I ducked. A few drops splattered me. The glass splintered on the wall behind me. The broken pieces fell soundlessly.
“And with that,” she said, completely calm, “I believe I must have used up my entire stock of girlish charm.”
I went over and picked up my hat. “I never thought you killed him,” I said. “But it would help to have some sort of reason for not telling you were there. It’s a help to have enough money for a retainer just to establish myself. And enough information to justify my accepting the retainer.”
She picked a cigarette out of a box, tossed it in the air, caught it between her lips effortlessly and lit it with a match that came from nowhere.
“My goodness. Am I supposed to have killed somebody?” she asked. I was still holding the hat. It made me feel foolish. I don’t know why. I put it on and started for the door.
“I trust you have carfare home,” the contemptuous voice said behind me.
I didn’t answer. I just kept going. When I had the door ready to open she said: “I also trust Miss Gonzales gave you her address and phone number. You should be able to get almost anything out of her—including, I am told, money.”
I let go of the doorknob and went back across the room fast. She stood her ground and the smile on her lips didn’t slip a millimeter.
“Look,” I said. “You’re going to find this hard to believe. But I came over here with the quaint idea that you might be a girl who needed some help—and would find it rather hard to get anyone you could bank on. I figured you went to that hotel room to make some kind of a payoff. And the fact that you went by yourself and took chances on being recognized—and were recognized by a house dick whose standard of ethics would take about as much strain as a very tired old cobweb—all this made me think you might be in one of those Hollywood jams that really mean curtains. But you’re not in any jam. You’re right up front under the baby spot pulling every tired ham gesture you ever used in the most tired B-picture you ever acted in—if acting is the word—”
“Shut up,” she said, between teeth so tight they grated. “Shut up, you slimy, blackmailing keyhole peeper.”
“You don’t need me,” I said. “You don’t need anybody. You’re so God-damn smart you could talk your way out of a safe-deposit box. Okay. Go ahead and talk your way out. I won’t stop you. Just don’t make me listen to it. I’d burst out crying to think a mere slip of an innocent little girl like you should be so clever. You do things to me, honey. Just like Margaret O’Brien.”
She didn’t move or breathe when I reached the door, nor when I opened it. I don’t know why. The stuff wasn’t that good.
I went down the stairs and across the court and out of the front door, almost bumping into a slim dark-eyed man who was standing there lighting a cigarette.
“Excuse me,” he said quietly, “I’m afraid I’m in your way.”
I started to go around him, then I noticed that his lifted right hand held a key. I reached out and snapped it out of his hand for no reason at all. I looked at the number stamped on it. No. 14. Mavis Weld’s apartment. I threw it off behind some bushes.
“You don’t need that,” I said. “The door isn’t locked.”
“Of course,” he said. There was a peculiar smile on his face. “How stupid of me.”
“Yeah,” I said. “We’re both stupid. Anybody’s stupid that bothers with that tramp.”
“I wouldn’t quite say that,” he answered quietly, his small sad eyes watching me without any particular expression.
“You don’t have to,” I said. “I just said it for you. I beg your pardon. I’ll get your key.” I went over behind the bushes, picked it up and handed it to him.
“Thank you very much,” he said. “And by the way—” He stopped. I stopped. “I hope I don’t interrupt an interesting quarrel,” he said. “I should hate to do that. No?” He smiled. “Well, since Miss Weld is a friend in common, may I introduce myself. My name is Steelgrave. Haven’t I seen you somewhere?”
“No you haven’t seen me anywhere, Mr. Steelgrave,” I said. “My name’s Marlowe, Philip Marlowe. It’s extremely unlikely that we’ve met. And strange to relate I never heard of you, Mr. Steelgrave. And I wouldn’t give a damn, even if your name was Weepy Moyer.” I never knew quite why I said that. There was nothing to make me say it, except that the name had been mentioned. A peculiar stillness came over his face. A peculiar fixed look in his silent black eyes. He took the cigarette out of his mouth, looked at the tip, flicked a little ash off it, although there was no ash to flick off, looking down as he said: “Weepy Moyer? Peculiar name. I don’t think I ever heard that. Is he somebody I should know?”
