“As well as I said I saw him. Now, don’t misunderstand. I insisted and I still insist that I cannot be sure it was McKay. I can only say that it looked like him. I don’t think the man who held me up was speaking in a natural tone of voice so that’s nothing to go by. I don’t intend at any time to say that I know it was McKay, now or at the trial, but if MacKay looks like the man and they find corroborating evidence to prove his guilt, I can’t help feeling that I’ve done the right thing. Or, if I did think McKay looked like the man, would you have me say flatly that I was certain he looked nothing like him?”

  Lowry got up. “No, Dr. Clayton. I suppose you did what you thought was best. It’s just made it awfully tough for McKay. Now, would there have been any likelihood that the people in the home of your patient had seen somebody prowling around the place?”

  “I don’t know. They never mentioned it.”

  “Would you mind giving me the address. I’d like to talk to them and make certain.”

  “Not at all.”

  Clayton pressed a button on the desk and the nurse came in.

  “Give Mr. Lowry the Lawrence girl’s address,” he told her. “If there’s anything else I can do,” he said to Lowry, “I’ll be glad to. If you’re right about your friend’s innocence I hope you can prove it.”

  “I suppose the police currycombed the car,” Lowry said.

  “I imagine so. At least there was nothing in it after it was returned to me.”

  “Well, thank you, Dr. Clayton.”

  “Not at all,” Clayton said. He walked with Lowry to the door. Outside, the nurse produced a little card from a file she kept on the corner of her desk, and she read off the name and address to Lowry, who scribbled it down in his notebook.

  There was another patient in the room, now, a man of about forty, well dressed, prosperous looking, secure, Lowry thought, in the comforting knowledge that here he would be getting the very best medical attention that money could buy.

  Everything was like that about the office and the house as well—solid on a foundation of money, competence. Lowry looked at the address he had just taken down and went out across the broad verandah, which he took in more appreciatively now that the interview with Clayton was behind him.

  In the garden, a good-looking woman in a light tan slack suit and a pretty little girl with long, braided blonde hair were standing deep in a small patch of vivid crimson poinsettias. As Lowry went down the stairs the child turned to look at him. She was blue eyed, tiny featured, an exquisite child. She smiled warmly at Lowry and he stopped to admire the lovely picture she made, standing there, tiny and fragile amidst the tall plants.

  20

  “Would you like one?” the child asked simply in a sweet voice.

  “I’d love to have one,” Lowry said.

  The woman turned around to look at him carefully. She had a long, austere, thin-lipped face, attractive in a remote way but cold. And Lowry thought there was a sadness in the eyes which perhaps she was disguising with the coldness.

  “Lovely day,” Lowry said.

  “Isn’t it?” she replied with frosty but automatic politeness.

  The little girl was coming toward him bearing a huge poinsettia. The woman watched her, seeming neither to approve nor to disapprove.

  The child handed Lowry the flower.

  “It is a lovely day, isn’t it?” she said softly, parrotlike.

  Lowry took the flower and bowed low in front of the child. “Thank you most kindly, Miss,” he said graciously. “And you’re absolutely right. It is a lovely day.”

  The little girl smiled brightly, showing pearly baby teeth. “I wish I was at the beach when the sun shines like this,” she said. “Then I could dig in the sand.”

  “What would you dig for?”

  “Oh, I don’t know,” she replied without a trace of embarrassment or self-consciousness. “But there’s treasure in the sand, they say. Maybe I might find some treasure if I had good luck.”

  “Well, then I hope you can go to the beach and find a wonderful treasure very soon.”

  “Oh, I’ll be going before long,” the child said happily. “Mother says we can go to the house in Laguna just as soon as the weather gets a little bit warmer.” She turned to the woman for confirmation. “Didn’t you say that, mother?”

  “Yes, dear,” her mother said. “But say goodbye to the nice man, now. You’d better come back and help me finish with the garden. It’s almost time for you to have your lunch.”

