Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 130, No. 1. Whole No. 791, July 2007

Over the Edge by James H. Cobb

Series character Kevin Pulaski has appeared in three previous EQMM stories, and in the novel West on 66, published by St. Martin’s Press (paperback '01). His creator, James H. Cobb, is also a prolific thriller writer, author of several titles in the Amanda Garrett technothriller series from G.P. Putnam, and of The Arctic Event, the latest book in Robert Ludlum’s Covert One series, scheduled for September 2007 release.

The topic was the evolution of the American hot rod, as seen by my friend and automotive mentor, Kevin Pulaski.

“Back in the Midwest when I was a kid, the serious speed hounds all ran roadsters: T-bolts, Model A's, or Deuces. The bad gassers, the souped-up, later-model coupes and two-door sedans, didn’t start taking over until after I’d moved out to the coast in the 'fifties.”

“Why’d it change, Kev?”

“A lot of reasons. More powerful overhead valve engines, better suspension systems. Streamlining started to count, and you had a little more metal around you in a crackup.”

A reminiscent smile crossed his weathered features. “And, man, then there were the backseats, those big ol’ chair car backseats.”

Somewhere a bird twirped sluggishly and you could see the San Gabriel range just outlining against the gray predawn. It was the dying end of a way long night.

We’d parked a block back so the rumble of the '57's beefed-up engine wouldn’t telegraph our approach, and the click of Lisette’s Italian heels counterpointed the scuff of my boots as we hiked in along the access road. I’d tried to send the Princess home in a cab, but she’d bucked over that trace. She’d been there at the start. She’d be there when it finished.

The house was space-age circular, all curved glass and pastel tiling, a flying saucer landed in the Hollywood Hills and spying on the city below. It was the perfect pad for a hip young bachelor in a world full of promise. There was a flagstone patio, a view that would stretch out to the Pacific, a barbeque grill, and a two-car garage. No pool yet, but it was probably coming.

We swung over the low stone wall that circled the compound, Lisette swearing under her breath as she struggled with her tapered skirt. Hunkering in the deeper shadow behind a big bougainvillea bush, we did our best raccoon imitations.

The pad’s bachelor was in residence and scared of the dark. Lamps glowed behind the drawn curtains and the patio lights glared.

“You find the garbage can,” I whispered. “I want another look at his car.”

“How come I get the glamour job?” she hissed back.

“Hey, Princess, you wanted in on this posse, remember? And you don’t hear Jay Silverheels bitching to Clayton Moore about his job assignments.”

I felt a baleful look aimed at me. “The Lone Ranger doesn’t get to make out with Tonto, either!”

“This is Hollywood. You might be surprised.”

I had pretty much all I needed, but there were a last couple of nails I wanted for the coffin. Keeping low, I crossed to the rear of the garage. The T-handle on the sliding door resisted a moment, then turned. He’d been convenient and hadn’t locked up.

I eased the door up a couple of feet and rolled under. The interior of the garage was stuffy with the waste heat radiating from a big block engine. The car sitting in the darkness matched the pad, a sleek '58 Pontiac Bonneville Convertible, fresh off the showroom floor. The top was up, but the driver’s window was rolled down. It took only a moment’s groping to reach through and find the faint, lingering patch of dampness on the backseat. That was one.

Outside, Lisette whistled a soft two-tone.

I rolled under the garage door once more and circled to where the Princess had made her find. A hip young bachelor couldn’t have his garbage can just sitting out in front of God and everybody. His was concealed behind a bamboo screen between the garage and the property wall. I shoved the screen aside and, preserving the prints, I eased the lid off the can, using the crooked tip of my little finger. The lid clattered a little as I set it aside. I used a quick flare of my cigarette lighter to examine the can’s contents. There was the other.

“And?” the Princess whisper-demanded.

“He’s dead.” I didn’t bother to speak softly. I didn’t much care if he heard us now.

Nearby I heard a sliding glass door rumble open on its tracks. “Is anyone out there?” a voice demanded.

I unzipped my windcheater, clearing the gun shoved under my belt. I didn’t think it would be one for the shooting board, but you never knew.

It was a notch bulldozer-carved into the flank of the Santa Monica hills, a future home development site for confident folks who didn’t believe in brush fires and earthquakes.

But on the previous evening, it had just been a boss place to go parking.

The lights of the L.A. basin rolled away from the foot of the Santa Monicas like a Persian carpet of stars and the air was warm, even at half past midnight. Half a dozen couple-occupied cars sat spaced out along the unfenced edge of the overlook and half a dozen low-playing car radios intermingled in a sensual whisper.

“Earth Angel” by the Crew-Cuts issued from the darkened interior of the ‘46 Ford, and, given the way the old sedan was slow-dancing on its suspension, I was about to put my foot right through one of those “moments to remember.” Too bad, but then my night had been bitched as well.

I rapped on the rear fender. “Hey, Gilly. I need words with you, man.”

