Murder Queen High, Page 6

  John Henry’s grin had vanished. He put a slow hand into his breast pocket and pulled the pencil into view again. His forehead had corrugated into puzzled lines. “Funny,” he said.

  “Johnny, is something wrong?”

  He didn’t raise his eyes from the Eversharp. “This isn’t my pencil.”

  “You sure?”

  “Of course I’m sure. Never saw it before in my life.”

  Sin laughed. “Well, I wouldn’t worry about it. You probably picked it up somewhere by mistake. Probably when we registered.”

  He paid no attention. The pencil was an ordinary Eversharp, colored black and sea-green, with a gold point and a removable eraser. “That’s what he meant.”

  “Who meant? What are you talking about?”

  “Anglin. ‘You already got it.’ This is what I’ve got, Sin. Anglin stuck this in my pocket when he fell against me last night.”

  His wife sobered. The sunshine filtering through the Venetian blinds wasn’t warm on her any more. “Let’s throw it away, Johnny.”

  “No. Everything I said last night might be right. We should have guessed a pencil before. Remember? In his pockets, Anglin had something to write on but nothing to write with.”

  “Let’s just throw it away. We came up here to have fun.”

  Ordinarily, John Henry would have given in to this typical wifely illogicality. But in his hand was Aladdin’s lamp, Long John Silver’s map, Ali Baba’s magic phrase. Strange excitement gripped him and he temporized. “Well — let’s just look at it a little first.” Sin sighed and lost.

  He turned the Eversharp over and over, while his brown eyes scrutinized its scratched surface. He gave an impatient grunt.

  “What are you looking for, honey?”

  John Henry took off the removable eraser and peered into the dark recesses of the cylinder. There seemed to be something wrapped tightly around the pencil’s lead cartridge. He probed for it with a forefinger, then borrowed one of Sin’s bobby pins. A couple of grunts later, he breathed out in satisfaction and pried a long narrow strip of tightly rolled paper from the interior of the pencil. “Well!” he announced happily.

  “Quick, open it up! What is it?” Now the excitement had Sin too, and she crowded close against her husband’s shoulder.

  The paper was oiled and the tight rolling made it hard to handle since it kept coiling up between John Henry’s fingers. The Conovers perused the column of writing on the paper strip and then looked at each other for an answer.

  “What do you make out of that?” John Henry wanted to know.

  “See?” Sin rejoined. Her point was that they didn’t know any more now than they had before and they should have thrown the pencil away to begin with.

  The writing on the paper resembled mostly an incredibly long safe combination. “Is that what it is?” John Henry asked.

  “That long?”

  “What else could it be?”

  Sin thought for a moment. “Theater seats?” It was her husband’s turn to laugh scornfully. She took the narrow strip of oiled paper from him and read it off slowly, carefully. “R-1. L-3. R-2. L-1. R-2. L-3. R-1. L-2. R-1. L-1. R-2. L-3. R-2. L-5. R-1. L-3. R-2. L-1. R-1.”

  “Must be a code,” John Henry muttered. “R and L usually stand for right and left, but maybe this is a cipher.”

  “I don’t know,” Sin admitted. Then she added, “I don’t want to know.”

  John Henry wound up the oiled paper and replaced it in the barrel of the Eversharp. This done, he began to amble around the room, speculatively appraising the walls and furniture.

  “What are you up to now?”

  “Sin, what’s the most likely place to find a pencil?”

  “I don’t know — in the desk, I guess.”

  John Henry nodded. Sin could tell from the set of his mouth that his mind was made up about something. He pulled open the center drawer of the small redwood writing desk, deposited the Eversharp reverently in the pencil trough, and closed the drawer again. “Psychology,” he explained condescendingly: “The best place to hide anything is right under people’s noses. They never think to look in the obvious places.”

  Sin remembered her own luck along this line in parlor games but said nothing. The sooner the pencil was stolen and gone, the better. “Hey, where you going, Johnny?”

  “Back in a few minutes,” John Henry said from the doorway. “After all that’s happened, I want to grill this Jordan woman.”

  “Johnny, you come back here!”

