Have Gat—Will Travel

A Shell Scott Mystery

Richard S. Prather

SINNER'S ALLEY

The morgue in Los Angeles is downstairs in the Hall of Justice. It was seven o'clock at night, dark now, and Mr. Franklin stopped me when we reached the building's entrance. "You go ahead," he said.

"Aren't you coming in with me?"

"No, Mr. Scott, I'm not going to look at her again. I couldn't. I'm not even going to look at her when the funeral . . ." His voice stopped suddenly, choked off, as if it had become almost impossible for him to speak.

But, then, he was her father, and last night she had been alive. She had left the house laughing, shouting back over her shoulder that she'd be home by ten. And Mr. Franklin hadn't seen his daughter again until he saw her on a slab here in the Los Angeles County Morgue.

She was only eighteen.

Last night, some time, somewhere, she had been raped. And some man's hands had closed about her soft throat and squeezed until there was no life left in her young body.

"No," Mr. Franklin repeated, "I won't ever see her again."

I left him standing on the street and went inside. Emil, the morgue attendant, was expecting me. He nodded without speaking, and turned. I followed him. He had her ready for me and I stopped by the table on which she lay. He reached for the top of the cloth covering her body. I had never seen the girl, Pam, alive. Yet, this wouldn't be like looking at the dead body of a stranger.

Mr. Franklin had come to my office, "Sheldon Scott, Investigations," in the afternoon and had asked me to take the case — for $500. I was spending all my time trying to recover two diamond necklaces, and there was $10,000 for me if I got the stones. I was close to them, so I'd told Mr. Franklin I couldn't help him. But he'd seemed about to go to pieces, and I'd finally agreed to come to his house, let him show me some things, and then come with him to the morgue.

At his home he'd taken me to Pam's room, shown me her clothes and school books, scuffed saddle shoes and high-school album. Then he'd left me alone with a big black photograph album. In the album was a photo record of each year of Pam's life. As a baby a few days old, growing up and walking, going to school; a picture taken every year on her birthday; snapshots of Pam alone and with friends, with the date and little notes that she had penned in white ink beneath each picture.

And slowly, without my even being conscious of it at first, I kind of got to know Pam. For one thing, in most of the pictures she was smiling; from the goofy, slobbery smile of a year-old baby girl to the sweet soft smile of a young lady of eighteen. In less than an hour I saw her grow up, pass through awkward adolescence, mature and bloom. I looked once more at the clothes she'd worn, the books she'd read, and they seemed different than they had at first. Mr. Franklin had mentioned he was a widower with one child — Pamela — and that knowledge seemed different, too, than it had at first.

Emil pulled the sheet from her body.

I don't know how long I looked at her. Then Emil said, "Ain't a very pretty looking deceased, is she?"

I answered finally, "She was, Emil. She was beautiful."

She wasn't now. Death never is very pretty — but this wasn't the quiet sleep you usually think of when death is mentioned. I had a snapshot of Pam in my pocket, but the dead girl didn't look like the picture at all. Her lips still were puffed, the lower one split in its center; her left eye was swollen and there were deep, pale scratches on one small breast. An ugly blue-yellow bruise stained the waxy whiteness of her thigh. And, of course, her throat and face were puffed, bruised and obscenely ugly.

"You can cover her now, Emil."

He pulled the sheet up over her body and her face. I got a morgue photo of her from Emil, then walked outside. I understood fully now why Mr. Franklin hadn't wanted to look at her.

When I stopped in front of him he didn't speak, just waited to see what I'd say.

"All right, Mr. Franklin," was all I could manage.

He sighed softly, then nodded.

"You go on home," I told him. "I'll get started."

Los Angeles Homicide is in Room 42 on the Temple Street floor of City Hall, and while it's not the cheeriest place in the world, it's a big improvement over the morgue. And Sam brightens the place up, at least for me. Sam is Captain Phil Samson of Homicide, big, gruff, with iron-gray hair and a clean-shaven pink face. He's my best friend in L.A., and we'd worked together often. I'd been talking to him for ten minutes and had read his reports. Pamela Franklin had kept a diary and that was on Sam's desk, too. I'd gone through it, looking particularly at the entries for the past few days, but hadn't learned anything from it. Nor had Homicide. It was the usual girl-stuff, full of underlined words and exclamation points, with everybody referred to either by nicknames or initials, as if to keep the diary more secret.

Pam had gone out with Orin West, a boy her age, at 6:30 last night. About 9:30, another couple driving in Elysian Park had seen someone lying a little way off the road. They'd stopped and the man had gone over the prostrate figure — that of a youth, who had mumbled a word or two then passed out. The couple called the police, who learned the unconscious kid was Orin West. He'd been beaten over the head; apparently later he'd regained consciousness and crawled almost to the road. Fifty feet away, hidden by the trees, Pam's body had been found, her clothing torn, her flesh still warm. From blurred footprints and trampled grass it appeared that more than one man had been involved in the attack.

I said to Samson, "The kid with Pam. What's this 'blagan' or 'blaging' he was trying to say before he passed out?"

Sam scratched his gray hair. "What the kid probably said was 'Black Gang.' Mean anything to you?"

It meant quite a bit. We'd been having trouble in L.A., with kid gangs, teen-age hoodlums. They'd been mixed up in robberies, beatings, and a case or two of gang-rape. There was a Red Gang, and the King's men, the Dukesters — and, among others, a Black Gang. From what I'd heard, the Black Gang was the toughest, nastiest group of hoodlums in the city.

I stood up. "Thanks, Sam. That sort of fingers the punks, doesn't it? I think I'll have a talk with some of them."

"Wait a minute," he said. "It fingers one, probably more out of maybe forty guys in the club. What the hell you think you're going to do? Beat them up one at a time? You'll get into plenty of trouble if you start slapping kids around."

I sat down as Sam added, "Besides, you lift a finger at one of them there'll be ten on your back." He frowned. "What you so steamed up for?"

I told him about Mr. Franklin and the trip to the morgue, showed him the snapshot and the morgue photo of Pam. I told him I was going to have a showdown with the kids tonight, despite his lecture. He could tell I was wound up, and he gave me a funny look. Then he said, "We had our eye on the Black Gang before this came up. Not Homicide. Robbery has been casing them for three weeks. They're as sure as they can be, without evidence to convict, that this Black Gang pulled a couple gas-station heists and knocked over a liquor store. And now we've got this rape-kill. All of our work has been under cover, so the gang doesn't know they've been fingered.

"The kid, Orin West, fingered them when he said 'Black Gang,' but he hasn't said a word since. He's in the hospital now, unconscious, and in a bad way. With his parents' consent, we released a story to the papers, saying both the boy and the girl died. So whoever clubbed him and raped the girl probably think they're clear." He paused. "If the boy comes out of it, maybe we'll get the right answer. But he might not make it, so we've got to go ahead." He gave me that funny look again. "Shell," he said slowly, "as long as you've already made up your mind to stick your neck out, go down to the gang's clubhouse and throw your weight around. Stir them up — particularly the head of the gang."

"Just give me the address."

He wrote it down for me, then said, "I told you we were working on this. In our own way. But it's all under cover and the kids can't know we're interested in them. That's the way we want it. If you can throw a scare into them it might help us a lot. But this bunch is nasty; you might get your head bashed in. Another thing, these gangs are usually all teen-agers — but the top in this one is a twenty-two-year-old tough named Chuck Dorr." He paused. "Dorr can't account for his time between eight and ten last night. And he was up on a sex rap here a few months back. Messing with a fourteen-year-old-girl, slapped her around a little."

"He's loose?"

Sam looked disgusted. "Naturally; fined fifty dollars and put on probation."

I got up. "I'll keep in touch, Sam."

"Stir them up — but don't overdo it. There's still a chance the West kid can tell us something. And for Pete's sake don't let them know you've even talked to a cop. We want them to keep on thinking the police never heard of them. That's important. I'll know what you're doing, but you're pretty much on your own. And watch this Dorr bastard. He's a grown man, and tough — bigger than you are."

I'm a shade under six two, barefoot, and weigh 206. "What is he?" I asked, "A monster?"

"You'll see him." Sam walked to the door with me and added, "Shell, I — uh — always leveled with you, so I'll tell you. I'm holding out a little on you."

"What does that mean?"

"Nothing. Just wanted to keep it level. Well, watch yourself. Some of those kids, at least one of them, thinks he's already committed two murders — Pam Franklin and Orin West. The next one will be easy. From the record, Chuck Dorr isn't quite right. And whoever pulled the deal last night, whether it was Dorr or somebody else, is definitely psycho."

I grinned. "I won't let anybody kill me, Sam." I left, but I didn't feel quite as flippant as I tried to sound.

I parked my Cad convertible around the corner from the Black Gang's clubhouse, then walked around the corner, down the street past a narrow alley, and stopped before the place. Two motorcycles and three jalopies that looked like hopped-up jobs were parked in front. The club itself was an ordinary house, a big one-story frame building set back twenty feet from the street. A cracked cement walk led through a dirt yard to the door. I walked over it and up onto a warped wooden porch.

There was a lot of noise inside — squeals and laughter and shouts and the thumping of feet as somebody danced heavily. It sounded like a big crowd. I didn't yet know quite how I'd handle this, but I figured I'd let the kids take the lead at first. If they were subdued and pleasant, I'd be the same — as much as possible, with the memory of Pam still fresh in my mind. I didn't expect a cordial reception, though; I'd been up against a couple of teen-age gangs before, and I long ago got over my initial erroneous impression that a criminal had to be an adult. A fifteen-year-old kid once clubbed me with a professionally made sap, and an eighteen-year-old shot at me with a zip gun. He missed by a couple of yards — but he tried not to. My .38 Colt Special was in its shoulder harness, but I hoped the kids would be nice and polite.

They weren't.

I rang the bell, and noise simmered down inside. A tall, skinny, rat-faced guy about seventeen opened the door and squinted out at me. "Yeah?"

"I'm looking for Chuck Dorr."

"Who's askin'?"

"Shell Scott. I'm a private detective."

"Never heard of you." He started to shut the door in my face, but my foot got in the way.

"I guess you didn't hear what I said."

"I heard you. He ain't here. Beat it. You ain't invited. Get it, Mr. Detective?"

This little punk was what I'd expected to find here, and he was making me mad, which I'd also expected. "You'll do," I said. "I'd just as soon talk to you."

He mumbled a couple of filthy words, then said, "The foot. The big foot. Move it."

I moved it. I lifted it up and kicked the door with it. Ratface staggered back a step and the door swung in and slammed against the wall. I walked inside, brushing past Ratface as the room got completely quiet. Three or four guys stood up, glaring at me. There were maybe a couple dozen kids in the big front room, about half of them girls, and all teen-agers. None of them was near my size, so Chuck Dorr wasn't in here.

There had obviously been some heavy petting going on. There was plenty of liquor in sight. Probably they were all half plastered, and there was a heavy sweet smell that indicated there were a few marijuana smokers scattered around. Liquor and marijuana make the punks bigger, smarter, tougher.

I stood inside the room for only a few seconds as hostile eyes stared at me, then the door slammed behind me and the silence ended. Three of the guys who'd stood up when I barged inside walked toward me, and the one in front, a short, stocky youngster with the sweet face of a child who spends his evenings looking at filthy postcards, said "Beat it, mister. This is a private racket." Another, with a thin, pimpled face and bright red lips, said. "Get lost; vamoose; disappear."

There were several other remarks, all equally clever. The girls present made it worse, because male punks, like those around me, always get tougher and more "clever" in front of their women — like guys kicking sand at the beach. And the women looked like the type who'd love it. Half a dozen were in jeans or slacks, others in tight dresses.

They didn't like having their party interrupted. I couldn't help thinking that Pam and her boy friend must not have liked it either, last night. I looked at the hard young faces of the three kids standing a yard away, glanced around at the other male faces and they were as vicious and ugly a collection as I'd ever seen in one room. Each time I looked at one of them I wondered if maybe he had beaten Pam, wrapped his fingers around her throat. Any one of them looked capable of it — and one or more of them had probably done it.

The short chunky kid and the red-lipped one on his left put their hands flat on my chest and shoved me toward the door. I could feel my face getting hot. It's simply part of the way I'm made; nothing in the world gripes me more than for a man to push me, shove me around — and now these brats were trying it.

"Keep your hands off me," I said.

Ratface was on my left. "Who do you think you are, Lumphead?"

I looked at Ratface and reached for the wallet in my inside coat pocket. "I already told you," I said.

Maybe he thought I was reaching for something else, maybe he just hoped to scare me; he was standing with his hands behind his back over his hip pockets, and he brought his right hand halfway from behind as I pulled the wallet out. When he spotted the wallet he put his hand behind him again, but not before I saw the reflection of light on the long-bladed knife he must have carried in a hip-pocket sheath. He was a sweet little underprivileged kid. I sure felt sorry for him.

I flipped the wallet open and showed him the photostat of my private detective's license, then showed it to the three other kids near me. They weren't impressed. "Yah, a fake cop," Ratface said, and one of the others made a yak-yak-yak sound. There was a little harsh laughter. I looked at Ratface.

"Let's start with you," I said. I pulled the snapshot of Pam I'd taken from Mr. Franklin's album out of my pocket and handed it to him. I didn't say anything, but waited to see what he'd do.

He looked at it. He kept looking at it. Finally he licked his lips, squinted up at me. "So what's this for?"

"You know her?"

"Nah. Should I, Lumphead?"

"Pass it around," I told him. "Give everybody a look."

He kept squinting at me, and for a few moments I didn't think he was going to do it. Then he shrugged. "So why not?" He showed the snap to the three punks alongside me and they shook their heads silently, then Ratface walked to the nearest chair, gave a young couple there the picture and mumbled something. The short chunky kid near me walked over to Ratface and they started whispering together, glancing occasionally at me. The other two joined them in a few seconds. I walked to the rear wall and leaned against it while the photo made the rounds. I wanted to be where I could watch all the faces — but mainly I wanted that wall at my back; I didn't like the way this was going.

There was a steady rumble of conversation; a lot of lips curled at me when the kids looked my way. The boys started moving around, gathering together; in half a minute all the girls were grouped around one of the couches and the guys were in two groups at the far side of the room. They talked softly, looking at me and then laughing, as if they were building up to something, working themselves up. Most of the male punks had drinks in their hands.

I didn't like the rumbling at all, because these were simply young hoodlums — just as bad as old hoodlums only younger. If they felt like it they could gang up on me and maybe split me open, but I had to be polite. They were products of their environment. No more so, oddly enough, than everybody else, including me, so I couldn't work up much sympathy for them.

Ninety-nine out of a hundred teen-agers — or grown-ups — you run into are fine people, but there's still the one per cent or less that doesn't belong. There are good kids and bad kids, good men and bad men, but when they shoot you in the head, you're just as dead whether they were born in a mansion or a slum, use a Magnum or a zip gun. And I guess I'm the kind of guy who looks at the finished product of our civilized jungle instead of the manufacturing process. I'm not the kind of guy who says to the cannibal gnawing on my leg, "Bless you, my son; I realize you're a product of your environment."

Finally all the little cannibals had seen Pam's photo, but nobody had seen her before. That was odd, because a picture of her had been in today's papers. And if the ones who had raped Pam, murdered her, were here — I wondered what was going on in their minds now.

Ratface left his pals, picked up the snapshot and walked over to me. He handed me the photo and then put his hands into his hip pockets again. "You satisfied?" he asked.

"Uh-uh. I still want to see Chuck."

He took the knife out of his pocket, making it obvious this time, and pared a tiny sliver from one of his thumbnails.

All the other male punks stood across the room looking at me. One of them tossed something shiny from one hand to another. At first I couldn't tell what it was, but then I saw it was a set of homemade knuckles probably made from a garbage can handle, with sharp pieces of steel projecting from it, steel slivers that could slice a man's face into shreds. A few other kids, including Ratface's short chunky friend, had their hands in their pockets.

"Beat it," Ratface said. "Now, Lumphead. I mean it."

I was getting awfully tired of this little punk telling me what I was going to do. "Listen, you pint-sized hood," I said, "quit flapping that nasty tongue of yours at me or —"

He interrupted, "Or what? Hey" — he turned and looked at the guys behind him — "he don't wanna leave." He motioned with his hand and the whole bunch of them walked toward me. They came slowly; the one kid had his knucks on his right fist, others still had hands in their pockets.

I put my hand under my coat, but hesitated; I didn't pull the gun out. You can shoot an Al Capone when he's big Al, but it's not considered proper when he's still Little Al. I remembered Sampson warning me that I'd be in plenty of trouble if I started slapping "kids" around. I was reaching the point, though, where I soon wouldn't give a damn; and if any kid came at me with a knife or knucks, it was quite likely I'd shoot him in the head.

I wrapped my fingers around the gun butt and pressed my back against the wall. "Hold it right there," I said. My voice had tightened up on me a little. "So help me, you punks get any closer I'll forget that you're children."

They kept coming. I started to slide the gun out — and right then I heard a car outside screech around the corner with its horn blaring. The car slid to a stop in front, still honking. The atmosphere in the room changed. The dozen or so punks stopped a couple of yards from me, some grinning and poking each other. Ratface trotted toward the door and was joined on the way by Shorty, the chunky kid who seemed to be his pal. They both hurried out. It seemed the boss had arrived.

In a minute the kids came back in, cocky expressions on their faces. Ratface winked at the others. Chuck was here; he'd fix me. I heard footsteps coming up the walk; that would be Chuck, but there was the fast tap-tap of high heels, too. Chuck came through the door first, and if there was a woman behind him, I couldn't see her. If there had been a diesel locomotive behind him I wouldn't have seen it.

As Samson had said, the guy was big.

The group of punks near me started milling around, paying less attention to me now, and as Chuck waved at everybody he got a chorus of "Hi, Chuck," and "Where ya' been, Chuck?" And "Hey, Chuck, this big lug's givin' us a hard time."

He looked at the knucks on the kid's hand, and at another kid with something metallic half out of his pocket. "Put that hardware away," he said. Then he walked across the room and stopped in front of me.

"What's the trouble?" he asked.

He was about half an inch taller than I, but he was so broad-shouldered and slim-waisted that he'd looked even taller in the doorway. His shoulders must have been three or four inches wider than mine, and his arms were long, too long. Wiry black hairs stuck up from the back of his hands and wrists and sprouted over the neck of the white T-shirt he wore under a brown coat. He wasn't a bad-looking guy — not what I'd expected at all.

"No trouble," I told him. "Not yet. Just asking questions."

He grinned. His voice was soft, pleasant, as he said, "Who asked you to ask questions?"

"Mr. Franklin."

"Franklin?" he said steadily. "Don't know him. So you better go right out the front door, and right back where you came from." The voice was still pleasant, but the grin was a little tight. Something was bothering me, about this guy; I thought I knew him from somewhere, but I couldn't place him.

"We ever meet before?" I asked him.

"Nope. We probably don't run in the same crowd."

I looked around at the kids and I said, "Apparently not."

And because I looked around I saw the girl — or rather the woman, because by no stretch of imagination could she be classed as a teen-ager. Looking at her suddenly like that was almost the same as getting kicked in the head.

She was a tall, platinum-haired dish with a hard, brassy-but-pretty face that seemed to have half a pound of paint on it, and she had no modesty at all. She could have lost half of her curves and still have been shapely, and I knew the curves were hers because she was wearing a pale blue off-the-shoulder blouse and a tight skirt. She walked across the room toward us. The strap of a big, brown leather bag was looped over her right shoulder, pulling the blouse out of line.

She stopped alongside Chuck, looking at me. Seeing her this close, hazel eyes with thickly mascaraed lashes, and all the rest, I was starting to think that if she'd scrape off most of the gooky paint, relax a little, and wear another shoulder bag on the other side she might not be half bad — but then she opened her mouth and spoiled any favorable impression I might have been getting.

"Chuckie," she said, "who's the creep?"

All she needed was chewing gum she could pull out of her mouth between thumb and index finger. It was that kind of a voice. High, scratchy, twangy, and if a voice all by itself can be stupid, that voice was stupid.

"Yeah," said Chuck. "Before you leave, who are you?"

I went through the wallet routine, pulling my coat open so he couldn't help seeing the .38. The license photostat didn't impress him any more than it had impressed the kids. He spotted the gun, raised an eyebrow and said, "Detective Special, huh? Real big man's gun." He glanced again at my license. "Well, what do you know? A slewfoot. An April-fool copper."

The platinum blonde giggled nasally. "Oh, Chuckie!" He was slaying her.

And I guess he got carried away by her stupid admiration, because he said, "Let's see the heater," and reached toward my shoulder for it. I let his finger touch the gun before I swung my open right hand and chopped him just under the bicep with its edge. I knew it hurt him and almost paralyzed his arm. He got so mad I thought his eyes were going to pop out.

That was okay. I wanted him mad. I wanted him boiling. I said, "I don't show the gun to people unless I mean to shoot them." I reached into my pocket and pulled out a picture of Pam and handed it to him before he could slug me. "I just dropped in to see if you know this girl," I said. "Do you?"

His jaw muscles were jumping and he was trying to work the fingers of his right hand, but he took the picture. He didn't look at it immediately, though. He stared at me, wiggling his jaw muscles till he'd worked the anger out of his face. He said huskily, sarcastically, "Glad to cooperate with a slewfoot."

He got his face nice and composed, glanced at the picture, and his face uncomposed all over again. He sort of jerked and his lips twisted, then he looked at me with anger flushing his face. "You rat," he said. "What you showing me her mugg for? I read the papers, Slewfoot. What you been doing, bothering those kids about it? So that's the Franklin who told you to snoop, huh?" He tossed the picture away, angrily. "I think I'll bust you one. What you come here for?"

"You don't know her, huh?"

"No, you —"

"Never saw her?"

"No."

"Go ahead," the brassy blonde said. "Hit the snooper, Chuckie."

Too bad, I thought; I could have liked her. Chuck had his fists balled up, and when they were balled they were lethal weapons.

"Listen, Slewfoot," he said. "I'll count up to ten. Be out of here when I finish or you'll get carried out."

I almost gave him an argument, but when I looked around I saw the dozen or so young cannibals ready to eat me alive. I'm pretty big, and I'm an ex-Marine crammed full of judo and the gamut of unarmed defense, but it was small consolation to know that if they all ganged up on me, I might get half a dozen before they massacred me. Maybe Chuck alone could massacre me.

He started counting. What the hell, I thought, I'd stirred them up. I shrugged and took a step toward the door. That brought me up right alongside the blonde.

"Some moxie," she said in the twangy voice. "Some tough muzzler you are."

"Oh, shut up," I said.

Wham! She had less control than Chuck. She brought a hand up and really clobbered me with it. She actually knocked me backward, but it might have been all right even then except that my foot banged into something. I landed on the end of my spine with a crash that jarred the whole house.

Then I saw what had tripped me. Or rather, the two things. Somehow, Ratface's short pal had got behind me and was down on all fours, and Chuck still had his leg poked out and was laughing fit to kill. For a second I sprawled on the floor with a big hot gripe growing bigger, then I planted my foot on Shorty's behind and shoved. He skidded forward and his face banged the carpet as I jumped to my feet, burning. The blonde and all the kids were laughing right along with Chuck, and as I got to my feet the laughter subsided slightly.

But Shorty rolled over and stood up, rubbed his face — and then laughed loudly at me, a noise with no mirth or merriment in it, just a rhythmic ha-ha-ha at the top of his lungs. Other kids caught on, picked it up. In seconds they were all looking at me, chanting their laughter in unison. It was strange, frightening, to look at the now unsmiling faces, hear the perversion of laughter from twenty throats. It was a savage sound, like the grunting of animals; a twisted, stupid exhibition that sent a shiver up my spine.

The blonde was still getting a large charge out of me. I was good for lots of laughs. But only her laughter seemed to have honest merriment in it. I suppose I did look a bit quaint standing there slobbering at them. She bent over and laughed so hard that the bag slipped from her shoulder and hit the floor, making as loud a noise when it landed as I had. She either carried a chunk of lead in there or a gun. Chuck had sweet playmates.

Chuck tapped me on the shoulder. I looked at him, and he wasn't smiling. "Eight," he said.

I started to crack wise, but when he got to nine I walked toward the door. The punks were massed in front of me, and if they hadn't moved I was mad enough to throw a few of them through the ceiling, even if it wouldn't have been wise. But they stepped slowly aside, still going ha-ha, and I walked past them trying to look everywhere at once. I thought I was going to make it to the door without any trouble, but suddenly somebody planted a foot on my behind and shoved hard.

It sent me stumbling up against the door and I spun around as I reached it. It had been Shorty, naturally, getting even. He didn't know it, but we were a long way from being even. I stared at the kids as the laughter slowed and stopped, and it took all my self-control and what little sense I had left to keep from jumping them and making pulp out of a few of them. I had already taken more from these little hoodlums than I'd have taken from an equal number of big thugs, and the longer I stared at them the bigger they looked. Just before they looked big enough for me to pull out my gun and shoot five of them, I made myself open the door and go outside.

A crescent moon was hidden behind scudding clouds and it looked like rain, but the chill air did little to cool me off. I tried to calm myself, thinking, as I walked back to the Cad. I hadn't actually learned a hell of a lot — except that the kids weren't just punks, but dangerous punks. Chuck's face had jumped around when I showed him Pam's picture, but he could hardly be blamed for looking a bit sick. I'd wanted to push him off balance, so I'd played a dirty trick on him; I'd handed him the morgue shot.

And right then I remembered where I'd seen him before. Maybe it was because I was thinking about him and Pam at the same time, but I remembered seeing him in a picture in the album Mr. Franklin had shown me. It had been on one of the last pages of the book; a group snapshot taken when Pam had gone to a picnic — in Elysian Park. Half a block up the street past my car was a small cocktail lounge. I went inside, found a phone booth in back and dialed Mr. Franklin's number. He answered.

"Mr. Franklin, this is Shell Scott. Do you know the names of the fellows your daughter went out with?"

"Why . . . yes, most all of them. Have you learned anything?"

"Not for sure. Did Pam ever mention a Chuck Dorr?"

"No. I've never heard the name."

"Look in the back of the photograph album for a snap taken at Elysian Park on a picnic. What's the date under it?"

He was gone for half a minute, then he said, "That was on the sixteenth of last month. She —" His voice broke.

I said quickly. "She know all these people?"

"She went there with her boy friend and another couple; they were to meet some others. She didn't know them all."

I told him I was just guessing, stabbing around, but I'd let him know if anything came up. Then I called Samson.

"Sam, the Franklin girl's diary still on your desk?"

"Yeah. What you want? And how's it going?"

I gave him a rundown on the party. "They're a mean bunch all right. That diary — what does it say for the night of the sixteenth, last month?"

In a minute he had read two or three lines that didn't interest me, the words Pam had written sounding strange in his gruff voice, then, "Divine time at the park. Both OW and JM asked me to the Junior-Senior Prom. Who'll I go with? OW, I think. He's a dream! But I don't think I'd even have gone to the picnic if I'd known anybody like CD would be there. I finally had to just ignore him, he was so fresh. I don't like older men anyway — and he's so hairy. Tomorrow I'll see OW and tell him I'll go with him." Sam paused. "That's all of it."

"The OW must be Orin West. CD is Chuck Dorr."

He said slowly, "You sure?"

"Positive." I told him about the photo in the album.

He said, "We haven't gone over it that close yet. It's getting tighter around Dorr, isn't it? How'd he impress you?"

"He's a rough baby. Doesn't seem like a dim brain, though. If he's psycho, he acts pretty normal."

"So did the mad killers Heirens and Robert Irwin. Looks as if we'll have to keep after the bunch, Shell. Do it the hard way."

"What do you mean?"

"Orin West just died. Never opened his mouth."

It wasn't just Pam now, I was thinking; it was two nice kids. Sam interrupted my thoughts by saying almost the same thing, then, "Nobody knows yet if there were others before this. And there'll be more if we don't get him. This one worries me."

That was the worst part, the frightening part. Even worse than the thought of Pam in the morgue was the thought of her killer, and others like him, walking the streets, meeting more Pams. They look like anybody else when they sit across from you in a restaurant or next to you in a darkened theater; they look like anybody else when they pass you on the street. You can't look behind their normal eyes into their abnormal minds to see the twisted desires, the strange, savage hungers.

"We've got to get this one," Samson said. "And we haven't got enough. You know the rules of evidence, Shell. We've got to get him good or they dismiss the case."

He talked a little longer. I knew what he wanted; he just didn't want to ask me, I could feel the hair move at the back of my neck, and my throat was a little drier when I said, "I like Dorr for it, too, Sam. He's either in it or knows about it. I'll try it again. I'll work on Dorr, and this time I'll really let him have it."

"Well . . . go ahead, Shell. Tell him anything. If he's the one, he'll be like jelly inside by now. But it's got to be right, boy. He's got to bust wide open or we lose him — and he won't bust easy."

"Yeah, Sam." My throat was good and dry. "I'll tell you the truth, pal. I'd like about a dozen big cops along."

He chuckled softly. "You'll be all right, Shell."

"Yeah," I said. "Sure." I hung up and walked back to the clubhouse.

I really didn't want to go back in there at all. I stopped in front of the door, put the .38 into my coat pocket, and kept my hand on it as I rang the bell.

Ratface looked out at me; I brushed past him and stopped just inside the room. Heads jerked around, eyes narrowed and I heard voices, "Well, he's askin' for it." Ratface started the ha-ha and the others took it up automatically.

I grabbed Ratface and yanked him to me, damn near lifting him off his feet. I put my face close to his. "Listen, you little fleeper, bag your head. Chop it! I've had all of you I can take."

His face got red and he put his hand on his hip.

"Go ahead," I said. "I'll lay you over my knee and let your punk friends laugh at that."

The door of the side room opened and Chuck was glaring at me. Even from where I stood I could see his jaw muscles bouncing around. The room got quiet. I shoved Ratface away from me hard enough to send him halfway across the room, then walked to Chuck, stopped near him where I could watch him and the kids at the same time.

He said coldly, slowly, "I told you to blow, Slewfoot."

"You told me a lot of things, friend."

His eyes narrowed. Lipstick stained his mouth. In the room behind him I could see the blonde sitting on a divan. I'd half expected a naked woman running around in there, but she was fully clothed — as fully clothed as she could be in that dress. Her lipstick was smeared, that was all.

Most of the kids were on their feet now, near me. They looked at me, then watched Chuck, waiting for the word. Chuck stepped toward me with his hand curling into a fist.

"I wouldn't," I said. My hand was still on the gun in my coat pocket, and with the other hand I flipped back the lapel of my coat, let him see the empty holster.

He stopped fast, glanced at my pocket, then at the kids. Finally he jerked his head toward the room behind him and said to me, "Get in here." He backed into the room and I followed him, slamming the door shut behind me.

He asked me, "What's this chatter?"

"You know what it is. The Franklin girl — Pam. You said you didn't know her. I know you did."

He looked at the blonde, "Beat it, Lucille."

"Chuckie! Well, I like that. I sure like that! Ain't I your girl? Huh, Chuckie?" This gal made me slightly ill, but a jealous blonde might help. She kept going, "You got nothin' you don't want me to hear, do you?"

"I told you to beat it," he said.

"What's the matter, Chuck?" I asked him. "She right? Maybe you don't want her to hear this."

He shrugged, staring at me.

"Elysian Park," I said. He just kept looking at me. "Picnic on the sixteenth. That's one time."

"So I saw her. So what? You think I'm about to say so to a lousy slewfoot when there's so much heat in the papers? I got my reasons, and they're not your business."

"I know your reasons. You read the papers, Chuck, so you know about the young guy that got killed." I grinned. "Only he didn't get killed. He's in the hospital. Talking."

All that happened was that he paused a moment, then seemed to get angrier. "I don't know what you're driving at."

The blonde, Lucille, stood near us now. "You stupid man," she twanged. "You're talking about the girl that got raped." She said it like two words: rape-ed. "My golly, why you askin' Chuckie for? Why'n't you ask me already?"

Her hands were on her hips, and if she had still been wearing her shoulder bag, she'd have been quite a sight; but the bag was on the couch. Even so, she was something to see.

"What does that mean?" I said.

"I'm not so dumb; you're bullyin' Chuckie about it, ain't you? Well, Chuckie and me, we was together last night. Ain't that right, honey?"

He hesitated, then said, "That's right, sweetheart." He looked at me. "You satisfied? Or do you want to land on your butt again?" Lucille giggled.

If Lucille were telling the truth, Chuck had a tasty alibi — but I was almost sure she was lying. For one thing, Samson had told me Chuck couldn't account for his time between eight and ten.

