He put out a couple of nicotined fingers. “Well, well, the old dog catcher himself. The eye that never forgets. Marlowe is the name, I believe?”
I stepped inside and waited for the door to squeak shut. A bare carpet-less room paved in brown linoleum, a flat desk and a rolltop at right angles to it, a big green safe that looked as fireproof as a delicatessen bag, two filing cases, three chairs, a built-in closet and washbowl in the corner by the door.
“Well, well, sit down,” Madder said. “Glad to see you.” He fussed around behind his desk and adjusted a burst-out seat cushion, sat on it. “Nice of you to drop around. Business?”
I sat down and put a cigarette between my teeth and looked at him. I didn’t say a word. I watched him start to sweat. It started up in his hair. Then he grabbed a pencil and made marks on his blotter. Then he looked at me with a quick darting glance, down at his blotter again. He talked—to the blotter.
“Any ideas?” he asked softly.
“About what?”
He didn’t look at me. “About how we could do a little business together. Say, in stones.”
“Who was the wren?” I asked.
“Huh? What wren?” He still didn’t look at me.
“The one that phoned me.”
“Did somebody phone you?”
I reached for his telephone, which was the old-fashioned gallows type. I lifted off the receiver and started to dial the number of Police Headquarters, very slowly. I knew he would know that number about as well as he knew his hat.
He reached over and pushed the hook down. “Now, listen,” he complained. “You’re too fast. What you calling copper for?”
I said slowly: “They want to talk to you. On account of you know a broad that knows a man had sore feet.”
“Does it have to be that way?” His collar was too tight now. He yanked at it.
“Not from my side. But if you think I’m going to sit here and let you play with my reflexes, it does.”
Madder opened a flat tin of cigarettes and pushed one past his lips with a sound like somebody gutting a fish. His hand shook.
“All right,” he said thickly. “All right. Don’t get sore.”
“Just stop trying to count clouds with me,” I growled. “Talk sense. If you’ve’ got a job for me, it’s probably too dirty for me to touch. But I’ll at least listen.”
He nodded. He was comfortable now. He knew I was bluffing. He puffed a pale swirl of smoke and watched it float up.
“That’s all right,” he said evenly. “I play dumb myself once in a while. The thing is we’re wise. Carol saw you go to the house and leave it again. No law came.”
“Carol?”
“Carol Donovan. Friend of mine. She called you up.”
I nodded. “Go ahead.”
He didn’t say anything. He just sat there and looked at me owlishly.
I grinned and leaned across the desk a little and said: “Here’s what’s bothering you. You don’t know why I went to the house or why, having gone, I didn’t yell police. That’s easy. I thought it was a secret.”
“We’re just kidding each other,” Madder said sourly.
“All right,” I said. “Let’s talk about pearls. Does that make it any easier?”
His eyes shone. He wanted to let himself get excited, but he didn’t. He kept his voice down, said coolly: “Carol picked him up one night, the little guy. A crazy little number, full of snow, but way back in his noodle an idea. He’d talk about pearls, about an old guy up in the northwest or Canada that swiped them a long time ago and still had them. Only he wouldn’t say who the old guy was or where he was. Foxy about that. Holding out. I wouldn’t know why.”
“He wanted to get his feet burned,” I said.
Madder’s lips shook and another fine sweat showed in his hair.
“I didn’t do that,” he said thickly.
“You or Carol, what’s the odds? The little guy died. They can make murder out of it. You didn’t find out what you wanted to know. That’s why I’m here. You think I have information you didn’t get. Forget it. If I knew enough, I wouldn’t be here, and if you knew enough, you wouldn’t want me here. Check?”
He grinned, very slowly, as if it hurt him. He struggled up in his chair and dragged a deeper drawer out from the side of his desk, put a nicely molded brown bottle up on the desk, and two striped glasses. He whispered: “Two-way split. You and me. I’m cutting Carol out. She’s too damn rough, Marlowe. I’ve seen hard women, but she’s the bluing on armor plate. And you’d never think it to look at her, would you?”
