31
“The D.A. wants to see you at nine o’clock,” he said. “After that I guess you can go on home. That is, if he doesn’t hang a pinch on you. I’m sorry you had to sit up in that chair all night.”
“It’s all right,” I said. “I needed the exercise.”
“Yeah, back in the groove again,” he said. He stared moodily at the dishes on the tray.
“Got Lagardie?” I asked him.
“No. He’s a doctor all right, though.” His eyes moved to mine. “He practiced in Cleveland.”
I said: “I hate it to be that tidy.”
“How do you mean?”
“Young Quest wants to put the bite on Steelgrave. So he just by pure accident runs into the one guy in Bay City that could prove who Steelgrave was. That’s too tidy.”
“Aren’t you forgetting something?”
“I’m tired enough to forget my name. What?”
“Me too,” French said. “Somebody had to tell him who Steelgrave was. When that photo was taken Moe Stein hadn’t been squibbed off. So what good was the photo unless somebody knew who Steelgrave was?”
“I guess Miss Weld knew,” I said. “And Quest was her brother.”
“You’re not making much sense, chum.” He grinned a tired grin. “Would she help her brother put the bite on her boy friend and on her too?”
“I give up. Maybe the photo was just a fluke. His other sister—my client that was—said he liked to take candid camera shots. The candider the better. If he’d lived long enough you’d have had him up for mopery.”
“For murder,” French said indifferently.
“Oh?”
“Maglashan found that ice pick all right. He just wouldn’t give out to you.”
“There’d have to be more than that.”
“There is, but it’s a dead issue. Clausen and Mileaway Marston both had records. The kid’s dead. His family’s respectable. He had an off streak in him and he got in with the wrong people. No point in smearing his family just to prove the police can solve a case.”
“That’s white of you. How about Steelgrave?”
“That’s out of my hands.” He started to get up. “When a gangster gets his how long does the investigation last?”
“Just as long as it’s front-page stuff,” I said. “But there’s a question of identity involved here.”
“No.”
I stared at him. “How do you mean, no?”
“Just no. We’re sure.” He was on his feet now. He combed his hair with his fingers and rearranged his tie and hat. Out of the corner of his mouth he said in a low voice: “Off the record—we were always sure. We just didn’t have a thing on him.”
“Thanks,” I said, “I’ll keep it to myself. How about the guns?”
He stopped and stared down at the table. His eyes came up to mine rather slowly. “They both belonged to Steelgrave. What’s more he had a permit to carry a gun. From the sheriff’s office in another county. Don’t ask me why. One of them—” he paused and looked up at the wall over my head—“one of them killed Quest… The same gun killed Stein.”
“Which one?”
He smiled faintly. “It would be hell if the ballistics man got them mixed up and we didn’t know,” he said.
He waited for me to say something. I didn’t have anything to say. He made a gesture with his hand.
“Well, so long. Nothing personal you know, but I hope the D.A. takes your hide off—in long thin strips.”
He turned and went out.
I could have done the same, but I just sat there and stared across the table at the wall, as if I had forgotten how to get up. After a while the door opened and the orange queen came in. She unlocked her roll top desk and took her hat off of her impossible hair and hung her jacket on a bare hook in the bare wall. She opened the window near her and uncovered her typewriter and put paper in it. Then she looked across at me. “Waiting for somebody?”
“I room here,” I said. “Been here all night.”
She looked at me steadily for a moment. “You were here yesterday afternoon. I remember.”
She turned to her typewriter and her fingers began to fly. From the open window behind her came the growl of cars filling up the parking lot. The sky had a white glare and there was not much smog. It was going to be a hot day.
The telephone rang on the orange queen’s desk. She talked into it inaudibly, and hung up. She looked across at me again.
“Mr. Endicott’s in his office,” she said. “Know the way?”
“I worked there once. Not for him, though. I got fired.”
She looked at me with that City Hall look they have. A voice that seemed to come from anywhere but her mouth said: “Hit him in the face with a wet glove.”
I went over near her and stood looking down at the orange hair. There was plenty of gray at the roots.
“Who said that?”
“It’s the wall,” she said. “It talks. The voices of the dead men who have passed through on the way to hell.”
I went out of the room walking softly and shut the door against the closer so that it wouldn’t make any noise.
32
You go in through double swing doors. Inside the double doors there is a combination PBX and information desk at which sits one of those ageless women you see around municipal offices everywhere in the world. They were never young and will never be old. They have no beauty, no charm, no style. They don’t have to please anybody. They are safe. They are civil without ever quite being polite and intelligent and knowledgeable without any real interest in anything. They are what human beings turn into when they trade life for existence and ambition for security.
Beyond this desk there is a row of glassed-in cubicles stretching along one side of a very long room. On the other side is the waiting room, a row of hard chairs all facing one way, towards the cubicles.
About half of the chairs were filled with people waiting and the look of long waiting on their faces and the expectation of still longer waiting to come. Most of them were shabby. One was from the jail, in denim, with a guard. A white-faced kid built like a tackle, with sick, empty eyes.
At the back of the line of cubicles a door was lettered SEWELL ENDICOTT DISTRICT ATTORNEY. I knocked and went on into a big airy corner room. A nice enough room, old-fashioned with padded black leather chairs and pictures of former D.A.’s and governors on the walls. Breeze fluttered the net curtains at four windows. A fan on a high shelf purred and swung slowly in a languid arc.
Sewell Endicott sat behind a flat dark desk and watched me come. He pointed to a chair across from him. I sat down. He was tall, thin and dark with loose black hair and long delicate fingers.
“You’re Marlowe?” he said in a voice that had a touch of the soft South.
I didn’t think he really needed an answer to that. I just waited.
“You’re in a bad spot, Marlowe. You don’t look good at all. You’ve been caught suppressing evidence helpful to the solution of a murder. That is obstructing justice. You could go up for it.”
“Suppressing what evidence?” I asked.
He picked a photo off his desk and frowned at it. I looked across at the other two people in the room. They sat in chairs side by side. One of them was Mavis Weld. She wore the dark glasses with the wide white bows. I couldn’t see her eyes, but I thought she was looking at me. She didn’t smile. She sat very still.
By her side sat a man in an angelic pale-gray flannel suit with a carnation the size of a dahlia in his lapel. He was smoking a monogrammed cigarette and flicking the ashes on the floor, ignoring the smoking stand at his elbow. I knew him by pictures I had seen in the papers. Lee Farrell, one of the hottest trouble-shooting lawyers in the country. His hair was white but his eyes were bright and young. He had a deep outdoor tan. He looked as if it would cost a thousand dollars to shake hands with him.
Endicott leaned back and tapped the arm of his chair with his long fingers. He turned with polite deference to Mavis Weld.