She sat perfectly silent, just looking. A long half minute went by. The corners of her mouth were white and her hands were rigid on her gabardine bag that matched her suit.
“You haven’t exactly wasted your time, have you?” she said at last. “How convenient that this publisher should have thought of employing you! So Terry named no names to you! Not a name. But it really didn’t matter, did it, Mr. Marlowe? Your instinct was unerring. May I ask what you propose to do next?”
“Nothing.”
“Why, what a waste of talent! How can you reconcile it with your obligation to your portrait of Madison? Surely there must be something you can do.”
“Just between the two of us,” I said, “you’re getting pretty corny. So Wade knew your sister. Thanks for telling me, however indirectly. I already guessed it. So what? He’s just one of what was most likely a fairly rich collection. Let’s leave it there. And let’s get around to why you wanted to see me. That kind of got lost in the shuffle didn’t it?”
She stood up. She glanced at her watch once more. “I have a car downstairs. Could I prevail upon you to drive home with me and drink a cup of tea?”
“Go on,” I said. “Let’s have it.”
“Do I sound so suspicious? I have a guest who would like to make your acquaintance.”
“The old man?”
“I don’t call him that,” she said evenly.
I stood up and leaned across the desk. “Honey, you’re awful cute sometimes. You really are. Is it all right if I carry a gun?”
“Surely you’re not afraid of an old man.” She wrinkled her lip at me.
“Why not? I’ll bet you are—plenty.”
She sighed. “Yes, I’m afraid I am. I always have been. He can be rather terrifying.”
“Maybe I’d better take two guns,” I said, then wished I hadn’t.
THIRTY-TWO
It was the damndest-looking house I ever saw. It was a square gray box three stories high, with a mansard roof, steeply sloped and broken by twenty or thirty double dormer windows with a lot of wedding cake decoration around them and between them. The entrance had double stone pillars on each side but the cream of the joint was an outside spiral staircase with a stone railing, topped by a tower room from which there must have been a view of the whole length of the lake.
The motor yard was paved with stone. What the place really seemed to need was a half mile of poplar-lined driveway and a deer park and a wild garden and a terrace on three levels and a few hundred roses outside the library window and a long green vista from every window ending in forest and silence and quiet emptiness. What it had was a wall of fieldstone around a comfortable ten or fifteen acres, which is a fair hunk of real estate in our crowded little country. The driveway was lined with a cypress hedge trimmed round. There were all sorts of ornamental trees in clumps here and there and they didn’t look like California trees. Imported stuff. Whoever built that place was trying to drag the Atlantic seaboard over the Rockies. He was trying hard, but he hadn’t made it.
Amos, the middle-aged colored chauffeur, stopped the Caddy gently in front of the pillared entrance, hopped out, and came around to hold the open door for Mrs. Loring. I got out first and helped him hold it. I helped her get out. She had hardly spoken to me since we got into the car in front of my building. She looked tired and nervous. Maybe this idiotic hunk of architecture depressed her. It would have depressed a laughing jackass and made it coo like a mourning dove.
“Who built this place?” I asked her. “And who was he mad at?”
She finally smiled. “Hadn’t you seen it before?”
“Never been this far into the valley.”
She walked me over to the other side of the driveway and pointed up. “The man who built it jumped out of that tower room and landed about where you are standing. He was a French count named La Tourelle and unlike most French counts he had a lot of money. His wife was Ramona Desborough, who was not exactly threadbare herself. In the silent-picture days she made thirty thousand a week. La Tourelle built this place for their home. It’s supposed to be a miniature of the Château de Blois. You know that, of course.”
“Like the back of my hand,” I said. “I remember now. It was one of those Sunday paper stories once. She left him and he killed himself. There was some kind of queer will too, wasn’t there?”
