"Chandler, Raymond - Little Sister, The" - читать интересную книгу автора (Chandler Raymond)

"Did it occur to you to ask the police about that?"
"I wouldn't dare ask the police. Orrin would never forgive me. He's difficult enough at the best of times. Our family--" She hesitated and there was something behind her eyes she tried not to have there. So she went on breathlessly: "Our family's not the kind of family--"
"Look," I said wearily, "I'm not talking about the guy lifting a wallet. I'm talking about him getting knocked down by a car and losing his memory or being too badly hurt to talk."
She gave me a level look which was not too admiring. "If it was anything like that, we'd know," she said. "Everybody has things in their pockets to tell who they are."
"Sometimes all they have left is the pockets."
"Are you trying to scare me, Mr. Marlowe?"
"If I am, I'm certainly getting nowhere fast. Just what do you think might have happened?"
She put her slim forefinger to her lips and touched it very carefully with the tip of that tongue. "I guess if I knew that I wouldn't have to come and see you. How much would you charge to find him?"
I didn't answer for a long moment, then I said: "You mean alone, without telling anybody?"
"Yes. I mean alone, without telling anybody."
"Uh-huh. Well that depends. I told you what my rates were."
She clasped her hands on the edge of the desk and squeezed them together hard. She had about the most meaningless set of gestures I had ever laid eyes on. "I thought you being a detective and all you could find him right away," she said. "I couldn't possibly afford more than twenty dollars. I've got to buy my meals here and my hotel and the train going back and you know the hotel is so terribly expensive and the food on the train--"
"Which one are you staying at?"
"I--I'd rather not tell you, if you don't mind."
"Why?"
"I'd just rather not. I'm terribly afraid of Orrin's temper. And, well I can always call you up, can't I?"
"Uh-huh. Just what is it you're scared of, besides Orrin's temper, Miss Quest?" I had let my pipe go out. I struck a match and held it to the bowl, watching her over it.
"Isn't pipe-smoking a very dirty habit?" she asked.
"Probably," I said. "But it would take more than twenty bucks to have me drop it. And don't try to side-step my questions."
"You can't talk to me like that," she flared up. "Pipesmoking is a dirty habit. Mother never let father smoke in the house, even the last two years after he had his stroke. He used to sit with that empty pipe in his mouth sometimes. But she didn't like him to do that really. We owed a lot of money too and she said she couldn't afford to give him money for useless things like tobacco. The church needed it much more than he did."
"I'm beginning to get it," I said slowly. "Take a family like yours and somebody in it has to be the dark meat."
She stood up sharply and clasped the first-aid kit to her body. "I don't like you," she said. "I don't think I'm going to employ you. If you're insinuating that Orrin has done something wrong, well I can assure you that it's not Orrin who's the black sheep of our family."
I didn't move an eyelash. She swung around and marched to the door and put her hand on the knob and then she swung around again and marched back and suddenly began to cry. I reacted to that just the way a stuffed fish reacts to cut bait. She got out her little handkerchief and tickled the corners of her eyes.
"And now I suppose you'll call the p-police," she said with a catch in her voice. "And the Manhattan p-paper will hear all about it and they'll print something n-nasty about us."
"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 weighs 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 making 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."