Lucille held her left hand up and moved it around to get a flash from the little stone. “I hate it,” she said. “I hate it like I hate the sunshine and the summer and the bright stars and the full moon. That’s how I hate it.”
I picked up the key and my suitcase and left them. A little more of that and I’d be falling in love with myself. I might even give myself a small unpretentious diamond ring.
CHAPTER 15
The house phone at the Casa del Poniente got no reply from Room 1224. I walked over to the desk. A stiff-looking clerk was sorting letters. They are always sorting letters.
“Miss Mayfield is registered here, isn’t she?” I asked.
He put a letter in a box before he answered me. “Yes, sir. What name shall I say?”
“I know her room number. She doesn’t answer. Have you seen her today?”
He gave me a little more of his attention, but I didn’t really send him. “I don’t think so.” He glanced over his shoulder. “Her key is out. Would you care to leave a message?”
“I’m a little worried. She wasn’t well last night. She could be up there sick, not able to answer the phone. I’m a friend of hers. Marlowe’s the name.”
He looked me over. His eyes were wise eyes. He went behind a screen in the direction of the cashier’s office and spoke to somebody. He came back in a short time. He was smiling.
“I don’t think Miss Mayfield is ill, Mr. Marlowe. She ordered quite a substantial breakfast in her room. And lunch. She has had several telephone calls.”
“Thanks a lot,” I said. “I’ll leave a message. Just my name and that I’ll call back later.”
“She might be out in the grounds or down on the beach,” he said. “We have a warm beach, well sheltered by a breakwater.” He glanced at the clock behind him. “If she is, she won’t be there much longer. It’s getting cool by now.”
“Thanks. I’ll be back.”
The main part of the lobby was up three steps and through an arch. There were people in it just sitting, the dedicated hotel lounge sitters, usually elderly, usually rich, usually doing nothing but watching with hungry eyes. They spend their lives that way. Two old ladies with severe faces and purplish permanents were struggling with an enormous jigsaw puzzle set out on a specially built king-size card table. Farther along there was a canasta game going—two women, two men. One of the women had enough ice on her to cool the Mojave Desert and enough make-up to paint a steam yacht. Both women had cigarettes in long holders. The men with them looked gray and tired, probably from signing checks. Farther along, still sitting where they could look out through the glass, a young couple were holding hands. The girl had a diamond and emerald sparkler and a wedding ring which she kept touching with her fingertips. She looked a little dazed.
I went out through the bar and poked around in the gardens. I went along the path that threaded the cliff top and had no trouble picking out the spot I had looked down on the night before from Betty Mayfield’s balcony. I could pick it out because of the sharp angle.
The bathing beach and small curved breakwater were a hundred yards along. Steps led down to it from the cliff. People were lying around on the sand. Some in swim suits or trunks, some just sitting there on rugs. Kids ran around screaming. Betty Mayfield was not on the beach.
I went back into the hotel and sat in the lounge.
I sat and smoked. I went to the newsstand and bought an evening paper and looked through it and threw it away. I strolled by the desk. My note was still in Box 1224. I went to the house phones and called Mr. Mitchell. No answer. I’m sorry. Mr. Mitchell does not answer his telephone.
A woman’s voice spoke behind me. “The clerk said you wanted to see me. Mr. Marlowe—” she said. “Are you Mr. Marlowe?”
She looked as fresh as a morning rose. She was wearing dark green slacks and saddle shoes and a green windbreaker over a white shirt with a loose Paisley scarf around that. A bandeau on her hair made a nice wind-blown effect.
The bell captain was hanging out his ear six feet away. I said. “Miss Mayfield?”
“I’m Miss Mayfield.”
“I have the car outside. Do you have time to look at the property?”
She looked at her wrist watch. “Ye-es, I guess so,” she said. “I ought to change pretty soon, but—oh, all right.”
“This way, Miss Mayfield.”
