The High Window (9 page)

Breeze sighed. “Murder and suicide during a drinking spree. The secretary went haywire and shot young Cassidy. I read it in the papers or something. Is that what you want me to say?”

“You read it in the papers,” I said, “but it wasn’t so. What’s more you knew it wasn’t so and the D. A. knew it wasn’t so and the D.A.’s investigators were pulled off the case within a matter of hours. There was no inquest. But every crime reporter in town and every cop on every homicide detail knew it was Cassidy that did the shooting, that it was Cassidy that was crazy drunk, that it was the secretary who tried to handle him and couldn’t and at last tried to get away from him, but wasn’t quick enough. Cassidy’s was a contact wound and the secretary’s was not. The secretary was left-handed and he had a cigarette in his left hand when he was shot. Even if you are right-handed, you don’t change a cigarette over to your other hand and shoot a man while casually holding the cigarette. They might do that on
Gang Busters,
but rich men’s secretaries don’t do it. And what were the family and the family doctor doing during the four hours they didn’t call the cops? Fixing it so there would only be a superficial investigation, And why were no tests of the hands made for nitrates? Because you didn’t want the truth. Cassidy was too big. But this was a murder case too, wasn’t it?”

“The guys were both dead,” Breeze said. “What the hell difference did it make who shot who?”

“Did you ever stop to think,” I asked, “that Cassidy’s secretary might have had a mother or a sister or a sweetheart—or all three? That they had their pride and their faith and their love for a kid who was made out to be a drunken paranoiac because his boss’s father had a hundred million dollars?”

Breeze lifted his glass slowly and finished his drink slowly and put it down slowly and turned the glass slowly on the glass top of the cocktail table. Spangler sat rigid, all shining eyes and lips parted in a sort of rigid half smile.

Breeze said: “Make your point.”

I said: “Until you guys own your own souls you don’t own mine. Until you guys can be trusted every time and always, in all times and conditions, to seek the truth out and find it and let the chips fall where they may—until that time comes, I have a right to listen to my conscience, and protect my client the best way I can. Until I’m sure you won’t do him more harm than you’ll do the truth good. Or until I’m hauled before somebody that can make me talk.”

Breeze said: “You sound to me just a little like a guy who is trying to hold his conscience down.”

“Hell,” I said. “Let’s have another drink. And then you can tell me about that girl you had me talk to on the phone.”

He grinned: “That was a dame that lives next door to Phillips. She heard a guy talking to him at the door one evening. She works days as an usherette. So we thought maybe she ought to hear your voice. Think nothing of it.”

“What kind of voice was it?”

“Kind of a mean voice. She said she didn’t like it.”

“I guess that’s what made you think of me,” I said.

I picked up the three glasses and went out to the kitchen with them.

SIXTEEN

When I got out there I had forgotten which glass was which, so I rinsed them all out and dried them and was starting to make more drinks when Spangler strolled out and stood just behind my shoulder.

“It’s all right,” I said. “I’m not using any cyanide this evening.”

“Don’t get too foxy with the old guy,” he said quietly to the back of my neck. “He knows more angles than you think.”

“Nice of you,” I said.

“Say, I’d like to read up on that Cassidy case,” he said. “Sounds interesting. Must have been before my time.”

“It was a long time ago,” I said. “And it never happened. I was just kidding.” I put the glasses on the tray and carried them back into the living room and set them around. I took mine over to my chair behind the chess table.

“Another phony,” I said. “Your sidekick sneaks out to the kitchen and gives me advice behind your back about how careful I ought to keep on account of the angles you know that I don’t think you know. He has just the right face for it. Friendly and open and an easy blusher.”

Spangler sat down on the edge of his chair and blushed. Breeze looked at him casually, without meaning.

“What did you find out about Phillips?” I asked.

“Yes,” Breeze said. “Phillips. Well, George Anson Phillips is a kind of pathetic case. He thought he was a detective, but it looks as if he couldn’t get anybody to agree with him. I talked to the sheriff at Ventura. He said George was a nice kind, maybe a little too nice to make a good cop, even if he had any brains. George did what they said and he would do it pretty well, provided they told him which foot to start on and how many steps to take which way and little things like that. But he didn’t develop much, if you get what I mean. He was the sort of cop who would be likely to hang a pinch on a chicken thief, if he saw the guy steal the chicken and the guy fell down running away and hit his head on a post or something and knocked himself out. Otherwise it might get a little tough and George would have to go back to the office for instructions. Well, it wore the sheriff down after a while and he let George go.”

Breeze drank some more of his drink and scratched his chin with a thumbnail like the blade of a shovel.

