There were no cedars on Cedar Lane, no trees of any kind. Its asphalt roadway, pocked by traffic, ran through a housing tract that was already decaying into slum, and ended abruptly at the roaring highway. Harry’s Service station (We Give Blue Chip Stamps) was on the corner. I noticed the metal and glass telephone booth standing by itself like a sentry box at the edge of Harry’s lot.
I pulled in beside the pumps, and a quick gray man came running out of the office. He looked very eager and a little punchy, like a retired welterweight or a superannuated Navy mechanic. The name Harry was embroidered on the chest of his white coveralls.
“Yessir,” he announced.
“Fill her up. She ought to take about ten.”
While the gas was running, I got out and looked at the number of the telephone in the booth. Davenport 93489. I returned to my car and Harry. He was wiping away at the windshield as if he had a cleanliness compulsion.
“Need change to phone?”
“No thanks. I’m a detective working on a murder case.”
“What do you know.” I couldn’t tell if he was being sardonic or naive.
“One of our suspects had a telephone call last night from that booth over there. That was shortly before six. Were you on duty?”
“Yeah, and I think I know the one you mean. You ain’t the first one that’s been asking for her.”
“A woman?”
“You’re not kidding.” He made the hourglass gesture with his hands. His wiping-rag flapped in the air. “Big blondie in a purple dress. I made change for her.”
“Change for what?”
“So she could phone long-distance. She gimme a fifty-dollar bill out of her shoe.”
“Where did she come from?”
“Up the hike.” Harry pointed up Cedar Lane towards the central section of Palo Alto. “She ankled it here like her feet were hurting.”
“Walking?”
“Yeah. That struck me funny, too. She looked like class.”
“Describe her.”
He described her. It was the Wycherly woman.
“You’re sure she was the one who made the phone call?”
“I couldn’t be wrong about that. Right in the middle of it, while she was talking, she hailed me over to the booth. She wanted to know the name of the nearest motel. That happens to be the Siesta. I told her she wouldn’t want to stay there. She said she would.”
“And did she?”
“I couldn’t say. She ankled off in that direction after she finished her phone call.”
“Which direction?”
“San Jose direction. The Siesta’s about a quarter mile that way, you can see the sign. It’s a crummy joint, like I tried to tell her. But she shut me up and went on talking into the phone.”
“Did you hear what she said?”
“Not a thing. I didn’t listen.”
“How was she acting?”
“Acting?”
“I mean, was she drunk or sober – did she seem to know what she was doing?”
“That’s what the other fellow wanted to know.” Harry scratched his head with black fingernails. “She walked straight, she talked straight. I guess you could say she was plenty nervous, though. Like I told the other fellow.”
“Big boy with red hair?”
“Naw, he wasn’t red-haired, and he was no boy. I think he was some kind of a doctor. He had the emblem on his car.”
“What kind of a car?”
“1959 light blue Impala two-door.”
“Did he give you his name?”
“Maybe he did. I don’t remember. I was pretty busy at the time.”
“What time?”
“Couple hours ago. I told him everything I told you. He went off in the direction of the Siesta.”
“Can you describe him?”
“I dunno. He looked like a doctor. You know how they give you the once-over like you was a patient. He had thick glasses, I noticed that, and he was well-dressed. He had on a brown tweed topcoat that must of set him back plenty.”
“How old?”
“Forty-five – fifty maybe. He had grey in his moustache. Older than me. And heavier.”
A road-grimed station wagon with an Oregon license came off the highway and stopped on the other side of the pumps. Three children in the back seat peered around with travel-drugged eyes, wondering if this was Disneyland. Jets went over. The driver of the station wagon gave Harry a Barney-Oldfield look across his wife. This was a pit-stop.
Harry said to me: “That will be five-oh-nine. You want the stamps?”
I paid him. “Skip the stamps. Keep the change. Thanks for the information.”
“Thank you.”
He ran around the pumps flapping his rag.
The Siesta Motor Court stood on scorched earth near a truck-stop diner. Its sign advertised Modern Housekeeping Facilities. Its cabins had cracks in the stucco as if they’d been leaned on by a giant hand, not lovingly. The place was a couple of levels below the Champion Hotel, which was not the Ritz.
I stopped beside the hutch marked Office, and climbed out onto crunching cinders. A cutdown A-model Ford was parked in front of a cabin at the rear. I went and looked at the steering-post. Bobby Doncaster’s name and his address in Boulder Beach were on the registration slip. I wrenched at the door of his present address. It was locked. The window beside it was covered with a cracked green blind.
A door opened somewhere behind me. A fat woman wearing a man’s sweater-coat over a flowered print dress came out of the office and undulated ponderously towards me. Earrings the size and color of brass curtain rings swung from her ears. She had soot-black hair with a single slash of white running back from her widow’s-peak tike a lightning scar.
“Roust out of it, you,” she said in a deep raw voice. “I know how to use this.”
She showed me a little nickel-plated revolver. It looked tiny as a toy in her large dimpled hand. She was breathing hard.
“I’m not a burglar, ma’am.”
“I don’t care who you are. Roust out of it.”
“I’m a detective. Put the gun up.”
I displayed an old special-deputy badge that the L.A. sheriff had given me for not particularly good conduct. She was impressed. She pushed the gun down her dress, where the bivalve of her bosom swallowed it.
“So what you want with us? We run a clean place. All that trouble last year was under a different management.”
I was keeping one eye on the door of the cabin. “Is the red-headed boy in there?”
“You want him?”
“I’m not the only one.”
She made a mournful face. “We’re not responsible for the people–”
“That’s not the point. Is he in there?”
“I don’t think so. I didn’t see him come back.”
I said to the cabin door: “Come out, Bobby, or I’m coming in.”
There was no response from inside. I leaned my shoulder against the flimsy door.
“What you think you’re doing?” the woman cried. “You don’t want to bust the door. Wait a minute now.”
She went away and came back jingling a key-ring. While she unlocked the door I took my gun out. It was gun day. I stepped into the dim blinded interior. It smelled of breaths and bodies. The furniture in the greenish gloom resembled underwater wreckage at a depth where nothing stirred.
The fat woman pulled a chain that turned on the ceiling light. It shone through a white glass globe like a fly-specked moon on a peeling veneer chest of drawers, a rug the color of packed earth, a double bed that had been slept in. Its sheets looked as if a pair of cell-mates had passed the night twisting them into ineffectual ropes for some frustrated escape. On the floor beside the bed a canvas overnight bag lay unzipped. It was stencilled with the initials R.D. and contained a change of underwear, some shirts and handkerchiefs, toothbrush and toothpaste and razor, and a checkbook whose last stub showed a balance of two-hundred-odd dollars in a Boulder Beach bank.