'I guess we can leave it to you. We’re at the Holiday Inn off the Hollywood freeway.'
'What would we do without you, lady?' said Palliser to Wanda, and meant it.
'All part of the job… Now, Stephanie, you can say whatever you want to us, you know, we won’t mind,' she said comfortably. 'We want to know anything you can tell us that might help to find out what happened to Sandra.'
'You’re a policewoman, aren’t you? I guess that must be kind of an interesting job. Well, I know that. It’s all just so awful-Sandra dead and all-but I want to tell how it was, only Mama and Daddy carried on so, and I didn’t like to say in front of Sandra’s mother--'
'That’s all right now, you just tell it the way it happened.'
'She said awful things about her mother,' said Sandra miserably, 'but maybe they were so, I don’t know. She said we could go to L.A., Hollywood, and get jobs, school was stupid and all the teachers squares and silly. She wanted to be a model, she said maybe we could get jobs like that right away, or there are schools where you can learn. I-well, I didn’t want to, I like school all right, but Sandra-she could always make me go along, sort of. She’d done it other times too. And her mother works, since the divorce, and my mother had a club meeting-last Saturday, I mean, so that’s when we did it. I packed a lot of clothes and things in Mama’s biggest suitcase, and Sandra had an overnight bag and a plane case, and we just took the bus out the state highway. It was crowded and nobody paid any notice, and at the end of the line we-uh-got out and, you know, started to hitch.' She took a breath. 'I was scared right from the first, that’s a thing you’re never supposed to do, get in strange cars, but Sandra wasn’t afraid of anything ever. She had fifteen dollars she’d saved from her allowance and I had nearly eight.'
Palliser and Wanda refrained from looking at each other. Glasser wandered in and pulled up a chair behind Palliser silently. She hardly noticed him; she was talking to Wanda.
'Well, this man gave us a ride all the way to L.A. He was a salesman of some kind, he was nice and friendly, he joked with Sandra-she told him we were both eighteen and I guess he believed that. She said we were going to see some relatives of hers here and just to let us out at Hollywood Boulevard, that was the only name here we knew, and he did. He said, Hollywood and what, and we didn’t know what to say.' Palliser put out one cigarette, lit p another, and thought, People. 'But it was all so queer, sort of,' said Stephanie, still sounding surprised. 'Not what l we thought it’d be-not what we thought Hollywood’d be like! Just a great big city, and Woolworth’s and Penney’s and drugstores just like home, only some funnier-looking people-I mean, it wasn’t glamorous or anything at all! And we had some sandwiches at a place, but it was Sunday and no place was open, I mean we looked in the yellow pages for those model agencies like Sandra said, but they wouldn’t be open till Monday and I said where were we going to sleep. And then Sandra got talking to this man-'
'Sunday,' said Wanda. 'The man who drove you here, that was over Saturday night? Do you know his name?'
'He said to call him Jim, that’s all. Yes, ma’am, we drove all night, he bought us two sandwiches at a place on the way. And this other man Sandra got talking to, it was at this place on Hollywood Boulevard we went in to eat. I mean, I didn’t like it, but a person doesn’t know what to do,' said Stephanie, blinking back sudden tears.
'My mother doesn’t think black people are very nice at all and Daddy always says nonsense, you judge people as individuals, and at school they seem to think they’re better than us because of slavery and all that and how do you know, anyway- But I didn’t like him! He got talking to Sandra and she told him about going to be a model and get jobs here and he said maybe he could help. He said did we have any place to stay and Sandra said not yet, and so he said we could stay at his place, his wife’d be glad to have us-I didn’t want to go, even when he said that, but Sandra said not to be silly. And he had a car, he took us to this house.'
'Did he tell you his name? What did he look like?'
'Sure. His name was Steve Smith. I didn’t see how he might help us get jobs, because, you know, he talked- oh, real ignorant and bad grammar. But after, Sandra said maybe he was a servant to somebody real high up in the movies or something like that. Anyway, he took us to this house, but his wife wasn’t there and he said she must’ve gone someplace.'
'Did you notice the name of the street?' asked Palliser.
