“Not much,” I said. “This year I have a house to live in—all to myself.”
“No woman?”
“Just me. In addition to that I have what you see here and twelve hundred dollars in the bank and a few thousand in bonds. That answer your question?”
“What’s the most you ever made on a single job?”
“Eight-fifty.”
“Jesus, how cheap can a guy get?”
“Stop hamming and tell me what you want.”
He killed his cigarette half smoked and immediately lit another. He leaned back in his chair. His lip curled at me.
“We were three guys in a foxhole eating,” he said. “It was cold as hell, snow all around. We eat out of cans. Cold food. A little shelling, more mortar fire. We are blue with the cold, and I mean blue, Randy Starr and me and this Terry Lennox. A mortar shell plops right in the middle of us and for some reason it don’t go off. Those jerries have a lot of tricks. They got a twisted sense of humor. Sometimes you think it’s a dud and three seconds later it ain’t a dud. Terry grabs it and he’s out of the foxhole before Randy and me can even start to get unstuck. But I mean quick, brother. Like a good ball handler. He throws himself face down and throws the thing away from him and it goes off in the air. Most of it goes over his head but a hunk gets the side of his face. Right then the krauts mount an attack and the next thing we know we ain’t there any more.”
Menendez stopped talking and gave me the bright steady glare of his dark eyes.
“Thanks for telling me,” I said.
“You take a good ribbing, Marlowe. You’re okay. Randy and me talked things over and we decided that what happened to Terry Lennox was enough to screw up any guy’s brains. For a long time we figured he was dead but he wasn’t. The krauts got him. They worked him over for about a year and a half. They did a good job but they hurt him too much. It cost us money to find out, and it cost us money to find him. But we made plenty in the black market after the war. We could afford it. All Terry gets out of saving our lives is half of a new face, white hair, and a bad case of nerves. Back east he hits the bottle, gets picked up here and there, kind of goes to pieces. There’s something on his mind but we never know what. The next thing we know he’s married to this rich dame and riding high. He unmarries her, hits bottom again, marries her again, and she gets dead. Randy and me can’t do a thing for him. He won’t let us except for that short job in Vegas. And when he gets in a real jam he don’t come to us, he goes to a cheapie like you, a guy that cops can push around. So then he gets dead, and without telling us goodbye, and without giving us a chance to pay off. I could have got him out of the country faster than a card sharp can stack a deck. But he goes crying to you. It makes me sore. A cheapie, a guy cops can push around.”
“The cops can push anybody around. What do you want me to do about it?”
“Just lay off,” Menendez said tightly.
“Lay off what?”
“Trying to make yourself dough or publicity out of the Lennox case. It’s finished, wrapped up. Terry’s dead and we don’t want him bothered any more. The guy suffered too much.”
“A hoodlum with sentiment,” I said. “That slays me.”
“Watch your lip, cheapie. Watch your lip. Mendy Menendez don’t argue with guys. He tells them. Find yourself another way to grab a buck. Get me?”
He stood up. The interview was finished. He picked up his gloves. They were snow-white pigskin. They didn’t look as if he ever had them on. A dressy type, Mr. Menendez. But very tough behind it all.
“I’m not looking for publicity,” I said. “And nobody’s offered me any dough. Why would they and for what?”
“Don’t kid me, Marlowe. You didn’t spend three days in the freezer just because you’re a sweetheart. You got paid off. I ain’t saying who by but I got a notion. And the party I’m thinking about has plenty more of the stuff. The Lennox case is closed and it stays closed even if—” He stopped dead and flipped his gloves at the desk edge.
“Even if Terry didn’t kill her,” I said.
His surprise was as thin as the gold on a weekend wedding ring. “I’d like to go along with you on that, cheapie. But it don’t make any sense. But if it did make sense—and Terry wanted it the way it is—then that’s how it stays.”
I didn’t say anything. After a moment he grinned slowly.
“Tarzan on a big red scooter,” he drawled. “A tough guy. Lets me come in here and walk all over him. A guy that gets hired for nickels and dimes and gets pushed around by anybody. No dough, no family, no prospects, no nothing. See you around, cheapie.”
