“I don’t think so.”
“Think what you like, pal. I’m telling you what I think. The D.A. will be sore because he dropped a blanket on the Lennox case. Even if the suicide and confession of Lennox made him look justified, a lot of people will want to know how Lennox, an innocent man, came to make a confession, how he got dead, did he really commit suicide or was he helped, why was there no investigation into the circumstances, and how come the whole thing died so fast. Also, if he has the original of this photostat he will think he has been double-crossed by the Sheriff’s people.”
“You don’t have to print the identifying stamp on the back.”
“We won’t. We’re pals with the Sheriff. We think he’s a straight guy. We don’t blame him because he can’t stop guys like Menendez. Nobody can stop gambling as long as it’s legal in all forms in some places and legal in some forms in all places. You stole this from the Sheriff’s office. I don’t know how you got away with it. Want to tell me?”
“Okay. The coroner will be sore because he buggered up the Wade suicide. The D.A. helped him with that too. Harlan Potter will be sore because something is reopened that he used a lot of power to close up. Menendez and Starr will be sore for reasons I’m not sure of, but I know you got warned off. And when those boys get sore at somebody he gets hurt. You’re apt to get the treatment Big Willie Magoon got.”
“Magoon was probably getting too heavy for his job.”
“Why?” Morgan drawled. “Because those boys have to make it stick. If they take the trouble to tell you to lay off, you lay off. I you don’t and they let you get away with it they look weak. The hard boys that run the business, the big wheels, the board of directors, don’t have any use for weak people. They’re dangerous. And then there’s Chris Mady.”
“He just about runs Nevada, I heard.”
“You heard right, chum. Mady is a nice guy but he knows what’s right for Nevada. The rich hoodlums that operate in Reno and Vegas are very careful not to annoy Mr. Mady. If they did, their taxes would go up fast and their police co-operation would go down the same way. Then the top guys back East would decide some changes were necessary. An operator who can’t get along with Chris Mady ain’t operating correctly. Get him the hell out of there and put somebody else in. Getting him out of there means only one thing to them. Out in a wooden box.”
“They never heard of me,” I said.
Morgan frowned and whipped an arm up and down in a meaningless gesture, “They don’t have to. Mady’s estate on the Nevada side of Tahoe is right next to Harlan Potter’s estate. Could be they say hello once in a while. Could be some character that is on Mady’s payroll hears from another guy on Potter’s payroll that a punk named Marlowe is buzzing too loud about things that are not any of his business. Could be that this passing remark gets passed on down to where the phone rings in some apartment in L. A. and a guy with large muscles gets a hint to go out and exercise himself and two or three of his friends. If somebody wants you knocked off or smashed, the muscle men don’t have to have it explained why. It’s mere routine to them. No hard feelings at all. Just sit still while we break your arm. You want this back?”
He held out the photostat.
“You know what I want,” I said.
Morgan stood up slowly and put the photostat in his inside pocket. “I could be wrong,” he said. “You may know more about it than I do. I wouldn’t know how a man like Harlan Potter looks at things.”
“With a scowl,” I said. “I’ve met him. But he wouldn’t operate with a goon squad. He couldn’t reconcile it with his opinion of how he wants to live.”
“For my money,” Morgan said sharply, “stopping a murder investigation with a phone call and stopping it by knocking off the witnesses is just a question of method. See you around—I hope.”
He drifted out of the office like something blown by the wind.
46
I drove out to Victor’s with the idea of drinking a gimlet and sitting around until the evening edition of the morning papers was on the street. But the bar was crowded and it wasn’t any fun. When the barkeep I knew got around to me he called me by name.
“You like a dash of bitters in it, don’t you?”
“Not usually. Just for tonight two dashes of bitters.”
“I haven’t seen your friend lately. The one with the green ice.”
“Neither have I.”