She fell in beside me. We walked across the lobby. I was getting to feel quite at home there. Betty Mayfield glanced viciously at the two jigsaw puzzlers.
“I hate hotels,” she said. “Come back here in fifteen years and you would find the same people sitting in the same chairs.”
“Yes, Miss Mayfield. Do you know anybody named Clyde Umney?”
She shook her head. “Should I?”
“Helen Vermilyea? Ross Goble?”
She shook her head again.
“Want a drink?”
“Not now, thanks.”
We came out of the bar and went along the walk and I held the door of the Olds for her. I backed out of the slot and pointed it straight up Grand Street towards the hills. She slipped dark glasses with spangled rims on her nose. “I found the traveler’s checks,” she said. “You’re a queer sort of detective.”
I reached in my pocket and held out her bottle of sleeping pills. “I was a little scared last night,” I said. “I counted these but I didn’t know how many had been there to start with. You said you took two. I couldn’t be sure you wouldn’t rouse up enough to gulp a handful.”
She took the bottle and stuffed it into her windbreaker. “I had quite a few drinks. Alcohol and barbiturates make a bad combination. I sort of passed out. It was nothing else.”
“I wasn’t sure. It takes a minimum of thirty-five grains of that stuff to kill. Even then it takes several hours. I was in a tough spot. Your pulse and breathing seemed all right but maybe they wouldn’t be later on. If I called a doctor, I might have to do a lot of talking. If you had taken an overdose, the homicide boys would be told, even if you snapped out of it. They investigate all suicide attempts. But if I guessed wrong, you wouldn’t be riding with me today. And where would I be then?”
“It’s a thought,” she said. “I can’t say I’m going to worry about it terribly. Who are these people you mentioned?”
“Clyde Umney’s the lawyer who hired me to follow you—on instructions from a firm of attorneys in Washington, D.C. Helen Vermilyea is his secretary. Ross Goble is a Kansas City private eye who says he is trying to find Mitchell.” I described him to her.
Her face turned stony. “Mitchell? Why should he be interested in Larry?”
I stopped at the corner of Fourth and Grand for an old coot in a motorized wheel chair to make a left turn at four miles an hour. Esmeralda is full of the damn things.
“Why should he be looking for Larry Mitchell?” she asked bitterly. “Can’t anybody leave anybody else alone?”
“Don’t tell me anything,” I said. “Just keep on asking me questions to which I don’t know the answers. It’s good for my inferiority complex. I told you I had no more job. So why am I here? That’s easy. I’m groping for that five grand in traveler’s checks again.”
“Turn left at the next corner,” she said, “and we can go up into the hills. There’s a wonderful view from up there. And a lot of very fancy homes.”
“The hell with them,” I said.
“It’s also very quiet up there.” She picked a cigarette out of the pack clipped to the dash and lit it.
“That’s two in two days,” I said. “You’re hitting them hard. I counted your cigarettes last night too. And your matches. I went through your bag. I’m kind of snoopy when I get roped in on a phony like that one. Especially when the client passes out and leaves me holding the baby.”
She turned her head to stare at me. “It must have been the dope and the liquor,” she said. “I must have been a little off base.”
“Over at the Rancho Descansado you were in great shape. You were hard a
s nails. We were going to take off for Rio and live in luxury. Apparently also in sin. All I had to do was get rid of the body. What a letdown! No body.”
She was still staring at me, but I had to watch my driving. I made a boulevard stop and a left turn. I went along another dead-end street with old streetcar tracks still in the paving.
“Turn left up the hill at that sign. That’s the high school down there.”
“Who fired the gun and what at?”
She pressed her temples with the heels of her hands. “I guess I must have. I must have been crazy. Where is it?”
“The gun? It’s safe. Just in case your dream came true, I might have to produce it.”
We were climbing now. I set the pointer to hold the Olds in third. She watched that with interest. She looked around her at the pale leather seats and the gadgets.
