Burden of Guilt Page 2

  “Oh, you bitch,” Kingsley said softly. “You filthy lying bitch!”

  “A bitch, maybe.” She shrugged her beautiful shoulders gently. “But neither filthy nor lying, my sweet!” Her eyes had a bright, malicious gleam in them as she looked at me again. “So there’s a problem for you, Lieutenant. Who are you going to believe? me? or that fearlessly truthful disbarred lawyer husband of mine?”

  “I think,” I said carefully, “I’m going to need a little time to figure out an answer to that question. Right now, I’ve just remembered an urgent appointment on the other side of town.”

  I made it out of the living room without actually breaking into a fast run, then headed toward the front door. The skinny little guy was waiting for me on the front porch, with an agonized look on his face.

  “She was listening just outside the door,” he confided in a hoarse whisper. “She heard everything the both of you said!”

  “So?” I grunted.

  “So now she knows about who that poor murdered girl is, and everything!”

  “Hold it, Tyler!” I glared at him. “How do you know she knows about the murdered girl, and everything?”

  “When I saw she was going to listen outside the door, I went outside the house, crawled under one of the open windows in the living room and listened, too.” His magnified eyes peered up into my face in a kind of frantic appeal. “She’s deliberately lying because she’s so mad at Gerard, now she’s found out what he was doing while she was in Palm Springs. Adele is a born troublemaker, and she always makes life hell on wheels for anyone that crosses her.”

  “Just what time did Kingsley get back last night, anyway?” I asked.

  “Oh, definitely before midnight,” Tyler said.

  “You saw him?” I prodded.

  “Well, no, I retired early last night.” The enormous eyes swam in a shining sea of sincerity. “But I can assure you Mr. Kingsley was telling the truth. He would never lie to an officer of the law!”

  Chapter Two

  The rented apartment was in Hillside, the swank residential area of Pine City, where you are a second-rate citizen if your poodle doesn’t wear a mink coat in the wintertime. I got there around ten in the morning, after having stopped off at a diner for breakfast and time out to try and inject a streak of sanity into my gibbering mind. The doorman didn’t unbend until I had shown him my tin, then the look on his face said it confirmed all his worst suspicions.

  “Mr. Cordain is renting the penthouse, Lieutenant,” he said in a sepulchral voice.

  “Trouble?” I asked in a sympathetic response.

  “It’s none of my business, but the ladies don’t exactly act like ladies, if you get what I mean.”

  I nodded wisely. “Noisy parties, and like that?”

  “There’s been some complaints.” He pulled his admiral’s cap a little lower over his eyes. “I had to send one of them back yesterday morning. Found her wandering around the lobby, casual as you please, in just a flimsy little nightgown thing that barely came down over her middle. Transparent, too. Nothing left to the imagination. Every time she moved, well…” He spread his hands helplessly. “Where’s the mystery anymore if they don’t keep something of themselves to themselves? Permissive society—chah!”

  “Thanks,” I told him.

  “That’s okay, Lieutenant.” He hesitated a moment. “Nothing real bad, is it?”

  “Just some questions,” I told him.

  “Transients!” He made it sound like a very dirty word. “They’re always trouble.”

  I rode the elevator up to the penthouse. The doorbell made a refined burping sound when I pressed it, and I had to press it three times before I got an answer. The first thing I saw was a tousled chestnut-brown head, sleepy hazel eyes with long curling lashes, a snub nose, and a mouth which, with the sly dimples at the corners, was a pagan appeal to sensuality. Then I saw the body that went with the face and I took a deep, slow breath.

  She was no more than five feet tall, but molded to perfection beneath the flimsy transparent garment that came all the way down to the tops of her shapely thighs. I could see the full surge of her breasts with their light pink tips, her slightly rounded stomach, and even the darker triangle that lifted enticingly between her thighs, and which, with the slightest upward movement of the garment, would be fully revealed to the light of day. The doorman was right; there was nothing left to the imagination. With an effort, I brought my eyes back up to her face.

