“That’s right,” I said. “So you realize how much discretion is required.”
He hesitated for no more than a moment, then said, “Give me the address. I’ll come over right away.”
I told him how to get to Langrishe Lodge and about dousing the car lights and parking by the conservatory, as I had. Then I hung up and turned to Clare. “You know who that was?”
“Linda Loring’s ex?”
“That’s right. You know him?”
“No. I never met him.”
“He’s a martinet and in love with himself,” I said, “but he also happens to be a good doctor—and discreet.”
Clare nodded. “Thank you.”
I shut my eyes and massaged the lids with my fingertips. Then I looked at her and asked, “You think you could rustle up a drink?”
She seemed helpless for a second. “There’s Richard’s whiskey,” she said. “I’ll go and see what I can find.”
“Where is Richard, by the way?” I said.
She shrugged. “Oh, you know—out.”
“What happens if he comes back and finds your brother in this state?”
“What will happen? Dick will laugh, probably, and go to bed. He doesn’t take much notice of what goes on between Rett and me.”
“And your mother?”
A flicker of alarm crossed her face. “Mother mustn’t know. She mustn’t.”
“Shouldn’t she be told? He is her son, after all.”
“It would break her heart. She doesn’t know about the drugs. When Richard gets angry at me, he threatens to tell her. It’s another way he holds power over me. Another of the many ways.”
“I get the picture,” I said. I rubbed my eyes again; they felt like they’d been lightly toasted in front of an open fire. “About that drink?”
She went away, and I returned to the bed and sat down on the edge of it and looked at the unconscious young man with the vomit on his shirt and his hair in a mess. I didn’t think he was dying, but I’m no expert when it comes to dope and dope fiends. Everett the Third was obviously a veteran—some of those needle marks on his arm had been there a long time. Sooner or later his mother was going to find out what her darling son did when he wasn’t at home having his hair stroked by her. I just hoped she wouldn’t find out the hard way. Having lost her husband like she had, the last thing she needed, at this stage of her life, was another violent death in the family.
Clare came back with a bottle of Southern Comfort and a cut-glass tumbler. She poured a generous measure and handed it to me. I stood up and tipped the edge of the glass to her in a gesture of appreciation. I don’t like Southern Comfort—too sickly sweet, for my taste—but it would do. I started to get out my cigarette case but changed my mind. It wouldn’t have seemed right, somehow, smoking in Clare Cavendish’s bedroom.
I glanced down at her brother again. “Where does he get the dope?” I asked.
“I don’t know where he gets it now.” She looked aside, biting her lip. Even in distress, she was beautiful. “Nico used to get him some, now and then,” she said. “That’s how I met him—Everett introduced us.” She made a sad little smile. “Are you shocked?”
“Yes,” I said, “a bit. I didn’t realize you and Peterson had that kind of relationship.”
“What do you mean? What kind of relationship?”
“The kind where you’re sleeping with a drug peddler.”
She flinched at that but made a quick recovery. She was getting her spirit back, now that she knew help was on the way and she could stop being responsible for everything. “You don’t understand women at all, do you,” she said.
I suddenly wondered if I’d ever heard her say my name, if she’d ever called me Philip. I didn’t think she had, not even when we were in bed together, in the glow of those blood-red painted roses. “No,” I said, “I don’t suppose I do. Does any man?”
“Yes, I’ve known some men who do.”
I drank my drink. It really was sickly sweet; they must put caramel or something in it. “Are you being straight with me?” I asked. “Did you really see Peterson on Market Street that day?”
Her eyes grew round. “Of course. Why would I lie?”
“I don’t know. Like you say, I don’t understand you.”
She sat down on the bed and folded her hands together and set them on her knees. “You’re right,” she said quietly, “I should have had nothing to do with him. He’s”—she searched for the word—“he’s unworthy. Does that sound strange? I don’t mean unworthy of me—God knows, I’m not worth all that much either. He’s charming, and funny, and he has an elegant mind. He’s even brave, in a way, but at the center there’s only a hollow.”
