I was half a block from it when something changed my mind and my destination.

A smallish young man in three shades of brown crossed the street ahead of me. His dark profile was pretty. He was Max Thaler, alias Whisper. I reached the corner of Mountain Boulevard in time to catch the flash of his brown-covered rear leg vanishing into the late Donald Willsson’s doorway.

I went back to Broadway, found a drug store with a phone booth in it, searched the directory for Elihu Willsson’s residence number, called it, told somebody who claimed to be the old man’s secretary that I had been brought from San Francisco by Donald Willsson, that I knew something about his death, and that I wanted to see his father.

When I made it emphatic enough I got an invitation to call.

The czar of Poisonville was propped up in bed when his secretary⁠—a noiseless slim sharp-eyed man of forty⁠—brought me into the bedroom.