Spangler held the glass uncertainly, pinching his lower lip between thumb and finger, looking at Breeze to see whether he would accept the drink.
Breeze looked at me very steadily. Then he sighed. Then he picked the glass up and tasted it and sighed again and shook his head sideways with a half smile; the way a man does when you give him a drink and he needs it very badly and it is just right and the first swallow is like a peek into a cleaner, sunnier, brighter world.
“I guess you catch on pretty fast, Mr. Marlowe,” he said, and leaned back on the davenport completely relaxed. “I guess now we can do some business together.”
“Not that way,” I said.
“Huh?” He bent his eyebrows together. Spangler leaned forward in his chair and looked bright and attentive.
“Having stray broads call me up and give me a song and dance so you can say they said they recognized my voice somewhere sometime. ”
“The girl’s name is Gladys Crane,” Breeze said.
“So she told me. I never heard of her.”
“Okay,” Breeze said. “Okay.” He showed me the flat of his freckled hand. “We’re not trying to pull anything that’s not legitimate. We only hope you ain’t, either.”
“Ain’t either what?”
“Ain’t either trying to pull anything not legitimate. Such as holding out on us.”
“Just why shouldn’t I hold out on you, if I feel like it?” I asked. “You’re not paying my salary.”
“Look, don’t get tough, Marlowe.”
“I’m not tough. I don’t have any idea of being tough. I know enough about cops not to get tough with them. Go ahead and speak your piece and don’t try to pull any more phonies like that telephone call.”
“We’re on a murder case,” Breeze said. “We have to try to run it the best we can. You found the body. You had talked to the guy. He had asked you to come to his apartment. He gave you his key. You said you didn’t know what he wanted to see you about. We figured that maybe with time to think back you could have remembered.”
“In other words I was lying the first time,” I said.
Breeze smiled a tired smile. “You been around enough to know that people always lie in murder cases.”
“The trouble with that is how are you going to know when I stop lying?”
“When what you say begins to make sense, we’ll be satisfied.”
I looked at Spangler. He was leaning forward so far he was almost out of his chair. He looked as if he was going to jump. I couldn’t think of any reason why he should jump, so I thought he must be excited. I looked back at Breeze. He was about as excited as a hole in the wall. He had one of his cellophane-wrapped cigars between his thick fingers and he was slitting the cellophane with a penknife. I watched him get the wrapping off and trim the cigar end with the blade and put the knife away, first wiping the blade carefully on his pants. I watched him strike a wooden match and light the cigar carefully, turning it around in the flame, then hold the match away from the cigar, still burning, and draw on the cigar until he decided it was properly lighted. Then he shook the match out and laid it down beside the crumpled cellophane on the glass top of the cocktail table. Then he leaned back and pulled up one leg of his pants and smoked peacefully. Every motion had been exactly as it had been when he lit a cigar in Hench’s apartment, and exactly as it always would be whenever he lit a cigar. He was that kind of man, and that made him dangerous. Not as dangerous as a brilliant man, but much more dangerous than a quick excitable one like Spangler.
“I never saw Phillips before today,” I said. “I don’t count that he said he saw me up in Ventura once, because I don’t remember him. I met him just the way I told you. He tailed me around and I braced him. He wanted to talk to me, he gave me his key, I went to his apartment, used the key to let myself in when he didn’t answer—as he had told me to do. He was dead. The police were called and through a set of events or incidents that had nothing to do with me, a gun was found under Hench’s pillow. A gun that had been fired. I told you this and it’s true.”
Breeze said: “When you found him you went down to the apartment manager, guy named Passmore, and got him to go up with you without telling him anybody was dead. You gave Passmore a phony card and talked about jewelry.”
I nodded. “With people like Passmore and apartment houses like that one, it pays to be a little on the cagey side. I was interested in Phillips. I thought Passmore might tell me something about him, if he didn’t know he was dead, that he wouldn’t be likely to tell me, if he knew the cops were going to bounce in on him in a brief space of time. That’s all there was to that.”
Breeze drank a little of his drink and smoked a little of his cigar and said: “What I’d like to get in the clear is this. Everything you just told us might be strictly the truth, and yet you might not be telling us the truth. If you get what I mean.”
“Like what?” I asked, getting perfectly well what he meant.
He tapped on his knee and watched me with a quiet up from under look. Not hostile, not even suspicious. Just a quiet man doing his job.
“Like this. You’re on a job. We don’t know what it is. Phillips was playing at being a private dick. He was on a job. He tailed you around. How can we know, unless you tell us, that his job and your job don’t tie in somewhere? And if they do, that’s our business. Right?”
“That’s one way to look at it,” I said. “But it’s not the only way, and it’s not my way.”
“Don’t forget this is a murder case, Marlowe.”
“I’m not. But don’t you forget I’ve been around this town a long time, more than fifteen years. I’ve seen a lot of murder cases come and go. Some have been solved, some couldn’t be solved, and some could have been solved that were not solved. And one or two or three of them have been solved wrong. Somebody was paid to take a rap, and the chances are it was known or strongly suspected. And winked at. But skip that. It happens, but not often. Consider a case like the Cassidy case. I guess you remember it, don’t you?”
