“He must have missed the clothes,” I said.
She nodded. “I think he did eventually—but he didn’t say so. Everything seemed to happen at once about that time. The papers were full of it, then Paul was missing, and then he was dead in Mexico. How was I to know that would happen? Roger was my husband. He had done an awful thing, but she was an awful woman. And he hadn’t known what he was doing. Then almost as suddenly as it began the papers dropped it. Linda’s father must have had something to do with that. Roger read the papers, of course, and he made just the sort of comments one would expect from an innocent bystander who had just happened to know the people involved.”
“Weren’t you afraid?” Spencer asked her quietly.
“I was sick with fear, Howard. If he remembered, he would probably kill me. He was a good actor—most writers are—and perhaps he already knew and was just waiting for a chance. But I couldn’t be sure. He might—just might—have forgotten the whole thing permanently. And Paul was dead.”
“If he never mentioned the clothes that you had dumped in the reservoir, that proved he suspected something,” I said. “And remember, in that stuff he left in the typewriter the other time—the time he shot the gun off upstairs and I found you trying to get it away from him—he said a good man had died for him.”
“He said that?” Her eyes widened just the right amount.
“He wrote it—on the typewriter. I destroyed it, he asked me to. I supposed you had already seen it.”
“I never read anything he wrote in his study.”
“You read the note he left the time Verringer took him away. You even dug something out of the wastebasket.”
“That was different,” she said coolly. “I was looking for a clue to where he might have gone.”
“Okay,” I said, and leaned back. “Is there any more?”
She shook her head slowly, with a deep sadness. “I suppose not. At the very last, the afternoon he killed himself, he may have remembered. We’ll never know. Do we want to know?”
Spencer cleared his throat. “What was Marlowe supposed to do in all this? It was your idea to get him here. You talked me into that, you know.”
“I was terribly afraid. I was afraid of Roger and I was afraid for him. Mr. Marlowe was Paul’s friend, almost the last person to see him who knew him. Paul might have told him something. I had to be sure. If he was dangerous, I wanted him on my side. If he found out the truth, there might still be some way to save Roger.”
Suddenly and for no reason that I could see, Spencer got tough. He leaned forward and pushed his jaw out.
“Let me get this straight, Eileen. Here was a private detective who was already in bad with the police. They’d had him in jail. He was supposed to have helped Paul—I call him that because you do—jump the country to Mexico. That’s a felony, if Paul was a murderer. So if he found out the truth and could clear himself, he would just sit on his hands and do nothing. Was that your idea?”
“I was afraid, Howard. Can’t you understand that? I was living in the house with a murderer who might be a maniac. I was alone with him a large part of the time.”
“I understand that,” Spencer said, still tough. “But Marlowe didn’t take it on, and you were still alone. Then Roger fired the gun off and for a week after that you were alone. Then Roger killed himself and very conveniently it was Marlowe who was alone that time.”
“That is true,” she said. “What of it? Could I help it?”
“All right,” Spencer said. “Is it just possible you thought Marlowe might find the truth and with the background of the gun going off once already, just kind of hand it to Roger and say something like, ‘Look, old man, you’re a murderer and I know it and your wife knows it. She’s a fine woman. She has suffered enough. Not to mention Sylvia Lennox’s husband. Why not do the decent thing and pull the trigger and everybody will assume it was just a case of too much wild drinking? So I’ll stroll down by the lake and smoke a cigarette, old man. Good luck and goodbye. Oh, here’s the gun. It’s loaded and it’s all yours.’”
“You’re getting horrible, Howard. I didn’t think anything of the sort.”
“You told the deputy Marlowe had killed Roger. What was that supposed to mean?”
She looked at me briefly, almost shyly. “I was very wrong to say that. I didn’t know what I was saying.”
“Maybe you thought Marlowe had shot him,” Spencer suggested calmly.
Her eyes narrowed. “Oh no, Howard. Why? Why would he do that? That’s an abominable suggestion.”
