The Taurus Trap

CHAPTER 1-2

“I think I understand,” I said. “Now a problem has come up.”

“Yes. The problem is, Peter is leaving me. I don’t mean that exactly. I mean he says he can’t stay any longer.”

“I see. Where would he go?”

“He says he’s going to move to ‘The Home,’ as he calls it.”

“‘The Home’?”

“For retired motion picture people. It’s out in the Valley. It’s a fine place and of course he would be welcome and well taken care of. No bother about pride and all that. He paid his dues.”

I couldn’t think of anything to say. I could imagine that Peter had just decided he had had enough of working around the house and—if there was a problem, so far it had only to do with Miss Dane’s wish that he would stay with her rather than go away. I couldn’t imagine anything I could do about that.

“I can see,” I said, “it presents you with a problem, having to find somebody else…”

She shook her head impatiently. “No, it isn’t that. That’s not a problem. A nuisance maybe, but not a problem. It’s that there’s something strange going on, something funny about the whole thing.”

“Oh?” I said.

“I think Peter’s lying to me—I mean about why he wants to leave.”

“What reason does he give?”

“Oh, something about…vague and mumbly, you know, about not being up to the work, not doing justice, earning his pay—the usual junk that men come up with.”

Junk, sure, I thought, but it might be simply true in Peter’s case. “What makes you think he’s lying?” I said.

“Certain things that have happened recently. Number one: about a month ago, Peter went out one afternoon to go to the market, and he didn’t come back for two days. Now that’s all right by itself. He’s free to come and go, it’s not as if we were married, or as if I were helpless or anything. But it was mysterious. He called up from the market and said he was having the things sent out. He said something had come up and he would have to be away, possibly overnight. He would keep in touch with me. All right. That was all the explanation he gave me—something had come up.

“So he came back two days later, about the middle of the afternoon. He had a black eye and there were a couple of bruises on his face. He was obviously unwell. I made him go to bed and stay there for the rest of the day and the night.”

My response was automatic. “Does Peter drink?” I asked.

She shook her head, twice, very firm. “No,” she said. “He can’t. Constitutionally, he just can’t. If he takes more than one drink, it puts him in the hospital—or used to. But when he got back after that two days, he wasn’t sick in that way.”

“He didn’t discuss it with you at all?”

“Not a word, except that he had fallen in the dark and banged up his face. I didn’t believe it then and I don’t believe it now. But he never explained.”

“All right. What happened next?”

“It was a couple of weeks ago. Two men came to the house to see Peter. He wasn’t here—he had driven to Malibu to do some shopping; he thought he might do some fishing too. These two men came and I said Peter was out, and they asked if they could wait for him. I didn’t like that too well and I explained that he might be a long time, but they were rather insistent, and they looked all right—respectable, well-dressed, you know—so I let them come in and wait, gave them a drink and so on. They waited about two hours and Peter didn’t come. They finally left.”

“They didn’t identify themselves?”

“No.”

“Did you ask them to identify themselves?”

“Well, no, I didn’t. I ought to have, oughtn’t I?”

“Yes. Did they talk between themselves at all while they waited?”

“Practically not at all. They made a few remarks about the view, and the liquor—very polite—but then they didn’t say anything at all. I didn’t stay with them very long They…bugged me, as my daughter would say.”

“They just sat here and waited for two hours and went away?”

“Yes. But they didn’t go far. About half an hour after they left the house I saw them over there.” She pointed toward the road outside, toward that dead man’s curve I had managed to make approaching the house. There was a clear view of most of its length from where we sat. “Up on the road,” she said. “Peter was there too, in his car. The two men had got out of their car and were standing in the road, talking to him. I saw Peter shake his head a couple of times, and finally the two of them got in their car and drove away and Peter came on home.”

“Any explanation this time?”

“No. I told him about the two waiting for him and he just shrugged it off. He didn’t say anything about meeting them on the road, so I didn’t say I had seen them. That’s all.”

“Anything else happen?”

“Two days ago,” she said, “Peter made his usual trip to the market—we have quite a long way to travel for supplies, by the way, and Peter usually does it by himself, because there are always extra little things, from the hardware store and so on, that I don’t know anything about, and besides, he gets along better when I’m not tagging along, but he’ll take me with him whenever I want to go, which isn’t often. Anyway, he came in with a box of groceries and left them on the kitchen shelf for me to put away, which is my part of the job. And in one of the paper sacks, along with some onions, was a piece of torn envelope with a message written in pencil. The message read: ‘Last chance Monday twenty-six-oh-five Redgrave before nine p.m.’”

“What did you do with the message?”

She picked up the magazine she had been looking at, riffled the pages and pulled out a piece of torn envelope.

“It’s right here,” she said. “I don’t know what to do with it. I just kept it.”

“You haven’t mentioned it to Peter?”

“No. I didn’t know how to handle it. After I found it, I called you.”

