Jim Sader 02 Sleep with Slander by Dolores Hitchens

Author:Dolores Hitchens [Hitchens, Dolores]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Library of America
Published: 2015-10-05T21:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER ELEVEN

HE WENT into the living room and sat down on a chair and smoked a cigarette. There was some thinking to be done, a course of action to be planned. Some legal angles had to be considered, relating to his hanging onto his license.

He wondered who represented the law on this particular hillside. The County Sheriff, probably, since it was north of the Laguna Beach city limits. He was certainly obligated, under the rules of his license, to co-operate with the Sheriff’s office in reporting the murder of Wanda Nevins.

He had also a duty to a client, in this case old man Gibbings whom he found completely detestable. There was no way on earth, once the murder had been reported, to keep Gibbings’ name out of it. The newspapers would seize on him like a pack of wolves. The tissue of secrecy would be torn. But it wasn’t old man Gibbings that Sader found himself worrying about. He was remembering an elephant of a woman in red pants and green jersey blouse, with a painted face, who had described for him the only image he had of Kit Gibbings, sitting alone at a table at Hollywood Park and studying a racing form.

And it was somehow this woman he had never met, with her nice white gloves and her pot of tea, and her fifty-dollar hat that she didn’t know was all wrong for her, it was this woman who slowly but surely tipped the scales for Sader.

He got off the chair, disposed of the cigarette butt in the bathroom, then went through the house swiftly. He found, in the hollow shell of the Buddha’s backside, a locked steel box to which there seemed to be no key. He carried it into the kitchen, pried up the lid with a screwdriver.

It was empty. Someone who had had a key had beat him to it. He wiped his prints off the steel surface, left it on the sink.

In a hatbox on the top shelf of Wanda’s closet were some bankbooks, bank statements, and a sheaf of canceled checks snapped together with a rubber band. Sader laid the checks on the dressing table and separated them with a pencil tip. They represented mortgage and house utility payments, and checks drawn for cash. The bankbooks had been issued by two different banks, one in Laguna Beach and one in Los Angeles. The Los Angeles account showed a savings account balance of a little more than twenty-two thousand dollars. The Laguna Beach account was a small checking operation; it appeared from what Sader could figure that four or five hundred dollars had been withdrawn every few weeks from the savings account in L.A. and deposited in the Laguna Beach account to make the mortgage and other payments.

The L.A. account had been started almost two years before with a single deposit of forty thousand dollars.

Sader put the bankbooks and the checks back in the box, taking care not to leave prints, and returned the box to its shelf.

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