“There’s no telephone up there,” he said, “and there was nothing important about the affair she was coming down for. So I got the wire before I gave much thought to it. The wire surprised me only mildly. Crystal and I have been washed up for years. She lives her life and I live mine. She has her own money and plenty of it. About twenty thousand a year from a family holding corporation that owns valuable oil leases in Texas. She plays around and I knew Lavery was one of her playmates. I might have been a little surprised that she would actually marry him, because the man is nothing but a professional chaser. But the picture looked ail right so far, you understand?”
“And then?”
“Nothing for two weeks. Then the Prescott Hotel in San Bernardino got in touch with me and said a Packard Clipper registered to Crystal Grace Kingsley at my address was unclaimed in their garage and what about it. I told them to keep it and I sent them a check. There was nothing much in that either. I figured she was still out of the state and that if they had gone in a car at all, they had gone in Lavery’s car. The day before yesterday, however, I met Lavery in front of the Athletic Club down on the corner here. He said he didn’t know where Crystal was.”
Kingsley gave me a quick look and reached a bottle and two tinted glasses up on the desk. He poured a couple of drinks and pushed one over. He held his against the light and said slowly:
“Lavery said he hadn’t gone away with her, hadn’t seen her in two months, hadn’t had any communications with her of any kind.”
I said, “You believed him?”
He nodded, frowning, and drank his ‘drink and pushed the glass to one side. I tasted mine. It was Scotch. Not very good Scotch.
“If I believed him,” Kingsley said,. “—and I was probably wrong to do it—it wasn’t because he’s a fellow you have to believe. Far from it. It’s because he’s a no good son of a bitch who thinks it is smart to lay his friends’ wives and brag about it. I feel he would have been tickled pink to stick’ it into me and break it off that ‘he had got my wife to run away with him and leave me flat. I know these tomcats and I know this one too well. He rode a route for us for a while and he was in trouble all the time. He couldn’t keep his hands off the office help. And apart from all that there was this wire from El Paso and I told him about it and why would he think it worth while to lie about it?”
“She might have tossed him out on his can,” I said. “That would have hurt him in his deep place—his Casanova complex.”
Kingsley brightened up a little, but not very much. He shook his head. “I still more than half way believe him,” he said. “You’ll have to prove me wrong. That’s part of why I wanted you. But there’s another and very worrying angle. I have a good job here, but a job is all it is. I can’t stand scandal. I’d be out of here in a hurry if my wife got mixed up with the police.”
“Police?”
“Among her other activities,” Kingsley said grimly, “my wife occasionally finds time to lift things in department stores. I think it’s just a sort of delusion of grandeur she gets when she has been hitting the bottle too hard, but it happens, and we have had some pretty nasty scenes in managers’ offices. So far I’ve been able to keep them from filing charges, but if something like that happened in a strange city where nobody knew her—” He lifted his hands and let them fall with a smack on the desk— “well, it might be a prison matter, mightn’t it?”
“Has she ever been fingerprinted?”
“She has never been arrested,” he said.
“That’s not what I mean. Sometimes in large department stores they make it a condition of dropping shoplifting charges that you give them your prints. It scares the amateurs and builds up a ifie of kleptomaniacs in their protective association. When the prints come in a certain number of times they call time on you.”
“Nothing like that has happened to my knowledge,” he said.
“Well, I think we might almost throw the shoplifting angle out of this for the time being,” I said. “If she got arrested, she would get searched. Even if the cops let her use a Jane Doe name on the police blotter, they would be likely to get in touch with you. Also she would start yelling for help when she found herself in a jam.” I tapped the blue and white telegraph form. “And this is a month old. If what you are thinking about happened around that time, the case would have been settled by now. If it was a first offense, she would get off with a scolding and a suspended sentence.”
He poured himself another drink to help him with his worrying. “You’re making me feel better,” he said.
“There are too many other things that could have happened,” I said. “That she did go away with Lavery and they split up. That she went away with some other man and the wire is a gag. That she went away alone or with a woman. That she drank herself over the edge and is holed up in some private sanatorium taking a cure. That she got into some jam we have no idea of. That she met with foul play.”
“Good God, don’t say that,” Kingsley exclaimed.
“Why not? You’ve got to consider it. I get a very vague idea of Mrs. Kingsley—that she is young, pretty, reckless, and wild. That she drinks and does dangerous things when she drinks. That she is a sucker for the men and might take up with a stranger who might turn out to be a crook. Does that fit?”
He nodded. “Every word of it.”
“How much money would she have with her?”
“She liked to carry enough. She has her own bank and her own bank account. She could have any amount of money.”
“Any children?”
“No children.”
“Do you have the management of her affairs?”
He shook his head. “She hasn’t any—excepting depositing checks and drawing out money and spending it. She never invests a nickeL And her money certainly never does me any good, if that’s what you are thinking.” He paused and then said: “Don’t think I haven’t tried. I’m human and it’s not fun to watch twenty thousand a year go down the drain and nothing to show for it but hangovers and boy friends of the class of Chris Lavery.”
“How are you with her bank? Could you get a detail of the checks she has drawn for the past couple of months?”
