Читать книгу The Little Sister - Raymond Chandler - Страница 4

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Five minutes later the buzzer sounded on the outer door of the half-office I use for a reception room. I heard the door close again. Then I didn’t hear anything more. The door between me and there was half open. I listened and decided somebody had just looked in at the wrong office and left without entering. Then there was a small knocking on wood. Then the kind of cough you use for the same purpose. I got my feet off the desk, stood up and looked out. There she was. She didn’t have to open her mouth for me to know who she was. And nobody ever looked less like Lady Macbeth. She was a small, neat, rather prissy-looking girl with primly smooth brown hair and rimless glasses. She was wearing a brown tailor-made and from a strap over her shoulder hung one of those awkward-looking square bags that make you think of a Sister of Mercy taking first aid to the wounded. On the smooth brown hair was a hat that had been taken from its mother too young. She had no make-up, no lipstick and no jewelry. The rimless glasses gave her that librarian’s look.

“That’s no way to talk to people over the telephone,” she said sharply. “You ought to be ashamed of yourself.”

“I’m just too proud to show it,” I said. “Come on in.” I held the door for her. Then I held the chair for her.

She sat down on about two inches of the edge. “If I talked like that to one of Dr. Zugsmith’s patients,” she said, “I’d lose my position. He’s most particular how I speak to the patients—even the difficult ones.”

“How is the old boy? I haven’t seen him since that time I fell off the garage roof.”

She looked surprised and quite serious. “Why surely you can’t know Dr. Zugsmith.” The tip of a rather anemic tongue came out between her lips and searched furtively for nothing.

“I know a Dr. George Zugsmith,” I said, “in Santa Rosa.”

“Oh no. This is Dr. Alfred Zugsmith, in Manhattan. Manhattan, Kansas, you know, not Manhattan, New York.”

“Must be a different Dr. Zugsmith,” I said. “And your name?”

“I’m not sure I’d care to tell you.”

“Just window shopping, huh?”

“I suppose you could call it that. If I have to tell my family affairs to a total stranger, I at least have the right to decide whether he’s the kind of person I could trust.”

“Anybody ever tell you you’re a cute little trick?”

The eyes behind the rimless cheaters flashed. “I should hope not.”

I reached for a pipe and started to fill it. “Hope isn’t exactly the word,” I said. “Get rid of that hat and get yourself a pair of those slinky glasses with colored rims. You know, the ones that are all cockeyed and oriental—”

“Dr. Zugsmith wouldn’t permit anything like that,” she said quickly. Then, “Do you really think so?” she asked and blushed ever so slightly.

I put a match to the pipe and puffed smoke across the desk. She winced back.

“If you hire me,” I said, “I’m the guy you hire. Me. Just as I am. If you think you’re going to find any lay readers in this business, you’re crazy. I hung up on you, but you came up here all the same. So you need help. What’s your name and trouble?”

She just stared at me.

“Look,” I said. “You come from Manhattan, Kansas. The last time I memorized the World Almanac that was a little town not far from Topeka. Population around twelve thousand. You work for Dr. Alfred Zugsmith and you’re looking for somebody named Orrin. Manhattan is a small town. It has to be. Only half a dozen places in Kansas are anything else. I already have enough information about you to find out your whole family history.

“But why should you want to. I’m fed up with people telling me histories. I’m just sitting here because I don’t have any place to go. I don’t want to work. I don’t want anything.”

“You talk too much.”

“Yes,” I said, “I talk too much. Lonely men always talk too much. Either that or they don’t talk at all. Shall we get down to business? You don’t look like the type that goes to see private detectives, and especially private detectives you don’t know.”

“I know that,” she said quietly. “And Orrin would be absolutely livid. Mother would be furious too. I just picked your name out of the phone book—”

“What principle?” I asked. “And with the eyes closed or open?”

She stared at me for a moment as if I were some kind of freak. “Seven and thirteen,” she said quietly.

“How?”

“Marlowe has seven letters,” she said, “and Philip Marlowe has thirteen. Seven together with thirteen—”

“What’s your name?” I almost snarled.

“Orfamay Quest.” She crinkled her eyes as if she could cry. She spelled the first name out for me, all one word. “I live with my mother,” she went on, her voice getting rapid now as if my time is costing her. “My father died four years ago. He was a doctor. My brother Orrin was going to be a surgeon, too, but he changed into engineering after two years of medical. Then a year ago Orrin came out to work for the Cal-Western Aircraft Company in Bay City. He didn’t have to. He had a good job in Wichita. I guess he just sort of wanted to come out here to California. Most everybody does.”

