The High Window (8 page)

FIFTEEN

The chessmen, red and white bone, were lined up ready to go and had that sharp, competent and complicated look they always have at the beginning of a game. It was ten o’clock in the evening, I was home at the apartment, I had a pipe in my mouth, a drink at my elbow and nothing on my mind except two murders and the mystery of how Mrs. Elizabeth Bright Murdock had got her Brasher Doubloon back while I still had it in my pocket.

I opened a little paper-bound book of tournament games published in Leipzig, picked out a dashing-looking Queen’s Gambit, moved the white pawn to Queen’s four, and the bell rang at the door.

I stepped around the table and picked the Colt .38 off the drop leaf of the oak desk and went over to the door holding it down beside my right leg.

“Who is it?”

“Breeze.”

I went back to the desk to lay the gun down again before I opened the door. Breeze stood there looking just as big and sloppy as ever, but a little more tired. The young, fresh-faced dick named Spangler was with him.

They rode me back into the room without seeming to and Spangler shut the door. His bright young eyes flicked this way and that while Breeze let his older and harder ones stay on my face for a long moment, then he walked around me to the davenport.

“Look around,” he said out of the corner of his mouth.

Spangler left the door and crossed the room to the dinette, looked in there, recrossed and went into the hall. The bathroom door squeaked, his steps went farther along.

Breeze took his hat off and mopped his semi-bald dome. Doors opened and closed distantly. Closets. Spangler came back.

“Nobody here,” he said.

Breeze nodded and sat down, placing his panama beside him.

Spangler saw the gun lying on the desk. He said: “Mind if I look?”

I said: “Phooey on both of you.”

Spangler walked to the gun and held the muzzle to his nose, sniffing. He broke the magazine out, ejected the shell in the chamber, picked it up and pressed it into the magazine. He laid the magazine on the desk and held the gun so that light went into the open bottom of the breech. Holding it that way he squinted down the barrel.

“A little dust,” he said. “Not much.”

“What did you expect?” I said. “Rubies?”

He ignored me, looked at Breeze and added: “I’d say this gun has not been fired within twenty-four hours. I’m sure of it.”

Breeze nodded and chewed his lip and explored my face with his eyes. Spangler put the gun together neatly and laid it aside and went and sat down. He put a cigarette between his lips and lit it and blew smoke contentedly.

“We know damn well it wasn’t a long .38 anyway,” he said. “One of those things will shoot through a wall. No chance of the slug staying inside a man’s head.”

“Just what are you guys talking about?” I asked.

Breeze said: “The usual thing in our business. Murder. Have a chair. Relax. I thought I heard voices in here. Maybe it was the next apartment.”

“Maybe,” I said.

“You always have a gun lying around on your desk?”

“Except when it’s under my pillow,” I said. “Or under my arm. Or in the drawer of the desk. Or somewhere I can’t just remember where I happened to put it. That help you any?”

“We didn’t come here to get tough, Marlowe.”

“That’s fine,” I said. “So you prowl my apartment and handle my property without asking my permission. What do you do when you get tough—knock me down and kick me in the face?”

“Aw hell,” he said and grinned. I grinned back. We all grinned. Then Breeze said: “Use your phone?”

I pointed to it. He dialed a number and talked to someone named Morrison, saying: “Breeze at—” He looked down at the base of the phone and read the number off—“Anytime now. Marlowe is the name that goes with it. Sure. Five or ten minutes is okay.”

He hung up and went back to the davenport.

“I bet you can’t guess why we’re here.”

“I’m always expecting the brothers to drop in,” I said.

“Murder ain’t funny, Marlowe.”

“Who said it was?”

“Don’t you kind of act as if it was?”

“I wasn’t aware of it.”

He looked at Spangler and shrugged. Then he looked at the floor. Then he lifted his eyes slowly, as if they were heavy, and looked at me again. I was sitting down by the chess table now.

“You play a lot of chess?” he asked, looking at the chessmen.

“Not a lot. Once in a while I fool around with a game here, thinking things out.”

“Don’t it take two guys to play chess?”

“I play over tournament games that have been recorded and published. There’s a whole literature about chess. Once in a while I work out problems. They’re not chess, properly speaking. What are we talking about chess for? Drink?”

