The Best American Noir of the Century

before.”

“Any idea where she might be?”

I shrugged. “Several, but I didn’t have a chance to do any checking. The sergeant said you were in a hurry.”

“I see …I think I’ll ask you to take a quick glance at the body we took out of the car. It probably won’t do much good, but you never know. I’d better warn you: it won’t be pleasant.”

“That’s all right,” I said. “I spent some time in the Pacific during the war. We opened up pillboxes with flamethrowers.”

“That should help.” He turned and moved off, skirting the wreckage, and I followed. A small khaki tarpaulin was spread out on the ground, bulged in the center where it covered an oblong object. Not a very big object. I began to catch the acrid-sweetish odor of burned meat, mixed with the faint biting scent of gasoline.

Martell bent and took hold of a corner of the tarpaulin. He said flatly, “Do the best you can, Mr. Kane,” and flipped back the heavy canvas.

It looked like nothing human. Except for the contours of legs and arms, it could have been a side of beef hauled out of a burning barn. Where the face had been was a smear of splintered and charred bone that bore no resemblance to a face. No hair, no clothing except for the remains of a woman’s shoe still clinging to the left foot; only blackened, flame-gnawed flesh and bones. And over it all the stench of a charnel house.

I backed away abruptly and clamped down on my teeth, fighting back a wave of nausea. Martell allowed the canvas to fall back into place. “Sorry, Mr. Kane. We can’t overlook any chances.”

“It’s all right,” I mumbled.

“You couldn’t identify …her?”

I shuddered. “Christ, no! Nobody could!”

“Let’s have a look at the car.”

I circled the wreck twice. It had stopped right-side up, the tires flat, the hood ripped to shreds, the engine shoved halfway into the front seat. The steering wheel was snapped off and the dashboard appeared to have been worked over with a sledgehammer. Flames had eaten away the upholstery and blackened the entire interior.

It was Donnas car; no doubt about that. The license plates showed the right number and a couple of rust spots on the right rear fender were as I remembered them. I said as much to Chief Deputy Martell and he nodded briefly and went over to say something I couldn’t hear to the four men.

He came back to me after a minute or two. “I’ve a few questions. Nothing more for you down here. Let’s go back upstairs.”

He was holding something in one hand. It was a woman’s bag: blue suede, small, with a gold clasp shaped like a question mark. I recognized it and my mouth felt a little dry.

It was a job getting up the steep slope. The red loam was dry and crumbled under my feet. The sun was still high enough to be hot on my back and my hands were sticky with ooze from the sagebrush.

Martell was waiting for me when I reached the road. I sat down on the front bumper of one of the department cars and shook the loose dirt out of my shoes, wiped most of the sage ooze off my palms, and brushed the knees of my trousers. The man in the green khaki uniform was still behind the wheel of the lead car but he wasn’t smoking now.

I followed the sheriff into the front seat of a black-and-white Mercury with a buggy-whip aerial at the rear bumper and a radio phone on the dash. He lit up a small yellow cigar in violation of a fire-hazard signboard across the road from us. He dropped the match into the dashboard ashtray and leaned back in the seat and bounced the suede bag lightly on one of his broad palms.

IV

He said, “One of the boys found this in a clump of sage halfway down the slope. You ever see it before?”

“My wife has one like it.”

He cocked an eye at me. “Not like it, Mr. Kane. This is hers. Personal effects, identification cards, all that. No doubt at all.”

“…OK.”

“And that’s your wife’s car?”

“Yeah.”

“But you say it’s not your wife who was in it?”

“No question about it,” I said firmly.

“When did you see her last?”

“Around nine-thirty this morning.” “But you talked to her later, I understand.”

“That’s right.”

“What time?”

“A few minutes past four this afternoon.”

He puffed out some blue smoke. “Sure it was your wife?”

“If I wouldn’t know, who would?”

His strong face was thoughtful, his blue eyes distant. “Mrs. Kane’s a singer, I understand.”

“That’s right,” I told him. “Uses her maiden name: Donna Collins.”

He smiled suddenly, showing good teeth. “Oh, sure. The missus and I heard her on the Dancing in Velvet program last week. She’s good — and a mighty lovely young woman, Mr. Kane.”

I muttered something polite. He put some cigar ash into the tray and leaned back again and said, “They must pay her pretty good, being a radio star.”

“Not a star,” I explained patiently. “Just a singer. It pays well, of course — but nothing like the top names pull down. However, Donna’s well fixed in her own right; her father died a while back and left her what amounts to quite a bit of money …Look, Sheriff, what’s the point of keeping me here? I don’t know who the dead woman is, but since she was using my wife’s car, the one to talk to is Mrs. Kane. She’s bound to be home by this time; why not ride into town with me and ask her?”

He was still holding the handbag. He put it down on the seat between us and looked off toward the blue haze that marked the foothills south of Burbank. “Your wife’s not home, Mr. Kane,” he said very quietly.

A vague feeling of alarm stirred within me. “How do you know that?” I demanded.

He gestured at the two-way radio. “The office is calling your apartment at ten-minute intervals. As soon as Mrs. Kane answers her phone, I’m to get word. I haven’t got it yet.”

I said harshly, “What am I supposed to do — sit here until they call you?”

He sighed a little and turned sideways on the seat far enough to cross his legs. The light blue of his eyes was frosted over now, and his jaw was a grim line.

“I’m going to have to talk to you like a Dutch uncle, Mr. Kane. As you saw, we’ve got a dead woman down there as the result of what, to all intents and purposes, was an unfortunate accident. Everything points to the victim’s being your wife except for two things, one of them your insistence that you spoke to her on the phone nearly two hours after the accident. That leaves us wondering — and with any one of several answers. One is that you’re lying; that you didn’t speak to her at all. If that’s the right answer, we can’t figure out the reason behind it. Two: your wife loaned a friend the car. Three: somebody lifted it from where it was parked. Four: you drove up here with her, knocked her in the head, and let the car roll over the edge.”

“Of all the goddamn-!”

He held up a hand, cutting me off. “Let’s take ‘em one at a time. I can’t see any reason, even if you murdered her, why you’d say your wife telephoned you afterwards. So until and unless something turns up to show us why you’d lie about it, I’ll have to believe she did make that call. As for her loaning the car, that could very well have happened, only it doesn’t explain why she’s missing now. This business of the car’s being stolen doesn’t hold up, because the key was still in the ignition and in this case.”

He took a folded handkerchief from the side pocket of his coat and opened it. A badly scorched leather case came to light, containing the ignition and trunk keys. The rest of the hooks were empty. I sat there staring at it, feeling my insides slowly and painfully contracting.