She nodded. “He left his ex-wife a few millions for carfare and tied the rest up in a trust. The estate was to be kept on just as it was. Nothing was to be changed, the dining table was to be laid in style every night, and nobody was to be allowed inside the grounds except the servants and the lawyers. The will was broken, of course. Eventually the estate was carved up to some extent and when I married Dr. Loring my father gave it to me for a wedding present. It must have cost him a fortune merely to make it fit to live in again. I loathe it. I always have.”
“You don’t have to stay here, do you?”
She shrugged in a tired sort of way. “Part of the time, at least. One of his daughters has to show him some sign of stability. Dr. Loring likes it here.”
“He would. Any guy who could make the kind of scene he made at Wade’s house ought to wear spats with his pajamas.”
She arched her eyebrows. “Why, thank you for taking such an interest, Mr. Marlowe. But I think enough has been said on that subject. Shall we go in? My father doesn’t like to be kept waiting.”
We crossed the driveway again and went up the stone steps and half of the big double doors swung open noiselessly and an expensive and very snooty-looking character stood aside for us to enter. The hallway was bigger than all the floor space in the house I was living in. It had a tesselated floor and there seemed to be stained-glass windows at the back and if there had been any light coming through them I might have been able to see what else was there. From the hallway we went through some more double carved doors into a dim room that couldn’t have been less than seventy feet long. A man was sitting there waiting, silent. He stared at us coldly.
“Am I late, Father?” Mrs. Loring asked hurriedly. “This is Mr. Philip Marlowe. Mr. Harlan Potter.”
The man just looked at me and moved his chin down about half an inch.
“Ring for tea,” he said. “Sit down, Mr. Marlowe.”
I sat down and looked at him. He looked at me like an entomologist looking at a beetle. Nobody said anything. There was complete silence until the tea came. It was put down on a huge silver tray on a Chinese table. Linda sat at a table and poured.
“Two cups,” Harlan Potter said. “You can have your tea in another room, Linda.”
“Yes, Father. How do you like your tea, Mr. Marlowe?”
“Any way at all,” I said. My voice seemed to echo off into the distance and get small and lonely.
She gave the old man a cup and then gave me a cup. Then she stood up silently and went out of the room. I watched her go. I took a sip of tea and got a cigarette out.
“Don’t smoke, please. I am subject to asthma.”
I put the cigarette back in the pack. I stared at him. I don’t know how it feels to be worth a hundred million or so, but he didn’t look as if he was having any fun. He was an enormous man, all of six feet five and built to scale. He wore a gray tweed suit with no padding. His shoulders didn’t need any. He wore a white shirt and a dark tie and no display handkerchief. A spectacle case showed in the outside breast pocket. It was black, like his shoes. His hair was black too, no gray at all. It was brushed sideways across his skull in a MacArthur sweep. And I had a hunch there was nothing under it but bare skull. His eyebrows were thick and black. His voice seemed to come from a long way off. He drank his tea as if he hated it.
“It will save time, Mr. Marlowe, if I put my position before you. I believe you are interfering in my affairs. If I am correct, I propose to stop it.”
“I don’t know enough about your affairs to interfere in them, Mr. Potter.”
“I disagree.”
He drank some more tea and put the
cup aside. He leaned back in the big chair he was sitting in and took me to pieces with his hard gray eyes.
“I know who you are, naturally. And how you make your living—if you make one—and how you became involved with Terry Lennox. It has been reported to me that you helped Terry get out of the country, that you have doubts about his guilt, and that you have since made contact with a man who was known to my dead daughter. For what purpose has not been explained to me. Explain it.”
“If the man has a name,” I said, “name it.”
He smiled very slightly, but not as if he was falling for me. “Wade. Roger Wade. Some sort of writer, I believe. A writer, they tell me, of rather prurient books which I should not be interested to read. I further understand that this man is a dangerous alcoholic. That may have given you a strange notion.”