  “I won’t be long — ”

  “John Henry — I warn you — ”

  “I know you’ll be reasonable, Sin.”

  John Henry Conover closed the blue door in time to block the pillow hurled by his reasonable wife.

  “Make it good,” Barselou gritted between his teeth to the plate-glass window. “Or make it funny. I’d like to laugh.”

  Behind him, across the broad desk, Odell quailed in the leather chair and pounded a pudgy hand impotently against the armrest. “I didn’t shoot him!”

  “If you hadn’t been in such a hurry with your gun last night, Anglin would have strolled right in here. We’d have a few right answers instead of a flock of wrong guesses.”

  “I knew you’d take it this way,” muttered Odell miserably.

  Barselou turned to consider him sarcastically. “You want a merit badge or something, fat boy? You not only kill off the goose but you make it so hot around here we can’t even look for the eggs.”

  “I didn’t kill him,” the plump aide repeated wearily. “Maybe Conover did, I don’t know.”

  “Sure — Conover’s got long arms. Reached around and shot Anglin in the back. Then he swallowed the gun.”

  “They didn’t have to come alone. Maybe they brought some armor along. I tell you I saw somebody pull a gun down at the end of the alley.” Odell’s eyes were redder than ever and his round cheeks twitched. “Lay can tell you — that’s not my bullet in Anglin’s back.”

  Barselou snorted. “Ask Lay — that’s your best yet. We’d all be in the gas chamber. They don’t call it anything but first degree when you plug a guy in the shoulder, chase him around all evening, then drill him through the back. And then this!” He yanked open a bottom drawer and lifted yards of gay cloth into view. It was the Arab burnoose. “You leave this lying in the alley. Didn’t want to make Lay guess at anything, did you? Lucky I found it instead.”

  Odell wisely kept silent. After a moment while Barselou clenched and unclenched his big fists, he thought it safe to ask, “What do you want me to do now?”

  “Nothing,” Barselou snapped. “You’re dead on this job. Get out to my place and lay low till this blows over.”

  “Okay.” The plump man squinted in weary relief and heaved himself to his feet. “I’m bushed from staying in the car all night.”

  “Don’t think I got any sleep, either. Odell, we got to find what Anglin knew about the Queen. She’s too attractive to hide out forever.”

  “I’ll wait for you to call me, chief,” Odell said.

  Barselou watched his henchman trudge for the door and scowled after him. Too bad Odell had canceled out his own usefulness. Good tough boy — if he just wasn’t so quick on the trigger. But the Conovers would remember him. He wasn’t good to have around.

  Barselou’s eyes pointed at the grain of the desk top, unfocused, analyzing. The Conovers. There had been nothing in their luggage, according to Gayner. Maybe it had been left in the first cottage — 15. They’d been pretty upset about being moved.

  That girl — Faye Jordan — was in there now, but he’d better tell Gayner to search the place carefully. No use overlooking any angles.

  Barselou picked up the phone and began to dial.

  “My business sense must have gotten the better of my social graces,” apologized Mr. Trim. He put his straw hat back on his head and pulled it down tightly to keep as much sun from his scalp as possible.

  Thelma Loomis sat at an umbrella-shaded table on
the yellow tile bank of the swimming pool. She had been pretending to read the Sunday comic section while her eyes traveled a regular course between Dick Tracy and the silver-thatched Sagmon Robottom on the opposite bank.

  “Perfectly all right,” she said unenthusiastically. “You’re not the first fellow to run from me.” From the corner of her eye, the Hollywood woman saw Mr. Trim’s gnarled hand close over the back of the other canvas chair at the table. Involuntarily, she groaned.

  Trim said, “Thanks — I guess I will sit for a while.” Miss Loomis laid her funny paper on the metal table between them. Across the pool, Robottom idly kicked at blue water with his muscular legs while he talked gaily with a young girl in a white knit bathing suit.

  The four of them were alone at the poll. Most of the hotel guests were Sunday morning sleepers. The Las Dunas swimming pool lay against the knee of a hill and had been expensively disguised as a small lake. A rough oval in shape, it was surrounded on three sides by the ubiquitous palm trees which were inset in the cement walk. Some of the fronds hung over the water. Like surrealist satires on the palms, gaudy beach umbrellas over round tables clustered along the banks of the pool.

