(Originally published in 1946)
I sat in my brand-new office with the odor of paint in my nostrils and waited for something to happen. I had been back on the Boulevard for one day. This was the beginning of the second day. Below the window, flashing in the morning sun, the traffic raced and roared with a noise like battle. It made me nervous. It made me want to move. I was all dressed up in civilian clothes with no place to go and nobody to go with.
Till Millicent Dreen came in.
I had seen her before, on the Strip with various escorts, and knew who she was: publicity director for Tele-Pictures. Mrs. Dreen was over forty and looked it, but there was electricity in her, plugged in to a secret source that time could never wear out. Look how high and tight I carry my body, her movements said. My hair is hennaed but comely, said her coiffure, inviting not to conviction but to suspension of disbelief. Her eyes were green and inconstant like the sea. They said what the hell.
She sat down by my desk and told me that her daughter had disappeared the day before, which was September the seventh.
“I was in Hollywood all day. We keep an apartment here, and there was some work I had to get out fast. Una isn’t working, so I left her at the beach house by herself.”
“Where is it?”
“A few miles above Santa Barbara.”
“That’s a long way to commute.”
“It’s worth it to me. When I can maneuver a weekend away from this town, I like to get really away.”
“Maybe your daughter feels the same, only more so. When did she leave?”
“Sometime yesterday. When I drove home to the beach house last night she was gone.”
“Did you call the police?”
“Hardly. She’s twenty-two and knows what she’s doing. I hope. Anyway, apron strings don’t become me.” She smiled like a cat and moved her scarlet-taloned fingers in her narrow lap. “It was very late and I was—tired. I went to bed. But when I woke up this morning it occurred to me that she might have drowned. I objected to it because she wasn’t a strong swimmer, but she went in for solitary swimming. I think of the most dreadful things when I wake up in the morning.”
“Went in for solitary swimming, Mrs. Dreen?”
“‘Went’ slipped out, didn’t it? I told you I think of dreadful things when I wake up in the morning.”
“If she drowned you should be talking to the police. They can arrange for dragging and such things. All I can give you is my sympathy.”
As if to estimate the value of that commodity, her eyes flickered from my shoulders to my waist and up again to my face. “Frankly, I don’t know about the police. I do know about you, Mr. Archer. You just got out of the army, didn’t you?”
“Last week.” I failed to add that she was my first postwar client.
“And you don’t belong to anybody, I’ve heard. You’ve never been bought. Is that right?”
“Not outright. You can take an option on a piece of me, though. A hundred dollars would do for a starter.”
She nodded briskly. From a bright black bag she gave me five twenties. “Naturally, I’m conscious of publicity angles. My daughter retired a year ago when she married—”
“Twenty-one is a good age to retire.”
“From pictures, maybe you’re right. But she could want to go back if her marriage breaks up. And I have to look out for myself. It isn’t true that there’s no such thing as bad publicity. I don’t know why Una went away.”
“Is your daughter Una Sand?”
“Of course. I assumed you knew.” My ignorance of the details of her life seemed to cause her pain. She didn’t have to tell me that she had a feeling for publicity angles.
Though Una Sand meant less to me than Hecuba, I remembered the name and with it a glazed blonde who had had a year or two in the sun, but who’d made a better pin-up than an actress.
“Wasn’t her marriage happy? I mean, isn’t it?”
“You see how easy it is to slip into the past tense?” Mrs. Dreen smiled another fierce and purring smile, and her fingers fluttered in glee before her immobile body. “I suppose her marriage is happy enough. Her Ensign’s quite a personable young man—handsome in a masculine way, and passionate she tells me, and naive enough.”
“Naive enough for what?”
“To marry Una. Jack Rossiter was quite a catch in this woman’s town. He was runner-up at Forest Hills the last year he played tennis. And now of course he’s a flier. Una did right well by herself, even if it doesn’t last.”
What do you expect of a war marriage? she seemed to be saying. Permanence? Fidelity? The works?
“As a matter of fact,” she went on, “it was thinking about Jack, more than anything else, that brought me here to you. He’s due back this week, and naturally”—like many unnatural people, she overused that adverb—“he’ll expect her to be waiting for him. It’ll be rather embarrassing for me if he comes home and I can’t tell him where she’s gone, or why, or with whom. You’d really think she’d leave a note.”
“I can’t keep up with you,” I said. “A minute ago Una was in the clutches of the cruel crawling foam. Now she’s taken off with a romantic stranger.”
“I consider possibilities, is all. When I was Una’s age, married to Dreen, I had quite a time settling down. I still do.”
Our gazes, mine as impassive as hers I hoped, met, struck no spark, and disengaged. The female spider who eats her mate held no attraction for me.
“I’m getting to know you pretty well,” I said with the necessary smile, “but not the missing girl. Who’s she been knocking around with?”
“I don’t think we need to go into that. She doesn’t confide in me, in any case.”
“Whatever you say. Shall we look at the scene of the crime?”
“There isn’t any crime.”
“The scene of the accident, then, or the departure. Maybe the beach house will give me something to go on.”
She glanced at the wafer-thin watch on her brown wrist. Its diamonds glittered coldly. “Do I have to drive all the way back?”
