“Can you make it without help?”
“Of course.” He got out of the car. “Aren’t you coming in for a drink or something?’
“Not tonight, thanks; I’ll wait here until you’re in the house.”
He stood there breathing hard. “Okay,” he said shortly.
He turned and walked carefully along a flagged path to the front door. He held on to a white pillar for a moment, then tried the door. It opened, he went in. The door stayed open and light washed across the green lawn. There was a sudden flutter of voices. I started backing from the driveway, following the back-up light. Somebody called out.
I looked and saw Eileen Wade standing in the open doorway. I kept going and she started to run. So I had to stop. I cut the lights and got out of the car. When she came up I said:
“I ought to have called you, but I was afraid to leave him.”
“Of course. Did you have a lot of trouble?”
“Well—a little more than ringing a doorbell.”
“Please come in the house and tell me all about it.”
“He should be in bed. By tomorrow he’ll be as good as new.”
“Candy will put him to bed,” she said. “He won’t drink tonight, if that’s what you are thinking of.”
“Never occurred to me. Goodnight, Mrs. Wade.”
“You must be tired. Don’t you want a drink yourself?”
I lit a cigarette. It seemed like a couple of weeks since I had tasted tobacco. I drank in the smoke.
“May I have just one puff?”
She came close to me and I handed her the cigarette. She drew on it and coughed. She handed it back laughing. “Strictly an amateur, as you see.”
“So you knew Sylvia Lennox,” I said. “Was that why you wanted to hire me?”
“I knew who?” She sounded puzzled.
“Sylvia Lennox.” I had the cigarette back now. I was eating it pretty fast.
“Oh,” she said, startled. “That girl that was—murdered. No, I didn’t know her personally. I knew who she was. Didn’t I tell you that?”
“Sorry, I’d forgotten just what you did tell me.”
She was still standing there quietly, close to me, slim and tall in a white dress of some sort. The light from the open door touched the fringe of her hair and made it glow softly.
“Why did you ask me if that had anything to do with my wanting to, as you put it, hire you?” When I didn’t answer at once she added, “Did Roger tell you he knew her?”
“He said something about the case when I told him my name. He didn’t connect me with it immediately, then he did. He talked so damn much I don’t remember half of what he said.”
“I see. I must go in, Mr. Marlowe, and see if my husband needs anything. And if you won’t come in—”
“I’ll leave this with you,” I said.
I took hold of her and pulled her towards me and tilted her head back. I kissed her hard on the lips. She didn’t fight me and she didn’t respond. She pulled herself away quietly and stood there looking at me.
“You shouldn’t have done that,” she said. “That was wrong. You’re too nice a person.”
“Sure. Very wrong.” I agreed. “But I’ve been such a nice faithful well-behaved gun dog all day long, I got charmed into one of the silliest ventures I ever tackled, and damned if it didn’t turn out just as though somebody had written a script for it. You know something? I believe you knew where he was all along—or at least knew the name of Dr. Verringer. You just wanted to get me involved with him, tangled up with him so I’d feel a sense of responsibility to look after him. Or am I crazy?”
“Of course you’re crazy,” she said coldly. “That is the most outrageous nonsense I ever listened to.” She started to turn away.
“Wait a minute,” I said. “That kiss won’t leave a scar. You just think it will. And don’t tell me I’m too nice a person. I’d rather be a heel.”
She looked back. “Why?”
“If I hadn’t been a nice guy to Terry Lennox, he would still be alive.”
“Yes?” she said quietly. “How can you be so sure? Goodnight, Mr. Marlowe. And thank you so very much for almost everything.”
She walked back along the edge of the grass. I watched her go into the house. The door closed. The porch light went off. I waved at nothing and drove away.