There was a muffled explosion of profanity from the Ford’s backseat, a lot of it shrill and feminine. I withdrew politely to the back bumper, giving the involved time to pull down, zip up, and tuck in. A minute or so later Gilly Bristol backed out of the driver’s side rear door whispering frantic apologies to the backseat’s other occupant.

He scuffled back to where I was parked on his back bumper, a lean, dark-haired kid fighting the good fight against acne. Like me, he was clad in the uniform of the day, Levis and a white T-shirt. “Jesus, Kev,” he moaned, drooping down on the bumper. “I was on second and slidin’ for third!”

As a responsible adult I should have lectured him on respecting his young lady’s reputation and saving himself for marriage, but then if Gilly had viewed me as a responsible adult, he probably wouldn’t be talking to me. Beyond that, if he was old enough to fink for the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department, he was old enough for a lot of other stuff.

Bristol owed me. I’d finagled him out of six months in the county youth farm on a joyriding rap and now he was making it even.

“My heart bleeds, man,” I replied, “but I been chasin’ you around these hills for half the friggin’ night. The word from the bird is you got me a name.”

“Yeah.” I saw his silhouette nod. “Tod Carroll, a senior at my school. He drives a red ‘fifty-four Chevy convert and lives in that new development above Brentwood. I got you somethin’ else, too.”

Gilly dug in his pocket and came up with a twist of Kleenex. Through the tissue I could feel a cluster of capsules and flat, dime-sized tablets. “The goofballs go for a dollar and the bennies are fifty cents a pop,” he reported. “Carroll makes the scene at all the parties around here on the weekends.”

“You got anything on his connection?”

“Nah, but his old man owns that big drugstore in the shopping center off Stone Canyon.”

“You think his old man could be part of the action?”

The kid shrugged. “I dunno, daddy-o. I’m only in good enough to buy from the guy. But he’s always holding.”

I’d already gotten a bearing on the Carroll kid from another of my high-school stoolies. This nailed it down. “Okay. Now you back way the hell off. From here on, this Carroll guy is strictly radio-active. Stay away from him! Got it?”

“Got it.”

I stowed the drugs in my jeans and drew the ten bucks I’d had ready. “You did good, man. Go buy your chick a deal for her charm bracelet.”

Gilly absorbed the pair of Lincolns and I could see his grin glint in the dark. Then his grin faded as we felt an angry flounce radiate from the Ford’s backseat. “Oh man, I’m gonna be startin’ from home plate again.”

“Then you better get swingin’ before your battery goes dead.”

I circled wide around the other parkers, keeping my footsteps light on the compacted gravel. Car, my bad Black Widow Chev, sat out near the road in a deeper puddle of night beneath a ‘dozer-spared smoke tree. The view was almost as good and the privacy was better. The glowing tip of a Fatima extra-length hovered in the front seat. “And?” a soft voice inquired over the Nat King Cole Trio.

Lisette wears shadow well. With her glossy brunette ponytail and black sweater and skirt she was a darker patch of dark in the dark, a glint of silver earring marking her place.

“A bad or a worse.” The Princess materialized for a moment under Car’s dome light as I slid in behind the wheel, her shoes kicked off and her feet tucked under her. She disappeared again as I slammed the door and let the night flood back. “The bad’s a kid ripping off his old man’s drugstore to sell to his classmates. The worse is the old man’s supplying.”

I took an envelope and a pencil stub out of the glove compartment. Switching on the dome light again, I sealed the drugs in the envelope and wrote the time, date, and location on the outside. My name and my badge number, L.A. County 748, went over the sealed flap.

I tossed the envelope back into the glove box. Tomorrow it and my report would go to narcotics detail and I’d be out of it. That’s how plainclothes intelligence works. Somebody else makes the busts. You just set ’em up to be knocked down.

Killing the dome light, I took a Lucky out of the soft pack crushed under the sun visor. Stealing the butt end of Lisette’s Fatima, I lit up from it and slouched lower, staring at the city lights. This was supposed to have been a night out with my girl, but then Gilly had left word at my contact number.

I was just damn lucky Lisette Kingman wasn’t a regular kind of a girl.

She slid across the seat, flowing around the Tornado floor shifter and demanding an arm be put around her, letting me know she didn’t mind her evening being messed up.

The Princess is my lover, my best friend, my sometimes extremely unofficial partner, and a mystery I’ve never been able to solve. Why should a true and righteous living doll like her waste her time with a four-hundred-and-fifty-dollar-a-month deputy sheriff when she could do a hell of a lot better by strolling into the bar of the Beverly Hilton and crooking a finger?

Sure, I’d gotten her out of a jam once, that crazy deal out on Route 66, but it wasn’t as if she owed me. As I ran my hand down her warm cashmere-sheathed flank I again decided it was just dumb luck and that I should shut up and ride it while it lasted.

“You’re thinking again,” she murmured, her chin propped on my shoulder.

“I am?”