I looked at it. The message she had quoted was scrawled in soft pencil across the paper. The part of the envelope that had been used bore a canceled stamp and postmark on one side and nothing on the other. Nothing was left of an address or return address. The postmark was illegible.

“What do you conclude from all this?” I asked.

She looked at me straight on with those blue eyes. “I think Peter’s in trouble. I think that whatever the trouble is, that’s what’s making him go away. I don’t think he intends to go to The Home at all. I think he’s going away so this trouble—whatever it is—won’t land on me.”

“Have you asked him about it at all? About the trouble?” I said.

“Yes, last night. I said, while we were eating supper, ‘Peter, are you in trouble?’ And he just laughed. ‘Me, in trouble?’ he said. ‘No, no trouble. The days of trouble are over.’”

“What did he mean by that?”

She shrugged. “Nothing—just a thing to say, like, ‘I’m not in the movies anymore, how could I be in trouble?’ It’s like a joke.”

“Why are you so sure the message in the onion sack wasn’t meant for you?”

“Because—it’s absolutely meaningless to me.”

Reason enough. “Has Peter said anything about when he expects to leave?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said. “Sunday, this coming Sunday.”

I looked at the message again. “Last chance Monday—” I looked at Mary Dane and I looked out the window, where the canyon was turning dark.

“You’ve considered the possibility,” I said, “that Peter just wants to get away, for a change?”

“Yes, I thought about that,” she said, “but I don’t think he does. Besides, those things I told you about, the bruises on his face, the two men, the message—I didn’t just make them up.”

“Of course. And your thought is that I may be able to find out what Peter’s trouble is and…save him from it?”

“Something like that, I suppose. Just finding out would be worth something to me. If there is something we can do about it, so much the better.”

“It may be some simple thing, some foolishness,” I said, thinking aloud. “Or it could get into an extensive bit of research.”

“I know. I’m prepared for that. I’ll write you a check right now for whatever you need at this time.”

“Well,” I said, “basically I cost seventy-five dollars a day, plus extraordinary expenses. A hundred and fifty now will get me started. If I put in less than a day, there’ll be a refund. A day is twenty-four hours.”

She opened a drawer in the table, took out a checkbook and pen and started writing. Across the near canyon, a red Jaguar made the death-defying circuit of the curve approaching the house. There was a girl at the wheel.

“One thing,” I said. “Did you tell Peter you were calling a private detective? Does he know that’s what I am?”

“No,” she said. “I told him you were interested in writing a book about me, my movie career.”

Do I look like a writer, I wondered, who has to write that kind of a book?

I got out my note pad and wrote down the address on the piece of envelope. I handed the envelope to Miss Dane as she handed me the check.

“I think you ought to give this to Peter,” I said, “or leave it where he will find it.”

“All right,” she said, “I will.”

“I’d better get started—unless there’s something more you can tell me.”

“I wish there was,” she said.

“Have you mentioned any of this to anyone else, anyone at all?”

“Some of it, to my daughter, Abigail. She’s an adopted daughter actually, but we’re quite close, maybe closer than we might be otherwise. I told her Peter said he was leaving and that I thought maybe he was in trouble. I didn’t tell her those details you know.”

“Did you mention that you might call in a detective?”

“Yes…as I remember, I suggested that.”

“Did she have any comment?”

“No. One reason we get along so well is that we don’t make too many suggestions to each other. Live and let live.”

“All right, I’ll go now,” I said.

I got up and she got up with me and gave me her hand, a cool, firm hand. She was a cool, firm lady. I liked her.

“You’ll hear from me,” I said, turning to the stairs.

“I hope so,” she said. “Thank you for coming.”

I climbed the stairs to the ballroom, where suddenly a movie was in progress. Swirling toward me over the giant checkerboard floor came a swinging, white leather miniskirt, a matching embroidered jacket, knee-high white boots and a crown of massed white curls. She was in a hurry. The boots slapped a tattoo on the parquet. Somewhere nearby, the cameras had to be rolling.

I stepped out of her direct path to give her flying room. She flew past me toward the stairs, looking straight ahead, and I went on toward the side door. It was hard not to stop and watch. I was still short of the door when she sang out, “Hey—!”

Given permission, I turned around and looked at her. She was poised at the top of the stairs, teetering a little in the high boots, her miniskirt still swinging around her longish, somewhat meaty legs.

“Yes?” I said.

“Are you driving down—that way?” she said.

“To Sunset, yes,” I said.

“Can I ride with you? The damned Jaguar is busted.”

“Certainly,” I said.

“Just a minute,” she said, starting down the stairs, “I have to see mother…wait for me…”

Her voice faded as she disappeared. She was better than her word. The white curls showed, rising from the stairwell, in less than a minute. She crossed the floor at a run. I barely managed to get the door open in time. Panting a little as she rushed through it, she said, “I’m Abigail Caccelli.”

“My name is Mac,” I said. “Car’s right over there.”

She beat me to it.