Black Mask Magazine (Vol. 30, No. 2 — July 1947)

Johnny Dillon was just looking for a bite to eat at the Blue Valley Inn — and never guessed that murder topped the menu. Not that he disapproved the killing of Harvey Costain, for compared to the notorious mouthpiece a rat was the King of Beasts. But he did think the killer showed very poor taste in using Johnny’s rod for the job.

Chapter One Soft Lights and Sweet Murder

A gusty wind boomed bleakly against the courthouse windows. When I got outside, trees were thrashing about in it and raindrops were pelting away the last dry patches on the sidewalk.

At the Ventura city limits, the sky opened up. Heavy sheet rain slogged the car and sluiced flatly down the windshield for over an hour. By the time it slacked off, I was still twenty miles from Los Angeles and half starved. My strap-watch said seven-thirty.

I yawned, just to break the monotony, and fished for a cigarette. Suddenly, a pair of oncoming headlights appeared to be swerving over the centerline at me.

I hit my brakes. My tires agonized on the wet pavement. The heap skidded until a rear wheel caught on rough shoulder gravel. It slewed the other way. A front wheel grabbed. I bounced and jolted and ground to a stop. A blinding glare raked my windshield and a sleek block-long convertible with a snugly fitted light-colored top swooshed through a puddle a few yards ahead of my front bumper, and careened up a side road towards the foothills.

I cursed its vanishing tail-lights at the top of my lungs. After a while, I stopped that and got a cigarette lit and kicked my stalled motor alive. The windshield wipers began to function again.

Two fat whitewashed adobe pillars guarded the side road. A rustic sign, arched between these, said Blue Valley Inn. I backed up, shifted, crawled ahead and swung in beneath the arch.

The road twisted, dipped and climbed through a grove of gnarled live oak trees, for about a quarter of a mile, to a narrow mesa, close against the foothills. In the middle of a lot of neglected garden stood a rambling old frame hotel with white scrolled porches, tricky little balconies above and red shingled turrets. A single light on a high pole shone dimly on the wet tops of a cluster of parked cars. I found a slot, next to a long black convertible with a light-colored top, and tooled into it.

The rain was little more than a drifting mist now. I got out of the heap. There was nobody in the convertible. Its radiator shell was still warm to my hand. I opened the door on the driver’s side. The name in the registration holder on the steering-shaft was Harvey L. Costain. It had a faintly familiar ring — and a Brentwood Heights address. I clicked the convertible door shut.

A graveled path led past rows of empty tennis courts and the dark ripple of water in a deserted swimming pool. I went up steps to a wide veranda. Draped windows leaked light on porch furniture stacked along the inner edge of the veranda out of the rain. A pair of tall double doors, in from the steps, had long ovals of etched glass in them and light behind the glass. One of the doors was opened from the inside by a tall Negro in a white mess jacket and gloves.

Soft lights and muted rumba music filled the lobby. It had solid old beams overhead and dark paneled walls. Logs blazed in a huge stone fireplace on the left. Across the room, beside a desk with its switchboard and mailboxes, wide carpeted stairs went up into darkness. Here and there on the polished oak floor were white bear rugs in front of tapestried lounges. About half of the customers wore evening clothes.

The tall Negro flashed teeth at me, nodded and closed the door with a delicate flourish. A sloe-eyed check girl with beautiful naked shoulders took my hat and gave me a slip of pasteboard for it and a look that froze the leer on my face. I fumbled out a dollar bill and dropped it on a plate. The music seemed to be coming from a shadowy room beyond a draped arch.

I ambled that way.

A hard-faced captain of waiters placed a fistful of leather-bound menus against my chest and said: “No tables. Sorry.”

“I’m hungry enough to eat off the floor,” I told him. “In fact, I could almost eat the floor, with a little mustard on it.”

He was not amused. “Others are waiting,” he sneered, and pawed the lobby with his eyes, crooked a finger at someone behind me.

“Will there be a table later?” I asked politely.

“Perhaps,” he shrugged, and wheeled back into the blue shadows. Some people drifted past me, trailing him. I followed for a step or two and watched them get seated.

A gold light slashed the deep blue of the dining room and a guitar player in a green velvet suit got up from his place with the orchestra. Several couples were struggling around on a small space of floor in front of the band platform. The guitar player let his instrument hang by its silk tasseled neck cord and grabbed the floor microphone for some solo work. The gold spotlight gave him an embalmed appearance.

The captain of waiters came back.

“How about putting my name down?” I asked.

“Yes, of course,” he said, raising his arm to signal again. I touched the arm, put enough weight on it to hold it down. “The name is John Dillon,” I said. “Let’s see you write it.”

“I’ll remember it,” he snapped, and jerked his arm free.

“By the way, did Harvey Costain get here yet?” I asked.

His eyes defrosted. “Are you a friend of Mr. Costain, sir?”

I smiled coldly.

“Even Mr. Costain has to wait, we’re that crowded,” he said, apologetically. “He’s in the cocktail lounge, if you care to join him, sir.” He pointed to the far end of the dining room.

“Thanks,” I said. “I’ll wait there, but I’m eating alone tonight. Try this for speed.” I passed him a tightly folded dollar bill and headed for the bar.

A deep-toned wall speaker brought the orchestra into the cocktail lounge. I settled on a leather-cushioned bar stool. One of the white-clad barmen was busy among the tables. The other one was serving a big-shouldered, black-haired man at the end of the bar. A slender girl with dark hair tumbling in soft waves down the back of her pale dinner dress sat next to the big-shouldered man staring moodily into her empty cocktail glass.

A huge blunt-fingered hand gripped my arm. A heavy, handsome face topped by crisp curly blond hair grinned down at me. “As I live and breathe, it’s Johnny Dillon. Long time no see. Where in hell you been keeping yourself, boy?”

“Well, well, Duke Mazonik. Hi, Duke,” I said, shaking the big paw. “I’ve been here and I’ve been there. In the Army four years. In town almost six months now. How’s police work?”

“Turned in my badge over a year ago.” He spread both hands flat on the bar top. “I’m making ten times the dough now.”

“Glad to hear it. The drinks are on you.”

“Sure. They’re on the house. Name yours.”

“Don’t tell me that you own this joint.”

“Gosh, no. Tony Zarsella is boss here.”

“Tony Zarsella? The gambler?”

“Yeah. You know him, huh?”

“About him,” I said dryly. “He used to work for another gambler, a man named Lew Gannon, out on the Strip. As a croupier or dealer or something. I hardly remember it now, but there was some stink at the time. I heard Gannon fired Zarsella for making his tables pay too well. Don’t ask me why.”

“Aw, don’t believe all you hear.” Mazonik grinned again, a faintly sheepish grin this time. “He’s in business for himself, now. Game rooms upstairs and everything. He’s got a nice setup here. I kind of keep an eye on things for him.”

A barman drifted over. He rested both hands on the inner edge of the bar and lowered his head and looked up through his eyebrows at me. “Rye, straight,” I said. Mazonik nodded and held up two fingers.

“What brings you to this den of evil?” Mazonik asked amiably.

“Hunger and thirst and a close shave,” I said.

“You sound like you’ve had a couple snorts already.”

“I had business up Ventura way today and a near head-on crash on the way home — out where your road turns in off the valley boulevard, only I didn’t know it was your road at the time. I got stalled there. Then I saw the sign and figured maybe I could get a little food up this way — so here I am.”

“Think of that. Still in the private eye racket?”

I nodded. Shot glasses clicked on the bar in front of us. They looked to be about twice the usual size and I said so. Mazonik winked at me. The barman filled the glasses to the brim without batting an eye and went away again.

“Lead in your gun,” Mazonik said cheerfully, and picked up his drink. I touched the other one. “Who is Harvey Costain?” I asked.

He lowered his drink and set it back on the bar, very gently. His eyes narrowed quizzically. “Is there a guy in your racket who don’t know?” he asked, in a soft, almost husky voice.

“Sure,” I said. “Me. The name’s familiar, but I can’t quite place it.”

“The mouthpiece,” he grunted. “You could almost spit in his eye from where you sit, only we don’t allow that sort of thing in here.”

My memory sharpened as I looked along the bar at the big-shouldered man next to the girl in the pale dinner dress. Harvey Costain had just begun to make a name for himself as the highest bidder’s attorney when the Japs hit Pearl Harbor. Now, he had a rather puffy countenance and looked somewhat drunk, in a quietly sullen way. He was too far away to hear our conversation, but I lowered my voice just to be on the safe side.

“He has nice taste,” I said. “Looks like she’s with him, anyway. His wife?”

“Yeah, she’s with him,” the big blond man grumbled in my ear. “She ain’t his wife, though. A torcher. Calls herself Gail Tremaine.”

The girl turned her head, met my stare for a brief moment, looked into her drink again. Her lips moved: Costain faced her suddenly. Even in that dim light you could see the mean glitter in his eyes. He planted a rough hand on her shoulder and pushed her backwards off the bar stool. She yelped, not loudly, and her body hit the lounge floor with a muffled thud. Women at the tables gasped. Costain curled his lip at them.

By the time I reached that end of the bar, the girl was on her feet, brushing absently at the folds of her skirt. Costain saw me behind him and stood up.

“I’m kind of old-fashioned,” I drawled. “I think you have the silliest puss I ever saw in my life.”

“It’ll pay you to mind your own business, farmer,” he sneered thickly.

I rapped a light left jab into his ribs. His chin came down, I cocked my right hand and started to throw it. A bolt of lightning cracked the walls of the cocktail lounge and hit me in the head. It flared through me. Thunder trailed it. The thunder rumbled, died. I found myself high in the air above the earth, falling rapidly. I hit the ground with a hard jar. It got dark and cold.

A tiny moon appeared in the sky. It began to grow. It grew until its rays spread a pinkish white glow over everything. Then a cloud drifted across the sky and blotted it out. I opened my eyes.

Gleaming white even teeth hung a couple of feet above my face. Heavy latin lips framed the teeth. The features above the lips were dark and latin. Hard black intelligent eyes went with the features. They watched me briefly, went away. Lamplight smacked me full in the eyes. I groaned, turned my head. My neck felt stiff.

Duke Mazonik’s blond wool and tanned handsome face leaned over me and said: “How you feeling, boy?”

“Terrible,” I growled. “Get the number of that truck?”

“Strictly corny,” he chuckled. “You’re O.K., John.”

I sat up.

We were in a long wide room with dark drapes over a row of windows and, across from them, a cheery blaze in a small neat brick fireplace. There was some rather modernistic furniture around. It included a large shiny walnut desk and a leather davenport. I was on the davenport.

The dark latin-faced man came over and shoved about three fingers of amber fluid in the bottom of a tall glass at me. I took it. My throat warmed up as the amber fluid slid down. A glow filled my stomach, spread, eased the stiffness in my neck. I gave him back the glass, rubbed my mouth with my hand.

“Meet the boss, John,” Mazonik said. “Tony Zarsella, Johnny Dillon. I’d like for you guys to like each other.”

I nodded, stood up, touched the side of my head, winced. A lump the size of a robin’s egg had risen behind my left ear. It burned under the pressure of my fingers.

“What did hit me?” I asked.

The big blond man grinned sheepishly again as he pulled a leather covered pocket sap out of his coat. He held it up for me to look at. “Me,” he admitted.

“What in hell for?” I snapped.

“Duke tells me you’re a private dick,” Zarsella said silkily.

“Yeah, and he used to be a cop,” I growled. “Also it might’ve been a nice day today, except it rained. So I get hit in the head.”

“A good dick needs a cool head,” Zarsella remarked dryly.

“Is that so?” I snarled. “Well, mine’s been O.K. so far.”

“Take it easy, boy,” Mazonik said earnestly. “I had to do it.”

“A good dick should control his temper better,” Zarsella said. He sat down behind the big walnut desk. Mazonik dropped the sap back in his pocket, showed me the palms of his hands and shrugged at me. I rubbed my head and winced again.

“Mr. Harvey Costain spends a great deal of money here,” Zarsella said, almost musingly. Among other things, the desk had a hand-beaten copper humidor on it. He lifted the lid, plucked out a thick cigar, rolled it gently between his fingers, sniffed at it, replaced the lid. “In my business, it doesn’t pay to let roughnecks maul the heavy spenders.”

“So that’s it,” I said nastily. “So Harvey Costain can blow his nose on the crap tables all he wants to, as long as he blows plenty of the long green along with what else comes out. And if he feels like it, he can push his lady friend in the face, too, huh?”

“He never pushed her in the face,” Mazonik said, in a bleak tone of voice.

“He pushed her,” I said harshly. “What do you want — blood?”

“It was his lady friend,” Zarsella drawled. “It never pays to mix in other people’s troubles, Dillon.”

“You guys make me sick,” I sneered. “Let me out of here.”

“Gosh, don’t be sore at me, boy,” Mazonik pleaded. His face was flushed. His eyes looked almost angry. Hard lights glinted in them.

“Where’s the fire escape?” I growled. “I smell smoke.”

Zarsella smiled thinly, shrugged. Mazonik stared bleakly at me and turned his head, finally, and jutted his chin at one of several doors the room had. I walked over, yanked it open and went out.

