13
I drove west on Sunset, fiddled around a few blocks without making up my mind whether anyone was trying to follow me, then parked near a drugstore and went into its phone booth. I dropped my nickel and asked the O-operator for a Pasadena number. She told me how much money to put in.
The voice which answered the phone was angular and cold. “Mrs. Murdock’s residence.”
“Philip Marlowe here. Mrs. Murdock, please.”
I was told to wait. A soft but very clear voice said: “Mr. Marlowe? Mrs. Murdock is resting now. Can you tell me what it is?”
“You oughtn’t to have told him.”
“I—who—?”
“That loopy guy whose handkerchief you cry into.”
“How dare you?”
“That’s fine,” I said. “Now let me talk to Mrs. Murdock. I have to.”
“Very well. I’ll try.” The soft clear voice went away and I waited a long wait. They would have to lift her up on the pillows and drag the port bottle out of her hard gray paw and feed her the telephone. A throat was cleared suddenly over the wire. It sounded like a freight train going through a tunnel.
“This is Mrs. Murdock.”
“Could you identify the property we were talking about this morning, Mrs. Murdock? I mean could you pick it out from others just like it?”
“Well—are there others just like it?”
“There must be. Dozens, hundreds for all I know. Anyhow dozens. Of course I don’t know where they are.”
She coughed. “I don’t really know much about it. I suppose I couldn’t identify it then. But in the circumstances—”
“That’s what I’m getting at, Mrs. Murdock. The identification would seem to depend on tracing the history of the article back to you. At least to be convincing.”
“Yes. I suppose it would. Why? Do you know where it is?”
“Morningstar claims to have seen it. He says it was offered to him for sale—just as you suspected. He wouldn’t buy. The seller was not a woman, he says. That doesn’t mean a thing, because he gave me a detailed description of the party which was either made up or was a description of somebody he knew more than casually. So the seller may have been a woman.”
“I see. It’s not important now.”
“Not important?”
“No. Have you anything else to report?”
“Another question to ask. Do you know a youngish blond fellow named George Anson Phillips? Rather heavy set, wearing a brown suit and a dark pork pie hat with a gay band. Wearing that today. Claimed to be a private detective.”
“I do not. Why should I?”
“I don’t know. He enters the picture somewhere. I think he was the one who tried to sell the article. Morningstar tried to call him up after I left. I snuck back into his office and overheard.”
“You what?’
“I snuck.”
“Please do not be witty, Mr. Marlowe. Anything else?”
“Yes, I agreed to pay Morningstar one thousand dollars for the return of the—the article. He said he could get it for eight hundred …”
“And where were you going to get the money, may I ask?”
“Well, I was just talking. This Morningstar is a downy bird. That’s the kind of language he understands. And then again you might have wanted to pay it. I wouldn’t want to persuade you. You could always go to the police. But if for any reason you didn’t want to go to the police, it might be the only way you could get it back—buying it back.”
I would probably have gone on like that for a long time, not knowing just what I was trying to say, if she hadn’t stopped me with a noise like a seal barking.
“This is all very unnecessary now, Mr. Marlowe. I have decided to drop the matter. The coin has been returned to me.”
“Hold the wire a minute,” I said.
I put the phone down on the shelf and opened the booth door and stuck my head out, filling my chest with what they were using for air in the drugstore. Nobody was paying any attention to me. Up front the druggist, in a pale blue smock, was chatting across the cigar counter. The counter boy was polishing glasses at the fountain. Two girls in slacks were playing the pinball machine. A tall narrow party in a black shirt and a pale yellow scarf was fumbling magazines at the rack. He didn’t look like a gunman.
I pulled the booth shut and picked up the phone and said: “A rat was gnawing my foot. It’s all right now. You got it back, you said. Just like that. How?”
“I hope you are not too disappointed,” she said in her uncompromising baritone. “The circumstances are a little difficult. I may decide to explain and I may not. You may call at the house tomorrow morning. Since I do not wish to proceed with the investigation, you will keep the retainer as payment in full.”
“Let me get this straight,” I said. “You actually got the coin back—not a promise of it, merely?”
“Certainly not. And I’m getting tired. So, if you—”
“One moment, Mrs. Murdock. It isn’t going to be as simple as all that. Things have happened.”
“In the morning you may tell me about them,” she said sharply, and hung up.
I pushed out of the booth and lit a cigarette with thick awkward fingers. I went back along the store. The druggist was alone now. He was sharpening a pencil with a small knife, very intent, frowning.
“That’s a nice sharp pencil you have there,” I told him. He looked up, surprised. The girls at the pinball machine looked at me, surprised. I went over and looked at myself in the mirror behind the counter. I looked surprised.
I sat down on one of the stools and said: “A double Scotch, straight.”
The counter man looked surprised. “Sorry, this isn’t a bar, sir. You can buy a bottle at the liquor counter.”
