Dig That Crazy Grave

A Shell Scott Mystery

Richard S. Prather

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter One

The Rand Brothers Mortuary was so beautiful it almost made you want to die.

Lustrous in the afternoon sunshine, it was low and graceful and white, like a squashed Taj Mahal or a tomb for Greek gods. It was located a few miles north of Los Angeles, directly across the street from the Rand Brothers Cemetery, a lavishly-landscaped twenty acres which included a gemlike lake and two small streams winding among the headstones like silver veins feeding the dead marble nymphs and fauns, and the shells of departed people.

I am a Shell, too, but not that kind. That’s my name: Shell Scott. And I am ordinarily found around people with much more wiggle in them. But this wasn’t a social call, it was business.

Business: I’m a private detective, detecting from the L.A.-Hollywood madhouse, and this balmy Thursday afternoon in May a bit of imminent skulduggery had brought me here. Imminent, indeed; less than five minutes remained before the wild noises would start. The loaded .38 Colt Special was under my coat, my pulse was as normal as it was likely to get, and the time was now. So I took a last look at the graveyard, then turned, went up smooth steps between wide, fluted columns and through the Rand Brothers Mortuary’s front doors — maybe to get shot and processed.

As I walked inside, hidden speakers poured soft music over me like thin embalming fluid. The melody was I Love You Truly, but it had a faintly cold and hollow sound, as if Death were humming it. My heels clicked on marble tiles, and the scent of lilies crept into my nostrils and clung there. My shoes squeaked. They squeaked abominably for ten paces down a cool, dim hall, then the hallway broadened into a large room. Dark red carpeting, oil paintings on the walls, gilt chairs, a black vase containing gladioli on a white marble table.

To my right was a small desk, on the desk a triangular wooden plaque bearing the name Mr. Truepenny, in gilt letters. Behind the plaque sat a long thin man with a long thin face and the morose, saintly, weak expression of a starving gazelle.

He stood up, stepped without haste around the side of his desk. He was so thin he could have been hung up in anatomy classrooms, a very tall egg with large luminous eyes.

Ye-es? he said, the deep voice soaring slowly upwards like the soft swoop of a dove’s wings. May I help you?

It was spooky. He sounded too eager to help me, and I didn’t want the kind of help he was used to giving to people, anyway. He advanced toward me with the slow and measured tread of a pallbearer carrying an invisible casket. The large eyes roamed over me, as if measuring me for size.

Maybe, I thought, he recognized me. I’d never seen this guy before, and didn’t think he’d ever seen me, but there was a chance my two friends — I use the word loosely, since last night they had beaten hell out of me — had described me to Truepenny. I’m easy enough to recognize, from even a garbled description: six-two, two hundred and five pounds, short blond hair sticking up in the air as if turned white overnight and still suffering from the shock, sharply angled eyebrows obtrusively white against the deep tan of my ex-Marine chops. It is well known, too, that I like a little color in my apparel, and he was now staring, eyebrows rising, at my tie, which resembled red and blue boa constrictors fighting to the death in a tub of milk.

I said, Are you Mr. Truepenny?

I am. What is your name, sir? And how may I be of service?

My name is Sheldon, Mr. Truepenny. It was true; that’s my first name. I understand those awaiting burial here are placed in a separate room — one set aside for that purpose.

Yes, Mr. Sheldon. Slowly he moved a long arm, extended a bony finger. The morgue. At the end of the hall. Next to the Silver Chapel. He smiled gently. Only one of the departed is there now — we seldom perform more than two or three interments a week.

Would it be possible for me to examine — ? I hope I’m wrong, but —

I understand. Please follow me. Truepenny turned and began creeping down the marble-tiled hallway.

I followed him, wishing he’d hurry. Tension was starting to build in me. I glanced at my watch; only two minutes left. Halfway to the hall’s end we passed a small room as its door opened and somebody came out. Before the door was closed again I caught a glimpse of a desk and chairs inside the room, a metal safe — and filing cabinets. That was probably the room I wanted.

Then came the eye-searing impact. The delightful and — especially here — completely unexpected impact. I had been so intent on looking into the room that I’d paid little attention to what had come out of it. And what had come out was a girl. There was, however, enough girl in this one to make two girls.

She glanced at me and her eyebrows went up the way Truepenny’s had; then she trotted to Truepenny who was still a few feet ahead of me. I forgot all about the time, the seconds tick-tick-ticking away. I stopped and I blinked and I looked.

She was a tall, firm, abundantly curvaceous lovely with pollen-gold hair and a shape to make corpses kick open caskets. I’d gotten only a glimpse of her face — enough, however, to last me until the next glimpse — but I had also watched her scurry to Truepenny, and I liked the way she scurried. She moved with the coiled-spring tension of a tiger between meals, a man-eating tiger, and in a day when most babes feel undressed unless crammed into corsets or squeezed into girdles, usually fat girdles, and thus walk with all the poetry of a packing case rolling downhill, this gal’s walk was not merely functional but also sensational, complete with natural little flesh ripples and flurries, ungirdled, uncrushed, uninhibited. She said something to Truepenny, but I didn’t catch it. I just stood there, the seconds tick-tick-ticking away.

Then she turned and walked toward me, paused briefly and looked up at my face. Hello, she said.

She wore a black skirt and black blouse, but the blouse’s neckline was a V from a newer and more generous alphabet, and the skirt — though it was not — gave the impression of being slit up the sides. Her lips were smooth, a fire-engine red, like soft cushions for hot kisses, and her cheekbones were high with little hollows beneath them. Only her eyes, the cool sad blue of frozen tears, seemed alien to the hidden fire burning in the rest of her.

The rest of her — ah-h. There the black cloth clung and clung, but in a sexy serial, surely to drop off between installments; and I got the dizzy impression that she would always wear clothes in just that way, like a nudist on quick trip between camps.

Hello, I said.

And off she went to that door again, in her splendid hurry, as if going to a fire. Well, with lips like that and a shape like that and a walk like that — and men in her future — she would always be going to a fire. Especially dressed like that.

Hello, she’d said, and Hello, I’d said. Two words. A full, meaty, satisfying conversation.

Not until then did I think: What in hell is she doing in a mortuary?

And then it began.

Outside, from somewhere in the cemetery — I knew exactly where in the cemetery, of course, since I’d put the items behind the marble bulk of a rather hefty naiad — came the noise. Softly, at first, a low whistle slowly gaining in volume. And then the full treatment, the gobble and toot and whistle and screech, getting louder and louder — and then bang!

By that time the second one had started — I’d placed six of them out there — and as the second bang! sounded high in the air, new noises began, blending marvelously with the first’s hooting and tooting and bang — pop-bang!

The door to the nearby office crashed open and the lovely said in a high voice, What’s that? and from behind me Truepenny cried, What’s that? and I chimed in, What’s that, what’s that?

Then there were seconds of stunned silence — here. Out there, it sounded as if the cemetery were erupting, tossing bones and skulls and ankles and tibias every which way. Suddenly both Truepenny and the lovely raced down the hall toward the squeal of hell’s unoiled hinges blending with elephant’s hiccuping and toots of last trumpets. It was even more than I’d hoped for, a rack for eardrums, a sound to send everybody outside the mortuary, except the corpses — a sound nearly loud enough to wake the dead.

And that, of course, was the whole idea.

I waited a moment longer. The tigerish lovely had far outdistanced Mr. Truepenny. She was outside now, trotting across the street. But Truepenny summoned up a burst of speed that was either going to get him there soon or kill him on the way.

I jumped to the door left open by the blonde, went inside in a hurry and stepped to the filing cabinets. I found one labeled, Fe-Ho, yanked it open. Inside were Manila folders, tabbed with names. I riffled them, found Foo — Fub — Gah —

Outside: pow — bang! Then silence.

The Fourth of July was nearly six weeks away, but soon Truepenny and the girl would be gazing at the smoking remains of this season’s first celebration. They were called super Whiz-Bang-Pows, according to the wholesaler who’d sold them to me, and I’d lit a five-minute fuse attached to six of the large uneconomical size designed for lighting at the ends of piers or in the middle of coliseums. In coliseums they are loud, in cemeteries you wouldn’t believe it. I had a minute or two left, no more. My hands were sweating.

Geh — Gib — Gra — and there it was.

I grinned, relaxed a little. Inside the folder was a single white sheet of bond paper. On it were several typed lines, names, an address on Greenfield Avenue, a lot of numbers, additions, a total. There were a few more notations and at the bottom a scribbled paid in full.

Outside, silence. But inside me, thumping and bumping. The sore spots on my head, where I’d been sapped last night, throbbed painfully. I studied the information on the sheet of paper, making sure I’d remember enough of it. Then I put the folder back in place, closed the file drawer, stepped to the door and cracked it open. The hallway was clear. I stepped into it, left the door ajar and walked across the marble tiles. I’d purposely put my noisemakers far into the cemetery’s grounds, and I got clear to the mortuary’s entrance before either of the two people out there glanced my way.

I was leaning against one of the white Grecian columns when Mr. Truepenny looked at me. He kneeled down, fingered something on the ground, then straightened up. He spoke to the girl, then turned and walked back toward the mortuary building.

I stayed where I was. When Truepenny got close to me I said, What was all that?

The expression on his face was sour. Fireworks. Some kind of firecrackers. I can’t understand it.

Firecrackers? I said.

Yes. Hmmph.

Was that all? It sounded like an armed resurrection. I paused. Well, I just waited around to tell you that, uh, the deceased was not the one. Thank you, Mr. Truepenny.

The lovely blonde was starting toward us now.

Mr. Truepenny said, Oh? What was your interest in the deceased, Mr. Scott?

It’s not important now. Thanks again. I walked down the steps and stopped. The blonde was scurrying my way. I had to watch. Just for a little.

She walked up to me. Hello. Wasn’t that odd?

Indeed. Mr. Truepenny says it was firecrackers.

Yes. Juvenile delinquents must have begun invading cemeteries.

If only they’d stay, I said. But I suppose we shouldn’t be bitter. After all, there are no bad children. Only bad parents. And their bad parents. And their bad parents. And —

She laughed. Her teeth were even and white, but they looked sharp.

Are you a bad parent? She could say something simple like that and make it sound as if she were biting your jugular vein.

I said, No, only a bad bachelor. Or a good bachelor. I’m not sure.

A bad bachelor is a good bachelor. She smiled.

I smiled. May the customers ask your name?

Your kind of customer can. I’m June Corey. Miss Corey. Bye. And up the steps she went.

Even in moments of extreme danger I will watch something like that. Then I turned, walked along the cement path to the street bordering the cemetery. I’d parked my sky-blue Cadillac convertible in shade off the road before skulking into the grounds to plant my screech bombs. I walked the half-block back to it and was reaching for the door handle before the thought exploded.

I had told Mr. Truepenny my name was Sheldon. He had called me Mr. Sheldon, too — the first time. But after returning, understandably a bit shaken from investigating my noises, he had called me — correctly — Mr. Scott.

A goose-bumpy chill prickled my spine, climbed over my scalp like frozen dandruff. I started to look around. Too late.

He must have been lying flat on the seat of my Cad, waiting for me. Suddenly he was there, sitting straight, grinning, the big gun in his right hand pointed at my chest. Even so, I started to duck aside, slapping my hand toward the Colt Special under my coat — because I knew the slob, Jake Luther, and when he’d been hitting me joyously with that sap last, he and his pal had promised to kill me the next time.

But as my fingers slapped the revolver’s butt, Jake said, Easy. Pot’s right behind you.

I believed him. I craned my head around, let my hand fall to my side again. Pot was there, eight or ten feet away and walking toward me. You couldn’t miss him. Even a hundred yards away you couldn’t miss him.

Pot was the handle by which Vince Potter was known among his fellow thieves and gunmen, musclemen and killers, the easy-money boys on the heavy, as the phrase goes in their jargon. He was five-nine or so, about two hundred and fifty ghastly pounds, square, solid, appallingly broad. Once he had been a circus strong man and he still worked out with weights and barbells, maybe elephants. He had the thick, overmuscled body of weight-lifters who don’t know when to stop — grotesque lumps of muscle all over him, almost no visible neck, huge slumped-forward shoulders growing into his head.

He had a black eye. I’d given it to him last night; but he’d won the fight. That is, he and Jake and a sap had won the fight. I looked at Jake and his big .45 automatic again as he said, I told you, Scott. You should of listened.

Go to hell.

He laughed. There wasn’t any mirth in it, though. There wasn’t any mirth in Jake. He was tall and thin and mean, had a small square head and a narrow smudge of mustache on his short upper lip. Jake Luther, quiet and cold. A professional killer. On his way to work.

Get in, he said.

Behind me, Pot laid a heavy thick-fingered hand on my back and shoved. I smacked into the side of my car, almost hard enough to dent it. Jake slid along the seat to the Cad’s far door, the bore of his automatic wavering slightly, say from solar plexus to liver to gall bladder, which isn’t very encouraging wavering.

Pot grabbed my wrists, quickly taped them behind my back. A minute later I was in the middle of the seat, Jake on my right. Pot behind the wheel of the Cad. Jake took the Colt Special from my shoulder clip, emptied my pockets, then put his gun away. Pot started the engine and we drove down the tree-lined street, passing their own sleek black Buick Electra a block from where I’d parked.

How’d you guys find me? I said.

Shut up.

Where are we going?

Shut up.

Listen, you miserable — ahck!

Jake had taken out his gun again. Briefly. Just long enough to pop me on the head with it. Not hard enough to knock me out but, as luck would have it, the blow landed right on top of an already aching lump. I wondered dizzily if you could get lumps on lumps, and determined to find out by experimenting on Jake’s skull — if the opportunity arose. Which didn’t seem likely.

I strained my wrists against the tape. No soap. There wasn’t a chance I could jump out of the car, even if there’d been any place to go then. Only one good thing about this: We were going away from the cemetery.

But if I knew these guys — and I did know these guys — we would be coming back.

Chapter Two

I hadn’t known Jake and Pot when it started. I hadn’t even known trouble was starting. Trouble didn’t come in packages like Evelyn Spring. Not usually.

She came in so quietly I didn’t know she was there until I glanced up from my desk. It was a few minutes before noon on Wednesday, the twenty-fourth of May. She was standing just inside the office, looking at me, a trim little ash-blonde gal, twenty-three or thereabouts, with a good figure, smooth skin, tender lips and lovely eyes. She was smartly dressed in a neat gray suit, and a wadded handkerchief was in her hand. Often, when women come into a private detective’s office, you see that wadded handkerchief. Usually damp, always crumpled from their kneading it, tugging at it. It’s like a flag of surrender, or maybe a bandage for their hidden wound. The little gal’s fingers squeezed the cloth in slow, regular pulses.

Are you Mr. Sheldon Scott?

That’s what it says on my frosted-glass window — Sheldon Scott, Investigations.

That’s me. I stood up and smiled at her. Come on in.

I walked around the desk, moved one of the deep leather chairs for her and she sat in it. I returned behind my desk as she said, I’m Miss Spring, Mr. Scott. Evelyn Spring. I — never hired a detective before —

She relaxed a little as we went through the usual preliminaries, then got to her trouble. It was her brother. So often it is a brother. This one had disappeared.

Both Evelyn and her brother, Danny Spring, lived alone, each in a small apartment, but he telephoned or dropped in to see her two or three times a week. She’d last seen him on Saturday, May thirteenth, and he’d promised to visit her the next day. But he hadn’t shown up, and she hadn’t seen or heard from him since.

I said, You’re sure of the date?

Yes. Sunday was my birthday. Danny said he was going to bring me a present. So I know he would have come by. She paused. If he could. A week ago I went to the police, made a missing person report. But they haven’t found out anything.

That didn’t sound so good. The L.A. police are an efficient bunch, and if they hadn’t run down anything on Danny Spring there probably wasn’t much to run down. I dialed the police building and got homicide. I’ve worked with the L.A. police for years and we have a very friendly relationship. In fact, Phil Samson, Homicide Captain, is the best friend I’ve got in town.

In a few seconds I was talking to Emerson in the missing persons section of Homicide. After determining that Spring wasn’t in police custody or a local hospital, they’d checked his apartment, found it empty and undisturbed, as if he’d left it expecting to return. No trace of him anywhere, including the morgue.

I hung up, turned to Evelyn and said, Nothing there.

She sat quietly, looking at me from the lovely eyes. They were a soft green, and around the iris, clear white. They made me think of green sea and white surf, of quietness, coolness, steadiness. The ash-blonde hair was cut fairly short and loosely waved, her skin was tanned and looked healthy. The gray suit swelled smoothly over her breasts, dipped in abruptly to hug her waist.

She sighed. The police would do all they could, she knew, but she hoped I could work on it, too. She’d brought two hundred and fifty dollars with her, and I accepted a hundred of it as a retainer. Then from her handbag she took a glossy four-by-five photo.

That’s Danny, she said. Three or four months ago. He’s twenty-nine.

He looked older. Dark eyes, curly black hair that was probably taut and springy, a go-to-hell grin. Good looking, but a little hard, an odd heaviness to his face as if the features were thickening. Evelyn told me she’d been worried about her brother for months, she didn’t like the company he kept. And he’d changed in the last year.

This company he kept, I said. Can you tell me their names? And does he have any special girl friend?

I don’t know who his friends are, really. Just people I’ve seen him with. Most of them were dirty-looking men, like beatniks or bums, but I never heard their names, except Frank. I guess Frank is Danny’s closest friend.

Frank who?

She shook her head. Just Frank, that’s all Danny ever called him. She described the man, told me a little more about her brother. Then she started to say something, stopped, finally blurted it out.

I think Danny’s using dope.

You mean narcotics? The hard stuff — Heroin? Or morphine?

One of those — that kind of dope.

Did you mention this to the police?

No. I thought they’d have found out something by now. Without my saying anything about it. But I’m really getting worried.

What makes you think he’s a user?

I didn’t for quite a while. But he acted — well, he’d get so irritable. Then a little later he’d be all right — when I’d see him at his place. Sometimes he yawned and sneezed a lot, and his eyes looked funny. It just didn’t dawn on me for a long time. Then I went to the library and read about the symptoms. Withdrawal symptoms, it’s called.

A simple name for hell. Withdrawal symptoms. They can start any time after the addict’s last shot, depending upon how badly he’s hooked, how much of the junk he needs. Easy at first. The yawning and sneezing she’d mentioned, nervousness; sleepiness. Then the eyes play tricks, get glassy, watery. Not much pain at the start. It takes a couple of days, sometimes a little longer, to get all the way to hell: the violent and wrenching shaking, flashes around and through the eyes, vomiting, diarrhea, leg cramps and then cramps all over, the whole body pulled and tugged and torn, chills and fever and sweat — and pain, pain, pain. Screaming, aching. Panic. That’s when the addict will do anything for a pop. Stealing, mugging, prostitution, murder — anything.

Sometimes, if they don’t get that pop, they collapse, just fall over. With a few, that’s the end of it — sometimes they die. Just like that.

I said, This makes it a little different, honey.

She blinked rapidly at me, eyes widening. At first I didn’t understand, then decided it was probably my casual choice of words. Don’t mind the honey, I said smiling. Put it down to the corrupting influence of Hollywood.

It just surprised me. Everything was so serious, and then — it surprised me.

Well, I call practically everybody that. Except men, of course. Not even Hollywood is that corrupting. But I shall call you Miss Spring henceforth —

Oh no, don’t. Suddenly she clasped her hands, put her arms straight down with her hands caught between her knees, and laughed merrily. At that moment she was so appealing and childlike, I wanted to pick her up and put her on my lap. Two seconds later she was more sober, a mature adult, smiling and taking a deep breath, and I still felt like picking her up and putting her on my lap.

I shook my head and said, Well, Miss Spring, honey — ah. Miss Spring, this does make a difference. You’d better tell me everything you can about Danny. And the change you’ve noticed in him.

It had started about a year ago, she guessed. For six or seven months Danny had borrowed money from her, never explaining why. Almost a thousand dollars before it ended. Then four months ago he’d stopped borrowing, seemed to have money of his own. No, he didn’t work anywhere; at least, she didn’t know about any job he held.

She paused, frowning. There’s one other little thing I want to mention, Mr. Scott.

Shell?

She smiled. AH right. But this — I don’t know if it’s important or not, but it was certainly strange. And it happened Saturday — the last time I saw Danny. He was at my apartment. The phone rang and I answered it. A man asked if Dan was there and I gave Danny the phone. He listened a while, then said, Sure, Jim. I’ll hunt up Frank and — Then the other fellow yelled something at him. I could hear the squawking through the receiver. Danny seemed scared, apologized and hung up. I asked him what was wrong and he said nothing, everything was fine. So, just conversation, I asked him who Jim was. He got white and angry, said he didn’t know anybody named Jim.

But he’d just called the guy that on the phone, huh?

Yes. I told Danny I’d heard him say the man’s name. He got really mad at me then. Either mad or scared. First he said he didn’t know anybody called Jim — then he made me promise I’d never tell anybody he’d mentioned that name at all. And he left right after that. You don’t know this Jim’s last name? No. I never heard of him before. Or since. We talked a couple of minutes more and she gave me her address and phone number. Then I walked her to the door.

I’ll get started and call you tonight or in the morning, Miss Spring. I grinned down at her and said, Miss Spring, honey.

She laughed merrily again. Call me Evelyn, honey.

She paused, looking up at me, then said seriously, Thank you, Shell. I feel so much better now. She was quiet for a moment. I really do feel a lot better. You seem so — strong, so capable. I’ll bet if anybody can find out what’s happened to Danny, you can.

Yeah, this little one had it, all right — something that could make a man take on fire-breathing dragons armed with only a portable fire extinguisher. I beamed down at her and said, If he’s anywhere to be found, I’ll find him!

It had the ring of Patrick Henry ending a speech, of Lincoln freeing the slaves. I guess I overdid it a bit. I mean, I was sincere as can be, but I’m not really that good.

Evelyn, though, beamed back at me, sighed, turned and walked down the hall.

Leaning against the door jamb, I watched her go, then took the .38 Colt Special from its shoulder clip and eased out the gun’s cylinder, smiling. I looked at the five loads in the chambers, their round brass bases like little bull’s-eyes — my fire extinguishers. I put the gun under my coat again and locked the office.

When Evelyn Spring left she seemed to feel better about Danny.

But I didn’t.

Chapter Three

In Los Angeles there is Wilshire Boulevard, the justly named Miracle Mile, lined with smart shops, towering office buildings, acres of department stores, the Ambassador Hotel, Cocoanut Grove, Brown Derby, Perino’s. That’s one end of the scale.

At the other end is Main Street, especially the decaying blocks between First and Third. Evelyn had told me her brother spent a lot of time there, drinking beer, talking to B-girls and men he knew or met in the smelly dives. A place called the Gayety, she’d said, was one of Danny’s hangouts.

The Gayety is a dark, damp, sour-smelling joint, almost empty at one o’clock in the afternoon. I had a beer. The bartender knew Danny well. Frank too. He knew them only as Dan and Frank. They usually came in together.

I asked him, When was the last time you saw Dan?

Saturday. Him and Frank come in.

Last Saturday?

No, Saturday before, it was. Didn’t see neither of them last weekend. Kind of odd. Theys usually in for a belt or two Saturdays.

An hour and a half and four beers later I’d talked to a dozen people along Main who knew Dan Spring. Most of them said he usually was with Frank. None of them knew Frank’s last name. Nobody I talked to had any idea who Jim might be.

One frowzy brunette with a puffy face waited until I’d bought a shot of bourbon for her, then told me, I heard Frank’s last name once, I think. Ivor — Iver — Ives. Something like that. She burped and smacked her lips. How about another shot of that juice, sweetie? Maybe I’ll remember.

I didn’t think she’d remember. I didn’t buy her any more juice.

She said, Go to hell, sweetie.

At nearly three-thirty p.m. I was having my last beer in a dump called the Starlight Roof. Why it was called the Starlight Roof will remain one of life’s little mysteries, since it was on street level, right off Main, and bore a marked resemblance to a bombed outhouse. I’d gotten the same story here and was ready to leave behind me the Starlight Roof, the Paradise, the Versailles Gardens, and even the Splendide, when the guy thumped his weight heavily on the stool next to mine.

Lemme buy you a beer, cousin, he said.

I barely glanced at him. No, thanks.

I started to slide off the stool. He reached out and clamped the fingers of his left hand around my forearm — and clamped is the word. It was like getting an arm caught under a truck.

He was half-turned toward me on his stool and appeared relaxed despite the muscle he was putting into ruining my arm. He was a wide man, and I’d seen him twice before in the last hour. Both times he’d come into bars, after me, taking a seat a few stools away — but close enough so he could hear what I said. He was a thick, overmuscled ape with thinning hair and a face like pale shoe leather pulled tight over steel or concrete. He must have weighed close to two hundred and fifty pounds, most of it muscle.

I managed to keep my voice calm and quiet. Unwind the hand.

He didn’t unwind it.

I was in an awkward position, half off the stool and pulled a little forward by his grip. My beer bottle was still on the bar in front of me, so I picked it up with my free hand. I was going to hit him on the mouth with it.

But then he let go. I could feel the sharp puff of pain in my arm, followed by a dull ache I would have for a while. I put the bottle down, slid off the stool and faced him.

He said, Sorry, cousin. Didn’t know you were touchy.

Now you know.

Don’t get so hot. Lemme buy you a beer.

I told you no. I’m going to tell you something else, friend.

Pot. The name’s Pot.

Keep your hooks off me.

Ah, nuts. I wanted a little talk, that’s all.

I still wanted to hit him. I probably would have broken my hand, but that’s not why I didn’t do it. I was curious to know why this character had been following me.

He squinted at me, raked crooked teeth over his lower lip. I just happened to hear you asking around about a couple of dudes I know. Dan and Frank.

You just happened to.

Yeah. We heist a few beers once in a while. They in trouble?

I didn’t say anything.

He said, You’re Scott, aint you? The private dick?

I nodded.

What’s a dick interested in them for?

Come on, get to the point.

The face got hard — or, rather, harder. That’s the way you want it, O.K. The point is, lose interest in them two. Just forget all about them. He looked at the bartender standing a few feet away polishing a glass. Beat it.

The bartender’s brows pulled down. The hell. I got to watch the bar.

Pot got up, walked past me, stepped to the bar and reached across it. He grabbed the bartender’s belt and the top of his pants in his left hand and yanked the man against the bar. Then, as if he were lifting an empty carton, he raised the bartender two feet in the air, held him tight against the bar, and said pleasantly, Beat it.

The bartender was fat, but he looked as if he were losing a pound a minute. Pot let him go. The bartender’s legs went out from under him when he hit the floor. His chin clipped the bar’s edge as he went down. He got up immediately, walked away without a word, out of sight somewhere in back.

Pot thumped onto his stool again and said, Where were we, cousin?

You were scaring me.

He chuckled. Yeah, like I was saying, forget about them dudes. You play ball, there could be a nice piece of change in it for you, Scott. Otherwise, well, I hate to even mention —

You’re wasting your time.

Could make it rough on you, cousin. This is just friendly advice so far. I don’t want to see you get hurt, see?

Why the excitement? I ask a couple of questions about Danny and Frank, and somebody sends a big bazoo to sound off at me. Or was this your brilliant idea?