Breeze looked at his watch. “I’m tired,” he said. “Let’s forget the Cassidy case. Let’s stick to the Phillips case.”
I shook my head. “I’m going to make a point, and it’s an important point. Just look at the Cassidy case. Cassidy was a very rich man, a multi-millionaire. He had a grown up son. One night the cops were called to his home and young Cassidy was on his back on the floor with blood all over his face and a bullet hole in the side of his head. His secretary was lying on his back in an adjoining bathroom, with his head against the second bathroom door, leading to a hall, and a cigarette burned out between the fingers of his left hand, just a short burned out stub that had scorched the skin between his fingers. A gun was lying by his right hand. He was shot in the head, not a contact wound. A lot of drinking had been done. Four hours had elapsed since the deaths and the family doctor had been there for three of them. Now, what did you do with the Cassidy case?”
Breeze sighed. “Murder and suicide during a drinking spree. The secretary went haywire and shot young Cassidy. I read it in the papers or something. Is that what you want me to say?”
“You read it in the papers,” I said, “but it wasn’t so. What’s more you knew it wasn’t so and the D. A. knew it wasn’t so and the D.A.’s investigators were pulled off the case within a matter of hours. There was no inquest. But every crime reporter in town and every cop on every homicide detail knew it was Cassidy that did the shooting, that it was Cassidy that was crazy drunk, that it was the secretary who tried to handle him and couldn’t and at last tried to get away from him, but wasn’t quick enough. Cassidy’s was a contact wound and the secretary’s was not. The secretary was left-handed and he had a cigarette in his left hand when he was shot. Even if you are right-handed, you don’t change a cigarette over to your other hand and shoot a man while casually holding the cigarette. They might do that on Gang Busters, but rich men’s secretaries don’t do it. And what were the family and the family doctor doing
during the four hours they didn’t call the cops? Fixing it so there would only be a superficial investigation, And why were no tests of the hands made for nitrates? Because you didn’t want the truth. Cassidy was too big. But this was a murder case too, wasn’t it?”
“The guys were both dead,” Breeze said. “What the hell difference did it make who shot who?”
“Did you ever stop to think,” I asked, “that Cassidy’s secretary might have had a mother or a sister or a sweetheart—or all three? That they had their pride and their faith and their love for a kid who was made out to be a drunken paranoiac because his boss’s father had a hundred million dollars?”
Breeze lifted his glass slowly and finished his drink slowly and put it down slowly and turned the glass slowly on the glass top of the cocktail table. Spangler sat rigid, all shining eyes and lips parted in a sort of rigid half smile.
Breeze said: “Make your point.”
I said: “Until you guys own your own souls you don’t own mine. Until you guys can be trusted every time and always, in all times and conditions, to seek the truth out and find it and let the chips fall where they may—until that time comes, I have a right to listen to my conscience, and protect my client the best way I can. Until I’m sure you won’t do him more harm than you’ll do the truth good. Or until I’m hauled before somebody that can make me talk.”
Breeze said: “You sound to me just a little like a guy who is trying to hold his conscience down.”
“Hell,” I said. “Let’s have another drink. And then you can tell me about that girl you had me talk to on the phone.”
He grinned: “That was a dame that lives next door to Phillips. She heard a guy talking to him at the door one evening. She works days as an usherette. So we thought maybe she ought to hear your voice. Think nothing of it.”
“What kind of voice was it?”
“Kind of a mean voice. She said she didn’t like it.”
“I guess that’s what made you think of me,” I said.
I picked up the three glasses and went out to the kitchen with them.
SIXTEEN
When I got out there I had forgotten which glass was which, so I rinsed them all out and dried them and was starting to make more drinks when Spangler strolled out and stood just behind my shoulder.
“It’s all right,” I said. “I’m not using any cyanide this evening.”
“Don’t get too foxy with the old guy,” he said quietly to the back of my neck. “He knows more angles than you think.”
“Nice of you,” I said.
“Say, I’d like to read up on that Cassidy case,” he said. “Sounds interesting. Must have been before my time.”
“It was a long time ago,” I said. “And it never happened. I was just kidding.” I put the glasses on the tray and carried them back into the living room and set them around. I took mine over to my chair behind the chess table.
“Another phony,” I said. “Your sidekick sneaks out to the kitchen and gives me advice behind your back about how careful I ought to keep on account of the angles you know that I don’t think you know. He has just the right face for it. Friendly and open and an easy blusher.”
Spangler sat down on the edge of his chair and blushed. Breeze looked at him casually, without meaning.
“What did you find out about Phillips?” I asked.
“Yes,” Breeze said. “Phillips. Well, George Anson Phillips is a kind of pathetic case. He thought he was a detective, but it looks as if he couldn’t get anybody to agree with him. I talked to the sheriff at Ventura. He said George was a nice kind, maybe a little too nice to make a good cop, even if he had any brains. George did what they said and he would do it pretty well, provided they told him which foot to start on and how many steps to take which way and little things like that. But he didn’t develop much, if you get what I mean. He was the sort of cop who would be likely to hang a pinch on a chicken thief, if he saw the guy steal the chicken and the guy fell down running away and hit his head on a post or something and knocked himself out. Otherwise it might get a little tough and George would have to go back to the office for instructions. Well, it wore the sheriff down after a while and he let George go.”
