“Yes. She was very kind, very unhappy. I pitied her.”
“Because of the death of her child?”
“Partly because of that. I don’t know. She was not happy.”
“Did you approve of her affair with Mr. Lawler?”
“Not approve, exactly. I understood it. She needed a special kind of love. A kind of attention.”
“Mr. Lawler gave her this?”
“He must have given it to her. Otherwise, she wouldn’t have gone on with him. That’s reasonable.”
“Yes, it is. It’s reasonable. And so are you, Maria. You’re a very reasonable woman. Tell me. What was your impression of her the night she disappeared?”
“Pardon?”
“Her emotional state, I mean. Was she depressed? Cheerful?”
“Not depressed. Not cheerful. She was eager. There’s a difference between eagerness and cheerfulness.”
“That’s true. Besides being reasonable, Maria, you are also perceptive. Did she seem excessively agitated in any way?”
“Just eager. She was always eager when she went to see Mr. Lawler.”
“Do you think that Mr. Markley was aware of the relationship between his wife and Lawler?”
“I don’t know. He didn’t show much interest in anything Mrs. Markley did. Not even when the child died.”
“All right. Just one more question. Maria. What time did Mrs. Markley leave here?”
“About eight. Perhaps a few minutes before or after.”
“Thank you, Maria.”
Maria turned her still brown face toward Faith Salem, who smiled and nodded. The maid nodded in return, three times, and went away. Faith Salem stood up abruptly, standing with her legs spread and her hands rammed into the patch pockets of the short white coat.
“Well?” she said.
“It looks hopeless,” I said. “You’d be wasting your money.”
“Perhaps so. If I don’t waste it on you, I’ll waste it on someone else.”
“In that case, it might as well be me.”
“You agree, then? You’ll take the job?”
Looking up at her, I was beginning to feel dominated, which was not good, so I removed the feeling by standing.
“Tentatively,” I said.
“What do you mean, tentatively?”
“I’ll make a preliminary investigation. If anything significant or interesting comes out of it, I’ll go ahead. If not, I’ll quit. You’ll pay my expenses and twenty-five dollars a day. Are those terms acceptable?”
“Yes. I accept.”
“Another thing. I’m to be allowed to talk with whomever I think necessary. Is that also agreed?”
“Yes, of course.” She hesitated, her soft lower lip protruding again in the darkly brooding expression. “You mean Graham, I suppose. I’d prefer, naturally, that he not know whom you’re working for.”
“I won’t tell him unless I think it’s advisable. I promise that much.”
“That’s good enough. I have confidence in your word, Mr. Hand.”
“Ethical. Someone told you, and you believe it, and that’s what I am. I’ll begin my investigation, it you don’t mind, by asking you one more question. What are you afraid of?”
“Afraid? I’m afraid of nothing. I honestly believe that I’ve never been afraid of anything in my life.”
“I’m ready to concede that you probably haven’t. Let me put it differently. What disturbs you about Constance Markley’s disappearance?”
“I’ve explained that. I don’t like loose ends. Graham has asked me to marry him. For my own reasons, I want to accept. First, however, he has to get a divorce. He can get it, I suppose, on grounds of desertion. I only want to know that it really was desertion.”
“That’s not quite convincing. What alternative to desertion, specifically, do you have in mind?”
“You said you would ask one more question, Mr. Hand. You’ve asked two.”
“Excuse me. You can see how dedicated I become to my work.”
“I should appreciate that, of course, and I do. I honestly have no specific alternative in mind. I just don’t like the situation as it stands. There’s another thing, however. I knew Constance, and I liked her, and now by an exceptional turn of events I’m in the position of appropriating something that was hers. I want to know that it’s all right. I want to know where she went, and why she went wherever she did, and that everything is all right there and will be all right here, whatever happens.”
I believed her. I believed everything she told me. She was a woman I could not doubt or condemn or even criticize. If I had been as rich as Graham Markley, I’d have taken her away, later if not then, and I’d have kept her, and there would have been between us, in the end, more than the money which would have been essential in the beginning.
“I’ll see what I can do,” I said. “Do you have a photograph of Constance Markley that I can take along?”
“Yes. There’s one here that Maria brought. I’ll get it for you.”
She went inside and was gone for a few minutes and came back with the photograph. I took it from her and put it into the side pocket of my coat without looking at it. There would be plenty of time later to look at it, and now, in the last seconds of our first meeting, I wanted to look at Faith Salem.
“Goodbye,” I said. “I’ll see you again in a few days and let you know if I intend to go ahead.”
“Call before you come,” she said.
“Yes,” I said. “Certainly.”
“I’ll see you to the door.”
“No. Don’t bother. You’d better stay here in the sun. In another half hour, it’ll be gone.”
“Yes. So it will.” She looked up at the white disk in the sky beyond a ridge of tooled stone. “Goodbye, then. I’ll be waiting to hear from you.”
She offered me her hand, and I took it and held it and released it. In the middle of the black and white acre, I paused and looked back. She had already removed the short white coat and was lying on her stomach on the yellow pad. Her face was buried in the crook of an elbow.
