"I promised her," he said simply.
He buttoned his overcoat, cocked his hat jauntily, nodded again and strolled to the door. He went out.
His steps died along the hall.
I went down to the bank and deposited my five-hundred-dollar check and drew out two hundred in currency.
I went upstairs again and sat in my chair thinking about Harry Jones and his story.
It seemed a little too pat. It bad the austere simplicity of fiction rather than the tangled woof of fact.
Captain Gregory ought to have been able to find Mona Mars, if she was that close to his beat. Supposing, that is, he had tried.
I thought about it most of the day.
Nobody came into the office.
Nobody called me on the phone.
It kept on raining.
26
At seven the rain had stopped for a breathing spell, but the gutters were still flooded.
On Santa Monica the water was level with the sidewalk and a thin film of it washed over the top of the curbing.
A traffic cop in shining black rubber from boots to cap sloshed through the flood on his way from the shelter of a sodden awning.
My rubber heels slithered on the sidewalk as I turned into the narrow lobby of the Fulwider Building.
A single drop light burned far back, beyond an open, once gilt elevator.
There was a tarnished and well-missed spittoon on a gnawed rubber mat.
A case of false teeth hung on the mustard-colored wall like a fuse box in a screen porch. I shook the rain off my hat and looked at the building directory beside the case of teeth.
Numbers with names and numbers without names.
Plenty of vacancies or plenty of tenants who wished to remain anonymous.
Painless dentists, shyster detective agencies, small sick businesses that had crawled there to die, mail order schools that would teach you how to become a railroad clerk or a radio technician or a screen writer — if the postal inspectors didn't catch up with them first.
A nasty building.
A building in which the smell of stale cigar butts would be the cleanest odor.
An old man dozed in the elevator, on a ramshackle stool, with a burstout cushion under him.
His mouth was open, his veined temples glistened in the weak light.
He wore a blue uniform coat that fitted him the way a stall fits a horse.
Under that gray trousers with frayed cuffs, white cotton socks and black kid shoes, one of which was slit across a bunion.
On the stool he slept miserably, waiting for a customer.
I went past him softly, the clandestine air of the building prompting me, found the fire door and pulled it open.
The fire stairs hadn't been swept in a month.
Bums had slept on them, eaten on them, left crusts and fragments of greasy newspaper, matches, a gutted imitation-leather pocketbook.
In a shadowy angle against the scribbled wall a pouched ring of pale rubber had fallen and had not been disturbed.
A very nice building.
I came out at the fourth floor sniffing for air.
The hallway had the same dirty spittoon and frayed mat, the same mustard walls, the same memories of low tide. I went down the line and turned a corner.
The name:
"L. D. Walgreen — Insurance," showed on a dark pebbled glass door, on a second dark door, on a third behind which there was a light.
One of the dark doors said:
"Entrance."
A glass transom was open above the lighted door.
Through it the sharp birdlike voice of Harry Jones spoke, saying:
"Canino?. . .
Yeah, I've seen you around somewhere.
Sure."
I froze.
The other voice spoke.
It had a heavy purr, like a small dynamo behind a brick wall. It said: "I thought you would." There was a vaguely sinister note in that voice.
A chair scraped on linoleum, steps sounded, the transom above me squeaked shut.
A shadow melted from behind the pebbled glass.