Darkest Hour (7 page)

Sanders looked at his wrist watch and scowled. “I would too,” he said, “but I promised Buddy that I’d be on the floor tonight when he goes to work. The reaction to opening night was tremendous, and that business with Monterey has shook him up more than he thinks. I told Vera that I’d drive her home. She came in the Willows limousine.”

“I’ll drive Miss Raymond home,” Simon said. “If she trusts me.”

Whitey Sanders looked at Simon sharply. His eyes were hard and penetrating.

“I have my own car today,” Simon added.

There was no response, verbal or otherwise. Somebody in La Verde had wired Hannah’s Rolls for extermination, and two people had cautioned Simon to drive carefully. One of them was Whitey Sanders. But there was no response and so Simon let the remark die. Sanders caught a sign of acceptance from Vera Raymond and rolled off in his Cadillac. That left two men seated in a Cougar. They were still there when Simon wheeled the Jaguar out of the lot with Sam Goddard’s woman in the bucket seat beside him. They pulled onto the highway and Simon asked, “Where’s the nearest respectable spa?”

“Go south to Delaney Road,” she said.

Delaney Road was about half a mile down the highway. There was a Standard gas station on one corner, a real estate office on the opposite corner and a hamburger stand and a vacant lot with a “For Sale” sign on the remaining corners. Simon shifted to low gear. “Turn east,” Vera Raymond told him, and he turned east. Less than a mile later they reached a big rural mailbox mounted on the corner of a white plank fence with the gate standing open at the driveway. The box was lettered “Sam’s Place” and Vera nodded for Simon to turn in. The lane curved up to where a white clapboard ranch house with a glassed-in lanai faced the sea from a nest of rose trees and bougainvillaea. Simon braked the car and cut the motor.

“You did say ‘even if it’s coffee,’” Vera reminded him.

She was a wise woman. The sun was still bright and the roses were in bloom. It would have been much harder to come home to an empty house after dark.

Sam Goddard’s last home was a far cry from the castles of Stone Canyon. They entered off the lanai through a pine-paneled living room with a huge log-burning fireplace, a pegged-wood floor and just enough maple and leather furniture. Vera removed her hat and dropped it on the old sea chest that served as a coffee table and then went directly to the kitchen. Moments later Simon heard a coffee grinder and began to envy the late Sam Goddard. His woman was intelligent, sophisticated and capable of making genuine coffee. She would, he fancied, also be able to broil a steak blood rare and concoct a salad dressing that would make the chef at Perrino’s want to turn in his union card. She had undoubtedly read all the rare volumes in the glass-faced bookcases lining the side walls of the long room and had shared many evenings with Sam listening to the records in a collection that ranged from Vivaldi to Turk Murphy. She had shared the good times, the bad times, and Simon wondered why Sam hadn’t married the girl.

When Vera came in with the coffee it was in an old-fashioned blue porcelain pot carried on a tray with two diner-type mugs. The sugar was still in the cube box and the cream was homogenized in a pint carton of milk. She set the tray down on the coffee table and invited Simon to sit down. She poured and the aroma was as fine as he expected it to be.

“Did Whitey Sanders tell you about Monterey’s death?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said. “When he called last night. He asked the time and place of Sam’s funeral and if there was anything he could do, and then he told me that Monte was dead. It was an accident, he said, or possibly suicide. He was making the arrangements for Monte’s funeral, but I wasn’t to come. One funeral was enough for me.”

She picked up her coffee mug and drank deeply. Her hands were steady, but she used them both.

“What about Sam?” Simon asked.

She lowered the mug slowly. “What do you mean?”

“Wasn’t his funeral a little sudden? Was there an autopsy?”

“I—I suppose so,” she said. “I’ve been too upset to think of things like that. He was killed when his Porsche ran off the highway in the fog. You know they call that stretch of highway Slaughter Alley when the fog’s heavy.”

“I didn’t realize it was that heavy Monday afternoon,” Simon said. “But I was in San Francisco.”

“It was bad from what I’ve heard. I didn’t leave the house all day, but we lost sight of the sea about two in the afternoon. That means the fog was over the highway. And Sam was tired. He’d been up all night. I shouldn’t have let him go, but when Sam had wind of a story he was like a bright-eyed cub reporter with the ink wet on his journalism diploma. He made his own deadlines, and they were fierce.”

