We talked for a few more minutes, and gradually the friction which had been building during the first part of our conversation lessened. It got quite enjoyable. When Lolita wasn't discussing Quinn or the trial she got pretty animated, and simply breathing shallowly she was very nearly animated enough to blow fuses in the next apartment.

She was telling me about auditioning for the job in the Gardenia Room. "I did have to audition," she said. "Mr. Sullivan makes all the acts audition for him, naturally. But especially the girl acts."

"Who's Sullivan?"

"Manager of the Gardenia Room, and he hires all the people for the shows. Sully, they call him. He's big and bald - it isn't that his hair's getting thin, he says, just that his scalp's getting thick." She laughed. "So he wears a beret all the time. Imagine, a beret, even in the office. Always chewing a big cigar. He kept trying to get me to take off my clothes."

"He didn't!"

"He sure did. But I didn't. You see, they always have one or two strip acts in the show, and he kept telling me I had the makings for a stripper."

"You've got the makings, all right."

"I kept telling him I was a singer, and I didn't have to take my clothes off to sing. You know what he said?"

"What?"

"He said it would sure help."

"Yeah. Help him."

"He kept saying, 'C'mon, baby, lessee what you got.'" She smiled. "He said a stripper who could sing too would be a sensational act - and he could even pay me for both jobs. If I'd just audition. But finally I convinced him I was a singer, period. He always auditions the girls in his office - even after the club closes sometimes. He's a crazy one."

"Yeah, crazy."

We were getting pretty far afield here. Especially with Lolita dressed just in that white robe. At least I guessed that was all she was dressed in. When I thought about it. Which was quite a lot.

But I said sternly, "However, about Quinn - "

"Oh, let's not talk about him any more," she said. "Let's relax just a little."

"I can't relax just a little."

"Oh." She crossed her legs and the white robe fell away from calf, knee, gleaming thigh.

"Now, look here," I said in a no-nonsense tone, "don't pull that stuff on me. It won't work, probably."

Her black hair was loose, spread in a ma.s.s over her shoulders. She shook her head from side to side, the thick hair gently whipping. The easy movement caused ripples beneath the top of her robe, which parted in a narrow V, and then a wider U, and finally became something like a W.

"I'm sorry," Lolita said in a glad voice, and uncrossed her long, lovely legs, only to cross them again the other way. The robe wiggled and billowed and slid.

Yeah, that's all she has on, just the robe, I thought. Wow! I thought. Give a man enough robe, I thought. But at the same warped moment another thought was fluttering in my skull, up there with the bats. And it was: Scott, old man, you've got to get out of here. But he wasn't listening.

"Oh, Sh.e.l.l, you're so businesslike," she said gayly. "Forget business for a minute, can't you?"

I said, "It won't work."

She shifted her position just a bit, as if getting more comfortable. She certainly looked more comfortable. "It won't," I said. "I'll give you ten to one it won't . . . Eight to five?"

Then she shifted a bit more and said, "Let's just talk fun, and have fun, and all. Just fun."

"Sounds fun," I said. "What's it mean - "

"Forget everything else. Just talk, have another drink, have a little party. The two of us."

"Why not? Sure. Fine and dandy." I didn't even give a hoot about quizzing her any more. After all, n.o.body's perfect. I have my flaws. I have my weaknesses. And my Achilles' heel is not in my feet.

She smiled gorgeously. "You don't have to sit clear at the other end of the divan, do you?"

"I should say not," I said, moving as I spoke.

Lolita, still smiling, leaned back against the cushions behind her and said, "Isn't this better, Sh.e.l.l? Now we - " Then she broke off suddenly, staring across the room. "Goodness," she said. "I had no idea."

"Huh?" I followed her gaze. There wasn't anything over there except a table, chair, and a big clock.

"Goodness," she said again, "I didn't know it was so late."

"It's later that you think."

"I'm on in twenty minutes."

"Say that again."

"I only have twenty minutes to get dressed, and undressed."

"One of us is nuts."

"Changed, I mean I'm due at the club - the band is already playing."

"I don't hear a thing."

"I might even get fired if I'm late again."

"I might get fired myself if - "

"You'll have to leave."

"Leave?"

"Go away. Get out. Go home,"

"But . . ."

"I'm sorry. I have to go to the club."

"But . . . but . . . but . . ." Nothing else came out. Her meaning was filtering in, but I was trying to keep it unaltered; then we were up off the divan, and she was saying, "I am sorry, Sh.e.l.l," and I was being led in something approaching stupor to the front door, and then the door was closing gently behind me and I was staring blankly at a small beetle or something else very unexciting which was running across the hall carpet.

I turned around and said to the closed door, "But . . ." I could hear her inside there trotting around. Getting dressed, I presumed. I raised a hand in the air and said, "But . . ." and let the hand fall to my side. I wasn't sure what had happened. Not a bit sure.

All I knew was that - somehow - she had tricked me.

Seven.

I really don't know how long I stood there. But I was still standing there, looking at the beetle. He - or she; you can't tell about beetles - was almost to the wall, and I was wondering what good it would do him or her when it got there. And then I heard the click of the doork.n.o.b behind me.

And Lolita's voice: "Sh.e.l.l?"

I swung around. "Yes? Yes?"

"You . . ." She stopped, started again. "It seems so silly. But you really think he might try to kill me, don't you?"

