21
The car was a dark blue seven-passenger sedan, a Packard of the latest model, custom-built. It was the kind of car you wear your rope pearls in. It was parked by a firehydrant and a dark foreign-looking chauffeur with a face of carved wood was behind the wheel. The interior was upholstered in quilted gray chenille. The Indian put me in the back. Sitting there alone I felt like a highclass corpse, laid out by an undertaker with a lot of good taste.
The Indian got in beside the chauffeur and the car turned in the middle of the block and a cop across the street said: “Hey,” weakly, as if he didn’t mean it, and then bent down quickly to tie his shoe.
We went west, dropped over to Sunset and slid fast and noiselessly along that. The Indian sat motionless beside the chauffeur. An occasional whiff of his personality drifted back to me. The driver looked as if he was half asleep but he passed the fast boys in the convertible sedans as though they were being towed. They turned on all the green lights for him. Some drivers are like that. He never missed one.
We curved through the bright mile or two of the Strip, past the antique shops with famous screen names on them, past the windows full of point lace and ancient pewter, past the gleaming new nightclubs with famous chefs and equally famous gambling rooms, run by polished graduates of the Purple Gang, past the Georgian-Colonial vogue, now old hat, past the handsome modernistic buildings in which the Hollywood flesh-peddlers never stop talking money, past a drive-in lunch which somehow didn’t belong, even though the girls wore white silk blouses and drum majorettes’ shakos and nothing below the hips but glazed kid Hessian boots. Past all this and down a wide smooth curve to the bridle path of Beverly Hills and lights to the south, all colors of the spectrum and crystal clear in an evening without fog, past the shadowed mansions up on the hills to the north, past Beverly Hills altogether and up into the twisting foothill boulevard and the sudden cool dusk and the drift of wind from the sea.
It had been a warm afternoon, but the heat was gone. We whipped past a distant cluster of lighted buildings and an endless series of lighted mansions, not too close to the road. We dipped down to skirt a huge green polo field with another equally huge practice field beside it, soared again to the top of a hill and swung mountainward up a steep hillroad of clean concrete that passed orange groves, some rich man’s pet because this is not orange country, and then little by little the lighted windows of the millionaires’ homes were gone and the road narrowed and this was Stillwood Heights.
The smell of sage drifted up from a canyon and made me think of a dead man and a moonless sky. Straggly stucco houses were molded flat to the side of the hill, like bas-reliefs. Then there were no more houses, just the still dark foothills with an early star or two above them, and the concrete ribbon of road and a sheer drop on one side into a tangle of scrub oak and manzanita where sometimes you can hear the call of the quails if you stop and keep still and wait. On the other side of the road was a raw clay bank at the edge of which a few unbeatable wild flowers hung on like naughty children that won’t go to bed.
Then the road twisted into a hairpin and the big tires scratched over loose stones, and the car tore less soundlessly up a long driveway lined with the wild geraniums. At the top of this, faintly lighted, lonely as a lighthouse, stood an eyrie, an eagle’s nest, an angular building of stucco and glass brick, raw and modernistic and yet not ugly and altogether a swell place for a psychic consultant to hang out his shingle. Nobody would be able to hear any screams.
The car turned beside the house and a light flicked on over a black door set into the heavy wall. The Indian climbed out grunting and opened the rear door of the car. The chauffeur lit a cigarette with an electric lighter and a harsh smell of tobacco came back to me softly in the evening. I got out.
We went over to the black door. It opened of itself slowly, almost with menace. Beyond it a narrow hallway probed back into the house. Light glowed from the glass brick walls.
The Indian growled. “Huh. You go in, big shot.”
“After you, Mr. Planting.”
He scowled and went in and the door closed after us as silently and mysteriously as it had opened. At the end of the narrow hallway we squeezed into a little elevator and the Indian closed the door and pressed a button. We rose softly, without sound. Such smelling as the Indian had done before was a mooncast shadow to what he was doing now.
The elevator stopped, the door opened. There was light and I stepped out into a turret room where the day was still trying to be remembered. There were windows all around it. Far off the sea flickered. Darkness prowled slowly on the hills. There were paneled walls where there were no windows, and rugs on the floor with the soft colors of old Persians, and there was a reception desk that looked as if it had been made of carvings stolen from an ancient church. And behind the desk a woman sat and smiled at me, a dry tight withered smile that would turn to powder if you touched it.
She had sleek coiled hair and a dark, thin, wasted Asiatic face. There were heavy colored stones in her ears and heavy rings on her fingers, including a moonstone and an emerald in a silver setting that may have been a real emerald but somehow managed to look as phony as a dime store slave bracelet. And her hands were dry and dark and not young and not fit for rings.
She spoke. The voice was familiar. “Ah, Meester Marlowe, so ver-ry good of you to come. Amthor he weel be so ver-ry pleased.”
