He laughed. “Sure, by an old coot of a judge falling to pieces with senile decay, and in the only state in the Union—and I’ve checked on that—where it could happen after the jury said otherwise. You’ve changed your name twice. If your story got printed out here—and it’s a pretty good story, honey—I guess you’d have to change your name again—and start traveling a little more. Gets kind of tiresome, doesn’t it?”
“That’s why I’m here,” she said. “That’s why you’re here. How much do you want? I realize it will only be a down payment.”
“Have I said anything about money?”
“You will,” she said. “And keep your voice down.”
“The cottage is all yours, honey. I walked around it before I came in. Doors closed, windows shut, blinds drawn, car ports empty. I can check with the office, if you’re nervous. I’ve got friends around here—people you need to know, people who can make life pleasant for you. Socially this is a tough town to break into. And it’s a damn dull town if you’re on the outside looking in.”
“How did you get in, Mr. Mitchell?”
“My old man is a big shot in Toronto. We don’t get on and he won’t have me around home. But he’s still my old man and he’s still the real thing, even if he does pay me to stay away.”
She didn’t answer him. Her steps went away. I heard her in the kitchen making the usual sounds connected with getting ice out of a tray of cubes. The water ran, the steps came back.
“I’d like one myself,” she said. “Perhaps I’ve been rude to you. I’m tired.”
“Sure,” he said equably. “You’re tired.” A pause. “Well, here’s to when you’re not tired. Say about seven-thirty this evening at The Glass Room. I’ll pick you up. Nice place for dinner. Dancing. Quiet. Exclusive, if that means anything any more. Belongs to the Beach Club. They don’t have a table unless they know you. I’m among friends there.”
“Expensive?” she asked.
“A little. Oh yes—and that reminds me. Until my monthly check comes in, you could let me have a couple of dollars.” He laughed. “I’m surprised at myself. I did mention money after all.”
“A couple of dollars?”
“A couple of hundred would be better.”
“Sixty dollars is all I have—until I can open an account or cash some traveler’s checks.”
“You can do that at the office, baby.”
“So I can. Here’s fifty. I don’t want to spoil you, Mr. Mitchell.”
“Call me Larry. Be human.”
“Should I?” Her voice had changed. There was a hint of invitation in it. I could imagine the slow smile of pleasure on his face. Then I guess from the silence that he had grabbed her and she had let him. Finally her voice was a little muffled, saying: “That’s enough, Larry. Be nice now and run along. I’ll be ready at seven-thirty.”
“One more for the road.”
In a moment the door opened and he said something I didn’t catch. I got up and went to the window and took a careful look through the slats of the blind. A floodlight was turned on in one of the tall trees. Under it I saw him stroll off up the slope and disappear. I went back to the heater panel and for a while I heard nothing and wasn’t sure what I was listening for. But I knew soon enough.
There was quick movement back and forth, the sound of drawers being pulled open, the snap of a lock, the bump of a lifted lid against something.
She was packing up to leave.
I screwed the long frosted bulbs back into the heater and replaced the grille and put the stethoscope back in my suitcase. The evening was getting chilly. I slipped my jacket on and stood in the middle of the floor. It was getting dark and no light on. I just stood there and thought it over. I could go to the phone and make a report and by that time she could be on her way in another cab to another train or plane to another destination. She could go anywhere she liked, but there would always be a dick to meet the train if it meant enough to the big important people back in Washington. There would always be a Larry Mitchell or a reporter with a good memory.. There would always be the little oddness to be noticed and there would always be somebody to notice it. You can’t run away from yourself.
I was doing a cheap sneaky job for people I didn’t like, but—that’s what you hire out for, chum. They pay the bills, you dig the dirt. Only this time I could taste it. She didn’t look like a tramp and she didn’t look like a crook. Which meant only that she could be both with more success than if she had.
5
I opened the door and went along to the next and pushed the little buzzer. Nothing moved inside. There was no sound of steps. Then came the click of a chain set in the groove and the door opened a couple of inches on light and emptiness. The voice said from behind the door: “Who is it?”
“Could I borrow a cup of sugar?”
“I haven’t any sugar.”
“Well how about a couple of dollars until my check comes in?”
More silence. Then the door opened to the limit of the chain and her face edged into the opening and shadowed eyes stared out at me. They were just pools in the dark. The floodlight set high in the tree glinted on them obliquely.
“Who are you?”
“I’m your next door neighbor. I was having a nap and voices woke me. The voices spoke words. I was intrigued.”
“Go somewhere else and be intrigued.”
“I could do that, Mrs. King—pardon me, Miss Mayfield—but I’m not sure you’d want me to.”
She didn’t move and her eyes didn’t waver. I shook a cigarette out of a pack and tried to push up the top of my Zippo with my thumb and rotate the wheel. You should be able to do it one-handed. You can too, but it’s an awkward process. I made it at last and got the cigarette going, yawned, and blew smoke out through my nose.
“What do you do for an encore?” she asked.
“To be strictly kosher I should call L.A. and tell the party who sent me. Maybe I could be talked out of it.”
“God,” she said fervently, “two of them in one afternoon. How lucky can a girl get?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know anything. I think I’ve been played for a sucker, but I’m not sure.”
“Wait a minute.” She shut the door in my face. She wasn’t gone long. The chain came out of the groove inside and the door came open.
I went in slowly and she stepped back and away from me. “How much did you hear? And shut the door, please.”
I shut it with my shoulder and leaned against it.
“The tag end of a rather nasty conversation. The walls here are as thin as a hoofer’s wallet.”
“You in show business?”
“Just the opposite of show business. I’m in the hide-and-seek business. My name is Philip Marlowe. You’ve seen me before.”
