The Chill Read Free

happy honeymooners.
    Alex burst into tears.

chapter
2
    I AGREED over lunch to help him find his wife. That and the chicken pot pie calmed him down. He couldn’t remember when he had eaten last, and he ate ravenously.
    We drove out to the Surf House in separate cars. It was on the sea at the good end of town: a pueblo hotel whose Spanish gardens were dotted with hundred-dollar-a-day cottages. The terraces in front of the main building descended in wide green steps to its own marina. Yachts and launches were bobbing at the slips. Further out on the water, beyond the curving promontory that gave Pacific Point its name, white sails leaned against a low gray wall of fog.
    The desk clerk in the Ivy League suit was very polite, but he wasn’t the one who had been on duty on the Sunday I was interested in. That one had been a summer replacement, a college boy who had gone back to school in the East. He himself, he regretted to say, knew nothing about Mrs. Kincaid’s bearded visitor or her departure.
    “I’d like to talk to the hotel photographer. Is he around today?”
    “Yes, sir. I believe he’s out by the swimming pool.”
    We found him, a thin spry man wearing a heavy camera like an albatross around his neck. Among the colored beach clothes and bathing costumes, his dark business suit made him look like an undertaker. He was taking some very candid picturesof a middle-aged woman in a Bikini who didn’t belong in one. Her umbilicus glared at the camera like an eyeless socket.
    When he had done his dreadful work, the photographer turned to Alex with a smile. “Hi. How’s the wife?”
    “I haven’t seen her recently,” Alex said glumly.
    “Weren’t you on your honeymoon a couple of weeks ago? Didn’t I take your picture?”
    Alex didn’t answer him. He was peering around at the pool-side loungers like a ghost trying to remember how it felt to be human. I said:
    “We’d like to get some copies made of that picture you took. Mrs. Kincaid is on the missing list, and I’m a private detective. My name is Archer.”
    “Fargo. Simmy Fargo.” He gave me a quick handshake, and the kind of glance a camera gives you when it records you for posterity. “In what sense on the missing list?”
    “We don’t know. She left here in a taxi on the afternoon of September the second. Kincaid has been looking for her ever since.”
    “That’s tough,” Fargo said. “I suppose you want the prints for circularization. How many do you think you’ll be needing?”
    “Three dozen?”
    He whistled, and slapped himself on his narrow wrinkled forehead. “I’ve got a busy weekend coming up, and it’s already started. This is Friday. I could let you have them by Monday. But I suppose you want them yesterday?”
    “Today will do.”
    “Sorry.” He shrugged loosely, making his camera bob against his chest.
    “It could be important, Fargo. What do you say we settle for a dozen, in two hours?”
    “I’d like to help you. But I’ve got a job.” Slowly, almost against his will, he turned and looked at Alex. “Tell you what I’ll do. I’ll call the wife in, and you can have your pictures. Only don’t stand me up, the way the other one did.”
    “What other one?” I said.
    “Big guy with a beard. He ordered a print of the same picture and never came back for it. I can let you have that print now if you like.”
    Alex came out of his dark trance. He took hold of Fargo’s arm with both hands and shook it. “You saw him then. Who is he?”
    “I thought maybe you knew him” Fargo disengaged himself and stepped back. “As a matter of fact, I thought I knew him, too. I could have sworn I took his picture once. But I couldn’t quite place the face. I see too many faces.”
    “Did he give you his name?”
    “He must have. I don’t take orders without a name. I’ll see if I can find it for you, eh?”
    We followed him into the hotel and through a maze of corridors to his small cluttered windowless office. He phoned his wife,