the light beside the bed still burned, but Connice was sprawled close beside him, breathing through parted lips, fast asleep.
He got up quietly so as not to disturb her. The springs squealed and she shifted, whimpering in her sleep. He stood a moment, naked, grinning down at her helpless nakedness.
He went into the bathroom, then returned. She was awake, lying on her back, her lovely breasts pointing at him, the light glittering in the perspiration on her body.
She got up. He said, "Where are you going?"
"Take a shower."
"I'll bathe you."
"Don't be crazy. You don't need to."
"I want to."
They got into the tub together. He turned on the water, found a bar of soap and stroked her body with it, taking his time. She purred, sagging against him, almost overcome with the comfort and pleasure of being caressed and fondled in the warmth.
He dried her with a heavy towel, swung her up in his arms and carried her in to the bed.
But he was troubled, and she saw this. He tried to concentrate upon the perfection of her breasts, the soft dark triangle at her thighs.
She stroked his face. "Why don't you turn on the TV?" she suggested. "There might be some news you want to hear."
He nodded, snapping it on. He returned to her, but sat tense, watching the gray tube flicker, brighten, and come to life.
There was a brief wait before the late-night news. Connice lay with her head on his shoulder. She stroked him with her fingers. It felt good, but he could not respond. She did not mind. She loved what she was doing to him, and it pleased her to be able to fondle him as much as she liked.
The newscaster mentioned the Sheram murder almost at once. After stating that the TV writer suspected of killing the aging man over a quarrel about a dog remained at large, the newsman said, "A new development which may point away from Alan Taylor was announced by the sheriff's office today. Miss Tess Simpson, a neighbor of the suspected Taylor, a woman who gave damaging evidence against Mr. Taylor at the coroner's inquest, has changed her story substantially "
Alan leaned forward, forgetting Connice, forgetting her fingers stroking him. He gazed, transfixed at the picture tube.
" Miss Simpson stated at the inquest that she had seen Mr. Taylor's lights on early the morning of the day Mr. Sherma was slain. Now she says that she did not see Mr. Taylor, but instead saw a man, much thinner and smaller than Mr. Taylor, on that fateful morning. According to Miss Simpson, she saw this small man leave Taylor's house through the garage. Unable to sleep, attracted by the light, Miss Simpson said she stood in the dark on her porch, saw this smaller man run out of the rear door of the Sheram house across the alley. She said the small man was not near enough for her to recognize, but she is now certain that it was not Mr. Taylor, who is taller, much bigger than the man she saw in the alley the night Sheram was slain."
The newscast went on, but Alan no longer heard it. His heart banged crazily.
He turned staring at Connice. "She's changed her story," he whispered. "The old Lez has changed her story!"
Connice caught him in her arms. "Oh, Alan, I'm so glad for you."
"I've got to get out there--. "
"What?"
"I've got to. I've got to talk to her. Maybe she could tell me enough what he looked like so that I'd know him. It's somebody who hated me. He came from my house, carrying my gun, wearing my shoes! He returned the shoes, and buried the gun in that vacant lot. I've got to talk to Simpson."
"You can't. Let the police handle it, Alan."
"But they don't know the people who might want to harm me. If I could talk to Simpson-"
"It might be a police trick to get you to do some foolish thing like this. They might be trying to get you back out there."
Alan was already reaching for his clothes. "That's a chance I've got to take."
Connice caught his arm. "Suppose it is a trick, and the police capture you. You'd never get free again."
He buckled his trousers, slipped on the shirt. He sat down then and pulled on the sandals.
He looked at her. "I don't believe it's a trick, Connice. It makes too much sense. Somebody did take my gun, and my old shoes. They would have come out of my garage, and they had to come back. What they didn't know was that the nosy old woman next door was standing in the dark, watching."
"She says she doesn't recognize the person."
"But she might be able to tell me something that will make it possible for me to recognize him. Don't you see, I've got to? It's my life, Connice."
She stood up unwillingly. "It's my life, too," she said. "I'll drive you out there."
"No. Stay out of it, Connice. It might be a police trick."
"That's a chance I'll have to take. You can't run around looking like this. Those dark glasses don't cover that much of your face."
After a moment, he nodded. "You can drive me out to Island Groves. You let me out and then drive back home. If I need you I'll call you."
"The story of my life," Connice said.
He stood and watched Connice dress, the panties that concealed from him the urgent loveliness of her thighs, the bra inhibiting those breasts, the dress covering all of it. She slipped her feet into her shoes and ran her fingers through her hair.
He touched her face gently. He said, "This will all end someday, Connice. If it does, I swear I'll make it up to you somehow."
"Well, let's go," she said. "Those kind words are enough to keep me going for a week."
CHAPTER TEN
THE freeway to island groves was bolts of black ribbon unrolled in the darkness, the strips pinned by bright-lighted exit ramps and direction signs.
Connice drove at sixty. The little car shivered at this speed, and its quivering reminded Alan of his own. He had been racing along at speeds that were no good for him, on roads he knew nothing about. And like the little Fiat, he was about to shake to pieces, to come unstuck.
Stillness lay thickly over the night-quieted roadway. He sat with his head back, feeling the familiar, melancholy exhaustion that seemed part of his being by now. He closed his eyes, listening to the pound of the engine, the racing tires on the pavement.
There was an eeriness about this darkness, as if he were returning to an alien place of his greatest unhappiness, as if he were consciously going back into a place from which he'd never escape again.
Connice slowed and with panic grabbing at his belly, Alan sat up, looking around. "What's the matter?" he said. "Island Groves turnoff just ahead."
