The Little Sister Read online

  “You don’t suppose anything of the sort. Stop chipping at my emotions. Let’s see a photo of him.”

  She put the handkerchief away in a hurry and dug something else out of her bag. She passed it across the desk. An envelope. Thin, but there could be a couple of snapshots in it. I didn’t look inside.

  “Describe him the way you see him,” I said.

  She concentrated. That gave her a chance to do something with her eyebrows. “He was twenty-eight years old last March. He has light brown hair, much lighter than mine, and lighter blue eyes, and he brushes his hair straight back. He’s very tall, over six feet. But he only weights about a hundred and forty pounds. He’s sort of bony. He used to wear a little blond mustache but mother made him cut it off. She said—”

  “Don’t tell me. The minister needed it to stuff a cushion.”

  “You can’t talk like that about my mother,” she yelped getting pale with rage.

  “Oh stop being silly. There’s a lot of things about you I don’t know. But you can stop pretending to be an Easter lily right now. Does Orrin have any distinguishing marks on him, like moles or scars, or a tattoo of the Twenty-Third Psalm on his chest? And don’t bother to blush.”

  “Well you don’t have to yell at me. Why don’t you look at the photograph?”

  “He probably has his clothes on. After all, you’re his sister. You ought to know.”

  “No he hasn’t,” she said tightly. “He has a little scar on his left hand where he had a wen removed.”

  “What about his habits? What does he do for fun—besides not smoking or drinking or going out with girls?”

  “Why—how did you know that?”

  “Your mother told me.”

  She smiled. I was beginning to wonder if she had one in her. She had very white teeth and she didn’t wave her gums. That was something. “Aren’t you silly,” she said. “He studies a lot and he has a very expensive camera he likes to snap people with when they don’t know. Sometimes it makes them mad. But Orrin says people ought to see themselves as they really are.”

  “Let’s hope it never happens to him,” I said. “What kind of camera is it?”

  “One of those little cameras with a very fine lens. You can take snaps in almost any kind of light. A Leica.”

  I opened the envelope and took out a couple of small prints, very clear. “These weren’t taken with anything like that,” I said.

  “Oh no. Philip took those, Philip Anderson. A boy I was going with for a while.” She paused and sighed. “And I guess that’s really why I came here, Mr. Marlowe. Just because your name’s Philip too.”

  I just said: “Uh-huh,” but I felt touched in some vague sort of way. “What happened to Philip Anderson?”

  “But it’s about Orrin—”

  “I know,” I interrupted. “But what happened to Philip Anderson?”

  “He’s still there in Manhattan.” She looked away. “Mother doesn’t like him very much. I guess you know how it is.”

  “Yes,” I said, “I know how it is. You can cry if you want to. I won’t hold it against you. I’m just a big soft slob myself.”

  I looked at the two prints. One of them was looking down and was no good to me. The other was a fairly good shot of a tall angular bird with narrow-set eyes and a thin straight mouth and a pointed chin. He had the expression I expected to see. If you forgot to wipe the mud off your shoes, he was the boy who would tell you. I laid the photos aside and looked at Orfamay Quest, trying to find something in her face even remotely like his. I couldn’t. Not the slightest trace of family resemblance, which of course meant absolutely nothing. It never has.

  “All right,” I said. “I’ll go down there and take a look. But you ought to be able to guess what’s happened. He’s in a strange city. He’s make good money for a while. More than he’s ever made in his life, perhaps. He’s meeting a kind of people he never met before. And it’s not the kind of town—believe me it isn’t, I know Bay City—that Manhattan, Kansas, is. So he just broke training and he doesn’t want his family to know about it. He’ll straighten out.”

  She just stared at me for a moment in silence, then she shook her head. “No. Orrin’s not the type to do that, Mr. Marlowe.”

  “Anyone is,” I said. “Especially a fellow like Orrin. The small-town sanctimonious type of guy who’s lived his entire life with his mother on his neck and the minister holding his hand. Out here he’s lonely. He’s got dough. He’d like to buy a little sweetness and light, and not the kind that comes through the east window of a church. Not that I have anything against that. I mean he already had enough of that, didn’t he?”

