Chapter 4

Wednesday, June 25th, 1947, 9:00 a.m.

I slept well for five and a half hours; it was more than I usually got. Most of the time, visions of something other than sugarplums danced in my head and kept me awake. The sheep I tried to count always turned into girls—a girl, dozens of times over.

I woke up when the alarm went off, did the usual morning things, fed Greenstreet, then left him in the company of KRAY’s Morning Serenade and headed for the Hellinger Building, where I’d had my office since I’d gotten out of the service. It was a clear day—a little humid, which meant the smog would probably settle in later—but at eight fifteen in the morning it was a nice leisurely walk, even though there wasn’t enough breeze to rustle the dandelions and the radio reported it was eighty degrees at eight.

Some PIs do their thinking in their cars. I concentrate too much on driving to do that. Walking is what helps me think; it’s a habit I picked up from Spade, and I do it almost every morning: I get a hundred ideas between my apartment and the office. Most of them get discarded, but one or two usually amount to something. On the way in that morning, I ran through last night’s encounter and the one o’clock phone call. I didn’t reach any conclusions, but I did make a mental list of things to check out and people to check with.

Besides, I like the scenery. I took a different route in daylight than I did at night, through a part of L.A. where the houses had been built to last and people actually planted flowers and shrubs in their yards and gave them enough water that they made it through the summer on their regularly mowed lawns. There were trees in the lawns, too, and bordering the sidewalks—mostly palms but the occasional oak or elm. Kids played ball in schoolyards, and on the sidewalks, boys hunkered down riding bicycles they pretended were motorcycles and girls chanted rhymes while they skipped rope. Women hung wet clothes in their backyards and talked to each other over the fence, and milkmen whistled tunes I didn’t know while they left milk bottles and cartons of cottage cheese and eggs on porches. I’d grown up in an Indianapolis neighborhood like this, in a house like these, and sometimes I thought I’d like to grow old in one. I’d actually thought for a while that was going to happen. Till a year ago next Thursday, anyway.

I reached the corner of Floyd Avenue and Thursby Street, where the Hellinger Building’s red brick rises twelve floors on a block where twelve floors is as high as anything rises, about ten till nine. If Los Angeles had a left auricle, the Hellinger Building would be in the middle of it. Weekdays, there’s plenty of traffic—in cars, streetcars, and buses, on foot and on bicycles—and plenty of noise to go with it: Everything’s getting pushed into the city’s bloodstream. I bought a paper from Stoker Thompson, the ex-middleweight challenger who’d taken one punch too many and now sold everything from Time and the Times to True Detective and chewing gum at his kiosk in front of the building. He smiled at me, like he did every day, and reported on his plan for his next fight, like he’d also done every day for the past couple of years. The plan never changed. I smiled back, wished him good luck, gave him a quarter for the paper and a package of peppermint Chiclets, and told him to keep the change to help cover his training expenses. He said “Thanks, Mr. Grahame” and “I’ll make sure you got a ringside seat.” “Sure thing, Stoker,” I said, and went on in. I almost never chewed gum, but it was handy to have around just in case. There were three packs in my desk.

I wiped my face with my handkerchief—the thermometer on the bank sign down the block read “85”—and walked into the lobby at 8:57. Whit Sterling and his elevator were waiting. Whit worked the six a.m.–to–three p.m. shift and did the morning janitoring with the help of a kid named Orrin Quest who’d just moved to L.A. from Manhattan—Kansas. Mike Figlia was the afternoon janitor from two till three; then he ran the elevator till eleven. From eleven to six, you were on your own; there wasn’t even a night watchman. The Hellinger Building was almost as old as my apartment building, and while the tenancy rate was higher, there were still too many vacancies to encourage management to operate the elevator twenty-four hours a day or make the building fashionable again.

