Free Evil That Men Do by Hugh Pentecost Page B

if, as you say, the story isn’t out, it must be a coincidence!” she said, and now she looked frightened.
    “I said the story wasn’t in the papers or on the radio,” I said. “I didn’t say it hadn’t leaked. If you didn’t kill Jeremy Slade, Doris, then the person who did is walking around loose and could easily have passed the word to Teague in California. Teague had plenty of time to make a jet flight that will get him here to the hotel by eleven.”
    “Is there a little more in that shaker?” she asked, holding out her empty martini glass.
    I filled it for her. Two little feverish spots had appeared beside her high cheekbones. I had the sudden feeling that she was trying to see some way out of a trap. You understand, I wasn’t investigating this case, but while she seemed willing to talk a little I thought I should encourage it.
    “I’m sure Craig will do anything you ask him—except desert you,” I said, when she didn’t speak.
    She stared at me over the rim of her glass, sipping at her drink.
    “You seem like a nice guy,” she said, finally. “You want to help.”
    “Without breaking too many laws,” I said, hoping a mild crack would loosen her up a litüe.
    “Then use your energies to help someone decent,” she said.
    “Meaning?”
    “Meaning Gary. Get him out of here—away—anywhere! And then stay out of it yourself. You’re the kind who has a nice girl somewhere. Go to her and thank God she isn’t someone like me.”
    “Melodrama,” I said.
    “I wish it was. Do you know anything about amnesia, Haskell?”
    “Mostly what I’ve read in suspense novels,” I said. “It’s usually a plot convenience for the author. It’s a nice way to hide a secret from a reader.”
    “That’s exactly what it is,” she said with a touch of impatience, “a way to hide a secret. A mechanism of the mind that helps you to forget something intolerable. That’s what’s happened to me, a reasonably intelligent girl. There’s something I can’t bear to remember.”
    “And you really don’t know what it is?”
    “I’ve been running for a long time,” she said. “But there was no place to run, so finally the mental machinery has taken over.”
    “I still say melodrama.”
    She got up from her chair and began to walk restlessly around the room, twisting from side to side as if something hurt her. I suddenly felt like an intruder, an involuntary Peeping Tom. But before I could tell her to-hell-with-it as far as I was concerned, it began to spill out of her.
    “Some people are unwillingly involved in situations that are completely unfamiliar to most other people. My situation involves money, Haskell. I was an only child, and I grew up in a world you probably can’t imagine. My grandparents were native Californians. My grandfather ran a modest truck farm not far from where Hollywood is today. I don’t suppose at the end of a year he had a thousand dollars’ profit to show for his work. But somehow he managed to save something, and just before World War I he put what he had saved into something called ‘moving pictures.’ Before you could say Mary Pickford he was suddenly a moderately rich man. He bought some property along the way, and when Hollywood began to grow into a city he owned a handsome piece of it. He was making money hand over fist, but until the day he died he didn’t believe the movies would ‘last.’ Property—land—was the only thing he really believed in. He sent my father looking for interesting buys, and Dad wound up purchasing a chunk of Texas. There turned out to be so much oil on the Texas property that I guess by the time I was born in 1940, Dad couldn’t even guess how rich he was. Just for fun there was the house in Beverly Hills, and a model ranch in Texas, and a kind of hunting lodge in the Adirondacks, and a beautiful house outside Paris that was eventually bombed into rubble during the war, and yachts, and planes, and anything you woke up in the morning with