The Best American Noir of the Century

by James Ellroy

  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 appliquéd 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.

  Where was Donna?

  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 after because that one called her husband after the accident.

  Now, since your wife's obviously alive, Mr. Kane, she's missing for one of two reasons: either she can't come home or she doesn't want to. "Can't" would mean she's being held against her will; we've nothing to indicate that. That leaves the possibility of her not wanting to come home. What reason would a woman have for staying away from her husband? The more likely one would be that she was either sore at him for something or had left him for another man.

  I said a short ugly word and threw my cigarette savagely into the fireplace. Donna would never pull a stunt like that! Hell, we'd only been married a few months and still as much in love as the day the knot was tied.

  Yeah ? How do you know? A lot of guys kid themselves into thinking the same thing, then wake up one morning and find the milkman has taken over. Or they find some hot love letters tied in blue ribbon and shoved under the mattress.

  I stopped short. It was an idea. Not love letters, of course; but there might be something among her personal files that could furnish a lead. It was about as faint a possibility as they come, but at least it would give me something to do.

  The big bottom drawer of her desk in the bedroom was locked. I remembered that she carried the key in the same case with those to the apartment and the car, so I used the fireplace poker to force the lock. Donna would raise hell about that when she got home, but I wasn't going to worry about that now.

  There was a big manila folder inside, crammed with letters, tax returns, receipted bills, bankbooks, and miscellaneous papers; I dumped them out and began to paw through the collection. A lot of the stuff had come from Dave Wainhope's office, and there were at least a dozen letters signed by him explaining why he was sending her such-and-such.

  The phone rang suddenly. I damned near knocked the chair over getting to it. It was Chief Deputy Martell.

  "Mrs. Kane show up?"

  "Not yet. No."

  He must have caught the disappointment in my voice. It was there to catch. He said, "That's funny ... Anyway, the body we found in that car wasn't her."

  "I told you that. Who was it?"

  "This Helen Wainhope. We brought the remains into the Georgia Street Hospital and her husband made the ID about fifteen minutes ago."

  I shivered, remembering. "How could he?"

  "There was enough left of one of her shoes. That and the compact did the trick."

  "He tell you why she was driving my wife's car?"

  Martell hesitated. "Not exactly. He said the two women had a date in town for today. He didn't know what time, but Mrs. Wainhope's car was on the fritz, so the theory is that your wife drove out there and picked her up."

  "News to me," I said.

  He hesitated again. "...Any bad blood between your wife and ...and Mrs. Wainhope ?"

  "That's a hell of a question!"

  "You want to answer it?" he said quietly.

  "You bet I do! They got along fine!"

  "If you say so." His voice was mild. "I just don't like this coincidence of Mrs. Kane's being mi
ssing at the same time her car goes off a cliff with a friend in it."

  "I don't care about that. I want my wife back."

  He sighed. "OK. Give me a description and I'll get out an all-points on her."

  I described Donna to him at length and he took it all down and said he'd be in touch with me later. I put back the receiver and went into the living room to make myself a drink. I hadn't eaten a thing since one o'clock that afternoon, but I was too tightened up with worry to be at all hungry.

  Time crawled by. I finished my drink while standing at the window, put together a second, and took it back into the bedroom and started through the papers from Donna's desk. At eight-fifteen the phone rang.

  "Clay? This is Dave—Dave Wainhope." His voice was flat and not very steady.

  I said, "Hello, Dave. Sorry to hear about Helen." It sounded pretty lame, but it was the best I could do at the time.

  "You know about it then?"

  "Certainly I know about it. It was Donna's car, remember?"

  "Of course, Clay." He sounded very tired. "I guess I'm not thinking too clearly. I called you about something else."

  "Yeah?"

  "Look, Clay, it's none of my business, I suppose. But what's wrong between you and Donna?"

  I felt my jaw sag a little. "Who said anything was wrong?"

  "All I know is, she was acting awfully strange. She wanted all the ready cash I had on hand, no explanation, no—"

  My fingers were biting into the receiver. "Wait a minute!" I shouted. "Dave, listen to me! You saw Donna?"

  "That's what I'm trying to tell you. She—"

  "When?"

  "...Why, not ten minutes ago. She—"

  "Where? Where was she? Where did you see her?"

  "Right here. At my office." He was beginning to get excited himself. "I stopped by on my way from the Georgia—"

  I cut him off. "Christ, Dave, I've been going nuts! I've been looking for her since four-thirty this afternoon. What'd she say? What kind of trouble is she in?"

  "I don't know. She wouldn't tell me anything—just wanted money quick. No checks. I thought maybe you and she had had a fight or something. I had around nine hundred in the safe; I gave it all to her and she beat —"

  I shook the receiver savagely. "But she must have said something! She wouldn't just leave without ... you know ..."

  "She said she sent you a letter earlier in the day."

  I dropped down on the desk chair. My hands were shaking and my mouth was dry. "A letter," I said dully. "A letter. Not in person, not even a phone call. Just a letter."

  By this time Dave was making comforting sounds. "I'm sure it's nothing serious, Clay. You know how women are. The letter'll probably tell you where she is and you can talk her out of it."

  I thanked him and hung up and sat there and stared at my thumb. For some reason I felt even more depressed than before. I couldn't understand why Donna wouldn't have turned to me if she was in trouble. That was always a big thing with us: all difficulties had to be shared ...

  I went into the kitchen and made myself a couple of cold salami sandwiches and washed them down with another highball. At nine-twenty I telephoned the Hollywood substation to let Martell know what Dave Wainhope had told me. Whoever answered said the chief deputy was out and to call back in an hour. I tried to leave a message on what it was about, but was told again to call back and got myself hung up on.

