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ill-tempered moment, then apparently broke in, saying, “Marie, I’ve got to go. The sooner I talk to Lieutenant Hastings, the sooner things will fall into place. You just do as I tell you. I’ll call you as soon as I’m free.” Abruptly, he cradled the phone and turned to face me.
    Because I’d seen his picture so often, Guest’s face seemed familiar, like the face of a movie star seen on the street. He looked to be in his early sixties. His body was lean and muscular: an athlete’s body, taut and trim. Alexander Guest was one of those restless, intense men who conveyed a sense of constant movement and tension, even sitting behind a desk. His gray hair was thick and wiry, growing low across his forehead, elegantly barbered. His face, like his body, was lean and vigorous, deeply creased down the cheeks and around the mouth. His nose was large and high bridged. His eyes were a clear gray, almost transparent. The eyes dominated the face: quick moving, shrewd, unsmiling, uncompromising. He looked like an actor perfectly cast in the role Alexander Guest played in real life: an incredibly successful trial lawyer, a living legend with an international reputation as a brilliant, ruthless winner. A gossip columnist had recently written that Guest never accepted clients unless their names appeared in Who’s Who.
    Immediately, he went on the offensive. “Have you gotten anything on your bulletin to have Kramer picked up?”
    “No, sir.”
    “Have you got men at all the airports? They should be covering Oakland and San Jose, too, as well as San Francisco—any airport that makes connections to New York.”
    “Did you tell that to Inspector Canelli?”
    “Certainly,” he snapped.
    I looked at my watch; the time was 3:15, almost exactly two hours since the murder. Assuming that he’d committed the crime at 1:10 A.M. , Gordon Kramer couldn’t have gotten to San Francisco International, the closest airport, before 1:45. By 2:45, probably, the airport police would have been alerted. We’d have to check the airline schedules to be sure, but I doubted whether any airline would leave San Francisco for New York before, say, 6:00 A.M. So it seemed probable that we had a better-than-even chance of apprehending the fugitive, assuming that he and his son were forced to wait for a flight out of town. In the wee hours, a man and a boy in a deserted airline terminal would be hard to miss.
    “Do you have any reason to believe that he’s going directly to New York?” I asked. “If he’s a fugitive, and he’s smart, he’d go somewhere else first. Los Angeles, for instance, or Portland. He’d want to get out of San Francisco as soon as possible. Once he does that, he can take his time going on to New York.”
    “Well,” Guest said, “he’s a fugitive, no question. And, sure as hell, he’s smart.” His voice was flat and furious; his eyes were stone cold.
    “What I’d like,” I said, taking out my notebook and ballpoint pen, “is for you to fill me in. Give me everything you can think of, from the beginning—everything that’s relevant to the crime.”
    “Yes—certainly.” Suddenly, as if his body couldn’t contain its own instant burst of energy, he rose to his feet. Wearing a plaid woolen bathrobe over paisley-printed silk pajamas, he began pacing back and forth behind the intricately carved table.
    “It all started,” he said, “almost seven years ago, when my daughter Marie—” He gestured to the phone. It was a short, resentful gesture, as if he were releasing a charge of sudden anger. “Marie married Gordon Kramer, in New York. She’d been married once before. In fact, she’d gone to New York to live for a while, to forget her first husband. Unfortunately, however, she met Kramer almost immediately, and in just a few months they got married, at City Hall, naturally. Secretly. Or, at least, surreptitiously, as if the marriage were a shameful secret. They lived in New York until John, their son, was