Someone had murdered a Munchkin. The little man was lying on his back in the middle of the Yellow Brick Road with his startled wide eyes looking into the overhead lights of an M.G.M. sound stage. He wore a kind of comic soldier’s uniform with a yellow coat and puffy sleeves and a big fez-like blue-and-yellow hat with a feather on top. His yellow hair and beard were the phony straw color of Hollywood. He might have looked kind of cute in a Tinseltown way if it hadn’t been for the knife sticking out of his chest. The knife was a brown-handled kitchen thing. Only the handle was visible.

As I stepped forward, I could see that the blood made a dark red trail down the far side of the body. The blood flowed into the cracks of the Yellow Brick Road. Up close I could see that the yellow paint was flecking off the bricks. I looked up the road. It didn’t lead to Oz, but to a blank, grey wall.

Then I looked at the body and the grey wall again and wondered what I was doing here. It was Friday, November l, 1940. It’s easy to remember because the previous night just after eleven I had felt the tremor of a mild earthquake. Some Californians mark their lives by the earthquakes and tremors they experience. I just remember them and wonder how long I’ll live lucky.

At the moment I didn’t feel lucky. I felt stupid. An hour earlier I had been talking to someone at Warner Brothers when a call reached me. Someone said she was Judy Garland, and I should get to Metro. I got there as fast as my ’34 Buick would take me, which was not very fast.

At the M.G.M. gate on Washington in Culver City I was greeted by two uniformed security men who didn’t recognize me. There was no reason they should. After a few years on the Glendale police force, I had taken a security job at Warner Brothers. I’d held that for about five years and lost it when I’d broken the arm of a cowboy star. I’d propped him up a lot of times, and he let me down once too often by taking a drunken swing at me. His broken bones knocked two weeks off the shooting schedule of his latest picture and knocked me out of the studio.