Harry took out his handkerchief, carefully wiped the steering wheel, the door rim, and then used the handkerchief, wrapped around his hand, as a sort of glove while he set the brakes and doused the lights and switched off the motor. He opened the car door and slipped out and laid the handkerchief on the door handle before closing the door. Then he backed from the car a few steps and paused. He could see Big Tom in there, lying forward on the dashboard; he thought Big Tom looked exactly like a passed-out drunk and wouldn’t be noticed seriously for hours, not before morning, perhaps, when it would be light enough to see the blood all over him.

“I’m sorry t’ have t’ do this,” Harry muttered. “I just can’t afford t’ get messed up in it.” He started away, then glanced back and whispered, “If I could help, I would. But nothing’s going t’ help now.”

He went back to the main cross-town street and looked around. He’d taken a cab all the way out here, answering Big Tom’s urgent summons, but that was before he had known what had happened. Now he wanted no one connecting him with the district, with Big Tom, or even with the city of Pasadena. He couldn’t risk a cab.

He waited for a bus, and when one came he sized it up; it was quite crowded, a bunch of noisy young people in the back and the others looking tired and indifferent, not paying any attention to each other. He got on. He crouched quickly into a seat near the door before anyone could notice the blood on the side of his suit.

When he reached his flat the blond girl was in bed asleep, naked as usual, reeking with sexy cologne.

Harry sponged the suit in the bathroom, put on his pajamas, took several aspirin and a couple of sleeping pills. When he sat on the side of the bed to yawn the girl roused and grunted at him, and he said, “Shaddap!” Finally he snapped off the bedside lamp and put his head on his pillow and lay there looking at the dark.

“Just like that!” Harry whispered to himself. “What a hell of a way t’ go!”

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

The long black car snaked into the drive, paused, then continued almost silently toward the house. The man behind the wheel, a huge black-haired man with a look of granite hardness about him, said, “Mr. Stolz, the front door’s open.”