“You were there?”
“Hell, no. I just heard.”
“Oh. Who told you, Mrs. Florian?”
“Some hoofer. I forget the name right now. Maybe a good stiff drink might help some. I feel like Death Valley.”
“And you look like a dead mule,” I thought, but didn’t say it out loud. “There’s just one more thing,” I said, “then I’ll maybe run out for some gin. I looked up the title to your house, I don’t know just why.”
She was rigid under the bedclothes, like a wooden woman. Even her eyelids were frozen half down over the clogged iris of her eyes. Her breath stilled.
“There’s a rather large trust deed on it,” I said. “Considering the low value of property around here. It’s held by a man named Lindsay Marriott.”
Her eyes blinked rapidly, but nothing else moved. She stared.
“I used to work for him,” she said at last. “I used to be a servant in his family. He kind of takes care of me a little.”
I took the unlighted cigarette out of my mouth and looked at it aimlessly and stuck it back in.
“Yesterday afternoon, a few hours after I saw you, Mr. Marriott called me up at my office. He offered me a job.”
“What kind of job?” Her voice croaked now, badly.
I shrugged. “I can’t tell you that. Confidential. I went to see him last night.”
“You’re a clever son of a bitch,” she said thickly and moved a hand under the bedclothes.
I stared at her and said nothing.
“Copper-smart,” she sneered.
I ran a hand up and down the door frame. It felt slimy. Just touching it made me want to take a bath.
“Well, that’s all,” I said smoothly. “I was just wondering how come. Might be nothing at all. Just a coincidence. It just looked as if it might mean something.”
“Copper-smart,” she said emptily. “Not a real copper at that. Just a cheap shamus.”
“I suppose so,” I said. “Well, good-by, Mrs. Florian. By the way, I don’t think you’ll get a registered letter tomorrow morning.”
She threw the bedclothes aside and jerked upright with her eyes blazing. Something glittered in her right hand. A small revolver, a Banker’s Special. It was old and worn, but looked business-like.
“Tell it,” she snarled. “Tell it fast.”
I looked at the gun and the gun looked at me. Not too steadily. The hand behind it began to shake, but the eyes still blazed. Saliva bubbled at the corners of her mouth.
“You and I could work together,” I said.
The gun and her jaw dropped at the same time. I was inches from the door. While the gun was still dropping, I slid through it and beyond the opening.
“Think it over,” I called back.
There was no sound, no sound of any kind.
I went fast back through the hall and dining room and out of the house. My back felt queer as I went down the walk. The muscles crawled.
Nothing happened. I went along the street and got into my car and drove away from there.
The last day of March and hot enough for summer. I felt like taking my coat off as I drove. In front of the 77th Street Station, two prowl car men were scowling at a bent front fender. I went in through the swing doors and found a uniformed lieutenant behind the railing looking over the charge sheet. I asked him if Nulty was upstairs. He said he thought he was, was I a friend of his. I said yes. He said okey, go on up, so I went up the worn stairs and along the corridor and knocked at the door. The voice yelled and I went in.
He was picking his teeth, sitting in one chair with his feet on the other. He was looking at his left thumb, holding it up in front of his eyes and at arm’s length. The thumb looked all right to me, but Nulty’s stare was gloomy, as if he thought it wouldn’t get well.
He lowered it to his thigh and swung his feet to the floor and looked at me instead of at his thumb. He wore a dark gray suit and a mangled cigar end was waiting on the desk for him to get through with the toothpick.
I turned the felt seat cover that lay on the other chair with its straps not fastened to anything, sat down, and put a cigarette in my face.
“You,” Nulty said, and looked at his toothpick, to see if it was chewed enough.
“Any luck?”
“Malloy? I ain’t on it any more.”
“Who is?”
“Nobody ain’t. Why? The guy’s lammed. We got him on the teletype and they got readers out. Hell, he’ll be in Mexico long gone.”
“Well, all he did was kill a Negro,” I said. “I guess that’s only a misdemeanor.”
