The Little Sister

“You don’t want to buy anything.”

He pushed the towel off his head, tossed it to one side and sat up slowly. He put his bench-made pebble-grain brogues on the carpet and passed a hand across his forehead. He looked tired but not dissipated. He fumbled another cigarette from somewhere, lit it and stared morosely through the smoke at the floor.

“Go on,” he said.

“I don’t know why you wasted all the build-up on me,” I said. “But I credit you with enough brains to know you couldn’t buy anything, and know it would stay bought.”

Ballou picked up the photo that Spink had put down near him on a long low table. He reached out a languid hand. “The piece that’s cut out would be the punch line no doubt,” he said.

I got the envelope out of my pocket and gave him the cut out corner, watched him fit the two pieces together.

“With a glass you can read the headline,” I said.

“There’s one on my desk. Please.”

I went over and got the magnifying glass off his desk “You’re used to a lot of service, aren’t you, Mr. Ballou?”

“I pay for it.” He studied the photograph through the glass and sighed. “Seems to me I saw that fight. They ought to take more care of these boys.”

“Like you do of your clients,” I said.

He laid down the magnifying glass and leaned back to stare at me with cool untroubled eyes.

“That’s the chap that owns The Dancers. Name’s Steelgrave. The girl is a client of mine, of course.” He made vague gesture towards a chair. I sat down in it. “What were you thinking of asking, Mr. Marlowe?”

“For what?”

“All the prints and the negative. The works.”

“Ten grand,” I said, and watched his mouth. The mouth smiled, rather pleasantly.

“It needs a little more explanation, doesn’t it? All I see is two people having lunch in a public place. Hardly disastrous to the reputation of my client. I assume that was what you had in mind.”

I grinned. “You can’t buy anything, Mr. Ballou. I could have had a positive made from the negative and another negative from the positive. If that snap is evidence of something, you could never know you had suppressed it.”

“Not much of a sales talk for a blackmailer,” he said, still smiling.

“I always wonder why people pay blackmailers. They can’t buy anything. Yet they do pay them, sometimes over and over and over again. And in the end are just where they started.”

“The fear of today,” he said, “always overrides the fear of tomorrow. It’s a basic fact of the dramatic emotions that the part is greater than the whole. If you see a glamour star on the screen in a position of great danger, you fear for her with one part of your mind, the emotional part. Notwithstanding that your reasoning mind knows that she is the star of the picture and nothing very bad is going to happen to her. If suspense and menace didn’t defeat reason, there would be very little drama.”

I said: “Very true, I guess,” and puffed some of my Camel smoke around.

His eyes narrowed a little. “As to really being able to buy anything, if I paid you a substantial price and didn’t get what I bought, I’d have you taken care of. Beaten to a pulp. And when you got out of the hospital, if you felt aggressive enough, you could try to get me arrested.”

“It’s happened to me,” I said. “I’m a private eye. I know what you mean. Why are you talking to me?”

He laughed. He had a deep pleasant effortless laugh. “I’m an agent, sonny. I always tend to think traders have a little something in reserve. But we won’t talk about any ten grand. She hasn’t got it. She only makes a grand a week so far. I admit she’s very close to the big money, though.”

“That would stop her cold,” I said, pointing to the photo. “No big money, no swimming pool with underwater lights, no platinum mink, no name in neons, no nothing. All blown away like dust.”

He laughed contemptuously.

“Okay if I show this to the johns down town, then?” I said.

He stopped laughing. His eyes narrowed. Very quietly he asked:

“Why would they be interested?”

I stood up. “I don’t think we’re going to do any business, Mr. Ballou. And you’re a busy man. I’ll take myself off.”

He got up off the couch and stretched, all six feet two of him. He was a very fine hunk of man. He came over and stood close to me. His seal-brown eyes had little gold flecks in them. “Let’s see who you are, sonny.”

He put his hand out. I dropped my open wallet into it. He read the photostat of my license, poked a few more things out of the wallet and glanced at them. He handed it back.

“What would happen, if you did show your little picture to the cops?”

“I’d first of all have to connect it up with something they’re working on—something that happened in the Van Nuys Hotel yesterday afternoon. I’d connect it up through the girl—who won’t talk to me—that’s why I’m talking to you.”

“She told me about it last night,” he sighed.

“Told you how much?” I asked.

“That a private detective named Marlowe had tried to force her to hire him, on the ground that she was seen in a downtown hotel inconveniently close to where a murder was committed.”

“How close?” I asked.

“She didn’t say.”

“Nuts she didn’t.”

He walked away from me to a tall cylindrical jar in the corner. From this he took one of a number of short thin Malacca canes. He began to walk up and down the carpet, swinging the cane deftly past his right shoe.

I sat down again and killed my cigarette and took a deep breath. “It could only happen in Hollywood,” I grunted.

He made a neat about turn and glanced at me. “I beg your pardon.”

“That an apparently sane man could walk up and down inside the house with a Piccadilly stroll and a monkey stick in his hand.”

He nodded. “I caught the disease from a producer at MGM. Charming fellow. Or so I’ve been told.” He stopped and pointed the cane at me. “You amuse the hell out of me, Marlowe. Really you do. You’re so transparent. You’re trying to use me for a shovel to dig yourself out of a jam.”

“There’s some truth in that. But the jam I’m in is nothing to the jam your client would be in if I hadn’t done the thing that put me in the jam.”

He stood quite still for a moment. Then he threw the cane away from him and walked over to a liquor cabinet and swung the two halves of it open. He poured something into a couple of pot-bellied glasses. He carried one of them over to me. Then went back and got his own. He sat down with it on the couch.

“Armagnac,” he said. “If you knew me, you’d appreciate the compliment. This stuff is pretty scarce. The Krauts cleaned most of it out. Our brass got the rest. Here’s to you.”

He lifted the glass, sniffed and sipped a tiny sip. I put mine down in a lump. It tasted like good French brandy.

Ballou looked shocked. “My God, you sip that stuff, you don’t swallow it whole.”

“I swallow it whole,” I said. “Sorry. She also told you that if somebody didn’t shut my mouth, she would be in a lot of trouble.”

He nodded.

“Did she suggest how to go about shutting my mouth?”

“I got the impression she was in favor of doing it with some kind of heavy blunt instrument. So I tried out a mixture of threat and bribery. We have an outfit down the street that specializes in protecting picture people. Apparently they didn’t scare you and the bribe wasn’t big enough.”

“They scared me plenty,” I said. “I damn near fanned a Luger at them. That junky with the .45 puts on a terrific act. And as for the money not being big enough, it’s all a question of how it’s offered to me.”

He sipped a little more of his Armagnac. He pointed at the photograph lying in front of him with the two pieces fitted together.

“We got to where you were taking that to the cops. What then?”

“I don’t think we got that far. We got to why she took this up with you instead of with her boy friend. He arrived just as I left. He has his own key.”

“Apparently she just didn’t.” He frowned and looked down into his Armagnac.

“I like that fine,” I said. “I’d like it still better if the guy didn’t have her door key.”

He looked up rather sadly. “So would I. So would we all. But show business has always been like that—any kind of show business. If these people didn’t live intense and rather disordered lives, if their emotions didn’t ride them too hard—well, they wouldn’t be able to catch those emotions in flight and imprint them on a few feet of celluloid or project them across the footlights.”

“I’m not talking about her love life,” I said. “She doesn’t have to shack up with a red-hot.”

“There’s no proof of that, Marlowe.”

I pointed to the photograph. “The man that took that is missing and can’t be found. He’s probably dead. Two other men who lived at the same address are dead. One of them was trying to peddle those pictures just before he got dead. She went to his hotel in person to take delivery. So did whoever killed him. She didn’t get delivery and neither did the killer. They didn’t know where to look.”

“And you did?”

“I was lucky. I’d seen him without his toupee. None of this is what I call proof, maybe. You could build an argument against it. Why bother? Two men have been killed, perhaps three. She took an awful chance. Why? She wanted that picture. Getting it was worth an awful chance. Why again? It’s just two people having lunch on a certain day. The day Moe Stein was shot to death on Franklin Avenue. The day a character named Steelgrave was in because the cops got a tip he was a Cleveland red-hot named Weepy Moyer. That’s what the record shows. But the photo says he was out of jail. And by saying that about him on that particular day it says who is he. And she knows it. And he still has her door key.”

I paused and we eyed each other solidly for a while. I said: “You don’t really want the cops to have that picture, do you? Win, lose or draw, they’d crucify her. And when it was all over it wouldn’t make a damn bit of difference whether Steelgrave was Moyer or whether Moyer killed Stein or had him killed or just happened to be out on a jail pass the day he was killed. If he got away with it, there’d always be enough people to think it was a fix. She wouldn’t get away with anything. She’s a gangster’s girl in the public mind. And as far as your business is concerned, she’s definitely and completely through.”

Ballou was silent for a moment, staring at me without expression. “And where are you all this time?” he asked softly.

“That depends a good deal on you, Mr. Ballou.”

“What do you really want?” His voice was thin and bitter now.

“What I wanted from her and couldn’t get. Something that gives me a colorable right to act in her interests up to the point where I decided I can’t go any farther.”

“By suppressing evidence?” he asked tightly.

“If it is evidence. The cops couldn’t find out without smearing Miss Weld. Maybe I can. They wouldn’t be bothered to try; they don’t care enough. I do.”

“Why?”

“Let’s say it’s the way I earn my living. I might have other motives, but that one’s enough.”

“What’s your price?”

“You sent it to me last night. I wouldn’t take it then. I’ll take it now. With a signed letter employing my services to investigate an attempt to blackmail one of your clients.”

I got up with my empty glass and went over and put it down on the desk. As I bent down I heard a soft whirring noise. I went around behind the desk and yanked upon a drawer. A wire recorder slid out on a hinged shelf. The motor was running and the fine steel wire was moving steadily from one spool to the other. I looked across at Ballou.

“You can shut it off and take the record with you,” he said. “You can’t blame me for using it.”

I moved the switch over to rewind and the wire reversed direction and picked up speed until the wire was winding so fast I couldn’t see it. It made a sort of high keening noise, like a couple of pansies fighting for a piece of silk. The wire came loose and the machine stopped. I took the spool off and dropped it into my pocket.

“You might have another one,” I said. “I’ll have to chance that.”

“Pretty sure of yourself, aren’t you, Marlowe?”

“I only wish I was.”

“Press that button on the end of the desk, will you?” I pressed it. The black glass doors opened and a dark girl came in with a stenographer’s notebook.

Without looking at her Ballou began to dictate. “Letter to Mr. Philip Marlowe, with his address. Dear Mr. Marlowe: This agency herewith employs you to investigate an attempt to blackmail one of its clients, particulars of which have been given to you verbally. Your fee is to be one hundred dollars a day with a retainer of five hundred dollars, receipt of which you acknowledge on the copy of this letter. Blah, blah, blah. That’s all, Eileen. Right away please.”

I gave the girl my address and she went out.

I took the wire spool out of my pocket and put it back in the drawer.

Ballou crossed his knees and danced the shiny tip of his shoe up and down staring at it. He ran his hand through crisp dark hair.

“One of these days,” he said, “I’m going to make the mistake which a man in my business dreads above all other mistakes. I’m going to find myself doing business with a man I can trust and I’m going to be just too damn smart to trust him. Here you’d better keep this.” He held out the two pieces of the photograph.

Five minutes later I left. The glass doors opened when I was three feet from them. I went past the two secretaries and down the corridor past the open door of Spink’s Office. There was no sound in there, but I could smell his cigar smoke. In the reception room exactly the same people seemed to be sitting around in the chintzy chairs. Miss Helen Grady gave me her Saturday-night smile. Miss Vane beamed at me.

I had been forty minutes with the boss. That made me as gaudy as a chiropractor’s chart.

19

The studio cop at the semicircular glassed-in desk put down his telephone and scribbled on a pad. He tore off the sheet and pushed it through the narrow slit not more than three quarters of an inch wide where the glass did not quite meet the top of his desk. His voice coming through the speaking device set into the glass panel had a metallic ring.

“Straight through to the end of the corridor,” he said, “you’ll find a drinking fountain in the middle of the patio. George Wilson will pick up there.”

I said: “Thanks. Is this bullet-proof glass?”

“Sure. Why?”

“I just wondered,” I said. “I never heard of anybody shooting his way into the picture business.”

Behind me somebody snickered. I turned to look at a girl in slacks with a red carnation behind her ear. She was grinning.

“Oh brother, if a gun was all it took.”

I went over to an olive-green door that didn’t have any handle. It made a buzzing sound and let me push it open. Beyond was an olive-green corridor with bare walls and a door at the far end. A rat trap. If you got into that and anything was wrong, they could still stop you. The far door made the same buzz and click. I wondered how the cop knew I was at it. So I looked up and found his eyes staring at me in a tilted mirror. As I touched the door the mirror went blank. They thought of everything.

Outside in the hot midday sun flowers rioted in a small patio with tiled walks and a pool in the middle and a marble seat. The drinking fountain was beside the marble seat. An elderly and beautifully dressed man was lounging on the marble seat watching three tan-colored boxers root up some tea-rose begonias. There was an expression of intense but quiet satisfaction on his face. He didn’t glance at me as I came up. One of the boxers, the biggest one, came over and made a wet on the marble seat beside his pants leg. He leaned down and patted the dog’s hard short-haired head.

“You Mr. Wilson?” I asked.

He looked up at me vaguely. The middle-sized boxer trotted up and sniffed and wet after the first one.

“Wilson?” He had a lazy voice with a touch of drawl to it. “Oh no. My name’s not Wilson. Should it be?”

“Sorry.” I went over to the drinking fountain and hit myself in the face with a stream of water. While I was wiping it off with a handkerchief the smallest boxer did his duty on the marble bench.

The man whose name was not Wilson said lovingly, “Always do it in the exact same order. Fascinates me.”

“Do what?” I asked.

“Pee,” he said. “Question of seniority it seems. Very orderly. First Maisie. She’s the mother. Then Mac. Year older than Jock, the baby. Always the same. Even in my office.”

“In your office?” I said, and nobody ever looked stupider saying anything.

He lifted his whitish eyebrows at me, took a plain brown cigar out of his mouth, bit the end off and spit it into the pool.

“That won’t do the fish any good,” I said.

He gave me an up-from-under look. “I raise boxers. The hell with fish.”

I figured it was just Hollywood. I lit a cigarette and sat down on the bench. “In your office,” I said. “Well, every day has its new idea, hasn’t it.”

“Up against the corner of the desk. Do it all the time. Drives my secretaries crazy. Gets into the carpet, they say. What’s the matter with women nowadays? Never bothers me. Rather like it. You get fond of dogs, you even like to watch them pee.”

One of the dogs heaved a full-blown begonia plant into the middle of the tiled walk at his feet. He picked it up and threw it into the pool.

“Bothers the gardeners, I suppose,” he remarked as he sat down again. “Oh well, if they’re not satisfied, they can always—” He stopped dead and watched a slim mail girl in yellow slacks deliberately detour in order to pass through the patio. She gave him a quick side glance and went off making music with her hips.

“You know what’s the matter with this business?” he asked me.

“Nobody does,” I said.

“Too much sex,” he said. “All right in its proper time and place. But we get it in carload lots. Wade through it. Stand up to our necks in it. Gets to be like flypaper.” He stood up. “We have too many flies too. Nice to have met you, Mister—”

“Marlowe,” I said. “I’m afraid you don’t know me.”

“Don’t know anybody,” he said. “Memory’s going. Meet too many people. Name’s Oppenheimer.”

“Jules Oppenheimer?”

He nodded. “Right. Have a cigar.” He held one out to me. I showed my cigarette. He threw the cigar into the pool, then frowned. “Memory’s going,” he said sadly. “Wasted fifty cents. Oughtn’t to do that.”

“You run this studio,” I said.

He nodded absently. “Ought to have saved that cigar. Save fifty cents and what have you got?”

“Fifty cents,” I said, wondering what the hell he was talking about.

“Not in this business. Save fifty cents in this business and all you have is five dollars worth of bookkeeping.” He paused and made a motion to the three boxers. They stopped whatever they were rooting at and watched him. “Just run the financial end,” he said. “That’s easy. Come on children, back to the brothel.” He sighed. “Fifteen hundred theaters,” he added.

I must have been wearing my stupid expression again. He waved a hand around the patio. “Fifteen hundred theaters is all you need. A damn sight easier than raising purebred boxers. The motion-picture business is the only business in the world in which you can make all the mistakes there are and still make money.”

“Must be the only business in the world where you can have three dogs pee up against your office desk,” I said.

“You have to have the fifteen hundred theaters.”

“That makes it a little harder to get a start,” I said.

He looked pleased. “Yes. That is the hard part.” He looked across the green clipped lawn at a four-story building which made one side of the open square. “All offices over there,” he said. “I never go there. Always redecorating. Makes me sick to look at the stuff some of these people put in their suites. Most expensive talent in the world. Give them anything they like, all the money they want. Why? No reason at all. Just habit. Doesn’t matter a damn what they do or how they do it. Just give me fifteen hundred theaters.”

“You wouldn’t want to be quoted on that, Mr. Oppenheimer?”

“You a newspaper man?”

“No.”

“Too bad. Just for the hell of it I’d like to see somebody try to get that simple elementary fact of life into the papers.” He paused and snorted. “Nobody’d print it. Afraid to. Come on, children!”

The big one, Maisie, came over and stood beside him. The middle-sized one paused to ruin another begonia and then trotted up beside Maisie. The little one, Jock, lined up in order, then with a sudden inspiration, lifted a hind leg at the cuff of Oppenheimer’s pants. Maisie blocked him off casually.

“See that?” Oppenheimer beamed. “Jock tried to get out of turn. Maisie wouldn’t stand for it.” He leaned down and patted Maisie’s head. She looked up at him adoringly.

“The eyes of your dog,” Oppenheimer mused. “The most unforgettable thing in the world.”

He strolled off down the tiled path towards the executive building, the three boxers trotting sedately beside him.

“Mr. Marlowe?”

I turned to find that a tall sandy-haired man with a nose like a straphanger’s elbow had sneaked up on me.

“I’m George Wilson. Glad to know you. I see you know Mr. Oppenheimer.”

“Been talking to him. He told me how to run the picture business. Seems all it takes is fifteen hundred theaters.”

“I’ve been working here five years. I’ve never even spoken to him.”

“You just don’t get pee’d on by the right dogs.”

“You could be right. Just what can I do for you, Mr. Marlowe?”

“I want to see Mavis Weld.”

“She’s on the set. She’s in a picture that’s shooting.”

“Could I see her on the set for a minute?”

He looked doubtful. “What kind of pass did they give you?”

“Just a pass, I guess.” I held it out to him. He looked it over.

“Ballou sent you. He’s her agent. I guess we can manage. Stage 12. Want to go over there now?”

“If you have time.”

“I’m the unit publicity man. That’s what my time is for.” We walked along the tiled path towards the corners of two buildings. A concrete roadway went between them towards the back lot and the stages.

“You in Ballou’s office?” Wilson asked.

“Just came from there.”

“Quite an organization, I hear. I’ve thought of trying myself. There’s nothing in this but a lot of grief.”

We passed a couple of uniformed cops, then turned to a narrow alley between two stages. A red wigwag was swinging in the middle of the alley, a red light was on over a door marked 12, and a bell was ringing steadily above the red light. Wilson stopped beside the door. Another cop in a tilted-back chair nodded to him, and looked me over with that dead gray expression that grows on them like scum on a water tank.

