The Little Sister

The Little Sister

A Philip Marlowe Novel

Raymond Chandler

The Little Sister

Copyright 1949 by Raymond Chandler.

All rights reserved.

1

The pebbled glass door panel is lettered in flaked black paint: “Philip Marlowe… Investigations.” It is a reasonably shabby door at the end of a reasonably shabby corridor in the sort of building that was new about the year the all-tile bathroom became the basis of civilization. The door is locked, but next to it is another door with the same legend which is not locked. Come on in—there’s nobody in here but me and a big bluebottle fly. But not if you’re from Manhattan, Kansas.

It was one of those clear, bright summer mornings we get in the early spring in California before the high fog sets in. The rains are over. The hills are still green and in the valley across the Hollywood hills you can see snow on the high mountains. The fur stores are advertising their annual sales. The call houses that specialize in sixteen-year-old virgins are doing a land-office business. And in Beverly Hills the jacaranda trees are beginning to bloom.

I had been stalking the bluebottle fly for five minutes, waiting for him to sit down. He didn’t want to sit down. He just wanted to do wingovers and sing the prologue to Pagliacci. I had the fly swatter poised in midair and I was all set. There was a patch of bright sunlight on the corner of the desk and I knew that sooner or later that was where he was going to light. But when he did, I didn’t even see him at first. The buzzing stopped and there he was. And then the phone rang.

I reached for it inch by inch with a slow and patient left hand. I lifted the phone slowly and spoke into it softly: “Hold the line a moment, please.”

I laid the phone down gently on the brown blotter. He was still there, shining and blue-green and full of sin. I took a deep breath and swung. What was left of him sailed halfway across the room and dropped to the carpet. I went over and picked him up by his good wing and dropped him into the wastebasket.

“Thanks for waiting,” I said into the phone.

“Is this Mr. Marlowe, the detective?” It was a small, rather hurried, little-girlish voice. I said it was Mr. Marlowe, the detective. “How much do you charge for your services, Mr. Marlowe?”

“What was it you wanted done?”

The voice sharpened a little. “I can’t very well tell you that over the phone. It’s—it’s very confidential. Before I’d waste time coming to your office I’d have to have some idea—”

“Forty bucks a day and expenses. Unless it’s the kind of job that can be done for a flat fee.”

“That’s far too much,” the little voice said. “Why, it might cost hundreds of dollars and I only get a small salary and—”

“Where are you now?”

“Why, I’m in a drugstore. It’s right next to the building where your office is.”

“You could have saved a nickel. The elevator’s free.”

“I—I beg your pardon?”

I said it all over again. “Come on up and let’s have a look at you,” I added. “If you’re in my kind of trouble, I can give you a pretty good idea—”

“I have to know something about you,” the small voice said very firmly. “This is a very delicate matter, very personal. I couldn’t talk to just anybody.”

“If it’s that delicate,” I said, “maybe you need a lady detective.”

“Goodness, I didn’t know there were any.” Pause. “But I don’t think a lady detective would do at all. You see, Orrin was living in a very tough neighborhood, Mr. Marlowe. At least I thought it was tough. The manager of the rooming house is a most unpleasant person. He smelled of liquor. Do you drink, Mr. Marlowe?”

“Well, now that you mention it—”

“I don’t think I’d care to employ a detective that uses liquor in any form. I don’t even approve of tobacco.”

“Would it be all right if I peeled an orange?”

I caught the sharp intake of breath at the far end of the line. “You might at least talk like a gentleman,” she said.

“Better try the University Club,” I told her. “I heard they had a couple left over there, but I’m not sure they’ll let you handle them.” I hung up.

It was a step in the right direction, but it didn’t go far enough. I ought to have locked the door and hid under the desk.

2

Five minutes later the buzzer sounded on the outer door of the half-office I use for a reception room. I heard the door close again. Then I didn’t hear anything more. The door between me and there was half open. I listened and decided somebody had just looked in at the wrong office and left without entering. Then there was a small knocking on wood. Then the kind of cough you use for the same purpose. I got my feet off the desk, stood up and looked out. There she was. She didn’t have to open her mouth for me to know who she was. And nobody ever looked less like Lady Macbeth. She was a small, neat, rather prissy-looking girl with primly smooth brown hair and rimless glasses. She was wearing a brown tailor-made and from a strap over her shoulder hung one of those awkward-looking square bags that make you think of a Sister of Mercy taking first aid to the wounded. On the smooth brown hair was a hat that had been taken from its mother too young. She had no make-up, no lipstick and no jewelry. The rimless glasses gave her that librarian’s look.

“That’s no way to talk to people over the telephone,” she said sharply. “You ought to be ashamed of yourself.”

“I’m just too proud to show it,” I said. “Come on in.” I held the door for her. Then I held the chair for her.

She sat down on about two inches of the edge. “If I talked like that to one of Dr. Zugsmith’s patients,” she said, “I’d lose my position. He’s most particular how I speak to the patients—even the difficult ones.”

“How is the old boy? I haven’t seen him since that time I fell off the garage roof.”

She looked surprised and quite serious. “Why surely you can’t know Dr. Zugsmith.” The tip of a rather anemic tongue came out between her lips and searched furtively for nothing.

“I know a Dr. George Zugsmith,” I said, “in Santa Rosa.”

“Oh no. This is Dr. Alfred Zugsmith, in Manhattan. Manhattan, Kansas, you know, not Manhattan, New York.”

“Must be a different Dr. Zugsmith,” I said. “And your name?”

“I’m not sure I’d care to tell you.”

“Just window shopping, huh?”

“I suppose you could call it that. If I have to tell my family affairs to a total stranger, I at least have the right to decide whether he’s the kind of person I could trust.”

“Anybody ever tell you you’re a cute little trick?”

The eyes behind the rimless cheaters flashed. “I should hope not.”

I reached for a pipe and started to fill it. “Hope isn’t exactly the word,” I said. “Get rid of that hat and get yourself a pair of those slinky glasses with colored rims. You know, the ones that are all cockeyed and oriental—”

“Dr. Zugsmith wouldn’t permit anything like that,” she said quickly. Then, “Do you really think so?” she asked, and blushed ever so slightly.

I put a match to the pipe and puffed smoke across the desk. She winced back.

“If you hire me,” I said, “I’m the guy you hire. Me. Just as I am. If you think you’re going to find any lay readers in this business, you’re crazy. I hung up on you, but you came up here all the same. So you need help. What’s your name and trouble?”

She just stared at me.

“Look,” I said. “You come from Manhattan, Kansas. The last time I memorized the World Almanac that was a little town not far from Topeka. Population around twelve thousand. You work for Dr. Alfred Zugsmith and you’re looking for somebody named Orrin. Manhattan is a small town. It has to be. Only half a dozen places in Kansas are anything else. I already have enough information about you to find out your whole family history.”

“But why should you want to?” she asked, troubled.

“Me?” I said. “I don’t want to. I’m fed up with people telling me histories. I’m just sitting here because I don’t have any place to go. I don’t want to work. I don’t want anything.”

“You talk too much.”

“Yes,” I said, “I talk too much. Lonely men always talk too much. Either that or they don’t talk at all. Shall we get down to business? You don’t look like the type that goes to see private detectives, and especially private detectives you don’t know.”

“I know that,” she said quietly. “And Orrin would be absolutely livid. Mother would be furious too. I just picked your name out of the phone book—”

“What principle?” I asked. “And with the eyes closed or open?”

She stared at me for a moment as if I were some kind of freak. “Seven and thirteen,” she said quietly.

“How?”

“Marlowe has seven letters,” she said, “and Philip Marlowe has thirteen. Seven together with thirteen—”

“What’s your name?” I almost snarled.

“Orfamay Quest.” She crinkled her eyes as if she could cry. She spelled the first name out for me, all one word. “I live with my mother,” she went on, her voice getting rapid now as if my time is costing her. “My father died four years ago. He was a doctor. My brother Orrin was going to be a surgeon, too, but he changed into engineering after two years of medical. Then a year ago Orrin came out to work for the Cal-Western Aircraft Company in Bay City. He didn’t have to. He had a good job in Wichita. I guess he just sort of wanted to come out here to California. Most everybody does.”

“Almost everybody,” I said. “If you’re going to wear those rimless glasses, you might at least try to live up to them.”

She giggled and drew a line along the desk with her fingertip, looking down. “Did you mean those slanting kind of glasses that make you look kind of oriental?”

“Uh-huh. Now about Orrin. We’ve got him to California, and we’ve got him to Bay City. What do we do with him?”

She thought a moment and frowned. Then she studied my face as if making up her mind. Then her words came with a burst: “It wasn’t like Orrin not to write to us regularly. He only wrote twice to mother and three times to me in the last six months. And the last letter was several months ago. Mother and I got worried. So it was my vacation and I came out to see him. He’d never been away from Kansas before.” She stopped. “Aren’t you going to take any notes?” she asked.

I grunted.

“I thought detectives always wrote things down in little notebooks.”

“I’ll make the gags,” I said. “You tell the story. You came out on your vacation. Then what?”

“I’d written to Orrin that I was coming but I didn’t get any answer. Then I sent a wire to him from Salt Lake City but he didn’t answer that either. So all I could do was go down where he lived. It’s an awful long way. I went in a bus. It’s in Bay City. No. 449 Idaho Street.”

She stopped again, then repeated the address, and I still didn’t write it down. I just sat there looking at her glasses and her smooth brown hair and the silly little hat and the fingernails with no color and her mouth with no lipstick and the tip of the little tongue that came and went between the pale lips.

“Maybe you don’t know Bay City, Mr. Marlowe.”

“Ha,” I said. “All I know about Bay City is that every time I go there I have to buy a new head. You want me to finish your story for you?”

“Wha-a-at?” Her eyes opened so wide that the glasses made them look like something you see in the deep-sea fish tanks.

“He’s moved,” I said. “And you don’t know where he’s moved to. And you’re afraid he’s living a life of sin in a penthouse on top of the Regency Towers with something in a long mink coat and an interesting perfume.”

“Well for goodness’ sakes!”

“Or am I being coarse?” I asked.

“Please, Mr. Marlowe,” she said at last, “I don’t think anything of the sort about Orrin. And if Orrin heard you say that you’d be sorry. He can be awfully mean. But I know something has happened. It was just a cheap rooming house, and I didn’t like the manager at all. A horrid kind of man. He said Orrin had moved away a couple of weeks before and he didn’t know where to and he didn’t care, and all he wanted was a good slug of gin. I don’t know why Orrin would even live in a place like that.”

“Did you say slug of gin?” I asked.

She blushed. “That’s what the manager said. I’m just telling you.”

“All right,” I said. “Go on.”

“Well, I called the place where he worked. The Cal-Western Company, you know. And they said he’d been laid off like a lot of others and that was all they knew. So then I went to the post office and asked if Orrin had put in a change of address to anywhere. And they said they couldn’t give me any information. It was against the regulations. So I told them how it was and the man said, well if I was his sister he’d go look. So he went and looked and came back and said no. Orrin hadn’t put in any change of address. So then I began to get a little frightened. He might have had an accident or something.”

“Did it occur to you to ask the police about that?”

“I wouldn’t dare ask the police. Orrin would never forgive me. He’s difficult enough at the best of times. Our family—” She hesitated and there was something behind her eyes she tried not to have there. So she went on breathlessly: “Our family’s not the kind of family—”

“Look,” I said wearily, “I’m not talking about the guy lifting a wallet. I’m talking about him getting knocked down by a car and losing his memory or being too badly hurt to talk.”

She gave me a level look which was not too admiring. “If it was anything like that, we’d know,” she said. “Everybody has things in their pockets to tell who they are.”

“Sometimes all they have left is the pockets.”

“Are you trying to scare me, Mr. Marlowe?”

“If I am, I’m certainly getting nowhere fast. Just what do you think might have happened?”

She put her slim forefinger to her lips and touched it very carefully with the tip of that tongue. “I guess if I knew that I wouldn’t have to come and see you. How much would you charge to find him?”

I didn’t answer for a long moment, then I said: “You mean alone, without telling anybody?”

“Yes. I mean alone, without telling anybody.”

“Uh-huh. Well that depends. I told you what my rates were.”

She clasped her hands on the edge of the desk and squeezed them together hard. She had about the most meaningless set of gestures I had ever laid eyes on. “I thought you being a detective and all you could find him right away,” she said. “I couldn’t possibly afford more than twenty dollars. I’ve got to buy my meals here and my hotel and the train going back and you know the hotel is so terribly expensive and the food on the train—”

“Which one are you staying at?”

“I—I’d rather not tell you, if you don’t mind.”

“Why?”

“I’d just rather not. I’m terribly afraid of Orrin’s temper. And, well I can always call you up, can’t I?”

“Uh-huh. Just what is it you’re scared of, besides Orrin’s temper, Miss Quest?” I had let my pipe go out. I struck a match and held it to the bowl, watching her over it.

“Isn’t pipe smoking a very dirty habit?” she asked.

“Probably,” I said. “But it would take more than twenty bucks to have me drop it. And don’t try to side-step my questions.”

“You can’t talk to me like that,” she flared up. “Pipe smoking is a dirty habit. Mother never let father smoke in the house, even the last two years after he had his stroke. He used to sit with that empty pipe in his mouth sometimes. But she didn’t like him to do that really. We owed a lot of money too and she said she couldn’t afford to give him money for useless things like tobacco. The church needed it much more than he did.”

“I’m beginning to get it,” I said slowly. “Take a family like yours and somebody in it has to be the dark meat.”

She stood up sharply and clasped the first-aid kit to her body. “I don’t like you,” she said. “I don’t think I’m going to employ you. If you’re insinuating that Orrin has done something wrong, well I can assure you that it’s not Orrin who’s the black sheep of our family.”

I didn’t move an eyelash. She swung around and marched to the door and put her hand on the knob and then she swung around again and marched back and suddenly began to cry. I reacted to that just the way a stuffed fish reacts to cut bait. She got out her little handkerchief and tickled the corners of her eyes.

“And now I suppose you’ll call the p-police,” she said with a catch in her voice. “And the Manhattan p-paper will hear all about it and they’ll print something n-nasty about us.”

“You don’t suppose anything of the sort. Stop chipping at my emotions. Let’s see a photo of him.”

She put the handkerchief away in a hurry and dug something else out of her bag. She passed it across the desk. An envelope. Thin, but there could be a couple of snapshots in it. I didn’t look inside.

“Describe him the way you see him,” I said.

She concentrated. That gave her a chance to do something with her eyebrows. “He was twenty-eight years old last March. He has light brown hair, much lighter than mine, and lighter blue eyes, and he brushes his hair straight back. He’s very tall, over six feet. But he only weighs about a hundred and forty pounds. He’s sort of bony. He used to wear a little blond mustache but mother made him cut it off. She said—”

“Don’t tell me. The minister needed it to stuff a cushion.”

“You can’t talk like that about my mother,” she yelped, getting pale with rage.

“Oh stop being silly. There’s a lot of things about you I don’t know. But you can stop pretending to be an Easter lily right now. Does Orrin have any distinguishing marks on him, like moles or scars, or a tattoo of the Twenty-Third Psalm on his chest? And don’t bother to blush.”

“Well you don’t have to yell at me. Why don’t you look at the photograph?”

“He probably has his clothes on. After all, you’re his sister. You ought to know.”

“No he hasn’t,” she said tightly. “He has a little scar on his left hand where he had a wen removed.”

“What about his habits? What does he do for fun—besides not smoking or drinking or going out with girls?”

“Why—how did you know that?”

“Your mother told me.”

She smiled. I was beginning to wonder if she had one in her. She had very white teeth and she didn’t wave her gums. That was something. “Aren’t you silly,” she said. “He studies a lot and he has a very expensive camera he likes to snap people with when they don’t know. Sometimes it makes them mad. But Orrin says people ought to see themselves as they really are.”

“Let’s hope it never happens to him,” I said. “What kind of camera is it?”

“One of those little cameras with a very fine lens. You can take snaps in almost any kind of light. A Leica.”

I opened the envelope and took out a couple of small prints, very clear. “These weren’t taken with anything like that,” I said.

“Oh no. Philip took those, Philip Anderson. A boy I was going with for a while.” She paused and sighed. “And I guess that’s really why I came here, Mr. Marlowe. Just because your name’s Philip too.”

I just said: “Uh-huh,” but I felt touched in some vague sort of way. “What happened to Philip Anderson?”

“But it’s about Orrin—”

“I know,” I interrupted. “But what happened to Philip Anderson?”

“He’s still there in Manhattan.” She looked away. “Mother doesn’t like him very much. I guess you know how it is.”

“Yes,” I said, “I know how it is. You can cry if you want to. I won’t hold it against you. I’m just a big soft slob myself.”

I looked at the two prints. One of them was looking down and was no good to me. The other was a fairly good shot of a tall angular bird with narrow-set eyes and a thin straight mouth and a pointed chin. He had the expression I expected to see. If you forgot to wipe the mud off your shoes, he was the boy who would tell you. I laid the photos aside and looked at Orfamay Quest, trying to find something in her face even remotely like his. I couldn’t. Not the slightest trace of family resemblance, which of course meant absolutely nothing. It never has.

“All right,” I said. “I’ll go down there and take a look. But you ought to be able to guess what’s happened. He’s in a strange city. He’s making good money for a while. More than he’s ever made in his life, perhaps. He’s meeting a kind of people he never met before. And it’s not the kind of town—believe me it isn’t, I know Bay City—that Manhattan, Kansas, is. So he just broke training and he doesn’t want his family to know about it. He’ll straighten out.”

She just stared at me for a moment in silence, then she shook her head. “No. Orrin’s not the type to do that, Mr. Marlowe.”

“Anyone is,” I said. “Especially a fellow like Orrin. The small-town sanctimonious type of guy who’s lived his entire life with his mother on his neck and the minister holding his hand. Out here he’s lonely. He’s got dough. He’d like to buy a little sweetness and light, and not the kind that comes through the east window of a church. Not that I have anything against that. I mean he already had enough of that, didn’t he?”

She nodded her head silently.

“So he starts to play,” I went on, “and he doesn’t know how to play. That takes experience too. He’s got himself all jammed up with some floozy and a bottle of hootch and what he’s done looks to him as if he’d stolen the bishop’s pants. After all, the guy’s going on twenty-nine years old and if he wants to roll in the gutter that’s his business. He’ll find somebody to blame it on after a while.”

“I hate to believe you, Mr. Marlowe,” she said slowly. “I’d hate for mother—”

“Something was said about twenty dollars,” I cut in.

She looked shocked. “Do I have to pay you now?”

“What would be the custom in Manhattan, Kansas?”

“We don’t have any private detectives in Manhattan. Just the regular police. That is, I don’t think we do.”

She probed in the inside of her tool kit again and dragged out a red change purse and from that she took a number of bills, all neatly folded and separate. Three fives and five ones. There didn’t seem to be much left. She kind of held the purse so I could see how empty it was. Then she straightened the bills out on the desk and put one on top of the other and pushed them across. Very slowly, very sadly, as if she was drowning a favorite kitten.

“I’ll give you a receipt,” I said.

“I don’t need a receipt, Mr. Marlowe.”

“I do. You won’t give me your name and address, so I want something with your name on it.”

“What for?”

“To show I’m representing you.” I got the receipt book out and made the receipt and held the book for her to sign the duplicate. She didn’t want to. After a moment reluctantly she took the hard pencil and wrote “Orfamay Quest” in a neat secretary’s writing across the face of the duplicate.

“Still no address?” I asked.

“I’d rather not.”

“Call me any time then. My home number is in the phone book too. Bristol Apartments, Apartment 428.”

“I shan’t be very likely to visit you,” she said coldly.

“I haven’t asked you yet,” I said. “Call me around four if you like. I might have something. And then again I might not.”

She stood up. “I hope mother won’t think I’ve done wrong,” she said, picking at her lip now with the pale fingernail. “Coming here, I mean.”

“Just don’t tell me any more of the things your mother won’t like,” I said. “Just leave that part out.”