Pot tried to keep a smile on. You were asking about somebody else, too, weren’t you? Mac, was it? He frowned suddenly. No, Jim. That was it

He was too casual. Yeah. Jim. I frowned. What’s his name? Maybe I was also too casual.

Pot grinned. Don’t know, huh? No matter. Just skip the whole bit, Scott. You could live to be ninety.

He got off his stool. He was four or five inches under my six-two, but he looked like a squashed seven-footer. Pot turned without another word and walked out to Main Street. I walked to the door in time to see him climb into a black Buick sedan, a new Electra, parked a few yards down the street. Somebody else was driving and pulled quickly into the traffic. I didn’t get a look at the driver, but I got the car’s license number.

I walked back to my stool and swallowed the last of my beer. Then I unbuttoned my shirt cuff, pulled up the coat and shirt sleeve, and looked at my arm.

The marks from Pot’s fingers were still there. I was going to have five bruises — which made five I owed Pot.

Homicide is on the third floor of L.A.’s police building. When I walked in, Lieutenant Rawlins was perched on the corner of a desk talking to another plainclothes officer, and the door to Samson’s office was open. I said, Hi, to Rawlins and went in to see Samson.

Captain Phil Samson is a career cop, for several years head of LA.’s Homicide Division. He’s a big, strong guy, gray-haired and gruff. And tough. Very tough. The hard-boiled cop shows in the set of his big jaw, the steady brown eyes, the crack of authority in his voice. But he’s not quite as tough as all that on the inside.

He had his usual black cigar going, so there was a ghastly stink in the room.

I said, Ah, the perfumed air of all outdoors. How gay —

Stow the bull, Shell, he grunted, scowling at me. What trouble are you in now?

Trouble? Why, Phil, you must be dizzy from this perfumed —

Come on, come on. What work, that you should be doing, do you want the Los Angeles Police Department to handle for you this time?

Well, there are a couple of little things. You got a missing person report, Wednesday, the seventeenth, on one Daniel Spring. His sister — a lovely girl, by the way — has hired me to find him. So I intend to pluck the city clean, scour the sewers —

Shell, Samson said wearily, trying to look disgusted, I really do have a couple of my own things to do. Nothing as important as all this. But, please, tell me what in hell you want.

I grinned. I was asking around about Danny Spring, down in the Main Street caves, when a large, unpleasant individual braced me with the old lay-off-or-else routine. Weight, about an eighth of a ton, five-nine, lumpy, and overconfident. Name of Pot, he says.

Got him. He with a thin, mean-looking gay named Jake?

He was only with me; and, Sam, it was one too many at that. Drove off with somebody else in a black Buick, though. Who’s Jake?

Side-kick. If you see Pot again, you can bet Jake will be with him. He paused and added pleasantly, If you see him. They’re both pretty hard boys. What’ve they got to do with your missing person?

Pot didn’t say. He’s got a record?

I know he killed a man, but he did it with his hands. Just gave the man a little tap with his fist and it kind of exploded his brains.

He didn’t look gentle. Or weak.

Used to be strong man in a circus — not one of the fakes. Still works out with weights, the way I get it. We’ve had him in here a time or two, but couldn’t hold him.

These two self-employed, or in business for somebody else?

Don’t know. Now that you mention it, I’d kind of like to know.

We went down to the second floor, into the Records and Identification Division, where Samson got the packages on both men. We sat at a small table, and after looking over the packages, he handed them to me, with two small mug shots on top.

One was a picture of Pot, named Vince Potter. The other was Jake Luther, a thin, mean-looking cat with narrow whiskers. The license number I’d noted earlier was the number of Luther’s Buick. Both men had long write-ups, but only Luther had done big time. His local make sheet showed he’d pulled an ADW rap at San Quentin and done a bit at Folsom for second-degree murder. Pot had never fallen from L.A., but the FBI kickback on him listed arrests, without conviction, in Peoria, Dallas, and Las Vegas. A couple of constipated characters.

Samson signed the packages, returned them, and we went back up to his office.

No narcotics raps in there, I said.

Should there be?

Just a thought. This Dan Spring I’m hunting is on the hard stuff. It’s not in the sister’s report, by the way.

He grunted. Junk, huh? If you get any more on that angle, give it to Feeney. I’d be interested, too.

Feeney is the captain in charge of the Narcotics Division. I’ve been mixed up in a few narcotics cases and, consequently, know Feeney pretty well; but even if I’d never heard of junk, I would have had contact with him. The work of the men in Narcotics is involved, directly or indirectly, with the work of almost every other division and bureau of the L.A. Police Department. The craving for junk pushes the addict into virtually every other crime in the books. Shoplifting, robbery, burglary, prostitution, muggings, murder — you name it. In their hunt for peace, the hypes go to war — against all the rest of us.

I said, Feeney losing sleep again?

Who sleeps? But you know how it is with junk in this town. Up for a while, then we get it pushed down, up again. Now it’s way up.

Any ideas?

Somebody new, maybe. Or our friend Cherry. Or maybe a dozen other reasons. But there’s a lot of the stuff around. Sam got out a new cigar. Feeney might have something recent if you’re interested. He’s pulled in a few known users and pushers. All little punks, so far as I know.

Cherry is a guy named Giannomo Ciari, called Joe Cherry, a local businessman who’s lived near L.A. for ten or twelve years now. I’ve seen him around town, usually with some beautiful young gal — always a blonde — and have even spoken to him a time or two. That was about the size of it. We’d never had trouble; but we weren’t friendly. He owned a restaurant, a textile manufacturing concern, a couple of office buildings in Hollywood, was a regular churchgoer and contributed heavily to numerous charities. As far as the local law knew, he hadn’t committed any overt criminal acts — none they could prove, anyway. They’d checked him out, found he had no local record, no record with the F.B.I. But they were still interested in him, and had been for seven years.

You can talk to officials in any big-city police department and make up a list of a dozen or so names, men suspected of being — or even known to be — big-time racketeers, members of the Syndicate, or the Mafia, or both, involved in blackmail, narcotics, union coercion, conspiracy, but on whom there is no evidence of criminal activity. No evidence, that is, which would be worth a nickel in court. And even when there is evidence, it has to be pretty damned conclusive, since these days many of our laws — and judges — seem designed primarily to protect the civil rights of the guilty rather than the innocent. Anyway, in L.A., Joe Cherry would have been among the top two or three on such a list of outstanding bums.

Cherry had long been suspected of being a narcotics wholesaler, but as far as the law was concerned, he was clean. Either he was clean, or else he was an extremely careful and clever hood. The only thing known for sure about the guy was that he’d met Don Salvatore Lucania — Charlie Lucky Luciano — in Italy twice in the last four years. On both occasions they had lunched together at the Hotel Excelsior in Naples. You can’t put a man in jail for that, but it sure makes him stink.

I said to Samson, It’s just an idea so far. I’ll see if it crops up again.

He nodded and picked up some papers in front of him. I went into Room 323, the Missing Persons Detail, and from the desk sergeant, got all the reports filed since May fourteenth, a total of eleven days. Often, in a single day, a dozen or more missing persons are reported to L.A. Homicide, so it was a sizable stack. I thumbed through them, found the one on Dan Spring and put it aside. But I kept looking, playing a hunch.

Nobody I’d talked to today had seen Danny Spring since the thirteenth; but none of them had seen his buddy, Frank, either. It was at least possible, then, that Frank was also among the missing. In which case, if he had any relatives in town, one of them might have filed a missing person report on Frank. So I went through the stack of reports looking for an Ives, or Ivor, or something similar.

While I riffled through the pages, two officers were talking behind the counter. The one who had brought the reports to me still held one of them in his hand, studying it.

He was saying to the other policeman, Yeah, I got a good look at her when she made out the report. Kept her here as long as I could, pal. Them hot blue eyes like to melted me — not to mention what the rest of her did.

The other officer chuckled. You can bet hubby didn’t run away from that babe. Unless he lost his mind.

Maybe she drove him out of it. Wouldn’t mind going a little crazy that way myself.

He tossed the report onto the counter by me and continued talking to the other man. Right then I found a report dated May twentieth, filed by a widow named Mrs. Martha Eiverson. I grinned. Close enough. Especially since the missing person was her son, Frank, whom she hadn’t seen since Sunday, May fourteenth.

I put that form aside, too, and restacked the rest, putting the report the two officers had been looking at on top. The name on it caught my eye. Two days ago, on Monday, May twenty-second, a Mrs. McCune had reported her husband missing. She hadn’t seen hubby since he left for work — an automobile agency he owned — on the previous Monday, the fifteenth.

Which meant nothing at all to me, except the husband’s name was James Randall McCune. James. The familiar is Jim. That probably meant nothing, either; but something about the report bothered me. Something about the name. I couldn’t pin it down, so I noted the information on the report, including the address, then reviewed the reports on Danny Spring and Frank Eiverson. The only new item that gave me was Mrs. Eiverson’s address. I jotted it down.

Then I checked out the name Frank Eiverson with the Records and Identification Division and another piece fell into what was becoming a pattern. Three years back Eiverson had been sent to San Quentin — on a narcotics conviction. He’d done a year there.

I called on Samson again, told him what I’d found.

He couldn’t add much. Yeah, fell for possession.

He a user?

Samson nodded. And a pusher. But we never proved it. Got him for possession, that’s all. He worked the black cigar from one side of his wide mouth to the other, then reached for the phone. He got Feeney in Narcotics, talked to him for a minute, hung up. That’s about the size of it, Shell. We picked up Eiverson early in fifty-seven. He was working at the Rand Brothers Mortuary. Living with his mother. Gives the same address now. Nothing on his current employment.

He was working where? A mortuary?

Yeah. Nothing there — we checked it out. Worked in the cemetery across the street, mowed lawns, dug holes, manual labor. Only held the job a couple of months. Only held any job a couple of months. Feeney says there’s nothing recent on him. Samson paused. But if he’s the Frank you’re interested in —

Yeah. And ten to one he is.

Samson bit into this cigar. Maybe it’s starting to look like something.

Maybe, I said, thanked him, and went out.

Chapter Four

The Eiverson house looked as if it was held up by the paint, and the paint itself was cracking and peeling. I got the same impression from Mrs. Eiverson when she answered my knock. Knock — the bell didn’t ring.

There is a name, beat generation, which has been applied to a gang of unkempt and uncouth cats who strike blows at conformity by conforming absolutely, dressing and talking and thinking alike, and who are seldom much prettier than the crumbs in their beards. There should be a name, bat generation, for unkempt and uncouth and crumby old bats. Like Mrs. Eiverson.

She peered past the door at me, hostile eyes squinting from a caked mass of powder and rouge and mascara. Mrs. Eiverson looked about sixty, made up to look a hundred. She wore a mold-green skirt, below which her slip was showing, a once-white blouse, darkened a tattle-tale black, a man’s sweater, and leather slippers which looked as if they were on the wrong feet. What I could see of the legs also looked as if they were on the wrong feet.

Whadda you want? she asked me.

Mrs. Eiverson?

Yeh.

I’d like to talk to you for a minute. May I come in?

Hell, no. You a cop?

No, I’m a private detective.

Whadda you want?

It’s about Frank.

Oh. That calmed her down a little. You find him?

No. May I come in?

She bit at a piece of lipstick, or skin, or dinner, then started to pull the door open. It hit something on the floor and she gave the door a yank. I went in. The room contained a threadbare rug, sagging couch, two over-stuffed chairs, from one of which some stuff like shredded wheat was spilling, a table and a floor lamp.

Mrs. Eiverson slumped on the couch and I sat in the understaffed chair. A minute’s conversation wasn’t much help. Frank lived here, but the last time Mrs. Eiverson had seen her son was Sunday morning, ten days ago. He was supposed to return that night, and he just hadn’t come home since.

When I asked Mrs. Eiverson if she had any idea what had happened to him, she said, How in hell would I know? A dear old lady.

Do you know Danny Spring?

Yeah, the bum. Frank hangs around with the bum. I don’t know anything about him, one of Frank’s friends. A bum.

Have you seen Danny in the last week or so?

Aint seen him in a month or more.

I’m anxious to locate Danny, Mrs. Eiverson. I’ll leave my card, and I’d appreciate a call from you if you hear from him or Frank.

She opened her mouth, closed it. She was thinking. You’re a detective, you say?

That’s right.

You’re gettin paid for this, huh?

I am.

Well, supposing I call you — if I hear something. You pay me?

She didn’t hint, she came right smack out with it. I said, Well, if that’s the way you want it.

It’s only fair. You’re getting paid. If I help you, I oughta get something out of it. Five dollars.

Inaudibly, I sighed. Five dollars.

It’s only fair, she said. Besides, my old-age money hasn’t come yet. The bum post office. Can’t get anything done on time. Bums. How’s a body supposed to live? Body can’t live on the measly check they give you anyhow.

About Frank, Mrs. Eiverson, can you give me the names of any of Frank’s other friends? Or a girl friend, maybe? I paused, then added, For free?

She didn’t know his friends, but she’d heard him mention a girl named Ruth Stanley. Ruthie, Frank called her. Mrs. Eiverson didn’t know where she lived, but Ruthie worked at the Regal Theater on Main Street. I’d walked right by it earlier today.

I said, Did you ever hear Frank mention anybody named Jake? Or Pot?

She shook her head.

While at the police building, I’d picked up a picture of Frank, and also copies of the mug shots of Jake and Pot. I fished the two mug shots from my pocket and showed them to her.

She shook her head again. Who are they?

A couple of men with police records. I wondered if Frank might have gotten mixed up with them.

Frank wouldn’t have nothing to do with them bums.

I smiled, a bit stiffly. Frank has a record himself, you know, Mrs. Eiverson. It’s just possible he met —

He was framed! Frank’s a good boy. It was them crumby cops.

Ma’am, they caught him with —

Framed! That’s the only way them crumby cops can solve anything. Never catch nobody, just frame somebody for it. The bums. Frankie never done nothing crooked in his life. Them cops framed him.

They didn’t frame him, Mrs. Eiverson. He was pushing narcotics — the rottenest crime on the books — only they couldn’t prove it. They did prove he was in possession of narcotics. So it’s not unreasonable to assume he might know a couple of hoods named Jake and Pot.

If those eyes had been hostile at the door, their glance had been loving compared to the one she was gunning me with now. I went on, not expecting real cooperation.

Where does Frank work, Mrs. Eiverson?

He don’t have no job. Not right at the moment.

He has to live some way. Where does he get his money?

He don’t need no money. I got the pension.

You said yourself that it was measly. Frank must get drinking money somewhere. Is he pushing dope?

That jarred an answer out of her. He’s got his unemployment insurance, you bum! And quit talking like that about Frankie.

Yeah, I know. He’s a good boy. I got up. Thanks for your help, Mrs. Eiverson.

Go on, get outa here.

I got outa there. From my car, I looked back at the house, wondering how in hell Frank got unemployment insurance. No job open in the Syndicate?

I sighed. Insurance — pensions — social security. Ah, I thought, that’s why they tax us, and tax us. For the wonderful welfare state. To help the needy. . . .

For fifty cents you can see a double feature at the Regal, plus the pièce de résistance, the stage show which includes singers, chorus girls, a tap dancer, and four strippers. Tonight the sign outside declared that the double bill was Inferno of Passion and Motorcycle Girls. Headlined in the stage show was Rosie Budd. So help me. I went in anyway.

A pale young guy with greasy hair took my ticket and told me where I could find the manager. The cigar-smoking manager didn’t know Danny Spring or Frank Eiverson, but Ruth Stanley worked in the stage show. The tap dancer. The stage show was on now; I’d have to wait till after Ruth’s act before I could go backstage and talk to her. She wasn’t a peeler, the guy leered, but there was a spot for her any time she wanted a raise.

As I found a seat, a tall, scantily-clad redhead was alone at stage left, doing something frenzied with the curtain. Then a blue spotlight fell on her and she made wretched movements to all points of the compass, ran off stage, ran back in response to applause and whistles, ran off again.

Then the chorus girls came on. Friends, it was frightening. They came on like buffaloes fleeing from the Indians. Chorus girls — hah. They looked like boys. They went this way and that way, and reeled about, hacking at the floor like blunt instruments attacking invisible corpses. Somehow, each one of the gals in that thundering crowd managed to give the impression that she was alone up there, and lost. After more than enough of that routine, they all went one-two-three kick, one-two-three kick, except one gal who went one-two-three-four kick, and off into the wings. They didn’t come back.

Then, Ruth Stanley. Ruthie. She wasn’t bad. After the chorus, she seemed stupendous. And, from where I sat, halfway back, she didn’t look at all unattractive. She wore tight shorts and a long-sleeved billowy blouse, was fairly slim and her legs were good. She did Tea for Two and Tiptoe Through the Tulips, then rat-tat-tatted off.

I got up, walked down the aisle and beneath the Exit sign at stage right, found the dressing rooms.

Ruth called, Come in, when I knocked.

Up close, she was a cute little gal, young and fresh-looking, about twenty-one or twenty-two. She had short brown hair and smoky brown eyes and was easy to talk to. She told me to call her Ruthie. I straddled a wooden chair and she sat at the dressing table while we chatted.

She sure was Frank Eiverson’s girl, she said. They were going steady, engaged really; but she hadn’t seen him in over a week. She couldn’t understand it. And why was a detective asking about him?

I said, I’m really trying to find a friend of his, Ruthie. Fellow named Danny Spring. You know him?

I’ve seen him with Frank a few times, but I don’t really know him. Just to say hello to.

It looks to me as if they’ve both left town in a hurry for some reason, or something’s happened to them both.

She slowly put a hand to her throat and her face suddenly got pale.

Wait a minute, Ruthie. I’m just guessing. Maybe I’m way off the beam. But they were reported missing about the same time, and I can’t find anybody who’s seen either of them since. So I hope you’ll tell me all you can about Frank, anything that might help me locate him — or his friends.

Color slowly came back into her face, and she started talking. It took a while, but finally she got to something interesting. I had asked her when she’d seen Frank last, and she said, Monday. Not a couple of days ago, the week before. He left that night. Or it might even have been Tuesday morning.

Left?

Well, he’d — we were at my place, my apartment. Drinking and talking. I fell asleep, and — well, when I woke up he was gone.

Uh-huh. But you did see him Monday night?

She nodded.

That made it a day after Mrs. Eiverson had last seen her son — and more than a day later than the last news I had about Danny Spring.

Ruthie continued, I thought something was wrong then. He acted so funny.

How do you mean?

Well, I’d have to go back a little. See, I’m crazy about traveling. Never have traveled any, but that’s what I want more than anything. Frank and me, we talked about it a lot, the places he’d take me and all — Egypt and Paris and all over. Well, the last month or two he’d been saying we were really going to do it; we’d go to all those places when we got married. He was going to make a lot of money, and we’d just pack up and go. She smiled. Be vagabonds, he said.

Did Frank say how he was going to make all that money?

No, but he said we’d have enough to go anywhere. She paused, frowning. That last night, though, he told me to be quiet when I talked about the passports and ships and all. Shut up,’ he said. It would have to wait, something had gone wrong. This deal, or whatever it was, was off. And he was so nervous. He acted scared.

Did he tell you any more about what went wrong? I said.

No. But there was something else funny. I can’t remember.

She closed her eyes, frowning. Suddenly her eyes popped open and she said brightly, Oh, I remember now. It was the funniest thing he ever said to me. It was a couple of weeks ago, about. We were drinking a little. She hesitated and then added, smiling. Actually, we were stoned. You know.

I grinned. I know.

And there we were, over in the Casbah or some place, and I asked him where all the money was coming from. Then he said the crazy thing. From the grave of Mr. Graves. Old Gravess old grave. Then he laughed and said, Not old grave, new grave, Ruthie. It just didn’t make sense but we laughed about it. It was such a crazy thing, though, I remembered it even the next day.

That last time you saw him, he was pretty upset, huh?

Real upset. I mean, he couldn’t sit still, and he sort of snapped at me. He wouldn’t ordinarily do that, you know. Frank’s as nice as anybody I ever met. He’s really wonderful, Mr. Scott. She paused, and said in a voice so soft and empty it gave me a funny, cool feeling in my stomach. He’s — got to be all right.

Her face squeezed in toward the middle and for a moment I thought she was going to cry. But then she started talking again, about the way Frank had acted, almost as if she were talking to herself. And then a phrase hit me. She was repeating what she’d told me about how nervous Frank had been, and added, Even his hands were shaking. I thought he was sick or something.

Finally, it filtered in. A few more questions and I was sure: first, that Frank Eiverson was still on junk, and had needed a shot bad that Monday night; also, that Ruthie didn’t have any idea what his nervousness had meant.

Ruthie, do you know if Frank was ever in jail for anything? Jail, or prison, or —

She didn’t let me finish. Of course not. She half-smiled. He’s not a crook or anything. What a funny thing to say.

A funny thing to say. Everything I’d learned about Frank Eiverson added more to the picture of a hoodlum, a punk, one little bubble on the city’s scum. But Ruthie didn’t share my picture of the guy. She was in love with him. It didn’t matter much whether Frank was giving her a line, or really loved her. She believed he was in love with her, that was enough. Ruthie seemed like a sweet little gal — despite Frank.

I lit a cigarette, offered her one, but she refused it. Ruthie, sometimes — I stopped, began again. How long have you known Frank?

Almost a year.

Well, sometimes a guy leaves out things in his — that happened before he met a girl, things that would make him look bad. Especially if he really likes the girl. Understand?

She started to speak, then stopped. After a while she asked me, Was Frank in jail, Mr. Scott?

He spent a year in San Quentin. For possession of narcotics.

She was quiet a long time. I don’t believe you. That’s what she said; but she believed me.

I dragged on my cigarette. I’d laid it out for Mrs. Eiverson, and it had been easy. It wasn’t so easy to tell Ruthie. He was convicted of possessing narcotics. He’s a user. The police think he was selling the stuff, too.

No —

Ruthie, the reason he acted so nervous that night is because he needed a shot. He’d gone too long without the drug — for some reason — and I want to know the reason. That’s why it’s so important for you to —

He didn’t, he didn’t! He’s not a — dope fiend.

I didn’t push it for a while. Then I said, It’s often difficult to tell an addict from a non-user, Ruthie. Until they’re overdue for the next shot.

Finally she said she’d seen Frank like that a time or two before, but it was just nerves, he’d been tired or something. She didn’t know anybody named Jake or Pot or Jim; the only friend she knew about was Danny.

She kept saying Frank was wonderful, but during the last minute or two before I left, the truth sank in. She kept looking straight at me, though eyes shiny and her head high, trying hard not to blink. Because if she blinked, the tears would spill.

I stubbed out my cigarette, stood up. Well, I said, I’ll — if you want, I’ll tell you whatever I find out. I stopped. Good night, Ruthie.

She didn’t speak.

When I went out she was staring past me, blankly, the tears running down her cheeks.

Chapter Five

In the Cad I smoked a cigarette, thinking about Ruthie and Frank. And junk. And the grave of Mr. Graves, whatever the hell that was.

Grave — cemetery — mortuary — Rand Brothers? Frank had been working at Rand Brothers when he’d taken that fall for possession. But it had been just one of many short-term jobs he’d held — and the police had checked out that angle, and dropped it.

It’s seldom profitable to go over the same ground the police have covered. Teams of officers, technicians, the facilities of the crime lab, make a very clean sweep, leaving little for an independent investigator to find — which was one reason why I hadn’t visited Dan Spring’s apartment yet. But there hadn’t been any cause for the police to give his place a thorough going-over; Spring was merely another missing person — then.

I phoned Evelyn Spring and chatted a bit, then told her I wanted to search her brother’s rooms. She said she’d call the manager and tell him to let me into the apartment.

The place was named the Biscayne, maybe because the original owner had hailed from Florida, or just because it sounded dignified, which the joint wasn’t. It was a wide, two-story wooden building on Kansas Avenue. A small yellow bulb burned outside the entrance, about the brightest spot for blocks. Kansas was dimly lighted to begin with, and, apparently, playful children had playfully busted three of the nearby street lamps. Possibly because nobody had busted the playful children.

The manager was an old geezer who would have looked natural with a straw between his gums. He wore blue overalls and a faded blue work shirt, and he couldn’t tell me anything about Danny that I didn’t already know. He hadn’t seen young Spring since the weekend before last. Saturday or Sunday, he didn’t recall.

He didn’t move out, though, did he? I asked. No moving van came around?

No, he just hasn’t been here. When I didn’t see him for a spell, I looked in on the apartment, case he meant to skip. But everything’’ there, clothes and all.

I thanked him, took the key he gave me and went upstairs, along the hall to the door marked 12. The place had two rooms and bath, no kitchen. It looked as if Danny might have left only minutes before — jacket tossed over a chair, a pair of brown shoes next to the bed, thick argyles stuffed into them.

After a twenty-minute search, the only item of interest I found was the writing pad next to the phone. No phone numbers were on the paper, but Danny had doodled on the pad, making little marks and figures. He had drawn half a dozen little pictures that I didn’t recognize at first. The word Rand was written a couple of times on the sheet, and probably that made the connection in my mind. The little figures were headstones, simple drawings of the stone markers which rest at the heads of graves.

But the prize was in the bathroom. I found Danny’s kit there, taped under the washbasin. I pulled the tape free, took out the small box and opened the hinged top. Inside was what addicts term the works, more complete than most I’d seen. It contained a hypodermic syringe and needle, a spoon with its handle bent back under the bowl so that, when resting on a table or the floor, the bowl would be level and about a half-inch in the air. The under side of the spoon was blackened from matches burning under it during the cooking. A heavy string, used as a tourniquet, and a small wad of absorbent cotton were also in the kit — plus three small transparent gelatin capsules filled with a dull white powder.

I opened one of the capsules. The powder had no odor. I put a little on my tongue, and it had the slightly bitter taste of Heroin. Three capsules of Heroin, three little caps of H.

I looked at them and said aloud, Rest in peace, Danny. Because it seemed likely that Danny was dead.

I once saw a hype named Grady take a long-overdue shot of Heroin. Until you’ve seen what the stuff does to a man, you can’t understand how ugly that innocent-looking white powder really is. But see one man halfway to hell, just one, and the statistics never look the same again. Maybe a man, or a kid, starts taking the junk for kicks, but soon the kick is gone and the hook is in. The pop is no longer for fun or for a lift, but simply to feel normal for a little while. Normal — the way he felt before he began taking the stuff. No lift now, no jag, no euphoria, just something to stop the pain, the scream inside. Something to stop the sweetly named withdrawal symptoms.

Grady had given me tips in the past, and I had needed information only he could give me. He’d moved, but I traced him to the smelliest, dirtiest hotel room I’d ever seen and was waiting inside when he showed. He’d been without food for three days. That didn’t bother him — food isn’t important to a hype — but he’d also been without his Heroin for three days, and that was important; that was his life. He’d just made a connection, bummed enough money to buy one cap of Heroin.

When Grady came in, he looked at me but didn’t speak, didn’t pay any attention to me. He reached under the bed and got the works. A crude outfit: eye-dropper, hypodermic needle, soft-drink bottle cap, some cotton. He was moaning, sweating, twitching every once in a while. He put a few drops of water in the bottle cap, dropped it and started to cry, got more water into it and managed to place the bottle cap on a little wire frame he’d made to hold it. He dumped the white powder into the water, held a match under the tin cap until the drug had cooked a little and dissolved. He’d stopped crying, but spit was running out the side of his mouth and down his stubbled chin. He smelled like an outhouse.

