He had already dismissed Karen Miller from his mind, Eddie saw, and was again fascinated by the house. The roof made a tall, turreted line against the darkening sky. It was an aloof and aristocratic old house, settled in amid dusty cedars and deodars, surrounded by almost a square block of lawns and shrubs. A mansion, Eddie thought, and the idea of fooling around it and the old woman who owned it made prickles of icy bumps crawl on his arms.

Suddenly a couple of lights went on inside, one upstairs and one down. “Doggone!” Skip muttered. “You see that? Both at once? Somebody’s there with her. I’ll find out from Karen tonight who it is.”

“Maybe a maid.” Eddie needed to do something with his hands, so he took cigarettes and a pack of matches from his jacket pocket and lit a smoke.

Skip shook his head. “She doesn’t keep a servant. Too cheap. She makes the chick help her and together they do it all, a hell of a job from what Karen tells me. A regular moperoo.”

“A place that big . . . must be a hundred rooms——”

“Nah. All she has is a gardener. He comes by the day, three times a week. Old guy, deaf as a post. Lives miles from here.”

“Well, then, this relative of hers——”

Skip’s teeth gleamed as he smiled. He was small and wiry, a reddish blond with pale, stony eyes, and when he smiled he looked like a fox. “Yeah, it must be him, the guy from Las Vegas.” They were past the house now. Looking back at it through the masking branches of trees, Eddie caught a cold, faint twinkle of light like a star’s, and this somehow seemed a warning, making the place more dangerous, more impregnable than ever. He choked over words he couldn’t get out.

The car picked up speed as the street leveled out. Beyond the Havermann place the street skirted vacant hilly acres rising to foothills, then descended again to another through boulevard, this one cross-town from Los Angeles, the route they’d taken to get here. Neon signs and street lamps were beginning to flare against the dusk. “Well, what do you say?” Skip asked. “Want a hamburger and coffee before we go on?”

“Sure,” Eddie said, trying to sound easy. His hands were cold and his fingers kept wanting to twitch; he felt a repeated need to swallow. He hoped that Skip didn’t notice his nervousness, and at the same time he envied Skip’s cool manner. This was something to keep you bug-eyed.