copper vase. It seemed like a lot of copper.
The man at the window turned around and showed me that he was going on fifty and had soft ash gray hair and plenty of it, and a heavy handsome face with nothing unusual about it except a short puckered scar in his left cheek that had almost the effect of a deep dimple. I remembered the dimple. I would have forgotten the man. I remembered that I had seen him in pictures a long time ago, at least ten years ago. I didn’t remember the pictures or what they were about or what he did in them, but I remembered the dark heavy handsome face and the puckered scar. His hair had been dark then.
He walked over to his desk and sat down and picked up his letter opener and poked at the ball of his thumb with the point. He looked at me with no expression and said: “You’re Marlowe?”
I nodded.
“Sit down.” I sat down. Eddie Prue sat in a chair against the wall and tilted the front legs off the floor.
“I don’t like peepers,” Morny said.
I shrugged.
“I don’t like them for a lot of reasons,” he said. “I don’t like them in any way or at any time. I don’t like them when they bother my friends. I don’t like them when they bust in on my wife.”
I didn’t say anything.
“I don’t like them when they question my driver or when they get tough with my guests,” he said.
I didn’t say anything.
“In short,” he said. “I just don’t like them.”
“I’m beginning to get what you mean,” I said.
He flushed and his eyes glittered. “On the other hand,” he said, “just at the moment I might have a use for you. It might pay you to play ball with me. It might be a good idea. It might pay you to keep your nose clean.”
“How much might it pay me?” I asked.
“It might pay you in time and health.”
“I seem to have heard this record somewhere,” I said. “I just can’t put a name to it.”
He laid the letter opener down and swung open a door in the desk and got a cut glass decanter out. He poured liquid out of it in a glass and drank it and put the stopper back in the decanter and put the decanter back in the desk.
“In my business,” he said, “tough boys come a dime a dozen. And would-be tough boys come a nickel a gross. Just mind your business and I’ll mind my business and we won’t have any trouble.” He lit a cigarette. His hand shook a little.
I looked across the room at the tall man sitting tilted against the wall, like a loafer in a country store. He just sat there without motion, his long arms hanging, his lined gray face full of nothing.
“Somebody said something about some money,” I said to Morny. “What’s that for? I know what the bawling out is for. That’s you trying to make yourself think you can scare me.”
“Talk like that to me,” Morny said, “and you are liable to be wearing lead buttons on your vest.”
“Just think,” I said. “Poor old Marlowe with lead buttons on his vest.”
Eddie Prue made a dry sound in his throat that might have been a chuckle.
“And as for me minding my own business and not minding yours,” I said, “it might be that my business and your business would get a little mixed up together. Through no fault of mine.”
“It better not,” Morny said. “In what way?” He lifted his eyes quickly and dropped them again.
“Well, for instance, your hard boy here calling me up on the phone and trying to scare me to death. And later in the evening calling me up and talking about five C’s and how it would do me some good to drive out here and talk to you. And for instance that same hard boy or somebody who looks just like him—which is a little unlikely—following around after a fellow in my business who happened to get shot this afternoon, on Court Street on Bunker Hill.”
Morny lifted his cigarette away from his lips and narrowed his eyes to look at the tip. Every motion, every gesture, right out of the catalogue.
“Who got shot?”
“A fellow named Phillips, a youngish blond kid. You wouldn’t like him. He was a peeper.” I described Phillips to him.
“I never heard of him,” Morny said.
“And also for instance, a tall blond who didn’t live there was seen coming out of the apartment house just after he was killed,” I said.
“What tall blond?” His voice had changed a little. There was urgency in it.
“I don’t know that. She was seen and the man who saw her could identify her, if he saw her again. Of course she need not have anything to do with Phillips.”
“This man Phillips was a shamus?”
I nodded. “I told you that twice.”
“Why was he killed and how?”
“He was sapped and shot in his apartment. We don’t know why he was killed. If we knew that, we would likely know who killed him. It seems to be that kind of a situation.”
