“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. “The Santa Barbara police are what you might expect in a town of this size. You see, I’ve heard about you, Mr. Rogers.”
“My initial fee is one hundred dollars. After that I charge people according to how much I think I can get out of them.”
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. 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.”
“Una Sand?”
“I assumed you knew.” She was a trifle pained by my ignorance of the details of her life. 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 sleek blonde who did more justice to her gowns than to the featured parts she had had during her year or two in the sun.
“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 very white fingers fluttered in glee before her immobile body. “Her marriage is happy enough. Her Ensign is a personable young man, I suppose, handsome, naive, and passionate. He was runner-up in the State tennis championships the last year he played. And, of course, he’s a flier.”
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 Ross, 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.”
“A minute ago Una was in the clutches of the cruel crawling foam. Now she’s gone away with a romantic stranger. Who’s she been knocking around with?”
“I consider possibilities, that is all. When I was Una’s age—” Our gazes, mine as impassive as hers I hoped, met, struck no spark, and disengaged.
“I’m getting to know you pretty well,” I said with the necessary smile, “but not the missing girl. My conversation is fair for an aging 4-F, but it isn’t worth a hundred bucks.”
“That grey over your ears is rather distinguished. Sort of a chinchilla effect.”
“Thanks. But shall we look at the scene of the crime?”
“There isn’t any crime.” She got up quickly and gracefully, a movement which at her age required self-control. An admirable and expert slut, I said to myself as I followed her high slim shoulders and tight-sheathed hips down the stairs to the bright street. But I felt a little sorry for the army of men who had warmed their hands at that secret electricity. I couldn’t help wondering if her daughter Una was like that. 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.
I followed Mrs. Dreen’s Buick convertible north out of Santa Barbara and for seven or eight miles along the coast highway. Then for a mile and a half along a winding dirt road through broken country to her private beach. The beach-house was set far back from the sea at the convergence of high 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 August dazzle of sun, sand and sea was like an arc-furnace. But there was some breeze from the sea, and a few clouds moved languidly inland over our heads. A little high plane was gambolling among them like a terrier in a hen yard.
“You have privacy,” I said to Mrs. Dreen when we had parked.
“One tires of the goldfish role. When I lie out there in the afternoons I — forget I have a name.” She pointed to a white raft in the middle of the cove which moved gently in the swells. “I simply take off my clothes and revert to protoplasm. All my clothes.”
I cocked an eye at the plane which 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.”
Almost unconsciously, we had been moving towards the water. Nothing could have looked more innocent than the quiet blue cove, held in the curve of the white beach like a benign blue eye set in a serene brow. Even while I thought that, however, the colors shifted as a cloud passed over the sun. Sly green and cruel imperial purple veiled the blue. I felt the primitive fascination and terror of water. The tide had turned and was coming in. The waves came up towards us, gnawing eternally at the land like the toothless jaws of a blind unsightly animal.
For a moment Mrs. Dreen looked old and uncertain. “It’s got funny moods, hasn’t it? I hope she isn’t in there.”
“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 there.”
“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 of 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 Ross 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 went through 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 Ross had shed, I said: