“Tell him to wear a clean shirt,” I said. “And lend you one.”
“My, my,” the little man said chidingly. “How tough we get how quick once we get that badge pinned on.”
He went soffly past me and down the wooden steps from the back porch. His footsteps tapped to the street sand faded. They sounded very much like Orfamay’s heels clicking along the corridor in my office building. And for some reason I had that empty feeling of having miscounted the trumps. No reason for it at all. Maybe it was the steely quality about the little man. No whimper, no bluster, just the smile, the whistling between the teeth, the light voice and the unforgetting eyes.
I went over and picked up the knife. The blade was long and round and thin, like a rat-tailed file that has been ground smooth. The handle and guard were lightweight plastic and seemed all one piece. I held the knife by the handle and gave it a quick flip at the table. The blade came loose and quivered in the wood.
I took a deep breath and slid the handle down over the end again and worked the blade loose from the table. A curious knife, with design and purpose in it, and neither of them agreeable.
I opened the door beyond the kitchen and went through it with the gun and knife in one hand.
It was a wall-bed living room, with the wall bed down and rumpled. There was an overstuffed chair with a hole burnt in the arm. A high oak desk with tilted doors like old-fashioned cellar doors stood against the wall by the front window. Near this there was a studio couch and on the studio couch lay a man. His feet hung over the end of the couch in knobby gray socks. His head had missed the pillow by two feet. It was nothing much to miss from the color of the slip on it. The upper part of him was contained in a colorless shirt and a threadbare gray coatsweater. His mouth was open and his face was shining with sweat and he breathed like an old Ford with a leaky head gasket. On a table beside him was a plate full of cigarette stubs, some of which had a homemade look. On the floor a near full gin bottle and a cup that seemed to have contained coffee but not at all recently. The room was full mostly of gin and bad air, but there was also a reminiscence of marijuana smoke.
I opened a window and leaned my forehead against the screen to get a little cleaner air into my lungs and looked out into the street. Two kids were wheeling bicycles along the lumberyard fence, stopping from time to time to study the examples of rest-room art on the boarding. Nothing else moved in the neighborhood. Not even a dog. Down at the corner was dust in the air as though a car had passed that way.
I went over to the desk. Inside it was the house register, so I leafed back until I came to the name “Orrin P. Quest,” written in a sharp meticulous handwriting, and the number 214 added in pencil by another hand that was by no means sharp or meticulous, I followed on through to the end of the register but found no new registration for Room 214. A party named G. W. Hicks had Room 215. I shut the register in the desk and crossed to the couch. The man stopped his snoring and bubbling and threw his right arm across his body as if he thought he was making a speech. I leaned down and gripped his nose tight between my first and second fingers and stuffed a handful of his sweater into his mouth. He stopped snoring and jerked this eyes open. They were glazed and bloodshot. He struggled against my hand. When I was sure he was fully awake I let go of him, picked the bottle full of gin off the floor and poured some into a glass that lay on its side near the bottle. I showed the glass to the man.
His hand came out to it with the beautiful anxiety of a mother welcoming a lost child.
I moved it out of his reach and said: “You the manager?”
He licked his lips stickily and said: “Gr-r-r-r.”
He made a grab for the glass. I put it on the table in front of him. He grasped it carefully in both hands and poured the gin into his face. Then he laughed heartily and threw the glass at me. I managed to catch it and up-end it on the table again. The man looked me over with a studied but unsuccessful attempt at sternness.
“What gives?” he croaked in an annoyed tone.
“Manager?”
He nodded and almost fell off the couch. “Must be I’m drunky,” he said. “Kind of a bit of a little bit drunky.”
“You’re not bad,” I said. “You’re still breathing.”
He put his feet on the ground and pushed himself upright. He cackled with sudden amusement, took three uneven steps, went down on his hands and knees and tried to bite the leg of a chair.
