He threw a twenty on the table, and then added some ones for the waiter. He stood a moment staring down at me. His eyes were bright and his face was still red. “I’m married and have four children,” he said abruptly.
“Congratulations.”
He made a swift noise in his throat and turned and went. He went pretty fast. I watched him for a while and then I didn’t. I drank the rest of my drink and got out my cigarettes and shook one loose and stuck it in my mouth and lit it. The old waiter came up and looked at the money.
“Can I get you anything else, sir?”
“Nope. The dough is all yours.”
He picked it up slowly. “This is a twenty-dollar bill, sir. The gentleman made a mistake.”
“He can read. The dough is all yours, I said.”
“I’m sure I’m very grateful. If you are quite sure, sir—”
“Quite sure.”
He bobbed his head and went away, still looking worried. The bar was filling up. A couple of streamlined demi-virgins went by caroling and waving. They knew the two hotshots in the booth farther on. The air began to be spattered with darlings and crimson fingernails.
I smoked half of my cigarette, scowling at nothing, and then got up to leave. I turned to reach back for my cigarettes and something bumped into me hard from behind. It was just what I needed. I swung around and I was looking at the profile of a broad-beamed crowd-pleaser in an overdraped oxford flannel. He had the outstretched arm of the popular character and the two-by-six grin of the guy who never loses a sale.
I took hold of the outstretched arm and spun him around. “What’s the matter, Jack? Don’t they make the aisles wide enough for your personality?”
He shook his arm loose and got tough. “Don’t get fancy, buster. I might loosen your jaw for you.”
“Ha, ha,” I said. “You might play center field for the Yankees and hit a home run with a breadstick.”
He doubled a meaty fist.
“Darling, think of your manicure,” I told him.
He controlled his emotions. “Nuts to you, wise guy,” he sneered. “Some other time, when I have less on my mind.”
“Could there be less?”
“G’wan, beat it,” he snarled. “One more crack and you’ll need new bridgework.”
I grinned at him. “Call me up, Jack. But with better dialogue.”
His expression changed. He laughed. “You in pictures, chum?”
“Only the kind they pin up in the post office.”
“See you in the mug book,” he said, and walked away, still grinning.
It was all very silly, but it got rid of the feeling. I went along the annex and across the lobby of the hotel to the main entrance. I paused inside to put on my sunglasses. It wasn’t until I got into my car that I remembered to look at the card Eileen Wade had given me. It was an engraved card, but not a formal calling card, because it had an address and a telephone number on it. Mrs. Roger Stearns Wade, 1247 Idle Valley Road. Tel. Idle Valley 5-6324.
I knew a good deal about Idle Valley, and I knew it had changed a great deal from the days when they had the gatehouse at the entrance and the private police force, and the gambling casino on the lake, and the fifty-dollar joy girls. Quiet money had taken over the tract after the casino was closed out. Quiet money had made it a subdivider’s dream. A club owned the lake and the lake frontage and if they didn’t want you in the club, you didn’t get to play in the water. It was exclusive in the only remaining sense of the word that doesn’t mean merely expensive.
I belonged in Idle Valley like a pearl onion on a banana split.
Howard Spencer called me up late in the afternoon. He had got over his mad and wanted to say he was sorry and he hadn’t handled the situation very well, and had I perhaps any second thoughts.
“I’ll go see him if he asks me to. Not otherwise.”
“I see. There would be a substantial bonus—”
“Look, Mr. Spencer,” I said impatiently, “you can’t hire destiny. If Mrs. Wade is afraid of the guy, she can move out. That’s her problem. Nobody could protect her twenty-four hours a day from her own husband. There isn’t that much protection in the world. But that’s not all you want. You want to know why and how and when the guy jumped the rails, and then fix it so that he doesn’t do it again—at least until he finishes the book. And that’s up to him. If he wants to write the damn book bad enough, he’ll lay off the hooch until he does it. You want too damn much.”
