“Upstairs?” he asked Ohls.
“Yeah—in her room.” Ohls stood up. “What you give her that demerol for, Doc?”
Dr. Loring frowned at him. “I prescribe for my patient as I think proper,” he said coldly. “I am not required to explain why. Who says I gave Mrs. Wade demerol?”
“I do. The bottle’s up there with your name on it. She’s got a regular drugstore in herThathroom. Maybe you don’t know it, Doc, but we have a pretty complete exhibit of the little pills downtown. Bluejays, redbirds, yellow jackets, goofballs, and all the rest of the list. Demerol’s about the worst of the lot. That’s the stuff Goering lived on, I heard somewhere. Took eighteen a day when they caught him. Took the army doctors three months to cut him down.”
“I don’t know what those words mean,” Dr. Loring said frigidly.
“You don’t? Pity. Bluejays are sodium amytal. Redbirds are seconal. Yellow jackets are nembutal. Goofballs are one of the barbiturates laced with benzedrine. Demerol is a synthetic narcotic that is very habit forming. You just hand ‘em out, huh? Is the lady suffering from something serious?”
“A drunken husband can be a very serious complaint indeed for a sensitive woman,” Dr. Losing said.
“You didn’t get around to him, huh? Pity. Mrs. Wade’s upstairs, Doc. Thanks for the time.”
“You are impertinent, sir. I shall report you.”
“Yeah, do that,” Ohls said. “But before you report me, do something else. Keep the lady dear in her head. I’ve got �uestions to ask.”
“I shall do exactly what I think best for her condition. Do you know who I am, by any chance? And just to make matters dear, Mr. Wade was not my patient. I don’t treat alcoholics.”
“Just their wives, huh?” Ohls snarled at him. “Yeah, I know who you are, Doc. I’m bleeding internally. My name is Ohls. Lieutenant Ohls.”
Dr. Losing went on up the stairs. Obis sat down again and grinned at me.
“You got to be diplomatic with this kind of people,” he said.
A man came out of the study and came up to Ohls. A thin serious-looking man with glasses and a brainy forehead.
“Lieutenant.”
“Shoot.”
“The wound is contact, typically, suicidal, with a good deal of distention from gas pressure. The eyes are exophthalmic from the same cause. I don’t think there will be any’ prints on the outside of the gun. It’s been bled on too freely.”
“Could it be homicide if the guy was asleep or passed out drunk?” Ohls asked him.
“Of course, but there’s no indication of it. The gun’s a Webley Hammerless. Typically, this gun takes a very stiff pull to cock it, but a very light pull to discharge it. The recoil explains the position of the gun. I see nothing against suicide so far. I expect a high figure on alcoholic concentration. If it’s high enough—” the man stopped and shrugged meaningly— “I might be inclined to doubt suicide.”
“Thanks. Somebody call the coroner?”
The man nodded and went away, Ohls yawned and looked at his watch. Then he looked at me.
“You want to blow?”
“Sure, if you’ll let me. I thought I was a suspect.”
“We might oblige you later on. Stick around where you can be found, that’s all. You were a dick once, you know how they go. Some you got to work fast before the evidence gets away from you, This one is just the opposite. If it was a homicide, who wanted him dead? His wife? She wasn’t here. You? Fine, you had the house to yourself and knew where the gun was. A perfect setup, Everything but a motive, and we might perhaps give some weight to your experience. I figure if you wanted to kill a guy, you could maybe do it a little less obviously.”
“Thahks, Bernie. I could at that.”
“The help wasn’t here. They’re out. So it must have been somebody that just happened to drop by. That somebody had to know where Wade’s gun was, had to find him drunk enough to be asleep or passed out, and had to pull the trigger when that speedboat was making enough noise to drown the shot, and had to get away before you came back into the house. That I don’t buy on any knowledge I have now. The only person who had the means and opportunity was the one guy who wouldn’t have used them—for the simple reason he was the one guy who had them.”
I stood up to go. “Okay, Bernie. I’ll be home all evening.”
“There’s just one thing,” Ohls said musingly. “This man Wade was a big time writer. Lots of dough, lots of reputation. I don’t go for his sort of crap myself. You might find nicer people than his characters in a whorehouse. That’s a matter of taste and none of my business as a cop. With all this money he had a beautiful home in one of the best places to live in in the county. He had a beautiful wife, lots of friends, and no troubles at all. What I want to know is what made all that so tough that he had to pull a trigger? Sure as hell something did. If you know, you better get ready to lay it on the line. See you.”
I went to the door. The man on the door looked back at Ohls, got the sign, and let me out. I got into my car and had to edge over on the lawn to get around the various official cars that jammed the driveway. At the gate another deputy looked me over but didn’t say anything. I slipped my dark glasses on and drove back towards the main highway. The road was empty and peacefuL The afternoon sun beat down on the manicured lawns and the large roomy expensive houses behind them.
