The Other Lady Vanishes

  Jake drove through the open wrought iron gates and along a drive that cut through a garden filled with well-kept flowering plants. Orange and grapefruit trees were scattered about the grounds. A decorative grape arbor marched along one wall.

  He brought the speedster to a halt at the front of the villa.

  “This is some house,” he remarked, shutting down the engine.

  “Florence told me that it was built by a tycoon just before the crash,” Adelaide explained. “The tycoon lost everything when the market plunged. This mansion was neglected for years and then another very wealthy man from L.A. picked it up. He poured a lot of money into it and now rents it out to celebrities who want more privacy than they can get at the Burning Cove Hotel.”

  Jake opened his door, climbed out from behind the wheel, and walked around to her side of the car to open the door. She got out, bag of tea in hand. Together they went up the front steps. She pressed the doorbell.

  “It really wasn’t necessary for you to accompany me today,” she said, not for the first time.

  “I told you, I’ve got a personal interest in Madam Zolanda.”

  “Yes,” she said. “You did tell me that.”

  She did not say anything else. They waited in silence for a minute or two.

  “I thought the assistant told you that this was an emergency,” Jake said.

  She pressed the doorbell again. Again there was no response.

  “Maybe they’re having breakfast out on the patio,” she suggested. “It’s a big house. They might not hear the bell.”

  She started walking along a flagstone path that led through the gardens to the rear of the villa. Jake followed without comment. He had been in a grim, somber mood since finding the cigarette butts and the matchbook, but there was a new level of tension in the atmosphere around him now.

  “This vacation is not doing a lot for your nerves, is it?” she said. “I’ll bet your doctor would be very unhappy if he could see you today.”

  “I don’t plan to tell him.”

  “That’s probably a good idea,” she said. She raised her voice. “Miss Leggett? Madam Zolanda? It’s Adelaide Brockton. I have your Enlightenment blend.”

  She and Jake rounded the back of the house and stopped at the edge of the large concrete patio. Some lounge chairs, a table, and an umbrella furnished the garden retreat.

  There was also an untidy bundle of what appeared to be vividly colored silk scarves.

  Adelaide stopped abruptly.

  “No,” she said very softly.

  Madam Zolanda had been a tall, dramatic figure in life. She looked so much smaller in death.

  Chapter 17

  “Stay here,” Jake said.

  He touched Adelaide’s shoulder briefly as he moved around her, silently reinforcing the command.

  She watched him crouch beside the body. Something about the swift, efficient manner in which he moved told her that this wasn’t the first time he had dealt with the dead. She thought about Raina Kirk’s opinion of Jake’s old line of work. The import-export business has been known to cover a multitude of illegal activities. And then she remembered what Raina had said about the death of Jake’s wife. Mrs. Truett hanged herself in the basement. Truett found the body.

  “She’s been dead for a while,” Jake said. He got to his feet. “Several hours, I think. Her neck is broken.” He looked up at the roof of the house. “She must have jumped. Or else someone wants us to believe that’s what happened.”

  Adelaide looked up at the high parapet that decorated the roof of the villa. “Someone wants us to believe she jumped?”

  “If I’m right about Zolanda, she was collecting blackmail secrets from a lot of people. It’s possible that one of her victims tracked her down and silenced her.”

  “I understand.”

  It made sense, but dark memories of the night that Dr. Ormsby, hallucinating wildly, had leaped through the arched window at the Rushbrook Sanitarium ghosted through Adelaide’s head. It must be a coincidence, she thought. Just a horrible coincidence.

  She realized Jake was watching her.

  “Are you all right?” he asked.

  “No,” she said. “I’m not. But I’m not going to faint, if that’s what’s worrying you. Jake, this makes no sense. Thelma called me a short time ago. You said Zolanda has been dead for quite a while.”

  “I think so, yes. I want to take a look around inside before we call the police.”

  “You’re hoping to find that diary that you said Zolanda was using to blackmail your friend.”

  “It’s a long shot, but I have to check it out.”

  Jake was already moving toward the open doors of the conservatory attached to the back of the mansion.

  Unable to think of anything else to do, she trailed after him. The glass room was furnished with green wrought iron benches and a lot of potted plants. Jake took in the surroundings with a quick, assessing glance and kept going.

  He opened another door and led the way along a wide, arched hall. At the far end he started up an elegant staircase.

  “Stay here,” he said. “I’ll be down in a few minutes.”

  He disappeared on the landing.

  Adelaide realized she was still clutching the packet of Enlightenment tea. She turned slowly on her heel and looked around. From where she stood she had a view of the grand living room with its high ceiling, arched windows, and dark wooden beams.

  The interior of the villa was as exotic as the outside. The walls were painted a rich ocher. There was a lot of colorful tile work around the hearth. The furniture was mostly covered in saddle brown leather and accented with throw pillows in jewel-toned fabrics.

