«Check,» I said. «How did you know that was his window and what would he be doing here at this time of night?»
«Loading up his little needles,» he said. «I’ve watched the guy some is how I know.»
«Watched him why?»
He looked at mc and said nothing. Then he looked back over his shoulder into the back part of the car. «How you doin’, pal?»
A thick sound that might be trying to be a voice came from under a rug on the floor of the car. «He likes riding,» De Spain said. «All these hard guys like riding around in cans. Okay. I’ll tuck the heap in the alley and we’ll go up.»
He slid around the corner of the building without lights and the car sound died in the moonlit darkness. Across the street a row of enormous eucalyptus trees fringed a set of public tennis courts. The smell of kelp came up along the boulevard from the ocean.
De Spain came back around the corner of the building and we went up to the locked lobby door and knocked on the heavy plate glass. Far back there was light from an open elevator beyond a big bronze mailbox. An old man came out of the elevator and along the corridor to the door and stood looking out at us with keys in his hand. De Spain held up his police shield. The old man squinted at it and unlocked the door and locked it after us without saying a word. He went back along the hall to the elevator and rearranged the homemade cushion on the stool and moved his false teeth around with his tongue and said: «What you want?»
He had a long gray face that grumbled even when it didn’t say anything. His trousers were frayed at the cuffs and one of his heelworn black shoes contained an obvious bunion. His blue uniform coat fitted him the way a stall fits a horse.
De Spain said: «Doc Austrian is upstairs, ain’t he?»
«I wouldn’t be surprised.»
«I ain’t trying to surprise you,» De Spain said. «I’d have worn my pink tights.»
«Yeah, he’s up there,» the old man said sourly.
«What time you last see Greb, the laboratory man on Four?»
«Didn’t see him.»
«What time you come on, Pop?»
«Seven.»
«Okay. Take us up to Six.»
The old man whooshed the doors shut and rode us up slowly and gingerly and whooshed the doors open again and sat like a piece of gray driftwood carved to look like a man.
De Spain reached up and lifted down the passkey that hung over the old man’s head.
«Hey, you can’t do that,» the old man said.
«Who says I can’t?»
The old man shook his head angrily, said nothing.
«How old are you, Pop?» De Spain said.
«Goin’ on sixty.»
«Goin’ on sixty hell. You’re a good juicy seventy. How come you got an elevator licence?»
The old man didn’t say anything. He clicked his false teeth. «That’s better,» De Spain said. «Just keep the old trap buttoned that way and everything will be wicky-wacky. Take hen down, Pop.»
We got out of the elevator and it dropped quietly in the enclosed shaft and De Spain stood looking down the hallway, jiggling the loose passkey on the ring. «Now listen,» he said. «His suite is at the end, four rooms. There’s a reception room made out of an office cut in half to make two reception rooms for adjoining suites. Out of that there’s a narrow hall inside the wall of this hall, a couple small rooms and the doc’s room. Got that?»
«Yeah,» I said. «What did you plan to do — burgle it?»
«I kept an eye on the guy for a while, after his wife died.»
«Too bad you didn’t keep an eye on the redheaded office nurse,» I said. «The one that got bumped off tonight.»
He looked at me slowly, out of his deep black eyes, out of his dead-pan face.
«Maybe I did,» he said. «As much as I had a chance.»
«Hell, you didn’t even know her name,» I said, and stared at him. «I had to tell you.»
He thought that over. «Well, seeing her in a white office uniform and seeing her naked and dead on a bed is kind of different, I guess.»
«Sure,» I said, and kept on looking at him.
«Okay. Now — you knock at the doc’s office, which is the third door from the end, and when he opens up I’ll sneak in at the reception room and come along inside and get an earful of whatever he says.»
«It sounds all right,» I said. «But I don’t feel lucky.»
We went down the corridor. The doors were solid wood and well fitted and no light showed behind any of them. I put my ear against the one De Spain indicated and heard faint movement inside. I nodded to De Spain down at the end of the hail. He fitted the passkey slowly into the lock and I rapped hard on the door and saw him go in out of the tail of my eye. The door shut behind him almost at once. I rapped on my door again.
It opened almost suddenly then, and a tall man was standing about a foot away from me with the ceiling light glinting on his pale sand-colored hair. He was in his shirtsleeves and he held a flat leather case in his hand. He was rail-thin, with dun eyebrows and unhappy eyes. He had beautiful hands, long and slim, with square but not blunt fingertips. The nails were highly polished and cut very close.
I said: «Dr. Austrian?»
He nodded. His Adam’s apple moved vaguely in his lean throat.
«This is a funny hour for me to come calling,» I said, «but you’re a hard man to catch up with. I’m a private detective from Los Angeles. I have a client named Harry Matson.»
He was either not startled or so used to hiding his feelings that it didn’t make any difference. His Adam’s apple moved around again and his hand moved the leather case he was holding, and he looked at it in a puzzled sort of way and then stepped back.
«I have no time to talk to you now,» he said. «Come back tomorrow.»
«That’s what Greb told me,» I said.
He got a jolt out of that. He didn’t scream on fall down in a fit but I could see it jarred him. «Come in,» he said thickly.
I went in and he shut the door. There was a desk that seemed to be made of black glass. The chains were chromium tubing with rough wool upholstery. The door to the next room was half open and the room was dark. I could see the stretched white sheet on an examination table and the stinnuplike things at the foot of it. I didn’t hear any sound from that direction.
On top of the black glass desk a clean towel was laid out and on the towel a dozen on so hypodermic syringes lay with needles separate. There was an electric sterilizing cabinet on the wall and inside there must have been another dozen needles and syringes. The juice was turned on. I went over and looked at the thing while the tall, nail-thin man walked around behind his desk and sat down.
«That’s a lot of needles working,» I said, and pulled one of the chairs near the desk.
«What’s your business with mc?» His voice was still thick.
«Maybe I could do you some good about your wife’s death,» I said.
«That’s very kind of you,» he said calmly. «What kind of good?»
«I might be able to tell you who murdered her,» I said.
His teeth glinted in a queer, unnatural half-smile. Then he shrugged and when he spoke his voice was no more dramatic than if we had been discussing the weather. «That would be kind of you. I had thought she committed suicide. The coroner and the police seemed to agree with me. But of course a private detective —»
«Greb didn’t think so,» I said, without any particular attempt at the truth. «The lab man who switched a sample of your wife’s blood for a sample from a real monoxide case.»