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“I swan,” I said.
Old Nosey said to Randall sharply: “Let me see your badge, young man. This young man had a whiskey breath on him t’other day. I ain’t never rightly trusted him.”
Randall took a gold and blue enamel badge out of his pocket and showed it to her.
“Looks like real police all right,” she admitted. “Well, ain’t nothing happened over Sunday. She went out for liquor. Come back with two square bottles.”
“Gin,” I said. “That just gives you an idea. Nice folks don’t drink gin.”
“Nice folks don’t drink no liquor at all,” Old Nosey said pointedly.
“Yeah,” I said. “Come Monday, that being today, and the mailman went by again. This time she was really sore.”
“Kind of smart guesser, ain’t you, young man? Can’t wait for folks to get their mouth open hardly.”
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Morrison. This is an important matter to us — “
“This here young man don’t seem to have no trouble keepin’ his mouth in place.”
“He’s married,” I said. “He’s had practice.”
Her face turned a shade of violet that reminded me, unpleasantly, of cyanosis. “Get out of my house afore I call the police!” she shouted.
“There is a police officer standing before you, madam,” Randall said shortly. “You are in no danger.”
“That’s right there is,” she admitted. The violet tint began to fade from her face. “I don’t take to this man.”
“You have company, madam. Mrs. Florian didn’t get her registered letter today either — is that it?”
“No.” Her voice was sharp and short. Her eyes were furtive. She began to talk rapidly, too rapidly. “People was there last night. I didn’t even see them. Folks took me to the picture show. Just as we got back — no, just after they driven off — a car went away from next door. Fast without any lights. I didn’t see the number.”
She gave me a sharp sidelong look from her furtive eyes. I wondered why they were furtive. I wandered to the window and lifted the lace curtain. An official blue-gray uniform was nearing the house. The man wearing it wore a heavy leather bag over his shoulder and had a vizored cap.
I turned away from the window, grinning.
“You’re slipping,” I told her rudely. “You’ll be playing shortstop in a Class C league next year.”
“That’s not smart,” Randall said coldly.
“Take a look out of the window.”
He did and his face hardened. He stood quite still looking at Mrs. Morrison. He was waiting for something, a sound like nothing else on earth. It came in a moment.
It was the sound of something being pushed into the front door mail slot. It might have been a handbill, but it wasn’t. There were steps going back down the walk, then along the street, and Randall went to the window again. The mailman didn’t stop at Mrs. Florian’s house. He went on, his blue-gray back even and calm under the heavy leather pouch.
Randall turned his head and asked with deadly politeness: “How many mail deliveries a morning are there in this district, Mrs. Morrison?”
She tried to face it out. “Just the one,” she said sharply — “one mornings and one afternoons.”
Her eyes darted this way and that. The rabbit chin was trembling on the edge of something. Her hands clutched at the rubber frill that bordered the blue and white apron.
“The morning delivery just went by,” Randall said dreamily. “Registered mail comes by the regular mailman?”
“She always got it Special Delivery,” the old voice cracked.
“Oh. But on Saturday she ran out and spoke to the mailman when he didn’t stop at her house. And you said nothing about Special Delivery.”
It was nice to watch him working — on somebody else.
Her mouth opened wide and her teeth had the nice shiny look that comes from standing all night in a glass of solution. Then suddenly she made a squawking noise and threw the apron over her head and ran out of the room.
He watched the door through which she had gone. It was beyond the arch. He smiled. It was a rather tired smile.
“Neat, and not a bit gaudy,” I said. “Next time you play the tough part. I don’t like being rough with old ladies — even if they are lying gossips.”
He went on smiling. “Same old story.” He shrugged. “Police work. Phooey. She started with facts, as she knew facts. But they didn’t come fast enough or seem exciting enough. So she tried a little lily-gilding.”
He turned and we went out into the hall. A faint noise of sobbing came from the back of the house. For some patient man, long dead, that had been the weapon of final defeat, probably. To me it was just an old woman sobbing, but nothing to be pleased about.
We went quietly out of the house, shut the front door quietly and made sure that the screen door didn’t bang. Randall put his hat on and sighed. Then he shrugged, spreading his cool well-kept hands out far from his body. There was a thin sound of sobbing still audible, back in the house.
The mailman’s back was two houses down the street.
“Police work,” Randall said quietly, under his breath, and twisted his mouth.
We walked across the space to the next house. Mrs. Florian hadn’t even taken the wash in. It still jittered, stiff and yellowish on the wire line in the side yard. We went up on the steps and rang the bell. No answer. We knocked. No answer.
“It was unlocked last time,” I said.
He tried the door, carefully screening the movement with his body. It was locked this time. We went down off the porch and walked around the house on the side away from Old Nosey. The back porch had a hooked screen. Randall knocked on that. Nothing happened. He came back off the two almost paintless wooden steps and went along the disused and overgrown driveway and opened up a wooden garage. The doors creaked. The garage was full of nothing. There were a few battered old-fashioned trunks not worth breaking up for firewood. Rusted gardening tools, old cans, plenty of those, in cartons. On each side of the doors, in the angle of the wall a nice fat black widow spider sat in its casual untidy web. Randall picked up a piece of wood and killed them absently. He shut the garage up again, walked back along the weedy drive to the front and up the steps of the house on the other side from Old Nosey. Nobody answered his ring or knock.
He came back slowly, looking across the street over his shoulder.
“Back door’s easiest,” he said. “The old hen next door won’t do anything about it now. She’s done too much lying.”
He went up the two back steps and slide a knife blade neatly into the crack of the door and lifted the hook. That put us in the screen porch. It was full of cans and some of the cans were full of flies.
“Jesus, what a way to live!” he said.
The back door was easy. A five-cent skeleton key turned the lock. But there was a bolt.
“This jars me,” I said. “I guess she’s beat it. She wouldn’t lock up like this. She’s too sloppy.”
“Your hat’s older than mine,” Randall said. He looked at the glass panel in the back door. “Lend it to me to push the glass in. Or shall we do a neat job?”
“Kick it in. Who cares around here?”
“Here goes.”
He stepped back and lunged at the lock with his leg parallel to the floor. Something cracked idly and the door gave a few inches. We heaved it open and picked a piece of jagged cast metal off the linoleum and laid it politely on the woodstone drainboard, beside about nine empty gin bottles.
Flies buzzed against the closed windows of the kitchen. The place reeked. Randall stood in the middle of the floor, giving it the careful eye.
Then he walked softly through the swing door without touching it except low down with his toe and using that to push it far enough back so that it stayed open. The living room was much as I had remembered it. The radio was off.
“That’s a nice radio,” Randall said. “Cost money. If it’s paid for. Here’s something.”
He went down on one knee and looked along the carpet. Then he went to the side of the radio and moved a loose cord with his foot. The plug came into view. He bent and studied the knobs on the radio front.
“Yeah,” he said. “Smooth and rather large. Pretty smart, that. You don’t get prints on a light cord, do you?”
“Shove it in and see if it’s turned on.”
He reached around and shoved it into the plug in the baseboard. The light went on at once. We waited. The thing hummed for a while and then suddenly a heavy volume of sound began to pour out of the speaker. Randall jumped at the cord and yanked it loose again. The sound was snapped off sharp.
When he straightened his eyes were full of light.
We went swiftly into the bedroom. Mrs. Jessie Pierce Florian lay diagonally across the bed, in a rumpled cotton house dress, with her head close to one end of the footboard. The corner post of the bed was smeared darkly with something the flies liked.
She had been dead long enough.
Randall didn’t touch her. He stared down at her for a long time and then looked at me with a wolfish baring of his teeth.
“Brains on her face,” he said. “That seems to be the theme song of this case. Only this was done with just a pair of hands. But Jesus what a pair of hands. Look at the neck bruises, the spacing of the finger marks.”
“You look at them,” I said. I turned away. “Poor old Nulty. It’s not just a shine killing any more.”
31
32
33
Old Nosey said to Randall sharply: “Let me see your badge, young man. This young man had a whiskey breath on him t’other day. I ain’t never rightly trusted him.”
Randall took a gold and blue enamel badge out of his pocket and showed it to her.
“Looks like real police all right,” she admitted. “Well, ain’t nothing happened over Sunday. She went out for liquor. Come back with two square bottles.”
“Gin,” I said. “That just gives you an idea. Nice folks don’t drink gin.”
“Nice folks don’t drink no liquor at all,” Old Nosey said pointedly.
“Yeah,” I said. “Come Monday, that being today, and the mailman went by again. This time she was really sore.”
“Kind of smart guesser, ain’t you, young man? Can’t wait for folks to get their mouth open hardly.”
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Morrison. This is an important matter to us — “
“This here young man don’t seem to have no trouble keepin’ his mouth in place.”
“He’s married,” I said. “He’s had practice.”
Her face turned a shade of violet that reminded me, unpleasantly, of cyanosis. “Get out of my house afore I call the police!” she shouted.
“There is a police officer standing before you, madam,” Randall said shortly. “You are in no danger.”