I said, "How, about, say, from eight to ten last night?"

"Oh, stop it, snooper. I'm gonna —"

He didn't get to tell me what he was going to do, because Lucille said, "Eight to ten? Six to twelve, you mean." She squeezed Chuck's arm and said, "Chuckie was with me, I told ya." She glared at me with a very unpleasant look on her painted face. "You want details already?"

Chuck opened the door and jerked his head. Half a dozen of the young guys walked over and stood in the doorway. I suddenly felt hemmed in, even with the gun in my pocket. I had a hunch I was leaving, one way or another — but I wanted to talk to the blonde. Alone. I wanted to ask her more about last night, and a fat roll of dollars might help her tell the truth. She acted like a gal you could buy almost anything from.

Chuck said, "Out, Slewfoot." Then he turned and spoke to the kids, "You want to take him, pallies?" The nasty rumble from them meant they'd like that very much.

While Chuck's back was to me, I caught the platinum blonde's eye, jerked my head toward the front of the house. Her eyes got puzzled. I turned as Chuck grabbed my arm and yanked me toward the door, toward the kids waiting for me.

They were waiting — and ready. I saw a couple of knives, some brass knucks, and one kid, my pal Shorty, held a chunk of pipe. I slammed a foot on the floor, stumbled, but caught my balance and jerked out the .38. When I'd first come into this place I'd been leery about pulling a gun on a bunch of kids; I wasn't any longer.

The nearest punk was only a couple of feet away and I pointed the gun at his belly, ready to use if I had to. He must have realized it, because he backed up in a hurry, banging into the kids behind him. "All of you, back — and fast," I said. I looked at Chuck. "Tell them to move, Chuckie."

He looked from me to the kids and I pointed the gun at him. It was quiet enough now so that he heard me cock the hammer, and when he still hesitated, I lifted the gun barrel over his head and fired a shot into the ceiling. The roar was a violent sound in the small room and the smell of burned powder hung in the air. The kids moved back from the doorway.

"Go on, Chuck," I said. "I'll put the next one lower if I have to. Out ahead of me."

He glared for half a second, face dark, then jerked his head and went through the door into the front room, followed by the blonde. I went after them and kept the gun pointed at Chuck. "One funny move, Chuck — from anybody — and you get it first. After you, your pals get it. And, believe me, I'll enjoy it."

I tried to watch them all as I walked to the door. When I reached it I said to Chuck, "Maybe you've got more sense than these punk kids. So maybe you'd better make sure none of your pals stick a head out after me."

He glared some more but didn't speak. I went out, waited a minute to make sure nobody followed me, then walked away from the house. The street was dark; three of the streetlights had been broken and for half a block there was only dim illumination. I walked to the sidewalk and twenty feet toward the corner waited a few feet this side of the alley. Five minutes passed. Three times cars drove down the street, lights splashing on me as I waited. I began to think the blonde either didn't get it when I jerked my head, or else she hadn't wanted to get it. Then I saw movement at the side of the house and she was walking toward me, her platinum hair visible in the dimness.

She stopped near me. "What is it?"

I was blunt. "What's your price to tell me the truth about last night?"

For a moment she didn't speak; then she said, "Damn!"

Light flashed in front of the house as the door opened. Chuck came through it fast and sprinted toward us. I thought he was going to keep coming and slam into me when he spotted us, and I got ready to give him the edge of my palm across his throat, but he stopped a yard away, his chest heaving.

He spoke to the blonde. "You didn't tell me you wanted some air," he said. He added, "Sweetheart." His voice sounded funny, tight. "You forgot your bag, sweetheart."

I noticed then that he had one hand in his coat pocket, but her brown leather bag was in his other hand. She reached for it quickly but he pulled it away. "I'll carry it for you. Back to the house, sweetheart."

I thought he'd come out here to bust me one, but surprisingly he paid no attention to me. He stuck the bag under his arm, then grabbed her wrist and they started back. But before they turned I got a good look at her face. It was almost as white as her hair. She was scared silly.

They went inside the club while I wondered what was screwy. I could understand Chuck's concern, and her fright, if she'd been lying about being with him last night. But something about it was peculiar; that talk about her bag, for one thing. And she'd been too scared. I turned and started walking toward the corner. At the alley I angled out to the curb, playing it safe. There was something wrong that I hadn't tumbled to yet. I almost had it; it was taking shape in my mind when I heard a shout behind me.

"Hey, Slewfoot!"

I stopped. Chuck walked rapidly up to me. "Tell you something," he said, lips tight against his teeth. He looked nasty, not normal. I put my hand on the Colt in my pocket as he moved around me until the street was behind him. "I'm gonna have to fix you, man," he said. "Gonna fix you good now, man."

He sounded crazy, and I started to take the gun from my pocket, wondering why he'd circled around me. Suddenly I realized that now the alley was at my back. I started to turn — and heard the scrape and rustle of movement in the darkness behind me. I spun around, yanking up the .38, and I saw the rat-faced kid and his pal almost upon me, the short one with something in his hand, raised above his head.

His hand swung down toward me and I started to jerk away, but Chuck's big fist slammed against my head from behind and shoved me forward. Just enough. The descending club hit my head a glancing blow and I fell to my knees, stunned. It seemed to take a long time for me to fall; I barely felt the jar as my knees hit the cement. I tried to move, raise the gun, and couldn't. Something jerked me over and hurled me onto my back; a foot kicked the gun from my hand. I saw Chuck's savage, contorted face above me as his fist slammed against my chin and my head cracked into the cement beneath me. In the moment before blackness swept over me, the coldness of sudden fear slid into my brain as I saw the insane and bestial features above mine, and thought of that inhuman face above Pam's face, and knew the man was crazy enough to kill. . . .

Someone was shaking me. At first my eyes wouldn't focus; pain throbbed in my skull. Then I saw the face of a patrolman bending over me. "You all right?" he was saying over and over.

I sat up slowly, looked around. "What happened?" I said.

"I came around the corner in my prowl car, saw these guys in my lights. I yelled at them as I stopped my car. They ran down the alley here. I chased them, but they got away. I came back to see if you were all right."

"I think I'm okay." I managed to get to my feet, leaned against the alley's brick wall, nauseated. "How long was I out?"

"Couple of minutes." Then he asked me to accompany him to headquarters to register a complaint. I showed him my credentials and explained that I was working with Captain Samson on a murder case. He wanted to stay around to help, but I dismissed that. I was mad enough at Chuck and his pals to want to bust them wide open by myself.

I leaned against the brick wall at the alley's mouth, swallowed the sickness in my throat, reached for my gun. Then I remembered the foot kicking it away from me. I couldn't find it, in or near the alley. They must have taken it, perhaps had intended to use it on me when the police car lights had fallen on them.

Nothing but my gun had been taken; my car keys were still in my pocket. I walked back to the Cad, unlocked the trunk. The car is like a traveling office, and in the trunk I keep most of the portable equipment I've used at one time or another and wish to have handy. There were a couple of infra-red gadgets; an optophone, its receiver and tripod; and the snooperscope, a kind of small infra-red telescope; a watch camera and some other gadgets — but not what I wanted: a gun.

I pawed through the stuff and found a hammer. It wouldn't be much good against a gun, but it would crush a man's skull and sink into his brain if he got close enough. I knew I couldn't go back into the clubhouse again; all those little monsters were potential killers — or killers already. But the hammer would be comforting in my hand while my brain cleared a little and the sickness died — and while I got my anger enough under control so that I wouldn't go and do something crazy.

I heard the popping of a motor from near the clubhouse. Then another joined it and roared. I walked rapidly to the building on the corner, looked around the edge. The first motorcycle raced away, followed closely by the second. A car crammed with teen-agers pulled away from the curb. There was a regular exodus from the club. Soon only one car was left: Chuck Dorr's.

Then the lights went out in the house. In the dimness four figures, bunched closely together, walked to the car. I recognized Chuck by his size: the blonde by her shape. The two others were smaller. All four got into the car and it pulled away from the curb, swung around in a U-turn and headed down the dimly lighted street away from me.

I ran to my Cad, started it up and followed them. Chuck's car didn't have a taillight burning, but I could see a car three blocks ahead. I hoped that it was Chuck's, that they hadn't already turned into a side street; I had to make sure in a hurry and I had to take the chance that they didn't know my Cad. I caught them, passed them fast. It was the right car. Chuck was at the wheel, but he was alone in the front seat; the three others were in back. Remembering the bosomy brassy blonde, I had half an idea what they were doing back there.

I got two blocks ahead of them and stayed there, watching in the rearview mirror. They'd be less likely to suspect a tail when I was ahead of them. They stayed behind for nearly two miles, and as I drove I tried to remember what I'd almost had back at the alley before I'd been slugged. I remembered Chuck's contorted face . . . and something crept into my thoughts so slowly then that I almost missed it. But I caught it — and shivered.

I didn't just suspect him now, just feel sure; I knew!

I was thinking of how Chuck's face had twitched and flooded with anger when I'd shown him Pam's photo. The morgue photo. I'd given him that one only to shock him, but when he looked at it his expression and words had told me he'd killed her. I had seen Pam's battered face in the morgue and in the morgue photo — and it wasn't Pam at all. Chuck hadn't looked at the photo until he'd got himself under control, but his first quick glance had told him it was Pam. He could have known only if he was the one who had made her face look like that, had carried the ugly picture in his twisted mind all day.

Suddenly the car behind me turned left. I slammed on the brakes, wrestled the Cad around and roared back to the turnoff, wheeled in a few hundred yards behind them. I couldn't figure where they'd be going, because the road led into desolate countryside. We were already far from the lights of town, and the moon was hidden behind clouds again.

I was worried about being spotted now, arousing their suspicions with lights following their car. I neared an isolated service station and I realized this might be my last chance to get in touch with Samson, get help out here. There were three guys against me, at least one of them with a gun — my gun. And I remembered the girl might have had a gun in her bag. Something flickered in my brain — but the station was on my right. If I stopped I might lose Chuck, but I had to chance it.

I swung in and ran to the station phone, shoved in a coin and dialed Homicide. Samson answered.

"Sam? Shell. Chuck Dorr's our man." I gave him a fast rundown on what I had, then said, "I tailed them out here — four of them. Chuck, his babe, and two young toughs. They're heading out into the sagebrush and I can't take them alone. Get some men —"

"What babe?" Samson interrupted.

"Some tough platinum-blonde tomato of Dorr's. They had some kind of beef, but I guess it's okay now. Who cares? They're out —"

"Where are you?"

He'd yelled it to me, startling me. I blurted out the location, telling him the direction they were heading.

He said, his voice higher, taut, "My God, Shell! She's a policewoman!"

Every bit of my skin tingled, got cold. I heard him drop the phone and shout. Maybe it shouldn't have surprised me, but it did; it stunned me. Sam was gone only a few seconds, but in that time I remembered words he had said to me: "Robbery has been casing them . . . I'll know what you're doing —" and a lot of other things that might have prepared me for this.

Then he was back. "Listen fast, Shell. I told you I was holding out on you, and that was it. I couldn't spill, because even you might have given something away when you saw her, and I couldn't take a chance with her in the spot she was in. She knew you were coming down to the club, that's why I let you go. She carries a gun, is a better shot than you are, and could cover you. Shell, is there any chance Dorr knows she's a cop?"

In the moment before I answered, I remembered the puzzled look in her hazel eyes when I'd jerked my head; she'd known who I was, maybe she'd thought I had some word from Samson. Now I understood how Sam had known Chuck wasn't alibied for last night; she'd told Sam, and even knowing Chuck might be Pam's killer, she'd taken the big chance and had come outside, worried, forgetting her bag. And then Dorr had come out with the bag that held her gun and must have held her shield or identification. Right after that I'd been beaten, probably was to have been killed — and they'd all left the club and brought her to this desolate spot.

"Sam," I said, "he knows."

He was cursing when I hung up. I sprinted to the car. The speedometer needle crept to ninety. After five or six miles I passed an intersection, a narrow road that extended both to my right and left. I swore, kept on going straight ahead. But no car showed up in my headlights, and finally I turned around and went back to the intersection. There wasn't time to wonder which branch they might have taken; I swung left onto the bumpy road and stopped, switched off the lights and got out of the car, opened the trunk. I found the infra-red scope and got behind the wheel again. If they saw me coming on this dark and little-traveled road I wouldn't have a chance — nor would she. I drove forward slowly, lights out, looking into the blackness ahead through the small scope.

It's now called the snooperscope, though it was the sniperscope in World War II when it was used by snipers, and by Army drivers driving without lights on dark nights. With the scope to my eyes I could see the outline of any otherwise invisible objects as much as two-hundred to three-hundred feet from me. As I drove I remembered Chuck's face when he'd hit me, Pam's face in the morgue — and Lucille's face. I remembered thinking Lucille might be pretty without the mass of paint and that brassy air.

I was almost ready to give up, turn around and try the other direction, when I saw the clear outline of a car in the scope. It was parked off the road on my right, and I stopped a hundred feet away, and went forward on foot, carrying the hammer. It was Chuck's car, empty.

The night was black, still, sky overcast and moon hidden behind the scudding clouds, but looking through the small tube I could see outlines of scattered trees and shrubs. I didn't see the four of them. They had parked on the road's right, so I walked to the right of the car.

And then I saw them: four sharp outlines visible through the tube, fifty yards away. I couldn't make out what they were doing. I ran toward them, trying not to make noise that would startle the men. Then I stopped running and walked slowly, carefully, until I could hear Chuck's voice. I still couldn't see them without the scope, but through it I saw Chuck's long arm reach to the front of Lucille's blouse and rip it savagely. The two others were behind her, holding her. I moved closer, gripping the hammer in my fist.

And now I could see them with my naked eyes. I heard Chuck's tense voice as he spoke viciously, savagely, filthily to Lucille, giving her an intimate description of what he and the other two with him now had done to Pam the night before. Then he told Lucille what they were going to do to her.

I was almost near enough to jump them, and I had been so intent on Chuck's words that I hadn't noticed the clouds overhead slipping away from the moon. But moonlight grew without my noticing it, and bathed us all in soft but bright silver — and at the same moment I recognized the two kids holding Lucille as Ratface and his pal, Shorty. Ratface saw me.

Before he shouted I saw the gun in Chuck's hand, saw him raise his arm and slam the gun against Lucille's head, saw her crumple as the kid yelled, "Look out! Chuck, it's —" Then I was sprinting toward them, raising the heavy hammer.

Chuck whirled and flame spat from his gun; I saw the two others spin around and jump toward me. Chuck's gun was pointing toward me, ready to fire again, and I hurled the hammer at him, heard it thud against his body as I slammed my left foot into the ground, pivoted and leaped at the two others. I jarred into one of them before he could move out of the way, and my left fist went into his stomach almost to his backbone. As he fell away from me, my hand sliced his neck and he went down. The other one, the short kid, was two yards away, a gun in his hand. I left the ground and leaped feet first through the air toward him, twisting my body to the left. The gun fired, sending a slug past my head, and then I kicked at his leg with my right foot as I hit the ground, sliding. He fell hard onto his back, and I raised my leg and pounded my heel into his groin with all my strength.

In the moonlight I could see Chuck Dorr bent over, fumbling on the ground. I got to my feet as he straightened up, hands empty. The hammer must have hit his arm and at least made him lose the gun. He bent over slightly, long powerful arms held out at his sides, and came toward me. I waited for him.

But as he reached me he dropped suddenly and dived at my feet with his hands reaching for my ankles. I brought up my knee and felt it scrape his cheek, and then he grabbed my legs and twisted them out from under me. I landed heavily on my side. He was grunting, harsh, explosive noises ripping from his throat, and his fist jarred into my back, cracking against my spine as I rolled away from him. He landed on top of me, fists smashing at my head and the side of my face. I slammed a fist against his jaw and rolled onto my back, kicked at his face as he scuttled toward me on all fours and reached for my throat.

My foot grazed his chin and thudded against his shoulder, twisting him, and I got my feet under me, started up as he caught his balance and lunged at me. His hands slapped against my throat, wrapped around it, thumbs digging deep into my throat's hollow as those same thumbs had pressed Pam's neck. His arms were high, his belly exposed, and as spots spun before my eyes and the blood congested in my face, distending the veins, I pulled my right arm back, the hand stretched open and my fingertips pointed stiffly at his solar plexus. His thumbs pressed deep into my flesh and blackness swelled before my eyes as I drove my open hand toward his belly.

But my blow was high, and I hit solid rib. I felt bone snap beneath my fingers. A gasp of pain ripped from his mouth and his hands loosened on my throat. I balled both hands into fists, jerked them upward hard, slamming my wrists against his arms. His fingers tore from my throat, and with my arms above my head I spread my hands open, sliced their edges down hard on the muscles at each side of his neck.

His arms dropped to his sides, and when he discovered he couldn't lift them, it was too late. I had plenty of time and I set myself, leaned forward as I swung, pivoting, getting the weight of my shoulder and body behind the blow, and smashed my fist against his mouth. As he staggered back I jumped forward and grabbed him, pulled him to me as I swung my fist against his mouth again. He'd had it all, then, but I sliced my palm's edge against the back of his jaw to make sure, then let him fall.

The short kid I'd kicked in the groin was vomiting. I hunted till I found the hammer and my gun, then I walked to Shorty and hit him on the head with the hammer. He rolled over. Ratface was moaning softly, so I gave him a tap, too. Then I walked to Chuck, hoping he'd wiggle so I could clobber him. He lay quietly. What the hell! I thought, and I clobbered him anyway. Maybe I put a bit too much pleasure into the blow, but I was thinking about Pam, and the small satisfaction Mr. Franklin would get when I told him who had raped and killed his daughter. Chuck would come out of it eventually. He'd make the gas chamber. Lucille and I had heard enough to send him to the cyanide cell.

Lucille!

I turned around. She lay unconscious. Her blouse was in ribbons. I knelt by her and felt for her pulse. It was strong. There was a lump alongside her head, but her hair had kept the skin from being broken. This was the first time I'd seen her face relaxed, composed; and without her act, the hard, brash manner to confuse the impression, I had to alter my original opinion of the girl. With most of the paint off her face and the thick mascara thinned, she'd be choice. She was the first cop I'd ever thought of as sexy.

In three or four minutes she moaned and came slowly out of it. Her eyes focused and she sat up fast, reaching for my face, long fingers curling into hooks.

"Whoa! Hey!" I yelped. "It's me. It's me."

She stopped reaching, sat up straight and blinked at me wonderingly. I remembered then that she had been sapped before I charged. "Oh," she said. "Mr. Scott. What . . ."

She was still bewildered. I gave her a quick explanation, told her everything was all right.

She looked around her. "Did you do all that?"

For a minute I didn't answer her, because I'd got another shock. It was her voice. It didn't twang. It was honey and warm wine, a lovely lilting sound that caressed my ears, sent a pleasant shiver up my back. I should have known. All the rest had been an act; the voice was just another part of it.

Finally I found my own voice. "I did it," I said. I almost added, "With my little hammer."

She winced then. "Ooh. My head hurts."

"Wait till these kids wake up." I had to chuckle. Seemed like everybody I knew had been hit on the head. Lucille and I talked for two or three minutes, and not once in all that time did it occur to me how silly this was: a shapely next-to-naked doll and me sitting here in the wilderness surrounded by virtual corpses.

I found out that she was from Robbery and had been casing the Black Gang for three weeks. She'd got just about enough information about four robberies the kids had pulled under Chuck's leadership — including where some of the loot was stashed — to put Chuck, Ratface, and Shorty, plus half a dozen more of the gang, out of circulation. Then the Franklin case had come up — and it fingered the Black Gang. She'd been in a perfect spot, close to Chuck, and she'd volunteered to stay with the gang a while longer.

She said, "I'm sorry I had to slap you, Mr. Scott —"

"Shell."

"— but the whole idea was that if Chuck got rattled he might spill something to me — if he was sure I was on his side. I had to make him think so, Mr. Scott, and —"

"Shell."

"— and I had to laugh. You did look funny, Mr. Scott."

"Shell."

She honestly didn't seem to realize how much was showing. Of course, she wasn't sitting where I was.

"If I made an arrest I'd need both my tin and gun, and Chuck spotted them," she continued. "He ran out of cigarettes and went looking in my bag for some. That's when he found out. He had my gun in his pocket when he ran into us outside the club. But I had him fooled till then." She made a face. "I even had to let him kiss me, but he never —" She stopped. "My God!" she gasped. "Just now, before he hit me, he said he was going to . . . going to . . ." She couldn't seem to get it out, and at first I didn't know what she was driving at.

"Going to . . . maybe he . . ."

Then I got it. "No, no. I saw him sap you. Two seconds later I came charging in like Thor. He didn't . . . he didn't . . . uh, well, anyway he didn't."

A big expression of relief flooded her face and she sighed heavily; oh man, she sighed heavily, and my mouth dropped open, and perhaps because of the turn the conversation had taken, perhaps because of the nearness of my mouth, she suddenly realized that Chuck had ripped her blouse wide open.

Softly she said, "Ah!" Then she reached up and covered herself with her hands, blushing as she breathed, "Oh, my goodness!"

I grinned. "Yes, indeed."

I had taken a couple of big chances tonight, so I figured I might as well take a little one. It worked out all right.

"Oh . . ." she said. "Oh, Shell."

Nothing else happened for almost a minute. I was close enough to touch her and we were staring at each other, our faces a foot apart. It built up slowly. There weren't any electric sparks, and the earth didn't shake or split apart; it just started getting hotter than hell where we were. Her face softened, slackened as I put my arm around her shoulders, pulled her toward me. Her lower lip drooped, her warm breath brushed my lips, and I felt as if I were going to melt and seep into the ground.

And then her face was closer, her lips parted, and her mouth touched mine and pressed and clung, and she wasn't covering herself any more, she didn't have to, and she was so warm and wonderful in my arms that we were both practically radioactive, and this went on until I figured I'd have to make the rounds with my hammer again pretty quick.

Just when things were getting interesting I heard sirens, and headlights slithered through the trees.

I sat up and looked around and my breathing was almost wiggling the shrubbery, and I said, "Well, they sure as hell picked a fine time for it."

In a matter of seconds, Sam and a couple of the boys from his squad were with us. They made short work of hauling Chuck and his pals into the police cars.

Sam took off his jacket and handed it to Lucille. She looked good to me even in the loose-fitting coat. Then Sam held out his hand to me while Lucille stood by, smiling. "We both owe you a lot, Shell. So does Mr. Franklin. Those kids are finished for sure now."

I couldn't say much; my pulse was still racing and I couldn't keep my eyes away from Lucille as she squeezed into the crowded front seat of Sam's car. Then she spoke. "It's been a pleasure, Shell."

"Yeah," I managed to reply. "I'd sure like to see more of you, some time. Tomorrow night, maybe?"

I was close enough to her now to notice that she blushed at what I'd said and she tugged Sam's coat more tightly around herself. I hastily added, "I mean let's get together for dinner. We can forget all about the young and the damned."

What she answered was drowned out by Sam's laughter as he shot the police car into high gear. Back to my Cad I went. God, she was lovely. I did want to see her again.

CODE 197

I wheeled the Cad off the street and stopped by the sign "Gordon's Tropical Fish." This was Sunday, and the whole clientele of "Sheldon Scott, Investigations" — that's me — was taking a needed day of rest. I cut the engine and turned in the seat to look, for the umpteenth time, at Donna.

Donna was Donna O'Reilly of the shimmering black hair and soft, tender mouth, and eyes green as the sod of her native Ireland. Donna was five-three of sweetly curving temptation, a breath of brogue, and full of cute little tricks like laughing warmly into your ear while biting on it.

That last sensational sensation I had experienced only a couple of times, since I'd met Donna less than eighteen hours ago when I'd made the date for today, but I had stratospheric hopes because we were miles out of Los Angeles and headed for a picnic in the yonder hills. Until now our potentially mad affair had been merely words and two nibbles, but I'm an optimist — and so far Donna liked everything I liked: dancing, bourbon-and-water, rare prime ribs. Even tropical fish, which I keep and breed.

Driving out she'd spotted the sign here and bubbled, "Oh, let's go in there. I know Mr. Gordon — he's spawning Amphiprion Percula today." Well, naturally I wheeled right in.

Donna swung her shapely legs out of the car. "Come on, Shell." She faced me, running white hands over her high breasts, in at her slim waist, and over rounded hips, smoothing her blue-jersey dress. It wasn't wrinkled. I caught up with Donna as she entered the fish hatchery.

The owner was a mild-looking middle-aged man with hair graying at the temples. When he saw Donna he beamed and grabbed her hands. After introductions, she said, "Mr. Scott wants to see the Amphiprion Percula." There was that word again. Mr. Gordon led us to a twenty-gallon tank, then went into another room.

"Hell," I said, "they're clownfish."

"Oh," Donna said, "I wanted to surprise you. You've seen them before!"

"Uh-huh — but you surprised me. I thought you were talking about whales or something. This is a treat, though. I've never seen so many of them at once. They're beautiful."

They were. Three pure white bands separating vivid yellow, black-tipped fins, and there were about thirty of them in the tank. A small fortune; they're hard to get. I heard a squeaking sound. Donna had brought in the thermos and uncorked it, was pouring coffee into the two metal cups from its top. She handed me the bigger cup and said, "Got to keep your stamina up."

"Baby," I said, "you'd better worry about keeping it down."

She grinned and directed me to points of interest in the room. There were about forty tanks lining the walls and I looked at Neons, Raspboras, Panchax, Badisbadis and more. Once I sipped at the coffee, but it was so hot it burned my lips. I walked back to Donna and noticed her cup was empty.

"All gone?" I asked, pointing. "Cast-iron esophagus?"

"I'm used to Mexican food." She grinned. "I like hot stuff."

"So do I like hot stuff."

"Then drink your coffee and let's go picnic."

I didn't know for sure what she meant by that, but I liked it. The cup was at my lips when I looked past Donna to the clownfish tank. Something was screwy. "Hey," I said to her, "something's wrong with the clowns. They're going crazy."

She laughed. "You mean they're flipping?"

I groaned as I walked to the tank. "Funny. You should be sent to the firing squad." But then I stopped cracking wise. Two clownfish floated belly-up at the water's surface.

"They're dying!" I told Donna. "Get Mr. Gordon."

She trotted off somewhere, but I was watching the tank. Anybody would hate to see such gorgeously colored fish gasping for air and dying, but probably only a fish fancier would feel the way I did. There must have been a dozen dead now.

Donna stopped beside me. "He'll be here in a minute and fix them up. Drink your coffee, Shell, and let's go."

That was the first thing she'd said that had hit me wrong. "Well, hell, honey," I said, "I'm going to wait . . ." I let it trail off, wondering why she was so anxious for me to drink the damned coffee. I looked at the full cup, then back at Donna.

She moistened her lips. "I'll be in the car, Shell."

I hardly noticed her going. When I looked at the tank again all the fish were dead. The water seemed murky. I raised my hand, rubbed it over my lips where they'd touched the coffee, then sat the cup down slowly, staring at it, a thin vein of revulsion and disbelief running through my brain. I walked out front. Donna wasn't in sight. The car was empty. I whirled around, ran back into the building, into the other room. It was empty, a door open in the far wall. Nobody was in or near the building, and when I sprinted back to my Cad and ground the engine, it didn't start. I found wires loose under the hood.

Sweating, with my hands moist and cold, I sat behind the wheel, thinking about Donna O'Reilly, who liked everything I like — because she must have planned it that way; Donna, who couldn't have drunk that steaming coffee so fast, who hadn't intended to drink any coffee from that thermos. But the one thought, oddly enough, hardest for me to accept was that anybody — not just a sweet-faced, lovely little Irish colleen, but anybody, could so casually have killed those thirty clowns.

Captain amos wade was a lean, almost cadaverous cop assigned to Bunco, but also the Department's antisubversive expert and liaison between City Hall and the FBI. He leaned back in his chair and said, "Drink your java, Shell. It won't kill you."

"Not this time, maybe." I was waiting until the chemist at Scientific Investigations reported on what was in that first cup of coffee, which I'd brought in. I'd told my story to the police, and looked at mugg shots in the "I" Room without seeing pictures of Donna or Mr. Gordon. I was here to kill time, but also because I enjoyed talking to Amos, to whom I'd been talking quite a bit lately. One of my closest friends, an ex-newspaperman and writer named Jim Brandon, was writing a book for which he'd got some factual material from Amos, and the three of us had often sat here jawing. Jim Brandon was tall and slim, brainy as hell, and looked a little like William Holden, which isn't bad. I not only liked Jim, but admired him because he was a good American who was working at it. In other words, he was actively anti-Communist. His book was anti-Communist, a nonfiction job.

Amos Wade said, "This Donna was a luscious little gal, huh?"

"On the outside. I met her at Pete's bar last night. She probably knew I usually drop in there when I leave the office. Hell, I thought I'd picked her up."

"No idea why the funny business?"

"How, but not why. She poured both cups of coffee from the thermos, then dumped hers into the fish tank. Wish that report would come in from SID. Like to know how I'd have died."

He grinned. "In agony, no doubt, in payment for your sins."

"No doubt, but I don't get it. This last year, I've handled twenty cases. Probably ten guys would like to knock me off."

"You just did another job for Jim, didn't you?"

"Yeah, flew to Boston. Got back night before last."

"How's his new book coming along?"

"Good. He's got to change something in it, he told me, but it's about wrapped up. He's coming over to my place this afternoon. Taking a whole half-day off, so he must be about finished." Jim had worked for three years, nights and weekends, on the thing and getting him away from the typewriter on Sunday was a rare occasion for celebration.

Wade's phone rang. I'd left word that I'd be here, and he listened for a minute and then handed me the phone. Jackson, the police chemist, told me they hadn't yet identified whatever was in the coffee, but added, "Wouldn't have killed you, Shell. Some kind of drug. Might take days to pin it down. We squirted a bit in some mice and a guinea pig. Killed the mice, put the pig to sleep. Haven't found any evidence of organic damage."

I thanked Jackson and hung up. This got stranger and stranger.

My apartment is in Hollywood's Spartan Apartment Hotel, and I'd just finished cleaning and oiling my .38 Colt Special, since it seemed possible that I'd be using it, when the buzzer sounded. It was nearly four p.m., when I expected Jim Brandon, but I loaded the revolver and snapped the cylinder shut before going to the door, gun dangling in my left hand.

It couldn't have taken more than a couple of seconds, but we crowded a lot into it. A lifetime. I swung the door open and saw the young guy standing there, saw the odd-looking gun pointed at my head, and almost instantly automatic reflexes sent me slamming sideways against the door.

There was a little popping sound and then my gun was jarring the palm of my left hand. I wasn't conscious of lifting my arm and pulling the trigger, but I saw the guy jerk, heard the meat-ax smack of bullets into his chest. I emptied the revolver into him.

Doors slammed, people came into the hall, a woman screamed. I was standing over the man's body, breathing as if I'd run a mile. The gun lay beside him and I picked it up. A perforated metal tube stuffed with cottony material was screwed into threads on its barrel — a pistol with a silencer. My neck was stinging and my hand came away from it stained with blood. Whoever was after me, they weren't trying to drug me now.

Inside my apartment I called the police. Jim was overdue and I phoned him, but there was no answer. Officers arrived and got busy, but Jim still hadn't shown, so on my way to Homicide, downtown, I stopped at Jim's small house on Rockledge Street.

There wasn't any answer to my ring. The door was unlocked and I went inside. He was in bed, covers part way down his tanned, well-muscled chest, mouth open.

I grinned, stopped beside the bed, grabbed his shoulder and shook him. "Wake up, you lazy —"

I jerked my hand away. A man's skin isn't ever that cold, not when he's alive. My throat seemed to close up. "Oh, God," I said. "Not Jim."

I've seen more dead men than I like to think about, but I had to leave the house and stand outside for ten minutes before I could go back into the bedroom. Then I looked the place over. Next to Jim's bed, in the drawer of a small night stand, was his gun, fully loaded. He always kept it handy; but he hadn't ever used it. I looked at the small .32 nestled in my palm, then dropped it into my coat pocket. Maybe I'd use it.

In the closet was a woman's coat and scarf, but I recognized them as belonging to Jim's fiancée, a lovely little redhead named Gale Winter. They'd been engaged for a year. Gale had seemed right for Jim too, typed clean manuscript for him, kept the coffee pot on when she was around, gave him a lot of love and encouragement. She'd been impatient about getting married, but Jim had known what he wanted most — or at least first — and that was his book in print. He'd had a special reason, more need to write his book than the average writer would have. Jim was not only an ex-newspaperman, but an ex-Communist. Ex-everything, now.

