“Are they very lonely?”
“Lonely as lighthouses.”
She crossed her legs and the pale glow of her skin in the light seemed to fill the room.
“So ask me the questions,” she said, making no attempt to cover her thighs.
“Who’s Steelgrave?”
“A man I’ve known for years. And liked. He owns things. A restaurant or two. Where he comes from—that I don’t know.”
“But you know him very well.”
“Why don’t you ask me if I sleep with him?”
“I don’t ask that kind of questions.”
She laughed and snapped ash from her cigarette. “Miss Gonzales would be glad to tell you.”
“She’s dark and lovely and passionate. And very, very kind.”
“And exclusive as a mailbox,” I said. “The hell with her. About Steelgrave—has he ever been in trouble?”
“Who hasn’t?”
“With the police.”
Her eyes widened a little too innocently. Her laugh was a little too silvery. “Don’t be ridiculous. The man is worth a couple of million dollars.”
“How did he get it?”
“How would I know?”
“All right. You wouldn’t. That cigarette’s going to burn your fingers.” I leaned across and took the stub out of her hand. Her hand lay open on her bare leg. I touched the palm with a fingertip. She drew away from me and tightened the hand into a fist.
“Don’t do that,” she said sharply.
“Why? I used to do that to girls when I was a kid.”
“I know.” She was breathing a little fast. “It makes me feel very young and innocent and kind of naughty. And I’m far from being young and innocent any more.”
“Then you don’t really know anything about Steelgrave.”
“I wish you’d make up your mind whether you are giving me a third degree or making love to me.”
“My mind has nothing to do with it,” I said.
After a silence she said: “I really do have to eat something, Marlowe. I’m working this afternoon. You wouldn’t want me to collapse on the set, would you?”
“Only stars do that.” I stood up. “Okay, I’ll leave. Don’t forget I’m working for you. I wouldn’t be if I thought you’d killed anybody. But you were there. You took a big chance. There was something you wanted very badly.”
She reached the photo out from somewhere and stared at it, biting her lip. Her eyes came up without her head moving.
“It could hardly have been this.”
“That was the one thing he had so well hidden that it was not found. But what good is it? You and a man called Steelgrave in a booth at The Dancers. Nothing in that.”
“Nothing at all,” she said.
“So it has to be something about Steelgrave—or something about the date.”
Her eyes snapped down to the picture again. “There’s nothing to tell the date,” she said quickly. “Even if it meant something. Unless the cut-out piece—”
“Here.” I gave her the cut-out piece. “But you’ll need a magnifier. Show it to Steelgrave. Ask him if it means anything. Or ask Ballou.”
I started towards the exit of the dressing room. “Don’t kid yourself the date can’t be fixed,” I said over my shoulder. “Steelgrave won’t.”
“You’re just building a sand castle, Marlowe.”
“Really?” I looked back at her, not grinning. “You really think that? Oh no you don’t. You went there. The man was murdered. You had a gun. He was a known crook. And I found something the police would love to have me hide from them. Because it must be as full of motive as the ocean is full of salt. As long as the cops don’t find it I have a license. And as long as somebody else doesn’t find it I don’t have an ice pick in the back of my neck. Would you say I was in an overpaid profession?”
She just sat there and looked at me, one hand on her kneecap, squeezing it. The other moving restlessly, finger by finger, on the arm of the chair.
All I had to do was turn the knob and go on out. I don’t know why it had to be so hard to do.
CHAPTER 20
There was the usual coming and going in the corridor outside my office and when I opened the door and walked into the musty silence of the little waiting room there was the usual feeling of having been dropped down a well dried up twenty years ago to which no one would come back ever. The smell of old dust hung in the air as flat and stale as a football interview.
I opened the inner door and inside there it was the same dead air, the same dust along the veneer, the same broken promise of a life of ease. I opened the windows and turned on the radio. It came up too loud and when I had it tuned down to normal the phone sounded as if it had been ringing for some time. I took my hat off it and lifted the receiver.
