As I crossed the living room Eileen was coming down the stairs in white slacks and open-toed sandals and a pale blue shirt. She looked at me with complete surprise. “I didn’t know you were here, Mr. Marlowe,” she said, as though she hadn’t seen me for a week and at that time I had just dropped in for tea.
He kept going. When he was gone I felt the bristles on my chin, shook myself, and decided to be on my way. I had had a skinful of the Wade family.
“I put his gun in the desk,” I said.
“Thanks for the coffee,” I said to his back.
“Gun?” Then it seemed to dawn on her. “Oh, last night was a little hectic, wasn’t it? But I thought you had gone home.”
He didn’t react at all, not even to the slap. That and being called a greaseball must have been deadly insults to him. But this time he just stood there wooden-faced, motionless. Then without a word he picked up the coffee tray and carried it out.
I walked over closer to her. She had a thin gold chain around her neck and some kind of fancy pendant in gold and blue on white enamel. The blue enameled part looked like a pair of wings, but not spread out. Against these there was a broad white enamel and gold dagger that pierced a scroll. I couldn’t read the words. It was some kind of military insigne.
“I don’t get called a son of a whore by the help, greaseball. I’ve got business here and I come around whenever I feel like it. Watch your lip from now on. You might get pistol-whipped. That pretty face of yours would never look the same again.”
“I got drunk,” I said. “Deliberately and not elegantly. I was a little lonely.”
I stood up and walked around the table. He moved enough to keep facing towards me. I watched his hand but he evidently wasn’t wearing a knife this morning. When I was close enough I slapped a hand across his face.
“You didn’t have to be,” she said, and her eyes were as clear as water. There wasn’t a trace of guile in them.
“I’m leaving.”
“A matter of opinion,” I said. “I’m leaving now and I’m not sure I’ll be back. You heard what I said about the gun?”
There was a gleam in his eye. “Just don’t come round any more, tough boy.”
“You put it in his desk. It might be a good idea to put it somewhere else. But he didn’t really mean to shoot himself, did he?”
“Pachuco stuff,” I said contemptuously. “All you’re touching is the small money. Lots of men play around when they’re lit. Anyhow she knows all about it. You don’t have anything to sell.”
“I can’t answer that. But next time he might.”
He shrugged that off. “The boss gets pretty rough when he blows his top. Better pay up, shamus.”
She shook her head. “I don’t think so. I really don’t. You were a wonderful help last night, Mr. Marlowe. I don’t know how to thank you.”
“That would buy a whole busload of wetbacks like you.”
“You made a pretty good try.”
He grinned. “You give me couple of yards, shamus. So I don’t tell the boss you come out of her room last night.”
She got pink. Then she laughed. “I had a very curious dream in the night,” she said slowly, looking off over my shoulder. “Someone I used to know was here in the house. Someone who has been dead for ten years.” Her fingers went up and touched the gold and enamel pendant. “That’s why I am wearing this today. He gave it to me.”
“Two hundred bucks.”
“I had a curious dream myself,” I said. “But I’m not telling mine. Let me know how Roger gets on and if there is anything I can do.”
“What’s that? Couple of yards.”
She lowered her eyes and looked into mine. “You said you were not coming back.”
“You understand all right. How much you shake him for? I bet it’s not more than a couple of yards.”
“I said I wasn’t sure. I may have to come back. I hope I won’t. There is something very wrong in this house. And only part of it came out of a bottle.”
He went back to Spanish. “No entendido.”
She stared at me, frowning. “What does that mean?”
“How much on the side—for not spilling what you know?”
“I think you know what I’m talking about.”
He frowned, then nodded. “Oh yes. Good money.”
She thought it over carefully. Her fingers were still touching the pendant gently. She let out a slow patient sigh. “There’s always another woman,” she said quietly. “At some time or other. It’s not necessarily fatal. We’re talking at cross purposes, aren’t we? We are not even talking about the same thing, perhaps?”
“You making it pay?”
“Could be,” I said. She was still standing on the steps, the third step from the bottom. She still had her fingers on the pendant. She still looked like a golden dream. “Especially if you have in mind that the other woman is Linda Loring.”
“I take care of the boss,” he said.
She dropped her hand from the pendant and came down one more step of the stairs.
He lifted the lid of a box and helped himself to a cigarette. He lit it and blew smoke at me insolently.
