Darker Than You Think (11 page)

"Can
you drive out to see me, Will?" she asked. "Right away?"

He
frowned at his watch. The Knob Hill was forty blocks out Center
Street, beyond the river and outside the city limits. The old
Mondrick house, just off the university campus, was forty blocks in
the other direction.

"Not
right now, Rowena," he stammered awkwardly. "Of course I
want to do everything I can to make things easy for you. I can come
out in the morning, or maybe later tonight if you need me. But right
now I have an engagement that I can't break—"

"Oh!"
The sound seemed almost a cry of pain. The receiver was silent for a
moment, and then Rowena Mondrick's calm sweet voice asked very
softly: "With that Bell woman?"

"With
April Bell," Barbee said.

"Will,
who is she?"

"Huh!"
Barbee caught his breath. You had to hand it to Rowena. She certainly
kept up with the world, in spite of all her tragedies. "Just a
fresh girl reporter," he said, "on the evening paper. I had
never met her before tonight. Turk didn't seem to like her, but I
thought she was pretty slick."

"You
didn't!" the blind woman protested, and then begged urgently:
"Break your date, Will! Or put her off, until you have time to
come and talk with me. Won't you? Please!"

"Sorry,"
he muttered awkwardly. "But I really can't, Rowena." A
faint resentment edged his tone, in spite of him. "I know you
don't like her—and your dog doesn't. But I find her very
interesting."

"I'm
sure you do," Rowena Mondrick said quietly. "It's true I
don't like her—for an excellent reason, that I want to tell you
whenever you have time to listen. So please drive out when you can."

He
couldn't speak of all the reasons behind his interest in April
Bell—he wasn't even sure that he fully understood them. Yet a
flood of pity for the blind woman in her bereavement made him regret
his impatience, and he said clumsily: "Sorry, Rowena. I'll come
to see you as soon as I can."

"Watch
yourself, Will!" cried that sweetly urgent voice. "Watch
yourself with her tonight. Because that woman plans to injure
you—dreadfully!"

"Injure
me?" he whispered unbelievingly. "How?"

"Come
out tomorrow," Rowena said, "I'll tell you."

"Please
explain—" Barbee gasped before he heard her hang up. He
put the receiver back, and stood a moment wondering what she could
have meant. He could see no possible reason behind her words—unless
she had turned her dog's savage lunge at April's kitten into a
personal antagonism.

Rowena
Mondrick, he remembered, had been given to spells of moody
strangeness ever since he knew her. Usually serene and normal as any
seeing person, keenly alive with her friends and her music, often
even gay—sometimes she left her piano and ignored her friends,
seeming to care only for the company of her huge dog and the caress
of the odd silver jewelry she wore.

Her
strangeness must be a natural aftermath of that ghastly event in
Africa, Barbee supposed, and Mondrick's sudden death had awakened her
old terrors. He'd see her in the morning, and do what he could to
soothe her irrational fears. He'd try to remember to take her a
couple of new records for the automatic phonograph Sam and Nora Quain
had given her.

But
now he was going to meet April Bell.

The
bar at the Knob Hill was a semicircular glass-walled room, indirectly
lit with a baleful, dim red glare. The seats were green leather and
chromium, too angular for comfort. The whole effect was sleek and
hard and disturbing—perhaps it was intended, Barbee thought, to
goad unsuspecting patrons into buying drinks enough so they wouldn't
be aware of it April Bell flashed her scarlet smile at him from a
tiny black table under an arch of red-lit glass. The white fur was
tossed carelessly over the back of another chair, and she somehow
looked utterly relaxed in the angular seat, as if this deliberately
jarring atmosphere didn't disturb her. Indeed, her long oval face
reflected a satisfaction that seemed almost feline.

Her
rather daring evening gown was a deep green that accented the eager
green of her slightly oblique eyes. Barbee hadn't even thought of
wearing dinner jacket or tails, and for a moment he was uncomfortably
aware of his gray year-old business suit, a little too loose on his
lank frame. But April didn't seem to mind and he forgot, in his
instant appreciation of all the white-wolf coat had hidden. The
white, well-groomed flesh of her seemed infinitely desirable, yet
something made him think of the blind woman's warning.

"May
I have a daiquiri?" she asked.

Barbee
ordered two daiquiris.

He
sat looking at her across the little table, so close he caught her
clean perfume. Almost drunk before the drinks came with the sheen of
her red hair and the dark intensity of her long eyes, the warm charm
of her eager-seeming smile and the lithe vitality of her perfect body
—he found it hard to recall his plan of action.

The
velvet caress of her slightly husky voice made him want to forget
that he suspected her of murder— yet he knew he could never
forget, until he learned the truth. The frantic unrest in him, the
sharp conflict of bright hope and vaguely dreadful terror, would not
be stilled.

He
had tried, driving across the long river bridge, to plan his inquiry.
Motivation, it seemed to him, was the essential point. If it were
true that she knew nothing of Mondrick, and had no reason to wish him
harm, then the whole thing became fantastic nonsense. Even if the
kitten's accidental presence had actually caused the fatal attack,
that unfortunate coincidence should trouble neither him nor the law.

