“Mr. Sherman—that’s the M.E.—said I could look you up and see what you have.”
“It’s off the record unless you agree to my terms.” I unlocked the desk and handed him the photostat. He read the four pages rapidly and then again more slowly. He looked very excited—about as excited as a mortician at a cheap funeral.
“Gimme the phone.”
I pushed it across the desk. He dialed, waited, and said: “This is Morgan. Let me talk to Mr. Sherman.” He waited and got some other female and then got his party and asked him to ring back on another line.
He hung up and sat holding the telephone in his lap with the forefinger pressing the button down. It rang again and he lifted the receiver to his ear.
“Here it is, Mr. Sherman.”
He read slowly and distinctly. At the end there was a pause. Then, “One moment, sir.” He lowered the phone and glanced across the desk. “He wants to know how you got hold of this.”
I reached across the desk and took the photostat away from him. “Tell him it’s none of his goddam business how I got hold of it. Where is something else. The stamp on the back of the pages show that.”
“Mr. Sherman, it’s apparently an official document of the Los Angeles Sheriffs office. I guess we could check its authenticity easy enough. Also there’s a price.”
He listened some more and then said: “Yes, sir. Right here.” He pushed the phone across the desk. “Wants to talk to you.”
It was a brusque authoritative voice. “Mr. Marlowe, what are your terms? And remember the Journal is the only paper in Los Angeles which would even consider touching this matter.”
“You didn’t do much on the Lennox case, Mr. Sherman.”
“I realize that. But at that time it was purely a question of scandal for scandal’s sake. There was no question of who was guilty. What we have now, if your document is genuine, is something quite different. What are your terms?”
“You print the confession in full in the form of a photographic reproduction. Or you don’t print it at all.”
“It will be verified. You understand that?”
“I don’t see how, Mr. Sherman. If you ask the D.A. he will either deny it or give it to every paper in town. He’d have to. If you ask the Sheriffs office they will put it up to the D.A.”
“Don’t worry about that, Mr. Marlowe. We have ways. How about your terms?”
“I just told you.”
“Oh. You don’t expect to be paid?”
“Not with money.”
“Well, you know your own business, I suppose. May I have Morgan again?”
I gave the phone back to Lonnie Morgan.
He spoke briefly and hung up. “He agrees,” he said. “I take that photostat and he checks it. He’ll do what you say. Reduced to half size it will take about half of page 1A.”
I gave him back the photostat. He held it and pulled at the tip of his long nose. “Mind my saying I think you’re a damn fool?”
“I agree with you.”
“You can still change your mind.”
“Nope. Remember that night you drove me home from the City Bastille? You said I had a friend to say goodbye to. I’ve never really said goodbye to him. If you publish this photostat, that will be it. It’s been a long time—a long, long time.”
“Okay, chum.” He grinned crookedly. “But I still think you’re a damn fool. Do I have to tell you why?”
“Tell me anyway.”
“I know more about you than you think. That’s the frustrating part of newspaper work. You always know so many things you can’t use. You get cynical. If this confession is printed in the Journal, a lot of people will be sore. The D.A., the coroner, the Sheriffs crowd, an influential and powerful private citizen named Potter, and a couple of toughies called Menendez and Starr. You’ll probably end up in the hospital or in jail again.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Think what you like, pal. I’m telling you what I think. The D.A. will be sore because he dropped a blanket on the Lennox case. Even if the suicide and confession of Lennox made him look justified, a lot of people will want to know how Lennox, an innocent man, came to make a confession, how he got dead, did he really commit suicide or was he helped, why was there no investigation into the circumstances, and how come the whole thing died so fast. Also, if he has the original of this photostat he will think he has been double-crossed by the Sheriff’s people.”
“You don’t have to print the identifying stamp on the back.”
“We won’t. We’re pals with the Sheriff. We think he’s a straight guy. We don’t blame him because he can’t stop guys like Menendez. Nobody can stop gambling as long as it’s legal in all forms in some places and legal in some forms in all places. You stole this from the Sheriffs office. I don’t know how you got away with it. Want to tell me?”
“No.”
“Okay. The coroner will be sore because he buggered up the Wade suicide. The D.A. helped him with that too. Harlan Potter will be sore because something is reopened that he used a lot of power to close up. Menendez and Starr will be sore for reasons I’m not sure of, but I know you got warned off. And when those boys get sore at somebody he gets hurt. You’re apt to get the treatment Big Willie Magoon got.”
“Magoon was probably getting too heavy for his job.”
“Why?” Morgan drawled. “Because those boys have to make it stick. If they take the trouble to tell you to lay off, you lay off. If you don’t and they let you get away with it they look weak. The hard boys that run the business, the big wheels, the board of directors, don’t have any use for weak people. They’re dangerous. And then there’s Chris Mady.”
“He just about runs Nevada, I heard.”
“You heard right, chum. Mady is a nice guy but he knows what’s right for Nevada. The rich hoodlums that operate in Reno and Vegas are very careful not to annoy Mr. Mady. If they did, their taxes would go up fast and their police cooperation would go down the same way. Then the top guys back East would decide some changes were necessary. An operator who can’t get along with Chris Mady ain’t operating correctly. Get him the hell out of there and put somebody else in. Getting him out of there means only one thing to them. Out in a wooden box.”
