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out before he was shot. No plateholder. I took hold of his limp chilling hand and rolled him a little. No plateholder. I didn’t like this development.
    I went into a hall at the back of the room and investigated the house. There was a bathroom on the right and a locked door, a kitchen at the back. The kitchen window had been jimmied. The screen was gone and the place where the hook had pulled out showed on the sill. The back door was unlocked. I left it unlocked and looked into a bedroom on the left side of the hall. It was neat, fussy, womanish. The bed had a flounced cover. There was perfume on the triple-mirrored dressing table, beside a handkerchief, some loose money, a man’s brushes, a keyholder. A man’s clothes were in the closet and a man’s slippers under the flounced edge of the bed cover. Mr. Geiger’s room. I took the keyholder back to the living room and went through the desk. There was a locked steel box in the deep drawer. I used one of the keys on it. There was nothing in it but a blue leather book with an index and a lot of writing in code, in the same slanting printing that had written to General Sternwood. I put the notebook in my pocket, wiped the steel box where I had touched it, locked the desk up, pocketed the keys, turned the gas logs off in the fireplace, wrapped myself in my coat and tried to rouse Miss Sternwood. It couldn’t be done. I crammed her vagabond hat on her head and swathed her in her coat and carried her out to her car. I went back and put all the lights out and shut the front door, dug her keys out of her bag and started the Packard. We went off down the hill without lights. It was less than ten minutes’ drive to Alta Brea Crescent. Carmen spent them snoring and breathing ether in my face. I couldn’t keep her head off my shoulder. It was all I could do to keep it out of my lap.

 
    EIGHT
    There was dim light behind narrow leaded panes in the side door of the Sternwood mansion. I stopped the Packard under the porte-cochere and emptied my pockets out on the seat. The girl snored in the corner, her hat tilted rakishly over her nose, her hands hanging limp in the folds of the raincoat. I got out and rang the bell. Steps came slowly, as if from a long dreary distance. The door opened and the straight, silvery butler looked out at me. The light from the hall made a halo of his hair.
    He said: “Good evening, sir,” politely and looked past me at the Packard. His eyes came back to look at my eyes.
    “Is Mrs. Regan in?”
    “No, sir.”
    “The General is asleep, I hope?”
    “Yes. The evening is his best time for sleeping.”
    “How about Mrs. Regan’s maid?”
    “Mathilda? She’s here, sir.”
    “Better get her down here. The job needs the woman’s touch. Take a look in the car and you’ll see why.”
    He took a look in the car. He came back. “I see,” he said. “I’ll get Mathilda.”
    “Mathilda will do right by her,” I said.
    “We all try to do right by her,” he said.
    “I guess you have had practice,” I said.
    He let that one go. “Well, good-night,” I said. “I’m leaving it in your hands.”
    “Very good, sir. May I call you a cab?”
    “Positively,” I said, “not. As a matter of fact I’m not here. You’re just seeing things.”
    He smiled then. He gave me a duck of his head and I turned and walked down the driveway and out of the gates.
    Ten blocks of that, winding down curved rain-swept streets, under the steady drip of trees, past lighted windows in big houses in ghostly enormous grounds, vague clusters of eaves and gables and lighted windows high on the hillside, remote and inaccessible, like witch houses in a forest. I came out at a service station glaring with wasted light, where a bored attendant in a white cap and a dark blue windbreaker sat hunched on a stool, inside the steamed glass, reading a paper. I started in, then kept going. I was as wet as I could get already. And on a night like that you can grow a beard waiting for a