I poked at the crisp new bills with a hungry finger. Then I pushed them away. “You can pay me when—and if—I deliver,” I said. “I’ll take my payment tonight in a short interview with Miss Conquest.”
Morny didn’t touch the money. He lifted the square bottle and poured himself another drink. This time he poured one for me and pushed it across the desk.
“And as for this Phillips murder,” I said, “Eddie here was following Phillips a little. You want to tell me why?”
“No.”
“The trouble with a case like this is that the information might come from somebody else. When a murder gets into the papers you never know what will come out. If it does, you’ll blame me.”
He looked at me steadily and said: “I don’t think so. I was a bit rough when you came in, but you shape up pretty good. I’ll take a chance.”
“Thanks,” I said. “Would you mind telling me why you had Eddie call me up and give me the shakes?”
He looked down and tapped on the desk. “Linda’s an old friend of mine. Young Murdock was out here this afternoon to see her. He told her you were working for old lady Murdock. She told me. I didn’t know what the job was. You say you don’t take divorce business, so it couldn’t be that the old lady hired you to fix anything like that up.” He raised his eyes on the last words and stared at me. I stared back at him and waited.
“I guess I’m just a fellow who likes his friends,” he said. “And doesn’t want them bothered by dicks.”
“Murdock owes you some money, doesn’t he?”
He frowned. “I don’t discuss things like that.” He finished his drink, nodded and stood up. “I’ll send Linda up to talk to you. Pick your money up.”
He went to the door and out. Eddie Prue unwound his long body and stood up and gave me a dim gray smile that meant nothing and wandered off after Morny.
I lit another cigarette and looked at the dental supply company’s bill again. Something squirmed at the back of my mind, dimly. I walked to the window and stood looking out across the valley. A car was winding up a hill towards a big house with a tower that was half glass brick with light behind it. The headlights of the car moved across it and turned in toward a garage. The lights went out and the valley seemed darker.
It was very quiet and quite cool now. The dance band seemed to be somewhere under my feet. It was muffled, and the tune was indistinguishable.
Linda Conquest came in through the open door behind me and shut it and stood looking at me with a cold light in her eyes.
19
She looked like her photo and not like it. She had the wide cool mouth, the short nose, the wide cool eyes, the dark hair parted in the middle and the broad white line between the parting. She was wearing a white coat over her dress, with the collar turned up. She had her hands in the pockets of the coat and a cigarette in her mouth.
She looked older, her eyes were harder, and her lips seemed to have forgotten to smile. They would smile when she was singing, in that staged artificial smile. But in repose they were thin and tight and angry.
She moved over to the desk and stood looking down, as if counting the copper ornaments. She saw the cut glass decanter, took the stopper out, poured herself a drink and tossed it down with a quick flip of the wrist.
“You’re a man named Marlowe?” she asked, looking at me. She put her hips against the end of the desk and crossed her ankles.
I said I was a man named Marlowe.
“By and large,” she said, “I am quite sure I am not going to like you one damned little bit. So speak your piece and drift away.”
“What I like about this place is everything runs so true to type,” I said. “The cop on the gate, the shine on the door, the cigarette and check girls, the fat greasy sensual Jew with the tall stately bored showgirl, the well-dressed, drunk and horribly rude director cursing the barman, the silent guy with the gun, the nightclub owner with the soft gray hair and the B-picture mannerisms, and now you—the tall dark torcher with the negligent sneer, the husky voice, the hard-boiled vocabulary.”
She said: “Is that so?” and fitted her cigarette between her lips and drew slowly on it. “And what about the wise-cracking snooper with the last year’s gags and the come-hither smile?”
“And what gives me the right to talk to you at all?” I said.
“I’ll bite. What does?”
“She wants it back. Quickly. It has to be fast or there will be trouble.”
“I thought—” she started to say and stopped cold. I watched her remove the sudden trace of interest from her face by monkeying with her cigarette and bending her face over it. “She wants what back, Mr. Marlowe?”
“The Brasher Doubloon.”
She looked up at me and nodded, remembering—letting me see her remembering.
“Oh, the Brasher Doubloon.”
“I bet you completely forgot it,” I said.
“Well, no. I’ve seen it a number of times,” she said. “She wants it back, you said. Do you mean she thinks I took it?”
“Yeah. Just that.”
“She’s a dirty old liar,” Linda Conquest said.
“What you think doesn’t make you a liar,” I said. “It only sometimes makes you mistaken. Is she wrong?”
