THE RADIO’S artful voice said, “This is KGB, San Diego’s Don Lee station. Stay tuned for the San Diego Scrapbook with Gloria Winke. A transcribed announcement.”
A tinkle of chords and a swing quartet broke into happy song.
“For teeth that are whiter
And quite a
Delighter,
(The cost is much lighter)
Get brighter —
Get BRY-TER!”
Sin flung herself across the bed and plunged the room into silence with a vicious twist of the knob. She was still panting with fright. And exertion.
Their clothes were scattered haphazardly around the bedroom. The two big suitcases yawned toothless on the bed. Sin had locked herself in the cottage and was obeying Sagmon Robottom’s warning as quickly as possible. She gathered up an armful of lingerie and hurled it into the emptier suitcase.
When she picked up her husband’s brown dress shoes, her lip commenced to tremble. Where was John Henry? It wasn’t like him to dash off like that without a word unless — Sin’s heart thudded faster than ever — unless he had learned something about the murder. Why did he insist on getting mixed up in things that were none of his business?
Sin wrapped the shoes in tissue paper she had saved from the unpacking the night before. Surely nothing could have happened to him in a crowded resort like Azure. Yet he was so dumb sometimes about the most obvious things.
The shoe wrappings rustled as she laid the package on her stack of slips. She caught herself watching the redwood desk in the outer room — the desk that held the Eversharp and the cipher. There was always the police. Sin turned her back defiantly on the telephone. If she stared the police looking for John Henry and he was perfectly all right, he’d be angry about all the fuss. Nevertheless …
Sin was still pondering the question perturbedly when she heard a door close softly in the next cottage.
She got up off her knees from atop the suitcase, letting the straps slip free. That was Miss Jordan’s cottage next door and if she had come back then John Henry … Eagerly, she peeked through the slats of the window blind.
It was not John Henry who had pulled the blue door to gently behind him and paused on the porch of Cottage 15. It was Gayner, his cadaverous face peering cautiously up and down the line of silent cottages. Then he stepped off the porch and started walking quickly down the flagstone path back to the hotel.
Sin opened the front door to her own cottage and stepped outside. Gayner had already vanished around a turn. Without reason, Sin began to run, anxious not to lose sight of him. Gayner was a tangible link between her and the tangled web that might have enmeshed her husband again. The assistant manager certainly was privileged to inspect the cottages whenever he chose — but something furtive in Gayner’s manner warned her that this had been no official visit.
Gayner was just going through the glass doors into the Las Dunas lobby when Sin reached the sunken patio. She slowed her pace as she crossed through the gay umbrellas and lolling guests.
Somebody called her name behind her. Sin turned quickly, a hopeful smile beginning on her generous mouth. The smile aborted. It was Sagmon Robottom, his bronze face stern, sauntering toward her from the pool. Sin whirled and fled. “Mrs. Conover!” Robottom called again.
She rushed up the steps and into the lobby. Gayner had gone past his registration desk without pausing and was now going down the front steps and crossing the driveway. His walk was brisk and purposeful.
“You look like you’re in a hurry,” Thelma Loomis said in her semimasculine voice, as the two women dodged around each other at the front entrance.
“Thanks,” Sin said automatically and kept going. Mr. Trim was just getting out of the elevator. He lifted his straw hat high as if to beckon Sin closer. She gave him a tight smile and didn’t slacken pace. Vernon laboriously forced the glass door open for her.
Gayner’s brown-suited back was still in sight through the driveway border of palms and tamarisks. He was about fifty yards in the lead. This had been cut to twenty-five by the time the assistant manager reached Coachella Street. Sin loitered behind the concealing bole of a palm while Gayner looked up and down the peaceful street. Then he darted across and went hurriedly down the hill toward the center of town.
Near the corner of Cahuilla Street, a block away from the Las Dunas, Gayner sidestepped suddenly and disappeared from sight. Sin’s pulse quickened but she made herself amble along in a tourist gait. If Gayner had realized he was being followed, she didn’t want to appear suspicious. She could just keep going downtown.
However, Gayner was apparently oblivious of his tracker. When she reached the spot where he’d faded from view, Sin found he’d merely angled sharply into a narrow alley. As she walked past, Gayner was twenty or thirty yards up the alley, opening the back door of one of the buildings.
The place looked familiar and it came to Sin why it should. Homer Anglin had died there. Gayner was letting himself quietly into the Ship of the Desert.
