I thought about it for a while. The noise of the traffic outside the building on the boulevard made an unmusical obbligato to my thinking. It was too loud. In summer in hot weather everything is too loud. I got up and shut the lower part of the window and called Detective-Sergeant Green at Homicide. He was obliging enough to be in.
“Look,” I said, after the preliminaries, “I heard something about Terry Lennox that puzzles me. A fellow I know used to know him in New York under another name. You check his war record?”
“You guys never learn,” Green said harshly. “You just never learn to stay on your own side of the street. That matter is closed, locked up, weighted with lead and dropped in the ocean. Get it?”
“I spent part of an afternoon with Harlan Potter last week at his daughter’s house in Idle Valley. Want to check?”
“Doing what?” he asked sourly. “Supposing I believe you.”
“Talking things over. I was invited. He likes me. Incidentally; he told me the girl was shot with a Mauser P.P.K. 7.65 mm. That news to you?”
“Go on.”
“Her own gun, chum. Makes a little difference, maybe. But don’t get me wrong. I’m not looking into any dark corners. This is a personal matter. Where did he get that wound?”
Green was silent. I heard a door close in the background. Then he said quietly, “Probably in a knife fight south of the border.”
“Aw hell, Green, you had his prints. You sent them to Washington like always. You got a report back—like always. All I asked was something about his service record.”
“Who said he had one,”
“Well, Mendy Menendez for one. Seems Lennox saved his life one time and that’s how he got the wound. He was captured by the Germans and they gave him the face he had.”
“Menendez, huh? You believe that son of a bitch? You got a hole in your own head. Lennox didn’t have any war record. Didn’t have any record of any kind under any name. You satisfied?”
“If you say so,” I said. “But I don’t see why Menendez would bother to come up here and tell me a yarn and warn me to keep my nose clean on account of Lennox was a pal of him and Randy Starr in Vegas and they didn’t want anybody fooling around. After all Lennox was already dead.”
“Who knows what a hoodlum figures?” Green asked bitterly. “Or why? Maybe Lennox was in a racket with them before he married all that money, and got respectable. He was a floor manager at Starr’s place in Vegas for a while. That’s where he met the girl. A smile and a bow and a dinner jacket Keep the customers happy and keep an eye on the house players. I guess he had class for the job.”
“He had charm,” I said. “They don’t use it in police business. Much obliged, Sergeant. How is Captain Gregorius these days?”
“Retirement leave. Don’t you read the papers?”
“Not the crime news, Sergeant. Too sordid.”
I started to say goodbye but he chopped me off. “What did Mr. Money want with you?”
“We just had a cup of tea together. A social call. He said he might put some business my way. He also hinted —just hinted, not in so many words—that any cop that looked cross-eyed at me would be facing a grimy future.”
“He don’t run the police department,” Green said.
“He admits it. Doesn’t even buy commissioners or D.A.’s, he said. They just kind of curl up in his lap when he’s having a doze.”
“Go to hell,” Green said, and hung up in my ear.
A difficult thing, being a cop. You never know whose stomach it’s safe to jump up and down on.
34
The stretch of broken-paved road from the highway to the curve of the hill was dancing in the noon heat and the scrub that dotted the parched land on both sides of it was flour-white with granite dust by this time. The weedy smell was almost nauseating. A thin hot acrid breeze was blowing. I had my coat off and my sleeves rolled up, but the door was too hot to rest an arm on. A tethered horse dozed wearily under a dump of live oaks. A brown Mexican sat on the ground and ate something out of a newspaper. A tumbleweed rolled lazily across the road and came to rest against a piece of granite outcrop, and a lizard that had been there an instant before disappeared without seeming to move at all.
Then I was around the hill on the blacktop and in another country. In five minutes I turned into the driveway of the Wades’ house, parked and walked across the flagstones and rang the bell. Wade answered the door himself, in a brown and white checked shirt with short sleeves, pale blue denim slacks, and house slippers. He looked tanned and he looked good. There was an ink stain on his hand and a smear of cigarette ash on one side of his nose.
He led the way into his study and parked himself behind his desk. On it there was a thick pile of yellow typescript. I put my coat on a chair and sat on the couch.
“Thanks for coming, Marlowe. Drink?”
I got that look on my face you get when a drunk asks you to have a drink. I could feel it. He grinned.
“I’ll have a coke,” he said.
“You pick up fast,” I said. “I don’t think I want a drink right now. I’ll take a coke with you.”
He pressed something with his foot and after a while Candy came. He looked surly. He had a blue shirt on and an orange scarf and no white coat. Two-tone black and white shoes, elegant high-wasted gabardine pants.
Wade ordered the cokes. Candy gave me a hard stare and went away.