“Yes, and knock it off,” she accused. “When you think too much you always think yourself into the mullygrubbles and you get boring when you get the mullygrubbles.”

“There were two bad habits my folks could never break me of, biting my nails and thinking.”

She snuggled insistently. “What you need is to channel all of that thinking into a more constructive vein.”

“Like what?”

Turnabout being fair play, she stole my Lucky Strike for a puff, returning it with a hint of lipstick flavoring. “Like all of the intriguing things that must be going on in these other cars.”

There might be something to that, given that these other parkers probably hadn’t come up here to discuss the Missile Gap.

“Well, let’s see,” says I. “My buddy, Gilly, down at the far end, is probably still trying to recover from a foul ball.”

“Called Kevin Pulaski!” Lisette chuckled in the dark. “That was cruel!”

“What can I say, Princess, life’s a bitch and then you die. That couple next to him in the ‘fifty-six Dodge ragtop are nonstarters. You can see where their heads are. All they’re hugging are the door handles. The girl must have her sweater, a purse, and a coil of barbed wire stacked in the middle of the seat... The MG-TD, man, I don’t even want to think about that. They gotta be contortionists... They’re set up in that big Nash Metro, though. It looks like a bathtub and drives like a cow but the front seat folds flat into the back to make a full-sized double bed. They got it made.”

A set of sharp little teeth lightly nipped through the fabric of my T-shirt. “How does a nineteen fifty-seven Chevrolet compare?”

As if she didn’t know. Another aspect of the Princess's rather exotic personality was that she found the combination of starlight and General Motors upholstery stimulating.

Maybe this night was only half shot after all.

Gale Storm was asking “Why Do Fools Fall in Love” when a new set of headlights turned in from the road and gravel crunched under tires. “More customers?” Lisette murmured, her voice kiss-muffled.

“If it’s a sheriff's cruiser, I’ll pull rank.”

A low-slung coupe pulled up to a clear spot on the edge of the overlook about fifteen yards ahead of us, its driver possibly not even aware that Car was parked back here. I ran an instinctive automobile ID on the silhouette outlined against the city lights, a Studebaker Golden Hawk, a year or two old.

“Some other people with the same excellent idea,” the Princess chuckled, brushing back a tousle of hair.

Then the driver of the Hawk lit a smoke, using a Ronson and not the car lighter. The momentary burst of flame light glinted off upswept blond hair. The driver was a woman and she was alone.

Lisette straightened a little, her Siamese cat’s curiosity kicking in. “That’s interesting. I wonder what she’s doing up here by her lonesome?”

“Meeting someone?”

“Maybe. But from her hairstyle, she’s older, at least up in her twenties. Old enough to have her own apartment or at least to be going with a man who has one.”

I mentally added my own car-guy’s assessment. You drove a Golden Hawk for style, not just for going places. It was a young sophisticate’s car. And a Studebaker is a definite step up from your basic Ford, Chevy, or Plymouth. The blonde would have the dough for her own place or at least for a good motel room.

“Maybe she’s inspired by car seats too?” I mused.

“Maybe, or maybe we have a genuine illicit rendezvous underway.” Lisette nuzzled into a more comfortable observing position. “What do you want to bet one or the other or both of them will be married? Just not to each other.”

“You’ve been reading Peyton Place again, haven’t you?”

It had only been a couple of minutes, but the cigarette shot out the Hawk’s open driver’s window, striking sparks off the ground. But after only a brief pause the lighter snapped once more. This time we caught a glimpse of a classic profile in the flame, the blonde’s movements abrupt and angry.

Lisette giggled. “Somebody is late and somebody isn’t happy about it.”

“Yeah, and somebody’s gonna catch hell for it,” I replied, playing with the tip of the Princess's ponytail. This was getting as good as the drive-in. All we needed was a bag of popcorn.

A few moments later another car pulled into the overlook, a big new Pontiac convertible with its top down. It drew in tight alongside the Golden Hawk, flared its brake lights, and shut down.

You could barely make out the outlines of the two vehicles and the suggestion and sound of someone getting out of the Pontiac. The dome light of the Studebaker flashed on as a man got in the passenger-side door: white male adult, late twenties; dark, carefully combed hair; a blue sports coat. You caught a radiated sense of not happy.

“You know, I think this isn’t exactly a romantic rendezvous,” Lisette commented.

“No, if it was, she would have got into the Poncho. More room, and the Stude’s got bucket seats. This has more of a ‘Honey it’s been wonderful but’ kind of a feel.”

“Could be.” Lisette switched off our radio. Even at that, they must have been keeping things low-key. Only once or twice did we hear a hint of a raised voice over the sounds of the other parkers’ music.

Time passed and the Princess and I lost interest in the couple in the Golden Hawk and resumed it with each other. I was lost in the intricacies of a new-model bra catch when I heard the Studebaker’s door open again. I glanced up to see movement between the two darkened cars.

