`Speaking of mayhem,' I said, `I'll ask you to look at these pictures if you can stand it. The identification should be nailed down.'
`Yes.'
I spread the photographs out for her. She looked them over carefully.
`Yes. It's Carol. The poor child.'
She had become very pale. Her black eyes stood out like the coal eyes of a snowgirl. She got to her feet and walked rather blindly into an adjoining room, shutting the door behind her.
I sat at her desk, pinched by her contour chair, and used the phone to ask her secretary to get me Lieutenant Bastian. He was on the line in less than a minute. I told him everything Susanna Drew had told me.
She came out of the next room and listened to the end of the conversation. `You don't waste any time,' she said when I hung up.
`Your evidence is important.'
`That's good. I'm afraid it's taken all I've got.'
She was still very pale. She moved toward me as if the floor under her feet was teetering. `Will you drive me home?'
Home was an apartment on Beverly Glen Boulevard. It had a mezzanine and a patio and African masks on the walls. She invited me to make us both a drink, and we sat and talked about Carol and then about Tom Hillman. She seemed to be very interested in Tom Hillman.
I was becoming interested in Susanna. Something about her dark intensity bit into me as deep as memory. Sitting close beside her, looking into her face, I began to ask myself whether, in my present physical and financial and moral condition, I could take on a woman with all those African masks.
The damn telephone rang in the next room. She got up, using my knee as a place to rest her hand. I heard her say: `So it's you. What do you want from me now?'
That was all I heard. She closed the door. Five minutes later, when she came out, her face had changed again. A kind of angry fear had taken the place of sorrow in her eyes, as if they had learned of something worse than death.
`Who was that, Susanna?'
`You'll never know.'
I drove downtown in a bitter mood and bully ragged my friend Colton, the DA's investigator, into asking Sacramento for Harold or Mike Harley's record, if any. While I was waiting for an answer I went downstairs to the newsstand and bought an early evening paper.
The murder and the kidnapping were front-page news, but there was nothing in the newspaper story I didn't already know, except that Ralph Hillman had had a distinguished combat record as a naval aviator and later (after Newport Line School) as a line officer. He was also described as a millionaire.
I sat in Colton's outer office trying to argue away my feeling that Bastian had shoved me onto the fringes of the case. The feeling deepened when the word came back from Sacramento that neither a Harold nor a Mike Harley had a California record, not even for a traffic violation. I began to wonder if I was on the track of the right man.
I drove back to the Strip through late afternoon traffic. It was nearly dusk when I reached my office. I didn't bother turning on the light for a while, but sat and watched the green sky at the window lose its color. Stars and neons came out. A plane like a moving group of stars circled far out beyond Santa Monica.
I closed the venetian blind, to foil snipers, and turned on the desk lamp and went through the day's mail. It consisted of three bills, and a proposition from the Motel Institute of St Louis. The Institute offered me, in effect, a job at twenty thousand a year managing a million-dollar convention motel. All I had to do was fill out a registration form for the Institute's mail-order course in motel management and send it to the Institute's registrar. If I had a wife, we could register as a couple.
I sat toying with the idea of filling out the form, but decided to go out for dinner first. I was making very incisive decisions. I decided to call Susanna Drew and ask her to have dinner with me, telling myself that it was in line of business. I could even deduct the tab from my income tax.
She wasn't in the telephone book. I tried Information. Unlisted number. I couldn't afford her anyway.
Before I went out for dinner by myself, I checked my answering service. Susanna Drew had left her number for me.
`I've been trying to get you,' I said to her.
`I've been right here in my apartment.'
`I mean before I knew you left your number.'
`Oh? What did you have in mind?'
`The Motel Institute of St Louis is making a very nice offer to couples who want to register for their course in motel management.'
`It sounds inviting. I've always wanted to go out to sunny California and manage a motel.'
`Good. We'll have dinner and talk strategy. Television won't last, you know that in your heart. None of these avant-garde movements last.'
`Sorry, Lew. I'd love dinner, another night. Tonight I'm not up to it. But I did want to thank you for looking after me this afternoon. I was in a bad way for a while.'
`I'm afraid I did it to you.'
`No. My whole lousy life reared up and did it to me. You and your pictures were just the catalytic
