“Just what did you expect of me, Mrs. Wade—in the beginning, when you first persuaded me to go hunting? Why me—what have I got to offer?”
“You kept faith,” she said quietly. “When it couldn’t have been very easy.”
“I’m touched. But I don’t think that was the reason.”
She came down the last step and then she was looking up at me. “Then what was the reason?”
“Or if it was—it was a damn poor reason. Just about the worst reason in the world.”
She frowned a tiny frown. “Why?”
“Because what I did—this keeping faith—is something even a fool doesn’t do twice.”
“You know,” she said lightly, “this is getting to be a very enigmatic conversation.”
“You’re a very enigmatic person, Mrs. Wade. So long and good luck and if you really care anything about Roger, you’d better find him the right kind of doctor—and quick.”
She laughed again. “Oh, that was a mild attack last night. You ought to see him in a bad one. He’ll be up and working by this afternoon.”
“Like hell he will. ”
“But believe me he will. I know him so well. ”
I gave her the last shot right in the teeth and it sounded pretty nasty.
“You don’t really want to save him, do you? You just want to look as if you are trying to save him.”
“That,” she said deliberately, “was a very beastly thing to say to me.”
She stepped past me and walked through the dining room doors and then the big room was empty and I crossed to the front door and let myself out. It was a perfect summer morning in that bright secluded valley. It was too far from the city to get any smog and cut off by the low mountains from the dampness of the ocean. It was going to be hot later, but in a nice refined exclusive sort of way, nothing brutal like the heat of the desert, not sticky and rank like the heat of the city. Idle Valley was a perfect place to live. Perfect. Nice people with nice homes, nice cars, nice horses, nice dogs, possibly even nice children.
But all a man named Marlowe wanted from it was out. And fast.
31
I went home and showered and shaved and changed clothes and began to feel clean again. I cooked some breakfast, ate it, washed up, swept the kitchen and the service porch, filled a pipe and called the phone answering service. I shot a blank. Why go to the office? There would be nothing there but another dead moth and another layer of dust. In the safe would be my portrait of Madison. I could go down and play with that, and with the five crisp hundred dollar bills that still smelled of coffee. I could do that, but I didn’t want to. Something inside me had gone sour. None of it really belonged to me. What was it supposed to buy? How much loyalty can a dead man use? Phooey: I was looking at life through the mists of a hangover.
It was the kind of morning that seems to go on forever. I was flat and tired and dull and the passing minutes seemed to fall into a void, with a soft whirring sound, like spent rockets. Birds chirped in the shrubbery outside and the cars went up and down Laurel Canyon Boulevard endlessly. Usually I wouldn’t even hear them. But I was brooding and irritable and mean and oversensitive. I decided to kill the hangover.
Ordinarily I was not a morning drinker. The Southern California climate is too soft for it. You don’t metabolize fast enough. But I mixed a tall cold one this time and sat in an easy chair with my shirt open and pecked at a magazine, reading a crazy story about a guy that had two lives and two psychiatrists, one was human and one was some kind of insect in a hive. The guy kept going from one to the other and the whole thing was as crazy as a crumpet, but funny in an offbeat sort of way. I was handling the drink carefully, a sip at a time, watching myself.
It was about noon when the telephone rang and the voice said: “This is Linda Loring. I called your office and your phone service told me to try your home. I’d like to see you.”
“Why?”
“I’d rather explain that in person. You go to your office from time to time, I suppose.”
“Yeah. From time to time. Is there any money in it?”
“I hadn’t thought of it that way. But I have no objection, if you want to be paid. I could be at your office in about an hour.”
“Goody.”
“What’s the matter with you?” she asked sharply.
“Hangover. But I’m not paralyzed. I’ll be there. Unless you’d rather come here.”
“Your office would suit me better.”
“I’ve got a nice quiet place here. Dead-end street, no near neighbors.”
“The implication does not attract me—if I understand you.”
“Nobody understands me, Mrs. Loring. I’m enigmatic. Okay, I’ll struggle down to the coop.”
“Thank you so much.” She hung up.
I was slow getting down there because I stopped on the way for a sandwich. I aired out the office and switched on the buzzer and poked my head through the communicating door and she was there already, sitting in the same chair where Mendy Menendez had sat and looking through what could have been the same magazine. She had a tan gabardine suit on today and she looked pretty elegant. She put the magazine aside, gave me a serious look and said: “Your Boston fern needs watering. I think it needs repotting too. Too many air roots.”
I held the door open for her. The hell with the Boston fern. When she was inside and I had let the door swing
