The Little Sister (14 page)

21

They were just finishing a funeral service at The Garland Home of Peace. A big gray hearse was waiting at the side entrance. Cars were clotted along both sides of the street, three black sedans in a row at the side of Dr. Vincent Lagardie’s establishment. People were coming sedately down the walk from the funeral chapel to the corner and getting into their cars. I stopped a third of a block away and waited. The cars didn’t move. Then three people came out with a woman heavily veiled and all in black. They half carried her down to a big limousine. The boss mortician fluttered around making elegant little gestures and body movements as graceful as a Chopin ending. His composed gray face was long enough to wrap twice around his neck.

The amateur pallbearers carried the coffin out the side door and professionals eased the weight from them and slid it into the back of the hearse as smoothly as if it had no more weight than a pan of butter rolls. Flowers began to grow into a mound over it. The glass doors were closed and motors started all over the block.

A few moments later nothing was left but one sedan across the way and the boss mortician sniffing a tree-rose on his way back to count the take. With a beaming smile he faded into his neat colonial doorway and the world was still and empty again. The sedan that was left hadn’t moved. I drove along and made a U-turn and came up behind it. The driver wore blue serge and a soft cap with a shiny peak. He was doing a crossword puzzle from the morning paper. I stuck a pair of those diaphanous mirror sunglasses on my nose and strolled past him toward Dr. Lagardie’s place. He didn’t look up. When I was a few yards ahead I took the glasses off and pretended to polish them on my handkerchief. I caught him in one of the mirror lenses. He still didn’t look up. He was just a guy doing a crossword puzzle. I put the mirror glasses back on my nose, and went around to Dr. Lagardie’s front door.

The sign over the door said: Ring and Enter. I rang, but the door wouldn’t let me enter. I waited. I rang again. I waited again. There was silence inside. Then the door opened a crack very slowly, and the thin expressionless face over a white uniform looked out at me.

“I’m sorry. Doctor is not seeing any patients today.” She blinked at the mirror glasses. She didn’t like them. Her tongue moved restlessly inside her lips.

“I’m looking for a Mr. Quest. Orrin P. Quest.”

“Who?” There was a dim reflection of shock behind her eyes.

“Quest. Q as in Quintessential, U as in Uninhibited, E as in Extrasensory, S as in Subliminal, T as in Toots. Put them all together and they spell Brother.”

She looked at me as if I had just come up from the floor of the ocean with a drowned mermaid under my arm.

“I beg your pardon. Dr. Lagardie is not—”

She was pushed out of the way by invisible hands and a thin dark haunted man stood in the half-open doorway.

“I am Dr. Lagardie. What is it, please?”

I gave him a card. He read it. He looked at me. He had the white pinched look of a man who is waiting for disaster to happen.

“We talked over the phone,” I said. “About a man named Clausen.”

“Please come in,” he said quickly. “I don’t remember, but come in.”

I went in. The room was dark, the blinds drawn, the windows closed. It was dark, and it was cold.

The nurse backed away and sat down behind a small desk. It was an ordinary living room with light painted woodwork which had once been dark, judging by the probable age of the house. A square arch divided the living room from the dining room. There were easy chairs and a center table with magazines. It looked like what it was—the reception room of a doctor practicing in what had been a private home.

The telephone rang on the desk in front of the nurse. She started and her hand went out and then stopped. She stared at the telephone. After a while it stopped ringing.

“What was the name you mentioned?” Dr. Lagardie asked me softly.

“Orrin Quest. His sister told me he was doing some kind of work for you, Doctor. I’ve been looking for him for days. Last night he called her up. From here, she said.”

“There is no one of that name here,” Dr. Lagardie said politely. “There hasn’t been.”

“You don’t know him at all?”

“I have never heard of him.”

“I can’t figure why he would say that to his sister.”

The nurse dabbed at her eyes furtively. The telephone on her desk burred and made her jump again. “Don’t answer it,” Dr. Lagardie said without turning his head.

We waited while it rang. Everybody waits while a telephone rings. After a while it stopped.

“Why don’t you go home, Miss Watson? There’s nothing for you to do here.”

“Thank you, Doctor.” She sat without moving, looking down at the desk. She squeezed her eyes shut and blinked them open. She shook her head hopelessly.

Dr. Lagardie turned back to me. “Shall we go into my office?”

We went across through another door leading to a hallway. I walked on eggs. The atmosphere of the house was charged with foreboding. He opened a door and ushered me into what must have once been a bedroom, but nothing suggested a bedroom. It was a small compact doctor’s office. An open door showed a part of an examination room. A sterilizer was working in the corner. There were a lot of needles cooking in it.

“That’s a lot of needles,” I said, always quick with an idea.

“Sit down, Mr. Marlowe.”

He went behind the desk and sat down and picked up a long thin letter-opening knife.

He looked at me levelly from his sorrowful eyes. “No, I don’t know anyone named Orrin Quest, Mr. Marlowe. I can’t imagine any reason in the world why a person of that name should say he was in my house.”

“Hiding out,” I said.

His eyebrows went up. “From what?”

“From some guys that might want to stick an ice pick in the back of his neck. On account of he is a little too quick with his little Leica. Taking people’s photographs when they want to be private. Or it could be something else, like peddling reefers and he got wise. Am I talking in riddles?”

“It was you who sent the police here,” he said coldly.

I didn’t say anything.

“It was you who called up and reported Clausen’s death.”

I said the same as before.

“It was you who called me up and asked me if I knew Clausen. I said I did not.”

“But it wasn’t true.”

“I was under no obligation to give you information, Mr. Marlowe.”

