He told me about her, patiently, without rancor. She drank, she played around, she wasn’t a very good wife by his standards, but he could have been brought up too strict. She had a heart as big as a house, he said, and he loved her. He didn’t kid himself he was any dreamboat, just a steady worker bringing home the pay check. They had a joint bank account. She had drawn it all out, but he was prepared for that. He had a pretty good idea who she had lit out with, and if he was right the man would clean her out and leave her stranded.
He smiled. “Lies I got no use for. It’s not a porce matter. I just want Mabel back again. But she don’t come back until I find her. Maybe it’s a kind of game with her.”
“Name of Kerrigan,” he said. “Monroe Kerrigan. I don’t aim to knock the Catholics. There is plenty of bad Jews too. This Kerrigan is a barber when he works. I ain’t knocking barbers either. But a lot of them are drifters and horse players. Not real steady.”
“What’s your trouble, Mr. Edelweiss? I don’t do porce business.” I tried to give him back the photo. He waved it away. “The client is always mister to me,” I added. “Until he has told me a few dozen lies anyway.”
“Won’t you hear from her when she is cleaned out?”
He got out a photo of her and showed it to me. She might have been beautiful to him. To me she was a big sloppy-looking cow of a woman with a weak mouth.
“She gets awful ashamed. She might hurt herself.”
“Call me Simp,” he said. “Everybody else does. I got it coming. I’m a Jewish man married to a Gentile woman, twenty-four years of age, beautiful. She run away a couple of times before.”
“It’s a Missing Persons job, Mr. Edelweiss. You should go down and make a report.”
After lunch I had Mr. Simpson W. Edelweiss. He had a card to prove it. He was manager of a sewing machine agency. He was a small tired-looking man about forty-eight to fifty, small hands and feet, wearing a brown suit with sleeves too long, and a stiff white collar behind a purple tie with black diamonds on it. He sat on the edge of the chair without fidgeting and looked at me out of sad black eyes. His hair was black too and thick and rough without a sign of gray in it that I could see. He had a clipped mustache with a reddish tone. He could have passed for thirty-five if you didn’t look at the backs of his hands.
“No. I’m not knocking the police, but I don’t want it that way. Mabel would be humiliated.”
She went out mumbling.
The world seemed to be full of people Mr. Edelweiss was not knocking. He put some money on the desk.
“Where does it say I have to be?”
“Two hundred dollars,” he said. “Down payment. I’d rather do it my way.”
She stood up and slammed her shabby bag against her stomach. “You’re no gentleman,” she said shrilly.
“It will happen again,” I said.
“I wouldn’t if I were you. If you mention my name she may call me up. If she does that, I’ll tell her the facts.”
“Sure.” He shrugged and spread his hands gently. “But twenty-four years old and me almost fifty. How could it be different? She’ll settle down after a while. Trouble is, no kids. She can’t have kids. A Jew likes to have a family. So Mabel knows that. She’s humiliated.”
“I’m goin’ to tell her I been in to see you. I don’t have to say it’s her. Just that you’re workin’ on it.”
“You’re a very forgiving man, Mr. Edelweiss.”
“I don’t have a license to threaten people I know nothing about.”
“Well I ain’t a Christian,” he said. “And I’m not knocking Christians, you understand. But with me it’s real. I don’t just say it. I do it. Oh, I almost forgot the most important.”
“Yeah, but you being a dick and all.”
He got out a picture postcard and pushed it across the desk after the money. “From Honolulu she sends it. Money goes fast in Honolulu. One of my uncles had a jewelry business there. Retired now. Lives in Seattle.”
“Anybody you know could do that,” I said.
I picked the photo up again. “I’ll have to farm this one out,” I told him. “And I’ll have to have this copied.”
It took her twenty minutes or more to tell me this. She kneaded her bag incessantly while telling it.
“I could hear you saying that, Mr. Marlowe, before I got here. So I come prepared.” He took out an envelope and it contained five more prints. “I got Kerrigan too, but only a snapshot.” He went into another pocket and gave me another envelope. I looked at Kerrigan. He had a smooth dishonest face that did not surprise me. Three copies of Kerrigan.
The next cookie in the dish was a woman, not old, not young, not clean, not too dirty, obviously poor, shabby, querulous and stupid. The girl she roomed with—in her set any woman who works out is a girl—was taking money out of her purse. A dollar here, four bits there, but it added up. She figured she was out close to twenty dollars in all. She couldn’t afford it. She couldn’t afford to move either. She couldn’t afford a detective. She thought I ought to be willing to throw a scare into the roommate just on the telephone like, not mentioning any names.
Mr. Simpson W. Edelweiss gave me another card which had on it his name, his residence, his telephone number. He said he hoped it would not cost too much but that he would respond at once to any demand for further funds and he hoped to hear from me.
I just shook my head. I didn’t want to fight him. He might hit me on the head with my desk. He snorted and went out, almost taking the door with him.
“Two hundred ought to pretty near do it if she’s still in Honolulu,” I said. “What I need now is a detailed physical description of both parties that I can put into a telegram. Height, weight, age, coloring, any noticeable scars or other identifying marks, what clothes she was wearing and had with her, and how much money was in the account she cleaned out. If you’ve been through this before, Mr. Edelweiss, you will know what I want.”
“Sure I’m sure.” He was halfway to the door before the nickel dropped. He swung around fast then. “Say that again, buster.”
“I got a peculiar feeling about this Kerrigan. Uneasy.”
He started for the door. “Are you sure it’s the dog she’s trying to poison?” I asked his back.