“Maybe you had better let me have my own notions, Mr. Potter. They are not important, naturally, but they’re all I have. First, I do not believe Terry killed his wife, because of the way it was done and because I don’t think he was that kind of man. Second, I didn’t make contact with Wade. I was asked to live in his house and do what I could to keep him sober while he finished a job of writing. Third, if he is a dangerous alcoholic, I haven’t seen any sign of it. Fourth, my first contact was at the request of his New York publisher and I didn’t at that time have any idea that Roger Wade even knew your daughter. Fifth, I refused this offer of employment and then Mrs. Wade asked me to find her husband who was away somewhere taking a cure. I found him and took him home.”
“Very methodical,” he said dryly.
“I’m not finished being methodical, Mr. Potter. Sixth, you or someone on your instructions sent a lawyer named Sewell Endicott to get me out of jail. He didn’t say who sent him, but there wasn’t anyone else in the picture. Seventh, when I got out of jail a hoodlum named Mendy Menendez pushed me around and warned me to keep my nose clean and gave me a song and dance about how Terry had saved his life and the life of a gambler at Las Vegas named Randy Starr. The story could be true for all I know. Menendez pretended to be sore that Terry hadn’t asked him for help getting to Mexico and had asked a punk like me instead. He, Menendez, could have done it two ways from the jack by lifting one finger, and done it much better.”
“Surely,” Harlan Potter said with a bleak smile, “you are not under the impression that I number Mr. Menendez and Mr. Starr among my acquaintances.”
“I wouldn’t know, Mr. Potter. A man doesn’t make your kind of money in any way I can understand. The next person to warn me off the courthouse lawn was your daughter, Mrs. Loring. We met by accident at a bar and we spoke because we were both drinking gimlets, Terry’s favorite drink, but an uncommon one around here. I didn’t know who she was until she told me. I told her a little of how I felt about Terry and she gave me the idea that I would have a short unhappy career if I got you mad. Are you mad, Mr. Potter?”
“When I am,” he said coldly, “you will not have to ask me. You will be in no uncertainty about it.”
“What I thought. I’ve been kind of expecting the goon squad to drop around, but they haven’t shown so far. I haven’t been bothered by the cops either. I could have been. I could have been given a rough time. I think all you wanted, Mr. Potter, was quiet. Just what have I done to disturb you?”
He grinned. It was a sour kind of grin, but it was a grin. He put his long yellow fingers together and crossed a leg over his knee and leaned back comfortably.
“A pretty good pitch, Mr. Marlowe, and I have let you make it. Now listen to me. You are exactly right in thinking all I want is quiet. It’s quite possible that your connection with the Wades may be incidental, accidental, and coincidental. Let it remain so. I am a family man in an age when it means almost nothing. One of my daughters married a Bostonian prig and the other made a number of foolish marriages, the last being with a complaisant pauper who allowed her to live a worthless and immoral life until he suddenly and for no good reason lost his self-control and murdered her. You think that impossible to accept because of the brutality with which it was done. You are wrong. He shot her with a Mauser automatic, the very gun he took with him to Mexico. And after he shot her he did what he did in order to cover the bullet wound. I admit the brutality of this, but remember the man had been in a war, had been badly wounded, had suffered a great deal and seen others suffer. He may not have intended to kill her. There may have been some sort of scuffle, since the gun belonged to my daughter. It was a small but powerful gun, 7.65 m/m caliber, a model called P.P.K. The bullet went completely through her head and lodged in the wall behind a chintz curtain. It was not found immediately and the fact was not published at all. Now let us consider the situation.” He broke off and stared at me. “Are you very badly in need of a cigarette?”
“Sorry, Mr. Potter. I took it out without thinking. Force of habit.” I put the cigarette back for the second time.
“Terry had just killed his wife. He had ample motive from the rather limited police point of view. But he also had an excellent defense—that it was her gun in her possession and that he tried to take it away from her and failed and she shot herself with it. A good trial lawyer could have done a lot with that. He would probably have been acquitted. If he had called me up then, I would have helped him. But by making the murder a brutal affair to cover the traces of the bullet, he made it impossible. He had to run away and even that he did clumsily.”