I laid the hundred dollar bill the Indian had given me down on the desk. I looked behind me. The Indian had gone down again in the elevator.
“Sorry. It was a nice thought, but I can’t take this.”
“Amthor he—he weesh to employ you, is it not?” She smiled again. Her lips rustled like tissue paper.
“I’d have to find out what the job is first.”
She nodded and got up slowly from behind the desk. She swished before me in a tight dress that fitted her like a mermaid’s skin and showed that she had a good figure if you like them four sizes bigger below the waist.
“I weel conduct you,” she said.
She pressed a button in the paneling and a door slid open noiselessly. There was a milky glow beyond it, I looked back at her smile before I went through. It was older than Egypt now. The door slid silently shut behind me.
There was nobody in the room.
It was octagonal, draped in black velvet from floor to ceiling, with a high remote black ceiling that may have been of velvet too. In the middle of a coal black lustreless rug stood an octagonal white table, just large enough for two pairs of elbows and in the middle of it a milk white globe on a black stand. The light came from this. How, I couldn’t see. On either side of the table there was a white octagonal stool which was a smaller edition of the table. Over against one wall there was one more such stool. There were no windows. There was nothing else in the room, nothing at all. On the walls there was not even a light fixture. If there were other doors, I didn’t see them. I looked back at the one by which I had come in. I couldn’t see that either.
I stood there for perhaps fifteen seconds with the faint obscure feeling of being watched. There was probably a peephole somewhere, but I couldn’t spot it. I gave up trying. I listened to my breath. The room was so still that I could hear it going through my nose, softly, like little curtains rustling.
Then an invisible door on the far side of the room slid open and a man stepped through and the door closed behind him. The man walked straight to the table with his head down and sat on one of the octagonal stools and made a sweeping motion with one of the most beautiful hands I have ever seen.
“Please be seated. Opposite me. Do not smoke and do not fidget. Try to relax, completely. Now how may I serve you?”
I sat down, got a cigarette into my mouth and rolled it along my lips without lighting it. I looked him over. He was thin, tall and straight as a steel rod. He had the palest finest white hair I ever saw. It could have been strained through silk gauze. His skin was as fresh as a rose petal. He might have been thirty-five or sixty-five. He was ageless. His hair was brushed straight back from as good a profile as Barrymore ever had. His eyebrows were coal black, like the walls and ceiling and floor. His eyes were deep, far too deep. They were the depthless drugged eyes of the somnambulist. They were like a well I read about once. It was nine hundred years old, in an old castle. You could drop a stone into it and wait. You could listen and wait and then you would give up waiting and laugh and then just as you were ready to turn away a faint, minute splash would come back up to you from the bottom of that well, so tiny, so remote that you could hardly believe a well like that possible.
His eyes were deep like that. And they were also eyes without expression, without soul, eyes that could watch lions tear a man to pieces and never change, that could watch a man impaled and screaming in the hot sun with his eyelids cut off.
He wore a double-breasted black business suit that had been cut by an artist. He stared vaguely at my fingers.
“Please do not fidget,” he said. “It breaks the waves, disturbs my concentration.”
“It makes the ice melt, the butter run and the cat squawk,” I said.
He smiled the faintest smile in the world. “You didn’t come here to be impertinent, I’m sure.”
“You seem to forget why I did come. By the way, I gave that hundred dollar bill back to your secretary. I came, as you may recall, about some cigarettes. Russian cigarettes filled with marihuana. With your card rolled in the hollow mouthpiece.
“You wish to find out why that happened?”
“Yeah. I ought to be paying you the hundred dollars.”
“That will not be necessary. The answer is simple. There are things I do not know. This is one of them.”
For a moment I almost believed him. His face was as smooth as an angel’s wing.
“Then why send me a hundred dollars—and a tough Indian that stinks—and a car? By the way, does the Indian have to stink? If he’s working for you, couldn’t you sort of get him to take a bath?”
“He is a natural medium. They are rare—like diamonds, and like diamonds, are sometimes found in dirty places. I understand you are a private detective?”
“Yes.”
“I think you are a very stupid person. You look stupid. You are in a stupid business. And you came here on a stupid mission.”
“I get it,” I said. “I’m stupid. It sank in after a while.”
“And I think I need not detain you any longer.”
“You’re not detaining me,” I said. “I’m detaining you. I want to know why those cards were in those cigarettes.”
He shrugged the smallest shrug that could be shrugged. “My cards are available to anybody. I do not give my friends marihuana cigarettes. Your question remains stupid.”
“I wonder if this would brighten it up any. The cigarettes were in a cheap Chinese or Japanese case of imitation tortoiseshell. Ever see anything like that?”
“No. Not that I recall.”
“I can brighten it up a little more. The case was in the pocket of a man named Lindsay Marriott. Ever hear of him?”
