Miss Lee was in the solarium. I followed her through the overdone bungalow into a glass addition that leaned against the front side of the house. A door at one end opened out onto the pool. It was closed now against the bite of a Hollywood winter, and Miss Lee was reclining indoors, on a leather-covered fainting couch, wearing a very small two-piece black bathing suit and tanning in the rays of the afternoon sun as it came filtering through the glass roof. There was a bar across the end nearest the house, and a couple of canvas chairs sitting about.

The woman on the couch had been on so many magazine covers that I felt I knew her. Her hair was jet black, and her eyes were black, and her skin was pale even after tanning. She looked like you could disappear forever into one of her sighs.

"Miss Lee," I said, "I'm Philip Marlowe."

"Of course, Mr. Marlowe. I've been expecting you. Will you have a drink?"

I said I would.

She smiled slowly and nodded toward the bar.

"Please help yourself, I really need to get another fifteen minutes of sun," she said. She had a way of dragging out every word so that she spoke very slowly, and you were obliged to hang on her words. I made a tall Scotch at the bar, adding ice from the silver bucket and watching the moisture bead up on the glass in the warm room.

I took my drink and sat in one of the canvas chairs where she could see me. I tried not to stare at her.

"I saw your photograph yesterday, hanging in the hallway of a man's home," I said. "He is a photographer and you had posed for him."

"Oh? What is his name?" she said.

"Valentine," I said. "Les Valentine."

She reached to the table beside her and took a long pull on a glass half full of what looked like water but probably wasn't.

"Valentine," she said. "What was his first name?"

"Les, that's how he signed the photograph, in gold, down in the right-hand corner."