Light steps sounded behind me and Eileen Wade came across the terrace and sat down beside me on the edge of a chaise.
“Well, what did you think?” she asked quietly.
“About the gentleman with the loose gloves?”
“Oh no.” She frowned. Then she laughed. “I hate people who make stagy scenes like that. Not that he isn’t a fine doctor. He has played that scene with half the men in the valley. Linda Loring is no tramp. She doesn’t look like one, talk like one, or behave like one. I don’t know what makes Dr. Loring behave as if she was.”
“Maybe he’s a reformed drunk,” I said. “A lot of them grow pretty puritanical.”
“It’s possible,” she said, and looked towards the lake. “This is a very peaceful place. One would think a writer would be happy here—if a writer is ever happy anywhere.” She turned to look at me. “So you won’t be persuaded to do what Roger asked.”
“There’s no point in it, Mrs. Wade. Nothing I could do. I’ve said all this before. I couldn’t be sure of being around at the right time. I’d have to be around all the time. That’s impossible, even if I had nothing else to do. If he went wild, for example, it would happen in a flash. And I haven’t seen any indications that he does get wild. He seems pretty solid to me.”
She looked down at her hands. “If he could finish his book, I think things would be much better.”
“I can’t help him do that.”
She looked up and put her hands on the edge of the chaise beside her. She leaned forward a little. “You can if he thinks you can. That’s the whole point. Is it that you would find it distasteful to be a guest in our house and be paid for it?”
“He needs a psychiatrist, Mrs. Wade. If you know one that isn’t a quack.”
She looked startled. “A psychiatrist? Why?”
I knocked the ashes out of my pipe and sat holding it, waiting for the bowl to get cooler before I put it away.
“You want an amateur opinion, here it is. He thinks he has a secret buried in his mind and he can’t get at it. It may be a guilty secret about himself, it may be about someone else. He thinks that’s what makes him drink, because he can’t get at this thing. He probably thinks that whatever happened, happened while he was drunk and he ought to find it wherever people go when they’re drunk—really bad drunk, the way he gets. That’s a job for a psychiatrist. So far, so good. If that is wrong, then he gets drunk because he wants to or can’t help it, and the idea about the secret is just his excuse. He can’t write his book, or anyway can’t finish it. Because he gets drunk. That is, the assumption seems to be that he can’t finish his book because he knocks himself out by drinking. It could be the other way around.”
“Oh no,” she said. “No. Roger has a great deal of talent. I feel quite sure that his best work is still to come.”
“I told you it was an amateur opinion. You said the other morning that he might have fallen out of love with his wife. That’s something else that could go the other way around.”
She looked towards the house, then turned so that she had her back to it. I looked the same way. Wade was standing inside the doors, looking out at us. As I watched he moved behind the bar and reached for a bottle.
“There’s no use interfering,” she said quickly. “I never do. Never. I suppose you’re right, Mr. Marlowe. There just isn’t anything to do but let him work it out of his system.”
The pipe was cool now and I put it away. “Since we’re groping around in the back of the drawer, how about that other way around?”
“I love my husband,” she said simply. “Not as a young girl loves, perhaps. But I love him. A woman is only a young girl once. The man I loved then is dead. He died in the war. His name, strangely enough, had the same initials as yours. It doesn’t matter now—except that sometimes I can’t quite believe that he is dead. His body was never found. But that happened to many men.”
She gave me a long searching look. “Sometimes—not often, of course—when I go into a quiet cocktail lounge or the lobby of a good hotel at a dead hour, or along the deck of a liner early in the morning or very late at night, I think I may see him waiting for me in some shadowy corner.” She paused and dropped her eyes. “It’s very silly. I’m ashamed of it. We were very much in love—the wild, mysterious, improbable kind of love that never comes but once.”