“Well really!”

“And stop saying ‘well really’.”

“I think you are a very offensive person,” she said.

“No, you don’t. You think I’m cute. And I think you’re a fascinating little liar. You don’t think I’m doing this for any twenty bucks, do you?”

She gave me a level, suddenly cool stare. “Then why?” Then when I didn’t answer she added, “Because spring is in the air?”

I still didn’t answer. She blushed a little. Then she giggled.

I didn’t have the heart to tell her I was just plain bored with doing nothing. Perhaps it was the spring too. And something in her eyes that was much older than Manhattan, Kansas.

“I think you’re very nice—really,” she said softly. Then she turned quickly and almost ran out of the office. Her steps along the corridor outside made tiny, sharp pecky sounds, kind of like mother drumming on the edge of the dinner table when father tried to promote himself a second piece of pie. And him with no money any more. No nothing. Just sitting in a rocker on the front porch back there in Manhattan, Kansas, with his empty pipe in his mouth. Rocking on the front porch, slow and easy, because when you’ve had a stroke you have to take it slow and easy. And wait for the next one. And the empty pipe in his mouth. No tobacco. Nothing to do but wait.

I put Orfamay Quest’s twenty hard-earned dollars in an envelope and wrote her name on it and dropped it in the desk drawer. I didn’t like the idea of running around loose with that much currency on me.

3

You could know Bay City a long time without knowing Idaho Street. And you could know a lot of Idaho Street without knowing Number 449. The block in front of it had a broken paving that had almost gone back to dirt. The warped fence of a lumberyard bordered the cracked sidewalk on the opposite side of the street. Halfway up the block the rusted rails of a spur track turned in to a pair of high, chained wooden gates that seem not to have been opened for twenty years. Little boys with chalk had been writing and drawing pictures on the gates and all along the fence.

Number 449 had a shallow, paintless front porch on which five wood and cane rockers loafed dissolutely, held together with wire and the moisture of the beach air. The green shades over the lower windows of the house were two thirds down and full of cracks. Beside the front door there was a large printed sign “No Vacancies.” That had been there a long time too. It had got faded and flyspecked. The door opened on a long hall from which stairs went up a third of the way back. To the right there was a narrow shelf with a chained, indelible pencil hanging beside it. There was a push button and a yellow and black sign above which read “Manager,” and was held up by three thumbtacks no two of which matched. There was a pay phone on the opposite wall.

I pushed the bell. It rang somewhere near by but nothing happened. I rang it again. The same nothing happened. I prowled along to a door with a black and white metal sign on it—“Manager.” I knocked on that. Then I kicked it. Nobody seemed to mind my kicking it.

I went back out of the house and down around the side where a narrow concrete walk led to the service entrance. It looked as if it was in the right place to belong to the manager’s apartment. The rest of the house would be just rooms. There was a dirty garbage pail on the small porch and a wooden box full of liquor bottles. Behind the screen the back door of the house was open. It was gloomy inside. I put my face against the screen and peered in. Through the open inner door beyond the service porch I could see a straight chair with a man’s coat hanging over it and in the chair a man in shirtsleeves with his hat on. He was a small man. I couldn’t see what he was doing, but he seemed to be sitting at the end of the built-in breakfast table in the breakfast nook.

I banged on the screen door. The man paid no attention. I banged again, harder. This time he tilted his chair back and showed me a small pale face with a cigarette in it. “Whatcha want?” he barked.

“Manager.”

“Not in, bub.”

“Who are you?”

“What’s it to you?”

“I want a room.”

“No vacancies, bub. Can’t you read large print?”

“I happen to have different information,” I said.

“Yeah?” He shook ash from his cigarette by flicking it with a nail without removing it from his small sad mouth. “Go fry your head in it.”

He tilted his chair forward again and went on doing whatever it was he was doing.

I made noise getting down off the porch and none whatever coming back up on it. I felt the screen door carefully. It was hooked. With the open blade of a penknife I lifted the hook and eased it out of the eye. It made a small tinkle but louder tinkling sounds were being made beyond, in the kitchen.

I stepped into the house, crossed the service porch, went through the door into the kitchen. The little man was too busy to notice me. The kitchen had a three-burner gas stove, a few shelves of greasy dishes, a chipped icebox and the breakfast nook. The table in the breakfast nook was covered with money. Most of it was paper, but there was silver also, in all sizes up to dollars. The little man was counting and stacking it and making entries in a small book. He wetted his pencil without bothering the cigarette that lived in his face.

There must have been several hundred dollars on that table.

“Rent day?” I asked genially.

The small man turned very suddenly. For a moment he smiled and said nothing. It was the smile of a man whose mind is not smiling. He removed the stub of cigarette from his mouth, dropped it on the floor and stepped on it. He reached a fresh one out of his shirt and put it in the same hole in his face and started fumbling for a match.

“You came in nice,” he said pleasantly.

Finding no match, he turned casually in his chair and reached into a pocket of his coat. Something heavy knocked against the wood of the chair. I got hold of his wrist before the heavy thing came out of the pocket. He threw his weight backwards and the pocket of the coat started to lift towards me. I yanked the chair out from under him.

He sat down hard on the floor and knocked his head against the end of the breakfast table. That didn’t keep him from trying to kick me in the groin. I stepped back with his coat and took a .38 out of the pocket he had been playing with.

“Don’t sit on the floor just to be chummy,” I said.

He got up slowly, pretending to be groggier than he was. His hand fumbled at the back of his collar and light winked on metal as his arm swept toward me. He was a game little rooster.

I sideswiped his jaw with his own gun and he sat down on the floor again. I stepped on the hand that held the knife. His face twisted with pain but he didn’t make a sound. So I kicked the knife into a corner. It was a long thin knife and it looked very sharp.

“You ought to be ashamed of yourself,” I said. “Pulling guns and knives on people that are just looking for a place to live. Even for these times that’s out of line.”

He held his hurt hand between his knees and squeezed it and began to whistle through his teeth. The slap on the jaw didn’t seem to have hurt him. “O.K.,” he said, “O.K. I ain’t supposed to be perfect. Take the dough and beat it. But don’t ever think we won’t catch up with you.”

I looked at the collection of small bills and medium bills and silver on the table. “You must meet a lot of sales resistance, the weapons you carry,” I told him. I walked across to the inner door and tried it. It was not locked. I turned back.

“I’ll leave your gun in the mailbox,” I said. “Next time ask to see the buzzer.”

He was still whistling gently between his teeth and holding his hand. He gave me a narrow, thoughtful eye, then shoveled the money into a shabby briefcase and slipped its catch. He took his hat off, straightened it around, put it back jauntily on the back of his head and gave me a quiet efficient smile.

“Never mind about the heater,” he said. “The town’s full of old iron. But you could leave the skiv with Clausen. I’ve done quite a bit of work on it to get it in shape.”

“And with it?” I said.

“Could be.” He flicked a finger at me airily. “Maybe we meet again some day soon. When I got a friend with me.”

“Tell him to wear a clean shirt,” I said. “And lend you one.”

“My, my,” the little man said chidingly. “How tough we get how quick once we get that badge pinned on.”

He went softly past me and down the wooden steps from the back porch. His footsteps tapped to the street sand faded. They sounded very much like Orfamay’s heels clicking along the corridor in my office building. And for some reason I had that empty feeling of having miscounted the trumps. No reason for it at all. Maybe it was the steely quality about the little man. No whimper, no bluster, just the smile, the whistling between the teeth, the light voice and the unforgetting eyes.

I went over and picked up the knife. The blade was long and round and thin, like a rat-tailed file that has been ground smooth. The handle and guard were lightweight plastic and seemed all one piece. I held the knife by the handle and gave it a quick flip at the table. The blade came loose and quivered in the wood.

I took a deep breath and slid the handle down over the end again and worked the blade loose from the table. A curious knife, with design and purpose in it, and neither of them agreeable.

I opened the door beyond the kitchen and went through it with the gun and knife in one hand.

It was a wall-bed living room, with the wall bed down and rumpled. There was an overstuffed chair with a hole burnt in the arm. A high oak desk with tilted doors like old-fashioned cellar doors stood against the wall by the front window. Near this there was a studio couch and on the studio couch lay a man. His feet hung over the end of the couch in knobby gray socks. His head had missed the pillow by two feet. It was nothing much to miss from the color of the slip on it. The upper part of him was contained in a colorless shirt and a threadbare gray coat-sweater. His mouth was open and his face was shining with sweat and he breathed like an old Ford with a leaky head gasket. On a table beside him was a plate full of cigarette stubs, some of which had a homemade look. On the floor a near full gin bottle and a cup that seemed to have contained coffee but not at all recently. The room was full mostly of gin and bad air, but there was also a reminiscence of marijuana smoke.

I opened a window and leaned my forehead against the screen to get a little cleaner air into my lungs and looked out into the street. Two kids were wheeling bicycles along the lumberyard fence, stopping from time to time to study the examples of rest-room art on the boarding. Nothing else moved in the neighborhood. Not even a dog. Down at the corner was dust in the air as though a car had passed that way.

I went over to the desk. Inside it was the house register, so I leafed back until I came to the name “Orrin P. Quest,” written in a sharp meticulous handwriting, and the number 214 added in pencil by another hand that was by no means sharp or meticulous, I followed on through to the end of the register but found no new registration for Room 214. A party named G. W. Hicks had Room 215. I shut the register in the desk and crossed to the couch. The man stopped his snoring and bubbling and threw his right arm across his body as if he thought he was making a speech. I leaned down and gripped his nose tight between my first and second fingers and stuffed a handful of his sweater into his mouth. He stopped snoring and jerked this eyes open. They were glazed and bloodshot. He struggled against my hand. When I was sure he was fully awake I let go of him, picked the bottle full of gin off the floor and poured some into a glass that lay on its side near the bottle. I showed the glass to the man.

His hand came out to it with the beautiful anxiety of a mother welcoming a lost child.

I moved it out of his reach and said: “You the manager?”

He licked his lips stickily and said: “Gr-r-r-r.”

He made a grab for the glass. I put it on the table in front of him. He grasped it carefully in both hands and poured the gin into his face. Then he laughed heartily and threw the glass at me. I managed to catch it and up-end it on the table again. The man looked me over with a studied but unsuccessful attempt at sternness.

“What gives?” he croaked in an annoyed tone.

“Manager?”

He nodded and almost fell off the couch. “Must be I’m drunky,” he said. “Kind of a bit of a little bit drunky.”

“You’re not bad,” I said. “You’re still breathing.”

He put his feet on the ground and pushed himself upright. He cackled with sudden amusement, took three uneven steps, went down on his hands and knees and tried to bite the leg of a chair.

I pulled him up on his feet again, set him down in the overstuffed chair with the burned arm and poured him another slug of his medicine. He drank it, shuddered violently and all at once his eyes seemed to get sane and cunning. Drunks of his type have a certain balanced moment of reality. You never know when it will come or how long it will last.

“Who the hell are you?” he growled.

“I’m looking for a man named Orrin P. Quest.”

“Huh?”

I said it again. He smeared his face with his hands and said tersely: “Moved away.”

“Moved away when?”

He waved his hand, almost fell out of his chair and waved it again the other way to restore his balance. “Gimme a drink,” he said.

I poured another slug of the gin and held it out of his reach.

“Gimme,” the man said urgently. “I’m not happy.”

“All I want is the present address of Orrin P. Quest.”

“Just think of that,” he said wittily and made a loose pass at the glass I was holding.

I put the glass down on the floor and got one of my business cards out for him. “This might help you to concentrate,” I told him.

He peered at the card closely, sneered, bent it in half and bent it again. He held it on the flat of his hand, spit on it, and tossed it over his shoulder.

I handed him the glass of gin. He drank it to my health, nodded solemnly, and threw the glass over his shoulder too. It rolled along the floor and thumped the baseboard. The man stood up with surprising ease, jerked a thumb towards the ceiling, doubled the fingers of his hand under it and made a sharp noise with his tongue and teeth.

“Beat it,” he said. “I got friends.” He looked at the telephone on the wall and back at me with cunning. “A couple of boys to take care of you,” he sneered. I said nothing. “Don’t believe me, huh?” he snarled, suddenly angry. I shook my head.

He started for the telephone, clawed the receiver off the hook, and dialed the five digits of a number. I watched him. One-three-five-seven-two.

That took all he had for the time being. He let the receiver fall and bang against the wall and he sat down on the floor beside it. He put it to his ear and growled at the wall: “Lemme talk to the Doc.” I listened silently.

“Vince! The Doc!” he shouted angrily. He shook the receiver and threw it away from him. He put his hands down on the floor and started to crawl in a circle. When he saw me he looked surprised and annoyed. He got shakily to his feet again and held his hand out. “Gimme a drink.”

I retrieved the fallen glass and milked the gin bottle into it. He accepted it with the dignity of an intoxicated dowager, drank it down with an airy flourish, walked calmly over to the couch and lay down, putting the glass under his head for a pillow. He went to sleep instantly.

I put the telephone receiver back on its hook, glanced out in the kitchen again, felt the man on the couch over and dug some keys out of his pocket. One of them was a passkey. The door to the hallway had a spring lock and I fixed it so that I could come in again and started up the stairs. I paused on the way to write “Doc—Vince, 13572” on an envelope. Maybe it was a clue.

The house was quite silent as I went on up.

4

The manager’s much filed passkey turned the lock of Room 214 without noise. I pushed the door open. The room was not empty. A chunky, strongly built man was bending over a suitcase on the bed, with his back to the door. Shirts and socks and underwear were laid out on the bed cover, and he was packing them leisurely and carefully, whistling between his teeth in a low monotone.

He stiffened as the door hinge creaked. His hand moved fast for the pillow on the bed.

“I beg your pardon,” I said. “The manager told me this room was vacant.”

He was as bald as a grapefruit. He wore dark gray flannel slacks and transparent plastic suspenders over a blue shirt. His hands came up from the pillow, went to his head, and down again. He turned and he had hair.

It looked as natural as hair ever looked, smooth, brown, not parted. He glared at me from under it.

“You can always try knocking,” he said.

He had a thick voice and a broad careful face that had been around.

“Why would I? If the manager said the room was empty?”

He nodded, satisfied. The glare went out of his eyes.

I came further into the room without invitation. An open love-pulp magazine lay face down on the bed near the suitcase. A cigar smoked in a green glass ashtray. The room was careful and orderly, and, for that house, clean.

“He must have thought you had already moved out,” I said, trying to look like a well-meaning party with some talent for the truth.

“Have it in half an hour,” the man said.

“O.K. if I look around?”

He smiled mirthlessly. “Ain’t been in town long, have you?”

“Why?”

“New around here, ain’t you?”

“Why?”

“Like the house and the neighborhood?”

“Not much,” I said. “The room looks all right.”

He grinned, showing a porcelain jacket crown that was too white for his other teeth. “How long you been looking?”

“Just started,” I said. “Why all the questions?”

“You make me laugh,” the man said, not laughing. “You don’t look at rooms in this town. You grab them sight unseen. This burg’s so jam-packed even now that I could get ten bucks just for telling there’s a vacancy here.”

“That’s too bad,” I said. “A man named Orrin P. Quest told me about the room. So there’s one sawbuck you don’t get to spend.”

“That so?” Not a flicker of an eye. Not a movement of a muscle. I might as well have been talking to a turtle.

“Don’t get tough with me,” the man said. “I’m a bad man to get tough with.”

He picked his cigar out of the green glass ashtray and blew a little smoke. Through it he gave me the cold gray eye. I got a cigarette out and scratched my chin with it.

“What happens to people that get tough with you?” I asked him. “You make them hold your toupee?”

“You lay off my toupee,” he said savagely.

“So sorry,” I said.

“There’s a ‘No Vacancy’ sign on the house,” the man said. “So what makes you come here and find one?”

“You didn’t catch the name,” I said. “Orrin P. Quest.” I spelled it for him. Even that didn’t make him happy. There was a dead-air pause.

He turned abruptly and put a pile of handkerchiefs into his suitcase. I moved a little closer to him. When he turned back there was what might have been a watchful look on his face. But it had been a watchful face to start with.

“Friend of yours?” he asked casually.

“We grew up together,” I said.

“Quiet sort of guy,” the man said easily. “I used to pass the time of day with him. Works for Cal-Western, don’t he?”

“He did,” I said.

“Oh. He quit?”

“Let out.”

We went on staring at each other. It didn’t get either of us anywhere. We both had done too much of it in our lives to expect miracles.

The man put the cigar back in his face and sat down on the side of the bed beside the open suitcase. Glancing into it I saw the square butt of an automatic peeping out from under a pair of badly folded shorts.

“This Quest party’s been out of here ten days,” the man said thoughtfully. “So he still thinks the room is vacant, huh?”

“According to the register it is vacant,” I said.

He made a contemptuous noise. “That rummy downstairs probably ain’t looked at the register in a month. Say—wait a minute.” His eyes sharpened and his hand wandered idly over the open suitcase and gave an idle pat to something that was close to the gun. When the hand moved away, the gun was no longer visible.

“I’ve been kind of dreamy all morning or I’d have wised up,” he said. “You’re a dick.”

“All right. Say I’m a dick.”

“What’s the beef?”

“No beef at all. I just wondered why you had the room.”

“I moved from 215 across the hail. This here is a better room. That’s all. Simple. Satisfied?”

“Perfectly,” I said, watching the hand that could be near the gun if it wanted to.

“What kind of dick? City? Let’s see the buzzer.”

I didn’t say anything.

“I don’t believe you got no buzzer.”

“If I showed it to you, you’re the type of guy would say it was counterfeit. So you’re Hicks.”

He looked surprised.

“George W. Hicks,” I said. “It’s in the register. Room 215. You just got through telling me you moved from 215.” I glanced around the room. “If you had a blackboard here, I’d write it out for you.”

“Strictly speaking, we don’t have to get into no snarling match,” he said. “Sure I’m Hicks. Pleased to meetcha. What’s yours?”

He held his hand out. I shook hands with him, but not as if I had been longing for the moment to arrive.

“My name’s Marlowe,” I said. “Philip Marlowe.”

“You know something,” Hicks said politely, “you’re a Goddamn liar.”

I laughed in his face.

“You ain’t getting no place with that breezy manner, bub. What’s your connection?”

I got my wallet out and handed him one of my business cards. He read it thoughtfully and tapped the edge against his porcelain crown.

“He coulda went somewhere without telling me,” he mused.

“Your grammar,” I said, “is almost as loose as your toupee.”

“You lay off my toupee, if you know what’s good for you,” he shouted.

“I wasn’t going to eat it,” I said. “I’m not that hungry.” He took a step towards me, and dropped his right shoulder. A scowl of fury dropped his lip almost as far.

“Don’t hit me. I’m insured,” I told him.

“Oh hell. Just another screwball.” He shrugged and put his lip back up on his face. “What’s the lay?”

“I have to find this Orrin P. Quest,” I said.

“Why?”

I didn’t answer that.

After a moment he said: “O.K. I’m a careful guy myself. That’s why I’m movin’ out.”

“Maybe you don’t like the reefer smoke.”

“That,” he said emptily, “and other things. That’s why Quest left. Respectable type. Like me. I think a couple of hard boys threw a scare into him.”

“I see,” I said. “That would be why he left no forwarding address. And why did they throw a scare into him?”

“You just mentioned reefer smoke, didn’t you? Wouldn’t he be the type to go to headquarters about that?”

“In Bay City?” I asked. “Why would he bother? Well, thanks a lot, Mr. Hicks. Going far?”

“Not far,” he said. “No. Not very far. Just far enough.”

“What’s your racket?” I asked him.

“Racket?” He looked hurt.

“Sure. What do you shake them for? How do you make your dibs?”

“You got me wrong, brother. I’m a retired optometrist.”

“That why you have the .45 gun in there?” I pointed to the suitcase.

“Nothing to get cute about,” he said sourly. “It’s been in the family for years.” He looked down at the card again. “Private investigator, huh?” he said thoughtfully. “What kind of work do you do mostly?”

