© R.Chandler, The High Window, 1943
E-Text: Greylib .
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The house was on Dresden Avenue in the Oak Noll section of Pasadena, a big solid cool-looking house with burgundy brick walls, a terra cotta tile roof, and a white stone trim. The front windows were leaded downstairs. Upstairs windows were of the cottage type and had a lot of rococo imitation stonework trimming around them.
From the front wall and its attendant flowering bushes a half acre or so of fine green lawn drifted in a gentle slope down to the street, passing on the way an enormous deodar around which it flowed like a cool green tide around a rock. The sidewalk and the parkway were both very wide and in the parkway were three white acacias that were worth seeing. There was a heavy scent of summer on the morning and everything that grew was perfectly still in the breathless air they get over there on what they call a nice cool day.
All I knew about the people was that they were a Mrs. Elizabeth Bright Murdock and family and that she wanted to hire a nice clean private detective who wouldn't drop cigar ashes on the floor and never carried more than one gun. And I knew she was the widow of an old coot with whiskers named Jasper Murdock who had made a lot of money helping out the community, and got his photograph in the Pasadena paper every year on his anniversary, with the years of his birth and death underneath, and the legend: His Life Was His Service.
I left my car on the street and walked over a few dozen stumble stones set into the green lawn, and rang the bell in the brick portico under a peaked roof. A low red brick wall ran along the front of the house the short distance from the door to the edge of the driveway. At the end of the walk, on a concrete block, there was a little painted Negro in white riding breeches and a green jacket and a red cap. He was holding a whip, and there was an iron hitching ring in the block at his feet. He looked a little sad, as if he had been waiting there a long time and was getting discouraged. I went over and patted his head while I was waiting for somebody to come to the door.
After a while a middle-aged sourpuss in a maid's costume opened the front door about eight inches and gave me the beady eye.
"Philip Marlowe," I said. "Calling on Mrs. Murdock. By appointment."
The middle-aged sourpuss ground her teeth, snapped her eyes shut, snapped them open and said in one of those angular hardrock pioneer-type voices: "Which one?"
"Huh?"
"Which Mrs. Murdock?" she almost screamed at me.
"Mrs. Elizabeth Bright Murdock," I said. "I didn't know there was more than one."
"Well, there is," she snapped. "Got a card?"
She still had the door a scant eight inches open. She poked the end of her nose and a thin muscular hand into the opening. I got my wallet out and got one of the cards with just my name on it and put it in the hand. The hand and nose went in and the door slammed in my face.
I thought that maybe I ought to have gone to the back door. I went over and patted the little Negro on the head again.
"Brother," I said, "you and me both."
Time passed, quite a lot of time. I stuck a cigarette in my mouth but didn't light it. The Good Humor man went by in his little blue and white wagon, playing Turkey in the Straw on his music box. A large black and gold butterfly fishtailed in and landed on a hydrangea bush almost at my elbow, moved its wings slowly up and down a few times, then took off heavily and staggered away through the motionless hot scented air.
The front door came open again. The sourpuss said: "This way."
I went in. The room beyond was large and square and sunken and cool and had the restful atmosphere of a funeral chapel and something of the same smell. Tapestry on the blank roughened stucco walls, iron grilles imitating balconies outside high side windows, heavy carved chairs with plush seats and tapestry backs and tarnished gilt tassels hanging down their sides. At the back a stained-glass window about the size of a tennis court. Curtained french doors underneath it. An old musty, fusty, narrow-minded, clean and bitter room. It didn't look as if anybody ever sat in it or would ever want to. Marble-topped tables with crooked legs, gilt clocks, pieces of small statuary in two colors of marble. A lot of junk that would take a week to dust. A lot of money, and all wasted. Thirty years before, in the wealthy close-mouthed provincial town Pasadena then was, it must have seemed like quite a room.
We left it and went along a hallway and after a while the sourpuss opened a door and motioned me in.
"Mr. Marlowe," she said through the door in a nasty voice, and went away grinding her teeth.
It was a small room looking out on the back garden. It had an ugly red and brown carpet and was furnished as an office. It contained what you would expect to find in a small office. A thin fragile-looking blondish girl in shell glasses sat behind a desk with a typewriter on a pulled-out leaf at her left. She had her hands poised on the keys, but she didn't have any paper in the machine. She watched me come into the room with the stiff, half-silly expression of a self-conscious person posing for a snapshot. She had a clear soft voice, asking me to sit down.
"I am Miss Davis. Mrs. Murdock's secretary. She wanted me to ask you for a few references."
"References?"
"Certainly. References. Does that surprise you?"
I put my hat on her desk and the unlighted cigarette on the brim of the hat. "You mean she sent for me without knowing anything about me?"
Her lip trembled and she bit it. I didn't know whether she was scared or annoyed or just having trouble being cool and businesslike. But she didn't look happy.
"She got your name from the manager of a branch of the California-Security Bank. But he doesn't know you personally," she said.
"Get your pencil ready," I said.
She held it up and showed me that it was freshly sharpened and ready to go.
I said: "First off, one of the vice-presidents of that same bank. George S. Leake. He's in the main office. Then State Senator Huston Oglethorpe. He may be in Sacramento, or he may be at his office in the State Building in L.A. Then Sidney Dreyfus, Jr., of Dreyfus, Turner and Swayne, attorneys in the Title-Insurance Building. Got that?"
She wrote fast and easily. She nodded without looking up. The light danced on her blond hair.
"Oliver Fry of the Fry-Krantz Corporation, Oil Well Tools. They're over on East Ninth, in the industrial district. Then, if you would like a couple of cops, Bernard Ohls of the D.A.'s staff, and Detective-Lieutenant Carl Randall of the Central Homicide Bureau. You think maybe that would be enough?"
"Don't laugh at me," she said. "I'm only doing what I'm told."
"Better not call the last two, unless you know what the job is," I said. "I'm not laughing at you. Hot, isn't it?"
"It's not hot for Pasadena," she said, and hoisted her phone book up on the desk and went to work.
While she was looking up the numbers and telephoning hither and yon I looked her over. She was pale with a sort of natural paleness and she looked healthy enough. Her coarse-grained coppery blond hair was not ugly in itself, but it was drawn back so tightly over her narrow head that it almost lost the effect of being hair at all. Her eyebrows were thin and unusually straight and were darker than her hair, almost a chestnut color. Her nostrils had the whitish look of an anaemic person. Her chin was too small, too sharp and looked unstable. She wore no makeup except orange-red on her mouth and not much of that. Her eyes behind the glasses were very large, cobalt blue with big irises and a vague expression. Both lids were tight so that the eyes had a slightly oriental look, or as if the skin of her face was naturally so tight that it stretched her eyes at the corners. The whole face had a sort of off-key neurotic charm that only needed some clever makeup to be striking.
She wore a one-piece linen dress with short sleeves and no ornament of any kind. Her bare arms had down on them, and a few freckles.
I didn't pay much attention to what she said over the telephone. Whatever was said to her she wrote down in shorthand, with deft easy strokes of the pencil. When she was through she hung the phone book back on a hook and stood up and smoothed the linen dress down over her thighs and said:
"If you will just wait a few moments--" and went towards the door.
Halfway there she turned back and pushed a top drawer of her desk shut at the side. She went out. The door closed. There was silence. Outside the window bees buzzed. Far off I heard the whine of a vacuum cleaner. I picked the unlighted cigarette off my hat, put it in my mouth and stood up. I went around the desk and pulled open the drawer she had come back to shut.
It wasn't any of my business. I was just curious. It wasn't any of my business that she had a small Colt automatic in the drawer. I shut it and sat down again.
She was gone about four minutes. She opened the door and stayed at it and said: "Mrs. Murdock will see you now."
We went along some more hallway and she opened half of a double glass door and stood aside. I went in and the door was closed behind me.
It was so dark in there that at first I couldn't see anything but the outdoors light coming through thick bushes and screens. Then I saw that the room was a sort of sun porch that had been allowed to get completely overgrown outside. It was furnished with grass rugs and reed stuff. There was a reed chaise longue over by the window. It had a curved back and enough cushions to stuff an elephant and there was a woman leaning back on it with a wine glass in her hand. I could smell the thick scented alcoholic odor of the wine before I could see her properly. Then my eyes got used to the light and I could see her.
She had a lot of face and chin. She had pewter-colored hair set in a ruthless permanent, a hard beak and large moist eyes with the sympathetic expression of wet stones. There was lace at her throat, but it was the kind of throat that would have looked better in a football sweater. She wore a grayish silk dress. Her thick arms were bare and mottled. There were jet buttons in her ears. There was a low glass-topped table beside her and a bottle of port on the table. She sipped from the glass she was holding and looked at me over it and said nothing.
I stood there. She let me stand while she finished the port in her glass and put the glass down on the table and filled it again. Then she tapped her lips with a handkerchief. Then she spoke. Her voice had a hard baritone quality and sounded as if it didn't want any nonsense.
"Sit down, Mr. Marlowe. Please do not light that cigarette. I'm asthmatic."
I sat down in a reed rocker and tucked the still unlighted cigarette down behind the handkerchief in my outside pocket.
"I've never had any dealing with private detectives, Mr. Marlowe. I don't know anything about them. Your references seem satisfactory. What are your charges?"
"To do what, Mrs. Murdock?"
"It's a very confidential matter, naturally. Nothing to do with the police. If it had to do with the police, I should have called the police."
"I charge twenty-five dollars a day, Mrs. Murdock. And of course expenses."
"It seems high. You must make a great deal of money." She drank some more of her port. I don't like port in hot weather, but it's nice when they let you refuse it.
"No," I said. "It isn't. Of course you can get detective work done at any price--just like legal work. Or dental work. I'm not an organization. I'm just one man and I work at just one case at a time. I take risks, sometimes quite big risks, and I don't work all the time. No, I don't think twenty-five dollars a day is too much."
"I see. And what is the nature of the expenses?"
"Little things that come up here and there. You never know."
"I should prefer to know," she said acidly.
"You'll know," I said. "You'll get it all down in black and white. You'll have a chance to object, if you don't like it."
"And how much retainer would you expect?"
"A hundred dollars would hold me," I said.
"I should hope it would," she said and finished her port and poured the glass full again without even waiting to wipe her lips.
"From people in your position, Mrs. Murdock, I don't necessarily have to have a retainer."
"Mr. Marlowe," she said, "I'm a strong-minded woman. But don't let me scare you. Because if you can be scared by me, you won't be much use to me."
I nodded and let that one drift with the tide.
She laughed suddenly and then she belched. It was a nice light belch, nothing showy, and performed with easy unconcern. "My asthma," she said carelessly. "I drink this wine as medicine. That's why I'm not offering you any."
I swung a leg over my knee. I hoped that wouldn't hurt her asthma.
"Money," she said, "is not really important. A woman in my position is always overcharged and gets to expect it. I hope you will be worth your fee. Here is the situation. Something of considerable value has been stolen from me. I want it back, but I want more than that. I don't want anybody arrested. The thief happens to be a member of my family-- by marriage."
She turned the wine glass with her thick fingers and smiled faintly in the dim light of the shadowed room. "My daughter-in-law," she said. "A charming girl--and tough as an oak board."
She looked at me with a sudden gleam in her eyes.
"I have a damn fool of a son," she said. "But I'm very fond of him. About a year ago he made an idiotic marriage, without my consent. This was foolish of him because he is quite incapable of earning a living and he has no money except what I give him, and I am not generous with money. The lady he chose, or who chose him, was a night club singer. Her name, appropriately enough, was Linda Conquest. They have lived here in this house. We didn't quarrel because I don't allow people to quarrel with me in my own house, but there has not been good feeling between us. I have paid their expenses, given each of them a car, made the lady a sufficient but not gaudy allowance for clothes and so on. No doubt she found the life rather dull. No doubt she found my son dull. I find him dull myself. At any rate she moved out, very abruptly, a week or so ago, without leaving a forwarding address or saying good-by."
She coughed, fumbled for a handkerchief, and blew her nose.
"What was taken," she went on, "was a coin. A rare gold coin called a Brasher Doubloon. It was the pride of my husband's collection. I care nothing for such things, but he did. I have kept the collection intact since he died four years ago. It is upstairs, in a locked fireproof room, in a set of fireproof cases. It is insured, but I have not reported the loss yet. I don't want to, if I can help it. I'm quite sure Linda took it. The coin is said to be worth over ten thousand dollars. It's a mint specimen."
