I stepped over the hollow place where a step would have been and knocked on the door. There was no bell push. Nobody answered. I tried the knob. Nobody had locked the door. I pushed it open and went in. I had that feeling. I was going to find something nasty inside.
A bulb burned in a frayed lamp crooked on its base, the paper shade split. There was a couch with a dirty blanket on it. There was an old cane chair, a Boston rocker, a table covered with a smeared oilcloth. On the table spread out beside a coffee cup was a copy of El Diario, a Spanish language newspaper, also a saucer with cigarette stubs, a dirty plate, a tiny radio which emitted music. The music stopped and a man began to rattle off a commercial in Spanish. I turned it off. The silence fell like a bag of feathers. Then the clicking of an alarm clock from beyond a half open door. Then the clank of a small chain, a fluttering sound and a cracked voice said rapidly: “Quién es? Quién es? Quién es?” This was followed by the angry chattering of monkeys. Then silence again.
From a big cage over in the corner the round angry eye of a parrot looked at me. He sidled along the perch as far as he could go.
“Amigo,” I said.
The parrot let out a screech of insane laughter.
“Watch your language, brother,” I said.
The parrot crabwalked to the other end of the perch and pecked into a white cup and shook oatmeal from his beak contemptuously. In another cup there was water. It was messy with oatmeal.
“I bet you’re not even housebroken,” I said.
The parrot stared at me and shuffled. He turned his head and stared at me with his other eye. Then he leaned forward and fluttered his tail feathers and proved me right.
“Necio!” he screamed. “Fuera!”
Somewhere water dripped from a leaky faucet. The clock ticked. The parrot imitated the ticking amplified.
I said: “Pretty Polly.”
“Hijo de la chingada,” the parrot said.
I sneered at him and pushed the half-open door into what there was of a kitchen. The linoleum on the floor was worn through to the boards in front of the sink. There was a rusty three-burner gas stove, an open shelf with some dishes and the alarm clock, a riveted hot water tank on a support in the corner, the antique kind that blows up because it has no safety valve. There was a narrow rear door, closed, with a key in the lock, and a single window, locked. There was a light bulb hanging from the ceiling. The ceiling above it was cracked and stained from roof leaks. Behind me the parrot shuffled aimlessly on his perch and once in a while let out a bored croak.
On the zinc drainboard lay a short length of black rubber tubing, and beside that a glass hypodermic syringe with the plunger pushed home. In the sink were three long thin empty tubes of glass with tiny corks near them. I had seen such tubes before.
I opened the back door, stepped to the ground and walked to the converted privy. It had a sloping roof, about eight feet high in front, less than six at the back. It opened outward, being too small to open any other way. It was locked but the lock was old. It did not resist me much.
The man’s scuffed toes almost touched the floor. His head was up in the darkness inches from the two by four that held up the roof. He was hanging by a black wire, probably a piece of electric light wire. The toes of his feet were pointed down as if they reached to stand on tiptoe. The worn cuffs of his khaki denim pants hung below his heels. I touched him enough to know that he was cold enough so that there was no point in cutting him down.
He had made very sure of that. He had stood by the sink in his kitchen and knotted the rubber tube around his arm, then clenched his fist to make the vein stand out, then shot a syringeful of morphine sulphate into his blood stream. Since all three of the tubes were empty, it was a fair guess that one of them had been full. He could not have taken in less than enough. Then he had laid the syringe down and released the knotted tube. It wouldn’t be long, not a shot directly into the blood stream. Then he had gone out to his privy and stood on the seat and knotted the wire around his throat. By that time he would be dizzy. He could stand there and wait until his knees went slack and the weight of his body took care of the rest. He would know nothing. He would already be asleep.
I closed the door on him. I didn’t go back into the house. As I went along the side towards Polton’s Lane, that handsome residential street, the parrot inside the shack heard me and screeched: “Quién es? Quién es? Quién es?”
Who is it? Nobody, friend. Just a footfall in the night.