“Dr. Loring seems to agree with me,” she said indifferently. “He must have some source of information.”
“Who’s we?”
“You said he had played that scene with half the males in the valley.”
“Okay, scram out of here. We don’t want you around.”
“Did I? Well—it was the conventional sort of thing to say at the time.” She came down another step.
“No, thanks.”
“I haven’t shaved,” I said.
“You want breakfast?” he asked morosely.
That startled her. Then she laughed. “Oh, I wasn’t expecting you to make love to me.”
I drank two cups black. Then I tried a cigarette. It was all right. I still belonged to the human race. Then Candy was back in the room again.
“Just what did you expect of me, Mrs. Wade—in the beginning, when you first persuaded me to go hunting? Why me—what have I got to offer?”
“Fresh. Just made,” he said, and went out.
“You kept faith,” she said quietly. “When it couldn’t have been very easy.”
He turned and went out. In no time at all he was back with a silver tray and a small silver pot of coffee on it and sugar and cream and a neat triangular napkin. He set it down on the cocktail table and removed the empty bottle and the rest of the drinking materials. He picked another bottle off the floor.
“I’m touched. But I don’t think that was the reason.”
“You’re right, Candy. I’m not tough at all.”
She came down the last step and then she was looking up at me. “Then what was the reason?”
In one jump I had him by the arm. He didn’t move. He just looked at me contemptuously. I laughed and let go of his arm.
“Or if it was—it was a damn poor reason. Just about the worst reason in the world.”
“Hijo de puta!”
She frowned a tiny frown. “Why?”
“Get the goddam coffee,” I yelled at him.
“Because what I did—this keeping faith—is something even a fool doesn’t do twice.”
“You ain’t tough this morning, shamus. You ain’t tough at all.”
“You know,” she said lightly, “this is getting to be a very enigmatic conversation.”
“Have it your own way.”
“You’re a very enigmatic person, Mrs. Wade. So long and good luck and if you really care anything about Roger, you’d better find him the right kind of doctor—and quick.”
He sneered at me. “Didn’t make her, huh? Got tossed out on your can, shamus.”
She laughed again. “Oh, that was a mild attack last night. You ought to see him in a bad one. He’ll be up and working by this afternoon.”
“I had to.”
“Like hell he will.”
“I put the lamps out. The boss is okay. Asleep. I shut his door. Why you get drunk?”
“But believe me he will. I know him so well.”
“Thanks.”
I gave her the last shot right in the teeth and it sounded pretty nasty.
“You want some coffee?”
“You don’t really want to save him, do you? You just want to look as if you are trying to save him.”
When I looked up Candy was standing in the doorway, spick and span in his white coat, his hair brushed back and shining black, his eyes bitter.
“That,” she said deliberately, “was a very beastly thing to say to me.”
I plowed across to the half bath and stripped off my tie and shirt and sloshed cold water on my face with both hands and sloshed it on my head. When I was dripping wet I toweled myself off savagely. I put my shirt and tie back on and reached for my jacket and the gun in the pocket banged against the wall. I took it out and swung the cylinder away from the frame and tipped the cartridges into my hand, five full, one just a blackened shell. Then I thought, what’s the use, there are always more of them. So I put them back where they had been before and carried the gun into the study and put it away in one of the drawers of the desk.
She stepped past me and walked through the dining room doors and then the big room was empty and I crossed to the front door and let myself out. It was a perfect summer morning in that bright secluded valley. It was too far from the city to get any smog and cut off by the low mountains from the dampness of the ocean. It was going to be hot later, but in a nice refined exclusive sort of way, nothing brutal like the heat of the desert, not sticky and rank like the heat of the city. Idle Valley was a perfect place to live. Perfect. Nice people with nice homes, nice cars, nice horses, nice dogs, possibly even nice children.
I got up on my feet and it took character. It took will power. It took a lot out of me, and there wasn’t as much to spare as there once had been. The hard heavy years had worked me over.
But all a man named Marlowe wanted from it was out. And fast.
A shaft of sunlight tickled one of my ankles. I opened my eyes and saw the crown of a tree moving gently against a hazed blue sky. I rolled over and leather touched my cheek. An axe split my head. I sat up. There was a rug over me. I threw that off and got my feet on the floor. I scowled at a clock. The clock said a minute short of six-thirty.