She started for the door, but I caught her by the wrist and spun her around. The torn blouse didn’t reveal any startling nakedness, merely some skin and part of a brassiere. You’d see more on the beach, far more, but you wouldn’t see it through a torn blouse.
I must have been leering a little, because she suddenly curled her fingers and tried to claw me.
“I’m no bitch in heat,” she said between tight teeth. “Take your paws off me.”
I got the other wrist and started to pull her closer. She tried to knee me in the groin, but she was already too close. Then she went limp and pulled her head back and closed her eyes. Her lips opened with a sardonic twist to them. It was a cool evening, maybe even cold down by the water. But it wasn’t cold where I was.
After a while she said with a sighing voice that she had to dress for dinner.
I said, “Uh-huh.”
After another pause she said it was a long time since a man had unhooked her brassiere. We did a slow turn in the direction of one of the twin day beds. They had pink and silver covers on them. The little odd things you notice.
Her eyes were open and quizzical. I studied them one at a time because I was too close to see them together. They seemed well matched.
“Honey,” she said softly, “you’re awful sweet, but I just don’t have the time.”
I closed her mouth for her. It seems that a key slid into the door from the outside, but I wasn’t paying too close attention. The lock clicked, the door opened, and Mr. Larry Mitchell walked in.
We broke apart. I turned and he looked at me droopy-eyed, six feet one and tough and wiry.
“I thought to check at the office,” he said, almost absently. “Twelve B was rented this afternoon, very soon after this was occupied. I got faintly curious, because there are a lot of vacancies here at the moment. So I borrowed the other key. And who is this hunk of beef, baby?”
“She told you not to call her ‘baby,’ remember?”
If that meant anything to him, he didn’t show it. He swung a knotted fist gently at his side.
The girl said: “He’s a private eye named Marlowe. Somebody hired him to follow me.”
“Did he have to follow you as close as all that? I seem to be intruding on a beautiful friendship.”
She jerked away from me and grabbed the gun out of her suitcase. “What we’ve been talking is money,” she told him.
“Always a mistake,” Mitchell said. His color was high and his eyes too bright. “Especially in that posilion. You won’t need the gun, honey.”
He poked at me with a straight right, very fast and well sprung. I stepped inside it, fast, cool and clever. But the right wasn’t his meal ticket. He was a lefty too. I ought to have noticed that at the Union Station in L.A. Trained observer, never miss a detail. I missed him with a right hook and he didn’t miss with his left.
It snapped my head back. I went off balance just long enough for him to lunge sideways and lift the gun out of the girl’s hand. It seemed to dance through the air and nestle in his left hand.
“Just relax,” he said. “I know it sounds corny, but I could drill you and get away with it. I really could.”
“Okay,” I said thickly. “For fifty bucks a day I don’t get shot. That costs seventy-five.”
“Please turn around. It would amuse me to look at your wallet.”
I lunged for him, gun and all. Only panic could have made him shoot and he was on his home field and nothing to panic about. But it may be that the girl wasn’t so sure. Dimly at the extreme edge of vision I saw her reach for the whiskey bottle on the table.
I caught Mitchell on the side of the neck. His mouth yapped. He hit me somewhere, but it wasn’t important. Mine was the better punch, but it didn’t win the wrist watch, because at that moment an army mule kicked me square on the back of my brain. I went zooming out over a dark sea and exploded in a sheet of flame.
6
The first sensation was that if anybody spoke harshly to me I should burst out crying. The second, that the room was too small for my head. The front of the head was a long way from the back, the sides were an enormous distance apart, in spite of which a dull throbbing beat from temple to temple. Distance means nothing nowadays.
The third sensation was that somewhere not far off an insistent whining noise went on. The fourth and last was that ice water was running down my back. The cover of a day bed proved that I had been lying on my face, if I still had one. I rolled over gently and sat up and a rattling noise ended in a thump. What rattled and thumped was a knotted towel full of melting ice cubes. Somebody who loved me very much had put them on the back of my head. Somebody who loved me less had bashed in the back of my skull. It could have been the same person. People have moods.
I got up on my feet and lunged for my hip. The wallet was there in the left pocket, but the flap was unbuttoned. I went through it. Nothing was gone. It had yielded its information, but that was no secret any more. My suitcase stood open on the stand at the foot of the day bed. So I was home in my own quarters.
I reached a mirror and looked at the face. It seemed familiar. I went to the door and opened it. The whining noise was louder. Right in front of me was a fattish man leaning against the railing. He was a middle-sized fat man and the fat didn’t look flabby. He wore glasses and large ears under a dull gray felt hat. The collar of his topcoat was turned up. His hands were in the pockets of his coat. The hair that showed at the sides of his head was battleship gray. He looked durable. Most fat men do. The light from the open door behind me bounced back from his glasses. He had a small pipe in his mouth, the kind they call a toy bulldog. I was still foggy but something about him bothered me. “Nice evening,” he said. “You want something?”
“Looking for a man. You’re not him.”
“I’m alone in here.”
“Right,” he said. “Thanks.” He turned his back on me and leaned his stomach against the railing of the porch.
I went along the porch to the whining noise. The door of 12C was wide open and the lights were on and the noise was a vacuum cleaner being operated by a woman in a green uniform.
I went in and looked the place over. The woman switched off the vacuum and stared at me. “Something you wanted?”
“Where’s Miss Mayfleld?”
She shook her head.
“The lady who had this apartment,” I said.
“Oh, that one. She checked out. Half an hour ago.” She switched the vacuum on again. “Better ask at the office,” she yelled through the noise. “This apartment is on change.”
I reached back and shut the door. I followed the black snake of the vacuum cord over to the wall and yanked the plug out. The woman in the green uniform stared at me angrily. I went over and handed her a dollar bill. She looked less angry.
