The telephone rang on the desk in front of the nurse. She started and her hand went out and then stopped. She stared at the telephone. After a while it stopped ringing.
“What was the name you mentioned?” Dr. Lagardie asked me softly.
“Orrin Quest. His sister told me he was doing some kind of work for you, Doctor. I’ve been looking for him for days. Last night he called her up. From here, she said.”
“There is no one of that name here,” Dr. Lagardie said politely. “There hasn’t been.”
“You don’t know him at all?”
“I have never heard of him.”
“I can’t figure why he would say that to his sister.”
The nurse dabbed at her eyes furtively. The telephone on her desk burred and made her jump again. “Don’t answer it,” Dr. Lagardie said without turning his head.
We waited while it rang. Everybody waits while a telephone rings. After a while it stopped.
“Why don’t you go home, Miss Watson? There’s nothing for you to do here.”
“Thank you, Doctor.” She sat without moving, looking down at the desk. She squeezed her eyes shut and blinked them open. She shook her head hopelessly.
Dr. Lagardie turned back to me. “Shall we go into my office?”
We went across through another door leading to the hallway. I walked on eggs. The atmosphere of the house was charged with foreboding. He opened a door and ushered me into what must have once been a bedroom, but nothing suggested a bedroom. It was a small compact doctor’s office. An open door showed a part of an examination room. A sterilizer was working in the corner. There were a lot of needles cooking in it.
“That’s a lot of needles,” I said, always quick with an idea.
“Sit down, Mr. Marlowe.”
He went behind the desk and sat down and picked up a long thin letter-opening knife.
He looked at me levelly from his sorrowful eyes. “No, I don’t know anyone named Orrin Quest, Mr. Marlowe. I can’t imagine any reason in the world why a person of that name should say he was in my house.”
“Hiding out,” I said.
His eyebrows went up. “From what?”
“From some guys that might want to stick an ice pick in the back of his neck. On account of he is a little too quick with his little Leica. Taking people’s photographs when they want to be private. Or it could be something else, like peddling reefers and he got wise. Am I talking in riddles?”
“It was you who sent the police here,” he said coldly.
I didn’t say anything.
“It was you who called up and reported Clausen’s death.”
I said the same as before.
“It was you who called me up and asked me if I knew Clausen. I said I did not.”
“But it wasn’t true.”
“I was under no obligation to give you information, Mr. Marlowe.”
I nodded and got a cigarette out and lit it. Dr. Lagardie glanced at his watch. He turned in his chair and switched off the sterilizer. I looked at the needles. A lot of needles. Once before I had had trouble in Bay City with a guy who cooked a lot of needles.
“What makes it?” I asked him. “The yacht harbor?” He picked up the wicked-looking paper knife with a silver handle in the shape of a nude woman. He pricked the ball of his thumb. A pearl of dark blood showed on it. He put it to his mouth and licked it. “I like the taste of blood,” he said softly.
There was a distant sound as of the front door opening and closing. We both listened to it carefully. We listened to retreating steps on the front steps of the house. We listened hard.
“Miss Watson has gone home,” Dr. Lagardie said. “We are all alone in the house.” He mulled that over and licked his thumb again. He laid the knife down carefully on the desk blotter. “Ah, the question of the yacht harbor,” he added. “The proximity of Mexico you are thinking of, no doubt. The ease with which marihuana—”
“I wasn’t thinking so much of marihuana any more.” I stared again at the needles. He followed my stare. He shrugged.
I said: “Why so many of them?”
“Is it any of your business?”
“Nothing’s any of my business.”
“But you seem to expect your questions to be answered.”
“I’m just talking,” I said. “Waiting for something to happen. Something’s going to happen in this house. It’s leering at me from corners.”
Dr. Lagardie licked another pearl of blood off his thumb.
I looked hard at him. It didn’t buy me a way into his soul. He was quiet, dark and shuttered and all the misery of life was in his eyes. But he was still gentle.
