He looked up and made a sort of face at me. Maybe it was the face of somebody being badly scared. Then he took his handkerchief out and wiped his forehead and sat holding it between his hands.
“When Merle told me mother had employed a detective—Merle ought not to have told me, but mother has promised not to scold her for it—” He looked at his mother. The old warhorse clamped her jaws and looked grim. The little girl had her eyes still on his face and didn’t seem to be very worried about the scolding. He went on: “—then I was sure she had missed the doubloon and had hired you on that account. I didn’t really believe she had hired you to find Linda. I knew where Linda was all the time. I went to your office to see what I could find out. I didn’t find out very much. I went to see Morny yesterday afternoon and told him about it. At first he laughed in my face, but when I told him that even my mother couldn’t sell the coin without violating the terms of Jasper Murdock’s will and that she would certainly set the police on him when I told her where the coin was, then he loosened up. He got up and went to the safe and got the coin out and handed it to me without a word. I gave him back his receipt and he tore it up. So I brought the coin home and told mother about it.”
He stopped talking and wiped his face again. The little girl’s eyes moved up and down with the motions of his hand.
In the silence that followed I said: “Did Morny threaten you?”
He shook his head. “He said he wanted his money and he needed it and I had better get busy and dig it up. But he wasn’t threatening. He was very decent, really. In the circumstances.”
“Where was this?”
“At the Idle Valley Club, in his private office.”
“Was Eddie Prue there?”
The little girl tore her eyes away from his face and looked at me. Mrs. Murdock said thickly: “Who is Eddie Prue?”
“Morny’s bodyguard,” I said. “I didn’t waste all my time yesterday, Mrs. Murdock.” I looked at her son, waiting.
He said: “No, I didn’t see him. I know him by sight, of course. You would only have to see him once to remember him. But he wasn’t around yesterday.”
I said: “Is that all?”
He looked at his mother. She said harshly: “Isn’t it enough?”
“Maybe,” I said. “Where is the coin now?”
“Where would you expect it to be?” she snapped.
I almost told her, just to see her jump. But I managed to hold it in. I said: “That seems to take care of that, then.”
Mrs. Murdock said heavily: “Kiss your mother, son, and run along.”
He got up dutifully and went over and kissed her on the forehead. She patted his hand. He went out of the room with his head down and quietly shut the door. I said to Merle: “I think you had better have him dictate that to you just the way he told it and make a copy of it and get him to sign it.”
She looked startled. The old woman snarled:
“She certainly won’t do anything of the sort. Go back to your work, Merle. I wanted you to hear this. But if I ever again catch you violating my confidence, you know what will happen.”
The little girl stood up and smiled at her with shining eyes. “Oh yes, Mrs. Murdock. I never will. Never. You can trust me.
“I hope so,” the old dragon growled. “Get out.”
Merle went out softly.
Two big tears formed themselves in Mrs. Murdock’s eyes and slowly made their way down the elephant hide of her cheeks, reached the corners of her fleshy nose and slid down her lip. She scrabbled around for a handkerchief, wiped them off and then wiped her eyes. She put the handkerchief away, reached for her wine and said placidly:
“I’m very fond of my son, Mr. Marlowe. Very fond. This grieves me deeply. Do you think he will have to tell this story to the police?”
“I hope not,” I said. “He’d have a hell of a time getting them to believe it.”
Her mouth snapped open and her teeth glinted at me in the dim light. She closed her lips and pressed them tight. scowling at me with her head lowered.
“Just what do you mean by that?” she snapped.
“Just what I said. The story doesn’t ring true. It has a fabricated, over-simple sound. Did he make it up himself or did you think it up and teach it to him?”
“Mr. Marlowe,” she said in a deadly voice, “you are treading on very thin ice.”
I waved a hand. “Aren’t we all? All right, suppose it’s true. Morny will deny it, and we’ll be right back where we started. Morny will have to deny it, because otherwise it would tie him to a couple of murders.”
“Is there anything so unlikely about that being the exact situation?” she blared.
“Why would Morny, a man with backing, protection and some influence, tie himself to a couple of small murders in order to avoid tying himself to something trifling, like selling a pledge? It doesn’t make sense to me.”
She stared, saying nothing. I grinned at her, because for the first time she was going to like something I said.
“I found your daughter-in-law, Mrs. Murdock. It’s a little strange to me that your son, who seems so well under your control, didn’t tell you where she was.”
“I didn’t ask him,” she said in a curiously quiet voice, for her.
“She’s back where she started, singing with the band at the Idle Valley Club. I talked to her. She’s a pretty hard sort of girl in a way. She doesn’t like you very well. I don’t find it impossible to think that she took the coin all right, partly from spite. And I find it slightly less impossible to believe that Leslie knew it or found it out and cooked up that yarn to protect her. He says he’s very much in love with her.”
She smiled. It wasn’t a beautiful smile, being on slightly the wrong kind of face. But it was a smile.
“Yes,” she said gently. “Yes. Poor Leslie. He would do just that. And in that case—” she stopped and her smile widened until it was almost ecstatic, “in that case my dear daughter-in-law may be involved in murder.”
I watched her enjoying the idea for a quarter of a minute. “And you’d just love that,” I said.
She nodded, still smiling, getting the idea she liked before she got the rudeness in my voice. Then her face stiffened and her lips came together hard. Between them and her teeth she said:
“I don’t like your tone. I don’t like your tone at all.”
