“You ain’t told me why that’s something I should start screaming about.”
“Mrs. Florian—Jessie to me—said her husband left her nothing but his old clothes and a bunch of stills of the gang who worked at his joint from time to time. I plied her with liquor and she is a girl who will take a drink if she has to knock you down to get the bottle. After the third or fourth she went into her modest bedroom and threw things around and dug the bunch of stills out of the bottom of an old trunk. But I was watching her without her knowing it and she slipped one out of the packet and hid it. So after a while I snuck in there and grabbed it.”
I reached into my pocket and laid the Pierrot girl on his desk. He lifted it and stared at it and his lips quirked at the corners.
“Cute,” he said. “Cute enough. I could of used a piece of that once. Haw, haw. Velma Valento, huh? What happened to this doll?”
“Mrs. Florian says she died—but that hardly explains why she hid the photo.”
“It don’t do at that. Why did she hide it?”
“She wouldn’t tell me. In the end, after I told her about the Moose being out, she seemed to take a dislike to me. That seems impossible, doesn’t it?”
“Go on,” Nulty said.
“That’s all. I’ve told you the facts and given you the exhibit. If you can’t get somewhere on this set-up, nothing I could say would help.”
“Where would I get? It’s still a shine killing. Wait’ll we get the Moose. Hell, it’s eight years since he saw the girl unless she visited him in the pen.”
“All right,” I said. “But don’t forget he’s looking for her and he’s a man who would bear down. By the way, he was in for a bank job. That means a reward. Who got it?”
“I don’t know,” Nulty said. “Maybe I could find out. Why?”
“Somebody turned him up. Maybe he knows who. That would be another job he would give time to.” I stood up. “Well, good-by and good luck.”
“You walking out on me?”
I went over to the door. “I have to go home and take a bath and gargle my throat and get my nails manicured.”
“You ain’t sick, are you?”
“Just dirty,” I said. “Very, very dirty.”
“Well, what’s your hurry? Sit down a minute.” He leaned back and hooked his thumbs in his vest, which made him look a little more like a cop, but didn’t make him look any more magnetic.
“No hurry,” I said. “No hurry at all. There’s nothing more I can do. Apparently this Velma is dead, if Mrs. Florian is telling the truth—and I don’t at the moment know of any reason why she should lie about it. That was all I was interested in.”
“Yeah,” Nulty said suspiciously—from force of habit.
“And you have Moose Malloy all sewed up anyway, and that’s that. So I’ll just run on home now and go about the business of trying to earn a living.”
“We might miss out on the Moose,” Nulty said. “Guys get away once in a while. Even big guys.” His eyes were suspicious also, insofar as they contained any expression at all. “How much she slip you?”
“What?”
“How much this old lady slip you to lay off?”
“Lay off what?”
“Whatever it is you’re layin’ off from now on.” He moved his thumbs from his armholes and placed them together in front of his vest and pushed them against each other. He smiled.
“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” I said, and went out of the office, leaving his mouth open.
When I was about a yard from the door, I went back and opened it again quietly and looked in. He was sitting in the same position, pushing his thumbs at each other. But he wasn’t smiling any more. He looked worried. His mouth was still open.
He didn’t move or look up. I didn’t know whether he heard me or not. I shut the door again and went away.
SEVEN
They had Rembrandt on the calendar that year, a rather smeary self-portrait due to imperfectly registered color plate. It showed him holding a smeared palette with a dirty thumb and wearing a tam-o’-shanter which wasn’t any too clean either. His other hand held a brush poised in the air, as if he might be going to do a little work after a while, if somebody made a down payment. His face was aging, saggy, full of the disgust of life and the thickening effects of liquor. But it had a hard cheerfulness that I liked, and the eyes were as bright as drops of dew.
I was looking at him across my office desk at about four-thirty when the phone rang and I heard a cool, supercilious voice that sounded as if it thought it was pretty good. It said drawlingly, after I had answered:
“You are Philip Marlowe, a private detective?”
