29
I was sitting on the side of my bed in my pajamas, thinking about getting up, but not yet committed. I didn’t feel very well, but I didn’t feel as sick as I ought to, not as sick as I would feel if I had a salaried job. My head hurt and felt large and hot and my tongue was dry and had gravel on it and my throat was stiff and my jaw was not untender. But I had had worse mornings.
It was a gray morning with high fog, not yet warm but likely to be. I heaved up off the bed and rubbed the pit of my stomach where it was sore from vomiting. My left foot felt fine. It didn’t have an ache in it. So I had to kick the corner of the bed with it.
I was still swearing when there was a sharp tap at the door, the kind of bossy knock that makes you want to open the door two inches, emit the succulent raspberry and slam it again.
I opened it a little wider than two inches. Detective-Lieutenant Randall stood there, in a brown gabardine suit, with a pork pie lightweight felt on his head, very neat and clean and solemn and with a nasty look in his eye.
He pushed the door slightly and I stepped away from it. He came in and closed it and looked around. “I’ve been looking for you for two days,” he said. He didn’t look at me. His eyes measured the room.
“I’ve been sick.”
He walked around with a light springy step, his creamy gray hair shining, his hat under his arm now, his hands in his pockets. He wasn’t a very big man for a cop. He took one hand out of his pocket and placed the hat carefully on top of some magazines.
“Not here,” he said.
“In a hospital.”
“Which hospital?”
“A pet hospital.”
He jerked as if I had slapped his face. Dull color showed behind his skin.
“A little early in the day, isn’t it—for that sort of thing?”
I didn’t say anything. I lit a cigarette. I took one draw on it and sat down on the bed again, quickly.
“No cure for lads like you, is there?” he said. “Except to throw you in the sneezer.”
“I’ve been a sick man and I haven’t had my morning coffee. You can’t expect a very high grade of wit.”
“I told you not to work on this case.”
“You’re not God. You’re not even Jesus Christ.” I took another drag on the cigarette. Somewhere down inside me felt raw, but I liked it a little better.
“You’d be amazed how much trouble I could make you.”
“Probably.”
“Do you know why I haven’t done it so far?”
“Yeah.”
“Why?” He was leaning over a little, sharp as a terrier, with that stony look in his eyes they all get sooner or later.
“You couldn’t find me.”
He leaned back and rocked on his heels. His face shone a little. “I thought you were going to say something else,” he said. “And if you said it, I was going to smack you on the button.”
“Twenty million dollars wouldn’t scare you. But you might get orders.”
He breathed hard, with his mouth a little open. Very slowly he got a package of cigarettes out of his pocket and tore the wrapper. His fingers were trembling a little. He put a cigarette between his lips and went over to my magazine table for a match folder. He lit the cigarette carefully, put the match in the ashtray and not on the floor, and inhaled.
“I gave you some advice over the telephone the other day,” he said. “Thursday.”
“Friday.”
“Yes—Friday. It didn’t take. I can understand why. But I didn’t know at that time you had been holding out evidence. I was just recommending a line of action that seemed like a good idea in this case.”
“What evidence?”
He stared at me silently.
“Will you have some coffee?” I asked. “It might make you human.”
“No.”
“I will.” I stood up and started for the kitchenette.
“Sit down,” Randall snapped. “I’m far from through.”
I kept on going out to the kitchenette, ran some water into the kettle and put it on the stove. I took a drink of cold water from the faucet, then another. I came back with a third glass in my hand to stand in the doorway and look at him. He hadn’t moved. The veil of his smoke was almost a solid thing to one side of him. He was looking at the floor.
“Why was it wrong to go to Mrs. Grayle when she sent for me?” I asked.
“I wasn’t talking about that.”
“Yeah, but you were just before.”
“She didn’t send for you.” His eyes lifted and had the stony look still. And the flush still dyed his sharp cheekbones. “You forced yourself on her and talked about scandal and practically blackmailed yourself into a job.”
“Funny. As I remember it, we didn’t even talk job. I didn’t think there was anything in her story. I mean, anything to get my teeth into. Nowhere to start. And of course I suppose she had already told it to you.”
“She had. That beer joint on Santa Monica is a crook hideout. But that doesn’t mean anything. I couldn’t get a thing there. The hotel across the street smells too. Nobody we want. Cheap punks.”
“She tell you I forced myself on her?”
