He came through a gate in the railing and started for the entrance and then did a nice cutback and came striding over to mc. He stood looking down at me—a big man, two inches over six feet and built to proportion. He had a well-massaged face that didn’t hide the lines of dissipation. His eyes were black, hard, and tricky.
“You want to see mc?”
I stood up, got out my billfold and gave him a card. He stared at the card and palmed it. His eyes became thoughtful.
“Who’s Mr. West?”
“Search me.”
He gave me a hard, direct, interested look. “You have the right idea,” he said. “Let’s go into my office.”
The receptionist was so mad she was trying to initial three papers at once when we went past her through the railing.
The office beyond was long, dim and quiet, but not cool. There was a large photo on the wall of a tough-looking old bird who had held lots of noses to lots of grindstones in his time. The big man went behind about eight hundred dollars’ worth of desk and tilted himself back in a padded high-backed director’s chair. He pushed a cigar humidor at mc. I lit a cigar and he watched me light it with cool, steady eyes.
“This is very confidential,” he said.
“Uh-huh.”
He read my card again and put it away in a gold-plated wallet. “Who sent you?”
“A friend in the sheriff’s office.”
“I’d have to know a little more about you than that.”
I gave him a couple of names and numbers. He reached for his phone, asked for a line and dialed them himself. He got both the parties I had mentioned and talked. In four minutes he had hung up and tilted his chair again. We both wiped the backs of our necks.
“So far, so good,” he said. “Now show me you’re the man you say you arc.”
I got my billfold out and showed him a small photostat of my license. He seemed pleased. “How much do you charge?”
“Twenty-five bucks a day and expenses.”
“That’s too much. What is the nature of the expenses?”
“Gas and oil, maybe a bribe or two, meals and whisky. Mostly whisky.”
“Don’t you eat when you’re not working?”
“Yeah—but not so well.”
He grinned. His grin like his eyes had a stony cast to it. “I think maybe we’ll get along,” he said.
He opened a drawer and brought out a Scotch bottle. We had a drink. He put the bottle on the floor, wiped his lips, lit a monogrammed cigarette and inhaled comfortably. “Better make it fifteen a day,” he said. “In times like these. And go easy on the liquor.”
“I was just kidding you,” I said. “A man you can’t kid is a man you can’t trust.”
He grinned again. “It’s a deal. First off though, your promise that in no circumstances you have anything to do with any cop friends you may happen to have.”
“As long as you haven’t murdered anybody, it suits me.”
He laughed. “Not yet. But I’m a pretty tough guy still. I want you to trace my wife and find out where she is and what she’s doing, and without her knowing it.
“She disappeared eleven days ago—August twelfth—from a cabin we have at Little Fawn Lake. That’s a small lake owned by myself and two other men. It’s three miles from Puma Point. Of course you know where that is.”
“In the San Bernardino Mountains, about forty miles from San Bernardino.”
“Yes.” He flicked ash from his cigarette on the desk top and leaned over to blow it off. “Little Fawn Lake is only about three-eighths of a mile long. It has a small dam we built for real estate development—just at the wrong time. There are four cabins up there. Mine, two belonging to my friends, neither of them occupied this summer, and a fourth on the near side of the lake as you come in. That one is occupied by a man named William Haines and his wife. He’s a disabled veteran with a pension. He lives there rent free and looks after the place. My wife has been spending the summer up there and was to leave on the twelfth to come in to town for some social activity over the weekend. She never came.”
I nodded. He opened a locked drawer and took out an envelope. He took a photo and a telegram from the envelope, and passed the telegram across the desk. It had been sent from El Paso, Texas, on August 15th at 9:18 AM. It was addressed to Howard Melton, 715 Avenant Building, Los Angeles. It read: Am crossing to get Mexican divorce. Will marry Lance. Good luck and goodbye. Julia.
I put the yellow form down on the desk. “Julia is my wife’s name,” Melton said.
“Who’s Lance?”
