“He didn’t come back to this house after the trip?”
“If he did,” the woman said, “I didn’t see him.”
“Did a moving truck come around?”
“No. All his furniture’s still in there.”
“Who picks up his mail?”
“I don’t know.”
“There isn’t any in the box.”
“Maybe he left a forwarding address,” the woman said. She shrugged.
“Do you know the names of any of his girlfriends?”
“Alice was one. I don’t remember her last name. She was a nice girl. He should have married her. Then he wouldn’t all the time be moving around.” The woman glanced across the street. “I have to get back to my mowing. Did Phil do something?”
“You’ve been very helpful, Mrs.—”
“Jennings,” she said. “Did Phil do something?”
“Can you direct us to the local post office?” Carella asked.
“Sure. Just drive straight into town. You can’t miss it. It’s right on the main street as you come into town. Did Phil do something?”
“Thank you for your time, Mrs. Jennings,” Carella said. Both men got into the car. Mrs. Jennings watched them as they drove away. Then she went to her next-door neighbor and told her some cops were around asking about Phil Kettering.
“He must have done something,” she told her neighbor.
THE POST OFFICE CLERK was a harassed man trying to keep pace with the mushrooming developments on Sand’s Spit.
“No sooner do we get mail service going to one development, than another one springs up,” he said. “Where are we supposed to get all the mailmen? This isn’t like the city, you know. In the city, a mailman steps into one apartment building and he gets rid of half his bag. Just pulls down the boxes, zing, zing, zing, files in the letters. Here, the mailman has to walk up the block, and he’s got to go up each front walk and put the letters in the box, and then walk down the path, and then to the next house, and then up the path—and he picks up letters from the boxes, too, takes them back to the office for mailing. Half the time he’s battling dogs and cats and what-not. A dame in one of the developments has a pet owl, would you believe it? The damn thing flies at the mailman’s head every time he goes up that front path. It’s murder. And every day there’s a new damn development. We can’t keep up with it.”
“Do you deliver mail to a man named Phil Kettering?” Hawes asked.
“Yes.” The clerk’s face lighted up. “Did you come for his mail? Did he send you for his mail?”
“We—”
“Jesus, am I glad to see you,” the clerk said. “We’ve got mail for him stacked to the goddamn ceiling. We had to stop putting it in his box because it was falling all over the front stoop. We finally brought it all back to the office. We’re hoping the stupid bastard’ll contact us with a forwarding address. You should see that pile. We’re not crowded enough, we’ve got to keep stacking his damn mail for him. Did you come for it?”
“No. But we’d like to see it.”
“I can’t let you take it out of this office,” the clerk said. “It’s addressed to him. We can’t deliver it to nobody but him.”
“We’re cops,” Carella said, and he showed his identification.
“It don’t make any difference,” the clerk said. “This mail is Government property. You’ll need a court order to take it with you.”
“Can we look at it first?”
“Sure. You’ve got an afternoon’s work cut out for you. That stuff’s been piling up since last September.”
“Where is it?”
“Back there in Kettering’s Korner. That’s what we call it. We’re thinking of starting a substation just to take care of that damn pile of mail. Why don’t people leave forwarding addresses? It’s the simplest thing in the world, you know. All you do is fill out a card.”
“Maybe Kettering didn’t want anyone to know where he was going,” Hawes said.
“What reason could he have for that?”
Hawes shrugged. “Can we see the mail?”
“Sure. Come on back with me.” The clerk shook his head. “It’s murder. Absolute murder.”
“Which is one good reason for not leaving a forwarding address,” Hawes said.
“Huh?” the clerk asked.
TOGETHER, CARELLA AND HAWES went through the stack of mail. There were circulars, bills, magazines, personal letters. The earliest postmark was August twenty-ninth. Some of the personal letters were from a man named Arthur Banks in Los Angeles. Some of the personal letters were from a woman named Alice Lossing in Isola. They copied her address from the envelope flaps. At this stage of the game, it did not seem necessary to obtain a court order granting possession of the mail.
At this stage of the game, it seemed necessary to visit Kettering’s office in Isola. They thanked the clerk and went out to the automobile.
“What do you make of it?”
“You don’t think he could have planned a murder as far back as September, do you?” Carella asked.
“I don’t know. But why else would he disappear?”
“Maybe he hasn’t. Maybe he’s just changed his residence. I doubt if a guy’s going to pick up and leave his business just because he had a little argument over a dinner table. Does that sound likely to you, Cotton?”
“It depends on what kind of a guy Kettering is. A patient hunter might do it. Wipe out all trace of himself, and then plan to kill Kramer. Who knows, Steve? There’ve been weirder ones, that’s for sure.”
“He’s a photographer, you know. That’s interesting, isn’t it?”
“Yes. You thinking of the Mencken woman?”
“Um-huh.”
“A guy named Jason Poole took her pictures.”
“Sure. But she thinks they’re in somebody else’s hands now, somebody who took over from Kramer.”
“Kettering?”
“Who knows? I’ll tell you one thing.”
“What’s that?”
“I’m very anxious to talk to this guy. I think he may have a lot of the answers.”
Hawes nodded. “There’s just one thing, though, Steve,” he said.
“Um? What’s that?”
“We’ve got to find him first.”
12.
PHIL KETTERING’S OFFICE was on one of the side streets of midtown Isola, off Jefferson Avenue. There were a good many big and prosperous firms with offices in the building. Phil Kettering’s was not one of them.
His office was at the end of the hall on the third floor, and his name was on the center of the frosted-glass door, and the word PHOTOGRAPHER was lettered in the lower right-hand corner just above the wooden portion of the door.
The office was locked.
Carella and Hawes found the superintendent of the building and asked him to open the door for them. The super had to check with the building management. It took forty-five minutes from the time of the request to the actual opening of the door.