drove away. Three girls, all blondes, all with strident voices, came out of the cabin next to Eudora’s and strolled down the road towards me swinging their hips and ogling anything in trousers within sight. As they passed me they all looked my way, but I kept my eyes firmly on the cabin.
A nice neighbourhood this, I thought. Not the kind of road Mrs. Bendix’s bunny-faced pal would care to walk down.
Paula’s smart little two-seater came bustling out of Princess Street and headed towards me. It pulled up and the door swung open. Paula looked very trim and slightly glacial in her grey, pin-head suit. She was hatless, and her brown eyes looked at me enquiringly.
“Where now?” she asked, as I settled beside her.
“Drive up here nice and slow and stop on the bend. Eudora’s place is that white and blue abomination on the right,” I said, and as the car moved forward I rapidly told her what had happened. “I have an idea she might communicate with someone,” I concluded. “I may be wrong, but I think it’ll be worth while keeping on eye on her for the next couple of hours. The only way to watch the house without getting the neighbours in an uproar is for us to be a courting couple. That’s something they all understand in this district.”
“Pity you had to pick on me,” Paula said coldly.
“Well, I couldn’t very well pick on Kerman,” I said, a little peeved. “Let me tell you some girls would jump at the opportunity.”
“Can I help it if some girls have queer tastes?” she asked, pulling up on the bend. “Is this right?”
“Yeah. Now for the love of mike, relax. You’re supposed to be enjoying this.” I slid my arm round the back of her neck. She leaned against me and stared moodily down the road at the cabin. I might just as well have necked with a dressmaker’s dummy. “Can’t you work up a little enthusiasm?” And I tried to nibble her ear.
“That may go down big with your other girl friends,” she said icily, jerking away, “but it doesn’t with me. If you’ll open the glove compartment you’ll find some whisky and a couple of sandwiches in there. That might keep you more suitably employed.”
I unwound my arm from her neck and dived into the glove compartment.
“You think of everything,” I said, beginning to munch. “This is the only thing in the world that’d stop me kissing you.”
“I knew that,” she said tartly. “That’s why I brought it.”
I was working on the second sandwich when an olive-green Dodge limousine came tearing down the road. I didn’t have to look twice to see it was the same olive-green Dodge and the same big tough driving it.
I wormed myself down in the seat to be out of sight.
“That’s the guy who’s been tailing me,” I said to Paula. “Keep an eye on him and see where he goes.”
“He’s stopped outside Eudora’s place, and he’s getting out,” she told me.
Cautiously I lifted my head until my eyes were level with the windshield. The Dodge had stopped as Paula had said outside the blue and white cabin. The big tough got out, slammed the door with so much force he nearly knocked the car on its side, and went pounding down the path to the front door. He didn’t knock, but turned the handle and marched in: a man in a hurry.
“And that, bright eyes, is called a hunch,” I said to Paula. “I thought she would either go out or telephone. Well, she telephoned. Big Boy has arrived for a consultation. It certainly looks as if I’ve tipped my hand. What happens from now on should be interesting.”
“What will you do when he leaves?”
“I’ll go in and tell her I couldn’t raise five hundred. Then we’ll see how she plays it.”
I had finished the sandwich and was just starting on the whisky when the front door of the cabin opened and Big Boy came out. He had been inside eleven and a half minutes by the clock on the dashboard. He looked to right and left, scowled at Paula’s parked car, but was too far away to see who was in it, walked leisurely up the path, vaulted over the gate, climbed into the Dodge and drove quietly away.
“Well, that didn’t take long,” I said. “If everyone transacted business as fast as that there’d be an awful lot more work done. Come on, honey, we may as well make the call. At least, you drive me over and wait outside. I wouldn’t like her to get nervous.”
Paula started the car and drove up to the gate of the blue and white cabin. I got out.
“You may or may not hear screams,” I said. “If you do, think nothing of it. It’ll only be Eudora impressed by my personality.”
“I hope she hits you over the head with a flat iron.”
“She may. She’s one of those unpredictable types. I like them that way.”
I climbed over the gate and walked down the path to the front door. I rapped and waited, whistling softly under my breath. Nothing happened. The house was as quiet as a mouse watching a cat.
I rapped again, remembering how Big Boy had looked up and down the road, and seeing in that memory a sudden sinister significance. I touched the door, but it was locked. It was my turn now to look up and down the road. Apart from Paula and the car it was as empty as the face of an old man who is out of tobacco and has no money. I lifted the knocker and slammed it down three times, making quite a noise. Paula peered out of the car window and frowned at me.
I waited. Still nothing happened. The mouse was still watching the cat. Silence brooded over the house.
“Drive down to Beach Road,” I said to Paula. “Wait for me there.”
She started the engine and drove away without looking at me. That’s one of the very good things about Paula. She knows an emergency when she sees one, and obeys orders without question.
Again I looked up and down the road, wondering if anyone was peeping at me from behind the curtains of the many houses within sight. I had to take that risk. I wandered around to the back of the house. The service door stood open, and moving quietly I peered into a small kitchen. It was the kind of kitchen you would expect to find in a house owned by a girl like Eudora Drew. She probably had a monthly wash-up. Everywhere, in the sink, on the table, on the chairs and floor, were dirty saucepans, crockery and glasses. The trash bin was crammed with empty bottles of gin and whisky. A frying-pan full of burnt grease and bluebottle flies leered up at me from the sink. There was a nicely blended smell of decay, dirt and sour milk hanging in the air. Not the way I should like to live, but then tastes differ.
I crossed the kitchen, opened the door and peered into the small, untidy hall. The doors opened on to the hall— presumably the living-room and the dining-room. I gumshoed to the right-hand door, peered into more untidiness, more dust, more slipshod living. Eudora wasn’t in there; nor was she in the dining-room. That left the upstairs rooms. I mounted the stairs quietly, wondering if she might be having a bath, and that was the reason why she hadn’t answered my ring, but decided it was unlikely. She wasn’t the type to take sudden baths.
She was in the front bedroom. Big Boy had made a thorough job of it, and she had done her best to protect herself. She lay across the tumbled bed, her legs sprawled out, her blouse ripped off her back. Knotted around her throat was a blue and red silk scarf—probably hers. Her eyes glared out of her blue-black face; her tongue lay in a little bed of foamy froth. She wasn’t a pretty sight, nor had death come to her easily.
I shifted my eyes away from her, and looked around the room. Nothing had been disturbed. It was as untidy and as dusty as the other rooms, and reeked of stale perfume.
I stepped quietly to the door, not looking at the bed again, and moved out of the room and into the passage. I was careful not to touch anything, and on my way downstairs I rubbed the banister rail with my handkerchief. I went into the smelly, silent little kitchen, pushed open the screen door that had swung to in the hot breeze, on down the garden path to the gate, and walked without haste to where Paula was waiting.
Chapter II
I
Captain of the Police Brandon sat behind his desk and glowered at me. He was a man around the wrong side