“That’s right there is,” she admitted. The violet tint began to fade from her face. “I don’t take to this man.”
“You have company, madam. Mrs. Florian didn’t get her registered letter today either — is that it?”
“No.” Her voice was sharp and short. Her eyes were furtive. She began to talk rapidly, too rapidly. “People was there last night. I didn’t even see them. Folks took me to the picture show. Just as we got back — no, just after they driven off — a car went away from next door. Fast without any lights. I didn’t see the number.”
She gave me a sharp sidelong look from her furtive eyes. I wondered why they were furtive. I wandered to the window and lifted the lace curtain. An official blue-gray uniform was nearing the house. The man wearing it wore a heavy leather bag over his shoulder and had a vizored cap.
I turned away from the window, grinning.
“You’re slipping,” I told her rudely. “You’ll be playing shortstop in a Class C league next year.”
“That’s not smart,” Randall said coldly.
“Take a look out of the window.”
He did and his face hardened. He stood quite still looking at Mrs. Morrison. He was waiting for something, a sound like nothing else on earth. It came in a moment.
It was the sound of something being pushed into the front door mail slot. It might have been a handbill, but it wasn’t. There were steps going back down the walk, then along the street, and Randall went to the window again. The mailman didn’t stop at Mrs. Florian’s house. He went on, his blue-gray back even and calm under the heavy leather pouch.
Randall turned his head and asked with deadly politeness: “How many mail deliveries a morning are there in this district, Mrs. Morrison?”
She tried to face it out. “Just the one,” she said sharply — “one mornings and one afternoons.”
Her eyes darted this way and that. The rabbit chin was trembling on the edge of something. Her hands clutched at the rubber frill that bordered the blue and white apron.
“The morning delivery just went by,” Randall said dreamily. “Registered mail comes by the regular mailman?”
“She always got it Special Delivery,” the old voice cracked.
“Oh. But on Saturday she ran out and spoke to the mailman when he didn’t stop at her house. And you said nothing about Special Delivery.”
It was nice to watch him working — on somebody else.
Her mouth opened wide and her teeth had the nice shiny look that comes from standing all night in a glass of solution. Then suddenly she made a squawking noise and threw the apron over her head and ran out of the room.
He watched the door through which she had gone. It was beyond the arch. He smiled. It was a rather tired smile.
“Neat, and not a bit gaudy,” I said. “Next time you play the tough part. I don’t like being rough with old ladies — even if they are lying gossips.”
He went on smiling. “Same old story.” He shrugged. “Police work. Phooey. She started with facts, as she knew facts. But they didn’t come fast enough or seem exciting enough. So she tried a little lily-gilding.”
He turned and we went out into the hall. A faint noise of sobbing came from the back of the house. For some patient man, long dead, that had been the weapon of final defeat, probably. To me it was just an old woman sobbing, but nothing to be pleased about.
We went quietly out of the house, shut the front door quietly and made sure that the screen door didn’t bang. Randall put his hat on and sighed. Then he shrugged, spreading his cool well-kept hands out far from his body. There was a thin sound of sobbing still audible, back in the house.
The mailman’s back was two houses down the street.
“Police work,” Randall said quietly, under his breath, and twisted his mouth.
We walked across the space to the next house. Mrs. Florian hadn’t even taken the wash in. It still jittered, stiff and yellowish on the wire line in the side yard. We went up on the steps and rang the bell. No answer. We knocked. No answer.
“It was unlocked last time,” I said.
He tried the door, carefully screening the movement with his body. It was locked this time. We went down off the porch and walked around the house on the side away from Old Nosey. The back porch had a hooked screen. Randall knocked on that. Nothing happened. He came back off the two almost paintless wooden steps and went along the disused and overgrown driveway and opened up a wooden garage. The doors creaked. The garage was full of nothing. There were a few battered old-fashioned trunks not worth breaking up for firewood. Rusted gardening tools, old cans, plenty of those, in cartons. On each side of the doors, in the angle of the wall a nice fat black widow spider sat in its casual untidy web. Randall picked up a piece of wood and killed them absently. He shut the garage up again, walked back along the weedy drive to the front and up the steps of the house on the other side from Old Nosey. Nobody answered his ring or knock.
He came back slowly, looking across the street over his shoulder.
“Back door’s easiest,” he said. “The old hen next door won’t do anything about it now. She’s done too much lying.”
He went up the two back steps and slide a knife blade neatly into the crack of the door and lifted the hook. That put us in the screen porch. It was full of cans and some of the cans were full of flies.
“Jesus, what a way to live!” he said.
The back door was easy. A five-cent skeleton key turned the lock. But there was a bolt.
“This jars me,” I said. “I guess she’s beat it. She wouldn’t lock up like this. She’s too sloppy.”
“Your hat’s older than mine,” Randall said. He looked at the glass panel in the back door. “Lend it to me to push the glass in. Or shall we do a neat job?”
“Kick it in. Who cares around here?”
“Here goes.”
He stepped back and lunged at the lock with his leg parallel to the floor. Something cracked idly and the door gave a few inches. We heaved it open and picked a piece of jagged cast metal off the linoleum and laid it politely on the woodstone drainboard, beside about nine empty gin bottles.
Flies buzzed against the closed windows of the kitchen. The place reeked. Randall stood in the middle of the floor, giving it the careful eye.
Then he walked softly through the swing door without touching it except low down with his toe and using that to push it far enough back so that it stayed open. The living room was much as I had remembered it. The radio was off.
“That’s a nice radio,” Randall said. “Cost money. If it’s paid for. Here’s something.”
He went down on one knee and looked along the carpet. Then he went to the side of the radio and moved a loose cord with his foot. The plug came into view. He bent and studied the knobs on the radio front.
“Yeah,” he said. “Smooth and rather large. Pretty smart, that. You don’t get prints on a light cord, do you?”
“Shove it in and see if it’s turned on.”
He reached around and shoved it into the plug in the baseboard. The light went on at once. We waited. The thing hummed for a while and then suddenly a heavy volume of sound began to pour out of the speaker. Randall jumped at the cord and yanked it loose again. The sound was snapped off sharp.
When he straightened his eyes were full of light.
We went swiftly into the bedroom. Mrs. Jessie Pierce Florian lay diagonally across the bed, in a rumpled cotton house dress, with her head close to one end of the footboard. The corner post of the bed was smeared darkly with something the flies liked.
She had been dead long enough.
Randall didn’t touch her. He stared down at her for a long time and then looked at me with a wolfish baring of his teeth.
“Brains on her face,” he said. “That seems to be the theme song of this case. Only this was done with just a pair of hands. But Jesus what a pair of hands. Look at the neck bruises, the spacing of the finger marks.”
“You look at them,” I said. I turned away. “Poor old Nulty. It’s not just a shine killing any more.”
31
A shiny black bug with a pink head and pink spots on it crawled slowly along the polished top of Randall’s desk and waved a couple of feelers around, as if testing the breeze for a takeoff. It wobbled a little as it crawled, like an old woman carrying too many parcels. A nameless dick sat at another desk and kept talking into an old-fashioned hushaphone telephone mouthpiece, so that his voice sounded like someone whispering in a tunnel. He talked with his eyes half closed, a big scarred hand on the desk in front of him holding a burning cigarette between the knuckles of the first and second fingers.
The bug reached the end of Randall’s desk and marched straight off into the air. It fell on its back on the floor, waved a few thin worn legs in the air feebly and then played dead. Nobody cared, so it began waving the legs again and finally struggled over on its face. It trundled slowly off into a corner towards nothing, going nowhere.
The police loudspeaker box on the wall put out a bulletin about a holdup on San Pedro south of Forty-fourth. The holdup was a middle-aged man wearing a dark gray suit and gray felt hat. He was last seen running east on Forty-fourth and then dodging between two houses. “Approach carefully,” the announcer said. “This suspect is armed with a .32 caliber revolver and has just held up the proprietor of a Greek restaurant at Number 3966 South San Pedro.”
A flat click and the announcer went off the air and another one came on and started to read a hot car list, in a slow monotonous voice that repeated everything twice.
The door opened and Randall came in with a sheaf of letter size typewritten sheets. He walked briskly across the room and sat down across the desk from me and pushed some papers at me.
“Sign four copies,” he said.
I signed four copies.
The pink bug reached a corner of the room and put feelers out for a good spot to take off from. It seemed a little discouraged. It went along the baseboard towards another corner. I lit a cigarette and the dick at the hushaphone abruptly got up and went out of the office.
Randall leaned back in his chair, looking just the same as ever, just as cool, just as smooth, just as ready to be nasty or nice as the occasion required.
“I’m telling you a few things,” he said, “just so you won’t go having any more brainstorms. Just so you won’t go master-minding all over the landscape any more. Just so maybe for Christ’s sake you will let this one lay.”
I waited.
“No prints in the dump,” he said. “You know which dump I mean. The cord was jerked to turn the radio off, but she turned it up herself probably. That’s pretty obvious. Drunks like loud radios. If you have gloves on to do a killing and you turn up the radio to drown shots or something, you can turn it off the same way. But that wasn’t the way it was done. And that woman’s neck is broken. She was dead before the guy started to smack her head around. Now why did he start to smack her head around?”