  “My name is Lorna Clayton,” the child said pleasantly, as she started to climb back into the flower bed. “What’s yours?”

  “Ned Lowry,” Lowry said. He grinned broadly at the pretty little child. “See you again sometime, Lorna. And thanks for the flowers.”

  She waved a white, dainty hand to him as he swung down the walk toward his car. Her mother was bending over the plants again.

  Lowry got into the car, frowning thoughtfully. The visit to Clayton had not been very fruitful, but perhaps some unexpected good would come out of an avenue he did not fully appreciate now. It was worth keeping in mind, at any rate. With so little to go on, every scrap of information was precious.

  He drove downtown and quickly found the address that the nurse had given him. The place was less than a quarter of a mile from Ramirez’ shack and the empty lot.

  It was dismal. The house was slate gray, a wooden shack, sooty and decrepit and dingy, exuding the sour stink of grinding poverty. Lowry looked up and down the street, estimating. Clayton’s car would have been parked there, about thirty feet from the lamp post.

  He knocked at the door.

  After a long pause, a young woman opened the door. She was a pretty woman, but with the ordinary prettiness of the country girl. Her face was badly made up with cheap rouge and her hair was dry and brittle. She wore a coarse linen blouse. Her breasts were big and full, almost abnormally so, leading Lowry to conclude that she was either astonishingly well developed or else nursing a child. More likely the latter, he thought.

  Lowry went through the process of introducing himself once again. He was beginning to feel like a brush salesman, he thought, going through the same fruitless questionings. What had he accomplished so far? Not a thing. Not a single thing. He had used up a lot of gasoline and a lot of time and a lot of shoe leather, but Bob McKay was just as thoroughly under suspicion of murder as he had ever been, and no opening was presenting itself.

  “Mrs. Lawrence, I believe?”

  “That’s right,” she said suspiciously.

  He smiled. “My name is Lowry, Ned Lowry. I’m from the Gazette.”

  The woman was looking at him in puzzled surprise.

  “It’s about Bob McKay,” he went on.

  She looked as though she understood why he was here now.

  “Yes,” she said. “Dr. Clayton’s car was stolen right in front of the door here. The police have already been here.”

  “I know,” he said. “Do you mind if I come in and talk with you for a while?”

  “Yes, come in.”

  He followed her into a room crammed with furniture that looked too heavy for the narrow space and gave off the musty smell of overstuffed mohair. In a corner of the room a child lay uneasily asleep in a crib. The child was thin, pale, unlovely.

  The woman asked him to sit down. Lowry lowered himself into a creaking overstuffed armchair. The woman sat down facing him. One of the middle buttons of her blouse was open, but she did not seem to notice. She seemed glad to sit down.

  21

  “That night, Mrs. Lawrence,” Lowry began. “How did you happen to call Dr. Clayton?”

  She looked sadly in the direction of the crib, a glance that told Lowry a great deal. The columnist felt sorry for her. There are tragedies outside of saloons and dance halls, he thought. Small tragedies, except for the people crushed by them. And people simply like to read about the saloon tragedies, not about the other kinds. That was why he wrote about them.

  “He has asthma,” she said. “A bad kind, the doctor says. He’ll choke to death some night when I’m asleep, I know it.”

  There were tears in her eyes.

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” Lowry said.

  “We haven’t much money.”

  He admired the fortitude that showed in the understatement.

  “I’ve been taking him to the clinic,” she went on. “We couldn’t afford to have a private doctor, of course. Dr. Clayton was the one who took care of him at the clinic most of the time.”

  “I see.”

  “When he got that terrible attack that night I didn’t know what to do. I was afraid to pick him up and rush to the hospital. I had no money to pay a doctor with. I was desperate. I called Dr. Clayton and told him what happened. He was very sweet and said he would come. He saved my baby’s life, I think.”

  “What time did he come?”

  “About three in the morning, I guess. I don’t know exactly. It seemed like the night had lasted for a million years.”

