“Nice,” Hernandez said at the end. “But not quite complete.” This was a cool competent dangerous guy, this Hernandez. Somebody in the Sheriff’s office had to be. “The night Wade shot off the gun in his bedroom you went into Mrs. Wade’s room and were in there for some time with the door shut. What were you doing in there?”
“She called me in and asked me how he was.”
“Why shut the door?”
“Wade was half asleep and I didn’t want to make any noise. Also the houseboy was hanging around with his ear out. Also she asked me to shut the door. I didn’t realize it was going to be important.”
“How long were you in there?”
“I don’t know. Three minutes maybe.”
“I suggest you were in there a couple of hours,” Hernandez said coldly. “Do I make myself clear?”
I looked at Ohls. Ohls didn’t look at anything. He was chewing on an unlighted cigarette as usual.
“You are misinformed, Captain.”
“We’ll see. After you left the room you went downstairs to the study and spent the night on the couch. Perhaps I should say the rest of the night.”
“It was ten minutes to eleven when he called me at home. It was long past two o’clock when I went into the study for the last time that night. Call it the rest of the night if you like.”
“Get the houseboy in here,” Hernandez said.
Ohls went out and came back with Candy. They put Candy in a chair. Hernandez asked him a few questions to establish who he was and so on. Then he said: “All right, Candy—we’ll call you that for convenience—after you helped Marlowe put Roger Wade to bed, what happened?”
I knew what was coming more or less. Candy told his story in a quiet savage voice with very little accent. It seemed as if he could turn that on and off at will. His story was that he had hung around downstairs in case he was wanted again, part of the time in the kitchen where he got himself some food, part of the time in the living room. While in the living room sitting in a chair near the front door he had seen Eileen Wade standing in the door of her room and he had seen her take her clothes off. He had seen her put a robe on with nothing under it and he had seen me go into her room and I shut the door and stayed in there a long time, a couple of hours he thought. He had gone up the stairs and listened. He had heard the bedsprings making sounds. He had heard whispering. He made his meaning very obvious. When he had finished he gave me a corrosive look and his mouth was twisted tight with hatred.
“Take him out,” Hernandez said.
“Just a minute,” I said. “I want to question him.”
“I ask the questions here,” Hernandez said sharply.
“You don’t know how, Captain. You weren’t there. He’s lying and he knows it and I know it.”
Hernandez leaned back and picked up one of the Sheriff’s pens. He bent the handle of the pen. It was long and pointed and made of stiffened horsehair. When he let go of the point it sprang back.
“Shoot,” he said at last.
I faced Candy. “Where were you when you saw Mrs. Wade take her clothes off?”
“I was sitting down in a chair near the front door,” he said in a surly tone.
“Between the front door and the two facing davenports?”
“What I said.”
“Where was Mrs. Wade?”
“Just inside the door of her room. The door was open.”
“What light was there in the living room?”
“One lamp. Tall lamp what they call a bridge lamp.”
“What light was on the balcony?”
“No light. Light in her bedroom.”
“What kind of light in her bedroom?”
“Not much light. Night table lamp, maybe.”
“Not a ceiling light?”
“No.”
“After she took her clothes off—standing just inside the door of her room, you said—she put on a robe. What kind of robe?”
“Blue robe. Long thing like a housecoat. She tie it with a sash.”
“So if you hadn’t actually seen her take her clothes off you wouldn’t know what she had on under the robe?”
He shrugged. He looked vaguely worried. “Si. That’s right. But I see her take her clothes off.”
“You’re a liar. There isn’t any place in the living room from which you could see her take her clothes off right bang in her doorway, much less inside her room. She would have to come out to the edge of the balcony. If she had done that she would have seen you.”
He just glared at me. I turned to Ohls. “You’ve seen the house. Captain Hernandez hasn’t—or has he?”
Ohls shook his head slightly. Hernandez frowned and said nothing.