“Not right now,” Breeze said. “I talked to Randall about you. He remembers you very well, in connection with a case down at the beach.” He moved his feet on the carpet, as if they were very tired. His solid old face was lined and gray with fatigue. “He said you wouldn’t murder anybody. He says you are a nice guy, on the level.”

“That was friendly of him,” I said.

“He says you make good coffee and you get up kind of late in the mornings and are apt to run to a very bright line of chatter and that we should believe anything you say, provided we can check it by five independent witnesses.”

“To hell with him,” I said.

Breeze nodded exactly as though I had said just what he wanted me to say. He wasn’t smiling and he wasn’t tough, just a big solid man working at his job. Spangler had his head back on the chair and his eyes half closed and was watching the smoke from his cigarette.

“Randall says we should look out for you. He says you are not as smart as you think you are, but that you are a guy things happen to, and a guy like that could be a lot more trouble than a very smart guy. That’s what he says, you understand. You look all right to me. I like everything in the clear. That’s why I’m telling you.”

I said it was nice of him.

The phone rang. I looked at Breeze, but he didn’tmove, so I reached for it and answered it. It was a girl’s voice. I thought it was vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t place it.

“Is this Mr. Philip Marlowe?”

“Yes.”

“Mr. Marlowe, I’m in trouble, very great trouble. I want to see you very badly. When can I see you?”

I said: “You mean tonight? Who am I talking to?”

“My name is Gladys Crane. I live at the Hotel Normandy on Rampart. When can you—”

“You mean you want me to come over there tonight?” I asked, thinking about the voice, trying to place it.

“I—” The phone clicked and the line was dead. I sat there holding it, frowning at it, looking across it at Breeze. His face was quietly empty of interest.

“Some girl says she’s in trouble,” I said. “Connection broken.” I held the plunger down on the base of the phone waiting for it to ring again. The two cops were completely silent and motionless. Too silent, too motionless.

The bell rang again and I let the plunger up and said: “You want to talk to Breeze, don’t you?”

“Yeah.” It was a man’s voice and it sounded a little surprised.

“Go on, be tricky,” I said, and got up from the chair and went out to the kitchen. I heard Breeze talking very briefly, then the sound of the phone being returned to the cradle.

I got a bottle of Four Roses out of the kitchen closet and three glasses. I got ice and ginger ale from the icebox and mixed three highballs and carried them in on a tray and sat the tray down on the cocktail table in front of the davenport where Breeze was sitting. I took two of the glasses, handed one to Spangler, and took the other to my chair.

Spangler held the glass uncertainly, pinching his lower lip between thumb and finger, looking at Breeze to see whether he would accept the drink.

Breeze looked at me very steadily. Then he sighed. Then he picked the glass up and tasted it and sighed again and shook his head sideways with a half smile; the way a man does when you give him a drink and he needs it very badly and it is just right and the first swallow is like a peek into a cleaner, sunnier, brighter world.

“I guess you catch on pretty fast, Mr. Marlowe,” he said, and leaned back on the davenport completely relaxed. “I guess now we can do some business together.”

“Not that way,” I said.

“Huh?” He bent his eyebrows together. Spangler leaned forward in his chair and looked bright and attentive.

“Having stray broads call me up and give me a song and dance so you can say they said they recognized my voice somewhere sometime. ”

“The girl’s name is Gladys Crane,” Breeze said.

“So she told me. I never heard of her.”

“Okay,” Breeze said. “Okay.” He showed me the flat of his freckled hand. “We’re not trying to pull anything that’s not legitimate. We only hope you ain’t, either.”

“Ain’t either what?”

“Ain’t either trying to pull anything not legitimate. Such as holding out on us.”

“Just why shouldn’t I hold out on you, if I feel like it?” I asked. “You’re not paying my salary.”

“Look, don’t get tough, Marlowe.”

“I’m not tough. I don’t have any idea of being tough. I know enough about cops not to get tough with them. Go ahead and speak your piece and don’t try to pull any more phonies like that telephone call.”

“We’re on a murder case,” Breeze said. “We have to try to run it the best we can. You found the body. You had talked to the guy. He had asked you to come to his apartment. He gave you his key. You said you didn’t know what he wanted to see you about. We figured that maybe with time to think back you could have remembered.”

“In other words I was lying the first time,” I said.

