The big bottom drawer of her desk in the bedroom was locked. I remembered that she carried the key in the same case with those to the apartment and the car, so I used the fireplace poker to force the lock. Donna would raise hell about that when she got home, but I wasn’t going to worry about that now.
There was a big manila folder inside, crammed with letters, tax returns, receipted bills, bankbooks, and miscellaneous papers; I dumped them out and began to paw through the collection. A lot of the stuff had come from Dave Wainhope’s office, and there were at least a dozen letters signed by him explaining why he was sending her such-and-such.
The phone rang suddenly. I damned near knocked the chair over getting to it. It was Chief Deputy Martell.
“Mrs. Kane show up?”
“Not yet. No.”
He must have caught the disappointment in my voice. It was there to catch. He said, “That’s funny... Anyway, the body we found in that car wasn’t her.”
“I told you that. Who was it?”
“This Helen Wainhope. We brought the remains into the Georgia Street Hospital and her husband made the ID about fifteen minutes ago.”
I shivered, remembering. “How could he?”
“There was enough left of one of her shoes. That and the compact did the trick.”
“He tell you why she was driving my wife’s car?”
Martell hesitated. “Not exactly. He said the two women had a date in town for today. He didn’t know what time, but Mrs. Wainhope’s car was on the fritz, so the theory is that your wife drove out there and picked her up.”
“News to me,” I said.
He hesitated again. “... Any bad blood between your wife and ... and Mrs. Wainhope?”
“That’s a hell of a question!”
“You want to answer it?” he said quietly.
“You bet I do! They got along fine!”
“If you say so.” His voice was mild. “I just don’t like this coincidence of Mrs. Kane’s being missing at the same time her car goes off a cliff with a friend in it.”
“I don’t care about that. I want my wife back.”
He sighed. “OK. Give me a description and I’ll get out an all-points on her.”
I described Donna to him at length and he took it all down and said he’d be in touch with me later. I put back the receiver and went into the living room to make myself a drink. I hadn’t eaten a thing since one o’clock that afternoon, but I was too tightened up with worry to be at all hungry.
Time crawled by. I finished my drink while standing at the window, put together a second, and took it back into the bedroom and started through the papers from Donna’s desk. At eight-fifteen the phone rang.
“Clay? This is Dave — Dave Wainhope.” His voice was flat and not very steady.
I said, “Hello, Dave. Sorry to hear about Helen.” It sounded pretty lame, but it was the best I could do at the time.
“You know about it then?”
“Certainly I know about it. It was Donna’s car, remember?”
“Of course, Clay.” He sounded very tired. “I guess I’m not thinking too clearly. I called you about something else.”
“Yeah?”
“Look, Clay, it’s none of my business, I suppose. But what’s wrong between you and Donna?”
I felt my jaw sag a little. “Who said anything was wrong?”
“All I know is, she was acting awfully strange. She wanted all the ready cash I had on hand, no explanation, no —”
My fingers were biting into the receiver. “Wait a minute!” I shouted. “Dave, listen to me! You saw Donna?”
“That’s what I’m trying to tell you. She —”
“When?”
“... Why, not ten minutes ago. She —”
“Where? Where was she? Where did you see her?”
“Right here. At my office.” He was beginning to get excited himself. “I stopped by on my way from the Georgia —”
I cut him off. “Christ, Dave, I’ve been going nuts! I’ve been looking for her since four-thirty this afternoon. What’d she say? What kind of trouble is she in?”
“I don’t know. She wouldn’t tell me anything—just wanted money quick. No checks. I thought maybe you and she had had a fight or something. I had around nine hundred in the safe; I gave it all to her and she beat —”
I shook the receiver savagely. “But she must have said something! She wouldn’t just leave without... you know...” “She said she sent you a letter earlier in the day.” I dropped down on the desk chair. My hands were shaking and my mouth was dry. “A letter,” I said dully. “A letter. Not in person, not even a phone call. Just a letter.”
By this time Dave was making comforting sounds. “I’m sure it’s nothing serious, Clay. You know how women are. The letter’ll probably tell you where she is and you can talk her out of it.”
I thanked him and hung up and sat there and stared at my thumb. For some reason I felt even more depressed than before. I couldn’t understand why Donna wouldn’t have turned to me if she was in trouble. That was always a big thing with us: all difficulties had to be shared...
I went into the kitchen and made myself a couple of cold salami sandwiches and washed them down with another highball. At nine-twenty I telephoned the Hollywood substation to let Martell know what Dave Wainhope had told me. Whoever answered said the chief deputy was out and to call back in an hour. I tried to leave a message on what it was about, but was told again to call back and got myself hung up on.
