I walked back to Broadway, found a taxi, and told the driver to take me to 1232 Hurricane Street.
VIII
My destination was a gray frame cottage with an iron picket fence around it. When I rang the bell the door was opened by a very thin man with a very tired face that had no color in it except a red spot the size of a half-dollar high on each cheek. This, I thought, is the lunger, Dan Rolff.
"I'd like to see Miss Brand," I told him.
"What name shall I tell her?" His voice was a sick man's voice, also an educated man's.
"It wouldn't mean anything to her. I want to see her about Willsson's death."
He looked at me with level, tired, dark eyes and said: "Yes?"
"I'm from the San Francisco office of the Continental Detective Agency. We're interested in the murder."
"That's nice of you," he said ironically. "Come in."
I went in—into a ground-floor room where a young woman sat at a table with a lot of papers on it. The room was disorderly, cluttered up. There were too many pieces of furniture in it, and none of them seemed to be in its proper place.
"Dinah," the lunger introduced me, "this gentleman has come from San Francisco to inquire into the late Mr. Willsson's demise on behalf of the Continental Detective Agency."
The young woman got up from the table, kicked a couple of newspapers out of her way, and came toward me with one hand out.
She was a couple of inches taller than I, which would make her about five feet eight, with a broad-shouldered, full-breasted, round-hipped body and big muscular legs. The hand she gave me was soft, warm, strong. Her face was the face of a girl of twenty-five, already
beginning to show signs of wear. Little lines ran across the corners of her big ripe mouth. Other lines made nets around her thick-lashed eyes. They were large eyes, blue, and a bit blood-shot. Her coarse brown hair needed trimming and was parted crookedly. Her upper lip had been rouged higher on one side than the other. She wore a dress of a particularly unbecoming wine color, and it gaped here and there down one side, where she had neglected to snap the fasteners, or they had popped open. There was a run in the front of her left stocking.
This was Dinah Brand, Poisonville's Cleopatra, if there was any truth in what I had been told.
"His father sent for you, of course," she said as she moved a pair of lizard-skin slippers and a cup and saucer off a chair to make room for me. Her voice was soft, lazy.
I told her the truth:
"Donald Willsson sent for me. I was waiting to see him when he was out becoming killed."
"Don't go away, Dan," she called to Rolff. He came back into the room. She returned to her place at the table. He sat on the opposite side, leaning his thin face on a thinner hand, staring at me without interest. She drew her brows together, making two creases between them, and asked: "You mean he knew someone was going to try to kill him?"
"I don't know," I admitted. "He didn't say what he wanted—maybe just help in the clean-up."
"But do you—?"
I made a complaint:
"It's no fun being a sleuth when somebody steals your stuff—does all the asking."
"I like to find out what's going on," she said, with a little laugh gurgling down in her throat.
"I'm that way, too," I replied. "For instance, I'd like to know why you made him have the check certified."
Very casually, Dan Rolff shifted in
