She looked lovely tonight-as she had on every day of our marriage, thus far-her dark hair up, a fetching pile of raven curls, her cute nose trailed with freckles, her wide full lips lushly lipsticked. No flower in her hair tonight; we’d have to settle for the cut flowers in crystal vases spotted about our cozy honeymoon shack.

“I mean,” Peggy continued, movie magazine in her lap now, “you’re not even really working any cases in this town, are you? Isn’t that Fred’s job?”

“I thought you liked it out here.”

“I do. You know how I feel about that.”

I knew well. We’d been here over three weeks, and Peggy had made it clear she liked Los Angeles, specifically Hollywood. I had made it clear I did not: to me Hollywood was one big movie set, a world of cheap fancy facades, especially the people.

I should have known I was in trouble the moment Peggy got a load of the Beverly Hills Hotel, with its pink-and-green stucco Mission-style-meets-Art-Moderne buildings strewn about grounds swarming with flowering shrubbery and colorful gardens. Staying at that hotel-a pastel, palm-flung make-believe land whose airy lobby was garnished with stunning floral arrangements and luxurious plants and overstuffed furniture for patrons with overstuffed wallets-was like living inside a movie, a sensation reinforced by having the likes of Cary Grant, Hedy Lamarr, Jimmy Stewart and Rosalind Russell sitting at the table next to you, in the hotel’s main dining room or its Polo Lounge.

Back in the late ’30s, when I met Peggy Hogan, she’d been studying at Sawyer Secretarial College, earning money on the side as an artist’s model, posing for Brown and Bigelow’s Chicago-based calendar artists. The business schooling was at her family’s insistence, as her ambition had been to become an actress. She had lived in Tower Town-at that time, the Chicago equivalent of Greenwich Village-and had some minor success in the Little Theater scene.