Sterling greeted me with his usual “Good morning, Mr. Grahame” in a chipper, enthusiastic way. He was forty-something, and would have looked like Adolphe Menjou did twenty years ago if he’d had more hair and a fuller mustache. And weighed thirty pounds more. As it was, Whit could stand behind a six-foot stuffed boa constrictor and disappear in its shadow. He’d done some movie extra work—“atmosphere,” they called it—and still had dreams of seeing his name on the silver screen. A lot of people in L.A. had those dreams, including plenty who ended up having nightmares because of them. I read about them in the paper almost every day.

“Good morning, Whit,” I said. He whistled “Laura” on the way up. I asked him to whistle something else. He said okay and started in on “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” mixing in a little lyric here and there. Whit’s singing voice was as thin as he was. I liked Sinatra’s version better. She’d liked Judy Garland’s.

He was still whistling it when he opened the door on eight. He interrupted himself to say “Bye, Mr. Grahame,” and closed the door. My “Bye, Whit” got lost in the thump clang of its close.

The eighth floor was usually quiet weekday mornings. Usually, neither Jules Bezzerides, the numismatist and rare coin and currency seller, nor Nick Garcos, who did taxidermy, showed up before eleven or so. I went fishing anytime I had a long weekend with nothing to do. If I ever caught a fish that was big enough, I was gonna have Nick stuff it and hang it on a wall in my office, right over the Paris calendar. I could hear Dixon Steele, the accountant, in his office, clicking away on his adding machine, and Madge Rapf and Kathie Moffat, the little old ladies who sewed wedding dresses (and the occasional shroud), were chattering softly in theirs. Madge and Kathie had been working together, and sharing a one-bedroom house in Santa Monica, since Hector was a pup. They’d invited me to supper a couple of times. Madge was a terrific cook, and Kathie had a heart of gold. They had a pair of girl lovebirds named Jane and Agnes who took turns sitting on their fingers and sang—or chattered like their owners—constantly.

I liked them both. Their door was open, so I stuck in my head and said “Good morning, ladies.” Madge smiled back. Kathie, the more talkative of the two, smiled and said “Good morning, Robert” in a voice as smooth and sweet as the apple cider my mother had made.

I was most of the way down the hall to room 805 when I heard the last chords of The Song on the radio and Gloria singing along. Gloria liked to sing, too. Her voice made Whit sound like Dick Powell. What made it worse was she couldn’t remember a lyric to save her soul. I looked at my watch. It was 8:59. I waited in the hall until the nine o’clock news began. Then I opened the door and went in.

Gloria was sitting at her desk, lost in listening to the news and typing the dictation, which she took cheerfully in her perfect, neat shorthand, with a winsome smile that showed off her large, perfect teeth. They looked like they could chew rusted steel and still stay white. I smiled and watched her.

“This is Nicholas Udo,” the radio was announcing boldly, “and here’s today’s news from KRAY! The killing of Bugsy Siegel continues to be the lead story in Los Angeles this morning. Yesterday Lieutenant Lauren Stanwyck of the LAPD released police photos of the murder scene, saying there was evidence that nine shots—yes, that’s right, nine shots—were fired into the room where Siegel sat at around ten thirty Friday night, from what the Lieutenant called ‘something very powerful.’ At least two of them passed completely through Siegel’s body including one—”

Gloria frowned and shook her head. Then she pursed her lips and squalled “La, la, la, la-la. La, la, la, la-la,” trying to drown out the radio’s continued description. Gloria did not like violence unless it was in one of the countless cowboy pictures she saw and loved.

“—that appears to have blown one of his eyes out of its socket and all the way across the parlor where he sat. Stay tuned! We’ll keep you up to date on all the latest developments in the murder of Bugsy Siegel, as—they—happen!”

Nicholas Udo shuffled some papers on mike. I hung my hat on the coat tree next to the door and said, “Morning, Miss Mitchum.”

Gloria jumped. “Oh!” She giggled. “You gave me a start! Nice morning, Mr. Grahame!” she said brightly. Gloria Mitchum was nothing if not brightly spoken.