“If you can spare the time, it might help. We’ll take my car.”
She rose decisively but gracefully, as though she had practiced the movement in front of a mirror. An expert bitch, I thought as I followed her high slim shoulders and tight-sheathed hips down the stairs to the bright street. I felt a little sorry for the army of men who had warmed themselves, or been burned, at that secret electricity. And I wondered if her daughter Una was like her.
When I did get to see Una, the current had been cut off; I learned about it only by the marks it left. It left marks.
We drove down Sunset to the sea and north on 101 Alternate. All the way to Santa Barbara, she read a typescript whose manila cover was marked: Temporary—This script is not final and is given to you for advance information only. It occurred to me that the warning might apply to Mrs. Dreen’s own story.
As we left the Santa Barbara city limits, she tossed the script over her shoulder into the backseat. “It really smells. It’s going to be a smash.”
A few miles north of the city, a dirt road branched off to the left beside a filling station. It wound for a mile or more through broken country to her private beach. The beach house was set well back from the sea at the convergence of brown bluffs which huddled over it like scarred shoulders. To reach it we had to drive along the beach for a quarter of a mile, detouring to the very edge of the sea around the southern bluff.
The blue-white dazzle of sun, sand, and surf was like an arcfurnace. But I felt some breeze from the water when we got out of the car. A few languid clouds moved inland over our heads. A little high plane was gamboling among them like a terrier in a henyard.
“You have privacy,” I said to Mrs. Dreen.
She stretched, and touched her varnished hair with her fingers. “One tires of the goldfish role. When I lie out there in the afternoons I—forget I have a name.” She pointed to the middle of the cove beyond the breakers, where a white raft moved gently in the swells. “I simply take off my clothes and revert to protoplasm. All my clothes.”
I looked up at the plane whose pilot was doodling in the sky. It dropped, turning like an early falling leaf, swooped like a hawk, climbed like an aspiration.
She said with a laugh: “If they come too low I cover my face, of course.”
We had been moving away from the house towards the water. Nothing could have looked more innocent than the quiet cove held in the curve of the white beach like a benign blue eye in a tranquil brow. Then its colors shifted as a cloud passed over the sun. Cruel green and violent purple ran in the blue. I felt the old primitive terror and fascination. Mrs. Dreen shared the feeling and put it into words:
“It’s got queer moods. I hate it sometimes as much as I love it.” For an instant she looked old and uncertain. “I hope she isn’t in there.”
The tide had turned and was coming in, all the way from Hawaii and beyond, all the way from the shattered islands where bodies lay unburied in the burnt-out caves. The waves came up towards us, fumbling and gnawing at the beach like an immense soft mouth.
“Are there bad currents here, or anything like that?”
“No. It’s deep, though. It must be twenty feet under the raft. I could never bottom it.”
“I’d like to look at her room,” I said. “It might tell us where she went, and even with whom. You’d know what clothes were missing?”
She laughed a little apologetically as she opened the door. “I used to dress my daughter, naturally. Not any more. Besides, more than half her things must be in the Hollywood apartment. I’ll try to help you, though.”
It was good to step out of the vibrating brightness of the beach into shadowy stillness behind Venetian blinds. “I noticed that you unlocked the door,” I said. “It’s a big house with a lot of furniture in it. No servants?”
“I occasionally have to knuckle under to producers. But I won’t to my employees. They’ll be easier to get along with soon, now that the plane plants are shutting down.”
We went to Una’s room, which was light and airy in both atmosphere and furnishings. But it showed the lack of servants. Stockings, shoes, underwear, dresses, bathing suits, lipstick-smeared tissue littered the chairs and the floor. The bed was unmade. The framed photograph on the night table was obscured by two empty glasses which smelt of highball, and flanked by overflowing ashtrays.
I moved the glasses and looked at the young man with the wings on his chest. Naive, handsome, passionate were words which suited the strong, blunt nose, the full lips and square jaw, the wide proud eyes. For Mrs. Dreen he would have made a single healthy meal, and I wondered again if her daughter was a carnivore. At least the photograph of Jack Rossiter was the only sign of a man in her room. The two glasses could easily have been from separate nights. Or separate weeks, to judge by the condition of the room. Not that it wasn’t an attractive room. It was like a pretty girl in disarray. But disarray.
We examined the room, the closets, the bathroom, and found nothing of importance, either positive or negative. When we had waded through the brilliant and muddled wardrobe which Una had shed, I turned to Mrs. Dreen.
“I guess I’ll have to go back to Hollywood. It would help me if you’d come along. It would help me more if you’d tell me who your daughter knew. Or rather who she liked—I suppose she knew everybody. Remember you suggested yourself that there’s a man in this.”
“I take it you haven’t found anything?”
“One thing I’m pretty sure of. She didn’t intentionally go away for long. Her toilet articles and pills are still in her bathroom. She’s got quite a collection of pills.”
“Yes, Una’s always been a hypochondriac. Also she left Jack’s picture. She only had the one, because she liked it best.”
“That isn’t so conclusive,” I said. “I don’t suppose you’d know whether there’s a bathing suit missing?”
“I really couldn’t say, she had so many. She was at her best in them.”
