by James Ellroy
The thing to do, I decided, was to stop at the apartment first. It was on the way, so I wouldn't lose much time, and I could take Donna along with me. Getting an explanation direct from her ought to satisfy the cops, and we could still get in a couple of drinks and a fast dinner, and make that premiere.
I covered the typewriter, put on my hat, locked up, and went down to the parking lot. It was a little past four-twenty.
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 bed-room 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 day's 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 thought it was too early for Ralph; he won't be home for two hours yet."
"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 Snow Soap television show. They're casting for a new musical and she thinks that's why this lunch. But I suppose you know about that. You like to come in for a drink?"
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 stiff brim 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 Donna's 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 c
ar, 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 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 Donna's 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.
"Recognize it?" Martell asked softly.
I nodded numbly. "It's Donna's."
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 ph
one 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.