  About ten minutes later the buzzer from downstairs sounded. I pushed the button and was standing in the hall door when a young fellow in a postman's gray uniform showed up with a special-delivery letter. I signed for it and closed the door and leaned there and ripped open the envelope.

  A single sheet of dime-store paper containing a few neatly typed lines and signed in ink in Donna's usual scrawl.

  Clay darling:

  I'm terribly sorry, but something that happened a long time ago has come back to plague me and I have to get away for a few days. Please don't try to find me, I'll be all right as long as you trust me.

  You know I love you so much that I won't remain away a day longer than I have to. Please don't worry, darling, I'll explain everything the moment I get back.

  All my love,

  Donna

  And that was that. Nothing that I could get my teeth into; no leads, nothing to cut away even a small part of my burden of concern. I walked into the bedroom with no spring in my step and dropped the letter on the desk and reached for the phone. But there was no point to that. Martell wouldn't be back at the station yet.

  Maybe I had missed something. Maybe the envelope was a clue? A clue to what? I looked at it. Carefully. The postmark was Hollywood. That meant it had gone through the branch at Wilcox and Selma. At five-twelve that afternoon. At five-twelve I was just about pulling up behind those department cars out on Stone Canyon Road. She would have had to mail it at the post office instead of a drop box for me to get it four hours later.

  No return address, front or back, as was to be expected. Just a cheap envelope, the kind you pick up at Woolworth's or Kress's. My name and the address neatly typed. The e key was twisted very slightly to the right and the t was tilted just far enough to be noticeable if you looked at it long enough.

  I let the envelope drift out of my fingers and stood there staring down at Donna's letter. My eyes wandered to the other papers next to it...

  I said, "Jesus Christ!" You could spend the next ten years in church and never say it more devoutly than I did at that moment. My eyes were locked to one of the letters David Wainhope had written to Donna—and in its typewritten lines two individual characters stood out like bright and shining beacons: a tilted t and a twisted e!

  VI

  It took some time— I don't know how much—before I was able to do any straight-line thinking. The fact that those two letters had come out of the same typewriter opened up so many possible paths to the truth behind Donna's disappearance that—well, I was like the mule standing between two stacks of hay.

  Finally I simply turned away and walked into the living room and poured a good half-inch of bonded bourbon into a glass and drank it down like water after an aspirin. I damned near strangled on the stuff; and by the time I stopped gasping for air and wiping the tears out of my eyes, I was ready to do some thinking.

  Back at the desk again, I sat down and picked up the two sheets of paper. A careful comparison removed the last lingering doubt that they had come out of the same machine. Other points began to fall into place: the fact that the typing in Donna's letter had been done by a professional. You can always tell by the even impression of the letters, instead of the dark-light-erasure-strike-over touch you find in an amateur job. And I knew that Donna had never used a typewriter in her life!

  All right, what did it mean? On the surface, simply that somebody had typed the letter for Donna, and at Dave Wainhope's office. It had to be his office, for he would hardly write business letters at home — and besides I was pretty sure Dave was strictly a pen-and-pencil man himself.

  Now what? Well, since it was typed in Dave's office, but not by Dave or Donna, it would indicate Dave's secretary had done the work. Does that hold up? It's got to hold up, friend; no one else works in that office but Dave and his secretary.

  Let's kind of dig into that a little. Let's say that Donna dropped in on Dave earlier in the afternoon, upset about something. Let's say that Dave is out, so Donna dictates a note to me and the secretary types it out. Very simple ... But is it?

  No.

  And here's why. Here are the holes: first, the note is on dime-store paper, sent in a dime-store envelope. Dave wouldn't have that kind of stationery in his office—not a big-front guy like Dave. OK, stretch it all the way out; say that Donna had brought her own paper and had the girl use it. You still can't tell me Dave's secretary wouldn't have told her boss about it when he got back to the office. And if she told him, he would certainly have told me during our phone conversation.

  But none of those points compares with th
e biggest flaw of them all: why would Donna have anyone type the letter for her when a handwritten note would do just as well—especially on a very private and personal matter like telling your husband you're in trouble?

  I got up and walked down the room and lit a cigarette and looked out the window without seeing anything. A small voice in the back of my mind said, "If all this brain work of yours is right, you know what it adds up to, don't you, pal?"

  I knew. Sure, I knew. It meant that Donna Kane was a threat to somebody. It meant that she was being held somewhere; that she had been forced to sign a note to keep me from reporting her disappearance to the cops until whoever was responsible could make a getaway.

  It sounded like a bad movie, and I tried hard to make myself believe that's all it was. But the more I dug into it, the more I went over the results of my reasoning, the more evident it became that there was no other explanation.

  You do only one thing in a case like that. I picked up the phone and called Martell again. He was still out. I took a stab at telling the desk sergeant, or whoever it was at the other end, what was going on. But it sounded so complex and confused, even to me, that he finally stopped me. "Look, neighbor, call back in about fifteen, twenty minutes. Martell's the man you want to talk to." He hung up before I could give him an argument.

  His advice was good and I intended to take it. Amateur detectives usually end up with both feet stuck in their esophagus. This was a police job. My part in it was to let them know what I'd found out, then get out of their way.

  That secretary would know. She was in this up to the hilt. I had seen her a few times: a dark-haired girl, quite pretty, a little on the small side but built right. Big blue eyes; I remembered that. Quiet. A little shy, if I remembered right. What was her name? Nora. Nora something. Camp-bell? Kenton? No. Kemper? That was it: Nora Kemper.

  I found her listed in the Central District phone book. In the 300 block on North Hobart, a few doors below Beverly Boulevard. I knew the section. Mostly apartment houses along there. Nothing fancy, but a long way from being a slum. The right neighborhood for private secretaries. As I remembered, she had been married but was now divorced.