“Did he tell you what kind of story he was working on?”

“No, but I was used to that. Sam was a brilliant man, but a little superstitious, too. He thought it was bad luck to talk about a story before it broke.”

“But Sam was retired.”

She smiled. It was a wan and melancholy smile, but it was an improvement over that tear-edged tension. “Sam could never completely retire,” she said. “He free-lanced for the past eight or ten years. He never made much money, but he kept his hand in. It gave him pride and pocket money.”

“I thought Sam owned a lot of land.”

“Once. It was sold bit by bit—all but this place. Lola, Sam’s wife, was extravagant, and Sam felt he owed her a high standard of living. Sam was a kind of man who’s becoming rather rare, Mr. Drake. He had a sense of responsibility.”

“Is that why he never divorced Lola?”

“Partly. Mostly it was because of her religion. And Steve, his son.”

“But Steven’s been dead a long time.”

“Yes. So has Lola. I know what you’re thinking, Mr. Drake. It was the classic question of our set until we moved out here and stopped having a set. Why didn’t Sam marry Vera Raymond? Well, I’ll tell you why. Because the Sam Goddard who fell in love with Vera Raymond was an important man. By the time he was free it was downhill all the way but with bumps. I might as well tell you the truth. It will all come out in probate anyway. Sam deeded this place to me five years ago. All the rest of his property was sold for taxes, hospital bills, court costs. Sam was a hothead, always getting into trouble. I hold a real estate license and work at it. I work out of an office in Enchanto. Well, you’ve seen Enchanto. When the freeway cut above us we began to depress. Then loan money got so tight even the resorts began to suffer. The hot swirlpools were drying up all along Pacific Coast Highway. What I’m telling you is that it’s been a rough go for us, and I couldn’t marry Sam without his pride. To the very last he had the idea that he would make the right contact—break the hot story or write the best seller that would give him back his manhood. Then he would have asked me to marry him. I knew that and he knew that I knew it. There was no need to discuss the matter.”

Simon’s coffee was tasting better all the time. Hannah would have warned him against the protectiveness he was feeling toward the common-law widow, but Hannah wasn’t sitting beside Vera Raymond on the wide divan facing the seaward windows of Sam’s place. And talking at such a time was good therapy. Simon waited and she continued.

“That’s the only reason I let him go after being out all the night before,” she said. “He was so excited—so enthusiastic I had to let him follow his lead.”

“What lead?” Simon demanded.

“I told you, I don’t know. All I know is that Sam got a telephone call the night before he was killed. It was from San Diego. I heard him repeat the name of a hotel there—the Balboa. Then he wrote down some directions on the memo pad—but I never saw what they were. I didn’t get in on the beginning of the conversation. I did hear him ask where the caller was calling from, and then he said, “If you’re in trouble it will be worse if you run.” I had the impression it was some teen-age boy. Sam’s done a lot of volunteer work with juveniles in trouble. It wasn’t the first time he’d taken off in the middle of the night to help someone.”

Simon decided to change the subject. “Would you mind letting me see Sam’s study?” he asked. “It’s not morbid curiosity. I remember Sam’s paper and Hannah has told me so much about him.”

The words came out right, and Vera Raymond seemed relieved to have something to do. She led him through a pair of French doors into the lanai room—a room cluttered with papers and books and old maps and news clippings hung on the wall. A wide, flat-topped desk faced the seaward windows; a pair of metal filing cabinets stood against one wall, and a narrow door opened into a small windowless room that had been partitioned off from the rest in one corner.

“Sam’s darkroom,” Vera explained. “Sometimes he did free-lance picture stories.”

There was no copy paper in the big electric typewriter on the desk, but Sam had been busy in the darkroom. Simon picked up a roll of exposed film and held it to the light. The frames were too small to pick up detail. The shots had been taken in a very poor light. Early morning light, he concluded. There were exterior shots of a building several stories high, and each shot was of a window with an ironwork balcony. A second strip of exposed film was even more confusing. It had been shot at an earlier hour when there was deeper contrast between the exterior and the lighted window, and in these shots someone appeared to be sitting or hanging from the railing.