Usually the junkie puts his hypodermic needle into the mouth of the eye-dropper — held in place with tape or a thread gasket — then sucks the dissolved drug up the needle, into the glass barrel, through a wad of cotton which strains the liquid. But Grady couldn’t wait. The tip of the eye-dropper was broken off, leaving sharp slivers of glass at its end. He managed to hold still long enough to suck the warm Heroin and water into the dropper, but then he just jabbed the splintered end into his arm, into the vein. He was on his knees and stayed like that for a long time, blood running down his arm, onto his hand.

Then Grady got up, went over and sat on the filthy, unmade bed. Finally, he said to me in a lazy voice, Hello, Scott. How long you been here?

Friendly as could be. Happy now, at peace. But I knew — and he knew, too — that if I had tried to stop him, he might have killed me. If he could. Shot me, knifed me, crushed in my skull, anything at all, any way he could. Not because he had something against me — or against anybody else in the world — but simply because I would have been in his way, keeping him from climbing out of hell again. Until the next time. And the next.

I don’t remember now if I got the information I was after; but I sure remember Grady. I’d known him for four or five years; he’d been a young attorney when we met. Clean, neat, bright of eye. First the marijuana, just for laughs, then the Heroin. He was a bright boy, he could handle it.

That’s the stuff the bastards sell.

That’s the stuff the wise school kids are talking about when they say, Come on. Jack boy, just try it once. It’s a real kick, don’t be a jerk.

And that’s the stuff Danny Spring had left in his room. Maybe he’d made a connection somewhere else, but I didn’t think so. When he needed his bang, he would have come back there where the three little caps were waiting for him. If he’d been able to.

The thought had come to me before, but it seemed a settled thing now. Danny Spring wasn’t coming back. Rest in peace, Danny.

I dropped the kit into my coat pocket, went downstairs, gave back the manager his key. When he closed the front door behind me, he turned out the yellow bulb, and for a moment it seemed dark as a tomb in front of the Biscayne. And as quiet.

At the sidewalk I turned right, angled across the grass parking area toward my car a few yards away. I didn’t see anything. I didn’t hear anything, either. What tipped me was the smell of beer. Beer on his breath.

My reflexes are good, and there’s a habit-pattern built into my nerves; when that faint alarm pimps in them, I move first and wonder about it later. But this time I didn’t move soon enough.

I was starting to jump when the big hands closed around my biceps. The fingers dug in, hard, painfully — like steel gears grinding into the muscle. Because I was already moving, I was able to swing my body around, pull my right arm free. But a hand was still clamped on my other biceps, and my movement stopped with a jerk, my body spinning sideways. I saw the second man then. He was shadowy in the dun light, but I could make out his features. I’d read his description, seen his mug shot. A tall thin guy with a small square head and narrow mustache. Those fingers gouging my muscles had already told me that Pot was behind me.

Jake had something in his hand, swung it at my face. I jerked my head aside and the loaded sap banged my ear, slammed the base of my neck. I brought my right arm up, across my body, and caught the side of his mouth with the edge of my palm. Pot grunted behind me. His other hand slapped my shoulder, slid down to my free elbow. Jake stumbled, turned back toward me. Pot was incredibly strong, his fingers seeming to rip my flesh. I lifted my right foot, kicked down at his feet, felt my heel pound on his instep. He grunted, and his fingers loosened.

I threw my right elbow backwards into his belly. It was like hitting a cement wall. But I kept turning, got my left foot planted on the grass, slammed my left fist at his face. It was a good blow, and a lucky one. I got my shoulder and the weight of my turning body behind it and landed hard on his eye. It jarred him and he moved back half a step. I knew Jake was right behind me now, that sap probably swinging again, and I ducked, grabbing for the .38 under my coat.

But that was it. The sap didn’t land solidly; it cracked the side of my head and my legs stopped working. I was still on my feet, but the message wouldn’t get through to them. When I tried to turn, one of my knees buckled like a loose hinge and I spilled down at a slant. The sap got me again on the way down.

I felt the ground thud against my chest. My face hit the grass and grating pain raked my skull. I tried to move, tried to get up. But I didn’t know where my hands were, or my arms. Blades of grass were like feathers between my lips. I pulled my head up an inch, another, thought for a moment I was making it, and then felt the grass pressing my face again.

Somebody spoke to me, lips close to my ear. I didn’t know who it was, but I could smell the beer. Pot. I tried to swear at him. No sound came out, and I felt the grass move against my lips.

Pot said, I told you, Scott. Told you I didn’t want you to get hurt. Now look what you done. His voice was casual, like a guy asking the time. You’re lucky, cousin.

Another voice, up above me somewhere this time, He don’t know how lucky. Had my way, I’d bust his skull in now.

Then Pot again, We aren’t killing you yet, Scott. Hear that? Second chance in the quiz. Kill you tomorrow. Unless you play ball. Play ball, nobody’ll kill you. Those questions you were asking, about Dan and Frank and all. You forget about that, like I told you before, and just live the good life. His voice was gentle. You’re sure lucky. You get the second chance. But no more. No more, cousin.

I knew where my hands were now. The back of one was touching my right thigh, the other was palm down, thumb caught under the bone of my hip. I got the thumb free, then slowly pulled up my right arm until both hands were palm down on the grass.

I had to get them higher, I thought, next to my chest, before I could push myself up. I pulled at the grass with my fingers and felt my hands moving alongside me, slowly, like fat spiders. There was a taste of metal in my mouth, as if I had a mouthful of dimes.

Lookit him, a voice said, from somewhere high above me. The voice sounded very soft, fluttering. He’s a tough one, aint he? Got all the muscle of a baby. Maybe we ought to change his diaper Lookit him.

I was thinking, if I could just get up, maybe I could kill him. If I could just get up. I had my hands in place, pushing, but the side of my face was still on the grass. I could see something near me. Somebody’s feet and legs.

One of the legs moved back, then I saw it swinging forward. Something dug into my side, and a hacking sound came out of my mouth. The dark turned a deep red, almost black — the color of pain. Then there was a blow on the side of my head, a split-second of brightness —

Chapter Six

After the brightness there was a dull ache in my side, a rhythmic throbbing in my head. I had my hands in the right spots, pushing. It took a long time. But after a while I was sitting up.

I slid back until I was leaning against a tree trunk and sat still in darkness for several minutes, then found my lighter, flipped it on and looked at my watch. It was a little after two in the morning.

My Cadillac was a few feet away from me. I was still on the grass parking where they’d dumped me. I’d been unconscious for — I counted back — about three hours. The involuntary nap, though restful, hadn’t helped much. My brain felt bruised. Probably it was bruised. But after a few minutes of deep breathing and walking off some of the ache from my lungs, I was in reasonably good shape again, ready to take on people — two people, anyway.

I still had my wallet, gun, car keys, everything that had been on me when Jake and Pot jumped me. Nothing was missing — except, of course, those two or three hours. They’d swiped those, all right. I didn’t know why they hadn’t taken anything from me but consciousness — why they hadn’t killed me, for that matter. But I had an inkling.

One thing I felt pretty sure of: those slobs weren’t dreaming up all this activity themselves; they were taking orders from somebody. Jake and Pot could have killed me — but they hadn’t. Jake had said he’d finish the job if it was up to him. Had my way I’d bust his skull in. Something like that. So it wasn’t up to him.

It was up to somebody else — who didn’t want me asking around about Dan Spring and Frank Eiverson, and maybe about Jim. Somebody who, perhaps, didn’t want me killed. At least, not right now. Not just yet. And that was a pretty big perhaps to begin with.

I walked to my car and opened the luggage compartment. The Cad is a brand-new convertible coupé, with white leather upholstery, standard except for the equipment I keep in the luggage compartment — electronic and infrared equipment, walkie-talkie, and so on. This time all I wanted was a pencil-sized flashlight with a hooded lens. I dropped it into my pocket, smoked a cigarette in the car, then took off.

A cemetery at three o’clock in the morning is not a cheery place under any circumstances. But at this particular three o’clock it would have caused Dracula to bite his own veins. A soft wind was blowing, warm and muggy like the last exhalation of an old man dying. Near me the wind stirred a tree’s branches and they clacked together, rattling softly.

Except for the thin white beam from my flashlight, there was no illumination. The narrow beam fell on granite headstones: rest in peace . . . , here lies . . . , here lies. . . .

I shivered. Depression grew in me. Probably much of the reason for it was the beating I’d just had, the ache which seemed to have spread from my skull down through my bones. But part of it was caused by the place, the miasma of death, the flat granite headstones with still-preserved bodies beneath them.

The grave of Mr. Graves, I thought, and shivered again. I’d come to the Rand Brothers Cemetery to look for a real grave, a real headstone with the name Graves carved upon it. But now that I was here it seemed a senseless thing to be doing. I thought again of what Ruthie had told me, the words Frank had spilled in his drunkenness. A new grave, he’d said. Not old grave, new grave, Ruthie. I kept on looking.

I examined tombstones, monuments, small headstones sunk flat into the grass. There were several new graves where I was now, recent burials. The first one I looked at was only a few days old, the simple indented inscription reading: benjamin pearson, january 11, 1871 — may 19, 1961. Died May 19, and this was the 24th — early the 25th now. He had probably been buried only a couple of days ago. Benjamin Pearson, ninety years old.

There were others here who’d died this pleasant May: alice mons, july 12, 1890 — may 16, 1961; joseph judson, september 14, 1919 — may 13, 1961; george h. weissman, december 25, 1939 — may 8, 1961. Born on Christmas, dead at twenty-one. And emily thurmen, march 22, 1928 — may 2, 1961; robert william north, october 5, 1960 — may 1, 1961. Robbie, he would have been, or Bobby. Not quite seven months old.

There were others for April, and earlier months of the year. And other years. Graves new and old. But no Graves. I looked at some of them. But not all. I’d been with the dead too long.

I turned out the flashlight, walked in darkness to my car, and drove toward home.

In the morning I awoke slowly — and painfully.

I had been dreaming that I lay beneath the ground, and over my head was a massive stone on which was my own name and the phrase: here lies. . . . But that wasn’t what had bothered me in my dream; it had been the pressure of that stone on my head, its weight sinking downward and slowly crushing my skull.

When I was fully awake, I realized the pressure on my head was from my own hands squeezing. That, and the pain from inside my skull. I recalled it all then. Jake and Pot, those grisly hours in the graveyard. I sat up and smacked my lips, and my head banged for a while. Wisps of that dream floated into my mind and I remembered there’d been a date on my headstone. For a few seconds I tried to remember what in hell it had been, then I rolled out of bed, creaking almost audibly.

A hot shower steamed some of the ache from me, but none of the burn. It was nearly ten, and I felt refreshed, mentally alert. Over my breakfast mush and black coffee I thought back over the events of yesterday.

One small item stuck in my mind. When Pot had braced me in the dive on Main Street, he’d mentioned my asking questions about Dan and Frank, adding, and Mac. After a moment he’d changed it to Jim. I’d thought he was just being casual, pretending the name was hazy in his mind, but maybe there was another reason. Floating up from my subconscious came a memory.

I once had been looking for a man named Harold Lanson, a small-time hoodlum known as Hal the Dandy, but whom I called simply Dandy. One morning, in the L.A. police building, a friend said to me, Hal’s looking for you, Shell; he’s up in the Homicide squadroom. I’d blinked at him and replied, What in hell is Dandy doing so near the clink? My friend was puzzled, since he had been referring to Hal Rider, a police lieutenant.

The word had gone into my ear as Hal, but had been translated automatically into Dandy. Maybe something similar had happened to Pot. That little subconscious nudge had started yesterday when I’d examined the missing person report on James Randall McCune. Maybe when Pot heard me mention Jim, it had meant Mac to him. James — Jim? McCune — Mac? Maybe. And maybe I was reaching into the next county.

The missing person report had stated that McCune owned some kind of automobile agency. I looked in the L.A. phone book’s yellow pages, and under Automobile dealers, new cars found McCune Motor Company. I dialed the number. A man answered.

Scott here, I said. I was checking the missing person report on McCune yesterday. Got a couple questions. O.K.?

Oh, yes. Of course. Officer.

I grinned. You heard anything from McCune?

No, sir. Not since the last day he was here.

And that was when?

Saturday, it was, the thirteenth, just before soon when he went home. We close at noon Saturdays.

And you expected him on Monday, right?

Sure. He just didn’t show.

Uh-huh. By the way, what do you call him? People who know him well, I mean. Jim?

Some do. Most of us call him Mac.

I thanked him and hung up, found McCune’s home phone number in the book, Zenith 4-4394. I dialed it

The phone rang a few times, then a woman answered, Hello?

Mrs. McCune?

Yes. Who is this?

My name’s Shell Scott, but you don’t know me. At least, we haven’t met. I wonder if I could come out and talk to you this afternoon?

I’m sorry. I was just leaving the house when the phone rang. What is it you want?

I’d like to talk to you about your husband.

Oh. Her voice showed sudden interest. Do you — have you news of him?

No, ma’am. I’m sorry. I just want to ask you some questions.

I see. You’re with the police department, then?

That tore it. No, I’m a private detective. This is in connection with — another matter. But I’d greatly appreciate your seeing me.

I’m sorry. As I told you, I was just leaving the house when the phone rang. And I really must go. My cab is waiting out front now.

If you can spare me a minute more on the phone, maybe that’ll be enough.

There was a brief silence. Then she said, Just so it’s no longer than that.

O.K. You haven’t seen or heard from your husband since Monday the fifteenth? That was the date she’d included in the missing person report filed downtown.

She told me, no, she hadn’t. There’d been no word, nothing. Mr. McCune had left Monday morning, presumably to go to his agency, but hadn’t come home that night. She’d then learned he hadn’t arrived at work. She had not filed the missing person report immediately because she kept expecting him to return; he’d gone off like that a couple of times before.

Occasionally he had one drink too many, she said. The way she said it, that one drink sounded like a couple of gallons.

I said, Do you know if your husband was friendly, or acquainted with, men named Danny Spring and Frank Eiverson?

I don’t recall those names. Of course, he knew many people I never met.

But you don’t remember his mentioning them, Danny and Frank?

No.

How about anybody named Jake or Pot?

Jake or — Pot? Goodness, no.

Their full names are Jake Luther and Vince Potter.

My husband certainly never mentioned them to me. Is there anything else, Mr. Scott? I really must go.

Just one thing. Do you refer to him as Jim or as Mac?

What an odd — well, I always called him James. Why do you ask?

It was just an idea. Thanks, Mrs. McCune. Will you be home later today?

No, I have to go out of town for two or three days.

Well, thanks again. Perhaps we can talk when you get back.

Of course, Mr. Scott.

We hung up. Something bothered me about the conversation. Possibly it was simply that she hadn’t sounded exactly prostrated with grief. However, she had also, a time or two, spoken of her husband in the past tense. But, then, some women start thinking of their husbands in the past tense the instant they say, I do. And maybe it was merely my aching head.

I’d started on this McCune thing, though — or it had started on me — and I meant to finish it. A contact in the telephone company checked long-distance calls to and from McCune’s home for me. Since the fifteenth, when James Randall McCune had last been seen, no long-distance calls had been made from Zenith 4-4394, and only one had been received. That one had been a collect call from Newport Beach, placed at 11:56 a.m. on Sunday, the twenty-first.

I jotted the Newport number in my book, thinking it was probably from James’s Aunt Agatha. I didn’t really expect to get any new information, but I called the number, anyway. Fishing for minnows, I got a shark.

The number was at the Orange Coast Motel, on Coast Highway between Newport Beach and Corona Del Mar. I spoke to the manager and, merely as routine, described James McCune, asked if anybody with his description had been registered in the motel during the last week or two.

What was that description again?

I told him what I had noted from the missing person report and accompanying photograph. Six feet tall, two hundred pounds, forty-three years old, red hair, ruddy complexion, brown eyes. In the picture, his face had appeared strong, I remembered, with straight brows over the dark eyes, and a firm, almost cruel mouth.

The red hair probably did it. Sure, the manager said, You must mean Mr. Wilson.

Wilson? He there now?

No, sir. Haven’t seen him since Sunday. He was here a week, Monday to Sunday.

He checked out, then?

No, never checked out. Just — I don’t know. No sign of him.

Wilson had checked in on Monday morning, the fifteenth, for an indefinite stay. The manager had seen him briefly Sunday morning, the twenty-first. And that was the last time he’d seen Mr. Wilson.

Chapter Seven

I called the police building, asked Missing Persons to have a photo of McCune ready for me, then drove to downtown L.A. and stopped off long enough to pick up the print. It took me about forty minutes, driving on the Santa Ana Freeway, to reach Newport and then find the Orange Coast Motel. The manager readily identified my photograph of McCune as Mr. Bill Wilson, but couldn’t add anything to what he’d said on the phone.

The Orange Coast consisted of fourteen units in the shape of an angular U with its arms extended toward the highway. A small swimming pool was centered between the two rows of rooms, and a couple of gals were splashing in it. McCune had spent his week in Number 4, and I talked to the occupants of rooms on either side of his. He’d been seen a time or two; but nobody could tell me anything else about him.

The two girls had climbed out of the pool and onto inflated mats. One of them was patting herself with a blue towel, the other was lighting a cigarette. I walked over to them. The one lighting the cigarette was a slinky blonde about thirty-seven or and no more than twenty-one years old. She rolled dark-blue slinky eyes up at me, blowing smoke from puckered lips. Her swimsuit was a sort of two-piece negligee, and wet.

Hi, I said.

Hi. She leaned back on her elbows, slid one bare foot slowly up the mat, knee bending excitingly.

As she smiled and waggled her nude knee I said, Ah —

She smiled and waggled her knee some more. Are you staying here? she said brightly.

Well, no. Not yet. But it seems a dandy idea, all right. Lots of fun. Are you?

Am I lots of fun?

Yes — no. I mean, are you staying here?

Uh-huh. Me and our husbands, we been here five weeks already.

Our husbands?

Uh-huh. Me and my sister, here, and my husband, and hers we been. They work all day, though. Down at the glue factory, whatever it is.

Something like a small pain shot through my forehead. I didn’t know exactly what she’d said, but I’d heard enough.

Well, I said, business-like, I am looking for a man named Bill Wilson. Do you know him?

Who’s Bill Wilson? the blonde asked.

My dear, that is what I am asking you.

She puckered her lips on the cigarette while I took McCune’s picture from my pocket, showed it to her.

That him?

Yes.

Well. So that’s Bill Wilson.

Ah, you know him!

No.

That little shooting pain got me again. But — but you said, So that’s Bill Wilson.’

So? You said you were looking for Bill Wilson, and then you showed me his picture, so I naturally said, So that’s Bill Wilson.’You don’t have to make a Federal case out of it. So that’s Bill Wilson, I says, and he goes into all this.

Right then I almost wished I hadn’t come. I took a deep breath, snorted some of it out and said, Then, you can state clearly, with finality and conviction, that you have never seen this man?

The other girl spoke. I’ve seen him.

You have? You really have?

Yes. That’s Mr. Wilson. He was here till Sunday, then he left with a couple of men.

I looked at the girl who had spoken. She was two or three years older than the blonde — her sister, I guessed. Certainly not her brother. She was about five and a half feet tall, in about five and a half inches of bikini, a redhead with saucy eyes and nose and lips and breasts. She was leaning forward to peer at the photo in my hand.

Yes, she said. That’s Mr. Wilson.

You say he left on Sunday?

Yes, with two other fellows.

Then it filtered in. I showed my mug shots of Jake and Pot to the redhead. Did those other fellows look anything like these two?

She took the pictures and examined them, nodding.

Exactly like them. I’ll bet they’re the same fellows.

I’ll bet, too. You ever see them before?

No, just Sunday.

What time was it when they left with Mr. Wilson? And do you know when they arrived?

Let’s see. I’d just come out for a swim, my strap broke and I had to fix it, so I was late. It was about one o’clock. They weren’t here more than five minutes. Knocked on Mr. Wilson’s door and went in, then came out again in just a little while. I was right here by the pool all the time. Didn’t swim any that day. I’d just tacked the strap, and I was afraid it might give.

I could understand why. I said, Did Mr. Wilson seem to go willingly?

Willingly?

Of his own free will.

Free will?

Well — he didn’t come out all covered with blood and staggering and whooping, did he?

Oh, no. I’d have noticed anything like that. No, they just walked out, all together.

I talked to them a little longer, but learned nothing more.

Before I left, the blonde examined the mug shots of Jake and Pot, and said, They sure look mean, don’t they both?

She wasn’t so dumb after all. She’d hit it right on the head that time. I thanked them, said to the blonde, Well, I hope everything’s swell at the glue factory, and to the redhead, You watch that strap, now, and left feeling divorced from reality.

But the divorce was annulled when I got a block or two away from those gals, and thought about what the redhead had told me. Then I went to the local telephone company. It took twenty minutes and some persuasion, but a long-distance operator checked calls made to the Orange Coast Motel for me. Only one had been received from the L.A. area on Sunday, the twenty-first. It had been placed from another Zenith number, 4-6089 this time, at five minutes after noon. I jotted the number in my notebook and wondered what the hell it meant.

James McCune lived in a large home on Sunset Plaza Drive in Hollywood. Large and impressive — the landscaping alone must have cost as much as a couple of small houses. I parked in front. Mrs. McCune had told me she’d be gone for a few days, but this was a peculiar situation, so I poked the bell anyway. Chimes rang pleasantly inside the house. There was no answer, no sign of life.

I started talking to neighbors. A short man about forty years old answered the door at the house next to McCune’s. He knew McCune and his wife by sight, but had only spoken to them a few times; they weren’t very sociable.

Not neighborly, he explained. He wished they were, he said, especially Mrs. McCune, adding, If I wasn’t a very happily married man —

You see Mr. McCune around here during the last few days?

No. Guess he’s on a trip or something. Wife’s home, though.

You mean now?

Don’t know about now. During the last week or so, I mean.

What kind of a gal is she? Young, fat, bony —

Younger than he is, in her twenties I’d say. Real tall, and a real looker, that one. The neighbor was only about five-four, so I figured real tall to him might be anything from five-three up. He went on, A real looker. If I wasn’t a happily married man — all this sun; she lies out in back soaking it up. Man, the legs!

He was a leg-watcher. He dwelt on them for a while, repeating, If I wasn’t a married man — Not even happily married this time, and after only a minute’s talk about legs.

I said, Remember how long it’s been since you saw Mr. McCune?

He frowned. Been a good week, I guess. More, probably.

Just to be sure I showed him McCune’s picture. It was McCune, all right. He didn’t recognize the pictures of Jake and Pot.

A bachelor, about thirty, in a big two-story redwood house on the opposite side of McCune’s home, corroborated what the first man had told me, especially the part about Mrs. McCune. Good-looking blonde girl with hot blue eyes and a stunning pair of — and so on. He wasn’t a leg-watcher. There was a fence between his house and the McCune place, and I wondered how he managed to see the lady sunning. But a casual glance showed me that his second-story windows overlooked the McCune’s backyard.

He noticed my glance and grinned. So it’s been outlawed? Can’t hang a man for looking. He paused. But if she wasn’t a married woman —

Somewhere between, If I wasn’t a married man, and, If she wasn’t a married woman, I began getting quite intrigued with Mrs. McCune. But the bachelor had little else to tell me; he didn’t recognize my mug shots, either, and said he hadn’t, seen McCune for close to two weeks.

A few more calls on neighbors got me approximately the same information, so I went back to my Cad. It was a little before four, a beautiful May afternoon, bright and balmy, a good day to be alive — which thought made me recall my trip to the cemetery last night. The grave of Mr. Graves, I thought. And an idea wiggled. The people who run cemeteries do not just lower customers into the ground and then forget the whole thing. As in any other business, there are records which must be kept — names, dates, expenses, taxes.

So, if there really was a Mr. Graves buried out there, it wasn’t necessary to prowl the grounds in order to find him. A check of the records could give me the information I wanted. The problem, then, was how to get a look at those records — quietly, surreptitiously, even sneakily. I sure didn’t want anybody to know I was looking for Mr. Graves, if that cat had anything to do with Frank Eiverson’s disappearance — disappearance, or death. I had a hunch that both Danny and Frank were dead by now, and maybe Jim McCune, too.

Right then a thought stopped me. Ever since my call to the Orange Coast Motel, I had been assuming that Jake and Pot must have forced McCune to accompany them. It had been a natural assumption, knowing what I did about Jake and Pot. But maybe — the thought fluttered in my mind — McCune hadn’t been forced after all. Maybe he had asked Jake and Pot to come to the motel.

I checked the scribbling in my notebook. Earlier I had listed those two phone calls I’d checked on. Both had been placed Sunday, May twenty-first. One, a call from the motel to McCune’s home at eleven-fifty-six a.m. Then one from that Zenith number — not McCune’s — to the motel at 12:05 p.m., only nine minutes after the first call. Approximately an hour later, Jake and Pot had arrived at the motel, and had left a few minutes later with McCune. He’d left with reasonable quietness, too. Not, at least, whooping and all covered with blood — the saucy redhead had told me clearly she would have noticed anything like that.

Interesting. Screwy, but interesting. I let it simmer a bit. McCune disappears. On Sunday, a week after his disappearance, he calls his wife and tells her to get in touch with Jake and Pot. Wife does, the boys call the motel — presumbly from that other Zenith number — and are told to come on down to Newport. An hour on the Freeway and they’re at the motel.

Which would mean that Jake and Pot were indeed working for somebody else — no surprise to me. But the somebody was beginning to look like James Randall McCune. Which would explain, among other things, why Pot had spoken of Jim as Mac, and why he hadn’t seemed pleased by my asking questions concerning Jim at all. It would also mean that Mrs. McCune knew her husband was not missing, knew about his association with Jake and Pot — knew a great deal more than I did. Including the fact, undoubtedly, that Shell Scott was causing her James no end of annoyance and might have to be taken on a one-way trip to the cemetery. In which case, my earlier phone call to Mrs. McCune had not been the most clever act in my life.

Maybe — and maybe not. Just bits and pieces, so far, conjecture, nothing solid enough to hang onto. I thought some more about the possibility of getting a look at the Rand Brothers records, while making sure, at the same time, that I didn’t become a part of them. The job would be easy enough if I could get everybody, inside the mortuary, outside the mortuary.

The angle hit me all of a sudden.

It was about forty days till the Fourth of July. Wholesalers had their firecracker stocks ready by this time — and I knew a wholesaler. He sold the little ones, and the big ones, and the enormous ones.

Whether it worked or not, the idea appealed to me. Even if I got killed, the plan had a virtue: I would go out with a bang.

I smiled. About six enormous ones would do it —

Chapter Eight

Well, those six enormous ones had sure as hell done it. And a fat lot of good it was going to do me now.

The tape chafed my wrists, cramped behind my back. Pot’s big vise-fingered hands rested loosely on the steering wheel of my Cadillac, and Jake held the gun on his thin thigh. Not pointed at me, but handy enough to use suddenly in case I should do something threatening, like wiggling my ears at him.

