“Really?” He looked down into his glass. He was only sipping the stuff. “We’ve only met twice and you’ve been more than white to me both times. What sort of feeling?”
“A feeling that next time I’ll find you in worse trouble than I can get you out of. I don’t know just why I have the feeling, but I have it.”
He touched the right side of his face gently with two fingertips. “Maybe it’s this. It does make me look a little sinister, I suppose. But it’s an honorable wound—or anyhow the result of one.”
“It’s not that. That doesn’t bother me at all. I’m a private dick. You’re a problem that I don’t have to solve. But the problem is there. Call it a hunch. If you want to be extra polite, call it a sense of character. Maybe that girl didn’t walk out on you at The Dancers just because you were drunk. Maybe she had a feeling too.”
He smiled faintly. “I was married to her once. Her name is Sylvia Lennox. I married her for her money.”
I stood up scowling at him. “I’ll fix you some scrambled eggs. You need food.”
“Wait a minute, Marlowe. You’re wondering why if I was down and out and Sylvia had plenty I couldn’t ask her for a few bucks. Did you ever hear of pride?”
“You’re killing me, Lennox.”
“Am I? My kind of pride is different. It’s the pride of a man who has nothing else. I’m sorry if I annoy you.”
I went out to my kitchen and cooked up some Canadian bacon and scrambled eggs and coffee and toast. We ate in the breakfast nook. The house belonged to the period that always had one.
I said I had to go to the office and would pick up his suitcase on the way back. He gave me the check ticket. His face now had a little color and the eyes were not so far back in his head that you had to grope for them.
Before I went out I put the whiskey bottle on the table in front of the couch. “Use your pride on that,” I said. “And call Vegas, if only as a favor to me.”
He just smiled and shrugged his shoulders. I was still sore going down the steps. I didn’t know why, any more than I knew why a man would starve and walk the streets rather than pawn his wardrobe. Whatever his rules were he played by them.
The suitcase was the damndest thing you ever saw. It was bleached pigskin and when new had been a pale cream color. The fittings were gold. It was English made and if you could buy it here at all, it would cost more like eight hundred than two. I planked it down in front of him. I looked at the bottle on the cocktail table. He hadn’t touched it. He was as sober as I was. He was smoking, but not liking that very well.
“I called Randy,” he said. “He was sore because I hadn’t called him before.”
“It takes a stranger to help you,” I said. “A present from Sylvia?” I pointed at the suitcase.
He looked out of the window. “No. That was given to me in England, long before I met her. Very long ago indeed. I’d like to leave it with you, if you could lend me an old one.”
I got five double sawbucks out of my wallet and dropped them in front of him. “I don’t need security.”
“That wasn’t the idea at all. You’re no pawnbroker. I just don’t want it with me in Vegas. And I don’t need this much money.”
“Okay. You keep the money and I’ll keep the suitcase. But this house is easy to burgle.”
“It wouldn’t matter,” he said indifferently. “It wouldn’t matter at all. ”
He changed his clothes and we ate dinner at Musso’s about five-thirty. No drinks. He caught the bus on Cahuenga and I drove home thinking about this and that. His empty suitcase was on my bed where he had unpacked it and put his stuff in a lightweight job of mine. His had a gold key which was in one of the locks. I locked the suitcase up empty and tied the key to the handle and put it on the high shelf on my clothes closet. It didn’t feel quite empty, but what was in it was no business of mine.
It was a quiet night and the house seemed emptier than usual. I set out the chessmen and played a French defense against Steinitz. He beat me in forty-four moves, but I had him sweating a couple of times.
The phone rang at nine-thirty and the voice that spoke was one I had heard before.
“Is this Mr. Philip Marlowe?”
“Yeah. I’m Marlowe.”
“This is Sylvia Lennox, Mr. Marlowe. We met very briefly in front of The Dancers one night last month. I heard afterwards that you had been kind enough to see that Terry got home.”
“I did that.”
“I suppose you know that we are not married any more, but I’ve been a little worried about him. He gave up the apartment he had in Westwood and nobody seems to know where he is.”
“I noticed how worried you were the night we met.”
“Look, Mr. Marlowe, I’ve been married to the man. I’m not very sympathetic to drunks. Perhaps I was a little unfeeling and perhaps I had something rather important to do. You’re a private detective and this can be put on a professional basis, if you prefer it.”
“It doesn’t have to be put on any basis at all, Mrs. Lennox. He’s on a bus going to Las Vegas. He has a friend there who will give him a job.”
She brightened up very suddenly. “Oh—to Las Vegas? How sentimental of him. That’s where we were married.”
“I guess he forgot,” I said, “or he would have gone somewhere else.”
Instead of hanging up on me she laughed. It was a cute little laugh. “Are you always as rude as this to your clients?”
