Black Mask (Vol. 33, No. 4 — November 1949)

I thought I was a lucky, lucky guy to collect a cool one hundred for weeping into a mobster’s bier — until I learned how my fellow casket-toters planned to pay off...

Chapter One Silhouette on the Door

All my clients are, first of all, just silhouettes on the ground glass door of my office. They stand out there in the corridor, reading the neat gold lettering — William Carmody, Confidential Investigations — and assure themselves that a private detective is just what they need in life. The silhouette that Vivian Ledell threw on the glass — I didn’t know her name then — should have been etched there permanently for art lovers. What I mean, I started gnawing on the phone.

“What?” Margaret O’Leary demanded from the other end of the line. She’d been bending my ear for twenty minutes and I hadn’t even gotten in a comma. “What did you say, Willie?”

“Upperplate wobble.” I explained. “I’ve got to go now. Business.”

“All right,” Maggie said. “What I called for, Willie, is to see if you want to go to a garden party this afternoon I’m doing a gossip spread on it for one of the fan mags. I can pass you off as my assistant... There’s a buffet lunch, Willie.”

“I’m eating these days,” I said stiffly.

“Sardines and crackers again? Don’t be a snob, baby. Movie people are just people.”

That was the tip-off. Maggie had her eye on a job for me but she knew I didn’t like movie clients. Sure, the pay is great, but they’re paying for insurance against bad publicity. And that means a cover-up.

The silhouette had finished reading the lettering and was beginning to undulate a little. “I’ve got to hang up,” I said. “A client has just come in.”

“It’s a woman,” she said bitterly. “I can always tell from the fast brush. If she doesn’t hire you, call me back.”

“No, thanks,” I said. “I don’t like Hollywood tea parties Some clown always falls into the swimming pool.” The doorknob was turning. “Good-by, Inspector,” I said loudly. “Call me anytime you need help.”

“You’ve used that routine so long,” Maggie said sadly, “the inspector has been retired with full pension.”

And on that note of harmony we went off the air.

My newest client was just coming through the door. The silhouette hadn’t told half the story. She wore high-waisted green slacks with a narrow gold belt, gold sandals, and a white blouse. I mention the blouse last because it seemed to me she could never have gotten through the door sideways She moved up the desk with a long slow stride and studied me from the corners of her green eyes.

She didn’t say anything, possibly because she was sucking in her cheeks. It made the fine, small bones of her face stand out, but just try talking that way.

The lead seemed to be up to me. I pointed out the clients’ chair and said: “Why not sit down and tell me all about it?”

She sneered delicately and stopped biting the inside of her cheeks long enough to say: “You don’t look at all the way I pictured you. I thought private detectives were oily little men with frayed collars and thirty-five-cent haircuts. You must be making this racket pay off.”

“I coin a few. How are things with you, baby?”

She parted her lips to let me see her teeth in what wasn’t quite a smile. “Now you’re in character,” she said. “A fast line and lousy manners. At that I suppose you do cater to a certain clientele.”

“I get all kinds in here,” I told her. “They have one thing in common. They either weep on my lapel, or call me bad names just to prove to themselves they’re tough. Either way, it’s all right with me, because I know what’s with them. They’re all scared of something.”

Her teeth snapped together and her green eyes got a queer shine on them. She fumbled around in a shoulder bag for a cigarette. I let her light it herself so she would have something to do. She made a mouth and floated a billow of smoke at me. Then she smiled.

“So I’m frightened? Very acute of you, Mr. Carmody. But if this is a sample of your work, I think Ivan made a big mistake in hiring you.”

“That makes all of us wrong,” I said. “Nobody named Ivan has hired me for weeks.”

Her head went slowly back as if her neck was no longer strong enough to support it. Her eyes, over the long sweep of her lower lashes, never left my face. She suddenly didn’t want her cigarette. If she wasn’t a scared client, she’d do till one came along.

“Ivan Castle,” she said, with tight lips. “He didn’t phone you? Yesterday afternoon?”

I shoved the ash tray I stole from Swifty’s Bar under her cigarette. “Nobody phoned me yesterday. I wasn’t in all day.”

“Oh... Well, that explains that.” It was a great relief to her. She fumbled in her bag again and came up with a hundred-dollar bill. I’d seen one in a bank once, so I knew what it was. “Now you’re hired.”

I let the bill lie on the desk blotter. “What do you expect to buy at those prices?”

“Not me,” she said. “Ivan Castle. He gave it to me for you yesterday. He said he’d phone you about it.”

She was working a one-way street now. I gave her back a fistful of silence. Outside a plane’s motor chewed holes in the rough tweed of city sounds. Probably a used-car dealer fouling God’s blue heaven with sky writing.

The girl went over to the window as if to watch, but she looked down, not up. I knew she could see the corner of Hollywood Boulevard and Ivar. Sometimes pigeons roosted on the ledge below the window. But nothing had ever held my attention so long.

Finally she said, to the window pane: “Ivan left for Hawaii last night on the Clipper from San Francisco.”

“Lucky, lucky Ivan,” I said.

“It was quite unexpected. He left some unfinished business — routine jobs and engagements, just odds and ends. But somebody has to take care of them.”

“Doesn’t Ivan have any friends who would lend a helping hand?”

She turned her profile toward me so I could see one side of a smile. “Perhaps he preferred to have them done professionally. He might not have wanted his friends to know all his affairs. Isn’t that understandable?”

Plausible, too, I thought.

“One of the odds and ends is to escort me to a party tonight,” she added.

I was getting more damn invitations to parties. “Ivan, of course, would be married.”

She bit off the smile and turned back to concentrate on the street. “There’s also a stack of books to be taken back to the public library. Now, there’s a simple, legitimate errand, possibly more suited to your talents. And principles.”

“I can handle the assignments,” I told her, “if there’s nothing tougher than those two.”

“I have a list here for you.” She held up an envelope and I got out from behind the desk. I wasn’t being a gentleman. I just wanted to take a look at the street. “It won’t be too difficult a way of making a hundred dollars.”

The top of her head came just under my nose and I smelled perfume in her dark brown hair. It was as heady as a sniff of brandy. The corner, three stories below, looked just the same as ever. A lot of cars and people and one dog on a leash.

“Look at that!” she said. “Isn’t it ghoulish?”

She had better eyes than I. “What?”

“That street car bench!”

It looked all right to me. In Hollywood there’s one on nearly every corner. They’re green, with stone legs, and have advertisements painted on the backs.

“Springer Mortuary,” she read. “Fine Funerals on Budget Terms. Call Us In Time of Need.”

The address was in one corner of the advertisement, but a small man in a black and white sport shirt was sitting in front of it. “It’s indecent,” she said violently. “They try to talk you into dying!”

A big red street car got between us and the bench for a moment. When it had lumbered on I saw that the small man in the sport shirt was still sitting there. Well, there’s no law that says you have to take just any street car.

“Do you want the hundred dollars, Mr. Carmody?”

I had another sniff of her perfume. “What can I lose?”

She turned and put the envelope in my hand. She smiled and sucked in her cheeks again.

“All the instructions are there,” she said crisply. “But you’ll have to hurry to make the first one. You’re due at the Springer Mortuary in one hour. You’re a pallbearer, pet, and you’re just the type!” She’d skated over to the door before I could get my face closed to ask the name of the deceased.

“My phone number will be on that list. Call me at six and I’ll let you know if I want to go to the party.”

She eased through the door in two movements. I’d been correct: she couldn’t quite make it, sideways.

Ivan’s letter said just about what the girl had told me: a half dozen simple errands which anyone going away unexpectedly might conceivably leave behind. Number six read: Take Vivian Ledell to Livvy’s party. Vivian’s phone number was attached.

I put the letter in my pocket and went downstairs and across the street to the bench. The little man had just snooted another street car. His clothes were strictly California sports wear but they were so new they still had tags on them. He lifted a gaze at me that was as pallid as an old maid’s dream. His eyes were dry and gray, like ballbearings, and he never seemed to blink.

I said: “Friend, would you move it about two feet over?”

He jerked a bony shoulder at the vacant length of the bench. “Warm up your own spot, friend.”

“I can’t stay,” I said. “I just want to see what you’re sitting on.”

“The back of my slacks,” he said. “Is that good enough, friend?”

“I’m a connoisseur of bench ads. I just want to see what’s written on the back of the bench.”

He hadn’t blinked yet. “Springer Mortuary. West Washington Boulevard, near Vermont. Take a V car. You can’t miss.”

“Thanks, friend,” I said. “You’ve been a help.”

“I wouldn’t say that,” he said, “friend.”

But he was as right. The Springer Mortuary was a square, red-tiled building of lavender stucco, and a blind albino couldn’t have missed it.

A soft, vague man in a black suit opened the door for me. “You are a mourner?” His voice seemed to come from some place else, as if he were a dummy for a not very good ventriloquist.

I told him I was a pallbearer and he bowed as if his neck was made of wood.

“You are a trifle late. The friends are paying their last respects in the Slumber Room.”

“Then I’ll go up too,” I said.

The little silent voice that women call intuition was informing me the deceased wasn’t merely Joe Blow from Barstow. I went into the Slumber Room and had my look at the casket...

The newspapers had always tagged him a Hollywood sportsman, which, in this town, is a libel-proof of calling somebody a gambler with an A-1 rating in mob circles But he’d not been a deso and dose guy. He had friends in the Movie Industry, though none of them had risked the publicity of attending his funeral. But they’d sent enough sprays and wreaths to perfume his way into the next world.

He’d used the name Joey Content, which was as phony as it sounded. Even in his coffin he was still handsome and dashing. Fortunately the person unknown who had corked him six times with a thirty-eight Police Special had been careful to aim at his stomach In the head, in the belly, you come out just as dead, but it was nice of the gunman not to spoil the profile.

The police had labeled it a gang killing. If they were right. I spent the next two hours in the company of the murderer. Because the other pallbearers were the town’s five leading hoods!

Their pictures had made the papers often enough for me to know them even though I didn’t recall all the names. I identified Sid Marble and I stopped there After Sid you went down the scale anyhow. He was a new resident in Los Angeles: a not-too-tall, well padded man with perfect teeth and quite a bit of pink scalp shining through his black hair. He didn’t introduce himself and neither did the others. I stood on ceremony too.

In dead silence we toted the mortal clay of Joey Content out to the hearse. Then we got into a big black car and rolled swiftly across town to the Slopes of Gilead Cemetery. It was a little pocket of silence surrounded by palm trees with feather duster tops and supple trunks that looked tall enough to sweep away the sky-writing. We latched onto the silver handles again and lugged Joey up a gentle slope to his final resting place.

A reverend read the Bible and said a prayer. He seemed a little embarrassed that he couldn’t think of something nice to say of the departed. But there wasn’t much anybody could say about the likes of Joey Content. When we started back down the hill, empty-handed, there wasn’t a damp eye in the house.

But now I had friends. I was the popularity kid. The boys enclosed me snugly and Sid Marble said: “You’ve changed, Ivan. You look fine but different somehow. Maybe you’re wearing elevators to get so tall. Is that the way it is, Ivan?”

“There seems to be a slight mistake, gents,” I said.

“I nearly didn’t know you, Ivan.” Marable had lemon juice in place of saliva. His voice was sharp and thin and unsweetened. “But I said to myself, Ivan is chief pallbearer. Ivan wouldn’t miss poor Joey’s funeral. So this is Ivan.”

“I’m just the understudy,” I said. “This is my big chance to make good.”

A tall, weedy man said, “Who would you be, scout? Trot out a bit of identification.”

I trotted out the photostat of my license The weedy individual glanced at it, spit on the well-kept grass and passed it on to Marable.

“A peeper,” Marable said sourly.

“It’s a living,” I said.

“Is it?” Marable asked. He got his point across. “Where is Ivan Castle, Carmody?”

I shrugged. These were the type of men who weren’t going to believe anything I could tell them. I could say Ivan was in Hawaii, or I could say I didn’t know where he was, and it would be all the same to them. They were unbelievers. So I kept my flap buttoned up.

Marable stared out across the green slopes of Gilead, where a reverent wind was pushing against the palm trees.

“This is a nice place, Carmody,” he said remotely. “But you wouldn’t want to spend a lot of time here. You think hard on that and you’ll know what I’m getting at. There’s just one thought I leave with you — don’t make it tough for Ivan’s friends to see him. If he wants to be anti-social, that’s his problem You just pick up your marbles and play on some other street. Catch?”

I caught and went the rest of the way for a touchdown. He was a long-winded character but that only made his point clearer. And for a hundred dollars I was nobody’s hero. The lone wolf bucking organized crime, taking on a gang single-handed, reads good in comic books but less good in the obituary columns.