I sat still with my jaws clamped, staring at the glitter of his gold cigarette case on the desk corner. I felt old and tired. I got up slowly and reached for the case.
“You forgot this,” I said, going around the desk.
“I got half a dozen of them,” he sneered.
When I was near enough to him I held it out. His hand reached for it casually. “How about half a dozen of these?” I asked him and hit him as hard as I could in the middle of his belly.
He doubled up mewling. The cigarette case fell to the floor. He backed against the wall and his hands jerked back and forth convulsively. His breath fought to get into his lungs. He was sweating. Very slowly and with an intense effort he straightened up and we were eye to eye again. I reached out and ran a finger along the bone of his jaw. He held still for it. Finally he worked a smile onto his brown face.
“I didn’t think you had it in you,” he said.
“Next time bring a gun—or don’t call me cheapie.”
“I got a guy to carry the gun.”
“Bring him with you. You’ll need him.”
“You’re a hard guy to get sore, Marlowe.”
I moved the gold cigarette case to one side with my foot and bent and picked it up and handed it to him. He took it and dropped it into his pocket.
“I couldn’t figure you,” I said. “Why it was worth your time to come up here and ride me. Then it got monotonous. All tough guys are monotonous. Like playing cards with a deck that’s all aces. You’ve got everything and you’ve got nothing. You’re just sitting there looking at yourself. No wonder Terry didn’t come to you for help. It would be like borrowing money from a whore.”
He pressed delicately on his stomach with two fingers. “I’m sorry you said that, cheapie. You could crack wise once too often.”
He walked to the door and opened it. Outside the bodyguard straightened from the opposite wall and turned. Menendez jerked his head. The bodyguard came into the office and stood there looking me over without expression.
“Take a good look at him, Chick,” Menendez said. “Make sure you know him just in case. You and him might have business one of these days.”
“I already saw him, Chief,” the smooth dark tight-lipped guy said in the tight-lipped voice they all affect. “He wouldn’t bother me none.”
“Don’t let him hit you in the guts,” Menendez said with a sour grin. “His right hook ain’t funny.”
The bodyguard just sneered at me. “He wouldn’t get that close.”
“Well, so long, cheapie,” Menendez told me and went out.
“See you around,” the bodyguard told me coolly. “The name’s Chick Agostino. I guess you’ll know me.”
“Like a dirty newspaper,” I said. “Remind me not to step on your face.”
His jaw muscles bulged. Then he turned suddenly and went out after his boss.
The door closed slowly on the pneumatic gadget. I listened but I didn’t hear their steps going down the hall. They walked as softly as cats. Just to make sure, I opened the door again after a minute and looked out. But the hall was quite empty.
I went back to my desk and sat down and spent a little time wondering why a fairly important local racketeer like Menendez would think it worth his time to come in person to my office and warn me to keep my nose clean, just minutes after I had received a similiar though differently expressed warni
ng from Sewell Endicott.
I didn’t get anywhere with that, so I thought I might as well make it a perfect score. I lifted the phone and put in a call to the Terrapin Club at Las Vegas, person to person, Philip Marlowe calling Mr. Randy Starr. No soap. Mr. Starr was out of town, and would I talk to anyone else? I would not. I didn’t even want to talk to Starr very badly. It was just a passing fancy. He was too far away to hit me.
After that nothing happened for three days. Nobody slugged me or shot at me or called me up on the phone and warned me to keep my nose clean. Nobody hired me to find the wandering daughter, the erring wife, the lost pearl necklace, or the missing will. I just sat there and looked at the wall. The Lennox case died almost as suddenly as it had been born. There was a brief inquest to which I was not summoned. It was held at an odd hour, without previous announcement and without a jury. The coroner entered his own verdict, which was that the death of Sylvia Potter Westerheym di Giorgio Lennox had been caused with homicidal intent by her husband, Terence William Lennox, since deceased outside the jurisdiction of the coroner’s office. Presumably a confession was read into the record. Presumably it was verified enough to satisfy the coroner.