I had already phoned Homicide, so I headed for City Hall. I'd looked all over Jim's house without finding even a trace of his manuscript. I knew much of what was in it, and I drove slowly toward downtown L.A., thinking about Jim, the book itself, and wondering if that book was why he'd been killed.

Years before I met him, Jim Brandon had been a reporter on one of the New York dailies, and had wound up joining the party. He was intelligent, hard-working, and had a free-and-easy way with words, so he'd landed in a professional group with other newspapermen and writers, plus a couple of radio commentators. They studied the technique of artful lying, how to combine emphasis with omission to create an impression contrary to fact, how to turn black into gray and sometimes — all the liars working together — black into white.

Jim went up fast in the party, and faster in the writing game. Fellow Communists promoted him and praised him publicly, and when he wrote his first book, a party-line novel, the Communist cabal applauded and it sold well.

Jim broke with the party, in 1945, right after the Duclos letter, and endured the standard smearing, went to the FBI and appeared before Congressional committees. The James Brandon who had been white became black overnight. Following the often-repeated pattern, he somehow became separated from his union, and his job, whereupon he came to the Coast and began writing what he somewhat facetiously called his "exposé." Naturally he wasn't really facetious about it.

The book dealt with the Communist party's huge propaganda machine in the United States, specifically with Communists in a large segment of the publishing industry — books, magazines, newspapers. His own story was in it but, more important, he'd done monumental research, named names, dates, places, quoted from Congressional documents and party literature. It was a kind of "interlocking subversion" in the brainwashing field, Jim had said.

Well, James Brandon was dead, and his book didn't seem to be around. Perhaps there was no connection.

This time I waited in the morgue. Amos Wade had come over to the Hall of Justice as soon as he got the word, and half a dozen of us stood together in a small group. Behind me the door opened and a deputy coroner came inside.

He said to me, "He'd been drinking a little, but death was due to cardiac — well, call it heart failure."

He pursed his lips, frowning. I felt stunned. It simply hadn't occurred to me that Jim might have died a normal death.

But the coroner's deputy was going on, "An extremely thin hypodermic needle inserted through the center of the left nipple, between the ribs, and directly into the heart muscle. A massive dose of digitalis injected, and — heart failure." He shook his head, still frowning. "We wouldn't have found it, not this soon, except that we had a couple of others killed the same way."

It was quiet for a long time. Then I said, "A couple of others? Who were they?"

He jerked a thumb at Amos. "He can tell you about them."

Wade's face was slack. "Both local Commies," he said quietly. "Apparently they got into trouble with the party." He paused, brow furrowed, then suddenly snapped his fingers and spun on his heel. "Come on to my office, Shell."

We went back to City Hall. It took fifteen minutes for Amos to find what he wanted; then he grinned at me. "Five-nine, bad acne scars . . ." He went on giving me the description of the man I'd shot. He phoned the "I" room and Homicide. Soon a man came in with a glossy photo. Amos glanced at it, handed it to me. "Otto Rheims," he said.

"That's the guy. Another one?"

He nodded. "His description rang a bell, but it wasn't until Jim that it hit me. Otto was in here once on a bunco rap and I checked his record. Twenty-four front organizations, May Day Parade, CP nominating petitions." He grinned wryly.

"Yeah," I said. "Amos, I didn't see Jim's manuscript in the house. He told me the only other people who'd seen it were you and Gale. Remember anything in it that looked important enough to cause this?"

"Sure. The whole thing. But I saw only a few excerpts, Shell. I don't remember anything specific."

"Screwy way to be killed. Especially three men."

Amos said, "Maybe the answer to why it's been used three times — three we know about — is that we've kept the story in the department. Could be the killers think those deaths passed as natural — which they almost did."

I swore. "How in hell could you stick a hypo into a man's chest without getting shot or knocked around? He'd put up a fight, maybe get marked up. I suppose you'd have to drug him first . . ." I stopped. Involuntarily I stood up, and cold seemed to start in my throat, spread to my heart and ripple over my body. "Drug him," I repeated. "In liquor, maybe. Or coffee."

Driving toward Gale Winter's home, I knew that I wasn't going to work on anything else but Jim's death until I found out who'd killed him. Our friendship would have been clear enough reason, but it was also clear that I'd have to learn who had murdered Jim before I'd know who was trying to kill me. And if I didn't learn fast the next time they tried they might get me. I thought of a thin, hollow needle. . . .

Somewhere in the pages of Jim's manuscript, or in what I knew of that book, or maybe in those conversations we'd had, there must be an answer; somewhere in what I knew of Jim. And the party. I thought back over the two years I'd known Jim, letting my mind brush the high points.

There was the night when he'd first told me about having been a Communist. It had been winter then, raining, and logs were burning in the small fireplace in his front room. Jim overflowed with nervous energy and he was pacing the room while he talked. We were drinking beer from cans and he'd just told me about joining the party, meeting with the pro group, finally getting fed up.

He ran a hand through his thick black hair, a quick, nervous movement that was typical of him. "I broke with them right after the Duclos letter," he said to me. "Christ, you should have seen the comrades, running around like chickens with their heads cut off. The new line hadn't come down from Moscow and nobody knew what to do, including me. Well, I'd been kidding myself for six months, pretending I was still making up my own mind, no matter what, but that finished it for me. I grew up in two days, walked out and never went back."

He shrugged. "Guys join the party and leave it. Guys get sick, too, but that doesn't mean they die. Some of us get well. That's why the comrades hate us ex-Commies, Shell; we're experts at diagnosing the disease. That's also why they have to kill us off." He was silent a long time before he added, "One way or another."

Maybe Jim had expected what had happened. Maybe. But the only time I'd seen him look scared had been in connection with an investigation I'd run off for him, the one that took me to Boston. That had come up during the last week.

He'd been saying about the book, "It's going to raise some hell, if I do say so, Shell. When you write a book attacking a segment of the publishing world, you've got to find somebody in the other segment who'll print it. I damn near didn't find a publisher — Barney Goodman here in L.A.'s the only man I've found willing to put it out. Barney's got a lot of guts, since I'm probably going to wind up with half a dozen libel suits."

Barney Goodman was the head of a small publishing house in Los Angeles. In addition, Barney was active in political affairs locally, a magnetic speaker who'd been on TV forums numerous times in the last year. He was only thirty-eight, but there was already talk about his running for the U.S. Senate in the next elections.

I said, "Barney's seen the manuscript?"

"Nope. Just Amos and Gale. Besides what you've read. But I told Barney the gist of it, what he could expect. Didn't scare him." He grinned. "But he's our next Senator — and we need some more like him."

"Okay, I'll vote for him. And if I ever write my memoirs I'll send them to Barney."

Jim went out for beer, and apparently got to thinking about something while in the kitchen. He was more sober when he came back, frowning, which was unusual for him.

"There's just one thing," he said, and stopped. After almost a minute he said, "Shell, remember when I told you about being in that pro group in New York?"

"Sure."

"There was a guy in the group named Lewis Tollman; he'd be about forty-five now, a real go-getter, intelligent, worked night and day for the party. The word went around that he was being groomed for big things. Seems he was that rarity, a guy who'd never been finger-printed. Little while later he was in an auto accident and wound up in the hospital. Point is, that's the last any of us heard of him. I assumed he'd died. It's — an important part of the book."

He swigged some beer. "He had a crippled hand, all closed up into a fist, something wrong with the nerve or muscles. Sometimes when he'd get excited, he'd point that fist at you with the little finger sticking out; only finger he could point with. Real odd thing, not something you'd forget. Well, a few days ago I was talking to a man and he got excited, raised his fist and pointed that little finger at me."

"Same guy?"

"No, that's the point. Didn't look at all like Lewis. Nothing wrong with his hand, either. I suppose a man could have a hand fixed and still, because of a thirty- or forty-year habit, use it in the same old way once in a while. But this guy was entirely different in appearance. Can't possibly be the same man." He paused. "The FBI's caught up with some comrades, though, who don't answer their descriptions — had some plastic surgery. And they do go underground, new faces, new pasts, have nothing to do with party activities — until they're needed for something big. By which time, of course, they're not suspect."

The upshot of it was that, because Jim wanted to know about Lewis Tollman for sure, I hopped a plane two days later and flew to Boston, then took a bus to the small city where the Merriman Hospital was located. Jim had given me a wealth of information from his files, date of the accident, description, all I needed.

With that information I didn't have to spend much time at the hospital. Half an hour after I'd arrived, a clerk was looking at a card in his hand and saying, "A patient answering that description, shriveled hand and all, was in here on that date. He hadn't been in an accident, however. There's no record of a Lewis Tollman."

"Who's your record of? And what was he in for?"

He looked at the card. "Mr. Arthur Harris. Doctor Zerek's patient. Doctor Zerek was our plastic surgeon."

"When can I see Doctor Zerek?"

He shook his head. "I'm afraid you can't, sir. Doctor Zerek died several years ago. He had a bad heart."

"Heart attack, huh? Would you know offhand when he died?"

"Why . . . just a moment." He went to another filing cabinet, fumbled through a drawer and read off a date to me. Then he looked around. "Odd you should have asked. He died less than a month after Mr. Harris was treated by him."

"Yeah," I said. "It is odd."

The next day I arrived back in L.A. When I gave my report to Jim his face got almost chalk-white. He licked dry lips. "That does it. I'll have to make a change . . ." He stopped. "Kind of late, now. God, I wouldn't have believed it. Not him."

That was all he'd say. We had arranged to get together Sunday, today — and now he was dead. If he'd made any last-minute change in the book, I wanted to find out what it was. Gale should know, since she'd typed it all.

She lived in a big two-story house with her parents and a bachelor brother, Fred, several years older than herself. Fred met me at the door, led me into the front room where Gale sat on a couch. He sat beside her and she looked up at me, eyes puffy from crying.

She spoke dully, but she answered my questions. "There were so many things in the book, Shell. A lot of names and case histories, stories about Communists getting into places where they could hire others, things like that."

"Can't you think of any specific thing that might explain —"

She winced. "No. It was all jumbled, Shell. I never typed more than a few consecutive pages at a time. Maybe from the middle or the end or front, I don't know. It's all mixed up."

"Remember anything about a man named Lewis Tollman?"

"The name sounds familiar, but . . . no."

I looked at her brother. "Fred, did Jim ever talk —"

He interrupted, shaking his head. "I don't know anything about the stuff. Don't want to know."

I turned to Gale. "You haven't the manuscript then?"

"No, I typed the original and a carbon, gave him the final pages last night."

"Final — you mean the book was finished?"

She bit her lip. "Yes. Finally. I'll . . . never forget what he said. I handed him the last ten pages and he grabbed me, and gave me a big kiss. The papers got all wrinkled." Two big tears welled up in her eyes, slid down her cheeks. "Jim looked so happy. He said, 'Sweetheart, that's it, that's the last. Wh-what do you say we get married?'" She sobbed, bent her head forward and cupped both hands over her eyes, shoulders shaking. Fred put his hand on her arm. I got up and left.

Barney goodman opened the front door of his modernistic home on the outskirts of Hollywood, smiled that warm smile of his and told me to come in. After leaving Gale's I'd phoned Goodman, asked if I might see him. I hadn't wanted to go into detail over the phone.

He shook my hand firmly, grinned his boyish grin and said, "This is a pleasure, Mr. Scott. You're the first private investigator I've met. At least — you're not investigating me, are you?"

"No. The main reason I'm here is to find out if Jim Brandon delivered his manuscript to you yet."

We had walked into a paneled den and he pointed to one of two deep leather chairs near each other. As we sat in them he said briskly, "Not yet, but I expect it soon. Perhaps tomorrow or the next day."

"Jim's dead," I said. "And the manuscript doesn't seem to be around. It's gone. I hoped he'd already delivered —"

Goodman leaped to his feet and stared down at me. "Dead? Why, he can't be. He — the manuscript's gone? What do you mean, the manuscript's gone?"

I got the queer impression he was shocked a little too much, but that was probably because of the great sadness he seemed to feel at Jim's death. I said, "It just hasn't been found."

"That's it. He must have hidden it somewhere. It's dynamite, you know. Jim looked all over for a publisher, but nobody would handle it except me. Can't blame them; he said frankly that he'd left himself and his publisher open for libel suits. I'm probably a damn fool to take the chance." He stood straighter, and squared his shoulders. "But somebody had to take the chance." Light glistened on Goodman's thick hair, cast bold shadows on his angular face. He looked like Washington crossing the Delaware, and I figured he could land in the Senate without kissing a single baby. But then he spoiled the fine impression he was making on me by adding, "The publicity would have been worth a million dollars."

After a moment he looked down at me and said slowly, "Is Jim really dead?"

"Yes." I couldn't help adding, "And the manuscript's gone. The only other people beside me who saw parts of it were his fiancée and Captain Amos Wade. Neither of them has any idea where it is."

"Unfortunately, I suppose they know you're here."

"'No; I talked to Jim's fiancée, then decided to check with you." I stopped. Why the hell should Goodman care if anybody knew where I was? Nobody did know, come to think of it.

"How did Jim die?" he asked me.

"It looked like a heart attack —"

"Dead," he blurted. "My God. How terrible!"

"Worse than that. He was murdered."

He looked at me blankly. "Murdered? But you said —"

"It only looked like a heart attack. Captain Wade told me the method was the same used on two murdered Commies." I went on talking but I'd thought of something possibly significant. When I'd reported to Jim Friday night and he'd said, "I've got to make a change . . ." I'd assumed he meant change in the book. But he could have been referring to a change in publishers.

For the first time I became conscious of my heartbeat. It slowly increased in tempo, throbbed a little more heavily. Casually, I said, "Anyway, he's dead. Would you still want to publish the book? If you had the script?"

"Pub — Of course, But that seems . . . if it's found, naturally I'll publish it."

"Reason I asked, Jim and I were pretty close. He told me months ago," I lied, "that as soon as the pages were typed he put his originals, the first-pages, somewhere or other. I don't know where, but Jim said he'd made arrangement for them to be mailed to me — if anything should ever happen to him."

"Splendid! Mr. Scott, get that to me and you can be sure I'll see that it's published."

"I imagine the first draft will reach me in a day or two. I'll bring it to you just as soon as Amos Wade and I and the Homicide men downtown go over it for any leads that might be in it."

Goodman was walking back and forth over the carpet now, right hand in his pocket. "No," he said. "Bring it here. I . . . frankly, you won't like this, but there were several local police officers mentioned in that book. I didn't see the manuscript, but learned that from Jim." His face was flushed. "I don't know who they are — he was secretive about names. Rightly so; too many innocent reputations damaged. But that script might disappear for good, if it hasn't already. You bring it here. I'll publish it, by God. We can do that much for Jim."

He was worked up, really quite excited. I said deliberately, "I can't do that. I'd like to, Mr. Goodman, but it has to be thoroughly checked first. The important thing is to learn who —"

He swung to face me. "The important thing is that book! You'll have to bring it to me, to the company. It's too important!" He was pointing his left hand at me, hand clenched into a fist, pointing at me with the extended little finger.

I'd half expected it, been needling him with words because of my growing suspicion, but it shocked hell out of me anyway and I blurted, ""Lewis Tollman!"

Even before I said his last name, his right hand came out of his pocket, a short-barreled gun gripped in his fingers. I was half out of that deep leather chair, hand slapping against the revolver under my coat, but he had me.

And he knew it. His face suddenly looked harder, older. "You fool," he said. "You miserable fool."

I said softly, "You killed Jim."

"Of course." He was casual, a man talking to a corpse. "Not personally; Donna handled it, burned the manuscript and carbon. She's a real artist. You were incredibly lucky." He smiled, went on. "It was a million-to-one chance, Brandon's learning about me. Years ago arrangements were made so that if anybody ever asked at the Merriman Hospital about Lewis Tollman or Arthur Harris, the National Committee would be informed." He stopped, smiled grimly at me. "The National Committee. That's how important I am, Scott."

I swore at him, almost ready to grab my gun in the hope I could get off at least one shot. But my movements were cramped in the deep chair.

Tollman — Goodman — said calmly, "I prefer not to shoot you here in my home and have to drag you away. But I shall, if it becomes necessary." He paused to let that sink in, then said, "Take out your gun. Use your left hand. Just two fingers, Mr. Scott."

I did what he said; he knew his business. He told me to stand up, clasp my hands behind my head, and I did. He had a self-satisfied, almost gloating look on his face, and he started talking to me, telling about himself. At first I thought he was just bragging, perhaps trying to build himself up in his own eyes, but then I realized that Barney Goodman had little or no opportunity to tell others what a really important man he was. Probably only a few other Communists high in the party, possibly only the National Committee, knew who he really was, what was planned for him. He must often have itched to tell others what he was telling me.

"Lewis Tollman died the day I entered Merriman Hospital. I got a new face, younger, to match the age on my new birth certificate. My hand was operated on. I established the new identity thoroughly and came to Los Angeles. I was provided with sufficient funds to start a publishing firm. And you'll have to admit that I've been careful. Not a single flaw."

"Wrong. You forget the guys like Jim Brandon. And the fact that you have to lie all the time. You can't help making slips — that hand of yours, for example. Besides, you're not useful until you start really working for the party. You'll give yourself away. Once you start spouting the Commie line —"

He laughed. "Don't be naive, Mr. Scott. You know that's not true. Even if it were, a man still has a right to honest opinions in this republic." He laughed again.

I'd just been talking, mainly for time, thinking I didn't have a prayer. But Goodman had told me to kick my gun toward him and it had been lying at his feet. Keeping his eyes on me he bent, picked my .38 up and dropped it into his pocket — and I remembered Jim's gun.

I'd forgotten that I'd had Jim's little .32 in my coat pocket ever since leaving his house. Muscles and nerves seemed to stretch taut in my body. Just a flicking away of his eyes on me, a momentary lapse, and I meant to grab for that gun. But he kept his eyes on me all the time. I caught the flash of headlights through a window beyond him. They approached the house, started to swing in before going out of sight.

Goodman was saying, "Besides, I'll be in the Senate soon."

"You have to be elected first."

"That's all settled, Scott. The number of votes I'll have to get, everything. It's planned for the next twenty years. I am elected."

I unwound my hands from behind my head, lowered them slightly. "I think a car has just pulled in, Goodman."

He kept smiling. I hoped I was right, that the car had come to the house. Because interruption or no interruption, I was going to dig for that .32 soon. I could imagine Barney Goodman in the Senate itself, that propaganda machine Jim had talked about booming and boosting him. Maybe more. In ten, fifteen years he might even wind up like a Lauchlin Currie, say, as a Presidential advisor.

The front door slammed. Goodman's brows twitched, but he didn't move the gun, and he kept his eyes on me. I lowered my right hand an inch, then farther. The door to the den burst open and somebody came inside. "Barney, I've just come from —"

Her voice stopped suddenly. Goodman turned his head to look at her. And if I hadn't been concentrating so hard on this chance I might have looked myself, because I knew that voice, that breath of brogue. But as soon as Goodman's eyes shifted I jammed my hand into my coat pocket, grabbed the gun and jumped sideways as I pulled it free.

Goodman shouted, swung toward me and fired before I could get the .32 pointed at him, the slug ripping along my arm. Then I squeezed the trigger twice. He staggered, shot at me again and missed. Blood stained the white shirt under his coat and slowly he bent forward. The gun barrel drooped, but he managed to pull the trigger again, the slug digging into the carpet. He fell to his knees.

I had time to aim, and my next shot caught him squarely in the forehead.

Donna was running toward the door when I said, "Go ahead, Donna."

She took one more step and froze, arms held out from her sides, hands opening and closing. She arched her shoulders as if expecting a bullet in the back. "Turn around," I said. "I'm not going to shoot you. You've got too much to tell us, baby."

I sat by the phone, waiting for the police, keeping my gun pointed at Donna. There would be a lot of yelling about this, I knew, but I'd be clear. What Donna was going to tell would help. But even without her I figured I'd have no trouble. This would be listed, in the parlance of the book, as a Code 197. Goodman had been pointing a gun at me, trying to kill me.

But even if he'd been unarmed, I thought, just standing there when I'd killed him, it would still have come under Code 197. At least in my book. That's the Penal Code, Section 197 — self-defense.

THE BUILD-UP

MY head throbbed, a sharp point of pain at the base of my skull. When I brought my hand away from the pain, it was sticky. I forced my eyes open, saw the dark red stain on my fingers. Still barely conscious, I moved my right hand and something dropped from it to the floor. It was a gun — mine, a little .32 revolver. I'm a private eye — that's why I always carry the gun.

Close on my left was the open window. It was screwy. I shouldn't have been sitting in an overstuffed chair next to the window. I struggled to my feet, got my hands on the sill. Six stories below was Main Street. Main Street in Altamira, California. I remembered part of it. There'd been the game here in the Raleigh Hotel. We'd been playing poker — five of us. Vic Foster, Danny Hastings, Jason, Stone, and me, Shell Scott.

I turned around. The felt-topped table was on its side in the middle of the room, green money on the carpet, alongside it. But it didn't look like more than a thousand or so. A couple of highball glasses lay on the floor. It looked as if there'd been a fight.

Then I saw him.

He was flat on his back beyond the table, eyes open and staring, blood all over the front of him, his white shirt streaked. It was Danny Hastings, two bullet holes in his chest. His face was marked up, blood under his nose and on his lips. No pulse, no breath — he was dead, all right.

The last I remembered of the game, there'd been only Vic Foster, Danny and me playing: the two others had left minutes before. Then Foster had quit, grabbed some fresh air at the window and walked behind me. Right after that, boom. The lights had gone out.

I heard a siren, went to the window, looked down as two cars pulled into the curb. Policemen left the cars and hurried into the building. At my feet was the little .32 I'd dropped when I'd come to; I picked it up, swung out the cylinder. Two empty cartridge cases were in it.

I didn't move for a moment, forcing myself to think. A Borneo headhunter could have figured out that Foster had killed Danny and was framing me for the murder — and Foster didn't do things halfway. That would be fixed so I'd have a fat chance of explaining to the police — especially now. For two weeks the papers had been riding the police hard about the still-unsolved murder of a union official named Tyler. Under the circumstances, they'd solve Danny's murder fast; it could even happen that they'd solve Tyler's murder fast.

My lips were sore, puffed and bruised. I'd been slugged while unconscious. Danny's face was marked up, too; it would look as if we'd been in a fight — and that could explain the lump on my head. It didn't help that I'd knocked Danny on his fanny a week ago.

I ran, I raced out of the room, down the stairs, and was at the third floor before I heard the heavy steps pounding upward. I didn't know how much the police knew about me — but I knew I had a murder gun in my pocket. A few feet on my right was the open door to room 302. I could see the middle-aged hotel maid putting new sheets on the bed. I jumped to the door and jerked off my coat, held it loosely in my hand as the officers reached the landing.

I glared inside at the woman, my hand on the doorknob. The two officers stood at the head of the stairs. "Okay, baby," I shouted, "if that's how you want it, you can fry in hell!"

The little woman's jaw dropped open and her eyes got very wide as I slammed the door shut with a crash that rang down the hallway. I swung around, putting on my coat, and walked to the stairs. The two uniformed officers were looking at me; one of them ran his eyes over my dark hair, my face, my puffed lips, checking my size and build. That probably meant they had some kind of description of the "killer."

"Well?" I roared at them. They looked at each other. I ran a finger over my puffed lips and mumbled, "The bitch, damn wildcat," as I started to brush by them. They shrugged, went on up the stairs.

Moments after they were out of sight the door behind me opened and the little old lady looked out. "What did I do?" she asked me.

I was on my way to the lobby. I got there, looked around. Several shops could be reached from the hotel lobby. I walked into one of them, a florist's shop. Several thousand dollars that had been in my wallet while I was unconscious were gone, I discovered, but I found a few bucks in my trousers pocket, bought a dozen roses, and continued with them to the street.

I was sweating, but I knew the mental storm wasn't showing on my face. Years of high-stakes poker had taught me to control my expression and bearing; but, inside, my kidneys were coming apart. Nobody stopped me while I walked to a cab a few yards away, told the driver to light out. He lit, I switched cabs a dozen blocks from the hotel, leaving my roses behind, got out of the second cab three blocks from Green Park. At Green Park I walked boldly onto the grass, picking up somebody's newspaper on the way, made a pillow of my coat and lay down with the newspaper over my face.

I thought about the four men I'd been playing poker with until about four p.m. today, Thursday. Vic Foster was an attorney and small-time politician with big ideas who'd twice run unsuccessfully for Congress. He was a tall, bony man, thin and sagging with a craggy face. Foster looked like an old-time western sheriff relaxing after cleaning up on all the outlaws in town. By shooting them in the back. Short, fat, white-haired Arthur Jason was a circuit court judge. Bert Stone, fifty years old and six-feet-four inches tall, with a big red nose that looked as if somebody had just slugged him on it, was an electronics expert and well-to-do businessman, owner of Altamira's biggest radio and TV agency and repair business. I understand that he could be had for "special" work if the price was right. He'd been in trouble a few months ago for allegedly putting a "bug" or wiretap on a local policeman's telephone. It had been a two-day sensation in the news, but wound up "all a mistake."

Danny Hastings, until today, had been a man with quite a bit of weight in town. A councilman, he knew most of Altamira's — and many of the State's — bigwigs on a first-name basis, and I'd picked up word on occasion that Danny was a fixer, bagman, go-between. If you wanted something fixed up for you, the word was "See Danny." But not any more.

It looked as if there'd been a falling out among thieves — but that didn't explain why I'd been picked as the patsy. And another thing was bothering me. If the police had arrived a few minutes earlier, they'd have found me unconscious on the floor, and unconscious men don't go around shooting holes in people. How could Foster have known I'd be on my feet when the police arrived?

I thought back to the end of that poker game. The five of us had sat around the table, well over a hundred thousand dollars in the game, a good third of it piled in front of me. Danny was dealing draw. I'd raised Foster's opening bet mainly because I was pushing a lucky streak, and then drawn one card to four hearts, getting a spade. Jason on my right was out; Stone and Danny on my left were three-card draws; Foster's craggy face had got a frown on it at my raise, but he'd called and drawn two cards. After the draw he looked at his hand, checked to me.

Unless they'd helped, Stone and Danny, caught between me and the opener, would probably fold if I chucked it in; Foster was the only man I felt worried about. And by now I knew him pretty well. You learn a lot about men in poker games. With the ante, there was about ten thousand in the pot. So I counted out ten thousand, watching Foster from the corner of my eye. He reached up and tugged gently on his left ear lobe.

Whenever Foster got in a tight spot, and was worried, he unconsciously pulled that ear lobe. If he'd gone in with three of a kind, that was all he had now. And his three of a kind couldn't beat my nothing, not when he played with his ear. I threw the money into the middle of the table and said, "I'll match the pot. Make it interesting."

Stone scratched that big nose of his, then he and Danny tossed their cards into the middle of the table. Foster said, "Trying to buy it, eh, Scott? Hell, I got nothing in there." He showed two kings. "Openers," he said, and tossed in his hand. I started to take in the money.

Foster said, "Shell, you still carry that little popgun?"

I patted my left armpit. "You know it." I looked at the money on the table. "I'll be carrying over a hundred thousand when I leave here."

He grinned. "Not unless you use the gun."

"The way you guys play poker, I don't need it. Deal."

He didn't deal. He said, "Yeah, you're lucky at cards, all right. Lucky at cards, unlucky in love."

"Not always."

"Always."

He wasn't smiling. He was thinking about Gloria.

Foster didn't like me a bit today — or any day; maybe he even hated me. Both of us had seen quite a lot of Gloria Meadows, only Foster hadn't seen much of her lately; I'd been holding her hand for most of the time this past month. Nobody could blame Vic Foster for resenting the switch in Gloria's attentions, because she was a dream that was still there when you woke up.

Gloria Meadows, slim but with plenty of oomph here and there, or whatever you want to call it, and no matter what you call it, she had it. Eyes deep and dark as sin, lips with more personality than some whole people, a soft, husky laugh like a backsliding devil's. She played piano and sang at a supper club downtown, sang in her soft voice that was white fingers on your spine, that turned a pop ballad into bedroom whispers. She had everything she needed, and all that I wanted. I'm a twenty-nine-year-old bachelor; but Gloria made me feel like becoming a thirty-year-old papa. Maybe I was in love with her: I wasn't sure yet. But I was sure about Vic Foster. He was in love with her.

Stone and Jason got up, said they'd had enough, and left almost immediately. After three more hands, Foster said he was through, then went to the window, saying he needed some fresh air. In a minute he walked around behind me. I was looking at Danny when it happened.

Danny didn't look surprised; his eyes went up over my head, then down again, and that was all. But he must have been very surprised a few seconds later. Lying in the park with a newspaper over my face, I couldn't even remember if the blow had hurt; I knew it hurt now, though. I knew one other thing, too: Foster should have called my ten thousand. He must have known he'd get it back. But habit was too strong; a man plays poker the way he lives.

From the park I went to the Dormann Hotel, directly across Main Street from the Raleigh. At the desk, a small gray clerk looked at me with no sign of recognition. There was one room available, on the sixth floor, facing Main Street; a "Mr. Brown" had checked out an hour or so ago. But his description was three or four inches over six feet, lot of bushy gray hair, big fat nose. "Brown," then, was Bert Stone. I paid for one night.

In the room I put a quarter in the radio and went to the window. Straight across the street was room 612 in the Raleigh. I could still see the overstuffed chair I'd been propped in while unconscious. The radio warmed up on what sounded like a news broadcast. I heard the words, "Shell Scott."

Your own name can always stop you, but especially if your first name is Shell and you'd like to keep it a secret. I'd missed the description of the murder scene, apparently, but the announcer went on to describe me very well, including "armed and dangerous." Then there was some interesting information. Victor Foster, Judge Jason and Bert Stone had told the police they'd been in a jolly "friendly dime-and-dollar" poker game with Danny Hastings and Shell Scott; the three of them had left together, leaving Scott alone with Danny Hastings. That was all they knew. But they were prepared to testify to that much, willingly, as good honest citizens interested in law and order.

To the police, and the average citizen, the testimony of those three upstanding citizens would be the truth; anything I said would be the natural attempt of a murderer to clear himself and shift the blame to others.

It was clever enough; they'd given this one a real buildup. But I had one ace left; I was alive and free, which those bums hadn't counted on. I used the room phone to call the home and office numbers of all three men but didn't get an answer anywhere. That figured. I got out of the hotel in a hurry, took a cab to Elm Street, where I hailed another cab and left it three blocks from Gloria's apartment house, the Essex, on quiet, tree-shaded Pepper Street. Gloria answered my ring. It was nearly dusk and she was already dressed for work. She had on a cocktail dress, as brief and stimulating as a straight shot, transparent as a martini with one olive. She didn't look surprised to see me, just a little worried.

Gloria stepped close and looked up into my face. "Shell, darling, I hoped you'd come here. I heard it on the radio. You didn't . . ."

"No, sweetheart. I didn't. You alone?"

She nodded, pulled me inside, literally shut the door with me, pressing me back against it. "Shell, honey, I knew you didn't . . . how did it happen —"

"Hold it. Most of the cops in town are looking for me. I haven't time to explain. Ah, sweetheart, uh . . . I haven't time for that, either." I pushed her away from me and we sat down, then I said to her, "Gloria, I'm sewed up in a tight frame and Foster's the guy with the needle. You know more about him than anybody else in town, including me. That's why I'm here, and I won't be here long. If you've got any idea why Foster and his pals would kill Danny and try to frame me for it, which is what happened, then give. I've got to start climbing out of this hole and I've got to find Vic Foster."

Dark brown eyes, long-lashed lids, soft unsmiling mouth. Her tongue moved slowly over her red lower lip; she shook her head. "I don't know, Shell. Vic was here a couple nights ago. That's why I couldn't meet you, remember?"

"Yeah."

"He asked me to marry him. But I told him no. That I wouldn't even be seeing him any more. You know why. I don't want to see anybody but you. And I told him so."

"How'd he take it?"

"Got angry. He'd been drinking, but he really began pouring it down then. Stormed out soon after."

I lit a cigarette. "Foster ever let anything drop about Danny? He say anything to you at all?"

She frowned. "He said something. That last night. But I can't recall . . ." She was quiet a few moments, then nodded slowly. "Yes, I remember now because it was so strange. He swore for a while, then he said, 'First Danny gets religion, and now you get stupid.' Something like that."

