“What was I before?”
“A nice quiet well-bred girl.”
“That was the act,” she said. “The other was my natural personality. Which goes with something else.” She brought a small automatic up from her side.
I looked at it. “Oh guns,” I said. “Don’t scare me with guns. I’ve lived with them all my life. I teethed on an old Derringer, single-shot, the kind the riverboat gamblers used to carry. As I got older I graduated to a lightweight sporting rifle, then a .303 target rifle and so on. I once made a bull at nine hundred yards with open sights. In case you don’t know, the whole target looks the size of a postage stamp at nine hundred yards.”
“A fascinating career,” she said.
“Guns never settle anything,” I said. “They are just a fast curtain to a bad second act.”
She smiled faintly and transferred the gun to her left hand. With her right she grabbed the edge of her blouse at the collar line and with a quick decisive motion tore it to the waist.
“Next,” she said, “but there’s no hurry about it, I turn the gun in my hand like this”—she put it back in her right hand, but held it by the barrel—”I slam myself on the cheekbone with the butt. I do a beautiful bruise.”
“And after that,” I said, “you get the gun into its proper position and release the safety catch and pull the trigger, just about the time I get through the lead column in the Sports Section.”
“You wouldn’t get halfway across the room.”
I crossed my legs and leaned back and lifted the green glass ashtray from the table beside the chair and balanced it on my knee and held the cigarette I was smoking between the first and second fingers of my right hand.
“I wouldn’t get any of the way across the room. I’d be sitting here like this, quite comfortable and relaxed.”
“But slightly dead,” she said. “I’m a good shot and it isn’t nine hundred yards.”
“Then you try to sell the cops your account of how I tried to attack you and you defended yourself.”
She tossed the gun into her suitcase and laughed. It sounded like a genuine laugh with real amusement in it. “Sorry,” she said. “You sitting there with your legs crossed and a hole in your head and me trying to explain how I shot you to defend my honor—the picture makes me a little lightheaded.”
She dropped into a chair and leaned forward with her chin cupped in a hand, the elbow propped on her knee, her face taut and drained, her dark red hair framing it too luxuriantly, so that her face looked smaller than it should have.
“Just what are you doing to me, Mr. Marlowe? Or is it the other way around—what I can do for you in return for you not doing anything at all?”
“Who is Eleanor King? What was she in Washington, D.C.? Why did she change her name somewhere along the way and have the initials taken off her bag? Odds and ends like that are what you could tell me. You probably won’t.”
“Oh, I don’t know. The porter took the initials off my things. I told him I had had a very unhappy marriage and was divorced and had been given the right to resume my unmarried name. Which is Elizabeth or Betty Mayfield. That could all be true, couldn’t it?”
“Yeah. But it doesn’t explain Mitchell.”
She leaned back and relaxed. Her eyes stayed watchful. “Just an acquaintance I made along the way. He was on the train.”
I nodded. “But he came down here in his own car. He made the reservation here for you. He’s not liked by the people here, but apparently he is a friend of someone with a lot of influence.”
“An acquaintance on a train or a ship sometimes develops very quickly,” she said.
“So it seems. He even touched you for a loan. Very fast work. And I got the impression you didn’t care for him too well.”
“Well,” she said. “so what? But as a matter of fact I’m crazy about him.” She turned her hand over and looked down at it. “Who hired you, Mr. Marlowe, and for what?”
“A Los Angeles lawyer, acting on instructions from back east.
I was to follow you and check you in somewhere. Which I did. But now you’re getting ready to move out. I’m going to have to start over again.”
“But with me knowing you’re there,” she said shrewdly. “So you’ll have a much harder job of it. You’re a private detective of some sort, I gather.”
I said I was. I had killed my cigarette some time back. I put the ashtray back on the table and stood up.
“Harder for me, but there are lots of others, Miss Mayfield.”
“Oh, I’m sure there are, and all such nice little men. Some of them are even fairly clean.”
“The cops are not looking for you. They’d have had you easily. It was known about your train. I even got a photo of you and a description. But Mitchell can make you do just what he wants. Money isn’t all he’ll want.”
I thought she flushed a little, but the light didn’t strike her face directly. “Perhaps so,” she said. “And perhaps I don’t mind.”
“You mind.”
She stood up suddenly and came near me. “You’re in a business that doesn’t pay fortunes, aren’t you?”
I nodded. We were very close now.
“Then what would it be worth to you to walk out of here and forget you ever saw me?”
“I’d walk out of here for free. As for the rest, I have to make a report.”
“How much?” She said it as if she meant it. “I can afford a substantial retainer. That’s what you call it, I’ve heard. A much nicer word than blackmail.”
“It doesn’t mean the same thing.”
“It could. Believe me, it can mean just that—even with some lawyers and doctors. I happen to know.”
“Tough break, huh?”
“Far from it, shamus. I’m the luckiest girl in the world. I’m alive.”
“I’m on the other side. Don’t give it away.”
“Well, what do you know,” she drawled. “A dick with scruples. Tell it to the seagulls, buster. On me it’s just confetti. Run along now, Mr. PI Marlowe, and make that little old phone call you’re so anxious about. I’m not restraining you.”
She started for the door, but I caught her by the wrist and spun her around. The torn blouse didn’t reveal any startling nakedness, merely some skin and part of a brassiere. You’d see more on the beach, far more, but you wouldn’t see it through a torn blouse.
I must have been leering a little, because she suddenly curled her fingers and tried to claw me.
“I’m no bitch in heat,” she said between tight teeth. “Take your paws off me.”
I got the other wrist and started to pull her closer. She tried to knee me in the groin, but she was already too close. Then she went limp and pulled her head back and closed her eyes. Her lips opened with a sardonic twist to them. It was a cool evening, maybe even cold down by the water. But it wasn’t cold where I was.
After a while she said with a sighing voice that she had to dress for dinner.
I said, “Uh-huh.”
After another pause she said it was a long time since a man had unhooked her brassiere. We did a slow turn in the direction of one of the twin day beds. They had pink and silver covers on them. The little odd things you notice.
Her eyes were open and quizzical. I studied them one at a time because I was too close to see them together. They seemed well matched.
“Honey,” she said softly, “you’re awful sweet, but I just don’t have the time.”
I closed her mouth for her. It seems that a key slid into the door from the outside, but I wasn’t paying too close attention. The lock clicked, the door opened, and Mr. Larry Mitchell walked in.
We broke apart. I turned and he looked at me droopy-eyed, six feet one and tough and wiry.
“I thought to check at the office,” he said, almost absently. “Twelve B was rented this afternoon, very soon after this was occupied. I got faintly curious, because there are a lot of vacancies here at the moment. So I borrowed the other key. And who is this hunk of beef, baby?”