“Wouldn’t matter if he did,” I said. “Harlan Potter’s friends wouldn’t listen to him. Also, she wasn’t killed with that bronze thing. She was shot through the head with her own gun.”
“She maybe had a gun,” he said almost dreamily. “But I didn’t know she had been shot. It wasn’t published.”
“Didn’t know or didn’t remember?” I asked him. “No, it wasn’t published.”
“What are you trying to do to me, Marlowe?” His voice was still creamy, almost gentle. “What do you want me to do? Tell my wife? Tell the police? What good would it do?”
“You said a good man died for you.”
“All I meant was that if there had been any real investigation I might have been identified as one—but only one—of the possible suspects. It would have finished me in several ways.”
“I didn’t come here to accuse you of a murder, Wade. What’s eating you is that you’re not sure yourself. You have a record of violence to your wife. You black out when you’re drunk. It’s no argument to say you don’t beat a woman’s head in just because she’s a tramp. That is exactly what somebody did do. And the guy who got credit for the job seemed to me a lot less likely than you.”
He walked to the open french windows and stood looking out at the shimmer of heat over the lake. He didn’t answer me. He hadn’t moved or spoken a couple of minutes later when there was a light knock at the door and Candy came in wheeling a tea wagon, with a crisp white cloth, silver-covered dishes, a pot of coffee, and two bottles of beer.
“Open the beer, boss?” he asked Wade’s back.
“Bring me a bottle of whiskey.” Wade didn’t turn around.
“Sorry, boss. No whiskey.”
Wade spun around and yelled at him, but Candy didn’t budge. He looked down at the check lying on the cocktail table and his head twisted as he read it. Then he looked up at me and hissed something between his teeth. Then he looked at Wade.
“I go now. This my day off.”
He turned and went. Wade laughed.
“So I get it myself,” he said sharply, and went.
I lifted one of the covers and saw some neatly trimmed three cornered sandwiches. I took one and poured some beer and ate the sandwich standing up. Wade came back with a bottle and a glass. He sat down on the couch and poured a stiff jolt and sucked it down. There was the sound of a car going away from the house, probably Candy leaving by the service driveway. I took another sandwich.
“Sit down and make yourself comfortable,” Wade said. “We have all afternoon to kill.” He had a glow on already. His voice was vibrant and cheerful. “You don’t like me, do you, Marlowe?”
“That question has already been asked and answered.”
“Know something? You’re a pretty ruthless son of a bitch. You’d do anything to find what you want. You’d even make love to my wife while I was helpless drunk in the next room.”
“You believe everything that knife thrower tells you?”
He poured some more whiskey into his glass and held it up against the light. “Not everything, no. A pretty color whiskey is, isn’t it? To drown in a golden flood—that’s not so bad. ‘To cease upon the midnight with no pain.’ How does that go on? Oh, sorry, you wouldn’t know. Too literary. You’re some kind of a dick, aren’t you? Mind telling me why you’re here.”
He drank some more whiskey and grinned at me. Then he spotted the check lying on the table. He reached for it and read it over his glass.
“Seems to be made out to somebody named Marlowe. I wonder why, what for. Seems I signed it. Foolish of me. I’m a gullible chap.”
“Stop acting,” I said roughly. “Where’s your wife?”
He looked up politely. “My wife will be home in due course. No doubt by that time I shall be passed out and she can entertain you at her leisure. The house will be yours.”
“Where’s the gun?” I asked suddenly.
He looked blank. I told him I had put it in his desk. “Not there now, I’m sure,” he said. “You may search if it pleases you. Just don’t steal any rubber bands.”
I went to the desk and frisked it. No gun. That was something. Probably Eileen had hidden it.
“Look, Wade, I asked you where your wife was. I think she ought to come home. Not for my benefit, friend, for yours. Somebody has to look out for you, and I’ll be goddamned if it’s going to be me.”