It was high time I heard from her again. Her cool compact voice said: “This time I really mean it.”
“Go on.”
“I lied before. I’m not lying now. I really have heard from Orrin.”
“Go on.”
“You’re not believing me. I can tell by your voice.”
“You can’t tell anything by my voice. I’m a detective. Heard from him how?”
“By phone from Bay City.”
“Wait a minute.” I put the receiver down on the stained brown blotter and lit my pipe. No hurry. Lies are always patient. I took it up again.
“We’ve been through that routine,” I said. “You’re pretty forgetful for your age. I don’t think Dr. Zugsmith would like it.”
“Please don’t tease me. This is very serious. He got my letter. He went to the post office and asked for his mail. He knew where I’d be staying. And about when I’d be here. So he called up. He’s staying with a doctor he got to know down there. Doing some kind of work for him. I told you he had two years medical.”
“Doctor have a name?”
“Yes. A funny name. Dr. Vincent Lagardie.”
“Just a minute. There’s somebody at the door.”
I laid the phone down very carefully. I might be brittle. It might be made of spun glass. I got a handkerchief out and wiped the palm of my hand, the one that had been holding it. I got up and went to the built-in wardrobe and looked at my face in the flawed mirror. It was me all right. I had a strained look. I’d been living too fast.
Dr. Vincent Lagardie, 965 Wyoming Street. Cattycorners from The Garland Home of Peace. Frame house on the corner. Quiet. Nice neighborhood. Friend of the extinct Clausen. Maybe. Not according to him. But still maybe.
I went back to the telephone and squeezed the jerks out of my voice. “How would you spell that?” I asked.
She spelled it—with ease and precision. “Nothing to do then, is there?” I said. “All jake to the angels—or whatever they say in Manhattan, Kansas.”
“Stop sneering at me. Orrin’s in a lot of trouble. Some—” her voice quivered a little and her breath came quickly, “some gangsters are after him.”
“Don’t be silly, Orfamay. They don’t have gangsters in Bay City. They’re all working in pictures. What’s Dr. Lagardie’s phone number?”
She gave it to me. It was right. I won’t say the pieces were beginning to fall into place, but at least they were getting to look like parts of the same puzzle. Which is all I ever get or ask.
“Please go down there and see him and help him. He’s afraid to leave the house. After all I did pay you.”
“I gave it back.”
“Well, I offered it to you again.”
“You more or less offered me other things that are more than I’d care to take.”
There was silence.
“All right,” I said. “All right. If I can stay free that long. I’m in a lot of trouble myself.”
“Why?”
“Telling lies and not telling the truth. It always catches up with me. I’m not as lucky as some people.”
“But I’m not lying, Philip. I’m not lying. I’m frantic.”
“Take a deep br
eath and get frantic so I can hear it.”
“They might kill him,” she said quietly.
“And what is Dr. Vincent Lagardie doing all this time?”
“He doesn’t know, of course. Please, please go at once. I have the address here. Just a moment.”
And the little bell rang, the one that rings far back at the end of the corridor, and is not loud, but you’d better hear it. No matter what other noises there are you’d better hear it.
“He’ll be in the phone book,” I said. “And by an odd coincidence I have a Bay City phone book. Call me around four. Or five. Better make it five.”
I hung up quickly. I stood up and turned the radio off, not having heard a thing it said. I closed the windows again. I opened the drawer of my desk and took out the Luger and strapped it on. I fitted my hat on my head. On the way out I had another look at the face in the mirror.
I looked as if I had made up my mind to drive off a cliff.
CHAPTER 21
They were just finishing a funeral service at The Garland Home of Peace. A big gray hearse was waiting at the side entrance. Cars were clotted along both sides of the street, three black sedans in a row at the side of Dr. Vincent Lagardie’s establishment. People were coming sedately down the walk from the funeral chapel to the corner and getting into their cars. I stopped a third of a block away and waited. The cars didn’t move. Then three people came out with a woman heavily veiled and all in black. They half carried her down to a big limousine. The boss mortician fluttered around making elegant little gestures and body movements as graceful as a Chopin ending. His composed gray face was long enough to wrap twice around his neck.