“You were the seventh pallbearer today, scout,” the weedy man appended. “That’s bad luck. Like three on a match. Or like the gal who catches the bride’s bouquet... Can we give you a ride?”

I said: “Neither now nor later, I hope!”

They let me walk the rest of the way down the slope alone. Even that was better than Joey Content could do.

Chapter Two Houdini Makes a Slip

It took three transfers to get me back to Hollywood Boulevard. On the way my stomach pulled itself up where it belonged and reminded me I still hadn’t had breakfast. I took a newspaper into Swifty’s Bar and read it over a cheese sandwich and a glass of ale.

Joey’s funeral got a nice play. The pallbearers were listed by name, but the story clearly had been written in advance. Ivan Castle made the line-up, though there was no mention of the seventh pallbearer, one William Carmody. No complaints!

The little man in the black and white sport shirt slipped into the chair across from me. In the dimness of the saloon his ball-bearing eyes had an almost luminous quality.

“That wasn’t much of a wake. How did Joey look?”

“Content,” I said.

“That’s a lousy pun,” he said, disgustedly. “Besides you read it in the Daily Star. Where’s Ivan Castle, friend?”

“You too?” I complained. “I don’t know, but you might try Hawaii.”

He said in a colorless voice: “You’re fronting for him, Carmody. That means you know where he is. Maybe the dame thinks he’s in Hawaii because he’s kissing her off. That part’s okay. Anybody has got a right to change women.”

“You’re a philosopher,” I told him. “Have you got a name?”

“Luther,” he said coldly. “I don’t need no last name. Look, Carmody, a lot of people want to find Ivan. Nobody maybe has given you any trouble yet because they think Ivan is easy to find. But he ain’t. I’ve been looking a week.”

“What makes Ivan so popular? No, let me guess. Either he knows who chilled Joey Content and somebody is afraid he’ll talk — or he killed Joey and the same somebody is sore about it.”

“Either way,” Luther said, “that somebody is going to come to see you. And you won’t like it, Carmody. So why not tell me now, and save yourself some teeth and some broken fingers?”

A winter wind blew down my spine. I could see it happening just that way. They weren’t going to believe I didn’t know where Ivan was. They’d think I was just being stubborn. And I’ve got nice teeth, too.

I lit a cigarette, just to show him how cool I was. He winced away from the smoke I blew at him as if his pipes couldn’t take it. His chest, behind the sport shirt, was so narrow and sunken there didn’t seem to be room for more than one lung.

“Luther,” I said. “Listen close, because this is something you’ll want to tell your friend, Sid. I don’t know Ivan Castle. I never laid my big blue eyes on him in my life. He paid me — by mail — to substitute for him on the handles, but I am not working for him. Or anybody else.”

He kept staring in that unblinking way till my own eyes hurt. “If you’re unemployed I got a job for you. Find Ivan Castle.”

I stood up and threw some money on the table. I’d get better conversation yelling down a rain barrel. I left him and went out into the sun.

Somebody said, “Mr. Carmody?”

It was a fat man in a plaid suit, obviously tailored by Omar the tentmaker. He was getting weighed on a penny scales but he hadn’t dropped his penny because he was trying to stand perfectly still. For him it wasn’t easy; there was so much of him that quivered. “You are Mr. Carmody?”

I admitted it.

“I want to discuss business with you.” He was more intent on getting the pointer on the scales to stand still. “I was up to your office. You were out, so I asked the barman in the nearest saloon. I’ve read about private detectives.”

“I’m glad I didn’t disappoint you.”

He inserted the penny. The machine burped and dropped a ticket in a slot. “I am Chauncey McLee — business manager for Paul Banner. Are you free to take an assignment?”

I didn’t want a movie client, Paul Banner or anybody else — not even a Hollywood glamour queen. But the little man with weak lungs was lounging in the doorway of Swifty’s and giving me a bleak, unwinking stare. Here was the answer, one way or the other, to whether I was Ivan Castle’s front.

“What’s the assignment?” I asked wearily.

Chauncey read the weight stamped on the ticket and winced. “I’d rather you got the details first-hand. I’ll run you out to Paul’s house if you’re free.”

“Haven’t a thing in the world,” I said for the little man’s benefit. I’d go there and say no, and ride a street car back. One more wouldn’t kill me — and that was more than I could say for Luther.

Chauncey turned the ticket over and read his fortune. “You must be careful that people don’t misjudge your cheerful easy-going nature for weakness. How true,” he said. “Uncannily correct.”

“Nobody understands me either,” I said. “Ain’t it hell?”

The expensive car rolled through traffic with no more noise than two angels quarreling. Chauncey stayed on Sunset till we were beyond Beverly Hills and then he dropped into one of the canyons. Chauncey chewed gum and thought. He didn’t seem the thinking type of man but he was working his brain cells now.

Presently he swung into the white-graveled driveway of a house that must have contained twenty rooms There were tall, white columns like a southern plantation home in a Selznick epic, and big green doors.

I said: “Banner must have a lot of relatives.”

Chauncey gave me a sour look and led the way through a long arbor that isolated the garages, and into the back yard. But only a clod would call it that. It was the size of a polo field and the grass looked like the greens of a country club. There were flowerbeds and a tennis court and a swimming pool.

The pool was full of water lilies and two swans. At least a hundred people were congregated around it. Chauncey said: “Forgot to mention Paul is throwing a little party. Do you mind?”

“Kismet,” I assured him. “I was destined to go to a party today.”

“A lot of superstition,” Chauncey said. “Help yourself to a drink while I round up the Boss.”

He oozed off across the town while I surveyed the crowd for signs of Margaret O’Leary. This had all the markings of the garden party she was going to write up for a fan book. But I didn’t see her.

I didn’t see Banner either, but he had provided entertainment for his guests. Another arbor had been transformed into a band stand for a string quartet. They were playing background music for a magic act. Being a sucker for the hocus-pocus dodge, I boldly found a vacant deck chair.

The magician was a gray ravaged man in a tuxedo he could no longer fill out. That might have been fortunate because the suit looked so old that a little bit of strain would have split all the seams. He was doing something with giant playing cards, but his hands were so shaky I didn’t think he was going to get through it.

He had my sympathy. His act just wasn’t sophisticated enough for this audience. They were mostly interested in seeing him louse up a trick. His long, thin face was pale and he was perspiring gently.

“Now, ladies and gentlemen,” he said, in a voice that had all the texture of tissue paper, “for my next effect I will need an assistant from the audience. Will some lady or gentleman please come up?”

Two sports sharing a lounge just in front of me hatched a fast plot in hysterical whispers. The one on the outside started to get up, giggling. I came off the starting blocks a half step ahead of him, brush blocked him with a hip as I passed, and went up front.

“Here is an obliging young man,” the magician announced. “Thank you, sir. First of all I want you to look at this pitcher. Look closely, please.”

It was a glass pitcher, lemonade type, and full of water. I knew it was water because he poured me a glassful. Up close, I could see that he was pale to the lips, which trembled as he talked. His hands were doing St. Vitus dance set to bebop.

“You are satisfied there is nothing in the pitcher but aqua pura? I just boiled it out of the swimming pool.” A small laugh. “Now you look like a man who would appreciate a real drink. What would you desire? Just name your favorite drink, sir.”

“Straight scotch,” I suggested.

“That’s an easy one.” He picked up a shot glass from his table and filled it from the pitcher of water. But now it wasn’t water. It was scotch. “Try that, young man.”

I took the glass. “Do I have to drink alone? Let’s see you pour yourself a quick one.”

The sports thought I was trying to trip up the old guy and started calling for him to produce another. He made the most of it, pretending a great reluctance, but he finally came through with another jigger of highland dew. It got a ripple of applause and under it I said: “Down the hatch, old-timer. You look like you need it.”

“You are a gentleman, sir,” he said, taking a bow. He never vanished anything as fast as that drink. “How did you ever wander into this snake pit?”

“Somebody left the gate open.”

“Cut and run for it,” he whispered. “I’ll cover you.”

He sailed through the rest of the trick, pouring any drink requested from the same pitcher. He produced everything, from absinthe to vodka. The sports were yelling for a frozen daiquiri when I saw Chauncey McLea giving me sign language to come a-running.

I joined him in the patio. “I didn’t mean for you to work for your drink,” he said. “Come in the house and meet the Boss.”

We went into the library. Two walls were lined from floor to ceiling with books, while one of the remaining walls was used up with a picture window. The other was a bar.

The Boss was already there, but it wasn’t Paul Banner. It was a tall and slender woman with fine lines that you knew were her own. You knew her coal black hair had always been that color. It was done up in braids on her head like a crown. This was what the glamour factories tried to produce and never quite managed, because it requires six generations of fine breeding. In short, here was a Lady.

“Mr. Carmody, Mrs. Banner,” Chauncey said, in a voice unexpectedly subdued. “Do you want me to leave, Judith?”

“Of course not.” She put out a beautiful hand to me. “It was kind of you to come so far, Mr. Carmody.”

Anything under a million miles wouldn’t have been too far.

“I know you must be busy, so I’ll not waste your time.” She smiled suddenly. “Come over here, Mr. Carmody. I want to see how good a detective you are.”

She led me over to the bookshelves. Ail the volumes were beautifully bound and perfectly matched. She put her hand on the fourth shelf. “This one. Tell me what you see, Mr. Carmody.”

“You must have bought these by the foot,” I said. I went down the line. There was no evidence that any of them had been moved since the interior decorator put them there. Except one. The little fringe of soft leather at the top was curved inward on all the others. But someone had hooked a finger over this one to pull it out and the fringe was bent backwards.

“Somebody must have got bored and read a book.”

She smiled again. Wryly. “Don’t be too perceptive, Mr. Carmody. Yes, that’s it. I was checking the other day to see if the maid had dusted properly and I noticed it. Take the book out, Mr. Carmody.”

I pulled it free. It was a book of philosophy by somebody with a long foreign name. Judith Banner took it and opened it. There was a folded paper between the pages.

“Nobody really gets desperate enough to read a book around here. It was used as a hiding place.” She handed me the note. “By my husband.”

“Are you sure you want me to read it?”

“It isn’t a love-note, Mr. Carmody. And I’m not trying to get divorce evidence. Does that make everything all right?”

“Now you’re being perceptive,” I told her.

The note was a half sheet of ordinary typewriter paper. It contained a raggedly typed three-line message.

I put the note back between the pages and returned the book to the shelves. “Forget it, just forget all about it, Mrs. Banner.”

“You disappoint me, Mr. Carmody,” she said.

I smiled at her. “A crank letter. Typed on paper that couldn’t possibly be traced, with a typewriter that was probably borrowed. I thought movie stars get these all the time.”

“And promptly turn them over to the studio, who pass them on to the police. Why did my husband hide this one?”

I shrugged. “How long ago did you find it?”

“About a month.”

“Why wait till now to take action?”

Chauncey McLee held out a pudgy hand. “Read this.”

It was a clipping from a movie column that had appeared in one of the local papers.

“Nice narrative style,” I said. “Why do you think this ties up with the extortion note?”

“Because Paul was so terribly upset by it. Ordinarily he is the most relaxed and carefree person in the world, but this frightened him. I’m convinced that the person who wrote the note did it to frighten Paul.”

“The fact that the rumor was correct in every detail except the important one,” Chauncey added, “points to the fact that the crank could have been in a position to have killed him then Held off to get his money.”

“You could pay him off,” I said.

“It wouldn’t solve anything,” Judith said. “Or else Paul would have done it.”

“Maybe he has.”

Chauncey said: “I’m his business manager. He can’t spend fifty dollars without my okaying it.”

I told Judith: “That implies this crank has something on your husband.”

“Who doesn’t have something in their past that would be better left buried? In the case of a movie personality it can be something ruinous.” She laid her hand on my sleeve. “You’re our last hope, Mr. Carmody.”

I’d just come out for the ride. I was going to say a fast no and go home. I looked into Judith Banner’s dark eyes and said: “Don’t worry about it anymore. I’ll land on him so hard he’ll come down with amnesia.”

Chauncey said hurriedly, “Here comes Paul. Keep it undercover, Carmody.”

Paul Banner, like most actors, looked pretty much the same off screen. A few more wrinkles maybe and a higher forehead. And he was quite a bit less charming.

“This is a stinkin’ party, Judith,” he said, striding into the library. “Why do we have to invite such stupid bores?”

“They’re your friends,” Chauncey said.

“Keep out of this, blubber boy,” Banner snapped. He gave me a look. “Present company excepted, of course.”

