I nodded, looking past him at the pile of twisted metal. The four men near it were looking my way, their faces empty of expression.
The quiet-faced man said, “I’m Chief Deputy Martell, out of Hollywood. They tell me it’s your wife’s car, but that your wife wasn’t using it. Has she told you yet who was?”
“Not yet; no. She was out when I called the apartment, although I’d spoken to her only a few minutes before.”
“Any idea where she might be?”
I shrugged. “Several, but I didn’t have a chance to do any checking. The sergeant said you were in a hurry.”
“I see ... I think I’ll ask you to take a quick glance at the body we took out of the car. It probably won’t do much good, but you never know. I’d better warn you: it won’t be pleasant.”
“That’s all right,” I said. “I spent some time in the Pacific during the war. We opened up pillboxes with flamethrowers.”
“That should help.” He turned and moved off, skirting the wreckage, and I followed. A small khaki tarpaulin was spread out on the ground, bulged in the center where it covered an oblong object. Not a very big object. I began to catch the acrid-sweetish odor of burned meat, mixed with the faint biting scent of gasoline.
Martell bent and took hold of a corner of the tarpaulin. He said flatly, “Do the best you can, Mr. Kane,” and flipped back the heavy canvas.
It looked like nothing human. Except for the contours of legs and arms, it could have been a side of beef hauled out of a burning barn. Where the face had been was a smear of splintered and charred bone that bore no resemblance to a face. No hair, no clothing except for the remains of a woman’s shoe still clinging to the left foot; only blackened, flame-gnawed flesh and bones. And over it all the stench of a charnel house.
I backed away abruptly and clamped down on my teeth, fighting back a wave of nausea. Martell allowed the canvas to fall back into place. “Sorry, Mr. Kane. We can’t overlook any chances.”
“It’s all right,” I mumbled.
“You couldn’t identify ... her?”
I shuddered. “Christ, no! Nobody could!”
“Let’s have a look at the car.”
I circled the wreck twice. It had stopped right-side up, the tires flat, the hood ripped to shreds, the engine shoved halfway into the front seat. The steering wheel was snapped off and the dashboard appeared to have been worked over with a sledgehammer. Flames had eaten away the upholstery and blackened the entire interior.
It was Donnas car; no doubt about that. The license plates showed the right number and a couple of rust spots on the right rear fender were as I remembered them. I said as much to Chief Deputy Martell and he nodded briefly and went over to say something I couldn’t hear to the four men.
He came back to me after a minute or two. “I’ve a few questions. Nothing more for you down here. Let’s go back upstairs.”
He was holding something in one hand. It was a woman’s bag: blue suede, small, with a gold clasp shaped like a question mark. I recognized it and my mouth felt a little dry.
It was a job getting up the steep slope. The red loam was dry and crumbled under my feet. The sun was still high enough to be hot on my back and my hands were sticky with ooze from the sagebrush.
Martell was waiting for me when I reached the road. I sat down on the front bumper of one of the department cars and shook the loose dirt out of my shoes, wiped most of the sage ooze off my palms, and brushed the knees of my trousers. The man in the green khaki uniform was still behind the wheel of the lead car but he wasn’t smoking now.
I followed the sheriff into the front seat of a black-and-white Mercury with a buggy-whip aerial at the rear bumper and a radio phone on the dash. He lit up a small yellow cigar in violation of a fire-hazard signboard across the road from us. He dropped the match into the dashboard ashtray and leaned back in the seat and bounced the suede bag lightly on one of his broad palms.
~ * ~
IV
He said, “One of the boys found this in a clump of sage halfway down the slope. You ever see it before?”
“My wife has one like it.”
He cocked an eye at me. “Not like it, Mr. Kane. This is hers. Personal effects, identification cards, all that. No doubt at all.”
“…OK.”
“And that’s your wife’s car?”
“Yeah.”
“But you say it’s not your wife who was in it?”
“No question about it,” I said firmly.
“When did you see her last?”
“Around nine-thirty this morning.” “But you talked to her later, I understand.”
“That’s right.”
“What time?”
“A few minutes past four this afternoon.”
He puffed out some blue smoke. “Sure it was your wife?”
“If I wouldn’t know, who would?”
His strong face was thoughtful, his blue eyes distant. “Mrs. Kane’s a singer, I understand.”
“That’s right,” I told him. “Uses her maiden name: Donna Collins.”
He smiled suddenly, showing good teeth. “Oh, sure. The missus and I heard her on the Dancing in Velvet program last week. She’s good — and a mighty lovely young woman, Mr. Kane.”
I muttered something polite. He put some cigar ash into the tray and leaned back again and said, “They must pay her pretty good, being a radio star.”