“Still was?”
“I guess so, as a working hypothesis. Unless you can find me evidence to the contrary.”
“You didn’t like your daughter much, did you?”
“No. I didn’t like her father. And she was prettier than I.”
“But not so intelligent?”
“Not as bitchy, you mean? She was bitchy enough. But I’m still worried about Jack. He loved her. Even if I didn’t.”
The telephone in the hall took the cue and began to ring. “This is Millicent Dreen,” she said into it. “Yes, you may read it to me.” A pause. “‘Kill the fatted calf, ice the champagne, turn down the sheets and break out the black silk nightie. Am coming home tomorrow.’ Is that right?”
Then she said, “Hold it a minute. I wish to send an answer. To Ensign Jack Rossiter, USS Guam, CVE 173, Naval Air Station, Alameda—is that Ensign Rossiter’s correct address? The text is: ‘Dear Jack join me at the Hollywood apartment there is no one at the beach house. Millicent.’ Repeat it, please…. Right. Thank you.”
She turned from the phone and collapsed in the nearest chair, not forgetting to arrange her legs symmetrically.
“So Jack is coming home tomorrow?” I said. “All I had before was no evidence. Now I have no evidence and until tomorrow.”
She leaned forward to look at me. “I’ve been wondering how far I can trust you.”
“Not so far. But I’m not a blackmailer. I’m not a mind reader, either, and it’s sort of hard to play tennis with the invisible man.”
“The invisible man has nothing to do with this. I called him when Una didn’t come home. Just before I came to your office.”
“All right,” I said. “You’re the one that wants to find Una. You’ll get around to telling me. In the meantime, who else did you call?”
“Hilda Karp, Una’s best friend—her only female friend.”
“Where can I get hold of her?”
“She married Gray Karp, the agent. They live in Beverly Hills.”
Their house, set high on a plateau of rolling lawn, was huge and fashionably grotesque: Spanish Mission with a dash of Paranoia. The room where I waited for Mrs. Karp was as big as a small barn and full of blue furniture. The bar had a brass rail.
Hilda Karp was a Dresden blonde with an athletic body and brains. By appearing in it, she made the room seem more real. “Mr. Archer, I believe?” She had my card in her hand, the one with Private Investigator on it.
“Una Sand disappeared yesterday. Her mother said you were her best friend.”
“Millicent—Mrs. Dreen—called me early this morning. But, as I said then, I haven’t seen Una for several days.”
“Why would she go away?”
Hilda Karp sat down on the arm of a chair, and looked thoughtful. “I can’t understand why her mother should be worried. She can take care of herself, and she’s gone away before. I don’t know why this time. I know her well enough to know that she’s unpredictable.”
“Why did she go away before?”
“Why do girls leave home, Mr. Archer?”
“She picked a queer time to leave home. Her husband’s coming home tomorrow.”
“That’s right, she told me he sent her a cable from Pearl. He’s a nice boy.”
“Did Una think so?”
She looked at me frigidly as only a pale blonde can look, and said nothing.
“Look,” I said. “I’m trying to do a job for Mrs. Dreen. My job is laying skeletons to rest, not teaching them the choreography of the Danse Macabre.”
“Nicely put,” she said. “Actually there’s no skeleton. Una has played around, in a perfectly casual way I mean, with two or three men in the last year.”
“Simultaneously, or one at a time?”
“One at a time. She’s monandrous to that extent. The latest is Terry Neville.”
“I thought he was married.”
“In an interlocutory way only. For God’s sake don’t bring my name into it. My husband’s in business in this town.”
“He seems to be prosperous,” I said, looking more at her than at the house. “Thank you very much, Mrs. Karp. Your name will never pass my lips.”
“Hideous, isn’t it? The name, I mean. But I couldn’t help falling in love with the guy. I hope you find her. Jack will be terribly disappointed if you don’t.”
I had begun to turn towards the door, but turned back. “It couldn’t be anything like this, could it? She heard he was coming home, she felt unworthy of him, unable to face him, so she decided to lam out?”
“Millicent said she didn’t leave a letter. Women don’t go in for all such drama and pathos without leaving a letter. Or at least a marked copy of Tolstoi’s Resurrection.”
“I’ll take your word for it.” Her blue eyes were very bright in the great dim room. “How about this? She didn’t like Jack at all. She went away for the sole purpose of letting him know that. A little sadism, maybe?”
“But she did like Jack. It’s just that he was away for over a year. Whenever the subject came up in a mixed gathering, she always insisted that he was a wonderful lover.”
“Like that, eh? Did Mrs. Dreen say you were Una’s best friend?”
Her eyes were brighter and her thin, pretty mouth twisted in amusement. “Certainly. You should have heard her talk about me.”
“Maybe I will. Thanks. Good-bye.”
A telephone call to a screenwriter I knew, the suit for which I had paid a hundred and fifty dollars of separation money in a moment of euphoria, and a false air of assurance got me past the studio guards and as far as the door of Terry Neville’s dressing room. He had a bungalow to himself, which meant that he was as important as the publicity claimed. I didn’t know what I was going to say to him, but I knocked on the door and, when someone said, “Who is it?” showed him.
