“We ought to get the car—” he started to say. I stopped him.
“No use. Too many other places. What kind of perfume does she use?”
He looked blank for an instant. “Oh—Gillerlain Regal, the Champagne of Perfumes,” he said woodenly. “A Chanel number once in a while.”
“What’s this stuff of yours like?”
“A kind of Chypre. Sandalwood Chypre.”
“The bedroom reeks with it,” I said. “It smelled like cheap stuff to me. But I’m no judge.”
“Cheap?” he said, stung to the quick. “My God, cheap? We get thirty dollars an ounce for it.”
“Well, this stuff smelled more like three dollars a gallon.”
He put his hands down hard on his knees and shook his head. “I’m talking about money,” he said. “Five hundred dollars. A check for it right now.”
I let the remark fall to the ground, eddying like a soiled feather. One of the old boys behind us stumbled to his feet and groped his way wearily out of the room.
Kingsley said gravely: “I hired you to protect me from scandal, and of course to protect my wife, if she needed it. Through no fault of yours the chance to avoid scandal is pretty well shot. It’s a question of my wife’s neck now. I don’t believe she shot Lavery. I have no reason for that belief. None at all. I just feel the conviction. She may even have been there last night, this gun may even be her gun. It doesn’t prove she killed him. She would be as careless with the gun as with anything else. Anybody could have got hold of it.”
“The cops down there won’t work very hard to believe that,” I said. “If the one I met is a fair specimen, they’ll just pick the first head they see and start swinging with their blackjacks. And hers will certainly be the first head they see when they look the situation over.”
He ground the heels of his hands together. His misery had a theatrical flavor, as real misery so often has.
“I’ll go along with you up to a point,” I said. “The set-up down there is almost too good, at first sight. She leaves clothes there she has been seen wearing and which can probably be traced. She leaves the gun on the stairs. It’s hard to think she would be as dumb as that.”
“You give me a little heart,” Kingsley said wearily.
“But none of that means anything,” I said. “Because we are looking at it from the angle of calculation, and people who commit crimes of passion or hatred, just commit them and walk out. Everything I have heard indicates that she is a reckless foolish woman. There’s no sign of planning in any of the scene down there. There’s every sign of a complete lack of planning.
But even if there wasn’t a thing down there to point to your wife, the cops would tie her up to Lavery. They will investigate his background, his friends, his women. Her name is bound to crop up somewhere along the line, and when it does, the fact that she has been out of sight for a month will make them sit up and rub their horny palms with glee. And of course they’ll trace the gun, and if it’s her gun—”
His hand dived for the gun in the chair beside him.
“Nope,” I said. “They’ll have to have the gun. Marlowe may be a very smart guy and very fond of you personally, but he can’t risk the suppression of such vital evidence as the gun that killed a man. Whatever I do has to be on the basis that your wife is an obvious suspect, but that the obviousness can be wrong.”
He groaned and put his big hand out with the gun on it. I took it and put it away. Then I took it out again and said: “Lend me your handkerchief. I don’t want to use mine. I might be searched.”
He handed me a stiff white handkerchief and I wiped the gun off carefully all over and dropped it into my pocket. I handed him back the handkerchief.
“My prints are all right,” I said. “But I don’t want yours on it. Here’s the only thing I can do. Go back down there and replace the gun and call the law. Ride it out with them and let the chips fall where they have to. The story will have to come out. What I was doing down there and why. At the worst they’ll find her and prove she killed him. At the best they’ll find her a lot quicker than I can and let me use my energies proving she didn’t kill him, which means, in effect, proving that somebody else did. Are you game for that?”
He nodded slowly. He said: “Yes—and the five hundred stands for showing Crystal didn’t kill him.”
“I don’t expect to earn it,” I said. “You may as well understand that now. How well did Miss Fromsett know Lavery? Out of office hours?”
His face tightened up like a charley horse. His fists went into hard lumps on his thighs. He said nothing.
