The Little Sister (4 page)

6

I drove back to Hollywood and locked myself in the office with the Bay City telephone book. It took me a quarter-hour to find out that the party who went with the telephone number one-three-five-seven-two in Bay City was a Dr. Vincent Lagardie, who called himself a neurologist, had his home and offices on Wyoming Street, which according to my map was not quite in the best residential neighborhood and not quite out of it. I locked the Bay City telephone book up in my desk and went down to the corner drugstore for a sandwich and a cup of coffee and used a pay booth to call Dr. Vincent Lagardie. A woman answered and I had some trouble getting through to Dr. Lagardie himself. When I did his voice was impatient. He was very busy, in the middle of an examination he said. I never knew a doctor who wasn’t. Did he know Lester B. Clausen? He never heard of him. What was the purpose of my inquiry?

“Mr. Clausen tried to telephone you this morning,” I said. “He was too drunk to talk properly.”

“But I don’t know Mr. Clausen,” the doctor’s cool voice answered. He didn’t seem to be in quite such a hurry now.

“Well that’s all right then,” I said. “Just wanted to make sure. Somebody stuck an ice pick into the back of his neck.”

There was a quiet pause. Dr. Lagardie’s voice was now almost unctuously polite. “Has this been reported to the police?”

“Naturally,” I said. “But it shouldn’t bother you—unless of course it was your ice pick.”

He passed that one up. “And who is this speaking?” he inquired suavely.

“The name is Hicks,” I said. “George W. Hicks. I just moved out of there. I don’t want to get mixed up with that sort of thing. I just figured when Clausen tried to call you—this was before he was dead you understand—that you might be interested.”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Hicks,” Dr. Lagardie’s voice said, “but I don’t know Mr. Clausen. I have never heard of Mr. Clausen or had any contact with him whatsoever. And I have an excellent memory for names.”

“Well, that’s fine,” I said. “And you won’t meet him now. But somebody may want to know why he tried to telephone you—unless I forget to pass the information along.”

There was a dead pause. Dr. Lagardie said: “I can’t think of any comment to make on that.”

I said: “Neither can I. I may call you again. Don’t get me wrong, Dr. Lagardie. This isn’t any kind of a shake. I’m just a mixed-up little man who needs a friend. I kind of felt that a doctor—like a clergyman—”

“I’m at your entire disposal,” Dr. Lagardie said. “Please feel free to consult me.”

“Thank you, doctor,” I said fervently. “Thank you very very much.”

I hung up. If Dr. Vincent Lagardie was on the level, he would now telephone the Bay City Police Department and tell them the story. If he didn’t telephone the police, he wasn’t on the level. Which might or might not be useful to know.

7

The phone on my desk rang at four o’clock sharp. “Did you find Orrin yet, Mr. Marlowe?”

“Not yet. Where are you?”

“Why I’m in the drugstore next to—”

“Come on up and stop acting like Mata Hari,” I said.

“Aren’t you ever polite to anybody?” she snapped.

I hung up and fed myself a slug of Old Forester to brace my nerves for the interview. As I was inhaling it I heard her steps tripping along the corridor. I moved across and opened the door.

“Come in this way and miss the crowd,” I said.

She seated herself demurely and waited.

“All I could find out,” I told her, “is that the dump on Idaho Street is peddling reefers. That’s marijuana cigarettes.”

“Why, how disgusting,” she said.

“We have to take the bad with the good in this life,” I said. “Orrin must have got wise and threatened to report it to the police.”

“You mean,” she said in her little-girl manner, “that they might hurt him for doing that?”

“Well, most likely they’d just throw a scare into him first.”

“Oh, they couldn’t scare Orrin, Mr. Marlowe,” she said decisively. “He just gets mean when people try to run him.”

“Yeah,” I said. “But we’re not talking about the same things. You can scare anybody—with the right technique.”

She set her mouth stubbornly. “No, Mr. Marlowe. They couldn’t scare Orrin.”

“Okay,” I said. “So they didn’t scare him. Say they just cut off one of his legs and beat him over the head with it. What would he do then—write to the Better Business Bureau?”

“You’re making fun of me,” she said politely. Her voice was as cool as boarding-house soup. “Is that all you did all day? Just find Orrin had moved and it was a bad neighborhood? Why I found that out for myself, Mr. Marlowe. I thought you being a detective and all—” She trailed off, leaving the rest of it in the air.

“I did a little more than that,” I said. “I gave the landlord a little gin and went through the register and talked to a man named Hicks. George W. Hicks. He wears a toupee. I guess maybe you didn’t meet him. He has, or had, Orrin’s room. So I thought maybe—” It was my turn to do a little trailing in the air.

