office, rummaged and found an address scrawled in a ragged ledger. It was Cornwell Street, only a couple of blocks away, a shabby old duplex. The girl who answered the door had a luscious model's figure, clearly visible in a pair of shorts and a halter, and she didn't know where Mike was but she knew where Gerber might be. He'd been dating Marlene Foster pretty heavy lately, she said, she and Marlene had been to school together, and Marlene had just got laid off her job so she might be out somewhere with Al. That address was Pennsylvania Avenue. The air- conditioning in the Monte Carlo barely had time to get going when they found the place, a single frame house with peeling paint. A shapeless woman in a wrinkled tent dress opened the door.
'Oh,' she said to the question. 'No, Al's not here. Him and Marlene went to the movies. Mostly for the air- conditioning. They went to the first show when it opened at one o'clock.'
'Do you know which one?' asked Landers.
'Sure, the Bijou over on Whittier. Unless they changed their minds. You're cops, aren't you?' She looked doubtfully at Landers. 'Even if you don't look old enough to be.'
Landers with his perennially boyish face would be hearing that one until he was a grandfather.
It was a little past three-thirty then and the first show was probably about over. They looked up the address at the nearest public phone and got to the theater fifteen minutes later. There was a public parking lot half a block away. They looked and spotted Gerber's old Chevy, so they waited.
There wasn't any shade and the sun beat fiercely on the sticky blacktop. They waited another fifteen minutes and a couple walked up to the car laughing and talking.
'Albert Gerber?' asked Hackett.
'Yeah, that's me.' He recognized them for what they were instantly and said, 'What the hell you want anyways?' He was tall and dark with a heavy tan and bulging muscles. The girl was small and blond. She looked scared.
'You,' said Landers and brought out the badge. They had already applied for the warrant.
Gerber came out with a string of obscenities and the girl began to cry. 'You promised you wouldn't get into any more trouble,' she wailed.
'I haven't done a thing, the dirty fuzz just pick on anybody got a little pedigree-'
'Well, Joe Bauman says you were with him on that heist the other day, and it's a charge of murder two this time, Gerber. That pharmacist is dead.'
Gerber said this and that about Bauman. 'I don't know what the hell you're talking about.'
'Come on,' said Landers. 'We're taking you in.'
Gerber fished out his car keys and gave them to the girl. He said, 'You get hold of Mike and tell him I'll need some bail money. The goddanm fuzz.'
They ferried him down to the jail and booked him in. Hackett said, 'We can talk to him some more later on, Tom-after they've got the air-conditioning fixed.'
The air-conditioning was still off at the jail and it felt hotter than it had outside, stuffy and stagnant.
Mendoza left early and got home by six o'clock. It was a little cooler up in the hills above Burbank, but the sun was still fairly high and unrelentingly bright. Beyond the tall iron gates which opened politely as he shoved the gadget on the dashboard, the green pasture on either side of the drive looked pleasantly pastoral. The Five Graces, the woolly white sheep to keep down the weeds, were peacefully huddled in a little cluster grazing industriously. Ken Kearney had the sprinklers going on the pasture. The Kearneys would be relaxing over dinner in their apartment attached to the stables for the ponies, Star and Diamond.
At the top of the hill, where the big old Spanish ranch house sprawled behind its concrete block wall, Mendoza slid the Ferrari into the garage beside Alison's Facel-Vega and Mairi's old Chevy and went in the back way. In the rear patio, Cedric, the Old English sheepdog, greeted him amiably. His long pink tongue was out; in this weather his heavy coat must be a burden. He followed Mendoza in through the service porch.
Mairi MacTaggart was at the stove, Alison busy making a salad. She glanced up. 'You're early, mi vida. The rat race just as usual?'
He bent to kiss her. ' Estoy rendido – I'm exhausted, for no good reason.'
'Is there anything new on the Martin girl?'
' Nada -and maybe nothing ever will show,' he said moodily.
'Now that,' said Mairi, shaking her silver curls at him, 'is a verra strange business indeed. I wonder what happened to that poor thing? Now, you go and sit down with the man, achara, I'll finish that.'
'I need a drink,' said Mendoza.
El Senor, the half-Siamese, could hear that particular cupboard opened the length of the house away, and came floating up to the counter top demanding his share in a raucous voice. Mendoza poured him half an ounce of rye in a saucer. 'Shortening your life,'' he said.
'I'll have a glass of sherry, carina.'
In the living room the twins scrambled up from coloring books to greet him. Baby Luisa was staggering around with a stuffed dog in her arms. The other three cats, Bast, Nefertiti, and Sheba, were dozing in a tangle on the couch. Cedric sprawled at Alison's feet and Mendoza gratefully sank into his big armchair and sipped rye. It cost a fortune to run the air-conditioning in the big house, but it was worth it.
'Have you heard from the French police?' asked Alison.
'That's a dirty word,' said Mendoza.
'I wish to goodness I could remember anything else she said. I've got the definite feeling there was something more, but it just won't come.'
'And it could turn out to be a dead end.' Mendoza sipped rye and tried to turn his mind off. No use worrying at the thing; it was futile. He sighed and leaned back. Someday maybe he would retire and be rid of the thankless job.·
Lander's Sportabout wasn't air-conditioned and he was perspiring and exhausted when he got home to the Hollywood apartment. The apartment, thank God, was air-conditioned, and Phil-whose parents had christened her Phillipa Rosemary before she decided to be a police-woman-looked cool and comfortable. She had got home just, ahead of him, but she had spent the day in air-conditioning down in the R. and I. office. She was bulging a good deal in the midsection these days; the baby was due at the end of December, and at the end of this month she'd be taking maternity leave and then she could stay home until the end of March. And by that time, he reflected without much enthusiasm, they'd be moved into that claptrap house in Azusa-Azusa, my God, forty miles farther to drive- and her car was eight years old and sooner or later she'd have to have another one, and he wasn't due for a raise until next year-and there'd be the house payments-and a baby-sitter.
'You look as if you had quite a day,' said Phil in a concerned voice.
'Well, you look fine,' said Landers. He kissed her, his cute little blond Phil with the freckles on her nose. 'The rat race. I need a drink before dinner.'
'It's just cold cuts and potato salad and odds and ends, unless you'd like a hamburger.'
'That's fine. I'll fix us some drinks and we can take our time.'
THE BRAWL in the Temple Street bar had been time consuming and took a little sorting out. There was only the one patrolman there and he said apologetically that a couple of witnesses had been long gone before he could get their names. There had been quite a little crowd in the place and most of them excited, but he'd done his best. Both Palliser and Grace had served apprenticeships riding squads and knew how awkward that kind of situation could be. 'But. I've got the one who did the knifing. His name's Tony Aguilar.' He had the man in cuffs, sitting at one of the battered wooden tables. 'I got here just about as it happened. The owner had called in-'
'Because I don't want no trouble.' The man leaning on the bar was thickset rather than fat, with a flourishing full black mustache and bushy black eyebrows. He looked nervous. 'Tony, he's got a temper on him. He starts to
