I stood up. He stood up too and held his hand out.
“We’re not tough. We just have a job to do. Don’t get too hostile with Javonen. The guy who owns that hotel draws a lot of water around here.”
“Thanks, Captain. I’ll try to be a nice little boy—even to Javonen.”
I went back along the hall. The same officer was on the desk. He nodded to me and I went out into the evening and got into my car. I sat with my hands tight on the steering wheel. I wasn’t too used to cops who treated me as if I had a right to be alive. I was sitting there when the desk officer poked his head out of the door and called that Captain Alessandro wanted to see me again.
When I got back to Captain Alessandro’s office, he was on the telephone. He nodded me to the customer’s chair and went on listening and making quick notes in what looked like the sort of condensed writing that many reporters use. After a while he said: “Thanks very much. We’ll be in touch.”
He leaned back and tapped on his desk and frowned.
“That was a report from the sheriff’s substation at Escondido. Mitchell’s car has been found—apparently abandoned. I thought you might like to know.”
“Thanks, Captain. Where was this?”
“About twenty miles from here, on a country road that leads to Highway 395, but is not the road a man would naturally take to get to 395. It’s a place called Los Penasquitos Canyon. Nothing there but outcrop and barren land and a dry river bed. I know the place. This morning a rancher named Gates went by there with a small truck, looking for fieldstone to build a wall. He passed a two-tone Buick hardtop parked off the side of the road. He didn’t pay much attention to the Buick, except to notice that it hadn’t been in a wreck, so somebody just parked it there.
“Later on in the day, around four, Gates went back to pick up another load of fieldstone. The Buick was still there. This time he stopped and looked it over. No keys in the lock, but the car wasn’t locked up. No sign of any damage. Just the same, Gates wrote down the license number and the name and address on the registration certificate. When he got back to his ranch he called the substation at Escondido. Of course the deputies knew Los Penasquitos Canyon. One of them went over and looked at the car. Clean as a whistle. The deputy managed to trick the trunk open. Empty except for a spare tire and a few tools. So he went back to Escondido and called in here. I’ve just been talking to him.”
I lit a cigarette and offered one to Captain Alessandro. He shook his head.
“Got any ideas, Marlowe?”
“No more than you have.”
“Let’s hear them anyway.”
“If Mitchell had some good reason to get lost and had a friend who would pick him up—a friend nobody here knew anything about—he would have stored his car in some garage. That wouldn’t have made anyone curious. There wouldn’t be anything to make the garage curious. They would just be storing a car. Mitchell’s suitcases would already have been in his friend’s car.”
“So?”
“So there wasn’t any friend. So Mitchell disappeared into thin air—with his nine suitcases—on a very lonely road that was hardly ever used.”
“Go on from there.” His voice was hard now. It had an edge to it. I stood up.
“Don’t bully me, Captain Alessandro. I haven’t done anything wrong. You’ve been very human so far. Please don’t get the idea that I had anything to do with Mitchell’s disappearance. I didn’t—and still don’t—know what he had on my client. I just know that she is a lonely and frightened and unhappy girl. When I know why, if I do manage to find out, I’ll let you know or I won’t. If I don’t, you’ll just have to throw the book at me. It wouldn’t be the first time it’s happened to me. I don’t sell out—even to good police officers.”
“Let’s hope it doesn’t turn out that way, Marlowe. Let’s hope.”
“I’m hoping with you, Captain. And thanks for treating me the way you have.”
I walked back down the corridor, nodded to the duty officer on the desk and climbed back into my car again. I felt twenty years older.
I knew—and I was pretty damn sure Captain Alessandro knew too—that Mitchell wasn’t alive, that he hadn’t driven his car to Los Penasquitos Canyon, but somebody had driven him there, with Mitchell lying dead on the floor of the back seat.
There was no other possible way to look at it. There are things that are facts, in a statistical sense, on paper, on a tape recorder, in evidence. And there are things that are facts because they have to be facts, because nothing makes any sense otherwise.
22
It is like a sudden scream in the night, but there is no sound. Almost always at night, because the dark hours are the hours of danger. But it has happened to me also in broad daylight—that strange, clarified moment when I suddenly know something I have no reason for knowing. Unless out of the long years and the long tensions, and in the present case, the abrupt certainty that what bullfighters call “the moment of truth” is here.
There was no other reason, no sensible reason at all. But I parked across from the entrance to the Rancho Descansado, and cut my lights and ignition, and then drifted about fifty yards downhill and pulled the brake back hard.
I walked up to the office. There was the small glow of light over the night bell, but the office was closed. It was only ten-thirty. I walked around to the back and drifted through the trees. I came on two parked cars. One was a Hertz rent car, as anonymous as a nickel in a parking meter, but by bending down I could read the license number. The car next to it was Goble’s little dark jalopy. It didn’t seem very long since it was parked by the Casa del Poniente. Now it was here.
I went on through the trees until I was below my room. It was dark, soundless. I went up the few steps very slowly and put my ear to the door. For a little while I heard nothing. Then I heard a strangled sob—a man’s sob, not