Only the blind had not seen Terry Neville. He was over six feet, colorful, shapely, and fragrant like a distant garden of flowers. For a minute he went on reading and smoking in his brocaded armchair, carefully refraining from raising his eyes to look at me. He even turned a page of his book.
“Who are you?” he said finally. “I don’t know you.”
“Una Sand—”
“I don’t know her, either.” Grammatical solecisms had been weeded out of his speech, but nothing had been put in their place. His voice was impersonal and lifeless.
“Millicent Dreen’s daughter,” I said, humoring him. “Una Rossiter.”
“Naturally I know Millicent Dreen. But you haven’t said anything. Good day.”
“Una disappeared yesterday. I thought you might be willing to help me find out why.”
“You still haven’t said anything.” He got up and took a step towards me, very tall and wide. “What I said was good day.”
But not tall and wide enough. I’ve always had an idea, probably incorrect, that I could handle any man who wears a scarlet silk bath-robe. He saw that idea on my face and changed his tune: “If you don’t get out of here, my man, I’ll call a guard.”
“In the meantime I’d straighten out that marcel of yours. I might even be able to make a little trouble for you.” I said that on the assumption that any man with his face and sexual opportunities would be on the brink of trouble most of the time.
It worked. “What do you mean by saying that?” he said. A sudden pallor made his carefully plucked black eyebrows stand out starkly. “You could get into a very great deal of hot water by standing there talking like that.”
“What happened to Una?”
“I don’t know. Get out of here.”
“You’re a liar.”
Like one of the clean-cut young men in one of his own movies, he threw a punch at me. I let it go over my shoulder and while he was off balance placed the heel of my hand against his very flat solar plexus and pushed him down into his chair. Then I shut the door and walked fast to the front gate. I’d just as soon have gone on playing tennis with the invisible man.
“No luck, I take it?” Mrs. Dreen said when she opened the door of her apartment to me.
“I’ve got nothing to go on. If you really want to find your daughter you’d better go to Missing Persons. They’ve got the organization and the connections.”
“I suppose Jack will be going to them. He’s home already.”
“I thought he was coming tomorrow.”
“That telegram was sent yesterday. It was delayed somehow. His ship got in yesterday afternoon.”
“Where is he now?”
“At the beach house by now, I guess. He flew down from Alameda in a Navy plane and called me from Santa Barbara.”
“What did you tell him?”
“What could I tell him? That Una was gone. He’s frantic. He thinks she may have drowned.” It was late afternoon, and in spite of the whiskey which she was absorbing steadily, like an alcohol lamp, Mrs. Dreen’s fires were burning low. Her hands and eyes were limp, and her voice was weary.
“Well,” I said, “I might as well go back to Santa Barbara. I talked to Hilda Karp but she couldn’t help me. Are you coming along?”
“Not again. I have to go to the studio tomorrow. Anyway, I don’t want to see Jack just now. I’ll stay here.”
The sun was low over the sea, gold-leafing the water and bloodying the sky, when I got through Santa Barbara and back onto the coast highway. Not thinking it would do any good but by way of doing something or other to earn my keep, I stopped at the filling station where the road turned off to Mrs. Dreen’s beach house.
“Fill her up,” I said to the woman attendant. I needed gas anyway.
“I’ve got some friends who live around here,” I said when she held out her hand for her money. “Do you know where Mrs. Dreen lives?”
She looked at me from behind disapproving spectacles. “You should know. You were down there with her today, weren’t you?”
I covered my confusion by handing her a five and telling her: “Keep the change.”
“No, thank you.”
“Don’t misunderstand me. All I want you to do is tell me who was there yesterday. You see all. Tell a little.”
“Who are you?”
I showed her my card.
“Oh.” Her lips moved unconsciously, computing the size of the tip. “There was a guy in a green convert, I think it was a Chrysler. He went down around noon and drove out again around four, I guess it was, like a bat out of hell.”
“That’s what I wanted to hear. You’re wonderful. What did he look like?”
“Sort of dark and pretty good-looking. It’s kind of hard to describe. Like the guy that took the part of the pilot in that picture last week—you know—only not so good-looking.”
“Terry Neville.”
“That’s right, only not so good-looking. I’ve seen him go down there plenty of times.”
“I don’t know who that would be,” I said, “but thanks anyway. There wasn’t anybody with him, was there?”
“Not that I could see.”
I went down the road to the beach house like a bat into hell. The sun, huge and angry red, was horizontal now, half-eclipsed by the sea and almost perceptibly sinking. It spread a red glow over the shore like a soft and creeping fire. After a long time, I thought, the cliffs would crumble, the sea would dry up, the whole earth would burn out. There’d be nothing left but bone-white cratered ashes like the moon.
When I rounded the bluff and came within sight of the beach I saw a man coming out of the sea. In the creeping fire which the sun shed he, too, seemed to be burning. The diving mask over his face made him look strange and inhuman. He walked out of the water as if he had never set foot on land before.
I walked towards him. “Mr. Rossiter?”
“Yes.” He raised the glass mask from his face and with it the illusion of strangeness lifted. He was just a handsome young man, well-set-up, tanned, and worried-looking.
“My name is Archer.”