He dropped his eyes a little. “No.”
I grinned. “Have some coffee?”
“No.”
I went back into the kitchenette and made the coffee and waited for it to drip. Randall followed me out this time and stood in the doorway himself.
“This jewel gang has been working in Hollywood and around for a good ten years to my knowledge,” he said. “They went too far this time. They killed a man. I think I know why.”
“Well, if it’s a gang job and you break it, that will be the first gang murder solved since I lived in the town. And I could name and describe at least a dozen.”
“It’s nice of you to say that, Marlowe.”
“Correct me if I’m wrong.”
“Damn it,” he said irritably. “You’re not wrong. There were a couple solved for the record, but they were just rappers. Some punk took it for the high pillow.”
“Yeah. Coffee?”
“If I drink some, will you talk to me decently, man to man, without wisecracking?”
“I’ll try. I don’t promise to spill all my ideas.”
“I can do without those,” he said acidly.
“That’s a nice suit you’re wearing.”
The flush dyed his face again. “This suit cost twenty seven-fifty,” he snapped.
“Oh Christ, a sensitive cop,” I said, and went back to the stove.
“That smells good. How do you make it?”
I poured. “French drip. Coarse ground coffee. No filter papers.” I got the sugar from the closet and the cream from the refrigerator. We sat down on opposite sides of the nook.
“Was that a gag, about your being sick, in a hospital?”
“No gag. I ran into a little trouble—down in Bay City. They took me in. Not the cooler, a private dope and liquor cure.”
His eyes got distant. “Bay City, eh? You like it the hard way, don’t you, Marlowe?”
“It’s not that I like it the hard way. It’s that I get it that way. But nothing like this before. I’ve been sapped twice, the second time by a police officer or a man who looked like one and claimed to be one. I’ve been beaten with my own gun and choked by a tough Indian. I’ve been thrown unconscious into this dope hospital and kept there locked up and part of the time probably strapped down. And I couldn’t prove any of it, except that I actually do have quite a nice collection of bruises and my left arm has been needled plenty.”
He stared hard at the corner of the table. “In Bay City,” he said slowly.
“The name’s like a song. A song in a dirty bathtub.”
“What were you doing down there?”
“I didn’t go down there. These cops took me over the line. I went to see a guy in Stillwood Heights. That’s in LA.”
“A man named Jules Amthor,” he said quietly. “Why did you swipe those cigarettes?”
I looked into my cup. The damned little fool. “It looked funny, him—Marriott—having that extra case. With reefers in it. It seems they make them up like Russian cigarettes down in Bay City with hollow mouthpieces and the Romanoff arms and everything.”
He pushed his empty cup at me and I refilled it. His eyes were going over my face line by line, corpuscle by corpuscle, like Sherlock Holmes with his magnifying glass or Thorndyke with his pocket lens.
“You ought to have told me,” he said bitterly. He sipped and wiped his lips with one of those fringed things they give you in apartment houses for napkins. “But you didn’t swipe them. The girl told me.”
“Aw well, hell,” I said. “A guy never gets to do anything in this country any more. Always women.”
“She likes you,” Randall said, like a polite FBI man in a movie, a little sad, but very manly. “Her old man was as straight a cop as ever lost a job. She had no business taking those things. She likes you.”
“She’s a nice girl. Not my type.”
“You don’t like them nice?” He had another cigarette going. The smoke was being fanned away from his face by his hand.
“I like smooth shiny girls, hardboiled and loaded with sin.”
“They take you to the cleaners,” Randall said indifferently.
“Sure. Where else have I ever been? What do you call this session?”
He smiled his first smile of the day. He probably allowed himself four.
“I’m not getting much out of you,” he said.
“I’ll give you a theory, but you are probably way ahead of me on it. This Marriott was a blackmailer of women, because Mrs. Grayle just about told me so. But he was something else. He was the finger man for the jewel mob. The society finger, the boy who would cultivate the victim and set the stage. He would cultivate women he could take out, get to know them pretty well. Take this holdup a week from Thursday. It smells. If Marriott hadn’t been driving the car, or hadn’t taken Mrs. Grayle to the Troc or hadn’t gone home the way he did, past that beer parlor, the holdup couldn’t have been brought off.”