I walked softly, going away.
NINETEEN
I walked softly, in no particular direction, but I knew where I would end up. I always did. At the Casa del Poniente. I climbed back into my car on Grand and circled a few blocks aimlessly, and then I was parked as usual in a slot near the bar entrance. As I got out I looked at the car beside mine. It was Goble’s shabby dark little jalopy. He was as adhesive as a band-aid.
At another time I would have been racking my brains for some idea of what he was up to, but now I had a worse problem. I had to go to the police and report the hanging man. But I had no notion what to tell them. Why did I go to his house? Because, if he was telling the truth, he had seen Mitchell leave early in the morning. Why was that of significance? Because I was looking for Mitchell myself. I wanted to have a heart to heart talk with him. About what? And from there on I had no answers that would not lead to Betty Mayfield, who she was, where she came from, why she changed her name, what had happened back in Washington, or Virginia or wherever it was, that made her run away.
I had $5000 of her money in traveler’s checks in my pocket, and she wasn’t even formally my client. I was stuck, but good.
I walked over to the edge of the cliff and listened to the sound of the surf. I couldn’t see anything but the occasional gleam of a wave breaking out beyond the cove. In the cove the waves don’t break, they slide in politely, like floorwalkers. There would be a bright moon later, but it hadn’t checked in yet.
Someone was standing not far away, doing what I was doing. A woman. I waited for her to move. When she moved I would know whether I knew her. No two people move in just the same way, just as no two sets of fingerprints match exactly.
I lit a cigarette and let the lighter flare in my face, and she was beside me.
“Isn’t it about time you stopped following me around?”
“You’re my client. I’m trying to protect you. Maybe on my seventieth birthday someone will tell me why.”
“I didn’t ask you to protect me. I’m not your client. Why don’t you go home—if you have a home—and stop annoying people?”
“You’re my client—five thousand dollars worth. I have to do something for it—even if it’s no more than growing a mustache.”
“You’re impossible. I gave you the money to let me alone. You’re impossible. You’re the most impossible man I ever met. And I’ve met some dillies.”
“What happened to that tall exclusive apartment house in Rio? Where I was going to lounge in silk pajamas and play with your long lascivious hair, while the butler set out the Wedgwood and the Georgian silver with that faint dishonest smile and those delicate gestures, like a pansy hair stylist fluttering around a screen star?”
“Oh, shut up!”
“Wasn’t a firm offer, huh? Just a passing fancy, or not even that. Just a trick to make me slaughter my sleeping hours and trot around looking for bodies that weren’t there.”
“Did anybody ever give you a swift poke in the nose?”
“Frequently, but sometimes I make them miss.”
I grabbed hold of her. She tried to fight me off, but no fingernails. I kissed the top of her head. Suddenly she clung to me and turned her face up.
“All right. Kiss me, if it’s any satisfaction to you. I suppose you would rather have this happen where there was a bed.”
“I’m human.”
“Don’t kid yourself. You’re a dirty low-down detective. Kiss me.”
I kissed her. With my mouth close to hers I sa
id: “He hanged himself tonight.”
She jerked away from me violently. “Who?” she asked in a voice that could hardly speak.
“The night garage attendant here. You may never have seen him. He was on mesca, tea, marijuana. But tonight he shot himself full of morphine and hanged himself in the privy behind his shack in Polton’s Lane. That’s an alley behind Grand Street.”
She was shaking now. She was hanging on to me as if to keep from falling down. She tried to say something, but her voice was just a croak.
“He was the guy that said he saw Mitchell leave with his nine suitcases early this morning. I wasn’t sure I believed him. He told me where he lived and I went over this evening to talk to him some more. And now I have to go to the cops and tell them. And what do I tell them without telling them about Mitchell and from then on about you?”
“Please—please—please leave me out of it,” she whispered. “I’ll give you more money. I’ll give you all the money you want.”
