friendship. Most charming. Goodbye, Howard. I am very tired and I have a headache. I’m going to my room and lie down. As for Mr. Marlowe—and I suppose he put you up to all this—I can only say to him that if he didn’t kill Roger in a literal sense, he certainly drove him to his death.”
She turned to walk away. I said sharply: “Mrs. Wade, just a moment. Let’s finish the job. No sense in being bitter. We are all trying to do the right thing. That suitcase you threw into the Chatsworth Reservoir—was it heavy?”
She turned and stared at me. “It was an old one, I said. Yes, it was very heavy.”
“How did you get it over the high wire fence around the reservoir?”
“What? The fence?” She made a helpless gesture. “I suppose in emergencies one has an abnormal strength to do what has to be done. Somehow or other I did it. That’s all. ”
“There isn’t any fence,” I said.
“Isn’t any fence?” She repeated it dully, as if it didn’t mean anything.”
“And there was no blood on Roger’s clothes. And Sylvia Lennox wasn’t killed outside the guesthouse, but inside it on the bed. And there was practically no blood, because she was already dead—shot dead with a gun—and when the statuette was used to beat her face to a pulp, it was beating a dead woman, And the dead, Mrs. Wade, bleed very little.”
She curled her lip at me contemptuously. “I suppose you were there,” she said scornfully.
Then she went away from us.
We watched her go. She went up the stairs slowly, moving with calm elegance. She disappeared into her room and the door closed softly but firmly behind her. Silence.
“What was that about the wire fence?” Spencer asked me vaguely. He was moving, his head back and forth. He was flushed and sweating. He was taking it gamely but it wasn’t easy, for him to take.
“Just a gag,” I said. “I’ve never been close enough to the Chatsworth Reservoir to know what it looks like. Maybe it has a fence around it, maybe not.”
“I see,” he said unhappily. “But the point is she didn’t know either.”
“Of course not. She killed both of them.”
43
Then something moved softly and Candy was standing at the end of the couch looking at me. He had his switch knife in his hand. He pressed the button and the blade shot out. He pressed the button and the blade went back into the handle. There was a sleek glitter in his eye.
“Million de pardones, senor,” he said. “I was wrong about you. She killed the boss. I think I—” He stopped and the blade shot out again.
“No.” I stood up and held my hand out. “Give me the knife, Candy. You’re just a nice Mexican houseboy. They’d hang it onto you and love it. Just the kind of smoke screen that would make them grin with delight. You don’t know what I’m talking about. But I do. They fouled it up so bad that they couldn’t straighten it out now if they wanted to. And they don’t want to. They’d blast a confession out of you so quickly you wouldn’t even have time to tell them your full name. And you’d be sitting on your fanny up in San Quentin with a life sentence three weeks from Tuesday.”
“I tell you before I am not a Mexican. I am Chileno from Vina del Mar near Valparaiso.”
“The knife, Candy. I know all that. You’re free. You’ve got money saved. You’ve probably got eight brothers and sisters back home. Be smart and go back where you came from. This job here is dead.”
“Lots of jobs,” he said quietly. Then he reached out and dropped the knife into my hand. “For you I do this.”
I dropped the knife into my pocket. He glanced up towards the balcony. “La senora—what do we do now?”
“Nothing. We do nothing at all. The senora is very tired. She has been living under a great strain. She doesn’t want to be disturbed.”
“We’ve got to call the police,” Spencer said grittily.
“Why?”
“Oh my God, Marlowe—we have to.”
“Tomorrow. Pick up your pile of unfinished novel and let’s go.”
“We’ve got to call the police. There is such a thing as law.”
“We don’t have to do anything of the sort. We haven’t enough evidence to swat a fly with. Let the law enforcement people do their own dirty work. Let the lawyers work it out. They write the laws for other lawyers to dissect in front of other lawyers called judges so that other judges can say the first judges were wrong and the Supreme Court can say the second lot were wrong. Sure there’s such a thing as law. We’re up to our necks in it. About all it does is make business for lawyers. How long do you think the big-shot mobsters would last if the lawyers didn’t show them how to operate?”
Spencer said angrily: “That has nothing to do with it. A man was killed in this house. He happened to be an author and a very successful and important one, but that has nothing to do with it either. He was a man and you and I know who killed him. There’s such a thing as justice.”
“Tomorrow.”
“You’re just as bad as she is if you let her get away with it. I’m beginning to wonder about you a little, Marlowe. You could have saved his life if you had been on your toes. In a sense you let her get away with it. And for all I know this whole performance this afternoon has been just that—a performance.”
“That’s right. A disguised love scene. You could see Eileen is crazy about me. When things quiet down we may get married. She ought to be pretty well fixed. I haven’t made a buck out of the Wade family yet. I’m getting