Closed doors with nothing but thick silence behind them lined the hallway on both sides. It was still too early for the sporting crowd to show. The hallway ended at a wide carpeted stairs. A chubby, pink-faced man wearing a tuxedo sat at the PBX switchboard behind the lobby desk. He raised his eyes and watched me come down the stairs. The hard-faced head waiter was standing in the dining room archway watching nothing.

In the dimness behind him, rumba notes still fluttered around like bats in the rafters. I slapped my hat check down so hard the slot-eyed check girl almost lost her haughty manner. She handed me my hat without dropping it. The tall Negro opened the door for me with the same smile and delicate flourish as before.

A sudden gust of wind almost blew me off the veranda. It was raining again. Hunger still gnawed inside me. My stomach felt as if it had shrunk to the size of a dried prune. I settled my hat around my ears, hunched up my coat collar and lunged down the veranda steps.

The light on the high pole was almost invisible and the graveled path was an inch under water now. I reached the heap in a hurry and stopped dead in my tracks.

Clutching my left door handle for support, the girl in the pale dinner dress was just standing there, staring into the long black convertible with the light-colored top. Her other hand clutched some sort of wrap, or coat, which dragged on the ground. The rain had plastered her hair to her head and the sides of her face. Her dress was soaked. It looked as thin as paint.

I peered into the convertible. Harvey Costain was in there, hunched over the steering wheel, out cold. I jerked my door open, grabbed the girl by the arm. She shuddered. A whimpering noise gurgled in her throat. She dropped the wrap. I picked it up.

“Inside, fast,” I barked. “You’ll have six kinds of pneumonia. I’ll get you home. Hurry it up.”

She didn’t move, or speak. I threw the wrap into the heap and pushed her in after it. Then I slammed the door and turned back to the convertible, climbed inside.

Something cold that wasn’t rain water trickled down my spine when I touched Costain. I shook him, put a hand under his chin, heaved him against the back of the seat. He was all dead weight. Half of the whites of his eyes showed starkly beneath his partially lowered eyelids. His coat lapels were parted enough for me to see the dark stain on his white shirt front.

He was not drunk. He was dead.

I let go of him. He flopped forward onto the steering wheel again. His nose hit the chromium horn ring. The horn let go, blasting the whispering quiet of the parking lot into shreds. I jumped at him, pushed his face off the wheel. The horn quit.

I found the dash-light switch, gave it a twist. I couldn’t find any guns, large or small, so I doused the switch and got out of the convertible.

The girl didn’t look at me as I slid under the wheel of my own car. Her large, dark, frightened eyes stared straight ahead through the windshield. She was shaking like a last lost leaf in a storm. Her breath came and went noisily between chattering teeth.

“Who killed him?” I asked sharply, pressing the starter.

She didn’t answer. I switched on my lights, backed out of the slot, shifted gears. “O.K.,” I said. “Where do you live?”

Still no answer. She looked half dead herself. I gunned the motor.

Chapter Two Shower of Death

A youngish man wearing thick-lensed eyeglasses, with a stethoscope protruding from the side pocket of his white jacket, came into the small waiting room. There was a printed form card in his hand.

I picked my shirt, dry now, off the steam radiator and put it on and began buttoning it up.

“Shock and exposure,” the man said. “What’s her name?”

“Gail Tremaine,” I told him. “That’s what the registration holder in her car had on it. I forget the address.”

“A couple of fanny bruises,” he said, in a dry professional voice. “Otherwise she doesn’t seem to have been hurt. What happened?”

“Another car sideswiped her, up near the pass on Cahuenga. I don’t think she was hurt much, either. A tire blew out on her car. That’s hell, a night like this.”

He nodded and stared thoughtfully at me, flicking a corner of the form card with his thumbnail. I finished buttoning my shirt and tucked it into my pants.

“I have to make some kind of a report,” he said. “How close were you?”

“To the accident?”

He nodded again.

“Fifty yards or so. I passed her and then had to back up. The other car didn’t stop. I wasn’t the other car, if that’s what you are thinking.”

He shook his head. “Not at all,” he said. “I’d like to have your name, though — just for the records.” He unshipped a pen.

I dug a card out of my wallet — not one of mine. I didn’t even remember the face of the man who had given it to me. The medico read it, placed it carefully on the table beside the form card and began copying the name. When he had done that, he waved the form card in the air to set the ink. I shrugged into my coat, buttoned that, and reached for my hat.

He re-read what he had written. “A. A. Steele, Insurance Indemnity Limited, eh? Canadian?”

“Not me,” I said. “I’m just their L.A. contact.”

“I see. No idea where she lives, eh?”

“No idea,” I said, truthfully.

He frowned, faintly. “She must have friends,” he said. He chewed his lip, thought, then shrugged and said: “She ought to be all right by morning. I don’t suppose we’ll have to bother you about anything.”

“Thanks,” I said. He gave me back the insurance man’s card. I stuffed it into my pocket and went into the corridor and along it to big glass doors at the end.

I stood outside, under the sheltering canopy, to light a cigarette and watch the rain for a moment. The night air had a smell of dead leaves and moist earth. A thousand drops hit to form wet little humps on a lighted square of pavement. Water gurgled in the gutters. I shrugged up my collar again and dashed out from the shelter.

The door of my car opened before I touched it. A gun muzzle poked itself into my face. A gruff voice said: “Get in before you drown.” The gun receded. I slid in under the wheel, pulled the door shut. The face beside me was just a vague blur in the depths of a raincoat collar under a pulled-down hat brim.

There was nothing vague or blurry about the gun. It was like a rock in his hand. “Where to?” I asked him.

“Drive on,” he grunted. “Turn when told.”

The car was pointed north, toward Hollywood Boulevard, so I tooled away from the curb and we crept forward. A starter whined, behind us. Headlights came on and crawled along on our tail. At the boulevard, I got a grunt and a wave of the gun, so I turned left and drove west.

The tag hung on about thirty yards back. Two more turns put us on Santa Monica, going west again. A traffic light stopped us. The tag closed in and became a close harsh glare on my wet rear windows. “Friends?” I asked.

No answer.

A block and a half beyond the La Cienega intersection, where the inter-urban car tracks split the street into a double right-of-way, there was a wide, empty lot beside an abandoned store building. The gun nudged my ribs. “This is it, bo,” the gunman growled. I swung into the empty lot.

We parked in the darkness of a dilapidated storage shed at the rear. “Out,” he said. I got out on my side. He followed me with the gun. The tag didn’t come into the shed. I saw its lights cruise past the empty lot. Then the wall of the store building cut them off.

Rain drummed on the roof of the shed, leaked through here and there and dripped steadily into ground puddles. The gunman stepped close to me, patted me over. I wasn’t wearing a gun, but before heading for Ventura that day, I had tucked one into the stash-away holster up under the dash panel of my car, just above the steering shaft. He made no move to search the car.

“Mind telling me what this is all about?” I asked him.

“Keep the lip buttoned and nobody gets hurt,” he growled.

“That’s nice to know,” I said. “Mind if I smoke?”

“Naw,” he grunted. “Go ahead.”

I dug out another cigarette. Even in the match flare, I couldn’t see much of his face. I lit the cigarette, smoked quietly until I had finished it, dropped it and stepped on it. About five minutes more passed and then another pair of headlights came along the street, the way we had come, turned into the empty lot, but did not come back to the shed. They blinked off and the motor of the car died. Its door opened. A figure climbed out of it and plodded toward the shed.

The gunman raised his voice enough to reach the figure.

“All set?”

“Yeah.” The figure halted and spoke in a muffled tone.

The gunman dangled my ignition keys in front of my face.

“These’ll be out there on the sidewalk,” he said. “Don’t try no funny stuff until we’re gone.” His gun covered me while he backed out of the shed. The other man made a low-voiced remark. The gunman turned and the two of them ran.

I jumped for my car, shoved my hand up under the dash panel. The stashed holster was still there — empty. The gun was gone. Out in front of the store building, a car motor roared briefly and faded. After that it was quiet again and lonely and there was only the whisper of the gusting wind and the rain beating on the roof of the shed.

My keys were on the city sidewalk all right. By the time I found them in front of the store. I was soaked to the skin. I went back into the side lot and walked over to the other parked car. It was Harvey Costain’s convertible. I opened the door for a brief moment, saw him still in there, still very very dead, and closed it again. Then I went back and got my car out of the shed and drove home.

A long hot steamy shower took the ice out of my bones. I stood in it until my pores were all open and the perspiration was oozing freely. In a little while my muscles all felt long and loose and limber. I spent a quick minute under cold water and turned it off. When I was dry again, I made a loin cloth of the towel and padded into the kitchenette for a drink.

One shot out of the flat bottle called for two. I was thinking about having a third when the phone rang. I padded back into the living room to answer it.

“Dillon?” a voice asked. I grunted and thought about the voice, trying to place it. I didn’t sound anything like my gunman friend or the figure who had driven Costain to the empty lot on Santa Monica. This voice had a nasal twang to it.

“Missing any guns?” It asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “One. You have it, huh?”

“You bet. It’s been fired, too.”

“Uh-huh. Now tell me Harvey Costain was killed with it some time tonight.”

“You guessed it, wise guy. The cops’ll be looking for it. All you got to do is forget you ever heard of Costain. Keep away from his girl friend, too. That way you got nothing to worry about.”

“Suppose I talk in my sleep some night?”

“The cops get the gun, sucker. So long.”

There was a dry faraway click on the line. I listened to wire hum for several seconds before recradling the phone. The hands of the electric clock on the radio table pointed almost to 3 A.M.

A wave of giddiness passed over me. I cackled out loud. To hell with the hard boys. To hell with Harvey Costain. To hell with the cops. Two drinks and I was higher than the birds that fly. I was big and hard and tough and hadn’t a worry in the world. Nothing solid had gone into my stomach for almost fifteen hours. I decided to look in the refrigerator.

I looked. The refrigerator held five eggs. That was all. The breadbox was empty. I broke the eggs into a tall glass. Then I emptied what whiskey was left in the flat bottle, almost half a pint, on top of the eggs. I stirred the mixture in the glass with a kitchen knife, turned out the lights and took the glass into the bedroom. I sat on the edge of the bed with it and guzzled until it was empty. I reached for a cigarette, thought about lighting it.

Sunlight smacked my eyes, when I opened them, and all but petrified my eyeballs. I was flat on my back, crosswise on the bed, with an empty egg-smeared glass in one hand and an unlighted cigarette in the other. The night lamp beside the bed was still on. The bedroom windows were closed but the shades were up. My mouth felt as if it was full of dry moldy cotton.

I sat up. My brain came loose from the back of my head and rolled forward and bounced against the inside of my forehead. When the throbbing died down a little, I set the egg glass on the night table under the lamp and reached a match and lit the cigarette. It tasted like old socks burning in my mouth. By sheer will power and cautious footwork I made it into the bathroom.

Another long hot shower followed by a quick cold one put enough strength in my arms to lift a safety razor. I shaved and dressed and drove down to the boulevard for a lumberjack’s breakfast in a place near the building my office is in. After that I bought a newspaper and went up to the office to read it.

Harvey Costain’s murder was on page one. His body had been found about four o’clock in the morning when a patrol car squad stopped to investigate a parked car in an empty lot out on west Santa Monica Boulevard. A slug from a thirty-eight automatic had been extracted from his left lung. The gun from which the slug had been fired had not been found.

Costain’s movements, up until about seven o’clock of the previous evening but not after, had been traced. His whereabouts for the next nine hours seemed to be something of a mystery.

He had left his offices in the Los Angeles Counselors’ Building on Hill Street near Fifth at three in the afternoon. According to his Filipino house-boy, he had reached his home in Brentwood Heights about four, dressed for the evening and had gone out again. Later he had been seen drinking alone at the bar of the Club Borracha on the Sunset Strip. Witnesses, names withheld, thought that he seemed slightly intoxicated and a bit surly when he left the Club Borracha around seven.

That seemed to be about all that the police knew at the moment — or were dishing out. There was no mention of Gail Tremaine anywhere in the story. It included a few other names, however, and told something about Costain’s past personal history. I chewed over the names. Some I knew and some I didn’t. They fell into three categories. Crook names. Rich names. Movie names. So far as I could tell, Costain had gotten them all off with verdicts of not guilty. The last of these trials was almost two years old. I skimmed rapidly through the stuff about his early life. Among the details were the facts that he was a Harvard man and a bachelor.

I folded the newspaper and dropped it into the wastebasket. I had a short quick drink out of the office bottle, to take the knots out of my neck, and lit a cigarette and settled down to do some serious thinking. At the end of an hour, I gave that up as a bad job, strapped on my spare gun — a thirty-eight automatic and mate to the one I was missing — and left the office.

The desk nurse at the emergency hospital was a hatchet-faced old battle axe who told me that she was only on duty days and knew nothing about anyone named Miss Gail Tremaine. Furthermore, I was holding up a stretcher case that was just then coming along the corridor. I slunk out of there with my hat in my hand.

It was a nice day, if you happen to care for cool bright sunny days, and the hills above Hollywood had that clear green look that comes after a heavy rain. A mud-spattered taxicab was parked in front of a cab zone sign, just beyond the ambulance driveway. Its driver snoozed peacefully behind its wheel.

I opened the rear door of the cab, shut it, then leaned against the outside of the front door on the passenger’s side. The window was down.

