Spencer was very quiet now. He leaned back and stared. But not at me. He stared at Eileen. She looked back at him with one of those faint half deprecatory, half seductive smiles women are so good at.
“But he was dead,- Howard. Long before I met Roger. What could it possibly matter? Roger knew all about it. I never stopped using my unmarried name. In the circumstances I had to. It was on my passport. Then after he was killed in action—” She stopped and drew a slow breath and let her hand fall slowly and softly to her knee. “All finished, all done for, all lost.”
“You’re sure Roger knew?” he asked her slowly.
“He knew something,” I said. “The name Paul Marston had a meaning for him. I asked him once and he got a funny look in his eyes. But he didn’t tell me why.”
She ignored that and spoke to Spencer.
“Why, of course Roger knew all about it.” Now she was smiling at Spencer patiently as if he was being a little slow on the take. The tricks they have.
“Then why lie about the dates?” Spencer asked dryly. “Why say the man was lost in 1940 when he was lost in 1942? Why wear a badge that he couldn’t have given you and make a point of saying that he did give it to you?”
“Perhaps I was lost in a dream,” she said softly. “Or a nightmare, more accurately. A lot of my friends were killed in the bombing. When you said goodnight in those days you tried not to make it sound like goodbye. But that’s what it often was. And when you said goodbye to a soldier—it was worse. It’s always the kind and gentle ones that get killed.”
He didn’t say anything. I didn’t say anything. She looked down at the pendant lying on the table in front of her. She picked it-up and fitted it to the chain around her neck again and leaned back composedly.
“I know I haven’t any right to cross-examine you, Eileen,” Spencer said slowly. “Let’s forget it. Marlowe made a big thing out of the badge and the marriage certificate and so on. Just for a moment I guess he had me wondering.”
“Mr. Marlowe,” she told him quietly, “makes a big thing out of trifles. But when it comes to a really big thing—like saving a man’s life—he is out by the lake watching a silly speedboat.”
“And you never saw Paul Marston again,” I said.
“How could I when he was dead?”
“You didn’t know he was dead. There was no report of his death from the Red Cross. He might have been taken prisoner.”
She shuddered suddenly. “In October 1942,” she said slowly, “Hitler issued an order that all Commando prisoners were to be turned over to the Gestapo. I think we all— know what that meant. Torture and a nameless death in some Gestapo dungeon.” She shuddered again. -Then she blazed at me: “You’re a horrible man. You want me to live that over again, to punish me for a trivial lie. Suppose someone you loved had been caught by those people and you knew what had happened, what must have happend to him or her? Is it so strange that I tried to build another kind of memory—even a false one?”
“I need a drink,” Spencer said. “I need a drink badly. May I have one?”
She clapped her hands and Candy drifted up from nowhere as he always did. He bowed to Spencer.
“What you like to drink, Sefior Spencer?”
“Straight Scotch, and plenty of it,” Spencer said.
Candy went over in the corner and pulled the bar out from the wall. He got a bottle up on it and poured a stiff jolt into a glass. He came back and set it down in front of Spencer. He started to leave again.
“Perhaps, Candy,” Eileen said., quietly, “Mr. Marlowe would like a drink too.”
He stopped and looked at her, his face dark and stubborn.
“No, thanks,” I said. “No drink for me.”
Candy made a snorting sound and walked off. There was another silence. Spencer put down half of his drink. He lit a cigarette. He spoke to me without looking at me.
“I’m sure Mrs. Wade or Candy could drive me back to Beverly Hills. Or I can get a cab. I take it you’ve said your piece.
I refolded the certified copy of the marriage license. I put it back in my pocket.
“Sure that’s the way you want it?” I asked him.
“That’s the way everybody wants it.”
