name comes up the party freezes.”
She stared at me and said nothing. I thought that an idea was stirring at the back of her eyes, but if so it didn’t come out. She said quietly:
“Morny will sure as hell kill him, if he doesn’t lay off Lois.”
“Go on with you. Lois flops at the drop of a hat. Anybody can see that.”
“Perhaps Alex is the one person who can’t see it.”
“Vannier hasn’t anything to do with my job anyway. He has no connection with the Murdocks.”
She lifted a corner of her lip at me and said: “No? Let me tell you something. No reason why I should. I’m just a great big open-hearted kid. Vannier knows Elizabeth Bright Murdock and well. He never came to the house but once while I was there, but he called on the phone plenty of times. I caught some of the calls. He always asked for Merle.”
“Well—that’s funny,” I said. “Merle, huh?”
She bent to crush out her cigarette and again she speared the stub and dropped it into the wastebasket.
“I’m very tired,” she said suddenly. “Please go away.”
I stood there for a moment, looking at her and wondering. Then I said: “Good night and thanks. Good luck.”
I went out and left her standing there with her hands in the pockets of the white coat, her head bent and her eyes looking at the floor.
It was two o’clock when I got back to Hollywood and put the car away and went upstairs to my apartment. The wind was all gone but the air still had that dryness and lightness of the desert. The air in the apartment was dead and Breeze’s cigar butt had made it a little worse than dead. I opened windows and flushed the place through while I undressed and stripped the pockets of my suit.
Out of them with other things came the dental supply company’s bill. It still looked like a bill to one H. R. Teager for 30 lbs. of crystobolite and 25 lbs. of albastone.
I dragged the phone book up on the desk in the living room and looked up Teager. Then the confused memory clicked into place. His address was 422 West Ninth Street. The address of the Belfont Building was 422 West Ninth Street.
H. R. Teager Dental Laboratories had been one of the names on doors on the sixth floor of the Belfont Building when I did my backstairs crawl away from the office of Elisha Morningstar.
But even the Pinkertons have to sleep, and Marlowe needed far, far more sleep than the Pinkertons. I went to bed.
20
It was just as hot in Pasadena as the day before and the big dark red brick house on Dresden Avenue looked just as cool and the little painted Negro waiting by the hitching block looked just as sad. The same butterfly landed on the same hydrangea bush—or it looked like the same one—the same heavy scent of summer lay on the morning, and the same middle-aged sourpuss with the frontier voice opened to my ring.
She led me along the same hallways to the same sunless sunroom. In it Mrs. Elizabeth Bright Murdock sat in the same reed chaise lounge and as I came into the room she was pouring herself a slug from what looked like the same port bottle but was more probably a grandchild.
The maid shut the door, I sat down and put my hat on the floor, just like yesterday, and Mrs. Murdock gave me the same hard level stare and said:
“Well?”
“Things are bad,” I said. “The cops are after me.”
She looked as flustered as a side of beef. “Indeed. I thought you were more competent than that.”
I brushed it off. “When I left here yesterday morning a man followed me in a coupe. I don’t know what he was doing here or how he got here. I suppose he followed me here, but I feel doubtful about that. I shook him off, but he turned up again in the hall outside my office. He followed me again, so I invited him to explain why and he said he knew who I was and he needed help and asked me to come to his apartment on Bunker Hill and talk to him. I went, after I had seen Mr. Morningstar, and found the man shot to death on the floor of his bathroom.”
Mrs. Murdock sipped a little port. Her hand might have shaken a little, but the light in the room was too dim for me to be sure. She cleared her throat.
“Go on.”
“His name is George Anson Phillips. A young, blond fellow, rather dumb. He claimed to be a private detective.”
“I never heard of him,” Mrs. Murdock said coldly. “I never saw him to my knowledge and I don’t know anything about him. Did you think I employed him to follow you?”
“I didn’t know what to think. He talked about pooling our resources and he gave me the impression that he was working for some member of your family. He didn’t say so in so many words.”
“He wasn’t. You can be quite definite on that.” The baritone voice was as steady as a rock.
“I don’t think you know quite as much about your family as you think you do, Mrs. Murdock.”
“I know you have been questioning my son—contrary to my orders,” she said coldly.
“I didn’t question him. He questioned me. Or tried to.”
“We’ll go into that later,” she said harshly. “What about this man you found shot? You are involved with the police on account of him?”
