Ross Thomas - No Questions Asked

“Very much.”

“Maybe when you find out something, you could come to dinner. I’m a pretty good cook. What I’m really saying is that I’m probably not through wanting to talk about it and I just don’t want to go down to a park to find a friendly ear. Maybe... maybe we could even get to be friends. I’ve never been that with a man. You know, just friends.”

“We could try,” I said.

“I’ve talked a lot, haven’t I?”

“Not really.”

“Nothing else you’d like to know?”

“Is there something else you remember about the little man, Felix Ambrose?”

She wrinkled her forehead, trying to remember. “He was about five feet tall and he dressed rather oddly. I mean for out here. He wore one of those old-fashioned salt and pepper suits with a vest and a bow tie and he spoke well, but as if he had somehow trained himself to do it. You know what I mean?”

I nodded and closed my eyes for a moment because something was happening to my memory. Something was poking at it, trying to tear through. Closing my eyes didn’t help so I opened them and said, “Anything else?”

She thought for a moment “Jack called him Doc a couple of times. Not Doctor, but Doc. I didn’t think anything of it then, but I do now.”

The sharp stick that had been poking at my memory tore through. I sighed. “He carried a cane, didn’t he? A silver-headed cane.”

The surprise in her face was real. “Why, yes, he did. I’d almost forgotten. You know him, don’t you?”

“I did a long time ago, but his name isn’t Felix Ambrose, it’s really Harry Amber, although sometimes he’s called Doc Amber because after he got through being a jockey he doped racehorses, and after he got out of jail for doing that, he turned himself into a pretty successful con man down in Florida — Miami mostly, but sometimes Palm Beach.”

“Then it was a fake from the beginning, wasn’t it? This man Ambrose or Amber couldn’t possibly have had a buyer for the book.”

“Not necessarily,” I said. “Doc Amber knows a lot of people. When you told the police about him, did they seem to know who he was?”

“No, they just wanted to know whether I knew how to get in touch with him or where he lived.”

“What’d you tell them?”

“I told them to try the phone book.”

Maude Goodwater and I talked for a little more than an hour. Mostly I listened while she told me how it had been, living with Jack Marsh, and how they had sometimes gone up to San Francisco on weekends, or down to Ensenada, or sometimes they had just stayed home and played records or walked along the beach.

She made it sound so idyllic that I asked her when Jack Marsh had found time to tend to his gambling. She told me that he was a plunger and that when he gambled he usually did it by himself, sometimes spending as much as a week or ten days in Las Vegas. He also liked the tracks. When he lost, which he did often, she said that he hadn’t been very pleasant to be around.

It was shortly after noon when I left her and went out to the Ford van. Guerriero was slumped down in the front seat behind the wheel reading a paperback edition of Camus’s Lyrical and Critical Essays .

“You should read that when you’re about forty,” I told him.

“Why?”

“It confirms what you suspected at twenty.”

He grinned and put the book up behind the sun visor. “Where to?”

“Santa Monica, but first maybe we should get some lunch. Is there any place you can recommend around here?”

He nodded as he started the engine. “There’s a place just down the highway that’s not too bad,” he said. “Some of the help’s kind of pretty anyhow.”

The place he suggested turned out to be the Crazy Horse Saloon, which had been decorated in a halfway serious attempt to make it resemble something out of the wild west or what nearly everybody, after half a century or so of Hollywood westerns, thought a wild west saloon should look like, providing it was air-conditioned. Actually, the hamburgers weren’t at all bad, although I have found that you seldom go wrong if you order a hamburger in Los Angeles, which is more than can be said for the rest of the nation. Also, the pretty girl who served us didn’t at all seem to mind being a waitress and she and Guerriero got to do some friendly flirting.

The sun had burned through the haze and the clouds by the time we got to Santa Monica and the ocean was back to being blue. Some oldsters were walking slowly and carefully beneath the tall palms in the narrow green park along Ocean Avenue. The oldsters looked the way a lot of retired people do — neat and clean and bored stiff.

Guerriero swung left on Santa Monica and we found a place to park without too much trouble in a metered zone near the corner of Second and Santa Monica. There was some traffic, but not too much. A few pedestrians went by, taking their time. It all looked bright and well swept and about half-asleep. I must have shaken my head because Guerriero again gave me his hard, white grin and said, “It’s not quite New York, is it?”

“Not quite.”

“You ought to see it about midnight.”

“What happens then?”

“Well, for excitement you can go out and bay at the moon.”

Most of the tenants of the bank building that Jack Marsh had his office in seemed to be either lawyers or dentists. Marsh’s office was on the sixth floor and I got into the elevator with a cheerful old party who told me that he was on his way up to have his last tooth pulled. When I told him that was too bad he cackled happily and said, “Hell, son, it’s something to do.”

After I let myself in with the key that Maude Goodwater had given me I saw that Jack Marsh had spent some money on furnishing his office. There were two rooms to it, the smaller outer office for his secretary, and the larger inner office where he had done his heavy thinking.

The door that led from the corridor into the suite had only Jack Marsh lettered on it and nothing else. Not Discreet Inquiries Undertaken or Private Investigator or even Walk In. There was a terribly modern desk of pale blond wood for his secretary and a typewriter that was protected with a grey IBM cover. On her desk there was nothing but the phone, a small calendar, and a glass vase, just large enough to hold a single white rose. The rose looked fresh. I looked around the rest of the room. There were three comfortable-looking chairs upholstered in pale tan or beige that were clustered around a coffee table whose glass top was supported by a base of polished chrome. The carpet was dark brown and thick. On the walls were a couple of prints and in the corner a coatrack.

I moved over to the desk and thumbed through the calendar. It was the kind whose pages turned on two metal hasps. I went back to the first of April and worked my way forward. All the notes were written in shorthand except for a few names that didn’t mean anything to me. I wrote the names down on an envelope anyway, feeling a little foolish. After that I tried the desk drawers, but they were locked.

Jack Marsh had done himself well in his own office. There was a nice big polished rosewood desk and behind it a high-backed chair that looked as if it were covered in real leather instead of Naugahyde and in front of the desk were some comfortable-looking chairs expensively covered in something that looked like suede but probably wasn’t. In one corner were three brown metal file cabinets that I didn’t even bother with because they were secured with padlocked metal poles that ran through their drawer handles just like they are at the CIA.

I went around the desk and sat down in the fine big swivel chair and tried the drawers. They weren’t locked. I wasn’t sure what I expected to find that the police hadn’t already found, but I went through the motions anyway. Maybe the police had missed something taped to the bottom of one of the drawers. They hadn’t, of course. They never do.