"Danny gets religion? What would that mean?"

"I don't know. But Vic said something else. I think I asked him what he was talking about and he said Danny had been spilling his . . . insides — to a priest."

"A priest?"

Gloria nodded. "That's what Vic said. But after that he got quiet, then yelled at me some more. Finally stormed out."

I could figure Danny's spilling his guts because he and Foster, and the other two, undoubtedly did know enough about each other so any one of them could hang them all. But to a priest? Danny lived on the west side of town. Pine Street; if he'd seen a priest it would probably have been in the church at Eighteenth and Pine, Father Shanlon. But I couldn't figure out how Foster would know about it. Danny wouldn't have told him. And Father Shanlon sure as hell — as Heaven wouldn't have mentioned it.

I said to Gloria, "You got any idea where Foster might go if he wanted to stay out of circulation temporarily?"

She did have an idea, but it didn't help much at the moment. A couple of months back, before I'd met Gloria and when she'd been seeing a lot of Vic Foster, he'd left town for a week or so and stayed at a small house he owned. "Vic said he had to get away for a few days, get some rest for his ulcer. Nobody would know he was at this house; kind of a hideaway for him, place to relax."

"Where is it?"

She shook her head. "Just out of town somewhere, Shell, but I don't recall where." She squinted at me. "He wrote me one letter, though; I even answered it, so the return address must have been on it. I've probably still got the letter — but no telling where. Want me to start looking?"

I stood up. "Yeah. But I can't wait. I'll phone you later. The police will probably get around to you before long. Don't lie to them and get yourself fouled up in this. Tell them I was here, and everything I said. Might even help me." I thought about that for a minute and had an idea concerning a cop named Billings.

"All right," she said. "If the police or anyone's here when you phone, I'll say, 'Hello, Lucille'." She got gracefully to her feet. "If I'm alone, I'll say, 'Shell, honey, honey, honey —'"

"Whoa!" Gloria had the habit, at certain highly stimulating moments, of saying, "honey," to me over and over again with a kind of hot husky intensity that did to my spine what Lionel Hampton does to a vibraphone. Wild music would click from my vertebrae, maybe audible only to me, but real crazy stuff in my ears. Stuff I always wanted to hear more of, too, but not at a time like this when hilarious cops with guns might burst in and fill my rear end with lead. Those wild-music moments were moments when I wanted no lead in me anywhere, but particularly not there.

So I trotted to the door. Another cab. Pretty quick the drivers were going to know me. This one took me to Eighteenth and Pine. Father Shanlon was a tall, thin man with a quiet voice and quiet eyes. It took a few minutes for me to explain what I wanted. He was shocked to hear that Danny had been murdered, but he didn't show any expression at all while I explained that the police were looking for me, looking for the wrong man.

Finally I said, "Father, had Danny just recently been coming to see you? Maybe asking for your help in . . . in some matter?"

He smiled. "Mr. Scott, I'm afraid that any conversations we might have had would be improper subjects for discussion."

It took me three more minutes of fast explanation, but then Father Shanlon told me that Danny Hastings had talked to him on several recent occasions. "He was troubled," Father Shanlon said. "He asked me for advice, and I told him to search his own mind and heart, that the answer was there." He sighed heavily. "Perhaps that wasn't enough."

Father Shanlon naturally wouldn't say what had been troubling Danny, but I told him what I suspected, and he took me to the confessional booth. I looked, searched while Father Shanlon watched me with an odd, unbelievable expression on his face. Neither of us said a word until I found it.

When I straightened up, Father Shanlon's expression wasn't unbelieving any more, but lined and sorrowful. "What is it?" he asked me quietly.

"I'm not quite sure, Father. I'm not the electronics expert — Bert Stone is, I told you there were three of them in on this deal." I held the thing out in the palm of my hand, a small oblong case a little larger than a pack of king size cigarettes. "It's some kind of bug, though. I'll give you generous odds . . . I mean, there's little doubt about it. Probably some kind of transmitter. Radio transmitter."

"But . . . It's impossible . . ."

"I'm afraid not, Father," I said. "Is this worse than murder?"

He didn't answer me, but his face answered for him. I'd found what appeared to be a battery-operated transmitter fastened beneath a seat; the receiver would have been almost anywhere within a mile or two of the church — with Foster, Stone, or Jason listening as Danny poured out his doubt and torment to his priest.

Father Shanlon agreed that I could take the small transmitter with me. Just before I left I said, "I'm sorry about this, Father. But you can understand why I had to come here. The men that did this . . . well. They've got me on a real hot spot."

He smiled gently. "I rather think they're on a much hotter spot than you, Mr. Scott."

This time I walked. I'd been pressing my luck long enough with cab drivers, and the address I wanted was only a few blocks away. Police Sergeant Dave Billings lived there, so I was going calling with my little .32 in my hand. We weren't exactly friends, but I'd known him ever since he'd worked traffic. He worked the day watch out of Homicide now, and I knew he often got home about this time; it was a little after seven p.m.

At seven thirty-five he turned in the drive and drove toward the closed garage. I waited till he had both hands on the garage door, then stepped from where I'd been waiting around the corner, stuck the gun in his back and said, "Easy, Billings. Just hang onto the door. All I want is some conversation."

I could feel the muscles in his back ridge and tighten, moving the gun; I stepped away from him. "Back in the car, Billings; first drop your gun, slow." In a few seconds we were both in his Ford sedan, with me in the rear seat still pointing my gun at him, his .38 in my pocket. I had him drive out to the street and park a couple blocks away. He already knew about the murder, so I merely told him exactly what had happened.

When I finished he said, "I won't call you a liar, Scott. Not while you've got a gun on me." He turned his head slightly. "Thirty-two, isn't it? A thirty-two killed Hastings."

"Sure. This is the gun that killed him. It's my gun. Only I didn't use it. I'm not going to tell you again. But half the town knows that Shell Scott always carries a gun. I made sure half the town knew it."

He grunted. There was a little clicking sound and I noticed that Billings had leaned away from me. I grabbed him by the back of his coat collar and yanked him against the seat. "What in the hell you trying to do?"

He swore. "Take it easy," he said. "Can't I get a light?" A cigarette was dangling from his mouth. I could feel perspiration moist on my palms.

"Billings," I said, "don't pull anything like that again. You can smoke when we finish talking. Till then, don't even wiggle."

He said, "You and Hastings had a beef a week or so back, didn't you?"

"Little one. Stang's bar and grill. He was drunk, took a swing at me, and I knocked him down. Hell, I was a shade spiffed myself. The boys who hung this frame on me probably figured that was another good reason to make me their patsy. Besides, they knew I'd be carrying my popgun. Handy murder gun for them. Most important, Foster was hot for my girl. With me out of the way, maybe he could do himself some good. And you've admitted the police got an anonymous tip. Another thing, I'm out maybe seventy thousand bucks today in that small game, bonus for the killers. That enough reason?"

"Sure," he said. I was making a big impression.

I told Billings then about my visit with Father Shanlon. He didn't say anything. I had him get out of the car and walk a few feet beyond it, then I put his gun and the little transmitter on the curb and told him to wait till I was long gone before getting them. And to check on that transmitter. Just before I got back into the car I said, "That's it, Billings. Nobody has heard my story before, but I could hardly walk into police headquarters with it. Now you know my side. Try to believe it."

He still didn't say anything. I started the car and took off in a hurry, went around the corner with the tires shrieking, and put some distance between Billings and me. At a pay phone I called Gloria.

"Hello, Shell, Shell, honey, honey, honey."

"Whoa, I get it —"

"Shell, you shouldn't have left. You got me all . . . I jumped right into a cold shower. I've just got a towel on —"

"Stop it, I didn't call —"

"Wait . . . there! No towel! You should see me now. I haven't a thing —"

"Shut up will you? Did you find that address?"

She sighed, told me it was 1844 Kingsman Road. That would be about ten miles out past the city limits. I hung up on Gloria in the middle of dialogue that ordinarily I'd have asked her to repeat, and gunned the Ford.

The house was small and white, surrounded by eucalyptus trees, back from the road about a hundred feet. A car was parked in the drive alongside it, and a light was burning beyond drawn curtains. I parked at the side of the road, walked to the house and found a window with the blinds up about an inch. Peering through it I could see into the room. Foster was in there.

He was standing, his back to me, at a small portable bar squirting soda water into a highball. He turned around and stared at the glass for a few seconds, then drank deeply from it. And I suddenly realized that I hadn't been really angry at any time since I'd been snapped by Foster, because seeing him now, the gripe swelled up in me suddenly, hot and red like a six-foot boil. I almost raised the .32 in my hand, but I didn't want to shoot the guy; I wanted to play with his head like a gourd and listen to the words spill out of him.

The front door was closed but unlocked and I eased it open, walked a few steps down a narrow hall to the partly open door behind which Foster was, pushed it open and stepped inside. Foster was looking away from me, didn't see or hear me. Not at first. I glanced around the room, then walked toward Foster with my gun pointed at his head. He turned casually, saw me, and his face got white.

His eyes dropped to the gun and riveted there. "Don't!" he squawked. "Shell. For God's sake, don't. We can work it out."

I kept walking toward him and he moved away from me until his back was against the wall. "Shell, we can fix it, I tell you. We can get you out of this."

"Seems only right, Foster," I said. "You worked hard enough to get me into it."

"Please." His voice rose. "You'll never get out if you kill me! They'll get you sure." I was nearly to him by then. He shut his eyes. "Shell, don't kill me. I'll confess it, everything. I'll write it out. Only don't kill me. He screamed. It startled hell out of me.

He was scared, but I didn't think he was as frightened as he pretended to be. I'd fix that, though. It didn't seem right to do it with his eyes closed, but I remembered that he'd sapped me from behind, then slammed me in the mouth while I was out, so it wasn't too difficult. I leaned forward, pivoting, and tried to shove my fist from his stomach to his backbone. Breath and spittle spewed from his lips and he bent forward, knees sagging. I stepped back, cocked my left fist again and tossed it against his mouth. At the last moment, though, I pulled the punch; I wanted him conscious, even if toothless. He slid to the floor; hands flapping against the carpet.

I said quietly, "All right, Foster. You want to start it with Danny?"

He licked his lips, grimaced in revulsion and spat. "He was going to the cops, spill everything," he said. "We'd have gone to jail — Stone, Jason, me. Danny had been in all of it with us, he must have gone crazy."

"Go on. All of it."

"The four of us, we've made a million the last couple years here in town. Started with Bert Stone. I gave him the idea. He tapped wires around the city, officials' phones right on down to local businessmen, people with money. Got plenty on them, blackmailed them. Not just for money; we got control of some contracts, money from building around town. In case of trouble, we could bring enough pressure to keep it quiet. The new housing development that's going up, fifteen-million-dollar operation. He says who gets the contracts, where the material has to be purchased. Voters don't know what's going on; they never do. There's plenty off the top." He licked his lips again. "Shell, we can cut you in. And Stone's a wizard. He's got a parabolic microphone that can pick up conversations right in the middle of the park, from a hundred feet away. No wires nothing. There's millions —"

"Shut up."

He stopped talking, and I started to turn away from him. I wanted cords from the windows, something to tie him up with. But Foster began talking again suddenly without prompting.

"Stone used that parabolic mike of his to get what we wanted on Tyler." Tyler, the union boss who'd been shot a couple weeks back. "Taped a talk Tyler had with a member of the Atlas Company's Bargaining Committee. About a strike Tyler was going to call if the company management didn't pay off fifty thousand. We got the hooks into him good, scared him plenty. Tyler handed us a hundred thousand from the union welfare fund; he must have got that much himself. Members didn't even know how much was in the fund, perfectly safe. Only he got rough. Threatened us. Waved a gun around. We had to shoot him."

"We? Or you, Foster?"

"I shot him. But we were all in it, deep. That's what got Danny; the killing, I mean. He started getting jerky. All on edge. Then when you cracked wise to him that day, he took a swing at you. Right then's when I figured it all out."

He kept on talking, and I finally began wondering how I'd managed to turn him on so completely with just a couple of pokes. Maybe I'd have figured it out. The rate I was going, I might have managed it by the year two thousand. But I got some help.

"Drop the gun, Scott. Turn around slowly."

I craned my head around, saw Stone in the open doorway behind me, a big automatic in his hand. Jason was in the hall beyond him. Foster was getting to his feet. "You took your damned time," he said angrily. "I yelled loud enough for you to hear me in the City Hall."

So that was why he'd screamed. He'd been ahead of me all the way, spilling everything to keep my attention. Stone was wearing slippers and trousers, his big chest bare; he must have been lying down here when I'd come in. I swore. I hadn't been able to reach any of them by phone earlier, and it probably should have occurred to me that all of them might be together; but it hadn't and when I'd seen Foster through the window, I hadn't been doing any thinking except about how I'd mangle him.

"I said to drop the gun," Stone said.

His .45 was pointed straight at me. I dropped the .32. From the corner of my eye I saw Foster move, step toward me. "Stop it, Vic!" Stone yelled sharply.

Foster had his fist drawn back, his mashed lips pressed together. "Look what the bastard did to me," he said.

"Don't be a fool. We can't mark him up."

"Then shoot him. Shoot him!"

"Just a minute," Stone said. "I want to know how he found us."

Foster apparently hadn't thought of that yet. His face went blank, then his lips twisted angrily. "Gloria," he said bitterly. "Well, she's asked for whatever —" He cut it off, jaws grinding together.

After a moment he went on, looking at Stone, "Scott's not just a handy out for us now; I've told the bastard everything. So get it over with."

Stone licked his lips. "You got us all into this, Vic. It was your idea. You'd better finish it."

Foster walked to Stone, jerked the gun from his hand and aimed it at me. For a second there I was a dead man. Nothing worked, not my muscles, my brain, nothing. Then I said the words, coming in a burst, "Better think about it, Foster. You've got nobody to frame for this one."

He chuckled. "We don't need anybody. You killed Danny, remember. The three of us here were the men who could place you there as the last man in the game with Danny. So you came here to shut us up."

That second, plus the time Foster had been speaking, was all I needed. If everything had been frozen before, it was racing now. I had always been able to bluff Foster out of any pot I really wanted, whether it was big or small, and this was the biggest pot of all. Maybe, I thought, maybe it would work. So I said. "Kill me, and you're all going to that little gas room at Quentin. The police will know it's cold-blooded murder."

Foster looked as if he were going to pull the trigger, but he relaxed slightly, let the gun drop lower and said, "You're crazy, Scott. This is self-defense. We've even got the gun you brought here — the gun you used on Danny."

I said, "You damn fool, the police know I didn't kill Danny. I've talked to them."

He frowned, then chuckled. "Sure you have. Never say die, huh? Well, it won't do you any —"

"I can prove it, Foster. Sergeant Billings for one. Call him; he's off duty, but I'll give you odds he's at the station now. He'll tell you the same thing. I even told him about the bug Stone planted in Father Shanlon's confessional booth." That jarred him and doubt grew on his face. I kept talking. "No reason for me to lie. You can check it in fifteen seconds. And I wish you would. If you don't, you're cutting your own throats along with mine."

Foster, frowning, reached up with his left hand and tugged gently at his earlobe. It was the moment I'd been waiting for, so I laughed out loud. It sounded pretty genuine and all three men looked at me. "Don't you get it yet?" I grinned at them. "Danny's not dead."

There was complete silence for a second. Then Foster said, "You're lying."

I looked at the other two then, at Stone and Jason. "I was unconscious when it happened, sure. But you two were clear out of the hotel — you, Stone, in the Dormann Hotel waiting to watch me come to so you could call the cops. Another part of your build-up — the frame wouldn't fit if they found me unconscious. When I came to, Danny was still breathing."

"You're lying," Foster said again. "I killed him."

I looked at him then. "Nuts. You shot him with that thirty-two of mine. You called it a little popgun, yourself, when you made sure I had it on me. Men have been shot two or three times with a forty-five and lived. Those little slugs poked holes in Danny, and shook him up, but they didn't kill him."

They just about half believed me. Even Foster. But it wouldn't last forever and I knew it. A bluff has to work only long enough for the man to toss in his hand, but to do me any good, this one had to work longer. I was praying that Foster would actually phone and talk to Billings. But even if that should make Billings wonder plenty after what I'd told him, it would still take ten minutes after the call for him to get out here — even if the police could trace the call.

Foster said, "We talked to the police. They said he was dead."

"I doubt that. I imagine you did most of the talking. Besides, what would you expect them to say? They still don't know who shot Danny. I told Billings who did it, though."

Foster tugged at his ear, then moved to the phone, keeping the gun pointed at me. I looked at Stone, at Jason. "You're the men who should be scared and running. You might make it if you started now."

Foster dialed. I held my breath, but then he said, "Who? Mr. Grant? This is Victor Foster. About Danny Hasting's body . . . I don't believe he has any relatives near here. I'd like to be sure he has a decent funeral . . . Yes."

Foster was grinning while he looked at me. And with good enough reason. The bluff had worked; he'd phoned. But he hadn't called Billings, or even the police. He'd called Grant, at the morgue. And Danny was in the morgue.

He talked for a few more seconds, his grin widening. Then he hung up. And this time he wasn't going to listen to any more conversation. He was going to kill me right now. I bent forward, tensing my leg muscles.

And then we heard it. We all heard it, the still distant, but clear, sound of a siren. Foster didn't take his eyes or the muzzle of the automatic off me, but Judge Jason walked to the window and raised the shade. "It's coming up here," he said. "They are. Several cars. It's police, I can see the red lights. I . . ." He let it trail off.

I heard Stone jump toward the window as the siren got louder, but my eyes were on Foster. If they were police cars, I didn't know how or why they'd come here, but I knew they must be for me. And I waited for Foster to take his eyes off me for one second. He did. He looked toward Jason and Stone at the window, the gun muzzle wavering away from me.

I lunged forward, bent over, and dived at him. The gun roared with a deafening crash almost in my ear; the bullet burned across the skin of my neck, and then I hit him, legs driving, and slammed him back against the wall with a crash that shook the little house. My shoulder ground into his side and cut off the yell that ripped from his throat. His hand clawed across my face and I swung my right fist at him, knuckles bouncing off his arm. The gun dropped, and then Foster had squirmed away from me.

He was scuttling across the floor on all fours. Jason and Stone were piling out the door and I saw them turn, start toward the back of the house. The siren was screaming almost in our ears now, and I could hear cars sliding to a stop in front. Foster got to his feet, as I slapped my hand against the automatic, raised it in my fist.

"Hold it, Foster! One step and I'll kill you," I shouted.

He was almost at the door. He turned his head around, face panic-stricken, then made his mistake. He gave one big leap toward the doorway and I fired. I aimed low and the heavy slug caught him while he was still in the air. It slammed his body around with a sudden wrench, drove him against the door frame. He bounced against it, fell to the floor and lay there with his hands clawing at the carpet.

Then the room was full of policemen. I couldn't remember seeing so many cops in one place at the same time. I took a few minutes, but Foster was still conscious and he talked to Billings just as eagerly as he'd earlier talked to me. I filled in anything he forgot, or otherwise neglected to mention. When things quieted down, Billings took me aside. "That happened pretty fast," he said. "We didn't come out here for them." He pointed at Foster; Jason and Stone had been grabbed as they went out the back door. "We came out for you."

"How'd you find me? It wasn't that phone call?"

"What phone call?" He paused a moment, then went on. "You got me a little hot, you know, when you stole my car."

"I needed transportation, and I'd already used too many cabs."

"Shouldn't have stolen a police car. That baby belongs to the city. Come on, I'll show you something." As we went outside he said, "I usually drive it home. Looks like anybody else's buggy — a plainclothes car we call them. Microphone in the glove compartment, aerial under the frame, everything looks normal." We were at the car then and he opened the right-hand door, pointed a glowing flashlight at the seat. "Take a look."

Something was stuffed down in back of the seat. "Transmission microphone," he said. "When you thought I was plugging in the lighter for my cigarette, I was turning on the radio. When you yanked me back by the collar, that gave me the chance to stuff the mike in there." He pulled the mike free. "Had to stuff it in so the button would stay down. You started transmitting to the police station before we even finished talking, and you drove off. You were transmitting all the time you were driving up here."

I swore, but happily.

He went on, "Didn't hear anything but the engine, since you didn't talk to yourself. Lost you for a while, but we finally got a fix on this transmitter and zeroed you in. Had all the radio cars in town out after you." He grunted heavily. "And we got three other live ones."

"You came close to getting a dead one," I said. "I guess you talked to Father Shanlon."

He shook his head. "No, but we will now. I've been too busy trying to catch up with you. And I didn't believe a word you said, anyway."

The ambulance attendants came out carrying Foster on a stretcher. Before they put him into the ambulance he started swearing at me. I leaned over the stretcher and said, "Foster, I've got a hunch you should have never bugged Shanlon's confessional. I'm not a very religious man myself, but it might be you were fooling around with some laws a little stronger than the city's."

His voice was weak, but he managed to swear filthily. "Don't give me that crap, Scott."

I shrugged. "Crap huh? I dunno myself, but maybe you will."

"What the hell do you mean?"

"You're gonna find out."

It seemed to me his face turned pale green, the color of Quentin's gas chamber, and that he held his breath. One thing was sure. Foster might never find out where he was going after that gas chamber, but he was going to go.

Billings drove me downtown in his police car. He was headed for the station, but I talked him into letting me out on Pepper Street. He said, "Listen, you've got to come down to Homicide, make a statement."

"Look, Billings, I'll come down. Hell, I want my money back. But there's somebody I've got to see first."

"Well, okay. But make it snappy. It's Thursday night; tomorrow's my day off, you know. Like to get everything cleaned up early."

"Don't worry about it."

He drove on toward town and I walked to the Essex. Two seconds after I pressed the buzzer, Gloria swung the door open, and her soft voice said, "Shell, honey!"

"Gloria," I cried. "Where's your towel?"

She pulled me inside and slammed the door. Some women take off their towel and they are merely nude; Gloria looked as if she'd just stepped out of a black-lace negligee. It was wondrous, it was tremendous, it was marvelous. It was Gloria's.

She grabbed me and said, "Oh, I was worried. But it's all right now."

"I can stay only a minute. Got to see Billings."

"Oh, honey, no."

"Got to get downtown . . . to police . . . headquarters . . ."

"Honey, honey, honey . . ."

Poor old Billings. I didn't get downtown until Saturday.

TROUBLE SHOOTER

I looked around the office wondering where to start. It wasn't a pleasant moment. I didn't want to start at all, didn't want to leave. But this was like a lot of Hollywood offices — lavish, expensive, all front, and a broke tenant.

The tenant — that's me, Shell Scott. And it looked as if Shell Scott was Hollywood's latest casualty. It had been great for a year, anyway. This one I'd liked. After the advertising agency, the stint on a newspaper, the odd jobs around Hollywood, I'd wound up a private investigator — I owned the license. Three years of it I'd had now, the last year in my office here on the Sunset Strip. That's right, the Sunset Strip.

A private detective is supposed to be unobstructive, a man who can fade away into the shadows. But this is Hollywood. The clients I want, the men and women of the movie industry, don't feel right hiring somebody who can fade away into the shadows. They don't want a shrinking violet, but a blooming eucalyptus with morning glories springing out all over it. So, after two meager years in downtown L.A. I'd bloomed and sprung out. On the Sunset Strip — the expensive Sunset Strip. Expensive, like Mocambo, Ciro's.

The office, like the address, is front. In Hollywood you have to have a front. A producer working on a two-million-dollar comic-strip-with-people doesn't — if he's in trouble and needs some kind of troubleshooter — get into the right mood, the paying mood, when he leaves his walnut paneled office, his mahogany desk, his pith helmet, his blonde, and enters a one-room office complete with green wooden filing cabinet. So, I've got the place fixed up to sock out the proper impression. Both rooms. Take a look at it. Squint, though, or close one eye.

In front is a wide, shallow office with black carpet, over-stuffed red-and-gray chairs, white desk at which sits — all in black — Yolanda. Yolanda, of whom more later. Then through the connecting door into the next room, my office. Desk made from the stump of a mangrove tree from Florida's Okefenokee Swamp, complete with roots. Zebra-striped chairs. Red chaise lounge. Scattered around, or hanging on the walls are my own pith helmet, blowgun, pictures of some stars and directors and Hollywood people, and many pictures of Shell. Shell — with an elephant gun in Africa, in mountain gear climbing an Alp, skiing at Sun Valley, and so on. When a potential Hollywood client walked into my office, he knew I was good.

Several clients had been satisfied this last year, too, but I hadn't had a real smash case for three months. Three months without a hit. Two months without even a divorce investigation. Just about everybody in the movie industry knew my name, but I was, as actors say, between engagements. Hollywood has a short memory. What counts is now, not then. You've got to keep producing.

Finally I started packing by gathering up the pictures, stacking them on my Okefenokee-Swamp-mangrove-tree-with-roots desk. Not another one in Hollywood like it. Then Yolanda came in. That's not quite right. Yolanda doesn't come in. She walks, she floats, she soars, she dips and dives and gyrates and wiggles and flows — in a word, Yolanda enters. Yolanda entered.

"We should have a wake or something, Shell."

"We should have some money."

"You're really moving it all out today?"

I nodded, looking at her. Yolanda, tall, black-haired, lithe and luscious, white-skinned, full red lips and huge nearly black eyes. In this town, where front is so important, Yolanda had it made. She also had it made behind and sideways, and in any town. I hated to give up the office, true; but most of all I hated to lose Yolanda.

She's my girl Friday, my secretary, phone-answerer, confidante, pal and what-not. She'd come to Hollywood to crash the movies, a dream she still clung to, but she couldn't act. She can't type either, can't take shorthand, but you can't have everything. The chaise lounge in my office is for her; that's where she takes dictation. Yolanda doesn't know Gregg, but she can invent pothooks like crazy, and the faster I talk, the more she squirms on the chaise lounge. I've had directors, writers, even producers, watching open-mouthed as I dictated a hundred and fifty words a minute, not hearing a word I said.

"Seems a shame," Yolanda said, her voice poured through honey.

"It is a shame."

"Isn't there anything we can do? Can I help any way, Shell?"

"All we need is several thousand dollars for rent and beans. I thought about putting on a turban and becoming a high-priced mystic. Records playing 'Swami River,' and all that."

She made a face. "A very bad idea. Also unfunny. You're just discouraged."

"I'm never discouraged. You don't appreciate me."

"Yes, I do. So much, that as long as you're taking down the pictures I'd like the one of you with the elephant gun. You're magnificent in that one. Did Bruno take it?"

"Nope. It was taken in Africa. Just after I shot an elephant."

"Really? You should have saved the tusks for this museum." She indicated the office. "Or maybe the whole head. Or the whole elephant —"

"I missed him."

"You missed an elephant?"

"I'm a lousy shot."

"It's a lousy day." I knew what she meant. We both looked around us, at the gorgeously ugly office.

Chimes played a soft, minor chord. That meant the door had opened out front. Yolanda and I looked at each other. It was only seven-thirty a.m.; usually we opened the office at ten. Yolanda swung around and entered the front office.

In a minute she returned. "Mr. Scott, I know you're busy, but Mr. Jay Kennedy is in the outer office. Can you see him for a moment?" She winked.

The door was naturally cracked so the words could be heard in the outer office. I'm always busy. "Why yes," I said. "My appointment isn't for a half an hour. Show Mr. Kennedy in, please."

Could I see Jay Kennedy? He was only a couple million dollars on the hoof, an independent producer who'd recently turned out a fine Western called Wagon Wheels.

He came in and shut the door behind him, a tall, erect man with gray hair, horn-rimmed glasses on his sharp nose, wearing a well-tailored gray suit. Even his face looked gray, drawn and worried.

He said, "Mr. Scott, I'll get straight to the point. I've heard a lot about you, and I need a good man to investigate a murder."

He stopped and the word hung there. None of my clients had brought me a murder case before. "Murder?" I said. "The police —"

"Hang the police! You'll understand why, in a moment. . . ."

Last night there had been a small party at the home of Bill and Louise Trent in the Hollywood hills. All ten persons present were connected with the movie Wagon Wheels, which Kennedy was currently co-producing with A.A. Porter, another well-known name. The party had been a wild-type party, which was one big reason Kennedy was here; he wanted the thing hushed fast. Kennedy had left early with one of the female stars of the movie, later returned to the address and discovered a young and lovely starlet named Melba Mallory face down in the swimming pool, dead, and the star of Wagon Wheels, Alan Grant, lying on the grass nearby, dead drunk. A few feet from him had been an empty whisky bottle, cracked, a smear of blood on it.

I said, "You're sure the girl was dead, Mr. Kennedy?"

He grimaced. "Yes, I . . . She was close to the edge at the shallow end. I touched her, lifted her a little." He swallowed. "She was dead, all right. Been hit over the head, cut there. Then in the water all that time . . ."

"Why did you say you went back to the Trents' home?"

"I didn't say. Alan was supposed to call me this morning, early. At five. We were doing some retakes today and I wanted to try to keep him reasonably sober. He's a terrible lush, you know. When I couldn't reach him at his suite, I assumed he was probably still at the party and went there." He sighed. "Alan couldn't tell me anything. He's the star of Wagon Wheels. And we've got another of his movies not yet released. I want this murder solved fast, before scandalous rumors spread. And if there are any more delays on this film I'll have to dig up more money — which I can't do. A few thousand left, naturally —" he smiled — "for your fee."

I smiled.

Still smiling, I said, "Ah, yes. Let's talk about that." We did. The upshot of it was that if all went well and Kennedy wasn't ruined, I'd be able to pay my rent for several months in advance.

Kennedy said, "All I want's the truth. And fast action. If Grant did it, then that's that. I don't think he did. I hope to God he didn't — he's a drunk, and weak, but not a murderer." He paused. "And almost anybody might have had reason to kill that little — that Melba."

"You say she was in the picture?"

"Yes. That was one of the conditions A.A. insisted on himself — A.A. Porter, co-producer with me." Kennedy's voice became more anguished. "Wagon Wheels is the biggest thing since Cimarron, a Birth-of-the-Nation Western in Deep Screen, Technicolor and CinemaScope, and A.A. insisted Melba play in it. Minor role, but she stank up every scene she was in." His face got bleak. "Supposed to be a poor ranch woman. She acts like Mata Hari spying on the cactus. We've cut out all we could without ruining the continuity, but it's not enough. I'd shoot Melba's scenes over with somebody else, if I had any money left, and if A.A. would allow it — which he wouldn't. But, then, she's dead now, isn't she?" Kennedy ran his hands through his graying hair. "Ulcers," he mumbled abstractedly. "Pills . . . worry. Sometimes I think maybe it isn't worth it."

"What isn't?"

He stared at me as if I'd asked a very stupid question. Lovingly he said, "Money. Yes, sometimes I . . . good heavens!" Kennedy was looking about in dazed fashion. He'd finally got a real penetrating look at my office. Now was the time to clinch the deal, while he was dazed; I always clinch my deals while the clients are dazed. I rang for Yolanda, and she entered.

"Take a memo," I said. She advanced to the chaise lounge and poised a pencil over her memo pad. I said, "Agreement between Mr. Jay Kennedy of Gargantua Productions and Shell Scott, Investigator, dated . . ." Yolanda began making pothooks and wiggling. Kennedy was middle-aged, getting younger. I stepped up my delivery and named a figure two thousand dollars higher than anything Kennedy had mentioned. His mouth sagged open. Just for fun, as I sometimes do, I threw in, "And the party of the first part agrees with the party of the second part, agreeing to pay the third part all the other parts plus a million dollars." Kennedy didn't hear a word. They never do, not when I'm dictating two hundred words a minute to Yolanda. With my brain I should be a millionaire.

Alan Grant was unconscious in his suite of rooms on the fourth floor of the Graystone. But he was becoming conscious. I had him in the shower and was pouring it to him, hot and cold, then hot and cold again. Kennedy hadn't called the police earlier, so I'd told him to take care of that detail and then join me here. He arrived just as I hauled Grant out of the shower.

Kennedy said, "I phoned the police. Didn't mention my name. They'll get to me soon enough. Too soon." He glanced at the bed on which I'd dumped Alan Grant.

Grant mumbled some swear words. I'd fixed hot coffee, and started pouring it down him. "While we're waking this guy up," I said, "you'd better give me a list of everybody at the party, what they do in the movie, where they live, if you know, and so on."

