He took his glasses off and polished them. He wiped perspiration from the hollows under his eyes, replaced the glasses and looked at the floor.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ve taken a pretty stiff punch this afternoon. It was bad enough to know Roger had killed himself. But this other version makes me feel degraded—just knowing about it.” He looked up at me. “Can I trust you?”
“To do what?”
“The right thing—whatever it is.” He reached down and picked up the pile of yellow script and tucked it under his arm. “No, forget it. I guess you know what you are doing. I’m a pretty good publisher but this is out of my line. I guess what I really am is just a goddam stuffed shirt.”
He walked past me and Candy stepped out of his way, then went quickly to the front door and held it open. Spencer went out past him with a brief nod. I followed. I stopped beside Candy and looked into his dark shining eyes.
“No tricks, amigo,” I said.
“The señora is very tired,” he said quietly. “She has gone to her room. She will not be disturbed. I know nothing, señor. No me acuerdo de nada … A sus órdenes, señor.”
I took the knife out of my pocket and held it out to him. He smiled.
“Nobody trusts me, but I trust you, Candy.”
“Lo mismo, señor. Muchas gracias.”
Spencer was already in the car. I got in and started it and backed down the driveway and drove him back to Beverly Hills. I let him out at the side entrance of the hotel.
“I’ve been thinking all the way back,” he said as he got out. “She must be a little insane. I guess they’d never convict her.”
“They won’t even try,” I said. “But she doesn’t know that.”
He struggled with the batch of yellow paper under his arm, got it straightened out, and nodded to me. I watched him heave open the door and go on in. I eased up on the brake and the Olds slid out from the white curb, and that was the last I saw of Howard Spencer.
I got home late and tired and depressed. It was one of those nights when the air is heavy and the night noises seem muffled and far away. There was a high misty indifferent moon. I walked the floor, played a few records, and hardly heard them. I seemed to hear a steady ticking somewhere, but there wasn’t anything in the house to tick. The ticking was in my head. I was a one-man death watch.
I thought of the first time I had seen Eileen Wade and the second and the third and the fourth. But after that something in her got out of drawing. She no longer seemed quite real. A murderer is always unreal once you know he is a murderer. There are people who kill out of hate or fear or greed. There are the cunning killers who plan and expect to get away with it. There are the angry killers who do not think at all. And there are the killers who are in love with death, to whom murder is a remote kind of suicide. In a sense they are all insane, but not in the way Spencer meant it.
It was almost daylight when I finally went to bed.
The jangle of the telephone dragged me up out of a black well of sleep. I rolled over on the bed, fumbled for slippers, and realized that I hadn’t been asleep for more than a couple of hours. I felt like a half-digested meal eaten in a greasy-spoon joint. My eyes were stuck together and my mouth was full of sand. I heaved up on the feet and lumbered into the living room and pulled the phone off the cradle and said into it: “Hold the line.”
I put the phone down and went into the bathroom and hit myself in the face with some cold water. Outside the window something went snip, snip, snip. I looked out vaguely and saw a brown expressionless face. It was the once-a-week Jap gardener I called Hardhearted Harry. He was trimming the tecoma—the way a Japanese gardner trims your tecoma. You ask him four times and he says, “next week,” and then he comes by at six o’clock in the morning and trims it outside your bedroom window.
I rubbed my face dry and went back to the telephone.
“Yeah?”
“This is Candy, señor.”
“Good morning, Candy.”
“La señora es muerta.”
Dead. What a cold black noiseless word it is in any language. The lady is dead.
“Nothing you did, I hope.”
“I think the medicine. It is called Demerol. I think forty, fifty in the bottle. Empty now. No dinner last night. This morning I climb up on the ladder and look in the window. Dressed just like yesterday afternoon. I break the screen open. La señora es muerto. Frio como agua de nieve.”
Cold as icewater. “You call anybody?”
“Sí. El Doctor Loring. He call the cops. Not here yet.”
“Dr. Loring, huh? Just the man to come too late.”
“I don’t show him the letter,” Candy said.
