I straightened up, dumped the stuff back into the basket and went over to the wooden door marked Laboratory. It had a new Yale lock on it and the passkey didn’t fit it. That was that. I switched off the lamp in the outer office and left.
The elevator was downstairs again. I rang for it and when it came up I sidled in around Pop Grandy, hiding the key, and hung it up over his head. The ring tinkled against the cage. He grinned.
“He’s gone,” I said. “Must have left last night. Must have been carrying a lot of stuff. His desk is cleaned out.”
Pop Grandy nodded. “Carried two suitcases. I wouldn’t notice that, though. Most always does carry a suitcase. I figure he picks up and delivers his work.”
“Work such as what?” I asked as the car growled down. Just to be saying something.
“Such as makin’ teeth that don’t fit,” Pop Grandy said. “For poor old bastards like me.”
“You wouldn’t notice,” I said, as the doors struggled open on the lobby. “You wouldn’t notice the color of a hummingbird’s eye at fifty feet. Not much you wouldn’t.”
He grinned. “What’s he done?”
“I’m going over to his house and find out,” I said. “I think most likely he’s taken a cruise to nowhere.”
“I’d shift places with him,” Pop Grandy said. “Even if he only got to Frisco and got pinched there, I’d shift places with him.”
26
Toberman Street. A wide dusty street, off Pico. No. 1854B was an upstairs flat, south, in a yellow and white frame building. The entrance door was on the porch, beside another marked 1352B. The entrances to the downstairs flats were at right angles, facing each other across the width of the porch. I kept on ringing the bell, even after I was sure that nobody would answer it. In a neighborhood like that there is always an expert window- peeker.
Sure enough the door of 1354A was pulled open and a small bright-eyed woman looked out at me. Her dark hair had been washed and waved and was an intricate mass of bobby pins.
“You want Mrs. Teager?” she shrilled.
“Mr. or Mrs.”
“They gone away last night on their vacation. They loaded up and gone away late. They had me stop the milk and the paper. They didn’t have much time. Kind of sudden, it was.”
“Thanks. What kind of car do they drive?”
The heartrending dialogue of some love serial came out of the room behind her and hit me in the face like a wet dishtowel.
The bright-eyed woman said: “You a friend of theirs?” In her voice, suspicion was as thick as the ham in her radio.
“Never mind,” I said in a tough voice. “All we want is our money. Lots of ways to find out what car they were driving.”
The woman cocked her head, listening. “That’s Beula May,” she told me with a sad smile. “She won’t go to the dance with Doctor Myers. I was scared she wouldn’t.”
“Aw hell,” I said, and went back to my car and drove on home to Hollywood.
The office was empty. I unlocked my inner room and threw the windows up and sat down.
Another day drawing to its end, the air dull and tired, the heavy growl of homing traffic on the boulevard, and Marlowe in his office nibbling a drink and sorting the day’s mail. Four ads; two bills; a handsome colored postcard from a hotel in Santa Rosa where I had stayed for four days last year, working on a case; a long, badly typed letter from a man named Peabody in Sausalito, the general and slightly cloudly drift of which was that a sample of the handwriting of a suspected person would, when exposed to the searching Peabody examination, reveal the inner emotional characteristics of the individual, classified according to both the Freudian and Jung systems.
There was a stamped addressed envelope inside. As I tore the stamp off and threw the letter and envelope away I had a vision of a pathetic old rooster in long hair, black felt hat and black bow tie, rocking on a rickety porch in front of a lettered window, with the smell of ham hocks and cabbage coming out of the door at his elbow.
I sighed, retrieved the envelope, wrote its name and address on a fresh one, folded a dollar bill into a sheet of paper and wrote on it: “This is positively the last contribution.” I signed my name, sealed the envelope, stuck a stamp on it and poured another drink.
I filled and lit my pipe and sat there smoking. Nobody came in, nobody called, nothing happened, nobody cared whether I died or went to El Paso.
Little by little the roar of the traffic quieted down. The sky lost its glare. Over in the west it would be red. An early neon light showed a block away, diagonally over roofs. The ventilator churned dully in the wall of the coffee shop down in the alley. A truck filled and backed and growled its way out on to the boulevard.
Finally the telephone rang. I answered it and the voice said: “Mr. Marlowe? This is Mr. Shaw. At the Bristol.”
“Yes, Mr. Shaw. How are you?”
“I’m very well thanks, Mr. Marlowe. I hope you are the same. There’s a young lady here asking to be let into your apartment. I don’t know why.”
“Me neither, Mr. Shaw. I didn’t order anything like that. Does she give a name?”
“Oh yes. Quite. Her name is Davis. Miss Merle Davis. She is—what shall I say?—quite verging on the hysterical.”
