The woman gathered herself together and made a dash for the penthouse. Moving clumsily and swiftly, Hoffman caught her around the waist. She didn't struggle, but stood stiff and white-faced in the circle of his arm.

"Not so fast now, baby. Got some questions to ask you. You the broad that's been sleeping with Deloney?"

She said to the man: "Are you going to let him talk to me this way? Tell him to take his hands off me."

"Take your hands off my wife," the man said without force.

"Then tell her to sit down and cooperate."

"Sit down and cooperate," the man said.

"Are you crazy? He smells like a still. He's crazy drunk."

"I know that."

"Then _do_ something."

"I am doing something. You got to humor them."

Hoffman smiled at him like a public servant who was used to weathering unjust criticism. His hurt mouth and mind made the smile grotesque. The woman tried to pull away from him. He only held her closer, his belly nudging her flank.

"You look a little bit like my dau'er Helen. You know my dau'er Helen?"

The woman shook her head frantically. Her hair fluffed out.

"She says there was a witness to the killing. Were you there when it happened, baby?"

"I don't even know what you're talking about."

"Sure you do. Luke Deloney. Somebody drilled him in the eye and tried to make it look like suicide."

"I remember Deloney," the man said. "I waited on him in my father's hamburg joint once or twice. He died before the war."

"Before the war?"

"That's what I said. Where you been the last twenty years, detective?"

Hoffman didn't know. He looked around at the rooftops of his city as if it was a strange place. The woman cried out: "Let me go, fatso."

He seemed to hear her from a long way off. "You speak with some respect to your old man."

"If you were my old man I'd kill myself."

"Don't give me no more of your lip. I've had as much of your lip as I'm going to take. You hear me?"

"Yes I hear you. You're a crazy old man and take your filthy paws off me."

Her hooked fingers raked at his face, leaving three bright parallel tracks. He slapped her. She sat down on the gravel roof. The man picked up the half-empty cola bottle. Its brown contents gushed down his arm as he raised it, advancing on Hoffman.

Hoffman reached under the back of his coat and took a revolver out of his belt. He fired it over the man's head. The pigeons flew up from the neighboring rooftop, whirling in great spirals. The man dropped the bottle and stood still with his hands raised. The woman, who had been whimpering, fell silent.

Hoffman glared at the glaring sky. The pigeons diminished into it. He looked at the revolver in his hand. With my eyes focused on the same object, I stepped out into the sunlight.

"You need any help with these witnesses, Earl?"

"Naw, I can handle 'em. Everythin's under control." He squinted at me. "What was the name again? Arthur?"

"Archer." I walked toward him, pushing my squat shadow ahead of me across the uneven surface of the gravel. "You'll get some nice publicity out of this, Earl. Solving the Deloney killing singlehanded."

"Yeah. Sure." His eyes were deeply puzzled. He knew I was talking nonsense, as he knew he had been acting nonsense out, but he couldn't admit it, even to himself. "They hid the body in the bas.e.m.e.nt."

"That means we'll probably have to dig."

"Is everybody crazy?" the man said between his upraised arms.

"Keep quiet, you," I said. "You better call for reinforcements, Earl. I'll hold the gun on these characters."

He hesitated for a stretching moment. Then he handed me the revolver and went into the penthouse, b.u.mping the doorframe heavily with his shoulder.

"Who are you?" the man said.

"I'm his keeper. Relax."

"Did he escape from the insane asylum?"

"Not yet."

The man's eyes were like raisins thumbed deep into dough. He helped his wife to her feet, awkwardly brushing off the seat of her robe. Suddenly she was crying in his arms and he was patting her back with his diamonded hand and saying something emotional in Greek.

Through the open door I could hear Hoffman talking on the phone: "Six men with shovels an' a drill for concrete. Her body's under the bas.e.m.e.nt floor. Want 'em here in ten minutes or somebody gets reamed!"

The receiver crashed down, but he went on talking. His voice rose and fell like a wind, taking up scattered fragments of the past and blowing them together in a whirl. "He never touched her. Wouldn't do that to the daughter of a friend. She was a good girl, too, a clean little daddy's girl. 'Member when she was a little baby, I used to give her her bath. She was soft as a rabbit. I held her in my arms, she called me da." His voice broke. "What happened?"

He was silent. Then he screamed. I heard him fall to the floor with a thud that shook the penthouse. I went inside. He was sitting with his back against the kitchen stove, trying to remove his trousers. He waved me back.

"Keep away from me. There's spiders on me."

"I don't see any spiders."

"They're under my clothes. Black widows. The killer's trying to poison me with spiders."

"Who is the killer, Earl?"

His face worked. "Never found out who put the chill on Deloney. Word came down from the top, close off the case. What can a man--?" Another scream issued from his throat. "My G.o.d, there's hundreds of 'em crawling on me."

He tore at his clothes. They were in blue and orange rags when the police arrived, and his old wrestler's body was naked and writhing on the linoleum.

The two patrolmen knew Earl Hoffman. I didn't even have to explain.

chapter 23.

The red sun sank abruptly when the plane came down into the shadow of the mountains. I had wired my ETA to the Walters agency, and Phyllis was waiting for me at the airport.

She took my hand and offered me her cheek. She had a peaches-and-cream complexion, a little the worse for sun, and opaque smiling eyes the color of Indian enamel.

"You look tired, Lew. But you do exist."

"Don't tell me. It makes me feel tiredr. You look wonderful."

"It gets more difficult as I get older. But then some other things get easier." She didn't say what things. We walked toward her car in the sudden evening. "What were you doing in Illinois, anyway? I thought you were working on a case in Pacific Point."

"It's in both places. I found an old pre-war murder in Illinois which seems to be closely tied in with the current ones. Don't ask me how. It would take all night to explain, and we have more important things to do."