The bell and the wigwag stopped and the red light cut off. Wilson pulled a heavy door open and I went past him. Inside was another door. Inside that what seemed after the sunlight to be pitch-darkness. Then I saw a concentration of lights in the far corner. The rest of the enormous sound stage seemed to be empty.

We went towards the lights. As we drew near the floor seemed to be covered with thick black cables. There were rows of folding chairs, a cluster of portable dressing rooms with names on the doors. We were wrong way on to the set and all I could see was the wooden backing and on either side a big screen. A couple of back-projection machines sizzled off to the side.

A voice shouted: “Roll ‘em.” A bell rang loudly. The two screens came alive with tossing waves. Another calmer voice said: “Watch your positions, please, we may have to end up matching this little vignette. All right, action.”

Wilson stopped dead and touched my arm. The voices of the actors came out of nowhere, neither loud nor distinct, an unimportant murmur with no meaning.

One of the screens suddenly went blank. The smooth voice, without change of tone, said: “Cut.”

The bell rang again and there was a general sound of movement. Wilson and I went on. He whispered in my ear: “If Ned Gammon doesn’t get this take before lunch, he’ll bust Torrance on the nose.”

“Oh. Torrance in this?” Dick Torrance at the time was a ranking star of the second grade, a not uncommon type of Hollywood actor that nobody really wants but a lot of people in the end have to take for lack of better.

“Care to run over the scene again, Dick?” the calm voice asked, as we came around the corner of the set and saw what it was—the deck of a pleasure yacht near the stern. There were two girls and three men in the scene. One of the men was middle-aged, in sport clothes, lounging in a deck chair. One wore whites and had red hair and looked like the yacht’s captain. The third was the amateur yachtsman, with the handsome cap, the blue jacket with gold buttons, the white shoes and slacks and the supercilious charm. This was Torrance. One of the girls was a dark beauty who had been younger; Susan Crawley. The other was Mavis Weld. She wore a wet white sharkskin swim suit, and had evidently just come aboard. A make-up man was spraying water on her face and arms and the edges of her blond hair.

Torrance hadn’t answered. He turned suddenly and stared at the camera. “You think I don’t know my lines?”

A gray-haired man in gray clothes came forward into the light from the shadowy background. He had hot black eyes, but there was no heat in his voice.

“Unless you changed them intentionally,” he said, his eyes steady on Torrance.

“It’s just possible that I’m not used to playing in front of a back projection screen that has a habit of running out of film only in the middle of a take.”

“That’s a fair complaint,” Ned Gammon said. “Trouble is he only has two hundred and twelve feet of film, and that’s my fault. If you could take the scene just a little faster—”

“Huh.” Torrance snorted. “If I could take it a little faster. Perhaps Miss Weld could be prevailed upon to climb aboard this yacht in rather less time than it would take to build the damn boat.”

Mavis Weld gave him a quick, contemptuous look. “Weld’s timing is just right,” Gammon said. “Her performance is just right too.”

Susan Crawley shrugged elegantly. “I had the impression she could speed it up a trifle, Ned. It’s good, but it could be better.”

“If it was any better, darling,” Mavis Weld told her smoothly, “somebody might call it acting. You wouldn’t want anything like that to happen in your picture, would you.”

Torrance laughed. Susan Crawley turned and glared at him. “What’s funny, Mister Thirteen?”

Torrance’s face settled into an icy mask. “The name again?” he almost hissed.

“Good heavens, you mean you didn’t know,” Susan Crawley said wonderingly. “They call you Mister Thirteen because any time you play a part it means twelve other guys have turned it down.”

“I see,” Torrance said coolly, then burst out laughing again. He turned to Ned Gammon. “Okay, Ned. Now everybody’s got the rat poison out of their system, maybe we can give it to you the way you want it.”

Ned Gammon nodded. “Nothing like a little hamming to clear the air. All right here we go.”

He went back beside the camera. The assistant shouted “roll ‘em” and the scene went through without a hitch.

“Cut,” Gammon said. “Print that one. Break for lunch everybody.”

The actors came down a flight of rough wooden steps and nodded to Wilson. Mavis Weld came last, having stopped to put on a terry-cloth robe and a pair of beach sandals. She stopped dead when she saw me. Wilson stepped forward.

“Hello, George,” Mavis Weld said, staring at me. “Want something from me?”

“Mr. Marlowe would like a few words with you. Okay?”

“Mr. Marlowe?”

Wilson gave me a quick sharp look. “From Ballou’s office. I supposed you knew him.”

“I may have seen him.” She was still staring at me. “What is it?”

I didn’t speak.

After a moment she said, “Thanks, George. Better come along to my dressing room, Mr. Marlowe.”

She turned and walked off around the far side of the set. A green and white dressing room stood against the wall. The name on the door was Miss Weld. At the door she turned and looked around carefully. Then she fixed her lovely blue eyes on my face.

“And now, Mr. Marlowe?”

“You do remember me?”

“I believe so.”

“Do we take up where we left off—or have a new deal with a clean deck?”

“Somebody let you in here Who? Why? That takes explaining.”

“I’m working for you. I’ve been paid a retainer and Ballou has the receipt.”

“How very thoughtful. And suppose I don’t want you to work for me? Whatever your work is.”

“All right, be fancy,” I said. I took the Dancers photo out of my pocket and held it out. She looked at me a long steady moment before she dropped her eyes. Then she looked at the snapshot of herself and Steelgrave in the booth. She looked at it gravely without movement. Then very slowly she reached up and touched the tendrils of damp hair at the side of her face. Ever so slightly she shivered. Her hand came out and she took the photograph. She stared at it. Her eyes came up again slowly, slowly.

“Well?” she asked.

“I have the negative and some other prints. You would have had them, if you had had more time and known where to look. Or if he had stayed alive to sell them to you.”

“I’m a little chilly,” she said. “And I have to eat some lunch.” She held the photo out to me.

“You’re a little chilly and you have to eat some lunch,” I said.

I thought a pulse beat in her throat. But the light was not too good. She smiled very faintly. The bored-aristocrat touch.

“The significance of all this escapes me,” she said.

“You’re spending too much time on yachts. What you mean is I know you and I know Steelgrave, so what has this photo got that makes anybody give me a diamond dog collar?”

“All right,” she said. “What?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “But if finding out is what it takes to shake you out of this duchess routine, I’ll find out. And in the meantime you’re still chilly and you still have to eat some lunch.”

“And you’ve waited too long,” she said quietly. “You haven’t anything to sell. Except perhaps your life.”

“I’d sell that cheap. For love of a pair of dark glasses and a delphinium-blue hat and a crack on the head from a high-heeled slipper.”

Her mouth twitched as if she was going to laugh. But there was no laughter in her eyes.

“Not to mention three slaps in the face,” she said. “Goodbye, Mr. Marlowe. You came too late. Much, much too late.”

“For me—or for you?” She reached back and opened the door of the dressing room.

“I think for both of us.” She went in quickly, leaving the door open.

“Come in and shut the door,” her voice said from the dressing room.

I went in and shut the door. It was no fancy custom-built star’s dressing room. Strictly utility only. There was a shabby couch, one easy chair, a small dressing table with mirror and two lights, a straight chair in front of it, a tray that had held coffee.

Mavis Weld reached down and plugged in a round electric heater. Then she grabbed up a towel and rubbed the damp edges of her hair. I sat down on the couch and waited.

“Give me a cigarette.” She tossed the towel to one side. Her eyes came close to my face as I lit the cigarette for her. “How did you like that little scene we ad libbed on the yacht?”

“Bitchy.”

“We’re all bitches. Some smile more than others, that’s all. Show business. There’s something cheap about it. There always has been. There was a time when actors went in at the back door. Most of them still should. Great strain, great urgency, great hatred, and it comes out in nasty little scenes. They don’t mean a thing”

“Cat talk,” I said.

She reached up and pulled a fingertip down the side of my cheek. It burned like a hot iron. “How much money do you make, Marlowe?”

“Forty bucks a day and expenses. That’s the asking price. I take twenty-five. I’ve taken less.” I thought about Orfamay’s worn twenty.

She did that with her finger again and I just didn’t grab hold of her. She moved away from me and sat in the chair, drawing the robe close. The electric heater was making the little room warm.

“Twenty-five dollars a day,” she said wonderingly. “Little lonely dollars.”

“Are they very lonely?”

“Lonely as lighthouses.”

She crossed her legs and the pale glow of her skin in the light seemed to fill the room.

“So ask me the questions,” she said, making no attempt to cover her thighs.

“Who’s Steelgrave?”

“A man I’ve known for years. And liked. He owns things. A restaurant or two. Where he comes from—that I don’t know.”

“But you know him very well.”

“Why don’t you ask me if I sleep with him?”

“I don’t ask that kind of questions.”

She laughed and snapped ash from her cigarette. “Miss Gonzales would be glad to tell you.”

“The hell with Miss Gonzales.”

“She’s dark and lovely and passionate. And very, very kind.”

“And exclusive as a mailbox,” I said. “The hell with her. About Steelgrave—has he ever been in trouble?”

“Who hasn’t?”

“With the police.”

Her eyes widened a little too innocently. Her laugh was a little too silvery. “Don’t be ridiculous. The man is worth a couple of million dollars.”

“How did he get it?”

“How would I know?”

“All right. You wouldn’t. That cigarette’s going to burn your fingers.” I leaned across and took the stub out of her hand. Her hand lay open on her bare leg. I touched the palm with a fingertip. She drew away from me and tightened the hand into a fist.

“Don’t do that,” she said sharply.

“Why? I used to do that to girls when I was a kid.”

“I know.” She was breathing a little fast. “It makes me feel very young and innocent and kind of naughty. And I’m far from being young and innocent any more.”

“Then you don’t really know anything about Steelgrave.”

“I wish you’d make up your mind whether you are giving me a third degree or making love to me.”

“My mind has nothing to do with it,” I said.

After a silence she said: “I really do have to eat something, Marlowe. I’m working this afternoon. You wouldn’t want me to collapse on the set, would you?”

“Only stars do that.” I stood up. “Okay, I’ll leave. Don’t forget I’m working for you. I wouldn’t be if I thought you’d killed anybody. But you were there. You took a big chance. There was something you wanted very badly.”

She reached the photo out from somewhere and stared at it, biting her lip. Her eyes came up without her head moving.

“It could hardly have been this.”

“That was the one thing he had so well hidden that it was not found. But what good is it? You and a man called Steelgrave in a booth at The Dancers. Nothing in that.”

“Nothing at all,” she said.

“So it has to be something about Steelgrave—or something about the date.”

Her eyes snapped down to the picture again. “There’s nothing to tell the date,” she said quickly. “Even if it meant something. Unless the cut-out piece—”

“Here.” I gave her the cut-out piece. “But you’ll need a magnifier. Show it to Steelgrave. Ask him if it means anything. Or ask Ballou.”

I started towards the exit of the dressing room. “Don’t kid yourself the date can’t be fixed,” I said over my shoulder. “Steelgrave won’t.”

“You’re just building a sand castle, Marlowe.”

“Really?” I looked back at her, not grinning. “You really think that? Oh no you don’t. You went there. The man was murdered. You had a gun. He was a known crook. And I found something the police would love to have me hide from them. Because it must be as full of motive as the ocean is full of salt. As long as the cops don’t find it I have a license. And as long as somebody else doesn’t find it I don’t have an ice pick in the back of my neck. Would you say I was in an overpaid profession?”

She just sat there and looked at me, one hand on her kneecap, squeezing it. The other moving restlessly, finger by finger, on the arm of the chair.

All I had to do was turn the knob and go on out. I don’t know why it had to be so hard to do.

20

There was the usual coming and going in the corridor outside my office and when I opened the door and walked into the musty silence of the little waiting room there was the usual feeling of having been dropped down a well dried up twenty years ago to which no one would come back ever. The smell of old dust hung in the air as flat and stale as a football interview.

I opened the inner door and inside there it was the same dead air, the same dust along the veneer, the same broken promise of a life of ease. I opened the windows and turned on the radio. It came up too loud and when I had it tuned down to normal the phone sounded as if it had been ringing for some time. I took my hat off it and lifted the receiver.

It was high time I heard from her again. Her cool compact voice said: “This time I really mean it.”

“Go on.”

“I lied before. I’m not lying now. I really have heard from Orrin.”

“Go on.”

“You’re not believing me. I can tell by your voice”

“You can’t tell anything by my voice. I’m a detective. Heard from him how?”

“By phone from Bay city.”

“Wait a minute.” I put the receiver down on the stained brown blotter and lit my pipe. No hurry. Lies are always patient. I took it up again.

“We’ve been through that routine,” I said. “You’re pretty forgetful for your age. I don’t think Dr. Zugsmith would like it.”

“Please don’t tease me. This is very serious. He got my letter. He went to the post office and asked for his mail. He knew where I’d be staying. And about when I’d be here. So he called up. He’s staying with a doctor he got know down there. Doing some kind of work for him. I told you he had two years medical.”

“Doctor have a name?”

“Yes. A funny name. Dr. Vincent Lagardie.”

“Just a minute. There’s somebody at the door.”

I laid the phone down very carefully. It might be brittle. It might be made of spun glass. I got a handkerchief out and wiped the palm of my hand, the one that had been holding it. I got up and went to the built-in wardrobe and looked at my face in the flawed mirror. It was me all right. I had a strained look. I’d been living too fast.

Dr. Vincent Lagardie, 965 Wyoming Street. Cattycorners from The Garland Home of Peace. Frame house on the corner. Quiet. Nice neighborhood. Friend of the extinct Clausen. Maybe. Not according to him. But still maybe.

I went back to the telephone and squeezed the jerks out of my voice. “How would you spell that?” I asked.

She spelled it—with ease and precision. “Nothing to do then, is there?” I said. “All jake to the angels—or whatever they say in Manhattan, Kansas.”

“Stop sneering at me. Orrin’s in a lot of trouble. Some—” her voice quivered a little and her breath came quickly, “some gangsters are after him.”

“Don’t be silly, Orfamay. They don’t have gangsters in Bay City. They’re all working in pictures. What’s Dr. Lagardie’s phone number?”

She gave it to me. It was right. I won’t say the pieces were beginning to fall into place, but at least they were getting to look like parts of the same puzzle. Which is all I ever get or ask.

“Please go down there and see him and help him. He’s afraid to leave the house. After all I did pay you.”

“I gave it back.”

“Well, I offered it to you again.”

“You more or less offered me other things that are more than I’d care to take.”

There was silence.

“All right,” I said. “All right. If I can stay free that long. I’m in a lot of trouble myself.”

“Why?”

“Telling lies and not telling the truth. It always catches up with me. I’m not as lucky as some people.”

“But I’m not lying, Philip. I’m not lying. I’m frantic.”

“Take a deep breath and get frantic so I can hear it.”

“They might kill him,” she said quietly.

“And what is Dr. Vincent Lagardie doing all this time?”

“He doesn’t know, of course. Please, please go at once. I have the address here. Just a moment.”

And the little bell rang, the one that rings far back at the end of the corridor, and is not loud, but you’d better hear it. No matter what other noises there are you’d better hear it.

“He’ll be in the phone book,” I said. “And by an odd coincidence I have a Bay City phone book. Call me around four. Or five. Better make it five.”

I hung up quickly. I stood up and turned the radio off, not having heard a thing it said. I closed the windows again. I opened the drawer of my desk and took out the Luger and strapped it on. I fitted my hat on my head. On the way out I had another look at the face in the mirror.

I looked as if I had made up my mind to drive off a cliff.

21

They were just finishing a funeral service at The Garland Home of Peace. A big gray hearse was waiting at the side entrance. Cars were clotted along both sides of the street, three black sedans in a row at the side of Dr. Vincent Lagardie’s establishment. People were coming sedately down the walk from the funeral chapel to the corner and getting into their cars. I stopped a third of a block away and waited. The cars didn’t move. Then three people came out with a woman heavily veiled and all in black. They half carried her down to a big limousine. The boss mortician fluttered around making elegant little gestures and body movements as graceful as a Chopin ending. His composed gray face was long enough to wrap twice around his neck.

The amateur pallbearers carried the coffin out the side door and professionals eased the weight from them and slid it into the back of the hearse as smoothly as if it had no more weight than a pan of butter rolls. Flowers began to grow into a mound over it. The glass doors were closed and motors started all over the block.

A few moments later nothing was left but one sedan across the way and the boss mortician sniffing a tree-rose on his way back to count the take. With a beaming smile he faded into his neat colonial doorway and the world was still and empty again. The sedan that was left hadn’t moved. I drove along and made a U-turn and came up behind it. The driver wore blue serge and a soft cap with a shiny peak. He was doing a crossword puzzle from the morning paper. I stuck a pair of those diaphanous mirror sunglasses on my nose and strolled past him toward Dr. Lagardie’s place. He didn’t look up. When I was a few yards ahead I took the glasses off and pretended to polish them on my handkerchief. I caught him in one of the mirror lenses. He still didn’t look up. He was just a guy doing a crossword puzzle. I put the mirror glasses back on my nose, and went around to Dr. Lagardie’s front door.

The sign over the door said: Ring and Enter. I rang, but the door wouldn’t let me enter. I waited. I rang again. I waited again. There was silence inside. Then the door opened a crack very slowly, and the thin expressionless face over a white uniform looked out at me.

“I’m sorry. Doctor is not seeing any patients today.” She blinked at the mirror glasses. She didn’t like them. Her tongue moved restlessly inside her lips.

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

“Who?” There was a dim reflection of shock behind her eyes.

“Quest. Q as in Quintessential, U as in Uninhibited, E as in Extrasensory, S as in Subliminal, T as in Toots. Put them all together and they spell Brother.”

She looked at me as if I had just come up from the floor of the ocean with a drowned mermaid under my arm.

“I beg your pardon. Dr. Lagardie is not—”

She was pushed out of the way by invisible hands and a thin dark haunted man stood in the half-open doorway.

“I am Dr. Lagardie. What is it, please?”

I gave him a card. He read it. He looked at me. He had the white pinched look of a man who is waiting for disaster to happen.

“We talked over the phone,” I said. “About a man named Clausen.”

“Please come in,” he said quickly. “I don’t remember, but come in.”

I went in. The room was dark, the blinds drawn, the windows closed. It was dark, and it was cold.

The nurse backed away and sat down behind a small desk. It was an ordinary living room with light painted woodwork which had once been dark, judging by the probable age of the house. A square arch divided the living room from the dining room. There were easy chairs and a center table with magazines. It looked like what it was—the reception room of a doctor practicing in what had been a private home.

The telephone rang on the desk in front of the nurse. She started and her hand went out and then stopped. She stared at the telephone. After a while it stopped ringing.

“What was the name you mentioned?” Dr. Lagardie asked me softly.

“Orrin Quest. His sister told me he was doing some kind of work for you, Doctor. I’ve been looking for him for days. Last night he called her up. From here, she said.”

“There is no one of that name here,” Dr. Lagardie said politely. “There hasn’t been.”

“You don’t know him at all?”

“I have never heard of him.”

“I can’t figure why he would say that to his sister.”

The nurse dabbed at her eyes furtively. The telephone on her desk burred and made her jump again. “Don’t answer it,” Dr. Lagardie said without turning his head.

We waited while it rang. Everybody waits while a telephone rings. After a while it stopped.

“Why don’t you go home, Miss Watson? There’s nothing for you to do here.”

“Thank you, Doctor.” She sat without moving, looking down at the desk. She squeezed her eyes shut and blinked them open. She shook her head hopelessly.

Dr. Lagardie turned back to me. “Shall we go into my office?”