He went away and came back with the drink. I pecked at it to make it last, because I didn’t feel like getting a glow on. Either I would get really stiff or stay sober. After a while I had another of the same. It was just past six when the kid with the papers came into the bar. One of the barkeeps yelled at him to beat it, but he managed one quick round of the customers before a waiter got hold of him and threw him out. I was one of the customers. I opened up the Journal and glanced at page lA. They bad made it. It was all there. They had reversed the photostat by making it black on white and by reducing it in size they had fitted it into the top half of the page. There was a short brusque editorial on another page. There was a half column by Lonnie Morgan with a by-line, on still another page.
I finished my drink and left and went to another place to eat dinner and then drove home.
Lonnie Morgan’s piece was a straightforward factual recapitulation of the facts and happenings involved in the Lennox case and the “suicide” of Roger Wade—the facts as they had been published. It added nothing, deduced nothing, imputed nothing. It was clear concise businesslike reporting. The editorial was something else. It asked questions—the kind a newspaper asks of public officials when they are caught with jam on their faces.
About nine-thirty the telephone rang and Bernie Ohls said he would drop by on his way home.
“Seen the Journal?” be asked coyly, and hung up without waiting for an answer.
When he got there he grunted about the steps and said he would drink a cup of coffee if I had one. I said I would make some. While I made It he wandered around the house and made himself very much at home.
“You live pretty lonely for a guy that could get himself disliked,” he said. “What’s over the hill in back?”
“Another street. Why?”
“Just asking. Your shrubbery needs pruning.”
I carried some coffee into the living room and he parked himself and sipped it. He lit one of my cigarettes and puffed at it for, a minute or two, then put it out. “Getting so I don’t care for the stuff,” he said. “Maybe it’s the TV commercials. They make you hate everything they try to sell. God, they must think the public is a halfwit. Every time some jerk in a white coat with a stethoscope hanging around his neck holds up some toothpaste or a pack of cigarettes or a bottle of beer or a mouthwash or a jar of shampoo or a little box of something that makes a fat wrestler smell like mountain lilac I always make a note never to buy any. Hell, I wouldn’t buy the product even if I liked it. You read the Journal, huh?”
“A friend of mine tipped me off. A reporter.”
“You got friends?” he asked wonderingly. “Didn’t tell you how they got hold of the material, did he?”
“No. And in this state he doesn’t have to tell you.”
“Springer is hopping mad. Lawford, the deputy D.A. that got the letter this morning, claims he took it straight to his boss, but it makes a guy wonder. What the Journal printed looks like a straight reproduction from the original. ”
I sipped coffee and said nothing.
“Serves him right,” Ohls went on. “Springer ought to have handled it himself. Personally I don’t figure it was Lawford that leaked. He’s a politician too.” He stared at me woodenly.
“What are you here for Bernie? You don’t like me. We used to be friends—as much as anybody can be friends with a tough cop. But it soured a little.”
He leaned forward and smiled—a little wolfishly. “No cop likes it when a private citizen does police work behind his back. If you had connected up Wade and the Lennox trail for me the time Wade got dea
d I’d have made out. If you had connected up Mrs. Wade and this Terry Lennox I’d have had her in the palm of my hand—alive. If you had come clean from the start Wade might be still alive. Not to mention Lennox. You figure you’re a pretty smart monkey, don’t you?”
“What would you like me to say?”
“Nothing. It’s too late. I told you a wise guy never fools anybody but himself. I told you straight and clear. So it didn’t take. Right now it might be smart for you to leave town. Nobody likes you and a couple of guys that don’t like people do something about it. I had the word from a stoolie.”
“I’m not that important. Bernie. Let’s stop snarling at each other. Until Wade was dead you didn’t even enter the case. After that it didn’t seem to, matter to you and to the coroner or to the D.A. or to anybody. Maybe I did some things wrong. But the truth came out. You could have had her yesterday afternoon—with what?”
“With what you had to tell us about her.”
“Me? With the police work I did behind your back?”
He stood up abruptly. His face was red. “Okay, wise guy. She’d have been alive. We could have booked her on suspicion. You wanted her dead; you punk, and you know it.”