I watched her eyes. Inside them, she was far, far away. It came to me that it wasn’t Peterson she was talking about, that she was only using him as a way of talking about someone else. It was true; I was sure it was. And that someone else was precious to her in a way that a man like Nico Peterson could never be—in a way that a man like me could never be, either. I suddenly wanted very much to kiss her. I couldn’t think why that was, I mean why I wanted to kiss her now, while she was so far from me, thinking of someone she loved. Women are not the only thing I don’t understand—I don’t understand myself, either, not one little bit.
Suddenly she lifted her head, holding up a hand. “I hear a car,” she said. “It must be Dr. Loring.”
We went down through the dark house, the way we had come up, and out into the garden. Loring’s car was there, stopped behind mine. As we arrived, Loring opened the door and got out.
Loring was thin, with a small goatee and arrogant eyes. We’d had some rough exchanges, the two of us. I didn’t know if he knew that his ex-wife wanted to marry me. It probably wouldn’t have made any difference; he couldn’t loathe me any more than he did already. And he’d washed his hands of Linda some time ago. “Marlowe,” he said coldly. “I’ve come, as you see.”
I introduced him to Clare. He shook her hand briefly and said, “Where’s the patient?”
We returned through the house to Clare’s bedroom. I shut the door behind us, turned, and leaned my back against it. I figured Clare could handle it from here. Everett was her brother, and it was best that I stay out of Loring’s way as much as possible.
He walked to the bed and set down his black bag on the bedspread. “What was it?” he said. “Heroin?”
“Yes,” Clare said in a hushed voice. “I think so.”
Loring felt Everett’s pulse, lifted his eyelids and examined the pupils, put a hand on his chest and pressed gently a couple of times. He nodded and took a hypodermic syringe out of his bag. “I’ll give him a shot of adrenaline,” he said. “He’ll come around in a while.”
“You mean it’s not—it’s not serious?” Clare asked.
He gave her a baleful glance. His eyes had a way of seeming to shrink in their sockets when he was angry or outraged, which was pretty often. “My dear woman,” he said, “your brother’s heart rate is less than fifty, and his respiratory rate is less than twelve. I should guess that for a period tonight he was on the point of death. Luckily, he’s young and relatively healthy. However”—he held an ampoule of clear liquid upside down and pierced the rubber cap with the tip of the hypodermic—“if he continues to indulge this habit, it will almost certainly kill him, sooner rather than later. There are people who can live with a heroin habit—they don’t live well, but they live—but your brother, I can clearly see, is not of that type.”
He plunged the needle into Everett’s arm and glanced up at Clare. “He’s weak. He has weakness written all over him. You should get him into a clinic. I can give you some names, people to call, places to go and see. Otherwise, without the slightest doubt, you’ll lose him.” He extracted the needle and put it away in his bag, along with the empty vial. He turned to Clare again. “Here is my card. Call me tomorrow.”
Clare sat down on the side of the bed again with her hands clasped in her lap. She lo
oked as if someone had punched her. Her brother stirred and groaned.
Loring turned away brusquely. “I’ll walk out with you,” I said. He gave me a cold stare.
* * *
We went down through the shadowy house. Loring was one of those men whose silence was more eloquent than his conversation. I could feel contempt and hatred coming off him like waves of heat. It wasn’t my fault his wife had left him and now wanted to marry me.
We walked through the dark conservatory and out into the night. The mist clung to my face like a wet scarf. Out at sea a light was winking on the mast of someone’s anchored boat. Loring opened the door of his car, threw his bag inside, and turned to me. “I don’t know why you keep turning up in my life, Marlowe,” he said. “I don’t like it.”
“I don’t enjoy it much myself,” I said. “But I’m grateful to you for coming out here tonight. You think he might have died?”