“They all go together,” he said. “It’s all one problem. But I guess I understand. It’s a little oversubtle for your kind of operation. Well, goodbye. I’m flying back to New York tonight.”
“Have a smooth trip.”
He thanked me and hung up. I forgot to tell him I had given his twenty to the waiter. I thought of calling back to tell him, then I thought he was miserable enough already.
I closed the office and started off in the direction of Victor’s to drink a gimlet, as Terry had asked me to in his letter. I changed my mind. I wasn’t feeling sentimental enough. I went to Lowry’s and had a martini and some prime ribs and Yorkshire pudding instead.
When I got home I turned on the TV set and looked at the fights. They were no good, just a bunch of dancing masters who ought to have been working for Arthur Murray. All they did was jab and bob up and down and feint one another off balance. Not one of them could hit hard enough to wake his grandmother out of a light doze. The crowd was booing and the referee kept clapping his hands for action, but they went right on swaying and jittering and jabbing long lefts. I turned to another channel and looked at a crime show. The action took place in a clothes closet and the faces were tired and over familiar and not beautiful. The dialogue was stuff even Monogram wouldn’t have used. The dick had a colored houseboy for comic relief. He didn’t need it, he was plenty comical all by himself. And the commercials would have sickened a goat raised on barbed wire and broken beer bottles.
I cut it off and smoked a long cool tightly packed cigarette. It was kind to my throat. It was made of fine tobacco. I forgot to notice what brand it was. I was about ready to hit the hay when Detective-Sergeant Green of homicide called me up.
“Thought you might like to know they buried your friend Lennox a couple of days ago right in that Mexican town where he died. A lawyer representing the family went down there and attended to it. You were pretty lucky this time, Marlowe. Next time you think of helping a pal skip the country, don’t.”
“How many bullet holes did he have in him?”
“What’s that?” he barked. Then he was silent for a space. Then he said rather too carefully: “One, I should say. It’s usually enough when it blows a guy’s head off. The lawyer is bringing back a set of prints and whatever was in his pockets. Anything more you’d like to know?”
“Yeah, but you can’t tell me. I’d like to know who killed Lennox’s wife.”
“Cripes, didn’t Grenz tell you he left a full confession? It was in the papers, anyway. Don’t you read the papers any more?”
“Thanks for calling me, Sergeant. It was real kind of you.”
“Look, Marlowe,” he said raspingly. “You got any funny ideas about this case, you could buy yourself a lot of grief talking about them. The case is closed, finalized, and laid away in mothballs. Damn lucky for you it is. Accessory after the fact is good for five years in this state. And let me tell you something else. I’ve been a cop a long time and one thing I’ve learned for sure is it ain’t always what you do that gets you sent up. It’s what it can be made to look like when it comes in to court. Goodnight.”
He hung up in my ear. I replaced the phone thinking that an honest cop with a bad conscience always acts tough. So does a dishonest cop. So does almost anyone, including me.
FOURTEEN
Next morning the bell rang as I was wiping the talcum off an earlobe. When I got to the door and opened up I looked into a pair of violet-blue eyes. She was in brown linen this time, with a pimento-colored scarf, and no
earrings or hat. She looked a little pale, but not as though anyone had been throwing her downstairs. She gave me a hesitant little smile.
“I know I shouldn’t have come here to bother you, Mr. Marlowe. You probably haven’t even had breakfast. But I had a reluctance to go to your office and I hate telephoning about personal matters.”
“Sure. Come in, Mrs. Wade. Would you go for a cup of coffee?”
She came into the living room and sat on the davenport without looking at anything. She balanced her bag on her lap and sat with her feet close together. She looked rather prim. I opened windows and pulled up venetian blinds and lifted a dirty ash tray off the cocktail table in front of her.
“Thank you. Black coffee, please. No sugar.”
I went out to the kitchen and spread a paper napkin on a green metal tray. It looked as cheesy as a celluloid collar. I crumpled it up and got out one of those fringed things that come in sets with little triangular napkins. They came with the house, like most of the furniture. I set out two Desert Rose coffee cups and filled them and carried the tray in.