“Have I?” She walked away from me in little cautious steps and went over by her open suitcase. She leaned against the arm of a chair. “Where?”
“Union Station in L.A. We waited between trains, you and I. I was interested in you. I was interested in what went on between you and Mr. Mitchell—that’s his name, isn’t it? I didn’t hear anything and I didn’t see much because I was outside the coffee shop.”
“So what interested you, you great big lovable something or other?”
“I’ve just told you part of it. The other thing that interested me was how you changed after your talk with him. I watched you work at it. It was very deliberate. You made yourself over into just another flip hardboiled modern cutie. Why?”
“What was I before?”
“A nice quiet well-bred girl.”
“That was the act,” she said. “The other was my natural personality. Which goes with something else.” She brought a small automatic up from her side.
I looked at it. “Oh guns,” I said. “Don’t scare me with guns. I’ve lived with them all my life. I teethed on an old Derringer, single-shot, the kind the riverboat gamblers used to carry. As I got older I graduated to a lightweight sporting rifle, then a .303 target rifle and so on. I once made a bull at nine hundred yards with open sights. In case you don’t know, the whole target looks the size of a postage stamp at nine hundred yards.”
“A fascinating career,” she said.
“Guns never settle anything,” I said. “They are just a fast curtain to a bad second act.”
She smiled faintly and transferred the gun to her left hand. With her right she grabbed the edge of her blouse at the collar line and with a quick decisive motion tore it to the waist.
“Next,” she said, “but there’s no hurry about it, I turn the gun in my hand like this”—she put it back in her right hand, but held it by the barrel—“I slam myself on the cheekbone with the butt. I do a beautiful bruise.”
“And after that,” I said, “you get the gun into its proper position and release the safety catch and pull the trigger, just about the time I get through the lead column in the Sports Section.”
“You wouldn’t get halfway across the room.”
I crossed my legs and leaned back and lifted the green glass ash tray from the table beside the chair and balanced it on my knee and held the cigarette I was smoking between the first and second fingers of my right hand.
“I wouldn’t get any of the way across the room. I’d be sitting here like this, quite comfortable and relaxed.”
“But slightly dead,” she said. “I’m a good shot and it isn’t nine hundred yards.”
“Then you try to sell the cops your account of how I tried to attack you and you defended yourself.”
She tossed the gun into her suitcase and laughed. It sounded like a genuine laugh with real amusement in it. “Sorry,” she said. “You sitting there with your legs crossed and a hole in your head and me trying to explain how I shot you to defend my honor—the picture makes me a little lightheaded.”
She dropped into a chair and leaned forward with her chin cupped in a hand, the elbow propped on her knee, her face taut and drained, her dark red hair framing it too luxuriantly, so that her face looked smaller than it should have.
“Just what are you doing to me, Mr. Marlowe? Or is it the other way around—what I can do for you in return for you not doing anything at all?”
“Who is Eleanor King? What was she in Washington, D.C.? Why did she change her name somewhere along the way and have the initials taken off her bag? Odds and ends like that are what you could tell me. You probably won’t.”
“Oh, I don’t know. The porter took the initials off my things. I told him I had had a very unhappy marriage and was divorced and had been given the right to resume my unmarried name. Which is Elizabeth or Betty Mayfield. That could all be true, couldn’t it?”
“Yeah. But it doesn’t explain Mitchell.”
She leaned back and relaxed. Her eyes stayed watchful. “Just an acquaintance I made along the way. He was on the train.”
I nodded. “But he came down here in his own car. He made the reservation here for you. He’s not liked by the people here, but apparently he is a friend of someone with a lot of influence.”
“An acquaintance on a train or a ship sometimes develops very quickly,” she said.
“So it seems. He even touched you for a loan. Very fast work. And I got the impression you didn’t care for him too well.”
“Well,” she said. “so what? But as a matter of fact I’m crazy about him.” She turned her hand over and looked down at it. “Who hired you, Mr. Marlowe, and for what?”
“A Los Angeles lawyer, acting on instructions from back east. I was to follow you and check you in somewhere. Which I did. But now you’re getting ready to move out. I’m going to have to start over again.”
“But with me knowing you’re there,” she said shrewdly. “So you’ll have a much harder job of it. You’re a private detective of some sort, I gather.”
I said I was. I had killed my cigarette some time back. I put the ash tray back on the table and stood up.
“Harder for me, but there are lots of others, Miss Mayfield.”
“Oh, I’m sure there are, and all such nice little men. Some of them are even fairly clean.”
“The cops are not looking for you. They’d have had you easily. It was known about your train. I even got a photo of you and a description. But Mitchell can make you do just what he wants. Money isn’t all he’ll want.”
I thought she flushed a little, but the light didn’t strike her face directly. “Perhaps so,” she said. “And perhaps I don’t mind.”
“You mind.”
She stood up suddenly and came near me. “You’re in a business that doesn’t pay fortunes, aren’t you?”
I nodded. We were very close now.
“Then what would it be worth to you to walk out of here and forget you ever saw me?”
“I’d walk out of here for free. As for the rest, I have to make a report.”
“How much?” She said it as if she meant it. “I can afford a substantial retainer. That’s what you call it, I’ve heard. A much nicer word than blackmail.”
“It doesn’t mean the same thing.”
“It could. Believe me, it can mean just that—even with some lawyers and doctors. I happen to know.”
“Tough break, huh?”
“Far from it, shamus. I’m the luckiest girl in the world. I’m alive.”
“I’m on the other side. Don’t give it away.”
“Well, what do you know,” she drawled. “A dick with scruples. Tell it to the seagulls, buster. On me it’s just confetti. Run along now, Mr. PI Marlowe, and make that little old phone call you’re so anxious about. I’m not restraining you.”