“And does Mr. Kingsley know Lieutenant M’Gee?”
She put my card beside a pile of freshly typed letterheads. She leaned back and put one arm on the desk and tapped lightly with a small gold pencil.
I grinned at her. The little blonde at the PBX cocked a shell-like ear and smiled a small fluffy smile. She looked playful and eager, but not quite sure of herself, like a new kitten in a house where they don’t care much about kittens.
“I’m hoping he does,” I said. “But maybe the best way to find out is to ask him.”
She initialed three letters rapidly, to keep from throwing her pen set at me. She spoke again without looking up.
“Mr. Kingsley is in conference. I’ll send your card in when I have an opportunity.”
I thanked her and went and sat in a chromium and leather chair that was a lot more comfortable than it looked. Time passed and silence descended on the scene. Nobody came in or went out. Miss Fromsett’s elegant hand moved over her papers and the muted peep of the kitten at the PBX was audible at moments, and the little click of the plugs going in and out.
I lit a cigarette and dragged a smoking stand beside the chair. The minutes went by on tiptoe, with their fingers to their lips. I looked the place over. You can’t tell anything about an outfit like that. They might be making millions, and they might have the sheriff in the back room, with his chair tilted against the safe.
Half an hour and three or four cigarettes later a door opened behind Miss Fromsett’s desk and two men came out backwards laughing. A third man held the door for them and helped them laugh. They all shook hands heartily and the two men went across the office and out. The third man dropped the grin off his face and looked as if he had never grinned in his life. He was a tall bird in a gray suit and he didn’t want any nonsense.
“Any calls?” he asked in a sharp bossy voice.
Miss Fromsett said softly: “A Mr. Marlowe to see you. From Lieutenant M’Gee. His business is personal.”
“Never heard of him,” the tall man barked. He took my card, didn’t even glance at me, and went back into his office. His door closed on the pneumatic closer and made a sound like “phooey.” Miss Fromsett gave me a sweet sad smile and I gave it back to her in the form of an obscene leer. I ate another cigarette and more time staggered by. I was getting to be very fond of the Gillerlain Company.
Ten minutes later the same door opened again and the big shot came out with his hat on and sneered that he was going to get a hair-cut. He started off across the Chinese rug in a swinging athletic stride, made about half the distance to the door and then did a sharp cutback and came over to where I was sitting.
“You want to see me?” he barked.
He was about six feet two and not much of it soft. His eyes were stone gray with flecks of cold light in them. He filled a large size in smooth gray flannel with a narrow chalk stripe, and filled it elegantly. His manner said he was very tough to get along with.
I stood up. “If you’re Mr. Derace Kingsley.”
“Who the hell did you think I was?”
I let him have that trick and gave him my other card, the one with the business on it. He clamped it in his paw and scowled down at it.
“Who’s M’Gee?” he snapped.
“He’s just a fellow I know.”
“I’m fascinated,” he said, glancing back at Miss Fromsett. She liked it. She liked it very much. “Anything else you would care to let drop about him?”
“Well, they call him Violets M’Gee,” I said. “On account of he chews little throat pastilles that smell of violets. He’s a big man with soft silvery hair and a cute little mouth made to kiss babies with. When last seen he was wearing a neat blue suit, wide-toed brown shoes, gray homburg hat, and he was smoking opium in a short briar pipe.”
“I don’t like your manner,” Kingsley said in a voice you could have cracked a Brazil nut on.
“That’s all right,” I said. “I’m not selling it.”
He reared back as if I had hung a week-old mackerel under his nose. After a moment he turned his back on me and said over his shoulder:
“I’ll give you exactly three minutes. God knows why.”
He burned the carpet back past Miss Fromsett’s desk to his door, yanked it open and let it swing to in my face. Miss Fromsett liked that too, but I thought there was a little sly laughter behind her eyes now.
