Stone pillars sat on either side of a driveway wide enough to take a circus caravan. The estate was maybe six prime acres. In the foggy moonlight ahead I saw a rambling colonial home that easily put Davies in the upper 2-percent income bracket of the city. His Mercedes-Benz sat in the drive where it curved past the house. A four-stall garage gleamed white through the murk. Beyond the garage was a tennis court, tarpaulined for the winter.
I parked, crunched over tiny pieces of gravel to the broad porch, ascended the steps, and used the brass knocker to rile the night.
The harsh noise it made embarrassed me. Probably Davies had a wife, maybe even children still living at home, and this was going to be terrible for them.
A woman wearing big pink Martian hair curlers and a flannel bathrobe opened the door. “Yes?”
“Are you Mrs. Davies?”
“I’m Myrna, the maid.”
“I need to speak to Mr. Davies.”
She peeked outside to his car. Then she peeked at me.
“I’m afraid he’s asleep.”
“I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to wake him up.”
I succeeded in making her angry. “If you’re not off this porch and out of this driveway in one minute, I will be calling the police.”
The slap of slippers sounded on the polished floor behind her.
Davies, formidable in his robe and looking not a bit sleepy, appeared behind her.
He seemed shocked when he saw me. “Aren’t you the fellow I met at Bryce’s tonight?”
I nodded.
“What the hell are you doing here?”
“I need to speak to you.”
“About what, for Christ’s sake?”
“The Palms.”
There is no other way to describe it—his face died. Human light left his eyes and his mouth went slack. He looked old and beaten.
“We’ll be all right, Myrna,” he said in barely a whisper.
“But—” She was still angry, even if he wasn’t.
“Please,” he said.
After another scowl in my direction she left.
He led me inside and across the expanse of floor to a door on the right of the grand staircase.
Inside was a den such as Ronald Colman might have had in an old MGM movie. There was a single twist. Instead of being filled with traditional culture—busts of composers, matched first editions of Henry James and Herman Melville—what he had here was a repository for artifacts of the American West. From the elk horns displayed on the far wall to the beautifully framed Frederic Remington paintings, this room was a tribute to pioneer days.
He still wasn’t speaking. He went over to an impressive bar and poured great amounts of bourbon from a decanter into glasses. He brought me mine, then sat down in a throne-like leather chair. He indicated for me to sit too.
Then he did something quite surprising. From the pocket of his robe, he brought out a revolver and aimed it directly at my face.
“You have five minutes to explain why I shouldn’t kill you.” He waggled the gun. “And don’t think I couldn’t get away with it. In case my house doesn’t convince, let me say that I am a very powerful man in the city.”
I said it simply. “The woman you were with tonight is dead. Somebody cut her throat.”
The way he started, I could see that it shocked him. “Bullshit,” he snapped.
“It’s a little late at night for me to come out here with made-up stories.”
I had the impression the gun was going to fall from his hand. He sat there with his wide body looking tough and in charge, but suddenly all his strength seemed to leave him.
He said, to himself, “She had a little girl. She showed me her picture once.”
“Larry, the night clerk, is probably going to implicate you in this. If I were the DA, I’d assume you killed her. I followed you from Hammond’s tonight, right to the motel. There wasn’t a ten-minute lapse from the time you left to the time the body was found. That would mean somebody had to have moved pretty fast. That kind of thing happens in movies, but almost never in real life.”
“What the hell were you following me for?”
My anger started to return as I had to explain myself. I took the photo of him with Jane from my pocket and flashed it at him.
“Recognize this?”
“Of course I do,” he snapped. “I’ve been paying for it for several months now.”
“Paying?”
“I assume you know how blackmail works.” His sarcasm conveyed his anger. “If I’d known that that bitch was—”
“I’m going to give you an opportunity to take that back. I happen to be very fond of this woman. Very fond.”
He sized me up, then decided to back off. At least a bit. “We had a little fun together. A little ‘casual nudity,’ as I call it. We didn’t even do anything. Just—” He shook his bald head. He was on the verge of becoming an old man. Tonight was hurrying the process along. “I guess I’d better tell you about my wife. She suffers from heart disease. Her doctors feel she could die at any time. They’ve warned me against stress or any kind of emotional upset where she’s concerned. She’s been in bed for the better part of the last six years. I know this may smack of rationalization, but I need a bit of life too. So I—play around—nothing very serious. The—woman—tonight—Jackie. We have our fun, but she’s actually a decent woman. Just happens to be a prostitute is all.”
He gripped the gun more firmly. It was once more pointing at my face.
“Anyway, I need some kind of life. One night after a party at Bryce’s, I met—Jane. We ended up at the Palms, rolling around on the bed. It was all pretty silly. As I said, nothing happened. Then the photographs started coming in the mail—you can imagine what they’d do to my wife.”
“How much did you have to pay?”
He became cognizant of the gun. He looked at it, at me, put it back in his pocket. Then he put his hands over his face and started shaking his head. Anybody else I would have suspected of crying quietly. But not him.
He looked up at me and shrugged. “When I was young I always thought that at sixty-five I’d lose interest in sex. But it’s just the opposite. Now it’s assumed a monumental importance in my life. I’ve retired from my aviation company except for the board work I do and— Sex is still very, very important. That’s why I liked Jackie so much. She was patient and kind and very good for me.”
“Yes.”
None of this made sense. Jane part of a blackmail ring?
“How much did you pay?” I asked again.
“Three thousand a month.”
I whistled.
“But you never found out who was sending them?”
“No,” he said, “and it’s a good thing I didn’t.”
“Why?”
“Because I would have killed them.” He shrugged. “It wasn’t the money, it was the potential harm it could have done my wife if she’d ever opened the envelope by mistake.” He sighed. “And now—if I’m implicated in all this—”
He sounded very different from the man who’d earlier bragged about how important he was in this city.
The knock almost got lost in the wind. A tiny knock.
Davies swung his large head around and stood up instantly, putting a finger to his lips for silence.
He opened the door and a frail, once handsome woman came delicately inside.
He put an arm around her, and it was easy to see in this gesture how much he cared about her.
“I heard all the noise, honey,” she said, “the voices at the front door downstairs and—”
Then she saw me and I was afraid she was going to faint.
The angles of her face drew even tighter and she looked nervously to her husband for an explanation of my presence.
“This is an old friend of mine, darling,” he said. “His car happened to stall a few blocks from here and so he decided to walk over and phone a garage from here.”
His eyes begged me to leave.
I stood up, walked over, took the lady’s hand. “A little piece of bad luck. Sorry I had to disturb you.”
“Oh, that’s all right. I’ve become an expert where bad luck’s concerned, I’m afraid.” She was so drawn and gaunt I didn’t mind her self-pity.
“Well,” I said, clapping Davies manfully on the shoulder, “the garage truck will probably be there by now. I’ll walk back.”
“Good luck,” he said.
I looked at his wife and then at him. Somehow I didn’t hate him the way I had when he’d only been a man in a picture with Jane.
“Good luck to you,” I said. I think I was being sincere.