Till Millicent Dreen came in.
I had seen her before, on the Strip with various escorts, and knew who she was: publicity director for Tele-Pictures. Mrs. Dreen was over forty and looked it, but there was electricity in her, plugged in to a secret source that time could never wear out. Look how high and tight I carry my body, her movements said. My hair is hennaed but comely, said her coiffure, inviting not to conviction but to suspension of disbelief. Her eyes were green and inconstant like the sea. They said what the hell.
She sat down by my desk and told me that her daughter had disappeared the day before, which was September the seventh.
“I was in Hollywood all day. We keep an apartment here, and there was some work I had to get out fast. Una isn’t working, so I left her at the beach house by herself.”
“Where is it?”
“A few miles above Santa Barbara.”
“That’s a long way to commute.”
“It’s worth it to me. When I can maneuver a weekend away from this town, I like to get really away.”
“Maybe your daughter feels the same, only more so. When did she leave?”
“Sometime yesterday. When I drove home to the beach house last night she was gone.”
“Did you call the police?”
“Hardly. She’s twenty-two and knows what she’s doing. I hope. Anyway, apron strings don’t become me.” She smiled like a cat and moved her scarlet-taloned fingers in her narrow lap. “It was very late and I was – tired. I went to bed. But when I woke up this morning it occurred to me that she might have drowned. I objected to it because she wasn’t a strong swimmer, but she went in for solitary swimming. I think of the most dreadful things when I wake up in the morning.”
“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. “Frankly, I don’t know about the police. I do know about you, Mr. Archer. You just got out of the army, didn’t you?”
“Last week.” I failed to add that she was my first postwar client.
“And you don’t belong to anybody, I’ve heard. You’ve never been bought. Is that right?”
“Not outright. You can take an option on a piece of me, though. A hundred dollars would do for a starter.”
She nodded briskly. 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 if her marriage breaks up. 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.”
“Is your daughter Una Sand?”
“Of course. I assumed you knew.” My ignorance of the details of her life seemed to cause her pain. 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 glazed blonde who had had a year or two in the sun, but who’d made a better pin-up than an actress.
“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 fingers fluttered in glee before her immobile body. “I suppose her marriage is happy enough. Her Ensign’s quite a personable young man – handsome in a masculine way, and passionate she tells me, and naive enough.”
“Naive enough for what?”
“To marry Una. Jack Rossiter was quite a catch in this woman’s town. He was runner-up at Forest Hills the last year he played tennis. And now of course he’s a flier. Una did right well by herself, even if it doesn’t last.”
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, 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.”
“I can’t keep up with you,” I said. “A minute ago Una was in the clutches of the cruel crawling foam. Now she’s taken off with a romantic stranger.”
“I consider possibilities, is all. When I was Una’s age, married to Dreen, I had quite a time settling down. I still do.”
Our gazes, mine as impassive as hers I hoped, met, struck no spark, and disengaged. The female spider who eats her mate held no attraction for me.
“I’m getting to know you pretty well,” I said with the necessary smile, “but not the missing girl. Who’s she been knocking around with?”
“I don’t think we need to go into that. She doesn’t confide in me, in any case.”
“Whatever you say. Shall we look at the scene of the crime?”
“There isn’t any crime.”
“The scene of the accident, then, or the departure. Maybe the beach house will give me something to go on.”
She glanced at the wafer-thin watch on her brown wrist. Its diamonds glittered coldly. “Do I have to drive all the way back?”
“If you can spare the time, it might help. We’ll take my car.”
She rose decisively but gracefully, as though she had practiced the movement in front of a mirror. An expert bitch, I thought as I followed her high slim shoulders and tight-sheathed hips down the stairs to the bright street. I felt a little sorry for the army of men who had warmed themselves, or been burned, at that secret electricity. And I wondered if her daughter Una was like her.
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.
We drove down Sunset to the sea and north on 101 Alternate. All the way to Santa Barbara, she read a typescript whose manila cover was marked: “Temporary – This script is not final and is given to you for advance information only.” It occurred to me that the warning might apply to Mrs. Dreen’s own story.
As we left the Santa Barbara city limits, she tossed the script over her shoulder into the back seat. “It really smells. It’s going to be a smash.”
A few miles north of the city, a dirt road branched off to the left beside a filling station. It wound for a mile or more through broken country to her private beach. The beach house was set well back from the sea at the convergence of 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 dazzle of sun, sand, and surf was like an arc-furnace. But I felt some breeze from the water when we got out of the car. A few languid clouds moved inland over our heads. A little high plane was gamboling among them like a terrier in a henyard.
“You have privacy,” I said to Mrs. Dreen.