38
Cold air rushed down the ventilator. It seemed a long way to the top. After three minutes that felt like an hour I poked my head out cautiously from the hornlike opening. Canvas-sheeted boats were gray blurs near by. Low voices muttered in the dark. The beam of the searchlight circled slowly. It came from a point still higher, probably a railed platform at the top of one of the stumpy masts. There would be a lad up there with a Tommygun too, perhaps even a light Browning. Cold job, cold comfort when somebody left the loading port unbolted so nicely.
Distantly music throbbed like the phony bass of a cheap radio. Overhead a masthead light and through the higher layers of fog a few bitter stars stared down.
I climbed out of the ventilator, slipped my .38 from my shoulder clip and held it curled against my ribs, hiding it with my sleeve. I walked three silent steps and listened. Nothing happened. The muttering talk had stopped, but not on my account. I placed it now, between two lifeboats. And out of the night and the fog, as it mysteriously does, enough light gathered into one focus to shine on the dark hardness of a machine gun mounted on a high tripod and swung down over the rail. Two men stood near it, motionless, not smoking, and their voices began to mutter again, a quiet whisper that never became words.
I listened to the muttering too long. Another voice spoke clearly behind me.
“Sorry, guests are not allowed on the boat deck.”
I turned, not too quickly, and looked at his hands. They were light blurs and empty.
I stepped sideways nodding and the end of a boat hid us. The man followed me gently, his shoes soundless on the damp deck.
“I guess I’m lost,” I said.
“I guess you are.” He had a youngish voice, not chewed out of marble. “But there’s a door at the bottom of the companionway. It has a spring lock on it. It’s a good lock. There used to be an open stairway with a chain and a brass sign. We found the livelier element would step over that.”
He was talking a long time, either to be nice, or to be waiting. I didn’t know which. I said: “Somebody must have left the door open.”
The shadowed head nodded. It was lower than mine.
“You can see the spot that puts us in, though. If somebody did leave it open, the boss won’t like it a nickel. If somebody didn’t, we’d like to know how you got up here. I’m sure you get the idea.”
“It seems a simple idea. Let’s go down and talk to him about it.”
“You come with a party?”
“A very nice party.”
“You ought to have stayed with them.”
“You know how it is—you turn your head and some other guy is buying her a drink.”
He chuckled. Then he moved his chin slightly up and down.
I dropped and did a frogleap sideways and the swish of the blackjack was a long spent sigh in the quiet air. It was getting to be that every blackjack in the neighborhood swung at me automatically. The tall one swore.
I said: “Go ahead and be heroes.”
I clicked the safety catch loudly.
Sometimes even a bad scene will rock the house. The tall one stood rooted, and I could see the blackjack swinging at his wrist. The one I had been talking to thought it over without any hurry.
“This won’t buy you a thing,” he said gravely. “You’ll never get off the boat.”
“I thought of that. Then I thought how little you’d care.”
It was still a bum scene.
“You want what?” he said quietly.
“I have a loud gun,” I said. “But it doesn’t have to go off. I want to talk to Brunette.”
“He went to San Diego on business.”
“I’ll talk to his standin.”
“You’re quite a lad,” the nice one said. “We’ll go down. You’ll put the heater up before we go through the door.”
“I’ll put the heater up when I’m sure I’m going through door.”
He laughed lightly. “Go back to your post, Slim. I’ll look into this.”
He moved lazily in front of me and the tall one appeared to fade into the dark.
“Follow me, then.”
We moved Indian file across the deck. We went down brassbound slippery steps. At the bottom was a thick door. He opened it and looked at the lock. He smiled, nodded, held the door for me and I stepped through, pocketing the gun.
The door closed and clicked behind us. He said:
“Quiet evening, so far.”
There was a gilded arch in front of us and beyond it a gaming room, not very crowded. It looked much like any other gaming room. At the far end there was a short glass bar and some stools. In the middle a stairway going down and up this the music swelled and faded. I heard roulette wheels. A man was dealing faro to a single customer. There were not more than sixty people in the room. At the faro table there was a pile of yellowbacks that would start a bank. The player was an elderly white-haired man who looked politely attentive to the dealer, but no more.
Two quiet men in dinner jackets came through the archway sauntering, looking at nothing. That had to be expected. They strolled towards us and the short slender man with me waited for them. They were well beyond the arch before they let their hands find their side pockets, looking for cigarettes of course.
“From now on we have to have a little organization here,” the short man said. “I don’t think you’ll mind?”
“You’re Brunette,” I said suddenly.
He shrugged. “Of course.”
“You don’t look so tough,” I said.
“I hope not.”
The two men in dinner jackets edged me gently.
“In here,” Brunette said. “We can talk at ease.”
He opened the door and they took me into dock.