He shrugged. “As I said, he’s young, and young men tend to survive all manner of self-pollution.” He was about to get into the car but paused. “What’s your connection with this family? You’re hardly at their social level, I’d have thought.”
“I’m doing some work for Mrs. Cavendish.”
He made a sound that from someone else might have been a laugh. “She must be in very deep trouble, if she had to call on you.”
“She’s not in trouble at all. She hired me to trace someone—a friend of hers.”
“Why doesn’t she go to the police?”
“It’s a private matter.”
“Yes, you’re good at poking into people’s private lives, aren’t you.”
“Look, Doc,” I said, “I’ve never knowingly done you harm. I’m sorry your wife left you—”
I could feel him stiffen in the darkness. “How dare you speak of my marriage.”
“I don’t know how I dare,” I said wearily. “But I want you to know I mean you no ill.”
“You think that matters to me? You think anything about you is of the slightest interest to me?”
“No, I guess not.”
“What happened to your face, by the way?”
“A fellow hit me with the barrel of a gun.”
He did that cold laugh again. “Nice people you deal with.”
I stepped back. “Anyway, thanks for coming. It can’t be a bad thing, if you saved a life.”
He seemed about to say more, but instead he got into the car and slammed the door and started up the engine and did a quick reverse, then skidded forward over the gravel and was gone.
I stood in the damp darkness for a minute, my damaged face lifted to the sky, breathing in the night’s salty air. I thought of going back into the house, then decided not to. I didn’t have anything more to say to Clare, not tonight, anyway. But she was back in my life. Oh, yes, she was back.
18
When I was young, a couple of millennia ago, I used to think I knew what I was doing. I was aware of the world’s caprices—the goat dances it likes to do with our hopes and desires—but where my own actions were concerned, I was pretty confident that I was sitting square in the driver’s seat, with the wheel held firmly in my own two hands. Now I know different. Now I know that decisions we think we make are in fact made only in hindsight, and that at the time things are actually happening, all we do is drift. It doesn’t trouble me much, this awareness of how little control I have over my affairs. Most of the time I’m content to slide along with the current, paddling my fingers in the water and tickling the odd fish out of its element. There are occasions, though, when I wish I’d made at least some effort to look ahead and calculate the consequences of what I was doing. I’m thinking here of my second visit to the Cahuilla Club, which was, I can safely say, a hell of a lot different from the first …
* * *
It was afternoon, and the place was busy. Some kind of convention was going on, and there were a lot of guys, most of them old, in colored shirts and tartan Bermuda shorts milling about among the bougainvillea with tall glasses in their hands, not all of them entirely steady on their pins. They were all wearing red fezzes, like upended flowerpots with tassels. Marvin the twitching gatekeeper had called ahead to the manager’s office and then waved me on. I left the Olds under a shady tree and walked up to the clubhouse. Halfway there I met the young-old guy who had accosted me last time. He was raking leaves off the pathway. He didn’t seem to recognize me. I greeted him anyway.
“Captain Hook about?” I asked. He gave me a nervous glance and went on with his raking. I tried again: “How are the Lost Boys today?”
He shook his head stubbornly. “I’m not s’posed to be talking to you,” he muttered.
“Is that so? Who says?”
“You know.”
“The captain?”
He looked warily this way and that. “You didn’t ought to mention him,” he said. “You gonna get me in trouble.”
“Well now, I wouldn’t want to do that. Only—”
A voice behind us spoke. “Lamarr? Didn’t I tell you about annoying the visitors?”
Lamarr gave a start, making a ducking motion with his shoulders, as if expecting a blow. Floyd Hanson strolled up, as usual with a hand in the pocket of his fresh-pressed slacks. Today he wore a light blue linen jacket and a white shirt and a shoelace tie fastened with the head of a bull carved from some shiny black stone.
“Hello, Mr. Hanson,” I said. “Lamarr wasn’t being annoying.”
