'Me? I'm a legitimate businessman.'
'So you were telling me. It doesn't answer the question.'
'It wasn't a good question.'
'I'll see if I can frame a better one - the hypothetical kind they ask the experts in court.'
'I'm no expert, and we're not in court.'
'Just in case you ever are, it will be good practice for you.'
He didn't feel the needle, which probably meant he was feeling deeper pains. 'How much black money did Leo siphon out of your counting room?'
He answered blandly. 'I don't know anything about it.'
'Naturally you wouldn't know about it. You're too legitimate.'
'Watch it,' he said. 'I've taken as much from you as I've ever taken from anybody.'
'Did he make discount deals with the big losers and use Cervantes to collect and stash the money?'
Davis looked at me carefully. His eyes were dead but unquiet. 'You ask the kind of questions that answer themselves. You don't need me.'
'We need each other,' I said. 'I want Leo Spillman, and you want the money he milked out of the business.'
'If you're talking about that money in L.A., it's gone. There's no way for me to get it back. Anyway, it's nickels and dimes. Our counting room handles more than that every day of the year.'
'So you have no problem.'
'None that you can help me with.'
Davis took another of his walks to the end of the room and back. He moved warily, with a kind of female stealth, as if his desert-colored office was actual desert, with rattlesnakes under the rug.
'If you do catch up with Leo,' he said, 'you might let me know. I'm willing to pay you for the information. Say five grand, if it's exclusive.'
'I wasn't planning to hire myself out as a finger.'
'Weren't you?'
He took another good look at my suit. 'Anyway, the offer stands, bud.'
He opened the door for me. The man with the wide shoulders and narrow head was waiting to accompany me downstairs. The girl who reminded me of Ginny was at one of the crap tables with a different escort. Everything that happened in Vegas seemed to be a repetition of something that had happened before.
I caught a plane back to Los Angeles and slept in my own bed.
27
A JAY WHO LIVED In my neighborhood woke me up in the morning. He was perched on a high limb outside my second-story apartment window, and he was yelling his head off for salted peanuts.
I looked in the cupboard: no salted peanuts. I scattered some wilted cornflakes on the windowsill. The jay didn't even bother to come down from his perch. He cocked his head on one side and looked sardonically at the last of the big spenders. Then he dove off the limb and flew away.
The milk in the refrigerator was sour. I shaved and put on clean linen and my other suit and went out for breakfast. I read the morning paper over my bacon and eggs. The killing of Martel was on the second page, and it was handled as a gang killing. The killing of Marietta Fablon was buried back in the Southland News. No connection was drawn between the two crimes.
On the way to my office on Sunset Boulevard I took a long detour to the Hall of Justice. Captain Perlberg had a preliminary report from the Crime Laboratory. The slug which Dr Wills had removed from Marietta Fablon's chest had almost certainly come from the same gun as the slug that killed Martel. The gun itself, which was probably an old .38-caliber revolver, had not been found, and neither had the person who fired it.
'Got any ideas on the subject?' Perlberg asked me.
'I know a fact. Martel worked for a Vegas casino owner named Leo Spillman.'
'Doing what?'
'I think he was Spillman's courier. Recently he went into business for himself.'
Perlberg gave me a melancholy look. He lit a cigarette and blew smoke at me across his cluttered desk. He wasn't hostile or aggressive, but he had a kind of enveloping Jewish force.
'Why didn't you mention this yesterday, Archer?'
'I went to Vegas last night and asked some questions. I didn't get very good answers, but I got enough to suggest that Martel was co-operating with Spillman in a tax-evasion dodge. Then he stopped co-operating. He wanted the cash for himself.'
'And Spillman gunned him?'
'Or had him gunned.'
Perlberg puffed on his cigarette, filling the small office with the fumes, as if smog was the native element in which his brain worked best.
'How does Mrs. Fablon fit into this hypothesis?'
'I don't know. I have a theory that Spillman killed her husband and she knew it.'
'Her husband was a suicide, according to the Montevista people.'
'So they keep telling me. But it isn't proven. Say he wasn't.'
'Then we have three unsolved killings instead of two. I need an extra killing like an extra hole in my head.'
He stubbed out his cigarette violently. It was the only show of impatience he permitted himself. 'Thanks for the information, though, and the ideas. They may be helpful.'
'I was hoping for a little assistance myself.'
'Anything, if it don't cost the taxpayers money.'
'I'm trying to find Leo Spillman-'
'Don't worry. I'll be on it as soon as you leave this office.'
It was an invitation to depart. I lingered in the doorway. 'Will you let me know when you locate him? I'd give a lot for a chance to talk to him.'
Perlberg said he would.
I drove across town to my own office. There was a sheaf of mail in the letterbox, but nothing that looked interesting. I carried it into the inner office and filed it on top of my desk. A thin film of dust on the desk reminded me that I hadn't been there since Friday. I dusted it with a piece of Kleenex and called my answering service.
'A Dr Sylvester has been trying to get you,' the girl on the switchboard said.
'Did he leave a number?'
'No, he said he had to make some hospital calls. He'll be in his office after one o'clock.'
'What did he want, do you know?'
'He didn't say. He sounded as if it was important, though. And last night you had a call from a Professor Tappinger. He did leave his number.'
She recited it, and I dialed Tappinger's house direct. Bess Tappinger answered.
'This is Lew Archer.'
'How lovely,' she said in her little-girl voice, her statutory rape voice. 'And what a coincidence. I was just thinking about you.'
I didn't ask her what she had been thinking. I didn't want to know.
'Is your husband there?'
'Taps is teaching all morning. Why don't you come over for a cup of coffee? I make a very good Italian coffee.'
'Thanks, but I'm not in town.'
'Oh, where are you?'
'In Hollywood.'
'That's only fifty miles. You could still get here before Taps comes home for lunch. I want to speak to you, Lew.'
'What about?'
'Us. Everything. I was up most of the night thinking about it - about the change in my life - and you're part of
