I walked all through it. I couldn’t be bothered.
I stopped walking. I was ready to talk to somebody.
TWENTY-SIX
The closet door was locked. The heavy chair was too heavy for me. It was meant to be. I stripped the sheets and pad off the bed and dragged the mattress to one side. There was a mesh spring underneath fastened top and bottom by coil springs of black enameled metal about nine inches long. I went to work on one of them. It was the hardest work I ever did. Ten minutes later I had two bleeding fingers and a loose spring. I swung it. It had a nice balance. It was heavy. It had a whip to it.
And when this was all done I looked across at the whiskey bottle and it would have done just as well, and I had forgotten all about it.
I drank some more water. I rested a little, sitting on the side of the bare springs. Then I went over to the door and put my mouth against the hinge side and yelled:
“Fire! Fire! Fire!”
It was a short wait and a pleasant one. He came running hard along the hallway outside and his key jammed viciously into the lock and twisted hard.
The door jumped open. I was flat against the wall on the opening side. He had the sap out this time, a nice little tool about five inches long, covered with woven brown leather. His eyes popped at the stripped bed and then began to swing around.
I giggled and socked him. I laid the coil spring on the side of his head and he stumbled forward. I followed him down to his knees. I hit him twice more. He made a moaning sound. I took the sap out of his limp hand. He whined.
I used my knee on his face. It hurt my knee. He didn’t tell me whether it hurt his face. While he was still groaning I knocked him cold with the sap.
I got the key from the outside of the door and locked it from the inside and went through him. He had more keys. One of them fitted my closet. In it my clothes hung. I went through my pockets. The money was gone from my wallet. I went back to the man with the white coat. He had too much money for his job. I took what I had started with and heaved him on to the bed and strapped him wrist and ankle and stuffed half a yard of sheet into his mouth. He had a smashed nose. I waited long enough to make sure he could breathe through it.
I was sorry for him. A simple hardworking little guy trying to hold his job down and get his weekly pay check. Maybe with a wife and kids. Too bad. And all he had to help him was a sap. It didn’t seem fair. I put the doped whiskey down where he could reach it, if his hands hadn’t been strapped.
I patted his shoulder. I almost cried over him.
All my clothes, even my gun harness and gun, but no shells in the gun, hung in the closet. I dressed with fumbling fingers, yawning a great deal.
The man on the bed rested. I left him there and locked him in.
Outside was a wide silent hallway with three closed doors. No sounds came from behind any of them. A winecolored carpet crept down the middle and was as silent as the rest of the house. At the end there was a jog in the hall and then another hall at right angles and the head of a big old-fashioned staircase with white oak bannisters. It curved graciously down into the dim hall below. Two stained glass inner doors ended the lower hall. It was tessellated and thick rugs lay on it. A crack of light seeped past the edge of an almost closed door. But no sound at all.
An old house, built as once they built them and don’t build them any more. Standing probably on a quiet street with a rose arbor at the side and plenty of flowers in front. Gracious and cool and quiet in the bright California sun. And inside it who cares, but don’t let them scream too loud.
I had my foot out to go down the stairs when I heard a man cough. That jerked me around and I saw there was a half-open door along the other hallway at the end. I tiptoed along the runner. I waited, close to the partly open door, but not in it. A wedge of light lay at my feet on the carpet. The man coughed again. It was a deep cough, from a deep chest. It sounded peaceful and at ease. It was none of my business. My business was to get out of there. But any man whose door could be open in that house interested me. He would be a man of position, worth tipping your hat to. I sneaked a little into the wedge of light. A newspaper rustled.
I could see part of a room and it was furnished like a room, not like a cell. There was a dark bureau with a hat on it and some magazines. Windows with lace curtains, a good carpet.
