Linda Lee, Incorporated Part 56

"Oh, she'd had in mind what she meant to do for a long time. I don't know how long, but she let a hint fall the other night, when she'd had a bit more drink than she needed, and I spent the best part of the evening trying to talk her out of it. She fobbed me off with a half-promise in the end; but I wasn't satisfied. And tonight, when she wasn't on hand to keep a dinner appointment, and one of the bellhops told me he'd seen her boarding a trolley for Beverly Hills.... Well: my chauffeur says we broke all existing records, getting out to Summerlad's. Why we weren't arrested neither of us knows. Lucky...."

Bel's words trailed off into a thoughtful mumble, he seemed momentarily lost in study of the rug on which he stood, then roused and put his hand to the door-k.n.o.b.

"If it matters," he announced--"possibly you'd care to know--we've telegraphed Summerlad's people in his home town, Terre Haute----his mother and sister. The family name appears to be Slade. We thought he ought to have them with him...."

"'We'?"

"Zinn and I."

"You told Mr. Zinn?"

"Called him up first thing. Naturally. n.o.body had a better right to know what had happened, holding Summerlad under contract as he does. He came right out, calling himself bad names for being in the picture business, and took charge. It was mostly thanks to him I was able to get away as soon as I did."

"Does he know the full story, Bel?"

"All that matters. But your part's still a dead secret between the four of us--including my chauffeur and Summerlad's j.a.p. I think those two have been well enough paid.... It remains to get hold of your man and make him forget he drove you out there for dinner and didn't bring you home. If you'll give me his address...."

"Perhaps I can attend to that better than you, Bel; without making it necessary to explain how you happen to be interested, I mean."

"You won't forget? This affair will be all over town before morning."

"I'll call Ben up at his home as soon as you've gone."

"Very well, then. I presume that brings us to good-night."

"But Bel...." Bellamy reclosed the door and turned back with weary patience. "About that poor girl...."

He looked startled. "That sounds like pity."

"Can one think of her in any other spirit? Have you any notion what will happen to her?"

"Nothing's going to happen to her--if I can find her before the police do."

"You don't mean you'd help her get away, Bel?"

"If it takes every dollar I've got in the world. Do you realize what it means if she's caught and put on trial--either for murder or attempted murder, as it turns out--in a case that's going to get the publicity this is bound to? Do you imagine it will be possible then to keep your name out of it? She's bound to tell her story in self-defense; and inasmuch as she's good-looking enough to be acquitted on one pretext or another, in all probability, the chances are in another six months she'll be starring in a film based on a re-hash of this pretty little affair."

"Then you will help me? I can count on you, Bel?"

"Help you?"

"Help get her away."

Bellamy started excitedly. "Mean to say you know where Nelly is?"

"She's here, Bel. She came straight to me, half-mad with anxiety on your account. It seems she's grateful to you for kindness----"

"And you didn't throw her out?" Bel interrupted, staring.

"She made me understand.... And she was so bewildered, so terrified....

I couldn't blame her, Bel; and I couldn't have put her out in any event."

"In there?" Bellamy nodded toward the bedchamber and, receiving a nod in reply, strode quickly to the door and threw it open.

The room was a pocket of darkness and, when the lights had been turned on, proved to be tenantless.

The nightly breeze from the hills was bellying the curtains at one of the windows that opened on the street. Lucinda ran to it and leaned out.

No sign of the car that by her order had been left standing before the side door, nearly an hour since....

XLII

Lucinda slept that night--and that she slept at all crossed her presentiment--but fitfully, in spells of profound and wasting lethargy broken by wretched watches of half-waking dread under the dominion of the incubus that agonized her dreams, that phantasm of the land-bird lost, spending its slender strength against the cruel vasts of night and sea and storm....

Toward morning exhaustion claimed her absolutely, sponging out every care, and for some hours her slumbers were unbroken. But she woke up as it were against her will, heavy of heart and without sense of having rested.

Sluggish resentment crawled in her mind, that she should feel so worn and old whose first moments after sleep were as a rule her happiest, when she would lie serene, luxuriating in whole refreshment and with normal optimism very like a child's looking forward to the day, making plans to fill in with small pleasures every hour that wasn't to be devoted to her work.

There was still the feel of immaturity in the day, the chilly souvenir of night which so frequently renders the mornings of Southern California sickly, before the sun finds strength enough to burn away the high fog that, like a thief in the dark, is wont to steal in after sundown from the sea.

What, then, had awakened her so far in advance of the customary hour?

Something hideous and hateful skulking like a torpid snake in the shadows beyond the threshold of consciousness, some foul shape that she instinctively shrank from calling up....

The bedside clock struck nine, and Lucinda started up in a flutter excited by the thought that she would yet another time be late and so afford fresh reason for dissension with her director ... then sank back to her pillow, cringing from memories that came trooping in the wake of the reminder that she was to know no more of Barry Nolan in her life....

No more of Nolan, no more of Nelly, no more of Lynn ... no more of Love....

With a convulsive movement she flung over in the bed and lay almost p.r.o.ne, her face snuggled into bare arms whose pure l.u.s.tre lent fire to the crimson that glowed in a lunette of cheek, the one ear visible, even in her neck's sleek loveliness.

Things that Nelly had told her, resting on that very bed, plain tales of the life that Lynn by preference had led, related in the flat and toneless accents of emotional prostration, therefore the more likely to be free from overstatement; things Lynn himself had owned inadvertently or injudiciously at the urge of vanity craving greater prestige in her sight; things that she knew of her own experience with the man, little circ.u.mstances of their a.s.sociation that had threatened its harmony, things she hadn't liked and wilfully had been blind to, denied, or disbelieved: all swam up from the deeps of memory to float like sc.u.m upon the surface of her consciousness.

Lonely and restless, starving for affection and all too eager to s.n.a.t.c.h at shadow and proclaim it substance, self-dedicated victim of a ready-made infatuation....

And she had called that Love!

What dishonor, what humiliation, what reproach!

What an escape! and at what cost!... a cost not yet all paid, and which if she would she might not pay alone, but must see others pay in part for her, Nelly and Lynn perhaps with their lives, Bel too in his way, in another way Zinn ... all called upon to lay down things they held dear that she might have her lesson, that she might learn Love is never lightly to be won, no, nor put by, either....

In the room adjoining she could hear her maid quietly moving about, tidying up, with presently a chirrup of the telephone, then a guarded mumble as the woman answered.

She was hanging up when Lucinda, dragging on a neglige, flung open the communicating door.

The maid said Mr. Zinn had called up, and gaped to see Lucinda's glance grow dull and the spirit of her entrance pa.s.s abruptly into apathy.