The High Window (2 page)

I stared at her and she stared back. Her eyes were as hard as the bricks in her front walk. I shrugged the stare off and said:

“Assuming that is so, Mrs. Murdock, just what do you want done?”

“In the first place I want the coin back. In the second place I want an uncontested divorce for my son. And I don’t intend to buy it. I daresay you know how these things are arranged.”

She finished the current instalment of port and laughed rudely.

“I may have heard,” I said. “You say the lady left no forwarding address. Does that mean you have no idea at all where she went?”

“Exactly that.”

“A disappearance then. Your son might have some ideas he hasn’t passed along to you. I’ll have to see him.”

The big gray face hardened into even ruggeder lines. “My son knows nothing. He doesn’t even know the doubloon has been stolen. I don’t want him to know anything. When the time comes I’ll handle him. Until then I want him left alone. He will do exactly what I want him to.”

“He hasn’t always,” I said.

“His marriage,” she said nastily, “was a momentary impulse. Afterwards he tried to act like a gentleman. I have no such scruples.”

“It takes three days to have that kind of momentary impulse in California, Mrs. Murdock.”

“Young man, do you want this job or don’t you?”

“I want it if I’m told the facts and allowed to handle the case as I see fit. I don’t want it if you’re going to make a lot of rules and regulations for me to trip over.”

She laughed harshly. “This is a delicate family matter, Mr. Marlowe. And it must be handled with delicacy.”

“If you hire me, you’ll get all the delicacy I have. If I don’t have enough delicacy, maybe you’d better not hire me. For instance, I take it you don’t want your daughter-in-law framed. I’m not delicate enough for that.”

She turned the color of a cold boiled beet and opened her mouth to yell. Then she thought better of it, lifted her port glass and tucked away some more of her medicine.

“You’ll do,” she said dryly, “I wish I had met you two years ago, before he married her.”

I didn’t know exactly what this last meant, so I let it ride. She bent over sideways and fumbled with the key on a house telephone and growled into it when she was answered.

There were steps and the little copper-blond came tripping into the room with her chin low, as if somebody might be going to take a swing at her.

“Make this man a check for two hundred and fifty dollars,” the old dragon snarled at her. “And keep your mouth shut about it.”

The little girl flushed all the way to her neck. “You know I never talk about your affairs, Mrs. Murdock,” she bleated. “You know I don’t. I wouldn’t dream of it, I—”

She turned with her head down and ran out of the room. As she closed the door I looked out at her. Her little lip was trembling but her eyes were mad.

“I’ll need a photo of the lady and some information,” I said when the door was shut again.

“Look in the desk drawer.” Her rings flashed in the dimness as her thick gray finger pointed.

I went over and opened the single drawer of the reed desk and took out the photo that lay all alone in the bottom of the drawer, face up, looking at me with cool dark eyes. I sat down again with the photo and looked it over. Dark hair parted loosely in the middle and drawn back loosely over a solid piece of forehead. A wide cool go-to-hell mouth with very kissable lips. Nice nose, not too small, not too large. Good bone all over the face. The expression of the face lacked something. Once the something might have been called breeding, but these days I didn’t know what to call it. The face looked too wise and too guarded for its age. Too many passes had been made at it and it had grown a little too smart in dodging them. And behind this expression of wiseness there was the look of simplicity of the little girl who still believes in Santa Claus.

I nodded over the photo and slipped it into my pocket, thinking I was getting too much out of it to get out of a mere photo, and in a very poor light at that.

The door opened and the little girl in the linen dress came in with a three-decker check book and a fountain pen and made a desk of her arm for Mrs. Murdock to sign. She straightened up with a strained smile and Mrs. Murdock made a sharp gesture towards me and the little girl tore the check out and gave it to me. She hovered inside the door, waiting. Nothing was said to her, so she went out softly again and closed the door.

I shook the check dry, folded it and sat holding it. “What can you tell me about Linda?”

“Practically nothing. Before she married my son she shared an apartment with a girl named Lois Magic—charming names these people choose for themselves—who is an entertainer of some sort. They worked at a place called the Idle Valley Club, out Ventura Boulevard way. My son Leslie knows it far too well. I know nothing about Linda’s family or origins. She said once she was born in Sioux Falls. I suppose she had parents. I was not interested enough to find out.”

Like hell she wasn’t. I could see her digging with both hands, digging hard, and getting herself a double handful of gravel.

“You don’t know Miss Magic’s address?”

“No. I never did know.”

