It was a Packard convertible, maroon or dark brown. The left window was down.
I felt for the license holder and poked light at it.
The registration read: Carmen Sternwood, 3765 Alta Brea Crescent, West Hollywood.
I went back to my car again and sat and sat.
The top dripped on my knees and my stomach burned from the whiskey.
No more cars came up the hill. No lights went on in the house before which I was parked.
It seemed like a nice neighborhood to have bad habits in.
At seven-twenty a single flash of hard white light shot out of Geiger's house like a wave of summer lightning.
As the darkness folded back on it and ate it up a thin tinkling scream echoed out and lost itself among the rain-drenched trees.
I was out of the car and on my way before the echoes died.
There was no fear in the scream.
It had a sound of half-pleasurable shock, an accent of drunkenness, an overtone of pure idiocy.
It was a nasty sound.
It made me think of men in white and barred windows and hard narrow cots with leather wrist and ankle straps fastened to them.
The Geiger hideaway was perfectly silent again when I hit the gap in the hedge and dodged around the angle that masked the front door.
There was an iron ring in a lion's mouth for a knocker.
I reached for it, I had hold of it.
At that exact instant, as if somebody had been waiting for the cue, three shots boomed in the house.
There was a sound that might have been a long harsh sigh.
Then a soft messy thump.
And then rapid footsteps in the house — going away.
The door fronted on a narrow run, like a footbridge over a gully, that filled the gap between the house wall and the edge of the bank.
There was no porch, no solid ground, no way to get around to the back.
The back entrance was at the top of a flight of wooden steps that rose from the alley-like street below. I knew this because I heard a clatter of feet on the steps, going down.
Then I heard the sudden roar of a starting car. It faded swiftly into the distance.
I thought the sound was echoed by another car, but I wasn't sure.
The house in front of me was as silent as a vault.
There wasn't any hurry. What was in there was in there.
I straddled the fence at the side of the runway and leaned far out to the draped but unscreened French window and tried to look in at the crack where the drapes came together.
I saw lamplight on a wall and one end of a bookcase.
I got back on the runway and took all of it and some of the hedge and gave the front door the heavy shoulder.
This was foolish.
About the only part of a California house you can't put your foot through is the front door.
All it did was hurt my shoulder and make me mad.
I climbed over the railing again and kicked the French window in, used my hat for a glove and pulled out most of the lower small pane of glass.
I could now reach in and draw a bolt that fastened the window to the sill.
The rest was easy.
There was no top bolt. The catch gave.
I climbed in and pulled the drapes off my face.
Neither of the two people in the room paid any attention to the way I came in, although only one of them was dead.
7
It was a wide room, the whole width of the house, It had a low beamed ceiling and brown plaster walls decked out with strips of Chinese embroidery and Chinese and Japanese prints in grained wood frames.
There were low bookshelves, there was a thick pinkish Chinese rug in which a gopher could have spent a week without showing his nose above the nap.
There were floor cushions, bits of odd silk tossed around, as if whoever lived there had to have a piece he could reach out and thumb.
There was a broad low divan of old rose tapestry.
It had a wad of clothes on it, including lilac-colored silk underwear.
There was a big carved lamp on a pedestal, two other standing lamps with jade-green shades and long tassels.
There was a black desk with carved gargoyles at the corners and behind it a yellow satin cushion on a polished black chair with carved arms and back.
The room contained an odd assortment of odors, of which the most emphatic at the moment seemed to be the pungent aftermath of cordite and the sickish aroma of ether.
On a sort of low dais at one end of the room there was a high-backed teakwood chair in which Miss Carmen Sternwood was sitting on a fringed orange shawl.