CHAPTER 2
The private office was everything a private office should be. It was long and dim and quiet and air-conditioned and its windows were shut and its gray Venetian blinds half-closed to keep out the July glare. Gray drapes matched the gray carpeting. There was a large black and silver safe in the corner and a low row of low filing cases that exactly matched it. On the wall there was a huge tinted photograph of an elderly party with a chiselled beak and whiskers and a wing collar. The Adams apple that edged through his wing collar looked harder than most peoples chins. The plate underneath the photograph read: Mr. Matthew Gillerlain 1860–1934.
Derace Kingsley marched briskly behind about eight hundred dollars’ worth of executive desk and planted his backside in a tall leather chair. He reached himself a panatela out of a copper and mahogany box and trimmed it and lit it with a fat copper desk lighter. He took his time about it. It didn’t matter about my time. When he had finished this, he leaned back and blew a little smoke and said:
“I’m a business man. I don’t fool around. You’re a licensed detective, your card says. Show me something to prove it.”
I got my wallet out and handed him things to prove it. He looked at them and threw them back across the desk. The celluloid holder with the photostat license in it fell to the floor. He didn’t bother to apologize.
“I don’t know M’Gee,” he said. “I know Sheriff Petersen. I asked for the name of a reliable man to do a job. I suppose you are the man.”
“M’Gee is in the Hollywood sub-station of the sheriffs office,” I said. “You can check on that.”
“Not necessary. I guess you might do, but don’t get flip with me. And remember when I hire a man he’s my man. He does exactly what I tell him and he keeps his mouth shut. Or he goes out fast. Is that clear? I hope I’m not too tough for you.”
“Why not leave that an open question?” I said.
He frowned. He said sharply: “What do you charge?”
“Twenty-five a day and expenses. Eight cents a mile for my car.”
“Absurd,” he said. “Far too much. Fifteen a day flat. That’s plenty. I’ll pay the mileage, within reason, the way things are now. But no joyriding.”
I blew a little gray cloud of cigarette smoke and fanned it with my hand. I said nothing. He seemed a little surprised that I said nothing.
He leaned over the desk and pointed with his cigar. “I haven’t hired you yet,” he said, “but if I do, the job is absolutely confidential. No talking it over with your cop friends. Is that understood?”
“Just what do you want done, Mr. Kingsley?”
“What do you care? You do all kinds of detective work, don’t you?”
“Not all kinds. Only the fairly honest kinds.”
He stared at me level-eyed, his jaws tight. His gray eyes had an opaque look.
“For one thing I don’t do divorce business,” I said. “And I get a hundred down as a retainer—from strangers.”
“Well, well,” he said, in a voice suddenly soft. “Well, well.”
“And as for your being too tough for me,” I said, “most of the clients start out either by weeping down my shirt or bawling me out to show who’s boss. But usually they end up very reasonable—if they’re still alive.”
“Well, well,” he said again, in the same soft voice, and went on staring at me. “Do you lose very many of them?” he asked.
“Not if they treat me right,” I said.
“Have a cigar,” he said.
I took a cigar and put it in my pocket.
“I want you to find my wife,” he said. “She’s been m
issing for a month.”
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll find your wife.”
He patted his desk with both hands. He stared at me solidly. “I think you will at that,” he said. Then he grinned. “I haven’t been called down like that in four years,” he said.
I didn’t say anything.
“Damn it all,” he said, “I liked it. I liked it fine.” He ran a hand through his thick dark hair. “She’s been gone a whole month,” he said. “From a cabin we have in the mountains. Near Puma Point. Do you know Puma Point?”
I said I knew Puma Point.
“Our place is three miles from the village,” he said, “partly over a private road. It’s on a private lake. Little Fawn Lake. There’s a dam three of us put up to improve the property. I own the tract with two other men. It’s quite large, but undeveloped and won’t be developed now for some time, of course. My friends have cabins, I have a cabin and a man named Bill Chess lives with his wife in another cabin rent free and looks after the place. He’s a disabled veteran with a pension. That’s all there is up there. My wife went up the middle of May, came down twice for weekends, was due down the 12th of June for a party and never showed up. I haven’t seen her since.”
