The High Window

“I’d hate to make you the offer,” I said.

“You make me the offer any time,” he said. “Day or night. Just make me the offer and see what it gets you.”

“Well, I’ll run along now and check with the officer of the club,” I said.

“Tell him to go spit up his left pants leg,” he said. “Tell him I said so.”

“I’ll do that,” I said.

A car came up behind and honked. I drove on. Half a block of dark limousine blew me off the road with its horn and went past me making a noise like dead leaves falling.

The wind was quiet out here and the valley moonlight was so sharp that the black shadows looked as if they had been cut with an engraving tool.

Around the curve the whole valley spread out before me. A thousand white houses built up and down the hills, ten thousand lighted windows and the stars hanging down over them politely, not getting too close, on account of the patrol.

The wall of the club building that faced the road was white and blank, with no entrance door, no windows on the lower floor. The number was small but bright in violet-colored neon. 8777. Nothing else. To the side, under rows of hooded, downward-shining lights, were even rows of cars set out in the white lined slots on the smooth black asphalt. Attendants in crisp clean uniforms moved in the lights.

The road went around to the back. A deep concrete porch there, with an overhanging canopy of glass and chromium, but very dim lights. I got out of the car and received a check with the license number on it, carried it over to a small desk where a uniformed man sat and dumped it in front of him.

“Philip Marlowe,” I said. “Visitor.”

“Thank you, Mr. Marlowe.” He wrote the name and number down, handed me back my check and picked up a telephone.

A Negro in a white linen double-breasted guards uniform, gold epaulettes, a cap with a broad gold band, opened the door for me.

The lobby looked like a high-budget musical. A lot of light and glitter, a lot of scenery, a lot of clothes, a lot of sound, an all-star cast, and a plot with all the originality and drive of a split fingernail. Under the beautiful soft indirect lighting the walls seemed to go up forever and to be lost in soft lascivious stars that really twinkled. You could just manage to walk on the carpet without waders. At the back was a free-arched stairway with a chromium and white enamel gangway going up in wide shallow carpeted steps. At the entrance to the dining room a chubby captain of waiters stood negligently with a two-inch satin stripe on his pants and a bunch of gold-plated menus under his arm. He had the sort of face that can turn from a polite simper to cold-blooded fury almost without moving a muscle.

The bar entrance was to the left. It was dusky and quiet and a bartender moved moth like against the faint glitter of piled glassware. A tall handsome blond in a dress that looked like seawater sifted over with gold dust came out of the Ladies’ Room touching up her lips and turned toward the arch, humming.

The sound of rumba music came through the archway and she nodded her gold head in time to it, smiling. A short fat man with a red face and glittering eyes waited for her with a white wrap over his arm. He dug his thick fingers into her bare arm and leered up at her.

A check girl in peach-bloom Chinese pajamas came over to take my hat and disapprove of my clothes. She had eyes like strange sins.

A cigarette girl came down the gangway. She wore an egret plume in her hair, enough clothes to hide behind a toothpick, one of her long beautiful naked legs was silver, and one was gold. She had the utterly disdainful expression of a dame who makes her dates by long distance.

I went into the bar and sank into a leather bar seat packed with down. Glasses tinkled gently, lights glowed softly, there were quiet voices whispering of love, or ten per cent, or whatever they whisper about in a place like that.

A tall fine-looking man in a gray suit cut by an angel suddenly stood up from a small table by the wall and walked over to the bar and started to curse one of the barmen. He cursed him in a loud clear voice for a long minute, calling him about nine names that are not usually mentioned by tall fine-looking men in well cut gray suits. Everybody stopped talking and looked at him quietly. His voice cut through the muted rumba music like a shovel through snow.

The barman stood perfectly still, looking at the man. The barman had curly hair and a clear warm skin and wide-set careful eyes. He didn’t move or speak. The tall man stopped talking and stalked out of the bar. Everybody watched him out except the barman.

The barman moved slowly along the bar to the end where I sat and stood looking away from me, with nothing in his face but pallor. Then he turned to me and said:

“Yes, sir?”

“I want to talk to a fellow named Eddie Prue.”

“So?”

“He works here,” I said.

“Works here doing what?” His voice was perfectly level and as dry as dry sand.

“I understand he’s the guy that walks behind the boss. If you know what I mean.”

“Oh. Eddie Prue.” He moved one lip slowly over the other and made small tight circles on the bar with his bar cloth.

“Your name?”

“Marlowe.”

“Marlowe. Drink while waiting?”

“A dry martini will do.”

“A martini. Dry. Veddy, veddy dry.”

“Okay.”

“Will you eat it with a spoon or a knife and fork?”

“Cut it in strips,” I said. “I’ll just nibble it.”

“On your way to school,” he said. “Should I put the olive in a bag for you?”

“Sock me on the nose with it,” I said. “If it will make you feel any better.”

“Thank you, sir,” he said. “A dry martini.”

He took three steps away from me and then came back and leaned across the bar and said: “I made a mistake in a drink. The gentleman was telling me about it.”

“I heard him.”

“He was telling me about it as gentlemen tell you about things like that. As big shot directors like to point out to you your little errors. And you heard him.”

“Yeah,” I said, wondering how long this was going to go on.

“He made himself heard—the gentleman did. So I come over here and practically insult you.”

“I got the idea,” I said.

He held up one of his fingers and looked at it thoughtfully.

“Just like that,” he said. “A perfect stranger.”

“It’s my big brown eyes,” I said. “They have that gentle look.”

“Thanks, chum,” he said, and quietly went away.

I saw him talking into a phone at the end of the bar. Then I saw him working with a shaker. When he came back with the drink he was all right again.

18

I carried the drink over to a small table against the wall and sat down there and lit a cigarette. Five minutes went by. The music that was coming through the fret had changed in tempo without my noticing it. A girl was singing. She had a rich deep down around the ankles contralto that was pleasant to listen to. She was singing Dark Eyes and the band behind her seemed to be falling asleep.

There was a heavy round of applause and some whistling when she ended.

A man at the next table said to his girl: “They got Linda Conquest back with the band. I heard she got married to some rich guy in Pasadena, but it didn’t take.”

The girl said: “Nice voice. If you like female crooners.”

I started to get up but a shadow fell across my table and a man was standing there.

A great long gallows of a man with a ravaged face and a haggard frozen right eye that had a clotted iris and the steady look of blindness. He was so tall that he had to stoop to put his hand on the back of the chair across the table from me. He stood there sizing me up without saying anything and I sat there sipping the last of my drink and listening to the contralto voice singing another song. The customers seemed to like corny music in there. Perhaps they were all tired out trying to be ahead of the minute in the place where they worked.

“I’m Prue,” the man said in his harsh whisper.

“So I gathered. You want to talk to me, I want to talk to you, and I want to talk to the girl that just sang.”

“Let’s go.”

There was a locked door at the back end of the bar. Prue unlocked it and held it for me and we went through that and up a flight of carpeted steps to the left. A long straight hallway with several closed doors. At the end of it a bright star cross-wired by the mesh of a screen. Prue knocked on a door near the screen and opened it and stood aside for me to pass him.

It was a cozy sort of office, not too large. There was a built-in upholstered corner seat by the french windows and a man in a white dinner jacket was standing with his back to the room, looking out. He had gray hair. There was a large black and chromium safe, some filing cases, a large globe in a stand, a small built-in bar, and the usual broad heavy executive desk with the usual high-backed padded leather chair behind it.

I looked at the ornaments on the desk. Everything standard and all copper. A copper lamp, pen set and pencil tray, a glass and copper ashtray with a copper elephant on the rim, a copper letter opener, a copper thermos bottle on a copper tray, copper corners on the blotter holder. There was a spray of almost copper-colored sweet peas in a copper vase. It seemed like a lot of copper.

The man at the window turned around and showed me that he was going on fifty and had soft ash gray hair and plenty of it, and a heavy handsome face with nothing unusual about it except a short puckered scar in his left cheek that had almost the effect of a deep dimple. I remembered the dimple. I would have forgotten the man. I remembered that I had seen him in pictures a long time ago, at least ten years ago. I didn’t remember the pictures or what they were about or what he did in them, but I remembered the dark heavy handsome face and the puckered scar. His hair had been dark then.

He walked over to his desk and sat down and picked up his letter opener and poked at the ball of his thumb with the point. He looked at me with no expression and said: “You’re Marlowe?”

I nodded.

“Sit down.” I sat down. Eddie Prue sat in a chair against the wall and tilted the front legs off the floor.

“I don’t like peepers,” Morny said.

I shrugged.

“I don’t like them for a lot of reasons,” he said. “I don’t like them in any way or at any time. I don’t like them when they bother my friends. I don’t like them when they bust in on my wife.”

I didn’t say anything.

“I don’t like them when they question my driver or when they get tough with my guests,” he said.

I didn’t say anything.

“In short,” he said. “I just don’t like them.”

“I’m beginning to get what you mean,” I said.

He flushed and his eyes glittered. “On the other hand,” he said, “just at the moment I might have a use for you. It might pay you to play ball with me. It might be a good idea. It might pay you to keep your nose clean.”

“How much might it pay me?” I asked.

“It might pay you in time and health.”

“I seem to have heard this record somewhere,” I said. “I just can’t put a name to it.”

He laid the letter opener down and swung open a door in the desk and got a cut glass decanter out. He poured liquid out of it in a glass and drank it and put the stopper back in the decanter and put the decanter back in the desk.

“In my business,” he said, “tough boys come a dime a dozen. And would-be tough boys come a nickel a gross. Just mind your business and I’ll mind my business and we won’t have any trouble.” He lit a cigarette. His hand shook a little.

I looked across the room at the tall man sitting tilted against the wall, like a loafer in a country store. He just sat there without motion, his long arms hanging, his lined gray face full of nothing.

“Somebody said something about some money,” I said to Morny. “What’s that for? I know what the bawling out is for. That’s you trying to make yourself think you can scare me.”

“Talk like that to me,” Morny said, “and you are liable to be wearing lead buttons on your vest.”

“Just think,” I said. “Poor old Marlowe with lead buttons on his vest.”

Eddie Prue made a dry sound in his throat that might have been a chuckle.

“And as for me minding my own business and not minding yours,” I said, “it might be that my business and your business would get a little mixed up together. Through no fault of mine.”

“It better not,” Morny said. “In what way?” He lifted his eyes quickly and dropped them again.

“Well, for instance, your hard boy here calling me up on the phone and trying to scare me to death. And later in the evening calling me up and talking about five C’s and how it would do me some good to drive out here and talk to you. And for instance that same hard boy or somebody who looks just like him—which is a little unlikely—following around after a fellow in my business who happened to get shot this afternoon, on Court Street on Bunker Hill.”

Morny lifted his cigarette away from his lips and narrowed his eyes to look at the tip. Every motion, every gesture, right out of the catalogue.

“Who got shot?”

“A fellow named Phillips, a youngish blond kid. You wouldn’t like him. He was a peeper.” I described Phillips to him.

“I never heard of him,” Morny said.

“And also for instance, a tall blond who didn’t live there was seen coming out of the apartment house just after he was killed,” I said.

“What tall blond?” His voice had changed a little. There was urgency in it.

“I don’t know that. She was seen and the man who saw her could identify her, if he saw her again. Of course she need not have anything to do with Phillips.”

“This man Phillips was a shamus?”

I nodded. “I told you that twice.”

“Why was he killed and how?”

“He was sapped and shot in his apartment. We don’t know why he was killed. If we knew that, we would likely know who killed him. It seems to be that kind of a situation.”

“Who is ‘we’?”

“The police and myself. I found him dead. So I had to stick around.”

Prue let the front legs of his chair down on the carpet very quietly and looked at me. His good eye had a sleepy expression I didn’t like.

Morny said: “You told the cops what?”

I said: “Very little. I gather from your opening remarks to me here that you know I am looking for Linda Conquest. Mrs. Leslie Murdock. I’ve found her. She’s singing here. I don’t know why there should have been any secret about it. It seems to me that your wife or Mr. Vannier might have told me. But they didn’t.”

“What my wife would tell a peeper,” Morny said, “you could put in a gnat’s eye.”

“No doubt she has her reasons,” I said. “However that’s not very important now. In fact it’s not very important that I see Miss Conquest. Just the same I’d like to talk to her a little. If you don’t mind.”

“Suppose I mind,” Morny said.

“I guess I would like to talk to her anyway,” I said. I got a cigarette out of my pocket and rolled it around in my fingers and admired his thick and still-dark eyebrows. They had a fine shape, an elegant curve.

Prue chuckled. Morny looked at him and frowned and looked back at me, keeping the frown on his face.

“I asked you what you told the cops,” he said.

“I told them as little as I could. This man Phillips asked me to come and see him. He implied he was too deep in a job he didn’t like and needed help. When I got there he was dead. I told the police that. They didn’t think it was quite the whole story. It probably isn’t. I have until tomorrow noon to fill it out. So I’m trying to fill it out.”

“You wasted your time coming here,” Morny said.

“I got the idea that I was asked to come here.”

“You can go to hell back any time you want to,” Morny said. “Or you can do a little job for me—for five hundred dollars. Either way you leave Eddie and me out of any conversations you might have with the police.”

“What’s the nature of the job?”

“You were at my house this morning. You ought to have an idea.”

“I don’t do divorce business,” I said.

His face turned white. “I love my wife,” he said. “We’ve only been married eight months. I don’t want any divorce. She’s a swell girl and she knows what time it is, as a rule. But I think she’s playing with a wrong number at the moment.”

“Wrong in what way?”

“I don’t know. That’s what I want found out.”

“Let me get this straight,” I said. “Are you hiring me on a job—or off a job I already have.”

Prue chuckled again against the wall.

Morny poured himself some more brandy and tossed it quickly down his throat. Color came back into his face. He didn’t answer me.

“And let me get another thing straight,” I said. “You don’t mind your wife playing around, but you don’t want her playing with somebody named Vannier. Is that it?”

“I trust her heart,” he said slowly. “But I don’t trust her judgment. Put it that way.”

“And you want me to get something on this man Vannier?”

“I want to find out what he is up to.”

“Oh. Is he up to something?”

“I think he is. I don’t know what.”

“You think he is—or you want to think he is?”

He stared at me levelly for a moment, then he pulled the middle drawer of his desk out, reached in and tossed a folded paper across to me. I picked it up and unfolded it. It was a carbon copy of a gray billhead. Cal-Western Dental Supply Company, and an address. The bill was for 30 lbs. Kerr’s Crystobolite $15.75, and 25 lbs. White’s Albastone, $7.75, plus tax. It was made out to H. R. Teager, Will Call, and stamped Paid with a rubber stamp. It was signed for in the corner: L.G. Vannier.

I put it down on the desk.

“That fell out of his pocket one night when he was here,” Morny said. “About ten days ago. Eddie put one of his big feet on it and Vannier didn’t notice he had dropped it.”

I looked at Prue, then at Morny, then at my thumb. “Is this supposed to mean something to me?”

“I thought you were a smart detective. I figured you could find out.”

I looked at the paper again, folded it and put it in my pocket. “I’m assuming you wouldn’t give it to me unless it meant something,” I said.

Morny went to the black and chromium safe against the wall and opened it. He came back with five new bills spread out in his fingers like a poker hand. He smoothed them edge to edge, riffled them lightly, and tossed them on the desk in front of me.

“There’s your five C’s,” he said. “Take Vannier out of my wife’s life and there will be the same again for you. I don’t care how you do it and I don’t want to know anything about how you do it. Just do it.”

I poked at the crisp new bills with a hungry finger. Then I pushed them away. “You can pay me when—and if—I deliver,” I said. “I’ll take my payment tonight in a short interview with Miss Conquest.”

Morny didn’t touch the money. He lifted the square bottle and poured himself another drink. This time he poured one for me and pushed it across the desk.

“And as for this Phillips murder,” I said, “Eddie here was following Phillips a little. You want to tell me why?”

“No.”

“The trouble with a case like this is that the information might come from somebody else. When a murder gets into the papers you never know what will come out. If it does, you’ll blame me.”

He looked at me steadily and said: “I don’t think so. I was a bit rough when you came in, but you shape up pretty good. I’ll take a chance.”

“Thanks,” I said. “Would you mind telling me why you had Eddie call me up and give me the shakes?”

He looked down and tapped on the desk. “Linda’s an old friend of mine. Young Murdock was out here this afternoon to see her. He told her you were working for old lady Murdock. She told me. I didn’t know what the job was. You say you don’t take divorce business, so it couldn’t be that the old lady hired you to fix anything like that up.” He raised his eyes on the last words and stared at me. I stared back at him and waited.

“I guess I’m just a fellow who likes his friends,” he said. “And doesn’t want them bothered by dicks.”

“Murdock owes you some money, doesn’t he?”

He frowned. “I don’t discuss things like that.” He finished his drink, nodded and stood up. “I’ll send Linda up to talk to you. Pick your money up.”

He went to the door and out. Eddie Prue unwound his long body and stood up and gave me a dim gray smile that meant nothing and wandered off after Morny.

I lit another cigarette and looked at the dental supply company’s bill again. Something squirmed at the back of my mind, dimly. I walked to the window and stood looking out across the valley. A car was winding up a hill towards a big house with a tower that was half glass brick with light behind it. The headlights of the car moved across it and turned in toward a garage. The lights went out and the valley seemed darker.

It was very quiet and quite cool now. The dance band seemed to be somewhere under my feet. It was muffled, and the tune was indistinguishable.

Linda Conquest came in through the open door behind me and shut it and stood looking at me with a cold light in her eyes.

19

She looked like her photo and not like it. She had the wide cool mouth, the short nose, the wide cool eyes, the dark hair parted in the middle and the broad white line between the parting. She was wearing a white coat over her dress, with the collar turned up. She had her hands in the pockets of the coat and a cigarette in her mouth.

She looked older, her eyes were harder, and her lips seemed to have forgotten to smile. They would smile when she was singing, in that staged artificial smile. But in repose they were thin and tight and angry.

She moved over to the desk and stood looking down, as if counting the copper ornaments. She saw the cut glass decanter, took the stopper out, poured herself a drink and tossed it down with a quick flip of the wrist.

“You’re a man named Marlowe?” she asked, looking at me. She put her hips against the end of the desk and crossed her ankles.

I said I was a man named Marlowe.

“By and large,” she said, “I am quite sure I am not going to like you one damned little bit. So speak your piece and drift away.”

“What I like about this place is everything runs so true to type,” I said. “The cop on the gate, the shine on the door, the cigarette and check girls, the fat greasy sensual Jew with the tall stately bored showgirl, the well-dressed, drunk and horribly rude director cursing the barman, the silent guy with the gun, the nightclub owner with the soft gray hair and the B-picture mannerisms, and now you—the tall dark torcher with the negligent sneer, the husky voice, the hard-boiled vocabulary.”

She said: “Is that so?” and fitted her cigarette between her lips and drew slowly on it. “And what about the wise-cracking snooper with the last year’s gags and the come-hither smile?”

“And what gives me the right to talk to you at all?” I said.

“I’ll bite. What does?”

“She wants it back. Quickly. It has to be fast or there will be trouble.”

“I thought—” she started to say and stopped cold. I watched her remove the sudden trace of interest from her face by monkeying with her cigarette and bending her face over it. “She wants what back, Mr. Marlowe?”

“The Brasher Doubloon.”

She looked up at me and nodded, remembering—letting me see her remembering.

“Oh, the Brasher Doubloon.”

“I bet you completely forgot it,” I said.

“Well, no. I’ve seen it a number of times,” she said. “She wants it back, you said. Do you mean she thinks I took it?”

“Yeah. Just that.”

“She’s a dirty old liar,” Linda Conquest said.

“What you think doesn’t make you a liar,” I said. “It only sometimes makes you mistaken. Is she wrong?”