“They never heard of me,” I said.
Morgan frowned and whipped an arm up and down in a meaningless gesture. “They don’t have to. Mady’s estate on the Nevada side of Tahoe is right next to Harlan Potter’s estate. Could be they say hello once in a while. Could be some character that is on Mady’s payroll hears from another guy on Potter’s payroll that a punk named Marlowe is buzzing too loud about things that are not any of his business. Could be that this passing remark gets passed on down to where the phone rings in some apartment in L.A. and a guy with large muscles gets a hint to go out and exercise himself and two or three of his friends. If somebody wants you knocked off or smashed, the muscle men don’t have to have it explained why. It’s mere routine to them. No hard feelings at all. Just sit still while we break your arm. You want this back?”
He held out the photostat.
“You know what I want,” I said.
Morgan stood up slowly and put the photostat in his inside pocket. “I could be wrong,” he said. “You may know more about it than I do. I wouldn’t know how a man like Harlan Potter looks at things.”
“With a scowl,” I said. “I’ve met him. But he wouldn’t operate with a goon squad. He couldn’t reconcile it with his opinion of how he wants to live.”
“For my money,” Morgan said sharply, “stopping a murder investigation with a phone call and stopping it by knocking off the witness is just a question of method. See you around—I hope.”
He drifted out of the office like something blown by the wind.
FORTY-SIX
I drove out to Victor’s with the idea of drinking a gimlet and sitting around until the evening edition of the morning papers was on the street. But the bar was crowded and it wasn’t any fun. When the barke
ep I knew got around to me he called me by name.
“You like a dash of bitters in it, don’t you?”
“Not usually. Just for tonight two dashes of bitters.”
“I haven’t seen your friend lately. The one with the green ice.”
“Neither have I.”
He went away and came back with the drink. I pecked at it to make it last, because I didn’t feel like getting a glow on. Either I would get really stiff or stay sober. After a while I had another of the same. It was just past six when the kid with the papers came into the bar. One of the barkeeps yelled at him to beat it, but he managed one quick round of the customers before a waiter got hold of him and threw him out. I was one of the customers. I opened up the Journal and glanced at page 1A. They had made it. It was all there. They had reversed the photostat by making it black on white and by reducing it in size they had fitted it into the top half of the page. There was a short brusque editorial on another page. There was a half column by Lonnie Morgan with a by-line, on still another page.
I finished my drink and left and went to another place to eat dinner and then drove home.
Lonnie Morgan’s piece was a straightforward factual recapitulation of the facts and happenings involved in the Lennox case and the “suicide” of Roger Wade—the facts as they had been published. It added nothing, deduced nothing, imputed nothing. It was clear concise businesslike reporting. The editorial was something else. It asked questions—the kind a newspaper asks of public officials when they are caught with jam on their faces.
About nine-thirty the telephone rang and Bernie Ohls said he would drop by on his way home.
“Seen the Journal?” he asked coyly, and hung up without waiting for an answer.
When he got there he grunted about the steps and said he would drink a cup of coffee if I had one. I said I would make some. While I made it he wandered around the house and made himself very much at home.
“You live pretty lonely for a guy that could get himself disliked,” he said. “What’s over the hill in back?”
“Another street. Why?”
“Just asking. Your shrubbery needs pruning.”
I carried some coffee into the living room and he parked himself and sipped it. He lit one of my cigarettes and puffed at it for a minute or two, then put it out. “Getting so I don’t care for the stuff,” he said. “Maybe it’s the TV commercials. They make you hate everything they try to sell. God, they must think the public is a halfwit. Every time some jerk in a white coat with a stethoscope hanging around his neck holds up some toothpaste or a pack of cigarettes or a bottle of beer or a mouthwash or a jar of shampoo or a little box of something that makes a fat wrestler smell like mountain lilac I always make a note never to buy any. Hell, I wouldn’t buy the product even if I liked it. You read the Journal, huh?”
“A friend of mine tipped me off. A reporter.”
“You got friends?” he asked wonderingly. “Didn’t tell you how they got hold of the material, did he?”
“No. And in this state he doesn’t have to tell you.”
“Springer is hopping mad. Lawford, the deputy D.A. that got the letter this morning, claims he took it straight to his boss, but it makes a guy wonder. What the Journal printed looks like a straight reproduction from the original.”
I sipped coffee and said nothing.
“Serves him right,” Ohls went on. “Springer ought to have handled it himself. Personally I don’t figure it was Lawford that leaked. He’s a politician too.” He stared at me woodenly.
“What are you here for, Bernie? You don’t like me. We used to be friends—as much as anybody can be friends with a tough cop. But it soured a little.”
He leaned forward and smiled—a little wolfishly. “No cop likes it when a private citizen does police work behind his back. If you had connected up Wade and the Lennox frail for me the time Wade got dead I’d have made out. If you had connected up Mrs. Wade and this Terry Lennox I’d have had her in the palm of my hand—alive. If you had come clean from the start Wade might be still alive. Not to mention Lennox. You figure you’re a pretty smart monkey, don’t you?”