“Don’t be so polite,” I said genially. “I’m a bore, too.”

“Well,” he said, “if you insist, old boy.”

“Paul!” Judith Banner said. “William is a friend of mine.” I wondered how she knew my first name.

“Sorry,” he muttered petulantly. “I want to talk to you alone, Judith.”

“I was just leaving,” I said. Judith gave me a look that was almost pleading, as if to say, Don’t mind him. He isn’t really like this. I smiled all around and went through the house searching for the party.

That’s when a female screamed. I shot through the door into the patio. Everybody was clustered at the edge of the pool on the far side, all laughing.

It was the magician. Either he had worked that magic pitcher a few too many times or one of the sports had thought of a great gag Anyway the old guy was down among the lily pads.

Maybe if he hadn’t been an alcoholic who couldn’t swim it would have been funny. But he was going down the second time, and everybody was breaking themselves up so much they never realized it.

I dove so flat that I barely went under. A half dozen strokes and I had him by the collar. Of course he grabbed me with a strangle hold and of course I slugged him. Then a dozen helping hands were pulling him up on the tiled edge of the pool. Somebody offered me a hand too, but I was proud. I swam down to the other end and climbed up the ladder.

Maggie O’Leary was leaning on the hand-rail, her chin in her palm. She didn’t say anything. She didn’t have to.

I pulled a water lily out of my hair. “Just like I told you,” I said, “some clown always falls into the pool!”

Chapter Three Blue Birds and Schemers

O’Leary drove me home while I dripped all over her car. She wore a white summer dress that didn’t hide much of her nice tan. Her legs were bare and golden brown and magnificent. It is my firm conviction that Maggie’s legs are the reincarnation of the original model which centuries of inferior craftsmanship have failed to reproduce. When your eye finally gets up to her pretty Irish pan, with stopovers and sidestrips, you are converted — or dead.

After a minute, she said, “I saw the whole thing, Willie. You were dramatic Like a moon pitcher hero. You certainly scared hell out of those swans too.”

“Maybe I should have let the old guy give the magic word.” I was sulking.

She patted my damp knee “I was teasing, baby. You’re my brave boy.”

“Fine,” I said. “But you’ve got competition. I have a yen for Judith Banner.”

Maggie took her hand away “Damn you,” she said bitterly. “You would pick on somebody I can’t compete with. I don’t need to ask if you took the job.”

“Well, I’ll need your car for the rest of the afternoon. Does that answer your question?”

“What are you going to do?”

“Go out to the Santa Rita Ranch. The crank who gave out that rumor must have seen Banner there. He may have phoned the newspapers from the ranch — a toll call. It’s a place to start.”

Maggie said thoughtfully: “And it’s a very exclusive joint. It oughtn’t to be hard to find out who was there that day.”

“Sounds to me like one of the ranch hands.” I said. “Somebody trying to pick up an easy five grand — or a guy with a grievance... Do I get the car?”

She sighed. “If I don’t lend it to you you’ll think I’m jealous of that Banner woman.”

I grinned at her. “Are you?”

She pulled up in front of a street-car bench that bore an advertisement for life insurance, and got out. “William,” she said, showing her pretty teeth, “you are a black-hearted, sadistic betrayer of young womanhood, and you have all the sensitivity of a mangey coyote. And furthermore—”

“That’s enough,” I told her. “You still love me. You convinced me of that.”

I drove home and changed clothes and then I stopped by my office to get the afternoon mail. I knew there’d be a half dozen bills from my creditors but no Carmody has ever lacked courage. I charged in and there were bills and there was Vivian Ledell.

She was sitting behind my desk smoking a cigarette. She’d changed her clothes too. and her off-white gabardine suit was the work of a Botticelli. There was no way of describing it — like a desert sunset.

I said: “I must have forgotten to lock the door.”

She watched me, with her cheeks sucked in, and then she laughed gaily. “I came back to talk about your job. How did it go off?”

I stared at her while all the little wheels in my head whirred around. Maybe my charm had produced a delayed reaction on her but I doubted it. “I didn’t have time to take the books back to the library.”

“But you did go to the funeral?”

“Yeah,” I said. “And I was superb as a pallbearer. The funeral home wanted to sign me up.”

“Big crowd?” she asked carelessly

“Practically none. Shows the kind of friends Joey had.”

She shrugged. “Some people don’t have any. Maybe I should have gone. I knew him slightly...” She looked at her cigarette thoughtfully. “Who was there?”

“That’s it!” I said. “That’s what I’ve been waiting for.” I sat on the corner of the desk and looked down at her. “It begins to make sense — of a warped kind. That was a sharp play this morning. A sleeper. You worked it nice, you and Ivan.”

“I don’t know what you are talking about,” she said cooly.

“Oh yes you do, sweetheart. It was cute, and it worked, but let’s not run it off its feet. Just why is Sid Marable looking for Ivan? Oh, he’s looking for him, all right. That’s what I was sent there to find out, wasn’t it?”

She didn’t say anything this time.

I said: “Okay, I’ll tell you! When Joey got his, Ivan ran for cover because he was afraid he was next on the list. He isn’t in Hawaii at all — he’s right here in town, waiting to see if he’s hot. That’s what he wants to know. Of course, six bullets in the belly would tell him that, but it would be a little hard to leave town then. Except in a box in the baggage car!”

“Don’t—” she said in a choked voice. “Don’t talk like that—”

“So how to find out?” I drummed on. “That was the problem. If he was going to get the treatment too, it would come when he showed up at the funeral. And if he didn’t show up, how would he ever be sure? So what do we do? Why, we hire a little four-for-a-quarter private-eye. One who isn’t too bright, preferably! We need a luscious babe to put on a little act to keep the jerk off balance, so he won’t start thinking—”

She was as pale as alabaster. “You got paid.”

“Sure, I got paid! And funerals come as low as sixty-five dollars in this town.”

“Please!” she gasped. “They’re not after you.”

“They won’t be long,” I assured her. “Right now they think I’m Ivan’s front. They bought your story that he ran out on you. What kind of act did you put on to sell that? It must have been good!” I leaned down to make her look at me. “Before long they’ll be coming in here to ask me for Ivan, but I’ll take care of that.”

“But you don’t know!”

“Try to convince Sid Marable. In fact, you’re going to get a chance to try. Because when I tell them how you sent up a trial balloon to see if anybody was going to start shooting at it, it won’t be my hide that gets ventilated!”

She shrank away, trying to retreat through the back of the chair. Her green eyes were glassy and her lips twitched.

“You’re it, Miss Ledell! And may I recommend the Slopes of Gilead Cemetery?”

“Stop saying those things!” she screamed. “I don’t want to die! I can’t stand to think about it.”

She clamped her teeth so tightly her jaws quivered. She was shaking all over, like someone whose soul is cold. She had a phobia about funerals and graveyards — and death. She wouldn’t be hard for Marable to melt down.

“Carmody,” she whispered, “what am I going to do?”

I shrugged. “I’ve got my own problem.”

“Please!” She grabbed my arm. “Please. I don’t want to die. I’m too young. Tell me...”

“Forget Ivan,” I said. “No matter where he’s hiding, it isn’t good enough. They’ll find him sooner or later. Don’t be found with him.”

“I can’t leave him alone—”

“Believe me,” I said earnestly, “I should be the last person to tell you to get out of this town. I need you here to take Marable off my back.” I paced the distance to the window. “I must be a movie hero at that! Go on — start running. Go far and fast. And if you see a flat-chested little man who answers to Luther, you will know you should have run a lot farther.”

“Luther?” she whispered, and her head started falling back as her neck muscles went lax. “Is he—?”

“Yeah,” I said. “He’s down there on the bench again.” I took a deep breath. “Look, there’s a back way out of here. Use it. I’ll go down the front way and sucker him off.”

She almost ran to the door, but there she stopped and looked at me as if something that she’d forgotten a long time ago had come back to her. “What... what about you?”

“I’ll get very busy on another job,” I said bitterly. “Maybe that will convince them I’m not working for Ivan.” She came slowly back across the room and looked at me with those green eyes. Then she reached up and kissed me. Her lips were as cold as winter rain.

“That doesn’t mean very much,” she said quietly. “I’ve kissed too many men for it to have any meaning left. But maybe you’ll understand.”

“Sure,” I said. “Sure. I understand.” She looked at me so sadly I bent and kissed her back. Most of the lipstick had come off, and when she smiled, without doing the business with the cheeks, I thought I caught a glimpse of the girl she must have been once. A million years ago.

She turned and walked out then and I never saw her again. But I saw plenty of Sid Marable...

I went downstairs to O’Leary’s car and waved at Luther, but he just stared back at me. I turned left on to Franklin and right off that on to Cahuenga. If he followed me I lost him somewhere on Dark Canyon Road.

Beyond Burbank I swung onto the turn-off to the Santa Rita Ranch and there wasn’t another car in sight. According to directions I picked up at a service station, the ranch was somewhere in the Verdugo Mountains. But when I came to the end of a narrow asphalt road there was only a big whitewashed wooden gate and a shanty.

A sliver of a man in a khaki uniform, with a gun strapped to his hip, came out of the shanty and gave me an empty smile. “Can I see your membership card, please?”

“I’m not a member,” I said.

“Sorry.” He gazed back down the road. “Only members or their guests.”

“Then I’ll be a guest,” I said.

“Whose guest?”

“How about Paul Banner?”

He continued to gaze back the way I’d come like an exile trying to see his homeland beyond the horizon. “I’ll be glad to phone in and ask,” he said gently.

“Don’t bother,” I grinned at him. “Banner never heard me.”

“That’s what I thought.” He smiled again and there was nothing in the smile but his teeth. Maybe he thought of things but they didn’t show.

“Just where is the ranch?” I asked. All I could see was a dusty, unpaved road that wound back through stunted growth, which was probably sagebrush, to the mountains in the background.

“Around the toe of that hump,” he said, pointing with his shoulder. “But there’s only one road. And I don’t need money. So I guess you couldn’t bribe me.”

“I wouldn’t think of trying,” I said. “But tell me one thing.” I started the car. “Who’s the owner of this hideaway?”

“Mr. Farrington,” he said gently. “Mr. Charles Farrington. And I hope you didn’t mean hideaway like I think you meant it.”

“Thought police!” I said. “That must be a great place in there.”

I drove back down the asphalt road to the highway. About five miles further along I came to a second asphalt road paralleling the first one. I swung on to it and ten minutes later I sighted the Santa Rita Ranch.

The stinkin’ liar, I thought.

The ranch house was long and low and rambling. From a distance it seemed made of cool white adobe. A dozen cars parked in front glinted in the afternoon sun. In the rear were the white-washed stables. Directly behind, the mountains rose in a ragged line against the sky.

I followed the dirt road as it wound around some hairpin turns, getting higher into the mountains without coming any closer to the ranch. Presently I was behind the stables, looking down on the bridle path twisting through the scrub pines. And still I was no nearer. It began to dawn on me that the guard hadn’t lied. Wherever the road led, it was not to the Santa Rita Ranch.

I pulled over to the outer edge of the road. The mountain went up steeply behind me into the pines where wild birds were chattering in a language I didn’t know. Below me a horse and rider cantered along the trail In the ranch yard a man in a red shirt and a cowboy hat was nailing tarpaper on the side of a small building, and his hammer lifted and fell rhythmically, with the sound in between, like a movie out of synchronization. He was farther off than he appeared.

I estimated the chances of cutting cross-country to the ranch, but I didn’t estimate long. It looked simple enough from this high point, but once down there, the ranch house would be out of sight and my woodcraft wasn’t equal to anything above four trees in a park.

Possibly Chauncey McLea could get me into the ranch, but that was for another day. I thought furiously about what to do now and came up with a real bright answer. I was done for the afternoon.

I started to turn back to the car when a voice said: “Stand and deliver, stranger.”

There was nothing wrong with his woodcraft. He’d come up close enough to pick my pockets and I hadn’t heard a sound of him. He was one of the narrowest men I’d ever seen and still he wasn’t skinny. There was plenty of long, stringy muscles on him. He was carrying a rifle with a telescopic sight. At this range he could have potted me with a bent bean shooter.

“You must be the backdoor guard,” I said.

“Forest ranger,” he stated briefly.

His strong bony face was narrow like the rest of him and his eye sockets were so deep that the shadow cast by the brim of his hat made him seem to be looking out at the world from behind a fence.

“Oh,” I said. “I thought you were in the same business as the guy down there at the gate to the ranch You look a lot alike.”

“My brother.” he said with something that was almost emotion. “A sinner. There’ll be a day for him.”

