I plowed across to the half bath and stripped off my tie and shirt and sloshed cold water on my face with both hands and sloshed it on my head. When I was dripping wet I toweled myself off savagely. I put my shirt and tie back on and reached for my jacket and the gun in the pocket banged against the wall. I took it out and swung the cylinder away from the frame and tipped the cartridges into my hand, five full, one just a blackened shell. Then I thought, what’s the use, there are always more of them. So I put them back where they had been before and carried the gun into the study and put it away in one of the drawers of the desk.
When I looked up Candy was standing in the doorway, spick and span in his white coat, his hair brushed back and shining black, his eyes bitter.
“You want some coffee?”
“Thanks.”
“I put the lamps out. The boss is okay. Asleep. I shut his door. Why you get drunk?”
“I had to.”
He sneered at me. “Didn’t make her, huh? Got tossed out on your can, shamus.”
“Have it your own way.”
“You ain’t tough this morning, shamus. You ain’t tough at all.”
“Get the goddam coffee,” I yelled at him.
“Hijo de la puta!”
In one jump I had him by the arm. He didn’t move. He just looked at me contemptuously. I laughed and let go of his arm.
“You’re right, Candy. I’m not tough at all.”
He turned and went out. In no time at all he was back with a silver tray and a small silver pot of coffee on it and sugar and cream and a neat triangular napkin. He set it down on the cocktail table and removed the empty bottle and the rest of the drinking materials. He picked another bottle off the floor.
“Fresh. Just made,” he said, and went out.
I drank two cups black. Then I tried a cigarette. It was all right. I still belonged to the human race. Then Candy was back in the room again.
“You want breakfast?” he asked morosely.
“No, thanks.”
“Okay, scram out of here. We don’t want you around.”
“Who’s we?”
He lifted the lid of a box and helped himself to a cigarette. He lit it and blew smoke at me insolently.
“I take care of the boss,” he said.
“You making it pay?”
He frowned, then nodded. “Oh yes. Good money.”
“How much on the side—for not spilling what you know?”
He went back to Spanish. “No entendido.”
“You understand all right. How much you shake him for? I bet it’s not more than a couple of yards.”
“What’s that? Couple of yards.”
“Two hundred bucks.”
He grinned. “You give me couple of yards, shamus. So I don’t tell the boss you come out of her room last night.”
“That would buy a whole busload of wetbacks like you.”
He shrugged that off. “The boss gets pretty rough when he blows his top. Better pay up, shamus.”
“Pachuco stuff,” I said contemptuously. “All you’re touching is the small money. Lots of men play around when they’re lit. Anyhow she knows all about it. You don’t have anything to sell.”
There was a gleam in his eye. “Just don’t come round any more, tough boy.”
“I’m leaving.”
I stood up and walked around the table. He moved enough to keep facing towards me. I watched his hand but he evidently wasn’t wearing a knife this morning. When I was close enough I slapped a hand across his face.
“I don’t get called a son of a whore by the help, greaseball. I’ve got business here and I come around whenever I feel like it. Watch your lip from now on. You might get pistol-whipped. That pretty face of yours would never look the same again.”
He didn’t react at all, not even to the slap. That and being called a greaseball must have been deadly insults to him. But this time he just stood there wooden-faced, motionless. Then without a word he picked up the coffee tray and carried it out.
“Thanks for the coffee,” I said to his back.
He kept going. When he was gone I felt the bristles on my chin, shook myself, and decided to be on my way. I had had a skinful of the Wade family.
As I crossed the living room Eileen was coming down the stairs in white slacks and open-toed sandals and a pale blue shirt. She looked at me with complete surprise. “I didn’t know you were here, Mr. Marlowe,” she said, as though she hadn’t seen me for a week and at that time I had just dropped in for tea.
“I put his gun in the desk,” I said.
“Gun?” Then it seemed to dawn on her. “Oh, last night was a little hectic, wasn’t it? But I thought you had gone home.”