"But pretty hard to sell," I said.
"Perhaps. I don't know. I didn't miss the coin until yesterday. I should not have missed it then, as I never go near the collection, except that a man in Los Angeles named Morningstar called up, said he was a dealer, and was the Murdock Brasher, as he called it, for sale? My son happened to take the call. He said he didn't believe it was for sale, it never had been, but that if Mr. Morningstar would call some other time, he could probably talk to me. It was not convenient then, as I was resting. The man said he would do that. My son reported the conversation to Miss Davis, who reported it to me. I had her call the man back. I was faintly curious."
She sipped some more port, flopped her handkerchief about and grunted.
"Why were you curious, Mrs. Murdock?" I asked, just to be saying something.
"If the man was a dealer of any repute, he would know that the coin was not for sale. My husband, Jasper Murdock, provided in his will that no part of his collection might be sold, loaned or hypothecated during my lifetime. Nor removed from this house, except in case of damage to the house necessitating removal, and then only by action of the trustees. My husband--" she smiled grimly-- "seemed to feel that I ought to have taken more interest in his little pieces of metal while he was alive."
It was a nice day outside, the sun shining, the flowers blooming, the birds singing. Cars went by on the street with a distant comfortable sound. In the dim room with the hardfaced woman and the winy smell everything seemed a little unreal. I tossed my foot up and down over my knee and waited.
"I spoke to Mr. Morningstar. His full name is Elisha Morningstar and he has offices in the Belfont Building on Ninth Street in downtown Los Angeles. I told him the Murdock collection was not for sale, never had been, and, so far as I was concerned, never would be, and that I was surprised that he didn't know that. He hemmed and hawed and then asked me if he might examine the coin. I said certainly not. He thanked me rather dryly and hung up. He sounded like an old man. So I went upstairs to examine the coin myself, something I had not done in a year. It was gone from its place in one of the locked fireproof cases."
I said nothing. She refilled her glass and played a tattoo with her thick fingers on the arm of the chaise longue. "What I thought then you can probably guess."
I said: "The part about Mr. Morningstar, maybe. Somebody had offered the coin to him for sale and he had known or suspected where it came from. The coin must be very rare."
"What they call a mint specimen is very rare indeed. Yes, I had the same idea."
"How would it be stolen?" I asked.
"By anyone in this house, very easily. The keys are in my bag, and my bag lies around here and there. It would be a very simple matter to get hold of the keys long enough to unlock a door and a cabinet and then return the keys. Difficult for an outsider, but anybody in the house could have stolen it."
"I see. How do you establish that your daughter-in-law took it, Mrs. Murdock?"
"I don't--in a strictly evidential sense. But I'm quite sure of it. The servants are three women who have been here many, many years--long before I married Mr. Murdock, which was only seven years ago. The gardener never comes in the house. I have no chauffeur, because either my son or my secretary drives me. My son didn't take it, first because he is not the kind of fool that steals from his mother, and secondly, if he had taken it, he could easily have prevented me from speaking to the coin dealer, Morningstar. Miss Davis--ridiculous. Just not the type at all. Too mousy. No, Mr. Marlowe, Linda is the sort of lady who might do it just for spite, if nothing else. And you know what these night club people are."
"All sorts of people--like the rest of us," I said. "No signs of a burglar, I suppose? It would take a pretty smooth worker to lift just one valuable coin, so there wouldn't be. Maybe I had better look the room over, though."
She pushed her jaw at me and muscles in her neck made hard lumps. "I have just told you, Mr. Marlowe, that Mrs. Leslie Murdock, my daughter-in-law, took the Brasher Doubloon."
I stared at her and she stared back. Her eyes were as hard as the bricks in her front walk. I shrugged the stare off and said:
"Assuming that is so, Mrs. Murdock, just what do you want done?"
"In the first place I want the coin back. In the second place I want an uncontested divorce for my son. And I don't intend to buy it. I daresay you know how these things are arranged."
She finished the current instalment of port and laughed rudely.
"I may have heard," I said. "You say the lady left no forwarding address. Does that mean you have no idea at all where she went?"
"Exactly that."
"A disappearance then. Your son might have some ideas he hasn't passed along to you. I'll have to see him."
The big gray face hardened into even ruggeder lines. "My son knows nothing. He doesn't even know the doubloon has been stolen. I don't want him to know anything. When the time comes I'll handle him. Until then I want him left alone. He will do exactly what I want him to."
"He hasn't always," I said.
"His marriage," she said nastily, "was a momentary impulse. Afterwards he tried to act like a gentleman. I have no such scruples."
"It takes three days to have that kind of momentary impulse in California, Mrs. Murdock."
"Young man, do you want this job or don't you?"
"I want it if I'm told the facts and allowed to handle the case as I see fit. I don't want it if you're going to make a lot of rules and regulations for me to trip over."
She laughed harshly. "This is a delicate family matter, Mr. Marlowe. And it must be handled with delicacy."
"If you hire me, you'll get all the delicacy I have. If I don't have enough delicacy, maybe you'd better not hire me. For instance, I take it you don't want your daughter-in-law framed. I'm not delicate enough for that."
She turned the color of a cold boiled beet and opened her mouth to yell. Then she thought better of it, lifted her port glass and tucked away some more of her medicine.
"You'll do," she said dryly, "I wish I had met you two years ago, before he married her."
I didn't know exactly what this last meant, so I let it ride. She bent over sideways and fumbled with the key on a house telephone and growled into it when she was answered.
There were steps and the little copper-blond came tripping into the room with her chin low, as if somebody might be going to take a swing at her.
"Make this man a check for two hundred and fifty dollars," the old dragon snarled at her. "And keep your mouth shut about it."
The little girl flushed all the way to her neck. "You know I never talk about your affairs, Mrs. Murdock," she bleated. "You know I don't. I wouldn't dream of it, I--"
She turned with her head down and ran out of the room. As she closed the door I looked out at her. Her little lip was trembling but her eyes were mad.
"I'll need a photo of the lady and some information," I said when the door was shut again.
"Look in the desk drawer." Her rings flashed in the dimness as her thick gray finger pointed.
I went over and opened the single drawer of the reed desk and took out the photo that lay all alone in the bottom of the drawer, face up, looking at me with cool dark eyes. I sat down again with the photo and looked it over. Dark hair parted loosely in the middle and drawn back loosely over a solid piece of forehead. A wide cool go-to-hell mouth with very kissable lips. Nice nose, not too small, not too large. Good bone all over the face. The expression of the face lacked something. Once the something might have been called breeding, but these days I didn't know what to call it. The face looked too wise and too guarded for its age. Too many passes had been made at it and it had grown a little too smart in dodging them. And behind this expression of wiseness there was the look of simplicity of the little girl who still believes in Santa Claus.
I nodded over the photo and slipped it into my pocket. thinking I was getting too much out of it to get out of a mere photo, and in a very poor light at that.
The door opened and the little girl in the linen dress came in with a three-decker check book and a fountain pen and made a desk of her arm for Mrs. Murdock to sign. She straightened up with a strained smile and Mrs. Murdock made a sharp gesture towards me and the little girl tore the check out and gave it to me. She hovered inside the door, waiting. Nothing was said to her, so she went out softly again and closed the door.
I shook the check dry, folded it and sat holding it. "What can you tell me about Linda?"
"Practically nothing. Before she married my son she shared an apartment with a girl named Lois Magic--charming names these people choose for themselves--who is an entertainer of some sort. They worked at a place called the Idle Valley Club, out Ventura Boulevard way. My son Leslie knows it far too well. I know nothing about Linda's family or origins. She said once she was born in Sioux Falls. I suppose she had parents. I was not interested enough to find out."
Like hell she wasn't. I could see her digging with both hands, digging hard, and getting herself a double handful of gravel.
"You don't know Miss Magic's address?"
"No. I never did know."
"Would your son be likely to know--or Miss Davis?"
"I'll ask my son when he comes in. I don't think so. You can ask Miss Davis. I'm sure she doesn't."
"I see. You don't know of any other friends of Linda's?"
"No."
"It's possible that your son is still in touch with her, Mrs. Murdock--without telling you."
She started to get purple again. I held my hand up and dragged a soothing smile over my face. "After all he has been married to her a year," I said. "He must know something about her."
"You leave my son out of this," she snarled.
I shrugged and made a disappointed sound with my lips. "Very well. She took her car, I suppose. The one you gave her?"
"A steel gray Mercury, 1940 model, a coupé. Miss Davis can give you the license number, if you want that. I don't know whether she took it."
"Would you know what money and clothes and jewels she had with her?"
"Not much money. She might have had a couple of hundred dollars, at most." A fat sneer made deep lines around her nose and mouth. "Unless of course she has found a new friend."
"There's that," I said. "Jewelry?"
"An emerald and diamond ring of no very great value, a platinum Longines watch with rubies in the mounting, a very good cloudy amber necklace which I was foolish enough to give her myself. It has a diamond clasp with twenty-six small diamonds in the shape of a playing card diamond. She had other things, of course. I never paid much attention to them. She dressed well but not strikingly. Thank God for a few small mercies."
She refilled her glass and drank and did some more of her semi-social belching.
"That's all you can tell me, Mrs. Murdock?"
"Isn't it enough?"
"Not nearly enough, but I'll have to be satisfied for the time being. If I find she did not steal the coin, that ends the investigation as far as I'm concerned. Correct?"
"We'll talk it over," she said roughly. "She stole it all right. And I don't intend to let her get away with it. Paste that in your hat, young man. And I hope you are even half as rough as you like to act, because these night club girls are apt to have some very nasty friends."
I was still holding the folded check by one corner down between my knees. I got my wallet out and put it away and stood up, reaching my hat off the floor.
"I like them nasty," I said. "The nasty ones have very simple minds. I'll report to you when there is anything to report, Mrs. Murdock. I think I'll tackle this coin dealer first. He sounds like a lead."
She let me get to the door before she growled at my back: "You don't like me very well, do you?"
I turned to grin back at her with my hand on the knob. "Does anybody?"
She threw her head back and opened her mouth wide and roared with laughter. In the middle of the laughter I opened the door and went out and shut the door on the rough mannish sound. I went back along the hall and knocked on the secretary's half open door, then pushed it open and looked in.
She had her arms folded on her desk and her face down on the folded arms. She was sobbing. She screwed her head around and looked up at me with tear-stained eyes. I shut the door and went over beside her and put an arm around her thin shoulders.
"Cheer up," I said. "You ought to feel sorry for her. She thinks she's tough and she's breaking her back trying to live up to it."
The little girl jumped erect, away from my arm. "Don't touch me," she said breathlessly. "Please. I never let men touch me. And don't say such awful things about Mrs. Murdock."
Her face was all pink and wet from tears. Without her glasses her eyes were very lovely.
I stuck my long-waiting cigarette into my mouth and lit it.
"I--I didn't mean to be rude," she snuffled. "But she does humiliate me so. And I only want to do my best for her." She snuffled some more and got a man's handkerchief out of her desk and shook it out and wiped her eyes with it. I saw on the hanging down corner the initials L.M. embroidered in purple. I stared at it and blew cigarette smoke towards the corner of the room, away from her hair. "Is there something you want?" she asked.
"I want the license number of Mrs. Leslie Murdock's car."
"It's 2X1111, a gray Mercury convertible, 1940 model."
"She told me it was a coupé."
"That's Mr. Leslie's car. They're the same make and year and color. Linda didn't take the car."
"Oh. What do you know about a Miss Lois Magic?"
"I only saw her once. She used to share an apartment with Linda. She came here with a Mr.--a Mr. Vannier."
"Who's he?"
She looked down at her desk. "I--she just came with him. I don't know him."
"Okay, what does Miss Lois Magic look like?"
"She's a tall handsome blond. Very--very appealing."
"You mean sexy?"
"Well--" she blushed furiously, "in a nice well-bred sort of way, if you know what I mean."
"I know what you mean," I said, "but I never got anywhere with it."
"I can believe that," she said tartly.
"Know where Miss Magic lives?"
She shook her head, no. She folded the big handkerchief very carefully and put it in the drawer of her desk, the one where the gun was.
