Nico Peterson's residence on Napier Street is where Philip Marlowe's search for Nico turns from a private investigation into a violent pursuit. Marlowe finds Lynn Peterson inside while searching the house; moments later, armed men enter and take her. The home’s ordinary details—a sink, an ice tray, and bottles of Canada Dry—remain in his memory against the brutality that follows, making the house both a place of investigation and the last setting in which he sees Lynn alive.

Setting and Investigation

Marlowe goes to the house on Napier Street to look for information about Nico Peterson. During the search, Lynn arrives and, in the brief interval before the intrusion, is fixing drinks. Marlowe later tells Clare Cavendish that Lynn came in while he was searching and that the men arrived through the back door, waving guns. The sudden entry ends the domestic pause and makes the residence a point of direct contact between Marlowe’s inquiry and the violence surrounding Nico.

Marlowe reports the attack to Joe Green by telephone, though he admits to giving only parts of what happened. He insists that the abduction is separate from his own investigation, while acknowledging that he believes the attackers were looking for Nico. His explanation is that the men had previously been seen outside the house, scouting and looking through the windows, and that they seemed like creditors pursuing a substantial debt. The residence therefore supplies a visible trail of surveillance, but not a confirmed account of what Nico owed or why Lynn was taken.

Lynn Peterson and the House's Domestic Details

The house is also preserved through Marlowe’s memory of Lynn in an unguarded moment. When he later sees her battered body, the remembered image that returns is of her standing by the sink with the ice tray in her hands and turning to tell him where the Canada Dry was. The small, specific gesture gives the earlier visit a human scale: Lynn is not only the person caught in the search for Nico, but someone Marlowe remembers in the ordinary act of helping him find a drink.

That memory sharpens the contrast between the house as a lived-in domestic space and the violence that reaches it. The evidence identifies the back door as the attackers’ entrance and the sink as the setting of Marlowe’s remembered exchange, but does not describe the house’s wider layout or its furnishings. Its significance rests less on architectural detail than on the abrupt collision of routine and armed intrusion.

Abduction, Murder, and Aftermath

The men who enter the residence take Lynn at gunpoint. Marlowe later recounts the episode to Clare, who is alarmed that he did not tell her sooner. The abduction makes clear that the danger connected with Nico has extended to his sister, even though Marlowe has not established the precise reason the attackers want her. The earlier surveillance of the house suggests that their interest was not spontaneous; they had been watching the residence before the confrontation.

Lynn is subsequently found dead, her face badly swollen and bruised and her throat cut. At the sight of her body, Marlowe recalls her at the Peterson house with the ice tray. The residence thus becomes the point to which his memory returns when he confronts the consequence of the abduction. It marks the last scene he associates with Lynn alive, while the circumstances that brought the armed men there remain tied to Nico’s disappearance and suspected debt.

Narrative Significance

The house concentrates the investigation’s shift from looking for a missing man to facing harm inflicted on those around him. Its windows have been watched, its threshold crossed by armed intruders, and its familiar domestic details later carried into Marlowe’s recollection of a murder. The contrast makes the residence more than a location where clues might be found: it is where the private search acquires an immediate human cost, and where Marlowe’s account of the case becomes entangled with his memory of Lynn.