“Well, but not favorably,” I said.
He turned his head and gave me a bleak stare, “I’m an assistant manager here, Mr. Marlowe. I double as security officer. I can’t discuss the reputation of a guest of the hotel with you.”
“You don’t have to. I know it. From various sources. I’ve observed him in action. Last night he put the bite on somebody and got enough to blow town. Taking his baggage with him, is my information.”
“Who gave this information to you?” He looked tough asking that.
I tried to look tough not answering it. “On top of that I’ll give you three guesses,” I said. “One, his bed wasn’t slept in last night. Two, it was reported to the office sometime today that his room had been cleaned out. Three, somebody on your night staff won’t show for work tonight. Mitchell couldn’t get all his stuff out without help.”
Javonen looked at me, then prowled the lobby again with his eyes. “Got something that proves you are what the card reads? Anyone can have a card printed.”
I got my wallet out and slipped a small photostat of my license from it and passed it over. He glanced at it and handed it back. I put it away.
“We have our own organization to take care of skipouts,” he said. “They happen—in any hotel. We don’t need your help. And we don’t like guns in the lobby. The clerk saw yours. Somebody else could see it. We had a stickup attempted here nine months ago. One of the heist guys got dead. I shot him.”
“I read about it in the paper,” I said. “It scared me for days and days.”
“You read some of it. We lost four or five thousand dollars worth of business the week following. People checked out by the dozen. You get my point?”
“I let the clerk see my gun butt on purpose. I’ve been asking for Mitchell all day and all I got was the runaround. If the man checked out, why not say so? Nobody had to tell me he had jumped his bill.”
“Nobody said he jumped his bill. His bill, Mr. Marlowe, was paid in full. So where does that leave you?”
“Wondering why it was a secret he had checked out.”
He looked contemptuous. “Nobody said that either. You don’t listen good. I said he was out of town on a trip. I said his bill was paid in full. I didn’t say how much baggage he took. I didn’t say he had given up his room. I didn’t say that what he took was all he had. Just what are you trying to make out of all this?”
“Who paid his bill?”
His face got a little red. “Look, buster, I told you he paid it. In person, last night, in full and a week in advance as well. I’ve been pretty patient with you. Now you tell me something. What’s your angle?”
“I don’t have one. You’ve talked me out of it. I wonder why he paid a week in advance.”
Javonen smiled—very slightly. Call it a down payment on a smile. “Look, Marlowe, I put in five years in Military Intelligence. I can size up a man—like for instance the guy we’re talking about. He pays in advance because we feel happier that way. It has a stabilizing influence.”
“He ever pay in advance before?”
“God damn it…!”
“Watch yourself,” I cut in. “The elderly gent with the walking stick is interested in your reactions.”
He looked halfway across the lobby to where a thin, old, bloodless man sat in a very low round-backed padded chair with his chin on gloved hands and the gloved hands on the crook of a stick. He stared unblinkingly in our direction.
“Oh, him,” Javonen said. “He can’t even see this far. He’s eighty years old.”
He stood up and faced me. “Okay, you’re clammed,” he said quietly. “You’re a private op, you’ve got a client and instructions. I’m only interested in protecting the hotel. Leave the gun home next time. If you have questions, come to me. Don’t question the help. It gets told around and we don’t like it. You wouldn’t find the local cops friendly if I suggested you were being troublesome.”
“Can I buy a drink in the bar before I go?”
“Keep your jacket buttoned.”
“Five years in Military Intelligence is a lot of experience,” I said looking up at him admiringly.
“It ought to be enough.” He nodded briefly and strolled away through the arch, back straight, shoulders back, chin in, a hard lean well set-up piece of man. A smooth operator. He had milked me dry—of everything that was printed on my business card.
Then I noticed that the old party in the low chair had lifted a gloved hand off the crook of his stick and was curving a finger at me. I pointed a finger at my chest and looked the question. He nodded, so over I went.
He was old, all right, but a long way from feeble and a long way from dim. His white hair was neatly parted, his nose was long and sharp and veined, his faded-out blue eyes were still keen, but the lids drooped wearily over them. One ear held the plastic button of a hearing aid, grayish pink like his ear. The suede gloves on his hands had the cuffs turned back. He wore gray spats over polished black shoes.
“Pull up a chair, young man.” His voice was thin and dry and rustled like bamboo leaves.
I sat down beside him. He peered at me and his mouth smiled. “Our excellent Mr. Javonen spent five years in Military Intelligence, as no doubt he told you.”
“Yes, sir. CIC, a branch of it.”
“Military Intelligence is an expression which contains an interior fallacy. So you are curious about how Mr. Mitchell paid his bill?”
I stared at him. I looked at the hearing aid. He tapped his breast pocket. “I was deaf long before they invented these things. As the result of a hunter balking at a fence. It was my own fault. I lifted him too soon. I was still a young man. I couldn’t see myself using an ear trumpet, so I learned to lip-read. It takes a certain amount of practice.”
“What about Mitchell, sir?”
“We’ll come to him. Don’t be in a hurry.” He looked up and nodded.
A voice said, “Good evening, Mr. Clarendon.” A bellhop went by on his way to the bar. Clarendon followed him with his eyes.
“Don’t bother with that one,” he said. “He’s a pimp. I have spent many many years in lobbies, in lounges and bars, on porches, terraces and ornate gardens in hotels all over the world. I have outlived everyone in my family. I shall go on being useless and inquisitive until the day comes when the stretcher carries me off to some nice airy corner room in a hospital. The starched white dragons will minister to me. The bed will be wound up, wound down. Trays will come with that awful loveless hospital food. My pulse and temperature will be taken at frequent intervals and invariably when I am dropping off to sleep. I shall lie there and hear the rustle of the starched skirts, the slurring sound of the rubber shoe soles on the aseptic floor, and see the silent horror of the doctor’s smile. After a while they will put the oxygen tent over me and draw the screens around the little white bed and I shall, without even knowing it, do the one thing in the world no man ever has to do twice.”
He turned his head slowly and looked at me. “Obviously, I talk too much. Your name, sir?”
“Philip Marlowe.”
“I am Henry Clarendon IV. I belong to what used to be called the upper classes. Groton, Harvard, Heidelberg, the Sorbonne. I even spent a year at Uppsala. I cannot clearly remember why. To fit me for a life of leisure, no doubt. So you are a private detective. I do eventually get around to speaking of something other than myself, you see.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You should have come to me for information. But of course you couldn’t know that.”
I shook my head. I lit a cigarette, first offering one to Mr. Henry Clarendon IV. He refused it with a vague nod.
“However, Mr. Marlowe, it is something you should have certainly learned. In every luxury hotel in the world there will be half a dozen elderly idlers of both sexes who sit around and stare like owls. They watch, they listen, they compare notes, they learn everything about everyone. They have nothing else to do, because hotel life is the most deadly of all forms of boredom. And no doubt I’m boring you equally.”