Out on the street, she snatched at my arm and I shook her off.
“Kinsey wait” Her face was remarkably pale.
“Blow it out your ass,” I said. “You’d better hire yourself a hot attorney, babe, because you’re going to need one.”
I moved off down the street, leaving Gwen behind.
CHAPTER 25
I locked the door to my place and tried dialing Nikki out at the beach. The phone rang eight times and I hung up, pacing the room after that with an unsettled sensation in my chest. There was something off. There was something not right and I couldn’t put my finger on what was bothering me. There was no feeling of closure. None. This should have been the end of it. The big climax. I’d been hired to find out who killed Laurence Fife and I had. The end. Finis. But I was left with half a case and a lot of loose ends. Gwen’s killing of Laurence had been part premeditation and part impulse, but the rest of it didn’t seem to fit. Why wasn’t everything falling into place? I couldn’t picture Gwen killing Libby Glass. Gwen had hated Laurence Fife for years, titillating herself perhaps with ways of killing him, maybe never even dreaming that she’d actually do it, never imagining that she could actually pull it off. She’d come up with oleander scheme and suddenly she’d seen a way to make it work. A perfect opportunity had presented itself and she’d acted. Surely Libby Glass’s death couldn’t have been that easy to arrange. How did Gwen know about her? How did she know where she lived? How could she have gotten into that apartment? And how could she have counted on her taking medication of any kind? I couldn’t picture Gwen driving to Vegas either. Couldn’t imagine her shooting Sharon in cold blood. For what? What was the point? Killing Laurence had wiped out an old grudge, satisfied an ancient and bitter hatred between them, but why kill the other two? Blackmail? Threat of exposure? That might account for Sharon but why Libby Glass? Gwen had seemed truly self-righteous in her bewilderment. Like her denial of any responsibility for killing the dog. There was just that odd note of genuine outrage in her voice. It didn’t make sense.
Unless there was someone else involved. Someone else who killed.
I felt a chill.
Oh my God. Lyle? Charlie? I sat down, blinking rapidly, hand across my mouth. I’d bought into the notion that one person killed all three, but maybe not. Maybe there was another possibility. I tried it out. Gwen had murdered Laurence Fife. Why couldn’t someone else have spotted the opening and taken advantage of it? The timing was close, the method the same. Of course it was going to look like it was all part of the same setup.
I thought about Lyle. I thought about his face, the strange imperceptibly mismatched eyes: sullen, watchful, belligerent. He said he’d been with Libby three days before she died. I knew he’d heard about Laurence’s death. He was not a man who possessed a giant intellect, but he could have managed that much, imitating the cunning of someone else even stoned.
I called my answering service. “I’m going down to Los Angeles,” I said. “If Nikki Fife calls, I want you to give her the telephone number of the Hacienda motel down there and tell her it’s important that she get in touch. But no one else. I don’t want it known that I’m out of town. I’ll check in with you often enough to pick up whatever calls come in. Just say I’m tied up and you don’t know where I am. You got that?”
“All right, Miss Millhone. Will do,” she said cheerfully and then clicked off. God. If I’d said to her, “Hold the calls. I’m slitting my throat,” she’d have responded with the same blank good will.
The drive to Los Angeles was good for me-soothing, uneventful. It was after nine and there wasn’t that much traffic on the darkened road south. On my left, hills swelled and rolled, covered with low vegetation-no trees, no rocks. On my right, the ocean rumbled, almost at arm’s length, looking very black except for a ruffle of white here and there. I passed Summerland, Carpinteria, passed the oil derricks and the power plant, which was garlanded with tiny lights like a decorative display at Christmastime. There was something restful about having nothing to worry about except having a wreck and getting killed. It freed my mind for other things.
I had made a mistake, a false assumption, and I felt like a novice. On the other hand, I’d made the very assumption that everyone else had made: same M.O., same murderer. But now I didn’t think that was true. Now it seemed to me the only explanation that made any sense was that someone else had killed Libby Glass-and Sharon too. I drove through Ventura, Oxnard, Camarillo, where the state mental asylum was located. I’ve heard that there is less tendency to violence among the institutionalized insane than there is in the citizenry at large and I believe that. I thought about Gwen without surprise or dismay, my mind jumping forward and back randomly Somehow I was more offended by the minor crimes of a Marcia Threadgill who tried for less, without any motivation at all beyond greed. I wondered if Marcia Threadgill was the new standard of morality against which I would now judge all other sins. Hatred, I could understand-the need for revenge, the payment of old debts. That’s what the notion of “justice” was all about anyway: settling up.
I went over the big hill into Thousand Oaks, with traffic picking up; tract housing stretched out on either side of the road, then shopping malls packed end to end. The night air was damp and I kept the windows rolled down. I felt over into the backseat for my briefcase and fumbled with the catch. I tucked my little automatic into my jacket pocket, encountering a wad of papers. I pulled them out and glanced down. Sharon Napier’s bills. I’d stuck them in my windbreaker on the way out of her place and I hadn’t thought about them since. I’d have to go through them. I tossed them on the passenger seat and looked at my watch by the icy wash of highway light. It was 10:10, forty-five minutes of driving left, maybe more given traffic on the surface roads once I got off the freeway. I thought about Charlie, wondering if I’d blown a perfectly nice relationship. He didn’t seem like the type to forgive and forget, but who knew. He was a lot more yielding than I was, that was for sure. My thoughts rambled on disjunctively. Lyle had known I was driving to Vegas. I wasn’t sure how Sharon connected, but I’d figure that out. Blackmail still seemed like the best bet. The letter I couldn’t figure at all. How had Libby come by that? Or had she? Maybe Lyle and Sharon were in cahoots. Maybe Lyle got the letter from her. Maybe he was planting the letter among Libby’s effects, not trying to take it away. It was certainly to his advantage to reinforce the idea of Libby’s romantic tie to Laurence Fife. He had known I was stopping back through to pick up her boxes. He could have made it back to Los Angeles well in advance of me since I’d stopped for the night to see Diane. Maybe he had deliberately timed it closely to incite my curiosity about what might have been tucked away there. My mind veered off that and I thought about Lieutenant Dolan with a faint smile. He was so sure Nikki had killed her husband, so satisfied with that. I’d have to put a call through to him when I got back. I thought about Lyle again. I didn’t intend to see him that night. He wasn’t as smart as Gwen, but he might be dangerous. If it was him. I didn’t think I should jump to conclusions again.
I checked into the Hacienda at 11:05, went straight to room #2, and put myself to bed. Arlette’s mother was on the desk. She is twice as fat.
In the morning, I showered and got back into the same clothes, staggering out to the car to retrieve the overnight case I kept in the crowded backseat. I went back to my room and brushed my teeth — oh blessed relief-and ran a comb through my hair. I went down to a delicatessen on the comer of Wilshire and Bundy, where I ordered scrambled eggs, sausage links, a toasted bagel with cream cheese, coffee, and fresh orange juice. Whoever invented breakfast really did it good.
I walked back up to the Hacienda to find Arlette waving a massive arm out the office door for me. Her round face was flushed, her little cap of blonde curls in a flyaway state, her eyes squeezed almost to invisibility by the heavy cheeks. I wondered when she’d last seen her own neck. Still, I liked her, irksome as she was at times.