  She nodded her head silently.

  “So he starts to play,” I went on, “and he doesn’t know how to play. That takes experience too. He’s got himself all jammed up with some floozy and a bottle of hootch and what he’s done looks to him as if he’d stolen the bishop’s pants. After all, the guy’s going on twenty-nine years old and if he wants to roll in the gutter that’s his business. He’ll find somebody to blame it on after a while.”

  “I hate to believe you, Mr. Marlowe,” she said slowly. “I’d hate for mother—”

  “Something was said about twenty dollars,” I cut in.

  She looked shocked. “Do I have to pay you now?”

  “What would be the custom in Manhattan, Kansas?”

  “We don’t have any private detectives in Manhattan. Just the regular police. That is, I don’t think we do.”

  She probed in the inside of her tool kit again and dragged out a red change purse and from that she took a number of bills, all neatly folded and separate. Three fives and five ones. There didn’t seem to be much left. She kind of held the purse so I could see how empty it was. Then she straightened the bills out on the desk and put one on top of the other and pushed them across. Very slowly, very sadly, as if she was drowning a favorite kitten.

  “I’ll give you a receipt,” I said.

  “I don’t need a receipt, Mr. Marlowe.”

  “I do. You won’t give me your name and address, so I want something with your name on it.”

  “What for?”

  “To show I’m representing you.” I got the receipt book out and made the receipt and held the book for her to sign the duplicate. She didn’t want to. After a moment reluctantly she took the hard pencil and wrote “Orfamay Quest” in a neat secretary’s writing across the face of the duplicate.

  “Still no address?” I asked.

  “I’d rather not.”

  “Call me any time then. My home number is in the phone book, too. Bristol Apartments, Apartment 428.”

  “I shan’t be very likely to visit you,” she said coldly.

  “I haven’t asked you yet,” I said. “Call me around four if you like. I might have something. And then again I might not.”

  She stood up. “I hope mother won’t think I’ve done wrong,” she said, picking at her lip now with the pale fingernail. “Coming here, I mean.”

  “Just don’t tell me any more of the things your mother won’t like,” I said. “Just leave that part out.”

  “Well really!”

  “And stop saying ‘well really.’ ”

  “I think you are a very offensive person,” she said.

  “No, you don’t. You think I’m cute. And I think you’re a fascinating little liar. You don’t think I’m doing this for any twenty bucks, do you?”

  She gave me a level, suddenly cool stare. “Then why?” Then when I didn’t answer she added, “Because spring is in the air?”

  I still didn’t answer. She blushed a little. Then she giggled.

  I didn’t have the heart to tell her I was just plain bored with doing nothing. Perhaps it was the spring too. And something in her eyes that was much older than Manhattan, Kansas.

  “I think you’re very nice—really,” she said softly. Then she turned quickly and almost ran out of the office. Her steps along the corridor outside made tiny, sharp pecky sounds, ki
nd of like mother drumming on the edge of the dinner table when father tried to promote himself a second piece of pie. And him with no money any more. No nothing. Just sitting in a rocker on the front porch back there in Manhattan, Kansas, with his empty pipe in his mouth. Rocking on the front porch, slow and easy, because when you’ve had a stroke you have to take it slow and easy. And wait for the next one. And the empty pipe in his mouth. No tobacco. Nothing to do but wait.

  I put Orfamay Quest’s twenty hard-earned dollars in an envelope and wrote her name on it and dropped it in the desk drawer. I didn’t like the idea of running around loose with that much currency on me.

  THREE

  You could know Bay City a long time without knowing Idaho Street. And you could know a lot of Idaho Street without knowing Number 449. The block in front of it had a broken paving that had almost gone back to dirt. The warped fence of a lumberyard bordered the cracked sidewalk on the opposite side of the street. Halfway up the block the rusted rails of a spur track turned in to a pair of high, chained wooden gates that seem not to have been opened for twenty years. Little boys with chalk had been writing and drawing pictures on the gates and all along the fence.