I walked over closer to her. She had a thin gold chain around her neck and some kind of fancy pendant in gold and blue on white enamel. The blue enameled part looked like a pair of wings, but not spread out. Against these there was a broad white enamel and gold dagger that pierced a scroll. I couldn’t read the words. It was some kind of military insigne.
“I got drunk,” I said. “Deliberately and not elegantly. I was a little lonely.”
“You didn’t have to be,” she said, and her eyes were as clear as water. There wasn’t a trace of guile in them.
“A matter of opinion,” I said. “I’m leaving now and I’m not sure I’ll be back. You heard what I said about the gun?”
“You put it in his desk. It might be a good idea to put it somewhere else. But he didn’t really mean to shoot himself, did he?”
“I can’t answer that. But next time he might.”
She shook her head. “I don’t think so. I really don’t. You were a wonderful help last night, Mr. Marlowe. I don’t know how to thank you.”
“You made a pretty good try.”
She got pink. Then she laughed. “I had a very curious dream in the night,” she said slowly, looking off over my shoulder. “Someone I used to know was here in the house. Someone who has been dead for ten years.” Her fingers went up and touched the gold and enamel pendant. “That’s why I am wearing this today. He gave it to me.”
“I had a curious dream myself,” I said. “But I’m not telling mine. Let me know how Roger gets on and if there is anything I can do.”
She lowered her eyes and looked into mine. “You said you were not coming back.”
“I said I wasn’t sure. I may have to come back. I hope I won’t. There is something very wrong in this house. And only part of it came out of a bottle.”
She stared at me, frowning. “What does that mean?”
“I think you know what I’m talking about.”
She thought it over carefully. Her fingers were still touching the pendant gently. She let out a slow patient sigh. “There’s always another woman,” she said quietly. “At some time or other. It’s not necessarily fatal. We’re talking at cross purposes, aren’t we? We are not even talking about the same thing, perhaps?”
“Could be,” I said. She was still standing on the steps, the third step from the bottom. She still had her fingers on the pendant. She still looked like a golden dream. “Especially if you have in mind that the other woman is Linda Loring.”
She dropped her hand from the pendant and came down one more step of the stairs.
“Dr. Loring seems to agree with me,” she said indifferently. “He must have some source of information.”
“You said he had played that scene with half the males in the valley.”
“Did I? Well—it was the conventional sort of thing to say at the time.” She came down another step.
“I haven’t shaved,” I said.
That startled her. Then she laughed. “Oh, I wasn’t expecting you to make love to me.”
“Just what did you expect of me, Mrs. Wade—in the beginning, when you first persuaded me to go hunting? Why me—what have I got to offer?”
“You kept faith,” she said quietly. “When it couldn’t have been very easy.”
“I’m touched
. But I don’t think that was the reason.”
She came down the last step and then she was looking up at me. “Then what was the reason?”
“Or if it was—it was a damn poor reason. Just about the worst reason in the world.”
She frowned a tiny frown. “Why?”
“Because what I did—this keeping faith—is something even a fool doesn’t do twice.”
“You know,” she said lightly, “this is getting to be a very enigmatic conversation.”
“You’re a very enigmatic person, Mrs. Wade. So long and good luck and if you really care anything about Roger, you’d better find him the right kind of doctor—and quick.”
She laughed again. “Oh, that was a mild attack last night. You ought to see him in a bad one. He’ll be up and working by this afternoon.”
“Like hell he will.”
“But believe me he will. I know him so well.”
I gave her the last shot right in the teeth and it sounded pretty nasty.
“You don’t really want to save him, do you? You just want to look as if you are trying to save him.”
“That,” she said deliberately, “was a very beastly thing to say to me.”
