his hat and stood up.
“How long you expect to stay dummied up?” he asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Let me help you out. I give you till tomorrow noon, a little better than twelve hours. I won’t get my post mortem report before that anyway. I give you till then to talk things over with your party and decide to come clean.”
“And after that?”
“After that I see the Captain of Detectives and tell him a private eye named Philip Marlowe is withholding information which I need in a murder investigation, or I’m pretty sure he is. And what about it? I figure he’ll pull you in fast enough to singe your breeches.”
I said: “Uh-huh. Did you go through Phillips’ desk?”
“Sure. A very neat young feller. Nothing in it at all, except a little kind of diary. Nothing in that either, except about how he went to the beach or took some girl to the pictures and she didn’t warm up much. Or how he sat in the office and no business come in. One time he got a little sore about his laundry and wrote a whole page. Mostly it was just three or four lines. There was only one thing about it. It was all done in a kind of printing.”
I said: “Printing?”
“Yeah, printing in pen and ink. Not big block caps like people trying to disguise things. Just neat fast little printing as if the guy could write that way as fast and easy as any way.”
“He didn’t write like that on the card he gave me,” I said.
Breeze thought about that for a moment. Then he nodded. “True. Maybe it was this way. There wasn’t any name in the diary either, in the front. Maybe the printing was just a little game he played with himself.”
“Like Pepys’ shorthand,” I said.
“What was that?”
“A diary a man wrote in a private shorthand, a long time ago.”
Breeze looked at Spangler, who was standing up in front of his chair, tipping the last few drops of his glass.
“We better beat it,” Breeze said. “This guy is warming up for another Cassidy case.”
Spangler put his glass down and they both went over to the door. Breeze shuffled a foot and looked at me sideways, with his hand on the doorknob.
“You know any tall blonds?”
“I’d have to think,” I said. “I hope so. How tall?”
“Just tall. I don’t know how tall that is. Except that it would be tall to a guy who is tall himself. A wop named Palermo owns that apartment house on Court Street. We went across to see him in his funeral parlors. He owns them too. He says he saw a tall blond come out of the apartment house about three-thirty. The manager, Passmore, don’t place anybody in the joint that he would call a tall blond. The wop says she was a looker. I give some weight to what he says because he give us a good description of you. He didn’t see this tall blond go in, just saw her come out. She was wearing slacks and a sports jacket and a wrap-around. But she had light blond hair and plenty of it under the wrap-around.”
“Nothing comes to me,” I said. “But I just remembered something else. I wrote the license number of Phillips’ car down on the back of an envelope. That will give you his former address, probably. I’ll get it.”
They stood there while I went to get it out of my coat in the bedroom. I handed the piece of envelope to Breeze and he read what was on it and tucked it into his billfold.
“So you just thought of this, huh?”
“That’s right.”
“Well, well,” he said. “Well, well.”
The two of them went along the hallway towards the elevator, shaking their heads.
I shut the door and went back to my almost untasted second drink. It was flat. I carried it to the kitchen and hardened it up from the bottle and stood there holding it and looking out of the window at the eucalyptus trees tossing their limber tops against the bluish dark sky. The wind seemed to have risen again. It thumped at the north window and there was a heavy slow pounding noise on the wall of the building, like a thick wire banging the stucco between insulators.
I tasted my drink and wished I hadn’t wasted the fresh whiskey on it. I poured it down the sink and got a fresh glass and drank some ice water.
Twelve hours to tie up a situation which I didn’t even begin to understand. Either that or turn up a client and let the cops go to work on her and her whole family. Hire Marlowe and get your house full of law. Why worry? Why be doubtful and confused? Why be gnawed by suspicion? Consult cockeyed, careless, clubfooted, dissipated investigator. Philip Marlowe, Glenview 7537. See me and you meet the best cops in town. Why despair? Why be lonely? Call Marlowe and watch the wagon come.
This didn’t get me anywhere either. I went back to the living room and put a match to the pipe that had cooled off now on the edge of the chess table. I drew the smoke in slowly, but it still tasted like the smell of hot rubber. I put it away and stood in the middle of the floor pulling my lower lip out and letting it snap back against my teeth.
The telephone rang. I picked it up and growled into it.
“Marlowe?”
The voice was a harsh low whisper. It was a harsh low whisper I had heard before.