"Already?" He shivered.
She glanced at him. "I wish you'd change your mind, Alan."
"I have, a hundred times."
"Then come back with me. This is a fool thing to do. It's no good. It's like putting your head in the gas chamber."
He shook his head. The car shivered as she whipped it onto the exit ramp, leaving the freeway. "No. I either go in all the way, or all the way out, Connice I can't go on like this."
"No. I suppose not."
"You know I can't."
"I just hope, I guess. That's all. You've been nicer the last two times I've seen you than ever before, than all the times before. Despite all the trouble, I've loved you like this. I can't help that." She tried to laugh. "And sooner or later, I will run out of fresh clothes for you."
He took her hand, squeezing it tightly. "There's never been anyone like you, doll. It's just taken all this to show me."
"like I always say, it's an ill wind " Connice tried to keep her voice light, but she failed. She could not do it. She was deeply troubled, and she couldn't hide it.
Alan nodded toward the darkness ahead. It was less than two blocks to his house now. This was close enough, too close.
She braked the car down, coming to a halt in the deepest shadows. She cut the engine. They sat for some moments holding their breath, scanning the dark, afraid to trust even the night.
A car passed at the end of the block, its lights glowing for the short passage of time. Connice gasped and clutched Alan's arms.
"It's all right," he whispered.
"The hell it is. If they see you, they'll kill you. Have you thought about that?"
"Yes."
"What will I do when I get the itch after they kill you? Who'll scratch it for me then?"
He smiled, kissing her lips lightly. "You'll find somebody," he teased.
She drew away. "That just proves it. You don't know much about women, bub."
"No?"
"Women want what they want not just anything that will scratch an itch."
"Well, what do you know? You learn something all the time."
She inhaled sharply. "No wonder you got your face battered up, a smart guy like you."
Alan kissed her again, his lips barely touching here this time.
"Please don't go," she said. "Stay with me."
"We can't hide forever. Sooner or later, they'd trace me to you. You know that. We've got to be free, Connice, or we don't have any life at all."
"I've been happy with what I've had."
"You've just had the itch."
He moved to get out of the car and she clung to him. "Let me hear, Alan. For God's sake. I can't stand not knowing."
He nodded. "I'll call you. I swear I will. But you must go now before somebody accidentally sees you here with me. They must not catch you with me, or see you with me, or know about you at all. If they do, I'll have nowhere to go."
She moved her head, agreeing at last. Her eyes were blurred with tears, but she shook them away. Her hair battered against her shoulders.
She watched him get out of the car. "You will come back?" she begged. "If you get hot, or hungry, or tired or need a change of clothes."
He nodded, waving to her. She started the engine, stepped on the gas and whipped away in the darkness. He stood watching her, feeling abandoned, more lost and alone than ever, and he could not say why.
Connice was all the way to the corner before she switched on the lights of her little car ...
Fear walked with Alan in the darkness.
Alan paused at the corner. Night breeze riffled the hair on his forehead, put a chill in his bones.
He searched the street carefully before he crossed it. He had to see, and not be seen. There was a chance of somebody out walking a dog, even at this unlikely hour.
Nothing moved along the street.
He crossed it, going halfway along the block to the alley that ran behind his own house.
Here he paused again, searching all the crannies of the alley. He held his breath, listening for the faintest whisper of sound. Yet there was none. He had the sense that he was being watched, but told himself this was foolish. It was his nerves, acting up.
They were ready to snap. He grinned sourly. If anyone were to speak his name, or if there were movement suddenly, he'd yell and never stop yelling.
He entered the alley, moving cautiously through the stillness.
The alley was narrower than he remembered, with garbage cans and hedges and doorways. The shadows were fearful. The only light filtered from the pallid gleam of corner street lamps.
He went pace by pace through the obscuring shadows. A cat cried somewhere and he stopped, holding his breath. He felt the fearful banging of his heart. Every breeze-stirred limb was an apparition in the dark.
He searched the deep shadows on both sides of the alley. Staked-out police could hide there, or sleepless neighbors prowling could be in deeper shadows. He could take no chances.
The darkness on both sides of him were like tall walls. The somber dark was inscrutable.
He glanced upward, seeing the cloud-frosted night sky. It was lighter up there, clearer, but he was secured to this darkness by fear and unreasoning injustice.
He slowed, reaching the corner of Tess Simpson's yard, next door to the house where he had lived for six months, trying to find himself again.
He exhaled. He'd found himself all right, out in the somber dark, frightened and alone.
A single light glowed wanly in Tess Simpson's house.
Alan stepped into her yard, the crisp grass crunching under his sandals.
He stared at the wan ring of light through her rear door. He fumbled with a problem that had not occurred to him until this moment.
He wanted to talk with Tess, he had to, and yet how could he get to her without frightening her so she would scream the neighborhood down on them?
He paused, feeling sick. There was no answer, no assurance. He would just have to take his chances.
There was no guarantee that Tess would want to talk to him under any circumstances, even if she had finally decided that he was not Sheram's killer.
He was at her back steps. He pressed close in the shadows and counted slowly to a hundred. He searched the overcast dark as he counted, but nothing moved.
He saw the light burned in her hallway, palely illuminating her kitchen.
He rapped on the back door, sharply. The sound rattled through the stillness, cannon-loud, it seemed to him. Enough to waken the neighborhood.
Only nothing happened inside Tess Simpson's house. The stillness persisted, unbroken.