“Anything that’s reasonably honest,” I said.

He nodded. “Reasonably is a word you could stretch. So is honest.”

I gave him a shady leer. “You’re so right,” I agreed. “Let’s get together some quiet afternoon and stretch them.” I reached out and slipped the card from between his fingers and dropped it into my pocket. “Thanks for the time,” I said.

I went out and closed the door, then stood against it listening. I don’t know what I expected to hear. Whatever it was I didn’t hear it. I had a feeling he was standing exactly where I had left him and looking at the spot where I had made my exit. I made noise going along the hall and stood at the head of the stairs.

A car drove away from in front of the house. Somewhere a door closed. I went quietly back to Room 215 and used the passkey to enter. I closed and locked its door silently, and waited just inside.

5

Not more than two minutes passed before Mr. George W. Hicks was on his way. He came out so quietly that I wouldn’t have heard him if I hadn’t been listening for precisely that kind of movement. I heard the slight metallic sound of the doorknob turning. Then slow steps. Then very gently the door was closed. The steps moved off. The faint distant creak of the stairs. Then nothing. I waited for the sound of the front door. It didn’t come. I opened the door of 215 and moved along the hall to the stair head again. Below there was the careful sound of a door being tried. I looked down to see Hicks going into the manager’s apartment. The door closed behind him. I waited for the sound of voices. No voices.

I shrugged and went back to 215.

The room showed signs of occupancy. There was a small radio on a night table, an unmade bed with shoes under it, and an old bathrobe hung over the cracked, pull-down green shade to keep the glare out.

I looked at all this as if it meant something, then stepped back into the hall and relocked the door. Then I made another pilgrimage into Room 214. Its door was now unlocked. I searched the room with care and patience and found nothing that connected it in any way with Orrin P. Quest. I didn’t expect to. There was no reason why I should. But you always have to look.

I went downstairs, listened outside the manager’s door, heard nothing, went in and crossed to put the keys on the desk. Lester B. Clausen lay on his side on the couch with his face to the wall, dead to the world. I went through the desk, found an old account book that seemed to be concerned with rent taken in and expenses paid out and nothing else. I looked at the register again. It wasn’t up to date but the party on the couch seemed enough explanation for that. Orrin P. Quest had moved away. Somebody had taken over his room. Somebody else had the room registered to Hicks. The little man counting money in the kitchen went nicely with the neighborhood. The fact that he carried a gun and a knife was a social eccentricity that would cause no comment at all on Idaho Street.

I reached the small Bay City telephone book off the hook beside the desk. I didn’t think it would be much of a job to sift out the party that went by the name of “Doc” or “Vince” and the phone number one-three-five-seven-two. First of all I leafed back through the register. Something which I ought to have done first. The page with Orrin Quest’s registration had been torn out. A careful man, Mr. George W. Hicks. Very careful.

I closed the register, glanced over at Lester B. Clausen again, wrinkled my nose at the stale air and the sickly sweetish smell of gin and of something else, and started back to the entrance door. As I reached it, something for the first time penetrated my mind. A drunk like Clausen ought to be snoring very loudly. He ought to be snoring his head off with a nice assortment of checks and gurgles and snorts. He wasn’t making any sound at all. A brown army blanket was pulled up around his shoulders and the lower part of his head. He looked very comfortable, very calm. I stood over him and looked down. Something which was not an accidental fold held the army blanket away from the back of his neck. I moved it. A square yellow wooden handle was attached to the back of Lester B. Clausen’s neck. On the side of the yellow handle were printed the words “Compliments of the Crumser Hardware Company.” The position of the handle was just below the occipital bulge.

It was the handle of an ice pick. . . .

I did a nice quiet thirty-five getting away from the neighborhood. On the edge of the city, a frog’s jump from the line, I shut myself in an outdoor telephone booth and called the Police Department.

“Bay City Police. Moot talking,” a furry voice said.

I said: “Number 449 Idaho Street. In the apartment of the manager. His name’s Clausen.”

“Yeah?” The voice said. “What do we do?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s a bit of a puzzle to me. But the man’s name is Lester B. Clausen. Got that?”

“What makes it important?” the furry voice said without suspicion.

“The coroner will want to know,” I said, and hung up.

6

I drove back to Hollywood and locked myself in the office with the Bay City telephone book. It took me a quarter-hour to find out that the party who went with the telephone number one-three-five-seven-two in Bay City was a Dr. Vincent Lagardie, who called himself a neurologist, had his home and offices on Wyoming Street, which according to my map was not quite in the best residential neighborhood and not quite out of it. I locked the Bay City telephone book up in my desk and went down to the corner drugstore for a sandwich and a cup of coffee and used a pay booth to call Dr. Vincent Lagardie. A woman answered and I had some trouble getting through to Dr. Lagardie himself. When I did his voice was impatient. He was very busy, in the middle of an examination he said. I never knew a doctor who wasn’t. Did he know Lester B. Clausen? He never heard of him. What was the purpose of my inquiry?

“Mr. Clausen tried to telephone you this morning,” I said. “He was too drunk to talk properly.”

“But I don’t know Mr. Clausen,” the doctor’s cool voice answered. He didn’t seem to be in quite such a hurry now.

“Well that’s all right then,” I said. “Just wanted to make sure. Somebody stuck an ice pick into the back of his neck.”

There was a quiet pause. Dr. Lagardie’s voice was now almost unctuously polite. “Has this been reported to the police?”

“Naturally,” I said. “But it shouldn’t bother you—unless of course it was your ice pick.”

He passed that one up. “And who is this speaking?” he inquired suavely.

“The name is Hicks,” I said. “George W. Hicks. I just moved out of there. I don’t want to get mixed up with that sort of thing. I just figured when Clausen tried to call you—this was before he was dead you understand—that you might be interested.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Hicks,” Dr. Lagardie’s voice said, “but I don’t know Mr. Clausen. I have never heard of Mr. Clausen or had any contact with him whatsoever. And I have an excellent memory for names.”

“Well, that’s fine,” I said. “And you won’t meet him now. But somebody may want to know why he tried to telephone you—unless I forget to pass the information along.”

There was a dead pause. Dr. Lagardie said: “I can’t think of any comment to make on that.”

I said: “Neither can I. I may call you again. Don’t get me wrong, Dr. Lagardie. This isn’t any kind of a shake. I’m just a mixed-up little man who needs a friend. I kind of felt that a doctor—like a clergyman—”

“I’m at your entire disposal,” Dr. Lagardie said. “Please feel free to consult me.”

“Thank you, doctor,” I said fervently. “Thank you very very much.”

I hung up. If Dr. Vincent Lagardie was on the level, he would now telephone the Bay City Police Department and tell them the story. If he didn’t telephone the police, he wasn’t on the level. Which might or might not be useful to know.

7

The phone on my desk rang at four o’clock sharp. “Did you find Orrin yet, Mr. Marlowe?”

“Not yet. Where are you?”

“Why I’m in the drugstore next to—”

“Come on up and stop acting like Mata Hari,” I said.

“Aren’t you ever polite to anybody?” she snapped.

I hung up and fed myself a slug of Old Forester to brace my nerves for the interview. As I was inhaling it I heard her steps tripping along the corridor. I moved across and opened the door.

“Come in this way and miss the crowd,” I said.

She seated herself demurely and waited.

“All I could find out,” I told her, “is that the dump on Idaho Street is peddling reefers. That’s marijuana cigarettes.”

“Why, how disgusting,” she said.

“We have to take the bad with the good in this life,” I said. “Orrin must have got wise and threatened to report it to the police.”

“You mean,” she said in her little-girl manner, “that they might hurt him for doing that?”

“Well, most likely they’d just throw a scare into him first.”

“Oh, they couldn’t scare Orrin, Mr. Marlowe,” she said decisively. “He just gets mean when people try to run him.”

“Yeah,” I said. “But we’re not talking about the same things. You can scare anybody—with the right technique.”

She set her mouth stubbornly. “No, Mr. Marlowe. They couldn’t scare Orrin.”

“Okay,” I said. “So they didn’t scare him. Say they just cut off one of his legs and beat him over the head with it. What would he do then—write to the Better Business Bureau?”

“You’re making fun of me,” she said politely. Her voice was as cool as boarding-house soup. “Is that all you did all day? Just find Orrin had moved and it was a bad neighborhood? Why I found that out for myself, Mr. Marlowe. I thought you being a detective and all—” She trailed off, leaving the rest of it in the air.

“I did a little more than that,” I said. “I gave the landlord a little gin and went through the register and talked to a man named Hicks. George W. Hicks. He wears a toupee. I guess maybe you didn’t meet him. He has, or had, Orrin’s room. So I thought maybe—” It was my turn to do a little trailing in the air.

She fixed me with her pale blue eyes enlarged by the glasses. Her mouth was small and firm and tight, her hands clasped on the desk in front of her over her large square bag, her whole body stiff and erect and formal and disapproving.

“I paid you twenty dollars, Mr. Marlowe,” she said coldly. “I understood that was in payment of a day’s work. It doesn’t seem to me that you’ve done a day’s work.”

“No,” I said. “That’s true. But the day isn’t over yet. And don’t bother about the twenty bucks. You can have it back if you like. I didn’t even bruise it.”

I opened the desk drawer and got out her money. I pushed it across the desk. She looked at it but didn’t touch it. Her eyes came up slowly to meet mine.

“I didn’t mean it like that. I know you’re doing the best you can, Mr. Marlowe.”

“With the facts I have.”

“But I’ve told you all I know.”

“I don’t think so,” I said.

“Well I’m sure I can’t help what you think,” she said tartly. “After all, if I knew what I wanted to know already, I wouldn’t have come here and asked you to find it out, would I?”

“I’m not saying you know all you want to know,” I answered. “The point is I don’t know all I want to know in order to do a job for you. And what you tell me doesn’t add up.”

“What doesn’t add up? I’ve told you the truth. I’m Orrin’s sister. I guess I know what kind of person he is.”

“How long did he work for Cal-Western?”

“I’ve told you that. He came out to California just about a year ago. He got work right away because he practically had the job before he left.”

“He wrote home how often? Before he stopped writing.”

“Every week. Sometimes oftener. He’d take turns writing to mother and me. Of course the letters were for both of us.”

“About what?”

“You mean what did he write about?”

“What did you think I meant?”

“Well, you don’t have to snap at me. He wrote about his work and the plant and the people there and sometimes about a show he’d been to. Or it was about California. He’d write about church too.”

“Nothing about girls?”

“I don’t think Orrin cared much for girls.”

“And lived at the same address all this time?”

She nodded, looking puzzled.

“And he stopped writing how long ago?”

That took thought. She pressed her lips and pushed a fingertip around the middle of the lower one. “About or four months,” she said at last.

“What was the date of his last letter?”

“I—I’m afraid I can’t tell you exactly the date. But it was like I said, three or four—”

I waved a hand at her “Anything out of the ordinary in it? Anything unusual said or anything unusual unsaid?”

“Why no. It seemed just like all the rest”

“Don’t you have any friends or relatives in this part of the country?”

She gave me a funny stare, started to say something, then shook her head sharply. “No.”

“Okay. Now I’ll tell you what’s wrong. I’ll skip over your not telling me where you’re staying, because it might be just that you’re afraid I’ll show up with a quart of hooch under my arm and make a pass at you.”

“That’s not a very nice way to talk,” she said.

“Nothing I say is nice. I’m not nice. By your standards nobody with less than three prayer-books could be nice. But I am inquisitive. What’s wrong with this picture is that you’re not scared. Neither you personally nor your mother. And you ought to be scared as hell.”

She clutched her bag to her bosom with tight little fingers. “You mean something has happened to him?” Her voice faded off into a sort of sad whisper, like a mortician asking for a down payment.

“I don’t know that anything has. But in your position, knowing the kind of guy Orrin was, the way his letters came through and then didn’t, I can’t see myself waiting for my summer vacation to come around before I start asking questions. I can’t see myself by-passing the police who have an organization for finding people. And going to a lone-wolf operator you never heard of, asking him to root around for you in the rubble. And I can’t see your dear old mother just sitting there in Manhattan, Kansas, week after week darning the minister’s winter underwear. No letter from Orrin. No news. And all she does about it is take a long breath and mend up another pair of pants.”

She came to her feet with a lunge. “You’re a horrid, disgusting person,” she said angrily. “I think you’re vile. Don’t you dare say mother and I weren’t worried. Just don’t you dare.”

I pushed the twenty dollars’ worth of currency a little closer to the other side of the desk. “You were worried twenty dollars’ worth, honey,” I said. “But about what I wouldn’t know. I guess I don’t really want to know. Just put this hunk of the folding back in your saddlebag and forget you ever met me. You might want to lend it to another detective tomorrow.”

She snapped her bag shut viciously on the money. “I’m not very likely to forget your rudeness,” she said between her teeth. “Nobody in the world’s ever talked to me the way you have.”

I stood up and wandered around the end of the desk. “Don’t think about it too much. You might get to like it.”

I reached up and twitched her glasses off. She took half a step back, almost stumbled, and I reached an arm around her by pure instinct. Her eyes widened and she put her hands against my chest and pushed. I’ve been pushed harder by a kitten.

“Without the cheaters those eyes are really something,” I said in an awed voice.

She relaxed and let her head go back and her lips open a little. “I suppose you do this to all the clients,” she said softly. Her hands now had dropped to her sides. The bag whacked against my leg. She leaned her weight on my arm. If she wanted me to let go of her, she had her signals mixed.

“I just didn’t want you to lose your balance,” I said.

“I knew you were the thoughtful type.” She relaxed still more. Her head went back now. Her upper lids drooped, fluttered a bit and her lips came open a little farther. On them appeared the faint provocative smile that nobody ever has to teach them. “I suppose you thought I did it on purpose,” she said.

“Did what on purpose?”

“Stumbled, sort of.”

“Wel-l-l-l.”

She reached a quick arm around my neck and started to pull. So I kissed her. It was either that or slug her. She pushed her mouth hard at me for a long moment, then quietly and very comfortably wriggled around in my arms and nestled. She let out a long easy sigh.

“In Manhattan, Kansas, you could be arrested for this,” she said.

“If there was any justice, I could be arrested just for being there,” I said.

She giggled and poked the end of my nose with a fingertip. “I suppose you really prefer fast girls,” she said, looking up at me sideways. “At least you won’t have to wipe off any lip rouge. Maybe I’ll wear some next time.”

“Maybe we’d better sit down on the floor,” I said. “My arm’s getting tired.”

She giggled again and disengaged herself gracefully. “I guess you think I’ve been kissed lots of times,” she said.

“What girl hasn’t?”

She nodded, gave me the up-from-under look that made her eyelashes cut across the iris. “Even at the church socials they play kissing games,” she said.

“Or there wouldn’t be any church socials,” I said.

We looked at each other with no particular expression.

“Well-l-l—” she began at last. I handed her back her glasses. She put them on. She opened her bag, looked at herself in a small mirror, rooted around in her bag and came out with her hand clenched.

“I’m sorry I was mean,” she said, and pushed something under the blotter of my desk. She gave me another little frail smile and marched to the door and opened it.

“I’ll call you,” she said intimately. And out she went, tap, tap, tap down the hail.

I went over and lifted the blotter and smoothed out the crumpled currency that lay under it. It hadn’t been much of a kiss, but it looked like I had another chance at the twenty dollars.

The phone rang before I had quite started to worry about Mr. Lester B. Clausen. I reached for it absently. The voice I heard was an abrupt voice, but thick and clogged, as if it was being strained through a curtain or somebody’s long white beard.

“You Marlowe?” it said.

“Speaking.”

“You got a safe-deposit box, Marlowe?”

I had enough of being polite for one afternoon. “Stop asking and start telling,” I said.

“I asked you a question, Marlowe.”

“I didn’t answer it,” I said. “Like this.” I reached over and pressed down the riser on the phone. Held it that way while I fumbled around for a cigarette. I knew he would call right back. They always do when they think they’re tough. They haven’t used their exit line. When it rang again I started right in.

“If you have a proposition, state it. And I get called ‘mister’ until you give me some money.”

“Don’t let that temper ride you so hard, friend. I’m in a jam. I need help. I need something kept in a safe place. For a few days. Not longer. And for that you make a little quick money.”

“How little?” I asked. “And how quick?”

“A C note. Right here and waiting. I’m warming it for you.”

“I can hear it purr,” I said. “Right where and waiting?” I was listening to the voice twice, once when I heard it and once when it echoed in my mind.

“Room 332, Van Nuys Hotel. Knock two quick ones and two slow ones. Not too loud. I got to have live action. How fast can you—”

“What is it you want me to keep?”

“That’ll wait till you get here. I said I was in a hurry.”

“What’s your name?”

“Just Room 332.”

“Thanks for the time,” I said. “Goodbye.”

“Hey. Wait a minute, dope. It’s nothing hot like you think. No ice. No emerald pendants. It just happens to be worth a lot of money to me—and nothing at all to anybody else.”

“The hotel has a safe.”

“Do you want to die poor, Marlowe?”

“Why not? Rockefeller did. Goodbye again.”

The voice changed. The furriness went out of it. It said sharply and swiftly: “How’s every little thing in Bay City?”

I didn’t speak. Just waited. There was a dim chuckle over the wire. “Thought that might interest you, Marlowe. Room 332 it is. Tramp on it friend. Make speed.”

The phone clicked in my ear. I hung up. For no reason a pencil rolled off the desk and broke its point on the glass doohickey under one of the desk legs. I picked it up and slowly and carefully sharpened it in the Boston sharpener screwed to the edge of the window frame, turning the pencil around to get it nice and even. I laid it down in the tray on the desk and dusted off my hands. I had all the time in the world. I looked out of the window. I didn’t see anything. I didn’t hear anything.

And then, for even less reason, I saw Orfamay Quest’s face without the glasses, and polished and painted and with blonde hair piled up high on the forehead with a braid around the middle of it. And bedroom eyes. They all have to have bedroom eyes. I tried to imagine this face in a vast close-up being gnawed by some virile character from the wide-open spaces of Romanoff’s bar.

It took me twenty-nine minutes to get to the Van Nuys Hotel.

8

Once, long ago, it must have had a certain elegance. But no more. The memories of old cigars clung to its lobby like the dirty gilt on its ceiling and the sagging springs of its leather lounging chairs. The marble of the desk had turned a yellowish brown with age. But the floor carpet was new and had a hard look, like the room clerk. I passed him up and strolled over to the cigar counter in the corner and put down a quarter for a package of Camels. The girl behind the counter was a straw blonde with a long neck and tired eyes. She put the cigarettes in front of me, added a packet of matches, dropped my change into a slotted box marked “The Community Chest Thanks You.”

“You’d want me to do that, wouldn’t you,” she said, smiling patiently. “You’d want to give your change to the poor little underprivileged kids with bent legs and stuff, wouldn’t you?”

“Suppose I didn’t,” I said.

“I dig up seven cents,” the girl said, “and it would be very painful.” She had a low lingering voice with a sort of moist caress in it like a damp bath towel. I put a quarter after the seven cents. She gave me her big smile then. It showed more of her tonsils.

“You’re nice,” she said. “I can see you’re nice. A lot of fellows would have come in here and made a pass at a girl. Just think. Over seven cents. A pass.”

“Who’s the house peeper here now?” I asked her, without taking up the option.

“There’s two of them.” She did something slow and elegant to the back of her head, exhibiting what seemed like more than one handful of blood-red fingernails in the process. “Mr. Hady is on nights and Mr. Flack is on days. It’s day now so it would be Mr. Flack would be on.”

“Where could I find him?”

She leaned over the counter and let me smell her hair, pointing with a half-inch fingernail toward the elevator bank. “It’s down along that corridor there, next to the porter’s room. You can’t miss the porter’s room on account of it has a half-door and says PORTER on the upper part in gold letters. Only that half is folded back like, so I guess maybe you can’t see it.”

“I’ll see it,” I said. “Even if I have to get a hinge screwed to my neck. What does this Flack look like?”

