“Se�or Marlowe?”
“What can I do for you?”
He handed me a folded paper. “Un aviso de parte del Se�or Starr en Las Vegas, se�or. Habla Usted Espaflol?”
“Yeah, but not fast. English would be better.”
“English then,” he said. “It is all the same to me.”
I took the paper and read it. “This introduces Cisco Maioranos, a friend of mine. I think he can fix you up. S.”
“Let’s go inside, Se�or Maioranos,” I said.
I held the door open for him. He smelled of perfume as he went by. His eyebrows were awfully damned dainty too. But he probably wasn’t as dainty as he looked because there were knife scars on both sides of his face.
52
He sat down in the customer’s chair and crossed his knees. “You wish certain information about Se�or Lennox, I am told.”
“The last scene only.”
“I was there at the time, se�or. I had a position in the hotel.” He shrugged. “Unimportant and of course ternporary. I was the day derk.” He spoke perfect English but with a Spanish rhythm. Spanish—American Spanish that is—has a definite rise and fall which to an American ear seems to have nothing to do with the meaning. It’s like the swell of the ocean.
“You don’t look the type,” I said.
“One has difficulties.”
“Who mailed the letter to me?”
He held out a box of cigarettes. “Try one of these.” I shook my head. “Too strong for me. Colombian cigarettes I like. Cuban cigarettes are murder.”
He smiled faintly, lit another pill himself, and blew smoke. The guy was so goddam elegant he was beginning to annoy me.
“I know about the letter, se�or. The mozo was afraid to go up to the room of this Se�or Lennox after the guarda was posted. The cop or dick, as you say. So I myself took the letter to the correo. After the shooting, you understand.”
“You ought to have looked inside. It had -a large piece of money in it.”
“The letter was sealed,” he said coldly. “El honor no se mueve de lado como los congrejos. That is, honor does not move sidewise like a crab, se�or.”
“My apologies. Please continue.”
“Se�or Lennox had a hundred-peso note in his left hand when I went into the room and shut the door in the face of the guarda. In his right hand was a pistol. On the table before him was the letter. Also another paper which I did not read. I refused the note.”
“Too much money,” I said, but he didn’t react to the sarcasm.
“He insisted. So I took the note finally and gave it to the mozo later. I took the letter out under the napkin on the tray from the previous service of coffee. The dick looked hard at me. But he said nothing. I was halfway down the stairs when I heard the shot. Very quickly I hid the letter and ran back upstairs. The dick was trying to kick the door open. I used my key. Se�or Lennox was dead.”
He moved his fingertips gently along the edge of the desk and sighed. “The rest no doubt you know.”
“Was the hotel full?”
“Not full, no. There were half a dozen guests.”
“Americans?”
“Two Americanos del Norte. Hunters.”
“Real Gringos or just transplanted Mexicans?”
He drew a fingertip slowly along the fawn-colored cloth above his knee. “I think one of them could well have been of Spanish origin. He spoke border Spanish. Very inelegant.”
“They go near Lennox’s room at all?”
He lifted his head sharply but the green cheaters didn’t do a thing for me. “Why should they, sefior?”
I nodded. “Well, it was damn nice of you to come in here and tell me about it, Se�or Maioranos. Tell Randy I’m ever so grateful, will you?”
“No hay de que, se�or. It is nothing.”
“And later on, if he has time, he could send me somebody who knows what he is talking about.”
“Se�or?” His voice was soft, but icy. “You doubt my word?”
“You guys are always talking about honor. Honor is the cloak of thieves—sometimes. Don’t get mad. Sit quiet and let me tell it another way.”
He leaned back superciliously.
“I’m only guessing, mind. I could be wrong. But I could be right too. These two Americanos were there for a purpose. They came in on a plane. They pretended to be hunters. One of them was named Menendez, a gambler. He registered under some other name or not. I wouldn’t know. Lennox knew they were there. He knew why. He wrote me that letter because he had a guilty conscience. He had played me for a sucker and he was too nice a guy for that to rest easy on him. He put the bill—five thousand dollars it was—in the letter because he had a lot of money and he knew I hadn’t. He also put in a little off-beat hint which might or might not register. He was the kind of guy who always wants to do the right thing but somehow winds up doing something else. You say you took the letter to the correo. Why didn’t you mail it in the box in front of the hotel?”
“The box, se�or?”
“The mailbox. The cajdn cartero, you call it, I think.”
He smiled. “Otatocl�n is not Mexico City, se�or. It is a very primitive place. A street mailbox in Otatod�n? No one there would understand what it was for. No one would collect letters from it.”