The cabby snorted, shook himself awake, swiveled his head to look at the back seat, eyed me suspiciously. “Take you somewhere, bud?” he asked, gruffly.

“That depends,” I said. “I got a phone call from a friend that she was in a slight accident and was here in the emergency hospital. I got delayed on the way over. Now it seems she has already been discharged.”

“A sad story, bud,” he said, not impolitely. “I feel for you.”

“She didn’t have her own car. I was thinking, she might have left in a cab.”

He yawned enormously and massaged his right shoulder with the thick dirty-nailed fingers of his left hand. He didn’t say anything. I dug out my billfold and extracted a five dollar bill and tucked the billfold away again. He looked at the bill and his eyes brightened.

“Could you change this?” I asked.

The brightness faded from his eyes. After a long moment, he fished some bills out of the pocket of his leather jacket, handed me five ones for the five, put his money away again. I fanned the ones out and held them like a poker hand.

“How long have you been at this stand?” I asked.

“Ever since I got out of the Army,” he said, in a flat voice. “When I learn to quit driving this tub like a tank, they’re gonna gimme a better one.”

“I mean today, this shift,” I said evenly.

“Since six A.M. That’ll be a buck.”

“Not so fast. You the only cab here?”

“Only one regular. I made a dozen trips between six and eight. That’s when they discharge the drunks and wild party champs. Describe your friend.”

“Dark hair, slender, light-colored dress.”

“Would you call her a looker?”

I nodded and dropped one of the bills on the cab seat. He looked at it without touching it, grimaced, as if remembering anything for longer than five minutes gave him a headache. I dropped another bill.

“Was she wearing a kind of fur jacket? Looked like it had been washed in a mud hole and not ironed afterwards?”

“That might be,” I said, shortly. “I told you she was in an accident last night, or early this moaning.”

“O.K., bud, don’t get sore. Most of the business I get here looks kind of bunged up. I just wanna be sure I had the right party.” He covered the bills with his hand. “She gimme a Yucca Street address, the Villa Morocco Apartments, near Wilcox. About six-fifteen I’d say that was, just after I come on the job.”

“Thanks,” I said, and turned abruptly and walked back along the street to my car.

Chapter Three Policemen Are Funny

The Villa Morocco was one of those Monterey type buildings with a cool green private jungle in the inner court. All of the apartments opened on the court and there was a dark wood balcony jutting out from white stucco walls for the upstairs tenants. In the heart of the jungle, water gurgled pleasantly in a tile-trimmed fountain.

It had a small intimate lobby off the entrance tunnel with a bare tessellated floor, rough antiqued plaster walls, majolica sand jars here and there and potted palms for the tourist trade. Heavy wormy-walnut chairs and settees gave it that final touch.

A pale-eyed desk clerk with a mascara darkened mustache patted at his breast pocket handkerchief rather self-consciously and said: “Your name, please, and whom did you wish to see?”

“Miss Gail Tremaine is whom,” I said. “Tell her it’s her cousin.”

He almost looked at me then. He said: “I’ll see if she is in, if you’d care to be seated.”

“What’s being seated got to do with it?” I asked him.

His small rosebud of a mouth twitched. He grabbed out the pocket handkerchief, coughed into it, very delicately, tore his eyes off my necktie, stared intently at my hat, as if trying desperately to recall what it was he had to do.

“You could give me her apartment number,” I suggested. “I could find it by myself — and kind of surprise her.”

“Oh, no,” he breathed, in a shocked voice. “That would not do at all. No one is allowed unannounced in here. After all, the guests pay for privacy.”

“And time for any strays to slip down the back stairs,” I grinned, archly. “That’s O.K., chum, but hurry it up.”

“I’m afraid I must have your name,” he insisted coldly.

“She might not recognize it,” I said. “It’s been a long time.”

If he touched any kind of a buzzer button, it was with his foot, because I didn’t see him move. A paneled door to the left of the PBX switchboard opened. The man who lounged out of the room behind the door had thick black eyebrows and a broad flat nose in the middle of a face that was as round as, and battered copper kettle. He weighed around two-fifty, with most of the weight at his belt line, and wore dark clothes. Dark blue suit, dark brown shirt, dark necktie. He didn’t look at me. “The dame in fourteen-B snuck her pooch in again,” he said to the deskman.

“Heavens,” the clerk groaned. “Not again.”

“Yeah. So I warned her for the last time. So she slipped me ten. So I give her a couple of hours to feed it and take it back to the farm. That’s five I owe you.”

“I hate to break up all this high finance,” I said.

The big moonfaced man swiveled his head and fixed me with the old hypnotic eye. “How’s that again?” he asked.

“I’m here to see Miss Tremaine.”

“Is that so? And your name is...?”

“Tremaine, same as hers. Cousin.”

“Well, well, step right into my office.”

He swung open a gate at the end of the desk. The clerk rested both elbows on the desk top and stared at one of the potted palms — stared past it out a window at two tall pale men wearing berets and talking together across the street. I edged through the gate and followed the big man into his office. He closed the door, softly, waved me into a chair.

“Keever’s the name,” he said. “I’m houseman here. I take kind of a special interest in Miss Tremaine. Any friend of hers is a friend of mine.”

“Nice of you. How about telling her that I’m here.”

“Yeah, sure. Right away. Cigar while waiting?”

“No thanks.” I got out a pack of cigarettes, tucked one between my lips. He made a magician’s pass in the air and held a match flame three inches from my nose. I drew a light from it, settled back, exhaled. He shook out the match and parked his broad fanny against the edge of his desk. His eyes stared calmly down into my eyes. He made no move toward the house phone behind him. After a long moment I grinned stiffly at him.

“O.K.,” I said. “How much to let me speak a few words with Gail Tremaine?”

He grinned back at me, not pleasantly. “Your name ain’t Tremaine,” he said. “I know a gumshoe when I see one. Been one myself for twenty-five years. Private?”

I dug out a card, one of my own this time, and passed it over to him.

“Yeah,” he grunted. He gave the card the careful eye and tucked it away in a fold of a soft dark breast pocket wallet. “John A. Dillon, huh? What’s the grift?”

“A client of mine thinks the Tremaine girl has her hooks into friend husband. I don’t think so myself, but I’d like to have a talk with her. Then I can go back and tell this old harpy of a client that she is nuts. Diplomatically, of course. She’s got plenty of dough and she’s not tight with it.”

“Just what kind of expenses are you getting?”

“You probably wouldn’t believe it if I told you.”

“Sounds like a set-up. C-note break you?”

“Take it easy. I haven’t put in a bill, yet.”

“You sound like a pushover. No retainer?”

“Oh, sure,” I said, airily. “A small one. But with this dame it’s better to wait and sock her all at once. Don’t worry, I know what I’m doing.”

He stared at me for a moment longer. A thought flickered in his eyes, but I couldn’t read it. Finally, he uncrossed his ankles and went around the desk and sat down behind it. He took the time to trim a cigar and light it. A smell of heavy-scented flowers drifted in through an open window behind him. The window looked out upon the center court.

I said: “How about a ten spot now and the rest on the cuff?”

He smiled an oily smile behind a thick cloud of cigar smoke. I took out my billfold and slid a ten dollar bill across the desk. He palmed it.

“Read the morning papers?” he asked, in a too casual voice. My pulse dropped so low that I felt numb all over. I didn’t answer him. I dragged deeply on the cigarette, exhaled, gave him the puzzled eye. “A dilly of a murder last night,” he said.

“Do tell.” I didn’t quite bleat. “Who got it?”

“A big shot. Harvey Costain, the racketeers’ mouthpiece. The heat’s on, this time. He’s been connected with a lot of fast dough, these last years. Somebody slipped him a lead button at last.”

“That’s terrible.” I managed the proper grimace without having my face crack wide open and fall off. “As one of the boys, I’d like to hear the details. Talk shop and all that. Right now, though, I’m in a bit of a hurry. Let’s announce me to Miss Tremaine, huh?”

“Relax. It’s only eleven-thirty. She don’t never get up until noon. Give her a chance to get coffee. She’s more apt to talk civil to you.”

“You seem to know a lot about her habits.”

“She’s been a tenant here ten months now.”

That didn’t sound like anything that I could use. I let it ride. He leaned back in his padded desk chair and blew a soft blue doughnut of smoke at the ceiling. A tired blow-fly buzzed in at the window and buzzed slowly around the room, as if searching for a dirty corner in which to drop its eggs. The dirty corner was there, but the fly didn’t see it and got discouraged and buzzed out again.

“She was his girl friend, kind of,” Keever said suddenly. He lowered his eyes and gave me a bright, almost pleased, look of expectancy. I did what I could to look jarred. The stub of my cigarette dangled between my lips. Smoke curled upward past my eyes. I squinted through it and said: “Aw, hell, you’re kidding.”

He shook his head from side to side, slowly, smiled his oily smile again, looked openly pleased. “Why would I kid about a thing like that?” he growled. “The rumor’s around he footed her bills — paid the rent. Naturally he would give her the money and let her pay it herself. He wouldn’t do nothing so foolish as to write us out one of his own checks. So it’s only a rumor — and I don’t believe it myself. Not about a lovely girl like Miss Tremaine.”

The hell you don’t, I thought, batting his gaze back at him for no score. “He ever visit her here?” I asked. “Or wouldn’t you know that?”

“Nothing ever happens around here that I don’t know,” he assured me, in a firm comfortable tone of voice. “Yeah, he come here. He was here last night. Around seven-thirty, that was. Like the papers say, he looked a little pie-eyed, even then. They went out, him and the girl, around fifteen minutes later. She comes in around six-thirty this morning — alone. Leaves a lot to the imagination, don’t it?”

“Yeah,” I grunted. “Like the lady and the tiger.”

“Huh?” He eyed me quizzically. “How’s that again?”

“Skip it,” I said. “So you are sitting on all of his and not telling any of it to the coppers, huh?”

“Aw, hell, what have I got they don’t already know? I mean, what have I really got? I ain’t the kind of a guy to get nobody in no trouble — especially a lovely girl like Miss Tremaine.”

We sat there, sparring with our eyes, half smiling, like a couple of gamblers with five aces apiece. I called him.

“You haven’t talked to the cops yet,” I said. “It’s kind of late to talk now, without getting your nose pinched some. That probably means you aren’t ever going to — because you see a little profit for your silence somewhere.”

“It’s already coming in,” he chuckled, and tucked my ten spot away in the soft dark wallet. He slipped the wallet back inside his coat, said. “Now tell me what you really came to see her about. Remember, I been around for a long time.”

“So have I,” I snapped. “I told you what I wanted to see her about — as much of the story as I decently could. I thought you were a man to be trusted.”

“Oh, I am, son, I am. Relax.” He reached out lazily and lifted the house phone, rumbled into it, then covered the mouthpiece with his hand. “Hope I don’t wake her up. A—”

“Lovely girl like that,” I finished for him.

He nodded, but he wasn’t looking at me. His eyes dreamed at a spot on the wall above my head. They focused suddenly. He took the cigar out of his face and smirked into the phone.

“Keever, the houseman, Miss Tremaine... Yeah, Keever. You have a visitor in the lobby, a gentleman... Yeah, he looks O.K. to me. Won’t say what he wants. He ain’t a sheriff or bill collector or nothing like that... Huh? I was just kidding, Miss Tremaine... Sure, I think you ought to see him. He’s maybe just an autograph hound or something. I’ll stick close to this phone, if you need me... O.K., thanks a lot, Miss Tremaine. Send him right up.”

He recradled the phone and gave me the nod. “Twelve-A, upstairs. She sounded kind of worried at that. Maybe she’s read the papers. Treat her gentle. I’ll be watching to see you come back this way.”

“Maybe you feel you ought to come along and sit on her other knee?”

“Naw. What’s between her and you is between you and her. You seem O.K.”

I ground out my cigarette stub in an ashtray, stood up. He watched me out the door and I could feel his eyes on the back of my neck as I threaded my way through the cool green private jungle in the court, and up the open stairway to the balcony.

Twelve-A was a corner apartment at the rear of the building. I pressed the nacre button beside the door. Muffled chimes rang softly, distantly. I waited.

In a minute or so the door opened. I looked down at a starched white maid’s cap perched in dead center on top of glistening straight black hair. A pair of apprehensive oriental eyes in a delicately boned face peered up at me.

I grinned reassuringly. “Alla samee Missy Tremaine, him home?”

“Come in, please,” the maid said, in a voice like a torch singer’s. I grabbed off my hat and tottered past her onto a pale aqua rug that was not quite as thick and soft as a down mattress. The door whispered shut.

“May I inform Miss Tremaine who is calling, please?”

“Johnny Dillon,” I blurted, stuffing my hat in my pocket.

“Thank you.” Her short black skirt swished away and her spiked heels flashed and disappeared. I clipped myself on the side of the chin with my left fist and pawed the room with my eyes.

It had a lot of pickled walnut furniture with pale aqua cushions, a few dark sticks here and there to make company for the grand piano which looked like polished black diamond, and was probably nothing but ebony shined up a little. An entire wall around a black tile fireplace was mirror-paneled. Brass fire tools and a brass screen sparkled on the hearth. Pieces of nutty sculpture in light and dark woods populated the odd corners of the room. There were books in built-in shelves.

