He walked over to his desk and sat down and picked up his letter opener and poked at the ball of his thumb with the point. He looked at me with no expression and said: “You’re Marlowe?”
I nodded.
“Sit down.” I sat down. Eddie Prue sat in a chair against the wall and tilted the front legs off the floor.
“I don’t like peepers,” Morny said.
I shrugged.
“I don’t like them for a lot of reasons,” he said. “I don’t like them in any way or at any time. I don’t like them when they bother my friends. I don’t like them when they bust in on my wife.”
I didn’t say anything.
“I don’t like them when they question my driver or when they get tough with my guests,” he said.
I didn’t say anything.
“In short,” he said. “I just don’t like them.”
“I’m beginning to get what you mean,” I said.
He flushed and his eyes glittered. “On the other hand,” he said, “just at the moment I might have a use for you. It might pay you to play ball with me. It might be a good idea. It might pay you to keep your nose clean.”
“How much might it pay me?” I asked.
“It might pay you in time and health.”
“I seem to have heard this record somewhere,” I said. “I just can’t put a name to it.”
He laid the letter opener down and swung open a door in the desk and got a cut glass decanter out. He poured liquid out of it in a glass and drank it and put the stopper back in the decanter and put the decanter back in the desk.
“In my business,” he said, “tough boys come a dime a dozen. And would-be tough boys come a nickel a gross. Just mind your business and I’ll mind my business and we won’t have any trouble.” He lit a cigarette. His hand shook a little.
I looked across the room at the tall man sitting tilted against the wall, like a loafer in a country store. He just sat there without motion, his long arms hanging, his lined gray face full of nothing.
“Somebody said something about some money,” I said to Morny. “What’s that for? I know what the bawling out is for. That’s you trying to make yourself think you can scare me.”
“Talk like that to me,” Morny said, “and you are liable to be wearing lead buttons on your vest.”
“Just think,” I said. “Poor old Marlowe with lead buttons on his vest.”
Eddie Prue made a dry sound in his throat that might have been a chuckle.
“And as for me minding my own business and not minding yours,” I said, “it might be that my business and your business would get a little mixed up together. Through no fault of mine.”
“It better not,” Morny said. “In what way?” He lifted his eyes quickly and dropped them again.
“Well, for instance, your hard boy here calling me up on the phone and trying to scare me to death. And later in the evening calling me up and talking about five C’s and how it would do me some good to drive out here and talk to you. And for instance that same hard boy or somebody who looks just like him—which is a little unlikely—following around after a fellow in my business who happened to get shot this afternoon, on Court Street on Bunker Hill.”
Morny lifted his cigarette away from his lips and narrowed his eyes to look at the tip. Every motion, every gesture, right out of the catalogue.
“Who got shot?”
“A fellow named Phillips, a youngish blond kid. You wouldn’t like him. He was a peeper.” I described Phillips to him.
“I never heard of him,” Morny said.
“And also for instance, a tall blond who didn’t live there was seen coming out of the apartment house just after he was killed,” I said.
“What tall blond?” His voice had changed a little. There was urgency in it.
“I don’t know that. She was seen and the man who saw her could identify her, if he saw her again. Of course she need not have anything to do with Phillips.”
“This man Phillips was a shamus?”
I nodded. “I told you that twice.”
“Why was he killed and how?”
“He was sapped and shot in his apartment. We don’t know why he was killed. If we knew that, we would likely know who killed him. It seems to be that kind of a situation.”
“Who is ‘we’?”
“The police and myself. I found him dead. So I had to stick around.”
Prue let the front legs of his chair down on the carpet very quietly and looked at me. His good eye had a sleepy expression I didn’t like.
Morny said: “You told the cops what?”
I said: “Very little. I gather from your opening remarks to me here that you know I am looking for Linda Conquest. Mrs. Leslie Murdock. I’ve found her. She’s singing here. I don’t know why there should have been any secret about it. It seems to me that your wife or Mr. Vannier might have told me. But they didn’t.”
“What my wife would tell a peeper,” Morny said, “you could put in a gnat’s eye.”
“No doubt she has her reasons,” I said. “However that’s not very important now. In fact it’s not very important that I see Miss Conquest. Just the same I’d like to talk to her a little. If you don’t mind.”
“Suppose I mind,” Morny said.
“I guess I would like to talk to her anyway,” I said. I got a cigarette out of my pocket and rolled it around in my fingers and admired his thick and still-dark eyebrows. They had a fine shape, an elegant curve.
Prue chuckled. Morny looked at him and frowned and looked back at me, keeping the frown on his face.
“I asked you what you told the cops,” he said.
“I told them as little as I could. This man Phillips asked me to come and see him. He implied he was too deep in a job he didn’t like and needed help. When I got there he was dead. I told the police that. They didn’t think it was quite the whole story. It probably isn’t. I have until tomorrow noon to fill it out. So I’m trying to fill it out.”
“You wasted your time coming here,” Morny said.
“I got the idea that I was asked to come here.”
“You can go to hell back any time you want to,” Morny said. “Or you can do a little job for me—for five hundred dollars. Either way you leave Eddie and me out of any conversations you might have with the police.”