She stepped past me and walked through the dining room doors and then the big room was empty and I crossed to the front door and let myself out. It was a perfect summer morning in that bright secluded valley. It was too far from the city to get any smog and cut off by the low mountains from the dampness of the Ocean. It was going to be hot later, but in a nice refined exclusive sort of way, nothing brutal like the heat of the desert, not sticky and rank like the heat of the city. Idle Valley was a perfect place to live. Perfect. Nice people with nice homes, nice cars, nice horses, nice dogs, possibly even nice children.
But all a man named Marlowe wanted from it was out. And fast.
THIRTY-ONE
I went home and showered and shaved and changed clothes and began to feel clean again. I cooked some breakfast, ate it, washed up, swept the kitchen and the service porch, filled a pipe and called the phone answering service. I shot a blank. Why go to the office? There would be nothing there but another dead moth and another layer of dust. In the safe would be my portrait of Madison. I could go down and play with that, and with the five crisp hundred-dollar bills that still smelled of coffee. I could do that, but I didn’t want to. Something inside me had gone sour. None of it really belonged to me. What was it supposed to buy? How much loyalty can a dead man use? Phooey: I was looking at life through the mists of a hangover.
It was the kind of morning that seems to go on forever. I was flat and tired and dull and the passing minutes seemed to fall into a void, with a soft whirring sound, like spent rockets. Birds chirped in the shrubbery outside and the cars went up and down Laurel Canyon Boulevard endlessly. Usually I wouldn’t even hear them. But I was brooding and irritable and mean and oversensitive. I decided to kill the hangover.
Ordinarily I was not a morning drinker. The Southern California climate is too soft for it. You don’t metabolize fast enough. But I mixed a tall cold one this time and sat in an easy chair with my shirt open and pecked at a magazine, reading a crazy story about a guy that had two lives and two psychiatrists, one was human and one was some kind of insect in a hive. The guy kept going from one to the other and the whole thing was as crazy as a crumpet, but funny in an off-beat sort of way. I was handling the drink carefully, a sip at a time, watching myself.
It was about noon when the telephone rang and the voice said: “This is Linda Loring. I called your office and your phone service told me to try your home. I’d like to see you.”
“Why?”
“I’d rather explain that in person. You go to your office from time to time, I suppose.”
“Yeah. From time to time. Is there any money in it?”
“I hadn’t thought of it that way. But I have no objection, if you want to be paid. I could be at your office in about an hour.”
“Goody.”
“What’s the matter with you?” she asked sharply.
“Hangover. But I’m not paralyzed. I’ll be there. Unless you’d rather come here.”
“Your office would suit me better.”
“I’ve got a nice quiet place here. Dead-end street, no near neighbors.”
“The implication does not attract me—if I understand you.”
“Nobody understands me, Mrs. Loring. I’m enigmatic. Okay, I’ll struggle down to the coop.”
“Thank you so much.” She hung up.
I was slow getting down there because I stopped on the way for a sandwich. I aired out the office and switched on the buzzer and poked my head through the communicating door and she was there already, sitting in the same chair where Mendy Menendez had sat and looking through what could have been the same magazine. She had a tan gabardine suit on today and she looked pretty elegant. She put the magazine aside, gave me a serious look, and said:
“Your Boston fern needs watering. I think it needs repotting too. Too many air roots.”
I held the door open for her. The hell with the Boston fern. When she was inside and I had let the door swing shut I held the customer’s chair for her and she gave the office the usual once over. I got around to my side of the desk.
“Your establishment isn’t exactly palatial,” she said. “Don’t you even have a secretary?”
“It’s a sordid life, but I’m used to it.”
“And I shouldn’t think very lucrative,” she said.
“Oh I don’t know. Depends. Want to see a portrait of Madison?’
“A what?”
“A five-thousand-dollar bill. Retainer. I’ve got it in the safe.” I got up and started over there. I spun the knob and opened it and unlocked a drawer inside, opened an envelope, and dropped it in front of her. She stared at it in something like amazement.