Gold lamé lounging pajamas made her look even slimmer and taller than I remembered her. She was in the room before I noticed her, and then the fragrance of her perfume hit me and I jerked my head around and stared.

“Yes?” Her voice startled me. I realized that I had not heard it before that moment. It was a soft, low, almost throaty voice, rather impersonal, like a time operator telling you the time. There was no sign of recognition in her eyes. I smiled a huge warm friendly smile.

“Dillon’s the name,” I gushed. “Remember me? The guy who drove you to the hospital last night?”

“A man named Steele took me there,” she answered coolly.

“Oh, that,” I murmured deprecatingly. “Just a name I used.”

“I see. And I suppose you have your reasons for giving a false name?”

“Uh-huh.” My smile stiffened, sickened, struggled a little and died. “Let’s sit down,” I mumbled. “I’ve had a touch of gout. My foot is killing me.”

She shrugged coldly, dropped languorously into one of the soft aqua chairs beside a pickled walnut table. Long gold legs glittered as she crossed them. She reached a cigarette off the end table. I fumbled up a light for her and then sat down on the piano bench and shakily lit one of my own cigarettes. A long deep drag of smoke steadied my nerves some. I decided that it was time to take the ball away from her.

“How well do you know Keever?” she asked.

“Keever?” I coughed out the cloud of smoke.

“Yes, Keever, That man downstairs.”

“Well, you know how it is with guys in the same racket.”

“So you are some sort of detective. I rather suspected it.”

“Uh-huh. Private. Keever seems to think a lot of you.”

“He’s a slimy wolf — or would be if he could, I wouldn’t trust him to walk my dog, if I had a dog.”

“How about me? Would it be all right if I aired the little fellow now and then, if and when you ever do get him?”

“Let’s talk about why you are here,” she said curtly. “What do you want?”

“Oh, nothing much,” I told her. “Hardly anything at all. It was such a fine morning, after all that rain yesterday, that I thought I would just scamper over for a chat before the police got around to you.”

“Indeed? And why should the police be getting around to me?”

“Well, policemen are funny. Er — I guess you trust your maid.”

“Implicitly. She’s gone to market for things for luncheon.”

“Such is faith. You trust her implicitly, but you suspected that I was some kind of a detective, so you sent her out. Who killed Harvey Costain?”

I made my voice hard and sharp and leered directly at her. It was her turn to swallow her cigarette and cough herself purple and fall on the floor and gasp out a full confession. She smiled for the first time that day, faintly, coolly, almost bleakly, but she smiled.

“Policemen are funny,” she drawled. “Funny, fast and very very tricky. That goes for the private variety, too.” Bitterness hardened her voice. “Lord, how I despise cops. All cops.”

“What did a cop ever do to you?” I grumbled.

“None of your business,” she snapped, lurching up out of the chair and standing stiff-legged in the middle of the thick soft aqua rug. “You’re wasting my time, baby, if that’s all you have to say. You’d better beat it.”

“Not quite,” I said, grimly. “Have the cops been here?”

“No,” she said huskily. “I hope I never see another cop as long as I live. Get going, baby.”

I stood up. Her big, dark eyes had lost some of their softness, but not all of it. The gold pajama cloth clung to her curves like heavy silk. Her lips parted and her breathing became a harsh dry sound.

“You’ll be seeing them, just the same,” I said.

“Quit hedging, baby. Is it money you are after?”

“Damn your money,” I snarled, pitching my cigarette into the fireplace. “I’m the guy who beefed to Harvey Costain when he knocked you down last night, out at the Blue Valley Inn bar. Tell me you don’t remember that.”

“Yes, I do remember,” she whispered, huskily.

“Well, that’s something at last.”

“They wouldn’t let you touch him.”

“Yeah. He was one of their juiciest suckers. They liked his dough. So they sapped me. To hell with them. To hell with him. That’s probably where he is. He’s dead — murdered. We both know that. I found you, soaked to the skin, outside in the parking lot, staring into his car. He was in there with a bullet in him even then. Who shot him? You?”

She began to tremble. “No,” she breathed. “I didn’t kill him.” Her eyes got larger, darker. They became deep black pools of emotion. The emotion was fear.

I took a quick long step, grabbed her. She quit shaking. Her body went rigid. Her perfume lapped at my brain, like a stormy surf eating away a soft sandy beach. I kissed her on the mouth, hard. She didn’t fight me or resist. She just stood there, unyielding, as stiff and motionless as a fence post. I let go of her and saw something new in her eyes. The fear had died down a little and there were flecks of anger in them.

“Funny, fast, tricky and common,” she said.

“Who killed Harvey Costain?” I asked huskily.

“I don’t know who killed him,” she answered

“I’d like to believe that,” I said. “I really would.”

“It’s true,” she said, and the brittleness went out of her voice. “After they carried you out of the bar, Harvey wanted to go. I stopped in the powder room. He went to get the car. Later, I waited outside on the porch. After a very long time, I was afraid he might have passed out, so I went out to the car myself — found him like that. Then, I don’t know how soon, someone came — you, I suppose — and then I was there in the hospital. That’s every bit of it.”

“Not quite,” I said, in a thick strained voice. “He was shot with my gun.”

She gave me a long look that made me want to pick up the big black piano and throw it into the next apartment, and sat down in the deep aqua chair.

“The gun was in my car, right next to his,” I said, still thickly. “I didn’t miss it until later. Too much later. The killer swiped it, used it, and afterwards phoned me at my place to tell me to keep my face shut or the gun would go to the police as evidence against me.”

Something thudded, somewhere in the apartment. This was followed by the sound of paper crackling and something rolling across kitchen linoleum. High heels beat a quick, brief tattoo on the same linoleum and the rolling sound stopped.

“Mina’s back.” Gail Tremaine whispered. I nodded. Sunlight poked through a tree branch near the balcony and shafted through the window to make moving patterns on the aqua rug. I dug out another cigarette, lit it.

“What was Harvey Costain to you?” I asked.

“A friend. A very good friend, once. After that he changed. He began to act as if he owned me.”

“Did he?”

“Did he what?”

“Own you.”

“No.” Anger stiffened her and glittered in her eyes again.

“A joint like this doesn’t go for peanuts,” I growled.

“Singing for Lew Gannon at the Club Borracha doesn’t exactly pay me peanuts either, baby,” she snapped. “I think you’d better leave now.”

I might have jumped a little because she said: “I suppose you thought the lady lived friendless and alone. An easy touch. Well. I have friends who can be as tough as they have to be. Put that in your pipe and smoke it.”

“Pipes bite my tongue,” I said lamely. “I like them, but they don’t like me. How did Mina get to market and back so invisibly?”

“There’s a back stairs,” she sneered. “So it’s going to put its tail between its legs and sneak home. You fooled me, baby. Those shoulders make you look almost manly.”

“They fool a lot of people.” I said. “I wasn’t thinking about your friends. It’s Keever. I’d like to give him something to worry over. You’d better watch your step with him, too. He may be a slimy wolf, but he’s nobody’s fool. See you later.”

I managed to work up a grin of sorts for her and left her sitting there, big-eyed and wondering, and pushed through a door into a narrow windowless dark serving pantry. The little Jap maid had a starched white apron on and was slicing cucumbers at a gleaming tiled sink.

“Hi, what’s for lunch?” I asked her.

She didn’t answer me.

“Nice day, isn’t it?” I drawled.

“Yes, it is,” she said, without looking up.

“Where’s the secret panel to the back stairs?”

“That door leads to them.” She looked at the door.

“I must be slipping,” I said, and let myself out. I closed the door, softly, and jogged down open wooden steps to a wide concrete alley. At the end of the alley, I halted to look along the street to where my car was parked. I didn’t see Keever anywhere, so I went along to the car and got in and drove away from there.

Chapter Four Too Bad for Dillon

Out on the Strip, that piece of Sunset Boulevard which is in the County and not subject to city ordinances, the coolness and lack of moisture in the air made it possible to see far out across the flats of West Los Angeles and Beverly Hills, almost to the ocean.

I paid a dollar and three cents for coffee and a hamburger at a drive-in restaurant and left my car there and strolled westward past agency doors looking like foreign embassies, night clubs closed until evening, antique shops where they seat you before mentioning prices and tanned young men sitting under striped sidewalk umbrellas, waiting to guide you past movie stars’ palaces for a fee, in your car.

A black cocker spaniel watched me enter the street bar of the Club Borracha. His leash was tied to the leg of a bar stool. A downy old party in soft gray flannels sat on top of the stool guzzling a martini. He had the glass tilted high, when I came in, and was going after the olive. I didn’t see any bartender and Gray Flannels seemed to be the only customer in the place.

I parked myself at the end of the bar with my back to the end wall and pulled my hat low over my face and glared around from under the brim. The dog picked up its ears, tilted its head a little to one side. I wrinkled my nose and bared my teeth at it. This earned me a low growl.

Gray Flannels jerked his nose out of his glass, frowned down at the dog, then scowled along the bar at me. “I say, must you annoy my dog?” His voice sounded as if the olive had gotten stuck in his throat.

I kept right on glaring at the dog from under my hat brim and didn’t answer him. The dog growled softly again.

“I say, must you?” The voice jumped an octave.

A short, sad-faced barman slid out of a door at the far end of the bar and glided toward us. He put both hands on the inner edge of the bar in front of Gray Flannels and said: “Something wrong, sir?”

“This person deliberately insulted Genghis Khan,” the man complained.

“Pardon me,” I said, nastily. “I just didn’t recognize the disguise.”

The barman swiveled his head around, slowly, almost mechanically, as if a vertical pivot rod held it to his shoulders and a little motor moved it. While he stared at me, his left hand fumbled under the bar. Then he just stood there, with both arms hanging slack at his sides, and watched me.

“You can’t bring a pet into a food or drink place in this town,” I drawled. “The penalties are awful ghastly.”

Gray Flannels whitened under his tan. He raked out a bill, threw it on the bar, yanked the leash loose from the bar stool. He didn’t quite leap out the street door. I could almost feel the floor burns on the dog’s paws and felt badly about that.

“Why?” the barman asked, in a bleak tone. “Why did you have to go and say that?”

“Didn’t you ever hear of the Board of Health?” I growled. “Read the rules.”

“What about the Board of Health?” a new voice asked, from behind me. It was a silky, almost whispering voice. I turned and gave it the tough eye and it tough-eyed me right back.

He was a natty little man in a smartly cut beige gabardine suit, about five-six in height and as lean as a jockey. He had black curly hair above a high forehead, a small, flat nose and a cleft in his chin. A cigarette dangled from one corner of his narrow thin-lipped mouth, lisping smoke, and horizontal wrinkles creased his forehead, as if my answer meant life or death to him, or the smoke bothered his eyes.

“Fine body of men,” I said. “Do a lot of good work.”

“Yeah?” The cigarette bobbled up and down. “So what?”

“So this joint’s had all the bad noise it can stand.”

Smoke fumed downward from his nostrils as he dropped the cigarette and stepped on it, finding it with the sole of his shoe without looking down and pressing it out. The barman sidled closer, watching me and mopping absently with his cloth on a bar-top that was as spotless as a dutch doorstep.

“I don’t follow you, friend,” the natty little man purred.

His voice didn’t have any sort of a nasal twang to it, but a voice on a phone can be disguised, so I said: “Who followed Harvey Costain when he left here last night?”

The barman’s aimless rubbing ceased abruptly and he leaned against the inner edge of the bar, not moving at all. The natty little man smiled slowly, almost sleepily, shrugged. “I wouldn’t know. All I know is what I read in the papers, as the saying is.”

“According to those same papers, this is where he was last seen.”

He shrugged again. “Make your point, friend.”

“Not here,” I said. “Too public. And not to you, unless your name is Lew Gannon.”

“I’m Eddie Crum,” he said, still smiling. “Let’s go up to the office.”

He turned on his heel. I slid off the bar stool. The barman’s hand began to circle absently again, around and around on the shiny bar-top. Crum held open a door in the side wall and let me go past him. The door closed soundlessly, as if cushioned by air, and we went up thickly carpeted stairs and along a hushed hallway past wide, solid-looking oak doors with fancy bronze knobs, all closed at the moment, to one at the end marked “Private” in fine goldleaf lettering.

Crum knocked lightly, then stood there inspecting the small neat fingernails of his other hand. A mechanical lock buzzed and he reached the knob, opened the door and let me pass him again.

The office was tastefully furnished and looked more like a deacon’s study than a place of business. It had a small functional fireplace, books on shelves built into paneled walls, somber drapes pulled back from some north-light windows and a comfortably worn oriental rug on the floor, faded but expensive.

A bull-necked, dark-haired, gray-eyed man in a soft dark tweed suit sat in a high-backed leather chair behind a large walnut desk with nothing on it but three telephones and a bronze ashtray. He was scratching the side of his head, just above his right ear, with the point of a bronze letter opener. His face held no expression at all as he said: “Is this the bar call?”

“Yeah,” Eddie Crum said. “This is it.”

“What’s your trouble?” the man asked me.

“No trouble,” I said. “You’re Gannon?”

