played over a forest of flowering shrubs and short trees that I couldn't identify in the dark. We went down a small hill, wound up a somewhat higher one and turned a corner. The house that rose up in front of us wasn't anywhere near big enough to hold all of California. Probably not more than the entire population of Los Angeles comfortably. It was lit from the outside with spotlights: white masonry with gables and towers and narrow Tudor windows with diamond panes. There was a vast porte-cochere in front, and when we pulled in under it and stopped, two more guys in blazers appeared to open the doors.
'You work for Walt Disney?' I said.
'It's a little showy,' Garcia said. He got out of the car. So did I. J.D. got out after me.
'Wait here, J.D.,' Garcia said.
'How long you gonna be, Eddie?' J.D. said. 'I got stuff I'm supposed to do tonight.'
Garcia paused and turned his head slowly and looked at J.D. He didn't say anything. J.D. shifted from one foot to the other. Then he tried a smile.
'No rush, Eddie,' he said. 'Anything else I got going tonight can wait.'
Garcia nodded and walked toward the front door. He seemed to expend no effort walking; he seemed to glide. I went after him. One of The Blazers opened the right-hand half of the double front door. It was ten feet high and studded with wrought-iron nail heads.
Inside was a stone floor the length of the house with French doors in the distance that led to something leafy. There was a vast curving staircase rising on the left side of the central corridor and doors opened to the right and left. The ceiling rose thirty or forty feet, and from it hung an enormous iron chandelier in which candles flickered. Real candles, on a giant iron wheel. There was probably a hundred of them. They provided the only light in the hall. On the stone floor there was an Oriental runner that reached the length of the floor and on the wall were tapestries of medieval knights on plump horses with delicate legs.
The front door closed behind us. A butler appeared. He opened one of the doors on the right-hand wall and held it open.
'Follow me, please,' he said.
We went through a library with bookshelves filled to the 15-foot ceilings and giant candles burning in 8-foot candlesticks. There was a fireplace that I could have ridden a horse into. To the right of the fireplace another door opened and we followed the butler through into some sort of space that, had it been three times smaller, might have been somebody's office. The far wall was all glass and opened out onto a pool and beyond, the spotlit gardens. The pool had been built to look like some sort of jungle pool with vines and plants dripping practically into it and a rock-strewn waterfall at the far end splashing down into the lapis lazuli water. There was a bar along another wall, a television set, an illuminated globe almost as big as the original, green leather furniture of the thick-sofa, club-chair variety scattered over a green marble floor, with here and there Oriental throw rugs to stand on if your feet got tired. On the right wall, behind a desk big enough to land helicopters on, wearing an actual red velvet smoking jacket with black silk lapels, was a hatchet-faced man with ice-white hair cut very short, and that phony-looking tan that everybody in Southern California thinks you have to have to prove that you don't live where there's smog. I had seen his picture on a wall once.
Hatchet Face was smoking a white clay pipe with a stem about a foot long, the kind you see in old Dutch paintings. He looked at me the way a wolf looks at the lamb chop and put the stem in his mouth and puffed.
'If you meet people bowling ten pins in the mountains,' I said, 'don't drink anything they offer.'
Hatchet Face didn't change expression. Maybe he couldn't.
Garcia said, 'Guy's name is Marlowe, Mr. Blackstone. He thinks he's tough, and he thinks he's funny.'
Blackstone's voice sounded like someone pouring sand out of a funnel.
'I don't think he's either,' he said. There was nothing there for me; I let it pass.
'We found him in that house on Kenmore,' Garcia said. 'He was tossing it.'
Blackstone nodded. He still had the long stem in his mouth, the bowl cradled in his right hand.
'Why?' he said.
'Says he's a PI. Got a California license, had a gun.'
'What else?'
'Didn't want to say. Said he wanted to talk with you. I figured you might want to talk with him.'
Blackstone nodded, once. It was an approval nod. Garcia didn't look like he cared whether Blackstone approved. On the other hand, Blackstone didn't look like he cared if Garcia cared. These weren't people who wore their hearts on their sleeves. Blackstone shifted his stare to me. His eyes were very pale blue, almost grey.
'What else?' he said in his sandy whisper.
'I was told a woman named Lola lived there,' I said. 'She popped up in a case I was working on.'
'And?'
'And I thought I'd look over her house, see what it told me.'
Blackstone waited. I waited. Eddie Garcia waited. You had the sense from Eddie that he could wait forever.
'And?'
'And what's your interest?' I said.
Blackstone looked from me to Garcia and back.
'Perhaps I should have Eddie teach you some manners,' he said.
'Perhaps you should stop trying to scare me to death and share a little information. Maybe we're not adversaries.'
'Adversaries.' Blackstone made a sound which he probably thought was a laugh. 'An intellectual peeper.'
'My wife reads aloud to me sometimes,' I said.
Blackstone made his sound again. 'With a wife that can read,' he said. 'You know that Lola Faithful is dead?'
'Yeah, shot in the head with a small-caliber gun at close range, in a photographer's office on Western Ave.'
'So what's that got to do with you?' Blackstone said.
'I found the body.'
Blackstone leaned back a little in his chair. He pushed his lower lip out maybe half a millimeter.
'You,' he said.
'Yeah, and that made me sort of wonder about who shot her.'
'Have you a theory?'
'Nothing as strong as a theory,' I said.
Blackstone stared at me for a moment, then he looked at Garcia, then back at me.
'I too would like to know who murdered her,' he said.
'I had a sense you might be interested,' I said. 'About the time your boys threw down on me in Lola's house. And I figure you don't know much about it or why would you have a couple of guys staking the place out. And I figure it's important as hell to you or why would one of the guys be your top boy.'
'What else do you figure?' Blackstone whispered.
'It's what I don't figure that matters. I don't figure whether you're interested in who killed Lola because of Lola, or because of who killed her.'
Again Blackstone looked at me with his expressionless gaze. Again he glanced at Garcia, which was probably as close as he got to indecision.
'I don't know Lola Faithful,' he said.
'So it's who killed her that you're worried about,' I said.
'Cops like the photographer,' he said.
'Cops like the obvious,' I said. 'Usually they're right.'
'You like him?' Blackstone said.
'No.'
'Why not?'
'He doesn't seem the type.'
'That's all?' Blackstone said.
'Yep.'