I spent another half hour milking him and writing things down. Then he stood up quietly, shook hands quietly, bowed and left the office quietly.
“I’ll twist her goddam neck if I catch her,” he said, and I didn’t doubt he could have done it. He could have twisted the hind leg off of an elephant. “That’s what makes it I want somebody else. Just because the little tike barks when a car goes by the house. Sour-faced old bitch.”
“Tell Mabel everything is fine,” he said as he went out.
“I’ve got troubles, too, Mr. Kuissenen.”
It turned out to be routine. I sent a wire to an agency in Honolulu and followed it with an airmail containing the photos and whatever information I had left out of the wire. They found her working as a chambermaid’s helper in a luxury hotel, scrubbing bathtubs and bathroom floors and so on. Kerrigan had done just what Mr. Edelweiss expected, cleaned her out while she was asleep and skipped, leaving her stuck with the hotel bill. She pawned a ring which Kerrigan couldn’t have taken without violence, and got enough out of it to pay the hotel but not enough to buy her way home. So Edelweiss hopped a plane and went after her.
He stood up glowering. “Big shot,” he said. “Don’t need the dough, huh? Can’t be bothered saving the life of a itty-bitty dog. Nuts to you, big shot.”
He was too good for her. I sent him a bill for twenty dollars and the cost of a long telegram. The Honolulu agency grabbed the two hundred. With a portrait of Madison in my office safe I could afford to be underpriced.
“Sorry,” I said. “I’m tied up. Spending a couple of weeks hiding in a gopher hole in your back yard would be out of my line anyway—even for fifty bucks.”
So passed a day in the life of a P.I. Not exactly a typical day but not totally untypical either. What makes a man stay with it nobody knows. You don’t get rich, you don’t often have much fun. Sometimes you get beaten up or shot at or tossed into the jailhouse. Once in a long while you get dead. Every other month you decide to give it up and find some sensible occupation while you can still walk without shaking your head. Then the door buzzer rings and you open the inner door to the waiting room and there stands a new face with a new problem, a new load of grief, and a small piece of money.
“It says on the door you’re an investigator,” he said truculently. “Okay, go the hell out and investigate. Fifty bucks if you catch her.”
“Come in, Mr. Thingummy. What can I do for you?”
I told him about the Tailwaggers. He was far from interested. He knew about the S.P.C.A. The S.P.C.A. could take a running jump. They couldn’t see nothing smaller than a horse.
There must be a reason.
“What’s them?”
Three days later in the shank of the afternoon Eileen Wade called me up, and asked me to come around to the house for a drink the next evening. They were having a few friends in for cocktails. Roger would like to see me and thank me adequately. And would I please send in a bill?
“S.P.C.A.? The Tailwaggers?”
“You don’t owe me anything, Mrs. Wade. What little I did I got paid for.”
“I try the police. They might get around to it some time next year. Right now they’re busy sucking up to MGM.”
“I must have looked very silly acting Victorian about it,” she said. “A kiss doesn’t seem to mean much nowadays. You will come, won’t you?”
“Try the police?”
“I guess so. Against my better judgment.”
“I got to work for a living, mister. I’m losing four twenty-five an hour just coming up here to ask.”
“Roger is quite well again. He’s working.”
“Why not do it yourself?”
“Good.”
“How much to watch out and catch her at it?” He stared at me as unblinkingly as a fish in a tank.
“You sound very solemn today. I guess you take life pretty seriously.”
The first was a big blond roughneck named Kuissenen or something Finnish like that. He jammed his massive bottom in the customer’s chair and planted two wide horny hands on my desk and said he was a power-shovel operator, that he lived in Culver City, and the goddam woman who lived next door to him was trying to poison his dog. Every morning before he let the dog out for a run in the back yard he had to search the place from fence to fence for meatballs thrown over the potato vine from next door. He’d found nine of them so far and they were loaded with a greenish powder he knew was an arsenic weed killer.
“Now and then. Why?”
I knew it was going to be one of those crazy days. Everyone has them. Days when nobody rolls in but the loose wheels, the dingoes who park their brains with their gum, the squirrels who can’t find their nuts, the mechanics who always have a gear wheel left over.
She laughed very gently and said goodbye and hung up. I sat there for a while taking life seriously. Then I tried to think of something funny so that I could have a great big laugh. Neither way worked, so I got Terry Lennox’s letter of farewell out of the safe and reread it. It reminded me that I had never gone to Victor’s for that gimlet he asked me to drink for him. It was just about the right time of day for the bar to be quiet, the way he would have liked it himself, if he had been around to go with me. I thought of him with a vague sadness and with a puckering bitterness too. When I got to Victor’s I almost kept going. Almost, but not quite. I had too much of his money. He had made a fool of me but he had paid well for the privilege.
Next morning I got up late on account of the big fee I had earned the night before. I drank an extra cup of coffee, smoked an extra cigarette, ate an extra slice of Canadian bacon, and for the three hundredth time I swore I would never again use an electric razor. That made the day normal. I hit the office about ten, picked up some odds and ends of mail, slit the envelopes and let the stuff lie on the desk. I opened the windows wide to let out the smell of dust and dinginess that collected in the night and hung in the still air, in the corners of the room, in the slats of the venetian blinds. A dead moth was spread-eagled on a corner of the desk. On the window sill a bee with tattered wings was crawling along the woodwork, buzzing in a tired remote sort of way, as if she knew it wasn’t any use, she was finished, she had flown too many missions and would never get back to the hive again.