She looked back. “Why?”
“If I hadn’t been a nice guy to Terry Lennox, he would still be alive.”
“Yes?” she said quietly. “How can you be so sure? Goodnight, Mr. Marlowe. And thank you so very much for almost everything.”
She walked back along the edge of the grass. I watched her into the house. The door closed. The porch light went off. I waved at nothing and drove away.
21
Next morning I got up late on account of the big fee I had earned the night before. I drank an extra cup of coffee, smoked an extra cigarette, ate an extra slice of Canadian bacon, and for the three hundredth time I swore I would never again use an electric razor. That made the day normal. I hit the office about ten, picked up some odds and ends of mail, slit the envelopes and let the stuff lie on the desk. I opened the windows wide to let out the smell of dust and dinginess that collected in the night and hung in the still air, in the corners of the room, in the slats of the venetian blinds. A dead moth was spread-eagled on a corner of the desk. On the window sill a bee with tattered wings was crawling along the woodwork, buzzing in a tired remote sort of way, as if she knew it wasn’t any use, she was finished, she had flown too many missions and would never get back to the hive again.
I knew it was going to be one of those crazy days. Everyone has them. Days when nobody rolls in, but the loose wheels, the dingoes who park their brains with their gum, the squirrels who can’t find their nuts, the mechanics who always have a gear wheel left over.
The first was a big blond roughneck named Kuissenen or something Finnish like that. He jammed his massive bottom in the customer’s chair and planted two wide horny hands on my desk and said he was a power-shovel operator, that he lived in Culver City, and the goddamn woman who lived next door to him was trying to poison his dog. Every morning before he let the dog out for a run in the back yard he had to search the place from fence to fence for meatballs thrown over the potato vine from next door. He’d found nine of them so far and they were loaded with a greenish powder he knew was an arsenic weed killer.
“How much to watch out and catch her at it?” He stared at me as unblinkingly as a fish in a tank.
“Why not do it yourself?”
“I got to work for a living, mister. I’m losing four twenty-five an hour just coming up here to ask.”
“Try the police?”
“I try the police. They might, get around to it some time next year. Right now they’re busy sucking up to MGM.”
“S.P.C.A.? The Tailwaggers?”
“What’s them?”
I told him about the Tailwaggers. He was far from interested. He knew about the S.P.C.A. The S.P.C.A. could take a running jump. They couldn’t see nothing smaller than a horse.
“It says on the door you’re an investigator,” he said truculently. “Okay, go the hell out and investigate. Fifty bucks if you catch her.”
“Sorry,” I said. “I’m tied up. Spending a couple of weeks hiding in a gopher hole in your back yard would be out of my line anyway—even for fifty bucks.”
He stood up glowering. “Big shot,” he said. “Don’t need the dough, huh? Can’t be bothered saving the life of a itty-bitty dog. Nuts to you, big shot.”
“I’ve got troubles too, Mr. Kuissenen.”
“I’ll twist her goddamn neck if I catch her,” he said, and I didn’t doubt he could have done it. He could have twisted the hind leg off of an elephant. “That’s what makes it I want somebody else. Just because the little tike barks when a car goes by the house. Sour-faced old bitch.”
He started for the door. “Are you sure it’s the dog she’s trying to poison?” I asked his back.
“Sure I’m sure.” He was halfway to the door before the nickel dropped. He swung around fast then. “Say that again, buster.”
I just shook my head. I didn’t want to fight him. He might hit me on the head with my desk. He snorted and went out, almost taking the door with him.
The next cookie in the dish was a woman, not old, not young, not clean, not too dirty, obviously poor, shabby, querulous and stupid. The girl she roomed with—in her set any woman who works out is a girl—was taking money out of her purse. A dollar here, four bits there, but it added up. She figured she was out close to twenty dollars in all. She couldn’t afford it. She couldn’t afford to move either. She couldn’t afford a detective. She thought I ought to be willing to throw a scare into the roommate just on the telephone like, not mentioning any names.
It took her twenty minutes or more to tell me this. She kneaded her bag incessantly while telling it.
“Anybody you know could do that,” I said.
“Yeah, but you bein’ a dick and all. ”
“I don’t have a license to threaten people I know nothing about.”
“I’m goin’ to tell her I been in to see you. I don’t have to say it’s her. Just that you’re workin’ on it.”
“I wouldn’t if I were you. If you mention my name she may call me up. If she does that, I’ll tell her the facts.”
She stood up and slammed her shabby bag against her stomach. “You’re no gentleman,” she said shrilly.
“Where does it say I have to be?”
She went out mumbling.