He got pencil and paper and began writing. Ten people had been at the party, all of them in some way connected with Wagon Wheels. Bill Trent was director; he and his wife Louise had been the host and hostess. Alan Grant had taken Melba Mallory to the party. Kennedy and Porter, co-producers, had gone to the party alone; so had the two feminine leads, Miss Le Braque and Evelyn Druid. The two others present had been Simon French, who'd done the Wagon Wheels screenplay, and his wife, Anastasia.

From Kennedy I got a pretty good mental picture of the murder scene. The swimming pool was beyond twenty yards of lawn at the rear of the big house in the Hollywood Hills. Kennedy had found Alan Grant passed out on the lawn at the base of some thick bushes about ten yards from the pool. Between him and the pool's edge had been the whisky bottle.

I said, "About that bottle, Mr. Kennedy. Looks as if Melba could have been slugged with it and then pushed into the water. Maybe the glass has fingerprints on it that the police can bring out. Might make everything simple."

He smoothed his gray hair. "I won't try to make excuses. I . . . I got a little panicked, I suppose. Wiped the bottle off and threw it into the pool. I was afraid then that Alan had . . . Anyway, that's what I did."

"Oh." After digesting that I went on. "Before long we'll know the approximate time Melba was killed. Might be a good idea if I knew where you were at the time of the murder."

He thought about that for a while, then said, "As I have intimated, the party last night was somewhat . . . abandoned. Consequently I left early, about midnight, with Miss Le Braque. Went to her apartment and had a drink or two. She'll tell you the same thing. Keep it to yourself. Business, you understand. But keep it to yourself, anyway."

Across the room there was a deep sighing sound. Grant said, "What's going on here?"

It took ten more minutes of coffee, conversation, and threats from Kennedy, to get any kind of story from Grant, and even then it wasn't very coherent. Grant swore he hadn't known Melba was dead, he positively hadn't killed her, hadn't even touched her. He'd seen her with somebody, though. Alan Grant was the tall, rangy rawboned type that looks good whispering sweet nothings to a horse, but this morning the horse would have run away neighing. The flesh hung slack on Grant's face, sagged and spread; his eyes were two small sunrises in a field of putty. His curly brown locks had become unlocked.

"Must've passed out," he said. "All seems like a dream. Remember lying there on the grass, everything swimming. Saw them by the pool. Lights were on. They didn't see me, or else they didn't give a damn. Didn't appear to have any clothes on. They were unclothed, yes. There right alongside the pool." He shook his head, squeezed his eyes shut. "Some man with Melba, but all I know is it was her. Then there was somebody came running up, and shome — some talk. And a kind of a fright. Whoever it was ran away. And the guy ran away. Then somebody came back, or somebody else did. I don't know. Leave me alone."

"You said somebody came back — after these two ran away. Where was Melba?" I asked.

"Still lying there."

"Who pushed her?"

"Hell, I don't know. Maybe I dreamed it. Pushed her in and ran away. Leave me alone."

That was all we could get out of him. He lay back on the bed and started snoring. Kennedy said, "How much of that do you think happened?"

"Well, you know this guy better than I do. Any chance he's faking part of this drunk act?"

"It's no act. He's probably telling the truth as well as he knows it, or remembers it. I hope so." Suddenly he winced and snapped his fingers. "A.A. — he's got to know about this." He wheeled, went to the phone alongside the bed.

By the time I got to the door, Kennedy was talking to A.A. Porter and I'd heard the words "Wagon Wheels" three or four times. Before I went out I told Kennedy to inform Mr. Porter that I'd be right out to see him. Kennedy nodded, waved a hand, and I left.

Miss le braque's home was on the way out to Porter's mansion, so I stopped there. She was a blonde, in less than dishabille, and she opened the door, then slammed it in my face, reappearing in a white robe. "Come in," she said.

I showed her the photostat of my license, told her who I was and why I was here. After a while, she corroborated Jay Kennedy's story in all details. Only they'd had several highballs together.

"Like one?" she asked me.

"No, thanks."

She simpered and smiled. "I'm going to have the lead in Wagon Tracks, Jay's next sequel to Wagon Wheels. Clever title, isn't it? After the Wagon Wheels, the Wagon Tra —"

"Please. You say Mr. Kennedy was with you at the party, then from midnight till he phoned Alan Grant's place at five you were alone together."

"Yes. Like a drinkie?"

"No. I don't drinkie in the morning. Thanks. Good-by. . . ."

A.A. Porter was waiting for me in the front doorway of his two-story auditorium. He was short, heavy, red-faced, with thinning strands of black hair on the top of his large head. Looking shaken and shocked, he pumped my hand and pulled me inside. "Terrible . . . terrible," he said in a deep, rumbling voice. "Jay just finished talking to me. Murdered. God! And Grant — do you think he did it, Scott?"

"I don't know who did it. I haven't even been to the Trents' house yet. Mr. Kennedy came to see me only about an hour ago."

He was nodding his big head. "Yes. But that fantastic story of Grant's."

"We can drag the pool, but I'll hazard a guess there's not even a minnow in it. Just Melba — though the police will have fished her out by now." I stopped. "Did Mr. Kennedy tell you the whole story that Grant gave us?"

He nodded. "Of course. Wagon Wheels must —"

"Forget Wagon Wheels for half a second, will you? And you'd better call Kennedy back and tell him to keep his mouth shut about your star's story. It's all right for the three of us to know about it, maybe, but it better not go any farther."

"See here!" He didn't like my tone and language. He was A.A. Porter.

I went on, "Look, by now the police are at the scene. I have to find out all I can before they put the whole bunch of you in jail. Besides which, I've got a lease expiring."

"A what?"

"And Yolanda. Never mind. Mr. Porter, I know there were ten people at the party; one of them was murdered. Of the nine remaining, I've learned that Mr. Kennedy and another person can alibi each other. It would help both of us if you could tell me, quick-like, where you were from, say, midnight on."

"That hardly seems necessary." His tone was frigid.

"You don't have to tell me a thing. But you're going to have to tell the police officers who'll soon be here. The quicker I can eliminate eight people, the quicker this mess will be over. Probably the police will get there sooner than I, but I'm going to have a good try at it. And that would make the mess smell sweeter for you and Kennedy. Make up your mind."

One thing I'd noted and liked about men like Kennedy and Porter, the big-wheel, executive, accustomed-to-command type, was that they made their decisions quickly and acted on them. Porter frowned at me for perhaps a second, then said briskly, "I suppose you're right. I was with Mrs. Trent, the hostess. We were —" he fixed his eyes on me, scowling slightly, and went on deliberately — "in the bedroom. Having . . . a . . . drink. A highball. It was necessary that we talk, and it was quiet there. We were together from shortly after midnight, say twelve-thirty, until four this morning, when I left."

This was the drinkingest gang I'd ever run across. Porter's story was so similar to Kennedy's that a man might almost think they'd compared them.

I said, "How is Melba Mallory's death going to affect the release of Wagon Wheels?"

"We'll probably have to shoot several scenes over. Actually, it may well improve the production. I had very high hopes for Miss Mallory, but she wasn't as good as I'd expected."

"Mr. Kennedy told me you insisted she have a pretty good part in the film."

"That's true." He nodded his big head. "I made a mistake. A man can't always be right." He paused. "I discovered Sandra Storme, you know. I rather hoped that Melba would be . . ." He shrugged.

Sandra Storme was the number-four box-office attraction. Everybody knew that Porter had discovered her. He told everybody. After another minute's conversation I left and drove to the Hollywood Hills.

Two police cars and an ambulance were parked in front, but I didn't see any policemen. Mrs. Trent answered my ring. Yes, she'd been with Mr. Porter. Yes, business. Yes, in the bedroom. Yes, of course, for a highball. Couldn't stand noise when she was drinking.

Mrs. Trent and I went back to the bedroom. We didn't drink anything. It was a lovely bedroom, with soft pastels dominating the color scheme, an enormous bed, dressing table, high beamed ceiling. This bedroom was at the rear of the house, one door leading from the hall into here, one other door, closed, in the left wall. "I guess that's all the questions I wanted to ask, Mrs. Trent. Thanks very much for letting me ask them. I know you've already talked to the police. You were with Mr. Porter for all that time. With him every minute?"

"Every minute." She paused. "Oh, he went in there for perhaps a couple of minutes."

I took a look. In "there" was a small chunk of Rome before the decline and fall. To be perfectly accurate, it was a bathroom, but with a sunken tub larger than some people's swimming pools, mosaic-tile walls, and the usual. A mink cover, even. Imagine. A big window was open in the rear wall and I looked out it at the lawn behind the house. And it appeared I was going to meet the police about now.

Several uniformed and plainclothes officers were grouped twenty yards away from the pool, one man taking pictures. One of the officers I'd come to know well in these last three years was looking this way, saw me and motioned for me to join them. I went back into the bedroom. Mrs. Trent took me down the hall to a side door and showed me out. I walked around the side of the house and up to Sergeant Casey, the man who had waved at me.

"Hi, Shell. Important people in this one, huh?"

"Yeah. I'm in it, you're in it. Kennedy's retained me."

"I heard. Three thousand policemen isn't enough?"

"Anything you can pass on? Free, I mean." Casey shook his head. I said, "How about the time of death?"

"Coroner can't tell this soon. You know that. Oh — he gave us a guess. Between two and three this a.m. Give or take a couple days. But he's usually close. Good man." He paused. "I suppose you just got up?"

"Been up for minutes. Even talked to a couple people."

"Suspects?" I nodded and he continued, "You might have to talk to them in jail pretty quick. We're rounding them up for interrogation. Got one downtown now. Guy named Simon French. Had him in jail since a little after three this morning."

"French?" He was the Wagon Wheels writer.

"Yeah. Writer who was at the ball here last night. One of the Hollywood Division's F cars picked him up. He was running down the street naked about half a mile from here."

"Naked, huh? Well, that's at least a misdemeanor. Also a little uninhibited."

"Yeah, these people are free as birds. You know what he said when the policemen asked him what the hell? The guy said he loved the cool, moist fingers of the morning wind on his burning flesh. He's a writer?"

"That's what they say. Thanks, Casey. Think I could talk to French at the jail?"

"You can ask."

"Sure. How about French's wife, Anastasia? She say anything about her hubby's track suit?"

"Haven't located her yet, far as I know. Not home. She's probably being ravished by the cool, moist fingers of the morning —"

I left before he got carried away. At the jail I was told that Simon French hadn't talked to anybody since being picked up in Hollywood. They let me see him, but he wouldn't tell me much, either. Just before I left, though, I said to him, "The police told you Melba was murdered, of course."

"Of course."

"I don't suppose you killed her."

"I don't suppose."

"French, your dialogue is lousy."

"Who's paying me?"

"The state may, if you keep it up. Look, French. Melba was minus clothes when she was killed. You were flying down the street, a Hollywood nudist, half a mile from where Melba was killed. Coincidence? And word floats around that more than two people cavorted about the Trents' pool around two or three this morning. Maybe four people. Maybe five. Maybe a few words from you could get you out of big trouble?"

Oddly enough, his face got a puzzled expression on it and he started to speak. But he didn't say anything.

I left and drove to French's home just off Beverly Boulevard. Nobody was there. I didn't see any police cars around. After waiting five minutes I started to leave when a big Cadillac pulled into the driveway. A short, pretty woman with her hair piled on top of her head got out of the Cad and walked toward the house.

There was a chance, since Anastasia French hadn't been available or talked to the police, that she didn't know much about what was going on this morning. Anyway, I was going to play it that way. She hadn't seen me yet, and I said, "Hello, Anastasia."

She looked up toward me, startled. "Hello . . . who are you?"

"Shell Scott, Mrs. French. Your husband around?"

"He — no." She unlocked the front door. "What do you want?"

I followed her inside, showed her my license, told her I was a detective. "Your husband's in jail," I said.

"Jail! What for?"

"Same deal I'm working on. The Melba Mallory thing?"

She gasped. "But that . . . he shouldn't be in jail."

"He is. Your husband was running down the street with no clothes on, and there seems to be some kind of law about —"

I broke it off because she was laughing. But it was stretched thin, close to hysterical laughter. She calmed herself, her face twitched, and words poured from her. "I've been driving around ever since it happened, trying to get my thoughts straight. I guess I went a little crazy."

I held my breath. It sounded as if I were about to get a lot of answers. She went on, "It was about two-thirty this morning, maybe three. I was alone. Everybody else was with somebody. I went looking for Alan. He'd gone out back with a bottle. I went out to the pool. Alan wasn't around, but I saw them — Melba and Si. My husband, with her!"

She stopped. Quietly I said, "By the pool, you mean?"

"Yes. And the lights were on. Not bright, but . . . right there, out in the open. I ran up to them. I guess I did what I did because of what he said — damn him! I yelled at him, 'Stop that this minute!'" She laughed shortly. "That damn living creep said, 'Really, darling. Not this minute.'"

She swung around and walked away from me, then turned and said, "I just got crazy mad. There was an empty whisky bottle there, and I picked it up, Officer. I'm sorry now for what I did, Off —" She stopped suddenly. "Let me see that — that thing you showed me again."

She meant the photostat of my license. I hadn't told her I was a policeman, hadn't realized till just now that she must have assumed that "detective" meant "police officer." I took out the photostat and told her, "I said I was a detective, Mrs. French. And I am. But I don't want to commit a misdemeanor here. I'm a private detective. Not that it makes much difference, really. How about finishing what you were saying?"

"You told me Si was in jail," she said. "Why would a private detective be interested in that?" She paused again. "I think you'd better leave."

I tried to get her talking again, but it was over. She told me to get out. Before I reached the door somebody knocked on it. Mrs. French opened the door and admitted two men. "Police officers," one of them said, showing his I.D. card. "You'll have to come downtown with us, Mrs. French."

I didn't know the man speaking; the other was an officer I knew casually, a man named Lake. He nodded briefly to me as Mrs. French said, "Downtown? What for? What right have you —"

"Come along, Mrs. French. You're under arrest."

"Arrest?" She sank into a chair. "What for?"

"Suspicion of murder."

Her face got ashen; shock spread over her features. "Who . . . Murder? Whose murder?"

I said, "Melba Mallory's."

She fainted. Her body slumped and she fell out of the chair.

Both of the officers jumped forward; they picked her up, placed her on a divan. The phone rang. Lake took it, listened a moment, then said to me, "It's for you, Scott. Guy named Kennedy."

Kennedy had been calling all over for me, had located me by going down the list of names he'd supplied me with this morning until he'd caught me here. He said, "Get over to the Graystone quick, Scott. Something's happened."

"If it's about the case, it's probably not important now. Mrs. Simon French just got through confessing. At least she started to. The police will get the rest of it. Looks as if this is working out about as well as it could."

He was silent for quite a while, letting what I'd said soak in, then his voice went on, "Not quite. Alan Grant just fell out of his fourth-floor window."

"He what?"

Kennedy said it again. "Either fell or jumped. I thought maybe he'd given us a false story this morning, and jumped . . . You say Anastasia confessed?"

"Well, not exactly. Now I think of it, she didn't actually get to the important points. I'll be right over."

I hung up and turned around. "It's okay if I leave, isn't it?" I asked Lake. "Client wants to see me."

"Yeah, you can go. But it's a good thing you didn't try to pass yourself off as a policeman."

"You heard that part?"

"We heard it all."

In Grant's room at the Graystone were Kennedy, a doctor, and Alan Grant — on the bed. I pointed at him and said to Kennedy, "I thought he'd be dead. Or at least in the hospital."

"Dead? That sodden, limp, drunken idiot? No. He fell on the awning over the apartment entrance. Bruised a good deal, but that's all. And drunk. That's mainly what's wrong with him now. He's so drunk he could have missed the awning and, anyhow, he'd probably lay there asking for bourbon." Kennedy pointed to a half-full bottle of bourbon on a stand beside the bed. "I left Alan passed out, but he must have come to wanting a drink. He always comes to wanting a drink."

The doctor straightened up, put some machinery back into his black bag. "He'll be all right. If he quits hitting the bottle."

That phrase made me think of Mrs. French again. She'd mentioned picking up the empty whisky bottle on the lawn by the pool; I was sure her next sentence would have been that she started swinging it at her hubby and Melba. Or just Melba. I looked at Alan Grant's sprawled body and asked the doctor if Grant would be able to talk to us. The doc said he would be able to talk all right, once he swam out of his alcoholic stupor. I sat down and thought about several bits of information I'd picked up.

After the doctor left I turned to Jay Kennedy. "You told me earlier that there were supposed to be some retakes made today at the studio. Is there a camera crew ready?"

"Yes. There's other work in progress. The whole crew, not just the cameramen."

"I'd like to borrow a cameraman, lighting expert, camera, film, the works. I want to make a movie."

He looked at me as if I'd just told him I wanted to hang him. "Why in the world do you want to make a movie?"

"So I can do the job you hired me for. Catch a killer, clean this up. I've been thinking, and it seems to me this might be the best way to do it. Maybe the only way. Well?"

He thought about it for a few seconds, then the quick decision and the immediate action. "All right." He walked to the phone, dialed, and barked a few orders into the phone, telling somebody to get a crew ready.

"This is, in a way, protection for you, Mr. Kennedy. It's pretty certain that one of nine people at the Trents' party killed Melba. It looks as if it was Mrs. French, but maybe not — and you were, after all, one of the nine. I'm personally convinced that you wouldn't kill the girl and then hire a detective to find out who killed her, which would be some kind of record for going crazy in a hurry. Besides which, both you and Miss Le Braque can alibi each other. But others might not be as convinced as I. And if this little movie is supposed to catch the right one of the nine, then none of the nine should know what's going to happen."

He nodded. "I believe I see what you're up to. Are you going to recreate the crime, Mr. Scott?"

"In a way. You'll see tonight. Oh, when your cameraman shoots what I tell him to, how soon can the film be ready for showing? I'd like to have this all set by four or five p.m. Projection room ready and so on."

He glanced at his watch. "Make it six tonight and I think it can be handled, if you don't spend more than an hour filming. This will cost a lot of money —"

"So did Wagon Wheels."

That hit him in his heart, right in the hundred-dollar bills. He spoke into the phone some more, talking about cameramen, cutters, technicians I hadn't even heard of, then he said, "One final point. For the rest of the afternoon, Mr. Shell Scott has carte blanche; the crew will take his orders. Anything he says, they are to consider my orders." Kennedy hung up.

A little worry seeped into my brains. I said, "It sounded as if I were going to shoot Gone With The Wind. This is just a simple, amateur —"

He interrupted. "You'll need all of them. The film has to be shot, processed, cut, spliced — this is my department, Mr. Scott. Yours is solving the murder."

I got a cold, sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. I had been buzzing around pretty fast today, and this film idea had just entered my head. If it was a flop, I was dead. It had to work now; the wheels were rolling at what I imagined was ten thousand dollars an hour. I had done it. Oh, boy, I had done it. If this thing merely popped instead of exploding, the next murder would be Shell Scott's. Maybe Jay Kennedy would get the gas chamber for it, but he'd die laughing.

As if he'd read my thoughts, Kennedy looked at me soberly and said, "Mr. Scott, one of the reasons I'm agreeing to this — this scheme of yours, in the dark, so to speak, is that the police have already talked to me at some length. After leaving them I returned here and learned of Alan Grant's mishap. But they were rather rough on me — not physically, of course, but their questions . . . it was a disturbing experience. And I had to tell them about wiping that whisky bottle clean and throwing it into the water. They were most unhappy about that. I want no more of it. I want this cleaned up. I don't want newspapers filled with conjectures, innuendoes, damaging remarks about me or any other innocent persons, remarks that might be remembered later even after all the truth is known. While Los Angeles and Hollywood are reading about the murder, I want it known that the case is closed, Melba's killer in jail. And, too, there must not be the slightest suspicion that Gargantua Productions would attempt to shield anyone in this matter, even myself. I want this matter closed tonight." He paused, and then said, so slowly that I missed not a single inflection, "That, Mr. Scott, is what I expect from you."

I grinned like a man whose teeth had just fallen out — painfully. "That, Mr. Kennedy, is what you're going to get." But I was thinking: I've never solved a murder; I've never even worked on a murder case. Good-by, office; good-by, Yolanda; good-by, Hollywood.

But then I got a grip on myself. "Good-by, Mr. Kennedy," I said. "I mean, I'd better get started." He nodded grimly. Maybe one nod is pretty much like another, but not this one. It was really grim.

It was also true that I'd better get started. I had Mr. Kennedy going along with me, but now I had to get the Los Angeles Police Department to cooperate. As long as I was past the point of no return, I told Jay Kennedy a couple other things I needed, and left to burn more bridges.

Well, for the first couple of hours after leaving the Graystone I had myself a ball, even though there were moments when I felt myself becoming appalled all over again. But with Kennedy and Gargantua behind me, I got enough cooperation from everybody, including the police, and was allowed to shoot the film at the murder scene itself, the Trents' home, in the Trents' absence. From the police I learned a few additional items: the time of Melba's death was still figured as between two and three this morning; Melba had been hit hard enough with the bottle — which had been recovered and examined without helpful results — to cause a concussion, but her death had been due to drowning — there was water in her lungs, breathed in when she "was pushed or fell" into the pool.

I arranged for two between-engagements actors, and one actress, to be present at the Trents' home; then I phoned Yolanda at the office.

"Hi, this is Scott." I gave her the address and said, "Grab your bikini and come out here. You're going to be in a movie."

Her delighted squeal drowned me out but I went on, "Hold it. This is a small thing I'm producing. And you play a corpse."

She stopped squealing, asked a couple questions which I answered, then said she was on her way. Actual filming took only about half an hour; I knew what I wanted. I talked a while with the crew, taking a couple aside and giving them instructions, then they left to handle their various jobs. Ten minutes after six p.m. everything was set.

Gathered in the projection room at Gargantua Productions were eleven people: the nine who had been at last night's party, including the partygoers I hadn't yet talked to, Yolanda and me, and a half-sober, and aching, Alan Grant. I'd found time to talk with Grant a short while before. Though more sober, he remembered even less about what had happened at the party. He didn't have the faintest idea whom he'd seen and didn't remember anything about his tumble from the Graystone, so I had to go ahead. Mrs. French had been brought there by policemen. No police officers were now inside the room itself, but a couple were right outside the door. I walked to the front of the room, stood before the white screen, facing the small group. I waited for a while, looking up at the heavy lamps poised above their heads, then down at their faces, letting it get quiet in the room. I was sweating, but not only because of some natural nervousness. The air conditioner hummed a bit noisily, but even with it cooling the air, it was still extremely hot. That was fine, though; I wanted it hot. I hoped to make it hot enough in here to catch a killer. I glanced around again, then started in.

"You all know part of the reason for your being here. It's because Melba Mallory was murdered at the party you all attended last night. One of you killed her. I know which one of you did it, and I'm going to tell you right now — or, better, I'm going to show you. This afternoon a crew from the studio and I shot a movie, a recreation of the murder which occurred last night."

I paused and looked at them. Jay Kennedy stared back at me, still grim. Mrs. Anastasia French, seated by her husband, placed one hand against her throat; her lips were parted, her face pale, and she looked as if she were going to faint again. Simon French chewed on his lip, frowning. A.A. Porter looked intently at me, occasionally nodding his big head. Both Evelyn Druid and Miss Le Braque sat quietly, staring at me. Alan Grant had both hands pressed against his temples. Mr. and Mrs. Trent were holding hands, Mrs. Trent saying something to her husband.

After a few seconds I went on, "One word for the murderer. You can make this a lot easier on everybody, including yourself, by telling us about it now." I didn't expect any results; nor did I get any. I said, "This film was shot in the daytime, with actors and actresses, but as you watch it, imagine that it's between two and three o'clock this morning. You all know where you were, including the killer." I smiled. "And now — if you'll pardon the expression — we'll look at the rushes."

I walked to my seat and slid in next to Yolanda. In the darkness, the killer would see the murder enacted again, the moment of death. His suspense and internal agony would surely, steadily mount. He'd be sweating even more than the rest in here, getting scared. And then he'd give himself away, if I'd set this up right.

As soon as I waved my hand in the air the lights went out, then the sudden darkness was relieved slightly by the faint reflection from the screen as the film began. There was no sound track and as the minutes passed the silence was broken only by the whisper of cloth against leather as somebody shifted position in a seat, the hum of the air conditioner, a heavy sigh or cough.

The action on the screen began with a long shot of the Trents' home, shooting across the pool toward the rear of the house. Nobody was in sight. Then the actor playing the part of Alan Grant strolled, occasionally staggering, into the scene. A partly full bottle of bourbon was in his hand. He sank to the ground at the base of the bushes where Alan Grant had, in fact, passed out. The camera moved in for a close-up as he drained the bottle, looked at it, then threw the bottle as it came to rest; then the bottle dissolved into Yolanda's face. She, playing Melba, whirled and ran around the side of the house toward the pool, followed by the actor representing Simon French. At the edge of the pool they sank to the grass, the writer in swimming trunks, Yolanda in her bikini. There was one kiss, that was all. Then the camera was raised, panned slowly from right to left over the grass, passing the empty bottle, then stopping on Alan Grant as he stirred, raised his head and stared toward the pool, eyes widening.

All of this was in silence in the projection room, but sitting there, watching the action unroll on the screen, I thought that there should have been a sound track. There should have been a burst of sound then, a crash of music. Something to show that this moment was a high point, a part of the climax. But I got something just as good; better, really — the quick, sharp intake of someone's breath. You couldn't tell from the sound where it came from; but I knew who it had been. Then the camera swung to the short, red-haired woman who left the side door, looked around, walked toward the pool. Mrs. French, the real one, would be the first to know who that actress represented.

The redhead walked toward the pool, stopped when she saw the two forms close together, raced to them, waving her arms, her mouth moving. The two on the grass didn't move apart. On the screen, Mrs. French whirled, face angry, saw the bottle on the ground, picked it up and raised it in her hand as she turned again. As her arm started downward a woman screamed, "Stop it! Stop it!" The piercing cry was a physical shock in the silent room.

Immediately the film stopped, the lights went on. Anastasia French was standing, hands pressed hard against her cheeks, eyes closed. "Don't show any more. Please. I'll tell you."

The slowly mounting tension had been too much for her. That was all right with me. In a harsh, fast burst of words, Mrs. French poured out almost the same story she'd told me earlier today, but this time she continued. "I barely hit my . . . husband. He ran. I hit her, hit Melba twice, three times. God, I don't know. I didn't mean to kill her. I was furious. I ran to my car, drove for hours." She pressed her hands against her eyes, sobbing. "I didn't even know I'd killed her."

I stood up. "Just a minute, Mrs. French," I said slowly. "You didn't kill her."

Anastasia turned quickly to look at me. But so did all the others in the room. I had them now, right where I wanted them. And that included the person who'd actually murdered Melba. Anastasia French wasn't the one I was after, but her outburst had helped. That shocking scream, her shrill words and sobs, had drawn the tension even tighter in here, squeezing us all together emotionally — all except one of us.

Mrs. French said, haltingly, "What? I . . ."

"She was drowned," I said. "Did you push her?"

"No . . . but I thought she must have come to . . . hurt. Fallen in —"

"Not quite like that," I said. "She didn't fall in."

It wasn't enough that I knew, or at least felt sure I knew, who'd killed Melba. I didn't have any real proof, nothing with which to convict — not yet. And I had to get it now. I'd burned my last bridge when that film started.

"You'll note that everything so far is just the way it happened," I said. "So is the rest of it. Now let's watch the murder itself. And the murderer."

I sat down, drenched with perspiration, feeling the heat, my throat getting dry with the strain of waiting. The lights went out, the movie began again at a point just before the film had been stopped. On the screen, Mrs. French whirled, the bottle descended, striking Simon French a glancing blow on the shoulder. He sprang to his feet, bending away from her, turned and ran out of the scene. Yolanda, as Melba, couldn't be seen, but the film showed the bottle rise in the air above her and descend rapidly once, twice, three times. Then a brief shot of Mrs. French's fear-struck face. She dropped the bottle, turned and ran. The camera followed her — but only part way.

As Mrs. French ran out of the scene, the camera stopped, focused on the rear of the Trents' house. At first there was nothing to see, but then movement was noticeable. In the window of that lavish Roman bath next to Mrs. Trent's bedroom, there was movement. That was me, Shell Scott. I was playing the murderer, crawling from the window, racing across the lawn, shoving the still body into the pool, then turning, sprinting toward the house, and climbing back through the window.

But the camera panned left again, to Alan Grant's slack features, his half-closed eyes. He shook his head, rubbed a hand over his face, slumped forward to the grass again. On the screen, odd figures and designs danced a moment as the film ended. The lights came on, brilliant after the darkness.

There wasn't a sound except the air conditioner's hum. I said, "Well, Porter?"

His face was ugly, not with anger but with sickness. But A.A. Porter, who'd made his biggest quick decision there at the window last night and followed it with the irrevocable action of murder, made another quick decision and did fairly well. He composed his features somewhat, rose and faced me. His voice was quiet, controlled, as he said, "You've made a terrible mistake, Scott. And I'll have to take you into court. You must realize that." He ran a hand over the thin strands of hair, wet and matted now like black moss. "This is worse than trying to call me a murderer. This is the most obscene, evil —"

"Hot, isn't it?"

He blinked, looked at me as if I'd lost my mind. "What?"

"I said, it's hot, isn't it?"

He shook his head, lack of comprehension on his red face. I said, "Look up above you, Porter. That's why it's hot. Those are lamps. You're a movie man — you were. You should know something about infra-red light. With enough infra-red light and a special fast film, you can take pictures in what appears to be darkness. I know just a little about it, but one of your technicians told me plenty this afternoon."

And at last he was frightened, scared. Scared to death. The fright spread visibly over his face like something poured on his skin.

"Sure," I said. "Only infra-red isn't in the visible spectrum — it's heat, not a light wave but a heat wave. A heat wave you can use for taking pictures. That's why the noisy air conditioner, so we wouldn't roast in here; that, and to cover up the sound of the camera."

He turned away from me, looked at the others, then slowly craned his head toward me again. "You get it now, don't you?" I asked him. "All the time you and the rest of us were watching the film I had run off, a camera was making a filmed record of us all." I pointed to the screen; if you looked for it, you could see the hole, the big lens. "And perfectly timed, Porter, so that every little twitch of expression can be coordinated with the exact scene of the murder picture that caused that expression." I let him think about it, then added, "I'm anxious to see what happened to your face every time the camera panned to the man on the grass, at the base of those bushes — the man who saw you murder Melba. And especially when the film showed me — as you — when I climbed out of that window and shoved the body into the pool. Think about it a little. Eleven people watching the murder film in darkness; no reason to dissemble, or make much effort to hide the expressions of shock or fear or revulsion on your face. Eleven people: Mrs. French, who thought she'd killed Melba, and nine other innocent persons gathered here — and you, Porter, the real murderer. How do you think you'll look in the film we just took with those?" I pointed at the lamps over our heads.

He crumbled. It looked as if he were starting to sag apart, the muscles getting lax under the skin. I gave him the last of it. "This, all of it, was set up just for you. I built it all around you, Porter. The murder re-enaction, the infra-red bit, and even one more thing just to clinch it. Even this is being filmed, Porter, with your guilt and fear all over you. Listen." I walked to the air conditioner, switched it off. In the heavy silence the whir of the camera could be heard, still running. "Everything you've done, almost everything you've thought, since you came into this room, we'll have wrapped up in tin cans by tomorrow. With sound, this time. I had all the facilities of your own studio to work with. You know something, Porter? You're just as dead as Melba."

"Melba," he said. His shoulders slumped and his face lost its twisted look, became quite calm. "She was driving me crazy," he said. "Melba was a beautiful woman. Terribly, horribly attractive. Like a drug, a disease. I was in love with her. I never stopped loving her. I wrote her letters, and she used them to force me to do things. Made me put her in the movie. She . . . humiliated me, told me about other men." His voice was nearly without inflection, a soft, almost casual sound. "I enjoyed killing her. I even waited at the window after I returned to the house, to make sure she didn't have a chance to live. I enjoyed it then for an hour afterward. But not since then. Not since then."

He became quiet, and I glanced around the room at the others. Every eye was on Porter, each face drawn, each frozen in its own fixed expression. I saw it on their faces, not Porter's, and looked back at him.

It was just a little gun, but it was a gun. I didn't see where he'd taken it from. Everybody had been briefly searched before entering the projection room, but Porter had managed to get in here with the gun he now held in his hand. His expression was still the same calm one as he asked me, "How did you know, Scott? How could you be so sure it was I?"

"Alan Grant," I said. He knew what I meant, even if nobody else did yet.

He nodded his big head. "I see. I knew that was a mistake." He raised the gun.

