“Please call me at the apartment house. Most urgent. I must see you.” It was signed D.
I dialed the number of the Chateau Bercy and asked for Miss Gonzales. Who was calling, please? One moment please, Mr. Marlowe. Buzz, buzz. Buzz, buzz.
“’Allo?”
“The accent’s a bit thick this afternoon.”
“Ah, it is you, amigo. I waited so long in your funny little office. Can you come over here and talk to me?”
“Impossible. I’m waiting for a call.”
“Well, may I come there?”
“What’s it all about?”
“Nothing I could discuss on the telephone, amigo.”
“Come ahead.”
I sat there and waited for the telephone to ring. It didn’t ring. I looked out of the window. The crowd was seething on the boulevard, the kitchen of the coffee shop next door was pouring the smell of Blue Plate Specials out of its ventilator shaft. Time passed and I sat there hunched over the desk, my chin in a hand, staring at the mustard-yellow plaster of the end wall, seeing on it the vague figure of a dying man with a short ice pick in his hand, and feeling the sting of its point between my shoulder blades. Wonderful what Hollywood will do to anybody. It will make a radiant glamour queen out of a drab little wench who ought to be ironing a truck driver’s shirts, a he-man hero with shining eyes and brilliant smile reeking of sexual charm out of some overgrown kid who was meant to go to work with a lunchbox. Out of a Texas car hop with the literacy of a character in a comic strip it will make an international courtesan, married six times to six millionaires and so blase and decadent at the end of it that her idea of a thrill is to seduce a furniture mover in a sweaty undershirt.
And by remote control it might even take a small-town prig like Orrin Quest and make an ice-pick murderer out of him in a matter of months, elevating his simple meanness into the classic sadism of the multiple killer.
It took her a little over ten minutes to get there. I heard the door open and close and I went through to the waiting room and there she was, the All-American Gardenia. She hit me right between the eyes. Her own were deep and dark and unsmiling.
She was all in black, like the night before, but a tailor-made outfit this time, a wide black straw hat set at a rakish angle, the collar of a white silk shirt folded out over the collar of her jacket, and her throat brown and supple and her mouth as red as a new fire engine.
“I waited a long time,” she said. “I have not had any lunch.”
“I had mine,” I said. “Cyanide. Very satisfying. I’ve only just stopped looking blue.”
“I am not in an amusing mood this morning, amigo.”
“You don’t have to amuse me,” I said. “I amuse myself. I do a brother act that has me rolling in the aisle. Let’s go inside.”
We went into my private thinking parlor and sat down.
“You always wear black?” I asked.
“But yes. It is more exciting when I take my clothes off.”
“Do you have to talk like a whore?”
“You do not know much about whores, amigo. They are always most respectable. Except of course the very cheap ones.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Thanks for telling me. What is the urgent matter we have to talk about? Going to bed with you is not urgent. It can be done any day.”
“You are in a nasty mood.”
“Okay. I’m in a nasty mood.”
She got one of her long brown cigarettes out of her bag and fitted it carefully into the golden tweezers. She waited for me to light it for her. I didn’t so she lit it herself with a golden lighter.
She held this doohickey in a black gauntleted glove and stared at me out of depthless black eyes that had no laughter in them now.
“Would you like to go to bed with me?”
“Most anyone would. But let’s leave sex out of it for now.”
“I do not draw a very sharp line between business and sex,” she said evenly. “And you cannot humiliate me. Sex is a net with which I catch fools. Some of these fools are useful and generous. Occasionally one is dangerous.” She paused thoughtfully.
I said: “If you’re waiting for me to say something that lets on I know who a certain party is—okay, I know who he is.”
“Can you prove it?”
“Probably not. The cops couldn’t.”
“The cops,” she said contemptuously, “do not always tell all they know. They do not always prove everything they could prove. I suppose you know he was in jail for ten days last February.”
“Yes.”
“Did it not occur to you as strange that he did not get bail?”
“I don’t know what charge they had him on. If it was as a material witness—”