“Would your son be likely to know—or Miss Davis?”

“I’ll ask my son when he comes in. I don’t think so. You can ask Miss Davis. I’m sure she doesn’t.”

“I see. You don’t know of any other friends of Linda’s?”

“No.”

“It’s possible that your son is still in touch with her, Mrs. Murdock—without telling you.”

She started to get purple again. I held my hand up and dragged a soothing smile over my face. “After all he has been married to her a year,” I said. “He must know something about her.”

“You leave my son out of this,” she snarled.

I shrugged and made a disappointed sound with my lips. “Very well. She took her car, I suppose. The one you gave her?”

“A steel gray Mercury, 1940 model, a coupé Miss Davis can give you the license number, if you want that. I don’t know whether she took it.”

“Would you know what money and clothes and jewels she had with her?”

“Not much money. She might have had a couple of hundred dollars, at most.” A fat sneer made deep lines around her nose and mouth. “Unless of course she has found a new friend.”

“There’s that,” I said. “Jewelry?”

“An emerald and diamond ring of no very great value, a platinum Longines watch with rubies in the mounting, a very good cloudy amber necklace which I was foolish enough to give her myself. It has a diamond clasp with twenty-six small diamonds in the shape of a playing card diamond. She had other things, of course. I never paid much attention to them. She dressed well but not strikingly. Thank God for a few small mercies.”

She refilled her glass and drank and did some more of her semi-social belching.

“That’s all you can tell me, Mrs. Murdock?”

“Isn’t it enough?”

“Not nearly enough, but I’ll have to be satisfied for the time being. If I find she did not steal the coin, that ends the investigation as far as I’m concerned. Correct?”

“We’ll talk it over,” she said roughly. “She stole it all right. And I don’t intend to let her get away with it. Paste that in your hat, young man. And I hope you are even half as rough as you like to act, because these night club girls are apt to have some very nasty friends.”

I was still holding the folded check by one corner down between my knees. I got my wallet out and put it away and stood up, reaching my hat off the floor.

“I like them nasty,” I said. “The nasty ones have very simple minds. I’ll report to you when there is anything to report, Mrs. Murdock. I think I’ll tackle this coin dealer first. He sounds like a lead.”

She let me get to the door before she growled at my back: “You don’t like me very well, do you?”

I turned to grin back at her with my hand on the knob. “Does anybody?”

She threw her head back and opened her mouth wide and roared with laughter. In the middle of the laughter I opened the door and went out and shut the door on the rough mannish sound. I went back along the hall and knocked on the secretary’s half open door, then pushed it open and looked in.

She had her arms folded on her desk and her face down on the folded arms. She was sobbing. She screwed her head around and looked up at me with tear-stained eyes. I shut the door and went over beside her and put an arm around her thin shoulders.

“Cheer up,” I said. “You ought to feel sorry for her. She thinks she’s tough and she’s breaking her back trying to live up to it.”

The little girl jumped erect, away from my arm. “Don’t touch me,” she said breathlessly. “Please. I never let men touch me. And don’t say such awful things about Mrs. Murdock.”

Her face was all pink and wet from tears. Without her glasses her eyes were very lovely.

I stuck my long-waiting cigarette into my mouth and lit it.

“I—I didn’t mean to be rude,” she snuffled. “But she does humiliate me so. And I only want to do my best for her.” She snuffled some more and got a man’s handkerchief out of her desk and shook it out and wiped her eyes with it. I saw on the hanging down corner the initials L.M. embroidered in purple. I stared at it and blew cigarette smoke towards the corner of the room, away from her hair. “Is there something you want?” she asked.

“I want the license number of Mrs. Leslie Murdock’s car.”

“It’s 2X1111, a gray Mercury convertible, 1940 model.”

“She told me it was a coupé.”

“That’s Mr. Leslie’s car. They’re the same make and year and color. Linda didn’t take the car.”

“Oh. What do you know about a Miss Lois Magic?”

“I only saw her once. She used to share an apartment with Linda. She came here with a Mr.—a Mr. Vannier.”

“Who’s he?”

She looked down at her desk. “I—she just came with him. I don’t know him.”

“Okay, what does Miss Lois Magic look like?”

“She’s a tall handsome blond. Very—very appealing. ”

“You mean sexy?”

“Well—” she blushed furiously, “in a nice well-bred sort of way, if you know what I mean.”

“I know what you mean,” I said, “but I never got anywhere with it.”

“I can believe that,” she said tartly.

“Know where Miss Magic lives?”

