I shook my head. I lit a cigarette, first offering one to Mr. Henry Clarendon IV. He refused it with a vague nod.
“However, Mr. Marlowe, it is something you should have certainly learned. In every luxury hotel in the world there will be half a dozen elderly idlers of both sexes who sit around and stare like owls. They watch, they listen, they compare notes, they learn everything about everyone. They have nothing else to do, because hotel life is the most deadly of all forms of boredom. And no doubt I’m boring you equally.”
“I’d rather hear about Mitchell, sir. Tonight at least, Mr. Clarendon.”
“Of course. I’m egocentric, and absurd, and I prattle like a schoolgirl. You observe that handsome dark-haired woman over there playing canasta? The one with too much jewelry and the heavy gold trim on her glasses?”
He didn’t point or even look. But I picked her out. She had an overblown style and she looked just a little hardboiled. She was the one with the ice, the paint.
“Her name is Margo West. She is seven times a divorcee. She has stacks of money and reasonably good looks, but she can’t hold a man. She tries too hard. Yet she’s not a fool. She would have an affair with a man like Mitchell, she would give him money and pay his bills, but she would never marry him. They had a fight last night. Nevertheless I believe she may have paid his bill. She often has before.”
“I thought he got a check from his father in Toronto every month. Not enough to last him, huh?”
Henry Clarendon IV gave me a sardonic smile. “My dear fellow, Mitchell has no father in Toronto. He gets no monthly check. He lives on women. That is why he lives in a hotel like this. There is always some rich and lonely female in a luxury hotel. She may not be beautiful or very young, but she has other charms. In the dull season in Esmeralda, which is from the end of the race meet at Del Mar until about the middle of January, the pickings are very lean. Then Mitchell is apt to travel—Majorca or Switzerland if he can make it, to Florida or one of the Caribbean islands if he is not in rich funds. This year he had poor luck. I understand he only got as far as Washington.”
He brushed a glance at me. I stayed deadpan polite, just a nice youngish guy (by his standards) being polite to an old gentleman who liked to talk.
“Okay,” I said. “She paid his hotel bill, maybe. But why a week in advance?”
He moved one gloved hand over the other. He tilted his stick and followed it with his body. He stared at the pattern in the carpet. Finally he clicked his teeth. He had solved the problem. He straightened up again.
“That would be severance pay,” he said dryly. “The final and irrevocable end of the romance. Mrs. West, as the English say, had had it. Also, there was a new arrival in Mitchell’s company yesterday, a girl with dark red hair. Chestnut red, not fire red or strawberry red. What I saw of their relationship seemed to me a little peculiar. They were both under some sort of strain.”
“Would Mitchell blackmail a woman?”
He chuckled. “He would blackmail an infant in a cradle. A man who lives on women always blackmails them, although the word may not be used. He also steals from them when he can get his hands on any of their money. Mitchell forged two checks with Margo West’s name. That ended the affair. No doubt she has the checks. But she won’t do anything about it except keep them.”
“Mr. Clarendon, with all due respect, how in hell would you know all these things?”
“She told me. She cried on my shoulder.” He looked toward the handsome dark-haired woman. “She does not at the moment look as if I could be telling the truth. Nevertheless I am.”
“And why are you telling it to me?”
His face moved into a rather ghastly grin. “I have no delicacy. I should like to marry Margo West myself. It would reverse the pattern. Very small things amuse a man of my age. A hummingbird, the extraordinary way a strellitzia bloom opens. Why at a certain point in its growth does the bud turn at right angles? Why does the bud split so gradually and why do the flowers emerge always in a certain exact order, so that the sharp unopened end of the bud looks like a bird’s beak and the blue and orange petals make a bird of paradise? What strange deity made such a complicated world when presumably he could have made a simple one? Is he omnipotent? How could he be? There’s so much suffering and almost always by the innocent. Why will a mother rabbit trapped in a burrow by a ferret put her babies behind her and allow her throat to be torn out? Why? In two weeks more she would not even recognize them. Do you believe in God, young man?”