I said: “Oh. Well, skip it. You did not take any coffee on any tray up to Se�or Lennox’s room, Se�or Maioranos. You did not go into the room past the dick. But the two Americanos did go in. The dick was fixed, of course. So were several other people. One of the Americanos slugged Lennox from behind. Then he took the Mauser pistol and opened up one of the cartridges and took out the bullet and put the cartridge back in the breech. Then he put this gun -to Lennox’s temple and pulled the trigger. It made a nasty-looking wound, but it did not kilt him. Then he was carried out on a stretcher covered up and well hidden. Then when the American lawyer arrived, Lennox was doped and packed in ice and kept in a dark corner of the carpinterla where the man was making a coffin. The American lawyer saw Lennox there, he was ice-cold, in a deep stupor, and there was a bloody blackened wound in his temple. He looked plenty dead. The next day the coffin was buried with stones in it. The American lawyer went home with the fingerprints and some kind of document which was a piece of cheese. How do you like that, Se�or Maioranos?”
He shrugged. “It would be possible, se�or. It would require money and influence. It would be possible, perhaps, if this Se�or Menendez was dosely related to important people in Otatocl�n, the alcalde, the hotel proprietor and so on.”
“Well, that’s possible to. It’s a good idea. It would explain why they picked a remote little place like Otatodan.”
He smiled quickly. “Then Se�or Lennox may still be alive, no?”
“Sure. The suicide had to be some kind of fake to back up the confession. It had to be good enough to fool a lawyer who had been a district attorney, but it would make a very sick monkey out of the current D.A. if it backfired. This Menendez is not as tough as he thinks he is, but he was tough enough to pistol-whip me for not keeping my nose clean. So he had to have reasons. If the fake got exposed, Menendez would be right in the middle of an international stink. The Mexicans don’t like crooked police work any more than we do.”
“All that is possible, se�or, as I very well know. But you accused me of lying. You said I did not go into the room where Se�or Lennox was and get his letter.”
“You were already in there, chum—writing the letter.”
He reached up and took the dark glasses off. Nobody can change the color of a man’s eyes.
“I suppose it’s a bit too early for a gimlet,” he said.
53
They had done a wonderful job on him in Mexico City, but why not? Their doctors, technicians, hospitals, painters, architects are as good as ours. Sometimes a little better. A Mexican cop invented the paraffin test for powder nitrates. They couldn’t make Terry’s face perfect, but they had done plenty. They had even changed his nose, taken out some bone and made it look flatter, less Nordic. They couldn’t eliminate every trace of a scar, so they had put a couple on the other side of his face too. Knife scars are not uncommon in Latin countries.
“They even did a nerve graft up here,” he said, and touched what had been the bad side of his face.
“How dose did I come?”
“Close enough. A few details wrong, but they are not important. It was a quick deal and some of it was improvised and I didn’t know myself just what was going to happen. I was told to do certain things and to leave a dear trail. Mendy didn’t like my writing to you, but I held out for that. He undersold you a little. He never noticed the bit about the mailbox.”
“You know who killed Sylvia?”
He didn’t answer me directly. “It’s pretty tough to turn a woman in for murder—even if she never meant much to you.”
“It’s a tough world. Was Harlan Potter in on all this?”
He smiled again. “Would he be likely to let anyone know that? My guess is not. My guess is he thinks I am dead. Who would tell him otherwise—unless you did?”
“What I’d tell him you could fold into a blade of grass. How’s Mendy these days—or is he?”
“He’s doing all right. In Acapulco. He slipped by because of Randy. But the boys don’t -go for rough work on cops. Mendy’s not as bad as you think. He has a heart.”
“So has a snake.”
“Well, what about that gimlet?”
I got up without answering him and went to the safe. I spun the knob and got out the envelope with the portrait of Madison on it and the five C notes that smelled of coffee. I dumped the lot out on the desk and then picked up the five C notes.
“These I keep. I spent almost all of it on expenses and research. The portrait of Madison I enjoyed playing with, It’s all yours now.”
I spread it on the edge of the desk in front of him. He looked at it but didn’t touch it.
“It’s yours to keep,” he said. “I’ve got plenty. You could have let things lie.”
“I know. After she killed her husband and got away with it she might have gone on to better things. He was of no real importance, of course. Just a human being with blood and a brain and emotions. He knew what happened too and he tried pretty hard to live with it. He wrote books. You may have heard of him.”
“Look, I couldn’t very well help what I did,” he said slowly. “I didn’t want anyone to get hurt. I wouldn’t have had a dog’s chance up here. A man can’t figure every angle that quick. I was scared and I ran. What should I have done?”
“I don’t know.”
“She had a mad streak. She might have killed him anyway.”
“Yeah, she might.”
“Well, thaw out a little. Let’s go have a drink somewhere where it’s cool and quiet.”
“No time right now, Se�or Maioranos.”
“We were pretty good friends once,” he said unhappily.
“Were we? I forget. That was two other fellows, seems to me. You permanently in Mexico?”
