The shoes were lying against the baseboard, looking as dissipated as shoes ever looked. I put them on wearily. I was an old man now. I was going down the last long hill. I still had a tooth left though. I felt it with my tongue. It didn’t seem to taste of gin.
“It will all come back to you,” I said. “Some day it will all come back to you. And you won’t like it.”
There was the lamp on the table by the open window. There was the fat green davenport. There was the doorway with the green curtains across it. Never sit with your back to a green curtain. It always turns out badly. Something always happens. Who had I said that to? A girl with a gun. A girl with a clear empty face and dark brown hair that had been blond.
I looked around for her. She was still there. She was lying on the pulled-down twin bed.
She was wearing a pair of tan stockings and nothing else. Her hair was tumbled. There were dark bruises on her throat. Her mouth was open and a swollen tongue filled it to over-flowing. Her eyes bulged and the whites of them were not white.
Across her naked belly four angry scratches leered crimson red against the whiteness of flesh. Deep angry scratches, gouged out by four bitter fingernails.
On the davenport there were tumbled clothes, mostly hers. My coat was there also. I disentangled it and put it on. Something crackled under my hand in the tumbled clothes. I drew out a long envelope with money still in it. I put it in my pocket. Marlowe, five hundred dollars. I hoped it was all there. There didn’t seem much else to hope for.
I stepped on the balls of my feet softly, as if walking on very thin ice. I bent down to rub behind my knee and wondered which hurt most, my knee, or my head when I bent down to nib the knee.
Heavy feet came along the hallway and there was a hard mutter of voices. The feet stopped. A hard fist knocked on the door.
I stood there leering at the door, with my lips drawn back tight against my teeth. I waited for somebody to open the door and walk in. The knob was tried, but nobody walked in. The knocking began again, stopped, the voices muttered again. The steps went away. I wondered how long it would take to get the manager with a pass key. Not very long.
Not nearly long enough for Marlowe to get home from the French Riviera.
I went to the green curtain and brushed it aside and looked down a short dark hallway into a bathroom. I went in there and put the light on. Two wash rugs on the floor, a bath mat folded over the edge of the tub, a pebbled glass window at the corner of the tub. I shut the bathroom door and stood on the edge of the tub and eased the window up. This was the sixth floor. There was no screen. I put my head out and looked into darkness and a narrow glimpse of a street with trees. I looked sideways and saw that the bathroom window of the next apartment was not more than three feet away. A well nourished mountain goat could make it without any trouble at all.
The question was whether a battered private detective could make it, and if so, what the harvest would be.
Behind me a rather remote and muffled voice seemed to be chanting the policeman’s litany: “Open it up or we’ll kick it in.” I sneered back at the voice. They wouldn’t kick it in because kicking in a door is hard on the feet. Policemen are kind to their feet. Their feet are about all they are kind to.
I grabbed a towel off the rack and pulled the two halves of the window down and eased out on the sill. I swung half of me over to the next sill, holding on to the frame of the open window. I could just reach to push the next window down, if it was unlocked. It wasn’t unlocked. I got my foot over there and kicked the glass over the catch. It made a noise that ought to have been heard in Reno. I wrapped the towel around my left hand and reached in to turn the catch. Down on the street a car went by, but nobody yelled at me.
I pushed the broken window down and climbed across to the other side. The towel fell out of my hand and fluttered down into the darkness to a strip of grass far below, between the two wings of the building.
I climbed in at the window of the other bathroom.
33
I climbed down into darkness and groped through darkness to a door and opened it and listened. Filtered moonlight coming through north windows showed a bedroom with twin beds, made up and empty. Not wall beds. This was a larger apartment. I moved past the beds to another door and into a living room. Both rooms were closed up and smelled musty. I felt my way to a lamp and switched it on. I ran a finger along the wood of a table edge. There was a light film of dust, such as accumulates in the cleanest room when it is left shut up.
The room contained a library dining table, an armchair radio, a book rack built like a hod, a big bookcase full of novels with their jackets still on them, a dark wood highboy with a siphon and a cut glass bottle of liquor and four striped glasses upside down on an Indian brass tray. Besides this paired photographs in a double silver frame, a youngish middle-aged man and woman, with round healthy faces and cheerful eyes. They looked out at me as if they didn’t mind my being there at all.
I sniffed the liquor, which was Scotch, and used some of it. It made my head feel worse but it made the rest of me feel better. I put light on the bedroom and poked into closets. One of them had a man’s clothes, tailor-made, plenty of them. The tailor’s label inside a coat pocket declared the owner’s name to be H. G. Talbot. I went to the bureau and poked around and found a soft blue shirt that looked a little small for me. I carried it into the bathroom and stripped mine off and washed my face and chest and wiped my hair off with a wet towel and put the blue shirt on. I used plenty of Mr. Talbot’s rather insistent hair tonic on my hair and used his brush and comb to tidy it up. By that time I smelled of gin only remotely, if at all.
The top button of the shirt wouldn’t meet its buttonhole so I poked into the bureau again and found a dark blue crepe tie and strung it around my neck. I got my coat back on and looked at myself in the mirror. I looked slightly too neat for that hour of the night, even for as careful a man as Mr. Talbot’s clothes indicated him to be. Too neat and too sober.
I rumpled my hair a little and pulled the tie close, and went back to the whisky decanter and did what I could about being too sober. I lit one of Mr. Talbot’s cigarettes and hoped that Mr. and Mrs. Talbot, wherever they were, were having a much better time than I was. I hoped I would live long enough to come and visit them.
I went to the living room door, the one giving on the hallway, and opened it and leaned in the opening smoking. I didn’t think it was going to work. But I didn’t think waiting there for them to follow my trail through the window was going to work any better.
A man coughed a little way down the hall and I poked my head out farther and he was looking at me. He came towards me briskly, a small sharp man in a neatly pressed police uniform. He had reddish hair and red-gold eyes.
I yawned and said languidly: “What goes on, officer?”
He stared at me thoughtfully. “Little trouble next door to you. Hear anything?”
“I thought I heard knocking. I just got home a little while ago.”
“Little late,” he said.
“That’s a matter of opinion,” I said. “Trouble next door, ah?”
“A dame,” he said. “Know her?”
“I think I’ve seen her.”
“Yeah,” he said. “You ought to see her now . . .” He put his hands to his throat and bulged his eyes out and gulped unpleasantly. “Like that,” he said. “You didn’t hear nothing, huh?”
“Nothing I noticed—except the knocking.”
“Yeah. What was the name?”
“Talbot.”
“Just a minute, Mr. Talbot. Wait there just a minute.”
He went along the hallway and leaned into an open doorway through which light streamed out. “Oh, lieutenant,” he said. “The man next door is on deck.”