She still didn’t look at him. In the same level tone she asked: “Do you want to know where we went after we left your apartment and whether he brought me home—things like that?”

“Yes.”

“Because if he did, he wouldn’t have had time to go down to the beach and kill her? Is that it?”

I said, “That’s a good part of it.”

“He didn’t bring me home,” she said slowly. “I took a taxi on Hollywood Boulevard, not more than five minutes after we left your place. I didn’t see him again. I supposed he went home.”

Degarmo said: “Usually the bim tries to give her boy friend a bit more alibi than that. But it takes all kinds, don’t it?”

Miss Fromsett said to me: “He wanted to bring me home, but it was a long way out of his way and we were both tired. The reason I was telling you this is because I know it doesn’t matter in the least. If I thought it did, I wouldn’t tell you.”

“So he did have time,” I said.

She shook her head. “I don’t know. I don’t know how much time was needed. I don’t know how he could have known where to go. Not from me, not from her through me. She didn’t tell me.” Her dark eyes were on mine, searching, probing. “Is this the kind of confidence you ask for?”

I folded the scarf up and put it back in my pocket. “We want to know where he is now.”

“I can’t tell you because I have no idea.” Her eyes had followed the scarf down to my pocket. They stayed there. “You say you were slugged. You mean knocked unconscious?”

“Yes. By somebody who was hidden out behind a curtain. We still fall for it. She pulled a gun on me and I was busy trying to take it away from her. There’s no doubt she shot Lavery.”

Degarmo stood up suddenly: “You’re making yourself a nice smooth scene, fellow,” he growled. “But you’re not getting anywhere. Let’s blow.”

I said: “Wait a minute. I’m not finished. Suppose he had something on his mind, Miss Fromsett, something that was eating pretty deep into him. That was how he looked tonight. Suppose he knew more about all this than we realized—or than I realized—and knew things were coming to a head. He would want to go somewhere quietly and try to figure out what to do. Don’t you think he might?”

I stopped and waited, looking sideways at Degarmo’s impatience. After a moment the girl said tonelessly: “He wouldn’t run away or hide, because it wasn’t anything he could run away or hide from. But he might want a time to himself to think.”

“In a strange place, in a hotel,” I said, thinking of the story that had been told me in the Granada. “Or in a much quieter place than that.”

I looked around for the telephone.

“It’s in my bedroom,” Miss Fromsett said, knowing at once what I was looking for.

I went down the room and through the door at the end. Degarmo was right behind me. The bedroom was ivory and ashes of roses. There was a big bed with no footboard and a pillow with the rounded hollow of a head. Toilet articles glistened on a built-in dresser with paneled mirrors on the wall above it. An open door showed mulberry bathroom tiles. The phone was on a night table by the bed.

I sat down on the edge of the bed and patted the place where Miss Fromsett’s head had been and lifted the phone and dialed long distance. When the operator answered I asked for Constable Jim Patton at Puma Point, person to person, very urgent. I put the phone back in the cradle and lit a cigarette. Degarmo glowered down at me, standing with his legs apart, tough and tireless and ready to be nasty. “What now?” he grunted.

“Wait and see.”

“Who’s running this show?”

“Your asking me shows that I am—unless you want the Los Angeles police to run it.”

He scratched a match on his thumbnail and watched it burn and tried to blow it out with a long steady breath that just bent the flame over. He got rid of that match and put another between his teeth and chewed on it. The phone rang in a moment.

“Ready with your Puma Point call.”

Patton’s sleepy voice came on the line. “Yes? This is Patton at Puma Point.”

“This is Marlowe in Los Angeles,” I said. “Remember me?”

“Sure I remember you, son. I ain’t only half awake though.”

“Do me a favor,” I said. “Although I don’t know why you should. Go or send over to Little Fawn Lake and see if Kingsley is there. Don’t let him see you. You can spot his car outside the cabin or maybe see lights. And see that he stays put. Call me back as soon as you know. I’m coming up. Can you do that?”

Patton said: “I got no reason to stop him if he wants to leave.”

“I’ll have a Bay City police officer with me who wants to question him about a murder. Not your murder, another one.”

There was a drumming silence along the wire. Patton said: “You ain’t just bein’ tricky, are you, son?”

“No. Call me back at Tunbridge 2722.”

“Should likely take me half an hour,” he said.

I hung up. Degarmo was grinning now. “This babe flash you a signal I couldn’t read?”

I stood up off the bed. “No. I’m just trying to read his mind. He’s no cold killer. Whatever fire there was is all burned out of him by now. I thought he might go to the quietest and most remote place he knows—just to get a grip of himself. In a few hours he’ll probably turn himself in. It would look better for you if you got to him before he did that.”

“Unless he puts a slug in his head,” Degarmo said coldly. “Guys like him are very apt to do that.”

“You can’t stop him until you find him.”

“That’s right.”

We went back into the living room. Miss Fromsett poked her head out of her kitchenette and said she was making coffee, and did we want any. We had some coffee and sat around looking like people seeing friends off at the railroad station.

The call from Patton came through in about twenty-five minutes. There was light in the Kingsley cabin and a car was parked beside it.

THIRTY-SIX

We ate some breakfast at Alhambra and I had the tank filled. We drove out Highway 70 and started moving past the trucks into the rolling ranch country. I was driving. Degarmo sat moodily in the corner, his hands deep in his pockets.

I watched the fat straight rows of orange trees spin by like the spokes of a wheel. I listened to the whine of the tires on the pavement and I felt tired and stale from lack of sleep and too much emotion.

We reached the long slope south of San Dimas that goes up to a ridge and drops down into Pomona. This is the ultimate end of the fog belt, and the beginning of that semi-desert region where the sun is as light and dry as old sherry in the morning, as hot as a blast furnace at noon, and drops like an angry brick at nightfall.

Degarmo stuck a match in the corner of his mouth and said almost sneeringly:

“Webber gave me hell last night. He said he was talking to you and what about.”

I said nothing. He looked at me and looked away again. He waved a hand outwards. “I wouldn’t live in this damn country if they gave it to me. The air’s stale before it gets up in the morning.”