“The chauffeur could have been driving,” Randall said reasonably. “But that wouldn’t have changed things much. Chauffeurs are not getting themselves pushed in the face with lead bullets by holdup men—for ninety a month. But there couldn’t be many stickups with Marriott alone with women or things would get talked about.”
“The whole point of this kind of racket is that things are not talked about,” I said. “In consideration for that the stuff is sold back cheap.”
Randall leaned back and shook his head. “You’ll have to do better than that to interest me. Women talk about anything. It would get around that this Marriott was a kind of tricky guy to go out with.”
“It probably did. That’s why they knocked him off.”
Randall stared at me woodenly. His spoon was stirring air in an empty cup. I reached over and he waved the pot aside. “Go on with that one,” he said.
“They used him up. His usefulness was exhausted. It was about time for him to get talked about a little, as you suggest. But you don’t quit in those rackets and you don’t get your time. So this last holdup was just that for him—the last. Look, they really asked very little for the jade considering its value. And Marriott handled the contact. But all the same Marriott was scared. At the last moment he thought he had better not go alone. And he figured a little trick that if anything did happen to him, something on him would point to a man, a man quite ruthless and clever enough to be the brains of that sort of mob, and a man in an unusual position to get information about rich women. It was a childish sort of trick but it did actually work.”
Randall shook his head. “A gang would have stripped him, perhaps even have taken the body out to sea and dumped it.”
“No. They wanted the job to look amateurish. They wanted to stay in business. They probably have another finger lined up,” I said.
Randall still shook his head. “The man these cigarettes pointed to is not the type. He has a good racket of his own. I’ve inquired. What did you think of him?”
His eyes were too blank, much too blank. I said: “He looked pretty damned deadly to me. And there’s no such thing as too much money, is there? And after all his psychic racket is a temporary racket for any one place. He has a vogue and everybody goes to him and after a while the vogue dies down and the business is licking its shoes. That is, if he’s a psychic and nothing else. Just like movie stars. Give him five years. He could work it that long. But give him a couple of ways to use the information he must get out of these women and he’s going to make a killing.”
“I’ll look him up more thoroughly,” Randall said with the blank look. “But right now I’m more interested in Marriott. Let’s go back farther—much farther. To how you got to know him.”
“He just called me up. Picked my name out of the phone book. He said so, at any rate.”
“He had your card.”
I looked surprised. “Sure. I’d forgotten that.”
“Did you ever wonder why he picked your name—ignoring that matter of your short memory?”
I stared at him across the top of my coffee cup. I was beginning to like him. He had a lot behind his vest besides his shirt.
“So that’s what you really came up for?” I said.
He nodded. “The rest, you know, is just talk.” He smiled politely at me and waited.
I poured some more coffee.
Randall leaned over sideways and looked along the cream-colored surface of the table. “A little dust,” he said absently, then straightened up and looked me in the eye.
“Perhaps I ought to go at this in a little different way,” he said. “For instance, I think your hunch about Marriott is probably right. There’s twenty-three grand in currency in his safe-deposit box—which we had a hell of a time to locate, by the way. There are also some pretty fair bonds and a trust deed to a property on West Fifty-fourth Place.”
He picked a spoon up and rapped it lightly on the edge of his saucer and smiled. “That interest you?” he asked mildly. “The number was 1644 West Fifty-fourth Place.”
“Yeah,” I said thickly.
“Oh, there was quite a bit of jewelry in Marriott’s box too—pretty good stuff. But I don’t think he stole it. I think it was very likely given to him. That’s one up for you. He was afraid to sell it—on account of the association of thought in his own mind.”
I nodded. “He’d feel as if it was stolen.”
“Yes. Now that trust deed didn’t interest me at all at first, but here’s how it works. It’s what you fellows are up against in police work. We get all the homicide and doubtful death reports from outlying districts. We’re supposed to read them the same day. That’s a rule, like you shouldn’t search without a warrant or frisk a guy for a gun without reasonable grounds. But we break rules. We have to. I didn’t get around to some of the reports until this morning. Then I read one about a killing of a Negro on Central, last Thursday. By a tough ex-con called Moose Malloy. And there was an identifying witness. And sink my putt, if you weren’t the witness.”
He smiled, softly, his third smile. “Like it?”
“I’m listening.”