  The turban that Zolanda had worn during her final performance sat on a coffee table. It looked as if it had been tossed there in a careless manner. A tuxedo coat was draped over the back of a chair. It looked too small for a man. Adelaide concluded it was probably the jacket that Thelma Leggett had worn in her role as Zolanda’s assistant.

  For some reason Adelaide found herself drawn to the turban. She studied it for a long moment and thought about Zolanda’s last prediction. Mark my words, someone in this theater will be dead by morning.

  There was an empty glass next to the turban, a small residue of what looked like whiskey inside.

  She could hear cupboard doors opening and closing overhead. Jake was making his way very quickly through the upstairs rooms.

  She wandered around for a time with absolutely no idea what she was looking for.

  She was about to give up on the living room and try her luck in the kitchen, when she caught the glitter of what looked like a chunk of broken glass on the floor beneath the bottom shelf of the liquor cabinet. The shard was a deep blue color.

  There was a lot of glassware in the cabinet but none of it was cobalt blue.

  She took a handkerchief out of her handbag, crouched beside the cabinet, and started to reach for the piece of glass.

  She froze when she realized that she was not looking at a shard of blue glass. She had been about to pick up the elegant stopper of a cobalt blue cut crystal perfume bottle.

  She stared at the stopper in disbelief. All she could think about in that moment was the black velvet case on Ormsby’s office desk, the case containing a dozen cut crystal perfume bottles. She had been trapped at Rushbrook long enough to learn a number of things about the inner workings of the asylum. She knew that Ormsby didn’t distill perfumes—he crafted illicit drugs. Some of those drugs ended up in elegant crystal perfume bottles.

  She reminded herself to think logically. Zolanda had done very well in the psychic business. She had no doubt owned several bottles of expensive perfume.

  She used the handkerchief to pick up the glittering crystal object. She brought the stopper close to her nose and sniffed very cautiously. There was no scent,
no trace whatsoever of perfume. How long did the fragrance of a perfume cling to crystal? She had no ready answer. But she knew a lot about the drug called Daydream. It was odorless and tasteless.

  She took another look around the living room. There was no sign of the other portion of the perfume bottle. Only the stopper remained.

  It could not be one of the bottles in the black velvet case, she told herself. How could a fake Hollywood psychic possibly be linked to the Rushbrook Sanitarium?

  She had to get control of her growing paranoia. She was starting to sound a lot like the other inmates on ward five. The blue perfume bottle stopper was just a blue glass object. It had obviously been part of a very expensive bottle of perfume, but there were probably thousands of bottles just like it.

  However, if the police concluded that Zolanda had been murdered, and if they discovered a link between the sanitarium and the psychic to the stars, and if they discovered that there was an escaped mental patient working as a tearoom waitress in Burning Cove, said escaped patient would probably become the number one suspect in the murder.

  There were a lot of ifs involved, but if they proved to be true, she would have to be prepared to disappear again.

  She put the stopper back down on the floor beneath the cabinet where she had found it. The police might notice it but she doubted that they would see it as significant. It was just part of a perfume bottle.

  Shaken, she went down the hall to the large kitchen.

  There was a half-full sack of Enlightenment on the tiled counter. A teapot and a kettle stood beside it. Zolanda had not run out of her special blend.

  “Damn,” Adelaide said softly.

  A movement in the doorway made her spin around. Jake stood in the opening. He looked at the tea things.

  “Can I assume that bag on the counter contains Zolanda’s special tea?” he asked.

  “Yes,” Adelaide said. “What’s more, there is plenty of it. Why would Thelma Leggett lie? Why would she call me this morning and insist that I come over here immediately?”

  Jake met her eyes. “You know the answer to that as well as I do.”

  “She was trying to set me up to take the fall for the murder of Madam Zolanda.”

  “Obviously,” Jake said. “And I can think of only one good reason why she would do that.”

  “She’s probably the person who is responsible for Zolanda’s death.”

  “If I were the detective investigating this death, I’d certainly consider Leggett my number one suspect,” Jake said. “However, it’s possible that she simply got scared when she found the body, and decided to run. Regardless, I think she took Zolanda’s secrets with her.”

  “You didn’t find the diary you are after, did you?”

  “I didn’t find it or anything else that looked like blackmail material.”

  “Maybe Thelma Leggett murdered Zolanda for her stash of extortion secrets,” Adelaide said.

  “At the moment Leggett is at the top of my personal list. But if I’m right about Zolanda collecting blackmail secrets, we’ve got a long list of mostly unidentified suspects. She was playing her psychic games with some of the most powerful people in Hollywood. The studios employ fixers whose job it is to get rid of extortionists like her.”

  It was probably a measure of her paranoia that his words actually lifted her spirits, Adelaide thought. She was oddly relieved by his analysis. If Zolanda was in the blackmail business, a number of people would have had a motive to murder her. There was no reason to assume that the perfume bottle had contained drugs from the lab at the sanitarium.

  “We’d better call the police,” she said.

  Jake raised his brows at her enthusiasm for summoning the authorities, but he did not comment on it.

  “Yes,” he said. “The longer we wait, the farther away Thelma Leggett will get.”

