32
It was a cheap looking building for so prosperous a town. It looked more like something out of the Bible belt. Bums sat unmolested in a long row on the retaining wall that kept the front lawn—now mostly Bermuda grass—from falling into the street. The building was of three stories and had an old belfry at the top, and the bell still hanging in the belfry. They had probably rung it for the volunteer fire brigade back in the good old chaw-and-spit days.
The cracked walk and the front steps let to open double doors in which a knot of obvious city hall fixers hung around waiting for something to happen so they could make something else out of it. They all had the well-fed stomachs, the careful eyes, the nice clothes and the reach-me-down manners. They gave me about four inches to get in.
Inside was a long dark hallway that had been mopped the day McKinley was inaugurated. A wooden sign pointed out the police department Information Desk. A uniformed man dozed behind a pint-sized PBX set into the end of a scarred wooden counter. A plainclothesman with his coat off and his hog’s leg looking like a fire plug against his ribs took one eye off his evening paper, bonged a spittoon ten feet away from him, yawned, and said the Chief’s office was upstairs at the back.
The second floor was lighter and cleaner, but that didn’t mean that it was clean and light. A door on the ocean side, almost at the end of the hall, was lettered: John Wax, Chief of Police. Enter.
Inside there was a low wooden railing and a uniformed man behind it working a typewriter with two fingers and one thumb. He took my card, yawned, said he would see, and managed to drag himself through a mahogany door marked John Wax, Chief of Police. Private. He came back and held the door in the railing for me.
I went on in and shut the door of the inner office. It was cool and large and had windows on three sides. A stained wood desk was set far back like Mussolini’s, so that you had to walk across an expanse of blue carpet to get to it, and while you were doing that you would be getting the beady eye.
I walked to the desk. A tilted embossed sign on it read: John Wax, Chief of Police. I figured I might be able to remember the name. I looked at the man behind the desk. No straw was sticking to his hair.
He was a hammered-down heavyweight, with short pink hair and a pink scalp glistening through it. He had small, hungry, heavy-lidded eyes, as restless as fleas. He wore a suit of fawn-colored flannel, a coffee-colored shirt and tie, a diamond ring, a diamond-studded lodge pin in his lapel, and the required three stiff points of handkerchief coming up a little more than the required three inches from his outside breast pocket.
One of his plump hands was holding my card. He read it, turned it over and read the back, which was blank, read the front again, put it down on his desk and laid on it a paperweight in the shape of a bronze monkey, as if he was making sure he wouldn’t lose it.
He pushed a pink paw at me. When I gave it back to him, he motioned to a chair.
“Sit down, Mr. Marlowe. I see you are in our business more or less. What can I do for you?”
“A little trouble, Chief. You can straighten it out for me in a minute, if you care to.”
“Trouble,” he said softly. “A little trouble.”
He turned in his chair and crossed his thick legs and gazed thoughtfully towards one of his pairs of windows. That let me see handspun lisle socks and English brogues that looked as if they had been pickled in port wine. Counting what I couldn’t see and not counting his wallet he had half a grand on him. I figured his wife had money.
“Trouble,” he said, still softly, “is something our little city don’t know much about, Mr. Marlowe. Our city is small but very, very clean. I look out of my western windows and I see the Pacific Ocean. Nothing cleaner than that, is there?” He didn’t mention the two gambling ships that were hull down on the brass waves just beyond the three-mile limit.
Neither did I. “That’s right, Chief,” I said.
He threw his chest a couple of inches farther. “I look out of my northern windows and I see the busy bustle of Arguello Boulevard and the lovely California foothills, and in the near foreground one of the nicest little business sections a man could want to know. I look out of my southern windows, which I am looking out of right now, and I see the finest little yacht harbor in the world, for a small yacht harbor. I don’t have no eastern windows, but if I did have, I would see a residential section that would make your mouth water. No, sir, trouble is a thing we don’t have a lot of on hand in our little town.”
“I guess I brought mine with me, Chief. Some of it at least. Do you have a man working for you named Galbraith, a plainclothes sergeant?”
“Why yes, I believe I do,” he said, bringing his eyes around. “What about him?”
“Do you have a man working for you that goes like this?” I described the other man, the one who said very little, was short, had a mustache and hit me with a blackjack. “He goes around with Galbraith, very likely. Somebody called him Mister Blane, but that sounded like a phony.”
