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“I don’t have one. You’ve talked me out of it. I wonder why he paid a week in advance.”

Javonen smiled—very slightly. Call it a down payment on a smile. “Look, Marlowe, I put in five years in Military Intelligence. I can size up a man—like for instance the guy we’re talking about. He pays in advance because we feel happier that way. It has a stabilizing influence.”

“He ever pay in advance before?”

“God damn it. . . !”

“Watch yourself,” I cut in. “The elderly gent with the walking stick is interested in your reactions.”

He looked halfway across the lobby to where a thin, old, bloodless man sat in a very low round-backed padded chair with his chin on gloved hands and the gloved hands on the crook of a stick. He stared unblinkingly in our direction.

“Oh, him,” Javonen said. “He can’t even see this far. He’s eighty years old.”

He stood up and faced me. “Okay, you’re clammed,” he said quietly. “You’re a private op, you’ve got a client and instructions. I’m only interested in protecting the hotel. Leave the gun home next time. If you have questions, come to me. Don’t question the help. It gets told around and we don’t like it. You wouldn’t find the local cops friendly if I suggested you were being troublesome.”

“Can I buy a drink in the bar before I go?”

“Keep your jacket buttoned.”

“Five years in Military Intelligence is a lot of experience,” I said looking up at him admiringly.

“It ought to be enough.” He nodded briefly and strolled away through the arch, back straight, shoulders back, chin in, a hard lean well set-up piece of man. A smooth operator. He had milked me dry—of everything that was printed on my business card.

Then I noticed that the old party in the low chair had lifted a gloved hand off the crook of his stick and was curving a finger at me. I pointed a finger at my chest and looked the question. He nodded, so over I went.

He was old, all right, but a long way from feeble and a long way from dim. His white hair was neatly parted, his nose was long and sharp and veined, his faded-out blue eyes were still keen, but the lids drooped wearily over them. One ear held the plastic button of a hearing aid, grayish pink like his ear. The suede gloves on his hands had the cuffs turned back. He wore gray spats over polished black shoes.

“Pull up a chair, young man.” His voice was thin and dry and rustled like bamboo leaves.

I sat down beside him. He peered at me and his mouth smiled. “Our excellent Mr. Javonen spent five years in Military Intelligence, as no doubt he told you.”

“Yes, sir. CIC, a branch of it.”

“Military Intelligence is an expression which contains an interior fallacy. So you are curious about how Mr. Mitchell paid his bill?”

I stared at him. I looked at the hearing aid. He tapped his breast pocket. “I was deaf long before they invented these things. As the result of a hunter balking at a fence. It was my own fault. I lifted him too soon. I was still a young man. I couldn’t see myself using an ear trumpet, so I learned to lip-read. It takes a certain amount of practice.”

“What about Mitchell, sir?”

“We’ll come to him. Don’t be in a hurry.” He looked up and nodded.

A voice said, “Good evening, Mr. Clarendon.” A bellhop went by on his way to the bar. Clarendon followed him with his eyes.

“Don’t bother with that one,” he said. “He’s a pimp. I have spent many many years in lobbies, in lounges and bars, on porches, terraces and ornate gardens in hotels all over the world. I have outlived everyone in my family. I shall go on being useless and inquisitive until the day comes when the stretcher carries me off to some nice airy corner room in a hospital. The starched white dragons will minister to me. The bed will be wound up, wound down. Trays will come with that awful loveless hospital food. My pulse and temperature will be taken at frequent intervals and invariably when I am dropping off to sleep. I shall lie there and hear the rustle of the starched skirts, the slurring sound of the rubber shoe soles on the aseptic floor, and see the silent horror of the doctor’s smile. After a while they will put the oxygen tent over me and draw the screens around the little white bed and I shall, without even knowing it, do the one thing in the world no man ever has to do twice.”

He turned his head slowly and looked at me. “Obviously, I talk too much. Your name, sir?”

“Philip Marlowe.”

“I am Henry Clarendon IV. I belong to what used to be called the upper classes. Groton, Harvard, Heidelberg, the Sorbonne. I even spent a year at Uppsala. I cannot clearly remember why. To fit me for a life of leisure, no doubt. So you are a private detective. I do eventually get around to speaking of something other than myself, you see.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You should have come to me for information. But of course you couldn’t know that.”