“I’m just listening.”
Randall frowned. “He probably didn’t know he’d broken her neck. He was sore at her,” he said. “Deduction.” He smiled sourly.
I blew some smoke and waved it away from my face.
“Well, why was he sore at her? There was a grand reward paid the time he was picked up at Florian’s for the bank job in Oregon. It was paid to a shyster who is dead since, but the Florians likely got some of it. Malloy may have suspected that. Maybe he actually knew it. And maybe he was just trying to shake it out of her.”
I nodded. It sounded worth a nod. Randall went on:
“He took hold of her neck just once and his fingers didn’t slip. If we get him, we might be able to prove by the spacing of the marks that his hands did it. Maybe not. The doc figures it happened last night, fairly early. Motion picture time, anyway. So far we don’t tie Malloy to the house last night, not by any neighbors. But it certainly looks like Malloy.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Malloy all right. He probably didn’t mean to kill her, though. He’s just too strong.”
“That won’t help him any,” Randall said grimly.
“I suppose not. I just make the point that Malloy does not appear to me to be a killer type. Kill if cornered — but not for pleasure or money — and not women.”
“Is that an important point?” he asked dryly.
“Maybe you know enough to know what’s important. And what isn’t. I don’t.”
He stared at me long enough for a police announcer to have time to put out another bulletin about the holdup of the Greek restaurant on South San Pedro. The suspect was now in custody. It turned out later that he was a fourteen-year-old Mexican armed with a water-pistol. So much for eye-witnesses.
Randall waited until the announcer stopped and went on:
“We got friendly this morning. Let’s stay that way. Go home and lie down and have a good rest. You look pretty peaked. Just let me and the police department handle the Marriott killing and find Moose Malloy and so on.”
“I got paid on the Marriott business,” I said. “I fell down on the job. Mrs. Grayle has hired me. What do you want me to do — retire and live on my fat?”
He stared at me again. “I know. I’m human. They give you guys licenses, which must mean they expect you to do something with them besides hang them on the wall in your office. On the other hand any acting-captain with a grouch can break you.”
“Not with the Grayles behind me.”
He studied it. He hated to admit I could be even half right. So he frowned and tapped his desk.
“Just so we understand each other,” he said after a pause. “If you crab this case, you’ll be in a jam. It may be a jam you can wriggle out of this time. I don’t know. But little by little you will build up a body of hostility in this department that will make it damn hard for you to do any work.”
“Every private dick faces that every day of his life — unless he’s just a divorce man.”
“You can’t work on murders.”
“You’ve said your piece. I heard you say it. I don’t expect to go out and accomplish things a big police department can’t accomplish. If I have any small private notions, they are just that — small and private.”
He leaned slowly across the desk. His thin restless fingers tap-tapped, like the poinsettia shoots tapping against Mrs. Jessie Florian’s front wail. His creamy gray hair shone. His cool steady eyes were on mine.
“Let’s go on,” he said. “With what there is to tell. Amthor’s away on a trip. His wife — and secretary — doesn’t know or won’t say where. The Indian has also disappeared. Will you sign a complaint against these people?”
“No. I couldn’t make it stick.”
He looked relieved. “The wife says she never heard of you. As to these two Bay City cops, if that’s what they were — that’s out of my hands. I’d rather not have the thing any more complicated than it is. One thing I feel pretty sure of — Amthor had nothing to do with Marriott’s death. The cigarettes with his card in them were just a plant.”
“Doc Sonderborg?”
He spread his hands. “The whole shebang skipped. Men from the D.A.’s office went down there on the quiet. No contact with Bay City at all. The house is locked up and empty. They got in, of course. Some hasty attempt had been made to clean up, but there are prints — plenty of them. It will take a week to work out what we have. There’s a wall safe they’re working on now. Probably had dope in it — and other things. My guess is that Sonderborg will have a record, not local, somewhere else, for abortion, or treating gunshot wounds or altering finger tips or for illegal use of dope. If it comes under Federal statutes, we’ll get a lot of help.”
“He said he was a medical doctor,” I said.
Randall shrugged. “May have been once. May never have been convicted. There’s a guy practicing medicine near Palm Springs right now who was indicted as a dope peddler in Hollywood five years ago. He was as guilty as hell — but the protection worked. He got off. Anything else worrying you?”
“What do you know about Brunette — for telling?”
“Brunette’s a gambler. He’s making plenty. He’s making it an easy way.”
“All right,” I said, and started to get up. “That sounds reasonable. But it doesn’t bring us any nearer to this jewel heist gang that killed Marriott.”
“I can’t tell you everything, Marlowe.”
“I don’t expect it,” I said. “By the way, Jessie Florian told me — the second time I saw her — that she had been a servant in Marriott’s family once. That was why he was sending her money. Anything to support that?”
“Yes. Letters in his safety-deposit box from her thanking him and saying the same thing.” He looked as if he was going to lose his temper. “Now will you for God’s sake go home and mind your own business?”
“Nice of him to take such care of the letters, wasn’t it?”
He lifted his eyes until their glance rested on the top of my head. Then he lowered the lids until half the iris was covered. He looked at me like that for a long ten seconds. Then he smiled. He was doing an awful lot of smiling that day. Using up a whole week’s supply.
“I have a theory about that,” he said. “It’s crazy, but it’s human nature. Marriott was by the circumstances of his life a threatened man. All crooks are gamblers, more or less, and all gamblers are superstitious — more or less. I think Jessie Florian was Marriott’s lucky piece. As long as he took care of her, nothing would happen to him.”
I turned my head and looked for the pink-headed bug. He had tried two corners of the room now and was moving off disconsolately towards a third. I went over and picked him up in my handkerchief and carried him back to the desk.
“Look,” I said. “This room is eighteen floors above ground. And this little bug climbs all the way up here just to make a friend. Me. My luck piece.” I folded the bug carefully into the soft part of the handkerchief and tucked the handkerchief into my pocket. Randall was pie-eyed. His mouth moved, but nothing came out of it.
“I wonder whose lucky piece Marriott was,” I said.
“Not yours, pal.” His voice was acid — cold acid.
“Perhaps not yours either.” My voice was just a voice. I went out of the room and shut the door.
I rode the express elevator down to the Spring Street entrance and walked out on the front porch of City Hall and down some steps and over to the flower beds. I put the pink bug down carefully behind a bush.
I wondered, in the taxi going home, how long it would take him to make the Homicide Bureau again.
I got my car out of the garage at the back of the apartment house and ate some lunch in Hollywood before I started down to Bay City. It was a beautiful cool sunny afternoon down at the beach. I left Arguello Boulevard at Third Street and drove over to the City Hall.
The bug reached the end of Randall’s desk and marched straight off into the air. It fell on its back on the floor, waved a few thin worn legs in the air feebly and then played dead. Nobody cared, so it began waving the legs again and finally struggled over on its face. It trundled slowly off into a corner towards nothing, going nowhere.
The police loudspeaker box on the wall put out a bulletin about a holdup on San Pedro south of Forty-fourth. The holdup was a middle-aged man wearing a dark gray suit and gray felt hat. He was last seen running east on Forty-fourth and then dodging between two houses. “Approach carefully,” the announcer said. “This suspect is armed with a .32 caliber revolver and has just held up the proprietor of a Greek restaurant at Number 3966 South San Pedro.”
A flat click and the announcer went off the air and another one came on and started to read a hot car list, in a slow monotonous voice that repeated everything twice.
The door opened and Randall came in with a sheaf of letter size typewritten sheets. He walked briskly across the room and sat down across the desk from me and pushed some papers at me.
“Sign four copies,” he said.
I signed four copies.
The pink bug reached a corner of the room and put feelers out for a good spot to take off from. It seemed a little discouraged. It went along the baseboard towards another corner. I lit a cigarette and the dick at the hushaphone abruptly got up and went out of the office.
Randall leaned back in his chair, looking just the same as ever, just as cool, just as smooth, just as ready to be nasty or nice as the occasion required.
“I’m telling you a few things,” he said, “just so you won’t go having any more brainstorms. Just so you won’t go master-minding all over the landscape any more. Just so maybe for Christ’s sake you will let this one lay.”
I waited.
“No prints in the dump,” he said. “You know which dump I mean. The cord was jerked to turn the radio off, but she turned it up herself probably. That’s pretty obvious. Drunks like loud radios. If you have gloves on to do a killing and you turn up the radio to drown shots or something, you can turn it off the same way. But that wasn’t the way it was done. And that woman’s neck is broken. She was dead before the guy started to smack her head around. Now why did he start to smack her head around?”
“I’m just listening.”
Randall frowned. “He probably didn’t know he’d broken her neck. He was sore at her,” he said. “Deduction.” He smiled sourly.
I blew some smoke and waved it away from my face.
“Well, why was he sore at her? There was a grand reward paid the time he was picked up at Florian’s for the bank job in Oregon. It was paid to a shyster who is dead since, but the Florians likely got some of it. Malloy may have suspected that. Maybe he actually knew it. And maybe he was just trying to shake it out of her.”
