No Questions Asked

13

Maude Goodwater and I talked for a little more than an hour. Mostly I listened while she told me how it had been, living with Jack Marsh, and how they had sometimes gone up to San Francisco on weekends, or down to Ensenada, or sometimes they had just stayed home and played records or walked along the beach.

She made it sound so idyllic that I asked her when Jack Marsh had found time to tend to his gambling. She told me that he was a plunger and that when he gambled he usually did it by himself, sometimes spending as much as a week or ten days in Las Vegas. He also liked the tracks. When he lost, which he did often, she said that he hadn’t been very pleasant to be around.

It was shortly after noon when I left her and went out to the Ford van. Guerriero was slumped down in the front seat behind the wheel reading a paperback edition of Camus’s Lyrical and Critical Essays.

“You should read that when you’re about forty,” I told him.

“Why?”

“It confirms what you suspected at twenty.”

He grinned and put the book up behind the sun visor. “Where to?”

“Santa Monica, but first maybe we should get some lunch. Is there any place you can recommend around here?”

He nodded as he started the engine. “There’s a place just down the highway that’s not too bad,” he said. “Some of the help’s kind of pretty anyhow.”

The place he suggested turned out to be the Crazy Horse Saloon, which had been decorated in a halfway serious attempt to make it resemble something out of the wild west or what nearly everybody, after half a century or so of Hollywood westerns, thought a wild west saloon should look like, providing it was air-conditioned. Actually, the hamburgers weren’t at all bad, although I have found that you seldom go wrong if you order a hamburger in Los Angeles, which is more than can be said for the rest of the nation. Also, the pretty girl who served us didn’t at all seem to mind being a waitress and she and Guerriero got to do some friendly flirting.

The sun had burned through the haze and the clouds by the time we got to Santa Monica and the ocean was back to being blue. Some oldsters were walking slowly and carefully beneath the tall palms in the narrow green park along Ocean Avenue. The oldsters looked the way a lot of retired people do — neat and clean and bored stiff.

Guerriero swung left on Santa Monica and we found a place to park without too much trouble in a metered zone near the corner of Second and Santa Monica. There was some traffic, but not too much. A few pedestrians went by, taking their time. It all looked bright and well swept and about half-asleep. I must have shaken my head because Guerriero again gave me his hard, white grin and said, “It’s not quite New York, is it?”

“Not quite.”

“You ought to see it about midnight.”

“What happens then?”

“Well, for excitement you can go out and bay at the moon.”

Most of the tenants of the bank building that Jack Marsh had his office in seemed to be either lawyers or dentists. Marsh’s office was on the sixth floor and I got into the elevator with a cheerful old party who told me that he was on his way up to have his last tooth pulled. When I told him that was too bad he cackled happily and said, “Hell, son, it’s something to do.”

After I let myself in with the key that Maude Goodwater had given me I saw that Jack Marsh had spent some money on furnishing his office. There were two rooms to it, the smaller outer office for his secretary, and the larger inner office where he had done his heavy thinking.

The door that led from the corridor into the suite had only Jack Marsh lettered on it and nothing else. Not Discreet Inquiries Undertaken or Private Investigator or even Walk In. There was a terribly modern desk of pale blond wood for his secretary and a typewriter that was protected with a grey IBM cover. On her desk there was nothing but the phone, a small calendar, and a glass vase, just large enough to hold a single white rose. The rose looked fresh. I looked around the rest of the room. There were three comfortable-looking chairs upholstered in pale tan or beige that were clustered around a coffee table whose glass top was supported by a base of polished chrome. The carpet was dark brown and thick. On the walls were a couple of prints and in the corner a coatrack.

I moved over to the desk and thumbed through the calendar. It was the kind whose pages turned on two metal hasps. I went back to the first of April and worked my way forward. All the notes were written in shorthand except for a few names that didn’t mean anything to me. I wrote the names down on an envelope anyway, feeling a little foolish. After that I tried the desk drawers, but they were locked.

Jack Marsh had done himself well in his own office. There was a nice big polished rosewood desk and behind it a high-backed chair that looked as if it were covered in real leather instead of Naugahyde and in front of the desk were some comfortable-looking chairs expensively covered in something that looked like suede but probably wasn’t. In one corner were three brown metal file cabinets that I didn’t even bother with because they were secured with padlocked metal poles that ran through their drawer handles just like they are at the CIA.

I went around the desk and sat down in the fine big swivel chair and tried the drawers. They weren’t locked. I wasn’t sure what I expected to find that the police hadn’t already found, but I went through the motions anyway. Maybe the police had missed something taped to the bottom of one of the drawers. They hadn’t, of course. They never do.

But there was some recent correspondence that Marsh had had with a manufacturer who was being robbed silly by some of his employees. Marsh had cleared that up nicely and the manufacturer had been so grateful that he had given Marsh a bonus.

