chapter 51

Sewell Endicott said he was working late and I could drop around in the evening about seven-thirty. He had a corner office with a blue carpet, a red mahogany desk with carved corners, very old and obviously very valuable, the usual glass-front bookshelves of mustardyellow legal books, the usual cartoons by Spy of famous English judges, and a large portrait of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes on the south wall, alone. Endicótt's chair was quilted in black leather. Near him was an open rolltop desk jammed with papers. It was an office no decorator had had a chance to pansy up. He was in his shirtsleeves and he looked tired, but he had that kind of face. He was smoking one of his tasteless cigarettes. Ashes from it had fallen on his loosened tie. His limp black hair was all over the place. He stared at me silently after I sat down. Then he said: "You're a stubborn son of a bitch, if ever I met one. Don't tell me you're still digging into that mess." "Something worries me a little. Would it be all right now if I assumed you were representing Mr. Harlan Potter when you came to see me in the birdcage?" He nodded. I touched the side of my face gently with my fingertips. It was all healed up and the swelling was gone, but one of the blows must have damaged a nerve. Part of the cheek was still numb. couldn't let it alone. It would get all right in time. "And that when you went to Otatoclán you were temporarily deputized as a member of the D.A.'s staff?" "Yes, but don't rub it in, Marlowe. It was a valuable connection. Perhaps I gave it too much weight." "Still is, I hope." He shook his head. "No. That's finished. Mr. Potter does his legal business through San Francisco, New York, and Washington firms." "I guess he hates my guts—if he thinks about it." Endicott smiled. "Curiously enough, he put all the blame on his son-in-law, Dr. Loring. A man like Harlan Potter has to blame somebody. He couldn't possibly be wrong himself. He felt that if Loring hadn't been feeding the woman dangerous drugs, none of it would have happened." "He's wrong. You saw Terry Lennox's body in Otatoclan, didn't you?" "I did indeed. In the back of a cabinet maker's shop. They have no proper mortuary there. He was making the coffin too. The body was ice-cold. I saw the wound in the temple. There's no question of identity, if you had any ideas along those lines." "No, Mr. Endicott, I didn't, because in his case it could hardly be possible. He was disguised a little though, wasn't he?" "Face and hands darkened, hair dyed black. But the scars were still obvious. And the fingerprints, of course, were easily checked from things he had handled at home." "What kind of police force do they have down there?" "Primitive. The jefe could just about read and write, But he knew about fingerprints. It was hot weather, you know. Quite hot." He frowned and took his cigarette out of his mouth and dropped it negligently into an enormous black basalt sort of receptade. "They had to get ice from the hotel," he added. "Plenty of ice." He looked at me again. "No embalming there. Things have to move fast." "You speak Spanish, Mr. Endicott?" "Only a few words. The hotel manager interpreted." He smiled. "A well-dressed smoothie, that fellow. Looked tough, but he was very polite and helpful. It was all over in no time." "I had a letter from Terry. I guess Mr. Potter would know about it. I told his daughter, Mrs. Loring. I showed it to her. There was a portrait of Madison in it." "A what?" "Five-thousand-dollar bill." He raised his eyebrows. "Really. Well, he could certainly afford it. His wife gave him a cool quarter of a million the second time they were married. I've an idea he meant to go to Mexico to live anyhow — quite apart from what happened. I don't know what happened to the money. I wasn't in on that." "Here's the letter, Mr. Endicott, if you care to read it." I took it out and gave it to him. He read it carefully, the way lawyers read everything. He put it down on the desk and leaned back and stared at nothing. "A little literary, isn't it?" he said quietly. "I wonder why he did it." "Killed himself, confessed, or wrote me the letter?" "Confessed and killed himself, of course," Endicott said sharply. "The letter is understandable. At least you got a reasonable recompense for what you did for him—and since. "The mailbox bothers me," I said. "Where he says there was a mailbox on the street under his window and the hotel waiter was going to hold his letter up before he mailed it, so Terry could see that it was mailed." Something in Endicott's eyes went to sleep. "Why?" he asked indifferently. He picked another of his filtered cigarettes out of a square box. I held my lighter across the desk for him. "They wouldn't have one in a place like Otatodán," I said. "Go on." "I didn't get it at first. Then I looked the place up. It's a mere village. Population say ten or twelve thousand. One street partly paved. The jefe has a Model A Ford as an official car. The post office is in the corner of a store, the carnicería, the butcher shop. One hotel, a couple of cantinas, no good roads, a small airfield. There's hunting around there in the mountains — lots of it. Hence the airfield. Only decent way to get there." "Go on. I know about the hunting." "So there's a mailbox on the street. Like there's a race course and a dog track and a golf course and a jai alai fronton and park with a colored fountain and a bandstand." "Then he made a mistake," Endicott said coldly. "Perhaps it was something that looked like a mailbox to him—say a trash receptacle." I stood up. I reached for the letter and refolded it and put it back in my pocket. "A trash receptacle," I said. "Sure, that's it. Painted with the Mexican colors,, green, white, red, and a sign on it stenciled in large clear print: KEEP OUR CITY CLEAN. In Spanish, of course. And lying around it seven mangy dogs." "Don't get cute, Marlowe." "Sorry if I let my brains show. Another small point I have already raised with Randy Starr. How come the letter got mailed at all? According to the letter the method was prearranged. So somebody told him about the mailbox. So somebody lied. So somebody mailed the letter with five grand in it just the same. Intriguing, don't you agree?" He puffed smoke and watched it float away. "What's your conclusion—and why ring Starr in on it?" "Starr and a heel named Menendez, now removed from our midst, were pals of Terry's in the British Army. They are wrong gees in a way — I should say in almost every way — but they still have room for personal pride and so on. There was a cover-up here engineered for obvious reasons. There was another sort of cover-up in Otatoclán, for entirely different reasons." "What's your conclusion?" he asked me again and much more sharply. "What's yours?" He didn't answer me. So I thanked him for his time and left. He was frowning as I opened the door, but I thought it was an honest frown of puzzlement. Or maybe he was trying to remember how it looked outside the hotel and whether there was a mailbox there. It was another wheel to start turning—no more. It turned for a solid month before anything came up. Then on a certain Friday morning I found a stranger waiting for me in my office. He was a well-dressed Mexican or Suramericano of some sort. He sat by the open window smoking a brown cigarette that smelled strong. He was tall and very slender and very elegant, with a neat dark mustache and dark hair, rather longer than we wear it, and a fawn-colored suit of some loosely woven material. He wore those green sunglasses. He stood up politely. "Se.or Marlowe?" "What can I do for you?" He handed me a folded paper. "Un aviso de parte del Se.or Starr en Las Vegas, se.or. Habla Usted Espaflol?" "Yeah, but not fast. English would be better." "English then," he said. "It is all the same to me." I took the paper and read it. "This introduces Cisco Maioranos, a friend of mine. I think he can fix you up. S." "Let's go inside, Se.or Maioranos," I said. I held the door open for him. He smelled of perfume as he went by. His eyebrows were awfully damned dainty too. But he probably wasn't as dainty as he looked because there were knife scars on both sides of his face.