“You still interested? I thought you was workin’?” His pale eyes moved damply over my face.
“I had a job last night, but it didn’t last. Have you still got that Pierrot photo?”
He reached around and pawed under his blotter. He held it out. It still looked pretty. I stared at the face.
“This is really mine,” I said. “If you don’t need it for the file, I’d like to keep it.”
“Should be in the file, I guess,” Nulty said. “I forgot about it. Okey, keep it under your hat. I passed the file in.”
I put the photo in my breast pocket and stood up. “Well, I guess that’s all,” I said, a little too airily.
“I smell something,” Nulty said coldly.
I looked at the piece of rope on the edge of his desk. His eyes followed my look. He threw the toothpick on the floor and stuck the chewed cigar in his mouth.
“Not this either,” he said.
“It’s a vague hunch. If it grows more solid, I won’t forget you.”
“Things is tough. I need a break, pal.”
“A man who works as hard as you deserves one,” I said.
He struck a match on his thumbnail, looked pleased because it caught the first time, and started inhaling smoke from the cigar.
“I’m laughing,” Nulty said sadly, as I went out.
The hall was quiet, the whole building was quiet. Down in front the prowl car men were still looking at their bent fender. I drove back to Hollywood.
The phone was ringing as I stepped into the office. I leaned down over the desk and said, “Yes?”
“Am I addressing Mr. Philip Marlowe?”
“Yes, this is Marlowe.”
“This is Mrs. Grayle’s residence. Mrs. Lewin Lockridge Grayle. Mrs. Grayle would like to see you here as soon as convenient.”
“Where?”
“The address is Number 862 Aster Drive, in Bay City. May I say you will arrive within the hour?”
“Are you Mr. Grayle?”
“Certainly not, sir. I am the butler.”
“That’s me you hear ringing the door bell,” I said.
CHAPTER 18
It was close to the ocean and you could feel the ocean in the air but you couldn’t see water from the front of the place. Aster Drive had a long smooth curve there and the houses on the inland side were just nice houses, but on the canyon side they were great silent estates, with twelve foot walls and wrought-iron gates and ornamental hedges; and inside, if you could get inside, a special brand of sunshine, very quiet, put up in noise-proof containers just for the upper classes.
A man in a dark blue Russian tunic and shiny black puttees and flaring breeches stood in the half-open gates. He was a dark, good-looking lad, with plenty of shoulders and shiny smooth hair and the peak on his rakish cap made a soft shadow over his eyes. He had a cigarette in the corner of his mouth and he held his head tilted a little, as if he liked to keep the smoke out of his nose. One hand had a smooth black gauntlet on it and the other was bare. There was a heavy ring on his third finger.
There was no number in sight, but this should be 862. I stopped my car and leaned out and asked him. It took him a long time to answer. He had to look me over very carefully. Also the car I was driving. He came over to me and as he came he carelessly dropped his ungloved hand towards his hip. It was the kind of carelessness that was meant to be noticed.
He stopped a couple of feet away from my car and looked me over again.
“I’m looking for the Grayle residence,” I said.
“This is it. Nobody in.”
“I’m expected.”
He nodded. His eyes gleamed like water. “Name?”
“Philip Marlowe.”
“Wait there.” He strolled, without hurry, over to the gates and unlocked an iron door set into one of the massive pillars. There was a telephone inside. He spoke briefly into it, snapped the door shut, and came back to me.
“You have some identification?”
I let him look at the license on the steering post. “That doesn’t prove anything,” he said. “How do I know it’s your car?”
I pulled the key out of the ignition and threw the door open and got out. That put me about a foot from him. He had nice breath. Haig and Haig at least.
“You’ve been at the sideboy again,” I said.
He smiled. His eyes measured me. I said:
“Listen, I’ll talk to the butler over that phone and he’ll know my voice. Will that pass me in or do I have to ride on your back?”
“I just work here,” he said softly. “If I didn’t—” he let the rest hang in the air, and kept on smiling.
“You’re a nice lad,” I said and patted his shoulder. “Dartmouth or Dannemora?”