“Well,” she said, “he’s a little squatty number, with a bit of a mustache. A sort of chunky type. Thick-set like, only not tall.” Her fingers moved languidly along the counter to where I could have touched them without jumping. “He’s not interesting,” she said. “Why bother?”

“Business,” I said, and made off before she threw a half-nelson on me.

I looked back at her from the elevators. She was staring after me with an expression she probably would have said was thoughtful.

The porter’s room was halfway down the corridor to the Spring Street entrance. The door beyond it was half open. I looked around its edge, then went in and closed it behind me.

A man was sitting at a small desk which had dust on it, a very large ashtray and very little else. He was short and thickset. He had something dark and bristly under his nose about an inch long. I sat down across from him and put a card on the desk.

He reached for the card without excitement, read it, turned it over and read the back with as much care as the front. There was nothing on the back to read. He picked half of a cigar out of his ashtray and burned his nose lighting it.

“What’s the gripe?” he growled at me.

“No gripe. You Flack?”

He didn’t bother to answer. He gave me a steady look which may or may not have concealed his thoughts, depending on whether he had any to conceal.

“Like to get a line on one of the customers,” I said.

“What name?” Flack asked, with no enthusiasm.

“I don’t know what name he’s using here. He’s in Room 332.”

“What name was he using before he came here?” Flack asked.

“I don’t know that either.”

“Well, what did he look like?” Flack was suspicious now. He reread my card but it added nothing to his knowledge.

“I never saw him, so far as I know.”

Flack said: “I must be overworked. I don’t get it.”

“I had a call from him,” I said. “He wanted to see me.”

“Am I stopping you?”

“Look, Flack. A man in my business makes enemies at times. You ought to know that. This party wants something done. Tells me to come on over, forgets to give his name, and hangs up. I figured I’d do a little checking before I went up there.”

Flack took the cigar out of his mouth and said patiently: “I’m in terrible shape. I still don’t get it. Nothing makes sense to me any more.”

I leaned over the desk and spoke to him slowly and distinctly: “The whole thing could be a nice way to get me into a hotel room and knock me off and then quietly check out. You wouldn’t want anything like that to happen in your hotel, would you, Flack?”

“Supposing I cared,” he said, “you figure you’re that important?”

“Do you smoke that piece of rope because you like it or because you think it makes you look tough?”

“For forty-five bucks a week,” Flack said, “would I smoke anything better?” He eyed me steadily.

“No expense account yet,” I told him. “No deal yet.” He made a sad sound and got up wearily and went out of the room. I lit one of my cigarettes and waited. He came back in a short time and dropped a registration card on the desk. Dr. G. W. Hambleton, El Centro, California was written on it in a firm round hand in ink. The clerk had written other things on it, including the room number and daily rate. Flack pointed a finger that needed a manicure or failing that a nailbrush.

“Came in at 2.47 P.M.,” he said. “Just today, that is. Nothing on his bill. One day’s rent. No phone calls. No nothing. That what you want?”

“What does he look like?” I asked.

“I didn’t see him. You think I stand out there by the desk and take pictures of them while they register?”

“Thanks,” I said. “Dr. G. W. Hambleton, El Centro. Much obliged.” I handed him back the registration card.

“Anything I ought to know,” Flack said as I went out, “don’t forget where I live. That is, if you call it living.”

I nodded and went out. There are days like that. Everybody you meet is a dope. You begin to look at yourself in the glass and wonder.

9

Room 332 was at the back of the building near the door to the fire escape. The corridor which led to it had a smell of old carpet and furniture oil and the drab anonymity of a thousand shabby lives. The sand bucket under the racked fire hose was full of cigarette and cigar stubs, an accumulation of several days. A radio pounded brassy music through an open transom. Through another transom people were laughing fit to kill themselves. Down at the end by Room 332 it was quieter.

I knocked the two longs and two shorts as instructed. Nothing happened. I felt jaded and old. I felt as if I had spent my life knocking at doors in cheap hotels that nobody bothered to open. I tried again. Then turned the knob and walked in. A key with a red fiber tab hung in the inside keyhole.

There was a short hall with a bathroom on the right. Beyond the hall the upper half of a bed was in view and a man lay on it in shirt and pants.

I said: “Dr. Hambleton?”

The man didn’t answer. I went past the bathroom door towards him. A whiff of perfume reached me and I started to turn, but not quickly enough. A woman who had been in the bathroom was standing there holding a towel in front of the lower part of her face. Dark glasses showed above the towel. And then the brim of a wide brimmed straw hat in a sort of dusty delphinium blue. Under that was fluffed-out pale blond hair. Blue ear buttons lurked somewhere back in the shadows. The sunglasses were in white frames with broad flat side bows. Her dress matched her hat. An embroidered silk or rayon coat was open over the dress. She wore gauntleted gloves and there was an automatic in her right hand. White bone grip. Looked like a .32.

“Turn around and put your hands behind you,” she said through the towel. The voice muffled by the towel meant as little to me as the dark glasses. It was not the voice which had talked to me on the telephone. I didn’t move.

“Don’t ever think I’m fooling,” she said. “I’ll give you exactly three seconds to do what I say.”

“Couldn’t you make it a minute? I like looking at you.”

She made a threatening gesture with the little gun. “Turn around,” she snapped. “But fast.”

“I like the sound of your voice too.”

“All right,” she said, in a tight dangerous tone. “If that’s the way you want it, that’s the way you want it.”

“Don’t forget you’re a lady,” I said, and turned around and put my hands up to my shoulders. A gun muzzle poked into the back of my neck. Breath almost tickled my skin. The perfume was an elegant something or other, not strong, not decisive. The gun against my neck went away and a white flame burned for an instant behind my eyes. I grunted and fell forward on my hands and knees and reached back quickly. My hand touched a leg in a nylon stocking but slipped off, which seemed a pity. It felt like a nice leg. The jar of another blow on the head took the pleasure out of this and I made the hoarse sound of a man in desperate shape. I collapsed on the floor. The door opened. A key rattled. The door closed. The key turned. Silence.

I climbed up to my feet and went into the bathroom. I bathed my head with a towel from the rack soaked with cold water. It felt as if the heel of a shoe had hit me. Certainly it was not a gun butt. There was a little blood, not much. I rinsed the towel out and stood there patting the bruise and wondering why I didn’t run after her screaming. But what I was doing was staring into the open medicine cabinet over the basin. The upper part of a can of talcum had been pried off the shoulder. There was talcum all over the shelf. A toothpaste tube had been cut open. Someone had been looking for something.

I went back to the little hallway and tried the room door. Locked from the outside. I bent down and looked through the keyhole. But it was an up-and-down lock, with the outer and inner keyholes on different levels. The girl in the dark glasses with the white rims didn’t know much about hotels. I twisted the night latch, which opened the outside lock, opened the door, looked along the empty corridor, and closed the door again.

Then I went towards the man on the bed. He had not moved during all this time, for a somewhat obvious reason.

Beyond the little hallway the room widened towards a pair of windows through which the evening sun slanted in a shaft that reached almost across the bed and came to a stop under the neck of the man that lay there. What it stopped on was blue and white and shining and round. He lay quite comfortably half on his face with his hands down at his sides and his shoes off. The side of his face was on the pillow and he seemed relaxed. He was wearing a toupee. The last time I had talked to him his name had been George W. Hicks. Now it was Dr. G. W. Hambleton. Same initials. Not that it mattered any more. I wasn’t going to be talking to him again. There was no blood. None at all, which is one of the few nice things about an expert ice-pick job.

I touched his neck. It was still warm. While I was doing it the shaft of sunlight moved away from the knob of the ice pick towards his left ear. I turned away and looked the room over. The telephone bell box had been opened and left open. The Gideon Bible was thrown in the corner. The desk had been searched. I went to a closet and looked into that. There were clothes in it and a suitcase I had seen before. I found nothing that seemed important. I picked a snap-brim hat off the floor and put it on the desk and went back to the bathroom. The point of interest now was whether the people who had ice picked Dr. Hambleton had found what they came for. They had had very little time.

I searched the bathroom carefully. I moved the top of the toilet tank and drained it. There was nothing in it. I peered down the overflow pipe. No thread hung there with a small object at the end of it. I searched the bureau. It was empty except for an old envelope. I unhooked the window screens and felt under the sills outside. I picked the Gideon Bible off the floor and leafed through it again. I examined the backs of three pictures and studied the edge of the carpet. It was tacked close to the wall and there were little pockets of dust in the depressions made by the tacks. I got down on the floor and examined the part under the bed. Just the same. I stood on a chair, looked into the bowl of the light fixture. It contained dust and dead moths. I looked the bed over. It had been made up by a professional and not touched since. I felt the pillow under the dead man’s head, then got the extra pillow out of the closet and examined its edges. Nothing.

Dr. Hambleton’s coat hung over a chair back. I went through that, knowing it was the least likely place to find anything. Somebody with a knife had worked on the lining and the shoulder padding. There were matches, a couple of cigars, a pair of dark glasses, a cheap handkerchief not used, a Bay City movie theater ticket stub, a small comb, an unopened package of cigarettes. I looked at it in the light. It showed no sign of having been disturbed. I disturbed it. I tore off the cover, went through it, found nothing but cigarettes.

That left Dr. Hambleton himself. I eased him over and got into his trouser pockets. Loose change, another handkerchief, a small tube of dental floss, more matches, a bunch of keys, a folder of bus schedules. In a pigskin wallet was a book of stamps, a second comb (here was a man who really took care of his toupee), three flat packages of white powder, seven printed cards reading Dr. G. W. Hambleton, O.D. Tustin Building, El Centro, California, Hours 9—12 and 2—4, and by Appointment. Telephone El Centro 5-0406. There was no driver’s license, no social-security card, no insurance cards, no real identification at all. There was $164 in currency in the wallet. I put the wallet back where I found it.

I lifted Dr. Hambleton’s hat off the desk and examined the sweatband and the ribbon. The ribbon bow had been picked loose with a knifepoint, leaving hanging threads. There was nothing hidden inside the bow. No evidence of any previous ripping and restitching.

This was the take. If the killers knew what they were looking for, it was something that could be hidden in a book, a telephone box, a tube of toothpaste, or a hatband. I went back into the bathroom and looked at my head again. It was still oozing a tiny trickle of blood. I gave it more cold water and dried the cut with toilet paper and flushed that down the bowl. I went back and stood a moment looking down on Dr. Hambleton, wondering what his mistake had been. He had seemed a fairly wise bird. The sunlight had moved over to the far edge of the room now, off the bed and down into a sad dusty corner.

I grinned suddenly, bent over and quickly and with the grin still on my face, out of place as it was, pulled off Dr. Hambleton’s toupee and turned it inside out. As simple as all that. To the lining of the toupee a piece of orange-colored paper was fastened by Scotch tape, protected by a square of cellophane. I pulled it loose, turned it over, and saw that it was a numbered claim check belonging to the Bay City Camera Shop. I put it in my wallet and put the toupee carefully back on the dead egg-bald head.

I left the room unlocked because I had no way to lock it.

Down the hall the radio still blared through the transom and the exaggerated alcoholic laughter accompanied it from across the corridor.

10

Over the telephone the Bay City Camera Shop man said: “Yes, Mr. Hicks. We have them for you. Six enlarged prints on glossy from your negative.”

“What time do you close?” I asked.

“Oh in about five minutes. We open at nine in the morning.”

“I’ll pick them up in the morning. Thanks.”

I hung up, reached mechanically into the slot and found somebody else’s nickel. I walked over to the lunch counter and bought myself a cup of coffee with it, and sat there sipping and listening to the auto horns complaining on the street outside. It was time to go home. Whistles blew. Motors raced. Old brake linings squeaked. There was a dull steady mutter of feet on the sidewalk outside. It was just after five-thirty. I finished the coffee, stuffed a pipe, and strolled a half-block back to the Van Nuys Hotel. In the writing room I folded the orange camera-shop check into a sheet of hotel stationery and addressed an envelope to myself. I put a special-delivery stamp on it and dropped it in the mail chute by the elevator bank. Then I went along to Flack’s office again.

Again I closed his door and sat down across from him. Flack didn’t seem to have moved an inch. He was chewing morosely on the same cigar butt and his eyes were still full of nothing. I relit my pipe by striking a match on the side of his desk. He frowned.

“Dr. Hambleton doesn’t answer his door,” I said.

“Huh?” Flack looked at me vacantly.

“Party in 332. Remember? He doesn’t answer his door.”

“What should I do—bust my girdle?” Flack asked.

“I knocked several times,” I said. “No answer. Thought he might be taking a bath or something, although I couldn’t hear anything. Went away for a while, then tried again. Same no answer again.”

Flack looked at a turnip watch he got from his vest. “I’m off at seven,” he said. “Jesus. A whole hour to go, and more. Boy, am I hungry.”

“Working the way you do,” I said, “you must be. You have to keep your strength up. Do I interest you at all in Room 332?”

“You said he wasn’t in,” Flack said irritably. “So what? He wasn’t in.”

“I didn’t say he wasn’t in. I said he didn’t answer his door.”

Flack leaned forward. Very slowly he removed the debris of the cigar from his mouth and put it in the glass tray. “Go on. Make me like it,” he said, carefully.

“Maybe you’d like to run up and look,” I said. “Maybe you didn’t see a first-class ice-pick job lately.”

Flack put his hands on the arms of his chair and squeezed the wood hard. “Aw,” he said painfully, “aw.” He got to his feet and opened the desk drawer. He took out a large black gun, flicked the gate open, studied the cartridges, squinted down the barrel, snapped the cylinder back into place. He unbuttoned his vest and tucked the gun down inside his waistband. In an emergency he could probably have got to it in less than a minute. He put his hat on firmly and jerked a thumb at the door.

We went up to the third floor in silence. We went down the corridor. Nothing had changed. No sound had increased or diminished. Flack hurried along to 332 and knocked from force of habit. Then tried the door. He looked back at me with a twisted mouth.

“You said the door wasn’t locked,” he complained.

“I didn’t exactly say that. It was unlocked, though.”

“It ain’t now,” Flack said, and unshipped a key on a long chain. He unlocked the door and glanced up and down the hall. He twisted the knob slowly without sound and eased the door a couple of inches. He listened. No sounds came from within. Flack stepped back, took the black gun out of his waistband. He removed the key from the door, kicked it wide open, and brought the gun up hard and straight, like the wicked foreman of the Lazy Q. “Let’s go,” he said out of the corner of his mouth.

Over his shoulder I could see that Dr. Hambleton lay exactly as before, but the ice-pick handle didn’t show from the entrance. Flack leaned forward and edged cautiously into the room. He reached the bathroom door and put his eye to the crack, then pushed the door open until it bounced against the tub. He went in and came out, stepped down into the room, a tense and wary man who was taking no chances.

He tried the closet door, leveled his gun and jerked it wide open. No suspects in the closet.

“Look under the bed,” I said.

Flack bent swiftly and looked under the bed.

“Look under the carpet,” I said.

“You kidding me?” Flack asked nastily.

“I just like to watch you work.”

He bent over the dead man and studied the ice pick.

“Somebody locked that door,” he sneered. “Unless you’re lying about its being unlocked.”

I said nothing.

“Well I guess it’s the cops,” he said slowly. “No chance to cover up on this one.”

“It’s not your fault,” I told him. “It happens even in good hotels.”

11

The redheaded intern filled out a DOA form and clipped his stylus to the outside pocket of his white jacket. He snapped the book shut with a faint grin on his face.

“Punctured spinal cord just below the occipital bulge, I’d say,” he said carelessly. “A very vulnerable spot. If you know how to find it. And I suppose you do.”

Detective Lieutenant Christy French growled. “Think it’s the first time I’ve seen one?”

“No, I guess not,” the intern said. He gave a last quick look at the dead man, turned and walked out of the room. “I’ll call the coroner,” he said over his shoulder. The door closed behind him.

“What a stiff means to those birds is what a plate of warmed-up cabbage means to me,” Christy French said sourly to the closed door. His partner, a cop named Fred Beifus, was down on one knee by the telephone box. He had dusted it for fingerprints and blown off the loose powder. He was looking at the smudge through a small magnifying glass. He shook his head, then picked some thing off the screw with which the box had been fastened shut.

“Gray cotton undertaker’s gloves,” he said disgustedly. “Cost about four cents a pair wholesale. Fat lot of good printing this joint. They were looking for something in the telephone box, huh?”

“Evidently something that could be there,” French said. “I didn’t expect prints. These ice-pick jobs are a specialty. We’ll get the experts after a while. This is just a quickover.”

He was stripping the dead man’s pockets and laying what had been in them out on the bed beside the quiet and already waxy corpse. Flack was sitting in a chair by the window, looking out morosely. The assistant manager had been up, said nothing with a worried expression, and gone away. I was leaning against the bathroom wall and sorting out my fingers.

Flack said suddenly: “I figure an ice-pick job’s a dame’s work. You can buy them anywhere. Ten cents. If you want one fast, you can slip it down inside a garter and let it hang there.”

Christy French gave him a brief glance which had a kind of wonder in it. Beifus said: “What kind of dames you been running around with, honey? The way stockings cost nowadays a dame would as soon stick a saw down her sock.”

“I never thought of that,” Flack said.

Beifus said: “Leave us do the thinking sweetheart. It takes equipment.”

“No need to get tough,” Flack said.

Beifus took his hat off and bowed. “You mustn’t deny us our little pleasures, Mr. Flack.”

Christy French said: “Besides, a woman would keep on jabbing. She wouldn’t even know how much was enough. Lots of the punks don’t. Whoever did this one was a performer. He got the spinal cord the first try. And another thing—you have to have the guy quiet to do it. That means more than one guy, unless he was doped, or the killer was a friend of his.”

I said: “I don’t see how he could have been doped, if he’s the party that called me on the phone.”

French and Beifus both looked at me with the same expression of patient boredom. “If,” French said, “and since you didn’t know the guy—according to you—there’s always the faint possibility that you wouldn’t know his voice. Or am I being too subtle?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I haven’t read your fan mail.”

French grinned.

“Don’t waste it on him,” Beifus told French. “Save it for when you talk to the Friday Morning Club. Some of them old ladies in the shiny-nose league go big for the nicer angles of murder.”

French rolled himself a cigarette and lit it with a kitchen match he struck on the back of a chair. He sighed.

“They worked the technique out in Brooklyn,” he explained. “Sunny Moe Stein’s boys specialized in it, but they run it into the ground. It got so you couldn’t walk across a vacant lot without finding some of their work. Then they came out here, what was left of them. I wonder why did they do that.”

“Maybe we just got more vacant lots,” Bell us said.

“Funny thing, though,” French said, almost dreamily. “When Weepy Moyer had the chill put on Sunny Moe Stein over on Franklin Avenue last February, the killer used a gun. Moe wouldn’t have liked that at all.”

“I betcha that was why his face had that disappointed look, after they washed the blood off,” Beifus remarked.

“Who’s Weepy Moyer?” Flack asked.

“He was next to Moe in the organization,” French told him. “This could easily be his work. Not that he’d have done it personal.”

“Why not?” Flack asked sourly.

“Don’t you guys ever read a paper? Moyer’s a gentleman now. He knows the nicest people. Even has another name. And as for the Sunny Moe Stein job, it just happened we had him in jail on a gambling rap. We didn’t get anywhere. But we did make him a very sweet alibi. Anyhow he’s a gentleman like I said, and gentlemen don’t go around sticking ice picks into people. They hire it done.”

“Did you ever have anything on Moyer?” I asked.

French looked at me sharply. “Why?”

“I just had an idea. But it’s very fragile,” I said.

French eyed me slowly. “Just between us girls in the powder room,” he said, “we never even proved the guy we had was Moyer. But don’t broadcast it. Nobody’s supposed to know but him and his lawyer and the D.A. and the police beat and the city hall and maybe two or three hundred other people.”

He slapped the dead man’s empty wallet against his thigh and sat down on the bed. He leaned casually against the corpse’s leg, lit a cigarette and pointed with it.