The amateur pallbearers carried the coffin out the side door and professionals eased the weight from them and slid it into the back of the hearse as smoothly as if it had no more weight than a pan of butter rolls. Flowers began to grow into a mound over it. The glass doors were closed and motors started all over the block.
A few moments later nothing was left but one sedan across the way and the boss mortician sniffing a tree-rose on his way back to count the take. With a beaming smile he faded into his neat colonial doorway and the world was still and empty again. The sedan that was left hadn’t moved. I drove along and made a U-turn and came up behind it. The driver wore blue serge and a soft cap with a shiny peak. He was doing a crossword puzzle from the morning paper. I stuck a pair of those diaphanous mirror sunglasses on my nose and strolled past him toward Dr. Lagardie’s place. He didn’t look up. When I was a few yards ahead I took the glasses off and pretended to polish them on my handkerchief. I caught him in one of the mirror lenses. He still didn’t look up. He was just a guy doing a crossword puzzle. I put the mirror glasses back on my nose, and went around to Dr. Lagardie’s front door.
The sign over the door said: Ring and Enter. I rang, but the door wouldn’t let me enter. I waited. I rang again. I waited again. There was silence inside. Then the door opened a crack very slowly, and the thin expressionless face over a white uniform looked out at me.
“I’m sorry. Doctor is not seeing any patients today.” She blinked at the mirror glasses. She didn’t like them. Her tongue moved restlessly inside her lips.
“I’m looking for a Mr. Quest. Orrin P. Quest.”
“Who?” There was a dim reflection of shock behind her eyes.
“Quest. Q as in quintessential, U as in uninhibited, E as in Extrasensory, S as in Subliminal, T as in Toots. Put them all together and they spell Brother.”
She looked at me as if I had just come up from the floor of the ocean with a drowned mermaid under my arm.
“I beg your pardon. Dr. Lagardie is not—”
She was pushed out of the way by invisible hands and a thin dark haunted man stood in the half-open doorway.
“I am Dr. Lagardie. What is it, please?”
I gave him a card. He read it. He looked at me. He had the white pinched look of a man who is waiting for a disaster to happen.
“We talked over the phone,” I said. “About a man named Clausen.”
“Please come in,” he said quickly. “I don’t remember, but come in.”
I went in. The room was dark, the blinds drawn, the windows closed. It was dark, and it was cold.
The nurse backed away and sat down behind a small desk. It was an ordinary living room with light painted woodwork which had once been dark, judging by the probable age of the house. A square arch divided the living room from the dining room. There were easy chairs and a center table with magazines. It looked like what it was—the reception room of a doctor practicing in what had been a private home.
The telephone rang on the desk in front of the nurse. She started and her hand went out and then stopped. She stared at the telephone. After a while it stopped ringing.
“What was the name you mentioned?” Dr. Lagardie asked me softly.
“Orrin Quest. His sister told me he was doing some kind of work for you, Doctor. I’ve been looking for him for days. Last night he called her up. From here, she said.”
“There is no one of that name here,” Dr. Lagardie said politely. “There hasn’t been.”
“You don’t know him at all?”
“I have never heard of him.”
“I can’t figure why he would say that to his sister.”
The nurse dabbed at her eyes furtively. The telephone on her desk burred and made her jump again. “Don’t answer it,” Dr. Lagardie said without turning his head.
We waited while it rang. Everybody waits while a telephone rings. After a while it stopped.
“Why don’t you go home, Miss Watson? There’s nothing for you to do here.”
“Thank you, Doctor.” She sat without moving, looking down at the desk. She squeezed her eyes shut and blinked them open. She shook her head hopelessly.