He stared vaguely. He was still holding the check. He put his glass down and tore the check across, then again and again, and let the pieces fall to the floor.
“Evidently the amount was too small,” he said. “Your services come very high. Even a thousand dollars and my wife fail to satisfy you. Too bad, but I can’t go any higher. Except on this.” He patted the bottle.
“I’m leaving,” I said.
“But why? You wanted me to remember. Well—here in the bottle is my memory. Stick around, pal. When I get lit enough I’ll tell you about all the women I have murdered.”
“All right, Wade. I’ll stick around for a while. But not in here. If you need me, just smash a chair against the wall.”
I went out and left the door open. I walked across the big living room and out to the patio and pulled one of the chaises into the shadow of the overhang and stretched out on it. Across the lake there was a blue haze against the hills. The Ocean breeze had begun to filter through the low mountains to the west. It wiped the air clean and it wiped away just enough of the heat. Idle Valley was having a perfect summer. Somebody had planned it that way. Paradise Incorporated, and also Highly Restricted. Only the nicest people. Absolutely no Central Europeans. Just the cream, the top drawer crowd, the lovely, lovely people. Like the Lorings and the Wades. Pure gold.
THIRTY-FIVE
I lay there for half an hour trying to make up my mind what to do. Part of me wanted to let him get good and drunk and see if anything came out. I didn’t think anything much would happen to him in his own study in his own house. He might fall down again but it would be a long time. The guy had capacity. And somehow a drunk never hurts himself very badly. He might get back his mood of guilt. More likely, this time he would just go to sleep.
The other part of me wanted to get out and stay out, but this was the part I never listened to. Because if I ever had I would have stayed in the town where I was born and worked in the hardware store and married the boss’s daughter and had five kids and read them the funny paper on Sunday morning and smacked their heads when they got out of line and squabbled with the wife about how much spending money they were to get and what programs they could have on the radio or TV set. I might even have got rich—small-town rich, an eight-room house, two cars in the garage, chicken every Sunday and the Reader’s Digest on the living room table, the wife with a cast-iron permanent and me with a brain like a sack of Portland cement. You take it, friend. I’ll take the big sordid dirty crooked city.
I got up and went back to the study. He was just sitting there staring at nothing, the Scotch bottle more than half empty, a loose frown on his face and a dull glitter in his eyes. He looked at me like a horse looking over a fence.
“What d’you want?”
“Nothing. You all right?”
“Don’t bother me. I have a little man on my shoulder telling me stories.”
I got another sandwich off the tea wagon and another glass of beer. I munched the sandwich and drank the beer, leaning against his desk.
“Know something?” he asked suddenly, and his voice suddenly seemed much more clear. “I had a male secretary once. Used to dictate to him. Let him go. He bothered me sitting there waiting for me to create. Mistake. Ought to have kept him. Word would have got around I was a homo. The clever boys that write book reviews because they can’t write anything else would have caught on and started giving me the buildup. Have to take care of their own, you know. They’re all queers, every damn one of them. The queer is the artistic arbiter of our age, chum. The pervert is the top guy now.”
“That so? Always been a
round, hasn’t he?”
He wasn’t looking at me. He was just talking. But he heard what I said.
“Sure, thousands of years. And especially in all the great ages of art. Athens, Rome, the Renaissance, the Elizabethan Age, the Romantic Movement in France—loaded with them. Queers all over the place. Ever read The Golden Bough? No, too long for you. Shorter version though. Ought to read it. Proves our sexual habits are pure conventions like—wearing a black tie with a dinner jacket. Me. I’m a sex writer, but with frills and straight.”
He looked up at me and sneered. “You know something? I’m a liar. My heroes are eight feet tall and my heroines have callouses on their bottoms from lying in bed with their knees up. Lace and ruffles, swords and coaches, elegance and leisure, duels and gallant death. All lies. They used perfume instead of soap, their teeth rotted because they never cleaned them, their fingernails smelled of stale gravy. The nobility of France urinated against the walls in the marble corridors of Versailles, and when you finally got several sets of underclothes off the lovely marquise the first thing you noticed was that she needed a bath. I ought to write it that way.”