A man not unknown to the world had died in a pool of blood in a house in Idle Valley, but the lazy quiet had not been disturbed. So far as the newspapers were concerned it might have happened in Tibet. At a turn of the road the walls of two estates came down to the shoulder and a dark green sheriff’s car was parked there. A deputy got out and held up his hand. I stopped. He came to the window.
“May I see your driver’s license, please?”
I took out my wallet and handed it to him open.
“Just the license, please, I’m not allowed to touch your wallet.”
I took it out and gave it to him. “What’s the trouble?”
He glanced into my car and handed me back my license.
“No trouble,” he said. “Just a routine check. Sorry to have troubled you.”
He waved me on and went back to the parked car. Just like a cop. They never tell you why they are doing anything. That way you don’t find out they don’t know themselves.
I drove home, bought myself a couple of cold drinks, went out to dinner, came back, opened the windows and my shirt and waited for something to happen. I waited a long time. It was nine o’dock when Bernie Ohls called up and told me to come in and not stop on the way to pick any flowers.
38
They Candy in a chair against the wall of the Sheriff’s anteroom. He hated me with his eyes as I went by him into the big square room where Sheriff Petersen held court in the middle of a collection of testimonials from a grateful public to his twenty years of faithful public service. The walls were loaded with photographs of horses and Sheriff ‘Petersen made a personal appearance in every photograph. The corners of his carved desk were horses’ heads.- His inkwell was a mounted polished horse’s hoof and his pens were planted in the mate to it filled with white sand. A gold plate on each of these said something or other about a date. In the middle of a spotless desk blotter lay a bag of Bull Durham and a pack of brown cigarette papers. Petersen rolled his own. He could roll one with one hand on horseback and often did, especially when leading a parade on a big white horse with a Mexican saddle loaded with beautiful Mexican silverwork. On horseback he wore a flat-crowned Mexican sombrero. He rode beautifully and his horse always knew exactly when to be quiet, when to act up so that the Sheriff with his calm inscrutable smile could bring the horse back under control with one hand. The Sheriff had a good act. He had a handsome hawklike profile, getting a little saggy under the chin by now, but he knew how to hold his head so it wouldn’t show too much. He put a lot of hard work into having his picture taken. He was in his middle fifties and his father, a Dane, had left him a lot of money. The Sheriff didn’t look like a Dane, because his hair was dark and his skin was brown and he had the impassive poise of a cigar store Indian and about the same kind of brains. But nobody had ever called him a crook. There had been crooks in his department and they had fooled him as well as they had fooled the public, but none of the crookedness rubbed off on Sheriff Petersen. He just went right on getting elected without even trying, riding white horses at the head of parades, and questioning suspects in front of cameras. That’s what the captions said. As a matter of fact he never questioned anybody. He wouldn’t have known how. He just sat at his desk looking sternly at the suspect, showing his profile to the camera. The flash bulbs would go off, the camera men woukl thank the Sheriff deferentially, and the suspect would be removed not having opened his mouth, and the Sheriff would go home to his ranch in the San Fernando Valley. There he could always be reached. If you couldn’t reach him in person, you could talk to one of his horses.
Once in a while, come election thne, some misguided politician would try to get Sheriff Petersen’s job, and would be apt to call him things like The Guy With The Built-In Profile or The Ham That Smokes Itself, but it didn’t get him anywhere. Sheriff Petersen just went right on getting reelected, a living testimonial to the fact that you can hold an important public office forever in our country with no qualifications for it but a clean nose, a photogenic face, and a dose mouth. If on top of that you look good on a horse, you are unbeatable.
As Ohls and I went in, Sheriff Petersen was standing behind his desk and the camera boys were filing out by another door. The Sheriff had his white Stetson Ofl. He was rolling a cigarette. He was all set to go home. He looked at me sternly.
“Who’s this?” he asked in a rich baritone voice.
“Name’s Philip Marlowe, Chief,” Ohls said. “Only person in the house when Wade shot himself. You want a picture?”
The Sheriff studied me. “I don’t think so,” he said, and turned to a big tired-looking man with iron-gray hair. “If you need me, I’ll be at the ranch, Captain Hernandez.”
“Yes, sir.”
Petersen lit his cigarette with a kitchen match. He lit it on his thumbnail. No lighters for Sheriff Petersen. He was strictly a roll-your-own-and-.light-‘em-with-one-hand type.
He said goodnight and went out. A deadpan character with hard black eyes went with him, his personal bodyguard. The door dosed. When he -was gone Captain Hernandez moved to the desk and sat in the Sheriff’s enormous chair and a stenotype operator in the corner moved his stand out from the wall to get elbow room. Ohls sat at the end of the desk and looked amused.
“All right, Marlowe,” Hernandez said briskly. “Let’s have it.”
“How come I don’t get my photo taken?”
“You heard what the Sheriff said.”
“Yeah, but why?” I whined.
Ohls laughed. “You know damn well why.”