“Just want to phone,” I said.
“Ain’t you got a phone in your room?”
“Stop thinking,” I said. “A dollar’s worth.”
I went to the phone and lifted it. A girl’s voice said: “Office. Your order, please.”
“This is Marlowe. I’m very unhappy.”
“What? … Oh yes, Mr. Marlowe. What can we do for you?”
“She’s gone. I never even got to talk to her.”
“Oh, I’m sorry, Mr. Marlowe,” she sounded as if she meant it. “Yes, she left. We couldn’t very well—”
“She say where to?”
“She just paid up and left, sir. Quite suddenly. No forwarding address at all.”
“With Mitchell?”
“I’m sorry, sir. I didn’t see anyone with her.”
“You must have seen something. How did she leave?”
“In a taxi. I’m afraid—”
“All right. Thank you.” I went back to my apartment.
The middle-sized fat man was sitting comfortably in a chair with his knees crossed.
“Nice of you to drop in,” I said. “Anything in particular I could do for you?”
“You could tell me where Larry Mitchell is.”
“Larry Mitchell?” I thought it over carefully. “Do I know him?”
He opened a wallet and extracted a card. He struggled to his feet and handed it to me. The card read: Goble and Green, Investigators, 310 Prudence Building, Kansas City, Missouri.
“Must be interesting work, Mr. Goble.”
“Don’t get funny with me, buster. I get annoyed rather easy.”
“Fine. Let’s watch you get annoyed. What do you do—bite your mustache?”
“I ain’t got no mustache, stupid.”
“You could grow one. I can wait.”
He got up on his feet much more rapidly this time. He looked down at his fist. Suddenly a gun appeared in his hand. “You ever get pistol-whipped, stupid?”
“Breeze off. You bore me. Mudheads always bore me.”
His hand shook and his face turned red. Then he put the gun back in the shoulder holster and wobbled towards the door. “You ain’t through with me,” he snarled over his shoulder.
I let him have that one. It wasn’t worth topping.
7
After a while I went down to the office.
“Well, it didn’t work,” I said. “Does either one of you happen to have noticed the cabdriver who took her away?”
“Joe Harms,” the girl said promptly. “You ought to maybe find him at the stand halfway up Grand. Or you could call the office. A pretty nice guy. He made a pass at me once.”
“And missed by from here to Paso Robles,” the clerk sneered.
“Oh, I don’t know. You didn’t seem to be there.”
“Yeah,” he sighed. “You work twenty hours a day trying to put enough together to buy a home. And by the time you have, fifteen other guys have been smooching your girl.”
“Not this one,” I said. “She’s just teasing you. She glows every time she looks at you.”
I went out and left them smiling at each other. Like most small towns, Esmeralda had one main Street from which in both directions its commercial establishments flowed gently for a short block or so and then with hardly a change of mood became streets with houses where people lived. But unlike most small California towns it had no false fronts, no cheesy billboards, no drive-in hamburger joints, no cigar counters or poolrooms, and no street corner toughs to hang around in front of them. The stores on Grand Street were either old and narrow but not tawdry or else well modernized with plate glass and stainless steel fronts and neon lighting in clear crisp colors. Not everybody in Esmeralda was prosperous, not everybody was happy, not everybody drove a Cadillac, a Jaguar or a Riley, but the percentage of obviously prosperous living was very high, and the stores that sold luxury goods were as neat and expensive-looking as those in Beverly Hills and far less flashy. There was another small difference too. In Esmeralda what was old was also clean and sometimes quaint. In other small towns what is old is just shabby.
I parked midway of the block and the telephone office was right in front of me. It was closed of course, but the entrance was set back and in the alcove which deliberately sacrificed money space to style were two dark green phone booths, like sentry boxes. Across the way was a pale buff taxi, parked diagonally to the curb in slots painted red. A gray-haired man sat in it reading the paper. I crossed to him.
“You Joe Harms?”
He shook his head. “He’ll be back after a while. You want a cab?”
“No, thanks.”
I walked away from him and looked in at a store window. There was a checked brown and beige sport shirt in the window which reminded me of Larry Mitchell. Walnut brogues, imported tweeds, ties, two or three, and matching shirts for them set out with plenty of room to breathe. Over the store the name of a man who was once a famous athlete. The name was in script, carved and painted in relief against a redwood background.
A telephone jangled and the cabdriver got out of the taxi and went across the sidewalk to answer it. He talked, hung up, got in his cab and backed out of the slot. When he was gone, the street was utterly empty for a minute. Then a couple of cars went by, then a good-looking well dressed colored boy and his prettied up cutie came strolling the block looking in at the windows and chattering. A Mexican in a green bellhop’s uniform drove up in somebody’s Chrysler New Yorker —it could be his for all I knew—went into the drugstore and came out with a carton of cigarettes. He drove back towards the hotel.
Another beige cab with the name Esmeralda Cab Company tooled around the corner and drifted into the red slot. A big bruiser with thick glasses got out and checked on the wall phone, then got back into his cab and pulled a magazine out from behind his rear-view mirror.
I strolled over to him and he was it. He was coatless and had his sleeves rolled up past the elbows, although this was no Bikini suit weather.
“Yeah. I’m Joe Harms.” He stuck a pill in his kisser and lit it with a Ronson.
“Lucille down at the Rancho Descansado thought maybe you’d give me a little information.” I leaned against his cab and gave him my big warm smile. I might as well have kicked the curbing.
“Information about what?”
“You picked up a fare this evening from one of their cottages. Number 12C. A tallish girl with reddish hair and a nice shape. Her name’s Betty Mayfield but she probably didn’t tell you that.”