“So it is,” I said. “I mean, so it isn’t. I’ve had a shock. I’m a little dazed. Give me a cup of coffee, weak, and a very thin ham sandwich on stale bread. No, I better not eat yet either. Good-by.”
I got down off the stool and walked to the door in a silence that was as loud as a ton of coal going down a chute. The man in the black shirt and yellow scarf was sneering at me over the New Republic.
“You ought to lay off that fluff and get your teeth into something solid, like a pulp magazine,” I told him, just to be friendly.
I went on out. Behind me somebody said: “Hollywood’s full of them.”
14
The wind had risen and had a dry taut feeling, tossing the tops of trees, and making the swung arc light up the side street cast shadows like crawling lava. I turned the car and drove east again.
The hock shop was on Santa Monica, near Wilcox, a quiet oldfashioned little place, washed gently by the lapping waves of time. In the front window there was everything you could think of, from a set of trout flies in a thin wooden box to a portable organ, from a folding baby carriage to a portrait camera with a four-inch lens, from a mother-of-pearl lorgnette in a faded plush case to a Single Action Frontier Colt, .44 caliber, the model they still make for Western peace officers whose grandfathers taught them how to file the trigger and shoot by fanning the hammer back.
I went into the shop and a bell jangled over my head and somebody shuffled and blew his nose far at the back and steps came. An old Jew in a tall black skull cap came along behind the counter, smiling at me over cut out glasses.
I got my tobacco pouch out, got the Brasher Doubloon out of that and laid it on the counter. The window in front was clear glass and I felt naked. No paneled cubicles with handcarved spittoons and doors that locked themselves as you closed them.
The Jew took the coin and lifted it on his hand. “Gold, is it? A gold hoarder you are maybe,” he said, twinkling.
“Twenty-five dollars,” I said. “The wife and the kiddies are hungry.”
“Oi, that is terrible. Gold, it feels, by the weight. Only gold and maybe platinum it could be.” He weighed it casually on a pair of small scales. “Gold it is,” he said. “So ten dollars you are wanting?”
“Twenty-five dollars.”
“For twenty-five dollars what would I do with it? Sell it, maybe? For fifteen dollars worth of gold is maybe in it. Okay. Fifteen dollars.”
“You got a good safe?”
“Mister, in this business are the best safes money can buy. Nothing to worry about here. It is fifteen dollars, is it?”
“Make out the ticket.”
He wrote it out partly with his pen and partly with his tongue. I gave my true name and address. Bristol Apartments, 1634 North Bristol Avenue, Hollywood.
“You are living in that district and you are borrowing fifteen dollars,” the Jew said sadly, and tore off my half of the ticket and counted out the money.
I walked down to the corner drugstore and bought an envelope and borrowed a pen and mailed the pawnticket to myself.
I was hungry and hollow inside. I went over to Vine to eat, and after that I drove downtown again. The wind was still rising and it was drier than ever. The steering wheel had a gritty feeling under my fingers and the inside of my nostrils felt tight and drawn.
The lights were on here and there in the tall buildings. The green and chromium clothier’s store on the corner of Ninth and Hill was a blaze of it. In the Belfont Building a few windows glowed here and there, but not many. The same old plowhorse sat in the elevator on his piece of folded burlap, looking straight in front of him, blank-eyed, almost gathered to history.
I said: “I don’t suppose you know where I can get in touch with the building superintendent?”
He turned his head slowly and looked past my shoulder. “I hear how in Noo York they got elevators that just whiz. Go thirty floors at a time. High speed. That’s in Noo York.”
“The hell with New York,” I said. “I like it here.”
“Must take a good man to run them fast babies.”
“Don’t kid yourself, dad. All those cuties do is push buttons, say ‘Good Morning, Mr. Whoosis,’ and look at their beauty spots in the car mirror. Now you take a Model T job like this—it takes a man to run it. Satisfied?”
“I work twelve hours a day,” he said. “And glad to get it.”
“Don’t let the union hear you.”
“You know what the union can do?” I shook my head. He told me. Then he lowered his eyes until they almost looked at me. “Didn’t I see you before somewhere?”
“About the building super,” I said gently.
“Year ago he broke his glasses,” the old man said. “I could of laughed. Almost did.”
“Yes. Where could I get in touch with him this time of the evening?”
He looked at me a little more directly.
“Oh, the building super? He’s home, ain’t he?”
“Sure. Probably. Or gone to the pictures. But where is home? What’s his name?”
“You want something?”
“Yes.” I squeezed a fist in my pocket and tried to keep from yelling. “I want the address of one of the tenants. The tenant I want the address of isn’t in the phone book—at his home. I mean where he lives when he’s not in his office. You know, home.” I took my hands out and made a shape in the air, writing the letters slowly, h o m e.
The old man said: “Which one?” It was so direct that it jarred me.
