Angel's Flight (A Mercy Allcutt Mystery) (28 page)

      Finish this up?
Damn
the woman!

      The fact that I’d actually thought a real, honest-to-goodness swear word shocked me. That was a good thing, because my befuddlement about my situation suddenly vanished in a puff of ire and pure rage took its place. I decided it didn’t matter if she had a gun and I didn’t. She was going to have to
work
to kill
me
, curse her black heart.

      Slowly I opened the car door. All things considered, it looked to me as if I might actually have a chance if I were daring, something I hadn’t had much experience being thus far in my life. Still, if I could only . . .

      “Oh!” I cried, stumbling on the running board and catching myself on the car’s seat.

      “Stop that!” bellowed Miss Dunstable. “Get up this instant!”

      “I think I sprained my ankle,” I lied in a shaky voice. The shakiness was unfeigned, believe me.

      “Get up and I’ll put you out of your misery.” To spur me on my way, I presume, she fired a shot that would have killed me had I still been standing.

      “Don’t do that! I’m getting up. It hurts, is all.”

      “Hurry up. I don’t have any more time to waste on you.”

      From my crouched position, I could tell that Miss Dunstable was expecting to see me rise up from the passenger side of the machine. She wasn’t looking below the window. Therefore, as quickly as I’d ever moved in my life, I darted across the seat, released the emergency brake and leaped back out of the car. Well, it was more of a scuttle than a leap, but you know what I mean.

      “What are you
doing
?” Shrieked Sylvia Dunstable, again pulling that wretched trigger and frightening me out of my skin.

      I didn’t answer. Rather, I pushed that stupid Model-T Ford as hard as I could from my very precarious crouched position, using the frame of the driver’s side door and the running board, as well as all the strength in my body.

      Darned if it didn’t work! The car started sliding slowly downhill.

      “Wait!
Wait!
What are you doing?”

      By that time I’d flattened myself on the ground, figuring that with the car in the way and moving she’d have a harder time fixing an aim on my body. With my heart in my throat, I could only see Miss Dunstable’s feet as she danced on the edge of the embankment trying to avoid being struck by her car. I think she attempted to get into the automobile so she could put it into gear and pull out the emergency brake, because I saw the door open but then, with a terrible crunching sound, the car’s tires slipped over the ledge and slid right downhill, taking Miss Dunstable with it, carried along by the open door. I heard her screech in astonishment, and then I heard one last explosion as she pulled the trigger a final time. I don’t know where that shot went, but it was nowhere near me, thank God.

      I didn’t stick around to see what had happened to Miss Dunstable or if her Model T had stopped somewhere on the down side of the hill. Rather, to the crashings and scrapings of metal against loose rock as the car slid and skidded, I picked myself up from my dusty refuge and ran like a madwoman down the hill toward Figueroa where I hoped like anything some kindhearted pedestrian or driver would rescue me.

      To my horror, I hadn’t run past the first bend in that cursed twisty road before I saw another automobile winding its way up the hill. Instantly my thoughts fastened upon Jacqueline Lloyd, and I turned and tried to scrabble my way up the side of the hill away from the drop-off. I wasn’t making much headway since the earth was dry and crumbly, and every time I grabbed on to a bush to pull myself up, it dislodged and we both tumbled backward. Nevertheless, those wretched murdering people were going to have to labor valiantly if they intended to kill me. I wasn’t about to give up until I was dead, blast it. And if Jacqueline Lloyd dared to grab one of my feet to keep me from climbing, I’d—

      
“Damn it to hell and back again, Mercy Allcutt, come down from there!”

      Stunned, I slid backward down the slope, landing on my bottom in the rocky dirt road. It hurt.

      “Ernie?”

      He reached down and grabbed my arm. “Are you all right?”

      “I-I think so. But, Ernie, it’s Miss—”

      “Dunstable. I know. Dammit, how did you end up here? We were following you all the way from Chinatown. Didn’t you suspect anything, dammit?”

      I tried to brush myself off, but Ernie still held one of my arms. Anyhow, the task was impossible. It looked as if I’d managed to accumulate a whole acre or more of Southern California dirt during my various adventures.

