“Sorry, Doc. I must have just let fly without seeing who it was.”
“It’s all right, nothing broken,” Verringer said, waving him away. “Get the car up here, Earl. And don’t forget the key for the padlock down below.”
“Car up here, sure. Right away. Key for the padlock. I got it. Right away, Doc.”
He went out of the room whistling.
Wade was sitting on the side of the bed, looking shaky. “You the dick he was talking about?” he asked me. “How did you find me?”
“Just asking around from people who know about these things,” I said. -“If you want to get home, you might get clothes on.”
Dr. Vetringer was leaning against the wall, massaging his jaw. “I’ll help him,” he said thickly. “All I do is help people and all they do is kick me in the teeth.”
“I know just how you feel,” I said.
I went out and left them to work at it.
20
The car was close by when they came out, but Earl was gone. He had stopped the car, cut the lights, and walked back towards the big cabin without saying anything to me. He was still whistling, groping for some half-remembered tune.
Wade climbed carefully into the back seat and I got in beside him. Dr. Verringer drove. If his jaw hurt badly and his head ached, he didn’t show it or mention it. We went over the ridge and sown to the end of the graveled drive. Earl had already been down and unlocked the gate and pulled it open. I told Verringer where my car was and he pulled up dose to it. Wade got into it and sat silent, staring at nothing. Verringer got out and went round beside him. He spoke to Wade gently.
“About my five thousand dollars, Mr. Wade. The check you promised me.”
Wade slid down and rested his head on the back of the seat. “I’ll think about it.”
“You promised it. I need it.”
“Duress, the word is, Verringer, a threat of harm. I have protection now.”
“I fed and washed you,” Verringer persisted. “I came in the night. I protected you, I cured you—for the time being, at least.”
“Not five grand worth,” Wade sneered. “You got plenty out of my pockets.”
Verringer wouldn’t let go. “I have a promise of a connection in Cuba, Mr. Wade. You are a rich man. You should help others in their need. I have Earl to look after. To avail myself of this opportunity I need the money. I will pay it back in full.”
I began to squirm. I wanted to smoke, but I was afraid it would make Wade sick.
“Like hell you’d pay it back,” Wade said wearily. “You won’t live long enough. One of these nights Blue Boy will kill you in your sleep.”
Verringer stepped back. I couldn’t see his expression, but his voice hardened.- “There are more unpleasant ways to die,” he said. “I think yours will be one of them.”
He walked back to his car and got into it. He drove in through his gates and was gone. I backed and turned and headed towards the city. After a mile or two Wade muttered: “Why should I give that fat slob five thousand dollars?”
“No reason at all.”
“Then why do I feel like a bastard for not giving it to him?”
“No reason at all.”
He turned his head just enough to look at me. “He handled me like a baby,” Wade said. “He hardly left me alone for fear Earl would come in and beat me up. He took every dime I had in my pockets.”
“You probably told him to.”
“You on his side?”
“Skip, it,” I said. “This is just a job to me.”
Silence for a couple of miles more. We went past the fringe of one of the outlying suburbs. Wade spoke again.
“Maybe I’ll give it to him. He’s broke. The property is foreclosed. He won’t get a dime out of it. All on account of that psycho. Why does he do it?”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“I’m a writer,” Wade said. “I’m supposed to understand what makes people tick. I don’t understand one damn thing about anybody.”
I turned over the pass and after a climb the lights of the valley spread out endlessly in front of us. We dipped down-to the highway north and west that goes to Ventura. After a while we passed through Encino. I stopped for a light and looked up towards the lights high on the hill where the big houses were. In one of them the Lennoxes had lived. We went on.
“The turn-off is pretty close now,” Wade said. “Or do you know it?”
“I know it.”
“By the way, you haven’t told me your name.”
“Philip Marlowe.”
“Nice name.” His voice changed sharply, saying: “Wait a minute. You the guy that was mixed up with Lennox?”
