“What the hell were you doing with him?” Then an air, quiet and watchful, settled over Big Tom. “Wait a minute. You’ve come on business?” Big Tom shook his head decisively. “Afraid you’re barking up the wrong tree. Don’t plan on me, Willy. I’m all through.”

Willy nodded mildly. “I know, it’s not even your kind of job. I wanted to offer it, though, because of the favors you did me in the past.”

“Forget it.” Big Tom turned the talk to other subjects: the house, the yard and the flowers, his family of cats. They were outdoors presently and Big Tom led Willy toward the lath house. “Begonias in here. I’m slipping some gardenias and camellias—not hard to do, but it takes them forever to start growing. See this fern? Jap gave it to me. The Japs irradiate or poison the damned fern some way; it comes all crinkly like that, like green lace.”

Willy nodded over the ferns. He thought the place smelled mossy and fungus-like. He said, “There’s this guy from Vegas, owns a chunk of a hotel over there. He’s got some dough hid out in an old barn of a place in Pasadena. Nobody around but an old woman and a young girl. The girl won’t make any trouble.”

Big Tom rearranged some potted plants and ran a hose over some fuchsias. “I’m sorry to hear that you’re meddling around with such things, Willy. You know and I know that you can’t afford it.”

“I’m not going to have any part of it,” Willy said. “I’m just offering you the information because you tried to help me a long time ago when nobody else would have spit on me if I was afire.”

Big Tom thrust a finger into a basket. “Getting dry. That’s the trouble with the canyon, the wind through here drying everything out. I water these fuchsias three, four times a day. Can’t keep ’em damp otherwise. Not even here, under the lath.” He worked his way around the bench.

“You always went for this stuff,” said Willy, trying not to walk on the fine green creeping growth on the floor.

“I’d of sure been better off if I’d done what the old gardener wanted me to. You know, that first time I was inside—they let me help Mr. Wilcox and he taught me to garden and grow things. Vegetables, too, that was the work end of it; we had to supply the tables at Preston. Then the flowers—he showed me how—that was the fun end of it, the beauty end, and I almost got a job gardening when I got out. Only, there was my brother. You remember Buddy.”

“Yeah. I remember.”