Gayner knocked on the door to Barselou’s office. There was no reply, and the beat of his knuckles echoed emptily throughout the big deserted restaurant. He glanced back over his shoulder. Down on the main floor stood nothing but white-clothed tables, a flock of immobile sheep stabled in chairs.
He opened the door partway and edged around it into the office. It too was forsaken. The desk had been swept clean of papers. The typewriter on the metal stand in the corner squatted like a hooded falcon. Only a meager amount of the early afternoon sunlight seeped in through the closed Venetian blinds.
Gayner sat down behind the desk in the swivel chair and stretched. He found a cigarette in the center drawer, rolled a match from his vest pocket and scratched it into flame on the sole of his shoe. Breathing out smoke, he pulled the telephone close to him on the desk.
The operator asked him to repeat the number. Then there was a humming of wires and then the measured cadence of the bell.
“Hello, there,” said Gayner finally. “Give me Mr. Barselou, please.” He took another long puff at the cigarette while he waited. “Oh — hello, Mr. Barselou. Gayner speaking.”
He listened heedfully, nodding his head in agreement.
“That’s what I wanted to tell you. I searched the Jordan girl’s cottage.” He listened briefly again. “No, sir. Nothing there. No, I’d swear to it.” A smile slid over Gayner’s pointed features. “Thanks, Mr. Barselou. I try to be thorough.” Then, anxiously, “Are you any closer to the Queen?”
The receiver rasped irritably. Gayner’s head bobbed up and down vigorously. “I understand that, Mr. Barselou. All the angles at my end are covered. We’ll find her yet.” The attentive listening again. Then, “All right, I’ll go through that one too. I’ll call you later, Mr. Barselou. Yes, sir. Goodbye.”
Gayner replaced the receiver and sat in the striped light, silently meditating. Then he neatly punched out the cigarette’s glowing stub against the rim of the metal wastebasket.
Sin peeked between the spines of a fan-shaped palm leaf. From her hiding place among the music racks on the bandstand, she watched Gayner come down the stairs from the second floor balcony and cross the the fiber tunnel that concealed the swinging kitchen doors. A moment later, she heard the faraway slam of the restaurant’s back door.
To be safe, she waited as long as she could and then let out her breath. A church hush lay over the Ship of the Desert. Both the water and lights of the neon waterfall were turned off for the day. She was all alone in the dead restaurant. Sin began to feel more foolish than nervous. She had followed Gayner here without trouble — but what next? She’d have a hard time explaining to anyone, even an unbiased judge, what exactly she was doing trespassing. For that matter, she didn’t even know herself.
Sin slipped down off the bandstand and tiptoed over to the twisted ironwork staircase that led to the balcony. Since she was trespassing anyway, she might as well make a good job of it. Wouldn’t John Henry be disgusted if she found out something important and he didn’t? Hugging the thought to her, Sin climbed the stairs, stepping carefully so her sandals wouldn’t scrape on the tile steps. At the top, she paused to listen. She heard nothing to keep her from opening the door to the office which Gayner had just quitted.
The leather-paneled room was melancholy in the scant bars of sunlight that fell across carpet and desk top. Cigarette smoke still hung in the air and a thin thread flowed upward from the wastebasket, silent evidence of Gayner’s recent presence. For some reason, the tobacco smoke gave Sin courage, adding a familiar note to the gloomy silence.
There was nothing interesting in sight, so Sin tried the desk drawers. They were unlocked. In the center drawer, under an open pack of cigarettes, was a sheaf of papers held together by a wire clip. She sat down in the big chair and liberated the sheets from the imprisoning clip.
The papers were all maps apparently of the area surrounding Azure, the Salton Sea and Borego Valley. The first one was labeled in ink: “Flood of 1849.” Penciled under this was the handwritten notation, “Very rough reconstruction — prob, inaccurate.” A large area of the drawing had been shaded, most of it lying south of Azure.
The next map was no more explicit. The date was 1891. Again a portion of the map was shaded but Sin discovered by comparison that the area was slightly smaller than on the first map, and more oval.
The date on the third map was 1905-07 and it was titled: “Formation of S/S.” The familiar darkened area was present, but the topography was drawn in greater detail, with place names added. Sin recognized Highway 99 which they had followed north from Brawley to Azure. At the southern tip of the Santa Rosa Mountains, another and smaller section had been shaded, its vertical lines superimposed on the horizontal stripes of the larger expanse. A cross had been drawn in pencil at a spot in this area and a notation made.