      “Don’t swear at me.” My voice was small, though. I’d started having a reaction to everything and there was a lump in my throat. “I thought you were going to meet—” I decided I’d better not finish that sentence.

      “Better not stand there jawing, Ernie. We’ve got to pick up the other sister.”

      Phil Bigelow. I’d no sooner registered his presence than I found myself lifted into Ernie’s arms. There was nothing romantic about the gesture, believe me. He handled me as if I were a sack of potatoes, dumped me in the back seat of Phil’s police vehicle, and leaped into the front next to Phil. I hadn’t even stopped bouncing when Phil gunned the engine and the heavy car plowed ahead up the hill.

      “Where’s Dunstable?” Ernie growled.

      He was being so mean, I didn’t want to tell him. But I, like Sylvia Dunstable, knew where my duty lay. Besides, the horrible woman had tried to killed me. “I left her up the road a bit.” I’d scold Ernie after Miss Dunstable had been picked up and jailed. If her Model T hadn’t squashed her. I shuddered at that thought.

      I needn’t have worried. We had no sooner rounded the bend in that stupid narrow road than we saw Miss Dunstable, looking a good deal less professional than usual, scrambling up to the road. Her spectacles were askew, she was bleeding from several cuts and scratches, and it looked to me as if she’d torn her stockings in her tumble downhill. What had been a perfectly lovely gray business suit was a dirty mess, and one of her sensible shoes was missing. If I didn’t know better, I’d have felt sorry for her.

      “What the hell happened here?” growled Ernie.

      Without waiting for an answer, he jumped out of the car and raced toward Miss Dunstable. Phil did likewise. What’s more, he drew his police weapon and yelled at the top of his lungs, “Stop in the name of the law, or I’ll shoot!”

      I hadn’t known policemen actually said things like that.

      We ended up with Phil driving back to the Los Angeles Police Station with me squished between him and Ernie in the front seat and Sylvia Dunstable, handcuffed and looking very upset, in the back seat. The only thing she said the whole way back was, “What about my machine?”

      Phil merely grunted. I presume that meant he didn’t give a rap about her car.

      It was only when I saw Jacqueline Lloyd stripped of her makeup did it register with me that she and Sylvia Dunstable, without her spectacles, looked somewhat alike. Some kind of detective
I
was.

      
Chapter Seventeen
 

I knew I’d be in for it when I returned to Chloe’s that day no matter what I did, as my clothing was wrecked, my fingernails showed definite evidence of having tried to climb a mountain, and there was dirt caked all over various parts of me. With Mother there, it wasn’t possible to sneak in and wash up before facing the family. I wish I had an apartment of my own to run away and hide in.

      But I didn’t.

      Therefore, since I knew I was going to be late getting home and I didn’t want to worry anyone, I telephoned Chloe from the police station to explain what had happened. Chloe gasped a couple of times, but she didn’t scold me.

      “Are you sure you’re all right?” was all she said.

      She sounded so concerned, I almost cried. You could bet any amount of money you wanted to, if you did such things, that our mother wasn’t going to be sweet like that.

      “I’m fine,” I said upon a deep and heartfelt sigh. “A little dirty, is all.” That wasn’t quite true, since I had numerous cuts and scrapes here and there, but none of them were serious.

      “Well, take care of yourself, and I’ll try to keep Mother calm.”

      “Thank you.” This time we both sighed. “Do your best, anyhow,” I said, feeling hopeless and almost hating our father for putting us through this ordeal with Mother.

      After my telephone call the interrogation process (Ernie said it was only questioning, but I know what it felt like to me) took hours and hours.

      “If you’d bothered to tell me what you were working on and what you’d discovered at the case, this wouldn’t have happened,” I told Ernie at one point.

      After rolling his eyes, Ernie said, “Dammit, Mercy, you’re not a copper
or
a trained investigator. You’re a secretary, and you have no business questioning people involved in the case, much less haring off to have lunch with the suspects.

      “I didn’t suspect her,” I said in my own defense. “Did
you
know she was Miss Lloyd’s sister?”

      “Not then. But you should have wondered why she was being so chummy with you that she offered to drive you to hell and gone to eat lunch.”