For a moment I thought back over the last hour. After leaving McCune’s I’d picked up my Whiz-Bang-Pows, then gone directly to Rand Brothers. I didn’t think there’d been a tail on me then, but it was a remote possibility. Then I’d planted the bangers, gone into the mortuary, checked the files and left. All fine, till that point, like clockwork; but I’d let my guard down then, thinking the hard part was over. The hard part, obviously, had been just beginning.

Well, at least I’d found Mr. Graves. That card in the Fe-Ho file had been headed: Graves, H. M. — Memorial Tomb, with an address on Greenfield Avenue, and the notation that survivors were his wife Loris, daughter Pamela, son Douglas. Just that and a string of numbers and figures, that looked like the record of payments.

So I knew where he was — if I could find the Graves Memorial Tomb. That is, if I lived long enough to find it. And it still didn’t mean a thing to me. Oh, this is grand, I thought. I am a grand detective. A grand, dead detective.

We’d gone up to the Strip and swung out toward Beverly Hills, when Pot turned onto a macadam drive on our right. It led between the sturdy cement posts of an openwork metal gate, slightly uphill, curving out of sight to the left. Trees lined the drive and formed a shadowed tunnel. We continued along the road for half a mile and I started wondering if these bums were heading for a nice isolated spot in which to shoot me.

If so, I was going to kick, literally. My hands were still taped, but my legs weren’t. Most likely, they could shoot me, even if they had to start by wounding my feet; but I was sure going to try kicking in a few teeth and other items before they did. I was about to perch on the back of the seat and start kicking in two directions at once when the road ended.

It didn’t actually end, it just curved around in a graceful oval through a half-acre of green grass. The velvety lawn fronted a beautiful, sprawling, ranch-style home, low and solid, built with dark lava rock and stained redwood. It was startling to see here, far off the highway, isolated and alone.

Who lives in the —

Shut up.

That was all these mush-heads had said to me since we’d climbed into the car, and it was beginning to irritate me, more than mildly.

I said, Listen, you mush-brained lumps —

Shut up.

The sensation that shuddered through me is difficult to put into words: it was like a series of cerebral hemorrhages erupting in my brain like small hot fountains, with the barely audible sound of little firecrackers popping. I was going to have a go at it, even if I managed only to bite off an ear.

I had tensed my legs and started straightening up when Pot spun the steering wheel, we veered left and stopped. During the past few seconds, I’d paid no attention to where we were going, but now I realized he’d swung alongside the house and then behind it. The boil in me slowly started diminishing to a simmer. This didn’t look like a place in which to shoot people.

There was more lawn in back, a roofed patio at the rear of the house, and a free-form swimming pool. And in and near the pool was a whole flock of free-form women. Perhaps that isn’t the right way to describe the women, since free form sounds spread out and shapeless, and that, these gals were not.

I thought: What’s this? Maybe they were going to shoot me, but grant me a last request, first. Actually, there wasn’t a whole flock of girls, even if girls could be flocks. There were only three, though these three could never be described accurately as only. We were parked about ten yards from the pool’’ edge. One of the girls had just pulled herself onto the cement, the other two stood between that girl and us.

Three luscious tomatoes, in bikinis which fit like tomato skins. One tall and very shapely blonde, one medium-sized and very shapely blonde, and one short and very shapely blonde. I didn’t know any of them, but I wouldn’t have minded knowing them. I liked them a lot better than Jake and Pot.

Blondes, blondes, I mentally grumbled, everywhere, I run into blondes. And that shows you into what weird mental shape these last hours had twisted me — grumbling about blondes. I had thought more than once that some day blondes might be the death of me, and now it looked as if this might be that day. Though not quite the way I’d planned it.

Jake put his gun away and climbed from the car. Pot wrapped a hand around my left arm, in case I decided to try running somewhere.

Beat it, Jake said to the girls.

One of them said, But we’ve only been here —

Beat it.

There was no more argument. They walked past the car and around the corner of the house.

Out, Jake said to me.

Jake had his gun in hand again, now that the girls were out of sight, and he pointed with it toward the house, then toward me. I walked to the house. Pot still holding my arm, gently.

We went inside, a few feet ahead to a hallway, then right and along it for what seemed a city block. The house was huge. As we walked, I wondered what the score was. Outside the McCune home in Hollywood, and also after Jake and Pot had got the drop on me, I’d been getting a new slant on the source of all my troubles. The more I thought about it, the bigger James Randall McCune loomed in the picture.

If these mugs worked for him, then he was the man responsible for Pot’s bracing me, for the working over given me last night. It even seemed probable that while I’d been ringing James McCune’s bell, his wife had been inside the joint. The way I figured it, she almost must have dropped her jaw when I gave her my name on the phone. And naturally she had declined to see me. The story about a cab waiting outside was surely a stall, simply to cut conversation short.

It was goofy, but starting to make a little sense. I was not going to be surprised if we walked into a room with the missing James Randall McCune sitting there.

We stopped before a heavy door of carved dark wood and Jake knocked twice, then turned the knob. Pot pushed me inside, shut the door behind us.

And there he sat, in a big, black leather chair, smoking a short cigar. Not James McCune.

Joe Cherry.

It rocked me, sent my slowly stacked blocks of logic tumbling into a heap. I felt my jaw sag, brows pull down; but I clicked my mouth shut.

Well, I said slowly, how are things with Charlie Lucky, Cherry?

That stung him, but he tried not to let it show, pulled his features back into an almost amiable expression. It looked as if he meant to play it pleasant, friendly. Somehow that didn’t seem good.

He ignored my question. Ignored me. Jake walked to the desk, put my gun, wallet, keys, change — everything he’d taken from me — in front of Cherry.

Here’s all he had on him, Jake said.

Cherry looked it over, examined papers in my wallet while I began to burn. I strained my wrists against the tape, but it was wasted effort. Finally, I relaxed, glanced at Jake and Pot, then looked at Cherry.

His appearance was impressive. Big and broad, solid. About my height, six-two, maybe five or ten pounds heavier than I. And almost good looking. Almost. He was thirty-seven years old, but he looked older. His skin was dark. Thick hair, black and oily as old crankcase drainings, grew too low on his forehead. The blue sheen from a beard that would ruin two blades per shave darkened his face. Black brows were straight thick lines over his dark eyes. He wore a beautifully tailored suit of iridescent gray material that looked as if it had been woven from fine metallic threads, a soft-collared white shirt and a pearl-colored tie — neat, expensive, but like camouflage or protective coloration. The face was feral, coarse, almost animal.

Finally he reached into his trousers pocket and took out a small gold key on a chain, unlocked the middle drawer of his desk and swept my gun, wallet, and the rest of my things into the drawer, closed and locked it again. Then he stopped ignoring me.

Hello, Scott. Sorry I had to get you here this way. I didn’t think you’d come otherwise.

You were right.

He smiled. Well, it’s done. Might as well let bygones be bygones — and have our little talk in a friendly atmosphere.

Sure. You have these slobs sap me, kick me around, haul me here like a side of beef. I stopped, made my voice sound more normal. We can talk. Don’t expect it to be friendly.

Cherry said, Now, that’s no way to be, Scott. Make the best of it. I’d rather have Jake untie your hands and let you relax, calm down, while we chew the fat a little. If you’ll be good.

I’ll be bad. If Jake takes this tape off my wrists, I’ll hit him right in the mouth.

Cherry laughed. It wasn’t forced; he seemed quite amused by my joke.

Jake smiled a little, too.

Cherry said, What’s your drink, Scott?

Bourbon. When I’m drinking.

Fix him up, Pot. Jake, get his hands loose. Scott’s a smart boy; he’ll be sensible.

Pot walked to a walnut cabinet against the wall, raised its top, a compact bar rose into view. Jake yanked roughly at my wrists, and the tape came off with a ripping sound, burning the skin. I rubbed my right wrist, drawing the arm back, turning. Jake was wadding the black tape between his palms. I hit him right in the mouth.

He sailed backwards, head going much faster than his feet, and behind me I heard Cherry’s voice again, No, Pot! Hold it!

By then I’d spun around. Pot was near me, a big .45 automatic over his head. Cherry had stopped him from swatting my skull with it — barely in time. The effort showed in Pot’s thick, muscular face; but he stopped the blow, took a step away from me, bringing down the gun and snapping the slide back. His eyes weren’t on my face, but on my stomach, at which vulnerable area he was aiming the gun.

Easy, Cherry said to him.

Cherry’s mouth was pulled down a little, and he’d hunched forward, toward the desk. But that was all. He barely seemed to have moved; his expression was sober, not angry. Cherry was hard to budge, rigid, self-controlled. The veneer wrinkled slightly, but didn’t crack.

He spoke conversationally, only with a rasp in his voice, Why in hell did you do a dumb thing like that?

You know why. If you’ve forgotten, ask Jake. I looked at Jake. He was flat on his back on the floor, but he wasn’t unconscious. Not completely. It looked as if he was trying to get up, but hadn’t discovered which way was up. His feet moved in little inch-long journeys of exploration, pressing air, heels rubbing the carpet. Blood was splashed on his coat and white shirt, and his mouth looked like an abstract painting of an ear

I’ll tell you something else, Cherry, I said softly. If I get half a chance, I’ll kill you. With more than mild pleasure. And dump you in the same grave with these two pus-brained psychos you sent to work me over last night. You guys with muscles for brains give me a sharp shooting pain right in the —

I stopped, because this time I had cracked the veneer. I had finally run off at the mouth enough to weaken Cherry’s admirable self-control, if not collapse it entirely. I didn’t know whether it was the accumulation of all I’d said, or the fact that I had finally threatened the big man himself, but the veneer not only cracked, it shattered. It was as though fury, shock, and even fright were visible stains, slapped onto his face. His face slowly turned from white to red and then achieved a singularly bilious lividity, awesome to behold. It would have been interesting as part of a sunset, but on a face it was unprecedented in my memory. He sputtered and then spoke and sputtered some more, finally got out a few words, like small bombs.

You — son of — you — Scott — that’s the last — It was largely unintelligible, and all the while that queer blend of anger and surprise and fright was on his face, like the expression of a man astonishingly aware that he was simultaneously experiencing hemorrhages, heart attacks, and bowel movements.

And that, finally, calmed me down. Reason came back in a rush, suddenly, as if the temperature of my brain dropped ten degrees between one second and the next. The lava still lay in my middle, but the volcano had stopped erupting.

Both Cherry’s hands were on the edge of his desk, fingers clamped tight, knuckles bloodless. He sputtered a little longer, then stopped. The fingers pressed the desk for a while and at last relaxed. In control again, he reached into a drawer on his right, then placed his fist, holding a long-barreled revolver, on the desk top.

Wrap him up, he said to Pot. He wants it hard, he gets it hard.

Pot found some more tape, and bound my wrists behind me again. I didn’t wiggle much, not this time. I didn’t say anything, either. Pot went at the job like a man preparing a mummy, winding the tape not only around my wrists behind my back, but halfway up my forearms.

Cherry said, Let him cool off in there, and jerked a thumb toward another carved-wood door on his right.

Pot slapped his hand on my back and shoved me toward the wall. He opened the door, pushed me inside the room, banged the door shut behind me. He didn’t come in, but stayed in the room with Cherry.

I could hear the rustle of movement, voices, but even with my ear pressed to the door, I couldn’t make out words. Except for a couch, two overstuffed chairs, a long black table with half a dozen wood-and-black-leather chairs around it, the room was empty. There was only the single door, and no windows.

A few minutes dragged by, five, maybe ten. I tried to sit comfortably on the couch, and wondered what these bums had in mind for me. A little sweat oozed out on my forehead, my chest, under my arms. I heard a sharp sound, muffled by walls and distance. It seemed to have come from where my car was parked. It had sounded like a gunshot. A little more sweat oozed out. Maybe a bullet was what they had in mind for me. I wondered if Cherry had shot Jake because of his broken mouth, the way people shoot horses with broken legs. That was too much to hope for, but the sound puzzled me. The trouble was, everything puzzled me.

Giannomo Ciari, I thought. I sure hadn’t been prepared to see Joe Cherry here — though I should have been, now that I thought back over the last couple of days. I thought, too, about all the blondes; because one of the few things known for sure about Joe Cherry was how often he was seen in the big night clubs, the expensive restaurants, with a lovely young gal, and the lovely young gal was always a blonde. It was said a brunette or redhead in some chorus line or at a hat-check counter might catch Cherry’s eye, and she might even become one of his frequent companions; but, if so, she did not remain a brunette or redhead for long. Maybe Cherry just liked the contrast, his dark and their lights or maybe he couldn’t enjoy a woman unless her hair ranged in color from wheat to platinum, but it was always dark, black-haired Cherry with the eye-catching, light-haired lovely — at the clubs, the race track, wherever he was seen in feminine company.

And I’d sure run into enough blondes lately. Three here at the pool — even remembering them, failed to help time pass quickly. I couldn’t see my watch, but at least half an hour passed while I sat or paced in the room. The silent treatment? Let me sit here and sweat?

So I sat. Sweating.

The door opened. Pot loomed in it. Come on. When I was seated in the chair before his desk, Cherry said to me, Think we can have that talk now? Or do you want to go back in the next room again? With Pot and Jake this time.

Jake had washed his face. In fact, he looked as if he’d taken a shower. His thin hair was plastered to his skull, and he’d changed clothes. The new shirt and coat had no blood on them. It didn’t help much. His mouth destroyed the neat effect.

I said, We can talk, Cherry. But it just can’t be all sweetness and light, under the circumstances.

Make an effort. You got no idea the patience I’ve had with you. And why? Because I want it friendly. Understand?

I understand the sap on my head last night. And Pot’s boot in my ribs. How friendly can you get?

I didn’t have nothing to do with that — and I don’t give a damn if you believe it or not. Here’s how friendly I feel. You ever been in Paris, Scott?

No.

A man can have a lot of fun in Paris — with a little money and the right connections. I’ve got the money, and the connections. I can fix you up with a year you’d never forget.

You mean you’ll give me an expense-paid year in Europe? Or anywhere else that’s not in the States?

That’s it.

I like it here.

You won’t. Not if you turn down this offer. He shook his head, looking puzzled.

Scott, don’t you get it? Hell, you haven’t got any choice. This is gravy. I’m giving you a chance to get out. Turn it down and — He paused for a few seconds. Well, you’ll never see Paris.

I didn’t say anything.

He stared at me, eyes dark under the black brows. Ten G’s — and you must have your own pile stashed away. One-way ticket to Paris. Doors opened for you — by me. You’d live like a king. Better. He smiled, thinly. Anyway, you’d live. Well?

I’ll admit I thought about his offer. It was something I would have enjoyed doing under other conditions. But Cherry’s way would take all the fun out of it. Out of it, and the rest of my life. I thought sourly, the rest of my life?

I said, Cherry, I don’t get this. You must have known when you hauled me here that I wouldn’t go for a payoff.

I had to try it this way. O.K., I didn’t think it would work, but there was always a chance. He looked at Jake and said, Remember, don’t mark him up.

The words dropped into my mind like little half-frozen squids — chilling, gently moving, ugly, with soft tentacles that brushed bare nerves. I thought of Paris and sidewalk cafés and steamy night clubs and girls with flirty hips and eyes but I couldn’t get my mouth open, even for that.

Pot hauled me to my feet, gave me his usual banging shove toward the door. Jake stood next to the door, smiling as if it was painful. Undoubtedly it was painful, but not enough to keep him from smiling.

Then Cherry said, Hold it a minute. Take this junk.

I looked back at him.

He pulled the little gold key from his pocket, unlocked his middle desk drawer, took my stuff out and pushed everything across the desk.

Pot picked up the items, walked in front of me. He slipped the wallet into my inside coat pocket, jammed the Colt Special into the clamshell holster I still wore, dropped the other things into a side pocket of my coat — except for the car keys, which he handed to Jake, saying, You drive his heap this trip. Jake took them, opened the carved-wood door.

I thought of something and said to Cherry, By the way, was one of those blondes out at the pool Mrs. McCune?

He stared at me silently for four or five seconds, black brows pulled down.

Then he said, Who in hell is Mrs. McCune?

Pot gave me another shove, and we started down that long hallway again.

Back, I thought, to the cemetery.

Chapter Nine

When we were half a mile from Rand Brothers Cemetery I tried to jump out of the car.

It was nearly dark. We were in the Cad again and its top was down; there was a grove of trees a few feet off the road. My hands still were taped behind me, but my legs weren’t bound. If I managed to topple from the car, and didn’t land on my head, and got to my feet in a hurry, I could run toward those trees, and get shot in the back. But at least it was better than not even trying.

So I sprang — a good three inches into the air.

Jake was driving, and Pot had one hand wrapped in the cloth of my coat. I went up three inches and Pot’s hand gave a yank and I went back down three inches. Then Pot’s other hand sailed through the air like a large ham hock and whacked me on the side of the head.

Don’t be so twitchy, he said mildly. We’re practically there.

That was the part I didn’t like. We were practically there, and there was the lousy cemetery. My head was ringing. Pot hadn’t walloped me very hard — not for a Pot wallop — but he could bust three of your ribs in front by slapping you jovially on the back. My head was ringing with the sound of millions of bells, like Sunday morning in heaven, or testing time in an alarm-clock factory. Man, I hadn’t known there were so many things loose inside my skull. Or maybe they hadn’t been loose until Pot clobbered me and loosened them.

Over the clanging of those bells I said, You miserable clunk. You won’t get away with this. Pot. You won’t — you won’t — I stopped. Why wouldn’t he?

Pot chuckled. You’re in for a surprise, Scott. This aint gonna be so bad.

The Buick Electra was still parked where it had been earlier in the day. Jake stopped a few feet in front of it. He turned off the engine, left the keys in the ignition, got out and walked to the Buick. Pot jerked me around, pulled at the tape on my wrists.

I had been jerked around, slammed around, and shoved around enough in the last twenty-four hours to last me more than a lifetime, and if this was the last act, I was going to play a little part in it. I stomped on Pot’s feet, roared, gnashed my teeth and tried to butt him with my head. Maybe I did butt him with my head; at least something happened to it. And there were those bells again.

Faintly, I felt the burn of tape on my wrists as Pot pulled several loops free. Dimly, I heard him say, A smart dude like you oughta be able to get the rest of it off. So long, cousin.

He slid out the door and trotted toward the black Buick, jumped inside. I shook my musical head, twisted around and got my eyes focused on the car as its lights were turned on. As Jake swung onto the road and started past the Cad, the bright headlights swept over me, blinding me, momentarily.

I ducked, then dived for the floorboards. They could still send bullets through the car door, but it would help if they didn’t see me. I shoved with my knees, pushed my body forward, started butting my head against the door handle, trying to get the door open, so I could run. The Buick’s engine got louder — and then fainter.

Fainter? They’d driven by, raced on down the road. For the first time I thought: Maybe those apes aren’t going to shoot me. I got my feet under me, slid up onto the seat, cautiously raised my head.

Sure enough. Far down the road the Electra’s red taillights blinked. I blinked back at them. For a while I was too surprised to do anything except stare at those diminishing red dots. They got fainter, disappeared.

What the hell? I thought. I looked around at the gathering darkness, but couldn’t see anything unnerving. After another minute, I got busy on the tape and managed to work it free. I wadded the black tape, stuffed it under the Cad’s seat, and reached for my gun. I flipped on the car lights and checked the Colt’s cylinder. Still loaded, five slugs in the cylinder and the usual empty chamber under the hammer, all normal.

Wallet, change, everything — even my gun, still loaded and ready for action. I thought about it, more than a little puzzled — and much more than a little relieved. But then I stopped thinking, started the car and left.

A lot of questions remained unanswered, but they could wait. I was driving with a single happy thought in my mind: I was in my own Cad, operating under my own power — and going away from the cemetery.

Usually, I park on North Rossmore in front of the Spartan Apartment Hotel, but tonight I drove to the alley behind the Spartan and pulled into one of the slots there.

It didn’t seem likely, after what had just happened, but what had just happened didn’t seem likely, either, so if anybody was planted out front with a gun or a bomb or embalming fluid I saw no point in asking for it.

I went in the back way, stopped at the desk and got my key. Nobody had come looking for me, but there’d been a few phone calls while I was out. I went up the stairs, down the hall and into my apartment.

Nobody was waiting there, either — all was undisturbed. I fed the frisky tropical fish in the community tank inside the front door and the color-splashed guppies in their smaller aquarium, momentarily eyeballed Amelia, the yard-square oil painting of a most daring tomato on my living-room wall, then undressed and showered.

I was in the bedroom climbing into a clean beige gabardine suit when the phone rang in the living room. I went in and grabbed it, said hello.

Hello, Mr. Scott? It was a woman’s voice.

Yes.

There was something familiar about the voice. While I was trying to recall where I’d heard it, she said, This is June, Mr. Scott. June Corey. Do you remember me?

June? Then I remembered. It all came back to me: the gal who could make corpses kick open caskets to give it one more try. The gal who moved like hot mercury, tall and lovely, with the shape like an experimental design for tomorrow’s production model, with blue eyes and red lips and long blonde hair. Oh, hell, I thought, another blonde.

But that is not what I said.

Hello! I remember. You bet I remember. Ha, do I remember? what a question. Well, how are things at the — It didn’t seem like the question to ask. Instead I said, Well, how are — things?

Fine, she said. I mean, not so good.

Things aren’t so good? We must not be talking about the same —

I’m afraid you’re in awful trouble, Mr. Scott. Danger. I mean, it’s — hard to say like this, on the phone. She paused. Where have you been? I’ve tried and tried to reach you.

I was at — a strange place. What do you mean, I’m in trouble? Hell, I already knew I was in trouble.

She said, I heard some men talking on the phone — I was on an extension — and they were talking about — She stopped.

About me?

Yes, but it was the rest of it. About — She stopped again.

Will you, for Pete’s sake, tell me what they said?

It just sounds so strange now. But they were talking about killing you.

I digested that. Or tried to. Then I said, Is that all?

Is that all? Isn’t that enough?

I didn’t mean it that way — it’s much more than enough. But did they say anything else? How and where and when they meant to kill me, that sort of thing.

Yes. A little. It sounded awful to me.

It sounds awful to me, too.

Could you meet me some place, Mr. Scott? I don’t like using the phone here — that’s how I happened to overhear them talking. And I’m a little afraid to stay here, anyway, now. I’m still at the mortuary.

It sounded a bit odd. But I could sympathize with her desire, and said, Sure, June. Want me to pick you up there?

Oh, goodness no! she said. I can’t afford to be seen with you. I mean — I hope it doesn’t sound awful, but with people going to kill you and all, I just can’t be seen — you understand, don’t you?

Of course. It was quite clear June had a head on her shoulders — and she wanted to keep it on her shoulders. You name it, I said.

Well, I’ll take a cab home, the Weatherly Hotel, then meet you around the corner on Normandie. Is that all right?

Sure. I looked at my watch. It was nearly eight p.m. About eight-thirty? That O.K.?

Make it nine. I have to get home, then shower and powder my body. And dress.

Powder — Everything got sort of far-off and faint for a moment. My mind had wandered away somewhere, and you know where.

She laughed, Oh, I don’t know why I said that. It’s just something I always do after I shower. After I walk around and get all dry, I mean. It just popped out, I wasn’t thinking. I’m sorry.

Don’t be sorry.

Nine then? Halfway down the block.

Fine. You rush home and — all. I’ll be waiting.

All right. ’Bye.

June. Before you hang up.

Yes?

I know you’re anxious to get off that phone and go, but I’m naturally curious. I would really hate to get shot on the way to meet you. So if you heard —

Oh, goodness, she interrupted. Of course. They said they were going to — do it at one in the morning. So there’s lots of time.

Sure, I thought. Loads of time. Whole hours of life stretched ahead of me. June seemed fairly casual about my impending demise — and that idle thought stuck in my skull with another one, less idle.

I asked her about it. June, how did you know where to reach me? I didn’t tell you my name.

I know. But I asked Mr. Truepenny. After you left, I went in and asked him. She paused, and added very casually, Not that I was interested or anything. In you, I mean. It’s just that you seemed nice, and — unusual. And you were so big, and kind of rough-looking, and the wild way you looked at me, and all, I — She paused again, then laughed. I’ll be honest. I was interested. Is that so bad?

I was looking at Amelia and smiling. No, I said, that’s not so bad. In fact, it’s dandy —

June was saying, Anyway, I wouldn’t want you getting killed, even if I’d never heard of you. There seemed something missing in that one, but she went on. And anyway, they’re not going to shoot you like you said, they’re going to blow up your bed. With you in it naturally.

Naturally.

I’d better go.

Yes.

I heard her hang up, but I kept staring at the phone for a half-minute or so. Then I shook my head gently, put the phone on the hook, and finished dressing.

So many interesting items had come at me during the brief conversation that it was difficult, if not impossible, to sort them out properly. There was plenty more for June to tell me, I felt certain; and I was increasingly eager to hear it all.

She’d told me one thing without putting it into words. Mr. Truepenny had known, for sure, who I was the moment I walked into Rand Brothers. Not only had there been that slip when he’d called me Mr. Scott instead of Mr. Sheldon, but there had also been the sudden and unpleasant appearance of Jake and Pot. And now June had informed me she’d learned who I was from Mr. Truepenny. So one of my deductions, at least, had been correct. It gave me hope. But not much.

There had been numerous other items of interest in June’s brief moment or two on the phone, urgent, vital. It is probably not to my credit that, above all the rest, was the intelligence that she powdered after every shower.

Chapter Ten

For ten minutes I had been parked on Normandie, in semidarkness between two street lamps. There had been no sign of June Corey. I was a little itchy, considering the day’s earlier events, and my .38 was on the seat next to me. It seemed unlikely that anybody would choose such a peculiarly complicated method as this if they wanted to knock me off, but my hand was around the gun’s butt, just in case.

Then, at fifteen minutes after nine, I heard the rapid click of high heels on the sidewalk. I turned and watched her move through the illumination of the street lamps, into deeper shadow, her head a pale glow as if her hair tangled and held the light. It was June, alone.

I stuck the gun back into its holster, leaned across the seat and opened the door. June slid in, pulled the door shut.

Hello, she said brightly. I’m a little late.

Hi. No strain — you’re here.

I got all dressed, then decided to change, she explained. Into something I thought you’d like more.

She’d done it. June looked tremendous. No matter what her first choice of dress had been, she had guessed correctly that I would like this one more, since it was undoubtedly less. It was pale blue, with thin shoulder straps, and looked like one of those backless cocktail dresses worn backward.

Like it? she asked me.

Yes, it’s — lots. I mean, I like it lots. Sure a — sure a pretty color.

She smiled. Thank you, Mr. Scott.

Make it Shell, huh?

Fine. She smiled again. Let’s not be formal.

Let’s not. How, I thought, could we? If she got any more informal she’d be arrested. That was certainly an arresting dress. It was at least a misdemeanor. A narrow-minded cop might pinch her for carrying unconcealed weapons — without even holsters — or maybe for felonious assault. Or — I tried to force my mind blank. I couldn’t do it.

Well, June said, what now?

I’ll tell you what —

Let’s go someplace else, Shell. All right?

All right, sure, O.K. I know a dandy place way up in the —

Can we go get a drink somewhere? I feel a little nervous.

