The High Window

The High Window

A Philip Marlowe Novel

Raymond Chandler

The High Window

Copyright 1942 by Raymond Chandler.

All rights reserved.

1

The house was on Dresden Avenue in the Oak Noll section of Pasadena, a big solid cool-looking house with burgundy brick walls, a terra cotta tile roof, and a white stone trim. The front windows were leaded downstairs. Upstairs windows were of the cottage type and had a lot of rococo imitation stonework trimming around them.

From the front wall and its attendant flowering bushes a half-acre or so of fine green lawn drifted in a gentle slope down to the street, passing on the way an enormous deodar around which it flowed like a cool green tide around a rock. The sidewalk and the parkway were both very wide and in the parkway were three white acacias that were worth seeing. There was a heavy scent of summer on the morning and everything that grew was perfectly still in the breathless air they get over there on what they call a nice cool day.

All I knew about the people was that they were a Mrs. Elizabeth Bright Murdock and family and that she wanted to hire a nice clean private detective who wouldn’t drop cigar ashes on the floor and never carried more than one gun. And I knew she was the widow of an old coot with whiskers named Jasper Murdock who had made a lot of money helping out the community, and got his photograph in the Pasadena paper every year on his anniversary, with the years of his birth and death underneath, and the legend: His Life Was His Service.

I left my car on the street and walked over a few dozen stumble stones set into the green lawn, and rang the bell in the brick portico under a peaked roof. A low red brick wall ran along the front of the house the short distance from the door to the edge of the driveway. At the end of the walk, on a concrete block, there was a little painted Negro in white riding breeches and a green jacket and a red cap. He was holding a whip, and there was an iron hitching ring in the block at his feet. He looked a little sad, as if he had been waiting there a long time and was getting discouraged. I went over and patted his head while I was waiting for somebody to come to the door.

After a while a middle-aged sourpuss in a maid’s costume opened the front door about eight inches and gave me the beady eye.

“Philip Marlowe,” I said. “Calling on Mrs. Murdock. By appointment.”

The middle-aged sourpuss ground her teeth, snapped her eyes shut, snapped them open and said in one of those angular hard-rock pioneer-type voices: “Which one?”

“Huh?”

“Which Mrs. Murdock?” she almost screamed at me.

“Mrs. Elizabeth Bright Murdock,” I said. “I didn’t know there was more than one.”

“Well, there is,” she snapped. “Got a card?”

She still had the door a scant eight inches open. She poked the end of her nose and a thin muscular hand into the opening. I got my wallet out and got one of the cards with just my name on it and put it in the hand. The hand and nose went in and the door slammed in my face.

I thought that maybe I ought to have gone to the back door. I went over and patted the little Negro on the head again.

“Brother,” I said, “you and me both.”

Time passed, quite a lot of time. I stuck a cigarette in my mouth but didn’t light it. The Good Humor man went by in his little blue and white wagon, playing Turkey in the Straw on his music box. A large black and gold butterfly fishtailed in and landed on a hydrangea bush almost at my elbow, moved its wings slowly up and down a few times, then took off heavily and staggered away through the motionless hot scented air.

The front door came open again. The sourpuss said: “This way.”

I went in. The room beyond was large and square and sunken and cool and had the restful atmosphere of a funeral chapel and something of the same smell. Tapestry on the blank roughened stucco walls, iron grilles imitating balconies outside high side windows, heavy carved chairs with plush seats and tapestry backs and tarnished gilt tassels hanging down their sides. At the back a stained-glass window about the size of a tennis court. Curtained french doors underneath it. An old musty, fusty, narrow-minded, clean and bitter room. It didn’t look as if anybody ever sat in it or would ever want to. Marble-topped tables with crooked legs, gilt clocks, pieces of small statuary in two colors of marble. A lot of junk that would take a week to dust. A lot of money, and all wasted. Thirty years before, in the wealthy close-mouthed provincial town Pasadena then was, it must have seemed like quite a room.

We left it and went along a hallway and after a while the sourpuss opened a door and motioned me in.

“Mr. Marlowe,” she said through the door in a nasty voice, and went away grinding her teeth.

2

It was a small room looking out on the back garden. It had an ugly red and brown carpet and was furnished as an office. It contained what you would expect to find in a small office. A thin fragile-looking blondish girl in shell glasses sat behind a desk with a typewriter on a pulled-out leaf at her left. She had her hands poised on the keys, but she didn’t have any paper in the machine. She watched me come into the room with the stiff, half-silly expression of a self-conscious person posing for a snapshot. She had a clear soft voice, asking me to sit down.

“I am Miss Davis. Mrs. Murdock’s secretary. She wanted me to ask you for a few references.”

“References?”

“Certainly. References. Does that surprise you?”

I put my hat on her desk and the unlighted cigarette on the brim of the hat. “You mean she sent for me without knowing anything about me?”

Her lip trembled and she bit it. I didn’t know whether she was scared or annoyed or just having trouble being cool and businesslike. But she didn’t look happy.

“She got your name from the manager of a branch of the California-Security Bank. But he doesn’t know you personally,” she said.

“Get your pencil ready,” I said.

She held it up and showed me that it was freshly sharpened and ready to go.

I said: “First off, one of the vice-presidents of that same bank. George S. Leake. He’s in the main office. Then State Senator Huston Oglethorpe. He may be in Sacramento, or he may be at his office in the State Building in L.A. Then Sidney Dreyfus, Jr., of Dreyfus, Turner and Swayne, attorneys in the Title-Insurance Building. Got that?”

She wrote fast and easily. She nodded without looking up. The light danced on her blond hair.

“Oliver Fry of the Fry-Krantz Corporation, Oil Well Tools. They’re over on East Ninth, in the industrial district. Then, if you would like a couple of cops, Bernard Ohls of the D.A.’s staff, and Detective-Lieutenant Carl Randall of the Central Homicide Bureau. You think maybe that would be enough?”

“Don’t laugh at me,” she said. “I’m only doing what I’m told.”

“Better not call the last two, unless you know what the job is,” I said. “I’m not laughing at you. Hot, isn’t it?”

“It’s not hot for Pasadena,” she said, and hoisted her phone book up on the desk and went to work.

While she was looking up the numbers and telephoning hither and yon I looked her over. She was pale with a sort of natural paleness and she looked healthy enough. Her coarse-grained coppery blond hair was not ugly in itself, but it was drawn back so tightly over her narrow head that it almost lost the effect of being hair at all. Her eyebrows were thin and unusually straight and were darker than her hair, almost a chestnut color. Her nostrils had the whitish look of an anemic person. Her chin was too small, too sharp and looked unstable. She wore no makeup except orange-red on her mouth and not much of that. Her eyes behind the glasses were very large, cobalt blue with big irises and a vague expression. Both lids were tight so that the eyes had a slightly oriental look, or as if the skin of her face was naturally so tight that it stretched her eyes at the corners. The whole face had a sort of off-key neurotic charm that only needed some clever makeup to be striking.

She wore a one-piece linen dress with short sleeves and no ornament of any kind. Her bare arms had down on them, and a few freckles.

I didn’t pay much attention to what she said over the telephone. Whatever was said to her she wrote down in shorthand, with deft easy strokes of the pencil. When she was through she hung the phone book back on a hook and stood up and smoothed the linen dress down over her thighs and said:

“If you will just wait a few moments—” and went towards the door.

Halfway there she turned back and pushed a top drawer of her desk shut at the side. She went out. The door closed. There was silence. Outside the window bees buzzed. Far off I heard the whine of a vacuum cleaner. I picked the unlighted cigarette off my hat, put it in my mouth and stood up. I went around the desk and pulled open the drawer she had come back to shut.

It wasn’t any of my business. I was just curious. It wasn’t any of my business that she had a small Colt automatic in the drawer. I shut it and sat down again.

She was gone about four minutes. She opened the door and stayed at it and said: “Mrs. Murdock will see you now.”

We went along some more hallway and she opened half of a double glass door and stood aside. I went in and the door was closed behind me.

It was so dark in there that at first I couldn’t see anything but the outdoors light coming through thick bushes and screens. Then I saw that the room was a sort of sun porch that had been allowed to get completely overgrown outside. It was furnished with grass rugs and reed stuff. There was a reed chaise lounge over by the window. It had a curved back and enough cushions to stuff an elephant and there was a woman leaning back on it with a wine glass in her hand. I could smell the thick scented alcoholic odor of the wine before I could see her properly. Then my eyes got used to the light and I could see her.

She had a lot of face and chin. She had pewter-colored hair set in a ruthless permanent, a hard beak and large moist eyes with the sympathetic expression of wet stones. There was lace at her throat, but it was the kind of throat that would have looked better in a football sweater. She wore a grayish silk dress. Her thick arms were bare and mottled. There were jet buttons in her ears. There was a low glass-topped table beside her and a bottle of port on the table. She sipped from the glass she was holding and looked at me over it and said nothing.

I stood there. She let me stand while she finished the port in her glass and put the glass down on the table and filled it again. Then she tapped her lips with a handkerchief. Then she spoke. Her voice had a hard baritone quality and sounded as if it didn’t want any nonsense.

“Sit down, Mr. Marlowe. Please do not light that cigarette. I’m asthmatic.”

I sat down in a reed rocker and tucked the still unlighted cigarette down behind the handkerchief in my outside pocket.

“I’ve never had any dealing with private detectives, Mr. Marlowe. I don’t know anything about them. Your references seem satisfactory. What are your charges?”

“To do what, Mrs. Murdock?”

“It’s a very confidential matter, naturally. Nothing to do with the police. If it had to do with the police, I should have called the police.”

“I charge twenty-five dollars a day, Mrs. Murdock. And of course expenses.”

“It seems high. You must make a great deal of money.” She drank some more of her port. I don’t like port in hot weather, but it’s nice when they let you refuse it.

“No,” I said. “It isn’t. Of course you can get detective work done at any price—just like legal work. Or dental work. I’m not an organization. I’m just one man and I work at just one case at a time. I take risks, sometimes quite big risks, and I don’t work all the time. No, I don’t think twenty-five dollars a day is too much.”

“I see. And what is the nature of the expenses?”

“Little things that come up here and there. You never know.”

“I should prefer to know,” she said acidly.

“You’ll know,” I said. “You’ll get it all down in black and white. You’ll have a chance to object, if you don’t like it.”

“And how much retainer would you expect?”

“A hundred dollars would hold me,” I said.

“I should hope it would,” she said and finished her port and poured the glass full again without even waiting to wipe her lips.

“From people in your position, Mrs. Murdock, I don’t necessarily have to have a retainer.”

“Mr. Marlowe,” she said, “I’m a strong-minded woman. But don’t let me scare you. Because if you can be scared by me, you won’t be much use to me.”

I nodded and let that one drift with the tide.

She laughed suddenly and then she belched. It was a nice light belch, nothing showy, and performed with easy unconcern. “My asthma,” she said carelessly. “I drink this wine as medicine. That’s why I’m not offering you any.”

I swung a leg over my knee. I hoped that wouldn’t hurt her asthma.

“Money,” she said, “is not really important. A woman in my position is always overcharged and gets to expect it. I hope you will be worth your fee. Here is the situation. Something of considerable value has been stolen from me. I want it back, but I want more than that. I don’t want anybody arrested. The thief happens to be a member of my family—by marriage.”

She turned the wine glass with her thick fingers and smiled faintly in the dim light of the shadowed room. “My daughter-in-law,” she said. “A charming girl—and tough as an oak board.”

She looked at me with a sudden gleam in her eyes.

“I have a damn fool of a son,” she said. “But I’m very fond of him. About a year ago he made an idiotic marriage, without my consent. This was foolish of him because he is quite incapable of earning a living and he has no money except what I give him, and I am not generous with money. The lady he chose, or who chose him, was a nightclub singer. Her name, appropriately enough, was Linda Conquest. They have lived here in this house. We didn’t quarrel because I don’t allow people to quarrel with me in my own house, but there has not been good feeling between us. I have paid their expenses, given each of them a car, made the lady a sufficient but not gaudy allowance for clothes and so on. No doubt she found the life rather dull. No doubt she found my son dull. I find him dull myself. At any rate she moved out, very abruptly, a week or so ago, without leaving a forwarding address or saying goodbye.”

She coughed, fumbled for a handkerchief, and blew her nose.

“What was taken,” she went on, “was a coin. A rare gold coin called a Brasher Doubloon. It was the pride of my husband’s collection. I care nothing for such things, but he did. I have kept the collection intact since he died four years ago. It is upstairs, in a locked fireproof room, in a set of fireproof cases. It is insured, but I have not reported the loss yet. I don’t want to, if I can help it. I’m quite sure Linda took it. The coin is said to be worth over ten thousand dollars. It’s a mint specimen.”

“But pretty hard to sell,” I said.

“Perhaps. I don’t know. I didn’t miss the coin until yesterday. I should not have missed it then, as I never go near the collection, except that a man in Los Angeles named Morningstar called up, said he was a dealer, and was the Murdock Brasher, as he called it, for sale? My son happened to take the call. He said he didn’t believe it was for sale, it never had been, but that if Mr. Morningstar would call some other time, he could probably talk to me. It was not convenient then, as I was resting. The man said he would do that. My son reported the conversation to Miss Davis, who reported it to me. I had her call the man back. I was faintly curious.”

She sipped some more port, flopped her handkerchief about and grunted.

“Why were you curious, Mrs. Murdock?” I asked, just to be saying something.

“If the man was a dealer of any repute, he would know that the coin was not for sale. My husband, Jasper Murdock, provided in his will that no part of his collection might be sold, loaned or hypothecated during my lifetime. Nor removed from this house, except in case of damage to the house necessitating removal, and then only by action of the trustees. My husband—” she smiled grimly—”seemed to feel that I ought to have taken more interest in his little pieces of metal while he was alive.”

It was a nice day outside, the sun shining, the flowers blooming, the birds singing. Cars went by on the street with a distant comfortable sound. In the dim room with the hard-faced woman and the winy smell everything seemed a little unreal. I tossed my foot up and down over my knee and waited.

“I spoke to Mr. Morningstar. His full name is Elisha Morningstar and he has offices in the Belfont Building on Ninth Street in downtown Los Angeles. I told him the Murdock collection was not for sale, never had been, and, so far as I was concerned, never would be, and that I was surprised that he didn’t know that. He hemmed and hawed and then asked me if he might examine the coin. I said certainly not. He thanked me rather dryly and hung up. He sounded like an old man. So I went upstairs to examine the coin myself, something I had not done in a year. It was gone from its place in one of the locked fireproof cases.”

I said nothing. She refilled her glass and played a tattoo with her thick fingers on the arm of the chaise lounge. “What I thought then you can probably guess.”

I said: “The part about Mr. Morningstar, maybe. Somebody had offered the coin to him for sale and he had known or suspected where it came from. The coin must be very rare.”

“What they call a mint specimen is very rare indeed. Yes, I had the same idea.”

“How would it be stolen?” I asked.

“By anyone in this house, very easily. The keys are in my bag, and my bag lies around here and there. It would be a very simple matter to get hold of the keys long enough to unlock a door and a cabinet and then return the keys. Difficult for an outsider, but anybody in the house could have stolen it.”

“I see. How do you establish that your daughter-in-law took it, Mrs. Murdock?”

“I don’t—in a strictly evidential sense. But I’m quite sure of it. The servants are three women who have been here many, many years—long before I married Mr. Murdock, which was only seven years ago. The gardener never comes in the house. I have no chauffeur, because either my son or my secretary drives me. My son didn’t take it, first because he is not the kind of fool that steals from his mother, and secondly, if he had taken it, he could easily have prevented me from speaking to the coin dealer, Morningstar. Miss Davis—ridiculous. Just not the type at all. Too mousy. No, Mr. Marlowe, Linda is the sort of lady who might do it just for spite, if nothing else. And you know what these nightclub people are.”

“All sorts of people—like the rest of us,” I said. “No signs of a burglar, I suppose? It would take a pretty smooth worker to lift just one valuable coin, so there wouldn’t be. Maybe I had better look the room over, though.”

She pushed her jaw at me and muscles in her neck made hard lumps. “I have just told you, Mr. Marlowe, that Mrs. Leslie Murdock, my daughter-in-law, took the Brasher Doubloon.”

I stared at her and she stared back. Her eyes were as hard as the bricks in her front walk. I shrugged the stare off and said:

“Assuming that is so, Mrs. Murdock, just what do you want done?”

“In the first place I want the coin back. In the second place I want an uncontested divorce for my son. And I don’t intend to buy it. I daresay you know how these things are arranged.”

She finished the current installment of port and laughed rudely.

“I may have heard,” I said. “You say the lady left no forwarding address. Does that mean you have no idea at all where she went?”

“Exactly that.”

“A disappearance then. Your son might have some ideas he hasn’t passed along to you. I’ll have to see him.”

The big gray face hardened into even ruggeder lines. “My son knows nothing. He doesn’t even know the doubloon has been stolen. I don’t want him to know anything. When the time comes I’ll handle him. Until then I want him left alone. He will do exactly what I want him to.”

“He hasn’t always,” I said.

“His marriage,” she said nastily, “was a momentary impulse. Afterwards he tried to act like a gentleman. I have no such scruples.”

“It takes three days to have that kind of momentary impulse in California, Mrs. Murdock.”

“Young man, do you want this job or don’t you?”

“I want it if I’m told the facts and allowed to handle the case as I see fit. I don’t want it if you’re going to make a lot of rules and regulations for me to trip over.”

She laughed harshly. “This is a delicate family matter, Mr. Marlowe. And it must be handled with delicacy.”

“If you hire me, you’ll get all the delicacy I have. If I don’t have enough delicacy, maybe you’d better not hire me. For instance, I take it you don’t want your daughter-in-law framed. I’m not delicate enough for that.”

She turned the color of a cold boiled beet and opened her mouth to yell. Then she thought better of it, lifted her port glass and tucked away some more of her medicine.

“You’ll do,” she said dryly, “I wish I had met you two years ago, before he married her.”

I didn’t know exactly what this last meant, so I let it ride. She bent over sideways and fumbled with the key on a house telephone and growled into it when she was answered.

There were steps and the little copper-blond came tripping into the room with her chin low, as if somebody might be going to take a swing at her.

“Make this man a check for two hundred and fifty dollars,” the old dragon snarled at her. “And keep your mouth shut about it.”

The little girl flushed all the way to her neck. “You know I never talk about your affairs, Mrs. Murdock,” she bleated. “You know I don’t. I wouldn’t dream of it, I—”

She turned with her head down and ran out of the room. As she closed the door I looked out at her. Her little lip was trembling but her eyes were mad.

“I’ll need a photo of the lady and some information,” I said when the door was shut again.

“Look in the desk drawer.” Her rings flashed in the dimness as her thick gray finger pointed.

I went over and opened the single drawer of the reed desk and took out the photo that lay all alone in the bottom of the drawer, face up, looking at me with cool dark eyes. I sat down again with the photo and looked it over. Dark hair parted loosely in the middle and drawn back loosely over a solid piece of forehead. A wide cool go-to-hell mouth with very kissable lips. Nice nose, not too small, not too large. Good bone all over the face. The expression of the face lacked something. Once the something might have been called breeding, but these days I didn’t know what to call it. The face looked too wise and too guarded for its age. Too many passes had been made at it and it had grown a little too smart in dodging them. And behind this expression of wiseness there was the look of simplicity of the little girl who still believes in Santa Claus.

I nodded over the photo and slipped it into my pocket. thinking I was getting too much out of it to get out of a mere photo, and in a very poor light at that.

The door opened and the little girl in the linen dress came in with a three-decker check book and a fountain pen and made a desk of her arm for Mrs. Murdock to sign. She straightened up with a strained smile and Mrs. Murdock made a sharp gesture towards me and the little girl tore the check out and gave it to me. She hovered inside the door, waiting. Nothing was said to her, so she went out softly again and closed the door.

