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was due for a P-card in a very few weeks. He’d probably have gone home in two or three months. Carl didn’t have to run away, and he knew it.”
    “Remember he had another man with him. Tom Rica may have done some pretty good needling.”
    “Is Tom Rica with him now?”
    “He wasn’t when I saw Carl.”
    “That’s good. I shouldn’t say it about a patient, but Tom Rica is a poor risk. He’s a heroin addict, and this isn’t his first cure. Or his last, I’m afraid.”
    “I’m sorry to hear it. I knew him when he was a boy. He had his troubles even then, but he was a bright kid.”
    “It’s queer that you should know Rica,” she said with some suspicion. “Isn’t that quite a coincidence?”
    “No. Tom Rica sent Carl Hallman to me.”
    “They are together, then?”
    “They left here together. Afterwards, they seem to have gone separate ways.”
    “Oh, I hope so. An addict looking for dope, and a vulnerable boy like Carl—they could make an explosive combination.”
    “Not a very likely combination,” I said. “How did they happen to be buddies?”
    “I wouldn’t say they were buddies, exactly. They were committed from the same place, and Carl’s been looking after Rica on the ward. We never have enough nurses and technicians to go around, so our better patients help to take care of the worse ones. Rica was in a bad way when he came in.”
    “How long ago was that?”
    “A couple of weeks. He had severe withdrawal symptoms—couldn’t eat, couldn’t sleep. Carl was a positive saint with him: I watched them together. If I’d known how it was going to turn out, I’d have—” She broke off, clamping her teeth down on her lower lip.
    “You like Carl,” I said in a neutral tone.
    The young woman colored, and answered rather sharply: “You would, too, if you knew him when he’s himself.”
    Maybe I would, I thought, but not the way Miss Parish did. Carl Hallman was a handsome boy, and a handsome boy in trouble was a double threat to women, a triple threat if he needed mothering.
    Not needing it, and none being offered, I left.

chapter
7
          T HE address which Carl had given me for his wife was near the highway in an older section of Purissima. The highway traffic thrummed invisibly like a damaged artery under the noon silence in the street. Most of the houses were frame cottages or stucco boxes built in the style of thirty years ago. A few were older, three-story mansions surviving from an era of elegance into an era of necessity.
    220 was one of these. Its long closed face seemed abashed by the present. Its white wooden walls needed paint. The grass in the front yard had grown and withered, untouched by the human hand.
    I asked the cab-driver to wait and knocked on the front door, which was surmounted by a fanlight of ruby-colored glass. I had to knock several times before I got an answer. Then the door was unlocked and opened, reluctantly and partially.
    The woman who showed herself in the aperture had unlikely purplish red hair cut in bangs on her forehead and recently permanented. Blue eyes burned like gas-flames in her rather inert face. Her mouth was crudely outlined in fresh lipstick, which I guessed she had just dabbed on as a concession to the outside world. The only other concession was a pink nylon robe from which her breasts threatened to overflow. I placed her age in the late forties. She couldn’t be Mrs. Carl Hallman. At least I hoped she couldn’t.
    “Is Mrs. Hallman home?”
    “No, she isn’t here. I’m Mrs. Gley, her mother.” Shesmiled meaninglessly. There was lipstick on her teeth, too, gleaming like new blood. “Is it something?”
    “I’d like very much to see her.”
    “Is it about—him?”
    “Mr. Hallman, you mean?”
    She nodded.
    “Well, I would like to talk to him.”
    “Talk to him! It needs more than talk to him. You might as well talk to a stone wall—beat your head bloody against it trying to change his ways.” Though she seemed angry