As the fifth I’d brought diminished, I tried to remember my manners and not pry into her affairs. I’m not much of a gentleman. Anyway, Maxine wasn’t touchy on the subject.
“After all,” she said, “you do rate something for your money. I just wish the story was more original.”
It was a little shopworn. Husband trouble and work trouble ganged up on her. She started drinking to keep going. When she had no husband and no work, she had more time to devote to it. Her money didn’t last forever. She’d put everything in hock. Now that was gone, too.
“I wish I could be cavalier about it,” she said, helping herself to another drink, “and say it had been fun and I had no regrets, but it stunk and I’m lousy with regrets.”
She killed her drink in one pass. She looked at me and smiled. “You’re having a hell of a time, aren’t you?” She patted the back of my hand. “Thanks anyway for not trying to save me with kind words.”
She excused herself and left the room. I marvelled at her control. I was beginning to feel slightly boiled, just keeping up with her the last couple of hours.
She was only gone a minute. When she dropped down beside me again, she tossed a leather-bound book in my lap. She was smiling. “Now you’ll know I’m drunk. I don’t know why I should want to inflict it on a decent guy like you, but that’s my diary. I want you to have it.”
I tried to give it back to her, but she insisted: “Please. Please keep it. I always wondered why I bothered to write all that stuff. Now I guess it was because I wanted somebody to understand me.”
She made a drink while I kicked it around. It whipped me. What was I supposed to say? I don’t think it mattered.
It might have been the cold, or maybe it was just the best thing I could think of right then. I took Maxine in my arms. I brushed her hair and cheek with my lips — her eyes. Then she looked up at me and kissed me like she meant it.
The next morning I wondered about it. I’m inclined to think of myself as an independent operator. In this business, ladies in distress are a dime a dozen, but I try to keep my interest in that type of woman strictly professional. And now I had this Maxine on the brain.
I’d heard about cures for the booze habit. But even if it worked, that wasn’t the whole answer to Maxine’s problem. I’d kept my nose out of her diary up to now. I didn’t need it to tell me she wasn’t on the lush just because she liked the taste of hooch. Maybe a psychiatrist was the answer. I meant to call Iggy and ask him what he thought. As I said, I was worried — about Martin Fowler.
The morning papers made quite a thing out of Maxine’s bout with the law. They published the scolding the judge had handed down almost verbatim, with a few dim-witted comments of their own. All around I had one hell of a morning.
Then about one o’clock, Maxine called me. For a wonder, she sounded sober: “Surprise,” she said, “they haven’t cut off my phone.”
I laughed. “How do you feel?”
“Wonderful,” she replied. “Are you sitting down?”
“Naturally.”
“Well, hold on, darling. This will be a shock.” She announced happily: “Maxine Keyes has a job — believe it or not!”
“On the level, that’s terrific!” I told her. “Tell me more.”
She was, she explained, getting the lead in a roadshow company. It wasn’t a lot of money, and she fully expected to have her creditors put the grab on most of it, but at least it was a start.
I congratulated her and told her we ought to have dinner and celebrate.
Could we make it the following night? She had to see some people about the play tonight. It was a date.
I wished her more luck and told her to be good. I felt a little better when I hung up.
By the following afternoon, I was as nervous as a madam at confession. I went rushing up there about four o’clock. I gave the doorbell a play to no returns.
That should have satisfied me Maxine was out. I wasn’t due there for at least a couple of hours. For some reason it didn’t.
I scrambled down the side of the hill to get around to Maxine’s back yard. The whole joint clung to the slope by its fingernails, so this yard wasn’t much more than a sodded patio built up behind a retaining wall. The grass, the trees, and the ragged ornamental shrubbery were burnt brown, the few pieces of garden furniture weatherbeaten to the same indefinite color.
On the table was an empty gin bottle, and across the back of the chair, Maxine’s coat. My first thought was that she had been out there having a drink, heard me ring, and had gone to the front door while I was coming around the house.
I went to the door to sing out and let her know I was there. It was locked.
I picked up her coat and fumbled through the pockets. I found a handkerchief soiled with lip rouge, and her keys. There was nothing else to do. I forced myself to look over the retaining wall.
Jackpot!
She was lying about sixty feet below me, crumpled against the yellow clay. Beyond the wall, I found a place where I could get down to her.
I could’ve spared myself the trouble. She was dead — her neck frozen at a crazy angle, her face scratched by the crumbled granite.
I climbed back to the house, let myself in and called the police. Then I lit a cigarette and started looking for myself. Ever since I met this dame I had been building up to this. Nobody had twisted my arm and said I had to answer for her. It hadn’t been love, either. Then what was I doing there, tangled in the mess that a neurotic, dipsomaniac ex-movie queen had made of her life?
That was where the doorbell caught me.
Sammy Hillman was the inspector in charge of the homicide detail. He and I had chewed over several bones together. For a cop, he wasn’t a bad guy. He came in smiling and looking around as though he thought I might have a drink waiting for him. “Hello, Fowler,” he said. “Can’t you let us drum up our own business?”
“You’d go broke in a week, Sammy, and you know it.”
Hillman took in what he could see of the house from where he was standing. “Nice creepy little cave this is,” he commented. “What’ve you got?”
I took him out back and showed him.
His gang spread out and went to work, while I told him what I knew. After I finished my recitation, we went down to view the remains. He didn’t say so, but I gathered he was satisfied it was just a case of too much grog and too little guts.
We were standing by the table in the back yard. I looked at the empty gin bottle Maxine had left behind. It hadn’t given anything to the fingerprint boys. It was just standing there like a tombstone.
Suddenly I wanted that bottle. “Look, Sammy,” I said, “don’t think I’ve gone completely nuts, but if it’s O.K. with you, I’d like to take this bottle — for a souvenir.”
He snorted. “Help yourself. One bottle more or less around this place can’t make any difference.”
I tucked the prize under my arm and said goodbye.
Sammy nodded. “This’ll last us a couple of weeks,” he said, “so take it easy.”
Chapter Two
Husbands and Homicide
I’d forgotten about eating. I went home and gave Maxine’s bottle the place of honor in the center of my cocktail table while I hustled a drink for myself in the kitchen. I brought it back and toasted my final link with Maxine.
I had another drink and started to get poetic about Maxine, life, and empty bottles. You don’t have to be boiled to get the connection, but it helps.
I remembered Maxine’s diary, still in the pocket of the coat I was wearing the night I met her. I got it, and another drink.
I spent the next couple of hours getting stewed and wondering at the junk a woman will immortalize in her diary. I could follow the general outline of her life, but mostly it was devoted to personalities and sounded pretty shallow. It made a good companion-piece for the empty gin bottle.