Second Longest Night by Stephen Marlowe

Author:Stephen Marlowe [Marlowe, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4532-9020-0
Publisher: MysteriousPress.com/Open Road
Published: 2012-11-05T14:54:00+00:00

Chapter Thirteen

I LIT A CIGARETTE and went exploring around the boardwalk and the dark shower stalls. Water was still dripping where Ralph had done his ablutions. I couldn’t find the gun.

I went back in through the rear door of the guest house and felt my way across the dark lobby. It was so hot and damp in there, King Oil could have opened a Turkish bath without importing any steam. Upstairs, it was even hotter. An oblong of yellow light was visible under Del Rey’s door, but the Homerson room was dark. I could hear someone pacing back and forth in there, though. Five steps toward me, the fifth on a creaking floorboard, then pivot, then five steps back, the first on a creaking floorboard.

The light was not the only thing coming from Del Rey’s room. There were voices. I tried to get over there like the poet’s fog which came on little cat feet, but I weigh almost two hundred pounds. Probably because they were too busy talking they didn’t hear me.

Everything they said was pot clear, but Lydia sounded friendly and, I thought, mildly seductive. Del Rey’s voice was a mixture of arrogance and indifference.

Lydia’s half of the conversation contained, “I didn’t expect ... Well, you just startled me, that’s all ... Oh, really, Paco. I ought to know my own husband. He makes a lot of noise about it, but I can twist him around my little finger. Can’t I? Look at me, Paco ... I—I like it when you look at me like that.”

Well, that’s what she said. It just didn’t sound like the same Lydia I heard in the shower stalls this afternoon. Del Rey’s portion of the conversation included, “... a woman’s prerogative to be like the weather ... Indeed, do you know him? Your own husband? ... This afternoon you did not like it. This afternoon ...

It hardly sounded as if anyone was going to kill anyone, but I wasn’t so sure about Ralph. I toyed with the idea of knocking on his door and asking him for the gun. It was a cinch I couldn’t just plop down on my own bed and get some sleep. Del Rey had said he still hadn’t made up his mind about tonight. But if I stood out here in the dim hallway and Ralph decided to come barging across it to find out what besides the gun collection his wife found so attractive in Del Rey’s room, people would start stuffing figurative keyholes whenever I showed up, and that doesn’t make a private detective’s work any easier.

In the end, I decided in favor of making my way downstairs as quietly as I could, parking myself on one of the sofas in the lobby, and waiting. This I did, and the Maracaibo heat finally got to me. I felt limp and weak and began to wish Senator Hartsell’s oil interests were in some sensible place like the Gulf of Mexico, which is hot but not this hot.

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