I shook the check dry, folded it and sat holding it. “What can you tell me about Linda?”

“Practically nothing. Before she married my son she shared an apartment with a girl named Lois Magic—charming names these people choose for themselves—who is an entertainer of some sort. They worked at a place called the Idle Valley Club, out Ventura Boulevard way. My son Leslie knows it far too well. I know nothing about Linda’s family or origins. She said once she was born in Sioux Falls. I suppose she had parents. I was not interested enough to find out.”

Like hell she wasn’t. I could see her digging with both hands, digging hard, and getting herself a double handful of gravel.

“You don’t know Miss Magic’s address?”

“No. I never did know.”

“Would your son be likely to know—or Miss Davis?”

“I’ll ask my son when he comes in. I don’t think so. You can ask Miss Davis. I’m sure she doesn’t.”

“I see. You don’t know of any other friends of Linda’s?”

“No.”

“It’s possible that your son is still in touch with her, Mrs. Murdock—without telling you.”

She started to get purple again. I held my hand up and dragged a soothing smile over my face. “After all he has been married to her a year,” I said. “He must know something about her.”

“You leave my son out of this,” she snarled.

I shrugged and made a disappointed sound with my lips. “Very well. She took her car, I suppose. The one you gave her?”

“A steel gray Mercury, 1940 model, a coupe. Miss Davis can give you the license number, if you want that. I don’t know whether she took it.”

“Would you know what money and clothes and jewels she had with her?”

“Not much money. She might have had a couple of hundred dollars, at most.” A fat sneer made deep lines around her nose and mouth. “Unless of course she has found a new friend.”

“There’s that,” I said. “Jewelry?”

“An emerald and diamond ring of no very great value, a platinum Longines watch with rubies in the mounting, a very good cloudy amber necklace which I was foolish enough to give her myself. It has a diamond clasp with twenty-six small diamonds in the shape of a playing card diamond. She had other things, of course. I never paid much attention to them. She dressed well but not strikingly. Thank God for a few small mercies.”

She refilled her glass and drank and did some more of her semi-social belching.

“That’s all you can tell me, Mrs. Murdock?”

“Isn’t it enough?”

“Not nearly enough, but I’ll have to be satisfied for the time being. If I find she did not steal the coin, that ends the investigation as far as I’m concerned. Correct?”

“We’ll talk it over,” she said roughly. “She stole it all right. And I don’t intend to let her get away with it. Paste that in your hat, young man. And I hope you are even half as rough as you like to act, because these nightclub girls are apt to have some very nasty friends.”

I was still holding the folded check by one corner down between my knees. I got my wallet out and put it away and stood up, reaching my hat off the floor.

“I like them nasty,” I said. “The nasty ones have very simple minds. I’ll report to you when there is anything to report, Mrs. Murdock. I think I’ll tackle this coin dealer first. He sounds like a lead.”

She let me get to the door before she growled at my back: “You don’t like me very well, do you?”

I turned to grin back at her with my hand on the knob. “Does anybody?”

She threw her head back and opened her mouth wide and roared with laughter. In the middle of the laughter I opened the door and went out and shut the door on the rough mannish sound. I went back along the hall and knocked on the secretary’s half open door, then pushed it open and looked in.

She had her arms folded on her desk and her face down on the folded arms. She was sobbing. She screwed her head around and looked up at me with tear-stained eyes. I shut the door and went over beside her and put an arm around her thin shoulders.

“Cheer up,” I said. “You ought to feel sorry for her. She thinks she’s tough and she’s breaking her back trying to live up to it.”

The little girl jumped erect, away from my arm. “Don’t touch me,” she said breathlessly. “Please. I never let men touch me. And don’t say such awful things about Mrs. Murdock.”

Her face was all pink and wet from tears. Without her glasses her eyes were very lovely.

I stuck my long-waiting cigarette into my mouth and lit it.

“I—I didn’t mean to be rude,” she snuffled. “But she does humiliate me so. And I only want to do my best for her.” She snuffled some more and got a man’s handkerchief out of her desk and shook it out and wiped her eyes with it. I saw on the hanging down corner the initials L.M. embroidered in purple. I stared at it and blew cigarette smoke towards the corner of the room, away from her hair. “Is there something you want?” she asked.

“I want the license number of Mrs. Leslie Murdock’s car.”

“It’s 2X1111, a gray Mercury convertible, 1940 model.”

“She told me it was a coupe.”

“That’s Mr. Leslie’s car. They’re the same make and year and color. Linda didn’t take the car.”

“Oh. What do you know about a Miss Lois Magic?”

“I only saw her once. She used to share an apartment with Linda. She came here with a Mr.—a Mr. Vannier.”

“Who’s he?”

She looked down at her desk. “I—she just came with him. I don’t know him.”

“Okay, what does Miss Lois Magic look like?”

“She’s a tall handsome blond. Very—very appealing.”

“You mean sexy?”

“Well—” she blushed furiously, “in a nice well-bred sort of way, if you know what I mean.”

“I know what you mean,” I said, “but I never got anywhere with it.”

“I can believe that,” she said tartly.

“Know where Miss Magic lives?”

She shook her head, no. She folded the big handkerchief very carefully and put it in the drawer of her desk, the one where the gun was.

“You can swipe another one when that’s dirty,” I said. She leaned back in her chair and put her small neat hands on her desk and looked at me levelly.

“I wouldn’t carry that tough-guy manner too far, if I were you, Mr. Marlowe. Not with me, at any rate.”

“No?”

“No. And I can’t answer any more questions without specific instructions. My position here is very confidential.”

“I’m not tough,” I said. “Just virile.”

She picked up a pencil and made a mark on a pad. She smiled faintly up at me, all composure again.

“Perhaps I don’t like virile men,” she said.

“You’re a screwball,” I said, “if ever I met one. Goodbye.”

I went out of her office, shut the door firmly, and walked back along the empty halls through the big silent sunken funereal living room and out of the front door.

The sun danced on the warm lawn outside. I put my dark glasses on and went over and patted the little Negro on the head again.

“Brother, it’s even worse than I expected,” I told him. The stumble-stones were hot through the soles of my shoes. I got into the car and started it and pulled away from the curb.

A small sand-colored coupe pulled away from the curb behind me. I didn’t think anything of it. The man driving it wore a dark porkpie type straw hat with a gay print band and dark glasses were over his eyes, as over mine.

I drove back towards the city. A dozen blocks later at a traffic stop, the sand-colored coupe was still behind me. I shrugged and just for the fun of it circled a few blocks. The coupe held its position. I swung into a street lined with immense pepper trees, dragged my heap around in a fast U-turn and stopped against the curbing.

The coupe came carefully around the corner. The blond head under the cocoa straw hat with the tropical print band didn’t even turn my way. The coupe sailed on and I drove back to the Arroyo Seco and on towards Hollywood. I looked carefully several times, but I didn’t spot the coupe again.

3

I had an office in the Cahuenga Building, sixth floor, two small rooms at the back. One I left open for a patient client to sit in, if I had a patient client. There was a buzzer on the door which I could switch on and off from my private thinking parlor.

I looked into the reception room. It was empty of everything but the smell of dust. I threw up another window, unlocked the communicating door and went into the room beyond. Three hard chairs and a swivel chair, flat desk with a glass top, five green filing cases, three of them full of nothing, a calendar and a framed license bond on the wall, a phone, a washbowl in a stained wood cupboard, a hat rack, a carpet that was just something on the floor, and two open windows with net curtains that puckered in and out like the lips of a toothless old man sleeping.

The same stuff I had had last year, and the year before that. Not beautiful, not gay, but better than a tent on the beach.

I hung my hat and coat on the hat rack, washed my face and hands in cold water, lit a cigarette and hoisted the phone book onto the desk. Elisha Morningstar was listed at 824 Belfont Building, 422 West Ninth Street. I wrote that down and the phone number that went with it and had my hand on the instrument when I remembered that I hadn’t switched on the buzzer for the reception room. I reached over the side of the desk and clicked it on and caught it right in stride. Somebody had just opened the door of the outer office.

I turned my pad face down on the desk and went over to see who it was. It was a slim tall self-satisfied looking number in a tropical worsted suit of slate blue, black and white shoes, a dull ivory-colored shirt and a tie and display handkerchief the color of jacaranda bloom. He was holding a long black cigarette-holder in a peeled back white pigskin glove and he was wrinkling his nose at the dead magazines on the library table and the chairs and the rusty floor covering and the general air of not much money being made.

As I opened the communicating door he made a quarter turn and stared at me out of a pair of rather dreamy pale eyes set close to a narrow nose. His skin was sun-flushed, his reddish hair was brushed back hard over a narrow skull, and the thin line of his mustache was much redder than his hair.

He looked me over without haste and without much pleasure. He blew some smoke delicately and spoke through it with a faint sneer.

“You’re Marlowe?”

I nodded.

“I’m a little disappointed,” he said. “I rather expected something with dirty fingernails.”

“Come inside,” I said, “and you can be witty sitting down.”

I held the door for him and he strolled past me flicking cigarette ash on the floor with the middle nail of his free hand. He sat down on the customer’s side of the desk, took off the glove from his right hand and folded this with the other already off and laid them on the desk. He tapped the cigarette end out of the long black holder, prodded the coal with a match until it stopped smoking, fitted another cigarette and lit it with a broad mahogany-colored match. He leaned back in his chair with the smile of a bored aristocrat.

“All set?” I enquired. “Pulse and respiration normal? You wouldn’t like a cold towel on your head or anything?”

He didn’t curl his lip because it had been curled when he came in. “A private detective,” he said. “I never met one. A shifty business, one gathers. Keyhole peeping, raking up scandal, that sort of thing.”

“You here on business,” I asked him, “or just slumming?”

His smile was as faint as a fat lady at a fireman’s ball.

“The name is Murdock. That probably means a little something to you.”

“You certainly made nice time over here,” I said, and started to fill a pipe.

He watched me fill the pipe. He said slowly: “I understand my mother has employed you on a job of some sort. She has given you a check.”

I finished filling the pipe, put a match to it, got it drawing and leaned back to blow smoke over my right shoulder towards the open window. I didn’t say anything.

He leaned forward a little more and said earnestly: “I know being cagey is all part of your trade, but I am not guessing. A little worm told me, a simple garden worm, often trodden on, but still somehow surviving—like myself. I happened to be not far behind you. Does that help to clear things up?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Supposing it made any difference to me.”

“You are hired to find my wife, I gather.”

I made a snorting sound and grinned at him over the pipe bowl.

“Marlowe,” he said, even more earnestly, “I’ll try hard, but I don’t think I am going to like you.”

“I’m screaming,” I said. “With rage and pain.”

“And if you will pardon a homely phrase, your tough guy act stinks.”

“Coming from you, that’s bitter.”

He leaned back again and brooded at me with pale eyes. He fussed around in the chair, trying to get comfortable. A lot of people had tried to get comfortable in that chair. I ought to try it myself sometime. Maybe it was losing business for me.

“Why should my mother want Linda found?” he asked slowly. “She hated her guts. I mean my mother hated Linda’s guts. Linda was quite decent to my mother. What do you think of her?”

“Your mother?”

“Of course. You haven’t met Linda, have you?”

“That secretary of your mother’s has her job hanging by a frayed thread. She talks out of turn.”

He shook his head sharply. “Mother won’t know. Anyhow, Mother couldn’t do without Merle. She has to have somebody to bully. She might yell at her or even slap her face, but she couldn’t do without her. What did you think of her?”

“Kind of cute—in an old world sort of way.”

He frowned. “I mean Mother. Merle’s just a simple little girl, I know.”

“Your powers of observation startle me,” I said.

He looked surprised. He almost forgot to fingernail the ash of his cigarette. But not quite. He was careful not to get any of it in the ashtray, however.

“About my mother,” he said patiently.

“A grand old warhorse,” I said. “A heart of gold, and the gold buried good and deep.”

“But why does she want Linda found? I can’t understand it. Spending money on it too. My mother hates to spend money. She thinks money is part of her skin. Why does she want Linda found?”

“Search me,” I said. “Who said she did?”

“Why, you implied so. And Merle—”

“Merle’s just romantic. She made it up. Hell, she blows her nose in a man’s handkerchief. Probably one of yours.”

He blushed. “That’s silly. Look, Marlowe. Please, be reasonable and give me an idea what it’s all about. I haven’t much money, I’m afraid, but would a couple of hundred—”

“I ought to bop you,” I said. “Besides I’m not supposed to talk to you. Orders.”

“Why, for heaven’s sake?”

“Don’t ask me things I don’t know. I can’t tell you the answers. And don’t ask me things I do know, because I won’t tell you the answers. Where have you been all your life? If a man in my line of work is handed a job, does he go around answering questions about it to anyone that gets curious?”

“There must be a lot of electricity in the air,” he said nastily, “for a man in your line of work to turn down two hundred dollars.”

There was nothing in that for me either. I picked his broad mahogany match out of the tray and looked at it. It had thin yellow edges and there was white printing on it. ROSEMONT H. RICHARDS ‘3—the rest was burnt off. I doubled the match and squeezed the halves together and tossed it in the waste basket.

“I love my wife,” he said suddenly and showed me the hard white edges of his teeth. “A corny touch, but it’s true.”

“The Lombardos are still doing all right.”

He kept his lips pulled back from his teeth and talked through them at me. “She doesn’t love me. I know of no particular reason why she should. Things have been strained between us. She was used to a fast moving sort of life. With us, well, it has been pretty dull. We haven’t quarreled. Linda’s the cool type. But she hasn’t really had a lot of fun being married to me.”

“You’re just too modest,” I said.

His eyes glinted, but he kept his smooth manner pretty well in place.

“Not good, Marlowe. Not even fresh. Look, you have the air of a decent sort of guy. I know my mother is not putting out two hundred and fifty bucks just to be breezy. Maybe it’s not Linda. Maybe it’s something else. Maybe—” he stopped and then said this very slowly, watching my eyes, “maybe it’s Morny.”

“Maybe it is,” I said cheerfully.

He picked his gloves up and slapped the desk with them and put them down again. “I’m in a spot there all right,” he said. “But I didn’t think she knew about it. Morny must have called her up. He promised not to.”

This was easy. I said: “How much are you into him for?” It wasn’t so easy. He got suspicious again. “If he called her up, he would have told her. And she would have told you,” he said thinly.

“Maybe it isn’t Morny,” I said, beginning to want a drink very badly. “Maybe the cook is with child by the iceman. But if it was Morny, how much?”

“Twelve thousand,” he said, looking down and flushing.

“Threats?”

He nodded.

“Tell him to go fly a kite,” I said. “What kind of lad is he? Tough?”

He looked up again, his face being brave. “I suppose he is. I suppose they all are. He used to be a screen heavy. Good looking in a flashy way, a chaser. But don’t get any ideas. Linda just worked there, like the waiters and the band. And if you are looking for her, you’ll have a hard time finding her.”

I sneered at him politely.

“Why would I have a hard time finding her? She’s not buried in the back yard, I hope.”

He stood up with a flash of anger in his pale eyes. Standing there leaning over the desk a little he whipped his right hand up in a neat enough gesture and brought out a small automatic, about .25 caliber with a walnut grip. It looked like the brother of the one I had seen in the drawer of Merle’s desk. The muzzle looked vicious enough pointing at me. I didn’t move.

“If anybody tries to push Linda around, he’ll have to push me around first,” he said tightly.

“That oughtn’t to be too hard. Better get more gun—unless you’re just thinking of bees.”

He put the little gun back in his inside pocket. He gave me a straight hard look and picked his gloves up and started for the door.

“It’s a waste of time talking to you,” he said. “All you do is crack wise.”

I said: “Wait a minute,” and got up and went around the desk. “It might be a good idea for you not to mention this interview to your mother, if only for the little girl’s sake.”

He nodded. “For the amount of information I got, it doesn’t seem worth mentioning.”

“That straight goods about your owing Morny twelve grand?”

He looked down, then up, then down again. He said: “Anybody who could get into Alex Morny for twelve grand would have to be a lot smarter than I am.”

I was quite close to him. I said: “As a matter of fact I don’t even think you are worried about your wife. I think you know where she is. She didn’t run away from you at all. She just ran away from your mother.”

He lifted his eyes and drew one glove on. He didn’t say anything.

“Perhaps she’ll get a job,” I said. “And make enough money to support you.”

He looked down at the floor again, turned his body to the right a little and the gloved fist made a tight unrelaxed arc through the air upwards. I moved my jaw out of the way and caught his wrist and pushed it slowly back against his chest, leaning on it. He slid a foot back on the floor and began to breathe hard. It was a slender wrist. My fingers went around it and met.

We stood there looking into each other’s eyes. He was breathing like a drunk, his mouth open and his lips pulled back. Small round spots of bright red flamed on his cheeks. He tried to jerk his wrist away, but I put so much weight on him that he had to take another short step back to brace himself. Our faces were now only inches apart.

“How come your old man didn’t leave you some money?” I sneered. “Or did you blow it all?”

He spoke between his teeth, stiff trying to jerk loose. “If it’s any of your rotten business and you mean Jasper Murdock, he wasn’t my father. He didn’t like me and he didn’t leave me a cent. My father was a man named Horace Bright who lost his money in the crash and jumped out of his office window.”

“You milk easy,” I said, “but you give pretty thin milk. I’m sorry for what I said about your wife supporting you. I just wanted to get your goat.”

I dropped his wrist and stepped back. He still breathed hard and heavily. His eyes on mine were very angry, but he kept his voice down.

“Well, you got it. If you’re satisfied, I’ll be on my way.”

“I was doing you a favor,” I said. “A gun toter oughtn’t to insult so easily. Better ditch it.”

“That’s my business,” he said. “I’m sorry I took a swing at you. It probably wouldn’t have hurt much, if it had connected.”

“That’s all right.”

He opened the door and went on out. His steps died along the corridor. Another screwball. I tapped my teeth with a knuckle in time to the sound of his steps as long as I could hear them. Then I went back to the desk, looked at my pad, and lifted the phone.

4

After the bell had rung three times at the other end of the line a light childish sort of girl’s voice filtered itself through a hank of gum and said: “Good morning. Mr. Morningstar’s office.”

“Is the old gentleman in?”

“Who is calling, please?”

“Marlowe.”

“Does he know you, Mr. Marlowe?”

“Ask him if he wants to buy any early American gold coins.”

“Just a minute, please.”

There was a pause suitable to an elderly party in an inner office having his attention called to the fact that somebody on the telephone wanted to talk to him. Then the phone clicked and a man spoke. He had a dry voice. You might even call it parched.

“This is Mr. Morningstar.”

“I’m told you called Mrs. Murdock in Pasadena, Mr. Morningstar. About a certain coin.”

“About a certain coin,” he repeated. “Indeed. Well?”

“My understanding is that you wished to buy the coin in question from the Murdock collection.”

“Indeed? And who are you, sir?”

“Philip Marlowe. A private detective. I’m working for Mrs. Murdock.”

“Indeed,” he said for the third time. He cleared his throat carefully. “And what did you wish to talk to me about, Mr. Marlowe?”

“About this coin.”

“But I was informed it was not for sale.”

“I still want to talk to you about it. In person.”

“Do you mean she has changed her mind about selling?”

“No.”

“Then I’m afraid I don’t understand what you want, Mr. Marlowe. What have we to talk about?” He sounded sly now.

I took the ace out of my sleeve and played it with a languid grace. “The point is, Mr. Morningstar, that at the time you called up you already knew the coin wasn’t for sale.”

“Interesting,” he said slowly. “How?”