“Have I seen her?”
“I guess so. She says you did.”
“Oh, the girl in the Dodge.”
He nodded, and poured two good-sized drinks, put the bottle down and stood up. “Water? I like it in mine.”
“No,” I said, “but why cut me in? I don’t know any more than you mentioned. Or very little. Certainly not as much as you must know to go that far.”
He leered across the glasses. “I know where I can get fifty grand for the Leander pearls, twice what you could get. I can give you yours and still have mine. You’ve got the front I need to work in the open. How about the water?”
“No water,” I said.
He went across to the built-in wash place and ran the water and came back with his glass half full. He sat down again, grinned, lifted it.
We drank.
5
So far I had only made four mistakes. The first was mixing in at all, even for Kathy Home’s sake. The second was staying mixed after I found Peeler Mardo dead. The third was letting Rush Madder see I knew what he was talking about. The fourth, the whiskey, was the worst.
It tasted funny even on the way down. Then there was that sudden moment of sharp lucidity when I knew, exactly as though I had seen it, that he had switched his drink for a harmless one cached in the closet.
I sat still for a moment, with the empty glass at my fingers’ ends, gathering my strength. Madder’s face began to get large and moony and vague. A fat smile jerked in and out under his Charlie Chan mustache as he watched me.
I reached back into my hip pocket and pulled out a loosely wadded handkerchief. The small sap inside it didn’t seem to show. At least Madder didn’t move, after his first grab under the coat.
I stood up and swayed forward drunkenly and smacked him square on the top of the head.
He gagged. He started to get up. I tapped him on the jaw. He became limp and his hand sweeping down from under his coat knocked his glass over on the desk top. I straightened it, stood silent, listening, struggling with a rising wave of nauseous stupor.
I went over to a communicating door and tried the knob. It was locked. I was staggering by now. I dragged an office chair to the entrance door and propped the back of it under the knob. I leaned against the door panting, gritting my teeth, cursing myself. I got handcuffs out and started back towards Madder.
A very pretty black-haired, gray-eyed girl stepped out of the clothes closet and poked a .32 at me.
She wore a blue suit cut with a lot of snap. An inverted saucer of a hat came down in a hard line across her forehead. Shiny black hair showed at the sides. Her eyes were slate-gray, cold, and yet lighthearted. Her face was fresh and young and delicate, and as hard as a chisel.
“All right, Marlowe. Lie down and sleep it off. You’re through.”
I stumbled towards her waving my sap. She shook her head. When her face moved it got large before my eyes. Its outlines changed and wobbled. The gun in her hand looked like anything from a tunnel to a toothpick.
“Don’t be a goof, Marlowe,” she said. “A few hours sleep for you, a few hours start for us. Don’t make me shoot. I would.”
“Damn you,” I mumbled. “I believe you would.”
“Right as rain, toots. I’m a lady that wants her own way. That’s fine. Sit down.”
The floor rose up and bumped me. I sat on it as on a raft in a rough sea. I braced myself on flat hands. I could h
ardly feel the floor. My hands were numb. My whole body was numb.
I tried to stare her down. “Ha-a! L-lady K-killer!” I giggled.
She threw a chilly laugh at me which I only just barely heard. Drums were beating in my head now, war drums from a far-off jungle. Waves of light were moving, and dark shadows and a rustle as of a wind in treetops. I didn’t want to lie down. I lay down.
The girl’s voice came from very far off, an elfin voice.
“Two-way split, eh? He doesn’t like my method, eh? Bless his big soft heart. We’ll see about him.”
Vaguely as I floated off I seemed to feel a dull jar that might have been a shot. I hoped she had shot Madder, but she hadn’t. She had merely helped me on my way out—with my own sap.
When I came around again it was night. Something clacked overhead with a heavy sound. Through the open window beyond the desk yellow light splashed on the high side walls of a building. The thing clacked again and the light went off. An advertising sign on the roof.