“What’s the nature of the job?”
“You were at my house this morning. You ought to have an idea.”
“I don’t do divorce business,” I said.
His face turned white. “I love my wife,” he said. “We’ve only been married eight months. I don’t want any divorce. She’s a swell girl and she knows what time it is, as a rule. But I think she’s playing with a wrong number at the moment.”
“Wrong in what way?”
“I don’t know. That’s what I want found out.”
“Let me get this straight,” I said. “Are you hiring me on a job—or off a job I already have.”
Prue chuckled again against the wall.
Morny poured himself some more brandy and tossed it quickly down his throat. Color came back into his face. He didn’t answer me.
“And let me get another thing straight,” I said. “You don’t mind your wife playing around, but you don’t want her playing with somebody named Vannier. Is that it?”
“I trust her heart,” he said slowly. “But I don’t trust her judgment. Put it that way.”
“And you want me to get something on this man Vannier?”
“I want to find out what he is up to.”
“Oh. Is he up to something?”
“I think he is. I don’t know what.”
“You think he is—or you want to think he is?”
He stared at me levelly for a moment, then he pulled the middle drawer of his desk out, reached in and tossed a folded paper across to me. I picked it up and unfolded it. It was a carbon copy of a gray billhead. Cal-Western Dental Supply Company, and an address. The bill was for 30 lbs. Kerr’s Crystobo
lite $15.75, and 25 lbs. White’s Albastone, $7.75, plus tax. It was made out to H. R. Teager, Will Call, and stamped Paid with a rubber stamp. It was signed for in the corner: L.G. Vannier.
I put it down on the desk.
“That fell out of his pocket one night when he was here,” Morny said. “About ten days ago. Eddie put one of his big feet on it and Vannier didn’t notice he had dropped it.”
I looked at Prue, then at Morny, then at my thumb. “Is this supposed to mean something to me?”
“I thought you were a smart detective. I figured you could find out.”
I looked at the paper again, folded it and put it in my pocket. “I’m assuming you wouldn’t give it to me unless it meant something,” I said.
Morny went to the black and chromium safe against the wall and opened it. He came back with five new bills spread out in his fingers like a poker hand. He smoothed them edge to edge, riffled them lightly, and tossed them on the desk in front of me.
“There’s your five C’s,” he said. “Take Vannier out of my wife’s life and there will be the same again for you. I don’t care how you do it and I don’t want to know anything about how you do it. Just do it.”
I poked at the crisp new bills with a hungry finger. Then I pushed them away. “You can pay me when—and if—I deliver,” I said. “I’ll take my payment tonight in a short interview with Miss Conquest.”
Morny didn’t touch the money. He lifted the square bottle and poured himself another drink. This time he poured one for me and pushed it across the desk.
“And as for this Phillips murder,” I said, “Eddie here was following Phillips a little. You want to tell me why?”
“No.”
“The trouble with a case like this is that the information might come from somebody else. When a murder gets into the papers you never know what will come out. If it does, you’ll blame me.”
He looked at me steadily and said: “I don’t think so. I was a bit rough when you came in, but you shape up pretty good. I’ll take a chance.”
“Thanks,” I said. “Would you mind telling me why you had Eddie call me up and give me the shakes?”
He looked down and tapped on the desk. “Linda’s an old friend of mine. Young Murdock was out here this afternoon to see her. He told her you were working for old lady Murdock. She told me. I didn’t know what the job was. You say you don’t take divorce business, so it couldn’t be that the old lady hired you to fix anything like that up.” He raised his eyes on the last words and stared at me. I stared back at him and waited.
“I guess I’m just a fellow who likes his friends,” he said. “And doesn’t want them bothered by dicks.”
“Murdock owes you some money, doesn’t he?”
He frowned. “I don’t discuss things like that.” He finished his drink, nodded and stood up. “I’ll send Linda up to talk to you. Pick your money up.”
He went to the door and out. Eddie Prue unwound his long body and stood up and gave me a dim gray smile that meant nothing and wandered off after Morny.
I lit another cigarette and looked at the dental supply company’s bill again. Something squirmed at the back of my mind, dimly. I walked to the window and stood looking out across the valley. A car was winding up a hill towards a big house with a tower that was half glass brick with light behind it. The headlights of the car moved across it and turned in toward a garage. The lights went out and the valley seemed darker.
It was very quiet and quite cool now. The dance band seemed to be somewhere under my feet. It was muffled, and the tune was indistinguishable.
Linda Conquest came in through the open door behind me and shut it and stood looking at me with a cold light in her eyes.
19
She looked like her photo and not like it. She had the wide cool mouth, the short nose, the wide cool eyes, the dark hair parted in the middle and the broad white line between the parting. She was wearing a white coat over her dress, with the collar turned up. She had her hands in the pockets of the coat and a cigarette in her mouth.
She looked older, her eyes were harder, and her lips seemed to have forgotten to smile. They would smile when she was singing, in that staged artificial smile. But in repose they were thin and tight and angry.
