Women made me sick.
I shaved and showered and dressed and got my raincoat out and went downstairs and looked out of the front door.
Across the street, a hundred feet up, a gray Plymouth sedan was parked.
It was the same one that had tried to trail me around the day before, the same one that I had asked Eddie Mars about.
There might be a cop in it, if a cop had that much time on his hands and wanted to waste it following me around.
Or it might be a smoothie in the detective business trying to get a noseful of somebody else's case in order to chisel a way into it.
Or it might be the Bishop of Bermuda disapproving of my night life.
I went out back and got my convertible from the garage and drove it around front past the gray Plymouth.
There was a small man in it, alone.
He started up after me.
He worked better in the rain.
He stayed close enough so that I couldn't make a short block and leave that before he entered it, and he stayed back far enough so that other cars were between us most of the time.
I drove down to the boulevard and parked in the lot next to my building and came out of there with my raincoat collar up and my hat brim low and the raindrops tapping icily at my face in between.
The Plymouth was across the way at a fireplug.
I walked down to the intersection and crossed with the green light and walked back, close to the edge of the sidewalk and the parked cars.
The Plymouth hadn't moved. Nobody got out of it.
I reached it and jerked open the door on the curb side.
A small bright-eyed man was pressed back into the corner behind the wheel I stood and looked in at him, the rain thumping my back.
His eyes blinked behind the swirling smoke of a cigarette. His hands tapped restlessly on the thin wheel.
I said: "Can't you make your mind up?"
He swallowed and the cigarette bobbed between his lips.
"I don't think I know you," he said, in a tight little voice.
"Marlowe's the name.
The guy you've been trying to follow around for a couple of days."
"I ain't following anybody, doc."
"This jalopy is.
Maybe you can't control it.
Have it your own way.
I'm now going to eat breakfast in the coffee shop across the street, orange juice, bacon and eggs, toast, honey, three or four cups of coffee and a toothpick.
I am then going up to my office, which is on the seventh floor of the building right opposite you.
If you have anything that's worrying you beyond endurance, drop up and chew it over.
I'll only be oiling my machine gun."
I left him blinking and walked away.
Twenty minutes later I was airing the scrubwoman's Soiree d' Amour out of my office and opening up a thick, rough envelope addressed in a fine, old-fashioned, pointed handwriting.
The envelope contained a brief formal note and a large mauve check for five hunched dollars, payable to Philip Marlowe and signed, Guy be Brisay Sternwood, by Vincent Norris.
That made it a nice morning.
I was making out a bank slip when the buzzer told me somebody had entered my two by four reception room.
It was the little man from the Plymouth.
"Fine," I said. "Come in and shed your coat."
He slid past me carefully as I held the door, as carefully as though he feared I might plant a kick in his minute buttocks.
We sat down and faced each other across the desk.
He was a very small man, not more than five feet three and would hardly weigh as much as a butcher's thumb.
He had tight brilliant eyes that wanted to look hard, and looked as hard as oysters on the half shell.
He wore a double-breasted dark gray suit that was too wide in the shoulders and had too much lapel. Over this, open, an Irish tweed coat with some badly worn spots. A lot of foulard tie bulged out and was rainspotted above his crossed lapels.
"Maybe you know me," he said. "I'm Harry Jones."
I said I didn't know him. I pushed a flat tin of cigarettes at him.
His small neat fingers speared one like a trout taking the fly.
He lit it with the desk lighter and waved his hand.
"I been around," he said. "Know the boys and such.
Used to do a little liquor-running down from Hueneme Point.