“Why don’t you?”
He chuckled. “Sure, and live in a five-room house in Compton—if I was that lucky.” He reached down and patted the whiskey bottle. “You’re lonely, pal. You need company.”
He got up and walked fairly steadily out of the room. I waited, thinking about nothing. A speedboat came racketing down the lake. When it came in sight I could see that it was high out of the water on its step and towing a surfboard with a husky sunburned lad on it. I went over to the french windows and watched it make a sweeping turn. Too fast, the speedboat almost turned over. The surfboard rider danced on one foot trying to hold his balance, then went shooting off into the water. The speedboat drifted to a stop and the man in the water came up to it in a lazy crawl, then went back along the tow rope and rolled himself on to the surfboard.
Wade came back with another bottle of whiskey. The speedboat picked up and went off into the distance. Wade put his fresh bottle down beside the other. He sat down and brooded.
“Christ, you’re not going to drink all that, are you?”
He squinted his eyes at me. “Take off, buster. Go on home and mop the kitchen floor or something. You’re in my light.” His voice was thick again. He had taken a couple in the kitchen, as usual.
“If you want me, holler.”
“I couldn’t get low enough to want you.”
“Yeah, thanks. I’ll be around until Mrs. Wade comes home. Ever hear of anybody named Paul Marston?”
His head came up slowly. His eyes focused, but with effort. I could see him fighting for control. He won the fight for the moment. His face became expressionless.
“Never did,” he said carefully, speaking very slowly. “Who’s he?”
The next time I looked in on him he was asleep, with his mouth open, his hair damp with sweat, and reeking of Scotch. His lips were pulled back from his teeth in a loose grimace and the furred surface of his tongue looked dry.
One of the whiskey bottles was empty. A glass on the table had about two inches in it and the other bottle was about three quarters full. I put the empty on the tea wagon and rolled it out of the room, then went back to close the french windows and turn the slats of the blinds. The speedboat might come back and wake him. I shut the study door.
I wheeled the tea wagon out to the kitchen, which was blue and white and large and airy and empty. I was still hungry. I ate another sandwich and drank what was left of the beer, then poured a cup of coffee and drank that. The beer was flat but the coffee was still hot. Then I went back to the patio. It was quite a long time before the speedboat came tearing down the lake again. It was almost four o’clock when I heard its distant roar swell into an ear-splitting howl of noise. There ought to be a law. Probably was and the guy in the speedboat didn’t give a damn. He enjoyed making a nuisance of himself, like other people I was meeting. I walked down to the edge of the lake.
He made it this time. The driver slowed just enough on the turn and the brown lad on the surfboard leaned far out against the centrifugal pull. The surfboard was almost out of the water, but one edge stayed in and then the speedboat straightened out and the surfboard still had a rider and they went back the way they had come and that was that. The waves stirred up by the boat came charging in towards the shore of the lake at my feet. They slapped hard against the piles of the short landing and jumped the tied boat up and down. They were still slapping it around when I turned back to the house.
As I reached the patio I heard a bell chiming from the direction of the kitchen. When it sounded again I decided that only the front door would have chimes. I crossed to it and opened it.
Eileen Wade was standing there looking away from the house. As she turned she said: “I’m sorry, I forgot my key.” Then she saw me. “Oh—I thought it was Roger or Candy.”
“Candy isn’t here. It’s Thursday.”
She came in and I shut the door. She put a bag down on the table between the two davenports. She looked cool and also distant. She pulled off a pair of white pigskin gloves.
“Is anything wrong?”
“Well, there’s a little drinking being done. Not bad. He’s asleep on the couch in his study.”
“He called you?”
“Yes, but not for that. He asked me to lunch. I’m afraid he didn’t have any himself.”
