“He didn’t kill me, probably he didn’t kill anybody,” I said. “Quest told his sister—according to her—that he was working for Dr. Lagardie, but that some gangsters were after him.”
“This Lagardie,” French said, prodding at his blotter with a pen point, “what do you make of him?”
“He used to practise in Cleveland. Downtown in a large way. He must have had his reasons for hiding out in Bay City.”
“Cleveland, huh?” French drawled and looked at a corner of the ceiling. Beifus looked down at his papers. Maglashan said:
“Probably an abortionist. I’ve had my eye on him for some time.”
“Which eye?” Beifus asked him mildly.
Maglashan flushed.
French said: “Probably the one he didn’t have on Idaho Street.”
Maglashan stood up violently. “You boys think you’re so goddam smart it might interest you to know that we’re just a small town police force. We got to double in brass once in a while. Just the same I like that reefer angle. It might cut down my work considerable. I’m looking into it right now.”
He marched solidly to the door and left. French looked after him. Beifus did the same. When the door closed they looked at each other.
“I betcha they pull that raid again tonight,” Beifus said.
French nodded.
Beifus said: “In a flat over a laundry. They’ll go down on the beach and pull in three or four vagrants and stash them in the flat and then they’ll line them up for the camera boys after they pull the raid.”
French said: “You’re talking too much, Fred.”
Beifus grinned and was silent. French said to me: “If you were guessing, what would you guess they were looking for in that room at the Van Nuys?”
“A claim check for a suitcase full of weed.”
“Not bad,” French said. “And still guessing where would it have been?”
“I thought about that. When I talked to Hicks down at Bay City he wasn’t wearing his muff. A man doesn’t around the house. But he was wearing it on the bed at the Van Nuys. Maybe he didn’t put it on himself.”
French said: “So?”
I said, “Wouldn’t be a bad place to stash a claim check.”
French said: “You could pin it down with a piece of scotch tape. Quite an idea.”
There was a silence. The orange queen went back to her typing. I looked at my nails. They weren’t as clean as they might be. After the pause French said slowly:
“Don’t think for a minute you’re in the clear, Marlowe. Still guessing, how come Dr. Lagardie to mention Cleveland to you?”
“I took the trouble to look him up. A doctor can’t change his name if he wants to go on practicing. The ice pick made you think of Weepy Moyer. Weepy Moyer operated in Cleveland. Sunny Moe Stein operated in Cleveland. It’s true the icepick technique was different, but it was an ice pick. You said yourself the boys might have learned. And always with these gangs there’s a doctor somewhere in the background.”
“Pretty wild,” French said. “Pretty loose connection.”
“Would I do myself any good if I tightened it up?”
“Can you?”
“I can try.”
French sighed. “The little Quest girl is okay,” he said. “I talked to her mother back in Kansas. She really did come out here to look for her brother. And she really did hire you to do it. She gives you a good write-up. Up to a point. She really did suspect her brother was mixed up in something wrong. You make any money on the deal?”
“Not much,” I said. “I gave her back the fee. She didn’t have much.”
“That way you don’t have to pay income tax on it,” Beifus said.
French said, “Let’s break this off. The next move is up to the D.A. And if I know Endicott, it will be a week from Tuesday before he decides how to play it.” He made a gesture towards the door.
I stood up. “Will it be all right if I don’t leave town?” I asked.
They didn’t bother to answer that one.
I just stood there and looked at them. The icepick wound between my shouders had a dry sting, and the flesh around the place was stiff. The side of my face and mouth smarted where Maglashan had sideswiped me with his well-used pigskin glove. I was in the deep water. It was dark and unclear and the taste of the salt was in my mouth.
They just sat there and looked back at me. The orange queen was clacking her typewriter. Cop talk was no more treat to her than legs to a dance director. They had the calm weathered faces of healthy men in hard condition. They had the eyes they always have, cloudy and gray like freezing water. The firm set mouth, the hard little wrinkles at the corners of the eyes, the hard hollow meaningless stare, not quite cruel and a thousand miles from kind. The dull ready-made clothes, worn without style, with a sort of contempt; the look of men who are poor and yet proud of their power, watching always for ways to make it felt, to shove it into you and twist it and grin and watch you squirm, ruthless without malice, cruel and yet not always unkind. What would you expect them to be? Civilization had no meaning for them. All they saw of it was the failures, the dirt, the dregs, the aberrations and the disgust.