  “Whatever you’re selling, we don’t want any.” Her husky voice still had a sleepy sound to it to match the look in her eyes. “Or are you giving away prizes?”

  “If I am, it certainly wouldn’t be for guessing what I’m thinking right now,” I said meaningfully, caressing that neat pink body with my eyes once more.

  “Oh?” The long eyelashes came down for a moment of consideration, then swept up again to reveal eyes from which the sleepy look had suddenly vanished.

  “I guess you must have had some reason for ringing the doorbell,” she remarked.

  “I wanted to see Mr. Cordain,” I remembered out loud, with no great enthusiasm.

  “He’s out right now, but he should be back soon.” She looked at me speculatively for a moment. “You can come in and wait for him, if you want.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  She turned and led the way back into the living room and, walking directly behind her, I noted with great appreciation the way the nightgown or whatever it was kept riding up to give me tantalizing glimpses of the bare rounded cheeks of her bottom. She didn’t care, this girl. She had no shame. The slow, rolling rhythm of her rump was beginning to have a hypnotic effect on me before we had gone even a couple of yards. The hem rose higher, giving me at least a couple of inches’ unrestricted view of her reverse cleavage.

  The living room was furnished in a kind of fancy bordello style, with enough couches and oversized armchairs for twenty people to have an orgy without anybody getting in anybody else’s way. She turned and faced me when we reached the center of the room, and yawned loudly.

  “Sorry. Late night last night, and I still feel bushed.” She put a hand under the deep swell of her left breast and scratched absently. The hem of her shift rose slightly to reveal a tiny wisp of chestnut hair between her thighs. “I need coffee. How about you?”

  “Fine,” I said hoarsely.

  “Why don’t you sit down and make yourself comfortable, Mr.—what did you say your name was?”

  “Wheeler,” I said. “Al Wheeler.”

  “Hi, Al Wheeler.” She stopped scratching and let her hand drop down to her side. Her crotch was once more an indistinct blur beneath the silk. “I’m Wanda Blair.”

  “Shirley Lucas’s girlfriend?”

  “Right.” Her eyes were interested. “You know Shirley?”

  “A friend of mine does,” I said easily.

  “One of Shirley’s clients, I guess.”

  I nodded. “A guy called Gerard Kingsley.”

  “Small world.” She headed obliquely across the room toward a door which presumably led to the kitchen. Her smooth round orbs undulated slowly beneath the shift, rising up over the lower slopes then falling again. “I won’t be long, Al. My instant coffee is almost instant. You want cream?”

  “Black will be fine,” I told her. “Need any help?”

  She stopped in the doorway and looked back at me over her shoulder, and her sensual lips parted in a gently mocking smile. Her breasts thrust forcefully against the transparent fabric, and I could see the nipples were larger than they had been before. She was waking up. “Us call girls have our own union rules. No client is ever allowed into the kitchen. It could destroy the image.”

  “But I’m not a client,” I said hopefully.

  “Not yet.” She shrugged her shoulders gently. “But I wouldn’t bet on the future, Al. With you, I figure business could be a pleasure.”

  Then she disappeared inside the kitchen, leaving me with the interesting thought of ho
w Sheriff Lavers would react if I put two hundred bucks on my expenses, and the reason right alongside. Her coffee was almost instant; she was back in what seemed no time at all, handed me the cup, then took her own across to the nearest couch and sat down with her feet tucked up underneath her. I saw down in an armchair facing her and sipped some coffee.

  “Kingsley’s some kind of a lawyer, isn’t he?” she said idly. “You in the same kind of racket, Al?”

  “More or less,” I agreed. “I had an early business appointment with him this morning, as it so happens.”

  “Now, there’s a coincidence!” She beamed at me. “You didn’t see Shirley over at his place, by any chance?”

  I nearly choked on a mouthful of scalding hot coffee. “Shirley? Why, was she supposed to be there?”

  “I don’t know, honestly. Hal invited the both of us to come down with him from San Francisco, and Shirley was supposed to be the big surprise present for Kingsley. It was a surprise all right! For a moment there, when he walked in last night and saw her, I figured he was about to have a heart attack!”