Bed springs creaked heavily. A big guy, like his cough. I reached out fingertips and pushed the door an inch or two. Nothing happened. Nothing ever was slower than my head craning in. I saw the room now, the bed, and the man on it, the ashtray heaped with stubs that overflowed on to a night table and from that to the carpet. A dozen mangled newspapers all over the bed. One of them in a pair of huge hands before a huge face. I saw the hair above the edge of the green paper. Dark, curly—black even—and plenty of it. A line of white skin under it. The paper moved a little more and I didn’t breathe and the man on the bed didn’t look up.
He needed a shave. He would always need a shave. I had seen him before, over on Central Avenue, in a Negro dive called Florian’s. I had seen him in a old suit with white golf balls on the coat and a whiskey sour in his hand. And I had seen him with an Army Colt looking like a toy in his fist, stepping softly through a broken door. I had seen some of his work and it was the kind of work that stays done.
He coughed again and rolled his buttocks on the bed and yawned bitterly and reached sideways for a frayed pack of cigarettes on the night table. One of them went into his mouth. Light flared at the end of his thumb. Smoke came out of his nose.
“Ah,” he said, and the paper went up in front of his face again.
I left him there and went back along the side hall. Mr. Moose Malloy seemed to be in very good hands. I went back to the stairs and down.
A voice murmured behind the almost closed door. I waited for the answering voice. None. It was a telephone conversation. I went over close to the door and listened. It was a low voice, a mere murmur. Nothing carried that meant anything. There was finally a dry clicking sound.
Silence continued inside the room after that.
This was the time to leave, to go far away. So I pushed the door open and stepped quietly in.
TWENTY-SEVEN
It was an office, not small, not large, with a neat professional look. A glass-doored bookcase with heavy books inside. A first aid cabinet on the wall. A white enamel and glass sterilizing cabinet with a lot of hypodermic needles and syringes inside it being cooked. A wide flat desk with a blotter on it, a bronze paper cutter, a pen set, an appointment book, very little else, except the elbows of a man who sat brooding, with his face in his hands.
Between the spread yellow fingers I saw hair the color of wet brown sand, so smooth that it appeared to be painted on his skull. I took three more steps and his eyes must have looked beyond the desk and seen my shoes move. His head came up and he looked at me. Sunken colorless eyes in a parchment-like face. He unclasped his hands and leaned back slowly and looked at me with no expression at all.
Then he spread his hands with a sort of helpless but disapproving gesture and when they came to rest again, one of them was very close to the corner of the desk.
I took two steps more and showed him the blackjack. His index and second finger still moved towards the corner of the desk.
“The buzzer,” I said, “won’t buy you anything tonight. I put your tough boy to sleep.”
His eyes got sleepy. “You have been a very sick man, sir. A very sick man. I can’t recommend your being up and about yet.”
I said: “The right hand.” I snapped the blackjack at it. It coiled into itself like a wounded snake.
I went around the desk grinning without there being anything to grin at. He had a gun in the drawer of course. They always have a gun in the drawer and they always get it too late, if they get it at all. I took it out. It was a .38 automatic, a standard model not as good as mine, but I could use its ammunition. There didn’t seem to be any in the drawer. I started to break the magazine out of his.
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He moved vaguely, his eyes still sunken and sad.
“Maybe you’ve got another buzzer under the carpet,” I said. “Maybe it rings in the Chief’s office down at headquarters. Don’t use it. Just for an hour I’m a very tough guy. Anybody comes in that door is walking into a coffin.”
“There is no buzzer under the carpet,” he said. His voice had the slightest possible foreign accent.
I got his magazine out and my empty one and changed them. I ejected the shell that was in the chamber of his gun and let it lie. I jacked one up into the chamber of mine and went back to the other side of the desk again.
There was a spring lock on the door. I backed towards it and pushed it shut and heard the lock click. There was also a bolt. I turned that.
I went back to the desk and sat in a chair. It took my last ounce of strength.
“Whiskey,” I said.
He began to move his hands around.
“Whiskey,” I said.
