He was gone four or five minutes. Light went on behind various windows, then off again. Then he came out of the house and while he was walking back to the car the light went off on the fan and the whole house was again as dark as we had found it.

He stood beside the car smoking and looking off down the curve of the street.

“One small car in the garage,” he said. “The cook says it’s hers. No sign of Kingsley. They say they haven’t seen him since this morning. I looked in all the rooms. I guess they told the truth. Webber and a print man were there late this afternoon and the dusting powder is still all over the main bedroom. Webber would be getting prints to check against what we found in Lavery’s house. He didn’t tell me what he got. Where would he be—Kingsley?”

“Anywhere,” I said. “On the road, in a hotel, in a Turkish bath getting the kinks out of his nerves. But we’ll have to try his girl friend first. Her name is Fromsett and she lives at the Bryson Tower on Sunset Place. That’s away downtown, near Bullock’s Wilshire.”

“She does what?” Degarmo asked, getting in under the wheel.

“She holds the fort in his office and holds his hand out of office hours. She’s no office cutie, though. She has brains and style.”

“This situation is going to use all she has,” Degarmo said. He drove down to Wilshire and we turned east again.

Twenty-five minutes brought us to the Bryson Tower, a white stucco palace with fretted lanterns in the forecourt and tall date palms. The entrance was in an L, up marble steps, through a Moorish archway, and over a lobby that was too big and a carpet that was too blue. Blue Ali Baba oil jars were dotted around, big enough to keep tigers in. There was a desk and a night clerk with one of those mustaches that get stuck under your fingernail.

Degarmo lunged past the desk towards an open elevator beside which a tired old man sat on a stool waiting for a customer. The clerk snapped at Degarmo’s back like a terrier.

“One moment, please. Whom did you wish to see?”

Degarmo spun on his heel and looked at me wonderingly. “Did he say ‘whom’?”

“Yeah, but don’t hit him,” I said. “There is such a word.”

Degarmo licked his lips. “I knew there was,” he said. “I often wondered where they kept it. Look, buddy,” he said to the clerk, “we want up to 716. Any objection?”

“Certainly I have,” the clerk said coldly. “We don’t announce guests at—” he lifted his arm and turned it neatly to look at the narrow oblong watch on the inside of his wrist—“at twenty-three minutes past four in the morning.”

“That’s what I thought,” Degarmo said. “So I wasn’t going to bother you. You get the idea?” He took his shield out of his pocket and held it so that the light glinted on the gold and the blue enamel. “I’m a police lieutenant.”

The clerk shrugged. “Very well. I hope there isn’t going to be any trouble. I’d better announce you then. What names?”

“Lieutenant Degarmo and Mr. Marlowe.”

“Apartment 716. That will be Miss Fromsett. One moment.”

He went behind a glass screen and we heard him talking on the phone after a longish pause. He came back and nodded.

“Miss Fromsett is in. She will receive you.”

“That’s certainly a load off my mind,” Degarmo said. “And don’t bother to call your house peeper and send him up to the scatter. I’m allergic to house peepers.”

The clerk gave a small cold smile and we got into the elevator.

The seventh floor was cool and quiet. The corridor seemed a mile long. We came at last to a door with 716 on it in gilt numbers in a circle of gilt leaves. There was an ivory button beside the door. Degarmo pushed it and chimes rang inside the door and it was opened.

Miss Fromsett wore a quilted blue robe over her pajamas. On her feet were small tufted slippers with high heels. Her dark hair was fluffed out engagingly and the cold cream had been wiped from her face and just enough makeup applied.

We went past her into a rather narrow room with several handsome oval mirrors and gray period furniture upholstered in blue damask. It didn’t look like apartment house furniture. She sat down on a slender love seat and leaned back and waited calmly for somebody to say something.

I said: “This is Lieutenant Degarmo of the Bay City police. We’re looking for Kingsley. He’s not at his house. We thought you might be able to give us an idea where to find him.”

She spoke to me without looking at me. “Is it that urgent?”

“Yes. Something has happened.”

“What has happened?”

Degarmo said bluntly: “We just want to know where Kingsley is, sister. We don’t have time to build up a scene.”

The girl looked at him with a complete absence of expression. She looked back at me and said:

“I think you had better tell me, Mr. Marlowe.”

“I went down there with the money,” I said. “I met her as arranged. I went to her apartment to talk to her. While there I was slugged by a man who was hidden behind a curtain. I didn’t see the man. When I came out of it she had been murdered.”

“Murdered?”

I said: “Murdered.”

She closed her fine eyes and the corners of her lovely mouth drew in. Then she stood up with a quick shrug and went over to a small, marble-topped table with spindly legs. She took a cigarette out of a small embossed silver box and lit it, staring emptily down at the table. The match in her hand was waved more and more slowly until it stopped, still burning, and she dropped it into a tray. She turned and put her back to the table.

“I suppose I ought to scream or something,” she said. “I don’t seem to have any feeling about it at all.”

Degarmo said: “We don’t feel so interested in your feelings right now. What we want to know is where Kingsley is. You can tell us or not tell us. Either way you can skip the attitudes. Just make your mind up.”

She said to me quietly: “The lieutenant here is a Bay City officer?”

I nodded. She turned at him slowly, with a lovely contemptuous dignity. “In that case,” she said, “he has no more right in my apartment than any other loud-mouthed bum that might try to toss his weight around.”

Degarmo looked at her bleakly. He grinned and walked across the room and stretched his long legs from a deep downy chair. He waved his hand at me.

“Okay, you work on her. I can get all the co-operation I need from the L. A. boys, but by the time I had things explained to them, it would be a week from next Tuesday.”

I said: “Miss Fromsett, if you know where he is, or where he started to go, please tell us. You can understand that he has to be found.”

She said calmly: “Why?”

Degarmo put his head back and laughed. “This babe is good,” he said. “Maybe she thinks we should keep it a secret from him that his wife has been knocked off.”

“She’s better than you think,” I told him. His face sobered and he bit his thumb. He looked her up and down insolently.

She said: “Is it just because he has to be told?”

I took the yellow and green scarf out of my pocket and shook it out loose and held it in front of her.

“This was found in the apartment where she was murdered. I think you have seen it.”

She looked at the scarf and she looked at me, and in neither of the glances was there any meaning. She said: “You ask for a great deal of confidence, Mr. Marlowe. Considering that you haven’t been such a very smart detective after all.”

“I ask for it,” I said, “and I expect to get it. And how smart I’ve been is something you don’t really know anything about.”

“This is cute,” Degarmo put in. “You two make a nice team. All you need is acrobats to follow you. But right now—”

She cut through his voice as if he didn’t exist. “How was she murdered?”

“She was strangled and stripped naked and scratched up.”

“Derry wouldn’t have done anything like that,” she said quietly.

Degarmo made a noise with his lips. “Nobody ever knows what anybody else will do, sister. A cop knows that much.”