“Why would I take her silly old coin?”

“Well—it’s worth a lot of money. She thinks you might need money. I gather she was not too generous.”

She laughed, a tight sneering little laugh. “No,” she said. “Mrs. Elizabeth Bright Murdock would not rate as very generous.”

“Maybe you just took it for spite, kind of,” I said hopefully.

“Maybe I ought to slap your face.” She killed her cigarette in Morny’s copper goldfish bowl, speared the crushed stub absently with the letter opener and dropped it into the wastebasket.

“Passing on from that to perhaps more important matters,” I said, “will you give him a divorce?”

“For twenty-five grand,” she said, not looking at me, “I should be glad to.”

“You’re not in love with the guy, huh?”

“You’re breaking my heart, Marlowe.”

“He’s in love with you,” I said. “After all you did marry him.”

She looked at me lazily. “Mister, don’t think I didn’t pay for that mistake.” She lit another cigarette. “But a girl has to live. And it isn’t always as easy as it looks. And so a girl can make a mistake, marry the wrong guy and the wrong family, looking for something that isn’t there. Security, or whatever.”

“But not needing any love to do it,” I said.

“I don’t want to be too cynical, Marlowe. But you’d be surprised how many girls marry to find a home, especially girls whose arm muscles are all tired out fighting off the kind of optimists that come into these gin and glitter joints.”

“You had a home and you gave it up.”

“It got to be too dear. That port-sodden old fake made the bargain too tough. How do you like her for a client?”

“I’ve had worse.”

She picked a shred of tobacco off her lip. “You notice what she’s doing to that girl?”

“Merle? I noticed she bullied her.”

“It isn’t just that. She has her cutting out dolls. The girl had a shock of some kind and the old brute has used the effect of it to dominate the girl completely. In company she yells at her but in private she’s apt to be stroking her hair and whispering in her ear. And the kid sort of shivers.”

“I didn’t quite get all that,” I said.

“The kid’s in love with Leslie, but she doesn’t know it. Emotionally she’s about ten years old. Something funny is going to happen in that family one of these days. I’m glad I won’t be there.”

I said: “You’re a smart girl, Linda. And you’re tough and you’re wise. I suppose when you married him you thought you could get your hands on plenty.”

She curled her lip. “I thought it would at least be a vacation. It wasn’t even that. That’s a smart ruthless woman, Marlowe. Whatever she’s got you doing, it’s not what she says. She’s up to something. Watch your step.”

“Would she kill a couple of men?”

She laughed.

“No kidding,” I said. “A couple of men have been killed and one of them at least is connected with rare coins.”

“I don’t get it,” she looked at me levelly. “Murdered, you mean?”

I nodded.

“You tell Morny all that?”

“About one of them.”

“You tell the cops?”

“About one of them. The same one.”

She moved her eyes over my face. We stared at each other. She looked a little pale, or just tired. I thought she had grown a little paler than before.

“You’re making that up,” she said between her teeth.

I grinned and nodded. She seemed to relax then.

“About the Brasher Doubloon?” I said. “You didn’t take it. Okay. About the divorce, what?”

“That’s none of your affair.”

“I agree. Well, thanks for talking to me. Do you know a fellow named Vannier?”

“Yes.” Her face froze hard now. “Not well. He’s a friend of Lois.”

“A very good friend.”

“One of these days he’s apt to turn out to be a small quiet funeral too.”

“Hints,” I said, “have sort of been thrown in that direction. There’s something about the guy. Every time his name comes up the party freezes.”

She stared at me and said nothing. I thought that an idea was stirring at the back of her eyes, but if so it didn’t come out. She said quietly:

“Morny will sure as hell kill him, if he doesn’t lay off Lois.”

“Go on with you. Lois flops at the drop of a hat. Anybody can see that.”

“Perhaps Alex is the one person who can’t see it.”

“Vannier hasn’t anything to do with my job anyway. He has no connection with the Murdocks.”

She lifted a corner of her lip at me and said: “No? Let me tell you something. No reason why I should. I’m just a great big open-hearted kid. Vannier knows Elizabeth Bright Murdock and well. He never came to the house but once while I was there, but he called on the phone plenty of times. I caught some of the calls. He always asked for Merle.”

“Well—that’s funny,” I said. “Merle, huh?”

She bent to crush out her cigarette and again she speared the stub and dropped it into the wastebasket.

“I’m very tired,” she said suddenly. “Please go away.”

I stood there for a moment, looking at her and wondering. Then I said: “Good night and thanks. Good luck.”

I went out and left her standing there with her hands in the pockets of the white coat, her head bent and her eyes looking at the floor.

It was two o’clock when I got back to Hollywood and put the car away and went upstairs to my apartment. The wind was all gone but the air still had that dryness and lightness of the desert. The air in the apartment was dead and Breeze’s cigar butt had made it a little worse than dead. I opened windows and flushed the place through while I undressed and stripped the pockets of my suit.

Out of them with other things came the dental supply company’s bill. It still looked like a bill to one H. R. Teager for 30 lbs. of crystobolite and 25 lbs. of albastone.

I dragged the phone book up on the desk in the living room and looked up Teager. Then the confused memory clicked into place. His address was 422 West Ninth Street. The address of the Belfont Building was 422 West Ninth Street.

H. R. Teager Dental Laboratories had been one of the names on doors on the sixth floor of the Belfont Building when I did my backstairs crawl away from the office of Elisha Morningstar.

But even the Pinkertons have to sleep, and Marlowe needed far, far more sleep than the Pinkertons. I went to bed.

20

It was just as hot in Pasadena as the day before and the big dark red brick house on Dresden Avenue looked just as cool and the little painted Negro waiting by the hitching block looked just as sad. The same butterfly landed on the same hydrangea bush—or it looked like the same one—the same heavy scent of summer lay on the morning, and the same middle-aged sourpuss with the frontier voice opened to my ring.

She led me along the same hallways to the same sunless sunroom. In it Mrs. Elizabeth Bright Murdock sat in the same reed chaise lounge and as I came into the room she was pouring herself a slug from what looked like the same port bottle but was more probably a grandchild.

The maid shut the door, I sat down and put my hat on the floor, just like yesterday, and Mrs. Murdock gave me the same hard level stare and said:

“Well?”

“Things are bad,” I said. “The cops are after me.”

She looked as flustered as a side of beef. “Indeed. I thought you were more competent than that.”

I brushed it off. “When I left here yesterday morning a man followed me in a coupe. I don’t know what he was doing here or how he got here. I suppose he followed me here, but I feel doubtful about that. I shook him off, but he turned up again in the hall outside my office. He followed me again, so I invited him to explain why and he said he knew who I was and he needed help and asked me to come to his apartment on Bunker Hill and talk to him. I went, after I had seen Mr. Morningstar, and found the man shot to death on the floor of his bathroom.”

Mrs. Murdock sipped a little port. Her hand might have shaken a little, but the light in the room was too dim for me to be sure. She cleared her throat.

“Go on.”

“His name is George Anson Phillips. A young, blond fellow, rather dumb. He claimed to be a private detective.”

“I never heard of him,” Mrs. Murdock said coldly. “I never saw him to my knowledge and I don’t know anything about him. Did you think I employed him to follow you?”

“I didn’t know what to think. He talked about pooling our resources and he gave me the impression that he was working for some member of your family. He didn’t say so in so many words.”

“He wasn’t. You can be quite definite on that.” The baritone voice was as steady as a rock.

“I don’t think you know quite as much about your family as you think you do, Mrs. Murdock.”

“I know you have been questioning my son—contrary to my orders,” she said coldly.

“I didn’t question him. He questioned me. Or tried to.”

“We’ll go into that later,” she said harshly. “What about this man you found shot? You are involved with the police on account of him?”

“Naturally. They want to know why he followed me, what I was working on, why he spoke to me, why he asked me to come to his apartment and why I went. But that is only the half of it.”

She finished her port and poured herself another glass.

“How’s your asthma?” I asked.

“Bad,” she said. “Get on with your story.”

“I saw Morningstar. I told you about that over the phone. He pretended not to have the Brasher Doubloon, but admitted it had been offered to him and said he could get it. As I told you. Then you told me it had been returned to you, so that was that.”

I waited, thinking she would tell me some story about how the coin had been returned, but she just stared at me bleakly over the wine glass.

“So, as I had made a sort of arrangement with Mr. Morningstar to pay him a thousand dollars for the coin—”

“You had no authority to do anything like that,” she barked.

I nodded, agreeing with her.

“Maybe I was kidding him a little,” I said. “And I know I was kidding myself. Anyway after what you told me over the phone I tried to get in touch with him to tell him the deal was off. He’s not in the phone book except at his office. I went to his office. This was quite late. The elevator man said he was still in his office. He was lying on his back on the floor, dead. Killed by a blow on the head and shock, apparently. Old men die easily. The blow might not have been intended to kill him. I called the Receiving Hospital, but didn’t give my name.”

“That was wise of you,” she said.

“Was it? It was considerate of me, but I don’t think I’d call it wise. I want to be nice, Mrs. Murdock. You understand that in your rough way, I hope. But two murders happened in a matter of hours and both the bodies were found by me. And both the victims were connected—in some manner—with your Brasher Doubloon.”

“I don’t understand. This other, younger man also?”

“Yes. Didn’t I tell you over the phone? I thought I did.” I wrinkled my brow, thinking back. I knew I had.

She said calmly: “It’s possible. I wasn’t paying a great deal of attention to what you said. You see, the doubloon had already been returned. And you sounded a little drunk.”

“I wasn’t drunk. I might have felt a little shock, but I wasn’t drunk. You take all this very calmly.”

“What do you want me to do?”

I took a deep breath. “I’m connected with one murder already, by having found the body and reported it. I may presently be connected with another, by having found the body and not reported it. Which is much more serious for me. Even as far as it goes, I have until noon today to disclose the name of my client.”

“That,” she said, still much too calm for my taste, “would be a breach of confidence. You are not going to do that, I’m sure.”

“I wish you’d leave that damn port alone and make some effort to understand the position,” I snapped at her.

She looked vaguely surprised and pushed her glass away—about four inches away.

“This fellow Phillips,” I said, “had a license as a private detective. How did I happen to find him dead? Because he followed me and I spoke to him and he asked me to come to his apartment. And when I got there he was dead. The police know all this. They may even believe it. But they don’t believe the connection between Phillips and me is quite that much of a coincidence. They think there is a deeper connection between Phillips and me and they insist on knowing what I am doing, who I am working for. Is that clear?”

“You’ll find a way out of all that,” she said. “I expect it to cost me a little more money, of course.”

I felt myself getting pinched around the nose. My mouth felt dry. I needed air. I took another deep breath and another dive into the tub of blubber that was sitting across the room from me on the reed chaise lounge, looking as unperturbed as a bank president refusing a loan.

“I’m working for you,” I said, “now, this week, today. Next week I’ll be working for somebody else, I hope. And the week after that for still somebody else. In order to do that I have to be on reasonably good terms with the police. They don’t have to love me, but they have to be fairly sure I am not cheating on them. Assume Phillips knew nothing about the Brasher Doubloon. Assume, even, that he knew about it, but that his death had nothing to do with it. I still have to tell the cops what I know about him. And they have to question anybody they want to question. Can’t you understand that?”

“Doesn’t the law give you the right to protect a client?” she snapped. “If it doesn’t, what is the use of anyone’s hiring a detective?”

I got up and walked around my chair and sat down again. I leaned forward and took hold of my kneecaps and squeezed them until my knuckles glistened.

“The law, whatever it is, is a matter of give and take, Mrs. Murdock. Like most other things. Even if I had the legal right to stay clammed up—refuse to talk—and got away with it once, that would be the end of my business. I’d be a guy marked for trouble. One way or another they would get me. I value your business, Mrs. Murdock, but not enough to cut my throat for you and bleed in your lap.”

She reached for her glass and emptied it.

“You seem to have made a nice mess of the whole thing,” she said. “You didn’t find my daughter-in-law and you didn’t find my Brasher Doubloon. But you found a couple of dead men that I have nothing to do with and you have neatly arranged matters so that I must tell the police all my private and personal business in order to protect you from your own incompetence. That’s what I see. If I am wrong, pray correct me.”

She poured some more wine and gulped it too fast and went into a paroxysm of coughing. Her shaking hand slid the glass on to the table, slopping the wine. She threw herself forward in her seat and got purple in the face.

I jumped up and went over and landed one on her beefy back that would have shaken the City Hall.

She let out a long strangled wail and drew her breath in rackingly and stopped coughing. I pressed one of the keys on her Dictaphone box and when somebody answered, metallic and loud, through the metal disk I said: “Bring Mrs. Murdock a glass of water, quick!” and then let the key up again.

I sat down again and watched her pull herself together. When her breath was coming evenly and without effort, I said: “You’re not tough. You just think you’re tough. You been living too long with people that are scared of you. Wait’ll you meet up with some law. Those boys are professionals. You’re just a spoiled amateur.”

The door opened and the maid came in with a pitcher of ice water and a glass. She put them down on the table and went out.

I poured Mrs. Murdock a glass of water and put it in her hand.

“Sip it, don’t drink it. You won’t like the taste of it, but it won’t hurt you.”

She sipped, then drank half of the glass, then put the glass down and wiped her lips.

“To think,” she said raspingly, “that out of all the snoopers for hire I could have employed, I had to pick out a man who would bully me in my own home.”

“That’s not getting you anywhere either,” I said. “We don’t have a lot of time. What’s our story to the police going to be?”

“The police mean nothing to me. Absolutely nothing. And if you give them my name, I shall regard it as a thoroughly disgusting breach of faith.”

That put me back where we started.

“Murder changes everything, Mrs. Murdock. You can’t dummy up on a murder case. We’ll have to tell them why you employed me and what to do. They won’t publish it in the papers, you know. That is, they won’t if they believe it. They certainly won’t believe you hired me to investigate Elisha Morningstar just because he called up and wanted to buy the doubloon. They may not find out that you couldn’t have sold the coin, if you wanted to, because they might not think of that angle. But they won’t believe you hired a private detective just to investigate a possible purchaser. Why should you?”

“That’s my business, isn’t it?”

“No. You can’t fob the cops off that way. You have to satisfy them that you are being frank and open and have nothing to hide. As long as they think you are hiding something they never let up. Give them a reasonable and plausible story and they go away cheerful. And the most reasonable and plausible story is always the truth. Any objection to telling it?”

“Every possible objection,” she said. “But it doesn’t seem to make much difference. Do we have to tell them that I suspected my daughter-in-law of stealing the coin and that I was wrong?”

“It would be better.”

“And that it has been returned and how?”

“It would be better.”

“That is going to humiliate me very much.”

I shrugged.

“You’re a callous brute,” she said. “You’re a cold-blooded fish. I don’t like you. I deeply regret ever having met you.”

“Mutual,” I said.

She reached a thick finger to a key and barked into the talking box. “Merle. Ask my son to come in here at once. And I think you may as well come in with him.”

She released the key, pressed her broad fingers together and let her hands drop heavily to her thighs. Her bleak eyes went up to the ceiling.

Her voice was quiet and sad saying: “My son took the coin. Mr. Marlowe. My son. My own son.”

I didn’t say anything. We sat there glaring at each other. In a couple of minutes they both came in and she barked at them to sit down.

21

Leslie Murdock was wearing a greenish slack suit and his hair looked damp, as if he had just been taking a shower. He sat hunched forward, looking at the white buck shoes on his feet, and turning a ring on his finger. He didn’t have his long black cigarette holder and he looked a little lonely without it. Even his mustache seemed to droop a little more than it had in my office.

Merle Davis looked just the same as the day before. Probably she always looked the same. Her copper blond hair was dragged down just as tight, her shell-rimmed glasses looked just as large and empty, her eyes behind them just as vague. She was even wearing the same one-piece linen dress with short sleeves and no ornament of any kind, not even earrings.

I had the curious feeling of reliving something that had already happened.

Mrs. Murdock sipped her port and said quietly:

“All right, son. Tell Mr. Marlowe about the doubloon. I’m afraid he has to be told.”

Murdock looked up at me quickly and then dropped his eyes again. His mouth twitched. When he spoke his voice had the toneless quality, a flat tired sound, like a man making a confession after an exhausting battle with his conscience.

“As I told you yesterday in your office I owe Morny a lot of money. Twelve thousand dollars. I denied it afterwards, but it’s true. I do owe it. I didn’t want mother to know. He was pressing me pretty hard for payment. I suppose I knew I would have to tell her in the end, but I was weak enough to want to put it off. I took the doubloon, using her keys one afternoon when she was asleep and Merle was out. I gave it to Morny and he agreed to hold it as security because I explained to him that he couldn’t get anything like twelve thousand dollars for it unless he could give its history and show that it was legitimately in his possession.”

He stopped talking and looked up at me to see how I was taking it. Mrs. Murdock had her eyes on my face, practically puttied there. The little girl was looking at Murdock with her lips parted and an expression of suffering on her face.

Murdock went on. “Morny gave me a receipt, in which he agreed to hold the coin as collateral and not to convert it without notice and demand. Something like that. I don’t profess to know how legal it was. When this man Morningstar called up and asked about the coin I immediately became suspicious that Morny either was trying to sell it or that he was at least thinking of selling it and was trying to get a valuation on it from somebody who knew about rare coins. I was badly scared.”

He looked up and made a sort of face at me. Maybe it was the face of somebody being badly scared. Then he took his handkerchief out and wiped his forehead and sat holding it between his hands.

“When Merle told me mother had employed a detective—Merle ought not to have told me, but mother has promised not to scold her for it—” He looked at his mother. The old warhorse clamped her jaws and looked grim. The little girl had her eyes still on his face and didn’t seem to be very worried about the scolding. He went on: “—then I was sure she had missed the doubloon and had hired you on that account. I didn’t really believe she had hired you to find Linda. I knew where Linda was all the time. I went to your office to see what I could find out. I didn’t find out very much. I went to see Morny yesterday afternoon and told him about it. At first he laughed in my face, but when I told him that even my mother couldn’t sell the coin without violating the terms of Jasper Murdock’s will and that she would certainly set the police on him when I told her where the coin was, then he loosened up. He got up and went to the safe and got the coin out and handed it to me without a word. I gave him back his receipt and he tore it up. So I brought the coin home and told mother about it.”

He stopped talking and wiped his face again. The little girl’s eyes moved up and down with the motions of his hand.

In the silence that followed I said: “Did Morny threaten you?”

He shook his head. “He said he wanted his money and he needed it and I had better get busy and dig it up. But he wasn’t threatening. He was very decent, really. In the circumstances.”

“Where was this?”

“At the Idle Valley Club, in his private office.”

“Was Eddie Prue there?”

The little girl tore her eyes away from his face and looked at me. Mrs. Murdock said thickly: “Who is Eddie Prue?”

“Morny’s bodyguard,” I said. “I didn’t waste all my time yesterday, Mrs. Murdock.” I looked at her son, waiting.

He said: “No, I didn’t see him. I know him by sight, of course. You would only have to see him once to remember him. But he wasn’t around yesterday.”

I said: “Is that all?”

He looked at his mother. She said harshly: “Isn’t it enough?”

“Maybe,” I said. “Where is the coin now?”

“Where would you expect it to be?” she snapped.

I almost told her, just to see her jump. But I managed to hold it in. I said: “That seems to take care of that, then.”

Mrs. Murdock said heavily: “Kiss your mother, son, and run along.”

He got up dutifully and went over and kissed her on the forehead. She patted his hand. He went out of the room with his head down and quietly shut the door. I said to Merle: “I think you had better have him dictate that to you just the way he told it and make a copy of it and get him to sign it.”