  “He didn’t appreciate the present?”

  “He didn’t stay too long, anyway. Spent about an hour holed up in the bedroom, talking business with Hal, then left. But Shirley got a call around eleven, then started acting all mysterious and said she had to go out. I didn’t ask her any questions, because Hal and I were kind of occupied at the time. But I kind of guessed Kingsley had changed his mind, and she’d gone to spend the night with him. Whenever she went, she isn’t back yet.” There was the faint sound of a key turning in the lock, and she smiled again. “This will be Hal, now.”

  A couple of seconds later a tall thin guy walked into the room. He was around forty, and the lines set deep into his hatchet-face didn’t do him any favors. A hank of thick black hair hung down over one eye, and the other looked at me malignantly through red and puffy rims. He was wearing a checked sport coat, tan slacks, suede boots, and a buttoned corduroy shirt with no tie. I looked in back of him, but didn’t see any foxhounds yelping at his heels.

  “Just what the hell is going on here?” The voice was deep and resonant, with a metallic edge to it that sandpapered my nerve ends.

  “Don’t be stupid, Hal,” Wanda Blair said casually. “You know I never work in the mornings.”

  “So who the hell is this punk, sitting here like he owns the apartment?” Cordain bellowed.

  “Al Wheeler.” She looked at him hard for a moment, then shuddered faintly. “And do you have to wear those clothes so early in the morning? Every time I look at you, I want to rush into the bathroom and throw up!”

  “Wheeler?” He swung around toward me. “I don’t know any goddamn Al Wheeler!”

  I got up out of the armchair and produced my tin. “Lieutenant Al Wheeler, from the sheriffs office, if we have to be formal.”

  Wanda Blair’s eyes widened. “Oh, no!” she said in a tragic voice. “Me and my big mouth!”

  “Don’t worry!” Cordain was arrogantly confident. “It’s just some snotty-nosed hick cop trying to big-time himself with the local sheriff.” He pushed the hank of hair away, and glared at me with two malignant eyes this time, both of them the color of dried-out olives. “So where’s the crime?” he asked contemptuously. “Or did they build a state line between San Francisco and Pine City while I wasn’t looking? The two girls came down here to share their vacation with me, is all!”

  “And why not?” I said mildly.

  “I’ll tell you why not! Because”—he blinked suddenly—“huh?”

  “If I could afford to bring a couple of gorgeous girls like Wanda and Shirley on vacation with me, I’d never go back to work,” I told him. “You know where Shirley is right now?”

  Wanda opened her mouth to say something, then looked at me and got herself impaled on my beady stare, so closed her mouth up tight again.

  “No, I don’t.” Cordain’s voice was back to a normal level. “She got a phone call late last night, said she had to go out, and off she went.”

  “How late?” I asked.

  “Who knows?” He shrugged irritably, caught my transferred beady stare, and thought again. “Sometime between ten-thirty and eleven-thirty, I guess.”

  “You didn’t ask where she was going?”

  If a hatchet can leer, that’s what his face did. “Shirley didn’t knock, she just opened the bedroom door and stuck her head in, then said she was going out. The kind of situation me and Wanda were in right then, we weren’t about to argue!”

  Maybe it was more the tone of his voice than the leer on his face, but I had a sudden feeling of revulsion and figured the time for bedroom farce was finished.

  “You should have asked,” I told him.

  “What the hell are you talking about?” His features reverted to their usual repugnant mold.

  “Or you should have asked,” I said to Wanda. “Seeing how she was your best friend, and all.”

  “Al Wheeler was kind of fun,” she said coldly. “But this come-on-strong lieutenant bit? Like forget it, Charlie, the scene’s moved!”

  “I met Shirley for the first time around six this morning,” I said in a very controlled voice. “She was lying on the grass under a lowering shrub in the backyard of the house Kingsley is renting. What was left of her slip was bunched up around her waist, and she wasn’t wearing anything else. Somebody had given her the kind of beating you don’t believe possible until you see the results. Then the same somebody had put their hands around her throat and strangled her to death.”

