I laughed in his face.
“You ain’t getting no place with that breezy manner, bub. What’s your connection?”
I got my wallet out and handed him one of my business cards. He read it thoughtfully and tapped the edge against his porcelain crown.
“He coulda went somewhere without telling me,” he mused.
“Your grammar,” I said, “is almost as loose as your toupee.”
“You lay off my toupee, if you know what’s good for you,” he shouted.
“I wasn’t going to eat it,” I said. “I’m not that hungry.” He took a step towards me, and dropped his right shoulder. A scowl of fury dropped his lip almost as far.
“Don’t hit me. I’m insured,” I told him.
“Oh hell. Just another screwball.” He shrugged and put his lip back up on his face. “What’s the lay?”
“I have to find this Orrin P. Quest,” I said.
“Why?”
I didn’t answer that.
After a moment he said: “O.K. I’m a careful guy myself. That’s why I’m movin’ out.”
“Maybe you don’t like the reefer smoke.”
“That,” he said emptily, “and other things. That’s why Quest left. Respectable type. Like me. I think a couple of hard boys threw a scare into him.”
“I see,” I said. “That would be why he left no forwarding address. And why did they throw a scare into him?”
“You just mentioned reefer smoke, didn’t you? Wouldn’t he be the type to go to headquarters about that?”
“In Bay City?” I asked. “Why would he bother? Well, thanks a lot, Mr. Hicks. Going far?”
“Not far,” he said. “No. Not very far. Just far enough.”
“What’s your racket?” I asked him.
“Racket?” He looked hurt.
“Sure. What do you shake them for? How do you make your dibs?”
“You got me wrong, brother. I’m a retired optometrist.”
“That why you have the .45 gun in there?” I pointed to the suitcase.
“Nothing to get cute about,” he said sourly. “It’s been in the family for years.” He looked down at the card again. “Private investigator, huh?” he said thoughtfully. “What kind of work do you do mostly?”
“Anything that’s reasonably honest,” I said.
He nodded. “Reasonably is a word you could stretch. So is honest.”
I gave him a shady leer. “You’re so right,” I agreed. “Let’s get together some quiet afternoon and stretch them.” I reached out and slipped the card from between his fingers and dropped it into my pocket. “Thanks for the time,” I said.
I went out and closed the door, then stood against it listening. I don’t know what I expected to hear. Whatever it was I didn’t hear it. I had a feeling he was standing exactly where I had left him and looking at the spot where I had made my exit. I made noise going along the hall and stood at the head of the stairs.
A car drove away from in front of the house. Somewhere a door closed. I went quietly back to Room 215 and used the passkey to enter. I closed and locked its door silently, and waited just inside.
5
Not more than two minutes passed before Mr. George W. Hicks was on his way. He came out so quietly that I wouldn’t have heard him if I hadn’t been listening for precisely that kind of movement. I heard the slight metallic sound of the doorknob turning. Then slow steps. Then very gently the door was closed. The steps moved off. The faint distant creak of the stairs. Then nothing. I waited for the sound of the front door. It didn’t come. I opened the door of 215 and moved along the hall to the stairhead again. Below there was the careful sound of a door being tried. I looked down to see Hicks going into the manager’s apartment. The door closed behind him. I waited for the sound of voices. No voices.
I shrugged and went back to 215.
The room showed signs of occupancy. There was a small radio on a night table, an unmade bed with shoes under it, and an old bathrobe hung over the cracked, pull-down green shade to keep the glare out.
I looked at all this as if it meant something, then stepped back into the hall and relocked the door. Then I made another pilgrimage into Room 214. Its door was now unlocked. I searched the room with care and patience and found nothing that connected it in any way with Orrin P. Quest. I didn’t expect to. There was no reason why I should. But you always have to look.
I went downstairs, listened outside the manager’s door, heard nothing, went in and crossed to put the keys on the desk. Lester B. Clausen lay on his side on the couch with his face to the wall, dead to the world. I went through the desk, found an old account book, that seemed to be concerned with rent taken in and expenses paid out and nothing else. I looked at the register again. It wasn’t up to date but the party on the couch seemed enough explanation for that. Orrin P. Quest had moved away. Somebody had taken over his room. Somebody else had the room registered to Hicks. The little man counting money in the kitchen went nicely with the neighborhood. The fact that he carried a gun and a knife was a social eccentricity that would cause no comment at all on Idaho Street.
