Charles Ardai - Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 102, No. 4 & 5. Whole No. 618 & 619, October 1993

“Can’t wait.”

He went looking for mein host. Hal Chatterton was in the kitchen, talking on a cellular telephone while coffee seeped through a filter. He said something and put down the phone.

“How’s Connie?” Roy took a chance on saying. “She was asleep when I left.”

“She’s asked me to do the impossible. Turn back time so that when you show up in her life, she can walk the other way.”

“I don’t have any quarrel with you, Hal.” He wanted to borrow the man’s car.

“How does it happen? Connie Seltzer shows me more stuff in a day than you could in a year. But she’s working for wages on a radio show, while you’re off to see the wizard.”

“Don’t put down the program, Hal. You’re the best on the coast.”

“Need some money? Is that what this is?”

“No, thanks. But I need your car. Just for the afternoon.”

“Can’t do it.”

“I’ll get it washed afterwards. Fill the tank.”

“I have to be in Laguna this afternoon. I need my car.”

Roy began to heat up. The unaccustomed shirt collar squeezed his neck. “Think about it, Hal. This is once in a lifetime.”

“Your lifetime, not mine.”

There was a long knife on the butcher-block table. Roy got himself out of that room. But he came back from the dark hallway and thrust his face into the light to say, “It’s my mother’s lifetime, too. And one other thing. You ask why I’m succeeding more than Connie? You’re such a homogenized bastard, you wouldn’t remember. The cream, Mr. Chatterton, always rises to the top.”

Roy plunged on down the hall. The situation was desperate. They could not make it to the Temple estate by bus or train, even if there had been time. And there was no time. They needed wheels. Roy passed an open doorway, saw bedclothes tossed back, a dresser with a lamp casting light over a litter of objects. He saw a wallet, some loose change, a handkerchief, a roll of mints. None of it mattered, but the ring of keys did.

There was nothing to think about, no time to think. He strode to the dresser, picked up the keys. A red tag had the letters BMW in gold. These were the keys to Hal Chatterton’s shiny black car.

Roy pocketed the keys and hurried to where his mother was waiting. She was seated on the lip of a chair with her knees together and her hands folded over a beaded purse. God grant me, Roy said to himself, some of the courage that sees this lady through hard times.

“Let’s hit the road,” he said cheerfully, picking up his script in its crisp new covers. “Hal is lending us his car.”

They went past Ventura, getting close to Santa Barbara, when Roy spotted the highway patrol cruiser in his rearview mirror. It tailed him for a mile or so while his stomach turned over. Hal could very well have reported the car as stolen. The cops would be verifying the license number on their computer.

“Why are we speeding up, Roy?”

“There’s a police car following me.”

“Shouldn’t you be slowing down?”

If they stopped him, it was all over. His intention had been to borrow the car and return it safely. But if Chatterton said stolen, that’s what it was. And the man had clout; half of Los Angeles listened to his dorky program. No cops would buy his story that he had to see the president. Why? To show him a movie script? He could picture some raw-boned officer with a gun strapped to his leg taking the script from him and reading the title. “An Air That Kills? Going to see the president with this, sir? Any weapons in the car? Get out slowly with your hands in sight. Lie face down on the pavement.”

The lights on the cruiser roof came on and the siren went Woop! as the police drew closer. Roy put his foot to the floor. The expensive car accelerated through the sixties, seventies, eighties. Chatterton’s vehicle handled as smoothly at ninety-five as it did at forty miles slower. They began overtaking and passing cars. His mother stared at him. “Are you in some kind of trouble, Roy Flagg? What have you done?”

“Open the glove compartment, Mother. Do it.” She pressed the chrome button and the door dropped down. “Take out that folded sheet of paper. Read me what it says. I wrote down the directions how to get to the estate.”

She read in a schoolteacher voice. “Two miles past The Grey Walrus beach bar. Turn right at big yellow house. Halfway up hill, guarded gate between eucalyptus trees.”

“And there it is,” Roy said. “The Grey Walrus.” There were three California highway-patrol cars behind him now. Watching for his next landmark, he had to reduce speed. The dark-lensed, implacable faces staring through the windshield of the car behind drew closer, filling Roy with dread. A battered pickup loaded with mattresses was in the lane ahead of him. He cut hard right and raced past, narrowly missing a rattling, weaving big-rig in the other lane. Looking back, he saw a police car absorb a sideswipe from the big-rig.

The cops began spinning, clipping the pickup and sending it across the median into the path of southbound traffic. Roy heard smashes, saw cars rear-ending over there. But the worst thing was the CHP cruiser. It was rolling now, glass spraying, a wheel off and bouncing along the highway. The other police cars were doing things to avoid running into the debris. For the moment, the pursuit was over.

That was when Roy noticed the police helicopter overhead. At the same moment, he saw the big yellow house. It was a restaurant; that was its color and its name. He pulled into the parking lot behind the frame building. There was no time for anything. “Mother, I have to go!” He snatched up his script.

“Royal, what’s going on?”

He saw her face, cold and hard with a threat of punishment in eyes made of glass. He could not stand looking at this face. “There’s no time. Stay here, you’ll be all right.”

“The president is waiting to talk to me.”

“I’ll explain there was an accident. He’ll understand.”

Roy slammed the car door and darted into a stand of trees on the hillside. The chopper was holding position high above the parking lot. Cops would soon arrive in numbers. What would Clara Hunter Flagg tell them? Everything she knew. But people in authority always have to check things out. If he hurried, there would still be time.

Roy was panting when he reached the iron gates. He could see a white porch and a red tile roof through dark foliage down a gravel lane. Two uniformed guards came forward to meet him. Three men in suits lingered by the gate, jackets unbuttoned.

“I had a flat tire at the bottom of the hill.” The self-deprecating grin was always there when he needed it. “I have an appointment. Royal Flagg.”

The guard turned a page on his clipboard. “Supposed to be a lady as well. Clara Flagg?”

“My mother. She’s not well, she couldn’t come. I’ll have to make her apologies.”

They patted him down, then let him go on up to the house. Another man in a suit headed him off on the porch and patted him down again. A maid led him through to a spacious room with logs burning in a fireplace. An elderly man with a bald head was tucked into a chair near the fire. A tall, slender woman in shiny red lounging pajamas rose from a chair on the other side of the fire. Roy looked past her, because Mike Linford was stretched out on a sofa with his shoes off and two pillows propping up the big pink face with its cap of salt-and-pepper hair. All three had drinks; the president was holding his glass on his belt buckle.

“You must be Roy Flagg. I’m Fanny Temple. That’s my husband, Ellis, over there.” She peered over Roy’s shoulder into the doorway. “Where’s your mother?”

“She was taken ill at the last minute. I’m sorry. I should have telephoned.”