“There’s a little drinking being done.”
“Do you have to do it with him?”
“At the moment, yes. Business. I said, is there anything new? I guess you know what I mean.”
“No. Are you aware, my good fellow, that you stood me up for an hour the other night? Did I strike you as the kind of girl that lets that sort of thing happen to her?”
“I ran into trouble. How about tonight?”
“Let me see — tonight is — what day of the week is it for heaven’s sake?”
“I’d better call you,” I said. “I may not be able to make it. This is Friday.”
“Liar.” The soft husky laugh came again. “It’s Monday. Same time, same place — and no fooling this time?”
“I’d better call you.”
“You’d better be there.”
“I can’t be sure. Let me call you.”
“Hard to get? I see. Perhaps I’m a fool to bother.”
“As a matter of fact you are.”
“Why?”
“I’m a poor man, but I pay my own way. And it’s not quite as soft a way as you would like.”
“Damn you, if you’re not there — “
“I said I’d call you.”
She sighed. “All men are the same.”
“So are all women — after the first nine.”
She damned me and hung up. The Chief’s eyes popped so far out of his head they looked as if they were on stilts.
He filled both glasses with a shaking hand and pushed one at me.
“So it’s like that,” he said very thoughtfully.
“Her husband doesn’t care,” I said, “so don’t make a note of it.”
He looked hurt as he drank his drink. He cracked the cardamon seeds very slowly, very thoughtfully. We drank to each other’s baby blue eyes. Regretfully the Chief put the bottle and glasses out of sight and snapped a switch on his call box.
“Have Galbraith come up, if he’s in the building. If not, try and get in touch with him for me.”
I got up and unlocked the doors and sat down again. We didn’t wait long. The side door was tapped on, the Chief called out, and Hemingway stepped into the room.
He walked solidly over to the desk and and stopped at the end of it and looked at Chief Wax with the proper expression of tough humility.
“Meet Mr. Philip Marlowe,” the Chief said genially. “A private dick from L.A.”
Hemingway turned enough to look at me. If he had ever seen me before, nothing in his face showed it. He put a hand out and I put a hand out and he looked at the Chief again.
“Mr. Marlowe has a rather curious story,” the Chief said, cunning, like Richelieu behind the arras. “About a man named Amthor who has a place in Stillwood Heights. He’s some sore of crystal-gazer. It seems Marlowe went to see him and you and Blane happened in about the same time and there was an argument of some kind. I forget the details.” He looked out of his windows with the expression of a man forgetting details.
“Some mistake,” Hemingway said. “I never saw this man before.”
“There was a mistake, as a matter of fact,” the Chief said dreamily. “Rather trifling, but still a mistake. Mr. Marlowe thinks it of slight importance.”
Hemingway looked at me again. His face still looked like a stone face.
“In fact he’s not even interested in the mistake,” the Chief dreamed on. “But he is interested in going to call on this man Amthor who lives in Stillwood Heights. He would like someone with him. I thought of you. He would like someone who would see that he got a square deal. It seems that Mr. Amthor has a very tough Indian bodyguard and Mr. Marlowe is a little inclined to doubt his ability to handle the situation without help. Do you think you could find out where this Amthor lives?”
“Yeah,” Hemingway said. “But Stillwood Heights is over the line, Chief. This just a personal favor to a friend of yours?”
“You might put it that way,” the Chief said, looking at his left thumb. “We wouldn’t want to do anything not strictly legal, of course.”
“Yeah,” Hemingway said. “No.” He coughed. “When do we go?”
The Chief looked at me benevolently. “Now would be okey,” I said. “If it suits Mr. Galbraith.”
“I do what I’m told,” Hemingway said.
The Chief looked him over, feature by feature. He combed him and brushed him with his eyes. “How is Captain Blane today?” he inquired, munching on a cardamon seed.
“Bad shape. Bust appendix,” Hemingway said. “Pretty critical.”
The Chief shook his head sadly. Then he got hold of the arms of his chair and dragged himself to his feet. He pushed a pink paw across his desk.
“Galbraith will take good care of you, Marlowe. You can rely on that.”
“Well, you’ve certainly been obliging, Chief,” I said. “I certainly don’t know how to thank you.”
“Pshaw! No thanks necessary. Always glad to oblige a friend of a friend, so to speak.” He winked at me. Hemingway studied the wink but he didn’t say what he added it up to.
We went out, with the Chief’s polite murmurs almost carrying us down the office. The door closed. Hemingway looked up and down the hall and then he looked at me.
“You played that one smart, baby,” he said. “You must got something we wasn’t told about.”
33
The car drifted quietly along a quiet street of homes. Arching pepper trees almost met above it to form a green tunnel. The sun twinkled through their upper branches and their narrow light leaves. A sign at the corner said it was Eighteenth Street.
Hemingway was driving and I sat beside him. He drove very slowly, his face heavy with thought.
“How much you tell him?” he asked, making up his mind.
“I told him you and Blane went over there and took me away and tossed me out of the car and socked me on the back of the head. I didn’t tell him the rest.”
“Not about Twenty-third and Descanso, huh?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I thought maybe I could get more co-operation from you if I didn’t.”
“That’s a thought. You really want to go over to Stillwood Heights, or was that just a stall?”
“Just a stall. What I really want is for you to tell me why you put me in that funnyhouse and why I was kept there?”
Hemingway thought. He thought so hard his cheek muscles made little knots under his grayish skin.
“That Blane,” he said. “That sawed-off hunk of shin meat. I didn’t mean for him to sap you. I didn’t mean for you to walk home neither, not really. It was just an act, on account of we are friends with this swami guy and we kind of keep people from bothering him. You’d be surprised what a lot of people would try to bother him.”
“Amazed,” I said.
He turned his head. His gray eyes were lumps of ice. Then he looked again through the dusty windshield and did some more thinking.
“Them old cops get sap-hungry once in a while,” he said. “They just got to crack a head. Jesus, was I scared. You dropped like a sack of cement. I told Blane plenty. Then we run you over to Sonderborg’s place on account of it was a little closer and he was a nice guy and would take care of you.”
“Does Amthor know you took me there?”
