“You’re getting horrible, Howard. I didn’t think anything of the sort.”
“You told the deputy Marlowe had killed Roger. What was that supposed to mean?”
She looked at me briefly, almost shyly. “I was very wrong to say that. I didn’t know what I was saying.”
“Maybe you thought Marlowe had shot him,” Spencer suggested calmly.
Her eyes narrowed. “Oh no, Howard. Why? Why would he do that? That’s an abominable suggestion.”
“Why?” Spencer wanted to know. “What’s abominable about it? The police had the same idea. And Candy gave them a motive. He said Marlowe was in your room for two hours the night Roger shot a hole in his ceiling—after Roger had been put to sleep with pills.”
She flushed to the roots of her hair. She stared at him dumbly.
“And you didn’t have any clothes on,” Spencer said brutally. “That’s what Candy told them.”
“But at the inquest—” she began to say in a shattered kind of voice. Spencer cut her off.
“The police didn’t believe Candy. So he didn’t tell it at the inquest.”
“Oh.” It was a sigh of relief.
“Also,” Spencer went on coldly, “the police suspected you. They still do. All they need is a motive. Looks to me like they might be able to put one together now.”
She was on her feet. “I think you had both better leave my house,” she said angrily. “The sooner the better.”
“Well, did you or didn’t you?” Spencer asked calmly, not moving except to reach for his glass and find it empty.
“Did I or didn’t I what?”
“Shoot Roger?”
She was standing there staring at him. The flush had gone. Her face was white and tight and angry.
“I’m just giving you the sort of thing you’d get in court.”
“I was out. I had forgotten my keys. I had to ring to get into the house. He was dead when I got home. All that is known. What has got into you, for God’s sake?”
He took a handkerchief out and wiped his lips. “Eileen, I’ve stayed in this house twenty times. I’ve never known that front door to be locked during the daytime. I don’t say you shot him. I just asked you. And don’t tell me it was impossible. The way things worked out it was easy.”
“I shot my own husband?” she asked slowly and wonderingly.
“Assuming,” Spencer said in the same indifferent voice, “that he was your husband. You had another when you married him.”
“Thank you, Howard. Thank you very much. Roger’s last book, his swan song, is there in front of you. Take it and go. And I think you had better call the police and tell them what you think. It will be a charming ending to our friendship. Most charming. Goodbye, Howard. I am very tired and I have a headache. I’m going to my room and lie down. As for Mr. Marlowe—and I suppose he put you up to all this—I can only say to him that if he didn’t kill Roger in a literal sense, he certainly drove him to his death.”
She turned to walk away. I said sharply: “Mrs. Wade, just a moment. Let’s finish the job. No sense in being bitter. We are all trying to do the right thing. That suitcase you threw into the Chatsworth Reservoir—was it heavy?”
She turned and stared at me. “It was an old one, I said. Yes, it was very heavy.”
“How did you get it over the high wire fence around the reservoir?”
“What? The fence?” She made a helpless gesture. “I suppose in emergencies one has an abnormal strength to do what has to be done. Somehow or other I did it. That’s all. ”
“There isn’t any fence,” I said.
“Isn’t any fence?” She repeated it dully, as if it didn’t mean anything.”
“And there was no blood on Roger’s clothes. And Sylvia Lennox wasn’t killed outside the guesthouse, but inside it on the bed. And there was practically no blood, because she was already dead—shot dead with a gun—and when the statuette was used to beat her face to a pulp, it was beating a dead woman, And the dead, Mrs. Wade, bleed very little.”
She curled her lip at me contemptuously. “I suppose you were there,” she said scornfully.
Then she went away from us.
We watched her go. She went up the stairs slowly, moving with calm elegance. She disappeared into her room and the door closed softly but firmly behind her. Silence.
“What was that about the wire fence?” Spencer asked me vaguely. He was moving, his head back and forth. He was flushed and sweating. He was taking it gamely but it wasn’t easy, for him to take.
