“Give me the money, please.” A little mist formed on the plate glass from her breath.

I said: “I’d have to know who you are.”

“You know who I am,” she said softly. “How much did you bring?”

“Five hundred.”

“It’s not enough,” she said. “Not nearly enough. Give it to me quickly. I’ve been waiting half of eternity for somebody to get here.”

“Where can we talk?”

“We don’t have to talk. Just give me the money and go the other way.”

“It’s not that simple. I’m doing this at quite a risk. I’m at least going to have the satisfaction of knowing what goes on where I stand.”

“Damn you,” she said acidly, “why couldn’t he come himself? I don’t want to talk. I want to get away as soon as I can.”

“You didn’t want him to come himself. He understood that you didn’t even want to talk to him on the phone.”

“That’s right,” she said quickly and tossed her head. “But you’ve got to talk to me,”

I said. “I’m not as easy as he is. Either to me or to the law. There’s no way out of it. I’m a private detective and I have to have some protection too.”

“Well, isn’t he charming,” she said. “Private detective and all.” Her voice held a low sneer.

“He did the best he knew how. It wasn’t easy for him to know what to do.”

“What do you want to talk about?”

“You, and what you’ve been doing and where you’ve been and what you expect to do. Things like that. Little things, but important.”

She breathed on the glass of the shop window and waited while the mist of her breath disappeared.

“I think it would be much better,” she said in the same cool empty voice, “for you to give me the money and let me work things out for myself.”

“No.”

She gave me another sharp sideways glance. She shrugged the shoulders of the gray coat impatiently.

“Very well, if it has to be that way. I’m at the Granada, two blocks north on Eighth. Apartment 618. Give me ten minutes. I’d rather go in alone.”

“I have a car.”

“I’d rather go alone.” She turned quickly and walked away.

She walked back to the corner and crossed the boulevard and disappeared along the block under a line of pepper trees. I went and sat in the Chrysler and gave her her ten minutes before I started it.

The Granada was an ugly gray building on a corner. The plate glass entrance door was level with the street. I drove around the corner and saw a milky globe with Garage painted on it. The entrance to the garage was down a ramp into the hard rubber-smelling silence of parked cars in rows. A lanky Negro came out of a glassed-in office and looked the Chrysler over.

“How much to leave this here a short time? I’m going upstairs.”

He gave me a shady leer. “Kinda late, boss. She needs a good dustin’ too. Be a dollar.”

“What goes on here?”

“Be a dollar,” he said woodenly.

I got out. He gave me a ticket. I gave him the dollar. Without asking him he said the elevator was in back of the office, by the Men’s Room.

I rode up to the sixth floor and looked at numbers on doors and listened to stillness and smelled beach air corning in at the end of corridors. The place seemed decent enough. There would be a few happy ladies in any apartment house. That would explain the lanky Negro’s dollar. A great judge of character, that boy.

I came to the door of Apartment 618 and stood outside it a moment and then kicked softly.

THIRTY-ONE

She still had the gray coat on. She stood back from the door and I went past her into a square room with twin wall beds and a minimum of uninteresting furniture. A small lamp on a window table made a dim yellowish light. The window behind it was open.

The girl said: “Sit down and talk then.”

She closed the door and went to sit in a gloomy Boston rocker across the room. I sat down on a thick davenport. There was a dull green curtain hanging across an open door space, at one end of the davenport. That would lead to dressing room and bathroom. There was a closed door at the other end. That would be the kitchenette. That would be all there was.

The girl crossed her ankles and leaned her head back against the chair and looked at me under long beaded lashes. Her eyebrows were thin and arched and as brown as her hair. It was a quiet, secret face. It didn’t look like the face of a woman who would waste a lot of motion.

“I got a rather different idea of you,” I said, “from Kingsley.”

Her lips twisted a little. She said nothing.

“From Lavery too,” I said. “It just goes to show that we talk different languages to different people.”

“I haven’t time for this sort of talk,” she said. “What is it you have to know?”

“He hired me to find you. I’ve been working on it. I supposed you would know that.”

“Yes. His office sweetie told me that over the phone. She told me you would be a man named Marlowe. She told me about the scarf.”

I took the scarf off my neck and folded it up and slipped it into a pocket. I said:

“So I know a little about your movements. Not very much. I know you left your car at the Prescott Hotel in San Bernardino and that you met Lavery there. I know you sent a wire from El Paso. What did you do then?”

“All I want from you is the money he sent. I don’t see that my movements are any of your business.”

“I don’t have to argue about that,” I said. “It’s a question of whether you want the money.”

“Well, we went to El Paso,” she said, in a tired voice. “I thought of marrying him then. So I sent that wire. You saw the wire?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I changed my mind. I asked him to go home and leave me. He made a scene.”

“Did he go home and leave you?”

“Yes. Why not?”

“What did you do then?”

“I went to Santa Barbara and stayed there a few days. Over a week in fact. Then to Pasadena. Same thing. Then to Hollywood. Then I came down here. That’s all.”

“You were alone all this time?”

She hesitated a little and then said: “Yes.”

“Not with Lavery—any part of it?”

“Not after he went home.”

“What was the idea?”

“Idea of what?” Her voice was a little sharp.

“Idea of going to these places and not sending any word. Didn’t you know he would be very anxious?”

“Oh, you mean my husband,” she said coolly. “I don’t think I worried much about him. He’d think I was in Mexico, wouldn’t he? As for the idea of it all—well, I just had to think things out. My life had got to be a hopeless tangle. I had to be somewhere quite alone and try to straighten myself out.”

“Before that,” I said, “you spent a month at Little Fawn Lake trying to straighten it out and not getting anywhere. Is that it?”

She looked down at her shoes and then up at me and nodded earnestly. The wavy brown hair surged forward along her cheeks. She put her left hand up and pushed it back and then rubbed her temple with one finger.

“I seemed to need a new place,” she said. “Not necessarily an interesting place. Just a strange place. Without associations. A place where I would be very much alone. Like a hotel.”