He nodded, tapping the letter opener against his strong white teeth. Crum dropped into an armchair, threw a leg over one of the arms, idly swung his foot. I sat down where I could watch them both and tossed my wallet on the desk and lit a cigarette while Gannon looked at my operative’s license.

“One of those,” he said dryly, passing back the wallet. “What’s the idea?”

“The idea is, Harvey Costain is my client,” I lied blandly. “Was, up to last night, that is. In a way, he still is.”

Nothing in his face changed. Crum put his head against the back of his chair and stared at the ceiling. Gannon drawled: “Anything to show to prove that?”

“I don’t have to prove that,” I snapped. “Not if I prove who murdered him.”

He smiled then, bleakly and not with his eyes.

“How are you doing, so far?” he asked, mildly.

“All right, so far,” I said stiffly. “I know about some trouble that he had last night, before he was bumped. Also about the trouble he had with you.”

The bleak smile faded. I grinned, nastily, and blew a long cloud of smoke at him. Without lifting his head off the chair back, Eddie Crum looked down the sides of his nose at me.

“Something else,” I said sharply. “It may come as a shock to you, but I had a spare gun all the time. I’m wearing it now. Nobody is going to get this one away from me, believe me.”

“Trouble is like booze,” Gannon said, almost softly. “A lot of people drink. Some can handle it. Others crack up.”

“Alcoholism runs in my family,” I sneered. “It killed my grandfather — at the age of a hundred and six.”

“This guy’s in a bad way, boss,” Eddie Crum purred at the ceiling. “Maybe he’s just thirsty. Maybe he needs a drink to straighten him out.”

“Maybe I just need to get my other gun back,” I rapped.

“O.K., you win,” Gannon sighed.

That jarred me. I should have guessed what was coming, but I stiffened and just sat there and gaped while his hand dipped into a drawer of the desk and came up with a gun. It was not my gun. He pointed it at me, smiled bleakly again and said: “On your feet, peeper.”

I stood up.

Crum got up and came over and frisked me smoothly and skidded my spare gun across the desk to his boss and went back and flopped in the big chair with his leg over the arm of it again. My cigarette was burning short and hot between my fingers. I had it by the very last shred of tobacco.

“Relax,” Gannon said, pushing the bronze ashtray at me. He put both guns in the desk drawer, closed the drawer. I dropped the stub into the ash tray and sat down. “So you lost another gun somewhere,” he mused.

I didn’t say anything.

“What was your job with Costain?” he asked.

I didn’t say anything.

“You never worked for him,” he said then. “You screwballed your way in here and now you are bluffing. I knew a thing or two about Costain’s business and who worked for him. I had him on a retainer basis myself. No matter what I thought about him personally, he was a smart attorney — and in my business, it pays to hire only the best.”

“Maybe he kept just one or two teenie weenie secrets to himself,” I drawled. “Like selling you out to Tony Zarsella.”

For a long moment he sat there with his hands flat on the desk top and stared at me and didn’t move a muscle. Eddie Crum rolled his eyes forward and looked down the sides of his nose again. Apart from that, he didn’t move either.

I had a sudden feeling that someone was behind me. I strained my ears for the sound of movement and silence thickened the air in the room until it was almost a chore to breathe. I jerked my head around. Nobody there. Crum snickered. Gannon glanced at him, briefly and without meaning. I clawed out another cigarette.

“You are still bluffing,” Gannon told me quietly.

“Like hell,” I said. “The johns think Costain was murdered where they found him, down below here in an empty lot on Santa Monica. That’s all crap.”

“Costain was bumped out in the valley and moved later,” he said. “He was knocked off in the rain in Tony Zarsella’s parking lot. Is that what you mean?”

I nodded, and wondered why my neck didn’t creak, the way it felt about then.

“I had the job done — just like that — to get rid of them both. Is that it?”

“That’s close enough,” I said stiffly. I groped out a matchbook, tore off a match. Gannon did a little tattoo on the desk top with the bronze letter opener. I lit the cigarette and said: “Rumor has it, Zarsella worked for you once.”

“Years ago,” he admitted.

“I gather he got fired. Maybe not. Either way, he’s competition for you, now that he’s got his own gambling setup out in the valley. He must attract a lot of the folks he knew when he worked here.”

Eddie Crum slid his leg off the chair arm and planted both feet on the carpet and looked at his boss. Gannon watched me.

“This town’s full of competition,” he said.

“There’s competition and there’s competition,” I said. “Zarsella gave you one kind and Costain gave you another kind.”

“How do you mean?” His voice seemed to tighten as he spoke.

“With a girl, is how I mean,” I grunted.

“You’re through, peeper,” he snapped. “I know all about you — and your missing gun. I got a phone call from the girl, just before you got here, so I was expecting you. She told me all about last night — and about you bothering her this morning.”

He stood the letter opener on its point on the shiny surface of the desk and leaned on it and almost drove it through the wood.

“I’ll tell you this just once,” he grated. “Forget the Harvey Costain case. It’s police business, not yours. And stay away from Gail Tremaine. Get that? I mean way away. Show him out, Eddie.”

Crum pushed himself up out of the chair. I sat still. One of the phones on the desk rang sharply, briefly. Gannon looked at it, but didn’t touch it, or move.

I said: “I’d kind of like to have my gun back.”

“The police are looking for an automatic thirty-eight,” he said heavily. “This gun is a thirty-eight.”

“Let’s go, friend,” Eddie Crum purred. The phone rang again. Gannon picked it up this time, and grunted into the mouthpiece. Crum touched my arm. I got up and followed him to the door.

When I looked back, Gannon was doodling with the letter opener and listening and not talking. He didn’t look up at me. I stepped into the hallway and Crum followed me and the door clicked shut. We went along past the heavy oak doors to the stairs, down them.

In the bar lounge, by the street door, Eddie Crum said: “I know how you feel, friend. She works here. I see her every night.”

“You will get your face shot off,” I told him.

“Hell, I mean that I see her around, at work.”

“You will get your face shot off,” I growled.

“I know my business,” he purred, grinning. “So long.”

The sad-faced barman had three customers, a long-jawed guy with teeth like a horse and two giggling dames, years too old for their clothes. One of the dames hiccoughed and then belched loudly. Her friends almost fell off their stools laughing, so she did it again. The barman looked disgusted.

“So long,” I said, and left.

At the drive-in restaurant, I had more coffee and then got my car and drove back to the office.

An hour of staring at the wall above my desk fed me up. There hadn’t been any mail when I got back, around mid-afternoon, no messages under the door, and nobody called me up.

I found an old pipe and blew the dust out of it and filled it up with tobacco, just for the hell of it. I sat there and smoked until my tongue got as raw as an open wound packed with salt and laid the pipe away. After that, I just sat there.

The traffic signal down on the corner whirred and clinked with monotonous regularity. A leather-lunged news vendor with rusted steel vocal chords bawled faintly in the distance, making the same noises over and over again. Traffic growled both ways along the boulevard. And nobody called me up.

Finally, I tapped the office bottle, with discretion, shut the windows, set the spring lock and let the door slam shut after me.

The afternoon sheets had more about Costain than the earlier editions, but they followed the usual pattern. They hinted, without naming names, that some prominent film folk with shady pasts and underworld connections might soon be dragged into the case. The police hinted, without naming names, that they already had a dozen suspects rounded up for questioning and the confessions would be rolling in before sundown. That would be in about two and a half hours, according to my strapwatch.

I re-read the story when I got up to the apartment and had my hat and shoes off and was sitting in a chair by the radio. I didn’t see my name anywhere, nor Gail Tremaine’s. There was still nothing about Tony Zarsella’s valley joint, and only a repeat on the previous mention of the Club Borracha — Costain had been seen there, around seven in the evening, but had left.

Knuckles hit the hall door, lightly. I crawled down off the ceiling after a while and stood flatfooted in the middle of the room. I was fresh out of guns. A key tickled the lock, the door opened. A tired looking maid with straggly gray hair poked her face in and said: “Oh, excuse me. I’ll come back.” She shut the door before I could open my mouth. Then the telephone rang.

I crossed the room to answer it.

“Dillon?” a voice asked. The voice with the nasal twang.

“All right,” I snarled. “Who’s bunions did I tramp on now?”

“Your own, sucker,” the voice twanged. “Too bad for you.”

“That’s not what your boss told me just now,” I growled.

“Huh?” This startled explosion of breath didn’t seem to make the voice sound any different, or give me any new ideas about it. “Think you’re smart, huh? O.K., wise guy. Now the cops get the gun.”

“Can’t we talk this over,” I asked. “Can’t I meet you somewhere?”

“Break it up,” the voice sneered. “You were warned what would happen if you got too nosey. So you got too nosey. So now the cops get the kill gun. Your gun.”

“Oh, hell, I already told them about that,” I yelled, and hung up.

I was in the bedroom stuffing what I thought I might need on a short trip into a traveling bag when the phone rang again. I let it ring several times and then lunged into the living room and grabbed it.

“Central Homicide,” I said, in a gruff tone.

“Ha-ha-ha,” a voice laughed — the same voice.

“Ha-ha, yourself,” I grated, and hung up again.

It let go almost immediately and kept on ringing. I got into my shoes and finished packing in nothing flat and got out of the apartment. As I prowled down the hall toward the elevator, the distant, muffled, insistent peal followed me. The closing elevator doors stopped that. I punched a down button.

Chapter Five The Face on Page One

A man with a tired sour expression turned the hotel register around and pushed a pen at me. I wrote a phony name and address and pushed a five dollar bill across the desk. He gave me fifty cents in change and slapped a desk bell.

Two crusty old codgers were deep in a checker game at a table against one wall of the narrow lobby. The desk bell woke them up. One of them looked at me in an annoyed way and made a move.

A pimply, hungry-eyed kid in a hop uniform two sizes too small for him minced out of the men’s room and picked up my bag. The deskman tossed a tabbed key at him. He speared it and stepped into a two-by-four elevator cage ahead of me.

We got off on five, the top floor, and went along a dim, narrow hallway with worn linoleum and smelling of hidden food and cheap disinfectant. The hop keyed his way into the last room at the back and switched on a light.

The room had a bed, a chair and a dresser and not much else. There was more worn linoleum, a brown and yellow checked pattern, on the floor. The bed frame was iron painted white. The chair and the dresser looked as if they might have been white at one time. A single window, closed at the moment, looked on the gray waste of an air shaft. On the wall above the bed was the picture of an Indian sitting on a horse. The horse looked all fagged out and the Indian was dying on the horse’s neck, as if the air in the room had gotten them both.

The hop dropped my bag and hung in the door-frame, staring at me. “Anything else, mister?” he asked, in a tight, foxy voice.

“You could open a window,” I said. “Or isn’t that allowed?”

He looked as if he had been stabbed in the back by a trusted friend as he dragged his feet to the window and heaved it up. Garbled voices and the clatter of dishes and a burned grease smell wafted into the room from the air shaft. I put the four-bit piece into his thin hand.

“How old are you?” I asked him.

His eyes narrowed. His mouth twitched. I fished out a ten dollar bill and folded it over twice and poked it into the breast pocket of his jacket. “That’ll buy me two bottles of liquor, if they’ll sell it to you,” I said.

“One, if I buy it for you,” he said.

“One, then, with ice and some soda.”

He grinned a tight, pimply-faced grin at me and went out. I locked the door and hung my hat and coat on the chair and switched out the light. For the next quarter hour, I smoked and lay on the bed and listened to the clatter in the air shaft. Noises came and went. A radio blared for a while and was cut off. Snores drifted across the shaft. The drone of a vacuum cleaner floated up from below. A dish crashed and a woman’s voice swore hoarsely. The snoring ceased abruptly but the cleaner whined on. I got up and tamped out my cigarette in an ashtray on the dresser and lay down again.

A fist thumped the door. I got up and unlocked it. Keever, the Villa Morocco house dick, lumbered into the room. I closed the door, leaned my back against it and watched him peer around.

“Cozy,” he said. “You are, that is.”

I didn’t answer him, or move.

“Conscience bothering you, son?” he asked.

He gave the room’s lone chair a brief doubtful glance and decided to sit on the edge of the bed. The bedsprings agonized under his bulk, but nothing let go. Thin knuckles tickled the door. I opened it, about six inches. The pimplyfaced bellhop held up a paper bag with two bottles in it.

“Couldn’t get no ice,” he said, sulkily. I reached for the bag, looked at the bottles, one whiskey, one soda.

“Old Plaster, huh?” I grunted. “I ought to send this back and buy some radiator fluid instead.”

“It was the best they had, best I could get.”

“I’ll bet.” I reached out and gathered the front of his uniform coat and pulled him close to the door. “That’ll be about nine bucks in change I’ve got coming, huh?”

“Seven bucks,” he wheezed. “Two-fifty for the booze. Four bits for fizz.”

“All right, you young bandit,” I snapped. “Hand it over.”

“I ain’t got it,” he whined. “Lemme go. I’ll yell.”

“Yell, and I’ll throttle you. Where’s the dough?”

“Down in the locker room, in my regular clothes.”

“Get it,” I rapped. “Bring it up or I’ll be down.”

I let go of him and slammed the door in his face.

“Mean bugger, ain’t you?” Keever chuckled. “A buck says you never see your seven again. I know these kids in joints like this.”

