“Get on with your act,” she snapped at me. “I know how you love it. Why didn’t you cuddle up to me? I wouldn’t have needed a sleeping pill—perhaps?”
“One thing at a time, if you don’t mind. And the first thing is that you were telling the truth when you came here. Mitchell was dead on your porch. But someone got his body out of there while you were over here making a sucker out of me. And somebody got him down to his car and then packed his suitcases and got them down. All this took time. It took more than time. It took a great big reason. Now who would do a thing like that—just to save you the mild embarrassment of reporting a dead man on your porch?”
“Oh, shut up!” She finished her drink and put the glass aside.
“I’m tired. Do you mind if I lie down on your bed?”
“Not if you take your clothes off.”
“All right—I’ll take my clothes off. That’s what you’ve been working up to, isn’t it?”
“You might not like that bed. Goble was beaten up on it tonight—by a hired gun named Richard Harvest. He was really brutalized. You remember Goble, don’t you? The fat sort of man in the little dark car that followed us up the hill the other night.”
“I don’t know anybody named Goble. And I don’t know anybody named Richard Harvest. How do you know all this? Why were they here—in your room?”
“The hired gun was waiting for me. After I heard about Mitchell’s car I had a hunch. Even generals and other important people have hunches. Why not me? The trick is to know when to act on one. I was lucky tonight—or last night. I acted on a hunch. He had a gun, but I had a tire iron.”
“What a big strong unbeatable man you are,” she said bitterly.
“I don’t mind the bed. Do I take my clothes off now?”
I went over and jerked her to her feet and shook her. “Stop your nonsense, Betty. When I want your beautiful white body, it won’t be while you’re my client. I want to know what you are afraid of. How the hell can I do anything about it if I don’t know? Only you can tell me.”
She began to sob in my arms.
Women have so few defenses, but they certainly perform wonders with those they have.
I held her tight against me. “You can cry and cry and sob and sob, Betty. Go ahead, I’m patient. If I wasn’t that—well, hell, if I wasn’t that—”
That was as far as I got. She was pressed tight to me trembling. She lifted her face and dragged my head down until I was kissing her.
“Is there some other woman?” she asked softly, between my teeth.
“There have been.”
“But someone very special?”
“There was once, for a brief moment. But that’s a long time ago now.”
“Take me. I’m yours—all of me is yours. Take me.”
24
A banging on the door woke me. I opened my eyes stupidly. She was clinging to me so tightly that I could hardly move. I moved her arms gently until I was free. She was still sound asleep.
I got out of bed and pulled a bathrobe on and went to the door;
I didn’t open it.
“What’s the matter? I was asleep.”
“Captain Alessandro wants you at the office right away. Open the door.”
“Sorry, can’t be done. I have to shave and shower and so on.”
“Open the door. This is Sergeant Green.”
“I’m sorry, Sergeant. I just can’t. But I’ll be along just as soon as I can make it.”
“You got a dame in there?”
“Sergeant, questions like that are out of line. I’ll be there.”
I heard his steps go down off the porch. I heard someone laugh. I heard a voice say, “This guy is really rich. I wonder what he does on his day off.”
I heard the police car going away. I went into the bathroom and showered and shaved and dressed. Betty was still glued to the pillow. I scribbled a note and put in on my pillow. “The cops want me. I have to go. You know where my car is. Here are the keys.”
I went out softly and locked the door and found the Hertz car. I knew the keys would be in it. Operators like Richard Harvest don’t bother about keys. They carry sets of them for all sorts of cars.
Captain Alessandro looked exactly as he had the day before. He would always look like that. There was a man with him, an elderly stony-faced man with nasty eyes.
Captain Alessandro nodded me to the usual chair. A cop in uniform came in and put a cup of coffee in front of me. He gave me a sly grin as he went out.
“This is Mr. Henry Cumberland of Westfield, Carolina, Marlowe. North Carolina. I don’t know how he found his way out here, but he did. He says Betty Mayfield murdered his son.”