I nodded. It sounded worth a nod. Randall went on:
“He took hold of her neck just once and his fingers didn’t slip. If we get him, we might be able to prove by the spacing of the marks that his hands did it. Maybe not. The doc figures it happened last night, fairly early. Motion picture time, anyway. So far we don’t tie Malloy to the house last night, not by any neighbors. But it certainly looks like Malloy.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Malloy all right. He probably didn’t mean to kill her, though. He’s just too strong.”
“That won’t help him any,” Randall said grimly.
“I suppose not. I just make the point that Malloy does not appear to me to be a killer type. Kill if cornered — but not for pleasure or money — and not women.”
“Is that an important point?” he asked dryly.
“Maybe you know enough to know what’s important. And what isn’t. I don’t.”
He stared at me long enough for a police announcer to have time to put out another bulletin about the holdup of the Greek restaurant on South San Pedro. The suspect was now in custody. It turned out later that he was a fourteen-year-old Mexican armed with a water-pistol. So much for eye-witnesses.
Randall waited until the announcer stopped and went on:
“We got friendly this morning. Let’s stay that way. Go home and lie down and have a good rest. You look pretty peaked. Just let me and the police department handle the Marriott killing and find Moose Malloy and so on.”
“I got paid on the Marriott business,” I said. “I fell down on the job. Mrs. Grayle has hired me. What do you want me to do — retire and live on my fat?”
He stared at me again. “I know. I’m human. They give you guys licenses, which must mean they expect you to do something with them besides hang them on the wall in your office. On the other hand any acting-captain with a grouch can break you.”
“Not with the Grayles behind me.”
He studied it. He hated to admit I could be even half right. So he frowned and tapped his desk.
“Just so we understand each other,” he said after a pause. “If you crab this case, you’ll be in a jam. It may be a jam you can wriggle out of this time. I don’t know. But little by little you will build up a body of hostility in this department that will make it damn hard for you to do any work.”
“Every private dick faces that every day of his life — unless he’s just a divorce man.”
“You can’t work on murders.”
“You’ve said your piece. I heard you say it. I don’t expect to go out and accomplish things a big police department can’t accomplish. If I have any small private notions, they are just that — small and private.”
He leaned slowly across the desk. His thin restless fingers tap-tapped, like the poinsettia shoots tapping against Mrs. Jessie Florian’s front wail. His creamy gray hair shone. His cool steady eyes were on mine.
“Let’s go on,” he said. “With what there is to tell. Amthor’s away on a trip. His wife — and secretary — doesn’t know or won’t say where. The Indian has also disappeared. Will you sign a complaint against these people?”
“No. I couldn’t make it stick.”
He looked relieved. “The wife says she never heard of you. As to these two Bay City cops, if that’s what they were — that’s out of my hands. I’d rather not have the thing any more complicated than it is. One thing I feel pretty sure of — Amthor had nothing to do with Marriott’s death. The cigarettes with his card in them were just a plant.”
“Doc Sonderborg?”
He spread his hands. “The whole shebang skipped. Men from the D.A.’s office went down there on the quiet. No contact with Bay City at all. The house is locked up and empty. They got in, of course. Some hasty attempt had been made to clean up, but there are prints — plenty of them. It will take a week to work out what we have. There’s a wall safe they’re working on now. Probably had dope in it — and other things. My guess is that Sonderborg will have a record, not local, somewhere else, for abortion, or treating gunshot wounds or altering finger tips or for illegal use of dope. If it comes under Federal statutes, we’ll get a lot of help.”
“He said he was a medical doctor,” I said.
Randall shrugged. “May have been once. May never have been convicted. There’s a guy practicing medicine near Palm Springs right now who was indicted as a dope peddler in Hollywood five years ago. He was as guilty as hell — but the protection worked. He got off. Anything else worrying you?”
“What do you know about Brunette — for telling?”
“Brunette’s a gambler. He’s making plenty. He’s making it an easy way.”
“All right,” I said, and started to get up. “That sounds reasonable. But it doesn’t bring us any nearer to this jewel heist gang that killed Marriott.”
“I can’t tell you everything, Marlowe.”
“I don’t expect it,” I said. “By the way, Jessie Florian told me — the second time I saw her — that she had been a servant in Marriott’s family once. That was why he was sending her money. Anything to support that?”
“Yes. Letters in his safety-deposit box from her thanking him and saying the same thing.” He looked as if he was going to lose his temper. “Now will you for God’s sake go home and mind your own business?”
“Nice of him to take such care of the letters, wasn’t it?”
He lifted his eyes until their glance rested on the top of my head. Then he lowered the lids until half the iris was covered. He looked at me like that for a long ten seconds. Then he smiled. He was doing an awful lot of smiling that day. Using up a whole week’s supply.
“I have a theory about that,” he said. “It’s crazy, but it’s human nature. Marriott was by the circumstances of his life a threatened man. All crooks are gamblers, more or less, and all gamblers are superstitious — more or less. I think Jessie Florian was Marriott’s lucky piece. As long as he took care of her, nothing would happen to him.”
I turned my head and looked for the pink-headed bug. He had tried two corners of the room now and was moving off disconsolately towards a third. I went over and picked him up in my handkerchief and carried him back to the desk.
“Look,” I said. “This room is eighteen floors above ground. And this little bug climbs all the way up here just to make a friend. Me. My luck piece.” I folded the bug carefully into the soft part of the handkerchief and tucked the handkerchief into my pocket. Randall was pie-eyed. His mouth moved, but nothing came out of it.
“I wonder whose lucky piece Marriott was,” I said.
“Not yours, pal.” His voice was acid — cold acid.
“Perhaps not yours either.” My voice was just a voice. I went out of the room and shut the door.
I rode the express elevator down to the Spring Street entrance and walked out on the front porch of City Hall and down some steps and over to the flower beds. I put the pink bug down carefully behind a bush.
I wondered, in the taxi going home, how long it would take him to make the Homicide Bureau again.
I got my car out of the garage at the back of the apartment house and ate some lunch in Hollywood before I started down to Bay City. It was a beautiful cool sunny afternoon down at the beach. I left Arguello Boulevard at Third Street and drove over to the City Hall.
32
It was a cheap looking building for so prosperous a town. It looked more like something out of the Bible belt. Bums sat unmolested in a long row on the retaining wall that kept the front lawn — now mostly Bermuda grass — from falling into the street. The building was of three stories and had an old belfry at the top, and the bell still hanging in the belfry. They had probably rung it for the volunteer fire brigade back in the good old chaw-and-spit days.
The cracked walk and the front steps let to open double doors in which a knot of obvious city hall fixers hung around waiting for something to happen so they could make something else out of it. They all had the well-fed stomachs, the careful eyes, the nice clothes and the reach-me-down manners. They gave me about four inches to get in.
Inside was a long dark hallway that had been mopped the day McKinley was inaugurated. A wooden sign pointed out the police department Information Desk. A uniformed man dozed behind a pint-sized PBX set into the end of a scarred wooden counter. A plainclothesman with his coat off and his hog’s leg looking like a fire plug against his ribs took one eye off his evening paper, bonged a spittoon ten feet away from him, yawned, and said the Chief’s office was upstairs at the back.
The second floor was lighter and cleaner, but that didn’t mean that it was clean and light. A door on the ocean side, almost at the end of the hall, was lettered: John Wax, Chief of Police. Enter.
Inside there was a low wooden railing and a uniformed man behind it working a typewriter with two fingers and one thumb. He took my card, yawned, said he would see, and managed to drag himself through a mahogany door marked John Wax, Chief of Police. Private. He came back and held the door in the railing for me.
I went on in and shut the door of the inner office. It was cool and large and had windows on three sides. A stained wood desk was set far back like Mussolini’s, so that you had to walk across an expanse of blue carpet to get to it, and while you were doing that you would be getting the beady eye.
I walked to the desk. A tilted embossed sign on it read: John Wax, Chief of Police. I figured I might be able to remember the name. I looked at the man behind the desk. No straw was sticking to his hair.
He was a hammered-down heavyweight, with short pink hair and a pink scalp glistening through it. He had small, hungry, heavy-lidded eyes, as restless as fleas. He wore a suit of fawn-colored flannel, a coffee-colored shirt and tie, a diamond ring, a diamond-studded lodge pin in his lapel, and the required three stiff points of handkerchief coming up a little more than the required three inches from his outside breast pocket.
One of his plump hands was holding my card. He read it, turned it over and read the back, which was blank, read the front again, put it down on his desk and laid on it a paperweight in the shape of a bronze monkey, as if he was making sure he wouldn’t lose it.
He pushed a pink paw at me. When I gave it back to him, he motioned to a chair.
“Sit down, Mr. Marlowe. I see you are in our business more or less. What can I do for you?”
“A little trouble, Chief. You can straighten it out for me in a minute, if you care to.”
“Trouble,” he said softly. “A little trouble.”