I reached the small Bay City telephone book off the hook beside the desk. I didn’t think it would be much of a job to sift out the party that went by the name of “Doc” or “Vince” and the phone number one-three-five-seven-two. First of all I leafed back through the register. Something which I ought to have done first. The page with Orrin Quest’s registration had been torn out. A careful man, Mr. George W. Hicks. Very careful.
I closed the register, glanced over at Lester B. Clausen again, wrinkled my nose at the stale air and the sickly sweetish smell of gin and of something else, and started back to the entrance door. As I reached it, something for the first time penetrated my mind. A drunk like Clausen ought to be snoring very loudly. He ought to be snoring his head off with a nice assortment of checks and gurgles and snorts. He wasn’t making any sound at all. A brown army blanket was pulled up around his shoulders and the lower part of his head. He looked very comfortable, very calm. I stood over him and looked down. Something which was not an accidental fold held the army blanket away from the back of his neck. I moved it. A square yellow wooden handle was attached to the back of Lester B. Clausen’s neck. On the side of the yellow handle were printed the words “Compliments of the Crumser Hardware Company.” The position of the handle was just below the occipital bulge.
It was the handle of an ice pick… .
I did a nice quiet thirty-five getting away from the neighborhood. On the edge of the city, a frog’s jump from the line, I shut myself in an outdoor telephone booth and called the Police Department.
“Bay City Police. Moot talking,” a furry voice said.
I said: “Number 449 Idaho Street. In the apartment of the manager. His name’s Clausen.”
“Yeah?” The voice said. “What do we do?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s a bit of a puzzle to me. But the man’s name is Lester B. Clausen. Got that?”
“What makes it important?” the furry voice said without suspicion.
“The coroner will want to know,” I said, and hung up.
6
I drove back to Hollywood and locked myself in the office with the Bay City telephone book. It took me a quarter-hour to find out that the party who went with the telephone number one-three-five-seven-two in Bay City was a Dr. Vincent Lagardie, who called himself a neurologist, had his home and offices on Wyoming Street, which according to my map was not quite in the best residential neighborhood and not quite out of it. I locked the Bay City telephone book up in my desk and went down to the corner drugstore for a sandwich and a cup of coffee and used a pay booth to call Dr. Vincent Lagardie. A woman answered and I had some trouble getting through to Dr. Lagardie himself. When I did his voice was impatient. He was very busy, in the middle of an examination he said. I never knew a doctor who wasn’t. Did he know Lester B. Clausen? He never heard of him. What was the purpose of my inquiry?
“Mr. Clausen tried to telephone you this morning,” I said. “He was too drunk to talk properly.”
“But I don’t know Mr. Clausen,” the doctor’s cool voice answered. He didn’t seem to be in quite such a hurry now.
“Well that’s all right then,” I said. “Just wanted to make sure. Somebody stuck an ice pick into the back of his neck.”
There was a quiet pause. Dr. Lagardie’s voice was now almost unctuously polite. “Has this been reported to the police?”
“Naturally,” I said. “But it shouldn’t bother you—unless of course it was your ice pick.”
He passed that one up. “And who is this speaking?” he inquired suavely.
“The name is Hicks,” I said. “George W. Hicks. I just moved out of there. I don’t want to get mixed up with that sort of thing. I just figured when Clausen tried to call you—this was before he was dead you understand—that you might be interested.”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Hicks,” Dr. Lagardie’s voice said, “but I don’t know Mr. Clausen. I have never heard of Mr. Clausen or had any contact with him whatsoever. And I have an excellent memory for names.”
“Well, that’s fine,” I said. “And you won’t meet him now. But somebody may want to know why he tried to telephone you—unless I forget to pass the information along.”
There was a dead pause. Dr. Lagardie said: “I can’t think of any comment to make on that.”
