davenport where Breeze was sitting. I took two of the glasses, handed one to Spangler, and took the other to my chair.
Spangler held the glass uncertainly, pinching his lower lip between thumb and finger, looking at Breeze to see whether he would accept the drink.
Breeze looked at me very steadily. Then he sighed. Then he picked the glass up and tasted it and sighed again and shook his head sideways with a half smile; the way a man does when you give him a drink and he needs it very badly and it is just right and the first swallow is like a peek into a cleaner, sunnier, brighter world.
“I guess you catch on pretty fast, Mr. Marlowe,” he said, and leaned back on the davenport completely relaxed. “I guess now we can do some business together.”
“Not that way,” I said.
“Huh?” He bent his eyebrows together. Spangler leaned forward in his chair and looked bright and attentive.
“Having stray broads call me up and give me a song and dance so you can say they said they recognized my voice somewhere sometime.”
“The girl’s name is Gladys Crane,” Breeze said.
“So she told me. I never heard of her.”
“Okay,” Breeze said. “Okay.” He showed me the flat of his freckled hand. “We’re not trying to pull anything that’s not legitimate. We only hope you ain’t, either.”
“Ain’t either what?”
“Ain’t either trying to pull anything not legitimate. Such as holding out on us.”
“Just why shouldn’t I hold out on you, if I feel like it?” I asked. “You’re not paying my salary.”
“Look, don’t get tough, Marlowe.”
“I’m not tough. I don’t have any idea of being tough. I know enough about cops not to get tough with them. Go ahead and speak your piece and don’t try to pull any more phonies like that telephone call.”
“We’re on a murder case,” Breeze said. “We have to try to run it the best we can. You found the body. You had talked to the guy. He had asked you to come to his apartment. He gave you his key. You said you didn’t know what he wanted to see you about. We figured that maybe with time to think back you could have remembered.”
“In other words I was lying the first time,” I said.
Breeze smiled a tired smile. “You been around enough to know that people always lie in murder cases.”
“The trouble with that is how are you going to know when I stop lying?”
“When what you say begins to make sense, we’ll be satisfied.”
I looked at Spangler. He was leaning forward so far he was almost out of his chair. He looked as if he was going to jump. I couldn’t think of any reason why he should jump, so I thought he must be excited. I looked back at Breeze. He was about as excited as a hole in the wall. He had one of his cellophane-wrapped cigars between his thick fingers and he was slitting the cellophane with a penknife. I watched him get the wrapping off and trim the cigar end with the blade and put the knife away, first wiping the blade carefully on his pants. I watched him strike a wooden match and light the cigar carefully, turning it around in the flame, then hold the match away from the cigar, still burning, and draw on the cigar until he decided it was properly lighted. Then he shook the match out and laid it down beside the crumpled cellophane on the glass top of the cocktail table. Then he leaned back and pulled up one leg of his pants and smoked peacefully. Every motion had been exactly as it had been when he lit a cigar in Hench’s apartment, and exactly as it always would be whenever he lit a cigar. He was that kind of man, and that made him dangerous. Not as dangerous as a brilliant man, but much more dangerous than a quick excitable one like Spangler.
“I never saw Phillips before today,” I said. “I don’t count that he said he saw me up in Ventura once, because I don’t remember him. I met him just the way I told you. He tailed me around and I braced him. He wanted to talk to me, he gave me his key, I went to his apartment, used the key to let myself in when he didn’t answer—as he had told me to do. He was dead. The police were called and through a set of events or incidents that had nothing to do with me, a gun was found under Hench’s pillow. A gun that had been fired. I told you this and it’s true.”
Breeze said: “When you found him you went down to the apartment manager, guy named Passmore, and got him to go up with you without telling him anybody was dead. You gave Passmore a phony card and talked about jewelry.”
I nodded. “With people like Passmore and apartment houses like that one, it pays to be a little on the cagey side. I was interested in Phillips. I thought Passmore might tell me something about him, if he didn’t know he was dead, that he wouldn’t be likely to tell me, if he knew the cops were going to bounce in on him in a brief space of time. That’s all there was to that.”
Breeze drank a little of his drink and smoked a little of his cigar and said: “What I’d like to get in the clear is this. Everything you just told us might be strictly the truth, and yet you might not be telling us the truth. If you get what I mean.”
“Like what?” I asked, getting perfectly well what he meant.
He tapped on his knee and watched me with a quiet up from under look. Not hostile, not even suspicious. Just a quiet man doing his job.
“Like this. You’re on a job. We don’t know what it is. Phillips was playing at being a private dick. He was on a job. He tailed you around. How can we know, unless you tell us, that his job and your job don’t tie in somewhere? And if they do, that’s our business. Right?”
“That’s one way to look at it,” I said. “But it’s not the only way, and it’s not my way.”
“Don’t forget this is a murder case, Marlowe.”
“I’m not. But don’t you forget I’ve been around this town a long time, more than fifteen years. I’ve seen a lot of murder cases come and go. Some have been solved, some couldn’t be solved, and some could have been solved that were not solved. And one or two or three of them have been solved wrong. Somebody was paid to take a rap,
