I got the blue and white telegram out of my pocket and held it in front of his bright brown eyes. He read it morosely, chewed his lip and growled:
“Oh for Chrissake, com’e on in then.”
He held the door wide and I went in past him, into a dim pleasant room with an apricot Chinese rug that looked expensive, deepsided chairs, a number of white drum lamps, a big Capehart in the corner, a long and very wide davenport in pale tan mohair shot with dark brown, and a fireplace with a copper screen and an overmantel in white wood. A fire was laid behind the screen and partly masked by a large spray of manzanita bloom. The bloom was turning yellow in places, but was still pretty. There was a bottle of Vat 69 and glasses on a tray and a copper icebucket on a low round burl walnut table with a glass top. The room went clear to the back of the house and ended in a flat arch through which showed three narrow windows and the top few feet of the white iron railing of the staircase going down.
Lavery swung the door shut and sat on the davenport. He grabbed a cigarette out of a hammered silver box and lit it and looked at me irritably. I sat down opposite him and looked him over. He had everything in the way of good looks the snapshot had indicated. He had a terrific torso and magnificent thighs. His eyes were chestnut brown and the whites of them slightly gray-white. His hair was rather long and curled a little over his temples. His brown skin showed no signs of dissipation. He was a nice piece of beef, but to me that was all he was. I could understand that women would think he was something to yell for.
“Why not tell us where she is?” I said. “We’ll find out eventually anyway and if you can tell us now, we won’t be bothering you.”
“It would take more than a private dick to bother me,” he said.
“No, it wouldn’t. A private dick can bother anybody. He’s persistent and used to snubs. He’s paid for his time and he would just as soon use it to bother you as any other way.”
“Look,” he said, leaning forward and pointing his cigarette at me. “I know what that wire says, but it’s the bunk. I didn’t go to El Paso with Crystal ‘Kingsley. I haven’t seen her in a long time—long before the date of that wire. I haven’t had any contact with her. I told Kingsley that.”
“He didn’t have to believe you.”
“Why would I lie to him?” He looked surprised.
“Why wouldn’t you?”
“Look,” he said earnestly, “it might seem so to you, but you don’t know her. Kingsley has no strings on her. If he doesn’t like the way she behaves he has a remedy. These proprietary husbands make me sick.”
“If you didn’t go to El Paso with her,” I said, “why did she send this telegram?”
“I haven’t the faintest idea.”
“You can do better than that,” I said. I pointed to the spray of manzanita in the fireplace. “You pick that up at Little Fawn Lake?”
“The hills around here are full of manzanita,” he said contemptuously.
“It doesn’t bloom like that down here.”
He laughed. “I was up there the third week in May. If you have to know. I suppose you can find out. That’s the last time I saw her.”
“You didn’t have any idea of marrying her?”
He blew smoke and said through it: “I’ve thought of it, yes. She has money. Money is always useful. But it would be too tough a way to make it.”
I nodded, but didn’t say anything. He looked at the manzanita spray in the fireplace and leaned back to blow smoke in the air and show me the strong brown line of his throat. After a moment, when I still didn’t say anything, he began to get restless. He glanced down at the card I had given him and said:
“So you hire yourself out to dig up dirt? Doing well at it?”
“Nothing to brag about. A dollar here, a dollar there.”
“And all of them pretty slimy,” he said.
“Look, Mr. Lavery, we don’t have to get into a fight. Kingsley thinks you know where his wife is, but won’t tell him. Either out of meanness or motives of delicacy.”
“Which way would he like it?” the handsome brownfacedman sneered.
“He doesn’t care, as long as he gets the information. He doesn’t care a great deal what you and she do together or where you go or whether she divorces him or not. He just wants to feel sure that everything is all right and that she isn’t in trouble of any kind.”
Lavery looked interested. “Trouble? What kind of trouble?” He licked the word around on his brown lips, tasting it.
“Maybe you won’t know the kind of trouble he is thinkingof.”
“Tell me,” he pleaded sarcastically. “I’d just ‘love to hear about some kind of trouble I didn’t know about.”
“You’re doing fine,” I told him. “No time to talk business, but always time for a wisecrack. If you think we might try to get a hook into you because you crossed a state line with her, forget it.”
“GQ climb up your thumb, wise guy. You’d have to prove I paid the freight, or it wouldn’t mean anything.”
“This wire has to mean something,” I said stubbornly. It seemed to me that I had said it before, several times.
“It’s probably just a gag. She’s full of little tricks like that. All of them silly, and some of them vicious.”
“I don’t see any point in this one.”
He ificked cigarette ash carefully at the glass top table. He gave me a quick up from under look and immediately looked away.
“I stood her up,” he said slowly. “It might be her idea of a way to get back at me. I was supposed to run up there one weekend. I didn’t go. I was—sick of her.”