I’m a little nervous myself. Swell, a drink sounds swell. I know a dandy place way up in the —

How about The Wild Tomato? Would you like that?

Would I!

You know it, then?

I know a lot of them.

But there’s only one, isn’t there? The little place on Western?

What in the hell are you talking about?

The little bar on Western, Shell. They make the best gimlets in town. But we can go somewhere else if you want.

No, that’s fine, I said, a little of the zip leaving me. Now that she’d straightened me out, I remembered the joint. It had been a beatnik dive before most of the beatniks died of the itch, or committed suicide, or whatever happened to the slobs. Now, if I remembered correctly, it had been repainted, renovated, fumigated, and a Latin combo had replaced the cretin poets.

So let’s go, I said, to The Wild Tomato.

We sat in a booth at opposite sides of a narrow table, our first drinks in front of us. Bourbon and water for me, a gimlet for June.

June narrowed her blue eyes at me, lifted the gimlet and said, Happy days.

And nights, I said.

I’ll drink to that.

While we sipped our booze, June went back over what she’d told me earlier, said she’d picked up the phone to call a cab and heard the men talking. One had mentioned my name, which by then she’d learned from Truepenny, and she’d listened to the rest.

They were actually talking about killing you, she said, blowing you up.

Pretty tricky. How were they planning to do it?

That’s where the part about when to do it came in. One of them said one a.m. would be a good time. If you weren’t home, the fellow was to go in and put the football under your bed. I thought it was a joke until he said something about when you flopped on the bed it would blow you through the roof. Then I guessed it was something that would blow up.

Yeah, it must have sounded like that. A football in hood argot is a pineapple, a bomb.

He said he’d phone your place to check, or have somebody else phone and get you out of there if you were home. Then this Luther would put the football under the bed.

Uh-huh. They sound like most unpleasant — Luther?

Yes. One fellow called the other one that.

Did Luther happen to mention a name?

He called the other one Mac.

Mac? I blinked at her. Luther would naturally be Jake Luther. But Mac? You say you overheard this in the — at Rand Brothers?

Yes. I was in my office. The one I was in when you came by earlier today.

That means one of the bums must have been at Rand Brothers.

She leaned forward, thinking, chin cupped in one long-fingered hand, elbow on the table. But her elbow was not all that was on the table. I tried to make my mind blank. Again, I couldn’t do it.

She said, He must have been there. On one of the other extensions. I hadn’t thought about that.

Which of the men were there?

Well — I don’t know, now you mention it. All I heard was part of the conversation, and I don’t know which was which. One voice was louder. Either it was the man on the extension, or else he just talked louder.

Which one?

She shook her head, blonde hair swinging, several things happening. I’m not sure. The one called Mac, I think.

What time was this?

Close to six. Usually I leave at six. Tonight I stayed a while, trying to phone you. And I was a little scared, anyway. It was such an — awful conversation. I mean, it was so ordinary, except for what they said.

Do you know a man named McCune?

Only Jim McCune. It jarred me, but she went right on, I think he has money invested in Rand Brothers. Anyway, he’s been in a few times to see Mr. Truepenny.

Could this Mac have been Jim McCune?

She frowned. Well, I’ve never talked to him on the phone. But I don’t think so. She shrugged. It’s hard to tell now, thinking back.

We each had another drink, went over her story some more. She was sure it hadn’t been Truepenny on the phone. Neither did she know if McCune, or anybody else, had been in the mortuary at the time. As far as she knew, Truepenny was the only person who’d been there.

I finished my drink, thinking about it. The call had been made around six p.m. From about five-thirty until six-thirty, I’d been at Joe Cherry’s, so the call had been made shortly before I left there. Jake Luther on the phone from Cherry’s talking to Mac? To McCune? Could be, but it sure didn’t make much sense to me.

I said to June, Did you ever meet McCune’s wife?

No, I didn’t even know he was married. She smiled. He doesn’t act married.

I grinned back at her. Neither do I.

But you’re a bachelor, aren’t you?

And how.

She laughed softly. Let’s get out of here.

O.K. by me.

I feel — uncomfortable with people around. You know, suppose somebody should see us together, and those awful men found out about it. I might get a bomb in my bed some night.

I had come to the conclusion that June had a bomb in her bed every night. But I naturally understood her concern, and we slid out of the booth.

June had chosen the bar, and she also picked the next place, which, I was surprised to discover, was an isolated and very pleasant spot. We reached it after driving over a mile on bumpy dirt roads. The place was several yards off the road, at the edge of a steeply sloping hill.

Near us was a group of slim trees, their drooping limbs shadowy against the night sky, above us, blackness pinned with stars. The moon was high, not yet full. Below us, spreading for miles, was the splendid sight of Hollywood and Los Angeles at night: millions of lights, the slow swirl of moving traffic, bright dots of neon.

I lit cigarettes and we smoked, talking about that phone conversation, but we’d covered the high points earlier. After a while, June said she felt safe from prying eyes for the first time tonight.

Except yours, Mr. Scott, she added laughing.

Shell. We weren’t going to be formal, remember? And lady, forgive my frankness, but you are never going to be safe from prying eyes. Not while there are men around. And, especially, not while I’m around.

Yours I don’t mind, Shell. She put out her cigarette, leaned closer to me. Yours I don’t mind at all.

Her voice had softened, become lower, huskier than usual, hotly rushing like the sound of a distant forest fire. Her breath warmed my cheek as she said, I like men like you, Shell, big and rough and tough, men with a growl in their eyes.

Well, now, I — growl?

I had turned to look at her. Her face was inches away. Light glimmered faintly on the moist curve of her lower lip as she smiled. I told you a lie earlier, Shell, a little white lie.

About that phone call?

No, not that. It was when I mentioned showering, walking around nude to get dry, then powdering my body, all of my body. Do you remember?

I hope to shout I remember.

I told you I hadn’t meant to mention that — it just slipped out in the conversation. That was the little lie. I said it on purpose, Shell. Deliberately, with design. I wanted you to think about it.

You got your wish. In fact —

The rest was true, though. I mean, I really do powder all over after I shower. With White Midnight — that’s what it’s called.

Every word June spoke was a picture in my thoughts, a film zipping through my mind. In Technicolor, Cinerama, even Smell-O-Vision. And that distant forest fire was less distant now, louder, hotter.

White Midnight, I said. Crazy. My arm was around her shoulders, fingers on the warm flesh of her arm. Uh, maybe you’d better not tell me any more about it. I have a mind like a steel trap. That’s not what I mean. I mean, I have a mind —

It makes me feel so luxurious, she interrupted. Almost sinful. She pressed gently against me, head raised, her breath on my mouth now.

Sinful, she went on, sinful but good, wonderful, like a caress —

My mouth pressed the words into her throat. My hands went around her, stopped on the bare softness of her back as she moved her body against me, moved her lips on my lips. Then she slid her mouth from mine, moved slightly away from me and laughed softly. Still laughing, she mashed her mouth on mine again.

Well, kids, lean back. Let me tell you.

Those fire-engine-red lips of June’s were soft cushions for hot kisses, all right; but that first kiss had been a mere sample, the kind you write home about. This one was the kind you don’t dare write home about. It was like learning other kissers had been using falsies instead of lips and this was the real thing at last.

June moved her head from side to side and I felt her teeth press without pain into my lower lip. Then she pulled her head back and looked at me.

Mmmm, she said. Shell, you make me feel so good. She laughed. You make me feel so good! How do you feel. Shell, how do you feel?

I think you lit my lips.

She laughed again. Let’s burn ’em off. Burn ’em, mmmm —

And the mmmm — became a caress that spread like raw gin in a starving stomach. It was like kissing a gal with three lips, like wow, like crazy, like — words failed me, lips failed me, everything failed me. Well, not quite everything.

Slowly, lingeringly, June took her mouth from mine, leaned away, arms sliding from around my neck. She let her head fall back, smiling and shaking her head; moonlight silvering her arched throat, her blonde hair waving silently. The narrow straps of the blue dress slid outward with her movement, crept over her shoulders and slipped down as she pressed her arms to her sides. Then she raised her arms and crossed them over her white breasts, fingers kneading her shoulders as she lowered her head again and stared at me from wide eyes.

June sucked in her breath, still smiling, lifted both arms high over her head, arching her back and leaning even farther from me, pale silver in the moonlight. Then she swayed toward me, leaned against me and curled her arms behind my neck. The scent of White Midnight rose like perfumed darkness from between warm silver breasts, and then her breath rushed over my mouth, and my lips found hers.

Found them, held them, kept them.

Chapter Eleven

It was nearly midnight when we turned off Sunset into Vine. Vine, after a few blocks, becomes North Rossmore, which passes in front of the Spartan Apartment Hotel. I had argued with June that I should drop her off and go home alone, since there was a possibility the boys would decide to move up their plan to an earlier time. An earlier time, like right now, say. But she insisted she wanted to go with me, and, without too much reluctance, I agreed.

As we neared the Spartan, June said, Is there any place in back where you can park, Shell?

Sure.

Then park in back, will you? I’m — I’d rather not go in the front way.

Now that we were close, she sounded a little less eager to stick by me through thick and thin and bombings.

I should take you home, June.

No, it’s all right. Really.

I parked behind the Spartan and we went in the back entrance, as I had done earlier in the day. I told June to wait down the hall while I opened the apartment door, went inside and looked around. Nothing blew up when I switched the lights on. In the bedroom, I crawled under the bed and examined the springs, using a flashlight, then carefully peeled back the blankets and sheets, felt over the mattress. All seemed normal, but just to be sure, I tossed a heavy chair onto the bed from the doorway, ducking around the wall as it landed. The only noise was the chair bouncing, then hitting the floor. I righted the chair, went into the hall.

June walked toward me and said, Everything all right?

Yep. There is no bomb under the bed.

She smiled. I’m glad to hear that.

I grinned, took her arm and led her inside. She looked around the apartment, commenting on the fish and Amelia. We sat on the chocolate-brown divan.

Drink? I asked.

She glanced at her watch. I’d love a gimlet. Shell. Or a plain old martini, if you don’t have any lime water.

There’s no such thing as a plain old martini. But when it comes to drinking, I’ve got everything from lime juice and little pearl onions to Obawalla Scotch, Waterloo Brandy, and fermented corn squeezings. I expect to get liquid rocket fuel as soon as it’s available to civilians.

June glanced at her watch again, almost nervously. I supposed she was making sure it was still a while till one.

A gimlet, then, she said. I do need a little refueling.

Coming up. I slid on the divan and went into the kitchenette, began hunting for the gin and lime water.

While puttering around I called to June, Speaking about refueling, these science cats have progressed from liquid rocket fuel to solid, so why couldn’t they invent solid booze?

Solid booze?

Sure. Why not? They say the solid stuff’s better, provides more thrust, burns with a fine blue flame or something. Why, the day may come when we can go to the freezer, haul out a chunk and bite off a martini.

And burn with a fine blue flame?

Now you’ve got it. A couple of bites and you go into orbit. There’s more than one way to reach outer space, you know. Shucks, I’ve been in outer space.

Really?

Sure. More times than you’d think. Lots of times.

She chuckled. What’s it like?

Oh, it’s not so much. I shrugged. Take the dark side of the moon. I’ve seen it. It’s so dark you can’t see a damn thing. Ah, but Arcturus. How well I remember Arcturus. There was a green-eyed babe there I’ll never forget. Green-eyed, green-eared, with green teeth, and three gorgeous green —

Shell, if you can’t find the lime water, I’ll have a plain glass of —

Ah, here it is. Little beggar was hiding behind, the passion-fruit juice. I took the bottle from the refrigerator. You shall have your gimlet in half a minute. A whole pot of gimlets, in fact.

A whole pot of gimlets sounds like more than I need.

But it’s got to last us the whole trip, dear. And some of it’s for me, anyway.

Trip?

Of course. To outer —

Never mind. Shell, we haven’t known each other very long. Do you always talk like this?

Naturally not. I never talk like this. But tonight is special. There’s madness in the air. Can’t you feel it twitching all around us?

Well, if you say so. It sort of tickles, doesn’t it?

Exactly. Glorious, isn’t it? But wait until you get these gimlets tickling you on the inside. Tickles inside and outside, tickles reaching for each other, tickles meeting, tickles mating. Wow, I can hardly wait!

I wouldn’t have believed — oh, dear.

What? I peered out through the kitchenette door at her. June was looking around, examining the divan. She bit her lower lip, and said again, Oh, dear.

What’s the matter?

I just realized I left my bag in the car. Shell. I have to fix my lips. I must be a fright.

Sure. You scare me, you’re so frightful. I’ll run down and grab the bag for you.

No. She stood up suddenly. I’ll get it.

But it’ll only take me —

I’ll get it, Shell. She paused, then smiled at me. You’ve much better things to do. Such as concocting those special drinks.

I stepped into the living room, holding the pitcher filled with ice cubes in one hand, bottle of gin in the other. June walked toward the door, then stopped and did a funny thing.

She stood before the door for a few seconds, then turned. She looked at me, took a step back toward me and raised one hand to her cheek. No, she said. It isn’t the way I —

But then she moistened her lips and smiled. Don’t mind me. I’ll be right back. You have those drinks ready.

And out she went. I shrugged, finished making the gimlets in the kitchenette, put the pitcherful and glasses on a tray, and carried it to the low coffee table before the divan. No sign of June yet. Maybe she was fixing her face in the car.

I poured the drinks, sipped mine, watched the fish slop around in the big tank for a while. June had been gone for quite some time. I’d finished my drink before I really began to get worried. But even then, I was worried merely about June.

I picked up the phone, talked to the desk man. Is a blonde gal down there in the lobby?

No. You lose a blonde, Shell? He sounded amused.

Well — no. I’m not sure. I looked at my watch and was surprised that so much time had passed. I said, I had one fifteen minutes or so ago. She left, said she’d be right back.

A blonde was down here for a minute or two. That was about twenty-five, thirty minutes ago, though. A real looker, stacked.

Pale blue dress?

Yeah. What there was of it.

She’s the one. It puzzled me. About twenty-five minutes ago we’d pulled up behind the Spartan. I’d spent ten minutes, at most, checking the apartment while June waited in the hall. Or maybe not in the hall. Muscles contracted gently in my stomach.

I said, What was she doing in the lobby? Did she say anything to you?

No, just walked past the desk. I didn’t notice where she went, Shell. But she waltzed back about half a minute later, went upstairs again.

Anybody else in the lobby?

No, empty all night. What’d you do, scare her off!

No, I don’t think so. Thanks.

I hung up. Very queer, I thought. And June certainly wouldn’t have been sitting down there in the Cad all this time. Unless — I didn’t like the next thought. I went out of the apartment, down the back stairs and outside. I could see the Cadillac parked where I’d left it. I stepped toward it — and stopped suddenly.

Two men stood near the Cad.

My hand slapped the butt of the .38 under my coat and I had the gun half out of its holster before I saw the uniforms. Police uniforms.

A flashlight beam struck my eyes. I ducked my head, squinting, muscles tightening along my spine. Maybe they weren’t police officers, just men in police uniforms. I stayed half-crouched, hand on the gun, ready to jump aside.

Then one of the men said, Take it easy, Scott.

His voice sounded familiar. The flashlight beam dropped lower on my body, and in its glow I could see the other uniformed man’s face.

Tanner? I said. Is that you, Tanner?

Yeah, Scott.

He was a patrolman from the Hollywood Division. A casual acquaintance, I knew him well enough to wave when I saw him. Further away, in the alley, I could see the police car.

What’s the trouble?

He walked up to me. You’re under arrest, Scott.

I’m what? Under arrest?

That’s right. He frisked me, took the .38 from its holster.

Wait a minute, Tanner, I said. Fun’s fun, but if this is some slob’s idea of a joke —

It’s no joke. His voice was calm and level, businesslike. Don’t give us a hard time, Scott.

I started to speak, then stopped, waited. Finally, I said, Spill it.

Want to tell us where you’ve been all night, Scott?

Since what time?

Suit yourself.

The other officer walked up to Tanner. I told them I’d left my apartment a little before nine p.m., had picked up a girl about nine-fifteen and filled in some of the details. I finished, And I was with her until about twenty minutes ago.

You drove back here about half an hour ago?

That’s right.

You were in your Cadillac all the time.

Yes.

You did the driving?

Of course, I did.

The Cadillac was never out of your possession, then, from nine p.m. until now?

What the hell is this?

Come on, Scott.

The Cad was not out of my possession; I did all the driving; the damn thing wasn’t even out of my sight until half an hour ago when I parked it right where it is now.

An unpleasant thought hit me. I couldn’t see the car clearly, in shadows beyond us, but it was there. And June had said she was going to get her bag from the car.

Slowly I said, There’s not — a girl in the car, is there?

A girl?

A blonde — I just told you about her. June. June Corey. She came down here, never came back.

Tanner didn’t say anything.

Quit being so damned cute, I told him. Is she in the car? Is she all right?

There’s nobody in the car.

I relaxed a little. You didn’t see her? Tall, blonde, good-looking woman?

We didn’t see her. He paused. Was there a blonde, Scott?

I squinted at him. Look, friend, I’m not going to tell you again.

Where is she? This blonde.

She came down to the car, to get her handbag, she said. But she didn’t show at the apartment again. That’s why I came down here, to see if she was O.K. I can’t understand —

I stopped. My skin seemed to tighten and turn cold. It was one of those things you barely notice, that makes almost no impression on your mind. I remembered watching June as she’d first walked to the car, climbed in. Then at the bar, later on that hilltop. I suppose it was odd that I’d failed to notice before.

She hadn’t had a bag.

No one spoke for several seconds, then I asked, What’s it all about, Tanner?

Were you on Twenty-first Street tonight? Any time around ten-thirty?

Twenty-first? That’s in L.A. I wasn’t anywhere near L.A. I told you, chum, we were in Hollywood, then up in, well, on that hill.

That’s where you were about ten-thirty, huh?

We were parked there before ten-thirty, at ten-thirty, and after ten-thirty. I sucked a breath through my teeth. And that’s it, Tanner. I’m through being nice and happy about this. Either spill the whole story or try to stop me from leaving.

We’ve got to take you in, Scott. Couple of men coming out from Central right now. Suspicion of hit-and-run.

Hit-and-run. Me? You mush-headed —

I stopped. Neither of the officers said anything, but the man with the flashlight turned its beam on the front of my Cadillac. The right front fender was crumpled inward, one side of the grill was bent. On the hood, near the ornament, was a concave impression. Something was smeared there — on the fender and bumper, too. I walked to the car, leaned close to look.

It’s blood, Tanner said.

For a second or two, my mind didn’t function. It was as if I’d been presented with an impossibility, something my mind couldn’t grasp. Then I turned and said, Something’s goofy. But this isn’t my car.

It isn’t?

It can’t be. I was in my car all night — except for the last half-hour or so. Something stirred in my mind.

Tanner said, It’s yours, Scott. Hell, we all know your Cad. Just take it easy.

He wasn’t playing it tough, simply doing his job. He was a nice, easygoing guy, who’d always seemed to like me well enough.

I tried to keep my voice pleasant. Tanner, it cannot be my car.

I walked to the door, leaned in and looked at the registration slip, read the name, Sheldon Scott, and my address. Muscles pulled tight in my stomach. The other officer flashed his light over my shoulder. I looked at the dashboard, the seat. My car is new, but even so, there are the little things which marked it as mine — A burn on the floor mat where I’d dropped a cigarette two or three weeks ago, a small nick in the steering wheel, a dark smudge inside the glass over the ammeter. I fumbled in my pocket, found the car keys and walked to the back of the car, opened the luggage compartment I looked blankly at all of my equipment, electronic gear, walkie-talkie, and the test. It was my car, all right.

I said to Tanner, O.K., it’s my Cad. Sure. But this was done in the last half-hour or so. I’m starting to understand —

A police radio car came down the alley, stopped nearby. Two more men joined us. One, in plainclothes, was Lieutenant Rawlins from downtown. My good friend Rawlins — from Homicide.

Tanner spoke to Rawlins, handed him my Colt. They moved a few feet away and talked for a minute, then Rawlins walked over to me and said hello.

Hi, Bill. I suppose you’ve got the picture.

Uh-huh.

I was just starting to tell these guys, the front of my Cad must have been banged in during the last half-hour. This is some kind of frame, but it won’t hold up. Somebody bangs in the fender, smears blood around, calls the cops. I stopped. What brought you guys here, anyway?

Hit-and-run, Shell.

Hell, there probably wasn’t a hit-and-run at all. This is just a half-clever —

There was a hit-and-run. Twenty-first Street. About ten-thirty.

Maybe there were half a dozen; but not with me anywhere near them.

That’s not all, Shell. It’s more than a hit-and-run this time.

More? What do you mean, more?

Murder. We’ll go over it downtown.

Are you nuts? What kind of damn fool —

Downtown, Shell. Don’t make it rougher than it is.

I sighed, tried on a grin. O.K., I’ll go quietly, Officer.

Rawlins didn’t smile. He opened the back door of the police car, shut it after I climbed inside. He got in front, and the other officer started the car.

I said, Bill, there was a blonde here. I don’t know what happened to her; but I was with her all evening. And not in L.A.

We’ll check it out.

Chapter Twelve

We walked into the Homicide squadroom in the police building a little after one. Not until then did I remember the call I was supposed to receive in my apartment at one, but I didn’t mention it.

First, there was Phil Samson.

Phil looked very tired. One of his black cigars, unlighted, was stuck in the corner of his wide mouth, and his teeth were clamped down hard on it. We said hello; then, impersonally, he asked me to repeat my story. The Homicide captain seldom takes an active part in interrogations, but this was a special case for Phil. In fact, he should have been home, in bed. So, I thought glumly, should I.

Besides Samson, Rawlins and three other Homicide men were present in the squadroom. I was getting special treatment. We weren’t in an interrogation room, but in the room where I’ve come hundreds of times before and I’d even been given a paper cup filled with hot coffee. Still, the atmosphere was unpleasant, strained, unhealthy. I went over the story a couple of times, leaving out only a few points. Then there was silence for almost a minute.

That knot of muscle in my stomach had spread through my whole body. I seemed to tighten up even more during the long silence. Finally, I said, Well? Do we just sit here? What are we waiting for?

Nobody spoke for a while. Then Phil took the cigar from his mouth, looked at it. Ballistics, he said.

Ballistics? What in hell has ballistics got to do with a hit-and — I let my question trail off, turned to Rawlins who was perched on the edge of a desk. You said something about a — a murder, Bill. Was it a shooting?

Yeah, a shooting.

What’s that got to do with me? I looked around at the five sober faces. I don’t get it. They all remained quiet. Listen, I said, anger creeping into my voice, I’ve been Little Lord Fauntleroy so far, but it’s a strain. It is not going to last. Now, can this treatment, boys.

Samson stopped looking at his cigar, put it back into his mouth. He took a wooden match from his pocket, fumbled with it, put it back. Rawlins stared at me, silently.

I felt my hands ball into fists, forced them open. Keeping my voice level, I said, I’ll give it to you once more. You know where I was all night. You also know damned well I wouldn’t lie about it, if it meant I’d boil in hell. But forget that. Suppose I had been on Twenty-first. Suppose I ran somebody down. Do you think I’d keep going? Don’t you know I’d stop, do what I could — call you guys myself?

After another heavy silence, I went on, Nobody who knows me would think for a minute I’d pull anything that rotten. And you guys know me. I looked at Samson. Especially you, Phil. And you, Bill. I glanced at Rawlins.

He lit a cigarette, then said to Samson, Want me to fill him in on the rest?

Samson did it himself. At ten-twenty-seven, a minute or so either way — he was still bleeding when the first car got there — a man was reported shot and killed in a room on Twenty-first Street. The suspect ran to his car and got away, racing down Twenty-first. Two blocks from the scene of the killing, he hit a woman, kept going. The woman was killed instantly. That was close to ten-thirty. We’ve had a local out since then. At — he checked a paper on his desk — eight-after-twelve a call came in to the complaint board. Witness to the hit-and-run reported seeing the accident. Said the car was a blue Cadillac convertible, top down, and he could see the driver. Looked like a big guy, light-colored hair. He had the license number.

And the number, of course, was mine.

SRT 210. That’s your number.

It stinks.

Nobody said anything. I asked, Man or woman on the phone? You said he got the license number.

It was a man.

It still stinks. Why an hour and a half after the alleged hit-and-run?

Not alleged. It happened. And you know as well as we do that witnesses to a crime often wait an hour — or a day — before they spill. Sometimes they never spill. Don’t want to get involved.

Eight-to-five it was an anonymous call.

Yeah, it was. You know that’s often part of the pattern, too.

Sure. But not this pattern. I stopped. Wait a minute. Wait a minute. Are you all sitting around waiting to see if that ballistics report —

Rawlins spoke then. Tanner gave me your gun. When we got here, I fired a slug into the tank myself. It’s being compared now with the lethal bullet taken from the body of the man killed on Twenty-first Street tonight. We’ll have the report from SID in a minute or two.

For a few seconds I couldn’t speak. The tank Rawlins had mentioned is in the Crime Lab, a nine-foot-deep cylinder filled with water. A bullet from a suspect’s gun is fired into it and recovered, then matched under a comparison microscope with the lethal bullet from the victim’s body. The lands and grooves and imperfections of a gun’s barrel leave distinctive striations on the sides of a bullet. Those marks show, as conclusively as fingerprints identify a man, whether or not the two bullets were fired from the same gun.

I relaxed a little. I knew nobody could have been shot at ten-thirty with my gun, because it had been on me all during the evening, from the time I left the Spartan until Tanner had taken the Colt from me.

Samson said, About this girl, the blonde. You say she works at Rand Brothers Mortuary?

That’s right.

And she called you about eight p.m.?

Yeah. That reminds me. The reason she called — she’d heard two men on the phone talking about the fun they were going to have killing me. I repeated the story, and finished, The call was supposed to come around one tonight. To get me out of the apartment. Then Luther was to put a bomb under — my bed. My story was sounding very weak, very strange.

There was no comment from the five men. I said, It’s true. At least that’s what she told me. But it’s starting to look —

You’ve had your gun on you all night? Rawlins asked.

Yeah. Well, except for a little while. I, uh, put it in the glove compartment.

Why?

Well, it was — lumpy. You know, when you’re with a blonde —

But nobody could have taken it from the glove compartment?

Bill, stated simply, nobody possibly could have taken the gun — or the car. And, hell, I was clear on the other side of Hollywood, nowhere near L.A.

Samson said, You’re positive nobody other than you could have been in possession of either your Cadillac or revolver during any part of the evening.

Yes. I’m positive. Absolutely and finally. When the report on that slug gets here, you can eat your cigar.

The phone had rung a few times and Samson had made notations on a paper before him. Now he lighted his cigar, deliberately. The choking fumes started smelling up the room, but there were no jokes about it this time.

Then Samson looked at me and said, No June Corey registered at the Weatherly. No place else near there, either, from what’s been checked so far.

But —

No June Corey works for Rand Brothers. Never has. No woman works for Rand Brothers. Two officers showed your picture to this Mr. Truepenny, got him out of bed. He says he’s never seen you —

What? I was out there this afternoon. I set off some — firecrackers.

Rawlins said incredulously, You did what?