“Let me tell you about the needles,” I said.
“By all means.” He picked the long thin knife up again.
“Don’t do that,” I said sharply. “It gives me the creeps. Like petting snakes.”
He put the knife down again gently and smiled. “We do seem to talk in circles,” he suggested.
“We’ll get there. About the needles. A couple of years back I had a case that brought me down here and mixed me up with a doctor named Almore. Lived over on Altair Street. He had a funny practice. Went out nights with a big case of hypodermic needles—all ready to go. Loaded with the stuff. He had a peculiar practice. Drunks, rich junkies, of whom there are far more than people think, overstimulated people who had driven themselves beyond the possibility of relaxing. Insomniacs—all the neurotic types that can’t take it cold. Have to have their little pills and little shots in the arm. Have to have help over the humps. It gets to be all humps after a while. Good business for the doctor. Almore was the doctor for them. It’s all right to say it now. He died a year or so back. Of his own medicine.”
“And you think I may have inherited his practice?”
“Somebody would. As long as there are the patients, there will be the doctor.”
He looked even more exhausted than before, “I think you are an ass, my friend. I did not know Dr. Almore. And I do not have the sort of practice you attribute to him. As for the needles—just to get that trifle out of the way—they are in somewhat constant use in the medical profession today, often for such innocent medicaments as vitamin injections. And needles get dull. And when they are dull they are painful. Therefore in the course of the day one may use a dozen or more. Without narcotics in a single one.”
He raised his head slowly and stared at me with a fixed contempt.
“I can be wrong,” I said. “Smelling that reefer smoke over at Clausen’s place yesterday, and having him call your number on the telephone—and call you by your first name—all this probably made me jump to wrong conclusions.”
“I have dealt with addicts,” he said. “What doctor has not? It is a complete waste of time.”
“They get cured sometimes.”
“They can be deprived of their drug. Eventually after great suffering they can do without it. That is not curing them, my friend. That is not removing the nervous or emotional flaw which made them become addicts. It is making them dull negative people who sit in the sun and twirl their thumbs and die of sheer boredom and inanition.”
“That’s a pretty raw theory, doctor.”
“You raised the subject. I have disposed of it. I will raise another subject. You may have noticed a certain atmosphere and strain about this house. Even with those silly mirror glasses on. Which you may now remove. They don’t make you look in the least like Cary Grant.”
I took them off. I’d forgotten all about them.
“The police have been here, Mr. Marlowe. A certain Lieutenant Maglashan, who is investigating Clausen’s death. He would be pleased to meet you. Shall I call him? I’m sure he would come back.”
“Go ahead, call him,” I said. “I just stopped off here on my way to commit suicide.”
His hand went towards the telephone but was pulled to one side by the magnetism of the paper knife. He picked it up again. Couldn’t leave it alone, it seemed.
“You cou
ld kill a man with that,” I said.
“Very easily,” and he smiled a little.
“An inch and a half in the back of the neck, square in the center, just under the occipital bulge.”
“An ice pick would be better,” he said. “Especially a short one, filed down very sharp. It would not bend. If you miss the spinal cord, you do no great damage.”
“Takes a bit of medical knowledge then?” I got out a poor old package of Camels and untangled one from the cellophane.
He just kept on smiling. Very faintly, rather sadly. It was not the smile of a man in fear. “That would help,” he said softly. “But any reasonably dexterous person could acquire the technique in ten minutes.”
“Orrin Quest had a couple of years medical,” I said.
“I told you I did not know anybody of that name.”
“Yeah, I know you did. I didn’t quite believe you.”
He shrugged his shoulders. But his eyes as always went to the knife in the end.
“We’re a couple or sweethearts,” I said. “We just sit here making with the old over-the-desk dialogue. As though we hadn’t a care in the world. Because both of us are going to be in the clink by nightfall.”