~ * ~
About ten minutes later the buzzer from downstairs sounded. I pushed the button and was standing in the hall door when a young fellow in a postman’s gray uniform showed up with a special-delivery letter. I signed for it and closed the door and leaned there and ripped open the envelope.
A single sheet of dime-store paper containing a few neatly typed lines and signed in ink in Donnas usual scrawl.
Clay darling:
I’m terribly sorry, but something that happened a long time ago has come back to plague me and I have to get away for a few days. Please don’t try to find me, I’ll be all right as long as you trust me.
You know I love you so much that I won’t remain away a day longer than I have to. Please don’t worry, darling, I’ll explain everything the moment I get back.
All my love,
Donna
And that was that. Nothing that I could get my teeth into; no leads, nothing to cut away even a small part of my burden of concern. I walked into the bedroom with no spring in my step and dropped the letter on the desk and reached for the phone. But there was no point to that. Martell wouldn’t be back at the station yet.
Maybe I had missed something. Maybe the envelope was a clue? A clue to what? I looked at it. Carefully. The postmark was Hollywood. That meant it had gone through the branch at Wilcox and Selma. At five-twelve that afternoon. At five-twelve I was just about pulling up behind those department cars out on Stone Canyon Road. She would have had to mail it at the post office instead of a drop box for me to get it four hours later.
No return address, front or back, as was to be expected. Just a cheap envelope, the kind you pick up at Woolworth’s or Kress’s. My name and the address neatly typed. The e key was twisted very slightly to the right and the t was tilted just far enough to be noticeable if you looked at it long enough.
I let the envelope drift out of my fingers and stood there staring down at Donna’s letter. My eyes wandered to the other papers next to it...
I said, “Jesus Christ!” You could spend the next ten years in church and never say it more devoutly than I did at that moment. My eyes were locked to one of the letters David Wainhope had written to Donna — and in its typewritten lines two individual characters stood out like bright and shining beacons: a tilted t and a twisted e!
~ * ~
VI
It took some time — I don’t know how much — before I was able to do any straight-line thinking. The fact that those two letters had
come out of the same typewriter opened up so many possible paths to the truth behind Donna’s disappearance that — well, I was like the mule standing between two stacks of hay.
Finally I simply turned away and walked into the living room and poured a good half-inch of bonded bourbon into a glass and drank it down like water after an aspirin. I damned near strangled on the stuff; and by the time I stopped gasping for air and wiping the tears out of my eyes, I was ready to do some thinking.
Back at the desk again, I sat down and picked up the two sheets of paper. A careful comparison removed the last lingering doubt that they had come out of the same machine. Other points began to fall into place: the fact that the typing in Donnas letter had been done by a professional. You can always tell by the even impression of the letters, instead of the dark-light-erasure-strike-over touch you find in an amateur job. And I knew that Donna had never used a typewriter in her life!
All right, what did it mean? On the surface, simply that somebody had typed the letter for Donna, and at Dave Wainhope’s office. It had to be his office, for he would hardly write business letters at home — and besides I was pretty sure Dave was strictly a pen-and-pencil man himself.
Now what? Well, since it was typed in Dave’s office, but not by Dave or Donna, it would indicate Dave’s secretary had done the work. Does that hold up? It’s got to hold up, friend; no one else works in that office but Dave and his secretary.
Let’s kind of dig into that a little. Let’s say that Donna dropped in on Dave earlier in the afternoon, upset about something. Let’s say that Dave is out, so Donna dictates a note to me and the secretary types it out. Very simple ... But is it?
No.
And here’s why. Here are the holes: first, the note is on dime-store paper, sent in a dime-store envelope. Dave wouldn’t have that kind of stationery in his office — not a big-front guy like Dave. OK, stretch it all the way out; say that Donna had brought her own paper and had the girl use it. You still can’t tell me Dave’s secretary wouldn’t have told her boss about it when he got back to the office. And if she told him, he would certainly have told me during our phone conversation.
But none of those points compares with the biggest flaw of them all: why would Donna have anyone type the letter for her when a handwritten note would do just as well — especially on a very private and personal matter like telling your husband you’re in trouble?
I got up and walked down the room and lit a cigarette and looked out the window without seeing anything. A small voice in the back of my mind said, “If all this brain work of yours is right, you know what it adds up to, don’t you, pal?”
I knew. Sure, I knew. It meant that Donna Kane was a threat to somebody It meant that she was being held somewhere; that she had been forced to sign a note to keep me from reporting her disappearance to the cops until whoever was responsible could make a getaway.
It sounded like a bad movie, and I tried hard to make myself believe that’s all it was. But the more I dug into it, the more I went over the results of my reasoning, the more evident it became that there was no other explanation.