She stopped talking and sat there half in a trance looking out over the lake. I looked back at the house again. Wade was standing just inside the open french windows with a glass in his hand. I looked back at Eileen. For her I wasn’t there any more. I got up and went into the house. Wade stood there with the drink and the drink looked pretty heavy. And his eyes looked wrong.
“How you making out with my wife, Marlowe?” It was said with a twist of the mouth.
“No passes, if you mean it that way.”
“That’s exactly the way I mean it. You got to kiss her the other night. Probably fancy yourself as a fast worker, but you’re wasting your time, bud. Even if you had the right kind of polish.”
I tried to move around him but he blocked me with a solid shoulder. “Don’t hurry away, old man. We like you around. We get so few private dicks in our house.”
“I’m the one too many,” I said.
He hoisted the glass and drank from it. When he lowered it he leered at me.
“You ought to give yourself a little more time to build resistance,” I told him. “Empty words, huh?”
“Okay, coach. Some little character builder, aren’t you? You ought to have more sense than to try educating a drunk. Drunks don’t educate, my friend. They disintegrate. And part of the process is a lot of fun.” He drank from the glass again, leaving it nearly empty. “And part of it is damned awful. But if I may quote the scintillating words of the good Dr. Loring, a bastardly bastard with a little black bag, stay away from my wife, Marlowe. Sure you go for her. They all do. You’d like to sleep with her. They all would. You’d like to share her dreams and sniff the rose of her memories. Maybe I would too. But there is nothing to share, chum—nothing, nothing, nothing. You’re all alone in the dark.”
He finished his drink and turned the glass upside down.
“Empty like that, Marlowe. Nothing there at all. I’m the guy that knows.”
He put the glass on the edge of the bar and walked stiffy to the foot of the stairs. He made about a dozen steps up, holding on to the rail, and stopped and leaned against it. He looked down at me with a sour grin.
“Forgive the corny sarcasm, Marlowe. You’re a nice guy. I wouldn’t want anything to happen to you.”
“Anything like what?”
“Perhaps she didn’t get around yet to that haunting magic of her first love, the guy that went missing in Norway. You wouldn’t want to be missing, would you, chum? You’re my own special private eye. You find me when I’m lost in the savage splendor of Sepulveda Canyon.” He moved the palm of his hand in a circular motion on the polished wood banister. “It would hurt me to the quick if you got lost yourself. Like that character who hitched up with the limeys. He got so lost a man sometimes wonders if he ever existed. You figure she could have maybe just invented him to have a toy to play with?”
“How would I know?”
He looked down at me. There were deep lines between his eyes now and his mouth was twisted with bitterness.
“How would anybody know? Maybe she don’t know herself. Baby’s tired. Baby been playing too long with broken toys. Baby wants to go bye-bye.”
He went on up the stairs.
I stood there until Candy came in and started tidying up around the bar, putting glasses on a tray, examining bottles to see what was left, paying no attention to me. Or so I thought. Then he said: “Señor. One good drink left. Pity to waste him.” He held up a bottle.
“You drink it.”
“Gracias, señor, no me gusta. Un vaso de Cerveza, no más. A glass of beer is my limit.”
“Wise man.”
“One lush in the house is en
ough,” he said, staring at me. “I speak good English, not?”
“Sure, fine.”
“But I think Spanish. Sometimes I think with a knife. The boss is my guy. He don’t need any help, hombre. I take care of him, see.”
“A great job you’re doing, punk.”
“Hijo de la flauta,” he said between his white teeth. He picked up a loaded tray and swung it up on the edge of his shoulder and the flat of his hand, bus boy style.
I walked to the door and let myself out, wondering how an expression meaning ‘son of a flute’ had come to be an insult in Spanish. I didn’t wonder very long. I had too many other things to wonder about. Something more than alcohol was the matter with the Wade family. Alcohol was no more than a disguised reaction.
Later that night, between nine-thirty and ten, I called the Wades’ number. After eight rings I hung up, but I had only just taken my hand off the instrument when it started to ring me. It was Eileen Wade.
