Free Farewell, My Lovely by Raymond Chandler Page B

Why not go back to my house and have one? You can phone the law from there. They have to come from West Los Angeles anyway. There's nothing up here but a fire station."
    "Just keep on going down to the coast. I'll play it solo."
    "But why? I'm not afraid of them. My story might help you."
    "I don't want any help. I've got to think. I want to be by myself for a while."
    "I--okey," she said.
    She made a vague sound in her throat and turned on to the boulevard. We came to the service station at the coast highway and turned north to Montemar Vista and the sidewalk cafe there. It was lit up like a luxury liner. The girl pulled over on to the shoulder and I got out and stood holding the door.
    I fumbled a card out of my wallet and passed it in to her. "Some day you may need a strong back," I said. "Let me know. But don't call me if it's brain work."
    She tapped the card on the wheel and said slowly: "You'll find me in the Bay City phone book. 819 Twenty-fifth Street. Come around and pin a putty medal on me for minding my own business. I think you're still woozy from that crack on the head."
    She swung her car swiftly around on the highway and I watched its twin tail-lights fade into the dark.
    I walked past the arch and the sidewalk cafe into the parking space and got into my car. A bar was right in front of me and I was shaking again. But it seemed smarter to walk into the West Los Angeles police station the way I did twenty minutes later, as cold as a frog and as green as the back of a new dollar bill.
    12
    It was an hour and a half later. The body had been taken away, the ground gone over, and I had told my story three or four times. We sat, four of us, in the day captain's room at the West Los Angeles station. The building was quiet except for a drunk in a cell who kept giving the Australian bush call while he waited to go downtown for sunrise court.
    A hard white light inside a glass reflector shone down on the flat topped table on which were spread the things that had come from Lindsay Marriott's pockets, things now that seemed as dead and homeless as their owner. The man across the table from me was named Randall and he was from Central Homicide in Los Angeles. He was a thin quiet man of fifty with smooth creamy gray hair, cold eyes, a distant manner. He wore a dark red tie with black spots on it and the spots kept dancing in front of my eyes. Behind him, beyond the cone of light, two beefy men lounged like bodyguards, each of them watching one of my ears.
    I fumbled a cigarette around in my fingers and lit it and didn't like the taste of it. I sat watching it burn between my fingers. I felt about eighty years old and slipping fast.
    Randall said coldly: "The oftener you tell this story the sillier it sounds. This man Marriott had been negotiating for days, no doubt, about this pay-off and then just a few hours before the final meeting he calls up a perfect stranger and hires him to go with him as a bodyguard."
    "Not exactly as a bodyguard," I said. "I didn't even tell him I had a gun. Just for company."
    "Where did he hear of you?"
    "First he said a mutual friend. Then that he just picked my name out of the book."
    Randall poked gently among the stuff on the table and detached a white card with an air of touching something not quite clean. He pushed it along the wood.
    "He had your card. Your business card."
    I glanced at the card. It had come out of his billfold, together with a number of other cards I hadn't bothered to examine back there in the hollow of Purissima Canyon. It was one of my cards all right. It looked rather dirty at that, for a man like Marriott. There was a round smear across one corner.
    "Sure," I said. "I hand those out whenever I get a chance. Naturally."
    "Marriott let you carry the money," Randall said. "Eight thousand dollars. He was rather a trusting soul."
    I drew on my cigarette and blew the smoke towards the ceiling. The light hurt my eyes. The back of my head ached.
    "I don't have the eight