The Collected Raymond Chandler

by Raymond Chandler

  I took a swig of my drink. Spencer had finished his. He was scratching at the material of the davenport. He had forgotten the pile of paper in front of him, the unfinished novel of the very much finished popular author.

  “I wouldn’t say he was nothing,” I said.

  She lifted her eyes and looked at me vaguely and dropped them again.

  “Less than nothing,” she said, with a new note of sarcasm in her voice. “He knew what she was, he married her. Then because she was what he knew she was, he killed her. And then ran away and killed himself.”

  “He didn’t kill her,” I said, “and you know it.”

  She came upright with a smooth motion and stared at me blankly. Spencer let out a noise of some kind.

  “Roger killed her,” I said, “and you also know that.”

  “Did he tell you?” she asked quietly.

  “He didn’t have to. He did give me a couple of hints. He would have told me or someone in time. It was tearing him to pieces not to.”

  She shook her head slightly. “No, Mr. Marlowe. That was not why he was tearing himself to pieces. Roger didn’t know he had killed her. He had blacked out completely. He knew something was wrong and he tried to bring it to the surface, but he couldn’t. The shock had destroyed his memory of it. Perhaps it would have come back and perhaps in the last moments of his life it did come back. But not until then. Not until then.”

  Spencer said in a sort of growl: “That sort of thing just doesn’t happen, Eileen.”

  “Oh yes, it does,” I said. “I know of two well-established instances. One was a blackout drunk who killed a woman he picked up in a bar. He strangled her with a scarf she was wearing fastened with a fancy clasp. She went home with him and what went on then is not known except that she got dead and when the law caught up with him he was wearing the fancy clasp on his own tie and he didn’t have the faintest idea where he got it.”

  “Never?” Spencer asked. “Or just at the time?”

  “He never admitted it. And he’s not around any more to be asked. They gassed him. The other case was a head wound. He was living with a rich pervert, the kind that collects first editions and does fancy cooking and has a very expensive secret library behind a panel in the wall. The two of them had a fight. They fought all over the house, from room to room, the place was a shambles and the rich guy eventually got the low score. The killer, when they caught him, had dozens of bruises on him and a broken finger. All he knew for sure was that he had a headache and he couldn’t find his way back to Pasadena. He kept circling around and stopping to ask directions at the same service station. The guy at the service station decided he was nuts and called the cops. Next time around they were waiting for him.”

  “I don’t believe that about Roger,” Spencer said. “He was no more psycho than I am.”

  “He blacked out when he was drunk,” I said.

  “I was there. I saw him do it,” Eileen said calmly.

  I grinned at Spencer. It was some kind of grin, not the cheery kind probably, but I could feel my face doing its best.

  “She’s going to tell us about it,” I told him. “Just listen. She’s going to tell us. She can’t help herself now.”

  “Yes, that is true,” she said gravely. “There are things no one likes to tell about an enemy, much less about one’s own husband. And if I have to tell them publicly on a witness stand, you are not going to enjoy it, Howard. Your fine, talented, ever so popular and lucrative author is going to look pretty cheap. Sexy as all get out, wasn’t he? On paper, that is. And how the poor fool tried to live up to it! All that woman was to him was a trophy. I spied on them. I should be ashamed of that. One has to say these things. I am ashamed of nothing. I saw the whole nasty scene. The guest house she used for her amours happens to be a nice secluded affair with its own garage and entrance on a side street, a dead end, shaded by big trees. The time came, as it must to people like Roger, when he was no longer a satisfactory lover. Just a little too drunk. He tried to leave but she came out after him screaming and stark naked, waving some kind of small statuette. She used language of a depth of filth and depravity I couldn’t attempt to describe. Then she tried to hit him with the statuette. You are both men and you must know that nothing shocks a man quite so much as to hear a supposedly refined woman use the language of the gutter and the public urinal. He was drunk, he had had sudden spells of violence, and he had one then. He tore the statuette out of her hand. You can guess the rest.”

  “There must have been a lot of blood,” I said.