“You’re in the business, you couldn’t help knowing. It’s a matter of public record that the Murdock collection cannot be sold during Mrs. Murdock’s lifetime.”

“Ah,” he said. “Ah.” There was a silence. Then, “At three o’clock,” he said, not sharp, but quick. “I shall be glad to see you here in my office. You probably know where it is. Will that suit you?”

“I’ll be there,” I said.

I hung up and lit my pipe again and sat there looking at the wall. My face was stiff with thought, or with something that made my face stiff. I took Linda Murdock’s photo out of my pocket, stared at it for a while, decided that the face was pretty commonplace after all, locked the photo away in my desk. I picked Murdock’s second match out of my ashtray and looked it over. The lettering on this one read: TOP ROW W. D. WRIGHT ‘36.

I dropped it back in the tray, wondering what made this important. Maybe it was a clue.

I got Mrs. Murdock’s check out of my wallet, endorsed it, made out a deposit slip and a check for cash, got my bank book out of the desk, and folded the lot under a rubber band and put them in my pocket.

Lois Magic was not listed in the phone book.

I got the classified section up on the desk and made a list of the half dozen theatrical agencies that showed in the largest type and called them. They all had bright cheerful voices and wanted to ask a lot of questions, but they either didn’t know or didn’t care to tell me anything about a Miss Lois Magic, said to be an entertainer.

I threw the list in the wastebasket and called Kenny Haste, a crime reporter on the Chronicle.

“What do you know about Alex Morny?” I asked him when we were through cracking wise at each other.

“Runs a plushy nightclub and gambling joint in Idle Valley, about two miles off the highway back towards the hills. Used to be in pictures. Lousy actor. Seems to have plenty of protection. I never heard of him shooting anybody on the public square at high noon. Or at any other time for that matter. But I wouldn’t like to bet on it.”

“Dangerous?”

“I’d say he might be, if necessary. All those boys have been to picture shows and know how nightclub bosses are supposed to act. He has a bodyguard who is quite a character. His name’s Eddie Prue, he’s about six feet five inches tall and thin as an honest alibi. He has a frozen eye, the result of a war wound.”

“Is Morny dangerous to women?”

“Don’t be Victorian, old top. Women don’t call it danger.”

“Do you know a girl named Lois Magic, said to be an entertainer. A tall gaudy blond, I hear.”

“No. Sounds as though I might like to.”

“Don’t be cute. Do you know anybody named Vannier? None of these people are in the phone book.”

“Nope. But I could ask Gertie Arbogast, if you want to call back. He knows all the nightclub aristocrats. And heels.”

“Thanks, Kenny. I’ll do that. Half an hour?”

He said that would be fine, and we hung up. I locked the office and left.

At the end of the corridor, in the angle of the wall, a youngish blond man in a brown suit and a cocoa-colored straw hat with a brown and yellow tropical print band was reading the evening paper with his back to the wall. As I passed him he yawned and tucked the paper under his arm and straightened up.

He got into the elevator with me. He could hardly keep his eyes open he was so tired. I went out on the street and walked a block to the bank to deposit my check and draw out a little folding money for expenses. From there I went to the Tigertail Lounge and sat in a shallow booth and drank a martini and ate a sandwich. The man in the brown suit posted himself at the end of the bar and drank coca colas and looked bored and piled pennies in front of him, carefully smoothing the edges. He had his dark glasses on again. That made him invisible.

I dragged my sandwich out as long as I could and then strolled back to the telephone booth at the inner end of the bar. The man in the brown suit turned his head quickly and then covered the motion by lifting his glass. I dialed the Chronicle office again.

“Okay,” Kenny Haste said. “Gertie Arbogast says Morny married your gaudy blond not very long ago. Lois Magic. He doesn’t know Vannier. He says Morny bought a place out beyond Bel-Air, a white house on Stillwood Crescent Drive, about five blocks north of Sunset. Gertie says Morny took it over from a busted flush named Arthur Blake Popham who got caught in a mail fraud rap. Popham’s initials are still on the gates. And probably on the toilet paper, Gertie says. He was that kind of a guy. That’s all we seem to know.”

“Nobody could ask more. Many thanks, Kenny.”

I hung up, stepped out of the booth, met the dark glasses above the brown suit under the cocoa straw hat and watched them turn quickly away.

I spun around and went back through a swing door into the kitchen and through that to the alley and along the alley a quarter block to the back of the parking lot where I had put my car.

No sand-colored coupe succeeded in getting behind me as I drove off, in the general direction of Bel-Air.

5

Stillwood Crescent Drive curved leisurely north from Sunset Boulevard, well beyond the Bel-Air Country Club golf course. The road was lined with walled and fenced estates. Some had high walls, some had low walls, some had ornamental iron fences, some were a bit old-fashioned and got along with tall hedges. The street had no sidewalk. Nobody walked in that neighborhood, not even the mailman.

The afternoon was hot, but not hot like Pasadena. There was a drowsy smell of flowers and sun, a swishing of lawn sprinklers gentle behind hedges and walls, the clear ratchety sound of lawn mowers moving delicately over serene and confident lawns.

I drove up the hill slowly, looking for monograms on gates. Arthur Blake Popham was the name. ABP would be the initials. I found them almost at the top, gilt on a black shield, the gates folded back on a black composition driveway.

It was a glaring white house that had the air of being brand new, but the landscaping was well advanced. It was modest enough for the neighborhood, not more than fourteen rooms and probably only one swimming pool. Its wall was low, made of brick with the concrete all oozed out between and set that way and painted over white. On top of the wall a low iron railing painted black. The name A. P. Morny was stenciled on the large silver-colored mailbox at the service entrance.

I parked my crate on the street and walked up the black driveway to a side door of glittering white paint shot with patches of color from the stained glass canopy over it. I hammered on a large brass knocker. Back along the side of the house a chauffeur was washing off a Cadillac.

The door opened and a hard-eyed Filipino in a white coat curled his lip at me. I gave him a card.

“Mrs. Morny,” I said.

He shut the door. Time passed, as it always does when I go calling. The swish of water on the Cadillac had a cool sound. The chauffeur was a little runt in breeches and leggings and a sweat-stained shirt. He looked like an overgrown jockey and he made the same kind of hissing noise as he worked on the car that a groom makes rubbing down a horse.

A red-throated hummingbird went into a scarlet bush beside the door, shook the long tubular blooms around a little, and zoomed off so fast he simply disappeared in the air.

The door opened, the Filipino poked my card at me. I didn’t take it.

“What you want?”

It was a tight crackling voice, like someone tiptoeing across a lot of eggshells.

“Want to see Mrs. Morny.”

“She not at home.”

“Didn’t you know that when I gave you the card?”

He opened his fingers and let the card flutter to the ground. He grinned, showing me a lot of cut-rate dental work.

“I know when she tell me.”

He shut the door in my face, not gently.

I picked the card up and walked along the side of the house to where the chauffeur was squirting water on the Cadillac sedan and rubbing the dirt off with a big sponge. He had red rimmed eyes and a bang of corn-colored hair. A cigarette hung exhausted at the corner of his lower lip.

He gave me the quick side glance of a man who is minding his own business with difficulty. I said:

“Where’s the boss?”

The cigarette jiggled in his mouth. The water went on swishing gently on the paint.

“Ask at the house, Jack.”

“I done asked. They done shut the door in mah face.”

“You’re breaking my heart, Jack.”

“How about Mrs. Morny?”

“Same answer, Jack. I just work here. Selling something?” I held my card so that he could read it. It was a business card this time. He put the sponge down on the running board, and the hose on the cement. He stepped around the water to wipe his hands on a towel that hung at the side of the garage doors. He fished a match out of his pants, struck it and tilted his head back to light the dead butt that was stuck in his face.

His foxy little eyes flicked around this way and that and he moved behind the car, with a jerk of the head. I went over near him.

“How’s the little old expense account?” he asked in a small careful voice.

“Fat with inactivity.”

“For five I could start thinking.”

“I wouldn’t want to make it that tough for you.”

“For ten I could sing like four canaries and a steel guitar.”

“I don’t like these plushy orchestrations,” I said.

He cocked his head sideways. “Talk English, Jack.”

“I don’t want you to lose your job, son. All I want to know is whether Mrs. Morny is home. Does that rate more than a buck?”

“Don’t worry about my job, Jack. I’m solid.”

“With Morny—or somebody else?”

“You want that for the same buck?”

“Two bucks.”

He eyed me over. “You ain’t working for him, are you?”

“Sure.”

“You’re a liar.”

“Sure.”

“Gimme the two bucks,” he snapped.

I gave him two dollars.

“She’s in the backyard with a friend,” he said. “A nice friend. You got a friend that don’t work and a husband that works, you’re all set, see?” He leered.

“You’ll be all set in an irrigation ditch one of these days.”

“Not me, Jack. I’m wise. I know how to play ‘em. I monkeyed around these kind of people all my life.”

He rubbed the two dollar bills between his palms, blew on them, folded them longways and wideways and tucked them in the watch pocket of his breeches.

“That was just the soup,” he said. “Now for five more—”

A rather large blond cocker spaniel tore around the Cadillac, skidded a little on the wet concrete, took off neatly, hit me in the stomach and thighs with all four paws, licked my face, dropped to the ground, ran around my legs, sat down between them, let his tongue out all the way and started to pant.

I stepped over him and braced myself against the side of the car and got my handkerchief out.

A male voice called: “Here, Heathcliff. Here, Heathcliff.” Steps sounded on a hard walk.

“That’s Heathcliff,” the chauffeur said sourly.

“Heathcliff?”

“Cripes, that’s what they call the dog, Jack.”

“Wuthering Heights?” I asked.

“Now you’re double-talking again,” he sneered. “Look out—company.”

He picked up the sponge and the hose and went back to washing the car. I moved away from him. The cocker spaniel immediately moved between my legs again; almost tripping me.

“Here, Heathcliff,” the male voice called out louder, and a man came into view through the opening of a latticed tunnel covered with climbing roses.

Tall, dark, with a clear olive skin, brilliant black eyes, gleaming white teeth. Sideburns. A narrow black mustache. Sideburns too long, much too long. White shirt with embroidered initials on the pocket, white slacks, white shoes. A wristwatch that curved halfway around a lean dark wrist, held on by a gold chain. A yellow scarf around a bronzed slender neck.

He saw the dog squatted between my legs and didn’t like it. He snapped long fingers and snapped a clear hard voice:

“Here, Heathcliff. Come here at once!”

The dog breathed hard and didn’t move, except to lean a little closer to my right leg.

“Who are you?” the man asked, staring me down.

I held out my card. Olive fingers took the card. The dog quietly backed out from between my legs, edged around the front end of the car, and faded silently into the distance.

“Marlowe,” the man said. “Marlowe, eh? What’s this? A detective? What do you want?”

“Want to see Mrs. Morny.”

He looked me up and down, brilliant black eyes sweeping slowly and the silky fringes of long eyelashes following them.

“Weren’t you told she was not in?”

“Yeah, but I didn’t believe it. Are you Mr. Morny?”

“No.”

“That’s Mr. Vannier,” the chauffeur said behind my back, in the drawled, over-polite voice of deliberate insolence. “Mr. Vannier’s a friend of the family. He comes here quite a lot.”

Vannier looked past my shoulder, his eyes furious. The chauffeur came around the car and spit the cigarette stub out of his mouth with casual contempt.

“I told the shamus the boss wasn’t here, Mr. Vannier.”

“I see.”

“I told him Mrs. Morny and you was here. Did I do wrong?”

Vannier said: “You could have minded your own business.”

The chauffeur said: “I wonder why the hell I didn’t think of that.”

Vannier said: “Get out before I break your dirty little neck for you.”

The chauffeur eyed him quietly and then went back into the gloom of the garage and started to whistle. Vannier moved his hot angry eyes over to me and snapped:

“You were told Mrs. Morny was not in, but it didn’t take. Is that it? In other words the information failed to satisfy you.”

“If we have to have other words,” I said, “those might do.”

“I see. Could you bring yourself to say what point you wish to discuss with Mrs. Morny?”

“I’d prefer to explain that to Mrs. Morny herself.”

“The implication is that she doesn’t care to see you.”

Behind the car the chauffeur said: “Watch his right, Jack. It might have a knife in it.”

Vannier’s olive skin turned the color of dried seaweed. He turned on his heel and rapped at me in a stifled voice: “Follow me.”

He went along the brick path under the tunnel of roses and through a white gate at the end. Beyond was a walled-in garden containing flowerbeds crammed with showy annuals, a badminton court, a nice stretch of greensward, and a small tiled pool glittering angrily in the sun. Beside the pool there was a flagged space set with blue and white garden furniture, low tables with composition tops, reclining chairs with footrests and enormous cushions, and over all a blue and white umbrella as big as a small tent.

A long-limbed languorous type of showgirl blond lay at her ease in one of the chairs, with her feet raised on a padded rest and a tall misted glass at her elbow, near a silver ice bucket and a Scotch bottle. She looked at us lazily as we came over the grass. From thirty feet away she looked like a lot of class. From ten feet away she looked like something made up to be seen from thirty feet away. Her mouth was too wide, her eyes were too blue, her makeup was too vivid, the thin arch of her eyebrows was almost fantastic in its curve and spread, and the mascara was so thick on her eyelashes that they looked like miniature iron railings.

She wore white duck slacks, blue and white open-toed sandals over bare feet and crimson lake toenails, a white silk blouse and a necklace of green stones that were not square cut emeralds. Her hair was as artificial as a nightclub lobby.

On the chair beside her there was a white straw garden hat with a brim the size of a spare tire and a white satin chinstrap. On the brim of the hat lay a pair of green sunglasses with lenses the size of doughnuts.

Vannier marched over to her and snapped out: “You’ve got to can that nasty little red-eyed driver of yours, but quick. Otherwise I’m liable to break his neck any minute. I can’t go near him without getting insulted.”

The blond coughed lightly, flicked a handkerchief around without doing anything with it, and said:

“Sit down and rest your sex appeal. Who’s your friend?”

Vannier looked for my card, found he was holding it in his band and threw it on her lap. She picked it up languidly, ran her eyes over it, ran them over me, sighed and tapped her teeth with her fingernails.

“Big, isn’t he? Too much for you to handle, I guess.”

Vannier looked at me nastily. “All right, get it over with, whatever it is.”

“Do I talk to her?” I asked. “Or do I talk to you and have you put it in English?”

The blond laughed. A silvery ripple of laughter that held the unspoiled naturalness of a bubble dance. A small tongue played roguishly along her lips.

Vannier sat down and lit a gold-tipped cigarette and I stood there looking at them.

I said: “I’m looking for a friend of yours, Mrs. Morny. I understand that she shared an apartment with you about a year ago. Her name is Linda Conquest.”

Vannier flicked his eyes up, down, up, down. He turned his head and looked across the pool. The cocker spaniel named Heathcliff sat over there looking at us with the white of one eye.

Vannier snapped his fingers. “Here, Heathcliff! Here, Heathcliff! Come here, sir!”

The blond said: “Shut up. The dog hates your guts. Give your vanity a rest, for heaven’s sake.”

Vannier snapped: “Don’t talk like that to me.”

The blond giggled and petted his face with her eyes.

I said: “I’m looking for a girl named Linda Conquest, Mrs. Morny.”

The blond looked at me and said: “So you said. I was just thinking. I don’t think I’ve seen her in six months. She got married.”

“You haven’t seen her in six months?”

“That’s what I said, big boy. What do you want to know for?”

“Just a private enquiry I’m making.”

“About what?”

“About a confidential matter,” I said.

“Just think,” the blond said brightly. “He’s making a private enquiry about a confidential matter. You hear that, Lou? Busting in on total strangers that don’t want to see him is quite all right, though, isn’t it, Lou? On account of he’s making a private enquiry about a confidential matter.”

“Then you don’t know where she is, Mrs. Morny?”

“Didn’t I say so?” Her voice rose a couple of notches.

“No. You said you didn’t think you had seen her in six months. Not quite the same thing.”

“Who told you I shared an apartment with her?” the blond snapped.

“I never reveal a source of information, Mrs. Morny.”

“Sweetheart, you’re fussy enough to be a dance director. I should tell you everything, you should tell me nothing.”

“The position is quite different,” I said. “I’m a hired hand obeying instructions. The lady has no reason to hide out, has she?”

“Who’s looking for her?”

“Her folks.”

“Guess again. She doesn’t have any folks.”

“You must know her pretty well, if you know that,” I said.

“Maybe I did once. That don’t prove I do now.”

“Okay,” I said. “The answer is you know, but you won’t tell.”

“The answer,” Vannier said suddenly, “is that you’re not wanted here and the sooner you get out, the better we like it.”

I kept on looking at Mrs. Morny. She winked at me and said to Vannier: “Don’t get so hostile, darling. You have a lot of charm, but you have small bones. You’re not built for the rough work. That right, big boy?”

I said: “I hadn’t thought about it, Mrs. Morny. Do you think Mr. Morny could help me—or would?”

She shook her head. “How would I know? You could try. If he don’t like you, he has guys around that can bounce you.”

“I think you could tell me yourself, if you wanted to.”

“How are you going to make me want to?” Her eyes were inviting.

“With all these people around,” I said, “how can I?”

“That’s a thought,” she said, and sipped from her glass, watching me over it.

Vannier stood up very slowly. His face was white. He put his hand inside his shirt and said slowly, between his teeth: “Get out, mugg. While you can still walk.”

I looked at him in surprise. “Where’s your refinement?” I asked him. “And don’t tell me you wear a gun with your garden clothes.”

The blond laughed, showing a fine strong set of teeth. Vannier thrust his hand under his left arm inside the shirt and set his lips. His black eyes were sharp and blank at the same time, like a snake’s eyes.

“You heard me,” he said, almost softly. “And don’t write me off too quick. I’d plug you as soon as I’d strike a match. And fix it afterwards.”

I looked at the blond. Her eyes were bright and her mouth looked sensual and eager, watching us.

I turned and walked away across the grass. About halfway across it I looked back at them. Vannier stood in exactly the same position, his hand inside his shirt. The blonde’s eyes were still wide and her lips parted, but the shadow of the umbrella had dimmed her expression and at that distance it might have been either fear or pleased anticipation.

I went on over the grass, through the white gate and along the brick path under the rose arbor. I reached the end of it, turned, walked quietly back to the gate and took another look at them. I didn’t know what there would be to see or what I cared about it when I saw it.

What I saw was Vannier practically sprawled on top of the blond, kissing her.

I shook my head and went back along the walk.

The red-eyed chauffeur was still at work on the Cadillac. He had finished the wash job and was wiping off the glass and nickel with a large chamois. I went around and stood beside him.

“How you come out?” he asked me out of the side of his mouth.

“Badly. They tramped all over me,” I said.

He nodded and went on making the hissing noise of a groom rubbing down a horse.

“You better watch your step. The guy’s heeled,” I said. “Or pretends to be.”

The chauffeur laughed shortly. “Under that suit? Nix.”

“Who is this guy Vannier? What does he do?”

The chauffeur straightened up, put the chamois over the sill of a window and wiped his hands on the towel that was now stuck in his waistband.

“Women, my guess would be,” he said.

“Isn’t it a bit dangerous—playing with this particular woman?”

“I’d say it was,” he agreed. “Different guys got different ideas of danger. It would scare me.”

“Where does he live?”

“Sherman Oaks. She goes over there. She’ll go once too often.”

“Ever run across a girl named Linda Conquest? Tall, dark, handsome, used to be a singer with a band?”

“For two bucks, Jack, you expect a lot of service.”

“I could build it up to five.”

He shook his head. “I don’t know the party. Not by that name. All kinds of dames come here, mostly pretty flashy. I don’t get introduced.” He grinned.

I got my wallet out and put three ones in his little damp paw. I added a business card.

