Only two cigarettes. She might have run out of fuel for her purse lighter but the dash lighter was still in its socket. I’d been acquainted with Dorothy Kurtz long enough to know she chain-smoked under stress. And after her blowup with Freemont she’d sat in this car for a long time, but she hadn’t reached for another cigarette.
What else had been funny? I sprawled across the bucket seats. Forget that taste of paradise you’d been enjoying, Pulaski, and relive those bits and pieces of the outside world you could recall. Replay the film in slow motion. What else had or hadn’t happened?
Dome light!
When Dr. Freemont had climbed into the Golden Hawk the first time, the dome light had switched on automatically, like it was supposed to. But when he’d gotten out, it hadn’t.
I rolled on my back and played the flashlight up at the ivory-colored strip of plastic inset in the roof liner. “Hey, somebody get me a pair of lab gloves and a screwdriver, a small Phillips-head!”
The others were clustering around the car now, peering through the broken windows. The balding guy in the windcheater thrust the gloves and the screwdriver in through the door.
Pulling on the thin rubber gloves, I carefully backed the tiny screws out of the light frame. It came free and I set the light cover aside.
The little light bulb was missing from its socket. Someone had wanted to do something around this car that required total darkness, something he didn’t want the witnesses he knew would be there to be able to see.
There were traces of aluminum powder around the interior of the wreck.
“Who’s the latent prints guy?”
My friend in the windcheater leaned in the driver’s door again. “That’s me.”
“How did you cover the car’s interior?”
“I dusted the door handles, steering wheel, and dashboard, the standard stuff, and I lifted two outstanding sets of fresh prints. Probably the woman’s and the doctor’s but we still have to match them against exemplars.”
“How about the brake release and the gearshift lever?”
“All I got were smears there. Nothing clear.”
“Could they have been wiped?”
He shrugged awkwardly. “Hard to say.”
I pointed at the dome light assembly. “Did you dust this?”
“No. I didn’t think anyone would have had a reason to touch it.”
“Somebody did. Dust it now, inside the mount and out.”
I squirmed out of the wreck, thinking hard. Okay, you son of a bitch, how'd you do it and where would you do it? You’d have to work fast. You’d have only seconds and you wouldn’t want attention, either then or later. Run that mental filmstrip one more time.
I circled around to the car’s passenger door. Hunkering down, I played the flashlight beam into the narrow crack between the door skin and frame.
And right there, at the bottom door angle, a little tiny bit of white fuzz. Standing, I wrenched on the door handle. It was jammed.
“Get me a wrecking bar! I gotta get this open.”
I had all the help I needed. Crowbars slammed into the crack in the doorframe and strong men heaved. The door cracked and squealed wide, protesting.
A little piece of string fell out on the ground, about three inches long. One end had been knotted several times, the other was frayed from a fresh break. It went straight into an evidence envelope.
“Okay, I want light on the edge of the drop-off, aimed downslope, right where the car went over! All we got!”
Generator cables were hauled across, the work arcs were hogged into position, and everyone grabbed a big hand lantern or a five-cell, even Lisette.
It was a seventy-degree, soft-earth slope, held in place by cheat grass and spiky California holly. You could see where the Golden Hawk’s wheels and belly pan had torn down through the tinder-dry ground cover and you had to thank God there hadn’t been a stone to strike a spark.
Digging the heels of my boots into the crumbling soil, I followed the track of the dying Studebaker, sliding down a few feet, stopping, then playing my flashlight into the brush, looking for what had to be there to make it all work.
I spotted it about forty feet below the lip of the overview, snagged on a bush, a rag of white plastic with big blue and red polka dots. A string trailed off from one end and it was still bright and clean and slickly wet.
Ned Freemont stepped out through his patio doors. Lisette flowed to one side, pressing back into the deeper black along the retaining wall, giving me working room.
“Who’s there?” the intern demanded again. You could see him in the growing dawn light. He was in his shirtsleeves, his tie yanked down sloppily. He was a little unsteady, as if he’d been putting a shot glass to good use, and he looked young and scared.
“Don’t tense, Doc. It’s the law,” I replied, staying back in the shadows beside the garage. “Deputy Pulaski, L.A. County. I was one of the guys up at the murder scene.”
“Murder?” I saw him weave a little under the impact of the word.
“Uh-huh,” I replied, stepping out onto the patio. “I’m just here collecting a little more evidence. Oh, and I’m collecting you, too. You’re under arrest for the murder of Dorothy Kurtz.”
“What... what are you talking about?” His voice started to lift. “Dorothy committed suicide. They said...”
I shook my head, taking a step closer. “Nah, you killed her. Premeditated and in the first degree, and, speaking as a cop, may I say thanks. In a world of plain old day-in day-out mayhem, this is the first time I’ve ever worked one of these fancy, set-up killings like Ellery Queen writes about. It’s been a charge.”
“You’re crazy!” His voice was cracking now. “I was nowhere near Dorothy when she...”
“That was the whole idea, wasn’t it? For you to be alibied and in the clear when her car went into the canyon?”
Before he could speak again I held out my left hand with the sheaf of bread slices in it, just starting to turn leathery. “Didn’t your mama ever tell you about the starving kids in China? That was a good half a loaf thrown away in your garbage. But then, you needed the plastic bread bag to pack the ice in.”
He stared at the bread in my hand as I eased in another step. “You dumped the bread out of the bag and emptied your ice trays into it. Then you tied off the end of the bag with five or six feet of string. You put it in your car and you drove up to the overview for your lovers’ showdown.
“Oh, and Miss Kurtz didn’t call you. You called her and asked her to meet you there. You had the terrain all scoped out. And, as you’d figured, there were other couples at the turnout, enjoying the view. It’s a popular place on Saturday night. You wanted witnesses but distracted ones. People who wouldn’t be paying too close attention to what you were up to.
“You pulled in alongside Dorothy Kurtz's Studebaker, got out of your car and into hers. She was pissed and you had words. Not many, because you’d already made up your mind to kill her.”
“No!”
“Oh yeah,” I insisted. “You’re an intern at a receiving hospital. You’ve seen plenty of car-crash victims. You know how people die. So you reached over, grabbed her by the hair, and smashed her throat across the steering wheel, maybe a couple of times, crushing her larynx. Then you held her while she convulsed and suffocated to death.”
He didn’t say anything this time. It was just a sound.
“As a doc,” I continued, “you’d also know how the warm night would blur the coroner’s ability to estimate the exact time of death, but you still had to move fast. You also didn’t want those witnesses to be able to see just exactly what you’d be doing when you got out of her car, so you disabled the dome light by removing the bulb.