"You can swipe another one when that's dirty," I said. She leaned back in her chair and put her small neat hands on her desk and looked at me levelly.
"I wouldn't carry that tough-guy manner too far, if I were you, Mr. Marlowe. Not with me, at any rate."
"No?"
"No. And I can't answer any more questions without specific instructions. My position here is very confidential."
"I'm not tough," I said. "Just virile."
She picked up a pencil and made a mark on a pad. She smiled faintly up at me, all composure again.
"Perhaps I don't like virile men," she said.
"You're a screwball," I said, "if ever I met one. Good-by."
I went out of her office, shut the door firmly, and walked back along the empty halls through the big silent sunken funereal living room and out of the front door.
The sun danced on the warm lawn outside. I put my dark glasses on and went over and patted the little Negro on the head again.
"Brother, it's even worse than I expected," I told him. The stumble-stones were hot through the soles of my shoes. I got into the car and started it and pulled away from the curb.
A small sand-colored coupé pulled away from the curb behind me. I didn't think anything of it. The man driving it wore a dark porkpie type straw hat with a gay print band and dark glasses were over his eyes, as over mine.
I drove back towards the city. A dozen blocks later at a traffic stop, the sand-colored coupé was still behind me. I shrugged and just for the fun of it circled a few blocks. The coupé held its position. I swung into a street lined with immense pepper trees, dragged my heap around in a fast U-turn and stopped against the curbing.
The coupé came carefully around the corner. The blond head under the cocoa straw hat with the tropical print band didn't even turn my way. The coupé sailed on and I drove back to the Arroyo Seco and on towards Hollywood. I looked carefully several times, but I didn't spot the coupé again.
I had an office in the Cahuenga Building, sixth floor, two small rooms at the back. One I left open for a patient client to sit in, if I had a patient client. There was a buzzer on the door which I could switch on and off from my private thinking parlor.
I looked into the reception room. It was empty of everything but the smell of dust. I threw up another window, unlocked the communicating door and went into the room beyond. Three hard chairs and a swivel chair, flat desk with a glass top, five green filing cases, three of them full of nothing, a calendar and a framed license bond on the wall, a phone, a washbowl in a stained wood cupboard, a hatrack, a carpet that was just something on the floor, and two open windows with net curtains that puckered in and out like the lips of a toothless old man sleeping.
The same stuff I had had last year, and the year before that. Not beautiful, not gay, but better than a tent on the beach.
I hung my hat and coat on the hatrack, washed my face and hands in cold water, lit a cigarette and hoisted the phone book onto the desk. Elisha Morningstar was listed at 824 Belfont Building, 422 West Ninth Street. I wrote that down and the phone number that went with it and had my hand on the instrument when I remembered that I hadn't switched on the buzzer for the reception room. I reached over the side of the desk and clicked it on and caught it right in stride. Somebody had just opened the door of the outer office.
I turned my pad face down on the desk and went over to see who it was. It was a slim tall self-satisfied looking number in a tropical worsted suit of slate blue, black and white shoes, a dull ivory-colored shirt and a tie and display handkerchief the color of jacaranda bloom. He was holding a long black cigarette-holder in a peeled back white pigskin glove and he was wrinkling his nose at the dead magazines on the library table and the chairs and the rusty floor covering and the general air of not much money being made.
As I opened the communicating door he made a quarter turn and stared at me out of a pair of rather dreamy pale eyes set close to a narrow nose. His skin was sun-flushed, his reddish hair was brushed back hard over a narrow skull, and the thin line of his mustache was much redder than his hair.
He looked me over without haste and without much pleasure. He blew some smoke delicately and spoke through it with a faint sneer.
"You're Marlowe?"
I nodded.
"I'm a little disappointed," he said. "I rather expected something with dirty fingernails."
"Come inside," I said, "and you can be witty sitting down."
I held the door for him and he strolled past me flicking cigarette ash on the floor with the middle nail of his free hand. He sat down on the customer's side of the desk, took off the glove from his right hand and folded this with the other already off and laid them on the desk. He tapped the cigarette end out of the long black holder, prodded the coal with a match until it stopped smoking, fitted another cigarette and lit it with a broad mahogany-colored match. He leaned back in his chair with the smile of a bored aristocrat.
"All set?" I enquired. "Pulse and respiration normal? You wouldn't like a cold towel on your head or anything?"
He didn't curl his lip because it had been curled when he came in. "A private detective," he said. "I never met one. A shifty business, one gathers. Keyhole peeping, raking up scandal, that sort of thing."
"You here on business," I asked him, "or just slumming?"
His smile was as faint as a fat lady at a fireman's ball.
"The name is Murdock. That probably means a little something to you."
"You certainly made nice time over here," I said, and started to fill a pipe.
He watched me fill the pipe. He said slowly: "I understand my mother has employed you on a job of some sort. She has given you a check."
I finished filling the pipe, put a match to it, got it drawing and leaned back to blow smoke over my right shoulder towards the open window. I didn't say anything.
He leaned forward a little more and said earnestly: "I know being cagey is all part of your trade, but I am not guessing. A little worm told me, a simple garaen worm, often trodden on, but still somehow surviving--like myself. I happened to be not far behind you. Does that help to clear things up?"
"Yeah," I said. "Supposing it made any difference to me."
"You are hired to find my wife, I gather."
I made a snorting sound and grinned at him over the pipe bowl.
"Marlowe," he said, even more earnestly, "I'll try hard, but I don't think I am going to like you."
"I'm screaming," I said. "With rage and pain."
"And if you will pardon a homely phrase, your tough guy act stinks."
"Coming from you, that's bitter."
He leaned back again and brooded at me with pale eyes. He fussed around in the chair, trying to get comfortable. A lot of people had tried to get comfortable in that chair. I ought to try it myself sometime. Maybe it was losing business for me.
"Why should my mother want Linda found?" he asked slowly. "She hated her guts. I mean my mother hated Linda's guts. Linda was quite decent to my mother. What do you think of her?"
"Your mother?"
"Of course. You haven't met Linda, have you?"
"That secretary of your mother's has her job hanging by a frayed thread. She talks out of turn."
He shook his head sharply. "Mother won't know. Anyhow, Mother couldn't do without Merle. She has to have somebody to bully. She might yell at her or even slap her face, but she couldn't do without her. What did you think of her?"
"Kind of cute--in an old world sort of way."
He frowned. "I mean Mother. Merle's just a simple little girl, I know."
"Your powers of observation startle me," I said.
He looked surprised. He almost forgot to fingernail the ash of his cigarette. But not quite. He was careful not to get any of it in the ashtray, however.
"About my mother," he said patiently.
"A grand old warhorse," I said. "A heart of gold, and the gold buried good and deep."
"But why does she want Linda found? I can't understand it. Spending money on it too. My mother hates to spend money. She thinks money is part of her skin. Why does she want Linda found?"
"Search me," I said. "Who said she did?"
"Why, you implied so. And Merle--"
"Merle's just romantic. She made it up. Hell, she blows her nose in a man's handkerchief. Probably one of yours."
He blushed. "That's silly. Look, Marlowe. Please, be reasonable and give me an idea what it's all about. I haven't much money, I'm afraid, but would a couple of hundred--"
"I ought to bop you," I said. "Besides I'm not supposed to talk to you. Orders."
"Why, for heaven's sake?"
"Don't ask me things I don't know. I can't tell you the answers. And don't ask me things I do know, because I won't tell you the answers. Where have you been all your life? If a man in my line of work is handed a job, does he go around answering questions about it to anyone that gets curious?"
"There must be a lot of electricity in the air," he said nastily, "for a man in your line of work to turn down two hundred dollars."
There was nothing in that for me either. I picked his broad mahogany match out of the tray and looked at it. It had thin yellow edges and there was white printing on it. ROSEMONT. H. RICHARDS '3--the rest was burnt off. I doubled the match and squeezed the halves together and tossed it in the waste basket.
"I love my wife," he said suddenly and showed me the hard white edges of his teeth. "A corny touch, but it's true."
"The Lombardos are still doing all right."
He kept his lips pulled back from his teeth and talked through them at me. "She doesn't love me. I know of no particular reason why she should. Things have been strained between us. She was used to a fast moving sort of life. With us, well, it has been pretty dull. We haven't quarreled. Linda's the cool type. But she hasn't really had a lot of fun being married to me."
"You're just too modest," I said.
His eyes glinted, but he kept his smooth manner pretty well in place.
"Not good, Marlowe. Not even fresh. Look, you have the air of a decent sort of guy. I know my mother is not putting out two hundred and fifty bucks just to be breezy. Maybe it's not Linda. Maybe it's something else. Maybe--" he stopped and then said this very slowly, watching my eyes, "maybe it's Morny."
"Maybe it is," I said cheerfully.
He picked his gloves up and slapped the desk with them and put them down again. "I'm in a spot there all right," he said. "But I didn't think she knew about it. Morny must have called her up. He promised not to."
This was easy. I said: "How much are you into him for?" It wasn't so easy. He got suspicious again. "If he called her up, he would have told her. And she would have told you," he said thinly.
"Maybe it isn't Morny," I said, beginning to want a drink very badly. "Maybe the cook is with child by the iceman. But if it was Morny, how much?"
"Twelve thousand," he said, looking down and flushing.
"Threats?"
He nodded.
"Tell him to go fly a kite," I said. "What kind of lad is he? Tough?"
He looked up again, his face being brave. "I suppose he is. I suppose they all are. He used to be a screen heavy. Good looking in a flashy way, a chaser. But don't get any ideas. Linda just worked there, like the waiters and the band. And if you are looking for her, you'll have a hard time finding her."
I sneered at him politely.
"Why would I have a hard time finding her? She's not buried in the back yard, I hope."
He stood up with a flash of anger in his pale eyes. Standing there leaning over the desk a little he whipped his right hand up in a neat enough gesture and brought out a small automatic, about .25 caliber with a walnut grip. It looked like the brother of the one I had seen in the drawer of Merle's desk. The muzzle looked vicious enough pointing at me. I didn't move.
"If anybody tries to push Linda around, he'll have to push me around first," he said tightly.
"That oughtn't to be too hard. Better get more gun--unless you're just thinking of bees."
He put the little gun back in his inside pocket. He gave me a straight hard look and picked his gloves up and started for the door.
"It's a waste of time talking to you," he said. "All you do is crack wise."
I said: "Wait a minute," and got up and went around the desk. "It might be a good idea for you not to mention this interview to your mother, if only for the little girl's sake."
He nodded. "For the amount of information I got, it doesn't seem worth mentioning."
"That straight goods about your owing Morny twelve grand?"
He looked down, then up, then down again. He said: "Anybody who could get into Alex Morny for twelve grand would have to be a lot smarter than I am."
I was quite close to him. I said: "As a matter of fact I don't even think you are worried about your wife. I think you know where she is. She didn't run away from you at all. She just ran away from your mother."
He lifted his eyes and drew one glove on. He didn't say anything.
"Perhaps she'll get a job," I said. "And make enough money to support you."
He looked down at the floor again, turned his body to the right a little and the gloved fist made a tight unrelaxed arc through the air upwards. I moved my jaw out of the way and caught his wrist and pushed it slowly back against his chest, leaning on it. He slid a foot back on the floor and began to breathe hard. It was a slender wrist. My fingers went around it and met.
We stood there looking into each other's eyes. He was breathing like a drunk, his mouth open and his lips pulled back. Small round spots of bright red flamed on his cheeks. He tried to jerk his wrist away, but I put so much weight on him that he had to take another short step back to brace himself. Our faces were now only inches apart.
"How come your old man didn't leave you some money?" I sneered. "Or did you blow it all?"
He spoke between his teeth, stifi trying to jerk loose. "If it's any of your rotten business and you mean Jasper Murdock, he wasn't my father. He didn't like me and he didn't leave me a cent. My father was a man named Horace Bright who lost his money in the crash and jumped out of his office window."
"You milk easy," I said, "but you give pretty thin milk. I'm sorry for what I said about your wife supporting you. I just wanted to get your goat."
I dropped his wrist and stepped back. He still breathed hard and heavily. His eyes on mine were very angry, but he kept his voice down.
"Well, you got it. If you're satisfied, I'll be on my way."
"I was doing you a favor," I said. "A gun toter oughtn't to insult so easily. Better ditch it."