The body was released for burial. It was flown north and buried in the family vault. The press was not invited. Nobody gave any interviews, least of all Mr. Harlan Potter, who never gave interviews. He was about as hard to see as the Dalai Lama. Guys with a hundred million dollars live a peculiar life, behind a screen of servants, bodyguards, secretaries, lawyers, and tame executives. Presumably they eat, sleep, get their hair cut, and wear clothes. But you never know for sure. Everything you read or hear about them has been processed by a public relations gang of guys who are paid big money to create and maintain a usable personality, something simple and clean and sharp, like a sterilized needle. It doesn’t have to be true. It just has to be consistent with the known facts, and the known facts you could count on your fingers.
Late afternoon of the third day the telephone rang and I was talking to a man who said his name was Howard Spencer, that he was a representative of a New York publishing house in California on a brief business trip, that he had a problem he would like to discuss with me and would I meet him in the bar of the Ritz-Beverly Hotel at eleven A.M. the next morning.
I asked him what sort of problem.
“Rather a delicate one,” he said, “but entirely ethical. If we don’t agree, I shall expect to pay you for your time, naturally.”
“Thank you, Mr. Spencer, but that won’t be necessary. Did someone I know recommend me to you?”
“Someone who knows about you—including your recent brush with the law, Mr. Marlowe. I might say that that was what interested me. My business, however, has nothing to do with that tragic affair. It’s just that—well, let’s discuss it over a drink, rather than over the telephone.”
“You sure you want to mix it with a guy who has been in the cooler?”
He laughed. His laugh and his voice were both pleasant. He talked the way New Yorkers used to talk before they learned to talk Flatbush.
“From my point of view, Mr. Marlowe, that is a recommendation, Not, let me add, the fact that you were, as you put it, in the cooler, but the fact, shall I say, that you appear to be extremely reticent, even under pressure.”
He was a guy who talked with commas, like a heavy novel. Over the phone anyway.
“Okay, Mr. Spencer, I’ll be there in the morning.”
He thanked me and hung up. I wondered who could have given me the plug. I thought it might be Sewell Endicott and called him to find out. But he had been out of town all week, and still was. It didn’t matter much. Even in my business you occasionally get a satisfied customer. And I needed a job because I needed the money—or thought I did, until I got home that night and found the letter with a portrait of Madison in it.
TWELVE
The letter was in the red and white birdhouse mailbox at the foot of my steps. A woodpecker on top of the box attached to the swing arm was raised and even at that I might not have looked inside because I never got mail at the house. But the woodpecker had lost the point of his beak quite recently. The wood was fresh broken. Some smart kid shooting off his atom gun.
The letter had Correo Aéreo on it and a flock of Mexican stamps and writing that I might or might not have recognized if Mexico hadn’t been on my mind pretty constantly lately. I couldn’t read the postmark. It was hand-stamped and the ink pad was pretty far gone. The letter was thick. I climbed my steps and sat down in the living room to read it. The evening seemed very silent. Perhaps a letter from a dead man brings its own silence with it.
It began without date and without preamble.
I’m sitting beside a second-floor window in a room in a not too clean hotel in a town called Otatoclán, a mountain town with a lake. There’s a mailbox just below the window and when the mozo comes in with some coffee I’ve ordered he is going to mail the letter for me and hold it up so that I can see it before he puts it in the slot. When he does that he gets a hundred-peso note, which is a hell of a lot of money for him.
Why all the finagling? There’s a swarthy character with pointed shoes and a dirty shirt outside the door watching it. He’s waiting for something, I don’t know what, but he won’t let me out. It doesn’t matter too much as long as the letter gets posted. I want you to have this money because I don’t need it and the local gendarmerie would swipe it for sure. It is not intended to buy anything. Call it an apology for making you so much trouble and a token of esteem for a pretty decent guy. I’ve done everything wrong as usual, but I still have the gun. My hunch is that you have probably made up your mind on a certain point. I might have killed her and perhaps I did, but I never could have done the other thing. That kind of brutality is not in my line. So something is very sour. But it doesn’t matter, not in the least. The main thing now is to save an unnecessary and useless scandal. Her father and her sister never did me any harm. They have their lives to live and I’m up to here in disgust with mine. Sylvia didn’t make a bum out of me, I was one already. I can’t give you any very clean answer about why she married me. I suppose it was just a whim. At least she died young and beautiful. They say lust makes a man old, but keeps a woman young. They say a lot of nonsense. They say the rich can always protect themselves and that in their world it is always summer. I’ve lived with them and they are bored and lonely people.
