And her eyes-which were of a lovely clear mountain-lake blue-were indeed half-lidded open.

“Go ahead,” I said numbly.

Fowley knelt, closed the woman’s eyes gingerly, gently, and moved away. I already had.

In fact, I was standing in the street, legs unsteady, weaving. Because the worst memory of all the memories invoked by this gruesome crime scene had come to me, on that closer look at her.

I knew this girl.

Jesus Christ, I knew this girl!

Detectives do not believe in coincidence. Some of us believe in fate, a few even believe in God; but none of us believe in coincidence-when we see it, we know it’s not true, we know something smells, we know somebody’s trying to fuck us.

Nevertheless, my knowing this girl, whose dead body we’d stumbled onto, was a coincidence, pure and simple-and I would just have to live with it (and you will just have to take my word for it). Trouble was, this pure and simple coincidence would look impure and complex to the cops.

And as for reporters and coincidence-newspapermen like Fowley, here, and his boss Richardson-they would hang me out to dry, by the short and curlies.

So how did I come to be standing in this vacant lot in the University section of Los Angeles, over the bisected corpse of a girl I had known? Let’s start with what a Chicago boy was doing in California in the first place-the usual reasons: business and pleasure. The business aspect had to do with the branch of the A-1 Detective Agency I was opening, going partners with Fred Rubinski.

Fred was an ex-cop from Chicago who’d been running his own one-man agency out of the Bradbury Building in downtown L.A. since before the war; he also had a piece of a Sunset Strip restaurant and good connections with the movie industry, both studios and stars. He was at the point where he needed to expand, much as I had done a few years earlier. Throwing in together would benefit both of us. So Fred was now Vice President of the A-1, with offices in Chicago and Los Angeles; and we were looking toward New York.