Chapter Sixteen
Sixteen
“Thank you, Sam. I know this is over and above.”
Sam put his leather-gloved hand to his forehead. “Oh, you gave me a fright. How do you always manage to do that? I didn’t see you.”
“That’s the general idea.” Billie scanned their surrounds. It appeared she truly had been unseen. This was a sleepy Sunday morning for most, and even the keenest folk in the neighborhood were only just beginning to wake up.
Sam took in her appearance, registered the evening clothes and stole, and if he noted her underslept visage he was tactful enough not to comment on it.
She had used her mother’s makeup and brushes to get herself together, but there was no cure for those bloodshot eyes.
Sam, for his part, had dutifully donned his white jacket of the night before, and his formal appearance sat slightly at odds with the rural feel of his vehicle.
His clothing did look a touch crumpled, but that didn’t matter in the slightest. His large aquamarine eyes searched her face. “Are you okay? What’s happening?”
“I don’t think anyone is watching us. Kill the engine for a second,” Billie instructed, and took a few minutes to get her assistant up to speed with events.
He sat listening with rapt attention as she described her groggy head, the discovery of the unfortunate Mr. Zervos in her flat, his removal to her mother’s place, and what her plan was.
She’d never seen his face darken so angrily.
“Who is this bastard who set you up?” he spat. “And drugged you?”
Was it the bartender who’d spiked her drink? Billie wondered. Surely not. Could someone have walked up to the bar and dropped something in it? And whoever it had been, were they acting alone or following someone else’s orders? Had the same person killed Zervos and moved his body?
“I don’t know yet, Sam,” she answered, “but there is some very dangerous game afoot here. He may be the same person who killed Zervos, and he clearly wants me out of the way, and, by extension, he—or she—wouldn’t be keen on you, either.
I advise you to watch your back.” It was chilling to imagine that a murderer might have been in her room while she slept.
A shiver moved up her body from the base of her spine and raised the hairs on the back of her neck.
She stifled the desire to physically shake it off and instead pushed her dark hair back and straightened in the seat.
External calm often helped muster the internal variety.
“I will watch out. Thank you,” Sam responded. He was shaking his head now. “I don’t get it . . . Why switch the body to your place? Why not put it where it won’t be found for a while?”
“Well, it certainly makes a statement. As a warning to me? To get me tied up with cops and rumors and uncertainty? At least long enough to miss the auction today?” she speculated.
“I don’t know. Maybe to get me done for murder, but that seems a stretch.
” She’d been thinking on it but found her faith in the system was not yet so poor that she believed they would actually lock her away.
Not for long, anyway. “I mean, what motive would I have?”
“He refused to talk?” Sam suggested.
“So I strangled him? What am I, the Gestapo? No, I’m not convinced a judge would be expected to buy that.” She shook her head. “To get the cops to descend and mire me and the case in problems, yes, but an actual conviction? To put me away for murder?”
Was it possible?
“Maybe they had a judge lined up specially for the job?” Sam wondered aloud.
Billie frowned, thinking. Alma’s coffee was bubbling away inside her, and she felt sharp with an almost supernatural clarity.
The drugs of the night before were no longer filling her mind with that awful mental fog, but it was more than that.
The horrifying jolt she’d woken to was still running across her nerves, electrifying her limbs and keeping her heart moving at an unnatural pace.
Now her assistant was watching her face, she noticed.
“I don’t know, Sam,” she finally said to him.
“At the very least someone wants to warn me off this case, or they want to tie me up with the law so I can’t continue working on it. ”
Yes. A warning. A fear tactic. They thought they could scare her away. Well, they didn’t know Billie Walker.
Billie tilted up her chin. “If they think this will put me off, they are dead wrong. I don’t know just what we’re dealing with yet, Sam, but this is a lot more complicated than we thought. There is something far more interesting and a helluva lot more rotten going on.”
When Billie and Sam pulled up in front of Cliffside Flats, the sun was up but most of the residents of Edgecliff were not.