  It was the kind of thing I don’t say very often, but then—my mind rationalized—you don’t meet that kind of homicide very often, either. Cordain just stood there staring at me, his mouth hanging open and his face a pale green color. Wanda Blair made a faint mewing sound, then suddenly clapped one hand to her mouth and ran from the room.

  “So maybe there’s a homicidal maniac loose in Pine City,” I said conversationally. “Or maybe a very rational killer who had good reason to kill Shirley Lucas.”

  “I need a drink,” he said thickly.

  He walked stiff-legged to the bar in the alcove at the far end of the room and made himself a drink, not bothering with any of the finer details beyond slopping neat rye into a glass until it was full. Then he drank it down in four quick gulps. Cordain would keep, I figured; maybe if he kept on drinking that way he would improve with age, like in fifteen minutes time. Meanwhile, back in the bathroom, was a girl probably in urgent need of someone to hold her head.

  By the time I found the right bedroom, she was lying face-down across the bed with her shoulders heaving violently. The shift was hiked up over her bare bottom, and beneath it, between her slightly parted legs, a small, narrow, quivering slice of moist, chestnut-topped flesh—but it didn’t do anything for me. Another time, perhaps. Right now, my mind was on other matters. I sat down on the end of the bed and lit a cigarette.

  “Go away!” she sobbed.

  “That’s always a problem in my line of work,” I said reasonably. “You want whoever killed Shirley to get away with it?”

  She rolled over onto her back and, in one quick continuous movement, came up into a sitting position. The swollen hazel eyes gleamed with a rare kind of hatred, so they almost started out of her tear-blotched face.

  “No!” She took a quick shuddering breath. “Shirley was about the best friend I ever had, and I’d give ten years of my life right now to get my hands around the throat of whoever killed her, and strangle them to death!”

  “It’s a dull routine but I don’t know one any better,” I said truthfully. “All that happens is that I keep on asking questions, and you give me truthful answers.”

  She swallowed hard. “Okay! Start asking!”

  “You know of any reason why anyone would want Shirley dead?”

  “None,” she said flatly. “Like I said, Shirley was a sweet girl. All her clients were crazy about her, and she never double-crossed anyone in her whole life!”

&
nbsp; “No special boyfriend in her life, no ex-husband?”

  “Not that I knew of, anyway. I’m sure there wasn’t. We shared an apartment for going on two years, and a couple of girls living together for that long in our particular line of business”—she shrugged expressively—“you get to know about all there is to know about each other.”

  “Cordain suggested you come with him here to Pine City?”

  “Sure.”

  “Tell me about it. I mean what did he say, exactly, when he came out with the idea?”

  She put her hands to her eyes and rubbed them hard. “Hal was a client of mine in the first place. Then, sometime back, he asked if he could bring along a friend of his to meet Shirley. The friend was Kingsley, of course, and I think Shirley liked him. Anyway, he used to be around pretty regularly after that first time. Then, a couple of days back, Hal came up to the apartment and said he had to come down here on business for a few days. Kingsley was already here, he said, and how would us two girls like to go along? It would be a real surprise for Kingsley to meet Shirley in Pine City, and he’d get a terrific boost out of it. Hal offered to pay all our expenses, and something over, and we figured it sounded like a great idea.” Her mouth twisted savagely in recollection. “A vacation with pay. That’s something a call girl doesn’t get too often!”

  “Didn’t Cordain tell either of you that Kingsley had his wife with him down here?” I asked.

  “He what?” The heavy fringes of her eyelashes closed together slowly, and then were held tight shut.

  “Maybe Cordain didn’t know that?” I hoped my voice sounded convincingly insincere.

  “He knew,” she said in a dull voice. “He must have known. Maybe it was his idea of a real funny practical joke.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “I wouldn’t have figured he was a guy with a strong sense of humor.”

  “Me, neither.” Her voice was still flat. “But I guess you never can tell.”

  “Does he talk much about his work?”

  She shook her head. “But I read the newspapers, like everybody else. I know what Hal is and does, the same way I know what happened to Kingsley after he defended Stensen.”