He held out his hand, which was wet, after wiping it on his bathing trunks, which were also wet. “Oh, yes, Mr. Archer. My mother-in-law mentioned you over the phone.”
“Are you enjoying your swim?”
“I am looking for the body of my wife.” It sounded as if he meant it. I looked at him more closely. He was big and husky, but he was just a kid, twenty-two or -three at most. Out of school into the air, I thought. Probably met Una Sand at a party, fell hard for all that glamour, married her the week before he shipped out, and had dreamed bright dreams ever since. I remembered the brash telegram he had sent, as if life was like the people in slick magazine advertisements.
“What makes you think she drowned?”
“She wouldn’t go away like this. She knew I was coming home this week. I cabled her from Pearl.”
“Maybe she never got the cable.”
After a pause he said: “Excuse me.” He turned towards the waves which were breaking almost at his feet. The sun had disappeared, and the sea was turning gray and cold-looking, an antihuman element.
“Wait a minute. If she’s in there, which I doubt, you should call the police. This is no way to look for her.”
“If I don’t find her before dark, I’ll call them then,” he said. “But if she’s here, I want to find her myself.” I could never have guessed his reason for that, but when I found it out it made sense. So far as anything in the situation made sense.
He walked a few steps into the surf, which was heavier now that the tide was coming in, plunged forward, and swam slowly towards the raft with his masked face under the water. His arms and legs beat the rhythm of the crawl as if his muscles took pleasure in it, but his face was downcast, searching the darkening sea floor. He swam in widening circles about the raft, raising his head about twice a minute for air.
He had completed several circles and I was beginning to feel that he wasn’t really looking for anything, but expressing his sorrow, dancing a futile ritualistic water dance, when suddenly he took air and dived. For what seemed a long time but was probably about twenty seconds, the surface of the sea was empty except for the white raft. Then the masked head broke water, and Rossiter began to swim towards shore. He swam a laborious side stroke, with both arms submerged. It was twilight now, and I couldn’t see him very well, but I could see that he was swimming very slowly. When he came nearer I saw a swirl of yellow hair.
He stood up, tore off his mask, and threw it away into the sea. He looked at me angrily, one arm holding the body of his wife against him. The white body half-floating in the shifting water was nude, a strange bright glistening catch from the sea floor.
“Go away,” he said in a choked voice.
I went to get a blanket out of the car, and brought it to him where he laid her out on the beach. He huddled over her as if to protect her body from my gaze. He covered her and stroked her wet hair back from her face. Her face was not pretty. He covered that, too.
I said: “You’ll have to call the police now.”
After a time he answered: “I guess you’re right. Will you help me carry her into the house?”
I helped him. Then I called the police in Santa Barbara, and told them that a woman had been drowned and where to find her. I left Jack Rossiter shivering in his wet trunks beside her blanketed body, and drove back to Hollywood for the second time.
Millicent Dreen was in her apartment in the Park-Wilshire. In the afternoon there had been a nearly full decanter of scotch on her buffet. At ten o’clock it was on the coffee table beside her chair, and nearly empty. Her face and body had sagged. I wondered if every day she aged so many years, and every morning recreated herself through the power of her will.
She said: “I thought you were going back to Santa Barbara. I was just going to go to bed.”
“I did go. Didn’t Jack phone you?”
“No.” She looked at me, and her green eyes were suddenly very much alive, almost fluorescent. “You found her?” she said.
“Jack found her in the sea. She was drowned.”
“I was afraid of that.” But there was something like relief in her voice. As if worse things might have happened. As if at least she had lost no weapons and gained no foes in the daily battle to hold position in the world’s most competitive city.
“You hired me to find her,” I said. “She’s found, though I had nothing to do with finding her—and that’s that. Unless you want me to find out who drowned her.”
“What do you mean?”
“What I said. Perhaps it wasn’t an accident. Or perhaps somebody stood by and watched her drown.”
I had given her plenty of reason to be angry with me before, but for the first time that day she was angry. “I gave you a hundred dollars for doing nothing. Isn’t that enough for you? Are you trying to drum up extra business?”
“I did one thing. I found out that Una wasn’t by herself yesterday.”
“Who was with her?” She stood up and walked quickly back and forth across the rug. As she walked her body was remolding itself into the forms of youth and vigor. She recreated herself before my eyes.
“The invisible man,” I said. “My tennis partner.”
Still she wouldn’t speak the name. She was like the priestess of a cult whose tongue was forbidden to pronounce a secret word. But she said quickly and harshly: “If my daughter was killed I want to know who did it. I don’t care who it was. But if you’re giving me a line and if you make trouble for me and nothing comes of it, I’ll have you kicked out of Southern California. I could do that.”
Her eyes flashed, her breath came fast, and her sharp breast rose and fell with many of the appearances of genuine feeling. I liked her very much at that moment. So I went away, and instead of making trouble for her I made trouble for myself.
I found a booth in a drugstore on Wilshire and confirmed what I knew, that Terry Neville would have an unlisted number. I called a girl I knew who fed gossip to a movie columnist, and found out that Neville lived in Beverly Hills but spent most of his evenings around town. At this time of night he was usually at Ronald’s or Chasen’s, a little later at Ciro’s. I went to Ronald’s because it was nearer, and Terry Neville was there.
