“You look good yourself,” I said. “From the other night I wouldn’t have believed it. You’ve got more, guts than you think you have.”
“What I need right now is more than guts. Something you don’t get by wishing for it. A belief in yourself. I’m a spoiled writer who doesn’t believe any more. I have a beautiful home, a beautiful wife, and a beautiful sales record. But all I really want is to get drunk and forget.”
He leaned his chin in his cupped hands and stared across the desk.
“Eileen said I tried to shoot myself. Was it that bad?”
“You don’t remember?”
He shook his head. “Not a damn thing except that I fell down and cut my head. And after a while I was in bed., And you were there’. Did Eileen call you?”
“Yeah. Didn’t she say?”
“She hasn’t been talking to me very much this last week. I guess she’s had it. Up to here.” He put the edge of one hand against his neck just under his chin. “That show Loring put on here didn’t help any.”
“Mrs. Wade said it meant nothing.”
“Well, she would, wouldn’t she? It happened to be the truth, but I don’t suppose she believed it when she said it. The guy is just -abnormally jealous. You have a drink or two with his wife in the corner and laugh a little and kiss her goodbye and right off he assumes you are sleeping with her. One reason being that he isn’t.”
“What I like about Idle Valley,” I said, “is that everybody is living just a comfortable normal life.”
He frowned and then the door opened and Candy came in with two cokes and glasses and poured the cokes. He set one in front of me without looking at me.
“Lunch in half an hour,” Wade said, “and where’s the white coat?”
“This my day off,” Candy said, deadpan. “I ain’t the cook, boss.”
“Cold cuts or sandwiches and beer will do,” Wade said. “The cook’s off today, Candy. I’ve got a friend to lunch.”
“You think he is your friend?” Candy sneered. “Better ask your wife.”
Wade leaned back in his chair and smiled at hint. “Watch your lip, little man. You’ve got it soft here. I don’t often ask a favor of you, do I?”
Candy looked down at the floor. After a moment he looked up and grinned., “Okay, boss. I put the ‘white coat on. I get the lunch, I guess.”
He turned softly and went out. Wade watched the door dose. Then he shrugged and looked at me.
“We used to call them servants. Now we call them domestic help. I wonder how long it will be before we have to give them breakfast in bed. I’m paying the guy too much money. He’s spoiled.”
“Wages—or something on the side?”
“Such as what?” he asked sharply.
I got up and handed him some folded yellow sheets. “you’d better read it. Evidently you don’t remember asking me to tear it up. It was in your typewriter, under the cover.”
He unfolded the yellow pages and leaned back to read them. The glass of coke fizzed unnoticed on the desk in front of him. He read slowly, frowning. When he came to the end he refolded the sheets and ran a finger along the edge.
“Did Eileen see this?” he asked carefully.
“I wouldn’t know. She might have.”
“Pretty wild, isn’t it?”
“I liked it. Especially the part about a good man dying for you.”
He opened the paper again and tore it into long strips viciously and dumped the strips into his wastebasket.
“I suppose a drunk will write or say or do anything,” he said slowly. “It’s meaningless to me. Candy’s not black mailing me. He likes me.”
“Maybe you’d better get drunk again. You might remember what you meant. You might remember a lot of things. We’ve been through this before—that night when the gun went off. I suppose the seconal blanked you out too. You sounded sober enough. But now you pretend not to remember writing that stuff I just gave you. No wonder you can’t write your book, Wade. It’s a wonder you can stay alive.”
He reached sideways and opened a drawer of his desk. His hand fumbled in it and came up with a three-decker check book. He opened it and reached for a pen.
“I owe you a thousand dollars,” he said quietly. He wrote in the book. Then on the counterfoil. He tore the check out, came around the desk with it, and dropped it in front of me. “Is that all right?”
I leaned back and looked up at him and didn’t touch the check and didn’t answer him. His face was tight and drawn. His eyes were deep and empty.
“I suppose yow think I killed her and let Lennox take the rap,” he said slowly. “She was a tramp all right. But you don’t beat a woman’s head in just because she’s a tramp. Candy knows I went there sometimes. The funny part of it is I don’t think he would tell. I could be wrong, but I don’t think so.”
“Wouldn’t matter if he did,” I said. “Harlan Potter’s Mends wouldn’t listen to him. Also, she wasn’t killed with that bronze thing. She was shot through the head with her own gun.”
“She maybe had a gun,” he said almost dreamily. “But I didn’t know she had been shot. It wasn’t published.”
“Didn’t know or didn’t remember?” I asked him. “No, it wasn’t published.”
“What are you trying to do to me, Marlowe?” His voice was still dreamy, almost gentle. “What do you want me to do? Tell my wife? Tell the police? What good would it do?”
“You said a good man died for you.”
“All I meant was that if there had been any real investigation I might have been identified aS one—but only one—of the possible suspects. It would have finished me in several ways.”
“I didn’t come here to accuse you of a murder, Wade. What’s eating you is that you’re not sure yourself. You have a record of violence to your wife. You black out when you’re drunk. It’s no argument to say you don’t beat a woman’s head in just because she’s a tramp. That is exactly what somebody did do. And the guy who got credit for the job seemed to me a lot less likely than you.”
