“Of course not. You’re a Good Samaritan, Simpson. Exactly where did you pick her up?”
“Down by the Cove. She was sitting in this Buick. I dropped a party off at the beach club and I was on my way back, kind of cruising along–”
“What time?”
“Around ten o’clock, I guess it was. I can check my schedule.”
“It isn’t important. Incidentally, did she pay you for the ride?”
“Yeah, she had a buck and some change in her purse. She had a hard time making it. No tip,” he added gloomily.
“Tough cheese.”
His fogged eyes brightened. “You’re a friend of hers, aren’t you? Wouldn’t you say I rate a tip on a run like that? I always say, better late than never.”
“Is that what you always say?” I handed him a dollar.
The Cove was a roughly semicircular inlet at the foot of a steep hill surmounted by a couple of hotels. Its narrow curving beach and the street above it were both deserted. An offshore wind had swept away the early morning mist, but the sky was still cloudy, and the sea grim. The long swells slammed the beach like stone walls falling, and broke in foam on the rocks that framed the entrance to the Cove.
I sat in my car and watched them. I was at a dead end. This seaswept place, under this iron sky, was like the world’s dead end. Far out at sea, a carrier floated like a chip on the horizon. A Navy jet took off from it and scrawled tremendous nothings on the distance.
Something bright caught my eye. It was in the trough of a wave a couple of hundred yards outside the Cove. Then it was on a crest: the aluminum air-bottle of an Aqua-Lung strapped to a naked brown back. Its wearer was prone on a surfboard, kicking with black-finned feet towards the shore. He was kicking hard, and paddling with one arm, but he was making slow progress. His other arm dragged in the opaque water. He seemed to be towing something, something heavy. I wondered if he had speared a shark or a porpoise. His face was inscrutable behind its glass mask.
I left my car and climbed down to the beach. The man on the surfboard came towards me with his tiring one-armed stroke, climbing the walled waves and sliding down them. A final surge picked him up and set him on the sand, almost at my feet. I dragged his board out of the backwash, and helped him to pull in the line that he was holding in one hand. His catch was nothing native to the sea. It was a man.
The end of the line was looped around his body under the armpits. He lay face down like an exhausted runner, a big man, fully clothed in soggy tweeds. I turned him over and saw the aquiline profile, the hairline moustache over the blue mouth, the dark eyes clogged with sand. Owen Dewar had made his escape by water.
The skin-diver took off his mask and sat down heavily, his chest working like a great furred bellows. “I go down for abalone,” he said between breaths. “I find this. Caught between two rocks at thirty-forty feet.”
“How long has he been in the water?”
“It’s hard to tell. I’d say a couple of days, anyway. Look at his color. Poor stiff. But I wish they wouldn’t drown themselves in my hunting grounds.”
“Do you know him?”
“Nope. Do you?”
“Never saw him before,” I said, with truth.
“How about you phoning the police, Mac? I’m pooped. And unless I make a catch, I don’t eat today. There’s no pay in fishing for corpses.”
“In a minute.”
I went through the dead man’s pockets. There was a set of car keys in his jacket pocket, and an alligator wallet on his hip. It contained no money, but the driver’s license was decipherable: Owen Dewar, Mesa Court, Las Vegas. I put the wallet back, and let go of the body. The head rolled sideways. I saw the small hole in his neck, washed clean by the sea.
“Holy Mother!” the diver said. “He was shot.”
I got back to the Falk house around midmorning. The sun had burned off the clouds, and the day was turning hot. By daylight the long, treeless street of identical houses looked cheap and rundown. It was part of the miles of suburban slums that the war had scattered all over Southern California.
Gretchen was sprinkling the brown front lawn with a desultory hose. She looked too big for the pocket-handkerchief yard. The sunsuit that barely covered her various bulges made her look even bigger. She turned off the water when I got out of my car.
“What gives? You’ve got trouble on your face if I ever saw trouble.”
“Dewar is dead. Murdered. A skin-diver found him in the sea off La Jolla.”
She took it calmly. “That’s not such bad news, is it? He had it coming. Who killed him?”
“I told you a gunman from Nevada was on his trail. Maybe he caught him. Anyway, Dewar was shot and bled to death from a neck wound. Then he was dumped in the ocean. I had to lay the whole thing on the line for the police, since there’s murder in it.”
“You told them what happened to Ethel?”
“I had to. They’re at the rest home talking to her now.”
“What about Ethel’s money? Was the money on him?”
“Not a trace of it. And he didn’t live to spend it. The police pathologist thinks he’s been dead for a week. Whoever got Dewar got the money at the same time.”
“Will she ever get it back, do you think?”
“If we can catch the murderer, and he still has it with him. That’s a big if. Where’s Clare, by the way? With her sister?”
“Clare went back to L.A.”
“What for?”
“Don’t ask me.” She shrugged her rosy shoulders. “She got Jake to drive her down to the station before he went to work. I wasn’t up. She didn’t even tell me she was going.” Gretchen seemed peeved.
“Did she get a telegram, or a phone call?”
“Nothing. All I know is what Jake told me. She talked him into lending her ten bucks. I wouldn’t mind so much, but it was all the ready cash we had, until payday. Oh well, I guess we’ll get it back, if Ethel recovers her money.”
“You’ll get it back,” I said. “Clare seems to be a straight kid.”
“That’s what I always used to think. When they lived here, before Ethel met Illman and got into the chips, Clare was just about the nicest kid on the block. In spite of all the trouble in her family.”
“What trouble was that?”
“Her father shot himself. Didn’t you know? They said it was an accident, but the people on the street – we knew different. Mr. Larrabee was never the same after his wife left him. He spent his time brooding, drinking and brooding. Clare reminded me of him, the way she behaved last night after you left. She wouldn’t talk to me or look at me. She shut herself up in her room and acted real cold. If you want the honest truth, I don’t like her using my home as if it was a motel and Jake was a taxi-service. The least she could of done was say goodbye to me.”
“It sounds as if she had something on her mind.”
All the way back to Los Angeles, I wondered what it was. It took me a little over two hours to drive from San Diego to West Hollywood. The black Lincoln with the searchlight and the Nevada license plates was standing at the curb below the redwood house. The front door of the house was standing open.
I transferred my automatic from the suitcase to my jacket pocket, making sure that it was ready to fire. I climbed the terraced lawn beside the driveway. My feet made no sound in the grass. When I reached the porch, I heard voices from inside. One was the gunman’s hoarse and deathly monotone:
“I’m taking it, sister. It belongs to me.”
“You’re a liar.”
“Sure, but not about this. The money is mine.”
“It’s my sister’s money. What right have you got to it?”
“This. Dewar stole it from me. He ran a poker game for me in Vegas, a high-stakes game in various hotels around town. He was a good dealer, and I trusted him with the house take. I let it pile up for a week, that was my mistake. I should’ve kept a closer watch on him. He ran out on me with twenty-five grand or more. That’s the money you’re holding, lady.”