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I met his pale stare. He grinned.

“You’re not making very good sense to me, Mr. Marlowe. I talk and talk, but not merely to hear the sound of my voice. I don’t hear it naturally in any case. Talking gives me an opportunity to study people without seeming altogether rude. I have studied you. My intuition, if such be the correct word, tells me that your interest in Mitchell is rather tangential. Otherwise you would not be so open about it.”

“Uh-huh. Could be,” I said. It was a spot for a paragraph of lucid prose. Henry Clarendon IV would have obliged. I didn’t have a damn thing more to say.

“Run along now,” he said. “I’m tired. I’m going up to my room and lie down a little. A pleasure to have met you, Mr. Marlowe.” He got slowly to his feet and steadied himself with the stick. It was an effort. I stood up beside him.

“I never shake hands,” he said. “My hands are ugly and painful. I wear gloves for that reason. Good evening. If I don’t see you again, good luck.”

He went off, walking slowly and keeping his head erect. I could see that walking wasn’t any fun for him.

The two steps up from the main lobby to the arch were made one at a time, with a pause in between. His right foot always moved first. The cane bore down hard beside his left. He went out through the arch and I watched him move towards an elevator. I decided Mr. Henry Clarendon IV was a pretty smooth article.

I strolled along to the bar. Mrs. Margo West was sitting in the amber shadows with one of the canasta players. The waiter was just setting drinks before them. I didn’t pay too much attention because farther along in a little booth against the wall was someone I knew better. And alone.

She had the same clothes on except that she had taken the bandeau off her hair and it hung loose around her face.

I sat down. The waiter came over and I ordered. He went away. The music from the invisible record player was low and ingratiating.

She smiled a little. “I’m sorry I lost my temper,” she said. “I was very rude.”

“Forget it. I had it coming.”

“Were you looking for me in here?”

“Not especially.”

“Were you—oh, I forgot.” She reached for her bag and put it in her lap. She fumbled in it and then passed something rather small across the table, something not small enough for her hand to hide that it was a folder of traveler’s checks. “I promised you these.”

“No.”

“Take them, you fool! I don’t want the waiter to see.”

I took the folder and slipped it into my pocket. I reached into my inside pocket and got out a small receipt book. I entered the counterfoil and then the body of the receipt. “Received from Miss Betty Mayfield, Hotel Casa del Poniente, Esmeralda, California, the sum of $5000 in American Express Company traveler’s checks of $100 denomination, countersigned by the owner, and remaining her property subject to her demand at any time until a fee is arranged with, and an employment accepted by me, the undersigned.”

I signed this rigmarole and held the book for her to see it.

“Read it and sign your name in the lower left-hand corner.”

She took it and held it close to the light.

“You make me tired,” she said. “Whatever are you trying to spring?”

“That I’m on the level and you think so.”

She took the pen I held out and signed and gave the stuff back to me. I tore out the original and handed it to her. I put the book away.

The waiter came and put my drink down. He didn’t wait to be paid. Betty shook her head at him. He went away.

“Why don’t you ask me if I have found Larry?”

“All right. Have you found Larry, Mr. Marlowe?”

“No. He has skipped the hotel. He had a room on the fourth floor on the same side as your room. Must be fairly nearly under it. He took nine pieces of luggage and beat it in his Buick. The house peeper, whose name is Javonen—he calls himself an assistant manager and security officer—is satisfied that Mitchell paid his bill and even a week in advance for his room. He has no worries. He doesn’t like me, of course.”

“Does somebody?”

“You do—five thousand dollars worth.”

“Oh, you
are
an idiot. Do you think Mitchell will come back?”

“I told you he paid a week in advance.”

She sipped her drink quietly. “So you did. But that could mean something else.”

“Sure. Just spitballing, for example, I might say it could mean that he didn’t pay his bill, but someone else did. And that the someone else wanted time to do something—such as getting rid of that body on your balcony last night. That is, if there was a body.”

“Oh, stop it!”

She finished her drink, killed her cigarette, stood up and left me with the check. I paid it and went back through the lobby, for no reason that I could think of. Perhaps by pure instinct. And I saw Goble getting into the elevator. He seemed to have a rather strained expression. As he turned he caught my eye, or seemed to, but be gave no sign of knowing me. The elevator went up.

I went out to my car and drove back to the Rancho Descansado. I lay down on the couch and went to sleep. It had been a lot of day. Perhaps if I had a rest and my brain cleared, I might have some faint idea of what I was doing.

