Della Street wakened as he opened the door of the car. “See her?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Where is she?”
“Gone.”
“Where?”
“Home.”
Della smiled, a sleep-drugged, wistful little smile. “You do have a way with women, don’t you, Chief?”
Chapter 12
The train, having stopped briefly to pick up a lone passenger, gathered momentum. Early morning sunlight was touching the snow-capped crests of high mountain ranges on the right. The locomotive, speeding past orange groves laden with golden fruit, whistled intermittently for grade crossings. In the sleepers, Pullman porters were beginning to haul out baggage and pile it in vestibules. In the diner, passengers were thinning out as the train approached the suburbs of Los Angeles.
Mason entered the dining car. Sally Elberton was seated alone at a table for two.
“One, sir?” the dining steward asked, holding up a finger at Mason. “We’ll have just time to serve you.”
Mason said, “Thank you. I’ll sit here,” and walked calmly over to seat himself opposite the young woman.
She kept her eyes on her plate for a moment, then elevated a cup of coffee to her lips, casually glanced at Mason, dropped her eyes back to the plate, then suddenly snapped her eyes back into a startled glance at the lawyer, the coffee cup held motionless in her hand.
“Good morning,” Mason said.
“Why — were you on this train? I didn’t know... You’ve been... south?”
“Just got on a little while ago,” Mason said.
“Oh.” She smiled. “I got on early, myself — been visiting a friend.”
A waiter bent solicitously over Mason’s shoulder. “If you’ll put your order in right away, sir...”
“Just a pot of coffee,” Mason said.
He opened his cigarette case, took out a cigarette, lit it, settled back in the chair with one arm resting lightly on the edge of the table. “Did you get to see him?” he asked.
“Who?”
“Your friend.”
She studied him for a moment as though debating whether to be angry or facetious, then smiled and said, “As it happened, my friend was not a him, but a her.”
“The name wouldn’t by any chance have been Milter?” Mason asked.
This time she decided to freeze him with cold indignation. “I don’t know what gave you that idea in the first place,” she said, “or who gave you the right to inquire into my private affairs.”
“I was just preparing you,” Mason said, “sort of giving you a dress rehearsal.”
“Rehearsal for what?”
“For the questions that are coming later.”
“I can assure you,” she said, her voice coldly formal, “that if anyone has the slightest right to ask me questions I will be able to answer without any assistance, Mr. Mason.”
Mason moved back slightly so that the waiter could bring his coffee. He handed the waiter a dollar bill, said, “Get the check, pay it, keep the change,” shifted his position slightly, waited until the grinning waiter had retired, and then asked quite casually, “Was Milter alive or dead when you called?”
She didn’t so much as bat an eyelash. Her face was a mask of cold disdain. “I don’t know to what you are referring,” she said.
Mason put sugar and cream in his coffee, stirred it, and drank the coffee slowly, enjoying his cigarette while he looked out at the scenery. The blonde who sat across from him continued to keep that cool stare of an annoyed young woman who is keeping herself very much aloof.
Mason finished his coffee, pushed back his chair, and got to his feet.
Surprise showed in the young woman’s eyes. “Is... is that all?” she asked, the words slipping in an unguarded moment through the wall of her reserve.
Mason smiled down at her. “You answered my question when I first asked it,” he said.
“How?”
“By that look of stiff surprise, by that dead pan, and the studied calmness of your reply. You’d been rehearsing your answer to it all night. You knew someone was going to ask it.”
With which he calmly strode from the diner, leaving a very disconcerted young woman craning her neck to stare at his back as he jerked open the door, crossed the vestibule, and went into the sleeper.
Mason found Marvin Adams in the last car. Adams stared up at him incredulously, got to his feet. “Mr. Mason!” he exclaimed. “I didn’t know you were taking this train.”
“I didn’t either,” Mason said. “Sit down, Marvin. I want to have a quick talk with you.”
Adams moved over so that Mason could sit down beside him.
Mason crossed his knees, made himself as comfortable as possible, leaning an elbow on the cushioned arm of the Pullman seat. “You took a duck from Witherspoon’s place last night,” he said.
Marvin’s face broke into a grin. “Cutest little cuss you ever saw. I got to feeding him flies, and he was just like a pet.”
“What happened to him?”
“Ί don’t know what did happen to him. He disappeared.”
“How?” Mason asked.
“I took him into town in the car I was driving.”
“Your car?”
“No, one that I’d borrowed from one of the boys there in El Templo. It was the sort of car a junior-college kid would drive. You know, it has seen a lot better days, but it gets you there and gets you back.”
“You drove it out to the Witherspoon ranch?”
Marvin Adams grinned. “Took the old junk heap out and parked it right in front of the family mansion,” he said. “I always thought it made Witherspoon sore when he saw that heap parked out in front of the place. Two and three times he told me whenever I wanted to come out, if I’d just telephone in, he’d have a chauffeur drive one of his cars in and pick me up.”
“You didn’t do that?”
“I’ll say I didn’t. The old heap didn’t look like much, but it was my sort. You know the feeling.”
Mason nodded. “Lois didn’t mind?” he asked.
The gleeful grin on the young man’s face faded into a tender smile. He said quietly, “She loved it.”
“All right,” Mason said, “you took the duck into town in that car, and what happened?”
“I’d said good-by to Lois. I had a quick job of packing a suitcase on my hands, and then a train to catch — and I suddenly realized I was hungry. I wanted a hamburger. There wasn’t any parking place on the main street. I knew a nice little restaurant down on Cinder Butte Avenue. I took the car down there and parked it...”
“Directly in front of the restaurant?” Mason interrupted.
“No. The place was pretty well cluttered up with cars. I had to drive about a block before I found a parking place. Why?”
“Nothing,” Mason said. “Just getting the picture straight is all. Guess that’s the lawyer in me. Go on.”
“Why all the commotion about the duck? Is old man Witherspoon sore at losing one of his prize ducks?”
Mason avoided that question, countered with another. He said, “That time when I first met you, you were mentioning something about sinking ducks with some new type of chemical. What’s it all about?”
“They’re known as detergents,” Adams said.
“What’s a detergent?”
The young man’s face showed the enthusiasm a person feels when he’s discussing a favorite subject. “The molecules of a detergent are built up on a complex structure. One end of each of the long molecules is hydrophobic, or, in other words, it tends to be repelled by water. The other end is hydrophilic, or has an affinity for water. When a detergent is mixed with water and applied to an oily surface, the end of the molecule which doesn’t affiliate with the water adheres to the oil. The other end affiliates with the water. Everyone knows there’s a certain natural antipathy between oil and water. They don’t mix. But a detergent does more than mix them. It really marries them.”