Some literary antiquarian of a rather special type may one day think it worth while to run through the files of the pulp detective magazines which flourished during the late twenties and early thirties, and determine just how and when and by what steps the popular mystery story shed its refined good manners and went native. He will need sharp eyes and an open mind. Pulp paper never dreamed of posterity and most of it must be a dirty brown color by now. And it takes a very open mind indeed to look beyond the unnecessarily gaudy covers, trashy titles and barely acceptable advertisements and recognize the authentic power of a kind of writing that, even at its most mannered and artificial, made most of the fiction of the time taste like a cup of luke-warm consomm at a spinsterish tearoom.

    I don't think this power was entirely a matter of violence, although far too many people got killed in these stories and their passing was celebrated with a rather too loving attention to detail. It certainly was not a matter of fine writing, since any attempt at that would have been ruthlessly blue-penciled by the editorial staff. Nor was it because of any great originality of plot or character. Most of the plots were rather ordinary and most of the characters rather primitive types of people. Possibly it was the smell of fear which these stories managed to generate. Their characters lived in a world gone wrong, a world in which, long before the atom bomb, civilization had created the machinery for its own destruction, and was learning to use it with all the moronic delight of a gangster trying out his first machine gun. The law was something to be manipulated for profit and power. The streets were dark with something more than night. The mystery story grew hard and cynical about motive and character, but it was not cynical about the effects it tried to produce nor about its technique of producing them. A few unusual critics recognized this at the time, which was all one had any right to expect. The average critic never recognizes an achievement when it happens. He explains it after it has become respectable.

    The emotional basis of the standard detective story was and had always been that murder will out and justice will be done. Its technical basis was the relative insignificance of everything except the final denouement. What led up to that was more or less passagework. The denouement would justify everything. The technical basis of the Black Mask type of story on the other hand was that the scene outranked the plot, in the sense that a good plot was one which made good scenes. The ideal mystery was one you would read if the end was missing. We who tried to write it had the same point of view as the film makers. When I first went to work in Hollywood a very intelligent producer told me that you couldn't make a successful motion picture from a mystery story, because the whole point was a disclosure that took a few seconds of screen time while the audience was reaching for its hat. He was wrong, but only because he was thinking of the wrong kind of mystery.

    As to the emotional basis of the hard-boiled story, obviously it does not believe that murder will out and justice will be done-unless some very determined individual makes it his business to see that justice is done. The stories were about the men who made that happen. They were apt to be hard men, and what they did, whether they were called police officers, private detectives or newspaper men, was hard, dangerous work. It was work they could always get. There was plenty of it lying around. There still is. Undoubtedly the stories about them had a fantastic element. Such things happened, but not so rapidly, nor to so closeknit a group of people, nor within so narrow a frame of logic. This was inevitable because the demand was for constant action; if you stopped to think you were lost. When in doubt have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand. This could get to be pretty silly, but somehow it didn't seem to matter. A writer who is afraid to overreach himself is as useless as a general who is afraid to be wrong.

    As I look back on my stories it would be absurd if I did not wish they had been better. But if they had been much better they would not have been published. If the formula had been a little less rigid, more of the writing of that time might have survived. Some of us tried pretty hard to break out of the formula, but we usually got caught and sent back. To exceed the limits of a formula without destroying it is the dream of every magazine writer who is not a hopeless hack. There are things in my stories which I might like to change or leave out altogether. To do this may look simple, but if you try, you find you cannot do it at all, You will only destroy what is good without having any noticeable effect on what is bad. You cannot recapture the mood, the state of innocence, much less the animal gusto you had when you had very little else. Everything a writer learns about the art or craft of fiction takes just a little away from his need or desire to write at all. In the end he knows all the tricks and has nothing to say.

    As for the literary quality of these exhibits, I am entitled to assume from the imprint of a distinguished publisher that I need not be sickeningly humble. As a writer I have never been able to take myself with that enormous earnestness which is one of the trying characteristics of the craft. And I have been fortunate to escape what has been called that form of snobbery which can accept the Literature of Entertainment in the Past, but only the Literature of Enlightenment in the Present." Between the one-syllable humors of the comic strip and the anemic subtleties of the litterateurs there is a wide stretch of country, in which the mystery story may or may not be an important landmark. There are those who hate it in all its forms. There are those who like it when it is about nice people ("that charming Mrs. Jones, whoever would have thought she would cut off her husband's head with a meat saw? Such a handsome man, too!"). There are those who think violence and sadism interchangeable terms, and those who regard detective fiction as subliterary on no better grounds than that it does not habitually get itself jammed up with subordinate clauses, tricky punctuation and hypothetical subjunctives. There are those who read it only when they are tired or sick, and, from the number of mystery novels they consume, they must be tired and sick most of the time. There are the aficionados of deduction and the aficionados of sex who can't get it into their hot little heads that the fictional detective is a catalyst, not a Casanova. The former demand a ground plan of Greythorpe Manor, showing the study, the gun room, the main hall and staircase and the passage to that grim little room where the butler polishes the Georgian silver, thin-lipped and silent, hearing the murmur of doom. The latter think the shortest distance between two points is from a blonde to a bed.

    No writer can please them all, no writer should try. The stories in this book certainly had no thought of being able to please anyone ten or fifteen years after they were written. The mystery story is a kind of writing that need not dwell in the shadow of the past and owes little if any allegiance to the cult of the classics. It is a good deal more than unlikely that any writer now living will produce a better historical novel than Henry Esmond, a better tale of children than The Golden Age, a sharper social vignette than Madame Bovary, a more graceful and elegant evocation than The Spoils of Poynton, a wider and richer canvas than War and Peace or The Brothers Karamazov. But to devise a more plausible mystery than The Hound of the Baskervilles or The Purloined Letter should not be too difficult. Nowadays it would be rather more difficult not to. There are no "classics" of crime and detection. Not one. Within its frame of reference, which is the only way it should be judged, a classic is a piece of writing which exhausts the possibilities of its form and can hardly be surpassed. No story or novel of mystery has done that yet. Few have come close. Which is one of the principal reasons why otherwise reasonable people continue to assault the citadel.

    RAYMOND CHANDLER

    La Jolla, California

    February 15, 1950

    

    

    

    

    

    We were sitting in a room at the Berglund. I was on the side of the bed, and Dravec was in the easy chair. It was my room.

    Rain beat very hard against the windows. They were shut tight and it was hot in the room and I had a little fan going on the table. The breeze from it hit Dravec's face high up, lifted his heavy black hair, moved the longer bristles in the fat path of eyebrow that went across his face in a solid line. He looked like a bouncer who had come into money.

    He showed me some of his gold teeth and said: "What you got on me?"

    He said it importantly, as if anyone who knew anything would know quite a lot about him.

    "Nothing," I said, "You're clean, as far as I know."

    He lifted a large hairy hand and stared at it solidly for a minute.

    "You don't get me. A feller named M'Gee sent me here. Violets M'Gee."

    "Fine. How is Violets these days?" Violets M'Gee was a homicide dick in the sheriff's office.

    He looked at his large hand and frowned. "No-you still don't get it. I got a job for you."

    "I don't go out much any more," I said. "I'm getting kind of frail."

    He looked around the room carefully, bluffing a bit, like a man not naturally observant.

    "Maybe it's money," he said.

    "Maybe it is," I said.

    He had a belted suede raincoat on. He tore it open carelessly and got out a wallet that was not quite as big as a bale of hay. Currency stuck out of it at careless angles. When he slapped it down on his knee it made a fat sound that was pleasant to the ear. He shook money out of it, selected a few bills from the bunch, stuffed the rest back, dropped the wallet on the floor and let it lie, arranged five century notes like a light poker hand and put them under the base of the fan on the table.

    That was a lot of work. It made him grunt.

    "I got lots of sugar," he said.

    "So I see. What do I do for that, if I get it?"

    "You know me now, huh?"

    "A little better."

    I got an envelope out of an inside pocket and read to him aloud from some scribbling on the back.

    "Dravec, Anton or Tony. Former Pittsburgh steelworker, truck guard, all-round muscle stiff. Made a wrong pass and got shut up. Left town, came West. Worked on an avocado ranch at El Seguro. Came up with a ranch of his own. Sat right on the dome when the El Seguro oil boom burst. Got rich. Lost a lot of it buying into other people's dusters. Still has enough. Serbian by birth, six feet, two hundred and forty, one daughter, never known to have had a wife. No police record of any consequence. None at all since Pittsburgh."

    I lit a pipe.

    "Jeeze," he said. "Where you promote all that?"

    "Connections. What's the angle?"

    He picked the wallet off the floor and moused around inside it with a couple of square fingers for a while, with his tongue sticking out between his thick lips. He finally got out a slim brown card and some crumpled slips of paper. He pushed them at me.

    The card was in golf type, very delicately done. It said: "Mr. Harold Hardwicke Steiner," and very small in the corner, "Rare Books and De Luxe Editions." No address or phone number.

    The white slips, three in number, were simple I 0 U's for a thousand dollars each, signed: "Carmen Dravec" in a sprawling, moronic handwriting.

    I gave it all back to him and said: "Blackmail?"

    He shook his head slowly and something gentle came into his face that hadn't been there before.

    "It's my little girl-Carmen. This Steiner, he bothers her. She goes to his joint all the time, makes whoopee. He makes love to her, I guess. I don't like it."

    I nodded. "How about the notes?"

    "I don't care nothin' about the dough. She plays-games with him. The hell with that. She's what you call man-crazy. You go tell this Steiner to lay off Carmen. I break his neck with my hands. See?"

    All this in a rush, with deep breathing. His eyes got small and round, and furious. His teeth almost chattered.

    I said: "Why have me tell him? Why not tell him yourself?"

    "Maybe I get mad and kill the-!" he yelled.

    I picked a match out of my pocket and prodded the loose ash in the bowl of my pipe. I looked at him carefully for a moment, getting hold of an idea.

    "Nerts, you're scared to," I told him.

    Both fists came up. He held them shoulder high and shook them, great knots of bone and muscle. He lowered them slowly, heaved a deep honest sigh, and said: "Yeah. I'm scared to. I dunno how to handle her. All the time some new guy and all the time a punk. A while back I gave a guy called Joe Marty five grand to lay off her. She's still mad at me."

    I stared at the window, watched the rain hit it, flatten out, and slide down in a thick wave, liked melted gelatin. It was too early in the fall for that kind of rain.

    "Giving them sugar doesn't get you anywhere," I said. "You could be doing that all your life. So you figure you'd like to have me get rough with this one, Steiner."

    "Tell him I break his neck!"

    "I wouldn't bother," I said. "I know Steiner. I'd break his neck for you myself, if it would do any good."

    He leaned forward and grabbed my hand. His eyes got childish. A gray tear floated in each of them.

    "Listen, M'Gee says you're a good guy. I tell you something I ain't told nobody-ever. Carmen-she's not my kid at all. I just picked her up in Smoky, a little baby in the street. She didn't have nobody. I guess maybe I steal her, huh?"

    "Sounds like it," I said, and had to fight to get my hand loose. I rubbed feeling back into it with the other one. The man had a grip that would crack a telephone pole.

    "I go straight then," he said grimly, and yet tenderly. "I come out here and make good, She grows up. I love her."

    I said: "Uh-huh. That's natural."

    "You don't get me. I wanta marry her."

    I stared at him.

    "She gets older, get some sense. Maybe she marry me, huh?" His voice implored me, as if I had the settling of that.

    "Ever ask her?"

    "I'm scared to," he said humbly.

    "She soft on Steiner, do you think?"

    He nodded. "But that don't mean nothin'."

    I could believe that. I got off the bed, threw a window up and let the rain hit my face for a minute.

    "Let's get this straight," I said, lowering the window again and going back to the bed. "I can take Steiner off your back. That's easy. I just don't see what it buys you."

    He grabbed for my hand again, but I was a little too quick for him this time.

    "You came in here a little tough, flashing your wad," I said. "You're going out soft. Not from anything I've said. You knew it already. I'm not Dorothy Dix, and I'm only partly a prune. But I'll take Steiner off you, if you really want that."

    He stood up clumsily, swung his hat and stared down at my feet.

    "You take him off my back, like you said. He ain't her sort, anyway."

    "It might hurt your back a little."

    "That's okay. That's what it's for," he said.

    He buttoned himself up, dumped his hat on his big shaggy head, and rolled on out. He shut the door carefully, as if he was going out of a sickroom.

    I thought he was as crazy as a pair of waltzing mice, but I liked him.

    I put his goldbacks in a safe place, mixed myself a long drink, and sat down in the chair that was still warm from him.

    While I played with the drink I wondered if he had any idea what Steiner's racket was.

    Steiner had a collection of rare and half-rare smut books which he loaned out as high as ten dollars a day-to the right people.

    

    

    It rained all the next day. Late in the afternoon I sat parked in a blue Chrysler roadster, diagonally across the Boulevard from a narrow store front, over which a green neon sign in script letters said: "H. H. Steiner."

    The rain splashed knee-high off the sidewalks, filled the gutters, and big cops in slickers that shone like gun barrels had a lot of fun carrying little girls in silk stockings and cute little rubber boots across the bad places, with a lot of squeezing.

    The rain drummed on the hood of the Chrysler, beat and tore at the taut material of the top, leaked in at the buttoned places, and made a pool on the floorboards for me to keep my feet in.

    I had a big flask of Scotch with me. I used it often enough to keep interested.

    Steiner did business, even in that weather; perhaps especially in that weather. Very nice cars stopped in front of his store, and very nice people dodged in, then dodged out again with wrapped parcels under their arms. Of course they could have been buying rare books and de luxe editions.

    At five-thirty a pimply-faced kid in a leather windbreaker came out of the store and sloped up the side street at a fast trot. He came back with a neat cream-and-gray coup�. Steiner came out and got into the coup�. He wore a dark green leather raincoat, a cigarette in an amber holder, no hat. I couldn't see his glass eye at that distance but I knew he had one. The kid in the windbreaker held an umbrella over him across the sidewalk, then shut it up and handed it into the coup�.

    Steiner drove west on the Boulevard. I drove west on the Boulevard. Past the business district, at Pepper Canyon, he turned north, and I tailed him easily from a block back. I was pretty sure he was going home, which was natural.

    He left Pepper Drive and took a curving ribbon of wet cement called La Verne Terrace, climbed up it almost to the top. It was a narrow road with a high bank on one side and a few well-spaced cabinlike houses built down the steep slope on the other side. Their roofs were not much above road level. The front of them were masked by shrubs. Sodden trees dripped all over the landscape.

    Steiner's hideaway had a square box hedge in front of it, more than window-high. The entrance was a sort of maze, and the house door was not visible from the road. Steiner put his gray-and-cream coup� in a small garage, locked up, went through the maze with his umbrella up, and light went on in the house.

    While he was doing this I had passed him and gone to the top of the hill. I turned around there and went back and parked in front of the next house above his. It seemed to be closed up or empty, but had no signs on it. I went into a conference with my flask of Scotch, and then just sat.

    At six-fifteen lights bobbed up the hill. It was quite dark by then. A car stopped in front of Steiner's hedge. A slim, tall girl in a slicker got out of it. Enough light filtered out through the hedge for me to see that she was dark-haired and possibly pretty. Voices drifted on the rain and a door shut. I got out of the Chrysler and strolled down the hill, put a pencil flash into the car. It was a dark maroon or brown Packard convertible. Its licence read to Carmen Dravec, 3596 Lucerne Avenue. I went back to my heap. A solid, slow-moving hour crawled by. No more cars came up or down the hill. It seemed to be a very quiet neighborhood. Then a single flash of hard white light leaked out of Steiner's house, like a flash of summer lightning. As the darkness fell again a thin tinkling scream trickled down the darkness and echoed faintly among the wet trees. I was out of the Chrysler and on my way before the last echo of it died.

    There was no fear in the scream. It held the note of a halfpleasurable shock, an accent of drunkenness, and a touch of pure idiocy.

    The Steiner mansion was perfectly silent when I hit the gap in the hedge, dodged around the elbow that masked the front door, and put my hand up to bang on the door.

    At that exact moment, as if somebody had been waiting for it, three shots racketed close together behind the door. After that there was a long, harsh sigh, a soft thump, rapid steps, going away into the back of the house.

    I wasted time hitting the door with my shoulder, without enough start. It threw me back like a kick from an army mule.

    The door fronted on a narrow runway, like a small bridge that led from the banked road. There was no side porch, no way to get at the windows in a hurry. There was no way around to the back except through the house or up a long flight of wooden steps that went up to the back door from the alleylike street below. On these steps I now heard a clatter of feet.

    That gave me the impulse and I hit the door again, from the feet up. It gave at the lock and I pitched down two steps into a big, dim, cluttered room. I didn't see much of what was in the room then. I wandered through to the back of the house.

    I was pretty sure there was death in it.

    A car throbbed in the street below as I reached the back porch. The car went away fast, without lights. That was that. I went back to the living room.

    

    

    That room reached all the way across the front of the house and had a low, beamed ceiling, walls painted brown. Strips of tapestry hung all around the walls. Books filled low shelves. There was a thick, pinkish rug on which some light fell from two standing lamps with pale green shades. In the middle of the rug there was a big, low desk and a black chair with a yellow satin cushion at it. There were books all over the desk.

    On a sort of dais near one end wall there was a teakwood chair with arms and a high back. A dark-haired girl was sitting in the chair, on a fringed red shawl.

    She sat very straight, with her hands on the arms of the chair, her knees close together, her body stiffly erect, her chin level. Her eyes were wide open and mad and had no pupils.

    She looked unconscious of what was going on, but she didn't have the pose of unconsciousness. She had a pose as if she was doing something very important and making a lot of it.

    Out of her mouth came a tinny chuckling noise, which didn't change her expression or move her lips. She didn't seem to see me at all.

    She was wearing a pair of long jade earrings, and apart from those she was stark naked.

    I looked away from her to the other end of the room.

    Steiner was on his back on the floor, just beyond the edge of the pink rug, and in front of a thing that looked like a small totem pole. It had a round open mouth in which the lens of a camera showed. The lens seemed to be aimed at the girl in the teakwood chair.

    There was a flashbulb apparatus on the floor beside Steiner's outfiung hand in a loose silk sleeve. The cord of the flashbulb went behind the totem pole thing.

    Steiner was wearing Chinese slippers with thick white felt soles. His legs were in black satin pajamas and the upper part of him in an embroidered Chinese coat. The front of it was mostly blood. His glass eye shone brightly and was the most lifelike thing about him. At a glance none of the three shots had missed.

    The flashbulb was the sheet lightning I had seen leak out of the house and the half-giggling scream was the doped and naked girl's reaction to that. The three shots had been somebody else's idea of how the proceedings ought to be punctuated. Presumably the idea of the lad who had gone very fast down the back steps.

    I could see something in his point of view. At that stage I thought it was a good idea to shut the front door and fasten it with the short chain that was on it. The lock had been spoiled by my violent entrance.

    A couple of thin purple glasses stood on a red lacquer tray on one end of the desk. Also a potbellied flagon of something brown. The glasses smelled of ether and laudanum, a mixture I had never tried, but it seemed to fit the scene pretty well.

    I found the girl's clothes on a divan in the corner, picked up a brown sleeved dress to begin with, and went over to her. She smelled of ether also, at a distance of several feet.

    The tinny chuckling was still going on and a little froth was oozing down her chin. I slapped her face, not very hard. I didn't want to bring her out of whatever kind of trance she was in, into a screaming fit.

    "Come on," I said brightly. "Let's be nice. Let's get dressed."

    She said: "G-g-go-ta-hell," without any emotion that I could notice.

    I slapped her a little more. She didn't mind the slaps, so I went to work getting the dress on her.

    She didn't mind the dress either. She let me hold her arms up but she spread her fingers wide, as if that was very cute. It made me do a lot of finagling with the sleeves. I finally got the dress on. I got her stockings on, and her shoes, and then got her up on her feet.

    "Let's take a little walk," I said. "Let's take a nice little walk."

    We walked. Part of the time her earrings banged against my chest and part of the time we looked like a couple of adagio dancers doing the splits. We walked over to Steiner's body and back. She didn't pay any attention to Steiner and his bright glass eye.

    She found it amusing that she couldn't walk and tried to tell me about it, but only bubbled. I put her arm on the divan while I wadded her underclothes up and shoved them into a deep pocket of my raincoat, put her handbag in my other deep pocket. I went through Steiner's desk and found a little blue notebook written in code that looked interesting. I put that in my pocket, too.

    Then I tried to get at the back of the camera in the totem pole, to get the plate, but couldn't find the catch right away. I was getting nervous, and I figured I could build up a better excuse if I ran into the law when I came back later to look for it than for any reason I could give if caught there now.

    I went back to the girl and got her slicker on her, nosed around to see if anything else of hers was there, wiped away a lot of fingerprints I probably hadn't made, and at least some of those Miss Dravec must have made. I opened the door and put out both the lamps.

    I got my left arm around her again and we struggled out into the rain and piled into her Packard. I didn't like leaving my own bus there very well, but that had to be. Her keys were in her car. We drifted off down the hill.

    Nothing happened on the way to Lucerne Avenue except that Carmen stopped bubbling and giggling and went to snoring. I couldn't keep her head off my shoulder. It was all I could do to keep it out of my lap. I had to drive rather slowly and it was a long way anyhow, clear over to the west edge of the city.

    The Dravec home was a large old-fashioned brick house in large grounds with a wall around them. A gray composition driveway went through iron gates and up a slope past flower beds and lawns to a big front door with narrow leaded panels on each side of it. There was dim light behind the panels as if nobody much was home.

    I pushed Carmen's head into the corner and shed her belongings in the seat, and got out.

    A maid opened the door. She said Mr. Dravec wasn't in and she didn't know where he was. Downtown somewhere. She had a long, yellowish, gentle face, a long nose, no chin and large wet eyes. She looked like a nice old horse that had been turned out to pasture after long service, and as if she would do the right thing by Carmen.

    I pointed into the Packard and growled: "Better get her to bed. She's lucky we don't throw her in the can-drivin' around with a tool like that on her."

    She smiled sadly and I went away.

    I had to walk five blocks in the rain before a narrow apartment house let me into its lobby to use a phone. Then I had to wait another twenty-five minutes for a taxi. While I waited I began to worry about what I hadn't completed.

    I had yet to get the used plate out of Steiner's camera.

    

    

    I paid the taxi off on Pepper Drive, in front of a house where there was company, and walked back up the curving hill of La Verne Terrace to Steiner's house behind its shrubbery.

    Nothing looked any different. I went in through the gap in the hedge, pushed the door open gently, and smelled cigarette smoke.

    It hadn't been there before. There had been a complicated set of smells, including the sharp memory of smokeless powder. But cigarette smoke hadn't stood out from the mixture.

    I closed the door and slipped down on one knee and listened, holding my breath. I didn't hear anything but the sound of the rain on the roof. I tried throwing the beam of my pencil flash along the floor. Nobody shot at me.

    I straightened up, found the dangling tassel of one of the lamps and made light in the room.

    The first thing I noticed was that a couple of strips of tapestry were gone from the wall. I hadn't counted them, but the spaces where they had hung caught my eye.

    Then I saw Steiner's body was gone from in front of the totem pole thing with the camera eye in its mouth. On the floor below, beyond the margin of the pink rug, somebody had spread down a rug over the place where Steiner's body had been. I didn't have to lift the rug to know why it had been put there.

    I lit a cigarette and stood there in the middle of the dimly lighted room and thought about it. After a while I went to the camera in the totem pole. I found the catch this time. There wasn't any plate-holder in the camera.

    My hand went towards the mulberry-colored phone on Steiner's low desk, but didn't take hold of it.

    I crossed into the little hallway beyond the living room and poked into a fussy-looking bedroom that looked like a woman's room more than a man's. The bed had a long cover with a flounced edge. I lifted that and shot my flash under the bed.

    Steiner wasn't under the bed. He wasn't anywhere in the house. Somebody had taken him away. He couldn't very well have gone by himself.

    It wasn't the law, or somebody would have been there still. It was only an hour and a half since Carmen and I left the place. And there was none of the mess police photographers and fingerprint men would have made.

    I went back to the living room, pushed the flashbulb apparatus around the back of the totem pole with my foot, switched off the lamp, left the house, got into my rain-soaked car and choked it to life.

    It was all right with me if somebody wanted to keep the Steiner kill hush-hush for a while. It gave me a chance to find out whether I could tell it leaving Carmen Dravec and the nude photo angle out.

    It was after ten when I got back to the Berglund and put my heap away and went upstairs to the apartment. I stood under a shower, then put pajamas on and mixed up a batch of hot grog. I looked at the phone a couple of times, thought about calling to see if Dravec was home yet, thought it might be a good idea to let him alone until the next day.

    I filled a pipe and sat down with my hot grog and Steiner's little blue notebook. It was in code, but the arrangement of the entries and the indented leaves made it a list of names and addresses. There were over four hundred and fifty of them. If this was Steiner's sucker list, he had a gold mine-quite apart from the blackmail angles.

    Any name on the list might be a prospect as the killer. I didn't envy the cops their job when it was handed to them.

    I drank too much whisky trying to crack the code. About midnight I went to bed, and dreamed about a man in a Chinese coat with blood all over the front who chased a naked girl with long jade earrings while I tried to photograph the scene with a camera that didn't have any plate in it.

    

    

    Violets M'Gee called me up in the morning, before I was dressed, but after I had seen the paper and not found anything about Steiner in it. His voice had the cheerful sound of a man who had slept well and didn't owe too much money.

    "Well, how's the boy?" he began.

    I said I was all right except that I was having a little trouble with my Third Reader. He laughed a little absently, and then his voice got too casual.

    "This guy Dravec that I sent over to see you-done anything for him yet?"

    "Too much rain," I answered, if that was an answer.

    "Uh-huh. He seems to be a guy that things happen to. A car belongin' to him is washin' about in the surf off Lido fish pier."

    I didn't say anything. I held the telephone very tightly.

    "Yeah," M'Gee went on cheerfully. "A nice new Cad all messed up with sand and sea water� Oh, I forgot. There's a guy inside it."

    I let my breath out slowly, very slowly. "Dravec?" I whispered.

    "Naw. A young kid. I ain't told Dravec yet. It's under the fedora. Wanta run down and look at it with me?"

    I said I would like to do that.

    "Snap it up. I'll be in my hutch," M'Gee told me and hung up.

    Shaved, dressed and lightly breakfasted I was at the County Building in half an hour or so. I found M'Gee staring at a yellow wall and sitting at a little yellow desk on which there was nothing but M'Gee's hat and one of the M'Gee feet. He took both of them off the desk and we went down to the official parking lot and got into a small black sedan.

    The rain had stopped during the night and the morning was all blue and gold. There was enough snap in the air to make life simple and sweet, if you didn't have too much on your mind. I had.

    It was thirty miles to Lido, the first ten of them through city traffic. M'Gee made it in three-quarters of an hour. At the end of that time we skidded to a stop in front of a stucco arch beyond which a long black pier extended. I took my feet out of the floorboards and we got out.

    There were a few cars and people in front of the arch. A motorcycle officer was keeping the people off the pier. M'Gee showed him a bronze star and we went out along the pier, into a loud smell that even two days' rain had failed to wash away.

    "There she is-on the tug," M'Gee said.

    A low black tug crouched off the end of the pier. Something large and green and nickeled was on its deck in front of the wheelhouse. Men stood around it.

    We went down slimy steps to the deck of the tug.

    M'Gee said hello to a deputy in green khaki and another man in plain clothes. The tug crew of three moved over to the wheelhouse, and set their backs against it, watching us.

    We looked at the car. The front bumper was bent, and one headlight and the radiator shell. The paint and the nickel were scratched up by sand and the upholstery was sodden and black. Otherwise the car wasn't much the worse for wear. It was a big job in two tones of green, with a wine-colored stripe and trimming.

    M'Gee and I looked into the front part of it. A slim, darkhaired kid who had been good-looking was draped around the steering post, with his head at a peculiar angle to the rest of his body. His face was bluish white. His eyes were a faint dull gleam under the lowered lids. His open mouth had sand in it. There were traces of blood on the side of his head which the sea water hadn't quite washed away.

    M'Gee backed away slowly, made a noise in his throat and began to chew on a couple of the violet-scented breath purifiers that gave him his nickname.

    "What's the story?" he asked quietly.

    The uniformed deputy pointed up to the end of the pier. Dirty white railings made of two-by-fours had been broken through in a wide space and the broken wood showed up yellow and bright.

    "Went through there. Must have hit pretty hard, too. The rain stopped early down here, about nine, and the broken wood is dry inside. That puts it after the rain stopped. That's all we know except she fell in plenty of water not to be banged up worse: at least half-tide, I'd say. That would be right after the rain stopped. She showed under the water when the boys came down to fish this morning. We got the tug to lift her out. Then we find the dead guy."

    The other deputy scuffed at the deck with the toe of his shoe. M'Gee looked sideways at me with foxy little eyes. I looked blank and didn't say anything.

    "Pretty drunk that lad," M'Gee said gently. "Showin' off all alone in the rain. I guess he must have been fond of driving. Yeah-pretty drunk."

    "Drunk, hell," the plainclothes deputy said. "The hand throttle's set halfway down and the guy's been sapped on the side of the head. Ask me and I'll call it murder."

    M'Gee looked at him politely, then at the uniformed man. "What you think?"

    "It could be suicide, I guess. His neck's broke and he could have hurt his head in the fall. And his hand could have knocked the throttle down. I kind of like murder myself, though."

    M'Gee nodded, said: "Frisked him? Know who he is?"

    The two deputies looked at me, then at the tug crew.

    "Okay. Save that part," M'Gee said. "I know who he is."

    A small man with glasses and a tired face and a black bag came slowly along the pier and down the slimy steps. He picked out a fairly clean place on the deck and put his bag down. He took his hat off and rubbed the back of his neck and smiled wearily.

    'Lo, Doc. There's your patient," M'Gee told him. "Took a dive off the pier last night. That's all we know now."

    The medical examiner looked in at the dead man morosely. He fingered the head, moved it around a little, felt the man's ribs. He lifted one lax hand and stared at the fingernails. He let it fall, stepped back and picked his bag up again.

    "About twelve hours," he said. "Broken neck, of course. I doubt if there's any water in him. Better get him out of there before he starts to get stiff on us. I'll tell you the rest when I get him on a table."

    He nodded around, went back up the steps and along the pier. An ambulance was backing into position beside the stucco arch at the pier head.

    The two deputies grunted and tugged to get the dead man out of the car and lay him down on the deck, on the side of the car away from the beach.

    "Let's go," M'Gee told me. "That ends this part of the show." We said goodbye and M'Gee told the deputies to keep their chins buttoned until they heard from him. We went back along the pier and got into the small black sedan and drove back towards the city along a white highway washed clean by the rain, past low rolling hills of yellow-white sand terraced with moss. A few gulls wheeled and swooped over something in the surf. Far out to sea a couple of white yachts on the horizon looked as if they were suspended in the sky.

    We laid a few miles behind us without saying anything to each other. Then M'Gee cocked his chin at me and said: "Got ideas?"

    "Loosen up," I said. "I never saw the guy before. Who is he?"

    "Hell, I thought you were going to tell me about it."

    "Loosen up, Violets," I said.

    He growled, shrugged, and we nearly went off the road into the loose sand.

    "Dravec's chauffeur. A kid named Carl Owen. How do I know? We had him in the cooler a year ago on a Mann Act rap. He run Dravec's hotcha daughter off to Yuma. Dravec went after them and brought them back and had the guy heaved in the goldfish bowl. Then the girl gets to him, and next morning the old man steams downtown and begs the guy off. Says the kid meant to marry her, only she wouldn't. Then, by heck, the kid goes back to work for him and been there ever since. What you think of that?"

    "It sounds just like Dravec," I said.

    "Yeah-but the kid could have had a relapse."

    M'Gee had silvery hair and a knobby chin and a little pouting mouth made to kiss babies with. I looked at his face sideways, and suddenly I got his idea. I laughed.

    "You think maybe Dravec killed him?" I asked. "Why not? The kid makes another pass at the girl and Dravec cracks down at him too hard. He's a big guy and could break a neck easy. Then he's scared. He runs the car down to Lido in the rain and lets it slide off the end of the pier. Thinks it won't show. Maybe don't think at all. Just rattled."

    "It's a kick in the pants," I said. "Then all he had to do was walk home thirty miles in the rain."

    "Go on. Kid me."

    "Dravec killed him, sure," I said. "But they were playing leapfrog. Dravec fell on him."

    "Okay, pal. Some day you'll want to play with my catnip mouse."

    "Listen, Violets," I said seriously. "If the kid was murdered-and you're not sure it's murder at all-it's not Dravec's kind of crime. He might kill a man in a temper-but he'd let him lay. He wouldn't go to all that fuss."

    We shuttled back and forth across the road while M'Gee thought about that.

    "What a pal," he complained. "I have me a swell theory and look what you done to it. I wish the hell I hadn't brought you. Hell with you. I'm goin' after Dravec just the same."

    "Sure," I agreed. "You'd have to do that. But Dravec never killed that boy. He's too soft inside to cover up on it."

    It was noon when we got back to town. I hadn't had any dinner but whisky the night before and very little breakfast that morning. I got off on the Boulevard and let M'Gee go on alone to see Dravec.

    I was interested in what had happened to Carl Owen; but I wasn't interested in the thought that Dravec might have murdered him.

    I ate lunch at a counter and looked casually at an early afternoon paper. I didn't expect to see anything about Steiner in it, and I didn't.

    After lunch I walked along the Boulevard six blocks to have a look at Steiner's store.

    

    

    It was a half-store frontage, the other half being occupied by a credit jeweler. The jeweler was standing in his entrance, a big, white-haired, black-eyed Jew with about nine carats of diamond on his hand. A faint, knowing smile curved his lips as I went past him into Steiner's.

    A thick blue rug paved Steiner's from wall to wall. There were blue leather easy chairs with smoke stands beside them. A few sets of tooled leather books were put out on narrow tables. The rest of the stock was behind glass. A paneled partition with a single door in it cut off a back part of the store, and in the corner by this a woman sat behind a small desk with a hooded lamp on it.

    She got up and came towards me, swinging lean thighs in a tight dress of some black material that didn't reflect any light. She was an ash-blonde, with greenish eyes under heavily mascaraed lashes. There were large jet buttons in the lobes of her ears; her hair waved back smoothly from behind them. Her fingernails were silvered.

    She gave me what she thought was a smile of welcome, but what I thought was a grimace of strain.

    "Was it something?"

    I pulled my hat low over my eyes and fidgeted. I said: "Steiner?"

    "He won't be in today. May I show you-"

    "I'm selling," I said. "Something he's wanted for a long time."

    The silvered fingernails touched the hair over one ear. "Oh, a salesman� Well, you might come in tomorrow."

    "He sick? I could go up to the house," I suggested hopefully. "He'd want to see what I have."

    That jarred her. She had to fight for her breath for a minute. But her voice was smooth enough when it came.

    "That-that wouldn't be any use. He's out of town today." I nodded, looked properly disappointed, touched my hat and started to turn away when the pimply-faced kid of the night before stuck his head through the door in the paneling. He went back as soon as he saw me, but not before I saw some loosely packed cases of books behind him on the floor of the back room.

    The cases were small and open and packed any old way. A man in very new overalls was fussing with them. Some of Steiner's stock was being moved out.

    I left the store and walked down to the corner, then back to the alley. Behind Steiner's stood a small black truck with wire sides. It didn't have any lettering on it. Boxes showed through the wire sides and, as I watched, the man in overalls came out with another one and heaved it up.

    I went back to the Boulevard. Half a block on, a fresh-faced kid was reading a magazine in a parked Green Top. I showed him money and said: "Tail job?"

    He looked me over, swung his door open, and stuck his magazine behind the rear-vision mirror.

    "My meat, boss," he said brightly.

    We went around to the end of the alley and waited beside a fireplug.

    There were about a dozen boxes on the truck when the man in the very new overalls got up in front and gunned his motor. He went down the alley fast and turned left on the street at the end. My driver did the same. The truck went north to Garfield, then east. It went very fast and there was a lot of traffic on Garfield. My driver tailed from too far back.

    I was telling him about that when the truck turned north off Garfield again. The street at which it turned was called Brittany. When we got to Brittany there wasn't any truck.

    The fresh-faced kid who was driving me made comforting sounds through the glass panel of the cab and we went up Brittany at four miles an hour looking for the truck behind bushes. I refused to be comforted.

    Brittany bore a little to the east two blocks up and met the next street, Randall Place, in a tongue of land on which there was a white apartment house with its front on Randall Place and its basement garage entrance on Brittany, a story lower. We were going past that and my driver was telling me the truck couldn't be very far away when I saw it in the garage.

    We went around to the front of the apartment house and I got out and went into the lobby.

    There was no switchboard. A desk was pushed back against the wall, as if it wasn't used any more. Above it names were on a panel of gilt mailboxes.

    The name that went with Apartment 405 was Joseph Marty. Joe Marty was the name of the man who played with Carmen Dravec until her papa gave him five thousand dollars to go away and play with some other girl. It could be the same Joe Marty.

    I went down steps and pushed through a door with a wired glass panel into the dimness of the garage. The man in the very new overalls was stacking boxes in the automatic elevator.

    I stood near him and lit a cigarette and watched him. He didn't like it very well, but he didn't say anything. After a while I said: "Watch the weight, buddy. She's only tested for half a ton. Where's it goin'?"

    "Marty, four-o-five," he said, and then looked as if he was sorry he had said it.

    "Fine," I told him. "It looks like a nice lot of reading."

    I went back up the steps and out of the building, got into my Green Top again.

    We drove back downtown to the building where I have an office. I gave the driver too much money and he gave me a dirty card which I dropped into the brass spittoon beside the elevators.

    Dravec was holding up the wall outside the door of my office.

    

    

    After the rain, it was warm and bright but he still had the belted suede raincoat on. It was open down the front, as were his coat, and vest underneath. His tie was under one ear. His face looked like a mask of gray putty with a black stubble on the lower part of it.

    He looked awful.

    I unlocked the door and patted his shoulder and pushed him in and got him into a chair. He breathed hard but didn't say anything. I got a bottle of rye out of the desk and poured a couple of ponies. He drank both of them without a word. Then he slumped in the chair and blinked his eyes and groaned and took a square white envelope out of an inner pocket. He put it down on the desk top and held his big hairy hand over it.

    "Tough about Carl," I said. "I was with M'Gee this morning."

    He looked at me emptily. After a little while he said:

    "Yeah. Carl was a good kid. I ain't told you about him much."

    I waited, looking at the envelope under his hand. He looked down at it himself.

    "I gotta let you see it," he mumbled. He pushed it slowly across the desk and lifted his hand off it as if with the movement he was giving up most everything that made life worth living. Two tears welled up in his eyes and slid down his unshaven cheeks.

    I lifted the square envelope and looked at it. It was addressed to him at his house, in neat pen-and-ink printing, and bore a Special Delivery stamp. I opened it and looked at the shiny photograph that was inside.

    Carmen Dravec sat in Steiner's teakwood chair, wearing her jade earrings. Her eyes looked crazier, if anything, than as I had seen them. I looked at the back of the photo, saw that it was blank, and put the thing face down on my desk.

    "Tell me about it," I said carefully.

    Dravec wiped the tears off his face with his sleeve, put his hands flat on the desk and stared down at the dirty nails. His fingers trembled on the desk.

    "A guy called me," he said in a dead voice. "Ten grand for the plate and the prints. The deal's got to be closed tonight, or they give the stuff to some scandal sheet."

    "That's a lot of hooey," I said. "A scandal sheet couldn't use it, except to back up a story. What's the story?"

    He lifted his eyes slowly, as if they were very heavy. "That ain't all. The guy say there's a jam to it. I better come through fast, or I'd find my girl in the cooler."

    "What's the story?" I asked again, filling my pipe. "What does Carmen say?"

    He shook his big shaggy head. "I ain't asked her. I ain't got the heart. Poor little girl. No clothes on her� No, I ain't got the heart� You ain't done nothin' on Steiner yet, I guess."

    "I didn't have to," I told him. "Somebody beat me to it." He stared at me open-mouthed, uncomprehending. It was obvious he knew nothing about the night before.

    "Did Carmen go out at all last night?" I asked carelessly.

    He was still staring with his mouth open, groping in his mind.

    "No. She's sick. She's sick in bed when I get home. She don't go out at all� What you mean-about Steiner?"

    I reached for the bottle of rye and poured us each a drink. Then I lit my pipe.

    "Steiner's dead," I said. "Somebody got tired of his tricks and shot him full of holes. Last night, in the rain."

    "Jeeze," he said wonderingly. "You was there?"

    I shook my head. "Not me. Carmen was there. That's the jam your man spoke of. She didn't do the shooting, of course."

    Dravec's face got red and angry. He balled his fists. His breath made a harsh sound and a pulse beat visibly in the side of his neck.

    "That ain't true! She's sick. She don't go out at all. She's sick in bed when I get home!"

