The milkman shut his mouth as if a winch controlled it. His eyes were huge and empty looking at me. Then he very carefully set his bottles down on the top step and leaned against the wall.
«That sounded like shots,» he said.
All this took a couple of seconds and felt like half an hour. I went back into my place and threw clothes on, grabbed odds and ends off the bureau, barged out into the hall. It was still empty, even of the milkman. A siren was dying somewhere near. A bald head with a hangover under it poked out of a door and made a snuffling noise.
I went down the back stairs.
There were two or three people out in the lower hail. I went out back. The garages were in two rows facing each other across a cement space, then two more at the end, leaving a space to go out to the alley. A couple of kids were coming over a fence three houses away.
Larry Batzel lay on his face, with his hat a yard away from his head, and one hand flung out to within a foot of a big black automatic. His ankles were crossed, as if he had spun as he fell. Blood was thick on the side of his face, on his blond hair, especially on his neck. It was also thick on the cement yard.
Two radio cops and the milk driver and a man in a brown sweater and bibless overalls were bending over him. The man in overalls was our janitor.
I went up to them, about the same time the two kids from over the fence hit the yard. The milk driver looked at me with a queer, strained expression. One of the cops straightened up and said: «Either of you guys know him? He’s still got half his face.»
He wasn’t talking to me. The milk driver shook his head and kept on looking at me from the corner of his eyes. The janitor said: «He ain’t a tenant here. He might of been a visitor. Kind of early for visitors, though, ain’t it?»
«He’s got party clothes on. You know your flophouse better’n I do,» the cop said heavily. He got out a notebook.
The other cop straightened up too and shook his head and went towards the house, with the janitor trotting beside him.
The cop with the notebook jerked a thumb at me and said harshly: «You was here first after these two guys. Anything from you?»
I looked at the milkman. Larry Batzel wouldn’t care, and a man has a living to earn. It wasn’t a story for a prowl car anyway.
«I just heard the shots and came running,» I said.
The cop took that for an answer. The milk driver looked up at the lowering gray sky and said nothing.
After a while I got back into my apartment and finished my dressing. When I picked my hat up off the window table by the Scotch bottle there was -a small rosebud lying on a piece of scrawled paper.
The note said: «You’re a good guy, but I think I’ll go it alone. Give the rose to Mona, if you ever should get a chance. Larry.»
I put those things in my wallet, and braced myself with a drink.
THREE
About three o’clock that afternoon I stood in the main hallway of the Winslow place and waited for the butler to come back. I had spent most of the day not going near my office or apartment, and not meeting any homicide men. It was only a question of time until I had to come through, but I wanted to see General Dade Winslow first. He was hard to see.
Oil paintings hung all around me, mostly portraits. There were a couple of statues and several suits of time-darkened armor on pedestals of dark wood. High over the huge marble fieplace hung two bullet-torn — or moth-eaten — cavalry pennants crossed in a glass case, and below them the painted likeness of a thin, spry-looking man with a black beard and mustachios and full regimentals of about the time of the Mexican War. This might be General Dade Winslow’s father. The general himself, though pretty ancient, couldn’t be quite that old.
Then the butler came back and said General Winslow was in the orchid house and would I follow him, please.
We went out of the french doors at the back and across the lawns to a big glass pavilion well beyond the garages. The butler opened the door into a sort of vestibule and shut it when I was inside, and it was already hot. Then he opened the inner door and it was really hot.
The air steamed. The walls and ceiling of the greenhouse dripped. In the half light enormous tropical plants spread their blooms and branches all over the place, and the smell of them was almost as overpowering as the smell of boiling alcohol.
The butler, who was old and thin and very straight and whitehaired, held branches of the plants back for me to pass, and we came to an opening in the middle of the place. A large reddish Turkish rug was spread down on the hexagonal flagstones. In the middle of the rug, in a wheel chair, a very old man sat with a traveling rug around his body and watched us come.
Nothing lived in his face but the eyes. Black eyes, deep-set, shining, untouchable. The rest of his face was the leaden mask of death, sunken temples, a sharp nose, outward-turning ear lobes, a mouth that was a thin white slit. He was wrapped partly in a reddish and very shabby bathrobe and partly in the rug. His hands had purple fingernails and were clasped loosely, motionless on the rug. He had a few scattered wisps of white hair on his skull.
The butler said: «This is Mr. Carmady, General.»
The old man stared at me. After a while a sharp, shrewish voice said: «Place a chair for Mr. Carmady.»
The butler dragged a wicker chair out and I sat down. I put my hat on the floor. The butler picked it up.
«Brandy,» the general said. «How do you like your brandy, sir?»
«Any way at all,» I said.
He snorted. The butler went away. The general stared at me with his unblinking eyes. He snorted again.
«I always take champagne with mine,» he said. «A third of a glass of brandy under the champagne, and the champagne as cold as Valley Forge. Colder, if you can get it colder.»
A noise that might have been a chuckle came out of him.
«Not that I was at Valley Forge,» he said. «Not quite that bad. You may smoke, sir.»
I thanked him and said I was tired of smoking for a while. I got a handkerchief out and mopped my face.
«Take your coat off, sir. Dud always did. Orchids require heat, Mr. Carmady — like sick old men.»
I took my coat off, a raincoat I had brought along. It looked like rain. Larry Batzel had said it was going to rain.
«Dud is my son-in-law. Dudley O’Mara. I believe you had something to tell me about him.»
«Just hearsay,» I said. «I wouldn’t want to go into it, unless I had your O.K., General Winslow.»
The basilisk eyes stared at me. «You are a private detective. You want to be paid, I suppose.»
«I’m in that line of business,» I said. «But that doesn’t mean I have to be paid for every breath I draw. It’s just something I heard. You might like to pass it on yourself to the Missing Persons Bureau.»
«I see,» he said quietly. «A scandal of some sort.»
The butler came back before I could answer. He wheeled a tea wagon in through the jungle, set it at my elbow and mixed me a brandy and soda. He went away.
I sipped the drink. «It seems there was a girl,» I said. «He knew her before he knew your daughter. She’s married to a racketeer now. It seems —»
«I’ve heard all that,» he said. «I don’t give a damn. What I want to know is where he is and if he’s all right. If he’s happy.»
I stared at him popeyed. After a moment I said weakly: «Maybe I could find the girl, or the boys downtown could, with what I could tell them.»
He plucked at the edge of his rug and moved his head about an inch. I think he was nodding. Then he said very slowly: «Probably I’m talking too much for my health, but I want to make something clear. I’m a cripple. I have two ruined legs and half my lower belly. I don’t eat much or sleep much. I’m a bore to myself and a damn nuisance to everybody else. So I miss Dud. He used to spend a lot of time with me. Why, God only knows.»