He was sitting in a booth for two in the long, low, smoke-filled room, eating smoked salmon and drinking stout. Across from him there was a sharp-faced terrier-like man who looked like his business manager and was drinking milk. Some Hollywood actors spend a lot of time with their managers, because they have a common interest.
I avoided the headwaiter and stepped up to Neville’s table. He saw me and stood up, saying: “I warned you this afternoon. If you don’t get out of here I’ll call the police.”
I said quietly: “I sort of am the police. Una is dead.” He didn’t answer and I went on: “This isn’t a good place to talk. If you’ll step outside for a minute I’d like to mention a couple of facts to you.”
“You say you’re a policeman,” the sharp-faced man snapped, but quietly. “Where’s your identification? Don’t pay any attention to him, Terry.”
Terry didn’t say anything. I said: “I’m a private detective. I’m investigating the death of Una Rossiter. Shall we step outside, gentlemen?”
“We’ll go out to the car,” Terry Neville said tonelessly. “Come on, Ed,” he added to the terrier-like man.
The car was not a green Chrysler convertible, but a black Packard limousine equipped with a uniformed chauffeur. When we entered the parking lot he got out of the car and opened the door. He was big and battered-looking.
I said: “I don’t think I’ll get in. I listen better standing up. I always stand up at concerts and confessions.”
“You’re not going to listen to anything,” Ed said.
The parking lot was deserted and far back from the street, and I forgot to keep my eye on the chauffeur. He rabbit-punched me and a gush of pain surged into my head. He rabbit-punched me again and my eyes rattled in their sockets and my body became invertebrate. Two men moving in a maze of lights took hold of my upper arms and lifted me into the car. Unconsciousness was a big black limousine with a swiftly purring motor and the blinds down.
Though it leaves the neck sore for days, the effect of a rabbit punch on the centers of consciousness is sudden and brief. In two or three minutes I came out of it, to the sound of Ed’s voice saying:
“We don’t like hurting people and we aren’t going to hurt you. But you’ve got to learn to understand, whatever your name is—”
“Sacher-Masoch,” I said.
“A bright boy,” said Ed. “But a bright boy can be too bright for his own good. You’ve got to learn to understand that you can’t go around annoying people, especially very important people like Mr. Neville here.”
Terry Neville was sitting in the far corner of the backseat, looking worried. Ed was between us. The car was in motion, and I could see lights moving beyond the chauffeur’s shoulders hunched over the wheel. The blinds were down over the back windows.
“Mr. Neville should keep out of my cases,” I said. “At the moment you’d better let me out of this car or I’ll have you arrested for kidnaping.”
Ed laughed, but not cheerfully. “You don’t seem to realize what’s happening to you. You’re on your way to the police station, where Mr. Neville and I are going to charge you with attempted blackmail.”
“Mr. Neville is a very brave little man,” I said. “Inasmuch as he was seen leaving Una Sand’s house shortly after she was killed. He was seen leaving in a great hurry and a green convertible.”
“My God, Ed,” Terry Neville said, “you’re getting me in a frightful mess. You don’t know what a frightful mess you’re getting me in.” His voice was high, with a ragged edge of hysteria.
“For God’s sake, you’re not afraid of this bum, are you?” Ed said in a terrier yap.
“You get out of here, Ed. This is a terrible thing, and you don’t know how to handle it. I’ve got to talk to this man. Get out of this car.”
He leaned forward to take the speaking tube, but Ed put a hand on his shoulder. “Play it your way, then, Terry. I still think I had the right play, but you spoiled it.”
“Where are we going?” I said. I suspected that we were headed for Beverly Hills, where the police know who pays them their wages.
Neville said into the speaking tube: “Turn down a side street and park. Then take a walk around the block.”
“That’s better,” I said when we had parked. Terry Neville looked frightened. Ed looked sulky and worried. For no good reason, I felt complacent.
“Spill it,” I said to Terry Neville. “Did you kill the girl? Or did she accidentally drown—and you ran away so you wouldn’t get mixed up in it? Or have you thought of a better one than that?”
“I’ll tell you the truth,” he said. “I didn’t kill her. I didn’t even know she was dead. But I was there yesterday afternoon. We were sunning ourselves on the raft, when a plane came over flying very low. I went away, because I didn’t want to be seen there with her—”
“You mean you weren’t exactly sunning yourselves?”
“Yes. That’s right. This plane came over high at first, then he circled back and came down very low. I thought maybe he recognized me, and might be trying to take pictures or something.”
“What kind of a plane was it?”
“I don’t know. A military plane, I guess. A fighter plane. It was a single-seater painted blue. I don’t know military planes.”
“What did Una Sand do when you went away?”
“I don’t know. I swam to shore, put on some clothes, and drove away. She stayed on the raft, I guess. But she was certainly all right when I left her. It would be a terrible thing for me if I was dragged into this thing. Mr.—”
“Archer.”
“Mr. Archer. I’m terribly sorry if we hurt you. If I could make it right with you—” He pulled out a wallet.
His steady pallid whine bored me. Even his sheaf of bills bored me. The situation bored me.