“Check.”
“Oh—you mean, yes. You have been recommended to me as a man who can be trusted to keep his mouth shut. I should like you to come to my house at seven o’clock this evening. We can discuss a matter. My name is Lindsay Marriott and I live at 4212 Cabrillo Street, Montemar Vista. Do you know where that is?”
“I know where Montemar Vista is, Mr. Marriott.”
“Yes. Well, Cabrillo Street is rather hard to find. The streets down here are all laid out in a pattern of interesting but intricate curves. I should suggest that you walk up the steps from the sidewalk cafe. If you do that, Cabrillo is the third street you come to and my house is the only one on the block. At seven then?”
“What is the nature of the employment, Mr. Marriott?”
“I should prefer not to discuss that over the phone.”
“Can’t you give me some idea? Montemar Vista is quite a distance.”
“I shall be glad to pay your expenses, if we don’t agree. Are you particular about the nature of the employment?”
“Not as long as it’s legitimate.”
The voice grew icicles. “I should not have called you, if it were not.”
A Harvard boy. Nice use of the subjunctive mood. The end of my foot itched, but my bank account was still trying to crawl under a duck. I put honey into my voice and said: “Many thanks for calling me, Mr. Marriott. I’ll be there.”
He hung up and that was that. I thought Mr. Rembrandt had a faint sneer on his face. I got the office bottle out of the deep drawer of the desk and took a short drink. That took the sneer out of Mr. Rembrandt in a hurry.
A wedge of sunlight slipped over the edge of the desk and fell noiselessly to the carpet. Traffic lights bongbonged outside on the boulevard, interurban cars pounded by, a typewriter clacked monotonously in the lawyer’s office beyond the party wall. I had filled and lit a pipe when the telephone rang again.
It was Nulty this time. His voice sounded full of baked potato. “Well, I guess I ain’t quite bright at that,” he said, when he knew who he was talking to. “I miss one. Malloy went to see that Florian dame.”
I held the phone tight enough to crack it. My upper lip suddenly felt a little cold. “Go on. I thought you had him cornered.”
“Was some other guy. Malloy ain’t around there at all. We get a call from some old window-peeker on West Fifty-four. Two guys was to see the Florian dame. Number one parked the other side of the street and acted kind of cagey. Looked the dump over good before he went in. Was in about an hour. Six feet, dark hair, medium heavy built. Come out quiet.”
“He had liquor on his breath too,” I said.
“Oh, sure. That was you, wasn’t it? Well, Number two was the Moose. Guy in loud clothes as big as a house. He come in a car too but the old lady don’t get the license, can’t read the number that far off. This was about a hour after you was there, she says. He goes in fast and is in about five minutes only. Just before he gets back in his car he takes a big gat out and spins the chamber. I guess that’s what the old lady saw he done. That’s why she calls up. She don’t hear no shots though, inside the house.”
“That must have been a big disappointment,” I said.
“Yeah. A nifty. Remind me to laugh on my day off. The old lady misses one too. The prowl boys go down there and don’t get no answer on the doo
r, so they walk in, the front door not being locked. Nobody’s dead on the floor. Nobody’s home. The Florian dame has skipped out. So they stop by next door and tell the old lady and she’s sore as a boil on account of she didn’t see the Florian dame go out. So they report back and go on about the job. So about an hour, maybe hour and a half after that, the old lady phones in again and says Mrs. Florian is home again. So they give the call to me and I ask her what makes that important and she hangs up in my face.”
Nulty paused to collect a little breath and wait for my comments. I didn’t have any. After a moment he went on grumbling.
“What you make of it?”
“Nothing much. The Moose would be likely to go by there, of course. He must have known Mrs. Florian pretty well. Naturally he wouldn’t stick around very long. He would be afraid the law might be wise to Mrs. Florian.”
“What I figure,” Nulty said calmly. “Maybe I should go over and see her—kind of find out where she went to.”
“That’s a good idea,” I said. “If you can get somebody to lift you out of your chair.”