"That's my business," he said. "I'm sorry I took a swing at you. It probably wouldn't have hurt much, if it had connected."
"That's all right."
He opened the door and went on out. His steps died along the corridor. Another screwball. I tapped my teeth with a knuckle in time to the sound of his steps as long as I could hear them. Then I went back to the desk, looked at my pad, and lifted the phone.
After the bell had rung three times at the other end of the line a light childish sort of girl's voice filtered itself through a hank of gum and said: "Good morning. Mr. Morningstar's office."
"Is the old gentleman in?"
"Who is calling, please?"
"Marlowe."
"Does he know you, Mr. Marlowe?"
"Ask him if he wants to buy any early American gold coins."
"Just a minute, please."
There was a pause suitable to an elderly party in an inner office having his attention called to the fact that somebody on the telephone wanted to talk to him. Then the phone clicked and a man spoke. He had a dry voice. You might even call it parched.
"This is Mr. Morningstar."
"I'm told you called Mrs. Murdock in Pasadena, Mr. Morningstar. About a certain coin."
"About a certain coin," he repeated. "Indeed. Well?"
"My understanding is that you wished to buy the coin in question from the Murdock collection."
"Indeed? And who are you, sir?"
"Philip Marlowe. A private detective. I'm working for Mrs. Murdock."
"Indeed," he said for the third time. He cleared his throat carefully. "And what did you wish to talk to me about, Mr. Marlowe?"
"About this coin."
"But I was informed it was not for sale."
"I still want to talk to you about it. In person."
"Do you mean she has changed her mind about selling?"
"No."
"Then I'm afraid I don't understand what you want, Mr. Marlowe. What have we to talk about?" He sounded sly now.
I took the ace out of my sleeve and played it with a languid grace. "The point is, Mr. Morningstar, that at the time you called up you already knew the coin wasn't for sale."
"Interesting," he said slowly. "How?"
"You're in the business, you couldn't help knowing. It's a matter of public record that the Murdock collection cannot be sold during Mrs. Murdock's lifetime."
"Ah," he said. "Ah." There was a silence. Then, "At three o'clock," he said, not sharp, but quick. "I shall be glad to see you here in my office. You probably know where it is. Will that suit you?"
"I'll be there," I said.
I hung up and lit my pipe again and sat there looking at the wall. My face was stiff with thought, or with something that made my face stiff. I took Linda Murdock's photo out of my pocket, stared at it for a while, decided that the face was pretty commonplace after all, locked the photo away in my desk. I picked Murdock's second match out of my ashtray and looked it over. The lettering on this one read: TOP ROW W. D. WRIGHT '36.
I dropped it back in the tray, wondering what made this important. Maybe it was a clue.
I got Mrs. Murdock's check out of my wallet, endorsed it, made out a deposit slip and a check for cash, got my bank book out of the desk, and folded the lot under a rubber band and put them in my pocket.
Lois Magic was not listed in the phone book.
I got the classified section up on the desk and made a list of the half dozen theatrical agencies that showed in the largest type and called them. They all had bright cheerful voices and wanted to ask a lot of questions, but they either didn't know or didn't care to tell me anything about a Miss Lois Magic, said to be an entertainer.
I threw the list in the waste basket and called Kenny Haste, a crime reporter on the Chronicle.
"What do you know about Alex Morny?" I asked him when we were through cracking wise at each other.
"Runs a plushy night club and gambling joint in Idle Valley, about two miles off the highway back towards the hills. Used to be in pictures. Lousy actor. Seems to have plenty of protection. I never heard of him shooting anybody on the public square at high noon. Or at any other time for that matter. But I wouldn't like to bet on it."
"Dangerous?"
"I'd say he might be, if necessary. All those boys have been to picture shows and know how night club bosses are supposed to act. He has a bodyguard who is quite a character. His name's Eddie Prue, he's about six feet five inches tall and thin as an honest alibi. He has a frozen eye, the result of a war wound."
"Is Morny dangerous to women?"
"Don't be Victorian, old top. Women don't call it danger."
"Do you know a girl named Lois Magic, said to be an entertainer. A tall gaudy blond, I hear."
"No. Sounds as though I might like to."
"Don't be cute. Do you know anybody named Vannier? None of these people are in the phone book."
"Nope. But I could ask Gertie Arbogast, if you want to call back. He knows all the night club aristocrats. And heels."
"Thanks, Kenny. I'll do that. Half an hour?"
He said that would be fine, and we hung up. I locked the office and left.
At the end of the corridor, in the angle of the wall, a youngish blond man in a brown suit and a cocoa-colored straw hat with a brown and yellow tropical print band was reading the evening paper with his back to the wall. As I passed him he yawned and tucked the paper under his arm and straightened up.
He got into the elevator with me. He could hardly keep his eyes open he was so tired. I went out on the street and walked a block to the bank to deposit my check and draw out a little folding money for expenses. From there I went to the Tigertail Lounge and sat in a shallow booth and drank a martini and ate a sandwich. The man in the brown suit posted himself at the end of the bar and drank coca colas and looked bored and piled pennies in front of him, carefully smoothing the edges. He had his dark glasses on again. That made him invisible.
I dragged my sandwich out as long as I could and then strolled back to the telephone booth at the inner end of the bar. The man in the brown suit turned his head quickly and then covered the motion by lifting his glass. I dialed the Chronicle office again.
"Okay," Kenny Haste said. "Gertie Arbogast says Morny married your gaudy blond not very long ago. Lois Magic. He doesn't know Vannier. He says Morny bought a place out beyond Bel-Air, a white house on Stillwood Crescent Drive, about five blocks north of Sunset. Gertie says Morny took it over from a busted flush named Arthur Blake Popham who got caught in a mail fraud rap. Popham's initials are still on the gates. And probably on the toilet paper, Gertie says. He was that kind of a guy. That's all we seem to know."
"Nobody could ask more. Many thanks, Kenny."
I hung up, stepped out of the booth, met the dark glasses above the brown suit under the cocoa straw hat and watched them turn quickly away.
I spun around and went back through a swing door into the kitchen and through that to the alley and along the alley a quarter block to the back of the parking lot where I had put my car.
No sand-colored coupé succeeded in getting behind me as I drove off, in the general direction of Bel-Air.
Stillwood Crescent Drive curved leisurely north from Sunset Boulevard, well beyond the Bel-Air Country Club golf course. The road was lined with walled and fenced estates. Some had high walls, some had low walls, some had ornamental iron fences, some were a bit oldfashioned and got along with tall hedges. The street had no sidewalk. Nobody walked in that neighborhood, not even the mailman.
The afternoon was hot, but not hot like Pasadena. There was a drowsy smell of flowers and sun, a swishing of lawn sprinklers gentle behind hedges and walls, the clear ratchety sound of lawn mowers moving delicately over serene and confident lawns.
I drove up the hill slowly, looking for monograms on gates. Arthur Blake Popham was the name. ABP would be the initials. I found them almost at the top, gilt on a black shield, the gates folded back on a black composition driveway.
It was a glaring white house that had the air of being brand new, but the landscaping was well advanced. It was modest enough for the neighborhood, not more than fourteen rooms and probably only one swimming pool. Its wall was low, made of brick with the concrete all oozed out between and set that way and painted over white. On top of the wall a low iron railing painted black. The name A. P. Morny was stencilled on the large silver-colored mailbox at the service entrance.
I parked my crate on the street and walked up the black driveway to a side door of glittering white paint shot with patches of color from the stained glass canopy over it. I hammered on a large brass knocker. Back along the side of the house a chauffeur was washing off a Cadillac.
The door opened and a hard-eyed Filipino in a white coat curled his lip at me. I gave him a card.
"Mrs. Morny," I said.
He shut the door. Time passed, as it always does when I go calling. The swish of water on the Cadillac had a cool sound. The chauffeur was a little runt in breeches and leggings and a sweat-stained shirt. He looked like an overgrown jockey and he made the same kind of hissing noise as he worked on the car that a groom makes rubbing down a horse.
A red-throated hummingbird went into a scarlet bush beside the door, shook the long tubular blooms around a little, and zoomed off so fast he simply disappeared in the air.
The door opened, the Filipino poked my card at me. I didn't take it.
"What you want?"
It was a tight crackling voice, like someone tiptoeing across a lot of eggshells.
"Want to see Mrs. Morny."
"She not at home."
"Didn't you know that when I gave you the card?"
He opened his fingers and let the card flutter to the ground. He grinned, showing me a lot of cut-rate dental work.
"I know when she tell me."
He shut the door in my face, not gently.
I picked the card up and walked along the side of the house to where the chauffeur was squirting water on the Cadillac sedan and rubbing the dirt off with a big sponge. He had red rimmed eyes and a bang of corn-colored hair. A cigarette hung exhausted at the corner of his lower lip.
He gave me the quick side glance of a man who is minding his own business with difficulty. I said:
"Where's the boss?"
The cigarette jiggled in his mouth. The water went on swishing gently on the paint.
"Ask at the house, Jack."
"I done asked. They done shut the door in mah face."
"You're breaking my heart, Jack."
"How about Mrs. Morny?"
"Same answer, Jack. I just work here. Selling something?" I held my card so that he could read it. It was a business card this time. He put the sponge down on the running board, and the hose on the cement. He stepped around the water to wipe his hands on a towel that hung at the side of the garage doors. He fished a match out of his pants, struck it and tilted his head back to light the dead butt that was stuck in his face.
His foxy little eyes flicked around this way and that and he moved behind the car, with a jerk of the head. I went over near him.
"How's the little old expense account?" he asked in a small careful voice.
"Fat with inactivity."
"For five I could start thinking."
"I wouldn't want to make it that tough for you."
"For ten I could sing like four canaries and a steel guitar."
"I don't like these plushy orchestrations," I said.
He cocked his head sideways. "Talk English, Jack."
"I don't want you to lose your job, son. All I want to know is whether Mrs. Momy is home. Does that rate more than a buck?"
"Don't worry about my job, Jack. I'm solid."
"With Morny--or somebody else?"
"You want that for the same buck?"
"Two bucks."
He eyed me over. "You ain't working for him, are you?"
"Sure."
"You're a liar."
"Sure."
"Gimme the two bucks," he snapped.
I gave him two dollars.
"She's in the backyard with a friend," he said. "A nice friend. You got a friend that don't work and a husband that works, you're all set, see?" He leered.
"You'll be all set in an irrigation ditch one of these days.'
"Not me, Jack. I'm wise. I know how to play 'em. I monkeyed around these kind of people all my life."
He rubbed the two dollar bills between his palms, blew on them, folded them longways and wideways and tucked them in the watch pocket of his breeches.
"That was just the soup," he said. "Now for five more--"
A rather large blond cocker spaniel tore around the Cadillac, skidded a little on the wet concrete, took off neatly, hit me in the stomach and thighs with all four paws, licked my face, dropped to the ground, ran around my legs, sat down between them, let his tongue out all the way and started to pant.
I stepped over him and braced myself against the side of the car and got my handkerchief out.
A male voice called: "Here, Heathcliff. Here, Heathcliff." Steps sounded on a hard walk.
"That's Heathcliff." the chauffeur said sourly.
"Heathcliff?"
"Cripes, that's what they call the dog, Jack."
"Wuthering Heights?" I asked.
"Now you're double-talking again," he sneered. "Look out--company."
He picked up the sponge and the hose and went back to washing the car. I moved away from him. The cocker spaniel immediately moved between my legs again; almost tripping me.
"Here, Heathcliff," the male voice called out louder, and a man came into view through the opening of a latticed tunnel covered with climbing roses.
Tall, dark, with a clear olive skin, brilliant black eyes, gleaming white teeth. Sideburns. A narrow black mustache. Sideburns too long, much too long. White shirt with embroidered initials on the pocket, white slacks, white shoes. A wrist watch that curved halfway around a lean dark wrist, held on by a gold chain. A yellow scarf around a bronzed slender neck.
He saw the dog squatted between my legs and didn't like it. He snapped long fingers and snapped a clear hard voice:
"Here, Heathcliff. Come here at once!"
The dog breathed hard and didn't move, except to lean a little closer to my right leg.
"Who are you?" the man asked, staring me down.
I held out my card. Olive fingers took the card. The dog quietly backed out from between my legs, edged around the front end of the car, and faded silently into the distance.
