Once in a while, come election time, some misguided politician would try to get Sheriff Petersen’s job, and would be apt to call him things like The Guy With The Built-In Profile or The Ham That Smokes Itself, but it didn’t get him anywhere. Sheriff Petersen just went right on getting re-elected, a living testimonial to the fact that you can hold an important public office forever in our country with no qualifications for it but a clean nose, a photogenic face, and a closed mouth. If on top of that you look good on a horse, you are unbeatable.
As Ohls and I went in, Sheriff Petersen was standing behind his desk and the camera boys were filing out by another door. The Sheriff had his white Stetson on. He was rolling a cigarette. He was all set to go home. He looked at me sternly.
“Who’s this?” he asked in a rich baritone voice.
“Name’s Philip Marlowe, Chief,” Ohls said. “Only person in the house when Wade shot himself. You want a picture?”
The Sheriff studied me. “I don’t think so,” he said, and turned to a big tired-looking man with iron-gray hair. “If you need me, I’ll be at the ranch, Captain Hernandez.”
“Yes, sir.”
Petersen lit his cigarette with a kitchen match. He lit it on his thumbnail. No lighters for Sheriff Petersen. He was strictly a roll-your-own-and-light-’em-with-one-hand type.
He said goodnight and went out. A deadpan character with hard black eyes went with him, his personal bodyguard. The door closed. When he was gone Captain Hernandez moved to the desk and sat in the Sheriffs enormous chair and a stenotype operator in the corner moved his stand out from the wall to get elbow room. Ohls sat at the end of the desk and looked amused.
“All right, Marlowe,” Hernandez said briskly. “Let’s have it.”
“How come I don’t get my photo taken?”
“You heard what the Sheriff said.”
“Yeah, but why?” I whined.
Ohls laughed. “You know damn well why.”
“You mean on account of I’m tall, dark, and handsome and somebody might look at me?”
“Cut it,” Hernandez said coldly. “Let’s get on with your statement. Start from the beginning.”
I gave it to them from the beginning: my interview with Howard Spencer, my meeting with Eileen Wade, her asking me to find Roger, my finding him, her asking me to the house, what Wade asked me to do and how I found him passed out near the hibiscus bushes and the rest of it. The stenotype operator took it down. Nobody interrupted me. All of it was true. The truth and nothing but the truth. But not quite all the truth. What I left out was my business.
“Nice,” Hernandez said at the end. “But not quite complete.” This was a cool competent dangerous guy, this Hernandez. Somebody in the Sheriff s office had to be. “The night Wade shot off the gun in his bedroom you went into Mrs. Wade’s room and were in there for some time with the door shut. What were you doing in there?”
“She called me in and asked me how he was.”
“Why shut the door?”
“Wade was half asleep and I didn’t want to make any noise. Also the houseboy was hanging around with his ear out. Also she asked me to shut the door. I didn’t realize it was going to be important.”
“How long were you in there?”
“I don’t know. Three minutes maybe.”
“I suggest you were in there a couple of hours,” Hernandez said coldly. “Do I make myself clear?”
I looked at Ohls. Ohls didn’t look at anything. He was chewing on an unlighted cigarette as usual.
“You are misinformed, Captain.”
“We’ll see. After you left the room you went downstairs to the study and spent the night on the couch. Perhaps I should say the rest of the night.”
“It was ten minutes to eleven when he called me at home. It was long past two o’clock when I went into the study for the last time that night. Call it the rest of the night if you like.”
“Get the houseboy in here,” Hernandez said.
Ohls went out and came back with Candy. They put Candy in a chair. Hernandez asked him a few questions to establish who he was and so on. Then he said: “All right, Candy—we’ll call you that for convenience—after you helped Marlowe put Roger Wade to bed, what happened?”
I knew what was coming more or less. Candy told his story in a quiet savage voice with very little accent. It seemed as if he could turn that on and off at will. His story was that he had hung around downstairs in case he was wanted again, part of the time in the kitchen where he got himself some food, part of the time in the living room. While in the living room sitting in a chair near the front door he had seen Eileen Wade standing in the door of her room and he had seen her take her clothes off. He had seen her put a robe on with nothing under it and he had seen me go into her room and I shut the door and stayed in there a long time, a couple of hours he thought. He had gone up the stairs and listened. He had heard the bedsprings making sounds. He had heard whispering. He made his meaning very obvious. When he had finished he gave me a corrosive look and his mouth was twisted tight with hatred.
“Take him out,” Hernandez said.
“Just a minute,” I said. “I want to question him.”
“I ask the questions here,” Hernandez said sharply.
“You don’t know how, Captain. You weren’t there. He’s lying and he knows it and I know it.”
Hernandez leaned back and picked up one of the Sheriffs pens. He bent the handle of the pen. It was long and pointed and made of stiffened horsehair. When he let go of the point it sprang back.
“Shoot,” he said at last.
I faced Candy. “Where were you when you saw Mrs. Wade take her clothes off?”
“I was sitting down in a chair near the front door,” he said in a surly tone.
“Between the front door and the two facing davenports?”
“What I said.”