“Lancelot Goodwin. He used to be my confidential secretary up to a year ago. Then he came into some money and quit. I have known for a long time that Julia and he were a bit soft on each other, if I may put it that way.”
“It’s all right with me,” I said.
He pushed the photo across the desk. It was a snapshot on glazed paper showing a slim, small blonde and a tall, lean, dark, handsome guy, about thirty-five, a shade too handsome. The blonde could have been anything from eighteen to forty. She was that type. She had a figure and didn’t act stingy with it. She wore a swimsuit which didn’t strain the imagination and the man wore trunks. They sat against a striped beach umbrella on the sand. I put the snapshot down on top of the telegram.
“That’s all the exhibits,” Melton said, “but not all the facts. Another drink?” He poured it and we drank it. He put the bottle down on the floor again and his telephone rang. He talked a moment, then juggled the hood and told the operator to hold his calls for a while.
“So far there would be nothing much to it,” he said. “But I met Lance Goodwin on the street last Friday. He said he hadn’t seen Julia in months. I believed him, because Lance is a fellow without many inhibitions, and he doesn’t scare. He’d be apt to tell me the truth about a thing like that. And I think he’ll keep his mouth shut.”
“Were there other fellows you thought of?”
“No. If there are any, I don’t know them. My hunch is, Julia has been arrested and is in jail somewhere and has managed, by bribery or otherwise, to hide her identity.”
“In jail for what?”
He hesitated a moment and then said very quietly: “Julia is a kleptomaniac. Not bad, and not all the time. Mostly when she is drinking too much. She has spells of that, too. Most of her tricks have been here in Los Angeles in the big stores where we have accounts. She’s been caught a few times and been able to bluff out and have the stuff put on the bill. No scandal so far that I couldn’t take care of. But in a strange town—” He stopped and frowned hard. “I have my job with the Doreme people to worry about,” he said.
“She ever been printed?”
“How?”
“Had her fingerprints taken and filed?”
“Not that I know of.” He looked worried at that.
“This Goodwin know about the sideline she worked?”
“I couldn’t say. I hope not. He’s never mentioned it, of course.”
“I’d like his address.”
“He’s in the book. Has a bungalow over in the Chevy Chase district, near Glendale. Very secluded place. I’ve a hunch Lance is quite a chaser.”
It looked like a very nice setup, but I didn’t say so out loud. I could see a little honest money coming my way for a change. “You’ve been up to this Little Fawn Lake since your wife disappeared, of course.”
He looked surprised. “Well, no. I’ve had no reason to. Until I met Lance in front of the Athletic Club I supposed he and Julia were together somewhere—perhaps even married already. Mexican divorces are quick.”
“How about money? She have much with her?”
“I don’t know. She has quite a lot of money of her own, inherited from her father. I guess she can get plenty of money.”
“I see. How was she dressed—or would you know?”
He shook his head. “I hadn’t seen her in two weeks. She wore rather dark clothes as a rule. Haines might be able to tell you. I suppose he’ll have
to know she disappeared. I think he can be trusted to keep his mouth shut.” Melton smiled wryly. “She had a small octagonal platinum wrist watch with a chain of large links. A birthday present. It had her name inside. She had a diamond and emerald ring and a platinum wedding ring engraved inside: Howard and Julia Melton. July 27th, 1926.”
“But you don’t suspect foul play, do you?”
“No.” His large cheekbones reddened a little. “I told you what I suspected.”
“If she’s in somebody’s jailhouse, what do I do? Just report back and wait?”
“Of course. If she’s not, keep her in sight until I can get there, wherever it is. I think I can handle the situation.”
“Uh-huh. You look big enough. You said she left Little Fawn Lake on August twelfth. But you haven’t been up there. You mean she did—or she was just supposed to—or you guess it from the date of the telegram?”
“Right. There’s one more thing I forgot. She did leave on the twelfth. She never drove at night, so she drove down the mountain in the afternoon and stopped at the Olympia Hotel until train time. I know that because they called me up a week later and said her car was in their garage and did I want to call for it. I said I’d be over and get it when I had time.”