He walked to the open french windows and stood looking out at ‘the shimmer of heat over the lake. He didn’t answer me. He hadn’t moved or spoken a couple of minutes later when there was a light knock at the door and Candy came in wheeling a tea wagon, with a crisp white cloth, silver-covered dishes, a pot of coffee, and two bottles of beer.
“Open the beer, boss?” he asked Wade’s back.
“Bring me a bottle of whiskey.” Wade didn’t turn around.
“Sorry, boss. No whiskey.”
Wade spun around and yelled at him, but Candy didn’t budge. He looked down at the check lying on the cocktail table and his head twisted as he read it. Then he looked up at me and hissed something between his teeth. Then he looked at Wade.
“I go now. This my day off.”
He turned and went. Wade laughed.
“So I get it myself,” he said sharply, and went.
I lifted one of the covers and saw some neatly trimmed three-cornered sandwiches.’ I took one and poured some beer and ate the sandwich standing up. Wade came back with a bottle and a glass. He Sat down on the couch and poured a stiff jolt and sucked it down. There was the sound of a car going away from the house, probably Candy leaving by the service driveway. I took another sandwich.
“Sit down and make yourself comfortable,” Wade said. “We have all afternoon to kill.” He had a glow on already. His voice was vibrant and cheerful. “You don’t like me, do you, Marlowe?”
“That question has already been asked and answered.”
“Know something? You’re a pretty ruthless son of a bitch. You’d do anything to find what you want. You’d even make love to my wife while I was helpless drunk in the next room.”
“You believe everything that knife thrower tells you?” He poured some more whiskey into his glass and held it up against the light. “Not everything, no. A pretty color whiskey is, isn’t it? To drown in a golden flood—that’s not so bad. ‘To cease upon the midnight with no pain.’ How does that go on? Oh, sorry, you wouldn’t know. Too literary. You’re some kind of a dick, aren’t you? Mind telling me why you’re here.”
He drank some more whiskey and grinned at me. Then he spotted the check lying on the table. He reached for it and read it over his glass.
“Seems to be made out to somebody named Marlowe. 1 wonder why, what for. Seems I signed it. Foolish of me, I’m a gullible chap.”
“Stop acting,” I said roughly. “Where’s your wife?”
He looked up politely, “My wife will be home in due course. No doubt by that time I shall be passed out and she can entertain you at her leisure. The house will be yours.”
“Where’s the gun?” I asked suddenly.
He looked blank. I told him I had put it in his desk. “Not there now, I’m sure,” he said. “You may search if it pleases you. Just don’t steal any rubber bands.”
I went to the desk and frisked it. No gun. That was something. Probably Eileen had hidden it.
“Look, Wade, I asked you where your wife was. I think she ought to come home. Not for my benefit, friend, for yours. Somebody has to look out for you, and I’ll be goddamned if it’s going to be me.”
He stared vaguely. He was still holding the check. He put his glass down and, tore the check across, then again and again, and let the pieces fall to the floor.
“Evidently the amount was too small,” he said. “Your services come very high. Even a thousand dollars and my wife fail to satisfy you. Too bad, but I can’t go any higher. Except on this.” He patted the bottle.
“I’m leaving,” I said.
‘But why? You wanted me to remember. Well—here in the bottle is my memory. Stick around, pal. When I get lit enough I’ll tell you about all the women I have murdered.”
“All right, Wade. I’ll stick around for a while. But not in here. If you need me, just smash a chair against the wall.”
I went out and left the door open. I walked across the big living room and out to the patio and pulled one of the chaises into the shadow of the overhang and stretched out on it. Across the lake there was a blue hare against the hills. The ocean breeze had begun to filter through the low mountains to the west. It wiped the air clean and it wiped away just enough of the heat. Idle Valley was having a perfect summer. Somebody had planned it that way. Paradise Incorporated, and also Highly Restricted. Only the nicest people. Absolutely no Central Europeans. Just the cream, the top drawer crowd, the lovely, lovely people. Like the Lorings and the Wades. Pure gold.
35
I lay there for half hour trying to make up my mind what to do. Part of me wanted to let him get good and drunk and see if anything came out. I didn’t think anything much would happen to him in his own study in his own house. He might fall down again but it would be a long time. The guy had capacity. And somehow a drunk never hurts himself very badly. He might get back his mood of guilt, More likely, this time he would just go to sleep.
The other part of me wanted to get out and stay out, but this was the part I never listened to. Because if I ever had I would have stayed in the town where I was born and worked in the hardware store and married the boss’s daughter and had five kids and read them the funny paper on Sunday morning and smacked their heads when they got out of line and squabbled with the wife about how much spending money they were to get and what programs they could have on the radio or TV set. I might even have got rich—small-town rich, an eight-roam house, two cars in the garage, chicken every Sunday and the Reader’s Digest on the living room table, the wife with a cast iron permanent and me with a brain like a sack of Portland cement. You take it, friend., I’ll take -the big sordid dirty crooked city.