    "You told me that," I said. "That's not true. I brought Carmen home myself. The maid knows, only she's trying to be decent about it. Carmen was at Steiner's house and I was watching outside. A gun went off and someone ran away. I didn't see him. Carmen was too drunk to see him. That's why she's sick."

    His eyes tried to focus on my face, but they were vague and empty, as if the light behind them had died. He took hold of the arms of the chair. His big knuckles strained and got white.

    "She don't tell me," he whispered. "She don't tell me. Me, that would do anything for her." There was no emotion in his voice; just the dead exhaustion of despair.

    He pushed his chair back a little. "I go get the dough," he said. "The ten grand. Maybe the guy don't talk."

    Then he broke. His big rough head came down on the desk and sobs shook his whole body. I stood up and went around the desk and patted his shoulder, kept on patting it, not saying anything. After a while he lifted his face smeared with tears and grabbed for my hand.

    "Jeeze, you're a good guy," he sobbed.

    "You don't know the half of it."

    I pulled my hand away from him and got a drink into his paw, helped him lift it and down it. Then I took the empty glass out of his hand and put it back on the desk. I sat down again.

    "You've got to brace up," I told him grimly. "The law doesn't know about Steiner yet. I brought Carmen home and kept my mouth shut. I wanted to give you and Carmen a break. That puts me in a jam. You've got to do your part."

    He nodded slowly, heavily. "Yeah, I do what you say- anything you say."

    "Get the money," I said. "Have it ready for the call. I've got ideas and you may not have to use it. But it's no time to get foxy� Get the money and sit tight and keep your mouth shut. Leave the rest to me. Can you do that?"

    "Yeah," he said. "Jeeze, you're a good guy."

    "Don't talk to Carmen," I said. "The less she remembers out of her drunk, the better. This picture-" I touched the back of the photo on the desk-"shows somebody was working with Steiner. We've got to get him and get him quick-even if it costs ten grand to do it."

    He stood up slowly. "That's nothin'. That's just dough. I go get it now. Then I go home. You do it like you want to. Me, I do just like you say."

    He grabbed for my hand again, shook it, and went slowly out of the office. I heard his heavy steps drag down the hall.

    I drank a couple of drinks fast and mopped my face.

    

    

    I drove my Chrysler slowly up La Verne Terrace towards Steiner's house.

    In the daylight, I could see the steep drop of the hill and the flight of wooden steps down which the killer had made his escape. The street below was almost as narrow as an alley. Two small houses fronted on it, not very near Steiner's place. With the noise the rain had been making it was doubtful if anyone in them had paid much attention to the shots.

    Steiner's looked peaceful under the afternoon sun. The unpainted shingles of the roof were still damp from the rain. The trees on the other side of the street had new leaves on them. There were no cars on the street.

    Something moved behind the square growth of box hedge that screened Steiner's front door.

    Carmen Dravec, in a green and white checkered coat and no hat, came out through the opening, stopped suddenly, looked at me wild-eyed, as if she hadn't heard the car. She went back quickly behind the hedge. I drove on and parked in front of the empty house.

    I got out and walked back. In the sunlight it felt like an exposed and dangerous thing to do.

    I went in through the hedge and the girl stood there very straight and silent against the half-open house door. One hand went slowly to her mouth, and her teeth bit at a funny-looking thumb that was like an extra finger. There were deep purpleblack smudges under her frightened eyes.

    I pushed her back into the house without saying anything, shut the door. We stood looking at each other inside. She dropped her hand slowly and tried to smile. Then all expression went out of her white face and it looked as intelligent as the bottom of a shoe box.

    I got gentleness into my voice and said: "Take it easy. I'm pals. Sit down in that chair by the desk. I'm a friend of your father's. Don't get panicky."

    She went and sat down in the yellow cushion in the black chair at Steiner's desk.

    The place looked decadent and off-color by daylight. It still stank of the ether.

    Carmen licked the corners of her mouth with the tip of a whitish tongue. Her dark eyes were stupid and stunned rather than scared now. I rolled a cigarette around in my fingers and pushed some books out of the way to sit on the edge of the desk. I lit my cigarette, puffed it slowly for a moment, then asked: "What are you doing here?"

    She picked at the material of her coat, didn't answer. I tried again.

    "How much do you remember about last night?"

    She answered that. "Remember what? I was sick last night-at home." Her voice was a cautious, throaty sound that only just reached my ears.

    "Before that," I said. "Before I brought you home. Here."

    A slow flush crept up her throat and her eyes widened. "You-you were the one?" she breathed, and began to chew on her funny thumb again.

    "Yeah, I was the one. How much of it all stays with you?"

    She said: "Are you the police?"

    "No. I told you I was a friend of your father's."

    "You're not the police?"

    "No."

    It finally registered. She let out a long sigh. "What-what do you want?"

    "Who killed him?"

    Her shoulders jerked in the checkered coat, but nothing changed much in her face. Her eyes slowly got furtive.

    "Who-who else knows?"

    "About Steiner? I don't know. Not the police, or someone would be here. Maybe Marty."

    It was just a stab in the dark, but it got a sudden, sharp cry out of her.

    "Marty!"

    We were both silent for a minute. I puffed on my cigarette and she chewed on her thumb.

    "Don't get clever," I said. "Did Marty kill him?"

    Her chin came down an inch. "Yes."

    "Why did he do it?"

    "I-I don't know," very dully.

    "Seen much of him lately?"

    Her hands clenched. "Just once or twice."

    "Know where he lives?"

    "Yes!" She spat it at me.

    "What's the matter? I thought you liked Marty."

    "I hate him!" she almost yelled.

    "Then you'd like him for the spot," I said.

    She was blank to that. I had to explain it. "I mean, are you willing to tell the police it was Marty?"

    Sudden panic flamed in her eyes.

    "If I kill the nude photo angle," I said soothingly.

    She giggled.

    That gave me a nasty feeling. If she had screeched, or turned white, or even keeled over, that would have been fairly natural. But she just giggled.

    I began to hate the sight of her. Just looking at her made me feel dopey.

    Her giggles went on, ran around the room like rats. They gradually got hysterical. I got off the desk, took a step towards her, and slapped her face.

    "Just like last night," I said.

    The giggling stopped at once and the thumb-chewing started again. She still didn't mind my slaps apparently. I sat on the end of the desk once more.

    "You came here to look for the camera plate-for the birthday suit photo," I told her.

    Her chin went up and down again.

    "Too late. I looked for it last night. It was gone then. Probably Marty has it. You're not kidding me about Marty?"

    She shook her head vigorously. She got out of the chair slowly. Her eyes were narrow and sloe-black and as shallow as an oyster shell.

    "I'm going now," she said, as if we had been having a cup of tea.

    She went over to the door and was reaching out to open it when a car came up the hill and stopped outside the house. Somebody got out of the car.

    She turned and stared at me, horrified.

    The door opened casually and a man looked in at us.

    

    

    He was a hatchet-faced man in a brown suit and a black felt hat. The cuff of his left sleeve was folded under and pinned to the side of his coat with a big black safety pin.

    He took his hat off, closed the door by pushing it with his shoulder, looked at Carmen with a nice smile. He had closecropped black hair and a bony skull. He fitted his clothes well, He didn't look tough.

    "I'm Guy Slade," he said. "Excuse the casual entrance. The bell didn't work. Is Steiner around?"

    He hadn't tried the bell. Carmen looked at him blankly, then at me, then back at Slade. She licked her lips but didn't say anything.

    I said: "Steiner isn't here, Mr. Slade. We don't know just where he is.', He nodded and touched his long chin with the brim of his hat.

    "You friends of his?"

    "We just dropped by for a book," I said, and gave him back his smile. "The door was half open. We knocked, then stepped inside. Just like you."

    "I see," Slade said thoughtfully. "Very simple."

    I didn't say anything. Carmen didn't say anything. She was staring fixedly at his empty sleeve.

    "A book, eh?" Slade went on. The way he said it told me things. He knew about Steiner's racket, maybe.

    I moved over towards the door. "Only you didn't knock," I said.

    He smiled with faint embarrassment. "That's right. I ought to have knocked, Sorry."

    "We'll trot along now," I said carelessly. I took hold of Carmen's arm.

    "Any message-if Steiner comes back?" Slade asked softly.

    "We won't bother you."

    "That's too bad," he said, with too much meaning.

    I let go of Carmen's arm and took a slow step away from her. Slade still had his hat in his hand. He didn't move. His deep-set eyes twinkled pleasantly.

    I opened the door again.

    Slade said: "The girl can go. But I'd like to talk to you a little."

    I stared at him, trying to look very blank.

    "Kidder, eh?" Slade said nicely.

    Carmen made a sudden sound at my side and ran out through the door. In a moment I heard her steps going down the hill. I hadn't seen her car, but I guessed it was around somewhere.

    I began to say: "What the hell-"

    "Save it," Slade interrupted coldly. "There's something wrong here. I'll just find out what it is."

    He began to walk around the room carelessly-too carelessly. He was frowning, not paying much attention to me. That made me thoughtful. I took a quick glance out of the window, but I couldn't see anything but the top of his car above the hedge.

    Slade found the potbellied flagon and the two thin purple glasses on the desk. He sniffed at one of them. A disgusted smile wrinkled his thin lips.

    "The lousy pimp," he said tonelessly.

    He looked at the books on the desk, touched one or two of them, went on around the back of the desk and was in front of the totem pole thing. He stared at that. Then his eyes went down to the floor, to the thin rug that was over the place where Steiner's body had been. Slade moved the rug with his foot and suddenly tensed, staring down.

    It was a good act-or else Slade had a nose I could have used in my business. I wasn't sure which-yet, but I was giving it a lot of thought.

    He went slowly down to the floor on one knee. The desk partly hid him from me.

    I slipped a gun out from under my arm and put both hands behind my body and leaned against the wall.

    There was a sharp, swift exclamation, then Slade shot to his feet. His arm flashed up. A long, black Luger slid into it expertly. I didn't move. Slade held the Luger in long, pale fingers, not pointing it at me, not pointing it at anything in particular.

    "Blood," he said quietly, grimly, his deep-set eyes black and hard now. "Blood on the floor there, under a rug. A lot of blood."

    I grinned at him. "I noticed it," I said. "It's old blood. Dried blood."

    He slid sideways into the black chair behind Steiner's desk and raked the telephone towards him by putting the Luger around it. He frowned at the telephone, then frowned at me.

    "I think we'll have some law," he said.

    "Suits me."

    Slade's eyes were narrow and as hard as jet. He didn't like my agreeing with him. The veneer had flaked off him, leaving a well-dressed hard boy with a Luger. Looking as if he could use it.

    "Just who the hell are you?" he growled.

    "A shamus. The name doesn't matter. The girl is my client. Steiner's been riding her with some blackmail dirt. We came to talk to him. He wasn't here."

    "Just walk in, huh?"

    "Correct. So what? Think we gunned Steiner, Mr. Slade?"

    He smiled slightly, thinly, but said nothing.

    "Or do you think Steiner gunned somebody and ran away?" I suggested.

    Steiner didn't gun anybody," Slade said. "Steiner didn't have the guts of a sick cat."

    I said: "You don't see anybody here, do you? Maybe Steiner had chicken for dinner, and liked to kill his chickens in the parlor."

    "I don't get it. I don't get your game."

    I grinned again. "Go ahead and call your friends downtown. Only you won't like the reaction you'll get."

    He thought that over without moving a muscle. His lips went back against his teeth.

    "Why not?" he asked finally, in a careful voice.

    I said: "I know you, Mr. Slade. You run the Aladdin Club down on the Palisades. Flash gambling. Soft lights and evening clothes and a buffet supper on the side. You know Steiner well enough to walk into his house without knocking. Steiner's racket needed a little protection now and then. You could be that."

    Slacle's finger tightened on the Luger, then relaxed. He put the Luger down on the desk, kept his fingers on it. His mouth became a hard white grimace.

    "Somebody got to Steiner," he said softly, his voice and the expression on his face seeming to belong to two different people. "He didn't show at the store today. He didn't answer his phone. I came up to see about it."

    "Glad to hear you didn't gun Steiner yourself," I said.

    The Luger swept up again and made a target of my chest. I said:

    "Put it down, Slade. You don't know enough to pop off yet. Not being bullet-proof is an idea I've had to get used to. Put it down. I'll tell you something-if you don't know it. Somebody moved Steiner's books out of his store today-the books he did his real business with."

    Slade put his gun down on the desk for the second time. He leaned back and wrestled an amiable expression onto his face.

    "I'm listening," he said.

    "I think somebody got to Steiner too," I told him. "I think that blood is his blood. The books being moved out from Steiner's store gives us a reason for moving his body away from here. Somebody is taking over the racket and doesn't want Steiner found till he's all set. Whoever it was ought to have cleaned up the blood. He didn't."

    Slade listened silently. The peaks of his eyebrows made sharp angles against the white skin of his indoor forehead.

    I went on: "Killing Steiner to grab his racket was a dumb trick, and I'm not sure it happened that way. But I am sure that whoever took the books knows about it, and that the blonde down in the store is scared stiff about something."

    "Any more?" Slade asked evenly.

    "Not right now. There's a piece of scandal dope I want to trace. If I get it, I might tell you where. That will be your muscler in."

    "Now would be better," Slade said. Then he drew his lips back against his teeth and whistled sharply, twice.

    I jumped. A car door opened outside. There were steps.

    I brought the gun around from behind my body. Slade's face convulsed and his hand snatched for the Luger that lay in front of him, fumbled at the butt.

    I said: "Don't touch it!"

    He came to his feet rigid, leaning over, his hand on the gun, but the gun not in his hand. I dodged past him into the hallway and turned as two men came into the room.

    One had short red hair, a white, lined face, unsteady eyes. The other was an obvious pug; a good-looking boy except for a flattened nose and one ear as thick as a club steak.

    Neither of the newcomers had a gun in sight. They stopped, stared.

    I stood behind Slade in the doorway. Slade leaned over the desk in front of me, didn't stir.

    The pug's mouth opened in a wide snarl, showing sharp, white teeth. The redhead looked shaky and scared.

    Slade had plenty of guts. In a smooth, low, but very clear voice he said:

    "This heel gunned Steiner, boys. Take him!"

    The redhead took hold of his lower lip with his teeth and snatched for something under his left arm. He didn't get it. I was all set and braced. I shot him through the right shoulder, hating to do it. The gun made a lot of noise in the closed room. It seemed to me that it would be heard all over the city. The redhead went down on the floor and writhed and threshed about as if I had shot him in the belly.

    The pug didn't move. He probably knew there wasn't enough speed in his arm. Slade grabbed his Luger up and started to whirl. I took a step and slammed him behind the ear. He sprawled forward over the desk and the Luger shot against a row of books.

    Slade didn't hear me say: "I hate to hit a one-armed man from behind, Slack, And I'm not crazy about the show-off. You made me do it."

    The pug grinned at me and said: "Okay, pal. What next?"

    "I'd like to get out of here, if I can do it without any more shooting. Or I can stick around for some law. It's all one to me."

    He thought it over calmly. The redhead was making moaning noises on the floor. Slade was very still.

    The pug put his hands up slowly and clasped them behind his neck. He said coolly: "I don't know what it's all about, but I don't give a good____________________ damn where you go or what you do when you get there. And this ain't my idea of a spot for a lead party. Drift!"

    "Wise boy. You've more sense than your boss."

    I edged around the desk, edged over towards the open door. The pug turned slowly, facing me, keeping his hands behind his neck. There was a wry but almost good-natured grin on his face.

    I skinned through the door and made a fast break through the gap in the hedge and up the hill, half expecting lead to fly after me. None came.

    I jumped into the Chrysler and chased it up over the brow of the hill and away from that neighborhood.

    

    

    It was after five when I stopped opposite the apartment house on Randall Place. A few windows were lit up already and radios bleated discordantly on different programs. I rode the automatic elevator to the fourth floor. Apartment 405 was at the end of a long hall that was carpeted in green and paneled in ivory. A cool breeze blew through the hall from open doors to the fire escape.

    There was a small ivory push button beside the door marked 405. I pushed it.

    After a long time a man opened the door a foot or so. He was a long-legged, thin man with dark brown eyes in a very brown face. Wiry hair grew far back on his head, giving him a great deal of domed brown forehead. His brown eyes probed at me impersonally.

    I said: "Steiner?"

    Nothing in the man's face changed. He brought a cigarette from behind the door and put it slowly between tight brown lips. A puff of smoke came towards me, and behind it words in a cool, unhurried voice, without inflection. "You said what?"

    "Steiner. Harold Hardwicke Steiner. The guy that has the books."

    The man nodded. He considered my remark without haste. He glanced at the tip of his cigarette, said: "I think I know him, But he doesn't visit here. Who sent you?"

    I smiled. He didn't like that. I said: "You're Marty?"

    The brown face got harder. "So what? Got a grift-or just amusin' yourself?"

    I moved my left foot casually, enough so that he couldn't slam the door.

    "You got the books," I said. "I got the sucker list. How's to talk it over?"

    Marty didn't shift his eyes from my face. His right hand went behind the panel of the door again, and his shoulder had a look as if he was making motions with a hand. There was a faint sound in the room behind him-very faint. A curtain ring clicked lightly on a rod.

    Then he opened the door wide. "Why not? If you think you've got something," he said coolly.

    I went past him into the room. It was a cheerful room, with good furniture and not too much of it. French windows in the end wall looked across a stone porch at the foothills, already getting purple in the dusk. Near the windows a door was shut. Another door in the same wall at the near end of the room had curtains drawn across it, on a brass rod below the lintel.

    I sat down on a davenport against the wall in which there were no doors. Marty shut the door and walked sideways to a tall oak writing desk studded with square nails. A cedarwood cigar box with gilt hinges rested on the lowered leaf of the desk. Marty picked it up without taking his eyes off me, carried it to a low table beside an easy chair. He sat down in the easy chair.

    I put my hat beside me and opened the top button of my coat and smiled at Marty.

    "Well-I'm listening," he said.

    He snubbed his cigarette out, lifted the lid of the cigar box and took out a couple of fat cigars.

    "Cigar?" he suggested casually, and tossed one at me.

    I reached for it and that made me a sap. Marty dropped the other cigar back into the box and came up very swiftly with a gun.

    I looked at the gun politely. It was a black police Colt, a.38. I had no argument against it at the moment.

    "Stand up a minute," Marty said. "Come forward just about two yards. You might grab a little air while you're doing that." His voice was elaborately casual.

    I was mad inside, but I grinned at him. I said: "You're the second guy I've met today that thinks a gun in the hand means the world by the tail. Put it away, and let's talk."

    Marty's eyebrows came together and he pushed his chin forward a little. His brown eyes were vaguely troubled.

    We stared at each other. I didn't look at the pointed black slipper that showed under the curtains across the doorway to my left.

    Marty was wearing a dark blue suit, a blue shirt and a black tie. His brown face looked somber above the dark colors. He said softly, in a lingering voice: "Don't get me wrong. I'm not a tough guy-just careful. I don't know hell's first thing about you. You might be a life-taker for all I know."

    "You're not careful enough," I said. "The play with the books was lousy."

    He drew a long breath and let it out silently. Then he leaned back and crossed his long legs and rested the Colt on his knee.

    "Don't kid yourself I won't use this, if I have to. What's your story?"

    "Tell your friend with the pointed shoes to come on in," I said. "She gets tired holding her breath."

    Without turning his head Marty called out: "Come on in, Agnes."

    The curtains over the door swung aside and the green-eyed blonde from Steiner's store joined us in the room. I wasn't very much surprised to see her there. She looked at me bitterly.

    "I knew damn well you were trouble," she told me angrily. "I told Joe to watch his step."

    "Save it," Marty snapped. "Joe's watchin' his step plenty. Put some light on so I can see to pop this guy, if it works out that way."

    The blonde lit a large floor lamp with a square red shade. She sat down under it, in a big velours chair and held a fixed painful smile on her face. She was scared to the point of exhaustion.

    I remembered the cigar I was holding and put it in my mouth. Marty's Colt was very steady on me while I got matches out and lit it.

    I puffed smoke and said through the smoke: "The sucker list I spoke of is in code. So I can't read the names yet, but there's about five hundred of them. You got twelve boxes of books, say three hundred. There'll be that many more out on loan. Say five hundred altogether, just to be conservative. If it's a good active list and you could run it around all the books, that would be a quarter of a million rentals. Put the average rental low-say a dollar. That's too low, but say a dollar. That's a lot of money these days. Enough to spot a guy for."

    The blonde yelped sharply: "You're crazy, if you-"

    "Shut up!" Marty swore at her.

    The blonde subsided and put her head back against the back of her chair. Her face was tortured with strain.

    "It's no racket for bums," I went on telling them. "You've got to get confidence and keep it. Personally I think the blackmail angles are a mistake. I'm for shedding all that."

    Marty's dark brown stare held coldly on my face. "You're a funny guy," he drawled smoothly. "Who's got this lovely racket?"

    "You have," I said. "Almost."

    Marty didn't say anything.

    "You shot Steiner to get it," I said. "Last night in the rain. It was good shooting weather. The trouble is, he wasn't alone when it happened. Either you didn't see that, or you got scared. You ran out. But you had nerve enough to come back and hide the body somewhere-so you could tidy up on the books before the case broke."

    The blonde made one strangled sound and then turned her face and stared at the wall. Her silvered fingernails dug into her palms. Her teeth bit her lip tightly.

    Marty didn't bat an eye. He didn't move and the Colt didn't move in his hand. His brown face was as hard as a piece of carved wood.

    "Boy, you take chances," he said softly, at last. "It's lucky as all hell for you I didn't kill Steiner."

    I grinned at him, without much cheer. "You might step off for it just the same," I said.

    Marty's voice was a dry rustle of sound. "Think you've got me framed for it?"

    "Positive."

    "How come?"

    "There's somebody who'll tell it that way." Marty swore then. "That-damned little-! She would- just that-damn her!"

    I didn't say anything. I let him chew on it. His face cleared slowly, and he put the Colt down on the table, kept his hand near it.

    "You don't sound like chisel as I know chisel," he said slowly, his eyes a tight shine between dark narrowed lids. "And I don't see any coppers here. What's your angle?"

    I drew on my cigar and watched his gun hand. "The plate that was in Steiner's camera. All the prints that have been made. Right here and right now. You've got it-because that's the only way you could have known who was there last night."

    Marty turned his head slightly to look at Agnes. Her face was still to the wall and her fingernails were still spearing her palms. Marty looked back at me.

    "You're cold as a night watchman's feet on that one, guy," he told me.

    I shook my head. "No. You're a sap to stall, Marty. You can be pegged for the kill easy. It's a natural. If the girl has to tell her story, the pictures won't matter. But she don't want to tell it."

    "You a shamus?" he asked.

    "Yeah."

    "How'd you get to me?"

    "I was working on Steiner. He's been working on Dravec. Dravec leaks money. You had some of it. I tailed the books here from Steiner's store. The rest was easy when I had the girl's story."

    "She say I gunned Steiner?"

    I nodded. "But she could be mistaken."

    Marty sighed. "She hates my guts," he said. "I gave her the gate. I got paid to do it, but I'd have done it anyway. She's too screwy for me."

    I said: "Get the pictures, Marty."

    He stood up slowly, looked down at the Colt, put it in his side pocket. His hand moved slowly up to his breast pocket.

    Somebody rang the door buzzer and kept on ringing it.

    

    

    Marty didn't like that. His lower lip went in under his teeth and his eyebrows drew down at the corners. His whole face got mean.

    The buzzer kept on buzzing.

    The blonde stood up quickly. Nerve tension made her face old and ugly.

    Watching me, Marty jerked a small drawer open in the tall desk and got a small, white-handled automatic out of it. He held it out to the blonde. She went to him and took it gingerly, not liking it.

    "Sit down next to the shamus," he rasped. "Hold the gun on him. If he gets funny, feed him a few."

    The blonde sat down on the davenport about three feet from me, on the side away from the door. She lined the gun on my leg. I didn't like the jerky look in her green eyes.

    The door buzzer stopped and somebody started a quick, light, impatient rapping on the panel. Marty went across and opened the door. He slid his right hand into his coat pocket and opened the door with his left hand, threw it open quickly.

    Carmen Dravec pushed him back into the room with the muzzle of a small revolver against his brown face.

    Marty backed away from her smoothly, lightly. His mouth was open and an expression of panic was on his face. He knew Carmen pretty well.

    Carmen shut the door, then bored ahead with her little gun. She didn't look at anyone but Marty, didn't seem to see anything but Marty. Her face had a dopey look.

    The blonde shivered the full length of her body and swung the white-handled automatic up and towards Carmen. I shot my hand out and grabbed her hand, closed my fingers down over it quickly, thumbed the safety to the on position, and held it there. There was a short tussle, which neither Marty nor Carmen paid any attention to. Then I had the gun.

    The blonde breathed deeply and stared at Carmen Dravec. Carmen looked at Marty with doped eyes and said: "I want my pictures."

    Marty swallowed and tried to smile at her. He said: "Sure, kid, sure," in a small, flat voice that wasn't like the voice he had used in talking to me.

    Carmen looked almost as crazy as she had looked in Steiner's chair. But she had control of her voice and muscles this time. She said: "You shot Hal Steiner."

    "Wait a minute, Carmen!" I yelped.

    Carmen didn't turn her head. The blonde came to life with a rush, ducked her head at me as if she was going to butt me, and sank her teeth in my right hand, the one that had her gun in it.

    I yelped some more. Nobody minded that either.

    Marty said: "Listen, kid, I didn't-"

    The blonde took her teeth out of my hand and spat my own blood at me. Then she threw herself at my leg and tried to bite that. I cracked her lightly on the head with the barrel of the gun and tried to stand up. She rolled down my legs and wrapped her arms around my ankles. I fell back on the davenport again. The blonde was strong with the madness of fear.

    Marty grabbed for Carmen's gun with his left hand, missed. The little revolver made a dull, heavy sound that was not loud. A bullet missed Marty and broke glass in one of the foldedback french windows.

    Marty stood perfectly still again. He looked as if all his muscles had gone back on him.

    "Duck and knock her off her feet, you damn' fool!" I yelled at him.

    Then I hit the blonde on the side of the head again, much harder, and she rolled off my feet. I got loose and slid away from her.

    Marty and Carmen were still facing each other like a couple of images.

    Something very large and heavy hit the outside of the door and the panel split diagonally from top to bottom.

    That brought Marty to life. He jerked the Colt out of his pocket andjumped back. I snapped a shot at his right shoulder and missed, not wanting to hurt him much. The heavy thing hit the door again with a crash that seemed to shake the whole building.

    I dropped the little automatic and got my own gun loose as Dravec came in with the smashed door.

    He was wild-eyed, raging drunk, berserk. His big arms were flailing. His eyes were glaring and bloodshot and there was froth on his lips.

    He hit me very hard on the side of the head without even looking at me. I fell against the wall, between the end of the davenport and the broken door.

    I was shaking my head and trying to get level again when Marty began to shoot.

    Something lifted Dravec's coat away from his body behind, as if a slug had gone clean through him. He stumbled, straightened immediately, charged like a bull.

    I lined my gun and shot Marty through the body. It shook him, but the Colt in his hand continued to leap and roar. Then Dravec was between us and Carmen was knocked out of the way like a dead leaf and there was nothing more that anybody could do about it.

    Marty's bullets couldn't stop Dravec. Nothing could. If he had been dead, he would still have got Marty.

    He got him by the throat as Marty threw his empty gun in the big man's face. It bounced off like a rubber ball. Marty yelled shrilly, and Dravec took him by the throat and lifted him clean off his feet.

    For an instant Marty's brown hands fought for a hold on the big man's wrists. Something cracked sharply, and Marty's hands fell away limply. There was another, duller crack. Just before Dravec let go of Marty's neck I saw that Marty's face was a purple-black color. I remembered, almost casually, that men whose necks are broken sometimes swallow their tongues before they die.

    Then Marty fell down in the corner and Dravec started to back away from him. He backed like a man losing his balance, not able to keep his feet under his center of gravity. He took four clumsy backward steps like that. Then his big body tipped over backwards and he fell on his back on the floor with his arms flung out wide.

    Blood came out of his mouth. His eyes strained upwards as if to see through a fog.

    Carmen Dravec went down beside him and began to wail like a frightened animal.

    There was noise outside in the hall, but nobody showed at the open door. Too much casual lead had been flipped around.

    I went quickly over to Marty and leaned over him and got my hand into his breast pocket. I got out a thick, square envelope that had something stiff and hard in it I straightened up with it and turned.

    Far off the wall of a siren sounded faintly on the evening air, seemed to be getting louder. A white-faced man peeped cautiously in through the doorway. I knelt down beside Dravec.

    He tried to say something, but I couldn't hear the words. Then the strained look went out of his eyes and they were aloof and indifferent like the eyes of a man looking at something a long way off, across a wide plain.

    Carmen said stonily: "He was drunk. He made me tell him where I was going. I didn't know he followed me."

    "You wouldn't," I said emptily.

    I stood up again and broke the envelope open. There were a few prints in it and a glass negative. I dropped the plate on the floor and ground it to pieces with my heel. I began to tear up the prints and let the pieces flutter down out of my hands.

    "They'll print plenty of photos of you now, girlie," I said. "But they won't print this one."

    "I didn't know he was following me," she said again, and began to chew on her thumb.

    The siren was loud outside the building now. It died to a penetrating drone and then stopped altogether, just about the time I finished tearing up the prints.

    I stood still in the middle of the room and wondered why I had taken the trouble. It didn't matter any more now.

    

    

    Leaning his elbow on the end of the big walnut table in Inspector Isham's office, and holding a burning cigarette idly between his fingers, Guy Slade said, without looking at me:

    "Thanks for putting me on the pan, shamus. I like to see the boys at Headquarters once in a while." He crinkled the corners of his eyes in an unpleasant smile.

    I was sitting at the long side of the table across from Isham. Isham was lanky and gray and wore nose glasses. He didn't look, act or talk copper. Violets M'Gee and a merry-eyed Irish dick named Grinnell were in a couple of round-backed chairs against a glass-topped partition wall that cut part of the office off into a reception room.

    I said to Slade: "I figured you found that blood a little too soon. I guess I was wrong. My apologies, Mr. Slade."

    "Yeah. That makes it just like it never happened." He stood up, picked a malacca cane and one glove off the table. "That all for me, Inspector?"

    "That's all tonight, Slade." Isham's voice was dry, cool, sardonic.

    Slade caught the crook of his cane over his wrist to open the door. He smiled around before he strolled out. The last thing his eyes rested on was probably the back of my neck, but I wasn't looking at him.

    Isham said: "I don't have to tell you how a police department looks at that kind of a cover-up on a murder."

    I sighed. "Gunfire," I said. "A dead man on the floor. A naked, doped girl in a chair not knowing what had happened. A killer I couldn't have caught and you couldn't have caught-then. Behind all this a poor old roughneck that was breaking his heart trying to do the right thing in a miserable spot. Go ahead-stick it into me. I'm not sorry."

    Isham waved all that aside. "Who did kill Steiner?"

    "The blonde girl will tell you."

    "I want you to tell me."

    I shrugged. "If you want me to guess-Dravec's driver, Carl Owen."

    Isham didn't look too surprised. Violets M'Gee grunted loudly.

    "What makes you think so?" Isham asked.

    "I thought for a while it could be Marty, partly because the girl said so. But that doesn't mean anything. She didn't know, and jumped at the chance to stick a knife into Marty. And she's a type that doesn't let loose of an idea very easily. But Marty didn't act like a killer. And a man as cool as Marty wouldn't have run out that way. I hadn't even banged on the door when the killer started to scram.

    "Of course I thought of Slade, too. But Slade's not quite the type either. He packs two gunmen around with him, and they'd have made some kind of a fight of it. And Slade seemed genuinely surprised when he found the blood on the floor this afternoon. Slade was in with Steiner and keeping tabs on him, but he didn't kill him, didn't have any reason to kill him, and wouldn't have killed him that way, in front of a witness, if he had a reason.

    "But Carl Owen would. He was in love with the girl once, probably never got over it. He had chances to spy on her, find out where she went and what she did. He lay for Steiner, got in the back way, saw the nude photo stunt and blew his top. He let Steiner have it. Then the panic got him and he just ran."

    "Ran all the way to Lido pier, and then off the end of that," Isham said dryly. "Aren't you forgetting that the Owen boy had a sap wound on the side of his head?"

    I said: "No. And I'm not forgetting that somehow or other Marty knew what was on that camera plate-or nearly enough to make him go in and get it and then hide a body in Steiner's garage to give him room." lsham said: "Get Agnes Laurel in here, Grinnell."

    Grinnell heaved up out of his chair and strolled the length of the office, disappeared through a door.

    Violets M'Gee said: "Baby, are you a pal!"

    I didn't look at him. Isham pulled the loose skin in front of his Adam's apple and looked down at the fingernails of his other hand.

    Grinnell came back with the blonde. Her hair was untidy above the collar of her coat. She had taken the jet buttons out of her ears. She looked tired but she didn't look scared any more. She let herself down slowly into the chair at the end of the table where Slade had sat, folded her hands with the silvered nails in front of her.

    Isham said quietly: "All right, Miss Laurel. We'd like to hear from you now."

    The girl looked down at her folded hands and talked without hesitation, in a quiet, even voice.

    "I've known Joe Marty about three months. He made friends with me because I was working for Steiner, I guess. I thought it was because he liked me. I told him all I knew about Steiner. He already knew a little. He had been spending money he had got from Carmen Dravec's father, but it was gone and he was down to nickels and dimes, ready for something else. He decided Steiner needed a partner and he was watching him to see if he had any tough friends in the background.

    "Last night he was in his car down on the street back of Steiner's house. He heard the shots, saw the kid tear down the steps, jump into a big sedan and take it on the lam. Joe chased him. Halfway to the beach, he caught him and ran him off the road. The kid came up with a gun, but his nerve was bad and Joe sapped him down. While he was out Joe went through him and found out who he was. When he came around Joe played copper and the kid broke and gave him the story. While Joe was wondering what to do about it the kid came to life and knocked him off the car and scrammed again. He drove like a crazy guy and Joe let him go. He went back to Steiner's house. I guess you know the rest. When Joe had the plate developed and saw what he had he went for a quick touch so we could get out of town before the law found Steiner. We were going to take some of Steiner's books and set up shop in another city."

    Agnes Laurel stopped talking. Isham tapped with his fingers, said: "Marty told you everything, didn't he?"

    "Uh-huh."

    "Sure he didn't murder this Carl Owen?"

    "I wasn't there. Joe didn't act like he'd killed anybody."

    Isham nodded. "That's all for now, Miss Laurel. We'll want all that in writing. We'll have to hold you, of course."

    The girl stood up. Grinnell took her out. She went out without looking at anyone.

    Isham said: "Marty couldn't have known Carl Owen was dead. But he was sure he'd try to hide out. By the time we got to him Marty would have collected from Dravec and moved on. I think the girl's story sounds reasonable."

    Nobody said anything. After a moment Isham said to me: "You made one bad mistake. You shouldn't have mentioned Marty to the girl until you were sure he was your man. That got two people killed quite unnecessarily."

    I said: "Uh-huh. Maybe I better go back and do it over again."

    "Don't get tough."

    "I'm not tough. I was working for Dravec and trying to save him from a little heartbreak. I didn't know the girl was as screwy as all that, or that Dravec would have a brainstorm. I wanted the pictures. I didn't care a lot about trash like Steiner or Joe Marty and his girl friend, and still don't."

    "Okay. Okay," Isham said impatiently. "I don't need you any more tonight. You'll probably be panned plenty at the inquest."

    He stood up and I stood up. He held out his hand.

    "But that will do you a hell of a lot more good than harm," he added dryly.

    I shook hands with him and went out. M'Gee came out after me. We rode down in the elevator together without speaking to each other. When we got outside the building M'Gee went around to the right side of my Chrysler and got into it.

    "Got any liquor at your dump?"

    "Plenty," I said.

    "Let's go get some of it."

    I started the car and drove west along First Street, through a long echoing tunnel. When we were out of that, M'Gee said: "Next time I send you a client I won't expect you to snitch on him, boy."

    We went on through the quiet evening to the Berglund. I felt tired and old and not much use to anybody.

    

    

    

    

    

    There was a brand-new aluminum-gray DeSoto sedan in front of the door. I walked around that and went up three white steps, through a glass door and up three more carpeted steps. I rang a bell on the wall.

    Instantly a dozen dog voices began to shake the roof. While they bayed and howled and yapped I looked at a small alcove office with a rolltop desk and a waiting room with mission leather chairs and three diplomas on the wall, at a mission table scattered with copies of the Dog Fancier's Gazette.

    Somebody quieted the dogs out back, then an inner door opened and a small pretty-faced man in a tan smock came in on rubber soles, with a solicitous smile under a pencil-line mustache. He looked around and under me, didn't see a dog. His smile got more casual.

    He said: "I'd like to break them of that, but I can't. Every time they hear a buzzer they start up. They get bored and they know the buzzer means visitors."

    I said: "Yeah," and gave him my card. He read it, turned it over and looked at the back, turned it back and read the front again.

    "A private detective," he said softly, licking his moist lips. "Well-I'm Dr. Sharp. What can I do for you?"

    "I'm looking for a stolen dog."

    His eyes flicked at me. His soft little mouth tightened. Very slowly his whole face flushed. I said: "I'm not suggesting you stole the dog, Doc. Almost anybody could plant an animal in a place like this and you wouldn't think about that chance they didn't own it, would you?"

    "One doesn't just like the idea," he said stiffly. "What kind of dog?"

    "Police dog."

    He scuffed a toe on the thin carpet, looked at a corner of the ceiling. The flush went off his face, leaving it with a sort of shiny whiteness. After a long moment he said: "I have only one police dog here, and I know the people he belongs to. So I'm afraid-"

    "Then you won't mind my looking at him," I cut in, and started towards the inner door.

    Dr. Sharp didn't move. He scuffed some more. "I'm not sure that's convenient," he said softly. "Perhaps later in the day."

    "Now would be better for me," I said, and reached for the knob.

    He scuttled across the waiting room to his little rolltop desk. His small hand went around the telephone there.

    "I'll-I'll just call the police if you want to get tough," he said hurriedly.

    "That's jake," I said. "Ask for Chief Fulwider. Tell him Carmady's here. I just came from his office."

    Dr. Sharp took his hand away from the phone. I grinned at him and rolled a cigarette around in my fingers.

    "Come on, Doc," I said. "Shake the hair out of your eyes and let's go. Be nice and maybe I'll tell you the story."

    He chewed both his lips in turn, stared at the brown blotter on his desk, fiddled with a corner of it, stood up and crossed the room in his white bucks, opened the door in front of me and we went along a narrow gray hallway. An operating table showed through an open door. We went through a door farther along, into a bare room with a concrete floor, a gas heater in the corner with a bowl of water beside it, and all along one wall two tiers of stalls with heavy wire mesh doors.

    Dogs and cats stared at us silently, expectantly, behind the mesh. A tiny chihuahua snuffled under a big red Persian with a wide sheep-skin collar around its neck. There was a sourfaced Scottie and a mutt with all the skin off one leg and a silky-gray Angora and a Sealyham and two more mutts and a razor-sharp fox terrier with a barrel snout and just the right droop to the last two inches of it.

    Their noses were wet and their eyes were bright and they wanted to know whose visitor I was.

    I looked them over. "These are toys, Doe," I growled. "I'm talking police dog. Gray and black, no brown. A male. Nine years old. Swell points all around except that his tail is too short. Do I bore you?"

    He stared at me, made an unhappy gesture. "Yes, but-" he mumbled. "Well, this way."

    We went back out of the room. The animals looked disappointed, especially the chihuahua, which tried to climb through the wire mesh and almost made it. We went back out of a rear door into a cement yard with two garages fronting on it. One of them was empty. The other, with its door open a foot, was a box of gloom at the back of which a big dog clanked a chain and put his jaw down flat on the old comforter that was his bed.

    "Be careful," Sharp said. "He's pretty savage at times. I had him inside, but he scared the others."

    I went into the garage. The dog growled. I went towards him and he hit the end of his chain with a bang. I said: "Hello there, Voss. Shake hands."

    He put his head back down on the comforter. His ears came forward halfway. He was very still. His eyes were wolfish, black-rimmed. Then the curved, too-short tail began to thump the floor slowly. I said: "Shake hands, boy," and put mine out. In the doorway behind me the little vet was telling me to be careful. The dog came up slowly on his big rough paws, swung his ears back to normal and lifted his left paw. I shook it.

    The little vet complained: "This is a great surprise to me, Mr-Mr.-"

    "Carmady," I said. "Yeah, it would be."

    I patted the dog's head and went back out of the garage.

    We went into the house, into the waiting room. I pushed magazines out of the way and sat on a corner of the mission table, looked the pretty little man over.

    "Okay," I said. "Give. What's the name of his folks and where do they live?"

    He thought it over sullenly. "Their name is Voss. They've moved East and they are to send for the dog when they're settled."