“How can you afford an expensive car like this? You don’t make a lot of money, do you?”
“They’re all expensive nowadays, even the cheap ones. Fellow might as well have one that can travel. I read somewhere that a dick should always have a plain dark inconspicuous car that nobody would notice. The guy had never been to L.A. In L.A. to be conspicuous you would have to drive a flesh-pink Mercedes-Benz with a sun porch on the roof and three pretty girls sunbathing.”
She giggled.
“Also,” I labored the subject, “it’s good advertising. Maybe I dreamed I was going to Rio. I could sell it there for more than it set me back new. On a freighter it wouldn’t cost too much to ferry.”
She sighed. “Oh, stop teasing me about that. I don’t feel funny today.”
“Seen your boy friend around?”
She sat very still. “Larry?”
“You got others?”
“Well—you might have meant Clark Brandon, although I hardly know him. Larry was pretty drunk last night. No—I haven’t seen him. Perhaps he’s sleeping it off.”
“Doesn’t answer his phone.”
The road forked. One white line curved to the left. I kept straight on, for no particular reason. We passed some old Spanish houses built high on the slope and some very modern houses built downhill on the other side. The road passed these and made a wide turn to the right. The paving here looked new. The road ran out to a point of land and a turning circle. There were two big houses facing each other across the turning circle. They were loaded with glass brick and their seaward windows were green glass. The view was magnificent. I looked at it for all of three seconds. I stopped against the end curb and cut the motor and sat. We were about a thousand feet up and the whole town was spread out in front of us like a 45 degree air photo.
“He might be sick,” I said. “He might have gone out. He might even be dead.”
“I told you—” She began to shake. I took the stub of the cigarette away from her and put it in the ash tray. I ran the car windows up and put an arm around her shoulders and pulled her head down on my shoulder. She was limp, unresisting; but she still shook.
“You’re a comfortable man,” she said. “But don’t rush me.”
“There’s a pint in the glove compartment. Want a snort?”
“Yes.”
I got it out and managed to pull the metal strip loose with one hand and my teeth. I held the bottle between my knees and got the cap off. I held it to her lips. She sucked some in and shuddered. I recapped the pint and put it away.
“I hate drinking from the bottle,” she said.
“Yeah. Unrefined. I’m not making love to you, Betty. I’m worried. Anything you want done?”
She was silent for a moment. Then her voice was steady, saying: “Such as what? You can have those checks back. They were yours. I gave them to you.”
“Nobody gives anybody five grand like that. It makes no sense. That’s why I came back down from L.A. I drove up there early this morning. Nobody goes all gooey over a character like me and talks about having half a million dollars and offers me a trip to Rio and a nice home complete with all the luxuries. Nobody drunk or sober does that because she dreamed a dead man was lying out on her balcony and would I please hurry around and throw him off into the ocean. Just what did you expect me to do when I got there—hold your hand while you dreamed?”
She pulled away and leaned in the far corner of the car. “All right, I’m a liar. I’ve always been a liar.”
I glanced at the rear view mirror. Some kind of small dark car had turned into the road behind and stopped. I couldn’t see who or what was in it. Then it swung hard right against the curbing and backed and made off the way it had come. Some fellow took the wrong road and saw it was a dead end.
“While I was on the way up those damn fire stairs,” I went on, “you swallowed your pills and then faked being awfully terribly sleepy and then after a while you actually did go to sleep—I think. Okay. I went out on the balcony. No stiff. No blood. If there had been, I might have managed to get him over the top of the wall. Hard work, but not impossible, if you know how to lift. But six trained elephants couldn’t have thrown him far enough to land in the ocean. It’s thirty-five feet to the fence and you’d have to throw him so far out that he would clear the fence. I figure an object as heavy as a man’s body would have to be thrown a good fifty feet outward to clear the fence.”
“I told you I was a liar.”