The room was like a cabin and not like a cabin. Two brass lamps swung in gimbels hung above a dark desk that was not wood, possibly plastic. At the end were two bunks in grained wood. The lower of them was made up and on the top one were half a dozen stacks of phonograph record books. A big combination radio-phonograph stood in the corner. There was a red leather chesterfield, a red carpet, smoking stands, a tabouret with cigarettes and a decanter and glasses, a small bar sitting cattycorners at the opposite end from the bunks.
“Sit down,” Brunette said and went around the desk. There were a lot of business-like papers on the desk, with columns of figures, done on a bookkeeping machine. He sat in a tall backed director’s chair and tilted it a little and looked me over. Then he stood up again and stripped off his overcoat and scarf and tossed them to one side. He sat down again. He picked a pen up and tickled the lobe of one ear with it. He had a cat smile, but I like cats.
He was neither young nor old, neither fat nor thin. Spending a lot of time on or near the ocean had given him a good healthy complexion. His hair was nut-brown and waved naturally and waved still more at sea. His forehead was narrow and brainy and his eyes held a delicate menace. They were yellowish in color. He had nice hands, not babied to the point of insipidity, but well-kept. His dinner clothes were midnight blue, I judged, because they looked so black. I thought his pearl was a little too large, but that might have been jealousy.
He looked at me for quite a long time before he said: “He has a gun.”
One of the velvety tough guys leaned against the middle of my spine with something that was probably not a fishing rod. Exploring hands removed the gun and looked for others.
“Anything else?” a voice asked.
Brunette shook his head. “Not now.”
One of the gunners slid my automatic across the desk. Brunette put the pen down and picked up a letter opener and pushed the gun around gently on his blotter.
“Well,” he said quietly, looking past my shoulder. “Do I have to explain what I want now?”
One of them went out quickly and shut the door. The other was so still he wasn’t there. There was a long easy silence, broken by the distant hum of voices and the deep-toned music and somewhere down below a dull almost imperceptible throbbing.
“Drink?”
“Thanks.”
The gorilla mixed a couple at the little bar. He didn’t try to hide the glasses while he did it. He placed one on each side of the desk, on black glass scooters.
“Cigarette?”
“Thanks.”
“Egyptian all right?”
“Sure.”
We lit up. We drank. It tasted like good Scotch. The gorilla didn’t drink.
“What I want—” I began.
“Excuse me, but that’s rather unimportant, isn’t it?”
The soft catlike smile and the lazy half-closing of the yellow eyes.
The door opened and the other one came back and with him was Mess-jacket, gangster mouth and all. He took one look at me and his face went oyster-white.
“He didn’t get past me,” he said swiftly, curling one end of his lips.
“He had a gun,” Brunette said, pushing it with the letter opener. “This gun. He even pushed it into my back more or less, on the boat deck.”
“Not past me, boss,” Mess-jacket said just as swiftly.
Brunette raised his yellow eyes slightly and smiled at me. “Well?”
“Sweep him out,” I said. “Squash him somewhere else.”
“I can prove it by the taximan,” Mess-jacket snarled.
“You’ve been off the stage since five-thirty?”
“Not a minute, boss.”
“That’s no answer. An empire can fall in a minute.”
“Not a second, boss.”
“But he can be had,” I said, and laughed.
Mess-jacket took the smooth gliding step of a boxer and his fist lashed like a whip. It almost reached my temple. There was a dull thud. His fist seemed to melt in midair. He slumped sideways and clawed at a corner of the desk, then rolled on his back. It was nice to see somebody else get sapped for a change.
Brunette went on smiling at me.
“I hope you’re not doing him an injustice,” Brunette said. “There’s still the matter of the door to the companionway.”
“Accidentally open.”
“Could you think of any other idea?”
“Not in such a crowd.”
“I’ll talk to you alone,” Brunette said, not looking at anyone but me.
The gorilla lifted Mess-jacket by the armpits and dragged him across the cabin and his partner opened an inner door. They went through. The door closed.
“All right,” Brunette said. “Who are you and what do you want?”
“I’m a private detective and I want to talk to a man named Moose Malloy.”
“Show me you’re a private dick.”
I showed him. He tossed the wallet back across the desk. His wind-tanned lips continued to smile and the smile was getting stagy.
“I’m investigating a murder,” I said. “The murder of a man named Marriott on the bluff near your Belvedere Club last Thursday night. This murder happens to be connected with another murder, of a woman, done by Malloy, an ex-con and bank robber and all-round tough guy.”
He nodded. “I’m not asking you yet what it has to do me. I assume you’ll come to that. Suppose you tell me how you got on my boat?”
“I told you.”
“It wasn’t true,” he said gently. “Marlowe is the name? It wasn’t true, Marlowe. You know that. The kid down on the stage isn’t lying. I pick my men carefully.”
“You own a piece of Bay City,” I said. “I don’t know how big a piece, but enough for what you want. A man named Sonderborg has been running a hideout there. He been running reefers and stickups and hiding hot boys. Naturally, he couldn’t do that without connections. I don’t think he could do it without you. Malloy was staying with him. Malloy has left. Malloy is about seven feet tall and hard to hide. I think he could hide nicely on a gambling boat.”