  Said Mr. Trim, “What are you watching him for?” Thelma Loomis moved her gaze hastily. “Curious,” she said. “I wanted to see how the old goat operated.” Her companion looked shocked. “He’s got quite a reputation around L.A.,” the writer explained gently. “Plus a wife.”

  Trim’s “Ah!” could have meant anything. But he looked disapprovingly at the archaeologist and his brunette consort.

  “That’s no relic he’s found there,” chuckled Miss Loomis.

  The girl’s two-piece swim suit clung insistently to her rounded and enticing body. An inviting face crowned by braids of black hair was turned up attentively to Robottom’s. And he was putting his most charming foot forward. Even across the wide expanse of pool came the constant flash of blinding white teeth in the bronze aquiline face.

  Then the silver-haired man got up lithely and fumbled in the pocket of his discarded beach robe.

  “He’s giving her something!” exclaimed Trim. “Say, is it — a key?”

  “Not so loud, for Pete’s sake,” said Thelma Loomis. Robottom handed the girl a little card that looked like a claim check. She tucked it in the waist of her suit so that the edge showed against her bare stomach. Then he said something and they both laughed.

  Mr. Trim clucked a couple of times. “A lottery. Maybe that ticket was a chance on something.”

  “You can say that again,” the blonde writer murmured.

  Apparently unaware of his audience, the archaeologist stood on the edge of the pool and stretched. Cords of muscle rippled above swim trunks that had been chosen to match his browned skin. The girl had cradled her chin in one hand and was watching him admiringly. Robottom said something over his shoulder to her. Then he launched his long body into a perfect dive, cleaving the blue water.

  Thelma Loomis watched the graceful display he made through the shimmering water as he arched his torso and sounded to the depths of the pool.

  “Say!” whispered Trim, tapping at her hand. “Another married man!”

  Miss Loomis quit wondering about the card and brought her sharp gaze up to the girl opposite. The brunette wasn’t appreciating Sagmon Robottom’s performance at all. Instead, she had her pert face turned to a stocky young man in gray trousers and blue sport coat who had strode purposefully from the direction of the guest cottages.

  “That’s young Conover,” hissed Mr. Trim.

  “Of course,” said Thelma Loomis exasperatedly.

  The girl patted the yellow tiles beside her and Conover sat down awkwardly, folding his legs beneath him.

  Robottom surfaced and blew out water. He looked for applause from the girl. Then he saw the man with whom she was engaged in fascinated conversation. The expression on his face was impossible to catalogue.

  John Henry had no more than determined how to pursue his course of clever questioning when Miss Jordan said matter-of-factly, “I suppose you’re here to find out how I got your cottage.”

  “Uh-well — no,” he managed.

  “Oh, sure you are,” Miss Jordan told him confidently. “Your wife probably sent you.”

  “That’s not true. In fact, she — ”

  The girl’s round eyes brightened still more and she leaned a smooth shoulder closer to him. “Why, Mr. Conover!” her voice caressed his ear. Conover’s stomach tingled. He felt as if he could warm his hands at her purple eyes.

  He glanced around hurriedly. Sin wasn’t in sight. A muscular middle-aged man was flailing up and down the pool, apparently disgruntled over something. And at a table on the other side, Mr. Trim and the fan magazine writer had developed sudden interest in the Sunday comic section.

  “Now, Miss Jordan — ” John Henry edged away from the white knit hip.

  “Call me Faye.”

  “Now, Miss Faye — ”

  “Faye! With an ‘e’ like in ‘easy.’”

  “Now, Faye, with — ”

  “You’re improving — Johnny.”

  “Now — ” said John Henry and forgot what it was. The girl had slid along the yellow tile so that her bare knee nudged his leg. He couldn’t retreat any farther without falling into the pool or actually getting up.

  John Henry started to give the whole thing up when he saw the card tucked into the waistband of her swim suit. Too large for a calling card, it evidently had some engraved letters on the side that was against her flesh. At least, the engraving had dented through onto the blank side in places. What was she doing carrying the card around in her bathing suit?