“Where was Mrs. Wade?”
“Just inside the door of her room. The door was open.”
“What light was there in the living room?”
“One lamp. Tall lamp what they call a bridge lamp.”
“What light was on the balcony?”
“No light. Light in her bedroom.”
“What kind of light in her bedroom?”
“Not much light. Night table lamp, maybe.”
“Not a ceiling light?”
“No.”
“After she took her clothes off—standing just inside the door of her room, you said—she put on a robe. What kind of robe?”
“Blue robe. Long thing like a house coat. She tie it with a sash.”
“So if you hadn’t actually seen her take her clothes off you wouldn’t know what she had on under the robe?”
He shrugged. He looked vaguely worried. “Si. That’s right. But I see her take her clothes off.”
“You’re a liar. There isn’t any place in the living room from which you could see her take her clothes off right bang in her doorway, much less inside her room. She would have to come out to the edge of the balcony. If she had done that she would have seen you.”
He just glared at me. I turned to Ohls. “You’ve seen the house. Captain Hernandez hasn’t —or has he?”
Ohls shook his head slightly. Hernandez frowned and said nothing.
“There is no spot in that living room, Captain Hernandez, from which he could see even the top of Mrs. Wade’s head—even if he was standing up—and he says he was sitting down—provided she was as far back as her own doorway or inside it. I’m four inches taller than he is and I could only see the top foot of an open door when I was standing just inside the front door of the house. She would have to come out to the edge of the balcony for him to see what he says he saw. Why would she do that? Why would she undress in her doorway even? There’s no sense to it.”
Hernandez just looked at me. Then he looked at Candy. “How about the time element?” he asked softly, speaking to me.
“That’s his word against mine. I’m talking about what can
be proved.”
Hernandez spit Spanish at Candy too fast for me to understand. Candy just stared at him sulkily.
“Take him out,” Hernandez said.
Ohls jerked a thumb and opened the door. Candy went out. Hernandez brought out a box of cigarettes, stuck one on his lip, and lit it with a gold lighter.
Ohls came back into the room. Hernandez said calmly: “I just told him that if there was an inquest and he told that story on the stand, he’d find himself doing a one-to-three up in Q for perjury. Didn’t seem to impress him much. It’s obvious what’s eating him. An old-fashioned case of hot pants. If he’d been around and we had any reason to suspect murder, he’d make a pretty good pigeon—except that he would have used a knife. I got the impression earlier that he felt pretty bad about Wade’s death. Any questions you want to ask, Ohls?”
Ohls shook his head. Hernandez looked at me and said: “Come back in the morning and sign your statement. We’ll have it typed out by then. We ought to have a P.M. report by ten o’clock, preliminary anyway. Anything you don’t like about this setup, Marlowe?”
“Would you mind rephrasing the question? The way you put it suggests there might be something I do like about it.”
“Okay,” he said wearily. “Take off. I’m going home.”
I stood up.
“Of course I never did believe that stuff Candy pulled on us,” he said. “Just used it for a corkscrew. No hard feelings, I hope.”
“No feelings at all, Captain. No feelings at all.”
They watched me go out and didn’t say goodnight. I walked down the long corridor to the Hill Street entrance and got into my car and drove home.
No feelings at all was exactly right. I was as hollow and empty as the spaces between the stars. When I got home I mixed a stiff one and stood by the open window in the living room and sipped it and listened to the groundswell of the traffic on Laurel Canyon Boulevard and looked at the glare of the big angry city hanging over the shoulder of the hills through which the boulevard had been cut. Far off the banshee wail of police or fire sirens rose and fell, never for very long completely silent. Twenty-four hours a day somebody is running, somebody else is trying to catch him. Out there in the night of a thousand crimes people were dying, being maimed, cut by flying glass, crushed against steering wheels or under heavy tires. People were being beaten, robbed, strangled, raped, and murdered. People were hungry, sick; bored, desperate with loneliness or remorse or fear, angry, cruel, feverish, shaken by sobs. A city no worse than others, a city rich and vigorous and full of pride, a city lost and beaten and full of emptiness.
It all depends on where you sit and what your own private score is. I didn’t have one. I didn’t care.
I finished the drink and went to bed.
THIRTY-NINE
The inquest was a flop. The coroner sailed into it before the medical evidence was complete, for fear the publicity would die on him. He needn’t have worried. The death of a writer—even a loud writer—is not news for long, and that summer there was too much to compete. A king abdicated and another was assassinated. In one week three large passenger planes crashed. The head man of a big wire service was shot to pieces in Chicago in his own automobile. Twenty-four convicts were burned to death in a prison fire. The Coroner of Los Angeles County was out of luck. He was missing the good things in life.
As I left the stand I saw Candy. He had a bright malicious grin on his face—I had no idea why—and as usual he was dressed just a little too well, in a cocoa brown gabardine suit with a white nylon shirt and a midnight blue bow tie. On the witness stand he was quiet and made a good impression. Yes, the boss had been pretty drunk lateIy a lot of times. Yes, he had helped put him to bed the night the gun went off upstairs. Yes, the boss had demanded whiskey before he, Candy, left on the last day, but he had refused to get it. No, he didn’t know anything about Mr. Wade’s literary work, but he knew the boss had been discouraged. He kept throwing it away and then getting it out of the wastebasket again. No, he had never heard Mr. Wade quarreling with anyone. And so on. The coroner milked him but it was thin stuff. Somebody had done a good coaching job on Candy.