We went across through another door leading to a hallway. I walked on eggs. The atmosphere of the house was charged with foreboding. He opened a door and ushered me into what must have once been a bedroom, but nothing suggested a bedroom. It was a small compact doctor’s office. An open door showed a part of an examination room. A sterilizer was working in the corner. There were a lot of needles cooking in it.

“That’s a lot of needles,” I said, always quick with an idea.

“Sit down, Mr. Marlowe.”

He went behind the desk and sat down and picked up a long thin letter-opening knife.

He looked at me levelly from his sorrowful eyes. “No, I don’t know anyone named Orrin Quest, Mr. Marlowe. I can’t imagine any reason in the world why a person of that name should say he was in my house.”

“Hiding out,” I said.

His eyebrows went up. “From what?”

“From some guys that might want to stick an ice pick in the back of his neck. On account of he is a little too quick with his little Leica. Taking people’s photographs when they want to be private. Or it could be something else, like peddling reefers and he got wise. Am I talking in riddles?”

“It was you who sent the police here,” he said coldly.

I didn’t say anything.

“It was you who called up and reported Clausen’s death.”

I said the same as before.

“It was you who called me up and asked me if I knew Clausen. I said I did not.”

“But it wasn’t true.”

“I was under no obligation to give you information, Mr. Marlowe.”

I nodded and got a cigarette out and lit it. Dr. Lagardie glanced at his watch. He turned in his chair and switched off the sterilizer. I looked at the needles. A lot of needles. Once before I had had trouble in Bay City with a guy who cooked a lot of needles.

“What makes it?” I asked him. “The yacht harbor?”

He picked up the wicked-looking paper knife with a silver handle in the shape of a nude woman. He pricked the ball of his thumb. A pearl of dark blood showed on it. He put it to his mouth and licked it. “I like the taste of blood,” he said softly.

There was a distant sound as of the front door opening and closing. We both listened to it carefully. We listened to retreating steps on the front steps of the house. We listened hard.

“Miss Watson has gone home,” Dr. Lagardie said. “We are all alone in the house.” He mulled that over and licked his thumb again. He laid the knife down carefully on the desk blotter. “Ah, the question of the yacht harbor,” he added. “The proximity of Mexico you are thinking of, no doubt. The ease with which marijuana—”

“I wasn’t thinking so much of marijuana any more.” I stared again at the needles. He followed my stare. He shrugged.

I said: “Why so many of them?”

“Is it any of your business?”

“Nothing’s any of my business.”

“But you seem to expect your questions to be answered.”

“I’m just talking,” I said. “Waiting for something to happen. Something is going to happen in this house. It’s leering at me from corners.”

Dr Lagardie licked another pearl of blood off his thumb.

I looked hard at him. It didn’t buy me a way into his soul. He was quiet, dark and shuttered and all the misery of life was in his eyes. But he was still gentle.

“Let me tell you about the needles,” I said.

“By all means.” He picked the long thin knife up again.

“Don’t do that,” I said sharply. “It gives me the creeps. Like petting snakes.”

He put the knife down again gently and smiled. “We seem to talk in circles,” he suggested.

“We’ll get there. About the needles. A couple of years back I had a case that brought me down here and mixed me up with a doctor named Almore. Lived over on Altair Street. He had a funny practice. Went out nights with a big case of hypodermic needles—all ready to go. Loaded with the stuff. He had a peculiar practice. Drunks, rich junkies, of whom there are far more than people think, over stimulated people who had driven themselves beyond the possibility of relaxing. Insomniacs—all the neurotic types that can’t take it cold. Have to have their little pills and little shots in the arm. Have to have help over the humps. It gets to be all humps after a while. Good business for the doctor. Almore was the doctor for them. It’s all right to say it now. He died a year or so back. Of his own medicine.”

“And you think I may have inherited his practice?”

“Somebody would. As long as there are the patients, there will be the doctor.”

He looked even more exhausted than before. “I think you are an ass, my friend. I did not know Dr. Almore. And I do not have the sort of practice you attribute to him. As for the needles—just to get that trifle out of the way—they are in somewhat constant use in the medical profession today, often for such innocent medicaments as vitamin injections. And needles get dull. And when they are dull they are painful. Therefore in the course of the day one may use a dozen or more. Without narcotics in a single one.”

He raised his head slowly and stared at me with a fixed contempt.

“I can be wrong,” I said. “Smelling that reefer smoke over at Clausen’s place yesterday, and having him call your number on the telephone—and call you by your first name—all this probably made me jump to wrong conclusions.”

“I have dealt with addicts,” he said. “What doctor has not? It is a complete waste of time.”

“They get cured sometimes.”

“They can be deprived of their drug. Eventually after great suffering they can do without it. That is not curing them, my friend. That is not removing the nervous or emotional flaw which made them become addicts. It is making them dull negative people who sit in the sun and twirl their thumbs and die of sheer boredom and inanition.”

“That’s a pretty raw theory, doctor.”

“You raised the subject. I have disposed of it. I will raise another subject. You may have noticed a certain atmosphere and strain about this house. Even with those silly mirror glasses on. Which you may now remove. They don’t make you look in the least like Cary Grant.”

I took them off. I’d forgotten all about them.

“The police have been here, Mr. Marlowe. A certain Lieutenant Maglashan, who is investigating Clausen’s death. He would be pleased to meet you. Shall I call him? I’m sure he would come back.”

“Go ahead, call him,” I said. “I just stopped off here on my way to commit suicide.”

His hand went towards the telephone but was pulled to the side by the magnetism of the paper knife. He picked it up again. Couldn’t leave it alone, it seemed.

“You could kill a man with that,” I said.

“Very easily,” and he smiled a little.

“An inch and a half in the back of the neck, square in the center, just under the occipital bulge.”

“An ice pick would be better,” he said. “Especially a short one, filed down very sharp. It would not bend. If you miss the spinal cord, you do no great damage.”

“Takes a bit of medical knowledge then?” I got out a poor old package of Camels and untangled one from the cellophane.

He just kept on smiling. Very faintly, rather sadly. It was not the smile of a man in fear. “That would help,” he said softly. “But any reasonably dexterous person could acquire the technique in ten minutes.”

“Orrin Quest had a couple of years medical,” I said.

“I told you I did not know anybody of that name.”

“Yeah, I know you did. I didn’t quite believe you.”

He shrugged his shoulders. But his eyes as always went to the knife in the end.

“We’re a couple of sweethearts,” I said. “We just sit here making with the old over-the-desk dialogue. As though we hadn’t a care in the world. Because both of us are going to be in the clink by nightfall.”

He raised his eyebrows again. I went on: “You, because Clausen knew you by your first name. And you may have been the last man he talked to. Me, because I’ve been doing all the things a P.I. never gets away with. Hiding evidence, hiding information, finding bodies and not coming in with my hat in my hand to these lovely incorruptible Bay City cops. Oh, I’m through. Very much through. But there’s a wild perfume in the air this afternoon. I don’t seem to care. Or I’m in love. I just don’t seem to care.”

“You have been drinking,” he said slowly.

“Only Chanel No. 5, and kisses, and the pale glow of lovely legs, and the mocking invitation in deep blue eyes. Innocent things like that.”

He just looked sadder than ever. “Women can weaken a man terribly, can they not?” he said.

“Clausen.”

“A hopeless alcoholic. You probably know how they are. They drink and drink and don’t eat. And little by little the vitamin deficiency brings on the symptoms of delirium. There is only one thing to do for them.” He turned and looked at the sterilizer. “Needles, and more needles. It makes me feel dirty. I am a graduate of the Sorbonne. But I practice among dirty little people in a dirty little town.”

“Why?”

“Because of something that happened years ago—in another city. Don’t ask me too much, Mr. Marlowe.”

“He used your first name.”

“It is a habit with people of a certain class. Onetime actors especially. And onetime crooks.”

“Oh,” I said. “That all there is to it?”

“All.”

“Then the cops coming here doesn’t bother you on account of Clausen. You’re just afraid of this other thing that happened somewhere else long gone. Or it could even be love.”

“Love?” He dropped the word slowly off the end of his tongue, tasting it to the last. A bitter little smile stayed after the word, like powder smell in the air after a gun is fired. He shrugged and pushed a desk cigarette box from behind a filing tray and over to my side of the desk.

“Not love then,” I said. “I’m trying to read your mind. Here you are a guy with a Sorbonne degree and a cheap little practice in a cheap and nasty little town. I know it well. So what are you doing here? What are you doing with people like Clausen? What was the rap, Doctor? Narcotics, abortions, or were you by any chance a medic for the gang boys in some hot Eastern city?”

“As for instance?” he smiled thinly.

“As for instance Cleveland.”

“A very wild suggestion, my friend.” His voice was like ice now.

“Wild as all hell,” I said. “But a fellow like me with very limited brains tends to try to fit the things he knows into a pattern. It’s often wrong, but it’s an occupational disease with me. It goes like this, if you want to listen.”

“I am listening.” He picked the knife up again and pricked lightly at the blotter on his desk.

“You knew Clausen. Clausen was killed very skillfully with an ice pick, killed while I was in the house, upstairs talking to a grifter named Hicks. Hicks moved out fast taking a page of the register with him, the page that had Orrin Quest’s name on it. Later that afternoon Hicks was killed with an ice pick in L.A. His room had been searched. There was a woman there who had come to buy something from him. She didn’t get it. I had more time to search. I did get it. Presumption A: Clausen and Hicks killed by same man, not necessarily for same reason. Hicks killed because he muscled in on another guy’s racket and muscled the other guy out. Clausen killed because he was a babbling drunk and might know who would be likely to kill Hicks. Any good so far?”

“Not the slightest interest to me,” Dr. Lagardie said.

“But you are listening. Sheer good manners, I suppose. Okay. Now what did I find? A photo of a movie queen and an ex-Cleveland gangster, maybe, now a Hollywood restaurant owner, etc., having lunch on a particular day. Day when this ex-Cleveland gangster was supposed to be in hock at the County Jail, also day when ex-Cleveland gangster’s onetime sidekick was shot dead on Franklin Avenue in Los Angeles. Why was he in hock? Tip-off that he was who he was, and say what you like against the L.A. cops they do try to run back-East hot shots out of town. Who gave them the tip? The guy they pinched gave it to them himself, because his ex-partner was being troublesome and had to be rubbed out, and being in jail was a first-class alibi when it happened.”

“All fantastic,” Dr. Lagardie smiled wearily. “Utterly fantastic.”

“Sure. It gets worse. Cops couldn’t prove anything on ex-gangster. Cleveland police not interested. The L.A. cops turn him loose. But they wouldn’t have turned him loose if they’d seen that photo. Photo therefore strong blackmail material, first against ex-Cleveland character, if he really is the guy; secondly against movie queen for being seen around with him in public. A good man could make a fortune out of that photo. Hicks not good enough. Paragraph. Presumption B: Orrin Quest, the boy I’m trying to find, took that photo. Taken with Contax or Leica, without flashbulb, without subjects knowing they were being photographed. Quest had a Leica and liked to do things like that. In this case of course he had a more commercial motive. Question, how did he get a chance to take photo? Answer, the movie queen was his sister. She would let him come up and speak to her. He was out of work, needed money. Likely enough she gave him some and made it a condition he stay away from her. She wants no part of her family. Is it still utterly fantastic, Doctor?”

He stared at me moodily. “I don’t know,” he said slowly. “It begins to have possibilities. But why are you telling this rather dangerous story to me?”

He reached a cigarette out of the box and tossed me one casually. I caught it and looked it over. Egyptian, oval and fat, a little rich for my blood. I didn’t light it, just sat holding it between my fingers, watching his dark unhappy eyes. He lit his own cigarette and puffed nervously.

“I’ll tie you in on it now,” I said. “You knew Clausen. Professionally, you said. I showed him I was a dick. He tried at once to call you up: He was too drunk to talk to you. I caught the number and later told you he was dead. Why? If you were on the level, you would call the cops. You didn’t. Why? You knew Clausen, you could have known some of his roomers. No proof either way. Paragraph. Presumption C: you knew Hicks or Orrin Quest or both. The L.A. cops couldn’t or didn’t establish identity of ex-Cleveland character—let’s give him his new name, call him Steelgrave. But somebody had to be able to—if that photo was worth killing people over. Did you ever practice medicine in Cleveland, Doctor?”

“Certainly not.” His voice seemed to come from far off. His eyes were remote too. His lips opened barely enough to admit his cigarette. He was very still.

I said: “They have a whole roomful of directories over at the telephone office. From all over the country. I checked you up.”

“A suite in a downtown office building,” I said. “And now this—an almost furtive practice in a little beach town. You’d have liked to change your name—but you couldn’t and keep your license. Somebody had to mastermind this deal, Doctor. Clausen was a bum, Hicks a stupid lout, Orrin Quest a nasty-minded creep. But they could be used. You couldn’t go up against Steelgrave directly. You wouldn’t have stayed alive long enough to brush your teeth. You had to work through pawns—expendable pawns. Well—are we getting anywhere?”

He smiled faintly and leaned back in his chair with a sigh. “Presumption D, Mr. Marlowe,” he almost whispered. “You are an unmitigated idiot.”

I grinned and reached for a match to light his fat Egyptian cigarette.

“Added to all the rest,” I said, “Orrin’s sister calls me up and tells me he is in your house. There are a lot weak arguments taken one at a time, I admit. But they do seem to sort of focus on you.” I puffed peacefully on the cigarette.

He watched me. His face seemed to fluctuate and become vague, to move far off and come back. I felt a tightness in my chest. My mind had slowed to a turtle’s gallop.

“What’s going on here?” I heard myself mumble.

I put my hands on the arms of the chair and pushed myself up. “Been dumb, haven’t I?” I said, with the cigarette still in my mouth and me still smoking it. Dumb was hardly the word. Have to coin a new word.

I was out of the chair and my feet were stuck in two barrels of cement. When I spoke my voice seemed to come through cotton wool.

I let go of the arms of the chair and reached for the cigarette. I missed it clean a couple of times, then got my hand around it. It didn’t feel like a cigarette. It felt like the hind leg of an elephant. With sharp toenails. They stuck into my hand. I shook my hand and the elephant took his leg away.

A vague but enormously tall figure swung around in front of me and a mule kicked me in the chest. I sat down on the floor.

“A little potassium hydrocyanide,” a voice said, over the transatlantic telephone. “Not fatal, not even dangerous. Merely relaxing. . .”

I started to get up off the floor. You ought to try it sometime. But have somebody nail the floor down first. This one looped the loop. After a while it steadied a little. I settled for an angle of forty-five degrees. I took hold of myself and started to go somewhere. There was a thing that might have been Napoleon’s tomb on the horizon. That was a good enough objective. I started that way. My heart beat fast and thick and I was having trouble opening my lungs. Like after being winded at football. You think your breath will never come back. Never, never, never.

Then it wasn’t Napoleon’s tomb any more. It was a raft on a swell. There was a man on it. I’d seen him somewhere. Nice fellow. We’d got on fine. I started towards him and hit a wall with my shoulder. That spun me around. I started clawing for something to hold on to. There was nothing but the carpet. How did I get down there? No use asking. It’s a secret. Every time you ask a question they just push the floor in your face. Okay, I started to crawl along the carpet. I was on what formerly had been my hands and knees. No sensation proved it. I crawled towards a dark wooden wall. Or it could have been black marble. Napoleon’s tomb again. What did I ever do to Napoleon? What for should he keep shoving his tomb at me?

“Need a drink of water,” I said.

I listened for the echo. No echo. Nobody said anything. Maybe I didn’t say it. Maybe it was just an idea I thought better of. Potassium cyanide. That’s a couple of long words to be worrying about when you’re crawling through tunnels. Nothing fatal, he said. Okay, this is just fun. What you might call semi-fatal. Philip Marlowe, 38, a private license operator of shady reputation, was apprehended by police last night while crawling through the Ballona Storm Drain with a grand piano on his back. Questioned at the University Heights Police station Marlowe declared he was taking the piano to the Maharajah of Coot-Berar. Asked why he was wearing spurs Marlowe declared that a client’s confidence was sacred. Marlowe is being held for investigation. Chief Hornside said police were not yet ready to say more. Asked if the piano was in tune Chief Hornside declared that he had played the Minute Waltz on it in thirty-five seconds and so far as he could tell there were no strings in the piano. He intimated that something else was. A complete statement to the press will be made within twelve hours, Chief Hornside said abruptly. Speculation is rife that Marlowe was attempting to dispose of a body.

A face swam towards me out of the darkness. I changed direction and started for the face. But it was too late in the afternoon. The sun was setting. It was getting dark rapidly. There was no face. There was no wall, no desk. Then there was no floor. There was nothing at all.

I wasn’t even there.

22

A big black gorilla with a big black paw had his big black paw over my face and was trying to push it through the back of my neck. I pushed back. Taking the weak side of an argument is my specialty. Then I realized that he was trying to keep me from opening my eyes.

I decided to open my eyes just the same. Others have done it, why not me? I gathered my strength and very slowly, keeping the back straight, flexing the thighs and knees, using the arms as ropes, I lifted the enormous weight of my eyelids.

I was looking at the ceiling, lying on my back on the floor, a position in which my calling has occasionally placed me. I rolled my head. My lungs felt stiff and my mouth felt dry. The room was just Dr. Lagardie’s consulting room. Same chair, same desk, same walls and window. There was a shuttered silence hanging around.

I got up on my haunches and braced myself on the floor and shook my head. It went into a flat spin. It spun down about five thousand feet and then I dragged it out and leveled off. I blinked. Same floor, same desk, same walls. But no Dr. Lagardie.

I wet my lips and made some kind of a vague noise to which nobody paid any attention. I got up on my feet. I was as dizzy as a dervish, as weak as a worn-out washer, as low as a badger’s belly, as timid as a titmouse, and as unlikely to succeed as a ballet dancer with a wooden leg.

I groped my way over behind the desk and slumped into Lagardie’s chair and began to paw fitfully through his equipment for a likely looking bottle of liquid fertilizer. Nothing doing. I got up again. I was as hard to lift as a dead elephant. I staggered around looking into cabinets of shining white enamel which contained everything somebody else was in a hurry for. Finally, after what seemed like four years on the road gang, my little hand closed around six ounces of ethyl alcohol. I got the top off the bottle and sniffed. Grain alcohol. Just what the label said. All I needed now was a glass and some water. A good man ought to be able to get that far. I started through the door to the examination room. The air still had the aromatic perfume of overripe peaches. I hit both sides of the doorway going through and paused to take a fresh sighting.

At that moment I was aware that steps were coming down the hall. I leaned against the wall wearily and listened.

Slow, dragging steps, with a long pause between each. At first they seemed furtive. Then they just seemed very, very tired. An old man trying to make it to his last armchair. That made two of us. And then I thought, for no reason at all, of Orfamay’s father back there on the porch in Manhattan, Kansas, moving quietly along to his rocking chair with his cold pipe in his hand, to sit down and look out over the front lawn and have himself a nice economical smoke that required no matches and no tobacco and didn’t mess up the living-room carpet. I arranged his chair for him. In the shade at the end of the porch where the bougainvillea was thick I helped him sit down. He looked up and thanked me with the good side of his face. His fingernails scratched on the arms of the chair as he leaned back.

The fingernails scratched, but it wasn’t on the arm of any chair. It was a real sound. It was close by, on the outside of a closed door that led from the examination room to the hallway. A thin feeble scratch, possibly a young kitten wanting to be let in. Okay, Marlowe, you’re an old animal lover. Go over and let the kitten in. I started. I made it with the help of the nice examination couch with the rings on the end and the nice clean towels. The scratching had stopped. Poor little kitten, outside and wanting in. A tear formed itself in my eye and trickled down my furrowed cheek. I let go of the examination table and made a smooth four yards to the door. The heart was bumping inside me. And the lungs still had that feeling of having been in storage for a couple of years. I took a deep breath and got hold of the doorknob and opened it. Just at the last moment it occurred to me to reach for a gun. It occurred to me but that’s as far as I got. I’m a fellow that likes to take an idea over by the light and have a good look at it. I’d have had to let go of the doorknob. It seemed like too big an operation. I just twisted the knob and opened the door instead.