She shook her head, no. She folded the big handkerchief very carefully and put it in the drawer of her desk, the one where the gun was.

“You can swipe another one when that’s dirty,” I said.

She leaned back in her chair and put her small neat hands on her desk and looked at me levelly.

“I wouldn’t carry that tough-guy manner too far, if I were you, Mr. Marlowe. Not with me, at any rate.”

“No?”

“No. And I can’t answer any more questions without specific instructions. My position here is very confidential.”

“I’m not tough,” I said. “Just virile.”

She picked up a pencil and made a mark on a pad. She smiled faintly up at me, all composure again.

“Perhaps I don’t like virile men,” she said.

“You’re a screwball,” I said, “if ever I met one. Good-by.”

I went out of her office, shut the door firmly, and walked back along the empty halls through the big silent sunken funereal living room and out of the front door.

The sun danced on the warm lawn outside. I put my dark glasses on and went over and patted the little Negro on the head again.

“Brother, it’s even worse than I expected,” I told him.

The stumble-stones were hot through the soles of my shoes. I got into the car and started it and pulled away from the curb.

A small sand-colored coupé pulled away from the curb behind me. I didn’t think anything of it. The man driving it wore a dark porkpie type straw hat with a gay print band and dark glasses were over his eyes, as over mine.

I drove back towards the city. A dozen blocks later at a traffic stop, the sand-colored coupe was still behind me. I shrugged and just for the fun of it circled a few blocks. The coupé held its position. I swung into a street lined with immense pepper trees, dragged my heap around in a fast U-turn and stopped against the curbing.

The coupé came carefully around the corner. The blond head under the cocoa straw hat with the tropical print band didn’t even turn my way. The coupé sailed on and I drove back to the Arroyo Seco and on towards Hollywood. I looked carefully several times, but I didn’t spot the coupé again.

THREE

I had an office in the Cahuenga Building, sixth floor, two small rooms at the back. One I left open for a patient client to sit in, if I had a patient client. There was a buzzer on the door which I could switch on and off from my private thinking parlor.

I looked into the reception room. It was empty of everything but the smell of dust. I threw up another window, unlocked the communicating door and went into the room beyond. Three hard chairs and a swivel chair, flat desk with a glass top, five green filing cases, three of them full of nothing, a calendar and a framed license bond on the wall, a phone, a washbowl in a stained wood cupboard, a hatrack, a carpet that was just something on the floor, and two open windows with net curtains that puckered in and out like the lips of a toothless old man sleeping.

The same stuff I had had last year, and the year before that. Not beautiful, not gay, but better than a tent on the beach.

I hung my hat and coat on the hatrack, washed my face and hands in cold water, lit a cigarette and hoisted the phone book onto the desk. Elisha Morningstar was listed at 824 Belfont Building, 422 West Ninth Street. I wrote that down and the phone number that went with it and had my hand on the instrument when I remembered that I hadn’t switched on the buzzer for the reception room. I reached over the side of the desk and clicked it on and caught it right in stride. Somebody had just opened the door of the outer office.

I turned my pad face down on the desk and went over to see who it was. It was a slim tall self-satisfied looking number in a tropical worsted suit of slate blue, black and white shoes, a dull ivory-colored shirt and a tie and display handkerchief the color of jacaranda bloom. He was holding a long black cigarette-holder in a peeled back white pigskin glove and he was wrinkling his nose at the dead magazines on the library table and the chairs and the rusty floor covering and the general air of not much money being made.

As I opened the communicating door he made a quarter turn and stared at me out of a pair of rather dreamy pale eyes set close to a narrow nose. His skin was sun-flushed, his reddish hair was brushed back hard over a narrow skull, and the thin line of his mustache was much redder than his hair.

He looked me over without haste and without much pleasure. He blew some smoke delicately and spoke through it with a faint sneer.

“You’re Marlowe?”

I nodded.

“I’m a little disappointed,” he said. “I rather expected something with dirty fingernails.”

“Come inside,” I said, “and you can be witty sitting down.”

I held the door for him and he strolled past me flicking cigarette ash on the floor with the middle nail of his free hand. He sat down on the customer’s side of the desk, took off the glove from his right hand and folded this with the other already off and laid them on the desk. He tapped the cigarette end out of the long black holder, prodded the coal with a match until it stopped smoking, fitted another cigarette and lit it with a broad mahogany-colored match. He leaned back in his chair with the smile of a bored aristocrat.