Hanson nodded to me, with his crooked little smile, and laid a hand on Lamarr’s khaki-clad shoulder and spoke to him softly: “You run along now, Lamarr.”
“Sure thing, Mr. Hanson,” Lamarr said, stammering. He threw a glance at me that was half resentful and half scared. Then he shuffled off with his rake in tow. Hanson watched him go with an indulgent expression.
“Lamarr has a good heart,” he said, “only he fantasizes.”
“He thinks you’re Captain Hook,” I said.
He nodded, smiling. “I don’t know how he knows about Peter Pan. I guess someone must have read the story to him once, or maybe he was taken to see it performed. Even the Lamarrs of this world had mothers, after all.” He turned to me. “What can I do for you, Mr. Marlowe?”
“You heard about Lynn Peterson?” I said.
He frowned. “Yes, of course. A tragic thing. Did I see your name somewhere in the newspaper reports of her death?”
“You probably did. I was with her when the killers took her.”
“I see. That must have been upsetting.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Upsetting, that’s the word.”
“Why did they ‘take her,’ as you put it?”
“They were looking for her brother.”
“Even though he’s dead?”
“Is he?”
Hanson said nothing to that, only gave me a long, reflective look, holding his head to one side. “Have you come to ask me more questions about Nico?” he said. “There’s really nothing further I can tell you.”
“You know a guy named Lou Hendricks?” I asked.
He thought about it. “The man who runs that casino out in the desert? I’ve met him. He’s been here at the club once or twice.”
“He’s not a member?”
“No. He came as a guest.”
Off across the lawn, the conventioneers sent up a ragged cheer. Hanson glanced in their direction, shading his eyes with a hand. “We have the Shriners in today,” he said, “as you see. They’re holding a charity golf tournament. They tend to get a little rowdy. Would you care for a drink?”
“I guess it wouldn’t do any harm. Just so long as it’s not tea.”
He smiled. “Come this way.”
We went in through the front door, past the ornate desk and the pert receptionist with the blue spectacles. There were groups of old fellows in fezzes loitering about the corridors and in the bar and the dining room. “Let’s go to my office,” Hanson said. “It’s quieter there.”
His office was a big high
handsome room discreetly fitted with choice pieces of blond furniture and some nice native Indian rugs on the floor. The walls were paneled in cherrywood, and there was a desk just like the one in the reception area, only bigger and more ornate. Hanson sure didn’t stint himself when it came to his creature comforts. What I did miss were any signs of a personal life—no framed photos of a wife and kiddies or a glamour shot of a lady love with a cigarette and a Veronica Lake wave that guys like Hanson usually have in a prominent position on their desks. Maybe he didn’t go in for ladies, or maybe the club frowned on the personal touch—what did it matter? All the same, there was something almost uncanny in the clipped neatness of the place.
“Take a seat, Mr. Marlowe,” Hanson said. He crossed to a sideboard on which an array of bottles was set out. “What can I get you?” he asked.
“Whiskey is fine.”
He searched through the bottles. “I’ve got some Old Crow here—will that do? I’m a martini man myself.”
He poured me a stiff one, added some cubes of ice, and came and handed me the glass. I was sitting on a neat little sofa with beveled wooden legs and a high back. “You not joining me?” I asked.
“Not while I’m working. Mr. Canning has strong views on the perils of the bottle.” He did his twinkling smile.
“Mind if I smoke? Mr. Canning got views on the weed, too?”
“Go ahead, please.” He watched me light up. I offered him my case, but he shook his head. He went to his desk and sat back against the front of it with his arms and ankles crossed. “You’re a persistent man, Mr. Marlowe,” he said lightly.
“You mean, I’m a pain in the rear.”
“That’s not what I said. I admire persistence.”
I sipped my drink and smoked my smoke and glanced about the room. “What exactly do you do, Mr. Hanson?” I asked. “I know you’re the manager, but what does that require of you?”
“There’s a lot of administration involved in running a club like this—you’d be surprised.”
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