She moved over to the desk and stood looking down, as if counting the copper ornaments. She saw the cut glass decanter, took the stopper out, poured herself a drink and tossed it down with a quick flip of the wrist.
“You’re a man named Marlowe?” she asked, looking at me. She put her hips against the end of the desk and crossed her ankles.
I said I was a man named Marlowe.
“By and large,” she said, “I am quite sure I am not going to like you one damned little bit. So speak your piece and drift away.”
“What I like about this place is everything runs so true to type,” I said. “The cop on the gate, the shine on the door, the cigarette and check girls, the fat greasy sensual Jew with the tall stately bored showgirl, the well-dressed, drunk and horribly rude director cursing the barman, the silent guy with the gun, the nightclub owner with the soft gray hair and the B-picture mannerisms, and now you—the tall dark torcher with the negligent sneer, the husky voice, the hard-boiled vocabulary.”
She said: “Is that so?” and fitted her cigarette between her lips and drew slowly on it. “And what about the wise-cracking snooper with the last year’s gags and the come-hither smile?”
“And what gives me the right to talk to you at all?” I said.
“I’ll bite. What does?”
“She wants it back. Quickly. It has to be fast or there will be trouble.”
“I thought—” she started to say and stopped cold. I watched her remove the sudden trace of interest from her face by monkeying with her cigarette and bending her face over it. “She wants what back, Mr. Marlowe?”
“The Brasher Doubloon.”
She looked up at me and nodded, remembering—letting me see her remembering.
“Oh, the Brasher Doubloon.”
“I bet you completely forgot it,” I said.
“Well, no. I’ve seen it a number of times,” she said. “She wants it back, you said. Do you mean she thinks I took it?”
“Yeah. Just that.”
“She’s a dirty old liar,” Linda Conquest said.
“What you think doesn’t make you a liar,” I said. “It only sometimes makes you mistaken. Is she wrong?”
“Why would I take her silly old coin?”
“Well—it’s worth a lot of money. She thinks you might need money. I gather she was not too generous.”
She laughed, a tight sneering little laugh. “No,” she said. “Mrs. Elizabeth Bright Murdock would not rate as very generous.”
“Maybe you just took it for spite, kind of,” I said hopefully.
“Maybe I ought to slap your face.” She killed her cigarette in Morny’s copper goldfish bowl, speared the crushed stub absently with the letter opener and dropped it into the wastebasket.
“Passing on from that to perhaps more important matters,” I said, “will you give him a divorce?”
“For twenty-five grand,” she said, not looking at me, “I should be glad to.”
“You’re not in love with the guy, huh?”
“You’re breaking my heart, Marlowe.”
“He’s in love with you,” I said. “After all you did marry him.”
She looked at me lazily. “Mister, don’t think I didn’t pay for that mistake.” She lit another cigarette. “But a girl has to live. And it isn’t always as easy as it looks. And so a girl can make a mistake, marry the wrong guy and the wrong family, looking for something that isn’t there. Security, or whatever.”
“But not needing any love to do it,” I said.
“I don’t want to be too cynical, Marlowe. But you’d be surprised how many girls marry to find a home, especially girls whose arm muscles are all tired out fighting off the kind of optimists that come into these gin and glitter joi
nts.”
“You had a home and you gave it up.”
“It got to be too dear. That port-sodden old fake made the bargain too tough. How do you like her for a client?”
“I’ve had worse.”
She picked a shred of tobacco off her lip. “You notice what she’s doing to that girl?”
“Merle? I noticed she bullied her.”
“It isn’t just that. She has her cutting out dolls. The girl had a shock of some kind and the old brute has used the effect of it to dominate the girl completely. In company she yells at her but in private she’s apt to be stroking her hair and whispering in her ear. And the kid sort of shivers.”
“I didn’t quite get all that,” I said.
“The kid’s in love with Leslie, but she doesn’t know it. Emotionally she’s about ten years old. Something funny is going to happen in that family one of these days. I’m glad I won’t be there.”
I said: “You’re a smart girl, Linda. And you’re tough and you’re wise. I suppose when you married him you thought you could get your hands on plenty.”
She curled her lip. “I thought it would at least be a vacation. It wasn’t even that. That’s a smart ruthless woman, Marlowe. Whatever she’s got you doing, it’s not what she says. She’s up to something. Watch your step.”
“Would she kill a couple of men?”
She laughed.
“No kidding,” I said. “A couple of men have been killed and one of them at least is connected with rare coins.”
“I don’t get it,” she looked at me levelly. “Murdered, you mean?”
I nodded.
“You tell Morny all that?”
“About one of them.”
“You tell the cops?”
“About one of them. The same one.”
She moved her eyes over my face. We stared at each other. She looked a little pale, or just tired. I thought she had grown a little paler than before.
“You’re making that up,” she said between her teeth.
I grinned and nodded. She seemed to relax then.
“About the Brasher Doubloon?” I said. “You didn’t take it. Okay. About the divorce, what?”
“That’s none of your affair.”
“I agree. Well, thanks for talking to me. Do you know a fellow named Vannier?”
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