“Huh? Oh, another nifty. It don’t make a lot of difference any more now though. I guess I won’t bother.”
“All right,” I said. “Let’s have it whatever it is.”
He chuckled. “We got Malloy all lined up. We really got him this time. We make him at Girard, headed north in a rented hack. He gassed up there and the service station kid recognized him from the description we broadcast a while back. He said everything jibed except Malloy had changed to a dark suit. We got county and state law on it. If he goes on north we get him at the Ventura line, and if he slides over to the Ridge Route, he had to stop at Castaic for his check ticket. If he don’t stop, they phone ahead and block the road. We don’t want no cops shot up, if we can help it. That sound good?”
“It sounds all right,” I said. “If it really is Malloy, and if he does exactly what you expect him to do.”
Nulty cleared his throat carefully. “Yeah. What you doing on it—just in case?”
“Nothing. Why should I be doing anything on it?”
“You got along pretty good with that Florian dame. Maybe she would have some more ideas.”
“All you need to find out is a full bottle,” I said.
“You handled her real nice. Maybe you ought to kind of spend a little more time on her.”
“I thought this was a police job.”
“Oh sure. Was your idea about the girl though.”
“That seems to be out—unless the Florian is lying about it.”
“Dames lie about anything—just for practice,” Nulty said grimly.
“You ain’t real busy, huh?”
“I’ve got a job to do. It came in since I saw you. A job where I get paid. I’m sorry.”
“Walking out, huh?”
“I wouldn’t put it that way. I just have to work to earn a living.”
“Okey, pal. If that’s the way you feel about it, okey.”
“I don’t feel any way about it,” I almost yelled. “I just don’t have time to stooge for you or any other cop.”
“Okey, get sore,” Nulty said, and hung up.
I held the dead phone and snarled into it: “Seventeen hundred and fifty cops in this town and they want me to do their leg work for them.”
I dropped the phone into its cradle and took another drink from the office bottle.
After a while I went down to the lobby of the building to buy an evening paper. Nulty was right in one thing at least. The Montgomery killing hadn’t even made the want-ad section so far.
I left the office again in time for an early dinner.
EIGHT
I got down to Montemar Vista as the light began to fade, but there was still a fine sparkle on the water and the surf was breaking far out in long smooth curves. A group of pelicans was flying bomber formation just under the creaming lip of the waves. A lonely yacht was taking in toward the yacht harbor at Bay City. Beyond it the huge emptiness of the Pacific was purple-gray.
Montemar Vista was a few dozen houses of various sizes and shapes hanging by their teeth and eyebrows to a spur of mountain and looking as if a good sneeze would drop them down among the box lunches on the beach.
Above the beach the highway ran under a wide concrete arch which was in fact a pedestrian bridge. From the inner end of this a Bight of concrete steps with a thick galvanized handrail on one side ran straight as a ruler up the side of the mountain. Beyond the arch the sidewalk cafe my client had spoken of, was bright and cheerful inside, but the iron-legged tile-topped tables outside under the striped awning were empty save for a single dark woman in slacks who smoked and stared moodily out to sea, with a bottle of beer in front of her. A fox terrier was using one of the iron chairs for a lamppost. She chided the dog absently as I drove past and gave the sidewalk cafe my business to the extent of using its parking space.
I walked back through the arch and started up the steps. It was a nice walk if you liked grunting. There were two hundred and eighty steps up to Cabrillo Street. They were drifted over with windblown sand and the handrail was as cold and wet as a toad’s belly.
When I reached the top the sparkle had gone from the water and a seagull with a broken trailing leg was twisting against the offsea breeze. I sat down on the damp cold top step and shook the sand out of my shoes and waited for my pulse to come down into the low hundreds. When I was breathing more or less normally again I shook my shirt loose from my back and went along to the lighted house which was the only one within yelling distance of the steps.
