guide—she said the smaller of the masked pair could have been a woman. She had already described him as kind of girlish built.”
“Any fingerprints, or the like?” I asked.
“No. Phels went over the apartment, the window, the roof, the wallet and the gun. Not a smear.”
“ Mrs. Main identify ’em?”
“She says she’d know the little one. Maybe she would.”
“Got anything on the who?”
“Not yet,” the lanky detective-sergeant said as we moved toward the door.
In the street I left the police sleuths and set out for Bruno Gungen’s home in Westwood Park.
The dealer in rare and antique jewelry was a little bit of a man and a fancy one. His dinner jacket was corset-tight around his waist, padded high and sharp at the shoulders. Hair, mustache and spade-shaped goatee were dyed black and greased until they were as shiny as his pointed pink fingernails. I wouldn’t bet a cent that the color in his fifty-year-old cheeks wasn’t rouge.
He came out of the depths of a leather library chair to give me a soft, warm hand that was no larger than a child’s, bowing and smiling at me with his head tilted to one side.
Then he introduced me to his wife, who bowed without getting up from her seat at the table. Apparently she was a little more than a third of his age. She couldn’t have been a day over nineteen, and she looked more like sixteen. She was as small as he, with a dimpled olive-skinned face, round