“Cood.” I stood up,, “I guess I was a fool to try to play it this way. Being a big time publisher and having the brains to go with it—if it takes any—you might have assumed I didn’t come out here just to play the heavy. I didn’t revive ancient history or spend my own money to get the facts just to twist them around somebody’s neck. I didn’t investigate Paul Marston because the-Gestapo murdered him, because Mrs. Wade was wearing the wrong badge, because she got mixed up on her dates, because she married him in one of those quickie wartime marriages. When I started investigating him I didn’t know any of those things. All I knew was his name. Now hew do you suppose I knew that?”
“No doubt somebody told you;” Spencer said curtly.
“Correct, Mr. Spencer. Somebody who knew him in New York after the war and later on saw him out here in Chasen’s with his wife.”
“Marston is a pretty common name,” Spencer said, and sipped his whiskey. He turned his head sideways and his right eyelid drooped a fraction of an inch. So I sat down again. “Even Paul Marstons could hardly be unique. There are nineteen Howard Spencers in the Greater New York area telephone directories, for instance. And four of them are just plain Howard Spencer with no middle initial.”
“Yeah. How many Paul Marstons would you say had had one side of their faces smashed by a delayed-action mortar shell and showed the scars and marks of the plastic surgery that repaired the damage?”
Spencer’s mouth fell open. He made some kind of heavy breathing sound. He got out a handkerchief and tapped his temples with it.
“How many Paul Marstons would you say had saved the lives of a couple of tough gamblers named Mendy Menendez and Randy Starr on that Same occasion? They’re still around, they’ve got good memories. They can talk when it suits them. Why ham it up any more, Spencer? Paul Marston and Terry Lennox were the same man. It can be proved beyond any shadow of a doubt.”
I didn’t expect anyone to jump six feet into the air and scream and nobody did. But there is a kind of silence that is almost as loud as a shout. I had it. I had it all around me, thick and hard. In the kitchen I could hear water run. Outside on the road I could hear the dull thump of a folded newspaper hit the driveway, then the light inaccurate whistling of a boy wheeling away on his bicycle.
I felt a tiny sting on the back of my neck. I jerked away from it and swung around. Candy was standing there with his knife in his hand. His dark face was wooden but there was something in his eyes I hadn’t seen before.
“You are tired, amigo,” he said softly. “I fix you a drink, no?”
“Bourbon on the rocks, thanks,” I said.
“De pronto, se�or.”
He snapped the knife shut, dropped it into the side pocket of his white jacket and went softly away.
Then at last I looked at Eileen. She sat leaning forward, her hands clasped tightly. The downward tilt of her face hid her expression if she had any. And when she spoke her voice had the lucid emptiness of that mechanical voice on the telephone that tells you the time and if you keep on listening, which people don’t because they have no reason to, it will keep on telling you the passing seconds forever, without the slightest change of inflection.
“I saw him once, Howard. Just once. I didn’t speak to him at all. Nor he to me. He was terribly changed. His hair was white and his face—it wasn’t quite the same face. But of course I knew him, and of course he knew me; We looked at each other. That was all. Then he was gone out of the room and the next day he was gone from her house. It was at the Lorings’ I saw him—and her. One afternoon late. You were there, Howard. And Roger was there. I suppose you saw him too.”
“We were introduced,” Spencer said. “I knew who he was married to.”
“Linda Loring told me he just disappeared. He gave no reason. There was no quarrel. Then after a while that woman divorced him. And still later I heard she found him again. He was down and out. And they were married again. Heaven knows why. I suppose he had no money and it didn’t matter to him any more. He knew that I was married to Roger. We were lost to each other.”
“Why?” Spencer asked.
Candy put my drink in front of me without a word. He looked at Spencer and Spencer shook his head. Candy drifted away. Nobody paid any attention to him. He was like the prop man in a Chinese play, the fellow that moves things around on the stage and the actors and audience alike behave as if he wasn’t there.