Gloria was somewhere around thirty—I’d never asked. I figured she was old enough to do the job and that was what mattered. She was a pretty girl in an odd sort of way. She favored thick, dark-colored blouses (and support brassieres underneath them) with long sleeves, laced cuffs, and Peter Pan collars, and severe gray and black business skirts that came down modestly to her ankles. The ankles were shapely and so was she: smooth, shiny pink skin that never seemed to sweat; blue eyes as bright as her speech; and a pert button nose like Stanwyck’s. And she was bubbly as champagne. Her hair was blond, bobbed and marcelled, like women wore twenty, twenty-five years ago. It looked odd among the pageboys and big soft Veronica Lake waves that were all the rage now, but it looked good.

So far Gloria had proved me right. She was a paragon of efficiency. Every morning she got in early so I would arrive to find my coffee—with exactly the right amount of sugar, which was a little disconcerting—waiting on my desk. She also tidied, brought flowers and arranged them in the various vases she must have bought because I didn’t, and thoroughly dusted the chairs, love seat, smoking stands, and magazine table in the waiting room. “Things need to look nice,” she’d told me. I didn’t much care one way or the other—I had yet to have a client say he or she was hiring me because there were flowers in the waiting room, and “decor” is something I saw pictures of once in a Better Homes and Gardens—but it seemed to make her happy.

The radio announcer was saying, “In national news, a second incident involving curious aircraft in the skies over Washington has been reported. A man claims he saw a saucer-shaped object as he flew his private airplane yesterday afternoon near Mount Rainier. This follows the report of a huge ‘flying doughnut’ seen in the sky over Puget Sound several days earlier, when forty-eight-year—” Gloria turned it off.

“Your coffee’s on your desk,” she said with her perkiest smile.

“Thank you.” Gloria made good coffee, which was all the more amazing because she never drank it. I headed for my office.

“And that new file,” she continued energetically, “for that Miss . . . Duryea, I think it is—it’s on your desk. With the receipt in it.”

I stopped. “Thank you, Miss Mitchum,” I said, and took another step office-ward.

“And I called the detectives in Seattle. Lieutenant Robinson is on vacation, but the other one—the sergeant?—he’ll be at HQ at thirteen thirty. You can call him then.”

I stopped again, looked at her, and smiled. Two months in my employ and she knew the ropes as well as I did. And she pulled some of them better. “Thank you, Miss Mitchum.”

“You’re welcome, Mr. Grahame,” she perked, her bob bouncing. “And you can call me Gloria, remember? Really, it’s fine. An informal office is a congenial office, that’s what I always say. Okeydokey?” She giggled, congenially. I remembered all right: She reminded me every morning. I’d avoided suggesting she call me Robert. It might encourage the aspirations she seemed to hold. I liked her, but she was my secretary. I planned to keep her my secretary. Just my secretary.

“Right,” I said. “Any appointments this morning, Gloria?”

She smiled even more brightly. “Nary a one!”

“Good.” I went to my desk, unlocked it, and dropped the Times on top. “I need you to go to the bank.”

She murmured an “oh” of pleasure, and came into my office. “A chance to be out in the glorious warm sunlight! Thank you!”

“I’m glad you think it’s glorious,” I said. “Most of us think it’s just too darn hot.”

Gloria fairly twinkled. “I like the heat.”

I laughed. “You may be the only one in L.A. who does. Besides the electric company. Here.” I handed her a deposit slip. “Fill that out and put this”—I gave her the envelope with Lizabeth Duryea’s retainer—“in the office account. Oh—and take out your pay for this week before you do. And a five-dollar bonus. We’ll worry about the taxes later.”

“But you pay me on Friday, Mr. Grahame,” she protested.

“Well, it’ll be one less check I have to sign.”

“And a bonus! Why, I’ve haven’t even been here two months, I’m so happy you think I’m doing a—”

“Let’s just think of it as Christmas come early.”

“Jangle Bulls, jangle Bulls, jangle all the way,” she sang. She giggled again. “Oh!” she said. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome, Miss Mi— Gloria.” She smiled adoringly. I looked back with my lips together and tight.

