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“Sex,” she said.

“Yep,” I said.

“Sex. That’s what.”

“That’s what, all right. You hit it that time. Couldn’t have said it better myself.”

“Sex …” she repeated, lingering over the word as one might linger over the olive in one’s first martini.

Maybe I’d better tell you about this kid before you get the wrong idea. Kid—hah. I’m only thirty years old myself, not exactly a kid, but this babe could have been my father.

You could say she was so thin she had to wear a fat girdle. You could say she appeared to be wearing a lifeless bra. You could say she had no visible means of sport.

But even that wouldn’t say it.

Her complexion was the delicate tint of poisoned limeade; and her expression was that of one biting down, all unaware, on thirty-two cavities. I had seen that light in her eyes before: in glass eyes. I had seen those curly locks on her head before: on drugstore dummies. I had seen—well, I had seen enough.

Her name was Agatha Smellow, and to put it gently, she simply was not my kind of tomato; thus this was—at least—an unusual circumstance for the one man of the one-man firm, Sheldon Scott, Investigations. That’s me, Shell Scott. And I wished I was dead.

“Well, Aggie, old girl,” I said—she had asked me to call her Aggie—“here’s to nothing.”

We clinked glasses. And she smiled her pearly smile, fluttering her eyelids.

Friends, in my years as a private investigator in Los Angeles, I have looked upon death and destruction, blood and urp, split brainboxes and disemboweled oxen. But I have seldom looked upon anything less appetizing than Aggie fluttering her bald lids at me.

An explanation—I hope—is in order.

I am a fairly large fellow, reasonably agile, healthily tanned from much Southern California sun. The face is bearable, even if it is not the one I might have chosen if given my pick of a half-dozen gorgeous ones; what poetry of feature it might once have possessed having since been edited into disrhythm by numerous individuals who bore me no good will—guys, that is, who socked me and kicked me and jumped on me and sapped me and even shot off a piece of one ear.

The head to which all that was done is topped by inch-long white hair springing upward, as if trying for an inch and a half, and sharply-angled cotton-white brows, which I now suffer bravely, having learned as a mere boy that despite the exercise of much ingenuity and even mustache wax I could not straighten them out.

Despite all this, I generally look forward to whatever life brings—even if, as sometimes happens, it’s death; for the blood does not creep in my veins, but rather, I like to think, sings and sometimes yodels in splendidly harmonious arteries.

More, in my yodeling blood are several pounds of iron filings, each ounce of which is magnetically attracted to what I think of, fondly, as toothsome tomatoes. I have, in fact, a fondness amounting virtually to dedication for lovely lasses with lissome curves and eyes like silk, with smiling lips and boastful cleavage, with fire in their glances—and all that.

Why, then, was I here?

Here, talking about sex?

Sex, with Aggie?

Listen, and I shall tell you a tale which will split your toenails …