He rummaged in the bottom drawer of his desk and produced a map, on which he made some markings. 'I suppose you know that General Bagshaw is dead.'
'I'm sorry to hear it.'
'We were devastated here at the bank. He always did his local banking with us. Mrs. Bagshaw still does, of course. If it's Mrs. Bagshaw you want to see, she's moved into one of the cottages at the Tennis Club. The house is leased to a fellow by the name of Martel.'
'You know him?'
'I've seen him. He does his banking at our main office downtown.'
McMinn gave me a quick suspicious look. 'Are you acquainted with Mr. Martel?'
'Not yet.'
I drove back into the foothills. The slopes were still green from the rains. The white and purple flowers on the brush gave out a smell like the slow breath of sunlight.
When I stopped my car at the Bagshaw mailbox, I could see the ocean below, hung on the horizon like unevenly blued washing. I had climbed only a few hundred feet but could feel the change in temperature, as if I had risen much nearer to the noon sun.
The house sat alone in its own canyon head, several hundred feet above the road. It looked almost as tiny as a bird-house. A blacktop driveway hair-pinned up to it from where I was parked.
A convertible with a snarl in the gearbox was toiling up behind me from the direction of town. It passed me, an old black Caddie, gray with dust, and stopped in front of my car.
The driver got out and came toward me. He was a middle-sized man wearing a hound's-tooth jacket and a good-looking pearl gray fedora, which he wore at a cocky slant. He moved with a kind of quick embarrassed belligerence. I had no doubt that he was Peter's 'detective', but he didn't look like a detective to me. An air of desperate failure hung about him like a personal odor.
I got out my black book and made a note of the Cadillac's license number. It had California plates.
'What are you writing?'
'A poem.'
He reached through the open window for my notebook. 'Let's see it,' he said in a loud unimpressive voice. His eyes were anxious.
'I never show work in progress.'
I closed the book and put it back in my inside breast pocket. Then I started to turn up the window on his arm. He yanked his arm away and pressed his face against the glass, blurring it momentarily with his breath.
'I want to see what you wrote about me.'
He took a miniature camera out of his pocket and rapped on the window with it, foolishly and frantically. 'What did you write about me?'
It was the kind of situation I liked to avoid, or terminate quickly. As the century wore on - I could feel it wearing on angry pointless encounters like this one tended more and more to erupt in violence. I got out on the right-hand side and walked around the front of the car toward him.
As long as I was in my car, he had been yelling at a machine, a Cadillac yelling at a Ford. Now we were both men, and he was shorter and narrower than I was. He stopped yelling. His whole personality changed. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, as if to disclaim the evil spirit that had invaded him and made him yell at me. Self-doubt pulled at his face like a surgically hidden scar.
'I didn't do anything out of line, did I? You got no call to write down my license number.'
'That remains to be seen,' I said in a semi-official tone. 'What are you doing here?'
'Sightseeing. I'm a tourist.'
His pale eyes glanced around at the sparsely inhabited hills as if he had never been out in the country before. 'This is a public road, isn't it?'
'We've had a report of a man who was representing himself as a law officer last night.'
His glance lighted briefly on my face, then jumped away. 'It couldn't be me. I never been here before in my life.'
'Let's see your driver's license.'
'Listen,' he said, 'we can get together on this. I don't have much with me but I got other resources.'
He drew a lonely ten from a worn calfskin billfold and tucked it in the breast pocket of my jacket. 'Here. Buy something for the kids. And call me Harry.'
He smiled with conscious charm. But the charm he was conscious of, if it had ever existed, had dried up and blown away. His front teeth glared at me like a pair of chisels. I removed the ten from my pocket, tore it in half, and gave him back the pieces.
His face fell apart. 'That's a ten-dollar bill. You must be a kook to tear up money like that.'
'You can put it together with Scotch tape. Now let me see your license before you commit another felony.'
'Felony?'
He said it the way a sick man pronounces the name of his disease.
'Bribery and impersonating an officer are felonies, Harry.'
He looked around at the daylight as if it had betrayed him, again. A little pale moon hung in a corner of the sky, faint as a thumbprint on a windowpane.
A fiercer light flashed down the canyon above us and almost dazzled me. It seemed to come from the head of a man who was standing with a girl on the terrace of the Bagshaw house. For a second I had the impression that he had great round eyes and that they had emitted the flashing light. Then I realized he was watching us through binoculars.
The man and the girl with him were as small as figures on a wedding cake. Their height and distance from me gave me a queer feeling, as if they were somehow unattainable, out of reach, out of time.
Harry Felony scrambled into his car and tried to start the engine. It turned over slowly like a dead man turning over in his grave. I had time to open the far door and get in on the gnawed leather seat.
'Where are we going, Harry?'
'Nowhere.'
He turned off the ignition and dropped his hands. 'Why don't you leave me alone?'
'Because you stopped a young man on this road last night and said you were a detective and asked him a lot of questions.'
He was silent while his malleable face went through new adjustments. 'I am a detective, in a way.'
'Where's your badge?'
He reached into his pocket for something, probably a dimestore badge, then changed his mind. 'I don't have one,' he admitted. 'I'm just a kind of amateur dick, you might say, looking into something for a friend. She' - he swallowed the pronoun- 'they didn't say anything about this kind of trouble.'
'Maybe we can make a deal after all. Let me see your driver's license.'
He got out his worn billfold and handed me a Photostat.
HARRY HENDRICKS 10750 Vanowen, Apt. 12 Canoga Park, Calif.
SEX M COLOR HAIR brn COLOR EYES blu HEIGHT 5' 9 ' WEIGHT 165 MARRIED no DATE OF BIRTH Apr 12 1928 AGE 38
From the lower left-hand corner a photograph of Harry grinned at me. I took down the address and the number of the license in my notebook.
'What do you want all that stuff for?' he said in a worried voice.
'So I can keep track of you. What do you do for a living, Harry?'
'Sell cars.'
'I don't believe you.'
'Used cars, on commission,' he said bitterly. 'I used to be an insurance adjuster but the little fellows can't compete with the big boys anymore. I've done a lot of things in my time. Name it and I done it.'
'Ever do time?'
He gave me a hurt look. 'Of course not. You said something about a deal.'
'I like to know who I'm dealing with.'
'Hell, you can trust me. I've got connections.'