Billie could not be sure if anyone was watching, but they made a nice show of their arrival in any event, Sam gallantly pulling up at the curb and walking around to the passenger door of his Ford to help her out with an extended hand.
Soon they saw they were not alone, as a woman who was clearly an early riser—and from the dark looks she was giving Billie, evidently not one to approve of exciting nocturnal activities—walked toward them on the footpath with her miniature schnauzer.
She wore a frown as deep as the Grand Canyon.
After scowling silently at Billie in her glittering evening clothes, she shook her head and moved along.
Sam, it seemed, was not as offensive, as she did not bother to glare in his direction.
The diminutive canine took no notice of his master’s moral judgments and Billie did her best to follow his lead.
She instead made a good performance of wishing Sam a pleasant day in a formal but lighthearted tone before walking up the sloping path toward the entrance of Cliffside Flats.
“Oh, you forgot something!” she called, turning back dramatically before she reached the front door of the building.
Sam shut down the engine, opened the door, and got out of the automobile. “What is it, Billie?” he called, a little more loudly than necessary.
She sashayed back to the street and handed Sam his handkerchief.
“Nice work,” she whispered. “That should do us well. Thank you.” If the cops weren’t there to see her arrival, at least it wouldn’t have been a performance completely without an audience.
It was hardly enough to wake the whole neighborhood, but perhaps some of the more nosy residents of Cliffside would be talking about her over their breakfast. She was already a scandal in their eyes anyway.
Billie waved as Sam drove off, presumably to get some overdue sleep rather than to change clothes and start canvassing his friends for a motor vehicle to borrow.
She took the opportunity to take one more look around the winding main road, wearing a vague, pleasant smile for the benefit of whoever might be watching her.
The birds were becoming louder and the sun was already starting to get hot.
There weren’t any cops on the street that Billie could detect, not in cop cars in any event, though she didn’t recognize all of the parked motorcars.
She thought she spotted a dark head in a parked late-thirties Vauxhall, though it could have been a reflection.
She walked back to the front door and slipped inside.
When Billie stepped out of the automatic lift a minute later, the constabulary was already standing outside her door, looking about ready to break in.
She did hate to be so terribly right about things.
At this early hour she was faced with one plainclothes officer and one uniformed constable, both gaping at her as she approached them in her mother’s finery.
It wasn’t the current fashion, wouldn’t have been the current fashion just before the war, either, but few men would know the difference—she hoped.
“Good morning, Officers,” Billie called, swaying over to them, beads flashing. “That’s my door you’re knocking on. How may I help you gentlemen?”
Even after two hours of hellish morning it was still before eight. On a normal Sunday she wouldn’t be awake until at least nine, and certainly she would have expected to rise later than that after a night out.
Billie smiled at the two men—her even, pretty smile with hidden steel behind the ivory.
The heavyset constable, with a long brow and a thin face like the wedge of a hatchet, was someone she vaguely recognized, but the other, taller man had not crossed her path before, she felt sure.
He had doffed his hat for her as she appeared in the corridor.
A gentlemanly type. He was about six feet in stature, broad-shouldered and rangy, and under other circumstances she would have found him fairly handsome, with his strong jaw and honest face.
He had pale eyes and paler lashes and his brown hair was shorn in a neat military cut, short except at the top, where it was smoothed down into a side part.
His blue suit was nicely fitted but worn.
The suit of a man who thought about other things.
The silk tie had a bird pattern in burgundy and ivory, with hints of sky blue.
Not bad. His fedora had a welt edge and was held in large but elegant hands.
Overall, he was neatly put together and perhaps ten years older than Billie.
Either that or the little creases by his eyes had been earned in the war and he was in his early thirties yet.
Hatchet Face didn’t require much inspection.
He was a little over Billie’s height but about three times her girth.
Sausage fingers. A face set in a permanent frown.
Aged in his twenties, he was a tough-guy underling, eager to prove his mettle.
A dime a dozen in this town. She was sure she’d already made his acquaintance on some job or other and had not been impressed.