Show Red for Danger Page 16

And Charles Forniss looked at him blankly. Forniss repeated, “Girl?”

  “She is here,” Latham said, and yelled it. “Where is she? What’s happened to—”

  “Get back,” Heimrich said, to Forniss. “She’s probably there by now, even if she—”

  Forniss did not wait. He went. Latham clenched his fists again, confronted Heimrich again.

  “If anything—” he shouted.

  “Shut up,” Heimrich said. “Quit yelling. Go with Forniss.”

  Heimrich himself ran to the glass paneling between pool and living room. He did not wait to see if Latham went as he was told. He wasted moments finding the handhold hollowed in the glass. Then he slid the panel open violendy and ran on slippery tile—it would be a fine ending to this confused affair if he fell into the pool—toward the door which opened on the dressing room. His shoes clattered on the tile. But there was no longer any use in silence.

  Heimrich and Forniss confronted each other at opposite ends of a narrow room, with a shower stall in one corner, a dressing table along one wall. There was nothing else between them. There was no black-clad girl in the room. Latham appeared behind Forniss and demanded, in a shout, to be told where Chris was.

  It took only moments to find out, not where she was, but how she had got away from where they were. She had not bothered, not taken time, to close the studio door behind her. The shadow of Chris Waggoner had rejoined other shadows of the night.

  Heimrich had run halfway down the driveway toward the road, and Forniss had had time to scramble some distance down the path, before they heard the putt-putt of the scooter. They were too distant to consult, and did not need to. They plodded back and met on the turnaround, by the Buick station wagon in which George Latham had precipitously arrived. Latham was getting into it.

  “Now Mr. Latham,” Heimrich said, and took his arm. Latham got out of the Buick. He whirled as he backed out of it, wrenched his arm free. He faced Heimrich then, glared at him—a large and solid and very angry young man. His fists doubled.

  “Now Mr. Latham,” Heimrich said, mildly. “Do we have to go through that again?”

  The glare faded from Latham’s face, faded slowly, left behind it an expression of anxiety. (What mobile faces these actors have, Heimrich thought.)

  “Suppose,” Heimrich said, “you tell me what this is all about, Mr. Latham.”

  Latham made a quick gesture, as if he would relegate that to some other time.

  “You’re going to stand here?” he said. “Talk? Not try to find out what’s happening to Chris?”

  “She’s going somewhere on the scooter,” Heimrich said. “Probably back to the Center, to the Inn. She’ll be all—”

  “How the hell do you know she will?” Latham said.

  The answer was obvious.

  “Why shouldn’t she be?”

  “Because,” Latham said, “can’t you see—she’s trying to find something. This—this thing you were hinting about. Whatever it was that somebody was after and got the design by mistake for. For God’s sake, man!”

  “She told you that? Did she tell you what she expected to find?”

  Latham made the gesture again.

  “You’re wasting time,” Heimrich said. “She told you she was coming here? To—find something she’d missed before? Something she couldn’t let us find?”

  “For God’s sake,” Latham said. “Not that she’d left. Something that would prove what she guessed.”

  “Which was?”

  Latham shook his head slowly.

  “I don’t know,” he said, and his voice was suddenly dull. “She wouldn’t tell me. Said it was only a guess.”

  “But, that she was coming here? To look?”

  Latham shook his head again. He said he hadn’t known about that. He said “the damn fool kid,” and there was anxiety in his voice; more than anxiety. (In his actor’s voice.)

  “You’ll just stand here?” he said. “Do nothing? Until—until I go through the whole thing?”

  “Now Mr. Latham,” Heimrich said, and meant “yes” and was so understood.

  Then—

  There had been nothing tangible, George Latham told them. Chris Waggoner had seemed, to him, abstracted. “As if she had something in that mind of hers.” He had tried to find out what; been told that it had nothing to do with him; told that he would learn soon enough.

  “This,” Heimrich said, “was after I had a telephone conversation? That a good many of you overheard?”