“Now . . .” I pointed to the envelope and raised my eyebrows.

“Okeydokey!” She gathered her hat and purse.

I walked to the window and looked out. I like L.A.’s looks, both in the light and the dark. By day it looks like a normal place, especially if you can’t see Hollywood or the huge sign in the hills that announces it. On clear days you can see all the life the city holds, both dark and light, its streets, buildings, people; the sky and the sun that was already brutally burnishing everything else I saw. It was like a familiar still life by some twentieth-century Hieronymus Bosch, creepy and fascinating.

I didn’t know that Los Angeles as well as I knew its darknesses, and I was more comfortable in them. Sometimes my life felt like a five o’clock shadow. It crept up on me and darkened my thinking like my late-afternoon beard darkened my jaws. But that was part of the job. Not a part I liked all that much. I grew up in Indiana. The sunshine there breeds optimism. I hadn’t been a cynical kid. I wondered when that had happened. Maybe during the war. Maybe after I got out of the military hospital and watched the rest of it in the newsreels. And, maybe, it was the day I investigated my first case.

Or maybe it wasn’t till a year ago, next Thursday.

I’d lived most of my adult life in Southern California. I was used to it, and I was particularly used to the heat and all the grimy shirt collars and clinging pants that came with it, but I’d never understood how anyone could like its swelter. She had, though. I hmph-ed. I’ll bet you don’t get this kind of heat in Chicago, I thought. At least, not in winter. I bet she hated it.

“I’ll be back shortly, Mr. Grahame,” Gloria said, interrupting my thoughts.

“Okay. Oh—Gloria?”

She stopped, one hand on the doorknob. “Yes, Mr. Grahame?”

“Do you know anything about the Morning Star?”

She looked perplexed, then crestfallen. “Gee, Mr. Grahame, I don’t,” she apologized. “I usually buy the Daily News.”

I resisted spreading the smile I felt crawling into my eyes. “I see.”

“I’ll look for one while I’m out, if you want.”

“No. Thanks.” I turned away. I could resist only so long.

“Okeydokey.” Gloria opened the door. “Bye-bye.”

“Uh-huh. Bye.” The door closed behind her.

* * *

I picked up the Duryea file, glanced through my notes, and jotted a few new ones, including the contact list I’d made in my head that morning and the call I’d received last night. I had no idea what to make of it. I figured somebody had followed Miss Duryea to and from my office, but nothing she’d said suggested who that someone might have been. Except a friend of Dan Scott, which didn’t make much sense, but a lot of things in this business don’t seem to make sense—not at first, anyway.

I’d start by making a few inquiries around L.A., see what my contacts among Scott’s peers in the insurance industry knew. Wally Dietrichson knew nearly everybody. I’d check a few of the nightspots since Miss Duryea suggested Dan Scott was fond of them until it was time to call Widmark: There were four hours till “thirteen thirty.” Gloria’s use of military time amused me, particularly since she used it only for off-the-hour designations: thirteen thirty or fourteen forty-five, never thirteen or fourteen hundred; three or four o’clock, not fifteen or sixteen hundred. Yeah, she had some curious traits. She skipped lunch hours in favor of putting in the extra time at her desk; carried the largest purse I’d ever seen, even larger than Lizabeth Duryea’s—and there was her musicianship. But I could live with her quirks. I had a few myself, and she was as dependable as Ted Williams with men on base and, besides, she was just my secretary. No matter what her aspirations might be. That was a mistake I didn’t plan to repeat.

Gloria had barely had time to catch the elevator when the outside door opened and I saw two figures step through. One was small woman, maybe five feet, who would have been attractive if she weren’t taking pains not to be. The word “doll” came to mind: the porcelain voodoo variety. She looked like she might be old enough to dress herself, but just barely. The other was a tall, wide, hard-looking man with no expression on his face. Both of them were dressed in dark men’s suits and wore gloves—tight black leather gloves—and hats. Hers was a black derby; he had a little gray porkpie that looked like a rusty thimble perched on the head of Frankenstein’s monster.

