II
It was a five-minute trip to the apartment building where Donna and I had been living since our marriage seven months before. I waited while a fat woman in red slacks and a purple and burnt-orange blouse pulled a yellow Buick away from the curb, banging a fender or two in the process, then parked and got out onto the walk.
It had started to cool off a little, the way it does in this part of the country along toward late afternoon. A slow breeze rustled the dusty fronds of palm trees lining the parkways along Fountain Avenue. A thin pattern of traffic moved past, and the few pedestrians in sight had the look of belonging there.
I crossed to the building entrance and went in. The small foyer was deserted and the mailbox for 2c, our apartment, was empty. I unlocked the inner door and climbed the carpeted stairs to the second floor and walked slowly down the dimly lighted corridor.
Strains of a radio newscast filtered through the closed door of the apartment across from 2c. Ruth Feldman was home. She might have word, if I needed it. I hoped I wouldn’t need it. There was the faint scent of jasmine on the air.
I unlocked the door to my apartment and went in and said, loudly: “Hey, Donna. It’s your ever-lovin’.”
All that came back was silence. Quite a lot of it. I closed the door and leaned against it and heard my heart thumping away. The white metal Venetian blinds at the living room windows overlooking the street were lowered but not turned, and there was a pattern of sunlight on the maroon carpeting. Our tank-type vacuum cleaner was on the floor in front of the fireplace, its hose tracing a lazy’s along the rug like a gray python, the cord plugged into a wall socket.
The silence was beginning to rub against my nerves. I went into the bedroom. The blind was closed and I switched on one of the red-shaded lamps on Donna’s dressing table. Nobody there. The double bed was made up, with her blue silk robe across the foot and her slippers with the powder blue pompons under the trailing edge of the pale yellow spread.
My face in the vanity’s triple mirrors had that strained look. I turned off the light and walked out of there and on into the bathroom, then the kitchen and breakfast nook. I knew all the time Donna wouldn’t be in any of them; I had known it from the moment that first wave of silence answered me.
But I looked anyway…
She might have left a note for me, I thought. I returned to the bedroom and looked on the nightstand next to the telephone. No note. Just the day’s mail: two bills, unopened; a business envelope from my agent, unopened, and a letter from Donna’s mother out in Omaha, opened and thrust carelessly back into the envelope.
The mail’s being there added up to one thing at least: Donna had been in the apartment after three o’clock that afternoon. What with all this economy wave at the post offices around the country, we were getting one delivery a day and that not before the middle of the afternoon. The phone call, the vacuum sweeper, the mail on the nightstand: they were enough to prove that my wife was around somewhere. Out for a lipstick, more than likely, or a carton of Fatimas, or to get a bet down on a horse.
I left the apartment and crossed the hall and rang the bell to 2d. The news clicked off in the middle of the days baseball scores and after a moment the door opened and Ruth Feldman was standing there.
“Oh. Clay.” She was a black-haired little thing, with not enough color from being indoors too much, and a pair of brown eyes that, in a prettier face, would have made her something to moon over on long winter evenings. “I
“I’m looking for Donna,” I said. “You seen her?”
She leaned negligently against the door edge and moved her lashes at me. The blouse she was wearing was cut much too low. “No-o-o. Not since this morning anyway. She came in about eleven for coffee and a cigarette. Stayed maybe half an hour, I guess it was.”
“Did she say anything about her plans for the day? You know: whether she was going to see anybody special, something like that?”
She lifted a shoulder. “Hunh-uh. She did say something about her agent wanting her to have lunch with this producer — what’s his name? — who does the
I told her no and thanked her and she pouted her lips at me. I could come in early any afternoon and drink her liquor and give her a roll in the hay, no questions asked, no obligations and no recriminations. Not just because it was me, either. It was there for anyone who was friendly, no stranger, and had clean fingernails. You find at least one like her in any apartment house, where the husband falls asleep on the couch every night over a newspaper or the television set.
I asked her to keep an eye out for Donna and tell her I had to run out to Stone Canyon on some urgent and unexpected business and that I’d call in the first chance I got. She gave me a big smile and an up-from-under stare and closed the door very gently.
I lit a cigarette and went back to the apartment to leave a note for Donna next to the telephone. Then I took a last look around and walked down one flight to the street, got into the car, and headed for Stone Canyon.
III
It was a quarter past five by the time I got out there. There was an especially nasty curve in the road just to the north of Yestone, and off on the left shoulder where the bend was sharpest, three department cars were drawn up in a bunch. A uniformed man was taking a smoke behind the wheel of the lead car; he looked up sharply as I made a U-turn and stopped behind the last car.
By the time I had cut off the motor and opened the door, he was standing there scowling at me. “Where d’ya think you’re goin’, Mac?”
“Sergeant Lindstrom telephoned me,” I said, getting out onto the sparse sun-baked growth they call grass in California.
He ran the ball of a thumb lightly along one cheek and eyed me stonily from under the stiffbrim of his campaign hat. “Your name Kane?”
“That’s it.”
He took the thumb off his face and used it to point. “Down there. They’re waitin’ for you. Better take a deep breath, Mac. You won’t like what they show you.”
I didn’t say anything. I went past him and on around the department car. The ground fell away in what almost amounted to a forty-five-degree slope, and a hundred yards down the slope was level ground. Down there a knot of men were standing near the scorched ruins of what had been an automobile. It could have been Donnas Chevy or it could have been any other light job. From its condition and across the distance I couldn’t tell.
It took some time and a good deal of care for me to work my way to the valley floor without breaking my neck. There were patches of scarred earth spaced out in a reasonably straight line all the way down the incline where the car had hit and bounced and hit again, over and over. Splinters of broken glass lay scattered about, and about halfway along was a twisted bumper and a section of grillwork. There was a good deal of brush around and it came in handy for hanging on while I found footholds. It was a tough place to get down, but the car at the bottom hadn’t had any trouble making it.
A tall, slender, quiet-faced man in gray slacks and a matching sports shirt buttoned at the neck but without a tie was waiting for me. He nodded briefly and looked at me out of light blue eyes under thick dark brows.
“Are you Clay Kane?” It was a soft, pleasant voice, not a cop’s voice at all.
I nodded, looking past him at the pile of twisted metal. The four men near it were looking my way, their faces empty of expression.
The quiet-faced man said, “I’m Chief Deputy Martell, out of Hollywood. They tell me it’s your wife’s car, but that your wife wasn’t using it. Has she told you yet who was?”
“Not yet; no. She was out when I called the apartment, although I’d spoken to her only a few minutes