I didn’t say anything. There was nothing for me to say. I sipped the coffee which was too hot, but good otherwise.
“Like to fill us in a little, Mr. Cumberland?”
“Who’s this?” He had a voice as sharp as his face.
“A private detective named Philip Marlowe. He operates out of Los Angeles. He is here because Betty Mayfield is his client. It seems that you have rather more drastic ideas about Miss Mayfield than he has.”
“I don’t have any ideas about her, Captain,” I said. “I just like to squeeze her once in a while. It soothes me.”
“You like being soothed by a murderess?” Cumberland barked at me.
“Well, I didn’t know she was a murderess, Mr. Cumberland. It’s all news to me. Would you care to explain?”
“The girl who calls herself Betty Mayfield—and that was her maiden name—was the wife of my son, Lee Cumberland. I never approved of the marriage. It was one of those wartime idiocies. My son received a broken neck in the war and had to wear a brace to protect his spinal column. One night she got it away from him and taunted him until he rushed at her. Unfortunately, he had been drinking rather heavily since he came home, and there had been quarrels. He tripped and fell across the bed. I came into the room and found her trying to put the brace back on his neck. He was already dead.”
I looked at Captain Alessandro. “Is this being recorded, Captain?”
He nodded. “Every word.”
“All right, Mr. Cumberland. There’s more, I take it.”
“Naturally. I have a great deal of influence in Westfield. I own the bank, the leading newspaper, most of the industry. The people of Westfield are my friends. My daughter-in-law was arrested and tried for murder and the jury brought in a verdict of guilty.”
“The jury were all Westfield people, Mr. Cumberland?”
“They were. Why shouldn’t they be?”
“I don’t know, sir. But it sounds like a one-man town.”
“Don’t get impudent with me, young man.”
“Sorry, sir. Would you finish?”
“We have a peculiar law in our state, and I believe in a few other jurisdictions. Ordinarily the defense attorney makes an automatic motion for a directed verdict of not guilty and it is just as automatically denied. In my state the judge may reserve his ruling until after the verdict. The judge was senile. He reserved his ruling. When the jury brought in a verdict of guilty, he declared in a long speech that the jury had failed to consider the possibility that my son had in a drunken rage removed the brace from his neck in order to terrify his wife. He said that where there was so much bitterness anything was possible, and that the jury had failed to consider the possibility that my daughter-in-law might have been doing exactly what she said she was doing—trying to put the brace back on my son’s neck. He voided the verdict and discharged the defendant.
“I told her that she had murdered my son and that I would see to it that she had no place of refuge anywhere on this earth. That is why I am here.”
I looked at the captain. He looked at nothing. I said: “Mr. Cumberland, whatever your private convictions, Mrs. Lee Cumberland, whom I know as Betty Mayfield, has been tried and acquitted. You have called her a murderess. That’s a slander. We’ll settle for a million dollars.”
He laughed al
most grotesquely. “You small-town nobody,” he almost screamed. “Where I come from you would be thrown into jail as a vagrant.”
“Make it a million and a quarter,” I said. “I’m not so valuable as your ex-daughter-in-law.”
Cumberland turned on Captain Alessandro. “What goes on here?” he barked. “Are you all a bunch of crooks?”
“You’re talking to a police officer, Mr. Cumberland.”
“I don’t give a good goddamn what you are,” Cumberland said furiously. “There are plenty of crooked police.”
“It’s a good idea to be sure—before you call them crooked,” Alessandro said, almost with amusement. Then he lit a cigarette and blew smoke and smiled through it.
“Take it easy, Mr. Cumberland. You’re a cardiac case. Prognosis unfavorable. Excitement is very bad for you. I studied medicine once. But somehow I became a cop. The war cut me off, I guess.”
Cumberland stood up. Spittle showed on his chin. He made a strangled sound in his throat. “You haven’t heard the last of this,” he snarled.
