“I’ve got troubles too, Mr. Kuissenen.”
“I’ll twist her goddam neck if I catch her,” he said, and I didn’t doubt he could have done it. He could have twisted the hind leg off of an elephant. “That’s what makes it I want somebody else. Just because the little tike barks when a car goes by the house. Sour-faced old bitch.”
He started for the door. “Are you sure it’s the dog she’s trying to poison?” I asked his back.
“Sure I’m sure.” He was halfway to the door before the nickel dropped. He swung around fast then. “Say that again, buster.”
I just shook my head. I didn’t want to fight him. He might hit me on the head with my desk. He snorted and went out, almost taking the door with him.
The next cookie in the dish was a woman, not old, not young, not dean, not too dirty, obviously poor, shabby, querulous and stupid. The girl she roomed with—in her set any woman who works Out is a girl—was taking money out of her purse. A dollar here, four bits there, but it added up. She figured she was out dose to twenty dollars in all. She couldn’t afford it. She couldn’t afford to move either. She couldn’t afford a detective. She thought I ought to be willing to throw a scare into the roommate just on the telephone like, not mentioning any names
It took her twenty minutes or more to tell me this. She kneaded her bag incessantly while telling it.
“Anybody you know could do that,” I said.
“Yeah, but you bein’ a dick and all.”
“I don’t have a license to threaten people I know nothing about.”
“I’m goin’ to tell her I been in to see you. I don’t have to say it’s her. Just that you’re workin’ on it.”
“I wouldn’t if I were you. If you mention my name she may call me up. If she does that, I’ll tell her the facts.”
She stood up and slammed her shabby bag against her stomach. “You’re no gentleman,” she said shrilly.
“Where does it say I have to be?”
She went out mumbling.
After lunch I had Mr. Simpson W. Edelweiss. He had a card to prove it. He was manager of a sewing machine agency. He was a small tired-looking man about forty-eight to fifty, small hands and feet, wearing a brown suit -with sleeves too long, and a stiff white collaf behind a purple tie with black diamonds on it. He sat on the edge of the chair without fidgeting and looked at me out of sad black eyes. His hair was black too and thick and rough without a sign of gray in it that I could see. He had a clipped mustache with a reddish tone. He could have passed for thirty-five if you didn’t look at the backs of his hands.
“Call me Simp,” he said. “Everybody else does. I got it coming! I’m a Jewish man married to a Gentile woman, twentyfour years of age, beautiful. She run away a couple of times before,”
He got out a photo of her and showed it to me. She might have been beautiful to him. To me she was a big sloppy-looking cow of a woman with a weak mouth.
“What’s your trouble, Mr. Edelweiss? I don’t do divorce business.” I tried to give him back the photo. He waved it away. “The client is always mister to me,” I added. “Until he has told me a few dozen lies anyway.”
He smiled. “Lies I got no use for. It’s not a divorce matter. I just want Mabel back again. But she don’t come back until I find her. Maybe it’s a kind of game with her.”
He told me about her, patiently, without rancor. She drank, she played around, she wasn’t a very good wife by his standards, but he could have been brought up too strict. She had a heart as big as a house, he said, and he loved her. He didn’t kid himself he was any dreamboat, just a steady worker bringing home the pay check. They had a joint bank account. She had drawn it all out, but he was prepared for that. He had a pretty good idea who she had lit out with, and if he was right the man would dean her out and leave her stranded.
“Name of Kerrigan,” he said, “Monroe Kerrigan. I don’t aim to knock the Catholics. There is plenty of bad Jews too. This Kerrigan is a barber when he works. I ain’t knocking barbers either. But a lot of them are drifters and horse players. Not real steady.”
“Won’t you hear from her when she is cleaned out?”
“She gets awful ashamed. She might hurt herself.”
“It’s a Missing Persons job, Mr. Edelweiss. You should go down and make a report.”
“No. I’m not knocking the police, but I don’t want it that way. Mabel would be humiliated.”
The world seemed to be full of people Mr. Edelweiss was not knocking. He put some money on the desk.
“Two hundred dollars,” he said. “Down payment. I’d rather do it my way.”
“It will happen again,” I said.
“Sure.” He shrugged and spread his hands gently. “But twentyfour years old and me almost fifty. How could it be different? She’ll settle down after a while. Trouble is, no kids. She can’t have kids. A Jew likes ‘to have a family. So Mabel knows that. She’s humiliated.”
“You’re a very forgiving man, Mr. Edelweiss.”
