The man at the desk was as immaculate as the desk officer. He was studying a card through a magnifying glass, and a tape recorder beside him was telling some dreary story in a crumpled, unhappy voice. The captain was about six feet three inches tall and had thick dark hair and a clear olive skin. His uniform cap was on the desk near him. He looked up, cut off the tape recorder and put down the magnifying glass and the card.
“Have a seat, Mr. Marlowe.”
I sat down. He looked at me for a moment without speaking. He had rather soft brown eyes, but his mouth was not soft.
“I understand you know Major Javonen at the Casa.”
“I’ve met him, Captain. We are not close friends.”
He smiled faintly. “That’s hardly to be expected. He wouldn’t enjoy private detectives asking questions in the hotel. He used to be in the CIC. We still call him Major. This is the politest goddam town I was ever in. We are a goddam smooth bunch around here, but we’re police just the same. Now about this Ceferino Chang?”
“So that’s his name. I didn’t know.”
“Yes. We know him. May I ask what you are doing in Esmeralda?”
“I was hired by a Los Angeles attorney named Clyde Umney to meet the Super Chief and follow a certain party until that party came to a stop somewhere. I wasn’t told why, but Mr. Umney said he was acting for a firm of Washington attorneys and he didn’t know why himself. I took the job because there is nothing illegal in following a person, if you don’t interfere with that person. The party ended up in Esmeralda. I went back to Los Angeles and tried to find out what it was all about. I couldn’t, so I took what I thought was a reasonable fee, two hundred and fifty, and absorbed my own expenses. Mr. Umney was not very pleased with me.”
The captain nodded. “That doesn’t explain why you are here or what you have to do with Ceferino Chang. And since you are not now working for Mr. Umney, unless you are working for another attorney you have no privilege.”
“Give me a break, if you can, Captain. I found out that the party I was following was being blackmailed, or there was an attempt at blackmail, by a man named Larry Mitchell. He lives or lived at the Casa. I have been trying to get in touch with him, but the only information I have is from Javonen and this Ceferino Chang. Javonen said he checked out, paid his bill, and a week in advance for his room. Chang told me he left at seven A.M. this morning with nine suitcases. There was something a bit peculiar about Chang’s manner, so I wanted to have another talk with him.”
“How did you know where he lived?”
“He told me. He was a bitter man. He said he lived on a rich man’s property, and he seemed angry that it wasn’t kept up.”
“Not good enough, Marlowe.”
“Okay, I didn’t think it was myself. He was on the weed. I pretended to be a pusher. Once in a while in my business a man has to do a good deal of faking.”
“Better. But there’s something missing. The name of your client—if you have one.”
“Could it be in confidence?”
“Depends. We never disclose the names of blackmail victims, unless they come out in court. But if this party has committed or been indicted for a crime, or has crossed a state line to escape prosecution, then it would be my duty as an officer of the law to report her present whereabouts and the name she is using.”
“Her? So you know already. Why ask me? I don’t know why she ran away. She won’t tell me. All I know is she is in trouble and in fear, and that somehow Mitchell knew enough to make her say uncle.”
He made a smooth gesture with his hand and fished a cigarette out of a drawer. He stuck it in his mouth but didn’t light it.
He gave me another steady look.
“Okay, Marlowe. For now I’ll let it lay. But if you dig anything up, here is where you bring it.”
I stood up. He stood up too and held his hand out.
“We’re not tough. We just have a job to do. Don’t get too hostile with Javonen. The guy who owns that hotel draws a lot of water around here.”
“Thanks, Captain. I’ll try to be a nice little boy—even to Javonen.”
I went back along the hall. The same officer was on the desk. He nodded to me and I went out into the evening and got into my car. I sat with my hands tight on the steering wheel. I wasn’t too used to cops who treated me as if I had a right to be alive. I was sitting there when the desk officer poked his head out of the door and called that Captain Alessandro wanted to see me again.
When I got back to Captain Alessandro’s office, he was on the telephone. He nodded me to the customer’s chair and went on listening and making quick notes in what looked like the sort of condensed writing that many reporters use. After a while he said: “Thanks very much. We’ll be in touch.”
He leaned back and tapped on his desk and frowned.
“That was a report from the sheriff’s substation at Escondido. Mitchell’s car has been found—apparently abandoned. I thought you might like to know.”
“Thanks, Captain. Where was this?”
“About twenty miles from here, on a country road that leads to Highway 395, but is not the road a man would naturally take to get to 395. It’s a place called Los Penasquitos Canyon. Nothing there but outcrop and barren land and a dry river bed. I know the place. This morning a rancher named Gates went by there with a small truck, looking for fieldstone to build a wall. He passed a two-tone Buick hardtop parked off the side of the road. He didn’t pay much attention to the Buick, except to notice that it hadn’t been in a wreck, so somebody just parked it there.
