So Ricardo Taonon’s wife had a convertible and it was her own property and no one else ever drove it and Edward Harold had called her not as his first choice but as his second. A woman with a superb figure who liked to show it. Edward Harold’s second choice.
Terry Clane, standing in the doorway of the telephone booth at the service station from which he had placed his call, began to breathe regularly and deeply, filling his blood with oxygen, letting the rhythm of his breathing furnish the preliminary foundation for concentration. Then when he had properly readied himself, he threw his mind completely into pin-point focus on the problem which confronted him.
Edward Harold had an alibi — or did he? When had he jumped from that window? Why had he jumped? Had it been because Gloster had walked in? If that were so, then Gloster had been in the warehouse probably as early as ten-thirty. Yet he had telephoned Clane shortly after eleven. And what of Edward Harold? That man at the time he had jumped through that window was already being sought by the police, a fugitive from justice with a death sentence hanging over his head. Bouted unexpectedly from the hideout where he had established himself for a long stay, fleeing out into the city without hat or coat... The police, already hot on his trail, would redouble their efforts to find him. Every new occupant of a hotel would be subject to suspicion. A man who would try to find a room without baggage at eleven o’clock at night... Airports watched, train terminals under surveillance... What would a man do under those circumstances? Where would he go? How would he hide?
A few seconds later, Clane became conscious of the service station attendant watching him.
Clane smiled and started walking away.
“Hey,” the attendant called, “you all right?”
“Yes, why?”
“I don’t know. I thought something had happened. All of a sudden you stood still and looked as though... looked as though you were sleeping with your eyes open.”
“I was thinking of something,” Clane said and hurried away.
He now had the answer that he wanted.
Clane couldn’t be certain that he was right because he hadn’t had all the facts on which to predicate a solution. But he felt that he knew what Edward Harold would try to do, the only thing that was left for him to do, if the facts were as Terry Clane understood them.
Discreet inquiry of the night man at the garage of the apartment house where Ricardo Taonon lived, plus a ten-dollar bill, gave Clane additional information as well as a look at Daphne Taonon’s convertible.
The car was a dark, low-slung, sleek convertible. It had been returned to the garage at about eight-thirty in the morning. The man didn’t know when it had been taken out. He came on duty at seven o’clock.
There was no evidence that the car had been off the main-traveled highway, no dust on the inner rims of the wheel. The windshield was now clean and polished. The day man said he had done that. When the car had been brought in, the windshield had been streaked with the evidences of moisture which had collected with fog drippings. There had been two clear semicircular spaces where the windshield wipers had fought back the moisture. The sides of the automobile were still streaked with stain where water, dripping down from the windshield, had been thrown back by the wind. The day man had suggested to Mrs. Taonon that he would “clean it up a little bit.” He just hadn’t got at it yet. He had polished the windshield, checked the radiator, and was about ready to wipe off the car with a damp cloth. It didn’t need a general wash, just a good wiping.
Clane made note of the license number.
The garage man volunteered more information. The night switchboard operator had told him long distance had been calling Mrs. Taonon at intervals all night. There had been no answer; apparently both Mr. and Mrs. Taonon had been out since midnight at least.
In a rented “drive-yourself” car, Terry Clane started exploring the possibilities.
Time, he knew, was running out. Yet he had to play a lone hand; to hurry would be fatal. His course of action called for self-discipline as rigorous as that inflicted upon himself by a race-track habitué who must discipline himself to a predetermined manner of betting over a period of weeks in order to play a consistent system.
Simply because he did not have the time to cover all of the territory, and because he knew that according to the law of probabilities, the better class of auto courts would have been completely filled up long before midnight, Clane decided on only the smaller, less pretentious courts.
He had four routes to choose from — one over the Golden Gate Bridge up through Marin County, another across the bay bridge up the Sacramento Road, another down through the Altamont Pass to the San Joaquin, and last of all, the peninsular road down to San Jose. And it was this last road that Clane took, merely because it would have been difficult to guard. The other roads involved crossing toll bridges, and plain-clothes officers unobtrusively stationed at the toll gates could have scrutinized closely the occupants of each automobile as toll was collected.
Clane sped on down the wide road, passed up all stops until he had left San Jose behind. Then he started his inquiries.
It was quite conceivable that Daphne Taonon would have written down a wrong license number on the register of an auto court, but she was not so apt to have misrepresented the type of car she was driving since that would have been a glaring discrepancy too easy to check.
Painstakingly Clane covered all of the smaller auto courts until at length a growing doubt turned to the bitter taste of defeat. He had quite evidently failed to duplicate Edward Harold’s process of reasoning. Or else they had taken a chance in crossing on one of the toll bridges.
Clane drove on, confident that he had now passed the last remote point of probability at which the parties would have stopped. He was now persevering only because he could, for the moment, think of nothing better.
An auto court of the cheaper sort was ahead on the right and because it offered a good place to turn around, Clane drove up to it. His inquiries were made merely from force of habit. Had a convertible containing a man and a woman registered at about — and Clane, doing quick mental arithmetic as to driving time, fixed the hour as one o’clock in the morning.
The woman who ran the place was in the aggressive forties, a woman who had been kicked around enough by life to learn to fight back. Her combat with life had given her a “what’s-in-it-for-me” attitude and a theory that, if you didn’t grab what you wanted out of life the minute you saw it, someone else was going to snatch it first.
Obviously she didn’t want any trouble with the law, but Terry would get no real cooperation from her until she knew more of what was in the wind.
“We rent cabins pretty late sometimes.”
“My question was specific,” Clane said, and paved the way with a ten-dollar bill, his pulse surging with sudden hope.
“Well, yes. We did rent a cabin. What’s your interest in it?”
“I am trying to find the woman,” Clane said. “I believe she drove away.”
“Yes, she’s working in town. The husband’s got the flu. He’s staying here in bed.”
“That’s too bad,” Clane said. “You don’t know where I could locate the woman?”
“She’s some sort of a saleswoman, I think. They’re selling stockings or something. Maybe cosmetics. She said she’d be out early in the morning, I don’t know just what time she left. She was gone when I got up. The husband’s still there, feeling pretty much under the weather. Maybe if you wanted to go into town, you could spot the car, a nice convertible.”
“I’ll talk with the husband,” Clane said. “He may know. What cabin’s he in?”
“Just a minute,” the woman said. “Let’s have an understanding. I don’t want any rough stuff.”