I nodded and got a cigarette out and lit it. Dr. Lagardie glanced at his watch. He turned in his chair and switched off the sterilizer. I looked at the needles. A lot of needles. Once before I had had trouble in Bay City with a guy who cooked a lot of needles.

“What makes it?” I asked him. “The yacht harbor?”

He picked up the wicked-looking paper knife with a silver handle in the shape of a nude woman. He pricked the ball of his thumb. A pearl of dark blood showed on it. He put it to his mouth and licked it. “I like the taste of blood,” he said softly.

There was a distant sound as of the front door opening and closing. We both listened to it carefully. We listened to retreating steps on the front steps of the house. We listened hard.

“Miss Watson has gone home,” Dr. Lagardie said. “We are all alone in the house.” He mulled that over and licked his thumb again. He laid the knife down carefully on the desk blotter. “Ah, the question of the yacht harbor,” he added. “The proximity of Mexico you are thinking of, no doubt. The ease with which marijuana—”

“I wasn’t thinking so much of marijuana any more.” I stared again at the needles. He followed my stare. He shrugged.

I said: “Why so many of them?”

“Is it any of your business?”

“Nothing’s any of my business.”

“But you seem to expect your questions to be answered.”

“I’m just talking,” I said. “Waiting for something to happen. Something is going to happen in this house. It’s leering at me from corners.”

Dr Lagardie licked another pearl of blood off his thumb.

I looked hard at him. It didn’t buy me a way into his soul. He was quiet, dark and shuttered and all the misery of life was in his eyes. But he was still gentle.

“Let me tell you about the needles,” I said.

“By all means.” He picked the long thin knife up again.

“Don’t do that,” I said sharply. “It gives me the creeps. Like petting snakes.”

He put the knife down again gently and smiled. “We seem to talk in circles,” he suggested.

“We’ll get there. About the needles. A couple of years back I had a case that brought me down here and mixed me up with a doctor named Almore. Lived over on Altair Street. He had a funny practice. Went out nights with a big case of hypodermic needles—all ready to go. Loaded with the stuff. He had a peculiar practice. Drunks, rich junkies, of whom there are far more than people think, over stimulated people who had driven themselves beyond the possibility of relaxing. Insomniacs—all the neurotic types that can’t take it cold. Have to have their little pills and little shots in the arm. Have to have help over the humps. It gets to be all humps after a while. Good business for the doctor. Almore was the doctor for them. It’s all right to say it now. He died a year or so back. Of his own medicine.”

“And you think I may have inherited his practice?”

“Somebody would. As long as there are the patients, there will be the doctor.”

He looked even more exhausted than before. “I think you are an ass, my friend. I did not know Dr. Almore. And I do not have the sort of practice you attribute to him. As for the needles—just to get that trifle out of the way—they are in somewhat constant use in the medical profession today, often for such innocent medicaments as vitamin injections. And needles get dull. And when they are dull they are painful. Therefore in the course of the day one may use a dozen or more. Without narcotics in a single one.”

He raised his head slowly and stared at me with a fixed contempt.

“I can be wrong,” I said. “Smelling that reefer smoke over at Clausen’s place yesterday, and having him call your number on the telephone—and call you by your first name—all this probably made me jump to wrong conclusions.”

“I have dealt with addicts,” he said. “What doctor has not? It is a complete waste of time.”

“They get cured sometimes.”

“They can be deprived of their drug. Eventually after great suffering they can do without it. That is not curing them, my friend. That is not removing the nervous or emotional flaw which made them become addicts. It is making them dull negative people who sit in the sun and twirl their thumbs and die of sheer boredom and inanition.”

“That’s a pretty raw theory, doctor.”

“You raised the subject. I have disposed of it. I will raise another subject. You may have noticed a certain atmosphere and strain about this house. Even with those silly mirror glasses on. Which you may now remove. They don’t make you look in the least like Cary Grant.”

I took them off. I’d forgotten all about them.

“The police have been here, Mr. Marlowe. A certain Lieutenant Maglashan, who is investigating Clausen’s death. He would be pleased to meet you. Shall I call him? I’m sure he would come back.”

“Go ahead, call him,” I said. “I just stopped off here on my way to commit suicide.”

His hand went towards the telephone but was pulled to the side by the magnetism of the paper knife. He picked it up again. Couldn’t leave it alone, it seemed.

“You could kill a man with that,” I said.

“Very easily,” and he smiled a little.

“An inch and a half in the back of the neck, square in the center, just under the occipital bulge.”

“An ice pick would be better,” he said. “Especially a short one, filed down very sharp. It would not bend. If you miss the spinal cord, you do no great damage.”

“Takes a bit of medical knowledge then?” I got out a poor old package of Camels and untangled one from the cellophane.

He just kept on smiling. Very faintly, rather sadly. It was not the smile of a man in fear. “That would help,” he said softly. “But any reasonably dexterous person could acquire the technique in ten minutes.”

“Orrin Quest had a couple of years medical,” I said.

“I told you I did not know anybody of that name.”

“Yeah, I know you did. I didn’t quite believe you.”

He shrugged his shoulders. But his eyes as always went to the knife in the end.

“We’re a couple of sweethearts,” I said. “We just sit here making with the old over-the-desk dialogue. As though we hadn’t a care in the world. Because both of us are going to be in the clink by nightfall.”

He raised his eyebrows again. I went on: “You, because Clausen knew you by your first name. And you may have been the last man he talked to. Me, because I’ve been doing all the things a P.I. never gets away with. Hiding evidence, hiding information, finding bodies and not coming in with my hat in my hand to these lovely incorruptible Bay City cops. Oh, I’m through. Very much through. But there’s a wild perfume in the air this afternoon. I don’t seem to care. Or I’m in love. I just don’t seem to care.”