He was braced to the doorframe by four hooked fingers made of white wax. He had eyes an eighth of an inch deep, pale gray-blue, wide open. They looked at me but they didn’t see me. Our faces were inches apart. Our breathing met in midair. Mine was quick and harsh, his was the far-off whisper which has not yet begun to rattle. Blood bubbled from his mouth and ran down his chin. something made me look down. Blood drained slowly down the inside of his trouser leg and out on his shoe and from his shoe it flowed without haste to the floor. It was already a small pool.

I couldn’t see where he had been shot. His teeth clicked and I thought he was going to speak, or try to speak. But that was the only sound from him. He had stopped breathing. His jaw fell slack. Then the rattle started. It isn’t rattle at all, of course. It isn’t anything like a rattle.

Rubber heels squeaked on the linoleum between the rug and the doorsill. The white fingers slid away from the doorframe. The man’s body started to wind up on the legs. The legs refused to hold it. They scissored. His torso turned in midair, like a swimmer in a wave, and jumped at me.

In the same moment his other arm, the one that had been out of sight, came up and over in a galvanic sweep that seemed not to have any possible living impetus behind it. It fell across my left shoulder as I reached for him. A bee stung me between the shoulder blades. Something besides the bottle of alcohol I had been holding thumped to the floor and rattled against the bottom of the wall.

I clamped my teeth hard and spread my feet and caught him under the arms. He weighed like five men. I took a step back and tried to hold him up. It was like trying to lift one end of a fallen tree. I went down with him. His head bumped the floor. I couldn’t help it. There wasn’t enough of me working to stop it. I straightened him out a bit and got away from him. I climbed up on my knees and bent down and listened. The rattle stopped. There was a long silence. Then there was a muted sigh, very quiet and indolent and without urgency. Another silence. Another still slower sigh, languid and peaceful as a summer breeze drifting past the nodding roses.

Something happened to his face and behind his face, the indefinable thing that happens in that always baffling and inscrutable moment, the smoothing out, the going back over the years to the age of innocence. The face now had a vague inner amusement, an almost roguish lift at the corners of the mouth. All of which was very silly, because I knew damn well, if I ever knew anything at all, that Orrin P. Quest had not been that kind of boy.

In the distance a siren wailed. I stayed kneeling and listened. It wailed and went away. I got to my feet and went over and looked out of the side window. In front of The Garland Home of Peace another funeral was forming up. The street was thick with cars again. People walked slowly up the path past the tree roses. Very slowly, the men with their hats in their hands long before they reached the little colonial porch.

I dropped the curtain and went over and picked up the bottle of ethyl alcohol and wiped it off with my handkerchief and laid it aside. I was no longer interested in alcohol. I bent down again and the bee-sting between my shoulder blades reminded me that there was something else to pick up. A thing with a round white wooden handle that lay against the baseboard. An ice pick with a filed-down blade not more than three inches long. I held it against the light and looked at the needle-sharp tip. There might or might not have been a faint stain of my blood on it. I pulled a finger gently beside the point. No blood. The point was very sharp.

I did some more work with my handkerchief and then bent down and put the ice pick on the palm of his right hand, white and waxy against the dull nap of the carpet. It looked too arranged. I shook his arm enough to make it roll off his hand to the floor. I thought about going through his pockets, but a more ruthless hand than mine would have done that already.

In a flash of sudden panic I went through mine instead. Nothing had been taken. Even the Luger under my arm had been left. I dragged it out and sniffed at it. It had not been fired, something I should have known without looking. You don’t walk around much after being shot with a Luger.

I stepped over the dark red pool in the doorway and looked along the hall. The house was still silent and waiting. The blood trail led me back and across to a room furnished like a den. There was a studio couch and a desk, some books and medical journals, an ashtray with five fat oval stubs in it. A metallic glitter near the leg of the studio couch turned out to be a used shell from an automatic—.32 caliber. I found another under the desk. I put them in my pocket.

I went back out and up the stairs. There were two bedrooms both in use, one pretty thoroughly stripped of clothes. In an ashtray more of Dr. Lagardie’s oval stubs. The other room contained Orrin Quest’s meager wardrobe, his spare suit and overcoat neatly hung in the closet, his shirts and socks and underwear equally neat in the drawers of a chest. Under the shirts at the back I found a Leica with an F.2 lens.

I left all these things as they were and went back downstairs into the room where the dead man lay indifferent to these trifles. I wiped off a few more doorknobs out of sheer perverseness, hesitated over the phone in the front room, and left without touching it. The fact that I was still walking around was a pretty good indication that the good Dr. Lagardie hadn’t killed anybody.

People were still crawling up the walk to the oddly undersized colonial porch of the funeral parlors across the street. An organ was moaning inside.

I went around the corner of the house and got into my car and left. I drove slowly and breathed deeply from the bottom of my lungs, but I still couldn’t seem to get enough oxygen.

Bay City ends about four miles from the ocean. I stopped in front of the last drugstore. It was time for me to make one more of my anonymous phone calls. Come and pick up the body, fellows. Who am I? Just a lucky boy who keeps finding them for you. Modest too. Don’t even want my name mentioned.

I looked at the drugstore and in through the plate-glass front. A girl with slanted cheaters was reading at a magazine. She looked something like Orfamay Quest. Something tightened up my throat.

I let the clutch in and drove on. She had a right to know first, law or no law. And I was far outside the law already.

23

I stopped at the office door with the key in my hand. Then I went noiselessly along to the other door, the one that was always unlocked, and stood there and listened. She might be in there already, waiting, with her eyes shining behind the slanted cheaters and the small moist mouth willing to be kissed. I would have to tell her a harder thing than she dreamed of, and then after a while she would go and I would never see her again.

I didn’t hear anything. I went back and unlocked the other door and picked the mail up and carried it over and dumped it on the desk. Nothing in it made me feel any taller. I left it and crossed to turn the latch in the other door and after a long slow moment I opened it and looked out. Silence and emptiness. A folded piece of paper lay at my feet. It had been pushed under the door. I picked it up and unfolded it.

“Please call me at the apartment house. Most urgent. I must see you.” It was signed D.

I dialed the number of the Chateau Bercy and asked for Miss Gonzales. Who was calling, please? One moment please, Mr. Marlowe. Buzz, buzz. Buzz, buzz.

“’Allo?”

“The accent’s a bit thick this afternoon.”

“Ah, it is you, amigo. I waited so long in your funny little office. Can you come over here and talk to me?”

“Impossible. I’m waiting for a call.”

“Well, may I come there?”

“What’s it all about?”

“Nothing I could discuss on the telephone, amigo.”

“Come ahead.”

I sat there and waited for the telephone to ring. It didn’t ring. I looked out of the window. The crowd was seething on the boulevard, the kitchen of the coffee shop next door was pouring the smell of Blue Plate Specials out of its ventilator shaft. Time passed and I sat there hunched over the desk, my chin in a hand, staring at the mustard-yellow plaster of the end wall, seeing on it the vague figure of a dying man with a short ice pick in his hand, and feeling the sting of its point between my shoulder blades. Wonderful what Hollywood will do to anybody. It will make a radiant glamour queen out of a drab little wench who ought to be ironing a truck driver’s shirts, a he-man hero with shining eyes and brilliant smile reeking of sexual charm out of some overgrown kid who was meant to go to work with a lunchbox. Out of a Texas car hop with the literacy of a character in a comic strip it will make an international courtesan, married six times to six millionaires and so blasé and decadent at the end of it that her idea of a thrill is to seduce a furniture mover in a sweaty undershirt.

And by remote control it might even take a small-town prig like Orrin Quest and make an ice-pick murderer out of him in a matter of months, elevating his simple meanness into the classic sadism of the multiple killer.

It took her a little over ten minutes to get there. I heard the door open and close and I went through to the waiting room and there she was, the All-American Gardenia. She hit me right between the eyes. Her own were deep and dark and unsmiling.

She was all in black, like the night before, but a tailor-made outfit this time, a wide black straw hat set at a rakish angle, the collar of a white silk shirt folded out over the collar of her jacket, and her throat brown and supple and her mouth as red as a new fire engine.

“I waited a long time,” she said. “I have not had any lunch.”

“I had mine,” I said. “Cyanide. Very satisfying. I’ve only just stopped looking blue.”

“I am not in an amusing mood this morning, amigo.”

“You don’t have to amuse me,” I said. “I amuse myself. I do a brother act that has me rolling in the aisle. Let’s go inside.”

We went into my private thinking parlor and sat down.

“You always wear black?” I asked.

“But yes. It is more exciting when I take my clothes off.”

“Do you have to talk like a whore?”

“You do not know much about whores, amigo. They are always most respectable. Except of course the very cheap ones.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Thanks for telling me. What is the urgent matter we have to talk about? Going to bed with you is not urgent. It can be done any day.”

“You are in a nasty mood.”

“Okay. I’m in a nasty mood.”

She got one of her long brown cigarettes out of her bag and fitted it carefully into the golden tweezers. She waited for me to light it for her. I didn’t so she lit it herself with a golden lighter.

She held this doohickey in a black gauntleted glove and stared at me out of depthless black eyes that had no laughter in them now.

“Would you like to go to bed with me?”

“Most anyone would. But let’s leave sex out of it for now.”

“I do not draw a very sharp line between business and sex,” she said evenly. “And you cannot humiliate me. Sex is a net with which I catch fools. Some of these fools are useful and generous. Occasionally one is dangerous.” She paused thoughtfully.

I said: “If you’re waiting for me to say something that lets on I know who a certain party is—okay, I know who he is.”

“Can you prove it?”

“Probably not. The cops couldn’t.”

“The cops,” she said contemptuously, “do not always tell all they know. They do not always prove everything they could prove. I suppose you know he was in jail for ten days last February.”

“Yes.”

“Did it not occur to you as strange that he did not get bail?”

“I don’t know what charge they had him on. If it was as a material witness—”

“Do you not think he could get the charge changed to something bailable—if he really wanted to?”

“I haven’t thought much about it,” I lied. “I don’t know the man.”

“You have never spoken to him?” she asked idly, a little too idly.

I didn’t answer.

She laughed shortly. “Last night, amigo. Outside Mavis Weld’s apartment. I was sitting in a car across the street.”

“I may have bumped into him accidentally. Was that the guy?”

“You do not fool me at all.”

“Okay. Miss Weld was pretty rough with me. I went away sore. Then I meet this ginzo with her door key in his hand. I yank it out of his hand and toss it behind some bushes. Then I apologize and go get it for him. He seemed like a nice little guy too.”

“Ver-ry nice,” she drawled. “He was my boy friend also.”

I grunted.

“Strange as it may seem I’m not a hell of a lot interested in your love life, Miss Gonzales. I assume it covers a wide field—all the way from Stein to Steelgrave.”

“Stein?” she asked softly. “Who is Stein?”

“A Cleveland hot shot that got himself gunned in front of your apartment house last February. He had an apartment there. I thought perhaps you might have met him.”

She let out a silvery little laugh. “Amigo, there are men I do not know. Even at the Chateau Bercy.”

“Reports say he was gunned two blocks away,” I said. “I like it better that it happened right in front. And you were looking out of the window and saw it happen. And saw the killer run away and just under a street light he turned back and the light caught his face and darned if it wasn’t old man Steelgrave. You recognized him by his rubber nose and the fact that he was wearing his tall hat with the pigeons on it.”

She didn’t laugh.

“You like it better that way,” she purred.

“We could make more money that way.”

“But Steelgrave was in jail,” she smiled. “And even if he was not in jail—even if, for example, I happened to be friendly with a certain Dr. Chalmers who was county jail physician at the time and he told me, in an intimate moment, that he had given Steelgrave a pass to go to the dentist—with a guard of course, but the guard was a reasonable man—on the very day Stein was shot—even if this happened to be true, would it not be a very poor way to use the information by blackmailing Steelgrave?”

“I hate to talk big,” I said, “but I’m not afraid of Steelgrave—or a dozen like him in one package.”

“But I am, amigo. A witness to a gang murder is not a very safe position in this country. No, we will not blackmail Steelgrave. And we will not say anything about Mr. Stein, whom I may or may not have known. It is enough that Mavis Weld is a close friend of a known gangster and is seen in public with him.”

“We’d have to prove he was a known gangster,” I said.

“Can we not do that?”

“How?”

She made a disappointed mouth. “But I felt sure that was what you had been doing these last couple of days.”

“Why?”

“I have private reasons.”

“They mean nothing to me while you keep them private.”

She got rid of the brown cigarette stub in my ashtray. I leaned over and squashed it out with the stub of a pencil. She touched my hand lightly with a gauntleted finger. Her smile was the reverse of anesthetic. She leaned back and crossed her legs. The little lights began to dance in her eyes. It was a long time between passes—for her.

“Love is such a dull word,” she mused. “It amazes me that the English language so rich in the poetry of love can accept such a feeble word for it. It has no life, no resonance. It suggests to me little girls in ruffled summer dresses, with little pink smiles, and little shy voices, and probably the most unbecoming underwear.”

I said nothing. With an effortless change of pace she became businesslike again.

“Mavis will get $75,000 a picture from now on, and eventually $150,000. She has started to climb and nothing will stop her. Except possibly a bad scandal.”

“Then somebody ought to tell her who Steelgrave is,” I said. “Why don’t you? And incidentally, suppose we did have all this proof, what’s Steelgrave doing all the time we’re putting the bite on Weld?”

“Does he have to know? I hardly think she would tell him. In fact, I hardly think she would go on having anything to do with him. But that would not matter to us—if we had our proof. And if she knew we had it.”

Her black gauntleted hand moved towards her black bag, stopped, drummed lightly on the edge of the desk, and so got back to where she could drop it in her lap. She hadn’t looked at the bag. I hadn’t either.

I stood up. “I might happen to be under some obligation to Miss Weld. Ever think of that?”

She just smiled.

“And if that was so,” I said, “don’t you think it’s about time you got the hell out of my office?”

She put her hands on the arms of her chair and started to get up, still smiling. I scooped the bag before she could change direction. Her eyes filled with glare. She made a spitting sound.

I opened the bag and went through and found a white envelope that looked a little familiar. Out of it I shook the photo at The Dancers, the two pieces fitted together and pasted on another piece of paper.

I closed the bag and tossed it across to her.

She was on her feet now, her lips drawn back over her teeth. She was very silent.

“Interesting,” I said and snapped a digit at the glazed surface of the print. “If it’s not a fake. Is that Steelgrave?”

The silvery laugh bubbled up again. “You are a ridicules character, amigo. You really are. I did not know they made such people any more.”

“Prewar stock,” I said. “We’re getting scarcer every day. Where did you get this?”

“From Mavis Weld’s purse in Mavis Weld’s dressing room. While she was on the set.”

“She know?”

“She does not know.”

“I wonder where she got it?”

“From you.”

“Nonsense.” I raised my eyebrows a few inches. “Where would I get it?”

She reached the gauntleted hand across the desk. Her voice was cold. “Give it back to me, please.”

“I’ll give it back to Mavis Weld. And I hate to tell you this, Miss Gonzales, but I’d never get anywhere as a blackmailer. I just don’t have the engaging personality.”

“Give it back to me,” she said sharply. “If you do not—”

She cut herself off. I waited for her to finish. A look of contempt showed on her smooth features.

“Very well,” she said. “It is my mistake. I thought you were smart, I can see that you are just another dumb private eye. This shabby little office,” she waved a black gloved hand at it, “and the shabby little life that goes on here—they ought to tell me what sort of idiot you are.”

“They do,” I said.

She turned slowly and walked to the door. I got around the desk and she let me open it for her.

She went out slowly. The way she did it hadn’t been learned at business college.

She went on down the hail without looking back. She had a beautiful walk.

The door bumped against the pneumatic door-closer and very softly clicked shut. It seemed to take a long time to do that. I stood there watching it as if I had never seen it happen before. Then I turned and started back towards my desk and the phone rang.

I picked it up and answered it. It was Christy French. “Marlowe? We’d like to see you down at headquarters.”

“Right away?”

“If not sooner,” he said and hung up.

I slipped the pasted-together print from under the blotter and went over to put it in the safe with the others. I put my hat on and closed the window. There was nothing to wait for. I looked at the green tip on the sweep hand of my watch. It was a long time until five o’clock. The sweep hand went around and around the dial like a door-to-door salesman. The hands stood at four-ten. You’d think she’d have called up by now. I peeled my coat off and unstrapped the shoulder harness and locked it with the Luger in the desk drawer. The cops don’t like you to be wearing a gun in their territory. Even if you have the right to wear one. They like you to come in properly humble, with your hat in your hand, and your voice low and polite, and your eyes full of nothing.

I looked at the watch again. I listened. The building seemed quiet this afternoon. After a while it would be silent and then the madonna of the dark-gray mop would come shuffling along the hall, trying doorknobs.

I put my coat back on and locked the communicating door and switched off the buzzer and let myself out into the hallway. And then the phone rang. I nearly took the door off its hinges getting back to it. It was her voice all right, but it had a tone I had never heard before. A cool balanced tone, not flat or empty or dead, or even childish. Just the voice of a girl I didn’t know and yet did know. What was in that voice I knew before she said more than three words.

“I called you up because you told me to,” she said. “But you don’t have to tell me anything. I went down there.”

I was holding the phone with both hands.

“You went down there,” I said. “Yes. I heard that. So?”

“I—borrowed a car,” she said. “I parked across the street. There were so many cars you would never have noticed me. There’s a funeral home there. I wasn’t following you. I tried to go after you when you came out but I don’t know the streets down there at all. I lost you. So I went back.”

“What did you go back for?”

“I don’t really know. I thought you looked kind of funny when you came out of the house. Or maybe I just had a feeling. He being my brother and all. So I went back and rang the bell. And nobody answered the door. I thought that was funny too. Maybe I’m psychic or something. All of a sudden I seemed to have to get into that house. And I didn’t know how to do it, but I had to.”

“That’s happened to me,” I said, and it was my voice, but somebody had been using my tongue for sandpaper.

“I called the police and told them I had heard shots,” she said. “They came and one of them got into the house through a window. And then he let the other one in. And after a while they let me in. And then they wouldn’t let me go. I had to tell them all about it, who he was, and that I had lied about the shots, but I was afraid something had happened to Orrin. And I had to tell them about you too.”

“That’s all right,” I said. “I’d have told them myself as soon as I could get a chance to tell you.”

“It’s kind of awkward for you, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“Will they arrest you or something?”

“They could.”

“You left him lying there on the floor. Dead. You had to, I guess.”

“I had my reasons,” I said. “They won’t sound too good, but I had them. It made no difference to him.”

“Oh you’d have your reasons all right,” she said. “You’re very smart. You’d always have reasons for things. Well, I guess you’ll have to tell the police your reasons too.”

“Not necessarily.”

“Oh yes, you will,” the voice said, and there was a ring of pleasure in it I couldn’t account for. “You certainly will. They’ll make you.”

“We won’t argue about that,” I said. “In my business a fellow does what he can to protect a client. Sometimes he goes a little too far. That’s what I did. I’ve put myself where they can hurt me. But not entirely for you.”

“You left him lying on the floor, dead,” she said. “And I don’t care what they do to you. If they put you in prison, I think I would like that. I bet you’ll be awfully brave about it.”

