The Chateau Marmont was a lovely, old-style, rambling kind of hotel. It turned its nose up at Los Angeles below and catered to wealthy and beautiful residents who did illegal things alone and with others in the upstairs rooms and the cottages out back. It was the kind of place where a man of my hue could be turned away at the front door for little to no reason. At places like the Chateau I’d have to come up with a trick just to get the doorman to answer a simple question. I could pretend to be a janitor looking for a job or maybe a chauffeur picking up a client. I would have needed to come up with some kind of subterfuge if I didn’t already have a backdoor man.

A few years earlier Bo Tierce, of Riverside via Mississippi, had already languished nineteen months at Folsom State Prison. Bo had been convicted of a trio of crimes: B and E, assault and battery, and rape. This because he had a record for burglary and he’d been working as a gardener for the mansion next door a few months before the crime.

The police arrested him at his home, when his wife was out waitressing at some diner. His bad record combined with no alibi convicted him. He pled guilty for a nine-year sentence bargained down from a probable thirty. I was hired by a Beverly Hills banker named Holloway who had lost a very valuable piece of art in the B and E part of Bo’s conviction. Holloway’s seventeen-year-old night maid, Sorrell Hart, had a shattered cheekbone and soiled virtue, but all Holloway was interested in was his possession: a small iron sculpture of an angry crow attributed to Picasso.

Holloway had called Saul Lynx to investigate the loss but Saul was on another case and so told him that his partner Easy Rawlins was a better fit.

Sorrell was living in Gardena with her spinster aunt trying to forget about that night. She wasn’t happy to see me but I had convinced Mr. Holloway to write her a severance check for twenty-five hundred dollars, and she needed, as well as deserved, the money.

Among other things I found out her attacker, unlike Bo, had a military tattoo and a small mustache. One might wonder why the police hadn’t gathered this data when they first questioned the most innocent victim of the crime. The answer was simple—Sorrell was in the hospital when the investigation started and the detectives in charge had already found out that Bo had a bad temper, one or two violent charges against him, and one conviction for burglary. The police questioned Miss Hart only once, and that was while she was still in the hospital.