“All right, all right. I was tryin’ to be professional but you got me. The day I went to the Eye a woman came to my office. She said her name was Charlotte Nell and that her daughter, Portia, had been seduced and turned out by Griggs. She wanted to find him to buy her daughter back. I asked around, found that he showed up at the Eye now and then. I asked some questions and a little guy in a green suit told me that he’d heard Griggs had been killed. I found out where the cat stayed at and called Anatole. Just a citizen doing his duty.”

“The man who told you,” Suggs said, “what’s his name?”

“Said it was Tom.”

“Tom what?”

I shrugged and Melvin snorted.

“White guy?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“How do I get in touch with this woman, this Charlotte Nell?”

“She said she’d come by the next day. . . . She didn’t.”

“You got a number?”

I shook my head and said, “I figured that with Griggs dead the daughter came back on her own.”

“Maybe the mother killed him,” Suggs suggested.

“If she did I wasn’t the one who told her where to find him.”

Melvin knew when he was being played. He also knew that when he once lost Mary I brought her back home.

“Sounds pretty slim,” he said after a bit.

“Am I under arrest?”

“The coroner says that he’d been dead for two days. That means you were asking about him after the killing.”

“I guess I could’a been creating an alibi. But why would I do that when I could just let someone else find the body on their own?”

“If I had that answer,” Suggs said, “you’d be in cuffs right now.”

“You want I should give you a description of the client?”

I made up some features and he jotted down a few notes. Charlotte Nell had nothing in common with Lola except her age and race. When I told Melvin that was all I remembered, he stood straight up from the visitor’s chair, told me that unless they found the killer someone would be back to ask more. I said that my door was always open and he left through it.

By noon I had migrated up to Niska’s desk. I’d spent an hour or two trying to think of how the LAPD could charge me with the pornographer’s death. It seemed unlikely and so I traded in Einstein for the Herald Examiner.

21

21

Somewhere just after 1:00 I heard the door downstairs slam shut. This gave me time to take the .38-caliber snub-nose from my pocket, place it on Niska’s blue blotter, and cover it with the newspaper. Some seconds passed and there came a knock on the upper door.