    "Cute at that," I said. "The dog's named Voss after a German war flier. The folks are named after the dog."

    "You think I'm lying," the little man said hotly.

    "Uh-uh. You scare too easy for a crook. I think somebody wanted to ditch the dog. Here's my story. A girl named Isobel Snare disappeared from her home in San Angelo, two weeks ago. She lives with her great-aunt, a nice old lady in gray silk who isn't anybody's fool. The girl had been stepping out with some pretty shady company in the night spots and gambling joints. So the old lady smelled a scandal and didn't go to the law. She didn't get anywhere until a girl friend of the Snare girl happened to see the dog in your joint. She told the aunt. The aunt hired me-because when the niece drove off in her roadster and didn't come back she had the dog with her."

    I mashed out my cigarette on my heel and lit another. Dr. Sharp's little face was as white as dough. Perspiration twinkled in his cute little mustache.

    I added gently: "It's not a police job yet. I was kidding you about Chief Fulwider. How's for you and me to keep it under the hat?"

    "What-what do you want me to do?" the little man stammered.

    "Think you'll hear anything more about the dog?"

    "Yes," he said quickly. "The man seemed very fond of him. A genuine dog lover. The dog was gentle with him."

    "Then you'll hear from him," I said. "When you do I want to know. What's the guy look like?"

    "He was tall and thin with very sharp black eyes. His wife is tall and thin like him. Well-dressed, quiet people."

    "The Snare girl is a little runt," I said. "What made it so hush-hush?"

    He stared at his foot and didn't say anything.

    "Okay," I said. "Business is business. Play ball with me and you won't get any adverse publicity. Is it a deal?" I held my hand out.

    "I'll play with you," he said softly, and put a moist fishy little paw in mine. I shook it carefully, so as not to bend it.

    I told him where I was staying and went back out to the sunny street and walked a block down to where I had left my Chrysler. I got into it and poked it forward from around the corner, far enough so that I could see the DeSoto and the front of Sharp's place.

    I sat like that for half an hour. Then Dr. Sharp came out of his place in street clothes and got into the DeSoto. He drove it off around the corner and swung into the alley that ran behind his yard.

    I got the Chrysler going and shot up the block the other way, took a plant at the other end of the alley.

    A third of the way down the block I heard growling, barking, snarling. This went on for some time. Then the DeSoto backed out of the concrete yard and came towards me. I ran away from it to the next corner.

    The DeSoto went south to Arguello Boulevard, then east on that. A big police dog with a muzzle on his head was chained in the back of the sedan. I could just see his head straining at the chain.

    I trailed the DeSoto.

    

    

    Carolina Street was away off at the edge of the little beach city. The end of it ran into a disused interurban right of way, beyond which stretched a waste of Japanese truck farms. There were just two houses in the last block, so I hid behind the first, which was on the corner, with a weedy grass plot and a high dusty red and yellow lantana fighting with a honeysuckle vine against the front wall.

    Beyond that two or three burned over lots with a few weed stalks sticking up out of the charred grass and then a ramshackle mud-colored bungalow with a wire fence. The DeSoto stopped in front of that.

    Its door slammed open and Dr. Sharp dragged the muzzled dog out of the back and fought him through a gate and up the walk. A big barrel-shaped palm tree kept me from seeing him at the front door of the house. I backed my Chrysler and turned it in the shelter of the corner house, went three blocks over and turned along a street parallel to Carolina. This street also ended at the right of way. The rails were rusted in a forest of weeds, came down the other side on to a dirt road, and started back towards Carolina.

    The dirt road dropped until I couldn't see over the embankment. When I had gone what felt like three blocks I pulled up and got out, went up the side of the bank and sneaked a look over it.

    The house with the wire gate was half a block from me. The DeSoto was still in front of it. Boomingly on the afternoon air came the deep-toned woof-woofing of the police dog. I put my stomach down in the weeds and sighted on the bungalow and waited.

    Nothing happened for about fifteen minutes except that the dog kept right on barking. Then the barking suddenly got harder and harsher. Then somebody shouted. Then a man screamed.

    I picked myself up out of the weeds and sprinted across the right of way, down the other side to the street end. As I got near the house I heard the low, furious growling of the dog worrying something, and behind it the staccato rattle of a woman's voice in anger, more than in fear.

    Behind the wire gate was a patch of lawn mostly dandelions and devil grass. There was a shred of cardboard hanging from the barrel-shaped palm, the remains of a sign. The roots of the tree had wrecked the walk, cracked it wide open and lifted the rough edges into steps.

    I went through the gate and thumped up wooden steps to a sagging porch. I banged on the door.

    The growling was still going on inside, but the scolding voice had stopped. Nobody came to the door.

    I tried the knob, opened the door and went in. There was a heavy smell of chloroform.

    In the middle of the floor, on a twisted rug, Dr. Sharp lay spread-eagled on his back, with blood pumping out of the side of his neck. The blood had made a thick glossy pool around his head. The dog leaned away from it, crouched on his forelegs, his ears flat to his head, fragments of a torn muzzle hanging about his neck. His throat bristled and the hair on his spine stood up and there was a low pulsing growl deep in his throat.

    Behind the dog a closet door was smashed back against the wall and on the floor of the closet a big wad of cotton-wool sent sickening waves of chloroform out on the air.

    A dark handsome woman in a print house dress held a big automatic pointed at the dog and didn't fire it.

    She threw a quick glance at me over her shoulder, started to turn. The dog watched her, with narrow, black-rimmed eyes. I took my Luger out and held it down at my side.

    Something creaked and a tall black-eyed man in faded blue overalls and a blue work shirt came through the swing door at the back with a sawed-off double-barrel shotgun in his hands. He pointed it at me.

    "Hey, you! Drop that gat!" he said angrily.

    I moved my jaw with the idea of saying something. The man's finger tightened on the front trigger. My gun went off-without my having much to do with it. The slug hit the stock of the shotgun, knocked it clean out of the man's hands. It pounded on the floor and the dog jumped sideways about seven feet and crouched again.

    With an utterly incredulous look on his face the man put his hands up in the air.

    I couldn't lose. I said: "Down yours too, lady."

    She worked her tongue along her lips and lowered the automatic to her side and walked away from the body on the floor.

    The man said: "Hell, don't shoot him. I can handle him."

    I blinked, then I got the idea. He had been afraid I was going to shoot the dog. He hadn't been worrying about himself.

    I lowered the Luger a little. "What happened?"

    "That-tried to chloroform-him, a fighting dog!"

    I said: 'Yeah. If you've got a phone, you'd better call an ambulance. Sharp won't last long with that tear in his neck."

    The woman said tonelessly: "I thought you were law."

    I didn't say anything. She went along the wall to a window seat full of crumpled newspapers, reached down for a phone at one end of it.

    I looked down at the little vet. The blood had stopped coming out of his neck. His face was the whitest face I had ever seen.

    "Never mind the ambulance," I told the woman. "Just call Police Headquarters."

    The man in the overalls put his hands down and dropped on one knee, began to pat the floor and talk soothingly to the dog.

    'Steady, old-timer. Steady. We're all friends now-all friends. Steady, Voss."

    The dog growled and swung his hind end a little. The man kept on talking to him. The dog stopped growling and the hackles on his back went down. The man in overalls kept on crooning to him.

    The woman on the window seat put the phone aside and said: "On the way. Think you can handle it, Jerry?"

    "Sure," the man said, without taking his eyes off the dog.

    The dog let his belly touch the floor now and opened his mouth and let his tongue hang out. The tongue dripped saliva, pink saliva with blood mixed in it. The hair at the side of the dog's mouth was stained with blood.

    

    

    The man called Jerry said: "Hey, Voss. Hey, Voss old kid. You're fine now. You're fine."

    The dog panted, didn't move. The man straightened up and went close to him, pulled one of the dog's ears. The dog turned his head sideways and let his ear be pulled. The man stroked his head, unbuckled the chewed muzzle and got it off.

    He stood up with the end of the broken chain and the dog came up on his feet obediently, went out through the swing door into the back part of the house, at the man's side.

    I moved a little, out of line with the swing door. Jerry might have more shotguns. There was something about Jerry's face that worried me. As if I had seen him before, but not very lately, or in a newspaper photo.

    I looked at the woman. She was a handsome brunette in her early thirties. Her print house dress didn't seem to belong with her finely arched eyebrows and her long soft hands.

    "How did it happen?" I asked casually, as if it didn't matter very much.

    Her voice snapped at me, as if she was aching to turn it loose. "We've been in the house about a week. Rented it furnished, I was in the kitchen, Jerry in the yard. The car stopped out front and the little guy marched in just as if he lived here. The door didn't happen to be locked, I guess. I opened the swing door a crack and saw him pushing the dog into the closet. Then I smelled the chloroform. Then things began to happen all at once and I went for a gun and called Jerry out of the window. I got back in here about the time you crashed in. Who are you?"

    "It was all over then?" I said. "He had Sharp chewed up on the floor?"

    "Yes-if Sharp is his name."

    "You and Jerry didn't know him?"

    "Never saw him before. Or the dog. But Jerry loves dogs."

    "Better change a little of that," I said. "Jerry knew the dog's name. Voss."

    Her eyes got tight and her mouth got stubborn. "I think you must be mistaken," she said in a sultry voice. "I asked you who you were, mister."

    "Who's Jerry?" I asked. "I've seen him somewhere. Maybe on a reader. Where'd he get the sawed-off? You going to let the cops see that?"

    She bit her lip, then stood up suddenly, went towards the fallen shotgun. I let her pick it up, saw she kept her hand away from the triggers. She went back to the window seat and pushed it under the pile of newspapers.

    She faced me. "Okay, what's the pay-off?" she asked grimly.

    I said slowly: "The dog is stolen. His owner, a girl, happens to be missing. I'm hired to find her. The people Sharp said he got the dog from sounded like you and Jerry. Their name was Voss. They moved East. Ever heard of a lady called Isobel Snare?"

    The woman said "No," tonelessly, and stared at the end of my chin.

    The man in overalls came back through the swing door wiping his face on the sleeve of his blue work shirt. He didn't have any fresh guns with him. He looked me over without much concern.

    I said: "I could do you a lot of good with the law, if you had any ideas about this Snare girl."

    The woman stared at me, curled her lips. The man smiled, rather softly, as if he held all the cards. Tires squealed, taking a distant corner in a hurry.

    "Aw, loosen up," I said quickly. "Sharp was scared. He brought the dog back to where he got him. He must have thought the house was empty. The chloroform idea wasn't so good, but the little guy was all rattled."

    They didn't make a sound, either of them. They just stared at me.

    "Okay," I said, and stepped over to the corner of the room. "I think you're a couple of lamsters. If whoever's coming isn't law, I'll start shooting. Don't ever think I won't."

    The woman said very calmly: "Suit yourself, kibitzer." Then a car rushed along the block and ground to a harsh stop before the house. I sneaked a quick glance out, saw the red spotlight on the windshield, the P.D. on the side. Two big bruisers in plain clothes tumbled out and slammed through the gate, up the steps.

    A fist pounded the door. "It's open," I shouted.

    The door swung wide and the two dicks charged in, with drawn guns.

    They stopped dead, stared at what lay on the floor. Their guns jerked at Jerry and me. The one who covered me was a big red-faced man in a baggy gray suit.

    "Reach-and reach empty!" he yelled in a large tough voice.

    I reached, but held on to my Luger. "Easy," I said. "A dog killed him, not a gun. I'm a private dick from San Angelo. I'm on a case here."

    "Yeah?" He closed in on me heavily, bored his gun into my stomach. "Maybe so, bud. We'll know all that later on."

    He reached up and jerked my gun loose from my hand, sniffed at it, leaning his gun into me.

    "Fired, huh? Sweet! Turn around."

    "Listen-"

    "Turn around, bud."

    I turned slowly. Even as I turned he was dropping his gun into a side pocket and reaching for his hip.

    That should have warned me, but it didn't. I may have heard the swish of the blackjack. Certainly I must have felt it. There was a sudden pool of darkness at my feet. I dived into it and dropped� and dropped� and dropped.

    

    

    When I came to the room was full of smoke. The smoke hung in the air, in thin lines straight up and down, like a bead curtain. Two windows seemed to be open in an end wall, but the smoke didn't move. I had never seen the room before.

    I lay a little while thinking, then I opened my mouth and yelled: "Fire!" at the top of my lungs.

    Then I fell back on the bed and started laughing. I didn't like the sound I made laughing. It had a goofy ring, even to me.

    Steps ran along somewhere and a key turned in the door and the door opened. A man in a short white coat looked in at me, hard-eyed. I turned my head a little and said: "Don't count that one, Jack. It slipped out."

    He scowled sharply. He had a hard small face, beady eyes. I didn't know him.

    "Maybe you want some more strait jacket," he sneered.

    "I'm fine, Jack," I said. "Just fine, I'm going to have me a short nap now."

    "Better be just that," he snarled.

    The door shut, the key turned, the steps went away.

    I lay still and looked at the smoke. I knew now that there wasn't any smoke there really. It must have been night because a porcelain bowl hanging from the ceiling on three chains had light behind it. It had little colored lumps around the edge, orange and blue alternating. While I watched them they opened like tiny portholes and heads stuck out of them, tiny heads like the heads on dolls, but alive heads. There was a man in a yachting cap and a large fluffy blonde and a thin man with a crooked bow tie who kept saying: "Would you like your steak rare or medium, sir?"

    I took hold of the corner of the rough sheet and wiped the sweat off my face. I sat up, put my feet down on the floor. They were bare. I was wearing canton flannel pajamas. There was no feeling in my feet when I put them down. After a while they began to tingle and then got full of pins and needles.

    Then I could feel the floor. I took hold of the side of the bed and stood up and walked.

    A voice that was probably my own was saying to me: "You have the D.T.s� you have the D.T.s� you have the D.T.s..

    I saw a bottle of whisky on a small white table between the two windows. I started towards it. It was a Johnnie Walker bottle, half full. I got it up, took a long drink from the neck. I put the bottle down again.

    The whisky had a funny taste. While I was realizing that it had a funny taste I saw a washbowl in the corner. I just made it to the washbowl before I vomited.

    I got back to the bed and lay there, The vomiting had made me very weak, but the room seemed a little more real, a little less fantastic. I could see bars on the two windows, a heavy wooden chair, no other furniture but the white table with the doped whisky on it. There was a closet door, shut, probably locked.

    The bed was a hospital bed and there were two leather straps attached to the sides, about where a man's wrists would be. I knew I was in some kind of prison ward.

    My left arm suddenly began to feel sore. I rolled up the loose sleeve, looked at half a dozen pinpricks on the upper arm, and a black and blue circle around each one.

    I had been shot so full of dope to keep me quiet that I was having the French fits coming out of it. That accounted for the smoke and the little heads on the ceiling light. The doped whisky was probably part of somebody else's cure.

    I got up again and walked, kept on walking. After a while I drank a little water from the tap, kept it down, drank more. Half an hour or more of that and! was ready to talk to somebody.

    The closet door was locked and the chair was too heavy for me. I stripped the bed, slid the mattress to one side. There was a mesh spring underneath, fastened at the top and bottom by heavy coil springs about nine inches long. It took me half an hour and much misery to work one of these loose.

    I rested a little and drank a little more cold water and went over to the hinge side of the door.

    I yelled "Fire!" at the top of my voice, several times.

    I waited, but not long. Steps ran along the hallway outside. The key jabbed into the door, the lock clicked. The hard-eyed little man in the short white coat dodged in furiously, his eyes on the bed.

    I laid the coil spring on the angle of his jaw, then on the back of his head as he went down. I got him by the throat. He struggled a good deal. I used a knee on his face. It hurt my knee.

    He didn't say how his face felt. I got a blackjack out of his right hip pocket and reversed the key in the door and locked it from the inside. There were other keys on the ring. One of them unlocked my closet. I looked in at my clothes.

    I put them on slowly, with fumbling fingers. I yawned a great deal. The man on the floor didn't move.

    I locked him in and left him.

    

    

    From a wide silent hallway, with a parquetry floor and a narrow carpet down its middle, flat white oak banisters swept down in long curves to the entrance hall. There were closed doors, big, heavy, old-fashioned. No sounds behind them. I went down the carpet runner, walking on the balls of my feet.

    There were stained glass inner doors to a vestibule from which the front door opened. A telephone rang as I got that far. A man's voice answered it, from behind a half-open door through which light came out into the dim hall.

    I went back, sneaked a glance around the edge of the open door, saw a man at a desk, talking into the phone. I waited until he hung up. Then I went in.

    He had a pale, bony, high-crowned head, across which a thin wave of brown hair curled and was plastered to his skull. He had a long, pale, joyless face. His eyes jumped at me. His hand jumped towards a button on his desk.

    I grinned, growled at him: "Don't. I'm a desperate man, warden." I showed him the blackjack.

    His smile was as stiff as a frozen fish. His long pale hands made gestures like sick butterflies over the top of his desk. One of them began to drift towards a side drawer of the desk.

    He worked his tongue loose-You've been a very sick man, sir. A very sick man. I wouldn't advise-"

    I flicked the blackjack at his wandering hand. It drew into itself like a slug on a hot stone. I said: "Not sick, warden, just doped within an inch of my reason. Out is what I want, and some clean whisky. Give."

    He made vague motions with his fingers. "I'm Dr. Sundstrand," he said. "This is a private hospital-not a jail."

    "Whisky," I croaked. "I get all the rest. Private funny house. A lovely racket. Whisky."

    "In the medicine cabinet," he said with a drifting, spent breath.

    "Put your hands behind your head."

    "I'm afraid you'll regret this." He put his hands behind his head.

    I got to the far side of the desk, opened the drawer his hand had wanted to reach, took an automatic out of it. I put the blackjack away, went back round the desk to the medicine cabinet on the wall. There was a pint bottle of bond bourbon in it, three glasses. I took two of them.

    I poured two drinks. "You first, warden."

    "I-I don't drink. I'm a total abstainer," he muttered, his hands still behind his head.

    I took the blackjack out again. He put a hand down quickly, gulped from one of the glasses. I watched him. It didn't seem to hurt him. I smelled my dose, then put it down my throat. It worked, and I had another, then slipped the bottle into my coat pocket.

    "Okay," I said. "Who put me in here? Shake it up. I'm in a hurry."

    "The-the police, of course."

    "What police?"

    He hunched his shoulders down in the chair. He looked sick. "A man named Galbraith signed as complaining witness. Strictly legal, I assure you. He is an officer." - I said: "Since when can a cop sign as complaining witness on a psycho case?"

    He didn't say anything.

    "Who gave me the dope in the first place?"

    "I wouldn't know that. I presume it has been going on a long time."

    I felt my chin. "All of two days," I said. "They ought to have gunned me. Less kickback in the long run. So long, warden."

    "If you go out of here," he said thinly, "you will be arrested at once."

    "Not just for going out," I said softly.

    As I went out he still had his hands behind his head.

    There was a chain and a bolt on the front door, beside the lock. But nobody tried to stop me from opening it. I crossed a big old-fashioned porch, went down a wide path fringed with flowers. A mockingbird sang in a dark tree. There was a white picket fence on the street. It was a corner house, on Twentyninth and Descanso.

    I walked four blocks east to a bus line and waited for a bus. There was no alarm, no cruising car looking for me. The bus came and I rode downtown, went to a Turkish Bath establishment, had a steam bath, a needle shower, a rub-down, a shave, and the rest of the whisky.

    I could eat then. I ate and went to a strange hotel, registered under a fake name. It was half past eleven. The local paper, which I read over more whisky and water, informed me that one Dr. Richard Sharp, who had been found dead in a vacant furnished house on Carolina Street, was still causing the police much headache. They had no clue to the murderer as yet.

    The date on the paper informed me that over forty-eight hours had been abstracted from my life without my knowledge or consent.

    I went to bed and to sleep, had nightmares and woke up out of them covered with cold sweat. That was the last of the withdrawal symptoms. In the morning I was a well man.

    

    

    Chief of police Fulwider was a hammered down, fattish heavyweight, with restless eyes and that shade of red hair that is almost pink. It was cut very short and his pink scalp glistened among the pink hairs. He wore a fawn-colored flannel suit with patch pockets and lapped seams, cut as every tailor can't cut flannel.

    He shook hands with me and turned his chair sideways and crossed his legs. That showed me French lisle socks at three or four dollars a pair, and hand-made English walnut brogues at fifteen to eighteen, depression prices.

    I figured that probably his wife had money.

    "Ah, Carmady," he said, chasing my card over the glass top of his desk, "with two a's, eh? Down here on a job?"

    "A little trouble," I said. "You can straighten it out, if you will."

    He stuck his chest out, waved a pink hand and lowered his voice a couple of notches.

    "Trouble," he said, "is something our little town don't have a lot of. Our little city is small, but very, very clean. I look out of my west window and I see the Pacific Ocean. Nothing cleaner than that. On the north Arguello Boulevard and the foothills. On the east the finest little business section you would want to see and beyond it a paradise of well-kept homes and gardens. On the south-if I had a south window, which I don't have-I would see the finest little yacht harbor in the world, for a small yacht harbor."

    "I brought my trouble with me," I said. "That is, some of it. The rest went on ahead. A girl named Isobel Snare ran off from home in the big city and her dog was seen here. I found the dog, but the people who had the dog went to a lot of trouble to sew me up."

    "Is that so?" the chief asked absently. His eyebrows crawled around on his forehead. I wasn't sure whether I was kidding him or he was kidding me.

    "Just turn the key in the door, will you?" he said. "You're a younger man than I am."

    I got up and turned the key and sat down again and got a cigarette out. By that time the chief had a right-looking bottle and two pony glasses on the desk, and a handful of cardamom seeds.

    We had a drink and he cracked three or four of the cardamom seeds and we chewed them and looked at one another.

    "Just tell me about it," he said then. "I can take it now."

    "Did you ever hear of a guy called Farmer Saint?"

    "Did I?" He banged his desk and the cardamom seeds jumped. "Why there's a thousand berries on that bimbo. A bank stickup, ain't he?"

    I nodded, trying to look behind his eyes without seeming to. "He and his sister work together. Diana is her name. They dress up like country folks and smack down small-town banks, state banks. That's why he's called Farmer Saint. There's a grand on the sister too."

    "I would certainly like to put the sleeves on that pair," the chief said firmly.

    "Then why the hell didn't you?" I asked him.

    He didn't quite hit the ceiling, but he opened his mouth so wide I was afraid his lower jaw was going to fall in his lap. His eyes stuck out like peeled eggs. A thin trickle of saliva showed in the fat crease at the corner. He shut his mouth with all the deliberation of a steam shovel.

    It was a great act, if it was an act.

    "Say that again," he whispered.

    I opened a folded newspaper I had with me and pointed to a column.

    "Look at this Sharp killing. Your local paper didn't do so good on it. It says some unknown rang the department and the boys ran out and found a dead man in an empty house. That's a lot of noodles. I was there. Farmer Saint and his sister were there. Your cops were there when we were there."

    "Treachery!" he shouted suddenly. "Traitors in the department." His face was now as gray as arsenic flypaper. He poured two more drinks, with a shaking hand.

    It was my turn to crack the cardamom seeds.

    He put his drink down in one piece and lunged for a mahogany call box on his desk. I caught the name Galbraith. I went over and unlocked the door.

    We didn't wait very long, but long enough for the chief to have two more drinks. His face got a better color.

    Then the door opened and the big red-faced dick who had sapped me loafed through it, with a bulldog pipe clamped in his teeth and his hands in his pockets. He shouldered the door shut, leaned against it casually.

    I said: "Hello, Sarge."

    He looked at me as if he would like to kick me in the face and not have to hurry about it.

    "Badge!" the fat chief yelled. "Badge! Put it on the desk. You're fired!"

    Gaibraith went over to the desk slowly and put an elbow down on it, put his face about a foot from the chief's nose,

    "What was that crack?" he asked thickly.

    "You had Farmer Saint under your hand and let him go," the chief yelled. "You and that saphead Duncan. You let him stick a shotgun in your belly and get away. You're through. Fired. You ain't got no more job than a canned oyster. Gimme your badge!"

    "Who the hell is Farmer Saint?" Galbraith asked, unimpressed, and blew pipe smoke in the chief's face.

    "He don't know," the chief whined at me. "He don't know. That's the kind of material I got to work with."

    "What do you mean, work?" Galbraith inquired loosely.

    The fat chief jumped as though a bee had stung the end of his nose. Then he doubled a meaty fist and hit Galbraith's jaw with what looked like a lot of power. Galbraith's head moved about half an inch.

    "Don't do that," he said. "You'll bust a gut and then where would the department be?" He shot a look at me, looked back at Fulwider. "Should I tell him?"

    Fulwider looked at me, to see how the show was going over. I had my mouth open and a blank expression on my face, like a farm boy at a Latin lesson.

    "Yeah, tell him," he growled, shaking his knuckles back and forth.

    Gaibraith stuck a thick leg over a corner of the desk and knocked his pipe out, reached for the whisky and poured himself a drink in the chief's glass. He wiped his lips, grinned. When he grinned he opened his mouth wide, and he had a mouth a dentist could have got both hands in, up to the elbows.

    He said calmly: "When me and Dunc crash the joint you was cold on the floor and the lanky guy was over you with a sap. The broad was on a window seat, with a lot of newspapers around her. okay. The lanky guy starts to tell us some yarn when a dog begins to howl out back and we look that way and the broad slips a sawed-off 12-gauge out of the newspapers and shows it to us. Well, what could we do except be nice? She couldn't have missed and we could. So the guy gets more guns out of his pants and they tie knots around us and stick us in a closet that has enough chloroform in it to make us quiet, without the ropes. After a while we hear 'em leave, in two cars. When we get loose the stiff has the place to hisself. So we fudge it a bit for the papers. We don't get no new line yet. How's it tie to yours?"

    "Not bad," I told him. "As I remember the woman phoned for some law herself. But I could be mistaken. The rest of it ties in with me being sapped on the floor and not knowing anything about it."

    Galbraith gave me a nasty look. The chief looked at his thumb.

    "When I came to," I said, "I was in a private dope and hooch cure out on Twenty-ninth. Run by a man named Sundstrand. I was shot so full of hop myself I could have been Rockefeller's pet dime trying to spin myself."

    "That Sundstrand," Galbraith said heavily. "That guy's been a flea in our pants for a long time. Should we go out and push him in the face, Chief?"

    "It's a cinch Farmer Saint put Carmady in there," Fulwider said solemnly. "So there must be some tie-up. I'd say yes, and take Carmady with you. Want to go?" he asked me.

    "Do I?" I said heartily.

    Gaibraith looked at the whisky bottle. He said carefully: "There's a grand each on this Saint and his sister. If we gather them in, how do we cut it?"

    "You cut me out," I said. "I'm on a straight salary and expenses."

    Gaibraith grinned again. He teetered on his heels, grinning with thick amiability.

    "Okydoke. We got your car in the garage downstairs. Some Jap phoned in about it. We'll use that to go in-just you and me."

    "Maybe you ought to have more help, Gal," the chief said doubtfully.

    "Uh-uh. Just me and him's plenty. He's a tough baby or he wouldn't be walkin' around."

    "Well, all right," the chief said brightly. "And we'll just have a little drink on it."

    But he was still rattled. He forgot the cardamom seeds.

    

    

    It was a cheerful spot by daylight. Tea-rose begonias made a solid mass under the front windows and pansies were a round carpet about the base of an acacia. A scarlet climbing rose covered a trellis to one side of the house, and a bronze-green hummingbird was prodding delicately in a mass of sweet peas that grew up the garage wall.

    It looked like the home of a well-fixed elderly couple who had come to the ocean to get as much sun as possible in their old age.

    Galbraith spat on my runningboard and shook his pipe out and tickled the gate open, stamped up the path and flattened his thumb against a neat copper bell.

    We waited. A grill opened in the door and a long sallow-face looked out at us under a starched nurse's cap.

    "Open up. It's the law," the big cop growled.

    A chain rattled and a bolt slid back. The door opened. The nurse was a six-footer with long arms and big hands, an ideal torturer's assistant. Something happened to her face and I saw she was smiling.

    "Why, it's Mr. Galbraith," she chirped, in a voice that was high-pitched and throaty at the same time. "How are you, Mr. Galbraith? Did you want to see Doctor?"

    "Yeah, and sudden," Galbraith growled, pushing past her.

    We went along the hall. The door of the office was shut. Galbraith kicked it open, with me at his heels and the big nurse chirping at mine.

    Dr. Sundtrand, the total abstainer, was having a morning bracer out of a fresh quart bottle. His thin hair was stuck in wicks with perspiration and his bony mask of a face seemed to have a lot of lines in it that hadn't been there the night before.

    He took his hand off the bottle hurriedly and gave us his frozen-fish smile. He said fussily: "What's this? What's this? I thought I gave orders-"

    "Aw, pull your belly in," Galbraith said, and yanked a chair near the desk. "Dangle, sister."

    The nurse chirped something more and went back through the door. The door was shut. Dr. Sundstrand worked his eyes up and down my face and looked unhappy.

    Galbraith put both his elbows on the desk and took hold of his bulging jowls with his fists. He stared fixedly, venomously, at the squirming doctor.

    After what seemed a very long time he said, almost softly: "Where's Farmer Saint?"

    The doctor's eyes popped wide. His Adam's apple bobbled above the neck of his smock. His greenish eyes began to look bilious.

    "Don't stall!" Galbraith roared. "We know all about your private hospital racket, the crook hideout you're runnin', the dope and women on the side. You made one slip too many when you hung a snatch on this shamus from the big town. Your big city protection ain't going to do you no good on this one. Come on, where is Saint? And where's that girl?"

    I remembered, quite casually, that I had not said anything about Isobel Snare in front of Galbraith-if that was the girl he meant.

    Dr. Sundstrand's hand flopped about on his desk. Sheer astonishment seemed to be adding a final touch of paralysis to his uneasiness.

    "Where are they?" Galbraith yelled again.

    The big door opened and the big nurse fussed in again. "Now, Mr. Galbraith, the patients. Please remember the patients, Mr. Galbraith."

    "Go climb up your thumb," Galbraith told her, over his shoulder.

    She hovered by the door. Sundstrand found his voice at last. It was a mere wisp of a voice. It said wearily: "As if you didn't know."

    Then his darting hand swept into his smock, and out again, with a gun glistening in it. Galbraith threw himself sideways, clean out of the chair. The doctor shot at him twice, missed twice. My hand touched a gun, but didn't draw it. Galbraith laughed on the floor and his big right hand snatched at his armpit, came up with a Lugar. It looked like my Lugar. It went off, just once.

    Nothing changed in the doctor's long face. I didn't see where the bullet hit him. His head came down and hit the desk and his gun made thud on the floor. He lay with his face on the desk, motionless.

    Galbraith pointed his gun at me, and got up off the floor. I looked at the gun again. I was sure it was my gun.

    "That's a swell way to get information," I said aimlessly.

    "Hands down, shamus. You don't want to play."

    I put my hands down. "Cute," I said. "I suppose this whole scene was framed just to put the chill on Doc."

    "He shot first, didn't he?"

    "Yeah," I said thinly. "He shot first."

    The nurse was sidling along the wall towards me. No sound had come from her since Sundstrand pulled his act. She was almost at my side. Suddenly, much too late, I saw the flash of knuckles on her good right hand, and hair on the back of the hand.

    I dodged, but not enough. A crunching blow seemed to split my head wide open. I brought up against the wall, my knees full of water and my brain working hard to keep my right hand from snatching at a gun.

    I straightened. Galbraith leered at me.

    "Not so very smart," I said. "You're still holding my Luger. That sort of spoils the plan, doesn't it?"

    "I see you get the idea, shamus."

    The chirpy-voiced nurse said, in a blank pause: "Jeeze, the guy's got a jaw like a elephant's foot. Damn if I didn't split a knuck on him."

    Galbraith's little eyes had death in them. "How about upstairs?" he asked the nurse.

    "All out last night. Should I try one more swing?"

    "What for? He didn't go for his gat, and he's too tough for you, baby. Lead is his meat."

    I said: "You ought to shave baby twice a day on this job."

    The nurse grinned, pushed the starched cap and the stringy blond wig askew on a bullet head. She-or more properly he-reached a gun from under the white nurse's uniform.

    Galbraith said: "It was self-defense, see? You tangled with Doe, but he shot first. Be nice and me and Dune will try to remember it that way."

    I rubbed my jaw with my left hand. "Listen, Sarge. I can take a joke as well as the next fellow. You sapped me in that house on Carolina Street and didn't tell about it. Neither did I. I figured you had reasons and you'd let me in on them at the right time. Maybe I can guess what the reasons are. I think you know where Saint is, or can find out. Saint knows where the Snare girl is, because he had her dog. Let's put a little more into this deal, something for both of us."

    "We've got ours, sappo. I promised Doe I'd bring you back and let him play with you. I put Dune in here in the nurse's rig to handle you for him. But he was the one we really wanted to handle."

    "All right," I said. "What do I get out of it?"

    "Maybe a little more living."

    I said: "Yeah. Don't think I'm kidding you-but look at that little window in the wall behind you."

    Galbraith didn't move, didn't take his eyes off me. A thick sneer curved his lips.

    Duncan, the female impersonator, looked-and yelled.

    A small, square, tinted glass window high up in the corner of the back wall had swung open quite silently. I was looking straight at it, past Galbraith's ear, straight at the black snout of a tommy gun, on the sill, at the two hard black eyes behind the gun.

    A voice I had last heard soothing a dog said: "How's to drop the rod, sister? And you at the desk-grab a cloud."

    

    

    The big cop's mouth sucked for air. Then his whole face lightened and he jerked around and the Luger gave one hard, sharp cough.

    I dropped to the floor as the tommy gun cut loose in a short burst. Galbraith crumpled beside the desk, fell on his back with his legs twisted. Blood came out of his nose and mouth.

    The cop in nurse's uniform turned as white as the starched cap. His gun bounced. His hands tried to claw at the ceiling.

    There was a queer, stunned silence. Powder smoke reeked. Farmer Saint spoke downward from his perch at the window, to somebody outside the house.

    A door opened and shut distinctly and running steps came along the hail. The door of our room was pushed wide. Diana Saint came in with a brace of automatics in her hands. A tall, handsome woman, neat and dark, with a rakish black hat, and two gloved hands holding guns.

    I got up off the floor, keeping my hands in sight. She tossed her voice calmly at the window, without looking towards it.

    "Okay, Jerry. I can hold them."

    Saint's head and shoulders and his submachine gun went away from the frame of the window, leaving blue sky and the thin, distant branches of a tall tree.

    There was a thud, as if feet dropped off a ladder to a wooden porch. In the room we were five statues, two fallen.

    Somebody had to move. The situation called for two more killings. From Saint's angle I couldn't see it any other way. There had to be a cleanup.

    The gag hadn't worked when it wasn't a gag. I tried it again when it was. I looked past the woman's shoulder, kicked a hard grin on to my face, said hoarsely:

    "Hello, Mike. Just in time."

    It didn't fool her, of course, but it made her mad. She stiffened her body and snapped a shot at me from the right-hand gun.- It was a big gun for a woman and it jumped. The other gun jumped with it. I didn't see where the shot went. I went in under the guns.

    My shoulder hit her thigh and she tipped back and hit her head against the jamb of the door. I wasn't too nice about knocking the guns out of her hands. I kicked the door shut, reached up and yanked the key around, then scrambled back from a high-heeled shoe that was doing its best to smash my nose for me.

    Duncan said: Keeno," and dived for his gun on the floor.

    "Watch that little window, if you want to live," I snarled at him.

    Then I was behind the desk, dragging the phone away from Dr. Sundstrand's dead body, dragging it as far from the line of the door as the cord would let me. I lay down on the floor with it and started to dial, on my stomach.

    Diana's eyes came alive on the phone. She screeched: "They've got me, Jerry! They've got me!"

    The machine gun began to tear the door apart as I bawled into the ear of a bored desk sergeant, Pieces of plaster and wood flew like fists at an Irish wedding. Slugs jerked the body of Dr. Sundstrand as though a chill was shaking him back to life. I threw the phone away from me and grabbed Diana's guns and started in on the door for our side. Through a wide crack I could see cloth. I shot at that.

    I couldn't see what Duncan was doing. Then I knew. A shot that couldn't have come through the door smacked Diana Saint square on the end of her chin. She went down again, stayed down.

    Another shot that didn't come through the door lifted my hat. I rolled and yelled at Duncan. His gun moved in a stiff arc, following me. His mouth was an animal snarl. I yelled again.

    Four round patches of red appeared in a diagonal line across the nurse uniform, chest high. They spread even in the short time it took Duncan to fall.

    There was a siren somewhere. It was my siren, coming my way, getting louder.

    The tommy gun stopped and a foot kicked at the door. It shivered, but held at the lock. I put four more slugs into it, well away from the lock.

    The siren got louder. Saint had to go. I heard his step running away down the hall. A door slammed. A car started out back in an alley. The sound of its going got less as the approaching siren screeched into a crescendo.

    I crawled over to the woman and looked at blood on her face and hair and soft soggy places on the front of her coat. I touched her face. She opened her eyes slowly, as if the lids were very heavy.

    "Jerry-" she whispered.

    "Dead," I lied grimly. "Where's Isobel Snare, Diana?"

    The eyes closed. Tears glistened, the tears of the dying.

    "Where's Isobel, Diana?" I pleaded. "Be regular and tell me. I'm no cop. I'm her friend. Tell me, Diana."

    I put tenderness and wistfulness into it, everything I had.

    The eyes half opened. The whisper came again:. "Jerry-" then it trailed off and the eyes shut. Then the lips moved once more, breathed a word that sounded like "Monty."

    That was all. She died.

    I stood up slowly and listened to the sirens.

    

    

    It was getting late and lights were going on here and there in a tall office building across the street. I had been in Fulwider's office all the afternoon. I had told my story twenty times. It was all true-what I told.

    Cops had been in and out, ballistics and print men, record men, reporters, half a dozen city officials, even an A.P. correspondent. The correspondent didn't like his handout and said so.

    The fat chief was sweaty and suspicious. His coat was off and his armpits were black and his short red hair curled as if it had been singed. Not knowing how much or little I knew he didn't dare lead me. All he could do was yell at me and whine at me by turns, and try to get me drunk in between.

    I was getting drunk and liking it.

    "Didn't nobody say anything at all!" he wailed at me for the hundredth time.

    I took another drink, flopped my hand around, looked silly. "Not a word, Chief," I said owlishly. "I'm the boy that would tell you. They died too sudden."

    He took hold of his jaw and cranked it. "Damn funny," he sneered. "Four dead ones on the floor and you not even nicked."

    "I was the only one," I said, "that lay down on the floor while still healthy."

    He took hold of his right ear and worried that. "You been here three days," he howled. "In them three days we got more crime than in three years before you come. It ain't human. I must be having a nightmare."

    "You can't blame me, Chief," I grumbled. "I came down here to look for a girl. I'm still looking for her. I didn't tell Saint and his sister to hide out in your town. When I spotted him I tipped you off, though your own cops didn't. I didn't shoot Doc Sundstrand before anything could be got out of him. I still haven't any idea why the phony nurse was planted there."

    "Nor me," Fulwider yelled. "But it's my job that's shot full of holes. For all the chance I got to get out of this I might as well go fishin' right now."

    I took another drink, hiccupped cheerfully. "Don't say that, Chief," I pleaded. "You cleaned the town up once and you can do it again. This one was just a hot grounder that took a bad bounce."

    He took a turn around the office and tried to punch a hole in the end wall, then slammed himself back in his chair. He eyed me savagely, grabbed for the whisky bottle, then didn't touch it-as though it might do him more good in my stomach.

    "I'll make a deal with you," he growled. "You run on back to San Angelo and I'll forget it was your gun croaked Sundstrand."

    "That's not a nice thing to say to a man that's trying to earn his living, Chief. You know how it happened to be my gun."

    His face looked gray again, for a moment. He measured me for a coffin. Then the mood passed and he smacked his desk, said heartily:

    "You're right, Carmady. I couldn't do that, could I? You still got to find that girl, ain't you? Okay, you run on back to the hotel and get some rest. I'll work on it tonight and see you in the A.M."

    I took another short drink, which was all there was left in the bottle. I felt fine. I shook hands with him twice and staggered out of his office. Flash bulbs exploded all over the corridor.

    I went down the City Hall steps and around the side of the building to the police garage. My blue Chrysler was home again. I dropped the drunk act and went on down the side streets to the ocean front, walked along the wide cement walk towards the two amusement piers and the Grand Hotel.

    It was getting dusk now. Lights on the piers came out. Masthead lights were lit on the small yachts riding at anchor behind the yacht harbor breakwater. In a white barbecue stand a man tickled wienies with a long fork and droned: "Get hungry, folks. Nice hot doggies here. Get hungry, folks."

    I lit a cigarette and stood there looking out to sea. Very suddenly, far out, lights shone from a big ship. I watched them, but they didn't move. I went over to the hot dog man.

