Severed Key (12 page)

“If you can pay the extra,” Kelly responded. “Tracy didn’t have a maid. She said it was silly in so small an apartment.”

The apartment, Simon conceded silently, could have been placed inside Kelly’s living room with a few square feet to spare.

“Actually,” Kelly added, “Tracy couldn’t really afford to live in this building, but it’s a good address for making contacts.”

“Contacts for what?” Simon asked.

“Contacts for whatever Kelly was doing. Publicity, mostly. Oh, dear! Only one closet! Well, all the better to find a soiled garment in.”

Kelly opened the closet doors and started her search. Simon proceeded to the kitchen where he discovered a clean breakfast setting in the dishwasher and a soiled highball glass on the counter. He sniffed the glass. Bourbon. He opened a cupboard and found a half-filled bottle of Jim Beam with a stained label that looked as if someone had poured carelessly. He lifted the bottle and found a whisky ring on the shelving.

“It isn’t here!” Kelly called from the closet. “The white thing—whatever-it-was—isn’t here.”

“It’s probably in Keith’s apartment,” Simon said.

“The new blue golf dress isn’t here, either.”

“What new blue golf dress?”

“The one Tracy wore when we went golfing last week. She got some grease on it from the door of my car.”

Simon moved on to the bathroom and turned on the light. A fluffy blue robe hung on a hook on the back of the bathroom door. At the cosmetic table he found an open powder box, a few soiled tissues and an open box containing one false eyelash—dark brown. He found the mate on the bathroom floor stuck in the spillage from a broken jar of cold cream. A gold monogrammed bath towel was folded neatly over a rod near the bath, but the towel rod attached to the lavatory held only a wash cloth. He opened the clothes hamper and took out a matching hand-towel as Kelly came to the bathroom door.

“Nowhere,” she reported. “The white thing is missing from the closet, and so is the blue golf dress and the yellow skirt Tracy wore the day we went to see my cousin’s new baby. What are you doing?”

Simon was sniffing the hand towel. He held it under her nose and watched her grimace.

“That’s awful!” she said. “It smells like my coffee table every morning.”

“Essence of dried bourbon,” Simon nodded. “He folded the towel and stuffed it into his jacket pocket. “Now,” he continued, “what happened to Tracy’s yellow skirt when you went to see your cousin’s baby.”

“Well, Tracy held the baby—”

“I get the picture. Maybe you can answer another question. Where did Tracy have her cleaning done?”

“At Peter’s—it’s just next door to the complex.”

Simon went to the telephone and dialled enquiries. He got the number of Peter’s Cleaner and made a second call. He asked if Miss Tracy Davis had come into the shop at any time the previous day, and then scowled over the answer. When the conversation was over he put down the telephone.

“Well?” Kelly demanded.

“No luck,” Simon said. “I was hoping to find someone who had seen her alive in her apartment yesterday morning, but Peter says she had an arrangement. Her hours were irregular and so whenever she wanted something cleaned she left it in the janitor’s closet next to her apartment. The janitor brought down the three garments yesterday morning.”

“Then we haven’t accomplished anything, have we?”

“I wouldn’t say that. We know that Tracy came back to this apartment and changed her soiled dress, and, unless the police have found another dress in Jack’s place, and I would have been gloatingly informed if they had, she traversed three floors up to his penthouse wearing nothing but an abbreviated nightgown.”

“Oh, wow!” Kelly breathed.

“You took the ‘wow’ right out of my mouth,” Simon said.

IT WASN’T A homey, morning coffee-klatch-after-the-kids-have-gone-off-to-school type of building. It was a sophisticated, swinger and hard-nosed businessman environment, and it was possible that the trek Simon had described could be carried off without raising the eyebrows of any resident or maintenance personnel who might have seen this mid-morning excursion. But the lab report had stated that Tracy Davis was in an advanced state of intoxication at the time of her death. That would have made her more noticeable. Lieutenant Howard was too much the professional investigator not to have checked out any possible eye-witnesses. Apparently having found none, he was satisfied to fix Tracy as an all-night visitor in Keith’s apartment. What Howard didn’t know was that Simon Drake had occupied the bed in Keith’s den and found no evidence of the soon-to-die Tracy on the premises in the morning. True, he hadn’t looked in Keith’s bathroom before leaving the apartment. But there had been only one breakfast coffee cup addition to the sink collection, and Jack’s note made no mention of another guest. Not being coy, he would at least have penned a warning against excess noise if Tracy had been on the premises.