“Mr. Morningstar.”
“He ain’t home. Still in his office.”
“Are you sure?”
“Sure I’m sure. I don’t notice people much. But he’s old like me and I notice him. He ain’t been down yet.”
I got into the car and said: “Eight.”
He wrestled the doors shut and we ground our way up. He didn’t look at me anymore. When the car stopped and I got out he didn’t speak or look at me again. He just sat there blank-eyed, hunched on the burlap and the wooden stool. As I turned the angle of the corridor he was still sitting there. And the vague expression was back on his face.
At the end of the corridor two doors were alight. They were the only two in sight that were. I stopped outside to light a cigarette and listen, but I didn’t hear any sound of activity. I opened the door marked Entrance and stepped into the narrow office with the small closed typewriter desk. The wooden door was still ajar. I walked along to it and knocked on the wood and said: “Mr. Morningstar.”
No answer. Silence. Not even a sound of breathing. The hairs moved on the back of my neck. I stepped around the door. The ceiling light glowed down on the glass cover of the jeweller’s scales, on the old polished wood around the leather desk top, down the side of the desk, on a squaretoed, elastic-sided black shoe, with a white cotton sock above it.
The shoe was at the wrong angle, pointing to the corner of the ceiling. The rest of the leg was behind the corner of the big safe. I seemed to be wading through mud as I went on into the room.
He lay crumpled on his back. Very lonely, very dead.
The safe door was wide open and keys hung in the lock of the inner compartment. A metal drawer was pulled out. It was empty now. There may have been money in it once.
Nothing else in the room seemed to be different.
The old man’s pockets had been pulled out, but I didn’t touch him except to bend over and put the back of my hand against his livid, violet-colored face. It was like touching a frog’s belly. Blood had oozed from the side of his forehead where he had been hit. But there was no powder smell on the air this time, and the violet color of his skin showed that he had died of a heart stoppage, due to shock and fear, probably. That didn’t make it any less murder.
I left the lights burning, wiped the doorknobs, and walked down the fire stairs to the sixth floor. I read the names on the doors going along, for no reason at all. H. R. Teager Dental Laboratories, L. Pridview, Public Accountant, Dalton and Rees Typewriting Service, Dr. E. J. Blaskowitz, and underneath the name in small letters: Chiropractic Physician.
The elevator came growling up and the old man didn’t look at me. His face was as empty as my brain.
I called the Receiving Hospital from the corner, giving no name.
15
The chessmen, red and white bone, were lined up ready to go and had that sharp, competent and complicated look they always have at the beginning of a game. It was ten o’clock in the evening, I was home at the apartment, I had a pipe in my mouth, a drink at my elbow and nothing on my mind except two murders and the mystery of how Mrs. Elizabeth Bright Murdock had got her Brasher Doubloon back while I still had it in my pocket.
I opened a little paper-bound book of tournament games published in Leipzig, picked out a dashing-looking Queen’s Gambit, moved the white pawn to Queen’s four, and the bell rang at the door.
I stepped around the table and picked the Colt .38 off the drop leaf of the oak desk and went over to the door holding it down beside my right leg.
“Who is it?”
“Breeze.”
I went back to the desk to lay the gun down again before I opened the door. Breeze stood there looking just as big and sloppy as ever, but a little more tired. The young, freshfaced dick named Spangler was with him.
They rode me back into the room without seeming to and Spangler shut the door. His bright young eyes flicked this way and that while Breeze let his older and harder ones stay on my face for a long moment, then he walked around me to the davenport.
“Look around,” he said out of the corner of his mouth.
Spangler left the door and crossed the room to the dinette, looked in there, recrossed and went into the hall. The bathroom door squeaked, his steps went farther along.
Breeze took his hat off and mopped his semi-bald dome. Doors opened and closed distantly. Closets. Spangler came hack.
“Nobody here,” he said.
Breeze nodded and sat down, placing his panama beside him.
Spangler saw the gun lying on the desk. He said: “Mind if I look?”
I said: “Phooey on both of you.”
Spangler walked to the gun and held the muzzle to his nose, sniffing. He broke the magazine out, ejected the shell in the chamber, picked it up and pressed it into the magazine. He laid the magazine on the desk and held the gun so that light went into the open bottom of the breech. Holding it that way he squinted down the barrel.
“A little dust,” he said. “Not much.”
“What did you expect?” I said. “Rubies?”
He ignored me, looked at Breeze and added: “I’d say this gun has not been fired within twenty-four hours. I’m sure of it.”
Breeze nodded and chewed his lip and explored my face with his eyes. Spangler put the gun together neatly and laid it aside and went and sat down. He put a cigarette between his lips and lit it and blew smoke contentedly.
“We know damn well it wasn’t a long .38 anyway,” he said. “One of those things will shoot through a wall. No chance of the slug staying inside a man’s head.”