He thought. “Yes. I tried at one time to treat him for camera shyness. He was trying to get into pictures. It was a waste of time. Pictures did not want him.”
“I can guess that,” I said. “He would photograph like Isadora Duncan. I’ve still got the big one left. Why did you send me the C-note.”
“My dear Mr. Marlowe,” he said coldly, “I am no fool. I sin in a very sensitive profession. I am a quack. That is to say I do things which the doctors in their small frightened selfish guild cannot accomplish. I am in danger at all times—from people like you. I merely wish to estimate the danger before dealing with it.”
“Pretty trivial in my case, huh?”
“It hardly exists,” he said politely and made a peculiar motion with his left hand which made my eyes jump at it. Then he put it down very slowly on the white table and looked at it. Then he raised his depthless eyes again and folded his arms.
“Your hearing—”
“I smell it now,” I said. “I wasn’t thinking of him.”
I turned my head to the left. The Indian was sitting on the third white stool against the black velvet.
He had some kind of a white smock on him over his other clothes. He was sitting without a movement, his eyes dosed, his head bent forward a little, as if he had been asleep for an hour. His dark strong face was full of shadows.
I looked back at Amthor. He was smiling his minute smile.
“I bet that makes the dowagers shed their false teeth,” I said. “What does he do for real money—sit on your knee and sing French songs?”
He made an impatient gesture. “Get to the point, please.”
“Last night Marriott hired me to go with him on an expedition that involved paying some money to some crooks at a spot they picked. I got knocked on the head. When I came out of it Marriott had been murdered.”
Nothing changed much in Amthor’s face. He didn’t scream or run up the walls. But for him the reaction was sharp. He unfolded his arms and refolded them the other way. His mouth looked grim. Then he sat like a stone lion outside the Public Library.
“The cigarettes were found on him,” I said.
He looked at me coolly. “But not by the police, I take it. Since the police have not been here.”
“Correct.”
“The hundred dollars,” he said very softly, “was hardly enough.”
“That depends what you expect to buy with it”
“You have these cigarettes with you?”
“One of them. But they don’t prove anything. As you said, anybody could get your cards. I’m just wondering why they were where they were. Any ideas?”
“How well did you know Mr. Marriott?” he asked softly.
“Not at all. But I had ideas about him. They were so obvious they stuck out.”
Amthor tapped lightly on the white table. The Indian still slept with his chin on his huge chest, his heavy-lidded eyes tight shut.
“By the way, did you ever meet a Mrs. Grayle, a wealthy lady who lives in Bay City?”
He nodded absently. “Yes, I treated her centers of speech. She had a very slight impediment.”
“You did a sweet job on her,” I said. “She talks as good as I do.”
That failed to amuse him. He still tapped on the table. I listened to the taps. Something about them I didn’t like. They sounded like a code. He stopped, folded his arms again and leaned back against the air.
“What I like about this job everybody knows everybody,” I said. “Mrs. Grayle knew Marriott too.”
“How did you find that out?” he asked slowly.
I didn’t say anything.
“You will have to tell the police—about those cigarettes,” he said.
I shrugged.
“You are wondering why I do not have you thrown out,” Amthor said pleasantly. “Second Planting could break your neck like a celery stalk. I am wondering myself. You seem to have some sort of theory. Blackmail I do not pay. It buys nothing—and I have many friends. But naturally there are certain elements which would like to show me in a bad light. Psychiatrists, sex specialists, neurologists, nasty little men with rubber hammers and shelves loaded with the literature of aberrations. And of course they are all—doctors, While I am still a—quack. What is your theory?”
I tried to stare him down, but it couldn’t be done; I felt myself licking my lips.
He shrugged lightly. “I can’t blame you for wanting to keep it to yourself. This is a matter that I must give thought to. Perhaps you are a much more intelligent man than I thought. I also make mistakes. In the meantime—” He leaned forward and put a hand on each side of the milky globe.
“I think Marriott was a blackmailer of women,” I said. “And finger man for a jewel mob. But who told him what women to cultivate—so that he would know their comings and goings, get intimate with them, make love to them, make them load up with the ice and take them out, and then slip to a phone and tell the boys where to operate?”
“That,” Amthor said carefully, “is your picture of Marriott—and of me. I am slightly disgusted.”
I leaned forward until my face was not more than a foot from his. “You’re in a racket. Dress it up all you please and it’s still a racket. And it wasn’t just the cards, Amthor. As you say, anybody could get those. It wasn’t the marihuana. You wouldn’t be in a cheap line like that—not with your chances. But on the back of each card there is a blank space. And on blank spaces, or even on written ones, there is sometimes invisible writing.”
He smiled bleakly, but I hardly saw it. His hands moved over the milky bowl.
The light went out. The room was as black as Carry Nation’s bonnet.