“What do you do for an encore?” she asked.
“To be strictly kosher I should call L.A. and tell the party who sent me. Maybe I could be talked out of it.”
“God,” she said fervently, “two of them in one afternoon. How lucky can a girl get?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know anything. I think I’ve been played for a sucker, but I’m not sure.”
“Wait a minute.” She shut the door in my face. She wasn’t gone long. The chain came out of the groove inside and the door came open.
I went in slowly and she stepped back and away from me. “How much did you hear? And shut the door, please.”
I shut it with my shoulder and leaned against it.
“The tag end of a rather nasty conversation. The walls here are as thin as a hoofer’s wallet.”
“You in show business?”
“Just the opposite of show business. I’m in the hide-and-seek business. My name is Philip Marlowe. You’ve seen me before.”
“Have I?” She walked away from me in little cautious steps and went over by her open suitcase. She leaned against the arm of a chair. “Where?”
“Union Station in L.A. We waited between trains, you and I. I was interested in you. I was interested in what went on between you and Mr. Mitchell—that’s his name, isn’t it? I didn’t hear anything and I didn’t see much because I was outside the coffee shop.”
“So what interested you, you great big lovable something or other?”
“I’ve just told you part of it. The other thing that interested me was how you changed after your talk with him. I watched you work at it. It was very deliberate. You made yourself over into just another flip hardboiled modern cutie. Why?”
“What was I before?”
“A nice quiet well-bred girl.”
“That was the act,” she said. “The other was my natural personality. Which goes with something else.” She brought a small automatic up from her side.
I looked at it. “Oh guns,” I said. “Don’t scare me with guns. I’ve lived with them all my life. I teethed on an old Derringer, single-shot, the kind the riverboat gamblers used to carry. As I got older I graduated to a lightweight sporting rifle, then a .303 target rifle and so on. I once made a bull at nine hundred yards with open sights. In case you don’t know, the whole target looks the size of a postage stamp at nine hundred yards.”
“A fascinating career,” she said.
“Guns never settle anything,” I said. “They are just a fast curtain to a bad second act.”
She smiled faintly and transferred the gun to her left hand. With her right she grabbed the edge of her blouse at the collar line and with a quick decisive motion tore it to the waist.
“Next,” she said, “but there’s no hurry about it, I turn the gun in my hand like this”—she put it back in her right hand, but held it by the barrel—”I slam myself on the cheekbone with the butt. I do a beautiful bruise.”
“And after that,” I said, “you get the gun into its proper position and release the safety catch and pull the trigger, just about the time I get through the lead column in the Sports Section.”
“You wouldn’t get halfway across the room.”
I crossed my legs and leaned back and lifted the green glass ashtray from the table beside the chair and balanced it on my knee and held the cigarette I was smoking between the first and second fingers of my right hand.
“I wouldn’t get any of the way across the room. I’d be sitting here like this, quite comfortable and relaxed.”
“But slightly dead,” she said. “I’m a good shot and it isn’t nine hundred yards.”
“Then you try to sell the cops your account of how I tried to attack you and you defended yourself.”
She tossed the gun into her suitcase and laughed. It sounded like a genuine laugh with real amusement in it. “Sorry,” she said. “You sitting there with your legs crossed and a hole in your head and me trying to explain how I shot you to defend my honor—the picture makes me a little lightheaded.”
She dropped into a chair and leaned forward with her chin cupped in a hand, the elbow propped on her knee, her face taut and drained, her dark red hair framing it too luxuriantly, so that her face looked smaller than it should have.
“Just what are you doing to me, Mr. Marlowe? Or is it the other way around—what I can do for you in return for you not doing anything at all?”
“Who is Eleanor King? What was she in Washington, D.C.? Why did she change her name somewhere along the way and have the initials taken off her bag? Odds and ends like that are what you could tell me. You probably won’t.”
“Oh, I don’t know. The porter took the initials off my things. I told him I had had a very unhappy marriage and was divorced and had been given the right to resume my unmarried name. Which is Elizabeth or Betty Mayfield. That could all be true, couldn’t it?”
“Yeah. But it doesn’t explain Mitchell.”
She leaned back and relaxed. Her eyes stayed watchful. “Just an acquaintance I made along the way. He was on the train.”
