Farewell, My Lovely

19

I walked down the curving driveway and lost myself in the shadow of the tall trimmed hedges and came to the gates. Another man was holding the fort now, a husky in plainclothes, an obvious bodyguard. He let me out with a nod.

A horn tooted. Miss Riordan’s coupe was drawn up behind my car. I went over there and looked in at her. She looked cool and sarcastic.

She sat there with her hands on the wheel, gloved and slim. She smiled.

“I waited. I suppose it was none of my business. What did you think of her?”

“I bet she snaps a mean garter.”

“Do you always have to say things like that?” She flushed bitterly. “Sometimes I hate men. Old men, young men, football players, opera tenors, smart millionaires, beautiful men who are gigolos and almost-heels who are — private detectives.”

I grinned at her sadly. “I know I talk too smart. It’s in the air nowadays. Who told you he was a gigolo?”

“Who?”

“Don’t be obtuse. Marriott.”

“Oh, it was a cinch guess. I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be nasty. I guess you can snap her garter any time you want to, without much of a struggle. But there’s one thing you can be sure of — you’re a late comer to the show.”

The wide curving street dozed peacefully in the sun. A beautifully painted panel truck slid noiselessly to a stop before a house across the street, then backed a little and went up the driveway to a side entrance. On the side of the panel truck was painted the legend. “Bay City Infant Service.”

Anne Riordan leaned towards me, her gray-blue eyes hurt and clouded. Her slightly too long upper lip pouted and then pressed back against her teeth. She made a sharp little sound with her breath.

“Probably you’d like me to mind my own business, is that it? And not have ideas you don’t have first. I thought I was helping a little.”

“I don’t need any help. The police don’t want any from me. There’s nothing I can do for Mrs. Grayle. She has a yarn about a beer parlor where a car started from and followed them, but what does that amount to? It was a crummy dive on Santa Monica. This was a high-class mob. There was somebody in it that could even tell Fei Tsui jade when he saw it.”

“If he wasn’t tipped off.”

“There’s that too,” I said, and fumbled a cigarette out of a package. “Either way there’s nothing for me in it.”

“Not even about psychics?”

I stared rather blankly. “Psychics?”

“My God,” she said softly. “And I thought you were a detective.”

“There’s a hush on part of this,” I said. “I’ve got to watch my step. This Grayle packs a lot of dough in his pants. And law is where you buy it in this town. Look at the funny way the cops are acting. No build-up, no newspaper handout, no chance for the innocent stranger to step in with the trifling clue that turns out to be all important. Nothing but silence and warnings to me to lay off. I don’t like it at all.”

“You got most of the lipstick off,” Anne Riordan said. “I mentioned psychics. Well, good-by. It was nice to know you — in a way.”

She pressed her starter button and jammed her gears in and was gone in a swirl of dust.

I watched her go. When she was gone I looked across the street. The man from the panel truck that said Bay City Infant Service came out of the side door of the house dressed in a uniform so white and stiff and gleaming that it made me feel clean just to look at it. He was carrying a carton of some sort. He got into his panel truck and drove away.

I figured he had just changed a diaper.

I got into my own car and looked at my watch before starting up. It was almost five.

The Scotch, as good enough Scotch will, stayed with me all the way back to Hollywood. I took the red lights as they came.

“There’s a nice little girl,” I told myself out loud, in the car, “for a guy that’s interested in a nice little girl.” Nobody said anything. “But I’m not,” I said. Nobody said anything to that either. “Ten o’clock at the Belvedere Club,” I said. Somebody said: “Phooey.”

It sounded like my voice.

It was a quarter to six when I reached my office again. The building was very quiet. The typewriter beyond the party wall was still. I lit a pipe and sat down to wait.