"You do, anyway. You have a dinner date at eight-thirty with Mrs. Sally Burke. You're an old friend of mine from Los Angeles, business unspecified. You take it from there."

"How did you fix it?"

"It wasn't hard. Sally dotes on free dinners and unattached men. She wants to get married again."

"But how did you get to know her?"

"I sort of happened into her at the bar where she hangs out and we got drunk together last night. One of us got drunk, anyway. She did some talking about her brother Judson, who may be the man you want."

"He is. Where does he live?"

"Somewhere on the South Sh.o.r.e. It's a hard place to find people, as you know. Arnie's out there looking for him now."

"Lead me to the sister."

"You sound like a lamb asking to be led to the slaughter. Actually she's a pretty nice gal," she said with female solidarity. "Not bright, but she has her heart in the right place. She's very fond of her brother."

"So was Lucrezia Borgia."

Phyllis slammed the car door. We drove toward Reno, a city where nothing good had ever happened to me, but I kept hoping.

Mrs. Sally Burke lived close in on Riley Street, in the upper flat of an old two-story house. Phyllis dropped me off in front of it at eight-twenty-nine, having extracted my promise to come back and spend the night with Arnie and her. Mrs. Burke was waiting in full panoply on the upper landing: tight black sheath with foxes, pearls and earrings, four-inch heels. Her hair was mingled brown and blonde, as if to express the complexity of her personality. Her brown eyes appraised me, as I came up to her level, the way an antebellum plantation owner might look over an able-bodied slave on the auction block.

She smelled nice, anyway, and she had a pleasant friendly anxious smile. We exchanged greetings and names. I was to call her Sally right away.

"I'm afraid I can't ask you in, the place is a mess. I never seem to get anything done on Sunday. You know the old song, 'Gloomy Sunday'? That is, since my divorce. Phyllis says you're divorced."

"Phyllis is right."

"It's different for a man," she said with some faint resentment. "But I can see you could use a woman to look after you."

She was one of the fastest and least efficient workers I'd ever met. My heart went down toward my boots. She was looking at my boots, and at the clothes I had slept in on the plane. On the other hand I was able-bodied. I had climbed the stairs unaided.

"Where shall we eat?" she said. "The Riverside is nice."

It was nice and expensive. After a couple of drinks I ceased to care about spending Alex's money. I began to be fascinated, in a way, by Sally Burke's conversation. Her ex-husband, if I could believe her, was a combination of Dracula, Hitler, and Uriah Heep. He made at least twenty-five thousand a year as a salesman in the Northwest, but more than once she had to attach his salary to collect her measly six hundred a month alimony. She was having a rough time making ends meet, especially now that her little brother had lost his job at the club.

I ordered her another drink and indicated mild sympathy.

"Jud's a good boy," she said, as if somebody had just denied it. "He played football at Washington State and led the team in rushing. A lot of people in Spokane thought he would have made All-American if he'd played for a better-known school. But he never got due recognition, he never has. He lost his coaching job out of sheer politics pure and simple. The charges they made were a lot of poppyc.o.c.k, he told me so himself."

"What charges?"

"Nothing. They were a lot of poppyc.o.c.k, I mean it." She finished her fourth martini and regarded me with simple cunning over the empty gla.s.s. "I don't believe you told me what kind of business that you're in. Lew?"

"I don't believe I did. I run a small agency in Hollywood."

"Isn't that interesting? Jud has always been interested in acting. He hasn't done any, actually, but he's said to be a very handsome boy. Jud was down in Hollywood last week."

"Looking for an acting job?"

"Anything," she said. "He's a willing worker, but the trouble is he isn't trained for anything, I mean after he lost his teaching credentials, and then the dance studio folded. Do you think you could get him something to do in Hollywood?"

"I'd certainly like to talk to him," I said truthfully.

She was tipsy and hopeful, and she wasn't surprised by my interest in her brother.

"_That_ can be arranged," she said. "As a matter of fact he's at my apartment right now. I could call him and tell him to come over here."

"Let's have dinner first."

"_I_ don't mind paying for Jud's dinner." She realized she had made a tactical error, and quickly back-tracked: "But I guess three's company, eh? I mean two."

She talked so much about her brother at dinner that it was almost like having him there. She recited his old football statistics. She told me, with a kind of vicarious enthusiasm, all about his prowess with the ladies. She explained about the brilliant ideas Jud was always hatching. The one I liked best was a plan for a condensed version of the Bible, with all the offensive pa.s.sages removed, for family reading.

Sally couldn't drink. She was coming apart by the time we finished eating. She wanted to pick up her brother and go and h.e.l.l around in the clubs, but my heart wasn't in it. I took her home. In the cab she went to sleep on my shoulder. This I didn't mind.

I woke her up on Riley Street and got her into the house and up the stairs. She seemed very large and loosely put together, and the foxes kept slipping. I felt as if I'd been nursing drunks all weekend.

A man in shirtsleeves and form-fitting trousers opened the door of her flat. With Sally leaning on me, I got a quick impression of him: a man of half-qualities who lived in a halfworld: he was half-handsome, half-lost, half-spoiled, half-smart, half-dangerous. His pointed Italian shoes were scuffed at the toes.

"Need any help?" he said to me.

"Don't be ridic," Sally said. "I'm in perfect control. Mr. Archer, meet brother Jud, Judson Foley."

"h.e.l.lo," he said. "You shouldn't have let her drink. She's got a weak head for liquor. Here, I'll take her."

With weary skill he looped her arm over his shoulders, clasped her around the waist, walked her through the front room into a lighted bedroom, laid her out on the Hollywood bed, and turned off the light.