“Just a gag,” I said. “I’ve never been close enough to the Chatsworth Reservoir to know what it looks like. Maybe it has a fence around it, maybe not.”
“I see,” he said unhappily. “But the point is she didn’t know either.”
“Of course not. She killed both of them.”
43
Then something moved softly and Candy was standing at the end of the couch looking at me. He had his switch knife in his hand. He pressed the button and the blade shot out. He pressed the button and the blade went back into the handle. There was a sleek glitter in his eye.
“Million de pardones, señor,” he said. “I was wrong about you. She killed the boss. I think I—” He stopped and the blade shot out again.
“No.” I stood up and held my hand out. “Give me the knife, Candy. You’re just a nice Mexican houseboy. They’d hang it onto you and love it. Just the kind of smoke screen that would make them grin with delight. You don’t know what I’m talking about. But I do. They fouled it up so bad that they couldn’t straighten it out now if they wanted to. And they don’t want to. They’d blast a confession out of you so quickly you wouldn’t even have time to tell them your full name. And you’d be sitting on your fanny up in San Quentin with a life sentence three weeks from Tuesday.”
“I tell you before I am not a Mexican. I am Chileno from Viña del Mar near Valparaiso.”
“The knife, Candy. I know all that. You’re free. You’ve got money saved. You’ve probably got eight brothers and sisters back home. Be smart and go back where you came from. This job here is dead.”
“Lots of jobs,” he said quietly. Then he reached out and dropped the knife into my hand. “For you I do this.”
I dropped the knife into my pocket. He glanced up towards the balcony. “La señora—what do we do now?”
“Nothing. We do nothing at all. The señora is very tired. She has been living under a great strain. She doesn’t want to be disturbed.”
“We’ve got to call the police,” Spencer said grittily.
“Why?”
“Oh my God, Marlowe—we have to.”
“Tomorrow. Pick up your pile of unfinished novel and let’s go.”
“We’ve got to call the police. There is such a thing as law.”
“We don’t have to do anything of the sort. We haven’t enough evidence to swat a fly with. Let the law enforcement people do their own dirty work. Let the lawyers work it out. They write the laws for other lawyers to dissect in front of other lawyers called judges so that other judges can say the first judges were wrong and the Supreme Court can say the second lot were wrong. Sure there’s such a thing as law. We’re up to our necks in it. About all it does is make business for lawyers. How long do you think the big-shot mobsters would last if the lawyers didn’t show them how to operate?”
Spencer said angrily: “That has nothing to do with it. A man was killed in this house. He happened to be an author and a very successful and important one, but that has nothing to do with it either. He was a man and you and I know who killed him. There’s such a thing as justice.”
“Tomorrow.”
“You’re just as bad as she is if you let her get away with it. I’m beginning to wonder about you a little, Marlowe. You could have saved his life if you had been on your toes. In a sense you let her get away with it. And for all I know this whole performance this afternoon has been just that—a performance.”
“That’s right. A disgui
sed love scene. You could see Eileen is crazy about me. When things quiet down we may get married. She ought to be pretty well fixed. I haven’t made a buck out of the Wade family yet. I’m getting impatient.”
He took his glasses off and polished them. He wiped perspiration from the hollows under his eyes, replaced the glasses and looked at the floor.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ve taken a pretty stiff punch this afternoon. It was bad enough to know Roger had killed himself. But this other version makes me feel degraded—just knowing about it.” He looked up at me. “Can I trust you?”
“To do what?”
“The right thing—whatever it is.” He reached down and picked up the pile of yellow script and tucked it under his arm. “No, forget it. I guess you know what you are doing, I’m a pretty good publisher but this is out of my line. I guess what I really am is just a goddamn stuffed shirt.”
He walked past me and Candy stepped out of his way, then went quickly to the front door and held it open. Spencer went out past him with a brief nod. I followed. I stopped beside Candy and looked into his dark shining eyes.
“No tricks, amigo,” I said.
