“There didn’t seem to be any reason to draw it out further,” Freemont continued. “I had my say and I left. I was feeling pretty lousy about the situation and I stopped for a couple of drinks on the way home. I’d just gotten back to my place when the sheriff's office called.”
He gestured vaguely after the departing ambulance. “I swear, Officers, I never expected... imagined this!” His voice broke. “I would have done something... helped her!”
“These things happen, Doctor,” the senior homicide man said. “You might as well go on home. You’ll be required to appear and testify at the coroner’s inquest. You’ll be notified as to the time and location.”
“Thank you, Officers.” He got his voice back under control. “You’ll have my full cooperation.”
He squared his shoulders manfully and walked back to the Bonneville.
“That’s it?” I said as he pulled away. “You’re not taking this Clyde in for a shakedown?”
“Why the hell make more trouble for him or us?” the senior dick replied. “He’s being straight up about the whole thing. He was going with a squirrelly dame, he broke it off, and she took a high dive. It won’t be the first time.”
“I know. That’s what’s bothering me!” I snapped back. “Am I the only one here getting the feel we’re reading from a friggin’ script?”
The homicide man looked annoyed. “Look, was this guy anywhere near the scene when the death occurred?”
“No.”
“Was anyone near the Kurtz woman’s car before it went off the edge?”
I could see where this was heading. “No.”
He had a point. I might have been, uh, distracted, during the time frame leading up to the woman’s death, but during the critical couple of minutes immediately before the Studebaker had gone over the edge I could testify that nobody had gone near it.
“Furthermore, Pulaski, you yourself said the car’s engine was running and when you went down to the wreck, you found the transmission set in drive. The car wasn’t pushed off the cliff, it was driven off. Right? And Kurtz was the only person in the vehicle.”
“Yeah.”
“Okay. We don’t have opportunity or means. Freemont was nowhere near the death car at the time of the wreck. Nor was anyone else, as you yourself can swear to.”
“How about motive?” I protested. “The victim was giving the primary suspect grief over their breakup. That’s been solid for homicide plenty of times.”
“It’s been solid for suicide, too, Deputy.” The dick was pulling rank now. “We’ve got no evidence of anything other than a gaga offing herself over her boyfriend. Until we do, that’s it!”
Punctuating his statement, the lift truck heaved the hulk of the Studebaker up and over the edge of the ravine, the wreck crumpled like an ivory and gold paper bag. A number of the responding units were checking themselves back into service and the detective team headed for their own car. “Tell you what, Pulaski,” the shorter and uglier of the pair called over his shoulder, “if you’re so worried about it, we’ll let you handle the cleanup. Maybe you can find yourselves a clue.”
I muttered a reply involving warm exhaust pipes under my breath.
Lisette dropped her cigarette butt to the ground, grinding it out under the toe of her pump. “Kevin, may I ask a dumb question?”
“Be my guest.”
“Is there any chance this could have been an accident? Could her foot have slipped on the brake or something and she went over the edge without meaning to?”
I shrugged. “Anything’s possible. But she wasn’t all that close to the edge, she was back a good twenty feet and there’s no slope to the turnout. Besides, the transmission had been shifted into drive. I checked that myself. The car went off the edge under power.”
She frowned as we studied the ruined Golden Hawk. The frame was too badly wrenched for towing. They’d need a flatbed to haul it to county impound.
“It just seems funny the way this car just... dribbled over the edge,” the Princess continued. “Say this woman had worked herself into a state of suicidal hysteria. When she made up her mind to finally kill herself, wouldn’t she have, you know, floored it, launching herself into the canyon?”
“You’d think so. But suicides are essentially screwball. It’s hard to say what one of them might do.”
The circle of lights in the night had grown smaller. Pretty much only the hoist crew and the forensics people were left and the lab guys were packing up their gear. One of them, a balding, heavyset man in chinos and a windcheater, ambled in our direction. “The dicks left you in charge of the crime scene, deputy,” he said. “You want a cast of the death car’s tire tracks or should we bother?”
I stubbed a boot toe into the brick-solid hardpan. “I doubt there’ll be any tracks to lift...” I looked around and my voice trailed off.
The unmarked homicide car had been backing out to the road, its headlights playing across the overlook. Now there hadn’t been any rain in L.A. for over two weeks, just sunny, eighty-degree chamber-of-commerce weather, dig it? The ground of the turnout was baked pale dry, all except for one dark moisture stain over where the Studebaker had been parked.
I mean, it might be no big deal. There could be a hundred innocent reasons for something to have been spilled there. But it was there, right where Dorothy Kurtz's death ride had started.
“Swing one of those work lights over here.”
I crossed to the patch of damp soil. It covered a couple of square feet. And there was a tire track in it, a partial at any rate. But the tread pattern was blurred in a funny way.
My first suspicion had been brake fluid, but it wasn’t. It was plain old water, and evaporating rapidly in the warm night. I dabbed a fingertip into the mud and tasted. There was neither the metallic taint of rust nor the sweetness of antifreeze. It hadn’t come from a radiator. Nor was the Golden Hawk air-conditioned, so it wasn’t condenser drip.
I spat out the test and stood up. Okay, lay it out. The Hawk had been parked right... here. I could see a couple of oil drops from its engine, the lubricant dark and not yet dust-dulled. I marked off the parking spot, scraping with the heel of my boot.
I was being watched. The Princess had followed me over and the lab guys and the crane crew. The Pontiac Bonneville had sat over... here, close alongside, just about the swing of a car door away. It had marked its territory with a drip from its crankcase as well. I added its outline to my reconstruction, then I studied how the positions related.
Okay, that put the water stain on the right side of the Studebaker, about between the passenger door and the right rear wheel well. The tire track would have been from the right rear tire. And didn’t the water stain trail off toward the edge of the overlook in a funny way?
“Photograph this,” I ordered. “Closeups and areas. And make a plaster cast of the track.”
I stepped back, making room for the lab men and my own thoughts. What else might still be here?
Cigarette butts. The two cigarettes I’d seen Dorothy Kurtz light. There they both were, smoldered out on the gravel, Marlboro filter tips with lipstick marks.
Just the two.
I strode back to the hulk of the Golden Hawk, pausing to grab a flashlight from the tool crib of the hoist truck.
They’d pried open the driver’s door of the Studebaker and now I forced it open again, leaning inside the coupe’s distorted interior. Panning the light around, I found half a dozen unsmoked smokes on the floorboards and the silver cigarette case they’d spilled from. I pulled open the dashboard ashtray and found that Dorothy Kurtz was one of those people Smokey the Bear hates, a butt flipper. The ashtray hadn’t been used recently.