He stood up and faced me. “Okay, you’re clammed,” he said quietly. “You’re a private op, you’ve got a client and instructions. I’m only interested in protecting the hotel. Leave the gun home next time. If you have questions, come to me. Don’t question the help. It gets told around and we don’t like it. You wouldn’t find the local cops friendly if I suggested you were being troublesome.”
“Can I buy a drink in the bar before I go?”
“Keep your jacket buttoned.”
“Five years in Military Intelligence is a lot of experience,” I said looking up at him admiringly.
“It ought to be enough.” He nodded briefly and strolled away through the arch, back straight, shoulders back, chin in, a hard lean well set-up piece of man. A smooth operator. He had milked me dry—of everything that was printed on my business card.
Then I noticed that the old party in the low chair had lifted a gloved hand off the crook of his stick and was curving a finger at me. I pointed a finger at my chest and looked the question. He nodded, so over I went.
He was old, all right, but a long way from feeble and a long way from dim. His white hair was neatly parted, his nose was long and sharp and veined, his faded-out blue eyes were still keen, but the lids drooped wearily over them. One ear held the plastic button of a hearing aid, grayish pink like his ear. The suede gloves on his hands had the cuffs turned back. He wore gray spats over polished black shoes.
“Pull up a chair, young man.” His voice was thin and dry and rustled like bamboo leaves.
I sat down beside him. He peered at me and his mouth smiled. “Our excellent Mr. Javonen spent five years in Military Intelligence, as no doubt he told you.”
“Yes, sir. CIC, a branch of it.”
“Military Intelligence is an expression which contains an interior fallacy. So you are curious about how Mr. Mitchell paid his bill?”
I stared at him. I looked at the hearing aid. He tapped his breast pocket. “I was deaf long before they invented these things. As the result of a hunter balking at a fence. It was my own fault. I lifted him too soon. I was still a young man. I couldn’t see myself using an ear trumpet, so I learned to lip-read. It takes a certain amount of practice.”
“What about Mitchell, sir?”
“We’ll come to him. Don’t be in a hurry.” He looked up and nodded.
A voice said, “Good evening, Mr. Clarendon.” A bellhop went by on his way to the bar. Clarendon followed him with his eyes.
“Don’t bother with that one,” he said. “He’s a pimp. I have spent many many years in lobbies, in lounges and bars, on porches, terraces and ornate gardens in hotels all over the world. I have outlived everyone in my family. I shall go on being useless and inquisitive until the day comes when the stretcher carries me off to some nice airy corner room in a hospital. The starched white dragons will minister to me. The bed will be wound up, wound down. Trays will come with that awful loveless hospital food. My pulse and temperature will be taken at frequent intervals and invariably when I am dropping off to sleep. I shall lie there and hear the rustle of the starched skirts, the slurring sound of the rubber shoe soles on the aseptic floor, and see the silent horror of the doctor’s smile. After a while they will put the oxygen tent over me and draw the screens around the little white bed and I shall, without even knowing it, do the one thing in the world no man ever has to do twice.”
He turned his head slowly and looked at me. “Obviously, I talk too much. Your name, sir?”
“Philip Marlowe.”
“I am Henry Clarendon IV. I belong to what used to be called the upper classes. Groton, Harvard, Heidelberg, the Sorbonne. I even spent a year at Uppsala. I cannot clearly remember why. To fit me for a life of leisure, no doubt. So you are a private detective. I do eventually get around to speaking of something other than myself, you see.”
“Yes, sir.”
“You should have come to me for information. But of course you couldn’t know that.”
I shook my head. I lit a cigarette, first offering one to Mr. Henry Clarendon IV. He refused it with a vague nod.
“However, Mr. Marlowe, it is something you should have certainly learned. In every luxury hotel in the world there will be half a dozen elderly idlers of both sexes who sit around and stare like owls. They watch, they listen, they compare notes, they learn everything about everyone. They have nothing else to do, because hotel life is the most deadly of all forms of boredom. And no doubt I’m boring you equally.”
“I’d rather hear about Mitchell, sir. Tonight at least, Mr. Clarendon.”
“Of course. I’m egocentric, and absurd, and I prattle like a schoolgirl. You observe that handsome dark-haired woman over there playing canasta? The one with too much jewelry and the heavy gold trim on her glasses?”
He didn’t point or even look. But I picked her out. She had an overblown style and she looked just a little hardboiled. She was the one with the ice, the paint.
“Her name is Margo West. She is seven times a divorcee. She has stacks of money and reasonably good looks, but she can’t hold a man. She tries too hard. Yet she’s not a fool. She would have an affair with a man like Mitchell, she would give him money and pay his bills, but she would never marry him. They had a fight last night. Nevertheless I believe she may have paid his bill. She often has before.”
“I thought he got a check from his father in Toronto every month. Not enough to last him, huh?”
Henry Clarendon IV gave me a sardonic smile. “My dear fellow, Mitchell has no father in Toronto. He gets no monthly check. He lives on women. That is why he lives in a hotel like this. There is always some rich and lonely female in a luxury hotel.
She may not be beautiful or very young, but she has other charms. In the dull season in Esmeralda, which is from the end of the race meet at Del Mar until about the middle of January, the pickings are very lean. Then Mitchell is apt to travel—Majorca or Switzerland if he can make it, to Florida or one of the Caribbean islands if he is not in rich funds. This year he had poor luck. I understand he only got as far as Washington.”