“Just what are you guys talking about?” I asked.
Breeze said: “The usual thing in our business. Murder. Have a chair. Relax. I thought I heard voices in here. Maybe it was the next apartment.”
“Maybe,” I said.
“You always have a gun lying around on your desk?”
“Except when it’s under my pillow,” I said. “Or under my arm. Or in the drawer of the desk. Or somewhere I can’t just remember where I happened to put it. That help you any?”
“We didn’t come here to get tough, Marlowe.”
“That’s fine,” I said. “So you prowl my apartment and handle my property without asking my permission. What do you do when you get tough—knock me down and kick me in the face?”
“Aw hell,” he said and grinned. I grinned back. We all grinned. Then Breeze said: “Use your phone?”
I pointed to it. He dialed a number and talked to someone named Morrison, saying: “Breeze at—” He looked down at the base of the phone and read the number off— “Anytime now. Marlowe is the name that goes with it. Sure. Five or ten minutes is okay.”
He hung up and went back to the davenport. “I bet you can’t guess why we’re here.”
“I’m always expecting the brothers to drop in,” I said.
“Murder ain’t funny, Marlowe.”
“Who said it was?”
“Don’t you kind of act as if it was?”
“I wasn’t aware of it.”
He looked at Spangler and shrugged. Then he looked at the floor. Then he lifted his eyes slowly, as if they were heavy, and looked at me again. I was sitting down by the chess table now.
“You play a lot of chess?” he asked, looking at the chessmen.
“Not a lot. Once in a while I fool around with a game here, thinking things out.”
“Don’t it take two guys to play chess?”
“I play over tournament games that have been recorded and published. There’s a whole literature about chess. Once in a while I work out problems. They’re not chess, properly speaking. What are we talking about chess for? Drink?”
“Not right now,” Breeze said. “I talked to Randall about you. He remembers you very well, in connection with a case down at the beach.” He moved his feet on the carpet, as if they were very tired. His solid old face was lined and gray with fatigue. “He said you wouldn’t murder anybody. He says you are a nice guy, on the level.”
“That was friendly of him,” I said.
“He says you make good coffee and you get up kind of late in the mornings and are apt to run to a very bright line of chatter and that we should believe anything you say, provided we can check it by five independent witnesses.”
“To hell with him,” I said.
Breeze nodded exactly as though I had said just what he wanted me to say. He wasn’t smiling and he wasn’t tough, just a big solid man working at his job. Spungler had his head back on the chair and his eyes half closed and was watching the smoke from his cigarette.
“Randall says we should look out for you. He says you are not as smart as you think you are, but that you are a guy things happen to, and a guy like that could be a lot more trouble than a very smart guy. That’s what he says, you understand. You look all right to me. I like everything in the clear. That’s why I’m telling you.”
I said it was nice of him.
The phone rang. I looked at Breeze, but he didn’t move, so I reached for it and answered it. It was a girl’s voice. I thought it was vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t place it.
“Is this Mr. Philip Marlowe?”
“Yes.”
“Mr. Marlowe. I’m in trouble, very great trouble. I want to see you very badly. When can I see you?”
I said: “You mean tonight? Who am I talking to?”
“My name is Gladys Crane. I live at the Hotel Normandy on Rampart. When can you—”
“You mean you want me to come over there tonight?” I asked, thinking about the voice, trying to place it.
“I—” The phone clicked and the line was dead. I sat there holding it, frowning at it, looking across it at Breeze. His face was quietly empty of interest.
“Some girl says she’s in trouble,” I said. “Connection broken.” I held the plunger down on the base of the phone waiting for it to ring again. The two cops were completely silent and motionless. Too silent, too motionless.
The bell rang again and I let the plunger up and said: “You want to talk to Breeze, don’t you?”
“Yeah.” It was a man’s voice and it sounded a little surprised.
“Go on, be tricky,” I said, and got up from the chair and went out to the kitchen. I heard Breeze talking very briefly then the sound of the phone being returned to the cradle.
I got a bottle of Four Roses out of the kitchen closet and three glasses. I got ice and ginger ale from the icebox and mixed three highballs and carried them in on a tray and sat the tray down on the cocktail table in front of the davenport where Breeze was sitting. I took two of the glasses, handed one to Spangler, and took the other to my chair.
Spangler held the glass uncertainly, pinching his lower lip between thumb and finger, looking at Breeze to see whether he would accept the drink.
Breeze looked at me very steadily. Then he sighed. Then he picked the glass up and tasted it and sighed again and shook his head sideways with a half smile; the way a man does when you give him a drink and he needs it very badly and it is just right and the first swallow is like a peek into a cleaner, sunnier, brighter world.
“I guess you catch on pretty fast, Mr. Marlowe,” he said, and leaned back on the davenport completely relaxed. “I guess now we can do some business together.”