I drank some of my coffee and looked at the package of cigarettes and looked away from it and said, ‘Is there anything else you can tell me that might help, Miss Kavanaugh? There’s not really much here, so far.’

‘Well, there are the wires.’

‘Wires?’

‘Yes, telegrams. Three days after he arrived in San Francisco-the twenty-first of December-Roy wired money to three different friends who had been with him on the return flight from Germany.’

‘For what reason?’

‘He’d lost it to them playing poker.’

‘How much money was involved?’

‘About a hundred dollars, I think.’

‘He paid off everyone he’d lost to in the game?’

‘Yes, there were only four of them playing.’

‘Where were the wires sent from?’

‘Eugene, Oregon.’

‘Do you have any idea why your fiancé would be in Eugene?’

‘No, none at all-none.’

‘And you didn’t receive any word from Oregon yourself?’

‘No, and I don’t understand that at all. Why would Roy send money paying off gambling debts to his friends, but nothing whatsoever to the woman he loves, the woman he’s going to marry?’

I had no answer for that. I said, ‘How did you find out about the wires?’

‘From Chuck Hendryx. He’s one of Roy’s friends, the first one I talked with when I came to San Francisco. I knew him slightly from before; Roy introduced us, and we’d been over to Chuck’s home in Marin County a couple of times before he and Roy left.’

‘Is this Hendryx still in the Army, or was he discharged too?’

‘He’s a full career man, with twenty-three years in now,’ Elaine said. ‘He came home for the holidays, to be with his wife and family. They don’t like to travel, and so they stay here in California most of the year.’