“After that George worked in a general store at Simi for a man named Sutcliff. It was a credit business with little books for each customer and George would have trouble with the books. He would forget to write the stuff down or write it in the wrong book and some of the customers would straighten him out and some would let George forget. So Sutcliff thought maybe George would do better at something else, and George came to L.A. He had come into a little money, not much, but enough for him to get a license and put up a bond and get himself a piece of an office. I was over there. What he had was desk room with another guy who claims he is selling Christmas cards. Name of Marsh. If George had a customer, the arrangement was Marsh would go for a walk. Marsh says he didn’t know where George lived and George didn’t have any customers. That is, no business came into the office that Marsh knows about. But George put an ad in the paper and he might have got a customer out of that. I guess he did, because about a week ago Marsh found a note on his desk that George would be out of town for a few days. That’s the last he heard of him. So George went over to Court Street and took an apartment under the name of Anson and got bumped off. And that’s all we know about George so far. Kind of a pathetic case.”

He looked at me with a level uncurious gaze and raised his glass to his lips.

“What about this ad?”

Breeze put the gIass down and dug a thin piece of paper out of his wallet and put it down on the cocktail table. I went over and picked it up and read it. It said:

Why worry? Why be doubtful or confused? Why be gnawed by suspicion? Consult cool, careful, confidential, discreet investigator. George Anson Phillips. Glenview 9521
.

I put it down on the glass again.

“It ain’t any worse than lots of business personals,” Breeze said. “It don’t seem to be aimed at the carriage trade.”

Spangler said: “The girl in the office wrote it for him. She said she could hardly keep from laughing, but George thought it was swell. The Hollywood Boulevard office of the
Chronicle.
”

“You checked that fast,” I said.

“We don’t have any trouble getting information,” Breeze said. “Except maybe from you.”

“What about Hench?”

“Nothing about Hench. Him and the girl were having a liquor party. They would drink a little and sing a little and scrap a little and listen to the radio and go out to eat once in a while, when they thought of it. I guess it had been going on for days. Just as well we stopped it. The girl has two bad eyes. The next round Hench might have broken her neck. The world is full of bums like Hench—and his girl.”

“What about the gun Hench said wasn’t his?”

“It’s the right gun. We don’t have the slug yet, but we have the shell. It was under George’s body and it checks. We had a couple more fired and comparisoned the ejector marks and the firing pin dents.”

“You believe somebody planted it under Hench’s pillow?”

“Sure. Why would Hench shoot Phillips? He didn’t know him.”

“How do you know that?”

“I know it,” Breeze said, spreading his hands. “Look, there are things you know because you have them down in black and white. And there are things you know because they are reasonable and have to be so. You don’t shoot somebody and then make a lot of racket calling attention to yourself, and all the time you have the gun under your pillow. The girl was with Hench all day. If Hench shot anybody, she would have some idea. She doesn’t have any such idea. She would spill, if she had. What is Hench to her? A guy to play around with, no more. Look, forget Hench. The guy who did the shooting hears the loud radio and knows it will cover a shot. But all the same he saps Phillips and drags him into the bathroom and shuts the door before he shoots him. He’s not drunk. He’s minding his own business, and careful. He goes out, shuts the bathroom door, the radio stops, Hench and the girl go out to eat. Just happens that way.”

“How do you know the radio stopped?”

“I was told,” Breeze said calmly. “Other people live in that dump. Take it the radio stopped and they went out. Not quiet. The killer steps out of the apartment and Hench’s door is open. That must be because otherwise he wouldn’t think anything about Hench’s door.”

“People don’t leave their doors open in apartment houses. Especially in districts like that.”

“Drunks do. Drunks are careless. Their minds don’t focus well. And they only think of one thing at a time. The door was open—just a little maybe, but open. The killer went in and ditched his gun on the bed and found another gun there. He took that away, just to make it look worse for Hench.”

“You can check the gun,” I said.

“Hench’s gun? We’ll try to, but Hench says he doesn’t know the number. If we find it, we might do something there. I doubt it. The gun we have we will try to check, but you know how those things are. You get just so far along and you think it is going to open up for you, and then the trail dies out cold. A dead end. Anything else you can think of that we might know that might be a help to you in your business?”

“I’m getting tired,” I said. “My imagination isn’t working very well. ”

“You were doing fine a while back,” Breeze said. “On the Cassidy case.”

I didn’t say anything. I filled my pipe up again but it was too hot to light. I laid it on the edge of the table to cool off.

“It’s God’s truth,” Breeze said slowly, “that I don’t know what to make of you. I can’t see you deliberately covering up on any murder. And neither can I see you knowing as little about all this as you pretend to know.”

I didn’t say anything, again.

Breeze leaned over to revolve his cigar butt in the tray until he had killed the fire. He finished his drink, put on his hat and stood up.

“How long you expect to stay dummied up?” he asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Let me help you out. I give you till tomorrow noon, a little better than twelve hours. I won’t get my post mortem report before that anyway. I give you till then to talk things over with your party and decide to come clean.”

