like drunk. I didn’t even know that he was an alcoholic. There’s a big difference. A man who drinks too much on occasion is still the same man as he was sober. An alcoholic, a real alcoholic is not the same man at all. You can’t predict anything about him for sure except that he will be someone you never met before.
Light steps sounded behind me and Eileen Wade came across the terrace and sat down beside me on the edge of a chaise.
“Well, what did you think?” she asked quietly. “About the gentleman with the loose gloves?”
“Oh no.”
She frowned. Then she laughed. “I hate people who make stagy scenes like that. Not that he isn’t a fine doctor. He has played that scene with half the men in the valley. Linda Loring is no tramp. She doesn’t look like one, talk like one, or behave like one. I don’t know what makes Dr. Loring behave as if she was.”
“Maybe he’s a reformed drunk,” I said. “A lot of them grow pretty puritanical. ”
“It’s possible,” she said, and looked towards the lake. “This is a very peaceful place. One would think a writer would be happy here—if a writer is ever happy anywhere.” She turned to look at me. “So you won’t be persuaded to do what Roger asked.”
“There’s no point in it, Mrs. Wade. Nothing I could do. I’ve said all this before. I couldn’t be sure of being around at the right time. I’d have to be around all the time. That’s impossible, even if I had nothing else to do. If he went wild, for example, it would happen in a flash. And I haven’t seen any indications that he does get wild. He seems pretty solid to me.”
She looked down at her hands. “If he could finish his book, I think things would be much better.”
“I can’t help him do that.”
She looked up and put her hands on the edge of the chaise beside her. She leaned forward a little. “You can if he thinks you can. That’s the whole point. Is it that you would find it distasteful to be a guest in our house and be paid for it?”
“He needs a psychiatrist, Mrs. Wade. If you know one that isn’t a quack,”
She looked startled “A psychiatrist? Why?”
I knocked the ashes out of my pipe and sat holding it, waiting for the bowl to get cooler before I put it away,
“You want an amateur opinion, here it is. He thinks he has a secret buried in his mind and he can’t get at it. It may be a guilty secret about himself, it may be about someone else. He thinks that’s what makes him drink, because be can’t get at this thing. He probably thinks that whatever happened, happened while he was drunk and he ought to find it wherever people go when they’re drunk—really bad drunk, the way he gets. That’s a job for a psychiatrist. So far, so good. If that is wrong, then he gets drunk because he wants to or can’t help it, and the idea about the secret is just his excuse. He can’t write his book, or anyway can’t finish it. Because he gets drunk. That is, the assumption seems to be that he can’t finish his book because he knocks himself out by thinking. It could be the other way around.”
“Oh no,” she said. “No. Roger has a great deal of talent. I feel quite sure that his best work is still to come.”
“I told you it was an amateur opinion. You said the other morning that he might have fallen out of love with his wife. That’s something else that could go the other way around.”
She looked towards the house, then turned so that she had her back to it. I looked the same way. Wade was standing inside the doors, looking out at us. As I watched he moved behind the bar and reached for a bottle.
“There’s no use interfering,” she said quickly. “I never do. Never. I suppose you’re right, Mr. Marlowe. There just isn’t anything to do but let him work it out of his system.”
The pipe was cool now and I put it away. “Since we’re groping around in the back of the drawer, how about that other way around?”
“I love my husband,” she said simply. “Not as a young girl loves, perhaps. But I love him. A woman is only a young girl once. The man I loved then is dead. He died in the war. His name, strangely enough, had the same initials as yours. It doesn’t matter now—except that sometimes I can’t quite believe that he is dead. His body was never found. But that happened to many men.”
She gave me a long searching look. “Sometimes—not often, of course—when I go into a quiet cocktail lounge or the lobby of a good hotel at a dead hour, or along the deck of a liner early in the morning or very late at night, I think I may see him waiting for me in some shadowy corner.” She paused and dropped her eyes. “It’s very silly. I’m ashamed of it. We were very much in love—the wild, mysterious, improbable kind of love that never comes but once.”
She stopped talking and sat there half in a trance looking out over the lake. I looked back at the house again. Wade was standing just inside the open french windows with a glass in his hand. I looked back at Eileen.
For her I wasn’t there any more. I got up and went into the house. Wade stood there with the drink and the drink looked pretty heavy. And his eyes looked wrong.
“How you making out with my wife, Marlowe?” It was said with a twist of the mouth.
“No passes, if you mean it that way.”
“That’s exactly the way I mean it. You got to kiss her the other night. Probably fancy yourself as a fast worker, but you’re wasting your time, bud. Even if you had the right kind of polish.”
I tried to move around him but he blocked me with a solid shoulder. “Don’t hurry away, old man. We like you around. We get so few private dicks in our house.”
“I’m the one too many,” I said.
He hoisted the glass and drank from it. When he lowered it he leered at me.
“You ought to give yourself a little more time to build resistance,” I told him. “Empty words, huh?”
“Okay, coach. Some little character builder, aren’t you? You ought to have more sense than to try educating a