The rest of the papers were heavier and glossier-aerial photographs of desert country on which she distinguished nothing familiar. She laid them aside and went back to the drawings with labels.
Sin squinted at the 1905-07 map in the brown light and then held it up to catch a little of the brightness filtering through the Venetian blinds.
Light, torrents of it, flooded the office. Sin shrieked and jumped up.
“Bad for your eyes, Mrs. Conover — reading in the dark,” Vernon lisped. He leaned sorrowfully in the doorway, his hand still on the light switch.
Sin swallowed and tried to say something. All that came out of her dry throat was a croak.
Vernon moved toward the desk. Sin backed away, her hands outstretched to ward him off. The maps floated to the carpet. “I’ll scream,” she whispered.
Vernon shook his head mournfully and Sin saw for the first time that he was pointing a gun at her — a short gray automatic that matched the lapels and trouser-stripes of his maroon uniform. “Don’t scream,” he said, looking the happiest that Sin had seen him. “Keep quiet and you might be all right.” He raised his voice. “All right.”
Gayner stepped through the open doorway and regarded their captive with chilly amusement. “I hope we didn’t give you too much of a shock, Mrs. Conover,” he said pleasantly. “But you can understand we had to take certain precautions. Vernon, I believe you may put away the gun. Mrs. Conover realizes that she’ll have to do as we say.”
Vernon appeared displeased as he slipped the automatic under the tail of his tunic into a hip pocket.
“What do you want from me?” Sin quavered, her eyes darting between the two. Her lips were trembling so that it was an effort to form the words.
Gayner said heartily, “That’s exactly what I was going to ask you. I’d be surprised if Mr. Barselou didn’t repeat the same question. Don’t make him repeat it too often.”
“Start thinking up a good answer,” Vernon advised her. “If you can.”
Gayner motioned Sin courteously toward the door. He followed her out of the office and down the wrought-iron staircase. The young bellboy threaded a path before them among the empty tables and pushed through the swinging doors into the kitchen. The hiss of hinges and their footsteps were the only noises.
No one had mentioned John Henry, Sin thought. Was that good or bad? Well, she’d soon know. This would certainly be a lesson to her. She stepped high over the scrubbed spot on the kitchen floor where Anglin’s body had lain last night. It might be the final lesson.
“Where’s the car?” asked Vernon. “I’ll bet we don’t have any keys.”
“The usual place. I have keys,” Gayner reassured him quietly. Before he opened the back door, “Now, Mrs. Conover, I needn’t warn you that screaming or running or any commotion at all will be utterly useless. And very foolish on your part, I assure you.”
They went out into the alley. Sin fought to grasp her dilemma. Here was not the terror of those frozen moments by the aviary when the white-haired savage had threatened her. The men walking on either side were not strangers. They were prosaic everyday persons — the assistant manager of her hotel and the bellhop who had brought her breakfast. Surely, Vernon in his ridiculous pillbox hat and overdecorated uniform couldn’t actually kill her with that gun he carried!
Sin thought hard and said, “Wait a minute.” The trio stopped. Gayner eyed her inquiringly.
Sin did her best to look tough and confidential at the same time. “Suppose,” she said, “I was to spill it to you torpedoes and not to Barselou.”
Vernon asked, puzzled, “What’s a torpedo?” Gayner said, “Yes?” encouragingly.
“Well — ” Sin groped for words. “If you got there first, you wouldn’t have to split with the big boy.” She hoped it meant more to them than it did to her.
“We certainly wouldn’t,” Gayner ruminated. “But, Mrs. Conover, can you give us the correct information?”
Sin nodded emphatically. “Play along with me and we’ll all wear diamonds.”
Vernon said, “I’m right for once.” A smile nearly encroached on his freckled features. Then he confronted the other man bitterly. “You’ll probably claim you’ve been thinking that all along.”
“No,” said Gayner. “You win.” He prodded Sin toward the street. “I didn’t think you knew anything, Mrs. Conover. Mr. Barselou was about to agree. I thought you were just a harmless snooper. But this puts a different light on it.”
“You’re going to take me to Barselou, anyway?”
“Definitely. You can make your bargain with him. As you quaintly put it, he’s the big boy.”
“But I really don’t know anything!” Sin cried desperately. The dam of reason broke. Mounting waves of dread overwhelmed her. The men beside her were prosaic — but their matter-of-fact purposefulness was a gripping peril in itself. “I was just kidding!” She begged with wide shiny eyes.