“There is no spot in that living room, Captain Hernandez, from which he could see even the top of Mrs. Wade’s head—even if he was standing up—and he says he was sitting down—provided the was as far back as her own doorway or inside it. I’m four inches taller than he is and I could only see the top foot of an open door when I was standing just inside the front door of the house. She would have to come out to the edge of the balcony for him to see what he says he saw. Why would she do that? Why would she undress in her doorway even? There’s no sense to it.”
Hernandez just looked at me. Then he looked at Candy. “How about the time element?” he asked softly, speaking to me.
“That’s his word against mine. I’m talking about what can be proved.”
Hernandez spit Spanish at Candy too fast for me to understand. Candy just stared at him sulkily.
“Take him out,” Hernandez said.
Ohls jerked a thumb and opened the door. Candy went out. Hernandez brought out a box of cigarettes, stuck one on his lip, and lit it with a gold lighter,
Ohls came back into the room. Hernandez said calmly: “I just told him that if there was an inquest and he told that story on the stand, he’d find himself doing a one-to-three up in Q for perjury. Didn’t seem to impress him much. It’s obvious what’s eating him. An old-fashioned case of hot pants, if he’d been around and we had any reason to suspect murder, he’d make a pretty good pigeon—except that he would have used a knife. I got the impression earlier that he felt pretty bad about Wade’s death. Any questions you want to ask, Ohls?”
Ohls shook his head. Hernandez looked at me and said: “Come back in the morning and sign your statement. We’ll have it typed out by then. We ought to have a P.M. report by ten o’clock, preliminary anyway. Anything you don’t like about this setup, Marlowe?”
“Would you mind rephrasing the question? The way you put it suggests there might be something I do like about it.”
“Okay,” he said wearily. “Take off. I’m going home.”
I stood up.
“Of course I never did believe that stuff Candy pulled on us,” he said. “Just used it for a corkscrew. No hard feelings, I hope.”
“No feelings at all, Captain. No feelings at all. ”
They watched me go out and didn’t say goodnight. I walked down the long corridor to the Hill Street entrance and got into my car and drove home.
No feelings at all was exactly right. I was as hollow and empty as the spaces between the stars. When I got home I mixed a stiff one and stood by the open window in the living room and sipped it and listened to the groundswell of the traffic on Laurel Canyon Boulevard and looked at the glare of the big angry city hanging over the shoulder of the hills through which the boulevard had been cut. Far off the banshee wail of police or fire sirens rose and fell, never for very long completely silent. Twenty-four hours a day somebody is running, somebody else is trying to catch him. Out there in the night of a thousand crimes people were dying, being maimed, cut by flying glass, crushed against steering wheels or under heavy tires. People were being beaten, robbed, strangled, raped, and murdered. People were hungry, sick; bored, desperate with loneliness or remorse or fear, angry, cruel, feverish, shaken by sobs. A city no worse than others, a city rich and vigorous and full of pride, a city lost a
nd beaten and full of emptiness.
It all depends on where you sit and what your own private score is. I didn’t have one. I didn’t care. I finished the drink and went to bed.
39
The inquest was a flop. The coroner sailed into it before the medical evidence was complete, for fear the publicity would die on him. He needn’t have worried. The death of a writer—even a loud writer—is not news for long, and that summer there was too much to compete. A king abdicated and another was assassinated. In one week three large passenger planes crashed. The head man of a big wire service was shot to pieces in Chicago in his own automobile. Twenty-four convicts were burned to death in a prison fire. The Coroner of Los Angeles County was out of luck. He was missing the good things in life.