I have written a confession. I feel a little sick and more than a little scared. You read about these situations in books, but you don’t read the truth. When it happens to you, when all you have left is the gun in your pocket, when you are cornered in a dirty little hotel in a strange country, and have only one way out—believe me, pal, there is nothing elevating or dramatic about it. It is just plain nasty and sordid and gray and grim.
So forget it and me. But first drink a gimlet for me at Victor’s. And the next time you make coffee, pour me a cup and put some bourbon in it and light me a cigarette and put it beside the cup. And after that forget the whole thing. Terry Lennox over and out. And so goodbye.
A knock at the door. I guess it will be the mozo with coffee. If it isn’t, there will be some shooting. I like Mexicans, as a rule, but I don’t like their jails. So long.
TERRY
That was all. I refolded the letter and put it back in the envelope. It had been the mozo with the coffee all right. Otherwise I would never have had the letter. Not with a portrait of Madison in it. A portrait of Madison is a $5000 bill.
It lay in front of me green and crisp on the table top. I had never even seen one before. Lots of people who work in banks haven’t either. Very likely characters like Randy Starr and Menendez wear them for folding money. If you went to a bank and asked for one, they wouldn’t have it. They’d have to get it for you from the Federal Reserve. It might take several days. There are only about a thousand of them in circulation in the whole U.S.A. Mine had a nice glow around it. It created a little private sunshine all its own.
I sat there and looked at it for a long time. At last I put it away in my letter case and went out to the kitchen to make that coffee. I did what he asked me to, sentimental or not. I poured two cups and added some bourbon to his and set it down on the side of the table where he had sat the morning I took him to the plane. I lit a cigarette for him and set it in an ash tray beside the cup. I watched the steam rise from the coffee and the thin thread of smoke rise from the cigarette. Outside in the tecoma a bird was gussing around, talking to himself in low chirps, with an occasional brief flutter of wings.
Then the coffee didn’t steam any more and the cigarette stopped smoking and was just a dead butt on the edge of an ash tray. I dropped it into the garbage can under the sink. I poured the coffee out and washed the cup and put it away.
That was that. It didn’t seem quite enough to do for five thousand dollars.
I went to a late movie after a while. It meant nothing. I hardly saw what went on. It was just noise and big faces. When I got home again I set out a very dull Ruy Lopez and that didn’t mean anything either. So I went to bed.
But not to sleep. At three A.M. I was walking the floor and listening to Khachaturyan working in a tractor factory. He called it a violin concerto. I called it a loose fan belt and the hell with it.
A white night for me is as rare as a fat postman. If it hadn’t been for Mr. Howard Spencer at the Ritz-Beverly I would have killed a bottle and knocked myself out. And the next time I saw a polite character drunk in a Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith, I would depart rapidly in several directions. There is no trap so deadly as the trap you set for yourself.
THIRTEEN
At eleven o’clock I was sitting in the third booth on the right-hand side as you go in from the dining-room annex. I had my back against the wall and I could see anyone who came in or went out. It was a clear morning, no smog, no high fog even, and the sun dazzled the surface of the swimming pool which began just outside the plateglass wall of the bar and stretched to the far end of the dining room. A girl in a white sharkskin suit and a luscious figure was climbing the ladder to the high board. I watched the band of white that showed between the tan of her thighs and the suit. I watched it carnally. Then she was out of sight, cut off by the deep overhang of the roof. A moment later I saw her Bash down in a one and a half. Spray came high enough to catch the sun and make rainbows that were almost as pretty as the girl. Then she came up the ladder and unstrapped her white helmet and shook her bleach job loose. She wobbled her bottom over to a small white table and sat down beside a lumberjack in white drill pants and dark glasses and a tan so evenly dark that he couldn’t have been anything but the hired man around the pool. He reached over and patted her thigh. She opened a mouth like a firebucket and laughed. That terminated my interest in her. I couldn’t hear the laugh but the hole in her face when she unzippered her teeth was all I needed.