      “That’s unfair, Ernie Templeton! If
you
didn’t suspect her, how was
I
supposed to suspect her?”

      “Suspicion has nothing to do with it!”

      “You’re being completely irrational. I thought Sylvia Dunstable and I were friends. It’s perfectly natural to take a meal with a friend!”

      “Children, children,” said Phil before either of us could say anything else.

      I glared at Ernie, who glared back at me. He was being
so
unfair.

      After clearing his throat, Phil hurried to speak as if he was afraid to leave any spaces of silence that Ernie or I might choose to fill with accusations. I kept glaring. So did Ernie.

      Phil said, “We picked Miss Lloyd up for questioning, because it seemed to us that she was the only person who could possibly have killed Mrs. Hartland the way she was killed.”

      “That makes sense to me. And do you know what she used? It was—”

      “
Mercy
!” That was Ernie, and he stomped my words flat. “Let Phil explain, why don’t you?”

      I glared some more, but recognized the validity of his comment, blast it.

      Phil went on. “After we picked her up and questioned her extensively, Miss Lloyd told us that she and Miss Dunstable are sisters. We wore her down, you see,” Phil said placatingly. I guess he was afraid Ernie and I might have a knock-down, drag-out fight right there in the police station. “She told us about the datura.”

      “Did she tell you how she got it?”

      “She said he soaked some poisoned arrow tips she’d taken from some director’s house.”

      “Amory Jordan’s,” I said, glad to tell him something he didn’t already know.

      “Oh, was it Jordan?”

      “Yes, according to Miss Dunstable.”

      Phil wrote it down.

      “Okay. She told us about the datura and how she’d pricked Mrs. Hartland under her bracelet with a needle dipped in the stuff, and how she’d made another pinprick in the back of her neck. I guess the coroner didn’t find the prick under her bracelet, or he thought it had been made by the clasp or something.”

      “And just exactly when did you first suspect Miss Lloyd?” I asked, feeling cranky as all get out.

      “When we checked out her past and discovered she’d acted in blue picture.” I’m pretty sure Phil colored a little bit when he said the bit about the blue movies.

      “And yet nobody bothered to tell me,” I grumbled.

      “Why should anybody tell you?” demanded Ernie. “You’re a damned secretary! You’re not supposed to be investigating anything at all, much less murder!”

      “I wouldn’t have had to investigate anything if you’d helped Mr. Easthope when he asked you to! Or if you’d bothered to tell me what was going on!” I retorted hotly. “All I knew was that Rupert Mullins was no murderer, but he was being held in jail for committing murder anyway, and then you started suspecting
Lulu
, of all people!”

      “Nuts,” bellowed Ernie. “You just can’t keep out of the damned way, can you?”

      “Hey,” said Phil. “Let’s all calm down, all right?”

      Ernie huffed. So did I.

      Phil continued, “When we got to the Figueroa Building to bring Miss Lloyd in—”

      “Why did you go to the Figueroa Building?” I asked. “Why didn’t you pick her up at her house?”

      Ernie snarled something incoherent, but Phil only sighed and explained. “We called her home, and her maid told us she’d gone to the Figueroa Building to consult with her attorney.”

      “I see,” I said formally. “Thank you.”

      “Anyhow, when we got there, Miss LaBelle told us the two of you had gone out to lunch.”

      “And if Lulu hadn’t told us what kind of car Dunstable drove, you’d probably be a dead duck right now,” Ernie growled.

      “I would not be a dead duck, Ernest Templeton! I saved myself from being shot by being quick and resourceful, curse you!
You
sure as anything didn’t rescue me! I was already rescued!” I was so angry that if it hadn’t been for my early childhood training, I’d probably have bopped Ernie with the candlestick telephone sitting on Phil’s desk.

      “You call that rescuing yourself? You were scrambling up a damned hill when I found you, remember!”

      “That’s only because I thought you were Miss Lloyd and Miss Dunstable’s accomplices! If you hadn’t taken up the whole blasted roadway, I’d have run down to Figueroa and hailed somebody!”

      “You’d have hailed
somebody
? Is that your idea of rescuing yourself?”

      “Ernest Templeton, you’re the most obnoxious, pigheaded—”