"Marlowe," the man said. "Marlowe, eh? What's this? A detective? What do you want?"
"Want to see Mrs. Morny."
He looked me up and down, brilliant black eyes sweeping slowly and the silky fringes of long eyelashes following them.
"Weren't you told she was not in?"
"Yeah, but I didn't believe it. Are you Mr. Morny?"
"No."
"That's Mr. Vannier," the chauffeur said behind my back, in the drawled, over-polite voice of deliberate insolence. "Mr. Vannier's a friend of the family. He comes here quite a lot."
Vannier looked past my shoulder, his eyes furious. The chauffeur came around the car and spit the cigarette stub out of his mouth with casual contempt.
"I told the shamus the boss wasn't here, Mr. Vannier."
"I see."
"I told him Mrs. Morny and you was here. Did I do wrong?"
Vannier said: "You could have minded your own business."
The chauffeur said: "I wonder why the hell I didn't think of that."
Vannier said: "Get out before I break your dirty little neck for you."
The chauffeur eyed him quietly and then went back into the gloom of the garage and started to whistle. Vannier moved his hot angry eyes over to me and snapped:
"You were told Mrs. Morny was not in, but it didn't take. Is that it? In other words the information failed to satisfy you."
"If we have to have other words," I said, "those might do."
"I see. Could you bring yourself to say what point you wish to discuss with Mrs. Morny?"
"I'd prefer to explain that to Mrs. Morny herself."
"The implication is that she doesn't care to see you."
Behind the car the chauffeur said: "Watch his right, Jack. It might have a knife in it."
Vannier's olive skin turned the color of dried seaweed. He turned on his heel and rapped at me in a stifled voice: "Follow me."
He went along the brick path under the tunnel of roses and through a white gate at the end. Beyond was a walled-in garden containing flowerbeds crammed with showy annuals, a badminton court, a nice stretch of greensward, and a small tiled pool glittering angrily in the sun. Beside the pool there was a flagged space set with blue and white garden furniture, low tables with composition tops, reclining chairs with footrests and enormous cushions, and over all a blue and white umbrella as big as a small tent.
A long-limbed languorous type of showgirl blond lay at her ease in one of the chairs, with her feet raised on a padded rest and a tall misted glass at her elbow, near a silver ice bucket and a Scotch bottle. She looked at us lazily as we came over the grass. From thirty feet away she looked like a lot of class. From ten feet away she looked like something made up to be seen from thirty feet away. Her mouth was too wide, her eyes were too blue, her makeup was too vivid, the thin arch of her eyebrows was almost fantastic in its curve and spread, and the mascara was so thick on her eyelashes that they looked like miniature iron railings.
She wore white duck slacks, blue and white open-toed sandals over bare feet and crimson lake toenails, a white silk blouse and a necklace of green stones that were not square cut emeralds. Her hair was as artificial as a night club lobby.
On the chair beside her there was a white straw garden hat with a brim the size of a spare tire and a white satin chin strap. On the brim of the hat lay a pair of green sun glasses with lenses the size of doughnuts.
Vannier marched over to her and snapped out: "You've got to can that nasty little red-eyed driver of yours, but quick. Otherwise I'm liable to break his neck any minute. I can't go near him without getting insulted."
The blond coughed lightly, flicked a handkerchief around without doing anything with it, and said:
"Sit down and rest your sex appeal. Who's your friend?"
Vannier looked for my card, found he was holding it in his band and threw it on her lap. She picked it up languidly, ran her eyes over it, ran them over me, sighed and tapped her teeth with her fingernails.
"Big, isn't he? Too much for you to handle, I guess."
Vannier looked at me nastily. "All right, get it over with, whatever it is."
"Do I talk to her?" I asked. "Or do I talk to you and have you put it in English?"
The blond laughed. A silvery ripple of laughter that held the unspoiled naturalness of a bubble dance. A small tongue played roguishly along her lips.
Vannier sat down and lit a gold-tipped cigarette and I stood there looking at them.
I said: "I'm looking for a friend of yours, Mrs. Morny. I understand that she shared an apartment with you about a year ago. Her name is Linda Conquest."
Vannier flicked his eyes up, down, up, down. He turned his head and looked across the pool. The cocker spaniel named Heathcliff sat over there looking at us with the white of one eye.
Vannier snapped his fingers. "Here, Heathcliff! Here, Heathcliff! Come here, sir!"
The blond said: "Shut up. The dog hates your guts. Give your vanity a rest, for heaven's sake."
Vannier snapped: "Don't talk like that to me."
The blond giggled and petted his face with her eyes.
I said: "I'm looking for a girl named Linda Conquest, Mrs. Morny."
The blond looked at me and said: "So you said. I was just thinking. I don't think I've seen her in six months. She got married."
"You haven't seen her in six months?"
"That's what I said, big boy. What do you want to know for?"
"Just a private enquiry I'm making."
"About what?"
"About a confidential matter," I said.
"Just think," the blond said brightly. "He's making a private enquiry about a confidential matter. You hear that, Lou? Busting in on total strangers that don't want to see him is quite all right, though, isn't it, Lou? On account of he's making a private enquiry about a confidential matter."
"Then you don't know where she is, Mrs. Morny?"
"Didn't I say so?" Her voice rose a couple of notches.
"No. You said you didn't think you had seen her in six months. Not quite the same thing."
"Who told you I shared an apartment with her?" the blond snapped.
"I never reveal a source of information, Mrs. Morny."
"Sweetheart, you're fussy enough to be a dance director. I should tell you everything, you should tell me nothing."
"The position is quite different," I said. "I'm a hired hand obeying instructions. The lady has no reason to hide out, has she?"
"Who's looking for her?"
"Her folks."
"Guess again. She doesn't have any folks."
"You must know her pretty well, if you know that," I said.
"Maybe I did once. That don't prove I do now."
"Okay," I said. "The answer is you know, but you won't tell."
"The answer," Vannier said suddenly, "is that you're not wanted here and the sooner you get out, the better we like it."
I kept on looking at Mrs. Morny. She winked at me and said to Vannier: "Don't get so hostile, darling. You have a lot of charm, but you have small bones. You're not built for the rough work. That right, big boy?"
I said: "I hadn't thought about it, Mrs. Morny. Do you think Mr. Morny could help me--or would?"
She shook her head. "How would I know? You could try. If he don't like you, he has guys around that can bounce you."
"I think you could tell me yourself, if you wanted to."
"How are you going to make me want to?" Her eyes were inviting.
"With all these people around," I said, "how can I?"
"That's a thought," she said, and sipped from her glass, watching me over it.
Vannier stood up very slowly. His face was white. He put his hand inside his shirt and said slowly, between his teeth: "Get out, mugg. While you can still walk."
I looked at him in surprise. "Where's your refinement?" I asked him. "And don't tell me you wear a gun with your garden clothes."
The blond laughed, showing a fine strong set of teeth. Vannier thrust his hand under his left arm inside the shirt and set his lips. His black eyes were sharp and blank at the same time, like a snake's eyes.
"You heard me," he said, almost softly. "And don't write me off too quick. I'd plug you as soon as I'd strike a match. And fix it afterwards."
I looked at the blond. Her eyes were bright and her mouth looked sensual and eager, watching us.
I turned and walked away across the grass. About halfway across it I looked back at them. Vannier stood in exactly the same position, his hand inside his shirt. The blond's eyes were still wide and her lips parted, but the shadow of the umbrella had dimmed her expression and at that distance it might have been either fear or pleased anticipation.
I went on over the grass, through the white gate and along the brick path under the rose arbor. I reached the end of it, turned, walked quietly back to the gate and took another look at them. I didn't know what there would be to see or what I cared about it when I saw it.
What I saw was Vannier practically sprawled on top of the blond, kissing her.
I shook my head and went back along the walk.
The red-eyed chauffeur was still at work on the Cadillac. He had finished the wash job and was wiping off the glass and nickel with a large chamois. I went around and stood beside him.
"How you come out?" he asked me out of the side of his mouth.
"Badly. They tramped all over me," I said.
He nodded and went on making the hissing noise of a groom rubbing down a horse.
"You better watch your step. The guy's heeled," I said. "Or pretends to be."
The chauffeur laughed shortly. "Under that suit? Nix."
"Who is this guy Vannier? What does he do?"
The chauffeur straightened up, put the chamois over the sill of a window and wiped his hands on the towel that was now stuck in his waistband.
"Women, my guess would be," he said.
"Isn't it a bit dangerous--playing with this particular woman?"
"I'd say it was," he agreed. "Different guys got different ideas of danger. It would scare me."
"Where does he live?"
"Sherman Oaks. She goes over there. She'll go once too often."
"Ever run across a girl named Linda Conquest? Tall, dark, handsome, used to be a singer with a band?"
"For two bucks, Jack, you expect a lot of service."
"I could build it up to five."
He shook his head. "I don't know the party. Not by that name. All kinds of dames come here, mostly pretty flashy. I don't get introduced." He grinned.
I got my wallet out and put three ones in his little damp paw. I added a business card.
"I like small close-built men," I said. "They never seem to be afraid of anything. Come and see me some time."
"I might at that, Jack. Thanks. Linda Conquest, huh? I'll keep my ear flaps off."
"So long," I said. "The name?"
"They call me Shifty. I never knew why."
"So long, Shifty."
"So long. Gat under his arm--in them clothes? Not a chance."
"I don't know," I said. "He made the motion. I'm not hired to gunfight with strangers."
"Hell, that shirt he's wearing only got two buttons at the top. I noticed. Take him a week to pull a rod from under that." But he sounded faintly worried.
"I guess he was just bluffing," I agreed. "If you hear mention of Linda Conquest, I'll be glad to talk business with you."
"Okay, Jack."
I went back along the black driveway. He stood there scratching his chin.
I drove along the block looking for a place to park so that I could run up to the office for a moment before going on downtown.
A chauffeur-driven Packard edged out from the curb in front of a cigar store about thirty feet from the entrance to my building. I slid into the space, locked the car and stepped out. It was only then that I noticed the car in front of which I had parked was a familiar-looking sand-colored coupé. It didn't have to be the same one. There were thousands of them. Nobody was in it. Nobody was near it that wore a cocoa straw hat with a brown and yellow band.
I went around to the street side and looked at the steering post. No license holder. I wrote the license plate number down on the back of an envelope, just in case, and went on into my building. He wasn't in the lobby, or in the corridor upstairs.
I went into the office, looked on the floor for mail, didn't find any, bought myself a short drink out of the office bottle and left. I didn't have any time to spare to get downtown before three o'clock.
The sand-colored coupé was still parked, still empty. I got into mine and started up and moved out into the traffic stream.
I was below Sunset on Vine before he picked me up. I kept on going, grinning, and wondering where he had hid. Perhaps in the car parked behind his own. I hadn't thought of that.
I drove south to Third and all the way downtown on Third. The sand-colored coupé kept half a block behind me all the way. I moved over to Seventh and Grand, parked near Seventh and Olive, stopped to buy cigarettes I didn't need, and then walked east along Seventh without looking behind me. At Spring I went into the Hotel Metropole, strolled over to the big horseshoe cigar counter to light one of my cigarettes and then sat down in one of the old brown leather chairs in the lobby.
A blond man in a brown suit, dark glasses and the now familiar hat came into the lobby and moved unobtrusively among the potted palms and the stucco arches to the cigar counter. He bought a package of cigarettes and broke it open standing there, using the time to lean his back against the counter and give the lobby the benefit of his eagle eye.
He picked up his change and went over and sat down with his back to a pillar. He tipped his hat down over his dark glasses and seemed to go to sleep with an unlighted cigarette between his lips.
I got up and wandered over and dropped into the chair beside him. I looked at him sideways. He didn't move. Seen at close quarters his face seemed young and pink and plump and the blond beard on his chin was very carelessly shaved. Behind the dark glasses his eyelashes flicked up and down rapidly. A hand on his knee tightened and pulled the cloth into wrinkles. There was a wart on his cheek just below the right eyelid.
I struck a match and held the flame to his cigarette. "Light?"
"Oh--thanks," he said, very surprised. He drew breath in until the cigarette tip glowed. I shook the match out, tossed it into the sand jar at my elbow and waited. He looked at me sideways several times before he spoke.
"Haven't I seen you somewhere before?"
"Over on Dresden Avenue in Pasadena. This morning."
