“Why, what a waste of talent! How can you reconcile it with your obligation to your portrait of Madison? Surely there must be something you can do.”
“Just between the two of us,” I said, “you’re getting pretty corny. So Wade knew your sister. Thanks for telling me, however indirectly. I already guessed it. So what? He’s just one of what was most likely a fairly rich collection. Let’s leave it there. And let’s get around to why you wanted to see me. That kind of got lost in the shuffle didn’t it?”
She stood up. She glanced at her watch once more. “I have a car downstairs. Could I prevail upon you to drive home with me and drink a cup of tea?”
“Go on,” I said. “Let’s have it.”
“Do I sound so suspicious? I have a guest who would like to make your acquaintance.”
“The old man?”
“I don’t call him that,” she said evenly, I stood up and leaned across the desk. “Honey, you’re awful cute sometimes. You really are. Is it all right if I carry a gun?”
“Surely you’re not afraid of an old man.” She wrinkled her lip at me.
“Why not? I’ll bet you are—plenty.”
She sighed. “Yes, I’m afraid I am. I always have been. He can be rather terrifying.”
“Maybe I’d better take two guns,” I said, then wished I hadn’t.
32
It was the damndest-looking house I ever saw. It was a square gray box three stories high, with a mansard roof, steeply sloped and broken by twenty or thirty double dormer windows with a lot of wedding cake decoration around them and between them. The entrance had double stone pillars on each side but the cream of the joint was an outside spiral staircase with a stone railing, topped by a tower room from which there must have been a view the whole length of the lake.
The motor yard was paved with stone. What the place really seemed to need was a half mile of poplar-lined driveway and a deer park and a wild garden and a terrace on three levels and a few hundred roses outside the library window and a long green vista from every window ending in forest and silence and quiet emptiness. What it had was a wall of fieldstone around a comfortable ten or fifteen acres, which is a fair hunk of real estate in our crowded little country. The driveway was lined with a cypress hedge trimmed round. There were all sorts of ornamental trees in clumps here and there and they didn’t look like California trees. Imported stuff. Whoever built that place was trying to drag the Atlantic seaboard over the Rockies. He was trying hard, but he hadn’t made it.
Amos, the middle-aged colored chauffeur, stopped the Caddy gently in front of the pillared entrance, hopped out, and came around to hold the open door for Mrs. Loring. I got out first and helped him hold it. I helped her get out. She had hardly spoken to me since we got into the car in front of my building. She looked tired and nervous. Maybe this idiotic hunk of architecture depressed her. It would have depressed a laughing jackass and made it coo like a mourning dove.
“Who built this place?” I asked her. “And who was he mad at?”
She finally smiled. “Hadn’t you seen it before?”
“Never been this far into the valley.”
She walked me over to the other side of the driveway and pointed up. “The man who built it jumped out of that tower room and landed about where you are standing. He was a French count named La Tourelle and unlike most French counts he had a lot of money. His wife was Ramona Desborough, who was not exactly threadbare herself. In the silent-picture days she made thirty thousand a week. La Tourelle built this place for their home. It’s supposed to be a miniature of the Chateau de Blois. You know that, of course.”
“Like the back of my hand,” I said. “I remember now. It was one of those Sunday paper stories once. She left him and he killed himself. There was some kind of queer will too, wasn’t there?”
She nodded. “He left his ex-wife a few millions for car fare and tied the rest up in a trust. The estate was to be kept on just as it was. Nothing was to be changed, the dining table was to be laid in style every night, and nobody was to be allowed inside the grounds except the servants and the lawyers. The will was broken, of course. Eventually the estate was carved up to some extent and when I married Dr. Loring my father gave it to me for a wedding present. It must have cost him a fortune merely to make it fit to live in again. I loathe it. I always have.”
“You don’t have to stay here, do you?”
She shrugged in a tired sort of way. “Part of the time, at least. One of his daughters has to show him some sign of stability. Dr. Loring likes it here.”
“He would. Any guy who could make the kind of scene he made at Wade’s house ought to wear spats with his pajamas.”
She arched her eyebrows. “Why, thank you for taking such an interest, Mr. Marlowe. But I think enough has been said on that subject. Shall we go in? My father doesn’t like to be kept waiting.”
We crossed the driveway again and went up the stone steps and half of the big double doors swung open noiselessly and an expensive and very snooty looking character stood aside for us to enter. The hallway was bigger than all the floor space in the house I was living in. It had a tessellated floor and there seemed to be stained-glass windows at the back and if there had been any light coming through them I might have been able to see what else was there. From the hallway we went through some more double carved doors into a dim room that couldn’t have been less than seventy feet long. A man was sitting there waiting, silent. He stared at us coldly.
“Am I late, Father?” Mrs. Loring asked hurriedly. “This is Mr. Philip Marlowe. Mr. Harlan Potter.”
The man just looked at me and moved his chin down about half an inch.
“Ring for tea,” he said. “Sit down, Mr. Marlowe.”
I sat down and looked at him. He looked at me like an entomologist looking at a beetle. Nobody said anything.