I shook my head. I lit a cigarette, first offering one to Mr. Henry Clarendon IV. He refused it with a vague nod.

“However, Mr. Marlowe, it is something you should have certainly learned. In every luxury hotel in the world there will be half a dozen elderly idlers of both sexes who sit around and stare like owls. They watch, they listen, they compare notes, they learn everything about everyone. They have nothing else to do, because hotel life is the most deadly of all forms of boredom. And no doubt I’m boring you equally.”

“I’d rather hear about Mitchell, sir. Tonight at least, Mr. Clarendon.”

“Of course. I’m egocentric, and absurd, and I prattle like a schoolgirl. You observe that handsome dark-haired woman over there playing canasta? The one with too much jewelry and the heavy gold trim on her glasses?”

He didn’t point or even look. But I picked her out. She had an overblown style and she looked just a little hardboiled. She was the one with the ice, the paint.

“Her name is Margo West. She is seven times a divorcee. She has stacks of money and reasonably good looks, but she can’t hold a man. She tries too hard. Yet she’s not a fool. She would have an affair with a man like Mitchell, she would give him money and pay his bills, but she would never marry him. They had a fight last night. Nevertheless I believe she may have paid his bill. She often has before.”

“I thought he got a check from his father in Toronto every month. Not enough to last him, huh?”

Henry Clarendon IV gave me a sardonic smile. “My dear fellow, Mitchell has no father in Toronto. He gets no monthly check. He lives on women. That is why he lives in a hotel like this. There is always some rich and lonely female in a luxury hotel. She may not be beautiful or very young, but she has other charms. In the dull season in Esmeralda, which is from the end of the race meet at Del Mar until about the middle of January, the pickings are very lean. Then Mitchell is apt to travel—Majorca or Switzerland if he can make it, to Florida or one of the Caribbean islands if he is not in rich funds. This year he had poor luck. I understand he only got as far as Washington.”

He brushed a glance at me. I stayed deadpan polite, just a nice youngish guy (by his standards) being polite to an old gentleman who liked to talk.

“Okay,” I said. “She paid his hotel bill, maybe. But why a week in advance?”

He moved one gloved hand over the other. He tilted his stick and followed it with his body. He stared at the pattern in the carpet. Finally he clicked his teeth. He had solved the problem. He straightened up again.

“That would be severance pay,” he said dryly. “The final and irrevocable end of the romance. Mrs. West, as the English say, had had it. Also, there was a new arrival in Mitchell’s company yesterday, a girl with dark red hair. Chestnut red, not fire red or strawberry red. What I saw of their relationship seemed to me a little peculiar. They were both under some sort of strain.”

“Would Mitchell blackmail a woman?”

He chuckled. “He would blackmail an infant in a cradle. A man who lives on women always blackmails them, although the word may not be used. He also steals from them when he can get his hands on any of their money. Mitchell forged two checks with Margo West’s name. That ended the affair. No doubt she has the checks. But she won’t do anything about it except keep them.”

“Mr. Clarendon, with all due respect, how in hell would you know all these things?”

“She told me. She cried on my shoulder.” He looked toward the handsome dark-haired woman. “She does not at the moment look as if I could be telling the truth. Nevertheless I am.”

“And why are you telling it to me?”

His face moved into a rather ghastly grin. “I have no delicacy. I should like to marry Margo West myself. It would reverse the pattern. Very small things amuse a man of my age. A hummingbird, the extraordinary way a strellitzia bloom opens. Why at a certain point in its growth does the bud turn at right angles? Why does the bud split so gradually and why do the flowers emerge always in a certain exact order, so that the sharp unopened end of the bud looks like a bird’s beak and the blue and orange petals make a bird of paradise? What strange deity made such a complicated world when presumably he could have made a simple one? Is he omnipotent? How could he be? There’s so much suffering and almost always by the innocent. Why will a mother rabbit trapped in a burrow by a ferret put her babies behind her and allow her throat to be torn out? Why? In two weeks more she would not even recognize them. Do you believe in God, young man?”

It was a long way around, but it seemed I had to travel it. “If you mean an omniscient and omnipotent God who intended everything exactly the way it is, no.”