“Christ,” he said. “Why didn’t you say you were a cop?”
We both grinned. He waved his hand and I went in through the half-open gate. The drive curved and tall molded hedges of dark green completely screened it from the street and from the house. Through a green gate I saw a Jap gardener at work weeding a huge lawn. He was pulling a piece of weed out of the vast velvet expanse and sneering at it the way Jap gardeners do. Then the tall hedge closed in again and I didn’t see anything more for a hundred feet. Then the hedge ended in a wide circle in which half a dozen cars were parked.
One of them was a small coupe. There were a couple of very nice two-tone Buicks of the latest model, good enough to go for the mail in. There was a black limousine, with dull nickel louvres and hubcaps the size of bicycle wheels. There was a long sport phaeton with the top down. A short very wide all-weather concrete driveway led from these to the side entrance of the house.
Off to the left, beyond the parking space there was a sunken garden with a fountain at each of the four corners. The entrance was barred by a wrought-iron gate with a flying Cupid in the middle. There were busts on light pillars and a stone seat with crouching griffins at each end. There was an oblong pool with stone waterlilies in it and a big stone bullfrog sitting on one of the leaves. Still farther a rose colonnade led to a thing like an altar, hedged in at both sides, yet not so completely but that the sun lay in an arabesque along the steps of the altar. And far over to the left there was a wild garden, not very large, with a sundial in the corner near an angle of wall that was built to look like a ruin. And there were flowers. There were a million flowers.
The house itself was not so much. It was smaller than Buckingham Palace, rather gray for California, and probably had fewer windows than the Chrysler Building.
I sneaked over to the side entrance and pressed a bell and somewhere a set of chimes made a deep mellow sound like church bells.
A man in a striped vest and gilt buttons opened the door, bowed, took my hat and was through for the day. Behind him in dimness, a man in striped knife-edge pants and a black coat and wing collar with gray striped tie leaned his gray head forward about half an inch and said: “Mr. Marlowe? If you will come this way, please—”
We went down a hall. It was a very quiet hall. Not a fly buzzed in it. The floor was covered with Oriental rugs and there were paintings along the walls. We turned a corner and there was more hall. A French window showed a gleam of blue water far off and I remembered almost with a shock that we were near the Pacific Ocean and that this house was on the edge of one of the canyons.
The butler reached a door and opened it against voices and stood aside and I went in. It was a nice room with large chesterfields and lounging chairs done in pale yellow leather arranged around a fireplace in front of which, on the glossy but not slippery floor, lay a rug as thin as silk and as old as Aesop’s aunt. A jet of flowers glistened in a corner, another on a low table, the walls were of dull painted parchment, there was comfort, space, coziness, a dash of the very modern and a dash of the very old, and three people sitting in a sudden silence watching me cross the floor.
One of them was Anne Riordan, looking just as I had seen her last, except that she was holding a glass of amber fluid in her hand. One was a tall thin sad-faced man with a stony chin and deep eyes and no color in his face but an unhealthy yellow. He was a good sixty, or rather a bad sixty. He wore a dark business suit, a red carnation, and looked subdued.
The third was the blonde. She was dressed to go out, in a pale greenish blue. I didn’t pay much attention to her clothes. They were what the guy designed for her and she would go to the right man. The effect was to make her look very young and to make her lapis lazuli eyes look very blue. Her hair was of the gold of old paintings and had been fussed with just enough but not too much. She had a full set of curves which nobody had been able to improve on. The dress was rather plain except for a clasp of diamonds at the throat. Her hands were not small, but they had shape, and the nails were the usual jarring note—almost magenta. She was giving me one of her smiles. She looked as if she smiled easily, but her eyes had a still look, as if they thought slowly and carefully. And her mouth was sensual.
“So nice of you to come,” she said. “This is my husband. Mix Mr. Marlowe a drink, honey.”
Mr. Grayle shook hands with me. His hand was cold and a little moist. His eyes were sad. He mixed a Scotch and soda and handed it to me.