As I left the stand I saw Candy. He had a bright malicious grin on his face—I had no idea why—and as usual he was dressed just a little too well, in a cocoa brown gabardine suit with a white nylon shirt and midnight blue bow tie. On the witness stand he was quiet and made a good impression. Yes, the boss had been pretty drunk lately a lot of times. Yes, he had helped put him to bed the night the gun went off upstairs. Yes, the boss had demanded whiskey before he, Candy, left on the last day, but he had refused to get it. No, he didn’t know anything about Mr. Wade’s literary work, but he knew the boss had been discouraged. He kept throwing it away and then getting it out of the wastebasket again. No, he had never heard Mr. Wade quarreling with anyone. And so on. The coroner milked him but it was thin stuff. Somebody had done a good coaching job on Candy.
Eileen Wade wore black and white. She was pale and spoke in a low clear voice which even the amplifier could not spoil. The coroner handled her with two pairs of velvet gloves. He talked to her as if he had trouble keeping the sobs out of his voice. When she left the stand he stood up and bowed and she gave him a faint fugitive smile that nearly made him choke on his salvia.
She almost passed me without a glance on the way out, then at the last moment turned her head a couple of inches and nodded very slightly, as if I was somebody she must have met somewhere a long time ago, but couldn’t quite place in her memory.
Outside on the steps when it was all over I ran into Ohls. He was watching the traffic down below, or pretending to.
“Nice job,” he said without turning his head. “Congratulations.”
“You did all right on Candy.”
“Not me, kid. The D.A. decided the sexy stuff was irrelevant”
“What sexy stuff was that?”
He looked at me then. “Ha, ha, ha,” he said. “And I don’t mean you.” Then his expression got remote. “I been looking at them for too many years. It wearies a man. This one came out of the special bottle. Old private stock. Strictly for the carriage trade. So long, sucker. Call me when you start wearing twenty-dollar shirts. I’ll drop around and hold your coat for you.”
People eddied around us going up and down the steps. We just stood there. Ohls took a cigarette out of his pocket and looked at it and dropped it on the concrete and ground it to nothing with his heel.
“Wasteful,” I said.
“Only a cigarette, pal. It’s not a life. After a while maybe you marry the girl, huh?”
“Shove it.”
He laughed sourly. “I been talking to the right people about the wrong things,” he said acidly. “Any objection?”
“No objection, Lieutenant,” I said, and went on down the steps. He said something behind me but I kept going.
I went over to a corn-beef joint on Flower. It suited my mood. A rude sign over the entrance said: “Men Only. Dogs and Women Not Admitted.” The service inside was equally polished. The waiter who tossed your food at you needed a shave and deducted his tip without being invited. The food was simple but very good and they had a brown Swedish beer which could hit as hard as a martini.
When I got back to the office the phone was ringing. Ohls said: “I’m coming by your place. I’ve got things to say.”
He must have been at or near the Hollywood substation because he was in the office inside twenty minutes. He planted himself in the customer’s chair and crossed his legs and growled: “I was out of line. Sorry. Forget it.”
“Why forget it? Let’s open up the wound.”
“Suits me. Under the hat, though. To some people you’re a wrong gee. I never knew you to do anything too crooked.”
“What was the crack about twenty-dollar shirts?”
“Aw hell, I was just sore,” Ohls said. “I was thinking of old man Potter. Like he told a secretary to tell a lawyer to tell District Attorney Springer to tell Captain Hernandez you were a personal friend of his.”
“He wouldn’t take the trouble.”
“You met him. He gave you time.”
“I met him, period. I didn’t like him, but perhaps it was only envy. He sent for me to give me some advice. He’s big and he’s tough and I don’t know what else. I don’t figure he’s a crook.”
“There ain’t no clean way to make a hundred million bucks,” Ohls said. “Maybe the head man thinks his hands are clean but somewhere along the line guys got pushed to the wall, nice little businesses got the ground cut from under them and had to sell out for nickels, decent people lost their jobs, stocks got rigged on the market, proxies got bought up like a pennyweight of old gold, and the five per centers and the big law firms got paid hundred-grand fees for beating some law the people wanted but the rich guys didn’t, on account of it cut into their profits. Big money is big power and big power gets used wrong. It’s the system. Maybe it’s the best we can get, but it still ain’t any Ivory Soap deal. ”
“You sound like a Red,” I said, just to needle him.
