the woman’s voice said imperiously, “Please close the gate again when you come through.”
I went in and closed the gate. A crushed-shell path bisected the garden to the front entrance. On both sides of the house, I saw as I followed the path, more cypress and fir trees rose up to give the place an even more secluded feel. But there were no trees to the rear; the ones that had grown there had been cleared off so as not to spoil the sea view. The other thing I noted was that the path branched near the front door, with the branch leading around on the north side to a kind of covered porch. Another path led away from the porch at right angles, into the woods.
The door opened just before I got to it and the housekeeper looked out. You’d have known she was a housekeeper anywhere you saw her; she was about fifty, she was dumpy, she had fat ankles and gray hair and the kind of mouth that seems always to be on the verge of shaping the words “Wipe your feet,” and she was wearing the kind of shapeless, nondescript dress nobody but a domestic would wear. She said, “Come in, please,” in the same imperious way she’d told me to close the gate. I went in, smiling at her on the way as a sort of experiment. It proved out, too: she didn’t smile back.
She led me down a hall to the back of the house, into the sort of room people like Alicia Purcell would call the “sun room.” There was no sun in it now, but there would be plenty later in the day, splashing in through a wide set of sliding glass doors. Outside the doors was a cobblestone terrace with a swimming pool at the far end and, closer in, some funny-looking tubular outdoor furniture-the umbrella over one of the tables had an artistically crooked pole and was made out of sparkly cloth the color of a loaded diaper. Nobody was on the terrace. Nobody was in the sun room, either, except the housekeeper and me.
Just me five seconds later. She said, “Mrs. Purcell will see you shortly,” and went away without waiting for a response.
I crossed to the glass doors and looked out. Fishing boats on the ocean, the tip of a point to the south-that was about all you could see of the surroundings from in there. Beyond the terrace were some scrub cypress and then the cliff that fell away to the sea. The land bellied out to the north, though, where the woods were thickest, to provide another hundred yards or so of clifftop in that direction.
It was quiet in there; whatever Alicia Purcell and the housekeeper were doing, they weren’t making any noise in the process. When I turned from the window my shoes made faint hollow thumps on the hardwood floor.
The furniture was all modernistic, and for my taste just as weird-looking as the outdoor stuff. The paintings on the walls were modernistic, too-abstracts or whatever. One of them caught my eye. Smacked my eye might be a better term. It was of a being with two heads. One of the heads was human enough and had red squiggles splashed down over the nose and mouth and chin; what the squiggles looked like was blood dripping from a wound on his forehead. The other head was that of a green horse. The name Chagall was painted in big childish blue letters across the bottom. If the two-headed thing was supposed to signify something profound, I couldn’t even begin to figure out what it was. And if this was great art you could have it and welcome. I’ll take vanilla.
I was still studying this monstrosity, with some of the same awe a little boy feels at the sight of his first potato bug, when the footsteps sounded in the hall. The woman who came in was in her early thirties, dressed in a black suede skirt and jacket, a white frilly blouse, and knee-high black boots. I could understand why some men would find her seductive. She was tall and leggy and on the regal side. Coal-black hair, eyes like black olives, pale skin, lipstick the color of blood. Sexy as hell, all right, if you liked your women looking as though they’d just crawled out of a coffin after a hard night of biting necks. She didn’t do much of anything for me, which was a good thing for several reasons. One of them being that I never did like having my neck bitten.
She came forward with her hand extended and a smile on her bright crimson mouth. “I’m sorry to have kept you waiting,” she said as we clasped hands. Hers was soft, almost silky, and tipped by blunt nails stained the same crimson color as her mouth; the pressure of her fingers was somehow intimate, sensual. “I was attending to some personal business.”
“Quite all right, Mrs. Purcell.”
“I’m afraid I was a bit snappish on the phone last night and I’d like to apologize.”
“Apology accepted.” Evidently she had decided to be civil and cooperative-a point in her favor.
“It’s just that everything has been such a strain the past six months. My husband’s accident, the period of readjustment, and now the terrible thing that happened to Leonard… I’m sure you understand.”
“Yes.”
“Well. Would you like some coffee? Tea?”
“Nothing, thanks.”
“Shall we sit down, then?”
We sat on the weird-looking furniture. She got what looked to be a couch; I got a chair that appeared to have been made out of a bunch of twisted-up coat hangers and had a funny off-color orange cushion that seemed to massage my rear end as I lowered into it, as if it were something sentient and perverted bent on playing grab-ass. I almost came up out of the thing in reaction. As it was I managed to curb my imagination and stay put-but I sat gingerly, with no squirming around. I did not want to give the chair any ideas.
Mrs. Purcell crossed one leg over the other. They were nice legs, and she was letting me see plenty of them under the short hem of the skirt. I wondered if the free show was deliberate-if she just naturally came on to every man she encountered-or if she just didn’t give a damn.
She said, “I suppose it’s that call Tom Washburn received?”
“Ma’am?”
“The reason he believes Kenneth was murdered. The call he took that was meant for Leonard.”
“How did you know about the call?”
“The police told me when they were here-the San Francisco police, last week. He was a crank, of course. The caller.”
“Was he? Why are you so sure?”
“If he did know something… sinister about Kenneth’s death-and I don’t believe that for a minute-why would he have waited six months to contact Leonard?”
That was the sticking point, all right. But I said, “He might have had his reasons.”
“What reasons, for heaven’s sake?”
“I don’t know, Mrs. Purcell.”
“Well,” she said, and waved a hand as if to wave away the entire issue. She probed in the slash pocket of her skirt, drawing the hem even higher on her thighs, and came out with a package of cigarettes and a platinum-and- gold lighter. I watched her light up and blow smoke off to one side. Marlene Dietrich, I thought. She didn’t smoke a cigarette; she made love to it.
I waited, not saying anything, to see what she would do with the conversation. Pretty soon she said, “Last night you mentioned some details you wanted to clear up. What are they?”
“They have to do with the night your husband died.”
“Yes?”
“According to the newspaper accounts, he disappeared at around nine-thirty-”
“Approximately, yes. That was the last any of us saw him.”
“Who saw him then?”
“Lina. He went out through the kitchen.”
I said, “Who would Lina be?”
“My housekeeper. She let you in.”
“Did your husband go out alone or with someone?”
“Alone.”
“When did you last see him?”
“Not long before that. In his hobby room.”
“May I ask what you talked about?”
“His drinking,” she said. “He’d had several Scotches and he was rather drunk. He had a tendency to make a spectacle of himself when he drank too much, so I-”
“How do you mean, make a spectacle of himself?”
“Oh, you know: he became obnoxiously loud, argumentative, sometimes insulting to guests.”
“But he hadn’t reached that state when you spoke to him?”
“No. But I knew it wouldn’t be long before one of his mood swings. I asked him to please not drink any