I could see his cheeks get pinker than they had been. He sighed.
"I must be lousy," he said.
"Boy, you stink," I agreed.
"Maybe it's the hat," he said.
"The hat helps," I said. "But you don't really need it."
"It's a pretty tough dollar in this town," he said sadly. "You can't do it on foot, you ruin yourself with taxi fares if you use taxis, and if you use your own car, it's always where you can't get to it fast enough. You have to stay too close."
"But you don't have to climb in a guy's pocket," I said. "Did you want something with me or are you just practising?"
"I figured I'd find out if you were smart enough to be worth talking to."
"I'm very smart," I said. "It would be a shame not to talk to me."
He looked carefully around back of his chair and on both sides of where we were sitting and then drew a small, pigskin wallet out. He handed me a nice fresh card from it. It read: George Anson Phillips. Confidential Investigations. 212 Senger Building, 1924 North Wilcox Avenue, Hollywood. A Glenview telephone number. In the upper left hand corner there was an open eye with an eyebrow arched in surprise and very long eyelashes.
"You can't do that," I said, pointing to the eye. "That's the Pinkerton's. You'll be stealing their business."
"Oh hell," he said, "what little I get wouldn't bother them." I snapped the card on my fingernail and bit down hard on my teeth and slipped the card into my pocket.
"You want one of mine--or have you completed your file on me?"
"Oh, I know all about you," he said. "I was a deputy at Ventura the time you were working on the Gregson case."
Gregson was a con man from Oklahoma City who was followed all over the United States for two years by one of his victims until he got so jittery that he shot up a service station attendant who mistook him for an acquaintance. It seemed a long time ago to me.
I said: "Go on from there."
"I remembered your name when I saw it on your registration this a.m. So when I lost you on the way into town I just looked you up. I was going to come in and talk, but it would have been a violation of confidence. This way I kind of can't help myself."
Another screwball. That made three in one day, not counting Mrs. Murdock, who might turn out to be a screwball too.
I waited while he took his dark glasses off and polished them and put them on again and gave the neighborhood the once over again. Then he said:
"I figured we could maybe make a deal. Pool our resources, as they say. I saw the guy go into your office, so I figured he had hired you."
"You knew who he was?"
"I'm working on him," he said, and his voice sounded flat and discouraged. "And where I am getting is no place at all."
"What did he do to you?"
"Well, I'm working for his wife."
"Divorce?"
He looked all around him carefully and said in a small voice: "So she says. But I wonder."
"They both want one," I said. "Each trying to get something on the other. Comical, isn't it?"
"My end I don't like so well. A guy is tailing me around some of the time. A very tall guy with a funny eye. I shake him but after a while I see him again. A very tall guy. Like a lamppost."
A very tall man with a funny eye. I smoked thoughtfully. "Anything to do with you?" the blond man asked me a little anxiously.
I shook my head and threw my cigarette into the sand jar. "Never saw him that I know of." I looked at my strap watch. "We better get together and talk this thing over properly, but I can't do it now. I have an appointment."
"I'd like to," he said. "Very much."
"Let's then. My office, my apartment, or your office, or where?"
He scratched his badly shaved chin with a well-chewed thumbnail.
"My apartment," he said at last. "It's not in the phone book. Give me that card a minute."
He turned it over on his palm when I gave it to him and wrote slowly with a small metal pencil, moving his tongue along his lips. He was getting younger every minute. He didn't seem much more than twenty by now, but he had to be, because the Gregson case had been six years back.
He put his pencil away and handed me back the card. The address he had written on it was 204 Florence Apartments, 128 Court Street.
I looked at him curiously. "Court Street on Bunker Hill?"
He nodded, flushing all over his blond skin. "Not too good," he said quickly. "I haven't been in the chips lately. Do you mind?"
"No, why would I?"
I stood up and held a hand out. He shook it and dropped it and I pushed it down into my hip pocket and rubbed the palm against the handkerchief I had there. Looking at his face more closely I saw that there was a line of moisture across his upper lip and more of it along the side of his nose. It was not as hot as all that.
I started to move off and then I turned back to lean down close to his face and say: "Almost anybody can pull my leg, but just to make sure, she's a tall blond with careless eyes, huh?"
"I wouldn't call them careless," he said.
I held my face together while I said: "And just between the two of us this divorce stuff is a lot of hooey. It's something else entirely, isn't it?"
"Yes," he said softly, "and something I don't like more every minute I think about it. Here."
He pulled something out of his pocket and dropped it into my hand. It was a flat key.
"No need for you to wait around in the hall, if I happen to be out. I have two of them. What time would you think you would come?"
"About four-thirty, the way it looks now. You sure you want to give me this key?"
"Why, we're in the same racket," he said, looking up at me innocently, or as innocently as he could look through a pair of dark glasses.
At the edge of the lobby I looked back. He sat there peacefully, with the half-smoked cigarette dead between his lips and the gaudy brown and yellow band on his hat looking as quiet as a cigarette ad on the back page of the Saturday Evening Post.
We were in the same racket. So I wouldn't chisel him. Just like that. I could have the key to his apartment and go in and make myself at home. I could wear his slippers and drink his liquor and lift up his carpet and count the thousand dollar bills under it. We were in the same racket.
The Belfont Building was eight stories of nothing in particular that had got itself pinched off between a large green and chromium cut rate suit emporium and a three-story and basement garage that made a noise like lion cages at feeding time. The small dark narrow lobby was as dirty as a chicken yard. The building directory had a lot of vacant space on it. Only one of the names meant anything to me and I knew that one already. Opposite the directory a large sign tilted against the fake marble wall said: Space for Renting Suitable for Cigar Stand. Apply Room 316.
There were two open-grill elevators but only one seemed to be running and that not busy. An old man sat inside it slack-jawed and watery-eyed on a piece of folded burlap on top of a wooden stool. He looked as if he had been sitting there since the Civil War and had come out of that badly.
I got in with him and said eight, and he wrestled the doors shut and cranked his buggy and we dragged upwards lurching. The old man breathed hard, as if he was carrying the elevator on his back.
I got out at my floor and started along the hallway and behind me the old man leaned out of the car and blew his nose with his fingers into a carton full of floor sweepings.
Elisha Morningstar's office was at the back, opposite the firedoor. Two rooms, both lettered in flaked black paint on pebbled glass. Elisha Morningstar. Numismatist. The one farthest back said: Entrance.
I turned the knob and went into a small narrow room with two windows, a shabby little typewriter desk, closed, a number of wall cases of tarnished coins in tilted slots with yellowed typewritten labels under them, two brown filing cases at the back against the wall, no curtains at the windows, and a dust gray floor carpet so threadbare that you wouldn't notice the rips in it unless you tripped over one.
An inner wooden door was open at the back across from the filing cases, behind the little typewriter desk. Through the door came the small sounds a man makes when he isn't doing anything at all. Then the dry voice of Elisha Morningstar called out:
"Come in, please. Come in."
I went along and in. The inner office was just as small but had a lot more stuff in it. A green safe almost blocked off the front half. Beyond this a heavy old mahogany table against the entrance door held some dark books, some flabby old magazines, and a lot of dust. In the back wall a window was open a few inches, without effect on the musty smell. There was a hatrack with a greasy black felt hat on it. There were three long-legged tables with glass tops and more coins under the glass tops. There was a heavy dark leather-topped desk midway of the room. It had the usual desk stuff on it, and in addition a pair of jeweller's scales under a glass dome and two large nickel-framed magnifying glasses and a jeweller's eyepiece lying on a buff scratch pad, beside a cracked yellow silk handkerchief spotted with ink.
In the swivel chair at the desk sat an elderly party in a dark gray suit with high lapels and too many buttons down the front. He had some stringy white hair that grew long enough to tickle his ears. A pale gray bald patch loomed high up in the middle of it, like a rock above timberline. Fuzz grew out of his ears, far enough to catch a moth.
He had sharp black eyes with a pair of pouches under each eye, brownish purple in color and traced with a network of wrinkles and veins. His cheeks were shiny and his short sharp nose looked as if it had hung over a lot of quick ones in its time. A Hoover collar which no decent laundry would have allowed on the premises nudged his Adam's apple and a black string tie poked a small hard knot out at the bottom of the collar, like a mouse getting ready to come out of a mousehole.
He said: "My young lady had to go to the dentist. You are Mr. Marlowe?"
I nodded.
"Pray, be seated." He waved a thin hand at the chair across the desk. I sat down. "You have some identification, I presume?"
I showed it to him. While he read it I smelled him from across the desk. He had a sort of dry musty smell, like a fairly clean Chinaman.
He placed my card face down on top of his desk and folded his hands on it. His sharp black eyes didn't miss anything in my face.
"Well, Mr. Marlowe, what can I do for you?"
"Tell me about the Brasher Doubloon."
"Ah, yes," he said. "The Brasher Doubloon. An interesting coin." He lifted his hands off the desk and made a steeple of the fingers, like an old time family lawyer getting set for a little tangled grammar. "In some ways the most interesting and valuable of all early American coins. As no doubt you know."
"What I don't know about early American coins you could almost crowd into the Rose Bowl."
"Is that so?" he said. "Is that so? Do you want me to tell you?"
"What I'm here for, Mr. Morningstar."
"It is a gold coin, roughly equivalent to a twenty-dollar gold piece, and about the size of a half dollar. Almost exactly. It was made for the State of New York in the year 1787. It was not minted. There were no mints until 1793, when the first mint was opened in Philadelphia. The Brasher Doubloon was coined probably by the pressure molding process and its maker was a private goldsmith named Ephraim Brasher, or Brashear. Where the name survives it is usually spelled Brashear, but not on the coin. I don't know why."
I got a cigarette into my mouth and lit it. I thought it might do something to the musty smell. "What's the pressure molding process?"
"The two halves of the mold were engraved in steel, in intaglio, of course. These halves were then mounted in lead. Gold blanks were pressed between them in a coin press. Then the edges were trimmed for weight and smoothed. The coin was not milled. There were no milling machines in 1787."
"Kind of a slow process," I said.
He nodded his peaked white head. "Quite. And, since the surface-hardening of steel without distortion could not be accomplished at that time, the dies wore and had to be remade from time to time. With consequent slight variations in design which would be visible under strong magnification. In fact it would be safe to say no two of the coins would be identical, judged by modern methods of microscopic examination. Am I clear?"
"Yeah," I said. "Up to a point. How many of these coins are there and what are they worth?"
He undid the steeple of fingers and put his hands back on the desk top and patted them gently up and down.
"I don't know how many there are. Nobody knows. A few hundred, a thousand, perhaps more. But of these very few indeed are uncirculated specimens in what is called mint condition. The value varies from a couple of thousand on up. I should say that at the present time, since the devaluation of the dollar, an uncirculated specimen, carefully handled by a reputable dealer, might easily bring ten thousand dollars, or even more. It would have to have a history, of course."
I said: "Ah," and let smoke out of my lungs slowly and waved it away with the flat of my hand, away from the old party across the desk from me. He looked like a non-smoker. "And without a history and not so carefully handled--how much?"
He shrugged. "There would be the implication that the coin was illegally acquired. Stolen, or obtained by fraud. Of course it might not be so. Rare coins do turn up in odd places at odd times. In old strong boxes, in the secret drawers of desks in old New England houses. Not often, I grant you. But it happens. I know of a very valuable coin that fell out of the stuffing of a horsehair sofa which was being restored by an antique dealer. The sofa had been in the same room in the same house in Fall River, Massachusetts, for ninety years. Nobody knew how the coin got there. But generally speaking, the implication of theft would be strong. Particularly in this part of the country."
He looked at the corner of the ceiling with an absent stare. I looked at him with a not so absent stare. He looked like a man who could be trusted with a secret--if it was his own secret.
He brought his eyes down to my level slowly and said: "Five dollars, please."
I said: "Huh?"
"Five dollars, please."
"What for?"
"Don't be absurd, Mr. Marlowe. Everything I have told you is available in the public library. In Fosdyke's Register, in particular. You choose to come here and take up my time relating it to you. For this my charge is five dollars."
"And suppose I don't pay it," I said.
He leaned back and closed his eyes. A very faint smile twitched at the corners of his lips. "You will pay it," he said.
I paid it. I took the five out of my wallet and got up to lean over the desk and spread it out right in front of him, carefully. I stroked the bill with my fingertips, as if it was a kitten.