I said: “I have no interest in messing up your brilliant career, Mr. Neville. I’d like to mess up your brilliant pan sometime, but that can wait. Until I have some reason to believe that you haven’t told me the truth, I’ll keep what you said under my hat. In the meantime, I want to hear what the coroner has to say.”
They took me back to Ronald’s, where my car was, and left me with many protestations of good fellowship. I said good night to them, rubbing the back of my neck with an exaggerated gesture. Certain other gestures occurred to me.
When I got back to Santa Barbara the coroner was working over Una. He said that there were no marks of violence on her body, and very little water in her lungs and stomach, but this condition was characteristic of about one drowning in ten.
I hadn’t known that before, so I asked him to put it into sixty-four-dollar words. He was glad to.
“Sudden inhalation of water may result in a severe reflex spasm of the larynx, followed swiftly by asphyxia. Such a laryngeal spasm is more likely to occur if the victim’s face is upward, allowing water to rush into the nostrils, and would be likely to be facilitated by emotional or nervous shock. It may have happened like that or it may not.”
“Hell,” I said, “she may not even be dead.”
He gave me a sour look. “Thirty-six hours ago she wasn’t.”
I figured it out as I got in my car. Una couldn’t have drowned much later than four o’clock in the afternoon on September the seventh.
It was three in the morning when I checked in at the Barbara Hotel. I got up at seven, had breakfast in a restaurant, and went to the beach house to talk to Jack Rossiter. It was only about eight o’clock when I got there, but Rossiter was sitting on the beach in a canvas chair watching the sea.
“You again?” he said when he saw me.
“I’d think you’d have had enough of the sea for a while. How long were you out?”
“A year.” He seemed unwilling to talk.
“I hate bothering people,” I said, “but my business is always making a nuisance out of me.”
“Evidently. What exactly is your business?”
“I’m currently working for your mother-in-law. I’m still trying to find out what happened to her daughter.”
“Are you trying to needle me?” He put his hands on the arms of the chair as if to get up. For a moment his knuckles were white. Then he relaxed. “You saw what happened, didn’t you?”
“Yes. But do you mind my asking what time your ship got into San Francisco on September the seventh?”
“No. Four o’clock. Four o’clock in the afternoon.”
“I suppose that could be checked?”
He didn’t answer. There was a newspaper on the sand beside his chair and he leaned over and handed it to me. It was the Late Night Final of a San Francisco newspaper for the seventh.
“Turn to page four,” he said.
I turned to page four and found an article describing the arrival of the USS Guam at the Golden Gate, at four o’clock in the afternoon. A contingent of Waves had greeted the returning heroes, and a band had played “California, Here I Come.”
“If you want to see Mrs. Dreen, she’s in the house,” Jack Rossiter said. “But it looks to me as if your job is finished.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“And if I don’t see you again, good-bye.”
“Are you leaving?”
“A friend is coming out from Santa Barbara to pick me up in a few minutes. I’m flying up to Alameda with him to see about getting leave. I just had a forty-eight, and I’ve got to be here for the inquest tomorrow. And the funeral.” His voice was hard. His whole personality had hardened overnight. The evening before his nature had been wide open. Now it was closed and invulnerable.
“Good-bye,” I said, and plodded through the soft sand to the house. On the way I thought of something, and walked faster.
When I knocked, Mrs. Dreen came to the door holding a cup of coffee, not very steadily. She was wearing a heavy wool dressing robe with a silk rope around the waist, and a silk cap on her head. Her eyes were bleary.
“Hello,” she said. “I came back last night after all. I couldn’t work today anyway. And I didn’t think Jack should be by himself.”
“He seems to be doing all right.”
“I’m glad you think so. Will you come in?”
I stepped inside. “You said last night that you wanted to know who killed Una no matter who it was.”
“Well?”
“Does that still go?”
“Yes. Why? Did you find out something?”
“Not exactly. I thought of something, that’s all.”
“The coroner believes it was an accident. I talked to him on the phone this morning.” She sipped her black coffee. Her hand vibrated steadily, like a leaf in the wind.
“He may be right,” I said. “He may be wrong.”
There was the sound of a car outside, and I moved to the window and looked out. A station wagon stopped on the beach, and a Navy officer got out and walked towards Jack Rossiter. Rossiter got up and they shook hands.
“Will you call Jack, Mrs. Dreen, and tell him to come into the house for a minute?”
“If you wish.” She went to the door and called him.
Rossiter came to the door and said a little impatiently: “What is it?”
“Come in,” I said. “And tell me what time you left the ship the day before yesterday.”
“Let’s see. We got in at four—”
“No, you didn’t. The ship did, but not you. Am I right?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“You know what I mean. It’s so simple that it couldn’t fool anybody for a minute, not if he knew anything about carriers. You flew your plane off the ship a couple of hours before she got into port. My guess is that you gave that telegram to a buddy to send for you before you left the ship. You flew down here, caught your wife being made love to by another man, landed on the beach—and drowned her.”
“You’re insane!” After a moment he said less violently: “I admit I flew off the ship. You could easily find that out anyway. I flew around for a couple of hours, getting in some flying time—”
“Where did you fly?”