“Quite on the contrary,” the fat Chief said as stiffly as a fat man can say anything. “He is my Chief of Detectives. Captain Blane.”
“Could I see these two guys in your office?”
He picked my card up and read it again. He laid it down. He waved a soft glistening hand.
“Not without a better reason than you have given me so far,” he said suavely.
“I didn’t think I could, Chief. Do you happen to know a man named Jules Amthor? He calls himself a psychic adviser. He lives at the top of a hill in Stillwood Heights.”
“No. And Stillwood Heights is not in my territory,” the Chief said. His eyes now were the eyes of a man who has other thoughts.
“That’s what makes it funny,” I said. “You see, I went to call on Mr. Amthor in connection with a client of mine. Mr. Amthor got the idea I was blackmailing him. Probably guys in his line of business get that idea rather easily. He had a tough Indian bodyguard I couldn’t handle. So the Indian held me and Amthor beat me up with my own gun. Then he sent for a couple of cops. They happened to be Galbraith and Mister Blane. Could this interest you at all?”
Chief Wax flapped his hands on his desk top very gently. He folded his eyes almost shut, but not quite. The cool gleam of his eyes shone between the thick lids and it shone straight at me. He sat very still, as if listening. Then he opened his eyes and smiled.
“And what happened then?” he inquired, polite as a bouncer at the Stork Club.
“They went through me, took me away in their car, dumped me out on the side of a mountain and socked me with a sap as I got out.”
He nodded, as if what I had said was the most natural thing in the world. “And this was in Stillwood Heights,” he said softly.
“Yeah.”
“You know what I think you are?” He leaned a little over the desk, but not far, on account of his stomach being in the way.
“A liar,” I said.
“The door is there,” he said, pointing to it with the little finger of his left hand.
I didn’t move. I kept on looking at him. When he started to get mad enough to push his buzzer I said: “Let’s not both make the same mistake. You think I’m a small time private dick trying to push ten times his own weight, trying to make a charge against a police officer that, even if it was true, the officer would take damn good care couldn’t be proved. Not at all. I’m not making any complaints. I think the mistake was natural. I want to square myself with Amthor and I want your man Galbraith to help me do it. Mister Blane needn’t bother. Galbraith will be enough. And I’m not here without backing. I have important people behind me.”
“How far behind?” the Chief asked and chuckled wittily.
“How far is 862 Aster Drive, where Mr. Merwin Lockridge Grayle lives?”
His face changed so completely that it was as if another man sat in his chair. “Mrs. Grayle happens to be my client,” I said.
“Lock the doors,” he said. “You’re a younger man than I am. Turn the bolt knobs. Well make a friendly start on this thing. You have an honest face, Marlowe.”
I got up and locked the doors. When I got back to the desk along the blue carpet, the Chief had a nice looking bottle out and two glasses. He tossed a handful of cardamon seeds on his blotter and filled both glasses.
We drank. He cracked a few cardamon seeds and we chewed them silently, looking into each other’s eyes.
“That tasted right,” he said. He refilled the glasses. It was my turn to crack the cardamon seeds. He swept the shells off his blotter to the floor and smiled and leaned back.
“Now let’s have it,” he said. “Has this job you are doing for Mrs. Grayle anything to do with Amthor?”
“There’s a connection. Better check that I’m telling you the truth, though.”
“There’s that,” he said and reached for his phone. Then he took a small book out of his vest and looked up a number. “Campaign contributors,” he said and winked. “The Mayor is very insistent that all courtesies be extended. Yes, here it is.” He put the book away and dialed.
He had the same trouble with the butler that I had. It made his ears get red. Finally he got her. His ears stayed red. She must have been pretty sharp with him. “She wants to talk to you,” he said and pushed the phone across his broad desk.
“This is Phil,” I said, winking naughtily at the Chief.
There was a cool provocative laugh. “What are you doing with that fat slob?”
“There’s a little drinking being done.”
“Do you have to do it with him?”
“At the moment, yes. Business. I said, is there anything new? I guess you know what I mean.”
“No. Are you aware, my good fellow, that you stood me up for an hour the other night? Did I strike you as the kind of girl that lets that sort of thing happen to her?”
