Date for Murder (2 page)

T
HE
Queen felt sure everything would be changed now at the Manders’ Date Ranch. With Miss Idell coming back there were bound to be explosions. It had always been like that, even when Miss Idell had been a kid, before she had gone East to college. The Queen sighed, a suppressed little sigh. With the Major gone, Miss Idell would have her own way all right.

The Queen told Sing, the Chinese cook, about it during one of her more idle moments. They were few, she always said, what with her position as manager of the household keeping her up at all hours.

“Things will blow up, see if they don’t,” she said to Sing. “The good Lord knows I have little enough time to myself around here. But with Miss Idell and Mr. Grant each wanting to do something different with the place, there just won’t be any peace. Of course, I think Miss Idell has fine ideas, but it seems to me that the Major did well enough.” She sniffed audibly and tucked a strand of greying hair over one ear.

Sing was San Francisco born and educated, and except on the rare occasions when he felt he was expected to sound like the popular conception of a Chinaman, his English was quite good.

“If Mr. Grant has his way,” he said over a cup of tea, “I think we will be looking for employment.”

The Queen sighed again and dropped ashes from her cigaret into her saucer. “You might as well go to bed,” she told him. “They seem to be planning to sit up all night. It isn’t your job to cater to Grant’s friends—not after dinner is over.” She sounded sorry for herself.

Sing finished his tea and politely patted his lips with his fingers.

“Since I must rise with the new day, I shall,” he said. “There is sufficient food prepared in the refrigerator should they desire additional refreshments.”

“Go to hell,” the Queen said.

Sing smiled broadly. “Okay, me go bed, chop chop.” He went out through the pantry and to his room.

The Queen shook her head as she watched him go. When that Chinaman wanted to show he had been to college, he certainly did a good job of it. When she wasn’t tired she rather enjoyed his deliberate inconsistencies. But it was almost two o’clock in the morning and she didn’t feel quite up to it. Of course, she could go to bed and let Grant and the party go hang. But with Miss Idell supposed to arrive at any moment, and Mr. Frank, the Major’s brother, still up, it wouldn’t be quite the thing. She rather enjoyed the feeling of martyring herself for the sake of “her family.”

The doorbell rang, and she rose reluctantly, drowning the spark of her cigaret in the remainder of her tea. Halfway to the hallway she remembered it might be Miss Idell and stopped to pat her hair into shape and tug the bulge out of the front of her blue dress. Her short, plump figure hurried a bit as the bell rang once more, insistently.

Grant Manders reached the door before she did. He weaved toward it on tall, stork-stem legs. The Queen tried not to show it, but she couldn’t help the little lines of disgust that crept around the corners of her thin mouth. It seemed that since he and his friends had arrived three days ago he had done nothing but drink. Look at him now, with his brown hair plastered to his forehead, his dark eyes sort of glassy and dull-looking.

“Now, Queen,” he said reproachfully, cocking one eye at her. “Don’t say it. Don’t even think it.” He spoke without much blur in his voice. He threw open the door. “Welcome to—Idell!”

Idell came breezily into the front hall, looking cool and capable in spite of the perspiration stains on the light green silk of her shirt.

“Hi, everybody,” she said.

“Shall I get your luggage?” the Queen asked.

“In Link’s car,” Grant said. “You drove his bus down, didn’t you?”

Idell smiled a bit wearily. “My luggage and Link’s car,” she said, “are tangled up somewhere with the sagebrush and cholla. Darling, I have had an experience.”

She beckoned to someone behind her. Mark Warren stepped hesitantly into the hallway. “And this is the hero of the whole affair.”

“Not really,” he said. “I just happened.”

Grant nodded to him; they knew each other in a casual business way. The Queen knew him quite well, but she was too puzzled to say anything.

“You had an accident, Miss Idell?”

“You might call it that,” Idell said. “Come into the other room, Mark. I want you to meet everybody. I heard there was a party.” She smiled at the Queen fluttering helplessly in the background. “Don’t worry, darling; I’m perfectly all right. Quite sober, too.”

Mark followed Idell and Grant through a draped archway to the left of the door. He smiled reassuringly at the Queen before he went into the living room.