“Sure,” I said. “Always a gay smile. Do you see what he had in his hand?”

“He didn’t have anything in his hand.”

“Well, lying near his hand.”

“There wasn’t anything. There wasn’t anything at all. What sort of thing?”

“That’s fine,” I said. “I’m glad of that. Well, goodbye. I’m going down to headquarters now. They want to see me. Good luck, if I don’t see you again.”

“You’d better keep your good luck,” she said. “You might need it. And I wouldn’t want it.”

“I did my best for you,” I said. “Perhaps if you’d given me a little more information in the beginning—”

She hung up while I was saying it.

I put the phone down in its cradle as gently as if it was a baby. I got out a handkerchief and wiped the palms of my hands. I went over to the washbasin and washed my hands and face. I sloshed cold water on my face and dried off hard with the towel and looked at it in the mirror.

“You drove off a cliff all right,” I said to the face.

24

The center of the room was a long yellow oak table. Its edges were unevenly grooved with cigarette burns. Behind it was a window with wire over the stippled glass. Also behind it with a mess of papers spread out untidily in front of him was Detective-Lieutenant Fred Beifus. At the end of the table leaning back on two legs of an armchair was a big burly man whose face had for me the vague familiarity of a face previously seen in a halftone on newsprint. He had a jaw like a park bench. He had the butt end of a carpenter’s pencil between his teeth. He seemed to be awake and breathing, but apart from that he just sat.

There were two roll top desks at the other side of the table and there was another window. One of the roll top desks was backed to the window. A woman with orange-colored hair was typing out a report on a typewriter stand beside the desk. At the other desk, which was endways to the window, Christy French sat in a tilted-back swivel chair with his feet on the corner of the desk. He was looking out of the window, which was open and afforded a magnificent view of the police parking lot and the back of a billboard.

“Sit down there,” Beifus said, pointing.

I sat down across from him in a straight oak chair without arms. It was far from new and when new had not been beautiful.

“This is Lieutenant Moses Maglashan of the Bay City police,” Beifus said. “He don’t like you any better than we do.”

Lieutenant Moses Maglashan took the carpenter’s pencil out of his mouth and looked at the teeth marks in the fat octagonal pencil butt. Then he looked at me. His eyes went over me slowly exploring me, noting me, cataloging me. He said nothing. He put the pencil back in his mouth.

Beifus said: “Maybe I’m a queer, but for me you don’t have no more sex appeal than a turtle.” He half turned to the typing woman in the corner. “Millie.”

She swung around from the typewriter to a shorthand notebook. “Name’s Philip Marlowe,” Beifus said. “With an ‘e’ on the end, if you’re fussy. License number?”

He looked back at me. I told him. The orange queen wrote without looking up. To say she had a face that would have stopped a clock would have been to insult her. It would have stopped a runaway horse.

“Now if you’re in the mood,” Beifus told me, “you could start in at the beginning and give us all the stuff you left out yesterday. Don’t try to sort it out. Just let it flow natural. We got enough stuff to check you as you go along.”

“You want me to make a statement?”

“A very full statement,” Beifus said. “Fun, huh?”

“This statement is to be voluntary and without coercion?”

“Yeah. They all are.” Beifus grinned.

Maglashan looked at me steadily for a moment. The orange queen turned back to her typing. Nothing for her yet. Thirty years of it had perfected her timing.

Maglashan took a heavy worn pigskin glove out of his pocket and put it on his right hand and flexed his fingers.

“What’s that for?” Beifus asked him.

“I bite my nails times,” Maglashan said. “Funny. Only bite ‘em on my right hand.” He raised his slow eyes to stare at me. “Some guys are more voluntary than others,” he said idly. “Something to do with the kidneys, they tell me. I’ve known guys of the not so voluntary type that had to go to the can every fifteen minutes for weeks after they got voluntary. Couldn’t seem to hold water.”

“Just think of that,” Beifus said wonderingly.

“Then there’s the guys can’t talk above a husky whisper,” Maglashan went on. “Like punch-drunk fighters that have stopped too many with their necks.”

Maglashan looked at me. It seemed to be my turn.

“Then there’s the type that won’t go to the can at all,” I said. “They try too hard. Sit in a chair like this for thirty hours straight. Then they fall down and rupture a spleen or burst a bladder. They over co-operate. And after sunrise court, when the tank is empty, you find them dead in a dark corner. Maybe they ought to have seen a doctor, but you can’t figure everything, can you, Lieutenant?”

“We figure pretty close down in Bay City,” he said. “When we got anything to figure with.”

There were hard lumps of muscle at the corners of his jaws. His eyes had a reddish glare behind them.

“I could do lovely business with you,” he said staring at me. “Just lovely.”

“I’m sure you could, Lieutenant. I’ve always had a swell time in Bay City—while I stayed conscious.”

“I’d keep you conscious a long long time, baby. I’d make a point of it. I’d give it my personal attention.”

Christy French turned his head slowly and yawned. “What makes you Bay City cops so tough?” he asked. “You pickle your nuts in salt water or something?”

Beifus put his tongue out so that the tip showed and ran it along his lips.

“We’ve always been tough,” Maglashan said, not looking at him. “We like to be tough. Jokers like this character here keep us tuned up.” He turned back to me. “So you’re the sweetheart that phoned in about Clausen. You’re right handy with a pay phone, ain’t you, sweetheart?”

I didn’t say anything.

“I’m talking to you, sweetheart,” Maglashan said. “I asked you a question, sweetheart. When I ask a question I get answered. Get that, sweetheart?”

“Keep on talking and you’ll answer yourself,” Christy French said. “And maybe you won’t like the answer, and maybe you’ll be so damn tough you’ll have to knock yourself out with that glove. Just to prove it.”

Maglashan straightened up. Red spots the size of half-dollars glowed dully on his cheeks.

“I come up here to get co-operation,” he told French slowly. “The big razzoo I can get to home. From my wife. Here I don’t expect the wise numbers to work out on me.”

“You’ll get co-operation,” French said. “Just don’t try to steal the picture with that nineteen-thirty dialogue.” He swung his chair around and looked at me. “Let’s take out a clean sheet of paper and play like we’re just starting this investigation. I know all your arguments. I’m no judge of them. The point is do you want to talk or get booked as a material witness?”

“Ask the questions,” I said. “If you don’t like the answers, you can book me. If you book me, I get to make a phone call.”

“Correct,” French said, “if we book you. But we don’t have to. We can ride the circuit with you. It might take days.”

“And canned cornbeef hash to eat,” Beifus put in cheerfully.

“Strictly speaking, it wouldn’t be legal,” French said. “But we do it all the time. Like you do a few things which you hadn’t ought to do maybe. Would you say you were legal in this picture?”

“No.”

Maglashan let out a deep throated, “Ha!”

I looked across at the orange queen who was back to her notebook, silent and indifferent.

“You got a client to protect,” French said.

“Maybe.”

“You mean you did have a client. She ratted on you.”

I said nothing.

“Name’s Orfamay Quest,” French said, watching me.

“Ask your questions,” I said.

“What happened down there on Idaho Street?”

“I went there looking for her brother. He’d moved away, she said, and she’d come out here to see him. She was worried. The manager, Clausen, was too drunk to talk sense. I looked at the register and saw another man had moved into Quest’s room. I talked to this man. He told me nothing that helped.”

French reached around and picked a pencil off the desk and tapped it against his teeth. “Ever see this man again?”

“Yes. I told him who I was. When I went back downstairs Clausen was dead. And somebody had torn a page out of the register. The page with Quest’s name on it. I called the police.”

“But you didn’t stick around?”

“I had no information about Clausen’s death.”

“But you didn’t stick around,” French repeated. Maglashan made a savage noise in his throat and threw the carpenter’s pencil clear across the room. I watched it bounce against the wall and floor and come to a stop.

“That’s correct,” I said.

“In Bay City,” Maglashan said, “we could murder you for that.”

“In Bay City you could murder me for wearing a blue tie,” I said.

He started to get up. Beifus looked sideways at him and said: “Leave Christy handle it. There’s always a second show.”

“We could break you for that,” French said to me without inflexion.

“Consider me broke,” I said. “I never liked the business anyway.”

“So you came back to your office. What then?”

“I reported to the client. Then a guy called me up and asked me over to the Van Nuys Hotel. He was the same guy I had talked to down on Idaho Street, but with a different name.”

“You could have told us that, couldn’t you?”

“If I had, I’d have had to tell you everything. That would have violated the conditions of my employment.”

French nodded and tapped his pencil. He said slowly: “A murder wipes out agreements like that. Two murders ought to do it double. And two murders by the same method, treble. You don’t look good, Marlowe. You don’t look good at all.”

“I don’t even look good to the client,” I said, “after today.”

“What happened today?”

“She told me her brother had called her up from this doctor’s house. Dr. Lagardie. The brother was in danger. I was to hurry on down and take care of him. I hurried on down. Dr. Lagardie and his nurse had the office closed. They acted scared. The police had been there.” I looked at Maglashan.

“Another of his phone calls,” Maglashan snarled.

“Not me this time,” I said.

“All right. Go on,” French said, after a pause.

“Lagardie denied knowing anything about Orrin Quest. He sent his nurse home. Then he slipped me a doped cigarette and I went away from there for a while. When I came to I was alone in the house. Then I wasn’t. Orrin Quest, or what was left of him, was scratching at the door. He fell through it and died as I opened it. With his last ounce of strength he tried to stick me with an ice pick.” I moved my shoulders. The place between them was a little stiff and sore, nothing more.

French looked hard at Maglashan. Maglashan shook his head, but French kept on looking at him. Beifus began to whistle under his breath. I couldn’t make out the tune at first, and then I could. It was “Old Man Mose is Dead.”

French turned his head and said slowly: “No ice pick was found by the body.”

“I left it where it fell,” I said.

Maglashan said: “Looks like I ought to be putting on my glove again.” He stretched it between his fingers. Somebody’s a goddamn liar and it ain’t me.”

“All right,” French said. “All right. Let’s not be theatrical. Suppose the kid did have an ice pick in his hand, that doesn’t prove he was born holding one.”

“Filed down,” I said. “Short. Three inches from the handle to the tip of the point. That’s not the way they come from the hardware store.”

“Why would he want to stick you?” Beifus asked with a derisive grin. “You were his pal. You were down there to keep him safe for his sister.”

“I was just something between him and the light,” I said. “Something that moved and could have been a man and could have been the man that hurt him. He was dying on his feet. I’d never seen him before. If he ever saw me, I didn’t know it.”

“It could have been a beautiful friendship,” Beifus said with a sigh. “Except for the ice pick, of course.”

“And the fact that he had it in his hand and tried to stick me with it could mean something.”

“For instance what?”

“A man in his condition acts from instinct. He doesn’t invent new techniques. He got me between the shoulder blades, a sting, the feeble last effort of a dying man. Maybe it would have been a different place and a much deeper penetration if he had had his health.”

Maglashan said: “How much longer we have to barber round with this monkey? You talk to him like he was human. Leave me talk to him my way.”

“The captain doesn’t like it,” French said casually.

“Hell with the captain.”

“The captain doesn’t like small-town cops saying the hell with him,” French said.

Maglashan clamped his teeth tight and the line of his jaw showed white. His eyes narrowed and glistened. He took a deep breath through his nose.

“Thanks for the co-operation,” he said and stood up. “I’ll be on my way.” He rounded the corner of the table and stopped beside me. He put his left hand out and tilted my chin up again.

“See you again, sweetheart. In my town.”

He lashed me across the face twice with the wrist end of the glove. The buttons stung sharply. I put my hand up and rubbed my lower lip.

French said: “For Chrissake, Maglashan, sit down and let the guy speak his piece. And keep your hands off him.”

Maglashan looked back at him and said: “Think you can make me?”

French just shrugged. After a moment Maglashan rubbed his big hand across his mouth and strolled back to his chair. French said:

“Let’s have your ideas about all this, Marlowe.”

“Among other things Clausen was probably pushing reefers,” I said. “I sniffed marijuana smoke in his apartment. A tough little guy was counting money in the kitchen when I got there. He had a gun and a sharpened rat-tail file, both of which he tried to use on me. I took them away from him and he left. He would be the runner. But Clausen was liquored to a point where you wouldn’t want to trust him any more. They don’t go for that in the organizations. The runner thought I was a dick. Those people wouldn’t want Clausen picked up. He would be too easy to milk. The minute they smelled dick around the house Clausen would be missing.”

French looked at Maglashan. “That make any sense to you?”

“It could happen,” Maglashan said grudgingly.

French said: “Suppose it was so, what’s it got to do with this Orrin Quest?”

“Anybody can smoke reefers,” I said. “If you’re dull and lonely and depressed and out of a job, they might be very attractive. But when you smoke them you get warped ideas and calloused emotions. And marijuana affects different people different ways. Some it makes very tough and some it just makes never-no-mind. Suppose Quest tried to put the bite on somebody and threatened to go to the police. Quite possibly all three murders are connected with the reefer gang.”

“That don’t jibe with Quest having a filed-down ice pick,” Beifus said.

I said: “According to the lieutenant here he didn’t have one. So I must have imagined that. Anyhow, he might just have picked it up. They might be standard equipment around Dr. Lagardie’s house. Get anything on him?”

He shook his head. “Not so far.”

“He didn’t kill me, probably he didn’t kill anybody,” I said. “Quest told his sister—according to her—that he was working for Dr. Lagardie, but that some gangsters were after him.”

“This Lagardie,” French said, prodding at his blotter with a pen point, “what do you make of him?”

“He used to practice in Cleveland. Downtown in a large way. He must have had his reasons for hiding out in Bay City.”

“Cleveland, huh?” French drawled and looked at a corner of the ceiling. Beifus looked down at his papers. Maglashan said:

“Probably an abortionist. I’ve had my eye on him for some time.”

“Which eye?” Beifus asked him mildly.

Maglashan flushed.

French said: “Probably the one he didn’t have on Idaho Street.”

Maglashan stood up violently. “You boys think you’re so goddamn smart it might interest you to know that we’re just a small town police force. We got to double in brass once in a while. Just the same I like that reefer angle. It might cut down my work considerable. I’m looking into it right now.”

He marched solidly to the door and left. French looked after him. Beifus did the same. When the door closed they looked at each other.

“I betcha they pull that raid again tonight,” Beifus said.

French nodded.

Beifus said: “In a flat over a laundry. They’ll go down on the beach and pull in three or four vagrants and stash them in the flat and then they’ll line them up for the camera boys after they pull the raid.”

French said: “You’re talking too much, Fred.”

Beifus grinned and was silent. French said to me: “If you were guessing, what would you guess they were looking for in that room at the Van Nuys?”

“A claim check for a suitcase full of weed.”

“Not bad,” French said. “And still guessing where would it have been?”

“I thought about that. When I talked to Hicks down at Bay City he wasn’t wearing his muff. A man doesn’t around the house. But he was wearing it on the bed at the Van Nuys. Maybe he didn’t put it on himself.”

French said: “So?”

I said, “Wouldn’t be a bad place to stash a claim check.”

French said: “You could pin it down with a piece of scotch tape. Quite an idea.”

There was a silence. The orange queen went back to her typing. I looked at my nails. They weren’t as clean as they might be. After the pause French said slowly: “Don’t think for a minute you’re in the clear, Marlowe. Still guessing, how come Dr. Lagardie to mention Cleveland to you?”

“I took the trouble to look him up. A doctor can’t change his name if he wants to go on practicing. The ice pick made you think of Weepy Moyer. Weepy Moyer operated in Cleveland. Sunny Moe Stein operated in Cleveland. It’s true the ice-pick technique was different, but it was an ice pick. You said yourself the boys might have learned. And always with these gangs there’s a doctor somewhere in the background.”

“Pretty wild,” French said. “Pretty loose connection.”

“Would I do myself any good if I tightened it up?”

“Can you?”

“I can try.”

French sighed. “The little Quest girl is okay,” he said. “I talked to her mother back in Kansas. She really did come out here to look for her brother. And she really did hire you to do it. She gives you a good write-up. Up to a point. She really did suspect her brother was mixed up in something wrong. You make any money on the deal?”

“Not much,” I said. “I gave her back the fee. She didn’t have much.”

“That way you don’t have to pay income tax on it,” Beifus said.

French said, “Let’s break this off. The next move is up to the D.A. And if I know Endicott, it will be a week from Tuesday before he decides how to play it.” He made a gesture towards the door.

I stood up. “Will it be all right if I don’t leave town?” I asked.

They didn’t bother to answer that one.

I just stood there and looked at them. The ice-pick wound between my shoulders had a dry sting, and the flesh around the place was stiff. The side of my face and mouth smarted where Maglashan had sideswiped me with his well-used pigskin glove. I was in the deep water. It was dark and unclear and the taste of the salt was in my mouth.

They just sat there and looked back at me. The orange queen was clacking her typewriter. Cop talk was no more treat to her than legs to a dance director. They had the calm weathered faces of healthy men in hard condition. They had the eyes they always have, cloudy and gray like freezing water. The firm set mouth, the hard little wrinkles at the corners of the eyes, the hard hollow meaningless stare, not quite cruel and a thousand miles from kind. The dull ready-made clothes, worn without style, with a sort of contempt; the look of men who are poor and yet proud of their power, watching always for ways to make it felt, to shove it into you and twist it and grin and watch you squirm, ruthless without malice, cruel and yet not always unkind. What would you expect them to be? Civilization had no meaning for them. All they saw of it was the failures, the dirt, the dregs, the aberrations and the disgust.

“What you standing there for?” Beifus asked sharply. “You want us to give you a great big spitty kiss? No snappy comeback, huh? Too bad.” His voice fell away to a dull drone. He frowned and reached a pencil off the desk. With a quick motion of his fingers he snapped it in half and held the two halves out on his palm.

“We’re giving you that much break,” he said thinly, the smile all gone. “Go on out and square things up. What the hell you think we’re turning you loose for? Maglashan bought you a rain check. Use it.”

I put my hand up and rubbed my lip. My mouth had too many teeth in it.

Beifus lowered his eyes to the table, picked up a paper and began to read it. Christy French swung around in his chair and put his feet on the desk and stared out of the open window at the parking lot. The orange queen stopped typing. The room was suddenly full of heavy silence, like a fallen cake.

I went on out, parting the silence as if I was pushing my way through water.

25

The office was empty again. No leggy brunettes, no little girls with slanted glasses, no neat dark men with gangster’s eyes.

I sat down at the desk and watched the light fade. The going-home sounds had died away. Outside the neon signs began to glare at one another across the boulevard. There was something to be done, but I didn’t know what. Whatever it was it would be useless. I tidied up my desk, listening to the scrape of a bucket on the tiling of the corridor. I put my papers away in the drawer, straightened the pen stand, got out a duster and wiped off the glass and then the telephone. It was dark and sleek in the fading light. It wouldn’t ring tonight. Nobody would call me again. Not now, not this time. Perhaps not ever.

I put the duster away folded with the dust in it, leaned back and just sat, not smoking, not even thinking. I was a blank man. I had no face, no meaning, no personality, hardly a name. I didn’t want to eat. I didn’t even want a drink. I was the page from yesterday’s calendar crumpled at the bottom of the wastebasket.

I pulled the phone towards me and dialed Mavis Weld’s number. It rang and rang and rang. Nine times. That’s a lot of ringing, Marlowe. I guess there’s nobody home. Nobody home to you. I hung up. Who would you like to call now? You got a friend somewhere that might like to hear your voice? No. Nobody.

Let the telephone ring, please. Let there be somebody to call up and plug me into the human race again. Even a cop. Even a Maglashan. Nobody has to like me. I just want to get off this frozen star.