She looked startled. The old woman snarled:

“She certainly won’t do anything of the sort. Go back to your work, Merle. I wanted you to hear this. But if I ever again catch you violating my confidence, you know what will happen.”

The little girl stood up and smiled at her with shining eyes. “Oh yes, Mrs. Murdock. I never will. Never. You can trust me.

“I hope so,” the old dragon growled. “Get out.”

Merle went out softly.

Two big tears formed themselves in Mrs. Murdock’s eyes and slowly made their way down the elephant hide of her cheeks, reached the corners of her fleshy nose and slid down her lip. She scrabbled around for a handkerchief, wiped them off and then wiped her eyes. She put the handkerchief away, reached for her wine and said placidly:

“I’m very fond of my son, Mr. Marlowe. Very fond. This grieves me deeply. Do you think he will have to tell this story to the police?”

“I hope not,” I said. “He’d have a hell of a time getting them to believe it.”

Her mouth snapped open and her teeth glinted at me in the dim light. She closed her lips and pressed them tight. scowling at me with her head lowered.

“Just what do you mean by that?” she snapped.

“Just what I said. The story doesn’t ring true. It has a fabricated, over-simple sound. Did he make it up himself or did you think it up and teach it to him?”

“Mr. Marlowe,” she said in a deadly voice, “you are treading on very thin ice.”

I waved a hand. “Aren’t we all? All right, suppose it’s true. Morny will deny it, and we’ll be right back where we started. Morny will have to deny it, because otherwise it would tie him to a couple of murders.”

“Is there anything so unlikely about that being the exact situation?” she blared.

“Why would Morny, a man with backing, protection and some influence, tie himself to a couple of small murders in order to avoid tying himself to something trifling, like selling a pledge? It doesn’t make sense to me.”

She stared, saying nothing. I grinned at her, because for the first time she was going to like something I said.

“I found your daughter-in-law, Mrs. Murdock. It’s a little strange to me that your son, who seems so well under your control, didn’t tell you where she was.”

“I didn’t ask him,” she said in a curiously quiet voice, for her.

“She’s back where she started, singing with the band at the Idle Valley Club. I talked to her. She’s a pretty hard sort of girl in a way. She doesn’t like you very well. I don’t find it impossible to think that she took the coin all right, partly from spite. And I find it slightly less impossible to believe that Leslie knew it or found it out and cooked up that yarn to protect her. He says he’s very much in love with her.”

She smiled. It wasn’t a beautiful smile, being on slightly the wrong kind of face. But it was a smile.

“Yes,” she said gently. “Yes. Poor Leslie. He would do just that. And in that case—” she stopped and her smile widened until it was almost ecstatic, “in that case my dear daughter-in-law may be involved in murder.”

I watched her enjoying the idea for a quarter of a minute. “And you’d just love that,” I said.

She nodded, still smiling, getting the idea she liked before she got the rudeness in my voice. Then her face stiffened and her lips came together hard. Between them and her teeth she said:

“I don’t like your tone. I don’t like your tone at all.”

“I don’t blame you,” I said. “I don’t like it myself. I don’t like anything. I don’t like this house or you or the air of repression in the joint, or the squeezed down face of the little girl or that twerp of a son you have, or this case or the truth I’m not told about it and the lies I am told about it and—”

She started yelling then, noise out of a splotched furious face, eyes tossing with fury, sharp with hate:

“Get out! Get out of this house at once! Don’t delay one instant! Get out!”

I stood up and reached my hat off the carpet and said: “I’ll be glad to.”

I gave her a sort of a tired leer and picked my way to the door and opened it and went out. I shut it quietly, holding the knob with a stiff hand and clicking the lock gently into place.

For no reason at all.

22

Steps gibbered along after me and my name was called and I kept on going until I was in the middle of the living room. Then I stopped and turned and let her catch up with me, out of breath, her eyes trying to pop through her glasses and her shining copper-blond hair catching funny little lights from the high windows.

“Mr. Marlowe? Please! Please don’t go away. She wants you. She really does!”

“I’ll be darned. You’ve got Sub-deb Bright on your mouth this morning. Looks all right too.”

She grabbed my sleeve. “Please!”

“The hell with her,” I said. “Tell her to jump in the lake. Marlowe can get sore too. Tell her to jump in two lakes, if one won’t hold her. Not clever, but quick.”

I looked down at the hand on my sleeve and patted it. She drew it away swiftly and her eyes looked shocked.

“Please, Mr. Marlowe. She’s in trouble. She needs you.”

“I’m in trouble too,” I growled. “I’m up to my ear flaps in trouble. What are you crying about?”

“Oh, I’m really very fond of her. I know she’s rough and blustery, but her heart is pure gold.”

“To hell with her heart too,” I said. “I don’t expect to get intimate enough with her for that to make any difference. She’s a fat-faced old liar. I’ve had enough of her. I think she’s in trouble all right, but I’m not in the excavating business. I have to get told things.”

“Oh, I’m sure if you would only be patient—”

I put my arm around her shoulders, without thinking. She jumped about three feet and her eyes blazed with panic.

We stood there staring at each other, making breath noises, me with my mouth open as it too frequently is, she with her lips pressed tight and her little pale nostrils quivering. Her face was as pale as the unhandy makeup would let it be.

“Look,” I said slowly, “did something happen to you when you were a little girl?”

She nodded, very quickly.

“A man scared you or something like that?”

She nodded again. She took her lower lip between her little white teeth.

“And you’ve been like this ever since?”

She just stood there, looking white.

“Look,” I said, “I won’t do anything to you that will scare you. Not ever.”

Her eyes melted with tears.

“If I touched you,” I said, “it was just like touching a chair or a door. It didn’t mean anything. Is that clear?”

“Yes.” She got a word out at last. Panic still twitched in the depths of her eyes, behind the tears. “Yes.”

“That takes care of me,” I said. “I’m all adjusted. Nothing to worry about in me any more. Now take Leslie. He has his mind on other things. You know he’s all right—in the way we mean. Right?”

“Oh, yes,” she said. “Yes, indeed.” Leslie was aces. With her. With me he was a handful of bird gravel.

“Now take the old wine barrel,” I said. “She’s rough and she’s tough and she thinks she can eat walls and spit bricks, and she bawls you out, but she’s fundamentally decent to you, isn’t she?”

“Oh, she is, Mr. Marlowe. I was trying to tell you—”

“Sure. Now why don’t you get over it? Is he still around—this other one that hurt you?”

She put her hand to her mouth and gnawed the fleshy part at the base of the thumb, looking at me over it, as if it was a balcony.

“He’s dead,” she said. “He fell out of a—out of a—a window.”

I stopped her with my big right hand. “Oh, that guy. I heard about him. Forget it, can’t you?”

“No,” she said, shaking her head seriously behind the hand. “I can’t. I can’t seem to forget it at all. Mrs. Murdock is always telling me to forget it. She talks to me for the longest times telling me to forget it. But I just can’t.”

“It would be a darn sight better,” I snarled, “if she would keep her fat mouth shut about it for the longest times. She just keeps it alive.”

She looked surprised and rather hurt at that. “Oh, that isn’t all,” she said. “I was his secretary. She was his wife. He was her first husband. Naturally she doesn’t forget it either. How could she?”

I scratched my ear. That seemed sort of non-committal. There was nothing much in her expression now except that I didn’t really think she realized that I was there. I was a voice coming out of somewhere, but rather impersonal. Almost a voice in her own head.

Then I had one of my funny and often unreliable hunches. “Look,” I said, “is there someone you meet that has that effect on you? Some one person more than another?”

She looked all around the room. I looked with her. Nobody was under a chair or peeking at us through a door or a window.

“Why do I have to tell you?” she breathed.

“You don’t. It’s just how you feel about it.”

“Will you promise not to tell anybody—anybody in the whole world, not even Mrs. Murdock?”

“Her last of all,” I said. “I promise.”

She opened her mouth and put a funny little confiding smile on her face, and then it went wrong. Her throat froze up. She made a croaking noise. Her teeth actually rattled.

I wanted to give her a good hard squeeze but I was afraid to touch her. We stood. Nothing happened. We stood. I was about as much use as a hummingbird’s spare egg would have been.

Then she turned and ran. I heard her steps going along the halls. I heard a door close.

I went after her along the hall and reached the door. She was sobbing behind it. I stood there and listened to the sobbing.

There was nothing I could do about it. I wondered if there was anything anybody could do about it.

I went back to the glass porch and knocked on the door and opened it and put my head in. Mrs. Murdock sat just as I had left her. She didn’t seem to have moved at all.

“Who’s scaring the life out of that little girl?” I asked her.

“Get out of my house,” she said between her fat lips. I didn’t move. Then she laughed at me hoarsely. “Do you regard yourself as a clever man, Mr. Marlowe?”

“Well, I’m not dripping with it,” I said.

“Suppose you find out for yourself.”

“At your expense?”

She shrugged her heavy shoulders. “Possibly. It depends. Who knows?”

“You haven’t bought a thing,” I said. “I’m still going to have to talk to the police.”

“I haven’t bought anything,” she said, “and I haven’t paid for anything. Except the return of the coin. I’m satisfied to accept that for the money I have already given you. Now go away. You bore me. Unspeakably.”

I shut the door and went back. No sobbing behind the door. Very still. I went on.

I let myself out of the house. I stood there, listening to the sunshine burn the grass. A car started up in back and a gray Mercury came drifting along the drive at the side of the house. Mr. Leslie Murdock was driving it. When he saw me he stopped.

He got out of the car and walked quickly over to me. He was nicely dressed; cream colored gabardine now, all fresh clothes, slacks, black and white shoes, with polished black toes, a sport coat of very small black and white check, black and white handkerchief, cream shirt, no tie. He had a pair of green sunglasses on his nose.

He stood close to me and said in a low timid sort of voice: “I guess you think I’m an awful heel.”

“On account of that story you told about the doubloon?”

“Yes.”

“That didn’t affect my way of thinking about you in the least,” I said.

“Well—”

“Just what do you want me to say?”

He moved his smoothly tailored shoulders in a deprecatory shrug. His silly little reddish brown mustache glittered in the sun.

“I suppose I like to be liked,” he said.

“I’m sorry, Murdock. I like your being that devoted to your wife. If that’s what it is.”

“Oh. Didn’t you think I was telling the truth? I mean, did you think I was saying all that just to protect her?”

“There was that possibility.”

“I see.” He put a cigarette into the long black holder, which he took from behind his display handkerchief. “Well—I guess I can take it that you don’t like me.” The dim movement of his eyes was visible behind the green lenses, fish moving in a deep pool.

“It’s a silly subject,” I said. “And damned unimportant. To both of us.”

He put a match to the cigarette and inhaled. “I see,” he said quietly. “Pardon me for being crude enough to bring it up.”

He turned on his heel and walked back to his car and got in. I watched him drive away before I moved. Then I went over and patted the little painted Negro boy on the head a couple of times before I left.

“Son,” I said to him, “you’re the only person around this house that’s not nuts.”

23

The police loudspeaker box on the wall grunted and a voice said: “KGPL. Testing.” A click and it went dead.

Detective-Lieutenant Jesse Breeze stretched his arms high in the air and yawned and said: “Couple of hours late, ain’t you?”

I said: “Yes. But I left a message for you that I would be. I had to go to the dentist.”

“Sit down.”

He had a small littered desk across one corner of the room. He sat in the angle behind it, with a tall bare window to his left and a wall with a large calendar about eye height to his right. The days that had gone down to dust were crossed off carefully in soft black pencil, so that Breeze glancing at the calendar always knew exactly what day it was.

Spangler was sitting sideways at a smaller and much neater desk. It had a green blotter and an onyx pen set and a small brass calendar and an abalone shell full of ashes and matches and cigarette stubs. Spangler was flipping a handful of bank pens at the felt back of a seat cushion on end against the wall, like a Mexican knife thrower flipping knives at a target. He wasn’t getting anywhere with it. The pens refused to stick.

The room had that remote, heartless, not quite dirty, not quite clean, not quite human smell that such rooms always have. Give a police department a brand new building and in three months all its rooms will smell like that. There must be something symbolic in it.

A New York police reporter wrote once that when you pass in beyond the green lights of a precinct station you pass clear out of this world, into a place beyond the law.

I sat down. Breeze got a cellophane-wrapped cigar out of his pocket and the routine with it started. I watched it detail by detail, unvarying, precise. He drew in smoke, shook his match out, laid it gently in the black glass ashtray, and said: “Hi, Spangler.”

Spangler turned his head and Breeze turned his head. They grinned at each other. Breeze poked the cigar at me.

“Watch him sweat,” he said.

Spangler had to move his feet to turn far enough around to watch me sweat. If I was sweating, I didn’t know it.

“You boys are as cute as a couple of lost golf balls,” I said. “How in the world do you do it?”

“Skip the wisecracks,” Breeze said. “Had a busy little morning?”

“Fair,” I said.

He was still grinning. Spangler was still grinning. Whatever it was Breeze was tasting he hated to swallow it. Finally he cleared his throat, straightened his big freckled face out, turned his head enough so that he was not looking at me but could still see me and said in a vague empty sort of voice:

“Hench confessed.”

Spangler swung clear around to look at me. He leaned forward on the edge of his chair and his lips were parted in an ecstatic half smile that was almost indecent.

I said: “What did you use on him—a pickax?”

“Nope.”

They were both silent, staring at me.

“A wop,” Breeze said.

“A what?”

“Boy, are you glad?” Breeze said.

“You are going to tell me or are you just going to sit there looking fat and complacent and watch me being glad?”

“We like to watch a guy being glad,” Breeze said. “We don’t often get a chance.”

I put a cigarette in my mouth and jiggled it up and down. “We used a wop on him,” Breeze said. “A wop named Palermo.”

“Oh. You know something?”

“What?” Breeze asked.

“I just thought of what is the matter with policemen’s dialogue.”

“What?”

“They think every line is a punch line.”

“And every pinch is a good pinch,” Breeze said calmly. “You want to know—or you want to just crack wise?”

“I want to know.”

“Was like this, then. Hench was drunk. I mean he was drunk deep inside, not just on the surface. Screwy drunk. He’d been living on it for weeks. He’d practically quit eating and sleeping. Just liquor. He’d got to the point where liquor wasn’t making him drunk, it was keeping him sober. It was the last hold he had on the real world. When a guy gets like that and you take his liquor away and don’t give him anything to hold him down, he’s a lost cuckoo.”

I didn’t say anything. Spangler still had the same erotic leer on his young face. Breeze tapped the side of his cigar and no ash fell off and he put it back in his mouth and went on.

“He’s a psycho case, but we don’t want any psycho case made out of our pinch. We make that clear. We want a guy that don’t have any psycho record.”

“I thought you were sure Hench was innocent.”

Breeze nodded vaguely. “That was last night. Or maybe I was kidding a little. Anyway in the night, bang, Hench is bugs. So they drag him over to the hospital ward and shoot him full of hop. The jail doc does. That’s between you and me. No hop in the record. Get the idea?”

“All too clearly,” I said.

“Yeah.” He looked vaguely suspicious of the remark, but he was too full of his subject to waste time on it. “Well, this a.m. he is fine. Hop still working, the guy is pale but peaceful. We go see him. How you doing, kid? Anything you need? Any little thing at all? Be glad to get it for you. They treating you nice in here? You know the line.”

“I do,” I said. “I know the line.”

Spangler licked his lips in a nasty way.

“So after a while he opens his trap just enough to say ‘Palermo’. Palermo is the name of the wop across the street that owns the funeral home and the apartment house and stuff. You remember? Yeah, you remember. On account of he said something about a tall blond. All hooey. Them wops got tall blonds on the brain. In sets of twelve. But this Palermo is important. I asked around. He gets the vote out up there. He’s a guy that can’t be pushed around. Well, I don’t aim to push him around. I say to Hench, ‘You mean Palermo’s a friend of yours?’ He says, ‘Get Palermo.’ So we come back here to the hutch and phone Palermo and Palermo says he will be right down. Okay. He is here very soon. We talk like this: Hench wants to see you, Mr. Palermo. I wouldn’t know why. He’s a poor guy, Palermo says. A nice guy. I think he’s okay. He wanta see me, that’sa fine. I see him. I see him alone. Without any coppers. I say, Okay, Mr. Palermo, and we go over to the hospital ward and Palermo talks to Hench and nobody listens. After a while Palermo comes out and he says, Okay, copper. He make the confess. I pay the lawyer, maybe. I like the poor guy. Just like that. He goes away.”

I didn’t say anything. There was a pause. The loudspeaker on the wall put out a bulletin and Breeze cocked his head and listened to ten or twelve words and then ignored it.

“So we go in with a steno and Hench gives us the dope. Phillips made a pass at Hench’s girl. That was day before yesterday, out in the hall. Hench was in the room and he saw it, but Phillips got into his apartment and shut the door before Hench could get out. But Hench was sore. He socked the girl in the eye. But that didn’t satisfy him. He got to brooding, the way a drunk will brood. He says to himself, that guy can’t make a pass at my girl. I’m the boy that will give him something to remember me by. So he keeps an eye open for Phillips. Yesterday afternoon he sees Phillips go into his apartment. He tells the girl to go for a walk. She don’t want to go for a walk, so Hench socks her in the other eye. She goes for a walk. Hench knocks on Phillips’ door and Phillips opens it. Hench is a little surprised at that, but I told him Phillips was expecting you. Anyway the door opens and Hench goes in and tells Phillips how he feels and what he is going to do and Phillips is scared and pulls a gun. Hench hits him with a sap. Phillips falls down and Hench ain’t satisfied. You hit a guy with a sap and he falls down and what have you? No satisfaction, no revenge. Hench picks the gun off the floor and he is very drunk there being dissatisfied and Phillips grabs for his ankle. Hench doesn’t know why he did what he did then. He’s all fuzzy in the head. He drags Phillips into the bathroom and gives him the business with his own gun. You like it?”

“I love it,” I said. “But what is the satisfaction in it for Hench?”

“Well, you know how a drunk is. Anyway he gives him the business. Well it ain’t Hench’s gun, you see, but he can’t make a suicide out of it. There wouldn’t be any satisfaction for him in that. So Hench takes the gun away and puts it under his pillow and takes his own gun out and ditches it. He won’t tell us where. Probably passes it to some tough guy in the neighborhood. Then he finds the girl and they eat.”

“That was a lovely touch,” I said. “Putting the gun under his pillow. I’d never in the world have thought of that.”

Breeze leaned back in his chair and looked at the ceiling. Spangler, the big part of the entertainment over, swung around in his chair and picked up a couple of bank pens and threw one at the cushion.

“Look at it this way,” Breeze said. “What was the effect of that stunt? Look how Hench did it. He was drunk, but he was smart. He found that gun and showed it before Phillips was found dead. First we get the idea that a gun is under Hench’s pillow that killed a guy—been fired anyway—and then we get the stiff. We believed Hench’s story. It seemed reasonable. Why would we think any man would be such a sap as to do what Hench did? It doesn’t make any sense. So we believed somebody put the gun under Hench’s pillow and took Hench’s gun away and ditched it. And suppose Hench ditched the death gun instead of his own, would he have been any better off? Things being what they were we would be bound to suspect him. And that way he wouldn’t have started our minds thinking any particular way about him. The way he did he got us thinking he was a harmless drunk that went out and left his door open and somebody ditched a gun on him.”

He waited, with his mouth a little open and the cigar in front of it, held up by a hard freckled hand and his pale blue eyes full of dim satisfaction.

“Well,” I said, “if he was going to confess anyway, it wouldn’t have made very much difference. Will he cop a plea?”

“Sure. I think so. I figure Palermo could get him off with manslaughter. Naturally I’m not sure.”

“Why would Palermo want to get him off with anything?”

“He kind of likes Hench. And Palermo is a guy we can’t push around.”