I said: “Uh-huh,” and gave him a long steady stare. “I don’t like that so well. I’d like it better if you did go to El Paso with her and had a fight and split up. Could you tell it that way?”
He flushed solidly behind the sunburn.
“God damn it,” he said, “I told you I didn’t go anywhere with her. Not anywhere. Can’t you remember that?”
“I’ll remember it when I believe it.”
He leaned over to snub out his cigarette. He stood up with an easy movement, not hurried at all, pulled the belt of his robe tight, and moved out to the end of the davenport.
“All right,” he said in a clear tight voice. “Out you go. Take the air. I’ve had enough of your third-degree tripe. You’re wasting my time and your own—if it’s worth anything.”
I stood up and grinned at him. “Not a lot, but for what it’s worth I’m being paid for it. It couldn’t be, for instance, that you ran into a little unpleasantness in some department store—say at the stocking or jewelry counter.”
He looked at me very carefully, drawing his eyebrows down at the corners and making his mouth small.
“I don’t get it,” he said, but there was thought behind his voice.
“That’s all I wanted to know,” I said. “And thanks for listening. By the way, what line of business are you in—since you left Kingsley?”
“What the hell business is it of yours?”
“None. But of course I can always find out,” I said, and moved a little way towards the door, not very far.
“At the moment I’m not doing anything,” he said coldly. “I expect a commission in the navy almost any day.”
“You ought to do well at that,” I said.
“Yeah. So long, snooper. And don’t bother to come back. I won’t be at home.”
I went over to the door and pulled it open. It stuck on the lower sill, from the beach moisture. When I had ‘it open, I looked back at him. ‘He was standing there narrow-eyed, full of muted thunder.
“I may have to come back,” I said. “But it won’t be just to swap gags. It will be because I find something out that needs talking over.”
“So you still think I’m lying,” he said savagely.
“I think you have something on your mind. I’ve looked at too many faces not to know. It may not be any of my business. If it is, you’re likely to have to throw me out again.”
“A pleasure,” he said. “And next time bring somebody to drive you home. In case you land on your fanny and knock your brains out.”
Then without any rhyme or reason that I could see, he spat on the rug in front of his feet.
It jarred me. It was like watching the veneer peel off and leave a tough kid in an alley. Or like hearing an apparently refined woman start expressing herself in fourletter words.
“So long, beautiful hunk,” I said, and left him standing there. I closed the door, had to jerk it to get it shut, and went up the path to the street. I stood on the sidewalk looking at the house across the way.
4
It was a wide shallow house with rose stucco wails faded out to a pleasant pastel shade and trimmed with dull green at the window frames. The roof was of green tiles, round rough ones. There was a deeply inset front door framed in a mosaic of multi-colored pieces of tiling and a small flower garden in front, behind a low stucco wall topped by an iron railing which the beach moisture had begun to corrode. Outside the wall to the left was the three-car garage, with a door opening inside the yard and a concrete path going from there to a side door of the house.
Set into the gate post was a bronze tablet which read: “Albert S. Almore, M.D.”
While I was standing there staring across the street, the black Cadillac I had already seen came purring around the corner and then down the block. It slowed and started to sweep outwards to get turning space to go into the garage, decided my car was in the way of that, and went on to the end of the road and turned in the widened-out space in front of the ornamental iron railing. It came back slowly and went into the empty third of the garage across the way.
The thin man in sun glasses went along the sidewalk to the house, carrying a double-handled doctor’s bag. Halfway along he slowed down to stare across at me. I went along towards my car. At the house he used a key and as he opened the door he looked across at me again.
I got into the Chrysler and sat there smoking and trying to make up my mind whether it was worth while hiring somebody to pull a tail on Lavery. I decided it wasn’t, not the way things looked so far.
CUrtains moved at a lower window close to the side door Dr. Almore had gone in at. A thin hand held them aside and I caught the glint of light on glasses. They were held aside for quite some time, before they fell together again.
I looked along the street at Lavery’s house. From this angle I could see that his service porch gave on a ifight of painted wooden steps to a sloping concrete walk and a flight of concrete steps ending in the paved alley below.
I looked across at Dr. Almore’s house again, wondering idly if he knew Lavery and how well. He probably knew him, since theirs were the only two houses in the block. But being a doctor, he wouldn’t tell me anything about him. As I looked, the curtains which had been lifted apart were now completely drawn aside.
The middle segment of the triple window they had masked had no screen. Behind it, Dr. Almore stood staring across my way, with a sharp frown on his thin face. I shook cigarette ash out of the window and he turned abruptly and sat down at a desk. His double-handled bag was on the desk in front of him. He sat rigidly, drumming on the desk beside the bag. His hand reached for the telephone, touched it and came away again. He lit a cigarette and shook the match violently, then strode to the window and stared out at me some more.