The telephone rang.

“Amigo,” her voice said. “There is trouble. Bad trouble. She wants to see you. She likes you. She thinks you are an honest man.”

“Where?” I asked. It wasn’t really a question, just a sound I made. I sucked on a cold pipe and leaned my head on my hand, brooding at the telephone. It was a voice to talk to anyway.

“You will come?”

“I’d sit up with a sick parrot tonight. Where do I go?”

“I will come for you. I will be before your building in fifteen minutes. It is not easy to get where we go.”

“How is it coming back,” I asked, “or don’t we care?”

But she had already hung up.

Down at the drugstore lunch counter I had time to inhale two cups of coffee and a melted-cheese sandwich with two slivers of ersatz bacon imbedded in it, like dead fish in the silt at the bottom of a drained pool.

I was crazy. I liked it.

26

It was a black Mercury convertible with a light top. The top was up. When I leaned in at the door Dolores Gonzales slid over towards me along the leather seat.

“You drive please, amigo. I do not really ever like to drive.”

The light from the drugstore caught her face. She had changed her clothes again, but it was still all black, save for a flame-colored shirt. Slacks and a kind of loose coat like a man’s leisure jacket.

I leaned on the door of the car. “Why didn’t she call me?”

“She couldn’t. She did not have the number and she had very little time.”

“Why?”

“It seemed to be while someone was out of the room for just a moment.”

“And where is this place she called from?”

“I do not know the name of the street. But I can find the house. That is why I come. Please get into the car and let us hurry.”

“Maybe,” I said. “And again maybe I am not getting into the car. Old age and arthritis have made me cautious.”

“Always the wisecrack,” she said. “It is a very strange man.”

“Always the wisecrack where possible,” I said, “and it is a very ordinary guy with only one head—which has been rather harshly used at times. The times usually started out like this.”

“Will you make love to me tonight?” she asked softly.

“That again is an open question. Probably not.”

“You would not waste your time. I am not one of these synthetic blondes with a skin you could strike matches on. These ex-laundresses with large bony hands and sharp knees and unsuccessful breasts.”

“Just for half an hour,” I said, “let’s leave the sex to the side. It’s great stuff, like chocolate sundaes. But there comes a time you would rather cut your throat. I guess maybe I’d better cut mine.”

I went around the car and slid under the wheel and started the motor.

“We go west,” she said, “through the Beverly Hills and then farther on.”

I let the clutch in and drifted around the corner to go south to Sunset. Dolores got one of her long brown cigarettes out.

“Did you bring a gun?” she asked.

“No. What would I want a gun for?” The inside of my left arm pressed against the Luger in the shoulder harness.

“It is better not perhaps.” She fitted the cigarette into the little golden tweezer thing and lit it with the golden lighter. The light flaring in her face seemed to be swallowed up by her depthless black eyes.

I turned west on Sunset and swallowed myself up in three lanes of racetrack drivers who were pushing their mounts hard to get nowhere and do nothing.

“What kind of trouble is Miss Weld in?”

“I do not know. She just said that it was trouble and she was much afraid and she needed you.”

“You ought to be able to think up a better story than that.”

She didn’t answer. I stopped for a traffic signal and turned to look at her. She was crying softly in the dark.

“I would not hurt a hair of Mavis Weld’s head,” she said. “I do not quite expect that you would believe me.”

“On the other hand,” I said, “maybe the fact that you don’t have a story helps.”

She started to slide along the seat towards me.

“Keep to your own side of the car,” I said. “I’ve got to drive this heap.”

“You do not want my head on your shoulder?”

“Not in this traffic.”

I stopped at Fairfax with the green light to let a man make a left turn. Horns blew violently behind. When I started again the car that had been right behind swung out and pulled level and a fat guy in a sweatshirt yelled: “Aw go get yourself a hammock!”

He went on, cutting in so hard that I had to brake.

“I used to like this town,” I said, just to be saying something and not to be thinking too hard. “A long time ago. There were trees along Wilshire Boulevard. Beverly Hills was a country town. Westwood was bare hills and lots offering at eleven hundred dollars and no takers. Hollywood was a bunch of frame houses on the interurban line. Los Angeles was just a big dry sunny place with ugly homes and no style, but goodhearted and peaceful. It had the climate they just yap about now. People used to sleep out on porches. Little groups who thought they were intellectual used to call it the Athens of America. It wasn’t that, but it wasn’t a neon-lighted slum either.”

We crossed La Cienega and went into the curve of the Strip. The Dancers was a blaze of light. The terrace was packed. The parking lot was like ants on a piece of overripe fruit.

“Now we get characters like this Steelgrave owning restaurants. We get guys like that fat boy that bawled me out back there. We’ve got the big money, the sharp shooters, the percentage workers, the fast-dollar boys, the hoodlums out of New York and Chicago and Detroit—and Cleveland. We’ve got the flash restaurants and night clubs they run, and the hotels and apartment houses they own, and the grifters and con men and female bandits that live in them. The luxury trades, the pansy decorators, the lesbian dress designers, the riffraff of a big hard-boiled city with no more personality than a paper cup. Out in the fancy suburbs dear old Dad is reading the sports page in front of a picture window, with his shoes off, thinking he is high class because he has a three-car garage. Mom is in front of her princess dresser trying to paint the suitcases out from under her eyes. And Junior is clamped onto the telephone calling up a succession of high school girls that talk pigeon English and carry contraceptives in their make-up kit.”

“It is the same in all big cities, amigo.”

“Real cities have something else, some individual bony structure under the muck. Los Angeles has Hollywood—and hates it. It ought to consider itself damn lucky. Without Hollywood it would be a mail-order city. Everything in the catalogue you could get better somewhere else.”

“You are bitter tonight, amigo.”

“I’ve got a few troubles. The only reason I’m driving this car with you beside me is that I’ve got so much trouble a little more will seem like icing.”

“You have done something wrong?” she asked and came close to me along the seat.

“Well, just collecting a few bodies,” I said. “Depends on the point of view. The cops don’t like the work done by us amateurs. They have their own service.”

“What will they do to you?”

“They might run me out of town and I couldn’t care less. Don’t push me so hard. I need this arm to shift gears with.”

She pulled away in a huff. “I think you are very nasty to get along with,” she said. “Turn right at the Lost Canyon Road.”

After a while we passed the University. All the lights of the city were on now, a vast carpet of them stretching down the slope to the south and on into the almost infinite distance. A plane droned overhead losing altitude, its two signal lights winking on and off alternately. At Lost Canyon I swung right skirting the big gates that led into Bel-Air. The road began to twist and climb. There were too many cars; the headlights glared angrily down the twisting white concrete. A little breeze blew down over the pass. There was the odor of wild sage, the acrid tang of eucalyptus, and the quiet smell of dust. Windows glowed on the hillside. We passed a big white two storied Monterey house that must have cost $70,000 and had a cut-out illuminated sign in front: “Cairn Terriers.”

“The next to the right,” Dolores said.

I made the turn. The road got steeper and narrower. There were houses behind walls and masses of shrubbery but you couldn’t see anything. Then we came to the fork and there was a police car with a red spotlight parked at it and across the right side of the fork two cars parked at right angles. A torch waved up and down. I slowed the car and stopped level with the police car. Two cops sat in it smoking. They didn’t move.

“What goes on?”

“Amigo, I have no idea at all.” Her voice had a hushed withdrawn sound. She might have been a little scared. I didn’t know what of.

A tall man, the one with the torch, came around the side of the car and poked the flash at me, then lowered it.

“We’re not using this road tonight,” he said. “Going anywhere in particular?”

I set the brake, reached for a flash which Dolores got out of the glove compartment. I snapped the light on to the tall man. He wore expensive-looking slacks, a sport shirt with initials on the pocket and a polka-dot scarf knotted around his neck. He had horn-rimmed glasses and glossy wavy black hair. He looked as Hollywood as all hell.

I said: “Any explanation—or are you just making law?”

“The law is over there, if you want to talk to them.” His voice held a tone of contempt. “We are merely private citizens. We live around here. This is a residential neighborhood. We mean to keep it that way.”

A man with a sporting gun came out of the shadows and stood beside the tall man. He held the gun in the crook of his left arm, pointed muzzle down. But he didn’t look as if he just had it for ballast.

“That’s jake with me,” I said. “I didn’t have any other plans. We just want to go to a place.”

“What place?” the tall man asked coolly.

I turned to Dolores. “What place?”

“It is a white house on the hill, high up,” she said.

“And what did you plan to do up there?” the tall man asked.

“The man who lives there is my friend,” she said tartly.

He shone the flash in her face for a moment. “You look swell,” he said. “But we don’t like your friend. We don’t like characters that try to run gambling joints in this kind of neighborhood.”

“I know nothing about a gambling joint,” Dolores told him sharply.

“Neither do the cops,” the tall man said. “They don’t even want to find out. What’s your friend’s name, darling?”

“That is not of your business,” Dolores spit at him.

“Go on home and knit socks, darling,” the tall man said. He turned to me.

“The road’s not in use tonight,” he said. “Now you know why.”

“Think you can make it stick?” I asked him.

“It will take more than you to change our plans. You ought to see our tax assessments. And those monkeys in the prowl car—and a lot more like them down at the City Hall—just sit on their hands when we ask for the law to be enforced.”

I unlatched the car door and swung it open. He stepped back and let me get out. I walked over to the prowl car. The two cops in it were leaning back lazily. Their loudspeaker was turned low, just audibly muttering. One of them was chewing gum rhythmically.

“How’s to break up this road block and let the citizens through?” I asked him.

“No orders, buddy. We’re just here to keep the peace. Anybody starts anything, we finish it.”

“They say there’s a gambling house up the line.”

“They say,” the cop said.

“You don’t believe them?”

“I don’t even try, buddy,” he said, and spat past my shoulder.

“Suppose I have urgent business up there.”

He looked at me without expression and yawned.

“Thanks a lot, buddy,” I said.

I went back to the Mercury, got my wallet out and handed the tall man a card. He put his flash on it, and said: “Well?”

He snapped the flash off and stood silent. His face began to take form palely in the darkness.

“I’m on business. To me it’s important business. Let me through and perhaps you won’t need this block tomorrow.”

“You talk large, friend.”

“Would I have the kind of money it takes to patronize a private gambling club?”

“She might,” he flicked an eye at Dolores. “She might have brought you along for protection.”

He turned to the shotgun man. “What do you think?”

“Chance it. Just two of them and both sober.”

The tall one snapped his flash on again and made a side sweep with it back and forth. A car motor started. One of the block cars backed around on to the shoulder. I got in and started the Mercury, went on through the gap and watched the block car in the mirror as it took up position again, then cut its high beam lights.

“Is this the only way in and out of here?”

“They think it is, amigo. There is another way, but it is private road through an estate. We would have had to go around by the valley side.”

“We nearly didn’t get through,” I told her. “This can’t be very bad trouble anybody is in.”

“I knew you would find a way, amigo.”

“Something stinks,” I said nastily. “And it isn’t wild lilac.”

“Such a suspicious man. Do you not even want to kiss me?”

“You ought to have used a little of that back at the road block. That tall guy looked lonely. You could have taken him off in the bushes.”

She hit me across the mouth with the back of her hand. “You son of a bitch,” she said casually. “The next driveway on the left, if you please.”

We topped a rise and the road ended suddenly in a wide black circle edged with whitewashed stones. Directly ahead was a wire fence with a wide gate in it, and a sign on-the gate: Private Road. No Trespassing. The gate was open and a padlock hung from one end of a loose chain on the posts. I turned the car around a white oleander bush: and was in the motor yard of a long low white house with a tile roof and a four-car garage in the corner, under a walled balcony. Both the wide garage doors were closed. There was no light in the house. A high moon made a bluish radiance on the white stucco walls. Some of the lower windows were shuttered. Four packing cases full of trash stood in a row at the foot of the steps. There was a big garbage can upended and empty. There were two steel drums with papers in them.

There was no sound from the house, no sign of life. I stopped the Mercury, cut the lights and the motor, and just sat. Dolores moved in the corner. The seat seemed to be shaking. I reached across and touched her. She was shivering.

“What’s the matter?”

“Get—get out, please,” she said as if her teeth chattered.

“How about you?”

She opened the door on her side and jumped out. I got out my side and left the door hanging open, the keys in the lock. She came around the back of the car and as she got close to me I could almost feel her shaking before she touched me. Then she leaned up against me hard, thigh to thigh and breast to breast. Her arms went around my neck.

“I am being very foolish,” she said softly. “He will kill me for this—just as he killed Stein. Kiss me.”

I kissed her. Her lips were hot and dry. “Is he in there?”

“Yes.”

“Who else?”

“Nobody else—except Mavis. He will kill her too.”

“Listen—”

“Kiss me again. I have not very long to live, amigo. When you are the finger for a man like that—you die young.”

I pushed her away from me, but gently.

She stepped back and lifted her right hand quickly. There was a gun in it now.

I looked at the gun. There was a dull shine on it from high moon. She held it level and her hand wasn’t shaking now.

“What a friend I would make if I pulled this trigger,” she said.

“They’d hear the shot down the road.”

She shook her head. “No, there is a little hill between. I do not think they would hear, amigo.”

I thought the gun would jump when she pulled the trigger. If I dropped just at the right moment—

I wasn’t that good. I didn’t say anything. My tongue felt large in my mouth.

She went on slowly, in a soft tired voice: “With Stein it did not matter. I would have killed him myself, gladly. That filth. To die is not much, to kill is not much. But to entice people to their deaths—” She broke off with what might have been a sob. “Amigo, I liked you for some strange reason. I should be far beyond such nonsense. Mavis took him away from me, but I did not want him to kill her. The world is full of men who have enough money.”

“He seems like a nice little guy,” I said, still watching the hand that held the gun. Not a quiver in it now.

She laughed contemptuously. “Of course he does. That is why he is what he is. You think you are tough, amigo. You are a very soft peach compared with Steelgrave.” She lowered the gun and now it was my time to jump. I still wasn’t good enough.

“He has killed a dozen men,” she said. “With a smile for each one. I have known him for a long time. I knew him Cleveland.”

“With ice picks?” I asked.

“If I give you the gun, will you kill him for me?”

“Would you believe me if I promised?”

“Yes.” Somewhere down the hill there was the sound of a car. But it seemed as remote as Mars, as meaningless as the chattering of monkeys in the Brazilian jungle. It had nothing to do with me.

“I’d kill him if I had to,” I said licking along my lips.

I was leaning a little, knees bent, all set for a jump again.

“Good night, amigo. I wear black because I am beautiful and wicked—and lost.”

She held the gun out to me. I took it. I just stood there holding it. For another silent moment neither of us moved. Then she smiled and tossed her head and jumped into the car. She started the motor and slammed the door shut. She idled the motor down and sat looking out at me. There was a smile on her face now.

“I was pretty good in there, no?” she said softly.

Then the car backed violently with a harsh tearing of the tires on the asphalt paving. The lights jumped on. The car curved away and was gone past the oleander bush. The lights turned left, into the private toad. The lights drifted off among trees and the sound faded into the long-drawn whee of tree frogs. Then that stopped and for a moment there was no sound at all. And no light except the tired old moon.

I broke the magazine from the gun. It had seven shells in it. There was another in the breach. Two less than a full load. I sniffed at the muzzle. It had been fired since it was cleaned. Fired twice, perhaps.

I pushed the magazine into place again and held the gun on the flat of my hand. It had a white bone grip. .32 caliber.

Orrin Quest had been shot twice. The two exploded shells I picked up on the floor of the room were .32 caliber.

And yesterday afternoon, in Room 332 of the Hotel Van Nuys, a blonde girl with a towel in front of her face had pointed a .32-caliber automatic with a white bone grip at me.

You can get too fancy about these things. You can also not get fancy enough.

27

I walked on rubber heels across to the garage and tried to open one of the two wide doors. There were no handles, so it must have been operated by a switch. I played a tiny pencil flash on the frame, but no switch looked at me.

I left that and prowled over to the trash barrels. Wooden steps went up to a service entrance. I didn’t think the door would be unlocked for my convenience. Under the porch was another door. This was unlocked and gave on darkness and the smell of corded eucalyptus wood. I closed the door behind me and put the little flash on again. In the corner there was another staircase, with a thing like a dumb-waiter beside it. It wasn’t dumb enough to let me work it. I started up the steps.

Somewhere remotely something buzzed. I stopped. The buzzing stopped. I started again. The buzzing didn’t. I went on up to a door with no knob, set flush. Another gadget.

But I found the switch to this one. It was an oblong movable plate set into the doorframe. Too many dusty hands had touched it. I pressed it and the door clicked and fell back off the latch. I pushed it open, with the tenderness of a young intern delivering his first baby.

Inside was a hallway. Through shuttered windows moonlight caught the white corner of a stove and the chromed griddle on top of it. The kitchen was big enough for a dancing class. An open arch led to a butler’s pantry filled to the ceiling. A sink, a huge icebox set into the wall, a lot of electrical stuff for making drinks without trying. You pick your poison, press a button, and four days later you wake up on the rubbing table in a reconditioning parlor.

Beyond the butler’s pantry a swing door. Beyond the swing door a dark dining room with an open end to a glassed-in lounge into which the moonlight poured like water through the floodgates of a dam.

A carpeted hall led off somewhere. From another flat arch a flying buttress of a staircase went up into more darkness, but shimmered as it went in what might have been glass brick and stainless steel.

At last I came to what should be the living room. It was curtained and quite dark, but it had the feel of great size. The darkness was heavy in it and my nose twitched at a lingering odor that said somebody had been there not too long ago. I stopped breathing and listened. Tigers could be in the darkness watching me. Or guys with large guns, standing flat-footed, breathing softly with their mouths open. Or nothing and nobody and too much imagination in the wrong place.

I edged back to the wall and felt around for a light switch. There’s always a light switch. Everybody has light switches. Usually on the right side as you go in. You go into a dark room and you want light. Okay, you have a light switch in a natural place at a natural height. This room hadn’t. This was a different kind of house. They had odd ways of handling doors and lights. The gadget this time might be something fancy like having to sing A above high C, or stepping on a flat button under the carpet, or maybe you just spoke and said: “Let there be light,” and a mike picked it up and turned the voice vibration into a low-power electrical impulse and a transformer built that up to enough voltage to throw a silent mercury switch.

I was psychic that night. I was a fellow who wanted company in a dark place and was willing to pay a high price for it. The Luger under my arm and the .32 in my hand made me tough. Two-gun Marlowe, the kid from Cyanide Gulch.

I took the wrinkles out of my lips and said aloud:

“Hello again. Anybody here needing a detective?”

Nothing answered me, not even a stand-in for an echo. The sound of my voice fell on silence like a tired head on a swans-down pillow.

And then amber light began to grow high up behind the cornice that circumnavigated the huge room. It brightened very slowly, as if controlled by a rheostat panel in a theater. Heavy apricot-colored curtains covered the windows.

The walls were apricot too. At the far end was a bar off to one side, a little catty-corner, reaching back into the space by the butler’s pantry. There was an alcove with small tables and padded seats. There were floor lamps and soft chairs and love seats and the usual paraphernalia of a living room, and there were long shrouded tables in the middle of the floor space.

The boys back at the roadblock had something after all. But the joint was dead. The room was empty of life. It was almost empty. Not quite empty.

A blonde in a pale cocoa fur coat stood leaning against the side of a grandfather’s chair. Her hands were in the pockets of the coat. Her hair was fluffed out carelessly and her face was not chalk-white because the light was not white.

“Hello again yourself,” she said in a dead voice. “I still think you came too late.”

