LITMIR.BIZ

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Wyeland flung open the creaking gate, recalled his manners, and let Lieutenant Kenmore through first onto the flagged walk.

      Branches of rhododendron and white-blooming es-callonia brushed Kenmore’s shoulder. To the right, he caught glimpses of a tennis court glimmering in the night with a faint, liquescent shine. Ahead, the boughs of a silk oak wept down their concealing leaves.

      The big house, beyond the tennis court and the silk oak, offered a cream stucco exterior rising three storeys tall to the steep pitch of an English-style roof. A few glimmers of light, as coy as harem ladies, peeped around the carefully draped windows.

      It was not a very imaginative house, but it was indubitably a solid one. It had cost a lot of money to build, and only a rich man could have afforded to live in it.

      Kenmore emerged from under the silk oak boughs.

      There was another light, this to his left, fanning from what was obviously the guesthouse doorway. The light fan touched the pyramidal form of sandbags enclosing a window. (Henry Bowling had his shelter, though not an excavated one.)

      The light fan continued, and silhouetted a kneeling figure that genuflected in deep, prayerful attitudes.

      Cadenced, the rhythmic movement suggested an anciently pagan rite.

      Air raid warden Wyeland directed his flashbeam ahead. And the kneeling figure became merely a man practicing Schafer Method artificial respiration upon another who lay stretched on the grass.

      This might have been an air raid drill incident.

      But in the darkness a woman sobbed—a sound that smote the lieutenant’s ear tragically and feverishly, and gave his nerves a sharply tightening twist.

      Kenmore snatched his companion’s flashlight and sprang forward.

      The disc of light fell on the victim’s turned and averted features—the thickish features of Henry R. Bowling.

      Bowling’s mouth gaped open. His face, suffused now with a mottled cherry blush had on it that peculiar expression which is most expressive of all, because it is no expression at all.

      It was a look of wide, stunned-eyed, and utter vacuity.

      “Good God!” thought Kenmore. “Good God!”

      He knew, from the moment he saw Bowling’s face, the attempted resuscitation was so much wasted effort.

      Henry Bowling was dead.

      III

      Men have more intuition than women any day, if they would stop and listen to it.—THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF CATHERINE HOPE.

      Unnatural death affected John Kenmore to about the extent a physician is emotionally affected when confronted with a repulsive disease. It was shocking, but it was also his job.

      He dropped to one knee and stared at Henry Bowling’s cherry-mottled face, and a change came over him. He ceased to be the John Kenmore who preferred tap beer to the bottled variety, considered Leon Errol funnier than Laurel and Hardy, and would rather spend his day off reeling in swordfish than spend it playing golf. As a normal human being, he felt all the complicated and instinctive emotions normal men do feel in the presence of death; but he put aside his personal feelings. They were not any more important than the color of the necktie he happened to be wearing.

      “What happened here?” said the homicide detective.

      “Gas heater.” The kneeling man bent forward on the pivot made by his cupped hands. A strand of dark hair fell, dangled before his lowered face. “Fumes—got him—I guess.”

      “You’ve sent for a doctor?”

      “Think so.” The other leaned back and rested with his hips on his heels, showing Kenmore a thin intent face from which the lock of dark hair had fallen away and down one flat cheek. “Can’t talk—doing this.”

      The eyes burned with their own preoccupation, and it was possible this man did not really see Lieutenant Kenmore.

      “One,” he said under his breath, and his body rocked forward, his cupped hands pressed against Henry Bowling’s ribs, and the strand of hair dropped from his forehead. “Two. Three. Four.”

      Kenmore straightened.

      “Mrs. Axiter would know about that,” suggested the warden at his side.

      Kenmore’s grey glance made out the woman’s form. She leaned against the pyramid of sandbags. She was watching, and weeping as she watched.

      Kenmore, as he came a step closer, saw that tears had washed paths down her faded, and he thought curiously heavily powdered face. Her hands hung lamely and limply at her sides.

      She had to gather herself, and gather her breath, to answer him.

      “I think,” Mrs. Axiter faltered, “the gardener went and phoned.”

      Kenmore could not be sure, from the indecisive sound of this, that a doctor had been called at all.

      (Not that he thought it would make any difference to Henry Bowling. However, that was the doctor’s province, and not a homicide detective’s.)

      The lieutenant took two more steps to the guesthouse door. It was a redwood cottage, and its interior had the ripened and dark look common to very old redwood. The end wall had been freshly paneled, and the new wood made an odd, eye-catching contrast to the other three, seasoned walls and the floor.

      The room was very hot; the heat came flooding up from a portable gas heater beyond the flat-top desk where the telephone stood.

      Kenmore lifted the telephone from its base, and dialed Seaview 3-3000, the La Jolla control room number.

      “Elliot?” said he. “You’d better rush your nearest casualty station physician to 222 Laguna Terrace—” and had to repeat the instruction to make the district warden understand he was not simply reporting a drill incident.

      William Wyeland had come in, a step behind the lieutenant.

      Very pale, he muttered: “I was in the A.E.F. last time, you know.”

      Kenmore understood perfectly what the apparently uncalled-for remark meant.

      “It gets you, anyway,” said he.

      “I suppose it’s—we were just talking . . . It’d already happened then. Of course, Theodora never dreamed,” said the other confusedly. “He was a good sector warden. She often said, no one could have done more. This is a heavy blow for all of us.”

      “Theodora?” Kenmore remembered, or half-remembered, the name.

      “My wife.”

      “You found him, did you?”

      “No,” said Wyeland. “I was at home, that’s my post. My daughter—she’s in the messengers—was the one.”

      “Your daughter . . . When was this?”

      “Just now.”

      “Five minutes ago? Ten?”

      Wyeland said, “Let’s see . . . I opened the envelope at 7:47—that was the time marked on it. Then I had to make up my report in writing. Mr. Bowling insisted on that; he said it saved time on the phone. I suppose it was a couple of minutes later when I tried to phone him here.”

      “He didn’t answer?”

      “No, but I thought nothing of that. I supposed the wires were down as a result of some earlier incident in the sector, you know. That was all prearranged, that if he didn’t answer the phone we were to send a messenger. So I sent Dorothy. But she had to go upstairs and get her armband—it took a minute or so more.”

      Wyeland colored faintly above his brown beard.

      “That,” said he, “was what we were talking about. My wife didn’t

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