“Yeah.”
He was staring at me in the darkness of the car. We passed the last buildings on the main drag of Encino.
“I knew her,” Wade said. “A little. Him I never saw. Queer business, that. The law boys gave you the rough edge, didn’t they?”
I didn’t answer him.
“Maybe you don’t like to talk about it,” he said.
“Could be. Why would it interest you?”
“Hell, I’m a writer. It must be quite a story.”
“Take tonight off. You must be feeling pretty weak.”
“Okay, Marlowe. Okay. You don’t like me. I get it.”
We reached the turn-off and I swung the car into it and towards the low hills and the gap between them that was Idle Valley.
“I don’t either like you or dislike you,” I said. “I don’t know you. Your wife asked me to find you and bring you home. When I deliver you at your house I’m through. Why she picked on me I couldn’t say. Like I said, it’s just a job.”
We turned the flank of a hill and hit a wider, more firmly paved road. He said his house was a mile farther on, on the right side. He told me the number, which I already knew. For a guy in his shape he was a pretty persistent talker.
“How much is she paying you?” he asked,
“We didn’t discuss it.”
“Whatever it is, it’s not enough. I owe you a lot of thanks. You did a great job, chum. I wasn’t worth the trouble.”
“That’s just the way you feel tonight.”
He laughed. “You know something, Marlowe? I could get to like you. You’re a bit of a bastard—like me.”
We reached the house. It was a two-story over-all shingle house with a small pillared portico and a long lawn from the entrance to a thick row of shrubs inside the white fence. There was a light in the portico. I pulled into the driveway and stopped close to the garage.
“Can you make it without help?”
“Of course.” He got out of the car. “Aren’t you coming in for a drink or something?”
“Not tonight, thanks; I’ll wait here until you’re in the house.”
He stood there breathing hard. “Okay,” he said shortly. He turned and walked carefully along a flagged path to the front door. He held on to a white pillar for a moment, then tried the door. It opened, he went in. The door stayed open and light washed across the green lawn. There was a sudden flutter of voices. I started backing from the driveway, following the back-up light. Somebody called out.
I looked and saw Eileen Wade standing in the open doorway. I kept going and she started to run. So I had to stop. I cut the lights and got out of the car. When she came up I said:
“I ought to have called you, but I was afraid to leave him.”
“Of course. Did you have a lot of trouble?”
“Well—a little more than ringing a doorbell.”
“Please come in the house and tell me all about it.”
“He should be in bed. By tomorrow he’ll be as good as new.”
“Candy will put him to bed,” she said, “He won’t drink tonight, if that’s what you are thinking of.”
“Never occurred to me. Goodnight, Mrs. Wade.”
“You must be tired. Don’t you want a drink yourself?”
I lit a cigarette. It seemed like a couple of weeks since I had tasted tobacco. I drank in the smoke.
“May I have just one puff?”
She came dose to me and I handed her the cigarette. She drew on it and coughed. She handed it back laughing. “Strictly an amateur, as you see.”
“So you knew Sylvia Lennox,” I said. “Was that why you wanted to hire me?”
“I knew who?” She sounded puzzled.
“Sylvia Lennox.” I had the cigarette back now. I was eating it pretty fast.
“Oh,” she said, startled. “That girl that was—murdered. No, I didn’t know her personally. I knew who she was. Didn’t I tell you that?”
“Sorry, I’d forgotten just what you did tell me.”
She was still standing there quietly, close to me, slim and tall in a white dress of some sort. The light from the open door touched the fringe of her hair and made it glow softly.
“Why did you ask me if that had anything to do with my wanting to, as you put it, hire you?” When I didn’t answer at once she added, “Did Roger tell you he knew her?”
“He said something about the case when I told him my name. He didn’t connect me with it immediately, then he did. He talked so damn much I don’t remember half of what he said.”
