Lieutenant Moses Maglashan took the carpenter’s pencil out of his mouth and looked at the teeth marks in the fat octagonal pencil butt. Then he looked at me. His eyes went over me slowly exploring me, noting me, cataloging me. He said nothing. He put the pencil back in his mouth.
Beifus said: “Maybe I’m a queer, but for me you don’t have no more sex appeal than a turtle.” He half turned to the typing woman in the corner. “Millie.”
She swung around from the typewriter to a shorthand notebook. “Name’s Philip Marlowe,” Beifus said. “With an ‘e’ on the end, if you’re fussy. License number?”
He looked back at me. I told him. The orange queen wrote without looking up. To say she had a face that would have stopped a clock would have been to insult her. It would have stopped a runaway horse.
“Now if you’re in the mood,” Beifus told me, “you could start in at the beginning and give us all the stuff you left out yesterday. Don’t try to sort it out. Just let it flow natural. We got enough stuff to check you as you go along.”
“You want me to make a statement?”
“A very full statement,” Beifus said. “Fun, huh?”
“This statement is to be voluntary and without coercion?”
“Yeah. They all are.” Beifus grinned.
Maglashan looked at me steadily for a moment. The orange queen turned back to her typing. Nothing for her yet. Thirty years of it had perfected her timing.
Maglashan took a heavy worn pigskin glove out of his pocket and put it on his right hand and flexed his fingers.
“What’s that for?” Beifus asked him.
“I bite my nails times,” Maglashan said. “Funny. Only bite ‘em on my right hand.” He raised his slow eyes to stare at me. “Some guys are more voluntary than others,” he said idly. “Something to do with the kidneys, they tell me. I’ve known guys of the not so voluntary type that had to go to the can every fifteen minutes for weeks after they got voluntary. Couldn’t seem to hold water.”
“Just think of that,” Beifus said wonderingly.
“Then there’s the guys can’t talk above a husky whisper,” Maglashan went on. “Like punch-drunk fighters that have stopped too many with their necks.”
Maglashan looked at me. It seemed to be my turn.
“Then there’s the type that won’t go to the can at all,” I said. “They try too hard. Sit in a chair like this for thirty hours straight. Then they fall down and rupture a spleen or burst a bladder. They over co-operate. And after sunrise court, when the tank is empty, you find them dead in a dark corner. Maybe they ought to have seen a doctor, but you can’t figure everything, can you, Lieutenant?”
“We figure pretty close down in Bay City,” he said. “When we got anything to figure with.”
There were hard lumps of muscle at the corners of his jaws. His eyes had a reddish glare behind them.
“I could do lovely business with you,” he said staring at me. “Just lovely.”
“I’m sure you could, Lieutenant. I’ve always had a swell time in Bay City—while I stayed conscious.”
“I’d keep you conscious a long long time, baby. I’d make a point of it. I’d give it my personal attention.”
Christy French turned his head slowly and yawned. “What makes you Bay City cops so tough?” he asked. “You pickle your nuts in salt water or something?”
Beifus put his tongue out so that the tip showed and ran it along his lips.
“We’ve always been tough,” Maglashan said, not looking at him. “We like to be tough. Jokers like this character here keep us tuned up.” He turned back to me. “So you’re the sweetheart that phoned in about Clausen. You’re right handy with a pay phone, ain’t you, sweetheart?”
I didn’t say anything.
“I’m talking to you, sweetheart,” Maglashan said. “I asked you a question, sweetheart. When I ask a question I get answered. Get that, sweetheart?”
“Keep on talking and you’ll answer yourself,” Christy French said. “And maybe you won’t like the answer, and maybe you’ll be so damn tough you’ll have to knock yourself out with that glove. Just to prove it.”
Maglashan straightened up. Red spots the size of half-dollars glowed dully on his cheeks.
“I come up here to get co-operation,” he told French slowly. “The big razzoo I can get to home. From my wife. Here I don’t expect the wise numbers to work out on me.”
“You’ll get co-operation,” French said. “Just don’t try to steal the picture with that nineteen-thirty dialogue.” He swung his chair around and looked at me. “Let’s take out a clean sheet of paper and play like we’re just starting this investigation. I know all your arguments. I’m no judge of them. The point is do you want to talk or get booked as a material witness?”
“Ask the questions,” I said. “If you don’t like the answers, you can book me. If you book me, I get to make a phone call.”
“Correct,” French said, “if we book you. But we don’t have to. We can ride the circuit with you. It might take days.”
“And canned cornbeef hash to eat,” Beifus put in cheerfully.
“Strictly speaking, it wouldn’t be legal,” French said. “But we do it all the time. Like you do a few things which you hadn’t ought to do maybe. Would you say you were legal in this picture?”
“No.”
Maglashan let out a deep throated, “Ha!”
I looked across at the orange queen who was back to her notebook, silent and indifferent.
“You got a client to protect,” French said.
“Maybe.”
“You mean you did have a client. She ratted on you.”
I said nothing.
“Name’s Orfamay Quest,” French said, watching me.
“Ask your questions,” I said.
“What happened down there on Idaho Street?”
“I went there looking for her brother. He’d moved away, she said, and she’d come out here to see him. She was worried. The manager, Clausen, was too drunk to talk sense. I looked at the register and saw another man had moved into Quest’s room. I talked to this man. He told me nothing that helped.”
French reached around and picked a pencil off the desk and tapped it against his teeth. “Ever see this man again?”
“Yes. I told him who I was. When I went back downstairs Clausen was dead. And somebody had torn a page out of the register. The page with Quest’s name on it. I called the police.”
“But you didn’t stick around?”
“I had no information about Clausen’s death.”
“But you didn’t stick around,” French repeated. Maglashan made a savage noise in his throat and threw the carpenter’s pencil clear across the room. I watched it bounce against the wall and floor and come to a stop.
“That’s correct,” I said.
“In Bay City,” Maglashan said, “we could murder you for that.”
“In Bay City you could murder me for wearing a blue tie,” I said.
He started to get up. Beifus looked sideways at him and said: “Leave Christy handle it. There’s always a second show.”
“We could break you for that,” French said to me without inflexion.
“Consider me broke,” I said. “I never liked the business anyway.”
“So you came back to your office. What then?”
“I reported to the client. Then a guy called me up and asked me over to the Van Nuys Hotel. He was the same guy I had talked to down on Idaho Street, but with a different name.”
“You could have told us that, couldn’t you?”
“If I had, I’d have had to tell you everything. That would have violated the conditions of my employment.”
French nodded and tapped his pencil. He said slowly: “A murder wipes out agreements like that. Two murders ought to do it double. And two murders by the same method, treble. You don’t look good, Marlowe. You don’t look good at all.”
“I don’t even look good to the client,” I said, “after today.”
“What happened today?”