“Not a star,” I explained patiently. “Just a singer. It pays well, of course — but nothing like the top names pull down. However, Donna’s well fixed in her own right; her father died a while back and left her what amounts to quite a bit of money . . . Look, Sheriff, what’s the point of keeping me here? I don’t know who the dead woman is, but since she was using my wife’s car, the one to talk to is Mrs. Kane. She’s bound to be home by this time; why not ride into town with me and ask her?”
He was still holding the handbag. He put it down on the seat between us and looked off toward the blue haze that marked the foothills south of Burbank. “Your wife’s not home, Mr. Kane,” he said very quietly.
A vague feeling of alarm stirred within me. “How do you know that?” I demanded.
He gestured at the two-way radio. “The office is calling your apartment at ten-minute intervals. As soon as Mrs. Kane answers her phone, I’m to get word. I haven’t got it yet.”
I said harshly, “What am I supposed to do — sit here until they call you?”
He sighed a little and turned sideways on the seat far enough to cross his legs. The light blue of his eyes was frosted over now, and his jaw was a grim line.
“I’m going to have to talk to you like a Dutch uncle, Mr. Kane. As you saw, we’ve got a dead woman down there as the result of what, to all intents and purposes, was an unfortunate accident. Everything points to the victim’s being your wife except for two things, one of them your insistence that you spoke to her on the phone nearly two hours after the accident. That leaves us wondering — and with any one of several answers. One is that you’re lying; that you didn’t speak to her at all. If that’s the right answer, we can’t figure out the reason behind it. Two: your wife loaned a friend the car. Three: somebody lifted it from where it was parked. Four: you drove up here with her, knocked her in the head, and let the car roll over the edge.”
“Of all the goddamn-!”
He held up a hand, cutting me off. “Let’s take ‘em one at a time. I can’t see any reason, even if you murdered her, why you’d say your wife telephoned you afterwards. So until and unless something turns up to show us why you’d lie about it, I’ll have to believe she did make that call. As for her loaning the car, that could very well have happened, only it doesn’t explain why she’s missing now. This business of the car’s being stolen doesn’t hold up, because the key was still in the ignition and in this case.”
He took a folded handkerchief from the side pocket of his coat and opened it. A badly scorched leather case came to light, containing the ignition and t
runk keys. The rest of the hooks were empty. I sat there staring at it, feeling my insides slowly and painfully contracting.
“Recognize it?” Martell asked softly
I nodded numbly. “It’s Donnas.”
He picked up the handbag with his free hand and thrust it at me. “Take a look through it.”
Still numb, I released the clasp and pawed through the contents. A small green-leather wallet containing seventy or eighty dollars and the usual identification cards, one of them with my office, address, and phone number. Lipstick, compact, mirror, comb, two initialed handkerchiefs, a few hairpins. The French enamel cigarette case and matching lighter I’d given her on her twenty-fifth birthday three months ago. Less than a dollar in change.
That was all. Nothing else. I shoved the stuff back in the bag and closed the clasp with stiff fingers and sat there looking dully at Martell.
He was refolding the handkerchief around the key case. He returned it to his pocket carefully, took the cigar out of his mouth and inspected the glowing tip.
“Your wife wear any jewelry, Mr. Kane?” he asked casually.
I nodded. “A wristwatch. Her wedding and engagement rings.”
“We didn’t find them. No jewelry at all.”
“You wouldn’t,” I said. “Whoever that is down there, she’s not Donna Kane.”
He sat there and looked out through the windshield and appeared to be thinking. He wore no hat and there was a strong sprinkling of gray in his hair and a bald spot about the size of a silver dollar at the crown. There was a network of fine wrinkles at the corners of his eyes, as there so often is in men who spend a great deal of time in the sun. He looked calm and confident and competent and not at all heroic.
Presently he said, “That phone call. No doubt at all that it was your wife?”
“None.”
“Recognized her voice, eh?”
I frowned. “Not so much that. It was more what she said. You know, certain expressions nobody else’d use. Pet name — you know.”
His lips quirked and I felt my cheeks burn. He said, “Near as you can remember, tell me about that call. If she sounded nervous or upset — the works.”
I put it all together for him, forgetting nothing. Then I went on about stopping off at the apartment, what I’d found there and what Ruth Feldman had said. Martell didn’t interrupt, only sat there drawing on his cigar and soaking it all in.
After I was finished, he didn’t move or say anything for what seemed a long time. Then he leaned forward and ground out the stub of the cigar and put a hand in the coat pocket next to me and brought out one of those flapped bags women use for formal dress, about the size of a business envelope and with an appliquéd design worked into it. Wordlessly he turned back the flap and let a square gold compact and matching lipstick holder slide out into the other hand.
“Ever see these before, Kane?”
I took them from him. His expression was impossible to read. There was nothing unusual about the lipstick tube, but the compact had a circle of brilliants in one corner and the initials H.W. in the circle.