“Yeah,” I said. I didn’t know what else to say. I got the same funny feeling as when talking to a person you know is a few paces off the path.

“I just came down to tell you this is a fire area,” he said, lapsing back into his dull monotone.

“You came down from where?”

“Look-out,” he said gravely, and glanced up over the pointed tops of the pines. The sinking sun touched on glass and I saw his look-out clinging to the side of the mountain like an eagle’s nest — high and remote and lonesome as the Ark on Ararat. “Watched you through my binoculars,” he said. “Came down to warn you about matches.”

One of those little flashes of brilliance that even Carmody has brightened up the day then. “You watch every car that stops on this road?”

“There’s only two or three a month,” he said.

“How’s for June fifteenth?” I said carefully. “Just about a month ago. Could you remember seeing anyone up here then?”

He looked at me for a long time as if he knew exactly what I was getting at, and why. And suddenly I knew here was a guy I could never outguess — nor even second-guess — because his way of thinking wasn’t like other people’s. Neither logic, nor experience, nor emotion was responsible for what went on inside his narrow head. Whatever his thoughts were, they were little pale creatures of a mind that had been alone too long.

“Gray coupe,” he said suddenly. “License number S44683 Earlier in the afternoon than this. Parked there better’n an hour.”

“That’s pretty good,” I said. “In fact too damn good! How come you remembered all that?”

“Had a sprained ankle,” he said dully. “Couldn’t get down here to warn him so I took down his number. If he’d started a fire I’d have traced him.”

I stared at him but I couldn’t see him. Nobody would ever see him because he was watching the world from behind his fence. “You took it down,” I persisted. “That’s fine. But how could you pull it out of the air like that? What made it stick in your mind? Did the guy do something?”

“He didn’t get out of the car,” the ranger droned. “Maybe he wasn’t alone. I never saw him. But he was scheming...”

The distant thud of the hammer down in the ranch yard was the last tenuous contact with reality. Even the birds up in the sunless pines had long ago slipped away silent as shadows. I said, “What’s that mean?”

His sunken eye sockets held no more light than a tomb.

“Scheming,” he said.

“How could you tell he wasn’t just necking with his girl friend?”

He considered me for a long moment, and if there was any recognizable emotion on his face, it was pity. For me. He turned as if to walk away, but he didn’t go. “That same week,” he said, and whoever he was talking to, it wasn’t me now, “I found a blue bird — up there.” He pointed indefinitely toward his eye in the sky. “It was dead. There wasn’t a mark on it — and nothing had killed it. But it was dead all right.”

I didn’t say anything. I was cold in the hot sun.

“I knew it was dead. Anybody could tell.” He hitched his rifle up higher under his arm. “Scheming,” he repeated softly, and went down the road without looking back.

I climbed into the car and backed it around in its own length. I’d had enough. But as I passed him on the way down I stopped and called out, “Thanks for the help.”

“I would have told you anyway,” he said vaguely as if he barely recalled it. “If you see my brother down there, give him a message for me. Tell him — there’ll be a day for him.”

I negotiated those hairpin turns so fast it put a permanent curve in the chassis of O’Leary’s car. I didn’t stop to deliver his message. I didn’t stop at all until I drove into Burbank. A busy little town, white in the sun. No tiny eyes peered at me from behind fences, and the sun seemed warmer than it had been upon the hill. But I was still cold.

Chapter Four The Alley Cat Called Murder

Miss Alberta Soames lived in a white frame house near Echo Park. It had a red door and red-trimmed windows with a flower box in front of the biggest one. It had a picture-postcard prettiness, but it was the smallest full-grown house I’d ever seen. I parked across the street and considered it, long and deeply. Not any of my thoughts make a great deal of sense.

The house and the flowers and a woman with a name like Alberta Soames went well together. A school teacher, or a lady real estate agent, would be about right. As normal and every day as a cup of tea. There was just one part I didn’t like: Miss Alberta Soames owned a gray coupe, ’41 model, license number S44688. The Automobile Club had been quite positive on that.

There were a couple of explanations. The ranger might have gotten the number wrong. Or Alberta had driven up there to pick wild flowers and not to spy on Paul Banner as he rode the mountain trails.

On the other hand Alberta might turn out to be just the type despite the name and the house. I locked Maggie’s car and walked up to the red front door.

A pushbutton got me chimes as mellow as a country church bell on a Sunday morning. It didn’t get me anything else. I rang again and waited. On the third ring I heard sounds inside as if someone was going to open the door as soon as she had time to tidy up the living room.

I was right in more ways than one. She was a small woman, perhaps in her middle forties, not quite gray, not exactly stout. She had a nice complexion with only a minimum of makeup, and a nice, quiet blue dress. Not a school teacher, perhaps; maybe the owner of a lending library who read all her books.

“Miss Albert Soames?” I asked.

“I was lying down,” she said, in a voice that gave me an obscure uneasiness. “You’ll come in, of course.”

“Of course,” I agreed.

“A bad headache,” she explained, almost anxiously. “Not serious, you understand. It will be better tomorrow.”

“I certainly hope it is,” I said. And I meant it.

The room was just the way I’d have expected. Neat and bright, furnished with taste and a sense of humor. There was a colorful woven rug on the hardwood floor. I tested a fragile-looking rocking chair before I sat down. Alberta walked over to a divan with stiff, careful dignity. She had something clutched tightly in one hand but I couldn’t see what. She didn’t sit on the divan but stood weaving very slightly, with poise and a faintly baffled expression. Somehow her eyes didn’t seem to focus.

I thought: Miss Soames, you’re weefled! Shame on you! “If you start talking about dead blue birds,” I warned her, “I’ll leave.”

“No indeed,” she said. “Though I did have a canary once. And a cat... Will you take these, please?” She held out her closed hand. I got up and went over to her. “It’s the strangest thing,” she said seriously. “I found them under the bed. They weren’t there last night. I looked under the bed—” she smiled — “like all old maids.”

She didn’t smell of liquor not even blackberry wine. But her eyeballs kept getting out of control and the irises were greatly enlarged. If it was dope they’d be in pin points. All I needed was another nut with a left-handed thread to make it a full day!

“I can’t explain where they came from,” she said. “Perhaps you’ll know what to do with them.”

She dropped a half dozen poker chips into my hand.

When I looked back at her face there were lines of panic on it. “I think,” she whispered, “you had better get a doctor for me. My headache...”

She fell with the same dignity that she did everything else.

I caught her before she hit the floor. I laid her on the divan and felt for her pulse. It was very faint. When I lifted her head, my hand found a damp place in her hair. There was blood, I felt a soft spot, like a baby has before the bones grow together. Something had struck there so hard the bone was crushed under the skin. How she had ever walked and talked was the kind of miracle that causes doctors to shrug and change the subject.

I found her telephone and did what the directions tell you to do. I said: “I want an ambulance and a policeman quick.”

I’d just hung up when the door chimes tolled. This time it sounded like a requiem. I put a gay, fat little cushion under Alberta’s head and went to the door.

It was a man. In a dazed way I had a picture of two huge eyes staring owlishly at me from behind very thick glasses; of a pursed red mouth and rosy cheeks. “Oh,” he said blankly. “I thought Bertie — Miss Soames — I didn’t realize she had company...”

“I’m not company,” I said. I was using someone else’s voice. I sounded a little like the ventriloquist’s dummy at the Springer Mortuary. “You’d better come in.”

“Perhaps I’m early.” He stepped just inside the door and blinked behind his glasses. “I could come back a little later.”

“If I let you go,” I said, “maybe you wouldn’t come back. You’re a friend of Miss Soames?”

“Oh, yes,” he said, enthusiastically. “Yes, indeed. I’m Everett Moss.”

I said: “She’s over there.”

He peered, big-eyed, as he walked around me to the divan. “Bertie?” he said anxiously. “What is it? Are you ill?”

“She’s had a headache again.”

He looked owl-eyed-blank. “Again? Have you called a doctor?”

I nodded. “She’s been hit on the head, I think. Awfully hard.”

I put my hand on her forehead and she gave a sudden little shudder as if it felt good. But then she didn’t move again.

After a long moment I knew that last shudder had been the breath of life escaping from her body, like a little mouse scurrying for a hole. And death was that gaunt gray alley cat they call Murder.

I said to Everett: “She’s gone... she’s dead.”

I don’t know what reaction I expected. Almost anything, except the one I got. He literally went into an epileptic fit.

I almost envied him. He was thrashing about on Alberta’s woven rug, but he didn’t look as if he was feeling much of anything. I was the one who was left to do the thinking, and my thoughts were gray as the ashes in the fire place. I put a handkerchief between Everett’s teeth so he wouldn’t bite his tongue off and let him alone.

Then I gave the little house a quick shakedown. This is what I found: a heap of costume jewelry on the bed; a typewriter on the table in the breakfast nook; and a supply of typing paper in a drawer. The jewelry looked as if it had been dumped there from a bureau drawer but it hadn’t been pawed over by an anxious thief, and the drawers were as neat as you’d expect of Alberta. There was nothing of any value anyway. Nothing else seemed to have been moved and there weren’t any more poker chips under the bed.

I rolled a sheet of the typing paper into the typewriter and I punched out: Now is the time for the quick brown bluebird to lay me down and die. The sentence looked perfectly all right. It wasn’t until I compared it with the typing on Paul Banner’s extortion note that I realized how punchy I must have been.

I went back to Everett. He was unconscious; Alberta was still dead.

And outside a siren was singing its lunatic cantata...

Sergeant Sheedy, out of Central Station, was young and hard-muscled and smart. He knew his job and he didn’t view private detectives with a suspicious eye. For all of him I could have been a street car conductor or a sign painter. I was a witness, nothing more, and presently it was time to say my piece.

I told him a straight story; perhaps a degree too straight. Sheedy’s expression got more incredulous as I talked. Finally he exploded: “Now let me get this straight! You were hired by this movie guy Banner—”

“Mrs. Banner—”

“—to find the crank who gave out a phony rumor about his death. So you head straight for a road behind this Santa Rita Ranch where some woods-runner has the license number all ready, waiting. Within three hours of getting the assignment you find the owner of the car dying from a blow on the skull, and her boy friend walks in like a lamb for the slaughter. Brother! I wish they’d break for me like that. Just once!”

I hadn’t mentioned Banner’s extortion notes; slipped my mind, I guess. “You could check,” I said, “except that ranger may have forgotten all about it by now. He’s been breathing that high thin air too long.”

Sheedy glanced sourly at the limp form of Everett Moss being carried out to the ambulance. “I can see this is going to be a picnic! An epileptic, a mad mountain-boy, and a private dick with second sight! Why can’t I ever draw a case where everybody is normal? Just once!”

He paused and studied me while he sucked on a tooth. “Kind of coincidental, isn’t it? Who knew you were going to come here tonight?”

“The ranger. Maybe the auto club. I wouldn’t be sure about that last.”

He grunted in disgust.

“What did you turn up in the house? And don’t tell me you didn’t shake the place!”

“The junk jewelry on the bed,” I said. “And that’s all. Maybe dumped there to make this look like a burglary.”

“Sure.” Sheedy dismissed that — perhaps a little too quickly. “You think this guy Moss skulled his sweetie?”

I shrugged. “Might have. It could have been Moss up there on the mountain road in Alberta’s car. If he told her what he’d done, she might have threatened to blow the whistle on him to keep him in line. So he lost his head and slugged her.”

“Just because the guy’s an epileptic that doesn’t necessarily mean he’s nuts,” Sheedy objected. “You said that because you’re suspicious of anybody who isn’t just like you.”

“I said it because you wanted me to,” I snapped. “You sit there feeding me ideas so I’ll put them into words for you. If it sounds good it was your idea — if it’s silly, I’m stuck with it.”

He stared at me, hard-eyed, and then he grinned without much humor.

I grinned back at him. I didn’t mean it either. “My theory is she fell into the fireplace and hit her head on the grate.”

“Get the hell out of here, Carmody,” he said quietly. “And don’t mess in this business till I tell you to. Otherwise, I’ll talk to Banner. You wouldn’t like that, would you?”

“Mrs. Banner wouldn’t like it,” I said. “And if she wouldn’t, then I wouldn’t.”

I went outside into the warm darkness where a mock orange tree was sweetening the night. But it was a little too much like the cloying perfume of the flowers that just this morning had been banked around Joey Content’s casket. A hot-shot gambler, and a nice middle-aged lady with a sense of humor. But as far as I could stretch my imagination they had in common only this: they were both as dead as the dreams of youth...

