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punishment, and I could feel her pulling at me. What she was showed all over her, if you believed in evidence at all. She had courage, and that thing called class, for lack of a better word, but they couldn’t keep her going for ever. She’d crack up. Then I wondered savagely why I was supposed to cry over her troubles. They were nothing to me, were they?
    “Why don’t you sell out and leave?” I asked.
    “No!” The vehemence of it surprised me. Then she went on, more calmly. “My husband put everything he had left into this place, and I have no intention of selling it at a sacrifice and running like a scared child.”
    “Then why don’t you landscape it? It looks so desolate it drives people away.”
    She stood up. “I know. But I simply don’t have the money.”
    And I had, I thought, and it was the kind of thing I was perhaps subconsciously looking for, but I didn’t want to become involved with her. I didn’t want to become involved with anybody. Period.
    She hesitated at the door. “Then you won’t even consider it?”
    “No,” I said. I didn’t like the way she could get through to me, and I wanted to get her and her troubles off my back once and for all. “There’s only one way I could stop him if I did find him. Do you want to hire me to beat up an insane man?”
    She flinched. “No. How awful—”
    I went on roughly, interrupting her. “I’m not sure I could. I was suspended from the San Francisco Police Department for brutality, but at least the man I beat up there was sane. I would assume there is a difference, so let’s drop it.”
    She frowned again, perplexed. “Brutality?”
    “That’s right.”
    She waited a minute for me to add something further, and when I didn’t, she said, “I’m sorry to have troubled you, Mr. Chatham,” and went out and closed the door.
    I returned to studying the ceiling. It was no different from a lot of others I had inspected.
    * * *
    About six I called another cab and went into town. I ate a solitary dinner at the Steak House, bought some magazines, and walked back to the motel in the blue and dust-suspended haze of dusk. There were cars parked in front of only three of the rooms. I was lying on the bed reading about half an hour later when I heard another crunch to a stop on the gravel, and then after a few minutes the sound of voices raised in argument. Or at least, one of them was raised. It was a man’s. The other sounded as if it might be Mrs. Langston. It continued, and the man’s voice grew louder. I got up and looked out.
    It was night now, but the lights were on. There were three of them before an open doorway two rooms to my left—Mrs. Langston, a tough-looking kid of about twenty, and a rawhide string of a girl at least five years younger who seemed incomplete without a motor-cycle and a crash helmet. A 1950 sedan was parked in front of the room. I walked over and leaned against the wail and smelled trouble.
    Mrs. Langston was holding out her hand with some money in it. “You’ll have to get out,” she said, “or I’ll call the police.”
    “Call the cops!” the kid said. “You kill me.” He was a big insolent number with hazel eyes and a ducktail haircut the color of wet concrete, and he wore Cossack boots, jeans, and a Basque pullover thing that strained just the way he wanted it across the ropy shoulders.
    “What’s the difficulty?” I asked.
    Mrs. Langston looked around. “He registered alone, but when I happened to look out a minute later I saw her bob up out of the back seat. I told him he’d have to leave, and tried to return his money, but he won’t take it.”
    “You want me to give it to him?” I asked.
    The kid measured me with a nasty look. “Don’t get eager, Dad. I know some dirty stuff.”
    “So do I,” I said, not paying too much attention to him. The whole thing had a phony ring. She rented these rooms for six dollars.
    Mrs. Langston was worried. “Maybe I’d better call the police.”
    “Never