“But you should, Mr. Marlowe. It is a great comfort. We all come to it in the end because we have to die and become dust. Perhaps for the individual that is all, perhaps not. There are grave difficulties about the afterlife. I don’t think I should really enjoy a heaven in which I shared lodgings with a Congo pygmy or a Chinese coolie or a Levantine rug peddler or even a Hollywood producer. I’m a snob, I suppose, and the remark is in bad taste. Nor can I imagine a heaven presided over by a benevolent character in a long white beard locally known as God. These are foolish conceptions of very immature minds. But you may not question a man’s religious beliefs however idiotic they may be. Of course I have no right to assume that I shall go to heaven. Sounds rather dull, as a matter of fact. On the other hand how can I imagine a hell in which a baby that died before baptism occupies the same degraded position as a hired killer or a Nazi death-camp commandant or a member of the Politburo? How strange it is that man’s finest aspirations, dirty little animal that he is, his finest actions also, his great and unselfish heroism, his constant daily courage in a harsh world—how strange that these things should be so much finer than his fate on this earth. That has to be somehow made reasonable. Don’t tell me that honor is merely a chemical reaction or that a man who deliberately gives his life for another is merely following a behavior pattern. Is God happy with the poisoned cat dying alone in convulsions behind the billboard? Is God happy that life is cruel and that only the fittest survive? The fittest for what? Oh no, far from it. If God were omnipotent and omniscient in any literal sense, he wouldn’t have bothered to make the universe at all. There is no success where there is no possibility of failure, no art without the resistance of the medium. Is it blasphemy to suggest that God has his bad days when nothing goes right, and that God’s days are very, very long?”

“You’re a wise man, Mr. Clarendon. You said something about reversing the pattern.”

He smiled faintly. “You thought I had lost the place in the overlong book of my words. No sir, I had not. A woman like Mrs. West almost always ends up marrying a series of pseudo-elegant fortune hunters, tango dancers with handsome sideburns, skiing instructors with beautiful blond muscles, faded French and Italian aristocrats, shoddy princelings from the Middle East, each worse than the one before. She might even in her extremity marry a man like Mitchell. If she married me, she would marry an old bore, but at least she would marry a gentleman.”

“Yeah.”

He chuckled. “The monosyllable indicates a surfeit of Henry Clarendon IV. I don’t blame you. Very well, Mr. Marlowe, why are you interested in Mitchell? But I suppose you can’t tell me.”

“No sir, I can’t. I’m interested in knowing why he left so soon after coming back, who paid his bill for him and why, if Mrs. West or, say, some well-heeled friend like Clark Brandon paid for him, it was necessary to pay a week in advance as well.”

His thin worn eyebrows curved upwards. “Brandon could easily guarantee Mitchell’s account by lifting the telephone. Mrs. West might prefer to give him the money and have him pay the bill himself. But a week in advance? Why would our Javonen tell you that? What does it suggest to you?”

“That there’s something about Mitchell the hotel doesn’t want known. Something that might cause the sort of publicity they hate.”

“Such as?”

“Suicide and murder are the sort of things I mean. That’s just by way of example. You’ve noticed how the name of a big hotel is hardly ever mentioned when one of the guests jumps out of a window? It’s always a midtown or a downtown hotel or a well-known exclusive hotel—something like that. And if it’s rather a high class place, you never see any cops in the lobby, no matter what happened upstairs.”

His eyes went sideways and mine followed his. The canasta table was breaking up. The dolled-up and well-iced woman called Margo West strolled off towards the bar with one of the men, her cigarette holder sticking out like a bowsprit.

“So?”

“Well,” I said, and I was working hard, “if Mitchell keeps his room on the records, whatever room he had—”

“Four-eighteen,” Clarendon put in calmly. “On the ocean side. Fourteen dollars a day out of season, eighteen in season.”

“Not exactly cheap for a guy on his uppers. But he still has it, let’s say. So whatever happened, he’s just away for a few days. Took his car out, put his luggage in around seven
A.M.
this morning. A damn funny time to leave when he was as drunk as a skunk late last night.”

Clarendon leaned back and let his gloved hands hang limp. I could see that he was getting tired. “If it happened that way, wouldn’t the hotel prefer to have you think he had left for good? Then you’d have to search for him somewhere else. That is, if you really are searching for him.”