I dug out the carbon of my property slip and turned it over and receipted on the original. I put my belongings back in my pockets. There was a man draped over the end of the booking desk and as I turned away he straightened up and spoke to me. He was about six feet four inches tall and as thin as a wire.
“Need a ride home?”
In the bleak light he looked young-old, tired and cynical, but he didn’t look like a grifter. “For how much?”
“For free. I’m Lonnie Morgan of the Journal. I’m knocking off.”
“Oh, police beat,” I said.
“Just this week. The City Hall is my regular beat.” We walked out of the building and found his car in the parking lot. I looked up at the sky. There were stars but there was too much glare. It was a cool pleasant night. I breathed it in. Then I got into his car and he drove away from there.
“I live way out in Laurel Canyon,” I said. “Just drop me anywhere.”
“They ride you in,” he said, “but they don’t worry how you get home. This case interests me, in a repulsive sort of way.”
“It seems there isn’t any case,” I said. “Terry Lennox shot himself this afternoon. So they say. So they say.”
“Very convenient,” Lonnie Morgan said, staring ahead through the windshield. His car drifted quietly along quiet streets. “It helps them build their wall.”
“What wall?”
“Somebody’s building a wall around the Lennox case, Marlowe. You’re smart enough to see that, aren’t you? It’s not getting the kind of play it rates, The D.A. left town tonight for Washington. Some kind of convention. He walked out on the sweetest hunk of publicity he’s had in years. Why?”
“No use to ask me. I’ve been in cold storage.”
“Because somebody made it worth his while, that’s why. I don’t mean anything crude like a wad of dough. Somebody promised him something important to him and there’s only one man connected with the case in a position to do that. The girl’s father.”
I leaned my head back in a corner of the car. “Sounds a little unlikely,” I said. “What about the press? Harlan Potter owns a few papers, but what about the competition?”
He gave me a brief amused glance and then concentrated on his driving. “Ever been a newspaperman?”
“No.”
“Newspapers are owned and published by rich men. Rich men all belong to the same dub. Sure, there’s competition—hard tough competition for circulation, for newsbeats, for exclusive stories. Just so long as it doesn’t damage the prestige and privilege and position of the owners. If it does, down comes the lid. The lid, my friend, is down on the Lennox case. The Lennox case, my friend, properly built up, could have sold a hell of a lot of papers. It has everything. The trial would have drawn feature writers from all over the country. But there ain’t going to be no trial. On account of Lennox checked out before it could get moving. Like I said—very convenient—for Harlan Potter and his family.”
I straightened up and gave him a hard stare.
“You calling the whole thing a fix?”
He twisted his mouth sardonically. “Could just be Lennox had some help committing suicide. Resisting arrest a little. Mexican cops have very itchy trigger fingers. If you want to lay a little bet, I’ll give you nice odds that nobody gets to count the bullet holes.”
“I think you’re wrong,” I said. “I knew Terry Lennox pretty well. He wrote himself off a long time ago. If they brought him back alive, he would have let them have it their way. He’d have copped a manslaughter plea.”
Lonnie Morgan shook his head. I knew what he was going to say and he said it. “Not a chance. If he had shot her or cracked her skull, maybe yes. But there was too much brutality. Her face was beaten to a pulp. Second degree murder would be the.-best he could get, and even that would raise a stink.”
I said: “You could be right.”
He looked at me again. “You say you knew the guy. Do you go for the setup?”
“I’m tired. I’m not in a thinking mood tonight.”
There was a long pause. Then Lonnie Morgan said quietly: “If I was a real bright guy. instead of a hack newspaperman, I’d think maybe he didn’t kill her at all.”
“It’s a thought.”
He stuck a cigarette in his mouth and lit it by scratching a match on the dashboard. He smoked silently with a fixed frown on his thin face. We reached Laurel Canyon and I told him where to turn off the boulevard and where to turn into my street. His car churned up the hill and stopped at the foot of my redwood steps.
I got out. “Thanks for the ride, Morgan. Care for a drink?”
“I’ll take a rain check. I figure you’d rather be alone.”
“I’ve got lots of time to be alone. Too damn much.”
“You’ve got a friend to say goodbye to,” he said. “He must have been that if you let them toss you into the can on his account.”
“Who said I did that?”
He smiled faintly. “Just because I can’t print it don’t mean I didn’t know it, chum. So long. See you around.”
I shut the car door and he turned and drove off down the hill. When his tail lights vanished around the corner I climbed the steps, picked up newspapers, and let myself into the empty house. I put all the lamps on and opened all the windows. The place was stuffy.
