“I can understand that, Mr. Potter.”
He beetled his eyebrows at me. “Be careful, young man. I don’t like irony. Can you understand now that I cannot tolerate any further investigation of any sort by any person? And why I have used all my influence to make what investigation there was as brief as possible and as little publicized as possible?”
“Sure—if you’re convinced he killed her.”
“Of course he killed her. With what intent is another matter. it is no longer important.- I am not a public character and I do not intend to be. I have always gone to a great deal of trouble to avoid any kind of publicity. I have influence but I d�n’t abuse it. The District Attorney of Los Angeles County is an ambitious man who has too much good sense to wreck his career for the notoriety of the moment. I see a glint in your eye, Marlowe. Get rid of it. We live in what is called a democracy, rule by the majority of the people. A fine ideal if it could be made to work. The people elect, but the party machines nominate, and the party machines to be effective must spend a great deal of money. Somebody has to give it to them, and that somebody, whether it be an individual, a financial group, a trade union or what have you, expects some consideration in return. What I and people of my kind expect is to be allowed to live our lives in decent privacy. I own newspapers, but I don’t like them. I regard them as a constant menace to whatever privacy we have left. Their constant yelping about a free press means, with a few honorable exceptions, freedom to peddle scandal, crime, sex, sensationalism, hate, innuendo, and the political and financial uses of propaganda. A newspaper is a business out to make money through advertising revenue. That is predicated on its circulation and you know what the circulation depends on.”
I got up and walked around my chair. He eyed me with cold attention. I sat down again. I needed a little luck. Hell, I needed it in carload lots. “Okay, Mr. Potter, what goes from here?”
He wasn’t listening. He was frowning at his own thoughts. “There’s a peculiar thing about money,” he went on. “In large quantities it tends to have a life of its own, even a conscience of its own. The power of money becomes very difficult to control. Man has always been a venal animal. The growth of populations, the huge costs of wars, the incessant pressure of confiscatory taxation—all these things make him more and more venaL The average man is tired and scared, and a tired, scared man can’t afford ideals. He has to buy food for his family. In our time we have seen a shocking decline in both public and private morals. You can’t expect quality from people whose lives are a subjection to a lack of quality. You can’t have quality with mass production. You don’t want it because it lasts too long. So you substitute styling, which is a commercial swindle intended to produce artificial obsolescence. Mass production couldn’t sell its goods next year unless it made what it sold this year look unfashionable a year from now. We have the whitest kitchens and the most shining bathrooms in the world. But in the lovely white kitchen the aveitage American housewife can’t produce a meal fit to eat, and the lovely shining bathroom is mostly a receptacle for deodorants, laxatives, sleeping pills, and the products of that confidence racket called the cosmetic industry. We make the finest packages in the world, Mr. Marlowe. The stuff inside is mostly junk.”
He took out a large white handkerchief and touched his temples with it. I was sitting there with my mouth open, wondering what made the guy tick. He hated everything.
“It’s a little too warm for me in these parts,” he said. “I’m used to a cooler climate. I’m beginning to sound like an editorial that has forgotten the point it wanted to make.”
“I got your point all right, Mr. Potter. You don’t like the way the world is going so you use what power you have to close off a private corner to live in-as near as possible to the way you remember people lived fifty years ago before the age of mass production. You’ve got a hundred million dollars and all it has bought you is a pain in the neck.”
He pulled the handkerchief taut by two opposite corners, then crumpled it into a ball and stuffed it in a pocket.
“And then?” he asked shortly.
“That’s all there is, there isn’t any more. You don’t care who murdered your daughter, Mr. Potter. You wrote her off as a bad job long ago. Even if Terry Lennox didn’t kill her, and the real murderer is still walking around free, you don’t care. You wouldn’t want him caught, because that would revive the scandal and there would have to be a trial and his defense would blow your privacy as high as the Empire State Building. Unless, of course, he was obliging enough to commit suicide, before there was any trial. Preferably in Tahiti or Guatemala or the middle of the Sahara Desert. Anywhere where the County would hate the expense of sending a man to verify what had happened.”
He smiled suddenly, a big rugged smile with a reasonable amount of friendliness in it.
“What do you want from me, Marlowe?”
“If you mean how much money, nothing. I didn’t ask myself here. I was brought. I ‘told the truth about how I met Roger Wade. But he did know your daughter and he does have a record of violence, although I haven’t seen any of it. Last night the guy tried to shoot himself. He’s a haunted man. He has a massive guilt complex. If I happened to be looking for a good suspect, he might do. I realize he’s only one of many, but he happens to be the only one I’ve met.”
He stood up and standing up he was really big. Tough too. He came over and stood in front of me.
“A telephone call, Mr. Marlowe, would deprive you of your license. Don’t fence with me. I won’t put up with it.”
“Two telephone calls and I’d wake up kissing the gutter—with the back of my head missing.”