  “Let’s talk,” he suggested, torn between retreat and curiosity.

  “Intimately,” Faye amended. “You start.”

  “No — let’s talk about you.”

  “All right. Do you know why I think you’re cute?”

  “No — ”

  “It’s because you give a virile impression, as though you could — ”

  “I mean — no, let’s you tell me about yourself.” The fingers with which John Henry intended to steal the card from between her bathing suit and her stomach were turning hot and cold alternately. He fiddled casually with a belt loop on his trousers, wishing his hand wouldn’t perspire so.

  Faye put her crimson lower lip out. ‘Oh, you didn’t want to see me at all! You’re just trying to pump me, squeeze me dry and throw me away. If you don’t build me up, I’ll go talk to that cute boy in the pool.”

  She turned her head toward the white-haired swimmer for a second and John Henry saw his chance. He streaked his hand for the mysterious card. And she turned back.

  “Oh, don’t!” he murmured desperately and dropped his hand. Faye stopped pouting and her small full mouth curved into a wise smile. “I wouldn’t think of it now,” she giggled.

  John Henry had dropped his unsuccessful hand on something warm and firm; he suddenly realized it was her bare leg. He drew back his fingers as from a hot iron. Faye put her face up close and whispered, “Are you a policeman?”

  He didn’t see any connection immediately. “Is that the way — ”

  “I’ll bet you think I had something to do with the murder.”

  “What murder?” He had her now. John Henry breathed deeply, trying to discern the odor of spilled peppermint. All he smelled was overpowering jasmine which made him sneeze.

  “You know what murder, Johnny. It was in the paper this morning.”

  “Oh.” He’d forgotten about the newspapers.

  “Do you think I did?”

  “Well, did you?”

  Faye Jordan shook her black braids disconsolately. “I wish I had. Nobody ever thinks I’m criminal. It’s not exciting. Nothing’s exciting.” Her eyes strayed down to the end of the pool where the athletic man was resting, his brown arms flattened across the tile, the bulk of his body still submerged.

  John Henry considered the engraved card again and was baffled. It had
slipped down inside her white knit trunks. He said suddenly, “Why did you insist on changing cottages with us, Faye?”

  Her wide-eyed stare was innocent. Conover sought in vain for deception behind the purple eyes. “I didn’t, Johnny.”

  John Henry pounced. “Mr. Gayner said you did.”

  Faye rubbed the back of her fist against her chin reproachfully. “You don’t trust me.” Her generous lip trembled.

  “Sure, I trust you, Faye. We — no, I just wondered — and then Gayner said — ”

  “Johnny,” she crooned throatily, “I don’t care what cottage I have. I can sleep anywhere. But that Mr. Gayner insisted that I move to Cottage 15.”

  “Oh-ho!” John Henry said. He heard a sniff from the direction of her turned-up nose, so he patted her shoulder paternally. “That’s okay. I believe you, Faye.”

  She sniffed more happily and stretched her figure toward him as if she expected to be stroked. Her hand rubbed her hip about where John Henry estimated the card had slipped to. “I’m impressed,” Faye whispered. “I’ll bet we’ll be as close as friends can get — darling.”

  John Henry gulped.

  Sin clenched her fists hard. She said to herself: now look here, St. Clair, you are not — positively not — going to lose your temper. Across the pool, Miss Jordan was smiling sleepily up at John Henry’s attentive face. Sin closed her eyes tight and gritted her teeth. Now look here, she began again.

  But she was on fire, from the dark red page-boy down to the crimson toenails that peeked out of her suede sandals. I don’t look so bad, either, she thought. In fact, I look darn good. She was wearing the filmy white blouse that her husband liked — “you know, Sin, one of the ones you can see through” — and the full peasant skirt. The ensemble chopped at least five years off her age and made her look a saucy eighteen again. Anyway, not like a cast-aside wife of three year’s standing.

  She speared another angry glance at the couple across the pool. John Henry was helping the Jordan girl to her feet. Her husband flashed a guilty look at Sin and then the brunette seized his hand gaily and started to drag him along the jagged path toward the guest cottages. Sin’s lips pressed out flat in a thin red line and she clenched her fists.