The Hall of Justice is the institutional setting where private inquiry enters the machinery of Los Angeles law enforcement. Marlowe visits its offices to consult investigators and confront official accounts of the deaths connected to his case; the building’s corridors and desks become a stage for deciding which evidence will be pursued, which explanations will be accepted, and which facts will remain outside the public record.

Offices and Investigators

Marlowe goes to the seventh floor, to the small offices used by the district attorney’s men, to meet Bernie Ohls. Ohls’s room is spare: a blotter, an inexpensive pen set, a hat, and one foot on the desk are its principal furnishings. The plain surroundings contrast with the experience Marlowe attributes to Ohls, whom he knows has killed nine men, three while undercover or believed to be undercover. The scene presents an official investigator whose unremarkable appearance conceals a history of violence and institutional work.

The building also houses the Missing Persons Bureau, where Captain Gregory receives Marlowe’s card and checks his standing by telephone. Gregory is deliberate and reserved; before responding to Marlowe’s request for information, he calls Ohls at the district attorney’s office and asks what Marlowe looks like. The call makes the Hall of Justice not simply a collection of offices but a connected system in which access and credibility are tested through contacts between departments.

Ohls and Marlowe leave the building together in a small blue sedan and drive to Lido, where a car and its dead chauffeur have been recovered from the water. Their journey begins with the authority of the Hall of Justice and leads to physical evidence at the scene: broken pier timbers, the tide, and the car’s recovery help a uniformed officer estimate when the vehicle went into the water. Official investigation here depends on reading material traces, though those traces do not by themselves settle every question of responsibility.

Evidence, Inference, and Dispute

The Hall of Justice is where the evidence surrounding Geiger’s and Brody’s deaths is turned into competing explanations. In a meeting with Ohls, Captain Cronjager, and Taggart Wilde, Marlowe recounts his investigation but deliberately leaves out two details: Carmen’s visit to Brody’s apartment and Eddie Mars’s visit to Geiger’s that afternoon. His account is therefore neither a complete disclosure nor a simple fabrication; it is a selective version shaped by what he chooses to protect.

The officials challenge the reasoning that connects Owen Taylor to Geiger’s death. Wilde points out that even if the fatal gun were found on Taylor or in his car, that fact would not conclusively prove Taylor fired it; the weapon might have been planted by Brody. Marlowe answers with an argument from motive, opportunity, and character. Taylor, he reasons, had a personal motive and was present with the opportunity to shoot Geiger, while Brody’s presumed commercial aim and conduct make him a less convincing killer. Marlowe’s distinction is crucial: a theory may be physically possible without, in his judgment, being the best explanation of the evidence. The exchange exposes the distance between inference and proof rather than erasing it.

Marlowe also uses the Hall of Justice meeting to turn attention from individual suspects to the protection that allowed Geiger’s business to operate. He says he can testify that a book came from Geiger’s store and that Agnes can identify the nature of the store’s business. He argues that the store served as a front and that Hollywood police permitted its operation, inviting the possibility that a grand jury might investigate the reasons. The dispute thus widens from who committed a killing to how local institutions may have enabled the conditions around it.

Official Accounts and Omitted Facts

The meeting does not produce a public account faithful to everything Marlowe knows. Afterward, the newspaper describes Geiger as having been killed the previous night, Brody as having died about an hour later, and Cronjager as having solved both murders with striking ease. Taylor’s death is presented as a suicide; the report says his family lived in Dubuque, that his body would be sent there, and that there would be no inquest. The printed narrative gives readers a neat sequence and an official resolution, while Marlowe’s investigation has left important complications undisclosed.

This gap is central to the Hall of Justice’s narrative significance. The institution is where evidence can be examined and where law-enforcement accounts acquire public authority, but the process is also shaped by jurisdictional tensions, selective disclosure, and the practical desire to avoid scandal. When Wilde challenges Marlowe to explain why he believes Taylor shot Geiger, the argument concerns evidentiary standards; when Marlowe raises the store’s tolerated operation, it concerns the institutional setting in which evidence was allowed to accumulate. In both cases, the building concentrates the novel’s tension between what can be inferred, what can be proved, and what official channels choose to say.