He flushed solidly behind the sunburn.
“God damn it,” he said, “I told you I didn’t go anywhere with her. Not anywhere. Can’t you remember that?”
“I’ll remember it when I believe it.”
He leaned over to snub out his cigarette. He stood up with an easy movement, not hurried at all, pulled the belt of his robe tight, and moved out to the end of the davenport.
“All right,” he said in a clear tight voice. “Out you go. Take the air. I’ve had enough of your third-degree tripe. You’re wasting my time and your own—if it’s worth anything.”
I stood up and grinned at him. “Not a lot, but for what it’s worth I’m being paid for it. It couldn’t be, for instance, that you ran into a little unpleasantness in some department store—say at the stocking or jewelry counter.”
He looked at me very carefully, drawing his eyebrows down at the corners and making his mouth small.
“I don’t get it,” he said, but there was thought behind his voice.
“That’s all I wanted to know,” I said. “And thanks for listening. By the way, what line of business are you in—since you left Kingsley?”
“What the hell business is it of yours?”
“None. But of course I can always find out,” I said, and moved a little way towards the door, not very far.
“At the moment I’m not doing anything,” he said coldly. “I expect a commission in the navy almost any day.”
“You ought to do well at that,” I said.
“Yeah. So long, snooper. And don’t bother to come back. I won’t be at home.”
I went over to the door and pulled it open. It stuck on the lower sill, from the beach moisture. When I had it open, I looked back at him. He was standing there narrow-eyed, full of muted thunder.
“I may have to come back,” I said. “But it won’t be just to swap gags. It will be because I find something out that needs talking over.”
“So you still think I’m lying,” he said savagely.
“I think you have something on your mind. I’ve looked at too many faces not to know. It may not be any of my business. If it is, you’re likely to have to throw me out again.”
“A pleasure,” he said. “And next time bring somebody to drive you home. In case you land on your fanny and knock your brains out.”
Then without any rhyme or reason that I could see, he spat on the rug in front of his feet.
It jarred me. It was like watching the veneer peel off and leave a tough kid in an alley. Or like hearing an apparently refined woman start expressing herself in four letter words.
“So long, beautiful hunk,” I said, and left him standing there. I closed the door, had to jerk it to get it shut, and went up the path to the street. I stood on the sidewalk looking at the house across the way.
4
It was a wide shallow house with rose stucco wails faded out to a pleasant pastel shade and trimmed with dull green at the window frames. The roof was of green tiles, round rough ones. There was a deeply inset front door framed in a mosaic of multi-colored pieces of tiling and a small flower garden in front, behind a low stucco wall topped by an iron railing which the beach moisture had begun to corrode. Outside the wall to the left was the three-car garage, with a door opening inside the yard and a concrete path going from there to a side door of the house.
Set into the gatepost was a bronze tablet which read: “Albert S. Almore, M.D.”
While I was standing there staring across the street, the black Cadillac I had already seen came purring around the corner and then down the block. It slowed and started to sweep outwards to get turning space to go into the garage, decided my car was in the way of that, and went on to the end of the road and turned in the widened-out space in front of the ornamental iron railing. It came back slowly and went into the empty third of the garage across the way.
The thin man in sunglasses went along the sidewalk to the house, carrying a double-handled doctor’s bag. Halfway along he slowed down to stare across at me. I went along towards my car. At the house he used a key and as he opened the door he looked across at me again.
I got into the Chrysler and sat there smoking and trying to make up my mind whether it was worthwhile hiring somebody to pull a tail on Lavery. I decided it wasn’t, not the way things looked so far.
Curtains moved at a lower window close to the side door Dr. Almore had gone in at. A thin hand held them aside and I caught the glint of light on glasses. They were held aside for quite some time, before they fell together again.
I looked along the street at Lavery’s house. From this angle I could see that his service porch gave on a flight of painted wooden steps to a sloping concrete walk and a flight of concrete steps ending in the paved alley below.
I looked across at Dr. Almore’s house again, wondering idly if he knew Lavery and how well. He probably knew him, since theirs were the only two houses in the block. But being a doctor, he wouldn’t tell me anything about him. As I looked, the curtains which had been lifted apart were now completely drawn aside.
The middle segment of the triple window they had masked had no screen. Behind it, Dr. Almore stood staring across my way, with a sharp frown on his thin face. I shook cigarette ash out of the window and he turned abruptly and sat down at a desk. His double-handled bag was on the desk in front of him. He sat rigidly, drumming on the desk beside the bag. His hand reached for the telephone, touched it and came away again. He lit a cigarette and shook the match violently, then strode to the window and stared out at me some more.
This was interesting, if at all, only because he was a doctor. Doctors, as a rule, are the least curious of men. While they are still interns they hear enough secrets to last them a lifetime. Dr. Almore seemed interested in me. More than interested, bothered.
I reached down to turn the ignition key, then Lavery’s front door opened and I took my hand away and leaned back again. Lavery came briskly up the walk of his house, shot a glance down the street and turned to go into his garage. He was dressed as I had seen him. He had a rough towel and a steamer rug over his arm. I heard the garage door lift up, then the car door open and shut, then the grind and cough of the starting car. It backed up the steep incline to the street, white steamy exhaust pouring from its rear end. It was a cute little blue convertible, with the top folded down and Lavery’s sleek dark head just rising above it. He was now wearing a natty pair of sun-goggles with very wide white side bows. The convertible swooped off down the block and danced around the corner.
There was nothing in that for me. Mr. Christopher Lavery was bound for the edge of the broad Pacific, to lie in the sun and let the girls see what they didn’t necessarily have to go on missing.
I gave my attention back to Dr. Almore. He was on the telephone now, not talking, holding it to his ear, smoking and waiting. Then he leaned forward as you do when the voice comes back, listened, hung up and wrote something on a pad in front of him. Then a heavy book with yellow sides appeared on his desk and he opened it just about in the middle. While he was doing this he gave one quick look out of the window, straight at the Chrysler.
He found his place in the book, leaned down over it and quick puffs of smoke appeared in the air over the pages. He wrote something else, put the book away, and grabbed the telephone again. He dialed, waited, began to speak quickly pushing his head down and making gestures in the air with his cigarette.
He finished his call and hung up. He leaned back and sat there brooding, staring down at his desk, but not forgetting to look out of the window every half minute. He was waiting, and I waited with him, for no reason at all. Doctors make many phone calls, talk to many people. Doctors look out of their front windows, doctors frown, doctors show nervousness, doctors have things on their mind and show the strain. Doctors are just people, born to sorrow, fighting the long grim fight like the rest of us.