I said: “I see.” I stood up. Spangler looked at me sideways along glistening eyes. “What about the girl?”

“Won’t say a word. She’s smart. We can’t do anything to her. Nice neat little job all around. You wouldn’t kick, would you? Whatever your business is, it’s still your business. Get me?”

“And the girl is a tall blond,” I said. “Not of the freshest but still a tall blond. Although only one. Maybe Palermo doesn’t mind.”

“Hell, I never thought of that,” Breeze said. He thought about it and shook it off. “Nothing in that, Marlowe. Not enough class.”

“Cleaned up and sober, you never can tell,” I said. “Class is a thing that has a way of dissolving rapidly in alcohol. That all you want with me?”

“Guess so.” He slanted the cigar up and aimed it at my eye. “Not that I wouldn’t like to hear your story. But I don’t figure I have an absolute right to insist on it the way things are.

“That’s white of you, Breeze,” I said. “And you too, Spangler. A lot of the good things in life to both of you.”

They watched me go out, both with their mouths a little open.

I rode down to the big marble lobby and went and got my car out of the official parking lot.

24

Mr. Pietro Palermo was sitting in a room which, except for a mahogany roll-top desk, a sacred triptych in gilt frames and a large ebony and ivory crucifixion, looked exactly like a Victorian parlor. It contained a horseshoe sofa and chairs with carved mahogany frames and antimacassars of fine lace. There was an ormolu clock on the gray green marble mantel, a grandfather clock ticking lazily in the corner, and some wax flowers under a glass dome on an oval table with a marble top and curved elegant legs. The carpet was thick and full of gentle sprays of flowers. There was even a cabinet for bric-a-brac and there was plenty of bric-a-brac in it, little cups in fine china, little figurines in glass and porcelain odds and ends of ivory and dark rosewood, painted saucers, an early American set of swan salt cellars, stuff like that.

Long lace curtains hung across the windows, but the room faced south and there was plenty of light. Across the street I could see the windows of the apartment where George Anson Phillips had been killed. The street between was sunny and silent.

The tall Italian with the dark skin and the handsome head of iron gray hair read my card and said:

“I got business in twelve minutes. What you want, Meester Marlowe?”

“I’m the man that found the dead man across the street yesterday. He was a friend of mine.”

His cold black eyes looked me over silently. “That’sa not what you tell Luke.”

“Luke?”

“He manage the joint for me.”

“I don’t talk much to strangers, Mr. Palermo.”

“That’sa good. You talk to me, huh?”

“You’re a man of standing, an important man. I can talk to you. You saw me yesterday. You described me to the police. Very accurately, they said.”

“Si. I see much,” he said without emotion.

“You saw a tall blond woman come out of there yesterday.”

He studied me. “Not yesterday. Wasa two three days ago I tell the coppers yesterday.” He snapped his long dark fingers. “The coppers, bah!”

“Did you see any strangers yesterday, Mr. Palermo?”

“Is back way in and out,” he said. “Is stair from second floor also.” He looked at his wrist watch.

“Nothing there then,” I said. “This morning you saw Hench.”

He lifted his eyes and ran them lazily over my face. “The coppers tell you that, huh?”

“They told me you got Hench to confess. They said he was a friend of yours. How good a friend they didn’t know, of course.”

“Hench make the confess, huh?” He smiled, a sudden brilliant smile.

“Only Hench didn’t do the killing,” I said.

“No?”

“No.”

“That’sa interesting. Go on, Meester Marlowe.”

“The confession is a lot of baloney. You got him to make it for some reason of your own.”

He stood up and went to the door and called out: “Tony.” He sat down again. A short tough-looking wop came into the room, looked at me and sat down against the wall in a straight chair.

“Tony, thees man a Meester Marlowe. Look, take the card.” Tony came to get the card and sat down with it. “You look at thees man very good, Tony. Not forget him, huh?”

Tony said: “Leave it to me, Mr. Palermo.”

Palermo said: “Was a friend to you, huh? A good friend, huh?”

“Yes.”

“That’sa bad. Yeah. That’sa bad. I tell you something. A man’s friend is a man’s friend. So I tell you. But you don’ tell anybody else. Not the damn coppers, huh?”

“No.”

“That’sa promise, Meester Marlowe. That’sa something not to forget. You not forget?”

“I won’t forget.”

“Tony, he not forget you. Get the idea?”

“I gave you my word. What you tell me is between us here.”

“That’sa fine. Okay. I come of large family. Many sisters and brothers. One brother very bad. Almost so bad as Tony.”

Tony grinned.

“Okay, thees brother live very quiet. Across the street. Gotta move. Okay, the coppers fill the joint up. Not so good. Ask too many questions. Not good for business, not good for thees bad brother. You get the idea?”

“Yes,” I said. “I get the idea.”

“Okay, thees Hench no good, but poor guy, drunk, no job. Pay no rent, but I got lotsa money. So I say, ‘Look, Hench, you make the confess. You sick man. Two three weeks sick. You go into court. I have a lawyer for you. You say to hell with the confess. I was drunk. The damn coppers are stuck. The judge he turn you loose and you come back to me and I take care of you. Okay?’ So Hench say okay, make the confess. That’sa all.”

I said: “And after two or three weeks the bad brother is a long way from here and the trail is cold and the cops will likely just write the Phillips killing off as unsolved. Is that it?”

“Si.” He smiled again. A brilliant warm smile, like the kiss of death.

“That takes care of Hench, Mr. Palermo,” I said. “But it doesn’t help me much about my friend.”

He shook his head and looked at his watch again. I stood up. Tony stood up. He wasn’t going to do anything, but it’s better to be standing up. You move faster.

“The trouble with you birds,” I said, “is you make mystery of nothing. You have to give the password before you bite a piece of bread. If I went down to headquarters and told the boys everything you have told me, they would laugh in my face. And I would be laughing with them.”

“Tony don’t laugh much,” Palermo said.

“The earth is full of people who don’t laugh much, Mr. Palermo,” I said. “You ought to know. You put a lot of them where they are.”

“Is my business,” he said, shrugging enormously.

“I’ll keep my promise,” I said. “But in case you should get to doubting that, don’t try to make any business for yourself out of me. Because in my part of town I’m a pretty good man and if the business got made out of Tony instead, it would be strictly on the house. No profit.”

Palermo laughed. “That’sa good,” he said. “Tony. One funeral—on the house. Okay.”

He stood up and held his hand out, a fine strong warm hand.

25

In the lobby of the Belfont Building, in the single elevator that had light in it, on the piece of folded burlap, the same watery-eyed relic sat motionless, giving his imitation of the forgotten man. I got in with him and said: “Six.”

The elevator lurched into motion and pounded its way upstairs. It stopped at six, I got out, and the old man leaned out of the car to spit and said in a dull voice:

“What’s cookin’?”

I turned around all in one piece, like a dummy on a revolving platform. I stared at him.

He said: “You got a gray suit on today.”

“So I have,” I said. “Yes.”

“Looks nice,” he said. “I like the blue you was wearing yesterday too.”

“Go on,” I said. “Give out.”

“You rode up to eight,” he said. “Twice. Second time was late. You got back on at six. Shortly after that the boys in blue came bustlin’ in.”

“Any of them up there now?”

He shook his head. His face was like a vacant lot. “I ain’t told them anything,” he said. “Too late to mention it now. They’d eat my ass off.”

I said: “Why?”

“Why I ain’t told them? The hell with them. You talked to me civil. Damn few people do that. Hell, I know you didn’t have nothing to do with that killing.”

“I played you wrong,” I said. “Very wrong.” I got a card out and gave it to him. He fished a pair of metal-framed glasses out of his pocket, perched them on his nose and held the card a foot away from them. He read it slowly, moving his lips, looked at me over the glasses, handed me back the card.

“Better keep it,” he said. “Case I get careless and drop it. Mighty interestin’ life yours, I guess.”

“Yes and no. What was the name?”

“Grandy. Just call me Pop. Who killed him?”

“I don’t know. Did you notice anybody going up there or coming down—anybody that seemed out of place in this building, or strange to you?”

“I don’t notice much,” he said. “I just happened to notice you.”

“A tall blond, for instance, or a tall slender man with sideburns, about thirty-five years old.”

“Nope.”

“Everybody going up or down about then would ride in your car.”

He nodded his worn head. “Less they used the fire stairs. They come out in the alley, bar-lock door. Party would have to come in this way, but there’s stairs back of the elevator to the second floor. From there they can get to the fire stairs. Nothing to it.”

I nodded. “Mr. Grandy, could you use a five dollar bill—not as a bribe in any sense, but as a token of esteem from a sincere friend?”

“Son, I could use a five dollar bill so rough Abe Lincoln’s whiskers would be all lathered up with sweat.”

I gave him one. I looked at it before I passed it over. It was Lincoln on the five, all right.

He tucked it small and put it away deep in his pocket. “That’s right nice of you,” he said. “I hope to hell you didn’t think I was fishin’.”

I shook my head and went along the corridor, reading the names again. Dr. E. J. Blaskowitz, Chiropractic Physician. Dalton and Rees, Typewriting Service. L. Pridview, Public Account. Four blank doors. Moss Mailing Company. Two more blank doors. H. R. Teager, Dental Laboratories. In the same relative position as the Morningstar office two floors above, but the rooms were cut up differently. Teager had only one door and there was more wall space in between his door and the next one.

The knob didn’t turn. I knocked. There was no answer. I knocked harder, with the same result. I went back to the elevator. It was still at the sixth floor. Pop Grandy watched me come as if he had never seen me before.

“Know anything about H. R. Teager?” I asked him.

He thought. “Heavy-set, oldish, sloppy clothes, dirty fingernails, like mine. Come to think I didn’t see him in today.”

“Do you think the super would let me into his office to look around?”

“Pretty nosey, the super is. I wouldn’t recommend it.”

He turned his head very slowly and looked up the side of the car. Over his head on a big metal ring a key was hanging. A pass-key. Pop Grandy turned his head back to normal position, stood up off his stool and said: “Right now I gotta go to the can.”

He went. When the door had closed behind him I took the key off the cage wall and went back along to the office of H. R. Teager, unlocked it and went in.

Inside was a small windowless anteroom on the furnishings of which a great deal of expense had been spared. Two chairs, a smoking stand from a cut rate drugstore, a standing lamp from the basement of some borax emporium, a flat stained wood table with some old picture magazines on it. The door closed behind me on the door closer and the place went dark except for what little light come through the pebbled glass panel. I pulled the chain switch of the lamp and went over to the inner door in a wall that cut across the room. It was marked: H.R. Teager. Private. It was not locked.

Inside it there was a square office with two uncurtained east windows and very dusty sills. There was a swivel chair and two straight chairs, both plain hard stained wood, and there was a squarish flat-topped desk. There was nothing on the top of it except an old blotter and a cheap pen set and a round glass ash tray with cigar ash in it. The drawers of the desk contained some dusty paper linings, a few wire clips, rubber bands, worn down pencils, pens, rusty pen points, used blotters, four uncancelled two-cent stamps, and some printed letterheads, envelopes and bill forms.

The wire paper basket was full of junk. I almost wasted ten minutes going through it rather carefully. At the end of that time I knew what I was pretty sure of already: that H.R. Teager carried on a small business as a dental technician doing laboratory work for a number of dentists in unprosperous sections of the city, the kind of dentists who have shabby offices on second floor walk-ups over stores, who lack both the skill and the equipment to do their own laboratory work, and who like to send it out to men like themselves, rather than to the big efficient hard-boiled laboratories who wouldn’t give them any credit.

I did find one thing. Teager’s home address at 1354B Toberman Street on the receipted part of a gas bill.

I straightened up, dumped the stuff back into the basket and went over to the wooden door marked Laboratory. It had a new Yale lock on it and the passkey didn’t fit it. That was that. I switched off the lamp in the outer office and left.

The elevator was downstairs again. I rang for it and when it came up I sidled in around Pop Grandy, hiding the key, and hung it up over his head. The ring tinkled against the cage. He grinned.

“He’s gone,” I said. “Must have left last night. Must have been carrying a lot of stuff. His desk is cleaned out.”

Pop Grandy nodded. “Carried two suitcases. I wouldn’t notice that, though. Most always does carry a suitcase. I figure he picks up and delivers his work.”

“Work such as what?” I asked as the car growled down. Just to be saying something.

“Such as makin’ teeth that don’t fit,” Pop Grandy said. “For poor old bastards like me.”

“You wouldn’t notice,” I said, as the doors struggled open on the lobby. “You wouldn’t notice the color of a hummingbird’s eye at fifty feet. Not much you wouldn’t.”

He grinned. “What’s he done?”

“I’m going over to his house and find out,” I said. “I think most likely he’s taken a cruise to nowhere.”

“I’d shift places with him,” Pop Grandy said. “Even if he only got to Frisco and got pinched there, I’d shift places with him.”

26

Toberman Street. A wide dusty street, off Pico. No. 1854B was an upstairs flat, south, in a yellow and white frame building. The entrance door was on the porch, beside another marked 1352B. The entrances to the downstairs flats were at right angles, facing each other across the width of the porch. I kept on ringing the bell, even after I was sure that nobody would answer it. In a neighborhood like that there is always an expert window-peeker.

Sure enough the door of 1354A was pulled open and a small bright-eyed woman looked out at me. Her dark hair had been washed and waved and was an intricate mass of bobby pins.

“You want Mrs. Teager?” she shrilled.

“Mr. or Mrs.”

“They gone away last night on their vacation. They loaded up and gone away late. They had me stop the milk and the paper. They didn’t have much time. Kind of sudden, it was.”

“Thanks. What kind of car do they drive?”

The heartrending dialogue of some love serial came out of the room behind her and hit me in the face like a wet dishtowel.

The bright-eyed woman said: “You a friend of theirs?” In her voice, suspicion was as thick as the ham in her radio.

“Never mind,” I said in a tough voice. “All we want is our money. Lots of ways to find out what car they were driving.”

The woman cocked her head, listening. “That’s Beula May,” she told me with a sad smile. “She won’t go to the dance with Doctor Myers. I was scared she wouldn’t.”

“Aw hell,” I said, and went back to my car and drove on home to Hollywood.

The office was empty. I unlocked my inner room and threw the windows up and sat down.

Another day drawing to its end, the air dull and tired, the heavy growl of homing traffic on the boulevard, and Marlowe in his office nibbling a drink and sorting the day’s mail. Four ads; two bills; a handsome colored postcard from a hotel in Santa Rosa where I had stayed for four days last year, working on a case; a long, badly typed letter from a man named Peabody in Sausalito, the general and slightly cloudly drift of which was that a sample of the handwriting of a suspected person would, when exposed to the searching Peabody examination, reveal the inner emotional characteristics of the individual, classified according to both the Freudian and Jung systems.

There was a stamped addressed envelope inside. As I tore the stamp off and threw the letter and envelope away I had a vision of a pathetic old rooster in long hair, black felt hat and black bow tie, rocking on a rickety porch in front of a lettered window, with the smell of ham hocks and cabbage coming out of the door at his elbow.

I sighed, retrieved the envelope, wrote its name and address on a fresh one, folded a dollar bill into a sheet of paper and wrote on it: “This is positively the last contribution.” I signed my name, sealed the envelope, stuck a stamp on it and poured another drink.

I filled and lit my pipe and sat there smoking. Nobody came in, nobody called, nothing happened, nobody cared whether I died or went to El Paso.

Little by little the roar of the traffic quieted down. The sky lost its glare. Over in the west it would be red. An early neon light showed a block away, diagonally over roofs. The ventilator churned dully in the wall of the coffee shop down in the alley. A truck filled and backed and growled its way out on to the boulevard.

Finally the telephone rang. I answered it and the voice said: “Mr. Marlowe? This is Mr. Shaw. At the Bristol.”

“Yes, Mr. Shaw. How are you?”

“I’m very well thanks, Mr. Marlowe. I hope you are the same. There’s a young lady here asking to be let into your apartment. I don’t know why.”

“Me neither, Mr. Shaw. I didn’t order anything like that. Does she give a name?”

“Oh yes. Quite. Her name is Davis. Miss Merle Davis. She is—what shall I say?—quite verging on the hysterical.”

“Let her in,” I said, rapidly. “I’ll be there in ten minutes. She’s the secretary of a client. It’s a business matter entirely.”

“Quite. Oh yes. Shall I—er—remain with her?”

“Whatever you think,” I said and hung up.

Passing the open door of the wash cabinet I saw a stiff excited face in the glass.

27

As I turned the key in my door and opened it Shaw was already standing up from the davenport. He was a tall man with glasses and a high domed bald head that made his ears look as if they had slipped down on his head. He had the fixed smile of polite idiocy on his face.

The girl sat in my easy chair behind the chess table. She wasn’t doing anything, just sitting there.

“Ah, there you are, Mr. Marlowe,” Shaw chirped. “Yes. Quite. Miss Davis and I have been having such an interesting little conversation. I was telling her I originally came from England. She hasn’t—er—told me where she came from.” He was halfway to the door saying this.

“Very kind of you, Mr. Shaw,” I said.

“Not at all,” he chirped. “Not at all. I’ll just run along now. My dinner, possibly—”

“It’s very nice of you,” I said, “I appreciate it.”

He nodded and was gone. The unnatural brightness of his smile seemed to linger in the air after the door closed, like the smile of the Cheshire Cat.

I said: “Hello, there.”

She said: “Hello.” Her voice was quite calm, quite serious. She was wearing a brownish linen coat and skirt, a broad brimmed low-crowned straw hat with a brown velvet band that exactly matched the color of her shoes and the leather trimming on the edges of her linen envelope bag. The hat was tilted rather daringly, for her. She was not wearing her glasses.

Except for her face she would have looked all right. In the first place her eyes were quite mad. There was white showing all around the iris and they had a sort of fixed look. When they moved the movement was so stiff that you could almost hear something creak. Her mouth was in a tight line at the corners, but the middle part of her upper lip kept lifting off her teeth, upwards and outwards as if fine threads attached to the edge of the lip were pulling it. It would go up so far that it didn’t seem possible, and then the entire lower part of her face would go into a spasm and when the spasm was over her mouth would be tight shut, and then the process would slowly start all over again. In addition to this there was something wrong with her neck, so that very slowly her head was drawn around to the left about forty-five degrees. It would stop there, her neck would twitch, and her head would slide back the way it had come.

The combination of these two movements, taken with the immobility of her body, the tight-clasped hands in her lap, and the fixed stare of her eyes, was enough to start anybody’s nerves backfiring.

There was a can of tobacco on the desk, between which and her chair was the chess table with the chessmen in their box. I got the pipe out of my pocket and went over to fill it at the can of tobacco. That put me just on the other side of the chess table from her. Her bag was lying on the edge of the table, in front of her and a little to one side. She jumped a little when I went over there, but after that she was just like before. She even made an effort to smile.

I filled the pipe and struck a paper match and lit it and stood there holding the match after I had blown it out.

“You’re not wearing your glasses,” I said.

She spoke. Her voice was quiet, composed. “Oh, I only wear them around the house and for reading. They’re in my bag.”

“You’re in the house now,” I said. “You ought to be wearing them.”

I reached casually for the bag. She didn’t move. She didn’t watch my hands. Her eyes were on my face. I turned my body a little as I opened the bag. I fished the glass case out and slid it across the table.

“Put them on,” I said.

“Oh, yes, I’ll put them on,” she said. “But I’ll have to take my hat off, I think . . .”

“Yes, take your hat off,” I said.

She took her hat off and held it on her knees. Then she remembered about the glasses and forgot about the hat. The hat fell on the floor while she reached for the glasses. She put them on. That helped her appearance a lot, I thought.

