She faltered, the blackness rolling over her in a wave.
“Yes, ma’am?” he said. “Maybe they got it from people that was polite and courteous themselves.”
Another black wave hit her. When she floated up out of it, she was lying on the lounge, and he was seated on its edge looking down at her.
“You shouldn’t be up wandering around, ma’am. Not so soon after a Caesarean.”
“Oh…” She blushed, tugged primly at her skirt. “Then, you’re Doctor Lord?”
“Might say I was a reasonable facsimile, thereof, ma’am. Now, you just stay here a minute. Goin’ to give you a little shot of something.”
He prepared a hypodermic. These many years after Doctor Lord’s death, he still received samples from the various medical supply houses.
He rolled up her sleeve, sponged her arm. As he started to inject the hypo, she tried to pull away from him.
“This won’t put me to sleep, will it, Doctor?”
“Well”—he depressed the hypo plunger, completed the injection—“Well, yes, ma’am. Give you the good sound rest you need.”
“But I can’t! I mustn’t! I’ve got to see Tom Lord!”
“Oh, you’ll see him, ma’am. And he’ll see you.” He grinned at her impishly, his voice following her down into the void in which she was swiftly descending. “Yes, sir, he’ll see a lot of you…literally and figuratively.”
Her brows knitted in drowsy puzzlement. Her eyes drifted open for a moment, stared into his. She blushed faintly, and a tiny, half-shamed giggle arose in her throat.
Then she was asleep.
Lord carried her upstairs, and into a bedroom. He carried her to the bed, and paused in the act of laying her down.
She needed rest, this little lady. Not just for a few hours, but at least several days. And the way she was bundled up, she sure couldn’t do much of a job resting. Felt like she had so damned many duds on—slips and underskirts and God-knew-what-all—that they weighed more than she did. And he wondered whether all these cumbersome trappings of modesty were her own idea or McBride’s.
Well, no matter. She had to come out of them, and there was no one but him to get her out.
He did so with awkward efficiency, laying her across his lap in baby-burping fashion and peeling the garments off over her head and down over her feet. Then, digging down into an ancient cedar chest, he came up with a tissue-paper-wrapped armful of gossamer silk and lace.
Its faint fragrance drifted up to him, and for a moment he was back in that long-ago night, in the dream that had been a reality. And a haunted, hungry look came into his eyes. He stood almost motionless, hugging the silk and lace against him, fighting to bring back, to hold onto something that was gone forever. Finally, seeing himself in the tall, mahogany-framed mirror, he was jerked back into the present.
He laughed harshly. He made his selections from the garments, tossed the others back into the cedar chest, and kicked the lid down on them.
Dressing Donna McBride in his mother’s nightgown and negligee, he was struck by how well they fitted. As though they had been made for her almost. As though they—she was—and he angrily slammed the door on the thought. So they were the same size. What the hell of it? A lot of women had the same full but delicate build, and it didn’t mean a damned thing. It had nothing to do with his feelings about Donna McBride, or why he was treating her as he was.
She was ill. Having killed her husband, he was responsible for her; he had to take care of her. And he also had to find out just how much she knew about Tom Lord, and exactly what she intended to do about it.
The last wasn’t too hard to guess; that is, if she knew nothing but the bald truth without the circumstances that went with it. Maybe the circumstances wouldn’t make any difference to a little hardhead like her anyway. Doubtless they wouldn’t. Her presence here indicated her attitude, her belief that McBride had been killed. And judging by the weight of her purse, she was all set to take care of his killer.
He opened the purse, and verified his assumption. He hefted the small, fully loaded pistol. It was brand, spanking new; bought, apparently, for just one purpose.
So…?
So he had to stick with her, keep an eye on her. Try to divert her or reason with her, or set up some defense for himself. He had to do it. Otherwise, he damned well wouldn’t be doing it. For in trying to stave off the danger which she represented, he was laying himself wide open to as great a peril in Joyce Lakewood.
