The air had the faint sweetish smell of old age.
He stared at me silently for a long minute.
He moved a hand, as if to prove to himself that he could still move it, then folded it back over the other. He said lifelessly:
"I didn't ask you to look for my son-in-law, Mr. Marlowe."
"You wanted me to, though."
"I didn't ask you to.
You assume a great deal.
I usually ask for what I want."
I didn't say anything.
"You have been paid," he went on coldly. "The money is of no consequence one way or the other.
I merely feel that you have, no doubt unintentionally, betrayed a trust." He closed his eyes on that.
I said: "Is that all you wanted to see me about?"
He opened his eyes again, very slowly, as though the lids were made of lead.
"I suppose you are angry at that remark," he said.
I shook my head.
"You have an advantage over me, General.
It's an advantage I wouldn't want to take away from you, not a hair of it. It's not much, considering what you have to put up with.
You can say anything you like to me and I wouldn't think of getting angry.
I'd like to offer you your money back.
It may mean nothing to you. It might mean something to me."
"What does it mean to you?"
"It means I have refused payment for an unsatisfactory job.
That's all."
"Do you do many unsatisfactory jobs?"
"A few.
Everyone does."
"Why did you go to see Captain Gregory?"
I leaned back and hung an arm over the back of the chair. I studied his face.
It told me nothing.
I didn't know the answer to his question — no satisfactory answer.
I said: "I was convinced you put those Geiger notes up to me chiefly as a test, and that you were a little afraid Regan might somehow be involved in an attempt to blackmail you.
I didn't know anything about Regan then.
It wasn't until I talked to Captain Gregory that I realized Regan wasn't that sort of guy in all probability."
"That is scarcely answering my question."
I nodded.
"No. That is scarcely answering your question.
I guess I just don't like to admit that I played a hunch.
The morning I was here, after I left you out in the orchid house, Mrs. Regan sent for me.
She seemed to assume I was hired to look for her husband and she didn't seem to like it.
She let drop however that 'they' had found his car in a certain garage.
The 'they' could only be the police. Consequently the police must know something about it.
If they did, the Missing Persons Bureau would be the department that would have the case.
I didn't know whether you had reported it, of course, or somebody else, or whether they had found the car through somebody reporting it abandoned in a garage.
But I know cops, and I knew that if they got that much, they would get a little more — especially as your driver happened to have a police record.
I didn't know how much more they would get.
That started me thinking about the Missing Persons Bureau. What convinced me was something in Mr. Wilde's manner the night we had the conference over at his house about Geiger and so on.
We were alone for a minute and he asked me whether you had told me you were looking for Regan.
I said you had told me you wished you knew where he was and that he was all right.
Wilde pulled his lip in and looked funny.
I knew just as plainly as though he had said it that by 'looking for Regan' he meant using the machinery of the law to look for him.