“Come on,” said Vernon. “I’m supposed to be on duty.”
They urged her out into the white sunlight of Date Street. A few paces down the block, a sober black Buick sedan nuzzled the curb. The two men walked her quickly toward the car.
From behind them, a man’s high-pitched voice called, “Yoo-hoo! Mrs. Conover!”
“You don’t hear him,” Gayner muttered and quickened his steps.
“Mrs. Conover!” Tires whirred on cement and Mr. Trim appeared alongside the trio, perched on a bicycle. Coming up behind him was the chunky figure of Thelma Loomis, also pedaling energetically. The Bry-Ter representative showed all his bad teeth in a waggish grin. “Ah, Mrs. Conover — you were trying to run away from me!”
“Not from you!” Sin choked.
Vernon and Gayner pushed against her from either side. Gayner said hurriedly, “We’re in quite a rush, Mr. Trim, so if — ”
Sin wriggled forward frantically. “Don’t wait for me, Mr. Gayner. The streets are too crowded today for what you had in mind.”
Vernon’s hand strayed to the pocket under the tail of his tunic. Gayner’s eyes were startled, but he said smoothly, “Oh, we wouldn’t think of going without you, Mrs. Conover.”
“I’ve been wanting to talk to Mr. Trim, anyway.” Sin put a hand on Vernon’s arm, pulling the little bellboy’s hand away from his hip pocket. “It was nice of you to offer me the ride.”
Thelma Loomis got off her bicycle and grated, “I’m glad that’s settled. You take this machine, young lady — I’m not built for it. I shouldn’t have left the hotel at all, but Trim here talked me into it.” She shoved the bike at Sin. “Here — or don’t you think these things are safe?”
“Oh, yes!” breathed Sin, grabbing the handlebars.
Gayner bowed slightly. “We’ll run along then, Mrs. Conover. I see we can’t do anything to change your mind.”
Sin couldn’t do anything but shake her head.
Gayner smiled frugally. “Some other time.” He jerked his head at the open-mouthed Vernon and the two got into the Buick. It slid away from the curb and turned the corner into Cahuilla Street.
Thelma Loomis clapped Sin on a trembling shoulder. “You and Trim have a good time.” She strode chuckling up the street toward the Las Dunas.
Mr. Trim asked, “What was it you had to say to me, Mrs. Conover?”
“This!” Sin cried, laughing brokenly. Disregarding the straw hat he clasped against his chest, she threw her arms around the little man and kissed his bald spot resoundingly. “Mr. Trim, I love you!”
Mr. Trim looked solemn. “But what about your husband?”
“Whereabouts you want to go?” the truck driver growled.
John Henry frowned and then wished he hadn’t because it made his headache worse. “Any place in town,” he said. The driver eased his foot away from the accelerator and the huge freight truck slowed down for the 25-mile speed limit that began with the outskirts of Azure.
As the truck crept into the center of the city the vacant lots and stucco homes became fewer. Here were shops, many of them branches of New York and San Francisco and Los Angeles stores, crowded close together and interspersed with neon-fronted and palatial nightclubs. Souvenir stands dotted street corners. Here and there, conspicuous in austerity, a branch brokerage office awaited the vacationing industrialist.
Few cars crawled the street today and only a sprinkling of people, although none of the stores observed Sunday as a holiday. Most of the tourists wore informal garb which was virtually a uniform in Azure — the men in shorts, slacks and T-shirts, the women in any of those, plus sun suits. Now and then this gaudy uniformity would be broken by the blue levis, plaid shirt and ten-gallon hat of a dude cowhand from one of the surrounding ranch resorts. Or the moccasined and brightly blanketed Indians who made their livelihood by posing for the eager cameras of Eastern tourists.
John Henry forgot his aching head for a moment as he got his first good look at the bizarre city. “What did you say?” he had to ask when he realized his burly companion had spoken.
“I was saying,” the driver repeated ungraciously, “that you really see some characters around this place. Take a gander at that creep on the bike — a black suit in this heat!” His calloused forefinger gestured in disgust toward a couple approaching on the opposite side of the avenue.
John Henry followed the grimy finger. Then his eyes lit up. “Stop the car!” he yelled. Alarmed, the driver jammed on his brakes and the big truck and trailer screeched to a halt in the middle of Date Street.
“What the hell — ” he was beginning.