He turned in his chair and crossed his thick legs and gazed thoughtfully towards one of his pairs of windows. That let me see handspun lisle socks and English brogues that looked as if they had been pickled in port wine. Counting what I couldn’t see and not counting his wallet he had half a grand on him. I figured his wife had money.
“Trouble,” he said, still softly, “is something our little city don’t know much about, Mr. Marlowe. Our city is small but very, very clean. I look out of my western windows and I see the Pacific Ocean. Nothing cleaner than that, is there?” He didn’t mention the two gambling ships that were hull down on the brass waves just beyond the three-mile limit.
Neither did I. “That’s right, Chief,” I said.
He threw his chest a couple of inches farther. “I look out of my northern windows and I see the busy bustle of Arguello Boulevard and the lovely California foothills, and in the near foreground one of the nicest little business sections a man could want to know. I look out of my southern windows, which I am looking out of right now, and I see the finest little yacht harbor in the world, for a small yacht harbor. I don’t have no eastern windows, but if I did have, I would see a residential section that would make your mouth water. No, sir, trouble is a thing we don’t have a lot of on hand in our little town.”
“I guess I brought mine with me, Chief. Some of it at least. Do you have a man working for you named Galbraith, a plainclothes sergeant?”
“Why yes, I believe I do,” he said, bringing his eyes around. “What about him?”
“Do you have a man working for you that goes like this?” I described the other man, the one who said very little, was short, had a mustache and hit me with a blackjack. “He goes around with Galbraith, very likely. Somebody called him Mister Blane, but that sounded like a phony.”
“Quite on the contrary,” the fat Chief said as stiffly as a fat man can say anything. “He is my Chief of Detectives. Captain Blane.”
“Could I see these two guys in your office?”
He picked my card up and read it again. He laid it down. He waved a soft glistening hand.
“Not without a better reason than you have given me so far,” he said suavely.
“I didn’t think I could, Chief. Do you happen to know a man named Jules Amthor? He calls himself a psychic adviser. He lives at the top of a hill in Stillwood Heights.”
“No. And Stillwood Heights is not in my territory,” the Chief said. His eyes now were the eyes of a man who has other thoughts.
“That’s what makes it funny,” I said. “You see, I went to call on Mr. Amthor in connection with a client of mine. Mr. Amthor got the idea I was blackmailing him. Probably guys in his line of business get that idea rather easily. He had a tough Indian bodyguard I couldn’t handle. So the Indian held me and Amthor beat me up with my own gun. Then he sent for a couple of cops. They happened to be Galbraith and Mister Blane. Could this interest you at all?”
Chief Wax flapped his hands on his desk top very gently. He folded his eyes almost shut, but not quite. The cool gleam of his eyes shone between the thick lids and it shone straight at me. He sat very still, as if listening. Then he opened his eyes and smiled.
“And what happened then?” he inquired, polite as a bouncer at the Stork Club.
“They went through me, took me away in their car, dumped me out on the side of a mountain and socked me with a sap as I got out.”
He nodded, as if what I had said was the most natural thing in the world. “And this was in Stillwood Heights,” he said softly.
“Yeah.”
“You know what I think you are?” He leaned a little over the desk, but not far, on account of his stomach being in the way.
“A liar,” I said.
“The door is there,” he said, pointing to it with the little finger of his left hand.
I didn’t move. I kept on looking at him. When he started to get mad enough to push his buzzer I said: “Let’s not both make the same mistake. You think I’m a small time private dick trying to push ten times his own weight, trying to make a charge against a police officer that, even if it was true, the officer would take damn good care couldn’t be proved. Not at all. I’m not making any complaints. I think the mistake was natural. I want to square myself with Amthor and I want your man Galbraith to help me do it. Mister Blane needn’t bother. Galbraith will be enough. And I’m not here without backing. I have important people behind me.”
“How far behind?” the Chief asked and chuckled wittily.
“How far is 862 Aster Drive, where Mr. Merwin Lockridge Grayle lives?”
His face changed so completely that it was as if another man sat in his chair. “Mrs. Grayle happens to be my client,” I said.
“Lock the doors,” he said. “You’re a younger man than I am. Turn the bolt knobs. Well make a friendly start on this thing. You have an honest face, Marlowe.”
I got up and locked the doors. When I got back to the desk along the blue carpet, the Chief had a nice looking bottle out and two glasses. He tossed a handful of cardamon seeds on his blotter and filled both glasses.
We drank. He cracked a few cardamon seeds and we chewed them silently, looking into each other’s eyes.
“That tasted right,” he said. He refilled the glasses. It was my turn to crack the cardamon seeds. He swept the shells off his blotter to the floor and smiled and leaned back.
“Now let’s have it,” he said. “Has this job you are doing for Mrs. Grayle anything to do with Amthor?”
“There’s a connection. Better check that I’m telling you the truth, though.”
“There’s that,” he said and reached for his phone. Then he took a small book out of his vest and looked up a number. “Campaign contributors,” he said and winked. “The Mayor is very insistent that all courtesies be extended. Yes, here it is.” He put the book away and dialed.
He had the same trouble with the butler that I had. It made his ears get red. Finally he got her. His ears stayed red. She must have been pretty sharp with him. “She wants to talk to you,” he said and pushed the phone across his broad desk.
“This is Phil,” I said, winking naughtily at the Chief.
There was a cool provocative laugh. “What are you doing with that fat slob?”
“There’s a little drinking being done.”
“Do you have to do it with him?”
“At the moment, yes. Business. I said, is there anything new? I guess you know what I mean.”
“No. Are you aware, my good fellow, that you stood me up for an hour the other night? Did I strike you as the kind of girl that lets that sort of thing happen to her?”
“I ran into trouble. How about tonight?”
“Let me see — tonight is — what day of the week is it for heaven’s sake?”
“I’d better call you,” I said. “I may not be able to make it. This is Friday.”
“Liar.” The soft husky laugh came again. “It’s Monday. Same time, same place — and no fooling this time?”
“I’d better call you.”
“You’d better be there.”
“I can’t be sure. Let me call you.”
“Hard to get? I see. Perhaps I’m a fool to bother.”
“As a matter of fact you are.”
“Why?”
“I’m a poor man, but I pay my own way. And it’s not quite as soft a way as you would like.”
“Damn you, if you’re not there — “
“I said I’d call you.”
She sighed. “All men are the same.”
“So are all women — after the first nine.”
She damned me and hung up. The Chief’s eyes popped so far out of his head they looked as if they were on stilts.
He filled both glasses with a shaking hand and pushed one at me.
“So it’s like that,” he said very thoughtfully.
“Her husband doesn’t care,” I said, “so don’t make a note of it.”
He looked hurt as he drank his drink. He cracked the cardamon seeds very slowly, very thoughtfully. We drank to each other’s baby blue eyes. Regretfully the Chief put the bottle and glasses out of sight and snapped a switch on his call box.
“Have Galbraith come up, if he’s in the building. If not, try and get in touch with him for me.”
I got up and unlocked the doors and sat down again. We didn’t wait long. The side door was tapped on, the Chief called out, and Hemingway stepped into the room.
He walked solidly over to the desk and and stopped at the end of it and looked at Chief Wax with the proper expression of tough humility.
“Meet Mr. Philip Marlowe,” the Chief said genially. “A private dick from L.A.”
Hemingway turned enough to look at me. If he had ever seen me before, nothing in his face showed it. He put a hand out and I put a hand out and he looked at the Chief again.
“Mr. Marlowe has a rather curious story,” the Chief said, cunning, like Richelieu behind the arras. “About a man named Amthor who has a place in Stillwood Heights. He’s some sore of crystal-gazer. It seems Marlowe went to see him and you and Blane happened in about the same time and there was an argument of some kind. I forget the details.” He looked out of his windows with the expression of a man forgetting details.
“Some mistake,” Hemingway said. “I never saw this man before.”
“There was a mistake, as a matter of fact,” the Chief said dreamily. “Rather trifling, but still a mistake. Mr. Marlowe thinks it of slight importance.”
Hemingway looked at me again. His face still looked like a stone face.
“In fact he’s not even interested in the mistake,” the Chief dreamed on. “But he is interested in going to call on this man Amthor who lives in Stillwood Heights. He would like someone with him. I thought of you. He would like someone who would see that he got a square deal. It seems that Mr. Amthor has a very tough Indian bodyguard and Mr. Marlowe is a little inclined to doubt his ability to handle the situation without help. Do you think you could find out where this Amthor lives?”
“Yeah,” Hemingway said. “But Stillwood Heights is over the line, Chief. This just a personal favor to a friend of yours?”
“You might put it that way,” the Chief said, looking at his left thumb. “We wouldn’t want to do anything not strictly legal, of course.”
“Yeah,” Hemingway said. “No.” He coughed. “When do we go?”
The Chief looked at me benevolently. “Now would be okey,” I said. “If it suits Mr. Galbraith.”
“I do what I’m told,” Hemingway said.
The Chief looked him over, feature by feature. He combed him and brushed him with his eyes. “How is Captain Blane today?” he inquired, munching on a cardamon seed.
