We waited while it rang. Everybody waits while a telephone rings. After a while it stopped.
“Why don’t you go home, Miss Watson? There’s nothing for you to do here.”
“Thank you, Doctor.” She sat without moving, looking down at the desk. She squeezed her eyes shut and blinked them open. She shook her head hopelessly.
Dr. Lagardie turned back to me. “Shall we go into my office?”
We went across through another door leading to a hallway. I walked on eggs. The atmosphere of the house was charged with foreboding. He opened a door and ushered me into what must have once been a bedroom, but nothing suggested a bedroom. It was a small compact doctor’s office. An open door showed a part of an examination room. A sterilizer was working in the corner. There were a lot of needles cooking in it.
“That’s a lot of needles,” I said, always quick with an idea.
“Sit down, Mr. Marlowe.”
He went behind the desk and sat down and picked up a long thin letter-opening knife.
He looked at me levelly from his sorrowful eyes. “No, I don’t know anyone named Orrin Quest, Mr. Marlowe. I can’t imagine any reason in the world why a person of that name should say he was in my house.”
“Hiding out,” I said.
His eyebrows went up. “From what?”
“From some guys that might want to stick an ice pick in the back of his neck. On account of he is a little too quick with his little Leica. Taking people’s photographs when they want to be private. Or it could be something else, like peddling reefers and he got wise. Am I talking in riddles?”
“It was you who sent the police here,” he said coldly.
I didn’t say anything.
“It was you who called up and reported Clausen’s death.”
I said the same as before.
“It was you who called me up and asked me if I knew Clausen. I said I did not.”
“But it wasn’t true.”
“I was under no obligation to give you information, Mr. Marlowe.”
I nodded and got a cigarette out and lit it. Dr. Lagardie glanced at his watch. He turned in his chair and switched off the sterilizer. I looked at the needles. A lot of needles. Once before I had had trouble in Bay City with a guy who cooked a lot of needles.
“What makes it?” I asked him. “The yacht harbor?”
He picked up the wicked-looking paper knife with a silver handle in the shape of a nude woman. He pricked the ball of his thumb. A pearl of dark blood showed on it. He put it to his mouth and licked it. “I like the taste of blood,” he said softly.
There was a distant sound as of the front door opening and closing. We both listened to it carefully. We listened to retreating steps on the front steps of the house. We listened hard.
“Miss Watson has gone home,” Dr. Lagardie said. “We are all alone in the house.” He mulled that over and licked his thumb again. He laid the knife down carefully on the desk blotter. “Ah, the question of the yacht harbor,” he added. “The proximity of Mexico you are thinking of, no doubt. The ease with which marijuana—”
“I wasn’t thinking so much of marijuana any more.” I stared again at the needles. He followed my stare. He shrugged.
I said: “Why so many of them?”
“Is it any of your business?”
“Nothing’s any of my business.”
“But you seem to expect your questions to be answered.”
“I’m just talking,” I said. “Waiting for something to happen. Something is going to happen in this house. It’s leering at me from corners.”
Dr Lagardie licked another pearl of blood off his thumb.
I looked hard at him. It didn’t buy me a way into his soul. He was quiet, dark and shuttered and all the misery of life was in his eyes. But he was still gentle.
“Let me tell you about the needles,” I said.
“By all means.” He picked the long thin knife up again.
“Don’t do that,” I said sharply. “It gives me the creeps. Like petting snakes.”
He put the knife down again gently and smiled. “We seem to talk in circles,” he suggested.
“We’ll get there. About the needles. A couple of years back I had a case that brought me down here and mixed me up with a doctor named Almore. Lived over on Altair Street. He had a funny practice. Went out nights with a big case of hypodermic needles—all ready to go. Loaded with the stuff. He had a peculiar practice. Drunks, rich junkies, of whom there are far more than people think, over stimulated people who had driven themselves beyond the possibility of relaxing. Insomniacs—all the neurotic types that can’t take it cold. Have to have their little pills and little shots in the arm. Have to have help over the humps. It gets to be all humps after a while. Good business for the doctor. Almore was the doctor for them. It’s all right to say it now. He died a year or so back. Of his own medicine.”
“And you think I may have inherited his practice?”