“Well I ain’t a Christian,” he said. “And I’m not knocking Christians, you understand. But with me it’s real. I don’t just say it. I do it. Oh, I almost forgot the most important.”
He got out a picture postcard and pushed it across the desk after the money, “From Honolulu she sends it. Money goes fast in Honolulu. One of my uncles had a jewelry business there. Retired now. Lives in Seattle.”
I picked the photd up again. “I’ll have to farm this one out,” I told him. “And I’ll have to have this copied.”
“I could hear you saying that, Mr. Marlowe, before I got here. So I come prepared.” He took out an envelope and it contained five more prints. “I got Kerrigan too, but only a snapshot.” He went into another pocket and gave me another envelope. I looked at Kerrigan. He had a smooth dishonest face that did not surprise me. Three copies of Kerrigan.
Mr. Simpson W. Edelweiss gave me another card which had on it his name, his residence, his telephone number. He said he hoped it would not cost too much but that he would respond at once to any demand for further funds and he hoped to hear from me.
“Two hundred ought to pretty near do it if she’s still in Honolulu,” I said. “What I need now is a detailed physical description of both parties that I can put into a telegram. Height, weight, age, coloring, any noticeable scars or other identifying marks, what dothes she was wearing and had with her, and how much money was in the account she cleaned out. If you’ve been through this before, Mr. Edelweiss, you will know what I want.”
“I got a peculiar feeling about this Kerrigan. Uneasy.”
I spent another half hour milking him and writing things down. Then he stood up quietly, shook hands quietly, bowed and left the office quietly.
“Tell Mabel everything is fine,” he said as he went out.
It turned out to be routine, I sent a wire to an agency in Honolulu and followed it with an airmail containing the photos and whatever information I had left out of the wire. They found her working as a chambermaid’s helper in a luxury hotel, scrubbing bathtubs and bathroom floors and so on. Kerrigan had done just what Mr. Edelweiss expected, cleaned her out while she was asleep and skipped, leaving her stuck with the hotel bill. She pawned a ring which Kerrigan couldn’t have taken without violence, and got enough out-of it to pay the hotel but not enough to buy her way home. So Edelweiss hopped a plane and went after her.
He was too good for her. I sent him a bill for twenty dollars and the cost of a long telegram. The Honolulu agency grabbed the two hundred. With a portrait of Madison in my office safe I could afford to be underpriced.
So passed a day in the life of a P.I. Not exactly a typical day but not totally untypical either. What makes a man stay with it nobody knows. You don’t get rich, you don’t often have much fun. Sometimes you get beaten up or shot at or tossed into the jailhouse. Once in a long while you get dead. Every other month you decide to give it up and find some sensible occupation while you can still walk without shaking your head. Then the door buzzer rings and you open the inner door to the waiting room and there stands a new face with a new problem, a new load of grief, and a small piece of money.
“Come in, Mr. Thingummy. What can I do for you?”
There must be a reason.
Three days later in the shank of the afternoon Eileen Wade called me up, and asked me to come around to the house for a drink the next evening. They were having a few friends in for cocktails. Roger would like to see me and thank me adequately. And would I please send in a bill?
“You don’t owe me anything, Mrs. Wade. What little I did I got paid for.”
“I must have looked very silly acting Victorian about it,” she said. “A kiss doesn’t seem to mean much nowadays. You will come, won’t you?”
“I guess so. Against my better judgment.”
“Roger is quite well again. He’s working.”
“Good.”
“You sound very solemn today. I guess you take life pretty seriously.”
“Now and then. Why?”
She laughed very gently and said goodbye and hung up. I sat there for a while taking life seriously. Then I tried to think of something funny so that I could have a great big laugh. Neither way worked, so I got Terry Lennox’s letter of farewell out of the safe and reread it. It reminded me that I had never gone to Victor’s for that gimlet he asked me to drink for him. It was just about the right time of day for -the bar to be quiet, the way he would have liked it himself, if he had been around to go with me. I thought of him with a vague sadness and with a puckering bitterness too. When I got to Victor’s I almost kept going. Almost, but not quite. I had too much of his money. He had made a fool of me but he had paid well for the privilege.
22
It was so quiet in Victor’s that you almost heard the temperature drop as you came in at the door, On a bar stool a woman in a black tailormade, which couldn’t at that time of year have been anything but some synthetic fabric like orlon, was sitting alone with a pale greenishcolored drink in front of her and smoking a cigarette in a long jade holder. She had that fine-drawn intense look that is sometimes neurotic, sometimes sex-hungry, and sometimes just the result of drastic dieting.
