“At Lavery’s house?”
“You’re not going to be insolent, are you, Mr. Marlowe?”
“I don’t know what your definition of that would be. I’m going to talk business as if it were business, not international diplomacy.”
“Very well.” She nodded slightly. “At Chris Lavery’s house, yes. I used to go there—once in a while. He had cocktail parties.”
“Then Lavery knew the Almores—or Mrs. Almore.”
She flushed very slightly. “Yes. Quite well.”
“And a lot of other women—quite well, too. I don’t doubt that. Did Mrs. Kingsley know her too?”
“Yes, better than I did. They called each other by their first names. Mrs. Almore is dead, you know. She committed suicide, about a year and a half ago.”
“Any doubt about that?”
She raised her eyebrows, but the expression looked artificial to me, as if it just went with the question I asked, as a matter of form.
She said: “Have you any particular reason for asking that question in that particular way? I mean, has it anything to do with—with what you are doing?”
“I didn’t think so. I still don’t know that it has. But yesterday Dr. Almore called a cop just because I looked at his house. After he had found out from my car license who I was. The cop got pretty tough with me, just for being there. He didn’t know what I was doing and I didn’t tell him I had been calling on Lavery. But Dr. Almore must have known that. He had seen me in front of Lavery’s house. Now why would he think it necessary to call a cop? And why would the cop think it smart to say that the last fellow who tried to put the bite on Almore ended up on the road gang? And why would the cop ask me if her folks—meaning Mrs. Almore’s folks, I suppose—had hired me? If you can answer any of those questions, I might know whether it’s any of my business.”
She thought about it for a moment, giving me one quick glance while she was thinking, and then looking away again.
“I only met Mrs. Almore twice,” she said slowly. “But I think I can answer your questions—all of them. The last time I met her was at Lavery’s place, as I said, and there were quite a lot of people there. There was a lot of drinking and loud talk. The women were not with their husbands and the men were not with their wives, if any. There was a man there named Brownwell who was very tight. He’s in the navy now, I heard. He was ribbing Mrs. Almore about her husband’s practice. The idea seemed to be that he was one of those doctors who run around all night with a case of loaded hypodermic needles, keeping the local fast set from having pink elephants for breakfast. Florence Almore said she didn’t care how her husband got his money so long as he got plenty of it and she had the spending of it. She was tight too and not a very nice person sober, I should imagine. One of those slinky glittering females who laugh too much and sprawl all over their chairs, showing a great deal of leg. A very light blonde with a high color and indecently large baby-blue eyes. Well, Brownwell told her not to worry, it would always be a good racket. In and out of the patient’s house in fifteen minutes and anywhere from ten to fifty bucks a trip. But one thing bothered him, he said, how even a doctor could get hold of so much dope without contacts. He asked Mrs. Almore if they had many nice gangsters to dinner at their house. She threw a glass of liquor in his face.”
I grinned, but Miss Fromsett didn’t. She crushed her cigarette out in Kingsley’s big copper and glass tray and looked at me soberly.
“Fair enough,” I said. “Who wouldn’t, unless he had a large hard fist to throw?”
“Yes. A few weeks later Florence Almore was found dead in the garage late at night. The door of the garage was shut and the car motor was running.” She stopped and moistened her lips slightly. “It was Chris Lavery who found her. Coming home at God knows what o’clock in the morning. She was lying on the concrete floor in pajamas, with her head under a blanket which was also over the exhaust pipe of the car. Dr. Almore was out. There was nothing about the affair in the papers, except that she had died suddenly. It was well hushed up.”
She lifted her clasped hands a little and then let them fall slowly into her lap again. I said: “Was something wrong with it, then?”
“People thought so, but they always do. Some time later I heard what purported to be the lowdown. I met this man Brownwell on Vine Street and he asked me to have a drink with him. I didn’t like him, but I had half an hour to kill. We sat at the back of Levy’s bar and he asked me if I remembered the babe who threw the drink in his face. I said I did. The conversation then went something very like this. I remember it very well.
“Brownwell said: ‘Our pal Chris Lavery is sitting pretty, if he ever runs out of girl friends he can touch for dough’”
“I said: ‘I don’t think I understand.’”
“He said: ‘Hell, maybe you don’t want to. The night the Almore woman died she was over at Lou Condy’s place losing her shirt at roulette. She got into a tantrum and said the wheels were crooked and made a scene. Condy practically had to drag her into his office. He got hold of Dr. Almore through the Physicians’ Exchange and after a while the doc came over. He shot her with one of his busy little needles. Then he went away, leaving Condy to get her home. It seems he had a very urgent case. So Condy took her home and the doc’s office nurse showed up, having been called by the doc, and Condy carried her upstairs and the nurse put her to bed. Condy went back to his chips. So she had to be carried to bed and yet the same night she got up and walked down to the family garage and finished herself off, with monoxide. What do you think of that?’ Brownwell was asking me.”
“I said: ‘I don’t know anything about it. How do you?’”
“He said: ‘I know a reporter on the rag they call a newspaper down there. There was no inquest and no autopsy. If any tests were made, nothing was told about them. They don’t have a regular coroner down there. The undertakers take turns at being acting coroner, a week at a time. They’re pretty well subservient to the political gang naturally. It’s easy to fix a thing like that in a small town, if anybody with any pull wants it fixed. And Condy had plenty at that time. He didn’t want the publicity of an investigation and neither did the doctor.’”
Miss Fromsett stopped talking and waited for me to say something. When I didn’t, she went on: “I suppose you know what all this meant to Brownwell.”
“Sure. Almore finished her off and then he and Condy between them bought a fix. It has been done in cleaner little cities than Bay City ever tried to be. But that isn’t all the story, is it?”