“Bad shape. Bust appendix,” Hemingway said. “Pretty critical.”
The Chief shook his head sadly. Then he got hold of the arms of his chair and dragged himself to his feet. He pushed a pink paw across his desk.
“Galbraith will take good care of you, Marlowe. You can rely on that.”
“Well, you’ve certainly been obliging, Chief,” I said. “I certainly don’t know how to thank you.”
“Pshaw! No thanks necessary. Always glad to oblige a friend of a friend, so to speak.” He winked at me. Hemingway studied the wink but he didn’t say what he added it up to.
We went out, with the Chief’s polite murmurs almost carrying us down the office. The door closed. Hemingway looked up and down the hall and then he looked at me.
“You played that one smart, baby,” he said. “You must got something we wasn’t told about.”
The cracked walk and the front steps let to open double doors in which a knot of obvious city hall fixers hung around waiting for something to happen so they could make something else out of it. They all had the well-fed stomachs, the careful eyes, the nice clothes and the reach-me-down manners. They gave me about four inches to get in.
Inside was a long dark hallway that had been mopped the day McKinley was inaugurated. A wooden sign pointed out the police department Information Desk. A uniformed man dozed behind a pint-sized PBX set into the end of a scarred wooden counter. A plainclothesman with his coat off and his hog’s leg looking like a fire plug against his ribs took one eye off his evening paper, bonged a spittoon ten feet away from him, yawned, and said the Chief’s office was upstairs at the back.
The second floor was lighter and cleaner, but that didn’t mean that it was clean and light. A door on the ocean side, almost at the end of the hall, was lettered: John Wax, Chief of Police. Enter.
Inside there was a low wooden railing and a uniformed man behind it working a typewriter with two fingers and one thumb. He took my card, yawned, said he would see, and managed to drag himself through a mahogany door marked John Wax, Chief of Police. Private. He came back and held the door in the railing for me.
I went on in and shut the door of the inner office. It was cool and large and had windows on three sides. A stained wood desk was set far back like Mussolini’s, so that you had to walk across an expanse of blue carpet to get to it, and while you were doing that you would be getting the beady eye.
I walked to the desk. A tilted embossed sign on it read: John Wax, Chief of Police. I figured I might be able to remember the name. I looked at the man behind the desk. No straw was sticking to his hair.
He was a hammered-down heavyweight, with short pink hair and a pink scalp glistening through it. He had small, hungry, heavy-lidded eyes, as restless as fleas. He wore a suit of fawn-colored flannel, a coffee-colored shirt and tie, a diamond ring, a diamond-studded lodge pin in his lapel, and the required three stiff points of handkerchief coming up a little more than the required three inches from his outside breast pocket.
One of his plump hands was holding my card. He read it, turned it over and read the back, which was blank, read the front again, put it down on his desk and laid on it a paperweight in the shape of a bronze monkey, as if he was making sure he wouldn’t lose it.
He pushed a pink paw at me. When I gave it back to him, he motioned to a chair.
“Sit down, Mr. Marlowe. I see you are in our business more or less. What can I do for you?”
“A little trouble, Chief. You can straighten it out for me in a minute, if you care to.”
“Trouble,” he said softly. “A little trouble.”
He turned in his chair and crossed his thick legs and gazed thoughtfully towards one of his pairs of windows. That let me see handspun lisle socks and English brogues that looked as if they had been pickled in port wine. Counting what I couldn’t see and not counting his wallet he had half a grand on him. I figured his wife had money.
“Trouble,” he said, still softly, “is something our little city don’t know much about, Mr. Marlowe. Our city is small but very, very clean. I look out of my western windows and I see the Pacific Ocean. Nothing cleaner than that, is there?” He didn’t mention the two gambling ships that were hull down on the brass waves just beyond the three-mile limit.
Neither did I. “That’s right, Chief,” I said.
He threw his chest a couple of inches farther. “I look out of my northern windows and I see the busy bustle of Arguello Boulevard and the lovely California foothills, and in the near foreground one of the nicest little business sections a man could want to know. I look out of my southern windows, which I am looking out of right now, and I see the finest little yacht harbor in the world, for a small yacht harbor. I don’t have no eastern windows, but if I did have, I would see a residential section that would make your mouth water. No, sir, trouble is a thing we don’t have a lot of on hand in our little town.”
“I guess I brought mine with me, Chief. Some of it at least. Do you have a man working for you named Galbraith, a plainclothes sergeant?”
“Why yes, I believe I do,” he said, bringing his eyes around. “What about him?”
“Do you have a man working for you that goes like this?” I described the other man, the one who said very little, was short, had a mustache and hit me with a blackjack. “He goes around with Galbraith, very likely. Somebody called him Mister Blane, but that sounded like a phony.”
“Quite on the contrary,” the fat Chief said as stiffly as a fat man can say anything. “He is my Chief of Detectives. Captain Blane.”
“Could I see these two guys in your office?”
He picked my card up and read it again. He laid it down. He waved a soft glistening hand.
“Not without a better reason than you have given me so far,” he said suavely.
“I didn’t think I could, Chief. Do you happen to know a man named Jules Amthor? He calls himself a psychic adviser. He lives at the top of a hill in Stillwood Heights.”
“No. And Stillwood Heights is not in my territory,” the Chief said. His eyes now were the eyes of a man who has other thoughts.
“That’s what makes it funny,” I said. “You see, I went to call on Mr. Amthor in connection with a client of mine. Mr. Amthor got the idea I was blackmailing him. Probably guys in his line of business get that idea rather easily. He had a tough Indian bodyguard I couldn’t handle. So the Indian held me and Amthor beat me up with my own gun. Then he sent for a couple of cops. They happened to be Galbraith and Mister Blane. Could this interest you at all?”
Chief Wax flapped his hands on his desk top very gently. He folded his eyes almost shut, but not quite. The cool gleam of his eyes shone between the thick lids and it shone straight at me. He sat very still, as if listening. Then he opened his eyes and smiled.
“And what happened then?” he inquired, polite as a bouncer at the Stork Club.
“They went through me, took me away in their car, dumped me out on the side of a mountain and socked me with a sap as I got out.”
He nodded, as if what I had said was the most natural thing in the world. “And this was in Stillwood Heights,” he said softly.
“Yeah.”
“You know what I think you are?” He leaned a little over the desk, but not far, on account of his stomach being in the way.
“A liar,” I said.
“The door is there,” he said, pointing to it with the little finger of his left hand.
I didn’t move. I kept on looking at him. When he started to get mad enough to push his buzzer I said: “Let’s not both make the same mistake. You think I’m a small time private dick trying to push ten times his own weight, trying to make a charge against a police officer that, even if it was true, the officer would take damn good care couldn’t be proved. Not at all. I’m not making any complaints. I think the mistake was natural. I want to square myself with Amthor and I want your man Galbraith to help me do it. Mister Blane needn’t bother. Galbraith will be enough. And I’m not here without backing. I have important people behind me.”
“How far behind?” the Chief asked and chuckled wittily.
“How far is 862 Aster Drive, where Mr. Merwin Lockridge Grayle lives?”
His face changed so completely that it was as if another man sat in his chair. “Mrs. Grayle happens to be my client,” I said.
“Lock the doors,” he said. “You’re a younger man than I am. Turn the bolt knobs. Well make a friendly start on this thing. You have an honest face, Marlowe.”
I got up and locked the doors. When I got back to the desk along the blue carpet, the Chief had a nice looking bottle out and two glasses. He tossed a handful of cardamon seeds on his blotter and filled both glasses.
We drank. He cracked a few cardamon seeds and we chewed them silently, looking into each other’s eyes.
“That tasted right,” he said. He refilled the glasses. It was my turn to crack the cardamon seeds. He swept the shells off his blotter to the floor and smiled and leaned back.
“Now let’s have it,” he said. “Has this job you are doing for Mrs. Grayle anything to do with Amthor?”
“There’s a connection. Better check that I’m telling you the truth, though.”
“There’s that,” he said and reached for his phone. Then he took a small book out of his vest and looked up a number. “Campaign contributors,” he said and winked. “The Mayor is very insistent that all courtesies be extended. Yes, here it is.” He put the book away and dialed.
He had the same trouble with the butler that I had. It made his ears get red. Finally he got her. His ears stayed red. She must have been pretty sharp with him. “She wants to talk to you,” he said and pushed the phone across his broad desk.
“This is Phil,” I said, winking naughtily at the Chief.
There was a cool provocative laugh. “What are you doing with that fat slob?”
“There’s a little drinking being done.”
“Do you have to do it with him?”
“At the moment, yes. Business. I said, is there anything new? I guess you know what I mean.”
“No. Are you aware, my good fellow, that you stood me up for an hour the other night? Did I strike you as the kind of girl that lets that sort of thing happen to her?”
“I ran into trouble. How about tonight?”
“Let me see — tonight is — what day of the week is it for heaven’s sake?”
“I’d better call you,” I said. “I may not be able to make it. This is Friday.”
“Liar.” The soft husky laugh came again. “It’s Monday. Same time, same place — and no fooling this time?”