Feeling sick, Alan rapped on the door again. The sound was louder this time, more frantic, like a drumbeat, alerting every neighbor.
Nothing happened in Tess's house. There was no answer. He touched the knob and found the door unlocked.
Frowning, he hesitated. All he had to do was walk in there and waken Tess unexpectedly. Her screams would bring Sevidge and Renner down on him for sure.
Still, once he was in the half-lighted kitchen, he could call to her without being heard all over Summit Street.
He stepped in through the door and started across the kitchen. He took only one step when his sandal struck something. It was like a bundle of sheets, heavy clothing a body.
Alan lunged backward.
He stared down at Tess. She lay sprawled like a rag doll on the polished floor of her kitchen. A pool of blood stained its glistening surface. A knife sprouted from between Tess' thin shoulder blades.
He did not have to touch her to know that she was dead.
Time passed in a terrible slowness. Afterward, he never knew how long he had remained, numbed, staring down at her body on that floor.
When he could finally move at all, it seemed to him there was no longer any sense in it, and he didn't want to move. He wanted to sink, to the floor beside Tess' angular body with the knife in it and admit that he was as dead as she was.
The one woman who could swear that he was not the man she'd seen running from his house, and from Sheram's house the night of the murder, she had been eternally silenced. His chance was gone.
He leaned against the table, exhausted, breathing through his mouth as if he had run a long way.
He heard the police cars.
He trembled slightly, involuntarily, but he did not react in surprise. He was beyond astonishment now. He believed in any evil thing that happened to him.
They came swiftly. He heard them from the front in the night silence and he heard others racing in both ways along the alley.
They were bottling him up in here with the latest corpse.
And this didn't surprise him, either. It was all like a part of a game. You fit all the pieces together and it formed a perfect frame with his face inside.
How could anyone know he was in here with Tess's body?
How could they have waited until he walked in and found her before they alerted the police?
Alan shuddered.
Contrary to all logic, this last bit made the first sense of anything that had happened to him since Sheram's death.
Somebody did know what he did, and where he went.
In that darkness out there tonight, somebody had stood silently in deep shadows and watched him come along the alley and enter this house.
Somebody who had planned the whole frame from the first.
The killer.
This made sense. Wait until he was in the house with Tess's body, call the police. Somebody had called the police on him before, and they would go on doing it until he was trapped and beyond aid.
Only now was no time to think about it. It was too late for thinking. He had to move. He had to get out of this house without being seen by the police who were parking their cars out front and racing cruisers both ways along the alley.
He had to do it, only it was impossible.
Still, it was better to be caught out there in the dark somewhere than in this room with this corpse.
Something caught at his heart, and he stared at the knife in Tess's back. He was certain the police would be able to prove it was a knife from his kitchen. The killer was taking no chance on his slipping the noose this time.
Alan stepped back, pressing against the wall. He wasted no more time. He heard voices on the walk out front. The cruiser lights illumined the alley. He had one chance. They may not yet be looking for a killer out in the dark.
It was the last chance remaining to him.
He slithered through the door, went down the steps and crouched in the darkness at the corner of the house. The cruisers were converging on this yard in the alley.
A bloated hibiscus clump made deep shadows near the line of his own property.
Alan crouched low and ran into the shadow of the bush. He saw the police and detectives in the glow from car lights in the front yard. He heard Tess's doorbell ringing.
Tess wasn't going to answer. Momentarily, police would be coining around the corners of her house, seeking a way inside.
He knelt low and crawled to the side of his own house. He inched along it toward his own back door. It seemed to him the cruiser lights parked in the alley made daylight of his yard and Tess's.
He heard the men over there, the detectives in the rear. They ran forward and tried the back door. They found it unlocked, shouted the news, and then Alan saw them go inside. They were silent for a stunned moment, and Alan knew what they'd found. Alan crouched shivering in the grayed darkness. He felt in his slacks pocket. Nothing. Then he remembered the key he stashed in the milk box outside the rear door.
It seemed to him that the last place they'd search for Alan Taylor at this moment was in Alan Taylor's own house, next door to the scene of the latest murder.
He found the key and pressed hard in the shadows, unlocked his door, and let himself inside.
He moved cautiously through the house that had lost all its familiarity or warmth. It was just another strange house in a subdivision where he did not belong.
It smelled musty and abandoned, the way Alan felt.
He found a jacket in his bedroom and slipped it on over his shirt. He put on socks and a dark pair of shoes. He did not know why he did these things. Perhaps for no better reason than that it was better to keep moving.
Every light glowed now in Tess Simpson's house. Standing in the darkness, he stared at the men prowling the house and the yard, striding across lighted places, walking in the shadows, shouting to each other.
Gradually, the entire neighborhood came to life. Lights burned in almost every house along Summit Street. When the ambulance came screaming with siren open and red light winking, people poured out to the walk, sleep-stunned, excited.
Alan glimpsed Renner and Sevidge in a lighted room at Tess's house. He retreated a step, involuntarily.
He heard the ambulance groan to a stop out front. Then the attendants ran up the walk and entered the house.
More and more people straggled from their homes to the walks and yards, out into the street.
Technicians from the police labs arrived and went to work in Tess's kitchen.
Alan retreated into the darkest part of his house. But fear was chewing at him again. Reflected light made his own house illuminated. There was no place to hide.
It occurred to him that the knife that killed Tess had come from this house. The police wouldn't know this at once, but soon they'd find it did not belong to Tess, and they would fan out.
Sevidge would think about the knives in Alan Taylor's house. It was the way Sevidge's mind worked. Then it would occur to him that Alan had returned, tried to get Simpson to say something that would clear him of murder, and failing, killed her.