“I ran into trouble. How about tonight?”
“Let me see—tonight is—what day of the week is it for heaven’s sake?”
“I’d better call you,” I said. “I may not be able to make it. This is Friday.”
“Liar.” The soft husky laugh came again. “It’s Monday. Same time, same place—and no fooling this time?”
“I’d better call you.”
“You’d better be there.”
“I can’t be sure. Let me call you.”
“Hard to get? I see. Perhaps I’m a fool to bother.”
“As a matter of fact you are.”
“Why?”
“I’m a poor man, but I pay my own way. And it’s not quite as soft a way as you would like.”
“Damn you, if you’re not there—”
“I said I’d call you.”
She sighed. “All men are the same.”
“So are all women—after the first nine.”
She damned me and hung up. The Chief’s eyes popped so far out of his head they looked as if they were on stilts.
He filled both glasses with a shaking hand and pushed one at me.
“So it’s like that,” he said very thoughtfully.
“Her husband doesn’t care,” I said, “so don’t make a note of it.”
He looked hurt as he drank his drink. He cracked the cardamon seeds very slowly, very thoughtfully. We drank to each other’s baby blue eyes. Regretfully the Chief put the bottle and glasses out of sight and snapped a switch on his call box.
“Have Galbraith come up, if he’s in the building. If not, try and get in touch with him for me.”
I got up and unlocked the doors and sat down again. We didn’t wait long. The side door was tapped on, the Chief called out, and Hemingway stepped into the room.
He walked solidly over to the desk and and stopped at the end of it and looked at Chief Wax with the proper expression of tough humility.
“Meet Mr. Philip Marlowe,” the Chief said genially. “A private dick from L.A.”
Hemingway turned enough to look at me. If he had ever seen me before, nothing in his face showed it. He put a hand out and I put a hand out and he looked at the Chief again.
“Mr. Marlowe has a rather curious story,” the Chief said, cunning, like Richelieu behind the arras. “About a man named Amthor who has a place in Stillwood Heights. He’s some sore of crystal-gazer. It seems Marlowe went to see him and you and Blane happened in about the same time and there was an argument of some kind. I forget the details.” He looked out of his windows with the expression of a man forgetting details.
“Some mistake,” Hemingway said. “I never saw this man before.”
“There was a mistake, as a matter of fact,” the Chief said dreamily. “Rather trifling, but still a mistake. Mr. Marlowe thinks it of slight importance.”
Hemingway looked at me again. His face still looked like a stone face.
“In fact he’s not even interested in the mistake,” the Chief dreamed on. “But he is interested in going to call on this man Amthor who lives in Stillwood Heights. He would like someone with him. I thought of you. He would like someone who would see that he got a square deal. It seems that Mr. Amthor has a very tough Indian bodyguard and Mr. Marlowe is a little inclined to doubt his ability to handle the situation without help. Do you think you could find out where this Amthor lives?”
“Yeah,” Hemingway said. “But Stillwood Heights is over the line, Chief. This just a personal favor to a friend of yours?”
“You might put it that way,” the Chief said, looking at his left thumb. “We wouldn’t want to do anything not strictly legal, of course.”
“Yeah,” Hemingway said. “No.” He coughed. “When do we go?”
The Chief looked at me benevolently. “Now would be okey,” I said. “If it suits Mr. Galbraith.”
“I do what I’m told,” Hemingway said.
The Chief looked him over, feature by feature. He combed him and brushed him with his eyes. “How is Captain Blane today?” he inquired, munching on a cardamon seed.
“Bad shape. Bust appendix,” Hemingway said. “Pretty critical.”
The Chief shook his head sadly. Then he got hold of the arms of his chair and dragged himself to his feet. He pushed a pink paw across his desk.
“Galbraith will take good care of you, Marlowe. You can rely on that.”
“Well, you’ve certainly been obliging, Chief,” I said. “I certainly don’t know how to thank you.”
“Pshaw! No thanks necessary. Always glad to oblige a friend of a friend, so to speak.” He winked at me. Hemingway studied the wink but he didn’t say what he added it up to.
We went out, with the Chief’s polite murmurs almost carrying us down the office. The door closed. Hemingway looked up and down the hall and then he looked at me.
“You played that one smart, baby,” he said. “You must got something we wasn’t told about.”