“They wouldn’t tell me. I tried to get some information of the sort once, when I had an idea she was being blackmailed. All I got was ice.”
“We can get it,” I said, “and we may have to. It will mean going to the Missing Persons Bureau. You wouldn’t like that?”
“If I had liked that, I wouldn’t have called you,” he said.
I nodded, gathered my exhibits together and put them away in my pockets. “There are more angles to this than I can even see now,” I said, “but I’ll start by talking to Lavery and then taking a run up to Little Fawn Lake and asking questions there. I’ll need Lavery’s address and a note to your man in charge at the mountain place.”
He got a letterhead out of his desk and wrote and passed it over. I read: “Dear Bill: This will introduce Mr. Philip Marlowe who wishes to look over the property. Please show him my cabin and assist him in every way. Yrs. Derace Kingsley.”
I folded this up and put it in the envelope he had addressed while I was reading it. “How about the other cabins up there?” I asked.
“Nobody up this year so far. One man’s in government service in Washington and the other is at Fort Leavenworth. Their wives are with them.”
“Now Lavery’s address,” I said.
He looked at a point well above the top of my head. “In Bay City. I could find the house but I forget the address. Miss Fromsett can give it to you, I think. She needn’t know why you want it. She probably will. And you want a hundred dollars, you said.”
“That’s all right,” I said. “That’s just something I said when you were tramping on me.”
He grinned. I stood up and hesitated by the desk looking at him. After a moment I said: “You’re not holding anything back, are you—anything important?”
He looked at his thumb. “No. I’m not holding anything back. I’m worried and I want to know where she is. I’m damn worried. If you get anything at all, call me any time, day or night.”
I said I would do that, and we shook hands and I went back down the long cool office and out to where Miss Fromsett sat elegantly at her desk.
“Mr. Kingsley thinks you can give me Chris Lavery’s address,” I told her and watched her face.
She reached very slowly for a brown leather address book and turned the leaves. Her voice was tight and cold when she spoke.
“The address we have is 623 Altair Street, in Bay City. Telephone Bay City 12523. Mr. Lavery has not been with us for more than a year. He may have moved.”
I thanked her and ,went ‘on to the door. From ‘there’ I glanced back at her. She was sitting very still, with her hands clasped on her desk, staring into space. A couple of red sp6ts burned in her cheeks. Her eyes were remote and bitter.
I got the impression that Mr. Chris Lavery was not a pleasant thought to her.
3
Altair Street lay on the edge of the V forming the inner end of a deep canyon. To the north was the cool blue sweep of the bay out to the point above Malibu. To the south the beach town of Bay City was spread out on a bluff above the coast highway.
It was a short street, not more than three or four blocks, and ended in a tall iron fence enclosing a large estate. Beyond the gilded spikes of the fence I could see trees and shrubs and a glimpse of lawn and part of a curving driveway, but the house was out of sight. On the inland side of Altair Street the houses were well kept and fairly large, but the few scattered bungalows on the edge of the canyon were nothing much. In the short half block ended by the iron fence were only two houses, on opposite sides of the street and almost directly across from each other. The smaller was number 623.
I drove past it, turned the car in the paved half circle at the end, of the street and came back to park in front of the lot next to Lavery’s place. His house was built downwards, one of those clinging vine effects, with the front door a little below street level, the patio on the roof, the bedroom in the basement, and a garage like the corner pocket on a pool table. A crimson bougainvillea was rusthng against the front wall and the flat stones of the front walk were edged with Korean moss. The door was narrow, grilled and topped by a lancet arch. Below the grill there was an iron knocker. I hammered on it.
Nothing happened. I pushed the bell at the side of the door and heard it ring inside not very far off and waited and nothing happened. I worked on the knocker again. Still nothing. I went back up the walk and along to the garage and lifted the door far enough to see that a car with white side-walled tires was inside. I went back to the front door.
A neat black Cadillac coupe came out of the garage across the way, backed, turned and came along past Lavery’s house, slowed, and a thin man in dark glasses looked at me sharply, as if I hadn’t any business to be there. I gave him my steely glare and he went on his way.
I went down Lavery’s walk again and did some more hammering on his knocker. This time I got results. The Judas window opened and I was looking at a handsome bright-eyed number through the bars of a grill.
“You make a hell of a lot of noise,” a voice said.
“Mr. Lavery?”
He said be was Mr. Lavery and what about it. I poked a card through the grill. A large brown hand took the card. The bright brown eyes came back and the voice said: “So sorry. Not needing ‘any detectives today please.”
“I’m working for Derace Kingsley.”
“The hell with both of you,” he said, and banged the Judas window.
I leaned on the bell beside the door and got a cigarette out with my free hand and had just struck the match on the woodwork beside the door when it was yanked open and a big guy in bathing trunks, beach sandals, and a white terrycloth bathrobe started to come out at me.
I took my thumb off the bell and grinned at him. “What’s the matter?” I asked him. “Scared?”
“Ring that bell again,” he said, “and I’ll throw you clear across the street.”
“Don’t be childish,” I told him. “You know perfectly well I’m going to talk to you and you’re going to talk to me.”