“Letter to who?”
“Señor Spencer.”
“Give it to the police, Candy. Don’t let Dr. Loring have it. Just the police. And one more thing, Candy. Don’t hide anything, don’t tell them any lies. We were there. Tell the truth. This time the truth and all the truth.”
There was a little pause. Then he said: “Sí. I catch. Hasta la vista, amigo.” He hung up.
I dialed the Ritz-Beverly and asked for Howard Spencer.
“One moment, please. I’ll give you the desk.”
A man’s voice said: “Desk speaking. May I help you?”
“I asked for Howard Spencer. I know it’s early, but it’s urgent.”
“Mr. Spencer checked out last evening. He took the eight o’clock plane to New York.”
“Oh, sorry. I didn’t know.”
I went out to the kitchen to make coffee—yards of coffee. Rich, strong, bitter, boiling hot, ruthless, depraved. The life-blood of tired men.
It was a couple of hours later that Bernie Ohls called me.
“Okay, wise guy,” he said. “Get down here and suffer.”
CHAPTER 44
It was like the other time except that it was day and we were in Captain Hernandez’s office and the Sheriff was up in Santa Barbara opening Fiesta Week. Captain Hernandez was there and Bernie Ohls and a man from the coroner’s office and Dr. Loring, who looked as if he had been caught performing an abortion, and a man named Lawford, a deputy from the D.A’s office, a tall gaunt expressionless man whose brother was vaguely rumored to be a boss of the numbers racket in the Central Avenue district.
Hernandez had some handwritten sheets of note paper in front of him, flesh-pink paper, deckle-edged, and written on with green ink.
“This is informal,” Hernandez said, when everybody was as comfortable as you can get in hard chairs. “No stenotype or recording equipment. Say what you like. Dr. Weiss represents the coroner who will decide whether an inquest is necessary. Dr. Weiss?”
He was fat, cheerful, and looked competent. “I think no inquest,” he said. “There is every surface indication of narcotic poisoning. When the ambulance arrived the woman was still breathing very faintly and she was in a deep coma and all the reflexes were negative. At that stage you don’t save one in a hundred. Her skin was cold and respiration would not be noticed without close examination. The houseboy thought she was dead. She died approximately an hour after that. I understand the lady was subject to occasional violent attacks of bronchial asthma. The Demerol was prescribed by Dr. Loring as an emergency measure.”
“Any information or deduction about the amount of Demerol taken, Dr. Weiss?”
“A fatal dose,” he said, smiling faintly. “There is no quick way of determining that without knowing the medical history, the acquired or natural tolerance. According to her confession she took twenty-three hundred milligrams, four or five times the minimal lethal dose for a non-addict.” He looked questioningly at Dr. Loring.
“Mrs. Wade was not an addict,” Dr. Loring said coldly. “The prescribed dose would be one or two fifty-milligram tablets. Three or four during a twenty-four-hour period would be the most I’d permit.”
“But you gave her fifty at a whack,” Captain Hernandez said. “A pretty dangerous drug to have around in that quantity, don’
t you think? How bad was this bronchial asthma, Doctor?”
Dr. Loring smiled contemptuously. “It was intermittent, like all asthma. It never amounted to what we term status asthmaticus, an attack so severe that the patient seems in danger of suffocating.”
“Any comment, Dr. Weiss?”
“Well,” Dr. Weiss said slowly, “assuming the note didn’t exist and assuming we had no other evidence of how much of the stuff she took, it could be an accidental overdose. The safety margin isn’t very wide. We’ll know for sure tomorrow. You don’t want to suppress the note, Hernandez, for Pete’s sake?”
Hernandez scowled down at his desk. “I was just wondering. I didn’t know narcotics were standard treatment for asthma. Guy learns something every day.”
Loring flushed. “An emergency measure, I said, Captain. A doctor can’t be everywhere at once. The onset of an asthmatic flareup can be very sudden.”
Hernandez gave him a brief glance and turned to Lawford. “What happens to your office, if I give this letter to the press?”