“I wanted her to take a good long quiet look at herself. What she did about it was her business. I wanted to clear an innocent man. I didn’t give a good goddamn how I did it and I don’t now. I’ll be around when you feel like doing something about me.”
“The hard boys will take care of you, buster. I won’t have to bother. You think you’re not important enough to bother them. As a P.I. named Marlowe, check. You’re not. As a guy who was told where to get off and blew a raspberry in their faces publicly in a newspaper, that’s different. That hurts their pride.”
“That’s pitiful,” I said, “Just thinking about it makes me bleed internally, to use your own expression.”
He went across to the door and opened it. He stood looking down the redwood steps and at the trees on the hill across the way and up the slope at the end of the street.
“Nice and quiet here,” he said. “Just quiet enough.”
He went on down the steps and got into his car and left, Cops never say goodbye. They’re always hoping to see you again in the line-up.
47
For a short time the next day things looked like getting lively. District Attorney Springer called an early press conference and delivered a statement. He was the big florid black-browed prematurely gray-haired type that always does so well in politics.
“I have read the document which purports to be a confession by the unfortunate and unhappy woman who recently took her life, a document which may or may not be genuine, but which, if genuine, is obviously the product of a disordered mind. I am willing to assume that the journal published this document in good faith, in spite of its many absurdities and inconsistencies, and these I shall not bore you with enumerating. If Eileen Wade wrote these words, and my office in conjunction with the staff of my respected coadjutor, Sheriff Petersen, will soon determine whether or no she did, then I say to you that she did not write them with a clear head, nor with a steady hand. It is only a matter of weeks since the unfortunate lady found her husband wallowing in his own blood, spilled by his own hand. Imagine the shock, the despair, the utter loneliness which must have followed so sharp a disaster! And now she has joined him in the bitterness of death. Is anything to be gained by disturbing the ashes of the dead? Anything, my friends, beyond the sale of a few copies of a newspaper which is badly in need of circulation? Nothing, my friends, nothing. Let us leave it at that. Like Ophelia in that great dramatic masterpiece called Hamlet, by the immortal William Shakespeare, Eileen Wade wore her rue with a difference. My political enemies would like to make much of that difference, but my friends and fellow voters will not be deceived. They know that this office has long stood for wise and mature law enforcement, for justice tempered with mercy, for solid, stable, and conservative government. The Journal stands for I know not what, and for what it stands I do not much or greatly care. Let the enlightened public judge for itself.”
The Journal printed this guff in its early edition (it was a round-the-clock newspaper) and Henry Sherman, the Managing Editor, came right back at Springer with a signed comment.
Mr. District-Attorney Springer was in good form this morning. He is a fine figure of a man and he speaks with a rich baritone voice that is a pleasure to listen to. He did not bore us with any facts. Any time Mr. Springer cares to have the authenticity of the document in question proved to him, the Journal will be most happy to oblige. We do not expect Mr. Springer to take any action to reopen cases which had been officially closed with his sanction or under his direction, just as we do not expect Mr. Springer to stand on his head on the tower of the City Hall. As Mr. Springer so aptly phrases it, is anything to be gained by disturbing the ashes of the dead? Or, as the Journal would prefer to phrase it less elegantly, is anything to be gained by finding out who committed a murder when the murderee is already dead? Nothing, of course, but justice and truth.
On behalf of the late William Shakespeare, the Journal wishes to thank Mr. Springer for his favorable mention of Hamlet, and for his substantially, although not exactly, correct allusion to Ophelia. ‘You must wear your rue with a difference’ was not said of Ophelia but by her, and just what she meant has never been very clear to our less erudite minds. But let that pass. It sounds well and helps to confuse the issue. Perhaps we may be permitted to quote, also from that officially approved dramatic production known as Hamlet, a good thing that happened to be said by a bad man: “And where the offence is let the great axe fall. ”
Lonnie Morgan called me up about noon and asked me how I liked it. I told him I didn’t think it would do Springer any harm.
“Only with the eggheads,” Lonnie Morgan said, “and they already had his number. I meant what about you?”