“Later on in the day, around four, Gates went back to pick up another load of fieldstone. The Buick was still there. This time he stopped and looked it over. No keys in the lock, but the car wasn’t locked up. No sign of any damage. Just the same, Gates wrote down the license number and the name and address on the registration certificate. When he got back to his ranch he called the substation at Escondido. Of course the deputies knew Los Penasquitos Canyon. One of them went over and looked at the car. Clean as a whistle. The deputy managed to trick the trunk open. Empty except for a spare tire and a few tools. So he went back to Escondido and called in here. I’ve just been talking to him.”
I lit a cigarette and offered one to Captain Alessandro. He shook his head.
“Got any ideas, Marlowe?”
“No more than you have.”
“Let’s hear them anyway.”
“If Mitchell had some good reason to get lost and had a friend who would pick him up—a friend nobody here knew anything about—he would have stored his car in some garage. That wouldn’t have made anyone curious. There wouldn’t be anything to make the garage curious. They would just be storing a car. Mitchell’s suitcases would already have been in his friend’s car.”
“So?”
“So there wasn’t any friend. So Mitchell disappeared into thin air—with his nine suitcases—on a very lonely road that was hardly ever used.”
“Go on from there.” His voice was hard now. It had an edge to it. I stood up.
“Don’t bully me, Captain Alessandro. I haven’t done anything wrong. You’ve been very human so far. Please don’t get the idea that I had anything to do with Mitchell’s disappearance. I didn’t—and still don’t— know what he had on my client. I just know that she is a lonely and frightened and unhappy girl. When I know why, if I do manage to find out, I’ll let you know or I won’t. If I don’t, you’ll just have to throw the book at me. It wouldn’t be the first time it’s happened to me. I don’t sell out—even to good police officers.”
“Let’s hope it doesn’t turn out that way, Marlowe. Let’s hope.”
“I’m hoping with you, Captain. And thanks for treating me the way you have.”
I walked back down the corridor, nodded to the duty officer on the desk and climbed back into my car again. I felt twenty years older.
I knew—and I was pretty damn sure Captain Alessandro knew too—that Mitchell wasn’t alive, that he hadn’t driven his car to Los Penasquitos Canyon, but somebody had driven him there, with Mitchell lying dead on the floor of the back seat.
There was no other possible way to look at it. There are things that are facts, in a statistical sense, on paper, on a tape recorder, in evidence. And there are things that are facts because they have to be facts, because nothing makes any sense otherwise.
22
It is like a sudden scream in the night, but there is no sound. Almost always at night, because the dark hours are the hours of danger. But it has happened to me also in broad daylight—that strange, clarified moment when I suddenly know something I have no reason for knowing. Unless out of the long years and the long tensions, and in the present case, the abrupt certainty that what bullfighters call “the moment of truth” is here.
There was no other reason, no sensible reason at all. But I parked across from the entrance to the Rancho Descansado, and cut my lights and ignition, and then drifted about fifty yards downhill and pulled the brake back hard.
I walked up to the office. There was the small glow of light over the night bell, but the office was closed. It was only ten-thirty. I walked around to the back and drifted through the trees. I came on two parked cars. One was a Hertz rent car, as anonymous as a nickel in a parking meter, but by bending down I could read the license number. The car next to it was Goble’s little dark jalopy. It didn’t seem very long since it was parked by the Casa del Poniente. Now it was here.
I went on through the trees until I was below my room. It was dark, soundless. I went up the few steps very slowly and put my ear to the door. For a little while I heard nothing. Then I heard a strangled sob—a man’s sob, not a woman’s. Then a thin, low cackling laugh. Then what seemed to be a hard blow. Then silence.
I went back down the steps and through the trees to my car. I unlocked the trunk and got out a tire iron. I went back to my room as carefully as before—even more carefully. I listened again. Silence. Nothing. The quiet of the night. I reached out my pocket flash and flicked it once at the window, then slid away from the door. For several minutes nothing happened. Then the door opened a crack.
I hit it hard with my shoulder and smashed it wide open. The man stumbled back and then laughed. I saw the glint of his gun in the faint light. I smashed his wrist with the tire iron. He screamed. I smashed his other wrist. I heard the gun hit the floor.
I reached back and switched the lights on. I kicked the door shut.
He was a pale-faced redhead with dead eyes. His face was twisted with pain, but his eyes were still dead. Hurt as he was, he was still tough.
“You ain’t going to live long, boy,” he said.
