“Thank you, doctor,” I said fervently. “Thank you very very much.”
I hung up. If Dr. Vincent Lagardie was on the level, he would now telephone the Bay City Police Department and tell them the story. If he didn’t telephone the police, he wasn’t on the level. Which might or might not be useful to know.
7
The phone on my desk rang at four o’clock sharp. “Did you find Orrin yet, Mr. Marlowe?”
“Not yet. Where are you?”
“Why I’m in the drugstore next to—”
“Come on up and stop acting like Mata Hari,” I said.
“Aren’t you ever polite to anybody?” she snapped.
I hung up and fed myself a slug of Old Forester to brace my nerves for the interview. As I was inhaling it I heard her steps tripping along the corridor. I moved across and opened the door.
“Come in this way and miss the crowd,” I said.
She seated herself demurely and waited.
“All I could find out,” I told her, “is that the dump on Idaho Street is peddling reefers. That’s marijuana cigarettes.”
“Why, how disgusting,” she said.
“We have to take the bad with the good in this life,” I said. “Orrin must have got wise and threatened to report it to the police.”
“You mean,” she said in her little-girl manner, “that they might hurt him for doing that?”
“Well, most likely they’d just throw a scare into him first.”
“Oh, they couldn’t scare Orrin, Mr. Marlowe,” she said decisively. “He just gets mean when people try to run him.”
“Yeah,” I said. “But we’re not talking about the same things. You can scare anybody—with the right technique.”
She set her mouth stubbornly. “No, Mr. Marlowe. They couldn’t scare Orrin.”
“Okay,” I said. “So they didn’t scare him. Say they just cut off one of his legs and beat him over the head with it. What would he do then—write to the Better Business Bureau?”
“You’re making fun of me,” she said politely. Her voice was as cool as boarding-house soup. “Is that all you did all day? Just find Orrin had moved and it was a bad neighborhood? Why I found that out for myself, Mr. Marlowe. I thought you being a detective and all—” She trailed off, leaving the rest of it in the air.
“I did a little more than that,” I said. “I gave the landlord a little gin and went through the register and talked to a man named Hicks. George W. Hicks. He wears a toupee. I guess maybe you didn’t meet him. He has, or had, Orrin’s room. So I thought maybe—” It was my turn to do a little trailing in the air.
She fixed me with her pale blue eyes enlarged by the glasses. Her mouth was small and firm and tight, her hands clasped on the desk in front of her over her large square bag, her whole body stiff and erect and formal and disapproving.
“I paid you twenty dollars, Mr. Marlowe,” she said coldly. “I understood that was in payment of a day’s work. It doesn’t seem to me that you’ve done a day’s work.”
“No,” I said. “That’s true. But the day isn’t over yet. And don’t bother about the twenty bucks. You can have it back if you like. I didn’t even bruise it.”
I opened the desk drawer and got out her money. I pushed it across the desk. She looked at it but didn’t touch it. Her eyes came up slowly to meet mine.
“I didn’t mean it like that. I know you’re doing the best you can, Mr. Marlowe.”
“With the facts I have.”
“But I’ve told you all I know.”
“I don’t think so,” I said.
“Well I’m sure I can’t help what you think,” she said tartly. “After all, if I knew what I wanted to know already, I wouldn’t have come here and asked you to find it out, would I?”
“I’m not saying you know all you want to know,” I answered. “The point is I don’t know all I want to know in order to do a job for you. And what you tell me doesn’t add up.”
“What doesn’t add up? I’ve told you the truth. I’m Orrin’s sister. I guess I know what kind of person he is.”
“How long did he work for Cal-Western?”
“I’ve told you that. He came out to California just about a year ago. He got work right away because he practically had the job before he left.”
“He wrote home how often? Before he stopped writing.”
“Every week. Sometimes oftener. He’d take turns writing to mother and me. Of course the letters were for both of us.”
“About what?”
“You mean what did he write about?”
“What did you think I meant?”
“Well, you don’t have to snap at me. He wrote about his work and the plant and the people there and sometimes about a show he’d been to. Or it was about California. He’d write about church too.”
“Nothing about girls?”
“I don’t think Orrin cared much for girls.”
“And lived at the same address all this time?”
She nodded, looking puzzled.
“And he stopped writing how long ago?”
That took thought. She pressed her lips and pushed a fingertip around the middle of the lower one. “About or four months,” she said at last.
“What was the date of his last letter?”
“I—I’m afraid I can’t tell you exactly the date. But it was like I said, three or four—”
I waved a hand at her “Anything out of the ordinary in it? Anything unusual said or anything unusual unsaid?”
“Why no. It seemed just like all the rest”
“Don’t you have any friends or relatives in this part of the country?”
She gave me a funny stare, started to say something, then shook her head sharply. “No.”
“Okay. Now I’ll tell you what’s wrong. I’ll skip over your not telling me where you’re staying, because it might be just that you’re afraid I’ll show up with a quart of hooch under my arm and make a pass at you.”
“That’s not a very nice way to talk,” she said.
“Nothing I say is nice. I’m not nice. By your standards nobody with less than three prayer-books could be nice. But I am inquisitive. What’s wrong with this picture is that you’re not scared. Neither you personally nor your mother. And you ought to be scared as hell.”
She clutched her bag to her bosom with tight little fingers. “You mean something has happened to him?” Her voice faded off into a sort of sad whisper, like a mortician asking for a down payment.
“I don’t know that anything has. But in your position, knowing the kind of guy Orrin was, the way his letters came through and then didn’t, I can’t see myself waiting for my summer vacation to come around before I start asking questions. I can’t see myself by-passing the police who have an organization for finding people. And going to a lone-wolf operator you never heard of, asking him to root around for you in the rubble. And I can’t see your dear old mother just sitting there in Manhattan, Kansas, week after week darning the minister’s winter underwear. No letter from Orrin. No news. And all she does about it is take a long breath and mend up another pair of pants.”
She came to her feet with a lunge. “You’re a horrid, disgusting person,” she said angrily. “I think you’re vile. Don’t you dare say mother and I weren’t worried. Just don’t you dare.”
I pushed the twenty dollars’ worth of currency a little closer to the other side of the desk. “You were worried twenty dollars’ worth, honey,” I said. “But about what I wouldn’t know. I guess I don’t really want to know. Just put this hunk of the folding back in your saddlebag and forget you ever met me. You might want to lend it to another detective tomorrow.”
She snapped her bag shut viciously on the money. “I’m not very likely to forget your rudeness,” she said between her teeth. “Nobody in the world’s ever talked to me the way you have.”
I stood up and wandered around the end of the desk. “Don’t think about it too much. You might get to like it.”