TWENTY-ONE
Next morning I got up late on account of the big fee I had earned the night before. I drank an extra cup of coffee, smoked an extra cigarette, ate an extra slice of Canadian bacon, and for the three hundredth time I swore I would never again use an electric razor. That made the day normal. I hit the office about ten, picked up some odds and ends of mail, slit the envelopes and let the stuff lie on the desk. I opened the windows wide to let out the smell of dust and dinginess that collected in the night and hung in the still air, in the corners of the room, in the slats of the venetian blinds. A dead moth was spread-eagled on a corner of the desk. On the window sill a bee with tattered wings was crawling along the woodwork, buzzing in a tired remote sort of way, as if she knew it wasn’t any use, she was finished, she had flown too many missions and would never get back to the hive again.
I knew it was going to be one of those crazy days. Everyone has them. Days when nobody rolls in but the loose wheels, the dingoes who park their brains with their gum, the squirrels who can’t find their nuts, the mechanics who always have a gear wheel left over.
The first was a big blond roughneck named Kuissenen or something Finnish like that. He jammed his massive bottom in the customer’s chair and planted two wide horny hands on my desk and said he was a power-shovel operator, that he lived in Culver City, and the goddam woman who lived next door to him was trying to poison his dog. Every morning before he let the dog out for a run in the back yard he had to search the place from fence to fence for meatballs thrown over the potato vine from next door. He’d found nine of them so far and they were loaded with a greenish powder he knew was an arsenic weed killer.
“How much to watch out and catch her at it?” He stared at me as unblinkingly as a fish in a tank.
“Why not do it yourself?”
“I got to work for a living, mister. I’m losing four twentyfive an hour just coming up here to ask.”
“Try the police?”
“I try the police. They might get around to it some time next year. Right now they’re busy sucking up to MGM.”
“S.P.C.A.? The Tailwaggers?”
“What’s them?”
I told him about the Tailwaggers. He was far from interested. He knew about the S.P.C.A. The S.P.C.A. could take a running jump. They couldn’t see nothing smaller than a horse.
“It says on the door you’re an investigator,” he said truculently. “Okay, go the hell out and investigate. Fifty bucks if you catch her.”
“Sorry,” I said. “I’m tied up. Spending a couple of weeks hiding in a gopher hole in your back yard would be out of my line anyway—even for fifty bucks.”
He stood up glowering. “Big shot,” he said. “Don’t need the dough, huh? Can’t be bothered saving the life of an itty-bitty dog. Nuts to you, big shot.”
“I’ve got troubles, too, Mr. Kuissenen.”
“I’ll twist her goddam neck if I catch her,” he said, and I didn’t doubt he could have done it. He could have twisted the hind leg off of an elephant. “That’s what makes it I want somebody else. Just because the little tike barks when a car goes by the house. Sour-faced old bitch.”
He started for the door. “Are you sure it’s the dog she’s trying to poison?” I asked his back.
“Sure I’m sure.” He was halfway to the door before the nickel dropped. He swung around fast then. “Say that again, buster.”
I just shook my head. I didn’t want to fight him. He might hit me on the head with my desk. He snorted and went out, almost taking the door with him.
The next cookie in the dish was a woman, not old, not young, not clean, not too dirty, obviously poor,
shabby, querulous and stupid. The girl she roomed with—in her set any woman who works out is a girl—was taking money out of her purse. A dollar here, four bits there, but it added up. She figured she was out close to twenty dollars in all. She couldn’t afford it. She couldn’t afford to move either. She couldn’t afford a detective. She thought I ought to be willing to throw a scare into the roommate just on the telephone like, not mentioning any names.
It took her twenty minutes or more to tell me this. She kneaded her bag incessantly while telling it.
“Anybody you know could do that,” I said.
“Yeah, but you being a dick and all.”
“I don’t have a license to threaten people I know nothing about.”
“I’m goin’ to tell her I been in to see you. I don’t have to say it’s her. Just that you’re workin’ on it.”
“I wouldn’t if I were you. If you mention my name she may call me up. If she does that, I’ll tell her the facts.”
She stood up and slammed her shabby bag against her stomach. “You’re no gentleman,” she said shrilly.
“Where does it say I have to be?”
She went out mumbling.