"Five dollars, Mr. Morningstar," I said.
He opened his eyes and looked at the bill. He smiled.
"And now," I said, "let's talk about the Brasher Doubloon that somebody tried to sell you."
He opened his eyes a little wider. "Oh, did somebody try to sell me a Brasher Doubloon? Now why would they do that?"
"They needed the money," I said. "And they didn't want too many questions asked. They knew or found out that you were in the business and that the building where you had your office was a shabby dump where anything could happen. They knew your office was at the end of a corridor and that you were an elderly man who would probably not make any false moves--out of regard for your health."
"They seem to have known a great deal," Elisha Morningstar said dryly.
"They knew what they had to know in order to transact their business. Just like you and me. And none of it was hard to find out."
He stuck his little finger in his ear and worked it around and brought it out with a little dark wax on it. He wiped it off casually on his coat.
"And you assume all this from the mere fact that I called up Mrs. Murdock and asked if her Brasher Doubloon was for sale?"
"Sure. She had the same idea herself. It's reasonable. Like I said over the phone to you, you would know that coin was not for sale. If you knew anything about the business at all. And I can see that you do."
He bowed, about one inch. He didn't quite smile but he looked about as pleased as a man in a Hoover collar ever looks.
"You would be offered this coin for sale," I said, "in suspicious circumstances. You would want to buy it, if you could get it cheap and had the money to handle it. But you would want to know where it came from. And even if you were quite sure it was stolen, you could still buy it, if you could get it cheap enough."
"Oh, I could, could I?" He looked amused, but not in a large way.
"Sure you could--if you are a reputable dealer. I'll assume you are. By buying the coin--cheap--you would be protecting the owner or his insurance carrier from complete loss. They'd be glad to pay you back your outlay. It's done all the time."
"Then the Murdock Brasher has been stolen," he said abruptly. "Don't quote me," I said. "It's a secret."
He almost picked his nose this time. He just caught himself. He picked a hair out of one nostril instead, with a quick jerk and a wince. He held it up and looked at it. Looking at me past it he said:
"And how much will your principal pay for the return of the coin?"
I leaned over the desk and gave him my shady leer. "One grand. What did you pay?"
"I think you are a very smart young man," he said. Then he screwed his face up and his chin wobbled and his chest began to bounce in and out and a sound came out of him like a convalescent rooster learning to crow again after a long illness.
He was laughing.
It stopped after a while. His face came all smooth again and his eyes, opened, black and sharp and shrewd.
"Eight hundred dollars," he said. "Eight hundred dollars for an uncirculated specimen of the Brasher Doubloon." He chortled.
"Fine. Got it with you? That leaves you two hundred. Fair enough. A quick turnover, a reasonable profit and no trouble for anybody."
"It is not in my office," he said. "Do you take me for a fool?" He reached an ancient silver watch out of his vest on a black fob. He screwed up his eyes to look at it. "Let us say eleven in the morning," he said. "Come back with your money. The coin may or may not be here, but if I am satisfied with your behavior, I will arrange matters."
"That is satisfactory," I said, and stood up. "I have to get the money anyhow."
"Have it in used bills," he said almost dreamily. "Used twenties will do. An occasional fifty will do no harm."
I grinned and started for the door. Halfway there I turned around and went back to lean both hands on the desk and push my face over it.
"What did she look like?"
He looked blank.
"The girl that sold you the coin."
He looked blanker.
"Okay," I said. "It wasn't a girl. She had help. It was a man. What did the man look like?"
He pursed his lips and made another steeple with his fingers. "He was a middle-aged man, heavy set, about five feet seven inches tall and weighing around one hundred and seventy pounds. He said his name was Smith. He wore a blue suit, black shoes, a green tie and shirt, no hat. There was a brown bordered handkerchief in his outer pocket. His hair was dark brown sprinkled with gray. There was a bald patch about the size of a dollar on the crown of his head and a scar about two inches long running down the side of his jaw. On the left side, I think. Yes, on the left side."
"Not bad," I said. "What about the hole in his right sock?"
"I omitted to take his shoes off."
"Darn careless of you," I said.
He didn't say anything. We just stared at each other, half curious, half hostile, like new neighbors. Then suddenly he went into his laugh again.
The five dollar bill I had given him was still lying on his side of the desk. I flicked a hand across and took it.
"You won't want this now," I said. "Since we started talking in thousands."
He stopped laughing very suddenly. Then he shrugged.
"At eleven a.m.," he said. "And no tricks, Mr. Marlowe. Don't think I don't know how to protect myself."
"I hope you do," I said, "because what you are handling is dynamite."
I left him and tramped across the empty outer office and opened the door and let it shut, staying inside. There ought to be footsteps outside in the corridor, but his transom was closed and I hadn't made much noise coming on crepe rubber soles. I hoped he would remember that. I sneaked back across the threadbare carpet and edged in behind the door, between the door and the little closed typewriter desk. A kid trick, but once in a while it will work, especially after a lot of smart conversation, full of worldliness and sly wit. Like a sucker play in football. And if it didn't work this time, we would just be there sneering at each other again.
It worked. Nothing happened for a while except that a nose was blown. Then all by himself in there he went into his sick rooster laugh again. Then a throat was cleared. Then a swivel chair squeaked, and feet walked.
A dingy white head poked into the room, about two inches past the end of the door. It hung there suspended and I went into a state of suspended animation. Then the head was drawn back and four unclean fingernails came around the edge of the door and pulled. The door closed, clicked, was shut. I started breathing again and put my ear to the wooden panel.
The swivel chair squeaked once more. The threshing sound of a telephone being dialed. I lunged across to the instrument on the little typewriter desk and lifted it. At the other end of the line the bell had started to ring. It rang six times. Then a man's voice said: "Yeah?"
"The Florence Aparments?"
"Yeah."
"I'd like to speak to Mr. Anson in Apartment two-o-four."
"Hold the wire. I'll see if he's in."
Mr. Morningstar and I held the wire. Noise came over it, the blaring sound of a loud radio broadcasting a baseball game. It was not close to the telephone, but it was noisy enough.
Then I could hear the hollow sound of steps coming nearer and the harsh rattle of the telephone receiver being picked up and the voice said:
"Not in. Any message?"
"I'll call later," Mr. Morningstar said.
I hung up fast and did a rapid glide across the floor to the entrance door and opened it very silently, like snow falling, and let it close the same way, taking its weight at the last moment, so that the click of the catch would not have been heard three feet away.
I breathed hard and tight going down the hall, listening to myself. I pushed the elevator button. Then I got out the card which Mr. George Anson Phillips had given me in the lobby of the Hotel Metropole. I didn't look at it in any real sense. I didn't have to look at it to recall that it referred to Apartment 204, Florence Apartments, 128 Court Street. I just stood there flicking it with a fingernail while the old elevator came heaving up in the shaft, straining like a gravel truck on a hairpin turn.
The time was three-fifty.
Bunker Hill is old town, lost town, shabby town, crook town. Once, very long ago, it was the choice residential district of the city, and there are still standing a few of the jigsaw Gothic mansions with wide porches and walls covered with round-end shingles and full corner bay windows with spindle turrets. They are all rooming houses now, their parquetry floors are scratched and worn through the once glossy finish and the wide sweeping staircases are dark with time and with cheap varnish laid on over generations of dirt. In the tall rooms haggard landladies bicker with shifty tenants. On the wide cool front porches, reaching their cracked shoes into the sun, and staring at nothing, sit the old men with faces like lost battles.
In and around the old houses there are flyblown restaurants and Italian fruitstands and cheap apartment houses and little candy stores where you can buy even nastier things than their candy. And there are ratty hotels where nobody except people named Smith and Jones sign the register and where the night clerk is half watchdog and half pander.
Out of the apartment houses come women who should be young but have faces like stale beer; men with pulled-down hats and quick eyes that look the street over behind the cupped hand that shields the match flame; worn intellectuals with cigarette coughs and no money in the bank; fly cops with granite faces and unwavering eyes; cokies and coke peddlers; people who look like nothing in particular and know it, and once in a while even men that actually go to work. But they come out early, when the wide cracked sidewalks are empty and still have dew on them.
I was earlier than four-thirty getting over there, but not much. I parked at the end of the street, where the funicular railway comes struggling up the yellow clay bank from Hill Street, and walked along Court Street to the Florence Apartments. It was dark brick in front, three stories, the lower windows at sidewalk level and masked by rusted screens and dingy net curtains. The entrance door had a glass panel and enough of the name left to be read. I opened it and went down three brass bound steps into a hallway you could touch on both sides without stretching. Dim doors painted with numbers in dim paint. An alcove at the foot of the stairs with a pay telephone. A sign: Manager Apt. 106. At the back of the hallway a screen door and in the alley beyond it four tall battered garbage pails in a line, with a dance of flies in the sunlit air above them.
I went up the stairs. The radio I had heard over the telephone was still blatting the baseball game. I read numbers and went up front. Apartment 204 was on the right side and the baseball game was right across the hall from it. I knocked, got no answer and knocked louder. Behind my back three Dodgers struck out against a welter of synthetic crowd noise. I knocked a third time and looked out of the front hall window while I felt in my pocket for the key George Anson Phillips had given me.
Across the street was an Italian funeral home, neat and quiet and reticent, white painted brick, flush with the sidewalk. Pietro Palermo Funeral Parlors. The thin green script of a neon sign lay across its façade, with a chaste air. A tall man in dark clothes came out of the front door and leaned against the white wall. He looked very handsome. He had dark skin and a handsome head of iron-gray hair brushed back from his forehead. He got out what looked at that distance to be a silver or platinum and black enamel cigarette case, opened it languidly with two long brown fingers and selected a gold-tipped cigarette. He put the case away and lit the cigarette with a pocket lighter that seemed to match the case. He put that away and folded his arms and stared at nothing with half-closed eyes. From the tip of his motionless cigarette a thin wisp of smoke rose straight up past his face, as thin and straight as the smoke of a dying campfire at dawn.
Another batter struck out or flied out behind my back in the recreated ball game. I turned from watching the tall Italian, put the key into the door of Apartment 204 and went in.
A square room with a brown carpet, very little furniture and that not inviting. The wall bed with the usual distorting mirror faced me as I opened the door and made me look like a two-time loser sneaking home from a reefer party. There was a birchwood easy chair with some hard looking upholstery beside it in the form of a davenport. A table before the window held a lamp with a shirred paper shade. There was a door on either side of the bed.
The door to the left led into a small kitchenette with a brown woodstone sink and a three-burner stove and an old electric icebox that clicked and began to throb in torment just as I pushed the door open. On the woodstone drain board stood the remains of somebody's breakfast, mud at the bottom of a cup, a burnt crust of bread, crumbs on a board, a yellow slime of melted butter down the slope of a saucer, a smeared knife and a granite coffee pot that smelled like sacks in a hot barn.
I went back around the wall bed and through the other door. It gave on a short hallway with an open space for clothes and a built-in dresser. On the dresser was a comb and a black brush with a few blond hairs in its black bristles. Also a can of talcum, a small flashlight with a cracked lens, a pad of writing paper, a bank pen, a bottle of ink on a blotter, cigarettes and matches in a glass ashtray that contained half a dozen stubs.
In the drawers of the dresser were about what one suitcase would hold in the way of socks and underclothes and handkerchiefs. There was a dark gray suit on a hanger, not new but still good, and a pair of rather dusty black brogues on the floor under it.
I pushed the bathroom door. It opened about a foot and then stuck. My nose twitched and I could feel my lips stiffen and I smelled the harsh sharp bitter smell from beyond the door. I leaned against it. It gave a little, but came back, as though somebody was holding it against me. I poked my head through the opening.
The floor of the bathroom was too short for him, so his knees were poked up and hung outwards slackly and his head was pressed against the woodstone baseboard at the other end, not tilted up, but jammed tight. His brown suit was rumpled a little and his dark glasses stuck out of his breast pocket at an unsafe angle. As if that mattered. His right hand was thrown across his stomach, his left hand lay on the floor, palm up, the fingers curled a little. There was a blood-caked bruise on the right side of his head, in the blond hair. His open mouth was full of shiny crimson blood.