I sat down two stools away and the barkeep nodded to me, but didn’t smile.
“A gimlet,” I said. “No bitters.”
He put the little napkin in front of me and kept looking at me. “You know something,” he said in a pleased voice. “I heard you and your friend talking one night and I got me in a bottle of that Rose’s Lime Juice. Then you didn’t come back any more and I only opened it tonight.”
“My friend left town,” I said, “A double if it’s all right with you. And thanks for taking the trouble.”
He went away. The woman in black gave me a quick glance, then looked down into her glass. “So few people drink them around here,” she said so quietly that I didn’t realize at first that she was speaking to me. Then she looked my way again. She had very large dark eyes. She had the reddest fingernails I had ever seen. But she didn’t look like a pickup and there was no trace of come-on in her voice. “Gimlets I mean.”
“A fellow taught me to like them,” I said.
“He must be English.”
“Why?”
“The lime juice. It’s as English as boiled fish with that awful anchovy sauce that looks as if the cook had bled into it. That’s how they got called limeys. The English—not the fish.”
“I thought it was more a tropical drink, hot weather stuff. Malaya or some place like that.”
“You-may be right.” She turned away again.
The bartender set the drink in front of me. With the lime juice it has a sort of pale greenish yellowish misty look. I tasted it. It was both sweet and sharp at the same time. The woman in black watched me, Then she lifted her own glass towards me. We both drank. Then I knew hers was the same drink.
The next move was routine, so I didn’t make it. I just sat there. “He wasn’t English,” I said after a moment. “I guess maybe he had been there during the war. We used to come in here once in a while, early like now. Before the mob started boiling.”
“It’s a pleasant hour,” she said. “In a bar almost the only pleasant hour.” She emptied her glass. “Perhaps I knew your friend,” she said. “What was his name?”
I didn’t answer her right away. I lit a cigarette and watched her tap the stub of hers out of the jade holder and fit another in its place. I reached across with a lighter. “Lennox,” I said.
She thanked me for the light and gave me a brief searching glance. Then she nodded. “Yea, I knew him very well. Perhaps a little too well.”
The barkeep drifted over and glanced at my glass. “A couple more of the same,” I said. “In a booth.”
I got down off the stool and stood waiting. She might or might not blow me down. I didn’t particularly care. Once in a while in this much too sex-conscious country a man and a woman can meet and talk without dragging bedrooms into it. This could be it, or she could just think I was on the make. If so, the hell with her.
She hesitated, but not for long. She gathered up a pair of black gloves and a black suede bag with a gold frame and clasp and walked across into a corner booth and sat down without a word. I sat down across the small table.
“My name is Marlowe.”
“Mine is Linda Loring,” she said calmly. “A bit of a sentimentalist, aren’t you, Mr. Marlowe?”
“Because I came in here to drink a gimlet? How about yourself?”
“I might have a taste for them.”
“So might I. But it would be a little too much coincidence.”
She smiled at me vaguely. She had emerald earrings and an emerald lapel pin. They looked like real stones because of the way they were cut—flat with beveled edges. And even in the dim light of a bar they had an inner glow.
“So you’re the man,” she said.
The bar waiter brought the drinks over and set them down. When he went away I said: “I’m a fellow who knew Terry Lennox, liked him, and had an occasional drink with him. It was kind of a side deal, an accidental friendship. I never went to his home or knew his wife. I saw her once in a parking lot.”
“There was a little more to it than that, wasn’t there?”
She reached for her glass. She had an emerald ring set in a nest of diamonds. Beside it a thin platinum band said she was married. I put her in the second half of the thirties, early in the second half.
“Maybe,” I said, “The guy bothered me. He still does. How about you?”
She leaned on an elbow and looked up at me without any particular expression. “I said I knew him rather too well. Too well to think it mattered much what happened to him. He had a rich wife who gave him all the luxuries. All she asked in return was to be let alone.”
“Seems reasonable,” I said.
“Don’t be sarcastic, Mr. Marlowe. Some women are like that. They can’t help it. It wasn’t as if he didn’t know in the beginning. If he had to get proud, the door was open. He didn’t have to kill her.”
“I agree with you.”
She straightened up and looked hard at me. Her lip curled. “So he ran away and, if what I hear is true, you helped him. I suppose you feel proud about that.”
“Not me,” I said. “I just did it for the money.”
“That is not amusing, Mr. Marlowe. Frankly I don’t know why I sit here drinking with you.”