“I don’t like to think. You do it — out loud.”
I shook my head.
“I’m supposed to be under cover,” Gabby went on. “If it’s that easy to lift the cover I want to know about it.”
I said, “I’m here. Therefore it’s that easy.”
“How?”
“I don’t know. I only know I have connections. They know I’m protecting them.”
He said, “You talk big as hell for a little guy.”
“That makes for a fair average,” I told him.
He laughed at that and said, “I like your guts.”
“Thanks.”
“What’s your problem?” Gabby asked after a minute.
I said, “It involves John Carver Billings the Second, the fellow who said he was with Maurine when she walked out on the party she was with.”
“Go on.”
“That’s all.”
He shook his head.
I said, “I’m interested in finding out where John Carver Billings was that night.”
“What’s stopping you?”
“Nothing.”
“Go ahead and find out, then.”
“That’s what I’m doing.”
“You’re not getting very far here.”
I grinned and lit a cigarette.
The bodyguard looked at Gabby, questioning him with a glance whether I should be tossed out of the window or kicked out into the corridor.
I blew out the match and said, “Young Billings says he picked up Maurine and then went out to a nitery and she went into the powder room and never came out.”
“Sound reasonable to you?” he asked.
“No,” I said.
“Keep talking,” he invited.
I said, “The way I size it up, Maurine Auburn was out with fellows that know their way around. They were giving her protection. Young Billings tells a nice story about drifting in and picking her up and taking her away from the party she was with, just as though she’d been some secretary out with a couple of filing clerks and accountants from the office. I don’t think it would have happened that way.”
“Keep on thinking — out loud.”
“So,” I said, “I hate to see young Billings getting in bad over something he didn’t do, something he couldn’t have done. And I wondered if perhaps you came up here to question him.”
Gabby Garvanza laughed.
I quit talking.
“Go on,” Garvanza said.
“That’s all there is.”
“There’s the door.”
I shook my head and said, “I want to know whether you’re going to question young Billings, whether you’re going to check up on him, whether that’s why you came up here, whether—”
“Go peddle your papers,” the bodyguard said.
I sat still.
Gabby Garvanza nodded his head. The bodyguard came toward me.
I said, “I might be in a position to do you a favor sometime.”
“Hold it,” Gabby said to the bodyguard.
“Not now,” I told him. “Later.”
“How much later?”
“When I find out why a man should jump into the frying pan.”
“Well, why did he?”
“There’s only one possible reason — to get out of the fire.”
“What fire?”
“That’s what I’m looking for.”
“When and if you find it, you could get the hell burned out of your fingers.”
“They’ve been burned before. I’m wearing gloves.”
“I don’t see ‘em.”
“I had to take them off to come here.”
“I’ll say you did.”
Gabby Garvanza thought things over, then said, “You haven’t any idea how uninterested I am in this Billings guy.”
“His story indicates you should be interested.”
“His story stinks.”
“You don’t believe it?”
Gabby said, “You’re a credulous guy. A Hollywood sport in plus fours comes in and tells you about how he walked into a lion’s den, grabbed a chunk of horse meat away from a lion, slapped his face, and walked out, and so you go to ask the lion if it’s true.”
“Are you the lion?”
Gabby met my eyes and said, “You ask too many questions, but your nerve interests me. I’ve told you all I’m telling. Now get the hell out of here.”
The bodyguard jerked the door open.
I went out.
Going down in the elevator I did a lot of thinking. John Carver Billings the Second must have picked a murder case that he thought he could beat because he was afraid that otherwise he might get mixed up in a murder case he couldn’t beat.
There wasn’t any murder recorded in San Francisco on that date, but I felt certain I’d been overlooking a bet. I decided to check the list of missing persons. There was just a chance I might find someone who had disappeared on Tuesday night.
I called our San Francisco correspondent, told him I was under cover, to check the list of missing persons, with special reference to Tuesday night, and bill the Los Angeles office. I told him I’d call later for the information.
Chapter Eleven
The evening newspapers saved me the trouble of asking my correspondent for a report. I read those papers and had the answer — or thought I did. It was the only answer I could find.
One George Bishop, a wealthy mining man, had left San Francisco Tuesday night to go to his mine in northern California.
He had never arrived.
Early today, the papers reported, his Cadillac automobile had been found where it had been driven off the road above Petaluma. There were blood spatters on the lefthand side of the front seat, and definite blood spatters on the inside of the windshield.
From the indications on the ground officers decided the automobile had been there for at least five days, perhaps longer. Putting two and two together, it looked as though Bishop had been waylaid late Tuesday night, probably by hitchhikers whom he had picked up and who had killed and robbed their benefactor.
It was known Bishop was in the habit of carrying large sums of cash with him on his business trips. On this trip he had expected to drive nearly all night in order to reach his mine in Siskiyou County early Wednesday morning.
In the trunk of the car police found a suitcase and leather handbag, both of the most expensive design, and filled with George Bishop’s personal wearing-apparel and toilet articles. Bishop’s wife had made a positive identification.
Police were now making an intensive search for Bishop’s body in the vicinity of the automobile. Judging from the position of the bloodstains it was assumed he had been killed by bullets fired by someone sitting in the back seat of his car. This led police to believe Bishop had picked up more than one hitchhiker. They reasoned that a lone hitchhiker would have been sitting in the front seat beside Bishop. If there had been two or three, however, the back seat would have been occupied.
From the nature of the blood spatters police were not at all certain two people had not been killed. At least one of the homicide experts felt that someone seated on the driver’s right had either been killed or seriously wounded.
Police, trying to reconstruct Bishop’s trip, felt that the car might have been driven some little distance after Bishop’s body had been dumped out inasmuch as there was no sign of the body anywhere near the car.
The most intensive search was along the main traveled highway, the assumption being that the murderers would have disposed of the body as soon as possible, and only after that had been done would they have driven the automobile up the little-used side road and then down the narrow lane to the place where it had been found. The murderers hardly dared risk driving any great distance with the body in the car, according to police reasoning.
The paper published a photograph of Bishop’s wife making an identification of the contents of the suitcase. The picture showed that she was a good-looking babe, and while she was supposed to have been “overcome with grief“ she had, nevertheless, been carefully conscious of the camera angles at the time the picture was taken, or else the photographer had been pretty clever about posing her.