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sunset?”
    I turned, startled to find Sergeant Manny Rodriguez grinning at me from the doorway. “Hello,” I said. “You must have rubber heels.”
    “Sure, a regular gum-shoe.” He sat down in my customer’s chair and leaned back. He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a package of cigarettes, offering one to me.
    I shook my head. “Just finished one. What’s new, Manny?”
    “Not enough,” he said. “McGill isn’t happy. He’s got Rickett as cold as a D.A. would want but he’s still fretting. It doesn’t look clean enough to him.”
    “What does he care? A conviction’s a conviction, isn’t it?”
    “Not to Captain McGill, incorruptible Captain Enoch McGill. He thinks it all goes back to that Bea Condor case. And that case is still a thorn in his side.”
    I had to be careful. I said easily, “Well, Rickett was the man he wanted in that one. Now he’s got him cold.”
    “Cold enough for a conviction,” Manny admitted, “but not clean enough for McGill’s conscience. He smells a frame.”
    I said nothing.
    Manny tilted his hat back and considered his cigarette. “I’ve been trying to find Josie Gonzales. Seen her?”
    “She’s dead,” I said.
    Manny turned to stare at me. “You’re sure?”
    I shook my head. “Pete Deutscher told me.”
    Manny was leaning forward in his chair now. “I don’t believe it. I’d know if she was dead. I knew her for years. I know a lot of her friends. I’d know if she was dead.”
    “All I know is what Pete told me. Cancer. You could ask Pete.”
    “I’ll do that.” He stood up. “Target dead and Josie dead. Would that make you happy, Joe?”
    “Why should it?”
    “I don’t know. Except that Condor case smelled to high heaven.” He put his cigarette out in the ash tray on my desk. “I’ve always been a sort of friend of yours for some damned reason. But if I knew you had paid off Target and Josie, I’d really come for you, Joe. I met that Bea Condor once, and she didn’t look like any whore to me.”
    “You can’t always tell in this town,” I said. “She had a lot of talent but it doesn’t necessarily follow she had much character.”
    Manny said nothing. His dark face was rigid and the hand that crushed the cigarette was clenched tightly. He turned without looking at me, said, “See you” over his shoulder and went out without closing the door.
    I wondered if it was Bea Condor he was thinking of, or Josie Gonzales. Manny isn’t usually grim.
    I thought of McGill. He’d been a Bea Condor admirer, too, and when her despoiler had been cleared by a susceptible jury because of Target’s and Josie’s testimony, he’d been deeply shocked. And he must know something about my part in it. So why had he been so genial today? Waiting for me to slip, using honey instead of vinegar? He’d wait a long time.
    I phoned Deutscher at his office and home, but didn’t get him. I wanted to tell him Manny was on the way.
    At Herbie’s on Vine, I had a few cheese snacks and a couple drinks of rye and then I walked over to the Monterey Plaza. I bought a Times and settled down into a deep lobby chair.
    Then the house detective, Art Gesler, came over to chin for a while, and time went by. And then a white-haired man in a beautiful blue gabardine suit was walking toward us across the lobby and I recognized Charles Adam Roland from the pictures I’d seen of him.
    Gesler knew him and the three of us talked in the lobby for a few minutes.
    When Gesler left us, Roland said, “Six years ago, he caught me trying to sneak out of this same hotel. You’d never know it by the way he acted tonight, would you?”
    “Art Gesler’s got a lot of regard for wealth,” I said, “and you look wealthy tonight.”
    “I’m solvent,” he said. “But we’re not wealthy yet , are we, Joe?”
    He was quite a boy: that white silky hair and those dark blue eyes and a deep sincere voice that radiated good will, confidence, the fellowship of man.
    He told me,