He stared at me with his mouth open.
“Put that dough out of sight,” I said.
He reached for it and crammed it back in his wallet. “What something else?” His eyes were small and thoughtful. His tongue pushed out his lower lip “It don’t seem to me you’re in a very hot trading position either.”
“You could be a little wrong about that. If I have to go back up there and tell Christy French and Beifus I was up there before and searched the body, I’d get a tongue-lashing all right. But he’d understand that I haven’t been holding out just to be smart. He’d know that somewhere in the background I had a client I was trying to protect. I’d get tough talk and bluster. But that’s not what you’d get.” I stopped and watched the faint glisten of moisture forming on his forehead now. He swallowed hard. His eyes were sick.
“Cut out the wise talk and lay your deal on the deck,” he said. He grinned suddenly, rather wolfishly. “Got here a little late to protect her, didn’t you?” The fat sneer he lived with was coming home again, but slowly, but gladly.
I killed my cigarette and got another one out and went through all the slow futile face-saving motions of lighting it, getting rid of the match, blowing smoke off to one side, inhaling deeply as though that scrubby little office was a hilltop overlooking the bouncing ocean—all the tired clichéd mannerisms of my trade.
“All right,” I said. “I’ll admit it was a woman. I’ll admit she must have been up there while he was dead, if that makes you happy. I guess it was just shock that made her run away.”
“Oh sure,” Flack said nastily. The fat sneer was all the way home now. “Or maybe she hadn’t ice-picked a guy in a month. Kind of lost touch.”
“But why would she take his key?” I said, talking to myself. “And why leave it at the desk? Why not just walk away and leave the whole thing? What if she did think she had to lock the door? Why not drop the key in a sand jar and cover it up? Or take it away with her and lose it? Why do anything with that key that would connect her with that room?” I brought my eyes down and gave Flack a thick leaden stare. “Unless of course she was seen to leave the room—with the key in her hand—and followed out of the hotel.”
“What for would anybody do that?” Flack asked.
“Because whoever saw her could have got into that room at once. He had a passkey.”
Flack’s eyes flicked up at me and dropped all in one motion.
“So he must have followed her,” I said. “He must have seen her dump the key at the desk and stroll out of the hotel and he must have followed her a little further than that.”
Flack said derisively: “What makes you so wonderful?”
I leaned down and pulled the telephone towards me. “I’d better call Christy and get this over with,” I said. “The more I think about it the scareder I get. Maybe she did kill him. I can’t cover up for a murderer.”
I took the receiver off the hook. Flack slammed his moist paw down hard on top of my hand. The phone jumped on the desk. “Lay off.” His voice was almost a sob. “I followed her to a car parked down the street. Got the number. Christ sake, pal, give me some kind of a break.” He was fumbling wildly in his pockets. “Know what I make on this job? Cigarette and cigar money and hardly a dime more. Wait a minute now. I think—” He looked down and played solitaire with some dirty envelopes, finally selected one and tossed it over to me. “License number,” he said wearily, “and if it’s any satisfaction to you, I can’t even remember what it was.”
I looked down at the envelope. There was a scrawled license number on it all right. Ill-written and faint and oblique, the way it would be written hastily on a paper held in a man’s hand on the street. 6N 333. California 1947.
“Satisfied?” This was Flack’s voice. Or it came out of his mouth. I tore the number off and tossed the envelope back to him.
“4P 327,” I said, watching his eyes. Nothing flicked in them. No trace of derision or concealment. “But how do I know this isn’t just some license number you had already?”
“You just got to take my word for it.”
“Describe the car,” I said.
“Caddy convertible, not new, top up. About 1942 model. Sort of dusty blue color.”
“Describe the woman.”
“Want a lot for your dough, don’t you, peeper?”
“Dr. Hambleton’s dough.”
He winced. “All right. Blonde. White coat with some colored stitching on it. Wide blue straw hat. Dark glasses. Height about five two. Built like a Conover model.”
“Would you know her again—without the glasses?” I asked carefully.
He pretended to think. Then shook his head, no.
“What was that license number again, Flackie?” I caught him off guard.
“Which one?” he said.
I leaned across the desk and dropped some cigarette ash on his gun. I did some more staring into his eyes. But I knew he was licked now. He seemed to know too. He reached for his gun, blew off the ash and put it back in the drawer of his desk.
“Go on. Beat it,” he said between his teeth. “Tell the cops I frisked the stiff. So what? Maybe I lose a job. Maybe I get tossed in the fishbowl. So what? When I come out I’m solid. Little Flackie don’t have to worry about coffee and crullers. Don’t think for a minute those dark cheaters fool little Flackie. I’ve seen too many movies to miss that lovely puss. And if you ask me that babe’ll be around for a long time. She’s a comer—and who knows—” he leered at me triumphantly—”she’d need a bodyguard one of these days. A guy to have around, watch things, keep her out of jams. Somebody that knows the ropes and ain’t unreasonable about dough. . . What’s the matter?”
I had put my head on one side and was leaning forward. I was listening. “I thought I heard a church bell,” I said.
“There ain’t any church around here,” he said contemptuously. “It’s that platinum brain of yours getting cracks in it.”
“Just one bell,” I said. “Very slow. Tolling is the word, I believe.”
Flack listened with me. “I don’t hear anything,” he said sharply.
“Oh you wouldn’t hear it,” I said. “You’d be the one guy in the whole world who wouldn’t hear it.”
He just sat there and stared at me with his nasty little eyes half closed and his nasty little mustache shining. One of his hands twitched on the desk, an aimless movement.
I left him to his thoughts, which were probably as small, ugly and frightened as the man himself.
12
The apartment house was over on Doheny Drive, just down the hill from the Strip. It was really two buildings, one behind the other, loosely connected by a floored patio with a fountain, and a room built over the arch. There were mailboxes and bells in the imitation marble foyer. Three out of the sixteen had no names over them. The names that I read meant nothing to me. The job needed a little more work. I tried the front door, found it unlocked, and the job still needed more work.
Outside stood two Cadillacs, a Lincoln Continental and a Packard Clipper. Neither of the Cadillacs had the right color or license. Across the way a guy in riding breeches was sprawled with his legs over the door of a low-cut Lancia. He was smoking and looking up at the pale stars which know enough to keep their distance from Hollywood. I walked up the steep hill to the boulevard and a block east and smothered myself in an outdoor sweat-box phone booth. I dialed a man named Peoria Smith, who was so-called because he stuttered—another little mystery I hadn’t had time to work out.
“Mavis Weld,” I said. “Phone number. This is Marlowe.”
“S-s-s-ure,” he said. “M-M-Mavis Weld huh? You want h-h-her ph-ph-phone number?”
“How much?”
“Be-b-b-be ten b-b-b-bucks,” he said.
“Just forget I called,” I said.