The Simeon Chamber (32 page)

“Well maybe the name Nick Jorgensen will ring a bell?”

Fletcher fixed his gaze on the Englishman’s eyes and watched the pupils dance with indecision—

to lie or not. That the question coursed through Holmes’s mind like a pulse of electricity was evidenced by a brief hesitation.

“I’m familiar with a member of the faculty by that name. Surely he’s not accused of murder?”

“No, Professor. Right now I’m just looking for a little information.” Fletcher moved to the card table and absently fingered some of the papers spread on the surface.

Jasper moved nervously toward the table and began to roll up several large, irregularly shaped pieces of heavy parchment. “Please, Lieutenant, it may look like a mess to you, but every scrap of paper is a small part in a large research puzzle. And right now I know 401

where each is located.” He slid the rolled parchments into a protective tube and leaned it against the wall beside the dining table.

Fletcher merely grunted in response.

“Please have a seat.” Jasper gestured toward a large overstuffed armchair in the opposite corner of the room.

Fletcher declined the offer and instead reached for a straight-backed chair at the dining table, a foot from the cardboard tube. He sat down, his eyes wandering over the surface of the table. “It must be interesting work. What exactly do you teach?”

“English literature.” Jasper bit off the syllables. “But I’m sure you didn’t come all this way to examine my curriculum vitae.”

Fletcher looked at him questioningly.

“My resume, Lieutenant.”

The detective pursed his lips and nodded slowly, as if in comprehension. “No. No, actually I came over here in response to a complaint.”

“A complaint?”

“Yeah. It seems you visited a woman out in Daly City earlier today.” Fletcher flipped open his notebook, more for effect than assistance. “Angie Bogardus.”

Jasper turned his back to Fletcher as he moved toward the large armchair in the corner. The detective imagined the icy caress of panic that flowed through Holmes’s brain with the realization that the old lady had seen through his alias. But as he turned and sat, any hint of apprehension was concealed behind a placid mask of British reserve. Jasper crossed one leg over the other knee and stared stonelike in silence at the officer.

Fletcher’s eyes returned to his notebook. “She says you came to her home and tried to pass yourself off as a friend of Mr. Jorgensen’s. She says you ransacked a downstairs apartment and took something.”

A sedate smile spread across Jasper’s face. “Surely she’s joking. The woman has a fanciful imagination.”

“No sir. She was dead serious.”

“Listen, Lieutenant. I did visit the house. It so happens that Professor Jorgensen asked me to pick up some papers for a lecture at the campus, as he was scheduled to be out of town. I stood on her front stoop and told the woman that. She was gracious enough 403

to allow me into Professor Jorgensen’s apartment. I found the necessary papers and left. I’m afraid that’s the long and short of it.”

“Why did you use an alias?”

“What alias?”

“Jason Stone. That’s the name she gave me.”

Jasper began to swallow saliva, the first crack in the otherwise impassive exterior.

“I introduced myself as Jasper Holmes.”

“That’s not what she says.”

“Well, she’s wrong.”

“I see.”

“Then you didn’t take a small key from the apartment?”

“Of course not.”

Fletcher reached for the cardboard tube propped against the wall and drummed his fingers against the plastic cap on the top end. “And of course you don’t know anything about the murder of Susan Paterson?”

“I’ve already told you, I never heard of the woman.” Jasper’s voice had gone up an octave from his last response.

“What do you know about the Drake parchments?” Fletcher concluded the question with a drum roll of his fingers on the plastic cap and watched as the Englishman’s gaze riveted on the long cardboard cylinder. The lawyer’s mother had rattled on incoherently about the parchments for several minutes before Fletcher could pry himself away, and she insisted that her son was in danger.

The old lady was sure that whoever had killed his partner was now after Bogardus.

“Let’s quit playing games,” said Fletcher. “Make no mistake concerning the seriousness of your position. If you continue with this story you’ll become an accessory after the fact of murder.”

There was no response from the Englishman.

“Well,” Fletcher slapped his knees and rose from the chair. “If you want it that way, get your coat and we’ll visit the bank. The custodian of the safe deposit vault gave me a dandy description—right down to your argyle socks.”