    "Anchored?" I asked him, pointing.

    He looked around the end of his booth, wrinkled his nose with contempt.

    "Hell, that's the gambling boat. The Cruise to Nowhere, they call the act, because it don't go no place. If Tango ain't crooked enough, try that. Yes, sir, that's the good ship Montecito. How about a nice warm puppy?"

    I put a quarter on his counter. "Have one yourself," I said softly. "Where do the taxis leave from.?"

    I had no gun. I went on back to the hotel to get my spare.

    The dying Diana Saint had said "Monty."

    Perhaps she just hadn't lived long enough to say "Montecito."

    At the hotel I lay down and fell asleep as though I had been anaesthetized. It was eight o'clock when I woke up, and I was hungry.

    I was tailed from the hotel, but not very far. Of course the clean little city didn't have enough crime for the dicks to be very good shadows.

    

    

    It was a long ride for forty cents. The water taxi, an old speedboat without trimmings, slid through the anchored yachts and rounded the breakwater. The swell hit us. All the company I had besides the tough-looking citizen at the wheel was two spooning couples who began to peck at each other's faces as soon as the darkness folded down.

    I stared back at the lights of the city and tried not to bear down too hard on my dinner. Scattered diamond points at first, the lights drew together and became a jeweled wristlet laid out in the show window of the night. Then they were a soft orange yellow blur above the top of the swell. The taxi smacked in the invisible waves and bounced like a surf boat. There was cold fog in the air.

    The portholes of the Montecito got large and the taxi swept out in a wide turn, tipped to an angle of forty-five degrees and careened neatly to the side of a brightly lit stage. The taxi engine idled down and backfired in the fog.

    A sloe-eyed boy in a tight blue mess jacket and a gangster mouth handed the girls out, swept their escorts with a keen glance, sent them on up. The look he gave me told me something about him. The way he bumped into my gun holster told me more.

    "Nix," he said softly. "Nix."

    He jerked his chin at the taxi man. The taxi man dropped a short noose over a bitt, turned his wheel a little and climbed on the stage. He got behind me.

    "Nix," the one in the mess jacket purred. "No gats on this boat, mister. Sorry."

    "Part of my clothes," I told him. "I'm a private dick. I'll check it."

    "Sorry, bo. No checkroom for gats. On your way."

    The taxi man hooked a wrist through my right arm. I shrugged.

    "Back in the boat," the taxi man growled behind me. "I owe you forty cents, mister. Come on."

    I got back into the boat.

    "Okay," I sputtered at Mess Jacket. "If you don't want my money, you don't want it. This is a hell of a way to treat a visitor. This is-"

    His sleek, silent smile was the last thing I saw as the taxi cast off and hit the swell on the way back. I hated to leave that smile.

    The way back seemed longer. I didn't speak to the taxi man and he didn't speak to me. As I got out on to the float at the pier he sneered at my back: "Some other night when we ain't so busy, shamus."

    Half a dozen customers waiting to go out stared at me. I went past them, past the door of the waiting room on the float, towards the steps at the landward end.

    A big redheaded roughneck in dirty sneakers and tarry pants and a torn blue jersey straightened from the railing and bumped into me casually.

    I stopped, got set. He said softly: " 's matter, dick? No soap on the hell ship?"

    "Do I have to tell you?"

    "I'm a guy that can listen."

    "Who are you?"

    "Just call me Red."

    "Out of the way, Red. I'm busy."

    He smiled sadly, touched my left side. "The gat's kind of bulgy under the light suit," he said. "Want to get on board? It can be done, if you got a reason."

    "How much is the reason?" I asked him.

    "Fifty bucks. Ten more if you bleed in my boat."

    I started away. "Twenty-five out," he said quickly. "Maybe you come back with friends, huh?"

    I went four steps away from him before I half turned, said: "Sold," and went on.

    At the foot of the bright amusement pier there was a flaring Tango Parlor, jammed full even at that still early hour. I went into it, leaned against a wall and watched a couple of numbers go up on the electric indicator, watched a house player with an inside straight give the high sign under the counter with his knee.

    A large blueness took form beside me and I smelled tar. A soft, deep, sad voice said: "Need help out there?"

    "I'm looking for a girl, but I'll look alone. What's your racket?" I didn't look at him.

    "A dollar here, a dollar there. I like to eat. I was on the cops but they bounced the."

    I liked his telling me that. "You must have been leveling," I said, and watched the house player slip his card across with his thumb over the wrong number, watched the counter man get his own thumb in the same spot and hold the card up.

    I could feel Red's grin. "I see you been around our little city. Here's how it works. I got a boat with an underwater bypass. I know a loading port I can open. I take a load out for a guy once in a while. There ain't many guys below decks. That suit you?"

    I got my wallet out and slipped a twenty and a five from it, passed them over in a wad. They went into a tarry pocket.

    Red said: "Thanks," softly, and walked away. I gave him a small start and went after him. He was easy to follow by his size, even in a crowd.

    We went past the yacht harbor and the second amusement pier and beyond that the lights got fewer and the crowd thinned to nothing. A short black pier stuck out into the water with boats moored all along it. My man turned out that.

    He stopped almost at the end, at the head of a wooden ladder. "I'll bring her down to here," he said. "Got to make noise warmin' up."

    "Listen," I said urgently. "I have to phone a man. I forgot."

    "Can do. Come on."

    He led the way farther along the pier, knelt, rattled keys on a chain, and opened a padlock. He lifted a small trap and took a phone out, listened to it.

    "Still working," he said with a grin in his voice. "Must belong to some crooks. Don't forget to snap the lock back on."

    He slipped away silently into the darkness. For ten minutes I listened to water slapping the piles of the pier, the occasional whirr of a seagull in the gloom. Then far off a motor roared and kept on roaring for minutes. Then the noise stopped abruptly. More minutes passed. Something thudded at the foot of the ladder and a low voice called up to me: "All set."

    I hurried back to the phone, dialed a number, asked for Chief Fulwider. He had gone home. I dialed another number, got a woman, asked her for the chief, said I was headquarters.

    I waited again. Then I heard the fat chiefs voice. It sounded full of baked potato.

    "Yeah? Can't a guy even eat? Who is it?"

    "Carmady, Chief. Saint is on the Montecito. Too bad that's over your line."

    He began to yell like a wild man. I hung up in his face, put the phone back in its zinc-lined cubbyhole and snapped the padlock. I went down the ladder to Red.

    His big black speedboat slid out over the oily water. There was no sound from its exhaust but a steady bubbling along the side of the shell.

    The city lights again became a yellow blur low on the black water and the ports of the good ship Montecito again got large and bright and round out to sea.

    

    

    There were no floodlights on the seaward side of the ship. Red cut his motor to half of nothing and curved in under the overhang of the stern, sidled up to the greasy plates as coyly as a clubman in a hotel lobby.

    Double iron doors loomed high over us, forward a little from the slimy links of a chain cable. The speedboat scuffed the Montecito's ancient plates and the sea water slapped loosely at the bottom of the speedboat under our feet. The shadow of the big ex-cop rose over me. A coiled rope flicked against the dark, caught on something, and fell back into the boat. Red pulled it tight, made a turn around something on the engine cowling.

    He said softly: "She rides as high as a steeplechaser. We gotta climb them plates."

    I took the wheel and held the nose of the speedboat against the slippery hull, and Red reached for an iron ladder flat to the side of the ship, hauled himself up into the darkness, grunting, his big body braced at right angles, his sneakers slipping on the wet metal rungs.

    After a while something creaked up above and feeble yellow light trickled out into the foggy air. The outline of a heavy door showed, and Red's crouched head against the light.

    I went up the ladder after him. It was hard work. It landed me panting in a sour, littered hold full of cases and barrels. Rats skittered out of sight in the dark corners. The big man put his lips to my ear: "From here we got an easy way to the boiler-room catwalk. They'll have steam up in one auxiliary, for hot water and the generators. That means one guy. I'll handle him. The crew doubles in brass upstairs. From the boiler room I'll show you a ventilator with no grating in it. Goes to the boat deck. Then it's all yours."

    "You must have relatives on board," I said.

    "Never no mind. A guy gets to know things when he's on the beach. Maybe I'm close to a bunch that's set to knock the tub over. Will you come back fast?"

    "I ought to make a good splash from the boat deck," I said. "Here."

    I fished more bills out of my wallet, pushed them at him.

    He shook his red head. "Uh-uh. That's for the trip back."

    "I'm buying it now," I said. "Even if I don't use it. Take the dough before I bust out crying."

    "Well-thanks, pal. You're a right guy."

    We went among the cases and barrels. The yellow light came from a passage beyond, and we went along the passage to a narrow iron door. That led to the catwalk. We sneaked along it, down an oily steel ladder, heard the slow hiss of oil burners and went among mountains of iron towards the sound.

    Around a corner we looked at a short, dirty Italian in a purple silk shirt who sat in a wired-together office chair, under a naked bulb, and read the paper with the aid of steel-rimmed spectacles and a black forefinger.

    Red said gently: "Hi, Shorty. How's all the little bambinos?" The Italian opened his mouth and reached swiftly. Red hit him. We put him down on the floor and tore his purple shirt into shreds for ties and a gag.

    "You ain't supposed to hit a guy with glasses on," Red said. "But the idea is you make a hell of a racket goin' up a ventilator-to a guy down here. Upstairs they won't hear nothing."

    I said that was the way I would like it, and we left the Italian bound up on the floor and found the ventilator that had no grating in it. I shook hands with Red, said I hoped to see him again, and started up the ladder inside the ventilator.

    It was cold and black and the foggy air rushed down it and the way up seemed a long way. After three minutes that felt like an hour I reached the top and poked my head out cautiously. Canvas-sheeted boats loomed near by on the boat-deck davits. There was a soft whispering in the dark between a pair of them. The heavy throb of music pulsed up from below. Overhead a masthead light, and through the thin, high layers of the mist a few bitter stars stared down.

    I listened, but didn't hear any police-boat sirens. I got out of the ventilator, lowered myself to the deck.

    The whispering came from a necking couple huddled under a boat. They didn't pay any attention to me. I went along the deck past the closed doors of three or four cabins. There was a little light behind the shutters of two of them. I listened, didn't hear anything but the merrymaking of the customers down below on the main deck.

    I dropped into a dark shadow, took a lungful of air and let it out in a howl-the snarling howl of a gray timber wolf, lonely and hungry and far from home, and mean enough for seven kinds of trouble.

    The deep-toned woof-woofing of a police dog answered me. A girl squealed along the dark deck and a man's voice said: "I thought all the shellac drinkers was dead."

    I straightened and unshipped my gun and ran towards the barking. The noise came from a cabin on the other side of the deck.

    I put an ear to the door, listened to a man's voice soothing the dog. The dog stopped barking and growled once or twice, then was silent. A key turned in the door I was touching.

    I dropped away from it, down on one knee. The door opened a foot and a sleek head came forward past its edge. Light from a hooded deck lamp made a shine on the black hair.

    I stood up and slammed the head with my gun barrel. The man fell softly out of the doorway into my arms. I dragged him back into the cabin, pushed him down on a made-up berth.

    I shut the door again, locked it. A small, wide-eyed girl crouched on the other berth. I said: "Hello, Miss Snare. I've had a lot of trouble finding you. Want to go home?"

    Farmer Saint rolled over and sat up, holding his head. Then he was very still, staring at me with his sharp black eyes. His mouth had a strained smile, almost good-humored.

    I ranged the cabin with a glance, didn't see where the dog was, but saw an inner door behind which he could be. I looked at the girl again.

    She was not much to look at, like most of the people that make most of the trouble. She was crouched on the berth with her knees drawn up and hair falling over one eye. She wore a knitted dress and golf socks and sport shoes with wide tongues that fell down over the instep. Her knees were bare and bony under the hem of the dress. She looked like a schoolgirl.

    I went over Saint for a gun, didn't find one. He grinned at me.

    The girl lifted her hand and threw her hair back. She looked at me as if I was a couple of blocks away. Then her breath caught and she began to cry.

    "We're married," Saint said softly. "She thinks you're set to blow holes in me. That was a smart trick with the wolf howl."

    I didn't say anything. I listened. No noises outside.

    "How'd you know where to come?" Saint asked.

    "Diana told me-before she died," I said brutally.

    His eyes looked hurt. "I don't believe it, shamus."

    "You ran out and left her in the ditch. What would you expect?"

    "I figured the cops wouldn't bump a woman and I could make some kind of a deal on the outside. Who got her?"

    "One of Fulwider's cops. You got him."

    His head jerked back and a wild look came over his face, then went away. He smiled sideways at the weeping girl.

    "Hello, sugar. I'll get you clear." He looked back at me. "Suppose I come in without a scrap. Is there a way for her to get loose?"

    "What do you mean, scrap?" I sneered.

    "I got plenty friends on this boat, shamus. You ain't even started yet."

    "You got her into it," I said. "You can't get her out. That's part of the pay-off."

    

    

    He nodded slowly, looked down at the floor between his feet. The girl stopped crying long enough to mop at her cheeks, then started in again.

    "Fulwider know I'm here?" Saint asked me slowly.

    "Yeah."

    "You give him the office?"

    "Yeah."

    He shrugged. "That's okay from your end. Sure. Only I'll never get to talk, if Fulwider pinches me. If I could get to talk to a D.A. I could maybe convince him she's not hep to my stuff."

    "You could have thought of that, too," I said heavily. "You didn't have to go back to Sundstrand's and cut loose with your stutter gun."

    He threw his head back and laughed. "No? Suppose you paid a guy ten grand for protection and he crossed you up by grabbing your wife and sticking her in a crooked dope hospital and telling you to run along far away and be good, or the tide would wash her up on the beach? What would you do-smile, or trot over with some heavy iron to talk to the guy?"

    "She wasn't there then," I said. "You were just kill-screwy. And if you hadn't hung on to that dog until he killed a man, the protection wouldn't have been scared into selling you out."

    "I like dogs," Saint said quietly. "I'm a nice guy when I'm not workin', but I can get shoved around just so much."

    I listened. Still no noises on deck outside.

    "Listen," I said quickly. "If you want to play ball with me, I've got a boat at the back door and I'll try to get the girl home before they want her. What happens to you is past me. I wouldn't lift a finger for you, even if you do like dogs."

    The girl said suddenly, in a shrill, little-girl voice: "I don't want to go home! I won't go home!"

    "A year from now you'll thank me," I snapped at her.

    "He's right, sugar," Saint said. "Better beat it with him."

    "I won't," the girl shrilled angrily. "I just won't. That's all."

    Out of the silence on the deck something hard slammed the outside of the door. A grim voice shouted: "Open up! It's the law!"

    I backed swiftly to the door, keeping my eyes on Saint. I spoke back over my shoulder: "Fulwider there?"

    "Yeah," the chiefs fat voice growled. "Carmady?"

    "Listen, Chief. Saint's in here and he's ready to surrender. There's a girl here with him, the one I told you about. So come in easy, will you?"

    "Right," the chief said. "Open the door."

    I twisted the key, jumped across the cabin and put my back against the inner partition, beside the door behind which the dog was moving around now, growling a little.

    The outer door whipped open. Two men I hadn't seen before charged in with drawn guns. The fat chief was behind them. Briefly, before he shut the door, I caught a glimpse of ship's uniforms.

    The two dicks jumped on Saint, slammed him around, put cuffs on him. Then they stepped back beside the chief. Saint grinned at them, with blood trickling down his lower lip.

    Fulwider looked at me reprovingly and moved a cigar around in his mouth. Nobody seemed to take an interest in the girl.

    "You're a hell of a guy, Carmady. You didn't give me no idea where to come," he growled.

    "I didn't know," I said. "I thought it was outside your jurisdiction, too."

    "Hell with that. We tipped the Feds. They'll be out."

    One of the dicks laughed. "But not too soon," he said roughly. "Put the heater away, shamus."

    "Try and make me," I told him.

    He started forward, but the chief waved him back. The other dick watched Saint, looked at nothing else.

    "How'd you find him then?" Fulwider wanted to know.

    "Not by taking his money to hide him out," I said.

    Nothing changed in Fulwider's face. His voice became almost lazy. "Oh, oh, you've been peekin'," he said very gently.

    I said disgustedly. "Just what kind of a sap did you and your gang take me for? Your clean little town stinks. It's the wellknown whited sepulcher. A crook sanctuary where the hot rods can lie low-if they pay off nice and don't pull any local capers-and where they can jump off for Mexico in a fast boat, if the finger waves towards them."

    The chief said very carefully: "Any more?"

    "Yeah," I shouted. "I've saved it for you too damn long. You had me doped until I was half goofy and stuck me in a private jail. When that didn't hold me you worked a plant up with Galbraith and Duncan to have my gun kill Sundstrand, your helper, and then have me killed resisting some arrest. Saint spoiled that party for you and saved my life. Not intending to, perhaps, but he did it. You knew all along where the little Snare girl was. She was Saint's wife and you were holding her yourself to make him stay in line. Hell, why do you suppose I tipped you he was out here? That was something you didn't know!"

    The dick who had tried to make me put up my gun said: "Now, Chief. We better make it fast. Those Feds-"

    Fulwider's jaw shook. His face was gray and his ears were far back in his head. The cigar twitched in his fat mouth.

    "Wait a minute," he said thickly, to the man beside. Then to me: "Well-why did you tip me?"

    "To get you where you're no more law than Billy the Kid," I said, "and see if you have the guts to go through with murder on the high seas."

    Saint laughed. He shot a low, snarling whistle between his teeth. A tearing animal growl answered him. The door beside me crashed open as though a mule had kicked it. The big police dog came through the opening in a looping spring that carried him clear across the cabin. The gray body twisted in mid-air. A gun banged harmlessly.

    "Eat 'em up, Voss!" Saint yelled. "Eat 'em alive, boy!"

    The cabin filled with gunfire. The snarling of the dog blended with a thick, choked scream. Fulwider and one of the dicks were down on the floor and the dog was at Fulwider's throat.

    The girl screamed and plunged her face into a pillow. Saint slid softly down from the bunk and lay on the floor with blood running slowly down his neck in a thick wave.

    The dick who hadn't gone down jumped to one side, almost fell headlong on the girl's berth, then caught his balance and pumped bullets into the dog's long gray body-wildly without pretense of aim.

    The dick on the floor pushed at the dog. The dog almost bit his hand off. The man yelled. Feet pounded on the deck. Yelling outside, Something was running down my face that tickled. My head felt funny, but I didn't know what had hit me.

    The gun in my hand felt large and hot. I shot the dog, hating to do it. The dog rolled off Fulwider and I saw where a stray bullet had drilled the chiefs forehead between the eyes, with the delicate exactness of pure chance.

    The standing dick's gun hammer clicked on a discharged shell. He cursed, started to reload frantically.

    I touched the blood on my face and looked at it. It seemed very black. The light in the cabin seemed to be failing.

    The bright corner of an axe blade suddenly split the cabin door, which was wedged shut by the chiefs body, and that of the groaning man beside him. I stared at the bright metal, watched it go away and reappear in another place.

    Then all the lights went out very slowly, as in a theater just as the curtain goes up. Just as it got quite dark my head hurt me, but I didn't know then that a bullet had fractured my skull.

    I woke up two days later in the hospital. I was there three weeks. Saint didn't live long enough to hang, but he lived long enough to tell his story. He must have told it well, because they let Mrs. Jerry (Farmer) Saint go home to her aunt.

    By that time the County Grand Jury had indicted half the police force of the little beach city. There were a lot of new faces around the City Hall, I heard. One of them was a big redheaded detective-sergeant named Norgard who said he owed me twenty-five dollars but had had to use it to buy a new suit when he got his job back. He said he would pay me out of his first check. I said I would try to wait.

    

    

    

    

    

    The first time I ever saw Larry Batzel he was drunk outside Sardi's in a secondhand Rolls-Royce. There was a tall blonde with him who had eyes you wouldn't forget. I helped her argue him out from under the wheel so that she could drive.

    The second time I saw him he didn't have any Rolls-Royce or any blonde or any job in pictures. All he had was the jitters and a suit that needed pressing. He remembered me. He was that kind of drunk.

    I bought him enough drinks to do him some good and gave him half my cigarettes. I used to see him from time to time "between pictures." I got to lending him money. I don't know just why. He was a big, handsome brute with eyes like a cow and something innocent and honest in them. Something I don't get much of in my business.

    The funny part was he had been a liquor runner for a pretty hard mob before Repeal. He never got anywhere in pictures, and after a while I didn't see him around any more.

    Then one day out of the clear blue I got a check for all he owed me and a note that he was working on the tables- gambling not dining-at the Dardanella Club, and to come out and look him up. So I knew he was back in the rackets.

    I didn't go to see him, but I found out somehow or other that Joe Mesarvey owned the place, and that Joe Mesarvey was married to the blonde with the eyes, the one Larry Batzel had been with in the Rolls that time. I still didn't go out there.

    Then very early one morning there was a dim figure standing by my bed, between me and the windows. The blinds had been pulled down. That must have been what wakened me. The figure was large and had a gun.

    I rolled over and rubbed my eyes.

    "Okay," I said sourly. "There's twelve bucks in my pants and my wrist watch cost twenty-seven fifty. You couldn't get anything on that."

    The figure went over to the window and pulled a blind aside an inch and looked down at the street. When he turned again I saw that it was Larry Batzel.

    His face was drawn and tired and he needed a shave. He had dinner clothes on still and a dark double-breasted overcoat with a dwarf rose drooping in the lapel.

    He sat down and held the gun on his knee for a moment before he put it away, with a puzzled frown, as if he didn't know how it got into his hand.

    "You're going to drive me to Berdoo," he said. "I've got to get out of town. They've put the pencil on me."

    "Okay," I said. "Tell me about it."

    I sat up and felt the carpet with my toes and lit a cigarette. It was a little after five-thirty.

    "I jimmied your lock with a piece of celluloid," he said. "You ought to use your night latch once in a while. I wasn't sure which was your flop and I didn't want to rouse the house."

    "Try the mailboxes next time," I said. "But go ahead. You're not drunk, are you?"

    "I'd like to be, but I've got to get away first. I'm just rattled. I'm not so tough as I used to be. You read about the O'Mara disappearance of course."

    "Yeah."

    "Listen, anyway. If I keep talking I won't blow up. I don't think I'm spotted here."

    "One drink won't hurt either of us," I said. "The Scotch is on the table there."

    He poured a couple of drinks quickly and handed me one. I put on a bathrobe and slippers. The glass rattled against his teeth when he drank.

    He put his empty glass down and held his hands tight together.

    "I used to know Dud O'Mara pretty well. We used to run stuff together down from Hueneme Point. We even carried the torch for the same girl. She's married to Joe Mesarvey now. Dud married five million dollars. He married General Dade Winslow's rickety-rackety divorc�e daughter."

    "I know all that," I said.

    "Yeah. Just listen. She picked him out of a speak, just like I'd pick up a cafeteria tray. But he didn't like the life. I guess he used to see Mona. He got wise Joe Mesarvey and Lash Yeager had a hot car racket on the side. They knocked him off."

    "The hell they did," I said. "Have another drink."

    "No. Just listen. There's just two points. The night O'Mara pulled down the curtain-no, the night the papers got it- Mona Mesarvey disappeared too. Only she didn't. They hid her out in a shack a couple of miles beyond Realito in the orange belt. Next door to a garage run by a heel named Art Huck, a hot car drop. I found out. I trailed Joe there."

    "What made it your business?" I asked.

    "I'm still soft on her. I'm telling you this because you were pretty swell to me once. You can make something of it after I blow. They hid her out there so it would look as if Dud had blown with her. Naturally the cops were not too dumb to see Joe after the disappearance. But they didn't find Mona. They have a system on disappearances and they play the system."

    He got up and went over to the window again, looked through the side of the blind.

    "There's a blue sedan down there I think I've seen before," he said. "But maybe not. There's a lot like it."

    He sat down again. I didn't speak.

    "This place beyond Realito is on the first side road north from the Foothill Boulevard. You can't miss it. It stands all alone, the garage and the house next door. There's an old cyanide plant up above there. I'm telling you this-"

    "That's point one," I said. "What was the second point?"

    "The punk that used to drive for Lash Yeager lit out a couple of weeks back and went East. I lent him fifty bucks. He was broke. He told me Yeager was out to the Winslow estate the night Dud O'Mara disappeared."

    I stared at him. "It's interesting, Larry. But not enough to break eggs over. After all we do have a police department."

    "Yeah. Add this. I got drunk last night and told Yeager what I knew. Then I quit the job at the Dardanella. So somebody shot at me outside where I live when I got home. I've been on the dodge ever since. Now, will you drive me to Berdoo?"

    I stood up. It was May but I felt cold. Larry Batzel looked cold, even with his overcoat on.

    "Absolutely," I said. "But take it easy. Later will be much safer than now. Have another drink. You don't know they knocked O'Mara off."

    "If he found out about the hot car racket, with Mona married to Joe Mesarvey, they'd have to knock him off. He was that kind of guy."

    I stood up and went towards the bathroom. Larry went over to the window again.

    "It's still there," he said over his shoulder. "You might get shot at riding with me."

    "I'd hate that," I said.

    "You're a good sort of heel, Carmady. It's going to rain. I'd hate like hell to be buried in the rain, wouldn't you?"

    "You talk too damn much," I said, and went into the bathroom.

    It was the last time I ever spoke to him.

    

    

    I heard him moving around while I was shaving, but not after I got under the shower, of course. When I came out he was gone. I padded over and looked into the kitchenette. He wasn't in there. I grabbed a bathrobe and peeked out into the hail. It was empty except for a milkman starting down the back stairs with his wiry tray of bottles, and the fresh folded papers leaning against the shut doors.

    "Hey," I called out to the milkman, "did a guy just come out of here and go by you?"

    He looked back at me from the corner of the wall and opened his mouth to answer. He was a nice-looking boy with fine large white teeth. I remember his teeth well, because I was looking at them when I heard the shots.

    They were not very near or very far. Out back of the apartment house, by the garages, or in the alley, I thought. There were two quick, hard shots and then the riveting machine. A burst of five or six, all a good chopper should ever need. Then the roar of the car going away.

    The milkman shut his mouth as if a winch controlled it. His eyes were huge and empty looking at me. Then he very carefully set his bottles down on the top step and leaned against the wall.

    "That sounded like shots," he said.

    All this took a couple of seconds and felt like half an hour. I went back into my place and threw clothes on, grabbed odds and ends off the bureau, barged out into the hall. It was still empty, even of the milkman. A siren was dying somewhere near. A bald head with a hangover under it poked out of a door and made a snuffling noise.

    I went down the back stairs.

    There were two or three people out in the lower hail. I went out back. The garages were in two rows facing each other across a cement space, then two more at the end, leaving a space to go out to the alley. A couple of kids were coming over a fence three houses away.

    Larry Batzel lay on his face, with his hat a yard away from his head, and one hand flung out to within a foot of a big black automatic. His ankles were crossed, as if he had spun as he fell. Blood was thick on the side of his face, on his blond hair, especially on his neck. It was also thick on the cement yard.

    Two radio cops and the milk driver and a man in a brown sweater and bibless overalls were bending over him. The man in overalls was our janitor.

    I went up to them, about the same time the two kids from over the fence hit the yard. The milk driver looked at me with a queer, strained expression. One of the cops straightened up and said: "Either of you guys know him? He's still got half his face."

    He wasn't talking to me. The milk driver shook his head and kept on looking at me from the corner of his eyes. The janitor said: "He ain't a tenant here. He might of been a visitor. Kind of early for visitors, though, ain't it?"

    "He's got party clothes on. You know your flophouse better'n I do," the cop said heavily. He got out a notebook.

    The other cop straightened up too and shook his head and went towards the house, with the janitor trotting beside him.

    The cop with the notebook jerked a thumb at me and said harshly: "You was here first after these two guys. Anything from you?"

    I looked at the milkman. Larry Batzel wouldn't care, and a man has a living to earn. It wasn't a story for a prowl car anyway.

    "I just heard the shots and came running," I said.

    The cop took that for an answer. The milk driver looked up at the lowering gray sky and said nothing.

    After a while I got back into my apartment and finished my dressing. When I picked my hat up off the window table by the Scotch bottle there was -a small rosebud lying on a piece of scrawled paper.

    The note said: "You're a good guy, but I think I'll go it alone. Give the rose to Mona, if you ever should get a chance. Larry."

    I put those things in my wallet, and braced myself with a drink.

    

    

    About three o'clock that afternoon I stood in the main hallway of the Winslow place and waited for the butler to come back. I had spent most of the day not going near my office or apartment, and not meeting any homicide men. It was only a question of time until I had to come through, but I wanted to see General Dade Winslow first. He was hard to see.

    Oil paintings hung all around me, mostly portraits. There were a couple of statues and several suits of time-darkened armor on pedestals of dark wood. High over the huge marble fieplace hung two bullet-torn-or moth-eaten-cavalry pennants crossed in a glass case, and below them the painted likeness of a thin, spry-looking man with a black beard and mustachios and full regimentals of about the time of the Mexican War. This might be General Dade Winslow's father. The general himself, though pretty ancient, couldn't be quite that old.

    Then the butler came back and said General Winslow was in the orchid house and would I follow him, please.

    We went out of the french doors at the back and across the lawns to a big glass pavilion well beyond the garages. The butler opened the door into a sort of vestibule and shut it when I was inside, and it was already hot. Then he opened the inner door and it was really hot.

    The air steamed. The walls and ceiling of the greenhouse dripped. In the half light enormous tropical plants spread their blooms and branches all over the place, and the smell of them was almost as overpowering as the smell of boiling alcohol.

    The butler, who was old and thin and very straight and whitehaired, held branches of the plants back for me to pass, and we came to an opening in the middle of the place. A large reddish Turkish rug was spread down on the hexagonal flagstones. In the middle of the rug, in a wheel chair, a very old man sat with a traveling rug around his body and watched us come.

    Nothing lived in his face but the eyes. Black eyes, deep-set, shining, untouchable. The rest of his face was the leaden mask of death, sunken temples, a sharp nose, outward-turning ear lobes, a mouth that was a thin white slit. He was wrapped partly in a reddish and very shabby bathrobe and partly in the rug. His hands had purple fingernails and were clasped loosely, motionless on the rug. He had a few scattered wisps of white hair on his skull.

    The butler said: "This is Mr. Carmady, General."

    The old man stared at me. After a while a sharp, shrewish voice said: "Place a chair for Mr. Carmady."

    The butler dragged a wicker chair out and I sat down. I put my hat on the floor. The butler picked it up.

    "Brandy," the general said. "How do you like your brandy, sir?"

    "Any way at all," I said.

    He snorted. The butler went away. The general stared at me with his unblinking eyes. He snorted again.

    "I always take champagne with mine," he said. "A third of a glass of brandy under the champagne, and the champagne as cold as Valley Forge. Colder, if you can get it colder."

    A noise that might have been a chuckle came out of him.

    "Not that I was at Valley Forge," he said. "Not quite that bad. You may smoke, sir."

    I thanked him and said I was tired of smoking for a while. I got a handkerchief out and mopped my face.

    "Take your coat off, sir. Dud always did. Orchids require heat, Mr. Carmady-like sick old men."

    I took my coat off, a raincoat I had brought along. It looked like rain. Larry Batzel had said it was going to rain.

    "Dud is my son-in-law. Dudley O'Mara. I believe you had something to tell me about him."

    "Just hearsay," I said. "I wouldn't want to go into it, unless I had your O.K., General Winslow."

    The basilisk eyes stared at me. "You are a private detective. You want to be paid, I suppose."

    "I'm in that line of business," I said. "But that doesn't mean I have to be paid for every breath I draw. It's just something I heard. You might like to pass it on yourself to the Missing Persons Bureau."

    "I see," he said quietly. "A scandal of some sort."

    The butler came back before I could answer. He wheeled a tea wagon in through the jungle, set it at my elbow and mixed me a brandy and soda. He went away.

    I sipped the drink. "It seems there was a girl," I said. "He knew her before he knew your daughter. She's married to a racketeer now. It seems-"

    "I've heard all that," he said. "I don't give a damn. What I want to know is where he is and if he's all right. If he's happy."

    I stared at him popeyed. After a moment I said weakly: "Maybe I could find the girl, or the boys downtown could, with what I could tell them."

    He plucked at the edge of his rug and moved his head about an inch. I think he was nodding. Then he said very slowly: "Probably I'm talking too much for my health, but I want to make something clear. I'm a cripple. I have two ruined legs and half my lower belly. I don't eat much or sleep much. I'm a bore to myself and a damn nuisance to everybody else. So I miss Dud. He used to spend a lot of time with me. Why, God only knows."

    "Well-" I began.

    "Shut up. You're a young man to me, so I can be rude to you. Dud left without saying goodbye to me. That wasn't like him. He drove his car away one evening and nobody has heard from him since. If he got tired of my fool daughter and her brat, if he wanted some other woman, that's all right. He got a brainstorm and left without saying goodbye to me, and now he's sorry. That's why I don't hear from him. Find him and tell him I understand. That's all-unless he needs money. If he does, he can have all he wants."

    His leaden cheeks almost had a,pink tinge now. His black eyes were brighter, if possible. He leaned back very slowly and closed his eyes.

    I drank a lot of my drink in one long swallow, I said: "Suppose he's in a jam. Say, on account of the girl's husband. This Joe Mesarvey."

    He opened his eyes and winked. "Not an O'Mara," he said. "It's the other fellow would be in a jam."

    "Okay. Shall I just pass on to the Bureau where I heard this girl was?"

    "Certainly not. They've done nothing. Let them go on doing it. Find him yourself. I'll pay you a thousand dollars-even if you only have to walk across the street. Tell him everything is all right here. The old man's doing fine and sends his love. That's all."

    I couldn't tell him. Suddenly I couldn't tell him anything Larry Batzel had told me, or what had happened to Larry, or anything about it. I finished my drink and stood up and put my coat back on. I said: "That's too much money for the job, General Winslow. We can talk about that later. Have I your authority to represent you in my own way?"

    He pressed a bell on his wheel chair. "Just tell him," he said. "I want to know he's all right and I want him to know I'm all right. That's all-unless he needs money. Now you'll have to excuse me. I'm tired."

    He closed his eyes. I went back through the jungle and the butler met me at the door with my hat.

    I breathed in some cool air and said: "The general wants me to see Mrs. O'Mara."

    

    

    This room had a white carpet from wall to wall. Ivory drapes of immense height lay tumbled casually on the white carpet inside the many windows. The windows stared towards the dark foothills, and the air beyond the glass was dark too. It hadn't started to rain yet, but there was a feeling of pressure in the atmosphere.

    Mrs. O'Mara was stretched out on a white chaise longue with both her slippers off and her feet in the net stockings they don't wear any more. She was tall and dark, with a sulky mouth. Handsome, but this side of beautiful.

    She said: "What in the world can I do for you? It's all known. Too damn known. Except that I don't know you, do I?"

    "Well, hardly," I said. "I'm just a private copper in a small way of business."

    She reached for a glass I hadn't noticed but would have looked for in a moment, on account of her way of talking and the fact she had her slippers off. She drank languidly, flashing a ring.

    "I met him in a speakeasy," she said with a sharp laugh. "A very handsome bootlegger, with thick curly hair and an Irish grin. So I married him. Out of boredom. As for him, the bootlegging business was even then uncertain-if there were no other attractions."

    She waited for me to say there were, but not as if she cared a lot whether I came through. I just said: "You didn't see him leave on the day he disappeared?"

    "No. I seldom saw him leave, or come back. It was like that." She drank some more of her drink,

    "Huh," I grunted. "But, of course, you didn't quarrel." They never do,

    "There are so many ways of quarreling, Mr. Carmady."

    "Yeah. I like your saying that. Of course you knew about the girl."

    "I'm glad I'm being properly frank to an old family detective. Yes, I knew about the girl." She curled a tendril of inky hair behind her ear.

    "Did you know about her before he disappeared?" I asked politely.

    "Certainly."

    "How?"

    "You're pretty direct, aren't you? Connections, as they say. I'm an old speak fancier. Or didn't you know that?"

    "Did you know the bunch at the Dardanella?"

    "I've been there." She didn't look startled, or even surprised. "In fact I practically lived there for a week. That's where I met Dudley O'Mara."

    "Yeah. Your father married pretty late in life, didn't he?"

    I watched color fade in her cheeks. I wanted her mad, but there was nothing doing. She smiled and the color came back and she rang a push bell on a cord down in the swansdown cushions of the chaise longue.

    "Very late," she said, "if it's any of your business."

    "It's not," I said.

    A coy-looking maid came in and mixed a couple of drinks at a side table. She gave one to Mrs. O'Mara, put one down beside me. She went away again, showing a nice pair of legs under a short skirt.

    Mrs. O'Mara watched the door shut and then said: "The whole thing has got Father into a mood. I wish Dud would wire or write or something."

    I said slowly: "He's an old, old man, crippled, half buried already. One thin thread of interest held him to life. The thread snapped and nobody gives a damn. He tries to act as if he didn't give a damn himself. I don't call that a mood. I call that a pretty swell display of intestinal fortitude."

    "Gallant," she said, and her eyes were daggers. "But you haven't touched your drink."

    "I have to go," I said. "Thanks all the same."

    She held a slim, tinted hand out and I went over and touched it. The thunder burst suddenly behind the hills and she jumped. A gust of air shook the windows.

    I went down a tiled staircase to the hallway and the butler appeared out of a shadow and opened the door for me.

    I looked down a succession of terraces decorated with flower beds and imported trees. At the bottom a high metal railing with gilded spearheads and a six-foot hedge inside. A sunken driveway crawled down to the main gates and a lodge inside them.

    Beyond the estate the hill sloped down to the city and the old oil wells of La Brea, now partly a park, partly a deserted stretch of fenced-in wild land. Some of the wooden derricks still stood. These had made the wealth of the Winslow family and then the family had run away from them up the hill, far enough to get away from the smell of the sumps, not too far for them to look out of the front windows and see what made them rich.

    I walked down brick steps between the terraced lawns. On one of them a dark-haired, pale-faced kid of ten or eleven was throwing darts at a target hung on a tree. I went along near him.

    "You young O'Mara?" I asked.

    He leaned against a stone bench with four darts in his hand and looked at me with cold, slaty eyes, old eyes.

    "I'm Dade Winslow Trevillyan," he said grimly.

    "Oh, then Dudley O'Mara's not your dad."

    "Of course not." His voice was full of scorn. "Who are you?"

    "I'm a detective. I'm going to find your-I mean, Mr. O'Mara."

    That didn't bring us any closer. Detectives were nothing to him. The thunder was tumbling about in the hills like a bunch of elephants playing tag. I had another idea.

    "Bet you can't put four out of five into the gold at thirty feet."

    He livened up sharply. "With these?"

    "Uh-huh."

    "How much you bet?" he snapped.

    "Oh, a dollar."

    He ran to the target and cleaned darts off it, came back and took a stance by the bench.

    "That's not thirty feet," I said.

    He gave me a sour look and went a few feet behind the bench. I grinned, then I stopped grinning.

    His small hand darted so swiftly I could hardly follow it. Five darts hung in the gold center of the target in less than that made seconds. He stared at me triumphantly.

    "Gosh, you're pretty good, Master Trevillyan," I grunted, and got my dollar out.

    His small hand snapped at it like a trout taking the fly. He had it out of sight like a flash.

    "That's nothing," he chuckled. "You ought to see me on our target range back of the garages. Want to go over there and bet some more?"

    I looked back up the hill and saw part of a low white building backed up to a bank,

    "Well, not today," I said. "Next time I visit here maybe. So Dud O'Mara is not your dad. If I find him anyway, will it be all right with you?"

    He shrugged his thin, sharp shoulders in a maroon sweater. "Sure. But what can you do the police can't do?"

    "It's a thought," I said, and left him.

    I went on down the brick walk to the bottom of the lawns and along inside the hedge towards the gatehouse. I could see glimpses of the street through the hedge. When I was halfway to the lodge I saw the blue sedan outside. It was a small neat car, low-slung, very clean, lighter than a police car, but about the same size. Over beyond it I could see my roadster waiting under the pepper tree.

    I stood looking at the sedan through the hedge. I could see the drift of somebody's cigarette smoke against the windshield inside the car. I turned my back to the lodge and looked up the hill. The Trevillyan kid had gone somewhere out of sight, to salt his dollar down maybe, though a dollar shouldn't have meant much to him.

    I bent over and unsheathed the 7.65 Luger I was wearing that day and stuck it nose-down inside my left sock, inside my shoe. I could walk that way, if I didn't walk too fast. I went on to the gates.

    They kept them locked and nobody got in without identification from the house. The lodge keeper, a big husky with a gun under his arm, came out and let me through a small postern at the side of the gates. I stood talking to him through the bars for a minute, watching the sedan, It looked all right. There seemed to be two men in it. It was about a hundred feet along in the shadow of the high wall on the other side. It was a very narrow street, without sidewalks. I didn't have far to go to my roadster.