Dr. Lagardie turned back to me. “Shall we go into my office?”
We went across through another door leading to the hallway. I walked on eggs. The atmosphere of the house was charged with foreboding. He opened a door and ushered me into what must have once been a bedroom, but nothing suggested a bedroom. It was a small compact doctor’s office. An open door showed a part of an examination room. A sterilizer was working in the corner. There were a lot of needles cooking in it.
“That’s a lot of needles,” I said, always quick with an idea.
“Sit down, Mr. Marlowe.”
He went behind the desk and sat down and picked up a long thin letter-opening knife.
He looked at me levelly from his sorrowful eyes. “No, I don’t know anyone named Orrin Quest, Mr. Marlowe. I can’t imagine any reason in the world why a person of that name should say he was in my house.”
“Hiding out,” I said.
His eyebrows went up. “From what?”
“From some guys that might want to stick an ice pick in the back of his neck. On account of he is a little too quick with his little Leica. Taking people’s photographs when they want to be private. Or it could be something else, like peddling reefers and he got wise. Am I talking in riddles?”
“It was you who sent the police here,” he said coldly.
I didn’t say anything.
“It was you who called up and reported Clausen’s death.”
I said the same as before.
“It was you who called me up and asked me if I knew Clausen. I said I did not.”
“But it wasn’t true.”
“I was under no obligation to give you information, Mr. Marlowe.”
I nodded and got a cigarette out and lit it. Dr. Lagardie glanced at his watch. He turned in his chair and switched off the sterilizer. I looked at the needles. A lot of needles. Once before I had had trouble in Bay City with a guy who cooked a lot of needles.
“What makes it?” I asked him. “The yacht harbor?” He picked up the wicked-looking paper knife with a silver handle in the shape of a nude woman. He pricked the ball of his thumb. A pearl of dark blood showed on it. He put it to his mouth and licked it.
“I like the taste of blood,” he said softly.
There was a distant sound as of the front door opening and closing. We both listened to it carefully. We listened to retreating steps on the front steps of the house. We listened hard.
“Miss Watson has gone home,” Dr. Lagardie said. “We are all alone in the house.” He mulled that over and licked his thumb again. He laid the knife down carefully on the desk blotter. “Ah, the question of the yacht harbor,” he added. “The proximity of Mexico you are thinking of, no doubt. The ease with which marihuana—”
“I wasn’t thinking so much of marihuana any more.” I stared again at the needles. He followed my stare. He shrugged.
I said: “Why so many of them?”
“Is it any of your business?”
“Nothing’s any of my business.”
“But you seem to expect your questions to be answered.”
“I’m just talking,” I said. “Waiting for something to happen. Something’s going to happen in this house. It’s leering at me from corners.”
Dr. Lagardie licked another pearl of blood off his thumb.
I looked hard at him. It didn’t buy me a way into his soul. He was quiet, dark and shuttered and all the misery of life was in his eyes. But he was still gentle.
“Let me tell you about the needles,” I said.
“By all means.” He picked the long thin knife up again.
“Don’t do that,” I said sharply. “It gives me the creeps. Like petting snakes.”
He put the knife down again gently and smiled. “We do seem to talk in circles,” he suggested.
“We’ll get there. About the needles. A couple of years back I had a case that brought me down here and mixed me up with a doctor named Almore. Lived over on Altair Street. He had a funny practice. Went out nights with a big case of hypodermic needles—all ready to go. Loaded with the stuff. He had a peculiar practice. Drunks, rich junkies, of whom there are far more than people think, overstimulated people who had driven themselves beyond the possibility of relaxing. Insomniacs—all the neurotic types that can’t take it cold. Have to have their little pills and little shots in the arm. Have to have help over the humps. It gets to be all humps after a while. Good business for the doctor. Almore was the doctor for them. It’s all right to say it now. He died a year or so back. Of his own medicine.”
The Collected Raymond Chandler Page 101