That hadn’t been hard to guess. I felt that I was getting to know Jack Marsh better and so far I hadn’t found much to like. I smiled at her. “You and he must have been very close.”
She nodded. “I worked for him for five years.”
“I meant close personally.”
“I knew him better than anybody,” she said. “Even better than her.”
“Miss Goodwater?”
“Miss Rich Bitch. I told him he was making a mistake when he moved in with her.” She nodded her head the way people do when they’ve been right and everyone else has been wrong. “I told him. And just look what happened.”
I wondered how old she was. With her glasses off and her eyes red and her nose all shiny she looked about ten but she talked like forty. Or maybe fifty. I guessed her to be thirty. Maybe thirty-two.
“But you kept on working for him even after he started living with Maude Goodwater.”
“Sure I did. Why shouldn’t I?”
I shrugged. I tried to make it an elaborate one.
Her lip curled up and for a moment I thought she was going to cry again, but I was wrong. It was a sneer. “We didn’t stop fucking just because he moved in with her.” That was her best pitch, the high, hard one, and she waited to see how I handled it.
I decided to watch it go by. “There’s just a chance,” I said, “that somebody set Jack up.”
“What do you mean set him up?” she said. “A cop shot him. A Washington cop with a funny name.”
“Fastnaught.”
“Yeah. That’s it. Fastnaught.”
“Jack wasn’t working this thing alone, you know,” I said, feeling odd about calling him Jack. “He had teamed up with somebody. Maybe this somebody tipped Fastnaught off. Let’s face it. Whoever was in it with Jack made off with a quarter of a million dollars plus the old book. All Jack got was dead.”
I didn’t know how much the Los Angeles police had told her, but I doubted that they had described how Fastnaught had tailed me out to Haines Point in the snow. It was one of those details that they probably wouldn’t have bothered to tell her. Jack Marsh had been shot and killed by a Washington cop. That was the big news and it should have been enough.
Her face was working itself up into another crying spell. I took out my handkerchief and handed it to her. She blew her nose with it and stuffed it into her pocket, not thinking about what she was doing. I didn’t ask for it back.
“I don’t know who was in it with him,” she said dully. “I keep hoping that they’ll find out that somebody made him do it. Held a gun to his head, you know, and made him do it. But I don’t guess there’s much chance of that, is there?”
“Not much.”
She produced another cigarette from her jacket pocket and held it up. It took a second before I realized that she was waiting for me to light it. I found my matches and lit it and then looked around for an ashtray. I found one on the desk where she had ground out the one that she was smoking before. I put the match in it. When I turned back she was chewing on her lower lip as if trying to decide how much she could tell me. I waited for her to make up her mind.
“I knew something funny was going on,” she said.
“You did, huh? How?”
“Because he didn’t talk about it. He always talked about them with me. His cases, I mean. Even after he moved out there to Malibu he talked them over with me because I understood what it was that he did. He was like any man. He liked to be oohed and ahed over and told how smart he was. She couldn’t do that because she didn’t understand what he did for a living and so he didn’t talk about it with her. I sometimes wondered what they did talk about. Maybe how beautiful the sunset was and crap like that Lovey-dovey stuff.”
“He didn’t tell you anything about it at all?”
“He told me he had to go to Washington and pick something up and bring it back. He didn’t say what.”
“Did he say who? I mean who was going to pay him?”
“Sure. Max Spivey at Pacifica was going to pay him. But there wasn’t any big deal about it. He did a lot of work for Max. The only funny thing was he wouldn’t tell me what he was going to pick up in Washington.”
“Did you ask?”
“Sure I asked. That’s when it got funny. When he wouldn’t tell me.”
“In that week before he went to Washington,” I said, “did he see Doc Amber?”
“Who?”
“Doc Amber. A little guy about five feet tall. He uses a lot of big words and wears what used to be called snappy clothes.”
She shook her head slowly. “He didn’t know anybody like that. I’d remember if he knew anybody like that.”
“Well, thanks for talking to me,” I said. “I know it must be difficult for you.”
She looked around the room and shook her head. “I don’t even know why I come down here. Nobody’s paying me. I don’t know if anybody ever will. I just check the mail and write a few letters. I talked to his lawyer about it but he’s not even sure about what’s going to happen. The rent’s paid to the end of the month. I guess I’ll just keep on coming down until then and after that I won’t come anymore.”
“It’s nice of you to do it.”
She looked at me, or at least those big purple glasses did. “You weren’t kidding me about that, were you? You know, about him saying ‘Virgie’ and all. You couldn’t make something like that up, could you?”
“No.” I said. “I couldn’t make something like that up. Nobody could.”
14
Downstairs in the lobby I found a pay phone and called the number that I had copied from Jack Marsh’s address book. It rang twice and then somebody, a man, answered and said, “Yeah?”
“Doc Amber, please,” I said, trying to be brisk and businesslike.
“He ain’t here.”
“When do you think he might be in?”
“How the hell should I know? I ain’t his secretary. Who’s this?”
“Just a friend.”
“Well, lemme tell you something, just a friend, he ain’t here and I don’t know when he’s gonna be here, if he is.”
“Maybe I could drop by and see him.”
“Maybe you could.”
“What’s the best time?”
“Like I said, how the hell should I know?”
“Maybe I could come by and wait for him.”
“I don’t give a shit what you do.”
“I’m not sure that I’ve got that address down right.”
There was a silence. Then the man said, “You say you’re just a friend of Doc’s, huh?”
“That’s right.”
“But you ain’t got this address?”
“I’m not sure that I’ve got it right.”
“Fuck off, Jack,” the man said and hung up.
I went back out to the van and climbed in. Guerriero started the engine. “Where to?” he said.
I handed him the envelope on which I’d written the number that I’d just called. “We’ve got a problem,” I said. “That number. I’d like to get an address to go with it.”
Guerriero tucked the envelope into a pocket. “No problem,” he said. “Not if you’re willing to spend twenty bucks.”
“I’m willing.”
It was a thirty-minute ride. We took the Santa Monica freeway into Los Angeles and got off at La Brea. We went north on La Brea and then turned east down Melrose until we came to a row of small shops on the right-hand side of the street. The shops sold a variety of things including health foods and antiques and paintings. The one we stopped in front of was called the Fat Attic and most of the stuff in its window seemed to be old clothes and odds and ends from the thirties and the forties and even the twenties.
In the center of the row of shops was a passageway that led back toward the rear. With Guerriero leading we went down the passageway until we came to a door. Guerriero knocked and the door was opened after a moment by a girl with long red hair and a freckled face. She couldn’t have been much more than nineteen.