Breeze drank some more of his drink and scratched his chin with a thumbnail like the blade of a shovel.
“After that George worked in a general store at Simi for a man named Sutcliff. It was a credit business with little books for each customer and George would have trouble with the books. He would forget to write the stuff down or write it in the wrong book and some of the customers would straighten him out and some would let George forget. So Sutcliff thought maybe George would do better at something else, and George came to L.A. He had come into a little money, not much, but enough for him to get a license and put up a bond and get himself a piece of an office. I was over there. What he had was desk room with another guy who claims he is selling Christmas cards. Name of Marsh. If George had a customer, the arrangement was Marsh would go for a walk. Marsh says he didn’t know where George lived and George didn’t have any customers. That is, no business came into the office that Marsh knows about. But George put an ad in the paper and he might have got a customer out of that. I guess he did, because about a week ago Marsh found a note on his desk that George would be out of town for a few days. That’s the last he heard of him. So George went over to Court Street and took an apartment under the name of Anson and got bumped off. And that’s all we know about George so far. Kind of a pathetic case.”
He looked at me with a level uncurious gaze and raised his glass to his lips.
“What about this ad?”
Breeze put the gIass down and dug a thin piece of paper out of his wallet and put it down on the cocktail table. I went over and picked it up and read it. It said:
Why worry? Why be doubtful or confused? Why be gnawed by suspicion? Consult cool, careful, confidential, discreet investigator. George Anson Phillips. Glenview 9521.
I put it down on the glass again.
“It ain’t any worse than lots of business personals,” Breeze said. “It don’t seem to be aimed at the carriage trade.”
Spangler said: “The girl in the office wrote it for him. She said she could hardly keep from laughing, but George thought it was swell. The Hollywood Boulevard office of the Chronicle.”
“You checked that fast,” I said.
“We don’t have any trouble getting information,” Breeze said. “Except maybe from you.”
“What about Hench?”
“Nothing about Hench. Him and the girl were having a liquor party. They would drink a little and sing a little and scrap a little and listen to the radio and go out to eat once in a while, when they thought of it. I guess it had been going on for days. Just as well we stopped it. The girl has two bad eyes. The next round Hench might have broken her neck. The world is full of bums like Hench—and his girl.”
“What about the gun Hench said wasn’t his?”
“It’s the right gun. We don’t have the slug yet, but we have the shell. It was under George’s body and it checks. We had a couple more fired and comparisoned the ejector marks and the firing pin dents.”
“You believe somebody planted it under Hench’s pillow?”
“Sure. Why would Hench shoot Phillips? He didn’t know him.”
“How do you know that?”
“I know it,” Breeze said, spreading his hands. “Look, there are things you know because you have them down in black and white. And there are things you know because they are reasonable and have to be so. You don’t shoot somebody and then make a lot of racket calling attention to yourself, and all the time you have the gun under your pillow. The girl was with Hench all day. If Hench shot anybody, she would have some idea. She doesn’t have any such idea. She would spill, if she had. What is Hench to her? A guy to play around with, no more. Look, forget Hench. The guy who did the shooting hears the loud radio and knows it will cover a shot. But all the same he saps Phillips and drags him
into the bathroom and shuts the door before he shoots him. He’s not drunk. He’s minding his own business, and careful. He goes out, shuts the bathroom door, the radio stops, Hench and the girl go out to eat. Just happens that way.”
“How do you know the radio stopped?”
“I was told,” Breeze said calmly. “Other people live in that dump. Take it the radio stopped and they went out. Not quiet. The killer steps out of the apartment and Hench’s door is open. That must be because otherwise he wouldn’t think anything about Hench’s door.”
“People don’t leave their doors open in apartment houses. Especially in districts like that.”
“Drunks do. Drunks are careless. Their minds don’t focus well. And they only think of one thing at a time. The door was open—just a little maybe, but open. The killer went in and ditched his gun on the bed and found another gun there. He took that away, just to make it look worse for Hench.”
“You can check the gun,” I said.
“Hench’s gun? We’ll try to, but Hench says he doesn’t know the number. If we find it, we might do something there. I doubt it. The gun we have we will try to check, but you know how those things are. You get just so far along and you think it is going to open up for you, and then the trail dies out cold. A dead end. Anything else you can think of that we might know that might be a help to you in your business?”
“I’m getting tired,” I said. “My imagination isn’t working very well. ”
“You were doing fine a while back,” Breeze said. “On the Cassidy case.”
I didn’t say anything. I filled my pipe up again but it was too hot to light. I laid it on the edge of the table to cool off.
“It’s God’s truth,” Breeze said slowly, “that I don’t know what to make of you. I can’t see you deliberately covering up on any murder. And neither can I see you knowing as little about all this as you pretend to know.”