I went on out and back to my office and put my feet on the desk and thought about her lying there in the sun. There was no sun in my office. In front of me was a blank wall, and behind me was a narrow window, and outside the narrow window was a narrow alley. Whenever I got tired of looking at the wall I could get up and stand by the window and look down into the alley, and whenever I got tired of looking into the alley I could sit down and look at the wall again, and whenever I got tired of looking at both the wall and the alley, which was frequently, I could go out somewhere and look at something else. Now I simply closed my eyes and saw clearly behind the lids a lean brown body interrupted in two places by the briefest of white hiatuses.
This was pleasant but not of the first importance. It was more important, though less pleasant, to think about Graham Markley. Conceding the priority of importance, I began reluctantly to think about him, and after a few minutes of reluctant thinking, I lowered my feet and reached for a telephone directory. After locating his name and number, I dialed the number and waited through a couple of rings, and then a voice came on that made me feel with its first careful syllable as if I’d neglected recently to bathe and clean my fingernails.
“Graham Markley’s residence,” the voice said.
“This is Percival Hand,” I said. “I’m a private detective. I’d like to speak with Mr. Markley.” Ordinarily I use the abbreviated version of my name, just plain Percy, but I felt compelled by the voice to be as proper and impressive as possible. As it was, in the exorbitantly long pause that followed, I felt as if I had been unpardonably offensive.
“If you will just hold the wire,” the voice said at last, “I shall see if Mr. Markley is at home.” Which meant, of course, that Mr.
Markley was certainly at home, but that it remained to be seen if he would be so irresponsible as to talk with a private detective on the telephone, which was surely unlikely. I held the wire and waited. I inspected my nails and found them clean. I tried to smell myself and couldn’t. Another voice came on abruptly, and it was, as it developed, the voice of Graham Markley.
“Graham Markley speaking. What can I do for you, Mr. Hand?”
“I’d like to make an appointment to see you personally, if possible.”
“About what?”
I had already considered the relative advantages in this particular instance of candor and deception, and I had decided that there was probably little or nothing to choose between them. In cases where deception gains me nothing, I’m always prepared to be candid, and that’s what I was now.
“About your wife. Your third wife, that is.”
“I can’t imagine why my wife should be a point of discussion between you and me, Mr. Hand.”
“I thought you might be able to give me some useful information.” There was a moment of waiting. The wire sang softly in the interim.
“For what purpose?” he said. “Am I to understand that you’re investigating my wife’s disappearance?”
“That’s right.”
“At whose request?”
“I’m not at liberty to say at the moment.”
“Come, Mr. Hand. If you expect any cooperation from me, you’ll have to be less reticent.”
“I haven’t received any cooperation from you yet, Mr. Markley.”
“It was reasonably apparent to everyone, including the police and myself, why my wife went away. I confess that I can’t see any use in stirring up an unpleasant matter that I had hoped was forgotten. Do you know anything that would justify it?”
Again I evaluated the advantages of candor and deception, and this time I chose deception. The advantages in its favor seemed so palpable, as a matter of fact, that the evaluation required no more than a second.
“I’ve learned something,” I lied, “that I think will interest you.”
“Perhaps you had better tell me what it is.”
“Sorry. I’d rather not discuss it over the telephone.”
“I can’t see you today. It’s impossible.”
‘Tomorrow will do. If you’ll set a time, I’ll be happy to call on you.”
“That won’t be necessary. I’ll come to your office.”
“I don’t want to inconvenience you.”
“Thank you for your consideration. However, I prefer to see you in your office. How about two o’clock tomorrow afternoon?”
“Good. I’ll be expecting you.”
I told him where my office was, and we said good-by and hung up. Hocking back in my chair, I elevated my feet again and closed my eyes. Faith Salem was still lying in the sun. I watched her for a few moments and then opened my eyes and lit a cigarette and began thinking about Regis Lawler. I didn’t accomplish much by this, for I didn’t have much material for thought to start with. I had met him casually a few times quite a while ago, in this or that place we had both gone to, but most of what I knew about him was incidental to what I knew about his brother, who was older and generally more important and had more about him worth knowing.
The brother’s name was Silas. After long and precarious apprentice years in a number of illegal operations, he had begun slowly to achieve a kind of acceptance, even respectability, that increased in ratio to the measure of his security. Now he was the owner of a fine restaurant. At least, it was a restaurant among other things, and it was that equally, if not primarily. When you went there, it was assumed that you had come for good food, and that’s what you got. You got it in rich and quiet surroundings to the music of a string quartet that sometimes played Beethoven as well as Fritz Kreisler and Johann Strauss. The chefs were the best that Lawler could hire, and the best that Lawler could hire were as good as any and better than most. On the correct principle that good food should tolerate no distractions, the service was performed by elderly colored waiters who were artists in the difficult technique of being solicitous without being obtrusive.
