“Recognize it?” Martell asked softly
I nodded numbly. “It’s Donnas.”
He picked up the handbag with his free hand and thrust it at me. “Take a look through it.”
Still numb, I released the clasp and pawed through the contents. A small green-leather wallet containing seventy or eighty dollars and the usual identification cards, one of them with my office, address, and phone number. Lipstick, compact, mirror, comb, two initialed handkerchiefs, a few hairpins. The French enamel cigarette case and matching lighter I’d given her on her twenty-fifth birthday three months ago. Less than a dollar in change.
That was all. Nothing else. I shoved the stuff back in the bag and closed the clasp with stiff fingers and sat there looking dully at Martell.
He was refolding the handkerchief around the key case. He returned it to his pocket carefully, took the cigar out of his mouth and inspected the glowing tip.
“Your wife wear any jewelry, Mr. Kane?” he asked casually.
I nodded. “A wristwatch. Her wedding and engagement rings.”
“We didn’t find them. No jewelry at all.”
“You wouldn’t,” I said. “Whoever that is down there, she’s not Donna Kane.”
He sat there and looked out through the windshield and appeared to be thinking. He wore no hat and there was a strong sprinkling of gray in his hair and a bald spot about the size of a silver dollar at the crown. There was a network of fine wrinkles at the corners of his eyes, as there so often is in men who spend a great deal of time in the sun. He looked calm and confident and competent and not at all heroic.
Presently he said, “That phone call. No doubt at all that it was your wife?”
“None.”
“Recognized her voice, eh?”
I frowned. “Not so much that. It was more what she said. You know, certain expressions nobody else’d use. Pet name — you know.”
His lips quirked and I felt my cheeks burn. He said, “Near as you can remember, tell me about that call. If she sounded nervous or upset — the works.”
I put it all together for him, forgetting nothing. Then I went on about stopping off at the apartment, what I’d found there and what Ruth Feldman had said. Martell didn’t interrupt, only sat there drawing on his cigar and soaking it all in.
After I was finished, he didn’t move or say anything for what seemed a long time. Then he leaned forward and ground out the stub of the cigar and put a hand in the coat pocket next to me and brought out one of those flapped bags women use for formal dress, about the size of a business envelope and with an appliqued design worked into it. Wordlessly he turned back the flap and let a square gold compact and matching lipstick holder slide out into the other hand.
“Ever see these before, Kane?”
I took them from him. His expression was impossible to read. There was nothing unusual about the lipstick tube, but the compact had a circle of brilliants in one corner and the initials H.W. in the circle.
I handed them back. “New to me, Sheriff.”
He was watching me closely. “Think a minute. This can be important. Either you or your wife know a woman with the initials H.W.?”
“…Not that I…Helen? Helen! Sure; Helen Wainhope! Dave Wainhope’s wife.” I frowned. “I don’t get it, Sheriff.”
He said slowly, “We found this bag a few feet from the wreck. Any idea how it might have gotten there?”
“Not that I can think of.”
“How well do you know these Wainhopes?”
“About as well as you get to know anybody. Dave is business manager for some pretty prominent radio people. A producer, couple of directors, seven or eight actors that I know of.”
“You mean he’s an agent?”
“Not that. These are people who make big money but can’t seem to hang on to it. Dave collects their checks, puts ‘em on an allowance, pays their bills, and invests the rest. Any number of men in that line around town.”
“How long have you known them?”
“Dave and Helen? Two, three years. Shortly after I got out here. As a matter of fact, he introduced me to Donna. She’s one of his clients.”
“The four of you go out together?”
“Now and then; sure.”
“In your wife’s car?”
“…I see what you’re getting at. You figure Helen might have left her bag there. Not a chance, Sheriff. We always used Dave’s Cadillac. Helen has a Pontiac convertible.”
“When did you see them last?”
“Well, I don’t know about Donna, but I had lunch with Dave …let’s see …day before yesterday. He has an office in the Taft Building.”
“Where do they live?”
“Over on one of those little roads off Beverly Glen. Not far from here, come to think about it.”
With slow care he pushed the compact and lipstick back in the folder and dropped it into the pocket it had come out of. “Taft Building, hunh?” he murmured. “Think he’s there now?”
I looked at my strapwatch. Four minutes till six. “I doubt it, Sheriff. He should be home by this time.”
“You know the exact address?”
“Well, it’s on Angola, overlooking the southern tip of the Reservoir. A good-sized redwood ranch house on the hill there. It’s the only house within a couple miles. You can’t miss it.”
He leaned past me and swung open the door. “Go on home, Kane. Soon as your wife shows up, call the station and leave word for me. I may call you later.”
“What about her car?”
He smiled without humor. “Nobody’s going to swipe it. Notify your insurance agent in the morning. But I still want to talk to Mrs. Kane.”
I slid out and walked back to my car. As I started the motor, the black-and-white Mercury made a tight turn on screaming tires and headed north. I pulled back onto the road and tipped a hand at the deputy. He glared at me over the cigarette he was lighting.
I drove much too fast all the way back to Hollywood.
V
She wasn’t there.
I snapped the switch that lit the end-table lamps flanking the couch and walked over to the window and stood there for a few minutes, staring down into Fountain Avenue. At seven o’clock it was still light outside. A small girl on roller skates scooted by, her sun-bleached hair flying. A tall, thin number in a pale blue sports coat and dark glasses got leisurely out of a green convertible with a wolf tail tied to the radiator emblem and sauntered into the apartment building across the street.
A formless fear was beginning to rise within me. I knew now that it had been born at four-thirty when I stopped off on my way to Stone Canyon and found the apartment empty. Seeing the charred body an hour later had strengthened that fear, even though I knew the dead woman couldn’t be Donna. Now that I had come home and found the place deserted, the fear was crawling into my throat, closing it to the point where breathing seemed a conscious effort.
I lit a cigarette and began to pace the floor. Let’s use a little logic on this, Kane. You used to be a top detective-story writer; let’s see you go to work on this the way one of your private eyes would operate.
All right, we’ve got a missing woman to find. To complicate matters, the missing woman’s car was found earlier in the day with a dead woman at the wheel. Impossible to identify her, but we know it’s not the one we’re