Barbee
didn't like to consider the other alternative. This tall redhead,
smiling with her intoxicating hint of special comradeship through a
foot or so of smoke-hazed air, seemed to offer him more than a
lonely, faintly embittered newspaperman could quite dare dream of,
and he didn't want to knock her gift into the dust. He wanted her to
like him.

He
didn't want to find a motive; he shrank from trying to discover why
she might have desired Mondrick's death. Yet a score of unsolved
riddles came crowding to haunt him, each casting its sinister shadow
across the girl's gay smile. Who had been Mondrick's "secret
enemy," awaiting the coming of a "Child of Night"?

Suppose
April Bell were a member of some desperate conspiracy? In this
seething postwar world, when nations and races and hostile
philosophies still battled to survive, when scientists fashioned
another more shocking agency of death each day, it wasn't hard to
picture that.

Suppose
Mondrick and his party, on their long trip home across the
battlegrounds of Asia, had secured evidence about the identity and
aims of those conspirators—and brought it back in that wooden
box? Taking extreme precautions—fully aware of some danger they
couldn't avoid—they had attempted to broadcast their warning.
But Mondrick, before he could name the menace, had fallen dead.

April
Bell had killed him—he couldn't quite escape the cold finality
of that. Whether it was freakish accident or premeditated homicide,
the black kitten she had brought to the plane in her snakeskin bag
must have been the fatal instrument. He didn't like the implication,
yet there it was.

Their
daiquiris came, and her white teeth smiled over the glass. She was
warm and real and near, and he tried desperately to shake off the
hard constraint of his suspicion. After all, he told himself, it was
utterly fantastic. In a world which afforded such efficient
instruments of homicide as knives and cyanide and tommy guns, no
serious murderer would think of depending on the protein dust from
the fur of a black kitten carried across the victim's path. No
efficient modern killer, he assured himself, would place any reliance
on a strangling ribbon knotted around a kitten's throat and a pin
thrust through its tiny heart. That is, unless—

Barbee
shook his head and raised his glass, with an awkward little smile, to
clink against April Bell's. The longer he let himself brood over
those vague improbabilities surrounding Dr. Mondrick's death, the
less pleasant they appeared. He determined to devote himself entirely
to the more attractive business of an evening with the most
fascinating woman he had ever met.

What
if she were a witch?

That
is, he amended the phrase, what if she had wished to bring about
Mondrick's death and expected to accomplish it by garroting little
Fifi? After all, he was fully fed up with his life as it had been.
Eighty hours a week on Preston Troy's dirty yellow rag for a wage
that hardly paid for his rent and meals and whisky. He had been
drinking nearly a fifth of cheap bourbon a day. April Bell, even if
she believed herself a witch, might prove to be a more exciting
escape.

She
looked at him as their glasses chimed, and her long dark eyes held a
cool, smiling challenge.

"Well
... Barbee?"

He
leaned across the tiny octagonal table.

"To
... our evening!" Her vital nearness took his breath. "Please,
April—I want to know about you—everything. Everywhere
you've been, and everything you've done. Your family and your
friends. What you dream about, and what you like for breakfast."

Her
red lips curved in a slow feline smile.

"You
ought to know better, Barbee—a woman's mystery is her charm."

He
couldn't help noticing again the even white strength of her perfect
teeth. They reminded him of Poe's weird story—something about a
man haunted by a dreadful compulsion to pull his sweetheart's teeth.
He tried to shake off that untimely association, and started to lift
his glass. A shudder made it tremble in his hand, and the pale drink
splashed on his fingers.

"Too
much mystery is alarming." He set the glass down carefully. "I'm
really afraid of you."

"So?"
She watched him wipe the cold stickiness of the spilled drink off his
fingers, the smile on her white mobile face seeming faintly
malicious, as if she were laughing at him secretly. "Really,
Barbee, you're the dangerous one."

Barbee
looked down uncomfortably, and sipped his drink. Until tonight, he
had thought he knew about women—far too much about them. But
April Bell baffled him.

"You
see, Barbee, I've tried to build an illusion." Her cool voice
mocked him with that secret laughter. "You've made me very
happy, accepting it. Surely you wouldn't want me to shatter it now?"

"I
do," he said soberly. "Please, April."

She
nodded, and red lights burned in her sleek hair.

"Very
well, Barbee," she purred. "For you, I'll drop my painted
veil."

She
set down her glass, and leaned toward him with her round arms crossed
on the tiny black table. The white curves of her shoulders and her
breasts were near him. Faintly, he thought he caught the natural odor
of her body, a light, dry, clean fragrance—he was glad it had
escaped the advertising crusades of the soap manufacturers. Her husky
voice dropped to match his own soberness.

"I'm
just a simple farmer's daughter, really," she told him. "I
was born here in Clarendon county-—my parents had a little
dairy up the river, just beyond the railroad bridge. I used to walk
half a mile every morning to catch the school bus."

Her
lips made a quick half smile.