Smitty grinned without mirth, mistaking his silence for hopelessness. "That's the trouble, Bill," he said. "There's no one who would help us!"
"I'm not so sure about that!" Morrow replied softly. "I'm not so sure at all—"
It was late Friday afternoon when Morrow parked the battered, mud-splattered truck on a side-street and climbed out to go for a quiet stroll in suburban Sacramento.
The street address he was looking for turned up in the next block, near the edge of town. It was an inconspicuous one of the long street-row of small houses with a green lawn stretching down to the curb and dotted with a few evergreen shrubs, a broad livingroom picture window in front, a white front door with a small ornamental iron night-lamp mounted above it, and a one-story, red-tiled roof in the flat, gently sloping California style.
Morrow walked past the house and around the block to the alley. He walked up the alley behind the house. Its rear was as inconspicuous as its front: a wide yard, partly in lawn, partly in flower garden and part gravelled with clothesline, enclosed by a low, whitewashed wood fence. The only noticeable difference was a small sand-box in which a small brother and sister were playing with toy cars. The little boy and girl wore matching rompers and had straw-colored hair which, Morrow concluded, they must have inherited from their mother. He'd never met Mrs. Foster, but he remembered Bob Foster's dark, heavy hair.
He walked on down the alley, studying the back yards behind the other houses. He noted how wide the alleyway was, how high surrounding fences, garages, and other obstructions were, and the lack of telephone poles or wires overhead. He nodded his satisfaction.
When he got back to the truck, he took a street-map from the glove compartment and carefully marked the exact location of Foster's house.
Then he drove out of Sacramento, had dinner at a roadside restaurant, and proceeded to Stockton. Smitty met him downtown and they went into a lunchroom for coffee.
"Groceries and laundry's taken care of," Smitty reported wryly. "How was Sacramento?"