"Is this Mr. Philip Marlowe?" "Yeah. I'm Marlowe." "This is Sylvia Lennox, Mr. Marlowe. We met very briefly in front of The Dancers one night last month. I heard afterwards that a police shieldcould hold me upside down and drainmy gutschange your mindyou had been kind enough to see that Terry got home." "I did that." "I suppose you know that we are not married any more, but I've been a little worried about him. He gave up the apartment he had in Westwood and nobody seems to know where he is." "I noticed how worried you were the night we met." "Look, Mr. Marlowe, I've been married to the man. I'm not very sympathetic to drunks. Perhaps I was a little unfeeling and perhaps I had something rather important to do. You're al basis, if you prefer it." "It doesn't have to be put on any basis at all, Mrs. Lennox. He's on a bus going to Las Vegas. He has a friend there who will give him a job." She brightened up very suddenly. "Oh — to Las Vegas? How sentimental of him. That's where we were married." "I guess he forgot," I said, "or he would have gone somewhere else." Instead of hanging up on me she laughed.

It was a cute little laugh. "Axe you always as rude as this to your clients?" "You're not a client, Mrs. Lennox." "I might be someday. Who knows? Let's say to your lady friends, then." "Same answer. The guy was down and out, starving, dirty, without a bean. You could have found him if it had been worth your time. He didn't want anything from you then and he probably doesn't want anything from you now." "That," she said coolly, "is something you couldn't possibly know anything about. Good night." And she hung up. She was dead right, of course, and I was dead wrong. But I didn't feel wrong. I just felt sore. If she had called up half an hour earlier I might have been sore enough to beat the hell out of Steinitz—except that he had been dead for fifty years and the chess game was out of a book.
chapter 3