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with some friends, the Ramseys, but I’m afraid we didn’t have the opportunity to be introduced. I hope you don’t mind gate crashers.”
    Conklin applied a heavy right hand to Trippet’s back and encircled Barbara’s waist with his left arm. She edged away. Conklin didn’t seem to notice. “Any friend of Billy and Shirley Ramsey’s a friend of mine,” he said. “Especially Shirley, eh?” and this time he dug an elbow into Trippet’s ribs.
    â€œTo be sure,” Trippet murmured when he was through wincing.
    â€œIf you want to meet anybody, just ask old Eddie Cauthorne here. Old Eddie knows everybody, right Eddie?”
    I started to tell him that Old Eddie didn’t know everybody and didn’t want to know everybody, but Conklin had moved off to use his ever busy hands on other guests.
    â€œI believe,” Trippet said, turning to me again, “that we were talking about your motor scooter. Do you actually have one?”
    â€œNo,” I said. “I drive a Volkswagen, but I have twenty-one other cars. Would you like one?”
    â€œThank you, no,” he said.
    â€œAll pre-1932. Prime condition.” As I said, I was on my third drink.
    â€œWhat in the world for?” Trippet said.
    â€œI inherited them.”
    â€œWhat do you do,” Barbara Trippet asked, “drive hither and yon?”
    â€œI rent them. To studios, producers, ad agencies.”
    â€œThat makes sense,” Trippet said. “But the gentleman we just spoke to—the one with the 1937 Plymouth. He’s afflicted, you know.”
    â€œIf he is, so are thousands of others.”
    â€œReally?”
    â€œSure,” I said. “Take those twenty-one jalopies I have. I keep them in a warehouse way to hell and gone out in East Los Angeles—past 190th. Nobody sees them; they’re not advertised; my phone’s unlisted. But I get at least one or two calls a day from nuts who want to buy a particular car—or even all of them.”
    â€œWhy not sell?”
    I shrugged. “They produce an income and I can use the money.”
    Trippet glanced at his watch, a gold affair that was thicker than a silver dollar, but not much thicker. “Tell me, do you like cars?”
    â€œNot particularly,” I said.
    â€œHow splendid. Why don’t you join us for dinner? I think I’ve just had a perfectly marvelous idea.”
    Barbara Trippet sighed. “You know,” she said to me, “the last time he said that we wound up in Aspen, Colorado, with a ski lodge.”
    After escaping from the cocktail party, we had dinner that night at one of those places on La Cienega which seem to change owners every few months. Barbara Trippet was a small, bright brunette of about my age, thirty-three, with green eyes and a wry, pleasant smile that she used often. At fifty-five, Richard K. E. Trippet just missed being elegant. Perhaps it was the way he wore his clothes or the manner in which he moved. Or it could have been what at first seemed to be a totally languid carriage until you noticed that actually he held himself fencepost straight and that it was the grace of his movements that gave him that curious air of blended indolence and energy. His hair was long and grey and it kept flopping down into his eyes as we talked over the steaks. He was not in the least reticent about himself, and most of the things he told me that night were true. Maybe all of them. I never found otherwise.
    Not only was he an Anarcho-Syndicalist in theory and a registered Democrat in practice, but he was also a naturalized U.S. citizen, a top-grade fencer, a saxophone player of merit, a specialist in medieval French, and had been, at one time or another, a captain in what he described as “a decent regiment,” a racing driver-mechanic, a skiing instructor and ski lodge owner (in Aspen), and finally he was still—now—a person of “independent