Jasper’s posture slumped in the chair. He let out a long sigh as his demeanor cracked like an egg. “You have to believe me, Lieutenant.

I know nothing of any killing.” His eyes searched the floor. “But I can enlighten you 5

concerning the parchments. Though I doubt you’ll believe much of it.”

Sam fidgeted nervously in the booth as he allowed the phone to ring at least twenty times. There was no answer. He told himself she was in the shower and unable to hear it. That was one possibility. But he knew there was another. The trip to Los Osos took longer than he’d figured. Perhaps long enough for Jennifer to conclude that they’d gone up the hill without her. He weighed the possibility that she had carried through on her threat and gone to the police. He walked quickly to the car.

Back on the highway Sam pushed the accelerator to the floor and gunned the Porsche north. Nick dug his fingers into the upholstery of the passenger seat as the car slid through the curves and swung repeatedly into the opposing lane of traffic to pass slower-moving vehicles.

Jorgensen was a puddle of cold sweat by the time the Porsche pulled into the parking lot at the inn in Cambria. Sam was out of the car and halfway through the lobby headed for the stairs before Nick could get his seatbelt off and his door open.

Bogardus bolted up the stairs two at a time and ran to the room. As he knocked on the door it swung open.

“Jennifer?”

There was no answer.

The closet door was half-open, caught on a pair of blue jeans that had fallen to the floor with their hanger and were now wedged under the mirrored door. Sam moved toward the bathroom and rapped on the door.

“Jennifer?”

He opened it and flipped on the light. The room was empty, the shower curtain drawn back to expose the combination shower-tub, beads of water still visible on the tile walls.

He pushed past the door and in a half-daze walked inside, staring in disbelief at the words printed in large block letters on the mirror. The crushed lipstick used for the message lay in the sink.

Nick finally caught up with him and stood in the bathroom door, looking over his shoulder.

“What the hell’s going on?” asked Nick.

Sam didn’t reply, but turned and walked out of the bathroom.

Nick passed his eyes over the words 407

on the mirror. BRING THE JOURNAL TO THE SEVEn SISTERS BY FOUR TOMORROW AFTERNOON OR THE WOMAN DIES.

Sam stood motionless, looking into the mirror of the closet door as if to rebuke the figure staring back at him. The puzzle was coming apart again and this time Jennifer Davies’s life hung in the balance.

“He’s got her, Nick.”

“Who’s got her?”

“Slade.”

“What?”

Sam turned and looked at his friend, a dark frown on his face. “Don’t you understand? It’s been Slade all along. He killed Jennifer’s father on the blimp. He killed Lamonge’s brother to keep him quiet. He murdered Pat because she was asking questions about the parchments, and he stabbed Symington because the man knew the answers. Now he has Jennifer, and all we have is a riddle.”

Nick looked at him with a puzzled expression.

Sam nodded toward the message on the mirror. “The Seven Sisters.”

For the first time since entering the room Nick smiled. “Let’s hope that finding the journal will be so easy.”

Sam shot him a questioning look.

“The Seven Sisters are a succession of white sandstone cliffs near Point Reyes on the Marin Coast. They reminded Drake of the white chalk cliffs of Dover. That’s why he called the place his Nova Albion when he landed.”

“Well, at least we have a point of rendezvous. Now all we need is the journal.”

“Why are you so certain it’s Slade we’re dealing with?”

Bogardus fixed him with a steady stare. “There’s one thing I never told you or Jennifer. Up in the castle when Symington was dying on the floor I asked another question. I asked who stabbed him. He was only able to say two words before he died—

`the sailor.` As a dying declaration it might not be good enough for a conviction with a jury, but it’s good enough for me.”

The cold hard reality of the message 409

smeared across the bathroom mirror suddenly hit home. Sam considered the consequences of failure. What would have been major disappointment if their search for the journal proved futile only a few hours before had now taken on the dimensions of hideous tragedy.

Nick walked slowly from the bathroom toward the bed. He stroked his beard with his left hand, his mind lost in thought.

“There may be more to it than that.”

“What do you mean?”