He was already overdue back at Joyce’s house. Joyce would be all saddled up and champing at the bit by now. Any minute she’d be phoning to ask why the hell the hold up, telling him to get going like he’d promised. And when he told her that the trip was off, indefinitely, if not permanently—this trip which meant so much to her and which she was already regarding as a prelude to marriage…
She wouldn’t take it. She wouldn’t take any excuses. She’d cry and she’d beg, and then she’d get sore. Blind, crazy mad. And pretty soon after that she’d be talking to Sheriff Dave Bradley. Putting him in a spot where he’d have to do something about the killing and the killer of Aaron McBride.
She’d be sorry about it afterward. But the damage would be done then.
The phone rang.
He hurried out of the room, pulled the door shut, and picked up the hall extension.
“Hello,” he said. “Oh, hi, Joyce.”
“Tom! For Pete’s sake, honey, what’s holding you up? I’ve been waiting and waiting, and—”
“Look, Joyce. Listen,” he cut in guardedly. “I can’t talk right now. I mean, I don’t want to do a lot of talkin’ over the telephone. But—”
“I don’t want to do a lot of talking either!” She was already sore; intuitively, she saw that her plans were fading away. “I want you to get over here right now, and you’d better come!”
“And I’m trying to tell you I can’t. We can’t make that trip, Joyce. Not for a while, anyways. I’ll try t’ get over an’ explain in a few days, but—”
“Wh-aat? What do you mean we can’t.…You’d better explain right now, damn you! I’m not going to believe it anyway, but you get over here or I’m coming over there!”
“Huh-uh,” he said, his temper flickering. “I’m not, and you’re not. You ain’t coming anywhere near here. I told you I was sorry, an’ you oughta know I—”
She broke in with an angry sob; she bawled. Lord fidgeted fretfully.
“Now, looky, Joyce. We talked about all we better, so—”
“Don’t you hang up on me, Tom Lord! You just try it and see what happens.”
“Swell,” said Lord, “and maybe after I see what happens, you’ll see what happens.”
He hung up. Almost immediately, the phone rang again.
“Now, you listen to me, Tom. I’m going to wait just thirty minutes for you to get over here. No, I’ll wait an hour. If…”
“You do that,” Lord said. “Try holdin’ your breath while you’re waiting.”
He slammed down the receiver.
The phone did not ring again.
11
Fat August Pellino was hard-hit by the suicide of George Carrington. The news was hardly in the papers before he received a series of guarded long-distance calls, followed by an equal number of visitors to his old-fashioned brick residence.
Always before, when there was need for a conference, Augie had called it. Otherwise, his business associates had left him strictly alone. This time, however, they had simply announced they were coming, advising him to hold himself in readiness. And in their action, Pellino saw the faint outlines of the handwriting on the wall.
He was no longer in the saddle—at least, he was not seated in it firmly. He was teetering, and the slightest jostle, the smallest move of the wrong kind, would find him dumped in the dust.
Mrs. Pellino prepared an elaborate old-country feast for the group. There was much bowing and scraping and exchanging of compliments; much embracing and fluid laughter. Pell
ino took part in it, but uncomfortably, with barely concealed impatience. He had never gone for this stuff. He had never liked these people, whom he thought of as wops. He was Sicilian himself, on his father’s side, but he was essentially his mother’s son. Essentially, he was Prussian rather than Latin.
At last, the formal feasting and gabbing was over. Mrs. Pellino vanished into the upper reaches of the house, and Augie and his guests retired to the basement. Bottles were opened, cigars passed. Augie found himself seated alone on one of the long leather lounges, and somehow a light had been focused on him. His associates, on the other hand, sat half in the shadows, ringing him in a seemingly casual semi-circle.
There was silence. It grew deeper and deeper. Pellino wanted to rip out a curse, to get up and start swinging at those blandly impassive faces. And he knew it would be the end of him if he did. For this silence—the treatment—was intended to provoke just some such outburst; to bring out any signs of weakness—or guilt—that might be in a man. And if such were revealed, the man was not allowed to slip from the saddle. He was knocked from it.