It was a long way around, but it seemed I had to travel it. “If you mean an omniscient and omnipotent God who intended everything exactly the way it is, no.”
“But you should, Mr. Marlowe. It is a great comfort. We all come to it in the end because we have to die and become dust. Perhaps for the individual that is all, perhaps not. There are grave difficulties about the afterlife. I don’t think I should really enjoy a heaven in which I shared lodgings with a Congo pygmy or a Chinese coolie or a Levantine rug peddler or even a Hollywood producer. I’m a snob, I suppose, and the remark is in bad taste. Nor can I imagine a heaven presided over by a benevolent character in a long white beard locally known as God. These are foolish conceptions of very immature minds. But you may not question a man’s religious beliefs however idiotic they may be. Of course I have no right to assume that I shall go to heaven. Sounds rather dull, as a matter of fact. On the other hand how can I imagine a hell in which a baby that died before baptism occupies the same degraded position as a hired killer or a Nazi death-camp commandant or a member of the Politburo? How strange it is that man’s finest aspirations, dirty little animal that he is, his finest actions also, his great and unselfish heroism, his constant daily courage in a harsh world—how strange that these things should be so much finer than his fate on this earth. That has to be somehow made reasonable. Don’t tell me that honor is merely a chemical reaction or that a man who deliberately gives his life for another is merely following a behavior pattern. Is God happy with the poisoned cat dying alone in convulsions behind the billboard? Is God happy that life is cruel and that only the fittest survive? The fittest for what? Oh no, far from it. If God were omnipotent and omniscient in any literal sense, he wouldn’t have bothered to make the universe at all. There is no success where there is no possibility of failure, no art without the resistance of the medium. Is it blasphemy to suggest that God has his bad days when nothing goes right, and that God’s days are very, very long?”
“You’re a wise man, Mr. Clarendon. You said something about reversing the pattern.”
He smiled faintly. “You thought I had lost the place in the overlong book of my words. No sir, I had not. A woman like Mrs. West almost always ends up marrying a series of pseudo-elegant fortune hunters, tango dancers with handsome sideburns, skiing instructors with beautiful blond muscles, faded French and Italian aristocrats, shoddy princelings from the Middle East, each worse than the one before. She might even in her extremity marry a man like Mitchell. If she married me, she would marry an old bore, but at least she would marry a gentleman.”
“Yeah.”
He chuckled. “The monosyllable indicates a surfeit of Henry Clarendon IV. I don’t blame you. Very well, Mr. Marlowe, why are you interested in Mitchell? But I suppose you can’t tell me.”
“No sir, I can’t. I’m interested in knowing why he left so soon after coming back, who paid his bill for him and why, if Mrs. West or, say, some well-heeled friend like Clark Brandon paid for him, it was necessary to pay a week in advance as well.”
His thin worn eyebrows curved upwards. “Brandon could easily guarantee Mitchell’s account by lifting the telephone. Mrs. West might prefer to give him the money and have him pay the bill himself. But a week in advance? Why would our Javonen tell you that? What does it suggest to you?”
“That there’s something about Mitchell the hotel doesn’t want known. Something that might cause the sort of publicity they hate.”
“Such as?”
“Suicide and murder are the sort of things I mean. That’s just by way of example. You’ve noticed how the name of a big hotel is hardly ever mentioned when one of the guests jumps out of a window? It’s always a midtown or a downtown hotel or a well-known exclusive hotel—something like that. And if it’s rather a high class place, you never see any cops in the lobby, no matter what happened upstairs.”
His eyes went sideways and mine followed his. The canasta table was breaking up. The dolled-up and well-iced woman called Margo West strolled off towards the bar with one of the men, her cigarette holder sticking out like a bowsprit.
“So?”
“Well,” I said, and I was working hard, “if Mitchell keeps his room on the records, whatever room he had—”
“Four-eighteen,” Clarendon put in calmly. “On the ocean side. Fourteen dollars a day out of season, eighteen in season.”
