“Did she say anything about her plans for the day? You know: whether she was going to see anybody special, something like that?”
She lifted a shoulder. “Hunh-uh. She did say something about her agent wanting her to have lunch with this producer — what’s his name? — who does the Snow Soap television show. They’re casting for a new musical and she thinks that’s why this lunch. But I suppose you know about that. You like to come in for a drink?”
I told her no and thanked her and she pouted her lips at me. I could come in early any afternoon and drink her liquor and give her a roll in the hay, no questions asked, no obligations and no recriminations. Not just because it was me, either. It was there for anyone who was friendly, no stranger, and had clean fingernails. You find at least one like her in any apartment house, where the husband falls asleep on the couch every night over a newspaper or the television set.
I asked her to keep an eye out for Donna and tell her I had to run out to Stone Canyon on some urgent and unexpected business and that I’d call in the first chance I got. She gave me a big smile and an up-from-under stare and closed the door very gently.
I lit a cigarette and went back to the apartment to leave a note for Donna next to the telephone. Then I took a last look around and walked down one flight to the street, got into the car, and headed for Stone Canyon.
III
It was a quarter past five by the time I got out there. There was an especially nasty curve in the road just to the north of Yestone, and off on the left shoulder where the bend was sharpest, three department cars were drawn up in a bunch. A uniformed man was taking a smoke behind the wheel of the lead car; he looked up sharply as I made a U-turn and stopped behind the last car.
By the time I had cut off the motor and opened the door, he was standing there scowling at me. “Where d’ya think you’re goin’, Mac?”
“Sergeant Lindstrom telephoned me,” I said, getting out onto the sparse sun-baked growth they call grass in California.
He ran the ball of a thumb lightly along one cheek and eyed me stonily from under the stiffbrim of his campaign hat. “Your name Kane?”
“That’s it.”
He took the thumb off his face and used it to point. “Down there. They’re waitin’ for you. Better take a deep breath, Mac. You won’t like what they show you.”
I didn’t say anything. I went past him and on around the department car. The ground fell away in what almost amounted to a forty-five-degree slope, and a hundred yards down the slope was level ground. Down there a knot of men were standing near the scorched ruins of what had been an automobile. It could have been Donnas Chevy or it could have been any other light job. From its condition and across the distance I couldn’t tell.
It took some time and a good deal of care for me to work my way to the valley floor without breaking my neck. There were patches of scarred earth spaced out in a reasonably straight line all the way down the incline where the car had hit and bounced and hit again, over and over. Splinters of broken glass lay scattered about, and about halfway along was a twisted bumper and a section of grillwork. There was a good deal of brush around and it came in handy for hanging on while I found footholds. It was a tough place to get down, but the car at the bottom hadn’t had any trouble making it.
A tall, slender, quiet-faced man in gray slacks and a matching sports shirt buttoned at the neck but without a tie was waiting for me. He nodded briefly and looked at me out of light blue eyes under thick dark brows.
“Are you Clay Kane?” It was a soft, pleasant voice, not a cop’s voice at all.
I nodded, looking past him at the pile of twisted metal. The four men near it were looking my way, their faces empty of expression.
The quiet-faced man said, “I’m Chief Deputy Martell, out of Hollywood. They tell me it’s your wife’s car, but that your wife wasn’t using it. Has she told you yet who was?”
“Not yet; no. She was out when I called the apartment, although I’d spoken to her only a few minutes before.”
“Any idea where she might be?”
I shrugged. “Several, but I didn’t have a chance to do any checking. The sergeant said you were in a hurry.”
“I see …I think I’ll ask you to take a quick glance at the body we took out of the car. It probably won’t do much good, but you never know. I’d better warn you: it won’t be pleasant.”
“That’s all right,” I said. “I spent some time in the Pacific during the war. We opened up pillboxes with flamethrowers.”
“That should help.” He turned and moved off, skirting the wreckage, and I followed. A small khaki tarpaulin was spread out on the ground, bulged in the center where it covered an oblong object. Not a very big object. I began to catch the acrid-sweetish odor of burned meat, mixed with the faint biting scent of gasoline.
Martell bent and took hold of a corner of the tarpaulin. He said flatly, “Do the best you can, Mr. Kane,” and flipped back the heavy canvas.
It looked like nothing human. Except for the contours of legs and arms, it could have been a side of beef hauled out of a burning barn. Where the face had been was a smear of splintered and charred bone that bore no resemblance to a face. No hair, no clothing except for the remains of a woman’s shoe still clinging to the left foot; only blackened, flame-gnawed flesh and bones. And over it all the stench of a charnel house.
I backed away abruptly and clamped down on my teeth, fighting back a wave of nausea. Martell allowed the canvas to fall back into place. “Sorry, Mr. Kane. We can’t overlook any chances.”
“It’s all right,” I mumbled.
“You couldn’t identify …her?”
I shuddered. “Christ, no! Nobody could!”
“Let’s have a look at the car.”
I circled the wreck twice. It had stopped right-side up, the tires flat, the hood ripped to shreds, the engine shoved halfway into the front seat. The steering wheel was snapped off and the dashboard appeared to have been worked over with a sledgehammer. Flames had eaten away the upholstery and blackened the entire interior.
It was Donnas car; no doubt about that. The license plates showed the right number and a couple of rust spots on the right rear fender were as I remembered them. I said as much to Chief Deputy Martell and he nodded briefly and went over to say something I couldn’t hear to the four men.
He came back to me after a minute or two. “I’ve a few questions. Nothing more for you down here. Let’s go back upstairs.”
He was holding something in one hand. It was a woman’s bag: blue suede, small, with a gold clasp shaped like a question mark. I recognized it and my mouth felt a little dry.
It was a job getting up the steep slope. The red loam was dry and crumbled under my feet. The sun was still high enough to be hot on my back and my hands were sticky with ooze from the sagebrush.
Martell was waiting for me when I reached the road. I sat down on the front bumper of one of the department cars and shook the loose dirt out of my shoes, wiped most of the sage ooze off my palms, and brushed the knees of my trousers. The man in the green khaki uniform was still behind the wheel of the lead car but he wasn’t smoking now.
I followed the sheriff into the front seat of a black-and-white Mercury with a buggy-whip aerial at the rear bumper and a radio phone on the dash. He lit up a small yellow cigar in violation of a fire-hazard signboard across the road from us. He dropped the match into the dashboard ashtray and leaned back in the seat and bounced the suede bag lightly on one of his broad palms.
IV
He said, “One of the boys found this in a clump of sage halfway down the slope. You ever see it before?”