The D.A.’s deputy glanced at me emptily. “What’s this guy doing here, Hernandez?”
“I invited him.”
“How do I know he won’t repeat everything said in here to some reporter?”
“Yeah, he’s a great talker. You found that out. The time you had him pinched.”
Lawford grinned, then cleared his throat. “I’ve read that purported confession,” he said carefully. “And I don’t believe a word of it. You’ve got a background of emotional exhaustion, bereavement, some use of drugs, the strain of wartime life in England under bombing, this clandestine marriage, the man coming back here, and so on. Undoubtedly she developed a feeling of guilt and tried to purge herself of it by a sort of transference.”
He stopped and looked around, but all he saw was faces with no expression. “I can’t speak for the D.A. but my own feeling is that your confession would be no grounds to seek an indictment even if the woman had lived.”
“And having already believed one confession you wouldn’t care to believe another that contradicted the first one,” Hernandez said caustically.
“Take it easy, Hernandez. Any law enforcement agency has to consider public relations. If the papers printed that confession we’d be in trouble. That’s for sure. We’ve got enough eager beaver reformer groups around just waiting for that kind of chance to stick a knife into us. We’ve got a grand jury that’s already jittery about the working-over your vice squad lieutenant got last week—it’s about ten days.”
Hernandez said: “Okay, it’s your baby. Sign the receipt for me.”
He shuffled the pink deckle-edged pages together and Lawford leaned down to sign a form. He picked up the pink pages, folded them, put them in his breast pocket and walked out.
Dr. Weiss stood up. He was tough, good-natured, unimpressed. “We had the last inquest on the Wade family too quick,” he said. “I guess we won’t bother to have this one at all.”
He nodded to Ohls and Hernandez, shook hands formally with Loring, and went out. Loring stood up to go, then hesitated.
“I take it that I may inform a certain interested party that there will be no further investigation of this matter?” he said stiffly.
“Sorry to have kept you away from your patients so long, Doctor.”
“You haven’t answered my question,” Loring said sharply. “I’d better warn you—”
“Get lost, Jack,” Hernandez said.
Dr. Loring almost staggered with shock. Then he turned and fumbled his way rapidly out of the room. The door closed and it was a half minute before anybody said anything. Hernandez shook himself and lit a cigarette. Then he looked at me.
“Well?” he said.
“Well what?”
“What are you waiting for?”
“This is the end, then? Finished? Kaput.”
“Tell him, Bernie.”
“Yeah, sure it’s the end,” Ohls said. “I was all set to pull her in for questioning. Wade didn’t shoot himself. Too much alcohol in his brain. But like I told you, where was the motive? Her confession could be wrong in details, but it proves she spied on him. She knew the layout of the guest house in Encino. The Lennox frail had taken both her men from her. What happened in the guest house is just what you want to imagine. One question you forgot to ask Spencer. Did Wade own a Mauser P.P.K.? Yeah, he owned a small Mauser automatic. We talked to Spencer already today on the phone. Wade was a blackout drunk. The poor unfortunate bastard either thought he had killed Sylvia Lennox or he actually had killed her or else he had some reason to know his wife had. Either way he was going to lay it on the line eventually. Sure, he’d been hitting the hooch long before, but he was a guy married to a beautiful nothing. The Mex knows all about it. The little bastard knows damn near everything. That was a dream girl. Some of her was here and now, but a lot of her was there and then. If she ever got hot pants, it wasn’t for her husband. Get what I’m talking about?”
I didn’t answer him.
“Damn near made her yourself, didn’t you?”
I gave him the same no answer.
Ohls and Hernandez both grinned sourly. “Us guys aren’t exactly brainless,” Ohls said. “We knew there was something in that story about her taking her clothes off. You outtalked him and he let you. He was hurt and confused and he liked Wade and he wanted to be sure. When he got sure he’d have used his knife. This was a personal matter with him. He never snitched on Wade. Wade’s wife did, and she deliberately fouled up the issue just to confuse Wade. It all adds. In the end I guess she was scared of him. And Wade never threw her down any stairs. That was an accident. She tripped and the guy tried to catch her. Candy saw that too.”