“Uh-huh. I wish I didn’t,” I said wearily. “Drink?”

“Don’t mind if I do,” he said. “Neat’s O.K. by me.”

There was a water tumbler on the dresser. I dusted it out and looked around for a good sharp edge to open the soda bottle on. Keever pulled a heavy key ring out of his pants. You could have burgled any house with the flat metal gadgets it held besides the keys. I made some crack or other.

“Tools of the trade,” he chuckled. “The gumshoe trade.”

I half filled the tumbler with whiskey and gave it to him. Then I poured about half of the soda water out on the window sill and reloaded the bottle with whiskey.

“What’s the matter?” Keever asked. “Can’t you take it?”

“Not this crap. Here’s how. What’s on your mind?”

He polished off his drink in manly style. I nibbled a little of the mixture in the soda bottle. I was afraid to light a cigarette near it. Keever sat there holding the empty glass. Amusement shone in his eyes, but not the nice-clean-fun kind of amusement.

“I been kind of wondering what’s on yours,” he said. “I asked you, is the old conscience bothering you, son?”

“Not that it’s any of your business,” I said. “No, it isn’t.”

“Something is,” he said dryly. “I dropped by your apartment, this afternoon, to see you. I figured it might be kind of interesting for you and me to chew over this Costain case and see if we couldn’t figure out something that maybe we could toss to friends downtown.”

“Providing either of us had any friends downtown.”

“Yeah. Well, like I say, I stopped by your place — just in time to see you legging down the street with a suitcase. So I kind of tool along behind. I follow you out to the airport and see you leave your crate in the garage out there — just like you was going to New York, or Chicago, or someplace. But you don’t take no plane. You get into a taxi and come right back to town and register under a wrong name in a flop like this. Wrong name registering is against the law, son.”

He cocked a heavy eyebrow at me, grinned and reached the bottle off the dresser and poured himself another shot. He downed the shot and put the bottle back and set the glass beside it.

“You know how to tail,” I said. “I didn’t see you.”

“I ain’t gumshoed twenty years for nothing,” he smirked.

I took another pull at the soda bottle, just to be doing something while the big coppery-faced man trimmed a cigar. He got it smoldering, ruining the last bit of breathable air in the room.

“Looks to me like you want somebody to think you skipped town,” he said. “After looking for a week or so and finding your crate at the airport, that is.”

“That could be,” I said.

“Cops want you?” he asked.

“No,” I said. “Since you are one of of the boys, I’ll tell you something. All in the strictest confidence, of course.”

He sat there, screened by oily blue smoke, and didn’t say anything. I said: “After I talked to the Tremaine girl this morning, I talked to this client that I told you about. Talked enough so’s she’s forgotten all about Gail Tremaine. But she still thinks friend husband is a heel, so I have to work a new angle for her. But I’m working alone — get that. No chiselers. Personally, I still think my client is nuts.”

“Maybe she is,” he said calmly. “I ain’t. Not nuts enough to believe you are working for any such rich and mysterious client. What’s my silence worth to you now?”

Somewhere, in one of the rooms off the air shaft, a fight started. A woman’s voice argued with a man’s voice. The words didn’t mean anything. The bitterness behind them did. The woman’s voice got shriller. The thud of a fist clipping a not so solid jaw stopped the fight.

“There’s a guy,” Keever chuckled. “He won’t never get took.”

“He’s a wife beater,” I sneered. “That doesn’t help him any.”

He worked his cigar across his mouth and stared up through his heavy black eyebrows at me. After a long moment, he grinned unpleasantly again and revolved a thumb around on the tips of two first fingers. I hauled out my wallet.

“Got a gun?” I asked, suddenly.

He looked surprised. “Yeah.”

“I’ll buy it off you,” I said.

“For five C’s,” he said gruffly.

“Hell, I haven’t got that much.”

“How much you got?”

“Less than two hundred, and I have to eat.”

“How much can you get?”

“I’ll pay one C. That’s final.”

He thought that over and nodded. I slid five twenty dollar bills out of the wallet and put the wallet away and laid the money on the ratty bedspread. He reached for it. I snatched it away.

He chuckled, deep in his throat, and dug up the gun, a thirty-two special with the barrel sawed off just ahead of the cylinder, a belly gun. He snapped out the cylinder and shook the cartridges into his hand. He polished each cartridge with his handkerchief, very carefully, and let them fall out of the handkerchief onto the bed. Then he polished the gun and dropped it the same way. I gave him the money and picked up the gun and reloaded it.

“I might be planning to murder somebody with this,” I said.

“Go ahead,” he said. “It ain’t registered to me. I took it off a mug, years ago.”

“I could hold you up now and get my dough back.”

He frowned, stood up, shook his head slowly. “Naw,” he growled. “You ain’t gonna do nothing like that. I gotta go now, son. One thing — lay off that kid. I may have some use for him.”

“Better tag me from here yourself,” I said. “I could lose that kid in a phone booth.”

“That’s an idea,” he rumbled, almost smiling again. “Well, so long, son. See you in jail.”

When he was gone, I nipped at the soda bottle and lit another cigarette. I sat on the bed for a long time, trying to think and, as usual, getting nowhere with it. What little daylight there had been in the air shaft disappeared completely. The rise and fall of voices, the radios, the smell of grease and badly cooked foods, the fights, the snores, the whispers, the clatter and the characters wrestling silently, like me, all went on. I gave it up, finally, tucked the thirty-two into my belt, kicked my suitcases under the bed and went out to eat.

It was the quiet time of evening, when dinners have not yet been finished, when only the floaters move in the streets like shadows, before the beginning of the rush to neighborhood movies and the scramble to grab a stool in the corner saloon. I drifted along Fountain to Vermont. There was a food sign to the north, in the middle of the block. A drugstore, cater-cornered across the intersection, had an outside book rack. I was over there, standing in front of the books, when a Chronicle truck dumped off the late edition.

My name jumped at me from the headlines.

I snaked the top paper out of the bundle and scuttled back across the street. In the dimmest booth the hash joint had, I gobbled up the details.

The police had my gun. They didn’t know how it, accompanied by my name and address typed on a plain white card, had gotten to the homicide bureau at headquarters, but a man had been detailed to find out. The rest of the force was combing the town for me.

The news photo did not look like me. It was poorly printed and showed solid, well-fed jowls. It had been taken when I first entered the detective business, a long time ago. That didn’t make me feel any better, because there were dicks, and even harness bulls, in town who knew me by sight.

There was still no mention of Gail Tremaine, no hint that Costain had met his death outside of a disguised and secluded gambling casino in the valley, no suspicion that he might have been the victim of some of the mobsters he defended — or doublecrossed — in court. I seemed to be the only new development. A slug from the mystery gun had been checked against the one they had taken from the corpse. The slugs matched. So the killer was a thick-skulled private investigator with a bad set of nerves named John Aloysius Dillon. The heat was on.

A buck-toothed waitress hovered over me. I snapped the paper shut. She gave me the peeved eye, as if I had as much as accused her of picking my pocket. I didn’t see a badge on her anywhere. I breathed again and ordered the deluxe dinner. She flounced away.

None of the customers on the counter stools looked like cops. No eyes peered through the front window at me. It took all the will power I had not to sneak a glance under the table.

I got out a cigarette and started tapping down the tobacco in it. On the third tap, I missed the edge of the table with it and it slipped through my fingers and fell on the floor. I got out another one and finally lit it without tamping it down.

There was a phone on the wall, just behind the booth I was in. I pulled my hat down over my face and hunched out of the booth. I pawed through the book, feeling fairly certain that the Blue Valley Inn would not be listed. It wasn’t, so I looked for Duke Mazonik’s home number, found it, dialed it, and, for a wonder, he was in.

“Hi, John,” he yawned. “What time is it?”

“Going on seven,” I breathed. I had a hand around the mouthpiece and spoke with my lips close to the hand. “Read the papers?”

“About Costain?” His tone sharpened. “Yeah, this morning, before I went to bed. Geez, what a mess. Tony is scared stiff. Me, too.”

“What do you mean, Tony is scared stiff?” I hissed.

“Quite a story,” he said. “Tell you when I see you.”

“Tonight’s papers say the cops know who did it,” I said.

“I’m damned,” he grunted. “Was it the D.A. or the Mayor?”

“It isn’t funny,” I growled. “They think I did it.”

“You?” His voice exploded against my eardrum. “No.”

“Uh-huh. That’s what it says in tonight’s papers.”

Silence. Then: “Where are you, John? In the clink?”

“Cut the kidding,” I snarled. “It’s not a damn bit funny.”

“I ain’t kidding, boy. You didn’t really do it, did you?”

“Hell, no. Have you got any friends downtown you can trust?”

“Geez, I dunno, boy. There’s some as figure I kind of let the department down when I quit. Why?”

“I’m in a jam. I need help. The smart thing would be to turn myself in. I’d do it, if I wasn’t afraid of being railroaded to death. You know yourself what they do to guys in my racket, whenever they get a chance.”

“Uh-huh. Geez, I dunno. You ain’t in jail yet, then, huh?”

“No.”

“Where?”

I bit a knuckle of the hand I had cupped around the phone and looked along the sides of my eyes. Nobody seemed to be paying any attention to me. The buck-toothed waitress was at the cash register, up near the front window, making change for a tall stoop-shouldered guy in greasy overalls. The cook was lifting a basket of french fried potatoes out of the hot grease vat with one hand and mopping sweat off his face with the other. The rest of the customers were chin deep in food. I read the white painted letters on the front window: EFAC ETILE.

“Elite Cafe,” I said, into the phone. “Vermont just north of Fountain, west side of the street. Meet you here?”

“Well, I just woke up,” he said, hesitantly. “I gotta be to work in a couple of hours. I... well, hell, sure, I’ll be there in half an hour. O.K.?”

“I just ordered dinner,” I said. “Look under the back table.”

“Sure, John. Don’t create no disturbance. Just sit tight.”

“Like I was part of the decorations,” I agreed. “See you.”

I hung up and slid back into the booth and in a minute the waitress came with some pinkish water with grease globs floating on it. She set the bowl in front of me and said: “Drink?”

“Now and then,” I grunted. “I mean, coffee. Got beer?”

“Listen, mister,” she said. “You ain’t stewed are you?”

“Who, me? No,” I said.

“No drunks in here, see?”

“Sure not. I’m O.K.”

“You got a breath on you.”

“Wine. Doctor’s orders.”

She sniffed sourly and went away.

I chased the lone piece of tomato around in the greasy pink water and captured it and ate it. It went down all right and stayed down, but I pushed the bowl away from me.

The dinner came and coffee with it.

I fooled with the food and ate a little of it and smoked while I ate. After the fourth of fifth mouthful, my stomach began to feel as if it was full of bird shot. I pushed the plate away and smoked and finished the coffee.

I had the Costain murder story pretty well memorized and was on the ninth or tenth cigarette when the table creaked and Duke Mazonik squeezed into the other side of the booth. He wasn’t smiling.

“I got a paper on the way,” he said. “Boy, are you in a jam.”

“I’ve been in jams before,” I said. “There must be some smart move I could make, but I just can’t think of it.”

He shook his head, from side to side, slowly, without taking his eyes off mine. He pulled a newspaper out of his side coat pocket and laid it on the table and squirmed uncomfortably, as if the booth was too tight a fit for him. I felt the same way.

“What’s your story?” he asked heavily.

I gave it to him. I told it as briefly as I could, without leaving out any of the details. In the middle of it, Buck Tooth spotted him and came over. He ordered black coffee. She brought the coffee and went away. I went on talking. He massaged his jaw with a big hand while he listened, rubbed his nose with the back of it when I had finished, squinted at me and scratched his left ear.

“I feel real bad about this, John,” he rumbled.

“Not half as bad as I do,” I muttered, bleakly.

“I mean, about me bopping you last night,” he said. “Then later, about the boys picking you up at the hospital. Those were Tony’s boys.”

I sat there and stared at him.

“That horn blast did it,” he explained. “Some of the boys should’ve been out with the cars all the time. On account of the rain, they weren’t. Anyhow, it must’ve been when you let the guy’s head hit the horn. A couple of the boys jump out to see, is it trouble. It is. It’s murder. A car steams away. Yours, but we don’t know it then. Two of them tag you to the hospital and phone back. Tony tells them where to take you and hold you so’s you won’t call no law until he decides what to do.”

“Oh, brother,” I said, softly. “That beats all.”

“Uh-huh. Tony decides he don’t want a murder in his back yard and says move it. I argue with him. He’s boss, he says, and move it. It’s somebody else’s trouble. He isn’t having any of it. He figures that the law can work just as well starting from scratch in an empty lot in town as they can from his place. So the boys move Costain and turn you loose. That’s all.”

“Well, I feel a little better.” I grinned stiffly at him. “You know what’ll happen if the cops pick me up and I tell my story.”

“I told Tony last night he was compounding — it’s dynamite.”

“Just tell him now he can pry me loose. It’s his worry now.”

“His worry, but your neck,” Mazonik growled. “Like the dame?”

“The torcher?” I shrugged. “Too much else on my mind to know.”

“Yeah,” he grunted. He rubbed his jaw again, said: “She like you?”

