Severed Key (14 page)

“Then it’s settled,” he said. “We start back right after breakfast and no stops on the way?”

Travis shrugged. “Okay, man. I don’t hanker to get sent up to Q. That on-the-job training they give in making licence plates doesn’t have much of a future. Hey, you want to hear the rest of my song?” He strummed the guitar as they walked back to the fire and sang another stanza:

He finished with a rebel yell and ran the rest of the way. He was a wild man, Bob thought, and there was no way of knowing what a wild man might do.

A BRIGHT CONE of light focused on the silver screen at the far side of the room, and then the film began to roll through the projector. An incredibly lovely face, framed with luxurious blonde hair, appeared in an expertly lit close-up. Large, adoring eyes pondered a tube of name brand shampoo prominently displayed in a carefully manicured hand. Moist lips trembled as the sensuously husky voice proclaimed that this preparation alone was responsible for the sexual success that nature had made mandatory even if the actress chose to go bald. For a period of sixty seconds the young Nordic goddess turned her head, tossed the mane of shimmering hair and finally closed the thickly accented declamation with a smile calculated to send all impressionable teenagers sprinting to the nearest cosmetic counter.

The film clip ended. The screen remained silver except for the fine whisp of smoke coiling up from a cigarette that made a tiny red glow in the shadows beyond the projector.

“Play the nudie bit again, Chester,” Hannah directed.

“You sound like a dirty old lady,” Chester said.

“Don’t be silly! I merely want to get another look at the way she walks.”

The next clip was a bath oil commercial. Discreetly lit and protected by a fine shim curtain, the same actress appeared,
au naturel
, at the edge of the rustic lily pond while the low-pitched background voice explained the therapeutic advantages of a new discovery distilled from the oil of rare mountain blossoms. There was no close-up in this commercial, but an almost total exposure of everything else.

When the clip was finished, Chester asked: “Do you want the sauna bath bit again?”

“No, that’s enough.”

“Aw, let’s have it again. I like the part where she rolled in the snow and squealed. I’ll bet that scene sold saunas to people who don’t even have houses.”

As the sauna commercial began to roll, a door opened behind the cigarette glow and a shaft of light fell momentarily across the screen. The door closed. Behind the accented tones of the voice of the actress came the unmistakeable crunch of dry crackers and the pungent aroma of pickled herring.

“Sacrilege!” Chester cried.

The girl on the screen, having completed her verbal orgasm, rose from the sauna bench and plunged into a bank of synthetic snow squealing with sensual delight. The clip ended and Chester sighed.

“Turn on the lights,” Hannah ordered. “We’ve been invaded.”

“I hope it isn’t the vice squad,” Chester said.

“If it is, run the latest newsreel of the atrocity of the day. I understand that war is rated G.”

Chester touched the light switch and both he and Hannah turned towards the door against which Simon leaned, crackers and herring in one hand and an opened bottle of beer in the other. He had a wide grease stain across the front of his jacket, a purple bruise on one cheek and a black eye-patch over his left eye.

“Let me guess,” Chester mused. “He has too much hair to be Moshe Dayan. It must be the guy who sells shirts.”

Hannah plunged the smouldering cigarette into an ashtray and, using her cane for leverage, got up from a throne-like Victorian peacock chair. “Simon, you’ve been in a fight!” she cried. “And you lost!”

Simon grinned. “Wrong—both times. I was almost mugged and it was a tie.”

“Mugged? Where? By whom?”

“In an underground garage. I don’t know who it was. The man got away.”

“What happened to your eye?”

“Nothing drastic. I took the edge of a blackjack on my left cheek and I have a beautiful shiner under this patch. Don’t ever get mugged in a major hotel. Management is so afraid of a law suit they turn every MD in the place loose on you. I kind of like the patch, though. It makes me look distinguished.” Simon drank from the beer bottle and nodded towards the screen across the room. “What’s been going on?” he asked. “An evening with the late Sigrid Thorsen?”

“A command performance,” Chester said. “Right after we talked on the telephone this morning, Hannah came down from her bachelor-watching perch and sent me out to see an old flame in the commercial flick industry. It pays to have influential friends, Simon. I came back with three vintage Thorsens which have been yanked from circulation because the agency fears adverse public reaction now that the lady is dead. My own feeling is that fate dealt Sigrid a very nasty blow. She had a future.”

