Its mate reappeared like a woodpecker on the other side of the tree.
Five minutes went by.
It got him.
His type are half nerves.
I heard a match strike and then whistling started. Then a dim shadow slipped along the grass to the next tree.
Then he was out on the walk coming straight towards me, swinging the cane and whistling.
A sour whistle with jitters in it.
I stared vaguely up at the dark sky.
He passed within ten feet of me and didn't give me a glance.
He was safe now. He had ditched it.
I watched him out of sight and went up the central walk of the La Baba and parted the branches of the third cypress.
I drew out a wrapped book and put it under my arm and went away from there.
Nobody yelled at me.
5
Back on the boulevard I went into a drugstore phone booth and looked up Mr. Arthur Gwynn Geiger's residence.
He lived on Laverne Terrace, a hillside street off Laurel Canyon Boulevard.
I dropped my nickel and dialed his number just for fun.
Nobody answered.
I turned to the classified section and noted a couple of bookstores within blocks of where I was.
The first I came to was on the north side, a large lower floor devoted to stationery and office supplies, a mass of books on the mezzanine.
It didn't look the right place.
I crossed the street and walked two blocks east to the other one.
This was more like it, a narrowed cluttered little shop stacked with books from floor to ceiling and four or five browsers taking their time putting thumb marks on the new jackets.
Nobody paid any attention to them.
I shoved on back into the store, passed through a partition and found a small dark woman reading a law book at a desk.
I flipped my wallet open on her desk and let her look at the buzzer pinned to the flap.
She looked at it, took her glasses off and leaned back in her chair.
I put the wallet away.
She had the fine-drawn face of an intelligent Jewess.
She stared at me and said nothing.
I said: "Would you do me a favor, a very small favor?" "I don't know.
What is it?" She had a smoothly husky voice.
"You know Geiger's store across the street, two blocks west?"
"I think I may have passed it."
"It's a bookstore," I said. "Not your kind of a bookstore.
You know darn well."
She curled her lip slightly and said nothing.
"You know Geiger by sight?" I asked.
"I'm sorry. I don't know Mr. Geiger."
"Then you couldn't tell me what he looks like?"
Her lip curled some more.
"Why should I?"
"No reason at all.
If you don't want to, I can't make you."
She looked out through the partition door and leaned back again.
"That was a sheriff's star, wasn't it?"
"Honorary deputy.
Doesn't mean a thing.
It's worth a dime cigar."
"I see." She reached for a pack of cigarettes and shook one loose and reached for it with her lips.