“If he tries to stir up a scandal about the girl, I’ll break him!” Chalmers snarled. “Keep in touch with me. I want to know what you’re doing… understand?”
I said I understood.
“And talk to this coroner fella. He promised me he’d fix this pregnancy business. I don’t want that to come out. Get tough with him, Dawson. Throw a scare into him!”
“If this turns out to be a murder case, Mr. Chalmers,” I said, “there’s nothing we can do about the verdict.”
“Don’t tell me what we can’t do!” he bawled. “Talk to this punk. Call me back to-morrow at this time.”
I said I would, and hung up.
I put a call through to coroner Maletti. When he came on the line I told him I had been talking to Chalmers, who was anxious to be assured that the arrangements he had made would stand. Maletti was full of oil and soft soap. Unless further evidence came to light, he said, il Signor Chalmers need not disturb himself about the verdict.
“You’ll be the one who’s disturbed if the verdict’s the wrong one,” I said, and slammed down the receiver.
By now it was dark and rain showed on the windows.
It was time, I decided as I went into my bedroom to get my raincoat, to pay a visit to the villa Palestra.
III
I left my car in the parking lot at the Stadium and walked up viale Paolo Veronese until I came to double wrought-iroN gates, set in an eight-foot high stone wall that surrounded the acre or so of garden in which the villa Palestra stood.
By now it was raining hard, and the long street was deserted. I pushed open one of the gates, moved into a dark driveway, screened by cypress trees and flowering shrubs.
Moving silently, I walked up the drive, hunching my shoulders against the rain. Fifty yards of driveway brought me to a bend, and around the bend I caught sight of the villa, a small, twostorey affair with a Florentine overhanging roof, white stucca walls and big windows.
There was a light on in one of the tower rooms, but the rest of the villa was in darkness.
The neatly kept lawns that surrounded the villa offered no cover. I moved around its edge, keeping close to the shrubs until I was facing the window of the lighted room. The curtains hadn’t been drawn, and I could look into the room, which was only about thirty yards from where I stood.
The furnishing was modern: the room was large. I could see a girl standing by a table, occupied in looking through a black evening bag.
I assumed she was Myra Seta and looked closely at her. She was quite something to see. Around twenty-five or six, tallish with chestnut-coloured hair that reached to her shoulders, she was in a white evening dress that fitted her like a second skin, and then flared out just below her hips into a waterfall of tulle and glittering sequins.
After she had rearranged her bag, she picked up a mink stole and slung it carelessly over her shoulders. Then, pausing to light a cigarette, she crossed the room, flicked off the lights and left me looking, at an expanse of black glass that reflected the swiftly moving rainclouds and pointed cypress trees.
I waited.
After a minute or so, I saw the front door open and she came out, sheltering under a large umbrella.
She ran down the path to the garage. A light sprang up at she pushed open the double doors. I could see a white and bottle-green Cadillac in the garage, about the size of a trolley car. She got into the car, leaving the umbrella against the wall. I heard the engine start up, and she drove out, passing within tea yards of where I was crouching. The headlights of the car made a white glare of rain, grass and shrubs.
I remained where I was, listening. I heard the car stop at the end of the drive, there was a long pause while she opened the gates, then the sound of the car door slamming, and the sound of the engine accelerating told me she had gone.
I remained where I was, looking towards the dark villa. I stayed motionless for several minutes. No light showed. I decided it was safe to explore. Turning up my collar against the rain, I walked around the villa. There were no lights to be seen in any of the rooms. I found a window unlatched on the ground floor. I eased it open, took out the flashlight I had brought with me and inspected a small, luxury kitchen beyond. I slid over the double sink and dropped noiselessly on to the riled floor. Closing the window, I made my way silently out of the kitchen, along a passage and into the hall.
A curved stairway on my left led to the upper rooms. I went up the stairs to a landing and inspected the four doors that faced me.
Turning the handle of the door that lay to the far right, I pushed the door open and looked in. This was obviously Myra’s room. There was a divan bed with a blood-red cover. The walls were of quilted grey satin. The furniture was silver. The carpet blood red. It was quite a room.
I nosed around without finding anything to interest me. There was a jewel box on the dressing-table. The contents would have made the most hardened burglar’s mouth water, but it left me cold. But it did tell me that she had plenty of money to burn or else she had a host of besotted admirers who were showering these baubles on her.
It wasn’t until I reached the last room, which appeared to be a spare bedroom, that I found what I had vaguely wondered I might find.
Against the wall were two suitcases. One of them lay on its side, open. In it were three of my best suits, three bottles of my favourite brand of whisky and my silver cigarette box. For a long moment I stood staring down at the suitcase, the beam of my flashlight unsteady. Then I knelt down and opened the second case. That too was full of the things that had been stolen from my apartment: everything was there except Helen’s camera.
Before I had time to consider the significance of this discovery, I heard a sound downstairs that made me practically jump out of my skin.
It was the kind of sound a hunter in the wilds of an African jungle who has been stalking some comparatively harmless animal hears that warns him a rogue elephant has arrived on the
scene.
The disturbance in this still, dark villa was of the violence of an earthquake.
There was a crash: someone had unlocked the front door and flung it open so that the door smashed against the wall.
Then a man’s voice bawled, “MYRA!”
When I was a kid, and back home, I had once been taken to a hog-calling contest. I had been tremendously impressed by the colossal volume of sound that had come from the leathery lungs of the hog callers. This sound that came up the stairs and reverberated around the dark, still room was as violent. It froze me, making the hairs on the nape of my neck stand up and making my heart skip a beat.
There was another crash that shook the house as the man below slammed the front door shut. Then the horrible, undisciplined voice yelled again: “MYRA!”
I recognized that voice. I had heard it on the telephone. Carlo had arrived!
Moving silently, I slid out of the bedroom. The lights were on in the hall. I went to the banister head and cautiously looked over. I couldn’t see anyone, but there were lights now on in the lounge.
Then the raucous voice began to sing.
It was the voice of a hooligan: a tuneless, obscenely loud, ruthlessly vulgar sound. You couldn’t call it a song: it was something out of the jungle: a sound that made me sweat.
I waited there because there was no way out of this villa except by way of the downstairs exits. So long as Carlo was there, I wasn’t taking any chances of showing myself.
I remained in the shadows, a foot away from the banisters where I couldn’t be seen. It was as well, for I suddenly saw the figure of a man standing in the lighted doorway of the lounge.
I edged back into the deeper shadows. It was the same broad-shouldered figure I had seen creeping around in the villa at Sorrento. I was sure of it.
