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admiring eyebrow above his glass. “You’ve been getting around. But that’s a scam. Underhill is famous for scams. And McGregor is shadier than he is. McGregor doesn’t sell aircraft. He flies hot television sets and dirty money south, and drugs and brown babies north. He’s well known to us.”
    Dave stared. “Brown babies?”
    “Mexican newborns,” Barker said. “To childless couples. Five thousand dollars the mortal soul. It’s not big in California yet. It’s mostly a Texas racket.”
    “Dear God.” Dave tasted his martini. It was bottled, premixed, not very good. “I don’t think Streeter was into smuggling. He liked danger, but a different kind.”
    “What he was into isn’t the point,” Barker said. “The point is, what was Underhill into. You know what Leppard found lying right beside his typewriter? An airline ticket. One way. To North Africa somewhere. Algiers? Algiers.”
    “It doesn’t prove murder,” Dave said. “There’s a guard on the gate at Streeter’s place. Did Underhill visit him at three in the morning? Did Leppard ask the guard?”
    Barker nodded. “He asked, and the guard said only tenants came. And nobody late. But sea air makes you sleepy. The guard could have nodded. Underhill could have reached in and worked the switch to open the gates.”
    Dave lifted and dropped a hand. “Whoever killed Streeter didn’t come in that way. They came in off the balcony to Streeter’s workroom. Third floor. Don’t ask me how they got there—from the roof, I suppose. They knocked over two flowerpots on their way. I saw the flowerpots.”
    Barker sat still. “Did Leppard see them?”
    “I’ll ask him when I see him. I want to see him.”
    Barker read his watch. “Tomorrow.”
    Dave tasted his drink—it was no better this time. “And one more favor, if I may,” he said. “The registration on a late-model white BMW.” He recited the license number on the car of the woman who had argued about the cat with De Lis at the condominium gates this morning. Barker penciled the numbers on a pad, picked up the phone, murmured instructions and read the numbers into it, and hung up. He downed another gulp of whiskey and grinned at Dave. “You’re right,” he said. “A secretary is a wonderful thing.”
    Hilda Vosper, a gray but chipper widow who lived just up the trail, appeared in the Jaguar’s headlights. She wore jeans, sneakers, a boy’s windbreaker jacket, and was walking her ragged little dog. Dave braked to say a neighborly hello. The dog barked and jumped like a fur yo-yo. Hilda Vosper laughed and waved a small friendly hand, and Dave jounced down into the yard of the converted stables where he lived. The front building was dark. Of course. Cecil’s van wasn’t here. No one was home. Dave locked the Jaguar, and rounded the raw-shingled end of the building to a courtyard sheltered by a big old live oak. He was used to the roughness of the weathered brick paving, but it jarred him tonight. Jumping that fence had been a mistake. He ached.
    He unlocked the heavy door of the front building, stepped onto deep carpet, touched a switch so that lamplight made warm circles in the vast, raftered room with its several levels, several groupings of comfortable furniture, and closed the door with relief. Not happiness—he hated coming home to an empty house. He’d never lived alone. First, he’d lived with his father and a succession of beautiful stepmothers—until the Army took him. After the war, he’d lived with Rod Fleming for twenty-two years, until Rod died of cancer. Then there’d been Doug Sawyer, a nice man but one who needed somebody Dave was not. And now there was Cecil Harris, a young black newsman he’d met on a case four or five years ago, up the coast.
    Driving here from Parker Center, feeling tired, Dave had hoped Cecil would get time off for dinner tonight. He was working two shifts this week. Dave was missing him badly, and it was only Wednesday. He stepped behind a