  Latham looked at him through abruptly narrowed eyes. He said, slowly, that he’d be damned. He also said that he ought to have known, that they all ought to have known. Heimrich merely waited.

  It had been after that, after dinner, that Latham had found the girl abstracted, as if she were “up to something.” Or, about to be. “I know that crazy little mind of hers,” Latham said, and, paradoxically, his tone was one of admiration. He had tried to find out what the thing, the plan, in her mind was. He had been told only that he would find out in time and—“that she was pretty sure of something.” That was what she had said. He had tried to get her to promise not to do anything, barge into anything, and had been told not to play the heavy. And then that she was tired, and that he bored her, and that she was going to bed.

  Latham, annoyed—and himself tired and hot—had had a nightcap in the taproom and gone up to his own room, on the second floor. It was a room that looked out over the parking lot. He had stripped down to shorts, and sat near the window and smoked, and wished he were cooler, and that the crazy kid weren’t so much under his skin. Or so, now, he said.

  He had not seen Chris cross the parking lot. He had not been looking. It was when he heard the scooter start up that he looked.

  “And there she was,” he said. “In the silliest damn getup I ever saw—black sweater. On a night like this. Black slacks. Wonder is she wasn’t wearing a mask and—and carrying a magnifying glass. The crazy little—made up like something in a scare movie. The crazy—”

  “You saw her in the parking lot light, I suppose.”

  Latham merely nodded to the obvious.

  “What I’m getting at,” he said. “She might as well—have carried a sign. In lights. ‘I’m up to something. I’m the girl detective.’” He moved abruptly, as if to get back into the car. He stopped before he was stopped.

  “Don’t you get it?” he asked, his tone now weary. “Anybody could have seen her. Anybody. Whoever it was she was trying to get something on. And—” He shrugged his shoulders, hopelessly. “We just stand here,” he said.

  “Mr. Latham,” Heimrich said. “Hasn’t it really occurred to you that you may have things upside down? That she planned things that way? That she herself—”

  “Damn it,” Latham said. “No, damn it!” His denial was violent.

  And Latham could not, Heimrich thought, more clearly have disclosed his own uneasiness, his own doubt. Heimrich looked at Latham; saw realization of this in Latham’s face. (His actor’s face. It is an actor’s profession to reveal. To reveal what is chosen to be revealed. Which was, of course, the catch—the catch in so much of this.)

  “So,” Heimrich said, “you decided to follow her. To—protect her.”

  “And a hell of a lot of good I’ve been,” Latham said. “Am being now. But—you can call it that.”

  He had dressed quickly, putting on whatever was close to hand. Heimrich looked at the man in the dark blue polo shirt, the dark gray slacks, the black shoes. Not as obviously, not as theatrically, he, too, was dressed to move unnoticed through the night.

  Latham looked puzzled. Then he said, “Oh, I see what you mean. It just happened.”

  He was told to go on. He said there wasn’t much more. He had dressed and gone downstairs and out of the Inn—

  “See anybody you knew?”

  He hadn’t. He hadn’t been looking for anybody. He might have been seen, if that was what Heimrich was getting at.

  “Go on, Mr. Latham.”

  He had
assumed the station wagon would be unlocked. It almost always was. It had been. So—

  “So you came here,” Heimrich said. “Guessing that she would come here.”

  “Hell,” Latham said. “You made it plain enough.”

  “And,” Heimrich said, “jumped me. Very—impetuously. Thinking?”

  “All I saw was—somebody,” Latham said. “Anybody. Thought whoever it was—whoever Chris suspected—had got here ahead of her and was waiting for her.”

  “Who?” Heimrich said, and was looked at blankly. “Did you think I might be?”

  Latham shrugged. He hadn’t had a notion.

  “Somebody my size?”

  But even that did not help. Until Heimrich had stood up—“and got ready to knock me down”—Latham had not, he said, had any idea as to the man’s size. His glimpse in the headlights had been brief; Heimrich had not been standing. As far as that went, he might have been—anybody.

  Such as?

