“After she took her clothes off—standing just inside the door of her room, you said—she put on a robe. What kind of robe?”
“Blue robe. Long thing like a housecoat. She tie it with a sash.”
“So if you hadn’t actually seen her take her clothes off you wouldn’t know what she had on under the robe?”
He shrugged. He looked vaguely worried. “Si. That’s right. But I see her take her clothes off.”
“You’re a liar. There isn’t any place in the living room from which you could see her take her clothes off right bang in her doorway, much less inside her room. She would have to come out to the edge of the balcony. If she had done that she would have seen you.”
He just glared at me. I turned to Ohls. “You’ve seen the house. Captain Hernandez hasn’t—or has he?”
Ohls shook his head slightly. Hernandez frowned and said nothing.
“There is no spot in that living room, Captain Hernandez, from which he could see even the top of Mrs. Wade’s head—even if he was standing up—and he says he was sitting down—provided the was as far back as her own doorway or inside it. I’m four inches taller than he is and I could only see the top foot of an open door when I was standing just inside the front door of the house. She would have to come out to the edge of the balcony for him to see what he says he saw. Why would she do that? Why would she undress in her doorway even? There’s no sense to it.”
Hernandez just looked at me. Then he looked at Candy. “How about the time element?” he asked softly, speaking to me.
“That’s his word against mine. I’m talking about what can be proved.”
Hernandez spit Spanish at Candy too fast for me to understand. Candy just stared at him sulkily.
“Take him out,” Hernandez said.
Ohls jerked a thumb and opened the door. Candy went out. Hernandez brought out a box of cigarettes, stuck one on his lip, and lit it with a gold lighter,
Ohls came back into the room. Hernandez said calmly: “I just told him that if there was an inquest and he told that story on the stand, he’d find himself doing a one-to-three up in Q for perjury. Didn’t seem to impress him much. It’s obvious what’s eating him. An old-fashioned case of hot pants, if he’d been around and we had any reason to suspect murder, he’d make a pretty good pigeon—except that he would have used a knife. I got the impression earlier that he felt pretty bad about Wade’s death. Any questions you want to ask, Ohls?”
Ohls shook his head. Hernandez looked at me and said: “Come back in the morning and sign your statement. We’ll have it typed out by then. We ought to have a P.M. report by ten o’clock, preliminary anyway. Anything you don’t like about this setup, Marlowe?”
“Would you mind rephrasing the question? The way you put it suggests there might be something I do like about it.”
“Okay,” he said wearily. “Take off. I’m going home.”
I stood up.
“Of course I never did believe that stuff Candy pulled on us,” he said. “Just used it for a corkscrew. No hard feelings, I hope.”
“No feelings at all, Captain. No feelings at all. ”
They watched me go out and didn’t say goodnight. I walked down the long corridor to the Hill Street entrance and got into my car and drove home.
No feelings at all was exactly right. I was as hollow and empty as the spaces between the stars. When I got home I mixed a stiff one and stood by the open window in the living room and sipped it and listened to the groundswell of the traffic on Laurel Canyon Boulevard and looked at the glare of the big angry city hanging over the shoulder of the hills through which the boulevard had been cut. Far off the banshee wail of police or fire sirens rose and fell, never for very long completely silent. Twenty-four hours a day somebody is running, somebody else is trying to catch him. Out there in the night of a thousand crimes people were dying, being maimed, cut by flying glass, crushed against steering wheels or under heavy tires. People were being beaten, robbed, strangled, raped, and murdered. People were hungry, sick; bored, desperate with loneliness or remorse or fear, angry, cruel, feverish, shaken by sobs. A city no worse than others, a city rich and vigorous and full of pride, a city lost and beaten and full of emptiness.
It all depends on where you sit and what your own private score is. I didn’t have one. I didn’t care. I finished the drink and went to bed.
39
The inquest was a flop. The coroner sailed into it before the medical evidence was complete, for fear the publicity would die on him. He needn’t have worried. The death of a writer—even a loud writer—is not news for long, and that summer there was too much to compete. A king abdicated and another was assassinated. In one week three large passenger planes crashed. The head man of a big wire service was shot to pieces in Chicago in his own automobile. Twenty-four convicts were burned to death in a prison fire. The Coroner of Los Angeles County was out of luck. He was missing the good things in life.
As I left the stand I saw Candy. He had a bright malicious grin on his face—I had no idea why—and as usual he was dressed just a little too well, in a cocoa brown gabardine suit with a white nylon shirt and midnight blue bow tie. On the witness stand he was quiet and made a good impression. Yes, the boss had been pretty drunk lately a lot of times. Yes, he had helped put him to bed the night the gun went off upstairs. Yes, the boss had demanded whiskey before he, Candy, left on the last day, but he had refused to get it. No, he didn’t know anything about Mr. Wade’s literary work, but he knew the boss had been discouraged. He kept throwing it away and then getting it out of the wastebasket again. No, he had never heard Mr. Wade quarreling with anyone. And so on. The coroner milked him but it was thin stuff. Somebody had done a good coaching job on Candy.
Eileen Wade wore black and white. She was pale and spoke in a low clear voice which even the amplifier could not spoil. The coroner handled her with two pairs of velvet gloves. He talked to her as if he had trouble keeping the sobs out of his voice. When she left the stand he stood up and bowed and she gave him a faint fugitive smile that nearly made him choke on his salvia.
