I lifted him by the armpits and managed to drag him in behind the hedge, out of sight from the street.
I went back to the car and moved it a hundred feet up the hill and locked it. He was still out when I got back.
I unlocked the door, dragged him into the house, shut the door.
He was beginning to gasp now.
I switched a lamp on. His eyes fluttered open and focused on me slowly.
I bent down, keeping out of the way of his knees and said:
"Keep quiet or you'll get the same and more of it.
Just lie quiet and hold your breath.
Hold it until you can't hold it any longer and then tell yourself that you have to breathe, that you're black in the face, that your eyeballs are popping out, and that you're going to breathe right now, but that you're sitting strapped in the chair in the clean little gas chamber up in San Quentin and when you take that breath you're fighting with all your soul not to take it, it won't be air you'll get, it will be cyanide fumes.
And that's what they call humane execution in our state now."
"Go — — yourself," he said with a soft stricken sigh.
"You're going to cop a plea, brother, don't ever think you're not.
And you're going to say just what we want you to say and nothing we don't want you to say."
"Go — — yourself."
"Say that again and I'll put a pillow under your head."
His mouth twitched.
I left him lying on the floor with his wrists shackled behind him and his cheek pressed into the rug and an animal brightness in his visible eye.
I put on another lamp and stepped into the hallway at the back of the living room.
Geiger's bedroom didn't seem to have been touched.
I opened the door, not locked now, of the bedroom across the hall from it.
There was a dim flickering light in the room and a smell of sandalwood.
Two cones of incense ash stood side by side on a small brass tray on the bureau.
The light came from the two tall black candles in the foot-high candlesticks. They were standing on straight-backed chairs, one on either side of the bed.
Geiger lay on the bed.
The two missing strips of Chinese tapestry made a St. Andrew's Cross over the middle of his body, hiding the blood-smeared front of his Chinese coat.
Below the cross his black-pajama'd legs lay stiff and straight.
His feet were in the slippers with thick white felt soles.
Above the cross his arms were crossed at the wrists and his hands lay flat against his shoulders, palms down, fingers close together and stretched out evenly.
His mouth was closed and his Charlie Chan moustache was as unreal as a toupee.
His broad nose was pinched and white. His eyes were almost closed, but not entirely. The faint glitter of his glass eye caught the light and winked at me.
I didn't touch him. I didn't go very near him.
He would be as cold as ice and as stiff as a board.
The black candles guttered in the draft from the open door.
Drops of black wax crawled down their sides.
The air of the room was poisonous and unreal.
I went out and shut the door again and went back to the living room.
The boy hadn't moved.
I stood still, listening for sirens.
It was all a question of how soon Agnes talked and what she said.
If she talked about Geiger, the police would be there any minute.
But she might not talk for hours.
She might even have got away.
I looked down at the boy.
"Want to sit up, son?"
He closed his eye and pretended to go to sleep.
I went over to the desk and scooped up the mulberry-colored phone and dialed Bernie Ohls' office.
He had left to go home at six o'clock.
I dialed the number of his home.
He was there.
"This is Marlowe," I said. "Did your boys find a revolver on Owen Taylor this morning?"