have business one of these days.”
“I already saw him, Chief,” the smooth dark tight-lipped guy said in the tight-lipped voice they all affect. “He wouldn’t bother me none.”
“Don’t let him hit you in the guts,” Menendez said with a sour grin. “His right hook ain’t funny.”
The bodyguard just sneered at me. “He wouldn’t get that close.”
“Well, so long, cheapie,” Menendez told me and went out.
“See you around,” the bodyguard told me coolly. “The name’s Chick Agostino. I guess you’ll know me.”
“Like a dirty newspaper,” I said. “Remind me not to step on your face.”
His jaw muscles bulged. Then he turned suddenly and went out after his boss.
The door closed slowly on the pneumatic gadget. I listened but I didn’t hear their steps going down the hall. They walked as softly as cats. Just to make sure I opened the door again after a minute and looked out. But the hall was quite empty.
I went back to my desk and sat down and spent a little time wondering why a fairly important local racketeer like Menendez would think it worth his time to come in person to my office and warn me to keep my nose clean, just minutes after I had received a similar though differently expressed warning from Sewell Endicott.
I didn’t get anywhere with that, so I thought I might as well make it a perfect score. I lifted the phone and put in a call to the Terrapin Club at Las Vegas, person to person, Philip Marlowe calling Mr. Randy Starr. No soap. Mr. Starr was out of town, and would I talk to anyone else? I would not. I didn’t even want to talk to Starr very badly. It was just a passing fancy. He was too far away to hit me.
After that nothing happened for three days. Nobody slugged me or shot at me or called me up on the phone and warned me to keep my nose clean. Nobody hired me to find the wandering daughter, the erring wife, the lost pearl necklace, or the missing will. I just sat there and looked at the wall. The Lennox case died almost as suddenly as it had been born. There was a brief inquest to which I was not summoned. It was held at an odd hour, without previous announcement and without a jury. The coroner entered his own verdict, which was that the death of Sylvia Potter Westerheym di Giorgio Lennox had been caused with homicidal intent by her husband, Terence William Lennox, since deceased outside the jurisdiction of the coroner’s office. Presumably a confession was read into the record. Presumably it was verified enough to satisfy the coroner.
The body was released for burial. It was flown north and buried in the family vault. The press was not invited. Nobody gave any interviews, least of all Mr. Harlan Potter, who never gave interviews. He was about as hard to see as the Dalai Lama. Guys with a hundred million dollars live a peculiar life, behind a screen of servants, bodyguards, secretaries, lawyers, and tame executives. Presumably they eat, sleep, get their haircut, and wear clothes. But you never know for sure. Everything you read or hear about them has been processed by a public relations gang of guys who are paid big money to create and maintain a usable personality, something simple and clean and sharp, like a sterilized needle. It doesn’t have to be true. It just has to be consistent with the known facts, and the known facts you could count on your fingers.
Late afternoon of the third day the telephone rang and I was talking to a man who said his name was Howard Spencer, that he was a representative of a New York publishing house in California on a brief business trip, that he had a problem he would like to discuss with me and would I meet him in the bar of the Ritz-Beverly Hotel at eleven A.M. the next morning.
I asked him what sort of problem.
“Rather a delicate one,” he said, “but entirely ethical. If we don’t agree, I shall expect to pay you for your time, naturally.”
“Thank you, Mr. Spencer, but that won’t be necessary. Did someone I know recommend me to you?”
“Someone who knows about you—including your recent brush with the law, Mr. Marlowe. I might say that that was what interested me. My business, however, has nothing to do with that tragic affair. It’s just that—well, let’s discuss it over a drink, rather than over the telephone.”
“You sure you want to mix it with a guy who has been in the cooler?”
He laughed. His laugh and his voice were both pleasant. He talked the way New Yorkers used to talk before they learned to talk Flatbush.
“From my point of view, Mr. Marlowe, that is a recommendation. Not, let me add, the fact that you were, as you put it, in the cooler, but the fact, shall I say, that you appear to be extremely reticent, even under pressure.”
He was a guy who talked with commas, like a heavy novel. Over the phone anyway.
“Okay, Mr. Spencer, I’ll be there in the morning.”
He thanked me and hung up. I wondered who could have given me the plug. I thought it might be Sewell Endicott and called him to find out. But he had been out of town all week, and still was. It didn’t matter much. Even in my business you occasionally get a satisfied customer. And I needed a job because I needed the money—or thought I did, until I got home that night and found the letter with a portrait of Madison in it.
12
The letter was in the red and white birdhouse mailbox at the foot of my steps. A woodpecker on top of the box attached to the swing arm was raised and even at that I might not have looked inside because I never got mail at the house. But the woodpecker had lost the point of his beak quite recently. The wood was fresh broken. Some smart kid shooting off his atom gun.
The letter had Correo Aereo on it and, a flock of Mexican stamps and writing that I might or might not have recognized if Mexico hadn’t been on my mind pretty constantly lately. I couldn’t read the postmark. It was hand- stamped and the inkpad was pretty far gone. The letter was thick. I climbed my steps and sat down in the living room to read it. The evening seemed very silent. Perhaps a letter from a dead man brings its own silence with it.
It began without date and without preamble.