“I wouldn’t know,” he said contemptuously. “I ain’t been investigated yet. You liked the suicide verdict, didn’t you?”
“What else could it be?”
“Nothing else, I guess.” He put his hard blunt hands on the desk and looked at the big brown freckles on the backs of them. “I’m getting old. Keratosis, they call those brown spots. You don’t get them until you’re past fifty. I’m an old cop and an old cop is an old bastard. I don’t like a few things about this Wade death.”
“Such as?” I leaned back and watched the tight sun wrinkles around his eyes.
“You get so you can smell a wrong setup, even when you know you can’t do a damn thing about it. Then you just sit and talk like now. I don’t like that he left no note.”
“He was drunk. Probably just a sudden crazy impulse.”
Ohls lifted his pale eyes and dropped his hands off the desk. “I went through his desk. He wrote letters to himself. He wrote and wrote and wrote. Drunk or sober he hit that typewriter. Some of it is wild, some of it kind of funny, and some of it is sad. The guy had something on his mind.
He wrote all around it but he never quite touched it. That guy would have left a two-page letter if he knocked himself off.”
“He was drunk,” I said again.
“With him that didn’t matter,” Ohls said wearily. “The next thing I don’t like is he did it there in that room and left his wife to find him. Okay, he was drunk. I still don’t like it. The next thing I don’t like Is he pulled the trigger just when the noise of that speedboat could drown out the shot. What difference would it make to him? More coincidence, huh? More coincidence still that the wife forgot her door keys on the help’s day off and had to ring the bell to get into the house.”
“She could have walked around to the back,” I said.
“Yeah, I know. What I’m talking about is a situation. Nobody to answer the door but you, and she said on the stand she didn’t know you were there. Wade wouldn’t have heard the bell if he bad been alive and working in his study. His door is soundproofed. The help was away. That was Thursday. That they forgot. Like she forgot her keys.”
“You’re forgetting something yourself. Bernie. My car was in the driveway. So she knew I was there—or that somebody was there—before the rang the bell. ”
He grinned. “I forgot that, didn’t I? All right, here’s the picture. You were down at the lake, the speedboat was making all that racket—incidentally it was a couple of guys from Lake Arrowhead just visiting, had their boat on a trailer—Wade was asleep In his study or passed out, somebody took the gun out of his desk already, and she knew you had put it there because you told her that other time. Now suppose she didn’t forget her keys, that she goes into the house, looks across and sees you down at the water, looks into the study and sees Wade asleep, knows where the gun is, gets it, waits for the right moment, plugs him, drops the gun where it was found, goes back outside the house, waits a little while for the speedboat to go away, and then rings the doorbell and waits for you to open it. Any objections?”
“With what motive?”
“Yeah,” he said sourly. “That knocks it. If she wanted to slough the guy, it was easy. She had him over a barrel, habitual drunk, record of violence to her. Plenty alimony, nice fat property settlement. No motive at all. Anyhow the timing was too neat. Five minutes earlier and she couldn’t have done it unless you were in on it.”
I started to say something but he put his hand up. “Take it easy. I’m not accusing anybody, just speculating. Five minutes later and you get the same answer. She had ten minutes to pull it off.”
“Ten minutes,” I said irritably, “that couldn’t possibly have been foreseen, much less planned.”
He leaned back in the chair and sighed. “I know. You’ve got all the answers, I’ve got all the answers. And I still don’t like it. What the hell were you doing with these people anyway? The guy writes you a check for a grand, then tears it up. Got mad at you, you say. You didn’t want it anyway, wouldn’t have taken it, you say. Maybe. Did he think you were sleeping with his wife?”
“Lay off. Bernie.”
“I didn’t ask were you, I asked did he think you were.”
“Same answer.”
“Okay, try this. What did the Mex have on him?”
“Nothing that I know of.”
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