Breeze smiled a tired smile. “You been around enough to know that people always lie in murder cases.”

“The trouble with that is how are you going to know when I stop lying?”

“When what you say begins to make sense, we’ll be satisfied.”

I looked at Spangler. He was leaning forward so far he was almost out of his chair. He looked as if he was going to jump. I couldn’t think of any reason why he should jump, so I thought he must be excited. I looked back at Breeze. He was about as excited as a hole in the wall. He had one of his cellophane-wrapped cigars between his thick fingers and he was slitting the cellophane with a penknife. I watched him get the wrapping off and trim the cigar end with the blade and put the knife away, first wiping the blade carefully on his pants. I watched him strike a wooden match and light the cigar carefully, turning it around in the flame, then hold the match away from the cigar, still burning, and draw on the cigar until he decided it was properly lighted. Then he shook the match out and laid it down beside the crumpled cellophane on the glass top of the cocktail table. Then he leaned back and pulled up one leg of his pants and smoked peacefully. Every motion had been exactly as it had been when he lit a cigar in Hench’s apartment, and exactly as it always would be whenever he lit a cigar. He was that kind of man, and that made him dangerous. Not as dangerous as a brilliant man, but much more dangerous than a quick excitable one like Spangler.

“I never saw Phillips before today,” I said. “I don’t count that he said he saw me up in Ventura once, because I don’t remember him. I met him just the way I told you. He tailed me around and I braced him. He wanted to talk to me, he gave me his key, I went to his apartment, used the key to let myself in when he didn’t answer—as he had told me to do. He was dead. The police were called and through a set of events or incidents that had nothing to do with me, a gun was found under Hench’s pillow. A gun that had been fired. I told you this and it’s true.”

Breeze said: “When you found him you went down to the apartment manager, guy named Passmore, and got him to go up with you without telling him anybody was dead. You gave Passmore a phony card and talked about jewelry.”

I nodded. “With people like Passmore and apartment houses like that one, it pays to be a little on the cagey side. I was interested in Phillips. I thought Passmore might tell me something about him, if he didn’t know he was dead, that he wouldn’t be likely to tell me, if he knew the cops were going to bounce in on him in a brief space of time. That’s all there was to that.”

Breeze drank a little of his drink and smoked a little of his cigar and said: “What I’d like to get in the clear is this. Everything you just told us might be strictly the truth, and yet you might not be telling us the truth. If you get what I mean.”

“Like what?” I asked, getting perfectly well what he meant.

He tapped on his knee and watched me with a quiet up from under look. Not hostile, not even suspicious. Just a quiet man doing his job.

“Like this. You’re on a job. We don’t know what it is. Phillips was playing at being a private dick. He was on a job. He tailed you around. How can we know, unless you tell us, that his job and your job don’t tie in somewhere? And if they do, that’s our business. Right?”

“That’s one way to look at it,” I said. “But it’s not the only way, and it’s not my way.”

“Don’t forget this is a murder case, Marlowe.”

“I’m not. But don’t you forget I’ve been around this town a long time, more than fifteen years. I’ve seen a lot of murder cases come and go. Some have been solved, some couldn’t be solved, and some could have been solved that were not solved. And one or two or three of them have been solved wrong. Somebody was paid to take a rap, and the chances are it was known or strongly suspected. And winked at. But skip that. It happens, but not often. Consider a case like the Cassidy case. I guess you remember it, don’t you?”

Breeze looked at his watch. “I’m tired,” he said. “Let’s forget the Cassidy case. Let’s stick to the Phillips case.”

I shook my head. “I’m going to make a point, and it’s an important point. Just look at the Cassidy case. Cassidy was a very rich man, a multi-millionaire. He had a grown up son. One night the cops were called to his home and young Cassidy was on his back on the floor with blood all over his face and a bullet hole in the side of his head. His secretary was lying on
his
back in an adjoining bathroom, with his head against the second bathroom door, leading to a hall, and a cigarette burned out between the fingers of his left hand, just a short burned out stub that had scorched the skin between his fingers. A gun was lying by his right hand. He was shot in the head, not a contact wound. A lot of drinking had been done. Four hours had elapsed since the deaths and the family doctor had been there for three of them. Now, what did you do with the Cassidy case?”