Free Bad Samaritan by William Campbell Gault Page A

and drank and talked about this and that, nothing worthy of recording. We ate fine food and drank fine wine (I guess) and went back to the living room for more talk.
    Toward the end of the evening I was sitting next to Pontius, remote from the others, when he said quietly. “Would you drop in at my house tomorrow morning, Brock? Si told me you are working with the police on his mother’s—on what happened.”
    “Glad to.” I waited for more, for some clarifying statement.
    None came. “Would nine o’clock be too early?” he asked.
    “I’ll be there.”

9
    I T HAPPENED AROUND TWO o’clock in the morning. The first warning was the rattle of a glass on the tile of the bathroom-sink tile counter, about twelve feet from my unpillowed ear.
    A prowler?
    From the living room came the thump of a picture, bouncing against the wall.
    Two prowlers?
    No! The bed began to sway gently, back and forth. From the kitchen came the sound of rattling china. My heart pounded in my ears, as Jan crowded over, reaching for me blindly in the dark, whimpering words I can’t remember now.
    “Easy,” I said quietly. “It will pass.”
    The bed stopped rocking and we untangled ourselves. I tried the bed-stand light. It worked. I snapped on the small radio to a flood of country music.
    “No power lines down,” I said. “At least not ours. It probably wasn’t centered around here.”
    “It was close enough for me. The next one could be worse. Should we go outside?”
    “ Let’s wait for the report.”
    The report interrupted the country music two aftershocks later. The quake had been centered off the coast of Oxnard, registering 4.7 on the Richter scale. No serious damage had been reported in the San Valdesto area; only scattered reports of broken windows had been received from Oxnard so far. The possibility of a tidal wave was imminent along the Oxnard shore.
    Nothing like an earthquake to remind a man of his fragile mortality. We tried to get back to sleep, but it was a nervous sleep, with only a few snatches of oblivion.
    We were up at six-thirty. “I’m not hungry,” Jan said. “How about you?”
    “It’s too early. I think I’ll go over my notes. Why don’t you see if there’s anything on the tube about the quake?”
    The local TV station was giving it the full treatment. They don’t get too much earth-shaking news in San Valdesto. Jan stayed with their repetitive coverage while I went over my Xerox copies, trying to find a pattern or a clue. Nothing.
    At eight o’clock, over our French toast, I said, “Paul Pontius asked me to stop in and see him this morning. I told him I’d be there at nine o’clock.”
    “Paul or Phyllis?”
    I gave that the answer it deserved—silence.
    “To put it in your vulgar terms, she’s a lot of mama, isn’t she?”
    “She has to be. He’s a lot of man. Did you notice how polite I was with him last night?”
    “I did. Why does he want to see you?”
    “He mentioned Maude, so maybe it’s about that. He might be the attorney for the estate.”
    “Joe Farini,” she said, “is the Marners’ attorney, and the Christophers’. Isn’t he the attorney who helped Skip that time?”
    “He is. I thought he was strictly a criminal lawyer. He must have come up in the world.”
    The day was overcast and gloomy. The road that led to the home of Paul and Phyllis Pontius wound through an area of high stone fences and iron gates, famous old estates now being unloaded on the new rich.
    The Pontius place had been built years ago by a retired steel magnate. “Pittsburgh rococo” best described it. Every broken leaf, shell and scroll had been carefully restored.
    I didn’t see the inside. Paul Pontius was waiting for me outside, sitting on a wrought-iron bench in a small garden in the side yard.
    “I’m still shaking,” he said.
    I sat on a wrought-iron chair near him. “I am, too. I get up at six-thirty.”
    “Phyllis is sleeping,” he said. “She took some pills, but they’re not