“What would you like me to say?”
“Nothing. It’s too late. I told you a wise guy never fools anybody but himself. I told you straight and clear. So it didn’t take. Right now it might be smart for you to leave town. Nobody likes you and a couple of guys that don’t like people do something about it. I had the word from a stoolie.”
“I’m not that important, Bernie. Let’s stop snarling at each other. Until Wade was dead you didn’t even enter the case. After that it didn’t seem to matter to you and to the coroner or to the D.A. or to anybody. Maybe I did some things wrong. But the truth came out, You could have had her yesterday afternoon—with what?”
“With what you had to tell us about her.”
“Me? With the police work I did behind your back?”
He stood up abruptly. His face was red. “Okay, wise guy. She’d have been alive. We could have booked her on suspicion. You wanted her dead, you punk, and you know it.”
“I wanted her to take a good long quiet look at herself. What she did about it was her business. I wanted to clear an innocent man. I didn’t give a good goddam how I did it and I don’t now. I’ll be around when you feel like doing something about me.”
“The hard boys will take care of you, buster. I won’t have to bother. You think you’re not important enough to bother them. As a P.I. named Marlowe, check. You’re not. As a guy who was told where to get off and blew a raspberry in their faces publicly in a newspaper, that’s different. That hurts their pride.”
“That’s pitiful,” I said. “Just thinking about it makes me bleed internally, to use your own expression.”
He went across to the door and opened it. He stood looking down the redwood steps and at the trees on the hill across the way and up the slope at the end of the street.
“Nice and quiet here,” he said. “Just quiet enough.”
He went on down the steps and got into his car and left. Cops never say goodbye. They’re always hoping to see you again in the line-up.
FORTY-SEVEN
For a short time the next day things looked like getting lively. District Attorney Springer called an early press conference and delivered a statement. He was the big florid black-browed prematurely gray-haired type that always does so well in politics.
“I have read the document which purports to be a confession by the unfortunate and unhappy woman who recently took her life, a document which may or may not be genuine, but which, if genuine, is obviously the product of a disordered mind. I am willing to assume that the Journal published this document in good faith, in spite of its many absurdities and inconsistencies,and these I shall not bore you with enumerating. If Eileen Wade wrote these words, and my office in conjunction with the staff of my respected coadjutor, Sheriff Petersen, will soon determine whether or not she did, then I say to you that she did not write them with a clear head, nor with a steady hand. It is only a matter of weeks since the unfortunate lady found her husband wallowing in his own blood, spilled by his own hand. Imagine the shock, the despair,the utter loneliness which must have followed so sharp a disaster! And now she has joined him in the bitterness of death. Is anything to be gained by disturbing the ashes of the dead? Anything, my friends, beyond the sale of a few copies of a newspaper which is badly in need of circulation? Nothing, my friends, nothing. Let us leave it at that. Like Ophelia in that great dramatic masterpiece called Hamlet, by the immortal William Shakespeare, Eileen Wade wore her rue with a difference. My political enemies would like to make much of that difference, but my friends and fellow voters will not be deceived. They know that this office has long stood for wise and mature law enforcement, for justice tempered with mercy, for solid, stable, and conservative government. The Journal stands for I know not what, and for what it stands I do not much or greatly care. Let the enlightened public judge for itself.”
The Jo
urnal printed this guff in its early edition (it was a round-the-clock newspaper) and Henry Sherman, the Managing Editor, came right back at Springer with a signed document.
Mr. District Attorney Springer was in good form this morning. He is a fine figure of a man and he speaks with a rich baritone voice that is a pleasure to listen to. He did not bore us with any facts. Any time Mr. Springer cares to have the authenticity of the document in question proved to him, the Journal will be most happy to oblige. We do not expect Mr. Springer to take any action to reopen cases which had been officially closed with his sanction or under his direction, just as we do not expect Mr. Springer to stand on his head on the tower of the City Hall. As Mr. Springer so aptly phrases it, is anything to be gained by disturbing the ashes of the dead? Or, as the Journal would prefer to phrase it less elegantly, is anything to be gained by finding out who committed a murder when the murderee is already dead? Nothing, of course, but justice and truth.
On behalf of the late William Shakespeare, the Journal wishes to thank Mr. Springer for his favorable mention of Hamlet, and for his substantially, although not exactly, correct allusion to Ophelia. ‘You must wear your rue with a difference’ was not said of Ophelia but by her, and just what she meant has never been very clear to our less erudite minds. But let that pass. It sounds well and helps to confuse the issue. Perhaps we may be permitted to quote, also from that officially approved dramatic production known as Hamlet, a good thing that happened to be said by a bad man: “And where the offence is let the great axe fall.”
Lonnie Morgan called me up about noon and asked me how I liked it. I told him I didn’t think it would do Springer any harm.
“Only with the eggheads,” Lonnie Morgan said, “and they already had his number. I meant what about you?”
“Nothing about me. I’m just sitting here waiting for a soft buck to rub itself against my cheek.”
“That wasn’t exactly what I meant.”