While she was doing this I got the gun out of her bag and slid it into my hip pocket. I didn’t think she saw me. It looked like the same Colt .25 automatic with the walnut grip that I had seen in the top right hand drawer of her desk the day before.

I went back to the davenport and sat down and said: “Well, here we are. What do we do now? Are you hungry?”

“I’ve been over to Mr. Vannier’s house,” she said.

“Oh.”

“He lives in Sherman Oaks. At the end of Escamillo Drive. At the very end.”

“Quiet, probably,” I said without meaning, and tried to blow a smoke ring, but didn’t make it. A nerve in my cheek was trying to twang like a wire. I didn’t like it.

“Yes,” she said in her composed voice, with her upper lip still doing the hoist and flop movement and her chin still swinging around at anchor and back again. “It’s very quiet there. Mr. Vannier has been living there three years now. Before that he lived up in the Hollywood hills, on Diamond Street. Another man lived with him there, but they didn’t get along very well, Mr. Vannier said.”

“I feel as if I could understand that too,” I said. “How long have you known Mr. Vannier?”

“I’ve known him eight years. I haven’t known him very well. I have had to take him a—a parcel now and then. He liked to have me bring it myself.”

I tried again with a smoke ring. Nope.

“Of course,” she said, “I never liked him very well. I was afraid he would—I was afraid he—”

“But he didn’t,” I said.

For the first time her face got a human natural expression—surprise.

“No,” she said. “He didn’t. That is, he didn’t really. But he had his pajamas on.”

“Taking it easy,” I said. “Lying around all afternoon with his pajamas on. Well, some guys have all the luck, don’t they?”

“Well you have to know something,” she said seriously. “Something that makes people pay you money. Mrs. Murdock has been wonderful to me, hasn’t she?”

“She certainly has,” I said. “How much were you taking him today?”

“Only five hundred dollars. Mrs. Murdock said that was all she could spare, and she couldn’t really spare that. She said it would have to stop. It couldn’t go on. Mr. Vannier would always promise to stop, but he never did.”

“It’s a way they have,” I said.

“So there was only one thing to do. I’ve known that for years, really. It was all my fault and Mrs. Murdock has been so wonderful to me. It couldn’t make me any worse than I was already, could it?”

I put my hand up and rubbed my cheek hard, to quiet the nerve. She forgot that I hadn’t answered her and went on again.

“So I did it,” she said. “He was there in his pajamas, with a glass beside him. He was leering at me. He didn’t even get up to let me in. But there was a key in the front door. Somebody had left a key there. It was—it was—” her voice jammed in her throat.

“It was a key in the front door,” I said. “So you were able to get in.”

“Yes.” She nodded and almost smiled again. “There wasn’t anything to it, really. I don’t even remember hearing the noise. But there must have been a noise, of course. Quite a loud noise.”

“I suppose so,” I said.

“I went over quite close to him, so I couldn’t miss,” she said.

“And what did Mr. Vannier do?”

“He didn’t do anything at all. He just leered, sort of. Well, that’s all there is to it. I didn’t like to go back to Mrs. Murdock and make any more trouble for her. And for Leslie.” Her voice hushed on the name, and hung suspended, and a little shiver rippled over her body. “So I came here,” she said. “And when you didn’t answer the bell, I found the office and asked the manager to let me in and wait for you. I knew you would know what to do.”

“And what did you touch in the house while you were there?” I asked. “Can you remember at all? I mean, besides the front door. Did you just go in at the door and come out without touching anything in the house?”

She thought and her face stopped moving. “Oh, I remember one thing,” she said. “I put the light out. Before I left. It was a lamp. One of these lamps that shine upwards, with big bulbs. I put that out.”

I nodded and smiled at her. Marlowe, one smile, cheerful. “What time was this—how long ago?”

“Oh just before I came over here. I drove. I had Mrs. Murdock’s car. The one you asked about yesterday. I forgot to tell you that she didn’t take it when she went away. Or did I? No, I remember now I did tell you.”

“Let’s see,” I said. “Half an hour to drive here anyway. You’ve been here close to an hour. That would be about five-thirty when you left Mr. Vannier’s house. And you put the light off.”

“That’s right.” She nodded again, quite brightly. Pleased at remembering. “I put the light out.”

“Would you care for a drink?” I asked her.

“Oh, no.” She shook her head quite vigorously. “I never drink anything at all.”

“Would you mind if I had one?”

“Certainly not. Why should I?”

I stood up, gave her a studying look. Her lip was still going up and her head was still going around, but I thought not so far. It was like a rhythm which is dying down.

It was difficult to know how far to go with this. It might be that the more she talked, the better. Nobody knows very much about the time of absorption of a shock.

I said: “Where is your home?”

“Why—I live with Mrs. Murdock. In Pasadena.”

“I mean, your real home. Where your folks are.”

“My parents live in Wichita,” she said. “But I don’t go there—ever. I write once in a while, but I haven’t seen them for years.”

“What does your father do?”

“He has a dog and cat hospital. He’s a veterinarian. I hope they won’t have to know. They didn’t about the other time. Mrs. Murdock kept it from everybody.”

“Maybe they won’t have to know,” I said. “I’ll get my drink.”

I went out around the back of her chair to the kitchen and poured it and I made it a drink that was a drink. I put it down in a lump and took the little gun off my hip and saw that the safety was on. I smelled the muzzle, broke out the magazine. There was a shell in the chamber, but it was one of those guns that won’t fire when the magazine is out. I held it so that I could look into the breech. The shell in there was the wrong size and was crooked against the breech block. It looked like a .32. The shells in the magazine were the right size, .25’s. I fitted the gun together again and went back to the living room.

I hadn’t heard a sound. She had just slid forward in a pile in front of the chair, on top of her nice hat. She was as cold as a mackerel.

I spread her out a little and took her glasses off and made sure she hadn’t swallowed her tongue. I wedged my folded handkerchief into the corner of her mouth so that she wouldn’t bite her tongue when she came out of it. I went to the phone and called Carl Moss.

“Phil Marlowe, Doc. Any more patients or are you through?”

“All through,” he said. “Leaving. Trouble?”

“I’m home,” I said. “Four-o-eight Bristol Apartments, if you don’t remember. I’ve got a girl here who has pulled a faint. I’m not afraid of the faint, I’m afraid she may be nuts when she comes out of it.”

“Don’t give her any liquor,” be said. “I’m on my way.”

I hung up and knelt down beside her. I began to rub her temples. She opened her eyes. The lip started to lift. I pulled the handkerchief out of her mouth. She looked up at me and said: “I’ve been over to Mr. Vannier’s house. He lives in Sherman Oaks. I—”

“Do you mind if I lift you up and put you on the davenport? You know me—Marlowe, the big boob that goes around asking all the wrong questions.”

“Hello,” she said.

I lifted her. She went stiff on me, but she didn’t say anything. I put her on the davenport and tucked her skirt down over her legs and put a pillow under her head and picked her hat up. It was as flat as a flounder. I did what I could to straighten it out and laid it aside on the desk.

She watched me sideways, doing this.

“Did you call the police?” she asked softly.

“Not yet,” I said. “I’ve been too busy.”

She looked surprised. I wasn’t quite sure, but I thought she looked a little hurt, too.

I opened up her bag and turned my back to her to slip the gun back into it. While I was doing that I took a look at what else was in the bag. The usual oddments, a couple of handkerchiefs, lipstick, a silver and red enamel compact with powder in it, a couple of tissues, a purse with some hard money and a few dollar bills, no cigarettes, no matches, no tickets to the theater.

I pulled open the zipper pocket at the back. That held her driver’s license and a flat packet of bills, ten fifties. I riffled them. None of them brand new. Tucked into the rubber band that held them was a folded paper. I took it out and opened it and read it. It was neatly typewritten, dated that day. It was a common receipt form and it would, when signed, acknowledge the receipt of $500. “Payment on Account.”

It didn’t seem as if it would ever be signed now. I slipped money and receipt into my pocket. I closed the bag and looked over at the davenport.

She was looking at the ceiling and doing that with her face again. I went into my bedroom and got a blanket to throw over her.

Then I went to the kitchen for another drink.

28

Dr. Carl Moss was a big burly Jew with a Hitler mustache, pop eyes and the calmness of a glacier. He put his hat and bag in a chair and went over and stood looking down at the girl on the davenport inscrutably.

“I’m Dr. Moss,” he said. “How are you?”

She said: “Aren’t you the police?”

He bent down and felt her pulse and then stood there watching her breathing. “Where does it hurt, Miss—”

“Davis,” I said. “Miss Merle Davis.”

“Miss Davis.”

“Nothing hurts me,” she said, staring up at him. “I—I don’t even know why I’m lying here like this. I thought you were the police. You see, I killed a man.”

“Well, that’s a normal human impulse,” he said. “I’ve killed dozens.” He didn’t smile.

She lifted her lip and moved her head around for him.

“You know you don’t have to do that,” he said, quite gently. “You feel a twitch of the nerves here and there and you proceed to build it up and dramatize it. You can control it, if you want to.”

“Can I?” she whispered.

“If you want to,” he said. “You don’t have to. It doesn’t make any difference to me either way. Nothing pains at all, eh?”

“No.” She shook her head.

He patted her shoulder and walked out to the kitchen. I went after him. He leaned his hips against the sink and gave me a cool stare. “What’s the story?”

“She’s the secretary of a client. A Mrs. Murdock in Pasadena. The client is rather a brute. About eight years ago a man made a hard pass at Merle. How hard I don’t know. Then—I don’t mean immediately—but around that time he fell out of a window or jumped. Since then she can’t have a man touch her—not in the most casual way, I mean.”

“Uh-huh.” His pop eyes continued to read my face. “Does she think he jumped out of the window on her account?”

“I don’t know. Mrs. Murdock is the man’s widow. She married again and her second husband is dead too. Merle has stayed with her. The old woman treats her like a rough parent treats a naughty child.”

“I see. Regressive.”

“What’s that?”

“Emotional shock, and the subconscious attempt to escape back to childhood. If Mrs. Murdock scolds her a good deal, but not too much, that would increase the tendency. Identification of childhood subordination with childhood protection.”

“Do we have to go into that stuff?” I growled.

He grinned at me calmly. “Look, pal. The girl’s obviously a neurotic. It’s partly induced and partly deliberate. I mean to say that she really enjoys a lot of it. Even if she doesn’t realize that she enjoys it. However, that’s not of immediate importance. What’s this about killing a man?”

“A man named Vannier who lives in Sherman Oaks. There seems to be some blackmail angle. Merle had to take him his money, from time to time. She was afraid of him. I’ve seen the guy. A nasty type. She went over there this afternoon and she says she shot him.”

“Why?”

“She says she didn’t like the way he leered at her.

“Shot him with what?”

“She had a gun in her bag. Don’t ask me why. I don’t know. But if she shot him, it wasn’t with that. The gun’s got a wrong cartridge in the breech. It can’t be fired as it is. Also it hasn’t been fired.”

“This is too deep for me,” he said. “I’m just a doctor. What did you want me to do with her?”

“Also,” I said, ignoring the question, “she said the lamp was turned on and it was about five-thirty of a nice summery afternoon. And the guy was wearing his sleeping suit and there was a key in the lock of the front door. And he didn’t get up to let her in. He just sort of sat there sort of leering.”

He nodded and said: “Oh.” He pushed a cigarette between his heavy lips and lit it. “If you expect me to tell you whether she really thinks she shot him, I can’t do it. From your description I gather that the man is shot. That so?”

“Brother, I haven’t been there. But that much seems pretty clear.”

“If she thinks she shot him and isn’t just acting—and God, how these types do act!—that indicates it was not a new idea to her. You say she carried a gun. So perhaps it wasn’t. She may have a guilt complex. Wants to be punished, wants to expiate some real or imaginary crime. Again I ask what do you want me to do with her? She’s not sick, she’s not loony.”

“She’s not going back to Pasadena.”

“Oh.” He looked at me curiously. “Any family?”

“In Wichita. Father’s a vet. I’ll call him, but she’ll have to stay here tonight.”

“I don’t know about that. Does she trust you enough to spend the night in your apartment?”

“She came here of her own free will, and not socially. So I guess she does.”

He shrugged and fingered the sidewall of his coarse black mustache. “Well, I’ll give her some Nembutal and we’ll put her to bed. And you can walk the floor wrestling with your conscience.”

“I have to go out,” I said. “I have to go over there and see what has happened. And she can’t stay here alone. And no man, not even a doctor is going to put her to bed. Get a nurse. I’ll sleep somewhere else.”

“Phil Marlowe,” he said. “The shop-soiled Galahad. Okay. I’ll stick around until the nurse comes.”

He went back into the living room and telephoned the Nurses’ Registry. Then he telephoned his wife. While he was telephoning, Merle sat up on the davenport and clasped her hands primly in her lap.

“I don’t see why the lamp was on,” she said. “It wasn’t dark in the house at all. Not that dark.”

I said: “What’s your dad’s first name?”

“Dr. Wilbur Davis. Why?”

“Wouldn’t you like something to eat?”

At the telephone Carl Moss said to me: “Tomorrow will do for that. This is probably just a lull.” He finished his call, hung up, went to his bag and came back with a couple of yellow capsules in his hand on a fragment of cotton. He got a glass of water, handed her the capsules and said: “Swallow.”

“I’m not sick, am I?” she said, looking up at him.

“Swallow, my child, swallow.”

She took them and put them in her mouth and took the glass of water and drank.

I put my hat on and left.

On the way down in the elevator I remembered that there hadn’t been any keys in her bag, so I stopped at the lobby floor and went out through the lobby to the Bristol Avenue side. The car was not hard to find. It was parked crookedly about two feet from the curb. It was a gray Mercury convertible and its license number was 2X1111. I remembered that this was the number of Linda Murdock’s car.

A leather key holder hung in the lock. I got into the car, started the engine, saw that there was plenty of gas, and drove it away. It was a nice eager little car. Over Cahuenga Pass it had the wings of a bird.

29

Escamillo Drive made three jogs in four blocks, for no reason that I could see. It was very narrow, averaged about five houses to a block and was overhung by a section of shaggy brown foothill on which nothing lived at this season except sage and manzanita. In its fifth and last block, Escamillo Drive did a neat little curve to the left, hit the base of the hill hard, and died without a whimper. In this last block were three houses, two on the opposite entering corners, one at the dead end. This was Vannier’s. My spotlight showed the key still in the door.

It was a narrow English type bungalow with a high roof, leaded front windows, a garage to the side, and a trailer parked beside the garage. The early moon lay quietly on its small lawn. A large oak tree grew almost on the front porch. There was no light in the house now, none visible from the front at least.

From the lay of the land a light in the living room in the daytime did not seem utterly improbable. It would be a dark house except in the morning. As a love nest the place had its points, but as a residence for a blackmailer I didn’t give it very high marks. Sudden death can come to you anywhere, but Vannier had made it too easy.

I turned into his driveway, backed to get myself pointed out of the dead end, and then drove down to the corner and parked there. I walked back in the street because there was no sidewalk. The front door was made of ironbound oak planks, beveled where they joined. There was a thumb latch instead of a knob. The head of the flat key projected from the lock. I rang the bell, and it rang with that remote sound of a bell ringing at night in an empty house. I walked around the oak tree and poked the light of my pencil flash between the leaves of the garage door. There was a car in there. I went back around the house and looked at a small flowerless yard walled in by a low wall of fieldstone. Three more oak trees, a table and a couple of all metal chairs under one of them. A rubbish burner at the back. I shone my light into the trailer before I went back to the front. There didn’t seem to be anybody in the trailer. Its door was locked.

I opened the front door, leaving the key in the lock. I wasn’t going to work any dipsy-doodle in this place. What ever was, was. I just wanted to make sure. I felt around on the wall inside the door for a light switch, found one and tilted it up. Pale flame bulbs in pairs in wall brackets went on all around the room, showing me the big lamp Merle had spoken of, as well as other things. I went over to switch the lamp on, then back to switch the wall light off. The lamp had a big bulb inverted in a porcelain glass bowl. You could get three different intensities of light. I clicked the button switch around until I had all there was.

The room ran from front to back, with a door at the back and an arch up front to the right. Inside that was a small dining room. Curtains were half drawn across the arch, heavy pale green brocade curtains, far from new. The fireplace was in the middle of the left wall, bookshelves opposite and on both sides of it, not built in. Two davenports angled across the corners of the room and there was one gold chair, one pink chair, one brown chair, one brown and gold jacquard chair with footstool.

Yellow pajama legs were on the footstool, bare ankles, feet in dark green morocco leather slippers. My eyes ran up from the feet, slowly, carefully. A dark green figured silk robe, tied with a tasseled belt. Open above the belt showing a monogram on the pocket of the pajamas. A handkerchief neat in the pocket, two stiff points of white linen. A yellow neck, the face turned sideways, pointed at a mirror on the wall. I walked around and looked in the mirror. The face leered all right.

The left arm and hand lay between a knee and the side of the chair, the right arm hung outside the chair, the ends of the fingers touching the rug. Touching also the butt of a small revolver, about .32 caliber, a belly gun, with practically no barrel. The right side of the face was against the back of the chair, but the right shoulder was dark brown with blood and there was some on the right sleeve. Also on the chair. A lot of it on the chair.

I didn’t think his head had taken that position naturally. Some sensitive soul had not liked the right side of it.

I lifted my foot and gently pushed the footstool sideways a few inches. The heels of the slippers moved reluctantly over the jacquard surface, not with it. The man was as stiff as a board. So I reached down and touched his ankle. Ice was never half as cold.

On a table at his right elbow was half of a dead drink, an ashtray full of butts and ash. Three of the butts had lipstick on them. Bright Chinese red lipstick. What a blond would use.

There was another ashtray beside another chair. Matches in it and a lot of ash, but no stubs.

On the air of the room a rather heavy perfume struggled with the smell of death, and lost. Although defeated, it was still there.

I poked through the rest of the house, putting lights on and off. Two bedrooms, one furnished in light wood, one in red maple. The light one seemed to be a spare. A nice bathroom with tan and mulberry tiling and a stall shower with a glass door. The kitchen was small. There were a lot of bottles on the sink. Lots of bottles, lots of glass, lots of fingerprints, lots of evidence. Or not, as the case may be.

I went back to the living room and stood in the middle of the floor breathing with my mouth as far as possible and wondering what the score would be when I turned this one in. Turn this one in and report that I was the fellow who had found Morningstar and run away. The score would be low, very low. Marlowe, three murders. Marlowe practically knee-deep in dead men. And no reasonable, logical, friendly account of himself whatsoever. But that wasn’t the worst of it. The minute I opened up I would cease to be a free agent. I would be through with doing whatever it was I was doing and with finding out whatever it was I was finding out.

Carl Moss might be willing to protect Merle with the mantle of Aesculapius, up to a point. Or he might think it would do her more good in the long run to get it all off her chest, whatever it was.

I wandered back to the jacquard chair and set my teeth and grabbed enough of his hair to pull the head away from the chair back. The bullet had gone in at the temple. The set-up could be for suicide. But people like Louis Vannier do not commit suicide. A blackmailer, even a scared blackmailer, has a sense of power, and loves it.

I let the head go back where it wanted to go and leaned down to scrub my hand on the nap of the rug. Leaning down I saw the corner of a picture frame under the lower shelf of the table at Vannier’s elbow. I went around and reached for it with a handkerchief.

The glass was cracked across. It had fallen off the wall. I could see the small nail. I could make a guess how it had happened. Somebody standing at Vannier’s right, even leaning over him, somebody he knew and had no fear of, had suddenly pulled a gun and shot him in the right temple. And then, startled by the blood or the recoil of the shot, the killer had jumped back against the wall and knocked the picture down. It had landed on a corner and jumped under the table. And the killer had been too careful to touch it, or too scared.