Alessandro nodded. “One of the interesting things about police work is that you never hear the last of anything. There are always too many loose ends. Just what would you like me to do? Arrest someone who has been tried and acquitted, just because you are a big shot in Westfield, Carolina?”
“I told her I’d never give her any peace,” Cumberland said furiously. “I’d follow her to the end of the earth. I’d make sure everyone knew just what she was!”
“And what is she, Mr. Cumberland?”
“A murderess that killed my son and was let off by an idiot of a judge—that’s what she is!”
Captain Alessandro stood up, all six feet three inches of him. “Take off, buster,” he said coldly. “You annoy me. I’ve met all kinds of punks in my time. Most of them have been poor stupid backward kids. This is the first time I’ve come across a great big important man who was just as stupid and vicious as a fifteen-year-old delinquent. Maybe you own Westfield, North Carolina, or think you do. You don’t own a cigar butt in my town. Get out before I put the arm on you for interfering with an officer in the performance of his duties.”
Cumberland almost staggered to the door and groped for the knob, although the door was wide open. Alessandro looked after him. He sat down slowly.
“You were pretty rough, Captain.”
“It’s breaking my heart. If anything I said makes him take another look at himself—oh well, hell!”
“Not his kind. Am I free to go?”
“Yes. Goble won’t make charges. He’ll be on his way back to Kansas City today. We’ll dig up something on this Richard Harvest, but what’s the use? We put him away for a while, and a hundred just like him are available for the same work.”
“What do I do about Betty Mayfield?”
“I have a vague idea that you’ve already done it,” he said, deadpan.
“Not until I know what happened to Mitchell.” I was just as deadpan as he was.
“All I know is that he’s gone. That doesn’t make him police business.”
I stood up. We gave each other those looks. I went out.
25
She was still asleep. My coming in didn’t wake her. She slept like a little girl, soundlessly, her face at peace. I watched her for a moment, then lit a cigarette and went out to the kitchen. When I had put coffee on to percolate in the handsome paper-thin dime store aluminum percolator provided by the management, I went back and sat on the bed. The note I had left was still on the pillow with my car keys.
I shook her gently and her eyes opened and blinked.
“What time is it?” she asked, stretching her bare arms as far as she could. “God, I slept like a log.”
“It’s time for you to get dressed. I have some coffee brewing. I’ve been down to the police station—by request. Your father-in-law is in town, Mrs. Cumberland.”
She shot upright and stared at me without breathing.
“He got the brush, but good, from Captain Alessandro. He can’t hurt you. Was that what all the fear was about?”
“Did he say—say what happened back in Westfield?”
“That’s what he came here to say. He’s mad enough to jump down his own throat. And what of it? You didn’t, did you? Do what they said?”
“I did not.” Her eyes blazed at me.
“Wouldn’t matter if you had—now. But it wouldn’t make me very happy about last night. How did Mitchell get wise?”
“He just happened to be there or somewhere nearby. Good heavens, the papers were full of it for weeks, It wasn’t hard for him to recognize me. Didn’t they have it in the papers here?”
“They ought to have covered it, if only because of the unusual legal angle. If they did, I missed it. The coffee ought to be ready now. How do you take it?”
“Black, please. No sugar.”
“Fine. I don’t have any cream or sugar. Why did you call yourself Eleanor King? No, don’t answer that. I’m stupid. Old man Cumberland would know your unmarried name.”
I went out to the kitchen and removed the top of the percolator, and poured us both a cup. I carried hers to her. I sat down in a chair with mine. Our eyes met and were strangers again.
She put her cup aside. “That was good. Would you mind looking the other way while I gather myself together?”