“That’s enough time on the vaudeville circuit. Here’s what we got, Fred. First off, the customer here was not too bright. He was going by the name of Dr. G. W. Hambleton and had the cards printed with an El Centro address and a phone number. It took just two minutes to find out there ain’t any such address or any such phone number. A bright boy doesn’t lay open that easy. Next, the guy is definitely not in the chips. He has fourteen smackeroos folding in here and about two bucks loose change. On his key ring he don’t have any car key or any safe-deposit key or any house key. All he’s got is a suitcase key and seven filed Yale master keys. Filed fairly recently at that. I figure he was planning to sneak the hotel a little. Do you think these keys would work in your dump, Flack?”

Flack went over and stared at the keys. “Two of them are the right size,” be said. “I couldn’t tell if they’d work by just looking. If I want a master key I have to get it from the office. All I carry is a passkey. I can only use that if the guest is out.” He took a key out of his pocket, a key on a long chain, and compared it. He shook his head. “They’re no good without more work,” he said. “Far too much metal on them.”

French flicked ash into the palm of his hand and blew it off as dust. Flack went back to his chair by the window.

“Next point,” Christy French announced. “He don’t have a driver’s license or any identification. None of his outside clothes were bought in El Centro. He had some kind of a grift, but he don’t have the looks or personality to bounce checks.”

“You didn’t really see him at his best,” Beifus put in.

“And this hotel is the wrong dump for that anyway,” French went on. “It’s got a crummy reputation.”

“Now wait a minute!” Flack began.

French cut him short with a gesture. “I know every hotel in the metropolitan district, Flack. It’s my business to know. For fifty bucks I could organize a double-strip act with French trimmings inside of an hour in any room in this hotel. Don’t kid me. You earn your living and I’ll earn mine. Just don’t kid me. All right. The customer had something he was afraid to keep around. That means he knew somebody was after him and getting close. So he offers Marlowe a hundred bucks to keep it for him. But he doesn’t have that much money on him. So what he must have been planning on was getting Marlowe to gamble with him. It couldn’t have been hot jewelry then. It had to be something semi-legitimate. That right, Marlowe?”

“You could leave out the semi,” I said.

French grinned faintly. “So what he had was something that could be kept flat or rolled up—in a phone box, a hatband, a Bible, a can of talcum. We don’t know whether it was found or not. But we do know there was very little time. Not much more than half an hour.”

“If Dr. Hambleton did the phoning,” I said. “You opened that can of beans yourself.”

“It’s kind of pointless any other way. The killers wouldn’t be in a hurry to have him found. Why should they ask anybody to come over to his room?” He turned to Flack. “Any chance to check his visitors?”

Flack shook his head gloomily. “You don’t even have to pass the desk to get to the elevators.”

Beifus said: “Maybe that was one reason be came here. That, and the homey atmosphere.”

“All right,” French said. “Whoever knocked him off could come and go without any questions asked. All he had to know was his room number. And that’s about all we know. Okay, Fred?”

Beifus nodded.

I said: “Not quite all. It’s a nice toupee, but it’s still a toupee.”

French and Beifus both swung around quickly. French reached, carefully removed the dead man’s hair, and whistled. “I wondered what that damn intern was grinning at,” he said. “The bastard didn’t even mention it. See what I see, Fred?”

“All I see is a guy without no hair,” Beifus answered.

“Maybe you never knew him at that. Mileaway Marston. Used to be a runner for Ace Devore.”

“Why sure enough,” Beifus chuckled. He leaned over and patted the dead bald head gently. “How you been all this time, Mileaway? I didn’t see you in so long I forgot. But you know me, pal. Once a softy always a softy.”

The man on the bed looked old and hard and shrunken without his toupee. The yellow mask of death was beginning to set his face into rigid lines.

French said calmly: “Well, that takes a load off my mind. This punk ain’t going to be no twenty-four-hour-a-day job. The hell with him.” He replaced the toupee over one eye and stood up off the bed. “That’s all for you two,” he said to Flack and me.

Flack stood up.

“Thanks for the murder, honey,” Beifus told him. “You get any more in your nice hotel, don’t forget our service. Even when it ain’t good, it’s quick.”

Flack went down the short hall and yanked the door open. I followed him out. On the way to the elevator we didn’t speak. Nor on the way down. I walked with him along to his little office, followed him in and shut the door. He seemed surprised.

He sat down at his desk and reached for his telephone. “I got to make a report to the Assistant Manager,” he said. “Something you want?”

I rolled a cigarette around on my fingers, put a match to it and blew smoke softly across the desk. “One hundred and fifty dollars,” I said.

Flack’s small, intent eyes became round holes in a face washed clean of expression. “Don’t get funny in the wrong place,” he said.

“After those two comedians upstairs, you could hardly blame me if I did. But I’m not being funny.” I beat a tattoo on the edge of the desk and waited.

Tiny beads of sweat showed on Flack’s lip above his little mustache. “I got business to attend to,” he said, more throatily this time. “Beat it and keep going.”

“Such a tough little man,” I said. “Dr. Hambleton had $164 currency in his wallet when I searched him. He promised me a hundred as retainer, remember? Now, in the same wallet, he has fourteen dollars. And I did leave the door of his room unlocked. And somebody else locked it. You locked it, Flack.”

Flack took hold of the arms of his chair and squeezed. His voice came from the bottom of a well saying: “You can’t prove a damn thing.”

“Do I have to try?”

He took the gun out of his waistband and laid it on the desk in front of him. He stared down at it. It didn’t have any message for him. He looked up at me again. “Fifty-fifty, huh?” he said brokenly.

There was a moment of silence between us. He got his old shabby wallet out and rooted in it. He came up with a handful of currency and spread bills out on the desk, sorted them into two piles and pushed one pile my way.

I said: “I want the whole hundred and fifty.”

He hunched down in his chair and stared at a corner of the desk. After a long time, he sighed. He put the two piles together and pushed them over—to my side of the desk.

“It wasn’t doing him any good,” Flack said. “Take the dough and breeze. I’ll remember you, buddy. All you guys make me sick to my stomach. How do I know you didn’t take half a grand off him.”

“I’d take it all. So would the killer. Why leave fourteen dollars?”

“So why did I leave fourteen dollars?” Flack asked, in a tired voice, making vague movements along the desk edge with his fingers. I picked up the money, counted it and threw it back at him.

“Because you’re in the business and could size him up. You knew he’d at least have room rent, and a few dollars for loose change. The cops would expect the same thing. Here, I don’t want the money. I want something else.”

He stared at me with his mouth open.

“Put that dough out of sight,” I said.

He reached for it and crammed it back in his wallet. “What something else?” His eyes were small and thoughtful. His tongue pushed out his lower lip “It don’t seem to me you’re in a very hot trading position either.”

“You could be a little wrong about that. If I have to go back up there and tell Christy French and Beifus I was up there before and searched the body, I’d get a tongue-lashing all right. But he’d understand that I haven’t been holding out just to be smart. He’d know that somewhere in the background I had a client I was trying to protect. I’d get tough talk and bluster. But that’s not what you’d get.” I stopped and watched the faint glisten of moisture forming on his forehead now. He swallowed hard. His eyes were sick.

“Cut out the wise talk and lay your deal on the deck,” he said. He grinned suddenly, rather wolfishly. “Got here a little late to protect her, didn’t you?” The fat sneer he lived with was coming home again, but slowly, but gladly.

I killed my cigarette and got another one out and went through all the slow futile face-saving motions of lighting it, getting rid of the match, blowing smoke off to one side, inhaling deeply as though that scrubby little office was a hilltop overlooking the bouncing ocean—all the tired clichéd mannerisms of my trade.

“All right,” I said. “I’ll admit it was a woman. I’ll admit she must have been up there while he was dead, if that makes you happy. I guess it was just shock that made her run away.”

“Oh sure,” Flack said nastily. The fat sneer was all the way home now. “Or maybe she hadn’t ice-picked a guy in a month. Kind of lost touch.”

“But why would she take his key?” I said, talking to myself. “And why leave it at the desk? Why not just walk away and leave the whole thing? What if she did think she had to lock the door? Why not drop the key in a sand jar and cover it up? Or take it away with her and lose it? Why do anything with that key that would connect her with that room?” I brought my eyes down and gave Flack a thick leaden stare. “Unless of course she was seen to leave the room—with the key in her hand—and followed out of the hotel.”

“What for would anybody do that?” Flack asked.

“Because whoever saw her could have got into that room at once. He had a passkey.”

Flack’s eyes flicked up at me and dropped all in one motion.

“So he must have followed her,” I said. “He must have seen her dump the key at the desk and stroll out of the hotel and he must have followed her a little further than that.”

Flack said derisively: “What makes you so wonderful?”

I leaned down and pulled the telephone towards me. “I’d better call Christy and get this over with,” I said. “The more I think about it the scareder I get. Maybe she did kill him. I can’t cover up for a murderer.”

I took the receiver off the hook. Flack slammed his moist paw down hard on top of my hand. The phone jumped on the desk. “Lay off.” His voice was almost a sob. “I followed her to a car parked down the street. Got the number. Christ sake, pal, give me some kind of a break.” He was fumbling wildly in his pockets. “Know what I make on this job? Cigarette and cigar money and hardly a dime more. Wait a minute now. I think—” He looked down and played solitaire with some dirty envelopes, finally selected one and tossed it over to me. “License number,” he said wearily, “and if it’s any satisfaction to you, I can’t even remember what it was.”

I looked down at the envelope. There was a scrawled license number on it all right. Ill-written and faint and oblique, the way it would be written hastily on a paper held in a man’s hand on the street. 6N 333. California 1947.

“Satisfied?” This was Flack’s voice. Or it came out of his mouth. I tore the number off and tossed the envelope back to him.

“4P 327,” I said, watching his eyes. Nothing flicked in them. No trace of derision or concealment. “But how do I know this isn’t just some license number you had already?”

“You just got to take my word for it.”

“Describe the car,” I said.

“Caddy convertible, not new, top up. About 1942 model. Sort of dusty blue color.”

“Describe the woman.”

“Want a lot for your dough, don’t you, peeper?”

“Dr. Hambleton’s dough.”

He winced. “All right. Blonde. White coat with some colored stitching on it. Wide blue straw hat. Dark glasses. Height about five two. Built like a Conover model.”

“Would you know her again—without the glasses?” I asked carefully.

He pretended to think. Then shook his head, no.

“What was that license number again, Flackie?” I caught him off guard.

“Which one?” he said.

I leaned across the desk and dropped some cigarette ash on his gun. I did some more staring into his eyes. But I knew he was licked now. He seemed to know too. He reached for his gun, blew off the ash and put it back in the drawer of his desk.

“Go on. Beat it,” he said between his teeth. “Tell the cops I frisked the stiff. So what? Maybe I lose a job. Maybe I get tossed in the fishbowl. So what? When I come out I’m solid. Little Flackie don’t have to worry about coffee and crullers. Don’t think for a minute those dark cheaters fool little Flackie. I’ve seen too many movies to miss that lovely puss. And if you ask me that babe’ll be around for a long time. She’s a comer—and who knows—” he leered at me triumphantly—”she’d need a bodyguard one of these days. A guy to have around, watch things, keep her out of jams. Somebody that knows the ropes and ain’t unreasonable about dough. . . What’s the matter?”

I had put my head on one side and was leaning forward. I was listening. “I thought I heard a church bell,” I said.

“There ain’t any church around here,” he said contemptuously. “It’s that platinum brain of yours getting cracks in it.”

“Just one bell,” I said. “Very slow. Tolling is the word, I believe.”

Flack listened with me. “I don’t hear anything,” he said sharply.

“Oh you wouldn’t hear it,” I said. “You’d be the one guy in the whole world who wouldn’t hear it.”

He just sat there and stared at me with his nasty little eyes half closed and his nasty little mustache shining. One of his hands twitched on the desk, an aimless movement.

I left him to his thoughts, which were probably as small, ugly and frightened as the man himself.

12

The apartment house was over on Doheny Drive, just down the hill from the Strip. It was really two buildings, one behind the other, loosely connected by a floored patio with a fountain, and a room built over the arch. There were mailboxes and bells in the imitation marble foyer. Three out of the sixteen had no names over them. The names that I read meant nothing to me. The job needed a little more work. I tried the front door, found it unlocked, and the job still needed more work.

Outside stood two Cadillacs, a Lincoln Continental and a Packard Clipper. Neither of the Cadillacs had the right color or license. Across the way a guy in riding breeches was sprawled with his legs over the door of a low-cut Lancia. He was smoking and looking up at the pale stars which know enough to keep their distance from Hollywood. I walked up the steep hill to the boulevard and a block east and smothered myself in an outdoor sweat-box phone booth. I dialed a man named Peoria Smith, who was so-called because he stuttered—another little mystery I hadn’t had time to work out.

“Mavis Weld,” I said. “Phone number. This is Marlowe.”

“S-s-s-ure,” he said. “M-M-Mavis Weld huh? You want h-h-her ph-ph-phone number?”

“How much?”

“Be-b-b-be ten b-b-b-bucks,” he said.

“Just forget I called,” I said.

“W-W-Wait a minute! I ain’t supposed to give out with them b-b-babes’ phone numbers. An assistant prop man is taking a hell of a chance.”

I waited and breathed back my own breath.

“The address goes with it naturally,” Peoria whined, forgetting to stutter.

“Five bucks,” I said. “I’ve got the address already. And don’t haggle. If you think you’re the only studio grifter in the business of selling unlisted telephone numbers—”

“Hold it,” he said wearily, and went to get his little red book. A left-handed stutterer. He only stuttered when he wasn’t excited. He came back and gave it to me. A Crestview number of course. If you don’t have a Crestview number in Hollywood you’re a bum.

I opened up the steel-and-glass cell to let in some air while I dialed again. After two rings a drawling sexy voice answered. I pulled the door shut.

“Ye-e-es,” the voice cooed.

“Miss Weld, please.”

“And who is calling Miss Weld if you please?”

“I have some stills Whitey wants me to deliver tonight.”

“Whitey? And who is Whitey, amigo?”

“The head still-photographer at the studio,” I said. “Don’t you know that much? I’ll come up if you’ll tell me which apartment. I’m only a couple of blocks away.”

“Miss Weld is taking a bath.” She laughed. I guess it was a silvery tinkle where she was. It sounded like somebody putting away saucepans where I was. “But of course bring up the photographs. I am sure she is dying to see them. The apartment number is fourteen.”

“Will you be there too?”

“But of course. But naturally. Why do you ask that?”

I hung up and staggered out into the fresh air. I went down the hill. The guy in the riding breeches was still hanging out of the Lancia but one of the Cadillacs was gone and two Buick convertibles had joined the cars in front. I pushed the bell to number fourteen, went on through the patio where scarlet Chinese honeysuckle was lit by a peanut spotlight. Another light glowed down on the big ornamental pool full of fat goldfish and silent lily pads, the lilies folded tight for the night. There were a couple of stone seats and a lawn swing. The place didn’t look very expensive except that every place was expensive that year. The apartment was on the second floor, one of two doors facing across a wide landing.

The bell chimed and a tall dark girl in jodhpurs opened the door. Sexy was very faint praise for her. The jodhpurs, like her hair, were coal black. She wore a white silk shirt with a scarlet scarf loose around her throat. It was not as vivid as her mouth. She held a long brown cigarette in a pair of tiny golden tweezers. The fingers holding it were more than adequately jeweled. Her black hair was parted in the middle and a line of scalp as white as snow went over the top of her head and dropped out of sight behind. Two thick braids of her shining black hair lay one on each side of her slim brown neck. Each was tied with a small scarlet bow. But it was a long time since she was a little girl.

She looked sharply down at my empty hands. Studio stills are usually a little too big to put in your pocket.

I said: “Miss Weld please.”

“You can give me the stills.” The voice was cool, drawling and insolent, but the eyes were something else. She looked almost as hard to get as a haircut.

“For Miss Weld personally. Sorry.”

“I told you she was taking a bath.”

“I’ll wait.”

“Are you quite sure you have the stills, amigo?”

“As sure as I’ll ever be. Why?”

“Your name?” Her voice froze on the second word, like a feather taking off in a sudden draft. Then it cooed and hovered and soared and eddied and the silent invitation of a smile picked delicately at the corners of her lips, very slowly, like a child trying to pick up a snowflake.

“Your last picture was wonderful, Miss Gonzales.”

The smile flashed like lightning and changed her whole face. The body came erect and vibrant with delight. “But it was stinking,” she glowed. “Positively God-damned stinking, you sweet lovely man. You know but positively God-damn well it was stinking.”

“Nothing with you in it stinks for me, Miss Gonzales.”

She stood away from the door and waved me in. “We will have a drink,” she said. “The God-damnest drink we will have. I adore flattery, however dishonest.”

I went in. A gun in the kidney wouldn’t have surprised me a bit. She stood so that I had to practically push her mammaries out of the way to get through the door. She smelled the way the Taj Mahal looks by moonlight. She closed the door and danced over to a small portable bar.

“Scotch? Or would you prefer a mixed drink? I mix a perfectly loathsome Martini,” she said.

“Scotch is fine, thanks.”

She made a couple of drinks in a couple of glasses you could almost have stood umbrellas in. I sat down in a chintz chair and looked around. The place was old-fashioned. It had a false fireplace with gas logs and a marble mantel, cracks in the plaster, a couple of vigorously colored daubs on the walls that looked lousy enough to have cost money, an old black chipped Steinway and for once no Spanish shawl on it. There were a lot of new-looking books in bright jackets scattered around and a double-barreled shotgun with a handsomely carved stock stood in the corner with a white satin bow tied around the barrels. Hollywood wit.

The dark lady in the jodhpurs handed me a glass and perched on the arm of my chair. “You may call me Dolores if you wish,” she said, taking a hearty swig out of her own tumbler.

“Thanks.”

“And what may I call you?”

I grinned.

“Of course,” she said, “I am most fully aware that you are a God-damn liar and that you have no stills in your pockets. Not that I wish to inquire into your no doubt very private business.”

“Yeah?” I inhaled a couple of inches of my liquor. “Just what kind of bath is Miss Weld taking? An old-fashioned soap or something with Arabian spices in it?”

She waved the remains of the brown cigarette in the small gold clasp. “Perhaps you would like to help her. The bathroom is over there—through the arch and to the right. Most probably the door is not locked.”

“Not if it’s that easy,” I said.

“Oh,” she gave me the brilliant smile again. “You like to do the difficult things in life. I must remember to be less approachable, must I not?” She removed herself elegantly from the arm of my chair and ditched her cigarette, bending over enough so that I could trace the outline of her hips.

“Don’t bother, Miss Gonzales. I’m just a guy who came here on business. I don’t have any idea of raping anybody.”

“No?” The smile became soft, lazy and, if you can’t think of a better word, provocative.

“But I’m sure as hell working up to it,” I said.

“You are an amusing son-of-a-bitch,” she said with a shrug and went off through the arch, carrying her half-quart of Scotch and water with her. I heard a gentle tapping on a door and her voice: “Darling, there’s a man here who says he has some stills from the studio. He says. Muy simpático. Muy guapo también. Con cojones.”

A voice I had heard before said sharply: “Shut up, you little bitch. I’ll be out in a second.”

The Gonzales came back through the archway humming. Her glass was empty. She went to the bar again. “But you are not drinking,” she cried, looking at my glass.

“I ate dinner. I only have a two-quart stomach anyway. I understand a little Spanish.”

She tossed her head. “You are shocked?” Her eyes rolled. Her shoulders did a fan dance.

“I’m pretty hard to shock.”

“But you heard what I said? Madre de Dios. I’m so terribly sorry.”

“I’ll bet,” I said.

She finished making herself another highball.

“Yes. I am so sorry,” she sighed. “That is, I think I am. Sometimes I am not sure. Sometimes I do not give a good goddamn. It is so confusing. All my friends tell me I am far too outspoken. I do shock you, don’t I?” She was on the arm of my chair again.