“The señora is very tired,” he said quietly. “She has gone to her room. She will not be disturbed. I know nothing, señor. No me acuerdo de nada . . . A sus órdenes, señor.”
I took the knife out of my pocket and held it out to him. He smiled.
“Nobody trusts me, but I trust you, Candy.”
“Lo mismo, señor. Muchas gracias.”
Spencer was already in the car. I got in and started it and backed down the driveway and drove him back to Beverly Hills. I let him out at the side entrance of the hotel.
“I’ve been thinking all the way back,” he said as he got out. “She must be a little insane. I guess they’d never convict her.”
“They won’t even try,” I said. “But she doesn’t know that.”
He struggled with the batch of yellow paper under his arm, got it straightened out, and nodded to me. I watched him heave open the door and go on in. I eased up on the brake and the Olds slid out from the white curb, and that was the last I saw of Howard Spencer.
I got home late and tired and depressed. It was one of those nights when the air is heavy and the night noises seem muffled and far away. There was a high misty indifferent moon. I walked the floor, played a few records, and hardly heard them. I seemed to hear a steady ticking somewhere, but there wasn’t anything in the house to tick. The ticking was in my head. I was a one-man death watch.
I thought of the first time I had seen Eileen Wade and the second and the third and the fourth. But after that something in her got out of drawing. She no longer seemed quite real. A murderer is always unreal once you know he is a murderer. There are people who kill out of hate or fear or greed. There are the cunning killers who plan and expect to get away with it. There are the angry killers who do not think at all. And there are the killers who are in love with death, to whom murder is a remote kind of suicide. In a sense they are all insane, but not in the way Spencer meant it.
It was almost daylight when I finally went to bed.
The jangle of the telephone dragged me up out of a black well of sleep. I rolled over on the bed, fumbled for slippers, and realized that I hadn’t been asleep for more than a couple of hours. I felt like a half-digested meal eaten in a greasy-spoon joint. My eyes were stuck together and my mouth was full of sand. I heaved up on the feet and lumbered into the living room and pulled the phone off the cradle and said into it: “Hold the line.”
I put the phone down and went into the bathroom and hit myself in the face with some cold water. Outside the window something went snip, snip, snip. I looked out vaguely and saw a brown expressionless face. It was the once-a-week Jap gardener I called Hardhearted Harry. He was trimming the tecoma—the way a Japanese gardener trims your tecoma. You ask him four times and he says, “next week,” and then he comes by at six o’clock in the morning and trims it outside your bedroom window.
I rubbed my face dry and went back to the telephone.
“Yeah?”
“This is Candy, señor.”
“Good morning, Candy.”
“La señora es muerta.”
Dead. What a cold black noiseless word it is in any language. The lady is dead.
“Nothing you did, I hope.”
“I think the medicine. It is called demerol. I think forty, fifty in the bottle. Empty now. No dinner last night. This morning I climb up on the ladder and look in the window. Dressed just like yesterday afternoon. I break the screen open. La señora es muerta. Frio como agua de nieve.”
Cold as ice water. “You call anybody?”
“Si. El Doctor Loring. He call the cops. Not here yet.”
“Dr. Loring, huh? Just the man to come too late.”
“I don’t show him the letter,” Candy said.
“Letter to who?”
“Señor Spencer.”
“Give it to the police, Candy. Don’t let Dr. Loring have it. Just the police. And one more thing, Candy. Don’t hide anything, don’t tell them any lies. We were there. Tell the truth. This time the truth and all the truth.”
There was a little pause. Then he said: “Si. I catch. Hasta la vista, amigo.” He hung up.
I dialed the Ritz-Beverly and asked for Howard Spencer.
“One moment, please. I’ll give you the desk.”
A man’s voice said: “Desk speaking. May I help you?”
“I asked for Howard Spencer. I know it’s early, but it’s urgent.”
“Mr. Spencer checked out last evening. He took the eight o’clock plane to New York.”
