Marcia Muller - Games to Keep the Dark Away

“Except?”

“Except that Barbara made him do it. She was always making him do things.”

“But why? What would she have needed forty thousand dollars in cash for?”

Susan rubbed her hands together and went back to picking up the apples. “I have a theory that she planned to bribe someone at the hospice to help her escape.”

“Escape? She wasn’t being held against her will, was she?”

“Well, not exactly. But you’ve got to remember Barbara was not really too well wrapped toward the end. She was paranoid and…I don’t know. That’s my theory.”

She seemed to have a number of theories, all of them conflicting and aimed at proving Andy didn’t kill her sister. I sat there, rolling an apple between my palms.

Susan must have sensed my doubtfulness. “Look,” she said, “I really don’t know what Barbara intended. I never was able to understand what went on in her head. She had everything-she was smart and pretty and had a husband who loved her. She didn’t have to work as a waitress and bring up a kid alone like I do. She didn’t have a husband who abandoned her before the kid was even born, like I did. And, when it was time for our rich aunt to will her money to somebody, she chose Barbara, not me. But did Barbara appreciate any of that? No. Not my sister. All her life she worked so hard, so goddamned hard, at screwing up.”

I remained silent, rolling the apple around and forming a theory of my own. “Had your sister accepted the fact she was going to die?”

“She believed it, if that’s what you mean.”

“But acceptance-the kind they talk about at The Tidepools-did she feel that?”

“Did she want to live out her life with dignity? Do something positive with what remained? I doubt it.”

“Then how about this?” I pitched the apple into the basket. “How about if she did make Andy withdraw the money, so she could use it as a bribe-”

“That’s what I said.”

“But not a bribe to get out of the place. A bribe for someone to get her the drugs and administer them. What if she bought herself a mercy killing?”

Susan looked startled, but then nodded. “That’s very possible. It would explain why they didn’t find the money with her things at the hospice.”

“Of course,” I went on, “why would she spend forty thousand dollars when she could have asked her own husband to help her?”

“No. Andy would never go along with something like that. He would never have helped her kill herself, and he certainly would never have gotten her the money had he known what it was for. She must have made up some story to tell him.”

“Andy worked at Port San Marco General Hospital. He would have had access to drugs.”

Stubbornly she shook her head. “No, he didn’t. He was in the education department; it’s a teaching hospital. He had nothing to do with drugs.”

“I thought he was a medical technician.”

“Yes, but he didn’t handle drugs. He was a medical photographer. He took pictures of autopsies and put together slide shows and teaching aids for the hospital’s educational programs.”

I stared at her.

“He was a damned good photographer too. He used to exhibit the portraits he took as a hobby in shows around the area.”

I sat in silence for several seconds, feeling a growing excitement. Things were beginning to fall into place at last.

“What’s wrong?” Susan asked.

“Do you have a picture of Andy?”

“Yes, in the living room.”

“Can I see it?”

She frowned, but stood up, brushing dead leaves off her jeans. “All right.”

We went into the house, to an old-fashioned formal parlor. My hands were shaking as I took the framed portrait from Susan’s hands. The face in it was bearded and the hair brown rather than blond, but it was the one I’d expected to see.

The younger, less careworn face of Abe Snelling.

I drove along the ridge above the Salinas Valley, ignoring the speed limit but keeping an eye out for the highway patrol. The air was hot and dry, and the needle on the MG’s temperature gauge rose dangerously toward the red zone. Every few minutes I would check it, tell myself it would be fine, and then my eyes would drift back to it again. King City, I thought, I’ll stop in King City. And try to phone Snelling again.

I’d called as soon as I left Susan Tellenberg’s, planning to hang up if the photographer answered and then rush to San Francisco. But the phone had rung and rung, and finally I’d decided to risk making the trip anyway. After all, it might only mean Snelling was in the darkroom. Hadn’t he said he unplugged the phone while working?

But, then, that might have been a lie-like all of Snelling’s other lies. Because the night he’d claimed to have worked late in the darkroom-the night I’d kept calling to tell him of Jane’s death-he most certainly had been in Port San Marco. Right now he might be hurrying for the airport or driving north, south, or east to a new identity.

My eyes strayed to the gauge. The needle had dropped slightly.

But why would Snelling run? He had no suspicion that I was close to uncovering his real identity. I hadn’t told him I planned to see Susan Tellenberg. Because of my manner on the phone earlier, he probably felt more secure. Maybe he was in the darkroom right now, printing more of his wonderful photos.

The photos. That was another tragedy. While it seemed certain that Abe Snelling-or Andy Smith, whatever you wished to call him-was a killer, he also had a rare talent that would cease to be used when he was arrested. There would be no more of those portraits that probed to the core of their subjects’ being, no more expressions of his unique understanding of human nature.

The needle on the temperature gauge rose again. Rapidly I calculated; it was only ten miles to King City.

Well, now I had answers to a number of my questions. I knew why Jane Anthony had gone to San Francisco, why Snelling had let her live at his house, why he had lied to me about how he met her. And I thought I knew why he had risked exposure by hiring me to find her.

I felt a certain responsibility for what had happened. Through me, Snelling had found out Jane was in the Port San Marco area. That had probably been enough to tell him how to locate her. He’d driven south, met her at the old pier, and…

The sign for the King City exit loomed up, and I moved into the right-hand lane.

What about John Cala? I was fairly sure he’d recognized Snelling leaving the pier, gone out there to see what he was doing, and found the body. Had he attempted to blackmail Snelling? I didn’t think so. After all, Don had said Cala wasn’t too bright. Probably Snelling had recognized him too and later lured him to the old amusement park with a promise of money. They were both from the area, and the boarded-up park was a likely place for a secret meeting at which cash was to change hands. But instead of cash…

I pulled off the freeway and turned into the gas station where I’d stopped earlier in the week. While the attendant filled my gas tank and radiator, I went to the phone booth and called Snelling. Again the phone rang unanswered. I hurried to the car, paid with a credit card, and was soon back on the freeway.

Salinas slipped by. Gilroy. Morgan Hill. It was rush hour in San Jose. I fretted and cursed and my temperature rose, but at least the car’s gauge remained constant.

I should have the radiator fixed, I thought. No, I should buy a new car. I had money in the bank, a fairly large reward from a grateful shipping company for whom I’d recovered a stolen consignment of cargo. It was more than enough for a new car. But then, it was almost enough for the down payment on a house. A house would solve the apartment problem…