“Along the coast. I didn’t get down this far. I landed at Alameda at five-thirty, and I can prove it.”
“Who’s your friend?” I pointed through the open door to the other officer, who was standing on the beach looking out to sea.
“Lieutenant Harris. I’m going to fly up to Alameda with him. I warn you, don’t make any ridiculous accusations in his presence, or you’ll suffer for it.”
“I want to ask him a question,” I said. “What sort of plane were you flying?”
“FM-3.”
I went out of the house and down the slope to Lieutenant Harris. He turned towards me and I saw the wings on his blouse.
“Good morning, lieutenant,” I said. “You’ve done a good deal of flying, I suppose?”
“Thirty-two months. Why?”
“I want to settle a bet. Could a plane land on this beach and take off again?”
“I think maybe a Piper Cub could. I’d try it anyway. Does that settle the bet?”
“It was a fighter I had in mind. An FM-3.”
“Not an FM-3,” he said. “Not possibly. It might just conceivably be able to land but it’d never get off again. Not enough room, and very poor surface. Ask Jack, he’ll tell you the same.”
I went back to the house and said to Jack: “I was wrong. I’m sorry. As you said, I guess I’m all washed up with this case.”
“Good-bye, Millicent,” Jack said, and kissed her cheek. “If I’m not back tonight I’ll be back first thing in the morning. Keep a stiff upper lip.”
“You do, too, Jack.”
He went away without looking at me again. So the case was ending as it had begun, with me and Mrs. Dreen alone in a room wondering what had happened to her daughter.
“You shouldn’t have said what you did to him,” she said. “He’s had enough to bear.”
My mind was working very fast. I wondered whether it was producing anything. “I suppose Lieutenant Harris knows what he’s talking about. He says a fighter couldn’t land and take off from this beach. There’s no other place around here he could have landed without being seen. So he didn’t land.
“But I still don’t believe that he wasn’t here. No young husband flying along the coast within range of the house where his wife was—well, he’d fly low and dip his wings to her, wouldn’t he? Terry Neville saw the plane come down.”
“Terry Neville?”
“I talked to him last night. He was with Una before she died. The two of them were out on the raft together when Jack’s plane came down. Jack saw them, and saw what they were doing. They saw him. Terry Neville went away. Then what?”
“You’re making this up,” Mrs. Dreen said, but her green eyes were intent on my face.
“I’m making it up, of course. I wasn’t here. After Terry Neville ran away, there was no one here but Una, and Jack in a plane circling over her head. I’m trying to figure out why Una died. I have to make it up. But I think she died of fright. I think Jack dived at her and forced her into the water. I think he kept on diving at her until she was gone. Then he flew back to Alameda and chalked up his flying time.”
“Fantasy,” she said. “And very ugly. I don’t believe it.”
“You should. You’ve got that cable, haven’t you?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Jack sent Una a cable from Pearl, telling her what day he was arriving. Una mentioned it to Hilda Karp. Hilda Karp mentioned it to me. It’s funny you didn’t say anything about it.”
“I didn’t know about it,” Millicent Dreen said. Her eyes were blank.
I went on, paying no attention to her denial: “My guess is that the cable said not only that Jack’s ship was coming in on the seventh, but that he’d fly over the beach house that afternoon. Fortunately, I don’t have to depend on guesswork. The cable will be on file at Western Union, and the police will be able to look at it. I’m going into town now.”
“Wait,” she said. “Don’t go to the police about it. You’ll only get Jack in trouble. I destroyed the cable to protect him, but I’ll tell you what was in it. Your guess was right. He said he’d fly over on the seventh.”
“When did you destroy it?”
“Yesterday, before I came to you. I was afraid it would implicate Jack.”
“Why did you come to me at all, if you wanted to protect Jack? It seems that you knew what happened.”
“I wasn’t sure. I didn’t know what had happened to her, and until I found out I didn’t know what to do.”
“You’re still not sure,” I said. “But I’m beginning to be. For one thing, it’s certain that Una never got her cable, at least not as it was sent. Otherwise she wouldn’t have been doing what she was doing on the afternoon that her husband was going to fly over and say hello. You changed the date on it, perhaps? So that Una expected Jack a day later? Then you arranged to be in Hollywood on the seventh, so that Una could spend a final afternoon with Terry Neville.”
“Perhaps.” Her face was completely alive, controlled but full of dangerous energy, like a cobra listening to music.
“Perhaps you wanted Jack for yourself,” I said. “Perhaps you had another reason, I don’t know. I think even a psychoanalyst would have a hard time working through your motivations, Mrs. Dreen, and I’m not one. All I know is that you precipitated a murder. Your plan worked even better than you expected.”
“It was accidental death,” she said hoarsely. “If you go to the police you’ll only make a fool of yourself, and cause trouble for Jack.”
“You care about Jack, don’t you?”
“Why shouldn’t I?” she said. “He was mine before he ever saw Una. She took him away from me.”
“And now you think you’ve got him back.” I got up to go. “I hope for your sake he doesn’t figure out for himself what I’ve just figured out.”
“Do you think he will?” Sudden terror had jerked her face apart. I didn’t answer her.