“This was only this morning, understand. So I looked at the name of the man making the report and I knew him, Nulty. So I knew the case was a flop. Nulty is the kind of guy—well, were you ever up at Crestline?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, up near Crestline there’s a place where a bunch of old box cars have been made into cabins. I have a cabin up there myself, but not a box car. These box cars were brought up on trucks, believe it or not, and there they stand without any wheels. Now Nulty is the kind of guy who would make a swell brakeman on one of those box cars.”
“That’s not nice,” I said. “A fellow officer.”
“So I called Nulty up and he hemmed and hawed around and spit a few times and then he said you had an idea about some girl called Velma something or other that Malloy was sweet on a long time ago and you went to see the widow of the guy that used to own the dive where the killing happened when it was a white joint, and where Malloy and the girl both worked at that time. And her address was 1644 West Fifty-fourth Place, the place Marriott had the trust deed on.”
“Yes?”
“So I just thought that was enough coincidence for one morning,” Randall said. “And here I am. And so far I’ve been pretty nice about it.”
“The trouble is,” I said, “it looks like more than it is. This Velma girl is dead, according to Mrs. Florian. I have her photo.”
I went into the living room and reached into my suitcoat and my hand was in midair when it began to feel funny and empty. But they hadn’t even taken the photos. I got them out and took them to the kitchen and tossed the Pierrot girl down in front of Randall. He studied it carefully.
“Nobody I ever saw,” he said. “That another one?”
“No, this is a newspaper still of Mrs. Grayle. Anne Riordan got it.”
He looked at it and nodded. “For twenty million, I’d marry her myself.”
“There’s something I ought to tell you,” I said. “Last night I was so damn mad I had crazy ideas about going down there and trying to bust it alone. This hospital is at Twenty-third and Descanso in Bay City. It’s run by a man named Sonderborg who says he’s a doctor. He’s running a crook hideout on the side. I saw Moose Malloy there last night. In a room.”
Randall sat very still, looking at me. “Sure?”
“You couldn’t mistake him. He’s a big guy, enormous. He doesn’t look like anybody you ever saw.”
He sat looking at me, without moving. Then very slowly he moved out from under the table and stood up.
“Let’s go see this Florian woman.”
“How about Malloy?”
He sat down again. “Tell me the whole thing, carefully.” I told him. He listened without taking his eyes off my face. I don’t think he even winked. He breathed with his mouth slightly open. His body didn’t move. His fingers tapped gently on the edge of the table. When I had finished he said:
“This Dr. Sonderborg—what did he look like?”
“Like a doper, and probably a dope peddler.” I described him to Randall as well as I could.
He went quietly into the other room and sat down at the telephone. He dialed his number and spoke quietly for a time. Then he came back. I had just finished making more coffee and boiling a couple of eggs and making two slices of toast and buttering them. I sat down to eat.
Randall sat down opposite me and leaned his chin in his hand. “I’m having a state narcotics man go down there with a fake complaint and ask to look around. He may get some ideas. He won’t get Malloy. Malloy was out of there ten minutes after you left last night. That’s one thing you can bet on.”
“Why not the Bay City cops?” I put salt on my eggs.
Randall said nothing. When I looked up at him his face was red and uncomfortable.
“For a cop,” I said, “you’re the most sensitive guy I ever met.”
“Hurry up with that eating. We have to go.”
“I have to shower and shave and dress after this.”
“Couldn’t you just go in your pajamas?” he asked acidly.
“So the town is as crooked as all that?” I said.
“It’s Laird Brunette’s town. They say he put up thirty grand to elect a mayor.”
“The fellow that owns the Belvedere Club?”
“And the two gambling boats.”
“But it’s in our county,” I said.
He looked down at his clean, shiny fingernails. “We’ll stop by your office and get those other two reefers,” he said. “If they’re still there.” He snapped his fingers. “If you’ll lend me your keys, I’ll do it while you get shaved and dressed.”
“We’ll go together,” I said. “I might have some mail.”
He nodded and after a moment sat down and lit another cigarette. I shaved and dressed and we left in Randall’s car.
I had some mail, but it wasn’t worth reading. The two cut up cigarettes in the desk drawer had not been touched. The office had no look of having been searched.
Randall took the two Russian cigarettes and sniffed at the tobacco and put them away in his pocket.
“He got one card from you,” he mused. “There couldn’t have been anything on the back of that, so he didn’t bother about the others. I guess Amthor is not very much afraid—just thought you were trying to pull something. Let’s go.”