This was the way Sevidge's mind worked, too.
Alan knew this without hearing the gray-faced detective speak. It was as if he could follow the convoluted direction of Sevidge's thoughts and that led straight to this house.
Alan breathed raggedly.
He had to get out of there. He had cleverly backed himself into a cul-de-sac.
The police and lab men would be working over there until dawn, at least.
Once Sevidge sent hunters into his house looking for proof that the knife belonged there, he would go the whole way, simply from habit. He would have them search the place. Even if Sevidge didn't believe Taylor was in there, he would search the place because that was the way his mind ran.
Alan crouched there in the darkness, trying to force his mind to think clearly.
It occurred to him again that the killer knew his movements, had probably seen him enter Tess's house earlier. Did this mean it was one of the neighbors? That made some kind of sense, even when Alan couldn't find a motive for the weird actions. Maybe a twisted mind could find its own reasons.
Anyhow, once the police kept him in this house until daybreak, he had no chance at all of getting out. He was then trapped, and a Sevidge search squad would turn him up.
He stared through the windows at the people flooding into the street and the yard outside Tess's house. They were all intent on what was there.
Alan breathed deeply, watching the crowd. The street was alive with people, and all interest was centered on the police, next door. If he had one chance of getting out of this house, and out of Island Groves, this was it.
He went carefully through the house to the rear door again. He stared out into the darkened yard, then let himself out the door. He angled away from the lighted cruisers in the alley. He heard people shouting from the street, and lights flared on in houses along the alley.
He kept walking through the yards until he reached the far corner of the alley. Then he turned toward the shopping center. Someone shouted something behind him.
The sound struck him like a rock in the small of his back. He didn't look over his shoulder. He braced himself and when they yelled again, Alan ran.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
ALAN RAN IN THE DARKNESS. HIS BREATH BURNED in his throat. His heart battered his rib cage, and sharp pains lanced through his chest. His body ached from the beating Big Eddie's boys had administered. The pain was more intense, because he had lost hope. He was not even running toward anything, now; he had nowhere to go.
All he could do was run from that nightmare, back there.
He took long, stiff-legged steps, and he looked over his shoulder.
He heard the sounds of cars firing to life, taking off, and then the rising wail of the first sirens. It was as if they screamed his name in the night.
The noise of the cars and the sirens brought the whole world awake, and they were on his tail, chasing him down, and the nightmare was complete now. His legs did not want to function, and the shadows no longer offered any place to hide.
He swore at himself because he was surrendering to panic, but he was unable to think clearly. Fear had taken over. He knew there was an answer to this hideous riddle, someone who knew him well had set him up, not once but twice, and they still worked to close the frame in on him.
Perhaps if he could think straight, he might figure the answer, he might hope to outthink the real killer, no matter who he was. But the killer sat calmly, unhurried, untroubled, everything working for him, and he was too tired and too sick to think at all.
He could only run...
He did not even hear the car approach behind him until it whipped past.
Hackles stood on his neck. He had to keep his mind alert. That car had not switched on its lights until it was almost upon him.
Instinctively, Alan flung himself from the walk into the deep shadows of a hedge. He stared after the racing car. He didn't fool himself. The driver had seen him running on this walk. He was lucky it was not a police car.
Unless he kept his eyes open, he might not be so lucky.
He waited there until the car turned at the nearest corner, tires screaming on the pavement. He pressed his fist against his mouth, running again.
The car raced around a corner behind him, like a persistent and mindless animal, playing with him before the kill. Its lights were off until it reached the intersection, then they were flared on and he was pinned in them like a bug on a wall.
The car came directly across the street toward him and slammed into the curb near him.
Alan tried to run, and couldn't. It was as if his legs had become elastic, stretching, but keeping him in the same place.
He jerked his head around and stared at the driver of the car.
His mouth sagged open. It was Nora. She glanced over her shoulder, listened for an instant to the cacophony of sirens, then she said. "Get in. Quick."
Still numbed with disbelief, Alan toppled into the car and sagged against the seat rest. Nora floored the accelerator and her big car lunged forward.
Alan lay with his head back, panting, with his mouth open.
Nora peered at his torn face, spoke in shock. "What happened to you?"
"Different things. All painful."
He watched the streets of Island Grove whip past. He wished Nora would drive slower. A cop stopping her would mean only a ticket for speeding to her, but it would mean a great deal more to him. But he was too tired, too troubled to say anything.
He turned his head slightly, gazing at that delicate, patrician profile against the night. Her beauty, her chill, her being here everything troubled him.
He said, "Nora. What are you doing out here this time of the morning?"
"Are you looking a gift horse in the mouth?"
"You told me to stay away. You said you couldn't help me. Why would you be out here looking for me?"
"I came looking for you, Alan," she said. Her voice lowered. "I tried to put you out of my mind. I couldn't do it. I worried about you, no matter how much I tried to warn myself to stay out of it. I couldn't. I found I couldn't turn my back on you, Alan."
Car lights approached, and a red blinker whirled above them.
"A police car." Alan whispered it in a panic he had never suspected those three words could ever arouse in him.
He slouched down into the seat on his spine, but Nora spoke sharply. "Sit up straight. Don't do anything that looks suspicious."
"I feel suspicious," Alan said. "If they stop us, I've had it."
"They won't stop us," she said with cold assurance. "I've been driving around out here for hours, and nobody has stopped me. Why should they now?"
