My fingers were biting into the receiver. “Wait a minute!” I shouted. “Dave, listen to me! You saw Donna?”
“That’s what I’m trying to tell you. She —”
“When?”
“…Why, not ten minutes ago. She —”
“Where? Where was she? Where did you see her?”
“Right here. At my office.” He was beginning to get excited himself. “I stopped by on my way from the Georgia —”
I cut him off. “Christ, Dave, I’ve been going nuts! I’ve been looking for her since four-thirty this afternoon. What’d she say? What kind of trouble is she in?”
“I don’t know. She wouldn’t tell me anything—just wanted money quick. No checks. I thought maybe you and she had had a fight or something. I had around nine hundred in the safe; I gave it all to her and she beat —”
I shook the receiver savagely. “But she must have said something! She wouldn’t just leave without…you know…” “She said she sent you a letter earlier in the day.” I dropped down on the desk chair. My hands were shaking and my mouth was dry. “A letter,” I said dully. “A letter. Not in person, not even a phone call. Just a letter.”
By this time Dave was making comforting sounds. “I’m sure it’s nothing serious, Clay. You know how women are. The letter’ll probably tell you where she is and you can talk her out of it.”
I thanked him and hung up and sat there and stared at my thumb. For some reason I felt even more depressed than before. I couldn’t understand why Donna wouldn’t have turned to me if she was in trouble. That was always a big thing with us: all difficulties had to be shared…
I went into the kitchen and made myself a couple of cold salami sandwiches and washed them down with another highball. At nine-twenty I telephoned the Hollywood substation to let Martell know what Dave Wainhope had told me. Whoever answered said the chief deputy was out and to call back in an hour. I tried to leave a message on what it was about, but was told again to call back and got myself hung up on.
About ten minutes later the buzzer from downstairs sounded. I pushed the button and was standing in the hall door when a young fellow in a postman’s gray uniform showed up with a special-delivery letter. I signed for it and closed the door and leaned there and ripped open the envelope.
A single sheet of dime-store paper containing a few neatly typed lines and signed in ink in Donnas usual scrawl.
Clay darling:
I’m terribly sorry, but something that happened a long time ago has come back to plague me and I have to get away for a few days. Please don’t try to find me, I’ll be all right as long as you trust me.
You know I love you so much that I won’t remain away a day longer than I have to. Please don’t worry, darling, I’ll explain everything the moment I get back.
All my love,
Donna
And that was that. Nothing that I could get my teeth into; no leads, nothing to cut away even a small part of my burden of concern. I walked into the bedroom with no spring in my step and dropped the letter on the desk and reached for the phone. But there was no point to that. Martell wouldn’t be back at the station yet.
Maybe I had missed something. Maybe the envelope was a clue? A clue to what? I looked at it. Carefully. The postmark was Hollywood. That meant it had gone through the branch at Wilcox and Selma. At five-twelve that afternoon. At five-twelve I was just about pulling up behind those department cars out on Stone Canyon Road. She would have had to mail it at the post office instead of a drop box for me to get it four hours later.
No return address, front or back, as was to be expected. Just a cheap envelope, the kind you pick up at Woolworth’s or Kress’s. My name and the address neatly typed. The e key was twisted very slightly to the right and the t was tilted just far enough to be noticeable if you looked at it long enough.
I let the envelope drift out of my fingers and stood there staring down at Donna’s letter. My eyes wandered to the other papers next to it…
I said, “Jesus Christ!” You could spend the next ten years in church and never say it more devoutly than I did at that moment. My eyes were locked to one of the letters David Wainhope had written to Donna — and in its typewritten lines two individual characters stood out like bright and shining beacons: a tilted t and a twisted e!
VI
It took some time — I don’t know how much — before I was able to do any straight-line thinking. The fact that those two letters had come out of the same typewriter opened up so many possible paths to the truth behind Donna’s disappearance that — well, I was like the mule standing between two stacks of hay.
Finally I simply turned away and walked into the living room and poured a good half-inch of bonded bourbon into a glass and drank it down like water after an aspirin. I damned near strangled on the stuff; and by the time I stopped gasping for air and wiping the tears out of my eyes, I was ready to do some thinking.
Back at the desk again, I sat down and picked up the two sheets of paper. A careful comparison removed the last lingering doubt that they had come out of the same machine. Other points began to fall into place: the fact that the typing in Donnas letter had been done by a professional. You can always tell by the even impression of the letters, instead of the dark-light-erasure-strike-over touch you find in an amateur job. And I knew that Donna had never used a typewriter in her life!
All right, what did it mean? On the surface, simply that somebody had typed the letter for Donna, and at Dave Wainhope’s office. It had to be his office, for he would hardly write business letters at home — and besides I was pretty sure Dave was strictly a pen-and-pencil man himself.
Now what? Well, since it was typed in Dave’s office, but not by Dave or Donna, it would indicate Dave’s secretary had done the work. Does that hold up? It’s got to hold up, friend; no one else works in that office but Dave and his secretary.
Let’s kind of dig into that a little. Let’s say that Donna dropped in on Dave earlier in the afternoon, upset about something. Let’s say that Dave is out, so Donna dictates a note to me and the secretary types it out. Very simple …But is it?
No.
And here’s why. Here are the holes: first, the note is on dime-store paper, sent in a dime-store envelope. Dave wouldn’t have that kind of stationery in his office — not a big-front guy like Dave. OK, stretch it all the way out; say that Donna had brought her own paper and had the girl use it. You still can’t tell me Dave’s secretary wouldn’t have told her boss about it when he got back to the office. And if she told him, he would certainly have told me during our phone conversation.
But none of those points compares with the biggest flaw of them alclass="underline" why would Donna have anyone type the letter for her when a handwritten note would do just as well — especially on a very private and personal matter like telling your husband you’re in trouble?
I got up and walked down the room and lit a cigarette and looked out the window without seeing anything. A small voice in the back of my mind said, “If all this brain work of yours is right, you know what it adds up to, don’t you, pal?”
I knew. Sure, I knew. It meant that Donna Kane was a threat to somebody It meant that she was being held somewhere; that she had been forced to sign a note to keep me from reporting her disappearance to the cops until whoever was responsible could make a getaway.
It sounded like a bad movie, and I tried hard to make myself believe that’s all it was. But the more I dug into it, the more I went over the results of my reasoning, the more evident it became that there was no other explanation.