“Do you know how to make an enlargement?” Simon asked.

“Not really,” Vera said. “I’ve only used the camera to shoot real estate properties we put on the market. Sam always developed them. What do you see?”

“It’s what I don’t see that bothers me. Look at that first strip. What do you make of it?”

Vera Raymond drew a pair of black-framed glasses from her jacket pocket and held the strip to the light. “It’s a building,” she said. “A large building. An apartment house or a hospital.”

“Local?”

“Lord, no! We don’t have anything that size in Enchanto! Look, there’s a garden or part of a garden in this shot. Maybe it’s a public building.”

“Or a hotel?”

She was interested. That was good. Perhaps if he could get her curious about Sam’s story, something to think about would help to hold back the memories.

“Let’s have a go at the darkroom,” Simon suggested. “I want an enlargement of this other strip.”

They moved into the darkroom and switched on the light. It was obvious that Sam had been busy before he took off on his last drive. The developing fluid was still in the pans, and a series of film strips and several enlargements were clothes-pinned to the drying line. Sam’s curiosity had been the same as Simon’s. It was the night shots that were enlarged in a series of blowups. In each enlargement the dark object on the railing became more clear.

“My God!” Vera breathed. “It’s a man! He looks dead. Mr. Drake—”

“Has anyone else been in this darkroom since Sam’s death?” Simon asked.

“No, I’m sure not.”

“Not the police? Not Whitey Sanders?”

“No. The police telephoned and I went to the mortuary where the ambulance had taken Sam’s body. Whitey didn’t come to the house at all. We met at Willows’. What do you think this means?”

“I don’t know. Sam’s story, I guess.”

“A dead man?”

“A dead man.”

“But who is he? Why is he dead?”

Simon didn’t answer. At the far end of the developing table he came across a pile of glossies Sam had never shot. They were old movie stills. Buildings with balconies and a romantic-looking male climbing or leaping up the wall. Long shots and closeups of Monte Monterey in his all-action prime.

“What are those photos?” Vera demanded.

It was too late to hide them. Simon let her look for herself.

“Monte? Of course, Sam had a whole collection of stills of Monte and some of Lola. She left old albums when she died. Mr. Drake, this is weird. Sam was thinking of Monte and now Monte’s dead—” She removed her glasses and slipped them back into her pocket. Her fingers worked nervously at the buttons of the jacket. “Maybe I shouldn’t mention this, but in the last few years Sam was interested in ESP. He talked about Steve’s death a lot. Said he had a peculiar dream the night before he was reported killed in action in Korea.”

“No!” Simon said sharply. “I think it’s just a coincidence. Don’t let your mind wander off on a kick like that. It was Sam’s story and he didn’t finish it. Maybe you and I can. Meanwhile, let me hold on to the film strips—they might help.” He ripped the enlargements off the line. “And now I hate to be an ungrateful guest,” he said, “but I really did have something other than coffee in mind when I suggested that drink. Why don’t we go somewhere for a steak and booze?”

It was an awkward attempt at giving comfort, and he sensed that it wouldn’t work. Vera did let him walk her out of the darkroom and turn off the light behind them, and she let him lead her out of Sam’s study with the fragments of Sam’s life still strewed about so casually it seemed he had merely gone out for cigarettes. But when they reached the living room she balked. The light was fading now. A chill was in the air.

“I’m going to light a fire,” she said. “It seems warmer than the gas furnace.”

A fire was already laid in the fireplace over a gas jet that caught the flame of her match. As soon as the fire was started Simon knew she would never leave the house.

“Maybe I could send out somewhere and have something delivered.”

She shook her head. “There’s plenty of food in the house, and there’s bourbon at the bar if you like bourbon. It was really very kind of you to come, Mr. Drake. I do want you to remember me to Hannah and thank her for the flowers and for sending you.”

It was as kind a brush as Simon had ever received, and he didn’t fight it. The rest of Sam Goddard’s burial day belonged to the woman who loved him. He was in the way.

He left her standing before the fire and walked out to the Jaguar. He could pick up the steak and a drink somewhere on the highway to San Diego.

