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were young men, with few discernible differences except that one was dark, one fair. Both had heavy shoulders and jaws, unmoved eyes, conspicuous guns in their holsters, and hands ready.
    “Who is he?” said the blue-eyed one.
    “I don’t know.”
    “Who are you?”
    I told them my name, and handed over my identification.
    “You’re a private detective?”
    “That’s right.”
    “But you don’t know who this is in the car?”
    I hesitated. If I told them it was Sidney Harrow, as I guessed, I’d have to explain how I found that out and would probably end up telling them everything I knew.
    “No,” I said.
    “How did you happen to find him?”
    “I was passing by.”
    “Passing by to where?”
    “The beach. I was going to take a walk on the beach.”
    “That’s a funny place to take a walk on a day like this,” said the fair one.
    I was ready to agree. The place had changed. The dead man had bled it of life and color. The men in uniform had changed its meaning. It was a dreary official kind of place with a cold draft blowing.
    “Where you from?” the dark one asked me.
    “Los Angeles. My address is on my photostat. I want it back, by the way.”
    “You’ll get it back when we’re finished with you. You got a car, or you come to town by public carrier?”
    “Car.”
    “Where is your car?”
    It hit me then, in a reaction that had been delayed by the shock of finding Harrow, if that’s who he was. My car was parked in front of the Sunset Motor Hotel. Whether I told them about it or not, the police would find it there. They’d talk to Mrs. Delong and learn that I’d been on Harrow’s trail.
    That was what happened. I told them where my car was, and before long I was in an interrogation room in police headquarters being questioned by two sergeants. I asked several times for a lawyer, specifically the lawyer who had brought me to town.
    They got up and left me alone in the room. It was an airless cubicle whose dirty gray plaster walls had been scribbled with names. I passed the time reading the inscriptions. Duke the Dude from Dallas had been there on a bum rap. Joe Hespeler had been there, and Handy Andy Oliphant, and Fast Phil Larrabee.
    The sergeants came back and regretted to say that they hadn’t been able to get in touch with Truttwell. But they wouldn’t let me try to phone him myself. In a way this breach of my rights encouraged me: it meant that I wasn’t a serious suspect.
    They were on a fishing expedition, hoping I’d done their work for them. I sat and let them do some of mine. The dead man was Sidney Harrow, without much question: his thumbprint matched the thumbprint on his driver’s license. He’d been shot in the head, once, and been dead for at least twelve hours. That placed the time of death no later than last midnight, when I had been at home in my apartment in West Los Angeles.
    I explained this to the sergeants. They weren’t interested. They wanted to know what I was doing in their county, and what my interest in Harrow was. They wheedled and begged and coaxed and pleaded and threatened me and made jokes. It gave me a queer feeling, which I didn’t mention to them, that I had indeed inherited Sidney Harrow’s life.

chapter
6
    A man in plain dark clothes came quietly into the room. Both the sergeants stood up, and he dismissed them. He had clipped gray hair, eyes that were hard and sober on either side of a scarred and broken nose. His mouth was chewedand ravaged by lifelong doubt and suspicion, and it kept working now. He sat down facing me across the table.
    “I’m Lackland, Captain of Detectives. I hear you been giving our boys a bad time.”
    “I thought it was the other way around.”
    His eyes searched my face. “I don’t see any marks on you.”
    “I have a right to a lawyer.”
    “We have a right to your cooperation. Try bucking us and you could end up flat on your rear end without a license.”
    “That reminds me, I want my photostat back.”
    Instead,