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piles of cases along the walls.
    “What about her?”
    “Nothing much. He got in a little trouble over her. I guess I shouldn’t be flapping at the mouth. Only you brought her up.”
    “Did he get too intense about her?”
    “You can say that twice. But what do you say we skip it? The guy’s dead now. He won’t be bothering women any more. He never did mean them any harm. And most ways he was a decent guy for a Mex, as straight as any white man.” He searched his mind for an illustration, and added: “He had a damn good record on the road.”
    “This trouble he got into over Annie Meyer,” I said. “What kind of trouble was it?”
    Tarko looked uncomfortable. “Tony was a little bit of a nut, see. Just about dames, I mean. Especially Annie. She let him take her out a couple of times last year, and then he got in the habit of following her around at night, peeping in her apartment window, stuff like that. The poor guy didn’t mean any harm, but he got himself picked up for it.”
    “Who picked him up?”
    “The sheriff. He gave Tony a tongue-lashing, said he was nuts and he ought to go and see a head-doctor. Tony told me all about it at the time.”
    My handmade cigarette was out. I dropped it and ground it under my heel. It had served its purpose.
    “About this girl of his—Jo—did you give the sheriff the dope on her?”
    “Not me. I wouldn’t give the chicken sheriff the time of day.”
    “You don’t seem to like the sheriff much.”
    “I know Brand Church too well. He drove a truck for the old man one summer when he was in college. I knew him way back before that, even, when his father ran a barbershop downtown. Brand was all right in those days, he was a damn good football-player in high school. Only going to college changed him. He came back to town with a lot of big ideas.”
    “What kind of big ideas?”
    “Psychology, he called it. Everybody was crazy except him. Hell, he even tried to pull it on me, said that I was accident-prone or something. He as much as told me I ought to get my head examined. Me.” An old anger reddened his scalp, blotchily. “Maybe he can put it over on the rest of the town. I don’t buy it. The old man don’t like him much, either, but he’s stuck with him for a son-in-law.”
    “How many daughters has Meyer got?”
    “Just the two. Church married the older one, Hilda. She was helping around the office that same summer, and she went for him. I never could figure out why. The old man raised a hell of a stink about it.”
    “Where does the old man live?”
    He gave me directions, and nudged me confidentially with his shoulder. “Don’t tell him what I said, eh? I like a guy that can roll his own, and I talk too much sometimes.”
    I thanked him for his information and told him I could hold it.

 
    CHAPTER 6 :
Meyer lived in a big frame house
that stood against a eucalyptus grove at the rear of a vacant lot. The lot wasn’t entirely vacant. Eight or nine car bodies, T-models, A-models, an old Reo truck, and a pickup layamong its weeds in various stages of disintegration.
    I left my car in the driveway and crossed the rank lawn, circling a concrete fishpond whose stagnant smell competed with the uric odor of the eucalyptus trees. The old-fashioned deep veranda was shadowy and cluttered with garden tools and tangled hose. Its boards creaked under my feet.
    A sharper sound split the silence, twice, three times. I tried the front door. It was locked. Three more shots cracked out, from somewhere deep inside the house, probably the basement. Between them I heard the tap-tap of approaching footsteps. A woman’s voice said through the door:
    “Is that you, Brand?”
    I didn’t answer. A light went on over my head and she pulled the heavy door open. “Oh. I’m sorry. I was expecting my husband.”
    She was a tall woman, still young, with a fine head of chestnut air. Her body leaning awkwardly in the doorway was heavy-breasted and very female, almost too female