Vera Raymond was right about the fog. It crept in from the sea in the late afternoon and hung like a cloudy canopy over the small bay of Enchanto-by-the-Sea. It brought the dusk early and Simon was driving the black Jaguar with the lights on by the time he reached a roadside inn called Rocky Point, which was located about twenty miles south of Enchanto. The inn was situated, logically, on a rocky point with a bank of windows facing the ocean. Simon took a window booth and ordered a Scotch and a rare steak. On less foggy days the view must be spectacular, but today the sea was a continuation of the fog with a wild, white foam fringe laced about the black rocks. While the chef grilled the steak Simon took his Scotch to the telephone booth in the bar and called Hannah.

“Simon, thank God you called,” she cried. “That beast you hired to protect the property won’t let Chester off the back porch.”

“Good,” Simon said. “Chester is supposed to stay in the house with you while I’m away.”

Chester was a Negro, an ex-collegiate wrestler with a Phi Beta Kappa key whom Hannah had found in the Marina Beach Department of Employment one day when she went searching for a cook. Chester couldn’t cook anything except spaghetti, which was not on Hannah’s diet, but could help her work out in the gymnasium and Hannah was still feminine enough, therefore vain enough, to prefer a good figure to a good cuisine.

“When are you coming back?” she asked.

“Not tonight.”

“Why not?”

He couldn’t answer that any more than he could tell her about the man with the wide-brimmed hat who had stood at the iron railing at the top of the stair well where Monterey died.

“I met a friend of Sam Goddard’s at the funeral,” he said. “A man named Leem.”

“Charley Leem?” Hannah exclaimed. “Is that old blackmailer still alive?”

“You knew him too?”

“Of course I knew him. He had one of those Hollywood gossip columns in Sam’s paper back in the days when people could read and took their daily quota of dirt from the gossips.”

“Why did you call him a blackmailer?”

“Because that’s what he was. Why not? Everybody in Hollywood who was anybody, or who expected to be anybody, wanted to get mentioned in the columns. They offered all kinds of goodies in return for a few lines in print. Charley got his share of the goodies. Then a newspaper strike cut down his operation for a while and he had to move into publicity at one of the studios. It was rough. No more loot. What’s Charley doing now?”

“He said he was working on a paper in San Diego, but he didn’t look prosperous…. Hannah, Whitey Sanders was at Goddard’s funeral.”

“I thought he would be,” Hannah said. “Whitey’s got a strong father complex. Something left over from being an agent. How is Vera Raymond?”

Simon drained his Scotch. Over the rim of the glass he could see the waiter approaching his table with the steak, and behind the waiter that mute gray blend of sea and sky and fog closing in against the glass like a shroud. From Sam’s Place the world would look bleak and empty, and even the firelight wouldn’t be warm enough.

“Lonely,” he said, and made his good-bys.

• • •

When Simon thought of Vera Raymond he lost his appetite, so he stopped thinking of her, devoured the steak and two cups of black coffee and left the inn feeling better. The fog was turning misty, and he dug his Aquascutum out of the trunk before continuing southward. Slaughter Alley. Vera Raymond was right. When the fog closed in over the highway, death lurked at every turn. The headlights of the Jaguar bounced back in Simon’s eyes. He dug a pair of tinted driving glasses out of the glove compartment and kept the tachometer reading below 20 r.p.m.’s. On such a night three days ago Sam Goddard’s Porsche had rolled down this same highway on a mission that had given him the roll of film Simon now carried in his suit pocket. The following afternoon the little sports car had driven north on the same highway and terminated the journey as a heap of twisted metal at the bottom of a ravine. Simon stopped thinking about Vera Raymond, the woman, and concentrated on her story. Probably not more than eighteen hours had passed between those two events, and the reason Simon was driving to San Diego now was to crack the mystery of what had happened during that time. He knew the beginning of the story: the Balboa Hotel.

The city emerged suddenly from the fog like a brightly lighted stage seen dimly through a mezzanine smoke screen. At his first opportunity Simon cut off the freeway and found a public telephone. The yellow pages gave him the location of the Balboa. He telephoned and an eager desk clerk informed him of available vacancies.

