“You wouldn’t be making this up?”
“Honest, I have friends there. Gretchen Falk and her husband, they’re good friends of Ethel’s and mine. We lived in San Diego for a while, before she married Edward. The Falks will be glad to let me stay with them.”
“Hadn’t you better phone them first?”
“I can’t. The phone’s disconnected. I tried it.”
“Are you sure these people exist?”
“Of course,” she said urgently.
I gave in. I turned out the lights and locked the door and put her bag in my car. Clare stayed very close to me.
As I was backing out, a car pulled in behind me, blocking the entrance to the driveway. I opened the door and got out. It was a black Lincoln with a searchlight mounted over the windshield.
Clare said: “He’s come back.”
The searchlight flashed on. Its bright beam swiveled towards me. I reached for the gun in my shoulder holster and got a firm grip on nothing. Holster and gun were packed in the suitcase in the trunk of my car. The searchlight blinded me.
A black gun emerged from the dazzle, towing a hand and an arm. They belonged to a quick-stepping cube-shaped man in a double-breasted flannel suit. A snap-brim hat was pulled down over his eyes. His mouth was as full of teeth as a barracuda’s. It said:
“Where’s Dewar?”
“Never heard of him.”
“Owen Dewar. You’ve heard of him.”
The gun dragged him forward another step and collided with my breastbone. His free hand palmed my flanks. All I could see was his unchanging smile, framed in brilliant light. I felt a keen desire to do some orthodontic work on it. But the gun was an inhibiting factor.
“You must be thinking of two other parties,” I said.
“No dice. This is the house, and that’s the broad. Out of the car, lady.”
“I will not,” she said in a tiny voice behind me.
“Out, or I’ll blow a hole in your boy friend here.”
Reluctantly, she clambered out. The teeth looked down at her ankles as if they wanted to chew them. I made a move for the gun. It dived into my solar plexus, doubling me over. Its muzzle flicked the side of my head. It pushed me back against the fender of my car. I felt a worm of blood crawling past my ear.
“You coward! Leave him alone.” Clare flung herself at him. He sidestepped neatly, moving on the steady pivot of the gun against my chest. She went to her knees on the blacktop.
“Get up, lady, but keep your voice down. How many boy friends you keep on the string, anyway?”
She got to her feet. “He isn’t my boy friend. Who are you? Where is Ethel?”
“That’s a hot one.” The smile intensified. “You’re Ethel. The question is, where’s Dewar?”
“I don’t know any Dewar.”
“Sure you do, Ethel. You know him well enough to marry him. Now tell me where he is, and nobody gets theirselves hurt.” The flat voice dropped, and added huskily: “Only I haven’t got much time to waste.”
“You’re wrong,” she said. “You’re completely mistaken. I’m not Ethel. I’m Clare. Ethel’s my older sister.”
He stepped back and swung the gun in a quarter-circle, covering us both. “Turn your face to the light. Let’s have a good look at you.”
She did as she was told, striking a rigid pose. He shifted the gun to his left hand, and brought a photograph out of his inside pocket. Looking from it to her face, he shook his head doubtfully.
“I guess you’re leveling, at that. You’re younger than this one, and thinner.” He handed her the photograph. “She your sister?”
“Yes. It’s Ethel.”
I caught a glimpse of the picture over her shoulder. It was a blown-up candid shot of two people. One was a pretty blonde who looked like Clare five years from now. She was leaning on the arm of a tall dark man with a hairline moustache. They were smirking at each other, and there was a flower-decked altar in the background.
“Who’s the man?” I said.
“Dewar. Who else?” said the teeth behind the gun. “They got married in Vegas last month. I got this picture from the Chaparral Chapel. It goes with the twenty-five-dollar wedding.” He snatched it out of Clare’s hands and put it back in his pocket. “It took me a couple of weeks to run her down. She used her maiden name, see.”
“Where did you catch up with her? San Diego?”
“I didn’t catch up with her. Would I be here if I did?”
“What do you want her for?”
“I don’t want her. I got nothing against the broad, except that she tied up with Dewar. He’s the boy I want.”
“What for?”
“You wouldn’t be inarested. He worked for me at one time.” The gun swiveled brightly towards Clare. “You know where your sister is?”
“No, I don’t. I wouldn’t tell you if I did.”
“That’s no way to talk now, lady. My motto’s cooperation. From other people.”
I said: “Her sister’s been missing for a week. The HP found her car in San Diego. It had bloodstains on the front seat. Are you sure you didn’t catch up with her?”
“I’m asking you the questions, punk.” But there was a trace of uncertainty in his voice. “What happened to Dewar if the blonde is missing?”
“I think he ran out with her money.”
Clare turned to me. “You didn’t tell me all this.”
“I’m telling you now.”
The teeth said: “She had money?”
“Plenty.”
“The bastard. The bastard took us both, eh?”
“Dewar took you for money?”
“You ask too many questions, punk. You’ll talk yourself to death one of these days. Now stay where you are for ten minutes, both of you. Don’t move, don’t yell, don’t telephone. I might decide to drive around the block and come back and make sure.”
He backed down the brilliant alley of the searchlight beam. The door of his car slammed. All of its lights went off together. It rolled away into darkness, and didn’t come back.
It was past midnight when we got to San Diego, but there was still a light in the Falks’ house. It was a stucco cottage on a street of identical cottages in Pacific Beach.
“We lived here once,” Clare said. “When I was going to high school. That house, second from the corner.” Her voice was nostalgic, and she looked around the jerry-built tract as if it represented something precious to her. The pre-Illman era in her young life.
I knocked on the front door. A big henna-head in a housecoat opened it on a chain. But when she saw Clare beside me, she flung the door wide.
“Clare honey, where you been? I’ve been trying to phone you in Berkeley, and here you are. How are you, honey?”
She opened her arms and the younger woman walked into them.
“Oh, Gretchen,” she said with her face on the redhead’s breast. “Something’s happened to Ethel, something terrible.”
“I know it, honey, but it could be worse.”
“Worse than murder?”
“She isn’t murdered. Put that out of your mind. She’s pretty badly hurt, but she isn’t murdered.”
Clare stood back to look at her face. “You’ve seen her? Is she here?”
The redhead put a finger to her mouth, which was big and generous-looking, like the rest of her. “Hush, Clare. Jake’s asleep, he has to get up early, go to work. Yeah, I’ve seen her, but she isn’t here. She’s in a nursing home over on the other side of town.”
“You said she’s badly hurt?”
“Pretty badly beaten, yeah, poor dear. But the doctor told me she’s pulling out of it fine. A little plastic surgery, and she’ll be good as new.”
“Plastic surgery?”
“Yeah, I’m afraid she’ll need it. I got a look at her face tonight, when they changed the bandages. Now take it easy, honey. It could be worse.”