Random Killer by Hugh Pentecost Page A

speed rather than reducing it.
    “Women, women, women,” he said.
    Glancing at him I thought he probably did all right with the girls himself. He was lean, hard, dashing in a kind of way. He must be constantly surrounded by them at his High Crest resort. I wondered if Harold Carpenter had been a kind of rival.
    “I see ’em in all shapes and sizes and stations of life at High Crest,” he said. The tires on the Rolls screeched a little as we took a hairpin right, headed down. “They have to have money, or their men have to have money, if they come to High Crest. But they’re a special breed. They’ve either made it big themselves, probably in films, or they’ve made men who’ve made it. It isn’t high society, like you have back in, say, Newport. They’re mostly at High Crest because they’re good in somebody’s bed. Most of them are ornaments to some male ego.”
    “Strange place for Joanna Fraser to have held a convention of women libbers,” I said.
    Chandler laughed. “Those gals created quite a problem,” he said. “They came without men, and they damn near created a riot going after the men who were there and already had women with them. They talked a great ball game about not being ‘sex objects,’ but they sure had an appetite for it after they got through telling you their slogans.”
    “Sharon Dain?” I suggested again.
    “Carpenter came to me that January,” Chandler said, “and told me he was bringing his own woman to High Crest for a while. We’ve got maybe a hundred cabins scattered around the main complex of buildings, and Carpenter had the use of one of them in the skiing season. This woman he was bringing would stay there with him. I didn’t object. Most of the cabins are occupied by people who haven’t been sanctified by the Pope. Nobody bothers these days to sign ‘Mr. and Mrs.’ People living together, not married, is the name of the game. They even have children, not married, and the gossip columnists write about it and nobody cares. Not like when I was a kid and you took a girl to a hotel, signed ‘Mr. and Mrs.,’ and tried not to look at the room clerk so you wouldn’t see his cynical smile. No, I didn’t object to Carpenter’s having a woman in his cabin. It might keep him from making passes at other women who belonged to other men.”
    “So Sharon Dain was the woman Carpenter brought to his cabin,” I said. I wondered if Chandler just wandered in his conversation by habit, or if he was deliberately avoiding the subject of Sharon Dain.
    We were racing across the floor of the valley, with High Crest almost directly above us, looking like something perched on top of a skyscraper.
    “Yeah, she was the one,” Chandler said. “She wasn’t usual. I mean, a lot of the women who come to High Crest in the skiing season don’t ski. But they dress for it. Pants, turtlenecks, wool toques, boots. Expensive, you understand, but winter sports. Sharon didn’t even pretend she was there for the skiing. Most of the time she looked like an actress who had been dressed by a costume designer for some porno movie. One zip of her zipper and she’d be ready for action. I suspect that look had gotten her wherever she was in films, which wasn’t very far. A man couldn’t look at her and think about the weather, or the skiing surface, or the downhill slope. All you could think about was taking her someplace and letting her demonstrate what she was obviously good at.”
    “Pretty?” I asked.
    “In an artificial way. False eyelashes, makeup. But built like you wouldn’t believe.”
    “So, did she solve your problems with Carpenter?”
    “Not really. He was a guy who was designed to preside over a harem. My wife called him ‘the golden gooser.’ ”
    I hadn’t heard about a wife before. We were charging up a mountain at what seemed to me a reckless speed.
    “Back in New York they’re wondering if Sharon had some other boyfriend, maybe from her past, who resented Carpenter and