“Why?” Spencer wanted to know. “What’s abominable about it? The police had the same idea. And Candy gave them a motive. He said Marlowe was in your room for two hours the night Roger shot a hole in his ceiling—after Roger had been put to sleep with pills.”
She flushed to the roots of her hair. She stared at him dumbly.
“And you didn’t have any clothes on,” Spencer said brutally. “That’s what Candy told them.”
“But at the inquest—” she began to say in a shattered kind of voice. Spencer cut her off.
“The police didn’t believe Candy. So he didn’t tell it at the inquest.”
“Oh.” It was a sigh of relief.
“Also,” Spencer went on coldly, “the police suspected you. They still do. All they need is a motive. Looks to me like they might be able to put one together now.”
She was on her feet. “I think you had both better leave my house,” she said angrily. “The sooner the better.”
“Well, did you or didn’t you?” Spencer asked calmly, not moving except to reach for his glass and find it empty.
“Did I or didn’t I what?”
“Shoot Roger?”
She was standing there staring at him. The flush had gone. Her face was white and tight and angry.
“I’m just giving you the sort of thing you’d get in court.”
“I was out. I had forgotten my keys. I had to ring to get into the house. He was dead when I got home. All that is known. What has got into you, for God’s sake?”
He took a handkerchief out and wiped his lips. “Eileen, I’ve stayed in this house twenty times. I’ve never known that front door to be locked during the daytime. I don’t say you shot him. I just asked you. And don’t tell me it was impossible. The way things worked out it was easy.”
“I shot my own husband?” she asked slowly and wonderingly.
“Assuming,” Spencer said in the same indifferent voice, “that he was your husband. You had another when you married him.”
“Thank you, Howard. Thank you very much. Roger’s last book, his swan song, is there in front of you. Take it and go. And I think you had better call the police and tell them what you think. It will be a charming ending to our friendship. Most charming. Goodbye, Howard. I am very tired and I have a headache. I’m going to my room and lie down. As for Mr. Marlowe—and I suppose he put you up to all this—I can only say to him that if he didn’t kill Roger in a literal sense, he certainly drove him to his death.”
She turned to walk away. I said sharply: “Mrs. Wade, just a moment. Let’s finish the job. No sense in being bitter. We are all trying to do the right thing. That suitcase you threw into the Chatsworth Reservoir—was it heavy?”
She turned and stared at me. “It was an old one, I said. Yes, it was very heavy.”
“How did you get it over the high wire fence around the reservoir?”
“What? The fence?” She made a helpless gesture. “I suppose in emergencies one has an abnormal strength to do what has to be done. Somehow or other I did it. That’s all.”
“There isn’t any fence,” I said.
“Isn’t any fence?” She repeated it dully, as if it didn’t mean anything.
“And there was no blood on Roger’s clothes. And Sylvia Lennox wasn’t killed outside the guest house, but inside it on the bed. And there was practically no blood, because she was already dead—shot dead with a gun—and when the statuette was used to beat h
er face to a pulp, it was beating a dead woman. And the dead, Mrs. Wade, bleed very little.”
She curled her lip at me contemptuously. “I suppose you were there,” she said scornfully.
Then she went away from us.
We watched her go. She went up the stairs slowly, moving with calm elegance. She disappeared into her room and the door closed softly but firmly behind her. Silence.
“What was that about the wire fence?” Spencer asked me vaguely. He was moving his head back and forth. He was flushed and sweating. He was taking it gamely but it wasn’t easy for him to take.
“Just a gag,” I said. “I’ve never been close enough to the Chatsworth Reservoir to know what it looks like. Maybe it has a fence around it, maybe not.”
“I see,” he said unhappily. “But the point is she didn’t know either.”
“Of course not. She killed both of them.”
FORTY-THREE
Then something moved softly and Candy was standing at the end of the couch looking at me. He had his switch knife in his hand. He pressed the button and the blade shot out. He pressed the button and the blade went back into the handle. There was a sleek glitter in his eye.
“Million de pardones, señor,” he said. “I was wrong about you. She killed the boss. I think I—” He stopped and the blade shot out again.