I took a step toward him. "Don't be a fool. Policemen are at both exits." I took another step, hoping I could get close enough to him. "Face it, Porter. There's no way out."

I was wrong. There was one way, and he took it. Before I could stop him he shoved the small gun's muzzle into his mouth and pulled the trigger. The sound was muffled, not loud at all. He stood erect for what seemed a long time; then he fell, and the silence ended.

Women screamed, and even men jumped out of their chairs. Everything was mixed up after that. People milled around, police came into the room, Yolanda hugged my arm. In a relatively quiet moment Jay Kennedy drew me aside. He was sober.

"Fine job, Scott," he said. First time he'd called me Scott. "I don't quite understand just how you were so sure it was A.A. I told A.A. the whole story Alan Grant gave us. But it was so confused —"

"That's not the important point about Grant," I said. "It was the fact that Porter tried to kill Grant. Pushed him out the window. Actually that was the crux as far as I was concerned. Grant's been drunk a thousand times, and I couldn't swallow the unbelievable coincidence of his falling out of his window today, of all days. Too convenient. So I figured he was pushed."

He kept frowning. I went on, "Except for me, only two people knew that Alan saw the murder committed — you and Porter. I told you earlier why I'd eliminated you. That left your co-producer. There were a few other angles. You'd told me he practically forced you to use Melba in Wagon Wheels; if she was such a horrible actress, there had to be some reason other than her ability as an actress. That was enough for me; as long as I felt sure he was guilty, I didn't need to know much about his motive. And I knew Porter could have had the opportunity."

He nodded, clapped me on the back and walked away.

Yolanda squeezed my arm. "Shell."

"Yes?" I looked at her, waiting for the gushing words, ready to say, "Oh, it was nothing much. Not for me." I waited as she smiled up at me. "Shell," she cooed, "didn't I look good?"

"Oh, it was nothing . . . Huh?"

"In the movie. Didn't I look good? Oh, I'm so grateful you let me play the corpse."

"You are, huh?"

"Yes, Shell. It was a real break."

"It was, huh?"

She squeezed my arm. I think I had a premonition then. Well, that about wrapped it up. After a while the hubbub died down. It was all over. . . .

I looked around the office. I sat in my zebra-striped chair, feet propped on my mangrove-root desk. The rent was paid well in advance with the fee from the Melba murder case. That one had caused quite a to-do in Hollywood. The movies all came out beautifully, the whole thing from the murder re-enactment until Porter had shot himself. And, of course, me. Shell Scott in action. Producer, director, writer, and star. Orson Welles crossed with Jack Webb. Hollywood's wonder boy, Shell Scott. But — no Yolanda.

Several prints of my epic had turned up around town and there'd been a good deal of favorable talk, some about me, but it turned out that as an actor I stank like eight-year-old eggs. Some of the talk had been combined with choking laughter. I guess the scene where I shoved Yolanda into the pool and spun about with my eyebrows wig-wagging, lips twitching, might have been a bit overdone. But all the other actors and actresses had got jobs because of the film. And, yes, Yolanda.

Melba's scenes in Wagon Wheels were being shot over, with Yolanda. She was scheduled for a good part in Wagon Tracks. Oh, I saw her once in a while, but not like before, in the office. The place seemed different, lonelier. I pressed the buzzer on the intercom and said, "How about coming in for a bit, Lorene?"

Lorene was blonde, dressed in white. And I'd had the desk in the front office painted black. Those were the only changes. Lorene came in. She didn't enter, and she couldn't yet take dictation like Yolanda had. But she was learning. We talked a while, then Lorene went back to her desk.

I sat with my foot propped on a mangrove pot. It had been a week since the last job. A week. Hollywood has a short memory; what counts is now, not then. So I sat at my desk and waited for a client. And thought about Yolanda.

MURDER'S STRIP TEASE

He died very quickly and quietly, with his mouth open to give me the rest of the story, and the only noise he made was when his head slammed into the hard mahogany of my desk. There wouldn't be much of a bruise or swelling; he was dead before he started toppling forward, out of the best chair in my office, with the neat hole slightly off center in the middle of his forehead staring vacantly at me like a third sightless eye.

That wasn't really where it started; at least as far as I was concerned. It started about five minutes before the bullet roared through his brain and messily out the back of his head.

It was about seven o'clock Friday night when he came in, and I'd just finished feeding some dried shrimp to the guppies I keep in a ten-gallon tank on top of the bookcase in the office; that's short for a kind of tropical fish that makes like rainbows. Yeah, guppies. I like guppies and the hell with you.

The guy was middle-aged and tall. Almost my height, say six-one, and he weighed maybe twenty pounds more than my two hundred and six. The extra twenty pounds was on his belly where he was starting to go to pot. He wore steel-rimmed glasses over eyes that were a washed-out watery blue and he had a square, red face, a weak chin, and a thick neck that wasn't quite comfortable in what must have been a size seventeen collar, at least.

He asked in a surprisingly thin voice, "Mr. Sheldon Scott?"

"That's right."

"Loring. John Loring." He gave me his hand as if it was a tip. The skin was soft and smooth, like a woman's.

I said, "Sit down, Mr. Loring. What can I do for you?"

While he planted the end of his tailbone on the edge of the leather chair before my desk I remembered the name Loring. It was spelled with dollar signs in Los Angeles, but up to now there'd always been a Mrs. in front of it. I'd hardly realized there was a Mr. The Mr. got his tailbone perched satisfactorily and said abruptly, "Mr. Scott, I'll pay you five thousand to get somebody for me."

I wiggled a couple eyebrows at him, coughed quietly, and said, "Slow down, Mr. Loring. I'm a private investigator, not an exterminator. What do you mean, get somebody?"

He grinned quickly, nervously, "Excuse my choice of words, Mr. Scott. I'm somewhat overwrought. I didn't mean you were to kill anyone. At least I don't think that will be necessary." He chuckled without humor and went on, "I want you to get a blackmailer off my back. I'm being blackmailed, and the funny thing is I haven't stepped out of line." He hesitated. "Not really, you know. I told the skunk tonight — just before I came here — that I wouldn't pay anything and if the pressure wasn't removed I'd go to the police. All I got was a laugh in my face. I remembered reading about some of your — ah — exploits, Mr. Scott, so I looked you up in the phone book and came here."

"Why me instead of the police you mentioned?"

"Well, blackmail, you know. I'm not exactly proud of it. I'd like it as quiet and private as possible. That's why I came to a private investigator. It's rather an odd affair and I want to be kept completely out of it if I can. That's important." He fumbled in his coat pocket, drew out a white envelope and handed it to me. "It's worth five thousand dollars to me if you do it my way."

I picked up the envelope, peeled it open and looked fondly at the crisp green C-notes inside.

I closed the envelope, tapped it against the back of my hand and said, "The offer's very attractive, Mr. Loring, but maybe you'd better give me the whole story. Who's blackmailing you? Who'd you have the beef with tonight? Start at the beginning."

He sighed and adjusted his steel-rimmed glasses. "Well, it actually started when I became unduly interested in art." He frowned. "Art," he repeated bitterly.

That was the end of the five minutes and from there on in he was dead.

He leaned forward toward me, opened his mouth to speak, and the shot came from the open window behind me. It sounded as if it came right out of my ear.

I saw the neat round hole appear slightly off center in Loring's forehead just before my legs uncoiled and hurled me sideways toward the wall. The gun cracked again and a slug ripped a hole in the carpet a foot from me as I came up on my hands and knees against the wall and leaped toward the corner parallel to the window.

I yanked my revolver out of its shoulder holster and had it ready for action just as Loring's head smacked soddenly into the edge of my desk and he flopped onto the carpet like a sack of cement. At almost the same instant I heard the guy drop off the fire escape and make tracks down the alley behind the building. I got to the window just in time to hear the roar as a car motor was gunned and clashed into gear. The car was gone with a shrill screaming of rubber before I could get a look. . . .

I dug a flash out of the desk and went over the fire escape, finding exactly nothing, then closed the window, locked it, and pulled down the shade before I paid any more attention to Loring. He didn't need any attention; he was slumped carelessly on the floor as if he was all tired out after a hard day's work. I left him resting and called Homicide.

It definitely wasn't my day. Instead of some nice guy like Captain Samson or Lieutenant Brown, I got Kerrigan. Lieutenant Jason Peter Kerrigan, with ears. His voice over the phone was a shrill whine that went through me like fingernails scraping on a window pane. I gave it to him fast, hung up on his screech, and dug a finger into the ear that had suffered the most.

Then I searched Loring.

He had the usual junk in his pockets: handkerchief, comb, wallet, change. I stuffed everything back except the wallet and went through that. The only things of interest were two cards. They were of interest because they had something to do with art. One was from Massy's, a well-known art store on Grand Street in downtown L. A. that specialized in fine paintings for a price; the other was printed "S. A. Fillson — Learn to Paint — Life Drawing," with an address on Broadway. I appropriated the two cards, illegally, and sat down behind my desk to wait for Kerrigan.

There's just one door into my office — the one that says, "Sheldon Scott, Investigations" on the frosted glass window — and Kerrigan came through it as if he was making a first down.

He stopped short for a moment, bandy legs spread wide while he glared at the body on the floor; then he turned the glare on me. A little perspiration glistened on his fat face and the inevitable dead cigar jutted from between his thick lips. His voice was the same as it had been over the phone five minutes before, only louder.

"So someone shot him from the window, huh? You told me through the window, right, Scott?"

I said wearily, knowing what was coming, "That's right."

"Right through the window. Right through the shade, too?"

"The window was open. I shut it and pulled the shade. Or should I have left it open so the guy could come back and try again?"

"You expect me to swallow that, Scott?"

He didn't like me.

I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. "Stop stretching so goddam far, Kerrigan. Okay, so I murdered him. Things were dull."

His face started getting red, and the longer we talked, the redder it got. When it got to the shade where he was ready to book me on suspicion of murder and toss me in the pokey I cooled him off. A little.

"Act your age, Kerrigan." I yanked my .38 Colt Special out of its holster, grabbed it by the two-inch barrel and handed it to him. "My gun hasn't been fired for days. What did I do with the murder gun? Eat it? Flush it down the drain? This guy was a client; I never saw him before in my life. I was supposed to help the guy, not knock him off. Whoever did it took a shot at me too, incidentally."

Kerrigan sniffed at the gun barrel, mumbled something under his breath, then shut up temporarily while the boys from Scientific Investigation went through their flashbulb routine around the body. I did get my gun back, but when the lieutenant left, I went along with him.

After half an hour at Headquarters I was on my way with the usual admonition to keep myself handy. It was after six o'clock so I had to use the Main Street exit from the City Hall, then took a right toward First. My office is between Third and Fourth on Broadway, just five blocks away, so I walked and wondered what the hell.

I was still wondering what the hell when I crossed Third Street and approached the Hamilton Building, where my office is, but I also wondered vaguely why a car would be parked in the alley at its edge. The car was facing left into Broadway, half out over the sidewalk, and I'd casually noticed it a few moments before. As I got closer, I could hear the soft purr of the motor running. Maybe I was keyed up, but I kept an eye on the car as I drew abreast of the Hamilton's wide doors.

It was a good thing.

There was a guy behind the steering wheel and when I caught the glint of metal in his hand I jumped sideways and dropped to my knees. It was pure reflex. I've seen too many guns not to get out of their way in a hurry. I was digging for my .38 before my knees hit the sidewalk.

Flame licked out of the car window, and the slug tugged at the cloth of my coat and burned across the skin of my shoulder. I flipped my gun up and snapped once at him. It had to be quick.

Don't get me wrong; I'm not usually that good. It was a lucky shot. But I got a glimpse of him as he slumped forward onto the steering wheel and his gun fell from relaxed fingers and clattered into the alley. The car horn started braying raucously as his body pressed against it. A couple of pedestrians darted frightened glances at me and scurried down the street like startled birds.

I kept my gun ready, got to my feet, and walked up to the car. I pulled the guy away from the steering wheel and the horn stopped braying suddenly.

He was a little guy, and he had an empty space in his mouth, as if he'd lost a tooth. He had. He'd also lost the back of his head. He was nobody I'd ever seen before and I started what-the-helling all over again. It didn't make sense; but it was finally filtering through my skull. Somebody wanted me dead.

Captain Phil Samson, tough, tricky, but thoroughly honest head of the Los Angeles Homicide Division, peered at me through bushy gray eyebrows after I gave him the whole story. His big jaw stuck out like a lump of cast iron and he wiggled a big-knuckled finger at me.

"Two of 'em," he said sweetly. "Two stiffs. One wasn't enough, huh. Shell?"

"Look, Sam," I said. "I told you how it happened. You've known me long enough so you know that's the straight copy. Why it happened, I don't know — not yet, anyway. Loring didn't get to tell me a damn thing except that he needed help. And he mumbled something about blackmail."

"Then this mysterious person plugged him from the window; that what you said?"

I nodded.

Samson didn't say anything; he just looked at me, wagging his big paw slowly from side to side like a cast-iron pendulum.

I got up. "Well, Sam, I'll be getting along. Not enough sleep lately. Pretty tired."

He started to say something, then changed his mind. I started for the door and he spoke.

"Guess I don't have to remind you to stick pretty close, Shell."

"You don't have to remind me."

Nobody said anything to me on my way out. It was easier than I'd expected. Too easy. I'd have bet fifty bucks Samson — my pal — had a tail on me.

I wasn't sleepy as I'd pretended to Samson so I headed for the office for a new coat. The hole in the coat I was wearing and the burn across my shoulder were reminding me I had a personal interest in this case now.

Samson had told me the guy I'd popped was Slippy Rancin, a two-bit torpedo with an I. Q. like two and two. I couldn't see Rancin dreaming up this caper all by himself the way it was beginning to shape up. And I wanted the right guy to get kissed off for the slug with my name on it. Besides, there was five grand of Loring's money resting where I'd stuck it in my inside coat pocket and I like my clients to get their money's worth. Even the dead ones.

This thing was screwier than a rejected pretzel. Probably the damnedest case I'd seen in two years of private-eyeing in L. A. A guy had been murdered right under my broken nose and in my own office; I'd shot a hood myself, and slugs had been tossed at me twice; I'd been twice to Headquarters; and I had a dead man's five G's in my kick. And I hadn't even started on the case.

Hell, I didn't even know what it was all about. But I did know somebody wanted me removed from among the living. They'd tried twice and maybe they thought the third time would be the charm.

It was high time the sleuth sleuthed.

My disgustingly yellow '47 Cadillac convertible got me to the Loring place on Lorraine Boulevard by a quarter to nine. The phone book had given me the address but it hadn't given me the dimensions. Anyone with a house that big had to be in the social register. Or a politician. It looked a little bit like a southern colonel's old mansion with glass bricks and modern improvements added. And it looked like enough moolah to choke all the cows in Carnation.

There were lights on inside so I walked up and fingered the buzzer. The door opened and a small, birdlike woman with a middle-aged, doll-sized face turned a pair of clear brown eyes on me. She didn't look like a wife who'd just learned she was a widow, so I asked for Mrs. Loring.

"I'm Mrs. Loring."

So she was the widow, but apparently she didn't know it yet.

"I'm a private investigator," I said. I'd just started to give her my name and state my business when she interrupted me with a remark that stopped me like Louis stopped Schmeling. The second time.

"Oh, yes. Come in, Mr. Ellis."

Ellis! I tossed that around like a hot dime while she led me in a spacious, soft-looking living room and sat down facing me under the one lamp that was burning.

She said, "I won't need you after tonight, Mr. Ellis. The police were here earlier and informed me that my husband had been murdered."

She said it as if she was telling me it was Booth who shot Lincoln.

She glanced toward the shadowed corner of the room and said, "Nancy, bring me my checkbook, please." She turned to me again, "Do you have anything to report?"

My head was spinning like the tenth Martini. I've been told I'm fast on the uptake, but I was a lap behind and losing ground fast. After everything else, now this. Ellis? Checkbook? Nancy? Report?

Nancy. I glanced toward the corner where there was some kind of a low-slung divan just in time to catch a dim flash of white thighs as someone I hadn't noticed up to now swung her legs to the floor and got up. I didn't know whether to appreciate it or be disinterested; Nancy might be nine or ninety.

"Report?" I mumbled. "Well, no. I haven't anything to report. Nothing of any importance." What the hell could I say? I was as confused as a pallbearer at the wrong funeral.

Mrs. Loring shrugged her tiny shoulders. "No matter," she said. "Oh, thank you, Nancy."

I looked up.

I gnashed my teeth.

I breathed heavily.

The girl was standing by Mrs. Loring and I could see with half an eye she wasn't nine or ninety. She was closer to twenty-five and she looked as if she'd started life with a beautiful face that had grown easier to look at every year.

And the body. The body had tagged right along.

She was about five-four of perfectly proportioned woman dressed in a terrifically curved white sweater and a pleated black skirt. Red hair hung down around her shoulders and she had a sullen red mouth with lips so full they looked as if they'd been bruised and swollen. On her, they looked good. Her eyes didn't fit with the sensual body and the bruised-looking lips. They were a deep brown that was almost black — and they were the widest, most innocent-looking eyes I'd ever seen in all my thirty years.

She was staring at my big frame with a hungry look.

I've got short-cropped blond hair that sticks straight up half an inch all over my head, almost white eyebrows that slant up and then swoop down at the corners of my gray eyes, a nose that hasn't been the same since it got busted on Okinawa, and a strong jaw. My face has seen a lot of sunshine and a lot of women, and some of the women have given me that hungry look before. But this was the full treatment.

She looked well-fed but half-starved. Do you follow me?

Mrs. Loring took the checkbook and said, "Nancy, this is Mr. Ellis. Mr. Ellis, my daughter, Nancy Howard." I must have looked a little surprised because she added, "By a previous marriage."

I nodded moronically at Nancy while she said, "How do you do?" in a voice that rustled against my ears like a caress.

I hated to stop drooling but I had to stop nodding some time and I had an idea this screwball situation wasn't going to last much longer. I'd noticed some big framed canvases hanging on the wall so I asked Mrs. Loring, "Incidentally, how long had Mr. Loring been interested in art?"

She looked at me curiously, then smiled thinly. "Mr. Ellis," she said, "isn't that what you were supposed to tell me?"

She continued to stare at me with dawning suspicion on her doll's face as she tore a check out of the book and waved it gently back and forth. I figured the party was about over, so I stood up.

"Sorry," I said. "No check. My name isn't Ellis; it's —"

"What!" I could almost hear her girdle ripping. "But you said — you told me . . ."

I interrupted politely, "No ma'am — you said. I told you I was a private investigator, which I am, but I didn't get a chance to give you my name. I came out to investigate your husband's death."

I might have said more, but Mrs. Loring opened her mouth a couple of times to say something, then thought better of it and whirled to face the dream girl.

"Nancy," she said in a quiet, controlled voice that might have come straight from the depths of Siberia, "show this man out. Quickly!"

By the time we reached the door, Mrs. Loring had stalked into another room where she was probably quietly hating me. Nancy followed me onto the porch and shut the door behind her.

"That wasn't nice," she said. She didn't sound angry.

"What wasn't?"

"Impersonating that man."

"I didn't intend to. Your mother jumped to the wrong conclusion."

"I know. It's all right. She's naturally a little upset."

She hadn't looked particularly upset until she'd found out I wasn't Ellis. The thought must have showed on my face because Nancy said, "I suppose you think we should have been crying in our pillows."

I didn't say anything.

"Well, we shouldn't have," she continued hotly. "John Loring was no good. I don't know how mother stood him for two years."

I let it ride. "Incidentally," I asked, "who is this Ellis? Mrs Loring didn't seem surprised to find a private dick at the front door."

"That's what he is. A detective, I mean. Mother hired him a few weeks ago."

"Hadn't she ever seen the guy?"

She shook her head. "No. She arranged everything by phone. It was a little distasteful to her anyway."

"Want to tell me why?"

"Why what?"

"Why your mother hired Ellis in the first place."

She frowned delightfully and said, "It couldn't possibly have anything to do with John's death. Honestly."

"Okay," I told her, "skip it for now. Can you give me an idea why anybody would want to kill your stepfather? Any scandal? Blackmail, maybe? Had he stepped on anyone's toes lately?"

"No. Not as far as I know. Just that he was a heel."

That wasn't much help so I thanked her, said good night, and turned to go.

She stepped close to me and laid a hand on my arm. I could feel the gentle pressure of her fingers through the rough tweed of my jacket.

"Wait," she said. "If you aren't Ellis, who are you?"

"Scott. Shell Scott."

"Honestly, Mr. Scott — Shell — I'd help you if I knew anything that would do you any good. I just don't know a thing I could tell you. I would like to help. Really I would."

For no good reason I believed her. Maybe because there was no good reason not to. I said. "I've got a couple things to do. If you're not in bed, maybe we could talk later when I've got a little more on this."

"I won't be in bed."

Maybe I imagined it, but I thought she swayed closer to me. Her hand felt like a branding iron on my arm, and the dim light from inside the house spilled soft shadows on her face. She was looking up at me with her lips moist and half parted in apparent invitation. But at the same time her wide innocent eyes were screaming, "No, no. A thousand times, no!"

A hell of a note. What would you have done?

I mumbled thanks, and good night again through lips that were a little dry, and started down the steps.

Her voice rustled softly down to me: "Call me later, why don't you, Shell? I'm interested, really."

I said, "Sure," wondering just what she meant by that.

After driving up a couple of one-way streets just in case a tail was on me, and checking a phone book, I found Ellis listed in a small hotel on Hill Street. It was only a little after nine-thirty p.m. but the room was dark. I rapped on the door thinking Ellis wasn't going to like being waked up.

He didn't seem to mind. The light inside clicked on and the door opened and a short husky guy in white shorts opened the door and squinted at me through brown hair hanging down over his eyes.

I asked him, "Are you Mr. Ellis?"

He brushed the hair out of his eyes and grunted an affirmative.

I showed him my credentials. "I'd like to talk to you, if you don't mind."

He blinked sleepily a couple of times, then his face brightened a little. "Yeah, sure," he said more cheerfully. "Come on in. A brother peeper, huh?" He waved me to a straight-backed wooden chair and sat down on the edge of the rumpled bed.

"I hate to say it," I told him, "but you're out of a job."

"Huh?"

"I just had a little chat with Mrs. Loring. She's got a final check all made out for you."

He looked puzzled. "I don't get it. She change her mind?"

"About what?"

"Don't she want no divorce? Or am I taking too long?"

"Neither," I said. "Somebody shot Loring through the head tonight. And in my office. You can see why I'm interested."

He whistled through his teeth, "Brother! Why'd you want to see me?"

"I haven't got much to go on; thought maybe you could give me a lead."

He was cooperative enough. Mrs. Loring had wanted a divorce, but papa said no sale. Mrs. Loring thought her husband had maybe been playing around so she'd hired Ellis by phone to follow Loring and try to catch hubby with his pants down. Figuratively speaking.

Ellis had trailed Loring for three weeks without digging up anything he could take to Mrs. Loring. She'd told him to call on her when he had something; he'd never had anything, he said, so he'd never called on her.

I asked him, "Where did he go mostly? Who did he see? I need some kind of a lead." I thought for a minute and added, "And how about his artistic interests? There's some kind of an art angle."

Ellis tossed me a cigarette, lit one himself, and held a match for me. "Tailing Loring was a dull job. He played a lot of golf at the Wilshire Country Club, had all his meals either at Mike Lyman's in Hollywood or at home, spent all his nights at home. Not many kicks in his life. Now, if I had all that dough . . ." His face got a dreamy look for a minute. "Art, huh?" he continued. "Well, he bought a couple pictures at Massy's on Grand. Modern stuff like a wormhole in a apple called 'Triumph of Dawn.' You know the junk. Then he went to an art class at a walk-up on Broadway near Sixth. Least I guess it was an art class; guys went in carrying brushes and easel things."

I got interested. "What kind of a class?"

"I dunno. Some painting thing run by a guy named Fillson."

Enter Fillson again. I dug out the card I'd taken off Loring's body, looked at it and asked, "How long had Loring been going to Fillson's?"

"I dunno how long." He fumbled in his pants draped over a chair, dug out a dimestore memo book, and flipped the pages. "Let's see. I started tailing him on a Monday three weeks ago. He went to Fillson's Tuesday and Thursday at one-thirty that week, Tuesday and Thursday the next week, and Tuesday this week. He didn't go this Thursday — that's yesterday. He'd usually stay about an hour."

"Anybody else go with him, or was he alone?"

"Never with anybody. A bunch of others showed up about the same time. Around a dozen; all men about forty or fifty. Looked like they'd all probably already made their dough and were maybe taking up painting as a hobby."

"How about tonight?" I asked.

"What about tonight?"

"If you were tailing Loring, maybe you saw someone follow him to my office."

"Oh." He shook his head. "Not tonight. I been tailing that guy day after day and sitting outside that mansion half of the nights. I gotta sleep some time. Besides, Loring always stays home nights. I been in bed since four this afternoon. He was home when I left and came here." He frowned and scratched his head. "Maybe I shoulda slept yesterday."

"Maybe," I said. "What do you know about Fillson?"

"Not much. Tall, thin guy. No chin and a black mustache with about ten whiskers in it. Used to run an artists' supply store. I guess you'd say he's graduated now. Has an expensive taste in dames."

"How's that?"

Ellis held up two fingers wrapped around each other. "He's like that with Velma Vail, strip queen of the Sabre Club. Torchy and terrific." He sighed, "But terrif. For a tomato like that I could learn to like pictures of wormy apples myself."

I ground out my cigarette in a glass tray. "Anything else you can tell me?"

"That's about it. The guy didn't lead a very exciting life."

I thanked him and got out.

I stopped at the desk and checked with the room clerk.

He told me Ellis had come in sometime during the afternoon and gone straight to his room. That was that.

In the phone booth in the lobby I checked Massy's. The only phone listed under that name was for the business downtown and nobody answered there. Nobody answered either at the number listed for Fillson's Studio or at his home. Blanks. I decided to check Fillson's place of business anyway.

At the office I grabbed a pocket flash and a ring of keys I'd collected in the course of my meanderings. Not exactly legal, maybe, but better than breaking doors. And quieter.

I left the Cad parked behind the Hamilton Building and walked up Broadway. The address I wanted was just on the other side of Sixth. I walked between a loan office and a real estate agency and up one flight of stairs and found the door labelled in simple bold letters, "S. A. Fillson."

The third key worked. I eased quietly inside, made sure the blinds were drawn, and poked around with my pocket flash. The place was really designed for comfort: one huge room that would have seemed more like Mrs. Loring's living room than a studio if it hadn't been for the strong, heavy odor of oil paints and turpentine that clung to my nostrils. There were stacks of half-finished canvases along the walls, and propped on half a dozen wooden easels, plus four or five surrealist blobs of crazy squares and circles hanging on the walls.

I took a peek at the canvases. Mostly nudes, all lousy, and a scattering of landscapes and still-lifes. The furniture, except for a few straight-backed chairs and three leather hassocks, was lush overstuffed divans and chairs done in deep reds and grays. A thick shag carpet stretched from wall to wall and I half expected to see a brace of Irish setters curled up before a nonexistent fireplace. No desk, no cabinets, no nothing to prowl through, though I hadn't the remotest idea what I expected to find if there were any.

Half a dozen big potted plants loomed in the shadows like miniature trees. I darted my flash around them one by one and caught a flash of white in the leaves of one of them. I walked over and picked up a little triangular piece of cloth that meant nothing. It looked a little like half of one of the toy parachutes I used to make as a kid out of an old handkerchief, four pieces of thread and a rock. Only it looked like three threads, half a handkerchief, and no rock. I stuck it in my pocket.

Fifteen minutes later I'd been over the whole place and found nothing more except a padlocked door in back that none of my keys would open. I started to turn away and get the hell out when light glimmered momentarily on something stuck in the back crack of the heavy door. I bent down and looked. It was a torn celluloid strip like the negatives you get back from the drug store, only much smaller.

I wormed it out and flashed my light through it and a shapely lass with her hands high over her head in the attitude of a top-heavy Balinese dancer peeped back at me. The image was too small for me to see much, but what I could see was pleasant. It looked as if she was wearing nothing except skin — altogether a delightful morsel. I dropped her into my shirt pocket, patted her gently, locked the front door behind me and left.

At the Owl Drug Store on the corner, I gave S. A. Fillson's residence another ring. I let the little buzzing noises snap out of the receiver till it was obvious nobody was going to answer, then hung up.

Outside, I lit a cigarette, ankled back to the Cadillac, and swung north into Broadway. I took a left at Second Street, followed it till it became Beverly beyond Lucas Avenue, and rolled on out Beverly Boulevard.

The Sabre Club is on Beverly Boulevard about a mile beyond the Wilshire Country Club. It's one of those small, intimate spots where you know everybody or nobody. There was a bar along one wall. Behind it, a mural of delicate fawns chasing equally delicate females over a grassy green field. Two white-coated bartenders were expertly mixing pink ladies and extra-dry martinis. Tables surrounded by dinner jackets and broad, padded shoulders, low-cut evening gowns and obvious white breasts.

The too smooth, faultlessly tailored headwaiter approached me and looked at my sport coat and slacks as if they were a red-and-white bathrobe. I looked over his shoulder to the small dance floor where a blonde with outside and inside curves was batting 1.000 into a microphone hanging down from the gloom of the ceiling.

I told the headwaiter, "I'm expected; I'm joining a friend."

He stared at me stonily.

Over his shoulder I watched the curvy blonde. It was easy to recognize her from the blowups outside the club. Velma Vail. And singing away like mad in a low, hot voice to a tall, thin guy at a ringside table.

I stopped at the ringside table and looked at the tall, thin guy. He had a triangular face wider at the top than at the bottom, arched eyebrows, and no chin. There were maybe ten whiskers in the wisp of a mustache on his narrow upper lip.

I sat down.

"Fillson?" I asked.

He unhooked his eyes from Velma and looked at me.

"I beg your pardon."

"Fillson?"

"That's my name, yes."

"I'm Shell Scott."

He didn't bat an eyelash. "So?"

"I'd like to talk to you."

He turned his head and looked at Velma Vail, then back at me, slightly annoyed. "Certainly. In a few minutes." He swiveled his head around and gave his undivided attention to the floor show.

You couldn't blame him.

I took a look myself and understood his desire to avoid conversation at the moment. Velma had stopped singing and was gliding over the floor in the dim blue light of a baby spot. She moved with the slow, easy grace of a jungle beast and there was something of the jungle's savagery in the controlled, sensual swaying of her body. She was dressed in a low-cut silver gown that clung to the voluptuous curves of her body like a second coat of varnish. She was tall, with wide hips, a narrow waist, and breasts that were almost too big.

Almost, I said.

She moved with a fluid undulation to the husky moan of saxophones carrying a weird melody over the heavy, rhythmic beat of the orchestra.

Ellis had said, "Velma Vail, strip queen of the Sabre Club." This was Velma Vail; this was the strip and she was good. She was out of this world.

It was over suddenly and Velma was gone and the brighter lights that flooded the room seemed brazen after the fragile dimness of the blue spot.

"Highball?" It was Fillson.

"Sure. Bourbon and water."

He signaled the waiter and ordered the drinks, a dry martini for himself.

"Now — Mr. Scott, was it? What did you want to talk about?"

"I'm a private investigator. I'm checking on the murder of John Loring."

"Loring! Good God! Murdered?" He did have a chin; it dropped about an inch.

"Murdered."

"Why, I knew him. He was a student of mine."

"I know. That's why I'm here."

He shook his head back and forth for a moment. "But why come to me? I knew nothing about the man."

"Nothing?"

"Except that he admired fine paintings and had absolutely no talent for drawing." His voice was pleasant, surprisingly deep for so thin a man. He continued to wag his head vaguely.

The waiter brought our drinks and I sipped at the bourbon. "How long had Loring attended your classes?"

"Why, I'm not sure. Two months or more. I don't see what bearing —"

"Just curious."

He grunted and lifted the olive out of his martini and twirled it on the little orange stick.

I said, "I'd like to see some of his work. Okay?"

"Certainly. Of course he was a beginner. Not very good."

"When?"

"When what?"

"When may I see them?"

"Tomorrow. Say three or four in the afternoon."

"Say four." He nodded and I said, "About Loring. Did he ever talk about any trouble he might have been in? Anything bothering him?"

Fillson shook his head. "The only things Mr. Loring and I ever discussed were in connection with his painting. His personal life was entirely his own affair." He said abruptly, "I'm sorry I can't help you, Mr. Scott," and the conversation seemed to be ended. I thanked him and stood up and walked over to the bar.