“You mean on account of I’m tall, dark, and handsome and somebody might look at me?”
“Cut it,” Hernandez said coldly. “Let’s get on with your statement. Start from the beginning.”
I gave it to them from the beginning: my interview with Howard Spencer, my meeting with Eileen Wade, her asking me to find Roger, my finding him, her asking me to the house, what Wade asked me to do and how I found him passed out near the hibiscus bushes and the rest of it. The stenotype operator took it down. Nobody interrupted me. All of it was true. The truth and nothing but the truth. But not quite all the truth. What I left out was my business.
“Nice,” Hernandez said at the end. “But not quite complete.” This was a cool competent dangerous guy, this Hernandez. Somebody in the Sheriff’s office had to be. “The night Wade shot off the gun in his bedroom you went into Mrs. Wade’s room and were in there for some time with the door shut. What were you doing in there?”
“She called me in and asked me how he was.”
“Why shut the door?”
“Wade was half asleep and I didn’t want to make any noise. Also the hbuseboy was hanging around with his ear out. Also she asked me to shut the door. I didn’t realize it was going to be important.”
“How long were you in there?”
“I don’t know. Three minutes maybe.”
“I suggest you were in there a couple of hours,” Hernandez said coldly. “Do I make myself dear?”
I looked at Ohls. Ohls didn’t look at anything. He was chewing on an unlighted cigarette as usual.
“You are misinformed, Captain.”
“We’ll see. After you left the room you went downstairs to the study and spent the night on the couch. Perhaps I should say the rest of the night.”
“It was ten minutes to eleven when he called me at home. It was long past two o’clock when I went into the study for the last time that night. Call it the rest of the night if you like.”
“Get the houseboy in here,” Hernandez said.
Ohls went out and came back with Candy. They put Candy in a chair. Hernandez asked him a few questions to establish who he was and so on. Then he said: “All right, Candy—we’ll call you that for convenience—after you helped Marlowe put Roger Wade to bed, what happened?”
I knew what was coming more or less. Candy told his story in a quiet savage voice with very little accent. It seemed as if he could turn that on and off at will. His story was that he had hung around downstairs in case he was wanted again, part of the time in the kitchen where he got himself some food, part of the time in the living room. While in the living room sitting in a chair near the front door he had seen Eileen Wade -standing in the door of her room and he had seen her take her clothes off. He had seen her put a robe on with nothing under it and he had seen me go into her room and I shut the door and stayed in there a long time, a couple of hours he thought. He had gone up the stairs and listened. He had heard the bedsprings making sounds. He had heard whispering. He made his meaning very obvious. When he had finished he gave me a corrosive look and his mouth was twisted tight with hatred.
“Take him out,” Hernandez said.
“Just a minute,” I said. “I want to question him.”
“I ask the questions here,” Hernandez said sharply.
“Ydu don’t know how, Captain. You weren’t there. He’s lying and he knows it and I know it.”
Hernandez leaned back and picked up one of the Sheriff’s pens. He bent the handle of the pen. It was long and pointed and made of stiffened horsehair. When he let go of the point it sprang back.
“Shoot,” he said at last.
I faced Candy. “Where were you when you saw Mrs. Wade take her dothes off?”
“I was sitting down in a chair near the fiont door,” he said in a surly tone.
“Between the front door and the two facing davenports?”
“What I said.”
“Where was Mrs. Wade?”
“Just inside the door of her room. The door was open.”
“What light was there in the living room?”
“One lamp. Tall lamp what they call a bridge lamp.”
“What light was on the balcony?”
“No light. Light in her bedroom.”
“What kind of light in her bedroom?”
“Not much light. Night table lamp, maybe.”
“Not a ceiling light?”
“No.”
“After she took her clothes off—standing just inside the door of her room, you said—she put on a robe. What kind of robe?”
“Blue robe. Long thing like a house coat. She tie it with a sash.”
“So if you hadn’t actually seen her take her clothes off you wouldn’t know what she had on under the robe?”
He shrugged. He looked vaguely worried. “Si. That’s right. But I see her take her clothes off.”
“You’re a liar. There isn’t any place in the living room from which you could see her take her clothes off right bang in her doorway, much less inside her room. She would have to come out to the edge of the balcony. If she had done that she would have seen you.”
He just glared at me. I turned to Ohls. “You’ve seen the house. Captain Hernandez hasn’t—or has he?”
Ohls shook his head slightly. Hernandez frowned andsaid nothing.
“There is no spot in that living room, Captain Hernandez, from which he could see even the top of Mrs. Wade’s head—even if he was standing up—and he says he was sitting down—provided the was as far back as her own doorway or inside it. I’m four inches taller than he is and I could only see the top foot of an open door when I was standing just inside the front door of the house, She would have to come out to the edge of the balcony for him to see what he says he saw. Why would she do that? Why would she undress in her doorway even? There’s no sense to it.”