“And after that?”

“After that I see the Captain of Detectives and tell him a private eye named Philip Marlowe is withholding information which I need in a murder investigation, or I’m pretty sure he is. And what about it? I figure he’ll pull you in fast enough to singe your breeches.”

I said: “Uh-huh. Did you go through Phillips’ desk?”

“Sure. A very neat young feller. Nothing in it at all, except a little kind of diary. Nothing in that either, except about how he went to the beach or took some girl to the pictures and she didn’t warm up much. Or how he sat in the office and no business come in. One time he got a little sore about his laundry and wrote a whole page. Mostly it was just three or four lines. There was only one thing about it. It was all done in a kind of printing.”

I said: “Printing?”

“Yeah, printing in pen and ink. Not big block caps like people trying to disguise things. Just neat fast little printing as if the guy could write that way as fast and easy as any way.

“He didn’t write like that on the card he gave me,” I said.

Breeze thought about that for a moment. Then he nodded. “True. Maybe it was this way. There wasn’t any name in the diary either, in the front. Maybe the printing was just a little game he played with himself.”

“Like Pepys’ shorthand,” I said.

“What was that?”

“A diary a man wrote in a private shorthand, a long time ago.”

Breeze looked at Spangler, who was standing up in front of his chair, tipping the last few drops of his glass.

“We better beat it,” Breeze said. “This guy is warming up for another Cassidy case.”

Spangler put his glass down and they both went over to the door. Breeze shuffled a foot and looked at me sideways, with his hand on the doorknob.

“You know any tall blonds?”

“I have to think,” I said. “I hope so. How tall?”

“Just tall. I don’t know how tall that is. Except that it would be tall to a guy who is tall himself. A wop named Palermo owns that apartment house on Court Street. We went across to see him in his funeral parlors. He owns them too. He says he saw a tall blond come out of the apartment house about three-thirty. The manager, Passmore, don’t place anybody in the joint that he would call a tall blond. The wop says she was a looker. I give some weight to what he says because he give us a good description of you. He didn’t see this tall blond go in, just saw her come out. She was wearing slacks and a sports jacket and a wrap-around. But she had light blond hair and plenty of it under the wrap-around.”

“Nothing comes to me,” I said. “But I just remembered something else. I wrote the license number of Phillips’ car down on the back of an envelope. That will give you his former address, probably. I’ll get it.”

They stood there while I went to get it out of my coat in the bedroom. I handed the piece of envelope to Breeze and he read what was on it and tucked it into his billfold.

“So you just thought of this, huh?”

“That’s right.”

“Well, well,” he said. “Well, well.”

The two of them went along the hallway towards the elevator, shaking their heads.

I shut the door and went back to my almost untasted second drink. It was flat. I carried it to the kitchen and hardened it up from the bottle and stood there holding it and looking out of the window at the eucalyptus trees tossing their limber tops against the bluish dark sky. The wind seemed to have risen again. It thumped at the north window and there was a heavy slow pounding noise on the wall of the building, like a thick wire banging the stucco between insulators.

I tasted my drink and wished I hadn’t wasted the fresh whiskey on it. I poured it down the sink and got a fresh glass and drank some ice water.

Twelve hours to tie up a situation which I didn’t even begin to understand. Either that or turn up a client and let the cops go to work on her and her whole family. Hire Marlowe and get your house full of law. Why worry? Why be doubtful and confused? Why be gnawed by suspicion? Consult cockeyed, careless, clubfooted, dissipated investigator. Philip Marlowe, Glenview 7537. See me and you meet the best cops in town. Why despair? Why be lonely? Call Marlowe and watch the wagon come.

This didn’t get me anywhere either. I went back to the living room and put a match to the pipe that had cooled off now on the edge of the chess table. I drew the smoke in slowly, but it still tasted like the smell of hot rubber. I put it away and stood in the middle of the floor pulling my lower lip out and letting it snap back against my teeth.

The telephone rang. I picked it up and growled into it.

“Marlowe?”

The voice was a harsh low whisper. It was a harsh low whisper I had heard before.

“All right,” I said. “Talk it up whoever you are. Whose pocket have I got my hand in now?”

“Maybe you’re a smart guy,” the harsh whisper said. “Maybe you would like to do yourself some good.”

“How much good?”

“Say about five C’s worth of good.”

“That’s grand,” I said. “Doing what?”

“Keeping your nose clean,” the voice said. “Want to talk about it?”

“Where, when, and who to?”

“Idle Valley Club. Morny. Any time you get here.”

“Who are you?”

A dim chuckle came over the wire. “Just ask at the gate for Eddie Prue.”

The phone clicked dead. I hung it up.

It was near eleven-thirty when I backed my car out of the garage and drove towards Cahuenga Pass.