There was complete silence until the tea came. It was put down on a huge silver tray on a Chinese table. Linda sat at a table and poured.
“Two cups,” Harlan Potter said. “You can have your tea in another room, Linda.”
“Yes, Father. How do you like your tea, Mr. Marlowe?”
“Any way at all,” I said. My voice seemed to echo off into the distance and get small and lonely.
She gave the old man a cup and then gave me a cup. Then she stood up silently and went out of the room. I watched her go. I took a sip of tea and got a cigarette out.
“Don’t smoke, please. I am subject to asthma.”
I put the cigarette back in the pack. I stared at him. I don’t know how it feels to be worth a hundred million or so, but he didn’t look as if he was having any fun. He was an enormous man, all of six feet five and built to scale. He wore a gray tweed suit with no padding. His shoulders didn’t need any. He wore a white shirt and a dark tie and no display handkerchief. A spectacle case showed in the outside breast pocket. It was black, like his shoes. His hair was black too, no gray at all. It was brushed sideways across his skull in a MacArthur sweep. And I had a hunch there was nothing under it but bare skull. His eyebrows were thick and black. His voice seemed to come from a long way off. He drank his tea as if he hated it.
“It will save time, Mr. Marlowe, if I put my position before you. I believe you are interfering in my affairs. If I am correct, I propose to stop it.”
“I don’t know enough about your affairs to interfere in them, Mr. Potter.”
“I disagree.”
He drank some more tea and put the cup aside. He leaned back in the big chair he was sitting in and took me to pieces with his hard gray eyes.
“I know who you are, naturally. And how you make your living—if you make one—and how you became involved with Terry Lennox. It has been reported to me that you helped Terry get out of the country, that you have doubts about his guilt, and that you have since made contact with a man who was known to my dead daughter. For what purpose has not been explained to me. Explain it.”
“If the man has a name,” I said, “name it.”
He smiled very slightly but not as if he was falling for me. “Wade. Roger Wade. Some sort of writer, I believe. A writer, they tell me, of rather prurient books which I should not be interested to read. I further understand that this man is a dangerous alcoholic. That may have given you a strange notion.”
“Maybe you had better let me have my own notions, Mr. Potter. They are not important, naturally, but they’re all I have. First, I do not believe Terry killed his wife, because of the way it was done and because I don’t think he was that kind of man. Second, I didn’t make contact with Wade. I was asked to live in his house and do what I could to keep him sober while he finished a job of writing. Third, if he is a dangerous alcoholic, I haven’t seen any sign of it. Fourth, my first contact was at the request of his New York publisher and I didn’t at that time have any idea that Roger Wade even knew your daughter. Fifth, I refused this offer of employment and then Mrs. Wade asked me to find her husband who was away somewhere taking a cure. I found him and took him home.”
“Very methodical,” he said dryly.
“I’m not finished being methodical, Mr. Potter. Sixth—you or someone on your instructions sent a lawyer named Sewell Endicott to get me out of jail. He didn’t say who sent him, but there wasn’t anyone else in the picture. Seventh, when I got out of jail a hoodlum named Mendy Menendez pushed me around and warned me to keep my nose clean and gave me a song and dance about how Terry had saved his life and the life of a gambler at Las Vegas named Randy Starr. The story could be true for all I know. Menendez pretended to be sore that Terry hadn’t asked him for help getting to Mexico and had asked a punk like me instead. He, Menendez, could have done it two ways from the jack by lifting one finger, and done it much better.”
“Surely,” Harlan Potter said with a bleak smile, “you are not under the impression that I number Mr. Menendez and Mr. Starr among my acquaintances.”
“I wouldn’t know, Mr. Potter. A man doesn’t make your kind of money in any way I can understand. The next person to warn me off the courthouse lawn was your daughter, Mrs. Loring. We met by accident at a bar and we spoke because we were both drinking gimlets, Terry’s favorite drink, but an uncommon one around here. I didn’t know who she was until she told me. I told her a little of how I felt about Terry and she gave me the idea that I would have a short unhappy career if I got you mad. Are you mad, Mr. Potter?”
“When I am,” he said coldly, “you will not have to ask me. You will be in no uncertainty about it.”
“What I thought. I’ve been kind of expecting the goon squad to drop around, but they haven’t shown so far. I haven’t been bothered by the cops either. I could have been. I could have been given a rough time. I think all you wanted, Mr. Potter, was quiet. Just what have I done to disturb you?”
He grinned. It was a sour kind of grin, but it was a grin. He put his long yellow fingers together and crossed a leg over his knee and leaned back comfortably.
“A pretty good pitch, Mr. Marlowe, and I have let you make it. Now listen to me. You are exactly right in thinking all I want is quiet. It’s quite possible that your connection with the Wades may be incidental, accidental, and coincidental. Let it remain so. I am a family man in an age when it means almost nothing. One of my daughters married a Bostonian prig and the other made a number of foolish marriages, the last being with a complaisant pauper who allowed her to live a worthless and immoral life until he suddenly and for, no good reason lost his self- control and murdered her. You think that impossible to accept because of the brutality with which it was done. You are wrong. He shot her with a Mauser automatic, the very gun he took with him to Mexico. And after he shot her he did what he did in order to cover the bullet wound. I admit the brutality of this, but remember the man had been in a war, had been badly wounded, had suffered a great deal and seen others suffer. He may not have intended to kill her. There may have been some sort of scuffle, since the gun belonged to my daughter. It was a small but powerful gun, 7.65mm caliber, a model called P.P.K. The bullet went completely through her head and lodged in the wall behind a chintz curtain. It was not found immediately and the fact was not published at all. Now let us consider the situation.” He broke off and stared at me. “Are you very badly in need of a cigarette?”
“Sorry, Mr. Potter. I took it out without thinking. Force of habit.” I put the cigarette back for the second time.
“Terry had just killed his wife. He had ample motive from the rather limited police point of view. But he also had an excellent defense—that it was her gun in her possession and that he tried to take it away from her and failed and she shot herself with it. A good trial lawyer could have done a lot with that. He would probably have been