“Don’t let the office fool you,” I said. “I worked for an old boy one time that would cash in at about twenty millions. Even your old man would say hello to him. His office was no better than mine, except he was a bit deaf and had that soundproofing stuff on the ceiling. On the floor brown linoleum, no carpet.”
She picked the portrait of Madison up and pulled it between her fingers and turned it over. She put it down again.
“You got this from Terry, didn’t you?”
“Gosh, you know everything, don’t you Mrs. Loring?”
She pushed the bill away from her, frowning. “He had one. He carried it on him ever since he and Sylvia were married the second time. He called it his mad money. It was not found on his body.”
“There could be other reasons for that.”
“I know. But how many people carry a five-thousand-dollar bill around with them? How many who could afford to give you that much money would give it to you in this form?”
It wasn’t worth answering. I just nodded. She went on brusquely.
“And what were you supposed to do for it, Mr. Marlowe? Or would you tell me? On that last ride down to Tijuana he had plenty of time to talk. You made it very clear the other evening that you didn’t believe his confession. Did he give you a list of his wife’s lovers so that you might find a murderer among them?”
I didn’t answer that either, but for different reasons.
“And would the name of Roger Wade appear on that list by any chance?” she asked harshly. “If Terry didn’t kill his wife, the murderer would have to be some violent and irresponsible man, a lunatic or a savage drunk. Only that sort of man could, to use your own repulsive phrase, beat her face into a bloody sponge. Is that why you are making yourself so very useful to the Wades—a regular mother’s helper who comes on call to nurse him when he is drunk, to find him when he is lost, to bring him home when he is helpless?”
“Let me set you right on a couple of points, Mrs. Loring. Terry may or may not have given me that beautiful piece of engraving. But he gave me no list and mentioned no names. There was nothing he asked me to do except what you seem to feel sure I
did do, drive him to Tijuana. My getting involved with the Wades was the work of a New York publisher who is desperate to have Roger Wade finish his book, which involves keeping him fairly sober, which in turn involves finding out if there is any special trouble that makes him get drunk. If there is and it can be found out, then the next step would be an effort to remove it. I say effort, because the chances are you couldn’t do it. But you could try.”
“I could tell you in one simple sentence why he gets drunk,” she said contemptuously. “That anemic blond show piece he’s married to.”
“Oh I don’t know,” I said. “I wouldn’t call her anemic.”
“Really? How interesting.” Her eyes glittered.
I picked up my portrait of Madison. “Don’t chew too long on that one, Mrs. Loring. I am not sleeping with the lady. Sorry to disappoint you.”
I went over to the safe and put my money away in the locked compartment. I shut the safe and spun the dial.
“On second thought,” she said to my back, “I doubt very much that anyone is sleeping with her.”
I went back and sat on the corner of the desk. “You’re getting bitchy, Mrs. Loring. Why? Are you carrying a torch for our alcoholic friend?”
“I hate remarks like that,” she said bitingly. “I hate them. I suppose that idiotic scene my husband made makes you think you have the right to insult me. No, I am not carrying a torch for Roger Wade. I never did—even when he was a sober man who behaved himself. Still less now that he is what he is.”
I flopped into my chair, reached for a matchbox, and stared at her. She looked at her watch.
“You people with a lot of money are really something,” I said. “You think anything you choose to say, however nasty, is perfectly all right. You can make sneering remarks about Wade and his wife to a man you hardly know, but if I hand you back a little change, that’s an insult. Okay, let’s play it low down. Any drunk will eventually turn up with a loose woman. Wade is a drunk, but you’re not a loose woman. That’s just a casual suggestion your high-bred husband drops to brighten up a cocktail party. He doesn’t mean it, he’s just saying it for laughs. So we rule you out, and look for a loose woman elsewhere. How far do we have to look, Mrs. Loring—to find one that would involve you enough to bring you down here trading sneers with me? It has to be somebody rather special, doesn’t it—otherwise why should you care?”