“None of it explains why she wanted me around.”
“I could think of reasons. One of them is old stuff. Every cop has run into it a hundred times. You were the loose end, the guy that helped Lennox escape, his friend, and probably to some extent his confidant. What did he know and what did he tell you? He took the gun that had killed her and he knew it had been fired. She could have thought he did it for her. That made her think he knew she had used it. When he killed himself she was sure. But what about you? You were still the loose end. She wanted to milk you, and she had the charm to use, and a situation ready-made for an excuse to get next to you. And if she needed a fall guy, you were it. You might say she was collecting fall guys.”
“You’re imputing too much knowledge to her,” I said.
Ohls broke a cigarette in half and started chewing on one half. The other half he stuck behind his ear.
“Another reason is she wanted a man, a big, strong guy that could crush her in his arms and make her dream again.”
“She hated me,” I said. “I don’t buy that one.”
“Of course,” Hernandez put in dryly. “You turned her down. But she would have got over that. And then you blew the whole thing up in her face with Spencer listening in.”
“You two characters been seeing any psychiatrists lately?”
“Jesus,” Ohls said, “hadn’t you heard? We got them in our hair all the time these days. We’ve got two of them on the staff. This ain’t police business any more. It’s getting to be a branch of the medical racket. They’re in and out of jail, the courts, the interrogation rooms. They write reports fifteen pages long on why some punk of a juvenile held up a liquor store or raped a schoolgirl or peddled tea to the senior class. Ten years from now guys like Hernandez and me will be doing Rorschach tests and word associations instead of chin-ups and target practice. When we go out on a case we’ll carry little black bags with portable lie detectors and bottles of truth serum. Too bad we didn’t grab the four hard monkeys that poured it on Big Willie Magoon. We might have been able to unmaladjust them and make them love their mothers.”
“Okay for me to blow?”
“What are you not convinced about?” Hernandez asked, snapping a rubber band.
“I’m convinced. The case is dead. She’s de
ad, they’re all dead. A nice smooth routine all around. Nothing to do but go home and forget it ever happened. So I’ll do that.”
Ohls reached the half cigarette from behind his ear, looked at it as if wondering how it got there, and tossed it over his shoulder.
“What are you crying about?” Hernandez said. “If she hadn’t been fresh out of guns she might have made it a perfect score.”
“Also,” Ohls said grimly, “the telephone was working yesterday.”
“Oh sure,” I said. “You’d have come running and what you would have found would have been a mixed up story that admitted nothing but a few silly lies. This morning you have what I suppose is a full confession. You haven’t let me read it, but you wouldn’t have called in the D.A. if it was just a love note. If any real solid work had been done on the Lennox case at the time, somebody would have dug up his war record and where he got wounded and all the rest of it. Somewhere along the line a connection with the Wades would have turned up. Roger Wade knew who Paul Marston was. So did another P.I. I happened to get in touch with.”
“It’s possible,” Hernandez admitted, “but that isn’t how police investigations work. You don’t fool around with an open-shut case, even if there’s no heat on to get it finalized and forgotten. I’ve investigated hundreds of homicides. Some are all of a piece, neat, tidy, and according to the book. Most of them make sense here, don’t make sense there. But when you get motive, means, opportunity, flight, a written confession, and a suicide immediately afterwards, you leave it lay. No police department in the world has the men or the time to question the obvious. The only thing against Lennox being a killer was that somebody thought he was a nice guy who wouldn’t have done it and that there were others who could equally well have done it. But the others didn’t take it on the lam, didn’t confess, didn’t blow their brains out. He did. And as for being a nice guy I figure sixty to seventy per cent of all the killers that end up in the gas chamber or the hot seat or on the end of a rope are people the neighbors thought were just as harmless as a Fuller Brush salesman. Just as harmless and quiet and well bred as Mrs. Roger Wade. You want to read what she wrote in that letter? Okay, read it. I’ve got to go down the hall.”
The Collected Raymond Chandler Page 142