I tossed down another highball to join the first and examined the room. A few feet beyond the end of the bar was a curtained doorway through which the girls in the floor show danced in and out. On the walls, more murals.

The lights dimmed and a spotlight cut through the smoke and fell on the master of ceremonies, who was announcing the end of the show and exhorting one and all to drink rapidly for the next hour, ha-ha. There'd be another show at midnight. I walked casually past the end of the bar and through the curtained doorway. Nobody stopped me.

Girls in various stages of dress — or undress — stood chatting and smoking, or scurrying about looking very nice indeed. I watched them chatting, smoking and scurrying — especially scurrying — for a moment, then stopped a cute little brunette in a G-string and a lacy brassiere that looked as if it was made out of imagination.

"Where would I find Velma Vail?"

She pointed at a door directly opposite me. "In there."

"Thanks, beautiful." I looked her over. I enjoyed looking her over. On the street she'd have looked good. She'd just finished her act, which consisted of dancing around in about half an ounce of clothing. So now she looked better than good.

I told her so.

She wrinkled her nose at me, but spun on her heel and walked off, jiggling. I let my eyes follow her; they followed easy. She opened a door and turned and looked at me before she went inside. Pleasure, pleasure — but duty called.

I walked over and knocked on Velma's door. Something was nagging at my brain while I waited, but I couldn't pin it down. No answer. I knocked again. Finally, I got smart and opened the door. Nothing. The silver gown with the low neck was there looking drastically different on a hanger, a lot of odds and ends, but no Velma. I'd dawdled over my highball too long.

I walked out front and climbed back on my stool at the bar. Over a double bourbon-and-water I squeezed my brains a little and wondered what had been nagging me. All I got was a headache so I called the highball a nightcap, downed it, and took off. It was eleven-thirty on the nose.

On my way out I glanced over at Fillson's table. No Fillson. Just a waiter mopping up with practiced swipes of a white cloth.

The lovebirds had done flew. . . .

I live in the Spartan Apartment Hotel on North Rossmore, just a long chip shot from the Wilshire Country Club's golf course. I parked the Cad around the corner, walked up to the second floor and down to room 212. I was just putting my key in the lock when somebody behind me said, "Shell Scott?"

I turned around. "Yeah?"

There were two guys standing at the side of the hall a few feet from me. One of them was a big, blunt-faced man with little pig eyes and two funny bumps on the bridge of his twisted nose, like the humps on the back of a camel. He looked tough as a four-bit steak. The other was a pint-sized character with wispy blond hair and a red face. His ears stuck out at almost right angles from the side of his head. Both of them had their right hands buried in their pockets. A couple of fine citizens, no doubt.

"What do you want?" I asked conversationally.

Camel-nose said, "You, Scott," not conversationally. He lifted his hand out of his pocket as if it was heavy. The reason it was heavy was the .45 automatic that nestled in his big fist. He shoved the gun back in his pocket. "Don't make any sudden motions," he said.

I didn't make any sudden motions.

The little guy walked up beside me, but didn't get between me and Camel-nose. He reached out and jerked my .38 from its holster and flashed a twisted grin at me.

"Just take it easy, pal," he said in a grating voice that rubbed my nerves like a file on my teeth. "We're goin' for a little walk."

"Oh?" I said brightly.

Camel-nose came alongside and wrapped thick fingers around my right wrist, casual-like. The little one walked a couple steps behind and to my left. Three guys out for a stroll. So far they were pretty smart.

Like that we walked downstairs, out onto North Rossmore, and left to Rosewood Avenue. Nobody said anything. Rosewood was even darker than Rossmore; that I didn't like. A few yards ahead of us I could see a long Buick sedan parked parallel to the curb. It looked as if three were going to ride out and two were going to ride back. One of those deals, I had the feeling.

Just as if I didn't know, I said, "What is this? Anything personal?"

"Patience, brother," the big man said. He talked as if he had an impediment in his head.

"Looks like I've been chosen," I said. "Why? It can't hurt to tell me, can it?"

Camel-nose laughed deep in his muscled throat as if I'd just told him the one about the lumberjack and the water barrel. But he didn't relax his hold on my wrist.

"No," he gurgled. "It can't hurt to tell you. But we ain't."

The little guy with the right-angle ears said, "Scott."

"Yeah?"

"How old are you?"

"What the hell's it to you?"

"Curious."

"Thirty."

"Hell, Scott, that's old enough." He laughed as if he'd said something funny. I didn't think so.

We were at the car. Camel-nose let go my wrist and lifted his right hand out of his pocket. I caught the dull gleam of light on his automatic. My insides felt like cold jelly: I licked my lips with the wad of cotton in my mouth.

I asked, "Here?"

"Not here. Get in."

The little guy walked over and opened the back door of the car and held it politely. Camel-nose jabbed me with his gun.

Up to now they'd been smart. They slipped a little.

Maybe it was enough, maybe not. I could wait and get it in the back on a lonely road, or I could take a chance and get it now. Maybe.

The three of us were standing at the right side of the car next to the sidewalk. I took it slow and stepped up into the rear of the Buick. Camel-nose started in after me. I squatted on the edge of the seat — still slow and easy — and let my left hand fall on the inside handle of the door. Camel-nose flopped his fanny heavily on the seat.

The slow motion stopped.

I twisted the handle and lunged sideways in the same motion. I flopped out the door like a drunk sprinter tumbling off his blocks, and the crack of the automatic sounded over the roar of the blood pounding in my ears. Something slapped at my hip, but I clung to the handle of the door and it flipped me around with a jerk that should have snapped my arm at the elbow.

I slammed the door backward and dropped flat on my back and pulled my legs up against my belly as Camel-nose crashed out the door. He was looking out toward the middle of the street, but he caught a glimpse of me on the ground and angled his gun down. Flame licked out of the muzzle and the hot breath of the slug screamed past my cheek as I uncoiled my legs.

I lashed out as if it was fourth down and I had to boot him twenty yards to save the game. He was so close I didn't have to aim; I just let go, and both heels hit him where he lived. He started wishing he didn't live there any more.

The fight went out of him quicker than a crease out of three-dollar pants and he dropped on top of me like half the Chicago Bears. The breath whooshed out of my lungs as his automatic clattered to the street.

I strained against the weight on top of me and pawed for the gun. The little guy was around the back of the car now and cracking down as I felt the butt of the automatic. He fired twice and I felt the sock and jar of the slugs before the gun was rocking and roaring in my fist.

He sagged to one knee and I kept pulling the trigger till the hammer clicked on an empty chamber and the little guy pitched forward on his face with his behind up over his head. I threw the empty gun at him.

The silence was thick and heavy except for the blood pounding and beating like a drum in my head. The little guy slowly unfolded and toppled over onto the street with a soft thud and lay very still and quiet.

I started wondering how I was.

Camel-nose was still lying half across me so I grabbed the back of his coat and pulled him off. My hand came away wet and sticky. The warm, sticky stuff was blood. I ran my other hand over my stomach and chest. Okay. Camel-nose had picked up the slugs meant for me.

At least I was alive; but neither of these guys was going to tell me who sent them after me. This was the third time that was supposed to be the charm.

I was beginning to get irritated.

I got up shakily and felt a twinge of pain. The first shot that clipped me had plowed a groove in one cheek. It wasn't going to bother my shaving. I dug my .38 out of the little guy's coat pocket and got out of there fast.

I was four blocks away and working all hundred and fifty horses under the Caddie's hood when I heard the shrill crescendo of police sirens and remembered my fingerprints were all over the .45 automatic I'd left behind. The hell with it. I couldn't afford to have any cops grilling me now. I was starting to get mad even if I didn't know who I was mad at.

I pulled into the parking lot at the Lanai Club on Wilshire. Inside, over a highball, I thought about Velma and Fillson and Ellis and Mrs. Loring and Nancy and the cute little gal in the nothing-brassiere. About Nancy's wide, chaste, innocent eyes — pure, "No, no, a thousand times, no!" eyes. And the provocative, inviting, sullen lips. Nice. I spent a nickel and called her.

"Hello." Her voice was musical.

"Nancy?"

"Uh-huh. Who is this? The big blond man?"

"Yeah. Shell. Said I might call, remember?"

"Sure. I hoped you would."

"Look," I said, "I'd like to talk to you some more. Too late?"

"Never too late, Shell. Where are you?"

"Lanai Club on Wilshire. I'll pick you up in a few minutes."

"Never mind, Shell. It's just a few blocks. I'll meet you there. Order me a shot with a beer chaser."

"Huh?"

She laughed merrily. "I was only kidding. You can order me a sidecar, though."

She didn't waste any time. The sidecar was barely delivered with my second drink when she walked in. She'd changed from the sweater and skirt combination she'd worn earlier and she was something to see. She had on a black strapless dress.

It was obvious what was holding the dress up, and what was holding the dress up was obvious. I loved it.

She slid onto the stool beside me and said, "Put your eyes back where they belong."

I grinned at her. "Don't tell me where my eyes belong. Not when you're nearly wearing that dress. You look good, Nancy."

"Thank you, sir."

After a little light banter I got down to cases. "Look, Nancy, things are getting a little rough. The shooting war's started."

The big, innocent eyes got wider still. "Someone shoot at you?"

"Nothing serious yet. But there's just a chance you might know something to make things easier for me. Maybe you could give me some help."

"If I can, Shell."

"Can't you think of anything or anybody that might have been giving your stepfather a bad time?"

She shook her head and the red hair swirled about her face.

I said, "I'm in this thing too deep to get out now even if I wanted to, which I don't. Loring was in my office tonight when he was shot. Just before he was killed, he'd said something about blackmail. Doesn't that ring any bells at all?"

She shook her head again. "I'm sorry, Shell. Actually, I didn't have much to do with him."

"How come? And if you feel like telling me now, why did your mother already have a private detective working for her?"

Nancy took a long swallow and said slowly, "Mom wanted to divorce John. He was nothing more than a parasite, really. He just married Mother because of her money. He didn't have any money of his own — maybe a few thousand dollars he'd wheedled out of Mom on one pretext or another.

"But I think most of that was gone and lately she wouldn't finance any more of his so-called investments. He wouldn't quietly give her a divorce; said he'd fight it all the way, he might even frame evidence against her and try to get alimony." She pressed her full lips together. "Alimony! Can you imagine? Anyway, that's what Ellis was working on — positive evidence for a divorce. Something he couldn't wiggle out of. Mother had lots of time and money, so she just told Ellis what she wanted and let him handle it. She wouldn't have done anything crooked; she just wanted to catch John in something."

I said, "You don't suppose Ellis actually did get anything on Mr. Loring, do you?"

"Why, no. He'd have reported to Mother if he had; that's what she was paying him for. Why?"

"Nothing," I said. "It's not important."

We had another round, and I sipped at my drink and thought. Maybe I was beginning to feel the drinks a little, but everything in this case seemed crazy as three reefers and a quart of absinthe. I thought back to the moment Loring had come into my office, and I went over everything I'd been told since then and everything that had happened.

I gargled bourbon quietly and drew designs on the moist spot on the bar and appreciated Nancy's sitting silently beside me. I tortured my brains and favored the left side of my behind on the bar stool.

And all of a sudden it hit me.

It hit me, wham, like that, and I slapped a hand against my forehead. The bartender looked at me with a hostile squint, then darted a look under the bar at his war club.

Nancy said, "What's the matter?"

I said, "Honey, go home. Papa's got work to do."

"See me later?"

"Yeah. I'll see you later."

I knocked on the door of Room 316 in the Brandon Hotel on Cahuenga. I'd got the address for five bucks from the bartender at the Sabre Club, and this time Velma was in.

She opened the door wide and stood facing me in a rose-pink negligee. Light streamed out of the room behind her and wrapped around her body like mist. I swallowed and walked into the room with my face a little warm. And not just from the drinks.

"Hello, Velma."

"Hello. What's with you?"

"Too bad, pretty baby. Party's over."

She said slowly, curiously, "What?"

"Ended, pfft, finished."

"You must be in the wrong room, mister."

"Right room." I could feel the double bourbons ganging up on me. "Right gal. You're Velma Vail. I'm Shell Scott, private eye, a snooper. I'm on the Loring kill and I've got it cold. And I've got you and your pal cold, and the blackmail's all washed up — cold."

She stood across the room looking at me, not saying anything.

"I'm almost sorry for you, pretty baby. This is the payoff." It sounded nice and dramatic, so I said it again, "This is the payoff."

"I don't know what you're talking about," she said, but there was an edge to her voice that hadn't been there before.

I pulled the strip of cloth with the threads and the little strip of torn celluloid out of my pocket and showed them to her. "These are yours, aren't they, Velma? I picked them up at Fillson's studio. It's up the river, baby."

She looked at the stuff in my hand and then back at my face. She didn't seem scared and she should have been. I was tired of getting shoved around.

She said, "Shell, that's no way to talk to me. Not really. Not when you hardly know me."

A cool number.

"Cut it, Velma," I told her. "I know you well enough already."

"Why, Shell," she said softly, "you don't know me at all."

She'd been holding that rose-pink negligee together with one hand at her throat. Now she let go.

I must have raised an eyebrow, or something, because she laughed right out loud. Threw her head back and laughed through parted white teeth. Then she shrugged her shoulders, let the gown fall to the floor and stepped out of it. In the bright light pouring from the ceiling, it was worth seeing; she stood straight and still with her hands at her sides, smiling at me.

She was naked as a new boil on a Roman nose.

She looked different than she had in the dim blue light at the Sabre Club; her body was something a man might dream about. Round and warm and full of promise. I stared. I admit it. I stared, but good. Gabriel could have blown his trumpet in my ear and I wouldn't have heard it.

I guess that's why I didn't hear anybody come up behind me. Or the swish of the sap. One minute Velma was there looking like September Morn. The next minute there were only shooting stars and a deep black pit. I'd had it.

Things were fuzzy. Very fuzzy. The bright light was in my eyes and dancing around and the little guy kept on banging on my head with the big pan that went bong, bong on my skull, and I felt sick as hell.

Only there wasn't any little guy and there wasn't any pan, and my head kept going bong, bong, anyway. There was only Velma sitting in an easy chair and pointing a wicked-looking little automatic at my navel.

I looked at the gun and I looked at Velma. "That might go off."

"It might." No gay banter. Just sort of bored.

I was flat on my back on the carpet and my hands were bent under me and the left side of my fanny felt as if somebody had branded it. I tried to pull my arms out from under me and couldn't. Somebody had looped a fine rope around my wrists and I could feel it cutting my skin when I pulled. But it felt like a sloppy job. Sloppy or not, there was still a gun pointed at my middle.

Velma had changed from the negligee into a tan suit, and a couple of traveling bags were at her feet.

"Going someplace?" I asked.

She nodded.

"Me too?"

She nodded again.

"Where?"

"Does it matter?"

"It matters."

"It shouldn't. You're only going part way."

I didn't like the sound of her voice. Suddenly she wasn't feminine any more.

I lay on my back and pulled easily, then harder at the rope.

"Hold still," Velma said. "Very still. I couldn't miss you from here."

She couldn't, at that. That was the third strike on me, but I was still standing at the plate. I didn't know I was out. I hunted around in my bonging brain for a weakness in her armor, and I had an idea. Not much of an idea, but an idea.

"Velma," I said. "You're a hell of a crummy excuse for a woman, aren't you? You'd let a guy get shot just to save some dirty nickels. You're not a woman, you're a flabby bitch on a broom."

She curled her lips back and spat at me, "Shut up!"

I kept my voice low and steady and as contemptuous as I could make it. "You're a lousy tart. You're one of the slimy, crawling things that hides from the sun." I kept it up for about a minute, looking straight at her. I said things I thought I'd never say to a woman, then spat on the rug at her feet.

It worked. Her face got white, then it got red and she got up and came toward me with her lips drawn back and her breath bubbling between her teeth. The gun was still in her right hand, pointing at me.

I thought she was going to let me have it in the belly and my muscles tightened and crawled till I saw her reaching for my face with her left hand. Her fingers were curled into hooks and the long, red nails could have torn out my eyes and ripped the skin from my face.

I rolled away from the clutching fingers and at the same time hooked my right heel behind her left foot. I drew up my left leg, fast, and jammed it as hard as I could against her knee.

I heard the sickening pop of the bone, and she screamed like a cat in a furnace.

She hit the floor hard and dropped the gun. But she had guts. I'll say that much for her. While I struggled and scrambled to my feet, she reached out — still moaning, half crying — and got her hand on the automatic. I didn't have any choice. I took one step toward her and laid my number ten Cordovan boot along the side of her head. And that was that.

I felt a little ashamed of myself, but better a bump on her skull than a hole in mine. I found the little apartment kitchen and a butcher knife and five minutes later I was out of the ropes and had them tight around Velma's wrists. She was still out, and I didn't worry about tying her legs.

She wasn't going to walk anyplace.

Wearily, I picked up the phone and called Homicide. Even Kerrigan's nasal whine sounded almost good. I told him what he'd find at the Brandon Hotel, hung up, and took off for my last stop.

This time I went in the door with Velma's little automatic in my hand. The door to the room in back was open and I walked quietly over the thick, shag carpet. My .38 Colt was resting on a small table against the far wall of the little room. I said, "Surprise, surprise."

He whirled around, disbelief staring from his eyes, the ten hairs on his upper lip twitching like a crawling caterpillar. He sputtered, but nothing came out.

I said, "Fillson, I'm going to break you in two. The boys you sent after me should have done a better job. And you shouldn't have left a woman to look after me. I'm going to crack your spine."

"Wait!" It was a little squeak.

"Wait, hell! You didn't wait when Slippy Rancin told you he'd knocked off Loring in my office and scared hell out of me. You didn't want me scared. You wanted me dead in case Loring had already spilled your blackmail caper to me." I said through my teeth, "You shouldn't have sent him back, Fillson."

He was pitiful, he was so scared. His face was the color of stale dough and he was shaking like an overweight matron skipping rope.

"I didn't know what I was doing," he whimpered. "I was out of my mind. Let me go. I'll pay you anything. Anything."

I shook my head at him. "No soap."

"I'll give you thousands," he croaked. "Everything I've got."

"Nope. I wouldn't want that money. But I'll give you a gun." I dropped the little gun at my feet and watched him. He let out a little sigh, as if something had busted inside him, and leaped for the gun.

I timed it like a Golden Gloves champ and met him halfway. I whipped my right fist into the middle of his face as if I was trying to split it in two.

I was trying.

He went up a little into the air, stopped, then went down slow and easy, like a rubber belt on a fat man.

I told the back of his head, "That's for the lump on my skull, sucker," but he wasn't listening. Maybe I was being a heel, but when a guy tries to introduce me to rigor mortis as hard as Fillson had, and then decides to do the job himself, I lose any fondness I might have had for him.

I took a look around the little room and saw just what I'd expected to see. A 16-mm. movie projector, complete darkroom equipment, and several shiny tin cans. The cans were all filled with exposed film. One reel was already spliced into the projector so I switched it on and grabbed an eyeful. I do mean eyeful. It was Fillson's art course, all right, and I wasn't surprised at that, either.

Kerrigan didn't seem very happy about the way I'd handled the situation, but he chewed his black cigar and listened while I filled in the events of the evening.

"Fillson had a sweet setup," I finished. "The squeeze. A new gimmick on the extortion racket. He ran an art class with a live model, but I'll bet neither she or the customers knew a palette from an easel. The model was an artist, too — Velma Vail — a bump and grind artist from the Sabre Club. And, incidentally, the cookie with the busted leg."

I flipped Kerrigan the torn strip of celluloid I'd pried out of the door: a big-bosomed gal posturing in a lot of fair skin and a G-string — possibly the same little triangle of cloth I'd picked up here at Fillson's earlier.

"That doesn't have to be Velma," I said, "but I'll give odds it is when your lab makes a big print of it. She's got some distinguishing characteristics that are hard to hide."

Kerrigan held the film up to the light and said, "Mmm."

"That's not a negative," I said. "It's a positive made from a negative so it can be run through a projector — movie film. It's all on reels in the back room. Including Velma."

"So what?"

"So this. Fillson picked the 'students' for his so-called classes with a lot of care. I got to wondering about that when I remembered a guy telling me they were all prosperous-looking and middle-aged, and all men. He let them park here in the easy chairs and soft divans while Velma went into her act. She might sit on a few laps or muss up a guy's pompadour — good clean, harmless fun, huh? Everybody has a roaring good time. Only all the while, a couple of cameras hidden behind the squares and circles in the surrealist paintings on the walls, or in the potted plants, or any other convenient place, are getting it all down on film.

"When just part of the film is run off, or some black-and-white prints made from choice frames, it doesn't look so much like good clean fun. It looks more like a sofa party. A man who wanted to keep his nose clean — a guy like Loring, for instance — would pay good dough to keep the picture out of circulation. If he didn't, he'd have one hell of a time explaining that his relations with Velma were purely platonic, or that he was merely attending a class in art appreciation."

Kerrigan spoke around the corner of his soggy cigar, "So where does Loring fit?"

"Fillson got his slimy hooks into Loring, but Loring couldn't pony up enough to keep Fillson satisfied, and he knew it. His only chance was to spend what dough he had trying to mess up Fillson's game — which is where I came in. If he could keep the pictures from getting to his wife, maybe he could get her to turn back into the goose that laid the golden eggs. But if the pictures ever got to Mrs. Loring — happy home, good-by.

"He knew she wanted a divorce, anyway, but he wouldn't give her one. What he didn't know was that she'd hired a private cop to tail him. Anyway, he was getting squeezed where it hurt, and he threatened Fillson with exposure if he didn't lay off. With Loring ready to pop, Fillson had to get rid of him or lose his sweet racket. Enter Slippy Rancin and exit Loring. The mistake was pulling it off in my office. Five gets you ten the slug used on Loring fits the gun Rancin was waving at me just before he departed this world."

I got up and stifled a groan. "The hell with it," I said. "You've got all you need in the back room. Amuse yourself. I've got a date."

I heard the whir of the projector starting as I went out the door and down the hall. Kerrigan was going to have himself a whale of a time. . . .

I looked at my watch. It was two-thirty in the a.m. I found a nickel in my pocket and flipped it. Heads I call Nancy, tails I get some sense and go to bed. Tails. I gave her a call.

She met me at the door, the wide eyes almost black in the dimness, the swollen lips half curved in a smile. I didn't kid around. I pulled her to me and kissed her. I kissed her good. When I let go her breath was coming a little faster and I was getting plenty of oxygen myself. Her lips still looked bruised and sullen and tempting, but she looked different somehow. Then I got it. Something had happened to her eyes.

A little sigh escaped her lips and she squinted up at me.

"Shell!" she said breathlessly. "My goodness! After all, I've only known you five or six hours."

Come to think of it, she was right. I laughed.

"Baby," I said, "wait till you've known me a week."

THE SLEEPER CAPER

You take a plane from the States and head south; a few hours later and up more than seven thousand feet, where the air is thin and clear, you land at Mexico City and take a cab to the Hipodromo de las Americas, where the horses run sideways, backwards, and occasionally around the seven-furlong track, and you go out to the paddock area after the fourth race.

You see a big, young, husky, unhandsome character with a Mexico City tan, short, prematurely white hair sticking up in the air like the end of a clipped whisk-broom, and his arms around the waists of two lovely young gals who look like Latin screen stars, and you say, "Geez, look at the slob with the two tomatoes."

That's me. I am the slob with the two tomatoes, and the hell with you.

Five days ago I'd left Los Angeles and my one-man agency, "Sheldon Scott, Investigations," and flown to Mexico for my client, Cookie Martini, an L. A. bookmaker. A big one. You may sneer at the thought of my taking a bookie for a client. Okay, sneer. As far as I'm concerned, people are going to gamble whether they are bookies or not. If they can't bet on the nags, they'll bet on the number of warts on some guy's nose. Cookie Martini was at least an honest bookie, and his money was clean. In the last year or so he'd started booking bets on tracks outside the States: France, South America, Mexico City. He and some other books taking Mexico City bets had recently been clipped for nearly three hundred thousand dollars. Cookie figured that too many longshots were coming in, too many sleepers, and he suspected a fix. So he'd hired me to find out if anything smelled here at the Hipodromo. It smelled. And it was starting to look as if a guy could get killed just sniffing.

"I wonder where Pete is?" Vera asked.

Vera was the tomato on my left, and I had to reach way down to put my arm around her. She was only five feet tall, but that still made her a head taller than Pete Pedro Ramirez, her husband. He was one of the season's leading riders at the Hipodromo, even though he was still an apprentice.

"He'll be here in a minute, Vera," I said.

He was a few minutes late, and we were to meet him here and wish him luck. Pete was riding Jetboy, the solid favorite in the fifth race coming up, and it was a big race for him. He'd started the day with a total of thirty-eight wins behind him and won the second race. One more winner and he'd lose his "bug," his apprentice's two-kilo weight allowance, and become a full-fledged jockey. It was important in another way, too. He was supposed to throw the race.

Elena Angel squeezed my right arm. "Here he comes, Shell."

For a moment, I just enjoyed the squeeze. This Elena was married to nobody and that pleased me hugely. She was tall, black-haired, with creamy skin and what I thought of simply as "Mexican" eyes. Dark eyes; soft, big, shadowed eyes with both the question and the answer in them. And her body could best be described with words that are pornographic.

I gave Elena a squeeze to make us even — actually, that particular squeeze put me way ahead — and looked to my left. I could see Pete walking toward us fast from the jockeys' room, practically sprinting. I always got a kick out of him when he was in a hurry — unless he was on a horse. He was only about four feet tall, wiry, a man of twenty-four who still looked like a kid — kid who'd haul off and slug you in the knee if you cracked wrong.

When he got close, I said, "Hi, champ. I'm sinking the roll this trip."

He grinned, jaws working while he flashed white teeth. Pete was nervous, high-strung as a thoroughbred, and he constantly chewed little candy-coated Chiclets.

"Sí," he said. "You sink it all, Shell. This one is a shoo-in. This one, I lose the bug for sure."

He spit out his gum and fished in his pocket for the pack, shook two white Chiclets out into his small palm. "Dio, they go fast," he said in surprise. "I thought I had a full box." He shrugged. "Gum?" He tossed one cube into his mouth and held out his hand.

The girls didn't chew. I took the gum, started to pop it into my mouth, and stopped when I saw Pete's face. I'd just noticed that his lips were puffed and the side of his jaw was swollen.

"What happened, Pete?" I asked. "You kiss a horse?"

He stopped grinning. "I kiss a fist. Jimmy Rath's." He saw the hot anger boil up in me at mention of the name, and he added, "I fix him. Don't worry. Sometime I fix him with a baseball bat. Anyway, I fix him good when I boot Jetboy in."

I looked toward the oval walking ring. Jimmy Rath was there with another guy about my size. I took a step toward them, but Elena and Vera both hung onto my arms and Pete said, "Relax, Shell. So what do we prove this way? When I boot this one home, I'm through for the day. I come up to your table, and you can stand right behind me when I spit in his eye. I don't need no bodyguard. Anyway, Rath's just Hammond's stooge. Hammond, he's back of it."

I knew what Pete meant. We both knew it, and everybody knew it, but proving it was another thing. When Cookie Martini sent me down here he'd given me a letter to Pete, and Cookie told me he'd checked and there wasn't a more honest jock in the business than Pete Ramirez. I'd watched Pete race Sunday, and met him afterwards. I told him what I was here for, laid it on the line. Pete was, if anything, more interested in cleaning up any mess here than I was. Like a lot of Mexican kids born in the poor outlying states, he'd had it tough as a kid. Now he was a jockey starting to make the grade and dream the big dream: a fine house, clothes — and a hundred pairs of shoes. Racing was his job, the center of his dream. Pete wanted it to be clean, and let the best man win.

And, Pete said, jocks were throwing races. He couldn't prove it but he knew it was happening because he could ride alongside the other jocks and see them pulling leather, holding their mounts back. Sometimes owners gave their jocks instructions that their horse wasn't to finish in the money, but Pete said this other thing was different; it happened too often, to the wrong horses. And Pete had heard soft talk, rumors of fixes and payoffs and threats against jocks who weren't supposed to win. Almost always it was the favorite supposed to lose, and a longshot that actually won.

Pete had nosed around, questioned the other jocks; I'd done a pile of routine legwork in Mexico City, checking the books I could find, talking to horse-players, trying to get a lead to who was putting the fixes in. The picture was pretty conclusive: at the top was a fat guy named Arthur Hammond whom everybody seemed to be scared of. He was from the States, had once been a trainer, but was ruled off the tracks for life because of shady practices. His retinue was a little mug named Jimmy Rath, and usually a couple of heavies. Hammond occupied the same table at the track every day. He'd been in a few scraps with the local cops, but never went to jail, mainly because he was "like that" with a Mexican biggie named Valdez. Valdez wasn't a politico, but he had almost as much behind-the-scenes power as the President. And Valdez always helped his pals. Always.

Jimmy Rath had got Pete alone yesterday and told him to lose the fifth race today, Thursday, for ten thousand pesos. Pete laughed at him and walked away, reporting the bribe offer to the Racing Commission and later to me. There were no witnesses or corroboration, and consequently no proof. Apparently Rath had just now made his offer again, a little differently.

I asked Pete, "When did this happen? Anybody see it?"

"No, no, of course not. He send me over to the tack room after the fourth, and boosted the ante to fifteen thousand. Then he say I either lose or get taken care of. I told him to go — well, you know. That's when he hit me, and when I wake up, he's gone."

Elena said angrily, "They ought to do something about that Rath."

"Yeah." As far as I was concerned, the "they" was rapidly becoming me. My fingers were sticky; I realized I still held the Chiclet in my sweaty hand, and the sugary coating was getting slippery. I stuck the gum into my coat pocket and looked toward the walking ring. Rath wasn't there. I knew where he probably was; with Hammond and two other bruisers upstairs.

In a few minutes Pete left to weigh in, and the three of us went back upstairs to our table high in the stands overlooking the beautiful oval track bordered by trees, the green lawn cool inside it. A hundred conversations swelled around us, and a constant stream of men and women wound in and out of the tables. It was pleasant and lovely, but mainly I was looking at four men seated a few tables away from us.

Jimmy Rath was there with two bruisers — and Hammond, a thick bulge of fat puffing over his collar. Rath's sitting at the same table was proof enough that Hammond was the boy fixing the races, as far as I was concerned. The Racing Commission and the cops felt differently. And it would take more than hunches to get Hammond because of his pal Valdez.

Suddenly I stopped paying any attention to Hammond. Something was moving on my leg, slowly, suggestively. Elena and I sat close together facing the track, and her hand was resting just above my knee, caressing me gently.

I turned and looked at her face close to mine, looked at the rest of her. She was wearing a gray skirt and a pink sweater that covered her up completely, but was still very nearly indecent. A shroud on that body would have looked indecent.

"Cuidado!" I said. "Be careful, baby. Two seconds and another inch, and I'll go screeching around the track with the horses."

She smiled, wiggled long lashes. My spine wiggled. "I will be careless," she said. "You do not look enough at me." Her hand moved. I moved. I had never been alone with Elena since Pete introduced us, but I knew if I ever was, there'd be plenty happening.

I put my hand over hers and said, "Honey, you want me to fall down frothing?"

"Yes," she said. Then: "What is frothing?"

The question was gone from her eyes now; only the answer was there. I started to tell her a terrible lie about what frothing meant, but right then the high, fast notes of the bugle sounded, and the announcer said the horses were coming onto the track for the Quinta Carrera, the fifth race.

Elena took her hand away, and I put it back; then the horses were passing in front of us. I saw Pete in bright red-and-white silks up on Jetboy, a black five-year-old gelding with clean, graceful lines. I expected Pete to look up and nod or wave, but he went right on past, head slightly bent.

I realized I didn't have a bet down on Jetboy, so I went down to the window and bought two fifty-peso win tickets. Jetboy was one to two, the odds-on favorite. By the time I'd reached the table again, the race had already started. I sat down beside Elena, stuck the two tickets into my pocket and my fingers hit the sticky gum.

I pulled it out and started to throw it away. Then I noticed that the white coating had melted and there was what appeared to be a hole pushed into the gum. I squinted at it, spread the thing with my fingernails. There was a hole all right, with a white powdery stuff inside it. It hit me all at once, and I jumped to my feet just as the crowd did, except that they were yelling about the race.

