I turned my face away from his charnel-house breath.
At midnight I was back in Santa Teresa, knocking on the door of Santana's house. He came to the door in a red velvet smoking-jacket, a volume of the Holmes-Pollock letters open under his arm.
"What under heaven?" he said in Spanish. "Your face, Mr. Archer!"
"I had a little plastic surgery done."
"Come in. Let me get you a drink."
Over the drink, Scotch and water in equal proportions, I told him where I had gone on the trail of the hat, and what had happened there.
"Where is the hat now?"
"Durano kept it. After all, he probably paid for it."
"And what do you make of it all?" Santana hunched his shoulders and spread his hands palms upward on his knees. In his paneled library, surrounded by books, he resembled an old spider at the center of his web.
"There isn't too much to go on, certainly not enough to try and have Durano and his torpedo brought in. That would take powerful medicine."
"I agree."
"What there is adds up to the reasonable alternative you asked for. Fern Dee was Durano's girl friend. She got fed up with him and the desert, as anybody but a gila monster would, and she left him. But that's one of the things the executives of the Syndicate can't permit, this year especially. Their women learn too much about their sources of income, ever to be allowed to run out on them. Besides, Durano is old and ugly and sick. She took her life in her hands when she left him, and she must have known it." I sipped my drink. The whisky burned my lips where they had been cut.
"And Lucy?"
"See how this sounds to you. Lucy was Fern Dee's maid, probably her confidante. She knew where Fern Dee had gone, perhaps she had instructions to follow her when she got the chance, and bring her clothes—"
"To Santa Teresa here."
"Evidently. Fern let her keep some of the clothes, and gave her money to live on quietly. There could have been blackmail involved, but I doubt that."
"Blackmail seems to be indicated," the lawyer said.
"It's doubtful. Gino traced Lucy down, don't forget. He talked to her in her room Tuesday night, and she didn't tell him where Fern was."
"You think that is why she was killed, that this Gino killed her?"
"It's a reasonable alternative," I said. "In any case, your client was an innocent bystander. He stood too near the fire, and got burned."
"We still have the task of proving it. Can we question this Gino in any way? Where is he?"
"In Santa Teresa," I said. "He followed me out of Palm Springs in a Buick. It was a pretty crude tail-job, and I lost him on 99. But he should be in town by now. He'll be looking for me. Durano thinks I can lead him to Fern Dee."
"Can you?"
"I think so."
"Do you have a gun?"
I patted my pocket. "I keep it in the glove compartment of my car."
Santana stood up. "I believe that I had better call the police."
"No," I said. "You want to give them the man along with the story."
"A doctor, at least. Those are nasty cuts on your mouth. They need attention."
"I'm on my way to see a doctor — Dr. Benning."
Santana exploded, dryly, like a puff-ball. "He is a bum physician, Mr. Archer. A charlatan. Only those who can find nothing better go to Benning. Those who have to."
"Girls that get caught, for example?"
"That is the rumor. As a matter of fact, I can confirm the rumor. I have many sorts of clients."
"I'm not proud."
There were lights on both the first and second stories of Dr. Benning's house. I parked at the curb and looked up and down the street. Yellow traffic lights winked on the bare asphalt. The sidewalks were deserted. A few late cars rolled into sight and out of mind. There was no sign of Gino's four-hole Buick sedan.
I pushed the bell-button under the large shabby sign. I heard quiet footsteps in the hallway, and Benning's long face was framed in the dirty glass pane. The light came on over my head. Benning unlocked the door, and opened it cautiously. His pale eyeballs were bloodshot, but not from sleep. He was fully clothed, in the suit I had seen him in that morning.
I got the curious idea that Dr. Benning had been crying.
His speech was slightly thick: "Archer, isn't it? You've been hurt, man."
"That can wait."
I leaned my shoulder against the half-open door, and he stepped back to let me enter. Under the lamp in the hallway, his bald pink pate looked innocent and vulnerable like a baby's. He took his worn felt hat from a brass rack on the wall, and placed it on his head.
"Going somewhere?"
The gesture had been unconscious. He didn't understand me. "No, I'm not going anywhere." His tone implied that he never had, had never even expected to. He moved back against the wall, out of the grim light. Beyond his dwarf shadow a flight of stairs rose into darkness.
"I came across a funny thing this afternoon, Dr. Benning. Your patient Lucy Deschamps — your ex-patient — had a clinical thermometer. Mrs. Norris found it in her bathroom."
"What's funny about that? Most people do, particularly hypochondriacs."
"The funny thing was that it registered a temperature of 107."
"Good lord, man. That's usually fatal in adults. Was she so ill as that? I had no idea." His reaction was phony.
He lifted his hat with his left hand and began to polish the top of his head with his right palm. It was ludicrous. I didn't know whether to laugh at him or weep with him.
"I don't think she was ill at all, or had a temperature. The weather did it."
He blinked at me, still polishing his scalp. Futility and unease surrounded him like an odor. "It's never been that hot in Santa Teresa."
"Lucy came from Palm Springs last August 16. It was that hot in Palm Springs in the middle of August."
"She told me San Francisco," he said feebly.
"Maybe she did. If you talked to her at all. Which I doubt."
"You're calling me a liar?" His body stayed loose against the wall, unstiffened by anger or pride.
Somewhere upstairs, above our heads, there was a scraping sound, a small flurry of movement. Then he stiffened.
"You are a liar," I said. "You said that Lucy was a hypochondriac, that fear might have motivated her suicide. But she hadn't taken her temperature in a month. A hypochondriac takes it every day."
"I may have misjudged her. I probably did. People make mistakes."
"No. She didn't even come here to see you. She came to see your receptionist. You lied this morning to cover up for Miss Tennent."
"I had to—" He broke off sharply, jammed the hat on his head, huddled long and thin against the wall.
"I want to speak to Miss Tennent. Is she upstairs?"
"No. I don't know where she is. She's gone away."
"I'll have a look, if you don't mind."
"No!" He moved sideways to the foot of the stairs. His actions had lost all sense of style or timing. Something had beaten the last vestiges of pride out of his body.
"Even if you do mind."
I pushed him to one side and went up. A dingy hallway lined with doors ran the length of the second story. A yellow tape of light showed under one of the doors. I opened it quietly.
The woman who had called herself Miss Tennent was packing a suitcase on an unmade bed on the far side of the room. She was leaning over the bed with her narrow back to me, the short black hair falling about her face.
She spoke without turning:
"You needn't come crawling back, Sam. I'm taking off, and you know it. Make it a clean break."
I said nothing. She turned sideways, still not looking at me, and picked up a bottle of black liquid that might have been hair dye. Wrapping it in a black brassiere, she pushed it into the suitcase.