“For Pete’s sake. You’ve already given me more than I’d keep. It isn’t money I want. It’s some sort of understanding of what the hell I’m doing and why. You must have heard of professional ethics. Some shreds of them still stick to me. Are you my client?”
“Yes. I give up. They all give up to you in the end, don’t they?”
“Far from it. I get pushed around plenty.”
I got the folder of traveler’s checks out of my pocket and put a pencil flash on them and tore out five. I refolded it and handed it to her. “I’ve kept five hundred dollars. That makes it legal. Now tell me what it’s all about.”
“No. You don’t have to tell anybody about that man.”
“Yes, I do. I have to go to the cop house just about now. I have to. And I have no story to tell them that they won’t bust open in three minutes. Here, take your goddam checks—and if you ever push them at me again, I’ll smack your bare bottom.”
She grabbed the folder and tore off into the darkness to the hotel. I just stood there and felt like a damn fool. I don’t know how long I stood there, but finally I stuffed the five checks into my pocket and went wearily back to my car and started off to the place where I knew I had to go.
TWENTY
A man named Fred Pope who ran a small motel had once told me his views on Esmeralda. He was elderly, talkative, and it always pays to listen. The most unlikely people sometimes drop a fact or two that means a lot in my business.
“I been here thirty years,” he said. “When I come here I had dry asthma. Now I got wet asthma. I recall when this town was so quiet dogs slept in the middle of the boulevard and you had to stop your car, if you had a car, and get out and push them out of the way. The bastards just sneered at you. Sundays it was like you was already buried. Everything shut up as tight as a bank vault. You could walk down Grand Street and have as much fun as a stiff in the morgue. You couldn’t even buy a pack of cigarettes. It was so quiet you could of heard a mouse combin’ his whiskers. Me and my old woman—she’s been dead fifteen years now—used to play cribbage in a little place we had down on the street that goes along the cliff, and we’d listen in case something exciting would happen—like an old geezer taking a walk and tapping with a cane. I don’t know if the Hellwigs wanted it that way or whether old man Hellwig done it out of spite. In them years he didn’t live here. He was a big shot in the farm equipment business.”
“More likely,” I said, “he was smart enough to know that a place like Esmeralda would become a valuable investment in time.”
“Maybe,” Fred Pope said. “Anyhow, he just about created the town. And after a while he came to live here—up on the hill in one of them great big stucco houses with tile roofs. Pretty fancy. He had gardens with terraces and big green lawns and flowering shrubs, and wrought iron gates—imported from Italy, I heard, and Arizona fieldstone walks, and not just one garden, half a dozen. And enough land to keep the neighbors out of his hair. He drank a couple bottles of hooch a day and I heard he was a pretty rough customer. He had one daughter, Miss Patricia Hellwig. She was the real cream and still is.
“By that time Esmeralda had begun to fill up. At first it was a lot of old women and their husbands, and I’m tellin’ you the mortician business was real good with tired old men that died and got planted by their loving widows. The goddam women last too long. Mine didn’t.”
He stopped and turned his head away for a moment, before he went on.
“There was a streetcar from San Diego by then, but the town was still quiet—too quiet. Not hardly anybody got born here. Child-bearing was thought kind of too sexy. But the war changed all that. Now we got guys that sweat, and tough school kids in levis and dirty shirts, and artists and country club drunks and them little gifte shoppes that sell you a two-bit highball glass for eight-fifty. We got restaurants and liquor stores, but we still don’t have no billboards or poolrooms or drive-ins. Last year they tried to put in a dime-in-the-slot telescope in the park. You ought to of heard the town council scream. They killed it for sure, but the place ain’t no bird refuge any more. We got as smart stores as Beverly Hills. And Miss Patricia, she spent her whole life working like a beaver to give things to the town. Hellwig died five years ago. The doctors told him he would have to cut down on the booze or he wouldn’t live a year. He cussed them out and said if he couldn’t take a drink when he wanted to, morning, noon or night, he’d be damned if he’d take one at all. He quit—and he was dead in a year.