“No. But if I wanted to be shocked I’d know right where to come.” She reached her glass behind her indolently and leaned towards me.

“But I do not live here,” she said. “I live at the Chateau Bercy.”

“Alone?”

She slapped me delicately across the tip of my nose. The next thing I knew I had her in my lap and she was trying to bite a piece off my tongue. “You are a very sweet son-of-a-bitch,” she said. Her mouth was as hot as ever a mouth was. Her lips burned like dry ice. Her tongue was driving hard against my teeth. Her eyes looked enormous and black and the whites showed under them.

“I am so tired,” she whispered into my mouth. “I am so worn, so incredibly tired.”

I felt her hand in my breast pocket. I shoved her off hard, but she had my wallet. She danced away with it laughing, flicked it open and went through it with fingers that darted like little snakes.

“So glad you two got acquainted,” a voice off to one side said coolly. Mavis Weld stood in the archway.

Her hair was fluffed out carelessly and she hadn’t bothered with make-up. She wore a hostess gown and very little else. Her legs ended in little green and silver slippers. Her eyes were empty, her lips contemptuous. But she was the same girl all right, dark glasses on or off.

The Gonzales gave her a quick darting glance, closed my wallet and tossed it. I caught it and put it away. She strolled to a table and picked up a black bag with a long strap, hooked it over her shoulder and moved towards the door.

Mavis Weld didn’t move, didn’t look at her. She looked at me. But there was no emotion of any kind in her face. The Gonzales opened the door and glanced outside and almost closed it and turned.

“The name is Philip Marlowe,” she said to Mavis Weld. “Nice don’t you think?”

“I didn’t know you bothered to ask them their names,” Mavis Weld said. “You so seldom know them long enough.”

“I see,” the Gonzales answered gently. She turned and smiled at me faintly. “Such a charming way to call a girl a whore, don’t you think?”

Mavis Weld said nothing. Her face had no expression.

“At least,” the Gonzales said smoothly as she pulled the door open again, “I haven’t been sleeping with any gunmen lately.”

“Are you sure you can remember?” Mavis Weld asked her in exactly the same tone. “Open the door, honey. This is the day we put the garbage out.”

The Gonzales looked back at her slowly, levelly, and with a knife in her eyes. Then she made a faint sound with her lips and teeth and yanked the door wide. It closed behind her with a jarring smash. The noise didn’t even flicker the steady dark-blue glare in Mavis Weld’s eyes.

“Now suppose you do the same—but more quietly,” she said.

I got out a handkerchief and scrubbed the lipstick over my face. It looked exactly the color of blood, fresh blood. “That could happen to anybody,” I said. “I wasn’t petting her. She was petting me.”

She marched to the door and heaved it open. “On your way, dreamboat. Make with the feet.”

“I came here on business, Miss Weld.”

“Yes. I can imagine. Out. I don’t know you. I don’t want to know you. And if I did, this wouldn’t be either the day or the hour.”

“Never the time and place and the loved one all together,” I said.

“What’s that?” She tried to throw me out with the point of her chin, but even she wasn’t that good.

“Browning. The poet, not the automatic. I feel sure you’d prefer the automatic.”

“Look little man, do I have to call the manager to bounce you downstairs like a basketball?”

I went over and pushed the door shut. She held on to the last moment. She didn’t quite kick me, but it cost her an effort not to. I tried to ease her away from the door without appearing to. She didn’t ease worth a darn. She stood her ground, one hand still reaching for the doorknob, her eyes full of dark-blue rage.

“If you’re going to stand that close to me,” I said, “maybe you’d better put some clothes on.”

She took her hand back and swung it hard. The slap sounded like Miss Gonzales slamming the door, but it stung. And it reminded me of the sore place on the back of my head.

“Did I hurt you?” she said softly.

I nodded.

“That’s fine.” She hauled off and slapped me again, harder if anything. “I think you’d better kiss me,” she breathed. Her eyes were clear and limpid and melting. I glanced down casually. Her right hand was balled into a very businesslike fist. It wasn’t too small to work with, either.

“Believe me,” I said. “There’s only one reason I don’t. Even if you had your little black gun with you. Or the brass knuckles you probably keep on your night table.”

She smiled politely.

“I might just happen to be working for you,” I said. “And I don’t go whoring around after every pair of legs I see.” I looked down at hers. I could see them all right and the flag that marked the goal line was no larger than it had to be. She pulled the hostess gown together and turned and walked over to the little bar shaking her head.

“I’m free, white and twenty-one,” she said. “I’ve seen all the approaches there are. I think I have. If I can’t scare you, lick you, or seduce you, what the hell can I buy you with?”

“Well—”

“Don’t tell me,” she interrupted sharply and turned with a glass in her hand. She drank and tossed the loose hair around and smiled a thin little smile. “Money, of course. How damned stupid of me to overlook that.”

“Money would help,” I said.

Her mouth twisted in wry disgust but the voice was almost affectionate. “How much money?”

“Oh a hundred bucks would do to start with.”

“You’re cheap. It’s a cheap little bastard, isn’t it? A hundred bucks it says. Is a hundred bucks money in your circle, darling?”

“Make it two hundred then. I could retire on that.”

“Still cheap. Every week of course. In a nice clean envelope?”

“You could skip the envelope. I’d only get it dirty.”

“And just what would I get for this money, my charming little gum-shoe? I’m quite sure of what you are, of course.”

“You’d get a receipt. Who told you I was a gum-shoe?”

She stared out of her own eyes for a brief instant before the act dropped over her again. “It must have been the smell.” She sipped her drink and stared at me over it with a faint smile of contempt.

“I’m beginning to think you write your own dialogue,” I said. “I’ve been wondering just what was the matter with it.”

I ducked. A few drops splattered me. The glass splintered on the wall behind me. The broken pieces fell soundlessly.

“And with that,” she said, completely calm, “I believe I must have used up my entire stock of girlish charm.”

I went over and picked up my hat. “I never thought you killed him,” I said. “But it would help to have some sort of reason for not telling you were there. It’s a help to have enough money for a retainer just to establish myself. And enough information to justify my accepting the retainer.”

She picked a cigarette out of a box, tossed it in the air, caught it between her lips effortlessly and lit it with a match that came from nowhere.

“My goodness. Am I supposed to have killed somebody?” she asked. I was still holding the hat. It made me feel foolish. I don’t know why. I put it on and started for the door.

“I trust you have carfare home,” the contemptuous voice said behind me.

I didn’t answer. I just kept going. When I had the door ready to open she said: “I also trust Miss Gonzales gave you her address and phone number. You should be able to get almost anything out of her—including, I am told, money.”

I let go of the doorknob and went back across the room fast. She stood her ground and the smile on her lips didn’t slip a millimeter.

“Look,” I said. “You’re going to find this hard to believe. But I came over here with the quaint idea that you might be a girl who needed some help—and would find it rather hard to get anyone you could bank on. I figured you went to that hotel room to make some kind of a payoff. And the fact that you went by yourself and took chances on being recognized—and were recognized by a house dick whose standard of ethics would take about as much strain as a very tired old cobweb—all this made me think you might be in one of those Hollywood jams that really mean curtains. But you’re not in any jam. You’re right up front under the baby spot pulling every tired ham gesture you ever used in the most tired B-picture you ever acted in—if acting is the word—”

“Shut up,” she said, between teeth so tight they grated. “Shut up, you slimy, blackmailing keyhole peeper.”

“You don’t need me,” I said. “You don’t need anybody. You’re so God-damn smart you could talk your way out of a safe-deposit box. Okay. Go ahead and talk your way out. I won’t stop you. Just don’t make me listen to it. I’d burst out crying to think a mere slip of an innocent little girl like you should be so clever. You do things to me, honey. Just like Margaret O’Brien.”

She didn’t move or breathe when I reached the door, nor when I opened it. I don’t know why. The stuff wasn’t that good.

I went down the stairs and across the court and out of the front door, almost bumping into a slim dark-eyed man who was standing there lighting a cigarette.

“Excuse me,” he said quietly, “I’m afraid I’m in your way.”

I started to go around him, then I noticed that his lifted right hand held a key. I reached out and snapped it out of his hand for no reason at all. I looked at the number stamped on it. No. 14. Mavis Weld’s apartment. I threw it off behind some bushes.

“You don’t need that,” I said. “The door isn’t locked.”

“Of course,” he said. There was a peculiar smile on his face. “How stupid of me.”

“Yeah,” I said. “We’re both stupid. Anybody’s stupid that bothers with that tramp.”

“I wouldn’t quite say that,” he answered quietly, his small sad eyes watching me without any particular expression.

“You don’t have to,” I said. “I just said it for you. I beg your pardon. I’ll get your key.” I went over behind the bushes, picked it up and handed it to him.

“Thank you very much,” he said. “And by the way—” He stopped. I stopped. “I hope I don’t interrupt an interesting quarrel,” he said. “I should hate to do that. No?” He smiled. “Well, since Miss Weld is a friend in common, may I introduce myself. My name is Steelgrave. Haven’t I seen you somewhere?”

“No you haven’t seen me anywhere, Mr. Steelgrave,” I said. “My name’s Marlowe, Philip Marlowe. It’s extremely unlikely that we’ve met. And strange to relate I never heard of you, Mr. Steelgrave. And I wouldn’t give a damn, even if your name was Weepy Moyer.” I never knew quite why I said that. There was nothing to make me say it, except that the name had been mentioned. A peculiar stillness came over his face. A peculiar fixed look in his silent black eyes. He took the cigarette out of his mouth, looked at the tip, flicked a little ash off it, although there was no ash to flick off, looking down as he said: “Weepy Moyer? Peculiar name. I don’t think I ever heard that. Is he somebody I should know?”

“Not unless you’re unusually fond of ice picks,” I said, and left him. I went on down the steps, crossed to my car, looked back before I got in. He was standing there looking down at me, the cigarette between his lips. From that distance I couldn’t see whether there was any expression on his face. He didn’t move or make any kind of gesture when I looked back at him. He didn’t even turn away. He just stood there. I got in and drove off.

13

I drove east on Sunset but I didn’t go home. At La Brea I turned north and swung over to Highland, out over Cahuenga Pass and down on to Ventura Boulevard, past Studio City and Sherman Oaks and Encino. There was nothing lonely about the trip. There never is on that road. Fast boys in stripped-down Fords shot in and out of the traffic streams, missing fenders by a sixteenth of an inch, but somehow always missing them. Tired men in dusty coupes and sedans winced and tightened their grip on the wheel and ploughed on north and west towards home and dinner, an evening with the sports page, the blatting of the radio, the whining of their spoiled children and the gabble of their silly wives. I drove on past the gaudy neons and the false fronts behind them, the sleazy hamburger joints that look like palaces under the colors, the circular drive-ins as gay as circuses with the chipper hard-eyed carhops, the brilliant counters, and the sweaty greasy kitchens that would have poisoned a toad. Great double trucks rumbled down over Sepulveda from Wilmington and San Pedro and crossed towards the Ridge Route, starting up in low-low from the traffic lights with a growl of lions in the zoo.

Behind Encino an occasional light winked from the hills through thick trees. The homes of screen stars. Screen stars, phooey. The veterans of a thousand beds. Hold it, Marlowe, you’re not human tonight.

The air got cooler. The highway narrowed. The cars were so few now that the headlights hurt. The grade rose against chalk walls and at the top a breeze, unbroken from the ocean, danced casually across the night.

I ate dinner at a place near Thousand Oaks. Bad but quick. Feed ‘em and throw ‘em out. Lots of business. We can’t bother with you sitting over your second cup of coffee, mister. You’re using money space. See those people over there behind the rope? They want to eat. Anyway they think they have to. God knows why they want to eat here. They could do better home out of a can. They’re just restless. Like you. They have to get the car out and go somewhere. Sucker-bait for the racketeers that have taken over the restaurants. Here we go again. You’re not human tonight, Marlowe.

I paid off and stopped in a bar to drop a brandy on top of the New York cut. Why New York, I thought. It was Detroit where they made machine tools. I stepped out into the night air that nobody had yet found out how to option. But a lot of people were probably trying. They’d get around to it.

I drove on to the Oxnard cut-off and turned back along the ocean. The big eight-wheelers and sixteen-wheelers were streaming north, all hung over with orange lights. On the right the great fat solid Pacific trudging into shore like a scrubwoman going home. No moon, no fuss, hardly a sound of the surf. No smell. None of the harsh wild smell of the sea. A California ocean. California, the department-store state. The most of everything and the best of nothing. Here we go again. You’re not human tonight, Marlowe.

All right. Why would I be? I’m sitting in that office, playing with a dead fly and in pops this dowdy little item from Manhattan, Kansas, and chisels me down to a shopworn twenty to find her brother. He sounds like a creep but she wants to find him. So with this fortune clasped to my chest, I trundle down to Bay City and the routine I go through is so tired I’m half asleep on my feet. I meet nice people, with and without ice picks in their necks. I leave, and I leave myself wide-open too. Then she comes in and takes the twenty away from me and gives me a kiss and gives it back to me because I didn’t do a full day’s work.

So I go see Dr. Hambleton, retired (and how) optometrist from El Centro, and meet again the new style in neckwear. And I don’t tell the cops. I just frisk the customer’s toupee and put on an act. Why? Who am I cutting my throat for this time? A blonde with sexy eyes and too many door keys? A girl from Manhattan, Kansas? I don’t know. All I know is that something isn’t what it seems and the old tired but always reliable hunch tells me that if the hand is played the way it is dealt the wrong person is going to lose the pot. Is that my business? Well, what is my business? Do I know? Did I ever know? Let’s not go into that. You’re not human tonight, Marlowe. Maybe I never was or ever will be. Maybe I’m an ectoplasm with a private license. Maybe we all get like this in the cold half-lit world where always the wrong thing happens and never the right.

Malibu. More movie stars. More pink and blue bathtubs. More tufted beds. More Chanel No. 5. More Lincoln Continentals and Cadillacs. More wind-blown hair and sunglasses and attitudes and pseudo-refined voices and waterfront morals. Now, wait a minute. Lots of nice people work in pictures. You’ve got the wrong attitude, Marlowe. You’re not human tonight.

I smelled Los Angeles before I got to it. It smelled stale and old like a living room that had been closed too long. But the colored lights fooled you. The lights were wonderful. There ought to be a monument to the man who invented neon lights. Fifteen stories high, solid marble. There’s a boy who really made something out of nothing.

So I went to a picture show and it had to have Mavis Weld in it. One of those glass-and-chromium deals where everybody smiled too much and talked too much and knew it. The women were always going up a long curving staircase to change their clothes. The men were always taking monogrammed cigarettes out of expensive cases and snapping expensive lighters at each other. And the help was round-shouldered from carrying trays with drinks across the terrace to a swimming pool about the size of Lake Huron but a lot neater.

The leading man was an amiable ham with a lot of charm, some of it turning a little yellow at the edges. The star was a bad-tempered brunette with contemptuous eyes and a couple of bad close-ups that showed her pushing forty-five backwards almost hard enough to break a wrist. Mavis Weld played second lead and she played it with wraps on. She was good, but she could have been ten times better. But if she had been ten times better half her scenes would have been yanked out to protect the star. It was as neat a bit of tightrope walking as I ever saw. Well it wouldn’t be a tightrope she’d be walking from now on. It would be a piano wire. It would be very high. And there wouldn’t be any net under it.

14

I had a reason for going back to the office. A special delivery letter with an orange claim check ought to have arrived there by now. Most of the windows were dark in the building, but not all. People work nights in other businesses than mine. The elevator man said “Howdy” from the depths of his throat and trundled me up. The corridor had lighted open doors where the scrubwomen were still cleaning up the debris of the wasted hours. I turned a corner past the slobbery hum of a vacuum cleaner, let myself into my dark office and opened the windows. I sat there at the desk doing nothing, not even thinking. No special-delivery letter. All the noise of the building, except the vacuum cleaner, seemed to have flowed out into the street and lost itself among the turning wheels of innumerable cars. Then somewhere along the hall outside a man started whistling “Lili Marlene” with elegance and virtuosity. I knew who that was. The night man checking office doors. I switched the desk lamp on and he passed without trying mine. His steps went away, then came back with a different sound, more of a shuffle. The buzzer sounded in the other office which was still unlocked. That would be special delivery. I went out to get it, only it wasn’t.

A fat man in sky-blue pants was closing the door with that beautiful leisure only fat men ever achieve. He wasn’t alone, but I looked at him first. He was a large man and wide. Not young nor handsome, but he looked durable. Above the sky-blue gabardine slacks he wore a two-tone leisure jacket which would have been revolting on a zebra. The neck of his canary-yellow shirt was open wide, which it had to be if his neck was going to get out. He was hatless and his large head was decorated with a reasonable amount of pale salmon-colored hair. His nose had been broken but well set and it hadn’t been a collector’s item in the first place.

The creature with him was a weedy number with red eyes and sniffles. Age about twenty, five feet nine, thin as a broom straw. His nose twitched and his mouth twitched and his hands twitched and he looked very unhappy.

The big man smiled genially. “Mr. Marlowe, no doubt?”

I said: “Who else?”

“It’s a little late for a business call,” the big man said and hid half the office by spreading out his hands. “I hope you don’t mind. Or do you already have all the business you can handle?”

“Don’t kid me. My nerves are frayed,” I said. “Who’s the junky?”

“Come along, Alfred,” the big man said to his companion. “And stop acting girlish.”

“In a pig’s valise,” Alfred told him.

The big man turned to me placidly. “Why do all these punks keep saying that? It isn’t funny. It isn’t witty. It doesn’t mean anything. Quite a problem, this Alfred. I got him off the stuff, you know, temporarily at least. Say ‘how do you do’ to Mr. Marlowe, Alfred.”

“Screw him,” Alfred said.

The big man sighed. “My name’s Toad,” he said. “Joseph P. Toad.”

I didn’t say anything.

“Go ahead and laugh,” the big man said. “I’m used to it. Had the name all my life.” He came towards me with his hand out. I took it. The big man smiled pleasantly into my eyes. “O.K. Alfred,” he said without looking back.

Alfred made what seemed to be a very slight and unimportant movement at the end of which a heavy automatic was pointing at me.

“Careful, Alfred,” the big man said, holding my hand with a grip that would have bent a girder. “Not yet.”

“In a pig’s valise,” Alfred said. The gun pointed at my chest. His finger tightened around the trigger. I watched it tighten. I knew at precisely what moment that tightening would release the hammer. It didn’t seem to make any difference. This was happening somewhere else in a cheesy program picture. It wasn’t happening to me.

The hammer of the automatic clicked dryly on nothing. Alfred lowered the gun with a grunt of annoyance and it disappeared whence it had come. He started to twitch again. There was nothing nervous about his movements with the gun. I wondered just what junk he was off of.

The big man let go of my hand, the genial smile still over his large healthy face.

He patted a pocket. “I got the magazine,” he said. “Alfred ain’t reliable lately. The little bastard might have shot you.”

Alfred sat down in a chair and tilted it against the wall and breathed through his mouth.

I let my heels down on the floor again.

“I bet he scared you,” Joseph P. Toad said.

I tasted salt on my tongue.

“You ain’t so tough,” Toad said, poking me in the stomach with a fat finger.

I stepped away from the finger and watched his eyes.

“What does it cost?” he asked almost gently.

“Let’s go into my parlor,” I said.

I turned my back on him and walked through the door into the other office. It was hard work but I made it. I sweated all the way. I went around behind the desk and stood there waiting. Mr. Toad followed me in placidly. The junky came twitching in behind him.

“You don’t have a comic book around, do you?” Toad asked. “Keeps him quiet.”

“Sit down,” I said. “I’ll look.”

He reached for the chair arms. I jerked a drawer open and got my hand around the butt of a Luger. I brought it up slowly, looking at Alfred. Alfred didn’t even look at me. He was studying the corner of the ceiling and trying to keep his mouth out of his eye.

“This is as comic as I get,” I said.

“You won’t need that,” the big man said, genially.