She shook her head. 'It wasn’t a very good neighborhood, I guess-lots of narrow little streets and awful run- down old houses. There wasn’t much furniture there, just some chairs and a TV and a couple of beds. And he went and got some hamburgers and asked would we like a couple of joints, and Sandra said sure but I knew that was marijuana and I was scared to because of what the school nurse told us last semester, so I didn’t take any but Sandra- Oh, what he looked like. Well, he was kind of tall, as tall as you anyway,' she said, looking at Palliser, 'and not very black, just sort of medium, and he had a mustache and a funny little beard just at the end of his chin.'
'What about the car?' asked Wanda.
'I don’t know the-the brand. It was an old car, a two-door. Blue, I guess. Anyway, Sandra got to talking real silly and I was scared then but I didn’t know what to do, I just went in the bedroom and shut the door. I guess I went to sleep. And all next day he was gone someplace and we mostly watched TV. There were Cokes and a lot of stuff to eat there, only by then I-just-wanted-to-go home!' said Stephanie. 'And he came back that night and said he’d been talking to somebody he knew about jobs for us, and so Sandra said wait and see. But the next night when he came, he got to talking sort of, you know, dirty, and tried to fool around with Sandra and I got more scared and I ran out the back door without my suitcase or anything, and I just about died till it got light-only I didn’t know where I was or what to do-I had my wallet in my pocket, I still had about four dollars and some change, and pretty soon I found that big public library, I felt sort of safe there and it was warm, but it closed at six and I just sort of walked on and I wanted to go home just the worst way, and so when I found that big railroad station I knew what to do. There were public phones and I got the operator and said to reverse the charges, and called home, and Daddy swore at me the minute he heard my voice, I guess he’d been awful scared about me. But I bet he couldn’t have been as scared as I was.'
And with reason, thought Palliser. Kids! If she was immature for her age-unlike the other one-still it was a funny age, a mixture of emotion and ignorance. She’d been lucky to be scared enough to run. 'It was Tuesday night when you left Sandra there, wherever it was?' That fitted in; the state of the body yesterday morning, she had probably been killed Tuesday night.
'Yes, sir.'
'Do you think you could recognize the house where he took you? Did you notice any street names when you ran away?'
She shook her head. 'It was dark. Oh, I remember one, Flower Street, just before I came to the library.'
Palliser rubbed his nose. That wasn’t much help; by what she said, she could have walked three dozen blocks before that. What was in his mind was that city dwellers tend to be curiously insular, stick to their own little corners: and when Steve Smith attempted to get rid of the body in that derelict building, a hundred to one he lived somewhere nearby, or had lived there. A house. Well, there were enough old streets with ramshackle old houses along them, both sides of San Pedro and other main drags down there.
'Do you think you could recognize him, Stephanie?' asked Wanda. 'If you saw his photograph?'
Stephanie nodded doubtfully. 'I think so. I tried to make Sandra come with me, I just knew something awful’d happen if we stayed there, but you never could get Sandra to do things. She got you to do things. Only-when Mama told me what happened to her-I mean, I knew Sandra all my life.' But this time, in spite of everything, Stephanie was rather enjoying herself, all of them listening to every word and Wanda taking notes.
'Wel1, I’ll tell you,' said Palliser, looking at his watch, 'suppose Miss Larsen takes you to lunch, Stephanie, and then we’ll take a ride around and see if you recognize any buildings, and then you can look at some pictures.'
She agreed almost enjoyably. When Wanda had led her out, Palliser looked at Glasser and said, 'Terrifying, no? Kids.'
'She was lucky,' agreed Glasser sleepily. 'Does Harry sound like the kind to have a whole house of his own? Even a ramshackle one?'
'Pay your money, take your choice. Could be his sister’s and the fami1y’s away visiting Aunt Mary. Could be his wife’s just left him. What I’m thinking about right now, he did take some steps to get rid of the body.' Palliser picked up the phone and called S.I.D. 'That D.O.A. yesterday-you pick up anything else at the scene?'
'Didn’t anybody call you? Well, we would have,' said Horder. 'It’s busy down here. You’l1 get a report. Yeah, no latents anywhere on the body-you thought it’d been dropped there-but out back of that building we picked up a