“Sure.” I picked a paperback off the table and made a pretense of reading it. It was about some private eye whose idea of a hot scene was a dead naked woman hanging from the shower rail with the marks of torture on her. By that time Betty was in the bathroom. I threw the paperback into the wastebasket, not having a garbage can handy at the moment. Then I got to thinking there are two kinds of women you can make love to. Those who give themselves so completely and with such utter abandonment that they don’t even think about their bodies. And there are those who are self-conscious and always want to cover up a little. I remembered a girl in a story by Anatole France who insisted on taking her stockings off. Keeping them on made her feel like a whore. She was right.
When Betty came out of the bathroom she looked like a fresh-opened rose, her make-up perfect, her eyes shining, every hair exactly in place.
“Will you take me back to the hotel? I want to speak to Clark.”
“You in love with him?”
“I thought I was in love with you.”
“It was a cry in the night,” I said. “Let’s not try to make it more than it was. There’s more coffee out in the kitchen.”
“No, thanks. Not until breakfast. Haven’t you ever been in love? I mean enough to want to be with a woman every day, every month, every year?”
“Let’s go.”
“How can such a hard man be so gentle?” she asked wonderingly.
“If I wasn’t hard, I wouldn’t be alive. If I couldn’t ever be gentle, I wouldn’t deserve to be alive.”
I held her coat for her and we went out to my car. On the way back to the hotel she didn’t speak at all. When we got there and I slid into the now familiar parking slot, I took the five folded traveler’s checks out of my pocket and held them out to her.
“Let’s hope it’s the last time we pass these back and forth,” I said. “They’re wearing out.”
She looked at them, but didn’t take them. “I thought they were your fee,” she said rather sharply.
“Don’t argue, Betty. You know very well that I couldn’t take money from you.”
“After last night?”
“After nothing. I just couldn’t take it. That’s all. I haven’t done anything for you. What are you going to do? Where are you going? You’re safe now.”
“I’ve no idea. I’ll think of something.”
“Are you in love with Brandon?”
“I might be.”
“He’s an ex-racketeer. He hired a gunman to scare Goble off. The gunman was ready to kill me. Could you really love a man like that?”
“A woman loves a man. Not what he is. And he may not have meant it.
”
“Goodbye, Betty. I gave it what I had, but it wasn’t enough.”
She reached her hand out slowly and took the checks. “I think you’re crazy. I think you’re the craziest man I ever met.” She got out of the car and walked away quickly, as she always did.
26
I gave her time to clear the lobby and go up to her room, and then I went into the lobby myself and asked for Mr. Clark Brandon on a house phone. Javonen came by and gave me a hard look, but he didn’t say anything.
A man’s voice answered. It was his all right.
“Mr. Brandon, you don’t know me, although we shared an elevator the other morning. My name is Philip Marlowe. I’m a private detective from Los Angeles, and I’m a friend of Miss Mayfield. I’d like to talk to you a little, if you’ll give me the time.”
“I seem to have heard something about you, Marlowe. But I’m all set to go out. How about a drink around six this evening?”
“I’d like to get back to Los Angeles, Mr. Brandon. I won’t keep you long.”
“All right,” he said grudgingly. “Come on up.”
He opened the door, a big, tall, very muscular man in top condition, neither hard nor soft. He didn’t offer to shake hands. He stood aside, and I went in.
“You alone here, Mr. Brandon?”
“Sure. Why?”
“I wouldn’t want anyone else to hear what I have to say.”
“Well say it and get done.”
He sat in a chair and put his feet up on an ottoman. He flicked a gold lighter at a gold-tipped cigarette. Big deal.
“I first came down here on the instructions of a Los Angeles lawyer to follow Miss Mayfield and find out where she went, and then report back. I didn’t know why and the lawyer said he didn’t either, but that he was acting for a reputable firm of attorneys in Washington. Washington, D.C.”
“So you followed her. So what?”
“So she made contact with Larry Mitchell, or he with her, and he had a hook of some sort into her.”
“Into a lot of women from time to time,” Brandon said coldly. “He specialized in it.”
“He doesn’t any more, does he?”
He stared at me with cool blank eyes. “What’s that mean?”
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