‘I saw him. As you said, a creep. But an informative creep. He’ll lose his job if he doesn’t stop that sudden rush of words to the mouth.’
Ogilvie told me what Jackson had said, which didn’t add anything to what I knew already.
‘I’d better tell you how I’ve been doing here.’
‘Where’s here?’ asked Ogilvie. ‘All I have is a telephone number.’
‘El Cerco – the Salton place.’ I brought him up to date and he said, ‘Bill, do you suspect murder?’
‘I don’t know yet.’
‘Look, you’re the boss but does it make any difference to us? We pay out anyway.’
‘It all depends on who has done the murdering.’
His voice was incredulous. ‘Mrs Salton?’
‘I didn’t say that,’ I said. ‘Not out loud, anyway. Do some checking on the political side if you can. I’ll tackle the Salton Estates end tomorrow. Tonight I’ll be at the Blue Water Casino tying up Mr Black. I’ll be there pretty late, say, about ten o’clock. I’m having dinner here. Mrs Salton is preparing it with her own fair hands.’
‘If you’re thinking what I think you’re thinking, you’d better watch for the arsenic in the artichokes. What’s she like, anyway?’
I considered before I spoke. ‘She’s fiftyish, runs to about two hundred pounds on the hoof, sallow complexion, dark moustache. You’ll be seeing her tonight at the casino.’
‘Ouch!’ said Ogilvie. ‘Bill, you work bloody hard for your money. See you later.’
He rang off and I grinned as I put down the telephone. But he was right; I do work bloody hard for my money. There was more to this than the possibility of a plain old insurance scam. My reputation as the best consultant in the business was at stake.
Back at the pool there was no one around so I sat down and contemplated the water. I had waited for Jill Salton to come to the point and all she had come up with was Jackson. Very curious. I thought of Jackson and Jill Salton, separately and in conjunction, and came to no conclusion.
Presently John came along. ‘Mrs Salton says to tell you she’s in the kitchen if you’d like to go along there.’
‘Where’s the kitchen?’
He told me. He had taken off his white coat and was dressed neatly in smart civvies. ‘Are you going off duty now, John?’
‘Yes, sir,’ he said stolidly.
‘Were you here the day Mr Salton walked out – the last day he was seen alive?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Do you know what Mr and Mrs Salton talked about just before he left?’
There was a sudden widening of his eyes, a movement quickly cancelled. He said quietly, ‘I don’t talk about the doings of my employer, sir.’
One in the eye for Kemp. I ought to have known not to pump the servants. Christ, what a lousy job I had. He stared at me steadily with defiant brown eyes, daring me to make something of it. He knew, all right! He knew what the Saltons had quarrelled about. But he wasn’t telling.
I said, ‘That’s good, John. Keep it that way.’
‘Is that all, sir?’
‘Yes.’ He turned away and I said, ‘How long have you worked for the Saltons?’
He was walking away as he said without turning his head, ‘Twenty-two years. It’s twenty-two years since I started with Mr Salton.’
I watched him until he was out of sight and thought what a right bastard I was, then I went into the changing room, showered, dressed and headed for the kitchen.
It was exactly what you’d expect to find in a house like that: a lot of stainless steel, eye-level ovens, islanded preparation counters, all gleaming and clean as a whistle. Jill Salton had changed, too. She was wearing a short frock, a simple little number you can buy anywhere for $1,000. As I arrived she said, ‘How do you like your martinis?’
I’m not a martini mystic. I shrugged and said, ‘As they come.’
‘You must get a lot of different martinis that way,’ she observed, and poured a healthy slug from a gin bottle into a shaker.
‘I like variety.’
She mixed the drinks and poured them, strained through cracked ice into chilled glasses taken from the refrigerator. ‘How often do you see my uncle?’
I smiled. ‘As little as possible. We don’t exactly rub shoulders.’
She handed me a glass. ‘He thinks a lot of you. He said so this afternoon.’
I sipped the martini. It was very good. ‘Face to face?’
‘Via satellite. He sang your praises a lot. He says you’re the best man in the business.’
‘I’ll have to remember that when I negotiate my next contract.’
She lifted her glass and her cool, green eyes appraised me over the rim. ‘What business would that be?’
‘What else but insurance? I’m a money man at heart.’
She smiled. ‘I doubt that. Are you married?’
‘Not at present.’
‘You sound as though you’ve been burned. You were married?’
I hooked over a chair with my foot and sat down. ‘Twice. My first wife died and my second divorced me.’
‘I’m sorry to hear about the first, and surprised at the second.’
‘Surprised?’
‘I can’t see how a woman in her right mind would let you get away.’
I thought she was joking but she seemed serious enough. Abruptly she put down her glass and walked across the kitchen to open the lid of a big deep freezer. I played it lightly and said to her back, ‘There was nothing to it. I didn’t wriggle off the hook – she threw me back.’
‘Why? Were you tomcatting?’
You ask some damn personal questions, Jill Salton, I thought, then reconsidered. Come to that, so did I. Perhaps this was her way of giving me a taste of my own medicine. ‘No,’ I said. ‘She didn’t like bigamy. I was married to the insurance industry.’
She took some packets to a counter and switched on an oven, then began to prepare the food. From what I could see, millionaires didn’t eat any better than the rest of us – just the same old frozen garbage. ‘Some women are fools,’ she said. ‘When I married David I knew what I was getting into. I knew he had his work and it would take up a lot of his time. But there’s a certain type of woman who doesn’t understand how important a man’s work can be to him.’ She paused with a knife upheld. ‘I suppose it means as much as having a baby does to a woman.’
‘You’re not the liberated feminist type, then. When were you married?’
‘Four years ago.’ She got busy with the knife. ‘Believe it or not, I was still a virgin at twenty-four.’
She was right – I did find it hard to believe. I wondered why the hell she was telling me all this. My acquaintanceship with beautiful young heiresses was admittedly limited, but I’d come across a handful in the way of business and none had felt impelled to tell me the more intimate details of her life. Still, statistically, anything can happen given a long enough period of time, and maybe she’d get around to telling me about the quarrel with her husband.
She