I took Sheedy’s advice and let the police department carry the ball for the rest of the week. They had the organization to do a better job than I could. I sat around my office playing with those six poker chips Alberta had given me. I’d forgotten about them till I cleaned out my pockets that night and that was too late. If I gave them to Sheedy with no better story than that, he’d have roisted me right out of the private detective business. He was a tough lad.

The chips were yellow plastic with a slightly raised border and a design like a treble clef in the center. Perhaps a private mark, I thought. In the back room of my mind there was an uneasy answer to whose chips they were, but I didn’t want to dwell on it. Besides, I couldn’t explain how they got under Alberta’s bed. So I put them in a drawer of my desk and waited for the police to pin the murder on Everett Moss.

And they did. He was arrested on suspicion of murder three days later as he left the hospital. And he promptly made a damaging statement before a lawyer got to him and dummied him up. He admitted he’d been outside the house for at least a half hour before I let him in. He thought he was catching Alberta with a secret admirer. Nobody else went into the house, he said, except me. And himself.

I phoned Judith Banner right away and made an appointment for the next day, to take another look at the extortion note.

A little later the afternoon mail came. A postal card had me thinking for a minute. It read: Will you do one more favor for met Misfortune has me by the heels again. It was signed The Great Dekema, and the address was out on Avenue 19.

Presently I worked that out with the typical Carmody deduction. Avenue 19 could only mean Lincoln Heights Jail. A wino’s home away from home. The one person I knew who would have a name like that was the wizard I’d saved from a watery grave. He must have been hitting that magic pitcher again. If I was the only person he could call on for help, he was in a bad way. So I went up to see him.

He greeted me with a sort of forlorn dignity and an old-fashioned humor. “You understand,” he smiled faintly, “as a student of Houdini I could escape from this smelly institution any time I chose. But I shouldn’t like to embarrass my jailers.”

“Probably all family men,” I agreed gravely, “who couldn’t afford to lose their jobs.” He looked gaunt enough to slip right through the bars. “How did you know who I was, old timer?”

“That day at Banner’s, I had you cast as the palace guard,” he explained. “When I looked for you to thank you for assisting me out of the pool, some fat gentleman told me your name. But he said you weren’t the watch-dog. So I deduced you must be a private eye.”

“What can I do for you?” I wanted to know.

He looked a little embarrassed. “I was thrown into this foul dungeon because I couldn’t meet their ridiculous fine. But I’m not asking for a loan,” he added quickly. “I have a sum of money owing me. From Banner. I didn’t collect my stipend that day. I thought of writing to him, but you know how those people are — little gold-plated gods protected by lackeys and worse.” His face contorted. “He would never see the letter — some hireling would throw it away—”

“Okay, dad,” I soothed. “I’m going out there tomorrow. I’ll put in a word for your money. You’ll be out of here before you know it.”

“You are an anachronism, sir,” he said in a trembling voice. “A gentleman in a benighted world full of knaves and profiteers.”

“And that’s the bitter truth!” I agreed. I left before he dampened my lapel.

I told Judith Banner about him the next day, and she promised to mail the check at once. She led me into the library, where I compared the extortion note with the scrambled sentence I’d typed on Alberta’s machine.

Same paper; same typing.

“I guess that’s it,” I said. “Your troubles are over.”

She smiled as if at some sad, private joke, and asked for my bill. I would have done it gratis for the sheer pleasure of doing something for her — a kid cutting the grass for the girl next door while his own lawn grows wild. But there was no way I could explain that to her, so I charged her all my conscience would bear.

“Thank you so much, Mr. Carmody,” she said at the door.

“I was William the other day.”

“So you were.” She gave me her hand and smiled. “Good-by, William. I wish—” she looked away and finished — “the best of luck to you.”

I gave her hand back to her and walked the two miles to the nearest bus stop.

Another job written off — short, profitable, and somehow disturbing But my part was all finished. I could forget it.

That’s what I thought. Thirty minutes later the whole damn thing went off like Krakatao! And you know who was sitting right on top?

Yeah...!

Chapter Five Unlucky Seventh

When I got off the bus, fat Chauncey McLea was getting weighed on the corner drugstore scales. His weight gave him no happiness. He didn’t read me the fortune. “Another note,” he said tersely. “This one means business.”

Something wrong here. “When was it sent?”

“Last night. Postmarked at seven-thirty in Los Angeles. I didn’t tell Judith about it. She worries...”

A sudden rush of something to the pit of my stomach made me slightly nauseated. “Come on to my office.”

The note had been typed with some other typewriter and the paper was different. But that figured, since Alberta’s machine was no longer available.

It was signed: You Know Who.

“Something new here,” I said. “What dame?”

“Hard to tell,” Chauncey’s balloon face was pained. “He changes them every third week.”

“What about Judith? Does she know?”

He shrugged the forty pounds of blubber that padded his shoulders. “I suppose so. But she won’t believe it. That woman, Carmody,” he said earnestly, “is the nearest thing to an angel you and I will ever see. And Paul is purest trash.”

“What keeps them together?”

He stared at something that only he could see. “I wish I knew. Will you get to work on this?”

I dug out the yellow poker chips. If the note writer wasn’t Everett Moss — and he wasn’t, unless they were furnishing typewriters for prisoners — the only lead I had was these chips. I tossed one to Chauncey.

“Mean anything to you?”

He studied it and his little eyes moved uneasily. “From the El Tempo Club. One of Paul’s favorite playgrounds. I’ve never been there. But I saw a chip like this on Paul’s dressing table once.”

I thought: Don’t be crazy, Carmody! You can’t tie up a gunned-out gangster, a movie star and a respectable department store buyer. That’s what Alberta had been.

Any number of people might have El Tempo poker chips. I knew the answer to my own next question, but I asked it anyway. “Who runs the El Tempo?”

“I don’t know — now,” Chauncey said. “Joey Content used to have it. But he got killed last week.”

He was telling me! I was the seventh pallbearer!

“Get on it right away, Carmody,” he urged. “This guy may mean business.”

“And you wouldn’t want to lose a good job!” But I wasn’t messing around with the boys who ran the El Tempo Club for any reason. That way lay Sid Marable. And sudden death.

“I’ll see what I can do,” I added insincerely.

He nodded, struggled out of the chair and squeezed through the door. A slob of a man nursing a torch for an angel...

An hour later Maggie walked in. I hadn’t seen her since the night I returned her car but there didn’t seem to be any hard feelings. She tossed me a plain black necktie.

“I don’t have a thing to wear it with,” I told her. “Off what stiff did you get this?”

“A street salesman sent it up,” she said. “He told me it was for you. I thought you must have ordered it.”

I sat looking at the tie and at Maggie. Then the phone rang. I picked up the receiver but there was only a gentle, distant hum.

“Hello,” I said. “Who’s there?”

“Shame on you, Carmody,” a dead voice whispered in my ear. “Letting a girl substitute in your coffin.” Then he hung up.

O’Leary watched me strangely. “Willie, what is it?”

I was holding something heavy. The phone. I put it down. I got up and walked on frozen feet over to the window. There were three pigeons squatting on the ledge below. In the early shadows of evening, Luther, the one-lunged gunman, was watching the street cars go by from his favorite bench. I put my hot palm against the cool glass.

“If it’s a woman,” O’Leary said from behind me, “I’m broadminded, Willie.”

I had to swallow twice to make room for my voice. I’d never thought of the possibility of them going to work on Maggie. I had to get Maggie out of my life — fast.

I said quietly, “I guess you’re going to have to be broadminded, Maggie. That was Judith Banner. I wouldn’t want the newspapers to get a hold of this — but you’re entitled to know.”

Her footsteps came quickly across the room. “Willie, what are you trying to say? What’s gotten into you anyway?”

“We’ll always he friends, you and I. Margaret,” I said. I put so much into it I scared myself. “I know you’ll understand. We both fought it—”

“Stop talking like a movie script!” she said furiously. “Tell it to me!”

“Okay, baby — if I have to spell it out for you.” I turned and looked at her. “We’re all wound up. But good. It’s been on the way for a long time. Now it’s here. Get out of my life, and stay out. All I want of you is a memory!”

She turned so white. I thought she was going to hit the deck Her soft lips trembled, and her eyes went dark and remote. She backed slowly away from me, like a child who simply doesn’t believe it, until her back came up against the door knob She never once took her gaze off me. The only thing that could ever haunt me more than that look in her eyes, would be to have to carry her up the grassy incline of the Slopes of Gilead Cemetery.

If she had said anything then, it would have caved me in. But she swallowed rigidly; then she turned and went out.

I watched her silhouette fade off the ground glass door and I had a hole in my stomach an elephant could have lost his foot in. I flattened the tin waste basket with one kick. It didn’t help. I wanted to hit something that would snap and bleed.

You can get scared enough to get brave. Maybe it’s sheer cornered desperation. but it passes for the same thing. You do things that a moment’s thought would tell you are crazy.

Only I wasn’t thinking. Two hours later I was in the El Tempo Club.

A bartender served me a straight scotch and a sneer. You’d have had to be richer than he was to rate a smile, and only movie stars and capitalists were. The club was on the side of a hill above that strip of Sunset that lies in the country I’d climbed fifty-seven steps to reach it, and that was an indication that it had something more than other places. Nobody climbs fifty-seven steps if they don’t have to.

And the end wasn’t in sight. The gambling rooms were farther up the hill in a separate building. That might discourage some players, but by the same token the police wouldn’t just casually drop in.

It took me an hour to figure the setup and five minutes fast talk to sell myself to the man with the cold-chisel face at the top of that second outdoor flight. He didn’t like to let strangers in, but I dropped Paul Banner’s name and that seemed to carry weight. I got in.

It was a fancy layout. Most places of this sort have a makeshift appearance because they’re here today and raided tomorrow. No doubt a combination of protection and inaccessibility was responsible for this air of permanence. They had everything but Russian roulette. And girl croupiers, all looking like movie extras, in low-cut evening gowns which were never designed as an aid to concentration on the spinning wheel.

One table had most of the trade, so I wandered over to it. Paul Banner was right in the middle of a hot winning streak. He was wearing a tux and he was in a better mood than the other time I’d seen him. I watched for a few minutes, then I rode one of Alberta’s yellow chips on his coattail.

Banner glanced up and apparently found my face familiar. “Hello, there!”

I didn’t think he knew where he’d seen me before, but he was out in public and he couldn’t be himself.

The girl croupier hadn’t spun the wheel. She was looking at my yellow chip with a little furrow on her lovely forehead. She was very dark, in a Spanish way, and as beautiful as Judith Banner. But there was a vast difference. You’d be proud to be seen with Judith any place. But if you got into an alley brawl you’d much rather have this girl along.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “There’s been a mistake somewhere. Your chip is not good.”

I leaned on the table. “Somebody must have changed the rules.”

“If you’ll take it to the office,” she said sharply, “I’m sure it will be straightened out.” She pushed the chip toward me.

Slender fingers clamped on my arm and a silky voice said: “Right this way, Carmody. You’re expected.”

I picked up my chip and went with him. He floated along like a dancing master, slight and elegant. We went into an office that was also elegant — a little too elegant.

To give the room the right balance of ruggedness was Sid Marable. “I thought you’d come, Carmody,” he said in his lemon-sour voice.

The dancing master said: “He tried to run one of Joey’s chips.”

Marable stared at me while a small fire smouldered behind his eyes. “This gets better and better, Carmody. Let’s have it.”

I threw the chip on the desk. “The girl says you’ll redeem it.”

Marable didn’t look at the chip. He opened a drawer and pulled out a sheath of bills. He tossed them to me. A quick riffle showed me there was around fifty bills. All hundreds.

“The stakes are high,” I said. “I’m sorry I didn’t bring the rest of the chips.”

“Don’t get greedy, Carmody. I’m a guy who doesn’t like trouble. I’m paying for no kickbacks. Where is he?”

“Castle?” I threw the money back to him. “We got off to a wrong start, Marable. I didn’t come in here to sell Ivan to you.”

“You didn’t come in just to make talk,” Marable said coldly. “Get on with it.”

“I will.” I leaned across the desk toward him. I was scared enough to be sore, and enough not to show how scared I really was “Lay off my girl, Marable. If anybody so much as whistles at her, I’ll know where to come. And I’ll do a lot of damage before your punks slow me down. That’s a promise.”

“What’s holding you up, Carmody?” he asked softly. “If that dame is so important to you, why don’t you do something for her? You could make some dough and save your girl. But what do you do? You come in and talk hard where talk won’t buy you a cigarette!”

“You’re a stupid man, Marable,” I said brightly. I had to say something.