“Not exactly cheap for a guy on his uppers. But he still has it, let’s say. So whatever happened, he’s just away for a few days. Took his car out, put his luggage in around seven A.M. this morning. A damn funny time to leave when he was as drunk as a skunk late last night.”
Clarendon leaned back and let his gloved hands hang limp. I could see that he was getting tired. “If it happened that way, wouldn’t the hotel prefer to have you think he had left for good? Then you’d have to search for him somewhere else. That is, if you really are searching for him.”
I met his pale stare. He grinned.
“You’re not making very good sense to me, Mr. Marlowe. I talk and talk, but not merely to hear the sound of my voice. I don’t hear it naturally in any case. Talking gives me an opportunity to study people without seeming altogether rude. I have studied you. My intuition, if such be the correct word, tells me that your interest in Mitchell is rather tangential. Otherwise you would not be so open about it.”
“Uh-huh. Could be,” I said. It was a spot for a paragraph of lucid prose. Henry Clarendon IV would have obliged. I didn’t have a damn thing more to say.
“Run along now,” he said. “I’m tired. I’m going up to my room and lie down a little. A pleasure to have met you, Mr. Marlowe.” He got slowly to his feet and steadied himself with the stick. It was an effort. I stood up beside him.
“I never shake hands,” he said. “My hands are ugly and painful. I wear gloves for that reason. Good evening. If I don’t see you again, good luck.”
He went off, walking slowly and keeping his head erect. I could see that walking wasn’t any fun for him. The two steps up from the main lobby to the arch were made one at a time, with a pause in between. His right foot always moved first. The cane bore down hard beside his left. He went out through the arch and I watched him move towards an elevator. I decided Mr. Henry Clarendon IV was a pretty smooth article.
I strolled along to the bar. Mrs. Margo West was sitting in the amber shadows with one of the canasta players. The waiter was just setting drinks before them. I didn’t pay too much attention because farther along in a little booth against the wall was someone I knew better. And alone.
She had the same clothes on except that she had taken the bandeau off her hair and it hung loose around her face.
I sat down. The waiter came over and I ordered. He went away. The music from the invisible record player was low and ingratiating.
She smiled a little. “I’m sorry I lost my temper,” she said. “I was very rude.”
“Forget it. I had it coming.”
“Were you looking for me in here?”
“Not especially.”
“Were you—oh, I forgot.” She. reached for her bag and put it in her lap. She fumbled in it and then passed something rather small across the table, something not small enough for her hand to hide that it was a folder of traveler’s checks. “I promised you these.”
“No.”
“Take them, you fool! I don’t want the waiter to see.”
I took the folder and slipped it into my pocket. I reached into my inside pocket and got out a small receipt book. I entered the counterfoil and then the body of the receipt. “Received from Miss Betty Mayfield, Hotel Casa del Poniente, Esmeralda, California, the sum of $5000 in American Express Company traveler’s checks of $100 denomination, countersigned by the owner, and remaining her property subject to her demand at any time until a fee is arranged with, and an employment accepted by me, the undersigned.”
I signed this rigmarole and held the book for her to see it.
“Read it and sign your name in the lower left-hand corner.”
She took it and held it close to the light.
“You make me tired,” she said. “Whatever are you trying to spring?”
“That I’m on the level and you think so.”
She took the pen I held out and signed and gave the stuff back to me. I tore out the original and handed it to her. I put the book away.
The waiter came and put my drink down. He didn’t wait to be paid. Betty shook her head at him. He went away.
“Why don’t you ask me if I have found Larry?”
“All right. Have you found Larry, Mr. Marlowe?”
“No. He has skipped the hotel. He had a room on the fourth floor on the same side as your room. Must be fairly nearly under it. He took nine pieces of luggage and beat it in his Buick. The house peeper, whose name is Javonen—he calls himself an assistant manager and security officer—is satisfied that Mitchell paid his bill and even a week in advance for his room. He has no worries. He doesn’t like me, of course.”