“She looked kind of queer when I asked her for his address yesterday morning,” I said.
He let a breath out slowly.
“Like a bad taste in the mouth,” I said. “Like a romance that fouled out. Am I too blunt?”
His nostrils quivered a little and his breath made noise in them for a moment. Then he relaxed and said quietly: “She—she knew him rather well—at one time. She’s a girl who would do about what she pleased in that way. Lavery was, I guess, a fascinating bird—to women.”
“I’ll have to talk to her,” I said.
“Why?” he asked shortly. Red patches showed in his cheeks.
“Never mind why. It’s my business to ask all sorts of questions of all sorts of people.”
“Talk to her then,” he said tightly. “As a matter of fact she knew the Almores. She knew Almore’s wife, the one who killed herself. Lavery knew her too. Could that have any possible connection with this business?”
“I don’t know. You’re in love with her, aren’t you?”
“I’d marry her tomorrow, if I could,” he said stiffly.
I nodded and stood up. I looked back along the room. It was almost empty now. At the far end a couple of elderly relics were still blowing bubbles. The rest of the soft chair boys had staggered back to whatever it was they did when they were conscious.
“There’s just one thing,” I said, looking down at Kingsley. “Cops get very hostile when there is a delay in calling them after a murder. There’s been delay this time and there will be more. I’d like to go down there as if it was the first visit today. I think I can make it that way, if I leave the Fallbrook woman out.”
“Fallbrook?” He hardly knew what I was talking about. “Who the hell—oh yes, I remember.”
“Well, don’t remember. I’m almost certain they’ll never hear a peep from her. She’s not the kind to have anything to do with the police of her own free will.”
“I understand,” he said.
“Be sure you handle it right then. Questions will be asked you before you are told Lavery is dead, before I’m allowed to get in touch with you—so far as they know. Don’t fall into any traps. If you do, I won’t be able to find anything out. I’ll be in the clink.”
“You could call me from the house down there—before you call the police,” he said reasonably.
“I know. But the fact that I don’t will be in my favor. And they’ll check the phone calls one of the first things they do. And if I call you from anywhere else, I might just as well admit that I came up here to see you.”
“I understand,” he said again. “You can trust me to handle it.”
We shook hands and I left him standing there.
18
The Athletic Club was on a corner across the street and half a block down from the Treloar Building. I crossed and walked north to the entrance. They had finished laying rose-colored concrete where the rubber sidewalk had been. It was fenced around, leaving a narrow gangway in and out of the building. The space was clotted with office help going in from lunch.
The Gifierlain Company’s reception room looked even emptier than the day before. The same fluffy little blonde was tucked in behind the PBX in the corner. She gave me a quick smile and I gave her the gunman’s salute, a stiff forefinger pointing at her, the three lower fingers tucked back under it, and the thumb wiggling up and down like a western gun fighter fanning h
is hammer. She laughed heartily, without making a sound. This was more fun than she had had in a week.
I pointed to Miss Fromsett’s empty desk and the little blonde nodded and pushed a plug in and spoke. A door opened and Miss Fromsett swayed elegantly out to her desk and sat down and gave me her cool expectant eyes.
“Yes, Mr. Marlowe? Mr. Kingsley is not in, I’m afraid.”
“I just came from him. Where do we talk?”
“Talk?”
“I have something to show you.”
“Oh, yes?” She looked me over thoughtfully. A lot of guys had probably tried to show her things, including etchings. At another time I wouldn’t have been above taking a flutter at it myself.
“Business,” I said. “Mr. Kingsley’s business.”
She stood up and opened the gate in the railing. “We may as well go into his office then.”
We went in. She held the door for me. As I passed her I sniffed. Sandalwood. I said: “Gillerlain Regal, the Champagne of Perfumes?”
She smiled faintly, holding the door. “On my salary?”
“I didn’t say anything about your salary. You don’t look like a girl who has to buy her own perfume.”