“Be with you in a minute,” I called.

“You Grahame?” the woman said.

“Be right there.”

“My name’s Wilmah.” She strode into my office, the man a step behind her.

She had a heavy East Coast accent. Boston or thereabouts, probably. Walter Dietrichson was from there. I’d met Wally while I was getting some more work done on my stomach; we were hospital roommates. He was, and is, a class guy who had had about as much chance of walking again as a quarter horse had of winning the Kentucky Derby: He’d fallen off a moving train en route from L.A. to a class reunion in Palo Alto. But he’d survived, nothing but a limp and a cane, and I had laughed with him and his wife over a drink to celebrate his ten-thousand-dollar insurance check from Pacific All-Risk. Wally’d been an oil engineer. Now, like Dan Scott, he was selling insurance, somewhere in the Valley, for a firm called Dietrichson, Keyes and Neff. We went fishing together whenever we could.

“Wilma what?” I said.

The girl’s stark white face suddenly looked like it had been pulled out of boiling water.

“Wilmer,” the big guy said.

He stood there, his hands hanging at his sides, looking like a mannequin that belonged in some store’s big-and-tall department. Except mannequins have smiles. This guy looked like whoever’d made him had forgotten what they looked like and decided a grim-lipped deadpan would do instead. He had to be six feet five and two hundred sixty pounds. None of which was fat. If he’d been on Fordham’s line, they wouldn’t have needed the other six blocks of granite. “Wilmer,” he repeated.

I nodded. “Uh-huh.”

The girl jacked a nail-bitten thumb at Stone Giant standing behind her. “And Elisha,” she muttered contentiously, daring me to disagree. Without changing his expression, Elisha nodded once.

I put down my coffee—it was getting cold; I don’t like cold coffee—and stood up behind my desk. “My secretary is out right now,” I told Wilma. “She’ll be back in a few minutes, and when she gets back, she’ll be happy to make an appointment for you. I’m kinda busy at the moment, so if you’d like to come back in half an hour or—”

“Elisha,” said Wilma.

The guy walked casually over to me, used one hand to lift me by the collar, stepped behind me, put me in a choke hold, lowered me to the floor, and stood there, calm as the barrel of a .38 just before someone squeezes the trigger, while I struggled—less to get away than to breathe.

“You know,” I squawked, “this isn’t a good way to begin an investigator-client relationship.”

Wilma seemed unconcerned at the jeopardy. “Where’s da package, Grahame?” she said.

I coughed. “What package?”

“Elisha,” said Wilma.

Elisha released my throat and pulled my arms behind me. Wilma, grinning, walked over and hit me in the stomach. She was tiny, but it hurt like heck and I gasped for breath. “Where’s da package, Grahame?” she repeated.

Between gasps, I whispered, “My secretary. Took it to the bank. It’s in my. Safety-deposit box. In their vault.”

Wilma grinned again. “No, it ain’t.” She punched me in the stomach again.

I turned green, and my gut shriveled. I’m not at all fond of being hit, but my stomach was the place I really hated it: Even after five years, I could feel the bullet wounds. I clenched my teeth and managed, “Not bad, for a girl.”

“My faddah wanted a boy,” said Wilma.

I took as deep a breath as I could. “Too bad he got a weasel.”

Wilma punched me in the face. I didn’t like that, either, and it hurt like heck, too. Small fist, all bone. I wondered that it didn’t break on contact, a situation I’d remedy just as soon as I had the chance. I felt a trickle of blood flow down my cheek.

“Where—is—da package?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I insisted.

“Tough guy, huh.” Wilma raised her fist again. I winced; she lowered it with a laugh, then sighed. “I can tell we’re gonna to have ta do it da hard way. Elisha?”

Elisha let go of my arms. I reached up to touch my face, but a hand—Elisha’s—stopped me by chopping my neck. I fell down, hard. Wilma kicked me, hard. In my stomach. I groaned, loudly. “Make it quick,” she said to the big guy. “Da girl’ll be back any minute. Frisk him, den look in da uddah office. I’ll look in here.”

