He sounded irritated and bored, but he took down Sharon’s address and said he’d send someone.
I checked my watch. I’d been in the apartment less than thirty minutes, but it was time to get out of there. I didn’t want the phone to ring. I didn’t want somebody knocking at the door unexpectedly. I moved toward the back, turning out lights as I went, unconsciously listening for sounds of someone approaching. I didn’t have a lot of time to spare.
I glanced back at Sharon. I didn’t like to leave her that way but I couldn’t see the point in waiting it out. I didn’t want to be linked to her death and I didn’t want to hang around Las Vegas waiting for the coroner’s inquest. And I certainly didn’t want Con Dolan to find out I’d been here. Maybe the Mafia had killed her, or maybe some pimp, or maybe the man at the casino who’d looked at her with such hunger when she counted out his two hundred and fifty bucks. Or maybe she knew something about Laurence Fife that she wasn’t supposed to tell.
I moved past her. Her fingers were relaxed in death, looking graceful, each tipped with a long rose-polished nail. I caught my breath. She had taken the slip with my name and motel jotted on it and had tucked it into her cigarette pack. But where was it? I looked around quickly, heart racing. I didn’t see it on the Formica tabletop, though there was a cigarette that had apparently burned down to nothing, leaving only a perfect column of ash. There was no cigarette pack on the arm of the couch, none on the counter. I checked the bathroom again, listening acutely for sounds of the police. I could have sworn I heard a siren some distance off and I felt a ripple of alarm. Shit. I had to find that note. The bathroom trash was full of Kleenex and a soap wrapper, old cigarette butts. No cigarette pack on the bedtable. None on the dresser top. I went back to the living room and looked down at her with distaste. There were two generous side pockets in the green velour robe. I gritted my teeth, feeling gingerly. The pack was on the righthand side, with maybe six cigarettes left, the sharply creased slip of paper bearing my name still visible under the cellophane. I tucked it hastily into my jacket.
I turned out the remaining lights and slipped to the back door, opening it a crack. I could hear voices remarkably close. A garbage can lid clattered near the apartment to my right.
“You better tell the manager her light’s burned out,” a woman commented. She sounded as if she was standing right next to me.
“Why don’t you tell her?” came the slightly annoyed reply.
“I don’t think she’s home. Her lights are off.”
“Yes she is. I just saw the lights on a minute ago.”
“Sherman, they’re off. The whole place is dark. She must have gone out the front,” the woman said. The wailing siren was very loud, its tone winding down like a phonograph.
My heart was pounding so hard it was making my chest bum. I eased out onto the darkened patio, pausing to tuck the keys back into the little crevice behind the plastic watering can. I hoped like hell it wasn’t my car keys I was hiding there. I slipped out of the patio, turning left, moving toward the street again. I had to force myself to walk casually past the patrol car that was now parked out front. I unlocked my car and got in, pushing the lock down hastily as though someone were in pursuit. I stripped off the rubber gloves. My head was aching fiercely and I felt a flash of clammy sweat, bile rising up in my throat. I had to get out of there. I swallowed convulsively. The nausea welled up and I fought an almost irresistible urge to heave. My hands were shaking so badly I could hardly get my car started but I managed, finally, and pulled away from the curb with care.
As I drove past the entranceway, I could see a uniformed patrolman move around to the back of Sharon’s apartment, hand on the gun at his hip. It seemed somewhat theatrical for a simple domestic complaint and I wondered, with a chill, if someone else had placed a call with a message more explicit than mine. Half a minute more and I’d have been trapped in that apartment with a lot of explaining to do. I didn’t like that idea at all.
I went back to the Bagdad and packed, cleaning the place of fingerprints. I felt as if I were running a low-grade fever. All I really wanted to do was roll up in a blanket and go back to sleep. Head throbbing, I went into the office. The manager’s wife was there this time, looking like a Turkish harem girl — if the word “girl” applied. She was probably sixty-five, with a finely wrinkled face, like something that had been left in the dryer too long. She wore a pale satin pillbox perched on her gray hair, veils draped provocatively over her ears.
“I’ll be on the road at five in the morning and I thought I’d get my bill squared away tonight, ” I said.
I gave her my room number and she sorted through the upright file, coming up with my ledger card. I was feeling restless, anxious, and sick, and I wanted to be out on the road. Instead, I had to force myself, brightly, casually, to deal with this woman who moved in slow motion.
“Where you headed?” she asked idly, toting up the charges on the adding machine. She made a mistake and had to do it all over again.
“Reno,” I said, lying automatically.
“Any luck?”
“What?”
“You win much?”
“Oh yeah, I’m doing pretty good,” I said. “I really surprised myself.”
“Better than most folk,” she remarked. “You won’t be making any long-distance calls before you leave?” She gave me a sharp look.
I shook my head. “I’m going to hit the sack.”
“You look like you could use some sleep,” she said. She filled out the credit-card charge slip, which I signed, taking my copy.
“I didn’t use the fifty dollars’ worth of coupons,” I said. “You might as well have those back.”
She put the unused coupons in the drawer without a word.
Within minutes, miraculously, I was out on Highway 93, heading southeast toward Boulder City, where I took 95 south. I got as far as Needles and then I had to have relief. I found a cheap motel and checked in, crawled under the covers again, and slept for ten hours straight. Even that far down in oblivion, I felt an awesome dread of what had been set in motion and a pointless, aching sense of apology to Sharon Napier for whatever part I’d played in her death.
CHAPTER 14
In the morning, I felt whole again. I ate a big breakfast in a little diner across the road from the motel, washing down bacon, scrambled eggs, and rye toast with fresh orange juice and three cups of coffee. I had the car filled up with gas, the oil checked, and then hit the road again. After Las Vegas, the desert drive was a pleasure. The land was spare, the colors subdued: a mild very pale lavender overlaid with fine dust. The sky was a stark, cloudless blue, the mountain ridges like crushed velvet, wrinkled dark gray along the face. There was something appealing about all that country unconquered yet, miles and miles of terrain without neon signs. The population was reduced to races of kangaroo rat and ground squirrel, the rocky canyons inhabited by kit fox and desert lynx. At fifty-five miles an hour, no wildlife was visible but I had heard the cries of tree frogs even in my sleep and I pictured now, from my speeding car, the clay and gravel washes filled with buffcolored lizards and millipedes, creatures whose adaption to their environment include the husbanding of moisture and an aversion to hot sun. There are parasol ants in the desert that cut off leaves and carry them as sunshades over their backs, storing them later like beach umbrellas in the subterranean chambers where they live. The idea made me smile, and I kept my mind resolutely from the recollection of Sharon Napier’s death.
I found Greg Fife in a little gray humpbacked camper outside Durmid on the eastern shore of the Salton Sea. It had taken me a while to track him down. Gwen had said that he lived on his boat but the boat had been pulled out of the water for paint and repair and Greg was temporarily lodged in an aluminum trailer that looked like a roly-poly bug. The interior was compact with a folding table hooked flat against the wall, a padded bench that became a single bed, a canvas chair that completely blocked passage to the sink, a chemical toilet, and a hot plate. He opened two bottles of beer, which he’d taken from a refrigerator the size of a cardboard box, located under the sink.