The horses were charging down the far side of the track, opposite the stands, and Jetboy trailed the fifth place horse by four lengths. Usually Pete stayed closer than that, but he wasn't riding as smoothly as he usually did. I knew damn well why, and my heart jumped up into my mouth as he started his move on the last turn. The crowd was jumping up and down as Jetboy reached the fourth spot close behind the bunched leaders. I watched Pete slumped over the saddle, riding sloppily, not like a kid with thirty-nine winners behind him — and then he tried to go through on the inside, and I bunched my hands into tight fists and almost squeezed my eyes shut. He couldn't make it; there wasn't room and I knew he couldn't make it. I was yelling at the top of my lungs as I saw Jetboy practically brushing the hard, sharp wooden rail. The whip came down again, and it all happened in a second.

Jetboy leaped forward, running up on the heels of the horse ahead, and stumbled and fell. I saw Pete hurtle through the air like a bundle of rags, slam into the rail — and in the sudden shocked silence of the crowd I thought I could hear him hit. He fell to the dirt track, rolled and lay still as the other horse sprinted down toward the finish line. Jetboy struggled up and galloped away.

I heard Vera's piercing scream, and then intuitively, I looked toward Hammond's table. He was watching the finish of the race, more interested in that than in Pete's crumpled body.

I snapped out of it, whirled and ran down the steps, sprinting toward the track. By the time I reached the rail, the huddle of doctors and officials cleared away, and Pete was lying there with a white sheet over his body and head, and there was nothing else I could do — except break Hammond in two. Clear down the middle.

I ran back up the steps, the fury hot in me now, my hands itching. I saw Vera lying in a faint at our table, Elena bending over her. I didn't stop. I walked straight to Hammond's table.

None of the men looked up until I stopped alongside them. Hammond was on my right, facing the track. Opposite me and on my left were the two musclemen, and Rath sat with his back to me. I could feel the muscles around my mouth twitching.

I put my palms flat down on the table and Hammond glanced up, his fat pink face gleaming slightly with perspiration, thick lips dry. "Yeah?" he asked.

"Don't 'yeah' me, you fat bastard," I shouted.

There was a slight movement behind me. I reached out without turning, slapping Rath backhanded and knocking him out of his chair. His head cracked against the iron rail, and he let out a yell and started to jump up.

"Wait a minute," Hammond said. "Wait a minute. What's this all about?"

"You don't know, huh, Hammond? You haven't the faintest idea!"

An empty glass in front of Hammond held several colored tickets. His program was open in front of him, Number 2 circled — a horse named Ladkin. I looked at the tote board where the winning numbers were already lighted under the oficial sign: 2, 3, 6, 1; Ladkin was the winner at fourteen to one. Another sleeper. Hammond didn't stop me as I picked up the glass and dumped out his tickets.

There were twenty fifty-peso win tickets on Number 3, and ten win tickets on Number 4. Nothing on the winner. For a few seconds it puzzled me, but only for a few seconds. Those heavy bets were enough to push the odds on Ladkin up to fourteen to one.

"Hammond," I said, "you usually bet two horses to win in the same race? A question, fat boy."

His pink face grew pinker and for the first time he got nasty. He leaned toward me, his face angry. "Give a listen, Scott. I heard all I care to hear right now. I know you been poking your ugly nose in the wrong holes, you hear me? You keep it up, you never will get stateside."

"It isn't just a fixed race now, fat boy. It's murder."

"Murder, my backside! The kid made a bad ride, that's all. Everybody makes a bad ride every now . . ."

I didn't wait for more. Half a dozen partly filled plates of food were on the table, and some highballs. I lifted the edge of the table and the whole goddam mess against Hammond's belly. He tried to scoot back, but the plates and glasses slid off the table as it hit him, and food and liquor smeared his tan suit. The big goon on my left reached for me, but I was more concerned about Rath. His right hand jerked under his coat but before he had a chance to get whatever he was reaching for, I hit him with the side of my hand, hard on his right shoulder. He yelled like a madman, his fingers spreading wide in pain, and then Hammond shouted, "Hold it! Rath! Kelly! Knock it off. Quick."

I'd thought we were going to have a real knockdown brawl right there, but Hammond apparently didn't want it that way. Rath hesitated, then obediently sat down. Kelly followed suit.

Hammond glared at me, eyes narrowed to angry slits. He brushed at the slop in his lap and said, "You'll regret this, Scott. You're gonna be damn sorry for this, you hear me?" He looked around the table and jerked his head, then got ponderously to his feet. The four of them left. Nothing else happened. It surprised me, but I didn't worry about it. I went back to my own table.

Half an hour later, after Vera had dazedly spoken with the track doctor in the emergency clinic and looked once more at Pete, we left. She didn't break down till we reached Pete's car. As we drove away she lay flat on the back seat, fingers clutching at the cushions and her body shaking with sobs. Vera didn't want to go home, so we took her to her mother's house. Then Elena and I flagged a taxi, drove to her apartment in Lomas Colony, and I took her to her door.

Before I left, she said, "Shell, you must be careful. It is very bad, I know, but go with care. Perhaps another time we can be happier together."

"Sure, Elena. I'll keep in touch."

She moved close to me, kissed me lightly on the mouth, then went inside.

In the cab again I told the driver to head toward the Prado. There were a lot of things I wanted to do, but first I was going to get Hammond and Rath, one way or another, but I didn't know how. Hammond had a lot of protection and power on his side, and you can't convict a man for murder — or even fixing races — because he buys tickets on losing horses. I was still trying to figure a way to get Hammond when the cab driver yelled, "Madre Dio!" and grabbed for the wheel as if it were a life preserver. A big Packard cut close to our fender, ramming its nose ahead of the cab. The cabbie jerked the wheel all the way over to his right, and jammed on the brakes so suddenly that I almost flew into the front seat. The cab skidded along the road, almost slamming into the Packard, and then shuddered to a stop.

We were on the Reforma, far from town still, and in a wooded section. Trees grew at the right of the road and there was little traffic here. One of Hammond's bruisers was jumping from the side door of the Packard and starting back toward us, a gun in his fist. There were a couple of guys behind him.

I didn't wait to identify them. I threw the cab's door open and leaped out and started to run into the trees, but a gun cracked and I heard the bullet whistle by me. The guy yelled something at me from no more than ten feet away. I'd had it; there wasn't a chance I could get into the trees before a slug hit me. I stopped.

I heard one footstep as I started to turn, but I never made it around. Probably it was a gun butt, but whatever it was, it was solid, and it landed on my skull. They were dragging me when I came to, and when I tried to move they stopped and dropped me. Somebody told me to get up, and in a minute I made it. We were deeper in the trees, and my company was Kelly, the other strong man, and Rath. Rath stood in front of me while the other two grabbed my arms and slammed me back against a tree, pulling my arms behind me around the tree trunk. And then Rath started in on me.

He was methodical about it, but it seemed to give him a sadistic pleasure. First he looked up at me from his approximate five-nine and said, "You sure made a fool of yourself today, Scott. You sure made the boss mad. We oughta plug you, but too many people saw that beef. We're gonna teach you to lay off us, though." He grinned. "After this, we figure you'll get a plane back to the States."

He waited till he'd told me all that, then he hit me. He hit me in the stomach, but I was braced for the blow and Rath wasn't an especially powerful man, anyway. The first time he hit me it didn't hurt so much; but along about the tenth time in the same spot it was getting bad. Once, while I still had the strength, I lifted one foot and tried to kick him in what is politely called the groin, but he got out of the way. Then he took a gun from one of the guys holding me, and slammed it along my jaw twice. My legs suddenly weren't strong enough to support me, and I sagged lower, my arms bending up behind me till it felt as if they'd pop out of their sockets.

Rath's face filmed with perspiration and a little saliva drooled from the corner of his mouth. He kept grinning all the time, enjoying himself. He'd hit me and the air would gush out of my mouth; everything swam in front of me and finally Rath was just a blur of movement that meant pain.

I realized the blows had stopped. A hand ripped my shirt open and I tried to lift my head. Rath slapped me several times then said, "Look, Scott."

My eyes focused slowly on the knife in his hand. I saw it move back and forth, then the point pressed against my chest. "See how easy to kill you?" Rath said. His voice was taut and excited like that of a man in bed with a woman. "See?" he said. He pushed on the knife a little and I felt the point bite into my chest, slice through the skin and flesh.

I almost yelled aloud, tried to press back against the tree, suck in my chest and get away from that blade, and Rath laughed, pulled the knife away and held it before my eyes, let me see the red-stained tip. "So get out of Mexico, Scott. Or next time I push this thing all the way in."

He ran the honed edge down the front of my chest, cutting the skin, not deep but painfully. Then he stepped back. The men behind me let go of my arms and I fell forward on my face, unable to stand. My cheek pressed against the dirt and I saw Rath's pointed shoe leave the ground and felt it dig into my side, then there was a blow on my head again and welcome blackness swept over me.

I must have lain there unconscious for quite a while because it was nearly dark when I came out of it. When I tried to move I gasped as pain leaped through my stomach and chest. I bit my lip, grunting, as I got slowly to my feet and started trying to find the road. I could move only a few feet before I had to stop and rest. Finally I reached the Reforma and got a taxi to stop.

"Get me to a doctor," I told him.

Doctor Dominguez pressed the last wide strip of adhesive tape against my chest and said, "There. You don't seem to have internal injuries, but we'd better get you to the hospital."

"I told you I haven't got time for that." My brain was alert enough now; I simply hurt like hell. "Just so I'm not bleeding inside, Doctor, and nothing's busted."

"At least you should go to bed and stay there."

I could explain to him that there wasn't room in my mind for thinking about hospitals or beds. The fat face of Hammond and the thin features of Rath, and the white, dead face of Pete Ramirez took up all the room there was in my mind. I just wasn't able to think about anything else even if I'd wanted to. And I didn't want to.

Before he'd started working on me I'd given Doctor Dominguez the cube of gum still in my pocket, the Chiclet, and told him what I suspected. Half an hour after he finished bandaging me he had the other answer.

"Yes, Mr. Scott," he said, "it was drugged. Crude, too; somebody merely hollowed out a small space inside the gum and filled it with the powder —"

"Would it kill a man?"

He frowned. "It might. Hard to say. It would at least make him sluggish, drowsy. Why? Where did you get this?"

"Arthur Hammond gave it to a jockey who was killed today."

He got slightly green. "Ah — no, you must be mistaken. Mr. Hammond is a well thought of man." It was obvious the name Hammond frightened him. He said, less warmly, professional now, "That is all I can do for you."

It was also obvious he wanted to get rid of me. I paid him, asked him to call me a cab, and left. . . .

I stood outside the Rio Rosa, a nightclub near Insurgentes, pain constant in my chest and stomach. I'd got a morphine surett from the doctor, but it was in my pocket; I might need it more later than I did right now. From the doctor's I'd gone to the Prado and picked up my gun; then I had started hunting for any one of the four men I was after. But now, three hours later, this was the only lead I had. I'd checked the phone book: no Hammond. A man with as many enemies as Hammond undoubtedly had doesn't advertise his address. I'd checked every crumb I knew in Mexico City, and plenty I didn't know. His address was a complete mystery. Almost all I'd learned was that a lot of people were afraid of Hammond and his thugs — and of Hammond's pal, Valdez. But I learned that a couple of months ago Jimmy Rath had paid the rent on an apartment for a girl named Chatita, who was now in the show here at Rio Rosa — and apparently didn't like Rath any more. I went inside.

For fifty pesos the headwaiter let me knock on the door of Chatita's dressing room. When she opened the door, her eyes widened with surprise. I guess I didn't look very handsome, with my jaw swollen and a cut in the flesh over my cheekbone.

I said, "May I talk to you for a minute?"

She looked at my bruised face, frowning. "I am sorry. I must get dressed."

Now that I took a look at her, she was right. She had on a silk wrapper thin enough so that the points of her full breasts showed through it. She started to shut the door and I took a chance. "It's about Jimmy Rath."

I got more than I bargained for. "Jimmy!" she said venomously. She opened the door wide, looked at my face again. "Did he do this to you?" I nodded and she said, "Come in." She shut the door behind me, locked it, then turned to face me. "Sit down," she said, pointing toward a wooden chair. "You . . . do not like Jimmy?"

"I hate him," I said. "I want to find him and tell him so."

She smiled. It wasn't a very nice smile. "I hope you find him," she said. "I hope you beat him to death."

This Chatita was tall, close to six feet in her high heels, and she would have towered above Rath. He was shaping up as a queer one. Chatita had the sensual, smooth-skinned face found on many of the lovely Mexican women, with large dark eyes and a mass of black hair. Her face had a hot beauty that went with her full-curved body.

"Where can I find him?" I asked.

"I wish I knew. How do you know I once knew him?"

"I heard you were friendly. Not any more, huh?"

She walked toward me, stood in front of the chair I sat in. "I am an exotica," she said. "A dancer." She meant, I figured, that she did a strip act. She went on, "My body, it assures me a living, a job."

I didn't know what she was getting at, but I nodded.

"My body," she said, "it is good. It is to be proud of." She had been holding the thin robe around her; now she parted it, slid it down from her shoulders as she faced me.

She wore brief panties beneath, nothing else. And she did have a lovely body, full and voluptuously curving. Her breasts were large, firm, erect. I didn't know why she had so suddenly pulled the robe from her shoulders, but soon I understood.

Her flat stomach was a criss-cross of scratches where someone had played there with a sharp knife. "You see," she said. "That is from Jimmy. I hope you find him." She bit her lip. "My body he has made ugly. Ugly!" She pulled the robe back over her shoulders.

She sat in a chair before the dressing table and we talked for a few minutes. When she'd known Rath, he had lived in Arthur Hammond's house — but she didn't know where the house was. It seemed no one knew where the fat bastard lived. Except for that she couldn't help me, though she gave me a better picture of Rath himself.

"He is evil," she said. "Insanely evil. He bought me expensive things, but I could not stay. I was with him one month. The cuts, they are from the knife he carries always." She hesitated, then went on, "Even in bed. He would hold it here —" she pointed to her throat — "when he . . . at the moment when . . . " She didn't finish it, but I knew what she meant. After a pause she continued, as if she wanted to share what she knew with somebody else. "He wanted me to hurt him. He liked to hurt and be hurt. Twice he gave to me the knife, asking that I hurt him with it. Carefully, he would say, carefully. But I could not do it and he would become angry, frightening. Then one night, he did this to me." She touched her stomach.

She was quiet for a minute. I had already told her that if I found Rath I was going to break several of his bones, and she said, "If you do find him, remind him of this. Will you, for me?" Her fingers moved slowly over her stomach beneath her silk robe again. "It would help me," she said, "because there is inside me much hate for him."

"I'll remind him, Chatita. If there's time."

I started to get up normally, forgetting my bruises, and flopped back into the chair. The next try I made it moving slowly. Chatita stepped to me and took my arm, her face softening for the first time. "I did not know you were hurt so. You hate him as much as I, no?"

"Maybe more, honey." Her robe had fallen open, baring her breasts. I put my hands on her shoulders, caressed her gently and said, "You probably make the cuts worse in your mind than they really are, Chatita. To a man, they mean nothing. Believe me. You're a beautiful and desirable woman."

I could hear her breathing quicken as I continued to touch her. Her tongue moved over her lower lip. "Thank you," she said. "It is good of you, but it is not true."

"It is true."

Under different circumstances, I don't think I'd have got out of there before morning. But I left. Before she closed the door she smiled at me and said, "Thank you. Perhaps . . . perhaps it is true."

I grinned, said, "You bet it is," and staggered out of the place.

At two in the morning I gave up and went back to my room at the del Prado. I hadn't learned anything except what Chatita had told me, and by two o'clock I felt like a walking hamburger. I went to bed.

Getting up in the morning and getting dressed was a solid half-hour of agony. It had been bad enough before I slept, but now my muscles had stiffened and every movement was torture. I was two-hundred-plus pounds of pain — and hate. But the hate was stronger than the pain.

I walked around the room for another half an hour working my arms, bending, stretching gingerly, until I felt better. Then I had breakfast and started hunting again. I knew if everything else failed I could spot the men I wanted at the track, but there were no more races until Saturday. I checked the phone books again — no Hammond listed.

At five o'clock in the afternoon I came out of a bar on Bucareli. I'd heard it was a hangout for Kelly, and I'd hoped to get some information. All I got was blank stares. But I found Kelly — and Rath.

When I came out, they were waiting for me in the big Packard, a custom job with a low two-digit license plate which shouted that this was an important car and to keep out of its way. Kelly was behind the wheel and Rath stood outside, leaning against the door. When he saw me, he walked over to me.

The street was crowded, but the gripe and fury and hate boiled up inside me when I saw him and I reached for him.

He said sharply, "Hold it. You want the girls hurt?"

That stopped me. "What do you mean, you little pile of —"

"Watch it," he said. I didn't like the casual, confident way he was talking. He knew I could bend him till he broke, but he said, "We told you to beat it, Scott. You got no sense at all. Now listen. There's a plane out at seven. You be on it. You don't want nothing to happen to those girls, do you?"

"What girls?"

"Vera. And Elena Angel. You kind of like that Elena's pretty face — and things. Don't you, Scott? She's a real hot-looking tamale. Be a shame if something happened to her. It will, Scott, unless you get lost fast."

I wanted to get my hands on this guy so bad it was hard for me to think, but that penetrated. When it did, I started cooling down. My heart slowed and thudded heavily in my chest. But finally I realized he had me over a barrel. If I kept nosing around, I might get Vera and Elena hurt or killed. The thought of Rath getting his slimy hands on either one of them turned my stomach.

Rath said, "You get out tonight, and we leave the gals alone." He shook his head. "Sure hate to miss gettin' next to that Elena, though."

I grabbed him, jerked him to me. "You little bastard."

He swallowed, but he said, "So help me, they'll get it. Let go. Let go of me. They'll get it sure."

"All right. I'll quit. But if you lay a hand on either of them, I'll kill you."

He grinned. "Seven o'clock. There'll be somebody at the airport to make sure you blow." Rath climbed into the car and they left. I went back into the bar, got the bar phone and shooed the bartender away. It had occurred to me that Rath would hardly have been so cocky unless he already had one or both of the girls somewhere.

Elena didn't have a phone, but I called Vera's mother, got Vera and made sure she was all right. I told her to stay put, not go out alone, then hung up, grabbed a cab and told the driver to step on it. Sick worry built up in me and I kept seeing Elena's face, the dark eyes; I could almost feel the caress of her fingers and the cool pressure of her lips.

In lomas we stopped in front of the apartments and I ran up and banged on Elena's door. It was unlocked and swung open. The apartment was empty. One blue slipper lay inside the front door. One. Its mate was nowhere in the apartment. There didn't seem to be any sign of a struggle, but in the bedroom I found a blouse and skirt, bra and panties folded neatly on a chair under which were shoes and stockings. The bathroom door was open and I went inside. The floor was wet in and near the shower, and a wet towel hung from the rack.

Elena had been here not long ago. But her clothes were still outside on the chair. They must have forced their way in and taken her just the way she was, maybe in a robe or coat from the closet, something to cover her nakedness. And I still didn't have any idea where they might have gone. I knew I couldn't trust Rath — or any of them. If I left on that plane tonight, no telling what would happen to Elena. But if I didn't leave . . .

I went into the bedroom, sat on the edge of the bed. I'd already gone over half the town, asking questions, threatening, trying to buy or beg information, and I'd got nothing solid. There had to be some other way. I racked my brain — and thought of something. It was a two-digit license number that I remembered seeing on a custom Packard.

It took me an hour, and thirty-five hundred pesos, which was a lot of money, especially in Mexico. Over four hundred dollars, but it was worth it. I paid the money to a police officer and learned that the license plates had been issued to Arthur L. Hammond at an address in Cuernavaca — fifty miles away over a curving, dangerous road.

I rented the fastest car I could find and pushed the accelerator down all the way and kept it down except when not slowing down would be suicide. I couldn't be sure Elena would be at Hammond's, but it seemed likely. Chatita had told me Rath lived at Hammond's. I remembered the other things she'd told me too, and I thought with revulsion, almost with horror, of Rath's hands on Elena's soft body, his knife at her throat . . . his wet lips on her lips and flesh. I kept the accelerator down.

It's usually more than an hour's drive to Cuernavaca from Mexico, but I made it in forty minutes. My watch said seven-fifteen when I cut the car lights and coasted to a stop near the big house where I knew Hammond lived. Three minutes at a service station, after I told the attendant the address, had given me the location, but three minutes were three too many. They'd know by now that I hadn't left on that seven o'clock plane. I took out my gun and checked it. Driving had loosened my muscles, but the pain that had been with me all day was even worse, and I wanted to be able to move fast, without pain slowing me.

I took the morphine surette from my pocket, pulled up my sleeve, jammed the hollow needle into my arm and squeezed half of the morphine into my blood. I knew how it would affect me, that it would keep me keyed up, make me a little lightheaded, but it would kill the pain enough so I'd be nearly normal — and it wouldn't slow me down or blur my brain too much.

I got out of the car and walked through darkness toward the house. The Packard was parked in the driveway. Lights burned in the lower floor of the house, and thick vines covered the walls. I walked to the rear of the house, feeling the morphine working, easing the ache. My skin tingled slightly.

I heard a scream, suddenly stifled. It had come from the back of the house here, above me. On the second floor, light spilled from an open window and I heard a short cry again — from that room where lights blazed. Ugly pictures crawled in my mind as I stared at the lighted window, then I walked toward the wall beneath it. Vines covered the entire wall, but I didn't know if they'd support my weight. Like a lot of the Cuernavaca houses, this one had small terrazas or balconies at many of the windows, including the one I wanted to reach. I pulled at one of the vines and let my body hang from it. It sagged, rustling and scraping slightly against the wall, but it didn't break.

I was a bit lightheaded now, and buoyant. I felt incredibly strong, and I was completely unafraid of what might happen to me. I took off my shoes and pulled myself up the vines, finding spots to place my feet, straining upward with all my strength in my arms. It seemed to take hours instead of minutes, as if time had been distorted, but my outstretched hand touched the rim of the balcony and I wrapped my fingers around it, pulled myself up, and stepped over the rail.

I could see into the room, see part of a bed, a bare leg in my line of vision. I moved to my right, taking the .38 Colt from its holster. Elena lay naked on the bed, huddled against the headboard. There was fear in her eyes, and revulsion. The muscles along her flat stomach rippled with terror, and her breasts heaved as she drew in a frightened breath.

I couldn't see anybody else. With the revolver tight in my right hand I bent and went through the open window fast. Elena jerked on the bed and rolled to one side and I looked toward her as I stepped inside the room. But even as I looked in her direction I sensed, more than I saw, movement on my right. I spun around, bringing up the gun as Rath jumped toward me, his thin face twisted and ugly, and the gleaming knife in his right fist slashing up from his side toward my belly. Instinctively I thrust my hands at the slashing blade and felt the jar against my gun just before it slipped from my hand and fell to the floor.

Rath jerked his hand back, thrust at me again with the knife, and I stepped aside. It seemed that I had all the time in the world and as the point of the knife leaped at me I slapped my hand past its arc and clamped my fingers on Rath's thin wrist. My other hand shot to his elbow, jerked as I pressed downward on his wrist, and in the slow motion of my mind I saw the knife turn to point at his chest, my fingers slipping down to cover his hand and imprison the knife there as he shouted in sudden pain. I gripped his elbow tight, then shoved with all my strength against Rath's hand.

The hand went back, carrying the knife against his chest. Slowly the knife went in, slowly, an inch, then two, and it was as though no fine flesh and muscle and tendons were there to stop the thin steel as it sank deeper into his chest until at the end it was buried there.

Rath staggered back, his mouth twisted. Perhaps it was the drug in my veins, or the blood pounding in my head, but it seemed that his face grew an expression not of fright or terror, but of an almost unholy pleasure. His lips were pulled back from his teeth and his eyes were stretched wide. I remembered that Chatita had said Rath liked to be hurt, to feel pain, and he was feeling pain now, deadly pain.

He stood quite still for seconds, facing me as his hands crept up to the handle of the knife and tugged gently at it, then still with that odd, crazed expression on his face he fell forward to his knees. Slowly he toppled to the floor, the projecting knife handle holding him at a queer angle. It took him quite a while to die.

I forgot to tell him about Chatita, and I wished I'd remembered. Rath seemed to die too happy.

I picked up the .38 and turned to the bed, every sense and nerve in my body keyed up and tingling. Elena threw herself into my arms, buried her head in my shoulder, and let all the horror and revulsion come out of her in a steady stream of tears.

She whispered, "Shell. Oh, my God, Shell," and then she pressed herself against me and pulled me close, tight against her naked body.

She was a wild, hot, frenzied woman for a long minute, savagely alive in my arms, pressing against me, kissing me, clutching and caressing me with hands and breasts and body, as if she couldn't thank me enough, as if she was thanking me with everything she owned.

"Elena, honey," I said. "Who else is here?"

She pulled away from me, suddenly remembering where she was, suddenly remembering the danger around us.

"Hammond is here. That is all." She spoke in short phrases, her breathing as unsteady as my own. "Rath was . . . just getting ready to . . ." She shuddered. "I thought he was going to kill you with the knife. We heard something outside. I did not know what or who it was. When I saw you, I thought he would kill you."

I got off the bed, moved away from her, the gun in my hand again. "What about the others?"

"Hammond only is here. Downstairs. I do not know where." She paused. "Shell, what are you going to do?"

I grinned at her, the blood pounding through my veins, thundering in my head. "I'm going to kill him."

She licked her lips and stared at me, leaned back on the bed with her arms behind her, conical breasts thrusting forward, stomach sucked in sharply, the long smooth sweep of thigh and leg extending to the floor. She didn't speak.

I left her there and found stairs leading into darkness below me and I walked down them, almost floating, alive in every pore and atom of my being. Then there was a hallway, light seeping under a door. I opened the door, stepped quietly inside.

Arthur Hammond stood at a bookcase on my right, his back to me. On his left a few feet away was a polished desk. There was a snub-nosed revolver on its top, out of place and ugly against the gleaming wood. Hammond's coat was off and I could see the strap of a shoulder harness he was still wearing. He must have taken the gun from its holster and put it on the desk top once he was safe in his home. He hadn't yet heard me.

I pointed my gun at his back, thumbed the hammer on full cock, let my finger tighten ever so lightly on the trigger.

"Hammond," I said softly.

He turned, placing his finger between the pages of a book he held in his hands. "What?" He blinked at me. For an eternity he stared at me, uncomprehending, then his features slackened as if the muscles that held his face to the skull were dissolving beneath the skin. His jaw sagged, his pouchy cheeks drooped, and he began to tremble.

"No, no," he said, his voice quavering. "Wait. Please wait." I could hardly hear him; his voice was a whisper floating in the room.

"This is it, Hammond," I said. "For killing Pete Ramirez. For a lot of things that you've done."

"I didn't kill him. I didn't." He said the same thing five or six times, unable to take his eyes from the bore of the gun I pointed at him. My finger almost trembled on the trigger. The gun had a soft pull and I knew just a breath more pressure and the hammer would fall, the pin would strike, the slug would rip into Hammond's fat, quivering body. He knew it too. He kept talking, repeating the same words over many times, but he never stopped, as if he knew that once he stopped speaking, a bullet would slam into him, rip into his heart or his brain.

"I didn't kill him. It was a drug. In the gum. It couldn't kill him. Please. It was Rath, he gave it to him, put it in his pocket after he hit him. The kid wasn't supposed to get killed, just lose the race. I had to make him lose."

"But it killed him, Hammond, as surely as if you'd shot him. He might have died even if he hadn't fallen."

That was the first time I'd spoken for quite a while, and it seemed to break the almost hypnotic spell that had gripped him. He put his hands out in front of him and moved sideways a little — toward the desk.

He reached to his cheek and pinched it hard, unconscious of the movement. "Let me go, Scott," he said.

"No."

"I haven't done anything. You were right about the races, but I didn't mean to kill Ramirez. I had to win. I'd already wired the name of the winner, Ladkin, to the men in Los Angeles. He had to win. They'd have killed me." He kept moving slowly toward his desk. His body hid the gun from my sight now, but his hands were still in front of him.

"What men in Los Angeles, Hammond?"

He gave me some names, rapidly. They didn't mean anything to me — but they would to Cookie Martini. Then he said, "I'll make you rich if you let me go, Scott. We pick the winner here and bet on the other horses to make the odds right. There's books in the States, and some here, that take Mexico bets. There's millions in it. I'll make you rich." His right hand rested on the edge of the desk behind him.

"How do you pick the winner, Hammond?" Just a little more time, I thought. He was going to try it soon. He kept edging closer to the gun.

"We know from friends, when a horse is ready for a good race. About the jockeys, we . . . bought a couple. One other was married, stepping out with a chippie, and we held that over him. Ramirez was just . . . a mistake, Scott, a bad break." He was getting some of his nerve back now. "Listen, Scott," he said. "Be sensible. You can take me in to the cops, but they won't keep me. You know Valdez? He won't let a rap stick. He'll cover for me, fix any charges. There's no proof anyway. You can't win, Scott. And I'll give you a hundred thousand dollars."

"That's not enough." His hand was out of sight behind him now; I knew he had his hand on the gun, was just working his nerve, pushing himself to the point where he could make his try. And I knew Hammond was telling the truth. I couldn't make a charge against him stick. Not here. And Valdez would get him out of any mess I got him into.

"I'll give you more, anything, anything you want."

"It's not enough."

He bit his lips. "You're a fool, Scott. Every man has a price. You've got a price, too, I know it." His voice got higher and louder as he kept on. "You're stupid, stupid. I can pay you; you're —"

It was a fool thing to do, but he did it. He dropped suddenly to the floor, his face as frightened as any face I've seen, but he swept the gun out in front of him, firing before the gun was pointed within a yard of me. He would have kept on firing, too, but I put that extra breath of pressure on the .38's trigger and it roared and flame spat toward Hammond's belly. He jerked as the slug struck and then I fired again, saw the small hole appear over his heart.

He slumped back against the desk and his head fell forward. He still had the gun in his hand, though, and I couldn't take any chances. I shot him in the head. Yeah, that was sure a damn-fool thing for Hammond to do. But I had to pull the trigger. I had to defend myself. Hell, he was going to shoot me.

He didn't move any more. He wouldn't. I couldn't help thinking that Hammond had been right: like everybody else I had my price; he'd just paid it. And I also thought that Valdez or Rath would have a hell of a time getting Hammond out of this mess.

There were still a few tag ends, including Kelly and the other strong-arm boy, but they could wait. I left Hammond on the floor and went out, back up the stairs. Most of all, I wanted to get the hell out of there before any of the boys showed up. Taking care of them was one thing. Meeting them in their own back yard was another. I ran up the stairs quickly.

When I opened the door, Elena was still on the bed but her hands were pressed tightly against her eyes. I shut the door behind me. Slowly she took her hands from her eyes and looked at me. She looked at me for a long time as the fright left her face. When she spoke her voice was tight.

"I'm going to pieces, Shell. I was going crazy. I heard shots. I . . . thought it might be you. And I wanted you to come back to me." She bit her lips, moved slightly on the bed, light gleaming dully on her nakedness.

"Get a coat on," I said. "Fast. We've got to get the hell out of here."

I was still feeling high, the blood still rushing through my veins and setting up a terrible din in my head. She grabbed a coat from the closet, a man's raincoat, shivered into it, and took one last look at Rath, dead and bloody on the floor.

"Let's go," she said, turning away. "Let's get the hell out of here, Shell. . . . "

She still was wearing the raincoat much later, but it wasn't covering a hell of a lot of her. It was open at the throat, spread in a wide V that gashed down to the tightly belted waist. Her legs were tucked under her sofa, in her apartment, and I was sitting next to her and marveling about the wonderful raincoats they were turning out these days.

The drug had worn off now, but who the hell needed it any more? I leaned toward her, pulling her close to me. She ran a hand over the tape on my chest.

Her face was an inch from mine when she said softly, her eyes heavy-lidded and her mouth slack with passion, "You are hurt. But I will be careful with you, my Shell. You will see."

I pulled her tight against me, kissed the corner of her mouth, her cheek, then with my lips against her ear I whispered, "Elena, honey, be as careless as you like."

THE END

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1957 by Fawcett Publications, Inc.

Copyright renewed 1985 by Richard S. Prather

Cover design by Open Road Integrated Media

ISBN 978-1-4804-9881-5

This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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Table of Contents

SINNER’S ALLEY

CODE 197

THE BUILD-UP

TROUBLE SHOOTER

MURDER’S STRIP TEASE

THE SLEEPER CAPER