The High Window (11 page)

It was very quiet and quite cool now. The dance band seemed to be somewhere under my feet. It was muffled, and the tune was indistinguishable.

Linda Conquest came in through the open door behind me and shut it and stood looking at me with a cold light in her eyes.

NINETEEN

She looked like her photo and not like it. She had the wide cool mouth, the short nose, the wide cool eyes, the dark hair parted in the middle and the broad white line between the parting. She was wearing a white coat over her dress, with the collar turned up. She had her hands in the pockets of the coat and a cigarette in her mouth.

She looked older, her eyes were harder, and her lips seemed to have forgotten to smile. They would smile when she was singing, in that staged artificial smile. But in repose they were thin and tight and angry.

She moved over to the desk and stood looking down, as if counting the copper ornaments. She saw the cut glass decanter, took the stopper out, poured herself a drink and tossed it down with a quick flip of the wrist.

“You’re a man named Marlowe?” she asked, looking at me. She put her hips against the end of the desk and crossed her ankles.

I said I was a man named Marlowe.

“By and large,” she said, “I am quite sure I am not going to like you one damned little bit. So speak your piece and drift away.”

“What I like about this place is everything runs so true to type,” I said. “The cop on the gate, the shine on the door, the cigarette and check girls, the fat greasy sensual Jew with the tall stately bored showgirl, the well-dressed, drunk and horribly rude director cursing the barman, the silent guy with the gun, the night club owner with the soft gray hair and the B-picture mannerisms, and now you—the tall dark torcher with the negligent sneer, the husky voice, the hard-boiled vocabulary.”

She said: “Is that so?” and fitted her cigarette between her lips and drew slowly on it. “And what about the wisecracking snooper with the last year’s gags and the come-hither smile?”

“And what gives me the right to talk to you at all?” I said.

“I’ll bite. What does?”

“She wants it back. Quickly. It has to be fast or there will be trouble.”

“I thought—” she started to say and stopped cold. I watched her remove the sudden trace of interest from her face by monkeying with her cigarette and bending her face over it. “She wants what back, Mr. Marlowe?”

“The Brasher Doubloon.”

She looked up at me and nodded, remembering—letting me see her remembering.

“Oh, the Brasher Doubloon.”

“I bet you completely forgot it,” I said.

“Well, no. I’ve seen it a number of times,” she said. “She wants it back, you said. Do you mean she thinks I took it?”

“Yeah. Just that.”

“She’s a dirty old liar,” Linda Conquest said.

“What you think doesn’t make you a liar,” I said. “It only sometimes makes you mistaken. Is she wrong?”

“Why would I take her silly old coin?”

“Well—it’s worth a lot of money. She thinks you might need money. I gather she was not too generous.”

She laughed, a tight sneering little laugh. “No,” she said. “Mrs. Elizabeth Bright Murdock would not rate as very generous.”

“Maybe you just took it for spite, kind of,” I said hopefully.

“Maybe I ought to slap your face.” She killed her cigarette in Morny’s copper goldfish bowl, speared the crushed stub absently with the letter opener and dropped it into the wastebasket.

“Passing on from that to perhaps more important matters,” I said, “will you give him a divorce?”

“For twenty-five grand,” she said, not looking at me, “I should be glad to.”

“You’re not in love with the guy, huh?”

“You’re breaking my heart, Marlowe.”

“He’s in love with you,” I said. “After all you did marry him.”

She looked at me lazily. “Mister, don’t think I didn’t pay for that mistake.” She lit another cigarette. “But a girl has to live. And it isn’t always as easy as it looks. And so a girl can make a mistake, marry the wrong guy and the wrong family, looking for something that isn’t there. Security, or whatever.”

“But not needing any love to do it,” I said.

“I don’t want to be too cynical, Marlowe. But you’d be surprised how many girls marry to find a home, especially girls whose arm muscles are all tired out fighting off the kind of optimists that come into these gin and glitter joints.”

“You had a home and you gave it up.”

“It got to be too dear. That port-sodden old fake made the bargain too tough. How do you like her for a client?”

“I’ve had worse.”

She picked a shred of tobacco off her lip. “You notice what she’s doing to that girl?”

“Merle? I noticed she bullied her.”

“It isn’t just that. She has her cutting out dolls. The girl had a shock of some kind and the old brute has used the effect of it to dominate the girl completely. In company she yells at her but in private she’s apt to be stroking her hair and whispering in her ear. And the kid sort of shivers.”

“I didn’t quite get all that,” I said.

