The doctor was standing on the lighted porch, waving good-bye. Dodd pressed down hard on the accelerator and the little car jumped across the driveway as if all of Sidalia’s chaps were biting at its heels.
He took Portola Drive back to the city. He wasn’t in any hurry. An hour ago he’d been overoptimistic about finding out what car Kellogg was driving, the make, the year, even the license plates; he had imagined himself following Kellogg, reaching him before the police did, breaking the case before they even knew there was a case.
“Dodd, boy dreamer,” he said aloud. “Me and my kind face.”
He was aware that the police would be waiting for him at Kellogg’s house and taking a dim view of his absence, but a few more minutes wouldn’t make much difference. The telephone call he intended to make had to be made in private, without Brandon or any policemen listening in.
He parked the car in front of the building where his office was located, and took the elevator up to the third floor. Lorraine, his secretary, had left a message for him in her typewriter, as she usually did when something important came up during his absence: “Spec. Del. letter from Fowler on your desk.” To make sure he didn’t miss the letter she had propped it between two ash trays, as if she mistrusted either his eyesight or his ability to find anything.
Dear Dodd:
Had just returned from posting my previous letter to you when Emilio called me from the Windsor bar to tell me that something milagroso had happened to him. I don’t agree that it’s miraculous, but it’s interesting. Someone sent him two ten-dollar bills in an envelope postmarked San Francisco. He thought at first the money came from some lady tourist who’d taken a fancy to him. Then he remembered that O’Donnell had borrowed two hundred fifty pesos from him several months ago, roughly twenty bucks. I draw several conclusions from this:
O’Donnell is in S.F.
He has some means of support.
His conscience is bothering him, and he’s scared. (In my experience “conscience money” usually has little to do with the debt or theft involved. It’s a pay-off for other things, triggered by fear.)
Whatever is on his mind, it’s serious enough to make him send the money anonymously, but not so serious as to make him cover his tracks completely.
These are my conclusions. Draw your own. And happy hunting!
Happy hunting. Dodd repeated the words grimly, remembering the dead man on the kitchen floor. There were many mistakes in Fowler’s letter: all the tenses were wrong. The hunt was over.
He picked up the phone and called a number in Atherton.
A woman answered on the second ring. “This is the Brandon residence.”
“I’d like to speak to Mrs. Brandon, please.”
“Mrs. Brandon has retired for the night.”
“It’s very important.”
“She’s got a headache. I have orders not to dis—”
“Is that Miss Lundquist?”
“Why yes.”
Dodd oiled up his voice. “I’m a friend of Mr. Brandon’s. He’s often spoken of you, Miss Lundquist.”
“He has? Well, my goodness.”
“My name is Dodd. I must talk to Mrs. Brandon. Tell her that, will you?”
“I guess, being as it’s so important, she won’t mind. Hold on.”
Dodd held on, cradling the phone between his shoulder and his ear while he lit a cigarette. He could hear nothing from the other end, no whispers or sounds of movement. He thought the line was dead. Minutes passed, and he was on the point of hanging up when Helene Brandon spoke suddenly and sharply in his ear: “Hello, who is this?”
“Elmer Dodd.”
“We’re not acquainted.”
“We are, in a sense, Mrs. Brandon. We had a telephone conversation a couple of hours ago.”
“Is this your idea of a joke? I’ve never talked to you on the telephone or any other way.”
“I was at Kellogg’s house when you called. Kellogg wasn’t.”
After a brief pause, she said in a low, muffled voice, “Is my husband with you?”
“No.”
“Does he know — about my call?”
“I haven’t told him. But he’s going to find out. So is everybody else in Northern California when this hits the newspapers.”
“The newspapers? Why should the newspapers be interested in a private conversation between me and my brother-in-law, or what I thought was my brother-in-law? And why should you want to tell them?”
“I don’t want to,” Dodd said. “I have to. I’ve got a license to hang on to. I can’t withhold evidence.”
“Evidence? Of what?”
“Brandon hasn’t been in touch with you?”
“No. He’s not home yet. I’m beginning to worry. He’s never this late, I don’t know where he can be.”
“He’s still at Kellogg’s house.”
“You shouldn’t have left him alone with Rupert,” she said shrilly. “God knows what will happen.”
“Kellogg isn’t there. He’s skipped town, with the police on his tail.”
“Police? Why? Have they found — Amy?”
“Not Amy. A man, a stranger. He was murdered in Kellogg’s house with a kitchen knife, sometime this afternoon.”
“Oh, my God! Rupert — Rupert...”
“I think Kellogg meant to get rid of the body. He started to clean up the mess but there was too much of it. He decided to leave town instead. So he picked up his dog, and his girlfriend, and left.”
“What girlfriend?”
“The one he lied to you about. You saw her in Lassiter’s at noon.” Dodd paused. “What happened, Mrs. Brandon? Did you walk in unexpectedly and louse up the rendezvous?”
She didn’t answer immediately. He thought she might be crying, but when she spoke again her voice was clear and crisp, with no evidence of tears. “She came in while I was talking to Rupert at the lunch counter. She was heading straight for him until he turned and stared at her. I’m not a mind reader, but I know there was a message in that look of his. Anyway, she bought a package of cigarettes and left. When I asked Rupert about her, he said he’d never seen her before. I had a feeling then, that he was lying. I still have. But it’s only a feeling, there’s no evidence to back it up.”
“There might be. What did the girl look like? And how much of a girl was she, and how much of a woman?”
“Early twenties. Blond, quite pretty, a bit overweight. She looked ill at ease and uncomfortable, as if her clothes were too new and too tight. I thought at the time she was a girl from the country, used to doing a lot of outside work. The tan she had wasn’t the kind we get around these parts. It was more like the kind you see on the migrant workers who pick fruit and cotton on the ranches in the Valley.”
“A lot of the migrants are Mexican,” Dodd said.
“A lot are white too. They both end up with the same color skin.”
“You said her hair was blond?”
“Bleached.”
“By the sun or the bottle?”
“Even in the Valley the sun doesn’t get that strong.”
“Have you any reason to believe the girl came from the Valley?”
“Her feet. They were very wide and flat, as if she was used to going barefoot.”
He didn’t argue the point, but he knew that very few of the Valley pickers went barefoot if they could afford shoes. Under the noon sun the ground grew hot as a kiln.
“I saw her again later,” Helene said. “She walked through Union Square with a man about ten years older than she was. I thought he might be her brother. He had the same coloring, and they had the same general air about them, as if they were ill at ease in the city and didn’t belong there. I’m pretty sure they were arguing about something, though I didn’t overhear any actual words.”