“No doubt his plans include Maude’s money,” Harlan said.
“You would think of such a thing. But it’s not true. He loves her for herself.”
“I see. I see. And you’re the honest broker who procured your own daughter for a fortune-hunter. How much is this brilliant fellow going to pay you for your services?”
The sunset had faded out. Deprived of its borrowed color, the old woman’s face behind the screen was drawn and bloodless.
“You know it’s not true, and you mustn’t say such things. Maude has been kind to you. You owe her some tolerance. Why don’t you give up gracefully and go home?”
“Because my sister has been misled. She’s in the hands of fools and knaves. Which are you, Mother?”
“Neither. And Maude is better off than she’s ever been in her life.” But her assurance was failing under his one-track pressure.
“This I desire to see for myself. Where are they?”
“You shan’t find out from me.” She looked at me with an obscure appeal in her eyes.
“Then I’ll find out for myself.”
It wasn’t hard to do. Leonard Lister was in the telephone book. He had an apartment address in Santa Monica, on one of the grid of streets above Lincoln Boulevard. I tried to talk Harlan, an obvious troublemaker, into letting me take it from here. But he was as hot as a cocker with bird scent in his nostrils. I had to let him come, or drop the case. And he’d probably make more trouble by himself.
It was almost dark when we found the place, an old two-story stucco house set back from the street behind a brown patch of lawn. Lister’s apartment was a small studio built over an attached garage. A flight of concrete steps slanted up the outside wall of the garage. There were lights in the house, and behind the blinded windows of the apartment. Under the late twilight stillness, our feet rustled in the dry grass.
“Imagine Maude being reduced to this,” Harlan said. “A woman of exquisite refinement, come to live in a slum with a – a gigolo.”
“Uh-huh. You better let me do the talking. You could get hurt, tossing that language around.”
“No ruffian can intimidate me.”
But he let me go ahead of him up the flight of steps. It was lit by an insect-repellent yellow bulb over the door at the top. I knocked on the door. There was no answer. I knocked again. Harlan reached past me and turned the knob. The door was locked.
“Pick the lock,” he said in an urgent whisper. “They’re in there lying low, I’m sure of it. You must have skeleton keys?”
“I also have a license to lose.”
He hammered the door till it vibrated in its frame. His seal-ringed knuckle made little dents in the paint. Soft footsteps approached from the other side. I thrust Harlan back with my arm. He almost lost his balance on the narrow landing.
The door opened. “What goes on?”
The man in the doorway wore a striped cotton bathrobe, and nothing else. His shoulders and bare chest were Herculean, a little bowed and softened by his age. He was in his late forties, perhaps. His red hair was shaggy and streaked with gray. His thick mouth gleamed like a bivalve in the red nest of his beard. His eyes were deepset and dreamy, the kind of eyes that watch the past or the future but seldom look directly at the present.
Over the shoulders which nearly filled the doorframe, I could see into the lighted room. It was cramped and neatly furnished with a studio bed, a few chairs. Books spilled from homemade shelves constructed out of red bricks and unfinished boards. In the cubbyhole kitchenette on the far side, a woman was working. I could see her dark head, her slim back with apron strings tied at the waist, and hear dishes rattling.
I told Lister who I was, but he was looking at the man behind me.
“Mr. Harlan, isn’t it? This is quite a surprise. I can’t say it’s a pleasant one.” His voice had the ease that great size gives a man. “Now what do you want, Mr. Harlan?”
“You know perfectly well. My sister.”
Lister stepped out, closing the door behind him. It became very cozy with the three of us on the yard-square landing, like the components of fission coming together. Lister’s bare feet were silent on the concrete. His voice was soft:
“Maude is busy. I’m pretty busy myself. I was just going to take a shower. So my advice to you is, go away. And don’t bother coming back. We’re going to be indefinitely busy.”
“Busy spending her money?” Harlan said.
Lister’s teeth flashed in his beard. His voice took on an edge.
“It’s easy to see why Maude won’t speak to you. Now take your detective friend and remove yourself from my doorstep.”
“So the old hag got in touch with you? How much of a percentage are you paying her?”
Lister moved quickly around me. He took Harlan by the front of his coat, lifted him, shook him once, and set him back on his feet.
“Speak of your mother with some respect, you little schnook.”
Harlan leaned on the railing, gripping it firmly like a child daring adults to dislodge him. His face in the yellow light looked sick with humiliation. He said in stubborn malice:
“I want to see my sister. I want to see what you’ve done to her, you bully.”
I said: “Let’s go,” and laid a hand on his arm.
“Are you on his side, too?” He was almost crying.
“A man’s home is his castle, after all. He doesn’t like you, Reginald. Neither does she, apparently.”
“You can say that again,” Lister said. “The little leech has sucked her blood for too long. Now get out of here before you make me mad for real.”
“Come on, Reginald. We’re getting nowhere.”
I detached him from the railing. Below and behind me, a man’s voice was raised. “Trouble up there, Lister?” The voice sounded as if its owner hoped so.
He was a gray-haired man in a Hawaiian print shirt, standing spraddle-legged in the splash of light at the foot of the stairs. It colored his spongy face and made his eyes look colorless.
“No trouble, Dolph. These gentleman are just leaving.”
Lister stood with his back against the door, a seedy hero in a dirty bathrobe defending his two-bit castle, and watched us go down the stairs. The door closed sharply, and the yellow light went out. Harlan muttered under his breath.
The gray-headed man was waiting for us at the bottom. He whispered through an alcoholic haze:
“Cops?”
I didn’t answer. He jerked at my coatsleeve, naggingly:
“What’s lover-man been up to now?”
“You wouldn’t be interested.”
“That’s what you think. You got another think coming. He’s got a woman with him, hasn’t he?”
“None of your business.”
I pulled my coatsleeve free. But he was hard to shake off. He thrust his pudgy face forward into mine.
“What Lister does is my business. I got a right to know if my tenants are living in sin.”
I started to walk away from him and his breath. He followed me across the driveway, bracing his wavering stride with one outstretched hand against the closed garage door. His voice trailed huskily after me:
“What’s the beef about? I got a right to know. I’m a respectable man, see. I don’t run any callhouse for broken-down fourflushers.”
“Wait a minute,” Harlan said. “Are you Lister’s landlord?”
“Sure thing. I never liked the s.o.b., it was the little woman that rented him the apartment. She thought he was class. I saw through him at a glance. Another movie has-been. A never-was.”