“I like small close-built men,” I said. “They never seem to be afraid of anything. Come and see me some time.”

“I might at that, Jack. Thanks. Linda Conquest, huh? I’ll keep my ear flaps off.”

“So long,” I said. “The name?”

“They call me Shifty. I never knew why.”

“So long, Shifty.”

“So long. Gat under his arm—in them clothes? Not a chance.”

“I don’t know,” I said. “He made the motion. I’m not hired to gunfight with strangers.”

“Hell, that shirt he’s wearing only got two buttons at the top. I noticed. Take him a week to pull a rod from under that.” But he sounded faintly worried.

“I guess he was just bluffing,” I agreed. “If you hear mention of Linda Conquest, I’ll be glad to talk business with you.”

“Okay, Jack.”

I went back along the black driveway. He stood there scratching his chin.

6

I drove along the block looking for a place to park so that I could run up to the office for a moment before going on downtown.

A chauffeur-driven Packard edged out from the curb in front of a cigar store about thirty feet from the entrance to my building. I slid into the space, locked the car and stepped out. It was only then that I noticed the car in front of which I had parked was a familiar-looking sand-colored coupe. It didn’t have to be the same one. There were thousands of them. Nobody was in it. Nobody was near it that wore a cocoa straw hat with a brown and yellow band.

I went around to the street side and looked at the steering post. No license holder. I wrote the license plate number down on the back of an envelope, just in case, and went on into my building. He wasn’t in the lobby, or in the corridor upstairs.

I went into the office, looked on the floor for mail, didn’t find any, bought myself a short drink out of the office bottle and left. I didn’t have any time to spare to get downtown before three o’clock.

The sand-colored coupe was still parked, still empty. I got into mine and started up and moved out into the traffic stream.

I was below Sunset on Vine before he picked me up. I kept on going, grinning, and wondering where he had hid. Perhaps in the car parked behind his own. I hadn’t thought of that.

I drove south to Third and all the way downtown on Third. The sand-colored coupe kept half a block behind me all the way. I moved over to Seventh and Grand, parked near Seventh and Olive, stopped to buy cigarettes I didn’t need, and then walked east along Seventh without looking behind me. At Spring I went into the Hotel Metropole, strolled over to the big horseshoe cigar counter to light one of my cigarettes and then sat down in one of the old brown leather chairs in the lobby.

A blond man in a brown suit, dark glasses and the now familiar hat came into the lobby and moved unobtrusively among the potted palms and the stucco arches to the cigar counter. He bought a package of cigarettes and broke it open standing there, using the time to lean his back against the counter and give the lobby the benefit of his eagle eye.

He picked up his change and went over and sat down with his back to a pillar. He tipped his hat down over his dark glasses and seemed to go to sleep with an unlighted cigarette between his lips.

I got up and wandered over and dropped into the chair beside him. I looked at him sideways. He didn’t move. Seen at close quarters his face seemed young and pink and plump and the blond beard on his chin was very carelessly shaved. Behind the dark glasses his eyelashes flicked up and down rapidly. A hand on his knee tightened and pulled the cloth into wrinkles. There was a wart on his cheek just below the right eyelid.

I struck a match and held the flame to his cigarette. “Light?”

“Oh—thanks,” he said, very surprised. He drew breath in until the cigarette tip glowed. I shook the match out, tossed it into the sand jar at my elbow and waited. He looked at me sideways several times before he spoke.

“Haven’t I seen you somewhere before? Over on Dresden Avenue in Pasadena. This morning.”

I could see his cheeks get pinker than they had been. He sighed.

“I must be lousy,” he said.

“Boy, you stink,” I agreed.

“Maybe it’s the hat,” he said.

“The hat helps,” I said. “But you don’t really need it.”

“It’s a pretty tough dollar in this town,” he said sadly. “You can’t do it on foot, you ruin yourself with taxi fares if you use taxis, and if you use your own car, it’s always where you can’t get to it fast enough. You have to stay too close.”

“But you don’t have to climb in a guy’s pocket,” I said. “Did you want something with me or are you just practicing?”

“I figured I’d find out if you were smart enough to be worth talking to.”

“I’m very smart,” I said. “It would be a shame not to talk to me.”

He looked carefully around back of his chair and on both sides of where we were sitting and then drew a small, pigskin wallet out. He handed me a nice fresh card from it. It read: George Anson Phillips. Confidential Investigations. 212 Senger Building, 1924 North Wilcox Avenue, Hollywood. A Glenview telephone number. In the upper left hand corner there was an open eye with an eyebrow arched in surprise and very long eyelashes.

“You can’t do that,” I said, pointing to the eye. “That’s the Pinkerton’s. You’ll be stealing their business.”

“Oh hell,” he said, “what little I get wouldn’t bother them.” I snapped the card on my fingernail and bit down hard on my teeth and slipped the card into my pocket.

“You want one of mine—or have you completed your file on me?”

“Oh, I know all about you,” he said. “I was a deputy at Ventura the time you were working on the Gregson case.”

Gregson was a con man from Oklahoma City who was followed all over the United States for two years by one of his victims until he got so jittery that he shot up a service station attendant who mistook him for an acquaintance. It seemed a long time ago to me.

I said: “Go on from there.”

“I remembered your name when I saw it on your registration this a.m. So when I lost you on the way into town I just looked you up. I was going to come in and talk, but it would have been a violation of confidence. This way I kind of can’t help myself.”

Another screwball. That made three in one day, not counting Mrs. Murdock, who might turn out to be a screwball too.

I waited while he took his dark glasses off and polished them and put them on again and gave the neighborhood the once over again. Then he said:

“I figured we could maybe make a deal. Pool our resources, as they say. I saw the guy go into your office, so I figured he had hired you.”

“You knew who he was?”

“I’m working on him,” he said, and his voice sounded flat and discouraged. “And where I am getting is no place at all.”

“What did he do to you?”

“Well, I’m working for his wife.”

“Divorce?”

He looked all around him carefully and said in a small voice: “So she says. But I wonder.”

“They both want one,” I said. “Each trying to get something on the other. Comical, isn’t it?”

“My end I don’t like so well. A guy is tailing me around some of the time. A very tall guy with a funny eye. I shake him but after a while I see him again. A very tall guy. Like a lamppost.”

A very tall man with a funny eye. I smoked thoughtfully. “Anything to do with you?” the blond man asked me a little anxiously.

I shook my head and threw my cigarette into the sand jar. “Never saw him that I know of.” I looked at my strap watch. “We better get together and talk this thing over properly, but I can’t do it now. I have an appointment.”

“I’d like to,” he said. “Very much.”

“Let’s then. My office, my apartment, or your office, or where?”

He scratched his badly shaved chin with a well-chewed thumbnail.

“My apartment,” he said at last. “It’s not in the phone book. Give me that card a minute.”

He turned it over on his palm when I gave it to him and wrote slowly with a small metal pencil, moving his tongue along his lips. He was getting younger every minute. He didn’t seem much more than twenty by now, but he had to be, because the Gregson case had been six years back.

He put his pencil away and handed me back the card. The address he had written on it was 204 Florence Apartments, 128 Court Street.

I looked at him curiously. “Court Street on Bunker Hill?”

He nodded, flushing all over his blond skin. “Not too good,” he said quickly. “I haven’t been in the chips lately. Do you mind?”

“No, why would I?”

I stood up and held a hand out. He shook it and dropped it and I pushed it down into my hip pocket and rubbed the palm against the handkerchief I had there. Looking at his face more closely I saw that there was a line of moisture across his upper lip and more of it along the side of his nose. It was not as hot as all that.

I started to move off and then I turned back to lean down close to his face and say: “Almost anybody can pull my leg, but just to make sure, she’s a tall blond with careless eyes, huh?”

“I wouldn’t call them careless,” he said.

I held my face together while I said: “And just between the two of us this divorce stuff is a lot of hooey. It’s something else entirely, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” he said softly, “and something I don’t like more every minute I think about it. Here.”

He pulled something out of his pocket and dropped it into my hand. It was a flat key.

“No need for you to wait around in the hall, if I happen to be out. I have two of them. What time would you think you would come?”

“About four-thirty, the way it looks now. You sure you want to give me this key?”

“Why, we’re in the same racket,” he said, looking up at me innocently, or as innocently as he could look through a pair of dark glasses.

At the edge of the lobby I looked back. He sat there peacefully, with the half-smoked cigarette dead between his lips and the gaudy brown and yellow band on his hat looking as quiet as a cigarette ad on the back page of the Saturday Evening Post.

We were in the same racket. So I wouldn’t chisel him. Just like that. I could have the key to his apartment and go in and make myself at home. I could wear his slippers and drink his liquor and lift up his carpet and count the thousand dollar bills under it. We were in the same racket.

7

The Belfont Building was eight stories of nothing in particular that had got itself pinched off between a large green and chromium cut rate suit emporium and a three-story and basement garage that made a noise like lion cages at feeding time. The small dark narrow lobby was as dirty as a chicken yard. The building directory had a lot of vacant space on it. Only one of the names meant anything to me and I knew that one already. Opposite the directory a large sign tilted against the fake marble wall said: Space for Renting Suitable for Cigar Stand. Apply Room 316.

There were two open-grill elevators but only one seemed to be running and that not busy. An old man sat inside it slack-jawed and watery-eyed on a piece of folded burlap on top of a wooden stool. He looked as if he had been sitting there since the Civil War and had come out of that badly.

I got in with him and said eight, and he wrestled the doors shut and cranked his buggy and we dragged upwards lurching. The old man breathed hard, as if he was carrying the elevator on his back.

I got out at my floor and started along the hallway and behind me the old man leaned out of the car and blew his nose with his fingers into a carton full of floor sweepings.

Elisha Morningstar’s office was at the back, opposite the fire door. Two rooms, both lettered in flaked black paint on pebbled glass. Elisha Morningstar. Numismatist. The one farthest back said: Entrance.

I turned the knob and went into a small narrow room with two windows, a shabby little typewriter desk, closed, a number of wall cases of tarnished coins in tilted slots with yellowed typewritten labels under them, two brown filing cases at the back against the wall, no curtains at the windows, and a dust gray floor carpet so threadbare that you wouldn’t notice the rips in it unless you tripped over one.

An inner wooden door was open at the back across from the filing cases, behind the little typewriter desk. Through the door came the small sounds a man makes when he isn’t doing anything at all. Then the dry voice of Elisha Morningstar called out:

“Come in, please. Come in.”

I went along and in. The inner office was just as small but had a lot more stuff in it. A green safe almost blocked off the front half. Beyond this a heavy old mahogany table against the entrance door held some dark books, some flabby old magazines, and a lot of dust. In the back wall a window was open a few inches, without effect on the musty smell. There was a hat rack with a greasy black felt hat on it. There were three long-legged tables with glass tops and more coins under the glass tops. There was a heavy dark leather-topped desk midway of the room. It had the usual desk stuff on it, and in addition a pair of jeweler’s scales under a glass dome and two large nickel-framed magnifying glasses and a jeweler’s eyepiece lying on a buff scratch pad, beside a cracked yellow silk handkerchief spotted with ink.

In the swivel chair at the desk sat an elderly party in a dark gray suit with high lapels and too many buttons down the front. He had some stringy white hair that grew long enough to tickle his ears. A pale gray bald patch loomed high up in the middle of it, like a rock above timberline. Fuzz grew out of his ears, far enough to catch a moth.

He had sharp black eyes with a pair of pouches under each eye, brownish purple in color and traced with a network of wrinkles and veins. His cheeks were shiny and his short sharp nose looked as if it had hung over a lot of quick ones in its time. A Hoover collar which no decent laundry would have allowed on the premises nudged his Adam’s apple and a black string tie poked a small hard knot out at the bottom of the collar, like a mouse getting ready to come out of a mouse hole.

He said: “My young lady had to go to the dentist. You are Mr. Marlowe?”

I nodded.

“Pray, be seated.” He waved a thin hand at the chair across the desk. I sat down. “You have some identification, I presume?”

I showed it to him. While he read it I smelled him from across the desk. He had a sort of dry musty smell, like a fairly clean Chinaman.

He placed my card face down on top of his desk and folded his hands on it. His sharp black eyes didn’t miss anything in my face.

“Well, Mr. Marlowe, what can I do for you?”

“Tell me about the Brasher Doubloon.”

“Ah, yes,” he said. “The Brasher Doubloon. An interesting coin.” He lifted his hands off the desk and made a steeple of the fingers, like an old time family lawyer getting set for a little tangled grammar. “In some ways the most interesting and valuable of all early American coins. As no doubt you know.”

“What I don’t know about early American coins you could almost crowd into the Rose Bowl.”

“Is that so?” he said. “Is that so? Do you want me to tell you?”

“What I’m here for, Mr. Morningstar.”

“It is a gold coin, roughly equivalent to a twenty-dollar gold piece, and about the size of a half dollar. Almost exactly. It was made for the State of New York in the year 1787. It was not minted. There were no mints until 1793, when the first mint was opened in Philadelphia. The Brasher Doubloon was coined probably by the pressure molding process and its maker was a private goldsmith named Ephraim Brasher, or Brashear. Where the name survives it is usually spelled Brashear, but not on the coin. I don’t know why.”

I got a cigarette into my mouth and lit it. I thought it might do something to the musty smell. “What’s the pressure molding process?”

“The two halves of the mold were engraved in steel, in intaglio, of course. These halves were then mounted in lead. Gold blanks were pressed between them in a coin press. Then the edges were trimmed for weight and smoothed. The coin was not milled. There were no milling machines in 1787.”

“Kind of a slow process,” I said.

He nodded his peaked white head. “Quite. And, since the surface-hardening of steel without distortion could not be accomplished at that time, the dies wore and had to be remade from time to time. With consequent slight variations in design which would be visible under strong magnification. In fact it would be safe to say no two of the coins would be identical, judged by modern methods of microscopic examination. Am I clear?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Up to a point. How many of these coins are there and what are they worth?”

He undid the steeple of fingers and put his hands back on the desktop and patted them gently up and down.

“I don’t know how many there are. Nobody knows. A few hundred, a thousand, perhaps more. But of these very few indeed are uncirculated specimens in what is called mint condition. The value varies from a couple of thousand on up. I should say that at the present time, since the devaluation of the dollar, an uncirculated specimen, carefully handled by a reputable dealer, might easily bring ten thousand dollars, or even more. It would have to have a history, of course.”

I said: “Ah,” and let smoke out of my lungs slowly and waved it away with the flat of my hand, away from the old party across the desk from me. He looked like a non-smoker. “And without a history and not so carefully handled—how much?”

He shrugged. “There would be the implication that the coin was illegally acquired. Stolen, or obtained by fraud. Of course it might not be so. Rare coins do turn up in odd places at odd times. In old strong boxes, in the secret drawers of desks in old New England houses. Not often, I grant you. But it happens. I know of a very valuable coin that fell out of the stuffing of a horsehair sofa which was being restored by an antique dealer. The sofa had been in the same room in the same house in Fall River, Massachusetts, for ninety years. Nobody knew how the coin got there. But generally speaking, the implication of theft would be strong. Particularly in this part of the country.”

He looked at the corner of the ceiling with an absent stare. I looked at him with a not so absent stare. He looked like a man who could be trusted with a secret—if it was his own secret.

He brought his eyes down to my level slowly and said: “Five dollars, please.”

I said: “Huh?”

“Five dollars, please.”

“What for?”

“Don’t be absurd, Mr. Marlowe. Everything I have told you is available in the public library. In Fosdyke’s Register, in particular. You choose to come here and take up my time relating it to you. For this my charge is five dollars.”

“And suppose I don’t pay it,” I said.

He leaned back and closed his eyes. A very faint smile twitched at the corners of his lips. “You will pay it,” he said.

I paid it. I took the five out of my wallet and got up to lean over the desk and spread it out right in front of him, carefully. I stroked the bill with my fingertips, as if it was a kitten.

“Five dollars, Mr. Morningstar,” I said.

He opened his eyes and looked at the bill. He smiled.

“And now,” I said, “let’s talk about the Brasher Doubloon that somebody tried to sell you.”

He opened his eyes a little wider. “Oh, did somebody try to sell me a Brasher Doubloon? Now why would they do that?”

“They needed the money,” I said. “And they didn’t want too many questions asked. They knew or found out that you were in the business and that the building where you had your office was a shabby dump where anything could happen. They knew your office was at the end of a corridor and that you were an elderly man who would probably not make any false moves—out of regard for your health.”

“They seem to have known a great deal,” Elisha Morningstar said dryly.

“They knew what they had to know in order to transact their business. Just like you and me. And none of it was hard to find out.”

He stuck his little finger in his ear and worked it around and brought it out with a little dark wax on it. He wiped it off casually on his coat.

“And you assume all this from the mere fact that I called up Mrs. Murdock and asked if her Brasher Doubloon was for sale?”

“Sure. She had the same idea herself. It’s reasonable. Like I said over the phone to you, you would know that coin was not for sale. If you knew anything about the business at all. And I can see that you do.”

He bowed, about one inch. He didn’t quite smile but he looked about as pleased as a man in a Hoover collar ever looks.

“You would be offered this coin for sale,” I said, “in suspicious circumstances. You would want to buy it, if you could get it cheap and had the money to handle it. But you would want to know where it came from. And even if you were quite sure it was stolen, you could still buy it, if you could get it cheap enough.”

“Oh, I could, could I?” He looked amused, but not in a large way.

“Sure you could—if you are a reputable dealer. I’ll assume you are. By buying the coin—cheap—you would be protecting the owner or his insurance carrier from complete loss. They’d be glad to pay you back your outlay. It’s done all the time.”

“Then the Murdock Brasher has been stolen,” he said abruptly.

“Don’t quote me,” I said. “It’s a secret.”

He almost picked his nose this time. He just caught himself. He picked a hair out of one nostril instead, with a quick jerk and a wince. He held it up and looked at it. Looking at me past it he said:

“And how much will your principal pay for the return of the coin?”

I leaned over the desk and gave him my shady leer. “One grand. What did you pay?”

“I think you are a very smart young man,” he said. Then he screwed his face up and his chin wobbled and his chest began to bounce in and out and a sound came out of him like a convalescent rooster learning to crow again after a long illness.

He was laughing.

It stopped after a while. His face came all smooth again and his eyes, opened, black and sharp and shrewd.

“Eight hundred dollars,” he said. “Eight hundred dollars for an uncirculated specimen of the Brasher Doubloon.” He chortled.

“Fine. Got it with you? That leaves you two hundred. Fair enough. A quick turnover, a reasonable profit and no trouble for anybody.”

“It is not in my office,” he said. “Do you take me for a fool?” He reached an ancient silver watch out of his vest on a black fob. He screwed up his eyes to look at it. “Let us say eleven in the morning,” he said. “Come back with your money. The coin may or may not be here, but if I am satisfied with your behavior, I will arrange matters.”

“That is satisfactory,” I said, and stood up. “I have to get the money anyhow.”

“Have it in used bills,” he said almost dreamily. “Used twenties will do. An occasional fifty will do no harm.”

I grinned and started for the door. Halfway there I turned around and went back to lean both hands on the desk and push my face over it.

“What did she look like?”

He looked blank.

“The girl that sold you the coin.”

He looked blanker.

“Okay,” I said. “It wasn’t a girl. She had help. It was a man. What did the man look like?”

He pursed his lips and made another steeple with his fingers. “He was a middle-aged man, heavy set, about five feet seven inches tall and weighing around one hundred and seventy pounds. He said his name was Smith. He wore a blue suit, black shoes, a green tie and shirt, no hat. There was a brown bordered handkerchief in his outer pocket. His hair was dark brown sprinkled with gray. There was a bald patch about the size of a dollar on the crown of his head and a scar about two inches long running down the side of his jaw. On the left side, I think. Yes, on the left side.”