I looked at it. It was a small picture, not interesting at all. A guy in doublet and hose, with lace at his sleeve ends, and one of those round puffy velvet hats with a feather, leaning far out of a window and apparently calling out to somebody downstairs. Downstairs not being in the picture. It was a color reproduction of something that had never been needed in the first place.

I looked around the room. There were other pictures, a couple of rather nice water colors, some engravings—very old-fashioned this year, engravings, or are they? Half a dozen in all. Well, perhaps the guy liked the picture, so what? A man leaning out of a high window. A long time ago.

I looked at Vannier. He wouldn’t help me at all. A man leaning out of a high window, a long time ago.

The touch of the idea at first was so light that I almost missed it and passed on. A touch of a feather, hardly that. The touch of a snowflake. A high window, a man leaning out—a long time ago.

It snapped in place. It was so hot it sizzled. Out of a high window a long time ago—eight years ago—a man leaning—too far—a man falling—to his death. A man named Horace Bright.

“Mr. Vannier,” I said with a little touch of admiration, “you played that rather neatly.”

I turned the picture over. On the back dates and amounts of money were written. Dates over almost eight years, amounts mostly of $500, a few $750’s, two for $1000. There was a running total in small figures. It was $11,100. Mr. Vannier had not received the latest payment. He had been dead when it arrived. It was not a lot of money, spread over eight years. Mr. Vannier’s customer had bargained hard.

The cardboard back was fastened into the frame with steel victrola needles. Two of them had fallen out. I worked the cardboard loose and tore it a little getting it loose. There was a white envelope between the back and the picture. Sealed, blank. I tore it open. It contained two square photographs and a negative. The photos were just the same. They showed a man leaning far out of a window with his mouth open yelling. His hands were on the brick edges of the window frame. There was a woman’s face behind his shoulder.

He was a thinnish dark-haired man. His face was not very clear, nor the face of the woman behind him. He was leaning out of a window and yelling or calling out.

There I was holding the photograph and looking at it. And so far as I could see it didn’t mean a thing. I knew it had to. I just didn’t know why. But I kept on looking at it. And in a little while something was wrong. It was a very small thing, but it was vital. The position of the man’s hands, lined against the corner of the wall where it was cut out to make the window frame. The hands were not holding anything, they were not touching anything. It was the inside of his wrists that lined against the angle of the bricks. The hands were in air.

The man was not leaning. He was falling.

I put the stuff back in the envelope and folded the cardboard back and stuffed that into my pocket also. I hid frame, glass and picture in the linen closet under towels.

All this had taken too long. A car stopped outside the house. Feet came up the walk.

I dodged behind the curtains in the archway.

30

The front door opened and then quietly closed.

There was a silence, hanging in the air like a man’s breath in frosty air, and then a thick scream, ending in a wail of despair.

Then a man’s voice, tight with fury, saying: “Not bad, not good. Try again.”

The woman’s voice said: “My God, it’s Louis! He’s dead!”

The man’s voice said: “I may be wrong, but I still think it stinks.”

“My God! He’s dead, Alex. Do something—for God’s sake—do something!”

“Yeah,” the hard tight voice of Alex Morny said. “I ought to. I ought to make you look just like him. With blood and everything. I ought to make you just as dead, just as cold, just as rotten. No, I don’t have to do that. You’re that already. Just as rotten. Eight months married and cheating on me with a piece of merchandise like that. My God! What did I ever think of to put in with a chippy like you?”

He was almost yelling at the end of it.

The woman made another wailing noise.

“Quit stalling,” Morny said bitterly. “What do you think I brought you over here for? You’re not kidding anybody. You’ve been watched for weeks. You were here last night. I’ve been here already today. I’ve seen what there is to see. Your lipstick on cigarettes, your glass that you drank out of. I can see you now, sitting on the arm of his chair, rubbing his greasy hair, and then feeding him a slug while he was still purring. Why?”

“Oh, Alex—darling—don’t say such awful things.”

“Early Lillian Gish,” Morny said. “Very early Lillian Gish. Skip the agony, toots. I have to know how to handle this. What the hell you think I’m here for? I don’t give one little flash in hell about you any more. Not any more, toots, not any more, my precious darling angel blond man-killer. But I do care about myself and my reputation and my business. For instance, did you wipe the gun off?”

Silence. Then the sound of a blow. The woman wailed. She was hurt, terribly hurt. Hurt in the depths of her soul. She made it rather good.

“Look, angel,” Morny snarled. “Don’t feed me the ham. I’ve been in pictures. I’m a connoisseur of ham. Skip it. You’re going to tell me how this was done if I have to drag you around the room by your hair. Now—did you wipe off the gun?”

Suddenly she laughed. An unnatural laugh, but clear and with a nice tinkle to it. Then she stopped laughing, Just as suddenly.

Her voice said: “Yes.”

“And the glass you were using?”

“Yes.”

Very quiet now, very cool, “And you put his prints on the gun?”

“Yes.”

He thought in the silence. “Probably won’t fool them,” he said. “It’s almost impossible to get a dead man’s prints on a gun in a convincing way. However. What else did you wipe off.”

“N-nothing. Oh Alex. Please don’t be so brutal.”

“Stop it. Stop it! Show me how you did it, how you were standing, how you held the gun.”

She didn’t move.

“Never mind about the prints,” Morny said. “I’ll put better ones on. Much better ones.”

She moved slowly across the opening of the curtains and I saw her. She was wearing pale green gabardine slacks, a fawn-colored leisure jacket with stitching on it, a scarlet turban with a gold snake in it. Her face was smeared with tears.

“Pick it up,” Morny yelled at her. “Show me!”

She bent beside the chair and came up with the gun in her hand and her teeth bared. She pointed the gun across the opening in the curtains, towards the space of room where the door was.

Morny didn’t move, didn’t make a sound.

The blonde’s hand began to shake and the gun did a queer up and down dance in the air. Her mouth trembled and her arm fell.

“I can’t do it,” she breathed. “I ought to shoot you, but I can’t.”

The hand opened and the gun thudded to the floor.

Morny went swiftly past the break in the curtains, pushed her out of the way and with his foot pushed the gun back to about where it had been.

“You couldn’t do it,” he said thickly. “You couldn’t do it. Now watch.”

He whipped a handkerchief out and bent to pick the gun up again. He pressed something and the gate fell open. He reached his right hand into his pocket and rolled a cartridge in his fingers, moving his fingertips on the metal, pushed the cartridge into a cylinder. He repeated the performance four times more, snapped the gate shut, then opened it and spun it a little to set it in a certain spot. He placed the gun down on the floor, withdrew his hand and handkerchief and straightened up.

“You couldn’t shoot me,” he sneered, “because there was nothing in the gun but one empty shell. Now its loaded again. The cylinders are in the right place. One shot has been fired. And your fingerprints are on the gun.”

The blond was very still, looking at him with haggard eyes.

“I forgot to tell you,” he said softly, “I wiped the gun off. I thought it would be so much nicer to be sure your prints were on it. I was pretty sure they were—but I felt as if I would like to be quite sure. Get it?”

The girl said quietly: “You’re going to turn me in?”

His back was towards me. Dark clothes. Felt hat pulled low. So I couldn’t see his face. But I could just about see the leer with which he said:

“Yes, angel, I am going to turn you in.”

“I see,” she said, and looked at him levelly. There was a sudden grave dignity in her over-emphasized chorus girl’s face.

“I’m going to turn you in, angel,” he said slowly, spacing his words as if he enjoyed his act. “Some people are going to be sorry for me and some people are going to laugh at me. But it’s not going to do my business any harm. Not a bit of harm. That’s one nice thing about a business like mine. A little notoriety won’t hurt it at all.”

“So I’m just publicity value to you, now,” she said. “Apart, of course, from the danger that you might have been suspected yourself.”

“Just so,” he said. “Just so.”

“How about my motive?” she asked, still calm, still level eyed and so gravely contemptuous that he didn’t get the expression at all.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t care. You were up to something with him. Eddie tailed you downtown to a street on Bunker Hill where you met a blond guy in a brown suit. You gave him something. Eddie dropped you and tailed the guy to an apartment house near there. He tried to tail him some more, but he had a hunch the guy spotted him, and he had to drop it. I don’t know what it was all about. I know one thing, though. In that apartment house a young guy named Phillips was shot yesterday. Would you know anything about that, my sweet?”

The blond said: “I wouldn’t know anything about it. I don’t know anybody named Phillips and strangely enough I didn’t just run up and shoot anybody out of sheer girlish fun.”

“But you shot Vannier, my dear,” Morny said almost gently.

“Oh yes,” she drawled. “Of course. We were wondering what my motive was. You get it figured out yet?”

“You can work that out with the johns,” he snapped. “Call it a lover’s quarrel. Call it anything you like.”

“Perhaps,” she said, “when he was drunk he looked just a little like you. Perhaps that was the motive.”

He said: “Ah,” and sucked his breath in.

“Better looking,” she said. “Younger, with less belly. But with the same goddamned self-satisfied smirk.”

“Ah,” Morny said, and he was suffering.

“Would that do?” she asked him softly.

He stepped forward and swung a fist. It caught her on the side of the face and she went down and sat on the floor, a long leg straight out in front of her, one hand to her jaw, her very blue eyes looking up at him.

“Maybe you oughtn’t to have done that,” she said. “Maybe I won’t go through with it, now.”

“You’ll go through with it, all right. You won’t have any choice. You’ll get off easy enough. Christ, I know that. With your looks. But you’ll go through with it, angel. Your fingerprints are on that gun.”

She got to her feet slowly, still with the hand to her jaw. Then she smiled. “I knew he was dead,” she said. “That is my key in the door. I’m quite willing to go downtown and say I shot him. But don’t lay your smooth white paw on me again—if you want my story. Yes. I’m quite willing to go to the cops. I’ll feel a lot safer with them than I feel with you.”

Morny turned and I saw the hard white leer of his face and the scar dimple in his cheek twitching. He walked past the opening in the curtains. The front door opened again. The blond stood still a moment, looked back over her shoulder at the corpse, shuddered slightly, and passed out of my line of vision.

The door closed. Steps on the walk. Then car doors opening and closing. The motor throbbed, and the car went away.

31

After a long time I moved out from my hiding place and stood looking around the living room again. I went over and picked the gun up and wiped it off very carefully and put it down again. I picked the three rouge-stained cigarette stubs out of the tray on the table and carried them into the bathroom and flushed them down the toilet. Then I looked around for the second glass with her fingerprints on it. There wasn’t any second glass. The one that was half full of a dead drink I took to the kitchen and rinsed out and wiped on a dishtowel.

Then the nasty part. I kneeled on the rug by his chair and picked up the gun and reached for the trailing bone-stiff hand. The prints would not be good, but they would be prints and they would not be Lois Morny’s. The gun had a checked rubber grip, with a piece broken off on the left side below the screw. No prints on that. An index print on the right side of the barrel, two fingers on the trigger guard, a thumbprint on the flat piece on the left side, behind the chambers. Good enough.

I took one more look around the living room.

I put the lamp down to a lower light. It still glared too much on the dead yellow face. I opened the front door, pulled the key out and wiped it off and pushed it back into the lock. I shut the door and wiped the thumb latch off and went my way down the block to the Mercury.

I drove back to Hollywood and locked the car up and started along the sidewalk past the other parked cars to the entrance of the Bristol.

A harsh whisper spoke to me out of darkness, out of a car. It spoke my name. Eddie Prue’s long blank face hung somewhere up near the roof of a small Packard, behind its wheel. He was alone in it. I leaned on the door of the car and looked in at him.

“How you making out, shamus?”

I tossed a match down and blew smoke at his face. I said: “Who dropped that dental supply company’s bill you gave me last night? Vannier, or somebody else?”

“Vannier.”

“What was I supposed to do with it—guess the life history of a man named Teager?”

“I don’t go for dumb guys,” Eddie Prue said.

I said: “Why would he have it in his pocket to drop? And if he did drop it, why wouldn’t you just hand it back to him? In other words, seeing that I’m a dumb guy, explain to me why a bill for dental supplies should get anybody all excited and start trying to hire private detectives. Especially gents like Alex Morny, who don’t like private detectives.”

“Morny’s a good head,” Eddie Prue said coldly.

“He’s the fellow for whom they coined the phrase, ‘as ignorant as an actor.’”

“Skip that. Don’t you know what they use that dental stuff for?”

“Yeah. I found out. They use albastone for making molds of teeth and cavities. It’s very hard, very fine grain and retains any amount of fine detail. The other stuff, crystobolite, is used to cook out the wax in an invested wax model. It’s used because it stands a great deal of heat without distortion. Tell me you don’t know what I’m talking about.”

“I guess you know how they make gold inlays,” Eddie Prue said. “I guess you do, huh?”

“I spent two of my hours learning today. I’m an expert. What does it get me?”

He was silent for a little while, and then he said: “You ever read the paper?”

“Once in a while.”

“It couldn’t be you read where an old guy named Morningstar was bumped off in the Belfont Building on Ninth Street, just two floors above where this H. R. Teager had his office. It couldn’t be you read that, could it?”

I didn’t answer him. He looked at me for a moment longer, then he put his hand forward to the dash and pushed the starter button. The motor of his car caught and he started to ease in the clutch.

“Nobody could be as dumb as you act,” he said softly. “Nobody ain’t. Good night to you.”

The car moved away from the curb and drifted down the hill towards Franklin. I was grinning into the distance as it disappeared.

I went up to the apartment and unlocked the door and pushed it open a few inches and then knocked gently. There was movement in the room. The door was pulled open by a strong-looking girl with a black stripe on the cap of her white nurse’s uniform.

“I’m Marlowe. I live here.”

“Come in, Mr. Marlowe. Dr. Moss told me.”

I shut the door quietly and we spoke in low voices. “How is she?” I asked.

“She’s asleep. She was already drowsy when I got here. I’m Miss Lymington. I don’t know very much about her except that her temperature is normal and her pulse still rather fast, but going down. A mental disturbance, I gather.”

“She found a man murdered,” I said. “It shot her full of holes. Is she hard enough asleep so that I could go in and get a few things to take to the hotel?”

“Oh, yes. If you’re quiet. She probably won’t wake. If she does, it won’t matter.”

I went over and put some money on the desk. “There’s coffee and bacon and eggs and bread and tomato juice and oranges and liquor here,” I said. “Anything else you’ll have to phone for.”

“I’ve already investigated your supplies,” she said, smiling. “We have all we need until after breakfast tomorrow. Is she going to stay here?”

“That’s up to Dr. Moss. I think she’ll be going home as soon as she is fit for it. Home being quite a long way off, in Wichita.”

“I’m only a nurse,” she said. “But I don’t think there is anything the matter with her that a good night’s sleep won’t cure.”

“A good night’s sleep and a change of company,” I said, but that didn’t mean anything to Miss Lymington.

I went along the hallway and peeked into the bedroom. They had put a pair of my pajamas on her. She lay almost on her back with one arm outside the bedclothes. The sleeve of the pajama coat was turned up six inches or more. The small hand below the end of the sleeve was in a tight fist. Her face looked drawn and white and quite peaceful. I poked about in the closet and got a suitcase and put some junk in it. As I started back out I looked at Merle again. Her eyes opened and looked straight up at the ceiling. Then they moved just enough to see me and a faint little smile tugged at the corners of her lips.

“Hello.” It was a weak spent little voice, a voice that knew its owner was in bed and had a nurse and everything.

“Hello.”

I went around near her and stood looking down, with my polished smile on my clear-cut features.

“I’m all right,” she whispered. “I’m fine. Ain’t I?”

“Sure.”

“Is this your bed I’m in?”

“That’s all right. It won’t bite you.”

“I’m not afraid,” she said. A hand came sliding towards me and lay palm up, waiting to be held. I held it. “I’m not afraid of you. No woman would ever be afraid of you, would she?”

“Coming from you,” I said, “I guess that’s meant to be a compliment.”

Her eyes smiled, then got grave again. “I lied to you,” she said softly. “I—I didn’t shoot anybody.”

“I know. I was over there. Forget it. Don’t think about it.”

“People are always telling you to forget unpleasant things. But you never do. It’s so kind of silly to tell you to, I mean.”

“Okay,” I said, pretending to be hurt. “I’m silly. How about making some more sleep?”

She turned her head until she was looking into my eyes. I sat on the edge of the bed, holding her hand.

“Will the police come here?” she asked.

“No. And try not to be disappointed.”

She frowned. “You must think I’m an awful fool.”

“Well—maybe.”

A couple of tears formed in her eyes and slid out at the corners and rolled gently down her cheeks.

“Does Mrs. Murdock know where I am?”

“Not yet. I’m going over and tell her.”

“Will you have to tell her—everything?”

“Yeah, why not?”

She turned the head away from me. “She’ll understand,” her voice said softly. “She knows the awful thing I did eight years ago. The frightful terrible thing.”

“Sure,” I said. “That’s why she’s been paying Vannier money all this time.”

“Oh dear,” she said, and brought her other hand out from under the bedclothes and pulled away the one I was holding so that she could squeeze them tightly together. “I wish you hadn’t had to know that. I wish you hadn’t. Nobody ever knew but Mrs. Murdock. My parents never knew. I wish you hadn’t.”

The nurse came in at the door and looked at me severely. “I don’t think she ought to be talking like this, Mr. Marlowe. I think you should leave now.”

“Look, Miss Lymington, I’ve known this little girl two days. You’ve only known her two hours. This is doing her a lot of good.”

“It might bring on another—er—spasm,” she said severely, avoiding my eyes.

“Well, if she has to have it, isn’t it better for her to have it now, while you’re here, and get it over with? Go on out to the kitchen and buy yourself a drink.”

“I never drink on duty,” she said coldly. “Besides somebody might smell my breath.”

“You’re working for me now. All my employees are required to get liquored up from time to time. Besides, if you had a good dinner and were to eat a couple of the Chasers in the kitchen cabinet, nobody would smell your breath.”

She gave me a quick grin and went back out of the room. Merle had been listening to this as if it was a frivolous interruption to a very serious play. Rather annoyed.

“I want to tell you all about it,” she said breathlessly. “I—”

I reached over and put a paw over her two locked hands. “Skip it. I know. Marlowe knows everything—except how to make a decent living. It doesn’t amount to beans. Now you’re going back to sleep and tomorrow I’m going to take you on the way back to Wichita—to visit your parents. At Mrs. Murdock’s expense.”

“Why, that’s wonderful of her,” she cried, her eyes opening wide and shining. “But she’s always been wonderful to me.”

I got up off the bed. “She’s a wonderful woman,” I said, grinning down at her. “Wonderful. I’m going over there now and we’re going to have a perfectly lovely little talk over the teacups. And if you don’t go to sleep right now, I won’t let you confess to any more murders.”

“You’re horrid,” she said. “I don’t like you.” She turned her head away and put her arms back under the bedclothes and shut her eyes.

I went towards the door. At the door I swung around and looked back quickly. She had one eye open, watching me. I gave her a leer and it snapped shut in a hurry.

I went back to the living room, gave Miss Lymington what was left of my leer, and went out with my suitcase.

I drove over to Santa Monica Boulevard. The hockshop was still open. The old Jew in the tall black skullcap seemed surprised that I was able to redeem my pledge so soon. I told him that was the way it was in Hollywood.

He got the envelope out of the safe and tore it open and took my money and pawn ticket and slipped the shining gold coin out on his palm.

“So valuable this is I am hating to give it back to you,” he said. “The workmanship, you understand, the workmanship, is beautiful.”

“And the gold in it must be worth all of twenty dollars,” I said.

He shrugged and smiled and I put the coin in my pocket and said goodnight to him.

32

The moonlight lay like a white sheet on the front lawn except under the deodar where there was the thick darkness of black velvet. Lights in two lower windows were lit and in one upstairs room visible from the front. I walked across the stumble stones and rang the bell.

