“I wanted to buy you a drink. I wanted to give you a buck. Here.” I held it out to him. “Thanks for coming up.”
He took the dollar and pocketed it, without a word of thanks. He hung there, smoke trailing from his nose, his eyes tight and mean.
“What I say here goes,” he said.
“It goes as far as you can push it,” I said. “And that couldn’t be very far. You had your drink and you had your graft. Now you can scram out?”
He turned with a swift tight shrug and slipped out of the room noiselessly.
Four minutes passed, then another knock, very light. The tall boy came in grinning. I walked away from him and sat on the bed again.
“You didn’t take to Les, I reckon?”
“Not a great deal. Is he satisfied?”
“I reckon so. You know what captains are. They have to have their cut. Maybe you better call me Les, Mr. Marlowe.”
“So you checked her out.”
“No, that was all a stall. She never checked in at the desk. But I remember the Packard. She gave me a dollar to put it away for her and to look after her stuff until train time. She ate dinner here. A dollar gets you remembered in this town. And there’s been talk about the car bein’ left so long.”
“What was she like to look at?”
“She wore a black and white outfit, mostly white, and a panama hat with a black and white band. She was a neat blonde lady like you said. Later on she took a hack to the station. I put her bags into it for her. They had initials on them but I’m sorry I can’t remember the initials.”
“I’m glad you can’t,” I said. “It would be too good. Have a drink. How old would she be?”
He rinsed the other glass and mixed a civilized drink for himself.
“It’s mighty hard to tell a woman’s age these days,” he said. “I reckon she was about thirty, or a little more or a little less.”
I dug in my coat for the snapshot of Crystal and Lavery on the beach and handed it to him.
He looked at it steadily and held it away from his eyes, then close.
“You won’t have to swear to it in court,” I said.
He nodded. “I wouldn’t want to. These small blondes are so much of a pattern that a change of clothes or light or makeup makes them all alike or all different.” He hesitated, staring at the snapshot.
“What’s worrying you?” I asked.
“I’m thinking about the gent in this snap. He enter into it at all?”
“Go on with that,” I said.
“I think this fellow spoke to her in the lobby, and had dinner with her. A tall good-lookin’ jasper, built like a fast light-heavy. He went in the hack with her too.”
“Quite sure about that?”
He looked at the money on the bed.
“Okay, how much does it cost?” I asked wearily.
He stiffened, laid the snapshot down and drew the two folded bills from his pocket and tossed them on the bed.
“I thank you for the drink,” he said, “and to hell with you.” He started for the door.
“Oh sit down and don’t be so touchy,” I growled.
He sat down and looked at me stiff-eyed.
“And don’t be so damn southern,” I said. “I’ve been knee deep in hotel hops for a lot of years. If I’ve met one who wouldn’t pull a gag, that’s fine. But you can’t expect me to expect to meet one that wouldn’t pull a gag.”
He grinned slowly and nodded quickly. He picked the snapshot up again and looked at me over it.
“This gent takes a solid photo,” he said. “Much more so than the lady. But there was another little item that made me remember him. I got the impression the lady didn’t quite like him walking up to her so openly in the lobby.”
I thought that over and decided it didn’t mean anything much. He might have been late or have missed some earlier appointment. I said:
“There’s a reason for that. Did you notice what jewelry the lady was wearing? Rings, ear-pendants, anything that looked conspicuous or valuable?”
He hadn’t noticed, he said.
“Was her hair long or short, straight or waved or curly, natural blonde or bleached?”
He laughed. “Hell, you can’t tell that last point, Mr. Marlowe. Even when it’s natural they want it lighter. As to the rest, my recollection is it was rather long, like they’re wearing it now and turned in a little at the bottom and rather straight. But I could be wrong.” He looked at the snapshot again. “She has it bound back here. You can’t tell a thing.”
“That’s right,” I said. “And the only reason I asked you was to make sure you didn’t over-observe. The guy that sees too much detail is just as unreliable a witness as the guy that doesn’t see any. He’s nearly always making half of it up. You check just about right, considering the circumstances. Thanks very much.”
I gave him back his two dollars and a five to keep them company. He thanked me, finished his drink and left softly. I finished mine and washed off again and decided I would rather drive home than sleep in that hole. I put my shirt and coat on again and went downstairs with my bag.