EIGHTEEN

An hour later I was parked in front of the hardware store. It wasn’t the only hardware store in Esmeralda, but it was the only one that backed on the alley called Polton’s Lane. I walked east and counted the stores. There were seven of them to the corner, all shining with plate glass and chromium trim. On the corner was a dress shop with mannequins in the windows, scarves and gloves and costume jewelry laid out under the lights. No prices showing. I rounded the corner and went south. Heavy eucalyptus trees grew out of the sidewalk. They branched low down and the trunks looked hard and heavy, quite unlike the tall brittle stuff that grows around Los Angeles. At the far corner of Polton’s Lane there was an automobile agency. I followed its high blank wall, looking at broken crates, piles of cartons, trash drums, dusty parking spaces, the back yard of elegance. I counted the buildings. It was easy. No questions to ask. A light burned in the small window of a tiny frame cottage that had long ago been somebody’s simple home. The cottage had a wooden porch with a broken railing. It had been painted once, but that was in the remote past before the shops swallowed it up. Once it may even have had a garden. The shingles of the roof were warped. The front door was a dirty mustard yellow. The window was shut tight and needed hosing off. Behind part of it hung what remained of an old roller blind. There were two steps up to the porch, but only one had a tread. Behind the cottage and halfway to the loading platform of the hardware store there was what had presumably been a privy. But I could see where a water pipe cut through the sagging side. A rich man’s improvements on a rich man’s property. A one-unit slum.

I stepped over the hollow place where a step would have been and knocked on the door. There was no bell push. Nobody answered. I tried the knob. Nobody had locked the door. I pushed it open and went in. I had that feeling. I was going to find something nasty inside.

A bulb burned in a frayed lamp crooked on its base, the paper shade split. There was a couch with a dirty blanket on it. There was an old cane chair, a Boston rocker, a table covered with a smeared oilcloth. On the table spread out beside a coffee cup was a copy of
El Diario,
a Spanish language newspaper, also a saucer with cigarette stubs, a dirty plate, a tiny radio which emitted music. The music stopped and a man began to rattle off a commercial in Spanish. I turned it off. The silence fell like a bag of feathers. Then the clicking of an alarm clock from beyond a half open door. Then the clank of a small chain, a fluttering sound and a cracked voice said rapidly:
“Quién es? Quién es? Quién es?”
This was followed by the angry chattering of monkeys. Then silence again.

From a big cage over in the corner the round angry eye of a parrot looked at me. He sidled along the perch as far as he could go.

“Amigo,”
I said.

The parrot let out a screech of insane laughter.

“Watch your language, brother,” I said.

The parrot crabwalked to the other end of the perch and pecked into a white cup and shook oatmeal from his beak contemptuously. In another cup there was water. It was messy with oatmeal.

“I bet you’re not even housebroken,” I said.

The parrot stared at me and shuffled. He turned his head and stared at me with his other eye. Then he leaned forward and fluttered his tail feathers and proved me right.

“Necio!”
he screamed.
“Fuera!”

Somewhere water dripped from a leaky faucet. The clock ticked. The parrot imitated the ticking amplified.

I said: “Pretty Polly.”

“Hijo de la chingada,”
the parrot said.

I sneered at him and pushed the half-open door into what there was of a kitchen. The linoleum on the floor was worn through to the boards in front of the sink. There was a rusty three-burner gas stove, an open shelf with some dishes and the alarm clock, a riveted hot water tank on a support in the corner, the antique kind that blows up because it has no safety valve. There was a narrow rear door, closed, with a key in the lock, and a single window, locked. There was a light bulb hanging from the ceiling. The ceiling above it was cracked and stained from roof leaks. Behind me the parrot shuffled aimlessly on his perch and once in a while let out a bored croak.

On the zinc drainboard lay a short length of black rubber tubing, and beside that a glass hypodermic syringe with the plunger pushed home. In the sink were three long thin empty tubes of glass with tiny corks near them. I had seen such tubes before.

I opened the back door, stepped to the ground and walked to the converted privy. It had a sloping roof, about eight feet high in front, less than six at the back. It opened outward, being too small to open any other way. It was locked but the lock was old. It did not resist me much.

The man’s scuffed toes almost touched the floor. His head was up in the darkness inches from the two by four that held up the roof. He was hanging by a black wire, probably a piece of electric light wire. The toes of his feet were pointed down as if they reached to stand on tiptoe. The worn cuffs of his khaki denim pants hung below his heels. I touched him enough to know that he was cold enough so that there was no point in cutting him down.

He had made very sure of that. He had stood by the sink in his kitchen and knotted the rubber tube around his arm, then clenched his fist to make the vein stand out, then shot a syringeful of morphine sulphate into his blood stream. Since all three of the tubes were empty, it was a fair guess that one of them had been full. He could not have taken in less than enough. Then he had laid the syringe down and released the knotted tube. It wouldn’t be long, not a shot directly into the blood stream. Then he had gone out to his privy and stood on the seat and knotted the wire around his throat. By that time he would be dizzy. He could stand there and wait until his knees went slack and the weight of his body took care of the rest. He would know nothing. He would already be asleep.

I closed the door on him. I didn’t go back into the house. As I went along the side towards Polton’s Lane, that handsome residential street, the parrot inside the shack heard me and screeched:
“Quién es? Quién es? Quién es?”

Who is it? Nobody, friend. Just a footfall in the night.