I set off six — Whiz-Bang-Pows — in the — cemetery.

I swallowed. It sounded a little crazy. Look, I wanted to pull everybody out of the place so I could check the records. And it worked, Truepenny and June — the blonde — hightailed it out. When I was leaving, Jake and Pot picked me up, took me out to Joe Cherry’s place.

I had covered, briefly, the afternoon’s events at Cherry’s. Hell, Cherry has to be mixed up in this. It’s obviously a frame, and Cherry has to be behind the thing.

How about your Cad? You admit it’s yours. We know it is, anyway.

Sure. My mouth was dry. Look, I was up in the apartment for half an hour, at least. Say twelve to twelve-thirty. Somebody could have taken the Cad then, driven a couple of blocks, slammed into somebody, brought it back. Maybe it was the girl, and she got panicky. Maybe there were two hit-and-runs.

None of them spoke. They just sat there and looked at me. It could have been set up, I went on. Or maybe they just banged up the front, hammered it in, smeared blood around while it was parked there.

Samson spoke, and he sounded very tired. Here’s the report from SID. The blood, hair, all of it match. It was your car, Shell. The stuff on it matches the hair and blood type of the girl, skin, nature of wounds, all of it.

I suddenly felt dizzy. And my head began throbbing. That throbbing in my skull had bothered me off and on since Jake and Pot had worked me over outside the Biscayne Apartments — about twenty-four hours ago now. Much of the time, I’d been able to ignore the ache and pounding inside my skull, but now it felt doubled, tripled in intensity. The ache had spread from my head down into the muscles of my neck.

My voice sounded strange, dull, when I said, There’s something funny — wrong with it, Phil. If it was planned — and it had to be — they might have — whoever it was, I mean — might have stopped, got some of the hair and blood —

I couldn’t think the thought through. For a confusing moment, I wondered if the pounding I’d been given, the blows of that leather-wrapped sap on my skull possibly could have — I pushed the thought from my mind. Men have often done odd things, ugly things, after head injuries. Even without losing consciousness, men have suffered concussions, developed amnesia or — or peculiarities. But I knew I’d been normal for these last twenty-four hours — except for a bad headache, I was normal.

It had been quiet for a long time. When I looked around, all five pairs of eyes were fixed on me. I licked my dry lips.

I’ve got a headache, is all, I said. I told you about Jake and Pot yesterday — Look, Sam, Bill — I glanced from one to the other. I know you’ve got to do this the — the SOP. Legal and all. That’s O.K., I don’t mind. But you know damned well I couldn’t pull anything like this. It’s pretty crazy, but I’ve told you all that happened. Everything I can remem — I mean, I gave it to you exactly the way it was.

Something had been trying to force its way into my thoughts. I stopped talking, tried to pin it down. The effort seemed to swell the ache in my head, as if just thinking sent more blood into the vessels, distending them, pushing against the artery walls. Sam had said the girl’s hair and blood matched the hair and blood on my car. That was it.

I said, Phil, you said a girl was run down. And the guy — you didn’t mention who he was, either.

Shooting victim was a man named Tony Kovin. A pusher called Koko.

Pusher? Dope?

Yeah. The girl was a dancer at the Regal Theater. Name of —

Ruthie! It hit me all at once, like a blow. Ruthie? Little Ruthie?

Samson pulled his clamped jaws apart. Ruth Stanley. How’d you know her name?

I talked to her last night. Oh, my God. Ruthie. I paused, remembering her as she’d been in her dressing room, tears spilling down her cheeks. She wanted to travel, I said stupidly. Cairo. Paris, far-off places, she said.

What? What are you talking about? Samson asked.

She wanted to travel. I — it’s what she said when I talked to her. I swallowed. Never mind. That wasn’t a hit-and-run, Phil. She was murdered.

Somebody came in then. I hardly noticed who it was, but saw the paper he put on the desk before Samson. He read it, then stared at the paper for a while. Samson looked ill, and something like a gray blush spread over his usually pink face.

He turned to Rawlins. The bullets match, he said slowly. The gun was Scott’s. The words came out of his mouth like stones. Book him.

I don’t remember standing, but suddenly I was on my feet. That’s crazy, I said. It’s crazy. They can’t match. Why, they can’t.

Samson looked at me. Shell, you know the boys here. And in SID. They don’t play tricks. The bullet Rawlins fired from your Colt, the bullet we took from Tony Kovin’s chest, they’re from the same gun. Your gun.

You’re crazy! You’re all out of your damned heads. It can’t be my gun. I tell you it was on me all the time! I was shouting. I lowered my voice and said, It wasn’t my gun.

Samson slid a .38 revolver across his desk. I picked it up. The bullets had been removed from the chambers. It was my gun. I knew it like my reflection in a mirror. It was my gun.

Samson said, Go on, Rawlins. Book him.

Wait a minute. My voice was tight. It can’t be. Something’s wrong. It’s just not possible. I had the gun on me. I swear it. This guy — Kovin — he must have been shot — another time.

I told you he was still bleeding when the first car got there. He was shot at ten-twenty-seven. Not more than a minute or two either way. Ten-twenty-seven.

Rawlins put his hand on my elbow, started me toward the door.

It’s a frame! I said. You know how many guys want me out of the way. It must have been Joe Cherry. He’s framed me somehow; it had to be Cherry.

Rawlins stopped then, turned his head to look at me. How? he said.

How? Well, I — how?

Rawlins pulled gently on my arm. My head throbbed as if my skull were in a vise. They took me down to the Central Jail, booked me, emptied my pockets, took my picture, pressed my inked fingers onto the print card, put me in a cell.

Then I was alone. The steel door closed and locked. Charged with hit-and-run. And with murder.

Chapter Thirteen

An hour later I still sat on the edge of my bunk. At least I wasn’t in a felony tank; I was in a separate cell.

For an hour I’d tried to think, make sense from what had occurred; but I was more confused than when I began. It had all come at me so suddenly — and crazily, unbelievably. Samson and Rawlins had kept insisting things had happened which couldn’t possibly have happened.

Not, at least, by any rules of sanity and logic — and because of that, for the past hour I kept pushing away one thought that kept slipping around corners in my mind: maybe, just maybe, I could be mistaken, could have blacked out briefly, forgotten an hour or more of this night.

Memories floated toward me and were pushed aside: the effects of drugs, hypnosis, temporary insanity; stories of people who had performed ugly or shameful acts and then had forgotten, buried them in their brains — or even invented other acts to replace them, acts which had never occurred, except in their imaginations. I felt chilled, my skin was cold and moist with sweat.

Finally, I looked at it squarely, examined the possibility that somewhere in my brain there might be a tiny clot, or pool of thick blood spreading, pressure on a complex of cells, nerve pathways twisted and torn, blanking out part of my memory.

But everything seemed so clear, everything. I shook my head violently, and pain pulled at the side of my neck. My fingers felt a small rough spot on the skin. I knew what had caused it. A long red fingernail digging. June Corey’s long red fingernail. That, I remembered. Hell, I could remember all of it, from the beginning in my office Wednesday noon, with Evelyn Spring. From then to here and now. There weren’t any blanks.

So I started at the beginning, went over every bit of it, every word and act I could recall. But, even then, I couldn’t figure it out. A man had been killed — with my gun; a woman had been killed — with my car; but I had been in my car all night, my Colt had been in my possession all night. I couldn’t explain the impossible.

The desk sergeant had let me keep my cigarettes and lighter. I lit another cigarette from the butt of the one I was finishing, sucked smoke into my lungs. Presses were probably rolling now, getting the morning editions of local newspapers ready to hit the streets. They would carry the story, my story: Shell Scott arrested, held in jail — charged with murder, and with hit-and-run. That second charge was almost worse than the deliberate killing. It was the act of a weakling, a fraud, a coward.

More than anything else, that knowledge convinced me there was a sane answer somewhere — if I could find it. Because I might have shot. Kovin, peddler of narcotics, but the hit-and-run — that wasn’t me. That I wouldn’t have done, couldn’t have done. If there was a sane answer, I had to find it. At least somebody had to; I couldn’t accomplish much in a cell. This mess wasn’t just a goofy chain of events that involved me, it was an ugly double crime that could put me into prison. Or worse — into the gas chamber.

The thought shook me, because it was true. The charges against me had already put me into a jail cell. And the police could make the charges stick in court. Hell, it was an open and shut case. A jury hearing the evidence would return a verdict of guilty without leaving the box. I’d vote guilty myself, if the same charges and evidence were against somebody else.

My cigarette had burned down, unnoticed, until it warmed my fingers. I dropped the smoke, mashed it under my shoe. Somewhere, in the darkness of a nearby cell, a man was coughing softly, steadily. I could hear another prisoner snoring raggedly. Suddenly, I felt short of breath as if I couldn’t get enough air into my lungs. I breathed deeply, ran a hand over my face, then stood up, walked the length of my cell, back and forth, lit another cigarette and sat on the bunk once more. I went over it all again, and again, until my brain felt like a squeezed sponge, the ache steady and dull now.

Strangely, I felt the way I had last night, when Jake and Pot had stood above me, as if I were still on the grass, trying to push myself up.

I lit another cigarette. Again, my thoughts came to a blank wall, so far and no farther. I couldn’t find the answers. None of them. I dropped the butt of my last smoke onto the floor, stared at its glowing end until it slowly died out.

There were noises from the cells, men talking and shouting. I could hear sounds of life around me. It was morning. I hadn’t slept. I hadn’t come up with any answers.

I’d smoked my last cigarette hours before, and butts were scattered on the floor. I bent over and picked one of them up, straightened it, stuck it between my lips. I took the lighter from my pocket, flipped it on, not thinking of anything except how good the smoke would taste in my mouth and throat.

And then I got it. Then it hit me. All of it, the why, and who, and how — all of it.

It came so suddenly and completely, it was like a blow, so surprisingly, that I dropped the lighter and heard it clink against the floor. For seconds, I didn’t move, holding my body completely still, as if that would help to hold my mind rigid, the thoughts precisely in place. But it was all there — the separate pieces had come together with the speed and beautiful precision of a zipper, all at once, the parts all interlocking.

Smiling, I bent and picked up the lighter, snapped it on and lighted the short, stale, twisted butt. Never had a cigarette tasted better.

Samson arrived shortly after eight o’clock. He came into the cell and the door was locked after him. He stood feet apart, fists planted on his hips, and looked at me.

Jailer said you wanted to see me, Shell.

Yep.

You feel O.K.?

I grinned at him. Great. Didn’t get any sleep — but you know how I like to carouse at night.

He shook his head, his pink face clean-shaven as always, but lined and sober. Shell, dammit, can’t you be serious about anything? You’re in real trouble this time. Why in hell —

Wait a minute, Phil. Something I want to tell you. But first, there’s one thing I want to ask you.

Go ahead.

The killing, hit-and-run, the whole thing. Do you think I did it?

That’s a hell of a thing to ask.

I know. You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to, Phil.

He scowled, found a spot on the edge of the bunk, sat down, pulled one of his ghastly black cigars from his coat pocket and found a wooden match.

Phil, I said seriously, don’t light it. Please don’t. Jail is punishment enough.

A vein stood out on his forehead. You son-of-a-bitch, he said. Even if you didn’t do it, you ought to get the gas chamber. I should toss the pill in the soup myself. You don’t deserve to live. You ought to be screaming for lawyers, habeas corpus, the Supreme Court. But you sit here and wise-crack, like the damn fool you are. You halfwit —

I let him get it out of his system. When he ran down I said quietly, Well, Phil?

He stuck the cigar in his mouth, clamped his teeth savagely on it, rolled it left, right, back again. Then he looked at me, brown eyes sharp on my face. O.K. I’ve gone over the evidence all night. It’s conclusive. Clear. You did it. There’s nothing says you didn’t, everything says you did. He shook his head. But I’m damned if I can believe it.

I grinned. It’s because, like me, Phil, you are out of your skull.

I must be. He scowled. There’s nothing I can do, Shell. You know that. If I had one thing to work on, one little thing —

Don’t worry about that.

He started to speak, then squinted at me. Don’t tell me you’ve got something.

I’ve got it all, Phil. But I can’t prove it in here. So if I convince you this is a frame — really convince you — what are my chances of getting sprung?

He thought about it for a while, scowling. It better be good.

O.K. You know what I’ve been working on — Dan Spring, Frank Eiverson, the rest of it. Including the fact that Jake and Pot worked me over night before last. At the time, I wondered why they hadn’t finished the job, gone ahead and finished me. The could have, but they didn’t. Why? What if they had killed me then — from your point of view, I mean, Phil.

You know what.

Sure. A lot of heat. You’d check into every move Spring and Eiverson made for the last thirty years, dig into everything I’ve been checking and a lot more besides. Right?

Right.

O.K., obviously the idea was to stop my investigation, get my nose out of their — and somebody else’s — business. That’s why the warning, the beating. And that’s why they did not kill me.

Samson, frowning, said, I see what you’re getting at. But —

No buts, Phil. Every punk and hoodlum in Southern California, and points beyond, knows Shell Scott’s great and good friend is one Phil Samson. And Phil Samson happens to be — revolting development — the Captain of L.A. Homicide. So killing me would sure end my investigation, but it wouldn’t end the investigation. It would have the opposite effect, in fact: more heat, more investigating, even more digging than I could have accomplished myself. That’s why I’m alive today — if you can call this living. I grinned. The guy who wanted me dead couldn’t afford to kill me; he couldn’t stand the heat it would turn on him.

Sam nodded slowly. Yeah. If you went up for this, that would be the end of it. O.K. He sighed. I’d buy it — if you were framed.

I was. By an expert. Let’s start with that shooting last night.

Samson pulled a wooden match from his pocket and lit his big black cigar, scowling at me, as if daring me to protest. He puffed on the cigar. Shell, we know the lethal bullet was fired from your Colt, no chance of a mistake there. You even admit the Colt was in your possession all night. So don’t try to tell me you suddenly remembered you left the gun in some dame’s apartment, or you blacked out —

Nothing like that, Phil. Look, we’ve been assuming all along that my gun was used. Even I assumed that. But, actually, we don’t know it was my gun, Phil — only that it was a bullet from my gun.

He took the cigar from his mouth, leaving his mouth open. He frowned. Then the frown slowly faded. Maybe — but how —

One step at a time. If somebody had a bullet fired from my Colt, and that slug were found in a dead man, wouldn’t the natural assumption be that I shot the man?

Samson was already shaking his head. Sorry, Shell. I went over that ballistics report, and talked to the men in SID, until I was blue in the face. Your bullet killed Kovin. Entrance wound was pretty big — as you know they often are — but the passage was clean, slug lodged smack at the end of it. If you’re going to tell me he was shot with another gun, and then somebody fished in and dug out the slug, pushed your pill down into —

Nothing quite so crude for Joe Cherry, Phil — and I say it was Cherry. Let’s get back to that nice clean slug of mine. Couldn’t it be reloaded into another cartridge case and fired into a man? Couldn’t that slug kill him, be identified as coming from my Colt — which in fact it would be — and point to me as the killer?

Wait a second. Maybe a guy could get the bullet — like we got one last night by firing your Colt into the SID tank — complete with striations. But those impressions would sure as hell be destroyed, or at least changed, when the reloaded bullet was fired from another gun. And that would show up under the microscope.

Sure, if it was fired from another .38 Colt Special, or similar gun with lands and grooves in the barrel. But how about a larger-bore gun, a big smooth-bore maybe? The .38 slug from my Colt could even be reloaded, with wadding or some kind of gasket, into a .45-caliber cartridge, say. That would give it any extra muzzle velocity needed to overcome leakage in the larger barrel — so it would be certain to penetrate the victim’s flesh, do the killing job.

Sam was quiet for a full minute. It sounds pretty good, Shell. It’s just — well, we never had one like this before.

I grinned. As far as you know, you haven’t.

Sam grunted. Still frowning he said, Even assuming a big-bore gun, smooth-bore, the bullet would likely twist. Without the barrel snug around the bullet, it would be likely to twist in the barrel, hit or at least brush the side. And that would mash out the marks of your Colt’s rifling on the slug.

Only where it, bit or scraped. And, Phil, as you know damned well, perfectly formed bullets are almost never dug out of bodies. They hit bone, get compressed just from flesh and muscle, are often so mashed up they’re either useless or there’s barely enough left to check under the comparison microscope. But identification can be made from a mangled slug just as human identification can be made from part of a fingerprint.

He nodded briskly. O.K. I’m sold. I’ll check that slug again, and the coroner’s report. The entrance wound was a little large. I remember thinking the bullet might have hit something before it entered the body — keyholed, like when the slug enters on an angle, not straight.

That figures. And I think I know how they got the bullet. Yesterday I was at Joe Cherry’s. I saw him lock my belongings — including my Colt — in his desk drawer. Then I spent half an hour or so alone in the next room. Just sat — no slugging, nothing. When I left, Cherry unlocked the drawer and gave the gun and the rest of my stuff back to me. I assumed my gun had, therefore, been in that drawer all the time I was in that next room. Probably Cherry unlocked and locked that desk drawer in my sight so I would think that — or, rather, wouldn’t think about it at all.

Uh-huh. So you figure he took out the gun and fired a slug somewhere, cleaned the Colt, put a new cartridge in the cylinder?

Right. Only he didn’t fire the gun just somewhere.’ While I was in that room I heard a shot. It sounded as if it came from near where my Cad was parked. And my Cad was parked ten yards from Cherry’s swimming pool.

Samson smiled slowly. Sure. Into the water.

Uh-huh. Probably as deep as the nine-foot water tank in SID — and they wind up with a perfect bullet from Shell Scott’s gun, complete with barrel impressions. All they had to do was dive in and pick it off the pool floor. Jake Luther did that job, I’m pretty sure. His hair was wet, flat on his bead when I saw him again. I thought he must have taken a shower. It seemed odd at the time.

Samson shook his head. It all fits, it could have been worked the way you say. But you still haven’t proved it.

I can’t prove it in here.

Don’t get restless. And what about your car?

That’s easy. From the time I left Joe Cherry’s until I parked behind the Spartan last night, I was not in my car.

You what?

I wasn’t in my Cad. That switch was made while I was at Cherry’s, too. When we left there, Jake was driving — and later I was driving without knowing it — another new Cadillac. Same year, model. Sky-blue, white leather upholstery. Hell, I had no reason, then, to think it wasn’t my buggy, no reason to search for the little things that would prove it was my Cadillac.

Maybe. They use it for the job —

Shoot the junk pusher they want to get rid of, run my Cad into Ruthie, Frank Eiverson’s girl friend —

Then make the switch again later, after you get back to the Spartan —

Guided, with a nice sense of timing, among other nice senses, by a gorgeous, blue-eyed blonde —

And you wouldn’t ever know a switch had been made. Could be. He puffed furiously on his cigar. The cell was beginning to stink, but I didn’t mind a bit. Samson continued, I’ll buy it. So how do we prove it?

I have delicately hinted at one requirement —

Yeah, yeah, we’ll see if you get a — leave of absence. Where’s the best place to start?

Maybe with June Corey. Her end was to keep me out of the way — in the substitute Cadillac — during the hours in which the frame was rigged. I think she made a phone call from the Spartan lobby immediately after we arrived there, undoubtedly so that another call, the anonymous one, could be made reporting my license number and description to the law. Obviously the police would soon know the car was registered under my name, and show up at the Spartan. So, after making sure I was settled, and giving her pals tune enough to switch the Cads, June took off. Find her, and she can tell a lot of it. Whatever part she knows, anyhow.

I bummed a cigarette from Samson, lighted it. Then there are the two Cadillacs. These guys planned too well to leave any prints in my own car, but maybe that substitute Cad will have my prints on it somewhere. And here’s another angle. When Jake and Pot left me in the Cad outside Rand Brothers — and, oddly, I thought, didn’t shoot me — I pulled the black friction tape off my wrists and stuffed it under the seat. Those guys must have figured their substitute Cad would never be checked if they managed to pull the switch off later, which they did. So they probably didn’t go over it carefully after that. The tape just might be there — if you find the car.

Samson was grinning, openly now. Probably stolen. If it’s on the hot sheets, we’ll know about it in half an hour.

When you come back, bring me the recent obits from a local paper, will you?

Bring what?

Obituary notices for the last couple of weeks.

He opened his mouth, then sighed and got up. What in hell do you want obits for?

The last link should be there, the piece I need. Actually, it’s just a check. I think I know the answer already.

Answer to what?

Where Dan Spring and Frank Eiverson are. And, probably, James McCune.

Samson’s big jaw wiggled like the end of a sledge hammer. And where would that be?

At Rand Brothers. In the cemetery.

Alive?

It isn’t likely. I figure they’re buried there. I hesitated, then went on rapidly, Of course, I won’t be sure until you dig them up, but I’m pretty sure —

Until what? Until I dig — He bit the words off, snorted, then went on less wildly, If you think I am going to dig up a whole damn cemetery to satisfy one of your goddamned whims —

This is no whim, Phil.

Then you had better re-think —

Hold it, Phil. I’m almost certain.

You’d better be more certain than almost certain. I’ll have a hell of a time explaining even one exhumation order.

You want to find them, don’t you? You want Joe Cherry, don’t you? You want me out of this dump, don’t you?

Find them, yes. Cherry, yes. But I’m half-convinced you belong in this dump, as you so generously refer to the finest cell block in the country. Samson paused, then asked me, How sure are you that these guys are at Rand Brothers?

Well — pretty sure. I’m not certain about McCune, that’s a queer situation. But either I’m all wet or both Dan and Frank are there. I’m sure of that, Phil. I paused, thinking. I’d bet my life on it.

He clamped his teeth on the well-chewed cigar. Yeah, that’s what you’re doing, you know.

And with that cheery thought, he left.

Chapter Fourteen

At nine-fifteen a.m. Samson came back to my cell.

He dropped the stack of clippings I’d asked for onto my bunk, then handed me a morning newspaper.

I wasn’t in the headlines, but I’d made the front page. The story gave me the impression that Shell Scott was not only in jail, but already convicted and serving his term in prison where he belonged. There was also a most unflattering picture of me.

Samson said, No Cad on the hot sheets. Shell.

Bang, like that. No Cad like mine reported stolen?

No Cad at all.

That’s great. What about the rest of it?

O.K., so far. The slug’s base is banged in on one side. No reason to look for it before, but the Crime Lab boys say you may be right — probably are. Could be from hitting the gun’s barrel on the way out. And at the base are some unusual little marks. Could’ve been made if the bullet was reloaded into another cartridge case. SID’s running tests on the powder residue around the wound now.

We’d have it if the damned car — I stopped. Wait a minute. Here’s something else — McCune.

What about McCune?

Your missing person report says he owned an automobile agency. In fact I phoned it once — the McCune Motor Company.

Used cars?

New.

Samson left again. During the ten minutes he was gone, I checked the stack of newspaper obits he’d brought.

Then Samson returned. This looks like it. McCune Motors is a Cadillac agency. Here’s how we’ll handle it. He spoke briskly now, We can’t afford to tip our hand, so I don’t want to haul in Cherry or his boys yet. I’ve sent Rawlins out to the McCune agency. Sam grinned. By the way, Rawlins says for me to tell you, you’re a hell of a lot of trouble.

Tell him I was born cursed, under the sign of —

Never mind. He’s going to be a customer, looking for a new Cad. He’ll just happen to like the looks of any blue convertible with white leather upholstery he sees on the lot.

It might seem odd, if it’s the same car.

Can’t be helped. If the Cad’s there at all, they’ll expect customers to look at it. Besides, the way you tell it. Cherry’s boys should think they’re clean as soap by now. Especially after seeing the morning papers.

Uh-huh. The people at McCune’s lot probably don’t know about this, anyhow.

Rawlins is already on his way there. If he finds anything, we’ll soon know.

Samson was gone over an hour. When he came back, Bill Rawlins was with him. Something was in Bill’s right hand. He said, Hi, and tossed the thing to me. It was a wadded mass of black friction tape.

I’ll be damned, I said, grinning. They probably didn’t even wash the car.

Rawlins grinned back. We haven’t checked it that close. I looked at half a dozen other cars and decided not to buy any. Left the Cad there, so I wouldn’t stir up suspicion, just in case.

I’d hate to lose —

Don’t worry, he said. Keene’s out there keeping an eye on it. It won’t get away. He paused, then added, I stopped at the Crime Lab on the way here, Shell. There was powder residue on Kovin’s clothing and around the wound. They’ve checked it. Not the kind of powder used in the cartridge for your .38.

Well, that helps. What kind of powder?

They’re still testing, but it looks like it could be powder from a shotgun shell.

I nodded. Sure, I said slowly. That settles the other angle — how they fired the slug. I was thinking of pistol or revolver cartridge cases, but a shotgun shell would be perfect. Probably they used a shotgun to fire it. Sawed off very short.

I sighed. I hadn’t realized how tightly I’d been wound until suddenly the tension left me, all at once. I sank down on the side of the bunk.

Well, I said, it’s a nice clean jail. But I’d kind of like out.

Bill and Samson grinned at each other, then looked at me. Almost in unison they said, You’re out.

Well, I was out. Not free of charges, not free as a bird, but out. In the custody of the police, sure, technically under arrest. But out.

I sat in the back seat of a police radio car with Rawlins. Samson was driving; an officer named Bailey sat up front with him. In another two or three minutes we would be at Rand Brothers Mortuary — and cemetery.

At the end of a hunt. Or the beginning of a lot of misery. Misery for me, but also for Samson and everybody else involved in what we were about to do. If I was wrong, not only would I be suddenly, swiftly back in jail, but Samson would be in hot, even boiling, water. Rawlins and the rest were acting under his orders, but even so, they would be criticized, reprimanded. Sam was sticking his neck far out, and I was beginning to have misgivings.

I wasn’t sure. Not sure at all.

Back in my cell, when everything had been, in one moment, black and miserable and in the next, bright and hopeful, I’d thought I was sure. I’d thought everything fit — like a zipper. But maybe I was caught in the zipper.

Samson’s voice interrupted my growing jitters. First car should be there now, he said. I hope to hell you know what you’re doing.

I, uh, yeah. I hope so, too.

That first car he’d mentioned was another police car with two men in it. They were to enter the mortuary, talk to everyone present — talk; the officers had no authority to arrest anybody. Not yet. Not until there was evidence of crime. But, nonetheless, they were going to make sure nobody at Rand Brothers made a phone call. That was important. We couldn’t afford to have word of what we were doing reach Cherry, or any of the others involved.

You know, I said, after this, I never want to see another graveyard.

Nobody answered me, but I had a hunch they felt the same way. For a moment I wondered if I should try to call it off — if it wasn’t already too late. But then I thought about the consequences, all the consequences. No matter what happened, it was worth taking the chance and going ahead.

We pulled into the cemetery grounds. The other radio car was parked before the beautiful mortuary building. As we stopped behind the car, a plainclothes officer walked down from the mortuary’s entrance and spoke to Samson.

Nobody in there but Truepenny, Captain. Everything’s under control. He paused. When we showed him the court order for the exhumation, he got real upset. I thought he was going to be sick.

Samson glanced around at me, then turned back to the officer. He say anything?

Protested for a while. Said we couldn’t dig up the graves. Desecrating the last resting places of the dead, he called it. The officer hesitated, then went on. Said he’d sue us, and all that. Give the story to the newspapers, raise hell.