He went to the medicine cabinet and got a flat bottle with a green revenue stamp on it and a glass.
“Two glasses,” I said. “I tried your whiskey once. I damn near hit Catalina Island with it.”
He brought two small glasses and broke the seal and filled the two glasses.
“You first,” I said.
He smiled faintly and raised one of the glasses.
“Your health, sir—what remains of it.” He drank. I drank. I reached for the bottle and stood it near me and waited for the heat to get to my heart. My heart began to pound, but it was back up in my chest again, not hanging on a shoelace.
“I had a nightmare,” I said. “Silly idea. I dreamed I was tied to a cot and shot full of dope and locked in a barred room. I got very weak. I slept. I had no food. I was a sick man. I was knocked on the head and brought into a place where they did that to me. They took a lot of trouble. I’m not that important.”
He said nothing. He watched me. There was a remote speculation in his eyes, as if he wondered how long I would live.
“I woke up and the room was full of smoke,” I said. “It was just a hallucination, irritation of the optic nerve or whatever a guy like you would call it. Instead of pink snakes I had smoke. So I yelled and a toughie in a white coat came in and showed me a blackjack. It took me a long time to get ready to take it away from him. I got his keys and my clothes and even took my money out of his pocket. So here I am. All cured. What were you saying?”
“I made no remark,” he said.
“Remarks want you to make them,” I said. “They have their tongues hanging out waiting to be said. This thing here—” I waved the blackjack lightly, “is a persuader. I had to borrow it from a guy.”
“Please give it to me at once,” he said with a smile you would get to love. It was like the executioner’s smile when he comes to your cell to measure you for the drop. A little friendly, a little paternal, and a little cautious at the same time. You would get to love it if there was any way you could live long enough.
I dropped the blackjack into his palm, his left palm.
“Now the gun, please,” he said softly. “You have been a very sick man, Mr. Marlowe. I think I shall have to insist that you go back to bed.”
I stared at him.
“I am Dr. Sonderborg,” he said, “and I don’t want any , nonsense.
He laid the blackjack down on the desk in front of him. His smile was as stiff as a frozen fish. His long fingers made movements like dying butterflies.
“The gun, please,” he said softly. “I advise strongly—”
“What time is it, warden?”
He looked mildly surprised. I had my wrist watch on now, but it had run down.
“It is almost midnight. Why?”
“What day is it?”
“Why, my dear sir—Sunday evening, of course.”
I steadied myself on the desk and tried to think and held the gun close enough to him so that he might try and grab it.
“That’s over forty-eight hours. No wonder I had fits. Who brought me here?”
He stared at me and his left hand began to edge towards the gun. He belonged to the Wandering Hand Society. The girls would have had a time with him.
“Don’t make me get tough,“ I whined. “Don’t make me lose my beautiful manners and my flawless English. Just tell me how I got here.”
He had courage. He grabbed for the gun. It wasn’t where he grabbed. I sat back and put it in my lap.
He reddened and grabbed for the whiskey and poured himself another drink and downed it fast. He drew a deep breath and shuddered. He didn’t like the taste of liquor. Dopers never do.
“You will be arrested at once, if you leave here,” he said sharply. “You were properly committed by an officer of the law—”
“Officers of the law can’t do it.”
That jarred him, a little. His yellowish face began to work.
“Shake it up and pour it,” I said. “Who put me in here, why and how? I’m in a wild mood tonight. I want to go dance in the foam. I hear the banshees calling. I haven’t shot a man in a week. Speak out, Dr. Fell. Pluck the antique viol, let the soft music float.”
“You are suffering from narcotic poisoning,” he said coldly. “You very nearly died. I had to give you digitalis three times. You fought, you screamed, you had to be restrained.” His words were coming so fast they were leap-frogging themselves. “If you leave my hospital in this condition, you will get into serious trouble.”
“Did you say you were a doctor—a medical doctor?”
