Their heads swung around to me in unison. “Guessing?” French asked slowly.
“Yes.”
He walked over to the covered table and laid the gun down some distance from the other. “Better tag them right away, Fred. They’re twins. We’ll both sign the tags.”
Beifus nodded and rooted around in his pockets. He came up with a couple of tie-on tags. The things cops carry around with them.
French moved back to me. “Let’s stop guessing and get to the part you know.”
“A girl I know called me this evening and said a client of mine was in danger up here—from him.” I pointed with my chin at the dead man in the chair. “This girl rode me up here. We passed the road block. A number of people saw us both. She left me in back of the house and went home.”
“Somebody with a name?” French asked.
“Dolores Gonzales, Chateau Bercy Apartments. On Franklin. She’s in pictures.”
“Oh-ho,” Beifus said and rolled his eyes.
“Who’s your client? Same one?” French asked. “No. This is another party altogether.”
“She have a name?”
“Not yet.”
They stared at me with hard bright faces. French’s jaw moved almost with a jerk. Knots of muscles showed at the sides of his jawbone.
“New rules, huh?” he said softly.
I said, “There has to be some agreement about publicity. The D.A. ought to be willing.”
Beifus said, “You don’t know the D.A. good, Marlowe. He eats publicity like I eat tender young garden peas.”
French said, “We don’t give you any undertaking whatsoever.”
“She hasn’t any name,” I said.
“There’s a dozen ways we can find out, kid,” Beifus said. “Why go into this routine that makes it tough for all of us?”
“No publicity,” I said, “unless charges are actually filed.”
“You can’t get away with it, Marlowe.”
“God damn it,” I said, “this man killed Orrin Quest. You take that gun downtown and check it against the bullets in Quest. Give me that much at least, before you force me into an impossible position.”
“I wouldn’t give you the dirty end of a burnt match,” French said.
I didn’t say anything. He stared at me with cold hate in his eyes. His lips moved slowly and his voice was thick saying, “You here when he got it?”
“No.”
“Who was?”
“He was,” I said looking across at the dead Steelgrave.
“Who else?”
“I won’t lie to you,” I said. “And I won’t tell you anything I don’t want to tell—except on the terms I stated. I don’t know who was here when he got it.”
“Who was here when you got here?”
I didn’t answer. He turned his head slowly and said to Beifus: “Put the cuffs on him. Behind.”
Beifus hesitated. Then he took a pair of steel handcuffs out of his left hip pocket and came over to me. “Put your hands behind you,” he said in an uncomfortable voice.
I did. He clicked the cuffs on. French walked over slowly and stood in front of me. His eyes were half closed. The skin around them was grayish with fatigue.
“I’m going to make a little speech,” he said. “You’re not going to like it.”
I didn’t say anything.
French said: “It’s like this with us, baby. We’re coppers and everybody hates our guts. And as if we didn’t have enough trouble, we have to have you. As if we didn’t get pushed around enough by the guys in the corner offices, the City Hall gang, the day chief, the night chief, the Chamber of Commerce, His Honor the Mayor in his paneled office four times as big as the three lousy rooms the whole homicide staff has to work out of. As if we didn’t have to handle one hundred and fourteen homicides last year out of three rooms that don’t have enough chairs for the whole duty squad to sit down in at once. We spend our lives turning over dirty underwear and sniffing rotten teeth. We go up dark stairways to get a gun punk with a skinful of hop and sometimes we don’t get all the way up, and our wives wait dinner that night and all the other nights. We don’t come home any more. And nights we do come home, we come home so goddamn tired we can’t eat or sleep or even read the lies the papers print about us. So we lie awake in the dark in a cheap house on a cheap street and listen to the drunks down the block having fun. And just about the time we drop off the phone rings and we get up and start all over again. Nothing we do is right, not ever. Not once. If we get a confession, we beat it out of the guy, they say, and some shyster calls us Gestapo in court and sneers at us when we muddle our grammar. If we make a mistake they put us back in uniform on Skid Row and we spend the nice cool summer evenings picking drunks out of the gutter and being yelled at by whores and taking knives away from greaseballs in zoot suits. But all that ain’t enough to make us entirely happy. We got to have you.”