  If he wanted names, Latham couldn’t guess at names. If Heimrich couldn’t. All right, then—Marley, Dale, “this fellow Fielding.” All about the right size. Zersk—Zersk was smaller, sure. But, again, until he was in the room, already “trying to knock somebody’s block off,” Latham had had no clear idea of the size of the man he had seen.

  “Looks to me,” Latham said, “as if you didn’t catch what you wanted in this trap of yours. Unless—” He stopped suddenly, as if the idea had just then entered his mind. “For God’s sake,” he said. “You don’t think it was me?”

  “Now Mr. Latham.”

  “Assume it isn’t me,” Latham said. “Assume Collins didn’t kill Peggy and himself. Somebody’s wandering around who’s killed two people. Only—not wandering now, is he? Not wandering into this trap of yours, anyway. And—if I noticed Chris was planning something, anybody might have noticed. And the crazy kid is off somewhere on that damned scooter—”

  There was, obviously, something to what Latham said. And—there was more to it.

  Young Crowley was there. Crowley was competent to take care of things. Nothing could slip up. Only—

  “Stick around,” Heimrich told Latham, told Forniss—the latter with a nod at Latham. “I want to make a telephone call.”

  XIII

  The goofy dog was taking his own sweet time about it. Which was like him; which was one of the things that made him a goofy dog. Probably he had forgotten what he had gone out to do and had found a place where the grass was cool and lain down on it and gone to sleep on it. When she finished the chapter, she would go out and call him.

  Not that that would necessarily do any good. Young Michael—when young Michael called it was different. Colonel came then, a lumbering Lassie. When she herself called, anything was likely to happen—a distant bark, a rush of great dog (or an amble of same) or nothing whatever. Which was another thing which made Colonel such a goofy dog. Susan had tried to put herself in Colonel’s place-more difficult, she found, than to put herself in the place of a more average dog—and decide why he behaved so. It seemed to be generally true that the greater distance away he was the more likely he was to respond to a call. (Which made no particular sense to Susan, pretending to be a dog named Colonel.) If he was near by, he was more likely to make no response at all. This, Susan thought, might be due to the fact that, in his hazy mind, Colonel considered himself already there—or, probably, “here.” “Here, Colonel.” But in Colonel’s mind, he was. That might account for it.

  Susan sat under a light, with a book, in shorts and minimal strapless halter. She wore even so much because, probably, she would have to go out and wander around in search of Colonel. Not that anybody would see her if she wandered naked—which on a night such as this would be most sensible—but still— Country, as somebody had said, is where you don’t have to pull the shades. But still—

  Given time, of course, Colonel would return of his own accord. He returned, often, quite abruptly, and this was particularly true at night. At a guess—Susan’s guess—realization that he was alone in the dark came over him suddenly, unexpectedly, and he hurried home to light and reassurance. Sometimes he was obviously frightened—looked, as Susan told him then, no doubt unfairly, as if he had been chased by a rabbit. Susan, sitting under a light—which was hot—turned a page and, after a time, another page. She reached the end of the chapter. It was really too hot a night to sit under a lamp, try to keep one’s mind on words. She would get Colonel in and turn lights off and go to bed. Or, perhaps, with Colonel secured, sit on the terrace in the milky darkness and, probably, contemplate the great oaf—the solid man who shied at phantoms. It would be cooler on the terrace.

  She went to the door and opened it and called Colonel’s name. She waited. Perhaps this was a responsive night. She called more loudly and nothing happened and she thought, Damn the dog, and stepped out and called again. No pony-size dog galumphed out of darkness, or straggled out. She stepped farther out on the terrace.

  And a man came out of shadows onto the turnaround, gravel grating under his feet, and made a motion—an up-and-down motion, a silencing, warning motion, with what he carried in his hand. Pale light, drifting through the windows of the house, fell on the man, on what he carried.

  Susan Faye could only gaze at him, gaze with disbelief. Because he had come not only out of the shadows of the night. He had come out of the shadows of the past.