He raised his eyebrows again. I went on:
“You, because Clausen knew you by your first name. And you may have been the last man he talked to. Me, because I’ve been doing all the things a P.I. never gets away with. Hiding evidence, hiding information, finding bodies and not coming in with my hat in my hand to these lovely incorruptible Bay City cops. Oh, I’m through. Very much through. But there’s a wild perfume in the air this afternoon. I don’t seem to care. Or I’m in love. I just don’t seem to care.”
“You have been drinking,” he said slowly.
“Only Chanel No. 5, and kisses, and the pale glow of lovely legs, and the mocking invitation in deep blue eyes. Innocent things like that.”
He just looked sadder than ever. “Women can weaken a man terribly, can they not?” he said.
“Clausen.”
“A hopeless alcoholic. You probably know how they are. They drink and drink and don’t eat. And little by little the vitamin deficiency brings on the symptoms of delirium. There is only one thing to do for them.” He turned and looked at the sterilizer. “Needles, and more needles. It makes me feel dirty. I am a graduate of the Sorbonne. But I practice among dirty little people in a dirty little town.”
“Why?”
“Because of something that happened years ago—in another city. Don’t ask me too much, Mr. Marlowe.”
“He used your first name.”
“It is a habit with people of a certain class. Onetime actors especially. And onetime crooks.”
“Oh,” I said. “That all there is to it?”
“All.”
“Then the cops coming here doesn’t bother you on account of Clausen. You’re just afraid of this other thing that happened somewhere else long gone. Or it could even be love.”
“Love?” He dropped the word slowly off the end of his tongue, tasting it to the last. A bitter little smile stayed after the word, like powder smell in the air after a gun is fired. He shrugged and pushed a desk cigarette box from behind a filing tray and over to my side of the desk.
“Not love then,” I said. “I’m trying to read your mind. Here you are a guy with a Sorbonne degree and a cheap little practice in a cheap and nasty little town. I know it well. So what are doing here? What are you doing with people like Clausen? What was the rap, Doctor? Narcotics, abortions, or were you by any chance a medic for the gang boys in some hot Eastern city?”
“As for instance?” he smiled thinly.
“As for instance Cleveland.”
“A very wild suggestion, my friend.” His voice was like ice now.
“Wild as all hell,” I said. “But a fellow like me with very limited brain tends to fit the things he knows into a pattern. It’s often wrong, but it’s an occupational disease with me. It goes like this, if you want to listen.”
“I am listening.” He picked the knife up again and pricked lightly at the blotter on his desk.
“You knew Clausen. Clausen was killed very skillfully with an ice pick, killed while I was in the house, upstairs talking to a grifter named Hicks. Hicks moved out fast taking a page of the register with him, the page that had Orrin Quest’s name on it. Later that afternoon Hicks was killed with an ice pick in L.A. His room had been searched. There was a woman there who had come to buy something from him. She didn’t get it. I had more time to search. I did get it. Presumption A: Clausen and Hicks killed by same man, not necessarily for same reason. Hicks killed because he muscled in on another guy’s racket and muscled the other guy out. Clausen killed because he was a babbling drunk and might know who would be likely to kill Hicks. Any good so far?”
“Not the slightest interest to me,” Dr. Lagardie said.
“But you are listening. Sheer good manners, I suppose. Okay. Now what did I find? A photo of a movie queen and an ex-Cleveland gangster, maybe, on a particular day. Day when the ex-Cleveland gangster was supposed to he in hock at the County Jail, also day when ex-Cleveland gangster’s onetime sidekick was shot dead on Franklin Avenue in Los Angeles. Why was he in hock? Tip-off that he was who he was, and say what you like against the L.A. cops they do try to run back-East hot shots out of town. Who gave them the tip? The guy they pinched gave it to them himself, because his ex-partner was being troublesome and had to be rubbed out, and being in jail was a first-class alibi when it happened.”
“All fantastic,” Dr. Lagardie smiled wearily. “Utterly fantastic.”