“Why?” she repeated. “Oh, you wouldn’t understand. What we had was lost. It could never be recovered. The Gestapo didn’t get him after all. There must have been some decent Nazis who didn’t obey Hitler’s order about the Commandos. So he survived, he came back. I used to pretend to myself that I would find him again, but as he had been, eager and young and unspoiled. But to find him married to that redheaded whore—that was disgusting. I already knew about her and Roger. I have no doubt Paul did too. So did Linda Loring, who is a bit of a tramp herself, but not completely so. They all are in that set. You ask me why I didn’t leave Roger and go back to Paul. After he had been in her arms and Roger had been in those same willing arms? No thank you. I need a little more inspiration than that. Roger I could forgive. He drank, he didn’t know what he was doing. He worried about his work and he hated himself because he was just a mercenary hack. He was a weak man, unreconciled, frustrated, but understandable. He was just a husband. Paul was either much more or he was nothing. In the end he was nothing.”
I took a swig of my drink. Spencer had finished his. He was scratching at the material of the davenport. He had forgotten the pile of paper in front of him, the unfinished novel of the very much finished popular author.
“I wouldn’t say he was nothing,” I said.
She lifted her eyes and looked at me vaguely and dropped them again.
“Less than nothing,” she said, with a new note of sarcasm in her voice. “He knew what she was, he married her. Then because she was what he knew she was, he killed her. And then ran away and killed himself.”
“He didn’t kill her,” I said, “and you know it.”
She came upright with a smooth motion and stared at me blankly. Spencer let out a noise of some kind.
“Roger killed her,” I said, “and you also know that.”
“Did he tell you?” she asked quietly.
“He didn’t have to. He did give me a couple of hints. He would have told me or someone in time. It was tearing him to pieces not to.”
She shook her head slightly. “No, Mr. Marlowe. That was not why he was tearing himself to pieces. Roger didn’t know he had killed her. He had blacked out completely. He knew something was wrong and he tried to bring it to the surface, but he couldn’t. The shock had destroyed his memory of it. Perhaps it would-have come back and perhaps in the last moments of his life it did come back. But not until then. Not until then.”
Spencer said in a sort of growl: “That sort of thing just doesn’t happen, Eileen.”
“Oh yes, it does,” I said. “I know of two well established instances. One was a blackout drunk who killed a woman he picked up in a bar. He strangled her with a scarf she was wearing fastened with a fancy clasp. She went home with him and what went on then is not known except that she got dead and when the law caught up with him he was wearing the fancy clasp on his own tie and he didn’t have the faintest idea where he got it.”
“Never?” Spencer asked. “Or just at the time?”
“He never admitted it. And he’s not around any more to be asked. They gassed him. The other case was a head wound. He was living with a rich pervert, the kind that collects first editions and does fancy cooking and has a very expensive secret library behind a panel in the wall. The two of them had a fight. They fought all over the house, from room to room, the place was a shambles and the rich guy eventually got the low score. The killer, when they caught him, had dozens of bruises on him and a broken finger. All he knew for sure was that he had a headache and he couldn’t find his-way back to Pasadena. He kept circling around and stopping to ask directions at the same service Station. The guy at the service station decided he was nuts and called the cops. Next time around they were waiting for him.”
“I don’t believe that about Roger,” Spencer said. “He was no more psycho than I am.”
“He blacked out when he was drunk,” I said.
“I was there. I saw him do it,” Eileen said calmly.
I grinned at Spencer. It was some kind of grin, not the cheery kind probably, but I could feel my face doing its best.
“She’s going to tell us about it,” I told him. “Just listen. She’s going to tell us. She can’t help herself now.”
“Yes, that is true,” she said gravely. “There are things no one likes to tell about an enemy, much less about one’s own husband. And if I have to tell them publicly on a witness stand, you are not going to enjoy it, Howard. Your fine, talented, ever so popular and lucrative author is going to look pretty cheap. Sexy as all get out, wasn’t he? On paper, that is. And how the poor fool tried to live up to it! AU that woman was to him was a trophy. I spied on them. I should be ashamed of that. One has to say these things. I am ashamed of nothing. I saw the whole nasty scene. The guest house she used for her amours happens to be a nice secluded affair with its own garage and entrance on a side street, a dead end, shaded by big trees. The time came, as it must to people like Roger, when he was no longer a satisfactory lover. Just a little too drunk. He tried to leave but she came out after him screaming and stark naked, waving some kind of small statuette. She used language of a depth of filth and depravity I couldn’t attempt to describe. Then she tried to hit him with the statuette. You are -both men and you must know that nothing shocks a man quite so much as to hear a supposedly refined woman use the language of the gutter and the public urinal. He was drunk, he had had sudden spells of violence, and he had one then. He tore the statuette out of her hand. You can guess the rest.”