I didn’t look at the little painted Negro by the hitching block. I didn’t pat his head tonight. The joke seemed to have worn thin.

A white-haired, red-faced woman I hadn’t seen before opened the door and I said: “I’m Philip Marlowe. I’d like to see Mrs. Murdock. Mrs. Elizabeth Murdock.”

She looked doubtful. “I think she’s gone to bed,” she said. “I don’t think you can see her.”

“It’s only nine o’clock.”

“Mrs. Murdock goes to bed early.” She started to close the door.

She was a nice old thing and I hated to give the door the heavy shoulder. I just leaned against it.

“It’s about Miss Davis,” I said. “It’s important. Could you tell her that?”

“I’ll see.”

I stepped back and let her shut the door.

A mockingbird sang in a dark tree nearby. A car tore down the street much too fast and skidded around the next corner. The thin shreds of a girl’s laughter came back along the dark street as if the car had spilled them out in its rush.

The door opened after a while and the woman said: “You can come in.”

I followed her across the big empty entrance room. A single dim light burned in one lamp, hardly reaching to the opposite wall. The place was too still, and the air needed freshening. We went along the hall to the end and up a flight of stairs with a carved handrail and newel post. Another hall at the top, a door open towards the back.

I was shown in at the open door and the door was closed behind me. It was a big sitting room with a lot of chintz, a blue and silver wallpaper, a couch, a blue carpet and french windows open on a balcony. There was an awning over the balcony.

Mrs. Murdock was sitting in a padded wing chair with a card table in front of her. She was wearing a quilted robe and her hair looked a little fluffed out. She was playing solitaire. She had the pack in her left hand and she put a card down and moved another one before she looked up at me.

Then she said: “Well?”

I went over by the card table and looked down at the game. It was Canfield.

“Merle’s at my apartment,” I said. “She threw an ing-bing.”

Without looking up she said:. “And just what is an ing-bing, Mr. Marlowe?”

She moved another card, then two more quickly.

“A case of the vapors, they used to call it,” I said. “Ever catch yourself cheating at that game?”

“It’s no fun if you cheat,” she said gruffly. “And very little if you don’t. What’s this about Merle? She has never stayed out like this before. I was getting worried about her.”

I pulled a slipper chair over and sat down across the table from her. It put me too low down. I got up and got a better chair and sat in that.

“No need to worry about her,” I said. “I got a doctor and a nurse. She’s asleep. She was over to see Vannier.”

She laid the pack of cards down and folded her big gray hands on the edge of the table and looked at me solidly.

“Mr. Marlowe,” she said, “you and I had better have something out. I made a mistake calling you in the first place. That was my dislike of being played for a sucker, as you would say, by a hardboiled little animal like Linda. But it would have been much better, if I had not raised the point at all. The loss of the doubloon would have been much easier to bear than you are. Even if I had never got it back.”

“But you did get it back,” I said.

She nodded. Her eyes stayed on my face. “Yes. I got it back. You heard how.”

“I didn’t believe it.”

“Neither did I,” she said calmly. “My fool of a son was simply taking the blame for Linda. An attitude I find childish.”

“You have a sort of knack,” I said, “of getting yourselves surrounded with people who take such attitudes.”

She picked her cards up again and reached down to put a black ten on a red jack, both cards that were already in the layout. Then she reached sideways to a small heavy table on which was her port. She drank some, put the glass down and gave me a hard level stare.

“I have a feeling that you are going to be insolent, Mr. Marlowe.”

I shook my head. “Not insolent. Just frank. I haven’t done so badly for you, Mrs. Murdock. You did get the doubloon back. I kept the police away from you—so far. I didn’t do anything on the divorce, but I found Linda—your son knew where she was all the time—and I don’t think you’ll have any trouble with her. She knows she made a mistake marrying Leslie. However, if you don’t think you got value—”

She made a humph noise and played another card. She got the ace of diamonds up to the top line. “The ace of clubs is buried, darn it. I’m not going to get it out in time.”

“Kind of slide it out,” I said, “when you’re not looking.”

“Hadn’t you better,” she said very quietly, “get on with telling me about Merle? And don’t gloat too much, if you have found out a few family secrets, Mr. Marlowe.”

“I’m not gloating about anything. You sent Merle to Vannier’s place this afternoon, with five hundred dollars.”

“And if I did?” She poured some of her port and sipped, eyeing me steadily over the glass.

“When did he ask for it?”

“Yesterday. I couldn’t get it out of the bank until today. What happened?”

“Vannier’s been blackmailing you for about eight years, hasn’t he? On account of something that happened on April 26^th, 1933?”

A sort of panic twitched in the depths of her eyes, but very far back, very dim, and somehow as though it had been there for a long time and had just peeped out at me for a second.

“Merle told me a few things,” I said. “Your son told me how his father died. I looked up the records and the papers today. Accidental death. There had been an accident in the street under his office and a lot of people were craning out of windows. He just craned out too far. There was some talk of suicide because he was broke and had fifty thousand life insurance for his family. But the coroner was nice and slid past that.”

“Well?” she said. It was a cold hard voice, neither a croak nor a gasp. A cold hard utterly composed voice.

“Merle was Horace Bright’s secretary. A queer little girl in a way, over timid, not sophisticated, a little girl mentality, likes to dramatize herself, very old-fashioned ideas about men, all that sort of thing. I figure he got high one time and made a pass at her and scared her out of her socks.”

“Yes?” Another cold hard monosyllable prodding me like a gun barrel.

“She brooded and got a little murderous inside. She got a chance and passed right back at him. While he was leaning out of a window. Anything in it?”

“Speak plainly, Mr. Marlowe. I can stand plain talk.”

“Good grief, how plain do you want it? She pushed her employer out of a window. Murdered him, in two words. And got away with it. With your help.”

She looked down at the left hand clenched over her cards. She nodded. Her chin moved a short inch, down, up.

“Did Vannier have any evidence?” I asked. “Or did he just happen to see what happened and put the bite on you and you paid him a little now and then to avoid scandal—and because you were really very fond of Merle?”

She played another card before she answered me. Steady as a rock.

“He talked about a photograph,” she said. “But I never believed it. He couldn’t have taken one. And if he had taken one, he would have shown it to me—sooner or later.”

I said: “No, I don’t think so. It would have been a very fluky shot, even if he happened to have the camera in his hand, on account of the doings down below in the street. But I can see he might not have dared to show it. You’re a pretty hard woman, in some ways. He might have been afraid you would have him taken care of. I mean that’s how it might look to him, a crook. How much have you paid him?”

“That’s none—” she started to say, then stopped and shrugged her big shoulders. A powerful woman, strong, rugged, ruthless and able to take it. She thought. “Eleven thousand one hundred dollars, not counting the five hundred I sent him this afternoon.”

“Ah. It was pretty darn nice of you, Mrs. Murdock. Considering everything.”

She moved a hand vaguely, made another shrug. “It was my husband’s fault,” she said. “He was drunk, vile. I don’t think he really hurt her, but, as you say, he frightened her out of her wits. I—I can’t blame her too much. She has blamed herself enough all these years.”

“She had to take the money to Vannier in person?”

“That was her idea of penance. A strange penance.”

I nodded. “I guess that would be in character. Later you married Jasper Murdock and you kept Merle with you and took care of her. Anybody else know?”

“Nobody. Only Vannier. Surely he wouldn’t tell anybody.”

“No. I hardly think so. Well, it’s all over now. Vannier is through.”

She lifted her eyes slowly and gave me a long level gaze. Her gray head was a rock on top of a hill. She put the cards down at last and clasped her hands tightly on the edge of the table. The knuckles glistened.

I said: “Merle came to my apartment when I was out. She asked the manager to let her in. He phoned me and I said yes. I got over there quickly. She told me she had shot Vannier.”

Her breath was a faint swift whisper in the stillness of the room.

“She had a gun in her bag, God knows why. Some idea of protecting herself against men, I suppose. But somebody—Leslie, I should guess—had fixed it to be harmless by jamming a wrong size cartridge in the breech. She told me she had killed Vannier and fainted. I got a doctor friend of mine. I went over to Vannier’s house. There was a key in the door. He was dead in a chair, long dead, cold, stiff. Dead long before Merle went there. She didn’t shoot him. Her telling me that was just drama. The doctor explained it after a fashion, but I won’t bore you with it. I guess you understand all right.”

She said: “Yes. I think I understand. And now?”

“She’s in bed, in my apartment. There’s a nurse there. I phoned Merle’s father long distance. He wants her to come home. That all right with you?”

She just stared.

“He doesn’t know anything,” I said quickly. “Not this or the other time. I’m sure of that. He just wants her to come home. I thought I’d take her. It seems to be my responsibility now. I’ll need that last five hundred that Vannier didn’t get for expenses.”

“And how much more?” she asked brutally.

“Don’t say that. You know better.”

“Who killed Vannier?”

“Looks like he committed suicide. A gun at his right hand. Temple contact wound. Morny and his wife were there while I was. I hid. Morny’s trying to pin it on his wife. She was playing games with Vannier. So she probably thinks he did it, or had it done. But it shapes up like suicide. The cops will be there by now. I don’t know what they will make of it. We just have to sit tight and wait it out.”

“Men like Vannier,” she said grimly, “don’t commit suicide.”

“That’s like saying girls like Merle don’t push people out of windows. It doesn’t mean anything.”

We stared at each other, with that inner hostility that had been there from the first. After a moment I pushed my chair back and went over to the french windows. I opened the screen and stepped out on to the porch. The night was all around, soft and quiet. The white moonlight was cold and clear, like the justice we dream of but don’t find.

The trees down below cast heavy shadows under the moon. In the middle of the garden there was a sort of garden within a garden. I caught the glint of an ornamental pool. A lawn swing beside it. Somebody was lying in the lawn swing and a cigarette tip glowed as I looked down.

I went back into the room. Mrs. Murdock was playing solitaire again. I went over to the table and looked down.

“You got the ace of clubs out,” I said.

“I cheated,” she said without looking up.

“There was one thing I wanted to ask you,” I said. “This doubloon business is still cloudy, on account of a couple of murders which don’t seem to make sense now that you have the coin back. What I wondered was if there was anything about the Murdock Brasher that might identify it to an expert—to a man like old Morningstar.”

She thought, sitting still, not looking up. “Yes. There might be. The coin-maker’s initials, E. B., are on the left wing of the eagle. Usually, I’m told, they are on the right wing. That’s the only thing I can think of.”

I said: “I think that might be enough. You did actually get the coin back, didn’t you? I mean that wasn’t just something said to stop my ferreting around?”

She looked up swiftly and then down. “It’s in the strong room at this moment. If you can find my son, he will show it to you.”

“Well, I’ll say good night. Please have Merle’s clothes packed and sent to my apartment in the morning.”

Her head snapped up again and her eyes glared. “You’re pretty highhanded about all this, young man.”

“Have them packed,” I said. “And send them. You don’t need Merle any more—now that Vannier is dead.”

Our eyes locked hard and held locked for a long moment. A queer stiff smile moved the corners of her lips. Then her head went down and her right hand took the top card off the pack held in her left hand and turned it and her eyes looked at it and she added it to the pile of unplayed cards below the layout, and then turned the next card, quietly, calmly, in a hand as steady as a stone pier in a light breeze.

I went across the room and out, closed the door softly, went along the hall, down the stairs, along the lower hall past the sun room and Merle’s little office, and out into the cheerless stuffy unused living room that made me feel like an embalmed corpse just to be in it.

The french doors at the back opened and Leslie Murdock stepped in and stopped, staring at me.

33

His slack suit was rumpled and also his hair. His little reddish mustache looked just as ineffectual as ever. The shadows under his eyes were almost pits.

He was carrying his long black cigarette holder, empty, and tapping it against the heel of his left hand as he stood not liking me, not wanting to meet me, not wanting to talk to me.

“Good evening,” he said stiffly. “Leaving?”

“Not quite yet. I want to talk to you.”

“I don’t think we have anything to talk about. And I’m tired of talking.”

“Oh yes we have. A man named Vannier.”

“Vannier? I hardly know the man. I’ve seen him around. What I know I don’t like.”

“You know him a little better than that,” I said.

He came forward into the room and sat down in one of the I-dare-you-to-sit-in-me chairs and leaned forward to cup his chin in his left hand and look at the floor.

“All right,” he said wearily. “Get on with it. I have a feeling you are going to be very brilliant. Remorseless flow of logic and intuition and all that rot. Just like a detective in a book.”

“Sure. Taking the evidence piece by piece, putting it all together in a neat pattern, sneaking in an odd bit I had on my hip here and there, analyzing the motives and characters and making them out to be quite different from what anybody—or I myself for that matter—thought them to be up to this golden moment—and finally making a sort of world-weary pounce on the least promising suspect.”

He lifted his eyes and almost smiled. “Who thereupon turns as pale as paper, froths at the mouth, and pulls a gun out of his right ear.”

I sat down near him and got a cigarette out. “That’s right. We ought to play it together sometime. You got a gun?”

“Not with me. I have one. You know that.”

“Have it with you last night when you called on Vannier?”

He shrugged and bared his teeth. “Oh. Did I call on Vannier last night?”

“I think so. Deduction. You smoke Benson and Hedges Virginia cigarettes. They leave a firm ash that keeps its shape. An ashtray at his house had enough of those little gray rolls to account for at least two cigarettes. But no stubs in the tray. Because you smoke them in a holder and a stub from a holder looks different. So you removed the stubs. Like it?”

“No.” His voice was quiet. He looked down at the floor again.

“That’s an example of deduction. A bad one. For there might not have been any stubs, but if there had been and they had been removed, it might have been because they had lipstick on them. Of a certain shade that would at least indicate the coloring of the smoker. And your wife has a quaint habit of throwing her stubs into the waste basket.”

“Leave Linda out of this,” he said coldly.

“Your mother still thinks Linda took the doubloon and that your story about taking it to give to Alex Morny was just a cover-up to protect her.”

“I said leave Linda out of it.” The tapping of the black holder against his teeth had a sharp quick sound, like a telegraph key.

“I’m willing to,” I said. “But I didn’t believe your story for a different reason. This.” I took the doubloon out and held it on my hand under his eyes.

He stared at it tightly. His mouth set.

“This morning when you were telling your story this was hocked on Santa Monica Boulevard for safekeeping. It was sent to me by a would-be detective named George Phillips. A simple sort of fellow who allowed himself to get into a bad spot through poor judgment and over-eagerness for a job. A thickset blond fellow in a brown suit, wearing dark glasses and a rather gay hat. Driving a sand-colored Pontiac, almost new. You might have seen him hanging about in the hall outside my office yesterday morning. He had been following me around and before that he might have been following you around.”

He looked genuinely surprised. “Why would he do that?” I lit my cigarette and dropped the match in a jade ashtray that looked as if it had never been used as an ashtray.

“I said he might have. I’m not sure he did. He might have just been watching this house. He picked me up here and I don’t think he followed me here.” I still had the coin on my hand, looked down at it, turned it over by tossing it, looked at the initials E. B. stamped into the left wing, and put it away. “He might have been watching the house because he had been hired to peddle a rare coin to an old coin dealer named Morningstar. And the old coin dealer somehow suspected where the coin came from, and told Phillips, or hinted to him, and that the coin was stolen. Incidentally, he was wrong about that. If your Brasher Doubloon is really at this moment upstairs, then the coin Phillips was hired to peddle was not a stolen coin. It was a counterfeit.”

His shoulders gave a quick little jerk, as if he was cold Otherwise he didn’t move or change position.

“I’m afraid it’s getting to be one of those long stories after all,” I said, rather gently. “I’m sorry. I’d better organize it a little better. It’s not a pretty story, because it has two murders in it, maybe three. A man named Vannier and a man named Teager had an idea. Teager is a dental technician in the Belfont Building, old Morningstar’s building. The idea was to counterfeit a rare and valuable gold coin, not too rare to be marketable, but rare enough to be worth a lot of money. The method they thought of was about what a dental technician uses to make a gold inlay. Requiring the same materials, the same apparatus, the same skills. That is, to reproduce a model exactly, in gold, by making a matrix in a hard white fine cement called albastone, then making a replica of the model in that matrix in molding wax, complete in the finest detail, then investing the wax, as they call it, in another kind of cement called crystobolite, which has the property of standing great heat without distortion. A small opening is left from the wax to outside by attaching a steel pin which is withdrawn when the cement sets. Then the crystobolite casting is cooked over a flame until the wax boils out through this small opening, leaving a hollow mold of the original model. This is clamped against a crucible on a centrifuge and molten gold is shot into it by centrifugal force from the crucible. Then the crystobolite, still hot, is held under cold water and it disintegrates, leaving the gold core with a gold pin attached, representing the small opening. That is trimmed off, the casting is cleaned in acid and polished and you have, in this case, a brand new Brasher Doubloon, made of solid gold and exactly the same as the original. You get the idea?”

He nodded and moved a hand wearily across his head.

“The amount of skill this would take,” I went on, “would be just what a dental technician would have. The process would be of no use for a current coinage, if we had a gold coinage, because the material and labor would cost more than the coin would be worth. But for a gold coin that was valuable through being rare, it would fit fine. So that’s what they did. But they had to have a model. That’s where you came in. You took the doubloon all right, but not to give to Morny. You took it to give to Vannier. Right?”

He stared at the floor and didn’t speak.

“Loosen up,” I said. “In the circumstances it’s nothing very awful. I suppose he promised you money, because you needed it to pay off gambling debts and your mother is close. But he had a stronger hold over you than that.”

He looked up quickly then, his face very white, a kind of horror in his eyes.

“How did you know that?” he almost whispered.

“I found out. Some I was told, some I researched, some I guessed. I’ll get to that later. Now Vannier and his pal have made a doubloon and they want to try it out. They wanted to know their merchandise would stand up under inspection by a man supposed to know rare coins. So Vannier had the idea of hiring a sucker and getting him to try to sell the counterfeit to old Morningstar, cheap enough so the old guy would think it was stolen. They picked George Phillips for their sucker, through a silly ad he was running in the paper for business. I think Lois Morny was Vannier’s contact with Phillips, at first anyway. I don’t think she was in the racket. She was seen to give Phillips a small package. This package may have contained the doubloon Phillips was to try to sell. But when he showed it to old Morningstar he ran into a snag. The old man knew his coin collections and his rare coins. He probably thought the coin was genuine enough—it would take a lot of testing to show it wasn’t—but the way the maker’s initials were stamped on the coin was unusual and suggested to him that the coin might be the Murdock Brasher. He called up here and tried to find out. That made your mother suspicious and the coin was found to be missing and she suspected Linda, whom she hates, and hired me to get it back and put the squeeze on Linda for a divorce, without alimony.”

“I don’t want a divorce,” Murdock said hotly. “I never had any such idea. She had no right—” he stopped and made a despairing gesture and a kind of sobbing sound.

“Okay, I know that. Well, old Morningstar threw a scare into Phillips, who wasn’t crooked, just dumb. He managed to get Phillips’ phone number out of him. I heard the old man call that number, eavesdropping in his office after he thought I had left. I had just offered to buy the doubloon back for a thousand dollars and Morningstar had taken up the offer, thinking he could get the coin from Phillips, make himself some money and everything lovely. Meantime Phillips was watching this house, perhaps to see if any cops were coming and going. He saw me, saw my car, got my name off the registration and it just happened he knew who I was.