“What you standing there for?” Beifus asked sharply. “You want us to give you a great big spitty kiss? No snappy comeback, huh? Too bad.” His voice fell away to a dull drone. He frowned and reached a pencil off the desk. With a quick motion of his fingers he snapped it in half and held the two halves out on his palm.
“We’re giving you that much break,” he said thinly, the smile all gone. “Go on out and square things up. What the hell you think we’re turning you loose for? Maglashan bought you a rain check. Use it.”
I put my hand up and rubbed my lip. My mouth had too many teeth in it.
Beifus lowered his eyes to the table, picked up a paper and began to read it. Christy French swung around in his chair and put his feet on the desk and stared out of the open window at the parking lot. The orange queen stopped typing. The room was suddenly full of heavy silence, like a fallen cake.
I went on out, parting the silence as if I was pushing ny way through water.
25
The office was empty again. No leggy brunettes, no little girls with slanted glasses, no neat dark men with gangster’s eyes.
I sat down at the desk and watched the light fade. The going-home sounds had died away. Outside the neon signs began to glare at one another across the boulevard. There was something to be done, but I didn’t know what. Whatever it was it would be useless. I tidied up my desk, listening to the scrape of a bucket on the tiling of the corridor. I put my papers away in the drawer, straightened the pen stand, got out a duster and wiped off the glass and then the telephone. It was dark and sleek in the fading light. It wouldn’t ring tonight. Nobody would call me again. Not now, not this time. Perhaps not ever.
I put the duster away folded with the dust in it, leaned back and just sat, not smoking, not even thinking. I was a blank man. I had no face, no meaning, no personality, hardly a name. I didn’t want to eat. I didn’t even want a drink. I was the page from yesterday’s calendar crumpled at the bottom of the waste basket.
I pulled the phone towards me and dialed Mavis Weld’s number. It rang and rang and rang. Nine times. That’s a lot of ringing, Marlowe. I guess there’s nobody home. Nobody home to you. I hung up. Who would you like to call now? You got a friend somewhere that might like to hear your voice? No. Nobody.
Let the telephone ring, please. Let there be somebody to call up and plug me into the human race again. Even a cop. Even a Maglashan. Nobody has to like me. I just want to get off this frozen star.
The telephone rang.
“Amigo,” her voice said. “There is trouble. Bad trouble. She wants to see you. She likes you. She thinks you are an honest man.”
“Where?” I asked. It wasn’t really a question, just a sound I made. I sucked on a cold pipe and leaned my head on my hand, brooding at the telephone. It was a voice to talk to anyway.
“You will come?”
“I’d sit up with a sick parrot tonight. Where do I go?”
“I will come for you. I will be before your building in fifteen minutes. It is not easy to get where we go.”
“How is it coming back,” I asked, “or don’t we care?”
But she had already hung up.
Down at the drugstore lunch counter I had time to inhale two cups of coffee and a melted-cheese sandwich with two slivers of ersatz bacon imbedded in it, like dead fish in the silt at the bottom of a drained pool.
I was crazy. I liked it.
26
It was a black Mercury convertible with a light top. The top was up. When I leaned in at the door Dolores Gonzales slid over towards me along the leather seat.
“You drive please, amigo. I do not really ever like to drive.”
The light from the drugstore caught her face. She had changed her clothes again, but it was still all black, save for a flame-colored shirt. Slacks and a kind of loose coat like a man’s leisure jacket.
I leaned on the door of the car. “Why didn’t she call me?”
“She couldn’t. She did not have the number and she had very little time.”
“Why?”
“It seemed to be while someone was out of the room for just a moment.”
“And where is this place she called from?”
“I do not know the name of the street. But I can find the house. That is why I come. Please get into the car and let us hurry.”