“Not bad,” I said. “What about the hole in his right sock?”

“I omitted to take his shoes off.”

“Darn careless of you,” I said.

He didn’t say anything. We just stared at each other, half curious, half hostile, like new neighbors. Then suddenly he went into his laugh again.

The five-dollar bill I had given him was still lying on his side of the desk. I flicked a hand across and took it.

“You won’t want this now,” I said. “Since we started talking in thousands.”

He stopped laughing very suddenly. Then he shrugged.

“At eleven a.m.,” he said. “And no tricks, Mr. Marlowe. Don’t think I don’t know how to protect myself.”

“I hope you do,” I said, “because what you are handling is dynamite.”

I left him and tramped across the empty outer office and opened the door and let it shut, staying inside. There ought to be footsteps outside in the corridor, but his transom was closed and I hadn’t made much noise coming on crepe rubber soles. I hoped he would remember that. I sneaked back across the threadbare carpet and edged in behind the door, between the door and the little closed typewriter desk. A kid trick, but once in a while it will work, especially after a lot of smart conversation, full of worldliness and sly wit. Like a sucker play in football. And if it didn’t work this time, we would just be there sneering at each other again.

It worked. Nothing happened for a while except that a nose was blown. Then all by himself in there he went into his sick rooster laugh again. Then a throat was cleared. Then a swivel chair squeaked, and feet walked.

A dingy white head poked into the room, about two inches past the end of the door. It hung there suspended and I went into a state of suspended animation. Then the head was drawn back and four unclean fingernails came around the edge of the door and pulled. The door closed, clicked, was shut. I started breathing again and put my ear to the wooden panel.

The swivel chair squeaked once more. The threshing sound of a telephone being dialed. I lunged across to the instrument on the little typewriter desk and lifted it. At the other end of the line the bell had started to ring. It rang six times. Then a man’s voice said: “Yeah?”

“The Florence Apartments?”

“Yeah.”

“I’d like to speak to Mr. Anson in Apartment two-o-four.”

“Hold the wire. I’ll see if he’s in.”

Mr. Morningstar and I held the wire. Noise came over it, the blaring sound of a loud radio broadcasting a baseball game. It was not close to the telephone, but it was noisy enough.

Then I could hear the hollow sound of steps coming nearer and the harsh rattle of the telephone receiver being picked up and the voice said:

“Not in. Any message?”

“I’ll call later,” Mr. Morningstar said.

I hung up fast and did a rapid glide across the floor to the entrance door and opened it very silently, like snow falling, and let it close the same way, taking its weight at the last moment, so that the click of the catch would not have been heard three feet away.

I breathed hard and tight going down the hall, listening to myself. I pushed the elevator button. Then I got out the card which Mr. George Anson Phillips had given me in the lobby of the Hotel Metropole. I didn’t look at it in any real sense. I didn’t have to look at it to recall that it referred to Apartment 204, Florence Apartments, 128 Court Street. I just stood there flicking it with a fingernail while the old elevator came heaving up in the shaft, straining like a gravel truck on a hairpin turn.

The time was three-fifty.

8

Bunker Hill is old town, lost town, shabby town, crook town. Once, very long ago, it was the choice residential district of the city, and there are still standing a few of the jigsaw Gothic mansions with wide porches and walls covered with round-end shingles and full corner bay windows with spindle turrets. They are all rooming houses now, their parquetry floors are scratched and worn through the once glossy finish and the wide sweeping staircases are dark with time and with cheap varnish laid on over generations of dirt. In the tall rooms haggard landladies bicker with shifty tenants. On the wide cool front porches, reaching their cracked shoes into the sun, and staring at nothing, sit the old men with faces like lost battles.

In and around the old houses there are flyblown restaurants and Italian fruit stands and cheap apartment houses and little candy stores where you can buy even nastier things than their candy. And there are ratty hotels where nobody except people named Smith and Jones sign the register and where the night clerk is half watchdog and half pander.

Out of the apartment houses come women who should be young but have faces like stale beer; men with pulled-down hats and quick eyes that look the street over behind the cupped hand that shields the match flame; worn intellectuals with cigarette coughs and no money in the bank; fly cops with granite faces and unwavering eyes; cokies and coke peddlers; people who look like nothing in particular and know it, and once in a while even men that actually go to work. But they come out early, when the wide cracked sidewalks are empty and still have dew on them.

I was earlier than four-thirty getting over there, but not much. I parked at the end of the street, where the funicular railway comes struggling up the yellow clay bank from Hill Street, and walked along Court Street to the Florence Apartments. It was dark brick in front, three stories, the lower windows at sidewalk level and masked by rusted screens and dingy net curtains. The entrance door had a glass panel and enough of the name left to be read. I opened it and went down three brass bound steps into a hallway you could touch on both sides without stretching. Dim doors painted with numbers in dim paint. An alcove at the foot of the stairs with a pay telephone. A sign: Manager Apt. 106. At the back of the hallway a screen door and in the alley beyond it four tall battered garbage pails in a line, with a dance of flies in the sunlit air above them.

I went up the stairs. The radio I had heard over the telephone was still blatting the baseball game. I read numbers and went up front. Apartment 204 was on the right side and the baseball game was right across the hall from it. I knocked, got no answer and knocked louder. Behind my back three Dodgers struck out against a welter of synthetic crowd noise. I knocked a third time and looked out of the front hall window while I felt in my pocket for the key George Anson Phillips had given me.

Across the street was an Italian funeral home, neat and quiet and reticent, white painted brick, flush with the sidewalk. Pietro Palermo Funeral Parlors. The thin green script of a neon sign lay across its façade, with a chaste air. A tall man in dark clothes came out of the front door and leaned against the white wall. He looked very handsome. He had dark skin and a handsome head of iron-gray hair brushed back from his forehead. He got out what looked at that distance to be a silver or platinum and black enamel cigarette case, opened it languidly with two long brown fingers and selected a gold-tipped cigarette. He put the case away and lit the cigarette with a pocket lighter that seemed to match the case. He put that away and folded his arms and stared at nothing with half-closed eyes. From the tip of his motionless cigarette a thin wisp of smoke rose straight up past his face, as thin and straight as the smoke of a dying campfire at dawn.

Another batter struck out or flied out behind my back in the recreated ball game. I turned from watching the tall Italian, put the key into the door of Apartment 204 and went in.

A square room with a brown carpet, very little furniture and that not inviting. The wall bed with the usual distorting mirror faced me as I opened the door and made me look like a two-time loser sneaking home from a reefer party. There was a birchwood easy chair with some hard looking upholstery beside it in the form of a davenport. A table before the window held a lamp with a shirred paper shade. There was a door on either side of the bed.

The door to the left led into a small kitchenette with a brown woodstone sink and a three-burner stove and an old electric icebox that clicked and began to throb in torment just as I pushed the door open. On the woodstone drain board stood the remains of somebody’s breakfast, mud at the bottom of a cup, a burnt crust of bread, crumbs on a board, a yellow slime of melted butter down the slope of a saucer, a smeared knife and a granite coffee pot that smelled like sacks in a hot barn.

I went back around the wall bed and through the other door. It gave on a short hallway with an open space for clothes and a built-in dresser. On the dresser was a comb and a black brush with a few blond hairs in its black bristles. Also a can of talcum, a small flashlight with a cracked lens, a pad of writing paper, a bank pen, a bottle of ink on a blotter, cigarettes and matches in a glass ashtray that contained half a dozen stubs.

In the drawers of the dresser were about what one suitcase would hold in the way of socks and underclothes and handkerchiefs. There was a dark gray suit on a hanger, not new but still good, and a pair of rather dusty black brogues on the floor under it.

I pushed the bathroom door. It opened about a foot and then stuck. My nose twitched and I could feel my lips stiffen and I smelled the harsh sharp bitter smell from beyond the door. I leaned against it. It gave a little, but came back, as though somebody was holding it against me. I poked my head through the opening.

The floor of the bathroom was too short for him, so his knees were poked up and hung outwards slackly and his head was pressed against the woodstone baseboard at the other end, not tilted up, but jammed tight. His brown suit was rumpled a little and his dark glasses stuck out of his breast pocket at an unsafe angle. As if that mattered. His right hand was thrown across his stomach, his left hand lay on the floor, palm up, the fingers curled a little. There was a blood-caked bruise on the right side of his head, in the blond hair. His open mouth was full of shiny crimson blood.

The door was stopped by his leg. I pushed hard and edged around it and got in. I bent down to push two fingers into the side of his neck against the big artery. No artery throbbed there, or even whispered. Nothing at all. The skin was icy. It couldn’t have been icy. I just thought it was. I straightened up and leaned my back against the door and made hard fists in my pockets and smelled the cordite fumes. The baseball game was still going on, but through two closed doors it sounded remote.

I stood and looked down at him. Nothing in that, Marlowe, nothing at all. Nothing for you here, nothing. You didn’t even know him. Get out, get out fast.

I pulled away from the door and pulled it open and went back through the hall into the living room. A face in the mirror looked at me. A strained, leering face. I turned away from it quickly and took out the flat key George Anson Phillips had given me and rubbed it between my moist palms and laid it down beside the lamp.

I smeared the doorknob opening the door and the outside knob closing the door. The Dodgers were ahead seven to three, the first half of the eighth. A lady who sounded well on with her drinking was singing Frankie and Johnny, the roundhouse version, in a voice that even whiskey had failed to improve. A deep man’s voice growled at her to shut up and she kept on singing and there was a hard quick movement across the floor and a smack and a yelp and she stopped singing and the baseball game went right on.

I put the cigarette in my mouth and lit it and went back down the stairs and stood in the half dark of the hall angle looking at the little sign that read: Manager, Apt. 106.

I was a fool even to look at it. I looked at it for a long minute, biting the cigarette hard between my teeth.

I turned and walked down the hallway towards the back. A small enameled plate on a door said: Manager. I knocked on the door.

9

A chair was pushed back, feet shuffled, the door opened.

“You the manager?”

“Yeah.” It was the same voice I had heard over the telephone. Talking to Elisha Morningstar.

He held an empty smeared glass in his hand. It looked as if somebody had been keeping goldfish in it. He was a lanky man with carroty short hair growing down to a point on his forehead. He had a long narrow head packed with shabby cunning. Greenish eyes stared under orange eyebrows. His ears were large and might have flapped in a high wind. He had a long nose that would be into things. The whole face was a trained face, a face that would know how to keep a secret, a face that held the effortless composure of a corpse in the morgue.

He wore his vest open, no coat, a woven hair watch guard, and round blue sleeve garters with metal clasps.

I said: “Mr. Anson?”

“Two-o-four.”

“He’s not in.”

“What should I do—lay an egg?”

“Neat,” I said. “You have them all the time, or is this your birthday?”

“Beat it,” he said. “Drift.” He started to close the door. He opened it again to say: “Take the air. Scram. Push off” Having made his meaning clear he started to close the door again.

I leaned against the door. He leaned against it on his side. That brought our faces close together. “Five bucks,” I said.

It rocked him. He opened the door very suddenly and I had to take a quick step forward in order not to butt his chin with my head.

“Come in,” he said.

A living room with a wall bed, everything strictly to specifications, even to the shirred paper lampshade and the glass ashtray. This room was painted egg-yolk yellow. All it needed was a few fat black spiders painted on the yellow to be anybody’s bilious attack.

“Sit down,” he said, shutting the door.

I sat down. We looked at each other with the clear innocent eyes of a couple of used car salesmen.

“Beer?” he said.

“Thanks.”

He opened two cans, filled the smeared glass he had been holding, and reached for another like it. I said I would drink out of the can. He handed me the can.

“A dime,” he said.

I gave him a dime.

He dropped it into his vest and went on looking at me. He pulled a chair over and sat in it and spread his bony upjutting knees and let his empty hand droop between them.

“I ain’t interested in your five bucks,” he said.

“That’s fine,” I said. “I wasn’t really thinking of giving it to you.”

“A wisey,” he said. “What gives? We run a nice respectable place here. No funny stuff gets pulled.”

“Quiet too,” I said. “Upstairs you could almost hear an eagle scream.”

His smile was wide, about three quarters of an inch. “I don’t amuse easy,” he said.

“Just like Queen Victoria,” I said.

“I don’t get it.”

“I don’t expect miracles,” I said. The meaningless talk had a sort of cold bracing effect on me, making a mood with a hard gritty edge.

I got my wallet out and selected a card from it. It wasn’t my card. It read: James B. Pollock, Reliance Indemnity Company, Field Agent. I tried to remember what James B. Pollock looked like and where I had met him. I couldn’t. I handed the carroty man the card.

He read it and scratched the end of his nose with one of the corners. “Wrong john?” he asked, keeping his green eyes plastered to my face.

“Jewelry,” I said and waved a hand.

He thought this over. While he thought it over I tried to make up my mind whether it worried him at all. It didn’t seem to.

“We get one once in a while,” he conceded. “You can’t help it. He didn’t look like it to me, though. Soft looking.”

“Maybe I got a bum steer,” I said. I described George Anson Phillips to him, George Anson Phillips alive, in his brown suit and his dark glasses and his cocoa straw hat with the brown and yellow print band. I wondered what had happened to the hat. It hadn’t been up there. He must have got rid of it, thinking it was too conspicuous. His blond head was almost, but not quite, as bad.

“That sound like him?”

The carroty man took his time making up his mind. Finally he nodded yes, green eyes watching me carefully, lean hard hand holding the card up to his mouth and running the card along his teeth like a stick along the palings of a picket fence.

“I didn’t figure him for no crook,” he said. “But hell, they come all sizes and shapes. Only been here a month. If he looked like a wrong gee, wouldn’t have been here at all.”

I did a good job of not laughing in his face. “What say we frisk the apartment while he’s out?”

He shook his head. “Mr. Palermo wouldn’t like it.”

“Mr. Palermo?”

“He’s the owner. Across the street. Owns the funeral parlors. Owns this building and a lot of other buildings. Practically owns the district, if you know what I mean.” He gave me a twitch of the lip and a flutter of the right eyelid. “Gets the vote out. Not a guy to crowd.”

“Well, while he’s getting the vote out or playing with a stiff or whatever he’s doing at the moment, let’s go up and frisk the apartment.”

“Don’t get me sore at you,” the carroty man said briefly.

“That would bother me like two per cent of nothing at all,” I said. “Let’s go up and frisk the apartment.” I threw my empty beer can at the waste basket and watched it bounce back and roll half way across the room.

The carroty man stood up suddenly and spread his feet apart and dusted his hands together and took hold of his lower lip with his teeth.

“You said something about five,” he shrugged.

“That was hours ago,” I said. “I thought better of it. Let’s go up and frisk the apartment.”

“Say that just once more—” his right hand slid towards his hip.

“If you’re thinking of pulling a gun, Mr. Palermo wouldn’t like it,” I said.

“To hell with Mr. Palermo,” he snarled, in a voice suddenly furious, out of a face suddenly charged with dark blood.

“Mr. Palermo will be glad to know that’s how you feel about him,” I said.

“Look,” the carroty man said very slowly, dropping his hand to his side and leaning forward from the hips and pushing his face at me as hard as he could. “Look. I was sitting here having myself a beer or two. Maybe three. Maybe nine. What the hell? I wasn’t bothering anybody. It was a nice day. It looked like it might be a nice evening—Then you come in.” He waved a hand violently.

“Let’s go up and frisk the apartment,” I said.

He threw both fists forward in tight lumps. At the end of the motion he threw his hands wide open, straining the fingers as far as they would go. His nose twitched sharply.

“If it wasn’t for the job,” he said.

I opened my mouth. “Don’t say it!” he yelled.

He put a hat on, but no coat, opened a drawer and took out a bunch of keys, walked past me to open the door and stood in it, jerking his chin at me. His face still looked a little wild.

We went out into the hall and along it and up the stairs. The ball game was over and dance music had taken its place. Very loud dance music. The carroty man selected one of his keys and put it in the lock of Apartment 204. Against the booming of the dance band behind us in the apartment across the way a woman’s voice suddenly screamed hysterically.

The carroty man withdrew the key and bared his teeth at me. He walked across the narrow hallway and banged on the opposite door. He had to knock hard and long before any attention was paid. Then the door was jerked open and a sharp-faced blond in scarlet slacks and a green pullover stared out with sultry eyes, one of which was puffed and the other had been socked several days ago. She also had a bruise on her throat and her hand held a tall cool glass of amber fluid.

“Pipe down, but soon,” the carroty man said. “Too much racket. I don’t aim to ask you again. Next time I call some law.”

The girl looked back over her shoulder and screamed against the noise of the radio: “Hey, Del! The guy says to pipe down! You wanna sock him?”

A chair squeaked, the radio noise died abruptly and a thick bitter-eyed dark man appeared behind the blond, yanked her out of the way with one hand and pushed his face at us. He needed a shave. He was wearing pants, street shoes and an undershirt.

He settled his feet in the doorway, whistled a little breath in through his nose and said:

“Buzz off. I just come in from lunch. I had a lousy lunch. I wouldn’t want nobody to push muscle at me.” He was very drunk, but in a hard practiced sort of way.

The carroty man said: “You heard me, Mr. Hench. Dim that radio and stop the roughhouse in here. And make it sudden.”

The man addressed as Hench said: “Listen, picklepuss—” and heaved forward with his right foot in a hard stamp.

The carroty man’s left foot didn’t wait to be stamped on. The lean body moved back quickly and the thrown bunch of keys hit the floor behind, and clanked against the door of Apartment 204. The carroty man’s right hand made a sweeping movement and came up with a woven leather blackjack.

Hench said: “Yah!” and took two big handfuls of air in his two hairy hands, closed the hands into fists and swung hard at nothing.

The carroty man hit him on the top of his head and the girl screamed again and threw a glass of liquor in her boy friend’s face. Whether because it was safe to do it now or because she made an honest mistake, I couldn’t tell.

Hench turned blindly with his face dripping, stumbled and ran across the floor in a lurch that threatened to land him on his nose at every step. The bed was down and tumbled. Hench made the bed on one knee and plunged a hand under the pillow.

I said: “Look out—gun.”

“I can fade that too,” the carroty man said between his teeth and slid his right hand, empty now, under his open vest.

Hench was down on both knees. He came up on one and turned and there was a short black gun in his right hand and he was staring down at it, not holding it by the grip at all, holding it flat on his palm.

“Drop it!” the carroty man’s voice said tightly and he went on into the room.

The blond promptly jumped on his back and wound her long green arms around his neck, yelling lustily. The carroty man staggered and swore and waved his gun around.

“Get him, Del!” the blond screamed. “Get him good!” Hench, one hand on the bed and one foot on the floor, both knees doubled, right hand holding the black gun flat on his palm, eyes staring down at it, pushed himself slowly to his feet and growled deep in his throat:

“This ain’t my gun.”

I relieved the carroty man of the gun that was not doing him any good and stepped around him, leaving him to shake the blond off his back as best he could. A door banged down the hallway and steps came along toward us.

I said: “Drop it, Hench.”

He looked up at me, puzzled dark eyes suddenly sober. “It ain’t my gun,” he said and held it out flat. “Mine’s a Colt .32—belly gun.”

I took the gun off his hand. He made no effort to stop me. He sat down on the bed, rubbed the top of his head slowly, and screwed his face up in difficult thought. “Where the hell—” his voice trailed off and he shook his head and winced.

I sniffed the gun. It had been fired. I sprang the magazine out and counted the bullets through the small holes in the side. There were six. With one in the magazine, that made seven. The gun was a Colt .32, automatic, eight shot. It had been fired. If it had not been reloaded, one shot had been fired from it.

The carroty man had the blond off his back now. He had thrown her into a chair and was wiping a scratch on his cheek. His green eyes were baleful.