I handed them back. “New to me, Sheriff.”
He was watching me closely. “Think a minute. This can be important. Either you or your wife know a woman with the initials H.W.?”
“... Not that I... Helen? Helen! Sure; Helen Wainhope! Dave Wainhope’s wife.” I frowned. “I don’t get it, Sheriff.”
He said slowly, “We found this bag a few feet from the wreck. Any idea how it might have gotten there?”
“Not that I can think of.”
“How well do you know these Wainhopes?”
“About as well as you get to know anybody. Dave is business manager for some pretty prominent radio people. A producer, couple of directors, seven or eight actors that I know of.”
“You mean he’s an agent?”
“Not that. These are people who make big money but can’t seem to hang on to it. Dave collects their checks, puts ‘em on an allowance, pays their bills, and invests the rest. Any number of men in that line around town.”
“How long have you known them?”
“Dave and Helen? Two, three years. Shortly after I got out here. As a matter of fact, he introduced me to Donna. She’s one of his clients.”
“The four of you go out together?”
“Now and then; sure.”
“In your wife’s car?”
“... I see what you’re getting at. You figure Helen might have left her bag there. Not a chance, Sheriff. We always used Dave’s Cadillac. Helen has a Pontiac convertible.”
“When did you see them last?”
“Well, I don’t know about Donna, but I had lunch with Dave ... let’s see ... day before yesterday. He has an office in the Taft Building.”
“Where do they live?”
“Over on one of those little roads off Beverly Glen. Not far from here, come to think about it.”
With slow care he pushed the compact and lipstick back in the folder and dropped it into the pocket it had come out of. “Taft Building, hunh?” he murmured. “Think he’s there now?”
I looked at my strapwatch. Four minutes till six. “I doubt it, Sheriff. He should be home by this time.”
“You know the exact address?”
“Well, it’s on Angola, overlooking the southern tip of the Reservoir. A good-sized redwood ranch house on the hill there. It’s the only house within a couple miles. You can’t miss it.”
He leaned past me and swung open the door. “Go on home, Kane. Soon as your wife shows up, call the station and leave word for me. I may call you later.”
“What about her car?”
He smiled without humor. “Nobody’s going to swipe it. Notify your insurance agent in the morning. But I still want to talk to Mrs. Kane.”
I slid out and walked back to my car. As I started the motor, the black-and-white Mercury made a tight turn on screaming tires and headed north. I pulled back onto the road and tipped a hand at the deputy. He glared at me over the cigarette he was lighting.
I drove much too fast all the way back to Hollywood.
~ * ~
V
She wasn’t there.
I snapped the switch that lit the end-table lamps flanking the couch and walked over to the window and stood there for a few minutes, staring down into Fountain Avenue. At seven o’clock it was still light outside. A small girl on roller skates scooted by, her sun-bleached hair flying. A tall, thin number in a pale blue sports coat and dark glasses got leisurely out of a green convertible with a wolf tail tied to the radiator emblem and sauntered into the apartment building across the street.
A formless fear was beginning to rise within me. I knew now that it had been born at four-thirty when I stopped off on my way to Stone Canyon and found the apartment empty. Seeing the charred body an hour later had strengthened that fear, even though I knew the dead woman couldn’t be Donna. Now that I had come home and found the place deserted, the fear was crawling into my throat, closing it to the point where breathing seemed a conscious effort.
Where was Donna?
I lit a cigarette and began to pace the floor. Let’s use a little logic on this, Kane. You used to be a top detective-story writer; let’s see you go to work on this the way one of your private eyes would operate.
All right, we’ve got a missing woman to find. To complicate matters, the missing woman’s car was found earlier in the day with a dead woman at the wheel. Impossible to identify her, but we know it’s not the one we’re after because that one called her husband after the accident.
Now, since your wife’s obviously alive, Mr. Kane, she’s missing for one of two reasons: either she can’t come home or she doesn’t want to. “Can’t” would mean she’s being held against her will; we’ve nothing to indicate that. That leaves the possibility of her not wanting to come home. What reason would a woman have for staying away from her husband? The more likely one would be that she was either sore at him for something or had lef
t him for another man.
I said a short ugly word and threw my cigarette savagely into the fireplace. Donna would never pull a stunt like that! Hell, we’d only been married a few months and still as much in love as the day the knot was tied.
Yeah? How do you know? A lot of guys kid themselves into thinking the same thing, then wake up one morning and find the milkman has taken over. Or they find some hot love letters tied in blue ribbon and shoved under the mattress.
I stopped short. It was an idea. Not love letters, of course; but there might be something among her personal files that could furnish a lead. It was about as faint a possibility as they come, but at least it would give me something to do.
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