Maglashan said: “How much longer we have to barber round with this monkey? You talk to him like he was human. Leave me talk to him my way.”
“The captain doesn’t like it,” French said casually.
“Hell with the captain.”
“The captain doesn’t like small-town cops saying the hell with him,” French said.
Maglashan clamped his teeth tight and the line of his jaw showed white. His eyes narrowed and glistened. He took a deep breath through his nose.
“Thanks for the co-operation,” he said and stood up. “I’ll be on my way.” He rounded the corner of the table and stopped beside me. He put his left hand out and tilted my chin up again.
“See you again, sweetheart. In my town.”
He lashed me across the face twice with the wrist end of the glove. The buttons stung sharply. I put my hand up and rubbed my lower lip.
French said: “For Chrissake, Maglashan, sit down and let the guy speak his piece. And keep your hands off him.”
Maglashan looked back at him and said: “Think you can make me?”
French just shrugged. After a moment Maglashan rubbed his big hand across his mouth and strolled back to his chair. French said:
“Let’s have your ideas about all this, Marlowe.”
“Among other things Clausen was probably pushing reefers,” I said. “I sniffed marijuana smoke in his apartment. A tough little guy was counting money in the kitchen when I got there. He had a gun and a sharpened rat-tail file, both of which he tried to use on me. I took them away from him and he left. He would be the runner. But Clausen was liquored to a point where you wouldn’t want to trust him any more. They don’t go for that in the organizations. The runner thought I was a dick. Those people wouldn’t want Clausen picked up. He would be too easy to milk. The minute they smelled dick around the house Clausen would be missing.”
French looked at Maglashan. “That make any sense to you?”
“It could happen,” Maglashan said grudgingly.
French said: “Suppose it was so, what’s it got to do with this Orrin Quest?”
“Anybody can smoke reefers,” I said. “If you’re dull and lonely and depressed and out of a job, they might be very attractive. But when you smoke them you get warped ideas and calloused emotions. And marijuana affects different people different ways. Some it makes very tough and some it just makes never-no-mind. Suppose Quest tried to put the bite on somebody and threatened to go to the police. Quite possibly all three murders are connected with the reefer gang.”
“That don’t jibe with Quest having a filed-down ice pick,” Beifus said.
I said: “According to the lieutenant here he didn’t have one. So I must have imagined that. Anyhow, he might just have picked it up. They might be standard equipment around Dr. Lagardie’s house. Get anything on him?”
He shook his head. “Not so far.”
“He didn’t kill me, probably he didn’t kill anybody,” I said. “Quest told his sister—according to her—that he was working for Dr. Lagardie, but that some gangsters were after him.”
“This Lagardie,” French said, prodding at his blotter with a pen point, “what do you make of him?”
“He used to practice in Cleveland. Downtown in a large way. He must have had his reasons for hiding out in Bay City.”
“Cleveland, huh?” French drawled and looked at a corner of the ceiling. Beifus looked down at his papers. Maglashan said:
“Probably an abortionist. I’ve had my eye on him for some time.”
“Which eye?” Beifus asked him mildly.
Maglashan flushed.
French said: “Probably the one he didn’t have on Idaho Street.”
Maglashan stood up violently. “You boys think you’re so goddamn smart it might interest you to know that we’re just a small town police force. We got to double in brass once in a while. Just the same I like that reefer angle. It might cut down my work considerable. I’m looking into it right now.”
He marched solidly to the door and left. French looked after him. Beifus did the same. When the door closed they looked at each other.
“I betcha they pull that raid again tonight,” Beifus said.
French nodded.
Beifus said: “In a flat over a laundry. They’ll go down on the beach and pull in three or four vagrants and stash them in the flat and then they’ll line them up for the camera boys after they pull the raid.”
French said: “You’re talking too much, Fred.”
Beifus grinned and was silent. French said to me: “If you were guessing, what would you guess they were looking for in that room at the Van Nuys?”
“A claim check for a suitcase full of weed.”
“Not bad,” French said. “And still guessing where would it have been?”
“I thought about that. When I talked to Hicks down at Bay City he wasn’t wearing his muff. A man doesn’t