Verbalizing the contradictions brought a response from Kelly.

“Tracy probably went up the way we came down,” she said. “She often used the back stairs to come to my place, especially if she wasn’t dressed for the elevator.”

“But why go to Keith’s apartment at all? He was downtown—”

“She mightn’t have known that. Jack’s a night person. He sometimes slept until ten or so. Besides, if the zombies were walking—”

“The what?”

“Zombies. You know—bad dreams we get with our eyes open. If Tracy was doing all that much drinking in the morning, she must have had zombies.”

“Then why didn’t she stop at your door instead of going on up to Keith’s?”

“Are you kidding? Do I have strong, manly shoulders to cry on? Honestly, Mr Simon Drake, for a real smart lawyer you can ask awfully stupid questions.”

Simon walked back to the bathroom door and stood staring down at the false eyelash embedded in spilled cold cream on the floor. “I suppose it takes a steady hand to put those things in place,” he reflected.

“What things?” Kelly asked.

“False eyelashes. The hair from one—the one on the floor, probably—was found under Tracy’s fingernail. Did she always wear them?”

“Whenever she went anywhere.”

“Even up the back stairs.”

“I suppose so. Why?”

“Just asking.” He touched the robe on the back of the door. “She didn’t even take time for this,” he added. “Those zombies must come on fast.”

Kelly watched him with careful eyes. “You don’t think Jack Keith killed her, do you?” she asked.

“Do you?”

“I don’t know. People do kill people, and sometimes it’s kind of extemporaneous—like an explosion.”

Simon nodded gravely. “And sometimes it’s kind of premeditated—like a frame-up,” he said.

It might have been his legal training—that basic indoctrination that a man is presumed innocent until proven guilty—or it might have been something as unreliable as an emotional tie to a trusted friend; but when Simon left Tracy Davis’s apartment he was no more convinced of Keith’s guilt in her death than when he had first heard the shocking news from Lieutenant Howard. There were things that Lieutenant Howard didn’t know. He didn’t know about the letter Jack Keith had received from Stockholm, for one thing, and he didn’t know about Jack’s postscript to his telephone call to Simon at the Century Plaza. Also, if Simon could pull it off, he wasn’t going to know about the visit to Tracy’s apartment. Pledging Kelly to secrecy, he followed her out of the back door.

“You go back upstairs and see who that man is sleeping on your divan,” he said. “You may get another party started.”

Simon took the stairs down one floor and then switched to the automatic elevator. He punched the GARAGE button and let the silent cubicle slide him down to the huge underground parking area that serviced tenants of the building. At mid-morning the garage was almost empty. He had no difficulty locating the slot bearing Keith’s name on a neat wall-hung sign. It was close to the exit and unoccupied. The sight of it brought an uneasy sense of void. He hadn’t expected to find Keith’s car (the police would have found it long ago if it had been left at home) but he had hoped to find an attendant who might remember the last time the big bronze Cadillac had been in the garage. There was no attendant. The area was protected by automatic gates that could be operated only by tenants. Simon took the elevator back up to the lobby and went out into the street.

The Jaguar was parked halfway down the block, and the plain-clothesmen seated in a black and white which was parked in the loading zone in front of the building didn’t so much as raise his eyes when Simon passed by. But just to make sure he wasn’t followed, Simon drove a devious route through the maze of hillside streets before cutting back to the boulevard. He stopped at the nearest news-stand and bought the morning papers. Parked at the kerb, he skimmed through the front pages. There was no report of the discovery of Tracy Davis’s body, and, considering the bizarre nature of her death, it was the kind of story that would delight any editor on a dull day. The police, for whatever reasons of their own, had kept the story out of the early editions, and that made Keith’s absence all the more ominous. If he was in hiding, it meant that he knew about the murder. He could know that because he had picked up the police call on the short-wave portable radio he carried in his car, or it could mean that he had returned to the apartment at some time during those five or more hours that had elapsed between Tracy Davis’s death and the discovery of her body. Or it could mean that he knew who had killed her—or that he had killed her himself. None of the possibilities were encouraging.