She sipped. “This is very nice,” she said. “You make good coffee.”
“Last time anyone drank coffee with me was just before I went to jail,” I said. “I guess you knew I’d been in the cooler, Mrs. Wade.”
She nodded. “Of course. You were suspected of having helped him escape, wasn’t it?”
“They didn’t say. They found my telephone number on a pad in his room. They asked me questions I didn’t answer—mostly because of the way they were asked. But I don’t suppose you are interested in that.”
She put her cup down carefully and leaned back and smiled at me. I offered her a cigarette.
“I don’t smoke, thank you. Of course I’m interested. A neighbor of ours knew the Lennoxes. He must have been insane. He doesn’t sound at all like that kind of man.”
I filled a bulldog pipe and lit it. “I guess so,” I said. “He must have been. He was badly wounded in the war. But he’s dead and it’s all done with. And I don’t think you came here to talk about that.”
She shook her head slowly. “He was a friend of yours, Mr. Marlowe. You must have a pretty strong opinion. And I think you are a pretty determined man.”
I tamped the tobacco in my pipe and lit it again. I took my time and stared at her over the pipe bowl while I was doing it.
“Look, Mrs. Wade,” I said finally. “My opinion means nothing. It happens every day. The most unlikely people commit the most unlikely crimes. Nice old ladies poison whole families. Clean-cut kids commit multiple holdups and shootings. Bank managers with spotless records going back twenty years are found out to be long-term embezzlers. And successful and popular and supposedly happy novelists get drunk and put their wives in the hospital. We know damn little about what makes even our best friends tick.”
I thought it would burn her up, but she didn’t do much more than press her lips together and narrow her eyes.
“Howard Spencer shouldn’t have told you that,” she said. “It was my own fault. I didn’t know enough to keep away from him. I’ve learned since that the one thing you can never do to a man who is drinking too much is to try to stop him. You probably know that much better than I do.”
“You certainly can’t stop him with words,” I said. “If you’re lucky, and if you have the strength, you can sometimes keep him from hurting himself or someone else. Even that takes luck.”
She reached quietly for her coffee cup and saucer. Her hands were lovely, like the rest of her. The nails were beautifully shaped and polished and only very slightly tinted.
“Did Howard tell you he hadn’t seen my husband this time?”
“Yeah.”
She finished her coffee and put the cup carefully back on the tray. She fiddled with the spoon for a few seconds. Then she spoke without looking up at me.
“He didn’t tell you why, because he didn’t know. I am very fond of Howard but he is the managing type, wants to take charge of everything. He thinks he is very executive.”
I waited, not saying anything. There was another silence. She looked at me quickly then looked away again. Very softly she said: “My husband has been missing for three days. I don’t know where he is. I came here to ask you to find him and bring him home. Oh, it has happened before. One time he drove himself all the way to Portland and got sick in a hotel there and had to get a doctor to sober him up. It’s a wonder how he ever got that far without getting into trouble. He hadn’t eaten anything for three days. Another time he was in a Turkish bath in Long Beach, one of those Swedish places where they give high colonics. And the last time it was some sort of small private and probably not very reputable sanitarium. This was less than three weeks ago. He wouldn’t tell me the name of it or where it was, just said he had been taking a cure and was all right. But he looked deadly pale and weak. I got a brief glimpse of the man who brought him home. A tall young man dressed in the sort of overelaborate cowboy outfit you would only see on the stage or in a technicolor musical film. He let Roger out in the driveway and backed out and drove away at once.”
“Could have been a dude ranch,” I said. “Some of these tame cowpunchers spend every dime they make on a fancy outfit like that. The women go crazy over them. That’s what they’re there for.”
She opened her bag and took out a folded paper. “I’ve brought you a check for five hundred dollars, Mr. Marlowe. Will you accept it as a retainer?”