“Yes, that’s what it is,” she said. “And if you want to know, I detest wearing perfume in the office. He makes me.”
We went down the long dim office and she took a chair at the end of the desk. I sat where I had sat the day before. We looked at each other. She was wearing tan today, with a ruffled jabot at her throat. She looked a little warmer, but still no prairie fire.
I offered her one of Kingsley’s cigarettes. She took it, took a light from his lighter, and leaned back.
“We needn’t waste time being cagey,” I said. “You know by now who I am and what I am doing. If you didn’t know yesterday morning, it’s only because he loves to play big shot.”
She looked down at the hand that lay on her knee, then lifted her eyes and smiled almost shyly.
“He’s a great guy,” she said. “In spite of the heavy executive act he likes to put on. He’s the only guy that gets fooled by it after all. And if you only knew what he has stood from that little tramp”—she waved her cigarette—“well, perhaps I’d better leave that out. What was it you wanted to see me about?”
“Kingsley said you knew the Almores.”
“I knew Mrs. Almore. That is, I met her a couple of times.”
“Where?”
“At a friend’s house. Why?”
“At Lavery’s house?”
“You’re not going to be insolent, are you, Mr. Marlowe?”
“I don’t know what your definition of that would be. I’m going to talk business as if it were business, not international diplomacy.”
“Very well.” She nodded slightly. “At Chris Lavery’s house, yes. I used to go there—once in a while. He had cocktail parties.”
“Then Lavery knew the Almores—or Mrs. Almore.”
She flushed very slightly. “Yes. Quite well.”
“And a lot of other women—quite well, too. I don’t doubt that. Did Mrs. Kingsley know her too?”
“Yes, better than I did. They called each other by their first names. Mrs. Almore is dead, you know. She committed suicide, about a year and a half ago.”
“Any doubt about that?”
She raised her eyebrows, but the expression looked artificial to me, as if it just went with the question I asked, as a matter of form.
She said: “Have you any particular reason for asking that question in that particular way? I mean, has it anything to do with—with what you are doing?”
“I didn’t think so. I still don’t know that it has. But yesterday Dr. Almore called a cop just because I looked at his house. After he had found out from my car license who I was. The cop got pretty tough with me, just for being there. He didn’t know what I was doing and I didn’t tell him I had been calling on Lavery. But Dr. Almore must have known that. He had seen me in front of Lavery’s house. Now why would he think it necessary to call a cop? And why would the cop think it smart to say that the last fellow who tried to put the bite on Almore ended up on the road gang? And why would the cop ask me if her folks—meaning Mrs. Almore’s folks, I suppose—had hired me? If you can answer any of those questions, I might know whether it’s any of my business.”
She thought about it for a moment, giving me one quick glance while she was thinking, and then looking away again.
“I only met Mrs. Almore twice,” she said slowly. “But I think I can answer your questions—all of them. The last time I met her was at Lavery’s place, as I said, and there were quite a lot of people there. There was a lot of drinking and loud talk. The women were not with their husbands and the men were not with their wives, if any. There was a man there named Brownwell who was very tight. He’s in the navy now, I heard. He was ribbing Mrs. Almore about her husband’s practice. The idea seemed to be that he was one of those doctors who run around all night with a case of loaded hypodermic needles, keeping the local fast set from having pink elephants for breakfast. Florence Almore said she didn’t care how her husband got his money so long as he got plenty of it and she had the spending of it. She was tight too and not a very nice person sober, I should imagine. One of those slinky glittering females who laugh too much and sprawl all over their chairs, showing a great deal of leg. A very light blonde with a high color and indecently large baby-blue eyes. Well, Brownwell told her not to worry, it would always be a good racket. In and out of the patient’s house in fifteen minutes and anywhere from ten to fifty bucks a trip. But one thing bothered him, he said, how even a doctor could get hold of so much dope without contacts. He asked Mrs. Almore if they had many nice gangsters to dinner at their house. She threw a glass of liquor in his face.”