“That’s fine,” I said, like somebody else talking, far away behind a wall. I could just barely hear the words. “But if I do, here it is. And this one’s loaded. Want me to prove it to you?”

The big man looked as near worried as he would ever look. “I’m sorry you take it like that,” he said. “I’m so used to Alfred I hardly notice him. Maybe you’re right. Maybe I ought to do something about him.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Do it this afternoon before you come up here. It’s too late now.”

“Now wait a minute, Mr. Marlowe.” He put his hand out. I slashed at it with the Luger. He was fast, but not fast enough. I cut the back of his hand open with the sight on the gun. He grabbed at it and sucked at the cut. “Hey, please! Alfred’s my nephew. My sister’s kid. I kind of look after him. He wouldn’t hurt a fly, really.”

“Next time you come up I’ll have one for him not to hurt,” I said.

“Now don’t be like that, mister. Please don’t be like that. I’ve got quite a nice little proposition—”

“Shut up,” I said. I sat down very slowly. My face burned. I had difficulty speaking clearly at all. I felt a little drunk. I said, slowly and thickly: “A friend of mine told me about a fellow that had something like this pulled on him. He was at a desk the way I am. He had a gun, just the way I have. There were two men on the other side of the desk, like you and Alfred. The man on my side began to get mad. He couldn’t help himself. He began to shake. He couldn’t speak a word. He just had this gun in his hand. So without a word he shot twice under the desk, right where your belly is.”

The big man turned a sallow green color and started to get up. But he changed his mind. He got a violent-looking handkerchief out of his pocket and mopped his face. “You seen that in a picture,” he said.

“That’s right,” I said. “But the man who made the picture told me where he got the idea. That wasn’t in any picture.” I put the Luger down on the desk in front of me and said in a more natural voice: “You’ve got to be careful about firearms, Mr. Toad. You never know but what it may upset a man to have an Army .45 snapped in his face—especially when he doesn’t know it’s not loaded. It made me kind of nervous for a minute. I haven’t had a shot of morphine since lunch time.”

Toad studied me carefully with narrow eyes. The junky got up and went to another chair and kicked it around and sat down and tilted his greasy head against the wall. But his nose and hands kept on twitching.

“I heard you were kind of hard-boiled,” Toad said slowly, his eyes cool and watchful.

“You heard wrong. I’m a very sensitive guy. I go all to pieces over nothing.”

“Yeah. I understand.” He stared at me a long time without speaking. “Maybe we played this wrong. Mind if I put my hand in my pocket? I don’t wear a gun.”

“Go ahead,” I said. “It would give me the greatest possible pleasure to see you try to pull a gun.”

He frowned, then very slowly got out a flat pigskin wallet and drew out a crisp new one-hundred-dollar bill. He laid it on the edge of the glass top, drew out another just like it, then one by one three more. He laid them carefully in a row along the desk, end to end. Alfred let his chair settle to the floor and stared at the money with his mouth quivering.

“Five C’s,” the big man said. He folded his wallet and put it away. I watched every movement he made. “For nothing at all but keeping the nose clean. Check?”

I just looked at him.

“You ain’t looking for nobody,” the big man said. “You couldn’t find nobody. You don’t have time to work for nobody. You didn’t hear a thing or see a thing. You’re clean. Five C’s clean. Okay?”

There was no sound in the office but Alfred’s sniffling. The big man half turned his head. “Quiet, Alfred. I’ll give you a shot when we leave,” the big man told him. “Try to act nice.” He sucked again at the cut on the back of his hand.

“With you for a model that ought to be easy,” I said.

“Screw you,” Alfred said.

“Limited vocabulary,” the big man told me. “Very limited. Get the idea, chum?” He indicated the money. I fingered the butt of the Luger. He leaned forward a little. “Relax, can’t you. It’s simple. This is a retainer. You don’t do a thing for it. Nothing is what you do. If you keep on doing nothing for a reasonable length of time you get the same amount later on. That’s simple, isn’t it?”

“And who am I doing this nothing for?” I asked.

“Me. Joseph P. Toad.”

“What’s your racket?”

“Business representative, you might call me.”

“What else could I call you? Besides what I could think up myself?”

“You could call me a guy that wants to help out a guy that don’t want to make trouble for a guy.”

“And what could I call that lovable character?” I asked.

Joseph P. Toad gathered the five hundred-dollar bills together, lined up the edges neatly and pushed the packet across the desk. “You can call him a guy that would rather spill money than blood,” he said. “But he don’t mind spilling blood if it looks like that’s what he’s got to do.”

“How is he with an ice pick?” I asked. “I can see how lousy he is with a .45.”

The big man chewed his lower lip, then pulled it out with a blunt forefinger and thumb and nibbled on the inside of it softly, like a milk cow chewing her cud. “We’re not talking about ice picks,” he said at length. “All we’re talking about is how you might get off on the wrong foot and do yourself a lot of harm. Whereas if you don’t get off on no foot at all, you’re sitting pretty and money coming in.”

“Who is the blonde?” I asked.

He thought about that and nodded. “Maybe you’re into this too far already,” he sighed. “Maybe it’s too late to do business.”

After a moment he leaned forward and said gently: “Okay. I’ll check back with my principal and see how far out he wants to come. Maybe we can still do business. Everything stands as it is until you hear from me. Check?”

I let him have that one. He put his hands on the desk and very slowly stood up, watching the gun I was pushing around on the blotter.

“You can keep the dough,” he said. “Come on, Alfred.” He turned and walked solidly out of the office.

Alfred’s eyes crawled sideways watching him, then jerked to the money on the desk. The big automatic appeared with the same magic in his thin right hand. Dartingly as an eel he moved over to the desk. He kept the gun on me and reached for the money with his left hand. It disappeared into his pocket. He gave me a smooth cool empty grin, nodded and moved away, apparently not realizing for a moment that I was holding a gun too.

“Come on, Alfred,” the big man called sharply from outside the door. Alfred slipped through the door and was gone.

The outer door opened and closed. Steps went along the hail. Then silence. I sat there thinking back over it, trying to make up my mind whether it was pure idiocy or just a new way to toss a scare.

Five minutes later the telephone rang.

A thick pleasant voice said: “Oh by the way, Mr. Marlowe, I guess you know Sherry Ballou, don’t you?”

“Nope.”

“Sheridan Ballou, Incorporated. The big agent? You ought to look him up sometime.”

I held the phone silently for a moment. Then I said: “Is he her agent?”

“He might be,” Joseph P. Toad said, and paused a moment. “I suppose you realize we’re just a couple of bit players, Mr. Marlowe. That’s all. Just a couple of bit players. Somebody wanted to find out a little something about you. It seemed the simplest way to do it. Now, I’m not so sure.”

I didn’t answer. He hung up. Almost at once the phone rang again.

A seductive voice said: “You do not like me so well, do you, amigo?”

“Sure I do. Just don’t keep biting me.”

“I am at home at the Chateau Bercy. I am lonely.”

“Call an escort bureau.”

“But please. That is no way to talk. This is business of a great importance.”

“I bet. But not the business I’m in.”

“That slut—What does she say about me?” she hissed.

“Nothing. Oh, she might have called you a Tijuana hooker in riding pants. Would you mind?”

That amused her. The silvery giggle went on for a little while. “Always the wisecrack with you. Is it not so? But you see I did not then know you were a detective. That makes a very big difference.”

I could have told her how wrong she was. I just said: “Miss Gonzales, you said something about business. What kind of business, if you’re not kidding me?”

“Would you like to make a great deal of money? A very great deal of money?”

“You mean without getting shot?” I asked.

Her in caught breath came over the wire. “Si,” she said thoughtfully. “There is also that to consider. But you are so brave, so big, so—”

“I’ll be at my office at nine in the morning, Miss Gonzales. I’ll be a lot braver then. Now if you’ll excuse me—”

“You have a date? Is she beautiful? More beautiful than I am?”

“For Christ’s sake,” I said. “Don’t you ever think of anything but one thing?”

“The hell with you, darling,” she said and hung up in my face.

I turned the lights out and left. Halfway down the hall I met a man looking at numbers. He had a special delivery in his hand. So I had to go back to the office and put it in the safe. And the phone rang again while I was doing this.

I let it ring. I had had enough for one day. I just didn’t care. It could have been the Queen of Sheba with her cellophane pajamas on—or off—I was too tired to bother. My brain felt like a bucket of wet sand.

It was still ringing as I reached the door. No use. I had to go back. Instinct was stronger than weariness. I lifted the receiver.

Orfamay Quest’s twittery little voice said: “Oh Mr. Marlowe I’ve been trying to get you for just the longest time. I’m so upset. I’m—”

“In the morning,” I said. “The office is closed.”

“Please, Mr. Marlowe—just because I lost my temper for a moment—”

“In the morning.”

“But I tell you I have to see you.” The voice didn’t quite rise to a yell. “It’s terribly important.”

“Unhuh.”

She sniffled. “You—you kissed me.”

“I’ve kissed better since,” I said. To hell with her. To hell with all women.

“I’ve heard from Orrin,” she said.

That stopped me for a moment, then I laughed. “You’re a nice little liar,” I said. “Goodbye.”

“But really I have. He called me. On the telephone. Right here where I’m staying.”

“Fine,” I said. “Then you don’t need a detective at all. And if you did, you’ve got a better one than I am right in the family. I couldn’t even find out where you were staying.”

There was a little pause. She still had me talking to her anyway. She’d kept me from hanging up. I had to give her that much.

“I wrote to him where I’d be staying,” she said at last.

“Unhuh. Only he didn’t get the letter because he had moved and he didn’t leave any forwarding address. Remember? Try again some time when I’m not so tired. Goodnight, Miss Quest. And you don’t have to tell me where you are staying now. I’m not working for you.”

“Very well, Mr. Marlowe. I’m ready to call the police now. But I don’t think you’ll like it. I don’t think you’ll like it at all.”

“Why?”

“Because there’s murder in it, Mr. Marlowe, and murder is a very nasty word—don’t you think?”

“Come on up,” I said. “I’ll wait.”

I hung up. I got the bottle of Old Forester out. There was nothing slow about the way I poured myself a drink and dropped it down my throat.

15

She came in briskly enough this time. Her motions were small and quick and determined. There was one of those thin little, bright little smiles on her face. She put her bag down firmly, settled herself in the customer’s chair and went on smiling.

“It’s nice of you to wait for me,” she said. “I bet you haven’t had your dinner yet, either.”

“Wrong,” I said. “I have had my dinner. I am now drinking whiskey. You don’t approve of whiskey-drinking do you?”

“I certainly do not.”

“That’s just dandy,” I said. “I hoped you hadn’t changed your mind.” I put the bottle up on the desk and poured myself another slug. I drank a little of it and gave her a leer above the glass.

“If you keep on with that you won’t be in any condition to listen to what I have to say,” she snapped.

“About this murder,” I said. “Anybody I know? I can see you’re not murdered—yet.”

“Please don’t be unnecessarily horrid. It’s not my fault. You doubted me over the telephone so I had to convince you. Orrin did call me up. But he wouldn’t tell me where he was or what he was doing. I don’t know why.”

“He wanted you to find out for yourself,” I said. “He’s building your character.”

“That’s not funny. It’s not even smart.”

“But you’ve got to admit it’s nasty,” I said. “Who was murdered? Or is that a secret too?”

She fiddled a little with her bag, not enough to overcome her embarrassment, because she wasn’t embarrassed. But enough to needle me into taking another drink.

“That horrid man in the rooming house was murdered. Mr.—Mr.—I forget his name.”

“Let’s both forget it,” I said. “Let’s do something together for once.” I dropped the whiskey bottle into the desk drawer and stood up. “Look, Orfamay, I’m not asking you how you know all this. Or rather how Orrin knows it all. Or if he does know it. You’ve found him. That’s what you wanted me to do. Or he’s found you, which comes to the same thing.”

“It’s not the same thing,” she cried. “I haven’t really found him. He wouldn’t tell me where he was living.”

“Well if it is anything like the last place, I don’t blame him.”

She set her lips in a firm line of distaste. “He wouldn’t tell me anything really.”

“Just about murders,” I said. “Trifles like that.”

She laughed bubblingly. “I just said that to scare you. I don’t really mean anybody was murdered, Mr. Marlowe. You sounded so cold and distant. I thought you wouldn’t help me any more. And—well, I just made it up.”

I took a couple of deep breaths and looked down at my hands. I straightened out the fingers slowly. Then I stood up. I didn’t say anything.

“Are you mad at me?” she asked timidly, making a little circle on the desk with the point of a finger.

“I ought to slap your face off,” I said. “And quit acting innocent. Or it mightn’t be your face I’d slap.”

Her breath caught with a jerk. “Why, how dare you!”

“You used that line,” I said. “You used it too often. Shut up and get the hell out of here. Do you think I enjoy being scared to death? Oh—there’s this.” I yanked a drawer open, got out her twenty dollars and threw them down in front of her. “Take this money away. Endow a hospital or a research laboratory with it. It makes me nervous having it around.”

Her hand reached automatically for the money. Her eyes behind the cheaters were round and wondering. “Goodness,” she said, assembling her handbag with a nice dignity. “I’m sure I didn’t know you scared that easy. I thought you were tough.”

“That’s just an act,” I growled, moving around the desk. She leaned back in her chair away from me. “I’m only tough with little girls like you that don’t let their fingernails grow too long. I’m all mush inside.” I took hold of her arm and yanked her to her feet. Her head went back. Her lips parted. I was hell with the women that day.

“But you will find Orrin for me, won’t you?” she whispered. “It was all a lie. Everything I’ve told you was a lie. He didn’t call me up. I—I don’t know anything.”

“Perfume,” I said sniffing. “Why, you little darling. You put perfume behind your ears—and all for me!”

She nodded her little chin half an inch. Her eyes were melting. “Take my glasses off,” she whispered, “Philip. I don’t mind if you take a little whiskey once in a while. Really I don’t.”

Our faces were about six inches apart. I was afraid to take her glasses off. I might have socked her on the nose.

“Yes,” I said in a voice that sounded like Orson Welles with his mouth full of crackers. “I’ll find him for you, honey, if he’s still alive. And for free. Not a dime of expense involved. I only ask one thing.”

“What, Philip?” she asked softly and opened her lips a little wider.

“Who was the black sheep in your family?”

She jerked away from me like a startled fawn might, if I had a startled fawn and it jerked away from me. She stared at me stony-faced.

“You said Orrin wasn’t the black sheep in your family. Remember? With a very peculiar emphasis. And when you mentioned your sister Leila, you sort of passed on quickly as if the subject was distasteful.”

“I—I don’t remember saying anything like that,” she said very slowly.

“So I was wondering,” I said. “What name does your sister Leila use in pictures?”

“Pictures?” she sounded vague. “Oh you mean motion pictures? Why I never said she was in pictures. I never said anything about her like that.”

I gave her my big homely lopsided grin. She suddenly flew into a rage.

“Mind your own business about my sister Leila,” she spit at me. “You leave my sister Leila out of your dirty remarks.”

“What dirty remarks?” I asked. “Or should I try to guess?”

“All you think about is liquor and women,” she screamed. “I hate you!” She rushed to the door and yanked it open and went out. She practically ran down the hall.

I went back around my desk and slumped into the chair. A very strange little girl. Very strange indeed. After a while the phone started ringing again, as it would. On the fourth ring I leaned my head on my hand and groped for it, fumbled it to my face.

“Utter McKinley Funeral Parlors,” I said.

A female voice said: “Wha-a-t?” and went off into a shriek of laughter. That one was a riot at the police smoker in 1921. What a wit. Like a hummingbird’s beak. I put the lights out and went home.

16

Eight-forty-five the next morning found me parked a couple of doors from the Bay City Camera Shop, breakfasted and peaceful and reading the local paper through a pair of sunglasses. I had already chewed my way through the Los Angeles paper, which contained no item about ice picks in the Van Nuys or any other hotel. Not even MYSTERIOUS DEATH IN DOWNTOWN HOTEL, with no names or weapons specified. The Bay City News wasn’t too busy to write up a murder. They put it on the first page, right next to the price of meat.

LOCAL MAN FOUND STABBED

IN IDAHO STREET ROOMING HOUSE

An anonymous telephone call late yesterday sent police speeding to an address on Idaho Street opposite the Seamans and Lansing Company’s lumber yard. Entering the unlocked door of his apartment, officers found Lester B. Clausen, 45, manager of the rooming house, dead on the couch. Clausen had been stabbed in the neck with an ice pick which was still in his body. After a preliminary examination, Coroner Frank L. Crowdy announced that Clausen had been drinking heavily and may have been unconscious at the time of his death. No signs of struggle were observed by the police.

Detective Lieutenant Moses Maglashan immediately took charge and questioned tenants of the rooming house on their return from work, but no light has so far been thrown on the circumstances of the crime. Interviewed by this reporter, Coroner Crowdy stated that Clausen’s death might have been suicide but that the position of the wound made this unlikely. Examination of the rooming house register disclosed that a page had recently been torn out. Lieutenant Maglashan, after questioning the tenants at length, stated that a thick-set middle-aged man with brown hair and heavy features had been noticed in the hallway of the rooming house on several occasions, but that none of the tenants knew his name or occupation. After carefully checking all rooms, Maglashan further gave it as his opinion that one of the roomers had left recently and in some haste. The mutilation of the register, however, the character of the neighborhood, the lack of an accurate description of the missing man, made the job of tracing him extremely difficult.

“I have no idea at present why Clausen was murdered,” Maglashan announced at a late hour last night. “But I have had my eye on this man for some time. Many of his associates are known to me. It’s a tough case, but we’ll crack it.”

It was a nice piece and only mentioned Maglashan’s name twelve times in the text and twice more in picture captions. There was a photo of him on page three holding an ice pick and looking at it with profound thought wrinkling his brows. There was a photo of 449 Idaho Street which did it more than justice, and a photo of something with a sheet over it on a couch and Lieutenant Maglashan pointing at it sternly. There was also a close-up of the mayor looking as executive as hell behind his official desk and an interview with him on the subject of post-war crime. He said just what you would expect a mayor to say—a watered-down shot of J. Edgar Hoover with some extra bad grammar thrown in.

At three minutes to nine the door of the Bay City Camera Shop opened and an elderly Negro began to sweep dirt across the sidewalk into the gutter. At nine A.M. a neat-appearing young guy in glasses fixed the lock on the door and I went in there with the black-and-orange check Dr. G. W. Hambleton had pasted to the inside of his toupee.

The neat-appearing young man gave me a searching glance as I exchanged the check and some money for an envelope containing a tiny negative and half a dozen shiny prints blown up to eight times the size of the negative. He didn’t say anything, but the way he looked at me gave me the impression that he remembered I was not the man who had left the negative.

I went out and sat in my car and looked over the catch. The prints showed a man and a blond girl sitting in a rounded booth in a restaurant with food in front of them. They were looking up as though their attention had suddenly been attracted and they had only just had time to react before the camera had clicked. It was clear from the lighting that no flashbulb had been used.

The girl was Mavis Weld. The man was rather small, rather dark, rather expressionless. I didn’t recognize him. There was no reason why I should. The padded leather seat was covered with tiny figures of dancing couples. That made the restaurant THE DANCERS. This added to the confusion. Any amateur camera hound that tried to flash a lens in there without getting an okay from the management would have been thrown out so hard that he would have bounced all the way down to Hollywood and Vine. I figured it must have been the hidden-camera trick, the way they took Ruth Snyder in the electric chair. He would have the little camera up hanging by a strap under his coat collar, the lens just peeping out from his open jacket, and he would have rigged a bulb release that he could hold in his pocket. It wasn’t too hard for me to guess who had taken the picture. Mr. Orrin P. Quest must have moved fast and smooth to get out of there with his face still in front of his head.

I put the pictures in my vest pocket and my fingers touched a crumpled piece of paper. I got it out and read: “Doctor Vincent Lagardie, 965 Wyoming Street, Bay City.” That was the Vince I had talked to on the phone, the one Lester B. Clausen might have been trying to call.