She put the folded check down on the table. I looked at it, but didn’t touch it. “Why?” I asked her. “You say he has been gone three days. It takes three or four to sober a man up and get some food into him. Won’t he come back the way he did before? Or does something make this time different?”
“He can’t stand much more of it, Mr. Marlowe. It will kill him. The intervals are getting shorter. I’m badly worried. I’m more than worried, I’m scared. It’s unnatural. We’ve been married for five years. Roger was always a drinker, but not a psychopathic drinker. Something is all wrong. I want him found. I didn’t sleep more than an hour last night.”
“Any idea why he drinks?”
The violet eyes were looking at me steadily. She seemed a bit fragile this morning, but certainly not helpless. She bit her lower lip and shook her head. “Unless it’s me,” she said at last, almost in a whisper. “Men fall out of love with their wives.”
“I’m only an amateur psychologist, Mrs. Wade. A man in my racket has to be a little of that. I’d say it’s more likely he has fallen out of love with the kind of stuff he writes.”
“It’s quite possible,” she said quietly. “I imagine all writers have spells like that. It’s true that he can’t seem to finish a book he is working on. But it isn’t as if he had to finish it for the rent money. I don’t think that is quite enough reason.”
“What sort of guy is he sober?”
She smiled. “Well, I’m rather prejudiced. I think he is a very nice guy indeed.”
“And how is he drunk?”
“Horrible. Bright and hard and cruel. He thinks he is being witty when he is only being nasty.”
“You left out violent.”
She raised her tawny eyebrows. “Just once, Mr. Marlowe. And too much has been made of that. I’d never have told Howard Spencer. Roger told him himself.”
I got up and walked around in the room. It was going to be a hot day. It already was hot. I turned the blinds on one of the windows to keep the sun out. Then I gave it to her straight.
“I looked him up in Who’s Who yesterday afternoon. He’s forty-two years old, yours is his only marriage, no children. His people are New Englanders, he went to Andover and Princeton. He has a war record and a good one. He has written twelve of these fat sex-and-swordplay historical novels and every damn one of them has been on the best-seller lists. He must have made plenty of the folding. If he had fallen out of love with his wife, he sounds like the type who would say so and get a divorce. If he was haring around with another woman, you w
ould probably know about it, and anyway he wouldn’t have to get drunk just to prove he felt bad. If you’ve been married five years, then he was thirty-seven when that happened. I’d say he knew most of what there is to know about women by that time. I say most, because nobody ever knows all of it.”
I stopped and looked at her and she smiled at me. I wasn’t hurting her feelings. I went on.
“Howard Spencer suggested—on what grounds I have no idea—that what’s the matter with Roger Wade is something that happened a long time ago before you were married and that it has caught up with him now, and is hitting him harder than he can take. Spencer thought of blackmail. Would you know?”
She shook her head slowly. “If you mean would I know if Roger had been paying out a lot of money to someone—no, I wouldn’t know that. I don’t meddle with his bookkeeping affairs He could give away a lot of money without my knowing it.”
“Okay then. Not knowing Mr. Wade I can’t have much idea how he would react to having the bite put on him. If he has a violent temper, he might break somebody’s neck. If the secret, whatever it is, might damage his social or professional standing or even, to take an extreme case, made the law boys drop around, he might pay off—for a while anyhow. But none of this gets us anywhere. You want him found, you’re worried, you’re more than worried. So how do I go about finding him? I don’t want your money, Mrs. Wade. Not now anyway.”
She reached into her bag again and came up with a couple of pieces of yellow paper. They looked like second sheets, folded, and one of them looked crumpled. She smoothed them out and handed them to me.
“One I found on his desk,” she said. “It was very late, or rather early in the morning. I knew he had been drinking and I knew he hadn’t come upstairs. About two o’clock I went down to see if he was all right—or comparatively all right, passed out on the floor or the couch or something. He was gone. The other paper was in the wastebasket or rather caught on the edge, so that it hadn’t fallen in.”