The redheaded rat of a captain was the only hop in the lobby. I carried my bag over to the desk and he didn’t move to take it off my hands. The eggheaded clerk separated me from two dollars without even looking at me.
“Two bucks to spend the night in this manhole,” I said, “when for free I could have a nice airy ashcan:”
The clerk yawned, got a delayed reaction, and said brightly: “It gets quite cool here about three in the morning. From then on until eight, or even nine, it’s quite pleasant.”
I wiped the back of my neck and staggered out to the car. Even the seat of the car was hot, at midnight.
I got home about two-forty-five and Hollywood was an icebox. Even Pasadena had felt cooL
14
I dreamed I was far down in the depths of icy green water with a corpse under my arm. The corpse had long blond hair that kept floating around in front of my face. An enormous fish with bulging eyes and a bloated body and scales shining with putrescence swam around leering like an elderly rou�. Just as I was about to burst from lack of air, the corpse came alive under my arm and got away from me and then I was fighting with the fish and the corpse was rolling over and over in the water spinning its long hair.
I woke up with a mouth full of sheet and both hands hooked on the head-frame of the bed and pulling hard. The muscles ached when I let go and lowered them. I got up and walked the room and lit a cigarette, feeling the carpet with bare toes. When I had finished the cigarette, I went back to bed.
It was nine o’clock when I woke up again. The sun was on my face. The room was hot. I showered and shaved and partly dressed and made the morning toast and eggs and coffee in the dinette. While I was finishing up there, was a knock at the apartment door.
I went to open it with my mouth full of toast. It was a lean, serious looking man in a severe gray suit.
“Floyd Greer, lieutenant, Central Detective Bureau,” he said and walked into the room.
He put out a dry hand and I shook it. He sat down on the edge of a chair, the way they do, and turned his hat in his hands and looked at me with the quiet stare they have.
“We got a call from San Bernardino about that business up at Puma Lake. Drowned woman. Seems you were on hand when the body was discovered.”
I nodded and said, “Have some coffee?”
“No thanks. I had breakfast two hours ago.”
I got my coffee and sat down across the room from him.
“They asked us to look you up,” he said. “Give them a line on you.”
“Sure.”
“So we did that. Seems like you have a clean bill of health so far as we are concerned. Kind of coincidence a man in your line would be around when the body was found.”
“I’m like that,” I said. “Lucky.”
“So I just thought I’d drop around and say howdy.”
“That’s fine. Glad to know you, lieutenant.”
“Kind of coincidence,” he said again, nodding. “You up there on business, so to speak?”
“If I was,” I said, “my business had nothing to do with the girl who was drowned, so far as I know.”
“But you couldn’t be sure?”
“Until you’ve finished with a case, you can’t ever be quite sure what its ramifications are, can you?”
“That’s right.” He circled his hat brim through his fingers again, like a bashful cowboy. There was nothing bashful about his eyes. “I’d like to feel sure that if these ramifications you speak of happened to take in this drowned woman’s affairs, you would put us wise.”
“I hope you can rely on that,” I said.
He bulged his lower lip with his tongue. “We’d like a little more than a hope. At the present time you don’t care to say?”
“At the present time I don’t know anything that Patton doesn’t know.”
“Who’s he?”
“The constable up at Puma Point.”
The lean serious man smiled tolerantly. He cracked a knuckle and after a pause said: “The San Berdoo D. A. will likely want to talk to you—before the inquest. But that won’t be very soon. Right now they’re trying to get a set of prints. We lent them a technical man.”
“That will be tough. The body’s pretty far gone.”
“It’s done all the time,” he said. “They worked out the system back in New York where they’re all the time pulling in floaters. They cut patches of skin off the fingers and harden them in a tanning solution and make stamps. It works well enough as a rule.”
“You think this woman had a record of some kind?”
“Why, we always take prints of a corpse,” he said. “You ought to know that.”
I said: “I didn’t know the lady. If you thought I did and that was why I was up there, there’s nothing to it.”
“But you wouldn’t care to say just why you were up there,” he persisted.
“So you think I’m lying to you,” I said.
He spun his hat on a bony forefinger. “You got me wrong, Mr. Marlowe. We don’t think anything at all. What we do is investigate and find out. This stuff is just routine. You ought to know that. You been around long enough.” He stood up and put his hat on. “You might let me know if you have to leave town. I’d be obliged.”