I got up off the floor like a man climbing out of thick mud. I waded over to the washbowl, sloshed water on my face, felt the top of my head and winced, waded back to the door and found the light switch.
Strewn papers lay around the desk, broken pencils, envelopes, an empty brown whiskey bottle, cigarette ends and ashes. The debris of hastily emptied drawers. I didn’t bother going through any of it. I left the office, rode down to the street in the shuddering elevator, slid into a bar and had a brandy, then got my car and drove on home.
I changed clothes, packed a bag, had some whiskey and answered the telephone. It was about nine-thirty.
Kathy Home’s voice said: “So you’re not gone yet. I hoped you wouldn’t be.”
“Alone?” I asked, still thick in the voice.
“Yes, but I haven’t been. The house has been full of coppers for hours. They were very nice, considering. Old grudge of some kind, they figured.”
“And the line is likely bugged now,” I growled. “Where was I supposed to be going?”
“Well—you know. Your girl told me.”
“Little dark girl? Very cool? Name of Carol Donovan?”
“She had your card. Why, wasn’t it—”
“I don’t have any girl,” I said grimly. “And I bet that just very casually, without thinking at all, a name slipped past your lips—the name of a town up north. Did it?”
“Ye-es,” Kathy Home admitted weakly.
I caught the night plane north.
It was a nice trip except that I had a sore head and a raging thirst for ice water.
6
The Snoqualmie Hotel in Olympia was on Capitol Way, fronting on the usual square city block of park. I left by the coffeeshop door and walked down a hill to where the last, loneliest reach of Puget Sound died and decomposed against a line of disused wharves. Corded firewood filled the foreground and old men pottered about in the middle of the stacks, or sat on boxes with pipes in their mouths and signs behind their heads reading: “Firewood and Split Kindling. Free Delivery.”
Behind them a low cliff rose and the vast pines of the north loomed against a gray-blue sky.
Two of the old men sat on boxes about twenty feet apart, ignoring each other. I drifted near one of them. He wore corduroy pants and what had been a red and black Mackinaw. His felt hat showed the sweat of twenty summers. One of his hands clutched a short black pipe, and with the grimed fingers of the other he slowly, carefully, ecstatically jerked at a long curling hair that grew out of his nose.
I set a box on end, sat down, filled my own pipe, lit it, puffed a cloud of smoke. I waved a hand at the water and said: “You’d never think that ever met the Pacific Ocean.”
He looked at me.
I said: “Dead end—quiet, restful, like your town. I like a town like this.” He went on looking at me.
“I’ll bet,” I said, “that a man that’s been around a town like this knows everybody in it and in the country near it.”
He said: “How much you bet?”
I took a silver dollar out of my pocket. They still had a few up there. The old man looked it over, nodded, suddenly yanked the long hair out of his nose and held it up against the light.
“You’d lose,” he said.
I put the dollar down on my knee. “Know anybody around here that keeps a lot of goldfish?” I asked.
He stared at the dollar. The other old man near by was wearing overalls and shoes without any laces. He stared at the dollar. They both spat at the same instant. The first old man said: “Leetle deef.” He got up slowly and went over to a shack built of old boards of uneven lengths. He went into it, banged the door.
The second old man threw his axe down pettishly, spat in the direction of the closed door and went off among the stacks of cordwood.
The door of the shack opened, the man in the Mackinaw poked his head out of it.
“Sewer crabs is all,” he said, and slammed the door again.
I put my dollar in my pocket and went back up the hill. I figured it would take too long to learn their language.
Capitol Way ran north and south. A dull green streetcar shuttled past on the way to a place called Tumwater. In the distance I could see the government buildings. Northward the street passed two hotels and some stores and branched right and left. Right went to Tacoma and Seattle. Left went over a bridge and out to the Olympic Peninsula.