If you wanted distractions, you went downstairs, below street level. This was known as the Apache Room, a little bit of the Left Bank transplanted, and it was phony and made no pretense of being anything else, and it was frankly for people who liked it that way. There were red-checked cloths on the tables, pretty girls with pretty legs who serviced the tables, a small orchestra with the peculiar quality that is supposed to be peculiarly Parisian, and murals all around the wails of girls in black stockings doing the can-can alternating with other murals of other girls being maltreated by Apaches and always showing quite a lot of one white thigh above a fancy garter in the deep slit of a tight skirt.
On the floor above the restaurant, up one flight of carpeted stairs, you could go to gamble if you chose. In a series of three large rooms muffled in drapes and carpets, you could play roulette or poker or blackjack or shoot dice, and sometimes you might even win at one or the other or all, but more often, of course, you lost and were expected to lose graciously. If you did not, as sometimes happened, you were escorted outside by a brace of hard-handed gentlemen in evening clothes, and you were thereafter persona non grata until you received absolution and clearance from Silas Lawler himself. The games were reputed to be honest, and, all things considered, they probably were.
In the basement, you could dance and make moderate love and get drunk, if you wished, on expensive drinks. In the restaurant, you did not get drunk or dance or make love or look at naughty murals. In the game rooms, you gambled quietly with no limit except your own judgment and bank account, and you saved everything else for some other place and some other time. Patrons passed as they pleased from one level to another, but the atmosphere was never permitted to go with them. The basement never climbed the stairs, nor did the upper floors descend.
Silas Lawler was, in brief, not a man to be taken lightly, or a man who would take lightly any transgression against himself or his interests. It was, I reflected, wholly incredible that he would be indifferent to the disappearance of a brother. Whatever the reason for the disappearance, whatever the technique of its execution, Silas Lawler knew it, or thought he knew it, and he might be prevailed upon to tell me in confidence, or he might not, but in any event it would be necessary for me to talk with him as soon as I could, which would probably be tomorrow. I would see Graham Markley at two, and later I would try to see Silas Lawler, and if nothing significant came of these two meetings I would go again to see Faith Salem, which would be a pleasure, and terminate our relationship, which would not.
Having thought my way back to Faith Salem, I closed my eyes and tried to find her, but the sun had left the terrace, and so had she. Opening my eyes, I lowered my feet and stood up. I had determined an agenda of sorts, and now there seemed to be nothing of importance left to do on this particular day. Besides, it was getting rather late, and I was getting rather hungry, and so I went out and patronized a steak house and afterward spent one-third of the night doing things that were not important and not related to anything that had gone before. About ten o’clock I returned to the room and bath and hot plate that I euphemistically called home. I went to bed and slept well.
CHAPTER 3.
I woke up at seven in the morning, which is a nasty habit of mine that endures through indiscretions and hangovers and intermittent periods of irregular living. In the bathroom, I shaved and necessarily looked at my face in the mirror. I like you, Mr. Hand, Faith Salem had said. I like your looks. Well, it was an ambiguous expression. You could like the looks of a Collie dog or a pair of shoes or a Shoebill stork. It could mean that you were inspired by confidence or amusement or the urge to be a sister. Looking at my face, I was not deluded. I decided that I was probably somewhere between the dog and the stork. I
finished shaving and dressed and went out for breakfast and arrived in due time at my office, where nothing happened all morning.
Two o’clock came, but Graham Markley didn’t. At ten after, he did.
I heard him enter the little cubbyhole in which my clients wait when there is another client ahead of them, which is something that should happen oftener than it does, and when I got to the door to meet him, he was standing there looking antiseptic among the germs. His expression included me with the others.
“Mr. Hand?” he said.
“That’s right. You’re Mr. Markley, I suppose?”
“Yes. I’m sorry to be late.”
“Think nothing of it. In this office, ten minutes late is early. Come in, please.”
He walked past me and sat down in the client’s chair beside the desk. Because I felt he would consider it an imposition, I didn’t offer to shake hands. I felt that he might even ignore or reject the offer, which would have made me indignant or even indiscreet. Resuming my place in the chair behind the desk, I made a quick inventory and acquired an impression. He sat rigidly, with his knees together and his hat on his knees. His straight black hair was receding but still had a majority present. His face was narrow, his nose was long, his lips were thin. Arrogance was implicit. He looked something like the guy who used to play Sherlock Holmes in the movies. Maybe he looked like Sherlock Holmes.
“Precisely what do you want to tell me, Mr. Hand?” he said.
“Well,” I said, “that isn’t quite my position. What I want is for you to tell me something.”
“Indeed? I gathered from our conversation on the telephone yesterday that you were in possession of some new information regarding my wife.”
“Did I infer that? It isn’t exactly true. What I meant to suggest was that the available information isn’t adequate. It leaves too much unexplained.”
“Do you think so? The police apparently didn’t. As a matter of fact, it was quite clear to everyone what my wife had done. It was, as you may realize, an embarrassing affair for me, and there seemed to be no good purpose in giving it undue publicity or in pursuing it indefinitely.”
The First Golden Age of Mystery & Crime MEGAPACK Page 16