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the number, but it was the one on the right at the far corner. I think it was Number Five.”
    I said, “Okay. We’ll see what we can do.”
    Billings said, “Remember that if you find these women there’s to be a five-hundred-dollar bonus.”
    I said, “That bonus business doesn’t conform to the rules of ethics that are laid down for the operation of a private detective agency.”
    “Why not?” Billings asked.
    “It makes it too much like operating on a contingency fee. They don’t like it.”
    “Who doesn’t like it?”
    “The people who issue the licenses.”
    “All right,” he said to Bertha, “you find the girls and I’ll donate five hundred dollars to your favorite charity.”
    “Are you nuts?” Bertha asked.
    “What do you mean?”
    “My favorite charity,” Bertha told him, “is me. ”
    “Your partner says contingency fees are out.”
    Bertha snorted.
    “Well, no one’s going to tell anyone about it,” Billings said, “unless you get loquacious.”
    “It’s okay by me,” Bertha said.
    I said, “I’d prefer to have it on a basis that—”
    “You haven’t found the girls yet,” Billings interrupted. “Now get this straight. I want an alibi for that night. The only way I can get it is to find these girls. I want affidavits. I’ve made my proposition. I’ve given you all of the informationthat I have. I’m not accustomed to having my word questioned.”
    He glared at me, arose stiffly, and walked out.
    Bertha looked at me angrily. “You damn near upset the applecart.”
    “Provided there is any applecart.”
    She tapped the cash drawer. “There’s three hundred dollars in there. That makes it an applecart.”
    I said, “Then we’d better start looking for the rotten apples.”
    “There aren’t any.”
    I said, “His story stinks.”
    “What do you mean?”
    I said, “Two girls drive down from San Francisco, they want to look over Hollywood, and see if they can find a movie star dining out somewhere.”
    “So what? That’s exactly what two women would do under the circumstances.”
    I said, “They’d driven down from San Francisco. The first thing they’d do would be to take a bath, unpack their suitcases, hook up a portable iron, run it over their clothes, freshen up with make-up, and then go looking for movie stars. The idea that they’d have driven all the way down from San Francisco and—”
    “You don’t know that they made it all in one day.”
    “All right, suppose they made it in two days. The idea that they’d have driven from San Luis Obispo or Bakersfield, or any other place, parked their car, and gone directly to a night club without stopping to make themselves as attractive as possible, stinks.”
    Bertha blinked her eyes over that one. “Perhaps they did all that but lied to Billings because they didn’t want him to know where they were staying.”
    I said, “Their suitcases must have been in the car,according to Billings’s statement.”
    Bertha sat there in her squeaking swivel chair, her fingers drumming nervously on the top of the desk, making the light scintillate from the diamonds with which she had loaded her fingers. “For the love of Pete,” she said, “get out and get on the job. What the hell do you think this partnership is, anyway? A debating society or a detective agency?”
    “I was simply pointing out the obvious.”
    “Well, don’t point it out to me,” Bertha yelled. “Go find those two women. The five-hundred-bucks bonus is the obvious in this case as far as I’m concerned!”
    “Did you,” I asked, “get a description?”
    She tore a sheet of paper from a pad on her desk and literally threw it at me. “There are all the facts,” she said. “My God, why did I ever get a partner like you? Some son of a bitch with money comes in and you start antagonizing him. And a five-hundred-dollar bonus, too.”
    I said, “I don’t suppose it ever occurred to you to ask him who John Carver Billings the First might have