LITMIR.BIZ

      Copyright © 1962 by Fawcett Publications, Inc.

      chapter one

      It was a nice, quiet party—the kind they throw on the last night of Carnival or when a war ends or if the human race has about twenty-four hours to live.

      The one kind of party it wasn’t was the kind you’d throw if you were expecting a private detective who had just flown in three thousand miles to find your missing husband.

      I stood at the bottom of a long flight of stone stairs, hefted my B-4 bag, stared up through the moonlight at the big villa on the hill and said, because I didn’t quite believe it, “Are you sure this is La Atalaya?”

      “Sí, señor,” the kid who had led the way from the town square answered. “The Watchtower. The villa of Señora Hartshorn.” Her house, not his. Robbie Hartshorn already had been missing long enough for them to have him dead and buried. But if so, his widow had a peculiar idea of mourning.

      Music drifted down the steep hillside. It was bullfighter music, a pasa doble searching in the night for a torero, and laughter and shouts of “Olé!” and “Quiero!” chased it down the steep stairs that were bone-white in the moonlight. I hefted the B-4 bag again and started climbing. The villa sat high on the edge of the hill like an eagle’s aerie, but I had forty pounds of luggage instead of wings. There were sixty-three steps. I counted them for no particular reason as the music got louder. They brought me to a broad terrace that looked down over the whitewashed buildings of Torremolinos and the golden moon-track on the Mediterranean beyond, and I told myself—as I had told myself before and would tell myself again—I was a long way from home.

      The double doors at the end of the terrace opened to disgorge a chunky woman who walked as if she’d had one or two too many but as if she knew how to handle the result. “A lady bullfighter just told me to go soak my head,” she informed me and the moonlight in a husky voice. “Did a lady bullfighter ever tell you to go soak your head?” The husky-voiced, chunky woman looked me over. “No, she wouldn’t. Though she might. She’s a real horse’s ass.”

      “Who?” I said.

      “Come on. There’s only one lady bullfighter in Torre.”

      “You wouldn’t be Mrs. Hartshorn?” I asked.

      “Don’t be a horse’s ass,” she said indignantly. “Me? That horse’s ass?” She laughed. It sounded like the other end of a horse whinnying. “Say, are you new around here? Maybe you’ve got the right idea, though, coming to one of Andrea Hartshorn’s parties complete with baggage.”

      “Is Mrs. Hartshorn inside?”

      “Who cares?” the chunky woman winked broadly. “I’m Nancy Huntington, all dressed up for a party and here it is only eleven-thirty and already my husband’s fried to the eyeballs. How come you popped in so late?”

      “The plane from Madrid to Malaga was delayed.”

      “Aren’t they always? Say, you mean to tell me you flew all the way down from Madrid for one of Andrea’s parties? The dirty liar told me it was a spur of the moment thing. Nancy Huntington gazed down at the moon-track and eased herself closer to me. Her perfume was musky and strong enough to have been applied by a roller. “Well, better late than never,” she breathed huskily. “What’s your name?”

      “Chester Drum,” I said. “I flew all the way from Washington, but not for a party. I’m one of Mrs. Hartshorn’s hired hands.”

      The chunky woman froze where she stood, as if a shaft of moonlight or my words had impaled her. And what I had said finished her interest in me. “Your employer is inside,” she said, grand-daming me. “Horse’s ass,” she mumbled under her breath.

      I went through the double doors to join the other descendants of Eohippus.

      A tall blonde leaning on thirty-nine hard enough to change its spots to forty was crouching in the center of a room not quite the size of a bull ring and making passes with a pink silk scarf like a bullfighter with a muleta. There were maybe fifty people in that room, most of them ignoring her with the completely casual indifference you find only at a big party and only at the expatriate watering places of the world, like St. Tropez or Palma de Majorca or Torremolinos on Spain’s Costa del Sol. But two or three men were sycophantically egging her on as her bare feet moved to the rhythm of the pasa doble coming from a hi-fi in the corner. The invisible bull lunged, and she pulled back and lifted her makeshift muleta, and there were a couple of half-hearted shouts of “Olé!” The blonde flashed big teeth at them, and rolled baby-blue eyes. Then she took two more steps in time to the music, hit her shins on the edge of a cocktail table and sat down hard. She blinked and tried to smile again, but tears were bright on her cheeks. She brushed long blonde hair away from her face and tried to stand up. She couldn’t make it. I realized then she was dead drunk.

      “All of you,” she cried, “you rotten stinking bastards, drinking my liquor, laughing at me behind my goddam back, Robbie would kick you all the hell out, didn’t you ever see a girl trip before?”

      There were some pained looks, but some half-hearted offers of assistance too. They were half-hearted enough for me to get there first. I caught the blonde under her shoulders. “Can you make it?” I whispered against her ear. “I’m going to take you outside for some air, Mrs. Hartshorn.”

      “I can make it clear down to the Club Mañana, if I want to,” she said. “Who are you? I don’t know you.”

      “Drum,” I said. “Governor Hartshorn cabled you I was coming, didn’t he?”

      “I don’t like my father-in-law.”

      “What does that have to do with anything? He wants to find Robbie. Don’t you?”

      “Of course I do,” she said indignantly. Her weight was still on my arms. She had made no move to get up.

      “Is throwing a party like this your idea of trying to find him?”

      That made her snapping mad, which was what I wanted. She got to her feet, turned on me and cried, “What the hell can I do? I don’t like my father-in-law, Mr. Drum, and I don’t think I’m going to like you.”

      “You don’t have to like me. You just have to tell me how he disappeared.”

      “I told the Guardia. I told the Consul in Malaga. He’s still missing.”

      “That’s why I’m here.”

      “You’re very modest.”

      “The Governor thinks I’m a good detective,” I said modestly.

      “I don’t like my father-in-law.”

      “Three strikes and out,” I said. “Let’s go.” She didn’t move. She was a blonde who had to be challenged. “If you think you can make it.”

      She snorted, and turned, and walked very steadily toward the double doors. “Where the hell are they hiding that bottle of Fundador?” someone bawled at the top of his voice as we left. “Hey, Andrea, where’s the—now, where the hell did Andrea go?” An old woman in a maid’s uniform smilingly asked him in Spanish what he wished. She was one of four patroling that bull ring of a room.

      Mrs. Huntington had deserted the terrace. I took Andrea Hartshorn’s elbow and guided her down the stairs.

      We were sitting at a sidewalk table in front of the Club Mañana in the center of town. On the stucco wall behind us, a poster showing a bullfighter in his suit of lights, the kind they wear in Madrid but not in Andalucia, said that there would be four afternoons devoted to los toros at the iron bull ring at Fuengirola this week.

      Andrea Hartshorn stared across the wide plaza. I stared at the poster. From a bodega across the plaza came the sound of gypsy music: rhythmic clapping in an oddly disturbing tempo and a man wailing at the top of his voice to his lost love.

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