“Do you think she’s in San Francisco?”
“I don’t know. She came back from there, you see. She didn’t come to me, but the man who runs the apartments down there, a Mr. Raisch, saw her. She had a small furnished apartment in Pacific Point, and about the end of December she turned up there and moved out, took away all her things. There was a man with her.”
“What sort of a man?”
“Mr. Raisch didn’t say. There seemed to be some kind of secret about the man – something sinister.”
“Is that a fact, or only your impression?”
“My impression. I suppose I’ve been too open to impression, lately. I can’t tell you what my life has been these last few weeks. I’ve gone down to Pacific Point on the bus half a dozen times, whenever I could get away. I’ve talked to the nurses that knew her at the hospital. She hasn’t been near the hospital since before Christmas, when she finished her last case. It was a man named Speed who had been shot in the stomach. The police came to question him, and he nearly died. The people at the hospital seemed to think that this Speed person was a gangster. That’s one of the things that frightens me. I’ve hardly slept a wink for weeks and weeks.” There were deep bluish hollows under her eyes, pitiable and ugly in the morning light from the window.
“Actually, though,” I said, “you’ve got nothing concrete to be afraid about.”
“My only daughter is gone–”
“Girls leave home all the time. It tears the hearts out of their mothers, but they don’t know it. They don’t find out till their own kids grow up and do it to them. She probably ran off and married this man that was with her at the apartment.”
“That’s what Mr. Raisch thought. Still Galley wouldn’t marry without letting me know. Besides, I’ve checked the registrations in Pacific Point, and Los Angeles as well, and there is no record of a marriage.”
“That doesn’t prove a thing. You can fly to New York or Hawaii in a day.” I took a cigarette from a pack in my pocket and automatically asked her: “Mind if I smoke?”
Her face froze, as if I had suggested an obscenity. “Smoke if you must, sir. I know what a hold the nicotine habit has on its victims. Dr. Lawrence was a smoker for years, until he finally broke free, with God’s help.”
I replaced the cigarette in my pocket and stood up to leave. Even with a million dollars, she wouldn’t have been the kind of woman I wanted to work for. And she probably didn’t have two nickels to rub against each other. As for the daughter, ten to one she’d simply decided to have a life of her own.
I put it less bluntly to her: “I think you should take it to Missing Persons, Mrs. Lawrence. I don’t think you have anything to worry about, but if you have, they can do more for you than I can. It would be a waste of money to hire me. I charge fifty a day and expenses. The police do everything free.”
Her answer surprised me: “I expected to pay you well. And I am not going to the police.”
“Why not? Missing daughters are their specialty. They’ve got a national system set up to find them.”
Grim bony lines came out in her face, and her eyes weren’t vague any more. “If Galley is living in sin with some man, it’s nobody’s business but my own.”
“Aren’t you jumping to conclusions?”
“I tell you you don’t know Galley. Men have been after her since high school, like flies to honey. She’s a good girl, Mr. Archer, I know how good. But I was a handsome girl myself when I was young, and I’ve seen the pitfalls of the flesh. I want to know what has happened to my daughter.”
I stood by the table and lit my cigarette and dropped the match on the tea tray. She didn’t say a word. After a stretching moment of silence, she reached from her chair and took a framed photograph from the top of the bookcase. “Look at her, you’ll understand what I mean.”
I took the picture from her hand. There was something slightly shady about the transaction, a faint implication that she was offering her daughter’s beauty as part payment on my services. Or maybe I was having impressions. I had one when I looked at the girl’s face. It was passionate and bold like her handwriting. Even in a white nurse’s cap, and a high chaste collar she was a girl you saw once and never forgot.
“It was her graduation picture, taken three years ago, but she still looks exactly the same. Isn’t she pretty?”
Pretty was hardly the word. With her fierce curled lips, black eyes and clean angry bones she must have stood out in her graduating class like a chicken hawk in a flock of pullets.
“If you want to spend fifty dollars,” I said, “I’ll go down to Pacific Point today and see what I can find out. Write down her last address and the name of whoever you talked to at the hospital.”
With the caution of a pheasant hen returning to her nest, she went to an old-fashioned sewing machine by the window, lifted the closed top and removed a worn black purse from its hiding place. Opening the tarnished clasp, she rummaged in the purse and counted five reluctant tens onto the table.
Dropping my ashes in my empty teacup, I noticed the arrangement of the leaves. My grandmother would have said it meant money and a dark stranger. The stranger could have been male or female, vertical or horizontal, depending on how you looked at the bottom of the cup.
Chapter 2
I drove south through Long Beach to Pacific Point. Crossing the mesa that flanked it to the northwest, you could see the town spread out, from the natural harbor half-enclosed by the curving finger of land that gave the place its name, to the houses on the ridge above the fogline. It rose from sea level in a gentle slope, divided neatly into social tiers, like something a sociologist had built to prove a theory. Tourists and transients lived in hotels and motels along the waterfront. Behind them a belt of slums lay ten blocks deep, where the darker half of the population lived and died. On the other side of the tracks – the tracks were there – the business section wore its old Spanish facades like icing on a stale cake. The people who worked in the stores and offices inhabited the grid of fifty-foot lots that covered the next ten blocks. On the slopes above them the owners and managers enjoyed their patios and barbecue pits. And along the lop of the ridge lived the really wealthy, who had bought their pieds-a-terre in Pacific Point because it reminded them of Juan-les-Pins.
The wife of a client of mine had taken an overdose of sleeping pills in a Pacific Point hotel, so I knew where the hospital was. I made a left turn off the highway and drove through empty afternoon streets to the hospital building. It was a rambling place of bilious yellow plaster, and the sight of it depressed me. My client’s wife had died of the sleeping pills. All that he really wanted was a divorce.
After a good deal of palaver, I found myself in the basement waiting-room of the hospital’s X-ray department, talking to a plump young thing in white nylon. Her arms and shoulders glowed a pleasant pink through this progressive fabric, and her straw-blond hair was cut sleek and short. Her name was Audrey Graham, and she didn’t mind talking at all. I told her the truth – that I was a detective looking for Galley Lawrence because her mother was worried – which was a refreshing change from my usual approach.
“I never did know Galley really well,” she said. “Sure, we were in the same class at Los Angeles General and graduated together and all. But you know how some girls are, introverted like. I’m more of an extrovert myself. I like meeting people, in a nice way, you know what I mean. Are you really a detective? I never met a private detective before.”