I walked softly, going away.

NINETEEN

I walked softly, in no particular direction, but I knew where I would end up. I always did. At the Casa del Poniente. I climbed back into my car on Grand and circled a few blocks aimlessly, and then I was parked as usual in a slot near the bar entrance. As I got out I looked at the car beside mine. It was Goble’s shabby dark little jalopy. He was as adhesive as a band-aid.

At another time I would have been racking my brains for some idea of what he was up to, but now I had a worse problem. I had to go to the police and report the hanging man. But I had no notion what to tell them. Why did I go to his house? Because, if he was telling the truth, he had seen Mitchell leave early in the morning. Why was that of significance? Because I was looking for Mitchell myself. I wanted to have a heart to heart talk with him. About what? And from there on I had no answers that would not lead to Betty Mayfield, who she was, where she came from, why she changed her name, what had happened back in Washington, or Virginia or wherever it was, that made her run away.

I had $5000 of her money in traveler’s checks in my pocket, and she wasn’t even formally my client. I was stuck, but good.

I walked over to the edge of the cliff and listened to the sound of the surf. I couldn’t see anything but the occasional gleam of a wave breaking out beyond the cove. In the cove the waves don’t break, they slide in politely, like floorwalkers. There would be a bright moon later, but it hadn’t checked in yet.

Someone was standing not far away, doing what I was doing. A woman. I waited for her to move. When she moved I would know whether I knew her. No two people move in just the same way, just as no two sets of fingerprints match exactly.

I lit a cigarette and let the lighter flare in my face, and she was beside me.

“Isn’t it about time you stopped following me around?”

“You’re my client. I’m trying to protect you. Maybe on my seventieth birthday someone will tell me why.”

“I didn’t ask you to protect me. I’m not your client. Why don’t you go home—if you have a home—and stop annoying people?”

“You’re my client—five thousand dollars worth. I have to do something for it—even if it’s no more than growing a mustache.”

“You’re impossible. I gave you the money to let me alone. You’re impossible. You’re the most impossible man I ever met. And I’ve met some dillies.”

“What happened to that tall exclusive apartment house in Rio? Where I was going to lounge in silk pajamas and play with your long lascivious hair, while the butler set out the Wedgwood and the Georgian silver with that faint dishonest smile and those delicate gestures, like a pansy hair stylist fluttering around a screen star?”

“Oh, shut up!”

“Wasn’t a firm offer, huh? Just a passing fancy, or not even that. Just a trick to make me slaughter my sleeping hours and trot around looking for bodies that weren’t there.”

“Did anybody ever give you a swift poke in the nose?”

“Frequently, but sometimes I make them miss.”

I grabbed hold of her. She tried to fight me off, but no fingernails. I kissed the top of her head. Suddenly she clung to me and turned her face up.

“All right. Kiss me, if it’s any satisfaction to you. I suppose you would rather have this happen where there was a bed.”

“I’m human.”

“Don’t kid yourself. You’re a dirty low-down detective. Kiss me.”

I kissed her. With my mouth close to hers I said: “He hanged himself tonight.”

She jerked away from me violently. “Who?” she asked in a voice that could hardly speak.

“The night garage attendant here. You may never have seen him. He was on mesca, tea, marijuana. But tonight he shot himself full of morphine and hanged himself in the privy behind his shack in Polton’s Lane. That’s an alley behind Grand Street.”

She was shaking now. She was hanging on to me as if to keep from falling down. She tried to say something, but her voice was just a croak.

“He was the guy that said he saw Mitchell leave with his nine suitcases early this morning. I wasn’t sure I believed him. He told me where he lived and I went over this evening to talk to him some more. And now I have to go to the cops and tell them. And what do I tell them without telling them about Mitchell and from then on about you?”

“Please—please—
please
leave me out of it,” she whispered. “I’ll give you more money. I’ll give you all the money you want.”

“For Pete’s sake. You’ve already given me more than I’d keep. It isn’t money I want. It’s some sort of understanding of what the hell I’m doing and why. You must have heard of professional ethics. Some shreds of them still stick to me. Are you my client?”

“Yes. I give up. They all give up to you in the end, don’t they?”

“Far from it. I get pushed around plenty.”

I got the folder of traveler’s checks out of my pocket and put a pencil flash on them and tore out five. I refolded it and handed it to her. “I’ve kept five hundred dollars. That makes it legal. Now tell me what it’s all about.”

“No. You don’t have to tell anybody about that man.”

“Yes, I do. I have to go to the cop house just about now. I have to. And I have no story to tell them that they won’t bust open in three minutes. Here, take your goddam checks—and if you ever push them at me again, I’ll smack your bare bottom.”

She grabbed the folder and tore off into the darkness to the hotel. I just stood there and felt like a damn fool. I don’t know how long I stood there, but finally I stuffed the five checks into my pocket and went wearily back to my car and started off to the place where I knew I had to go.