The Long Goodbye

not so much what we want from you as what we might be willing to let you get away with—if you co-operate.”

I stared at him. He did a little paper-fiddling. He moved around in his chair, looked at his bottle, and had to use up a lot of will power not grabbing for it. “Maybe you’d like the whole libretto,” he said suddenly with an off-key leer. “Well, smart guy, just to show you I’m not kidding, here it is.”

I leaned across his desk and he thought I was reaching for his bottle. He grabbed it away and put it back in the drawer. I just wanted to drop a stub in his ashtray. I leaned back again and lit another pill. He spoke rapidly.

“Lennox got off the plane at Mazatlan, an airline junction point and a town of about thirty-five thousand. He disappeared for two or three hours. Then a tall man with black hair and a dark skin and what might have been a lot of knife scars booked to Torreon under the name of Silvano Rodriguez. His Spanish was good but not good enough for a man of his name. He was too tall for a Mexican with such dark skin. The pilot turned in a report on him. The cops were too slow at Torreon. Mex cops are no balls of fire. What they do best is shoot people. By the time they got going the man had chartered a plane and gone on to a little mountain town called Otatoclan, a small time summer resort with a lake. The pilot of the charter plane had trained as a combat pilot in Texas. He spoke good English. Lennox pretended not to catch what he said.”

“If it was Lennox,” I put in.

“Wait a while, chum. It was Lennox all right. Okay, he gets off at Otatoclan and registers at the hotel there, this time as Mario de Cerva. He was wearing a gun, a Mauser 7.65, which doesn’t mean too much in Mexico, of course. But the charter pilot thought the guy didn’t seem kosher, so he had a word with the local law. They put Lennox under surveillance. They did some checking with Mexico City and then they moved in.”

Grenz picked up a ruler and sighted along it, a meaningless gesture which kept him from looking at me.

I said, “Uh-huh. Smart boy, your charter pilot, and nice to his customers. The story stinks.”

He looked up at me suddenly. “What we want,” he said dryly, “is a quick trial, a plea of second degree which we will accept. There are some angles we’d rather not go into. After all, the family is pretty influential. ”

“Meaning Harlan Potter.”

He nodded briefly. “For my money the whole idea is all wet. Springer could have a field day with it. It’s got everything. Sex, scandal, money, beautiful unfaithful wife, wounded war hero husband—I suppose that’s where he got the scars—hell, it would be front page stuff for weeks. Every rag in the country would eat it up. So we shuffle it off to a fast fade.” He shrugged. “Okay, if the chief wants it that way, it’s up to him. Do I get that statement?” He turned to the recording machine which had been humming away softly all this time, with the light showing in front.

“Turn it off,” I said.

He swung around and gave me a vicious look. “You like it in jail?”

“It’s not too bad. You don’t meet the best people, but who the hell wants to? Be reasonable, Grenz. You’re trying to make a fink out of me. Maybe I’m obstinate, or even sentimental, but I’m practical too. Suppose you had to hire a private eye—yeah, yeah, I know how you would hate the idea—but just suppose you were where it was your only out. Would you want one that finked on his friends?”

He stared at me with hate.

“A couple more points. Doesn’t it strike you that Lennox’s evasion tactics were just a little too transparent? If he wanted to be caught, he didn’t have to go to all that trouble. If he didn’t want to be caught, he had brains enough not to disguise himself as a Mexican in Mexico.”

“Meaning what?” Grenz was snarling at me now.

“Meaning you could just be filling me up with a lot of hooey you made up, that there wasn’t any Rodriguez with dyed hair and there wasn’t any Mario de Cerva at Otatoclan, and you don’t know any more about where Lennox is than where Black Beard the Pirate buried his treasure.”

He got his bottle out again. He poured himself a shot and drank it down quickly, as before. He relaxed slowly. He turned in his chair and switched off the recording machine.

“I’d like to have tried you,” he said gratingly. “You’re the kind of wise guy I like to work over. This rap will be hanging over you for a long long time, cutie. You’ll walk with it and eat with it and sleep with it. And next time you step out of line we’ll murder you with it. Right now I got to do something that turns my guts inside out.”

He pawed on his desk and pulled the face-down paper to him, turned it over and signed it. You can always tell when a man is writing his own name. He has a special way of moving. Then he stood up and marched around the desk and threw the door of his shoe box open and yelled for Spranklin.

The fat man came in with his B.O. Grenz gave him the paper.

“I’ve just signed your release order,” he said. “I’m a public servant and sometimes I have unpleasant duties. Would you care to know why I signed it?”

I stood up. “If you want to tell me.”

“The Lennox case is closed, mister. There ain’t any Lennox case. He wrote out a full confession this afternoon in his hotel room and shot himself. In Otatoclan, just like I said.”

I stood there looking at nothing. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Grenz back away slowly as if he thought I might be going to slug him. I must have looked pretty nasty for a moment. Then he was behind his desk again and Spranklin had grabbed onto my arm.

“Come on, move,” he said in a whining kind of voice. “Man likes to get to home nights once in a while.”

I went out with him and closed the door. I closed it quietly as if on a room where someone had just died.

10

I dug out the carbon of my property slip and turned it over and receipted on the original. I put my belongings back in my pockets. There was a man draped over the end of the booking desk and as I turned away he straightened up and spoke to me. He was about six feet four inches tall and as thin as a wire.

“Need a ride home?”