“What happened down there on Idaho Street?”
“I went there looking for her brother. He’d moved away, she said, and she’d come out here to see him. She was worried. The manager, Clausen, was too drunk to talk sense. I looked at the register and saw another man had moved into Quest’s room. I talked to this man. He told me nothing that helped.”
French reached around and picked a pencil off the desk and tapped it against his teeth. “Ever see this man again?”
“Yes. I told him who I was. When I went back downstairs Clausen was dead. And somebody had torn a page out of the register. The page with Quest’s name on it. I called the police.”
“But you didn’t stick around?”
“I had no information about Clausen’s death.”
“But you didn’t stick around,” French repeated. Maglashan made a savage noise in his throat and threw the carpenter’s pencil clear across the room. I watched it bounce against the wall and floor and come to a stop.
“That’s correct,” I said.
“In Bay City,” Maglashan said, “we could murder you for that.”
“In Bay City you could murder me for wearing a blue tie,” I said.
He started to get up. Beifus looked sideways at him and said: “Leave Christy handle it. There’s always a second show.”
“We could break you for that,” French said to me without inflexion.
“Consider me broke,” I said. “I never liked the business anyway.”
“So you came back to your office. What then?”
“I reported to the client. Then a guy called me up and asked me over to the Van Nuys Hotel. He was the same guy I had talked to down on Idaho Street, but with a different name.”
“You could have told us that, couldn’t you?”
“If I had, I’d have had to tell you everything. That would have violated the conditions of my employment.”
French nodded and tapped his pencil. He said slowly: “A murder wipes out agreements like that. Two murders ought to do it double. And two murders by the same method, treble. You don’t look good, Marlowe. You don’t look good at all.”
“I don’t even look good to the client,” I said, “after today.”
“What happened today?”
“She told me her brother had called her up from this doctor’s house. Dr. Lagardie. The brother was in danger. I was to hurry on down and take care of him. I hurried on down. Dr. Lagardie and his nurse had the office closed. They acted scared. The police had been there.” I looked at Maglashan.
“Another of his phone calls,” Maglashan snarled.
“Not me this time,” I said.
“All right. Go on,” French said, after a pause.
“Lagardie denied knowing anything about Orrin Quest. He sent his nurse home. Then he slipped me a doped cigarette and I went away from there for a while. When I came to I was alone in the house. Then I wasn’t. Orrin Quest, or what was left of him, was scratching at the door. He fell through it and died as I opened it. With his last ounce of strength he tried to stick me with an ice pick.” I moved my shoulders. The place between them was a little stiff and sore, nothing more.
French looked hard at Maglashan. Maglashan shook his head, but French kept on looking at him. Beifus began to whistle under his breath. I couldn’t make out the tune at first, and then I could. It was “Old Man Mose is Dead.”
French turned his head and said slowly: “No ice pick was found by the body.”
“I left it where it fell,” I said.
Maglashan said: “Looks like I ought to be putting on my glove again.” He stretched it between his fingers. Somebody’s a goddamn liar and it ain’t me.”
“All right,” French said. “All right. Let’s not be theatrical. Suppose the kid did have an ice pick in his hand, that doesn’t prove he was born holding one.”
“Filed down,” I said. “Short. Three inches from the handle to the tip of the point. That’s not the way they come from the hardware store.”
“Why would he want to stick you?” Beifus asked with a derisive grin. “You were his pal. You were down there to keep him safe for his sister.”
“I was just something between him and the light,” I said. “Something that moved and could have been a man and could have been the man that hurt him. He was dying on his feet. I’d never seen him before. If he ever saw me, I didn’t know it.”
“It could have been a beautiful friendship,” Beifus said with a sigh. “Except for the ice pick, of course.”
“And the fact that he had it in his hand and tried to stick me with it could mean something.”
“For instance what?”
“A man in his condition acts from instinct. He doesn’t invent new techniques. He got me between the shoulder blades, a sting, the feeble last effort of a dying man. Maybe it would have been a different place and a much deeper penetration if he had had his health.”