He spun the yellow chip and watched it moodily. “When I took over this place, I put in a new line of chips. All of Joey’s were supposed to have been destroyed. Where did you get this one?”

“Not from Ivan,” I assured him. “A woman named Alberta Soames had it. She wouldn’t know Ivan either. She was murdered the first of the week. Suppose you fit that in for me.”

Marable picked up the chip and examined it closely. “I’m going to tell you something, Carmody, though I don’t know why I waste my time. Joey was making a nice thing out of the El Tempo Club. He got his cut of the take, and more. But we haven’t figured out how he did it. Maybe he had some extra chips made up for a stooge to pass off on one of the cashiers. The stooge would be Ivan. That’s why we’re looking for Ivan.”

“I didn’t think of that,” I said. “I thought Ivan had been a witness to Joey’s shooting.”

Marable looked surprised. “It was Ivan who knocked Joey off. That gang war angle is strictly for street circulation. Hell, we wanted to ask him a lot of questions.”

“How about the wheels?” I suggested. “Maybe he had some of them gimmicked.”

“Give us a little credit!” Marable snapped. “I took every piece of equipment apart personally. If there is a bug in any of it. do you think I wouldn’t have found it?”

I stood up. “You got a problem there. Maybe you need a private detective. But not me. I just came into warn you about Luther’s health. Either pull him off or I’ll blow some smoke in his face and suffocate him!”

“Luther is wiry.” Marble smiled. “He’ll take a lot of wear.”

“He’ll get a lot,” I promised. I thought I had him half-convinced. I started for the door.

“Carmody,” he called after me. “Joey got into us for a hundred grand. He didn’t have any left when the undertaker sent in his bill. How much of it is Ivan paying you?”

You couldn’t argue with somebody as convinced as that. To Marable a cut of a hundred thousand dollars was incentive enough for anything. I was front man for Ivan Castle, and all hell wouldn’t change it.

I made a disorderly withdrawal into the gambling room. I’d thrown my Sunday bluff and he called it. Now how did I get out of here with all my skin?

It wasn’t going to be easy Those steep, dark steps leading down the side of the hill were a perfect place for an accident. Maybe a window in the gent’s room would do for an emergency exit.

Paul Banner was still winning like he owned the wheel as I started down a softly lit corridor, following an arrow.

I never found the rest room I had a blurred sense of someone moving very fast but I didn’t really see him. I took it right where my head comes to a point, and then I was falling. The floor fell away with me and I dropped nine miles without a ’chute.

All I knew from then on was what people told me. People in the paddy wagon. They said cops came out of the air conditioning. They never saw so many cops at one time outside of the policemen’s ball. How they did it was still a mystery.

But even with a head full of pirouetting devils, I could supply the answer Marable would come up with. It wouldn’t be any more accurate than the existing belief that I knew where Ivan Castle was hiding, but it was bound to catch on — in the wrong places. To wit: one William Carmody had fingered the El Tempo Club for the cops. For time and place, call the Springer Mortuary — Fine Funerals On Budget Terms!

Chapter Six To the Slopes of Gilead

I spent the night in a cell. I didn’t have bail and I was in no condition to phone Lieutenant Kissinger of the Hollywood station, who would have sprung me. Kissinger didn’t have much use for me, but he was fond of Maggie, which sometimes caused him to do things against his conscience. There was one other reason why that cell was good enough for me, and his name was Sid Marable. I felt safer here.

In the morning I had a headache the Grand Canyon wouldn’t have held. Moving at all was pure agony and if I’d had any choice, I’d not have lifted my head. But bail had been put up for me and they wanted the cell for a triangle murder suspect. When I got outside, Maggie was waiting.

I said: “I thought I told you to stay away from me.”

She was wearing slacks, which on her are a crime against mankind. She didn’t look at me as she said: “I was down here for the auction, and I overheard your name being read off.”

“And you just happened to have fifty bucks in your girdle!”

“I never wear a girdle,” she said indignantly. “I had the money because I thought I might buy something at the auction.”

I tried to focus on her. “What are you talking about — auction?”

“You know — the police auction. All the lost and found articles that have not been claimed. Let’s go in.”

“You can’t buy anything if you’re broke,” I pointed out.

She still wouldn’t look at me and I couldn’t tell what she was thinking. But the fact that she had bailed me out was a good sign that she’d listen to reason when the time came that Marble and his hoods weren’t breathing down my neck.

“We can watch,” she said. “I have a few dollars left.”

I didn’t believe for a minute she had come down here this early in the day for a police auction. But I went along with her. It was the least I could do.

I didn’t pay much attention to the auction. There was the usual mishmash of stuff that looks good in an attic. A junkman could have made a modest haul. Presently I was aware that Maggie had entered the bidding against a Main Street character with the sniffles.

“How much money do you have?” she whispered. I had about twelve. “That’s enough. I have nine-fifty. I think that little man is a shill anyway.”

“What are you bidding on?”

“That box. Can’t you see?”

“See?” I moaned. “I’m hardly breathing! Let’s go get some coffee.”

“Wait. Nine!” she called. The Skid Row gentleman sniffled indignantly. “It’s perfect to keep old love-letters in,” Maggie informed me, with a touch of bitterness.

“Nine dollars the lovely lady bids.” The auctioneer’s voice didn’t do anything good for my head. “Who’ll say nine-fifty?”

“Nine-fifty,” the opposition bid.

“Let’s get this over with.” I lifted a shaky voice. “Twenty-one bucks!”

That did it. But it didn’t make me any friends. Even Maggie glared.

“Why did you do that? I could have got it for a lot less.”

“It’s a present for you,” I told her. “I didn’t want anything cheap.”

We got the box, a tricked-up little orange item, somewhat larger than a cigarette box. A fierce black dragon curled its way over most of the front and cover, but today nothing could scare me. I put the box under one arm, took Maggie’s hand and got out of there.

We never made the street. A plainclothes-man latched on to my elbow. “You’re under arrest, buddy. You too, lady.”

“Oh, well,” I said. “I didn’t want to leave that cell anyway.”

Maggie had more fight in her. She insisted on asking questions, though she didn’t get any answers. We were rushed into an office.

Sergeant Sheedy was sitting behind a charred and scarred desk.

He took one look at the box under my arm and went off like a Chinese New Years. “Not him!” he roared at the detective. “You ox-brained moron! I’ll have you walking a beat in a subdivision that isn’t even under construction. Go after the other guy!”

It took quite a while to cool him off long enough to get some sense out of him. “That box,” he said, in a strangled voice. “We don’t know where it came from. Some fool patrolman turned it in without any report — a lost and found. But one of my boys — not that half-wit that arrested you — tied it up with the Soames kill. Never mind how,” he added craftily. “So we planted it in the auction and gave it a mention in the newspapers.”

“Great!” I said. “So the guy who killed Alberta was supposed to walk in and get himself arrested while bidding on it.”

Sheedy looked mysterious. “I have reasons to think he might. Did you get a look at the guy who was bidding against you?”

“A wino.” I shrugged him off. “Not the type. Besides, I thought you had Everett Moss tapped for that job.”

He gave me a narrow look. “Why are you so anxious to pin it on Moss?”

“I’m not trying to pin it on anybody,” I yelled.

“Then stop making insinuations,” he snarled. “Now get out of here before I book you for obstructing justice. And leave the box! I’ll give you a receipt for your money.”

Outside we pooled our pennies and found enough for coffee. Maggie asked: “Why did he say you were trying to pin it on Moss?”

“A copper’s psychology,” I explained. “He’s got an angle he doesn’t want to talk about, so he uses that way of fogging up the situation.”

We found a cafe and I gulped some steaming coffee for strength to live the hour out. “Let’s you come clean now. Why were you down here so early? And don’t give me any more talk about the auction.”

“You’re certainly grumpy in the morning, aren’t you? I’m glad you’re not going to marry me.” Then she patted my hand. “All right, Willie, I’ll talk. The cop that Kissinger put on your tail phoned me that you were in jail, so I dug into the sugar bowl and came down to redeem you.”

“Cop?” I said. “What are you talking about? How did Kissinger get into this deal?”

“He put a man on you yesterday when I told him you were in trouble. Good heavens, Willie, you didn’t think I believed that story about you and Judith Banner! Why, she wouldn’t take you in a month-end sale!”

“You can say things like that,” I said stiffly, “knowing I’m in no shape to hit you.”

Her eyes got tender. “You were so noble and dramatic making that speech. It’s just that you’re such a poor liar, baby. You never know what to do with your hands.”

I just stared at her.

“I knew it had to be something bad to make you do it,” she said. “You were afraid somebody would get even with you through me—”

“Stop being so all-knowing! And why didn’t you stay out of it? I’m still so hot I’m radioactive.”

“You’d better tell me about it, Willie. Maybe I can think of something.”

So I told her what I knew. It didn’t take a lot of telling.

“The big puzzle.” I said, “is to tie up Joey Content’s murder with Alberta s. She had six poker chips from his gambling club She didn’t know where they came from, and neither do I Marable says he destroyed all of them when he took over the El Tempo If I could find Ivan. I could get some answers.” “Banner seems to be the crux of the whole thing.” Maggie said slowly “He connects with Alberta through whoever was trying to extort him. and he knew Joey Content and later Marable at the El Tempo.”

“Now if I could just prove Banner wrote those letters himself and gave out his own death report, I’d have a swell suspect!”

“Don’t just laugh it off!” Maggie retorted. “Maybe he created a crank and an extortionist as a rabbit for the legal bloodhounds to chase.”

The girl had a point. I said: “Only we’re lacking one motive. It’s conceivable Banner could have dropped enough money to Joey Content to shoot him during a beef over it. But I just can’t buy a big name movie star ever knowing a person like Alberta ever existed.”

Maggie put her chin on her fist. “He wasn’t always a big movie star Maybe during his early days he knew her... He’s not a very nice person. Willie. I interviewed him the day of the lawn party and I found out a lot about him. He didn’t like my probing.”

I remembered how disagreeable he’d been when he came into the library where I had talked to Judith Banner. “Give me a rough sketch.” I suggested.

“Well, first, his name isn’t really Banner. But he wouldn’t tell me what it was. And he used to be a Broadway hoofer — about thirty years ago How he worked his way up to being a star would make a crook’s manual. And, boy, is he tight with his money!”

“How about his wife? How did he ever happen to get someone like her?”

“Judith?” O’Leary looked a little forlorn. “She’s Pasadena society — real blue blood. Paul married her because he had to have proof he was a success. Money wasn’t enough.”

“That’s a good character analysis — for him. But why did Judith, with her looks and breeding and background and wealth, marry Banner?”

“If you were a woman,” O’Leary said, giving me an odd glance. “I could explain it to you. But if you were a woman you wouldn’t need it explained.”

“Oh, don’t be so damn obscure! What else?”

“Well — there’s Chauncey. Paul keeps him around for pig-sticking. More proof that he’s the great Paul Banner. And Chauncey takes it because he’s in love with Judith. Also because he gets a big salary from Paul. They’re half-brothers.”

“I will be damned!” I stared at her. “What do you know about that!”

She looked pleased. “Does that mean something to you?”

“Maybe. Let’s go up to my office. I want another look at that last threat letter.”

I gave the waitress our pennies and we went outside into the midmorning smog. Halfway to the next block I pulled up sharply.

“Maggie,” I said urgently, “where’s that tail of Kissinger’s now?”

“I don’t know. He was around...”

“Find him,” I ordered. “Find him quick. Don’t argue, baby — just run!” I gave her a push in the right direction.

Luther and the weedy character, who’d been number three on Joey’s coffin handles, closed in from two directions. Marable was at the wheel of a long black car.

For once, Maggie showed good sense. She was outside Luther and she kept running back toward the cafe. Maybe the tail had lingeerd there over his coffee. Maybe he was trying to date a waitress. It didn’t make a lot of difference. I never laid eyes on him.

Luther’s gun must have been awfully heavy in his small hand. He prodded me into the car. Marable, watching me in the rear-view mirror, said wonderingly: “Ivan must have given you a big chunk of that hundred grand, Carmody. The things you’ll do for money!”

On the coast just north of Malibu, a bleak, high cliff drops sharply into the restless Pacific. Centuries of foaming-mad waves have attacked the broken rocks of the foot of this cliff, and the seagulls have long used it as their own Wailing Wall. It’s a lonely, haunted place, and I didn’t think I could ever rest peacefully there. But that’s where I was headed.

It was Sid Marable’s idea of a handy place to lose a body, and the only one who didn’t agree with him didn’t have a vote.

“We got to weigh him down,” his spiteful voice went on. “That dame he was with is going to kick up a fuss. But without a corpse, she’s off to a bad start.”