“There’s something I didn’t tell you because until now I wasn’t sure it was important,” said Nick. “The other day before I left from Angie’s to head down the coast i made a telephone call to Akron, Ohio.”

Sam’s expression was one of irritation. He was in no mood for one of Jorgensen’s irrelevant tales.

“I talked with a man who flies blimps. In fact he flies the blimp that Jennifer’s father disappeared from.”

“What?” Sam was torn from his preoccupation with the message on the bathroom mirror.

“It seems that the air frame on the gondola from that navy blimp is still in use. It’s been refurbished and refitted. Sam, the gondola from the Ghost Blimp is part of the Goodyear airship America.

“And that’s not all. I got some interesting information from the pilot. It seems he’s had an abiding curiosity about the history of that old gondola for some time. He’s done research, performed some calculations, and he has an interesting theory.”

“What is it?”

“Try this on for size. He thinks two men walked off that blimp back in 1942.”

“Two?”

“Yep. He’s studied photographs taken of the ship as it floated in at the beach near the cliff house. It appears that the blimp came in at sea level and touched down several times in the sand and again on a nearby golf course. Then for some unknown reason it took off like a rocket and climbed several thousand feet before it drifted over the city. It stayed up for hours before it came down. According to the pilot only one thing can account for a steep ascent of that kind—displacement of a lot of weight. They found one small depth 1

charge on the golf course. But that wouldn’t be enough, according to the pilot. He says that after accounting for the weight of the depth charge, the additional jettisoned weight would have had to be in the neighborhood of 300 to 350 pounds to account for the rate of ascent. When it came down in the city nothing else was missing from the ship.”

“So he concluded …” said Sam.

“That two men stepped off that blimp somewhere on the golf course that day, and that both disappeared as if they walked into a time warp.” Nick completed the sentence.

The cold hand of fear tickled Sam’s spine. Two men had walked off that airship thirty years before. One of them was Raymond Slade.

For the first time since his initial interview with Jennifer Davies more than two weeks before, Sam considered the possibilities and settled the doubt in his mind. For something now told him that James Spencer was alive. 12

A budding carpet of soft green grass was already beginning to take hold, growing up through brittle dead straw from the previous spring’s pasture. The light of the setting sun was a brilliant hue of orange and purple as it streaked through a bank of fog resting on the horizon far out to sea.

Sam and Nick huddled in the shadows of one of the small log huts that served as hay barns for the dwindling herd of zebras that grazed on the hills below the castle. They were both winded and Nick’s legs were beginning to cramp. He bent at the waist, placing his hands on his knees and taking deep breaths.

“It’s times like this that your body sends a four-letter word to your brain.” Nick dribbled thick saliva onto the straw at his feet. “So-That-O-P.”

“We only have a short distance to go. Up that gully and into that grove of oaks.” Sam pointed off in the direction of the top of the hill. “We’ll wait there until it’s completely dark.”

“Do you know where we are in relation to the animal enclosures?” Nick gasped between panting breaths.

Sam laid the heavy nylon rope on the ground at his feet and fumbled in the pocket of his jacket for the map. He knelt on one 413

knee and opened the map on the loose dirt of the hut floor.

“The best I can figure is we’re here.”

He pointed to an area on the map. “If I remember the road right, the animal enclosures are here.” He drew his fingers across the map less than an inch to another location.

It looked so close. But as Nick oriented himself on the map he saw that the line representing Highway 1 was only about three inches from their present location. It had taken them nearly two hours, and a quart of sweat, to cover the territory between the road and the hut.

“What are we going to do when we get there?” The question sounded stupid even as Nick asked it, but he had no idea what they were looking for.

“Your guess is as good as mine. From what Symington said it should be a pretty good-sized room. Apparently they stashed a good quantity of sizable artworks there from time to time.”

“You’d think something like that would be pretty obvious. I mean, don’t you think groundskeepers would stumble onto the place?”

Sam shrugged. “I don’t know. When the zoo was active I doubt if anybody except the keepers would venture near the place. Symington and his committee probably had them on their payroll. After the zoo fell into disuse, from what I gather, the place was pretty much abandoned.