Pellino wondered who his successor would be, and he saw, or rather sensed, that the man had already been elected. He was from New Jersey, and his name was Salvatore Onate; one of the oldest of the group and undoubtedly the most prosperous. Obviously, there had been some kind of meeting prior to this one, and Sal had been named spokesman and leader in waiting.
The silence went on and on. August waited, as calmly quiet outwardly as his guests. There was a sudden, tinkling crash, and he jumped. Involuntarily, he half-rose from the lounge.
A ripple of soft laughter ran through the room. Salvatore Onate smiled apologetically.
“How clumsy of me, August. I’m afraid I broke one of your glasses.”
Pellino was furious, but he managed a half-polite gesture of dismissal. The glass was a cheap thing, really, and Sal should leave it where it had fallen.
“Perhaps that would be best,” Onate nodded gravely. “After all, who can put together a broken glass?”
“Who indeed?” said Pellino.
He was prepared to outwait and outtalk this old bastard as long as it was necessary. Dropping that glass, damn him; deliberately taking him for a rise! But the younger men had little patience for this kind of game, and Onate noted their growing restlessness.
“Now, we should get down to business, Gus,” he said, his voice growing curt. “We got a lot of dough parked with you. It don’t look to us like you’re taking very good care of it.”
“So how ain’t I?” Pellino shrugged. “Maybe you ain’t looking at it right.”
“He’s looking at it right!” snapped Carlos Moroni, the Chicago man. “Two so-called suicides in less than a month! Two big-shots from the same company, and not a very big company at that! This is smart? You think you can crap all over the landscape without raising a stink?”
Pellino glowered at him. He snarled that he had neither directly nor indirectly caused the deaths of Carrington and McBride, and the police were quite content to accept them as suicides.
“How the hell you know they are?” sneered the Los Angeles representative. “Did they write you a letter? How you know the roof ain’t about to fall in on us right now?”
“Because there’s no goddamned reason for it to!”
“Conceding,” said Sal Onate, “that the suicides were legitimate…and we are not at all sure that you are without guilt in the Carrington matter…”
“What”—Pellino swallowed—“what do you mean by that?”
“Don’t play dumb,” said Moroni. “What the hell would we mean? You ask me, we ought to’ve been keeping tabs on you a lot sooner.”
There were nods of agreement to this. A strangling tightness came into Pellino’s throat. The situation was far worse than he had thought. Apparently, he had been under surveillance for months.
“All right,” he said, “Carrington was out here to the house. Just a little while before he died. But no one knew about it.”
“We knew about it.”
“But I didn’t have nothing to do with his getting killed! He was by himself when it happened. Sure, I was sore about his coming out here. Sure, I tossed him around a little. So what?”
“Let it go,” said Onate, with seeming idleness. “You had nothing to do with it. You are not probably responsible for McBride’s death. Now, what about this officer, the man Thomas Lord?”
“What about him? He got rooked and he’s sore. So what?”
“Then everything is fine, yes?” Onate nodded, his tone still idle. “Our investment is safe. There is nothing to fear.”
“Well…sure. You can add it up for yourself.”
“But we have had no return on the investment, Gus. Practically none. It has all been plowed back into the business, along with our original capital.”
“So you know the answer to that. Look at the new drilling rigs we bought, and them things cost! Better than two hundred grand a rig! We bought tanks and trucks and—”
“How much would they bring at a forced sale? Assuming, that is, that such a sale was possible.”
“How much?” Pellino frowned. “I don’t get you, Sal.”
But, of course, he did get it, and they knew that he did. The possibility of investigation had at last made them see the danger which he had seen in the beginning. Highlands had been racing against time. The oil had had to be gotten out of the ground very quickly. Thus, the huge and constant investment in new equipment—equipment which, as salvage, would not bring a fraction of its original cost.
“Our holdings,” said Sal Onate, “have a book value of more than five million dollars. We suggest that you sell them.”
