case started out big, but by that morning it was a Part Two item. There was a photo of Sylvia, but none of Terry. There was a snap of me that I didn’t know existed. “L. A. Private Detective Held for Questioning.” There was a large photo of the Lennox home in Encino. It was pseudo English with a lot of peaked roof and it would have cost a hundred bucks to wash the windows. It stood on a knoll in a big two acres, which is a lot of real estate for the Los Angeles area. There was a photo of the guesthouse, which was a miniature of the main building. It was hedged in with trees. Both photos had obviously been taken from some distance off and then blown up and trimmed. There was no photo of what the papers called the “death room.”
I had seen all this stuff before, in jail, but I read it and looked at it again with different eyes. It told me nothing except that a rich and beautiful girl had been murdered and the press had been pretty thoroughly excluded. So the influence had started to work very early. The crime beat boys must have gnashed their teeth and gnashed them in vain. It figured. If Terry talked to his father-in-law in Pasadena the very night she was killed, there would have been a dozen guards on the estate before the police were even notified.
But there was something that didn’t figure at all—the way she had been beaten up. Nobody could sell me that Terry had done that.
I put the lamps out and sat by an open window. Outside in a bush a mockingbird ran through a few trills and admired himself before settling down for the night. My neck itched, so I shaved and showered and went to bed and lay on my back listening, as if far off in the dark I might hear a voice, the kind of calm and patient voice that makes everything clear. I didn’t hear it and I knew I wasn’t going to. Nobody was going to explain the Lennox case to me. No explanation was necessary. The murderer had confessed and he was dead. There wouldn’t even be an inquest.
As Lonnie Morgan of the Journal had remarked—very convenient. If Terry Lennox had killed his wife, that was fine. There was no need to try him and bring out all the unpleasant details. If he hadn’t killed her, that was fine too. A dead man is the best fall guy in the world. He never talks back.
11
In the morning I shaved again and dressed and drove downtown in the usual way and parked in the usual place and if the parking lot attendant happened to know that I was an important public character he did a top job in hiding it. I went upstairs and along the corridor and got keys out to unlock my door. A dark smooth-looking guy watched me.
“You Marlowe?”
“So?”
“Stick around,” he said. “A guy wants to see you.” He unplastered his back from the wall and strolled off languidly.
I stepped inside the office and picked up the mail. There was more of it on the desk where the night cleaning woman had put it. I slit the envelopes after I opened windows, and threw away what I didn’t want, which was practically all of it. I switched on the buzzer to the other door and filled a pipe and lit it and then just sat there waiting for somebody to scream for help.
I thought about Terry Lennox in a detached sort of way. He was already receding into the distance, white hair and scarred face and weak charm and his peculiar brand of pride. I didn’t judge him or analyze him, just as I had never asked him questions about how he got wounded or how he ever happened to get himself married to anyone like Sylvia. He was like somebody you meet on board ship and get to know very well and never really know at all. He was gone like the same fellow when he says goodbye at the pier and let’s keep in touch, old man, and you know you won’t and he won’t. Likely enough you’ll never even see the guy again. If you do he will be an entirely different person, just another Rotarian in a club car. How’s business? Oh, not too bad. You look good. So do you. I’ve put on too much weight. Don’t we all? Remember that trip in the Franconia (or whatever it was)? Oh sure, swell trip, wasn’t it?
The hell it was a swell trip. You were bored stiff. You only talked to the guy because there wasn’t anybody around that interested you. Maybe it was like that with Terry Lennox and me. No, not quite. I owned a piece of him. I had invested time and money in him, and three days in the icehouse, not to mention a slug on the jaw and a punch in the neck that I felt every time I swallowed. Now he was dead and I couldn’t even give him back his five hundred bucks. That made me sore. It is always the little things that make you sore.
The door buzzer and the telephone rang at the same time. I answered the phone first because the buzzer meant only that somebody had walked into my pint-size waiting room.
“Is this Mr. Marlowe? Mr. Endicott is calling you. One moment please.”
He came on the line. “This is Sewell Endicott,” he said, as if he didn’t know his goddamn secretary had already fed me his name.
“Good morning, Mr. Endicott.”
“Glad to hear they turned you loose. I think possibly you had the right idea not to build any resistance.”
“It wasn’t an idea. It was just mulishness.”
“I doubt if you’ll hear any more about it. But if you do and need help, let me hear from you.”
“Why would I? The man is dead. They’d have a hell of a time proving he ever came near me. Then they’d have to prove I had guilty knowledge. And then they’d have to prove he had committed a crime or was a fugitive.”
He cleared his throat. “Perhaps,” he said carefully, “you haven’t been told he left a full confession.”
“I was told, Mr. Endicott. I’m talking to a lawyer. Would I be out of line in suggesting that the confession would have to be proved too, both as to genuineness and as to veracity?”
“I’m afraid I have no time for a legal discussion,” he said sharply. “I’m flying to Mexico with a rather melancholy duty to perform. You can probably guess what it is?”
“Uh-huh. Depends who you’re representing. You didn’t tell me, remember.”
“I remember very well. Well, goodbye, Marlowe. My offer of help is still good. But let me also offer you a little advice. Don’t be too certain you’re in the clear. You’re in a pretty vulnerable business.”
He hung up. I put the phone back in its cradle carefully. I sat for a moment with my hand on it, scowling. Then I wiped the scowl off my face and got up to open the communicating door into my waiting room.
A man was sitting by the window ruffling a magazine. He wore a bluish-gray suit with an almost invisible pale