Samson glanced at me again — with eyes like brown ice cubes.

The officer finished his report, Then he shut up, when he knew we were going ahead anyway. Hasn’t opened his mouth since.

Well, Samson said, let’s get it done.

It was a splendid day, warm, with a just-cool-enough breeze, and not even a shred of cloud against the blue sky. Tree leaves, stirred by the soft wind, rustled pleasantly; the grass was as smooth and vivid as a putting green. May usually brings good weather to Los Angeles, and this was one of its finest hours: two o’clock on a balmy afternoon.

The square spade made its first clean cut down into the grass — another, then several more. A rectangular piece of turf was lifted from the surface of the grave and placed neatly to one side.

Samson, standing next to me, puffed furiously on his cigar. Without looking at me he said, You’re pretty certain this is the one you want. Shell?

I — it — well, Phil —

Never mind. Don’t tell me.

I took a few steps to the right, looked at the headstone again, read the carved inscription: joseph judson, september 14, 1919 — may 13, 1961.

I stepped back alongside Samson. That’s the one I want. It’ll either be this one, or Alice Mons’ grave. If — if it’s any of them at all.

It better be this one. He scowled at me. You get one free, Shell. This one.

I knew what he meant, precisely. We couldn’t go from one grave to another, casually tearing them up. If this wasn’t the one, he wouldn’t even start on a second.

Samson said, Shell, tell me just a little more. You don’t think this Joseph Judson is in there?

Oh, no. He’s in there.

Grass squares were piled a few feet to the side, and dirt was heaped at the foot of the grave. The day was warm, but I felt cold. Then a shovel scraped on the casket. My throat felt as if it had closed up completely. Oddly, at that scraping sound, Samson, Rawlins, and the two other officers present turned as one and looked at me. I looked at the gaping hole, brown in the smooth green grass.

In a few minutes the casket lay on the grass before us. Large, long, square-sided, with the rounded lid arching above it. The lid, still closed, was ready to be opened. One of the officers placed his hands at the side of the casket.

Hold it, Samson said.

I actually jumped — about an inch into the air.

What’s the matter? I asked him.

Nothing. It’s just that, since this is your idea, you should have the — reward of opening the casket.

The reward of opening — I echoed in a flat voice. Of course.

The officer stepped aside. I took his place — gripped the lid and pulled. I felt weak, now that the moment was actually upon me. The lid moved, began to open.

I couldn’t have been more anxious if I’d been opening the casket from inside. I gave a sudden yank, let the lid fall open wide.

Samson was the first man to speak.

I’ll be damned, he said.

I stared into the casket. He was there. I’d never seen him alive, but he looked like his photo, even now. Danny Spring. A hole in his head.

Chapter Fifteen

For half a minute or so nobody even moved toward the open casket. Danny Spring’s body was easy to see. It was very high in the casket, resting on something. Something big. Like a body. Precariously balanced now, his body barely would have fit beneath the curved top of the coffin. But it had fit.

Finally, Samson stepped alongside me. Spring? he said.

Yeah. And that would be Joseph Judson underneath him.

Sam looked at me, shaking his head. What a place to get rid of a body. Who in hell would think of looking in a grave? How did you know?

I didn’t know. I mean, I wasn’t sure. But I was here two nights ago looking for a particular grave. I didn’t find it, but I did see this headstone, and the others I mentioned to you. Names and, most important, the dates of death. The newspaper obits show Judson died on the thirteenth, which is the date on the headstone, and show also that he was buried here on the fifteenth.

And just because of that, and the fact that Spring disappeared on the fourteenth, you guessed he was buried here? In a grave with another dead man?

Not quite. And not for quite a while. All I knew was that Danny had disappeared by the fourteenth, and nobody I talked to saw him on or after that date. Later, for other reasons, I became convinced he was dead. The fifteenth would have been the first chance to bury him here. And Judson was the only person buried here on the fifteenth. Same reasoning for Frank, last seen on the fifteenth — by little Ruthie, down at the morgue now.

You think Frank’s here, too.

I’m certain of it, now. I walked to the grave over which the headstone read: alice mons, july 12, 1890 — may 16, 1961. I looked at Samson. Frank should be in this one. Alice Mons died on the sixteenth of this month, was buried here on the eighteenth. As far as I could find out, nobody’s seen Frank alive since the fifteenth; this was the first burial at Rand Brothers after that date. Truepenny told me himself they performed only one or two burials a week. I don’t know when Frank was killed, but I figure it was before the eighteenth — if so, this is where we should find him.

Samson was still frowning. You must have had more to go on than that. You couldn’t just pull it out of the air.

I did have more. For one thing, I thought for a while that I was going to be buried at Rand Brothers. Here — but hardly with a headstone of my own. That probably started the chain of thought. But I didn’t really get it until late yesterday afternoon, and I didn’t understand it until this morning. Joe Cherry, take it from me, is a very hard man to ruffle. He’s controlled, cold, a hard boy who doesn’t jump when you stick him.

So?

I stuck him gently, and he damn near jumped out of his skin. I remembered that this morning in my cell, wondered what had hit him so hard. I’d threatened him — but the more I thought about it, the less I believed my popping off would have unstrung him so. And, Phil, he was unstrung. Seldom, if ever, have I seen a man so unstrung. I thought he was going to kill me — only, of course, he didn’t want to kill me. Not with this neat frame all set up.

If it wasn’t my threat that made him flip, it must have been something else I said to him. I thought about it for a while, in my cozy cell, and it hit me. I had just told Cherry that if I got a chance, I’d kill him. But that wasn’t when it happened. It happened when I said I’d also kill Jake and Pot — and dump them in the same grave with Cherry.

Sam grunted. He reacted, huh?

Like nuclear piles approaching critical mass. Naturally enough; he had just finished dumping his dead men in the same graves with other people.

Samson was silent for half a minute. Then he nodded slowly, almost wearily. I can see how that would eventually bring you here. You, I mean. Not necessarily anybody else.

There was more, Phil. Rand Brothers was mixed up in this like the sauce in spaghetti. When I made my first visit, Truepenny recognized me, June Corey was here. Add the fact that both Dan and Frank were on junk, popping Heroin.

Popping Heroin? What’s that got to do with the graves?

Everything. That’s why they’re in them.

Shell —

You and Feeney have wanted to clobber Joe Cherry for years now, right?

Seven years.

Well, now you’ve got him.

Not quite. Maybe we know what he did; but there’s no case, no proof.

There will be. As soon as we check one more grave.

He raised an eyebrow. Another one?

Yeah. The grave of Mr. Graves, I said.

Truepenny — under arrest now, and consequently looking more than ever like one of his customers — stood quietly outside the Graves Memorial Tomb. He was ready to co-operate. Among other things, Danny’s body had been embalmed, and we knew Truepenny had embalmed it.

A memorial tomb usually looks like a little house or building, inside of which one or several persons may be buried in crypts, or in which their ashes may be placed in niches. This one was made of smooth cement, about seven feet high and eight feet wide and long. The lower four feet all around the vault were faced with dark squares of tile.

Truepenny touched one of the tile squares and it moved inward, exposing a small switch. He said, The inside of this vault is laced with infra-red beams, invisible to the eye, but which actuate photo-electric cells, should anyone enter the vault without first turning off the switch.

So? Samson said, scowling in a way that could strike terror to the gall bladder of much braver men than Truepenny. What happens if you don’t push the switch?

The door closes automatically after the person or persons who have entered, and it cannot be opened from the inside. At the same moment, an alarm sounds — ah, somewhere. I, ah — do not know where.

He knew, all right; but we didn’t push it. Samson looked at me. A burial vault — that can’t be unlocked from inside. Now there’s a dandy.

Yeah, which explains how it happened that Spring got caught, but Frank got away. I looked at the mortician. Right, Truepenny?

He was sure he didn’t understand what I was talking about.

Samson, looking a little puzzled, said, I’m pretty sure I don’t know what you’re talking about, either.

Well, assume Frank Eiverson and Dan Spring came a-creeping through the graveyard here, in the dead of night, and one of them skulked into this —

Without poetics, huh? Sam growled.

One of them entered the tomb, while the other stood watch outside. Plain breaking and entering, O.K.? The guy — Dan Spring, of course, since he was the first guy caught, whereas Frank temporarily got away — walked inside and stirred up the infra-red beams, actuating the switch. The door closed, and he was stuck inside. Under the circumstances, Frank can be forgiven if he took off like a bird, probably to call for help.

Samson still looked puzzled. Breaking and entering? Here? What in hell for?

Let’s take a look. I turned to the mortician. Lead on, Mr. Truepenny.

He looked pretty sick, but he led us inside the tomb. Its walls were marble-faced, and in the wall before us were three crypts, each covered, its marble slab screwed into place before it. The one we wanted was at the bottom. In a few minutes we’d unscrewed the heavy marble covering and, with Samson at one end and me at the other, placed it on the tomb’s floor. Then we slid the casket out of the exposed crypt.

I tugged at one end of the lid while Sam lifted the other. It creaked slightly as it was opened. In the coffin was the corpse which, so far, had been referred to obliquely — for concealment in writing and speech, in the manner of a hoodlum’s alias; but also, I thought, appropriately — as Mr. Graves. It consisted of several small sacks made of transparent plastic, the plastic top folded over two or three times and stapled. And in each sack were several ounces of a white powder.

Ye gods, Samson said. He counted them. Great balls of fire. Thirty-six. There’s probably — six kilos here. He opened one of the sacks, felt the fine powder, smelled it, jaw muscles bulging. Looks like Heroin, he said. Six kilos of H.

He pulled a cigarette pack from his pocket, ripped it open and tore off a wide strip of die tinfoil, dropped a pinch of the powder on it and held a match under the foil for a few seconds. The powder ignited almost immediately, flaring up and leaving a little residue that looked like solid black-strap molasses — or cooked Opium.

Samson went on, his voice very soft, Yeah, Heroin. And damned pure stuff. Must be seventy, eighty per cent pure H.

He crumpled the foil in his big fist and looked at Truepenny. I saw Samson’s face harden, jaw muscles bulging, fist squeezing tighter. But after two or three long seconds, he shook his head slightly, relaxed, pulled his eyes away from Truepenny’s face. Wait’ll Feeney sees this, he said quietly.

He stepped to the door of the tomb, called Rawlins over and briefly spoke to him, then came back inside. He looked at the sacks of Heroin again. That’s a lot of H, he said. Could bring in a million bucks or more on the street. And a couple hundred jobs for me. Murders, assaults, D.O.A’s —

He’d mentioned a few of the twenty-three major crimes, all under the jurisdiction of Homicide, and all of which, at one time or another, are caused directly by the need for narcotics. He could have mentioned several others. Assault and battery. Abortion. Treason.

Alice Mons’ grave was open now. She was in her last resting place, and so was Frank Eiverson. He had a bullet hole, like Danny’s, in his head; and another one in his back.

Digging was nearly complete on the third grave, above which the headstone read: benjamin pearson, january 11, 1871 — may 19, 1961.

Samson said, It won’t surprise me this time if McCune’s in there. Nothing would surprise me this time. But why the Pearson grave?

Actually, I’m not at all sure about McCune, Phil, despite the fact that we’ve found Spring and Eiverson. But if McCune’s here at all, it figures this is the spot. Pearson died on the nineteenth, was buried here on the twenty-second, Monday. I traced McCune to a beach motel, and he was there, alive, on Sunday the twenty-first. But I don’t think he stayed alive till Monday. If not, Monday was the first chance to bury McCune.

I stretched, pulling some of the tension out of my back muscles, then went on, In both other cases, Cherry had the dead men buried as soon as there was a new casket to be planted here. No reason to change their operating procedure for McCune — if they killed him.

They hadn’t changed the procedure. And McCune hadn’t stayed alive till Monday. He lay in awkward rest in the casket with Mr. Pearson. He did not look as if he were sleeping — not with half his skull blown away.

Truepenny, appearing quite spooky by now, explained the modus operandi. The bodies had been brought, one by one, to the mortuary by Jake and Pot, who had told him each was to be buried in the same casket with the next person for whom services were held. After services in the Silver Chapel, the casket was removed to the hearse out back — but with a stop on the way, at the Rand Brothers morgue, where the extra body was waiting. Also waiting was a similar casket, what might be called the large economy size, to hold two people.

In the morgue, a quick switch was made, transferring the deceased to the larger casket, and placing the extra corpse on top. Then, the slightly arched lid was closed, the casket carried to the hearse and driven into the cemetery. There, at the open grave, and in full view of assembled mourners, the larger casket — which naturally nobody assumed to be different from the one they’d seen earlier — was lowered into the ground.

From where Samson and I stood, we could see the three gaping holes in the earth. Three dead men, three brown scars in the smooth green grass. It seemed like a lot, but it was just a drop in the bucket, really. Three of the many, many graves of Mr. Graves.

Well, Samson said, that about does it here. Let’s go wrap it up.

He referred, of course, to Jake and Pot. And Joe Cherry.

I grinned at Samson. Let’s.

Chapter Sixteen

Samson cleverly waited until we were almost at Joe Cherry’s big rock and redwood home before radioing the local police department and getting the chiefs O.K. to proceed to the scene.

Then Samson opened the glove compartment of the radio car, took out a short-barreled revolver and handed the gun to me. It was my Colt Special.

I really didn’t think you were going to come up smelling like roses this time, he said. But I brought this along, just in case. He paused. What put you onto Cherry in the first place, Shell?

Cherry himself, when you come right down to it. It was obvious Jake and Pot were working for somebody else; I didn’t know who — until Cherry had them haul me in for that chat I told you about, when he got so unstrung. Actually, I had quite a lot of information by then, Phil. I just didn’t know what it meant, where it pointed — but Cherry did.

I stuck the Colt into my clamshell holster, which I was still wearing, went on, I knew both Danny and Frank were in on some deal with a guy called Jim, sometimes called Mac — a guy who turned out to be McCune. It was a big deal, too, a lot of loot for Danny and Frank. Ruthie gave me the key to it when she said Frank told her, in a burst of drunkenness, that his big money, their travel money, was coming from the grave of Mr. Graves. Like a nonsense rhyme — only we’ve met Mr. Graves now, so we know it wasn’t nonsense. And we already knew the kind of work Cherry does — even if we couldn’t prove it before.

Samson grunted and said sourly, Even if we can’t prove it, yet.

I knew what he meant, and why he spoke with such sourness. We had plenty on Cherry, but still didn’t have courtroom proof. Truepenny’s story implicated only Jake and Pot, and himself, but not Joe Cherry. And Truepenny, though undoubtedly lying through his teeth, had claimed to know nothing about any narcotics.

Most important, California courts — thanks in large measure to Supreme Court decisions — are peculiarly lenient, not only on the hooked, the users, but also on the narcotics dealers and pushers themselves. It’s cuckoo, but that’s the temper of our courts these days. Enormous effort is expended to preserve the so-called constitutional rights and civil liberties of criminals, inevitably at the expense of the vast majority of non-criminals. Which is like sparing the wolves to protect the sheep.

So, the combination of the Cahan and Priestly decisions and judicial loving-kindness, or warped compassion, plus a governor reluctant to act, has made California a lovely place — for dope pushers. The cops arrest them and judges, far too often, turn them loose. Even when hardened narcotics violators are actually convicted, many have their felony convictions reduced to misdemeanors, still others are given probation, and some serve no time in jail at all. Even when you’ve got the sons-of-bitches dead to rights, some Superior Court judge moans, This boy’s sick, and sends him and his fellow son-of-bitches to hospitals. They’re sick, all right — like Al Capone, Khrushchev, and Jack the Ripper.

At the moment, progressing into 1961, I knew that concerned men were trying to get the State Legislature to pass narcotics laws with teeth in them. But right now, they don’t even have gums in them. Consequently, while we knew what Cherry had done, we didn’t have enough on him to get an indictment handed down from a Grand Jury, much less a case that would hold up in Superior Court.

But there was still Jake and Pot to talk to — and maybe squeeze a little. And Cherry himself.

I spotted the macadam road leading off the highway. There’s the turn-off, Phil, I said.

He swung into it, moving fast, but without the siren. When we reached the open area before the big, sprawling house, Samson said, This shack must’ve cost a couple hundred thousand dollars.

Yeah. Profit from a few kilos. We can pull around in back. I pointed.

One car, a black Buick Electra, was parked in front of the place. Sam drove to the rear, past the swimming pool, and stopped near the back door through which I’d been guided by Jake and Pot yesterday. There was no commotion, no sign that we’d been seen or heard.

Samson pulled a snub-nosed revolver from his belt holster and said, Take the back. Shell. I’ll go in the front way.

Watch yourself. These guys —

He snorted, cutting me off, Advice, yet.

What I mean is, they’re — they’re sick.

He grinned, looked at his watch. I’ll come in from the front, one minute from — now.

We got out of the car and Samson disappeared around the side of the house as I walked quietly to the rear door, checking the second hand of my watch. The knob turned easily, the door opened and I slipped through it.

A few feet ahead was the long carpeted hallway down which I’d walked with Jake and Pot. I stepped to it, glanced both ways. Nobody was in sight. I turned left, walked a few feet to an open door. Beyond it was an enormous living room, complete with heavy, rugged furniture and a stone fireplace. The room was empty. I could see the front door, outside which Samson was probably standing. A little over half a minute had passed.

I walked rapidly down the hallway toward the room where I’d talked with Cherry yesterday. As I neared the door, I heard voices. I was still ten yards from the room when a great banging came from the front of the house — Samson making a racket.

Next to me, a door stood ajar. I eased it open, looked inside. It was a small bedroom, a guest room, probably — empty. I stepped inside, pushed the door almost shut.

The voices nearby stopped, then started again, more softly. Feet thumped in the hallway. I peered through the crack in the door, gun ready, as Jake Luther hurried past, a frown on his lean, mean face. A .45 automatic was in his right hand, and as he walked by, he snapped back the slide, cocking the gun.

It bothered me, but I shrugged it off; Samson could take care of himself. And I had my own worries.

I watched Jake until he went into the big living room, out of sight. Then I stepped into the hall and walked as silently as I could to the door of Cherry’s office. It was shut. I put my left hand on the doorknob, cocked my .38 and then turned the knob, shoving forward, hard.

As the door flew open, I jumped into the room, crouching, but nobody was in sight. I jerked my head toward that adjacent room — and then it happened. He must have been standing to the right of the door, behind it, as it opened. As I turned my head to the left, the door slammed back against me, cracked into my hip and sent me stumbling forward. I turned my head, barely in time to see Pot jumping toward me. His hands were empty, but I didn’t have a chance to catch my balance, much less turn toward him before he hit me.

He slammed solidly into me, the full, hard weight of him, his fist cracking against my right arm. The gun flipped from my hand, flew through the air and hit the wall. The .38 has an easy one-pound pull, and the impact triggered the cocked gun. The sudden crack blended with the smack of a bullet tearing into the ceiling.

I landed on the floor, left knee banging it first, and then my face sliding over the carpet. Pot dropped toward me with both his big hands reaching for my throat. I raised one leg and kicked at Pot’s face, missed. My heel jarred his shoulder, turning him in the air.

I heard pounding in the hallway — then a muffled bang and crash from the front of the house. Pot thudded onto the floor next to me. The whole room shook. He started up again as I got to my knees. Those pounding feet were close now, a man running toward me. Pot swung a beefy arm as he came up from the floor, his fist landing alongside my neck like the kick of a kangaroo. It knocked me to my left, but I threw my hand against the floor and shoved myself back, swinging my other arm up over my head and down.

I aimed the blow at his face, but he was moving aside and my hand’s edge hammered hard and solidly against the arch of his collarbone. The deep, muffled sound as the bone broke was surprisingly loud. There was sudden movement in the doorway as Pot let out a roar of pain, slapped his right hand toward me, dug thick fingers into my throat. A shot cracked in the hallway, followed almost immediately by the deeper, and nearer, boom of a .45 automatic.

Pot’s one hand held my throat, pressed my chin so tightly I couldn’t turn my head toward that movement near us. My vision started to blur. I clasped both hands together, yanked them up against Pot’s hard forearm as two more rapid shots sounded in the hall.

Pot’s fingers tore from my throat. My arms were already raised and I threw my open right hand down toward his collarbone again, deliberately this time, aiming for the other side of his neck. The blow landed and the bone popped as somebody almost inside the room made a soft coughing sound.

I jerked my head around. Jake was bent forward in the doorway. As I looked at him, the automatic slipped from his fingers, hit the floor. He raised one hand toward his chest, toward a spot red with welling blood; but the hand never got there. The arm fell to his side and his knees bent more — slowly, at first, as if he were straining to keep them from giving way. Before he fell, Jake pulled his head around, stared at me with death in his eyes.

So long, you son-of-a-bitch, I said.

Chapter Seventeen

Jake lasted only a second longer, but he heard me. I wanted him to hear me. Then his knees buckled. He dropped limply, the top of his head smacking the door frame. He lay still, neck bent far to one side.

Pot had rolled back toward me, and tried to brace himself against the floor; but his arm crumpled, unable to support his weight. He cried out in pain and toppled forward.

Samson, chest heaving, stepped over Jake’s body, his gun held ready in front of him. As Pot fell forward, Samson flipped the gun toward him.

Easy, I said. He won’t give us any trouble.

I got to my feet, wound Pot’s coat in both hands and yanked him up. He grunted, arms bent at the elbows, but only slightly raised. I grabbed his left wrist, twisted the arm behind his back. He yelled, and it was pretty loud.

What’s with him? Samson said.

He’s got a busted collarbone. Busted in a couple of places. Pot won’t be swinging at anybody else’s skull for a while. Not for a long while.

Samson glanced quickly around the room, stepped into the hall and looked up and down it, then swung back toward me. As he turned, his coat flapped away from his body and I saw a red strain against the white of his shirt.

Phil, I said, you’re hit.

He rubbed the back of his left hand against his side. It’s nothing, he said. Just pinked me. Samson nudged Jake with his foot, bent and picked up the automatic. Missed this one with my first shot, he said almost apologetically. Looked like he was drawing a bead on you in here. Had to rush it.

I thought about that, now there was time to think. Then I gulped in some air, shakily, let it out Thanks, Phil.

Yeah. No sign of Cherry?

Not yet.

Samson knelt by Jake, felt his pulse, then ran his hands over the limp body. He pulled a braided leather sap from Jake’s hip pocket, tossed it to me, then stepped from the room and trotted down the hall.

I let go of Pot’s arm, wrapped my fingers around the grip of the spring-loaded sap and said, Pot.

He turned his head. I smiled, and swatted him between the eyes. Then I dropped the sap into my coat pocket, picked my .38 off the carpet and stepped to the door of the adjoining room, in which I’d been left yesterday afternoon. The door was locked. I kicked it open, went inside. The room was empty.

A few minutes later I met Samson in the big living room. Find anything? I asked him.

No. No sign of Cherry.

How’s that side?

O.K. I told you he just pinked me.

I stepped next to him and pulled back his coat. He was right; the bullet had torn a groove in the flesh, but it wasn’t deep.

I said, Pot’s resting uncomfortably. Jake’s dead. And I found this.

I handed a large Manila envelope to him, and as he opened it and looked at the gun inside, I said, Found that thing in the same place I got the envelope to put it in — Cherry’s desk. It’s a sawed-off, sixteen-gauge shotgun. Crude pistol grip, barrel cut to about four inches. Some heater, huh?

Yeah, looks like a smudge pot. Must be the one.

Right, the one used to put my slug into Tony Kovin. I didn’t handle it, though I doubt there’s much chance you’ll find any prints on it.

He nodded, then walked to the front door and looked out as a car’s tires crunched in front. Police car, he said.

Two officers came inside and Samson spoke to them briefly, gave one the envelope. Both men went through the room, and I heard them moving down the hallway.

Samson said, Well, that’s two down. But I wish to hell Cherry had been here.

You don’t wish it as much as I do. Maybe Pot can give us a clue to where the bum is.

But Pot, when he came around, added little that was new. The main value of his conversation was that it corroborated much of what I’d told Samson. Knowing that Danny, Frank, and McCune had been buried at Rand Brothers, we were able to hit Pot with that, plus what Truepenny had told us. Finally, Pot admitted helping Jake haul the bodies to Rand Brothers, and later dumping them into the already occupied caskets.

Samson said, Give us the rest of it. Potter.

That’s all there is.

Cherry told you to bump them and you pulled the jobs, then took the bodies to the mortuary. That it?

No, you got it wrong. These were guys Jake had trouble with. He plugged them, then asked me to help him get rid of the stiffs. I just helped a friend out. Pot started to shrug, then let out a gasp as broken bones ground together. Probably I broke a law, but that’s all I had to do with it.

Listen, Pot, I said, you haven’t a prayer. We already know how it happened. That Sunday night Danny and Frank went to heist Mr. Graves. He glanced toward me. Yeah, the H, I said. Danny went into the tomb first, and that trick door kept him there. Frank took off — and undoubtedly phone Jim McCune, the guy who dreamed up the heist in the first place. You and Jake, tipped by the alarm, high-tailed it to Rand Brothers. You grabbed Danny, forced him to spill, killed him that night — then started hunting Frank Eiverson. By that time McCune had powdered, but you got Frank in a day or two. I’d say it was early Tuesday morning, probably at his home. Frank needed his junk, but Cherry made damned sure none was available in the places where Frank usually made a connection. Like Danny, Frank undoubtedly had a fix at his room, and it’s eight-to-five you just waited there for him. That took care of Frank. You caught up with McCune at the Orange Coast Motel last Sunday. I’ve got witnesses who can prove you and Jake took McCune away from the motel about one o’clock Sunday. I paused. Sure, you just helped Jake bury some people.

Pot silently stared at me, then looked at Samson. I think I better chin with a lawyer, cousin.

And that was the last thing he said.

At five, that balmy May afternoon, Samson and I stood near the swimming pool behind Cherry’s house. Pot and Jake had left us, Pot on his way to the prison ward of the general hospital, and Jake headed for the morgue. If Pot knew where Cherry was, he hadn’t dropped any hints.

Samson ran a hand over his gray hair. He’s a cool one, that Potter. A cool bastard. He sighed, then turned to me. What was that about witnesses seeing Luther and Potter take McCune from a motel? Were you laying it on him a little, or was it straight?

It was straight, I said.

They could testify in court?

I don’t know why not. Then I remembered my dizzy moments with those two gals. That is, I said, they could testify, but I’m not certain what kind of witnesses those two babes would make.

Two babes?

Yeah. A couple of tomatoes, enormously endowed with everything except brains. They were by the swimming pool at the Coast Motel. One of them saw the two hard boys arrive, and leave with McCune. Blonde and a redhead. At least, they could place Pot with McCune, which might help put the squeeze on Pot.

Uh-huh. Two babes. Endowed. How come you always run into such babes?

Just live wrong, I guess.

Samson shook his head, snorted, found a cigar and stuck it into his mouth. He swore softly again, then said, Well, we got the local and APB out on Cherry. Maybe that’ll turn him up.

Maybe.

That’s all we need now. Just him. And the babe who helped frame you.

Yeah, I said, thinking of lovely June Corey. Well, she sure had the frame for it.

We started toward the radio car, and right then it hit me. Not just one thing, but closer to half a dozen. I spun around, ran back to the house.