“What have you done about it?” I asked.
“Nothing. Not a thing. I haven’t even been up there.” He waited, wanting me to ask why.
I said: “Why?”
He pushed his chair back to get a locked drawer open. He took out a folded paper and passed it over. I unfolded it and saw it was a Postal Telegraph form. The wire had been filed at El Paso on June 14th at 9:19 A.M. It was addressed to Derace Kingsley, 965 Carson Drive, Beverly Hills, and read:
“AM CROSSING TO GET MEXICAN DIVORCE STOP WILL MARRY CHRIS STOP GOOD LUCK AND GOODBY CRYSTAL.”
I put this down on my side of the desk and he was handing me a large and very clear snapshot on glazed paper which showed a man and a woman sitting on the sand under a beach umbrella. The man wore trunks and the woman what looked like a very daring white sharkskin bathing suit. She was a slim blonde, young and shapely and smiling. The man was a hefty dark handsome lad with fine shoulders and legs, sleek dark hair and white teeth. Six feet of a standard type of homewrecker. Arms to hold you close and all his brains in his face. He was holding a pair of dark glasses in his hand and smiling at the camera with a practiced and easy smile.
“That’s Crystal,” Kingsley said, “and that’s Chris Lavery. She can have him and he can have her and to hell with them both.”
I put the photo down on the telegram. “All right, what’s the catch?” I asked him.
“There’s no telephone up there,” he said, “and there was nothing important about the affair she was coming down for. So I got the wire before I gave much thought to it. The wire surprised me only mildly. Crystal and I have been washed up for years. She lives her life and I live mine. She has her own money and plenty of it. About twenty thousand a year from a family holding corporation that owns valuable oil leases in Texas. She plays around and I knew Lavery was one of her playmates. I might have been a little surprised that she would actually marry him, because the man is nothing but a professional chaser. But the picture looked all right so far, you understand?”
“And then?”
“Nothing for two weeks. Then the Prescott Hotel in San Bernardino got in touch with me and said a Packard Clipper registered to Crystal Grace Kingsley at my address was unclaimed in their garage and what about it. I told them to keep it and I sent them a check. There was nothing much in that either. I figured she was still out of the state and that if they had gone in a car at all, they had gone in Lavery’s car. The day before yesterday, however, I met Lavery in front of the Athletic Club down on the corner here. He said he didn’t know where Crystal was.”
Kingsley gave me a quick look and reached a bottle and two tinted glasses up on the desk. He poured a couple of drinks and pushed one over. He held his against the light and said slowly:
“Lavery said he hadn’t gone away with her, hadn’t seen her in two months, hadn’t had any communications with her of any kind.”
I said, “You believed him?”
He nodded, frowning, and drank his drink and pushed the glass to one side. I tasted mine. It was Scotch. Not very good Scotch.
“If I believed him,” Kingsley said, “—and I was probably wrong to do it—it wasn’t because he’s a fellow you have to believe. Far from it. It’s because he’s a no-good son of a bitch who thinks it is smart to lay his friends’ wives and brag about it. I feel he would have been tickled pink to stick it into me and break it off that he had got my wife to run away with him and leave me flat. I know these tomcats and I know this one too well. He rode a route for us for a while and he was in trouble all the time. He couldn’t keep his hands off the office help. And apart from all that there was this wire from El Paso and I told him about it and why would he think it worth while to lie about it?”
“She might have tossed him out on his can,” I said. “That would have hurt him in his deep place—his Casanova complex.”
Kingsley brightened up a little, but not very much. He shook his head. “I still more than half way believe him,” he said. “You’ll have to prove me wrong. That’s part of why I wanted you. But there’s another and very worrying angle. I have a good job here, but a job is all it is. I can’t stand scandal. I’d be out of here in a hurry if my wife got mixed up with the police.”
“Police?”