“Someone just rang here,” she said. “I had a sort of hunch it might be you. I was just getting ready to take a shower.”
“It was me, but it wasn’t important, Mrs. Wade. He seemed a little woolly-headed when I left—Roger did. I guess maybe I feel a little responsibility for him by now.”
“He’s quite all right,” she said. “Fast asleep in bed. I think Dr. Loring upset him more than he showed. No doubt he talked a lot of nonsense to you.”
“He said he was tired and wanted to go to bed. Pretty sensible, I thought.”
“If that is all he said, yes. Well, goodnight and thank you for calling, Mr. Marlowe.”
“I didn’t say it was all he said. I said he said it.”
There was a pause, then: “Everyone gets fantastic ideas once in a while. Don’t take Roger too seriously, Mr. Marlowe. After all, his imagination is rather highly developed. Naturally it would be. He shouldn’t have had anything to drink so soon after the last time. Please try to forget all about it. I suppose he was rude to you among other things.”
“He wasn’t rude to me. He made quiet a lot of sense. Your husband is a guy who can take a long hard look at himself and see what is there. It’s not a very common gift. Most people go through life using up half their energy trying to protect a dignity they never had. Goodnight, Mrs. Wade.”
She hung up and I set out the chess board. I filled a pipe, paraded the chessmen and inspected them for French shaves and loose buttons, and played a championship tournament game between Gortchakoff and Meninkin, seventy-two moves to a draw, a prize specimen of the irresistible force meeting the immovable object, a battle without armor, a war without blood, and as elaborate a waste of human intelligence as you could find anywhere outside an advertising agency.
TWENTY-FIVE
Nothing happened for a week except that I went about my business which just then didn’t happen to be very much business. One morning George Peters of the The Carne Organization called me up and told me he had happened to be down Sepulveda Canyon way and had looked in on Dr. Verringer’s place just out of curiosity. But Dr. Verringer was no longer there. Half a dozen teams of surveyors were mapping the tract for a subdivision. Those he spoke to had never even heard of Dr. Verringer.
“The poor sucker got closed out on a trust deed,” Peters said. “I checked. They gave him a grand for a quitclaim just to save time and expense, and now somebody is going to make a million bucks clear, out of cutting the place up for residential property. That’s the difference between crime and business. For business you gotta have capital. Sometimes I think it’s the only difference.”
“A properly cynical remark,” I said, “but big time crime takes capital too.”
“And where does it come from, chum? Not from guys that hold up liquor stores. So long. See you soon.”
It was ten minutes to eleven on a Thursday night when Wade called me up. His voice was thick, almost gurgling, but I recognized it somehow. And I could hear short hard rapid breathing over the telephone.
“I’m in bad shape, Marlowe. Very bad. I’m slipping my anchor. Could you make it out here in a hurry?”
“Sure—but let me talk to Mrs. Wade a minute.”
He didn’t answer. There was a crashing sound, then a dead silence, then in a short while a kind of banging around. I yelled something into the phone without getting any answer. Time passed. Finally the light click of the receiver being replaced and the buzz of an open line.
In five minutes I was on the way. I made it in slightly over half an hour and I still don’t know how. I went over the pass on wings and hit Ventura Boulevard with the light against me and made a left turn anyhow and dodged between trucks and generally made a damn fool of myself. I went through Encino at close to sixty with a spotlight on the outer edge of the parked cars so that it would freeze anyone with a notion to step out suddenly. I had the kind of luck you only get when you don’t care. No cops, no sirens, no red flashers. Just visions of what might be happening in the Wade residence and not very pleasant visions. She was alone in the house with a drunken maniac, she was lying at the bottom of the stairs with her neck broken, she was behind a locked door and somebody was howling outside and trying to break it in, she was running down a moonlit road barefoot and a big buck Negro with a meat cleaver was chasing her.