I grinned, but Miss Fromsett didn’t. She crushed her cigarette out in Kingsley’s big copper and glass tray and looked at me soberly.
“Fair enough,” I said. “Who wouldn’t, unless he had a large hard fist to throw?”
“Yes. A few weeks later Florence Almore was found dead in the garage late at night. The door of the garage was shut and the car motor was running.” She stopped and moistened her lips slightly. “It was Chris Lavery who found her. Coming home at God knows what o’clock in the morning. She was lying on the concrete floor in pajamas, with her head under a blanket which was also over the exhaust pipe of the car. Dr. Almore was out. There was nothing about the affair in the papers, except that she had died suddenly. It was well hushed up.”
She lifted her clasped hands a little and then let them fall slowly into her lap again. I said: “Was something wrong with it, then?”
“People thought so, but they always do. Some time later I heard what purported to be the lowdown. I met this man Brownwell on Vine Street and he asked me to have a drink with him. I didn’t like him, but I had half an hour to kill. We sat at the back of Levy’s bar and he asked me if I remembered the babe who threw the drink in his face. I said I did. The conversation then went something very like this. I remember it very well.
“Brownwell said: ‘Our pal Chris Lavery is sitting pretty, if he ever runs out of girl friends he can touch for dough’”
“I said: ‘I don’t think I understand.’”
“He said: ‘Hell, maybe you don’t want to. The night the Almore woman died she was over at Lou Condy’s place losing her shirt at roulette. She got into a tantrum and said the wheels were crooked and made a scene. Condy practically had to drag her into his office. He got hold of Dr. Almore through the Physicians’ Exchange and after a while the doc came over. He shot her with one of his busy little needles. Then he went away, leaving Condy to get her home. It seems he had a very urgent case. So Condy took her home and the doc’s office nurse showed up, having been called by the doc, and Condy carried her upstairs and the nurse put her to bed. Condy went back to his chips. So she had to be carried to bed and yet the same night she got up and walked down to the family garage and finished herself off, with
monoxide. What do you think of that?’ Brownwell was asking me.”
“I said: ‘I don’t know anything about it. How do you?’”
“He said: ‘I know a reporter on the rag they call a newspaper down there. There was no inquest and no autopsy. If any tests were made, nothing was told about them. They don’t have a regular coroner down there. The undertakers take turns at being acting coroner, a week at a time. They’re pretty well subservient to the political gang naturally. It’s easy to fix a thing like that in a small town, if anybody with any pull wants it fixed. And Condy had plenty at that time. He didn’t want the publicity of an investigation and neither did the doctor.’”
Miss Fromsett stopped talking and waited for me to say something. When I didn’t, she went on: “I suppose you know what all this meant to Brownwell.”
“Sure. Almore finished her off and then he and Condy between them bought a fix. It has been done in cleaner little cities than Bay City ever tried to be. But that isn’t all the story, is it?”
“No. It seems Mrs. Almore’s parents hired a private detective. He was a man who ran a night watchman service down there and he was actually the second man on the scene that night, after Chris. Brownwell said he must have had something in the way of information but he never got a chance to use it. They arrested him for drunk driving and he got a jail sentence.”
I said: “Is that all?”
She nodded. “And if you think I remember it too well, it’s part of my job to remember conversations.”
“What I was thinking was that it doesn’t have to add up to very much. I don’t see where it has to touch Lavery, even if he was the one who found her. Your gossipy friend Brownwell seems to think what happened gave somebody a chance to blackmail the doctor. But there would have to be some evidence, especially when you’re trying to put the bite on a man who has already cleared himself with the law.”
Miss Fromsett said: “I think so too. And I’d like to think blackmail was one of the nasty little tricks Chris Lavery didn’t quite run to. I think that’s all I can tell you, Mr. Marlowe. And I ought to be outside.”
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