“Oh, Peter means well, don’t you, old boy?” As if to foreclose an answer, he looked at me with a grin pasted on over his embarrassment. “What will you drink, Lew? I’m going to have a tonic.”
“That will do for me.”
The houseman retreated.
“What about this disappearance?” I said.
“Perhaps disappearance isn’t exactly the right word. My client’s son walked out on his family deliberately. They made no attempt to follow him up or bring him back, at least not for many years.”
“Why not?”
“I gather they were just as dissatisfied with him as he was with them. They disapproved of the girl he’d married. ‘Disapproved’ is putting it mildly, and there were other bones of contention. You can see how serious the rift was from the fact that he sacrificed his right to inherit a large estate.”
“Does he have a name, or do we call him Mr. X?”
Sable looked pained. It hurt him physically to divulge information. “The family’s name is Galton. The son’s name is, or was, Anthony Galton. He dropped out of sight in 1936. He was twenty-two at the time, just out of Stanford.”
“That’s a long time ago.” From where I sat, it was like a previous century.
“I told you this thing was very nearly hopeless. However, Mrs. Galton wants her son looked for. She’s going to die any day herself, and she feels the need for some sort of reconciliation with the past.”
“Who says she’s going to die?”
“Her doctor. Dr. Howell says it could happen at any time.”
The houseman loped into the room with a clinking tray. He made a show of serviceability as he passed us our gin-and-tonics. I noticed the blue anchor tattoo on the back of his hand, and wondered if he was a sailor. Nobody would mistake him for a trained servant. A half-moon of old lipstick clung to the rim of the glass he handed me. When he went away again, I said:
“Young Galton got married before he left?”
“Indeed he did. His wife was the immediate cause of the trouble in the family. She was going to have a child.”
“And all three of them dropped out of sight?”
“As if the earth had opened and swallowed them,” Sable said dramatically.
“Were there any indications of foul play?”
“Not so far as I know. I wasn’t associated with the Galton family at the time. I’m going to ask Mrs. Galton herself to tell you about the circumstances of her son’s departure. I don’t know exactly how much of it she wants aired.”
“Is there more to it?”
“I believe so. Well, cheers,” he said cheerlessly. He gulped his drink standing. “Before I take you to see her, I’d like some assurance that you can give us your full time for as long as necessary.”
“I have no commitments. How much of an effort does she want?”
“The best you can give, naturally.”
“You might do better with one of the big organizations.”
“I think not. I know you, and I trust you to handle this affair with some degree of urbanity. I can’t have Mrs. Galton’s last days darkened by scandal. My overriding concern in this affair is the protection of the family name.”
Sable’s voice throbbed with emotion, but I doubted that it was related to any deep feeling he had for the Galton family. He kept looking past me or through me, anxiously, as if his real concerns lay somewhere else.
I got some hint of what they were when we were on our way out. A pretty blond woman about half his age emerged from behind a banana tree in the court. She was wearing jeans and an open-necked white shirt. She moved with a kind of clumsy stealth, like somebody stepping out of ambush.
“Hello, Gordon,” she said in a brittle voice. “Fancy meeting you here.”
“I live here, don’t I?”
“That was supposed to be the theory.”
Sable spoke carefully to her, as if he was editing his sentences in his head: “Alice, this is no time to go into all of it again. Why do you think I stayed home this morning?”
“A lot of good it did me. Where do you think you’re going now?”
“Out.”
“Out where?”
“You have no right to cross-examine me, you know.”
“Oh yes I have a right.”
She stood squarely in front of him in a deliberately ugly posture, one hip out, her breasts thrust forward under the white shirt, at the same time sharp and tender. She didn’t seem to be drunk, but there was a hot moist glitter in her eyes. Her eyes were large and violet, and should have been beautiful. With dark circles under them, and heavy eyeshadow on the upper lids, they were like two spreading bruises.
“Where are you taking my husband?” she said to me.
“Mr. Sable is doing the taking. It’s a business matter.”
“What sort of business, eh? Whose business?”
“Certainly not yours, dear.” Sable put his arm around her. “Come to your room now. Mr. Archer is a private detective working on a case for me – nothing to do with you.”
“I bet not.” She jerked away from him, and swung back to me. “What do you want from me? There’s nothing to find out. I sit in this morgue of a house, with nobody to talk to, nothing to do. I wish I was back in Chicago. People in Chicago like me.”
“People here like you, too.” Sable was watching her patiently, waiting for her bout of emotion to wear itself out.
“People here hate me. I can’t even order drinks in my own house.”
“Not in the morning, and this is why.”
“You don’t love me at all.” Her anger was dissolving into self-pity. A shift of internal pressure forced tears from her eyes. “You don’t care a thing about me.”
“I care very much. Which is why I hate to see you fling yourself around the landscape. Come on, dear, let’s go in.”
He touched her waist, and this time she didn’t resist. With one arm holding her, he escorted her around the pool to a door which opened on the court. When he closed the door behind them, she was leaning heavily on him. I found my own way out.
Chapter 2
SABLE KEPT me waiting for half an hour. From where I sat in my car, I could see Santa Teresa laid out like a contour map, distinct in the noon light. It was an old and settled city, as such things go in California. Its buildings seemed to belong to its hills, to lean with some security on the past. In contrast with them, Sable’s house was a living-machine, so new it hardly existed.
When he came out, he was wearing a brown suit with a wicked little red pin stripe in it, and carrying a cordovan dispatch case. His manner had changed to match his change in costume. He was businesslike, brisk, and remote.
Following his instructions and his black Imperial, I drove into the city and across it to an older residential section. Massive traditional houses stood far back from the street, behind high masonry walls or topiary hedges.
Arroyo Park was an economic battleground where managers and professional people matched wits and incomes. The people on Mrs. Galton’s street didn’t know there had been a war. Their grandfathers or great-grandfathers had won it for them; death and taxes were all they had to cope with.
Sable made a signal for a left turn. I followed him between stone gateposts in which the name Galton was cut. The majestic iron gates gave a portcullis effect. A serf who was cutting the lawn with a power-mower paused to tug at his forelock as we went by. The lawn was the color of the ink they use to print the serial numbers on banknotes, and it stretched in unbroken smoothness for a couple of hundred yards. The white facade of a pre-Mizener Spanish mansion glared in the green distance.
The driveway curved around to the side of the house, and through a porte-cochère. I parked behind a Chevrolet coupe displaying a doctor’s caduceus. Further back, in the shade of a great oak, two girls in shorts were playing badminton. The bird flew back and forth between them in flashing repartee. When the dark-headed girl with her back to us missed, she said: