The letter came just before noon, special delivery, a dime-store envelope with the return address F. S. Lacey, Puma Point, California. Inside was a check for a hundred dollars, made out to cash and signed Frederick S. Lacey, and a sheet of plain white bond paper typed with a number of strikeovers. It said:
Mr. John Evans,
Dear Sir:
I have your name from Len Esterwald. My business is urgent and extremely confidential. I inclose a retainer. Please come to Puma Point Thursday afternoon or evening, if at all possible, register at the Indian Head Hotel, and call me at 2306.
Yours,
There hadn’t been any business in a week, but this made it a nice day. The bank on which the check was drawn was about six blocks away. I went over and cashed it, ate lunch, and got the car out and started off.
It was hot in the valley, hotter still in San Bernardino, and it was still hot at five thousand feet, fifteen miles up the high-gear road to Puma Lake. I had done forty of the fifty miles of curving, twisting highway before it started to cool off, but it didn’t get really cool until I reached the dam and started along the south shore of the lake past the piled-up granite boulders and the sprawled camps in the flats beyond. It was early evening when I reached Puma Point and I was as empty as a gutted fish.
The Indian Head Hotel was a brown building on a corner, opposite a dance hall. I registered, carried my suitcase upstairs and dropped it in a bleak, hard-looking room with an oval rug on the floor, a double bed in the corner, and nothing on the bare pine wall but a hardware-store calendar all curled up from the dry mountain summer. I washed my face and hands and went downstairs to eat.
The dining-drinking parlor that adjoined the lobby was full to overflowing with males in sport clothes and liquor breaths and females in slacks and shorts with blood-red fingernails and dirty knuckles. A fellow with eyebrows like John L. Lewis was prowling around with a cigar screwed info his face. A lean, pale-eyed cashier in shirt sleeves was fighting to get the race results from Hollywood Park on a small radio that was as full of static as the mashed potato was full of water. In the deep, black corner of the room a hillbilly symphony of five defeatists in white coats and purple shirts was trying to make itself heard above the brawl at the bar.
I gobbled what they called the regular dinner, drank a brandy to sit on it, and went out onto the main stem. It was still broad daylight, but the neon lights were turned on and the evening was full of the noise of auto horns, shrill voices, the rattle of bowls, the snap of .22s at the shooting gallery, juke-box music, and behind all this the hoarse, hard mutter of speedboats on the lake. At a corner opposite the post office a blue-and-white arrow said telephone. I went down a dusty side road that suddenly became quiet and cool and piny. A tame doe deer with a leather collar on its neck wandered across the road in front of me. The phone office was a log cabin, and there was a booth in the corner with a coin-in-the-slot telephone. I shut myself inside and dropped my nickel and dialed 2306. A woman’s voice answered.
I said: “Is Mr. Fred Lacey there?”
“Who is calling, please?”
“Evans is the name.”
“Mr. Lacey is not here right now, Mr. Evans. Is he expecting you?”
That gave her two questions to my one. I didn’t like it. I said: “Are you Mrs. Lacey?”
“Yes. I am Mrs. Lacey.” I thought her voice was taut and overstrung, but some voices are like that all the time.
“It’s a business matter,” I said. “When will he be back?”
“I don’t know exactly. Sometime this evening, I suppose. What did you—”
“Where is your cabin, Mrs. Lacey?”
“It’s... it’s on Ball Sage Point, about two miles west of the village. Are you calling from the village? Did you—”
“I’ll call back in an hour, Mrs. Lacey,” I said, and hung up. I stepped out of the booth. In the other corner of the room a dark girl in slacks was writing in some kind of account book at a little desk. She looked up and smiled and said: “How do you like the mountains?”
I said: “Fine.”
“It’s very quiet up here,” she said. “Very restful.”
“Yeah. Do you know anybody named Fred Lacey?”
“Lacey? Oh, yes, they just had a phone put in. They bought the Baldwin cabin. It was vacant for two years, and they just bought it. It’s out at the end of Ball Sage Point, a big cabin on high ground, looking out over the lake. It has a marvelous view. Do you know Mr. Lacey?”
“No,” I said, and went out of there.
The tame doe was in the gap of the fence at the end of the walk. I tried to push her out of the way. She wouldn’t move, so I stepped over the fence and walked back to the Indian Head and got into my car.
There was a gas station at the east end of the village. I pulled up for some gas and asked the leathery man who poured it where Ball Sage Point was.
“Well,” he said. “That’s easy. That ain’t hard at all. You won’t have no trouble finding Ball Sage Point. You go down here about a mile and a half past the Catholic church and Kincaid’s Camp, and at the bakery you turn right and then you keep on the road to Willerton Boys’ Camp, and it’s the first road to the left after you pass on by. It’s a dirt road, kind of rough. They don’t sweep the snow off in winter, but it ain’t winter now. You know somebody out there?”
“No.” I gave him money. He went for the change and came back.
“It’s quiet out there,” he said. “Restful. What was the name?”
“Murphy,” I said.
“Glad to know you, Mr. Murphy,” he said, and reached for my hand. “Drop in any time. Glad to have the pleasure of serving you. Now, for Ball Sage Point you just keep straight on down this road—”
“Yeah,” I said, and left his mouth flapping.
I figured I knew how to find Ball Sage Point now, so I turned around and drove the other way. It was just possible Fred Lacey would not want me to go to his cabin.
Half a block beyond the hotel the paved road turned down toward a boat landing, then east again along the shore of the lake. The water was low. Cattle were grazing in the sour-looking grass that had been under water in the spring. A few patient visitors were fishing for bass or bluegill from boats with outboard motors. About a mile or so beyond the meadows a dirt road wound out toward a long point covered with junipers. Close inshore there was a lighted dance pavilion. The music was going already, although it still looked like late afternoon at that altitude. The band sounded as if it was in my pocket. I could hear a girl with a throaty voice singing “The Woodpecker’s Song.” I drove on past and the music faded and the road got rough and stony. A cabin on the shore slid past me, and there was nothing beyond it but pines and junipers and the shine of the water. I stopped the car out near the tip of the point and walked over to a huge tree fallen with its roots twelve feet in the air. I sat down against it on the bone-dry ground and lit a pipe. It was peaceful and quiet and far from everything. On the far side of the lake a couple of speedboats played tag, but on my side there was nothing but silent water, very slowly getting dark in the mountain dusk. I wondered who the hell Fred Lacey was and what he wanted and why he didn’t stay home or leave a message if his business was so urgent. I didn’t wonder about it very long. The evening was too peaceful. I smoked and looked at the lake and the sky, and at a robin waiting on the bare spike at the top of a tall pine for it to get dark enough so he could sing his good-night song.