1Steps gibbered along after me and my name was called and I kept on going until I was in the middle of the living room. Then I stopped and turned and let her catch up with me, out of breath, her eyes trying to pop through her glasses and her shining copper-blond hair catching funny little lights from the high windows.

2"Mr. Marlowe? Please! Please don't go away. She wants you. She really does!"

3"I'll be darned. You've got Sub-deb Bright on your mouth this morning. Looks all right too."

4She grabbed my sleeve. "Please!"

5"The hell with her," I said. "Tell her to jump in the lake. Marlowe can get sore too. Tell her to jump in two lakes, if one won't hold her. Not clever, but quick."

6I looked down at the hand on my sleeve and patted it. She drew it away swiftly and her eyes looked shocked.

7"Please, Mr. Marlowe. She's in trouble. She needs you."

8"I'm in trouble too," I growled. "I'm up to my ear flaps in trouble. What are you crying about?"

9"Oh, I'm really very fond of her. I know she's rough and blustery, but her heart is pure gold."

10"To hell with her heart too," I said. "I don't expect to get intimate enough with her for that to make any difference. She's a fat-faced old liar. I've had enough of her. I think she's in trouble all right, but I'm not in the excavating business. I have to get told things."

11"Oh, I'm sure if you would only be patient—"

12I put my arm around her shoulders, without thinking. She jumped about three feet and her eyes blazed with panic.

13We stood there staring at each other, making breath noises, me with my mouth open as it too frequently is, she with her lips pressed tight and her little pale nostrils quivering. Her face was as pale as the unhandy makeup would let it be.

14"Look," I said slowly, "did something happen to you when you were a little girl?"

15She nodded, very quickly.

16"A man scared you or something like that?"

17She nodded again. She took her lower lip between her little white teeth.

18"And you've been like this ever since?"

19She just stood there, looking white.

20"Look," I said, "I won't do anything to you that will scare you. Not ever."

21Her eyes melted with tears.

22"If I touched you," I said, "it was just like touching a chair or a door. It didn't mean anything. Is that clear?"

23"Yes." She got a word out at last. Panic still twitched in the depths of her eyes, behind the tears. "Yes."

24"That takes care of me," I said. "I'm all adjusted. Nothing to worry about in me any more. Now take Leslie. He has his mind on other things. You know he's all right—in the way we mean. Right?"

25"Oh, yes," she said. "Yes, indeed." Leslie was aces. With her. With me he was a handful of bird gravel.

26"Now take the old wine barrel," I said. "She's rough and she's tough and she thinks she can eat walls and spit bricks, and she bawls you out, but she's fundamentally decent to you, isn't she?"

27"Oh, she is, Mr. Marlowe. I was trying to tell you—"

28"Sure. Now why don't you get over it? Is he still around—this other one that hurt you?"

29She put her hand to her mouth and gnawed the fleshy part at the base of the thumb, looking at me over it, as if it was a balcony.

30"He's dead," she said. "He fell out of a—out of a—a window."

31I stopped her with my big right hand. "Oh, that guy. I heard about him. Forget it, can't you?"

32"No," she said, shaking her head seriously behind the hand. "I can't. I can't seem to forget it at all. Mrs. Murdock is always telling me to forget it. She talks to me for the longest times telling me to forget it. But I just can't."

33"It would be a darn sight better," I snarled, "if she would keep her fat mouth shut about it for the longest times. She just keeps it alive."

34She looked surprised and rather hurt at that. "Oh, that isn't all," she said. "I was his secretary. She was his wife. He was her first husband. Naturally she doesn't forget it either. How could she?"

35I scratched my ear. That seemed sort of non-committal. There was nothing much in her expression now except that I didn't really think she realized that I was there. I was a voice coming out of somewhere, but rather impersonal. Almost a voice in her own head.

36Then I had one of my funny and often unreliable hunches. "Look," I said, "is there someone you meet that has that effect on you? Some one person more than another?"

37She looked all around the room. I looked with her. Nobody was under a chair or peeking at us through a door or a window.

38"Why do I have to tell you?" she breathed.

39"You don't. It's just how you feel about it."

40"Will you promise not to tell anybody—anybody in the whole world, not even Mrs. Murdock?"

41"Her last of all," I said. "I promise."

42She opened her mouth and put a funny little confiding smile on her face, and then it went wrong. Her throat froze up. She made a croaking noise. Her teeth actually rattled.

43I wanted to give her a good hard squeeze but I was afraid to touch her. We stood. Nothing happened. We stood. I was about as much use as a hummingbird's spare egg would have been.

44Then she turned and ran. I heard her steps going along the hall. I heard a door close.

45I went after her along the hall and reached the door. She was sobbing behind it. I stood there and listened to the sobbing.

46There was nothing I could do about it. I wondered if there was anything anybody could do about it.

47I went back to the glass porch and knocked on the door and opened it and put my head in. Mrs. Murdock sat just as I had left her. She didn't seem to have moved at all.

48"Who's scaring the life out of that little girl?" I asked her.

49"Get out of my house," she said between her fat lips.

50I didn't move. Then she laughed at me hoarsely.

51"Do you regard yourself as a clever man, Mr. Marlowe?"

52"Well, I'm not dripping with it," I said.

53"Suppose you find out for yourself."

54"At your expense?"

55She shrugged her heavy shoulders. "Possibly. It depends. Who knows?"

56"You haven't bought a thing," I said. "I'm still going to have to talk to the police."

57"I haven't bought anything," she said, "and I haven't paid for anything. Except the return of the coin. I'm satisfied to accept that for the money I have already given you. Now go away. You bore me. Unspeakably."

58I shut the door and went back. No sobbing behind the door. Very still. I went on.

59I let myself out of the house. I stood there, listening to the sunshine burn the grass. A car started up in back and a gray Mercury came drifting along the drive at the side of the house. Mr. Leslie Murdock was driving it. When he saw me he stopped.

60He got out of the car and walked quickly over to me. He was nicely dressed; cream colored gabardine now, all fresh clothes, slacks, black and white shoes, with polished black toes, a sport coat of very small black and white check, black and white handkerchief, cream shirt, no tie. He had a pair of green sun glasses on his nose.

61He stood close to me and said in a low timid sort of voice: "I guess you think I'm an awful heel."

62"On account of that story you told about the doubloon?"

63"Yes."

64"That didn't affect my way of thinking about you in the least," I said.

65"Well—"

66"Just what do you want me to say?"

67He moved his smoothly tailored shoulders in a deprecatory shrug. His silly little reddish brown mustache glittered in the sun.

68"I suppose I like to be liked," he said.

69"I'm sorry, Murdock. I like your being that devoted to your wife. If that's what it is."

70"Oh. Didn't you think I was telling the truth? I mean, did you think I was saying all that just to protect her?"

71"There was that possibility."

72"I see." He put a cigarette into the long black holder, which he took from behind his display handkerchief. "Well—I guess I can take it that you don't like me." The dim movement of his eyes was visible behind the green lenses, fish moving in a deep pool.

73"It's a silly subject," I said. "And damned unimportant. To both of us."

74He put a match to the cigarette and inhaled. "I see," he said quietly. "Pardon me for being crude enough to bring it up."

75He turned on his heel and walked back to his car and got in. I watched him drive away before I moved. Then I went over and patted the little painted Negro boy on the head a couple of times before I left.

76"Son," I said to him, "you're the only person around this house that's not nuts."