I pulled him up on his feet again, set him down in the overstuffed chair with the burned arm and poured him another slug of his medicine. He drank it, shuddered violently and all at once his eyes seemed to get sane and cunning. Drunks of his type have a certain balanced moment of reality. You never know when it will come or how long it will last.
“Who the hell are you?” he growled.
“I’m looking for a man named Orrin P. Quest.”
“Huh?”
I said it again. He smeared his face with his hands and said tersely: “Moved away.”
“Moved away when?”
He waved his hand, almost fell out of his chair and waved it again the other way to restore his balance. “Gimme a drink,” he said.
I poured another slug of the gin and held it out of his reach.
“Gimme,” the man said urgently. “I’m not happy.”
“All I want is the present address of Orrin P. Quest.”
“Just think of that,” he said wittily and made a loose pass at the glass I was holding.
I put the glass down on the floor and got one of my business cards out for him. “This might help you to concentrate,” I told him.
He peered at the card closely, sneered, bent it in half and bent it again. He held it on the flat of his hand, spit on it, and tossed it over his shoulder.
I handed him the glass of gin. He drank it to my health, nodded solemnly, and threw the glass over his shoulder too. It rolled along the floor and thumped the baseboard. The man stood up with surprising ease, jerked a thumb towards the ceiling, doubled the fingers of his hand under it and made a sharp noise with his tongue and teeth.
“Beat it,” he said. “I got friends.” He looked at the telephone on the wall and back at me with cunning. “A couple of boys to take care of you,” he sneered. I said nothing. “Don’t believe me, huh?” he snarled, suddenly angry. I shook my head.
He started for the telephone, clawed the receiver off the hook, and dialed the five digits of a number. I watched him. One-three-five-seven-two.
That took all he had for the time being. He let the receiver fall and bang against the wall and he sat down on the floor beside it. He put it to his ear and growled at the wall: “Lemme talk to the Doc.” I listened silently.
“Vince! The Doc!” he shouted angrily. He shook the receiver and threw it away from him. He put his hands down on the floor and started to crawl in a circle. When he saw me he looked surprised and annoyed. He got shakily to his feet again and held his hand out. “Gimme a drink.”
I retrieved the fallen glass and milked the gin bottle into it. He accepted it with the dignity of an intoxicated dowager, drank it down with an airy flourish, walked calmly over to the couch and lay down, putting the glass under his head for a pillow. He went to sleep instantly.
I put the telephone receiver back on its hook, glanced out in the kitchen again, felt the man on the couch over and dug some keys out of his pocket. One of them was a passkey. The door to the hallway had a spring lock and I fixed it so that I could come in again and started up the stairs. I paused on the way to write “Doc—Vince, 13572” on an envelope. Maybe it was a clue.
The house was quite silent as I went on up.
4
The manager’s much filed passkey turned the lock of Room 214 without noise. I pushed the door open. The room was not empty. A chunky, strongly built man was bending over a suitcase on the bed, with his back to the door. Shirts and socks and underwear were laid out on the bed cover, and he was packing them leisurely and carefully, whistling between his teeth in a low monotone.
He stiffened as the door hinge creaked. His hand moved fast for the pillow on the bed.
“I beg your pardon,” I said. “The manager told me this room was vacant.”
He was as bald as a grapefruit. He wore dark gray flannel slacks and transparent plastic suspenders over a blue shirt. His hands came up from the pillow, went to his head, and down again. He turned and he had hair.
It looked as natural as hair ever looked, smooth, brown, not parted. He glared at me from under it.
“You can always try knocking,” he said.
He had a thick voice and a broad careful face that had been around.
“Why would I? If the manager said the room was empty?”
He nodded, satisfied. The glare went out of his eyes.
I came further into the room without invitation. An open love-pulp magazine lay face down on the bed near the suitcase. A cigar smoked in a green glass ash tray. The room was careful and orderly, and, for that house, clean.
