It was an anonymous of office in an anonymous kind of building, don't ask me where.  I can find my way around Washington and New York, not to mention London, Paris, Stockholm, 0slo, Copenhagen, and East and West Berlin, but Los Angeles is an unexeplored and unmapped wilderness as far as I'm concerned.  Anybody who can figure out those freeways is wasting his time hind a steering wheel.  With that kind of genius, he ought to be doing advanced research on space travel.

Anyway, it was the place to which Charlie Devlin - so help me, Charlie was what they called her around home base - had brought me after the firearms demonstion, when I asked to make a long-distance phone call.  I thought it was damn nice of her.  She could have taken me that filling station pay phone and made me call collect and supply my own dime.  I had a hunch that her new accommodating attitude was due, at least partly, to the fact that she felt she'd misjudged me: I hadn't shot up anybody after all.

"Yes, sir, it was a phony," I said into the telephone.  "That's right, sir.  Strictly a snow job for our benefit."

I looked across the desk at the black man and the red-haired girl watching me from the doorway.  Charlie stood behind them, guarding them.  I didn't feel the nickname really fit her - or maybe there was more to her than I'd been allowed to see.  An arrogant, inhibited, self-righteous young lady who nevertheless allowed her colleagues to address her as Charlie just couldn't take herself as seriously as she seemed to.  But Miss Devlin's character was strictly beside the point, at least for the moment.

"Yes, sir," I said.  "Warfel must have got a scriptwriter over from Hollywood to do the screenplay.  It was good typecasting, but the sinister pug-type didn't shoot Annette O'Leary and the heartless starlet-type didn't set her up for it, even though they were both eager to claim the glory.  No, sir, I have no idea how Warfel got them to cooperate.  They aren't saying.  But guys like that have ways of applying pressure."

I watched the two faces as I said it.  McConnell's features remained impassive, but Beverly's eyes widened and darkened a bit as if at a frightening memory.

"What was the tipoff?  Well, no one thing exactly, sir, except that Warfel looked like a man putting on an act and overdoing it, casually inviting me to spill blood all over his bedroom carpet, for God's sake!  And McConnell was willing enough to confess to murder - maybe a little too willing - but when he heard that the girl had been roughed up before she was shot, he was jolted just like any black man accused of manhandling a white girl would be.  He hadn't expected that, and he wasn't braced for it....  Just a minute, sir."

McConnell had taken an angry step forward.  "You're just playing Sherlock Holmes, man!"  he snapped.  "What do you know about black men and white girls?"

I regarded him without affection.  The name he had called me, back at the pistol range, didn't bother me greatly, but the attitude it illustrated did.  I don't like people who think tolerance is a one-way street.  If Mr. McConnell wanted his origins treated with respect by me, he could damn well treat mine the same way, and keep his loaded racial terms to himself.

"I don't know too much," I said, "but you did react, amigo, and you didn't know how to handle that big pistol that was supposed to be your pride and joy.  You may have shot lots of people with other guns, but not with that one or anything like it, and that's what killed Annette O'Leary.  Maybe I got the right answer for the wrong reasons, but I got it, didn't I?"

I waited.  He was silent.  The girl known locally as Charlie spoke a soft command and he stepped back into the doorway.  I addressed myself to the telephone once more, watching Beverly as I talked.