Eileen Wade wore black and white. She was pale and spoke in a low clear voice which even the amplifier could not spoil. The coroner handled her with two pairs of velvet gloves. He talked to her as if he had trouble keeping the sobs out of his voice. When she left the stand he stood up and bowed and she gave him a faint fugitive smile that nearly made him choke on his saliva.
She almost passed me without a glance on the way out, then at the last moment turned her head a couple of inches and nodded very slightly, as if I was somebody she must have met somewhere a long time ago, but couldn’t quite place in her memory.
Outside on the steps when it was all over I ran into Ohls. He was watching the traffic down below, or pretending to.
“Nice job,” he said without turning his head. “Congratulations.”
“You did all right on Candy.”
“Not me, kid. The D.A. decided the sexy stuff was irrelevant.”
“What sexy stuff was that?”
He looked at me then. “Ha, ha, ha,” he said. “And I don’t mean you.” Then his expression got remote. “I been looking at them for too many years. It wearies a man. This one came out of the special bottle. Old private stock. Strictly for the carriage trade. So long, sucker. Call me when you start wearing twenty-dollar shirts. I’ll drop around and hold your coat for you.
People eddied around us going up and down the steps. We just stood there. Ohls took a cigarette out of his pocket and looked at it and dropped it on the concrete and ground it to nothing with his heel.
“Wasteful,” I said.
“Only a cigarette, pal. It’s not a life. After a while maybe you marry the girl, huh?”
“Shove it.”
He laughed sourly. “I been talking to the right people about the wrong things,” he said acidly. “Any objection?”
“No objection, Lieutenant,” I said, and went on down the steps. He said something behind me but I kept going.
I went over to a corn-beef joint on Flower. It suited my mood. A rude sign over the entrance said: “Men Only. Dogs and Women Not Admitted.” The service inside was equally polished. The waiter who tossed your food at you needed a shave and deducted his tip without being invited. The food was simple but very good and they had a brown Swedish beer which could hit as hard as a martini.
When I got back to the office the phone was ringing. Ohls said: “I’m coming by your place. I’ve got things to say.”
He must have been at or near the Hollywood substation because he was in the office inside twenty minutes. He planted himself in the customer’s chair and crossed his legs and growled:
“I was out of line. Sorry. Forget it.”
“Why forget it? Let’s open up the wound.”
“Suits me. Under the hat, though. To some people you’re a wrong gee. I never knew you to do anything too crooked.”
“What was the crack about twenty-dollar shirts?”
“Aw hell, I was just sore,” Ohls said. “I was thinking of old man Potter. Like he told a secretary to tell a lawyer to tell District Attorney Springer to tell Captain Hernandez you were a personal friend of his.”
“He wouldn’t take the trouble.”
“You met him. He gave you time.”
“I met him, period. I didn’t like him, but perhaps it was only envy. He sent for me to give me some advice. He’s big and he’s tough and I don’t know what else. I don’t figure he’s a crook.”
“There ain’t no clean way to make a hundred million bucks,” Ohls said. “Maybe the head man thinks his hands are clean but somewhere along the line guys got pushed to the wall, nice little businesses got the ground cut from under them and had to sell out for nickels, decent people lost their jobs, stocks got rigged on the market, proxies got bought up like a pennyweight of old gold, and the five per centers and the big law firms got paid hundred-grand fees fo
r beating some law the people wanted but the rich guys didn’t, on account of it cut into their profits. Big money is big power and big power gets used wrong. It’s the system. Maybe it’s the best we can get, but it still ain’t any Ivory Soap deal.”
“You sound like a Red,” I said, just to needle him.
“I wouldn’t know,” he said contemptuously. “I ain’t been investigated yet. You liked the suicide verdict, didn’t you?”
“What else could it be?”
“Nothing else, I guess.” He put his hard blunt hands on the desk and looked at the big brown freckles on the backs of them. “I’m getting old. Keratosis, they call those brown spots. You don’t get them until you’re past fifty. I’m an old cop and an old cop is an old bastard. I don’t like a few things about this Wade death.”
“Such as?” I leaned back and watched the tight sun wrinkles around his eyes.
“You get so you can smell a wrong setup, even when you know you can’t do a damn thing about it. Then you just sit and talk like now. I don’t like that he left no note.”
“He was drunk. Probably just a sudden crazy impulse.”
Ohls lifted his pale eyes and dropped his hands off the desk. “I went through his desk. He wrote letters to himself. He wrote and wrote and wrote. Drunk or sober he hit that typewriter. Some of it is wild, some of it is kind of funny, and some of it is sad. The guy had something on his mind. He wrote all around it but he never quite touched it. That guy would have left a two-page letter if he knocked himself off.”