You do only one thing in a case like that. I picked up the phone and called Martell again. He was still out. I took a stab at telling the desk sergeant, or whoever it was at the other end, what was going on. But it sounded so complex and confused, even to me, that he finally stopped me. “Look, neighbor, call back in about fifteen, twenty minutes. Martell’s the man you want to talk to.” He hung up before I could give him an argument.
His advice was good and I intended to take it. Amateur detectives usually end up with both feet stuck in their esophagus. This was a police job. My part in it was to let them know what I’d found out, then get out of their way.
That secretary would know. She was in this up to the hilt. I had seen her a few times: a dark-haired girl, quite pretty, a little on the small side but built right. Big blue eyes; I remembered that. Quiet. A little shy, if I remembered right. What was her name? Nora. Nora something. Campbell? Kenton? No. Kemper? That was it: Nora Kemper.
I found her listed in the Central District phone book. In the 300 block on North Hobart, a few doors below Beverly Boulevard. I knew the section. Mostly apartment houses along there. Nothing fancy, but a long way from being a slum. The right neighborhood for private secretaries. As I remembered, she had been married but was now divorced.
I looked at my watch. Less than five minutes since I’d called the sheriff’s office. I thought of Donna tied and gagged and stuck away in, say, the trunk of some car. It was more than I could take.
I was on my way out the door when I thought of something else. I went back into the bedroom and dug under a pile of sports shirts in the bottom dresser drawer and took out the gun I’d picked up in San Francisco the year before. It was a Smith & Wesson .38, the model they called the Terrier. I made sure it was loaded, shoved it under the waistband of my slacks in the approved pulp-magazine style, and left the apartment.
~ * ~
VII
It was a quiet street, bordered with tall palms, not much in the way of streetlights. Both curbs were lined with cars, and I had to park half a block down and across the way from the number I wanted.
I got out and walked slowly back through the darkness. I was a little jittery, but that was to be expected. Radio music drifted from a bungalow court and a woman laughed thinly. A couple passed me, arm in arm, the man in an army officer’s uniform. I didn’t see anyone else around.
The number I was after belonged to a good-sized apartment building, three floors and three separate entrances. Five stone steps, flanked by a wrought-iron balustrade, up to the front door. A couple of squat Italian cypresses in front of the landing.
There was no one in the foyer. In the light from a yellow bulb in a ceiling fixture I could make out the names above the bell buttons. Nora Kemper’s apartment was 205. Automatically I reached for the button, then hesitated. There was no inner door to block off the stairs. Why not go right on up and knock on her door? No warning, no chance for her to think up answers before I asked the questions.
I walked up the carpeted steps to the second floor and on down the hall. It was very quiet. Soft light from overhead fixtures glinted on pale green walls and dark green doors. At the far end of the hall, a large window looked out on the night sky.
Number 205 was well down the corridor. No light showed under the edge of the door. I pushed a thumb against a small pearl button set flush in the jamb and heard a single flatted bell note.
Nothing happened. No answering steps, no questioning voice. A telephone rang twice in one of the other apartments and a car horn sounded from the street below.
I tried the bell again, with the same result. Now what? Force the door? No sense to that, and besides, illegal entry was against the law. I wouldn’t know how to go about it anyway.
She would have to come home eventually. Thing to do was stake out somewhere and wait for her to show up. If she didn’t arrive within the next half hour, say, then I would hunt up a phone and call Martell.
I went back to the stairs and was on the point of descending to the first floor when I heard the street door close and light steps against the tile flooring down there. It could be Nora Kemper. Moving silently, I took the steps to the third floor and stood close to the wall where the light failed to reach.
A woman came quickly up the steps to the second floor. From where I stood I couldn’t see her face clearly, but her build and the color of her hair were right. She was wearing a light coat and carrying a white drawstring bag, and she was in a hurry. She turned in the right direction, and the moment she was out of sight I raced back to the second floor.
It was Nora Kemper, all right. She was standing in front of the door to 205 and digging into her bag for the key. I had a picture of her getting inside and closing the door and refusing to let me in.
I said, “Hold it a minute, Miss Kemper.”
She jerked her head up and around, startled. I moved toward her slowl
y. When the light reached my face, she gasped and made a frantic jab into the bag, yanked out her keys, and tried hurriedly to get one of them into the lock.
I couldn’t afford to have that door between us. I brought the gun out and said sharply, “Stay right there. I want to talk to you.”
The hand holding the keys dropped limply to her side. She began to hack away, retreating toward the dead end of the corridor. Her face gleamed whitely, set in a frozen mask of fear.
She stopped only when she could go no farther. Her back pressed hard against the wall next to the window, her eyes rolled, showing the whites.
Her voice came out in a ragged whisper. “Wha-what do you want?”
The Best American Noir of the Century Page 15