A moment later the Golden Hawk’s engine started and its passenger door slammed. The driver’s door on the Bonneville opened and shut as well, then the larger vehicle fired up. The Pontiac shot backward out of its parking place, not quite clipping Car’s bumper. Its headlights blazed on as it slued around and tore out onto the highway, spraying a double roostertail of gravel behind it. The smaller Studebaker continued to sit at the edge of the turnout, lights off and its engine muttering disconsolately.

“I don’t think that went too well,” I said.

“Mmmm, no,” the Princess murmured judgmentally. “That'll be a five-pound-box-of-chocolates-and-a-dozen-roses makeup.”

“At least. Anyway, it looks like the show's over.”

“Are you kidding?” Lisette snapped the radio back on and slipped her bared arms around my neck. “It’s just starting, my pet.”

Time and music flowed past: Santos and Johnny’s “Sleepwalking,” Patti Page’s “Tennessee Waltz,” the theme from Moulin Rouge, and the Four Aces’ “Three Coins in the Fountain.” The final tropical-bird squawk from Martin’s Denny’s “Quiet Village” faded and the station break for the one o’clock news broke the spell. The first thing I noticed upon returning to Earth was the continuing idle of the Studebaker engine.

There were only two or three cars left in the turnout, and the Golden Hawk was one of them. Its driver was still just sitting there. My cop’s alarm bells, suppressed for a time, started ringing.

The Princess caught my mood change. “What’s wrong?” she asked, coming up to peer over the seat back. With her sweater and skirt lost somewhere in Car’s interior, she was a paler shadow against the seat covers.

“I don’t know. The blonde in the Golden Hawk’s still out there. She must be thinking awfully hard about something.”

And then the blonde must have made up her mind about whatever it was, because she slowly and deliberately drove her car off the edge of the overlook and into the canyon below, drowning out the night music with the crash and crumple of buckling steel.

A suicide gets worked like a homicide until you’re sure it isn’t. The pleasant darkness had been replaced by the glare of work lights and headlights and the murmur of romantic radio had been supplanted by the hiss and chatter of police two-ways.

Sheriff's Search and Rescue had brought in their Dodge deuce-and-a-half with the heavy lift A-frame. A regular wrecker wouldn’t have had the hundred-and-fifty-foot reach to get to the bottom of the ravine. They were walking the hook down to the demolished Golden Hawk as the lab and coroner’s crews finished up at the crash site.

Assistant Coroner Michael O'Doul wheezed his way over the edge of the turnout followed by a couple of deputies carrying a sheet-wrapped form on a stretcher. Miss Dorothy Kurtz, white female adult, age thirty-two, blond, green eyes, 5'3", approximately 130 pounds, former resident of Santa Monica.

I’d found her purse in the wreck. There had been no suicide note.

Mortuary Mike’s beefy features were streaked with sweat and dust and he had grass seeds stuck in his moustache.

“What do you think, man?” I asked

“It won’t be official until she’s posted,” he replied, “but eyeballing it, I’d say death by asphyxiation from a crushed larynx.”

I nodded. “It probably happened when she did the piledriver into the wash at the bottom of the slope. You could see where the upper arc of the steering wheel caught her right across the throat.”

“The car didn’t roll or torch, that’s something anyway,” Mike mused. “She was a real good-looking woman.”

Mortuary Mike had a somewhat different view of the fairer sex. Most of the girls he met were on the quiet side.

A couple of blue serge suits crossed to where the deputies were preparing to load the body into the ambulance. “Hold the body here for a minute, O'Doul. We got somebody coming up to make a positive ID.”

“You got a relative?” I asked.

“Nah, a boyfriend. A Dr. Ned Freemont. He interns at the hospital where she worked.”

“Does this Dr. Freemont stand about five eleven with dark hair and does he drive a new Pontiac ragtop?” I asked.

These guys were Homicide Detectives, capital H, capital D, while I was just a pathetic little silver badge working drugs & juvenile for Metro intelligence. I should have genuflected, but the mood wasn’t on me.

“Yeah, Pulaski, he does. He also admits meeting the girl up here tonight. But he’s also got a solid alibi. At the time the lady was taking her high dive he was sitting in a cocktail lounge on Melrose in front of a swarm of witnesses. We’ve checked and the bartender remembers him. We’ve also talked to the other couples who were up here and their stories all match with yours and his. It’s a suicide.”

I glanced at the sheet-wrapped shape on the stretcher. “Yeah, I guess so.”

Still...

Lisette hovered at the edge of the light pool, listening intently. Her hair was ordered, her lipstick touched up, and there wasn’t a hint that her lingerie was still wadded up under Car’s front seat.

Well, hardly a hint anyway.

The shorter and uglier of the blue suits openly ogled her unconfined curves. “By the way, Pulaski,” he said, leering in word and deed, “just what were you doing up here tonight?”

If he was hoping for a maidenly blush and a lowering of the eyes, he was shopping at the wrong store. The Princess had never been embarrassed over anything she’d ever done, up to and including planning a mob hit on her own stepfather. “He was being the living end, darling,” she replied, snorting Fatima smoke. “The absolute living end.”