“Oh, sorry. I didn’t know.”
I went out to the kitchen to make coffee—yards of coffee. Rich, strong, bitter, boiling hot, ruthless, depraved. The lifeblood of tired men.
It was a couple of hours later that Bernie Ohls called me.
“Okay, wise guy,” he said. “Get down here and suffer.”
44
It was like the other time except that it was day and we were in Captain Hernandez’s office and the Sheriff was up in Santa Barbara opening Fiesta Week. Captain Hernandez was there and Bernie Ohls and a man from the coroner’s office and Dr. Loring, who looked as if he had been caught performing an abortion, and a man named Lawford, a deputy from the D.A.’s office, a tall gaunt expressionless man whose brother was vaguely rumored to be a boss of the numbers racket in the Central Avenue district.
Hernandez had some handwritten sheets of notepaper in front of him, flesh-pink paper, deckle-edged, and written on with green ink.
“This is informal,” Hernandez said, when everybody was as comfortable as you can get in hard chairs. “No stenotype or recording equipment. Say what you like. Dr. Weiss represents the coroner who will decide whether an inquest is necessary. Dr. Weiss?”
He was fat, cheerful, and looked competent. “I think no inquest,” he said. “There is every surface indication of narcotic poisoning. When the ambulance arrived the woman was still breathing very faintly and she was in a deep coma and all the reflexes were negative. At that stage you don’t save one in a hundred. Her skin was cold and respiration would not be noticed without close examination, The houseboy thought she was dead. She died approximately an hour after that. I understand the lady was subject to occasional violent attacks of bronchial asthma. The demerol was prescribed by Dr. Loring as an emergency measure.”
“Any information or deduction about the amount of demerol taken, Dr. Weiss?”
“A fatal dose,” he said, smiling faintly. “There is no quick way of determining that without knowing the medical history, the acquired or natural tolerance. According to her confession she took twenty-three hundred milligrams, four or five times the minimal lethal dose for a non-addict.” He looked questioningly at Dr. Loring.
“Mrs. Wade was not an addict,” Dr. Loring said coldly. “The prescribed dose would be one or two fifty-milligram tablets. Three or four during a tw
enty-four-hour period would be the most I’d permit.”
“But you gave her fifty at a whack,” Captain Hernandez said. “A pretty dangerous drug to have around in that quantity, don’t you think? How bad was this bronchial asthma, Doctor?”
Dr. Loring smiled contemptuously. “It was intermittent, like all asthma. It never amounted to what we term status asthmaticus, an attack so severe that the patient seems in danger of suffocating.”
“Any comment, Dr. Weiss?”
“Well,” Dr. Weiss said slowly, “assuming the note didn’t exist and assuming we had no other evidence of how much of the stuff she took, it could be an accidental overdose. The safety margin isn’t very wide. We’ll know for sure tomorrow. You don’t want to suppress the note, Hernandez, for Pete’s sake?”
Hernandez scowled down at his desk. “I was just wondering. I didn’t know narcotics were standard treatment for asthma. Guy learns something every day.”
Loring flushed. “An emergency measure, I said, Captain. A doctor can’t be everywhere at once. The onset of an asthmatic flare-up can be very sudden.”
Hernandez gave him a brief glance and turned to Lawford. “What happens to your office, if I give this letter to the press?”
The D.A.’s deputy glanced at me emptily. “What’s this guy doing here, Hernandez?”
“I invited him.”
“How do I know he won’t repeat everything said in here to some reporter?”
“Yeah, he’s a great talker. You found that out. The time you had him pinched.”
Lawford grinned, then cleared his throat. “I’ve read that purported confession,” he said carefully. “And I don’t believe a word of it. You’ve got a background of emotional exhaustion, bereavement, some use of drugs, the strain of wartime life in England under bombing, this clandestine marriage, the man coming back here, and so on. Undoubtedly she developed a feeling of guilt and tried to purge herself of it by a sort of transference.”
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