  “You were very anxious while you were waiting,” Lowry said.

  “I was dying with the baby,” she said with sharp brevity.

  Lowry kept his voice gentle, trying not to upset her. “You must have been looking through the window every once in a while to see if the doctor were coming, weren’t you?”

  “Yes. I was up and back a million times.”

  “Did you see anybody around the house, anybody on the street?”

  “No, but McKay got into the car after the doctor parked it,” she said. “He needn’t have been around here before then.”

  “Not McKay,” Lowry snapped irritably, nearly losing his temper at the woman’s calm assumption of his friend’s guilt.

  “I beg your pardon,” Mrs. Lawrence said. Despite the shabbiness of the house and her own worn condition, she drew herself up haughtily, insulted at his contradiction.

  “I’m sorry,” Lowry said. “You see, I don’t think that man who did the killing and stole the car was McKay. It makes me angry to hear it.”

  “Oh,” she said indifferently. McKay’s tragedy didn’t mean a thing to her. She had too many woes of her own to care very much about anybody else’s.

  “When the doctor arrived,” Lowry said, “he took care of the baby and left. You didn’t happen to see him to the door, did you?”

  “No, I stayed close to the baby.”

  She was getting impatient. Lowry realized that in a few minutes she would probably ask him to leave. He had taken up plenty of her time already.

  He rose wearily and looked in the direction of the crib.

  In a gentle voice he asked, “How’s he been feeling lately?”

  She shrugged in a gesture of eloquent hopelessness. “They keep coming back, those attacks. They’ll kill him yet. I know it, he’ll never live to be old enough to walk or talk.” The tears came to her eyes again.

  “Bad attacks like the one he had that night—he’s been having them since the doctor was here?”

  “Only one more like the one he had that night, thank God.”

  Lowry sat down again. The woman looked at him peculiarly.

  “When was that?” he asked with new urgency in his voice.

  “One night about a week after the other one, I guess.”

  “And did you call Dr. Clayton again?”

  “Yes, but I suppose I was expecting too much from him. He couldn’t come out here that night. He said it would be all right if I carried the baby to the hospital. But I was afraid. It was a cold night and I didn’t want the baby to catch a chill. I begged the doctor to come out here. He hung up on me. I can’t blame him for that. We never could pay him anything. And it was awfully late, like the last time.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I could only do one thing. I wrapped the baby up and took him down to the hospital. They took care of him. He was practically purple all over by the time I got there.”

  Lowry got up again and started toward the door. “Thanks awfully,” he said. “You’ve been a great help to me, Mrs. Lawrence. I’m grateful for the time you’ve just spent. And I hope the baby feels better.”

  He contemplated giving her some money. But he decided against it. She was a poor woman, but she had her pride, and it would only humiliate and anger her if he handed her money. It was far better to mail her some cash in a plain envelope. Maybe she would know who it was from, but more likely she would just regard it as a gift from God.

  As he moved to the door she asked curiously, “You think this man McKay is innocent?”

  “Yes.”

  She shook her head. “Everybody has his own troubles, I guess.”

  * * *

  Lowry found Brady at headquarters. The latter was in an uncommonly good mood when Lowry came upon him in the detectives’ room.

  “You must have been catching up on your sleep lately, Brady,” Lowry said. “You look like a contented cat or something.”

  “Sit down, Lonelyhearts,” Brady said. “Things are just sort of quiet around here for a change. Can’t say that I mind it, either, this way. It kind of gives a guy a chance to breathe.”

  “You mean nobody’s up there hollering ‘get that man’ because you just got one, eh?”

  “Something like that.”

  “I figured that was what you were grinning about. You’re pretty damn proud of yourself, I’ll bet.”

  “You still don’t think McKay’s the man, do you, Lowry?”

  “Less than ever.”

  Brady wasn’t impressed by Lowry’s statement. He leaned back and yawned extravagantly.

