“What is it you want me to keep?”
“That’ll wait till you get here. I said I was in a hurry.”
“What’s your name?”
“Just Room 332.”
“Thanks for the time,” I said. “Goodbye.”
“Hey. Wait a minute, dope. It’s nothing hot like you think. No ice. No emerald pendants. It just happens to be worth a lot of money to me—and nothing at all to anybody else.”
“The hotel has a safe.”
“Do you want to die poor, Marlowe?”
“Why not? Rockefeller did. Goodbye again.”
The voice changed. The furriness went out of it. It said sharply and swiftly: “How’s every little thing in Bay City?”
I didn’t speak. Just waited. There was a dim chuckle over the wire. “Thought that might interest you, Marlowe. Room 332 it is. Tramp on it friend. Make speed.”
The phone clicked in my ear. I hung up. For no reason a pencil rolled off the desk and broke its point on the glass doohickey under one of the desk legs. I picked it up and slowly and carefully sharpened it in the Boston sharpener screwed to the edge of the window frame, turning the pencil around to get it nice and even. I laid it down in the tray on the desk and dusted off my hands. I had all the time in the world. I looked out of the window. I didn’t see anything. I didn’t hear anything.
And then, for even less reason, I saw Orfamay Quest’s face without the glasses, and polished and painted and with blonde hair piled up high on the forehead with a braid around the middle of it. And bedroom eyes. They all have to have bedroom eyes. I tried to imagine this face in a vast close-up being gnawed by some virile character from the wide-open spaces of Romanoff’s bar.
It took me twenty-nine minutes to get to the Van Nuys Hotel.
8
Once, long ago, it must have had a certain elegance. But no more. The memories of old cigars clung to its lobby like the dirty gilt on its ceiling and the sagging springs of its leather lounging chairs. The marble of the desk had turned a yellowish brown with age. But the floor carpet was new and had a hard look, like the room clerk. I passed him up and strolled over to the cigar counter in the corner and put down a quarter for a package of Camels. The girl behind the counter was a straw blonde with a long neck and tired eyes. She put the cigarettes in front of me, added a packet of matches, dropped my change into a slotted box marked “The Community Chest Thanks You.”
“You’d want me to do that, wouldn’t you,” she said, smiling patiently. “You’d want to give your change to the poor little underprivileged kids with bent legs and stuff, wouldn’t you?”
“Suppose I didn’t,” I said.
“I dig up seven cents,” the girl said, “and it would be very painful.” She had a low lingering voice with a sort of moist caress in it like a damp bath towel. I put a quarter after the seven cents. She gave me her big smile then. It showed more of her tonsils.
“You’re nice,” she said. “I can see you’re nice. A lot of fellows would have come in here and made a pass at a girl. Just think. Over seven cents. A pass.”
“Who’s the house peeper here now?” I asked her, without taking up the option.
“There’s two of them.” She did something slow and elegant to the back of her head, exhibiting what seemed like more than one handful of blood-red fingernails in the process. “Mr. Hady is on nights and Mr. Flack is on days. It’s day now so it would be Mr. Flack would be on.”
“Where could I find him?”
She leaned over the counter and let me smell her hair, pointing with a half-inch fingernail toward the elevator bank. “It’s down along that corridor there, next to the porter’s room. You can’t miss the porter’s room on account of it has a half-door and says PORTER on the upper part in gold letters. Only that half is folded back like, so I guess maybe you can’t see it.”
“I’ll see it,” I said. “Even if I have to get a hinge screwed to my neck. What does this Flack look like?”
“Well,” she said, “he’s a little squatty number, with a bit of a mustache. A sort of chunky type. Thick-set like, only not tall.” Her fingers moved languidly along the counter to where I could have touched them without jumping. “He’s not interesting,” she said. “Why bother?”
“Business,” I said, and made off before she threw a half-nelson on me.
I looked back at her from the elevators. She was staring after me with an expression she probably would have said was thoughtful.
The porter’s room was halfway down the corridor to the Spring Street entrance. The door beyond it was half open. I looked around its edge, then went in and closed it behind me.
A man was sitting at a small desk which had dust on it, a very large ashtray and very little else. He was short and thickset. He had something dark and bristly under his nose about an inch long. I sat down across from him and put a card on the desk.
He reached for the card without excitement, read it, turned it over and read the back with as much care as the front. There was nothing on the back to read. He picked half of a cigar out of his ashtray and burned his nose lighting it.
“What’s the gripe?” he growled at me.
“No gripe. You Flack?”
He didn’t bother to answer. He gave me a steady look which may or may not have concealed his thoughts,