I said: “Neither can I. I may call you again. Don’t get me wrong, Dr. Lagardie. This isn’t any kind of a shake. I’m just a mixed-up little man who needs a friend. I kind of felt that a doctor—like a clergyman—”
“I’m at your entire disposal,” Dr. Lagardie said. “Please feel free to consult me.”
“Thank you, doctor,” I said fervently. “Thank you very very much.”
I hung up. If Dr. Vincent Lagardie was on the level, he would now telephone the Bay City Police Department and tell them the story. If he didn’t telephone the police, he wasn’t on the level. Which might or might not be useful to know.
7
The phone on my desk rang at four o’clock sharp. “Did you find Orrin yet, Mr. Marlowe?”
“Not yet. Where are you?”
“Why I’m in the drugstore next to—”
“Come on up and stop acting like Mata Hari,” I said.
“Aren’t you ever polite to anybody?” she snapped.
I hung up and fed myself a slug of Old Forester to brace my nerves for the interview. As I was inhaling it I heard her steps tripping along the corridor. I moved across and opened the door.
“Come in this way and miss the crowd,” I said.
She seated herself demurely and waited.
“All I could find out,” I told her, “is that the dump on Idaho Street is peddling reefers. That’s marijuana cigarettes.”
“Why, how disgusting,” she said.
“We have to take the bad with the good in this life,” I said. “Orrin must have got wise and threatened to report it to the police.”
“You mean,” she said in her little-girl manner, “that they might hurt him for doing that?”
“Well, most likely they’d just throw a scare into him first.”
“Oh, they couldn’t scare Orrin, Mr. Marlowe,” she said decisively. “He just gets mean when people try to run him.”
“Yeah,” I said. “But we’re not talking about the same things. You can scare anybody—with the right technique.”
She set her mouth stubbornly. “No, Mr. Marlowe. They couldn’t scare Orrin.”
“Okay,” I said. “So they didn’t scare him. Say they just cut off one of his legs and beat him over the head with it. What would he do then—write to the Better Business Bureau?”
“You’re making fun of me,” she said politely. Her voice was as cool as boarding-house soup. “Is that all you did all day? Just find Orrin had moved and it was a bad neighborhood? Why I found that out for myself, Mr. Marlowe. I thought you being a detective and all—” She trailed off, leaving the rest of it in the air.
“I did a little more than that,” I said. “I gave the landlord a little gin and went through the register and talked to a man named Hicks. George W. Hicks. He wears a toupee. I guess maybe you didn’t meet him. He has, or had, Orrin’s room. So I thought maybe—” It was my turn to do a little trailing in the air.
She fixed me with her pale blue eyes enlarged by the glasses. Her mouth was small and firm and tight, her hands clasped on the desk in front of her over her large square bag, her whole body stiff and erect and formal and disapproving.
“I paid you twenty dollars, Mr. Marlowe,” she said coldly. “I understood that was in payment of a day’s work. It doesn’t seem to me that you’ve done a day’s work.”
“No,” I said. “That’s true. But the day isn’t over yet. And don’t bother about the twenty bucks. You can have it back if you like. I didn’t even bruise it.”
I opened the desk drawer and got out her money. I pushed it across the desk. She looked at it but didn’t touch it. Her eyes came up slowly to meet mine.
“I didn’t mean it like that. I know you’re doing the best you can, Mr. Marlowe.”
“With the facts I have.”
“But I’ve told you all I know.”
“I don’t think so,” I said.
“Well I’m sure I can’t help what you think,” she said tartly. “After all, if I knew what I wanted to know already, I wouldn’t have come here and asked you to find it out, would I?”
“I’m not saying you know all you want to know,” I answered. “The point is I don’t know all I want to know in order to do a job for you. And what you tell me doesn’t add up.”
“What doesn’t add up? I’ve told you the truth. I’m Orrin’s sister. I guess I know what kind of person he is.”
“How long did he work for Cal-Western?”
“I’ve told you that. He came out to California just about a year ago. He got work right away because he practically had the job before he left.”
“He wrote home how often? Before he stopped writing.”
“Every week. Sometimes oftener. He’d take turns writing to mother and me. Of course the letters were for both of us.”
“About what?”