I made some coffee and drank it and took the five C notes out of the toffee can. They were rolled tight and pushed down into the coffee at the side. I walked up and down with a cup of coffee in my hand, turned the TV on, turned it off, sat, stood, and sat again. I read through the papers that had piled up on the front steps. The Lennox case started out big, but by that morning it was a Part Two item. There was a photo of Sylvia, but none. of Terry. There was a snap of me that I didn’t know existed. “L.A. Private Detective Held for Questioning.” There was a large photo of the Lennox home in Encino. It was pseudo English with a lot of peaked roof and it would have cost a hundred bucks to wash the windows. It stood on a knoll in a big two acres, which is a lot of real estate for the Los Angeles area. There was a photo of the guest house, which was a miniature of the main building. It was hedged in with trees. Both photos had obviously been taken from some distance off and then blown up and trimmed, There was no photo of what the papers called the “death room.”
I had seen all this stuff before, in jail, but I read it and looked at it again with different eyes. It told me nothing except that a rich and beautiful girl had been murdered and the press had been pretty thoroughly excluded. So the influence had started to work very early. The crime beat boys must have gnashed their teeth and gnashed them in vain. It figured. If Terry talked to his father-in-law in Pasadena the very night she was killed, there would have been a dozen guards on the estate before the police were even notified.
But there was something that didn’t figure at all—the way she had been beaten up. Nobody could sell me that Terry had done that.
I put the lamps out and sat by an open window. Outside in a bush a mockingbird ran through a few trills and admired himself before settling down for the night. My neck itched, so I shaved and showered and went to bed and lay on my back listening, as if far off in the dark I might hear a voice, the kind of caIrn and patient voice that makes everything clear. I didn’t hear it and I knew I wasn’t going to. Nobody was going to explain the Lennox case to me. No explanation was necessary. The murderer had confessed and he was dead. There wouldn’t even be an inquest.
As Lonnie Morgan of the Journal had remarked—very convenient. If Terry Lennox had killed his wife, that was fine. There was no need to try him and bring out all the unpleasant details. If he hadn’t killed her, that was fine too. A dead man is the best fall guy in the world. He never talks back.
11
In the morning I shaved again and dressed and drove downtown in the usual way and parked in the usual place and if the parking lot attendant happened to know that I I was an important public character he did a top job in hiding it. I went upstairs and along the corridor and got keys out to unlock my door. A dark smooth-looking guy watched me.
“You Marlowe?”
“So?”
“Stick around,” he said. “A guy wants to see you.” He unplastered his back-from the wail and strolled off languidly.
I stepped inside the office and picked up the mail. There was more of it on the desk where the night deaning woman had put it. I slit the envelopes after I opened windows, and threw away what I didn’t want, which was practically all of it. I switched on the buzzer to the other door and filled a pipe and lit it and then just sat there waiting for somebody to scream for help.
I thought about Terry Lennox in a detached sort of way. He was already receding into the distance, white hair and scarred face and weak charm and his peculiar brand of pride. I didn’t judge him or analyze him, just as I had never asked him questions about how he got wounded or how he ever happened to get himself married to anyone like Sylvia. He was like somebody you meet on board ship and get to know very well and never really know at all. He was gone like the same fellow when he says goodbye at the pier and let’s keep in touch, old man, and you know you won’t and he won’t. Likely enough you’ll never even see the guy again. If you do he will be an entirely different person, just another Rotarian in a dub car. How’s business? Oh, not too bad. You look good. So do you. I’ve put on too much weight. Don’t we all? Remember that trip in the Franconia (or whatever it was)? Oh sure, swell trip, wasn’t it?
The hell it was a swell trip. You were bored stiff. You only talked to the guy because there wasn’t anybody around that interested you. Maybe it was like that with Terry Lennox and me. No, not quite. I owned a piece of him. I had invested time and money in him, and three days in the icehouse, not to mention a slug on the jaw and a punch in the neck that I felt every time I swallowed. Now he was dead and I couldn’t even give him back his five hundred bucks. That made me sore. It is always the little things that make you sore.
The door buzzer and the telephone rang at the same time. I answered the phone first because the buzzer meant only that somebody had walked into my pint-size waiting room.
“Is this Mr. Marlowe? Mr. Endicott is calling you. One moment please.”
He came on the line. “This is Sewell Endicott,” he said, as if he didn’t know his goddam secretary had already fed me his name.
“Good morning, Mr. Endicott.”
“Glad to hear they turned you loose. I think possibly you had the right idea not to build any resistance.”
“It wasn’t an idea. It was just mulishness.”
“I doubt if you’ll hear any more about it. But if you do and need help, let me hear from you.”
“Why would I? The man is dead. They’d have a hell of a time proving he ever came near me. Then they’d have to prove I had guilty knowledge. And then they’d have to prove he had committed a crime or was a fugitive.”
He cleared his throat. “Perhaps,” he said carefully, “you haven’t been told he left a full confession.”
“I was told, Mr. Endicott. I’m talking to a lawyer. Would I be. out of line in suggesting that the confession would have to be proved too, both as to genuineness and as to veracity?”