    I walked a little stiffly across the dark pavement and got in, grabbed quickly down into a small compartment in the front part of the seat where I kept a spare gun. It was a police Colt. I slid it inside my under-arm holster and started the car.

    I eased the brake off and pulled away. Suddenly the rain let go in big splashing drops and the sky was as black as Carrie Nation's bonnet. Not so black but that I saw the sedan wheel away from the curb behind me.

    I started the windshield wiper and built up to forty miles an hour in a hurry. I had gone about eight blocks when they gave me the siren. That fooled me. It was a quiet street, deadly quiet. I slowed down and pulled over to the curb. The sedan slid up beside me and I was looking at the black snout of a submachine gun over the sill of the rear door.

    Behind it a narrow face with reddened eyes, a fixed mouth. A voice above the sound of the rain and the windshield wiper and the noise of the two motors said: "Get in here with us. Be nice, if you know what I mean."

    They were not cops. It didn't matter now. I shut off the ignition, dropped my car keys on the floor and got out on the running board. The man behind the wheel of the sedan didn't look at me. The one behind kicked a door open and slid away along the seat, holding the tommy gun nicely.

    I got into the sedan.

    "Okay, Louie. The frisk."

    The driver came out from under his wheel and got behind me. He got the Colt from under my arm, tapped my hips and pockets, my belt line.

    "Clean," he said, and got back into the front of the car.

    The man with the tommy reached forward with his left hand and took my Colt from the driver, then lowered the tommy to the floor of the car and draped a brown rug over it. He leaned back in the corner again, smooth and relaxed, holding the Colt on his knee.

    "Okay, Louie. Now let's ride."

    

    

    We rode-idly, gently, the rain drumming on the roof and streaming down the windows on one side. We wound along curving hill streets, among estates that covered acres, whose houses were distant clusters of wet gables beyond blurred trees.

    A tang of cigarette smoke floated under my nose and the redeyed man said: "What did he tell you?"

    "Little enough," I said. "That Mona blew town the night the papers got it. Old Winslow knew it already."

    "He wouldn't have to dig very deep for that," Red-eyes said. "The buttons didn't. What else?"

    "He said he'd been shot at. He wanted me to ride him out of town. At the last moment he ran off alone. I don't know why."

    "Loosen up, peeper," Red-eyes said dryly. "It's your only way out."

    "That's all there is," I said, and looked out of the window at the driving rain.

    "You on the case for the old guy?"

    "No. He's tight."

    Red-eyes laughed. The gun in my shoe felt heavy and unsteady, and very far away. I said: "That might be all there is to know about O'Mara."

    The man in the front seat turned his head a little and growled: "Where the hell did you say that street was?"

    "Top of Beverly Glen, stupid. Mulholland Drive." "Oh, that. Jeeze, that ain't paved worth a damn." "We'll pave it with the peeper," Red-eyes said. The estates thinned out and scrub oak took possession of the hillsides.

    "You ain't a bad guy," Red-eyes said. "You're just tight, like the old man. Don't you get the idea? We want to know everything he said, so we'll know whether we got to blot you or no."

    "Go to hell," I said. "You wouldn't believe me anyway."

    "Try us. This is just a job to us. We just do it and pass on."

    "It must be nice work," I said. "While it lasts."

    "You'll crack wise once too often, guy."

    "I did-long ago, while you were still in Reform School. I'm still getting myself disliked."

    Red-eyes laughed again. There seemed to be very little bluster about him.

    "Far as we know you're clean with the law. Didn't make no cracks this morning. That right?"

    "If I say yes, you can blot me right now. Okay."

    "How about a grand pin money and forget the whole thing?"

    "You wouldn't believe that either."

    "Yeah, we would. Here's the idea. We do the job and pass on. We're an organization. But you live here, you got goodwill and a business. You'd play ball."

    "Sure," I said. "I'd play ball."

    "We don't," Red-eyes said softly, "never knock off a legit. Bad for the trade."

    He leaned back in the corner, the gun on his right knee, and reached into an inner pocket. He spread a large tan wallet on his knee and fished two bills out of it, slid them folded along the seat. The wallet went back into his pocket.

    "Yours," he said gravely. "You won't last twenty-four hours if you slip your cable."

    I picked the bills up. Two five hundreds. I tucked them in my vest. "Right," I said. "I wouldn't be a legit any more then, would I?"

    "Think that over, dick."

    We grinned at each other, a couple of nice lads getting along in a harsh, unfriendly world. Then Red-eyes turned his head sharply.

    "Okay, Louie, Forget the Mulholland stuff. Pull up."

    The car was halfway up a long bleak twist of hill. The rain drove in gray curtains down the slope. There was no ceiling, no horizon. I could see a quarter of a mile and I could see nothing outside our car that lived.

    The driver edged over to the side of the bank and shut his motor off. He lit a cigarette and draped an arm on the back seat.

    He smiled at me. He had a nice smile-like an alligator. "We'll have a drink on it," Red-eyes said. "I wish I could make me a grand that easy. Just tyin' my nose to my chin."

    "You ain't got no chin," Louie said, and went on smiling. Red-eyes put the Colt down on the seat and drew a flat halfpint out of his side pocket. It looked like good stuff, green stamp, bottled in bond. He unscrewed the top with his teeth, sniffed at the liquor and smacked his lips.

    "No Crow McGee in this," he said. "This is the company spread. Tilt her."

    He reached along the seat and gave me the bottle. I could have had his wrist, but there was Louie, and I was too far from my ankle.

    I breathed shallowly from the top of my lungs and held the bottle near my lips, sniffed carefully. Behind the charred smell of the bourbon there was something else, very faint, a fruity odor that would have meant nothing to me in another place. Suddenly and for no reason at all I remembered something Larry Batzel had said, something like: "East of Realito, towards the mountains, near the old cyanide plant." Cyanide. That was the word.

    There was a swift tightness in my temples as I put the bottle to my mouth. I could feel my skin crawling, and the air was suddenly cold on it. I held the bottle high up around the liquor level and took a long gurgling drag at it. Very hearty and relaxing. About half a teaspoonful went into my mouth and none of that stayed there.

    I coughed sharply and lurched forward gagging. Red-eyes laughed.

    "Don't say you're sick from just one drink, pal."

    I dropped the bottle and sagged far down in the seat, gagging violently. My legs slid way to the left, the left one underneath. I sprawled down on top of them, my arms limp. I had the gun.

    I shot him under my left arm, almost without looking. He never touched the Colt except to knock it off the seat. The one shot was enough. I heard him lurch. I snapped a shot upward towards where Louie would be.

    Louie wasn't there. He was down behind the front seat. He was silent. The whole car, the whole landscape was silent. Even the rain seemed for a moment to be utterly silent rain.

    I still didn't have time to look at Red-eyes, but he wasn't doing anything. I dropped the Luger and yanked the tommy gun out from under the rug, got my left hand on the front grip, got it set against my shoulder low down. Louie hadn't made a sound.

    "Listen, Louie," I said softly, "I've got the stutter gun. How's about it?"

    A shot came through the seat, a shot that Louie knew wasn't going to do any good. It starred a frame of unbreakable glass. There was more silence. Louie said thickly: "I got a pineapple here. Want it?"

    "Pull the pin and hold it," I said. "It will take care of both of us."

    "Hell!" Louie said violently. "Is he croaked? I ain't got no pineapple."

    I looked at Red-eyes then. He looked very comfortable in the corner of the seat, leaning back. He seemed to have three eyes, one of them redder even than the other two. For under-arm shooting that was something to be almost bashful about. It was too good.

    "Yeah, Louie, he's croaked," I said. "How do we get together?"

    I could hear his hard breathing now, and the rain had stopped being silent. "Get out of the heap," he growled. "I'll blow."

    "You get out, Louie. I'll blow."

    "Jeeze, I can't walk home from here, pal."

    "You won't have to, Louie. I'll send a car for you."

    "Jeeze, I ain't done nothing. All I done was drive."

    "Then reckless driving will be the charge, Louie. You can fix that-you and your organization. Get out before I uncork this popgun."

    A door latch clicked and feet thumped on the running board, then on the roadway. I straightened up suddenly with the chopper. Louie was in the road in the rain, his hands empty and the alligator smile still on his face.

    I got out past the dead man's neatly shod feet, got my Colt and the Luger off the floor, laid the heavy twelve-pound tommy gun back on the car floor. I got handcuffs off my hip, motioned to Louie. He turned around sulkily and put his hands behind him.

    "You got nothing on me," he complained. "I got protection."

    I clicked the cuffs on him and went over him for guns, much more carefully than he had gone over me. He had one besides the one he had left in the car.

    I dragged Red-eyes out of the car and let him arrange himself on the wet roadway. He began to bleed again, but he was quite dead. Louie eyed him bitterly.

    "He was a smart guy," he said. "Different. He liked tricks. Hello, smart guy."

    I got my handcuff key out and unlocked one cuff, dragged it down and locked it to the dead man's lifted wrist.

    Louie's eyes got round and horrified and at last his smile went away.

    "Jeeze," he whined. "Holy-! Jeeze. You ain't going to leave me like this, pal?"

    "Goodbye, Louie," I said. "That was a friend of mine you cut down this morning."

    "Holy-!" Louie whined.

    I got into the sedan and started it, drove on to a place where I could turn, drove back down the hill past him. He stood stiffly as a scorched tree, his face as white as snow, with the dead man at his feet, one linked hand reaching up to Louie's hand. There was the horror of a thousand nightmares in his eyes.

    I left him there in the rain.

    It was getting dark early. I left the sedan a couple of blocks from my own car and locked it up, put the keys in the oil strainer. I walked back to my roadster and drove downtown.

    I called the homicide detail from a phone booth, asked for a man named Grinnell, told him quickly what had happened and where to find Louie and the sedan. I told him I thought they were the thugs that machine-gunned Larry Batzel. I didn't tell him anything about Dud O'Mara.

    "Nice work," Grinnell said in a queer voice. "But you better come in fast. There's a tag out for you, account of what some milk driver phoned in an hour ago."

    "I'm all in," I said. "I've got to eat. Keep me off the air and I'll come in after a while."

    "You better come in, boy. I'm sorry, but you better."

    "Well, okay," I said.

    I hung up and left the neighborhood without hanging around. I had to break it now. I had to, or get broken myself.

    I had a meal down near the Plaza and started for Realito.

    

    

    At about eight o'clock two yellow vapor lamps glowed high up in the rain and a dim stencil sign strung across the highway read: "Welcome to Realito."

    Frame houses on the main street, a sudden knot of stores, the lights of the corner drugstore behind fogged glass, a flyingcluster of cars in front of a tiny movie palace, and a dark bank on another corner, with a knot of men standing in front of it in the rain. That was Realito. I went on. Empty fields closed in again.

    This was past the orange country; nothing but the empty fields and the crouched foothills, and the rain.

    It was a smart mile, more like three, before I spotted a side road and a faint light on it, as if from behind drawn blinds in a house. Just at that moment my left front tire let go with an angry hiss. That was cute. Then the right rear let go the same way.

    I stopped almost exactly at the intersection. Very cute indeed. I got out, turned my raincoat up a little higher, unshipped a flash, and looked at a flock of heavy galvanized tacks with heads as big as dimes. The flat shiny butt of one of them blinked at me from my tire.

    Two flats and one spare. I tucked my chin down and started towards the faint light up the side road.

    It was the place all right. The light came from the tilted skylight on the garage roof. Big double doors in front were shut tight, but light showed at the cracks, strong white light. I tossed the beam of the flash up and read: "Art Huck-Auto Repairs and Refinishing."

    Beyond the garage a house sat back from the muddy road behind a thin clump of trees. That had light too. I saw a small buttoned-up coup� in front of the wooden porch.

    The first thing was the tires, if it could be worked, and they didn't know me. It was a wet night for walking.

    I snapped the flash out and rapped on the doors with it. The light inside went out. I stood there licking rain off my upper lip, the flash in my left hand, my right inside my coat. I had the Luger back under my arm again.

    A voice spoke through the door, and didn't sound pleased.

    "What you want? Who are you?"

    "Open up," I said. "I've got two flat tires on the highway and only one spare. I need help."

    "We're closed up, mister. Realito's a mile west of here."

    I started to kick the door. There was swearing inside, then another, much softer voice.

    "A wise guy, huh? Open up, Art."

    A bolt squealed and half of the door sagged inward. I snapped the flash again and it hit a gaunt face. Then an arm swept and knocked it out of my hand. A gun had just peeked at me from the flailing hand.

    I dropped low, felt around for the flash and was still. I just didn't pull a gun.

    "Kill the spot, mister. Guys get hurt that way."

    The flash was burning down in the mud. I snapped it off, stood up with it. Light went on inside the garage, outlined a tall man in coveralls. He backed inward and his gun held on me.

    "Come on in and shut the door."

    I did that. "Tacks all over the end of your street," I said. "I thought you wanted the business."

    "Ain't you got any sense? A bank job was pulled at Realito this afternoon."

    "I'm a stranger here," I said, remembering the knot of men in front of the bank in the rain.

    "Okay, okay. Well there was and the punks are hid out somewhere in the hills, they say. You stepped on their tacks, huh?"

    "So it seems." I looked at the other man in the garage.

    He was short, heavy-set, with a cool brown face and cool brown eyes. He wore a belted raincoat of brown leather. His brown hat had the usual rakish tilt and was dry. His hands were in his pockets and he looked bored.

    There was a hot sweetish smell of pyroxylin paint on the air. A big sedan over in the corner had a paint gun lying on its fender. It was a Buick, almost new. It didn't need the paint it was getting.

    The man in coveralls tucked his gun out of sight through a flap in the side of his clothes. He looked at the brown man. The brown man looked at me and said gently: "Where you from, stranger?"

    "Seattle," I said.

    "Going west-to the big city?" He had a soft voice, soft and dry, like the rustle of well-worn leather.

    "Yes. How far is it?"

    "About forty miles. Seems farther in this weather. Come the long way, didn't you? By Tahoe and Lone Pine?"

    "Not Tahoe," I said. "Reno and Carson City."

    "Still the long way." A fleeting smile touched the brown lips.

    "Take a jack and get his flats, Art."

    "Now, listen, Lash-" the man in the coveralls growled, and stopped as though his throat had been cut from ear to ear.

    I could have sworn that he shivered. There was dead silence. The brown man didn't move a muscle. Something looked out of his eyes, and then his eyes lowered, almost shyly. His voice was the same soft, dry rustle of sound.

    "Take two jacks, Art. He's got two flats."

    The gaunt man swallowed. Then he went over to a corner and put a coat on, and a cap. He grabbed up a socket wrench and a handjack and wheeled a dolly jack over to the doors.

    "Back on the highway, is it?" he asked me almost tenderly.

    "Yeah. You can use the spare for one spot, if you're busy," I said.

    "He's not busy," the brown man said and looked at his fingernails.

    Art went out with his tools. The door shut again. I looked at the Buick. I didn't look at Lash Yeager. I knew it was Lash Yeager. There wouldn't be two men called Lash that came to that garage. I didn't look at him because I would be looking across the sprawled body of Larry Batzel, and it would show in my face. For a moment, anyway.

    He glanced towards the Buick himself. "Just a panel job to start with," he drawled. "But the guy that owns it has dough and his driver needed a few bucks. You know the racket."

    "Sure," I said.

    The minutes passed on tiptoe. Long, sluggish minutes. Then feet crunched outside and the door was pushed open. The light hit pencils of rain and made silver wires of them. Art trundled two muddy flats in sulkily, kicked the door shut, let one of the flats fall on its side. The rain and fresh air had given him his nerve back. He looked at me savagely.

    "Seattle," he snarled. "Seattle, my eye!"

    The brown man lit a cigarette as if he hadn't heard. Art peeled his coat off and yanked my tire up on a rim spreader, tore it loose viciously, had the tube out and cold-patched in nothing flat. He strode scowling over to the wall near me and grabbed an air hose, let enough air into the tube to give it body, and hefted it in both hands to dip it in a washtub of water.

    I was a sap, but their teamwork was very good. Neither had looked at the other since Art came back with my tires.

    Art tossed the air-stiffened tube up casually, caught it with both hands wide, looked it over sourly beside the washtub of water, took one short easy step and slammed it down over my head and shoulders.

    He jumped behind me in a flash, leaned his weight down on the rubber, dragged it tight against my chest and arms. I could move my hands, but I couldn't get near my gun.

    The brown man brought his right hand out of his pocket and tossed a wrapped cylinder of nickels up and down on his palm as he stepped lithely across the floor.

    I heaved back hard, then suddenly threw all my weight forward. Just as suddenly Art let go of the tube, and kneed me from behind.

    I sprawled, but I never knew when I reached the floor. The fist with the weighted tube of nickels met me in midflight. Perfectly timed, perfectly weighted, and with my own weight to help it out.

    I went out like a puff of dust in a draft.

    

    

    It seemed there was a woman and she was sitting beside a lamp. Light shone on my face, so I shut my eyes again and tried to look at her through my eyelashes. She was so platinumed that her head shone like a silver fruit bowl.

    She wore a green traveling dress with a mannish cut to it and a broad white collar falling over the lapels. A sharp-angled glossy bag stood at her feet. She was smoking, and a drink was tall and pale at her elbow.

    I opened my eye wider and said: "Hello there."

    Her eyes were the eyes I remembered, outside Sardi's in a secondhand Rolls-Royce. Very blue eyes, very soft and lovely. Not the eyes of a hustler around the fast money boys.

    "How do you feel?" Her voice was soft and lovely too.

    "Great," I said. "Except somebody built a filling station on my jaw."

    "What did you expect, Mr. Carmady? Orchids?"

    "So you know my name."

    "You slept well. They had plenty of time to go through your pockets. They did everything but embalm you."

    "Right," I said.

    I could move a little, not very much. My wrists were behind my back, handcuffed. There was a little poetic justice in that. From the cuffs a cord ran to my ankles, and tied them, and then dropped down out of sight over the end of the davenport and was tied somewhere else. I was almost as helpless as if I had been screwed up in a coffin.

    "What time is it?"

    She looked sideways down at her wrist, beyond the spiral of her cigarette smoke.

    "Ten-seventeen. Got a date?"

    "Is this the house next the garage? Where are the boys- digging a grave?"

    "You wouldn't care, Carmady. They'll be back."

    "Unless you have the key to these bracelets you might spare me a little of that drink."

    She rose all in one piece and came over to me, with the tall amber glass in her hand. She bent over me. Her breath was delicate. I gulped from the glass craning my neck up.

    "I hope they don't hurt you," she said distantly, stepping back. "I hate killing."

    "And you Joe Mesarvey's wife. Shame on you. Gimme some more of the hooch."

    She gave me some more. Blood began to move in my stiffened body.

    "I kind of like you," she said. "Even if your face does look like a collision mat."

    "Make the most of it," I said. "It won't last long even this good."

    She looked around swiftly and seemed to listen. One of the two doors was ajar. She looked towards that. Her face seemed pale. But the sounds were only the rain.

    She sat down by the lamp again.

    "Why did you come here and stick your neck out?" she asked slowly, looking at the floor.

    The carpet was made of red and tan squares. There were bright green pine trees on the wallpaper and the curtains were blue. The furniture, what I could see of it, looked as if it came from one of those places that advertise on bus benches.

    "I had a rose for you," I said. "From Larry Batzel."

    She lifted something off the table and twirled it slowly, the dwarf rose he had left for her.

    "I got it," she said quietly. "There was a note, but they didn't show me that. Was it for me?"

    "No, for me. He left it on my-table before he went out and got shot."

    Her face fell apart like something you see in a nightmare. Her mouth and eyes were black hollows. She didn't make a sound. And after a moment her face settled back into the same calmly beautiful lines.

    "They didn't tell me that either," she said softly.

    "He got shot," I said carefully, "because he found out what Joe and Lash Yeager did to Dud O'Mara. Bumped him off."

    That one didn't faze her at all. "Joe didn't do anything to Dud O'Mara," she said quietly. "I haven't seen Dud in two years. That was just newspaper hooey, about me seeing him."

    "It wasn't in the papers," I said.

    "Well, it was hooey wherever it was. Joe is in Chicago. He went yesterday by plane to sell out. If the deal goes through, Lash and I are to follow him. Joe is no killer."

    I stared at her.

    Her eyes got haunted again. "Is Larry-is he-?"

    "He's dead," I said. "It was a professional job, with a tommy gun. I didn't mean they did it personally."

    She took hold of her lip and held it for a moment tight between her teeth. I could hear her slow, hard breathing. She jammed her cigarette in an ashtray and stood up.

    "Joe didn't do it!" she stormed. "I know damn well he didn't. He-" She stopped cold, glared at me, touched her hair, then suddenly yanked it off. It was a wig. Underneath her own hair was short like a boy's, and streaked yellow and whitish brown, with darker tints at the roots. It couldn't make her ugly.

    I managed a sort of laugh. "You just came out here to molt, didn't you, Silver-Wig? And I thought they were hiding you out-so it would look as if you had skipped with Dud O'Mara."

    She kept on staring at me. As if she hadn't heard a word I said. Then she strode over to a wall mirror and put the wig back on, straightened it, turned and faced me.

    "Joe didn't kill anybody," she said again, in a low, tight voice. "He's a heel-but not that kind of heel. He doesn't know anything more about where Dud O'Mara went than I do. And I don't know anything."

    "He just got tired of the rich lady and scrammed," I said dully.

    She stood near me now, her white fingers down at her sides, shining in the lamplight. Her head above me was almost in shadow. The rain drummed and my jaw felt large and hot and the nerve along the jawbone ached, ached.

    "Lash has the only car that was here," she said softly. "Can you walk to Realito, if I cut the ropes?"

    "Sure. Then what?"

    "I've never been mixed up in a murder. I won't now. I won't ever."

    She went out of the room very quickly, and came back with a long kitchen knife and sawed the cord that tied my ankles, pulled it off, cut the place where it was tied to the handcuffs. She stopped once to listen, but it was just the rain again.

    I rolled up to a sitting position and stood up. My feet were numb, but that would pass. I could walk. I could run, if I had to.

    "Lash has the key of the cuffs," she said dully.

    "Let's go," I said. "Got a gun?"

    "No. I'm not going. You beat it. He may be back any minute. They were just moving stuff out of the garage."

    I went over close to her. "You're going to stay here after turning me loose? Wait for that killer? You're nuts. Come on, Silver-Wig, you're going with me."

    "No."

    "Suppose," I said, "he did kill O'Mara? Then he also killed Larry. It's got to be that way."

    "Joe never killed anybody," she almost snarled at me.

    "Well, suppose Yeager did."

    "You're lying, Carmady. Just to scare me. Get out. I'm not afraid of Lash Yeager. I'm his boss's wife."

    "Joe Mesarvey is a handful of mush," I snarled back. "The only time a girl like you goes for a wrong gee is when he's a handful of mush. Let's drift."

    "Get out!" she said hoarsely.

    "Okay." I turned away from her and went through the door.

    She almost ran past me into the hallway and opened the front door, looked out into the black wetness. She motioned me forward.

    "Goodbye," she whispered. "I hope you find Dud. I hope you find who killed Larry. But it wasn't Joe."

    I stepped close to her, almost pushed her against the wall with my body.

    "You're still crazy, Silver-Wig. Goodbye."

    She raised her hands quickly and put them on my face. Cold hands, icy cold. She kissed me swiftly on the mouth with cold lips.

    "Beat it, strong guy. I'll be seeing you some more. Maybe in heaven."

    I went through the door and down the dark slithery wooden steps of the porch, across gravel to the round grass plot and the clump of thin trees. I came past them to the roadway, went back along it towards Foothill Boulevard. The rain touched my face with fingers of ice that were no colder than her fingers.

    The curtained roadster stood just where I had left it, leaned over, the left front axle on the tarred shoulder of the highway. My spare and one stripped rim were thrown in the ditch.

    They had probably searched it, but I still hoped. I crawled in backwards and banged my head on the steering post and rolled over to get the manacled hands into my little secret gun pocket. They touched the barrel. It was still there.

    I got it out, got myself out of the car, got hold of the gun by the right end and looked it over.

    I held it light against my back to protect it a little from the rain and started back towards the house.

    

    

    I was halfway there when he came back. His lights turning quickly off the highway almost caught me. I flopped into the ditch and put my nose in the mud and prayed.

    The car hummed past. I heard the wet rasp of its tires shouldering the gravel in front of the house. The motor died and lights went off. The door slammed. I didn't hear the house door shut, but I caught a feeble fringe of light through the trees as it opened.

    I got up on my feet and went on. I came up beside the car, a small coup�, rather old. The gun was down at my side, pulled around my hip as far as the cuffs would let it come.

    The coup� was empty. Water gurgled in the radiator. I listened and heard nothing from the house. No loud voices, no quarrel. Only the heavy bong-bong-bong of the raindrops hitting the elbows at the bottom of rain gutters.

    Yeager was in the house. She had let me go and Yeager was in there with her. Probably she wouldn't tell him anything. She would just stand and look at him. She was his boss's wife. That would scare Yeager to death.

    He wouldn't stay long, but he wouldn't leave her behind, alive or dead. He would be on his way and take her with him. What happened to her later on was something else.

    All I had to do was wait for him to come out. I didn't do it.

    I shifted the gun into my left hand and leaned down to scoop up some gravel. I threw it against the front window. It was a weak effort. Very little even reached the glass.

    I ran back behind the coup� and got its door open and saw the keys in the ignition lock. I crouched down on the running board, holding on to the door post.

    The house had already gone dark, but that was all. There wasn't any sound from it. No soap. Yeager was too cagy.

    I reached it with my foot and found the starter, then strained back with one hand and turned the ignition key. The warm motor caught at once, throbbed gently against the pounding rain.

    I got back to the ground and slid along to the rear of the car, crouched down.

    The sound of the motor got him. He couldn't be left there without a car.

    A darkened window slid up an inch, only some shifting of light on the glass showing it moved. Flame spouted from it, the racket of three quick shots. Glass broke in the coup�.

    I screamed and let the scream die into a gurgling groan. I was getting good at that sort of thing. I let the groan die in a choked gasp. I was through, finished. He had got me. Nice shooting, Yeager.

    Inside the house a man laughed. Then silence again, except for the rain and the quietly throbbing motor of the coup�.

    Then the house door inched open. A figure showed in it. She came out on the porch, stiffly, the white showing at her collar, the wig showing a little but not so much. She came down the steps like a wooden woman. I saw Yeager crouched behind her.

    She started across the gravel. Her voice said slowly, without any tone at all:

    "I can't see a thing, Lash. The windows are all misted."

    She jerked a little, as if a gun had prodded her, and came on. Yeager didn't speak. I could see him now past her shoulder, his hat, part of his face. But no kind of a shot for a man with cuffs on his wrists.

    She stopped again, and her voice was suddenly horrified.

    "He's behind the wheel!" she yelled. "Slumped over!"

    He fell for it. He knocked her to one side and started to blast again. More glass jumped around. A bullet hit a tree on my side of the car. A cricket whined somewhere. The motor kept right on humming.

    He was iow, crouched against the black, his face a grayness without form that seemed to come back very slowly after the glare of the shots. His own fire had blinded him too-for a second. That was enough.

    I shot him four times, straining the pulsing Colt against my ribs.

    He tried to turn and the gun slipped away from his hand. He half snatched for it in the air, before both his hands suddenly went against his stomach and stayed there. He sat down on the wet gravel and his harsh panting dominated every other sound of the wet night.

    I watched him lie down on his side, very slowly, without taking his hands away from his stomach. The panting stopped.

    It seemed like an age before Silver-Wig called out to me. Then she was beside me, grabbing my arm.

    "Shut the motor off!" I yelled at her. "And get the key of these damn irons out of his pocket."

    "You d-darn fool," she babbled. "W-what did you come back for?"

    

    

    Captain Al Root of the Missing Persons Bureau swung in his chair and looked at the sunny window. This was another day, and the rain had stopped long since.

    He said gruffly: "You're making a lot of mistakes, brother. Dud O'Mara just pulled down the curtain. None of those people knocked him off. The Batzel killing had nothing to do with it. They've got Mesarvey in Chicago and he looks clean. The Heeb you anchored to the dead guy don't even know who they were pulling the job for. Our boys asked him enough to be sure of that."

    "I'll bet they did," I said. "I've been in the same bucket all night and I couldn't tell them much either."

    He looked at me slowly, with large, bleak, tired eyes. "Killing Yeager was all right, I guess. And the chopper. In the circumstances. Besides I'm not homicide. I couldn't link any of that to O'Mara-unless you could."

    I could, but I hadn't. Not yet. "No," I said. "I guess not." I stuffed and lit my pipe. After a sleepless night it tasted better,

    "That all that's worrying you?"

    "I wondered why you didn't find the girl, at Realito. It couldn't have been very hard-for you."

    "We just didn't. We should have. I admit it. We didn't. Anything else?"

    I blew smoke across his desk. "I'm looking for O'Mara because the general told me to. It wasn't any use my telling him you would do everything that could be done. He could afford a man with all his time on it. I suppose you resent that."

    He wasn't amused. "Not at all, if he wants to waste money. The people that resent you are behind a door marked Homicide Bureau."

    He planted his feet with a slap and elbowed his desk.

    "O'Mara had fifteen grand in his clothes. That's a lot of jack but O'Mara would be the boy to have it. So he could take it out and have his old pals see him with it. Only they wouldn't think it was fifteen grand of real dough. His wife says it was. Now with any other guy but an ex-legger in the gravy that might indicate an intention to disappear. But not O'Mara. He packed it all the time."

    He bit a cigar and put a match to it. He waved a large finger. "See?"

    I said I saw.

    "Okay. O'Mara had fifteen grand, and a guy that pulls down the curtain can keep it down only so long as his wad lasts. Fifteen grand is a good wad. I might disappear myself, if I had that much. But after it's gone we get him. He cashes a check, lays down a marker, hits a hotel or store for credit, gives a reference, writes a letter or gets one. He's in a new town and he's got a new name, but he's got the same old appetite. He has to get back into the fiscal system one way or another. A guy can't have friends everywhere, and if he had, they wouldn't all stay clammed forever. Would they?"

    "No, they wouldn't," I said.

    "He went far," Roof said. "But the fifteen grand was all the preparation he made. No baggage, no boat or rail or plane reservation, no taxi or private rental hack to a point out of town. That's all checked. His own car was found a dozen blocks from where he lived. But that means nothing. He knew people who would ferry him several hundred miles and keep quiet about it, even in the face of a reward. Here, but not everywhere. Not new friends."

    "But you'll get him," I said.

    "When he gets hungry."

    "That could take a year or two. General Winslow may not live a year. That is a matter of sentiment, not whether you have an open file when you retire."

    "You attend to the sentiment, brother." His eyes moved and bushy reddish eyebrows moved with them. He didn't like me. Nobody did, in the police department, that day.

    "I'd like to," I said and stood up. "Maybe I'd go pretty far to attend to that sentiment."

    "Sure," Roof said, suddenly thoughtful. "Well, Winslow is a big man. Anything I can do let me know."

    "You could find out who had Larry Batzel gunned," I said. "Even if there isn't any connection."

    "We'll do that. Glad to," he guffawed and flicked ash all over his desk. "You just knock off the guys who can talk and we'll do the rest. We like to work that way."

    "It was self-defense," I growled. "I couldn't help myself."

    "Sure. Take the air, brother. I'm busy."

    But his large bleak eyes twinkled at me as I went out.

    

    

    The morning was all blue and gold and the birds in the ornamental trees of the Winslow estate were crazy with song after the rain.

    The gatekeeper let me in through the postern and I walked up the driveway and along the top terrace to the huge carved Italian front door. Before I rang the bell I looked down the hill and saw the Trevillyan kid sitting on his stone bench with his head cupped in his hands, staring at nothing.

    I went down the brick path to him. "No darts today, son?"

    He looked up at me with his lean, slaty, sunken eyes.

    "No. Did you find him?"

    "Your dad? No, sonny, not yet."

    He jerked his head. His nostrils flared angrily. "He's not my dad I told you. And don't talk to me as if I was four years old. My dad he's-he's in Florida or somewhere."

    "Well, I haven't found him yet, whoever's dad he is," I said.

    "Who smacked your jaw?" he asked, staring at me.

    "Oh, a fellow with a roll of nickels in his hand."

    "Nickels?"

    "Yeah. That's as good as brass knuckles. Try it sometime, but not on me," I grinned.

    "You won't find him," he said bitterly, staring at my jaw. "Him, I mean. My mother's husband."

    "I bet I do."

    "How much you bet?"

    "More money than even you've got in your pants."

    He kicked viciously at the edge of a red brick in the walk. His voice was still sulky, but more smooth. His eyes speculated.

    "Want to bet on something else? C'mon over to the range. I bet you a dollar I can knock down eight out of ten pipes in ten shots."

    I looked back towards the house. Nobody seemed impatient to receive me.

    "Well," I said, "we'll have to make it snappy. Let's go."

    We went along the side of the house under the windows. The orchid green-house showed over the tops of some bushy trees far back. A man in neat whipcord was polishing the chromium on a big car in front of the garages. We went past there to the low white building against the bank.

    The boy took a key out and unlocked the door and we went into close air that still held traces of cordite fumes. The boy clicked a spring lock on the door.

    "Me first," he snapped.

    The place looked something like a small beach shooting gallery. There was a counter with a.22 repeating rifle on it and a long, slim target pistol. Both well oiled but dusty. About thirty feet beyond the counter was a waist-high, solid-looking partition across the building, and behind that a simple layout of clay pipes and ducks and two round white targets marked off with black rings and stained by lead bullets.

    The clay pipes ran in an even line across the middle, and there was a big skylight, and a row of hooded overhead lights.

    The boy pulled a cord on the wall and a thick canvas blind slid across the skylight. He turned on the hooded lights and then the place really looked like a beach shooting gallery.

    He picked up the.22 rifle and loaded it quickly from a cardboard box of shells,.22 shorts.

    "A dollar I get eight out of ten pipes?"

    "Blast away," I said, and put my money on the counter.

    He took aim almost casually, fired too fast, showing off. He missed three pipes. It was pretty fancy shooting at that. He threw the rifle down on the counter.

    "Gee, go set up some more. Let's not count that one. I wasn't set."

    "You don't aim to lose any money, do you, son? Go set 'em up yourself. It's your range."

    His narrow face got angry and his voice got shrill. "You do it! I've got to relax, see. I've got to relax."

    I shrugged at him, lifted a flap in the counter and went along the whitewashed side wall, squeezed past the end of the low partition. The boy clicked his reloaded rifle shut behind me.

    "Put that down," I growled back at him. "Never touch a gun when there's anyone in front of you."

    He put it down, looking hurt.

    I bent down and grabbed a handful of clay pipes out of the sawdust in a big wooden box on the floor. I shook the yellow grains of wood off them and started to straighten up.

    I stopped with my hat above the barrier, just the top of my hat. I never knew why I stopped. Blind instinct.

    The.22 cracked and the lead bullet bonged into the target in front of my head. My hat stirred lazily on my head, as though a blackbird had swooped at it during the nesting season.

    A nice kid. He was full of tricks, like Red-eyes. I dropped the pipes and took hold of my hat by the brim, lifted it straight up off my head a few inches. The gun cracked again. Another metallic bong on the target.

    I let myself fall heavily to the wooden flooring, among the pipes.

    A door opened and shut. That was all. Nothing else. The hard glare from the hooded lights beat down on me. The sun peeked in at the edges of the skylight blind. There were two bright new splashes on the nearest target, and there were four small round holes in my hat, two and two, on each side.

    I crawled to the end of the barrier and peeked around it. The boy was gone. I could see the small muzzles of the two guns on the counter.

    I stood up and went back along the wall, switched the lights off, turned the knob of the spring lock and went out. The Winslow chauffeur whistled at his polish job around in front of the garages.

    I crushed my hat in my hand and went back along the side of the house, looking for the kid. I didn't see him. I rang the front door bell.

    I asked for Mrs. O'Mara. I didn't let the butler take my hat.

    

    

    She was in an oyster-white something, with white fur at the cuffs and collar and around the bottom. A breakfast table on wheels was pushed to one side of her chair and she was flicking ashes among the silver.

    The coy-looking maid with the nice legs came and took the table out and shut the tall white door. I sat down.

    Mrs. O'Mara leaned her head back against a cushion and looked tired. The line of her throat was distant, cold. She stared at me with a cool, hard look, in which there was plenty of dislike.

    "You seemed rather human yesterday," she said. "But I see you are just a brute like the rest of them. Just a brutal cop."

    "I came to ask you about Lash Yeager," I said.

    She didn't even pretend to be amused. "And why should you think of asking me?"

    "Well-if you lived a week at the Dardanella Club-" I waved my crunched-together hat.

    She looked at her cigarette fixedly. "Well, I did meet him, I believe. I remember the rather unusual name."

    "They all have names like that, those animals," I said. "It seems that Larry Batzel-I guess you read in your paper about him too-was a friend of Dud O'Mara's once. I didn't tell you about him yesterday. Maybe that was a mistake."

    A pulse began to throb in her throat. She said softly: "I have a suspicion you are about to become very insolent, that I may even have to have you thrown out."

    "Not before I've said my piece," I said. "It seems that Mr. Yeager's driver-they have drivers as well as unusual names, those animals-told Larry Batzel that Mr. Yeager was out this way the night O'Mara disappeared."

    The old army blood had to be good for something in her. She didn't move a muscle. She just froze solid.

    I got up and took the cigarette from between her frozen fingers and killed it in a white jade ashtray. I laid my hat carefully on her white satin knee. I sat down again.

    Her eyes moved after a while. They moved down and looked at the hat. Her face flushed very slowly, in two vivid patches over the cheekbones. She fought around with her tongue and lips.

    "I know," I said. "It's not much of a hat. I'm not making you a present of it. But just look at the bullet holes in it once."

    Her hand became alive and snatched at the hat. Her eyes became flames.

    She spread the crown out, looked at the holes, and shuddered.

    "Yeager?" she asked, very faintly. It was a wisp of a voice, an old voice.

    I said very slowly: "Yeager wouldn't use a.22 target rifle, Mrs. O'Mara."

    The flame died in her eyes. They were pools of darkness much emptier than darkness.

    "You're his mother," I said. "What do you want to do about it?"

    "Merciful God! Dade! He� shot at you!"

    "Twice," I said.

    "But why? Oh, why?"

    "You think I'm a wise guy, Mrs. O'Mara. Just another hardeyed boy from the other side of the tracks. It would be easy in this spot, if I was. But I'm not that at all, really. Do I have to tell why he shot at me!"

    She didn't speak. She nodded slowly. Her face was a mask now.

    "I'd say he probably can't help it," I said. "He didn't want me to find his stepfather, for one thing. Then he's a little lad that likes money. That seems small, but it's part of the picture. He almost lost a dollar to me on his shooting. It seems small, but he lives in a small world. Most of all, of course, he's a crazy little sadist with an itchy trigger finger."

    "How dare you!" she flared. It didn't mean anything. She forgot it herself instantly.

    "How dare I? I do dare. Let's not bother figuring why he shot at me. I'm not the first, am I? You wouldn't have known what I was talking about, you wouldn't have assumed he did it on purpose."

    She didn't move or speak. I took a deep breath.

    "So let's talk about why he shot Dud O'Mara," I said. If I thought she would yell even this time, I fooled myself. The old man in the orchid house had put more into her than her tallness and her dark hair and her reckless eyes.

    She pulled her lips back and tried to lick them, and it made her look like a scared little girl, for a second. The lines of her cheeks sharpened and her hand went up like an artificial hand moved by wires and took hold of the white fur at her throat and pulled it tight and squeezed it until her knuckles looked like bleached bone. Then she just stared at me.

    Then my hat slid off her knee on to the floor, without her moving. The sound it made falling was one of the loudest sounds I had ever heard.

    "Money," she said in a dry croak. "Of course you want money."

    "How much money do I want?"

    "Fifteen thousand dollars."

    I nodded, stiff-necked as a floorwalker trying to see with his back.

    "That would be about right. That would be the established retainer. That would be about what he had in his pockets and what Yeager got for getting rid of him."

    "You're too-damned smart," she said horribly. "I could kill you myself and like it."

    I tried to grin. "That's right. Smart and without a feeling in the world. It happened something like this. The boy got O'Mara where he got me, by the same simple ruse. I don't think it was a plan. He hated his stepfather, but he wouldn't exactly plan to kill him."

    "He hated him," she said.

    "So they're in the little shooting gallery and O'Mara is dead on the floor, behind the barrier, out of sight. The shots, of course, meant nothing there. And very little blood, with a head shot, small caliber. So the boy goes out and locks the door and hides. But after a while he has to tell somebody. He has to. He tells you. You're his mother. You're the one to tell."

    "Yes," she breathed. "He did just that." Her eyes had stopped hating me.

    "You think about calling it an accident, which is okay, except for one thing. The boy's not a normal boy, and you know it. The general knows it, the servants know. There must be other people that know it. And the law, dumb as you think they are, are pretty smart with subnormal types. They get to handle so many of them. And I think he would have talked. I think, after a while, he would even have bragged."