  “Seriously, Brady,” Lowry said. “Would you give McKay just the thousandth part of a break if it were possible?”

  Brady’s rugged jaw came forward like an advancing army tank.

  “Take a tip from me, Lowry. It’s finished. Forget all about it.”

  “I’m not asking for tips. Would you give him a break if it were possible? Or are you so anxious to send somebody to the gas chamber for the Blair murder that you don’t give a hoot in hell whether the man you send is the right one or not?”

  Brady’s eyes grew cold. “I think he’s the right man or I wouldn’t have pulled him in.”

  “Sure, you think he is. But do you know? Do you want his death on your conscience forever?”

  Brady scowled. “Listen, Lowry, don’t come in here to heckle me. What is it you want?”

  “Tell me, have you checked all of Doris Blair’s boyfriends?”

  “Yeah,” Brady said. “Including McKay.”

  “Where did she go with those guys?”

  Brady shrugged. “You try to dig that out, Lowry. What the devil do you think hotel registers tell, anyway?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Carrol wouldn’t have had to go to hotels with her,” Lowry said.

  “Carrol wouldn’t have had to go anyplace with her. McKay was doing the going during the period we’re interested in.”

  “A nice sugar daddy McKay was. Rolling in wealth. Driving around in a new Cadillac every Monday. Just the sort to keep Doris the way she wanted to be kept, eh, Brady?”

  “He didn’t need money,” Brady said. “It must have been love. They sat in cars and looked at the moon.”

  “But before you pulled McKay in you had been checking hotels and apartments.”

  Brady bit off the end of a cigar. He lit it slowly and took several deep puffs, allowing the columnist to wait impatiently.

  He said finally, “Yeah. There was nothing in it. I tell you this must have been romance, Lowry. I don’t even think the Blair girl had been seeing anybody for some time except this lug. We went over every hotel they generally go to. There wasn’t a thing. Not a single solitary goddam thing, Lowry.”

  Lowry locked his hands together. “Seriously, Brady, if I find what you couldn’t, would you at least take a look-see at it? Or do you have your heart set on railroading that poor son of a bitch?”

  Brady blew another cloud of smoke arrogantly toward the ceiling.

  “Okay, Lonelyhearts,” he said without interest. “I’ll do you that much of a favor. I’ll listen to you if you come up with anything. But you can save yourself the exercise. You won’t find a thing.”

  “Let me worry about that, Brady.”

  “It’s all yours.”

  22

  There was a fresh liveliness in Lowry’s step as he went to his car again. He drove on a few blocks, pulling up outside of a drugstore. The phone booth was in the back. He waited impatiently until a bulky woman who was monopolizing the phone booth finally found herself able to tear herself away from the telephone. He lifted his hat as he brushed hastily past her and sat down in the booth.

  He dialed Terry’s number. She picked up before the phone had finished its first ring.

  “Boy!” he exclaimed. “You must have been sitting right on top of the phone.”

  “Hello, Ned. I’ve been waiting to hear from you for so long.”

  “I’ll pick you up in about twenty minutes,” he told her. “How does this sound? We’ll go for a ride in the country.”

  “What?” Terry asked in surprise.

  “The fresh air will do you good, Terry,” Lowry said. “Believe me.”

  “I don’t get you. Just drop everything and go for a drive?”

  “I know it seems heartless at a time like this,” Lowry said. “But perhaps we can mix the pleasure with a little business. It won’t be entirely a joyride. I’ve got something in mind.”

  “I figured you had. It isn’t like you to take joyrides for their own sake.”

  “Well? Are you with me?”

  “I guess so, Ned. I wasn’t doing anything but biting my nails anyway just now. What sort of business do you mean?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  “But—”

  “Trust me, Terry. And don’t ask questions. You’ll understand soon enough.”

  “Okay.”

  “I’ll be right over. So long.”

  Terry was ready to leave when he arrived at her apartment. The light-colored sports suit she wore seemed to blend with her pallor. She looked trim and neat. But so very pale.