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cheekbones, blue down-dragging mouth. His pale glistening eyes were on me, and so was his black gun.
    “What’s the pitch?” He had yellow teeth.
    “I should be asking you.”
    “Only you’re doing the answering.” The gun nodded in agreement.
    “Joe asked me up for a drink. When I knocked on the door it flew open. Where is Joe, anyway?”
    “Come on, boy, you can do better than that. Joe never asked anybody up for a drink. Joe’s been gone three days. And you don’t drop into a friend’s place with iron showing.” He kicked my gun towards me. “Don’t pick it up.”
    “All right,” I said in tones of boyish candor. “Tarantine ran out on me. He owes me money.”
    Interest flickered wanly in the pale eyes. “That’s better. What kind of money?”
    “I manage a young fighter in Pacific Point. Tarantine bought a piece of him. He didn’t pay up.”
    “You’re doing better, eh? But you’ll have to do better yet. You come along with me.”
    To the land of shades, I thought, the other side of the river. “Where do you stay, the morgue?” His temples were clean and hollowed like a death’s-head under the black hat. The paper-thin wings of his nose were snowbird white.
    “Be still if you want to walk. I can have you carried.” He stooped quickly, scooped up my gun and dropped it in his pocket. I had no chance to move on him.
    He made me walk ahead through the living-room. “Youdid a nice thorough shakedown on it,” I said. “You should apply for a job in an asylum tearing hemp.”
    “I’ve seen it done to people,” he told me dryly. “People that talked too much.” And he jabbed his automatic hard in my kidneys.
    We went down in the upended casket of an elevator, as close as Siamese twins, across the deserted lobby, into the street. The buildings had grown thick into nighttime shapes, and the lights had lost their hominess. The man at my side and one pace to my rear had a car with a driver waiting halfway down the block.

CHAPTER
7 :     
The man behind the wheel was a
run-of-the-mine thug with a carbuncular swelling on the back of his neck. He gave me one dull look as I stepped into the back seat and paid no more attention to me. When he switched on his lights I saw that the thick windshield had the greenish yellow tinge of bulletproof glass.
    “Dowser’s?” the driver grunted.
    “You guessed it.”
    The long black car rode heavily and fast. My companion sat in one corner of the back seat with his gun on his knee. I sat in the other corner and thought of a brigadier I’d known in Colón during the war. His hobby was hunting sharks in the open sea, with no equipment but a mask and a knife. I used to run his speedboat for him sometimes. Nobody on his staff could figure out why he did it. I asked him about it one day when he nearly got himself killed and I had to go in after him. He said that it gave him background for dealing with human beings. He was a very shy man for a general.
    They took me to a hilltop between Santa Monica and Pacific Palisades. A one-car private road turned off the highway to the left and spiraled up the steep slope. At the top a green iron gate barred the entrance to the driveway. The driver honked his horn. As if in automatic response two arc-lights on telephone poles on either side of the gate came on and lit up the front of the house. It was a wide low ranch-style bungalow painted adobe gray. In spite of the red tile roof, it looked a little like a concrete strong point. The man who came out of the gatehouse completed the illusion by strolling sentry-like with a shotgun under his arm. He leaned it against the gatepost, opened the gate, waved us through.
    The front door had a Judas window shaped like a mail slot, above a brass knocker that represented copulating horses for some reason. Judas himself opened the door. He was a curly-headed man with a kind of second-hand Irish good looks. He was wearing headwaiter black for the occasion, with a dingy black bowtie