“Also, a past,” Simon said.

Hannah brightened. “The man’s been rolling in more than one kind of dirt. Give, Simon. Give!”

“Not necessarily dirt,” Simon said, “—statistics. But I’ve been working all day and come home to a dinner of crackers and cold beer. There must be a steak down in the freezer somewhere, Chester.”

“There is.”

“Good. Take the chill off in the broiler while I shower and get into something clean, and then we’ll all sit down and play find the hidden faces. You haven’t heard from Jack Keith, have you?”

“Not a whisper.”

“The law?”

“I still think the telephone’s tapped.”

“You’re probably right.” Simon deposited the empty beer bottle next to Hannah’s ashtray and moved towards the door. “And don’t put that projector away,” he added. “I’d like to see that rolling-in-the-snow scene again myself.”

Later, after dinner, Simon, in slacks and sweater, relaxed in Hannah’s sitting room, which was also the projection room, and related as much of his day’s work as he thought appropriate to tell. It was when he described his conversation with the detective in New York that Hannah became interested.

“So Sigrid was involved with Juan Sandovar!” she exclaimed. “The Scandinavians have always had a weakness for Latins.”

“Most girls do have a weakness for a man with a few hundred million,” Chester said. “But I thought she was going to marry Arne Lundberg—who probably never made more than $150 a week in his life.”

Hannah smiled. “It does sound like an old movie script, doesn’t it? Beautiful girl spurns rich lover for the poor boy from back home. Actually, I’m sure it was the other way around. Deposed dictators and their heirs are like royalty. They never marry unless there’s a political advantage to the liaison. Sigrid probably needed a friendly shoulder to lean on when the affair began to cool.”

“You’re both missing the point,” Simon said. “Don’t you get the picture? Sandovar—now you’ve got me calling him that—Sands had a flight reservation booked by a syndicate-owned travel agency. Sigrid, booked by the same agency, was making the same flight a week later. Sands cancelled and gave his ticket to Sigrid. Sands flew to Las Vegas instead of Los Angeles, but came on the same day Sigrid was due. Both had reservations—not together, by the way—at the same hotel.”

“And Sigrid didn’t tell her boyfriend of her change of plans,” Chester added.

“Right. That’s what makes it all so interesting—that and the fact that Angie Cerva met Sandovar at the airport.”

“Where Jack Keith spotted them,” Hannah said.

“And his trouble began.”

“I thought Keith’s trouble began when he received the letter from Stockholm.”

“In a sense, you’re right. One of the last things Keith told me on the telephone was that he thought he knew who sent that letter. If he did find out that much it could explain the dead woman in his bed.”

“A frame,” Chester suggested.

“Or a warning.”

“Maybe he killed her,” Hannah said dryly.

She had a sheaf of stills in her lap—glossies of Sigrid Thorsen that Chester had dug up from the same source that delivered the film. She seemed more interested in them than the conversation—listening with one ear while she sipped her after-dinner Drambuie.

“That stuff’s getting too strong for you,” Simon said tersely. “Keith’s no psycho. He would only kill in self-defence, and I’ve never known him to defend himself from an attractive woman. And even if he was involved in something we know nothing about—would such a resourceful guy strangle a woman and leave her in his own bed? Let’s give him credit for some instinct of self-preservation!”

“You said ‘warning’,” Chester reminded. “A warning of what?”

“Of what would happen to him if he didn’t drop the case. Of course, a police search for him is also an effective way of hampering his freedom of movement. If I only knew what he was on to, I might know where to look for him.”

“No clues?” Hannah asked.

“Two. Keith spotted two men at LAX who were watching Cerva when he met Sands. He said—still says—they were detectives. I feel sure they weren’t. I met them in San Diego and they’re both with the Atomic Energy Commission.”

“Doesn’t the AEC have investigators?” Chester asked.

