She hesitated a second but she knew she had already made the decision. She lowered the camera.
“Forget it,” she said. “You don’t need to pay me not to take your photo, Mr. Fleming. I’m very sorry about Miss Carstairs.”
“Thank you,” Fleming said. He hesitated. “I owe you.”
“No,” she said. “You don’t.”
He fled down the steps and jumped into his convertible. Tires shrieked when he pulled away from the curb and raced down the street.
“Reckon the rumors in the Hollywood papers are true,” the officer mused. “Looks like Mr. Fleming and Miss Carstairs were having an affair. I’d better tell Detective Archer about this.”
The cop disappeared inside the house.
Vivian shot the house and hurried back to her car. This was why she was never going to have a great career in photojournalism, she thought. Taking a picture of the body at a crime scene was one thing. Photographing the shocked lover after he had begged her not to take his picture was beyond her. It would have felt wrong, indecent.
She jumped into the speedster and drove quickly down the winding lanes of the ritzy neighborhood and through the quiet streets of the town below. She parked in front of the beach house and hurried inside with her camera.
She headed straight for her darkroom—a converted pantry off the kitchen—grabbed the bottle of developer, and filled up the first tray. Next she prepared the stop bath and finally the fixer tray.
When she had everything ready she turned off the lights, closed the heavy black curtain as an extra precaution against light, and went to work.
An hour and twenty minutes later she was in the office of the photo editor of theAdelina Beach Courier. Eddy Banks—middle-aged, reekingof cigar smoke, and endowed with extremely poor taste in clothes—studied the prints of the Carstairs murder.
“These are damn good,” he said. “Her fans are gonna be in tears tomorrow when they see this shot.” He narrowed his eyes. “Carstairs will go on the front page. I’ll use the house for page two. Nice bit of atmosphere. Did you give either of these to one of the syndicates?”
“No,” Vivian said. “They’re all yours if you want them. But these aren’t my five-dollar celebrity-seen-in-a-nightclub shots. I want seventy-five for those two pictures.”
“I’ll give you thirty bucks for both.”
“Fifty.”
“Consider ’em sold.” Eddy eyed her. “These photos are going to go national. You ought to demand a photo credit as well as the cash.”
“You know the last thing I want is to have my name associated with newspaper photos.”
“Still dreaming of making it big in the art world, huh?” Eddy shook his head. “You’re wasting your time.”
“Because I’m not good enough to be an art photographer?”
“Hell, no.” Eddy snorted. “Because the art world is never going to take photography seriously, especially not the kind you do.”
“Times are changing.”
“Some things never change.” Eddy took another look at the picture of Clara Carstairs on the sofa. “She was a real beauty, wasn’t she? She looks so young. Downright tragic. Do the cops have any leads?”
“I don’t think so, not unless Archer found something at the scene tonight. From what I could see it was the same setup as the Washfield and Attenbury murders. No signs of a struggle. Celebrity victim in a dramatic pose. Bloodstained antique dagger at the scene.”
Eddy shook his head. “Can’t be that many expensive old daggers around.”
“According to the cops, none of the museums or antiques galleriesin the Los Angeles area have reported any thefts of daggers. Whoever is doing this probably has access to a private collection.”
“Sounds like it.”
“He must be wealthy, too,” Vivian added. “Rich enough not to care about leaving a valuable antique at the scene of a murder.”
“Good point.” Eddy planted his cigar in his mouth. “Well, looks like we’ve got our headline.”
“Clara Carstairs Murdered byDagger Killer, Police Baffledfor the front-page shot,” Vivian suggested. “Mansion of Doomfor the second photo?”