He laughed harshly. “I don’t operate that way. I suppose in your quaint line of business it is natural for you to think so. I’ve given you too much of my time. I’ll ring for the butler to show you out.”
“Not necessary,” I said, and stood up myself. “I came here and got told. Thanks for the time.”
He held his hand out. “Thank you for coming. I think you’re a pretty honest sort of fellow. Don’t be a hero, young man. There’s no percentage in it.”
I shook hands with him. He had a grip like a pipe wrench. He smiled at me benignantly now. He was Mr. Big, the winner, everything under control.
“One of these days I might be able to throw some business your way,” he said. “And don’t go away thinking that I buy politicians or law enforcement officers. I don’t have to. Goodbye, Mr. Marlowe. And thank you again for coming.”
He stood there and watched me out of the room. I had my hand on the front door when Linda Lori-ng popped out of a shadow somewhere.
“Well?” she asked me quietly. “How did you get on with Father?”
“Fine. He explained civilization to me. I mean how it looks to him. He’s going to let it go on for a little while longer. But it better be careful and not interfere with his private life. If it does, he’s apt to make a phone call to God and cancel the order.”
“You’re hopeless,” she said.
“Me? I’m hopeless? Lady, take a look at your old man. Compared with him I’m a blue-eyed baby with a brand new rattle.”
I went on out and Amos had the Caddy there waiting. He4drove me back to Hollywood. I offered him a buck but he wouldn’t take it. I offered to buy him the poems of T. S. Eliot. He said he already had them.
33
A week went by and I heard nothing from the Wades. The weather was hot and sticky and the acid sting of the smog had crept as far west as Beverly Hills. From the top of Mulholland Drive you could see it leveled out all over the city like a ground mist. When you were in it you could taste it and smell it and it made your eyes smart. Everybody was griping about it. In Pasadena, where the stuffy millionaires holed up after Beverly Hills was spoiled for them by the movie crowd, the city fathers screamed with rage. Everything was the fault of the smog. If the canary wouldn’t sing, if the milkman was late, if the Pekinese had fleas, if an old coot in a starched collar had a heart’ attack on the way to church, that was the smog. Where I lived it was usually clear in the early morning and nearly always at night. Once in a while a whole day would be dear, nobody quite knew why.
It was on a day like that—it happened to be a Thursday— that Roger Wade called me up. “How are you? This is Wade.” He sounded fine.
“Fine, and you?”
“Sober, I’m afraid. Scratching a hard buck. We ought to have a talk. And I think I owe you some dough.”
“Nope.”
“Well, how about lunch today? Could you make it here somewhere around one?”
“I guess so. How’s Candy?”
“Candy?” He sounded puzzled. He must have blacked out plenty that night. “Oh, he helped you put me to bed that night.”
“Yeah. He’s a helpful little guy—in spots. And Mrs. Wade?”
“She’s fine too. She’s in town shopping today.”
We hung up and I sat and rocked in my swivel chair. I ought to have asked him how the book was going. Maybe you always ought to ask a writer how the book is going. And then again maybe he gets damned tired of that question.
I had another call in a little while, a strange voice.
“This is Roy Ashterfelt. George Peters told me to call you up, Marlowe.”
“Oh yes, thanks. You’re the fellow that knew Terry Lennox in New York. Called himself-Marston then.”
“That’s right. He was sure on the sauce. But it’s the same guy all right. You couldn’t very well mistake him. Out here I saw him in Chasen’s one night with his wife. I was with a client. The client knew them. Can’t tell you the client’s name, I’m afraid.”
“I understand. It’s not very important now, I guess. What was his first name?”
“Wait a minute while I bite my thumb. Oh yeah, Paul. Paul Marston. And there was one thing more, if it interests you. ‘He was wearing a British Army service badge. Their version of the ruptured duck.”
“I see. What happened to him?”
“I don’t know. I came west. Next time I saw him he was here too—married to Harlan Potter’s somewhat wild daughter. But you know all that.”
“They’re both dead now. But thanks for telling me.”
“Not at all. Glad to help. Does it mean anything to you?”
“Not a thing,” I said, and I was a liar. “I never asked him about himself. He told me once he -had been brought up in an orphanage. Isn’t it just possible you made a mistake?”
“With that white hair and that scarred face, brother? Not a chance. I won’t say I never forget a face, but not that one.”
“Did he see you?”
“If he did, he didn’t let on. Hardly expect him to in the circumstances. Anyhow he might not have remembered me. Like I said, he was always pretty well lit back in New York.”
I thanked him some more and he said it was a pleasure and we hung up.
I thought about it for a while. The noise of the traffic outside the building on the boulevard made an unmusical obbligato to my thinking. It was too loud. In summer in hot weather everything is too loud. I got up and shut the lower part of the window and called Detective-Sergeant Green at Homicide. He was obliging enough to be in.
“Look,” I said, after the preliminaries, “I heard something about Terry Lennox that puzzles me. A fellow I know used to know him in New York under another name. You check his war record?”