“Better get some law,” I said. “A shot has been fired from this gun and it’s about time you found out there’s a dead man in the apartment across the hall.”

Hench looked up at me stupidly and said in a quiet, reasonable voice: “Brother, that simply ain’t my gun.”

The blond sobbed in a rather theatrical manner and showed me an open mouth twisted with misery and ham acting. The carroty man went softly out of the door.

10

“Shot in the throat with a medium caliber gun and a soft-nosed bullet,” Detective-Lieutenant Jesse Breeze said. “A gun like this and bullets like is in here.” He danced the gun on his hand, the gun Hench had said was not his gun. “Bullet ranged upwards and probably hit the back of the skull. Still inside his head. The man’s dead about two hours. Hands and face cold, but body still warm. No rigor. Was sapped with something hard before being shot. Likely with a gun butt. All that mean anything to you boys and girls?”

The newspaper he was sitting on rustled. He took his hat off and mopped his face and the top of his almost bald head. A fringe of light colored hair around the crown was damp and dark with sweat. He put his hat back on, a flat-crowned panama, burned dark by the sun. Not this year’s hat, and probably not last year’s.

He was a big man, rather paunchy, wearing brown and white shoes and sloppy socks and white trousers with thin black stripes, an open neck shirt showing some ginger-colored hair at the top of his chest, and a rough sky-blue sports coat not wider at the shoulders than a two-car garage. He would be about fifty years old and the only thing about him that very much suggested cop was the calm, unwinking unwavering stare of his prominent pale blue eyes, a stare that had no thought of being rude, but that anybody but a cop would feel to be rude. Below his eyes across the top of his cheeks and the bridge of his nose there was a wide path of freckles, like a mine field on a war map.

We were sitting in Hench’s apartment and the door was shut. Hench had his shirt on and he was absently tying a tie with thick blunt fingers that trembled. The girl was lying on the bed. She had a green wrap-around thing twisted about her head, a purse by her side and a short squirrel coat across her feet. Her mouth was a little open and her face was drained and shocked.

Hench said thickly: “If the idea is the guy was shot with the gun under the pillow, okay. Seems like he might have been. It ain’t my gun and nothing you boys can think up is going to make me say it’s my gun.”

“Assuming that to be so,” Breeze said, “how come? Somebody swiped your gun and left this one. When, how, what kind of gun was yours?”

“We went out about three-thirty or so to get something to eat at the hash house around the corner,” Hench said. “You can check that. We must have left the door unlocked. We were kind of hitting the bottle a little. I guess we were pretty noisy. We had the ball game going on the radio. I guess we shut it off when we went out. I’m not sure. You remember?” He looked at the girl lying white-faced and silent on the bed. “You remember, sweet?”

The girl didn’t look at him or answer him.

“She’s pooped,” Hench said. “I had a gun, a Colt .32, same caliber as that, but a belly gun. A revolver, not an automatic. There’s a piece broken off the rubber grip. A Jew named Morris gave it to me three four years ago. We worked together in a bar. I don’t have no permit, but I don’t carry the gun neither.”

Breeze said: “Hitting the hooch like you birds been and having a gun under the pillow sooner or later somebody was going to get shot. You ought to know that.”

“Hell, we didn’t even know the guy,” Hench said. His tie was tied now, very badly. He was cold sober and very shaky. He stood up and picked a coat off the end of the bed and put it on and sat down again. I watched his fingers tremble lighting a cigarette. “We don’t know his name. We don’t know anything about him. I see him maybe two three times in the hall, but he don’t even speak to me. It’s the same guy, I guess. I ain’t even sure of that.”

“It’s the fellow that lived there,” Breeze said. “Let me see now, this ball game is a studio re-broadcast, huh?”

“Goes on at three,” Hench said. “Three to say four-thirty, or sometimes later. We went out about the last half the third. We was gone about an inning and a half, maybe two. Twenty minutes to half an hour. Not more.”

“I guess he was shot just before you went out,” Breeze said. “The radio would kill the noise of the gun near enough. You must of left your door unlocked. Or even open.”

“Could be,” Hench said wearily. “You remember, honey?” Again the girl on the bed refused to answer him or even look at him.

Breeze said: “You left your door open or unlocked. The killer heard you go out. He got into your apartment, wanting to ditch his gun, saw the bed down, walked across and slipped his gun under the pillow, and then imagine his surprise. He found another gun there waiting for him. So he took it along. Now if he meant to ditch his gun, why not do it where he did his killing? Why take the risk of going into another apartment to do it? Why the fancy pants?”

I was sitting in the corner of the davenport by the window. I put in my nickel’s worth, saying: “Suppose he had locked himself out of Phillips’ apartment before he thought of ditching the gun? Suppose, coming out of the shock of his murder, he found himself in the hall still holding the murder gun. He would want to ditch it fast. Then if Hench’s door was open and he had heard them go out along the hall—”

Breeze looked at me briefly and grunted: “I’m not saying it isn’t so. I’m just considering.” He turned his attention back to Hench. “So now, if this turns out to be the gun that killed Anson, we got to try and trace your gun. While we do that we got to have you and the young lady handy. You understand that, of course?”

Hench said: “You don’t have any boys that can bounce me hard enough to make me tell it different.”

“We can always try,” Breeze said mildly. “And we might just as well get started.”

He stood up, turned and swept the crumpled newspapers off the chair on to the floor. He went over to the door, then turned and stood looking at the girl on the bed. “You all right, sister, or should I call for a matron?”

The girl on the bed didn’t answer him.

Hench said: “I need a drink. I need a drink bad.”

“Not while I’m watching you,” Breeze said and went out of the door.

Hench moved across the room and put the neck of a bottle into his mouth and gurgled liquor. He lowered the bottle, looked at what was left in it and went over to the girl. He pushed her shoulder.

“Wake up and have a drink,” he growled at her.

The girl stared at the ceiling. She didn’t answer him or show that she had heard him.

“Let her alone,” I said. “Shock.”

Hench finished what was in the bottle, put the empty bottle down carefully and looked at the girl again, then turned his back on her and stood frowning at the floor. “Jeeze, I wish I could remember better,” he said under his breath.

Breeze came back into the room with a young fresh-faced plainclothes detective. “This is Lieutenant Spangler,” he said. “He’ll take you down. Get going, huh?”

Hench went back to the bed and shook the girl’s shoulder. “Get on up, babe. We gotta take a ride.”

The girl turned her eyes without turning her head, and looked at him slowly. She lifted her shoulders off the bed and put a hand under her and swung her legs over the side and stood up, stamping her right foot, as if it was numb.

“Tough, kid—but you know how it is,” Hench said. The girl put a hand to her mouth and bit the knuckle of her little finger, looking at him blankly. Then she swung the hand suddenly and hit him in the face as hard as she could. Then she half ran out of the door.

Hench didn’t move a muscle for a long moment. There was a confused noise of men talking outside, a confused noise of cars down below in the street. Hench shrugged and cocked his heavy shoulders back and swept a slow look around the room, as if he didn’t expect to see it again very soon, or at all. Then he went out past the young fresh-faced detective.

The detective went out. The door closed. The confused noise outside was dimmed a little and Breeze and I sat looking at each other heavily.

11

After a while Breeze got tired of looking at me and dug a cigar out of his pocket. He slit the cellophane band with a knife and trimmed the end of the cigar and lit it carefully, turning it around in the flame, and holding the burning match away from it while he stared thoughtfully at nothing and drew on the cigar and made sure it was burning the way he wanted it to burn.

Then he shook the match out very slowly and reached over to lay it on the sill of the open window. Then he looked at me some more.

“You and me,” he said, “are going to get along.”

“That’s fine,” I said.

“You don’t think so,” he said. “But we are. But not because I took any sudden fancy to you. It’s the way I work. Everything in the clear. Everything sensible. Everything quiet. Not like that dame. That’s the kind of dame that spends her life looking for trouble and when she finds it, it’s the fault of the first guy she can get her fingernails into.”

“He gave her a couple of shiners,” I said. “That wouldn’t make her love him too much.”

“I can see,” Breeze said, “that you know a lot about dames.”

“Not knowing a lot about them has helped me in my business,” I said. “I’m open-minded.”

He nodded and examined the end of his cigar. He took a piece of paper out of his pocket and read from it. “Delmar B. Hench, 45, bartender, unemployed. Maybelle Masters, 26, dancer. That’s all I know about them. I’ve got a hunch there ain’t a lot more to know.”

“You don’t think he shot Anson?” I asked.

Breeze looked at me without pleasure. “Brother, I just got here.” He took a card out of his pocket and read from that. “James B. Pollock, Reliance Indemnity Company, Field Agent. What’s the idea?”

“In a neighborhood like this it’s bad form to use your own name,” I said. “Anson didn’t either.”

“What’s the matter with the neighborhood?”

“Practically everything,” I said.

“What I would like to know,” Breeze said, “is what you know about the dead guy?”

“I told you already.”

“Tell me again. People tell me so much stuff I get it all mixed up.”

“I know what it says on his card, that his name is George Anson Phillips, that he claimed to be a private detective. He was outside my office when I went to lunch. He followed me downtown, into the lobby of the Hotel Metropole. I led him there. I spoke to him and he admitted he had been following me and said it was because he wanted to find out if I was smart enough to do business with. That’s a lot of baloney, of course. He probably hadn’t quite made up his mind what to do and was waiting for something to decide him. He was on a job—he said—he had got leery of and he wanted to join up with somebody, perhaps somebody with a little more experience than he had, if he had any at all. He didn’t act as if he had.”

Breeze said: “And the only reason he picked on you is that six years ago you worked on a case in Ventura while he was a deputy up there.”

I said, “That’s my story.”

“But you don’t have to get stuck with it,” Breeze said calmly. “You can always give us a better one.”

“It’s good enough,” I said. “I mean it’s good enough in the sense that it’s bad enough to be true.”

He nodded his big slow head.

“What’s your idea of all this?” he asked.

“Have you investigated Phillips’ office address?”

He shook his head, no.

“My idea is you will find out he was hired because he was simple. He was hired to take this apartment here under a wrong name, and to do something that turned out to be not what he liked. He was scared. He wanted a friend, he wanted help. The fact that he picked me after so long a time and such little knowledge of me showed he didn’t know many people in the detective business.”

Breeze got his handkerchief out and mopped his head and face again. “But it don’t begin to show why he had to follow you around like a lost pup instead of walking right up to your office door and in.”

“No,” I said, “it doesn’t.”

“Can you explain that?”

“No. Not really.”

“Well, how would you try to explain it?”

“I’ve already explained it in the only way I know how. He was undecided whether to speak to me or not. He was waiting for something to decide him. I decided by speaking to him.”

Breeze said: “That is a very simple explanation. It is so simple it stinks.”

“You may be right,” I said.

“And as the result of this little hotel lobby conversation this guy, a total stranger to you, asks you to his apartment and hands you his key. Because he wants to talk to you.”

I said, “Yes.”

“Why couldn’t he talk to you then?”

“I had an appointment,” I said.

“Business?”

I nodded.

“I see. What you working on?”

I shook my head and didn’t answer.

“This is murder,” Breeze said. “You’re going to have to tell me.”

I shook my head again. He flushed a little.

“Look,” he said tightly, “you got to.”

“I’m sorry, Breeze,” I said. “But so far as things have gone, I’m not convinced of that.”

“Of course you know I can throw you in the can as a material witness,” he said casually.

“On what grounds?”

“On the grounds that you are the one who found the body, that you gave a false name to the manager here, and that you don’t give a satisfactory account of your relations with the dead guy.”

I said: “Are you going to do it?”

He smiled bleakly. “You got a lawyer?”

“I know several lawyers. I don’t have a lawyer on a retainer basis.”

“How many of the commissioners do you know personally?”

“None. That is, I’ve spoken to three of them, but they might not remember me.”

“But you have good contacts, in the mayor’s office and so on?”

“Tell me about them,” I said. “I’d like to know.”

“Look, buddy,” he said earnestly, “you must got some friends somewhere. Surely.”

“I’ve got a good friend in the Sheriff’s office, but I’d rather leave him out of it.”

He lifted his eyebrows. “Why? Maybe you’re going to need friends. A good word from a cop we know to be right might go a long way.”

“He’s just a personal friend,” I said. “I don’t ride around on his back. If I get in trouble, it won’t do him any good.”

“How about the homicide bureau?”

“There’s Randall,” I said. “If he’s still working out of Central Homicide. I had a little time with him on a case once. But he doesn’t like me too well.”

Breeze sighed and moved his feet on the floor, rustling the newspapers he had pushed down out of the chair.

“Is all this on the level—or are you just being smart? I mean about all the important guys you don’t know?”

“It’s on the level,” I said. “But the way I am using it is smart.”

“It ain’t smart to say so right out.”

“I think it is.”

He put a big freckled hand over the whole lower part of his face and squeezed. When he took the hand away there were round red marks on his cheeks from the pressure of thumb and fingers. I watched the marks fade.

“Why don’t you go on home and let a man work?” he asked crossly.

I got up and nodded and went towards the door. Breeze said to my back: “Gimme your home address.”

I gave it to him. He wrote it down. “So long,” he said drearily: “Don’t leave town. We’ll want a statement—maybe tonight.”

I went out. There were two uniformed cops outside on the landing. The door across the way was open and a fingerprint man was still working inside. Downstairs I met two more cops in the hallway, one at each end of it. I didn’t see the carroty manager. I went out the front door. There was an ambulance pulling away from the curb. A knot of people hung around on both sides of the street, not as many as would accumulate in some neighborhoods.

I pushed along the sidewalk. A man grabbed me by the arm and said: “What’s the damage, Jack?”

I shook his arm off without speaking or looking at his face and went on down the street to where my car was.

12

It was a quarter to seven when I let myself into the office and clicked the light on and picked a piece of paper off the floor. It was a notice from the Green Feather Messenger Service saying that a package was held awaiting my call and would be delivered upon request at any hour of the day or night. I put it on the desk, peeled my coat off and opened the windows. I got a half bottle of Old Taylor out of the deep drawer of the desk and drank a short drink, rolling it around on my tongue. Then I sat there holding the neck of the cool bottle and wondering how it would feel to be a homicide dick and find bodies lying around and not mind at all, not have to sneak out wiping doorknobs, not have to ponder how much I could tell without hurting a client and how little I could tell without too badly hurting myself. I decided I wouldn’t like it.

I pulled the phone over and looked at the number on the slip and called it. They said my package could be sent right over. I said I would wait for it.

It was getting dark outside now. The rushing sound of the traffic had died a little and the air from the open window, not yet cool from the night, had that tired end-of-the-day smell of dust, automobile exhaust, sunlight rising from hot walls and sidewalks, the remote smell of food in a thousand restaurants, and perhaps, drifting down from the residential hills above Hollywood—if you had a nose like a hunting dog—a touch of that peculiar tomcat smell that eucalyptus trees give off in warm weather.

I sat there smoking. Ten minutes later the door was knocked on and I opened it to a boy in a uniform cap who took my signature and gave me a small square package, not more than two and a half inches wide, if that. I gave the boy a dime and listened to him whistling his way back to the elevators.

The label had my name and address printed on it in ink, in a quite fair imitation of typed letters, larger and thinner than pica. I cut the string that tied the label to the box and unwound the thin brown paper. Inside was a thin cheap cardboard box pasted over with brown paper and stamped Made in Japan with a rubber stamp. It would be the kind of box you would get in a Jap store to hold some small carved animal or a small piece of jade. The lid fitted down all the way and tightly. I pulled it off and saw tissue paper and cotton wool.

Separating these I was looking at a gold coin about the size of a half dollar, bright and shining as if it had just come from the mint.

The side facing me showed a spread eagle with a shield for a breast and the initials E.B. punched into the left wing. Around these was a circle of beading, between the beading and the smooth unmilled edge of the coin, the legend E PLURIBUS UNUM. At the bottom was the date 1787.

I turned the coin over on my palm. It was heavy and cold and my palm felt moist under it. The other side showed a sun rising or setting behind a sharp peak of mountain, then a double circle of what looked like oak leaves, then more Latin, NOVA EBOBACA COLUMBIA EXCELSIOR. At the bottom of this side, in smaller capitals, the name BRASHER.

I was looking at the Brasher Doubloon.

There was nothing else in the box or in the paper, nothing on the paper. The handwritten printing meant nothing to me. I didn’t know anybody who used it.

I filled an empty tobacco pouch half full, wrapped the coin up in tissue paper, snapped a rubber band around it and tucked it into the tobacco in the pouch and put more in on top. I closed the zipper and put the pouch in my pocket. I locked the paper and string and box and label up in a filing cabinet, sat down again and dialed Elisha Morningstar’s number on the phone. The bell rang eight times at the other end of the line. It was not answered. I hardly expected that. I hung up again, looked Elisha Morningstar up in the book and saw that he had no listing for a residence phone in Los Angeles or the outlying towns that were in the phone book.

I got a shoulder holster out of the desk and strapped it on and slipped a Colt .38 automatic into it, put on hat and coat, shut the windows again, put the whiskey away, clicked the lights off and had the office door unlatched when the phone rang.

The ringing bell had a sinister sound, for no reason of itself, but because of the ears to which it rang. I stood there braced and tense, lips tightly drawn back in a half grin. Beyond the closed window the neon lights glowed. The dead air didn’t move. Outside the corridor was still. The bell rang in darkness, steady and strong.

I went back and leaned on the desk and answered. There was a click and a droning on the wire and beyond that nothing. I depressed the connection and stood there in the dark, leaning over, holding the phone with one hand and holding the flat riser on the pedestal down with the other. I didn’t know what I was waiting for.

The phone rang again. I made a sound in my throat and put it to my ear again, not saying anything at all.

So we were there silent, both of us, miles apart maybe, each one holding a telephone and breathing and listening and hearing nothing, not even the breathing.

Then after what seemed a very long time there was the quiet remote whisper of a voice saying dimly, without any tone:

“Too bad for you, Marlowe.”

Then the click again and the droning on the wire and I hung up and went back across the office and out.

13

I drove west on Sunset, fiddled around a few blocks without making up my mind whether anyone was trying to follow me, then parked near a drugstore and went into its phone booth. I dropped my nickel and asked the o-operator for a Pasadena number. She told me how much money to put in.

The voice which answered the phone was angular and cold. “Mrs. Murdock’s residence.”

“Philip Marlowe here. Mrs. Murdock, please.”

I was told to wait. A soft but very clear voice said: “Mr. Marlowe? Mrs. Murdock is resting now. Can you tell me what it is?”

“You oughtn’t to have told him.”

“I—who—?”

“That loopy guy whose handkerchief you cry into.”

“How dare you?”

“That’s fine,” I said. “Now let me talk to Mrs. Murdock. I have to.”

“Very well. I’ll try.” The soft clear voice went away and I waited a long wait. They would have to lift her up on the pillows and drag the port bottle out of her hard gray paw and feed her the telephone. A throat was cleared suddenly over the wire. It sounded like a freight train going through a tunnel.

“This is Mrs. Murdock.”

“Could you identify the property we were talking about this morning, Mrs. Murdock? I mean could you pick it out from others just like it?”

“Well—are there others just like it?”

“There must be. Dozens, hundreds for all I know. Anyhow dozens. Of course I don’t know where they are.”

She coughed. “I don’t really know much about it. I suppose I couldn’t identify it then. But in the circumstances—”

“That’s what I’m getting at, Mrs. Murdock. The identification would seem to depend on tracing the history of the article back to you. At least to be convincing.”

“Yes. I suppose it would. Why? Do you know where it is?”