She rifled the desk while he searched me and my pockets. He found a Colt .38 in a shoulder holster, pulled it out, tossed it away, and continued to rummage, withdrawing and discarding my wallet, a few dollars in cash, a tin of aspirin, and a key ring with three keys—one to my apartment, one to the office, one to my desk—and an empty book of matches I kept so I’d have to look for one if I had an irresistible urge to light up. I figured the couple of extra minutes would give me the chance to resist. So far I’d figured right. At that moment, however, I would have happily lit one. If I’d been able to lift my head.

“Nothin’,” said Elisha.

“Check out dere,” Wilma said, and pointed to the waiting room. Elisha clunked into it. I heard the clatter of overturning furniture and banging metal cabinet doors and the slamming of the drawers in Gloria’s desk. Wilma finished with my desk, then overturned the boxes on the metal shelving and began on the file cabinets. It was a good thing I didn’t have more cases; she pulled out everything in all of them and dumped it the floor—except the one that was locked. She pulled on its top drawer, then the second, then the first again. “Somethin’ wrong wit’ dis file?” she said.

Lying on the wood floor was uncomfortable, but I was beginning to feel like I would one day again be able to breathe like everybody else, and I was silently congratulating myself on the wisdom of not having eaten anything that morning. “Nothing, except it’s locked,” I told her. “And I don’t have the key.” I hadn’t figured to need to get into that file this morning, so I’d left it at home—taped underneath Greenstreet’s food dish with its partner.

“Locked,” said Wilma. “Oh.” She grinned. Her teeth were small and bucked; I could see her sinking them into a chunk of cheese as the spring released the hammer that snapped down and broke her neck. I’d have been happy to pick up the remains and toss them in the garbage.

She yanked the top drawer again. It barely rattled. “Elisha,” she called. “Come in here.”

“There’s nothing in that file,” I told her again.

Wilma chuckled and kicked my hip. “Then open it.”

I groaned again. To heck with picking up the remains. I’d gladly supply the cheese. “Nuts. You open it, you want to see so bad. I don’t have the key.”

“Okay. Elisha: Open it.” She tapped the file cabinet.

Elisha put one hand on the handle of the top drawer and pulled. Hard. The cabinet rocked toward him, but the drawer stayed closed. I grinned. He let go, took a breath, put the same hand on the same handle, then braced the cabinet with his free hand and a foot. He pulled again, harder. And grunted. The drawer snapped open. I stopped grinning.

“Hey!” I said. “That lock was expensive.”

Wilma looked at me. “Elisha,” she said. Immediately, Elisha took a step toward my prostrate and pained body.

“Okay, okay,” I said quickly. “I get the message.”

Wilma worked her way through each of the four drawers and found nothing. She turned to me, venom in her squint. “It’s empty,” she hissed.

“I told you that.”

She walked toward me slowly and raised a foot. I winced again and rolled away. Yeah, I was beginning to feel better but I was also beginning to respect that foot. She might look twelve, but she kicked like a chorus girl who’d been working at it for years. “Last time: Where’s da package, Grahame,” she said through her teeth.

I shook my head. “I—don’t—know.”

Wilma shook hers. She let her foot drop harmlessly.

“Maybe, maybe he’s tellin’ the truth,” ventured Elisha. Well, well: Stone Mountain not only had a vocabulary but he could think, too.

The girl whipped around to face him. “Da trut’?” she barked.

“Yeah,” I said. “Maybe I’m telling the truth. Some people do that, y’ know.”

I braced myself, just in case, but Wilma just stood there. “Da trut’,” she repeated. She spat past me, then looked at her watch. “We’ll be back, gumshoe.”

“That’s good to know, Wilma,” I said. “I’ll try to have cheese danish next—”

“My name is Wilmah!” she shouted.

“Oh, yeah, it is. Do excuse me. Wilma.”

Her powdery face turned bright red again. “Why, you . . .” she began, pulled a .32 from her waistband, and cocked the hammer.

