The hat she wore had a veil, a dainty visor of spotted black silk that stopped at the tip of her nose-and a nice tip it was, to a very nice nose, aristocratic but not too narrow or too long, and nothing at all like Cleopatra's jumbo schnozzle. She was taller than she had seemed when I saw her from the window, tall and slender with broad shoulders and trim hips. I was about to call to her to come in, using my special deep-toned, you-can-trust-me-I'm-a-detective voice, when she came in anyway, without knocking. The sound of high heels on a wooden floor always gets something going in me. The buzzer sounded to announce that the outer door had opened, and I heard a woman walk across the waiting room and pause a moment at the door of my office. There was a coin in there with the head of Alexander the Great on it, and another one showing Cleopatra in profile, with that big nose of hers-what did they all see in her? I had to apply a little muscle to get the goods back, but nothing serious.
Then Bernie Ohls in the Sheriff's office put me in touch with a nice little old lady whose hophead son had pinched her late husband's rare coin collection. He was worried, and sweated a lot, but nothing happened and I got paid. He said he was a businessman and I decided to believe him. He had a blue jaw and wore a gold wristband and a pinkie ring with a ruby in it as big as a boysenberry. I had done a week playing bodyguard to a guy who had flown in from New York on the clipper. She looked left and right and left again-she must have been so good when she was a little girl-then crossed the sunlit street, treading gracefully on her own shadow. She wore a hat, too, a skimpy affair that made it seem as if a small bird had alighted on the side of her hair and settled there happily.
Long legs, a slim cream jacket with high shoulders, navy blue pencil skirt. I watched a woman at the corner of Cahuenga and Hollywood, waiting for the light to change. Cars trickled past in the street below the dusty window of my office, and a few of the good folks of our fair city ambled along the sidewalk, men in hats, mostly, going nowhere. The telephone on my desk had the air of something that knows it's being watched. It was one of those Tuesday afternoons in summer when you wonder if the earth has stopped revolving.
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