“You’re not going to live at all. Get out of my way.”
He managed to laugh.
“You’ve still got legs,” I said. “Bend them at the knees and lie down—face down—that is, if you want a face.”
He tried to spit at me, but his throat choked. He slid down to his knees, holding his arms out. He was groaning now. Suddenly he crumpled. They’re so goddam tough when they hold the stacked deck. And they never know any other kind of deck.
Goble was lying on the bed. His face was a mass of bruises and cuts. His nose was broken. He was unconscious and breathing as if half strangled.
The redhead was still out, and his gun lay on the floor near him. I wrestled his belt off and strapped his ankles together. Then I turned him over and went through his pockets. He had a wallet with $670 in it, a driver’s license in the name of Richard Harvest, and the address of a small hotel in San Diego. His pocketbook contained numbered checks on about twenty banks, a set of credit cards, but no gun permit.
I left him lying there and went down to the office. I pushed the button of the night bell, and kept on pushing it. After a while a figure came down through the dark. It was Jack in a bathrobe and pajamas. I still had the tire iron in my hand.
He looked startled. “Something the matter, Mr. Marlowe?”
“Oh, no. Just a hoodlum in my room waiting to kill me. Just another man beaten to pieces on my bed. Nothing the matter at all. Quite normal around here, perhaps.”
“I’ll call the police.”
“That would be awfully damn nice of you, Jack. As you see, I am still alive. You know what you ought to do with this place? Turn it into a pet hospital.”
He unlocked the door and went into the office. When I heard him talking to the police I went back to my room. The redhead had guts. He had managed to get into a sitting position against the wall. His eyes were still dead and his mouth was twisted into a grin. I went over to the bed. Goble’s eyes were open.
“I didn’t make it,” he whispered. “Wasn’t as good as I thought I was. Got out of my league.”
“The cops are on their way. How did it happen?”
“I walked into it. No complaints. This guy’s a lifetaker. I’m lucky. I’m still breathing. Made me drive over here. He cooled me, tied me up, then he was gone for a while.”
“Somebody must have picked him up, Goble. There’s a rent car beside yours. If he had that over at the Casa, how did he get back there for it?”
Goble turned his head slowly and looked at me. “I thought I was a smart cookie. I learned different. All I want is back to Kansas City. The little guys can’t beat the big guys—not ever. I guess you saved my life.”
Then the police were there.
First two prowl car boys, nice cool-looking serious men in the always immaculate uniforms and the always deadpan faces. Then a big tough sergeant who said his name was Sergeant Holzminder, and that he was the cruising sergeant on the shift. He looked at the redhead and went over to the bed.
“Call the hospital,” he said briefly, over his shoulder.
One of the cops went out to the car. The sergeant bent down over Goble. “Want to tell me?”
“The redhead beat me up. He took my money. Stuck a gun into me at the Casa. Made me drive him here. Then he beat me up.”
“Why?”
Goble made a sighing sound and his head went lax on the pillow. Either he passed out again or faked it. The sergeant straightened up and turned to me. “What’s your story?”
“I haven’t any, Sergeant. The man on the bed had dinner with me tonight. We’d met a couple of times. He said he was a Kansas City PI. I never knew what he was doing here.”
“And this?” The sergeant made a loose motion towards the redhead, who was still grinning a sort of unnatural epileptic grin.
“I never saw him before. I don’t know anything about him, except that he was waiting for me with a gun.”
“That your tire iron?”
“Yes, Sergeant.”
The other cop came back into the room and nodded to the sergeant. “On the way.”
“So you had a tire iron,” the sergeant said coldly. “So why?”
“Let’s say I just had a hunch someone was waiting for me here.”
“Let’s try it that you didn’t have a hunch, that you already knew. And knew a lot more.”
“Let’s try it that you don’t call me a liar until you know what you’re talking about. And let’s try it that you don’t get so goddam tough just because you have three stripes. And let’s try something more. This guy may be a hood, but he still has two broken wrists, and you know what that means, Sergeant? He’ll never be able to handle a gun again.”
“So we book you for mayhem.”
“If you say so, Sergeant.”
Then the ambulance came. They carried Goble out first and then the intern put temporary splints on the two wrists of the redhead. They unstrapped his ankles. He looked at me and laughed.
“Next time, pal, I’ll think of something original—but you did all right. You really did.”
He went out. The ambulance doors clanged shut and the growling sound of it died. The sergeant was sitting down now, with his cap off. He was wiping his forehead.
“Let’s try again,” he said evenly. “From the beginning. Like as if we didn’t hate each other and were just trying to understand. Could we?”
“Yes, Sergeant. We could. Thanks for giving me the chance.”