“Such as?”
“Suicide and murder are the sort of things I mean. That’s just by way of example. You’ve noticed how the name of a big hotel is hardly ever mentioned when one of the guests jumps out of a window? It’s always a midtown or a downtown hotel or a well-known exclusive hotel—something like that. And if it’s rather a high class place, you never see any cops in the lobby, no matter what happened upstairs.”
His eyes went sideways and mine followed his. The canasta table was breaking up. The dolled-up and well-iced woman called Margo West strolled off towards the bar with one of the men, her cigarette holder sticking out like a bowsprit.
“So?”
“Well,” I said, and I was working hard, “if Mitchell keeps his room on the records, whatever room he had—”
“Four-eighteen,” Clarendon put in calmly. “On the ocean side.
Fourteen dollars a day out of season, eighteen in season.”
“Not exactly cheap for a guy on his uppers. But he still has it, let’s say. So whatever happened, he’s just away for a few days. Took his car out, put his luggage in around seven A.M. this morning. A damn funny time to leave when he was as drunk as a skunk late last night.”
Clarendon leaned back and let his gloved hands hang limp. I could see that he was getting tired. “If it happened that way, wouldn’t the hotel prefer to have you think he had left for good? Then you’d have to search for him somewhere else. That is, if you really are searching for him.”
I met his pale stare. He grinned.
“You’re not making very good sense to me, Mr. Marlowe. I talk and talk, but not merely to hear the sound of my voice. I don’t hear it naturally in any case. Talking gives me an opportunity to study people without seeming altogether rude. I have studied you. My intuition, if such be the correct word, tells me that your interest in Mitchell is rather tangential. Otherwise you would not be so open about it.”
“Uh-huh. Could be,” I said. It was a spot for a paragraph of lucid prose. Henry Clarendon IV would have obliged. I didn’t have a damn thing more to say.
“Run along now,” he said. “I’m tired. I’m going up to my room and lie down a little. A pleasure to have met you, Mr. Marlowe.” He got slowly to his feet and steadied himself with the stick. It was an effort. I stood up beside him.
“I never shake hands,” he said. “My hands are ugly and painful. I wear gloves for that reason. Good evening. If I don’t see you again, good luck.”
He went off, walking slowly and keeping his head erect. I could see that walking wasn’t any fun for him. The two steps up from the main lobby to the arch were made one at a time, with a pause in between. His right foot always moved first. The cane bore down hard beside his left. He went out through the arch and I watched him move towards an elevator. I decided Mr. Henry Clarendon IV was a pretty smooth article.
I strolled along to the bar. Mrs. Margo West was sitting in the amber shadows with one of the canasta players. The waiter was just setting drinks before them. I didn’t pay too much attention because farther along in a little booth against the wall was someone I knew better. And alone.
She had the same clothes on except that she had taken the bandeau off her hair and it hung loose around her face.
I sat down. The waiter came over and I ordered. He went away. The music from the invisible record player was low and ingratiating.
She smiled a little. “I’m sorry I lost my temper,” she said.
“I was very rude.”
“Forget it. I had it coming.”
“Were you looking for me in here?”
“Not especially.”
“Were you—oh, I forgot.” She reached for her bag and put it in her lap. She fumbled in it and then passed something rather small across the table, something not small enough for her hand to hide that it was a folder of traveler’s checks. “I promised you these.”
“No.”
“Take them, you fool! I don’t want the waiter to see.”
I took the folder and slipped it into my pocket. I reached into my inside pocket and got out a small receipt book. I entered the counterfoil and then the body of the receipt. “Received from Miss Betty Mayfield, Hotel Casa del Poniente, Esmeralda, California, the sum of $5000 in American Express Company traveler’s checks of $100 denomination, countersigned by the owner, and remaining her property subject to her demand at any time until a fee is arranged with, and an employment accepted by me, the undersigned.”
I signed this rigmarole and held the book for her to see it.
“Read it and sign your name in the lower left-hand corner.”
She took it and held it close to the light.
“You make me tired,” she said. “Whatever are you trying to spring?”
“That I’m on the level and you think so.”
She took the pen I held out and signed and gave the stuff back to me. I tore out the original and handed it to her. I put the book away.
The waiter came and put my drink down. He didn’t wait to be paid. Betty shook her head at him. He went away.
“Why don’t you ask me if I have found Larry?”
“All right. Have you found Larry, Mr. Marlowe?”
“No. He has skipped the hotel. He had a room on the fourth floor on the same side as your room. Must be fairly nearly under it. He took nine pieces of luggage and beat it in his Buick. The house peeper, whose name is Javonen—he calls himself an assistant manager and security officer—is satisfied that Mitchell paid his bill and even a week in advance for his room. He has no worries. He doesn’t like me, of course.”
“Does somebody?”
“You do—five thousand dollars worth.”
“Oh, you are an idiot. Do you think Mitchell will come back?”
“I told you he paid a week in advance.”
She sipped her drink quietly. “So you did. But that could mean something else.”
“Sure. Just spit-balling, for example, I might say it could mean that he didn’t pay his bill, but someone else did. And that the someone else wanted time to do something—such as getting rid of that body on your balcony last night. That is, if there was a body.”
“Oh, stop it!”
She finished her drink, killed her cigarette, stood up and left me with the check. I paid it and went back through the lobby, for no reason that I could think of. Perhaps by pure instinct. And I saw Goble getting into the elevator. He seemed to have a rather strained expression. As he turned he caught my eye, or seemed to, but he gave no sign of knowing me. The elevator went up.
I went out to my car and drove back to the Rancho Descansado. I lay down on the couch and went to sleep. It had been a lot of day. Perhaps if I had a rest and my brain cleared, I might have some faint idea of what I was doing.
18
An hour later I was parked in front of the hardware store. It wasn’t the only hardware store in Esmeralda, but it was the only one that backed on the alley called Polton’s Lane. I walked east and counted the stores. There were seven of them to the corner, all shining with plate glass and chromium trim. On the corner was a dress shop with mannequins in the windows, scarves and gloves and costume jewelry laid out under the lights. No prices showing. I rounded the corner and went south. Heavy eucalyptus trees grew out of the sidewalk. They branched low down and the trunks looked hard and heavy, quite unlike the tall brittle stuff that grows around Los Angeles. At the far corner of Polton’s Lane there was an automobile agency. I followed its high blank wall, looking at broken crates, piles of cartons, trash drums, dusty parking spaces, the back yard of elegance. I counted the buildings. It was easy. No questions to ask. A light burned in the small window of a tiny frame cottage that had long ago been somebody’s simple home. The cottage had a wooden porch with a broken railing. It had been painted once, but that was in the remote past before the shops swallowed it up. Once it may even have had a garden. The shingles of the roof were warped. The front door was a dirty mustard yellow. The window was shut tight and needed hosing off. Behind part of it hung what remained of an old roller blind. There were two steps up to the porch, but only one had a tread. Behind the cottage and halfway to the loading platform of the hardware store there was what had presumably been a privy. But I could see where a water pipe cut through the sagging side. A rich man’s improvements on a rich man’s property. A one-unit slum.