“I’m beginning to get it,” I said slowly. “Take a family like yours and somebody in it has to be the dark meat.”
She stood up sharply and clasped the first-aid kit to her body. “I don’t like you,” she said. “I don’t think I’m going to employ you. If you’re insinuating that Orrin has done something wrong, well I can assure you that it’s not Orrin who’s the black sheep of our family.”
I didn’t move an eyelash. She swung around and marched to the door and put her hand on the knob and then she swung around again and marched back and suddenly began to cry. I reacted to that just the way a stuffed fish reacts to cut bait. She got out her little handkerchief and tickled the corners of her eyes.
“And now I suppose you’ll call the p-police,” she said with a catch in her voice. “And the Manhattan p-paper will hear all about it and they’ll print something n-nasty about us.”
“You don’t suppose anything of the sort. Stop chipping at my emotions. Let’s see a photo of him.”
She put the handkerchief away in a hurry and dug something else out of her bag. She passed it across the desk. An envelope. Thin, but there could be a couple of snapshots in it. I didn’t look inside.
“Describe him the way you see him,” I said.
She concentrated. That gave her a chance to do something with her eyebrows. “He was twenty-eight years old last March. He has light brown hair, much lighter than mine, and lighter blue eyes, and he brushes his hair straight back. He’s very tall, over six feet. But he only weighs about a hundred and forty pounds. He’s sort of bony. He used to wear a little blond mustache but mother made him cut it off. She said—”
“Don’t tell me. The minister needed it to stuff a cushion.”
“You can’t talk like that about my mother,” she yelped, getting pale with rage.
“Oh stop being silly. There’s a lot of things about you I don’t know. But you can stop pretending to be an Easter lily right now. Does Orrin have any distinguishing marks on him, like moles or scars, or a tattoo of the Twenty-Third Psalm on his chest? And don’t bother to blush.”
“Well you don’t have to yell at me. Why don’t you look at the photograph?”
“He probably has his clothes on. After all, you’re his sister. You ought to know.”
“No he hasn’t,” she said tightly. “He has a little scar on his left hand where he had a wen removed.”
“What about his habits? What does he do for fun—besides not smoking or drinking or going out with girls?”
“Why—how did you know that?”
“Your mother told me.”
She smiled. I was beginning to wonder if she had one in her. She had very white teeth and she didn’t wave her gums. That was something. “Aren’t you silly,” she said. “He studies a lot and he has a very expensive camera he likes to snap people with when they don’t know. Sometimes it makes them mad. But Orrin says people ought to see themselves as they really are.”
“Let’s hope it never happens to him,” I said. “What kind of camera is it?”
“One of those little cameras with a very fine lens. You can take snaps in almost any kind of light. A Leica.”
I opened the envelope and took out a couple of small prints, very clear. “These weren’t taken with anything like that,” I said.
“Oh no. Philip took those, Philip Anderson. A boy I was going with for a while.” She paused and sighed. “And I guess that’s really why I came here, Mr. Marlowe. Just because your name’s Philip too.”
I just said: “Uh-huh,” but I felt touched in some vague sort of way. “What happened to Philip Anderson?”
“But it’s about Orrin—”
“I know,” I interrupted. “But what happened to Philip Anderson?”
“He’s still there in Manhattan.” She looked away. “Mother doesn’t like him very much. I guess you know how it is.”
“Yes,” I said, “I know how it is. You can cry if you want to. I won’t hold it against you. I’m just a big soft slob myself.”
I looked at the two prints. One of them was looking down and was no good to me. The other was a fairly good shot of a tall angular bird with narrow-set eyes and a thin straight mouth and a pointed chin. He had the expression I expected to see. If you forgot to wipe the mud off your shoes, he was the boy who would tell you. I laid the photos aside and looked at Orfamay Quest, trying to find something in her face even remotely like his. I couldn’t. Not the slightest trace of family resemblance, which of course meant absolutely nothing. It never has.
“All right,” I said. “I’ll go down there and take a look. But you ought to be able to guess what’s happened. He’s in a strange city. He’s making good money for a while. More than he’s ever made in his life, perhaps. He’s meeting a kind of people he never met before. And it’s not the kind of town—believe me it isn’t, I know Bay City—that Manhattan, Kansas, is. So he just broke training and he doesn’t want his family to know about it. He’ll straighten out.”
She just stared at me for a moment in silence, then she shook her head. “No. Orrin’s not the type to do that, Mr. Marlowe.”
“Anyone is,” I said. “Especially a fellow like Orrin. The small-town sanctimonious type of guy who’s lived his entire life with his mother on his neck and the minister holding his hand. Out here he’s lonely. He’s got dough. He’d like to buy a little sweetness and light, and not the kind that comes through the east window of a church. Not that I have anything against that. I mean he already had enough of that, didn’t he?”
She nodded her head silently.
“So he starts to play,” I went on, “and he doesn’t know how to play. That takes experience too. He’s got himself all jammed up with some floozy and a bottle of hootch and what he’s done looks to him as if he’d stolen the bishop’s pants. After all, the guy’s going on twenty-nine years old and if he wants to roll in the gutter that’s his business. He’ll find somebody to blame it on after a while.”
“I hate to believe you, Mr. Marlowe,” she said slowly. “I’d hate for mother—”
“Something was said about twenty dollars,” I cut in.
She looked shocked. “Do I have to pay you now?”
“What would be the custom in Manhattan, Kansas?”
“We don’t have any private detectives in Manhattan. Just the regular police. That is, I don’t think we do.”
She probed in the inside of her tool kit again and dragged out a red change purse and from that she took a number of bills, all neatly folded and separate. Three fives and five ones. There didn’t seem to be much left. She kind of held the purse so I could see how empty it was. Then she straightened the bills out on the desk and put one on top of the other and pushed them across. Very slowly, very sadly, as if she was drowning a favorite kitten.
“I’ll give you a receipt,” I said.
“I don’t need a receipt, Mr. Marlowe.”
“I do. You won’t give me your name and address, so I want something with your name on it.”
“What for?”
“To show I’m representing you.” I got the receipt book out and made the receipt and held the book for her to sign the duplicate. She didn’t want to. After a moment reluctantly she took the hard pencil and wrote “Orfamay Quest” in a neat secretary’s writing across the face of the duplicate.
“Still no address?” I asked.
“I’d rather not.”
“Call me any time then. My home number is in the phone book too. Bristol Apartments, Apartment 428.”
“I shan’t be very likely to visit you,” she said coldly.
“I haven’t asked you yet,” I said. “Call me around four if you like. I might have something. And then again I might not.”
She stood up. “I hope mother won’t think I’ve done wrong,” she said, picking at her lip now with the pale fingernail. “Coming here, I mean.”