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wait, I heard his voice. I hardly recognized it. It had a blurred quality, almost as if Sable had been crying:
    “This is Gordon Sable.”
    “Archer speaking. You took off before we could make definite arrangements. On a case like this I need an advance, and expense money, at least three hundred.”
    There was a click, and then a whirring on the wire. Someone was dialing. A woman’s voice said: “Operator! I want the police.”
    “Get off the line,” Sable said.
    “I’m calling the police.” It was his wife’s voice, shrill with hysteria.
    “I’ve already called them. Now get off the line. It’s in use.” A receiver was fumbled into place. I said: “You still there, Sable?”
    “Yes. There’s been an accident, as you must have gathered.” He paused. I could hear his breathing.
    “To Mrs. Sable?”
    “No, though she’s badly upset. My houseman, Peter, has been stabbed. I’m afraid he’s dead.”
    “Who stabbed him?”
    “It isn’t clear. I can’t get much out of my wife. Apparently some goon came to the door. When Peter opened it, he was knifed.”
    “You want me to come out?”
    “If you think it will do any good. Peter is past help.”
    “I’ll be there in a few minutes.”
    But it took me longer than that. The Arroyo Park suburb was new to me. I took a wrong turning and got lost in its system of winding roads. The roads all looked alike, with flat-roofed houses, white and gray and adobe, scattered along the terraced hillsides.
    I went around in circles for a while, and came out on top of the wrong hill. The road dwindled into a pair of ruts in a field where nothing stood but a water tower. I turned, and stopped to get my bearings.
    On a hilltop a mile or more to my left, I could make out a flat pale green roof which looked like the Arizona gravel roof of Sable’s house. On my right, far below, a narrow asphalt road ran like a dark stream along the floor of the valley. Between the road and a clump of scrub oaks an orange rag of flame came and went. Black smoke trickled up from it into the still blue air. When I moved I caught a flash of sunlight on metal. It was a car, nose down in the ditch, and burning.
    I drove down the long grade and turned right along the asphalt road. A fire siren was ululating in the distance. The smoke above the burning car was twisting higher andspreading like a slow stain over the trees. Watching it, I almost ran down a man.
    He was walking toward me with his head bent, as if in meditation, a thick young man with shoulders like a bull. I honked at him and applied the brakes. He came on doggedly. One of his arms swung slack, dripping red from the fingers. The other arm was cradled in the front of his sharp flannel jacket.
    He came up to the door on my side and leaned against it. “Can you gimme a lift?” Oily black curls tumbled over his hot black eyes. The bright blood on his mouth gave him an obscene look, like a painted girl.
    “Smash up your car?”
    He grunted.
    “Come around to the other side if you can make it.”
    “Negative. This side.”
    I caught the glint of larceny in his eyes, and something worse. I reached for my car keys. He was ahead of me. The short blue gun in his right hand peered at the corner of the open window:
    “Leave the keys where they are. Open the door and get out.”
    Curlyhead talked and acted like a pro, or at least a gifted amateur with a vocation. I opened the door and got out.
    He waved me away from the car. “Start walking.”
    I hesitated, weighing my chances of taking him.
    He used his gun to point toward the city. “Get going, Bud. You don’t want a calldown with me.”
    I started walking. The engine of my car roared behind me. I got off the road. But Curlyhead turned in a driveway, and drove off in the other direction, away from the sirens.
    The fire was out when I got to it. The county firemen were coiling their hose, replacing it on the side of the long red truck. I went up to the cab and asked the man at the