John Henry had already opened the door and now he vaulted to the pavement. “Thanks a lot for the ride,” he tossed over his shoulder and darted across the street.
“Sin!”
The red-haired girl on the bicycle looked up. Her eyes got wider and wider. Then she put her hands on her cheeks and screamed. “Johnny!”
Her handle bars spun unguided into Trim’s bicycle. Cement and sky whirled crazily for a moment. When the sky was on top for good again, Sin was sitting on the cement without a vehicle. Both bicycles were heaped near by on Mr. Trim.
“Sin, Sin — are you all right?” John Henry’s voice said. Sin shook her head to clear it of everything except what she wanted most to see. Then she reached her arms up for her husband. He hugged her. She laughed against his shoulder.
“Johnny, darling, I was worried sick —
“I’m sorry, Sin. I shouldn’t have — ”
“I was afraid — I didn’t know — and those men — and the gun — they were going to — ”
“You don’t seem to be bruised,” said John Henry, surveying her lovingly.
Sin put an experimental hand behind her. Then she sighed. “It won’t show.”
Amid a jangling of metal, Mr. Trim arose from the street to join them. His lower lip trembled. “Vicious!” he said and kicked the tire of the top bicycle. It rolled over lazily and impaled a pedal through the straw hat he hadn’t picked up yet. He clenched his fists and drew ten deep breaths.
Sin began to get back some presence of mind. “I’m awfully sorry, Mr. Trim. I was so worried about Johnny and when I saw him — ”
The Bry-Ter representative summoned up a brave smile. It faded quite a bit as he discovered one serge trouser leg was ripped from the hip down, exposing a milk-white thigh and calf. “They were new, too,” he reminded himself.
“I’ll insist on taking care of this,” John Henry said.
Trim shook his head wisely. “Expense account.”
Sin wrinkled her nose at the tangled bikes. “For real enjoyment give me a well-boiled icycle,” she quoted.
The tooth-paste man looked puzzled. “That’s a Spoonerism,” explained Sin apologetically. “From Reverend Spooner of Oxford. He was always talking in reverse English. My mind’s cluttered with useless quotes like that.”
“Let’s get out of the sun,” Conover suggested. His headache was beginning to nag him again. Trim passed a palm cautiously over his naked scalp and agreed eagerly.
Across Date Street, the broad walk had been roofed over to shade the tables of a sidewalk cafe. They dragged the bicycles to the curb, sat down at the table nearest the street and listened to John Henry relate his adventures.
“I got dizzy all of a sudden,” he concluded. “When I woke up I was all by myself in this empty library. Somebody had gone through my pockets. Faye was gone.”
“She drugged you and searched you!” Sin said accusingly.
“I guess so. Anyway, I climbed out a window and walked to the main road and hitchhiked back here.” John Henry looked uncomfortable. “All right, I made a fool of myself. Next time I’ll keep my nose in my own business like you, Sin.”
His wife shifted uneasily and picked at a loose thread on her gay skirt. “Well,” she murmured, “as a matter of record — ” While she told of Sagmon Robottom and his mysterious warning, John Henry’s chin began to jut forward. As she continued with the story of following Gayner and finding the flood maps, his face turned red. And when Sin had ended the tale of the near kidnaping, her husband slammed his fist down on the linoleum-topped table hard enough to bring a waiter scurrying out from the café interior.
“That does it! That’s enough for us, Sin.”
“What would you like, sir?” the waiter requested timidly.
“Nothing in this town!” John Henry roared, glaring at him. The waiter backed up and regarded him with bewilderment.
There was no amusement on Trim’s face as he hunched across from the Conovers. He confessed slowly, “I don’t know what to say. My instructions never allowed for this sort of thing.”
“We came here on a vacation,” John Henry stated, and his voice was dangerously level. “Not to sun ourselves on a firing range. Not to be searched. Not to have my wife threatened.”
“I’ll admit that all this hasn’t been very pleasant, but before you do anything hasty think of the Company that sent you here — free of charge. I feel personally responsible. What could I ever tell my Company?”
“Tell them to stop sending people to this munitions dump! We’re through with it.”
“Please reconsider. Please stay till tomorrow, at least. Until I can get in touch with the Company. I’ll send a wire — ”
John Henry sucked in his breath. He looked at his wife questioningly. “I’ll leave it to you, Sin. You won this vacation. Do we go or stay?”
Sin spoke for the first time in several minutes. “We’re already packed,” she said.