“Okay, Mr. Melton. I think I’ll run around and check over this Lancelot Goodwin a little first, He might happen not to have told you the truth.”
He handed me the Other Cities phone book and I looked it up. Lancelot Goodwin lived at 3416 Chester Lane. I didn’t know where that was, but I had a map in the car.
I said: “I’m going out there and snoop around. I’d better have a little money on account. Say a hundred bucks.”
“Fifty should do to start,” he said. He took out his gold-plated wallet and gave me two twenties and a ten. “I’ll get you to sign a receipt—just as a matter of form.”
He had a receipt book in his desk and wrote out what he wanted and I signed it. I put the two exhibits in my pocket and stood up. We shook hands.
I left him with the feeling that he was a guy who would not make many small mistakes, especially about money. As I went out the receptionist gave me the nasty eye. I worried about it almost as far as the elevator.
Two—The Silent House
My car was in a lot across the street, so I took it north to Fifth and west to Flower and from there down to Glendale Boulevard and so on into Glendale. That made it about lunch time, so I stopped and ate a sandwich.
Chevy Chase is a deep canyon in the foothills that separate Glendale from Pasadena. It is heavily wooded, and the streets branching off the main drag are apt to be pretty shut-in and dark. Chester Lane was one of them, and was dark enough to be in the middle of a redwood forest. Goodwin’s house was at the deep end, a small English bungalow with a peaked roof and leaded windowpanes that wouldn’t have let much light in, even if there had been any to let in. The house was set back in a fold of the hills, with a big oak tree practically on the front porch. It was a nice little place to have fun.
The garage at the side was shut up. I walked along a twisted path made of steppingstones and pushed the bell. I could hear it ring somewhere in the rear with that sound bells seem to have in an empty house. I rang it twice more. Nobody came to the door. A mockingbird flew down on the small, neat front lawn and poked a worm out of the sod and went away with it. Somebody started a car out of sight down the curve of the street. There was a brand-new house across the street with a For Sale sign stuck into the manure and grass seed in front of it. No other house was in sight.
I tried the bell one more time and did a snappy tattoo with the knocker, which was a ring held in the mouth of a lion. Then I left the front door and put an eye to the crack between the garage doors. There was a car in there, shining dimly in the faint light. I prowled around to the back yard and saw two more oak trees and a rubbish burner and three chairs around a green garden table under one of the trees. It looked so shady and cool and pleasant back there, I would have liked to stay. I went to the back door, which was half glass but had a spring lock. I tried turning the knob, which was silly. It opened and I took a deep breath and walked in.
This Lancelot Goodwin ought to be willing to listen to a little reason, if he caught me. If he didn’t, I wanted to glance around his effects. There was something about him maybe just his first name—that worried me.
The back door opened on a porch with high, narrow screens. From that another unlocked door, also with a spring lock, opened into a kitchen with gaudy tiles and an enclosed gas stove. There were a lot of empty bottles on the sink. There were two swing doors. I pushed the one towards the front of the house. It gave on an alcove dining room with a buffet on which there were more liquor bottles but not empty.
The living room was to my right under an arch. It was dark even in the middle of the day. It was nicely furnished, with built-in bookshelves and books that hadn’t been bought in sets. There was a highboy radio in the corner, with a half-empty glass of amber fluid on top of it. And there was ice in the amber fluid. The radio made a faint humming sound and light glowed behind the dial. It was on, but the volume was down to nothing.
That was funny. I turned around and looked at the back corner of the room and saw something funnier.
A man was sitting in a deep brocade chair with slippered feet on a footstool that matched the chair. He wore an open-neck polo shirt and ice-cream pants and a white belt. His left hand rested easily on the wide arm of the chair and his right hand drooped languidly outside the other arm to the carpet, which was a solid dull rose. He was a lean, dark, handsome guy, rangily built. One of those lads who move fast and are much stronger than they look. His mouth was slightly open showing the edges of his teeth. His head was a little sideways, as though he had dozed off as he sat there, having himself a few drinks and listening to the radio.
