“Who is ‘we’?”
“The police and myself. I found him dead. So I had to stick around.”
Prue let the front legs of his chair down on the carpet very quietly and looked at me. His good eye had a sleepy expression I didn’t like.
Morny said: “You told the cops what?”
I said: “Very little. I gather from your opening remarks to me here that you know I am looking for Linda Conquest. Mrs. Leslie Murdock. I’ve found her. She’s singing here. I don’t know why there should have been any secret about it. It seems to me that your wife or Mr. Vannier might have told me. But they didn’t.”
“What my wife would tell a peeper,” Morny said, “you could put in a gnat’s eye.”
“No doubt she has her reasons,” I said. “However that’s not very important now. In fact it’s not very important that I see Miss Conquest. Just the same I’d like to talk to her a little. If you don’t mind.”
“Suppose I mind,” Morny said.
“I guess I would like to talk to her anyway,” I said. I got a cigarette out of my pocket and rolled it around in my fingers and admired his thick and still-dark eyebrows. They had a fine shape, an elegant curve.
Prue chuckled. Morny looked at him and frowned and looked back at me, keeping the frown on his face.
“I asked you what you told the cops,” he said.
“I told them as little as I could. This man Phillips asked me to come and see him. He implied he was too deep in a job he didn’t like and needed help. When I got there he was dead. I told the police that. They didn’t think it was quite the whole story. It probably isn’t. I have until tomorrow noon to fill it out. So I’m trying to fill it out.”
“You wasted your time coming here,” Morny said.
“I got the idea that I was asked to come here.”
“You can go to hell back any time you want to,” Morny said. “Or you can do a little job for me—for five hundred dollars. Either way you leave Eddie and me out of any conversations you might have with the police.”
“What’s the nature of the job?”
“You were at my house this morning. You ought to have an idea.”
“I don’t do divorce business,” I said.
His face turned white. “I love my wife,” he said. “We’ve only been married eight months. I don’t want any divorce. She’s a swell girl and she knows what time it is, as a rule. But I think she’s playing with a wrong number at the moment.”
“Wrong in what way?”
“I don’t know. That’s what I want found out.”
“Let me get this straight,” I said. “Are you hiring me on a job—or off a job I already have.”
Prue chuckled again against the wall.
Morny poured himself some more brandy and tossed it quickly down his throat. Color came back into his face. He didn’t answer me.
“And let me get another thing straight,” I said. “You don’t mind your wife playing around, but you don’t want her playing with somebody named Vannier. Is that it?”
“I trust her heart,” he said slowly. “But I don’t trust her judgment. Put it that way.”
“And you want me to get something on this man Vannier?”
“I want to find out what he is up to.”
“Oh. Is he up to something?”
“I think he is. I don’t know what.”
“You think he is—or you want to think he is?”
He stared at me levelly for a moment, then he pulled the middle drawer of his desk out, reached in and tossed a folded paper across to me. I picked it up and unfolded it. It was a carbon copy of a gray billhead. Cal-Western Dental Supply Company, and an address. The bill was for 30 lbs. Kerr’s Crystobolite $15.75, and 25 lbs. White’s Albastone, $7.75, plus tax. It was made out to H. R. Teager, Will Call, and stamped Paid with a rubber stamp. It was signed for in the corner: L.G. Vannier.
I put it down on the desk.
“That fell out of his pocket one night when he was here,” Morny said. “About ten days ago. Eddie put one of his big feet on it and Vannier didn’t notice he had dropped it.”
I looked at Prue, then at Morny, then at my thumb. “Is this supposed to mean something to me?”
“I thought you were a smart detective. I figured you could find out.”
I looked at the paper again, folded it and put it in my pocket. “I’m assuming you wouldn’t give it to me unless it meant something,” I said.
Morny went to the black and chromium safe against the wall and opened it. He came back with five new bills spread out in his fingers like a poker hand. He smoothed them edge to edge, riffled them lightly, and tossed them on the desk in front of me.
“There’s your five C’s,” he said. “Take Vannier out of my wife’s life and there will be the same again for you. I don’t care how you do it and I don’t want to know anything about how you do it. Just do it.”