The door was stopped by his leg. I pushed hard and edged around it and got in. I bent down to push two fingers into the side of his neck against the big artery. No artery throbbed there, or even whispered. Nothing at all. The skin was icy. It couldn't have been icy. I just thought it was. I straightened up and leaned my back against the door and made hard fists in my pockets and smelled the cordite fumes. The baseball game was still going on, but through two closed doors it sounded remote.
I stood and looked down at him. Nothing in that, Marlowe, nothing at all. Nothing for you here, nothing. You didn't even know him. Get out, get out fast.
I pulled away from the door and pulled it open and went back through the hall into the living room. A face in the mirror looked at me. A strained, leering face. I turned away from it quickly and took out the flat key George Anson Phillips had given me and rubbed it between my moist palms and laid it down beside the lamp.
I smeared the doorknob opening the door and the outside knob closing the door. The Dodgers were ahead seven to three, the first half of the eighth. A lady who sounded well on with her drinking was singing Frankie and Johnny, the roundhouse version, in a voice that even whiskey had failed to improve. A deep man's voice growled at her to shut up and she kept on singing and there was a hard quick movement across the floor and a smack and a yelp and she stopped singing and the baseball game went right on.
I put the cigarette in my mouth and lit it and went back down the stairs and stood in the half dark of the hall angle looking at the little sign that read: Manager, Apt. 106.
I was a fool even to look at it. I looked at it for a long minute, biting the cigarette hard between my teeth.
I turned and walked down the hallway towards the back. A small enameled plate on a door said: Manager. I knocked on the door.
A chair was pushed back, feet shuffled, the door opened.
"You the manager?"
"Yeah." It was the same voice I had heard over the telephone. Talking to Elisha Morningstar.
He held an empty smeared glass in his hand. It looked as if somebody had been keeping goldfish in it. He was a lanky man with carroty short hair growing down to a point on his forehead. He had a long narrow head packed with shabby cunning. Greenish eyes stared under orange eyebrows. His ears were large and might have flapped in a high wind. He had a long nose that would be into things. The whole face was a trained face, a face that would know how to keep a secret, a face that held the effortless composure of a corpse in the morgue.
He wore his vest open, no coat, a woven hair watchguard, and round blue sleeve garters with metal clasps.
I said: "Mr. Anson?"
"Two-o-four."
"He's not in."
"What should I do--lay an egg?"
"Neat," I said. "You have them all the time, or is this your birthday?"
"Beat it," he said. "Drift." He started to close the door. He opened it again to say: "Take the air. Scram. Push off" Having made his meaning clear he started to close the door again.
I leaned against the door. He leaned against it on his side. That brought our faces close together. "Five bucks," I said.
It rocked him. He opened the door very suddenly and I had to take a quick step forward in order not to butt his chin with my head.
"Come in," he said.
A living room with a wallbed, everything strictly to specifications, even to the shirred paper lampshade and the glass ashtray. This room was painted egg-yolk yellow. All it needed was a few fat black spiders painted on the yellow to be anybody's bilious attack.
"Sit down," he said, shutting the door.
I sat down. We looked at each other with the clear innocent eyes of a couple of used car salesmen.
"Beer?" he said.
"Thanks."
He opened two cans, filled the smeared glass he had been holding, and reached for another like it. I said I would drink out of the can. He handed me the can.
"A dime," he said.
I gave him a dime.
He dropped it into his vest and went on looking at me. He pulled a chair over and sat in it and spread his bony upjutting knees and let his empty hand droop between them.
"I ain't interested in your five bucks," he said.
"That's fine," I said. "I wasn't really thinking of giving it to you."
"A wisey," he said. "What gives? We run a nice respectable place here. No funny stuff gets pulled."
"Quiet too," I said. "Upstairs you could almost hear an eagle scream."
His smile was wide, about three quarters of an inch. "I don't amuse easy," he said.
"Just like Queen Victoria," I said.
"I don't get it."
"I don't expect miracles," I said. The meaningless talk had a sort of cold bracing effect on me, making a mood with a hard gritty edge.
I got my wallet out and selected a card from it. It wasn't my card. It read: James B. Pollock, Reliance Indemnity Company, Field Agent. I tried to remember what James B. Pollock looked like and where I had met him. I couldn't. I handed the carroty man the card.
He read it and scratched the end of his nose with one of the corners. "Wrong john?" he asked, keeping his green eyes plastered to my face.
"Jewelry," I said and waved a hand.
He thought this over. While he thought it over I tried to make up my mind whether it worried him at all. It didn't seem to.
"We get one once in a while," he conceded. "You can't help it. He didn't look like it to me, though. Soft looking."
"Maybe I got a bum steer," I said. I described George Anson Phillips to him, George Anson Phillips alive, in his brown suit and his dark glasses and his cocoa straw hat with the brown and yellow print band. I wondered what had happened to the hat. It hadn't been up there. He must have got rid of it, thinking it was too conspicuous. His blond head was almost, but not quite, as bad.
"That sound like him?"
The carroty man took his time making up his mind. Finally he nodded yes, green eyes watching me carefully, lean hard hand holding the card up to his mouth and running the card along his teeth like a stick along the palings of a picket fence.
"I didn't figure him for no crook," he said. "But hell, they come all sizes and shapes. Only been here a month. If he looked like a wrong gee, wouldn't have been here at all."
I did a good job of not laughing in his face. "What say we frisk the apartment while he's out?"
He shook his head. "Mr. Palermo wouldn't like it."
"Mr. Palermo?"
"He's the owner. Across the street. Owns the funeral parlors. Owns this building and a lot of other buildings. Practically owns the district, if you know what I mean." He gave me a twitch of the lip and a flutter of the right eyelid. "Gets the vote out. Not a guy to crowd."
"Well, while he's getting the vote out or playing with a stiff or whatever he's doing at the moment, let's go up and frisk the apartment."
"Don't get me sore at you," the carroty man said briefly.
"That would bother me like two per cent of nothing at all," I said. "Let's go up and frisk the apartment." I threw my empty beer can at the waste basket and watched it bounce back and roll half way across the room.
The carroty man stood up suddenly and spread his feet apart and dusted his hands together and took hold of his lower lip with his teeth.
"You said something about five," he shrugged.
"That was hours ago," I said. "I thought better of it. Let's go up and frisk the apartment."
"Say that just once more--" his right hand slid towards his hip.
"If you're thinking of pulling a gun, Mr. Palermo wouldn't like it," I said.
"To hell with Mr. Palermo," he snarled, in a voice suddenly furious, out of a face suddenly charged with dark blood.
"Mr. Palermo will be glad to know that's how you feel about him," I said.
"Look," the carroty man said very slowly, dropping his hand to his side and leaning forward from the hips and pushing his face at me as hard as he could. "Look. I was sitting here having myself a beer or two. Maybe three. Maybe nine. What the hell? I wasn't bothering anybody. It was a nice day. It looked like it might be a nice evening--Then you come in." He waved a hand violently.
"Let's go up and frisk the apartment," I said.
He threw both fists forward in tight lumps. At the end of the motion he threw his hands wide open, straining the fingers as far as they would go. His nose twitched sharply.
"If it wasn't for the job," he said.
I opened my mouth. "Don't say it!" he yelled.
He put a hat on, but no coat, opened a drawer and took out a bunch of keys, walked past me to open the door and stood in it, jerking his chin at me. His face still looked a little wild.
We went out into the hall and along it and up the stairs. The ball game was over and dance music had taken its place. Very loud dance music. The carroty man selected one of his keys and put it in the lock of Apartment 204. Against the booming of the dance band behind us in the apartment across the way a woman's voice suddenly screamed hysterically.
The carroty man withdrew the key and bared his teeth at me. He walked across the narrow hallway and banged on the opposite door. He had to knock hard and long before any attention was paid. Then the door was jerked open and a sharp-faced blond in scarlet slacks and a green pullover stared out with sultry eyes, one of which was puffed and the other had been socked several days ago. She also had a bruise on her throat and her hand held a tall cool glass of amber fluid.
"Pipe down, but soon," the carroty man said. "Too much racket. I don't aim to ask you again. Next time I call some law."
The girl looked back over her shoulder and screamed against the noise of the radio: "Hey, Del! The guy says to pipe down! You wanna sock him?"
A chair squeaked, the radio noise died abruptly and a thick bitter-eyed dark man appeared behind the blond, yanked her out of the way with one hand and pushed his face at us. He needed a shave. He was wearing pants, street shoes and an undershirt.
He settled his feet in the doorway, whistled a little breath in through his nose and said:
"Buzz off. I just come in from lunch. I had a lousy lunch. I wouldn't want nobody to push muscle at me." He was very drunk, but in a hard practised sort of way.
The carroty man said: "You heard me, Mr. Hench. Dim that radio and stop the roughhouse in here. And make it sudden."
The man addressed as Hench said: "Listen, picklepuss--" and heaved forward with his right foot in a hard stamp.
The carroty man's left foot didn't wait to be stamped on. The lean body moved back quickly and the thrown bunch of keys hit the floor behind, and clanked against the door of Apartment 204. The carroty man's right hand made a sweeping movement and came up with a woven leather blackjack.
Hench said: "Yah!" and took two big handfuls of air in his two hairy hands, closed the hands into fists and swung hard at nothing.
The carroty man hit him on the top of his head and the girl screamed again and threw a glass of liquor in her boy friend's face. Whether because it was safe to do it now or because she made an honest mistake, I couldn't tell.
Hench turned blindly with his face dripping, stumbled and ran across the floor in a lurch that threatened to land him on his nose at every step. The bed was down and tumbled. Hench made the bed on one knee and plunged a hand under the pillow.
I said: "Look out--gun."
"I can fade that too," the carroty man said between his teeth and slid his right hand, empty now, under his open vest.
Hench was down on both knees. He came up on one and turned and there was a short black gun in his right hand and he was staring down at it, not holding it by the grip at all, holding it flat on his palm.
"Drop it!" the carroty man's voice said tightly and he went on into the room.
The blond promptly jumped on his back and wound her long green arms around his neck, yelling lustily. The carroty man staggered and swore and waved his gun around.
"Get him, Del!" the blond screamed. "Get him good!" Hench, one hand on the bed and one foot on the floor, both knees doubled, right hand holding the black gun flat on his palm, eyes staring down at it, pushed himself slowly to his feet and growled deep in his throat:
"This ain't my gun."
I relieved the carroty man of the gun that was not doing him any good and stepped around him, leaving him to shake the blond off his back as best he could. A door banged down the hallway and steps came along toward us.
I said: "Drop it, Hench."
He looked up at me, puzzled dark eyes suddenly sober. "It ain't my gun," he said and held it out flat. "Mine's a Colt .32--belly gun."
I took the gun off his hand. He made no effort to stop me. He sat down on the bed, rubbed the top of his head slowly, and screwed his face up in difficult thought. "Where the hell--" his voice trailed off and he shook his head and winced.
I sniffed the gun. It had been fired. I sprang the magazine out and counted the bullets through the small holes in the side. There were six. With one in the magazine, that made seven. The gun was a Colt .32, automatic, eight shot. It had been fired. If it had not been reloaded, one shot had been fired from it.
The carroty man had the blond off his back now. He had thrown her into a chair and was wiping a scratch on his cheek. His green eyes were baleful.
"Better get some law," I said. "A shot has been fired from this gun and it's about time you found out there's a dead man in the apartment across the hail."
Hench looked up at me stupidly and said in a quiet, reasonable voice: "Brother, that simply ain't my gun."
The blond sobbed in a rather theatrical manner and showed me an open mouth twisted with misery and ham acting. The carroty man went softly out of the door.
"Shot in the throat with a medium caliber gun and a softnosed bullet," Detective-Lieutenant Jesse Breeze said. "A gun like this and bullets like is in here." He danced the gun on his hand, the gun Hench had said was not his gun. "Bullet ranged upwards and probably hit the back of the skull. Still inside his head. The man's dead about two hours. Hands and face cold, but body still warm. No rigor. Was sapped with something hard before being shot. Likely with a gun butt. All that mean anything to you boys and girls?"
The newspaper he was sitting on rustled. He took his hat off and mopped his face and the top of his almost bald head. A fringe of light colored hair around the crown was damp and dark with sweat. He put his hat back on, a flat-crowned panama, burned dark by the sun. Not this year's hat, and probably not last year's.
He was a big man, rather paunch