On the back seat of his car lay the hat and sunglasses Douglas had been wearing in disguise. They’d been discarded. Along with the oversized jacket that Tom had lent him.
Tom considered what might have happened in the time he’d left Douglas sitting in his car. First of all, there was the possibility of Douglas heading for the midwest where he had relatives, and where there would be a certain amount of safety. But he certainly wouldn’t have gone without the disguise of the hat, glasses, and jacket.
What was more probable, as Tom saw it, was that Douglas had been spotted by some authorities approaching Tom’s car and rather than get Tom into trouble, had made a run for it. There was even the chance that he hadn’t got too far before he’d been captured and returned to the camps.
Feeling certain that he’d badly failed Douglas, for whose cause Tom had become so involved, he now leaned against the fender of his car and envisioned the young man being delivered, probably at gunpoint, back to the authorities in Los Angeles. For Tom, there was no other way of looking at what had happened except as his fault. And besides, he’d really taken a liking to the kid.
So deeply entrenched in this feeling of self-recrimination was Tom that he didn’t realize that somebody had come up from behind him.
“Hi,” Douglas said.
“Jeez, Douglas, where were you?” Tom said, relieved at seeing him, and husding him into the car.
“Out looking for Maggie,” Douglas said. “I felt useless just sitting here, so a couple of hours ago, I went way down into the ravine. There wasn’t any sign of Maggie and I would know. I used to go rabbit hunting with my dad. I’d know if an animal or a person was in the vicinity. There’s nothing down there except snakes. The place is loaded with them.”
“I don’t get it,” Tom said, puzzled. “Nobody walks from an accident like that,”
“If it was an accident,” Douglas ventured, sounding to himself like his favorite movie serial character, Richie O’Rourke, Boy Detective. “Maybe somebody knew she was on her way to harbor an escaped evacuee. Maybe she was captured by some gang or other. Like that bunch of hoods that attacked you the other day.”
“There’s no one that could have known what she was going to do,” Tom replied. “Unless she blabbed it to somebody.”
“Or,” Douglas conjectured, “unless she was followed here, forced off the road and abducted. With her car being shoved off the road to make it look like an accident.”
Tom remembered what the man at the records office had bragged to him about. Dealing with other hig stars by other means, usually fatal.
“Let’s get out of here,” Tom said, realizing Douglas could be right. A few minutes later he parked the Packard near Doc’s brightly lit diner. He found it full of police, rescue workers, press photographers and reporters. In one corner of the diner, Hedda Hopper had set up her headquarters from where she transmitted an hourly bulletin to her large radio audience.
Louella Parsons, with a similar set-up, ran her empire from the opposite corner of the restaurant. She made it quite clear on the air waves that hers was the very latest news regarding Maggie. The disappearance and search for Maggie Graym was proving to be one of the biggest news stories since the attack on Pearl Harbor.
“I ain’t never done business like this, I can tell you,” Doc said happily while tending the constantly ringing cash register.
Tom used up most of his food rations on a couple of ham sandwiches to go, and was waiting for his order when he overheard someone ask Doc if he’d seen somebody called Giuseppe Lambozza recently.
“Come to think of it, I saw Gus yesterday. Looks like he’s got a woman friend. Saw him driving past the station with a woman in that beat-up old Ford of his. I waved at him, but he speeded up, as much as that old rattlebox could take.”
“A woman, huh?” the customer replied. “Well, maybe that’s what Giuseppe needs. He’s been up there on his farm alone ever since his wife, Rosa, died, when would you say that was, about eighteen or twenty years ago?”
“More like twenty-five,” Doc answered. “And of course some people around these parts say Gus was a son of a bitch who worked poor Rosa to death. Renting her out to work as a rancho field hand from morning to night and at the same time making her keep up on all her other duties. So I feel sorry for any woman who gets in his path.”
“What did she look like anyway?” The customer asked.
“What are you talking about?” Doc asked. “You seen her around town just like me. She had black hair and had a face fulla moles and by the time Giuseppe got through with her she weighed about eighty pounds.”
“Not Rosa,” the customer replied impatiently, “I’m talking about the woman in the car. The woman who was in Giuseppe’s car. What did she look like?”
“Oh, her,” Doc said. “I couldn’t rightly see. I only know she was a woman.”
Tom had only been half listening to this conversation while waiting, but something about what they were saying made a connection for him. A longshot connection, to be sure, but still, something to go on.
He rushed Doc, momentarily startling the old man.
“Where does this guy live?” Tom demanded.
“Hold on, young fella, hold on,” Doc said, “where does who live?”
“This guy you two were just talking about.” Tom said, “This Giuseppe guy!”