“I’d better call you.”
“You’d better be there.”
“I can’t be sure. Let me call you.”
“Hard to get? I see. Perhaps I’m a fool to bother.”
“As a matter of fact you are.”
“Why?”
“I’m a poor man, but I pay my own way. And it’s not quite as soft a way as you would like.”
“Damn you, if you’re not there — “
“I said I’d call you.”
She sighed. “All men are the same.”
“So are all women — after the first nine.”
She damned me and hung up. The Chief’s eyes popped so far out of his head they looked as if they were on stilts.
He filled both glasses with a shaking hand and pushed one at me.
“So it’s like that,” he said very thoughtfully.
“Her husband doesn’t care,” I said, “so don’t make a note of it.”
He looked hurt as he drank his drink. He cracked the cardamon seeds very slowly, very thoughtfully. We drank to each other’s baby blue eyes. Regretfully the Chief put the bottle and glasses out of sight and snapped a switch on his call box.
“Have Galbraith come up, if he’s in the building. If not, try and get in touch with him for me.”
I got up and unlocked the doors and sat down again. We didn’t wait long. The side door was tapped on, the Chief called out, and Hemingway stepped into the room.
He walked solidly over to the desk and and stopped at the end of it and looked at Chief Wax with the proper expression of tough humility.
“Meet Mr. Philip Marlowe,” the Chief said genially. “A private dick from L.A.”
Hemingway turned enough to look at me. If he had ever seen me before, nothing in his face showed it. He put a hand out and I put a hand out and he looked at the Chief again.
“Mr. Marlowe has a rather curious story,” the Chief said, cunning, like Richelieu behind the arras. “About a man named Amthor who has a place in Stillwood Heights. He’s some sore of crystal-gazer. It seems Marlowe went to see him and you and Blane happened in about the same time and there was an argument of some kind. I forget the details.” He looked out of his windows with the expression of a man forgetting details.
“Some mistake,” Hemingway said. “I never saw this man before.”
“There was a mistake, as a matter of fact,” the Chief said dreamily. “Rather trifling, but still a mistake. Mr. Marlowe thinks it of slight importance.”
Hemingway looked at me again. His face still looked like a stone face.
“In fact he’s not even interested in the mistake,” the Chief dreamed on. “But he is interested in going to call on this man Amthor who lives in Stillwood Heights. He would like someone with him. I thought of you. He would like someone who would see that he got a square deal. It seems that Mr. Amthor has a very tough Indian bodyguard and Mr. Marlowe is a little inclined to doubt his ability to handle the situation without help. Do you think you could find out where this Amthor lives?”
“Yeah,” Hemingway said. “But Stillwood Heights is over the line, Chief. This just a personal favor to a friend of yours?”
“You might put it that way,” the Chief said, looking at his left thumb. “We wouldn’t want to do anything not strictly legal, of course.”
“Yeah,” Hemingway said. “No.” He coughed. “When do we go?”
The Chief looked at me benevolently. “Now would be okey,” I said. “If it suits Mr. Galbraith.”
“I do what I’m told,” Hemingway said.
The Chief looked him over, feature by feature. He combed him and brushed him with his eyes. “How is Captain Blane today?” he inquired, munching on a cardamon seed.
“Bad shape. Bust appendix,” Hemingway said. “Pretty critical.”
The Chief shook his head sadly. Then he got hold of the arms of his chair and dragged himself to his feet. He pushed a pink paw across his desk.
“Galbraith will take good care of you, Marlowe. You can rely on that.”
“Well, you’ve certainly been obliging, Chief,” I said. “I certainly don’t know how to thank you.”
“Pshaw! No thanks necessary. Always glad to oblige a friend of a friend, so to speak.” He winked at me. Hemingway studied the wink but he didn’t say what he added it up to.
We went out, with the Chief’s polite murmurs almost carrying us down the office. The door closed. Hemingway looked up and down the hall and then he looked at me.
“You played that one smart, baby,” he said. “You must got something we wasn’t told about.”
33
The car drifted quietly along a quiet street of homes. Arching pepper trees almost met above it to form a green tunnel. The sun twinkled through their upper branches and their narrow light leaves. A sign at the corner said it was Eighteenth Street.
Hemingway was driving and I sat beside him. He drove very slowly, his face heavy with thought.
“How much you tell him?” he asked, making up his mind.
“I told him you and Blane went over there and took me away and tossed me out of the car and socked me on the back of the head. I didn’t tell him the rest.”
“Not about Twenty-third and Descanso, huh?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I thought maybe I could get more co-operation from you if I didn’t.”
“That’s a thought. You really want to go over to Stillwood Heights, or was that just a stall?”
“Just a stall. What I really want is for you to tell me why you put me in that funnyhouse and why I was kept there?”
Hemingway thought. He thought so hard his cheek muscles made little knots under his grayish skin.
“That Blane,” he said. “That sawed-off hunk of shin meat. I didn’t mean for him to sap you. I didn’t mean for you to walk home neither, not really. It was just an act, on account of we are friends with this swami guy and we kind of keep people from bothering him. You’d be surprised what a lot of people would try to bother him.”
“Amazed,” I said.
He turned his head. His gray eyes were lumps of ice. Then he looked again through the dusty windshield and did some more thinking.
“Them old cops get sap-hungry once in a while,” he said. “They just got to crack a head. Jesus, was I scared. You dropped like a sack of cement. I told Blane plenty. Then we run you over to Sonderborg’s place on account of it was a little closer and he was a nice guy and would take care of you.”
“Does Amthor know you took me there?”
“Hell, no. It was our idea.”
“On account of Sonderborg is such a nice guy and he would take care of me. And no kickback. No chance for a doctor to back up a complaint if I made one. Not that a complaint would have much chance in this sweet little town, if I did make it.”
“You going to get tough?” Hemingway asked thoughtfully.
“Not me,” I said. “And for once in your life neither are you. Because your job is hanging by a thread. You looked in the Chief’s eyes and you saw that. I didn’t go in there without credentials, not this trip.”
“Okey,” Hemingway said and spat out of the window. “I didn’t have any idea of getting tough in the first place except just the routine big mouth. What next?”
“Is Blane really sick?”
Hemingway nodded, but somehow failed to look sad. “Sure is. Pain in the gut day before yesterday and it bust on him before they could get his appendix out. He’s got a chance — but not too good.”
“We’d certainly hate to lose him,” I said. “A fellow like that is an asset to any police force.”
Hemingway chewed that one over and spat it out of the car window.
“Okey, next question,” he sighed.
“You told me why you took me to Sonderborg’s place. You didn’t tell me why he kept me there over forty-eight hours, locked up and shot full of dope.”
Hemingway braked the car softly over beside the curb. He put his large hands on the lower part of the wheel side by side and gently rubbed the thumbs together.
“I wouldn’t have an idea,” he said in a far-off voice.
“I had papers on me showing I had a private license,” I said. “Keys, some money, a couple of photographs. If he didn’t know you boys pretty well, he might think the crack on the head was just a gag to get into his place and look around. But I figure he knows you boys too well for that. So I’m puzzled.”
“Stay puzzled, pally. It’s a lot safer.”
“So it is,” I said. “But there’s no satisfaction in it.”
“You got the L.A. law behind you on this?”
“On this what?”
“On this thinking bout Sonderborg.”
“Not exactly.”
“That don’t mean yes or no.”
“I’m not that important,” I said. “The L.A. law can come in here any time they feel like it — two thirds of them anyway. The Sheriff’s boys and the D.A.’s boys. I have a friend in the D.A.’s office. I worked there once. His name is Bernie Ohls. He’s Chief Investigator.”
“You give it to him?”
“No. I haven’t spoken to him in a month.”
“Thinking about giving it to him?”
“Not if it interferes with a job I’m doing.”
“Private job?”
“Yes.”
“Okey, what is it you want?”
“What’s Sonderborg’s real racket?”
Hemingway took his hands off the wheel and spat out of the window. “We’re on a nice street here, ain’t we? Nice homes, nice gardens, nice climate. You hear a lot about crooked cops, or do you?”
“Once in a while,” I said.
“Okey, how many cops do you find living on a street even as good as this, with nice lawns and flowers? I’d know four or five, all vice squad boys. They get all the gravy. Cops like me live in itty-bitty frame houses on the wrong side of town. Want to see where I live?”
“What would it prove?”
“Listen, pally,” the big man said seriously. “You got me on a string, but it could break. Cops don’t go crooked for money. Not always, not even often. They get caught in the system. They get you where they have you do what is told them or else. And the guy that sits back there in the nice big corner office, with the nice suit and the nice liquor breath he thinks chewing on them seeds makes smell like violets, only it don’t — he ain’t giving the orders either. You get me?”
“What kind of a man is the mayor?”
“What kind of guy is a mayor anywhere? A politician. You think he gives the orders? Nuts. You know what’s the matter with this country, baby?”
“Too much frozen capital, I heard.”
