He braced himself. His whole body got stiff. He turned slowly, then looked back.
“I’m sorry,” he said quietly. “But you’re wrong about that. I’m going to walk quite slowly to the plane. You have plenty of time to stop me.”
He walked. I watched him, The guy in the doorway of the office was waiting, but not too impatient. Mexicans seldom are. He reached down and patted the pigskin suitcase and grinned at Terry. Then he stood aside and Terry went through the door. In a little while Terry came out through the door on the other side, where the customs people are when you’re coming in. He walked, still slowly, across the gravel to the steps. He stopped there and looked towards me. He didn’t signal or wave. Neither did I. Then he went up into the plane, and the steps were pulled back.
I got into the Olds and started it and backed and turned and moved halfway across the parking space. The tall woman and the short man were still out on the field. The woman had a handkerchief out to wave. The plane began to taxi down to the end of the field raising plenty of dust. It turned at the far end and the motors revved up in a thundering roar. It began to move forward picking up speed slowly.
The dust rose in clouds behind it. Then it was airborne. I watched it lift slowly into the gusty air and fade off into the naked blue sky to the southeast.
Then I left. Nobody at the border gate looked at me as if my face meant as much as the hands on a clock.
6
It’s a long drag back from Tijuana and one of the dullest drives in the state. Tijuana is nothing; all they want there is the buck. The kid who sidles over to your car and looks at you with big wistful eyes and says, “One dime, please, mister,” will try to sell you his sister in the next sentence. Tijuana is not Mexico. No border town is anything but a border town, just as no waterfront is anything but a waterfront. San Diego? One of the most beautiful harbors in the world and nothing in it but navy and a few fishing boats. At night it is fairyland. The swell is as gentle as an old lady singing hymns. But Marlowe has to get home and count the spoons.
The road north is as monotonous as a sailor’s chantey. You go through a town, down a hill, along a stretch of beach, through a town, down a hill, along a stretch of beach.
It was two o’clock when I got back and they were waiting for me in a dark sedan with no police tags, no red light, only the double antenna, and not only police cars have those. I was halfway up the steps before they came out of it and yelled at me, the usual couple in the usual suits, with the usual stony leisure of movement, as if the world was waiting hushed and silent for them to tell it what to do.
“Your name Marlowe? We want to talk to you.”
He let me see the glint of a badge. For all I caught of it he might have been Pest Control. He was gray blond and looked sticky. His partner was tall, good-looking, neat, and had a precise nastiness about him, a goon with an education. They had watching and waiting eyes, patient and careful eyes, cool disdainful eyes, cops’ eyes. They get them at the passing-out parade at the police school.
“Sergeant Green, Central Homicide. This is Detective Dayton.”
I went on up and unlocked the door. You don’t shake hands with big city cops. That close is too close.
They sat in the living room. I opened the windows and the breeze whispered. Green did the talking.
“Man named Terry Lennox. Know him, huh?”
“We have a drink together once in a while. He lives in Encino, married money. I’ve never been where he lives.”
“Once in a while,” Green said. “How often would that be?”
“It’s a vague expression. I meant it that way. It could be once a week or once in two months.”
“Met his wife?”
“Once, very briefly, before they were married.”
“You saw him last when and where?”
I took a pipe off the end table and filled it. Green leaned forward close to me. The tall lad sat farther back holding a ballpoint poised over a red-edged pad.
“This is where I say, ‘What’s this all about?’ and you say, ‘We ask the questions.’”
“So you just answer them, huh?”
I lit the pipe. The tobacco was a little too moist. It took me some time to light it properly and three matches.
“I got three,” Green said, “but I already used up a lot of it waiting around. So snap it up, mister. We know who you are. And you know we ain’t here to work up an appetite.”
“I was just thinking,” I said. “We used to go to Victor’s fairly often, and not so often to The Green Lantern and The Bull and Bear—that’s the place down at the end of the Strip that tries to look like an English inn—”
“Quit stalling.”
“Who’s dead?” I asked.
Detective Dayton spoke up. He had a hard, mature, don’t-try-to-fool-with-me voice. “Just answer the questions, Marlowe. We are conducting a routine investigation. That’s all you need to know.”
Maybe I was tired and irritable. Maybe I felt a little guilty. I could learn to hate this guy without even knowing him. I could just look at him across the width of a cafeteria and want to kick his teeth in.
“Shove it, Jack,” I said. “Keep that guff for the juvenile bureau. It’s a horse laugh even to them.”
Green chuckled. Nothing changed in Dayton’s face that you could put a finger on but he suddenly looked ten years older and twenty years nastier. The breath going through his nose whistled faintly.
