"Kyle, Duncan - Terror's Cradle" - читать интересную книгу автора (Kyle Duncan)

Then he hung up. After a stupefied moment I realized I was still holding the phone, so I replaced it and lay back on die bed, thinking. Very few people knew I was in Las Vegas: Alex Scown was one, and not only had he sent me in the first place, he'd go off like fulminate if I left without the interview with Susannah. Then there was Spinetti, to whom I'd given my number not long before. But the caller hadn't been Spinetti. Some friend of Spinetti's? I grinned suddenly, imagining the conversation, the delicate little plot. Get Sellers out and you get the London Daily News out, too. Once they're out, the story's yours for two thousand bucks. Hell, Charlie, you can even pretend to be Sellers. Fifteen hundred. Two thousand I said, Charlie, and that's cheap. Okay? Okay.

I switched on the TV set to look for a newscast, and when I found it, Scown's editorial judgment was neatly confirmed. I had to wait for item nine, newscaster's head and shoulders only, for die senate inquiry. But item one had been Susannah. They'd had the county sheriff, niggled that he hadn't seen Miss Rhodes, but By God he would, yessir, 'cause when it came to justice in this here county, movie stars weren't no different to nobody else, and she'd better show for the coroner, collapse or no collapse.' Patently neither the sheriff nor anyone else had the faintest idea where she was.

I picked up the phone, dialled Western Union and dictated a cable to London to let Scown know that things were set for morning then opened my bag to get out pyjamas and shaving case. No shaving case. A thing isn't lost when you know where it is and I knew exactly where the shaving case was. It was in the bathroom of my Washington hotel room. I swore. There'd be no cleaning of teeth tonight; no morning shave; and worse, my new electric razor was in the damned thing, the one Alsa had given me to replace the one I had left in Russia.

'I want a call to Washington,' I said into the phone, 'The Drake Hotel.' You can do things like that in America. In Britain you spend half an hour waiting for Inquiries to answer because you have to have the number. Anyway, they told me the razor had been found and they'd send it on to London. Nice of them. Our pleasure, sir, and there was a call for you after you checked out.

I listened as he told me the call had come in from Gothenburg, Sweden, at 3 p.m. Washington time. From a Miss Alison Hay. They'd told her I'd gone, but she'd left a message just in case. Would I call her back and the matter was urgent. He gave me the number she'd left.

I hung up and looked at my watch. It would now be four in the morning in Gothenburg, I calculated, and urgent or not, a barbaric hour to telephone her. As it happened, I got the arithmetic wrong; by that time it was seven o'clock in die Swedish morning. Not that it would have made any difference . . .




CHAPTER TWO

When Spinetti telephoned I was still asleep. I came to reluctantly and stretched out a dopey arm to pick up the receiver.

He said, 'Be out front in ten minutes.'

'Where is she?' The dopeyness slid away.

'We talk outside.'

'Hold on a sec.' I picked up my watch and scowled at it. Half-past six. Then I said, 'Food. Breakfast. Don't I get any?'

'Thought you were on a story.'

Some people have that idea. Reporters need neither food nor drink. All news editors believe it, in the same way they believe there's a telephone under every blade of grass. I said, "Twenty minutes,' hung up and crawled out of bed and under the shower.

I dressed quickly, grabbed my cassette recorder and notebook and hurried through to the snack counter in the fruit machine hall, drank a glass of orange juice, took two bites of a ham sandwich and a mouthful of coffee and hurried outside.

Spinetti had changed his clothes but the expression was limited as before. He was sitting inside a big white Oldsmobile and I watched myself hurry towards him in the twin mirrors of his sunglasses.

'Seventeen minutes,' I said. "Not bad.

'C'mon, huh?'

I climbed in beside him. 'What's the hurry?'

'Long ways to go/ he said. The engine was running and he was already easing the Olds into the traffic on the Strip as I was closing the car door.

'Arizona or California?' I was chewing the remaining mouthful of sandwich.

'You handle a boat?' I frowned. 'What kind of boat?'

'Power boat.'