“The hell it was nothing.”
She kept the smile long enough to nod and turn and walk away. I spotted the bar over in the corner by some very large french windows. It was one of those things you push around. I was halfway across the room, trying not to bump anybody, when a voice said: “Oh, Mr. Marlowe.”
I turned and saw Mrs. Loring on a couch beside a prissy-looking man in rimless cheaters with a smear on his chin that might have been a goatee. She had a drink in her hand and looked bored. He sat still with his arms folded and scowled.
I went over there. She smiled at me and gave me her hand. “This is my husband, Dr. Loring. Mr. Philip Marlowe, Edward.”
The guy with the goatee gave me a brief look and a still briefer nod. He didn’t move otherwise. He seemed to be saving his energy for better things.
“Edward is very tired,” Linda Loring said. “Edward is always very tired.”
“Doctors often are,” I said. “Can I get you a drink, Mrs. Loring? Or you, Doctor?”
“She’s had enough,” the man said without looking at either of us. “I don’t drink. The more I see of people who do, the more glad I am that I don’t.”
“Come back, little Sheba,” Mrs. Loring said dreamily.
He swung around and did a take. I got away from there and made it to the bar. In the company of her husband Linda Loring seemed like a different person. There was an edge to her voice and a sneer in her expression which she hadn’t used on me even when she was angry.
Candy was behind the bar. He asked me what I would drink.
“Nothing right now, thanks. Mr. Wade wants to see me.”
“Es muy occupado, senor. Very busy.”
I didn’t think I was going to like Candy. When I just looked at him he added: “But I go see. De pronto, senor.”
He threaded his way delicately through the mob and was back in no time at all. “Okay, chum, let’s go,” he said cheerfully.
I followed him across the room the long way of the house. He opened a door, I went through, he shut it behind me, and a lot of the noise was dimmed. It was a corner room, big and cool and quiet, with french windows and roses outside and an air-conditioner set in a window to one side. I could see the lake, and I could see Wade lying flat out on a long blond leather couch. A big bleached wood desk had a typewriter on it and there was a pile of yellow paper beside the typewriter.
“Good of you to come, Marlowe,” he said lazily. “Park yourself. Did you have a drink or two?”
“Not yet.” I sat down and looked at him. He still looked a bit pale and pinched. “How’s the work going?”
“Fine, except that I get tired too quick. Pity a four-day drunk is so painful to get over. I often do my best work after one. In my racket it’s so easy to tighten up and get all stiff and wooden. Then the stuff is no good. When it’s good it comes easy. Anything you have read or heard to the contrary is a lot of mishmash?”
“Depends who the writer is, maybe,” I said. “It didn’t come easy to Flaubert, and his stuff is good.”
“Okay,” Wade said, sitting up. “So you have read Flaubert, so that makes you an intellectual, a critic, a savant of the literary world.” He rubbed his forehead. “I’m on the wagon and I hate it. I hate everybody with a drink in his hand. I’ve got to go out there and smile at those creeps. Every damn one of them knows I’m an alcoholic. So they wonder what I’m running away from. Some Freudian bastard has made that a commonplace. Every ten-year-old kid knows it by now. If I had a ten-year-old kid, which God forbid, the brat would be asking me, ‘What are you running away from when you get drunk, Daddy?’”
“The way I got it, all this was rather recent,” I said.
“It’s got worse, but I was always a hard man with a bottle. When you’re young and in hard condition you can absorb a lot of punishment. When you are pushing forty you don’t snap back the same way.”
I leaned back and lit a cigarette. “What did you want to see me about?”
“What do you think I’m running away from, Marlowe?”
“No idea. I don’t have enough information. Besides, everybody is running away from something.”
“Not everybody gets drunk. What are you running away from? Your youth or a guilty conscience or the knowledge that you’re a small time operator in a small time business?”
“I get it,” I said. “You need somebody to insult. Fire away, chum. When it begins to hurt I’ll let you know.”
He grinned and rumpled his thick curly hair. He speared his chest with a forefinger. “You’re looking right at a small time operator in a small time business, Marlowe. All writers are punks and I am one of the punkest. I’ve written twelve best sellers, and if I ever finish that stack of magoozium on the desk there I may possibly have written thirteen. And not a damn one of them worth the powder to blow it to hell. I have a lovely home in a highly restricted residential neighborhood that belongs to a highly restricted multimillionaire. I have a lovely wife who loves me and a lovely publisher who loves me and I love me the best of all. I’m an egotistical son of a bitch, a literary prostitute or pimp—choose your own word—and an all-round heel. So what can you do for me?”
“Well, what?”
“Why don’t you get sore?”
“Nothing to get sore about. I’m just listening to you hate yourself. It’s boring but it doesn’t hurt my feelings.”
He laughed roughly. “I like you,” he said, “Let’s have a drink.”
“Not in here, chum. Not you and me alone. I don’t care to watch you take the first one. Nobody can stop you and I don’t guess anyone would try. But I don’t have to help.”