“Oh.” She sat down slowly on a davenport. “You know, I completely forgot it was Thursday. The cook’s away too. How stupid.”
“Candy got the lunch before he left. I guess I’ll blow now. I hope my car wasn’t in your way.”
She smiled. “No. There was plenty of room. Won’t you have some tea? I’m going to have some.”
“All right.” I didn’t know why I said that. I didn’t want any tea. I just said it.
She slipped off a linen jacket. She hadn’t worn a hat. “I’ll just look in and see if Roger is all right.”
I watched her cross to the study door and open it. She stood there a moment and closed the door and came back.
“He’s still asleep. Very soundly. I have to go upstairs for a moment. I’ll be right down.”
I watched her pick up her jacket and gloves and bag and go up the stairs and into her room. The door closed. I crossed to the study with the idea of removing the bottle of hooch. If he was still asleep, he wouldn’t need it.
THIRTY-SIX
The shutting of the french windows had made the room stuffy and the turning of the venetian blinds had made it dim. There was an acrid smell on the air and there was too heavy a silence. It was not more than sixteen feet from the door to the couch and I didn’t need more than half of that to know a dead man lay on that couch.
He was on his side with his face to the back of the couch, one arm crooked under him and the forearm of the other lying almost across his eyes. Between his chest and the back of the couch there was a pool of blood and in that pool lay the Webley Hammerless. The side of his face was a smeared mask.
I bent over him, peering at the edge of the wide open eye, the bare and gaudy arm, at the inner curve of which I could see the puffed and blackened hole in his head from which the blood oozed still.
I left him like that. His wrist was warm but there was no doubt he was quite dead. I looked around for some kind of note or scribble. There was nothing but the pile of script on the desk. They don’t always leave notes. The typewriter was uncovered on its stand. There was nothing in that. Otherwise everything looked natural enough. Suicides prepare themselves in all sorts of ways, some with liquor, some with elaborate champagne dinners. Some in evening clothes, some in no clothes. People have killed themselves on the tops of walls, in ditches, in bathrooms, in the water, over the water, on the water. They have hanged themselves in bars and gassed themselves in garages. This one looked simple. I hadn’t heard the shot but it must have gone off when I was down by the lake watching the surfboard rider make his turn.
There was plenty of noise. Why that should have mattered to Roger Wade I didn’t know. Perhaps it hadn’t. The final impulse had coincided with the run of the speedboat. I didn’t like it, but nobody cared what I liked.
The torn pieces of the check were still on the floor but I left them. The torn strips of that stuff he had written that other night were in the wastebasket. These I did not leave. I picked them out and made sure I had them all and stuffed them into my pocket. The basket was almost empty, which made it easy. No use wondering where the gun had been. There were too many places to hide it in. It could have been in a chair or in the couch, under one of the cushions. It could have been on the floor, behind the books, anywhere.
I went out and shut the door. I listened. From the kitchen, sounds. I went out there. Eileen had a blue apron on and the kettle was just beginning to whistle. She turned the flame down and gave me a brief impersonal glance.
“How do you like your tea, Mr. Marlowe?”
“Just out of the pot as it comes.”
I leaned against the wall and got a cigarette out just to have something to do with my fingers. I pinched and squeezed it and broke it in half and threw one half on the floor. Her eyes followed it down. I bent and picked it up. I squeezed the two halves together into a little ball.
She made the tea. “I always take cream and sugar,” she said over her shoulder. “Strange, when I drink my coffee black. I learned tea drinking in England. They were using saccharin instead of sugar. When the war came they had no cream, of course.”
“You lived in England?”
“I worked there. I stayed all through the Blitz. I met a man—but I told you about that.”
“Where did you meet Roger?”
“In New York.”
“Married there?”
She swung around, frowning. “No, we were not married in New York. Why?”
“Just talking while the tea draws.”
She looked out of the window over the sink. She could see down to the lake from there. She leaned against the edge of the drainboard and her fingers fiddled with a folded tea towel.