“But why should you want to?” she asked, troubled.
“Me?” I said. “I don’t want to. I’m fed up with people telling me histories. I’m just sitting here because I don’t have any place to go. I don’t want to work. I don’t want anything.”
“You talk too much.”
“Yes,” I said, “I talk too much. Lonely men always talk too much. Either that or they don’t talk at all. Shall we get down to business? You don’t look like the type that goes to see private detectives, and especially private detectives you don’t know.”
“I know that,” she said quietly. “And Orrin would be absolutely livid. Mother would be furious too. I just picked your name out of the phone book—”
“What principle?” I asked. “And with the eyes closed or open?”
She stared at me for a moment as if I were some kind of freak. “Seven and thirteen,” she said quietly.
“How?”
“Marlowe has seven letters,” she said, “and Philip Marlowe has thirteen. Seven together with thirteen—”
“What’s your name?” I almost snarled.
“Orfamay Quest.” She crinkled her eyes as if she could cry. She spelled the first name out for me, all one word. “I live with my mother,” she went on, her voice getting rapid now as if my time is costing her. “My father died four years ago. He was a doctor. My brother Orrin was going to be a surgeon, too, but he changed into engineering after two years of medical. Then a year ago Orrin came out to work for the Cal-Western Aircraft Company in Bay City. He didn’t have to. He had a good job in Wichita. I guess he just sort of wanted to come out here to California. Most everybody does.”
“Almost everybody,” I said. “If you’re going to wear those rimless glasses, you might at least try to live up to them.”
She giggled and drew a line along the desk with her fingertip, looking down. “Did you mean those slanting kind of glasses that make you look kind of oriental?”
“Uh-huh. Now about Orrin. We’ve got him to California, and we’ve got him to Bay City. What do we do with him?”
She thought a moment and frowned. Then she studied my face as if making up her mind. Then her words came with a burst: “It wasn’t like Orrin not to write to us regularly. He only wrote twice to mother and three times to me in the last six months. And the last letter was several months ago. Mother and I got worried. So it was my vacation and I came out to see him. He’d never been away from Kansas before.” She stopped. “Aren’t you going to take any notes?” she asked.
I grunted.
“I thought detectives always wrote things down in little notebooks.”
“I’ll make the gags,” I said. “You tell the story. You came out on your vacation. Then what?”
“I’d written to Orrin that I was coming but I didn’t get any answer. Then I sent a wire to him from Salt Lake City but he didn’t answer that either. So all I could do was go down where he lived. It’s an awful long way. I went in a bus. It’s in Bay City. No. 449 Idaho Street.”
She stopped again, then repeated the address, and I still didn’t write it down. I just sat there looking at her glasses and her smooth brown hair and the silly little hat and the fingernails with no color and her mouth with no lipstick and the tip of the little tongue that came and went between the pale lips.
“Maybe you don’t know Bay City, Mr. Marlowe.”
“Ha,” I said. “All I know about Bay City is that every time I go there I have to buy a new head. You want me to finish your story for you?”
“Wha-a-at?” Her eyes opened so wide that the glasses made them look like something you see in the deep-sea fish tanks.
“He’s moved,” I said. “And you don’t know where he’s moved to. And you’re afraid he’s living a life of sin in a penthouse on top of the Regency Towers with something in a long mink coat and an interesting perfume.”
“Well for goodness’ sakes!”
“Or am I being coarse?” I asked.
“Please, Mr. Marlowe,” she said at last, “I don’t think anything of the sort about Orrin. And if Orrin heard you say that you’d be sorry. He can be awfully mean. But I know something has happened. It was just a cheap rooming house, and I didn’t like the manager at all. A horrid kind of man. He said Orrin had moved away a couple of weeks before and he didn’t know where to and he didn’t care, and all he wanted was a good slug of gin. I don’t know why Orrin would even live in a place like that.”
“Did you say slug of gin?” I asked.
She blushed. “That’s what the manager said. I’m just telling you.”
“All right,” I said. “Go on.”
“Well, I called the place where he worked. The Cal-Western Company, you know. And they said he’d been laid off like a lot of others and that was all they knew. So then I went to the post office and asked if Orrin had put in a change of address to anywhere. And they said they couldn’t give me any information. It was against the regulations. So I told them how it was and the man said, well if I was his sister he’d go look. So he went and looked and came back and said no. Orrin hadn’t put in any change of address. So then I began to get a little frightened. He might have had an accident or something.”
“Did it occur to you to ask the police about that?”
“I wouldn’t dare ask the police. Orrin would never forgive me. He’s difficult enough at the best of times. Our family—” She hesitated and there was something behind her eyes she tried not to have there. So she went on breathlessly: “Our family’s not the kind of family—”
“Look,” I said wearily, “I’m not talking about the guy lifting a wallet. I’m talking about him getting knocked down by a car and losing his memory or being too badly hurt to talk.”
She gave me a level look which was not too admiring. “If it was anything like that, we’d know,” she said. “Everybody has things in their pockets to tell who they are.”
“Sometimes all they have left is the pockets.”
“Are you trying to scare me, Mr. Marlowe?”
“If I am, I’m certainly getting nowhere fast. Just what do you think might have happened?”
She put her slim forefinger to her lips and touched it very carefully with the tip of that tongue. “I guess if I knew that I wouldn’t have to come and see you. How much would you charge to find him?”
I didn’t answer for a long moment, then I said: “You mean alone, without telling anybody?”
“Yes. I mean alone, without telling anybody.”
“Uh-huh. Well that depends. I told you what my rates were.”
She clasped her hands on the edge of the desk and squeezed them together hard. She had about the most meaningless set of gestures I had ever laid eyes on. “I thought you being a detective and all you could find him right away,” she said. “I couldn’t possibly afford more than twenty dollars. I’ve got to buy my meals here and my hotel and the train going back and you know the hotel is so terribly expensive and the food on the train—”
“Which one are you staying at?”
“I—I’d rather not tell you, if you don’t mind.”
“Why?”
“I’d just rather not. I’m terribly afraid of Orrin’s temper. And, well I can always call you up, can’t I?”
“Uh-huh. Just what is it you’re scared of, besides Orrin’s temper, Miss Quest?” I had let my pipe go out. I struck a match and held it to the bowl, watching her over it.
“Isn’t pipe smoking a very dirty habit?” she asked.
“Probably,” I said. “But it would take more than twenty bucks to have me drop it. And don’t try to side-step my questions.”
“You can’t talk to me like that,” she flared up. “Pipe smoking is a dirty habit. Mother never let father smoke in the house, even the last two years after he had his stroke. He used to sit with that empty pipe in his mouth sometimes. But she didn’t like him to do that really. We owed a lot of money too and she said she couldn’t afford to give him money for useless things like tobacco. The church needed it much more than he did.”