“I’m afraid I have no time for a legal discussion,” he said sharply. “I’m flying to Mexico with a rather melancholy duty to perform. You can probably guess what it is?”
“Uh-huh. Depends who you’re representing. You didn’t tell me, remember.”
“I remember very well. Well, goodbye, Marlowe. My offer of help is still good. But let me also offer you a little advice. Don’t be too certain you’re in the dear. You’re in a pretty vulnerable business.”
He hung up. I put the phone back in its cradle carefully. I sat for a moment with my hand on it, scowling. Then I wiped the scowl off my face and got up to open the communicating door into my waiting room.
A man was sitting by the window ruffling a magazine, He wore a bluish-gray suit with an almost invisible pale blue check. On his crossed feet were black moccasin-type ties, the kind with two eyelets that are almost as comfortable as strollers and don’t wear your socks out every time you walk a block. His white handkerchief was folded square and the end of-a pair of sunglasses showed behind it. He had thick dark wavy hair. He was tanned very dark. He looked up with bird-bright eyes and smiled under a hairline mustache. His tie was a dark maroon tied in a pointed bow over a sparkling white shirt.
He threw the magazine aside. “The crap these rags go for,” he said. “I been reading a piece about Costello. Yeah, they know all about Costello. Like I know all about Helen of Troy.”
“What can I do for you?”
He looked me over unhurriedly. “Tarzan on a big red scooter,” he said.
“What?”
“You. Marlowe. Tarzan on a big red scooter. They rough you up much?”
“Here and there. What makes it your business?”
“After Alibright talked to Gregorius?”
“No. Not after that.”
He nodded shortly. “You got a crust asking Allbright to use ammunition on that slob.”
“I asked you what made it your business. Incidentally I don’t know Commissioner Allbright and I didn’t ask him to do anything. Why would he do anything for me?”
He stared at me morosely. He stood up slowly, graceful as a panther. He walked across the room and looked into my office. He jerked his head at me and went in. He was a guy. who owned the place where he happened to be. I went in after him and shut the door. He stood by the desklooking around, amused.
“You’re small time,” he said. “Very small time.”
I went behind my desk and waited.
“How much you make in a month, Marlowe?”
I let it ride, and lit my pipe.
“Seven-fifty would be-tops,” he said.
I dropped a burnt match into a tray and puffed tobacco smoke.
“You’re a piker, Marlowe. You’re a peanut grifter. You’re so little it takes a magnifying glass to see you.”
I didn’t say anything at all.
“You got cheap emotions. You’re cheap all over. You pal around with a guy, eat a few drinks, talk a few gags, slip him a little dough when he’s strapped, and you’re sold out to him. Just like some school kid that read Frank Merriwell. You got no guts, no brains, noconnections, no savvy, so you throw out a phony attitude and expect people to cry over you. Tarzan on a big red scooter.” He smiled a small weary smile. “In my book you’re’ a nickel’s worth of nothing.”
He leaned across the desk and flicked me across the face back-handed, casually and contemptuously, not meaning to hurt me, and the small smile stayed on his face. Then when I didn’t even move for that he sat down slowly and leaned an elbow on the desk and cupped his brown chin in his brown hand. The bird-bright eyes stared at me without anything in them but brightness.
“Know who I am, cheapie?”
“Your name’s Menendez. The boys call you Mendy. You operate on the Strip.”
“Yeah? How did I get so big?”
“I wouldn’t know. You probably started out as a pimp in a Mexican whorehouse.”
He took a gold cigarette case out of his pocket and lit a brown cigarette with a gold lighter. He blew acrid smoke and nodded. He put the gold cigarette case on the desk and caressed it with his fingertips.
“I’m a big bad man, Marlowe. I make lots of dough. I got to make lots of dough to juice the guys I got to juice in order to make lots of dough to juice the guys I got to juice. I got a place in Bel-Air that cost ninety grand and I already. spent more than that to fix it up. I got a lovely platinum-blond wife and two kids in private schools back east. My wife’s got a hundred and fifty grand in rocks and another seventy-five in furs and dothes. I got a butler, two maids, a cook, a chauffeur, not counting the monkey that walks behind me. Everywhere I go I’m a darling. The best of everything, the best food, the -best drinks, the best hotel suites. I got a place in Florida and a seagoing yacht with a crew of five men. I got a Bentley, two Cadillacs, a Chrysler station wagon, and an MG for my boy. Couple of years my girl gets one too. What you got?”
“Not much,” I said. “This year I have a house to live in—all to myself.”
“No woman?”
“Just me. In addition to that I have what you see here and twelve hundred dollars in the bank and a few thousand in bonds. That answer your question?”
“What’s the most you ever made on a single job?”
“Eight-fifty.”
“Jesus, how cheap can a guy get?”
“Stop hamming and tell me what you want.”
He killed his cigarette half smoked and immediately lit another. He leaned back in his chair. His lip curled at me.