“Wilmer,” Elisha said sternly.

She looked at him. For a long moment, there was only the sound of the desk fan spinning uselessly. Then Wilma released the hammer and stood, glaring at me.

I had to laugh. “What’s the matter, gunsel? Scared of a little gunfire?”

She fired. Amazingly, the bullet missed me and hit the leg of the desk. Splinters flew. I felt the hair on the back of my neck go stiff.

“Wilmer!” Elisha said again, a little more sternly. He did not move.

Wilma lowered her gun slowly, spat, and tucked it into her belt. She buttoned her jacket. Then she swung her leg at me.

I was ready. I grabbed it and she tumbled to the floor; her derby flew off. I climbed to my hands and knees and was pushing myself toward her when Elisha yelled, “Stop.”

I stopped. I looked at him. He was holding a .44 automatic, and I had no doubt his aim was better than Wilma’s. I figured there was no use getting on the wrong side of a guy that big, especially when he was holding an automatic that was just as big as he was. Besides, he looked like he only had one side, and it was solid concrete. I stayed on my hands and knees. It was an old suit anyway.

Wilma picked herself up and brushed off her pants and coat. “Let’s go,” she said. Elisha grunted his assent. She glared at me again, grabbed her hat, and stalked into the outer office.

Elisha grinned. His mouth looked like somebody had staked a claim on it: Half his teeth were gold. The other half were missing. He took a step in my direction and aimed his size 14 foot at my face. I threw my arms up, but he stopped in mid-kick, lowered the foot, and laughed. I was plenty relieved. If his kick was half as bad as his laugh, it would be plenty vicious.

The big guy looked at me a moment longer, then, gun still in hand, followed Wilma out. The door slammed behind them, and I heard footsteps pounding down the wooden hall.

I waited till I figured Whit had had enough time to close the elevator door behind them. I was still hurting—it felt like I would hurt for a month—but I raised myself slowly, taking breaths as deep as my belly would comfortably allow. I checked for broken bones. There weren’t any. I stood up. Cautiously. I touched my face; there wasn’t much blood, and what was there was almost dry. I had plenty of blood; I could do without those few drops. What I couldn’t do was understand: who they were, how they knew about the package, why they wanted it. Somehow, Dan Scott had to be behind the invasion; I didn’t know how, but I would find out.

I went to the desk, picked up my cup, and took a swallow of coffee. It was tepid, but it helped ease the tightness in my throat and stomach.

I walked gingerly to the cabinet Elisha had forced open, knelt down, and reached into the very back of the empty bottom drawer, in the concave ridge behind the file slide I’d moved last night, just before I left. I smiled. Ah, the magic of cellophane tape.

Moving slowly, I picked up my gun, the .38 Colt—most people favored automatics these days, but I liked, and trusted, the old-fashioned kind—and started on the rest.

I glanced into the waiting area: It looked like a quake had hit. Well, I’d deal with that later. I grabbed an empty box and began to fill it with the residue of Wilma and Elisha’s spree that was strewn across my office.

I’d filled one box, and the second was still half empty when I heard the footsteps clicking in the hallway. The shadow of a figure was moving briskly toward the outer door. It was embracing something large. I was in no mood for another visitor, much less one carrying a surprise. I took out my gun and stood by the door to my office. I was hidden, but I could see anyone who came through the frosted glass. The footsteps stopped. I cocked the hammer. The figure adjusted its burden. I waited. The door opened. I raised the gun.

Arms filled, Gloria walked in. “I’m back, Mr. Grahame,” she called cheerfully. “Guess what I’ve—” She saw the mess and gasped. “Oh, my, what—Mr. Grahame! Where are you? Are you all right?”

I breathed a small sigh of relief and lowered my Colt. “I’m fine, Gloria,” I said, and stepped into the waiting room.

She dropped the package and her purse on her desk. “What . . . ?” she began. Her voice trailed off. She gestured around the disarray.

“I had a couple visitors. They weren’t very friendly.”