“He followed me around trying to make up his mind to ask me for help until I braced him in a downtown hotel and he mumbled about knowing me from a case in Ventura when he was a deputy up there, and about being in a spot he didn’t like and about being followed around by a tall guy with a funny eye. That was Eddie Prue, Morny’s sidewinder. Morny knew his wife was playing games with Vannier and had her shadowed. Prue saw her make contact with Phillips near where he lived on Court Street, Bunker Hill, and then followed Phillips until he thought Phillips had spotted him, which he had. And Prue, or somebody working for Morny, may have seen me go to Phillips’ apartment on Court Street. Because he tried to scare me over the phone and later asked me to come and see Morny.”

I got rid of my cigarette stub in the jade ashtray, looked at the bleak unhappy face of the man sitting opposite me, and plowed on. It was heavy going, and the sound of my voice was beginning to sicken me.

“Now we come back to you. When Merle told you your mother had hired a dick, that threw a scare into you. You figured she had missed the doubloon and you came steaming up to my office and tried to pump me. Very debonair, very sarcastic at first, very solicitous for your wife, but very worried. I don’t know what you think you found out, but you got in touch with Vannier. You now had to get the coin back to your mother in a hurry, with some kind of story. You met Vannier somewhere and he gave you a doubloon. Chances are it’s another counterfeit. He would be likely to hang on to the real one. Now Vannier sees his racket in danger of blowing up before it gets started. Morningstar has called your mother and I have been hired. Morningstar has spotted something. Vannier goes down to Phillips’ apartment, sneaks in the back way, and has it out with Phillips, trying to find out where he stands.

“Phillips doesn’t tell him he has already sent the counterfeit doubloon to me, addressing it in a kind of printing afterwards found in a diary in his office. I infer that from the fact Vannier didn’t try to get it back from me. I don’t know what Phillips told Vannier, of course, but the chances are he told him the job was crooked, that he knew where the coin came from, and that he was going to the police or to Mrs. Murdock. And Vannier pulled a gun, knocked him on the head and shot him. He searched him and the apartment and didn’t find the doubloon. So he went to Morningstar. Morningstar didn’t have the counterfeit doubloon either, but Vannier probably thought he had. He cracked the old man’s skull with a gun butt and went through his safe, perhaps found some money, perhaps found nothing, at any rate left the appearance of a stickup behind him. Then Mr. Vannier breezed on home, still rather annoyed because he hadn’t found the doubloon, but with the satisfaction of a good afternoon’s work under his vest. A couple of nice neat murders. That left you.”

34

Murdock flicked a strained look at me, then his eyes went to the black cigarette holder he still had clenched in his hand. He tucked it in his shirt pocket, stood up suddenly, ground the heels of his hands together and sat down again. He got a handkerchief out and mopped his face.

“Why me?” he asked in a thick strained voice.

“You knew too much. Perhaps you knew about Phillips, perhaps not. Depends how deep you were in it. But you knew about Morningstar. The scheme had gone wrong and Morningstar had been murdered. Vannier couldn’t just sit back and hope you wouldn’t hear about that. He had to shut your mouth, very, very tight. But he didn’t have to kill you to do it. In fact killing you would be a bad move. It would break his hold on your mother. She’s a cold ruthless grasping woman, but hurting you would make a wildcat of her. She wouldn’t care what happened.”

Murdock lifted his eyes. He tried to make them blank with astonishment. He only made them dull and shocked.

“My mother—what—?”

“Don’t kid me any more than you have to,” I said. “I’m tired to death of being kidded by the Murdock family. Merle came to my apartment this evening. She’s there now. She had been over to Vannier’s house to bring him some money. Blackmail money. Money that had been paid to him off and on for eight years. I know why.”

He didn’t move. His hands were rigid with strain on his knees. His eyes had almost disappeared into the back of his head. They were doomed eyes.

“Merle found Vannier dead. She came to me and said she had killed him. Let’s not go into why she thinks she ought to confess to other people’s murders. I went over there and he had been dead since last night. He was as stiff as a wax dummy. There was a gun lying on the floor by his right hand. It was a gun I had heard described, a gun that belonged to a man named Hench, in an apartment across the hall from Phillips’ apartment. Somebody ditched the gun that killed Phillips and took Hench’s gun. Hench and his girl were drunk and left their apartment open. It’s not proved that it was Hench’s gun, but it will be. If it is Hench’s gun, and Vannier committed suicide, it ties Vannier to the death of Phillips. Lois Morny also ties him to Phillips, in another way. If Vannier didn’t commit suicide—and I don’t believe he did—it might still tie him to Phillips. Or it might tie somebody else to Phillips, somebody who also killed Vannier. There are reasons why I don’t like that idea.”

Murdock’s head came up. He said: “No?” in a suddenly clear voice. There was a new expression on his face, something bright and shining and at the same time just a little silly. The expression of a weak man being proud.

I said: “I think you killed Vannier.”

He didn’t move and the bright shining expression stayed on his face.

“You went over there last night. He sent for you. He told you he was in a jam and that if the law caught up with him, he would see that you were in the jam with him. Didn’t he say something like that?”

“Yes,” Murdock said quietly. “Something exactly like that. He was drunk and a bit high and he seemed to have a sense of power. He gloated, almost. He said if they got him in the gas chamber, I would be sitting right beside him. But that wasn’t all he said.”

“No. He didn’t want to sit in the gas chamber and he didn’t at the time see any very good reason why he should, if you kept your mouth good and tight. So he played his trump card. His first hold on you, what made you take the doubloon and give it to him, even if he did promise you money as well, was something about Merle and your father. I know about it. Your mother told me what little I hadn’t put together already. That was his first hold and it was pretty strong. Because it would let you justify yourself. But last night he wanted something still stronger. So he told you the truth and said he had proof.”

He shivered, but the light clear proud look managed to stay on his face.

“I pulled a gun on him,” he said, almost in a happy voice. “After all she is my mother.”

“Nobody can take that away from you.”

He stood up, very straight, very tall. “I went over to the chair he sat in and reached down and put the gun against his face. He had a gun in the pocket of his robe. He tried to get it, but he didn’t get it in time. I took it away from him. I put my gun back in my pocket. I put the muzzle of the other gun against the side of his head and told him I would kill him, if he didn’t produce his proof and give it to me. He began to sweat and babble that he was just kidding me. I clicked back the hammer on the gun to scare him some more.”

He stopped and held a hand out in front of him. The hand shook but as he stared down at it it got steady. He dropped it to his side and looked me in the eye.

“The gun must have been filed or had a very light action. It went off. I jumped back against the wall and knocked a picture down. I jumped from surprise that the gun went off, but it kept the blood off me. I wiped the gun off and put his fingers around it and then put it down on the floor close to his hand. He was dead at once. He hardly bled except the first spurt. It was an accident.”

“Why spoil it?” I half sneered. “Why not make it a nice clean honest murder?”

“That’s what happened. I can’t prove it, of course. But I think I might have killed him anyway. What about the police?”

I stood up and shrugged my shoulders. I felt tired, spent, drawn out and sapped. My throat was sore from yapping and my brain ached from trying to keep my thoughts orderly.

“I don’t know about the police,” I said. “They and I are not very good friends, on account of they think I am holding out on them. And God knows they are right. They may get to you. If you weren’t seen, if you didn’t leave any fingerprints around, and even if you did, if they don’t have any other reason to suspect you and get your fingerprints to check, then they may never think of you. If they find out about the doubloon and that it was the Murdock Brasher, I don’t know where you stand. It all depends on how well you stand up to them.”

“Except for mother’s sake,” he said. “I don’t very much care. I’ve always been a flop.”

“And on the other hand,” I said, ignoring the feeble talk, “if the gun really has a very light action and you get a good lawyer and tell an honest story and so on, no jury will convict you. Juries don’t like blackmailers.”

“That’s too bad,” he said. “Because I am not in a position to use that defense. I don’t know anything about blackmail. Vannier showed me where I could make some money, and I needed it badly.”

I said: “Uh-huh. If they get you where you need the blackmail dope, you’ll use it all right. Your old lady will make you. If it’s her neck or yours, she’ll spill.”

“It’s horrible,” he said. “Horrible to say that.”

“You were lucky about that gun. All the people we know have been playing with it, wiping prints off and putting them on. I even put a set on myself just to be fashionable, it’s tricky when the hand is still. But I had to do it. Morny was over there having his wife put hers on. He thinks she killed Vannier, so she probably thinks he did.”

He just stared at me. I chewed my lip. It felt as still as a piece of glass.

“Well, I guess I’ll just be running along now,” I said.

“You mean you are going to let me get away with it?” His voice was getting a little supercilious again.

“I’m not going to turn you in, if that’s what you mean. Beyond that I guarantee nothing. If I’m involved in it, I’ll have to face up to the situation. There’s no question of morality involved. I’m not a cop nor a common informer nor an officer of the court. You say it was an accident. Okay, it was an accident. I wasn’t a witness. I haven’t any proof either way. I’ve been working for your mother and whatever right to my silence that gives her, she can have. I don’t like her, I don’t like you, I don’t like this house. I didn’t particularly like your wife. But I like Merle. She’s kind of silly and morbid, but she’s kind of sweet too. And I know what has been done to her in this damn family for the past eight years. And I know she didn’t push anybody out of any window. Does that explain matters?”

He gobbled, but nothing came that was coherent.

“I’m taking Merle home,” I said. “I asked your mother to send her clothes to my apartment in the morning. In case she kind of forgets, being busy with her solitaire game, would you see that that is done?”

He nodded dumbly. Then he said in a queer small voice: “You are going—just like that? I haven’t—I haven’t even thanked you. A man I hardly know, taking risks for me—I don’t know what to say.”

“I’m going the way I always go,” I said. “With an airy smile and a quick flip of the wrist. And with a deep and heartfelt hope that I won’t be seeing you in the fish bowl. Good night.”

I turned my back on him and went to the door and out. I shut the door with a quiet firm click of the lock. A nice smooth exit, in spite of all the nastiness. For the last time I went over and patted the little painted Negro on the head and then walked across the long lawn by the moon-drenched shrubs and the deodar tree to the street and my car.

I drove back to Hollywood, bought a pint of good liquor, checked in at the Plaza, and sat on the side of the bed staring at my feet and lapping the whiskey out of the bottle.

Just like any common bedroom drunk.

When I had enough of it to make my brain fuzzy enough to stop thinking, I undressed and got into bed and after a while, but not soon enough, I went to sleep.

35

It was three o’clock in the afternoon and there were five pieces of luggage inside the apartment door, side by side on the carpet. There was my yellow cowhide, well scraped on both sides from being pushed around in the boots of cars. There were two nice pieces of airplane luggage both marked L.M. There was an old black imitation walrus thing marked M.D. and there was one of these little leatherette overnight cases which you can buy in drugstores for a dollar forty-nine.

Dr. Carl Moss had just gone out of the door cursing me because he had kept his afternoon class of hypochondriacs waiting. The sweetish smell of his Fatima poisoned the air for me. I was turning over in what was left of my mind what he had said when I asked him how long it would take Merle to get well.

“It depends what you mean by well. She’ll always be high on nerves and low on animal emotion. She’ll always breathe thin air and smell snow. She’d have made a perfect nun. The religious dream, with its narrowness, its stylized emotions and it grim purity, would have been a perfect release for her. As it is she will probably turn out to be one of these acid-faced virgins that sit behind little desks in public libraries and stamp dates in books.”

“She’s not that bad,” I had said, but he had just grinned at me with his wise Jew face and gone out of the door. “And besides how do you know they are virgins?” I added to the closed door, but that didn’t get me any farther.

I lit a cigarette and wandered over to the window and after a while she came through the doorway from the bed room part of the apartment and stood there looking at me with her eyes dark-ringed and a pale composed little face without any makeup except on the lips.

“Put some rouge on your cheeks,” I told her. “You look like the snow maiden after a hard night with the fishing fleet.”

So she went back and put some rouge on her cheeks. When she came back again she looked at the luggage and said softly: “Leslie lent me two of his suitcases.”

I said: “Yeah,” and looked her over. She looked very nice. She had a pair of long-waisted rust-colored slacks on, and Bata shoes and a brown and white print shirt and an orange scarf. She didn’t have her glasses on. Her large clear cobalt eyes had a slightly dopey look, but not more than you would expect. Her hair was dragged down tight, but I couldn’t do anything much about that.

“I’ve been a terrible nuisance,” she said. “I’m terribly sorry.”

“Nonsense. I talked to your father and mother both. They’re tickled to death. They’ve only seen you twice in over eight years and they feel as if they had almost lost you.”

“I’ll love seeing them for a while,” she said, looking down at the carpet. “It’s very kind of Mrs. Murdock to let me go. She’s never been able to spare me for long.” She moved her legs as if she wondered what to do with them in slacks, although they were her slacks and she must have had to face the problem before. She finally put her knees close together and clasped her hands on top of them.

“Any little talking we might have to do,” I said, “or anything you might want to say to me, let’s get it over with now. Because I’m not driving halfway across the United States with a nervous breakdown in the seat beside me.”

She bit a knuckle and sneaked a couple of quick looks at me around the side of the knuckle. “Last night—” she said, and stopped and colored.

“Let’s use a little of the old acid,” I said. “Last night you told me you killed Vannier and then you told me you didn’t. I know you didn’t. That’s settled.”

She dropped the knuckle, looked at me levelly, quiet, composed and the hands on her knees now not straining at all.

“Vannier was dead a long time before you got there. You went there to give him some money for Mrs. Murdock.”

“No—for me,” she said. “Although of course it was Mrs. Murdock’s money. I owe her more than I’ll ever be able to repay. Of course she doesn’t give me much salary, but that would hardly—”

I said roughly: “Her not giving you much salary is a characteristic touch and your owing her more than you can ever repay is more truth than poetry. It would take the Yankee outfield with two bats each to give her what she has coming from you. However, that’s unimportant now. Vannier committed suicide because he had got caught out in a crooked job. That’s flat and final. The way you behaved was more or less an act. You got a severe nervous shock seeing his leering dead face in a mirror and that shock merged into another one a long time ago and you just dramatized it in your screwy little way.”

She looked at me shyly and nodded her copper-blond head, as if in agreement.

“And you didn’t push Horace Bright out of any window,” I said.

Her face jumped then and turned startlingly pale. “I—I—” her hand went to her mouth and stayed there and her shocked eyes looked at me over it.

“I wouldn’t be doing this,” I said, “if Dr. Moss hadn’t said it would be all right and we might as well hand it to you now. I think maybe you think you killed Horace Bright. You had a motive and an opportunity and just for a second I think you might have had the impulse to take advantage of the opportunity. But it wouldn’t be in your nature. At the last minute you would hold back. But at that last minute probably something snapped and you pulled a faint. He did actually fall, of course, but you were not the one that pushed him.”

I held it a moment and watched the hand drop down again to join the other one and the two of them twine together and pull hard on each other.

“You were made to think you had pushed him,” I said. “It was done with care, deliberation and the sort of quiet ruthlessness you only find in a certain kind of woman dealing with another woman. You wouldn’t think of jealousy to look at Mrs. Murdock now—but if that was a motive, she had it. She had a better one—fifty thousand dollars’ life insurance—all that was left from a ruined fortune. She had the strange wild possessive love for her son such women have. She’s cold, bitter, unscrupulous and she used you without mercy or pity, as insurance, in case Vannier ever blew his top. You were just a scapegoat to her. If you want to come out of this pallid sub-emotional life you have been living, you have got to realize and believe what I am telling you. I know it’s tough.”

“It’s utterly impossible,” she said quietly, looking at the bridge of my nose, “Mrs. Murdock has been wonderful to me always. It’s true I never remembered very well—but you shouldn’t say such awful things about people.”

I got out the white envelope that had been in the back of Vannier’s picture. Two prints in it and a negative. I stood in front of her and put a print on her lap.

“Okay, look at it. Vannier took it from across the street.” She looked at it. “Why that’s Mr. Bright,” she said. “It’s not a very good picture, is it? And that’s Mrs. Murdock—Mrs. Bright she was then—right behind him. Mr. Bright looks mad.” She looked up at me with a sort of mild curiosity.

“If he looks mad there,” I said, “you ought to have seen him a few seconds later, when he bounced.”

“When he what?”

“Look,” I said, and there was a kind of desperation in my voice now, “that is a snapshot of Mrs. Elizabeth Bright Murdock giving her first husband the heave out of his office window. He’s falling. Look at the position of his hands. He’s screaming with fear. She is behind him and her face is hard with rage—or something. Don’t you get it at all? This is what Vannier has had for proof all these years. The Murdocks never saw it, never really believed it existed. But it did. I found it last night, by a fluke of the same sort that was involved in the taking of the picture. Which is a fair sort of justice. Do you begin to understand?”

She looked at the photo again and laid it aside. “Mrs. Murdock has always been lovely to me,” she said.

“She made you the goat,” I said, in the quietly strained voice of a stage manager at a bad rehearsal. “She’s a smart tough patient woman. She knows her complexes. She’ll even spend a dollar to keep a dollar, which is what few of her type will do. I hand it to her. I’d like to hand it to her with an elephant gun, but my polite breeding restrains me.”

“Well,” she said, “that’s that,” And I could see she had heard one word in three and hadn’t believed what she had heard. “You must never show this to Mrs. Murdock. It would upset her terribly.”

I got up and took the photo out of her hand and tore it into small pieces and dropped them in the wastebasket.

“Maybe you’ll be sorry I did that,” I told her, not telling her I had another and the negative. “Maybe some night—three months—three years from now—you will wake up in the night and realize I have been telling you the truth. And maybe then you will wish you could look at that photograph again. And maybe I am wrong about this too. Maybe you would be very disappointed to find out you hadn’t really killed anybody. That’s fine. Either way it’s fine. Now we are going downstairs and get in my car and we are going to drive to Wichita to visit your parents. And I don’t think you are going back to Mrs. Murdock, but it may well be that I am wrong about that too. But we are not going to talk about this any more. Not any more.”

“I haven’t any money,” she said.

“You have five hundred dollars that Mrs. Murdock sent you. I have it in my pocket.”

“That’s really awfully kind of her,” she said.

“Oh hell and fireflies,” I said and went out to the kitchen and gobbled a quick drink, before we started. It didn’t do me any good. It just made me want to climb up the wall and gnaw my way across the ceiling.

36

I was gone ten days. Merle’s parents were vague kind patient people living in an old frame house in a quiet shady street. They cried when I told them as much of the story as I thought they should know. They said they were glad to have her back and they would take good care of her and they blamed themselves a lot, and I let them do it.

When I left Merle was wearing a bungalow apron and rolling pie crust. She came to the door wiping her hands on the apron and kissed me on the mouth and began to cry and ran back into the house, leaving the doorway empty until her mother came into the space with a broad homey smile on her face to watch me drive away.

I had a funny feeling as I saw the house disappear, as though I had written a poem and it was very good and I had lost it and would never remember it again.

I called Lieutenant Breeze when I got back and went down to ask him how the Phillips case was coming. They had cracked it very neatly, with the right mixture of brains and luck you always have to have. The Mornys never went to the police after all, but somebody called and told about a shot in Vannier’s house and hung up quickly. The fingerprint man didn’t like the prints on the gun too well, so they checked Vannier’s hand for powder nitrates. When they found them they decided it was suicide after all. Then a dick named Lackey working out of Central Homicide thought to work on the gun a little and he found that a description of it had been distributed, and a gun like it was wanted in connection with the Phillips killing. Hench identified it, but better than that they found a half print of his thumb on the side of the trigger, which, not ordinarily being pulled back, had not been wiped off completely.

With that much in hand and a better set of Vannier’s prints than I could make they went over Phillips’ apartment again and also over Hench’s. They found Vannier’s left hand on Hench’s bed and one of his fingers on the underside of the toilet flush lever in Phillips’ place. Then they got to work in the neighborhood with photographs of Vannier and proved he had been along the alley twice and on a side street at least three times. Curiously, nobody in the apartment house had seen him, or would admit it.