    "Go on," she said.

    "You wouldn't risk that," I said. "Not for your son and not for the sick old man in the orchid house. You'd do any awful criminal callous thing rather than risk that. You did it. You knew Yeager and you hired him to get rid of the body. That's all-except that hiding the girl, Mona Mesarvey, helped to make it look like a deliberate disappearance."

    "He took him away after dark, in Dud's own car," she said hollowly.

    I reached down and picked my hat off the floor. "How about the servants?"

    "Norris knows. The butler. He'd die on the rack before he told."

    "Yeah. Now you know why Larry Batzel was knocked off and why I was taken for a ride, don't you?"

    "Blackmail," she said. "It hadn't come yet, but I was waiting for it. I would have paid anything, and he would know that."

    "Bit by bit, year by year, there was a quarter of a millon in it for him, easy. I don't think Joe Mesarvey was in it at all. I know the girl wasn't."

    She didn't say anything. She just kept her eyes on my face.

    "Why in hell," I groaned, "didn't you take the guns away from him?"

    "He's worse than you think. That would have started something worse. I'm-I'm almost afraid of him myself."

    "Take him away," I said. From here. From the old man. He's young enough to be cured, by the right handling. Take him to Europe. Far away. Take him now. It would kill the general out of hand to know his blood was in that."

    She got up draggingly and dragged herself across to the windows. She stood motionless, almost blending into the heavy white drapes. Her hands hung at her sides, very motionless also. After a while she turned and walked past me. When she was behind me she caught her breath and sobbed just once.

    "It was very vile. It was the vilest thing I ever heard of. Yet I would do it again. Father would not have done it. He would have spoken right out. It would, as you say, have killed him."

    "Take him away," I pounded on. "He's hiding out there now. He thinks he got me. He's hiding somewhere like an animal. Get him. He can't help it."

    "I offered you money," she said, still behind me. "That's nasty. I wasn't in love with Dudley O'Mara. That's nasty too. I can't thank you. I don't know what to say."

    "Forget it," I said. "I'm just an old workhorse. Put your work on the boy."

    "I promise. Goodbye, Mr. Carmady."

    We didn't shake hands. I went back down the stairs and the butler was at the front door as usual. Nothing in his face but politeness.

    "You will not want to see the general today, sir?"

    "Not today, Norris."

    I didn't see the boy outside. I went through the postern and got into my rented Ford and drove on down the hill, past where the old oil wells were.

    Around some of them, not visible from the street, there were still sumps in which waste water lay and festered with a scum of oil on top. They would be ten or twelve feet deep, maybe more. There would be dark things in them. Perhaps in one of them- I was glad I had killed Yeager.

    On the way back downtown I stopped at a bar and had a couple of drinks. They didn't do me any good.

    All they did was make me think of Silver-Wig, and I never saw her again.

    

    

    

    

    The big guy wasn't any of my business. He never was, then or later, least of all then.

    I was over on Central, which is the Harlem of Los Angeles, on one of the "mixed" blocks, where there were still both white and colored establishments. I was looking for a little Greek barber named Tom Aleidis whose wife wanted him to come home and was willing to spend a little money to find him. It was a peaceful job. Tom Aleidis was not a crook.

    I saw the big guy standing in front of Shamey's, an all-colored drink and dice second-floor, not too savory. He was looking up at the broken stencils in the electric sign, with a sort of rapt expression, like a hunky immigrant looking at the Statue of Liberty, like a man who had waited a long time and come a long way.

    He wasn't just big. He was a giant. He looked seven feet high, and he wore the loudest clothes I ever saw on a really big man.

    Pleated maroon pants, a rough grayish coat with white billiard balls for buttons, brown suede shoes with explosions in white kid on them, a brown shirt, a yellow tie, a large red carnation, and a front-door handkerchief the color of the Irish flag. It was neatly arranged in three points, under the red carnation. On Central Avenue, not the quietest dressed street in the world, with that size and that make-up he looked about as unobtrusive as a tarantula on a slice of angel food.

    He went over and swung back the doors into Shamey's. The doors didn't stop swinging before they exploded outward again. What sailed out and landed in the gutter and made a high, keening noise, like a wounded rat, was a slick-haired colored youth in a pinchback suit. A "brown," the color of coffee with rather thin cream in it. His face, I mean.

    It still wasn't any of my business. I watched the colored boy creep away along the walls. Nothing more happened. So I made my mistake.

    I moved along the sidewalk until I could push the swing door myself. Just enough to look in. Just too much.

    A hand I could have sat in took hold of my shoulder and hurt and lifted me through the doors and up three steps.

    A deep, soft voice said in my ear easily, "Smokes in here, pal. Can you tie that?"

    I tried for a little elbow room to get to my sap. I wasn't wearing a gun. The little Greek barber business hadn't seemed to be that sort of job.

    He took hold of my shoulder again.

    "It's that kind of place," I said quickly.

    "Don't say that, pal. Beulah used to work here. Little Beulah."

    "Go on up and see for yourself."

    He lifted me up three more steps.

    "I'm feeling good," he said. "I wouldn't want anybody to bother me. Let's you and me go on up and maybe nibble a drink."

    "They won't serve you," I said.

    "I ain't seen Beulah in eight years, pal," he said softly, tearing my shoulder to pieces without noticing what he was doing. "She ain't even wrote in six. But she'll have a reason. She used to work here. Let's you and me go on up."

    "All right," I said. "I'll go up with you. Just let me walk. Don't carry me. I'm fine. Carmady's the name. I'm all grown up. I go to the bathroom alone and everything. Just don't carry me."

    "Little Beulah used to work here," he said softly. He wasn't listening to me.

    We went on up. He let me walk.

    A crap table was in the far corner beyond the bar, and scattered tables and a few customers were here and there. The whiny voices chanting around the crap table stopped instantly. Eyes looked at us in that dead, alien silence of another race.

    A large Negro was leaning against the bar in shirt-sleeves with pink garters on his arms. An ex-pug who had been hit by everything but a concrete bridge. He pried himself loose from the bar edge and came towards us in a loose fighter's crouch.

    He put a large brown hand against the big man's gaudy chest. It looked like a stud there.

    "No white folks, brother. Jes' fo' the colored people. I'se sorry."

    "Where's Beulah?" the big man asked in his deep, soft voice that went with his big white face and his depthless black eyes.

    The Negro didn't quite laugh. "No Beulah, brother. No hooch, no gals, jes' the scram, brother. Jes' the scram."

    "Kind of take your goddam mitt off me," the big man said.

    The bouncer made a mistake, too. He hit him. I saw his shoulder drop, his body swing behind the punch. It was a good clean punch. The big man didn't even try to block it.

    He shook his head and took hold of the bouncer by the throat. He was quick for his size. The bouncer tried to knee him. The big man turned him and bent him, took hold of the back of his belt. That broke. So the big man just put his huge hand flat against the bouncer's spine and threw him, clear across the narrow room. The bouncer hit the wall on the far side with a crash that must have been heard in Denver. Then he slid softly down the wall and lay there, motionless.

    "Yeah," the big man said. "Let's you and me nibble one."

    We went over to the bar. The barman swabbed the bar hurriedly. The customers, by ones and twos and threes, drifted out, silent across the bare floor, silent down the dim uncarpeted stairs. Their departing feet scarcely rustled.

    "Whisky sour," the big man said.

    We had whisky sours.

    "You know where Beulah is?" the big man asked the barman impassively, licking his whisky sour down the side of the thick glass.

    "Beulah, you says?" the barman whined. "I ain't seen her roun' heah lately. Not right lately, no suh."

    "How long you been here?" 'Bout a yeah, Ah reckon. 'Bout a yeah. Yes suh. 'Bout-" "How long's this coop been a dinge box?"

    "Says which?"

    The big man made a fist down at his side, about the size of a bucket.

    "Five years anyway," I put in. "This fellow wouldn't know anything about a white girl named Beulah."

    The big man looked at me as if I had just hatched out. His whisky sour didn't seem to improve his temper.

    "Who the hell asked you to stick your face in?"

    I smiled. I made it a big, friendly smile. "I'm the fellow came in here with you. Remember?"

    He grinned back, a flat, white grin. "Whisky sour," he told the barman. "Get them fleas outa your pants. Service."

    The barman scuttled around, hating us with the whites of his eyes.

    The place was empty now, except for the two of us and the barman, and the bouncer over against the far wall.

    The bouncer groaned and stirred. He rolled over and began to crawl softly along the baseboard, like a fly with one wing. The big man paid no attention to him.

    "There ain't nothing left of the joint," he complained. "They was a stage and a band and cute little rooms where you could have fun. Beulah did some warbling. A redhead. Awful cute. We was to of been married when they hung the frame on me."

    We had two more whisky sours before us now. "What frame?" I asked.

    "Where you figure I been them eight years I told you about?"

    "In somebody's Stony Lonesome," I said.

    "Right." He prodded his chest with a thumb like a baseball bat. "Steve Skalla. The Great Bend job in Kansas. Just me. Forty grand. They caught up with me right here. I was what that-hey!"

    The bouncer had made a door at the back and fallen through it. A lock clicked.

    "Where's that door lead to?" the big man demanded.

    "Tha-tha's Mistah Montgom'ry's office, suh. He's the boss. He's got his office back-"

    "He might know," the big man said. He wiped his mouth on the Irish flag handkerchief and arranged it carefully back in his pocket. "He better not crack wise neither. Two more whisky sours."

    He crossed the room to the door behind the crap table. The lock gave him a little argument for a moment, then a piece of the panel dropped off and he went through, shut the door after him.

    It was very silent in Shamey's now. I looked at the barman.

    "This guy's tough," I said quickly. "And he's liable to go mean. You can see the idea. He's looking for an old sweetie who used to work here when it was a place for whites. Got any artillery back there?"

    "I thought you was with him," the barman said suspiciously. "Couldn't help myself. He dragged me up. I didn't feel like being thrown over any houses."

    "Shuah. Ah got me a shotgun," the barman said, still suspicious.

    He began to stoop behind the bar, then stayed in that position rolling his eyes.

    There was a dull flat sound at the back of the place, behind the shut door. It might have been a slammed door. It might have been a gun. Just the one sound. No other followed it.

    The barman and I waited too long, wondering what the sound was. Not liking to think what it could be.

    The door at the back opened and the big man came through quickly, with a Colt army.45 automatic looking like a toy in his hand.

    He looked the room over with one swift glance. His grin was taut. He looked like the man who could take forty grand singlehanded from the Great Bend Bank.

    He came over to us in swift, almost soundless steps, for all his size.

    "Rise up, nigger!"

    The barman came up slowly, gray; his hands empty, high.

    The big man felt me over, stepped away from us.

    "Mr. Montgomery didn't know where Beuiah was either," he said softly. "He tried to tell me-with this." He waggled the gun. "So long, punks. Don't forget your rubbers."

    He was gone, down the stairs, very quickly, very quietly.

    I jumped around the bar and took the sawed-off shotgun that lay there, on the shelf. Not to use on Steve Skalla. That was not my job. So the barman wouldn't use it on me. I went back across the room and through that door.

    The bouncer lay on the floor of a hall with a knife in his hand. He was unconscious. I took the knife out of his hand and stepped over him through a door marked Office.

    Mr. Montgomery was in there, behind a small scarred desk, close to a partly boarded-up window. Just folded, like a handkerchief or a hinge.

    A drawer was open at his right hand. The gun would have come from there. There was a smear of oil on the paper that lined it.

    Not a smart idea, but he would never have a smarter one- not now.

    Nothing happened while I waited for the police.

    When they came both the barman and the bouncer were gone. I had locked myself in with Mr. Montgomery and the shotgun. Just in case.

    Hiney got it. A lean-jawed, complaining, overslow detective lieutenant, with long yellow hands that he held on his knees while he talked to me in his cubicle at Headquarters. His shirt was darned under the points of his old-fashioned stiff collar. He looked poor and sour and honest.

    This was an hour or so later. They knew all about Steve Skalla then, from their own records. They even had a ten-year-old photo that made him look as eyebrowless as a French roll. All they didn't know was where he was.

    "Six foot six and a half," Kiney said. "Two hundred sixtyfour pounds. A guy that size can't get far, not in them fancy duds. He couldn't buy anything else in a hurry. Whyn't you take him?"

    I handed the photo back and laughed.

    Hiney pointed one of his long yellow fingers at me bitterly. "Carmady, a tough shamus, huh? Six feet of man, and a jaw you could break rocks on. Whyn't you take him?"

    "I'm getting a little gray at the temples," I said. "And I didn't have a gun. He had. I wasn't on a gun-toting job over there. Skalla just picked me up. I'm kind of cute sometimes."

    Hiney glared at me.

    "All right," I said. "Why argue? I've seen the guy. He could wear an elephant in his vest pocket. And I didn't know he'd killed anybody. You'll get him all right."

    "Yeah," Hiney said. "Easy. But I just don't like to waste my time on these shine killings. No pix. No space. Not even three lines in the want-ad section. Heck, they was five smokes- five, mind you-carved Harlem sunsets all over each other over on East Eight-four one time. All dead. Cold meat. And the--newshawks wouldn't even go out there."

    "Pick him up nice," I said. "Or he'll knock off a brace of prowlies for you. Then you'll get space."

    "And I wouldn't have the case then neither," Hiney jeered. "Well, the hell with him. I got him on the air. Ain't nothing else to do but just sit."

    "Try the girl," I said. "Beulah. Skalla will. That's what he's after. That's what started it all. Try her."

    "You try her," Hiney said. "I ain't been in a joy house in twenty years."

    "I suppose I'd be right at home in one. How much will you pay?"

    "Jeeze, guy, coppers don't hire private dicks. What with?" He rolled a cigarette out of a can of tobacco. It burned down one side like a forest fire. A man yelled angrily into a telephone in the next cubbyhole. Hiney made another cigarette with more care and licked it and lighted it. He clasped his bony hands on his bony knees again.

    "Think of your publicity," I said. "I bet you twenty-five I find Beulah before you put Skalla under glass."

    He thought it over. He seemed almost to count his bank balance on his cigarette puffs.

    "Ten is top," he said. "And she's all mine-private."

    I stared at him.

    "I don't work for that kind of money," I said. "But if I can do it in one day-and you let me alone-I'll do it for nothing. Just to show you why you've been a lieutenant for twenty years."

    He didn't like that crack much better than I liked his about the joy house. But we shook hands on it.

    I got my old Chrysler roadster out of the official parking lot and drove back towards the Central Avenue district.

    Shamey's was closed up, of course. An obvious plainclothes man sat in a car in front of it, reading a paper with one eye. I didn't know why. Nobody there knew anything about Skalla.

    I parked around the corner and went into the diagonal lobby of a Negro hotel called the Hotel Sans Souci. Two rows of hard, empty chairs stared at each other across a strip of fiber carpet. Behind a desk a bald-headed man had his eyes shut and his hands clasped on the desk top. He dozed. He wore an ascot tie that had been tied about 1880, and the green stone in his stickpin was not quite as large as a trash barrel. His large, loose chin folded down on it gently, and his brown hands were soft, peaceful, and clean.

    A metal embossed sign at his elbow said: This Hotel Is Under the Protection of the International Consolidated Agencies, Inc.

    When he opened one eye I pointed to the sign and said: "H.P.D. man checking up. Any trouble here?"

    H.P.D. means Hotel Protective Department, which is the part of a large agency that looks after check bouncers and people who move out by the back stairs, leaving second-hand suitcases full of bricks.

    "Trouble, brother," he said, in a high, sonorous voice, "is something we is fresh out of." He lowered the voice four or five notches and added, "We don't take no checks."

    I leaned on the counter across from his folded hands and started to spin a quarter on the bare, scarred wood.

    "Heard what happened over at Shamey's this morning?"

    "Brother, I forgit." Both his eyes were open now and he was watching the blur of light made by the spinning quarter.

    "The boss got bumped off," I said. "Montgomery. Got his neck broken."

    "May the Lawd receive his soul, brother." The voice went down again. "Cop?"

    "Private-on a confidential lay. And I know a man who can keep one that way when I see one."

    He looked me over, closed his eyes again. I kept spinning the quarter. He couldn't resist looking at it.

    "Who done it?" he asked softly. "Who fixed Sam?"

    "A tough guy out of the jailhouse got sore because it wasn't a white joint. It used to be. Remember?"

    He didn't say anything. The coin fell over with a light whirr and lay still.

    "Call your play," I said. "I'll read you a chapter of the Bible or buy you a drink. Either one."

    "Brother," he said sonorously, "I kinda like to read my Bible in the seclusion of my family." Then he added swiftly, in his business voice, "Come around to this side of the desk."

    I went around there and pulled a pint of bonded bourbon off my hip and handed it to him in the shelter of the desk. He poured two small glasses, quickly, sniffed his with a smooth, expert manner, and tucked it away.

    "What you want to know?" he asked. "Ain't a crack in the sidewalk I don't know. Mebbe I ain't tellin' though. This liquor's been in the right company."

    "Who ran Shamey's before it was a colored place?"

    He stared at me, surprised. "The name of that pore sinner was Shamey, brother."

    I groaned. "What have I been using for brains?"

    "He's daid, brother, gathered to the Lawd. Died in nineteen and twenty-nine. A wood alcohol case, brother. And him in the business." He raised his voice to the sonorous level. "The same year the rich folks lost their goods and chattels, brother." The voice went down again. "I didn't lose me a nickel."

    "I'll bet you didn't. Pour some more. He leave any folks- anybody that's still around?"

    He poured another small drink, corked the bottle firmly. "Two is all-before lunch," he said. "I thank you, brother. Yo' method of approach is soothin' to a man's dignity." He cleared his throat. "Had a wife," he said. "Try the phone book."

    He wouldn't take the bottle. I put it back on my hip. He shook hands with me, folded his on the desk once more and closed his eyes.

    The incident, for him, was over.

    There was only one Shamey in the phone book. Violet Lu Shamey, 1644 West Fifty-fourth Place. I spent a nickel in a booth.

    After a long time a dopey voice said, "Uh-huh. Wh-what is it?"

    "Are you the Mrs. Shamey whose husband once ran a place on Central Avenue-a place of entertainment?"

    "Wha-what? My goodness sakes alive! My husband's been gone these seven years. Who did you say you was?"

    "Detective Carmady. I'll be right out. It's important."

    "Wh-who did you say-"

    It was a thick, heavy, clogged voice.

    It was a dirty brown house with a dirty brown lawn in front of it. There was a large bare patch around a tough-looking palm tree, On the porch stood one lonely rocker.

    The afternoon breeze made the unpruned shoots of last year's poinsettias tap-tap against the front wall. A line of stiff, yellowish, half-washed clothes jittered on a rusty wire in the side yard.

    I drove on a little way and parked my roadster across the street, and walked back.

    The bell didn't work, so I knocked. A woman opened the door blowing her nose. A long yellow face with weedy hair growing down the sides of it. Her body was shapeless in a flannel bathrobe long past all color and design. It was just something around her. Her toes were large and obvious in a pair of broken man's slippers.

    I said, "Mrs. Shamey?"

    "You the-?"

    "Yeah. I just called you."

    She gestured me in wearily. "I ain't had time to get cleaned up yet," she whined.

    We sat down in a couple of dingy mission rockers and looked at each other across a living room in which everything was junk except a small new radio droning away behind its dimly lighted panel.

    "All the company I got," she said. Then she tittered. "Bert ain't done nothing, has he? I don't get cops calling on me much."

    "Bert?"

    "Bert Shamey, mister. My husband."

    She tittered again and flopped her feet up and down. In her titter was a loose alcoholic overtone. It seemed I was not to get away from it that day.

    "A joke, mister," she said. "He's dead. I hope to Christ there's enough cheap blondes where he is. He never got enough of them here."

    "I was thinking more about a redhead," I said.

    "I guess he'd use one of those too." Her eyes, it seemed to me, were not so loose now. "I don't call to mind. Any special one?"

    "Yeah. A girl named Beulah. I don't know her last name. She worked at the Club on Central. I'm trying to trace her for her folks. It's a colored place now and, of course, the people there never heard of her."

    "I never went there," the woman yelled, with unexpected violence. "I wouldn't know."

    "An entertainer," I said. "A singer. No chance you'd know her, eh?"

    She blew her nose again, on one of the dirtiest handkerchiefs I ever saw. "I got a cold."

    "You know what's good for it," I said.

    She gave me a swift, raking glance. "I'm fresh out of that."

    "I'm not."

    "Gawd," she said. "You're no cop. No cop ever bought a drink."

    I brought out my pint of bourbon and balanced it on my knee. It was almost full still. The clerk at the Hotel Sans Souci was no reservoir. The woman's seaweed-colored eyes jumped at the bottle. Her tongue coiled around her lips.

    "Man, that's liquor," she sighed. "I don't care who you are. Hold it careful, mister."

    She heaved up and waddled out of the room and came back with two thick, smeared glasses.

    "No fixin's," she said. "Just what you brought." She held the glasses out.

    I poured her a slug that would have made me float over a wall. A smaller one for me. She put hers down like an aspirin tablet and looked at the bottle. I poured her another. She took that over to her chair. Her eyes had turned two shades browner.

    "This stuff dies painless with me," she said. "It never knows what hit it. What was we talkin' about?"

    "A red-haired girl named Beulah. Used to work at the joint. Remember better now?"

    "Yeah." She used her second drink. I went over and stood the bottle on the table beside her. She used some out of that.

    "Hold on to your chair and don't step on no snakes," she said. "I got me a idea."

    She got up out of the chair, sneezed, almost lost her bathrobe, slapped it back against her stomach and stared at me coldly.

    "No peekin'," she said, and wagged a finger at me and went out of the room again, hitting the side of the door casement on her way.

    From the back of the house presently there were various types of crashes. A chair seemed to be kicked over. A bureau drawer was pulled out too far and smashed to the floor. There was fumbling and thudding and loud language. After a while, then, there was the slow click of a lock and what seemed to be the screech of a trunk top going up. More fumbling and banging things around. A tray landed on the floor, I thought. Then a chortle of satisfaction.

    She came back into the room holding a package tied with faded pink tape. She threw it in my lap.

    "Look' em over, Lou. Photos. Newspaper stills. Not that them tramps ever got in no newspapers except by way of the police blotter. They're people from the joint. By God, they're all the-left me. Them and his old clothes."

    She sat down and reached for the whisky again.

    I untied the tape and looked through a bunch of shiny photos of people in professional poses. Not all of them were women. The men had foxy faces and racetrack clothes or make-up. Hoofers and comics from the filling-station circuits. Not many of them ever got west of Main Street. The women had good legs and displayed them more than Will Hays would have liked. But their faces were as threadbare as a bookkeeper's coat. All but one.

    She wore a Pierrot costume, at least from the waist up. Under the high conical white hat her fluffed-out hair might have been red. Her eyes had laughter in them. I won't say her face was unspoiled. I'm not that good at faces. But it wasn't like the others. It hadn't been kicked around. Somebody had been nice to that face. Perhaps just a tough mug like Steve Skalla. But he had been nice. In the laughing eyes there was still hope.

    I threw the others aside and carried this one over to the sprawled, glassy-eyed woman in the chair. I poked it under her nose.

    "This one," I said. "Who is she? What happened to her?"

    She stared at it fuzzily, then chuckled.

    "Tha's Steve Skalla's girl, Lou. Heck, I forgot her name."

    "Beulah," I said. "Beulah's her name."

    She watched me under her tawny, mangled eyebrows. She wasn't so drunk.

    "Yeah?" she said. "Yeah?"

    "Who's Steve Skalla?" I rapped.

    "Bouncer down at the joint, Lou." She giggled again. "He's in the pen."

    "Oh no, he isn't," I said. "He's in town. He's out. I know him. He just got in."

    Her face went to pieces like a clay pigeon. Instantly I knew who had turned Skalla up to the local law. I laughed. I couldn't miss. Because she knew. If she hadn't known, she wouldn't have bothered to be cagey about Beulah. She couldn't have forgotten Beulah. Nobody could.

    Her eyes went far back into her head. We stared into each other's faces. Then her hand snatched at the photo.

    I stepped back and tucked it away in an inside pocket.

    "Have another drink," I said. I handed her the bottle.

    She took it, lingered over it, gurgled it slowly down her throat, staring at the faded carpet.

    "Yeah," she said whisperingly. "I turned him in but he never knew. Money in the bank he was. Money in the bank."

    "Give me the girl," I said. "And Skalla knows nothing from me."

    "She's here," the woman said. "She's in radio. I heard her once on KLBL. She's changed her name, though. I dunno."

    I had another hunch. "You do know," I said. "You're bleeding her still. Shamey left you nothing. What do you live on? You're bleeding her because she pulled herself up in the world, from people like you and Skalla. That's it, isn't it?"

    "Money in the bank," she croaked. "Hundred a month. Reg'lar as rent. Yeah."

    The bottle was on the floor again. Suddenly, without being touched, it fell over on its side. Whisky gurgled out. She didn't move to get it.

    "Where is she?" I pounded on. "What's her name?"

    "I dunno, Lou. Part of the deal. Get the money in a cashier's check. I dunno. Honest."

    "The hell you don't!" I snarled. "Skalla-"

    She came to her feet in a surge and screamed at me, "Get out, you! Get out before I call a cop! Get out, you "Okay, okay." I put a hand out soothingly. "Take it easy. I won't tell Skalla. Just take it easy."

    She sat down again slowly and retrieved the almost empty bottle. After all I didn't have to have a scene now. I could find out other ways.

    She didn't even look towards me as I went out. I went out into the crisp fall sunlight and got into my car. I was a nice boy, trying to get along. Yes, I was a swell guy. I liked knowing myself. I was the kind of guy who chiseled a sodden old wreck out of her life secrets to win a ten-dollar bet.

    I drove down to the neighborhood drugstore and shut myself in its phone booth to call Hiney.

    "Listen," I told him, "the widow of the man that ran Shamey's when Skalla worked there is still alive. Skalla might call to see her, if he thinks he dares."

    I gave him the address. He said sourly, "We almost got him. A prowl car was talkin' to a Seventh Street conductor at the end of the line. He mentioned a guy that size and with them clothes. He got off at Third and Alexandria, the conductor says. What he'll do is break into some big house where the folks is away. So we got him bottled."

    I told him that was fine.

    KLBL was on the western fringe of that part of the city that melts into Beverly Hills. It was housed in a flat stucco building, quite unpretentious, and there was a service station in the form of a Dutch windmill on the corner of the lot. The call letters of the station revolved in neon letters on the sails of the windmill.

    I went into a ground-floor reception room, one side of which was glass and showed an empty broadcasting studio with a stage and ranged chairs for an audience. A few people sat around the reception room trying to look magnetic, and the blond receptionist was spearing chocolates out of a large box with nails that were almost royal purple in color.

    I waited half an hour and then got to see a Mr. Dave Marineau, studio manager. The station manager and the dayprogram manager were both too busy to see me. Marineau had a small sound-proofed office behind the organ. It was papered with signed photographs.

    Marineau was a handsome tall man, somewhat in the Levantine style, with red lips a little too full, a tiny silky mustache, large limpid brown eyes, shiny black hair that might or might not have been marceled, and long, pale, nicotined fingers.

    He read my card while I tried to find my Pierrot girl on his wall and didn't.

    "A private detective, eh? What can we do for you?"

    I took my Pierrot out and placed it down on his beautiful brown blotter. It was fun watching him stare at it. All sorts of minute things happened to his face, none of which he wanted known. The sum total of them was that he knew the face and that it meant something to him. He looked up at me with a bargaining expression.

    "Not very recent," he said. "But nice. I don't know whether we could use it or not. Legs, aren't they?"

    "It's at least eight years old," I said. "What would you use it for?"

    "Publicity, of course. We get one in the radio column about every second month, We're a small station still."

    "Why?"

    "You mean you don't know who it is?"

    "I know who she was," I said.

    "Vivian Baring, of course, Star of our Jumbo Candy Bar program. Don't you know it? A triweekly serial, half an hour."

    "Never heard of it," I said. "A radio serial is my idea of the square root of nothing."

    He leaned back and lit a cigarette, although one was burning on the edge of his glass-lined tray.

    "All right," he said sarcastically. "Stop being fulsome and get to business, What is it you want?"

    "I'd like her address."

    "I can't give you that, of course. And you won't find it in any phone book or directory. I'm sorry." He started to gather papers together and then saw the second cigarette and that made him feel like a sap. So he leaned back again.

    "I'm in a spot," I said. "I have to find the girl. Quickly. And I don't want to look like a blackmailer."

    He licked his very full and very red lips. Somehow I got the idea he was pleased at something.

    He said softly, "You mean you know something that might hurt Miss Baring-and incidentally the program?"

    "You can always replace a star in radio, can't you?"

    He licked his lips some more. Then his mouth tried to get tough. "I seem to smell something nasty," he said.

    "It's your mustache burning," I said.

    It wasn't the best gag in the world, but it broke the ice. He laughed. Then he did wingovers with his hands. He leaned forward and got as confidential as a tipster.

    "We're going at this wrong," he said. "Obviously. You're probably on the level-you look it-so let me make my play." He grabbed a leatherbound pad and scribbled on it, tore the leaf off and passed it across.

    I read: _1737 North Flores Avenue_.

    "That's her address," he said. "I won't give the phone number without her O.K. Now treat me like a gentleman. That is, if it concerns the station."

    I tucked his paper into my pocket and thought it over. He had suckered me neatly, put me on my few remaining shreds of decency. I made my mistake.

    "How's the program going?"

    "We're promised network audition. It's simple, everyday stuff called 'A Street in Our Town,' but it's done beautifully. It'll wow the country some day. And soon." He wiped his hand across his fine white brow. "Incidentally, Miss Baring writes the scripts herself."

    "Ah," I said. "Well, here's your dirt. She had a boy friend in the big house. That is he used to be. She got to know him in a Central Avenue joint where she worked once. He's out and he's looking for her and he's killed a man. Now wait a minute-"

    He hadn't turned as white as a sheet, because he didn't have the right skin. But he looked bad.

    "Now wait a minute," I said. "It's nothing against the girl and you know it. She's okay. You can see that in her face. It might take a little counterpublicity, if it all came out. But that's nothing. Look how they gild some of those tramps in Hollywood."

    "It costs money," he said. "We're a poor studio. And the network audition would be off." There was something faintly dishonest about his manner that puzzled me.

    "Nuts," I said, leaning forward and pounding the desk. "The real thing is to protect her. This tough guy-Steve Skalla is his name-is in love with her. He kills people with his bare hands. He won't hurt her, but if she has a boy friend or a husband-"

    "She's not married," Marineau put in quickly, watching the rise and fall of my pounding hand.

    "He might wring his neck for him. That would put it a little too close to her. Skalla doesn't know where she is. He's on the dodge, so it's harder for him to find out. The cops are your best bet, if you have enough drag to keep them from feeding it to the papers."

    "Nix," he said. "Nix on the cops. You want the job, don't you?"

    "When do you need her here again?"

    "Tomorrow night. She's not on tonight"

    "I'll hide her for you until then," I said. "If you want me to. That's as far as I'd go alone."

    He grabbed my card again, read it, dropped it into a drawer.

    "Get out there and dig her out," he snapped. "If she's not home, stick till she is. I'll get a conference upstairs and then we'll see. Hurry it!"

    I stood up. "Want a retainer?" he snapped.

    "That can wait."

    He nodded, made some more wingovers with his hands and reached for his phone.

    That number on Flores would be up near Sunset Towers, across town from where I was. Traffic was pretty thick, but I hadn't gone more than twelve blocks before I was aware that a blue coup� which had left the studio parking lot behind me was still behind me.

    I jockeyed around in a believable manner, enough to feel sure it was following me. There was one man in it. Not Skalla. The head was a foot too low over the steering wheel.

    I jockeyed more and faster and lost it. I didn't know who it was, and at the moment, I hadn't time to bother figuring it out.

    I reached the Flores Avenue place and tucked my roadster into the curb.

    Bronze gates opened into a nice bungalow court, and two rows of bungalows with steep roofs of molded shingles gave an effect a little like the thatched cottages in old English sporting prints. A very little.

    The grass was almost too well kept. There was a wide walk and an oblong pool framed in colored tiles and stone benches along its sides. A nice place. The late sun made interesting shadows over its lawns, and except for the motor horns, the distant hum of traffic up on Sunset Boulevard wasn't unlike the drone of bees.

    My number was the last bungalow on the left. Nobody answered the bell, which was set in the middle of the door so that you would wonder how the juice got to where it had to go. That was cute too. I rang time after time, then I started back to the stone benches by the pool to sit down and wait.

    A woman passed me walking fast, not in a hurry, but like a woman who always walks fast. She was a thin, sharp brunette in burnt-orange tweeds and a black hat that looked like a pageboy's hat. It looked like the devil with the burnt-orange tweeds. She had a nose that would be in things and tight lips and she swung a key container.

    She went up to my door, unlocked it, went in. She didn't look like Beulah.

    I went back and pushed the bell again. The door opened at once. The dark, sharp-faced woman gave me an up-and-down look and said: "Well?"

    "Miss Baring? Miss Vivian Baring?"

    "Who?" It was like a stab.

    "Miss Vivian Baring-of KLBL," I said. "I was told-"

    She flushed tightly and her lips almost bit her teeth. 'If this is a gag, I don't care for it," she said. She started the door towards my nose.

    I said hurriedly, "Mr. Marineau sent me."

    That stopped the door closing. It opened again, very wide. The woman's mouth was as thin as a cigarette paper. Thinner.

    "I," she said very distinctly, "happen to be Mr. Marineau's wife. This happens to be Mr. Marineau's residence, I wasn't aware that this-this-"

    "Miss Vivian Baring," I said. But it wasn't uncertainty about the name that had stopped her. It was plain, cold fury.

    "-that this Miss Baring," she went on, exactly as though I had not said a word, "had moved in here. Mr. Marineau must be feeling very amusing today."

    "Listen, lady. This isn't-"

    The slamming door almost made a wave in the pool down the walk. I looked at it for a moment, and then I looked at the other bungalows. If we had an audience, it was keeping out of sight. I rang the bell again.

    The door jumped open this time. The brunette was livid. "Get off my porch!" she yelled. "Get off before I have you thrown off!"

    "Wait a minute," I growled. "This may be a gag for him, but it's no gag to the police."

    That got her. Her whole expression got soft and interested.

    "Police?" she cooed.

    "Yeah. It's serious. It involves a murder. I've got to find this Miss Baring. Not that she, you understand-"

    The brunette dragged me into the house and shut the door and leaned against it, panting.

    "Tell me," she said breathlessly. "Tell me. Has that redheaded something got herself mixed up in a murder?' Suddenly her mouth snapped wide open and her eyes jumped at me.

    I slapped a hand over her mouth. "Take it easy!" I pleaded. "It's not your Dave. Not Dave, lady."

    "Oh." She got rid of my hand and let out a sigh and looked silly. "No, of course. Just for a moment� Well, who is it?"

    "Nobody you know. I can't broadcast things like that, anyway. I want Miss Baring's address. Have you got it?"

    I didn't know any reason why she would have. Or rather, I might be able to think of one, if I shook my brains hard enough.

    "Yes," she said. "Yes, I have. Indeed, I have. Mister Smarty doesn't know that. Mister Smarty doesn't know as much as he thinks he knows, does Mister Smarty? He-"

    "The address is all I can use right now," I growled. "And I'm in a bit of a hurry, Mrs. Marineau. Later on-" I gave her a meaning look. "I'm sure I'll want to talk to you."

    "It's on Heather Street," she said. "I don't know the number. But I've been there. I've been past there. It's only a short street, with four or five houses, and only one of them on the downward side of the hill." She stopped, added, "I don't think the house has a number. Heather Street is at the top of Beachwood Drive."

    "Has she a phone?"

    "Of course, but a restricted number. She would have. "They all do, those-. If I knew it-"

    "Yeah," I said. "You'd call her up and chew her ear off. Well, thank you very much, Mrs. Marineau. This is confidential, of course. I mean confidential."

    "Oh, by all means!"

    She wanted to talk longer but I pushed past her out of the house and went back down the flagged walk. I could feel her eyes on me all the way, so I didn't do any laughing.

    The lad with the restless hands and the full red lips had had what he thought was a very cute idea. He had given me the first address that came into his head, his own. Probably he had expected his wife to be out. I didn't know. It looked awfully silly, however I thought about it-unless he was pressed for time.

    Wondering why he should be pressed for time, I got careless. I didn't see the blue coup� double-parked almost at the gates until I also saw the man step from behind it.

    He had a gun in his hand.

    He was a big man, but not anything like Skalla's size. He made a sound with his lips and held his left palm out and something glittered in it. It might have been a piece of tin or a police badge.

    Cars were parked along both sides of Flores. Half a dozen people should have been in sight. There wasn't one-except the big man with the gun and myself.

    He came closer, making soothing noises with his mouth.

    "Pinched," he said. "Get in my hack and drive it, like a nice lad." He had a soft, husky voice, like an overworked rooster trying to croon.

    "You all alone?"

    "Yeah, but I got the gun," he sighed. "Act nice and you're as safe as the bearded woman at a Legion convention. Safer."

    He was circling slowly, carefully. I saw the metal thing now.

    "That's a special badge," I said. "You've got no more right to pinch me than I have to pinch you."

    "In the hack, ho. Be nice or your guts lie on this here street. I got orders." He started to pat me gently. "Hell, you ain't even rodded."

    "Skip it!" I growled. "Do you think you could take me if I was?"

    I walked over to his blue coup� and slid under its wheel. The motor was running. He got in beside me and put his gun in my side and we went on down the hill.

    "Take her west on Santa Monica," he husked. "Then up, say, Canyon Drive to Sunset. Where the bridle path is."

    I took her west on Santa Monica, past the bottom of Holloway, then a row of junk yards and some stores. The street widened and became a boulevard past Doheney. I let the car out a little to feel it. He stopped me doing that. I swung north to Sunset and then west again. Lights were being lit in big houses up the slopes. The dusk was full of radio music.

    I eased down and took a look at him before it got too dark. Even under the pulled-down hat on Flores I had seen the eyebrows, but I wanted to be sure. So I looked again. They were the eyebrows, all right.

    They were almost as even, almost as smoothly black, and fully as wide as a half-inch strip of black plush pasted across his broad face above the eyes and nose. There was no break in the middle. His nose was large and coarse-grained and had hung out over too many beers.

    "Bub McCord," I said. "Ex-copper. So you're in the snatch racket now. It's Folsom for you this time, baby."

    "Aw, can it." He looked hurt and leaned back in the corner. Bub McCord, caught in a graft tangle, had done a three in Quentin. Next time he would go to the recidivist prison, which is Folsom in our state.

    He leaned his gun on his left thigh and cuddled the door with his fat back. I let the car drift and he didn't seem to mind. It was betweentimes, after the homeward rush of the office man, before the evening crowd came out "This ain't no snatch," he complained. "We just don't want no trouble. You can't expect to go up against an organization like KLBL with a two-bit shakedown, and get no kickback. It ain't reasonable." He spat out of the window without turning his head. "Keep her rollin', ho."

    "What shakedown?"

    "You wouldn't know, would you? Just a wandering peeper with his head stuck in a knothole, huh? That's you. Innocent, as the guy says."

    "So you work for Marineau. That's all I wanted to know. Of course I knew it already, after I back-alleyed you, and you showed up again."

    "Neat work, ho-but keep her rollin'. Yeah, I had to phone in. Just caught him."

    "Where do we go from here?"

    "I take care of you till nine-thirty. After that we go to a place."

    "What place?"

    "It ain't nine-thirty. Hey, don't go to sleep in that there corner."

    "Drive it yourself, if you don't like my work."

    He pushed the gun at me hard. It hurt. I kicked the coup� out from under him and set him back in his corner, but he kept his gun in a good grip. Somebody called out archly on somebody's front lawn.

    Then I saw a red light winking ahead, and a sedan just passing it, and through the rear window of the sedan two flat caps side by side.

    "You'll get awfully tired of holding that gun," I told McCord. "You don't dare use it anyway. You're copper-soft. There's nothing so soft as a copper who's had his badge torn off. Just a big heel. Copper-soft."

    We weren't near to the sedan, but I wanted his attention. I got it. He slammed me over the head and grabbed the wheel and yanked the brake on. We ground to a stop. I shook my head woozily. By the time I came out of it he was away from me again, in his corner.

    "Next time," he said thinly, for all his huskiness, "I put you to sleep in the rumble. Just try it, ho. Just try it, Now roll- and keep the wisecracks down in your belly."

    I drove ahead, between the hedge that bordered the bridle path and the wide parkway beyond the curbing. The cops in the sedan tooled on gently, drowsing, listening with half an ear to their radio, talking of this and that. I could almost hear them in my mind, the sort of thing they would be saying.

    "Besides," McCord growled. "I don't need no gun to handle you. I never see the guy I couldn't handle without no gun."

    "I saw one this morning," I said. I started to tell him about Steve Skalla.