“Among her other activities,” Kingsley said grimly, “my wife occasionally finds time to lift things in department stores. I think it’s just a sort of delusion of grandeur she gets when she has been hitting the bottle too hard, but it happens, and we have had some pretty nasty scenes in managers’ offices. So far I’ve been able to keep them from filing charges, but if something like that happened in a strange city where nobody knew her—” He lifted his hands and let them fall with a smack on the desk—“well, it might be a prison matter, mightn’t it?”
“Has she ever been fingerprinted?”
“She has never been arrested,” he said.
“That’s not what I mean. Sometimes in large department stores they make it a condition of dropping shoplifting charges that you give them your prints. It scares the amateurs and builds up a file of kleptomaniacs in their protective association. When the prints come in a certain number of times they call time on you.”
“Nothing like that has happened to my knowledge,” he said.
“Well, I think we might almost throw the shoplifting angle out of this for the time being,” I said. “If she got arrested, she would get searched. Even if the cops let her use a Jane Doe name on the police blotter, they would be likely to get in touch with you. Also she would start yelling for help when she found herself in a jam.” I tapped the blue and white telegraph form. “And this is a month old. If what you are thinking about happened around that time, the case would have been settled by now. If it was a first offense, she would get off with a scolding and a suspended sentence.”
He poured himself another drink to help him with his worrying. “You’re making me feel better,” he said.
“There are too many other things that could have happened,” I said. “That she did go away with Lavery and they split up. That she went away with some other man and the wire is a gag. That she went away alone or with a woman. That she drank herself over the edge and is holed up in some private sanatorium taking a cure. That she got into some jam we have no idea of. That she met with foul play.”
“Good God, don’t say that,” Kingsley exclaimed.
“Why not? You’ve got to consider it. I get a very vague idea of Mrs. Kingsley—that she is young, pretty, reckless, and wild. That she drinks and does dangerous things when she drinks. That she is a sucker for the men and might take up with a stranger who might turn out to be a crook. Does that fit?”
He nodded. “Every word of it.”
“How much money would she have with her?”
“She liked to carry enough. She has her own bank and her own bank account. She could have any amount of money.”
“Any children?”
“No children.”
“Do you have the management of her affairs?”
He shook his head. “She hasn’t any—excepting depositing checks and drawing out money and spending it. She never invests a nickel. And her money certainly never does me any good, if that’s what you are thinking.” He paused and then said: “Don’t think I haven’t tried. I’m human and it’s not fun to watch twenty thousand a year go down the drain and nothing to show for it but hangovers and boy friends of the class of Chris Lavery.”
“How are you with her bank? Could you get a detail of the checks she has drawn for the past couple of months?”
“They wouldn’t tell me. I tried to get some information of the sort once, when I had an idea she was being blackmailed. All I got was ice.”
“We can get it,” I said, “and we may have to. It will mean going to the Missing Persons Bureau. You wouldn’t like that?”
“If I had liked that, I wouldn’t have called you,” he said.
I nodded, gathered my exhibits together and put them away in my pockets. “There are more angles to this than I can even see now,” I said, “but I’ll start by talking to Lavery and then taking a run up to Little Fawn Lake and asking questions there. I’ll need Lavery’s address and a note to your man in charge at the mountain place.”
He got a letterhead out of his desk and wrote and passed it over. I read: “Dear Bill: This will introduce Mr. Philip Marlowe who wishes to look over the property. Please show him my cabin and assist him in every way. Yrs. Derace Kingsley.”
I folded this up and put it in the envelope he had addressed while I was reading it. “How about the other cabins up there?” I asked.
“Nobody up this year so far. One man’s in government service in Washington and the other is at Fort Leavenworth. Their wives are with them.”
“Now Lavery’s address,” I said.
He looked at a point well above the top of my head. “In Bay City. I could find the house but I forget the address. Miss Fromsett can give it to you, I think. She needn’t know why you want it. She probably will. And you want a hundred dollars, you said.”
The Collected Raymond Chandler Page 67