“Morningstar claims to have seen it. He says it was offered to him for sale—just as you suspected. He wouldn’t buy. The seller was not a woman, he says. That doesn’t mean a thing, because he gave me a detailed description of the party which was either made up or was a description of somebody he knew more than casually. So the seller may have been a woman.”

“I see. It’s not important now.”

“Not important?”

“No. Have you anything else to report?”

“Another question to ask. Do you know a youngish blond fellow named George Anson Phillips? Rather heavy set, wearing a brown suit and a dark pork pie hat with a gay band. Wearing that today. Claimed to be a private detective.”

“I do not. Why should I?”

“I don’t know. He enters the picture somewhere. I think he was the one who tried to sell the article. Morningstar tried to call him up after I left. I snuck back into his office and overheard.”

“You what?”

“I snuck.”

“Please do not be witty, Mr. Marlowe. Anything else?”

“Yes, I agreed to pay Morningstar one thousand dollars for the return of the—the article. He said he could get it for eight hundred . . .”

“And where were you going to get the money, may I ask?”

“Well, I was just talking. This Morningstar is a downy bird. That’s the kind of language he understands. And then again you might have wanted to pay it. I wouldn’t want to persuade you. You could always go to the police. But if for any reason you didn’t want to go to the police, it might be the only way you could get it back—buying it back.”

I would probably have gone on like that for a long time, not knowing just what I was trying to say, if she hadn’t stopped me with a noise like a seal barking.

“This is all very unnecessary now, Mr. Marlowe. I have decided to drop the matter. The coin has been returned to me.”

“Hold the wire a minute,” I said.

I put the phone down on the shelf and opened the booth door and stuck my head out, filling my chest with what they were using for air in the drugstore. Nobody was paying any attention to me. Up front the druggist, in a pale blue smock, was chatting across the cigar counter. The counter boy was polishing glasses at the fountain. Two girls in slacks were playing the pinball machine. A tall narrow party in a black shirt and a pale yellow scarf was fumbling magazines at the rack. He didn’t look like a gunman.

I pulled the booth shut and picked up the phone and said: “A rat was gnawing my foot. It’s all right now. You got it back, you said. Just like that. How?”

“I hope you are not too disappointed,” she said in her uncompromising baritone. “The circumstances are a little difficult. I may decide to explain and I may not. You may call at the house tomorrow morning. Since I do not wish to proceed with the investigation, you will keep the retainer as payment in full.”

“Let me get this straight,” I said. “You actually got the coin back—not a promise of it, merely?”

“Certainly not. And I’m getting tired. So, if you—”

“One moment, Mrs. Murdock. It isn’t going to be as simple as all that. Things have happened.”

“In the morning you may tell me about them,” she said sharply, and hung up.

I pushed out of the booth and lit a cigarette with thick awkward fingers. I went back along the store. The druggist was alone now. He was sharpening a pencil with a small knife, very intent, frowning.

“That’s a nice sharp pencil you have there,” I told him. He looked up, surprised. The girls at the pinball machine looked at me, surprised. I went over and looked at myself in the mirror behind the counter. I looked surprised.

I sat down on one of the stools and said: “A double Scotch, straight.”

The counter man looked surprised. “Sorry, this isn’t a bar, sir. You can buy a bottle at the liquor counter.”

“So it is,” I said. “I mean, so it isn’t. I’ve had a shock. I’m a little dazed. Give me a cup of coffee, weak, and a very thin ham sandwich on stale bread. No, I better not eat yet either. Goodbye.”

I got down off the stool and walked to the door in a silence that was as loud as a ton of coal going down a chute. The man in the black shirt and yellow scarf was sneering at me over the New Republic.

“You ought to lay off that fluff and get your teeth into something solid, like a pulp magazine,” I told him, just to be friendly.

I went on out. Behind me somebody said: “Hollywood’s full of them.”

14

The wind had risen and had a dry taut feeling, tossing the tops of trees, and making the swung arc light up the side street cast shadows like crawling lava. I turned the car and drove east again.

The hock shop was on Santa Monica, near Wilcox, a quiet old-fashioned little place, washed gently by the lapping waves of time. In the front window there was everything you could think of, from a set of trout flies in a thin wooden box to a portable organ, from a folding baby carriage to a portrait camera with a four-inch lens, from a mother-of-pearl lorgnette in a faded plush case to a Single Action Frontier Colt, .44 caliber, the model they still make for Western peace officers whose grandfathers taught them how to file the trigger and shoot by fanning the hammer back.

I went into the shop and a bell jangled over my head and somebody shuffled and blew his nose far at the back and steps came. An old Jew in a tall black skullcap came along behind the counter, smiling at me over cut out glasses.

I got my tobacco pouch out, got the Brasher Doubloon out of that and laid it on the counter. The window in front was clear glass and I felt naked. No paneled cubicles with hand carved spittoons and doors that locked themselves as you closed them.

The Jew took the coin and lifted it on his hand. “Gold, is it? A gold hoarder you are maybe,” he said, twinkling.

“Twenty-five dollars,” I said. “The wife and the kiddies are hungry.”

“Oi, that is terrible. Gold, it feels, by the weight. Only gold and maybe platinum it could be.” He weighed it casually on a pair of small scales. “Gold it is,” he said. “So ten dollars you are wanting?”

“Twenty-five dollars.”

“For twenty-five dollars what would I do with it? Sell it, maybe? For fifteen dollars worth of gold is maybe in it. Okay. Fifteen dollars.”

“You got a good safe?”

“Mister, in this business are the best safes money can buy. Nothing to worry about here. It is fifteen dollars, is it?”

“Make out the ticket.”

He wrote it out partly with his pen and partly with his tongue. I gave my true name and address. Bristol Apartments, 1634 North Bristol Avenue, Hollywood.

“You are living in that district and you are borrowing fifteen dollars,” the Jew said sadly, and tore off my half of the ticket and counted out the money.

I walked down to the corner drugstore and bought an envelope and borrowed a pen and mailed the pawn ticket to myself.

I was hungry and hollow inside. I went over to Vine to eat, and after that I drove downtown again. The wind was still rising and it was drier than ever. The steering wheel had a gritty feeling under my fingers and the inside of my nostrils felt tight and drawn.

The lights were on here and there in the tall buildings. The green and chromium clothier’s store on the corner of Ninth and Hill was a blaze of it. In the Belfont Building a few windows glowed here and there, but not many. The same old plow horse sat in the elevator on his piece of folded burlap, looking straight in front of him, blank-eyed, almost gathered to history.

I said: “I don’t suppose you know where I can get in touch with the building superintendent?”

He turned his head slowly and looked past my shoulder. “I hear how in Noo York they got elevators that just whiz. Go thirty floors at a time. High speed. That’s in Noo York.”

“The hell with New York,” I said. “I like it here.”

“Must take a good man to run them fast babies.”

“Don’t kid yourself, dad. All those cuties do is push buttons, say ‘Good Morning, Mr. Whoosis,’ and look at their beauty spots in the car mirror. Now you take a Model T job like this—it takes a man to run it. Satisfied?”

“I work twelve hours a day,” he said. “And glad to get it.”

“Don’t let the union hear you.”

“You know what the union can do?” I shook my head. He told me. Then he lowered his eyes until they almost looked at me. “Didn’t I see you before somewhere?”

“About the building super,” I said gently.

“Year ago he broke his glasses,” the old man said. “I could of laughed. Almost did.”

“Yes. Where could I get in touch with him this time of the evening?”

He looked at me a little more directly.

“Oh, the building super? He’s home, ain’t he?”

“Sure. Probably. Or gone to the pictures. But where is home? What’s his name?”

“You want something?”

“Yes.” I squeezed a fist in my pocket and tried to keep from yelling. “I want the address of one of the tenants. The tenant I want the address of isn’t in the phone book—at his home. I mean where he lives when he’s not in his office. You know, home.” I took my hands out and made a shape in the air, writing the letters slowly, h o m e.

The old man said: “Which one?” It was so direct that it jarred me.

“Mr. Morningstar.”

“He ain’t home. Still in his office.”

“Are you sure?”

“Sure I’m sure. I don’t notice people much. But he’s old like me and I notice him. He ain’t been down yet.”

I got into the car and said: “Eight.”

He wrestled the doors shut and we ground our way up. He didn’t look at me anymore. When the car stopped and I got out he didn’t speak or look at me again. He just sat there blank-eyed, hunched on the burlap and the wooden stool. As I turned the angle of the corridor he was still sitting there. And the vague expression was back on his face.

At the end of the corridor two doors were alight. They were the only two in sight that were. I stopped outside to light a cigarette and listen, but I didn’t hear any sound of activity. I opened the door marked Entrance and stepped into the narrow office with the small closed typewriter desk. The wooden door was still ajar. I walked along to it and knocked on the wood and said: “Mr. Morningstar.”

No answer. Silence. Not even a sound of breathing. The hairs moved on the back of my neck. I stepped around the door. The ceiling light glowed down on the glass cover of the jeweler’s scales, on the old polished wood around the leather desk top, down the side of the desk, on a square-toed, elastic-sided black shoe, with a white cotton sock above it.

The shoe was at the wrong angle, pointing to the corner of the ceiling. The rest of the leg was behind the corner of the big safe. I seemed to be wading through mud as I went on into the room.

He lay crumpled on his back. Very lonely, very dead.

The safe door was wide open and keys hung in the lock of the inner compartment. A metal drawer was pulled out. It was empty now. There may have been money in it once.

Nothing else in the room seemed to be different.

The old man’s pockets had been pulled out, but I didn’t touch him except to bend over and put the back of my hand against his livid, violet-colored face. It was like touching a frog’s belly. Blood had oozed from the side of his forehead where he had been hit. But there was no powder smell on the air this time, and the violet color of his skin showed that he had died of a heart stoppage, due to shock and fear, probably. That didn’t make it any less murder.

I left the lights burning, wiped the doorknobs, and walked down the fire stairs to the sixth floor. I read the names on the doors going along, for no reason at all. H. R. Teager Dental Laboratories, L. Pridview, Public Accountant, Dalton and Rees Typewriting Service, Dr. E. J. Blaskowitz, and underneath the name in small letters: Chiropractic Physician.

The elevator came growling up and the old man didn’t look at me. His face was as empty as my brain.

I called the Receiving Hospital from the corner, giving no name.

15

The chessmen, red and white bone, were lined up ready to go and had that sharp, competent and complicated look they always have at the beginning of a game. It was ten o’clock in the evening, I was home at the apartment, I had a pipe in my mouth, a drink at my elbow and nothing on my mind except two murders and the mystery of how Mrs. Elizabeth Bright Murdock had got her Brasher Doubloon back while I still had it in my pocket.

I opened a little paper-bound book of tournament games published in Leipzig, picked out a dashing-looking Queen’s Gambit, moved the white pawn to Queen’s four, and the bell rang at the door.

I stepped around the table and picked the Colt .38 off the drop leaf of the oak desk and went over to the door holding it down beside my right leg.

“Who is it?”

“Breeze.”

I went back to the desk to lay the gun down again before I opened the door. Breeze stood there looking just as big and sloppy as ever, but a little more tired. The young, fresh faced dick named Spangler was with him.

They rode me back into the room without seeming to and Spangler shut the door. His bright young eyes flicked this way and that while Breeze let his older and harder ones stay on my face for a long moment, then he walked around me to the davenport.

“Look around,” he said out of the corner of his mouth.

Spangler left the door and crossed the room to the dinette, looked in there, recrossed and went into the hall. The bathroom door squeaked, his steps went farther along.

Breeze took his hat off and mopped his semi-bald dome. Doors opened and closed distantly. Closets. Spangler came hack.

“Nobody here,” he said.

Breeze nodded and sat down, placing his panama beside him.

Spangler saw the gun lying on the desk. He said: “Mind if I look?”

I said: “Phooey on both of you.”

Spangler walked to the gun and held the muzzle to his nose, sniffing. He broke the magazine out, ejected the shell in the chamber, picked it up and pressed it into the magazine. He laid the magazine on the desk and held the gun so that light went into the open bottom of the breech. Holding it that way he squinted down the barrel.

“A little dust,” he said. “Not much.”

“What did you expect?” I said. “Rubies?”

He ignored me, looked at Breeze and added: “I’d say this gun has not been fired within twenty-four hours. I’m sure of it.”

Breeze nodded and chewed his lip and explored my face with his eyes. Spangler put the gun together neatly and laid it aside and went and sat down. He put a cigarette between his lips and lit it and blew smoke contentedly.

“We know damn well it wasn’t a long .38 anyway,” he said. “One of those things will shoot through a wall. No chance of the slug staying inside a man’s head.”

“Just what are you guys talking about?” I asked.

Breeze said: “The usual thing in our business. Murder. Have a chair. Relax. I thought I heard voices in here. Maybe it was the next apartment.”

“Maybe,” I said.

“You always have a gun lying around on your desk?”

“Except when it’s under my pillow,” I said. “Or under my arm. Or in the drawer of the desk. Or somewhere I can’t just remember where I happened to put it. That help you any?”

“We didn’t come here to get tough, Marlowe.”

“That’s fine,” I said. “So you prowl my apartment and handle my property without asking my permission. What do you do when you get tough—knock me down and kick me in the face?”

“Aw hell,” he said and grinned. I grinned back. We all grinned. Then Breeze said: “Use your phone?”

I pointed to it. He dialed a number and talked to someone named Morrison, saying: “Breeze at—” He looked down at the base of the phone and read the number off—”Anytime now. Marlowe is the name that goes with it. Sure. Five or ten minutes is okay.”

He hung up and went back to the davenport. “I bet you can’t guess why we’re here.”

“I’m always expecting the brothers to drop in,” I said.

“Murder ain’t funny, Marlowe.”

“Who said it was?”

“Don’t you kind of act as if it was?”

“I wasn’t aware of it.”

He looked at Spangler and shrugged. Then he looked at the floor. Then he lifted his eyes slowly, as if they were heavy, and looked at me again. I was sitting down by the chess table now.

“You play a lot of chess?” he asked, looking at the chessmen.

“Not a lot. Once in a while I fool around with a game here, thinking things out.”

“Don’t it take two guys to play chess?”

“I play over tournament games that have been recorded and published. There’s a whole literature about chess. Once in a while I work out problems. They’re not chess, properly speaking. What are we talking about chess for? Drink?”

“Not right now,” Breeze said. “I talked to Randall about you. He remembers you very well, in connection with a case down at the beach.” He moved his feet on the carpet, as if they were very tired. His solid old face was lined and gray with fatigue. “He said you wouldn’t murder anybody. He says you are a nice guy, on the level.”

“That was friendly of him,” I said.

“He says you make good coffee and you get up kind of late in the mornings and are apt to run to a very bright line of chatter and that we should believe anything you say, provided we can check it by five independent witnesses.”

“To hell with him,” I said.

Breeze nodded exactly as though I had said just what he wanted me to say. He wasn’t smiling and he wasn’t tough, just a big solid man working at his job. Spangler had his head back on the chair and his eyes half closed and was watching the smoke from his cigarette.

“Randall says we should look out for you. He says you are not as smart as you think you are, but that you are a guy things happen to, and a guy like that could be a lot more trouble than a very smart guy. That’s what he says, you understand. You look all right to me. I like everything in the clear. That’s why I’m telling you.”

I said it was nice of him.

The phone rang. I looked at Breeze, but he didn’t move, so I reached for it and answered it. It was a girl’s voice. I thought it was vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t place it.

“Is this Mr. Philip Marlowe?”

“Yes.”

“Mr. Marlowe. I’m in trouble, very great trouble. I want to see you very badly. When can I see you?”

I said: “You mean tonight? Who am I talking to?”

“My name is Gladys Crane. I live at the Hotel Normandy on Rampart. When can you—”

“You mean you want me to come over there tonight?” I asked, thinking about the voice, trying to place it.

“I—” The phone clicked and the line was dead. I sat there holding it, frowning at it, looking across it at Breeze. His face was quietly empty of interest.

“Some girl says she’s in trouble,” I said. “Connection broken.” I held the plunger down on the base of the phone waiting for it to ring again. The two cops were completely silent and motionless. Too silent, too motionless.

The bell rang again and I let the plunger up and said: “You want to talk to Breeze, don’t you?”

“Yeah.” It was a man’s voice and it sounded a little surprised.

“Go on, be tricky,” I said, and got up from the chair and went out to the kitchen. I heard Breeze talking very briefly then the sound of the phone being returned to the cradle.

I got a bottle of Four Roses out of the kitchen closet and three glasses. I got ice and ginger ale from the icebox and mixed three highballs and carried them in on a tray and sat the tray down on the cocktail table in front of the davenport where Breeze was sitting. I took two of the glasses, handed one to Spangler, and took the other to my chair.

Spangler held the glass uncertainly, pinching his lower lip between thumb and finger, looking at Breeze to see whether he would accept the drink.

Breeze looked at me very steadily. Then he sighed. Then he picked the glass up and tasted it and sighed again and shook his head sideways with a half smile; the way a man does when you give him a drink and he needs it very badly and it is just right and the first swallow is like a peek into a cleaner, sunnier, brighter world.

“I guess you catch on pretty fast, Mr. Marlowe,” he said, and leaned back on the davenport completely relaxed. “I guess now we can do some business together.”

“Not that way,” I said.

“Huh?” He bent his eyebrows together. Spangler leaned forward in his chair and looked bright and attentive.

“Having stray broads call me up and give me a song and dance so you can say they said they recognized my voice somewhere sometime.”

“The girl’s name is Gladys Crane,” Breeze said.

“So she told me. I never heard of her.”

“Okay,” Breeze said. “Okay.” He showed me the flat of his freckled hand. “We’re not trying to pull anything that’s not legitimate. We only hope you ain’t, either.”

“Ain’t either what?”

“Ain’t either trying to pull anything not legitimate. Such as holding out on us.”

“Just why shouldn’t I hold out on you, if I feel like it?” I asked. “You’re not paying my salary.”

“Look, don’t get tough, Marlowe.”

“I’m not tough. I don’t have any idea of being tough. I know enough about cops not to get tough with them. Go ahead and speak your piece and don’t try to pull any more phonies like that telephone call.”

“We’re on a murder case,” Breeze said. “We have to try to run it the best we can. You found the body. You had talked to the guy. He had asked you to come to his apartment. He gave you his key. You said you didn’t know what he wanted to see you about. We figured that maybe with time to think back you could have remembered.”

“In other words I was lying the first time,” I said.

Breeze smiled a tired smile. “You been around enough to know that people always lie in murder cases.”

“The trouble with that is how are you going to know when I stop lying?”

“When what you say begins to make sense, we’ll be satisfied.”

I looked at Spangler. He was leaning forward so far he was almost out of his chair. He looked as if he was going to jump. I couldn’t think of any reason why he should jump, so I thought he must be excited. I looked back at Breeze. He was about as excited as a hole in the wall. He had one of his cellophane-wrapped cigars between his thick fingers and he was slitting the cellophane with a penknife. I watched him get the wrapping off and trim the cigar end with the blade and put the knife away, first wiping the blade carefully on his pants. I watched him strike a wooden match and light the cigar carefully, turning it around in the flame, then hold the match away from the cigar, still burning, and draw on the cigar until he decided it was properly lighted. Then he shook the match out and laid it down beside the crumpled cellophane on the glass top of the cocktail table. Then he leaned back and pulled up one leg of his pants and smoked peacefully. Every motion had been exactly as it had been when he lit a cigar in Hench’s apartment, and exactly as it always would be whenever he lit a cigar. He was that kind of man, and that made him dangerous. Not as dangerous as a brilliant man, but much more dangerous than a quick excitable one like Spangler.