“The kid’s in love with Leslie, but she doesn’t know it. Emotionally she’s about ten years old. Something funny is going to happen in that family one of these days. I’m glad I won’t be there.”

I said: “You’re a smart girl, Linda. And you’re tough and you’re wise. I suppose when you married him you thought you could get your hands on plenty.”

She curled her lip. “I thought it would at least be a vacation. It wasn’t even that. That’s a smart ruthless woman, Marlowe. Whatever she’s got you doing, it’s not what she says. She’s up to something. Watch your step.”

“Would she kill a couple of men?”

She laughed.

“No kidding,” I said. “A couple of men have been killed and one of them at least is connected with rare coins.”

“I don’t get it,” she looked at me levelly. “Murdered, you mean?”

I nodded.

“You tell Morny all that?”

“About one of them.”

“You tell the cops?”

“About one of them. The same one.”

She moved her eyes over my face. We stared at each other. She looked a little pale, or just tired. I thought she had grown a little paler than before.

“You’re making that up,” she said between her teeth.

I grinned and nodded. She seemed to relax then.

“About the Brasher Doubloon?” I said. “You didn’t take it. Okay. About the divorce, what?”

“That’s none of your affair.”

“I agree. Well, thanks for talking to me. Do you know a fellow named Vannier?”

“Yes.” Her face froze hard now. “Not well. He’s a friend of Lois.”

“A very good friend.”

“One of these days he’s apt to turn out to be a small quiet funeral too.”

“Hints,” I said, “have sort of been thrown in that direction. There’s something about the guy. Every time his name comes up the party freezes.”

She stared at me and said nothing. I thought that an idea was stirring at the back of her eyes, but if so it didn’t come out. She said quietly:

“Morny will sure as hell kill him, if he doesn’t lay off Lois.”

“Go on with you. Lois flops at the drop of a hat. Anybody can see that.”

“Perhaps Alex is the one person who can’t see it.”

“Vannier hasn’t anything to do with my job anyway. He has no connection with the Murdocks.”

She lifted a corner of her lip at me and said: “No? Let me tell you something. No reason why I should. I’m just a great big open-hearted kid. Vannier knows Elizabeth Bright Murdock and well. He never came to the house but once while I was there, but he called on the phone plenty of times. I caught some of the calls. He always asked for Merle.”

“Well—that’s funny,” I said. “Merle, huh?”

She bent to crush out her cigarette and again she speared the stub and dropped it into the wastebasket.

“I’m very tired,” she said suddenly. “Please go away.”

I stood there for a moment, looking at her and wondering. Then I said: “Good night and thanks. Good luck.”

I went out and left her standing there with her hands in the pockets of the white coat, her head bent and her eyes looking at the floor.

It was two o’clock when I got back to Hollywood and put the car away and went upstairs to my apartment. The wind was ail gone but the air still had that dryness and lightness of the desert. The air in the apartment was dead and Breeze’s cigar butt had made it a little worse than dead. I opened windows and flushed the place through while I undressed and stripped the pockets of my suit.

Out of them with other things came the dental supply company’s bill. It still looked like a bill to one H. R. Teager for 30 lbs. of crystobolite and 25 lbs. of albastone.

I dragged the phone book up on the desk in the living room and looked up Teager. Then the confused memory clicked into place. His address was 422 West Ninth Street. The address of the Belfont Building was 422 West Ninth Street.

H. R. Teager Dental Laboratories had been one of the names on doors on the sixth floor of the Belfont Building when I did my backstairs crawl away from the office of Elisha Morningstar.

But even the Pinkertons have to sleep, and Marlowe needed far, far more sleep than the Pinkertons. I went to bed.

TWENTY

It was just as hot in Pasadena as the day before and the big dark red brick house on Dresden Avenue looked just as cool and the little painted Negro waiting by the hitching block looked just as sad. The same butterfly landed on the same hydrangea bush—or it looked like the same one—the same heavy scent of summer lay on the morning, and the same middle-aged sourpuss with the frontier voice opened to my ring.

She led me along the same hallways to the same sunless sunroom. In it Mrs. Elizabeth Bright Murdock sat in the same reed chaise-longue and as I came into the room she was pouring herself a slug from what looked like the same port bottle but was more probably a grandchild.

The maid shut the door, I sat down and put my hat on the floor, just like yesterday, and Mrs. Murdock gave me the same hard level stare and said:

“Well?”

“Things are bad,” I said. “The cops are after me.”

She looked as flustered as a side of beef. “Indeed. I thought you were more competent than that.”