“Too late for what?”

I walked towards her, a movement which was always a pleasure. Even then, even in that too silent house.

“You’re kind of cute,” she said. “I didn’t think you were cute. You found a way in. You—” Her voice clicked off and strangled itself in her throat.

“I need a drink,” she said after a thick pause. “Or maybe I’ll fall down.”

“That’s a lovely coat,” I said. I was up to her now. I reached out and touched it. She didn’t move. Her mouth moved in and out, trembling.

“Stone marten,” she whispered. “Forty thousand dollars. Rented. For the picture.”

“Is this part of the picture?” I gestured around the room.

“This is the picture to end all pictures—for me. I—I do need that drink. If I try to walk—” the clear voice whispered away into nothing. Her eyelids fluttered up and down.

“Go ahead and faint,” I said. “I’ll catch you on the first bounce.”

A smile struggled to arrange her face for smiling. She pressed her lips together, fighting hard to stay on her feet.

“Why did I come too late?” I asked. “Too late for what?”

“Too late to be shot.”

“Shucks, I’ve been looking forward to it all evening. Miss Gonzales brought me.”

“I know.”

I reached out and touched the fur again. Forty thousand dollars is nice to touch, even rented.

“Dolores will be disappointed as hell,” she said, her mouth edged with white.

“No.”

“She put you on the spot—just as she did Stein.”

“She may have started out to. But she changed her mind.”

She laughed. It was a silly pooped-out little laugh like a child trying to be supercilious at a playroom tea party.

“What a way you have with the girls,” she whispered. “How the hell do you do it, wonderful? With doped cigarettes? It can’t be your clothes or your money or your personality. You don’t have any. You’re not too young, nor too beautiful. You’ve seen your best days and—”

Her voice had been coming faster and faster, like a motor with a broken governor. At the end she was chattering. When she stopped a spent sigh drifted along the silence and she caved at the knees and fell straight forward into my arms.

If it was an act it worked perfectly. I might have had guns in all nine pockets and they would have been as much use to me as nine little pink candles on a birthday cake.

But nothing happened. No hard characters peeked at me with automatics in their hands. No Steelgrave smiled at me with the faint dry remote killer’s smile. No stealthy footsteps crept up behind me.

She hung in my arms as limp as a wet tea towel and not as heavy as Orrin Quest, being less dead, but heavy enough to make the tendons in my knee joints ache. Her eyes were closed when I pushed her head away from my chest. Her breath was inaudible and she had that bluish look on the parted lips.

I got my right hand under her knees and carried her over to a gold couch and spread her out on it. I straightened up and went along to the bar. There was a telephone on the corner of it but I couldn’t find the way through to the bottles. So I had to swing over the top. I got a likely looking bottle with a blue and silver label and five stars on it. The cork had been loosened. I poured dark and pungent brandy into the wrong kind of glass and went back over the bar top, taking the bottle with me.

She was lying as I had left her, but her eyes were open.

“Can you hold a glass?”

She could, with a little help. She drank the brandy and pressed the edge of the glass hard against her lips as if she wanted to hold them still. I watched her breathe into the glass and cloud it. A slow smile formed itself on her mouth.

“It’s cold tonight,” she said.

She swung her legs over the edge of the couch and put her feet on the floor.

“More,” she said, holding the glass out. I poured into it. “Where’s yours?”

“Not drinking. My emotions are being worked on enough without that.”

The second drink made her shudder. But the blue look had gone away from her mouth and her lips didn’t glare like stop lights and the little etched lines at the corners of her eyes were not in relief any more.

“Who’s working on your emotions?”

“Oh, a lot of women that keep throwing their arms around my neck and fainting on me and getting kissed and so forth. Quite a full couple of days for a beat-up gumshoe with no yacht.”

“No yacht,” she said. “I’d hate that. I was brought up rich.”

“Yeah,” I said. “You were born with a Cadillac in your mouth. And I could guess where.”

Her eyes narrowed. “Could you?”

“Didn’t think it was a very tight secret, did you?”

“I—I—” She broke off and made a helpless gesture. “I can’t think of any lines tonight.”

“It’s the Technicolor dialogue,” I said. “It freezes up on you.”

“Aren’t we talking like a couple of nuts?”

“We could get sensible. Where’s Steelgrave?”

She just looked at me. She held the empty glass out and I took it and put it somewhere or other without taking my eyes off her. Nor she hers off me. It seemed as if a long long minute went by.

“He was here,” she said at last, as slowly as if she had to invent the words one at a time. “May I have a cigarette?”

“The old cigarette stall,” I said. I got a couple out and put them in my mouth and lit them. I leaned across and tucked one between her ruby lips.

“Nothing’s cornier than that,” she said. “Except maybe butterfly kisses.”

“Sex is a wonderful thing,” I said. “When you don’t want to answer questions.”

She puffed loosely and blinked, then put her hand up to adjust the cigarette. After all these years I can never put a cigarette in a girl’s mouth where she wants it.

She gave her head a toss and swung the soft loose hair around her cheeks and watched me to see how hard that hit me. All the whiteness had gone now. Her cheeks were a little flushed. But behind her eyes things watched and waited.

“You’re rather nice,” she said, when I didn’t do anything sensational. “For the kind of guy you are.”

I stood that well too.

“But I don’t really know what kind of guy you are, do I?” She laughed suddenly and a tear came from nowhere and slid down her cheek.

“For all I know you might be nice for any kind of guy.”

She snatched the cigarette loose and put her hand to her mouth and bit on it. “What’s the matter with me? Am I drunk?”

“You’re stalling for time,” I said. “But I can’t make up my mind whether it’s to give someone time to get here—or to give somebody time to get far away from here. And again it could just be brandy on top of shock. You’re a little girl and you want to cry into your mother’s apron.”

“Not my mother,” she said. “I could get as far crying into a rain barrel.”

“Dealt and passed. So where is Steelgrave?”

“You ought to be glad wherever he is. He had to kill you. Or thought he had.”

“You wanted me here, didn’t you? Were you that fond of him?”

She blew cigarette ash off the back of her hand. A flake of it went into my eye and made me blink.

“I must have been,” she said, “once.” She put a hand down on her knee and spread the fingers out, studying the nails. She brought her eyes up slowly without moving her head. “It seems like about a thousand years ago I met a nice quiet little guy who knew how to behave in public and didn’t shoot his charm around every bistro in town. Yes, I liked him. I liked him a lot.”

She put her hand up to her mouth and bit a knuckle. Then she put the same hand into the pocket of the fur coat and brought out a white-handled automatic, the brother of the one I had myself.

“And in the end I liked him with this,” she said.

I went over and took it out of her hand. I sniffed the muzzle. Yes. That made two of them fired around.

“Aren’t you going to wrap it up in a handkerchief, the way they do in the movies?”

I just dropped it into my other pocket, where it could pick up a few interesting crumbs of tobacco and some seeds that grow only on the southeast slope of the Beverly Hills City Hall. It might amuse a police chemist for a while.

28

I watched her for a minute, biting at the end of my lip. She watched me. I saw no change of expression. Then I started prowling the room with my eyes. I lifted up the dust cover on one of the long tables. Under it was a roulette layout but no wheel. Under the table was nothing.

“Try that chair with the magnolias on it,” she said.

She didn’t look towards it so I had to find it myself. Surprising how long it took me. It was a high-backed wing chair, covered in flowered chintz, the kind of chair that a long time ago was intended to keep the draft off while you sat crouched over a fire of cannel coal.

It was turned away from me. I went over there walking softly, in low gear. It almost faced the wall. Even at that it seemed ridiculous that I hadn’t spotted him on my way back from the bar. He leaned in the corner of the chair with his head tilted back. His carnation was red and white and looked as fresh as though the flower girl had just pinned it into his lapel. His eyes were half open as such eyes usually are. They stared at a point in the corner of the ceiling. The bullet had gone through the outside pocket of his double-breasted jacket. It had been fired by someone who knew where the heart was.

I touched his cheek and it was still warm. I lifted his hand and let it fall. It was quite limp. It felt like the back of somebody’s hand. I reached for the big artery in his neck. No blood moved in him and very little had stained his jacket. I wiped my hands off on my handkerchief and stood for a little longer looking down at his quiet little face. Everything I had done or not done, everything wrong and everything right—all wasted.

I went back and sat down near her and squeezed my kneecaps.

“What did you expect me to do?” she asked. “He killed my brother.”

“Your brother was no angel.”

“He didn’t have to kill him.”

“Somebody had to—and quick.” Her eyes widened suddenly.

I said: “Didn’t you ever wonder why Steelgrave never went after me and why he let you go to the Van Nuys yesterday instead of going himself? Didn’t you ever wonder why a fellow with his resources and experience never tried to get hold of those photographs, no matter what he had to do to get them?”

She didn’t answer.

“How long have you known the photographs existed?” I asked.

“Weeks, nearly two months. I got one in the mail a couple of days after—after that time we had lunch together.”

“After Stein was killed.”

“Yes, of course.”

“Did you think Steelgrave had killed Stein?”

“No. Why should I? Until tonight, that is.”

“What happened after you got the photo?”

“My brother Orrin called me up and said he had lost his job and was broke. He wanted money. He didn’t say anything about the photo. He didn’t have to. There was only one time it could have been taken.”

“How did he get your number?”

“Telephone? How did you?”

“Bought it.”

“Well—” She made a vague movement with her hand. “Why not call the police and get it over with.”

“Wait a minute. Then what? More prints of the photo?”

“One every week. I showed them to him.” She gestured toward the chintzy chair. “He didn’t like it. I didn’t tell him about Orrin.”

“He must have known. His kind find things out.”

“I suppose so.”

“But not where Orrin was hiding out,” I said. “Or he wouldn’t have waited this long. When did you tell Steelgrave?”

She looked away from me. Her fingers kneaded her arm. “Today,” she said in a distant voice.

“Why today?”

Her breath caught in her throat. “Please,” she said. “Don’t ask me a lot of useless questions. Don’t torment me. There’s nothing you can do. I thought there was—when I called Dolores. There isn’t now.”

I said: “All right. There’s something you don’t seem to understand. Steelgrave knew that whoever was behind that photograph wanted money—a lot of money. He knew that sooner or later the blackmailer would have to show himself. That was what Steelgrave was waiting for. He didn’t care anything about the photo itself, except for your sake.”

“He certainly proved that,” she said wearily.

“In his own way,” I said.

Her voice came to me with glacial calm. “He killed my brother. He told me so himself. The gangster showed through then all right. Funny people you meet in Hollywood, don’t you—including me.”

“You were fond of him once,” I said brutally.

Red spots flared on her cheeks.

“I’m not fond of anybody,” she said. “I’m all through being fond of people.” She glanced briefly towards the high-backed chair. “I stopped being fond of him last night. He asked me about you, who you were and so on. I told him. I told him that I would have to admit that I was at the Van Nuys Hotel when that man was lying there dead.”

“You were going to tell the police that?”

“I was going to tell Julius Oppenheimer. He would know how to handle it.”

“If he didn’t one of his dogs would,” I said.

She didn’t smile. I didn’t either.

“If Oppenheimer couldn’t handle it, I’d be through in pictures,” she added without interest “Now I’m through everywhere else as well.”

I got a cigarette out and lit it. I offered her one. She didn’t want one. I wasn’t in any hurry. Time seemed to have lost its grip on me. And almost everything else. I was flat out.

“You’re going too fast for me,” I said, after a moment. “You didn’t know when you went to the Van Nuys that Steelgrave was Weepy Moyer.”

“No.”

“Then what did you go there for?”

“To buy back those photographs.”

“That doesn’t check. The photographs didn’t mean anything to you then. They were just you and him having lunch.”

She stared at me and winked her eyes tight, then opened them wide. “I’m not going to cry,” she said. “I said I didn’t know. But when he was in jail that time, I had to know there was something about him that he didn’t care to have known. I knew he had been in some kind of racket, I guess. But not killing people.”

I said: “Uh-huh.” I got up and walked around the high-backed chair again. Her eyes traveled slowly to watch me. I leaned over the dead Steelgrave and felt under his arm on the left side. There was a gun there in the holster. I didn’t touch it. I went back and sat down opposite her again.

“It’s going to cost a lot of money to fix this,” I said.

For the first time she smiled. It was a very small smile, but it was a smile. “I don’t have a lot of money,” she said. “So that’s out.”

“Oppenheimer has. You’re worth millions to him by now.”

“He wouldn’t chance it. Too many people have their knives into the picture business these days. He’ll take his loss and forget it in six months.”

“You said you’d go to him.”

“I said if I got into a jam and hadn’t really done anything, I’d go to him. But I have done something now.”

“How about Ballou? You’re worth a lot to him too.”

“I’m not worth a plugged nickel to anybody. Forget it, Marlowe. You mean well, but I know these people.”

“That puts it up to me,” I said. “That would be why you sent for me.”

“Wonderful,” she said. “You fix it, darling. For free.” Her voice was brittle and shallow again.

I went and sat beside her on the davenport. I took hold of her arm and pulled her hand out of the fur pocket and took hold of that. It was almost ice cold, in spite of the fur.

She turned her head and looked at me squarely. She shook her head a little. “Believe me, darling, I’m not worth it—even to sleep with.”

I turned the hand over and opened the fingers out. They were stiff and resisted. I opened them out one by one. I smoothed the palm of her hand.

“Tell me why you had the gun with you.”

“The gun?”

“Don’t take time to think. Just tell me. Did you mean to kill him?”

“Why not, darling? I thought I meant something to him. I guess I’m a little vain. He fooled me. Nobody means anything to the Steelgraves of this world. And nobody means anything to the Mavis Welds of this world any more.”

She pulled away from me and smiled thinly. “I oughtn’t to have given you that gun. If I killed you I might get clear yet.”

I took it out and held it towards her. She took it and stood up quickly. The gun pointed at me. The small tired smile moved her lips again. Her finger was very firm on the trigger.

“Shoot high,” I said. “I’m wearing my bullet-proof underwear.”

She dropped the gun to her side and for a moment she just stood staring at me. Then she tossed the gun down on the davenport.

“I guess I don’t like the script,” she said. “I don’t like the lines. It just isn’t me, if you know what I mean.”

She laughed and looked down at the floor. The point of her shoe moved back and forth on the carpeting. “We’ve had a nice chat, darling. The phone’s over there at the end of the bar.”

“Thanks, do you remember Dolores’s number?”

“Why Dolores?”

When I didn’t answer she told me. I went along the room to the corner of the bar and dialed. The same routine as before. Good evening, the Chateau Bercy, who is calling Miss Gonzales please. One moment, please, buzz, buzz, and then a sultry voice saying: “Hello?”

“This is Marlowe. Did you really mean to put me on a spot?”

I could almost hear her breath catch. Not quite. You can’t really hear it over the phone. Sometimes you think you can.

“Amigo, but I am glad to hear your voice,” she said, “I am so very very glad.”

“Did you or didn’t you?”

“I—I don’t know. I am very sad to think that I might have. I like you very much.”

“I’m in a little trouble here.”

“Is he—” Long pause. Apartment house phone. Careful. “Is he there?”

“Well—in a way. He is and yet he isn’t.”

I really did hear her breath this time. A long indrawn sigh that was almost a whistle.

“Who else is there?”

“Nobody. Just me and my homework. I want to ask you something. It is deadly important. Tell me the truth. Where did you get that thing you gave me tonight?”

“Why, from him. He gave it to me.”

“When?”

“Early this evening. Why?”

“How early?”

“About six o’clock, I think.”

“Why did he give it to you?”

“He asked me to keep it. He always carried one.”

“Asked you to keep it why?”

“He did not say, amigo. He was a man that did things like that. He did not often explain himself.”

“Notice anything unusual about it? About what he gave you?”

“Why—no, I did not.”

“Yes, you did. You noticed that it had been fired and that it smelled of burned powder.”

“But I did not—”

“Yes, you did. Just like that. You wondered about it. You didn’t like to keep it. You didn’t keep it. You gave it back to him. You don’t like them around anyhow.”

There was a long silence. She said at last, “But of course. But why did he want me to have it? I mean, if that was what happened.”

“He didn’t tell you why. He just tried to ditch a gun on you and you weren’t having any. Remember?”

“That is something I have to tell?”

“Si.”

“Will it be safe for me to do that?”

“When did you ever try to be safe?”

She laughed softly. “Amigo, you understand me very well.”

“Goodnight,” I said.

“One moment, you have not told me what happened.”

“I haven’t even telephoned you.”

I hung up and turned.

Mavis Weld was standing in the middle of the floor watching me.

“You have your car here?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Get going.”

“And do what?”

“Just go home. That’s all.”

“You can’t get away with it,” she said softly.

“You’re my client.”

“I can’t let you. I killed him. Why should you be dragged into it?”

“Don’t stall. And when you leave go the back way. Not the way Dolores brought me.”

She stared me straight in the eyes and repeated in a tense voice, “But I killed him.”

“I can’t hear a word you say.”

Her teeth took hold of her lower lip and held it cruelly. She seemed hardly to breathe. She stood rigid. I went over close to her and touched her cheek with a fingertip. I pressed it hard and watched the white spot turn red.

“If you want to know my motive,” I said, “it has nothing to do with you. I owe it to the johns. I haven’t played clean cards in this game. They know. I know. I’m just giving them a chance to use the loud pedal.”

“As if anyone ever had to give them that,” she said, and turned abruptly and walked away. I watched her to the arch and waited for her to look back. She went on through without turning. After a long time I heard a whirring noise. Then the bump of something heavy—the garage door going up. A car started a long way off. It idled down and after another pause the whirring noise again.

When that stopped the motor faded off into the distance. I heard nothing now. The silence of the house hung around me in thick loose folds like that fur coat around the shoulders of Mavis Weld.

I carried the glass and bottle of brandy over to the bar and climbed over it. I rinsed the glass in a little sink and set the bottle back on the shelf. I found the trick catch this time and swung the door open at the end opposite the telephone. I went back to Steelgrave.

I took out the gun Dolores had given me and wiped it off and put his small limp hand around the butt, held it there and let go. The gun thudded to the carpet. The position looked natural. I wasn’t thinking about fingerprints. He would have learned long ago not to leave them on any gun.

That left me with three guns. The weapon in his holster I took out and went and put it on the bar shelf under the counter, wrapped in a towel. The Luger I didn’t touch. The other white-handled automatic was left. I tried to decide about how far away from him it had been fired. Beyond scorching distance, but probably very close beyond. I stood about three feet from him and fired two shots past him. They nicked peacefully into the wall. I dragged the chair around until it faced into the room. I laid the small automatic down on the dust cover of one of the roulette tables. I touched the big muscle in the side of his neck, usually the first to harden. I couldn’t tell whether it had begun to set or not. But his skin was colder than it had been.

There was not a hell of a lot of time to play around with.

I went to the telephone and dialed the number of the Los Angeles Police Department. I asked the police operator for Christy French. A voice from homicide came on, said he had gone home and what was it. I said it was a personal call he was expecting. They gave me his phone number at home, reluctantly, not because they cared, but because they hate to give anybody anything any time.

I dialed and a woman answered and screamed his name. He sounded rested and calm.

“This is Marlowe. What were you doing?”

“Reading the funnies to my kid. He ought to be in bed. What’s doing?”

“Remember over at the Van Nuys yesterday you said a man could make a friend if he got you something on Weepy Moyer?”

“Yeah.”

“I need a friend.”

He didn’t sound very interested. “What you got on him?”

“I’m assuming it’s the same guy. Steelgrave.”

“Too much assuming, kid. We had him in the fishbowl because we thought the same. It didn’t pan any gold.”

