“No, it wouldn’t. A private dick can bother anybody. He’s persistent and used to snubs. He’s paid for his time and he would just as soon use it to bother you as any other way.”

“Look,” he said, leaning forward and pointing his cigarette at me. “I know what that wire says, but it’s the bunk. I didn’t go to El Paso with Crystal Kingsley. I haven’t seen her in a long time—long before the date of that wire. I haven’t had any contact with her. I told Kingsley that.”

“He didn’t have to believe you.”

“Why would I lie to him?” He looked surprised.

“Why wouldn’t you?”

“Look,” he said earnestly, “it might seem so to you, but you don’t know her. Kingsley has no strings on her. If he doesn’t like the way she behaves he has a remedy. These proprietary husbands make me sick.”

“If you didn’t go to El Paso with her,” I said, “why did she send this telegram?”

“I haven’t the faintest idea.”

“You can do better than that,” I said. I pointed to the spray of manzanita in the fireplace. “You pick that up at Little Fawn Lake?”

“The hills around here are full of manzanita,” he said contemptuously.

“It doesn’t bloom like that down here.”

He laughed. “I was up there the third week in May. If you have to know. I suppose you can find out. That’s the last time I saw her.”

“You didn’t have any idea of marrying her?”

He blew smoke and said through it: “I’ve thought of it, yes. She has money. Money is always useful. But it would be too tough a way to make it.”

I nodded, but didn’t say anything. He looked at the manzanita spray in the fireplace and leaned back to blow smoke in the air and show me the strong brown line of his throat. After a moment, when I still didn’t say anything, he began to get restless. He glanced down at the card I had given him and said:

“So you hire yourself out to dig up dirt? Doing well at it?”

“Nothing to brag about. A dollar here, a dollar there.”

“And all of them pretty slimy,” he said.

“Look, Mr. Lavery, we don’t have to get into a fight. Kingsley thinks you know where his wife is, but won’t tell him. Either out of meanness or motives of delicacy.”

“Which way would he like it?” the handsome brownfaced man sneered.

“He doesn’t care, as long as he gets the information. He doesn’t care a great deal what you and she do together or where you go or whether she divorces him or not. He just wants to feel sure that everything is all right and that she isn’t in trouble of any kind.”

Lavery looked interested. “Trouble?What kind of trouble?” He licked the word around on his brown lips, tasting it.

“Maybe you won’t know the kind of trouble he is thinking of.”

“Tell me,” he pleaded sarcastically. “I’d just love to hear about some kind of trouble I didn’t know about.”

“You’re doing fine,” I told him. “No time to talk business, but always time for a wisecrack. If you think we might try to get a hook into you because you crossed a state line with her, forget it.”

“Go climb up your thumb, wise guy. You’d have to prove I paid the freight, or it wouldn’t mean anything.”

“This wire has to mean something,” I said stubbornly. It seemed to me that I had said it before, several times.

“It’s probably just a gag. She’s full of little tricks like that. All of them silly, and some of them vicious.”

“I don’t see any point in this one.”

He flicked cigarette ash carefully at the glass-top table. He gave me a quick up from under look and immediately looked away.

“I stood her up,” he said slowly. “It might be her idea of a way to get back at me. I was supposed to run up there one week-end, I didn’t go. I was—sick of her.”

I said: “Uh-huh,” and gave him a long steady stare. “I don’t like that so well. I’d like it better if you did go to El Paso with her and had a fight and split up. Could you tell it that way?”

He flushed solidly behind the sunburn.

“God damn it,” he said, “I told you I didn’t go anywhere with her. Not anywhere. Can’t you remember that?”

“I’ll remember it when I believe it.”

He leaned over to snub out his cigarette. He stood up with an easy movement, not hurried at all, pulled the belt of his robe tight, and moved out to the end of the davenport.

“All right,” he said in a clear tight voice. “Out you go. Take the air. I’ve had enough of your third-degree tripe. You’re wasting my time and your own—if it’s worth anything.”

I stood up and grinned at him. “Not a lot, but for what it’s worth I’m being paid for it. It couldn’t be, for instance, that you ran into a little unpleasantness in some department store—say at the stocking or jewelry counter.”

He looked at me very carefully, drawing his eyebrows down at the corners and making his mouth small.

“I don’t get it,” he said, but there was thought behind his voice.

“That’s all I wanted to know,” I said. “And thanks for listening. By the way, what line of business are you in—since you left Kingsley?”

“What the hell business is it of yours?”

“None. But of course I can always find out,” I said, and moved a little way towards the door, not very far.

“At the moment I’m not doing anything,” he said coldly. “I expect a commission in the navy almost any day.”

“You ought to do well at that,” I said.

“Yeah. So long, snooper. And don’t bother to come back. I won’t be at home.”

I went over to the door and pulled it open. It stuck on the lower sill, from the beach moisture. When I had it open, I looked back at him. He was standing there narrow-eyed, full of muted thunder.

“I may have to come back,” I said. “But it won’t be just to swop gags. It will be because I find something out that needs talking over.”

“So you still think I’m lying,” he said savagely.

“I think you have something on your mind. I’ve looked at too many faces not to know. It may not be any of my business. If it is, you’re likely to have to throw me out again.”

“A pleasure,” he said. “And next time bring somebody to drive you home. In case you land on your fanny and knock your brains out.”

Then without any rhyme or reason that I could see, he spat on the rug in front of his feet.

It jarred me. It was like watching the veneer peel off and leave a tough kid in an alley. Or like hearing an apparently refined woman start expressing herself in four-letter words.

“So long, beautiful hunk,” I said, and left him standing there. I closed the door, had to jerk it to get it shut, and went up the path to the street. I stood on the sidewalk looking at the house across the way.

FOUR

It was a wide shallow house with rose stucco walls faded out to a pleasant pastel shade and trimmed with dull green at the window frames. The roof was of green tiles, round rough ones. There was a deeply inset front door framed in a mosaic of multi-colored pieces of tiling and a small flower garden in front, behind a low stucco wall topped by an iron railing which the beach moisture had begun to corrode. Outside the wall to the left was the three-car garage, with a door opening inside the yard and a concrete path going from there to a side door of the house.