drunk. Drunks don’t educate, my friend. They disintegrate. And part of the process is a lot of fun.” He drank from the glass again, leaving it nearly empty. “And part of it is damned awful. But if I may quote the scintillating words of the good Dr. Loring, a bastardly bastard with a little black bag, stay away from my wife, Marlowe. Sure you go for her. They all do. You’d like to sleep with her. They all would. You’d like to share her dreams and sniff the rose of her memories. Maybe I would too. But there is nothing to share, chum—nothing, nothing, nothing. You’re all alone in the dark.” He finished his drink and turned the glass upside down. “Empty like that, Marlowe. Nothing there at all. I’m the guy that knows.”
He put the glass on the edge of the bar and walked stiffly to the foot of the stairs. He made about a dozen steps up, holding on to the rail, and stopped and leaned against it. He looked down at me with a sour grin.
“Forgive the corny sarcasm, Marlowe. You’re a nice guy. I wouldn’t want anything to happen to you.”
“Anything like what?”
“Perhaps she didn’t get around yet to that haunting magic of her first love, the guy that went missing in Norway. You wouldn’t want to be missing, would you, chum? You’re my own special private eye. You find me when I’m lost in the savage splendor of Sepulveda Canyon.” He moved the palm of his hand in a circular motion on the polished wood banister. “It would hurt me to the quick if you got lost yourself. Like that character who hitched up with the limeys. He got so lost a man sometimes wonders if he ever existed. You figure she could have maybe just invented him to have a toy to play with?”
“How would I know?”
He looked down at me. There were deep lines between his eyes now and his mouth was twisted with bitterness.
“How would anybody know? Maybe she don’t know herself. Baby’s tired. Baby been playing too long with broken toys. Baby wants to go bye-bye.”
He went on up the stairs.
I stood there until Candy came in and started tidying up around the bar, putting glasses on a tray, examining bottles to see what was left, paying no attention to me. Or so. I thought. Then be said: “Senor. One good drink left. Pity to waste him.” He held up a bottle.
“You drink it.”
“Gracias, senor, no me gusta. Un vaso de Cerveza, no mas. A glass of beer is my limit.”
“Wise man.”
“One lush in the house is enough,” he said, staring at me. ‘I speak good English, not?”
“Sure, fine.”
“But I think Spanish. Sometimes I think with a knife. The boss is my guy. He don’t need any help, hombre. I take care of him, see.”
“A great job you’re doing, punk.”
“Hijo de la flauta,” he said between his white teeth. He picked up a loaded tray and swung it up on the edge of his shoulder and the flat of his hand, bus boy style.
I walked to the door and let myself out, wondering how an expression meaning ‘son of a flute’ had come to be an insult in Spanish. I didn’t wonder very long. I had too many other things to wonder about. Something more than alcohol was the matter with the Wade family. Alcohol was no more than a disguised reaction.
Later that night, between nine-thirty and ten, I called the Wades’ number. After eight rings I hung up, but I had only just taken my hand off the instrument when it started to ring me. It was Eileen Wade.
“Someone just rang here,” she said. “I had a sort of hunch it might be you. I was just getting ready to take a shower.”
“It was me, but it wasn’t important, Mrs. Wade. He seemed a little woolly-headed when I left—Roger did. I guess maybe I feel a little responsibility for him by now.”
“He’s quite all right,” she said. “Fast asleep in bed. I think Dr. Loring upset him more than he showed. No doubt he talked a lot of nonsense to you,”
“He said he was tired and wanted to go to bed. Pretty sensible, I thought.”
“If that is all he said, yes. Well, goodnight and thank you for calling, Mr. Marlowe.”
“I didn’t say it was all he said. I said he said it.”
There was a pause, then: “Everyone gets fantastic ideas once in a while. Don’t take Roger too seriously, Mr. Marlowe. After all, his imagination is rather highly developed. Naturally it would be. He shouldn’t have had anything to drink so soon after the last time. Please try to forget all about it. I suppose he was rude to you among other things.”
“He wasn’t rude to me. He made quite a lot of sense. Your husband is a guy who can take a long hard look at himself and see what is there. It’s not a very common gift. Most people go through life using up half their energy trying to protect a dignity they never had. Goodnight, Mrs. Wade.”
She hung up and I set out the chessboard. I filled a pipe, paraded the chessmen and inspected them for French shaves and loose buttons, and played a championship tournament game between Gortchakoff and Meninkin, seventy-two moves to a draw, a prize specimen of the irresistible force meeting the immovable object, a battle without armor, a war without blood, and as elaborate a waste of human intelligence as you could find anywhere outside an advertising agency.
25
Nothing happened for a week except that I went about my business which just then didn’t happen to be very much business. One morning George Peters of The Carne Organization called me up and told me he had happened to be down Sepulveda Canyon way and had looked in on Dr. Verringer’s place just out of curiosity. But Dr. Verringer was no longer there. Half a dozen teams of surveyors were mapping the tract for a subdivision. Those he spoke to had never even heard of Dr. Verringer.