  He wore a leather jerkin, and a broad-brimmed hat of curious shape. He wore leather boots which came to mid-thigh and flared there. The hat was pulled low, so that most of his face was in shadow. Below the shadow, a pointed beard jutted.

  The pistol he carried in his hand should have been an ancient flintlock. It was not.

  For an instant, Susan’s reeling mind told her only that this was preposterous, that this was an hallucination. But in almost the same instant, she knew that the man was quite solid, quite real, and that he was one of the men who were making the picture, and was in the costume of the picture.

  She was conscious, momentarily, of relief—a ghost did not walk her terrace. Just a man, dressed up fantastically, come to—

  And in that instant of realization, that at first reassuring close of the mind on the safe matter of fact, Susan shivered with fear.

  Who? her mind called out. Come to—what?

  The mind’s time is not real time. Susan’s raced from bewilderment to relief to fear while the man in the clothes the Dutch had worn along the Hudson three hundred years before took two long steps toward her, with no sound but the grating of leather bootsoles on gravel. The moving pistol spoke for him; for an instant of greater fear Susan thought that the pistol alone would speak.

  “Go back in,” the man said. His voice was oddly husky; it was as if he whispered loudly. It was as if something were wrong with his throat. “Turn off the light.”

  The gun in his hand moved, then, impatiendy, as if it were more restless than the hand which held it.

  Susan backed toward the door, moved slowly, her hands raised in the futile semblance of protection.

  “Don’t be afraid,” the man said, in the same voice—the same false voice. That was it—a false voice. “You’ll be all right if you tell me.”

  And, as she moved backward, groped behind her and pulled the screen open, he moved forward. But he did not lessen the distance between them.

  “Just go in and turn off the light,” the man said. “There’ll be all the light we’ll need.”

  She went in, went half across the room to the lamp, and, with her hand on it, turned. The man was a shadow at the door; his head was down so that, more than before, the broad brim of his archaic hat shadowed his face. Shadowed all but the beard, which was itself a shadow.

  He did not move in the door, only waited. She turned the light off—the friendly light, the protecting light. With the light gone, the costumed man in the doorway disappeared for a moment—all but disappeared. Then, as her eyes adjusted, he was there again. He came into the room. He closed the screen door a
nd then the glass-paneled front door. Now faint shadows came into the room from the night’s milky glow; came through windows on either side of the door, through the glass in the door.

  The faint light fell on Susan; her naked arms and legs were white in it. She said, “Who are you? What do you want?”

  And as she said that she thought—One of them has a beard. The one with the beard! The only one she knew by sight. The one half the country knew by sight.

  “You’re Dale,” she said. “Francis Dale. What are you doing here?”

  The pistol moved impatiently; moved back and forth.

  “What was wrong at the house?” the man said. He used the same hoarse, loud whisper.

  “I don’t know what you mean,” she said. “Why do you go on talking that way?”

  She felt exasperated anger that he should go on talking that way. It was amazing that annoyance over anything so trivial should, even momentarily, replace fear. But perhaps the falseness of the voice was part of the fear. She struck at it, and struck at fear.

  “You know what I mean,” the man said. “Something wrong. Something didn’t fit the picture. What was it?” The voice did not change.

  Susan’s mind raced. How did he— Of course. The man who had stood outside the window. This was the man. Francis Dale—he was the man.

  “The design,” she said. He knew already. “Brian had—” She hesitated. Give him more to be afraid of? Or, less? “There was a message in the design. But—you know that. You stole—”

  “That’s no good,” the man said, and for a moment the voice was a “real” voice. Real, and impatient—and harsh with impatience. “There wasn’t any message.” The husky whisper came back with that. Why, since she knew who he was, had told him she knew, did he keep on with that?

  “It’s only,” she said, “that you couldn’t see it. The message—”

  But the man was shaking his head, and shaking it with certainty.

  “I told you that’s no good,” he said. “The other thing. The thing you told Heimrich you couldn’t remember. You’re going to remember it, aren’t you? Now. For me.”