After lunch I had Mr. Simpson W. Edelweiss. He had a card to prove it. He was manager of a sewing machine agency. He was a small tired-looking man about forty-eight to fifty, small hands and feet, wearing a brown suit with sleeves too long, and a stiff white collar behind a purple tie with black diamonds on it. He sat on the edge of the chair without fidgeting and looked at me out of sad black eyes. His hair was black too and thick and rough without a sign of gray in it that I could see. He had a clipped mustache with a reddish tone. He could have passed for thirty-five if you didn’t look at the backs of his hands.
“Call me Simp,” he said. “Everybody elese does. I got it coming. I’m a Jewish man married to a Gentile woman, twenty-four years of age, beautiful. She run away a couple of times before.”
He got out a photo of her and showed it to me. She might have been beautiful to him. To me she was a big sloppy-looking cow of a woman with a weak mouth.
“What’s your trouble, Mr. Edelweiss? I don’t do divorce business.” I tried to give him back the photo. He waved it away. “The client is always mister to me,” I added. “Until he has told me a few dozen lies anyway.”
He smiled. “Lies I got no use for. It’s not a divorce matter. I just want Mabel back again. But she don’t come back until I find her. Maybe it’s a kind of game with her.”
He told me about her, patiently, without rancor. She drank, she played around, she wasn’t a very good wife by his standards, but he could have been brought up too strict. She had a heart as big as a house, he said, and he loved her. He didn’t kid himself he was any dreamboat, just a steady worker bringing home the pay check. They had a joint bank account. She had drawn it all out, but he was prepared for that. He had a pretty good idea who she had lit out with, and if he was right the man would clean her out and leave her stranded.
“Name of Kerrigan,” he said. “Monroe Kerrigan. I don’t aim to knock the Catholics. There is plenty of bad Jews too. This Kerrigan is a barber when he works. I ain’t knocking barbers either. But a lot of them are drifters and horse players. Not real steady.”
“Won’t you hear from her when she is cleaned out?”
“She gets awful ashamed. She might hurt herself.”
“It’s a Missing Persons job, Mr. Edelweiss. You should go down and make a report.”
“No. I’m not knocking the police, but I don’t want it that way. Mabel would be humiliated.”
The world seemed to be full of people Mr. Edelweiss was not knocking. He put some money on the desk.
“Two hundred dollars,” he said. “Down payment. I’d rather do it my way.”
“It will happen again,” I said.
“Sure.” He shrugged and spread his hands gently. “But twenty-four years old and me almost fifty. How could it be different? She’ll settle down after a while. Trouble is, no kids. She can’t have kids. A Jew likes to have a family. So Mabel knows that. She’s humiliated.”
“You’re a very forgiving man, Mr. Edelweiss.”
“Well I ain’t a Christian,” he said. “And I’m not knocking Christians, you understand. But with me it’s real. I don’t just say it. I do it. Oh, I almost forgot the most important.”
He got out a picture postcard and pushed it across the desk after the money. “From Honolulu she sends it. Money goes fast in Honolulu. One of my uncles had a jewelry business there. Retired now. Lives in Seattle.”
I picked the photo up again. “I’ll have to farm this one out,” I told him. “And I’ll have to have this copied.”
“I could hear you saying that, Mr. Marlowe, before I got here. So I come prepared.” He took out an envelope and it contained five more prints. “I got Kerrigan too, but only a snapshot.” He went into another pocket and gave me another envelope. I looked at Kerrigan. He had a smooth dishonest face that did not surprise me. Three copies of Kerrigan.
Mr. Simpson W. Edelweiss gave me another card which had on it his name, his residence, his telephone number. He said he hoped it would not cost too much but that he would respond at once to any demand for further funds and he hoped to hear from me.
“Two hundred ought to pretty near do it if she’s still in Honolulu,” I said. “What I need now is a detailed physical description of both parties that I can put into a telegram. Height, weight, age, coloring, any noticeable scars or other identifying marks, what clothes she was wearing and had with her, and how much money was in the account she cleaned out. If you’ve been through this before, Mr. Edelweiss, you will know what I want.”