“There must have been a lot of blood,” I said.
“Blood?” She laughed bitterly. “You should have seen him when he got home. When I ran for my car to get away he was just standing there looking down at her. Then he bent and picked her up in his arms-and carried her into the guest house. I knew then that the shock had partially sobered him. He got home in about an hour. He was very quiet. It shook him when he saw me waiting. But he wasn’t drunk then. He was dazed. There was blood on his face, on his hair, all over the front of his coat. I got him into the lavatory off the study and got him stripped and cleaned off enough to get him upstairs into the shower. I put him to bed. I got an old suitcase and went downstairs and gathered up the bloody clothes and put them in the suitcase. I cleaned the basin and the floor and then I took a ‘wet towel out and made sure his car was clean. I put it away and got mine out. I drove to the Chatsworth Reservoir and you can guess what I did with the suitcase full of bloody clothes and towels.”
She stopped. Spencer was scratching at the palm of his left hand. She gave him a quick glance and went on.
“While I was away he got up and drank a lot of whiskey. And the next morning he didn’t remember a single thing. That is, he didn’t say a word about it or behave as if he had anything on his mind but a hangover. And I said nothing.”
“He must have missed the clothes,” I said.
She nodded. “I think he did eventually—but he didn’t say so. Everything seemed to happen at once about that time. The papers were full of it, then Paul was missing, and then-he was dead in Mexico. How was I to know that would happen? Roger was my husband. He had done an awful thing, but she was an awful woman. And he hadn’t known what he was doing. Then almost as suddenly as it began the papers ‘dropped it. Linda’s father must have had something to do with that. Roger read the papers, of course, and he made just the sOrt of comments one would expect from an innocent bystander who had just happened to know the people involved.”
“Weren’t you afraid?” Spencer asked her quietly.
“I was sick with fear, Howard. If he remembered, he would probably kill me. He was a good actor—most writers are—and perhaps he already knew and was just waiting for a chance. But I couldn’t be sure. He might— just might—have forgotten the whole thing permanently. And Paul was dead.”
“If he never mentioned the clothes that you had dumped in the reservoir, that proved he suspected something,” I said. “And remember, in that stuff he left in the typewriter the other time—the time he shot the gun off upstairs and I found you trying to get it away from him—he said a good ni�n had died for him.”
“He said that?” Her eyes widened just the right amount.
“He wrote it—on the typewriter. I destroyed it, he asked me to. I supposed you had already seen it.”
“I never read anything he wrote in his study.”
“You read the note he left the time Verringer took him away. You even dug something out of the wastebasket.”
“That was different,” she said coolly. “I was looking for a due to where he might have gone.”
“Okay,” I said, and leaned back. “Is there any more?”
She shook her head slowly, with a deep sadness. “I suppose not. At the very last, the afternoon he killed himself, he may have remembered. We’ll never know. Do we want to know?”
Spencer cleared his throat. ‘What was Marlowe supposed to do in all this? It was your idea to get him here. You talked me into that, you know.”
“I was terribly afraid. I was afraid of Roger and I was afraid for him. Mr. Marlowe was Paul’s friend, almost the ‘last person to see him who knew him. Paul might have told him something. I had to be sure. If he was dangerous, I wanted him on my side. If he found out the truth, there might still be some way to save Roger.”
Suddenly and for no reason that I could see, Spencer got tough. He leaned forward and pushed his jaw out.