I got up and went back to the study. He was just sitting there staring at nothing, the Scotch bottle more than half empty, a loose frown on his face and a dull glitter in his eyes. He looked at me like a horse looking over a fence.
“What d’you want?”
“Nothing. You all right?”
“Don’t bother me. I have a little man on my shoulder telling me stories.”
I got another sandwich off the tea wagon and another glass of beer. I munched the sandwich and drank the beer, leaning against his desk.
“Know something?” he asked suddenly, and his voice suddenly seemed much more dear. “I had a male secretary once. Used to dictate to him. Let him go. He bothered me sitting there waiting for me to create. Mistake. Ought to have kept him. Word would have got around I was a homo. The dever boys that write book reviews because they can’t write anything else would have caught on and started giving me the buildup. Have to take care of their own, you know. They’re all queen, every damn one of them. The queer is the artistic arbiter of our age, chum. The pervert is the top guy now.”
“That so? Always been around, hasn’t he?”
He wasn’t looking at me. He was just talking. But he heard what I said.
“Sure, thousands of years. And especially in all the great ages of art. Athens, Rome, the Renaissance, the Elizabethan Age, the Romantic Movement in France—loaded with them. Queen all over the place. Ever read The Golden Bough? No, too long for you. Shorter version though. Ought to read it. Proves our sexual habits are pure conventions like—wearing a black tie with a dinner jacket. Me. I’m a sex writer, but with frills and straight.”
He looked up at me and sneered. “You know something? Fm a liar. My heroes are eight feet tall and my heroines have callouses on their bottoms from lying in bed with their knees up. Lace and ruffles, swords and coaches, elegance and leisure, duels and gallant death. All lies. They used perfume instead of soap, their teeth rotted because they never deaned them, their fingernails smelled of stale gravy. The nobility of France urinated against the walls in the marble-corridors of Versailles, and when you finally got several sets of underclothes off the lovely marquise the first thing you noticed was that she needed a bath. I ought to write it that way.”
“Why don’t you?”
He chuckled. “Sure, and live in a five-room house in Compton—if I was that lucky.” He reached down and patted the whiskey bottle. “You’re lonely, pal. You need company.”
He got up and walked fairly steadily out of the room. I waited, thinking about nothing. A speedboat came racketing down the lake. When it came in sight I could see that it was high out of the water on its step and towing a surfboard with a husky sunburned lad on it. I went over to the french windows and watched it make a sweeping turn. Too fast, the speedboat almost turned over. The surfboard rider danced on one foot trying to hold, his balance, ihen went shooting off into the-water. The speedboat drifted to a stop and the man in the water came up to it in a lazy crawl, then went back along the tow rope and rolled himself on to the surfboard.
Wade came back with another bottle of whiskey. The speedboat picked up and went off into the distance. Wade put his fresh bottle down beside the other. He sat down and brooded.
“Christ, you’re not going to drink all that, are you?”
He squinted his eyes at me. “Take off, buster. Go on home and mop the kitchen floor or something. You’re in my light.” His voice was thick again. He had taken a couple in the kitchen, as usual.
“If you want me, holler.”
“I couldn’t get low enough to want you.”
“Yeah, thanks. I’ll be around until Mrs. Wade comes home. Ever hear of anybody named Paul Marston?”
His head came up slowly. His eyes focused, but with effort. I could see him fighting for controL He won the fight for the moment. His face became expressionless.
“Never did,” he said carefully, speaking very slowly, “Who’s he?”
The next time I looked in on him he was asleep, with his mouth open, his hair damp withsweat, and reeking of Scotch. His lips were pulled back from his teeth in a loose grimace and the furred surface of his tongue looked dry.
One of the whiskey bottles was empty. A glass on the table had about two inches in it and the other bottle was about three quarters full. I put the empty on the tea wagon and rolled it out of the room, then went back to close the french windows and turn the slats of the blinds. The speedboat might come back and wake him. I shut the study door.
I wheeled the tea wagon out to the kitchen, which was blue and white and large and airy and empty, I was still hungry. I ate another sandwich and drank what was left of the beer, then poured a cup of coffee and drank that. The beer was flat but the coffee was still hot. Then I went back to the patio. It was quite a long time before the speedboat came tearing down the lake again. It was almost four o’clock when I heard its distant roar swell into an ear-splitting howl of noise. There ought to be a law. Probably was and the guy in the speedboat didn’t give a damn. He enjoyed making a nuisance of himself, like other people I was meeting. I walked down to the edge of the lake.
He made it this time. The driver slowed just enough on the turn and the brown lad on the surfboard leaned far out against the centrifugal pull. The surfboard was almost out of the water, but one edge stayed in and then the speedboat straightened out and the surfboard still had a rider and they went back the way they had come and that was that. The waves stirred up by the boat came charging in towards the shore of the lake at my feet. They slapped h3rd against the piles of the short landing and jumped the tied boat up and down. They were still slapping it around when I turned back to the house.
As I reached the patio I heard a bell chiming from the direction of the kitchen. When it sounded again I decided that only the front door would have chimes. I crossed to it and opened it.