“I never saw Phillips before today,” I said. “I don’t count that he said he saw me up in Ventura once, because I don’t remember him. I met him just the way I told you. He tailed me around and I braced him. He wanted to talk to me, he gave me his key, I went to his apartment, used the key to let myself in when he didn’t answer—as he had told me to do. He was dead. The police were called and through a set of events or incidents that had nothing to do with me, a gun was found under Hench’s pillow. A gun that had been fired. I told you this and it’s true.”

Breeze said: “When you found him you went down to the apartment manager, guy named Passmore, and got him to go up with you without telling him anybody was dead. You gave Passmore a phony card and talked about jewelry.”

I nodded. “With people like Passmore and apartment houses like that one, it pays to be a little on the cagey side. I was interested in Phillips. I thought Passmore might tell me something about him, if he didn’t know he was dead, that he wouldn’t be likely to tell me, if he knew the cops were going to bounce in on him in a brief space of time. That’s all there was to that.”

Breeze drank a little of his drink and smoked a little of his cigar and said: “What I’d like to get in the clear is this. Everything you just told us might be strictly the truth, and yet you might not be telling us the truth. If you get what I mean.”

“Like what?” I asked, getting perfectly well what he meant.

He tapped on his knee and watched me with a quiet up from under look. Not hostile, not even suspicious. Just a quiet man doing his job.

“Like this. You’re on a job. We don’t know what it is. Phillips was playing at being a private dick. He was on a job. He tailed you around. How can we know, unless you tell us, that his job and your job don’t tie in somewhere? And if they do, that’s our business. Right?”

“That’s one way to look at it,” I said. “But it’s not the only way, and it’s not my way.”

“Don’t forget this is a murder case, Marlowe.”

“I’m not. But don’t you forget I’ve been around this town a long time, more than fifteen years. I’ve seen a lot of murder cases come and go. Some have been solved, some couldn’t be solved, and some could have been solved that were not solved. And one or two or three of them have been solved wrong. Somebody was paid to take a rap, and the chances are it was known or strongly suspected. And winked at. But skip that. It happens, but not often. Consider a case like the Cassidy case. I guess you remember it, don’t you?”

Breeze looked at his watch. “I’m tired,” he said. “Let’s forget the Cassidy case. Let’s stick to the Phillips case.”

I shook my head. “I’m going to make a point, and it’s an important point. Just look at the Cassidy case. Cassidy was a very rich man, a multimillionaire. He had a grown up son. One night the cops were called to his home and young Cassidy was on his back on the floor with blood all over his face and a bullet hole in the side of his head. His secretary was lying on his back in an adjoining bathroom, with his head against the second bathroom door, leading to a hail, and a cigarette burned out between the fingers of his left hand, just a short burned out stub that had scorched the skin between his fingers. A gun was lying by his right hand. He was shot in the head, not a contact wound. A lot of drinking had been done. Four hours had elapsed since the deaths and the family doctor had been there for three of them. Now, what did you do with the Cassidy case?”

Breeze sighed. “Murder and suicide during a drinking spree. The secretary went haywire and shot young Cassidy. I read it in the papers or something. Is that what you want me to say?”

“You read it in the papers,” I said, “but it wasn’t so. What’s more you knew it wasn’t so and the D.A. knew it wasn’t so and the D.A.’s investigators were pulled off the case within a matter of hours. There was no inquest. But every crime reporter in town and every cop on every homicide detail knew it was Cassidy that did the shooting, that it was Cassidy that was crazy drunk, that it was the secretary who tried to handle him and couldn’t and at last tried to get away from him, but wasn’t quick enough. Cassidy’s was a contact wound and the secretary’s was not. The secretary was left-handed and he had a cigarette in his left hand when he was shot. Even if you are right-handed, you don’t change a cigarette over to your other hand and shoot a man while casually holding the cigarette. They might do that on Gang Busters, but rich men’s secretaries don’t do it. And what were the family and the family doctor doing during the four hours they didn’t call the cops? Fixing it so there would only be a superficial investigation. And why were no tests of the hands made for nitrates? Because you didn’t want the truth. Cassidy was too big. But this was a murder case too, wasn’t it?”

“The guys were both dead,” Breeze said. “What the hell difference did it make who shot who?”

“Did you ever stop to think,” I asked, “that Cassidy’s secretary might have had a mother or a sister or a sweetheart—or all three? That they had their pride and their faith and their love for a kid who was made out to be a drunken paranoiac because his boss’s father had a hundred million dollars?”

Breeze lifted his glass slowly and finished his drink slowly and put it down slowly and turned the glass slowly on the glass top of the cocktail table. Spangler sat rigid, all shining eyes and lips parted in a sort of rigid half smile.

Breeze said: “Make your point.”

I said: “Until you guys own your own souls you don’t own mine. Until you guys can be trusted every time and always, in all times and conditions, to seek the truth out and find it and let the chips fall where they may—until that time comes, I have a right to listen to my conscience, and protect my client the best way I can. Until I’m sure you won’t do him more harm than you’ll do the truth good. Or until I’m hauled before somebody that can make me talk.”

Breeze said: “You sound to me just a little like a guy who is trying to hold his conscience down.”

“Hell,” I said. “Let’s have another drink. And then you can tell me about that girl you had me talk to on the phone.”

He grinned: “That was a dame that lives next door to Phillips. She heard a guy talking to him at the door one evening. She works days as an usherette. So we thought maybe she ought to hear your voice. Think nothing of it.”

“What kind of voice was it?”

“Kind of a mean voice. She said she didn’t like it.”

“I guess that’s what made you think of me,” I said. I picked up the three glasses and went out to the kitchen with them.

16

When I got out there I had forgotten which glass was which, so I rinsed them all out and dried them and was starting to make more drinks when Spangler strolled out and stood just behind my shoulder.

“It’s all right,” I said. “I’m not using any cyanide this evening.”

“Don’t get too foxy with the old guy,” he said quietly to the back of my neck. “He knows more angles than you think.”

“Nice of you,” I said.

“Say, I’d like to read up on that Cassidy case,” he said. “Sounds interesting. Must have been before my time.”

“It was a long time ago,” I said. “And it never happened. I was just kidding.” I put the glasses on the tray and carried them back into the living room and set them around. I took mine over to my chair behind the chess table.

“Another phony,” I said. “Your sidekick sneaks out to the kitchen and gives me advice behind your back about how careful I ought to keep on account of the angles you know that I don’t think you know. He has just the right face for it. Friendly and open and an easy blusher.”

Spangler sat down on the edge of his chair and blushed. Breeze looked at him casually, without meaning.

“What did you find out about Phillips?” I asked.

“Yes,” Breeze said. “Phillips. Well, George Anson Phillips is a kind of pathetic case. He thought he was a detective, but it looks as if he couldn’t get anybody to agree with him. I talked to the sheriff at Ventura. He said George was a nice kid, maybe a little too nice to make a good cop, even if he had any brains. George did what they said and he would do it pretty well, provided they told him which foot to start on and how many steps to take which way and little things like that. But he didn’t develop much, if you get what I mean. He was the sort of cop who would be likely to hang a pinch on a chicken thief, if he saw the guy steal the chicken and the guy fell down running away and hit his head on a post or something and knocked himself out. Otherwise it might get a little tough and George would have to go back to the office for instructions. Well, it wore the sheriff down after a while and he let George go.”

Breeze drank some more of his drink and scratched his chin with a thumbnail like the blade of a shovel.

“After that George worked in a general store at Simi for a man named Sutcliff. It was a credit business with little books for each customer and George would have trouble with the books. He would forget to write the stuff down or write it in the wrong book and some of the customers would straighten him out and some would let George forget. So Sutcliff thought maybe George would do better at something else, and George came to L.A. He had come into a little money, not much, but enough for him to get a license and put up a bond and get himself a piece of an office. I was over there. What he had was desk room with another guy who claims he is selling Christmas cards. Name of Marsh. If George had a customer, the arrangement was Marsh would go for a walk. Marsh says he didn’t know where George lived and George didn’t have any customers. That is, no business came into the office that Marsh knows about. But George put an ad in the paper and he might have got a customer out of that. I guess he did, because about a week ago Marsh found a note on his desk that George would be out of town for a few days. That’s the last he heard of him. So George went over to Court Street and took an apartment under the name of Anson and got bumped off. And that’s all we know about George so far. Kind of a pathetic case.”

He looked at me with a level uncurious gaze and raised his glass to his lips.

“What about this ad?”

Breeze put the glass down and dug a thin piece of paper out of his wallet and put it down on the cocktail table. I went over and picked it up and read it. It said:

Why worry? Why be doubtful or confused? Why be gnawed by suspicion? Consult cool, careful, confidential, discreet investigator. George Anson Phillips. Glenview 9521.

I put it down on the glass again.

“It ain’t any worse than lots of business personals,” Breeze said. “It don’t seem to be aimed at the carriage trade.”

Spangler said: “The girl in the office wrote it for him. She said she could hardly keep from laughing, but George thought it was swell. The Hollywood Boulevard office of the Chronicle.”

“You checked that fast,” I said.

“We don’t have any trouble getting information,” Breeze said. “Except maybe from you.”

“What about Hench?”

“Nothing about Hench. Him and the girl were having a liquor party. They would drink a little and sing a little and scrap a little and listen to the radio and go out to eat once in a while, when they thought of it. I guess it had been going on for days. Just as well we stopped it. The girl has two bad eyes. The next round Hench might have broken her neck. The world is full of bums like Hench—and his girl.”

“What about the gun Hench said wasn’t his?”

“It’s the right gun. We don’t have the slug yet, but we have the shell. It was under George’s body and it checks. We had a couple more fired and comparisoned the ejector marks and the firing pin dents.”

“You believe somebody planted it under Hench’s pillow?”

“Sure. Why would Hench shoot Phillips? He didn’t know him.”

“How do you know that?”

“I know it,” Breeze said, spreading his hands. “Look, there are things you know because you have them down in black and white. And there are things you know because they are reasonable and have to be so. You don’t shoot somebody and then make a lot of racket calling attention to yourself, and all the time you have the gun under your pillow. The girl was with Hench all day. If Hench shot anybody, she would have some idea. She doesn’t have any such idea. She would spill, if she had. What is Hench to her? A guy to play around with, no more. Look, forget Hench. The guy who did the shooting hears the loud radio and knows it will cover a shot. But all the same he saps Phillips and drags him into the bathroom and shuts the door before he shoots him. He’s not drunk. He’s minding his own business, and careful. He goes out, shuts the bathroom door, the radio stops, Hench and the girl go out to eat. Just happens that way.”

“How do you know the radio stopped?”

“I was told,” Breeze said calmly. “Other people live in that dump. Take it the radio stopped and they went out. Not quiet. The killer steps out of the apartment and Hench’s door is open. That must be because otherwise he wouldn’t think anything about Hench’s door.”

“People don’t leave their doors open in apartment houses. Especially in districts like that.”

“Drunks do. Drunks are careless. Their minds don’t focus well. And they only think of one thing at a time. The door was open—just a little maybe, but open. The killer went in and ditched his gun on the bed and found another gun there. He took that away, just to make it look worse for Hench.”

“You can check the gun,” I said.

“Hench’s gun? We’ll try to, but Hench says he doesn’t know the number. If we find it, we might do something there. I doubt it. The gun we have we will try to check, but you know how those things are. You get just so far along and you think it is going to open up for you, and then the trail dies out cold. A dead end. Anything else you can think of that we might know that might be a help to you in your business?”

“I’m getting tired,” I said. “My imagination isn’t working very well.”

“You were doing fine a while back,” Breeze said. “On the Cassidy case.”

I didn’t say anything. I filled my pipe up again but it was too hot to light. I laid it on the edge of the table to cool off.

“It’s God’s truth,” Breeze said slowly, “that I don’t know what to make of you. I can’t see you deliberately covering up on any murder. And neither can I see you knowing as little about all this as you pretend to know.”

I didn’t say anything, again.

Breeze leaned over to revolve his cigar butt in the tray until he had killed the fire. He finished his drink, put on his hat and stood up.

“How long you expect to stay dummied up?” he asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Let me help you out. I give you till tomorrow noon, a little better than twelve hours. I won’t get my post mortem report before that anyway. I give you till then to talk things over with your party and decide to come clean.”

“And after that?”

“After that I see the Captain of Detectives and tell him a private eye named Philip Marlowe is withholding information which I need in a murder investigation, or I’m pretty sure he is. And what about it? I figure he’ll pull you in fast enough to singe your breeches.”

I said: “Uh-huh. Did you go through Phillips’ desk?”

“Sure. A very neat young feller. Nothing in it at all, except a little kind of diary. Nothing in that either, except about how he went to the beach or took some girl to the pictures and she didn’t warm up much. Or how he sat in the office and no business come in. One time he got a little sore about his laundry and wrote a whole page. Mostly it was just three or four lines. There was only one thing about it. It was all done in a kind of printing.”

I said: “Printing?”

“Yeah, printing in pen and ink. Not big block caps like people trying to disguise things. Just neat fast little printing as if the guy could write that way as fast and easy as any way.”

“He didn’t write like that on the card he gave me,” I said.

Breeze thought about that for a moment. Then he nodded. “True. Maybe it was this way. There wasn’t any name in the diary either, in the front. Maybe the printing was just a little game he played with himself.”

“Like Pepys’ shorthand,” I said.

“What was that?”

“A diary a man wrote in a private shorthand, a long time ago.”

Breeze looked at Spangler, who was standing up in front of his chair, tipping the last few drops of his glass.

“We better beat it,” Breeze said. “This guy is warming up for another Cassidy case.”

Spangler put his glass down and they both went over to the door. Breeze shuffled a foot and looked at me sideways, with his hand on the doorknob.

“You know any tall blonds?”

“I’d have to think,” I said. “I hope so. How tall?”

“Just tall. I don’t know how tall that is. Except that it would be tall to a guy who is tall himself. A wop named Palermo owns that apartment house on Court Street. We went across to see him in his funeral parlors. He owns them too. He says he saw a tall blond come out of the apartment house about three-thirty. The manager, Passmore, don’t place anybody in the joint that he would call a tall blond. The wop says she was a looker. I give some weight to what he says because he give us a good description of you. He didn’t see this tall blond go in, just saw her come out. She was wearing slacks and a sports jacket and a wrap-around. But she had light blond hair and plenty of it under the wrap-around.”

“Nothing comes to me,” I said. “But I just remembered something else. I wrote the license number of Phillips’ car down on the back of an envelope. That will give you his former address, probably. I’ll get it.”

They stood there while I went to get it out of my coat in the bedroom. I handed the piece of envelope to Breeze and he read what was on it and tucked it into his billfold.

“So you just thought of this, huh?”

“That’s right.”

“Well, well,” he said. “Well, well.”

The two of them went along the hallway towards the elevator, shaking their heads.

I shut the door and went back to my almost untasted second drink. It was flat. I carried it to the kitchen and hardened it up from the bottle and stood there holding it and looking out of the window at the eucalyptus trees tossing their limber tops against the bluish dark sky. The wind seemed to have risen again. It thumped at the north window and there was a heavy slow pounding noise on the wall of the building, like a thick wire banging the stucco between insulators.

I tasted my drink and wished I hadn’t wasted the fresh whiskey on it. I poured it down the sink and got a fresh glass and drank some ice water.

Twelve hours to tie up a situation which I didn’t even begin to understand. Either that or turn up a client and let the cops go to work on her and her whole family. Hire Marlowe and get your house full of law. Why worry? Why be doubtful and confused? Why be gnawed by suspicion? Consult cockeyed, careless, clubfooted, dissipated investigator. Philip Marlowe, Glenview 7537. See me and you meet the best cops in town. Why despair? Why be lonely? Call Marlowe and watch the wagon come.

This didn’t get me anywhere either. I went back to the living room and put a match to the pipe that had cooled off now on the edge of the chess table. I drew the smoke in slowly, but it still tasted like the smell of hot rubber. I put it away and stood in the middle of the floor pulling my lower lip out and letting it snap back against my teeth.

The telephone rang. I picked it up and growled into it.

“Marlowe?”

The voice was a harsh low whisper. It was a harsh low whisper I had heard before.

“All right,” I said. “Talk it up whoever you are. Whose pocket have I got my hand in now?”

“Maybe you’re a smart guy,” the harsh whisper said. “Maybe you would like to do yourself some good.”

“How much good?”

“Say about five C’s worth of good.”

“That’s grand,” I said. “Doing what?”

“Keeping your nose clean,” the voice said. “Want to talk about it?”

“Where, when, and who to?”

“Idle Valley Club. Morny. Any time you get here.”

“Who are you?”

A dim chuckle came over the wire. “Just ask at the gate for Eddie Prue.”

The phone clicked dead. I hung it up.

It was near eleven-thirty when I backed my car out of the garage and drove towards Cahuenga Pass.

17

About twenty miles north of the pass a wide boulevard with flowering moss in the parkways turned towards the foothills. It ran for five blocks and died—without a house in its entire length. From its end a curving asphalt road dove into the hills. This was Idle Valley.

Around the shoulder of the first hill there was a low white building with a tiled roof beside the road. It had a roofed porch and a floodlighted sign on it read: Idle Valley Patrol. Open gates were folded back on the shoulders of the road, in the middle of which a square white sign standing on its point said STOP in letters sprinkled with reflector buttons. Another floodlight blistered the space of road in front of the sign.

I stopped. A uniformed man with a star and a strapped-on gun in a woven leather holster looked at my car, then at a board on a post.

He came over to the car. “Good evening. I don’t have your car. This is a private road. Visiting?”

“Going to the club.”

“Which one?”

“Idle Valley Club.”

“Eighty-seven Seventy-seven. That’s what we call it here. You mean Mr. Morny’s place?”

“Right.”

“You’re not a member, I guess.”

“No.”

“I have to check you in. To somebody who is a member or to somebody who lives in the valley. All private property here, you know.”

“No gate crashers, huh?”

He smiled. “No gate crashers.”

“The name is Philip Marlowe,” I said. “Calling on Eddie Prue.”

“Prue?”

“He’s Mr. Morny’s secretary. Or something.”

“Just a minute, please.”

He went to the door of the building, and spoke. Another uniformed man inside, plugged in on a PBX. A car came up behind me and honked. The clack of a typewriter came from the open door of the patrol office. The man who had spoken to me looked at the honking car and waved it in. It slid around me and scooted off into the dark, a green long open convertible sedan with three dizzy-looking dames in the front seat, all cigarettes and arched eyebrows and go-to-hell expressions. The car flashed around a curve and was gone.

The uniformed man came back to me and put a hand on the car door. “Okay, Mr. Marlowe. Check with the officer at the club, please. A mile ahead on your right. There’s a lighted parking lot and the number on the wall. Just the number. Eighty-seven Seventy-seven. Check with the officer there, please.”

I said: “Why would I do that?”

He was very calm, very polite, and very firm. “We have to know exactly where you go. There’s a great deal to protect in Idle Valley.”

“Suppose I don’t check with him?”

“You kidding me?” His voice hardened.

“No. I just wanted to know.”

“A couple of cruisers would start looking for you.”

“How many are you in the patrol?”

“Sorry,” he said. “About a mile ahead on the right, Mr. Marlowe.”

I looked at the gun strapped to his hip, the special badge pinned to his shirt. “And they call this a democracy,” I said.

He looked behind him and then spat on the ground and put a hand on the sill of the car door. “Maybe you got company,” he said. “I knew a fellow belonged to the John Reed Club. Over in Boyle Heights, it was.”

“Tovarich,” I said.

“The trouble with revolutions,” he said, “is that they get in the hands of the wrong people.”

“Check,” I said.

“On the other hand,” he said, “could they be any wronger than the bunch of rich phonies that live around here?”

“Maybe you’ll be living in here yourself someday,” I said. He spat again. “I wouldn’t live in here if they paid me fifty thousand a year and let me sleep in chiffon pajamas with a string of matched pink pearls around my neck.”