    Another red stoplight showed. The sedan ahead seemed loath to leave it. McCord lit a cigarette with his left hand, bending his head a little.

    I kept telling him about Skalla and the bouncer at Shamey's.

    Then I tramped on the throttle.

    The little car shot ahead without a quiver. McCord started to swing his gun at me. I yanked the wheel hard to the right and yelled: "Hold tight! It's a crash!"

    We hit the prowl car almost on the left rear fender. It waltzed around on one wheel, apparently, and loud language came out of it. It slewed, rubber screamed, metal made a grinding sound, the left tailight splintered and probably the gas tank bulged.

    The little coup� sat back on its heels and quivered like a scared rabbit.

    McCord could have cut me in half. His gun muzzle was inches from my ribs. But he wasn't a hard guy, really. He was just a broken cop who had done time and got himself a cheap job after it and was on an assignment he didn't understand.

    He tore the right-hand door open, and jumped out of the car.

    One of the cops was out by this time, on my side. I ducked down under the wheel. A flash beam burned across the top of my hat.

    It didn't work. Steps came near and the flash jumped into my face.

    "Come on out of that," a voice snarled. "What the hell you think this is-a racetrack?"

    I got out sheepishly. McCord was crouched somewhere behind the coup�, out of sight.

    "Lemme smell of your breath."

    I let him smell my breath.

    "Whisky," he said. "I thought so. Walk, baby. Walk." He prodded me with the flashlight.

    I walked.

    The other cop was trying to jerk his sedan loose from the coup�. He was swearing, but he was busy with his own troubles.

    "You don't walk like no drunk," the cop said. "What's the matter? No brakes?" The other cop had got the bumpers free and was climbing back under his wheel.

    I took my hat off and bent my head. "Just an argument," I said. "I got hit. It made me woozy for a minute."

    McCord made a mistake. He started running when he heard that. He vaulted across the parkway, jumped the wall and crouched. His footsteps thudded on turf.

    That was my cue. "Holdup!" I snapped at the cop who was questioning me. "I was afraid to tell you!"

    "Jeeze, the howling-!" he yelled, and tore a gun out of his holster. "Why'n't you say so?" He jumped for the wall, "Circle the heap! We want that guy!" he yelled at the man in the sedan.

    He was over the wall. Grunts. More feet pounding on the turf. A car stopped half a block away and a man started to get out of it but kept his foot on the running hoard. I could barely see him behind his dimmed headlights.

    The cop in the prowl car charged at the hedge that bordered the bridle path, backed furiously, swung around and was off with screaming siren.

    I jumped into McCord's coup�, and jerked the starter. Distantly there was a shot, then two shots, then a yell. The siren died at a corner and picked up again.

    I gave the coup� all it had and left the neighborhood. Far off, to the north, a lonely sound against the hills, a siren kept on wailing.

    I ditched the coup� half a block from Wilshire and took a taxi in front of the Beverly-Wilshire. I knew I could be traced. That wasn't important. The important thing was how soon.

    From a cocktail bar in Hollywood I called Hiney. He was still on the job and still sour.

    "Anything new on Skalla?"

    "Listen," he said nastily, "was you over to talk to that Shamey woman? Where are you?"

    "Certainly I was," I said. "I'm in Chicago."

    "You better come on home. Why was you there?"

    "I thought she might know Beulah, of course. She did. Want to raise that bet a little?"

    "Can the comedy. She's dead."

    "Skalla-" I started to say.

    "That's the funny side," he grunted. "He was there. Some nosy old-next door seen him. Only there ain't a mark on her. She died natural. I kind of got tied up here, so I didn't get over to see her."

    "I know how busy you are," I said in what seemed to me a dead voice.

    "Yeah. Well, hell, the doc don't even know what she died of. Not yet."

    "Fear," I said. "She's the one that turned Skalla up eight years ago. Whisky may have helped a little."

    "Is that so?" Hiney said. "Well, well. We got him now anyways. We make him at Girard, headed north in a rent hack. We got the county and state law in on it. If he drops over to the Ridge, we nab him at Castaic. She was the one turned him up, huh? I guess you better come in, Carmady."

    "Not me," I said. "Beverly Hills wants me for a hit-and-run. I'm a criminal myself now."

    I had a quick snack and some coffee before I took a taxi to Las Mores and Santa Monica and walked up to where I had left my roadster parked.

    Nothing was happening around there except that some kid in the back of a car was strumming a ukelele.

    I pointed my roadster towards Heather Street.

    Heather Street was a gash in the side of a steep flat slope, at the top of Beachwood Drive. It curved around the shoulder enough so that even by daylight you couldn't have seen much more than half a block of it at one time while you were on it.

    The house I wanted was built downward, one of those clinging-vine effects, with a front door below the street level, a patio on the roof, a bedroom or two possibly in the basement, and a garage as easy to drive into as an olive bottle.

    The garage was empty, but a big shiny sedan had its two right wheels off the road, on the shoulder of the bank. There were lights in the house.

    I drove around the curb, parked, walked back along the smooth, hardly used cement and poked a fountain pen flash into the sedan. It was registered to one David Marineau, 1737 North Flores Avenue, Hollywood, California. That made me go back to my heap and get a gun out of a locked pocket.

    I repassed the sedan, stepped down three rough stone steps and looked at the bell beside a narrow door topped by a lancet arch.

    I didn't push it, I just looked at it. The door wasn't quite shut. A fairly wide crack of dim light edged around its panel. I pushed it an inch. Then I pushed it far enough to look in.

    Then I listened. The silence of that house was what made me go in. It was one of those utterly dead silences that come after an explosion. Or perhaps I hadn't eaten enough dinner. Anyway I went in.

    The long living room went clear to the back, which wasn't very far as it was a small house. At the back there were french doors and the metal railing of a balcony showed through the glass. The balcony would be very high above the slope of the hill, built as the house was.

    There were nice lamps, nice chairs with deep sides, nice tables, a thick apricot-colored rug, two small cozy davenports, one facing and one right-angled to a fireplace with an ivory mantel and a miniature Winged Victory on that. A fire was laid behind the copper screen, but not lit.

    The room had a hushed, warm smell. It looked like a room where people got made comfortable. There was a bottle of Vat 69 on a low table with glasses and a copper bucket, and tongs.

    I fixed the door about as I had found it and just stood. Silence. Time passed. It passed in the dry whirr of an electric clock on a console radio, in the far-off hoot of an auto horn down on Beachwood half a mile below, in the distant hornet drone of a night-flying plane, in the metallic wheeze of a cricket under the house.

    Then I wasn't alone any longer.

    Mrs. Marineau slid into the room at the far end, by a door beside the french doors. She didn't make any more noise than a butterfly. She still wore the pillbox black hat and the burnt-orange tweeds, and they still looked like hell together. She had a small glove in her hand wrapped around the butt of a gun. I don't know why. I never did find that out.

    She didn't see me at once and when she did it didn't mean anything much. She just lifted the gun a little and slid along the carpet towards me, her lip clutched back so far that I couldn't even see the teeth that clutched it, But I had a gun out now myself. We looked at each other across our guns. Maybe she knew me. I hadn't any idea from her expression.

    I said, "You got them, huh?"

    She nodded a little. "Just him'," she said.

    "Put the gun down, You're all through with it."

    She lowered it a little. She hadn't seemed to notice the Colt I was pushing through the air in her general direction. I lowered that too.

    She said, "She wasn't here."

    Her voice had a dry, impersonal sound, flat, without timbre.

    "Miss Baring wasn't here?" I asked.

    "No."

    "Remember me?"

    She took a better look at me but her face didn't light up with any pleasure.

    "I'm the guy that was looking for Miss Baring," I said. "You told me where to come. Remember? Only Dave sent a logan to put the arm on me and ride me around while he came up here himself and promoted something. I couldn't guess what."

    The brunette said, "You're no cop. Dave said you were a fake."

    I made a broad, hearty gesture and moved a little closer to her, unobtrusively. "Not a city cop," I admitted. "But a cop. And that was a long time ago. Things have happened since then. Haven't they?"

    "Yes," she said. "Especially to Dave. Hee, hee."

    It wasn't a laugh. It wasn't meant to be a laugh. It was just a little steam escaping through a safety valve.

    "Hee, hee," I said. We looked at each other like a couple of nuts being Napoleon and Josephine.

    The idea was to get close enough to grab her gun. I was still too far.

    "Anybody here besides you?" I asked.

    "Just Dave."

    "I had an idea Dave was here." It wasn't clever, but it was good for another foot.

    "Oh, Dave's here," she agreed. "Yes. You'd like to see him?"

    "Well- if it isn't too much trouble."

    "Hee, hee," she said. "No trouble at all. Like this."

    She jerked the gun up and snapped the trigger at me. She did it without moving a muscle of her face.

    The gun not going off puzzled her, in a sort of vague, weekbefore-last manner. Nothing immediate or important. I wasn't there any more. She lifted the gun up, still being very careful about the black kid glove wrapped about its butt, and peered into the muzzle. That didn't get her anywhere. She shook the gun. Then she was aware of me again. I hadn't moved. I didn't have to, now.

    "I guess it's not loaded," she said.

    "Maybe just all used up," I said. "To bad. These little ones only hold seven. My shells won't fit, either. Let's see if I can do anything?"

    She put the gun in my hand. Then she dusted her hands together. Her eyes didn't seem to have any pupils, or to be all pupils. I wasn't sure which.

    The gun wasn't loaded. The magazine was quite empty. I sniffed the muzzle. The gun hadn't been fired since it was last cleaned.

    That got me. Up to that point it had looked fairly simple, if I could get by without any more murder. But this threw it. I hadn't any idea what either of us was talking about now.

    I dropped her pistol into my side pocket and put mine back on my hip and chewed my lip for a couple of minutes, to see what might turn up. Nothing did.

    The sharp-faced Mrs. Marineau merely stood still and stared at a spot between my eyes, fuzzily, like a rather blotto tourist seeing a swell sunset on Mount Whitney.

    "Well," I said at last, "let's kind of look through the house and see what's what."

    "You mean Dave?"

    "Yeah, we could take that in."

    "He's in the bedroom." She tittered. "He's at home in bedrooms."

    I touched her arm and turned her around. She turned obediently, like a small child.

    "But this one will be the last one he'll be at home in," she said. "Hee, hee."

    "Oh, yeah. Sure," I said.

    My voice sounded to me like the voice of a midget.

    Dave Marineau was dead all right-if there had been any doubt about it.

    A white bowl lamp with raised figures shone beside a large bed in a green and silver bedroom. It was the only light in the room. It filtered a hushed kind of light down at his face. He hadn't been dead long enough to get the corpse look.

    He lay sprawled casually on the bed, a little sideways, as though he had been standing in front of it when he was shot. One arm was flung out as loose as a strand of kelp and the other was under him. His open eyes were flat and shiny and almost seemed to hold a self-satisfied expression. His mouth was open a little and the lamplight glistened on the edges of his upper teeth.

    I didn't see the wound at all at first. It was high up, on the right side of his head, in the temple, but back rather far, almost far enough to drive the petrosal bone through the brain. It was powder-burned, rimmed with dusky red, and a fine trickle spidered down from it and got browner as it got thinner against his cheek.

    "Hell, that's a contact wound," I snapped at the woman. "A suicide wound."

    She stood at the foot of the bed and stared at the wall above his head. If she was interested in anything besides the wall, she didn't show it.

    I lifted his still limp right hand and sniffed at the place where the base of the thumb joins the palm. I smelled cordite, then I didn't smell cordite, then I didn't know whether I smelled cordite or not. It didn't matter, of course. A paraffin test would prove it one way or the other.

    I put the hand down again, carefully, as though it were a fragile thing of great value. Then I plowed around on the bed, went down on the floor, got halfway under the bed, swore, got up again and rolled the dead man to one side enough to look under him. There was a bright, brassy shellcase but no gun.

    It looked like murder again. I liked that better. He wasn't the suicide type.

    "See any gun?" I asked her.

    "No." Her face was as blank as a pie pan.

    "Where's the Baring girl? What are you supposed to be doing here?"

    She bit the end of her left little finger. "I'd better confess," she said. "I came here to kill them both."

    "Go on," Isaid.

    "Nobody was here. Of course, after I phoned him and he told me you were not a real cop and there was no murder and you were a blackmailer and just trying to scare me out of the address-" She stopped and sobbed once, hardly more than a sniff, and moved her line of sight to a corner of the ceiling.

    Her words had a tumbled arrangement, but she spoke them like a drugstore Indian.

    "I came here to kill both of them," she said. "I don't deny that."

    "With an empty gun?"

    "It wasn't empty two days ago. I looked. Dave must have emptied it. He must have been afraid."

    "That listens," I said. "Go on."

    "So I came here. That was the last insult-his sending you to me to get her address. That was more than I would-"

    "The story," I said. "I know how you felt. I've read it in the love mags myself."

    "Yes. Well, he said there was something about Miss Baring he had to see her about on account of the studio and it was nothing personal, never had been, never would be-"

    "My Gawd," I said, "I know that too. I know what he'd feed you. We've got a dead man lying around here. We've got to do something, even if he was just your husband."

    "You-, she said.

    "Yeah," I said. "That's better than the dopey talk. Go on."

    "The door wasn't shut. I came in. That's all. Now, I'm going. And you're not going to stop me. You know where I live, you-.' She called me the same name again.

    "We'll talk to some law first," I said. I went over and shut the door and turned the key on the inside of it and took it out. Then I went over to the french doors. The woman gave me looks, but I couldn't hear what her lips were calling me now.

    French doors on the far side of the bed opened on the same balcony as the living room. The telephone was in a niche in the wall there, by the bed, where you could yawn and reach out for it in the morning and order a tray of diamond necklaces sent up to try on.

    I sat down on the side of the bed and reached for the phone, and a muffled voice came to me through the glass and said: "Hold it, pal! Just hold it!"

    Even muffled by the glass it was a deep, soft voice. I had heard it before. It was Skalla's voice.

    I was in line with the lamp. The lamp was right behind me. I dived off the bed on to the floor, clawing at my hip.

    A shot roared and glass sprinkled the back of my neck. I couldn't figure it. Skalla wasn't on the balcony. I had looked.

    I rolled over and started to snake away along the floor away from the french doors, my only chance with the lamp where it was.

    Mrs. Marineau did just the right thing-for the other side. She jerked a slipper off and started slamming me with the heel of it. I grabbed for her ankles and we wrestled around and she cut the top of my head to pieces.

    I threw her over. It didn't last long. When I started to get up Skalla was in the room, laughing at me. The.45 still had a home in his fist. The french door and the locked screen outside looked as though a rogue elephant had passed that way.

    "Okay," I said. "I give up."

    "Who's the twist? She sure likes you, pal."

    I got up on my feet. The woman was over in a corner somewhere. I didn't even look at her.

    "Turn around, pal, while I give you the fan."

    I hadn't worked my gun loose yet. He got that. I didn't say anything about the door key, but he took it. So he must have been watching from somewhere. He left me my car keys. He looked at the little empty gun and dropped it back in my pocket.

    "Where'd you come from?" I asked.

    "Easy. Clumb up the balcony and held on, looking through the grill at you. Cinch to an old circus man. How you been, pal?"

    Blood from the top of my head was leaking down my face. I got a handkerchief out and mopped at it. I didn't answer him.

    "Jeeze, you sure was funny on the bed grabbin' for the phone with the stiff at your back."

    "I was a scream," I growled. "Take it easy. He's her husband."

    He looked at her. "She's his woman?"

    I nodded and wished I hadn't.

    "That's tough. If I'd a known-but I couldn't help meself. The guy asked for it."

    "You-" I started to say, staring at him. I heard a queer, strained whine behind me, from the woman.

    "Who else, pal? Who else? Let's all go back in that livin' room. Seems to me they was a bottle of nice-looking hooch there. And you need some stuff on that head."

    "You're crazy to stick around here," I growled. "There's a general pickup out for you. The only way out of this canyon is back down Beachwood or over the hills-on foot."

    Skalla looked at me and said very quietly, "Nobody's phoned no law from here, pal."

    Skalla watched me while I washed and put some tape on my head in the bathroom. Then we went back to the living room. Mrs. Marineau, curled up on one of the davenports, looked blankly at the unlit fire. She didn't say anything.

    She hadn't run away because Skalla had her in sight all the time. She acted resigned, indifferent, as if she didn't care what happened now.

    I poured three drinks from the Vat 69 bottle, handed one to the brunette. She held her hand out for the glass, half smiled at me, crumpled off the davenport to the floor with the smile still on her face.

    I put the glass down, lifted her and put her back on the davenport with her head low. Skalla stared at her. She was out cold, as white as paper.

    Skalla took his drink, sat down on the other davenport and put the.45 beside him. He drank his drink looking at the woman, with a queer expression on his big pale face.

    "Tough," he said. "Tough. But the louse was cheatin' on her anyways. The hell with him." He reached for another drink, swallowed it, sat down near her on the other davenport right-angled to the one she lay on.

    "So you're a dick," he said.

    "How'd you guess?"

    "Lu Shamey told me about a guy goin' there. He sounded like you. I been around and looked in your heap outside. I walk silent."

    "Well-what now?" I asked.

    He looked more enormous than ever in the room in his sports clothes. The clothes of a smart-aleck kid. I wondered how long it had taken him to get them together. They couldn't have been ready-made. He was much too big for that.

    His feet were spread wide on the apricot rug, he looked down sadly at the white kid explosions on the suede. They were the worst-looking shoes I ever saw.

    "What you doin' here?" he asked gruffly.

    "Looking for Beulah. I thought she might need a little help. I had a bet with a city cop I'd find her before he found you. But I haven't found her yet."

    "You ain't seen her, huh?"

    I shook my head, slowly, very carefully.

    He said softly, "Me neither, pal. I been around for hours. She ain't been home. Only the guy in the bedroom come here. How about the dinge manager up at Shamey's?"

    "That's what the tag's for."

    "Yeah. A guy like that. They would. Well, I gotta blow. I'd like to take the stiff, account of Beulah. Can't leave him around to scare her. But I guess it ain't any use now. The dinge kill queers that."

    He looked at the woman at his elbow on the other little davenport. Her face was still greenish white, her eyes shut. There was a movement of her breast.

    "Without her," he said, "I guess I'd clean up right and button you good." He touched the.45 at his side. "No hard feelings, of course, just for Beulah. But the way it is-heck, I can't knock the frail off."

    "Too bad." I snarled, feeling my head.

    He grinned. "I guess I'll take your heap. For a short ways. Throw them keys over."

    I threw them over. He picked them up and laid them beside the big Colt. He leaned forward a little. Then he reached back into one of his patch pockets and brought out a small pearlhandled gun, about.25 caliber. He held it on the Hat of his hand.

    "This done it," he said. "I left a rent hack I had on the street below and come up the bank and around the house. I hear the bell ring. This guy is at the front door. I don't come up far enough for him to see me. Nobody answers. Well, what do you think? The guy's got a key. A key to Beulah's house!"

    His huge face became one vast scowl. The woman on the davenport was breathing a little more deeply, and I thought I saw one of her eyelids twitch.

    "What the hell," I said. "He could get that a dozen ways. He's a boss at KLBL where she works. He could get at her bag, take an impression. Hell, she didn't have to give it to him."

    "That's right, pal." He beamed. "0' course, she didn't have to give it to the-. Okay, he went in, and I made it fast after him. But he had the door shut. I opened it my way. After that it didn't shut so good, you might of noticed. He was in the middle of this here room, over there by a desk. He's been here before all right though"-the scowl came back again, although not quite so black-because he slipped a hand into the desk drawer and come up with this." He danced the pearl-handled thing on his enormous palm.

    Mrs. Marineau's face now had distinct lines of tensity.

    "So I start for him. He lets one go. A miss. He's scared and runs into the bedroom. Me after. He lets go again. Another miss. You'll find them slugs in the wall somewheres."

    "I'll make a point of it," I said.

    "Yeah, then I got him. Well, hell, the guy's only a punk in a white muffler, If she's washed up with me, okay. I want it from her, see? Not from no greasy-faced piece of cheese like him. So I'm sore. But the guy's got guts at that."

    He rubbed his chin. I doubted the last bit.

    "I say: 'My woman lives here, pal. How come?' He says: 'Come back tomorrow. This here is my night.'"

    Skalla spread his free left hand in a large gesture. "After that nature's got to take its course, ain't it? I pull his arms and legs off. Only while I'm doing it the damn little gat pops off and he's as limp as-as-" he glanced at the woman and didn't finish what he was going to say. "Yeah, he was dead."

    One of the woman's eyelids flickered again. I said, "Then?"

    "I scrammed. A guy does. But I come back. I got to thinkin' it's tough on Beulah, with that stiff on her bed. So I'll just go back and ferry him out to the desert and then crawl in a hole for a while. Then this frail comes along and spoils that part."

    The woman must have been shamming for quite a long time. She must have been moving her legs and feet and turning her body a fraction of an inch at a time, to get in the right position, to get leverage against the back of the davenport.

    The pearl-handled gun still lay on Skalla's flat hand when she moved. She shot off the davenport in a flat dive, gathering herself in the air like an acrobat. She brushed his knees and picked the gun off his hand as neatly as a chipmunk peels a nut.

    He stood up and swore as she rolled against his legs. The big Colt was at his side, but he didn't touch it or reach for it. He stooped to take hold of the woman with his big hands empty.

    She laughed just before she shot him.

    She shot him four times, in the lower belly, then the hammer clicked. She threw the gun at his face and rolled away from him.

    He stepped over her without touching her. His big pale face was quite empty for a moment, then it settled into stiff lines of torture, lines that seemed to have been there always.

    He walked erectly along the rug towards the front door. I jumped for the big Colt and got it. To keep it from the woman. At the fourth step he took, blood showed on the yellowish nap of the rug. After that it showed at every step he took.

    He reached the door and put his big hand flat against the wood and leaned there for a moment. Then he shook his head and turned back. His hand left a bloody smear on the door from where he had been holding his belly.

    He sat down in the first chair he came to and leaned forward and held himself tightly with his hands. The blood came between his fingers slowly, like water from an overflowing basin.

    "Them little slugs," he said, "hurt just like the big ones, down below anyways."

    The dark woman walked towards him like a marionette. He watched her come unblinkingly, under his half-lowered, heavy lids.

    When she got close enough she leaned over and spat in his face.

    He didn't move. His eyes didn't change. I jumped for her and threw her into a chair. I wasn't nice about it.

    "Leave her alone," he grunted at me. "Maybe she loved the guy."

    Nobody tried to stop me from telephoning this time.

    Hours later I sat on a red stool at Lucca's, at Fifth and Western, and sipped a martini and wondered how it felt to be mixing them all day and never drink one.

    I took another martini over and ordered a meal. I guess I ate it. It was late, past one, Skalla was in the prison ward of the General Hospital. Miss Baring hadn't showed up yet, but they knew she would, as soon as she heard Skalla was under glass, and no longer dangerous.

    KLBL, who didn't know anything about it at first, had got a nice hush working. They were to have twenty-four clear hours to decide how to release the story.

    Lucca's was almost as full as at noon. After a while an Italian brunette with a grand nose and eyes you wouldn't fool with came over and said: "I have a table for you now."

    My imagination put Skalla across the table from me. His flat black eyes had something in them that was more than mere pain, something he wanted me to do. Part of the time he was trying to tell me what it was, and part of the time he was holding his belly in one piece and saying again: "Leave her alone, Maybe she loved the guy."

    I left there and drove north to Franklin and over Franklin to Beachwood and up to Heather Street. It wasn't staked. They were that sure of her.

    I drifted along the street below and looked up the scrubby slope spattered with moonlight and showing her house from behind as if it were three stories high. I could see the metal brackets that supported the porch. They looked high enough off the ground so that a man would need a balloon to reach them. But there was where he had gone up. Always the hard way with him.

    He could have run away and had a fight for his money or even bought himself a place to live up in. There were plenty of people in the business, and they wouldn't fool with Skalla. But he had come back instead to climb her balcony, like Romeo, and get his stomach full of slugs. From the wrong woman, as usual.

    I drove around a white curve that looked like moonlight itself and parked and walked up the hill the rest of the way. I carried a flash, but I didn't need it to see there was nobody on the doorstep waiting for the milk. I didn't go in the front way. There might just happen to be some snooper with night glasses up on the hill.

    I sneaked up the bank from behind, between the house and the empty garage. I found a window I could reach and made not much noise breaking it with a gun inside my hat. Nothing happened except that the crickets and tree frogs stopped for a moment.

    I picked a way to the bedroom and prowled my flash around discreetly, after lowering the shades and pulling the drapes across them. The light dropped on a tumbled bed, on daubs of print powder, on cigarette butts on the window sills and heel marks in the nap of the carpet. There was a green and silver toilet set on the dressing table and three suitcases in the closet. There was a built-in bureau back in there with a lock that meant business. I had a chilled-steel screwdriver with me as well as the flash. I jimmied it.

    The jewelry wasn't worth a thousand dollars. Perhaps not half. But it meant a lot to a girl in show business. I put it back where I got it.

    The living room had shut windows and a queer, unpleasant, sadistic smell. The law enforcement had taken care of the Vat 69, to make it easier for the fingerprint men. I had to use my own. I got a chair that hadn't been bled on into a corner, wet my throat and waited in the darkness.

    A shade flapped in the basement or somewhere. That made me wet my throat again. Somebody came out of a house half a dozen blocks away and whooped. A door banged. Silence. The tree frogs started again, then the crickets. Then the electric clock on the radio got louder than all the other sounds together.

    Then I went to sleep.

    When I woke up the moon had gone from the front windows and a car had stopped somewhere. Light, delicate, careful steps separated themselves from the night. They were outside the front door. A key fumbled in the lock.

    In the opening door the dim sky showed a head without a hat. The slope of the hill was too dark to outline any more. The door clicked shut.

    Steps rustled on the rug. I already had the lamp cord in my fingers. I yanked it and there was light.

    The girl didn't make a sound, not a whisper of sound. She just pointed the gun at me.

    I said, "Hello, Beulah."

    She was worth waiting for.

    Not too tall, not too short; that girl. She had the long legs that can walk and dance. Her hair even by the light of the one lamp was like a brush fire at night. Her face had laughter wrinkles at the corner of the eyes. Her mouth could laugh.

    The features were shadowed and had that drawn look that makes some faces more beautiful because it makes them more delicate. I couldn't see her eyes. They might have been blue enough to make you jump, but I couldn't see.

    The gun looked about a.32, but had the extreme rightangled grip of a Mauser.

    After a while she said very softly, "Police, I suppose."

    She had a nice voice, too. I still think of it, at times.

    I said, "Let's sit down and talk. We're all alone here. Ever drink out of the bottle?"

    She didn't answer. She looked down at the gun she was holding, half smiled, shook her head.

    "You wouldn't make two mistakes," I said. "Not a girl as smart as you are."

    She tucked the gun into the side pocket of a long ulsterlike coat with a military collar.

    "Who are you?"

    "Just a shamus. Private detective to you. Carmady is the name. Need a lift?"

    I held my bottle out. It hadn't grown to my hand yet. I still had to hold it.

    "I don't drink, Who hired you?"

    "KLBL. To protect you from Steve Skalla."

    "So they know," she said. "So they know about him."

    I digested that and said nothing.

    "Who's been here?" she went on sharply. She was still standing in the middle of the room, with her hands in her coat pockets now, and no hat.

    "Everybody but the plumber," I said. "He's a little late, as usual."

    "You're one of those men." Her nose seemed to curl a little. "Drugstore comics."

    "No," I said. "Not really. It's just a way I get talking to the people I have to talk to. Skalla came back again and ran into trouble and got shot up and arrested. He's in the hospital. Pretty bad."

    She didn't move. "How bad?"

    "He might live if he'd have surgery. Doubtful, even with that. Hopeless without. He has three in the intestines and one in the liver."

    She moved at last and started to sit down. "Not in that chair," I said quickly. "Over here."

    She came over and sat near me, on one of the davenports. Lights twisted in her eyes. I could see them now. Little twisting lights like Catherine wheels spinning brightly.

    She said, "Why did he come back?"

    "He thought he ought to tidy up. Remove the body and so on. A nice guy, Skalla."

    "Do you think so?"

    "Lady, if nobody else in the world thinks so, I do."

    "I'll take that drink," she said.

    I handed her the bottle. I grabbed it away in a hurry. "Gosh," I said. "You have to break in on this stuff."

    She looked towards the side door that led to the bedroom back of me.

    "Gone to the morgue," I said. "You can go in there."

    She stood up at once and went out of the room. She came back almost at once.

    "What have they got on Steve?" she asked. "If he recovers."

    "He killed a nigger over on Central this morning. It was more or less self-defense on both sides. I don't know. Except for Marineau he might get a break."

    "Marineau?" she said.

    "Yeah. You knew he killed Marineau."

    "Don't be silly," she said. "I killed Dave Marineau."

    "Okay," I said. "But that's not the way Steve wants it."

    She stared at me. "You mean Steve came back here deliberately to take the blame?"

    "If he had to, I guess. I think he really meant to cart Marineau off to the desert and lose him. Only a woman showed up here-Mrs. Marineau."

    "Yes," the girl said tonelessly. "She thinks I was his mistress. That greasy spoon."

    "Were you?" I asked.

    "Don't try that again," she said. "Even if I did work on Central Avenue once." She went out of the room again.

    Sounds of a suitcase being yanked about came into the living room. I went in after her. She was packing pieces of cobweb and packing them as if she liked nice things nicely packed.

    "You don't wear that stuff down in the tank," I told her, leaning in the door.

    She ignored me some more. "I was going to make a break for Mexico," she said. "Then South America. I didn't mean to shoot him. He roughed me up and tried to blackmail me into something and I went and got the gun. Then we struggled again and it went off. Then I ran away."

    "Just what Skalla said he did," I said. "Hell, couldn't you just have shot the-on purpose?"

    "Not for your benefit," she said. "Or any cop. Not when I did eight months in Dalhart, Texas, once for rolling a drunk. Not with that Marineau woman yelling her head off that I seduced him and then got sick of him."

    "A lot she'll say," I grunted. "After I tell how she spat in Skalla's face when he had four slugs in him."

    She shivered. Her face whitened. She went on taking the things out of the suitcase and putting them in again.

    "Did you roll the drunk really?"

    She looked up at me, then down. "Yes," she whispered.

    I went over nearer to her. "Got any bruises or torn clothes to show?" I asked.

    "No."

    "Too bad," I said, and took hold of her.

    Her eyes flamed at first and then turned to black stone, I tore her coat off, tore her up plenty, put hard fingers into her arms and neck and used my knuckles on her mouth. I let her go, panting. She reeled away from me, but didn't quite fall.

    "We'll have to wait for the bruises to set and darken," I said. "Then we'll go downtown."

    She began to laugh. Then she went over to the mirror and looked at herself. She began to cry.

    "Get out of here while I change my clothes!" she yelled. "I'll give it a tumble. But if it makes any difference to Steve-I'm going to tell it right."

    "Aw, shut up and change your clothes," I said.

    I went out and banged the door.

    I hadn't even kissed her. I could have done that, at least. She wouldn't have minded any more than the rest of the knocking about I gave her.

    We rode the rest of the night, first in separate cars to hide hers in my garage, then in mine. We rode up the coast and had coffee and sandwiches at Malibu, then on up and over. We had breakfast at the bottom of the Ridge Route, just north of San Fernando.

    Her face looked like a catcher's mitt after a tough season. She had a lower lip the size of a banana and you could have cooked steaks on the bruises on her arms and neck, they were so hot.

    With the first strong daylight we went to the City Hall.

    They didn't even think of holding her or checking her up. They practically wrote the statement themselves. She signed it blank-eyed, thinking of something else. Then a man from KLBL and his wife came down to get her.

    So I didn't get to ride her to a hotel. She didn't get to see Skalla either, not then. He was under morphine.

    He died at two-thirty the same afternoon. She was holding one of his huge, limp fingers, but he didn't know her from the Queen of Siam.

    

    

    

    

    

    

    I was smoking my pipe and making faces at the back of my name on the glass part of the office door when Violets M'Gee called me up. There hadn't been any business in a week.

    "How's the sleuth racket, huh?" Violets asked. He's a homicide dick in the sheriffs office, "Take a little flutter down at the beach? Body guarding or something, it is.',

    "Anything that goes with a dollar," I said. "Except murder. I get three-fifty for that."

    "I bet you do nice neat work too. Here's the lay, John."

    He gave me the name, address and telephone number of a man named Lindley Paul who lived at Castellamare, was a socialite and went everywhere except to work, lived alone with a Jap servant, and drove a very large car. The sheriffs office had nothing against him except that he had too much fun.

    Castellamare was in the city limits, but didn't look it, being a couple of dozen houses of various sizes hanging by their eyebrows to the side of a mountain, and looking as if a good sneeze would drop them down among the box lunches on the beach. There was a sidewalk caf� up on the highway, and beside that a cement arch which was really a pedestrian bridge. From the inner end of this a flight of white concrete steps went straight as a ruler up the side of the mountain.

    Quinonal Avenue, Mr. Lindley Paul had told me over the phone, was the third street up, if I cared to walk. It was, he said, the easiest way to find his place the first time, the streets being designed in a pattern of interesting but rather intricate curves. People had been known to wander about in them for several hours without making any more yardage than an angleworm in a bait can.

    So I parked my old blue Chrysler down below and walked up. It was a fine evening and there was still some sparkle on the water when I started. It had all gone when I reached the top. I sat down on the top step and rubbed my leg muscles and waited for my pulse to come down into the low hundreds. After that I shook my shirt loose from my back and went along to the house, which was the only one in the foreground.

    It was a nice enough house, but it didn't look like really important money. There was a salt-tarnished iron staircase going up to the front door and the garage was underneath the house. A long black battleship of a car was backed into it, an immense streamlined boat with enough hood for three cars and a coyote tail tied to the radiator cap. It looked as if it had cost more than the house.

    The man who opened the door at the top of the iron stairs wore a white flannel suit with a violet satin scarf arranged loosely inside the collar. He had a soft brown neck, like the neck of a very strong woman. He had pale blue-green eyes, about the color of an aquamarine, features on the heavy side but very handsome, three precise ledges of thick blond hair rising from a smooth brown forehead, an inch more of height than I had-which made him six feet one-and the general look of a guy who would wear a white flannel suit with a violet satin scarf inside the collar.

    He cleared his throat, looked over my left shoulder, and said: "Yes?"

    "I'm the man you sent for. The one Violets M'Gee recommended."

    "Violets? Gracious, what a peculiar nickname. Let me see, your name is-"

    He hesitated and I let him work at it until he cleared his throat again and moved his blue-green eyes to a spot several miles beyond my other shoulder.

    "Dalmas," I said. "The same as it was this afternoon."

    "Oh, come in, Mr. Dalmas. You'll excuse me, I'm sure. My houseboy is away this evening. So I-" He smiled deprecatingly at the closing door, as though opening and closing it himself sort of dirtied him.

    The door put us on a balcony that ran around three sides of a big living room, only three steps above it in level. We went down the steps and Lindley Paul pointed with his eyebrows at a pink chair, and I sat down on it and hoped I wouldn't leave a mark.

    It was the kind of room where people sit on floor cushions with their feet in their laps and sip absinthe through lumps of sugar and talk from the backs of their throats, and some of them just squeak. There were bookshelves all around the balcony and bits of angular sculpture in glazed clay on pedestals. There were cozy little divans and bits of embroidered silk tossed here and there against the bases of lamps and so on. There was a big rosewood grand piano and on it a very tall vase with just one yellow rose in it, and under its leg there was a peachcolored Chinese rug a gopher could have spent a week in without showing his nose above the nap.

    Lindley Paul leaned in the curve of the piano and lit a cigarette without offering me one. He put his head back to blow smoke at the tall ceiling and that made his throat look more than ever like the throat of a woman.

    "It's a very slight matter," he said negligently. "Really hardly worth bothering you about. But I thought I might as well have an escort. You must promise not to flash any guns or anything like that. I suppose you do carry a gun."

    "Oh, yes," I said. "Yes." I looked at the dimple in his chin. You could have lost a marble in it.

    "Well, I won't want you to use it, you know, or anything like that. I'm just meeting a couple of men and buying something from them. I shall be carrying a little money in cash."

    "How much money and what for?" I asked, putting one of my own matches to one of my own cigarettes.

    "Well, really-" It was a nice smile, but I could have put the heel of my hand in it without feeling bad. I just didn't like the man.

    "It's rather a confidential mission I'm undertaking for a friend. I'd hardly care to go into the details," he said.

    "You just want me to go along to hold your hat,"I suggested.

    His hand jerked and some ash fell on his white suit cuff. That annoyed him. He frowned down at it, then he said softly, in the manner of a sultan suggesting a silk noose for a harem lady whose tricks have gone stale: "You are not being impertinent, I hope."

    "Hope is what keeps us alive," I said.

    He stared at me for a while. "I've a damned good mind to give you a sock on the nose," he said.

    "That's more like it," I said. "You couldn't do it without hardening up a bit, but I like the spirit. Now let's talk business."

    He was still a bit sore. "I ordered a bodyguard," he said coldly. "If I employed a private secretary I shouldn't tell him all my personal business."

    "He'd know it if he worked for you steady. He'd know it upside down and backwards. But I'm just day labor. You've got to tell me. What is it-blackmail?"

    After a long time he said: "No. It's a necklace of Fei Tsui jade worth at least seventy-five thousand dollars. Did you ever hear of Fei Tsui jade?"

    "No."

    "We'll have a little brandy and I'll tell you about it. Yes, we'll have a little brandy."

    He leaned away from the piano and went off like a dancer, without moving his body above the waist. I put my cigarette out and sniffed at the air and thought I smelled sandalwood, and then Lindley Paul came back with a nice-looking bottle and a couple of sniffing glasses. He poured a tablespoonful in each and handed me a glass.

    I put mine down in one piece and waited for him to get through rolling his spoonful under his nose and talk. He got around to it after a while.

    He said in a pleasant enough tone: "Fei Tsui jade is the only really valuable kind. The others are valuable for the workmanship put on them, chiefly. Fei Tsui is valuable in itself. There are no known unworked deposits, very little of it in existence, all the known deposits having been exhausted hundreds of years ago. A friend of mine had a necklace of this jade. Fiftyone carved mandarin beads, perfectly matched, about six carats each. It was taken in a holdup some time ago. It was the only thing taken, and we were warned-I happened to be with this lady, which is one reason why I'm taking the risk of making the pay-off-not to tell the police or any insurance company, but wait for a phone call. The call came in a couple of days, the price was set at ten thousand dollars, and the time is tonight at eleven. I haven't heard the place yet. But it's to be somewhere fairly near here, somewhere along the Palisades."

    I looked into my empty sniffing glass and shook it. He put a little more brandy in it for me. I sent that after the first dose and lit another cigarette, one of his this time, a nice Virginia Straight Cut with his monogram on the paper.

    "Jewel ransom racket," I said. "Well organized, or they wouldn't know where and when to pull the job. People don't wear valuable jewels out very much, and half of the time, when they do, they're phonies. Is jade hard to imitate?"

    "As to material, no," Lindley Paul said. "As to workmanship-that would take a lifetime."

    "So the stuff can't be cut," I said. "Which means it can't be fenced except for a small fraction of the value. So the ransom money is the gang's only pay-off. I'd say they'll play ball, You left your bodyguard problem pretty late, Mr. Paul. How do you know they'll stand for a bodyguard?"

    "I don't," he said rather wearily. "But I'm no hero. I like company in the dark. If the thing misses-it misses. I thought of going it alone and then I thought, why not have a man hidden in the back of my car, just in case?"

    "In case they take your money and give you a dummy package? How could I prevent that? If I start shooting and come out on top and it is a dummy package, you'll never see your jade again. The contact men won't know who's behind the gang. And if I don't open up, they'll be gone before you can see what they've left you. They may not even give you anything. They may tell you your stuff will come to you through the mail after the money has been checked for markings. Is it marked?"

    "My God, no!"

    "It ought to be," I growled. "It can be marked these days so that only a microscope and black light could show the markings up. But that takes equipment, which means cops. Okay. I'll take a flutter at it. My part will cost you fifty bucks. Better give it to me now, in case we don't come back. I like to feel money."

    His broad, handsome face seemed to turn a little white and glistening. He said swiftly: "Let's have some more brandy."

    He poured a real drink this time.

    We sat around and waited for the phone to ring. I got my fifty bucks to play with.

    The phone rang four times and it sounded from his voice as if women were talking to him. The call we wanted didn't come through until ten-forty.

    

    

    

    I drove. Or rather I held the wheel of the big black car and let it drive itself. I was wearing a sporty light-colored overcoat and hat belonging to Lindley Paul. I had ten grand in hundreddollar bills in one of the pockets. Paul was in the back seat. He had a silver-mounted Luger that was a pip to look at, and I hoped he knew how to use it. There wasn't anything about the job I liked.