“Almost everybody,” I said. “If you’re going to wear those rimless glasses, you might at least try to live up to them.”

She giggled and drew a line along the desk with her fingertip, looking down. “Did you mean those slanting kind of glasses that make you look kind of oriental?”

“Uh-huh. Now about Orrin. We’ve got him to California, and we’ve got him to Bay City. What do we do with him?”

She thought a moment and frowned. Then she studied my face as if making up her mind. Then her words came with a burst: “It wasn’t like Orrin not to write to us regularly. He only wrote twice to mother and three times to me in the last six months. And the last letter was several months ago. Mother and I got worried. So it was my vacation and I came out to see him. He’d never been away from Kansas before.” She stopped. “Aren’t you going to take any notes?” she asked.

I grunted.

“I thought detectives always wrote things down in little notebooks.”

“I’ll make the gags,” I said. “You tell the story. You came out on your vacation. Then what?”

“I’d written to Orrin that I was coming but I didn’t get any answer. Then I sent a wire to him about Salt Lake City but he didn’t answer that either. So all I could do was go down where he lived. It’s an awful long way. I went in a bus. It’s in Bay City. No. 449 Idaho Street.”

She stopped again, then repeated the address, and I still didn’t write it down. I just sat there looking at her glasses and her smooth brown hair and the silly little hat and the fingernails with no color and her mouth with no lipstick and the tip of the little tongue that came and went between the pale lips.

“Maybe you don’t know Bay City, Mr. Marlowe.”

“Ha,” I said. “All I know about Bay City is that every time I go there I have to buy a new head. You want me to finish your story for you?”

“Wha-a-at?” Her eyes opened so wide that the glasses made them look like something you see in the deep-sea fish tanks.

“He’s moved,” I said. “And you don’t know where he’s moved to. And you’re afraid he’s living a life of sin in a penthouse on top of the Regency Towers with something in a long mink coat and an interesting perfume.”

“Well for goodness’ sakes!”

“Or am I being coarse?” I asked.

“Please, Mr. Marlowe,” she said at last, “I don’t think anything of the sort about Orrin. And if Orrin heard you say that you’d be sorry. He can be awfully mean. But I know something has happened. It was just a cheap rooming house, and I didn’t like the manager at all. A horrid kind of man. He said Orrin had moved away a couple of weeks before and he didn’t know where to and he didn’t care, and all he wanted was a good slug of gin. I don’t know why Orrin would even live in a place like that.”

“Did you say slug of gin?” I asked.

She blushed. “That’s what the manager said. I’m just telling you.”

“All right,” I said. “Go on.”

“Well, I called the place where he worked. The Cal-Western Company, you know. And they said he’d been laid off like a lot of others and that was all they knew. So then I went to the post office and asked if Orrin had put in a change of address to anywhere. And they said they couldn’t give me any information. It was against the regulations. So I told them how it was and the man said, well if I was his sister he’d go look. So he went and looked and came back and said no. Orrin hadn’t put in any change of address. So then I began to get a little frightened. He might have had an accident or something.”

“Did it occur to you to ask the police about that?”

“I wouldn’t dare ask the police. Orrin would never forgive me. He’s difficult enough at the best of times. Our family—” She hesitated and there was something behind her eyes she tried not to have there. So she went on breathlessly: “Our family’s not the kind of family—”

“Look,” I said wearily, “I’m not talking about the guy lifting a wallet. I’m talking about him getting knocked down by a car and losing his memory or being too badly hurt to talk.”

She gave me a level look which was not too admiring. “If it was anything like that, we’d know,” she said. “Everybody has things in their pockets to tell who they are.”

“Sometimes all they have left is pockets.”

“Are you trying to scare me, Mr. Marlowe?”

“If I am, I’m certainly getting nowhere fast. Just what do you think might have happened?”

She put her slim forefinger to her lips and touched it very carefully with the tip of that tongue. “I guess if I knew that I wouldn’t have to come and see you. How much would you charge to find him?”

I didn’t answer for a long moment, then I said: “You mean alone, without telling anybody?”

“Yes. I mean alone, without telling anybody.”

“Uh-huh. Well that depends. I told you what my rates were.”

She clasped her hands on the edge of the desk and squeezed them together hard. She had about the most meaningless set of gestures I had ever laid eyes on. “I thought you being a detective and all you could find him right away,” she said. “I couldn’t possibly afford more than twenty dollars. I’ve got to buy my meals here and my hotel and the train going back and you know the hotel is so terribly expensive and the food on the train—”

“Which one are you staying at?”