I brushed it off. “When I left here yesterday morning a man followed me in a coupé. I don’t know what he was doing here or how he got here. I suppose he followed me here, but I feel doubtful about that. I shook him off, but he turned up again in the hall outside my office. He followed me again, so I invited him to explain why and he said he knew who I was and he needed help and asked me to come to his apartment on Bunker Hill and talk to him. I went, after I had seen Mr. Morningstar, and found the man shot to death on the floor of his bathroom.”

Mrs. Murdock sipped a little port. Her hand might have shaken a little, but the light in the room was too dim for me to be sure. She cleared her throat.

“Go on.”

“His name is George Anson Phillips. A young, blond fellow, rather dumb. He claimed to be a private detective.”

“I never heard of him,” Mrs. Murdock said coldly. “I never saw him to my knowledge and I don’t know anything about him. Did you think I employed him to follow you?”

“I didn’t know what to think. He talked about pooling our resources and he gave me the impression that he was working for some member of your family. He didn’t say so in so many words.”

“He wasn’t. You can be quite definite on that.” The baritone voice was as steady as a rock.

“I don’t think you know quite as much about your family as you think you do, Mrs. Murdock.”

“I know you have been questioning my son—contrary to my orders,” she said coldly.

“I didn’t question him. He questioned me. Or tried to.”

“We’ll go into that later,” she said harshly. “What about this man you found shot? You are involved with the police on account of him?”

“Naturally. They want to know why he followed me, what I was working on, why he spoke to me, why he asked me to come to his apartment and why I went. But that is only the half of it.”

She finished her port and poured herself another glass.

“How’s your asthma?” I asked.

“Bad,” she said. “Get on with your story.”

“I saw Morningstar. I told you about that over the phone. He pretended not to have the Brasher Doubloon, but admitted it had been offered to him and said he could get it. As I told you. Then you told me it had been returned to you, so that was that.”

I waited, thinking she would tell me some story about how the coin had been returned, but she just stared at me bleakly over the wine glass.

“So, as I had made a sort of arrangement with Mr. Morningstar to pay him a thousand dollars for the coin—”

“You had no authority to do anything like that,” she barked.

I nodded, agreeing with her.

“Maybe I was kidding him a little,” I said. “And I know I was kidding myself. Anyway after what you told me over the phone I tried to get in touch with him to tell him the deal was off. He’s not in the phone book except at his office. I went to his office. This was quite late. The elevator man said he was still in his office. He was lying on his back on the floor, dead. Killed by a blow on the head and shock, apparently. Old men die easily. The blow might not have been intended to kill him. I called the Receiving Hospital, but didn’t give my name.”

“That was wise of you,” she said.

“Was it? It was considerate of me, but I don’t think I’d call it wise. I want to be nice, Mrs. Murdock. You understand that in your rough way, I hope. But two murders happened in a matter of hours and both the bodies were found by me. And both the victims were connected—in some manner—with your Brasher Doubloon.”

“I don’t understand. This other, younger man also?”

“Yes. Didn’t I tell you over the phone? I thought I did.” I wrinkled my brow, thinking back. I knew I had.

She said calmly: “It’s possible. I wasn’t paying a great deal of attention to what you said. You see, the doubloon had already been returned. And you sounded a little drunk.”

“I wasn’t drunk. I might have felt a little shock, but I wasn’t drunk. You take all this very calmly.”

“What do you want me to do?”

I took a deep breath. “I’m connected with one murder already, by having found the body and reported it. I may presently be connected with another, by having found the body and not reported it. Which is much more serious for me. Even as far as it goes, I have until noon today to disclose the name of my client.”

“That,” she said, still much too calm for my taste, “would be a breach of confidence. You are not going to do that, I’m sure.”

“I wish you’d leave that damn port alone and make some effort to understand the position,” I snapped at her.

She looked vaguely surprised and pushed her glass away—about four inches away.

“This fellow Phillips,” I said, “had a license as a private detective. How did I happen to find him dead? Because he followed me and I spoke to him and he asked me to come to his apartment. And when I got there he was dead. The police know all this. They may even believe it. But they don’t believe the connection between Phillips and me is quite that much of a coincidence. They think there is a deeper connection between Phillips and me and they insist on knowing what I am doing, who I am working for. Is that clear?”

“You’ll find a way out of all that,” she said. “I expect it to cost me a little more money, of course.”

I felt myself getting pinched around the nose. My mouth felt dry. I needed air. I took another deep breath and another dive into the tub of blubber that was sitting across the room from me on the reed chaise-longue, looking as unperturbed as a bank president refusing a loan.

