Mrs. Brown had come out of her trance and moved toward me with a curious look.
`What is that?'
`A letter to Mike from his brother Harold. May I have it?'
`You're welcome to it.'
`Thank you. I believe it's evidence. It seems to have started Mike thinking about the possibility of bleeding the Hillmans for money.'
And it explained, I thought, why Harold had blamed himself for instigating the crime.
`May I read it?'
I handed it to her. She held it at arm's length, squinting.
`I'm afraid I need my glasses.'
We went downstairs to the living room, where she put on horn-rimmed reading glasses and sat in her armchair with the letter. 'Sipe,' she said when she finished reading it. `That's the name I was trying to think of before.'
She raised her voice and called: `Robert! Come in here.'
Rob Brown answered from the back of the house: `I was just coming.'
He appeared in the doorway carrying a clinking pitcher and three glasses on a tray. He said with a placatory look at his wife: `I thought I'd make some fresh lemonade for the three of us. It's a warm night.'
`That was thoughtful, Robert. Put it down on the coffee table. Now, what was the name of the ex-policeman that Mike left town with, the first time?'
'Sipe. Otto Sipe.'
He flushed slightly. `That man was a bad influence, I can tell you.'
I wondered if he still was. The question seemed so urgent that I drove right back to the airport and caught the first plane out, to Salt Lake City. A late jet from Minneapolis rescued me from a night in the Salt Lake City airport and deposited me at Los Angeles International, not many miles from the Barcelona Hotel, where a man named Sipe was watchman.
18
I HAD A gun in a locked desk drawer in my apartment, and one in my office. The apartment in West Los Angeles was nearer. I went there.
It was in a fairly new, two-story building with a long roofed gallery on which the second-floor apartments opened directly. Mine was the second-floor back. I parked in the street and climbed the outside stairs.
It was the dead dull middle of the night, the static hour when yesterday ended and tomorrow gathered its forces to begin. My own forces were running rather low, but I wasn't tired. I had slept on the planes. And my case was breaking, my beautiful terrible mess of a case was breaking.
A light shone dimly behind my draped front window, and when I tried the door it was unlocked. I had no family, no wife, no girl. I turned the knob quietly, and slowly and tentatively opened the door.
It seemed I had a girl after all. She was curled up on the studio couch under a blanket which came from my bed. The light from a standing lamp shone down on her sleeping face. She looked so young I felt a hundred years old.
I closed the door. `Hey, Stella.'
Her body jerked under the blanket. Throwing it off, she sat up. She was wearing a blue sweater and a skirt. `Oh,' she said. `It's you.'
`Who were you expecting?'
`I don't know. But don't be cross with me. I was just dreaming something, I forget what, but it was depressing.'
Her eyes were still dark with the dream.
`How in the world did you get in here?'
`The manager let me in. I told him I was a witness. He understood.'
`I don't. A witness to what?'
`Quite a few things,' she said with some spirit. `If you want me to tell you, you can stop treating me like a mentally retarded delinquent. Nobody else does, except my parents.'
I sat on the edge of the studio couch beside her. I liked the girl but at the moment she was an obstruction, and could turn into a serious embarrassment. `Do your parents know you're here?'
`Of course not. How could I tell them? They wouldn't have let me come, and I had to come. You ordered me to get in touch with you if I ever heard from Tommy. Your answering service couldn't find you and finally they gave me your home address.'
`Are you telling me you've heard from him?'
She nodded. Her eyes held steady on my face. They were brimming with complex feelings, more womanly than girlish. `He phoned around four o'clock this afternoon. Mother was at the store, and I had a chance to answer the phone myself.'
`Where was he, did he say?'
`Here in-' She hesitated. `He made me promise not to tell anyone. And I've already broken my promise once.'