It swept thirty by forty feet across the eastern half of the two story adobe ranch house. The floor was tile, and the walls were of cool plaster decorated here and there with colorful desert paintings. A huge fireplace took up a good section of the front wall, and a small fountain holding a nymph who spouted water held the center of the floor. The sound of the water tinkling into the pool was quite cooling after the heavy heat of outside. You didn’t notice the heat, not with the air-conditioning.

The floor was spotted with carelessly placed Navajo rugs, and rattan chairs and divans lolled luxuriously along the walls. Before he sat in one Mark knew it would be comfortable, like most rattan. A sufficiency of end-tables and ash stands, now holding full glasses and innumerable cigaret stubs, gave the room a much-used air. Across from the fireplace Mark could see French doors leading onto the patio. Mark thought it would be a comfortable room if it was cut down to about one quarter the size.

He felt Idell’s cool, slim hand touch his as he stopped inside the archway.

“Hello, everybody,” she said with her brittle gayety. “I bring a hero.” She tugged at Mark’s hand, moving him reluctantly across the room behind her. “Link, darling,” she said to the man seated nearest the archway, “I’m awfully sorry about your car. Really I am. But I’ll buy you another.” She turned to Mark. “Mark Warren, James Link. I call him ape-man because apes and missing links always go together, somehow. And he does look sort of like an ape, don’t you think?”

Mark thought so, but only in silence. He had seen Link occasionally riding into Indio with Grant. He accepted the hand thrust at him and didn’t bother to return the tremendous pressure on his fingers. Link was a giant, two inches taller than Mark’s six feet and half again as broad. His face was dark and glowering, with eyes under bushy black brows and a chin thrust forward like that of a belligerent bulldog.

“Wrecked it, huh?” he rumbled at Idell.

“Darling, no,” she said. “Some men did. They came at me, shooting and banging away. It was frightful.” She didn’t seem in the least frightened now, but Mark remembered the pounding knot of fear against the whiteness of her throat.

The others in the room (there seemed to be about a half dozen tucked in various places) laughed. All but Link. His dark face with its blue-black beard showing through tanned skin turned the color of pallid putty, and for a moment his eyes threatened to roll back in his head. Fear, Mark thought. The man is frightened half out of his senses. But he didn’t look the kind who would be afraid of something that might have happened to someone else. Long seconds passed before color drained back into his face and a smile formed half-heartedly on his thick lips.

“Yeah,” he said. “I usually see green dragons and purple dogs myself.” It fell flat in Mark’s ears because he knew it was forced.

“Nobody believes me,” Idell said in mock anger. “You tell them, Mark. No, first meet them all.” She tugged at him and drew him across the room. “Clinton Jeffers,” she said, indicating a big blond man, as husky as Link but not so tall. “You know, the All-American tackle from Grant’s college? He was famous two years ago. Nobody knows him now, of course.”

Jeffers took Mark’s hand without exerting too much pressure. “Yeah,” he said cheerfully. “The forgotten man. Glad to see you, Idell. I got worried; thought you’d piled up the car, coming so late.”

Idell smiled at him and waved her hand at a small blonde woman seated beside Jeffers. She had a cocktail glass in one hand. “Myra Cartwright. You know Myra, Mark. Everybody knows Myra.”

Yes, he knew Myra, and he admitted as much with a pleasant smile. She had stopped for gas numerous times on her way home from her woman’s shop in Indio. She was a small and brittle blonde with pointed features and hard, blue-black eyes as sharp as pointed nails. But there was a roundness to her small figure and something in her eyes when she smiled that made men forget her sharpness. Mark had heard a great deal of her; he noted with interest her long, unpolished fingernails.

They wandered along the room. Mark met Maybelle Farman, of the oil Farmans, and her cousin, slim and dark where she was short and athletic and dark. Mark took it for granted her cousin’s name was Farman too. He was introduced simply as Chunk. When he smiled he showed even white teeth in his deeply tanned face. He was almost effeminate, with his small hands and feet, but when he rose Mark got the impression of wiry grace. His eyes were brown and like an adoring spaniel’s when he looked at Idell.

“We were getting worried!” He had a New England accent.

“Terribly,” Maybelle agreed. “That car of Link’s is too fast.” Mark saw her eyes turn toward Link, and they seemed to hate him.

“And Leona Taylor, surely,” Idell was saying, as she dragged Mark across the room to where a deep chair and matching divan sat near the French doors. Mark looked at Leona Taylor and felt that he need not have been pulled toward her; he was drawn to her.