“Do you have a courtyard?” Simon asked. “I’d like an inside room if it overlooks a courtyard.”

The clerk assured him that the Balboa did indeed have a courtyard, and Simon reserved a room in the name of Simon Drake. Within twenty minutes the Jaguar reached the hotel—a seven-story building with an adjacent parking area and a side entrance reached by passing through a small courtyard. It was old and inviting, modernized to meet standards for comfort but still retaining the flavor of a more gracious age. Simon’s chief interest, as he strode toward the doorway, was the manner in which the hotel walls framed three sides of the courtyard showing, above the ground floor, a wide window with an iron grillwork railing at each room. Light from the dining room and entrance bathed the lower level, but, above the light line, only the occupied rooms showed in the darkness. His hunch was right. Sam Goddard’s photos could have been taken from this courtyard.

It was Wednesday night and the bar and grill were quiet. The dining room had long since been vacated, and the lounge was empty except for a pair of die-hard octogenarians ensconced in a deep-cushioned lounge. Simon paid in advance and sent up a trial balloon.

“I’m here on the recommendation of a friend,” he said. “I think he was registered here last Sunday. Maybe he’s still here. Sam Goddard?”

It was a good chance that not more than a dozen of the people who had known Sam had bothered to read his obituary, and it was an even better chance that the desk clerk wasn’t among them. He showed no reaction to the sound of the name. He did check the registration file.

“Goddard?” he repeated. “G-O-D-D-A-R-D … no, I don’t recall the name and there’s no such card in this week’s file.”

Simon flashed a public-relations smile. “Guess I got my weeks confused,” he said. “About the room—do you have anything high enough to get away from the street sounds?”

“Sixth floor all right, Mr. Drake?”

“Perfect,” Simon said. “Where’s the nearest public library?”

“Try the main branch—three blocks to your left as you go out the front entrance.”

Simon thanked the clerk and accepted his key. He glanced at the clock over the registration desk and saw that it was only eight-fifteen. Sam Goddard hadn’t registered at the Balboa, but he had taken pictures from the courtyard if Simon wasn’t very much mistaken in his identification of balconies. The three-block walk would take only a few minutes, and back issues of the San Diego papers might provide a clue to what he was looking for. The fog was less dense away from the coastline, but something about the shadowed street caused him to turn up his coat collar protectively. He walked swiftly until he reached the easily identifiable library with its lights still glowing.

The interior was large and well organized. One question at the information desk and he was directed upstairs to the newspaper and periodical room where the more recent editions of the local papers were racked neatly in chronological order. Sam Goddard had driven to San Diego on Sunday night: logically, therefore, it would be the late editions of Monday’s papers that might provide a clue to the story he was investigating. The warning bell for closing time had sounded before Simon found what he was searching for buried several pages deep in a one-column item.

STUDENT SLAIN IN HOTEL MYSTERY
The bizarre and brutal slaying of a guest at the Balboa Hotel is being investigated today by local authorities. The victim, N. B. Kwan, 26, a foreign-exchange student at the La Jolla campus of the University of California, was found early this morning on the balcony of his room at the downtown hotel. Kwan had been severely beaten and then impaled, alive, it is believed, on an iron spear of the balcony railing. Indications of a struggle within the room without evidence of theft suggest a vengeance killing. The deceased, who had registered at the hotel only the day before his body was discovered by a maid in an adjacent suite, had received no visitors, according to room clerk James Frame. He told Detective L. Prinz of the San Diego Police that Kwan had given instructions that he was not to be disturbed while preparing a required thesis. The body was removed to the morgue pending further investigation.

• • •

The warning bell having failed to stampede lingering patrons to the exits, a tactful librarian now ordered the gradual turning off of lights and Simon, with no pangs of conscience, took advantage of the situation to carefully tear the item from the page before replacing the newspaper in its rack.

“If you’re in trouble it will be worse if you run—”

That fragment of Sam Goddard’s telephone conversation overheard and repeated by Vera Raymond haunted Simon as he returned to the street. On the surface it was sound enough, and yet Goddard had failed to heed his own advice. He had run, run with a camera loaded with shots that would brighten the eyes and raise the temperature of the San Diego police force. Sam Goddard, Simon’s legal mind concluded, had risked a charge of criminal conspiracy in the pursuit of a story that must be bigger than the brief obit of N. B. Kwan indicated.

