10

I dug out the carbon of my property slip and turned it over and receipted on the original. I put my belongings back in my pockets. There was a man draped over the end of the booking desk and as I turned away he straightened up and spoke to me. He was about six feet four inches tall and as thin as a wire.

“Need a ride home?”

In the bleak light he looked young-old, tired and cynical, but he didn't look like a grifter. “For how much?”

“For free. I'm Lonnie Morgan of the Journal . I'm knocking off.”

“Oh, police beat,” I said.

“Just this week. The City Hall is my regular beat.”

We walked out of the building and found his car in the parking lot. I looked up at the sky. There were stars but there was too much glare. It was a cool pleasant night. I breathed it in. Then I got into his car and he drove away from there.

“I live way out in Laurel Canyon,” I said. “Just drop me anywhere.”

“They ride you in,” he said, “but they don't worry how you get home. This case interests me, in a repulsive sort of way.”

“It seems there isn't any case,” I said. “Terry Lennox shot himself this afternoon. So they say. So they say.”

“Very convenient,” Lonnie Morgan said, staring ahead through the windshield. His car drifted quietly along quiet streets. “It helps them build their wall.”

“What wall?”

“Somebody's building a wall around the Lennox case, Marlowe.You're smart enough to see that, aren't you? It's not getting the kind of play it rates, The D.A. left town tonight for Washington. Some kind of convention. He walked out on the sweetest hunk of publicity he's had in years. Why?”

“No use to ask me. I've been in cold storage.”

“Because somebody made it worth his while, that's why. I don't mean anything crude like a wad of dough. Somebody promised him something important to him and there's only one man connected with the case in a position to do that. The girl's father.”

I leaned my head back in a corner of the car. “Sounds a little unlikely,” I said. “What about the press? Harlan Potter owns a few papers,but what about the competition?”

He gave me a brief amused glance and then concentrated on his driving. “Ever been a newspaperman?”

“No.”

“Newspapers are owned and published by rich men. Rich men all belong to the same club. Sure, there's competition—hard tough competition for circulation, for newsbeats, for exclusive stories. Just so long as it doesn't damage the prestige and privilege and position of the owners. If it does, down comes the lid. The lid, my friend, is down on the Lennox case. The Lennox case, my friend, properly built up, could have sold a hell of a lot of papers. It has everything. The trial would have drawn feature writers from all over the country. But there ain't going to be no trial. On account of Lennox checked out before it could get moving.Like I said—very convenient—for Harlan Potter and his family.”

I straightened up and gave him a hard stare.

“You calling the whole thing a fix?”

He twisted his mouth sardonically. “Could just be Lennox had some help committing suicide. Resisting arrest a little. Mexican cops have very itchy trigger fingers. If you want to lay a little bet, I'll give you nice odds that nobody gets to count the bullet holes.”

“I think you're wrong,” I said. “I knew Terry Lennox pretty well. He wrote himself off a long time ago. If they brought him back alive, he would have let them have it their way. He'd have copped a manslaughter plea.”

Lonnie Morgan shook his head. I knew what he was going to say and he said it. “Not a chance. If he had shot her or cracked her skull, maybe yes. But there was too much brutality. Her face was beaten to a pulp. Second degree murder would be the best he could get, and even that would raise a stink.”

I said: “You could be right.”

He looked at me again. “You say you knew the guy. Do you go for the setup?”

“I'm tired. I'm not in a thinking mood tonight.”

There was a long pause. Then Lonnie Morgan said quietly: “If I was a real bright guy instead of a hack newspaperman, I'd think maybe he didn't kill her at all.”

“It's a thought.”

He stuck a cigarette in his mouth and lit it by scratching a match on the dashboard. He smoked silently with a fixed frown on his thin face. We reached Laurel Canyon and I told him where to turn off the boulevard and where to turn into my street. His car churned up the hill and stopped at the foot of my redwood steps.

I got out. “Thanks for the ride, Morgan. Care for a drink?”

“I'll take a rain check. I figure you'd rather be alone.”

“I've got lots of time to be alone. Too damn much.”

“You've got a friend to say goodbye to,” he said. “He must have been that if you let them toss you into the can on his account.”

“Who said I did that?”

He smiled faintly. “Just because I can't print it don't mean I didn't know it, chum. So long. See you around.”

I shut the car door and he turned and drove off down the hill. When his tail lights vanished around the corner I climbed the steps, picked up newspapers, and let myself into the empty house. I put all the lamps on and opened all the windows. The place was stuffy.

I made some coffee and drank it and took the five C notes out of the coffee can. They were rolled tight and pushed down into the coffee at the side. I walked up and down with a cup of coffee in my hand, turned the TV on, turned it off, sat, stood, and sat again. I read through the papers that had piled up on the front steps. The Lennox case started out big, but by that morning it was a Part Two item. There was a photo of Sylvia, but none of Terry. There was a snap of me that I didn't know existed. “L.A.Private Detective Held for Questioning.” There was a large photo of the Lennox home in Encino. It was pseudo English with a lot of peaked roof and it would have cost a hundred bucks to wash the windows. It stood on a knoll in a big two acres, which is a lot of real estate for the Los Angeles area. There was a photo of the guest house, which was a miniature of the main building. It was hedged in with trees. Both photos had obviously been taken from some distance off and then blown up and trimmed. There was no photo of what the papers called the “death room.”

I had seen all this stuff before, in jail, but I read it and looked at it again with different eyes. It told me nothing except that a rich and beautiful girl had been murdered and the press had been pretty thoroughly excluded. So the influence had started to work very early. The crime beat boys must have gnashed their teeth and gnashed them in vain. It figured. If Terry talked to his father-in-law in Pasadena the very night she was killed,there would have been a dozen guards on the estate before the police were even notified.

But there was something that didn't figure at all—the way she had been beaten up. Nobody could sell me that Terry had done that.

I put the lamps out and sat by an open window. Outside in a bush a mockingbird ran through a few trills and admired himself before settling down for the night. My neck itched, so I shaved and showered and went to bed and lay on my back listening, as if far off in the dark I might hear a voice, the kind of calm and patient voice that makes everything clear. I didn't hear it and I knew I wasn't going to. Nobody was going to explain the Lennox case to me. No explanation was necessary. The murderer had confessed and he was dead. There wouldn't even be an inquest.

As Lonnie Morgan of the Journal had remarked—very convenient. If Terry Lennox had killed his wife, that was fine. There was no need to try him and bring out all the unpleasant details. If he hadn't killed her, that was fine too. A dead man is the best fall guy in the world. He never talks back.