“I—I’d rather not tell you, if you don’t mind.”

“Why?”

“I’d just rather not. I’m terribly afraid of Orrin’s temper. And, well I can always call you up, can’t I?”

“Uh-huh. Just what is it you’re scared of, besides Orrin’s temper, Miss Quest?” I had let my pipe go out. I struck a match and held it to the bowl, watching her over it.

“Isn’t pipe-smoking a very dirty habit?” she asked.

“Probably,” I said. “But it would take more than twenty bucks to have me drop it. And don’t try to side-step my questions.”

“You can’t talk to me like that,” she flared up. “Pipe-smoking is a dirty habit. Mother never let father smoke in the house, even the last two years after he had his stroke. He used to sit with that empty pipe in his mouth sometimes. But she didn’t like him to do that really. We owed a lot of money too and she said she couldn’t afford to give him money for useless things like tobacco. The church needed it much more than he did.”

“I’m beginning to get it,” I said slowly. “Take a family like yours and somebody in it has to be the dark meat.”

She stood up sharply and clasped the first-aid kit to her body. “I don’t like you,” she said. “I don’t think I’m going to employ you. If you’re insinuating that Orrin has done something wrong, well I can assure you that it’s not Orrin who’s the black sheep of our family.”

I didn’t move an eyelash. She swung around and marched to the door and put her hand on the knob and then she swung around again and marched back and suddenly began to cry. I reacted to that just the way a stuffed fish reacts to cut bait. She got out her little handkerchief and tickled the corners of her eyes.

“And now I suppose you’ll call the p-police,” she said with a catch in her voice. “And the Manhattan p-paper will hear about it and they’ll print something n-nasty about us.”

“You don’t suppose anything of the sort. Stop chipping at my emotions. Let’s see a photo of him.”

She put the handkerchief away in a hurry and dug something else out of her bag. She passed it across the desk. An envelope. Thin, but there could be a couple of snapshots in it. I didn’t look inside.

“Describe him the way you see him,” I said.

She concentrated. That gave her a chance to do something with her eyebrows. “He was twenty-eight years old last March. He has light brown hair, much lighter than mine, and lighter blue eyes, and he brushes his hair straight back. He’s very tall, over six feet. But he only weighs about a hundred and forty pounds. He’s sort of bony. He used to wear a little blond mustache but mother made him cut it off. She said—”

“Don’t tell me. The minister needed it to stuff a cushion.”

“You can’t talk like that about my mother,” she yelped getting pale with rage.

“Oh stop being silly. There’s a lot of things about you I don’t know. But you can stop pretending to be an Easter lily right now. Does Orrin have any distinguishing marks on him, like moles or scars, or a tattoo of the Twenty-Third Psalm on his chest? And don’t bother to blush.”

“Well you don’t have to yell at me. Why don’t you look at the photograph?”

“He probably has his clothes on. After all, you’re his sister. You ought to know.”

“No he hasn’t,” she said tightly. “He has a little scar on his left hand where he had a wen removed.”

“What about his habits? What does he do for fun—besides not smoking or drinking or going out with girls?”

“Why—how did you know that?”

“Your mother told me.”

She smiled. I was beginning to wonder if she had one in her. She had very white teeth and she didn’t wave her gums. That was something. “Aren’t you silly,” she said. “He studies a lot and he has a very expensive camera he likes to snap people with when they don’t know. Sometimes it makes them mad. But Orrin says people ought to see themselves as they really are.”

“Let’s hope it never happens to him,” I said. “What kind of camera is it?”

“One of those little cameras with a very fine lens. You can take snaps in almost any kind of light. A Leica.”

I opened the envelope and took out a couple of small prints, very clear. “These weren’t taken with anything like that,” I said.

“Oh no. Philip took those, Philip Anderson. A boy I was going with for a while.” She paused and sighed. “And I guess that’s really why I came here, Mr. Marlowe. Just because your name’s Philip too.”

I just said: “Uh-huh,” but I felt touched in some vague sort of way. “What happened to Philip Anderson?”

“But it’s about Orrin—”

“I know,” I interrupted. “But what happened to Philip Anderson?”

“He’s still there in Manhattan.” She looked away. “Mother doesn’t like him very much. I guess you know how it is.”

“Yes,” I said, “I know how it is. You can cry if you want to. I won’t hold it against you. I’m just a big soft slob myself.”

