“I’ll give it back to Mavis Weld. And I hate to tell you this, Miss Gonzales, but I’d never get anywhere as a blackmailer. I just don’t have the engaging personality.”
“Give it back to me,” she said sharply. “If you do not—”
She cut herself off. I waited for her to finish. A look of contempt showed on her smooth features.
“Very well,” she said. “It is my mistake. I thought you were smart, I can see that you are just another dumb private eye. This shabby little office,” she waved a black gloved hand at it, “and the shabby little life that goes on here—they ought to tell me what sort of idiot you are.”
“They do,” I said.
She turned slowly and walked to the door. I got around the desk and she let me open it for her.
She went out slowly. The way she did it hadn’t been learned at business college.
She went on down the hail without looking back. She had a beautiful walk.
The door bumped against the pneumatic door-closer and very softly clicked shut. It seemed to take a long time to do that. I stood there watching it as if I had never seen it happen before. Then I turned and started back towards my desk and the phone rang.
I picked it up and answered it. It was Christy French. “Marlowe? We’d like to see you down at headquarters.”
“Right away?”
“If not sooner,” he said and hung up.
I slipped the pasted-together print from under the blotter and went over to put it in the safe with the others. I put my hat on and closed the window. There was nothing to wait for. I looked at the green tip on the sweep hand of my watch. It was a long time until five o’clock. The sweep hand went around and around the dial like a door-to-door salesman. The hands stood at four-ten. You’d think she’d have called up by now. I peeled my coat off and unstrapped the shoulder harness and locked it with the Luger in the desk drawer. The cops don’t like you to be wearing a gun in their territory. Even if you have the right to wear one. They like you to come in properly humble, with your hat in your hand, and your voice low and polite, and your eyes full of nothing.
I looked at the watch again. I listened. The building seemed quiet this afternoon. After a while it would be silent and then the madonna of the dark-gray mop would come shuffling along the hall, trying doorknobs.
I put my coat back on and locked the communicating door and switched off the buzzer and let myself out into the hallway. And then the phone rang. I nearly took the door off its hinges getting back to it. It was her voice all right, but it had a tone I had never heard before. A cool balanced tone, not flat or empty or dead, or even childish. Just the voice of a girl I didn’t know and yet did know. What was in that voice I knew before she said more than three words.
“I called you up because you told me to,” she said. “But you don’t have to tell me anything. I went down there.”
I was holding the phone with both hands.
“You went down there,” I said. “Yes. I heard that. So?”
“I—borrowed a car,” she said. “I parked across the street. There were so many cars you would never have noticed me. There’s a funeral home there. I wasn’t following you. I tried to go after you when you came out but I don’t know the streets down there at all. I lost you. So I went back.”
“What did you go back for?”
“I don’t really know. I thought you looked kind of funny when you came out of the house. Or maybe I just had a feeling. He being my brother and all. So I went back and rang the bell. And nobody answered the door. I thought that was funny too. Maybe I’m psychic or something. All of a sudden I seemed to have to get into that house. And I didn’t know how to do it, but I had to.”
“That’s happened to me,” I said, and it was my voice, but somebody had been using my tongue for sandpaper.
“I called the police and told them I had heard shots,” she said. “They came and one of them got into the house through a window. And then he let the other one in. And after a while they let me in. And then they wouldn’t let me go. I had to tell them all about it, who he was, and that I had lied about the shots, but I was afraid something had happened to Orrin. And I had to tell them about you too.”
“That’s all right,” I said. “I’d have told them myself as soon as I could get a chance to tell you.”
“It’s kind of awkward for you, isn’t it?”
“Yes.”
“Will they arrest you or something?”
“They could.”
“You left him lying there on the floor. Dead. You had to, I guess.”
“I had my reasons,” I said. “They won’t sound too good, but I had them. It made no difference to him.”
“Oh you’d have your reasons all right,” she said. “You’re very smart. You’d always have reasons for things. Well, I guess you’ll have to tell the police your reasons too.”
“Not necessarily.”
“Oh yes, you will,” the voice said, and there was a ring of pleasure in it I couldn’t account for. “You certainly will. They’ll make you.”
“We won’t argue about that,” I said. “In my business a fellow does what he can to protect a client. Sometimes he goes a little too far. That’s what I did. I’ve put myself where they can hurt me. But not entirely for you.”
“You left him lying on the floor, dead,” she said. “And I don’t care what they do to you. If they put you in prison, I think I would like that. I bet you’ll be awfully brave about it.”
“Sure,” I said. “Always a gay smile. Do you see what he had in his hand?”
“He didn’t have anything in his hand.”
“Well, lying near his hand.”
“There wasn’t anything. There wasn’t anything at all. What sort of thing?”
“That’s fine,” I said. “I’m glad of that. Well, goodbye. I’m going down to headquarters now. They want to see me. Good luck, if I don’t see you again.”
“You’d better keep your good luck,” she said. “You might need it. And I wouldn’t want it.”
“I did my best for you,” I said. “Perhaps if you’d given me a little more information in the beginning—”
She hung up while I was saying it.
I put the phone down in its cradle as gently as if it was a baby. I got out a handkerchief and wiped the palms of my hands. I went over to the washbasin and washed my hands and face. I sloshed cold water on my face and dried off hard with the towel and looked at it in the mirror.
“You drove off a cliff all right,” I said to the face.
24
The center of the room was a long yellow oak table. Its edges were unevenly grooved with cigarette burns. Behind it was a window with wire over the stippled glass. Also behind it with a mess of papers spread out untidily in front of him was Detective-Lieutenant Fred Beifus. At the end of the table leaning back on two legs of an armchair was a big burly man whose face had for me the vague familiarity of a face previously seen in a halftone on newsprint. He had a jaw like a park bench. He had the butt end of a carpenter’s pencil between his teeth. He seemed to be awake and breathing, but apart from that he just sat.
There were two roll top desks at the other side of the table and there was another window. One of the roll top desks was backed to the window. A woman with orange-colored hair was typing out a report on a typewriter stand beside the desk. At the other desk, which was endways to the window, Christy French sat in a tilted-back swivel chair with his feet on the corner of the desk. He was looking out of the window, which was open and afforded a magnificent view of the police parking lot and the back of a billboard.
“Sit down there,” Beifus said, pointing.
I sat down across from him in a straight oak chair without arms. It was far from new and when new had not been beautiful.
“This is Lieutenant Moses Maglashan of the Bay City police,” Beifus said. “He don’t like you any better than we do.”