Chapter One
Ellery was spread over the pony-skin chair before the picture window, huarachos crossed on the typewriter table, a ten-inch frosted glass in his hand, and the corpse at his feet. He was studying the victim between sips and making not too much out of her. However, he was not concerned. It was early in the investigation, she was of unusual proportions, and the ron consoled.
He took another sip.
It was a curious case. The victim still squirmed; from where he sat he could make out signs of life. Back in New York they had warned him that these were an illusion, reflexes following the death rattle. Why, you won’t believe it, they had said, but corruption’s set in already and anyone who can tell a stinkweed from a camellia will testify to it. Ellery had been skeptical. He had known deceased in her heyday ― a tumid wench, every man’s daydream, and the laughing target of curses and longing. It was hard to believe that such vitality could be exterminated.
On the scene of the crime ― or rather above it, for the little house he had taken was high over the city, a bird’s nest perched on the twig tip of an upper branch of the hills ― Ellery still doubted. There she lay under a thin blanket of smog, stirring a little, and they said she was dead.
Fair Hollywood.
Murdered, ran the post-mortem, by Television.
He squinted down at the city, sipping his rum and enjoying his nakedness. It was a blue-white day. The hill ran green and flowered to the twinkled plain, simmering in the sun.
There had been no technical reason for choosing Hollywood as the setting for his new novel. Mystery stories operate under special laws of growth; their beginnings may lie in the look in a faceless woman’s eye glimpsed in a crowd for exactly the duration of one heartbeat, or in the small type on page five of a life insurance policy; generally the writer has the atlas to pick from. Ellery had had only the gauziest idea of where he was going; at that stage of the game it could as well have been Joplin, Missouri, or the kitchens of thin fact, his plot was in such a cloudy state that when he heard about the murder of Hollywood he took it as a sign from the heavens and made immediate arrangements to be present at the autopsy. His trade being violent death, a city with a knife in its back seemed just the place to take his empty sample cases.
Well, there was life in the old girl yet. Of course, theaters with MOVIES ARE BETTER THAN EVER on their marquees had crossbars over their portals saying CLOSED; you could now get a table at the Brown Derby without waiting more than twenty minutes; that eminent haberdasher of the Strip, Mickey Cohen, was out of business; movie stars were cutting their prices for radio; radio actors were auditioning tensely for television as they redesigned their belts or put their houses up for sale; shopkeepers were complaining that how could anybody find money for yard goods or nail files when the family budget was mortgaged to Hoppy labels, the new car, and the television set; teen-age gangs, solemnly christened “wolf packs” by the Los Angeles newspapers, cruised the streets beating up strangers, high school boys were regularly caught selling marijuana, and “Chicken!” was the favorite highway sport of the hot-rodders; and you could throttle a tourist on Hollywood Boulevard between Vine and La Brea any night after 10:30 and feel reasonably secure against interruption.