“Maybe,” I said. “And again maybe I am not getting into the car. Old age and arthritis have made me cautious.”
“Always the wisecrack,” she said. “It is a very strange man.”
“Always the wisecrack where possible,” I said, “and it is a very ordinary guy with only one head—which has been rather harshly used at times. The times usually started out like this.”
“Will you make love to me tonight?” she asked softly.
“That again is an open question. Probably not.”
“You would not waste your time. I am not one of these synthetic blondes with a skin you could strike matches on. These ex-laundresses with large bony hands and sharp knees and unsuccessful breasts.”
“Just for half an hour,” I said, “let’s leave the sex to the side. It’s great stuff, like chocolate sundaes. But there comes a time you would rather cut your throat. I guess maybe I’d better cut mine.”
I went around the car and slid under the wheel and started the motor.
“We go west,” she said, “through the Beverly Hills and then farther on.”
I let the clutch in and drifted around the corner to go south to Sunset. Dolores got one of her long brown cigarettes out.
“Did you bring a gun?” she asked.
“No. What would I want a gun for?” The inside of my left arm pressed against the Luger in the shoulder harness.
“It is better not perhaps.” She fitted the cigarette into the little golden tweezer thing and lit it with the golden lighter. The light flaring in her face seemed to be swallowed up by her depthless black eyes.
I turned west on Sunset and swallowed myself up in three lanes of race-track drivers who were pushing their mounts hard to get nowhere and do nothing.
“What kind of trouble is Miss Weld in?”
“I do not know. She just said that it was trouble and she was much afraid and she needed you.”
“You ought to be able to think up a better story than that.”
She didn’t answer. I stopped for a traffic signal and turned to look at her. She was crying softly in the dark.
“I would not hurt a hair of Mavis Weld’s head,” she said. “I do not quite expect that you would believe me.”
“On the other hand,” I said, “maybe the fact that you don’t have a story helps.”
She started to slide along the seat towards me.
“Keep to your own side of the car,” I said. “I’ve got to drive this heap.”
“You do not want my head on your shoulder?”
“Not in this traffic.”
I stopped at Fairfax with the green light to let a man make a left turn. Horns blew violently behind. When I started again the car that had been right behind swung out and pulled level and a fat guy in a sweatshirt yelled:
“Aw go get yourself a hammock!”
He went on, cutting in so hard that I had to brake.
“I used to like this town,” I said, just to be saying something and not to be thinking too hard. “A long time ago. There were trees along Wilshire Boulevard. Beverly Hills was a country town. Westwood was bare hills and lots offering at eleven hundred dollars and no takers. Hollywood was a bunch of frame houses on the interurban line. Los Angeles was just a big dry sunny place with ugly homes and no style, but goodhearted and peaceful. It had the climate they just yap about now. People used to sleep out on porches. Little groups who thought they were intellectual. used to call it the Athens of America. It wasn’t that, but it wasn’t a neon-lighted slum either.”
We crossed La Cienega and went into the curve of the Strip. The Dancers was a blaze of light. The terrace was packed. The parking lot was like ants on a piece of overripe fruit.
“Now we get characters like this Steelgrave owning restaurants. We get guys like that fat boy that bawled me out back there. We’ve got the big money, the sharp shooters, the percentage workers, the fast-dollar boys, the hoodlums out of New York and Chicago and Detroit—and Cleveland. We’ve got the flash restaurants and night clubs they run, and the hotels and apartment houses they own, and the grifters and con men and female bandits that live in them. The luxury trades, the pansy decorators, the lesbian dress designers, the riffraff of a big hard-boiled city with no more personality than a paper cup. Out in the fancy suburbs dear old Dad is reading the sports page in front of a picture window, with his shoes off, thinking he is high class because he has a three-car garage. Mom is in front of her princess dresser trying to paint the suitcases out from under her eyes. And Junior is clamped onto the telephone calling up a succession of high school girls that talk pigeon English and carry contraceptives in their make-up kit.”
“It is the same in all big cities, amigo.”