Then he sat down in a corner and was silent. I drank half of the drink and grinned at Miss Riordan. She looked at me with a sort of absent expression, as if she had another clue.
“Do you think you can do anything for us?” the blonde asked slowly, looking down into her glass. “If you think you can, I’d be delighted. But the loss is rather small compared with having any more fuss with gangsters and awful people.”
“I don’t know very much about it really,” I said.
“Oh, I hope you can.” She gave me a smile I could feel in my hip pocket.
I drank the other half of my drink. I began to feel rested. Mrs. Grayle rang a bell set into the arm of the leather chesterfield and a footman came in. She half pointed to the tray. He looked around and mixed two drinks. Miss Riordan was still playing cute with the same one and apparently Mr. Grayle didn’t drink. The footman went out.
Mrs. Grayle and I held our glasses. Mrs. Grayle crossed her legs, a little carelessly.
“I don’t know whether I can do anything,” I said. “I doubt it. What is there to go on?”
“I’m sure you can.” She gave me another smile. “How far did Lin Marriott take you into his confidence?”
She looked sideways at Miss Riordan. Miss Riordan just couldn’t catch the look. She kept right on sitting. She looked sideways the other way. Mrs. Grayle looked at her husband. “Do you have to bother with this, honey?”
Mr. Grayle stood up and said he was very glad to have met me and that he would go and lie down for a while. He didn’t feel very well. He hoped I would excuse him. He was so polite I wanted to carry him out of the room just to show my appreciation.
He left. He closed the door softly, as if he was afraid to wake a sleeper. Mrs. Grayle looked at the door for a moment and then put the smile back on her face and looked at me.
“Miss Riordan is in your complete confidence, of course.”
“Nobody’s in my complete confidence, Mrs. Grayle. She happens to know about this case—what there is to know.”
“Yes.” She drank a sip or two, then finished her glass at a swallow and set it aside.
“To hell with this polite drinking,” she said suddenly. “Let’s get together on this. You
’re a very good-looking man to be in your sort of racket.”
“It’s a smelly business,” I said.
“I didn’t quite mean that. Is there any money in it—or is that impertinent?”
“There’s not much money in it. There’s a lot of grief. But there’s a lot of fun too. And there’s always a chance of a big case.”
“How does one get to be a private detective? You don’t mind my sizing you up a little? And push that table over here, will you? So I can reach the drinks.”
I got up and pushed the huge silver tray on a stand across the glossy floor to her side. She made two more drinks. I still had half of my second.
“Most of us are ex-cops,” I said. “I worked for the D.A. for a while. I got Bred.”
She smiled nicely. “Not for incompetence, I’m sure.”
“No, for talking back. Have you had any more phone calls?”
“Well—” She looked at Anne Riordan. She waited. Her look said things.
Anne Riordan stood up. She carried her glass, still full, over to the tray and set it down. “You probably won’t run short,” she said. “But if you do—and thanks very much for talking to me, Mrs. Grayle. I won’t use anything. You have my word for it.”
“Heavens, you’re not leaving,” Mrs. Grayle said with a smile.
Anne Riordan took her lower lip between her teeth and held it there for a moment as if making up her mind whether to bite it off and spit it out or leave it on a while longer.
“Sorry, afraid I’ll have to. I don’t work for Mr. Marlowe, you know. Just a friend. Good-by, Mrs. Grayle.”
The blonde gleamed at her. “I hope you’ll drop in again soon. Any time.” She pressed the bell twice. That got the butler. He held the door open.
Miss Riordan went out quickly and the door closed. For quite a while after it closed, Mrs. Grayle stared at it with a faint smile. “It’s much better this way, don’t you think?” she said after an interval of silence. I nodded. “You’re probably wondering how she knows so much if she’s just a friend,” I said. “She’s a curious little girl. Some of it she dug out herself, like who you were and who owned the jade necklace. Some of it just happened. She came by last night to that dell where Marriott was killed. She was out riding. She happened to see a light and came down there.”
The Collected Raymond Chandler Page 31