“Certainly. I am Dr. Sonderborg, as I told you.”
“You don’t scream and fight from narcotic poisoning, doc. You just lie in a coma. Try again. And skim it. All I want is the cream. Who put me in your private funny house?”
“But—”
“But me no buts. I’ll make a sop of you. I’ll drown you in a butt of Malmsey wine. I wish I had a butt of Malmsey wine myself to drown in. Shakespeare. He knew his liquor too. Let’s have a little of our medicine.” I reached for his glass and poured us a couple more. “Get on with it, Karloff.”
“The police put you in here.”
“What police?”
“The Bay City police naturally.” His restless yellow fingers twisted his glass. “This is Bay City.”
“Oh. Did this police have a name?”
“A Sergeant Galbraith, I believe. Not a regular patrol car officer. He and another officer found you wandering outside the house in a dazed condition on Friday night. They brought you in because this place was close. I thought you were an addict who had taken an overdose. But perhaps I was wrong.”
“It’s a good story. I couldn’t prove it wrong. But why keep me here?”
He spread his restless hands. “I have told you again and again that you were a very sick man and still are. What would you expect me to do?”
“I must owe you some money then.”
He shrugged. “Naturally. Two hundred dollars.”
I pushed my chair back a little. “Dirt cheap. Try and get it.”
“If you leave here,” he said sharply, “you will be arrested at once.”
I leaned back over the desk and breathed in his face. “Not just for going out of here, Karloff. Open that wall safe.”
He stood up in a smooth lunge. “This has gone quite far enough.”
“You won’t open it?”
“I most certainly will not open it.”
“This is a gun I’m holding.”
He smiled, narrowly and bitterly.
“It’s an awful big safe,” I said. “New too. This is a fine gun. You won’t open it?”
Nothing changed in his face.
“Damn it,” I said. “When you have a gun in your hand, people are supposed to do anything you tell them to. It doesn’t work, does it?”
He smiled. His smile held a sadistic pleasure. I was slipping back. I was going to collapse.
I staggered at the desk and he waited, his lips parted softly.
I stood leaning there for a long moment, staring into his eyes. Then I grinned. The smile fell off his face like a soiled rag. Sweat stood out on his forehead.
“So long,” I said. “I leave you to dirtier hands than mine.”
I backed to the door and opened it and went out.
The front doors were unlocked. There was a roofed porch. The garden hummed with flowers. There was a white picket fence and a gate. The house was on a corner. It was a cool, moist night, no moon.
The sign on the corner said Descanso Street. Houses were lighted down the block. I listened for sirens. None came. The other sign said Twenty-third Street. I plowed over to Twenty-fifth Street and started towards the eight-hundred block. No. 819 was Anne Riordan’s number. Sanctuary.
I had walked a long time before I realized that I was still holding the gun in my hand. And I had heard no sirens.
I kept on walking. The air did me good, but the whiskey was dying, and it writhed as it died. The block had fir trees along it, and brick houses, and looked like Capitol Hill in Seattle more than Southern California.
There was a light still in No. 819. It had a white portecochère, very tiny, pressed against a tall cypress hedge. There were rose bushes in front of the house. I went up the walk. I listened before I pushed the bell. Still no sirens wailing. The bell chimed and after a little while a voice croaked through one of those electrical contraptions that let you talk with your front door locked.
“What is it, please?”
“Marlowe.”
Maybe her breath caught, maybe the electrical thing just made that sound being shut off.
The door opened wide and Miss Anne Riordan stood there in a pale green slack suit looking at me. Her eyes went wide and scared. Her face under the glare of the porchlight was suddenly pale.
“My God,” she wailed. “You look like Hamlet’s father!”
TWENTY-EIGHT
The living room had a tan figured rug, white and rose chairs, a black marble fireplace with very tall brass andirons, high bookcases built back into the walls, and rough cream drapes against the lowered venetian blinds.