“Oh sure. That’s obvious. The interesting point is why. Here—take this.” I had another seconal out of the night table and another glass of water. He got up on one elbow and grabbed for the glass and missed it by a good four inches. I put it in his hand. He managed to drink and swallow his pill. Then he lay back flat and deflated, his face drained of emotion. His nose had that pinched look. He could almost have been a dead man. He wasn’t throwing anybody down any stairs tonight. Most likely not any night.
When his eyelids got heavy I went out of the room. The weight of the Webley was against my hip, dragging at my pocket. I started back downstairs again. Eileen’s door was open. Her room was dark but there was enough light from the moon to frame her standing just inside the door. She called out something that sounded like a name, but it wasn’t mine. I stepped dose to her.
“Keep your voice down,” I said. “He’s gone back to sleep.”
“I always knew you would come back,” she said softly. “Even after ten years.”
I peered at her. One of us was goofy.
“Shut the door,” she said in the same caressing voice. “All these years I have kept myself for you.”
I turned and shut the door. It seemed like a good idea at the moment. When I faced her she was already falling towards me. So I caught her. I damn well had to. She pressed herself hard against me and her hair brushed my face. Her mouth came up to be kissed. She was trembling. Her lips opened and her teeth opened and her tongue darted. Then her hands dropped and jerked at something and the robe she was wearing came open and underneath it she was as naked as September Morn but a darn sight less coy.
“Put me on the bed,” she breathed.
I did that. Putting my arms around her I touched bare skin, soft skin, soft yielding flesh. I lifted her and carried her the few steps to the bed and lowered her. She kept her arms around my neck. She was making some kind of a whistling noise in her throat. Then she thrashed about and moaned. This was murder. I was as erotic as a stallion. I was losing control. You don’t get that sort of invitation from that sort of woman very often anywhere.
Candy saved me. There was a thin squeak and I swudg around to see the doorknob moving. I jerked loose and jumted for the door. I got it open and barged out through it and the Mex was tearing along the hall and down the stairs. Halfway down he stopped and turned and leered at me. Then he was gone
I went back to the door and shut it—from the outside this time. Some kind of weird noises were coming from the woman on the bed, but that’s all they were now. Weird noises. The spell was broken.
I went down the stairs fast and crossed into the study and grabbed the bottle of Scotch and tilted it; When I couldn’t swallow any more I leaned against the wall and panted and let the stuff burn in me until the fumes reached my brain.
It was a long time since dinner. It was a long time since anything that was normal. The whiskey hit me hard and fast and I kept guzzling it until the room started to get hazy and the furniture was all in the wrong places and the lamplight was like widlfire or summer lightning. Then I was flat out on the leather couch, trying to balance the bottle on my chest. It seemed to be empty. It rolled away and thumped on the floor.
That was the last incident of which I took any precise notice.
30
A shaft of sunlight tickled one of my ankles. I opened my eyes and saw the crown of a tree moving gently against a hazed blue sky. I rolled over and leather touched my cheek. An axe split my head. I sat up. There was a rug over me. I threw that off and got my feet on the floor. I scowled at a dock. The dock said a minute short of six-thirty.
I got up on my feet and it took character. It took will power. It took a lot out of me, and there wasn’t as much to spare as there once had been. The hard heavy years had worked me over.
I plowed across to the half bath and stripped off my tie and shirt and sloshed cold water in my face with both hands and sloshed it on my head. When I was dripping wet I toweled myself off savagely. I put my shirt and tie back on and reached for my jacket and the gun in the pocket banged against the wall. I took it out and swung the cylinder away from the frame and tipped the cartridges into my hand, five full, one just a blackened shell. Then I thought, what’s the use, there-are always more of them. So I put them back where they had been before and carried the gun into the study and put it away in one of the drawers of the desk.
When I looked up Candy was standing in the doorway, spick and span in his white coat, his hair brushed back and shining black, his eyes bitter.
“You want some coffee?”
“Thanks.”
“I put the lamps out. The boss is okay. Asleep. I shut his door. Why you get drunk?”
“I had to.”
He sneered at me. “Didn’t make her, huh? Got tossed out on your can, shamus.”
“Have it your own way.”
“You ain’t tough this morning, shamus. You ain’t tough at all.”
“Get the goddain coffee,” I yelled at him.
“Hijo de Ia puta!”
In one jump I had him by the arm. He didn’t move. He just looked at me contemptuously. I laughed and let go of his arm.