“Nothing about me. I’m just sitting here waiting for a soft buck to rub itself against my cheek.”
“That wasn’t exactly what I meant.”
“I’m still healthy. Quit trying to scare me. I got what I wanted. If Lennox was still alive he could walk right up to Springer and spit in his eye.”
“You did it for him. And by this time Springer knows that. They got a hundred ways to frame a guy they don’t like. I don’t figure what made it worth your time. Lennox wasn’t that much man.”
“What’s that got to do with it?”
He was silent for a moment. Then he said: “Sorry, Marlowe. Shut my big mouth. Good luck.”
We hung up after the usual goodbyes.
About two in the afternoon Linda Loring called me. “No names, please,” she said. “I’ve just flown in from that big lake up north. Somebody up there is boiling over something that was in the Journal last night. My almost ex-husband got it right between the eyes. The poor man was weeping when I left. He flew up to report.”
“What do you mean, almost ex-husband?”
“Don’t be stupid. For once Father approves. Paris is an excellent place to get a quiet divorce. So I shall soon be leaving to go there. And if you have any sense left you could do worse than spend a little of that fancy engraving you showed me going a long way off yourself.”
“What’s it got to do with me?”
“That’s the second stupid question you’ve asked. You’re not fooling anyone but yourself, Marlowe. Do you know how they shoot tigers?”
“How would I?”
“They tie a goat to a stake and then hide out in a blind. It’s apt to be rough on the goat. I like you. I’m sure I don’t know why, but I do. I hate the idea of your being the goat. You tried so hard to do the right thing—as you saw it.”
“Nice of you,” I said. “If I stick my neck out and it gets chopped, it’s still my neck.”
“Don’t be a hero, you fool,” she said sharply. “Just because someone we knew chose to be a fall guy, you don’t have to imitate him.”
“I’ll buy you a drink if you’re
going to be around long enough.”
“Buy me one in Paris. Paris is lovely in the fall. ”
“I’d like to do that too. I hear it was even better in the spring. Never having been there I wouldn’t know.”
“The way you’re going you never will. ”
“Goodbye, Linda. I hope you find what you want.”
“Goodbye,” she said coldly. “I always find what I want. But when I find it, I don’t want it any more.”
She hung up. The rest of the day was a blank. I ate dinner and left the Olds at an all night garage to have the brake linings checked. I took a cab home. The street was as empty as usual. In the wooden mailbox was a free soap coupon. I went up the steps slowly. It was a soft night with a little haze in the air. The trees on the hill hardly moved. No breeze. I unlocked the door and pushed it part way open and then stopped. The door was about ten inches open from the frame. It was dark inside, there was no sound. But I had the feeling that the room beyond was not empty. Perhaps a spring squeaked faintly or I caught the gleam of a white jacket across the room. Perhaps on a warm still night like this one the room beyond the door was not warm enough, not still enough. Perhaps there was a drifting smell of man on the air. And perhaps I was just on edge.
I stepped sideways off the porch on to the ground and leaned down against the shrubbery. Nothing happened. No light went on inside, there was no movement anywhere that I heard, I had a gun in a belt holster on the left side, butt forward, a short-barreled Police 38. I jerked it out and it got me nowhere. The silence continued. I decided I was a damn fool. I straightened up and lifted a foot to go back to the front door, and then a car turned the corner and came fast up the hill and stopped almost without sound at the foot of my steps. It was a big-black sedan with the lines of a Cadillac. It could have been Linda Loring’s car, except for two things. Nobody opened a door and the windows on my side were all shut tight. I waited and listened, crouched against the bush, and there was nothing to listen to and nothing to wait for. Just a dark car motionless at the foot of my redwood steps, with the windows closed. If its motor was still running I couldn’t hear it. Then a big red spotlight clicked on and the beam struck twenty feet beyond the corner of the house. And then very slowly the big car backed until the spotlight could swing across the front of the house, across the hood and up.
The Long Goodbye pm-6 Page 32