“No.” I stood up and held my hand out. “Give me the knife, Candy. You’re just a nice Mexican houseboy. They’d hang it into you and love it. Just the kind of smoke screen that would make them grin with delight. You don’t know what I’m talking about. But I do. They fouled it up so bad that they couldn’t straighten it out now if they wanted to. And they don’t want to. They’d blast a confession out of you so quickly you wouldn’t even have time to tell them your full name. And you’d be sitting on your fanny up in San Quentin with a life sentence three weeks from Tuesday.”
“I tell you before I am not a Mexican. I am Chileno from Viña del Mar near Valparaíso.”
“The knife, Candy. I know all that. You’re free. You’ve got money saved. You’ve probably got eight brothers and sisters back home. Be smart and go back where you came from. This job here is dead.”
“Lots of jobs,” he said quietly. Then he reached out and dropped the knife into my hand. “For you I do this.”
I dropped the knife into my pocket. He glanced up towards the balcony. “La señora—what do we do now?”
“Nothing. We do nothing at all. The señora is very tired. She has been living under a great strain. She doesn’t want to be disturbed.”
“We’ve got to call the police,” Spencer said grittily.
“Why?”
“Oh my God, Marlowe—we have to.”
“Tomorrow. Pick up your pile of unfinished novel and let’s go.”
“We’ve got to call the police. There is such a thing as law.”
“We don’t have to do anything of the sort. We haven’t enough evidence to swat a fly with. Let the law enforcement people do their own dirty work. Let the lawyers work it out. They write the laws for other lawyers to dissect in front of other lawyers called judges so that other judges can say the first judges were wrong and the Supreme Court can say the second lot were wrong. Sure there’s such a thing as law. We’re up to our necks in it. About all it does is make business for lawyers. How long do you think the big-shot mobsters would last if the lawyers didn’t show them how to operate?”
Spencer said angrily: “That has nothing to do with it. A man was killed in this house. He happened to be an author and a very successful and important one, but that has nothing to do with it either. He was a man and you and I know who killed him. There’s such a thing as justice.”
“Tomorrow.”
“You’re just as bad as she is if you let her get away with it. I’m beginning to wonder about you a little, Marlowe. You could have saved his life if you had been on your toes. In a sense you let her get away with it. And for all I know this whole performance this afternoon has been just that—a performance.”
“That’s right. A disguised love scene. You could see Eileen is crazy about me. When things quiet down we may get married. She ought to be pretty well fixed. I haven’t made a buck out of the Wade family yet. I’m getting impatient.”
He took his glasses off and polished them. He wiped perspiration from the hollows under his eyes, replaced the glasses and looked at the floor.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ve taken a pretty stiff punch this afternoon. It was bad enough to know Roger had killed himself. But this other version makes me feel degraded—just knowing about it.” He looked up at me. “Can I trust you?”
“To do what?”
“The right thing—whatever it is.” He reached down and picked up the pile of yellow script and tucked it under his arm. “No, forget it. I guess you know what you are doing. I’m a pretty good publisher but this is out of my line. I guess what I really am is just a goddam stuffed shirt.”
He walked past me and Candy stepped out of his way, then went quickly to the front door and held it open. Spencer went out past him with a brief nod. I followed. I stopped beside Candy and looked into his dark shining eyes.
“No tricks, amigo,” I said.
“The señora is very tired,” he said quietly. “She has gone to her room. She will not be disturbed. I know nothing, señor. No me acuerdo de nada . . . A sus órdenes, señor.”
I took the knife out of my pocket and held it out to him. He smiled.
“Nobody trusts me, but I trust you, Candy.”
“Lo mismo, señor. Muchas gracias.”
Spencer was already in the car. I got in and started it and backed down the driveway and drove him back to Beverly Hills. I let him out at the side entrance of the hotel.
“I’ve been thinking all the way back,” he said as he got out. “She must be a little insane. I guess they’d never convict her.”
“They won’t even try,” I said. “But she doesn’t know that.”
