“Don’t get clever, for God’s sake,” I urged her. “This is a spot for a little old-fashioned simplicity. Did Brody kill him?”
“Kill who?”
“Oh, Christ,” I said.
She looked hurt. Her chin came down an inch. “Yes,” she said solemnly. “Joe did it.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.” She shook her head, persuading herself that she didn’t know.
“Seen much of him lately?”
Her hands went down and made small white knots. “Just once or twice. I hate him.”
“Then you know where he lives.”
“Yes.”
“And you don’t like him any more?”
“I hate him!”
“Then you’d like him for the spot.”
A little blank again. I was going too fast for her. It was hard not to. “Are you willing to tell the police it was Joe Brody?” I probed.
Sudden panic flamed all over her face. “If I can kill the nude-photo angle, of course,” I added soothingly.
She giggled. That gave me a nasty feeling. If she had screeched or wept or even nosedived to the floor in a dead faint, that would have been all right. She just giggled. It was suddenly a lot of fun. She had had her photo taken as Isis and somebody had swiped it and somebody had bumped Geiger off in front of her and she was drunker than a Legion convention, and it was suddenly a lot of nice clean fun. So she giggled. Very cute. The giggles got louder and ran around the corners of the room like rats behind the wainscoting. She started to go hysterical. I slid off the desk and stepped up close to her and gave her a smack on the side of the face.
“Just like last night,” I said. “We’re a scream together. Reilly and Sternwood, two stooges in search of a comedian.”
The giggles stopped dead, but she didn’t mind the slap any more than last night. Probably all her boy friends got around to slapping her sooner or later. I could understand how they might. I sat down on the end of the black desk again.
“Your name isn’t Reilly,” she said seriously. “It’s Philip Marlowe. You’re a private detective. Viv told me. She showed me your card.” She smoothed the cheek I had slapped. She smiled at me, as if I was nice to be with.
“Well, you do remember,” I said. “And you came back to look for that photo and you couldn’t get into the house. Didn’t you?”
Her chin ducked down and up. She worked the smile. I was having the eye put on me. I was being brought into camp. I was going to yell “Yippee!” in a minute and ask her to go to Yuma.
“The photo’s gone,” I said. “I looked last night, before I took you home. Probably Brody took it with him. You’re not kidding me about Brody?”
She shook her head earnestly.
“It’s a pushover,” I said. “You don’t have to give it another thought. Don’t tell a soul you were here, last night or today. Not even Vivian. Just forget you were here. Leave it to Reilly.”
“Your name isn’t—” she began, and then stopped and shook her head vigorously in agreement with what I had said or with what she had just thought of. Her eyes became narrow and almost black and as shallow as enamel on a cafeteria tray. She had had an idea. “I have to go home now,” she said, as if we had been having a cup of tea.
“Sure.”
I didn’t move. She gave me another cute glance and went on towards the front door. She had her hand on the knob when we both heard a car coming. She looked at me with questions in her eyes. I shrugged. The car stopped, right in front of the house. Terror twisted her face. There were steps and the bell rang. Carmen stared back at me over her shoulder, her hand clutching the door knob, almost drooling with fear. The bell kept on ringing. Then the ringing stopped. A key tickled at the door and Carmen jumped away from it and stood frozen. The door swung open. A man stepped through it briskly and stopped dead, staring at us quietly, with complete composure.
13
He was a gray man, an gray, except for his polished black shoes and two scarlet diamonds in his gray satin tie that looked like the diamonds on roulette layouts. His shirt was gray and his double-breasted suit of soft, beautifully cut flannel. Seeing Carmen he took a gray hat off and his hair underneath it was gray and as fine as if it had been sifted through gauze. His thick gray eyebrows had that indefinably sporty look. He had a long chin, a nose with a hook to it, thoughtful gray eyes that had a slanted look because the fold of skin over his upper lid came down over the corner of the lid itself.
He stood there politely, one hand touching the door at his back, the other holding the gray hat and flapping it gently against his thigh. He looked hard, not the hardness of the tough guy. More like the hardness of a well-weathered horseman. But he was no horseman. He was Eddie Mars.
He pushed the door shut behind him and put that hand in the lap-seamed pocket of his coat and left the thumb outside to glisten in the rather dim light of the room. He smiled at Carmen. He had a nice easy smile. She licked her lips and stared at him. The fear went out of her face. She smiled back.
“Excuse the casual entrance,” he said. “The bell didn’t seem to rouse anybody. Is Mr. Geiger around?”
I said: “No. We don’t know just where he is. We found the door a little open. We stepped inside.”
He nodded and touched his long chin with the brim of his hat. “You’re friends of his, of course?”
“Just business acquaintances. We dropped by for a book.”
“A book, eh?” He said that quickly and brightly and, I thought, a little slyly, as if he knew all about Geiger’s books. Then he looked at Carmen again and shrugged.
I moved towards the door. “We’ll trot along now,” I said. I took hold of her arm. She was staring at Eddie Mars. She liked him.
“Any message—if Geiger comes back?” Eddie Mars asked gently.
“We won’t bother you.”
“That’s too bad,” he said, with too much meaning. His gray eyes twinkled and then hardened as I went past him to open the door. He added in a casual tone: “The girl can dust. I’d like to talk to you a little, soldier.”
I let go of her arm. I gave him a blank stare. “Kidder, eh?” he said nicely. “Don’t waste it. I’ve got two boys outside in a car that always do just what I want them to.”
Carmen made a sound at my side and bolted through the door. Her steps faded rapidly down hill. I hadn’t seen her car, so she must have left it down below. I started to say: “What the hell–!”
“Oh, skip it,” Eddie Mars sighed. “There’s something wrong around here. I’m going to find out what it is. If you want to pick lead out of your belly, get in my way.”
“Well, well,” I said, “a tough guy.”
“Only when necessary, soldier.” He wasn’t looking at me any more. He was walking around the room, frowning, not paying any attention to me. I looked out above the broken pane of the front window. The top of a car showed over the hedge. Its motor idled.
Eddie Mars found the purple flagon and the two gold-veined glasses on the desk. He sniffed at one of the glasses, then at the flagon. A disgusted smile wrinkled his lips. “The lousy pimp,” he said tonelessly.
He looked at a couple of books, grunted, went on around the desk and stood in front of the little totem pole with the camera eye. He studied it, dropped his glance to the floor in front of it. He moved the small rug with his foot, then bent swiftly, his body tense. He went down on the floor with one gray knee. The desk hid him from me partly. There was a sharp exclamation and he came up again. His arm flashed under his coat and a black Luger appeared in his hand. He held it in long brown fingers, not pointing it at me me, not pointing it at anything.
“Blood,” he said. “Blood on the floor there, under the rug. Quite a lot of blood.”
“Is that so?” I said, looking interested.
He slid into the chair behind the desk and hooked the mulberry-colored phone towards him and shifted the Luger to his left hand. He frowned sharply at the telephone, bringing his thick gray eyebrows close together and making a hard crease in the weathered skin at the top of his hooked nose. “I think we’ll have some law,” he said.
I went over and kicked at the rug that lay where Geiger had lain. “It’s old blood,” I said. “Dried blood.”
“Just the same we’ll have some law.”
“Why not?” I said.