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the slope. I saw when it reached the highway that she was driving and that her friend was in the seat beside her. He was wearing his grey suit, with a shirt and tie, and he bore a curious resemblance to those blank-faced dummies you see in the windows of men’s clothing stores. They turned south, toward Los Angeles.
    I followed them down the highway. Malibu slowed them, and I was close on their tail as they passed through the shabby fringes of Pacific Palisades. They made a left turn onto Sunset. The light had changed when I reached the corner. By the timeit changed in my favor, the Buick was far out of sight. I tried to make up the minutes I had lost, but the squealing curves of the Boulevard kept my speed down.
    I remembered that the Blackwells lived in the hills off Sunset. On the chance that Harriet was on her way home, I turned in through the baronial gates of Bel Air. But I couldn’t find the Blackwell house, and had to go back to the hotel to ask directions.
    It was visible from the door of the hotel bar. The white-coated barman pointed it out to me: a graceful Spanish mansion which stood at the top of the terraced slope. I gave the barman a dollar of Blackwell’s money and asked him if he knew the Colonel.
    “I wouldn’t say I
know
him. He isn’t one of your talkative drinkers.”
    “What kind of a drinker is he?”
    “The silent type. My favorite type.”
    I went back to my car and up the winding road to the hilltop house. The rose garden in front of it was contained like a conflagration by a clipped boxwood hedge. Harriet’s Buick was standing in the semicircular gravel drive.
    I could see her father’s white head over the roof of the car. His voice carried all the way out to the road. I caught isolated words like sneak and scrounger.
    When I got nearer I could see that Blackwell was carrying a double-barreled shotgun at the hip. Burke Damis got out of the car and spoke to him. I didn’t hear what he said, but the muzzle of the shotgun came up to the level of his chest. Damis reached for it.
    The older man fell back a step. The level gun rested firmly at his shoulder. Damis took a step forward, thrusting out his chest as if he welcomed the threat of the gun.
    “Go ahead and shoot me. It would fix you at least.”
    “I warn you, you can press me so far and no farther.”
    Damis laughed. “You ain’t seen nothing yet, old man.”
    These things were being said as I climbed out of my car and walked toward them, slowly. I was afraid of jarring the precarious balance of the scene. It was very still on the hilltop. I could hear the sound of their breathing and other things besides: my feet crunching in the gravel, the low call of a mourning dove from the television antenna on the roof.
    Neither Blackwell nor Damis looked at me as I came up beside them. They weren’t in physical contact, but their faces were contorted as though their hands had death grips on each other. The double muzzle of the shotgun dominated the scene like a pair of empty insane eyes.
    “There’s a dove on the roof,” I said conversationally. “If you feel like shooting something, Colonel, why don’t you take a shot at it? Or is there a law against it in these parts? I seem to remember something about a law.”
    He turned to me with a grimace of rage stamped in the muscles of his face. The gun swung with his movement. I took hold of the double barrel and forced it up toward the unoffending sky. I lifted it out of Blackwell’s hands, and broke open the breach. There was a shell in each chamber. I tore a fingernail unloading them.
    “Give me back my shotgun,” he said.
    I gave it to him empty. “Shooting never solved a thing. Didn’t you learn that in the war?”
    “The fellow insulted me.”
    “The way I heard it, insults were traveling in both directions.”
    “But you didn’t hear what he said. He made a filthy accusation.”
    “So you want big black filthy headlines, and a nice long filthy trial in Superior