• • •

It was five minutes after nine when Simon reached the drugstore located two blocks from the Balboa. He purchased a toothbrush, toothpaste, razor and an evening newspaper, and then he stopped at the public phone booth to scrutinize the local directory. Leem wasn’t a common name, but he could find no Charles Leem—not even a C. Leem. It was possible that Sam Goddard’s ex-columnist had an unlisted telephone, but hardly likely that he had no telephone at all. Leem was the logical lead to more information on the hotel murder, but tomorrow was another day and Simon returned to the hotel with no more complicated plans than a quick shower and a good night’s sleep. But sounds from the direction of the bar indicated the employment of a pianist with a deep admiration for Jimmy Rowles. Simon appreciated good musical taste and knew that secrets unmentionable at the front desk might blossom into fluency in a more intimate locale.

Once his eyes were accustomed to the darkness of the room, Simon understood why it had been so quiet earlier in the evening. It was off-season. A cluster of four were patronizing the piano bar, and one booth held two customers. The room was virtually empty; but the show must go on, and the cool pianist seemed oblivious to his lack of audience. Darkness did have its advantages. Behind him, on a small dais, were stacked the instruments of a brass and wind combo that would probably come on later. Simon took a stool at the bar, ordered a Scotch on the rocks and tried to talk football to a broad-shouldered bartender who turned out to be a Shakespearean actor moonlighting for the winter. He didn’t know a T formation from a point after touchdown, but he smelled cop when Simon mentioned the late Mr. Kwan. He froze like a fresh daiquiri.

“Sorry, sir. I never met the gentleman.”

“He didn’t come in for a drink?”

“He came to write a thesis. I understand the kitchen sent up quite a few pots of tea. Do you want a refill, sir?”

Simon said yes, and it was somewhere through the second drink that he noticed the two shadows vacate the booth. The taller one, male, left the bar and disappeared somewhere beyond the door to the lobby; the shorter one, female, attractive and attired in a stylish state of disrobe, came to the bar and perched on the stool next to Simon.

“What are you drinking?” she asked without preface.

“Old Rarity,” Simon answered.

“Make it two, Angus,” the girl told the bartender.

“My pleasure,” Simon said. “And I’ve never before known a bartender named Angus.”

“My name is Eve,” the girl said.

“I could have guessed,” Simon responded.

She smiled briefly. “I don’t usually do this sort of thing,” she added, “but I get goose bumps when I think of going upstairs to bed alone.”

Angus brought the girl’s drink in time to hear her remark. “Change your room,” he suggested.

“I did change it. They moved me down to three-six-seven—exactly three floors below where it happened. Just the same, I get goose bumps. I keep thinking how—if I hadn’t taken those sleeping powders Sunday night—I might have heard the fight and called the desk. I could have saved that poor gook’s life.”

“You’re guilt-prone,” Angus said. “You’ve got to get control. You can’t carry the whole world on your shoulders.”

“Gook?” Simon echoed.

Eve downed her Scotch like a dry sponge. “Kwan,” she said. “I heard you mention his name when nimble-fingers stopped to crack his knuckles. I had the room next door. I didn’t know anything happened until I heard cops stomping all over the gook’s balcony.”

Angus filled up Eve’s glass again. She nodded and he also filled Simon’s. Eve shoved two dollars across the bar in payment. The emancipated woman was definitely in.

“I wish you wouldn’t use that derogatory term,” Angus remarked. “Gook—Charley. Doesn’t show respect.”

Eve stared at him over the rim of her glass. “I was married six years,” she said, “and it was for love. You should have heard some of the things my husband called me. Anyway, the poor gook’s dead and I feel responsible.”

“It was just fate—Kismet,” Simon suggested.

Now she turned the bland stare in his direction. “That’s a cop-out,” she protested. “I mean, suppose we all just turned away and washed our hands like Pompous Pilate?”

“I think you mean Pontius Pilate,” Simon murmured.

“That’s what I said. I mean, there’s been too much turning away. I think people should be more committed—more involved.”