She sat quietly in a rattan chair partially concealed behind a potted palm. The fingers of her right hand, tipped with soft-toned polish, were clasped around a glass which had hardly been touched. Her hair was a drab brown, drawn in soft waves and curled at the base of her neck. But a second look showed Mark the drabness was purely imaginary. Incredible lights shot through her hair when she moved, capturing rainbow glints like a prism. And as if to bely the brown shade of her hair, her face was a white cameo in pallid marble with two great violet eyes shining from it. Mark made no attempt to guess her age. She might have been anywhere from twenty-five to thirty-five. But her type was ageless, ageless and exotic. He could not tell whether she knew of her own beauty. When she held out one blue-veined hand she was quiet and reserved. When her violet eyes met his he felt an insane stirring in his blood. He was relieved when Idell’s voice allowed him to turn his eyes from Leona Taylor.

“And this is Uncle Frank,” she was saying. “There is always an Uncle Frank. But this one is a dear. He happens to be executor of Father’s estate, too. He’s a lawyer.”

And a famous one, Mark thought. He had heard of Frank Manders, the great civil lawyer, but he had never seen him before. His open, rugged face, weathered like an outdoor man’s, made it difficult to imagine him in a city courtroom. His eyes and hair were grey and sparkling with life. Mark liked him instantly.

“Pardon my not rising, young man,” Frank Manders said. “I’m a bit under the weather.” Mark saw a light blanket draped over his legs, and the tops of a pair of crutches peered from behind the divan. “I had an accident on a fishing trip three months ago,” he said. “Rode like a tenderfoot, and my horse threw me. Broke my leg in two places below the knee. Confounded nuisance for a man of my age.”

“Sorry to hear of it, sir,” Mark said.

Frank Manders leaned toward Idell. “Now what is this, young lady? You wrecked the car, I suppose.”

“It was literally shot out from under me,” she said. “They chased me all the way from Riverside. At least that’s where I first noticed them. Every time there was a dark, lonely stretch they started shooting. They hit the car once just this side of Banning.”

“Who is they? Good Lord, child, are you serious?”

“Quite serious,” Mark said. “I saw them shoot at her after she left my station not a half hour ago.”

“I don’t know who ‘they’ are, Uncle Frank,” Idell said. “I got a glimpse of two men when they went by me after I left Mark’s. They came out of the Palm Springs road. I fooled them, so they took that one by mistake. It was a convertible sedan. After they found me again, I decided I was tired of playing cops and robbers, so I slowed down this side of Coachella, set the throttle on Link’s car and jumped.” Her voice was light and airy, but Mark caught a throb of tension beneath it.

Idell showed them the palms of her hands. There were red marks in the heels and on her fingertips. “I was really lucky. I lit running.” She laughed and glanced across the room at Link, who had moved nearer. “If your car went straight you might catch it in the Salton Sea, darling. I only put two gallons of gas in the tank. I thought I would use about that much before I had to leave it. And I didn’t want it to catch fire.”

“Then you planned to jump,” Mark said.

“Certainly. I didn’t want them to go on shooting at me forever.”

“Why didn’t you let me help?”

“Please,” she said, squeezing his fingers. “You did enough, chasing after them in that awful car of yours.”

“It gets me around,” he said stiffly.

“I’m sorry,” she said, and sounded as if she meant it. “Really I am. It was sweet of you to go to all that trouble, Mark.”

“I don’t understand this,” Frank Manders said. “And I’m going to find out what’s back of it.” He sounded as if he could quite easily.

Link came forward and put one arm protectingly around Idell’s waist. “They must have mistaken your car for someone else’s.”

“Your car, darling,” she reminded him.

“I’ll mix drinks for you two,” Grant said unexpectedly. “You look as though you need them.”

Mark wondered why he hadn’t spoken before, and saw now that Grant was a bit too far gone to realize completely what had happened. He staggered badly as he went to the bar in one corner of the room.

“Make mine a double Scotch,” Idell said. “I feel awfully shaky.”

Mark saw whiteness grow around her temples and the edges of her lips and knew what was going to happen. Link had taken his arm away, so Mark was the first to catch her. Link took her feet and they laid her on the divan.