“You got a tip. He set that tip up himself. So the night Stein was squibbed off he would be where you knew.”

“You just making this up—or got evidence?” He sounded a little less relaxed.

“If a man got out of jail on a pass from the jail doctor, could you prove that?”

There was a silence. I heard a child’s voice complaining and a woman’s voice speaking to the child.

“It’s happened,” French said heavily. “I dunno. That a tough order to fill. They’d send him under guard. Did he get to the guard?”

“That’s my theory.”

“Better sleep on it. Anything else?”

“I’m out at Stillwood Heights. In a big house where they were setting up for gambling and the local residents didn’t like it.”

“Read about it. Steelgrave there?”

“He’s here. I’m here alone with him.”

Another silence. The kid yelled and I thought I heard a slap. The kid yelled louder. French yelled at some body.

“Put him on the phone,” French said at last.

“You’re not bright tonight, Christy. Why would I call you?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Stupid of me. What’s the address there?”

“I don’t know. But it’s up at the end of Tower Road in Stillwood Heights and the phone number is Halldale 9-5033. I’ll be waiting for you.”

He repeated the number and said slowly: “This time you wait, huh?”

“It had to come sometime.”

The phone clicked and I hung up.

I went back through the house putting on lights as I found them and came out at the back door at the top of the stairs. There was a floodlight for the motor yard. I put that on. I went down the steps and walked along to the oleander bush. The private gate stood open as before. I swung it shut, hooked up the chain and clicked the padlock. I went back, walking slowly, looking up at the moon, sniffing the night air, listening to the tree frogs and the crickets. I went into the house and found the front door and put the light on over that. There was a big parking space in front and a circular lawn with roses. But you had to slide back around the house to the rear to get away.

The place was a dead end except for the driveway through the neighboring grounds. I wondered who lived there. A long way off through trees I could see the lights of a big house. Some Hollywood big shot, probably, some wizard of the slobbery kiss, and the pornographic dissolve.

I went back in and felt the gun I had just fired. It was cold enough. And Mr. Steelgrave was beginning to look as if he meant to stay dead.

No siren. But the sound of a car coming up the hill at last. I went out to meet it, me and my beautiful dream.

29

They came in as they should, big, tough and quiet their eyes flickering with watchfulness and cautious with disbelief.

“Nice place,” French said. “Where’s the customer?”

“In there,” Beifus said, without waiting for me to answer.

They went along the room without haste and stood in front of him looking down solemnly.

“Dead, wouldn’t you say?” Beifus remarked, opening up the act.

French leaned down and took the gun that lay on the floor with thumb and finger on the trigger guard. His eyes flicked sideways and he jerked his chin. Beifus took the other white-handled gun by sliding a pencil into the end of the barrel.

“Fingerprints all in the right places, I hope,” Beifus said. He sniffed. “Oh yeah, this baby’s been working. How’s yours, Christy?”

“Fired,” French said. He sniffed again. “But not recently.” He took a clip flash from his pocket and shone it into the barrel of the black gun. “Hours ago.”

“Down at Bay City, in a house on Wyoming Street,” I said.

Their heads swung around to me in unison. “Guessing?” French asked slowly.

“Yes.”

He walked over to the covered table and laid the gun down some distance from the other. “Better tag them right away, Fred. They’re twins. We’ll both sign the tags.”

Beifus nodded and rooted around in his pockets. He came up with a couple of tie-on tags. The things cops carry around with them.

French moved back to me. “Let’s stop guessing and get to the part you know.”

“A girl I know called me this evening and said a client of mine was in danger up here—from him.” I pointed with my chin at the dead man in the chair. “This girl rode me up here. We passed the road block. A number of people saw us both. She left me in back of the house and went home.”

“Somebody with a name?” French asked.

“Dolores Gonzales, Chateau Bercy Apartments. On Franklin. She’s in pictures.”

“Oh-ho,” Beifus said and rolled his eyes.

“Who’s your client? Same one?” French asked. “No. This is another party altogether.”

“She have a name?”

“Not yet.”

They stared at me with hard bright faces. French’s jaw moved almost with a jerk. Knots of muscles showed at the sides of his jawbone.

“New rules, huh?” he said softly.

I said, “There has to be some agreement about publicity. The D.A. ought to be willing.”

Beifus said, “You don’t know the D.A. good, Marlowe. He eats publicity like I eat tender young garden peas.”

French said, “We don’t give you any undertaking whatsoever.”

“She hasn’t any name,” I said.

“There’s a dozen ways we can find out, kid,” Beifus said. “Why go into this routine that makes it tough for all of us?”

“No publicity,” I said, “unless charges are actually filed.”

“You can’t get away with it, Marlowe.”

“God damn it,” I said, “this man killed Orrin Quest. You take that gun downtown and check it against the bullets in Quest. Give me that much at least, before you force me into an impossible position.”

“I wouldn’t give you the dirty end of a burnt match,” French said.

I didn’t say anything. He stared at me with cold hate in his eyes. His lips moved slowly and his voice was thick saying, “You here when he got it?”

“No.”

“Who was?”

“He was,” I said looking across at the dead Steelgrave.

“Who else?”

“I won’t lie to you,” I said. “And I won’t tell you anything I don’t want to tell—except on the terms I stated. I don’t know who was here when he got it.”

“Who was here when you got here?”

I didn’t answer. He turned his head slowly and said to Beifus: “Put the cuffs on him. Behind.”

Beifus hesitated. Then he took a pair of steel handcuffs out of his left hip pocket and came over to me. “Put your hands behind you,” he said in an uncomfortable voice.

I did. He clicked the cuffs on. French walked over slowly and stood in front of me. His eyes were half closed. The skin around them was grayish with fatigue.

“I’m going to make a little speech,” he said. “You’re not going to like it.”

I didn’t say anything.

French said: “It’s like this with us, baby. We’re coppers and everybody hates our guts. And as if we didn’t have enough trouble, we have to have you. As if we didn’t get pushed around enough by the guys in the corner offices, the City Hall gang, the day chief, the night chief, the Chamber of Commerce, His Honor the Mayor in his paneled office four times as big as the three lousy rooms the whole homicide staff has to work out of. As if we didn’t have to handle one hundred and fourteen homicides last year out of three rooms that don’t have enough chairs for the whole duty squad to sit down in at once. We spend our lives turning over dirty underwear and sniffing rotten teeth. We go up dark stairways to get a gun punk with a skinful of hop and sometimes we don’t get all the way up, and our wives wait dinner that night and all the other nights. We don’t come home any more. And nights we do come home, we come home so goddamn tired we can’t eat or sleep or even read the lies the papers print about us. So we lie awake in the dark in a cheap house on a cheap street and listen to the drunks down the block having fun. And just about the time we drop off the phone rings and we get up and start all over again. Nothing we do is right, not ever. Not once. If we get a confession, we beat it out of the guy, they say, and some shyster calls us Gestapo in court and sneers at us when we muddle our grammar. If we make a mistake they put us back in uniform on Skid Row and we spend the nice cool summer evenings picking drunks out of the gutter and being yelled at by whores and taking knives away from greaseballs in zoot suits. But all that ain’t enough to make us entirely happy. We got to have you.”

He stopped and drew in his breath. His face glistened a little as if with sweat. He leaned forward from his hips.

“We got to have you,” he repeated. “We got to have sharpers with private licenses hiding information and dodging around corners and stirring up dust for us to breathe in. We got to have you suppressing evidence and framing set-ups that wouldn’t fool a sick baby. You wouldn’t mind me calling you a goddamn cheap double-crossing keyhole peeper, would you, baby?”

“You want me to mind?” I asked him.

He straightened up. “I’d love it,” he said. “In spades redoubled.”

“Some of what you say is true,” I said. “Not all. Any private eye wants to play ball with the police. Sometimes it’s a little hard to find out who’s making the rules of the ball game. Sometimes he doesn’t trust the police, and with cause. Sometimes he just gets in a jam without meaning to and has to play his hand out the way it’s dealt. He’d usually rather have a new deal. He’d like to keep on earning a living.”

“Your license is dead,” French said. “As of now. That problem won’t bother you any more.”

“It’s dead when the commission that gave it to me says so. Not before.”

Beifus said quietly, “Let’s get on with it, Christy. This could wait.”

“I’m getting on with it,” French said. “My way. This bird hasn’t cracked wise yet. I’m waiting for him to crack wise. The bright repartee. Don’t tell me you’re all out of the quick stuff, Marlowe.”

“Just what is it you want me to say?” I asked him.

“Guess,” he said.

“You’re a man eater tonight,” I said. “You want to break me in half. But you want an excuse. And you want me to give it to you?”

“That might help,” he said between his teeth.

“What would you have done in my place?” I asked him.

“I couldn’t imagine myself getting that low.”

He licked at the point of his upper lip. His right hand was hanging loose at his side. He was clenching and unclenching the fingers without knowing it.

“Take it easy, Christy,” Beifus said. “Lay off.”

French didn’t move. Beifus came over and stepped between us. French said, “Get out of there, Fred.”

French doubled his fist and slugged him hard on the point of the jaw. Beifus stumbled back and knocked me out of the way. His knees wobbled. He bent forward and coughed. He shook his head slowly in a bent-over position. After a while he straightened up with a grunt. He turned and looked at me. He grinned.

“It’s a new kind of third degree,” he said. “The cops beat hell out of each other and the suspect cracks up from the agony of watching.”

His hand went up and felt the angle of his jaw. It already showed swelling. His mouth grinned but his eyes were still a little vague. French stood rooted and silent.

Beifus got out a pack of cigarettes and shook one loose and held the pack out to French. French looked at the cigarette, looked at Beifus.

“Seventeen years of it,” he said. “Even my wife hates me.”

He lifted his open hand and slapped Beifus across the cheek with it lightly. Beifus kept on grinning.

French said: “Was it you I hit, Fred?”

Beifus said: “Nobody hit me, Christy. Nobody that I can remember.”

French said: “Take the cuffs off him and take him out to the car. He’s under arrest. Cuff him to the rail if you think it’s necessary.”

“Okay.” Beifus went around behind me. The cuffs came loose. “Come along, baby,” Beifus said.

I stared hard at French. He looked at me as if I was the wallpaper. His eyes didn’t seem to see me at all.

I went out under the archway and out of the house.

30

I never knew his name, but he was rather short and thin for a cop, which was what he must have been, partly because he was there, and partly because when he leaned across the table to reach a card I could see the leather underarm holster and the butt end of a police .38.

He didn’t speak much, but when he did he had a nice voice, a soft-water voice. And he had a smile that warmed the whole room.

“Wonderful casting,” I said, looking at him across the cards.

We were playing double Canfield. Or he was. I was just there, watching him, watching his small and very neat and very clean hands go out across the table and touch a card and lift it delicately and put it somewhere else. When he did this he pursed his lips a little and whistled without tune, a low soft whistle, like a very young engine that is not yet sure of itself.

He smiled and put a red nine on a black ten.

“What do you do in your spare time?” I asked him.

“I play the piano a good deal,” he said. “I have a seven-foot Steinway. Mozart and Bach mostly. I’m a bit old-fashioned. Most people find it dull stuff. I don’t.”

“Perfect casting,” I said, and put a card somewhere.

“You’d be surprised how difficult some of that Mozart is,” he said. “It sounds so simple when you hear it played well.”

“Who can play it well?” I asked.

“Schnabel.”

“Rubinstein?”

He shook his head. “Too heavy. Too emotional. Mozart is just music. No comment needed from the performer.”

“I bet you get a lot of them in the confession mood,” I said. “Like the job?”

He moved another card and flexed his fingers lightly. His nails were bright but short. You could see he was a man who loved to move his hands, to make little neat inconspicuous motions with them, motions without any special meaning, but smooth and flowing and light as swans down. They gave him a feel of delicate things delicately done, but not weak. Mozart, all right. I could see that.

It was about five-thirty, and the sky behind the screened window was getting light. The roll top desk in the corner was rolled shut. The room was the same room I had been in the afternoon before. Down at the end of the table the square carpenter’s pencil was lying where somebody had picked it up and put it back after Lieutenant Maglashan of Bay City threw it against the wall. The flat desk at which Christy French had sat was littered with ash. An old cigar butt clung to the extreme edge of a glass ashtray. A moth circled around the overhead light on a drop cord that had one of those green and white glass shades they still have in country hotels.

“Tired?” he asked.

“Pooped.”

“You oughtn’t to get yourself involved in these elaborate messes. No point in it that I can see.”

“No point in shooting a man?”

He smiled the warm smile. “You never shot anybody.”

“What makes you say that?”

“Common sense—and a lot of experience sitting here with people.”

“I guess you do like the job,” I said.

“It’s night work. Gives me the days to practice. I’ve had it for twelve years now. Seen a lot of funny ones come and go.”

He got another ace out, just in time. We were almost blocked.

“Get many confessions?”

“I don’t take confessions,” he said. “I just establish a mood.”

“Why give it all away?”

He leaned back and tapped lightly with the edge of a card on the edge of the table. The smile came again. “I’m not giving anything away. We got you figured long ago.”

“Then what are they holding me for?”

He wouldn’t answer that. He looked around at the clock on the wall. “I think we could get some food now.” He got up and went to the door. He half opened it and spoke softly to someone outside. Then he came back and sat down again and looked at what we had in the way of cards.

“No use,” he said. “Three more up and we’re blocked. Okay with you to start over?”

“Okay with me if we never started at all. I don’t play cards. Chess.”

He looked up at me quickly. “Why didn’t you say so? I’d rather have played chess too.”

“I’d rather drink some hot black coffee as bitter as sin.”

“Any minute now. But I won’t promise the coffee’s what you’re used to.”

“Hell, I eat anywhere. . . Well, if I didn’t shoot him, who did?”

“Guess that’s what is annoying them.”

“They ought to be glad to have him shot.”

“They probably are,” he said. “But they don’t like the way it was done.”

“Personally I thought it was as neat a job as you could find.”

He looked at me in silence. He had the cards between his hands, all in a lump. He smoothed them out and flicked them over on their faces and dealt them rapidly into the two decks. The cards seemed to pour from his hands in a stream, in a blur.

“If you were that fast with a gun,” I began.

The stream of cards stopped. Without apparent motion a gun took their place. He held it lightly in his right hand pointed at a distant corner of the room. It went away and the cards started flowing again.

“You’re wasted in here,” I said. “You ought to be in Las Vegas.”

He picked up one of the packs and shuffled it slightly and quickly, cut it, and dealt me a king high flush in spades.

“I’m safer with a Steinway,” he said.

The door opened and a uniformed man came in with a tray.

We ate canned cornbeef hash and drank hot but weak coffee. By that time it was full morning.

At eight-fifteen Christy French came in and stood with his hat on the back of his head and dark smudges under his eyes.

I looked from him to the little man across the table. But he wasn’t there any more. The cards weren’t there either. Nothing was there but a chair pushed in neatly to the table and the dishes we had eaten off gathered on a tray. For a moment I had that creepy feeling.

Then Christy French walked around the table and jerked the chair out and sat down and leaned his chin on his hand. He took his hat off and rumpled his hair. He stared at me with hard morose eyes. I was back in coptown again.

31

“The D.A. wants to see you at nine o’clock,” he said. “After that I guess you can go on home. That is, if he doesn’t hang a pinch on you. I’m sorry you had to sit up in that chair all night.”

“It’s all right,” I said. “I needed the exercise.”

“Yeah, back in the groove again,” he said. He stared moodily at the dishes on the tray.

“Got Lagardie?” I asked him.

“No. He’s a doctor all right, though.” His eyes moved to mine. “He practiced in Cleveland.”

I said: “I hate it to be that tidy.”

“How do you mean?”

“Young Quest wants to put the bite on Steelgrave. So he just by pure accident runs into the one guy in Bay City that could prove who Steelgrave was. That’s too tidy.”

“Aren’t you forgetting something?”

“I’m tired enough to forget my name. What?”

“Me too,” French said. “Somebody had to tell him who Steelgrave was. When that photo was taken Moe Stein hadn’t been squibbed off. So what good was the photo unless somebody knew who Steelgrave was?”

“I guess Miss Weld knew,” I said. “And Quest was her brother.”

“You’re not making much sense, chum.” He grinned a tired grin. “Would she help her brother put the bite on her boy friend and on her too?”

“I give up. Maybe the photo was just a fluke. His other sister—my client that was—said he liked to take candid camera shots. The candider the better. If he’d lived long enough you’d have had him up for mopery.”

“For murder,” French said indifferently.

“Oh?”

“Maglashan found that ice pick all right. He just wouldn’t give out to you.”

“There’d have to be more than that.”

“There is, but it’s a dead issue. Clausen and Mileaway Marston both had records. The kid’s dead. His family’s respectable. He had an off streak in him and he got in with the wrong people. No point in smearing his family just to prove the police can solve a case.”

“That’s white of you. How about Steelgrave?”

“That’s out of my hands.” He started to get up. “When a gangster gets his how long does the investigation last?”

“Just as long as it’s front-page stuff,” I said. “But there’s a question of identity involved here.”

“No.”

I stared at him. “How do you mean, no?”

“Just no. We’re sure.” He was on his feet now. He combed his hair with his fingers and rearranged his tie and hat. Out of the corner of his mouth he said in a low voice: “Off the record—we were always sure. We just didn’t have a thing on him.”

“Thanks,” I said, “I’ll keep it to myself. How about the guns?”

He stopped and stared down at the table. His eyes came up to mine rather slowly. “They both belonged to Steelgrave. What’s more he had a permit to carry a gun. From the sheriff’s office in another county. Don’t ask me why. One of them—” he paused and looked up at the wall over my head—“one of them killed Quest… The same gun killed Stein.”

“Which one?”

He smiled faintly. “It would be hell if the ballistics man got them mixed up and we didn’t know,” he said.

He waited for me to say something. I didn’t have anything to say. He made a gesture with his hand.

“Well, so long. Nothing personal you know, but I hope the D.A. takes your hide off—in long thin strips.”

He turned and went out.

I could have done the same, but I just sat there and stared across the table at the wall, as if I had forgotten how to get up. After a while the door opened and the orange queen came in. She unlocked her roll top desk and took her hat off of her impossible hair and hung her jacket on a bare hook in the bare wall. She opened the window near her and uncovered her typewriter and put paper in it. Then she looked across at me. “Waiting for somebody?”

“I room here,” I said. “Been here all night.”

She looked at me steadily for a moment. “You were here yesterday afternoon. I remember.”

She turned to her typewriter and her fingers began to fly. From the open window behind her came the growl of cars filling up the parking lot. The sky had a white glare and there was not much smog. It was going to be a hot day.

The telephone rang on the orange queen’s desk. She talked into it inaudibly, and hung up. She looked across at me again.

“Mr. Endicott’s in his office,” she said. “Know the way?”

“I worked there once. Not for him, though. I got fired.”

She looked at me with that City Hall look they have. A voice that seemed to come from anywhere but her mouth said: “Hit him in the face with a wet glove.”

I went over near her and stood looking down at the orange hair. There was plenty of gray at the roots.

“Who said that?”

“It’s the wall,” she said. “It talks. The voices of the dead men who have passed through on the way to hell.”

I went out of the room walking softly and shut the door against the closer so that it wouldn’t make any noise.

32

You go in through double swing doors. Inside the double doors there is a combination PBX and information desk at which sits one of those ageless women you see around municipal offices everywhere in the world. They were never young and will never be old. They have no beauty, no charm, no style. They don’t have to please anybody. They are safe. They are civil without ever quite being polite and intelligent and knowledgeable without any real interest in anything. They are what human beings turn into when they trade life for existence and ambition for security.