“No.” I chain-smoked a light onto another cigarette and crushed the old stub in a dish. He pulled his lower lip out, folded it over the upper one, held it there with the ball of his thumb and dusted the joint with his eyes.

The clock on the wall behind the counter said eight-fifteen. Buck Tooth was cleaning out the cash register. That meant closing time. The chef was heaving empty milk cases out a back door. A couple of late customers were still stoking themselves at the counter. Outside the front window, traffic seemed to have livened up a bit.

“This Keever,” Mazonik said, in a moment. “He sounds tricky.”

“He’d skin himself, if it meant money to him,” I said.

“Yeah. He pegged you plenty fast. You check him any?”

“No,” I said. “I was hoping you had, one time or another.”

He shook his head slowly again. “This is a big town, John. Guys like him, they come and they go. You can be in police work damn near all your life and still not know even half of them.”

Just then a prowl car swung in and parked, out at the curb. I froze. One of the men in it got out and came into the restaurant and sat down at the counter up front, near the cash register. Mazonik looked where I was looking and back at me and grinned.

“Even cops have to eat,” he said, chuckling softly.

“Have fun,” I said, bitterly. “I don’t feel good.”

His grin faded. “Can’t blame you,” he said quietly.

“What was the trouble between Zarsella and Gannon?”

“Trouble?” He frowned. “Hell, don’t make too much out of that. Both of them guys are too smart to pull a killing like this — trouble or no trouble.”

“Don’t stall me,” I said brusquely. “If you know and don’t tell me, there are other ways of finding out. I think there was some kind of trouble between Gannon and Costain, too. Gannon is soft on the girl. She works for him. The torcher.”

His frown deepened. He chewed his lip and didn’t say anything.

“Gannon practically kidded around with me this afternoon,” I said. “Either to pump me, or just to have fun. I went there to pump him, of course, but the kidding stopped when I mentioned the girl’s name. He warned me to lay off her — and he didn’t mean just professionally.”

“It does sound kind of funny at that,” he admitted. “What then?”

“Nothing. He had his right bower show me out — and kept my other gun.”

“How’d he sound, him and his hard boy? Their voices, I mean. Anything like this voice on the phone? I guess you could spot the killer that way, maybe — if you could hear him, not on the phone, and recognize him.”

I shook my head. I told him what I thought about voices over telephones, that they could be disguised and didn’t mean anything. He nodded, twisted his face again, closed a big fist up tight, stared at it, opened it slowly, looked at me.

“I’ll tell you the truth, John,” he said. “Tony never mentioned why he left Lew Gannon. Not to me. You can believe it or not, but we never have talked about it. I figured it was none of my business. I never asked him nothing.”

“Better begin now, then,” I said.

He shrugged. “I’ll prod him, sure.”

“If the cops get me, I talk, see?”

“Hell, you couldn’t prove nothing.”

“With the torcher to back me, yes.”

“Uh-huh. Maybe you got something.”

The first prowlie finished gobbling and went out and his partner came in and sat on the same stool. His glance met mine, casually, switched to the bill-of-fare chalked on a blackboard under the clock.

“With the heat on me like this, I’m handicapped,” I said. “But I can still get around, with luck, and pick up a nugget or two that’ll make your old pals down at headquarters listen without laughing in my face.”

“Your luck won’t hold forever,” he said. “Got any ideas?”

“Not any good ones,” I said. “The killer could be Gannon — or his smoothie, Eddie Crum, with Gannon behind him. All I need to do is prove that Costain had double-crossed Gannon, or that Gannon hated Costain’s guts on account of the girl. Knocking him off out at Zarsella’s joint would be just one way of eliminating the old competish — good business — two birds with one slug, as the guy says.”

“That would kind of put the girl in the middle, wouldn’t it? She was with him. If Gannon was soft on her, like you say, he wouldn’t put her in the middle of nothing like that. Now, this house dick might. Keever. He took you, boy. Don’t overlook him.”

“I won’t overlook him. And I’m not going to overlook your boss, either. Competition works both ways. Tony Zarsella may be a fat clown and a soft touch to you, but he’s been around a long time. He’s hooked his fat fingers in plenty of deals that wouldn’t look good in the morning papers. Hell, Costain might even have been blackmailing him.”

He didn’t like that. He stared at me — a hard stare, developed in the years he walked behind a badge, and before, in the ring, and before that fighting older tougher kids for the right to peddle papers on the busy corners. I met his gaze, squarely. I had been raised in a logging camp myself.

“The killer could be somebody you ain’t even thought of, yet,” he growled.

“Could be,” I growled back at him. “In fact, it could even be you.”

Movement and sound went on around us. Headlights out on the street, going both ways, and the swish of tires on pavement. Feet scuffing sidewalk and faces floating past the front windows. Inside, there was the coming and going behind the counter and the rattle of closing-up chores. The prowlie on the front stool was shoveling in the last of his pie.

“Figured out my motive?” Mazonik asked stiffly.

“A gambler’s right bower gets more dough than a cop,” I said. “Ten times more, you told me last night. But the gambler gets more than the bower. A hundred times more.”

“I frame Tony and then step into his shoes, huh?”

“Uh-huh. That is roughly the gist of the idea.”

“Geez, who’da thought it. But why kill Costain?”

“Damned if I know. You’ve got me there, pal.”

“Geez, I must be nuts,” he sighed. “I’m screwy to even be talking to you. Your gun is the kill gun. The law says so, and you as much as admit it, but you claim you didn’t do the job. You are a fugitive, and here I sit. Geez, if that lad up front knew who you were, he’d shoot us both — that’s a cinch. I ought to turn you in.”

I grinned crookedly and jiggled a cigarette into my face and managed to light it without roasting more than half of my nose.

“Now’s your chance,” I said. My voice sounded as if it had to come through a pipe. A sewer pipe, ten miles long.

“Hell, John, we are both nuts.” He snorted, softly. “I never was much of a policeman. Take it easy. Lay low. I gotta get going. Offhand, I don’t really know what I can do for you, but I’ll do something. See you, boy.”

We shook hands and my hand felt as if he had broken it. I watched him out and then ambled up and paid my check. The prowlie stood behind me, waiting to pay his. I slid out the door. Down at the corner, at Fountain Avenue, I looked back over my shoulder. The prowl car swung out from the curb, did a fast U-turn, with its siren snarling, and headed north on Vermont.

I hiked back to the hotel.

Chapter Six A Heel Run Down

Except for an owlish-looking deskman, not the one who had checked me in, the dimmed lobby was empty. Something seemed wrong when I got up to the room. The door was unlocked — but I couldn’t remember, for sure, whether I had locked it. I eased inside, closed the door. Nothing moved. Noise in the air shaft was about the same. I found the light.

My suitcase was still under the bed. I hauled it out. A search told me that my stuff was all there, but someone had pawed it over. I sniffed at the soda on the dresser. The bottle was still half full, with a few sluggish last bubbles rising in it. I decided not to touch it. The whiskey bottle was gone.

There were no alcoves or closets to the room where a stranger might hide. I doused the light, stepped into the hallway, locked the door and tried the knob this time. Then I prowled back to the elevator and rode it down.

The deskman leaned against his side of the desk and yawned at me. I pushed through the door to the men’s room. Used paper towels littered the floor. Other paper had been dropped around the bowls in the stalls. My nose curled a little at the smell in there. The hungry-eyed, pimply-faced bellhop didn’t seem to mind it.

He was a mouth breather. His eyes were glued to a thick, three-inch square picture book and he was lolling in an old worn-out lobby chair in a corner. He glanced up, saw me. His hand, with the book in it, slid off the arm of the chair and dropped behind it. He looked as guilty as if he’d been caught with his hand in a blind man’s tin cup.

I grabbed the front of his jacket, lifted him. The picture book dropped and skidded under the chair. He had a breath like a sick mule. I let go of him. He flopped back in the chair, hard. The chair moved. Glass rattled on the floor tiles — my whiskey bottle, empty now.

“Did the guy hire you to ransack my room?” I grated.

“What guy?” he whined. “I ain’t ransacked nothing.”

“You little— How much did he pay you?”

“Nothing. I don’t even know what you mean, fella.”

“The hell you don’t. I mean fatty, the big guy, Keever.”

“Honest, mister, he never paid me nothing. Not a cent.”

Hinges squeaked dryly behind me. I whirled. The owlish-looking deskman poked his nose in a couple of inches past the edge of the door and said: “What goes on?”

“Hey, Gus, help,” the hop croaked. “This guy’s murdering me.”

Gus vanished.

I yanked the sawed-off thirty-two out of my belt. The kid paled visibly and seemed to shrink in size until his suit almost fitted loosely. “You asked for it,” I snapped. “Talk it up, fast.”

“He — that is, the fast guy, he says, keep an eye on you. He never paid me no dough. He just says, keep your seven bucks — if you took it off me, let him know. If you check out, let him know. He says to tail you, if I can. But you don’t check out. I seen your bag upstairs when I—”

“Let him know where?” I rapped.

“I forget,” he whispered. “I don’t remember.”

I held the gun muzzle to his nose and grinned nastily.

“Villa Morocco Apartments,” he wheezed. “Twelve-B.”

I shoved the gun into my pocket and got out of there.

As I hit the street, I heard the brief low growl of another siren over on Vermont. Gus had called the law. I walked west a block and cut north. At Sunset Boulevard, I hailed a cab.

There were warm lights in the Villa Morocco lobby. It looked cozy. I didn’t go in. I paid off the cab at the curb and plowed through the entrance arcade to the inner court. Flower fragrance on the air in the court seemed heavier at night than in daytime. Lamps over some of the apartment doors were on. I went back past the splash of the fountain.

Twelve-B was dark. Twelve-A, upstairs, had a look of somebody home. I punched Keever’s bell, hoping that it was Keever’s, and heard faint and distant chimes followed by nothing. Foliage screened me off from the front office windows. I leaned on the button again, waited. A door opened and closed, somewhere up above, and heels clicked along the balcony. The heels reached the open wooden stairway, clumped down it. The figure was a woman in a fur coat — a large, bosomy blonde. Her heels changed note at the bottom on the patio stone, echoed hollowly under the arcade and faded. The door in front of me was not locked when I thumbed the latch.

I held it open a few inches and listened. Nothing stirred, or screamed. No guns went off in my face. I moved inside, pressed the door shut. Its catch slid in place with a dry click. I held my breath, opened my mouth, grimaced with the strain of not breathing, and listened some more.

Silence almost smothered me. Then a toilet flushed somewhere, distantly, and water flowed in the piping in another part of the building. That made the world seem a little more normal. Around me, in 12B, nobody moved.

After a long moment, I struck a match and a tiny light flared up about twenty paces away. A ghostly face under the brim of a hat gave me a long scared stare. Then I grinned and it grinned foolishly back at me. It was my own face, reflected from the mirrored wall around a familiar appearing dark-tiled fireplace.

A lot of brocaded furniture bulked dimly in the wavering matchlight. Glassware and polished metal ornaments gleamed dully. There were dark heavy drapes, walls with built-in shelves lined with books and more brassy fire tools on a little rack at the end of the hearth tiles, like the ones upstairs. There was also more thick carpeting to walk on, as soft as swamp moss. It seemed like far too much apartment for any guy living on just a house dick’s wages.

I waded across the living room in the dark. A swing door, like the one in Gail Tremaine’s apartment, let me into a small serving pantry and then the kitchen. I figured it would be safe to risk a light, that far back, and flipped a switch. The back door was wide open.

I peered out into the night. The alley looked deserted. A light outside the door at the top of the back stairs was on. A soft cool night breeze blew against my face. I pulled my face in and closed the door on the breeze.

A row of empty beer bottles stood on the drainboard of the kitchen sink. There were some ants in the breadbox, nothing else, no staple groceries on the kitchen shelves. Dishes in the cupboards had a thin film of dust on them. The refrigerator was empty and dusty inside and the electric cord was not even plugged in. The gas stove oven was full of pots and pans that had a look of rust and disuse.

Back in the living room, I lit a few more matches and snooped behind chairs and pawed around in drawers. An antique cherrywood desk held letters addressed to A. J. Keever, some bills with his name on them, half a dozen cigars wrapped in cellophane, plain white envelopes and some stamps in one of the pigeon-holes, several paper matchbooks with AJK on them and one from a New York hotel, a couple of old burned-out light bulbs and a handful of thumbtacks in one of the lower drawers. A lot of odds and ends. Nothing for me.

I didn’t hear a noise — I felt it.

There was a half open door in the wall to the left of the desk... I thought and tried and couldn’t remember if it had been closed before. I had no recollection of the door at all. Pain seared my fingers as the matchflame burned close to them and died.

I quit breathing again.

My shoes turned to lead. It took all the energy that I had left to lift them forward. When my groping had touched the door frame, I reached the other one into my pocket and gripped the butt of the thirty-two. My lungs caught on fire and my chest began to heave. I had to breathe. I felt up and down the wall inside the door, touched a switch, snapped it.

Keever was lying on the floor in his bedroom — dead.

Somebody had beaten the side of his face to a pulp. The shoulders of his coat were spattered with fresh blood. Blood matted his hair. There was blood on the carpet under his chin. He didn’t have any ear at all on the side I could see.