“You guys never learn,” Green said harshly. “You just never learn to stay on ybur own side -of the street. That matter is closed, locked up, weighted with lead and dropped in the ocean. Get it?”
“I spent part of an afternoon with Harlan Potter last week at his daughter’s house in Idle Valley. Want to check?”
“Doing what?” he asked sourly. “Supposing I believe you.”
“Talking things over. I was invited. He likes me. Incidentally; he told me the girl was shot with a Mauser P.P.K. 7.65 mm. That news to you?”
“Go on.”
“Her own gun, chum. Makes a little difference, maybe. But don’t get me wrong. I’m not looking into any dark corners. This is a personal matter. Where did he get that wound?”
Green was silent. I heard a door close ia the background. Then he said quietly, “Probably in a knife fight south of the border.”
“Aw hell, Green, you had his prints. You sent them to Washington like always. You got a report back—like always. All I asked was something about his service record.”
“Who said he had one,”
“Well, Mendy Menendez for one. Seems Lennox saved his life one time and that’s how he got the wound. He was captured by the Germans and they gave him the face he had.”
“Menendez, huh? You believe that son of a bitch? You got a hole in your own head. Lennox didn’t have any war record. Didn’t have any record of any kind under any name. You satisfied?”
“If you say so,” I said. “But I don’t see why Menendez would bother to come up here and tell me a yarn and warn me to keep my nose dean on account of Lenndx was a pal of him and Randy Starr in Vegas and they didn’t want anybody fooling around. After all Lennox was already dead.”
“Who knows what a hoodlum figures?” Green asked bitterly. “Or why? Maybe Lennox was in a racket with them before he married all that money, and got respectable. He was a floor manager at Starr’s place in Vegas for a while. That’s where he met the girL A’ smile and a bow and a dinner jacket Xeep the customers happy and keep an eye on the house players. I guess he had class for the job.”
“He had charm,” I said. “They don’t use it in police business. Much obliged, Sergeant. How is Captain Gregorius these days?”
“Retirement leave. Don’t you read the papers?”
“Not the crime news, Sergeant. Too sordid.”
I started to say goodbye but he chopped me off. “What did Mr. Money want with you?”
“We just had a cup of tea together. A social call. He said he might put some business my way. He also hinted—just hinted, not in so many words—that any cop that looked cross-eyed at me would be facing a grimy future.”
“He don’t run the police department,” Green said.
“He admits it. Doesn’t even buy commissioners or D.A.‘s, he said. They just kind of curl up in his lap when he’s having a doze.”
“Go to hell,” Green said, and hung up in my ear.
A difficult thing, being a cop. You never know whose stomach it’s safe to jump up and down on.
34
The stretch of broken-paved road from the highway to the curve of the hill was dancing in the noon heat and the scrub that dotted the parched land on both sides of it was flour-white with granite dust by this time. The weedy smell was almost nauseating. A thin hot acrid breeze was blowing. I had my coat off and my sleeves rolled up, but the door was too hot to rest an arm on. A tethered horse dozed wearily under a dump of live oaks. A brown Mexican sat on the ground and ate something out of a newspaper. A tumbleweed rolled lazily across the road and came to rest against a piece of granite outcrop, and a lizard that had been there an instant before disappeared without seeming to move at all.
Then I was around the hill on the blacktop and in another country. In five minutes I turned into the driveway of the Wades’ house, parked and walked across the flagstones and rang the bell. Wade answered the door himself, in a brown and white checked shirt with short sleeves, pale blue denim slacks, and house slippers. He looked tanned and he looked good. There was an i�kstain on his hand and a smear of cigarette ash on one side of his nose.
He led the way into his study and parked himself behind his desk. On it there was a thick pile of yellow typescript. I put my coat on a chair and sat on the couch.
“Thanks for coming, Marlowe. Drink?”
I got that look on my face you get when a drunk asks you to have a drink. I could feel it. He grinned.
“I’ll have a coke,” he said.
“You pick up fast,” I said. “I don’t think I want a drink right now. I’ll take a coke with you.”
He pressed something with his foot and after a while Candy came. He looked surly. He had a blue shirt on and an orange scarf and no white coat. Two-tone black and white shoes, elegant high-wasted gabardine pants.
Wade ordered the cokes. Candy gave me a hard stare and went away.
“Book?” I said, pointing to the stack of paper.
“Yeah. Stinks.”
“I don’t believe it. How far along?”
“About two thirds of the way—for what it’s worth. Which is damn little. You know how a writer can tell when he’s washed up?”
“Don’t know anything about writers.” I filled my pipe,
“When he starts reading his old stuff for inspiration. That’s absolute. I’ve got five hundred pages of typescript here, well over a hundred thousand words. My books run long. The public likes long books. The damn fool public thinks if there’s a lot of pages there must be a lot-of gold. I don’t dare read it over. And I can’t remember half of what’s in it. I’m just plain scared to look at my own work.”