“Not unless you’re unusually fond of ice picks,” I said, and left him. I went on down the steps, crossed to my car, looked back before I got in. He was standing there looking down at me, the cigarette between his lips. From that distance I couldn’t see whether there was any expression on his face. He didn’t move or make any kind of gesture when I looked back at him. He didn’t even turn away. He just stood there. I got in and drove off.
THIRTEEN
I drove east on Sunset but I didn’t go home. At La Brea I turned north and swung over to Highland, out over Cahuenga Pass and down on to Ventura Boulevard, past Studio City and Sherman Oaks and Encino. There was nothing lonely about the trip. There never is on that road. Fast boys in stripped-down Fords shot in and out of the traffic streams, missing fenders by a sixteenth of an inch, but somehow always missing them. Tired men in dusty coups and sedans winced and tightened their grip on the wheel and ploughed on north and west towards home and dinner, an evening with the sports page, the blatting of the radio, the whining of their spoiled children and the gabble of their silly wives. I drove on past the gaudy neons and the false fronts behind them, the sleazy hamburger joints that look like palaces under the colors, the circular drive-ins as gay as circuses with the chipper hard-eyed carhops, the brilliant counters, and the sweaty greasy kitchens that would have poisoned a toad. Great double trucks rumbled down over Sepulveda from Wilmington and San Pedro and crossed towards the Ridge Route, starting up in low-low from the traffic lights with a growl of lions in the zoo.
Behind Encino an occasional light winked from the hills through thick trees. The homes of screen stars. Screen stars, phooey. The veterans of a thousand beds. Hold it, Marlowe, you’re not human tonight.
The air got cooler. The highway narrowed. The cars were so few now that the headlights hurt. The grade rose against chalk walls and at the top a breeze, unbroken from the ocean, danced casually across the night.
I ate dinner at a place near Thousand Oaks. Bad but quick. Feed ’em and throw ’em out. Lots of business. We can’t bother with you sitting over your second cup of coffee, mister. You’re using money space. See those people over there behind the rope? They want to eat. Anyway they think they have to. God knows why they want to eat here. They could do better home out of a can. They’re just restless. Like you. They have to get the car out and go somewhere. Sucker-bait for the racketeers that have taken over the restaurants. Here we go again. You’re not human tonight, Marlowe.
I paid off and stopped in a bar to drop a brandy on top of the New York cut. Why New York, I thought. It was Detroit where they made machine tools. I stepped out into the night air that nobody had yet found out how to option. But a lot of people were probably trying. They’d get around to it.
I drove on to the Oxnard cut-off and turned back along the ocean. The big eight-wheelers and sixteen-wheelers were streaming north, all hung over with orange lights. On the right the great fat solid Pacific trudging into shore like a scrubwoman going home. No moon, no fuss, hardly a sound of the surf. No smell. None of the harsh wild smell of the sea. A California ocean. California, the department-store state. The most of everything and the best of nothing. Here we go again. You’re not human tonight, Marlowe.
All right. Why would I be? I’m sitting in that office, playing with a dead fly and in pops this dowdy little item
from Manhattan, Kansas, and chisels me down to a shopworn twenty to find her brother. He sounds like a creep but she wants to find him. So with this fortune clasped to my chest, I trundle down to Bay City and the routine I go through is so tired I’m half asleep on my feet. I meet nice people, with and without ice picks in their necks. I leave, and I leave myself wide-open too. Then she comes in and takes the twenty away from me and gives me a kiss and gives it back to me because I didn’t do a full day’s work.
So I go see Dr. Hambleton, retired (and how) optometrist from El Centro, and meet again the new style in neckwear. And I don’t tell the cops. I just frisk the customer’s toupee and put on an act. Why? Who am I cutting my throat for this time? A blonde with sexy eyes and too many door keys? A girl from Manhattan, Kansas? I don’t know. All I know is that something isn’t what it seems and the old tired but always reliable hunch tells me that if the hand is played the way it is dealt the wrong person is going to lose the pot. Is that my business? Well, what is my business? Do I know? Did I ever know? Let’s not go into that. You’re not human tonight, Marlowe. Maybe I never was or ever will be. Maybe I’m an ectoplasm with a private license. Maybe we all get like this in the cold half-lit world where always the wrong thing happens and never the right.