“You’re right, Candy. I’m not tough at all.”
He turned and went out. In no time at all he was back with a silver tray and a imall silver pot of coffee on it and sugar and cream and a neat triangular napkin. He set it down on the cocktail table and removed the empty bottle and the rest of the drinking materials. He picked another bottle off the floor.
“Fresh. Just made,” he said, and went out.
I drank two cups black. Then I tried a cigarette. It was all right. I still belonged to the human race. Then Candy was back in the room again.
“You want breakfast?” he asked morosely.
“No, thanks.”
“Okay, scram out of here. We don’t want you around.”
“Who’s we?”
He lifted the lid of a box and helped himself to a cigarette. He lit it and blew smoke at me insolently.
“I take care of the boss,” he said. “You making it pay?”
He frowned, then nodded. “Oh yes. Good money.”
“How much on the side—for not spilling what you know?”
He went back to Spanish. “No entendido.”
“You understand all right. How much you shake him for? I bet it’s not more than a couple of yards.”
“What’s that? Couple of yards.”
“Two hundred bucks.”
He grinned. “You give me couple of yards, shamus. So I don’t tell the boss you come out of her room last night.”
“That would buy, a whole busload of wetbacks like you.” He shrugged that off. “The boss gets pretty rough when he blows his top. Better pay up, shamus.”
“Pachuco stuff,” I said contemptuously. “All you’re touching is the small money. Lots of men play around when they’re lit. Anyhow she knows all about it. You don’t have anything to sell.”
There was a gleam in his eye. “Just don’t come round any more, tough boy.”
“I’m leaving.”
I stood up and walked around the table. He moved enough to keep facing towards me. I watched his hand but he evidently wasn’t wearing a knife this morning. -When I was close enough I slapped a hand across his face.
“I don’t get called a son of a whore by the help, greaseball. I’ve got business here and I come around whenever I feel like it. Watch your lip from now on. You might get pistol-whipped. That pretty face of yours would never look the same again.”
He didn’t react at all, not even to the slap. That and being called a greaseball must have been deadly insults to him. But this time he just stood there wooden-faced, motionless. Then without a word he picked up the coffee tray and carried it out.
“Thanks for the coffee,” I said to his back.
He kept going. When he was gone I felt the bristles on my chin, shook myself, and decided to be on my way. I had had a skinful of the Wade family.
As I crossed the living room Eileen was coming down the stairs in white slacks and open-toed sandals and a pale blue shirt. She looked at me with complete surprise. “I didn’t know you were here, Mr. Marlowe,” she said, as though she hadn’t seen me for a week and at that time I had just dropped in for tea.
“I put his gun in the desk,” I said.
“Gun?” Then ft seemed to dawn on her. “Oh, last night was a little hectic, wasn’t it? But I thought you had gone home.”
I walked over closer to her. She had a thin gold chain around her neck and some kind of fancy pendant in gold and blue on white enamel. The blue enameled part looked like a pair of wings, but not spread out. Against these there was a broad white enamel and gold dagger that pierced a scroll. I couldn’t read the words. It was some kind of military insigne.
“I got drunk,” I said. “Deliberately and not elegantly. I was a little lonely.”
“You didn’t have to be,” she said, and her eyes were as clear as water. There wasn’t a trace of guile in them.
“A matter of opinion,” I said. “I’m leaving now and I’m not sure I’ll be back. You heard what I said about the gun?”
“You put it in his desk. It might be a good idea to put it somewhere else. But he didn’t really mean to shoot himself, did he?”
“I can’t answer that. But next time he might.”
She shook her head. “I don’t think so. I really don’t. You were a wonderful help last night, Mr. Marlowe. I don’t know how to thank you.”
“You made a pretty good try.”
She got pink. Then she laughed. “I had a very curious dream in the night,” she said slowly, looking off over my shoulder. “Someone I used to know was here in the house. Someone who has been dead for ten years.” Her fingers went up and touched the gold and enamel pendant. “That’s why I am wearing this today. He gave it to me.”
“I had a curious dream myself,” I said. “But I’m not telling mine. Let me know how Roger gets on and if there is anything I can do.”
She lowered her eyes and looked into mine. “You said yoti were not coming back.”
“I said I wasn’t sure. I may have to come back. I hope I won’t. There is something very wrong in this house. And only part of it came out of a bottle.”
She stared at me, frowning. “What does that mean?”
“I think you know what I’m talking about.”