“I’m working for you,” I said, “now, this week, today. Next week I’ll be working for somebody else, I hope. And the week after that for still somebody else. In order to do that I have to be on reasonably good terms with the police. They don’t have to love me, but they have to be fairly sure I am not cheating on them. Assume Phillips knew nothing about the Brasher Doubloon. Assume, even, that he knew about it, but that his death had nothing to do with it. I still have to tell the cops what I know about him. And they have to question anybody they want to question. Can’t you understand that?”

“Doesn’t the law give you the right to protect a client?” she snapped. “If it doesn’t, what is the use of anyone’s hiring a detective?”

I got up and walked around my chair and sat down again. I leaned forward and took hold of my kneecaps and squeezed them until my knuckles glistened.

“The law, whatever it is, is a matter of give and take, Mrs. Murdock. Like most other things. Even if I had the legal right to stay clammed up—refuse to talk—and got away with it once, that would be the end of my business. I’d be a guy marked for trouble. One way or another they would get me. I value your business, Mrs. Murdock, but not enough to cut my throat for you and bleed in your lap.”

She reached for her glass and emptied it.

“You seem to have made a nice mess of the whole thing,” she said. “You didn’t find my daughter-in-law and you didn’t find my Brasher Doubloon. But you found a couple of dead men that I have nothing to do with and you have neatly arranged matters so that I must tell the police all my private and personal business in order to protect you from your own incompetence. That’s what I see. If I am wrong, pray correct me.”

She poured some more wine and guIped it too fast and went into a paroxysm of coughing. Her shaking hand slid the glass on to the table, slopping the wine. She threw herself forward in her seat and got purple in the face.

I jumped up and went over and landed one on her beefy back that would have shaken the City Hall.

She let out a long strangled wail and drew her breath in rackingly and stopped coughing. I pressed one of the keys on her dictaphone box and when somebody answered, metallic and loud, through the metal disk I said: “Bring Mrs. Murdock a glass of water, quick!” and then let the key up again.

I sat down again and watched her pull herself together. When her breath was coming evenly and without effort, I said: “You’re not tough. You just think you’re tough. You been living too long with people that are scared of you. Wait’ll you meet up with some law. Those boys are professionals. You’re just a spoiled amateur.”

The door opened and the maid came in with a pitcher of ice water and a glass. She put them down on the table and went out.

I poured Mrs. Murdock a glass of water and put it in her hand.

“Sip it, don’t drink it. You won’t like the taste of it, but it won’t hurt you.”

She sipped, then drank half of the glass, then put the glass down and wiped her lips.

“To think,” she said raspingly, “that out of all the snoopers for hire I could have employed, I had to pick out a man who would bully me in my own home.”

“That’s not getting you anywhere either,” I said. “We don’t have a lot of time. What’s our story to the police going to be?”

“The police mean nothing to me. Absolutely nothing. And if you give them my name, I shall regard it as a thoroughly disgusting breach of faith.”

That put me back where we started.

“Murder changes everything, Mrs. Murdock. You can’t dummy up on a murder case. We’ll have to tell them why you employed me and what to do. They won’t publish it in the papers, you know. That is, they won’t if they believe it. They certainly won’t believe you hired me to investigate Elisha Morningstar just because he called up and wanted to buy the doubloon. They may not find out that you couldn’t have sold the coin, if you wanted to, because they might not think of that angle. But they won’t believe you hired a private detective just to investigate a possible purchaser. Why should you?”

“That’s my business, isn’t it?”

“No. You can’t fob the cops off that way. You have to satisfy them that you are being frank and open and have nothing to hide. As long as they think you are hiding something they never let up. Give them a reasonable and plausible story and they go away cheerful. And the most reasonable and plausible story is always the truth. Any objection to telling it?”

“Every possible objection,” she said. “But it doesn’t seem to make much difference. Do we have to tell them that I suspected my daughter-in-law of stealing the coin and that I was wrong?”

“It would be better.”

“And that it has been returned and how?”

“It would be better.”

“That is going to humiliate me very much.”

I shrugged.

“You’re a callous brute,” she said. “You’re a cold-blooded fish. I don’t like you. I deeply regret ever having met you.”

“Mutual,” I said.

She reached a thick finger to a key and barked into the talking box. “Merle. Ask my son to come in here at once. And I think you may as well come in with him.”

She released the key, pressed her broad fingers together and let her hands drop heavily to her thighs. Her bleak eyes went up to the ceiling.

Her voice was quiet and sad saying: “My son took the coin, Mr. Marlowe. My son. My own son.”

I didn’t say anything. We sat there glaring at each other. In a couple of minutes they both came in and she barked at them to sit down.