“I got a peculiar feeling about this Kerrigan. Uneasy.”
I spent another half hour milking him and writing things down. Then he stood up quietly, shook hands quietly, bowed and left the office quietly.
“Tell Mabel everything is fine,” he said as he went out.
It turned out to be routine. I sent a wire to an agency in Honolulu and followed it with an airmail containing the photos and whatever information I had left out of the wire. They found her working as a chambermaid’s helper in a luxury hotel, scrubbing bathtubs and bathroom floors and so on. Kerrigan had done just what Mr. Edelweiss expected, cleaned her out while she was asleep and skipped, leaving her stuck with the hotel bill. She pawned a ring which Kerrigan couldn’t have taken without violence, and got enough out of it to pay the hotel but not enough to buy her way home. So Edelweiss hopped a plane and went after her.
He was too good for her. I sent him a bill for twenty dollars and the cost of a long telegram. The Honolulu agency grabbed the two hundred. With a portrait of Madison in my office safe I could afford to be underpriced.
So passed a day in the life of a P.I. Not exactly a typical day but not totally untypical either. What makes a man stay with it nobody knows. You don’t get rich, you don’t often have much fun. Sometimes you get beaten up or shot at or tossed into the jailhouse. Once in a long while you get dead. Every other month you decide to give it up and find some sensible occupation while you can still walk without shaking your head. Then the door buzzer rings and you open the inner door to the waiting room and there stands a new face with a new problem, a new load of grief, and a small piece of money.
“Come in, Mr. Thingummy. What can I do for you?”
There must be a reason.
Three days later in the shank of the afternoon Eileen Wade called me up, and asked me to come around to the house for a drink the next evening. They were having a few friends in for cocktails. Roger would like to see me and thank me adequately. And would I please send in a bill?
“You don’t owe me anything, Mrs. Wade. What little I did I got paid for.”
“I must have looked very silly acting Victorian about it,” she said. “A kiss doesn’t seem to mean much nowadays. You will come, won’t you?”
“I guess so. Against my better judgment.”
“Roger is
quite well again. He’s working.”
“Good.”
“You sound very solemn today. I guess you take life pretty seriously.”
“Now and then. Why?”
She laughed very gently and said goodbye and hung up. I sat there for a while taking life seriously. Then I tried to think of something funny so that I could have a great big laugh. Neither way worked, so I got Terry Lennox’s letter of farewell out of the safe and reread it. It reminded me that I had never gone to Victor’s for that gimlet he asked me to drink for him. It was just about the right time of day for the bar to be quiet, the way he would have liked it himself, if he had been around to go with me. I thought of him with a vague sadness and with a puckering bitterness too. When I got to Victor’s I almost kept going. Almost, but not quite. I had too much of his money. He had made a fool of me but he had paid well for the privilege.
TWENTY-TWO
It was so quiet in Victor’s that you almost heard the temperature drop as you came in at the door. On a bar stool a woman in a black tailormade, which couldn’t at that time of year have been anything but some synthetic fabric like orlon, was sitting alone with a pale greenish-colored drink in front of her and smoking a cigarette in a long jade holder. She had that fine-drawn intense look that is sometimes neurotic, sometimes sex-hungry, and sometimes just the result of drastic dieting.
I sat down two stools away and the barkeep nodded to me, but didn’t smile.
“A gimlet,” I said. “No bitters.”
He put the little napkin in front of me and kept looking at me. “You know something,” he said in a pleased voice. “I heard you and your friend talking one night and I got me in a bottle of that Rose’s Lime Juice. Then you didn’t come back any more and I only opened it tonight.”
“My friend left town,” I said. “A double if it’s all right with you. And thanks for taking the trouble.”
He went away. The woman in black gave me a quick glance, then looked down into her glass. “So few people drink them around here,” she said so quietly that I didn’t realize at first that she was speaking to me. Then she looked my way again. She had very large dark eyes. She had the reddest fingernails I had ever seen. But she didn’t look like a pickup and there was no trace of come-on in her voice. “Gimlets I mean.”