Short and ugly lost his leer and his taller partner screwed his puss into something resembling a grin. Heck, who was I to argue?

At that moment, a familiar Pontiac Bonneville pulled off the highway and drew in behind the row of sheriff's cruisers and emergency vehicles. The convertible’s top was up now.

Behind us, the winch on the lifter truck started to moan and chatter.

A uniformed deputy led Dr. Ned Freemont over to where we were standing. I recognized the dark hair, not so carefully styled now, and the expensive sports coat. The intern was boyishly handsome but trying to look older. The late Miss Kurtz might have had a good five years on him. An interesting combo. And you could sense this wasn’t any kind of struggling young medical student. He was coming from money, heading into money. He looked shook and his college-grad features were darkening under his next-day’s beard.

We did the ritualistic flashing of the tin and I let the homicide guys make the equally ritualistic apologies for getting the doctor out at this hour. Then came the request to have a look under the sheet.

She looked even older. They usually do dead.

Freemont gritted his teeth. “Yes, that’s Dorothy.”

The lead homicide man gave Mike O'Doul the nod to load up. “I hope you understand we’ve got some questions to ask, Doctor. We found your name in the young woman’s address book and several... personal pieces of correspondence from you in her purse. Deputy Pulaski has also identified you as being up here and speaking with Miss Kurtz shortly before her death. Do you have anything to say about that?”

His face twisted. “Only that this mess was my fault. Dorothy... Miss Kurtz called my house earlier this evening. She asked, demanded, that I meet her at this overlook. We’d come here before. It was a favorite place for her.”

“You had a relationship with Miss Kurtz?”

Freemont nodded. “We worked the same shift at Hollywood Receiving Hospital and we’d dated off and on for a while. It was just casual, from my point of view anyway. But Dorothy saw it differently. When I saw things were getting too serious, I tried to break it off, but she didn’t take it well. She’d developed this fixation... about us. About our getting married...”

He glanced at the sheet-wrapped body sliding into the back of the big Buick ambulance. “It was my fault. I never should have let it happen.”

“Did she ever give you a hint she was planning on wasting herself, Doc?” Crude on my part, yeah, but I was curious to see how he’d take it.

He just looked at me, suffering like a basset hound. “No! Of course not! If she had I’d have done things differently! I’d have gotten her professional help! As it was, I came up here tonight to tell her, once and for all, it was over, that marriage just wasn’t in the books! Dorothy became upset, frenzied, but I swear to God she never said a word about suicide.”

The Princess and I swapped thoughtful glances. In Lisette’s outburst of erotic snoopiness, she’d turned our radio off to see if we could hear anything from the interior of the Golden Hawk. If anyone had been flipping out, they’d been damn quiet about it.

“There didn’t seem to be any reason to draw it out further,” Freemont continued. “I had my say and I left. I was feeling pretty lousy about the situation and I stopped for a couple of drinks on the way home. I’d just gotten back to my place when the sheriff's office called.”

He gestured vaguely after the departing ambulance. “I swear, Officers, I never expected... imagined this!” His voice broke. “I would have done something... helped her!”

“These things happen, Doctor,” the senior homicide man said. “You might as well go on home. You’ll be required to appear and testify at the coroner’s inquest. You’ll be notified as to the time and location.”

“Thank you, Officers.” He got his voice back under control. “You’ll have my full cooperation.”

He squared his shoulders manfully and walked back to the Bonneville.

“That’s it?” I said as he pulled away. “You’re not taking this Clyde in for a shakedown?”

“Why the hell make more trouble for him or us?” the senior dick replied. “He’s being straight up about the whole thing. He was going with a squirrelly dame, he broke it off, and she took a high dive. It won’t be the first time.”

“I know. That’s what’s bothering me!” I snapped back. “Am I the only one here getting the feel we’re reading from a friggin’ script?”

The homicide man looked annoyed. “Look, was this guy anywhere near the scene when the death occurred?”

“No.”

“Was anyone near the Kurtz woman’s car before it went off the edge?”

I could see where this was heading. “No.”

He had a point. I might have been, uh, distracted, during the time frame leading up to the woman’s death, but during the critical couple of minutes immediately before the Studebaker had gone over the edge I could testify that nobody had gone near it.

“Furthermore, Pulaski, you yourself said the car’s engine was running and when you went down to the wreck, you found the transmission set in drive. The car wasn’t pushed off the cliff, it was driven off. Right? And Kurtz was the only person in the vehicle.”

“Yeah.”

“Okay. We don’t have opportunity or means. Freemont was nowhere near the death car at the time of the wreck. Nor was anyone else, as you yourself can swear to.”

“How about motive?” I protested. “The victim was giving the primary suspect grief over their breakup. That’s been solid for homicide plenty of times.”

