I wiped the back of my neck and staggered out to the car. Even the seat of the car was hot, at midnight.

I got home about two-forty-five and Hollywood was an icebox. Even Pasadena had felt cool.

FOURTEEN

I dreamed I was far down in the depths of icy green water with a corpse under my arm. The corpse had long blond hair that kept floating around in front of my face. An enormous fish with bulging eyes and a bloated body and scales shining with putrescence swam around leering like an elderly roué. Just as I was about to burst from lack of air, the corpse came alive under my arm and got away from me and then I was fighting with the fish and the corpse was rolling over and over in the water spinning its long hair.

I woke up with a mouth full of sheet and both hands hooked on the head-frame of the bed and pulling hard. The muscles ached when I let go and lowered them. I got up and walked the room and lit a cigarette, feeling the carpet with bare toes. When I had finished the cigarette, I went back to bed.

It was nine o’clock when I woke up again. The sun was on my face. The room was hot. I showered and shaved and partly dressed and made the morning toast and eggs and coffee in the dinette. While I was finishing up there was a knock at the apartment door.

I went to open it with my mouth full of toast. It was a lean, serious-looking man in a severe gray suit.

“Floyd Greer, lieutenant, Central Detective Bureau,” he said and walked into the room.

He put out a dry hand and I shook it. He sat down on the edge of a chair, the way they do, and turned his hat in his hands and looked at me with the quiet stare they have.

“We got a call from San Bernardino about that business up at Puma Lake. Drowned woman. Seems you were on hand when the body was discovered.”

I nodded and said, “Have some coffee?”

“No thanks. I had breakfast two hours ago.”

I got my coffee and sat down across the room from him.

“They asked us to look you up,” he said. “Give them a line on you.”

“Sure.”

“So we did that. Seems like you have a clean bill of health so far as we are concerned. Kind of coincidence a man in your line would be around when the body was found.”

“I’m like that,” I said. “Lucky.”

“So I just thought I’d drop around and say howdy.”

“That’s fine. Glad to know you, lieutenant.”

“Kind of a coincidence,” he said again, nodding. “You up there on business, so to speak?”

“If I was,” I said, “my business had nothing to do with the girl who was drowned, so far as I know.”

“But you couldn’t be sure?”

“Until you’ve finished with a case, you can’t ever be quite sure what its ramifications are, can you?”

“That’s right.” He circled his hat brim through his fingers again, like a bashful cowboy. There was nothing bashful about his eyes. “I’d like to feel sure that if these ramifications you speak of happened to take in this drowned woman’s affairs, you would put us wise.”

“I hope you can rely on that,” I said.

He bulged his lower lip with his tongue. “We’d like a little more than a hope. At the present time you don’t care to say?”

“At the present time I don’t know anything that Patton doesn’t know.”

“Who’s he?”

“The constable up at Puma Point.”

The lean serious man smiled tolerantly. He cracked a knuckle and after a pause said: “The San Berdoo D.A. will likely want to talk to you—before the inquest. But that won’t be very soon. Right now they’re trying to get a set of prints. We lent them a technical man.”

“That will be tough. The body’s pretty far gone.”

“It’s done all the time,” he said. “They worked out the system back in New York where they’re all the time pulling in floaters. They cut patches of skin off the fingers and harden them in a tanning solution and make stamps. It works well enough as a rule.”

“You think this woman had a record of some kind?”

“Why, we always take prints of a corpse,” he said. “You ought to know that.”

I said: “I didn’t know the lady. If you thought I did and that was why I was up there, there’s nothing to it.”

“But you wouldn’t care to say just why you were up there,” he persisted.

“So you think I’m lying to you,” I said.

He spun his hat on a bony forefinger. “You got me wrong, Mr. Marlowe. We don’t think anything at all. What we do is investigate and find out. This stuff is just routine. You ought to know that. You been around long enough.” He stood up and put his hat on. “You might let me know if you have to leave town. I’d be obliged.”

I said I would and went to the door with him. He went out with a duck of his head and a sad half-smile. I watched him drift languidly down the hall and punch the elevator button.

I went back out to the dinette to see if there was any more coffee. There was about two-thirds of a cup. I added cream and sugar and carried my cup over to the telephone. I dialed Police Headquarters downtown and asked for the Detective Bureau and then for Lieutenant Floyd Greer.

The voice said: “Lieutenant Greer is not in the office. Anybody else do?”

“De Soto in?”

“Who?”

I repeated the name.

“What’s his rank and department?”

“Plain-clothes something or other.”

“Hold the line.”

I waited. The burring male voice came back after a while and said: “What’s the gag? We don’t have a De Soto on the roster. Who’s this talking?”

I hung up, finished my coffee and dialed the number of Derace Kingsley’s office. The smooth and cool Miss Fromsett said he had just come in and put me through without a murmur.

“Well,” he said, loud and forceful at the beginning of a fresh day. “What did you find out at the hotel?”

“She was there all right. And Lavery met her there. The hop who gave me the dope brought Lavery into it himself, without any prompting from me. He had dinner with her and went with her in a cab to the railroad station.”

“Well, I ought to have known he was lying,” Kingsley said slowly. “I got the impression he was surprised when I told him about the telegram from El Paso. I was just letting my impression get too sharp. Anything else?”

“Not there. I had a cop calling on me this morning, giving me the usual looking over and warning not to leave town without letting him know. Trying to find out why I went to Puma Point. I didn’t tell him and as he wasn’t even aware of Jim Patton’s existence, it’s evident that Patton didn’t tell anybody.”

“Jim would do his best to be decent about it,” Kingsley said. “Why were you asking me last night about some name—Mildred something or other?”

I told him, making it brief. I told him about Muriel Chess’s car and clothes being found and where.

“That looks bad for Bill,” he said. “I know Coon Lake myself, but it would never have occurred to me to use that old woodshed—or even that there was an old woodshed. It not only looks bad, it looks premeditated.”