“Oh, dear!” She removed her hat, then hurried toward me and began to dust me off. “Oh, you’ve got a cut! Let me get—”

I touched my face again. The blood was sticky, still not quite dry. “It’s just a scrape, don’t—”

“A scrape can be just as dangerous as a cut. Now you sit down and I’ll clean it!” she commanded. I sat, more amused than injured, in one of the still upright, well-dusted chairs. Gloria had an unexpected maternal instinct. “Where’s your kit?”

I pointed to a storage cabinet. The doors were open and its contents a mess. “In there,” I said. “Top shelf, unless they ‘moved’ it.” She went to get it. “What’s in the package?” I asked.

Gloria stopped. She turned toward me with a startled look. “The pa— Oh!” She laughed. “That.” She waved at her desk. “I got you a pillow. The bank was giving them away with a deposit of seventy-five dollars!”

“Greenstreet’ll like that. He’s torn half the feathers out of the one he sleeps on.”

She returned, the first aid kit in hand, and carefully ministered to my “wound.” “They were giving a choice,” she added. “A pillow or a down comforter, but I thought, this is Los Angeles. No one has to have a comforter.” She giggled. “Not even me. Actually, it was very surprising that they were giving them away at all.”

She applied iodine. I hate iodine. I squirmed. “That stings.”

Gloria patted my head. “Oh, it will be fine in a minute,” she said. “Shall I call the police, Mr. Grahame?” She tucked away the iodine bottle and peeled the back from a small adhesive strip. “Oh, my, there are things all over! All those poor flowers! But don’t you worry about it, I’ll take care of everything, lickety-split. Okeydokey?” She applied the bandage to the cut and pressed it gently into place. “Were they looking for something? Did they locate it?”

“They said they were. I don’t think they found it.”

“What?!”

“I don’t know.” There was no reason to tell her that. She’d just ask more questions and—for her own safety—the less she knew, the better. Wilma had said they’d be back, and I believed her. “I think that’s fine, Gloria.” I reached for my face. She slapped my hand, something even my mother never did.

“Don’t play with that!” she exclaimed. “You’ll pull it off and it will start to blee—” The phone rang. “Oh!” she said.

“I think you better answer that.” I touched the bandage. I was sorely tempted to rip it off.

“Oh. Yes, of course.” She straightened herself and went to her desk. She cleared her throat, put down the first aid kit, and lifted the receiver. “This is the office of Robert Grahame, private investigator. May I help you?” she said, the perfect and pleasant professional. She listened. “Who’s calling?”

She shook her head and covered the mouthpiece. “He won’t say,” she whispered. She sounded nervous about it.

“Ask him what it’s about,” I said. I righted chairs and vases and repositioned the Looks and Lifes on the magazine table.

Gloria cleared her throat again and lifted the phone. “Can I tell Mr. Grahame what it’s about?” she asked, then: “Uh-huh. . . . Uh-huh. One moment please.” She covered the mouthpiece. “He won’t say,” she whispered, still nervously.

This was tiresome. “Tell him I’m out and to leave a number. I’ll call him back.” I wanted another cup of coffee, one I could drink while it was still hot. Then I wanted to go get a hard-boiled egg sandwich, or something else I’d be able to chew despite the growing ache in my jaw, and eat it while I read the Times and recovered from the morning’s misadventure. That would have to wait, though, until I’d made a start on reordering the office. I looked at it again and frowned, wondering why.

Gloria pursed her lips and nodded. “Well, Mr. Grahame is out of the office, right n— . . . I’m, um, not sure. I don’t think he’ll be too long. If you can leave— . . . I don’t know what time he’ll be back, I can’t say for—”

“Nuts,” I muttered, not loud enough for Gloria to hear. “I just walked in.” I took the phone from her. “This is Grahame,” I said into it.

The voice on the other end was mellifluous and friendly, just like an insurance salesman’s ought to be. “Mr. Grahame?” it said. “This is Dan Scott. I think you’re lookin’ for me.”