An elderly flatfoot was strolling down the line of parked cars, marking tires with yellow chalk. He told me where Wyoming Street was. I drove out there. It was a cross-town street well out beyond the business district, parallel with two numbered streets. Number 965, a gray-white frame house, was on a corner. On its door a brass plate said Vincent Lagardie, M.D., Hours 10.00 to 12.00 and 2.30 to 4.00.

The house looked quiet and decent. A woman with an unwilling small boy was going up the steps. She read the plate, looked at a watch pinned to her lapel and chewed irresolutely on her lip. The small boy looked around carefully, then kicked her on the ankle. She winced but her voice was patient. “Now, Johnny, you mustn’t do that to Aunty Fern,” she said mildly.

She opened the door and dragged the little ape in with her. Diagonally across the intersection was a big white colonial mansion with a portico which was roofed and much too small for the house. Floodlight reflectors were set into the front lawn. The walk was bordered by tree roses in bloom. A large black and silver sign over the portico said: “The Garland Home of Peace.” I wondered how Dr. Lagardie liked looking out of his front windows at a funeral parlor. Maybe it made him careful.

I turned around at the intersection and drove back to Los Angeles, and went up to the office to look at my mail and lock my catch from the Bay City Camera Shop up in the battered green safe—all but one print. I sat down at the desk and studied this through a magnifying glass. Even with that and the camera shop blow-up the detail was still clear. There was an evening paper, a News-Chronicle, lying on the table in front of the dark thin expressionless man who sat beside Mavis Weld. I could just read the headline. LIGHT HEAVYWEIGHT CONTENDER SUCCUMBS TO RING INJURIES. Only a noon or late sports edition would use a headline like that. I pulled the phone towards me. It rang just as I got my hand on it.

“Marlowe? This is Christy French downtown. Any ideas this morning?”

“Not if your teletype’s working. I’ve seen a Bay City paper.”

“Yeah, we got that,” he said casually. “Sounds like the same guy, don’t it? Same initials, same description, same method of murder, and the time element seems to check. I hope to Christ this doesn’t mean Sunny Moe Stein’s mob have started in business again.”

“If they have, they’ve changed their technique,” I said. “I was reading up on it last night. The Stein mob used to jab their victims full of holes. One of them had over a hundred stab wounds in him.”

“They could learn better,” French said a little evasively, as if he didn’t want to talk about it. “What I called you about was Flack. Seen anything of him since yesterday afternoon?”

“No.”

“He skipped out. Didn’t come to work. Hotel called his landlady. Packed up and left last night. Destination unknown.”

“I haven’t seen him or heard from him,” I said.

“Didn’t it strike you as kind of funny our stiff only had fourteen bucks in his kick?”

“It did a little. You answered that yourself.”

“I was just talking. I don’t buy that any more. Flack’s either scared out or come into money. Either he saw something he didn’t tell and got paid to breeze, or else he lifted the customer’s case dough, leaving the fourteen bucks to make it look better.”

I said: “I’ll buy either one. Or both at the same time. Whoever searched that room so thoroughly wasn’t looking for money.”

“Why not?”

“Because when this Dr. Hambleton called me up I suggested the hotel safe to him. He wasn’t interested.”

“A type like that wouldn’t have hired you to hold his dough anyway,” French said. “He wouldn’t have hired you to keep anything for him. He wanted protection or he wanted a sidekick—or maybe just a messenger.”

“Sorry,” I said. “He told me just what I told you.”

“And seeing he was dead when you got over there,” French said, with a too casual drawl, “you couldn’t hardly have given him one of your business cards.”

I held the phone too tight and thought back rapidly over my talk with Hicks in the Idaho Street rooming house. I saw him holding my card between his fingers, looking down at it. And then I saw myself taking it out of his hand quickly, before he froze to it. I took a deep breath and let it out slowly.

“Hardly,” I said. “And stop trying to scare me to death.”

“He had one, chum. Folded twice across in his pants watch pocket. We missed it the first time.”

“I gave Flack a card,” I said, stiff-lipped.

There was silence. I could hear voices in the background and the clack of a typewriter. Finally French said dryly: “Fair enough. See you later.” He hung up abruptly.

I put the phone down very slowly in its cradle and flexed my cramped fingers. I stared down at the photo lying on the desk in front of me. All it told me was that two people, one of whom I knew, were having lunch at The Dancers. The paper on the table told me the date, or would.

I dialed the News-Chronicle and asked for the sports section. Four minutes later I wrote on a pad: “Ritchy Belleau, popular young light heavyweight contender, died in the Sisters Hospital just before midnight February 19 as a result of ring injuries sustained the previous evening in the main event at the Hollywood Legion Stadium. The News-Chronicle Noon Sports Edition for February 20 carried the headlines.”

I dialed the same number again and asked for Kenny Haste in the City Room. He was an ex-crime reporter I had known for years. We chatted around for a minute and then I said:

“Who covered the Sunny Moe Stein killing for you?”

“Tod Barrow. He’s on the Post-Dispatch now. Why?”

“I’d like the details, if any.”

He said he would send to the morgue for the file and call me, which he did ten minutes later. “He was shot twice in the head, in his car, about two blocks from the Chateau Bercy on Franklin. Time, about 11.15 P.M.”

“Date, February 20,” I said, “or was it?”

“Check, it was. No witnesses, no arrests except the usual police stock company of book-handlers, out-of-work fight managers and other professional suspects. What’s in it?”

“Wasn’t a pal of his supposed to be in town about that time?”

“Nothing here says so. What name?”

“Weepy Moyer. A cop friend of mine said something about a Hollywood money man being held on suspicion and then released for lack of evidence.”

Kenny said: “Wait a minute. Something’s coming back to me—yeah. Fellow named Steelgrave, owns The Dancers, supposed to be a gambler and so on. Nice guy. I’ve met him. That was a bust.”

“How do you mean, a bust?”

“Some smart monkey tipped the cops he was Weepy Moyer and they held him for ten days on an open charge for Cleveland. Cleveland brushed it off. That didn’t have anything to do with the Stein killing. Steelgrave was under glass all that week. No connection at all. Your cop friend has been reading pulp magazines.”

“They all do,” I said. “That’s why they talk so tough. Thanks, Kenny.”

We said goodbye and hung up and I sat leaning back in my chair and looking at my photograph. After a while I took scissors and cut out the piece that contained the folded newspaper with the headline. I put the two pieces in separate envelopes and put them in my pocket with the sheet from the pad.

I dialed Miss Mavis Weld’s Crestview number. A woman’s voice answered after several rings. It was a remote and formal voice that I might or might not have heard before. All it said was, “Hello?”

“This is Philip Marlowe. Is Miss Weld in?”

“Miss Weld will not be in until late this evening. Do you care to leave a message?”

“Very important. Where could I reach her?”

“I’m sorry. I have no information.”

“Would her agent know?”

“Possibly.”

“You’re quite sure you’re not Miss Weld?”

“Miss Weld is not in.” She hung up.

I sat there and listened to the voice. At first I thought yes, then I thought no. The longer I thought the less I knew. I went down to the parking lot and got my car out.

17

On the terrace at The Dancers a few early birds were getting ready to drink their lunch. The glass-fronted upstairs room had the awning let down in front of it. I drove on past the curve that goes down into the Strip and stopped across the street from a square building of two stories of rose-red brick with small white leaded bay windows and a Greek porch over the front door and what looked, from across the street, like an antique pewter doorknob. Over the door was a fanlight and the name Sheridan Ballou, Inc., in black wooden letters severely stylized. I locked my car and crossed to the front door. It was white and tall and wide and had a keyhole big enough for a mouse to crawl through. Inside this keyhole was the real lock. I went for the knocker, but they had thought of that too. It was all in one piece and didn’t knock.

So I patted one of the slim fluted white pillars and opened the door and walked directly into the reception room which filled the entire front of the building. It was furnished in dark antique-looking furniture and many chairs and settees of quilted chintz-like material. There were lace curtains at the windows and chintz boxes around them that matched the chintz of the furniture. There was a flowered carpet and a lot of people waiting to see Mr. Sheridan Ballou.

Some of them were bright and cheerful and full of hope. Some looked as if they had been there for days. One small dark girl was sniffling into her handkerchief in the corner. Nobody paid any attention to her. I got a couple of profiles at nice angles before the company decided I wasn’t buying anything and didn’t work there.

A dangerous-looking redhead sat languidly at an Adam desk talking into a pure-white telephone. I went over there and she put a couple of cold blue bullets into me with her eyes and then stared at the cornice that ran around the room.

“No,” she said into the phone. “No. So sorry. I’m afraid it’s no use. Far, far too busy.” She hung up and ticked off something on a list and gave me some more of her steely glance.

“Good morning. I’d like to see Mr. Ballou,” I said. I put my plain card on her desk. She lifted it by one corner, smiled at it amusedly.

“Today?” she inquired amiably. “This week?”

“How long does it usually take?”

“It has taken six months,” she said cheerfully. “Can’t somebody else help you?”

“No.”

“So sorry. Not a chance. Drop in again won’t you? Somewhere about Thanksgiving.” She was wearing a white wool skirt, a burgundy silk blouse and a black velvet over-jacket with short sleeves. Her hair was a hot sunset. She wore a golden topaz bracelet and topaz earrings and a topaz dinner ring in the shape of a shield. Her fingernails matched her blouse exactly. She looked as if it would take a couple of weeks to get her dressed.

“I’ve got to see him,” I said.

She read my card again. She smiled beautifully. “Everyone has,” she said. “Why—er—Mr. Marlowe. Look at all these lovely people. Every one of them has been here since the office opened two hours ago.”

“This is important.”

“No doubt. In what way if I may ask?”

“I want to peddle a little dirt.”

She picked a cigarette out of a crystal box and lit it with a crystal lighter. “Peddle? You mean for money—in Hollywood?”

“Could be.”

“What kind of dirt? Don’t be afraid to shock me.”

“It’s a bit obscene, Miss—Miss—” I screwed my head around to read the plaque on her desk.

“Helen Grady,” she said. “Well, a little well-bred obscenity never did any harm, did it?”

“I didn’t say it was well-bred.”

She leaned back carefully and puffed smoke in my face.

“Blackmail in short.” She sighed. “Why the hell don’t you lam out of here, bud? Before I throw a handful of fat coppers in your lap?”

I sat on the corner of her desk, grabbed a double handful of her cigarette smoke and blew it into her hair. She dodged angrily. “Beat it, lug,” she said in a voice that could have been used for paint remover.

“Oh oh. What happened to the Bryn Mawr accent?”

Without turning her head she said sharply: “Miss Vane.”

A tall slim elegant dark girl with supercilious eyebrows looked up. She had just come through an inner door camouflaged as a stained-glass window. The dark girl came over. Miss Grady handed her my card: “Spink.”

Miss Vane went back through the stained-glass window with the card.

“Sit down and rest your ankles, big stuff,” Miss Grady informed me. “You may be here all week.”

I sat down in a chintz winged chair, the back of which came eight inches above my head. It made me feel shrunken. Miss Grady gave me her smile again, the one with the hand-honed edge, and bent to the telephone once more.

I looked around. The little girl in the corner had stopped crying and was making up her face with calm unconcern. A very tall distinguished-looking party swung up a graceful arm to stare at his elegant wrist watch and oozed gently to his feet. He set a pearl-gray homburg at a rakish angle on the side of his head, checked his yellow chamois gloves and his silver-knobbed cane, and strolled languidly over to the red-headed receptionist.

“I have been waiting two hours to see Mr. Ballou,” he said icily in a rich sweet voice that had been modulated by a lot of training. “I’m not accustomed to waiting two hours to see anybody.”

“So sorry, Mr. Fortescue. Mr. Ballou is just too busy for words this A.M.”

“I’m sorry I cannot leave him a check,” the elegant tall party remarked with a weary contempt. “Probably the only thing that would interest him. But in default of that—”

“Just a minute, kid.” The redhead picked up a phone and said into it: “Yes?. . . Who says so besides Goldwyn? Can’t you reach somebody that’s not crazy?. . . Well try again.” She slammed the telephone down. The tall party had not moved.

“In default of that,” he resumed as if he had never stopped speaking, “I should like to leave a short personal message.”

“Please do,” Miss Grady told him. “I’ll get it to him somehow.”

“Tell him with my love that he is a dirty polecat.”

“Make it skunk, darling,” she said. “He doesn’t know any English words.”

“Make it skunk and double skunk,” Fortescue told her. “With a slight added nuance of sulphurated hydrogen and a very cheap grade of whore-house perfume.” He adjusted his hat and gave his profile the once over in a mirror. “I now bid you good morning and to hell with Sheridan Ballou, Incorporated.”

The tall actor stalked out elegantly, using his cane to open the door.

“What’s the matter with him?” I asked.

She looked at me pityingly. “Billy Fortescue? Nothing’s the matter with him. He isn’t getting any parts so he comes in every day and goes through that routine. He figures somebody might see him and like it.”

I shut my mouth slowly. You can live a long time in Hollywood and never see the part they use in pictures.

Miss Vane appeared through the inner door and made a chin-jerk at me. I went in past her. “This way. Second on the right.” She watched me while I went down the corridor to the second door which was open. I went in and closed the door.

A plump white-haired Jew sat at the desk smiling at me tenderly. “Greetings,” he said. “I’m Moss Spink. What’s on the thinker, pal? Park the body. Cigarette?” He opened a thing that looked like a trunk and presented me with a cigarette which was not more than a foot long. It was in an individual glass tube.

“No thanks,” I said. “I smoke tobacco.”

He sighed. “All right. Give. Let’s see. Your name’s Marlowe. Huh? Marlowe. Marlowe. Have I ever heard of anybody named Marlowe?”

“Probably not,” I said. “I’ve never heard of anybody named Spink. I asked to see a man named Ballou. Does that sound like Spink? I’m not looking for anybody named Spink. And just between you and me, the hell with people named Spink.”

“Anti-Semitic huh?” Spink said. He waved a generous hand on which a canary-yellow diamond looked like an amber traffic light. “Don’t be like that,” he said. “Sit down and dust off the brains. You don’t know me. You don’t want to know me. O.K. I ain’t offended. In a business like this you got to have somebody around that don’t get offended.”

“Ballou,” I said.

“Now be reasonable, pal. Sherry Ballou’s a very busy guy. He works twenty hours a day and even then he’s way behind schedule. Sit down and talk it out with little Spinky.”

“You’re what around here?” I asked him.

“I’m his protection, pal. I gotta protect him. A guy like Sherry can’t see everybody. I see people for him. I’m the same as him—up to a point you understand.”

“Could be I’m past the point you’re up to,” I said.

“Could be,” Spink agreed pleasantly. He peeled a thick tape off an aluminum individual cigar container, reached the cigar out tenderly and looked it over for birthmarks. “I don’t say not. Why not demonstrate a little? Then we’ll know. Up to now all you’re doing is throwing a line. We get so much of that in here it don’t mean a thing to us.”

I watched him clip and light the expensive-looking cigar. “How do I know you wouldn’t double-cross him?” I asked cunningly.

Spink’s small tight eyes blinked and I wasn’t sure but that there were tears in them. “Me cross Sherry Ballou?” he asked brokenly in a hushed voice, like a six-hundred-dollar funeral. “Me? I’d sooner double-cross my own mother.”

“That doesn’t mean anything to me either,” I said. “I never met your mother.”

Spink laid his cigar aside in an ashtray the size of a bird bath. He waved both his arms. Sorrow was eating into him. “Oh pal. What a way to talk,” he wailed. “I love Sherry Ballou like he was my own father. Better. My father—well, skip it. Come on, pal. Be human. Give with a little of the old trust and friendliness. Spill the dirt to little Spinky, huh?”

I drew an envelope from my pocket and tossed it across the desk to him. He pulled the single photograph from it and stared at it solemnly. He laid it down on the desk. He looked up at me, down at the photo, up at me. “Well,” he said woodenly, in a voice suddenly empty of the old trust and friendliness he had been talking about. “What’s it got that’s so wonderful?”

“Do I have to tell you who the girl is?”

“Who’s the guy?” Spink snapped.

I said nothing.

“I said who’s the guy?” Spink almost yelled at me. “Cough up, mug. Cough up.”

I still didn’t say anything. Spink reached slowly for his telephone, keeping his hard bright eyes on my face.

“Go on. Call them,” I said. “Call downtown and ask for Lieutenant Christy French in the homicide bureau. There’s another boy that’s hard to convince.”

Spink took his hand off the phone. He got up slowly and went out with the photograph. I waited. Outside on Sunset Boulevard traffic went by distantly, monotonously. The minutes dropped silently down a well. The smoke of Spink’s freshly lit cigar played in the air for a moment, then was sucked through the vent of the air-conditioning apparatus. I looked at the innumerable inscribed photos on the walls, all inscribed to Sherry Ballou with somebody’s eternal love. I figured they were back numbers if they were in Spink’s office.

18

After a while Spink came back and gestured to me. I followed him along the corridor through double doors into an anteroom with two secretaries. Past them towards more double doors of heavy black glass with silver peacocks etched into the panels. As we neared the doors they opened of themselves.

We went down three carpeted steps into an office that had everything in it but a swimming pool. It was two stories high, surrounded by a balcony loaded with book shelves. There was a concert grand Steinway in the corner and a lot of glass and bleached-wood furniture and a desk about the size of a badminton court and chairs and couches and tables and a man lying on one of the couches with his coat off and his shirt open over a Charvet scarf you could have found in the dark by listening to it purr. A white cloth was over his eyes and forehead and a lissome blond girl was wringing out another in a silver bowl of ice water at a table beside him.

The man was a big shapely guy with wavy dark hair and a strong brown face below the white cloth. An arm dropped to the carpet and a cigarette hung between fingers, wisping a tiny thread of smoke.

The blond girl changed the cloth deftly. The man on the couch groaned. Spink said: “This is the boy, Sherry. Name of Marlowe.”

The man on the couch groaned. “What does he want?”

Spink said: “Won’t spill.”

The man on the couch said: “What did you bring him in for then? I’m tired.”

Spink said: “Well you know how it is, Sherry. Sometimes you kind of got to.”

The man on the couch said: “What did you say his beautiful name was?”

Spink turned to me. “You can tell us what you want now. And make it snappy, Marlowe.”

I said nothing.

After a moment the man on the couch slowly raised the arm with the cigarette at the end of it. He got the cigarette wearily into his mouth and drew on it with the infinite languor of a decadent aristocrat moldering in a ruined chateau.

“I’m talking to you, pal,” Spink said harshly. The blonde changed the cloth again, looking at nobody. The silence hung in the room as acrid as the smoke of the cigarette. “Come on, lug. Snap it up.”

I got one of my Camels out and lit it and picked out a chair and sat down. I stretched my hand out and looked at it. The thumb twitched up and down slowly every few seconds.

Spink’s voice cut into this furiously: “Sherry don’t have all day, you.”

“What would he do with the rest of the day?” I heard myself asking. “Sit on a white satin couch and have his toenails gilded?”

The blonde turned suddenly and stared at me. Spink’s mouth fell open. He blinked. The man on the couch lifted a slow hand to the corner of the towel over his eyes. He removed enough so that one seal-brown eye looked at me. The towel fell softly back into place.

“You can’t talk like that in here,” Spink said in a tough voice.

I stood up. I said: “I forgot to bring my prayer book. This is the first time I knew God worked on commission.”

Nobody said anything for a minute. The blonde changed the towel again.

From under it the man on the couch said calmly: “Get the Jesus out of here, darlings. All but the new chum.”

Spink gave me a narrow glare of hate. The blonde left silently.

Spink said: “Why don’t I just toss him out on his can?” The tired voice under the towel said: “I’ve been wondering about that so long I’ve lost interest in the problem. Beat it.”

“Okay, boss,” Spink said. He withdrew reluctantly. He paused at the door, gave me one more silent snarl and disappeared.

The man on the couch listened to the door close and then said: “How much?”