I walked on rubber heels across to the garage and tried to open one of the two wide doors. There were no handles, so it must have been operated by a switch. I played a tiny pencil flash on the frame, but no switch looked at me.
I left that and prowled over to the trash barrels. Wooden steps went up to a service entrance. I didn’t think the door would be unlocked for my convenience. Under the porch was another door. This was unlocked and gave on darkness and the smell of corded eucalyptus wood. I closed the door behind me and put the little flash on again. In the corner there was another staircase, with a thing like a dumb-waiter beside it. It wasn’t dumb enough to let me work it. I started up the steps.
Somewhere remotely something buzzed. I stopped. The buzzing stopped. I started again. The buzzing didn’t. I went on up to a door with no knob, set flush. Another gadget.
But I found the switch to this one. It was an oblong movable plate set into the doorframe. Too many dusty hands had touched it. I pressed it and the door clicked and fell back off the latch. I pushed it open, with the tenderness of a young intern delivering his first baby.
Inside was a hallway. Through shuttered windows moonlight caught the white corner of a stove and the chromed griddle on top of it. The kitchen was big enough for a dancing class. An open arch led to a butler’s pantry filled to the ceiling. A sink, a huge icebox set into the wall, a lot of electrical stuff for making drinks without trying. You pick your poison, press a button, and four days later you wake up on the rubbing table in a reconditioning parlor.
Beyond the butler’s pantry a swing door. Beyond the swing door a dark dining room with an open end to a glassed-in lounge into which the moonlight poured like water through the floodgates of a dam.
A carpeted hall led off somewhere. From another flat arch a flying buttress of a staircase went up into more darkness, but shimmered as it went in what might have been glass brick and stainless steel.
At last I came to what should be the living room. It was curtained and quite dark, but it had the feel of great size. The darkness was heavy in it and my nose twitched at a lingering odor that said somebody had been there not too long ago. I stopped breathing and listened. Tigers could be in the darkness watching me. Or guys with large guns, standing flat-footed, breathing softly with their mouths open. Or nothing and nobody and too much imagination in the wrong place.
I edged back to the wall and felt around for a light switch. There’s always a light switch. Everybody has light switches. Usually on the right side as you go in. You go into a dark room and you want light. Okay, you have a light switch in a natural place at a natural height. This room hadn’t. This was a different kind of house. They had odd ways of handling doors and lights. The gadget this time might be something fancy like having to sing A above high C, or stepping on a flat button under the carpet, or maybe you just spoke and said: “Let there be light,” and a mike picked it up and turned the voice vibration into a low-power electrical impulse and a transformer built that up to enough voltage to throw a silent mercury switch.
I was psychic that night. I was a fellow who wanted company in a dark place and was willing to pay a high price for it. The Luger under my arm and the .32 in my hand made me tough. Two-gun Marlowe, the kid from Cyanide Gulch.
I took the wrinkles out of my lips and said aloud:
“Hello again. Anybody here needing a detective?”
Nothing answered me, not even a stand-in for an echo. The sound of my voice fell on silence like a tired head on a swans-down pillow.
And then amber light began to grow high up behind the cornice that circumnavigated the huge room. It brightened very slowly, as if controlled by a rheostat panel in a theater. Heavy apricot-colored curtains covered the windows.
The walls were apricot too. At the far end was a bar off to one side, a little catty-corner, reaching back into the space by the butler’s pantry. There was an alcove with small tables and padded seats. There were floor lamps and soft chairs and love seats and the usual paraphernalia of a living room, and there were long shrouded tables in the middle of the floor space.
The boys back at the roadblock had something after all. But the joint was dead. The room was empty of life. It was almost empty. Not quite empty.
A blonde in a pale cocoa fur coat stood leaning against the side of a grandfather’s chair. Her hands were in the pockets of the coat. Her hair was fluffed out carelessly and her face was not chalk-white because the light was not white.
“Hello again yourself,” she said in a dead voice. “I still think you came too late.”
“Too late for what?”
I walked towards her, a movement which was always a pleasure. Even then, even in that too silent house.
“You’re kind of cute,” she said. “I didn’t think you were cute. You found a way in. You—” Her voice clicked off and strangled itself in her throat.
“I need a drink,” she said after a thick pause. “Or maybe I’ll fall down.”
“That’s a lovely coat,” I said. I was up to her now. I reached out and touched it. She didn’t move. Her mouth moved in and out, trembling.
“Stone marten,” she whispered. “Forty thousand dollars. Rented. For the picture.”
“Is this part of the picture?” I gestured around the room.
“This is the picture to end all pictures—for me. I—I do need that drink. If I try to walk—” the clear voice whispered away into nothing. Her eyelids fluttered up and down.
“Go ahead and faint,” I said. “I’ll catch you on the first bounce.”
A smile struggled to arrange her face for smiling. She pressed her lips together, fighting hard to stay on her feet.
“Why did I come too late?” I asked. “Too late for what?”
