“That’s Mr. Leslie’s car. They’re the same make and year and color. Linda didn’t take the car.”
“Oh. What do you know about a Miss Lois Magic?”
“I only saw her once. She used to share an apartment with Linda. She came here with a Mr.—a Mr. Vannier.”
“Who’s he?”
She looked down at her desk. “I—she just came with him. I don’t know him.”
“Okay, what does Miss Lois Magic look like?”
“She’s a tall handsome blond. Very—very appealing.”
“You mean sexy?”
“Well—” she blushed furiously, “in a nice well-bred sort of way, if you know what I mean.”
“I know what you mean,” I said, “but I never got anywhere with it.”
“I can believe that,” she said tartly.
“Know where Miss Magic lives?”
She shook her head, no. She folded the big handkerchief very carefully and put it in the drawer of her desk, the one where the gun was.
“You can swipe another one when that’s dirty,” I said. She leaned back in her chair and put her small neat hands on her desk and looked at me levelly.
“I wouldn’t carry that tough-guy manner too far, if I were you, Mr. Marlowe. Not with me, at any rate.”
“No?”
“No. And I can’t answer any more questions without specific instructions. My position here is very confidential.”
“I’m not tough,” I said. “Just virile.”
She picked up a pencil and made a mark on a pad. She smiled faintly up at me, all composure again.
“Perhaps I don’t like virile men,” she said.
“You’re a screwball,” I said, “if ever I met one. Goodbye.”
I went out of her office, shut the door firmly, and walked back along the empty halls through the big silent sunken funereal living room and out of the front door.
The sun danced on the warm lawn outside. I put my dark glasses on and went over and patted the little Negro on the head again.
“Brother, it’s even worse than I expected,” I told him. The stumble-stones were hot through the soles of my shoes. I got into the car and started it and pulled away from the curb.
A small sand-colored coupe pulled away from the curb behind me. I didn’t think anything of it. The man driving it wore a dark porkpie type straw hat with a gay print band and dark glasses were over his eyes, as over mine.
I drove back towards the city. A dozen blocks later at a traffic stop, the sand-colored coupe was still behind me. I shrugged and just for the fun of it circled a few blocks. The coupe held its position. I swung into a street lined with immense pepper trees, dragged my heap around in a fast U-turn and stopped against the curbing.
The coupe came carefully around the corner. The blond head under the cocoa straw hat with the tropical print band didn’t even turn my way. The coupe sailed on and I drove back to the Arroyo Seco and on towards Hollywood. I looked carefully several times, but I didn’t spot the coupe again.
3
I had an office in the Cahuenga Building, sixth floor, two small rooms at the back. One I left open for a patient client to sit in, if I had a patient client. There was a buzzer on the door which I could switch on and off from my private thinking parlor.
I looked into the reception room. It was empty of everything but the smell of dust. I threw up another window, unlocked the communicating door and went into the room beyond. Three hard chairs and a swivel chair, flat desk with a glass top, five green filing cases, three of them full of nothing, a calendar and a framed license bond on the wall, a phone, a washbowl in a stained wood cupboard, a hat rack, a carpet that was just something on the floor, and two open windows with net curtains that puckered in and out like the lips of a toothless old man sleeping.
The same stuff I had had last year, and the year before that. Not beautiful, not gay, but better than a tent on the beach.
I hung my hat and coat on the hat rack, washed my face and hands in cold water, lit a cigarette and hoisted the phone book onto the desk. Elisha Morningstar was listed at 824 Belfont Building, 422 West Ninth Street. I wrote that down and the phone number that went with it and had my hand on the instrument when I remembered that I hadn’t switched on the buzzer for the reception room. I reached over the side of the desk and clicked it on and caught it right in stride. Somebody had just opened the door of the outer office.
I turned my pad face down on the desk and went over to see who it was. It was a slim tall self-satisfied looking number in a tropical worsted suit of slate blue, black and white shoes, a dull ivory-colored shirt and a tie and display handkerchief the color of jacaranda bloom. He was holding a long black cigarette-holder in a peeled back white pigskin glove and he was wrinkling his nose at the dead magazines on the library table and the chairs and the rusty floor covering and the general air of not much money being made.
As I opened the communicating door he made a quarter turn and stared at me out of a pair of rather dreamy pale eyes set close to a narrow nose. His skin was sun-flushed, his reddish hair was brushed back hard over a narrow skull, and the thin line of his mustache was much redder than his hair.
He looked me over without haste and without much pleasure. He blew some smoke delicately and spoke