She fixed me with her pale blue eyes enlarged by the glasses. Her mouth was small and firm and tight, her hands clasped on the desk in front of her over her large square bag, her whole body stiff and erect and formal and disapproving.

“I paid you twenty dollars, Mr. Marlowe,” she said coldly. “I understood that was in payment of a day’s work. It doesn’t seem to me that you’ve done a day’s work.”

“No,” I said. “That’s true. But the day isn’t over yet. And don’t bother about the twenty bucks. You can have it back if you like. I didn’t even bruise it.”

I opened the desk drawer and got out her money. I pushed it across the desk. She looked at it but didn’t touch it. Her eyes came up slowly to meet mine.

“I didn’t mean it like that. I know you’re doing the best you can, Mr. Marlowe.”

“With the facts I have.”

“But I’ve told you all I know.”

“I don’t think so,” I said.

“Well I’m sure I can’t help what you think,” she said tartly. “After all, if I knew what I wanted to know already, I wouldn’t have come here and asked you to find it out, would I?”

“I’m not saying you know all you want to know,” I answered. “The point is I don’t know all I want to know in order to do a job for you. And what you tell me doesn’t add up.”

“What doesn’t add up? I’ve told you the truth. I’m Orrin’s sister. I guess I know what kind of person he is.”

“How long did he work for Cal-Western?”

“I’ve told you that. He came out to California just about a year ago. He got work right away because he practically had the job before he left.”

“He wrote home how often? Before he stopped writing.”

“Every week. Sometimes oftener. He’d take turns writing to mother and me. Of course the letters were for both of us.”

“About what?”

“You mean what did he write about?”

“What did you think I meant?”

“Well, you don’t have to snap at me. He wrote about his work and the plant and the people there and sometimes about a show he’d been to. Or it was about California. He’d write about church too.”

“Nothing about girls?”

“I don’t think Orrin cared much for girls.”

“And lived at the same address all this time?”

She nodded, looking puzzled.

“And he stopped writing how long ago?”

That took thought. She pressed her lips and pushed a fingertip around the middle of the lower one. “About or four months,” she said at last.

“What was the date of his last letter?”

“I—I’m afraid I can’t tell you exactly the date. But it was like I said, three or four—”

I waved a hand at her “Anything out of the ordinary in it? Anything unusual said or anything unusual unsaid?”

“Why no. It seemed just like all the rest”

“Don’t you have any friends or relatives in this part of the country?”

She gave me a funny stare, started to say something, then shook her head sharply. “No.”

“Okay. Now I’ll tell you what’s wrong. I’ll skip over your not telling me where you’re staying, because it might be just that you’re afraid I’ll show up with a quart of hooch under my arm and make a pass at you.”

“That’s not a very nice way to talk,” she said.

“Nothing I say is nice. I’m not nice. By your standards nobody with less than three prayer-books could be nice. But I am inquisitive. What’s wrong with this picture is that you’re not scared. Neither you personally nor your mother. And you ought to be scared as hell.”

She clutched her bag to her bosom with tight little fingers. “You mean something has happened to him?” Her voice faded off into a sort of sad whisper, like a mortician asking for a down payment.

“I don’t know that anything has. But in your position, knowing the kind of guy Orrin was, the way his letters came through and then didn’t, I can’t see myself waiting for my summer vacation to come around before I start asking questions. I can’t see myself by-passing the police who have an organization for finding people. And going to a lone-wolf operator you never heard of, asking him to root around for you in the rubble. And I can’t see your dear old mother just sitting there in Manhattan, Kansas, week after week darning the minister’s winter underwear. No letter from Orrin. No news. And all she does about it is take a long breath and mend up another pair of pants.”

She came to her feet with a lunge. “You’re a horrid, disgusting person,” she said angrily. “I think you’re vile. Don’t you dare say mother and I weren’t worried. Just don’t you dare.”

I pushed the twenty dollars’ worth of currency a little closer to the other side of the desk. “You were worried twenty dollars’ worth, honey,” I said. “But about what I wouldn’t know. I guess I don’t really want to know. Just put this hunk of the folding back in your saddlebag and forget you ever met me. You might want to lend it to another detective tomorrow.”

She snapped her bag shut viciously on the money. “I’m not very likely to forget your rudeness,” she said between her teeth. “Nobody in the world’s ever talked to me the way you have.”

I stood up and wandered around the end of the desk. “Don’t think about it too much. You might get to like it.”

I reached up and twitched her glasses off. She took half a step back, almost stumbled, and I reached an arm around her by pure instinct. Her eyes widened and she put her hands against my chest and pushed. I’ve been pushed harder by a kitten.

“Without the cheaters those eyes are really something,” I said in an awed voice.