I looked at the two prints. One of them was looking down and was no good to me. The other was a fairly good shot of a tall angular bird with narrow-set eyes and a thin straight mouth and a pointed chin. He had the expression I expected to see. If you forgot to wipe the mud off your shoes, he was the boy who would tell you. I laid the photos aside and looked at Orfamay Quest, trying to find something in her face even remotely like his. I couldn’t. Not the slightest trace of family resemblance, which of course meant absolutely nothing. It never has.

“All right,” I said. “I’ll go down there and take a look. But you ought to be able to guess what’s happened. He’s in a strange city. He’s made good money for a while. More than he’s ever made in his life, perhaps. He’s meeting a kind of people he never met before. And it’s not the kind of town—believe me it isn’t, I know Bay City—that Manhattan, Kansas, is. So he just broke training and he doesn’t want his family to know about it. He’ll straighten out.”

She just stared at me for a moment in silence, then she shook her head. “No. Orrin’s not the type to do that, Mr. Marlowe.”

“Anyone is,” I said. “Especially a fellow like Orrin. The small town sanctimonious type of guy who’s lived his entire life with his mother on his neck and the minister holding his hand. Out here he’s lonely. He’s got dough. He’d like to buy a little sweetness and light, and not the kind that comes through the east window of a church. Not that I have anything against that. I mean he already had enough of that, didn’t he?”

She nodded her head silently.

“So he starts to play,” I went on, “and he doesn’t know how to play. That takes experience too. He’s got himself all jammed up with some floozy and a bottle of hootch and what he’s done looks to him as if he’d stolen the bishop’s pants. After all, the guy’s going on twenty-nine years old and if he wants to roll in the gutter that’s his business. He’ll find somebody to blame it on after a while.”

“I hate to believe you, Mr. Marlowe,” she said slowly. “I’d hate for mother—”

“Something was said about twenty dollars,” I cut in.

She looked shocked. “Do I have to pay you now?”

“What would be the custom in Manhattan, Kansas?”

“We don’t have any private detectives in Manhattan. Just the regular police. That is, I don’t think we do.”

She probed in the inside of her tool kit again and dragged out a red change purse and from that she took a number of bills, all neatly folded and separate. Three fives and five ones. There didn’t seem to be much left. She kind of held the purse so I could see how empty it was. Then she straightened the bills out on the desk and put one on top of the other and pushed them across. Very slowly, very sadly, as if she was drowning a favorite kitten.

“I’ll give you a receipt,” I said.

“I don’t need a receipt, Mr. Marlowe.”

“I do. You won’t give me your name and address, so I want something with your name on it.”

“What for?”

“To show I’m representing you.” I got the receipt book out and made the receipt and held the book for her to sign the duplicate. She didn’t want to. After a moment reluctantly she took the hard pencil and wrote “Orfamay Quest” in a neat secretary’s writing across the face of the duplicate.

“Still no address?” I asked.

“I’d rather not.”

“Call me any time then. My home number is in the phone book, too. Bristol Apartments, Apartment 428.”

“I shan’t be very likely to visit you,” she said coldly.

“I haven’t asked you yet,” I said. “Call me around four if you like. I might have something. And then again I might not.”

She stood up. “I hope mother won’t think I’ve done wrong,” she said, picking at her lip now with the pale fingernail. “Coming here, I mean.”

“Just don’t tell me any more of the things your mother won’t like,” I said. “Just leave that part out.”

“Well really!”

“And stop saying ‘well really.’ ”

“I think you are a very offensive person,” she said.

“No, you don’t. You think I’m cute. And I think you’re a fascinating little liar. You don’t think I’m doing this for any twenty bucks, do you?”

She gave me a level, suddenly cool stare. “Then why?” Then when I didn’t answer she added, “Because spring is in the air?”

I still didn’t answer. She blushed a little. Then she giggled.

I didn’t have the heart to tell her I was just plain bored with doing nothing. Perhaps it was the spring too. And something in her eyes that was much older than Manhattan, Kansas.

“I think you’re very nice—really,” she said softly. Then she turned quickly and almost ran out of the office. Her steps along the corridor outside made tiny, sharp pecky sounds, kind of like mother drumming on the edge of the dinner table when father tried to promote himself a second piece of pie. And him with no money any more. No nothing. Just sitting in a rocker on the front porch back there in Manhattan, Kansas, with his empty pipe in his mouth. Rocking on the front porch, slow and easy, because when you’ve had a stroke you have to take it slow and easy. And wait for the next one. And the empty pipe in his mouth. No tobacco. Nothing to do but wait.

I put Orfamay Quest’s twenty hard-earned dollars in an envelope and wrote her name on it and dropped it in the desk drawer. I didn’t like the idea of running around loose with that much currency on me.