Derace Kingsley marched briskly behind about eight hundred dollars worth of executive desk and planted his backside in a tall leather chair. He reached himself a panatela out of a copper and mahogany box and trimmed it and lit it with a fat copper desk lighter. He took his time about it. It didn’t matter about my time. When he had finished this, he leaned back and blew a little smoke and said: “I’m a business man. I don’t fool around. You’re a licensed detective your card says. Show me something to prove it.”
I got my wallet out and handed him things to prove it. He looked at them and threw them back across the desk. The celluloid holder with the photostat license in it fell to the floor. He didn’t bother to apologize.
“I don’t know M’Gee,” he said. “I know Sheriff Petersen. I asked for the name of a reliable man to do a job. I suppose you are the man.”
“M’Gee is in the Hollywood sub-station of the sheriff’s office,” I said. “You can check on that.”
“Not necessary. I guess you might do, but don’t get flip with me. And remember when I hire a man he’s my man. He does exactly what I tell him and he keeps his mouth shut. Or he goes out fast. Is that clear? I hope I’m not too tough for you.”
“Why not leave that an open question?” I said.
He frowned. He said sharply: “What do you charge?”
“Twenty-five a day and expenses. Eight cents a mile for my car.”
“Absurd,” he said. “Far too much. Fifteen a day flat. That’s plenty. I’ll pay the mileage, within reason, the way things are now. But no joy-riding.”
I blew a little gray cloud of cigarette smoke and fanned it with my hand. I said nothing. He seemed a little surprised that I said nothing.
He leaned over the-desk and pointed with his cigar. “I haven’t hired you yet,” he said, “but if I do, the job is absolutely confidential. No talking it over with your cop friends. Is that understood?”
“Just what do you want done, Mr. Kingsley?”
“What do you care? You do all kinds of detective work, don’t you?”
“Not all kinds. Only the fairly honest kinds.”
He stared at me level-eyed, his jaws tight. His gray eyes had an opaque look.
“For one thing I don’t do divorce business,” I said. “And I get a hundred down as a retainer—from strangers.”
“Well, well,” he said, in a voice suddenly soft. “Well, well.”
“And as for your being too tough for me,” I said, “most of the clients start out either by weeping down my shirt or bawling me out to show who’s boss. But usually they end up very reasonable—if they’re still alive.”
“Well, well,” he said again, in the same soft voice, and went on staring at me. “Do you lose very many of them? he asked.
“Not if they treat me right,” I said.
“Have a cigar,” he said.
I took a cigar and put it in my pocket.
“I want you to find my wife,” he said. “She’s been missing for a month.”
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll find your wife.”
He patted his desk with both hands. He stared at me solidly. “I think you will at that,” he said. Then he grinned. “I haven’t been called down like that in four years,” he said.
I didn’t say anything.
“Damn it all,” he said, “I liked it. I liked it fine.” He ran a hand through his thick dark hair. “She’s been gone a whole month,” he said. “From a cabin we have in the mountains. Near Puma Point. Do you know Puma Point?”
I said I knew Puma Point.
“Our place is three miles from the village,” he said, “partly over a private road. It’s on a private lake. Little Fawn Lake. There’s a dam three of us put up to improve the property. I own the tract with two other men. It’s quite large, but undeveloped and won’t be developed now for some time, of course. My friends have cabins, I have a cabin and a man named Bill Chess lives with his wife in another cabin rent-free and looks after the place. He’s a disabled veteran with a pension. That’s all there is up there. My wife went up the middle of May, came down twice for weekends, was due down the 12th of June for a party and never showed up. I haven’t seen her since.”
“What have you done about it?” I asked.
“Nothing. Not a thing. I haven’t even been up there.” He waited, wanting me to ask why.
I said: “Why?”
He pushed his chair back to get a locked drawer open. He took out a folded paper and passed it over; I unfolded it and saw it was a Postal Telegraph form. The wire had been filed at El Paso on June 14th at 9:19 A.M. It was addressed to Derace Kingsley, 965 Carson Drive, Beverly Hills, and read: “AM CROSSING TO GET MEXICAN DIVORCE . STOP WILL MARRY CHRIS STOP GOOD LUCK AND GOODBYE CRYSTAL.”
I put this down on my side of the desk and he was handing me a large and very clear snapshot on glazed paper which showed a man and a woman sitting on the sand under a beach umbrella. The man wore trunks and the woman what looked like a very daring white sharkskin bathing suit. She was a slim blonde, young and shapely and smiling. The man was a hefty dark handsome lad with fine shoulders and legs, sleek dark hair and white teeth. Six feet of a standard type of home wrecker. Arms to hold you close and all his brains in his face. He was holding a pair of dark glasses in his hand and smiling at the camera with a practiced and easy smile.
“That’s Crystal,” Kingsley said, “and that’s Chris Layery. She can have him and he can have her and to hell with them both.”
I put the photo down on the telegram. “All right, what’s the catch?” I asked him.
“There’s no telephone up there,” he said, “and there was nothing important about the affair she was coming down for. So I got the wire before I gave much thought to it. The wire surprised me only mildly. Crystal and I have been washed up for years. She lives her life and I live mine. She has her own money and plenty of it. About twenty thousand a year from a family holding corporation that owns valuable oil leases in Texas. She plays around and I knew Lavery was one of her playmates. I might have been a little surprised that she would actually marry him, because the man is nothing but a professional chaser. But the picture looked all right so far, you understand?”
“And then?”
“Nothing for two weeks. Then the Prescott Hotel in San Bernardino got in touch with me and said a Packard Clipper registered to Crystal Grace Kingsley at my address was unclaimed in their garage and what about it. I told them to keep it and I sent them a check. There was nothing much in that either. I figured she was still out of the state and that if they had gone in a car at all, they had gone in Lavery’s car. The day before yesterday, however, I met Lavery in front of the Athletic Club down on the corner here. He said he didn’t know where Crystal was.”
Kingsley gave me a quick look and reached a bottle and two tinted glasses up on the desk. He poured a couple of drinks and pushed one over. He held his against the light and said slowly: “Lavery said he hadn’t gone away with her, hadn’t seen her in two months, hadn’t had any communications with her of any kind.”
I said, “You believed him?”
He nodded, frowning, and drank his drink and pushed the glass to one side. I tasted mine. It was Scotch. Not very good Scotch.
“If I believed him,” Kingsley said,. “—and I was probably wrong to do it—it wasn’t because he’s a fellow you have to believe. Far from it. It’s because he’s a no good son of a bitch who thinks it is smart to lay his friends wives and brag about it. I feel he would have been tickled pink to stick it into me and break it off that he had got my wife to run away with him and leave me flat. I know these tomcats and I know this one too well. He rode a route for us for a while and he was in trouble all the time. He couldn’t keep his hands off the office help. And apart from all that there was this wire from El Paso and I told him about it and why would he think it worth while to lie about it?”