“That’s a cheap, shoddy attempt to frighten me.”
“It is,” I admitted.
“Why are you doing it if you don’t want money?”
“I want information.”
“Yet you tell me that I shouldn’t give out information, that I should see a lawyer.”
“If you’re guilty.”
“What else do you want to know, Mr. Lam?”
“Garvanza,” I said. “Ever hear your husband mention that name?”
This time there could be no mistaking the little start that she gave; then her face was a poker face once more. “Garvanza,” she said slowly. “I’ve heard that name somewhere.”
“Your husband ever talk with you about a Garvanza?”
“No, I don’t think he did. We discussed business very infrequently. I am not certain whether he knew a Mr. Garvanza or not.”
I said, “When I mentioned Meredith, you wanted to know whether it was a man or a woman. On the Garvanza question you popped right out with a denial without asking whether it was Mr. Garvanza or Miss Garvanza or Mrs. Garvanza.”
“Or the little Garvanza baby,” she said sarcastically.
“Exactly.”
“I’m very much afraid you and I aren’t going to get along at all, Mr. Lam.”
“I don’t see any reason why not. I think we’re doing fine.”
“I don’t.”
“As soon as you get over the act of righteous indigna- tion that you’re using to cover up your slip when I mentioned Garvanza’s name, I think we’re going to be real chummy.”
The slate-colored eyes studied me for four or five seconds which felt like as many minutes; then she said, “Yes, Mr. Lam. He knew Gabby Garvanza. I don’t know how well. I’ve heard him speak of Mr. Garvanza, and when he read in the papers that Gabby Garvanza had been shot down in Los Angeles he was very, very much worried. I know that. He tried to keep me from seeing it, but I know that he was. Now I’ve answered your question. Where do we go from there?”
“Now,” I said, “you’re beginning to talk. Garvanza never called on him at the house here?”
“I have heard him mention Mr. Garvanza’s name. And I know that he knew Gabby Garvanza. Offhand, I don’t know exactly when Garvanza was shot. Let me see, that was on the Thursday before my husband disappeared. He was reading the paper, and all of a sudden he gave a startled exclamation, a half-strangled cry.
“It was at breakfast. I looked up at him and thought he might have something stuck in his throat. He coughed and reached for the coffee cup as though to take a swallow of liquid, then kept on coughing, putting on an act of having choked over something he’d eaten.”
“What did you do?”
“I played right along. I got up and patted him on the back a few times, told him to hold his head down between his knees, and then, after a while, he quit coughing and smiled at me and said that a piece of toast had gone down his windpipe.”
“You knew he was lying?”
“Of course.”
“So what did you do?”
“After he’d left for the office I folded the newspaper over in just the position it had been in when he’d been reading, and looked for the item that had alarmed him. It must have been the one about a Los Angeles mobster, Gabby Garvanza, being shot. I couldn’t for the life of me figure out why that would have made any difference to George, but I remembered it. The paper said Garvanza would recover.
“I knew something was really bothering him all Sunday night and all Monday. When he told me he was going to the mine Tuesday I felt certain that in some way it had something to do with the thing that had been on his mind.
“You understand, Mr. Lam, I haven’t any evidence for all this. It’s simply womanly intuition, and I don’t for the life of me know why I’m letting my hair down and telling you all this.”
“Probably,” I said, “because I called the turn and you do have a young lover. Therefore, you’d like very much to get the case cleared up before the police start messing around.”
She said, “I don’t know what it is about you, but you can say things and get away with them that would cause me to start slapping your face if it weren’t for — for the way you say them. Sometimes — I don’t know — you seem to be sincere.”
“All right, you haven’t answered the question.”
“No, Mr. Lam. You’re wrong. I haven’t any lover, and I don’t give a damn how much the police mess into my present.”
“How about your past?”
Again her eyes held mine steadily. “That,” she said, “I wouldn’t like.”
“Vulnerable?”
“I’m not answering questions on that. Anyway, I’ve given you all the information I have because I think you might be on the right track. While the police haven’t started suspecting me as yet they will before very long, and I’d like to avoid that phase of the case. My husband took out insurance in my favor about six weeks ago.”
“You haven’t told the police that?”
“They haven’t asked me.”
I said, “Tell me about this mine up in Siskiyou County.”
“It’s owned by one of my husband’s corporations. He had several different companies.”
“Just where is this mine?”
“Somewhere up in the Seiad Valley. That’s a wild country in the back part of Siskiyou County.”
“What happens at the mine?”
She smiled. Her voice was that of a patient parent. “People work the mine. The ore is dumped into conveyors and carried down to the railroad. It’s put aboard flat cars and shipped to the smelting company.”
“That’s another one of your husband’s corporations?”
“He controls it, yes.”
“And then what happens?”
“He gets checks from the smelting company for the amount of mineral that’s in the ore.”
“Big checks?”
“I think so. My husband makes big money.”
“Who handles your husband’s accounts? Does he have an office?”
“No, my husband has no office in the conventional sense of the word. He’s a mining man. His office is under his hat. His accounts are kept by an income tax man — a Mr. Hartley L. Channing. You’ll find him listed in the phone book.”
“Know anything else that could be of help?”
She said, “There’s one thing. My husband is terribly superstitious.”
“In what way?”
“He is a great believer in luck.”
“Most mining men are.”
“But my husband has this one fixed superstition. No matter how many mines he opens and closes, one of them, usually the best one, must be named ‘The Green Door,’ and so carried on the books.”
I thought that over. There was a gambling joint in San Francisco known as The Green Door. I wondered if she knew of that, and I wondered if her husband did. Perhaps he’d been lucky in the gambling house one night and felt the name would bring him luck in connection with his mining companies.
“Anything else?” I asked.
“Well, yes — in a way—”
“Go on.”
“When my husband left Tuesday evening he knew that he was going into danger.”
“How do you know?”
“He was always a little apprehensive about leaving me alone.”
“Why?”
“I’ve tried to figure that one out, too. I think it’s largely because he was an older man and I was so much younger and — Well, I think under those circumstances a man gets a little more possessive than would otherwise be the case, and is — shall we say, a little more apprehensive.”
“So what?”
“So he made it a point to keep a gun in the bureau drawer. He had carefully instructed me how to use it.”
“Go on.”
“When he left Tuesday he took that gun with him. It was the first time he’d ever done that when he went on a trip,”