There was more correspondence with another client concerning Marsh’s fees. The client thought they were a little high and Marsh had had to explain how they could have been higher, if it hadn’t been for Marsh’s years of experience, diligence, and general acumen, which had enabled him to solve the client’s problem (where his wife went on Thursday afternoons) long before Marsh’s competition could have come up with the same answer. I felt that Jack Marsh wrote a nice letter.

The only thing that I found tucked away out of sight were some bills with either Past Due or Final Notice stamped on them. They were from men’s clothing stores, a sporting goods shop, and a mechanic who specialized in Porsches.

In the center drawer of the desk was a red address book. I went through it. Some of the names and addresses and phone numbers had been entered in what I recognized as the secretary’s pretty round hand. I skipped those and concentrated on the ones that apparently had been entered by Marsh. They were written in a blocky kind of penmanship that seemed more concerned with legibility than style. I went through the book twice before I caught it. In the D’s at the bottom of the page written lightly in pencil was “Doc” and a phone number.

I took the envelope that I had used earlier and wrote the number down. I had just finished when I heard the door to the outer office open and close. I put the red address book back in the top drawer and stood up. Someone coughed once in the outer office. I thought it sounded like a woman’s cough, but I wasn’t sure because there isn’t that much difference between the way that men and women cough.

After the cough it was very quiet again and I thought I could hear my own breathing. I listened hard and heard the sound of a paper match being struck. It popped a little, the way they sometimes do.

She came through the door then, smoking a cigarette. She jumped when she saw me and opened her mouth and I wasn’t sure whether she was going to scream so I said, “Maude Goodwater gave me a key.” I fished the key out of my pocket and held it up so that she could see it.

“This isn’t her office,” the woman said. “She had no right to do that.”

“You must be Virginia Neighbors,” I said. “I was going to call you.”

She remembered the cigarette that she was holding and brought it up to her lips and inhaled some smoke. She blew it out in a long, thin plume, staring at me.

“Okay,” she said. “You know me, but I don’t know you.”

I looked at her for a moment before saying anything. She had a goggley look about her because of the enormous round purple sunglasses that she was wearing. They seemed to be more darkly tinted at their tops than at their bottoms. I couldn’t see her eyes because of them. I could see her hair though. It was blond and parted in the center and it fell down her back. How far, I couldn’t tell. She had a full red mouth that lipstick had made even redder and it might have looked kissable to some, but it looked only pouty to me, although that might have been the way that she always looked when she was angry or surprised or even both. Beneath her mouth and to the left was a small brown mole, almost a beauty mark. Her nose, I remember, was pink and shiny.

“My name’s St. Ives.”

“That still doesn’t tell me anything.”

“I was there when Jack Marsh got shot,” I said and waited to see what that did for her.

Her lower lip trembled, until she caught it between her teeth. I went over to where she was standing, reached up and gently took the dark glasses off. She had round blue eyes whose whites were so red that they looked almost inflamed. I handed her the glasses.

“Go ahead,” I said. “You should cry some more if it helps.”

She was wearing a pale tan pants suit with a dark brown sweater and I noticed that she had nice breasts. I still notice things like that. I probably always will. The jacket of the pants suit had pockets and she reached into one of them and brought out a pink wad of Kleenex and blew her nose into it.

“I’m not going to cry,” she said, putting the dark glasses back on and stuffing the Kleenex back into her pocket. She had managed to hold on to the cigarette through all of this and she took another drag from it inhaling the smoke deeply.

“Are you a cop?” she said, blowing the smoke out

“No.”

“But you were there when he got shot?”

“Yes.”

“Then you must be that guy from New York, the go-between. I heard about you, but I didn’t remember your name.”

“Who told you about me?”

“The cops. The L.A. cops. They were here yesterday and last week, right after — well, right after it happened. They went through everything. But not until I made sure they had a warrant. Then they asked me a lot of dumb questions.”

“Such as?”

“Why should I tell you?”

“No reason. I’m just trying to find out what really happened.”

“He got shot. Killed. That’s what happened.”

“I know. I was there.”

“Did he—” She stopped to bite her lip again. “Did it hurt him much? I mean did he suffer?”

“No. It was over in a second.”

“Did he — well, did he say anything?”

I decided to give her something to keep. It wouldn’t do any harm and perhaps on those long nights to come she could take it out and fondle it and perhaps play “might have been” with it.

“He muttered something — just one word. It sounded something like ‘Virgie,’ but I wasn’t sure what it meant so I never told anyone about it.”

Her chin trembled and then her nose turned even pinker and her mouth opened and she started to bawl in earnest. She took off the dark glasses so she could dab at her eyes again with the Kleenex. I went over and patted her on the shoulder and said something meaningless like, “Come on now,” and, “There, there.”