“I see. I must go in, Mr. Marlowe, and see if my husband needs anything. And if you won’t come in—”
“I’ll leave this with you,” I said.
I took hold of her and pulled her towards me and tilted her head back. I kissed her hard on the lips. She didn’t fight me and she, didn’t respond. She pulled herself away quietly and stood there looking at me.
“You shouldn’t have done that,” she said. “That was wrong. You’re too nice a person.”
“Sure. Very wrong,” I agreed. “But I’ve been such a nice faithful well-behaved gun dog all day long, I got charmed into one of the silliest ventures I ever tackled, and damned if it didn’t turn out just as though somebody had written a script for it. You know something? I believe you knew where he was all along—or at least knew the name of Dr. Verringer. You just wanted to get me involved with him, tangled up with him so I’d feel a sense of responsibility to look after him. Or am I crazy?”
“Of course you’re crazy,” she said coldly. “That is the most outrageous nonsense I ever listened to.” She started to turn away.
“Wait a minute,” I said. “That kiss won’t leave a scar. You just think it will. And don’t tell me I’m too nice a person. I’d rather be a heel.”
She looked back. “Why?”
“If I hadn’t been a nice guy to Terry Lennox, he would still be alive.”
“Yes?” she said quietly. “How can you be so sure? Goodnight, Mr. Marlowe. And thank you so very much for almost everything.”
She walked back along the edge of the grass. I watched her into the house. The door dosed. The porch light went off. I waved at nothing and drove away.
21
Next morning I got up late on account of the big fee I had earned the night before. I drank an extra cup of coffee, smoked an extra cigarette, ate an extra slice of Canadian bacon, and for the three hundredth time I swore I would never again use an electric razor. That made the day normal. I hit the office about ten, picked up some odds and ends of mail, slit the envelopes and let the stuff lie on the desk. I opened the windows wide to let out the smell of dust and dinginess that collected in the night and hung in the still air, in the corners of the room, in the slats of the venetian blinds. A dead moth was spread-eagled on a corner of the desk. On the window sill a bee with tattered wings was crawling along the woodwork, buzzing in a tired remote sort of way, as if she knew it wasn’t any use, she was finished, she had flown too many missions and would never get back to the hive again.
I knew it was going to be one of those crazy days. Everyone has them. Days when nobody rolls in, but the loose wheels, the dingoes who park their brains with their gum, the squirrels who can’t find their nuts, the mechanics who always have a gear wheel left over.
The first was a big blond roughneck named Kuissenen or something Finnish like that. He jammed his massive bottom in the customer’s chair and planted two wide horny hands on my desk and said he was a power-shovel operator, that he lived in Culver City, and the goddarn woman who lived next door to him was trying to poison his dog. Every morning before he let the dog out for a run in the back yard he had to search the place from fence to fence for meatballs thrown over the potato vine from next door. He’d found nine of them so far and they were loaded with a greenish powder he knew was an arsenic weed killer.
“How much to watch out and catch her at it?” He stared at me as unblinkingly as a fish in a tank.
“Why not do it yourself?”
“I got to work for a living, mister. I’m losing four twentyfive an hour just coming up here to ask.”
“Try the police?”
“I try the police. They might, get around to it some time next year. Right now they’re busy sucking up to MGM.”
“S.P.C.A.? The Tafiwaggers?”
“What’s them?”
I told him about the Tailwaggers. He was far from interested. He knew about the S.P.C.A. The S.P.C.A. could take a running jump. They couldn’t see nothing smaller than a horse.
“It says on the door you’re an investigator,” he said truculently. “Okay, go the hell out and investigate. Fifty bucks if you catch her.”
“Sorry,” I said. “I’m tied up. Spending a couple of weeks hiding in a gopher hole in your back yard would be out of my line anyway—even for fifty bucks.”
He stood up glowering. “Big shot,” he said. “Don’t need the dough, huh? Can’t be bothered saving the life of a itty-bitty dog. Nuts to you, big shot.”