“He certainly did, Mr. Potter. But he called you up in Pasadena first, didn’t he? He told me he did.”
The big man nodded. “I told him to disappear and I would still see what I could do. I didn’t want to know where he was. That was imperative. I could not hide a criminal.”
“Sounds good, Mr. Potter.”
“Do I detect a note of sarcasm? No matter. When I learned the details there was nothing to be done. I could not permit the sort of trial that kind of killing would result in. To be frank, I was very glad when I learned that he had shot himself in Mexico and left a confession.”
“I can understand that, Mr. Potter.”
He beetled his eyebrows at me. “Be careful, young man. I don’t like irony. Can you understand now that I cannot tolerate any further investigation of any sort by any person? And why I have used all my influence to make what investigation there was as brief as possible and as little publicized as possible?”
“Sure—if you’re convinced he killed her.”
“Of course he killed her. With what intent is another matter. It is no longer important. I am not a public character and I do not intend to be. I have always gone to a great deal of trouble to avoid any kind of publicity. I have influence but I don’t abuse it. The District Attorney of Los Angeles County is an ambitious man who has too much good sense to wreck his career for the notoriety of the moment. I see a glint in your eye, Marlowe. Get rid of it. We live in what is called a democracy, rule by the majority of the people. A fine ideal if it could be made to work. The people elect, but the party machines nominate, and the party machines to be effective must spend a great deal of money. Somebody has to give it to them, and that somebody, whether it be an individual, a financial group, a trade union or what have you, expects some consideration in return. What I and people of my kind expect is to be allowed to live our lives in decent privacy. I own newspapers, but I don’t like them. I regard them as a constant menace to whatever privacy we have left. Their constant yelping about a free press means, with a few honorable exceptions, freedom to peddle scandal, crime, sex, sensationalism, hate, innuendo, and the political and financial uses of propaganda. A newspaper is a business out to make money through advertising revenue. That is predicated on its circulation and you know what the circulation depends on.”
I got up and walked around my chair. He eyed me with cold attention. I sat down again. I needed a little luck. Hell, I needed it in carload lots.
“Okay, Mr. Potter, what goes from here?”
He wasn’t listening. He was frowning at his own thoughts. “
There’s a peculiar thing about money,” he went on. “In large quantities it tends to have a life of its own, even a conscience of its own. The power of money becomes very difficult to control. Man has always been a venal animal. The growth of populations, the huge costs of wars, the incessant pressure of confiscatory taxation—all these things make him more and more venal. The average man is tired and scared, and a tired, scared man can’t afford ideals. He has to buy food for his family. In our time we have seen a shocking decline in both public and private morals. You can’t expect quality from people whose lives are a subjection to a lack of quality. You can’t have quality with mass production. You don’t want it because it lasts too long. So you substitute styling, which is a commercial swindle intended to produce artificial obsolescence. Mass production couldn’t sell its goods next year unless it made what it sold this year look unfashionable a year from now. We have the whitest kitchens and the most shining bathrooms in the world. But in the lovely white kitchen the average American housewife can’t produce a meal fit to eat, and the lovely shining bathroom is mostly a receptacle for deodorants, laxatives, sleeping pills, and the products of that confidence racket called the cosmetic industry. We make the finest packages in the world, Mr. Marlowe. The stuff inside is mostly junk.”
He took out a large white handkerchief and touched his temples with it. I was sitting there with my mouth open, wondering what made the guy tick. He hated everything.
“It’s a little too warm for me in these parts,” he said. “I’m used to a cooler climate. I’m beginning to sound like an editorial that has forgotten the point it wanted to make.”
“I got your point all right, Mr. Potter. You don’t like the way the world is going so you use what power you have to close of a private corner to live in as near as possible to the way you remember people lived fifty years ago before the age of mass production. You’ve got a hundred million dollars and all it has bought you is a pain in the neck.”