I pulled myself together, took a deep breath and snorted it out. "I do. I don't say it's a sure thing, but he might. And if he might, there's no sense making it easy for him."

She sighed, moistened her felonious lips. "You really think I should stay away from the club tonight?"

"Tonight - and for many more nights."

"Well . . . come back in, will you, Sh.e.l.l? Maybe you're right. You've got me half convinced."

I went back in. Two minutes later we were on that divan again, and I had the other half of her convinced.

And a little later she said, "Oh, Sh.e.l.l, don't go. Don't go."

"h.e.l.l," I said weakly, "who's going?"

Before midnight we left the Whitestone. Half an hour later I parked my Cad near the Washington, a medium-priced hotel on Washington Boulevard. I'd used every trick I knew to make sure we weren't tailed - being the last car through red lights, doubling back, going the wrong way up one-way streets and so on - and I knew we hadn't been followed.

In a few more minutes Lolita was checked into room forty-one - not as Lolita Lopez - and I said to her at the door, "I'll be pretty busy tomorrow, so I probably won't get back here till tomorrow night sometime. You keep out of sight till then."

She smiled. "I'll even call room service for food."

"Fine. See you tomorrow, honey."

She nodded, looking at me from half-lidded eyes. "'Bye, Sh.e.l.l."

I went back to the Cad, climbed in and headed for home.

At ten o'clock the next morning I started to get a little panicky. Because this was Monday morning and there remained exactly forty-eight hours before Ross Miller's execution - which meant that Miller was now being taken from his cell in San Quentin's Death Row and moved into an isolation cell. He would be moved only once again, into the gas chamber. And now I knew he was innocent, knew an innocent man was going to die - unless I stopped his execution.

But the only man who could stop that execution was the Governor of the State of California. And merely what I "knew" - tales from alcoholic hoodlums, rumbles from the city's sc.u.m, deductions, logic, hearsay evidence - would not at all impress the Governor of the State of California.

In the next six hours I didn't get close to anything that would help Miller, or hurt Quinn. I talked to Ira Semmelwein and John Porter, the two men Pinky told me were being paid off by Quinn. They were cordial, pleasant, but - Quinn? Who in the world was Frank Quinn? The gangster? Goodness, they didn't know any gangsters.

That's the way it went. Moreover, I had to move about with considerable care. I knew Quinn would try to get me again. I didn't know where or when or how; but I knew he'd try - until I managed to stop him. So at four o'clock that afternoon I parked before the Twenty-Centuries Costume Center on La Cienega Boulevard.

The thought of actually attending Frank Quinn's hoodlum ball tomorrow night was a prospect which still filled me with something approaching total nausea. But I had decided to make the necessary preparations for that insanity, just in case.

I got out of the Cad and walked over to the Costume Center. On display behind the window was a stately mannequin of a gal in powdered wig and fluffy silks and laces, looking much like Marie Antoinette, and with her dress scooped out even lower than today's most daring gowns. Worn any lower it would have been merely a high skirt. I liked it a lot. Next to Marie was a guy from a different period, a Roman gladiator, who didn't look glad about anything; he was tugging strenuously at a broad-bladed sword sticking from his solar plexus, and looking pretty uncomfortable. It was an interesting window, but of no great help to me, so I went on inside.

The inside was even more interesting than the outside, primarily because the little honey-blonde lovely behind the counter was no wax model, but definitely a model I could wax enthusiastic about, and she was wearing a harem costume that would have cremated the sultan.

I walked up to the counter and leaned over it toward her, and she batted big long dark lashes at me like a gal waving two fans in a Spanish fandango and said, "Can I help you?" and I said, "You have."

She cooed and chuckled and made jolly noises all at once, which turned out to be quite delightful even though you may not think that possible, and I said, "I note that you are already modeling, in superlative fashion, one of this establishment's costumes. That being the case - "

She interrupted, grinning just as widely as I was, "The Marie Antoinette costume sells for six hundred and twenty dollars, and I don't model that one."

"Well, at least I knew it was Marie Antoinette. I'm not so stupid."

"Did you want the costume?"

"No, I'm after something for me." She coughed delicately and fluttered the fanlike eyelashes over soft brown eyes, and I added hastily, "For me to wear, I mean. I'm invited to a costume ball."

"What did you have in mind?"

"Something that will cover me all up."

"That seems a shame."

"Doesn't it? I want to . . . surprise some people."

"Oh, you don't want to be recognized. A surprise?"

"That's it."

She thought a moment. And very cute, she was, thinking. It was as if she had to stretch unused muscles, creakingly, but then her soft little face smoothed out and she said, "I have it!"

"You do indeed."

"The clown!"

"What?"

"The clown! There!" She pointed, all excited. Here was a gal who really threw herself into her work. "Isn't it dreamy?"

I followed her pointing finger. All I saw was a stiff model wearing a black floor-length gown or robe and a black hood with eyes and mouth holes cut in it, and holding a broad-bladed axe.

"Not the Executioner, silly," she said. "The Clown."

Then I spotted him, another ten feet farther away. It was another figure, male this time, presumably, dressed in a baggy white outfit which droopily covered his whole body, even including the legs in somewhat the same fashion as this little gal's harem bloomers, and which had three six-inch red b.u.t.toms down the front. On his head was a ta.s.seled red-and-blue cap, and his face was painted white and red and black with a big blue nose stuck on for good measure. He was somewhat nightmarish, if not exactly dreamy, and he was exactly what I wanted.