She relaxed and let her head go back and her lips open a little. “I suppose you do this to all the clients,” she said softly. Her hands now had dropped to her sides. The bag whacked against my leg. She leaned her weight on my arm. If she wanted me to let go of her, she had her signals mixed.

“I just didn’t want you to lose your balance,” I said.

“I knew you were the thoughtful type.” She relaxed still more. Her head went back now. Her upper lids drooped, fluttered a bit and her lips came open a little farther. On them appeared the faint provocative smile that nobody ever has to teach them. “I suppose you thought I did it on purpose,” she said.

“Did what on purpose?”

“Stumbled, sort of.”

“Wel-l-l-l.”

She reached a quick arm around my neck and started to pull. So I kissed her. It was either that or slug her. She pushed her mouth hard at me for a long moment, then quietly and very comfortably wriggled around in my arms and nestled. She let out a long easy sigh.

“In Manhattan, Kansas, you could be arrested for this,” she said.

“If there was any justice, I could be arrested just for being there,” I said.

She giggled and poked the end of my nose with a fingertip. “I suppose you really prefer fast girls,” she said, looking up at me sideways. “At least you won’t have to wipe off any lip rouge. Maybe I’ll wear some next time.”

“Maybe we’d better sit down on the floor,” I said. “My arm’s getting tired.”

She giggled again and disengaged herself gracefully. “I guess you think I’ve been kissed lots of times,” she said.

“What girl hasn’t?”

She nodded, gave me the up-from-under look that made her eyelashes cut across the iris. “Even at the church socials they play kissing games,” she said.

“Or there wouldn’t be any church socials,” I said.

We looked at each other with no particular expression.

“Well-l-l—” she began at last. I handed her back her glasses. She put them on. She opened her bag, looked at herself in a small mirror, rooted around in her bag and came out with her hand clenched.

“I’m sorry I was mean,” she said, and pushed something under the blotter of my desk. She gave me another little frail smile and marched to the door and opened it.

“I’ll call you,” she said intimately. And out she went, tap, tap, tap down the hail.

I went over and lifted the blotter and smoothed out the crumpled currency that lay under it. It hadn’t been much of a kiss, but it looked like I had another chance at the twenty dollars.

The phone rang before I had quite started to worry about Mr. Lester B. Clausen. I reached for it absently. The voice I heard was an abrupt voice, but thick and clogged, as if it was being strained through a curtain or somebody’s long white beard.

“You Marlowe?” it said.

“Speaking.”

“You got a safe-deposit box, Marlowe?”

I had enough of being polite for one afternoon. “Stop asking and start telling,” I said.

“I asked you a question, Marlowe.”

“I didn’t answer it,” I said. “Like this.” I reached over and pressed down the riser on the phone. Held it that way while I fumbled around for a cigarette. I knew he would call right back. They always do when they think they’re tough. They haven’t used their exit line. When it rang again I started right in.

“If you have a proposition, state it. And I get called ‘mister’ until you give me some money.”

“Don’t let that temper ride you so hard, friend. I’m in a jam. I need help. I need something kept in a safe place. For a few days. Not longer. And for that you make a little quick money.”

“How little?” I asked. “And how quick?”

“A C note. Right here and waiting. I’m warming it for you.”

“I can hear it purr,” I said. “Right where and waiting?” I was listening to the voice twice, once when I heard it and once when it echoed in my mind.

“Room 332, Van Nuys Hotel. Knock two quick ones and two slow ones. Not too loud. I got to have live action. How fast can you—”

“What is it you want me to keep?”

“That’ll wait till you get here. I said I was in a hurry.”

“What’s your name?”

“Just Room 332.”

“Thanks for the time,” I said. “Goodbye.”

“Hey. Wait a minute, dope. It’s nothing hot like you think. No ice. No emerald pendants. It just happens to be worth a lot of money to me—and nothing at all to anybody else.”

“The hotel has a safe.”

“Do you want to die poor, Marlowe?”

“Why not? Rockefeller did. Goodbye again.”

The voice changed. The furriness went out of it. It said sharply and swiftly: “How’s every little thing in Bay City?”

I didn’t speak. Just waited. There was a dim chuckle over the wire. “Thought that might interest you, Marlowe. Room 332 it is. Tramp on it friend. Make speed.”

The phone clicked in my ear. I hung up. For no reason a pencil rolled off the desk and broke its point on the glass doohickey under one of the desk legs. I picked it up and slowly and carefully sharpened it in the Boston sharpener screwed to the edge of the window frame, turning the pencil around to get it nice and even. I laid it down in the tray on the desk and dusted off my hands. I had all the time in the world. I looked out of the window. I didn’t see anything. I didn’t hear anything.