Alan stared at the police car as it whipped past. He saw the patrolmen in it fling glances toward Nora's Caddy, but they didn't slow down.
He exhaled heavily.
He put his head back on the seat, trying to think. Nora's amazing appearance out here had bought him respite from the chase. It gave him a chance to think. But he could not think clearly. His mind kept coming back to Nora's being out here, and he couldn't put sense into it.
She whipped the big car up a freeway entrance ramp and Alan exhaled again. He read the lighted signs pointing toward L.A. The freeway was almost deserted. He told himself he should feel better, but somehow he did not.
He could not shake a terrible, persistent sense of wrong.
They did not speak on the drive downtown. Nora left the freeway and finally Alan asked. "Not that it matters, but where are you taking me?"
"To my place," Nora answered. "You'll be safe there."
He frowned, remembering that other time he had gone to her place. He did not say anything until she had parked her car in the apartment building garage and they were in the self-service elevator gliding upward to her penthouse.
"What about you, Nora? Will you be safe fooling around with me, taking chances like this? It made more sense when you warned me that your career was important, and a scandal would jeopardize it. I know what safety means to you. I know what your career means to you."
"Yes," she said cryptically, "I'm sure you do."
He frowned, following her out of the elevator cage and along the sleek corridor to the door of her apartment.
He watched her fit her key into the lock. He shoved his hand into his jacket pocket and his fingers struck something slick, smooth, fragile. He knew what it was without looking at it.
He followed Nora into her smartly appointed living loom, drawing her panties from his jacket pocket.
She turned from the door, saw the panties. Her face flushed. "Where did you get them?"
"You left them at my place. The night you came out there."
She bit her lip. "Oh, yes. I remember." She took them from him as if acutely embarrassed by the incident.
Alan frowned, watching her wad the panties into her fist. "You threw them behind a chair. I guess you couldn't find them when you started to dress. You must have been in a hurry."
Nora tilted her head and walked away from him. Clearly, she didn't want to discuss it. She glanced across her shoulder, motioning him to follow. They went along the corridor to her bedroom.
"Your poor face," Nora said. "You're hurt. You must be tired."
"I'm pretty beat."
"Why don't you go to bed for a while? Rest. We can talk later. Decide what to do."
"What is there to do? I can't prove I'm innocent."
"Maybe you're not helping your own case, running like this, Alan. Have you thought about that?"
"Good Lord are you suggesting I turn myself in now?"
She gave him a faint smile. "I don't know yet what might be best. We won't talk about it now. Wait until you're rested."
He gazed at her strangely. She smiled again, meaning to reassure him, he supposed, but there was an emptiness in the pit of his belly that would not be relieved, a feeling of apprehension that he could not explain. "I'll undress you," she said. "I'll put you to bed."
Alan watched her, scowling. She tossed her panties across the room, then she loosened his shirt, removing it. She undressed him and pushed him down on her silk-sheeted bed, naked.
She pulled the sheet over him. "You rest now," she said. "You're safe here."
He wondered why he did not feel safe. Nora turned down the rights, leaving only a small night lamp glowing. He should have fallen instantly to sleep, and yet he could not. His eyes burned, and that sense of wrong persisted.
He said, "Nora."
"Yes."
"I can't sleep yet."
"You must rest."
"Talk to me until I'm sleepy," he said. "I want you to lie down with me, talk to me."
She laughed throatily. "Are you sure you want to talk?"
He didn't answer. She hesitated a moment, and then he saw her standing before her mirrors, slowly removing her clothing.
Alan's mind fled back to that night she had come to his house for dinner, and had undressed for him, his first sight of those superb breasts, the sleek, flat belly, the rise at her thighs, the shapely-legs. He had been unable to believe she had brought that body out to him, just as he found it difficult to believe she wanted to give herself to him now. It just wasn't in character for her. He wasn't a VIP far from it, less now than he had been that night she came to his house. Now he was a fugitive, a hunted man, wanted for murder, the last kind of person on this earth that Nora would get near willingly-
He could not concentrate on her loveliness because this truth kept battering at him. She couldn't want him. Not now, not that night she came out to his house. It didn't make sense. She wanted something, all right, then and now, but not a fugitive like him, a man with no future.
Her future, her career, her security these were the most important drives in her life. She had bought into the big Duke & Thomson advertising agency some years ago because owning a part of the firm gave her an added sense of power, of strength.
Why would she jeopardize all this for him now?
He shook his head. He wasn't that much of a lover. She could find twenty better men by picking up her telephone and calling numbers listed in her date book.
Standing there now, Nora dropped away the last piece of her clothing. Her creamy, pink body glowed in the vague light. He saw the reflections of her in the dark mirrors: the incredible lines of that body, the sharp up-thrust of those high jutting breasts.
Even as she walked toward him, he found himself unable to make it compute. It didn't add up, and it bothered him so he could not even concentrate upon her nakedness, her availability.
He whispered it in the soft light, "Why?"
She appeared not to hear him. She paused for a moment beside the bed, turning herself slowly, letting him look at her nude beauty.
But he felt cold. He said, "What do you want, Nora? What do you really want?"
"Why, you silly boy. They have hurt you, haven't they? Did they drop you on your head? Can't you look at me and see what I want?" She caught the sheet and threw it from him. It billowed like a balloon for a moment and then settled over the foot of the bed. She gazed down at him. "I want you."
He didn't speak, lying chilled on her bed.
She sank down beside him. She stroked him with her hand. She said, disappointed, "What's the matter, darling? Don't you want me?"
"I told you. I can't figure you out."