  “What, exactly, are we going to tell the police?”

  “The truth.” Jake crossed to an end table that held an elegant telephone. “Most of it. We’ll tell them that this morning you got a phone call from Thelma Leggett pleading for an emergency delivery of tea. When we got here, we found the body and, good citizens that we are, we immediately called the police.”

  “We don’t mention the missing diary, I take it?”

  “No,” Jake said. “If that diary ever became part of a police investigation, there would be no way to keep the contents out of the press.”

  “What about us—you and me? The police will wonder why we’re both here at this hour of the morning.”

  Jake tightened his jaw. “My apologies for the failure of chivalry, but I’m afraid we’ll have to tell them the truth about that, too.”

  “You mean we tell them that we spent the night together. Yes, I understand.” Adelaide crossed her arms and shook her head, resigned to the inevitable. “They’ll assume the worst, of course.”

  “The worst?”

  She glared at him, flushing a little. “They’ll think we’re involved in an affair. Don’t worry, it’s not a problem for me. I told you, I’m not concerned with my reputation. This is Burning Cove, after all. People here are much more interested in which leading lady is sleeping with which leading man at the Burning Cove Hotel. They won’t care about the private life of a tearoom waitress.”

  “Maybe not in other circumstances, but as of this morning that tearoom waitress is one of the people who found the body of the psychic to the stars. Don’t kid yourself; that will show up in the afternoon edition of the Burning Cove Herald.”

  “Things might be a little awkward for a while.” She brightened. “Probably good for business at Refresh, though. Curiosity is bound to bring a lot of people into the shop. Florence will be thrilled.”

  “That’s the spirit; look at the marketing angle.” Jake’s eyes got colder. “A small reminder, if this case blows up into a full-scale murder investigation, you’re not the only one who will need an alibi.”

  It took a beat before she got his meaning. When she did, she drew a very deep breath.

  “Yes, of course,” she said. “I never thought of that. You could be viewed as a potential suspect. After all, you believe that Zolanda was an extortionist.”

  “In other words, I have a very good motive for killing her.”

  Adelaide unfolded her arms and spread her hands. “Looks like we’re stuck with each other.”

  “I prefer to think of us as allies.”

  “Right. Allies.”

  “By the way,” Jake said. “I found this in the other room under the liquor cabinet. Would you mind putting it in your handbag?”

  He held out the perfume bottle stopper.

  The crystal stopper glittered darkly in the palm of his hand. Adelaide got a little light-headed. Jake obviously thought that the stopper was important. That did not bode well.

  Reluctantly she crossed the short distance between them, reached out, and plucked the stopper from his palm.

  “Can I assume we’re not going to tell the police about this, either?” she asked as she dropped it into her handbag.

  His smile was razor sharp. “No, we are not going to tell the police about that perfume bottle stopper.”

  She swallowed hard. “Why not?”

  “I doubt if the cops would think it was important, but it might get dumped into an evidence file where we won’t be able to get at it.”

  “Why would we want to get hold of it again?”

  “A couple of reasons. The first is that it’s the one thing that looked out of place in the living room.”

  “Most women have bottles of perfume,” Adelaide pointed out.

  “But most women keep their perfume on their dressing tables, not in their living rooms.”

  She could not argue with that logic. “What’s the second reason for taking it with us?”

  “That stopper looks like it
belongs to a very expensive bottle of perfume,” Jake said. “If we find the missing portion, we might find the killer.”

  “You really think Zolanda was murdered, don’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  He picked up the elegant telephone and dialed the operator.

  Chapter 18

  “The police are going to conclude that Zolanda jumped to her death, aren’t they?” Adelaide said.

  Jake looked at her. She sounded almost hopeful—enthusiastic, even—about the possibility that the cops would call the psychic’s death a suicide. He couldn’t tell what she was thinking, but he was certain that she had undergone a few changes of mood from the time they had discovered the body until that moment in the kitchen when he had given her the top of the perfume bottle.

  At the moment she was standing next to him in the gardens at the edge of the patio. They were watching a handful of uniformed officers and a detective named Brandon from the Burning Cove Police Department. A doctor named Skipton, who evidently served as the local medical examiner when one was needed, had taken charge of the body.

  “I’m not so sure,” he said. “Detective Brandon doesn’t like the fact that Thelma Leggett has disappeared. Got a hunch he’ll look for her, but if she left town, which seems likely, there’s not much he can do. There’s no point mentioning my theory that Zolanda was a blackmailer and that Leggett is now in possession of the extortion material, because I have absolutely no proof.”

  “If the police do find Leggett, they’ll probably find the diary.”

  “Which means I have to find her first.”

  Adelaide regarded him with a thoughtful expression. “You’re planning to look for Thelma Leggett yourself.”

  “I don’t have much choice.”

  She nodded, accepting the statement. It occurred to him that a lot of women—hell, a lot of people, male and female—would have been more than a little uneasy with the idea of pursuing a private inquiry. But Adelaide didn’t seem to have any difficulty with the plan.