Samson yelled, Hey! What —

But I kept going.

Chapter Eighteen

I ran into the house, across the living room, down the long hall, into Cherry’s office again.

I jumped to the phone but didn’t use it, just looked at the number in the little white circle on its base: Zenith 4-6089. Of course. I ran back down the hall, mentally banging myself on the head.

Samson was standing next to the radio car.

Come on, I yelled, and jumped in.

He slid under the wheel, started the car. What the hell’s happening?

Dig out, Phil. I’ll explain on the way.

We parked halfway down the block, walked to the front door. I rang the bell. In a few seconds, I heard the sound of high-heels clicking on an uncarpeted part of the floor.

Ah, I said, the lovely is home.

The lovely? I thought you said Joe Cherry might be here.

Oh, he is, I think. But I refer to the hot-eyed blonde tomato who lives here.

Here? I thought you never met Mrs. McCune, Samson said.

That’s where we were, on Sunset Plaza Drive in Hollywood, at the home of the late James McCune.

Sure I did, Phil, I said. Only she told me she was June Corey.

The door opened a crack, started to close suddenly, and hit my foot. Then my shoulder hit the door, banged it open. June stepped back, hands falling limply to her sides. Mrs. McCune, really, but it would be quite a while before I stopped thinking of her as June. I was a little disappointed, though, that I hadn’t put two and two together before this.

I remembered phrases I’d heard in description of Mrs. McCune, from policemen in the Missing Persons Detail, the neighbors I’d talked to here on Sunset Plaza Drive: Them hot blue eyes like to melted me — , In her twenties — tall and a real looker — man, the legs!, Good-looking blonde gal with hot blue eyes and a stunning pair of — Not conclusive, maybe, but description which could apply equally to Mrs. McCune and Miss Corey. Conclusive enough when added to all the rest of it.

Hi, June, I said softly.

She tried to smile, but nothing smiled except her mouth; and it takes much more than that to make a smile. The corners of her lips moved up, then sagged down, went up, down again. This time they stayed down.

Oh, she said. Oh. That was all.

I walked in past her, pulling the .38 from its holster.

Finally she got some words out. He’s not here.

He? Honey, I said, I didn’t ask you anything.

He wasn’t in the living room. I looked at June. Listen carefully, sweetheart. If he’s here, I’ll find him. So make it easy. I looked at the big blue eyes. Don’t keep on lying now. It’s too late to lie.

She held my eyes with hers — for a long time. At least, it seemed a long time. In the den, she said, and nodded toward a door. Last room at the end of the hall. On the left. She paused, glanced at the Colt in my hand. He doesn’t have a gun.

I’ll check that part for myself. Samson stood alongside me and I said, Watch her, Phil. She’s good.

We’d better both take him, Samson said. He looked at June. You answered the door. So you must not have seen us walk up. Right?

Yes. But he’ll be wondering who rang.

Come on, Samson said to me.

Let me have him, Phil.

He scowled. I said, There’s just a chance he’ll think I’m alone. And I hope he does. I paused. He might try to get away.

Samson continued to scowl.

I said, I know it’s a little irregular. But I really want this one, Phil.

Finally, he shrugged, Watch yourself. Then he grinned. This one’s pretty sick, too, you know.

Yeah. And he’s going to be a lot sicker.

As I walked from the room, Samson took June’s arm, led her toward a couch. At the end of the hall, I stopped, tried the door on my left. It opened, and I stepped inside.

He was really very surprised to see me.

His expression told me better than words that he’d been sure, until this moment, that I was in a cell at the L.A. police building. Samson and I had been careful during the day, and apparently, he hadn’t heard anything about the activity at Rand Brothers. I knew that neither Jake nor Pot had been able to get in touch with him. He’d known the heat was on him, but he sure hadn’t realized it was scorching his fanny. I said, Hello, Cherry. How are thing with Charlie Lucky?

He was rigid. His black eyebrows had gone far up on his forehead, and his mouth had opened half an inch as he sucked in his breath. For him, that was close to complete collapse. But he recovered quickly, and said, Hello, Scott. What brings you here?

You. You’re under arrest. Cherry.

He laughed. Hell, you can’t arrest me —

I’ve just done it, you son of a bitch. And it’s legal — a private person can make an arrest when he knows a felony has been committed.

Felony? Scott, I haven’t even spit —

Try murder. Conspiracy to commit murder. Complicity in hit-and-run, homicide, auto theft, violation of the California Health and Safety Code — hell, this could go on for an hour. On your feet, Cherry.

He was sitting in a large modern chair, his legs outstretched, feet resting on a low leather hassock. He was in shirt sleeves, the crease of his brown trousers sharp as a knife. A cigarette was between the fingers of his left hand, and a large diamond ring glittered on his little finger. Casually, he flicked ashes into a tray near him. You don’t mean you’re taking me downtown?

You’ve got it

He filled his lungs with smoke, spewed it out. I read you were in a little trouble yourself, Scott.

Only a little. And you didn’t read it, you did it. It was almost good enough, too. Cherry. But there were little holes in it. And we poked them bigger.

We?

Me and the law. Captain Samson, Rawlins, a whole mess of law. How do you think I sprang from the can? Chewed through the wall? No, the frame came apart at the seams, Cherry. We found the Cad at McCune’s, the sawed-off shotgun at your dump. Hell, we even know you fired my Colt into your swimming pool. It was good, yes; good enough, no.

That struck him, finally. Cherry looked like a man stabbed with a sharp icicle. He tried to be casual, though, and carelessly flicked ashes from his cigarette. Too carelessly; he missed the tray. Then he slowly glanced around the room, at the closed door behind me.

It pleased me. I wanted him to start thinking about getting away. Unless he figured the jig was up. Cherry was the kind to go quietly to jail, knowing he wouldn’t be there very long. Even from jail, he could contact his highly paid and respectable attorneys; then would follow — if really necessary — a hundred thousand dollars or so spread around in the right places. That much money can buy a lot of sympathy — a lot of propaganda — and many transfusions for bleeding hearts. Then, back to the big home, the lush blondes, the race tracks and night clubs. And his negotiable asset: Heroin. He might get away with it, too, I thought. But not with me, not with me. So I gave him some more, a little at a time.

We’ve got the H, I said. Mr. Graves.

That hurt him.

Truepenny talked, Cherry. So did Pot. It was true. Maybe Pot hadn’t said all we’d wanted to hear, but he’d talked a little. Jake’s dead.

He started to say something, held it back.

There’s another item, Cherry. Three items, in fact. I spoke slowly, gave it time to sink in. Three, all at Rand Brothers. Where we picked up the six kilos. One was Danny Spring. One was Frank Eiverson. His face had gone pale, and the normally dark skin looked sallow and ugly, like something rotten. It was something rotten. And one was James Randall McCune, I said. How does it look now, Cherry?

I had seen Joe Cherry’s veneer shatter once before, suddenly, when I’d said I’d dump him into the same grave with his two hoods. Now it was happening again, but in a different way. Slowly, like time-lapse photography of a man aging, or of a face decaying. I thought, oddly, that if a moving picture were taken of a dead man’s face as it shriveled and wasted away for days, and the film were then run off in the space of a single minute, the picture might look very much like what was happening to Cherry’s face now. But he wasn’t soft. He was very tough.

He must have stopped breathing for those moments, but then, he filled his chest with air, licked his lips a few times and stood up. You know what you’re full of, don’t you, Scott? You talk like a crazy man. I’ve got no idea what you’re talking about. He breathed deeply again. But no sense arguing with you, pal. Call in the fuzz and let’s get going. I didn’t say anything.

You did come here with a carload of cops, didn’t you? he asked pleasantly. You wouldn’t be dumb enough to try taking me alone. Or would you? He paused. Maybe you are that dumb, Scott.

I grinned, but didn’t answer.

I could just about imagine what he was thinking: probably I wasn’t alone; but if I was, and he could take me, he might have several hours, at the very least, before the law put the arm on him. In those hours he could make his plans, phone attorneys — even skip the country in case the evidence against him appeared conclusive.

I knew the moment when he made up his mind. He stood a little straighter, his lips pressed together a little tighter. He took a step toward me, then stopped, looking at the revolver in my hand.

He was in shirt sleeves, no bulges, no gun on him. I grinned, broke my Colt and ejected the cartridges, dropped them into my coat pocket. A small table stood near the door. I placed my revolver on it, took off my coat and dropped it on top of the gun, watching Cherry. He smiled as I stepped toward him.

A yard from him, I stopped. His chin was tucked down and he looked up past the black brows at me, starting to move aside, around me. I didn’t do anything except keep facing him. Suddenly he started a left jab toward my head, stopped it and threw his right fist at me.

He was fast, but I had seen plenty who were faster. I caught the blow on my forearm, swung to my left, carrying his arm out, slammed a cupped hand under his chin and shoved. His head snapped up and he went back two steps. The chair was behind him and his foot hit it, putting him off balance.

While he was still unbalanced, I stepped in close and whipped the back of my hand across his face, then brought it forward, palm smacking the side of his jaw, smacked the back of it against his cheek again. I wasn’t trying to be fancy; I wanted to make him mad. He was too cold, too much in control most of the time, and I wanted to bring him to a boil. I did; he started boiling.

When Cherry came back at me his face was twisted, his mouth open, lips pulled apart, tight against his teeth. The veins in his neck stood out. And he was wide open. I was set, waiting for him, and I hit him with everything I had. It was a long right hand, straight in, no feint, no nothing, just a right hand with my shoulder and every ounce of my weight behind it.

My fist smashed his nose. Pain filled my right arm. It didn’t run from wrist to shoulder, the pain was just suddenly there, the whole length of my arm. It felt as if I’d broken my hand. A tight, scratchy sound grated from Cherry’s throat as he staggered backward. He hit the chair again but went over it this time, the chair toppling. He sprawled on the carpet, legs moving queerly.

After nearly a minute, he got to his hands and knees. I stayed where I was. He was motionless for a while, blood dripping from his nose and landing on the carpet. He stayed there, obviously until he felt steadier, stronger; but I didn’t try to hurry him.

When Cherry got to his feet, he moved easily enough. He looked all right, except for his nose, and the scarlet wetness running down his mouth. I moved in on him. He stepped toward me, cocking a fist. But he didn’t use the fist — he kicked his right leg forward, viciously. I turned, barely in time, caught the point of his shoe on the front of my thigh. But it gave Cherry time to throw a punch. It was his left, and it was hard. The blow landed solidly on the side of my head, rocked me. He was close to me, one of his feet behind my leg, his body jarring against me.

I went down over his foot, landed heavily, rolled and started up. Cherry had stepped toward me, was swinging his foot at my head. If I hadn’t already been on my way up, it might have landed there; instead it dug into my chest. But then I was on my feet again. The kick had turned Cherry’s body to one side. I’d intended to use nothing but my fists on him, none of the tricks. But with the two kicks Cherry changed my mind.

I held my arms in front of me, hands open loosely, let him turn, swing. He threw a right at my head, and I crouched, raising my arms higher, crossing them with my right arm closest to his body. As his swinging wrist jarred against my crossed forearms, I clamped my left hand above and inside his wrist and stepped in close, sliding my other hand up his arm to grip the outside of his biceps. I pivoted to my left and slammed my shoulder solidly into his armpit, dug the fingers of both hands into his arm and pulled hard as I bent forward. He grunted once, flipped over my head and sailed three feet through the air. I hadn’t realized the wall was so near. His feet were higher than his head when his back crashed against the wall. His rear end hit first, then his skull bounced on the wood. He landed in a heap on the floor, sprawled awkwardly, not quite unconscious, hardly moving.

His fingers moved first, then one arm. He got one leg under him, knee against the carpet, made it a foot from the floor and flopped prone. I sat down in the chair he’d been using earlier, lighted a cigarette. It was half-smoked before Cherry finally wobbled to his feet.

As he stood there swaying, blood on his mouth, his chin, his neck, I said, That should cancel a few of the lumps your boys gave me. Cherry. A few. But I still owe you some. Not to mention Danny and Frank and McCune. I ground out the cigarette. And Ruth Stanley, little Ruthie. I got to my feet, moved toward him. And God knows how many others, dead and dying. God knows how many others, Cherry.

He got his hands up, shook his head from side to side. Then he peeled his red lips apart and swore at me. I let him finish and said, You can call this off any time you want to, Cherry.

He swung at me. I wouldn’t have believed it could happen, the shape he was in, but somehow he got past my left and landed under my chin, his knuckles digging into my throat. I stood flat-footed, hit him twice, grabbed him as he bounced off the wall, and hammered my right hand into his mouth.

I’ll say this much for Joe Cherry — it’s the only thing I can give him, in all I ever learned about him and his life, but I’ve got to hand him this — he got up, all told, seven times.

Chapter Nineteen

When I called Samson he took two steps and was inside the room. He apparently had been right outside the door for a while.

I asked, Where’s the girl?

She’s O.K. Rawlins came out in another car — good God. He was staring at Joe Cherry. What in hell did you hit him with?

Me.

He looked at my bloody, puffed hands, then walked silently to Cherry, kneeled by him and felt for his pulse. I put my coat on, reloaded the Colt and pressed the gun into its holster.

Samson said, Well, he’s alive. That’s something.

Yeah. It’s too bad.

He grunted. I guess he had it coming. In fact, I know damn well he had it coming.

We left Cherry, went into the front room. Rawlins and another plainclothes man were there. June sat quietly on the couch.

Shell, she said.

I looked at her. Yeah?

The captain talked to me while — he told me about the — you in jail.

The frame you mean — that happy little party you helped the fellows plan?

Yes. I did help them, Shell. And I lied to you. But I didn’t know they were going to — murder. And do such a horrible thing to you. I thought —

Oh, nuts, June. Or, rather, nuts, Mrs. McCune. I sounded tired. I was tired. Especially my arms. They felt like big lumps of bone-bruises. It’s a little late —

But it’s true. I thought they just wanted you out of the way for a few hours. Joe told me to do it, and, well, I did. But I swear I didn’t know —

Oh, go to hell. Tell it to a police stenographer.

She dropped her eyes, studied her hands folded in her lap. Samson spoke to Bill Rawlins, who went out to his car. He came back in, said he’d called for an ambulance and it was on the way.

June raised her head and looked at me. There were actually tears in her big blue eyes. She must have worked pretty hard on this bit, I thought. She said, I’ve already told the captain the way it was. All of it. Except this. I did lie to you, Shell. But only about overhearing the phone call in the mortuary that night — you know there wasn’t any call — and about who I was. But I didn’t lie about the rest of it. She paused. Not the — rest of it.

She give it all to you, Phil?

He shrugged. Seemed to.

Sounds like the straight stuff?

Well — could be. She admits knowing her husband was a minor partner with Cherry in the narcotics traffic, fronted for him in the Mortuary and Cad agency. Claims she didn’t know it for a long time, only found out in the last few weeks. She couldn’t decide what to do. Then McCune disappeared.

She didn’t know why he new? She didn’t know about the narcotics heist that flopped?

Claims not. It’s possible.

I smiled. I told you she was good, Phil. I looked at June. Did she say she knows Joe Cherry killed her husband?

Yeah, that, too, Shell. Says he must have had it done, the way it looks now. She believes he’s responsible.

She believes he’s responsible. You mean she didn’t tell you she fingered her husband for Cherry?

June didn’t move a wet eyelash.

Samson said, What’s that?

I told him about the phone calls to and from the Orange Coast Motel, stressed the times. Then I said, So clearly McCune, after the heist blew up and he’d been lying low for about a week, on Sunday the twenty-first at 11:56 a.m. phoned his loving wife. Probably to get news of the heat here — maybe he even wanted her to join him. He either told her where he was calling from or else left his number, because nine minutes after he called his ever-loving, somebody did phone the motel — but strange to relate, not from his home here. The call was from Zenith 4-6089, which — surprise, surprise — is Joe Cherry’s number. An hour later, Jake and Pot showed up at the Orange Coast Motel, and away went McCune with them. I sighed. Never to be seen alive again.

A call from here to Cherry’s number wouldn’t be long distance, but I decided to bluff it anyway. Eight-to-five, when you check, there’ll be a record of a call from this number. Zenith 4-4394, to Zenith 4-6089, at about — two or three minutes after noon. Roughly.

June said, You won’t have to check. I made the call. It’s true James phoned me that Sunday, and left his number. I called Joe and told him what the number was. But —

Ah, those buts, I said. I grinned at her. Now you tell us. When you know we can find out anyway.

That’s not the reason I didn’t mention it before, Shell. I just — I was afraid it would look bad.

You were right, sweetheart. It looks terrible.

But I didn’t know Joe was going to kill him. He told me James had stolen something from him, he only wanted it back.

Samson’s eyes met mine. Joe Cherry had, by Mrs. McCune’s admission, told her McCune had stolen something from him. We knew what it was — Heroin — and that McCune had only tried to steal it. Which was what had started the ball rolling in this mess, brought Evelyn Spring to my office.

I smiled at June. You didn’t know Joe Cherry was going to kill James, hey? Who was it said the things we don’t know can’t hurt us? But how does it happen you know hubby is decomposing?

I — She swallowed, her lovely face pale. After it happened, Joe finally told me. It was an accident, you see. James got frightened and ran, and one of the men had to shoot him.

Of course, they had to. And while James was rapidly fleeing away, they shot a remarkable bullet after him. This bullet caught up with him, curved around and drilled him right smack in the forehead, lifting much of his skull off his brain.

She managed to get a little paler.

I added, And left powder burns on his face.

I — that’s what Joe —

You should have seen James there in the casket, June. Half his brain gone, the rest spilling from his skull case like moldy scrambled eggs. And him in a casket with another dead guy. Like Danny and Frank. Some accident

She let out a gasp, swayed a little. But she hung on, and said, her voice very soft and thin, All I know is what Joe told me.

Sure. When did Joe Cherry tell you about this tragedy?

Last Monday. He said it happened the day before.

So, of course, the sensible thing for you to do — once he was dead — was to file a missing person report.

Well, I — I did file the report that same day, Monday. She was pretty chalky now, and her gorgeous blue eyes wobbled a little. Yes, I knew James was dead. But Joe made me file the report. He didn’t want anybody else to think James was dead, and he told me to do it. He might have killed me, too — I was afraid of him. He can be very frightening. Shell.

Yeah, I know. He’s got a growl in his eyes. I thought about my last look at Cherry. Anyway, he used to.

Chapter Twenty

Well, mrs. McCune testified against Joe Cherry, and later stood trial herself. But her attorney was smart and arranged for a fixed jury: all men. She went to Tehachapi, but not for long.

Truepenny testified against Cherry, too, and so did I. At least we tried to, but much of the testimony was inadmissible as hearsay, or for some other technicality. Man, you wouldn’t believe there are so many technicalities for protecting the guilty. Even so, it would have looked good, except for one thing.

While in the hospital, Vince Potter decided to cop a plea, if he could, and told us Cherry had ordered the frame for me, and the rest of it. The way Pot told it, he sounded almost innocent, but we could put it together the way it must have been. Jake had used the sawed-off shotgun to shoot Tony Kovin with the bullet from my gun — Kovin being the only man still alive, other than Pot himself, who could prove Cherry trafficked in narcotics. Ruthie had been a possible danger to Cherry because of her association with Frank Eiverson, and because Cherry learned I had talked to her.

So Ruthie was sapped and taken to Twenty-first Street one night. After killing Kovin, Jake drove my Cad down dark and empty Twenty-first to the point where Pot stood holding the unconscious Ruthie alongside his Buick. When Jake raced down the road, Pot simply had thrown Ruthie in front of my Cad, then driven away in the Electra. Jake just kept on going. Later — after getting the word from Mrs. McCune — he’d switched Cads and called the law. By then, of course, Ruthie’s crushed body had been found and taken to the morgue. The rest of it, I knew.

But Pot was cagey, and though he told us all that while in the hospital, he never signed a confession. Then came the day when he was to be transferred from the general hospital to a cell in the police building.

I was there that day. So was Samson, plus a couple of uniformed officers. We walked down the steps, the uniformed policemen at Pot’s left and right, Samson and me a few feet behind them. And suddenly Pot fell.

We thought at first he’d stumbled. There wasn’t the sound of any shot. Samson said, What the hell —

That was as far as he got. We all heard it. But it wasn’t a gunshot. It was the sound of an explosion, a sharp, solid blast. High in a building a block away, on our left, a spot of flame bloomed and vanished. The window frame and glass splintered and flew outward, fragments falling to the street below. Something else fell, too, clattered against the sidewalk.

Samson, one of the officers, and I ran up the street. Bits of wood, shards of glass, and a twisted length of metal lay on the sidewalk. The metal was bent, but it was still recognizable as the barrel of a rifle. Only splinters of the stock remained.

Samson squatted by it, craned his head up at me.

I said, You don’t think — I stopped, pretty sure what had happened, even then; but I wasn’t quite ready to say it.

Samson swore softly, fluently. Yeah, he said. That’s what I think.

I started to run for the building’s entrance but Samson called me, Hold it, Shell. There’s no rush.

I stopped. He was right.

Samson got slowly to his feet, heavy shoulders slumping a little. He pulled his neck back and looked up, toward the window where the explosion had occurred. There’s no rush, he repeated. You know what we’ll find up there. Another dead man. A very messy dead man.

That’s what we found. He was in the middle of the room, on his back. One arm dangled loosely from exposed muscle and shattered bone, the hand blown away. His face bad been ripped into shreds by the force of the blast. This was a new one for the Los Angeles Police Department, too, but we all knew how it had been worked, even before the report from SID came in.

The high-powered rifle was equipped with telescopic sight and efficient silencer, but it was a very special instrument for killing in another way. A most ingenious artisan had hollowed out the stock and concealed therein a sizable quantity of explosive, so arranged that pulling the gun’s trigger and firing a cartridge set off, in the next fraction of a second, a bang violent enough to eliminate completely whoever fired the gun.

Thus, I thought, no worry this time about the hired killer getting caught — and talking. No loose ends. The trail ended here, in a blood-spattered room.

A few minutes later we stood next to Pot’s body. A crowd had gathered. Pot had died instantly, a bullet in his brain.

Samson’s brown eyes were hard as rock when he looked at me, but his voice was gentle, almost casual. Nice shot, he said.

Yeah. Wonder who the guy was?

We’ll probably get a make on him in a day or two. Samson shrugged. For all the good that’ll do us. He watched silently as Pot’s body was placed on a stretcher. Then he said softly, Too bad.

He had it coming. In fact both of them had it coming.

Them? I wasn’t thinking about them. I was thinking about the guy who dreamed this up. Giannomo Ciari.

Him, I said. Yeah. Good old Joe.

What it boiled down to, was that we didn’t have Vince Potter in court when, after many delays, the time finally came to testify for the prosecution. But we’d known, as soon as Pot dropped with that slug in his head, how it would go. The men who could have proved Joe Cherry an accessory, at least, to several murders, and could have given intimate details about his narcotics operations, were all dead: McCune, Jake Luther, Vince Potter, Frank Eiverson and Danny Spring, Tony Kovin, Pot’s killer, Ruthie. Mrs. McCune’s testimony helped, as did Truepenny’s and mine. Not enough. We weren’t able to stick him for murder, but we got him on the narcotics rap.

The deputy D.A. proved that the six kilos of Heroin we’d seized belonged to Giannomo Ciari. The Mr. Graves memorial tomb was Cherry’s, and Truepenny testified not only to that, but also to seeing Cherry himself place the narcotics in the casket.

Cherry didn’t protest, didn’t even deny possession. He had no previous record, no convictions, he had a battery of expensive attorneys. He was afraid of only one thing: justice.

Under California law, the verdict was: guilty.

Cherry was convicted of illegally possessing narcotics. Convicted of one count, violation of Section 11500, Article 4, Division X of the Health and Safety Code of the State of California.

The Superior Court judge was a kindly old coot with fuzzy white hair and a twinkle in his eyes. Clearly he was chockful of compassion for his fellow man — and Ciari was a fellow man, wasn’t he? Clearly he loved his human brothers — and Ciari was a human brother, wasn’t he? Clearly, he was a senile old fat-head.

The law had Giannomo Ciari. And the law gummed him.

He was sentenced, under the law of the State of California, to be punished by imprisonment in the county jail for six months.

Joe Cherry, multiple murderer, narcotics wholesaler, went smiling to the county can. Convicted and sentenced, in effect, for possessing narcotic drugs without a prescription.

But all that was in the future when I’d left Samson at the L.A. police building that Friday night in May, my hands still aching from pounding on Joe Cherry’s face. Pot was still alive then, and it looked as if we had a pretty good case. I felt like a drink.

There is a bar named Pete’s on Broadway near my office. So, after visiting Evelyn Spring, reporting on the case and her brother’s death, and waiting till her tears had temporarily dried, I told her I’d call again, and went to Pete’s.

I had a bourbon and water, then another. When I was halfway through the second highball, a girl sitting two stools away asked me if I had a light.

I’d barely noticed her, but as I held my lighter to the cigarette around which her soft, red, smooth, yummy mouth was puckering, I noticed. She was gorgeous. As she puckered and puffed on the cigarette, the reflected flame of my lighter put little hot spots of fire in her bright blue eyes.

She tossed her head and blew smoke between those wild red lips, and, smiling, said, Thanks. Haven’t — haven’t we met somewhere before?

I grinned. Why, my dear, I said, it is quite possible —

I stopped as she tossed her head again, long blonde hair swirling like the smoke curling from her mouth. Blue eyes — blonde — stacked —

Oh, no, I thought. Not another of those gorgeous, blue-eyed, stacked blondes. I’d had enough gorgeous, blue-eyed, stacked blondes to last me a lifetime. Several lifetimes.

What’s the matter? she said.

She said it leaning closer, taking a deep breath. Or maybe it only looked as if she were taking a deep breath. She was one of those tomatoes who always look like they’re taking a deep breath. The voice was warm and vibrant, like the sound of blood boiling.

Just out of curiosity, I took a little extra look. About five-five or so, smooth, smartly dressed, with a body that made those after pictures of Vic Tanny girls look like before pictures of Vic Tanny. Very friendly face. Very friendly everything, as far as I could see — which was pretty far.

But I pulled my gaze away, swallowed some of my drink. I have had enough of gorgeous, blue-eyed blondes, I told myself.

Is something the matter? she asked. Have I done something wrong?

I looked at her again. No, I said. No —

Because she was even closer, holding an even deeper breath, and I noticed that those little hot spots of fire were still in her bright blue eyes — even though my lighter, if not my name, had gone out. She was still smiling, too, a go-to-hell smile, a go-to-hell with me smile.

Then, knowing I was slipping, knowing the almost frightening truth that a man never gets enough of gorgeous blue-eyed blondes, knowing she’d stopped smoking but smoke still seemed to be curling from her mouth, knowing she was easing onto the stool next to me, and knowing with final surrender that I was glad, I beamed upon the lovely blue-eyed blonde and said, grinning, No, my dear, you haven’t done anything wrong. At least — not yet.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright 1961 by Fawcett Publications, Inc.

Copyright renewed 1989 by Richard S. Prather

Cover design by Open Road Integrated Media

ISBN 978-1-4804-9895-2

This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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Table of Contents

Title Page

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Copyright