  Number 449 had a shallow, paintless front porch on which five wood and cane rockers loafed dissolutely, held together with wire and the moisture of the beach air. The green shades over the lower windows of the house were two thirds down and full of cracks. Beside the front door there was a large printed sign “No Vacancies.” That had been there a long time too. It had got faded and fly-specked. The door opened on a long hall from which stairs went up a third of the way back. To the right there was a narrow shelf with a chained, indelible pencil hanging beside it. There was a push button and a yellow and black sign above which read “Manager,” and was held up by three thumbtacks no two of which matched. There was a pay phone on the opposite wall.

  I pushed the bell. It rang somewhere near by but nothing happened. I rang it again. The same nothing happened. I prowled along to a door with a black and white metal sign on it— “Manager.” I knocked on that. Then I kicked it. Nobody seemed to mind my kicking it.

  I went back out of the house and down around the side where a narrow concrete walk led to the service entrance. It looked as if it was in the right place to belong to the manager’s apartment. The rest of the house would be just rooms. There was a dirty garbage pail on the small porch and a wooden box full of liquor bottles. Behind the screen the back door of the house was open. It was gloomy inside. I put my face against the screen and peered in. Through the open inner door beyond the service porch I could see a straight chair with a man’s coat hanging over it and in the chair a man in shirtsleeves with his hat on. He was a small man. I couldn’t see what he was doing, but he seemed to be sitting at the end of the built-in breakfast table in the breakfast nook.

  I banged on the screen door. The man paid no attention. I banged again, harder. This time he tilted his chair back and showed me a small pale face with a cigarette in it. “Whatcha want?” he barked.

  “Manager.”

  “Not in, bub.”

  “Who are you?”

  “What’s it to you?”

  “I want a room.”

  “No vacancies, bub. Can’t you read large print?”

  “I happen to have different information,” I said.

  “Yeah?” He shook ash from his cigarette by flicking it with a nail without removing it from his small sad mouth. “Go fry your head in it.”

  He tilted his chair forward again and went on doing whatever it was he was doing.

  I made noise getting down off the porch and none whatever coming back up on it. I felt the screen door carefully. It was hooked. With the open blade of a penknife I lifted the hook and eased it out of the eye. It made a small tinkle but louder tinkling sounds were being made beyond, in the kitchen.

  I stepped into the house, crossed the service porch, went through the door into the kitchen. The little man was too busy to notice me. The kitchen had a three-burner gas stove, a few shelves of greasy dishes, a chipped icebox and the breakfast nook. The table in the breakfast nook was covered with money. Most of it was paper, but there was silver also, in all sizes up to dollars. The little man was counting and stacking it and making entries in a small book. He wetted his pencil without bothering the cigarette that lived in his face.

  There must have been several hundred dollars on that table.

  “Rent day?” I asked genially.

  The small man turned very suddenly. For a moment he smiled and said nothing. It was the smile of a man whose mind is not smiling. He removed the stub of cigarette from his mouth, dropped it on the floor and stepped on it. He reached a fresh one out of his shirt and put it in the same hole in his face and started fumbling for a match.

  “You came in nice,” he said pleasantly.

  Finding no match, he turned casually in his chair and reached into a pocket of his coat. Something heavy knocked against the wood of the chair. I got hold of his wrist before the heavy thing came out of the pocket. He threw his weight backwards and the pocket of the coat started to lift towards me. I yanked the chair out from under him.

  He sat down hard on the floor and knocked his head against the end of the breakfast table. That didn’t keep him from trying to kick me in the groin. I stepped back with his coat and took a .38 out of the pocket he had been playing with.

  “Don’t sit on the floor just to be chummy,” I said.

  He got up slowly, pretending to be groggier than he was. His hand fumbled at the back of his collar and light winked on metal as his arm swept toward me. He was a game little rooster.

  I sideswiped his jaw with his own gun and he sat down on the floor again. I stepped on the hand that held the knife. His faced twisted with pain but he didn’t make a sound. So I kicked the knife into a corner. It was a long thin knife and it looked very sharp.

  “You ought to be ashamed of yourself,” I said. “Pulling guns and knives on people that are just looking for a place to live. Even for these times that’s out of line.”

