impatient.”
He took his glasses off and polished them. He wiped perspiration from the hollows under his eyes, replaced the glasses and looked at the floor.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ve taken a pretty stiff punch this afternoon. It was bad enough to know Roger had killed himself. But this other version makes me feel degraded—just knowing about it.” He looked up at me. “Can I trust you?”
“To do what?”
“The right thing—whatever it is.” He reached down and picked up the pile of yellow script and tucked it under his arm. “No, forget it. I guess you know what you are doing, I’m a pretty good publisher but this is out of my line. I guess what I really am is just a goddamn stuffed shirt.”
He walked past me and Candy stepped out of his way, then went quickly to the front door and held it open. Spencer went out past him with a brief nod. I followed. I stopped beside Candy and looked into his dark shining eyes.
“No tricks, amigo,” I said.
“The senora is very tired,” he said quietly. “She has gone to her room. She will not be disturbed. I know nothing, senor. No me acuerdo de nada . . . A sus ordenes, senor.”
I took the knife out of my pocket and held it out to him. He smiled.
“Nobody trusts me, but I trust you, Candy.”
“Lo mismo, senor. Muchas gracias.”
Spencer was already in the car. I got in and started it and backed down the driveway and drove him back to Beverly Hills. I let him out at the side entrance of the hotel.
“I’ve been thinking all the way back,” he said as he got out. “She must be a little insane. I guess they’d never convict her.”
“They won’t even try,” I said. “But she doesn’t know that.”
He struggled with the batch of yellow paper under his arm, got it straightened out, and nodded to me. I watched him heave open the door and go on in. I eased up on the brake and the Olds slid out from the white curb, and that was the last I saw of Howard Spencer.
I got home late and tired and depressed. It was one of those nights when the air is heavy and the night noises seem muffled and far away. There was a high misty indifferent moon. I walked the floor, played a few records, and hardly heard them. I seemed to hear a steady ticking somewhere, but there wasn’t anything in the house to tick. The ticking was in my head. I was a one-man death watch.
I thought of the first time I had seen Eileen Wade and the second and the third and the fourth. But after that something in her got out of drawing. She no longer seemed quite real. A murderer is always unreal once you know he is a murderer. There are people who kill out of hate or fear or greed. There are the cunning killers who plan and expect to get away with it. There are the angry killers who do not think at all. And there are the killers who are in love with death, to whom murder is a remote kind of suicide. In a sense they are all insane, but not in the way Spencer meant it.
It was almost daylight when I finally went to bed.
The jangle of the telephone dragged me up out of a black well of sleep. I rolled over on the bed, fumbled for slippers, and realized that I hadn’t been asleep for more than a couple of hours. I felt like a half-digested meal eaten in a greasy-spoon joint. My eyes were stuck together and my mouth was full of sand. I heaved up on the feet and lumbered into the living room and pulled the phone off the cradle and said into it: “Hold the line.”
I put the phone down and went into the bathroom and hit myself in the face with some cold water. Outside the window something went snip, snip, snip. I looked out vaguely and saw a brown expressionless face. It was the once-a-week Jap gardener I called Hardhearted Harry. He was trimming the tecoma—the way a Japanese gardener trims your tecoma. You ask him four times and he says, “next week,” and then he comes by at six o’clock in the morning and trims it outside your bedroom window.
I rubbed my face dry and went back to the telephone.
“Yeah?”
“This is Candy, senor.”
“Good morning, Candy.”
“La senora es muerta.”
Dead. What a cold black noiseless word it is in any language. The lady is dead.
“Nothing you did, I hope.”
“I think the medicine. It is called demerol. I think forty, fifty in the bottle. Empty now. No dinner last night. This morning I climb up on the ladder and look in the window. Dressed just like yesterday afternoon. I break the screen open. La senora es muerta. Frio como agua de nieve.”
Cold as ice water. “You call anybody?”
“Si. El Doctor Loring. He call the cops. Not here yet.”
“Dr. Loring, huh? Just the man to come too late.”
“I don’t show him the letter,” Candy said.
“Letter to who?”
“Senor Spencer.”
“Give it to the police, Candy. Don’t let Dr. Loring have it. Just the police. And one more thing, Candy. Don’t hide anything, don’t tell them any lies. We were there. Tell the truth. This time the truth and all the truth.”