There was a gun on the floor beside his right hand and there was a scorched red hole in the middle of his forehead.
Blood dripped very quietly from the end of his chin and fell on his white polo shirt.
For all of a minute—which in a spot like that can be as long as a chiropractor’s thumb—I didn’t move a muscle. If I drew a full breath, it was a secret. I just hung there, empty as a busted flush, and watched Mr. Lancelot Goodwin’s blood form small pear-shaped globules on the end of his chin and then very slowly and casually drop and add themselves to the large patch of crimson that changed the whiteness of his polo shirt. It seemed to me that even in that time the blood dripped slower. I lifted a foot at last, dragged it out of the cement it was stuck in, took a step, and then hauled the other foot after it like a ball and chain. I moved across the dark and silent room.
His eyes glittered as I got close. I bent over to stare into them, to try and meet their look. It couldn’t be done. It never can, with dead eyes. They are always pointed a little to one side or up or down. I touched his face. It was warm and slightly moist. That would be from his drink. He hadn’t been dead more than twenty minutes.
I swung around hard, as if somebody were trying to sneak up behind me with a blackjack, but nobody was. The silence held. The room was full of it, brimming over with it. A bird chirped outdoors in a tree, but that only made the silence thicker. You could have cut slices of it and buttered them.
I started looking at other things in the room. There was a silver-framed photo lying on the floor, back up, in front of the plaster mantel. I went over and lifted it with a handkerchief and turned it. The glass was cracked neatly from corner to corner. The photo showed a slim, light-haired lady with a dangerous smile. I took out the snapshot Howard Melton had given me and held it beside the photo. I was sure it was the same face, but the expression was different, and it was a very common type of face.
I took the photograph carefully into a nicely furnished bedroom and opened a drawer in a long-legged chest. I removed the photo from the frame, polished the frame off nicely with my handkerchief and tucked it under some shirts. Not very clever, but as clever as I felt.
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br /> Nothing seemed very pressing now. If the shot had been heard, and recognized as a shot, radio cops would have been there long ago. I took my photo into the bathroom and trimmed it close with my pocketknife and flushed the scraps down the toilet. I added the photo to what I had in my breast pocket, and went back to the living room.
There was an empty glass on the low table beside the dead man’s left hand. It would have his prints. On the other hand somebody else might have taken a sip out of it and left other prints. A woman, of course. She would have been sitting on the arm of the chair, with a soft, sweet smile on her face, and the gun down behind her back. It had to be a woman. A man couldn’t have shot him in just that perfectly relaxed position. I gave a guess what woman it was—but I didn’t like her leaving her photo on the floor. That was bad publicity.
I couldn’t risk the glass. I wiped it off and did something I didn’t enjoy. I made his hand hold it again, then put it back on the table. I did the same thing with the gun. When I let his hand fall—the trailing hand this time—it swung and swung, like a pendulum on a grandfather’s clock. I went to the glass on the radio and wiped it off. That would make them think she was pretty wise, a different kind of woman altogether—if there are different kinds. I collected four cigarette stubs with lipstick about the shade called “Carmen,” a blond shade. I took them to the bathroom and gave them to the city. I wiped off a few shiny fixtures with a towel, did the same for the front doorknob, and called it a day. I couldn’t wipe over the whole damn house.
I stood and looked at Lancelot Goodwin a moment longer. The blood had stopped flowing. The last drop on his chin wasn’t going to fall. It was going to hang there and get dark and shiny and as permanent as a wart.
I went back through the kitchen and porch, wiping a couple more doorknobs as I went, strolled around the side of the house and took a quick gander up and down the street. Nobody being in sight, I tied the job up with ribbon by ringing the front doorbell again and smearing the button and knob well while I did it. I went to my car, got in and drove away. This had all taken less than half an hour. I felt as if I had fought all the way through the Civil War.
Collected Stories of Raymond Chandler Page 85
