I reached up and twitched her glasses off. She took half a step back, almost stumbled, and I reached an arm around her by pure instinct. Her eyes widened and she put her hands against my chest and pushed. I’ve been pushed harder by a kitten.
“Without the cheaters those eyes are really something,” I said in an awed voice.
She relaxed and let her head go back and her lips open a little. “I suppose you do this to all the clients,” she said softly. Her hands now had dropped to her sides. The bag whacked against my leg. She leaned her weight on my arm. If she wanted me to let go of her, she had her signals mixed.
“I just didn’t want you to lose your balance,” I said.
“I knew you were the thoughtful type.” She relaxed still more. Her head went back now. Her upper lids drooped, fluttered a bit and her lips came open a little farther. On them appeared the faint provocative smile that nobody ever has to teach them. “I suppose you thought I did it on purpose,” she said.
“Did what on purpose?”
“Stumbled, sort of.”
“Wel-l-l-l.”
She reached a quick arm around my neck and started to pull. So I kissed her. It was either that or slug her. She pushed her mouth hard at me for a long moment, then quietly and very comfortably wriggled around in my arms and nestled. She let out a long easy sigh.
“In Manhattan, Kansas, you could be arrested for this,” she said.
“If there was any justice, I could be arrested just for being there,” I said.
She giggled and poked the end of my nose with a fingertip. “I suppose you really prefer fast girls,” she said, looking up at me sideways. “At least you won’t have to wipe off any lip rouge. Maybe I’ll wear some next time.”
“Maybe we’d better sit down on the floor,” I said. “My arm’s getting tired.”
She giggled again and disengaged herself gracefully. “I guess you think I’ve been kissed lots of times,” she said.
“What girl hasn’t?”
She nodded, gave me the up-from-under look that made her eyelashes cut across the iris. “Even at the church socials they play kissing games,” she said.
“Or there wouldn’t be any church socials,” I said.
We looked at each other with no particular expression.
“Well-l-l—” she began at last. I handed her back her glasses. She put them on. She opened her bag, looked at herself in a small mirror, rooted around in her bag and came out with her hand clenched.
“I’m sorry I was mean,” she said, and pushed something under the blotter of my desk. She gave me another little frail smile and marched to the door and opened it.
“I’ll call you,” she said intimately. And out she went, tap, tap, tap down the hail.
I went over and lifted the blotter and smoothed out the crumpled currency that lay under it. It hadn’t been much of a kiss, but it looked like I had another chance at the twenty dollars.
The phone rang before I had quite started to worry about Mr. Lester B. Clausen. I reached for it absently. The voice I heard was an abrupt voice, but thick and clogged, as if it was being strained through a curtain or somebody’s long white beard.
“You Marlowe?” it said.
“Speaking.”
“You got a safe-deposit box, Marlowe?”
I had enough of being polite for one afternoon. “Stop asking and start telling,” I said.
“I asked you a question, Marlowe.”
“I didn’t answer it,” I said. “Like this.” I reached over and pressed down the riser on the phone. Held it that way while I fumbled around for a cigarette. I knew he would call right back. They always do when they think they’re tough. They haven’t used their exit line. When it rang again I started right in.
“If you have a proposition, state it. And I get called ‘mister’ until you give me some money.”
“Don’t let that temper ride you so hard, friend. I’m in a jam. I need help. I need something kept in a safe place. For a few days. Not longer. And for that you make a little quick money.”
“How little?” I asked. “And how quick?”
“A C note. Right here and waiting. I’m warming it for you.”
“I can hear it purr,” I said. “Right where and waiting?” I was listening to the voice twice, once when I heard it and once when it echoed in my mind.
“Room 332, Van Nuys Hotel. Knock two quick ones and two slow ones. Not too loud. I got to have live action. How fast can you—”
“What is it you want me to keep?”
“That’ll wait till you get here. I said I was in a hurry.”
“What’s your name?”
“Just Room 332.”
“Thanks for the time,” I said. “Goodbye.”
“Hey. Wait a minute, dope. It’s nothing hot like you think. No ice. No emerald pendants. It just happens to be worth a lot of money to me—and nothing at all to anybody else.”
“The hotel has a safe.”
“Do you want to die poor, Marlowe?”
“Why not? Rockefeller did. Goodbye again.”
The voice changed. The furriness went out of it. It said sharply and swiftly: “How’s every little thing in Bay City?”
I didn’t speak. Just waited. There was a dim chuckle over the wire. “Thought that might interest you, Marlowe. Room 332 it is. Tramp on it friend. Make speed.”
The phone clicked in my ear. I hung up. For no reason a pencil rolled off the desk and broke its point on the glass doohickey under one of the desk legs. I picked it up and slowly and carefully sharpened it in the Boston sharpener screwed to the edge of the window frame, turning the pencil around to get it nice and even. I laid it down in the tray on the desk and dusted off my hands. I had all the time in the world. I looked out of the window. I didn’t see anything. I didn’t hear anything.
And then, for even less reason, I saw Orfamay Quest’s face without the glasses, and polished and painted and with blonde hair piled up high on the forehead with a braid around the middle of it. And bedroom eyes. They all have to have bedroom eyes. I tried to imagine this face in a vast close-up being gnawed by some virile character from the wide-open spaces of Romanoff’s bar.
It took me twenty-nine minutes to get to the Van Nuys Hotel.
8
Once, long ago, it must have had a certain elegance. But no more. The memories of old cigars clung to its lobby like the dirty gilt on its ceiling and the sagging springs of its leather lounging chairs. The marble of the desk had turned a yellowish brown with age. But the floor carpet was new and had a hard look, like the room clerk. I passed him up and strolled over to the cigar counter in the corner and put down a quarter for a package of Camels. The girl behind the counter was a straw blonde with a long neck and tired eyes. She put the cigarettes in front of me, added a packet of matches, dropped my change into a slotted box marked “The Community Chest Thanks You.”
“You’d want me to do that, wouldn’t you,” she said, smiling patiently. “You’d want to give your change to the poor little underprivileged kids with bent legs and stuff, wouldn’t you?”
“Suppose I didn’t,” I said.
“I dig up seven cents,” the girl said, “and it would be very painful.” She had a low lingering voice with a sort of moist caress in it like a damp bath towel. I put a quarter after the seven cents. She gave me her big smile then. It showed more of her tonsils.
“You’re nice,” she said. “I can see you’re nice. A lot of fellows would have come in here and made a pass at a girl. Just think. Over seven cents. A pass.”
“Who’s the house peeper here now?” I asked her, without taking up the option.
“There’s two of them.” She did something slow and elegant to the back of her head, exhibiting what seemed like more than one handful of blood-red fingernails in the process. “Mr. Hady is on nights and Mr. Flack is on days. It’s day now so it would be Mr. Flack would be on.”
“Where could I find him?”
She leaned over the counter and let me smell her hair, pointing with a half-inch fingernail toward the elevator bank. “It’s down along that corridor there, next to the porter’s room. You can’t miss the porter’s room on account of it has a half-door and says PORTER on the upper part in gold letters. Only that half is folded back like, so I guess maybe you can’t see it.”