“He must have thought you had already moved out,” I said, trying to look like a well-meaning party with some talent for the truth.
“Have it in half an hour,” the man said.
“O.K. if I look around?”
He smiled mirthlessly. “Ain’t been in town long, have you?”
“Why?”
“New around here, ain’t you?”
“Why?”
“Like the house and the neighborhood?”
“Not much,” I said. “The room looks all right.”
He grinned, showing a porcelain jacket crown that was too white for his other teeth. “How long you been lookng?”
“Just started,” I said. “Why all the questions?”
“You make me laugh,” the man said, not laughing. “You don’t look at rooms in this town. You grab them sight unseen. This burg’s so jam-packed even now that I could get ten bucks just for telling there’s a vacancy here.”
“That’s too bad,” I said. “A man named Orrin P. Quest told me about the room. So there’s one sawbuck you don’t get to spend.”
“That so?” Not a flicker of an eye. Not a movement of a muscle. I might as well have been talking to a turtle.
“Don’t get tough with me,” the man said. “I’m a bad man to get tough with.”
He picked his cigar out of the green glass ash tray and blew a little smoke. Through it he gave me the cold gray eye. I got a cigarette out and scratched my chin with it.
“What happens to people that get tough with you?” I asked him. “You make them hold your toupee?”
“You lay off my toupee,” he said savagely.
“So sorry,” I said.
“There’s a ‘No Vacancy’ sign on the house,” the man said. “So what makes you come here and find one?”
“You didn’t catch the name,” I said. “Orrin P. Quest.” I spelled it for him. Even that didn’t make him happy. There was a dead-air pause.
He turned abruptly and put a pile of handkerchiefs into his suitcase. I moved a little closer to him. When he turned back there was what might have been a watchful look on his face. But it had been a watchful face to start with.
“Friend of yours?” he asked casually.
“We grew up together,” I said.
“Quiet sort of guy,” the man said easily. “I used to pass the time of day with him. Works for Cal-Western, don’t he?”
“He did,” I said.
“Oh. He quit?”
“Let out.”
We went on staring at each other. It didn’t get either of us anywhere. We both had done too much of it in our lives to expect miracles.
The man put the cigar back in his face and sat down on the side of the bed beside the open suitcase. Glancing into it I saw the square butt of an automatic peeping out from under a pair of badly folded shorts.
“This Quest party’s been out of here ten days,” the man said thoughtfully. “So he still thinks the room is vacant, huh?”
“According to the register it is vacant,” I said.
He made a contemptuous noise. “That rummy downstairs probably ain’t looked at the register in a month. Say—wait a minute.” His eyes sharpened and his hand wandered idly over the open suitcase and gave an idle pat to something that was close to the gun. When the hand moved away, the gun was no longer visible.
“I’ve been kind of dreamy all morning or I’d have wised up,” he said. “You’re a dick.”
“All right. Say I’m a dick.”
“What’s the beef?”
“No beef at all. I just wondered why you had the room.”
“I moved from 215 across the hail. This here is a better room. That’s all. Simple. Satisfied?”
“Perfectly,” I said, watching the hand that could be near the gun if it wanted to.
“What kind of dick? City? Let’s see the buzzer.”
I didn’t say anything.
“I don’t believe you got no buzzer.”
“If I showed it to you, you’re the type of guy would say it was counterfeit. So you’re Hicks.”
He looked surprised.
“George W. Hicks,” I said. “It’s in the register. Room 215. You just got through telling me you moved from 215.” I glanced around the room. “If you had a blackboard here, I’d write it out for you.”
“Strictly speaking, we don’t have to get into no snarling match,” he said. “Sure I’m Hicks. Pleased to meetcha. What’s yours?”
He held his hand out. I shook hands with him, but not as if I had been longing for the moment to arrive.
“My name’s Marlowe,” I said. “Philip Marlowe.”
“You know something,” Hicks said politely, “you’re a Goddamn liar.”