“Yeah. Unrefined. I’m not making love to you, Betty. I’m worried. Anything you want done?”
She was silent for a moment. Then her voice was steady, saying: “Such as what? You can have those checks back. They were yours. I gave them to you.”
“Nobody gives anybody five grand like that. It makes no sense. That’s why I came back down from L.A. I drove up there early this morning. Nobody goes all gooey over a character like me and talks about having half a million dollars and offers me a trip to Rio and a nice home complete with all the luxuries. Nobody drunk or sober does that because she dreamed a dead man was lying out on her balcony and would I please hurry around and throw him off into the ocean. Just what did you expect me to do when I got there—hold your hand while you dreamed?”
She pulled away and leaned in the far corner of the car. “All right, I’m a liar. I’ve always been a liar.”
I glanced at the rear view mirror. Some kind of small dark car had turned into the road behind and stopped. I couldn’t see who or what was in it. Then it swung hard right against the curbing and backed and made off the way it had come. Some fellow took the wrong road and saw it was a dead end.
“While I was on the way up those damn fire stairs,” I went on, “you swallowed your pills and then faked being awfully terribly sleepy and then after a while you actually did go to sleep—I think. Okay. I went out on the balcony. No stiff. No blood. If there had been, I might have managed to get him over the top of the wall. Hard work, but not impossible, if you know how to lift. But six trained elephants couldn’t have thrown him far enough to land in the ocean. It’s thirty-five feet to the fence and you’d have to throw him so far out that he would clear the fence. I figure an object as heavy as a man’s body would have to be thrown a good fifty feet outward to clear the fence.”
“I told you I was a liar.”
“But you didn’t tell me why. Let’s be serious. Suppose a man had been dead on your balcony. What would you expect me to do about it? Carry him down the fire stairs and get him into the car I had and drive off into the woods somewhere and bury him? You do have to take people into your confidence once in a while when bodies are lying around.”
“You took my money,” she said tonelessly. “You played up to me.”
“That way I might find out who was crazy.”
“You found out. You should be satisfied.”
“I found out nothing—not even who you are.”
She got angry. “I told you I was out of my mind,” she said in a rushing voice. “Worry, fear, liquor, pills—why can’t you leave me alone? I told you I’d give you back that money. What more do you want?”
“What do I do for it?”
“Just take it.” She was snapping at me now. “That’s all. Take it and go away. Far, far away.”
“I think you need a good lawyer.”
“That’s a contradiction in terms,” she sneered. “If he was good, he wouldn’t be a lawyer.”
“Yeah. So you’ve had some painful experience along those lines. I’ll find out in time, either from you or some other way. But I’m still being serious. You’re in trouble. Apart from what happened to Mitchell, if anything, you’re in enough trouble to justify hiring yourself a lawyer. You changed your name. So you had reasons. Mitchell was putting the bite on you. So he had reasons. A firm of Washington attorneys is looking for you. So they have reasons. And their client has reasons to have them looking for you.”
I stopped and looked at her as well as I could see her in the freshly darkening evening. Down below, the ocean was getting a lapis lazuli blue that somehow failed to remind me of Miss Vermilyea’s eyes. A flock of gulls went south in a fairly compact mass but it wasn’t the kind of tight formation North Island is used to. The evening plane from L.A. came down the coast with its port and starboard lights showing, and then the winking light below the fuselage went on and it swung out to sea for a long lazy turn into Lindbergh Field.
“So you’re just a shill for a crooked lawyer,” she said nastily, and grabbed for another of my cigarettes.
“I don’t think he’s very crooked. He just tries too hard. But that’s not the point. You can lose a few bucks to him without screaming. The point is something called privilege. A licensed investigator doesn’t have it. A lawyer does, provided his concern is with the interests of a client who has retained him. If the lawyer hires an investigator to work in those interests, then the investigator has privilege. That’s the only way he can get it.”
“You know what you can do with your privilege,” she said.
“Especially as it was a lawyer that hired you to spy on me.”
I took the cigarette away from her and puffed on it a couple of times and handed it back.
“It’s all right, Betty. I’m no use to you. Forget I tried to be.”
“Nice words, but only because you think I’ll pay you more to be of use to me. You’re just another of them. I don’t want your damn cigarette either.” She threw it out of the window. “Take me back to the hotel.”
I got out of the car and stamped on the cigarette. “You don’t do that in the California hills,” I told her. “Not even out of season.” I got back into the car and turned the key and pushed the starter button. I backed away and made the turn and drove back up the curve to where the road divided. On the upper level where the solid white line curved away a small car was parked. The car was lightless. It could have been empty.
I swung the Olds hard the opposite way from the way I had come, and flicked my headlights on with the high beam. They swept the cars as I turned. A hat went down over a face, but not quick enough to hide the glasses, the fat broad face, the out-jutting ears of Mr. Ross Goble of Kansas City.
The lights went on past and I drove down a long hill with lazy curves. I didn’t know where it went except that all roads around there led to the ocean sooner or later. At the bottom there was a T-intersection. I swung to the right and after a few blocks of narrow street I hit the boulevard and made another right turn. I was now driving back towards the main part of Esmeralda.
She didn’t speak again until I got to the hotel. She jumped out quickly when I stopped.
“If you’ll wait here, I’ll get the money.”
