He turned his head to spit. I was meeting the spitting boys today.

“What’s your grift then? We don’t like peepers down here. We don’t have one in town.”

“Is that so?”

“Yeah, that’s so. So come on, talk it up. Unless you want to ride down to the clubhouse and sweat it out under the bright lights.”

I didn’t answer him.

“Her folks hire you?” he asked suddenly.

I shook my head.

“The last boy that tried it ended up on the road gang, sweetheart.”

“I bet it’s good,” I said, “if only I could guess. Tried what?”

“Tried to put the bite on him,” he said thinly.

“Too bad I don’t know how,” I said. “He looks like an easy man to bite.”

“That line of talk don’t buy you anything,” he said.

“All right,” I said. “Let’s put it this way. I don’t know Dr. Almore, never heard of him, and I’m not interested in him. I’m down here visiting a friend and looking at the view. If I’m doing anything else, it doesn’t happen to be any of your business. If you don’t like that, the best thing to do is to take it down to headquarters and see the day captain.”

He moved a foot heavily on the running board and looked doubtful. “Straight goods?” he asked slowly.

“Straight goods.”

“Aw hell, the guy’s screwy,” he said suddenly and looked back over his shoulder at the house. “He ought to see a doctor.” He laughed, without any amusement in the laugh. He took his foot off my running board and rumpled his wiry hair.

“Go on—beat it,” he said. “Stay off our reservation, and you won’t make any enemies.”

I pressed the starter again. When the motor was idling gently I said: “How’s Al Norgaard these days?”

He stared at me. “You know Al?”

“Yeah. He and I worked on a case down here a couple of years ago—when Wax was chief of police.”

“Al’s in the military police. I wish I was,” he said bitterly. He started to walk away and then swung sharply on his heel. “Go on, beat it before I change my mind,” he snapped.

He walked heavily across the street and through Dr. Almore’s front gate again.

I let the clutch in and drove away. On the way back to the city, I listened to my thoughts. They moved fitfully in and out, like Dr. Almore’s thin nervous hands pulling at the edges of his curtains.

Back in Los Angeles I ate lunch and went up to my office in the Cahuenga Building to see what mail there was. I called Kingsley from there.

“I saw Lavery,” I told him. “He told me just enough dirt to sound frank. I tried to needle him a little, but nothing came of it. I still like the idea that they quarreled and split up and that he hopes to fix it up with her yet.”

“Then he must know where she is,” Kingsley said.

“He might, but it doesn’t follow. By the way a rather curious thing happened to me on Lavery’s street. There are only two houses. The other belongs to a Dr. Almore.” I told him briefly about the rather curious thing.

He was silent for a moment at the end and then he said: “Is this Dr. Albert Almore?”

“Yes?”

“He was Crystal’s doctor for a time. He came to the house several times when she was—well, when she had been overdrinking. I thought him a little too quick with a hypodermic needle. His wife—let me see, there was something about his wife. Oh yes, she committed suicide.”

I said, “When?”

“I don’t remember. Quite a long time ago. I never knew them socially. What are you going to do now?”

I told him I was going up to Puma Lake, although it was a little late in the day to start.

He said I would have plenty of time and that they had an hour more daylight in the mountains.

I said that was fine and we hung up.

FIVE

San Bernardino baked and shimmered in the afternoon heat. The air was hot enough to blister my tongue. I drove through it gasping, stopped long enough to buy a pint of liquor in case I fainted before I got to the mountains, and started up the long grade to Crestline. In fifteen miles the road climbed five thousand feet, but even then it was far from cool. Thirty miles of mountain driving brought me to the tall pines and a place called Bubbling Springs. It had a clapboard store and a gas pump, but it felt like paradise. From there on it was cool all the way.

The Puma Lake dam had an armed sentry at each end and one in the middle. The first one I came to had me close all the windows of the car before crossing the dam. About a hundred yards away from the dam a rope with cork floats barred the pleasure boats from coming any closer. Beyond these details the war did not seem to have done anything much to Puma Lake.

Canoes paddled about on the blue water and rowboats with outboard motors put-putted and speedboats showing off like fresh kids made wide swathes of foam and turned on a dime and girls in them shrieked and dragged their hands in the water. Jounced around in the wake of the speedboats people who had paid two dollars for a fishing license were trying to get a dime of it back in tired-tasting fish.

The road skimmed along a high granite outcrop and dropped to meadows of coarse grass in which grew what was left of the wild irises and white and purple lupine and bugle flowers and columbine and penny-royal and desert paint brush. Tall yellow pines probed at the clear blue sky. The road dropped again to lake level and the landscape began to be full of girls in gaudy slacks and snoods and peasant handkerchiefs and rat rolls and fat-soled sandals and fat white thighs. People on bicycles wobbled cautiously over the highway and now and then an anxious-looking bird thumped past on a power-scooter.

A mile from the village the highway was joined by another lesser road which curved back into the mountains. A rough wooden sign under the highway sign said: Little Fawn Lake 1¾ miles. I took it. Scattered cabins were perched along the slopes for the first mile and then nothing. Presently another very narrow road debouched from this one and another rough wooden sign said: Little Fawn Lake. Private Road. No Trespassing.

I turned the Chrysler into this and crawled carefully around huge bare granite rocks and past a little waterfall and through a maze of black oak trees and ironwood and manzanita and silence. A bluejay squawked on a branch and a squirrel scolded at me and beat one paw angrily on the pine cone it was holding. A scarlet-topped woodpecker stopped probing in the dark long enough to look at me with one beady eye and then dodge behind the tree trunk to look at me with the other one. I came to a five-barred gate and another sign.

Beyond the gate the road wound for a couple of hundred yards through trees and then suddenly below me was a small oval lake deep in trees and rocks and wild grass, like a drop of dew caught in a curled leaf. At the near end of it was a rough concrete dam with a rope handrail across the top and an old millwheel at the side. Near that stood a small cabin of native pine with the bark on it.