“Say that again,” he said softly.
I said it again.
He hit me across the face with his open hand. It jerked my head around hard. My face felt hot and large.
“Say it again,” he said softly.
I said it again. His hand swept and knocked my head to one side again.
“Say it again.”
“Nope. Third time lucky. You might miss.” I put a hand up and rubbed my cheek.
He stood leaning down, his lips drawn back over his teeth, a hard animal glare in his very blue eyes.
“Any time you talk like that to a cop,” he said, “you know what you got coming. Try it on again and it won’t be the flat of a hand I’ll use on you.”
I bit hard on my lips and rubbed my cheek.
“Poke your big nose into our business and you’ll wake up in an alley with the cats looking at you,” he said.
I didn’t say anything. He went and sat down again, breathing hard. I stopped rubbing my face and held my hand out and worked the fingers slowly, to get the hard clench out of them.
“I’ll remember that,” I said. “Both ways.”
22
It was early evening when I got back to Hollywood and up to the office. The building had emptied out and the corridors were silent. Doors were open and the cleaning women were inside with their vacuum cleaners and their dry mops and dusters.
I unlocked the door to mine and picked up an envelope that lay in front of the mail slot and dropped it on the desk without looking at it. I ran the windows up and leaned out, looking at the early neon lights glowing, smelling the warm, foody air that drifted up from the alley ventilator of the coffee shop next door.
I peeled off my coat and tie and sat down at the desk and got the office bottle out of the deep drawer and bought myself a drink. It didn’t do any good. I had another, with the same result.
By now Webber would have seen Kingsley. There would be a general alarm out for his wife, already, or very soon. The thing looked cut and dried to them. A nasty affair between two rather nasty people, too much loving, too much drinking, too much proximity ending in a savage hatred and a murderous impulse and death.
I thought this was all a little too simple.
I reached for the envelope and tore it open. It had no stamp. It read: “Mr. Marlowe: Florence Almore’s parents are a Mr. and Mrs. Eustace Grayson, presently residing at the Rossmore Arms, 640 South Oxford Avenue. I checked this by calling the listed phone number. Yrs. Adrienne Fromsett.”
An elegant handwriting, like the elegant hand that wrote it. I pushed it to one side and had another drink. I began to feel a little less savage. I pushed things around on the desk. My hands felt thick and hot and awkward. I ran a finger across the corner of the desk and looked at the streak made by the wiping off of the dust. I look at the dust on my finger and wiped that off. I looked at my watch. I looked at the wall. I looked at nothing.
I put the liquor bottle away and went over to the washbowl to rinse the glass out. When I had done that I washed my hands and bathed my face in cold water and looked at it. The flush was gone from the left cheek, but it looked a little swollen. Not very much, but enough to make me tighten up again. I brushed my hair and looked at the gray in it. There was getting to be plenty of gray in it. The face under the hair had a sick look.
I didn’t like the face at all.
I went back to the desk and read Miss Fromsett’s note again. I smoothed it out on the glass and sniffed it and smoothed it out some more and folded it and put it in my coat pocket.
I sat very still and listened to the evening grow quiet outside the open windows. And very slowly I grew quiet with it.
23
The Rossmore Arms was a gloomy pile of dark red brick built around a huge forecourt. It had a plush-lined lobby containing silence, tubbed plants, a bored canary in a cage as big as a dog-house, a smell of old carpet dust and the cloying fragrant of gardenias long ago.
The Graysons were on the fifth floor in front, in the north wing. They were sitting together in a room which seemed to be deliberately twenty years out of date. It had fat over-stuffed furniture and brass doorknobs, shaped like eggs, a huge wall mirror in a gilt frame, a marble-topped table in the window and dark red plush side drapes by the windows. It smelled of tobacco smoke and behind that the air was telling me they had had lamb chops and broccoli for dinner.
Grayson’s wife was a plump woman who might once have had big baby-blue eyes. They were faded out now and dimmed by glasses and slightly protuberant. She had kinky white hair. She sat darning socks with her thick ankles crossed, her feet just reaching the floor, and a big wicker sewing basket in her lap.
Grayson was a long stooped yellow-faced man with high shoulders, bristly eyebrows and almost no chin. The upper part of his face meant business. The lower part was just saying goodbye. He wore bifocals and he had been gnawing fretfully at the evening paper. I had looked him up in the city directory. He was a C.P.A. and looked it very inch. He even had ink on his fingers and there were four pencils in the pocket of his open vest.
He read my card carefully for the seventh time and looked me up and down and said slowly: “What is it you want to see us about, Mr. Marlowe?”
“I’m interested in a man named Lavery. He lives across the street from Dr. Almore. Your daughter was the wife of Dr. Almore. Lavery is the man who found your daughter the night she—died.”
They both pointed like bird dogs when I deliberately hesitated on the last word. Grayson looked at his wife and she shook her head.