“A guy can’t stay honest if he wants to,” Hemingway said. “That’s what’s the matter with this country. He gets chiseled out of his pants if he does. You gotta play the game dirty or you don’t eat. A lot of bastards think all we need is ninety thousand FBI men in clean collars and brief cases. Nuts. The percentage would get them just the way it does the rest of us. You know what I think? I think we gotta make this little world all over again. Now take Moral Rearmament. There you’ve got something. M.R.A. There you’ve got something, baby.”
“If Bay City is a sample of how it works, I’ll take aspirin,” I said.
“You could get too smart,” Hemingway said softly. “You might not think it, but it could be. You could get so smart you couldn’t think about anything but bein’ smart. Me, I’m just a dumb cop. I take orders. I got a wife and two kids and I do what the big shots say. Blane could tell you things. Me, I’m ignorant.”
“Sure Blane has appendicitis? Sure he didn’t just shoot himself in the stomach for meanness?”
“Don’t be that way,” Hemingway complained and slapped his hands up and down on the wheel. “Try and think nice about people.”
“About Blane?”
“He’s human — just like the rest of us,” Hemingway said. “He’s a sinner — but he’s human.”
“What’s Sonderborg’s racket?”
“Okey, I was just telling you. Maybe I’m wrong. I had you figured for a guy that could be sold a nice idea.”
“You don’t know what his racket is,” I said.
Hemingway took his handkerchief out and wiped his with it. “Buddy, I hate to admit it,” he said. “But you ought to know damn well that if I knew or Blane knew Sonderborg had a racket, either we wouldn’t of dumped you in there or you wouldn’t ever have come out, not walking. I’m talking about a real bad racket, naturally. Not fluff stuff like telling old women’s fortunes out of a crystal ball.”
“I don’t think I was meant to come out walking,” I said. “There’s a drug called scopolamine, truth serum, that sometimes makes people talk without their knowing it. It’s not sure fire, any more than hypnotism is. But it sometimes works. I think I was being milked in there to find out what I knew. But there are only three ways Sonderborg could have known that there was anything for me to know that might hurt him. Amthor might have told him, or Moose Malloy might have mentioned to him that I went to see Jessie Florian, or he might have thought putting me in there was a police gag.”
Hemingway was driving and I sat beside him. He drove very slowly, his face heavy with thought.
“How much you tell him?” he asked, making up his mind.
“I told him you and Blane went over there and took me away and tossed me out of the car and socked me on the back of the head. I didn’t tell him the rest.”
“Not about Twenty-third and Descanso, huh?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I thought maybe I could get more co-operation from you if I didn’t.”
“That’s a thought. You really want to go over to Stillwood Heights, or was that just a stall?”
“Just a stall. What I really want is for you to tell me why you put me in that funnyhouse and why I was kept there?”
Hemingway thought. He thought so hard his cheek muscles made little knots under his grayish skin.
“That Blane,” he said. “That sawed-off hunk of shin meat. I didn’t mean for him to sap you. I didn’t mean for you to walk home neither, not really. It was just an act, on account of we are friends with this swami guy and we kind of keep people from bothering him. You’d be surprised what a lot of people would try to bother him.”
“Amazed,” I said.
He turned his head. His gray eyes were lumps of ice. Then he looked again through the dusty windshield and did some more thinking.
“Them old cops get sap-hungry once in a while,” he said. “They just got to crack a head. Jesus, was I scared. You dropped like a sack of cement. I told Blane plenty. Then we run you over to Sonderborg’s place on account of it was a little closer and he was a nice guy and would take care of you.”
“Does Amthor know you took me there?”
“Hell, no. It was our idea.”
“On account of Sonderborg is such a nice guy and he would take care of me. And no kickback. No chance for a doctor to back up a complaint if I made one. Not that a complaint would have much chance in this sweet little town, if I did make it.”
“You going to get tough?” Hemingway asked thoughtfully.
“Not me,” I said. “And for once in your life neither are you. Because your job is hanging by a thread. You looked in the Chief’s eyes and you saw that. I didn’t go in there without credentials, not this trip.”
“Okey,” Hemingway said and spat out of the window. “I didn’t have any idea of getting tough in the first place except just the routine big mouth. What next?”
“Is Blane really sick?”
Hemingway nodded, but somehow failed to look sad. “Sure is. Pain in the gut day before yesterday and it bust on him before they could get his appendix out. He’s got a chance — but not too good.”
“We’d certainly hate to lose him,” I said. “A fellow like that is an asset to any police force.”
Hemingway chewed that one over and spat it out of the car window.
“Okey, next question,” he sighed.
“You told me why you took me to Sonderborg’s place. You didn’t tell me why he kept me there over forty-eight hours, locked up and shot full of dope.”
Hemingway braked the car softly over beside the curb. He put his large hands on the lower part of the wheel side by side and gently rubbed the thumbs together.
“I wouldn’t have an idea,” he said in a far-off voice.
“I had papers on me showing I had a private license,” I said. “Keys, some money, a couple of photographs. If he didn’t know you boys pretty well, he might think the crack on the head was just a gag to get into his place and look around. But I figure he knows you boys too well for that. So I’m puzzled.”
“Stay puzzled, pally. It’s a lot safer.”
“So it is,” I said. “But there’s no satisfaction in it.”
“You got the L.A. law behind you on this?”
“On this what?”
“On this thinking bout Sonderborg.”
“Not exactly.”
“That don’t mean yes or no.”
“I’m not that important,” I said. “The L.A. law can come in here any time they feel like it — two thirds of them anyway. The Sheriff’s boys and the D.A.’s boys. I have a friend in the D.A.’s office. I worked there once. His name is Bernie Ohls. He’s Chief Investigator.”
“You give it to him?”
“No. I haven’t spoken to him in a month.”
“Thinking about giving it to him?”
“Not if it interferes with a job I’m doing.”
“Private job?”
“Yes.”
“Okey, what is it you want?”
“What’s Sonderborg’s real racket?”
Hemingway took his hands off the wheel and spat out of the window. “We’re on a nice street here, ain’t we? Nice homes, nice gardens, nice climate. You hear a lot about crooked cops, or do you?”
“Once in a while,” I said.
“Okey, how many cops do you find living on a street even as good as this, with nice lawns and flowers? I’d know four or five, all vice squad boys. They get all the gravy. Cops like me live in itty-bitty frame houses on the wrong side of town. Want to see where I live?”
“What would it prove?”
“Listen, pally,” the big man said seriously. “You got me on a string, but it could break. Cops don’t go crooked for money. Not always, not even often. They get caught in the system. They get you where they have you do what is told them or else. And the guy that sits back there in the nice big corner office, with the nice suit and the nice liquor breath he thinks chewing on them seeds makes smell like violets, only it don’t — he ain’t giving the orders either. You get me?”
“What kind of a man is the mayor?”
“What kind of guy is a mayor anywhere? A politician. You think he gives the orders? Nuts. You know what’s the matter with this country, baby?”
“Too much frozen capital, I heard.”
“A guy can’t stay honest if he wants to,” Hemingway said. “That’s what’s the matter with this country. He gets chiseled out of his pants if he does. You gotta play the game dirty or you don’t eat. A lot of bastards think all we need is ninety thousand FBI men in clean collars and brief cases. Nuts. The percentage would get them just the way it does the rest of us. You know what I think? I think we gotta make this little world all over again. Now take Moral Rearmament. There you’ve got something. M.R.A. There you’ve got something, baby.”
“If Bay City is a sample of how it works, I’ll take aspirin,” I said.
“You could get too smart,” Hemingway said softly. “You might not think it, but it could be. You could get so smart you couldn’t think about anything but bein’ smart. Me, I’m just a dumb cop. I take orders. I got a wife and two kids and I do what the big shots say. Blane could tell you things. Me, I’m ignorant.”
“Sure Blane has appendicitis? Sure he didn’t just shoot himself in the stomach for meanness?”
“Don’t be that way,” Hemingway complained and slapped his hands up and down on the wheel. “Try and think nice about people.”
“About Blane?”
“He’s human — just like the rest of us,” Hemingway said. “He’s a sinner — but he’s human.”
“What’s Sonderborg’s racket?”
“Okey, I was just telling you. Maybe I’m wrong. I had you figured for a guy that could be sold a nice idea.”
“You don’t know what his racket is,” I said.
Hemingway took his handkerchief out and wiped his with it. “Buddy, I hate to admit it,” he said. “But you ought to know damn well that if I knew or Blane knew Sonderborg had a racket, either we wouldn’t of dumped you in there or you wouldn’t ever have come out, not walking. I’m talking about a real bad racket, naturally. Not fluff stuff like telling old women’s fortunes out of a crystal ball.”
“I don’t think I was meant to come out walking,” I said. “There’s a drug called scopolamine, truth serum, that sometimes makes people talk without their knowing it. It’s not sure fire, any more than hypnotism is. But it sometimes works. I think I was being milked in there to find out what I knew. But there are only three ways Sonderborg could have known that there was anything for me to know that might hurt him. Amthor might have told him, or Moose Malloy might have mentioned to him that I went to see Jessie Florian, or he might have thought putting me in there was a police gag.”