“Good enough,” the weedy man said indifferently.

Luther just nodded.

Carmody wasn’t asked for an opinion. “Okay, gents,” I said. “You win. I’ll give you Ivan.”

“All of a sudden now he knows where Ivan is.” Marable stared coldly at me in the rear-view mirror. “Maybe we no longer want him, Carmody. It don’t matter much how he and Joey were knocking down on the profits. There ain’t going to be any more profits!”

“You’re a little late, scout,” the other man said. “We had a very bad night last night!”

“One of the customers broke a wheel,” Marable said bitterly, “and in the El Tempo when you break a wheel you can retire in your old age. That was bad enough, but when the law got the rest, we went out of business. You can’t stand two raps like that, Carmody.”

I began to get a vacant feeling down where my coffee was. The only hole card I had to bluff with was Ivan and nobody would even call me. I said, with a sort of desperate hope: “How about that money Ivan got away with after Joey conked out? That ought to make a nice sinking fund.”

Marable glanced sideways at the weedy character. “Maybe you got a point, Carmody. Let’s hear you talk it up.”

“I know where he is,” I said carefully. “I found out by accident — not because I’ve been hiding him out. It doesn’t matter if you believe that or not. The point is, I can show you where he is. I don’t promise you can get to him.”

“We’ll get to him,” Marable assured me, “unless he’s in Fort Knox.” I believed him. “Where to, Carmody?”

I tried not to let my breath out too sharply. But at least I’d escape those rocks in the surf. Who wants sea-gulls for mourners? “Turn left on the next street. We have to double back to Glendale Boulevard.”

Luther said uneasily: “He’s got a flip tongue. He’ll talk you into something. I think it’s a trick.”

“We didn’t promise him anything,” Marable pointed out. “If he produces, maybe we’ll put him on a train for the East.”

“It’s a trick,” Luther persisted. “I got a premonition of trouble.”

Marable said wearily: “Turn it off, Luther.”

We had a lot of silence through Glendale, and more of the same for Burbank. I gave directions from time-to-time just to keep the interest up. I hesitated when we passed the asphalt road leading into the Santa Rita Ranch. The guard at the gate had a gun, and he’d be tough about letting anyone in, but he was outnumbered, and the element of surprise was against him. And Marable was desperate.

“Another five miles,” I said.

We swung down the second asphalt road and presently started up the grade into the mountains. On the hairpin turns I got sick, and it wasn’t anything but fear. I was so scared my fingernails were turning blue. I didn’t have any rosy dreams that I was going to be allowed to walk out of this even if I did turn Ivan over to them. And if my guess was wrong, I’d picked as quiet and lonely a spot to die in as those rocks beyond Malibu...

Chapter Seven Hideaway Ranch

“Pull over here,” I said pointing to the loop of the road that overhung the bridal paths of the ranch. Marable stopped the car.

“Well?” he demanded. “Where is he — hiding up a tree?”

“Trot him out,” the other man ordered.

“I told you he’d be tough to get at,” I said. “He’s down at the ranch. There’s only one road leading into it, and that’s patrolled. This is the back way.”

Marable gave me a disputed stare. “Do we look like burros? How are we going to get down there?”

“Maybe I should have sent him to you C.O.D. I put the finger on him — you carry it from here. Maybe if you wait long enough, he’ll ride along the trail.”

Marable looked at the weedy man. “What do you think?”

“Could be. Looks like a tight setup from here.”

“How are we going to smoke him out?” Luther demanded.

“That can wait,” Marable said. “All right, Carmody — out.”

“You mean I’ve got to walk down from here?”

“You won’t have to walk far,” Marable promised quietly. “You can’t say you didn’t have it coming. Get out.”

I got out. I didn’t have a talking-point. My legs held me up, but only barely. The three men got out too.

“Start walking,” Marable ordered.

I tried to wet my lips. I couldn’t have spit if my foot had been on fire. “Doesn’t the condemned man get a last cigarette?”

“Smoking is a bad habit,” Luther said coldly. “You won’t miss it.”

I looked at Marable. “How do you stand having a guy like that around? Doesn’t he get any fun out of life?”

“Let him have a cigarette, Luther,” Marable growled. “Other people have lungs!”

I lit up. I was proud of the way I did it with one match. The smell of tobacco and dust and things growing in the bright sun was sweeter than any perfume. Maybe those gray, lonely rocks would have made it easier to let go of life. Up here the world was a great place to be in.

I filled my lungs with smoke and blew a little of it at Luther. Marable smiled with remote amusement when the little man went into a paroyzxm of coughing. But he kept his gun on me. So did his pal.

I made the cigarette last as long as possible. It’s a terrible thing, knowing your life is only as long as a cigarette.

The coals got closer and closer to my fingers and I wondered if, conversely, I was getting closer to the Everlasting Coals.

Marable’s acid voice ate through my thoughts. “Okay, we’re convinced. You’re a big man, Carmody. You’re going out like a hero. Now walk over to the edge.”

I walked over to the edge. Luther followed, flat-footed. “Turn around,” he said in a half-whisper.

“Start shooting.” I wondered whose voice I’d borrowed for the occasion. I sounded like a boy soprano. “Do it while I’m looking at you. Let’s see how tough you are!”

Each agonizing second I stalled was that much longer for something to happen in. But it should have happened long ago. There wasn’t a sound in the hills but the heavy beat of my heart.

“I’d as soon it be in the belly.” Luther’s gray, ball-bearing eyes had a wild shine on them now. “I was just giving you a choice.”

I turned around. Slowly. I was afraid my muscles would freeze on me in that final second. Maybe they did. The crash-and-whine of the rifle gave me an involuntary start. I went over the edge, head first.

The second shot was walking on the heels of the first one, but Luther’s bubbling scream got in between. The sounds of panic on the road above and behind me imprinted themselves on the tape-recorder of my mind for later listening. Afterwards, I did remember them: the shouts, the failing screams of Luther, and the steady, methodical rifle fire. But as I went over the edge I heard nothing but myself falling.

The slope was steep and gritty with nothing to slow my tumbling body till I hit the first growth of scrub oak fifty feet down. Small rocks tore at me, and my eyes filled with dirt, and I choked on the dust I kicked up. I didn’t, at that moment, know if I’d been shot. I hurt in a dozen places, but my mind was somersaulting with my body, and I couldn’t concentrate. Then the scrub oak flagged me down.

For safety, I rolled deep into it. It wasn’t much cover at first. But I didn’t need any. I heard the black car turning around in that narrow loop of road. Marable was wrenching the gears. He’d probably forgotten to release the emergency too.

I lifted my head for a brief, spinning look at the car. It was headed down and rocking on the turns. I felt like the last horse on a merry-go-round. I wouldn’t win any races, hut at least I was going to finish. With that I fainted like a coy maiden...

I got hack up the incline on my hands and knees. It was the best I could manage. That way I found the little cards which I’d not have noticed otherwise. They appeared to have been carelessly tossed there from the road — and since the last rain.

I picked up three. The wind might have fluttered others into the scrub oak, but three were enough. Weighing machine tickets, with someone’s fortune on them. It would have been a nice touch if the fortunes were ironically close to the facts, such as: Beware of a dark man with a gun.

But the only thing significant was the weight stamped on each. They were all about the same — 263 pounds. I knew only one person in this hassle who weighed that much.

The ranger was emerging from the pines when I got back up on the road. His rifle with its telescopic sight dangled easily on his arm. He stared at me from his brooding, hidden eyes without the slightest light of recognition.

“Nice shooting,” I said weakly. “But you sure took your time!”

He continued to stare at me, silently.

“I thought the cigarette would get you interested. For whatever it’s worth, you saved my life.”

“I aimed at his shoulder,” he said suddenly. “But I killed him.” There was a long smear of blood on the road. “He was dead when they put him into the car.”

“There wasn’t much to Luther. A rifle bullet would go right through him. Even at that range.”

He wasn’t listening to me. His head was cocked a little as if he were listening to something or somebody, but it wasn’t me.

I asked: “Do you have a telephone up there?”

He didn’t say anything, just turned and started to climb the hill. I followed him.

He’d worn a narrow path up through that labyrinth of pines where the sun had never shone. I felt tiny sharp eyes watching us from the deep green depths, but they didn’t make a sound. Strange, ashen little flowers grew beside the path looking like waifs who knew they would die when darkness fell. By the time we reached his eagle’s nest we’d crossed an invisible frontier into a land where even shadows fell the wrong way.

A magnificent red setter butted open a screen door and came out to meet us. I patted his head but he didn’t wag his tail or show the slightest interest. His brown eyes had the same remoteness in them as his owner’s.

“Nice dog,” I said. Neither of them answered me. I went into the lookout station and cranked an old-fashioned wall telephone. I phoned Paul Banner’s house. He was out and so was Judith, so I got Chauncey McLea. Banner, he said, was riding at the Santa Rita Ranch.

“Can you get me past the guard at the gate?”

“I guess so,” he said uncertainly. “But why?”

“Never mind now. Get a car and come and get me.” I told him where I was. “I’ll meet you down the road.”

Next I put a call through to Sheedy because I knew Maggie would be there. It took several minutes to convince her I wasn’t dead in a culvert. When I went outside, the ranger was sitting on a stump with the dog’s head between his knees and recounting in a quiet monotone, as if in a confessional, what had happened down on the road.

I said: “He looks like he understands you.”

The ranger lifted his eyes to me with nothing but pity on his mind. Of course the dog understood him. I started to ask if the dog ever talked back but I bit down hard on the question. Because I knew what the answer would be — and I was afraid I’d believe him...

I tried to say my thanks again but he didn’t seem to know what I was talking about. I left him and wended my way down that crooked path to the road and still there wasn’t a sound except the quick beat of my own footsteps following close as if afraid of being left behind.

While I waited for Chauncey, I sorted out all the mismated patches of this crazy quilt of corruption and murder. I knew where everybody fitted and why, but when it came to proof I couldn’t prove New Year’s fell on January first.

The black car skidded to a stop. Chauncey’s big face was like seven pounds of dirty lard. “What’s up, Carmody?” he demanded.

I ignored him, and he drove in sullen silence. At the end of the asphalt road the guard came out of his shanty and looked at a card Chauncey showed him. Then he glanced at me and smiled from the teeth out.

“I see you made it,” he said in his gentle voice. He might have been calling me a dirty name.

I said, for no reason at all: “There’ll be a day for you!”

He pulled the smile inside so quickly that his Adam’s apple convulsed. Then he turned and went back into the shanty without another word.

“You certainly chilled him,” Chauncey said, in a subdued voice. “What was that you said to him?”

“The password.”

Maybe I should have said it that first time. I might have stopped this thing before it got started.

We drove down the dusty road, leaving a gray-white dragon’s tail behind us, and around the toe of the hump. The ranch was right behind it. Chauncey pointed out Banner’s car, a lemon-yellow convertible.

A generous share of the ranch house had been alloted to the bar. It was a horsy room with an exposed oaken-beamed ceiling and a huge field-stone fireplace and colorful Indian rugs on the floor.

Paul Banner, a girl and a man were sitting at a heavy redwood table. Both were familiar. The man wore a brown tweed sports coat with a bright orange and black show handkerchief, and burnt orange shirt. He was still as pale and wasted as a castaway, but the aura of intoxication was gone and I hardly knew him. It was the Great Dekema himself.

“Didn’t you get your money?” I asked him. “Mrs. Banner said she’d mail it.”

He took the handkerchief from his breast pocket and wiped his already dry face. There wasn’t enough of him left to perspire. “Brother Banner is the one who owes me money,” he said quietly.

“Just what the hell is all this?” Brother Banner demanded. Then he saw Chauncey behind me. “And what are you doing here, Porky?”

“Paul—” Chauncey began in a sickly voice, but I cut him off.

“I’ve been investigating those extortion notes of yours,” I said. “Your wife found one of them and hired me — though it was Chauncey who instigated it for reasons of his own.”

“Now, look here!” Chauncey protested, half rising out of his chair.

“Sit down!” I snapped. “You wrote that last letter yourself to keep the investigation from running down after Everett Moss was tagged as the crank. You did it because you’re in love with Judith, and you hate Banner.”

“Of course he hates me,” Banner said impatiently. “But he hasn’t the guts to do anything about it.”

“He did plenty,” I informed him. “He’s been spying on you from up in the hills. He knew you were using this place to meet your girl friend and he wanted to start a scandal to ruin you — and break up your marriage.” I turned back to Chauncey. “If the real crank had known about another woman, he would have used it in the other notes.”