“Sure. It gets worse. Cops couldn’t prove anything on ex-gangster. Cleveland police not interested. The L.A. cops turn him loose. But they wouldn’t have turned him loose if they’d seen that photo. Photo therefore strong blackmail material, first against ex-Cleveland character, if he really is the guy; secondly against movie queen for being seen around with him in public. A good man could make a fortune out of that photo. Hicks not good enough. Paragraph. Presumption B: Orrin Quest, the boy I’m trying to find, took that photo. Taken with Contax or Leica, without flashbulb, without subjects knowing they were being photographed. Quest had a Leica and liked to do things like that. In this case of course he had a more commercial motive. Question, how did he get a chance to take photo? Answer, the movie queen was his sister. She would let him come up and speak to her. He was out of work, needed money. Likely enough she gave him some and made it a condition he stay away from her. She wants no part of her family. Is it still utterly fantastic, Doctor?”
He stared at me moodily. “I don’t know,” he said slowly. “It begins to have possibilities. But why are you telling this rather dangerous story to me?”
He reached a cigarette out of the box and tossed me one casually. I caught it and looked it over. Egyptian, oval and fat, a little rich for my blood. I didn’t light it, just sat holding it between my fingers, watching his dark unhappy eyes. He lit his own cigarette and puffed nervously.
“I’ll tie you in on it now,” I said. “You knew Clausen. Professionaly, you said. I showed him I was a dick. He tried at once to call you up: He was too drunk to talk to you. I caught the number and later told you he was dead. Why? If you were on the level, you would call the cops. You didn’t. Why? You knew Clausen, you could have known some of his roomers. No proof either way. Paragraph. Presumption C: you knew Hicks or Orrin Quest or both. The L.A. cops couldn’t or didn’t establish identity of ex-Cleveland character—let’s give him his new name, call him Steelgrave. But somebody had to be able to—if that photo was worth killing people over. Did you ever practice medicine in Cleveland, Doctor?”
“Certainly not.” His voiced seemed to come from far off. His eyes were remote too. His lips opened barely enough to admit his cigarette. He was very still.
I said: “They have a whole roomful of directories over at the telephone office. From all over the country. I checked you up.”
“A suite in a
downtown office building,” I said. “And now this—an almost furtive practice in a little beach town. You’d have liked to change your name—but you couldn’t and keep your license. Somebody had to mastermind this deal, Doctor. Clausen was a bum. Hicks a stupid lout, Orrin Quest a nasty-minded creep. But they could be used. You couldn’t go up against Steelgrave directly. You wouldn’t have stayed alive long enough to brush your teeth. You had to work through pawns—expendable pawns. Well—are we getting anywhere?”
He smiled faintly and leaned back in his chair with a sigh. “Presumption D, Mr. Marlowe,” he almost whispered. “You are an unmitigated idiot.”
I grinned and reached for a match to light his fat Egyptian cigarette.
“Added to all the rest,” I said, “Orrin’s sister calls me up and tells me he is in your house. There are a lot of weak arguments taken one at a time, I admit. But they do seem to sort of focus on you.” I puffed peacefully on the cigarette.
He watched me. His face seemed to fluctuate and become vague, to move far off and come back. I felt a tightness in my chest. My mind had slowed to a turtle’s gallop.
“What’s going on here?” I heard myself mumble.
I put my hands on the arms of the chair and pushed myself up. “Been dumb, haven’t I?” I said, with the cigarette still in my mouth and me still smoking it. Dumb was hardly the word. Have to coin a new word.
I was out of the chair and my feet were stuck in two barrels of cement. When I spoke my voice seemed to come through cottonwool.
I let go of the arms of the chair and reached for the cigarette. I missed it clean a couple of times, then got my hand around it. It didn’t feel like a cigarette. It felt like the hind leg of an elephant. With sharp toenails. They stuck into my hand. I shook my hand and the elephant took his leg away.
A vague but enormously tall figure swung around in front of me and a mule kicked me in the chest. I sat down on the floor.