Her lip trembled and she bit it. I didn’t know whether she was scared or annoyed or just having trouble being cool and businesslike. But she didn’t look happy.
“She got your name from the manager of a branch of the California-Security Bank. But he doesn’t know you personally,” she said.
“Get your pencil ready,” I said.
She held it up and showed me that it was freshly sharpened and ready to go.
I said: “First off, one of the vice-presidents of that same bank. George S. Leake. He’s in the main office. Then State Senator Huston Oglethorpe. He may be in Sacramento, or he may be at his office in the State Building in L.A. Then Sidney Dreyfus, Jr., of Dreyfus, Turner and Swayne, attorneys in the Title-Insurance Building. Got that?”
She wrote fast and easily. She nodded without looking up. The light danced on her blond hair.
“Oliver Fry of the Fry-Krantz Corporation, Oil Well Tools. They’re over on East Ninth, in the industrial district. Then, if you would like a couple of cops, Bernard Ohls of the D.A.’s staff, and Detective-Lieutenant Carl Randall of the Central Homicide Bureau. You think maybe that would be enough?”
“Don’t laugh at me,” she said. “I’m only doing what I’m told.”
“Better not call the last two, unless you know what the job is,” I said. “I’m not laughing at you. Hot, isn’t it?”
“It’s not hot for Pasadena,” she said, and hoisted her phone book up on the desk and went to work.
While she was looking up the numbers and telephoning hither and yon I looked her over. She was pale with a sort of natural paleness and she looked healthy enough. Her coarse-grained coppery blond hair was not ugly in itself, but it was drawn back so tightly over her narrow head that it almost lost the effect of being hair at all. Her eyebrows were thin and unusually straight and were darker than her hair, almost a chestnut color. Her nostrils had the whitish look of an anemic person. Her chin was too small, too sharp and looked unstable. She wore no makeup except orange-red on her mouth and not much of that. Her eyes behind the glasses were very large, cobalt blue with big irises and a vague expression. Both lids were tight so that the eyes had a slightly oriental look, or as if the skin of her face was naturally so tight that it stretched her eyes at the corners. The whole face had a sort of off-key neurotic charm that only needed some clever makeup to be striking.
She wore a one-piece linen dress with short sleeves and no ornament of any kind. Her bare arms had down on them, and a few freckles.
I didn’t pay much attention to what she said over the telephone. Whatever was said to her she wrote down in shorthand, with deft easy strokes of the pencil. When she was through she hung the phone book back on a hook and stood up and smoothed the linen dress down over her thighs and said:
“If you will just wait a few moments—” and went towards the door.
Halfway there she turned back and pushed a top drawer of her desk shut at the side. She went out. The door closed. There was silence. Outside the window bees buzzed. Far off I heard the whine of a vacuum cleaner. I picked the unlighted cigarette off my hat, put it in my mouth and stood up. I went around the desk and pulled open the drawer she had come back to shut.
It wasn’t any of my business. I was just curious. It wasn’t any of my business that she had a small Colt automatic in the drawer. I shut it and sat down again.
She was gone about four minutes. She opened the door and stayed at it and said: “Mrs. Murdock will see you now.”
We went along some more hallway and she opened half of a double glass door and stood aside. I went in and the door was closed behind me.
It was so dark in there that at first I couldn’t see anything but the outdoors light coming through thick bushes and screens. Then I saw that the room was a sort of sun porch that had been allowed to get completely overgrown outside. It was furnished with grass rugs and reed stuff. There was a reed chaise lounge over by the window. It had a curved back and enough cushions to stuff an elephant and there was a woman leaning back on it with a wine glass in her hand. I could smell the thick scented alcoholic odor of the wine before I could see her properly. Then my eyes got used to the light and I could see her.
She had a lot of face and chin. She had pewter-colored hair set in a ruthless permanent, a hard beak and large moist eyes with the sympathetic expression of wet stones. There was lace at her throat, but it was the kind of throat that would have looked better in a football sweater. She wore a grayish silk dress. Her thick arms were bare and mottled. There were jet buttons in her ears. There was a low glass-topped table beside her and a bottle of port on the table. She sipped from the glass she was holding and looked at me over it and said nothing.
I stood there. She let me stand while she finished the port in her glass and put the glass down on the table and filled it again. Then she tapped her lips with a handkerchief. Then she spoke. Her voice had a hard baritone quality and sounded as if it didn’t want any nonsense.
“Sit down, Mr. Marlowe. Please do not light that cigarette. I’m asthmatic.”
I sat down in a reed rocker and tucked the still unlighted cigarette down behind the handkerchief in my outside pocket.
“I’ve never had any dealing with private detectives, Mr. Marlowe. I don’t know anything about them. Your references seem satisfactory. What are your charges?”
“To do what, Mrs. Murdock?”
“It’s a very confidential matter, naturally. Nothing to do with the police. If it had to do with the police, I should have called the police.”
“I charge twenty-five dollars a day, Mrs. Murdock. And of course expenses.”
“It seems high. You must make a great deal of money.” She drank some more of her port. I don’t like port in hot weather, but it’s nice when they let you refuse it.
“No,” I said. “It isn’t. Of course you can get detective work done at any price—just like legal work. Or dental work. I’m not an organization. I’m just one man and I work at just one case at a time. I take risks, sometimes quite big risks, and I don’t work all the time. No, I don’t think twenty-five dollars a day is too much.”