I tossed the weight cards on the table. “And I found those up in the hills. That’s about your weight. The ranger up there can identify you as one of the people who parked on the mountain road. If that isn’t enough, how about checking the typing on that last note against your office typewriter?”

“That’s enough,” Banner said, and Chauncey’s face showed it was. “I’ll settle the rest of this my own way.”

“And you’ve got plenty to settle! Suppose we start on that business in the El Tempo gambling room last night?”

Banner snapped his fingers. “That’s where I’ve seen you.”

“And that’s where I saw your girl friend,” I shot back. “She was the croupier at the table where you made the killing.”

Chapter Eight Crazy Quill of Death

Banner said sharply: “Don’t say anything, Lolita.” He was watchful as he turned back to me. “You know I can have you tossed right out of here.”

“But you won’t. I’ve got a story to tell, Banner. It’s a story I dreamed up while I was up in the hills a little earlier. It’s neat and tight and it has no loose ends. Of course, I don’t have any proof but maybe you’d like to hear it just for story value. You’ve got a fat part in it.”

He decided charm was the way to handle this. “If I’m in it, then I’ll listen.”

“I talked to Marable today,” I said. “Or rather he talked to me. He said somebody broke a wheel last night. When I was there you were riding a win streak. How much did you take the place for?”

“Enough,” he said grimly. “But I just got even. I lost plenty when Joey Content had the place.”

“Because Joey had a rigged wheel,” I said. “You found out how it worked, and when Lolita pulled the strings you got well.”

Lolita poisoned me with a glance from her hot black eyes. She wasn’t a lady like Judith. Maybe that was why Banner was playing around with her. She demanded, “Do I have to take that, Paul?”

“I don’t know yet,” Banner said cautiously. “He’s playing a hand. Let’s see what proof he’s got.”

“None,” I said. “This is just a story. Except the part about that raid last night. I was there, remember? How did the cops work it? Big mystery. But I’ll tell you how. They had inside help. Somebody tipped them off. It’s the only answer. Now, in my story, that’d be you. You lost your nerve after you got into Marable for all that money, so you phoned for the law.”

“That’ll take a little proving!”

“If I could prove anything, I’d prove you knew about Joey Content’s coked wheel. Then you’d be in the deep freeze!”

Banner’s eyes flickered just a little.

I said, “However it was wired, it was a tricky job. Sid Marable took every piece of equipment apart and he couldn’t find it. If it was that good, how many people do you suppose knew about it? Joey, of course, and maybe Ivan Castle. And the guy who did the job on the wheel.” I wasn’t going to like the rest of this, but then I hadn’t liked anything that had happened thus far today.

“Joey didn’t tell you,” I went on, “because it was making money for him — up till he started fertilizing the palm trees in the Slopes of Gilead. Ivan might have sold you the secret, but from what I’ve heard you’re a slow man with a buck.” I grinned wearily. “Besides, that angle doesn’t fit my story.”

Nobody had anything to say. “And it wasn’t Lolita, because she didn’t work there at the time. Marable put in girl croupiers when he took over.”

“Sounds to me you’ve talked yourself up a blind alley,” Banner observed, but he was bluffing now. “You’ve eliminated everybody involved.”

“All but one. For my story I need somebody smart or tricky enough to gimmick a wheel so a sharpshooter like Marable couldn’t find it. Somebody like a magician.”

The Great Dekema didn’t move. His ravaged face was so stony I couldn’t tell a thing from it.

I sighed inside my aching chest. I didn’t want to have to put him on the rack, but there was nothing for it.

“The police think Marable removed Joey. Marable insists Ivan Castle killed him. But let’s assume neither one did it. In that case it would go like this: Joey refused to pay off when the wiring job was finished — or, better, he paid off in chips. That would be the way Joey would operate — and my magician would right away lose it all back on another of Joey’s wheels. That might make him killing mad.”

“What are you trying to say?” Banner demanded, almost incredulously.

“Just murder,” I said tiredly. “Maybe it was something else that Joey and this presto guy quarrelled about. I don’t know. Maybe nobody will ever know. But they quarrelled and the magician shot him with Joey’s own gun.”

“Being the only magician present, Mr. Carmody,” Dekema said tightly, “may I say your story is getting tiresome?”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I really am. I’ll try not to be so long. Do you see where I’m leading, Banner? I’m trying to tie you up to this man. Let’s say you knew him in the old days when you were a Broadway hoofer. That’s one part of my story that could be verified.”

“I knew a lot of people in those days,” Banner said curtly.

“And recently you got a letter from one of them,” I said. “He’s not a big success like you. In fact, he’s a failure and an alcoholic. Maybe he’s been irrational part of the time. He even reached the point where he began to believe there’s no justice — he has nothing and you have everything. So he writes a letter demanding five thousand dollars.”

“You get just enough truth into your story to make it sound good,” Banner said. “My wife showed you a note. You’ve got that much.”

I had that much, but not a lot more. Just a solid conviction. “You didn’t kick in with the five thousand dollars. You hoped it was all a bluff, so you stalled to see what would happen. That’s when your old-time pal started a phony death rumor to build a fire under you. He’d been in the hills, too — in a borrowed car You were scared — not because you thought he’d kill you, but because now you knew he’d seen you riding with your girl, Lolita. So you met him at your garden party.”

“And he told me about a wired wheel in the El Tempo?” Banner snorted derisively. “Just like that.”

“No — he sold it to you. I can see you singing a hard luck song — you’d lost all your allowance on Joey’s crooked wheel and Chauneey wouldn’t okay any checks. So you couldn’t give him any money. About then he’d mention he knew all about a wheel in the El Tempo — if Marable hadn’t discovered it. And he hadn’t.”

I looked them all over for signs of cracking. I couldn’t see any. “So you offered him a split of what you could take out of the El Tempo. He went for that. I don’t think he wanted to, but he was desperate for money.”

“Thanks,” Dekema said with faint sarcasm.

I didn’t look at him. “I’m finished with that part of my story I don’t know if you liked it. Banner, I don’t particularly care I was just rehearsing it — to tell Sid Marable. So if you want to argue any points, take it up with him.”

Banner’s tanned, handsome face had taken on a faintly greenish cast He was the scaredest actor in Hollywood.

I turned to Dekema. “I’ve libeled you in front of witnesses, old-timer by calling you a murderer. But in case you’re thinking of suing, here’s the end of my story... You had the details of that trick wheel hidden away for safe keeping. A piece of paper in a box. A box about the right size to hold old love letters — or jewelry. You gave it to a lady friend as a gift. You didn’t get enough work to need it anyway.”

All I had to do now was tie in Alberta’s murder. It was there, and Dekema was the link, even if I didn’t have enough proof to fit in my eye.

“But in the meantime you’d been hitting the muscatel so hard the lady handed you your walking papers. She even got a new boy friend. So when you went around to her house to get the box, she wasn’t glad to see you. I think she tried to keep you out. You blew your top and forced your way in and took the box.”

I was hoarding my few crumbs of real evidence for the psychological moment. “You dumped Alberta’s jewelry on the bed. There wasn’t an empty drawer or container in the place, and the jewelry had to come from somewhere. You took the container with you.”

Banner said abruptly: “That’s all built on the premise that she refused to give him the paper. There’s no reason why she’d refuse.”

“She didn’t know about it.” I wasn’t slamming my words over now. I was just too damned tired. “It was in a secret compartment — it was a trick box. It’s down at headquarters now. Do you want to bet I can’t find a false bottom in it, old-timer?”

“No,” he said grayly. “That’s one of the few points you can check. Another is Alberta. I admit I know Alberta. But that’s all I admit.”

I stared at him. I’d forgotten that he’d gone to jail that same night. And he’d just gotten out. He couldn’t have heard—

“She won’t talk on you, old timer.” I tried to say it as gently as possible. “You must have hit her when she scuffled with you at the door. Maybe you knocked her against the grate in the fireplace. Anyway — she’s dead.”

“Dead?” he repeated. “Not Alberta!”

His harrowed face twitched spasmodically and something leaked out of his eyes and found a crease to run down. “I didn’t know. No one told me... I never meant any harm to come to her. She was the only person in the world I gave a damn for. Why, I did all those things to get money so she’d come back to me!”

“Shut up, you fool,” Banner commanded. “I’ll get you a good lawyer.”

“It’s too late for that,” he said, in a bottomless voice. “Don’t you see? With Alberta dead, what difference does it all make?”

He turned back to me. “You were right all the way, sir. Every step. I’ve always had a bad temper. I shot that gambler and I struck Alberta. I mailed the plan of the wheel to Banner. Then I got dead drunk. When I came to, I was in the tank and I didn’t have the box. I got word out to an old drinking friend to try to find it.”

“Your friend did pretty good,” I said. “But he didn’t have enough money. The police found a tieup between the box and Alberta. Maybe fingerprints, maybe an old letter or a picture that was still in the secret compartment — they wouldn’t tell me. But I guessed about the secret compartment when I saw your handkerchief.”

His hand went to his breast pocket. “This?”

“It’s the same color of orange, with the same black dragons as on the magic box.”

“Yes,” he said, “of course. All my props were marked the same way.”

“Besides, you dropped some poker chips on the floor of Alberta’s house. She didn’t know where they came from, so they had to be in the box, and that meant a compartment she didn’t know about.”

I was wrung out like a bar rag on a Saturday night. I’d been planning to hit him with a small lie that Alberta had named him to me before she died. If he’d blinked I’d have been sure. Instead he cracked wide open on something I hadn’t even thought of. A great detective, that Carmody.

“The six chips,” he said, almost dreamily. “My masterpiece — that wheel. You see, the plastic spindle has a steel center. You’d have to break the spindle, to find it. The wire from the magnet led through the thickness of the table. I inlaid a small piece of wood that would make contact with a certain minimum weight — six poker chips.”

I said: “It fooled everybody.”

He beamed sadly. “The spot on the green baize wasn’t marked. You had to memorize the exact point where the stack of chips had to be placed.”

Then he must have thought about Alberta because the light went out of his eyes. He stood up, one hand in the pocket of his brown tweed coat. “I think,” he said distantly, “I’ll leave here. Please don’t try to detain me. I should not want to shoot anyone else... Your car keys, please, Paul.”

Banner hesitated, glanced at me, and threw the keys sullenly on the table. Dekema took them and walked away.

Banner said, explosively: “I think he’s bluffing. He doesn’t have a gun.”

“All he needs to settle it,” I said, “is a stiff finger! I’ve had mine for today.”

Outside a flash of yellow shot past the window. “The guard can stop him,” Banner suggested, but nobody made any move to phone him. “What are you going to do, Carmody?”

“I don’t know. Tell it all to the police. They know they’ve got the wrong guy in jail. Maybe they can get evidence to make my story stand up...”

“You take Chauncey’s car back to town.” Banner looked uncomfortable. “Lolita is catching a bus.”

I said: “Lolita is very wise to get out of town! A vacation wouldn’t do your health any harm. If I can’t make any attempted murder charge stick against Marable, I’m going to throw you to him to get him off my neck.”

I walked out, and I didn’t look back.

Outside, I felt a hand on my sleeve. I looked up tiredly.

“Willie...” Maggie was standing beside me. She hadn’t had any trouble getting past the guard. “Darling, are you all right?”

I said, “Get me out of here. Don’t talk, Maggie. Just get me away.”

On the way out we passed a tall, handsome man with graying hair.

“Mr. Farrington?”

“Yes,” he said cordially.

“Would you have Ivan Castle stashed away somewhere?”

“I would not,” he snapped.

I stared at him. It was very obvious that he was telling the truth.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” I said.

Maybe Ivan was in Hawaii. But who cared now? Not me, certainly. I’d never wanted to know where he was from the start.

In all my years there’d never been such an accumulation of weariness in my bones. I thought of all the people who’d been involved in larceny, extortion and murder — and for the life of me I couldn’t understand why. No one, not Joey nor Ivan nor Banner nor Chauncey, had needed money. Dekema alone had understandable motives, and he would pay the greatest price for it. And I was the one who had to pull the plug on him.

“Only the poor,” I told Maggie, “have the right to be crooked.”

It seemed like a fine bit of philosophy. It did me until we were on Dark Canyon Road, almost to the Cahuenga Freeway, where several cars had pulled off on the shoulder. A little knot of people were down in the roadside ditch. I slowed up, but I didn’t stop. There wasn’t anything I could do...

A car had slammed into the far bank of the ditch at a terrific speed. It was folded up like a lemon-colored accordion. I couldn’t see the driver but I knew he was in there. Not even Houdini could have gotten out of that.