Malibu. More movie stars. More pink and blue bathtubs. More tufted beds. More Chanel No. 5. More Lincoln Continentals and Cadillacs. More wind-blown hair and sunglasses and attitudes and pseudo-refined voices and waterfront morals. Now, wait a minute. Lots of nice people work in pictures. You’ve got the wrong attitude, Marlowe. You’re not human tonight.
I smelled Los Angeles before I got to it. It smelled stale and old like a living room that had been closed too long. But the colored lights fooled you. The lights were wonderful. There ought to be a monument to the man who invented neon lights. Fifteen stories high, solid marble. There’s a boy who really made something out of nothing.
So I went to a picture show and it had to have Mavis Weld in it. One of those glass-and-chromium deals where everybody smiled too much and talked too much and knew it. The women were always going up a long curving staircase to change their clothes. The men were always taking monogrammed cigarettes out of expensive cases and snapping expensive lighters at each other. And the help was round-shouldered from carrying trays with drinks across the terrace to a swimming pool about the size of Lake Huron but a lot neater.
The leading man was an amiable ham with a lot of charm, some of it turning a little yellow at the edges. The star was a bad-tempered brunette with contemptuous eyes and a couple of bad close-ups that showed her pushing forty-five backwards almost hard enough to break a wrist. Mavis Weld played second lead and she played it with wraps on. She was good, but she could have been ten times better. But if she had been ten times better half her scenes would have been yanked out to protect the star. It was as neat a bit of tightrope walking as I ever saw. Well it wouldn’t be a tightrope she’d be walking from now on. It would be a piano wire. It would be very high. And there wouldn’t be any net under it.
FOURTEEN
I had a reason for going back to the office. A special-delivery letter with an orange claim check ought to have arrived there by now. Most of the windows were dark in the building, but not all. People work nights in other businesses than mine. The elevator man said “Howdy” from the depths of his throat and trundled me up. The corridor had lighted open doors where the scrubwomen were still cleaning up the debris of the wasted hours. I turned a corner past the slobbery hum of a vacuum cleaner, let myself into my dark office and opened the windows. I sat there at the desk doing nothing, not even thinking. No special-delivery letter. All the noise of the building, except the vacuum cleaner, seemed to have flowed out into the street and lost itself among the turning wheels of innumerable cars. Then somewhere along the hall outside a man started whistling “Lili Marlene” with elegance and virtuosity. I knew who that was. The night man checking office doors. I switched the desk lamp on and he passed without trying mine. His steps went away, then came back with a different sound, more of a shuffle. The buzzer sounded in the other office which was still unlocked. That would be special delivery. I went out to get it, only it wasn’t.
A fat man in sky-blue pants was closing the door with that beautiful leisure only fat men ever achieve. He wasn’t alone, but I looked at him first. He was a large man and wide. Not young nor handsome, but he looked durable. Above the sky-blue gabardine slacks he wore a two-tone leisure jacket which would have been revolting on a zebra. The neck of his canary-yellow shirt was open wide, which it had to be if his neck was going to get out. He was hatless and his large head was decorated with a reasonable amount of pale salmon-colored hair. His nose had been broken but well set and it hadn’t been a collector’s item in the first place.
The creature with him was a weedy number with red eyes and sniffles. Age about twenty, five feet nine, thin as a broom straw. His nose twitched and his mouth twitched and his hands twitched and he looked very unhappy.
The big man smiled genially. “Mr. Marlowe, no doubt?”
I said: “Who else?”
“It’s a little late for a business call,” the big man said and hid half the office by spreading out his hands. “I hope you don’t mind. Or do you already have all the business you can handle?”
“Don’t kid me. My nerves are frayed,” I said. “Who’s the junky?”
“Come along, Alfred,” the big man said to his companion. “And stop acting girlish.”
“In a pig’s valise,” Alfred told him.