The waiting game was a sorry sport, and Simon had no liking for it. He started his own search for Keith. It began by trying to get inside the detective’s mind. He had been busy before making that phone call to the Century Plaza. He had learned things that didn’t come from a coroner’s report on the death of Arne Lundberg. Simon decided to begin his search from the place where Keith had started his investigation. He drove back to the Century Plaza again and left his car with the doorman. Passing through the lobby, he looked casually for Sandovar without breaking his pace to the manager’s office. Sandovar was nowhere in sight, but an introduction and a brief request did bring a response from the man in charge. The room reserved for Sigrid Thorsen was still reserved. It had been taken for a week and paid in advance. By whom? The manager smiled.

“Are you from the police, Mr Drake?” he asked.

“I’m an attorney,” Simon said. “Miss Thorsen is dead. There’s the matter of a small estate—”

“I see. I asked because this is the second time I’ve given this information. Miss Thorsen’s reservation was booked by the Mercury Travel Agency in New York City.”

“And her plane reservation?”

“The same source, I would imagine. That really doesn’t concern us here.”

“I see. Now, let’s see if my ESP is working. The other time you gave the same information—was it to a red-haired private detective named Keith?”

The manager laughed, nodding. “A friend?”

“Sometimes. It depends on who he’s working for. He beat me to the information this time. When was he here—yesterday?”

“The day before yesterday—about this time.”

“Of course,” Simon reflected. “We had dinner that night. He told me then about the reservation. He just didn’t tell where it originated.” The manager was a busy man, and Simon was preparing to leave the office when he remembered Sandovar. “Oh, I think you have as a guest a man I met in Las Vegas last week—a Mr Sands. He must have checked in on Friday. Could I have his room number, please?”

Now the manager laughed. “You really do have ESP, Mr Drake.”

“Keith made the same inquiry?”

“The same. Mr Sands has a suite—you can get the number at the desk. And you might find this interesting, because Mr Keith did—his reservation was also made in New York by the Mercury Travel Agency.”

Simon thanked the manager and stopped at the registration desk on his way out. He got the number of Sands’s suite but declined to have a call put through to the occupant. He had too much on his mind now to take on the alleged Sandovar so soon. In a quick flashback his mind focused on what he had glimpsed through the open door leading to Keith’s bedroom just twenty-four hours earlier—the black telephone dropped carelessly on the bed. The time differential would have made it possible for Keith to telephone his New York contacts and learn whatever he might have learned about those reservations before he wrote a note for his sleeping guest and slipped off to the coroner’s office. Even without seeing the murder room, Simon could guess the telephone was no longer on the bed when Lieutenant Howard’s men found the Davis girl’s body. She had been strangled with the belt from one of Keith’s robes. The telephone would have been in the way.

He located a nook in the lobby that was secluded enough to house a battery of public telephones and rang up The Mansion at Marina Beach. Chester answered the call.

“Marina Heights Lonely Hearts Club,” he said.

“What’s wrong?” Simon asked. “Is Hannah giving you a bad time?”

“Not me. It’s that poor honky with the co-educational plumbing. Hannah’s been perched on the second landing balcony with her binoculars all morning. She won’t even come down for lunch.”

“Man and Hannah Lee does not live by bread alone,” Simon said. “Now, listen. This is important. I’ve got a file on Jack Keith in my study—income tax records. Look it up, get the number of his answering service and ring me back. Got a pencil?”

“Will the kitchen reminder slate do?”

“Anything so you don’t forget this number.” Simon read off the number on the telephone, waited for Chester’s affirmation and hung up. He had time for one and a half cigarettes before the telephone rang. Pen in hand, he jotted the number Chester delivered on the inside of a match folder.

“I take it you haven’t located the red-head,” Chester said.

“You’re right. Nothing from that direction?”

“Not a jangle. You don’t think he really strangled that chick, do you?”

“Not unless he had a better reason than anything I can imagine. Stick close to the phone just in case. And, Chester, if Hannah stays up on that landing too long send up a pitcher of ice water.”