“But you didn’t tell me why. Let’s be serious. Suppose a man had been dead on your balcony. What would you expect me to do about it? Carry him down the fire stairs and get him into the car I had and drive off into the woods somewhere and bury him? You do have to take people into your confidence once in a while when bodies are lying around.”
“You took my money,” she said tonelessly. “You played up to me.”
“That way I might find out who was crazy.”
“You found out. You should be satisfied.”
“I found out nothing—not even who you are.”
She got angry. “I told you I was out of my mind,” she said in a rushing voice. “Worry, fear, liquor, pills—why can’t you leave me alone? I told you I’d give you back that money. What more do you want?”
“What do I do for it?”
“Just take it.” She was snapping at me now. “That’s all. Take it and go away. Far, far away.”
“I think you need a good lawyer.”
“That’s a contradiction in terms,” she sneered. “If he was good, he wouldn’t be a lawyer.”
“Yeah. So you’ve had some painful experience along those lines. I’ll find out in time, either from you or some other way. But I’m still being serious. You’re in trouble. Apart from what happened to Mitchell, if anything, you’re in enough trouble to justify hiring yourself a lawyer. You changed your name. So you had reasons. Mitchell was putting the bite on you. So he had reasons. A firm of Washington attorneys is looking for you. So they have reasons. And their client has reasons to have them looking for you.”
I stopped and looked at her as well as I could see her in the freshly darkening evening. Down below, the ocean was getting a lapis lazuli blue that somehow failed to remind me of Miss Vermilyea’s eyes. A flock of gulls went south in a fairly compact mass but it wasn’t the kind of tight formation North Island is used to. The evening plane from L.A. came down the coast with its port and starboard lights showing, and then the winking light below the fuselage went on and it swung out to sea for a long lazy turn into Lindbergh Field.
“So you’re just a shill for a crooked lawyer,” she said nastily, and grabbed for another of my cigarettes.
“I don’t think he’s very crooked. He just tries too hard. But that’s not the point. You can lose a few bucks to him without screaming. The point is something called privilege. A licensed investigator doesn’t have it. A lawyer does, provided his concern is with the interests of a client who has retained him. If the lawyer hires an investigator to work in those interests, then the investigator has privilege. That’s the only way he can get it.”
“You know what you can do with your privile
ge,” she said. “Especially as it was a lawyer that hired you to spy on me.”
I took the cigarette away from her and puffed on it a couple of times and handed it back.
“It’s all right, Betty. I’m no use to you. Forget I tried to be.”
“Nice words, but only because you think I’ll pay you more to be of use to me. You’re just another of them. I don’t want your damn cigarette either.” She threw it out of the window. “Take me back to the hotel.”
I got out of the car and stamped on the cigarette. “You don’t do that in the California hills,” I told her. “Not even out of season.” I got back into the car and turned the key and pushed the starter button. I backed away and made the turn and drove back up the curve to where the road divided. On the upper level where the solid white line curved away a small car was parked. The car was lightless. It could have been empty.
I swung the Olds hard the opposite way from the way I had come, and flicked my headlights on with the high beam. They swept the cars as I turned. A hat went down over a face, but not quick enough to hide the glasses, the fat broad face, the outjutting ears of Mr. Ross Goble of Kansas City.
The lights went on past and I drove down a long hill with lazy curves. I didn’t know where it went except that all roads around there led to the ocean sooner or later. At the bottom there was a T-intersection. I swung to the right and after a few blocks of narrow street I hit the boulevard and made another right turn. I was now driving back towards the main part of Esmeralda.
She didn’t speak again until I got to the hotel. She jumped out quickly when I stopped.
“If you’ll wait here, I’ll get the money.”
“We were tailed,” I said.
“What—?” She stopped dead, with her head half turned.
“Small car. You didn’t notice him unless you saw my lights brush him as I made the turn at the top of the hill.”
“Who was it?” Her voice was tense.
The Collected Raymond Chandler Page 155