She laughed lightly, laying her head on his stomach. "You still can't believe I'd want you? Is that it?"
"You want something," he said. "But I can't figure it."
"That's because you try to make something complicated of it, darling. Why can't you realize that I am a woman, and you're a very handsome, very virile man?"
"Does not compute," he said. He ran his hands through her rich, patiently coiffured hair. It was difficult to believe that she wanted this precisely-set hair mussed, even now, naked in a bed.
She moved her head on his bare skin, stroking him with her fingers. "You can't forget that I am a career woman, can you? Does that make me less than feminine to you, Alan?"
"I know what your career means to you. I know what security means to you. I can't see you putting these things in peril. Not for me. Not for any man, if you want the truth."
She laughed again. "You're right, darling, my whole life has been directed toward success, toward getting what I want. I suppose I had a better than normal girlhood. I had everything I wanted. My stepfather was insanely in love with me from the time I was thirteen, and wild with jealousy all the time I was in high school. But that town, the men I met, nothing was what I wanted. I wanted to know interesting, rich and famous people. People who created. Accomplished. People who lived exciting lives. My stepfather wouldn't let me alone, even after my mother died. I tried to tell him he had no claims on me he was not truly my father, and I wouldn't let him be my lover ... I ran away from him. I got into advertising. I have been successful. My career has been everything I wanted and I've never put it in jeopardy until now."
Alan stirred, sweating on the bed. "Suddenly some days ago you stopped acting like the remote, aloof career woman. You came out to Island Groves to see me. You even left your panties in my bedroom ... I don't know why, but this seems the last thing you'd do."
She laughed. "I just couldn't find them."
"No," he persisted, talking half to himself. "It just isn't like you to leave anything incriminating behind you ... even panties ... I tried to return them to you the next day, but you were back in character as the boss, and I couldn't do it."
"I don't want to talk about them."
"You never left any loose ends in your life did you?"
"I don't know." Her voice sounded odd. "What do you mean?"
He sighed, staring at the ceiling. His hands moved on her head, his fingers massaging behind her ears, along the nape of her neck. Her hair was wild about her head. He was certain she hated this disorder, this untidiness, even when she tried to ignore it.
He said it again, "What do you want from me, Nora?"
There was a brief silence. "Must we want something-each from the other something except what is natural between us right now?"
He exhaled. "That's just it. It doesn't seem natural. Doing it would be like making conversation-something beside the point."
She raised her head slightly. Her hair was snarled about her face. She forced a smile. "You're all mixed up. But I'll make you want it ... I know how to make you want it."
She sank forward upon him. and he caught his breath as she loved him. But even now when she moved in wild abandon, he thought of Connice, the way she had done this, loving to do it the difference it made. He could tell that Nora didn't love doing it, she didn't want to do it, but whatever she did want depended on her making him believe she liked it.
He caught her head, held her still. "Why don't we just talk a little while?"
She turned, her lips bruised, her face flushed. "Why, darling, what's the matter?"
"That's it, I don't know." He stared at her nudity, wondering why he felt a chill instead of desire. He had never seen a lovelier body than Nora's; it was-likely he never would. But either he'd had too much loving, not enough rest, or he was too tired, too scared, too troubled the fact was he could not respond to Nora's lovely nudity, nor all her uninhibited overtures.
He could not force himself to want her.
"You're tired," she whispered. She kissed along his belly, upward over his chest to his throat. "You close your eyes. Sleep. When you wake up, you'll feel more like it."
Nora pulled herself up beside him with her full, firm breasts suspended above his face. She stroked him gently, soothing him. The agony of weariness attacked him, and he shivered as if chilled.
"Rest," she said. "Sleep. You'll be all right ...
While you're sleeping, I'll get something to put on your poor, battered face ... you'll wake up feeling so much better. My poor darling, who did such a thing to you?"
"I went looking for the killer of Ira Festfsh," he said.
"Ira Festish? Who's he?"
"One of the people in those unsolved crimes I wrote about. I suppose you don't remember, but one of the syndicate hoods came to see me and told me to lay off the Festish murder. He was a lot more upset about it even than you were about the twenty-grand murder--and not nearly so pretty."
"Why should you go near those people?"
"In desperation. I was framed in Sherarn's murder. I know that. It finally boiled down to somebody who had such a guilty conscience they thought I was writing about them in those scripts. But except for the Festish case, it didn't make sense. We changed everything. If the murderer was a man in real life, we made him a woman, or changed the locale. If a woman was the killer, we changed it to a man like we did in the twenty-grand murder. Remember?"
"No. I don't remember," Nora said.
"What? You don't remember the twenty-grand murder case, after the way you bitched about it?" He stared at her. "The only suspect in the case was a woman when old man Brinkerhoff was killed. You have to remember. Twenty grand was stolen from him, and she'd left some article of clothing behind. Only we made the killer a man, and he left a pair of gloves in the car that burned in the canyon."
"No. I don't remember. Maybe I've had too much on my mind lately. I've been worried sick about you, darling ... and I'm still worried. You've got to rest." She got up. "I'll get you a couple of my sleeping pills."
He lay staring at the ceiling. He heard her go into the bathroom, open the medicine chest, run water in a glass.
She returned, unselfconscious in her nudity. She gave him the pills, the water. He drank them down.
"Now sleep," Nora said. "Stop worrying. Everything is going to be fine."
He lay down on the bed. She sank beside him, stroking his hair, pressing her warm breasts upon him. But her nude nearness could not eat through the sense of wrong that pervaded everything, and it seemed to him he was grasping at wisps of the truth, but then the pills went to work, and he sank into sleep, going deep and suddenly into darkness.