“Oh yes. I’m not here legally even. I never was. I told you I was born in Salt Lake City. I was born in MontreaL I’ll be a Mexican national pretty soon now. All it takes is a good lawyer. I’ve always liked Mexico. It wouldn’t be much risk going to Victor’s for that gimlet.”
“Pick up your money, Se�or Maioranos. It has too much blood on it.”
“You’re a poor man.”
“How would you know?”
He picked the bill up and stretched it between his thin fingers and slipped it casually into an inside pocket. He bit his lip with the very white teeth you can have when you have a brown skin.
“I couldn’t tell you any more than I did that morning you drove me to Tijuana. I gave you a chance to call the law and turn me in.”
“I’m not sore at you. You’re just that kind of guy. For a long time I couldn’t figure you at all. You had nice ways and nice qualities, but there was something wrong. You had standards and you lived up to them, but they were personal. They had no relation to any kind of ethics or scruples. You were a nice guy because you had a nice nature. But you were just as happy with mugs or hoodlums as with honest men. Provided the hoodlums spoke fairly good English and had fairly acceptable table manners. You’re a moral defeatist. I think maybe the war did it and again I think maybe-you were born that way.”
“I don’t get it,” he said. “I really don’t. I’m trying to pay you back and you won’t let me. I couldn’t have told you any more than I did. You wouldn’t have stood for it.”
“That’s as nice a thing as was ever said to me.”
“I’m glad you like something about me. I got in a bad jam. I happened to know the sort of people who know how to deal with bad jams. They owed me for an incident that happened long ago in the war. Probably the only time in my life I ever did the right thing quick like a mouse. And when I needed them, they delivered. And for free. You’re not the only guy in the world that has no price tag, Marlowe.”
He leaned across the desk and snapped at one of my cigarettes. There was an uneven flush on his face under the deep tan. The scars showed up against it. I watched him spring a fancy gas cartridge lighter loose from a pocket and light the cigarette. I got a whiff of perfume from him.
“You bought a lot of me, Terry. For a smile and a nod and a wave of the hand and a few quiet drinks in a quiet bar here and there. It was nice while it lasted. So long, amigo. I won’t say goodbye. I said it to you when it meant something. I said it when it was sad and lonely and final.”
“I came back too late,” he said. “These plastic jobs take time.”
“You wouldn’t have come at all if I hadn’t smoked you out.”
There was suddenly a glint of tears in his eyes. He put his dark glasses back on quickly.
“I wasn’t sure about it,” he said. “I hadn’t made up my mind. They didn’t want me to tell you anything. I just hadn’t made up my mind.”
“Don’t worry about it, Terry. There’s always somebody around to do it for you.”
“I was in the Commandos, bud. They don’t take you if you’re just a piece of fluff. I got badly hurt and it wasn’t any fun with those Nazi doctors. It did something to me.”
“I know all that, Terry. You’re a very sweet guy in a lQt of ways. I’m not judging you. I never did. It’s just that you’re not here any more. You’re long gone. You’ve got nice clothes and perfume and you’re as elegant as a fifty-dollar whore.”
“That’s just an act,” he said almost desperately.
“You get a kick out of it, don’t you?”
His mouth dropped in a sour smile. He shrugged an expressive energetic Latin shrug.
“Of course. An act is all there is. There isn’t anything else. In here—” he tapped his chest with the lighter—“thereisn’t anything. I’ve had it, Marlowe. I had it long ago. Well—i goes that winds things up.”
He stood up. I stood up. He put out a lean hand. I shook it.
“So long, Sedor Maioranos. Nice to have known you— however briefly.”
“Goodbye.”
He turned and walked across the floor and out. I watched the door dose. I listened to his steps going away down the imitation marble corridor. After a while they got faint, then they got silent. I kept on listening anyway. What for? Did I want him to stop suddenly and turn and come back and talk me out of the way I felt? Well, he didn’t. That was the last I saw of him.
I never saw any of them again—except the cops. No way has yet been invented to say goodbye to them.
About the Author
RAYMOND CHANDLER was born in Chicago, Illinois, on July 23, 1888, but spent most of his boyhood and youth in England, where he attended Duiwich College and later worked as a freelance journalist for The Westminster Gazette and The Spectator. During World War I, he served in France with the First Division of the Canadian Expeditionary Force, transferring later to the Royal flying Corps (R.A.F.). In 1919 -he returned to the United States, settling in California, where he eventually became director of a number of indepen— dent oil companies. The Depression put an end to his business career, and in 1933, at the age of forty-five, he turned to writing, publishing -his first stories in Black Mask. His first novel, The Big Sleep, was published in 19 39. Never a prolific writer, he published only one collection of stories and seven novels in his lifetime. In the last year of his life he was elected president of the Mystery Writers of America. He died in La Jolla, California, on March 26, 1959.