It was over after a minute or so and she put the dark glasses back on. “He called me that most of the time. Virgie, I mean.”

That hadn’t been hard to guess. I felt that I was getting to know Jack Marsh better and so far I hadn’t found much to like. I smiled at her. “You and he must have been very close.”

She nodded. “I worked for him for five years.”

“I meant close personally.”

“I knew him better than anybody,” she said. “Even better than her.”

“Miss Goodwater?”

“Miss Rich Bitch. I told him he was making a mistake when he moved in with her.” She nodded her head the way people do when they’ve been right and everyone else has been wrong. “I told him. And just look what happened.”

I wondered how old she was. With her glasses off and her eyes red and her nose all shiny she looked about ten but she talked like forty. Or maybe fifty. I guessed her to be thirty. Maybe thirty-two.

“But you kept on working for him even after he started living with Maude Goodwater.”

“Sure I did. Why shouldn’t I?”

I shrugged. I tried to make it an elaborate one.

Her lip curled up and for a moment I thought she was going to cry again, but I was wrong. It was a sneer. “We didn’t stop fucking just because he moved in with her.” That was her best pitch, the high, hard one, and she waited to see how I handled it.

I decided to watch it go by. “There’s just a chance,” I said, “that somebody set Jack up.”

“What do you mean set him up?” she said. “A cop shot him. A Washington cop with a funny name.”

“Fastnaught.”

“Yeah. That’s it. Fastnaught.”

“Jack wasn’t working this thing alone, you know,” I said, feeling odd about calling him Jack. “He had teamed up with somebody. Maybe this somebody tipped Fastnaught off. Let’s face it. Whoever was in it with Jack made off with a quarter of a million dollars plus the old book. All Jack got was dead.”

I didn’t know how much the Los Angeles police had told her, but I doubted that they had described how Fastnaught had tailed me out to Haines Point in the snow. It was one of those details that they probably wouldn’t have bothered to tell her. Jack Marsh had been shot and killed by a Washington cop. That was the big news and it should have been enough.

Her face was working itself up into another crying spell. I took out my handkerchief and handed it to her. She blew her nose with it and stuffed it into her pocket, not thinking about what she was doing. I didn’t ask for it back.

“I don’t know who was in it with him,” she said dully. “I keep hoping that they’ll find out that somebody made him do it. Held a gun to his head, you know, and made him do it. But I don’t guess there’s much chance of that, is there?”

“Not much.”

She produced another cigarette from her jacket pocket and held it up. It took a second before I realized that she was waiting for me to light it. I found my matches and lit it and then looked around for an ashtray. I found one on the desk where she had ground out the one that she was smoking before. I put the match in it. When I turned back she was chewing on her lower lip as if trying to decide how much she could tell me. I waited for her to make up her mind.

“I knew something funny was going on,” she said.

“You did, huh? How?”

“Because he didn’t talk about it. He always talked about them with me. His cases, I mean. Even after he moved out there to Malibu he talked them over with me because I understood what it was that he did. He was like any man. He liked to be oohed and ahed over and told how smart he was. She couldn’t do that because she didn’t understand what he did for a living and so he didn’t talk about it with her. I sometimes wondered what they did talk about. Maybe how beautiful the sunset was and crap like that Lovey-dovey stuff.”

“He didn’t tell you anything about it at all?”

“He told me he had to go to Washington and pick something up and bring it back. He didn’t say what.”

“Did he say who? I mean who was going to pay him?”

“Sure. Max Spivey at Pacifica was going to pay him. But there wasn’t any big deal about it. He did a lot of work for Max. The only funny thing was he wouldn’t tell me what he was going to pick up in Washington.”

“Did you ask?”

“Sure I asked. That’s when it got funny. When he wouldn’t tell me.”

“In that week before he went to Washington,” I said, “did he see Doc Amber?”

“Who?”

“Doc Amber. A little guy about five feet tall. He uses a lot of big words and wears what used to be called snappy clothes.”

She shook her head slowly. “He didn’t know anybody like that. I’d remember if he knew anybody like that.”

“Well, thanks for talking to me,” I said. “I know it must be difficult for you.”

She looked around the room and shook her head. “I don’t even know why I come down here. Nobody’s paying me. I don’t know if anybody ever will. I just check the mail and write a few letters. I talked to his lawyer about it but he’s not even sure about what’s going to happen. The rent’s paid to the end of the month. I guess I’ll just keep on coming down until then and after that I won’t come anymore.”

“It’s nice of you to do it.”

She looked at me, or at least those big purple glasses did. “You weren’t kidding me about that, were you? You know, about him saying ‘Virgie’ and all. You couldn’t make something like that up, could you?”

“No.” I said. “I couldn’t make something like that up. Nobody could.”