I said, “There’s nothing to investigate. They’re both dead. It’s the same old suicide-pact stuff.”
“But that automobile being here. The whole thing is cockeyed. I want the straight of it.”
“If I told you all I knew about it, it would still be cockeyed.”
“Who’s your client? Who are you working for?”
I shook my head.
Sellers said, “Wait here.”
His heavy feet crunched on the gravel as he went back into the office of the auto court. He was in there about five minutes, then came out, folding a paper. He climbed into the police car, and said, “Okay, we’ll take another ride.”
This time we went to San Robles.
6285 Orange Avenue was a post-war job that had been knocked together out of such materials as were available and such labour as had been willing to work. It was a Monterey-type house, neat enough on the outside, but the builders had been up against a problem of cost per square foot and had tried to make the square feet as few as possible.
Fifteen years ago the place would have been an architect’s model, a miniature house used for an estate agent’s office or an oversized doll-house. Now it was two bedrooms and bath, twelve thousand, seven hundred and eighty-five dollars.