“Of course it does. But why in the devil would they be interested in a syndicate banker—?” Simon paused, reflecting. “Costello,” he said, slowly, drawing out the name like an old memory beginning to surface through the confusion of time. “That’s what Keith said to the New York agent: ‘Maybe they pulled a Costello twist.’ I assumed he was referring to some case he’d worked on, but there’s no way of getting to his files with his apartment under police guard. Now it occurs to me that he may have been thinking about something quite different. If you two charming people can get along without me for a few minutes, I’m going to crack a book or two in my library.”

“Cheers!” Chester cried. “Now I can look at the films again!”

“Not without me!”

Chagrined, Chester turned to Hannah. “Don’t you want to see them again?”

Hannah shook her head. “Not necessary,” she said. “And I have some research work, too.” She shuffled the photos and made a terse judgement. “I think she’s wearing a wig.”

“That sounds a little catty,” Simon said.

“Of course it does. That’s one of the privileges of being, shall we say, mature? We have to get our fun some way.”

“You were having plenty of fun this morning up on the balcony with those binoculars,” Chester said. “By the way, I’ve met the new neighbour and he could use a wig. He’s getting bald.”

“Bald! That’s a cruel word, Chester. Mr Bernardi has a middle-aged natural, that’s all.”

Simon went to the library and remained there for half an hour. When he returned to Hannah’s study, she was nowhere in sight and Chester was working with the projector.

“Well?” Chester queried, “did you learn anything?”

“Quite a bit,” Simon said. “Does the name Frank Costello mean anything to you?”

“Of course it does. He’s one of the underworld biggies.”

“That’s what the books say. It seems he made a lot of his early income smuggling gems. One of his lieutenants was killed in an airline crash years ago and scattered over half a million dollars’ worth of gems all over the desert. Now, as I read it, a ‘Costello twist’ could mean that Keith thought that seat reservation switch was planned. Angie Cerva is watched everywhere he goes, but he met Johnny Sands, or Sandovar, out in the open where everybody could see.”

“Deliberately?” Chester asked.

“Possibly. For the sake of speculation, suppose that Cerva and Sandovar had some kind of a deal working. Somebody else knew about it—maybe a law enforcement agency—maybe a rival mob. In any event something has to be transferred from New York to Los Angeles, something transferred or some important contact made. Sandovar, knowing he would be watched, made a reservation on a plane and then sent Sigrid Thorsen in his place.”

“She’s not exactly inconspicuous,” Chester protested.

“She didn’t have to be. The important thing is that her name has never appeared in the gossip columns with Johnny Sands—the New York detective had to dig out the information about their connection, remember? Not only that, she’s never been connected with Cerva.

“So she wouldn’t be watched.”

“Exactly. But the unpredictable occurred. The plane crashed and the operation was never completed. Do you remember that piece of Sigrid’s luggage that Keith and I fished out of the drink? We left it at the warehouse with the other recovered items, but that very night, while I was sleeping at a friend’s apartment, my boat was ransacked.”

“You didn’t tell us that.”

“It didn’t seem relevant at the time. The marina guard thought it was hoodlums. He told me that even the warehouse was robbed that night. Now, who was it that identified Sigrid’s bag at the warehouse?”

“Arne Lundberg.”

“Who was dead within twenty-four hours. Don’t ask me where Arne fits in this puzzle because I don’t know yet. He could have been just the grief-stricken lover, as the newspapers say, or he could have been involved in some other way. The important thing is that he’s dead now. And somebody else was interested enough to visit the warehouse—Johnny Sands. His picture was in the newspaper, too.”

“I see what you mean,” Chester said. “There was a lot of interest in anything of Sigrid’s that was recovered from the sea. Maybe I should drive down to that warehouse and find out if her bag was among the stolen articles.”

“That’s your first order of business for tomorrow. Now, since Keith and I were the ones who recovered that bag, it was just possible that we picked up something else that carried her initials—which would account for the ransacked boat. I didn’t think about that until this afternoon when I was nicked with a blackjack. I rolled behind another car in the garage and caught a glimpse of the attacker from under the wheels. Never saw his face, but I did see his hair—lots of it and very blond. Might even be bleached. I remembered then that Keith’s Caddy was almost sideswiped by a dark sedan the night we drove away from Lundberg’s apartment complex after we found him dead. I didn’t see the driver of the car but a big-shouldered fellow with a lot of blond hair was in the front seat beside him. It could have been the same man.”