    The meeting place was a hollow at the head of Purissima Canyon, about fifteen minutes from the house. Paul said he knew the spot fairly well and wouldn't have any trouble directing me.

    We switchbacked and figure-eighted around on the side of the mountain until I got dizzy and then all of a sudden we were out on the state highway, and the lights of the streaming cars were a solid white beam as far as you could see in either direction. The long-haul trucks were on their way.

    We turned inland past a service station at Sunset Boulevard. There was loneliness then, and for a while the smell of kelp, not very strong, and the smell of wild sage dripping down the dark slopes much stronger. A dim, distant yellow window would peek down at us from the crest of some realtor's dream. A car would growl by and its white glare would hide the hills for a moment. There was a half-moon and wisps of cold fog chasing it down the sky.

    "Off here is the Bel-Air Beach Club," Paul said. "The next canyon is Las Pulgas and the next after that is Purissima. We turn off at the top of the next rise." His voice was hushed, taut. It didn't have any of the Park Avenue brass of our'earlier acquaintance.

    "Keep your head down," I growled back at him. "We may be watched all the way. This car sticks out like spats at an Iowa picnic."

    The car purred on in front of me until, "Turn right here," he whispered sharply at the top of the next hill.

    I swung the black car into a wide, weed-grown boulevard that had never jelled into a traffic artery. The black stumps of unfinished electroliers jutted up from the crusted sidewalk. Brush leaned over the concrete from the waste land behind. I could hear crickets chirp and tree frogs drone behind them. The car was that silent.

    There was a house to a block now, all dark. The folks out there went to bed with the chickens it seemed. At the end of this road the concrete stopped abruptly and we slid down a dirt slope to a dirt terrace, then down another slope, and a barricade of what looked like four-by-fours painted white loomed across the dirt road.

    I heard a rustling behind me and Paul leaned over the seat, with a sigh in his whispered voice. "This is the spot. You've got to get out and move that barricade and drive on down into the hollow. That's probably so that we can't make a quick exit, as we'd have to back out with this car. They want their time to get away."

    "Shut up and keep down unless you hear me yell," I said.

    I cut the almost noiseless motor and sat there listening. The crickets and tree frogs got a little louder. I heard nothing else. Nobody was moving nearby, or the crickets would have been still. I touched the cold butt of the gun under my arm, opened the car door and slid out on to the hard clay, stood there. There was brush all around. I could smell the sage. There was enough of it to hide an army. I went towards the barricade.

    Perhaps this was just a tryout, to see if Paul did what he was told to do.

    I put my hands out-it took both of them-and started to lift a section of the white barrier to one side. It wasn't a tryout. The largest flashlight in the world hit me square in the face from a bush not fifteen feet away.

    A thin, high, niggerish voice piped out of the darkness behind the flash: "Two of us with shotguns. Put them mitts up high an' empty. We ain't takin' no chances."

    I didn't say anything. For a moment I just stood holding the barricade inches off the ground. Nothing from Paul or the car. Then the weight of the four-by-fours pulled my muscles and my brain said let go and I put the section down again. I put my hands slowly into the air. The flash pinned me like a fly squashed on the wall, I had no particular thought except a vague wonder if there hadn't been a better way for us to work it.

    "Tha's fine," the thin, high, whining voice said. "Jes' hold like that until I git aroun' to you."

    The voice awakened vague echoes in my brain. It didn't mean anything though. My memory had too many such echoes. I wondered what Paul was doing. A thin, sharp figure detached itself from the fan of light, immediately ceased to be sharp or of any shape at all, and became a vague rustling off to the side. Then the rustling was behind me. I kept my hands in the air and blinked at the glare of the flash.

    A light finger touched my back, then the hard end of a gun. The half-remembered voice said: "This may hurt jes' a little."

    A giggle and a swishing sound. A white, hot glare jumped through the top of my head. I piled down on.the barricade and clawed at it and yelled. My right hand tried to jerk down under my left arm.

    I didn't hear the swishing sound the second time. I only saw the white glare get larger and larger, until there was nothing else anywhere but hard, aching white light. Then there was darkness in which something red wriggled like a germ under the microscope. Then there was nothing red and nothing wriggling, just darkness and emptiness, and a falling sensation.

    I woke up looking fuzzily at a star and listening to two goblins talking in a black hat.

    "Lou Lid."

    "What's that?"

    "Lou Lid."

    "Who's Lou Lid?"

    "A tough dinge gunman you saw third-degreed once down at the Hall."

    "Oh� LouLid."

    I rolled over and clawed at the ground and crawled up on one knee. I groaned. There wasn't anybody there. I was talking to myself, coming out of it. I balanced myself, holding my hands flat on the ground, listening, not hearing anything. When I moved my hands, dried burrs stuck to the skin and the sticky ooze from the purple sage from which wild bees get most of their honey.

    Honey was sweet. Much, much too sweet, and too hard on the stomach. I leaned down and vomited.

    Time passed and I gathered my insides together again. I still didn't hear anything but the buzzing in my own ears. I got up very cautiously, like an old man getting out of a tub bath. My feet didn't have much feeling in them and my legs were rubbery. I wobbled and wiped the cold sweat of nausea off my forehead and felt the back of my head. It was soft and pulpy, like a bruised peach. When I touched it I could feel the pain clear down to my ankles. I could feel every pain I ever felt since the first time I got kicked in the rear in grade school.

    Then my eyes cleared enough for me to see the outlines of the shallow bowl of wild land, with brush growing on the banks all around like a low wall, and a dirt road, indistinct under the sinking moon, crawling up one side. Then I saw the car.

    It was quite close to me, not more than twenty feet away. I just hadn't looked in that direction. It was Lindley Paul's car, lightless. I stumbled over to it and instinctively grabbed under my arm for a gun. Of course there wasn't any gun there now. The whiny guy whose voice reminded me of someone would have seen to that. But I still had a fountainpen flash. I unshipped it, opened the rear door of the car and poked the light in.

    It didn't show anything-no blood, no torn upholstery, no starred or splintered glass, no bodies. The car didn't seem to have been the scene of a battle. It was just empty. The keys hung on the ornate panel. It had been driven down there and left. I pointed my little flash at the ground and began to prowl, looking for him. He'd be around there all right, if the car was.

    Then in the cold silence a motor throbbed above the rim of the bowl. The light in my hand went out. Other lights- headlights-tilted up over the frayed bushes. I dropped and crawled swiftly behind the hood of Lindley Paul's car.

    The lights tilted down, got brighter. They were coming down the slope of the dirt road into the bowl. I could hear the dull, idling sound of a small motor now.

    Halfway down the car stopped. A spotlight at the side of the windshield clicked on and swung to one side. It lowered, held steady on some point I couldn't see. The spot clicked off again and the car came slowly on down the slope.

    At the bottom it turned a little so that its headlights raked the black sedan. I took my upper lip between my teeth and didn't feel myself biting it until I tasted the blood.

    The car swung a little more. Its lights went out abruptly. Its motor died and once more the night became large and empty and black and silent. Nothing-no movement, except the crickets and tree frogs far off that had been droning all the time, only I hadn't been hearing them. Then a door latch snapped and there was a light, quick step on the ground and a beam of light cut across the top of my head like a sword.

    Then a laugh. A girl's laugh-strained, taut as a mandolin wire. And the white beam jumped under the big black car and hit my feet.

    The girl's voice said sharply: "All right, you. Come out of there with your hands up-and very damned empty! I've got you covered!"

    I didn't move.

    The voice stabbed at me again. "Listen, I've got three slugs for your feet, mister, and seven more for your tummy, and spare clips, and I change them plenty fast. Coming?"

    "Put that toy up!" I snarled. "Or I'll blow it out of your hand." My voice sounded like somebody else's voice. It was hoarse and thick.

    "Oh, a hard-boiled gentleman." There was a little quaver in the voice now. Then it hardened again, "Coming? I'll count three. Look at all the odds I'm giving you-twelve big fat cylinders to hide behind-or is it sixteen? Your feet will hurt you though. And anklebones take years to get well when they've been hurt, and sometimes-"

    I straightened up and looked into her flashlight. "I talk too much when I'm scared, too," I said.

    "Don't-don't move another inch! Who are you?"

    "A bum private dick-detective to you. Who cares?"

    I started around the car towards her. She didn't shoot. When I was six feet from her I stopped.

    "You stay right there!" she snapped angrily-after I had stopped.

    "Sure. What were you looking at back there, with your windshield spotlight?"

    "A man."

    "Hurt bad?"

    "I'm afraid he's dead," she said simply. "And you look half dead yourself."

    "I've been sapped," I said. "It always makes me dark under the eyes."

    "A nice sense of humor," she said. "Like a morgue attendant."

    "Let's look him over," I said gruffly. "You can stay behind me with your popgun, if it makes you feel any safer."

    "I never felt safer in my life," she said angrily, and backed away from me.

    I circled the little car she had come in, An ordinary little car, nice and clean and shiny under what was left of the moon. I heard her steps hehind me but I didn't pay any attention to her. About halfway up the slope a few feet off to the side I saw his foot.

    I put my own little flash on him and then the girl added hers. I saw him all. He was smeared to the ground, on his back, at the base of a bush. He was in that bag-of-clothes position that always means the same thing.

    The girl didn't speak. She kept away from me and breathed hard and held her light as steadily as any tough old homicide veteran.

    One of his hands was flung out in a frozen gesture. The fingers were curled. The other hand was under him and his overcoat was twisted as though he had been thrown out and rolled. His thick blond hair was matted with blood, black as shoe polish under the moon, and there was more of it on his face and there was a gray ooze mixed in with the blood. I didn't see his hat.

    Then was when I ought to have got shot, Up to that instant I hadn't even thought of the packet of money in my pocket. The thought came to me so quickly now, jarred me so hard, that I jammed a hand down into my pocket. It must have looked exactly like a hand going for a gun.

    The pocket was quite empty. I took the hand out and looked back at her.

    "Mister," she half sighed, if I hadn't made my mind up about your face-"

    "I had ten grand," I said. "It was his money. I was carrying it for him. It was a pay-off. I just remembered the money. And you've got the sweetest set of nerves I ever met on a woman. I didn't kill him."

    "I didn't think you killed him," she said. "Somebody hated him to smash his head open like that."

    "I hadn't known him long enough to hate him," I said. "Hold the flash down again."

    I knelt and went through his pockets, trying not to move him much. He had loose silver and bills, keys in a tooled leather case, the usual billfold with the usual window for a driver's licence and the usual insurance cards behind the licence. No money in the folder. I wondered why they had missed his trouser pockets. Panicked by the light, perhaps. Otherwise they'd have stripped him down to his coat lining. I held more stuff up in her light: two fine handkerchiefs as white and crisp as dry snow; half a dozen paper match folders from swank night traps; a silver cigarette case as heavy as a buggy weight and full of his imported straightcuts; another cigarette case, with a tortoise-shell frame and embroidered silk sides, each side a writhing dragon. I tickled the catch open and there were three long cigarettes under the elastic, Russians, with hollow mouthpieces. I pinched one. It felt old, dry.

    "Maybe for ladies," I said. "He smoked others."

    "Or maybe jujus," the girl said behind me, breathing on my neck. "I knew a lad who smoked them once. Could I look?"

    I passed the case up to her and she poked her flash into it until I growled at her to put it on the ground again. There wasn't anything else to examine. She snapped the case shut and handed it back and I put it in his breast pocket.

    "That's all. Whoever tapped him down was afraid to wait and clean up. Thanks."

    I stood up casually and turned and speared the little gun out of her hand.

    "Darn it, you didn't have to get rough!" she snapped. "Give," I said. "Who are you, and how come you ride around this place at midnight?"

    She pretended I had hurt her hand, put the flash on it and looked at it carefully.

    "I've been nice to you, haven't I?" she complained. "I'm burning up with curiosity and scared and I haven't asked you a single question, have I?"

    "You've been swell," I said. "But I'm in a spot where I can't fool around. Who are you? And douse the flash now. We don't need light any more."

    She put it out and the darkness lightened for us gradually until we could see the outlines of the bushes and the dead man's sprawled body and the glare in the southeastern sky that would be Santa Monica.

    "My name is Carol Pride," she said. "I live in Santa Monica. I try to do feature stories for a newspaper syndicate. Sometimes I can't get sleepy at night and I go out riding-just anywhere. I know all this country like a book. I saw your little light flickering around down in the hollow and it seemed to me it was pretty cold for young love-if they use lights."

    "I wouldn't know," I said. "I never did. So you have spare clips for this gun. Would you have a permit for it?"

    I hefted the little weapon. It felt like a Colt.25 in the dark. It had a nice balance for a small gun. Plenty of good men have been put to sleep with.25's.

    "Certainly I have a permit. That was just bluff about the spare clips though."

    "Not afraid of things are you, Miss Pride? Or would it be Mrs.?"

    "No, it wouldn't This neighborhood isn't dangerous. People don't even lock their doors around here. I guess some bad men just happened to get wise how lonely it is."

    I turned the little gun around and held it out. "Here. It's not my night to be clever. Now if you'll be good enough to ride me down to Castellamare, I'll take my car there and go find some law."

    "Shouldn't somebody stay with him?"

    I looked at the radiolite dial of my wrist watch. "It's a quarter to one," I said. "We'll leave him with the crickets and the stars. Let's go."

    She tucked the gun in her bag and we went back down the slope and got into her car. She jockeyed it around without lights and drove it back up the slope. The big black car looked like a monument standing there behind us.

    At the top of the rise I got out and dragged the section of white barricade back into position across the road. He was safe for the night now, and likely enough for many nights.

    The girl didn't speak until we had come near the first house. Then she put the lights on and said quietly: "There's blood on your face, Mr. Whatever-Your-Name-Is, and I never saw a man who needed a drink worse. Why not go back to my house and phone West Los Angeles from there? There's nothing but a fire station in this neighborhood."

    "John Dalmas is the name," I said. "I like the blood on my face. You wouldn't want to be mixed up in a mess like this. I won't even mention you."

    She said: "I'm an orphan and live all alone. It wouldn't matter in the slightest."

    "Just keep going down to the beach," I said. "I'll play it solo after that."

    But we had to stop once before we got to Castellamare, The movement of the car made me go off into the weeds and be sick again.

    When we came to the place where my car was parked and the steps started up the hill I said good night to her and sat in the Chrysler until I couldn't see her taillights any more.

    The sidewalk caf� was still open. I could have gone in there and had a drink and phoned. But it seemed smarter to do what I did half an hour later-walk into the West Los Angeles Police Station cold sober and green, with the blood still on my face.

    Cops are just people. And their whisky is just as good as what they push across bars at you.

    

    

    

    I didn't tell it well. It tasted worse all the time. Reavis, the man who came out from the downtown homicide bureau, listened to me with his eyes on the floor, and two plainclothes men lounged behind him like a bodyguard. A prowl-car unit had gone out long before to guard the body.

    Reavis was a thin, narrow-faced, quiet man about fifty, with smooth gray skin and immaculate clothes. His trousers had a knife-edge crease and he pulled them up carefully after he sat down. His shirt and tie looked as if he had put them on new ten minutes ago and his hat looked as if he had bought it on the way over.

    We were in the day captain's room at the West Los Angeles Police Station, just off Santa Monica Boulevard, near Sawtelle. There were just the four of us in it. Some drunk in a cell, waiting to go down to the city drunk tank for sunrise court, kept giving the Australian bush call all the time we were talking.

    "So I was his bodyguard for the evening," I said at the end. "And a sweet job I made of it."

    "I wouldn't give any thought to that," Reavis said carelessly. "It could happen to anybody. Seems to me they took you for this Lindley Paul, slugged you to save argument and to get plenty of time, perhaps didn't have the stuff with them at all and didn't mean to give it up so cheap. When they found you were not Paul they got sore and took it out on him."

    "He had a gun," I said. "A swell Luger, but two shotguns staring at you don't make you warlike."

    "About this darktown brother," Reavis said. He reached for a phone on the desk.

    "Just a voice in the dark. I couldn't be sure."

    "Yeah, but we'll find what he was doing about that time. Lou Lid. A name that would linger."

    He lifted the phone off its cradle and told the PBX man: "Desk at headquarters, Joe� This is Reavis out in West L.A. on that stick-up murder. I want a Negro or half-Negro gunman name of Lou Lid. About twenty-two to twenty-four, a lightish brown, neat-appearing, small, say one hundred thirty, cast in one eye, I forget which. There's something on him, but not much, and he's been in and out plenty times. The boys at Seventy-seventh will know him. I want to check his movements for this evening. Give the colored squad an hour, then put him on the air."

    He cradled the phone and winked at me. "We got the best shine dicks west of Chicago. If he's in town, they'll pick him off without even looking. Will we move out there now?"

    We went downstairs and got into a squad car and went back through Santa Monica to the Palisades.

    Hours later, in the cold gray dawn, I got home. I was guzzling aspirin and whisky and bathing the back of my head with very hot water when my phone jangled. It was Reavis.

    "Well, we got Lou Lid," he said. "Pasadena got him and a Mex named Fuente. Picked them up on Arroyo Seco Boulevard-not exactly with shovels, but kind of careful."

    "Go on," I said, holding the phone tight enough to crack it, "give me the punch line."

    "You guessed it already. They found them under the Colorado Street Bridge. Gagged, trussed fore and aft with old wire. And smashed like ripe oranges. Like it?"

    I breathed hard. "It's just what I needed to make me sleep like a baby," I said.

    The hard concrete pavement of Arroyo Seco Boulevard is some seventy-five feet directly below Colorado Street Bridge- sometimes also known as Suicide Bridge.

    "Well," Reavis said after a pause, "it looks like you bit into something rotten. What do you say now?"

    "Just for a quick guess I'd say an attempted hijack of the pay-off money by a couple of smart-alecks that got a lead to it somehow, picked their own spot and got smeared with the cash."

    "That would riced inside help," Reavis said. "You mean guys that knew the beads were taken, but didn't have them. I like better that they tried to leave town with the whole take instead of passing it to the boss. Or even that the boss thought he had too many mouths to feed."

    He said good night and wished me pleasant dreams. I drank enough whisky to kill the pain in my head, Which was more than was good for me.

    I got down to the office late enough to be elegant, but not feeling that way. Two stitches in the back of my scalp had begun to draw and the tape over the shaved place felt as hot as a bartender's bunion.

    My office was two rooms hard by the coffee-shop smell of the Mansion House Hotel. The little one was a reception room I always left unlocked for a client to go in and wait, in case I had a client and he wanted to wait.

    Carol Pride was in there, sniffing at the faded red davenport, the two odd chairs, the small square of carpet and the boy'ssize library table with the pre-Repeal magazines on it.

    She wore brownish speckled tweeds with wide lapels and a mannish shirt and tie, nice shoes, a black hat that might have cost twenty dollars for all I knew, and looked as if you could have made it with one hand out of an old desk blotter.

    "Well, you do get up," she said. "That's nice to know. I was beginning to think perhaps you did all your work in bed."

    "Tut, tut," I said. "Come into my boudoir."

    I unlocked the communicating door, which looked better than just kicking the lock lightly-which had the same effect-and we went into the rest of the suite, which was a rust-red carpet with plenty of ink on it, five green filing cases, three of them full of California climate, an advertising calendar showing the Dionne quintuplets rolling around on a sky-blue floor, a few near walnut chairs, and the usual desk with the usual heel marks on it and the usual squeaky swivel chair behind it. I sat down in that and put my hat on the telephone.

    I hadn't really seen her before, even by the lights down at Castellamare. She looked about twenty-six and as if she hadn't slept very well. She had a tired, pretty little face under fluffedout brown hair, a rather narrow forehead with more height than is considered elegant, a small inquisitive nose, an upper lip a shade too long and a mouth more than a shade too wide. Her eyes could be very blue if they tried. She looked quiet, but not mousy-quiet. She looked smart, but not Hollywood-smart.

    "I read it in the evening paper that comes out in the morning," she said. "What there was of it."

    "And that means the law won't break it as a big story. They'd have held it for the morning sheets."

    "Well, anyhow, I've been doing a little work on it for you," she said.

    I stared hard at her, poked a flat box of cigarettes across the desk, and filled my pipe. "You're making a mistake," I said. "I'm not on this case. I ate my dirt last night and banged myself to sleep with a bottle. This is a police job."

    "I don't think it is," she said. "Not all of it. And anyway you have to earn your fee. Or didn't you get a fee?"

    "Fifty bucks," I said. "I'll return it when I know who to return it to. Even my mother wouldn't think I earned it."

    "I like you," she said. "You look like a guy who was almost a heel and then something stopped him-just at the last minute. Do you know who that jade necklace belonged to?"

    I sat up with ajerk that hurt. "What jade necklace?" I almost yelled. I hadn't told her anything about a jade necklace. There hadn't been anything in the paper about a jade necklace.

    "You don't have to be clever. I've been talking to the man on the case-Lieutenant Reavis. I told him about last night. I get along with policemen. He thought I knew more than I did. So he told me things."

    "Well-who does it belong to?" I asked, after a heavy silence.

    "A Mrs. Philip Courtney Prendergast, a lady who lives in Beverly Hills-part of the year at least. Her husband has a million or so and a bad liver. Mrs. Prendergast is a black-eyed blonde who goes places while Mr. Prendergast stays home and takes calomel."

    "Blondes don't like blonds," I said. "Lindley Paul was as blond as a Swiss yodeler."

    "Don't be silly. That comes of reading movie magazines. This blonde liked that blond. I know. The society editor of the Chronicle told me. He weighs two hundred pounds and has a mustache and they call him Giddy Gertie."

    "He tell you about the necklace?"

    "No. The manager of Blocks Jewelry Company told me about that. I told him I was doing an article on rare jade-for the Police Gazette. Now you've got me doing the wisecracks."

    I lit my pipe for the third time and squeaked my chair back and nearly fell over backwards.

    "Reavis knows all this?" I asked, trying to stare at her without seeming to.

    "He didn't tell me he did. He can find out easily enough. I've no doubt he will. He's nobody's fool."

    "Except yours," I said. "Did he tell you about Lou Lid and Fuente the Mex?"

    "No. Who are they?"

    I told her about them. "Why, that's terrible," she said, and smiled.

    "Your old man wasn't a cop by any chance, was he?" I asked suspiciously.

    "Police Chief of Pomona for almost fifteen years."

    I didn't say anything. I remembered that Police Chief John Pride of Pomona had been shot dead by two kid bandits about four years before.

    After a while I said: "I should have thought of that. All right, what next?"

    "I'll lay you five to one Mrs. Prendergast didn't get her necklace back and that her bilious husband has enough drag to keep that part of the story and their name out of the papers, and that she needs a nice detective to help her get straightened out-without any scandal."

    "What scandal?"

    "Oh, I don't know. She's the type that would have a basket of it in her dressing room."

    "I suppose you had breakfast with her," I said. "What time did you get up?"

    "No, I can't see her till two o'clock. I got up at six."

    "My God," I said, and got a bottle out of the deep drawer of my desk. "My head hurts me something terrible."

    "Just one," Carol Pride said sharply. "And only because you were beaten up. But I daresay that happens quite often."

    I put the drink inside me, corked the bottle but not too tightly, and drew a deep breath.

    The girl groped in her brown bag and said: "There's something else. But maybe you ought to handle this part of it yourself."

    "It's nice to know I'm still working here," I said.

    She rolled three long Russian cigarettes across the desk. She didn't smile.

    "Look inside the mouthpieces," she said, "and draw your own conclusions. I swiped them out of that Chinese case last night. They all have that something to make you wonder."

    "And you a cop's daughter," I said.

    She stood up, wiped a little pipe ash off the edge of my desk with her bag and went towards the door.

    "I'm a woman to. Now I've got to go see another society editor and find out more about Mrs. Philip Courtney Prendergast and her love life. Fun, isn't it?"

    The office door and my mouth shut at about the same moment.

    I picked up one of the Russian cigarettes. I pinched it between my fingers and peeped into the hollow mouthpiece. There seemed to be something rolled up in there, like a piece of paper or card, something that wouldn't have improved the drawing of the cigarette. I finally managed to dig it out with the nailfile blade of my pocketknife.

    It was a card all right, a thin ivory calling card, man's size. Three words were engraved on it, nothing else.

    

SOUKESIAN THE PSYCHIC

    

    I looked into the other mouthpieces, found identical cards in each of them. It didn't mean a thing to me. I had never heard of Soukesian the Psychic. After a while I looked him up in the phone book. There was a man named Soukesian on West Seventh. It sounded Armenian so I looked him up again under Oriental Rugs in the classified section. He was there all right, but that didn't prove anything. You don't have to be a psychic to sell oriental rugs. You only have to be a psychic to buy them. And something told me this Soukesian on the card didn't have anything to do with oriental rugs.

    I had a rough idea what his racket would be and what kind of people would be his customers. And the bigger he was the less he would advertise. If you gave him enough time and paid him enough, he would cure anything from a tired husband to a grasshopper plague. He would be an expert in frustrated women, in tricky, tangled, love affairs, in wandering boys who hadn't written home, in whether to sell the property now or hold it another year, in whether this part will hurt my type with my public or improve it. Even men would go to him- guys who bellowed like bulls around their own offices and were all cold mush inside just the same. But most of all, women- women with money, women with jewels, women who could be twisted like silk thread around a lean Asiatic finger.

    I refilled my pipe and shook my thoughts around without moving my head too much, and fished for a reason why a man would carry a spare cigarette case, with three cigarettes in it not meant for smoking, and in each of those three cigarettes the name of another man concealed. Who would find that name?

    I pushed the bottle to one side and grinned. Anyone would find those cards who went through Lindley Paul's pockets with a fine-tooth comb-carefully and taking time. Who would do that? A cop. And when? If Mr. Lindley Paul died or was badly hurt in mysterious circumstances.

    I took my hat off the telephone and called a man named Willy Peters who was in the insurance business, so he said, and did a sideline selling unlisted telephone numbers bribed from maids and chauffeurs. His fee was five bucks. I figured Lindley Paul could afford it out of his fifty.

    Willy Peters had what I wanted. It was a Brentwood Heights number.

    I called Reavis down at headquarters. He said everything was fine except his sleeping time and for me just to keep my mouth shut and not worry, but I ought really to have told him about the girl. I said that was right but maybe he had a daughter himself and wouldn't be so keen to have a lot of camera hounds jumping out at her. He said he had and the case didn't make me look very good but it could happen to anyone and so long.

    I called Violets M'Gee to ask him to lunch some day when he had just had his teeth cleaned and his mouth was sore. But he was up in Ventura returning a prisoner. Then I called the Brentwood Heights number of Soukesian the Psychic.

    After a while a slightly foreign woman's voice said: " 'Allo."

    "May I speak to Mr. Soukesian?"

    "I am ver-ry sor-ry. Soukesian he weel never speak upon the telephone. I am bees secretar-ry. Weel I take the message?"

    "Yeah. Got a pencil?"

    "But of course I 'ave the pencil. The message, eef you please?" I gave her my name and address and occupation and telephone number first. I made sure she had them spelled right.

    Then I said: "It's about the murder of a man named Lindley Paul. It happened last night down on the Palisades near Santa Monica. I'd like to consult Mr. Soukesian."

    "He weel be ver-ry pleased." Her voice was as calm as an oyster. "But of course I cannot give you the appointment today. Soukesian he ees always ver-ry busy. Per'aps tomorrow-"

    "Next week will be fine," I said heartily.' "There's never any hurry about a murder investigation. Just tell him I'll give him two hours before I go to the police with what I know."

    There was a silence. Maybe a breath caught sharply and maybe it was just wire noise. Then the slow foreign voice said: "I weel tell him. I do not understand-"

    "Give it the rush, angel. I'll be waiting in my office."

    I hung up, fingered the back of my head, put the three cards away in my wallet and felt as if I could eat some hot food. I went out to get it.

    

    

    

    The Indian smelled. He smelled clear across my little reception room when I heard the outer door open and got up to see who it was. He stood just inside the door looking as if he had been cast in bronze. He was a big man from the waist up and had a big chest.

    Apart from that he looked like a bum. He wore a brown suit, too small for him. His hat was at least two sizes too small, and had been perspired in freely by someone it fitted better than it fitted him. He wore it about where a house wears a weathercock. His collar had the snug fit of a horse collar and was about the same shade of dirty brown. A tie dangled from it, outside his buttoned coat, and had apparently been tied with a pair of pliers in a knot the size of a pea. Around his bare throat above the collar he wore what looked like a piece of black ribbon.

    He had a big, flat face, a big, high-bridged, fleshy nose that looked as hard as the prow of a cruiser, He had lidless eyes, drooping jowls, the shoulders of a blacksmith. If he had been cleaned up a little and dressed in a white nightgown, he would have looked like a very wicked Roman senator.

    His smell was the earthy smell of the primitive man; dirty, but not the dirt of cities. "Huh," he said. "Come quick. Come now."

    I jerked my thumb at the inner office and went back into it. He followed me ponderously and made as much noise walking as a fly makes. I sat down behind my desk, pointed at the chair opposite, but he didn't sit down. His small black eyes were hostile.

    "Come where?" I wanted to know.

    "Huh. Me Second Harvest. Me Hollywood Indian."

    "Take a chair, Mr. Harvest."

    He snorted and his nostrils got very wide. They had been wide enough for mouseholes in the first place.

    "Name Second Harvest, No Mr. Harvest. Nuts."

    "What do you want?"

    "He say come quick. Big white father say come now. He say-"

    "Don't give me any more of that pig Latin," I said. "I'm no schoolmarm at the snake dances."

    "Nuts," he said.

    He removed his hat with slow disgust and turned it upside down. He rolled a finger around under the sweatband. That turned the sweatband up into view. He removed a paper clip from the edge of the leather and moved near enough to throw a dirty fold of tissue paper on the desk. He pointed at it angrily. His lank, greasy black hair had a shelf all around it, high up, from the too-tight hat.

    I unfolded the bit of tissue paper and found a card which read: Soukesian the Psychic. It was in thin script, nicely engraved. I had three just like it in my wallet.

    I played with my empty pipe, stared at the Indian, tried to ride him with my stare. "Okay. What does he want?"

    "He want you come now. Quick."

    "Nuts," I said. The Indian liked that. That was the fraternity grip. He almost grinned. "It will cost him a hundred bucks as a retainer," I added.

    "Huh?"

    "Hundred dollars. Iron men. Bucks to the number one hundred. Me no money, me no come. Savvy?" I began to count by opening and closing both fists.

    The Indian tossed another fold of tissue paper on the desk. I unfolded it. It contained a brand-new hundred-dollar bill.

    "Psychic is right," I said. "A guy that smart I'm scared of, but I'll go nevertheless."

    The Indian put his hat back on his head without bothering to fold the sweatband under. It looked only very slightly more comical that way.

    I took a gun from under my arm, not the one I had had the night before unfortunately-I hate to lose a gun-dropped the magazine into the heel of my hand, rammed it home again, fiddled with the safety and put the gun back in its holster.

    This meant no more to the Indian than if I had scratched my neck.

    "I gottum car," he said. "Big car. Nuts."

    "Too bad," I said. "I don't like big cars any more. However, let's go."

    I locked up and we went out. In the elevator the Indian smelled very strong indeed. Even the elevator operator noticed it.

    The car was a tan Lincoln touring, not new but in good shape, with glass gypsy curtains in the back. It dipped down past a shining green polo field, zoomed up the far side, and the dark, foreign-looking driver swung it into a narrow paved ribbon of white concrete that climbed almost as steeply as Lindley Paul's steps, but not as straight. This was well out of town, beyond Westwood, in Brentwood Heights.

    We climbed past two orange groves, rich man's pets, as that is not orange country, past houses molded flat to the side of the foothills, like bas-reliefs.

    Then there were no more houses, just the burnt foothills and the cement ribbon and a sheer drop on the left into the coolness of a nameless canyon, and on the right heat bouncing off the seared clay bank at whose edge a few unbeatable wild flowers clawed and hung on like naughty children who won't go to bed.

    And in front of me two backs, a slim, whipcord back with a brown neck, black hair, a vizored cap on the black hair, and a wide, untidy back in an old brown suit with the Indian's thick neck and heavy head above that, and on his head the ancient greasy hat with the sweatband still showing.

    Then the ribbon of road twisted into a hairpin, the big tires skidded on loose stones, and the tan Lincoln tore through an open gate and up a steep drive lined with pink geraniums growing wild. At the top of the drive there was an eyrie, an eagle's nest, a hilltop house of white plaster and glass and chromium, as modernistic as a fluoroscope and as remote as a lighthouse.

    The car reached the top of the driveway, turned, stopped before a blank white wall in which there was a black door. The Indian got out, glared at me. I got out, nudging the gun against my side with the inside of my left arm.

    The black door in the white wall opened slowly, untouched from outside, and showed a narrow passage ending far back. A bulb glowed in the ceiling.

    The Indian said: "Huh. Go in, big shot."

    "After you, Mr. Harvest."

    He went in scowling and I followed him and the black door closed noiselessly of itself behind us. A bit of mumbo-jumbo for the customers, At the end of the narrow passage there was an elevator, I had to get into it with the Indian. We went up slowly, with a gentle purring sound, the faint hum of a small motor. The elevator stopped, its door opened without a whisper and there was daylight.

    I got out of the elevator. It dropped down again behind me with the Indian still in it. I was in a turret room that was almost all windows, some of them close-draped against the afternoon glare. The rugs on the floor had the soft colors of old Persians, and there was a desk made of carved panels that probably came out of a church. And behind the desk there was a woman smiling at me, a dry, tight, withered smile that would turn to powder if you touched it.

    She had sleek, black, coiled hair, a dark Asiatic face. There were pearls in her ears and rings on her fingers, large, rather cheap rings, including a moonstone and a square-cut emerald that looked as phony as a ten-cent-store slave bracelet. Her hands were little and dark and not young and not fit for rings.

    "Ah, Meester Dalmas, so ver-ry good of you to come. Soukesian he weel be so pleased."

    "Thanks," I said. I took the new hundred-dollar bill out of my wallet and laid it on her desk, in front of her dark, glittering hands. She didn't touch it or look at it. "My party," I said. "But thanks for the thought."

    She got up slowly, without moving the smile, swished around the desk in a tight dress that fitted her like a mermaid's skin, and showed that she had a good figure, if you liked them four sizes bigger below the waist than above it.

    "I weel conduct you," she said.

    She moved before me to a narrow panelled wall, all there was of the room besides the windows and the tiny elevator shaft. She opened a narrow door beyond which there was a silky glow that didn't seem to be daylight. Her smile was older than Egypt now. I nudged my gun holster again and went in.

    The door shut silently behind me. The room was octagonal, draped in black velvet, windowless, with a remote black ceiling. In the middle of the black rug there stood a white octagonal table, and on either side of that a stool that was a smaller edition of the table. Over against the black drapes there was one more such stool. There was a large milky ball on a black stand on the white table. The light came from this. There was nothing else in the room.

    I stood there for perhaps fifteen seconds, with that obscure feeling of being watched. Then the velvet drapes parted and a man came into the room and walked straight over to the other side of the table and sat down. Only then did he look at me.

    He said: "Be seated opposite me, please. Do not smoke and do not move around or fidget, if you can avoid it. How may I serve you?"

    

    

    

    He was a tall man, straight as steel, with the blackest eyes I had ever seen and the palest and finest blond hair I had ever seen. He might have been thirty or sixty. He didn't look any more like an Armenian than I did. His hair was brushed straight back from as good a profile as John Barrymore had at twentyeight. A matinee idol, and I expected something furtive and dark and greasy that rubbed its hands.

    He wore a black double-breasted business suit cut like nobody's business, a white shirt, a black tie. He was as neat as a gift book.

    I gulped and said: "I don't want a reading. I know all about this stuff."

    "Yes?" he said delicately. "And what do you know about it?"

    "Let it pass," I said. "I can figure the secretary because she's a sweet buildup for the shock people get when they see you. The Indian stumps me a bit, but it's none of my business anyhow. I'm not a bunko squad cop. What I came about is a murder."

    "The Indian happens to be a natural medium," Soukesian said mildly. "They are much rarer than diamonds and, like diamonds, they are sometimes found in dirty places. That might not interest you either. As to the murder you may inform me. I never read the papers."

    "Come, come," I said. "Not even to see who's pulling the big checks at the front office? Oke, here it is."

    And I laid it in front of him, the whole damn story, and about his cards and where they had been found.

    He didn't move a muscle. I don't mean that he didn't scream or wave his arms or stamp on the floor or bite his nails. I mean he simply didn't move at all, not even an eyelid, not even an eye. He just sat there and looked at me, like a stone lion outside the Public Library.

    When I was all done he put his finger right down on the spot. "You kept those cards from the police? Why?"

    "You tell me. I just did."

    "Obviously the hundred dollars I sent you was not nearly enough."

    "That's an idea too," I said. "But I hadn't really got around to playing with it."

    He moved enough to fold his arms. His black eyes were as shallow as a cafeteria tray or as deep as a hole to China- whichever you like. They didn't say anything, either way.

    He said: "You wouldn't believe me if I said I only knew this man in the most casual manner-professionally?"

    "I'd take it under advisement," I said.

    "I take it you haven't much faith in me. Perhaps Mr. Paul had. Was anything on those cards besides my name?"

    "Yeah," I said. "And you wouldn't like it." This was kindergarten stuff, the kind the cops pull on radio crime dramatizations. He let it go without even looking at it.

    "I'm in a sensitive profession," he said. "Even in this paradise of fakers. Let me see one of those cards."

    "I was kidding you," I said. "There's nothing on them but your name." I got my wallet out and withdrew one card and laid it in front of him. I put the wallet away. He turned the card over with a fingernail.

    "You know what I figure?" I said heartily. "I figure Lindley Paul thought you would be able to find out who did him in, even if the police couldn't. Which means he was afraid of somebody."

    Soukesian unfolded his arms and folded them the other way. With him that was probably equivalent to climbing up the light fixture and biting off a bulb.

    "You don't think anything of the sort," he said. "How much-quickly-for the three cards and a signed statement that you searched the body before you notified the police?"

    "Not bad," I said, "for a guy whose brother is a rug peddler."

    He smiled, very gently. There was something almost nice about his smile. "There are honest rug dealers," he said. "But Arizmian Soukesian is not my brother. Ours is a common name in Armenia."

    I nodded.

    "You think I'm just another faker, of course," he added.

    "Go ahead and prove you're not."

    "Perhaps it is not money you want after all," he said carefully.

    "Perhaps it isn't."

    I didn't see him move his foot, but he must have touched a floor button. The black velvet drapes parted.and the Indian came into the room. He didn't look dirty or funny any more.

    He was dressed in loose white trousers and a white tunic embroidered in black. There was a black sash around his waist and a black fillet around his forehead. His black eyes were sleepy. He shuffled over to the stool beside the drapes and sat down and folded his arms and leaned his head on his chest. He looked bulkier than ever, as if these clothes were over his other clothes.

    Soukesian held his hands above the milky globe that was between us on the white table. The light on the remote black ceiling was broken and began to weave into odd shapes and patterns, very faint because the ceiling was black. The Indian kept his head low and his chin on his chest but his eyes turned up slowly and stared at the weaving hands.

    The hands moved in a swift, graceful, intricate pattern that meant anything or nothing, that was like Junior Leaguers doing Greek dances, or coils of Christmas ribbon tossed on the floor-whatever you liked.

    The Indian's solid jaw rested on his solid chest and slowly, like a toad's eyes, his eyes shut.

    "I could have hypnotized him without all that," Soukesian said softly. "It's merely part of the show."

    "Yeah." I watched his lean, firm throat.

    "Now, something Lindley Paul touched," he said. "This card will do."

    He stood up noiselessly and went across to the Indian and pushed the card inside the fillet against the Indian's forehead, left it there. He sat down again.

    He began to mutter softly in a guttural language I didn't know. I watched his throat.

    The Indian began to speak. He spoke very slowly and heavily, between motionless lips, as though the words were heavy stones he had to drag up hill in a blazing hot sun.

    "Lindley Paul bad man. Make love to squaw of chief. Chief very angry. Chief have necklace stolen, Lindley Paul have to get urn back. Bad man kill. GmT."

    The Indian's head jerked as Soukesian clapped his hands. The little lidless black eyes snapped open again. Soukesian looked at me with no expression at all on his handsome face.

    "Neat," I said. "And not a darn bit gaudy." I jerked a thumb at the Indian. "He's a bit heavy to sit on your knee, isn't he? I haven't seen a good ventriloquist act since the chorus girls quit wearing tights."

    Soukesian smiled very faintly.

    "I watched your throat muscles," I said. "No matter. I guess I get the idea. Paul had been cutting corners with somebody's wife. The somebody was jealous enough to have him put away. It has points, as a theory. Because this jade necklace she was wearing wouldn't be worn often and somebody had to know she was wearing it that particular night when the stick-up was pulled off. A husband would know that."

    "It is quite possible," Soukesian said. "And since you were not killed perhaps it was not the intent to kill Lindley Paul. Merely to beat him up."

    "Yeah," I said. "And here's another idea. I ought to have had it before. If Lindley Pau