But even asleep, he could not rest. Something was wrong, terribly wrong. About everything, but especially about Nora's coming to Island Grove, finding him, bringing him here, and treating him with such solicitude. No matter how he tried to put logic in it, it didn't make sense.
In his sleep, he felt hot and uncomfortable. He felt as if he were lying on a red-hot bed of coals instead of sleek, cool sheets.
He fretted, turning. But he didn't bump against Nora's body, and even in his sleep, this seemed strange. She had been lying dose against him, and now she was gone. Gone? Where was she gone?
He tried to open his eyes, but the effect of the pills was too strong, he couldn't do it.
He felt as if his brain were swirling, around and around like the red stripes of a barber pole. He was frightened, unable to rest. He wanted to wake up. It was suddenly more than that. He was in terror, afraid to sleep in this place, and he wanted to open his eyes.
Only he could not do it.
He tried to cry out. He wanted to shout Nora's name, but he knew he was failing to do this, too. He merely made groaning sounds that were unintelligible, even to him. He was screaming Nora's name, but only inside his brain.
He felt himself sinking deeper into a warm morass of unconsciousness. Something kept screaming a warning in his brain. If he succumbed to this deeper sleep, he was lost. He could not say why. He only knew it was true.
He struggled on the bed, fighting as if against invisible bonds that held him down. He concentrated, sweating, and finally opened his eyes.
He was alone in the bedroom. The bedroom door stood half open. He heard something that was familiar and yet strange at the same time.
He did not know how long it was before he realized it was the sound of a telephone dial. Nora was dialing, calling someone. She had every right to use her own phone, and yet he was sure there was some sinister, terrible result in store for him if she completed that call.
He managed to swing his legs off the bed. He felt numb and half paralyzed, only partly awake. He took long shambling steps across to the door. He leaned against the jamb, staring out into the lighted living room.
Nora stood there, naked. She completed the dialing and waited as the phone rang. Someone must have answered, because Nora said, "Hello, is this the sheriff's office?"
Alan yelled. His voice rattled in the room when he shouted her name.
Nora wheeled around, trembling. She stared at him. Her face went gray. Her mouth sagged open. She almost dropped the receiver.
Alan lunged across the room, taking awkward, disjointed steps. He grabbed the receiver from her hand and threw it back in its cradle.
Then he caught her arm and hurled her away from the phone. She staggered and went toppling back to the couch.
CHAPTER TWELVE
"YOU!"
Alan's voice was hoarse. He stood over Nora, legs apart, braced against the lingering effects of the sleeping pill.
"What's the matter with you?" she cried. "Have you gone insane?"
"Sure. I'm insane. I've been crazy all along." He raged with sudden laughter. Nora had brushed her hair, sprayed and lacquered it back into perfection upon her head. She had done this, or he'd never have wakened in time to intercept her call to the police. "It's you, all right," he said. "It has to be you. Nothing else makes sense."
"Alan, you're ill. You're drugged with sleeping pills. What's wrong with you?"
"I want out of here, that's all. I'm getting out of here. And you're not calling the cops." He grabbed the phone and ripped it from the wall. "You called them once on me, didn't you?"
"I don't know what you're talking about!"
"Of course you don't. That first time I came up here. You were shocked to see me out of jail, weren't you? You thought you'd put me away for good, didn't you for murder?"
"Alan, you've gone insane!"
"No. I've gone sane. Maybe those hoods beat the sense into me. Maybe I got so low, so beat, I had to see the truth even about you. All of a sudden, I even remember that you paid twenty thousand for a share in Duke & Thomson-"
"You're not making sense."
"I'm making sense. No wonder you didn't want the Twenty Grand Murder Case aired. Even if I had changed it so the only suspect was old Brinkerhoff's stepson and not his stepdaughter. His stepdaughter! It wouldn't take long to check and find that your stepfather's name was Brinkerhoff, would it? And you thought I had found that out, didn't you? That's what got you bugged. Your conscience was so guilty, you were sure I'd figured the truth. You thought I was going to try to blackmail you ... So you fixed me, didn't you? You came out, you fixed me a steak dinner, gave me a look at your incredible beauty, gave me liquor that you knew poisoned me. Your loving and the liquor, it knocked me out while you put on my old shoes, my pants and coat, went over and killed old Sheram while I slept. What a frame-up! Who'd ever connect the aloof Nora with a murder in the suburbs? Just as nobody suspected you of the Brinkerhoff murder. Your mother had been dead for years. Nobody out here even knew Brinkerhoff was your stepfather, or connected with you in any way ... You got rid of him and you got the money that started you onward and upward in business, didn't you? And you thought I was smart enough to have figured that out-or maybe I'd stumbled over the truth about your being his stepdaughter while I was doing research. Sorry to disappoint you, doll. I wasn't that smart."
"I don't think you're smart at all," she said coldly. She glared up at him.
They were like two primitives, taut, naked, gazes fixed on each other in violent hatred.
"So when I came up here looking for help, you sent me away. After I left, you notified the police "
"Why would I do that?"
"For the same reason you called them now. To be sure I was caught. To be sure your frame held me. I was too scared to think when the cops turned those lights on me, or I'd have known they didn't just happen to find me on that street somebody had told them I was there. There they were, with searchlights and guns at four a.m. because you had told them I was around here. You set me up from the first, Nora, only I couldn't figure why until I realized that twenty-grand crime script really was about a woman. An ambitious, greedy woman who lusted for power and security enough to kill for it ... Only you didn't kill just once, after all, did you?"