  “Blood?” She laughed bitterly. “You should have seen him when he got home. When I ran for my car to get away he was just standing there looking down at her. Then he bent and picked her up in his arms and carried her into the guest house. I knew then that the shock had partially sobered him. He got home in about an hour. He was very quiet. It shook him when he saw me waiting. But he wasn’t drunk then. He was dazed. There was blood on his face, on his hair, all over the front of his coat. I got him into the lavatory off the study and got him stripped and cleaned off enough to get him upstairs into the shower. I put him to bed. I got an old suitcase and went downstairs and gathered up the bloody clothes and put them in the suitcase. I cleaned the basin and the floor and then I took a wet towel out and made sure his car was clean. I put it away and got mine out. I drove to the Chatsworth Reservoir and you can guess what I did with the suitcase full of bloody clothes and towels.”

  She stopped. Spencer was scratching at the palm of his left hand. She gave him a quick glance and went on.

  “While I was away he got up and drank a lot of whiskey. And the next morning he didn’t remember a single thing. That is, he didn’t say a word about it or behave as if he had anything on his mind but a hangover. And I said nothing.”

  “He must have missed the clothes,” I said.

  She nodded. “I think he did eventually—but he didn’t say so. Everything seemed to happen at once about that time. The papers were full of it, then Paul was missing, and then he was dead in Mexico. How was I to know that would happen? Roger was my husband. He had done an awful thing, but she was an awful woman. And he hadn’t known what he was doing. Then almost as suddenly as it began the papers dropped it. Linda’s father must have had something to do with that. Roger read the papers, of course, and he made just the sort of comments one would expect from an innocent bystander who had just happened to know the people involved.”

  “Weren’t you afraid?” Spencer asked her quietly.

  “I was sick with fear, Howard. If he remembered, he would probably kill me. He was a good actor—most writers are—and perhaps he already knew and was just waiting for a chance. But I couldn’t be sure. He might—just might—have forgotten the whole thing permanently. And Paul was dead.”

  “If he never mentioned the clothes that you had dumped in the reservoir, that proved he suspected something,” I said. “And remember, in that stuff he left in the typewriter the other time—the time he shot the gun off upstairs and I found you trying to get it away from him—he said a good man had died for him.”

  “He said that?” Her eyes widened just the right amount.

  “He wrote it—on the typewriter. I destroyed it, he asked me to. I supposed you had already seen it.”

  “I never read anything he wrote in his study.”

  “You read the note he left the time Verringer took him away. You even dug something out of the wastebasket.”

  “That was different,” she said coolly. “I was looking for a clue to where he might have gone.”

  “Okay,” I said, and leaned back. “Is there any more?”

  She shook her head slowly, with a deep sadness. “I suppose not. At the very last, the afternoon he killed himself, he may have remembered. We’ll never know. Do we want to know?”

  Spencer cleared his throat. “What was Marlowe supposed to do in all this? It was your idea to get him here. You talked me into that, you know.”

  “I was terribly afraid. I
was afraid of Roger and I was afraid for him. Mr. Marlowe was Paul’s friend, almost the last person to see him who knew him. Paul might have told him something. I had to be sure. If he was dangerous, I wanted him on my side. If he found out the truth, there might still be some way to save Roger.”

  Suddenly and for no reason that I could see, Spencer got tough. He leaned forward and pushed his jaw out.

  “Let me get this straight, Eileen. Here was a private detective who was already in bad with the police. They’d had him in jail. He was supposed to have helped Paul—I call him that because you do—jump the country to Mexico. That’s a felony, if Paul was a murderer. So if he found out the truth and could clear himself, he would just sit on his hands and do nothing. Was that your idea?”

  “I was afraid, Howard. Can’t you understand that? I was living in the house with a murderer who might be a maniac. I was alone with him a large part of the time.”

  “I understand that,” Spencer said, still tough. “But Marlowe didn’t take it on, and you were still alone. Then Roger fired the gun off and for a week after that you were alone. Then Roger killed himself and very conveniently it was Marlowe who was alone that time.”

  “That is true,” she said. “What of it? Could I help it?”

  “All right,” Spencer said. “Is it just possible you thought Marlowe might find the truth and with the background of the gun going off once already, just kind of hand it to Roger and say something like, ‘Look, old man, you’re a murderer and I know it and your wife knows it. She’s a fine woman. She has suffered enough. Not to mention Sylvia Lennox’s husband. Why not do the decent thing and pull the trigger and everybody will assume it was just a case of too much wild drinking? So I’ll stroll down by the lake and smoke a cigarette, old man. Good luck and goodbye. Oh, here’s the gun. It’s loaded and it’s all yours.’ ”

  “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 guest house, 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.”

  CHAPTER 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 into 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 Valparaíso.”

  “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 disguised 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.”