His face looked like fresh killed beef. It glistened wetly, dark red. I touched the door, opened it a little wider, without thinking to look behind it. Keever’s outflung hand was warm to the touch, but no pulse flickered in him.

This time I heard something, a step and the rustle of cloth, and remembered about looking behind doors. Then it was too late, of course. Something swished and thudded on top of my hat. I yelled. My hat fell off. The swishing noise came again. I tried to duck. I grabbed blindly at a pants-leg full of muscle and then a third blow landed on the side of my neck. Thunder rumbled in my head. The room turned over and the floor fell on top of me. I straightened my arms and tried to heave the floor off my chest but the room began to rock. Then the lights went out and the room rocked harder. It rocked itself right side up.

I stood up, groggily, took a step, banged my shins on something, moved in another direction, tripped over somebody’s leg, pitched forward and almost smashed my face on a bedpost. The post slid past my ear and caught me in the shoulder. More searing pain.

I got my feet untangled, after a while, and hauled myself onto the bed and sat on the edge of it until my head had cleared. Then I got up and toured cautiously around the dark heap on the floor and got the light back on.

Keever hadn’t moved. He was still quite dead.

I prodded once more for any sign of a pulse. The killer was messy but thorough. I backed away and got stiffly to my feet. Keever’s one unmashed eye stared bleakly at a spot on the carpet about a foot ahead of his nose. His big chin made a deep dent in the nap. Blood was still collecting in the dent. He was not long dead.

A black leather briefcase lay against the wall on the other side of the bed. Papers littered the floor around it. I wiped some blood off my hand on the bed and went around it and tried to read the scattered sheets without bending over. I was afraid if I bent over I would be sick. My head felt large and hollow and salty saliva was welling in my mouth. My jaws ached with it.

One corner of a velvet document protruded from the briefcase. I looked at it and thought about it. It seemed to be a photostat. Photostats have many uses. Huge corporations spend fortunes on photostats every year. Blackmailers never spend a dime on them — but they sometimes collect on them.

I swallowed hard and took a deep breath and bent over.

The brown document was a photostat of a marriage certificate. The ceremony had been performed in the state of Nevada, in some town with a name I’d never heard of. The girl’s name had been Helen Baird. The groom’s name was Duke Mazonik. After careful deliberation, I decided that Helen Baird’s legal married name must be Mrs. Duke Mazonik. It was still a little groggy.

Voices reached me from a long way off. I shook my head to clear it some more and the voices got louder — gruff voices, cop voices. Heavy feet thumped the patio stones in the court. I staggered to the light switch,

slapped it off.

I was in the kitchen when the door chimes sounded. I wondered how long it would take them to give that up and go on in to find Keever and then charge out the back after me. A lot less time than it would take me to reach the street at the end of the alley, probably. I closed the back door. The soft cool night breeze brushed the last of the cobwebs out of my brain. I went up the back stairs.

When the little Jap maid came into the kitchen and saw me, she yelped and fled back through the serving pantry. I plunged after her. The swing door hit me in the face and staggered me for a moment. Then I butted it open and jumped into Gall Tremaine’s living room and halted.

The hand that held the Luger was like a stone block. Behind the hand was a dark sleeve. The dark sleeve was part of a beautifully cut midnight blue dinner jacket with Lew Gannon inside of it.

We stood there for seconds, a few feet apart, and glared at each other like two stray cats that have come nose to nose at the end of a board fence.

He moved first. He put the Luger against my chest and patted me over and dug the sawed-off thirty-two out of my pocket. “You must own a regular arsenal,” he drawled, stepping backwards, away from me. The Luger muzzle made a slight arc in the air. “Better come in and explain yourself.”

He put the Luger away under his arm and shoved the thirty-two into his left side pocket and held it there. I went past him. Gail Tremaine came out of the bedroom in a strapless evening gown of pale blue. It was enough to make me forget the man with the guns — almost.

“It’s you,” she said coldly. “You frightened Mina half to death.”

“I didn’t mean to,” I told her. “I was in a hurry.”

“So are we,” Gannon said dryly. “What’s the idea?”

A smoky haze came between them and me. I rubbed the side of my face and shook my head from side to side. My legs began to tremble. I tottered to a chair and dropped into it. The smoky haze got thicker. Voices murmured. Glass tinkled on glass. A cloud of spicy fragrance wrapped itself around my head and a slim white hand with crimson fingernails held a drink under my nose. I grabbed the drink and gulped it. The gray fog evaporated.

“What’s the matter with you?” Gannon asked, sharply.

“It’s the high cost of living,” I said. “It gets me.”

“Save the gags,” he snapped.

“Living is a big problem,” I said. “Just staying alive. Too many guns. Too many hits in the head.”

“He sounds punchy.” Gail Tremaine said, and laughed harshly.

“A party is what I need. Let’s have a party.”

“We’re late for one now,” Gannon said. “Some people are waiting for us at the club. If you don’t feel like explaining the intrusion, then get going, but fast.”

“No,” I said. “Don’t rush me. A fellow I know got married. That was a long time ago, but I only just now found out about it. It and a little more. I owe him something. I owe you something. I owe your trigger something. I owe my landlord, my tailor and the finance company, too. Got to begin squaring accounts. Let’s go.”

I hunched forward on the chair, got to my feet. The drink began to work. It hardened my stomach up a bit and I began to feel fairly tough again.

“Watch yourself,” Gannon warned. “I read tonight’s paper. I know the cops want you, but I’m willing to give you the benefit of any doubt. You’re free to blow. Beat it.”

“Wait until you read this,” I said, and raised my hand to reach inside my coat. His left pocket jumped and the cloth bulged. My hand froze in mid-air. I lowered it, slowly, and grinned.

“Help yourself,” I said.

He took a step. His right hand slid in between my coat and shirt and touched the photostat. I grabbed his wrist with both hands, leaned back from the waist, dug both thumbs deep into the back of his hand between the finger bones, and twisted, heaving all my weight forward at the same time. He kicked his feet into the air to save his arm. The photostat flipped at the ceiling, zigzagged to the floor. He landed on his back. The fall shook the building. Air oozed out of his lungs in a long flat groan, as if he wanted to get rid of it and was doing it deliberately.

I gathered in all the guns.

“Hold it,” I barked at the girl.

She dropped the brass fire tongs. They hit the hearth with a metallic clatter. More music for the boys downstairs. A phone dial whirred nearby. I shot a glance through the bedroom doorway. The little Jap maid was busily hooking out a number.

“Hey,” I yelled, and waved the Luger at her.

She dropped the phone and covered her face with her hands and waited for death.

“Old Killer Dillon,” I said bleakly, to no one in particular.

Gannon made a noise. His throat muscles looked like taut ropes under the skin of his neck. Congested blood darkened his face. His arms and legs move jerkily. His hands clawed at his belly.

The girl in the pale blue evening gown didn’t move. Strain widened her dark eyes. The pallor of her face made the lipstick on her full-lipped wide mouth look almost black. I grabbed up the photostat and dangled it in front of her.

“Your friend Keever had this made,” I growled. “I think he was murdered for it. But I barged in right after he was killed — downstairs, right below this, in his apartment — and the killer had to leave without it. I guess the same guy killed Costain, huh?”

“No,” she shook her head. “Oh, no,” she said, in a choked voice. “I... who do you mean?”

“The Duke,” I said heavily. “You have a very jealous husband, Mrs. Mazonik. I can’t say I blame him for much of anything — except the way he put me in the middle of murder.”

“Duke Mazonik and I have been divorced for over a year,” she whispered.

I shrugged. “That only makes it possible for you to testify against him,” I said. “It doesn’t change any facts. The Duke killed Harvey Costain, on account of you, probably. With what I have now, the police will have no trouble proving that. The Duke killed Keever, too. There was a heel. Maybe he had it coming. That Keever would have blackmailed his own grandmother.”

A faint shiver shook her bare shoulders. The man on the floor got his breath back, finally. He gulped it in with a wracking heave of his chest. The congested blood began to go out of his face. His eyes cut me up in little strips and fed me to the sharks.

The girl said: “What now?” Her voice sounded as if she was past caring.

“The joint’s crawling with cops,” I said. “It’s time to whistle for them.”

“Not yet,” a new voice said.

Duke Mazonik came through the swing door from the kitchen. He had an old worn service revolver in his hand. It pointed at me. His eyes had a glaze over them. There were stiff lines around his mouth. “Drop them guns, John.”

I dropped the guns. The butt of the Luger bounced off my foot and a tickle of pain ran up my leg. It seemed to be one of those days.

“Remember that voice on the phone, John?” the big blond ex-cop asked, in a cold lifeless tone of voice.

I nodded, stiffly. My mouth felt dry and overcrowded with my tongue in it.

“I never put you in the middle, boy,” he grated harshly. “You put yourself in the middle. If you coulda kept your face out of this, nobody woulda got hurt, except Harvey Costain. He got what was coming to him.”

“What about Keever?” I husked. “He knew Costain was spending a lot of time here. He smelled something fishy. He must have guessed who had a motive for killing Costain. He was the one who dug up the fact that Gail Tremaine was Helen Baird — Mrs. Duke Mazonik. Money might have kept him quiet for a while — until his demands got larger than your bank account. Then what?”

“He stuck his face in, yeah. But he ain’t got no face no more, has he?”

“No,” I said thickly. “He ain’t got no face no more. How’s my face doing?”

“Not so good, John. Not so good. This is curtains for all of us. Me, too.”

Madness glittered in his eyes. His gun had sagged a bit. He raised it, with me as his first target. In the sudden awful silence that fell upon the room, you could hear the remote tread of heavy feet and distant muffled shouts. The police were doing what they could to track me down.

Mazonik cocked the revolver with his thumb and the dry click of the hammer was like the crack of a rifle.

A stealthy movement caught my eye. Gannon’s left hand was less than six inches from the butt of the Luger. I smiled waxily at the big round black front end of Mazonik’s gun. This was it.

I yelled.

The gun went off and a giant sledge hammered my right shoulder and spun me around. I went down, but not out. Guns slammed. Women screamed. Glass crashed. Police whistles let go, shrilly. Guns kept on slamming. Big flat feet thundered on wood. Wood gave way with a tearing splintering sound. Then everything went black.

I woke up in a white room under white sheets on a white bed. My shoulder was packed in white gauze. When the nurse came in, she said that my face was rather white, too. I had lost a little blood.

My first visitor was Lew Gannon. He was very pleasant and spoke quietly, as if he had been warned not to excite the patient. Neither the girl, Gail Tremaine, nor the little Jap maid had been hurt, he told me. One of Mazonik’s slugs had nicked him a little, but not seriously. He had shot Mazonik three times with the Luger. The big blond ex-cop was still alive.

He asked how I was feeling and I told him fine. He asked if the District Attorney, or anybody like that, had been in to see me. I shook my head, no. He laid his soft gray felt hat on the white dresser and sat down on the foot of the bed and smiled.

Then he told me that he had asked the authorities not to bother me until I felt better. I said that was nice of him. He kept on smiling and looked a little embarrassed and said not to worry about any hospital bills.

I gave him the eye.

“The D.A. is taking care of your bills,” he said. “You cracked a murder case for him pretty fast. It’s only fair. You saved more than that in time and money for the city.”

“I wasn’t working for the city,” I said. “Or the D.A. either.”

He reached for his hat and got off the bed and then just stood there holding the hat. “I thought you’d like to know,” he said.

“Uh-huh, sure,” I said. “Thanks for coming.”

He fumbled with the hat and looked down at it.

“Thanks for saving my life, too,” I told him.

“Oh, hell.” He flushed. “I didn’t come here for that. You made the holes and did the blocking. Anybody could have carried the ball behind you. Mazonik just signed a full confession, by the way.”

He lifted his eyes from the hat. There was something in them, something on his mind. I felt too stiff and old and tired to wonder, or care, what it was. I didn’t say anything.

“Harv Costain was Gail’s lawyer,” he said. “Got the divorce for her on some grounds of brutality — stuff like that. I think she ought to have told you”

“Maybe it slipped her mind,” I said, quietly.

“Mazonik waited in your car after the ruckus in the bar out at Tony Zarsella’s place in the valley. That’s when he found your gun. Costain came out alone to get the car and Mazonik shot him. Zarsella never knew who killed Costain, but he didn’t want any trouble, so he had his boys move the body. It all seems rather simple, now, doesn’t it?”

He smiled politely again. I let him get on with it.

“It seems that you stirred up this flattie — Keever. He smelled some easy blackmail and put the bite on Mazonik. That tipped Mazonik off that you were on the prod. He gave you a scare-off call on the phone in a disguised voice, but it didn’t take. So he turned in your gun — the murder weapon — and let the law take its course with you. Then you told him, in some restaurant, that Keever was on your trail. So he decided that he would have to silence the guy, permanently. That left only me in his way.”

He watched carefully to see how I took that.

I took it fine, without a word.

“I was next on his list,” he said, somberly.

“Is that all in the confession, too?”

“No. But I saw him. And he hates my guts.”

“She works for you. Is that it?”

He came out with it then. “I’m planning to marry her,” he said, simply. “I’ll give her your best wishes and say good-bye to her for you.”

He put the hat on, very carefully, waited. A faint smell of ether drifted down the hall and into the room. I lay there and stared sleepily at him. He flushed and turned on his heel and went out.