“All set?” I enquired. “Pulse and respiration normal? You wouldn’t like a cold towel on your head or anything?”

He didn’t curl his lip because it had been curled when he came in. “A private detective,” he said. “I never met one. A shifty business, one gathers. Keyhole peeping, raking up scandal, that sort of thing.”

“You here on business,” I asked him, “or just slumming?”

His smile was as faint as a fat lady at a fireman’s ball.

“The name is Murdock. That probably means a little something to you.”

“You certainly made nice time over here,” I said, and started to fill a pipe.

He watched me fill the pipe. He said slowly: “I understand my mother has employed you on a job of some sort. She has given you a check.”

I finished filling the pipe, put a match to it, got it drawing and leaned back to blow smoke over my right shoulder towards the open window. I didn’t say anything.

He leaned forward a little more and said earnestly: “I know being cagey is all part of your trade, but I am not guessing. A little worm told me, a simple garden worm, often trodden on, but still somehow surviving—like myself. I happened to be not far behind you. Does that help to clear things up?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Supposing it made any difference to me.”

“You are hired to find my wife, I gather.”

I made a snorting sound and grinned at him over the pipe bowl.

“Marlowe,” he said, even more earnestly, “I’ll try hard, but I don’t think I am going to like you.”

“I’m screaming,” I said. “With rage and pain.”

“And if you will pardon a homely phrase, your tough guy act stinks.”

“Coming from you, that’s bitter.”

He leaned back again and brooded at me with pale eyes. He fussed around in the chair, trying to get comfortable. A lot of people had tried to get comfortable in that chair. I ought to try it myself sometime. Maybe it was losing business for me.

“Why should my mother want Linda found?” he asked slowly. “She hated her guts. I mean my mother hated Linda’s guts. Linda was quite decent to my mother. What do you think of her?”

“Your mother?”

“Of course. You haven’t met Linda, have you?”

“That secretary of your mother’s has her job hanging by a frayed thread. She talks out of turn.”

He shook his head sharply. “Mother won’t know. Anyhow, Mother couldn’t do without Merle. She has to have somebody to bully. She might yell at her or even slap her face, but she couldn’t do without her. What did you think of her?”

“Kind of cute—in an old world sort of way.”

He frowned. “I mean Mother. Merle’s just a simple little girl, I know.”

“Your powers of observation startle me,” I said.

He looked surprised. He almost forgot to fingernail the ash of his cigarette. But not quite. He was careful not to get any of it in the ashtray, however.

“About my mother,” he said patiently.

“A grand old warhorse,” I said. “A heart of gold, and the gold buried good and deep.”

“But why does she want Linda found? I can’t understand it. Spending money on it too. My mother hates to spend money. She thinks money is part of her skin. Why does she want Linda found?”

“Search me,” I said. “Who said she did?”

“Why, you implied so. And Merle—”

“Merle’s just romantic. She made it up. Hell, she blows her nose in a man’s handkerchief. Probably one of yours.”

He blushed. “That’s silly. Look, Marlowe. Please, be reasonable and give me an idea what it’s all about. I haven’t much money, I’m afraid, but would a couple of hundred—”

“I ought to bop you,” I said. “Besides I’m not supposed to talk to you. Orders.”

“Why, for heaven’s sake?”

“Don’t ask me things I don’t know. I can’t tell you the answers. And don’t ask me things I do know, because I won’t tell you the answers. Where have you been all your life? If a man in my line of work is handed a job, does he go around answering questions about it to anyone that gets curious?”

“There must be a lot of electricity in the air,” he said nastily, “for a man in your line of work to turn down two hundred dollars.”

There was nothing in that for me either. I picked his broad mahogany match out of the tray and looked at it. It had thin yellow edges and there was white printing on it.
ROSEMONT. H. RICHARDS
’3—the rest was burnt off. I doubled the match and squeezed the halves together and tossed it in the waste basket.

“I love my wife,” he said suddenly and showed me the hard white edges of his teeth. “A corny touch, but it’s true.”

“The Lombardos are still doing all right.”

He kept his lips pulled back from his teeth and talked through them at me. “She doesn’t love me. I know of no particular reason why she should. Things have been strained between us. She was used to a fast moving sort of life. With us, well, it has been pretty dull. We haven’t quarreled. Linda’s the cool type. But she hasn’t really had a lot of fun being married to me.”

“You’re just too modest,” I said.

His eyes glinted, but he kept his smooth manner pretty well in place.