“You’re simple,” Brunette said softly. “Supposing I wanted to hide him, why should I take the risk out here?” He sipped his drink. “After all I’m in another business. It’s hard enough to keep a good taxi service running with out a lot of trouble. The world is full of places a crook can hide. If he has money. Could you think of a better idea?”
“I could, but to hell with it.”
“I can’t do anything for you. So how did you get on the boat?”
“I don’t care to say.”
“I’m afraid I’ll have to have you made to say, Marlowe.” His teeth glinted in the light from the brass ship’s lamps. “After all, it can be done.”
“If I tell you, will you get word to Malloy?”
“What word?”
I reached for my wallet lying on the desk and drew a card from it and turned it over. I put the wallet away and got a pencil instead. I wrote five words on the back of the card and pushed it across the desk. Brunette took it and read what I had written on it. “It means nothing to me,” he said.
“It will mean something to Malloy.”
He leaned back and stared at me. “I don’t make you out. You risk your hide to come out here and hand me a card to pass on to some thug I don’t even know. There’s no sense to it.”
“There isn’t if you don’t know him.”
“Why didn’t you leave your gun ashore and come aboard the usual way?”
“I forgot the first time. Then I knew that toughie in the mess jacket would never let me on. Then I bumped into a fellow who knew another way.”
His yellow eyes lighted as with a new flame. He smiled and said nothing.
“This other fellow is no crook but he’s been on the beach with his ears open. You have a loading port that has been unbarred on the inside and you have a ventilator shaft out of which the grating has been removed. There’s one man to knock over to get to the boat deck. You’d better check your crew list, Brunette.”
He moved his lips soffly, one over the other. He looked down at the card again. “Nobody named Malloy is on board this boat,” he said. “But if you’re telling the truth about that loading port, I’ll buy.”
“Go and look at it.”
He still looked down. “If there’s any way I can get word to Malloy, I will. I don’t know why I bother.”
“Take a look at that loading port.”
He sat very still for a moment, then leaned forward and pushed the gun across the desk to me.
“The things I do,” he mused, as if he was alone. “I run towns, I elect mayors, I corrupt police, I peddle dope, I hide out crooks, I heist old women strangled with pearls. What a lot of time I have.” He laughed shortly. “What a lot of time.”
I reached for my gun and tucked it back under my arm. Brunette stood up. “I promise nothing,” he said, eyeing me steadily. “But I believe you.”
“Of course not.”
“You took a long chance to hear so little.”
“Yes.”
“Well—” he made a meaningless gesture and then put his hand across the desk.
“Shake hands with a chump,” he said softly.
I shook hands with him. His hand was small and firm and a little hot.
“You wouldn’t tell me how you found out about this loading port?”
“I can’t. But the man who told me is no crook.”
“I could make you tell,” he said, and immediately shook his head. “No. I believed you once. I’ll believe you again. Sit still and have another drink.”
He pushed a buzzer. The door at the back opened and one of the nice-tough guys came in.
“Stay here. Give him a drink, if he wants it. No rough stuff.”
The torpedo sat down and smiled at me calmly. Brunette went quickly out of the office. I smoked. I finished my drink. The torpedo made me another. I finished that, and another cigarette.
Brunette came back and washed his hands over in the corner, then sat down at his desk again. He jerked his head at the torpedo. The torpedo went out silently.
The yellow eyes studied me. “You win, Marlowe. And I have one hundred and sixty-four men on my crew list. Well—” he shrugged. “You can go back by the taxi. Nobody will bother you. As to your message, I have a few contacts. I’ll use them. Good night. I probably should say thanks. For the demonstration.”
“Good night,” I said, and stood up and went out.
There was a new man on the landing stage. I rode to shore on a different taxi. I went along to the bingo parlor and leaned against the wall in the crowd.
Red came along in a few minutes and leaned beside me against the wall.
“Easy, huh?” Red said softly, against the heavy clear voices of the table men calling the numbers.
“Thanks to you. He bought. He’s worried.”
Red looked this way and that and turned his lips a little more close to my ear. “Get your man?”
“No. But I’m hoping Brunette will find a way to get him a message.”
Red turned his head and looked at the tables again. He yawned and straightened away from the wall. The beak-nosed man was in again. Red stepped over to him and said: “Hiya, Olson,” and almost knocked the man off his feet pushing past him.
Olson looked after him sourly and straightened his hat. Then he spat viciously on the floor.
As soon as he had gone, I left the place and went along to the parking lot back towards the tracks where I had left my car.
I drove back to Hollywood and put the car away and went up to the apartment.
I took my shoes off and walked around in my socks feeling the floor with my toes. They would still get numb again once in a while.
Then I sat down on the side of the pulled-down bed and tried to figure time. It couldn’t be done. It might take hours or days to find Malloy. He might never be found until the police got him. If they ever did—alive.