“I don’t blame you,” I said. “I don’t like it myself. I don’t like anything. I don’t like this house or you or the air of repression in the joint, or the squeezed down face of the little girl or that twerp of a son you have, or this case or the truth I’m not told about it and the lies I am told about it and—”
She started yelling then, noise out of a splotched furious face, eyes tossing with fury, sharp with hate:
“Get out! Get out of this house at once! Don’t delay one instant! Get out!”
I stood up and reached my hat off the carpet and said: “I’ll be glad to.”
I gave her a sort of a tired leer and picked my way to the door and opened it and went out. I shut it quietly, holding the knob with a stiff hand and clicking the lock gently into place.
For no reason at all.
22
Steps gibbered along after me and my name was called and I kept on going until I was in the middle of the living room. Then I stopped and turned and let her catch up with me, out of breath, her eyes trying to pop through her glasses and her shining copper-blond hair catching funny little lights from the high windows.
“Mr. Marlowe? Please! Please don’t go away. She wants you. She really does!”
“I’ll be darned. You’ve got Sub-deb Bright on your mouth this morning. Looks all right too.”
She grabbed my sleeve. “Please!”
“The hell with her,” I said. “Tell her to jump in the lake. Marlowe can get sore too. Tell her to jump in two lakes, if one won’t hold her. Not clever, but quick.”
I looked down at the hand on my sleeve and patted it. She drew it away swiftly and her eyes looked shocked.
“Please, Mr. Marlowe. She’s in trouble. She needs you.”
“I’m in trouble too,” I growled. “I’m up to my ear flaps in trouble. What are you crying about?”
“Oh, I’m really very fond of her. I know she’s rough and blustery, but her heart is pure gold.”
“To hell with her heart too,” I said. “I don’t expect to get intimate enough with her for that to make any difference. She’s a fat-faced old liar. I’ve had enough of her. I think she’s in trouble all right, but I’m not in the excavating business. I have to get told things.”
“Oh, I’m sure if you would only be patient—”
I put my arm around her shoulders, without thinking. She jumped about three feet and her eyes blazed with panic.
We stood there staring at each other, making breath noises, me with my mouth open as it too frequently is, she with her lips pressed tight and her little pale nostrils quivering. Her face was as pale as the unhandy makeup would let it be.
“Look,” I said slowly, “did something happen to you when you were a little girl?”
She nodded, very quickly.
“A man scared you or something like that?”
She nodded again. She took her lower lip between her little white teeth.
“And you’ve been like this ever since?”
She just stood there, looking white.
“Look,” I said, “I won’t do anything to you that will scare you. Not ever.”
Her eyes melted with tears.
“If I touched you,” I said, “it was just like touching a chair or a door. It didn’t mean anything. Is that clear?”
“Yes.” She got a word out at last. Panic still twitched in the depths of her eyes, behind the tears. “Yes.”
“That takes care of me,” I said. “I’m all adjusted. Nothing to worry about in me any more. Now take Leslie. He has his mind on other things. You know he’s all right—in the way we mean. Right?”
“Oh, yes,” she said. “Yes, indeed.” Leslie was aces. With her. With me he was a handful of bird gravel.
“Now take the old wine barrel,” I said. “She’s rough and she’s tough and she thinks she can eat walls and spit bricks, and she bawls you out, but she’s fundamentally decent to you, isn’t she?”
“Oh, she is, Mr. Marlowe. I was trying to tell you—”
“Sure. Now why don’t you get over it? Is he still around—this other one that hurt you?”
She put her hand to her mouth and gnawed the fleshy part at the base of the thumb, looking at me over it, as if it was a balcony.
“He’s dead,” she said. “He fell out of a—out of a—a window.”
I stopped her with my big right hand. “Oh, that guy. I heard about him. Forget it, can’t you?”
“No,” she said, shaking her head seriously behind the hand. “I can’t. I can’t seem to forget it at all. Mrs. Murdock is always telling me to forget it. She talks to me for the longest times telling me to forget it. But I just can’t.”
“It would be a darn sight better,” I snarled, “if she would keep her fat mouth shut about it for the longest times. She just keeps it alive.”
She looked surprised and rather hurt at that. “Oh, that isn’t all,” she said. “I was his secretary. She was his wife. He was her first husband. Naturally she doesn’t forget it either. How could she?”
I scratched my ear. That seemed sort of non-committal. There was nothing much in her expression now except that I didn’t really think she realized that I was there. I was a voice coming out of somewhere, but rather impersonal. Almost a voice in her own head.
Then I had one of my funny and often unreliable hunches. “Look,” I said, “is there someone you meet that has that effect on you? Some one person more than another?”
She looked all around the room. I looked with her. Nobody was under a chair or peeking at us through a door or a window.
“Why do I have to tell you?” she breathed.
“You don’t. It’s just how you feel about it.”
“Will you promise not to tell anybody—anybody in the whole world, not even Mrs. Murdock?”
“Her last of all,” I said. “I promise.”
She opened her mouth and put a funny little confiding smile on her face, and then it went wrong. Her throat froze up. She made a croaking noise. Her teeth actually rattled.
I wanted to give her a good hard squeeze but I was afraid to touch her. We stood. Nothing happened. We stood. I was about as much use as a hummingbird’s spare egg would have been.
Then she turned and ran. I heard her steps going along the halls. I heard a door close.