“It’s been solid for suicide, too, Deputy.” The dick was pulling rank now. “We’ve got no evidence of anything other than a gaga offing herself over her boyfriend. Until we do, that’s it!”

Punctuating his statement, the lift truck heaved the hulk of the Studebaker up and over the edge of the ravine, the wreck crumpled like an ivory and gold paper bag. A number of the responding units were checking themselves back into service and the detective team headed for their own car. “Tell you what, Pulaski,” the shorter and uglier of the pair called over his shoulder, “if you’re so worried about it, we’ll let you handle the cleanup. Maybe you can find yourselves a clue.”

I muttered a reply involving warm exhaust pipes under my breath.

Lisette dropped her cigarette butt to the ground, grinding it out under the toe of her pump. “Kevin, may I ask a dumb question?”

“Be my guest.”

“Is there any chance this could have been an accident? Could her foot have slipped on the brake or something and she went over the edge without meaning to?”

I shrugged. “Anything’s possible. But she wasn’t all that close to the edge, she was back a good twenty feet and there’s no slope to the turnout. Besides, the transmission had been shifted into drive. I checked that myself. The car went off the edge under power.”

She frowned as we studied the ruined Golden Hawk. The frame was too badly wrenched for towing. They’d need a flatbed to haul it to county impound.

“It just seems funny the way this car just... dribbled over the edge,” the Princess continued. “Say this woman had worked herself into a state of suicidal hysteria. When she made up her mind to finally kill herself, wouldn’t she have, you know, floored it, launching herself into the canyon?”

“You’d think so. But suicides are essentially screwball. It’s hard to say what one of them might do.”

The circle of lights in the night had grown smaller. Pretty much only the hoist crew and the forensics people were left and the lab guys were packing up their gear. One of them, a balding, heavyset man in chinos and a windcheater, ambled in our direction. “The dicks left you in charge of the crime scene, deputy,” he said. “You want a cast of the death car’s tire tracks or should we bother?”

I stubbed a boot toe into the brick-solid hardpan. “I doubt there’ll be any tracks to lift...” I looked around and my voice trailed off.

The unmarked homicide car had been backing out to the road, its headlights playing across the overlook. Now there hadn’t been any rain in L.A. for over two weeks, just sunny, eighty-degree chamber-of-commerce weather, dig it? The ground of the turnout was baked pale dry, all except for one dark moisture stain over where the Studebaker had been parked.

I mean, it might be no big deal. There could be a hundred innocent reasons for something to have been spilled there. But it was there, right where Dorothy Kurtz's death ride had started.

“Swing one of those work lights over here.”

I crossed to the patch of damp soil. It covered a couple of square feet. And there was a tire track in it, a partial at any rate. But the tread pattern was blurred in a funny way.

My first suspicion had been brake fluid, but it wasn’t. It was plain old water, and evaporating rapidly in the warm night. I dabbed a fingertip into the mud and tasted. There was neither the metallic taint of rust nor the sweetness of antifreeze. It hadn’t come from a radiator. Nor was the Golden Hawk air-conditioned, so it wasn’t condenser drip.

I spat out the test and stood up. Okay, lay it out. The Hawk had been parked right... here. I could see a couple of oil drops from its engine, the lubricant dark and not yet dust-dulled. I marked off the parking spot, scraping with the heel of my boot.

I was being watched. The Princess had followed me over and the lab guys and the crane crew. The Pontiac Bonneville had sat over... here, close alongside, just about the swing of a car door away. It had marked its territory with a drip from its crankcase as well. I added its outline to my reconstruction, then I studied how the positions related.

Okay, that put the water stain on the right side of the Studebaker, about between the passenger door and the right rear wheel well. The tire track would have been from the right rear tire. And didn’t the water stain trail off toward the edge of the overlook in a funny way?

“Photograph this,” I ordered. “Closeups and areas. And make a plaster cast of the track.”

I stepped back, making room for the lab men and my own thoughts. What else might still be here?

Cigarette butts. The two cigarettes I’d seen Dorothy Kurtz light. There they both were, smoldered out on the gravel, Marlboro filter tips with lipstick marks.

Just the two.

I strode back to the hulk of the Golden Hawk, pausing to grab a flashlight from the tool crib of the hoist truck.

They’d pried open the driver’s door of the Studebaker and now I forced it open again, leaning inside the coupe’s distorted interior. Panning the light around, I found half a dozen unsmoked smokes on the floorboards and the silver cigarette case they’d spilled from. I pulled open the dashboard ashtray and found that Dorothy Kurtz was one of those people Smokey the Bear hates, a butt flipper. The ashtray hadn’t been used recently.

Only two cigarettes. She might have run out of fuel for her purse lighter but the dash lighter was still in its socket. I’d been acquainted with Dorothy Kurtz long enough to know she chain-smoked under stress. And after her blowup with Freemont she’d sat in this car for a long time, but she hadn’t reached for another cigarette.