Beyond this right and left turn the street suddenly became old and shabby, with broken asphalt paving, a Chinese restaurant, a boarded-up movie house, a pawnbroker’s establishment. A sign jutting over the dirty pavement said “Smoke Shop,” and in small letters underneath, as if it hoped nobody was looking, “Pool.”
I went in past a rack of gaudy magazines and a cigar showcase that had flies inside it. There was a long wooden counter on the left, a few slot machines, a single pool table. Three kids fiddled with the slot machines and a tall thin man with a long nose and no chin played pool all by himself, with a dead cigar in his face.
I sat on a stool and a hard-eyed bald-headed man behind the counter got up from a chair, wiped his hands on a thick gray apron, showed me a gold tooth.
“A little rye,” I said. “Know anybody that keeps goldfish?”
“Yeah,” he said. “No.”
He poured something behind the counter and shoved a thick glass across.
“Two bits.”
I sniffed the stuff, wrinkled my nose. “Was it the rye the ‘yeah’ was for?”
The bald-headed man held up a large bottle with a label that said something about: “Cream of Dixie Straight Rye Whiskey Guaranteed at Least Four Months Old.”
“Okey,” I said. “I see it just moved in.”
I poured some water in it and drank it. It tasted like a cholera culture. I put a quarter on the counter. The barman showed me a gold tooth on the other side of his face and took hold of the counter with two hard hands and pushed his chin at me.
“What was that crack?” he asked, almost gently.
“I just moved in,” I said. “I’m looking for some goldfish for the front window. Goldfish.”
The barman said very slowly: “Do I look like a guy would know a guy would have goldfish?” His face was a little white.
The long-nosed man who had been playing himself a round of pool racked his cue and strolled over to the counter beside me and threw a nickel on it.
“Draw me a Coke before you wet yourself,” he told the barman.
The barman pried himself loose from the counter with a good deal of effort. I looked down to see if his fingers had made any dents in the wood. He drew a Coke, stirred it with a swizzlestick, dumped it on the bar top, took a deep breath and let it out through his nose, grunted and went away towards a door marked “Toilet.”
The long-nosed man lifted his Coke and looked into the smeared mirror behind the bar. The left side of his mouth twitched briefly. A dim voice came from it, saying: “How’s Peeler?”
I pressed my thumb and forefinger together,
put them to my nose, sniffed, shook my head sadly.
“Hitting it high, huh?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I didn’t catch the name.”
“Call me Sunset. I’m always movin’ west. Think he’ll stay clammed?”
“He’ll stay clammed,” I said.
“What’s your handle?”
“Dodge Willis, El Paso,” I said.
“Got a room somewhere?”
“Hotel.”
He put his glass down empty. “Let’s dangle.”
7
We went up to my room and sat down and looked at each other over a couple of glasses of Scotch and ice water. Sunset studied me with his close-set expressionless eyes, a little at a time, but very thoroughly in the end, adding it all up.
I sipped my drink and waited. At last he said in his lipless “stir” voice: “How come Peeler didn’t come hisself?”
“For the same reason he didn’t stay when he was here.”
“Meaning which?”
“Figure it out for yourself,” I said.
He nodded, just as though I had said something with a meaning. Then: “What’s the top price?”
“Twenty-five grand.”
“Nuts.” Sunset was emphatic, even rude.
I leaned back and lit a cigarette, puffed smoke at the open window and watched the breeze pick it up and tear it to pieces.
“Listen,” Sunset complained. “I don’t know you from last Sunday’s sports section. You may be all to the silk. I just don’t know.”
“Why’d you brace me?” I asked.
“You had the word, didn’t you?”
This was where I took the dive. I grinned at him. “Yeah. Goldfish was the password. The Smoke Shop was the place.”
His lack of expression told me I was right. It was one of those breaks you dream of, but don’t handle right even in dreams.
“Well, what’s the next angle?” Sunset inquired, sucking a piece of ice out of his glass and chewing on it.
I laughed. “Okey, Sunset, I’m satisfied you’re cagey. We could go on like this for weeks. Let’s put our cards on the table. Where is the old guy?”