She thought it over carefully. Her fingers were still touching the pendant gently. She let out a slow patient sigh. “There’s always another woman,” she said quietly.
“At some time or other. It’s not necessarily fatal. We’re talking at cross purposes, aren’t we? We are not even talking about the same thing, perhaps.”
“Could be,” I said. She was still standing on the steps, the third step from the bottom. She still had her fingers on the pendant. She still looked like a golden dream. “Especially if you have in mind ‘that the other woman is Linda Loring.”
She dropped her hand from the pendant and came down one more step of the stairs.
“Dr. Loring seems to agree with me,” she said indifferently. “He must have some source of information.”
“You said he had played that scene with half the males in the valley.”
“Did I? Well—it was the conventional sort of thing to say at the time.” She came down another step.
“I haven’t shaved,” I said.
That startled her. Then she laughed. “Oh, I wasn’t expecting you to make love to me.”
“Just what did you expect of me, Mrs. Wade—in the beginning, when you first persuaded me to go hunting? Why me—what have I got to offer?”
“You kept faith,” she said quietly. “When it couldn’t have been very easy.”
“I’m touched. But I don’t think that was the reason.”
She came down the last step and then she was looking up at me. “Then what was the reason?”
“Or if it was—it was a damn poor reason. Just about the worst reason in the world.”
She frowned a tiny frown. “Why?”
“Because what I did—this keeping faith—is something even a fool doesn’t do twice.”
“You know,” she said lightly, “this is getting to be a very enigmatic conversation.”
“You’re a very enigmatic person, Mrs. Wade. So long and good luck and if you really care anything about Roger, you’d better find him the right kind of doctor—and quick.”
She laughed again. “Oh, that was a mild attack last night. You ought to see him in a bad one. He’ll be up and working by this afternoon.”
“Like hell he will.”
“But believe me he will. I know him so well.”
I gave her the last shot right in the teeth and it sounded pretty nasty.
“You don’t really want to save him, do you? You just want to look as if you are trying to save him.”
“That,” she said deliberately, “was a very beastly thing to say to me.”
She stepped past me and walked through the dining room doors and then the big room was empty and I crossed to the front door and let myself out. It was a perfect summer morning in that bright secluded valley. It was too far from the city to get any smog and cut off by the low mountains from the dampness of the ocean. It was going to be hot later, but in a nice refined exclusive sort of way, nothing brutal like the heat of the desert, not sticky and rank like the heat of the city. Idle Valley-was a perfect place to live. Perfect. Nice people with nice homes, nice cars, nice horses, nice dogs, possibly even nice children.
But all a man named Marlowe wanted from it was out. And fast.
31
I went home and showered and shaved and changed clothes and began to feel clean again. I cooked some breakfast, ate it, washed up, swept the kitchen and the service porch, filled a pipe and called the phone answering service. I shot a blank. Why go to the office? There would be nothing there but another dead moth and another layer of dust. In the safe would be my portrait of Madison. I could go down and play with that, and with the five crisp hundred dollar bills that still smelled of coffee. I could do that, but I didn’t want to. Something inside me had gone sour. None of it really belonged to me. What was it supposed to buy? How much loyalty can a dead man use? Phooey: I was looking at life through the mists of a hangover.
It was the kind of morning that seems to go on forever. I was flat and tired and dull and the passing minutes seemed to fall into a void, with a soft whirring sound, like spent rockets. Birds chirped in the shrubbery outside and the cars went up and down Laurel Canyon Boulevard endlessly. Usually I wouldn’t even hear them. But I was brooding and irritable and mean and oversensitive. I decided to kill the hangover.
Ordinarily I was not a morning drinker. The Southern California climate is too soft for it. You don’t metabolize fast enough. But I mixed a tall cold one this time and sat in an easy chair with my shirt open and pecked at a magazine, reading a crazy story about a guy that had two lives and two psychiatrists, one was human and one was some kind of insect in a hive. The guy kept going from one to the other and the whole ‘thing was as crazy as -a crumpet, but funny in an off-beat sort of way. I was handling the drink carefully, a sip at a time, watching myself.
It was about noon when the telephone rang and the voice said: “This is Linda Loving. I called your office and your phone service told me to try your home. I’d like to see you.’
“Why?”
“I’d rather explain that in person. You go to your office from time to time, I suppose.”
“Yeah. From time to time. Is there any money in it?”
“I hadn’t thought of it that way. But I have no objection, if you want to be paid. I could be at your office in about an hour.”
“Goody.”