What else had been funny? I sprawled across the bucket seats. Forget that taste of paradise you’d been enjoying, Pulaski, and relive those bits and pieces of the outside world you could recall. Replay the film in slow motion. What else had or hadn’t happened?

Dome light!

When Dr. Freemont had climbed into the Golden Hawk the first time, the dome light had switched on automatically, like it was supposed to. But when he’d gotten out, it hadn’t.

I rolled on my back and played the flashlight up at the ivory-colored strip of plastic inset in the roof liner. “Hey, somebody get me a pair of lab gloves and a screwdriver, a small Phillips-head!”

The others were clustering around the car now, peering through the broken windows. The balding guy in the windcheater thrust the gloves and the screwdriver in through the door.

Pulling on the thin rubber gloves, I carefully backed the tiny screws out of the light frame. It came free and I set the light cover aside.

The little light bulb was missing from its socket. Someone had wanted to do something around this car that required total darkness, something he didn’t want the witnesses he knew would be there to be able to see.

There were traces of aluminum powder around the interior of the wreck.

“Who’s the latent prints guy?”

My friend in the windcheater leaned in the driver’s door again. “That’s me.”

“How did you cover the car’s interior?”

“I dusted the door handles, steering wheel, and dashboard, the standard stuff, and I lifted two outstanding sets of fresh prints. Probably the woman’s and the doctor’s but we still have to match them against exemplars.”

“How about the brake release and the gearshift lever?”

“All I got were smears there. Nothing clear.”

“Could they have been wiped?”

He shrugged awkwardly. “Hard to say.”

I pointed at the dome light assembly. “Did you dust this?”

“No. I didn’t think anyone would have had a reason to touch it.”

“Somebody did. Dust it now, inside the mount and out.”

I squirmed out of the wreck, thinking hard. Okay, you son of a bitch, how'd you do it and where would you do it? You’d have to work fast. You’d have only seconds and you wouldn’t want attention, either then or later. Run that mental filmstrip one more time.

I circled around to the car’s passenger door. Hunkering down, I played the flashlight beam into the narrow crack between the door skin and frame.

And right there, at the bottom door angle, a little tiny bit of white fuzz. Standing, I wrenched on the door handle. It was jammed.

“Get me a wrecking bar! I gotta get this open.”

I had all the help I needed. Crowbars slammed into the crack in the doorframe and strong men heaved. The door cracked and squealed wide, protesting.

A little piece of string fell out on the ground, about three inches long. One end had been knotted several times, the other was frayed from a fresh break. It went straight into an evidence envelope.

“Okay, I want light on the edge of the drop-off, aimed downslope, right where the car went over! All we got!”

Generator cables were hauled across, the work arcs were hogged into position, and everyone grabbed a big hand lantern or a five-cell, even Lisette.

It was a seventy-degree, soft-earth slope, held in place by cheat grass and spiky California holly. You could see where the Golden Hawk’s wheels and belly pan had torn down through the tinder-dry ground cover and you had to thank God there hadn’t been a stone to strike a spark.

Digging the heels of my boots into the crumbling soil, I followed the track of the dying Studebaker, sliding down a few feet, stopping, then playing my flashlight into the brush, looking for what had to be there to make it all work.

I spotted it about forty feet below the lip of the overview, snagged on a bush, a rag of white plastic with big blue and red polka dots. A string trailed off from one end and it was still bright and clean and slickly wet.

Ned Freemont stepped out through his patio doors. Lisette flowed to one side, pressing back into the deeper black along the retaining wall, giving me working room.

“Who’s there?” the intern demanded again. You could see him in the growing dawn light. He was in his shirtsleeves, his tie yanked down sloppily. He was a little unsteady, as if he’d been putting a shot glass to good use, and he looked young and scared.

“Don’t tense, Doc. It’s the law,” I replied, staying back in the shadows beside the garage. “Deputy Pulaski, L.A. County. I was one of the guys up at the murder scene.”

“Murder?” I saw him weave a little under the impact of the word.

“Uh-huh,” I replied, stepping out onto the patio. “I’m just here collecting a little more evidence. Oh, and I’m collecting you, too. You’re under arrest for the murder of Dorothy Kurtz.”

“What... what are you talking about?” His voice started to lift. “Dorothy committed suicide. They said...”

I shook my head, taking a step closer. “Nah, you killed her. Premeditated and in the first degree, and, speaking as a cop, may I say thanks. In a world of plain old day-in day-out mayhem, this is the first time I’ve ever worked one of these fancy, set-up killings like Ellery Queen writes about. It’s been a charge.”

“You’re crazy!” His voice was cracking now. “I was nowhere near Dorothy when she...”

“That was the whole idea, wasn’t it? For you to be alibied and in the clear when her car went into the canyon?”

Before he could speak again I held out my left hand with the sheaf of bread slices in it, just starting to turn leathery. “Didn’t your mama ever tell you about the starving kids in China? That was a good half a loaf thrown away in your garbage. But then, you needed the plastic bread bag to pack the ice in.”

