took her hat off of her impossible hair and hung her jacket on a bare hook in the bare wall. She opened the window near her and uncovered her typewriter and put paper in it. Then she looked across at me. “Waiting for somebody?”
“I room here,” I said. “Been here all night.”
She looked at me steadily for a moment. “You were here yesterday afternoon. I remember.”
She turned to her typewriter and her fingers began to fly. From the open window behind her came the growl of cars filling up the parking lot. The sky had a white glare and there was not much smog. It was going to be a hot day.
The telephone rang on the orange queen’s desk. She talked into it inaudibly, and hung up. She looked across at me again.
“Mr. Endicott’s in his office,” she said. “Know the way?”
“I worked there once. Not for him, though. I got fired.”
She looked at me with that City Hall look they have. A voice that seemed to come from anywhere but her mouth said: “Hit him in the face with a wet glove.”
I went over near her and stood looking down at the orange hair. There was plenty of gray at the roots.
“Who said that?”
“It’s the wall,” she said. “It talks. The voices of the dead men who have passed through on the way to hell.”
I went out of the room walking softly and shut the door against the closer so that it wouldn’t make any noise.
32
You go in through double swing doors. Inside the double doors there is a combination PBX and information desk at which sits one of those ageless women you see around municipal offices everywhere in the world. They were never young and will never be old. They have no beauty, no charm, no style. They don’t have to please anybody. They are safe. They are civil without ever quite being polite and intelligent and knowledgeable without any real interest in anything. They are what human beings turn into when they trade life for existence and ambition for security.
Beyond this desk there is a row of glassed-in cubicles stretching along one side of a very long room. On the other side is the waiting room, a row of hard chairs all facing one way, towards the cubicles.
About half of the chairs were filled with people waiting and the look of long waiting on their faces and the expectation of still longer waiting to come. Most of them were shabby. One was from the jail, in denim, with a guard. A white-faced kid built like a tackle, with sick, empty eyes.
At the back of the line of cubicles a door was lettered SEWELL ENDICOTT DISTRICT ATTORNEY. I knocked and went on into a big airy corner room. A nice enough room, old-fashioned with padded black leather chairs and pictures of former D.A.’s and governors on the walls. Breeze fluttered the net curtains at four windows. A fan on a high shelf purred and swung slowly in a languid arc.
Sewell Endicott sat behind a flat dark desk and watched me come. He pointed to a chair across from him. I sat down. He was tall, thin and dark with loose black hair and long delicate fingers.
“You’re Marlowe?” he said in a voice that had a touch of the soft South.
I didn’t think he really needed an answer to that. I just waited.
“You’re in a bad spot, Marlowe. You don’t look good at all. You’ve been caught suppressing evidence helpful to the solution of a murder. That is obstructing justice. You could go up for it.”
“Suppressing what evidence?” I asked.
He picked a photo off his desk and frowned at it. I looked across at the other two people in the room. They sat in chairs side by side. One of them was Mavis Weld. She wore the dark glasses with the wide white bows. I couldn’t see her eyes, but I thought she was looking at me. She didn’t smile. She sat very still.
By her side sat a man in an angelic pale-gray flannel suit with a carnation the size of a dahlia in his lapel. He was smoking a monogrammed cigarette and flicking the ashes on the floor, ignoring the smoking stand at his elbow. I knew him by pictures I had seen in the papers. Lee Farrell, one of the hottest trouble-shooting lawyers in the country. His hair was white but his eyes were bright and young. He had a deep outdoor tan. He looked as if it would cost a thousand dollars to shake hands with him.
Endicott leaned back and tapped the arm of his chair with his long fingers. He turned with polite deference to Mavis Weld.
“And how well did you know Steelgrave, Miss Weld?”
“Intimately. He was very charming in some ways. I can hardly believe—” She broke off and shrugged.
“And you are prepared to take the stand and swear as to the time and place when this photograph was taken?” He turned the photograph over and showed it to her.
Farrell said indifferently, “Just a moment. Is that that the evidence Mr. Marlowe is supposed to have suppressed?
“I ask the questions,” Endicott said sharply.
Farrell smiled. “Well, in case the answer is yes, that photo isn’t evidence of anything.”
Endicott said softly: “Will you answer my question, Miss Weld?”
She said quietly and easily: “No, Mr. Endicott, I couldn’t swear when that picture was taken or where. I didn’t know it was being taken.”
“All you have to do is look at it,” Endicott suggested.