“Sell them! But—”
“But you can’t,” Onate nodded. “The title to our principal leases—and, of course, everything attached to them and deriving from them—is clouded. No one but a fool would buy them at even the most modest price.”
Pellino hesitated, trying to protest. Then, feebly, he spread his hands. “All right, Sal; you called the turn. But things have been that way right from the beginning.”
“No. They are not as they were in the beginning. Neither McBride nor Carrington was dead then—both under suspicious circumstances. Nor is Lord the man which you represented him as being. He is not a bumbling, small-town clown, but an intelligent and determined man; a trouble maker of the worst kind. At one time, perhaps, he could have been bought off reasonably. But now…”
He shook his head, leaving the sentence unfinished. Pellino said hopefully that it was still worth a try. But he was far from sure that it was, and uncertainty was in his voice.
As yet, apparently, Lord hadn’t fully appreciated the strength of his position. But any gesture of appeasement was apt to open his eyes, and his reaction was more than apt to be disastrous.
“So all right,” said Pellino, “maybe we don’t make him no offer. Maybe it wouldn’t be smart.”
“And?”
“What do you think? He’s a loner, no heirs or kin. He ain’t around any more, we got no worries.”
It was easily his worst blunder. Onate gave him a look of frowning incredulity. Carlos Moroni snorted, jerking a contemptuous thumb at him.
“Get this Pellino, will you? Like some half-assed mystery writer! He don’t know what the hell to do, so he has everyone drowned in a flood.”
“Very stupid, Gus,” sighed Sal Onate. “Two deaths, two that could have been murder, and now you suggest a third. Killing a man who is not only identified with Highlands, but also associated with the law. If this is an example of your thinking…”
“The stupid son of a bitch don’t think at all!” snapped the Los Angeles man. And then they were all talking at once.
He had done nothing right. Every move he had made, seemingly shrewd at the time, was now cited as a blunder. Mrs. McBride was suspicious. Lord had declared a vendetta. Highlands had a dangerously ugly reputation in the fields. Danger loomed from every side; the danger of expo
sure and the danger of losing their entire investment. And for the great risks they had taken and were taking, they had received no payment whatsoever. When there had been a sizable pot to split, Pellino had dumped it into an exploratory well. Seventy thousand dollars sunk into the ground, with a string of tools irretrievably jammed on top of it.
“And according to our geological reports,” said Sal Onate severely, “there was no oil there in the first place. It was simply more of our money thrown away.”
Pellino’s temper flickered, then wearily subsided. It was their right to check on him. And checking, they would naturally check on that wildcat well; on anything that might be misfeasance or malfeasance, betrayal or blunder. They were always thorough, men like these. They did not act without ample evidence.
“Well, Gus?” said Onate. “Well?”
Pellino stalled, carefully relighting his cigar and carefully blowing out the match.
“Well, how about it?” said Moroni. “You got something to say or not?”
August looked at him coolly, took a long puff from his cigar, and spewed a stream of smoke at him. “I’ve got something to say. You want to listen, or do you want to jump down my throat?”
“Talk!”
Pellino talked. He declared that he had never had any intention of hitting Lord; in suggesting that Lord be got out of the way, he had meant only that. Either to have him lured and kept away peaceably, or to have him framed. With the contact he had in Big Sands one or the other should be a cinch.
“Contact!” Moroni spat. “Now, there’s a fancy name for a whore. Five million bucks, and he’s bettin’ it on a double-crossing whore!”
“Now, Carlos,” said Onate mildly. “Whores can be very useful.…You can manage this quickly, Gus?”
“Why not?”
“Good. It is settled, then.”
The meeting broke up shortly after that. When his guests had departed, Pellino repaired to the kitchen, sat there drinking coffee and staring sourly into nothingness. He was by no means sure that he could get rid of Lord. He had simply been talking off the top of his head, making promises because he had to. Given enough time, he could doubtless dispose of Lord in a way that would be free of kickbacks. But he had virtually no time; he had to rush in without any time for laying a proper groundwork. And such tactics seldom resulted in success.