He stared at the bread in my hand as I eased in another step. “You dumped the bread out of the bag and emptied your ice trays into it. Then you tied off the end of the bag with five or six feet of string. You put it in your car and you drove up to the overview for your lovers’ showdown.

“Oh, and Miss Kurtz didn’t call you. You called her and asked her to meet you there. You had the terrain all scoped out. And, as you’d figured, there were other couples at the turnout, enjoying the view. It’s a popular place on Saturday night. You wanted witnesses but distracted ones. People who wouldn’t be paying too close attention to what you were up to.

“You pulled in alongside Dorothy Kurtz's Studebaker, got out of your car and into hers. She was pissed and you had words. Not many, because you’d already made up your mind to kill her.”

“No!”

“Oh yeah,” I insisted. “You’re an intern at a receiving hospital. You’ve seen plenty of car-crash victims. You know how people die. So you reached over, grabbed her by the hair, and smashed her throat across the steering wheel, maybe a couple of times, crushing her larynx. Then you held her while she convulsed and suffocated to death.”

He didn’t say anything this time. It was just a sound.

“As a doc,” I continued, “you’d also know how the warm night would blur the coroner’s ability to estimate the exact time of death, but you still had to move fast. You also didn’t want those witnesses to be able to see just exactly what you’d be doing when you got out of her car, so you disabled the dome light by removing the bulb.

“When you’d made sure of the dark, you got out of the Studebaker and chocked its rear wheel with the bag of ice from your car. You’d left it in the backseat where you could grab it easily. Then you reached back into the Studebaker, started it, released the parking brake, and put the automatic transmission in drive.

“With the engine just idling, the Stude didn’t quite have enough power to ride up and over the ice chock wedged under its wheel. But man, that ice was melting. You wiped your prints off the shift lever and brake handle and you were careful to slam the string tied to the ice bag in the Studebaker’s door. Then you got back in your car and you peeled out, real loud and showy, so that everyone in that turnout would remember you leaving and when.”

I chuckled softly for effect. “You must have been sweating blood, praying that no peeping Tom would look into that Golden Hawk before you got yourself safely situated on that barstool. Nobody did, and after about twenty minutes, the Studebaker’s idling engine pulled the car over the melting ice and rolled it off the edge of the overlook.

“As it did, the string closed in the door pulled the ice bag after the car. And, like you figured, the bag was torn away by the brush on the hillside, becoming just another piece of road trash in the sticker bushes. The couple of inches of string caught in the door would be disregarded as irrelevant and the water stain on the ground from the melting ice would evaporate.”

I was within grabbing range now. “And it did, just not fast enough.”

You could see the trapped animal welling up in Freemont’s eyes. For all of his attempted cunning he really wasn’t a very good killer. But he made the effort. “This is crazy! I don’t know what you’re talking about!”

“Doc,” I said gently, “the coroner’s checking the body for torn scalp follicles and he’ll be paying real close attention to bruising and blood-pooling discrepancies. And while you wiped off the outside of the Stude’s dome light, we’ve got a real good set of your prints from the inside of the housing. The backseat of your car is damp from where you laid the ice bag, and we’ve got a plaster cast of the blurred tire track made by the car riding up and over it. Our crime lab will be able to match the string caught in the Golden Hawk’s door with that tied to the bread bag and probably to a hunk you’ve got laying around your house somewhere.”

I gestured with the bread slices I still held. “The lab's also going to be able to match the recipe of the breadcrumbs adhering to the inside of the bread bag with what’s in your garbage can. They can probably even match the baking batch and the individual loaf.”

I tossed the bread down on the paving. “That’s gonna be more than enough for the D.A. to bind you over. Now you can be smart or you can be stupid. Which do you want?”

“I want to talk with my family’s lawyer,” he said dully. He was going to be smart.

“Suit yourself.” I unhooked my handcuffs from the back of my belt. “You can call him from the Hall of Justice.”

There was some pink in the gray over the San Gabes and a few more birds were waking up as we led him down the road towards Car.

We’d take him in so the detectives could catch the credit and the paperwork. Then the Princess and I would drive out to her place or mine. We’d grab a shower, a little sleep, and maybe get back to what we’d started up on the hills.

I guided Freemont with a hand on his shoulder while the Princess trotted along beside us. “Why kill her?” she asked conversationally. “You had it all, the money, the medical degree, the future. Why mess it up?”

Sometimes if you hit ’em just when they’re in shock from the arrest, when they’re in that strange moment of emotional relief because their guilt’s out, sometimes they’ll pop open.

“Dorothy wanted to get married,” he murmured, sounding very young and very lost. “And I wasn’t ready. She said she’d gotten pregnant. She’d make it ugly with my family, a breach of promise... She’d ruin my chances with the practice that was taking me on... It just seemed easier for her not to be there anymore.”

“Not really, man,” I replied. “Not really.”

© 2007 by James H. Cobb