We went past her into a rather narrow room with several handsome oval mirrors and gray period furniture upholstered in blue damask. It didn’t look like apartment house furniture. She sat down on a slender love seat and leaned back and waited calmly for somebody to say something.
I said: “This is Lieutenant Degarmo of the Bay City police. We’re looking for Kingsley. He’s not at his house. We thought you might be able to give us an idea where to find him.”
She spoke to me without looking at me. “Is it that urgent?”
“Yes. Something has happened.”
“What has happened?”
Degarmo said bluntly: “We just want to know where Kingsley is, sister. We don’t have time to build up a scene.”
The girl looked at him with a complete absence of expression.
She looked back at me and said: “I think you had better tell me, Mr. Marlowe.”
“I went down there with the money,” I said. “I met her as arranged. I went to her apartment to talk to her. While there I was slugged by a man who was hidden behind a curtain. I didn’t see the man. When I came out of it she had been murdered.”
“Murdered?”
I said: “Murdered.”
She closed her fine eyes and the corners of her lovely mouth drew in. Then she stood up with a quick shrug and went over to a small, marble-topped table with spindly legs. She took a cigarette out of a small embossed silver box and lit it, staring emptily down at the table. The match in her hand was waved more and more slowly until it stopped, still burning, and she dropped it into a tray. She turned and put her back to the table.
“I suppose I ought to scream or something,” she said. “I don’t seem to have any feeling about it at all.”
Degarmo said: “We don’t feel so interested in your feelings right now. What we want to know is where Kingsley is. You can tell us or not tell us. Either way you can skip the attitudes. Just make your mind up.”
She said to me quietly: “The lieutenant here is a Bay City officer?”
I nodded. She turned at him slowly, with a lovely contemptuous dignity. “In that case,” she said, “he has no more right in my apartment than any other loud-mouthed bum that might try to toss his weight around.”
Degarmo looked at her bleakly. He grinned and walked across the room and stretched his long legs from a deep downy chair. He waved his hand at me.
“Okay, you work on her. I can get all the co-operation I need from the L.A. boys, but by the time I had things explained to them, it would be a week from next Tuesday.”
I said: “Miss Fromsett, if you know where he is, or where he started to go, please tell us. You can understand that he has to be found.”
She said calmly: “Why?”
Degarmo put his head back and laughed. “This babe is good,” he said. “Maybe she thinks we should keep it a secret from him that his wife has been knocked off.”
“She’s better than you think,” I told him. His face sobered and he bit his thumb. He looked her up and down insolently.
She said: “Is it just because he has to be told?”
I took the yellow and green scarf out of my pocket and shook it out loose and held it in front of her.
“This was found in the apartment where she was murdered. I think you have seen it.”
She looked at the scarf and she looked at me, and in neither of the glances was there any meaning. She said: “You ask for a great deal of confidence, Mr. Marlowe. Considering that you haven’t been such a very smart detective after all.”
“I ask for it,” I said, “and I expect to get it. And how smart I’ve been is something you don’t really know anything about.”
“This is cute,” Degarmo put in. “You two make a nice team. All you need is acrobats to follow you. But right now “
She cut through his voice as if he didn’t exist. “How was she murdered?”
“She was strangled and stripped naked and scratched up.”
“Derry wouldn’t have done anything like that,” she said quietly.
Degarmo made a noise with his lips. “Nobody ever knows what anybody else will do, sister. A cop knows that much.”
She still didn’t look at him. In the same level tone she asked: “Do you want to know where we went after we left your apartment and whether he brought me home—things like that? Because if he did, he wouldn’t have had time to go down to the beach and kill her? Is that it?”
I said, “That’s a good part of it.”
“He didn’t bring me home,” she said slowly. “I took a taxi on Hollywood Boulevard, not more than five minutes after we left your place. I didn’t see him again. I supposed he went home.”
Degarmo said: “Usually the bum tries to give her boy friend a bit more alibi than that. But it takes all kinds, don’t it?”
Miss Fromsett said to me: “He wanted to bring me home, but it was a long way out of his way and we were both tired. The reason I was telling you this is because I know it doesn’t matter in the least. If I thought it did, I