He stared down at her. "It wouldn't have been smart to kill me. They might connect me and you even as boss and employer. But who would ever connect you with a dirty old man like Sheram? A man you'd never even met? But they'd connect me vengeful me, killing him for poisoning my dog. You really figured it. One more murder to secure your place on top of the world. Up here, high above L.A. You owned the world, if you just killed that old man and got me blamed for it and out of the way before I could blackmail you."
He turned, walking away from her, forgetting for the moment that they were naked. Nudity suddenly didn't matter. Everything was basic here, life, death, murder.
"Only Sheram's death wasn't enough. Tess Simpson saw you that night. But Tess was a Lesbian, and she came to see you-didn't she?"
Nora shrugged. "She came up here. The horrible old Lesbian. She'd say nothing about seeing me that night if I became her lover." She shuddered. "When I threw her out, she went to the police ... I had to kill her."
"With a knife from my place! Oh, you really wanted me, didn't you, Nora? You wanted me dead!"
She leaped up from the couch. Her breasts quivered, trembling with the emotions that racked her. "You were in my way!" she screamed. "I tried to help you. You were a drunk, eaten up with grief, and I tried to help you ... But you wouldn't drop that story about Brinkerhoff ... I tried to get you to drop it, but you wouldn't do it."
He shook his head. "And you were so eaten up with guilt that you couldn't believe I knew nothing about your being Brinkerhoff's stepdaughter!"
She strode past him, going out to the balcony, overlooking the city that gleamed like a chest of spilled jewels in the final moments before dawn.
She stood looking out over the town, the world that had belonged to her until he came along to threaten her.
"You wouldn't drop it!" she raged. "Oh, I knew. You'd keep picking at it, until one day you found out that I was Brinkerhoff's stepdaughter and then and then it would have cost me everything..." She gazed out upon the dark town. "I had worked too hard, too long. I couldn't lose it. I couldn't stand to lose it."
He gazed at her, standing nude on that balcony like some vengeful goddess on Olympus plotting the extermination of unimportant earth creatures so far below her they were like tiny lights winking in the darkness.
Alan's voice was dead. "Where are my clothes, Nora? I'm getting out of here."
She laughed at him, her voice quavering. "Then you'll go naked."
"Where are my clothes?" He strode out to the balcony beside her. It was as if they were removed from all that world below them. But he knew better.
She laughed again. "They're gone, Alan! Your clothes. I put them down the disposal ... I was taking no chances. You were going to stay here this time until the police came for you."
He gazed about helplessly. Then he forced himself to laugh. "Was that very smart, Nora? If you let them find me here in your apartment, you can't help getting involved ... aren't you afraid they might learn the truth?"
"How? Who'd believe you? I told them you had forced your way in here once, and I'll tell them you did it again."
He shook his head, staring at her. "Murder means nothing to you, does it?"
"Not when it means I might lose all this." She swung her arm, her breasts pulling taut, making her lovelier than ever, more a pagan goddess than ever. "I worked too hard, too long. They won't take it away from me. I won't let them take it away from me!"
"You've lost it anyway, Nora. It's too late now."
"What are you talking about?"
"About you. About murder. Maybe that first murder was smart. I don't know. Brinkerhoff. Trying to bed you down. Trying to drag you down. Trying to keep you in a world you wanted to escape. Trying to make you an old man's mistress when you wanted to own a world of your own. You lured him away from anybody who knew there was any connection between you. You killed him, you took the money you needed to start you on your way."
"It was my money. My mother's money. I had every right to it."
"Sure. It bought you all this. And a terrible sense of guilt you couldn't escape for a minute. Every little sign looked suspicious. I was working on unsolved murders, trying to please you, but you saw it as my attempting to blackmail you. To threaten you. You stopped being smart then, Nora killing Sheram just looked smart, and killing Tess was even more stupid. I'll tell the police she came here to see you, and they'll find witnesses to prove she was here. You're mixed up in it, and it's all going to fall apart."
"No! Because they're going to blame you! You forced your way in here. I had to kill you. Nobody will ever question me about Sheram or Simpson and your murder will be justified self-defense!"
Alan shivered, staring at the wild lights glittering in Nora's widened eyes. "And how are you going to accomplish that?"
"like this!" she screamed.
She raised her arms like battering rams and ran toward him.
Alan caught his breath, seeing that she meant to shove him over the low railing of her balcony and send him to his death in the street, God knew how many floors below.
"Nora! Don't!" he said.
But it was more like a nightmare than all the nightmarish things that had happened to this moment. There was no flicker of sanity remaining in her distended eyes. Her mouth was stretched taut across her teeth. Her whole body shook with the hatred she felt, the need to kill the one final murder that would secure everything for her.
Her splayed hands struck at him. He leaped back, his legs striking the balcony railing. For a second he tottered there, catching his balance.
He saw Nora go sailing past him as if on some violent hurricane, drawn outward. She didn't even scream. One moment she was poised there, like a bird in flight, and then she plunged downward.
Alan leaped away from the railing, trembling.
There was not a sound. From here on her penthouse balcony, it was as if she had never existed.
But he knew she was dead down there. He heard sounds of ambulances, cars, distant cries.
He covered his face with his hands, sick with agony. All he could see in his mind was the way it was, Nora sprawled broken in death down there, naked.
She had tried to conceal herself from the world, and it had not worked out, and she lay in death, exposed for all the curious to see.