  He held his hurt hand between his knees and squeezed it and began to whistle through his teeth. The slap on the jaw didn’t seem to have hurt him. “O.K.,” he said, “O.K. I ain’t supposed to be perfect. Take the dough and beat it. But don’t ever think we won’t catch up with you.”

  I looked at the collection of small bills and medium bills and silver on the table. “You must meet a lot of sales resistance, the weapons you carry,” I told him. I walked across to the inner door and tried it. It was not locked. I turned back.

  “I’ll leave your gun in the mailbox,” I said. “Next time ask to see the buzzer.”

  He was still whistling gently between his teeth and holding his hands. He gave me a narrow, thoughtful eye, then shoveled the money into a shabby briefcase and slipped its catch. He took his hat off, straightened it around, put it back jauntily on the back of his head and gave me a quiet efficient smile.

  “Never mind about the heater,” he said. “The town’s full of old iron. But you could leave the skiv with Clausen. I’ve done quite a bit of work on it to get it in shape.”

  “And with it?” I said.

  “Could be.” He flicked a finger at me airily. “Maybe we meet again some day soon. When I got a friend with me.”

  “Tell him to wear a clean shirt,” I said. “And lend you one.”

  “My, my,” the little man said chidingly. “How tough we get how quick once we get that badge pinned on.”

  He went softly past me and down the wooden steps from the back porch. His footsteps tapped to the street and faded. They sounded very much like Orfamay’s heels clicking along the corridor in my office building. And for some reason I had that empty feeling of having miscounted the trumps. No reason for it at all. Maybe it was the steely quality about the little man. No whimper, no bluster, just the smile, the whistling between the teeth, the light voice and the unforgetting eyes.

  I went over and picked up the knife.
The blade was long and round and thin, like a rattailed file that has been ground smooth. The handle and guard were lightweight plastic and seemed all one piece. I held the knife by the handle and gave it a quick flip at the table. The blade came loose and quivered in the wood.

  I took a deep breath and slid the handle down over the end again and worked the blade loose from the table. A curious knife, with design and purpose in it, and neither of them agreeable.

  I opened the door beyond the kitchen and went through it with the gun and knife in one hand.

  It was a wall-bed living room, with the wall bed down and rumpled. There was an overstuffed chair with a hole burnt in the arm. A high oak desk with tilted doors like old-fashioned cellar doors stood against the wall by the front window. Near this there was a studio couch and on the studio couch lay a man. His feet hung over the end of the couch in knobby gray socks. His head had missed the pillow by two feet. It was nothing much to miss from the color of the slip on it. The upper part of him was contained in a colorless shirt and a threadbare gray coatsweater. His mouth was open and his face was shining with sweat and he breathed like an old Ford with a leaky head gasket. On a table beside him was a plate full of cigarette stubs, some of which had a homemade look. On the floor a near full gin bottle and a cup that seemed to have contained coffee but not at all recently. The room was full mostly of gin and bad air, but there was also a reminiscence of marijuana smoke.

  I opened a window and leaned my forehead against the screen to get a little cleaner air into my lungs and looked out into the street. Two kids were wheeling bicycles along the lumberyard fence, stopping from time to time to study the examples of restroom art on the boarding. Nothing else moved in the neighborhood. Not even a dog. Down at the corner was dust in the air as though a car had passed that way.

  I went over to the desk. Inside it was the house register, so I leafed back until I came to the name “Orrin P. Quest,” written in a sharp meticulous handwriting, and the number 214 added in pencil by another hand that was by no means sharp or meticulous. I followed on through to the end of the register but found no new registration for Room 214. A party named G. W. Hicks had Room 215. I shut the register in the desk and crossed to the couch. The man stopped his snoring and bubbling and threw his right arm across his body as if he thought he was making a speech. I leaned down and gripped his nose tight between my first and second fingers and stuffed a handful of his sweater into his mouth. He stopped snoring and jerked his eyes open. They were glazed and bloodshot. He struggled against my hand. When I was sure he was fully awake I let go of him, picked the bottle full of gin off the floor and poured some into a glass that lay on its side near the bottle. I showed the glass to the man.