It wasn’t like that at all. When I swung the Olds into their driveway lights were on all over the house and she was standing in the open doorway with a cigarette in her mouth. I got out and walked over the flagstones to her. She had slacks on and a shirt with an open collar. She looked at me calmly. If there was any excitement around there I had brought it with me.
The first thing I said was as loony as the rest of my behavior. “I thought you didn’t smoke.”
“What? No, I don’t usually.” She took the cigarette out and looked at it and dropped it and stepped on it. “Once in a long while. He called Dr. Verringer.”
It was a remote placid voice, a voice heard at night over water. Completely relaxed.
“He couldn’t,”I said. “Dr. Verringer doesn’t live there any more. He called me.”
“Oh really? I just heard him telephoning and asking someone to come in a hurry. I thought it must be Dr. Verringer.”
“Where is he now?”
“He fell down,” she said. “He must have tipped the chair too far back. He’s done it before. He cut his head on something. There’s a little blood, not much.”
“Well, that’s fine,” I said. “We wouldn’t want a whole lot of blood. Where is he now, I asked you.”
She looked at me solemnly. Then she pointed. “Out there somewhere. By the edge of the road or in the bushes along the fence.”
I leaned forward and peered at her. “Chrissake, didn’t you look?” I decided by this time that she was in shock. Then I looked back across the lawn. I didn’t see anything but there was heavy shadow near the fence.
“No, I didn’t look,” she said quite calmly. “You find him. I’ve had all of it I can take. I’ve had more than I can take. You find him.”
She turned and walked back into the house, leaving the door open. She didn’t walk very far. About a yard inside the door she just crumpled to the floor and lay there. I scooped her up and spread her out on one of the two big davenports that faced each other across a long blond cocktail table. I felt her pulse. It didn’t seem very weak or unsteady. Her eyes were closed and the lids were blue. I left here there and went back out.
He was there all right, just as she had said. He was lying on his side in the shadow of the hibiscus. He had a fast thumping pulse and his breathing was unnatural. Something on the back of his head was sticky. I spoke to him and shook him a little. I slapped his face a couple of times. He mumbled but didn’t come to. I dragged him up into a sitting position and dragged one of his arms over my shoulder and heaved him up with my back turned to him and grabbed for a leg. I lost. He was as heavy as a block of cement. We both sat down on the grass and I took a short breather and tried again. Finally I got him hoisted into a fireman
’s lift position and plowed across the lawn in the direction of the open front door. It seemed about the same distance as a round trip to Siam. The two steps of the porch were ten feet high. I staggered over to the couch and went down on my knees and rolled him off. When I straightened up again my spine felt as if it had cracked in at least three places.
Eileen Wade wasn’t there any more. I had the room to myself. I was too bushed at the moment to care where anybody was. I sat down and looked at him and waited for some breath. Then I looked at his head. It was smeared with blood. His hair was sticky with it. It didn’t look very bad but you never know with a head wound.
Then Eileen Wade was standing beside me, quietly looking down at him with that same remote expression.
“I’m sorry I fainted,” she said. “I don’t know why.”
“I guess we’d better call a doctor.”
“I telephoned Dr. Loring. He is my doctor, you know. He didn’t want to come.”
“Try somebody else then.”
“Oh he’s coming,” she said. “He didn’t want to. But he’s coming as soon as he can manage.”
“Where’s Candy?”
“This is his day off. Thursday. The cook and Candy have Thursdays off. It’s the usual thing around here. Can you get him up to bed?”
“Not without help. Better get a rug or blanket. It’s a warm night, but cases like this get pneumonia very easily.”
She said she would get a rug. I thought it was damn nice of her. But I wasn’t thinking very intelligently. I was too bushed from carrying him.
We spread a steamer rug over him and in fifteen minutes Dr. Loring came, complete with starched collar and rimless cheaters and the expression of a man who has been asked to clean up after the dog got sick.