It was a nice little house with a salt-tarnished spiral of staircase going up to the front door and an imitation coachlamp for a porchlight. The garage was underneath and to one side. Its door was lifted up and rolled back and the light of the porchlamp shone obliquely on a huge black battleship of a car with chromium trimmings, a coyote tail tied to the Winged Victory on the radiator cap and engraved initials where the emblem should be. The car had a right-hand drive and looked as if had cost more than the house.
I went up the spiral steps, looked for a bell, and used a knocker in the shape of a tiger’s head. Its clatter was swallowed in the early evening fog. I heard no steps in the house. My damp shirt felt like an icepack on my back. The door opened silently, and I was looking at a tall blond man in a white flannel suit with a violet satin scarf around his neck.
There was a cornflower in the lapel of his white coat and his pale blue eyes looked faded out by comparison. The violet scarf was loose enough to show that he wore no tie and that he had a thick, soft brown neck, like the neck of a strong woman. His features were a little on the heavy side, but handsome, he had an inch more of height than I had, which made him six feet one. His blond hair was arranged, by art or nature, in three precise blond ledges which reminded me of steps, so that I didn’t like them. I wouldn’t have liked them anyway. Apart from all this he had the general appearance of a lad who would wear a white flannel suit with a violet scarf around his neck and a cornflower in his lapel.
He cleared his throat lightly and looked past my shoulder at the darkening sea. His cool supercilious voice said: “Yes?”
“Seven o’clock,” I said. “On the dot.”
“Oh yes. Let me see, your name is—” He paused and frowned in the effort of memory. The effect was as phony as the pedigree of a used car. I let him work at it for a minute, then I said:
“Philip Marlowe. The same as it was this afternoon.”
He gave me a quick darting frown, as if perhaps something ought to be done about that. Then he stepped back and said coldly:
“Ah yes. Quite so. Come in, Marlowe. My house boy is away this evening.”
He opened the door wide with a fingertip, as though opening the door himself dirtied him a little.
I went in past him and smelled perfume. He closed the door. The entrance put us on a low balcony with a metal railing that ran around three sides of a big studio living room. The fourth side contained a big
fireplace and two doors. A fire was crackling in the fireplace. The balcony was lined with bookshelves and there were pieces of glazed metallic looking bits of sculpture on pedestals.
We went down three steps to the main part of the living room. The carpet almost tickled my ankles. There was a concert grand piano, closed down. On one corner of it stood a tall silver vase on a strip of peach-colored velvet, and a single yellow rose in the vase. There was plenty of nice soft furniture, a great many floor cushions, some with golden tassels and some just naked. It was a nice room, if you didn’t get rough. There was a wide damask covered divan in a shadowy corner, like a casting couch. It was the kind of room where people sit with their feet in their laps and sip absinthe through lumps of sugar and talk with high affected voices and sometimes just squeak. It was a room where anything could happen except work.
Mr. Lindsay Marriott arranged himself in the curve of the grand piano, leaned over to sniff at the yellow rose, then opened a French enamel cigarette case and lit a long brown cigarette with a gold tip. I sat down on a pink chair and hoped I wouldn’t leave a mark on it. I lit a Camel, blew smoke through my nose and looked at a piece of black shiny metal on a stand. It showed a full, smooth curve with a shallow fold in it and two protuberances on the curve. I stared at it. Marriott saw me staring at it.
“An interesting bit,” he said negligently. “I picked it up just the other day. Asta Dial’s Spirit of Dawn.”
“I thought it was Klopstein’s Two Warts on a Fanny,” I said.
Mr. Lindsay Marriott’s face looked as if he had swallowed a bee. He smoothed it out with an effort.
“You have a somewhat peculiar sense of humor,” he said.
“Not peculiar,” I said. “Just uninhibited.”
“Yes,” he said very coldly. “Yes—of course. I’ve no doubt . . . Well, what I wished to see you about is, as a matter of fact, a very slight matter indeed. Hardly worth bringing you down here for. I am meeting a couple of men tonight and paying them some money. I thought I might as well have someone with me. You carry a gun?”