“Not good, Marlowe. Not even fresh. Look, you have the air of a decent sort of guy. I know my mother is not putting out two hundred and fifty bucks just to be breezy. Maybe it’s not Linda. Maybe it’s something else. Maybe—” he stopped and then said this very slowly, watching my eyes, “maybe it’s Morny.”

“Maybe it is,” I said cheerfully.

He picked his gloves up and slapped the desk with them and put them down again. “I’m in a spot there all right,” he said. “But I didn’t think she knew about it. Morny must have called her up. He promised not to.”

This was easy. I said: “How much are you into him for?”

It wasn’t so easy. He got suspicious again. “If he called her up, he would have told her, And she would have told you,” he said thinly.

“Maybe it isn’t Morny,” I said, beginning to want a drink very badly. “Maybe the cook is with child by the iceman. But if it was Morny, how much?”

“Twelve thousand,” he said, looking down and flushing.

“Threats?”

He nodded.

“Tell him to go fly a kite,” I said. “What kind of lad is he? Tough?”

He looked up again, his face being brave. “I suppose he is. I suppose they all are. He used to be a screen heavy. Good looking in a flashy way, a chaser. But don’t get any ideas. Linda just worked there, like the waiters and the band. And if you are looking for her, you’ll have a hard time finding her.”

I sneered at him politely.

“Why would I have a hard time finding her? She’s not buried in the back yard, I hope.”

He stood up with a flash of anger in his pale eyes. Standing there leaning over the desk a little he whipped his right hand up in a neat enough gesture and brought out a small automatic, about .25 caliber with a walnut grip. It looked like the brother of the one I had seen in the drawer of Merle’s desk. The muzzle looked vicious enough pointing at me. I didn’t move.

“If anybody tries to push Linda around, he’ll have to push me around first,” he said tightly.

“That oughtn’t to be too hard. Better get more gun—unless you’re just thinking of bees.”

He put the little gun back in his inside pocket. He gave me a straight hard look and picked his gloves up and started for the door.

“It’s a waste of time talking to you,” he said. “All you do is crack wise.”

I said: “Wait a minute,” and got up and went around the desk. “It might be a good idea for you not to mention this interview to your mother, if only for the little girl’s sake. ”

He nodded. “For the amount of information I got, it doesn’t seem worth mentioning.”

“That straight goods about your owing Morny twelve grand?”

He looked down, then up, then down again. He said: “Anybody who could get into Alex Morny for twelve grand would have to be a lot smarter than I am.”

I was quite close to him. I said: “As a matter of fact I don’t even think you are worried about your wife. I think you know where she is. She didn’t run away from you at all. She just ran away from your mother.”

He lifted his eyes and drew one glove on. He didn’t say anything.

“Perhaps she’ll get a job,” I said. “And make enough money to support you.”

He looked down at the floor again, turned his body to the right a little and the gloved fist made a tight unrelaxed arc through the air upwards. I moved my jaw out of the way and caught his wrist and pushed it slowly back against his chest, leaning on it. He slid a foot back on the floor and began to breathe hard. It was a slender wrist. My fingers went around it and met.

We stood there looking into each other’s eyes. He was breathing like a drunk, his mouth open and his lips pulled back. Small round spots of bright red flamed on his cheeks. He tried to jerk his wrist away, but I put so much weight on him that he had to take another short step back to brace himself. Our faces were now only inches apart.

“How come your old man didn’t leave you some money?” I sneered. “Or did you blow it all?”

He spoke between his teeth, still trying to jerk loose. “If it’s any of your rotten business and you mean Jasper Murdock, he wasn’t my father. He didn’t like me and he didn’t leave me a cent. My father was a man named Horace Bright who lost his money in the crash and jumped out of his office window.”

“You milk easy,” I said, “but you give pretty thin milk. I’m sorry for what I said about your wife supporting you. I just wanted to get your goat.”

I dropped his wrist and stepped back. He still breathed hard and heavily. His eyes on mine were very angry, but he kept his voice down.

“Well, you got it. If you’re satisfied, I’ll be on my way.”

“I was doing you a favor,” I said. “A gun toter oughtn’t to insult so easily. Better ditch it.”

“That’s my business,” he said. “I’m sorry I took a swing at you. It probably wouldn’t have hurt much, if it had connected.”

“That’s all right.”

He opened the door and went on out. His steps died along the corridor. Another screwball. I tapped my teeth with a knuckle in time to the sound of his steps as long as I could hear them. Then I went back to the desk, looked at my pad, and lifted the phone.