“Does somebody?”
“You do—five thousand dollars worth.”
“Oh, you are an idiot. Do you think Mitchell will come back?”
“I told you he paid a week in advance.”
She sipped her drink quietly. “So you did. But that could mean something else.”
“Sure. Just spitballing, for example, I might say it could mean that he didn’t pay his bill, but someone else did. And that the someone else wanted time to do something—such as getting rid of that body on your balcony last night. That is, if there was a body.”
“Oh, stop it!”
She finished her drink, killed her cigarette, stood up and left me with the check. I paid it and went back through the lobby, for no reason that I could think of. Perhaps by pure instinct. And I saw Goble getting into the elevator. He seemed to have a rather strained expression. As he turned he caught my eye, or seemed to, but he gave no sign of knowing me. The elevator went up.
I went out to my car and drove back to the Rancho Descansado. I lay down on the couch and went to sleep. It had been a lot of day. Perhaps if I had a rest and my brain cleared, I might have some faint idea of what I was doing.
18
An hour later I was parked in front of the hardware store. It wasn’t the only hardware store in Esmeralda, but it was the only one that backed on the alley called Polton’s Lane. I walked east and counted the stores. There were seven of them to the corner, all shining with plate glass and chromium trim. On the corner was a dress shop with mannequins in the windows, scarves and gloves and costume jewelry laid out under the lights. No prices showing. I rounded the corner and went south. Heavy eucalyptus trees grew out of the sidewalk. They branched low down and the trunks looked hard and heavy, quite unlike the tall brittle stuff that grows around Los Angeles. At the far corner of Polton’s Lane there was an automobile agency. I followed its high blank wall, looking at broken crates, piles of cartons, trash drums, dusty parking spaces, the back yard of elegance. I counted the buildings. It was easy. No questions to ask. A light burned in the small window of a tiny frame cottage that had long ago been somebody’s simple home. The cottage had a wooden porch with a broken railing. It had been painted once, but that was in the remote past before the shops swallowed it up. Once it may even have had a garden. The shingles of the roof were warped. The front door was a dirty mustard yellow. The window was shut tight and needed hosing off. Behind part of it hung what remained of an old roller blind. There were two steps up to the porch, but only one had a tread. Behind the cottage and halfway to the loading platform of the hardware store there was what had presumably been a privy. But I could see where a water pipe cut through the sagging side. A rich man’s improvements on a rich man’s property. A one-unit slum.
I stepped over the hollow place where a step would have been and knocked on the door. There was no bell push. Nobody answered. I tried the knob. Nobody had locked the door. I pushed it open and went in. I had that feeling. I was going to find something nasty inside.
A bulb burned in a frayed lamp crooked on its base, the paper shade split. There was a couch with a dirty blanket on it. There was an old cane chair, a Boston rocker, a table covered with a smeared oilcloth. On the table spread out beside a coffee cup was a copy of El Diario, a Spanish language newspaper, also a saucer with cigarette stubs, a dirty plate, a tiny radio which emitted music. The music stopped and a man began to rattle off a commercial in Spanish. I turned it off. The silence fell like a bag of feathers. Then the clicking of an alarm clock from beyond a half open door. Then the clank of a small chain, a fluttering sound and a cracked voice said rapidly: “Qui�n es? Qui�n es? Quien es?” This was followed by the angry chattering of monkeys. Then silence again.
From a big cage over in the corner the round angry eye of a parrot looked at me. He sidled along the perch as far as he could go.
“Amigo,” I said.
The parrot let out a screech of insane laughter.
“Watch your language, brother,” I said.
The parrot crabwalked to the other end of the perch and pecked into a white cup and shook oatmeal from his beak contemptuously. In another cup there was water. It was messy with oatmeal.
“I bet you’re not even housebroken,” I said.
The parrot stared at me and shuffled. He turned his head and stared at me with his other eye. Then he leaned forward and fluttered his tail feathers and proved me right.