“The docs had a name for it—they always have—and I guess Miss Hellwig had a name for them. Anyway, they got bumped off the staff of the hospital and that knocked them loose from Esmeralda. It didn’t matter a whole lot. We still got about sixty doctors here. The town’s full of Hellwigs, some with other names, but all of the family one way or another. Some are rich and some work. I guess Miss Hellwig works harder than most. She’s eighty-six now, but tough as a mule. She don’t chew tobacco, drink, smoke, swear or use no make-up. She give the town the hospital, a private school, a library, an art center, public tennis courts, and God knows what else. And she still gets driven in a thirty-year-old Rolls-Royce that’s about as noisy as a Swiss watch. The mayor here is two jumps from a Hellwig, both downhill. I guess she built the municipal center too, and sold it to the city for a dollar. She’s some woman. Of course we got Jews here now, but let me tell you something. A Jew is supposed to give you a sharp deal and steal your nose, if you ain’t careful. That’s all bunk. A Jew enjoys trading; he likes business, but he’s only tough on the surface. Underneath a Jewish businessman is usually real nice to deal with. He’s human. If you want cold-blooded skinning, we got a bunch of people in this town now that will cut you down to the bone and add a service charge. They’ll take your last dollar from you between your teeth and look at you like you stole it from them.”
TWENTY-ONE
The cop house was part of a long modernistic building at the corner of Hellwig and Orcutt. I parked and went into it, still wondering how to tell my story, and still knowing I had to tell it.
The business office was small but very clean, and the duty officer on the desk had two sharp creases in his shirt, and his uniform looked as if it had been pressed ten minutes before. A battery of six speakers on the wall was bringing in police and sheriff’s reports from all over the county. A tilted plaque on the desk said the duty officer’s name was Griddell. He looked at me the way they all look, waiting.
“What can we do for you, sir?” He had a cool pleasant voice, and that look of discipline you find in the best ones.
“I have to report a death. In a shack behind the hardware store on Grand, in an alley called Polton’s Lane, there’s a man hanging in a sort of privy. He’s dead. No chance to save him.”
“Your name, please?” He was already pressing buttons.
“Philip Marlowe. I’m a Los Angeles private detective.”
“Did you notice the number of this place?”
“It didn’t have one that I could see. But it’s right smack b
ehind the Esmeralda Hardware Company.”
“Ambulance call, urgent,” he said into his mike. “Possible suicide in a small house behind the Esmeralda Hardware Store. Man hanging in a privy behind the house.”
He looked up at me. “Do you know his name?”
I shook my head. “But he was the night garage man at the Casa del Poniente.”
He flicked some sheets of a book. “We know him. Has a record for marijuana. Can’t figure how he held the job, but he may be off it now, and his sort of labor is pretty scarce here.”
A tall sergeant with a granite face came into the office, gave me a quick glance and went out. A car started.
The duty officer flicked a key on a small PBX. “Captain, this is Griddell on the desk. A Mr. Philip Marlowe has reported a death in Polton’s Lane. Ambulance moving. Sergeant Green is on his way. I have two patrol cars in the vicinity.”
He listened for a moment, then looked at me. “Captain Alessandro would like to speak to you, Mr. Marlowe. Down the hall, last door on the right, please.”
He was on the mike again before I was through the swinging door.
The last door on the right had two names on it. Captain Alessandro in a plaque fastened to the wood, and Sergeant Green on a removable panel. The door was half open, so I knocked and went in.
The man at the desk was as immaculate as the desk officer. He was studying a card through a magnifying glass, and a tape recorder beside him was telling some dreary story in a crumpled, unhappy voice. The captain was about six feet three inches tall and had thick dark hair and a clear olive skin. His uniform cap was on the desk near him. He looked up, cut off the tape recorder and put down the magnifying glass and the card.
“Have a seat, Mr. Marlowe.”
I sat down. He looked at me for a moment without speaking. He had rather soft brown eyes, but his mouth was not soft.
“I understand you know Major Javonen at the Casa.”