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puffed on it. The light went out of her eyes. “Can you prove that he did it?”
    “What do you mean by that?”
    “Just exactly what I said.” She spaced her words. “Can you prove it?”
    “No,” I admitted. “But—”
    Her laugh was short and bitter. “Can I prove it? No. It’s my word against a dead man.” She began to cry again. “I know what Sheriff Cooper will think.” She made a little short-armed gesture of distaste. “And Harris, that dirty-minded deputy of his. Every time he comes here he feels me with his eyes, doing with his mind what Jerry did with his body.”
    Her reasoning seemed twisted somehow. But it was difficult for me to think coherently. I wished I’d accepted the drink Corliss had offered me. “What will they think?”
    Her swollen left eye was completely closed now. Closed too tight to let tears escape. “They’ll think I was being bad with Jerry. And you caught us. They’ll think you fought over me.”
    “But your dress?”
    “Anyone can tear a dress,” she sobbed. “I could have torn it myself.”
    “Your eye, then.”
    Her voice was a little silver hammer pounding at me. “You could have hit me as well as Jerry.”
    That much was true. I thought a moment. “But if we don’t go to the law, what can we do?”
    Corliss looked at the man on the floor without pity, the way she had looked at the bee in the car. “We can get rid of his body.”
    “How?”
    “Hide it.”
    Both of us were panting again. I said, “That’s easier said than done. Where would we hide it?”
    “In one of the caves.”
    “What caves?”
    “In the mountains above Malibu.”
    I shook my head. “That’s out.”
    “Why?” she demanded.
    I told her. “Because bodies in caves are always found.”
    Corliss got off my lap and paced the floor like a tawny caged cat. “Then somewhere else. Figure out something.” She threw the words at me. “You’re the man I love. You say that you love me.”
    The cigarette was burning my fingers. I snuffed it out. “I do.”
    Corliss stopped pacing and faced me. “Then do something about it. Do you want to go to jail? Do you prefer that to marrying me?”
    I caught at her hips with both hands and tried to pull her to me. “You know better than that.”
    Corliss twisted her hips free, leaving only the feel of her in my hands.
    “Then think, Swede.” She screamed the words at me. “For both our sakes.”
    “How well did you know him?” I asked.
    She looked at the man on the floor with revulsion. “I didn’t know him. I went out with him once. To a Damon Runyon Cancer Fund dance in Manhattan Beach. On the way home he tried to get fresh, do what he did tonight. And I told him that I never wanted to see him again.”
    “Then what were you doing in his bar last night when you met me?”
    “Telling him off,” Corliss said. “To get even with me for turning him down, he’s been telling it all up and down the beach that I — well, that I’m not the sort of person I ought to be.”
    “What’s his last name?” I asked her.
    Corliss said, “Wolkowysk.”
    “He owned his own bar?”
    “I don’t know. He claimed that he did. But I doubt it. Why?”
    I said, “I’m just wondering how soon he’ll be missed.”
    She lifted her hair away from the back of her neck, then let it drop back in place, like a golden helmet. “Think, Swede, please,” she begged me. “I — I don’t want either of us to go to jail.”
    “There’s no reason why you should,” I pointed out. “You’d have been justified in shooting him. Besides, you didn’t kill him. I did.”
    She said, “In the eyes of the law, both of us are equally guilty.” Corliss came back into my hands again. “We didn’t mean this to happen, did we, Swede?”
    “No.”
    “But it has.” Corliss took my palms from her hips and pressed them against her thighs. “Think, darling. At the best this is manslaughter. And even if I go free it could mean a ten-, perhaps a twenty-year sentence for