That nice Dr. Loring. Mrs. Roger Wade’s prescription.
I shook two of them loose and put the bottle back and poured a glass of water from a thermos jug on the night table. He said one capsule would be enough. He took it and drank some water and lay back and stared at the ceiling again. Time passed. I sat in a chair and watched him. He didn’t seem to get sleepy, Then he said slowly:
“I remember something. Do me a favor, Marlowe. I wrote some crazy stuff I don’t want Eileen to see. It’s on top of the typewriter under the cover. Tear it up, for me,
“Sure. That all you remember?”
“Eileen is all right? Positive about that?”
“Yes. She’s just tired. Let it ride, Wade. Stop thinking. I shouldn’t have asked you.”
“Stop thinking, the man says.” His voice was a little drowsy now. He was talking as if to himself. “Stop thinking, stop dreaming, stop loving, stop hating. Goodnight, sweet prince. I’ll take that other pill. ”
I gave it to him with some more water. He lay back again, this time with his head turned so that he could see me. “Look, Marlowe, I wrote some stuff I don’t want Eileen—”
“You told me already. I’ll attend to it when you go to sleep.”
“Oh. Thanks. Nice to have you around. Very nice.”
Another longish pause. His eyelids were getting heavy.
“Ever kill a man, Marlowe?”
“Yes.”
“Nasty feeling, isn’t it?”
“Some people like it.”
His eyes went shut all the way. Then they opened again, but they looked vague. “How could they?”
I didn’t answer. The eyelids came down again, very gradually, like a slow curtain in the theater. He began to snore. I waited a little longer. Then I dimmed the light in the room and went out.
27
I stopped outside Eileen’s door and listened. I didn’t hear any sound of movement inside, so I didn’t knock. If she wanted to know how he was, it was up to her. Downstairs the living room looked bright and empty. I put out some of the lights. From over near the front door I looked up at the balcony. The middle part of the living room rose to the full height of the house walls and was crossed by open beams that also supported the balcony. The balcony was wide and edged on two sides by a solid railing which looked to be about three and a half feet high. The top and the uprights were cut square to match the crossbeams. The dining room was through a square arch dosed off by double louvered doors. Above it I guessed there were servants’ quarters. This part of the second floor was walled off so there would be another stairway reaching it from the kitchen part of the house. Wade’s room was in the corner over his study. I could see the light from his open door reflected against the high ceiling and I could see the top foot of his doorway.
I cut all the lights except in one standing lamp and crossed to the study. The door was shut but two lamps were lit, a standing lamp at the end of the leather couch and a cowled desk lamp. The typewriter was on a heavy stand under this and beside it on the desk there was a disorderly mess of yellow paper. I sat in a padded chair and studied the layout. What I wanted to know was how he had cut his head. I sat in his desk chair with the phone at my left hand. The spring was set very weak. If I tilted back and went over, my head might have caught the corner of the desk. I moistened my handkerchief and rubbed the wood. No blood, nothing there. There was a lot of stuff on the desk, including a row of books between bronze elephants, and an old-fashioned square glass inkwell. I tried that without result. Not much point to it anyway, because if someone else had slugged him, the weapon didn’t have to be in the room. And there wasn’t anyone else to do it. I stood up and switched on the cornice lights. They reached into the shadowy corner and of course the answer was simple enough after all. A square metal wastebasket was lying on its side over against the wall, with paper spilled. It couldn’t have walked there, so it had been thrown or kicked. I tried its sharp corners with my moistened handkerchief. I got the red-brown smear of blood this time. No mystery at all. Wade had fallen over and struck his head on the sharp corner of the wastebasket—a glancing blow most likely—picked himself up and booted the damn thing across the room. Easy.
Then he would have another quick drink. The drinking liquor was on the cocktail table in front of the couch. An empty bottle, another three quarters full, a thermos jug of water and a silver bowl containing water which had been ice cubes. There was only one glass and it was the large economy size.
Having taken his drink he felt a little better. He noticed the phone off the hook in a bleary sort of way and very likely didn’t remember any more what he had been doing with it. So he just walked across and put it back in its cradle. The time had been just about right. There is something compulsive about a telephone. The gadget ridden man of our age loves it, loathes it, and is afraid of it. But he always treats it with respect, even when he is drunk. The telephone is a fetish.
Any normal man would have said hello into the mouthpiece before hanging up, just to be sure. But not necessarily a man who was bleary with drink and had just taken a fall. It didn’t matter anyhow. His wife might have done it, she might have heard the fall and the bang as the wastebasket bounced against the wall and come into the study. About that time the last drink would kick him in the face and he would stagger out of the house and across the front lawn and pass out where I had found him. Somebody was coming for him. By this time he didn’t know who it was. Maybe the good Dr. Verringer.
So far, so good. So what would his wife do? She couldn’t handle him or reason with him and she might well be afraid to try. So she would call somebody to come and help. The servants were out, so it would have to be by the telephone. Well, she had called somebody. She had called that nice Dr. Loring. I’d just assumed she called him after I got there. She hadn’t said so.
From here on it didn’t quite add up. You’d expect her to look for him and find him and make sure he wasn’t hurt. It wouldn’t hurt him to lie out on the ground on a warm summer night for a while. She couldn’t move him. It had taken all I had to do that. But you wouldn’t quite expect to find her standing in the open doorway smoking a cigarette, not knowing except very vaguely where he was. Or would you? I didn’t know what she had been through with him, how dangerous he was in that condition, how much afraid she might be to go near him. “I’ve had all of it I can take,” she had said to me when I arrived. “You find him.” Then she had gone inside and pulled a faint.
It still bothered me, but I had to leave it at that. I had to assume that when she had been up against the situation often enough to know there was nothing she could do about it except to let it ride, then that would be
