Her eyes melted with tears.
“If I touched you,” I said, “it was just like touching a chair or a door. It didn’t mean anything. Is that clear?”
“Yes.” She got a word out at last. Panic still twitched in the depths of her eyes, behind the tears. “Yes.”
“That takes care of me,” I said. “I’m all adjusted. Nothing to worry about in me any more. Now take Leslie. He has his mind on other things. You know he’s all right—in the way we mean. Right?”
“Oh, yes,” she said. “Yes, indeed.” Leslie was aces. With her. With me he was a handful of bird gravel.
“Now take the old wine barrel,” I said. “She’s rough and she’s tough and she thinks she can eat walls and spit bricks, and she bawls you out, but she’s fundamentally decent to you, isn’t she?”
“Oh, she is, Mr. Marlowe. I was trying to tell you—”
“Sure. Now why don’t you get over it? Is he still around—this other one that hurt you?”
She put her hand to her mouth and gnawed the fleshy part at the base of the thumb, looking at me over it, as if it was a balcony.
“He’s dead,” she said. “He fell out of a—out of a—a window.”
I stopped her with my big right hand. “Oh, that guy. I heard about him. Forget it, can’t you?”
“No,” she said, shaking her head seriously behind the hand. “I can’t. I can’t seem to forget it at all. Mrs. Murdock is always telling me to forget it. She talks to me for the longest times telling me to forget it. But I just can’t.”
“It would be a darn sight better,” I snarled, “if she would keep her fat mouth shut about it for the longest times. She just keeps it alive.”
She looked surprised and rather hurt at that. “Oh, that isn’t all,” she said. “I was his secretary. She was his wife. He was her first husband. Naturally she doesn’t forget it either. How could she?”
I scratched my ear. That seemed sort of non-committal. There was nothing much in her expression now except that I didn’t really think she realized that I was there. I was a voice coming out of somewhere, but rather impersonal. Almost a voice in her own head.
Then I had one of my funny and often unreliable hunches. “Look,” I said, “is there someone you meet that has that effect on you? Some one person more than another?”
She looked all around the room. I looked with her. Nobody was under a chair or peeking at us through a door or a window.
“Why do I have to tell you?” she breathed.
“You don’t. It’s just how you feel about it.”
“Will you promise not to tell anybody—anybody in the whole world, not even Mrs. Murdock?”
“Her last of all,” I said. “I promise.”
She opened her mouth and put a funny little confiding smile on her face, and then it went wrong. Her throat froze up. She made a croaking noise. Her teeth actually rattled.
I wanted to give her a good hard squeeze but I was afraid to touch her. We stood. Nothing happened. We stood. I was about as much use as a hummingbird’s spare egg would have been.
Then she turned and ran. I heard her steps going along the halls. I heard a door close.
I went after her along the hall and reached the door. She was sobbing behind it. I stood there and listened to the sobbing.
There was nothing I could do about it. I wondered if there was anything anybody could do about it.
I went back to the glass porch and knocked on the door and opened it and put my head in. Mrs. Murdock sat just as I had left her. She didn’t seem to have moved at all.
“Who’s scaring the life out of that little girl?” I asked her.
“Get out of my house,” she said between her fat lips. I didn’t move. Then she laughed at me hoarsely. “Do you regard yourself as a clever man, Mr. Marlowe?”
“Well, I’m not dripping with it,” I said.
“Suppose you find out for yourself.”
“At your expense?”
She shrugged her heavy shoulders. “Possibly. It depends. Who knows?”
“You haven’t bought a thing,” I said. “I’m still going to have to talk to the police.”
“I haven’t bought anything,” she said, “and I haven’t paid for anything. Except the return of the coin. I’m satisfied to accept that for the money I have already given you. Now go away. You bore me. Unspeakably.”
I shut the door and went back. No sobbing behind the door. Very still. I went on.
I let myself out of the house. I stood there, listening to the sunshine burn the grass. A car started up in back and a gray Mercury came drifting along the drive at the side of the house. Mr. Leslie Murdock was driving it. When he saw me he stopped.
He got out of the car and walked quickly over to me. He was nicely dressed; cream colored gabardine now, all fresh clothes, slacks, black and white shoes, with polished black toes, a sport coat of very small black and white check, black and white handkerchief, cream shirt, no tie. He had a pair of green sunglasses on his nose.