He struggled with the batch of yellow paper under his arm, got it straightened out, and nodded to me. I watched him heave open the door and go on in. I eased up on the brake and the Olds slid out from the white curb, and that was the last I saw of Howard Spencer.
I got home late and tired and depressed. It was one of those nights when the air is heavy and the night noises seem muffled and far away. There was a high misty indifferent moon. I walked the floor, played a few records, and hardly heard them. I seemed to hear a steady ticking somewhere, but there wasn’t anything in the house to tick. The ticking was in my head. I was a one-man death watch.
I thought of the first time I had seen Eileen Wade and the second and the third and the fourth. But after that something in her got out of drawing. She no longer seemed quite real. A murderer is always unreal once you know he is a murderer. There are people who kill out of hate or fear or greed. There are the cunning killers who plan and expect to get away with it. There are the angry killers who do not think at all. And there are the killers who are in love with death, to whom murder is a remote kind of suicide. In a sense they are all insane, but not in the way Spencer meant it.
It was almost daylight when I finally went to bed.
The jangle of the telephone dragged me up out of a black well of sleep. I rolled over on the bed, fumbled for slippers, and realized that I hadn’t been asleep for more than a couple of hours. I felt like a halfdigested meal eaten in a greasy-spoon joint. My eyes were stuck together and my mouth was full of sand. I heaved up on the feet and lumbered into the living room and pulled the phone off the cradle and said into it: “Hold the line.”
I put the phone down and went into the bathroom and hit myself in the face with some cold water. Outside the window something went snip, snip, snip. I looked out vaguely and saw a brown expressionless face. It was the once-a-week Jap gardener I called Hardhearted Harry. He was trimming the tecoma—the way a Japanese gardner trims your tecoma. You ask him four times and he says, “next week,” and then he com
es by at six o’clock in the morning and trims it outside your bedroom window.
I rubbed my face dry and went back to the telephone.
“Yeah?”
“This is Candy, señor.”
“Good morning, Candy.”
“La señora es muerta.”
Dead. What a cold black noiseless word it is in any language. The lady is dead.
“Nothing you did, I hope.”
“I think the medicine. It is called Demerol. I think forty, fifty in the bottle. Empty now. No dinner last night. This morning I climb up on the ladder and look in the window. Dressed just like yesterday afternoon. I break the screen open. La señora es muerto. Frio como agua de nieve.”
Cold as icewater. “You call anybody?”
“Sí. El Doctor Loring. He call the cops. Not here yet.”
“Dr. Loring, huh? Just the man to come too late.”
“I don’t show him the letter,” Candy said.
“Letter to who?”
“Señor Spencer.”
“Give it to the police, Candy. Don’t let Dr. Loring have it. Just the police. And one more thing, Candy. Don’t hide anything, don’t tell them any lies. We were there. Tell the truth. This time the truth and all the truth.”
There was a little pause. Then he said: “Sí. I catch. Hasta la vista, amigo.” He hung up.
I dialed the Ritz-Beverly and asked for Howard Spencer.
“One moment, please. I’ll give you the desk.”
A man’s voice said: “Desk speaking. May I help you?”
“I asked for Howard Spencer. I know it’s early, but it’s urgent.”
“Mr. Spencer checked out last evening. He took the eight o’clock plane to New York.”
“Oh, sorry. I didn’t know.”
I went out to the kitchen to make coffee—yards of coffee. Rich, strong, bitter, boiling hot, ruthless, depraved. The lifeblood of tired men.
It was a couple of hours later that Bernie Ohls called me.
“Okay, wise guy,” he said. “Get down here and suffer.”
FORTY-FOUR
It was like the other time except that it was day and we were in Captain Hernandez’s office and the Sheriff was up in Santa Barbara opening Fiesta Week. Captain Hernandez was there and Bernie Ohls and a man from the coroner’s office and Dr. Loring, who looked as if he had been caught performing an abortion, and a man named Lawford, a deputy from the D.A’s office, a tall gaunt expressionless man whose brother was vaguely rumored to be a boss of the numbers racket in the Central Avenue district.