Part 17 (1/2)

”Why do I have to tell you?” she breathed.

”You don't. It's just how you feel about it.”

”Will you promise not to tell anybody-anybody in the whole world, not even Mrs. Murdock?”

”Her last of all,” I said. ”I promise.”

She opened her mouth and put a funny little confiding smile on her face, and then it went wrong. Her throat froze up. She made a croaking noise. Her teeth actually rattled.

I wanted to give her a good hard squeeze but I was afraid to touch her. We stood. Nothing happened. We stood. I was about as much use as a hummingbird's spare egg would have been.

Then she turned and ran. I heard her steps going along the hall. I heard a door close.

I went after her along the hall and reached the door. She was sobbing behind it. I stood there and listened to the sobbing.

There was nothing I could do about it. I wondered if there was anything anybody could do about it.

I went back to the gla.s.s porch and knocked on the door and opened it and put my head in. Mrs. Murdock sat just as I had left her. She didn't seem to have moved at all.

”Who's scaring the life out of that little girl?” I asked her.

”Get out of my house,” she said between her fat lips.

I didn't move. Then she laughed at me hoa.r.s.ely.

”Do you regard yourself as a clever man, Mr. Marlowe?”

”Well, I'm not dripping with it,” I said.

”Suppose you find out for yourself.”

”At your expense?”

She shrugged her heavy shoulders. ”Possibly. It depends. Who knows?”

”You haven't bought a thing,” I said. ”I'm still going to have to talk to the police.”

”I haven't bought anything,” she said, ”and I haven't paid for anything. Except the return of the coin. I'm satisfied to accept that for the money I have already given you. Now go away. You bore me. Unspeakably.”

I shut the door and went back. No sobbing behind the door. Very still. I went on.

I let myself out of the house. I stood there, listening to the suns.h.i.+ne burn the gra.s.s. A car started up in back and a gray Mercury came drifting along the drive at the side of the house. Mr. Leslie Murdock was driving it. When he saw me he stopped.

He got out of the car and walked quickly over to me. He was nicely dressed; cream colored gabardine now, all fresh clothes, slacks, black and white shoes, with polished black toes, a sport coat of very small black and white check, black and white handkerchief, cream s.h.i.+rt, no tie. He had a pair of green sun gla.s.ses on his nose.

He stood close to me and said in a low timid sort of voice: ”I guess you think I'm an awful heel.”

”On account of that story you told about the doubloon?”

”Yes.”

”That didn't affect my way of thinking about you in the least,” I said.

”Well-”

”Just what do you want me to say?”

He moved his smoothly tailored shoulders in a deprecatory shrug. His silly little reddish brown mustache glittered in the sun.

”I suppose I like to be liked,” he said.

”I'm sorry, Murdock. I like your being that devoted to your wife. If that's what it is.”

”Oh. Didn't you think I was telling the truth? I mean, did you think I was saying all that just to protect her?”

”There was that possibility.”

”I see.” He put a cigarette into the long black holder, which he took from behind his display handkerchief. ”Well-I guess I can take it that you don't like me.” The dim movement of his eyes was visible behind the green lenses, fish moving in a deep pool.

”It's a silly subject,” I said. ”And d.a.m.ned unimportant. To both of us.”

He put a match to the cigarette and inhaled. ”I see,” he said quietly. ”Pardon me for being crude enough to bring it up.”

He turned on his heel and walked back to his car and got in. I watched him drive away before I moved. Then I went over and patted the little painted Negro boy on the head a couple of times before I left.

”Son,” I said to him, ”you're the only person around this house that's not nuts.”

TWENTY-THREE.

The police loudspeaker box on the wall grunted and a voice said: ”KGPL. Testing.” A click and it went dead.

Detective-Lieutenant Jesse Breeze stretched his arms high in the air and yawned and said: ”Couple of hours late, ain't you?”

I said: ”Yes. But I left a message for you that I would be. I had to go to the dentist.”

”Sit down.”

He had a small littered desk across one corner of the room. He sat in the angle behind it, with a tall bare window to his left and a wall with a large calendar about eye height to his right. The days that had gone down to dust were crossed off carefully in soft black pencil, so that Breeze glancing at the calendar always knew exactly what day it was.

Spangler was sitting sideways at a smaller and much neater desk. It had a green blotter and an onyx pen set and a small bra.s.s calendar and an abalone sh.e.l.l full of ashes and matches and cigarette stubs. Spangler was flipping a handful of bank pens at the felt back of a seat cus.h.i.+on on end against the wall, like a Mexican knife thrower flipping knives at a target. He wasn't getting anywhere with it. The pens refused to stick.

The room had that remote, heartless, not quite dirty, not quite clean, not quite human smell that such rooms always have. Give a police department a brand new building and in three months all its rooms will smell like that. There must be something symbolic in it.

A New York police reporter wrote once that when you pa.s.s in beyond the green lights of a precinct station you pa.s.s clear out of this world, into a place beyond the law.

I sat down. Breeze got a cellophane-wrapped cigar out of his pocket and the routine with it started. I watched it detail by detail, unvarying, precise. He drew in smoke, shook his match out, laid it gently in the black gla.s.s ashtray, and said: ”Hi, Spangler.”