Free The Galton Case by Ross MacDonald Page A

money for horses and tennis?”
    “From his family. They’re heavily loaded.”
    “Good Lord, don’t tell me he’s the missing heir. Is that why you’re making a search for him?”
    “That’s why.”
    “They waited long enough.”
    “You can say that again. Can you tell me how to get to the house the Browns were living in when you visited them?”
    “I’m afraid not. I might be able to
show
you, though.”
    “When?”
    “Tomorrow morning if you like.”
    “That’s good of you.”
    “Not at all. I
liked
John Brown. Besides, I haven’t been to Luna Bay for years. Eons. Maybe I’ll rediscover my lost youth.”
    “Maybe.” But I didn’t think it likely.
    Neither did he.

chapter
9
    I N THE morning I picked up Bolling at his Telegraph Hill apartment. It was one of those sparkling days that make up for all the fog in San Francisco. An onshore wind had swept the air clear and tessellated the blue surface of the Bay. A white ship cutting a white furrow was headed out toward the Golden Gate. White gulls hung above her on the air.
    Bolling looked at all this with a fishy eye. He was frowsy and gray and shivering with hangover. He crawled into the back seat and snored all the way to our destination. It was a dingy, formless town sprawling along the coast highway. Its low buildings were dwarfed by the hills rising behind it, the broad sea spreading out in front.
    I stopped beside a filling-station where the inland road met Highway 1, and told Bolling to wake up.
    “Wha’ for?” he mumbled from the depths of sleep. “Wha’ happen?”
    “Nothing yet. Where do we go from here?”
    He groaned and sat up and looked around. The glare from the ocean made his eyes water. He shaded them with his hand. “Where are we?”
    “Luna Bay.”
    “It doesn’t look the same,” he complained. “I’m not sure whether I can find the place or not. Anyway, we turn north here. Just drive along slowly, and I’ll try to spot the road.”
    Almost two miles north of Luna Bay, the highway cut inland across the base of a promontory. On the far side of the promontory, a new-looking asphalt road turned off toward the sea. A billboard stood at the intersection: “Marvista Manor. Three bedrooms and rumpus room. Tile bathrooms. Built-in kitchens. All utilities in. See our model home.”
    Bolling tapped my shoulder. “This is the place, I think.”
    I backed up and made a left turn. The road ran straight for several hundred yards up a gentle slope. We passed a rectangle of bare adobe as big as a football field, where earth-movers were working. A wooden sign at the roadside explained their activity: “Site of the Marvista Shopping Center.”
    From the crest of the slope we looked down over the roof-tops of a hundred or more houses. They stood along the hillside on raw earth terraces which were only just beginning to sprout grass. Driving along the winding street between them, I could see that most of the houses were occupied. There were curtains at the windows, children playing in the yards, clothes drying on the lines. The houses were painted different colors, which only seemed to emphasize their sameness.
    The street unwound itself at the foot of the slope, paralleling the edge of the bluffs. I stopped the car and turned to look at Bolling.
    “I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s changed so much, I can’t be certain this is the place. There were some clapboard bungalows, five or six of them, scattered along the bluff. The Browns lived in one of them, if memory serves me.”
    We got out and walked toward the edge of the bluff. Acouple of hundred feet below, the sea wrinkled like blue metal against its base, and burst in periodic white explosions. A mile to the south, under the shelter of the promontory, a cove of quiet water lay in a brown rind of beach.
    Bolling pointed toward the cove. “This has to be the place. I remember Brown telling me that inlet was used as a harbor by rum-runners in the old Prohibition days. There used to be