The big man turned to me placidly. “Why do all these punks keep saying that? It isn’t funny. It isn’t witty. It doesn’t mean anything. Quite a problem, this Alfred. I got him off the stuff, you know, temporarily at least. Say ‘how do you do’ to Mr. Marlowe, Alfred.”
“Screw him,” Alfred said.
The big man sighed. “My name’s Toad,” he said. “Joseph P. Toad.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Go ahead and laugh,” the big man said. “I’m used to it. Had the name all my life.” He came towards me with his hand out. I took it. The big man smiled pleasantly into my eyes. “O.K. Alfred,” he said without looking back.
Alfred made what seemed to be a very slight and unimportant movement at the end of which a heavy automatic was pointing at me.
“Careful, Alfred,” the big man said, holding my hand with a grip that would have bent a girder. “Not yet.”
“In a pig’s valise,” Alfred said. The gun pointed at my chest. His finger tightened around the trigger. I watched it tighten. I knew at precisely what moment that tightening would release the hammer. It didn’t seem to make any difference. This was happening somewhere else in a cheesy program picture. It wasn’t happening to me.
The hammer of the automatic clicked dryly on nothing. Alfred lowered the gun with a grunt of annoyance and it disappeared whence it had come. He started to twitch again. There was nothing nervous about his movements with the gun. I wondered just what junk he was off of.
The big man let go of my hand, the genial smile still over his large healthy face.
He patted a pocket. “I got the magazine,” he said. “Alfred ain’t reliable lately. The little bastard might have shot you.”
Alfred sat down in a chair and tilted it against the wall and breathed through his mouth.
I let my heels down on the floor again.
“I bet he scared you,” Joseph P. Toad said.
I tasted salt on my tongue.
“You ain’t so tough,” Toad said, poking me in the stomach with a fat finger.
I stepped away from the finger and watched his eyes.
“What does it cost?” he asked almost gently.
“Let’s go into my parlor,” I said.
I turned my back on him and walked through the door into the other office. It was hard work but I made it. I sweated all the way. I went around behind the desk and stood there waiting. Mr. Toad followed me in placidly. The junky came twitchin
g in behind him.
“You don’t have a comic book around, do you?” Toad asked. “Keeps him quiet.”
“Sit down,” I said. “I’ll look.”
He reached for the chair arms. I jerked a drawer open and got my hand around the butt of a Luger. I brought it up slowly, looking at Alfred. Alfred didn’t even look at me. He was studying the corner of the ceiling and trying to keep his mouth out of his eye.
“This is as comic as I get,” I said.
“You won’t need that,” the big man said, genially.
“That’s fine,” I said, like somebody else talking, far away behind a wall. I could just barely hear the words. “But if I do, here it is. And this one’s loaded. Want me to prove it to you?”
The big man looked as near worried as he would ever look. “I’m sorry you take it like that,” he said. “I’m so used to Alfred I hardly notice him. Maybe you’re right. Maybe I ought to do something about him.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Do it this afternoon before you come up here. It’s too late now.”
“Now wait a minute, Mr. Marlowe.” He put his hand out. I slashed at it with the Luger. He was fast, but not fast enough. I cut the back of his hand open with the sight on the gun. He grabbed at it and sucked at the cut. “Hey, please! Alfred’s my nephew. My sister’s kid. I kind of look after him. He wouldn’t hurt a fly, really.”
“Next time you come up I’ll have one for him not to hurt,” I said.
“Now don’t be like that, mister. Please don’t be like that. I’ve got quite a nice little proposition—”
“Shut up,” I said. I sat down very slowly. My face burned. I had difficulty speaking clearly at all. I felt a little drunk. I said, slowly and thickly: “A friend of mine told me about a fellow that had something like this pulled on him. He was at a desk the way I am. He had a gun, just the way I have. There were two men on the other side of the desk, like you and Alfred. The man on my side began to get mad. He couldn’t help himself. He began to shake. He couldn’t speak a word. He just had this gun in his hand. So without a word he shot twice under the desk, right where your belly is.”
The Little Sister Page 8
