39
It was about ten o’clock when I called the Grayle number in Bay City. I thought it would probably be too late to catch her, but it wasn’t. I fought my way through a maid and the butler and finally heard her voice on the line. She sounded breezy and well-primed for the evening.
“I promised to call you,” I said. “It’s a little late, but I’ve had a lot to do.”
“Another stand-up?” Her voice got cool.
“Perhaps not. Does your chauffeur work this late?”
“He works as late as I tell him to.”
“How about dropping by to pick me up? I’ll be getting squeezed into my commencement suit.”
“Nice of you,” she drawled. “Should I really bother?” Amthor had certainly done a wonderful job with her centers of speech—if anything had ever been wrong with them.
“I’d show you my etching.”
“Just one etching?”
“It’s just a single apartment.”
“I heard they had such things,” she drawled again, then changed her tone. “Don’t act so hard to get. You have a lovely build, mister. And don’t ever let anyone tell you different. Give me the address again.”
I gave it to her and the apartment number. “The lobby door is locked,” I said. “But I’ll go down and slip the catch.”
“That’s fine,” she said. “I won’t have to bring my jimmy.”
She hung up, leaving me with a curious feeling of having talked to somebody that didn’t exist.
I went down to the lobby and slipped the catch and then took a shower and put my pajamas on and lay down on the bed. I could have slept for a week. I dragged myself up off the bed again and set the catch on the door, which I had forgotten to do, and walked through a deep hard snowdrift out to the kitchenette and laid out glasses and a bottle of liqueur Scotch I had been saving for a really highclass seduction.
I lay down on the bed again. “Pray,” I said out loud. “There’s nothing left but prayer.”
I closed my eyes. The four walls of the room seemed to hold the throb of a boat, the still air seemed to drip with fog and rustle with sea wind. I smelled the rank sour smell of a disused hold. I smelled engine oil and saw a wop in a purple shirt reading under a naked light bulb with his grandfather’s spectacles. I climbed and climbed up a ventilator shaft. I climbed the Himalayas and stepped out on top and guys with machine guns were all around me. I talked with a small and somehow very human yellow-eyed man who was a racketeer and probably worse. I thought of the giant with the red hair and the violet eyes, who was probably the nicest man I had ever met.
I stopped thinking. Lights moved behind my closed lids. I was lost in space. I was a gilt-edged sap come back from a vain adventure. I was a hundred dollar package of dynamite that went off with a noise like a pawnbroker looking at a dollar watch. I was a pink-headed bug crawling up the side of the City Hall.
I was asleep.
I woke slowly, unwillingly, and my eyes stared at reflected light on the ceiling from the lamp. Something moved gently in the room.
The movement was furtive and quiet and heavy. I listened to it. Then I turned my head slowly and looked at Moose Malloy. There were shadows and he moved in the shadows, as noiselessly as I had seen him once before. A gun in his hand had a dark oily business-like sheen. His hat was pushed back on his black curly hair and his nose sniffed, like the nose of a hunting dog.
He saw me open my eyes. He came softly over to the side of the bed and stood looking down at me.
“I got your note,” he said. “I make the joint clean. I don’t make no cops outside. If this is a plant, two guys goes out in baskets.”
I rolled a little on the bed and he felt swiftly under the pillows. His face was still wide and pale and his deep-set eyes were still somehow gentle. He was wearing an overcoat tonight. It fitted him where it touched. It was burst out in one shoulder seam, probably just getting it on. It would be the largest size they had, but not large enough for Moose Malloy.
“I hoped you’d drop by,” I said. “No copper knows any thing about this. I just wanted to see you.”
“Go on,” he said.
He moved sideways to a table and put the gun down and dragged his overcoat off and sat down in my best easy chair. It creaked, but it held. He leaned back slowly and arranged the gun so that it was close to his right hand. He dug a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket and shook one loose and put it into his mouth without touching it with his fingers. A match flared on a thumbnail. The sharp smell of the smoke drifted across the room.
“You ain’t sick or anything?” he said.
“Just resting. I had a hard day.”
“Door was open. Expecting someone?”
“A dame.”
He stared at me thoughtfully.
“Maybe she won’t come,” I said. “If she does, I’ll stall her.”
“What dame?”
“Oh, just a dame. If she comes, I’ll get rid of her. I’d rather talk to you.”
His very faint smile hardly moved his mouth. He puffed his cigarette awkwardly, as if it was too small for his fingers to hold with comfort.
“What made you think I was on the Monty?” he asked.
“A Bay City cop. It’s a long story and too full of guessing.”
“Bay City cops after me?”
“Would that bother you?”
He smiled the faint smile again. He shook his head slightly.
“You killed a woman,” I said. “Jessie Florian. That was a mistake.”
He thought. Then he nodded. “I’d drop that one,” he said quietly.
“But that queered it,” I said. “I’m not afraid of you. You’re no killer. You didn’t mean to kill her. The other one—over on Central—you could have squeezed out of. But not out of beating a woman’s head on a bedpost until her brains were on her face.”
“You take some awful chances, brother,” he said softly.
“The way I’ve been handled,” I said, “I don’t know the difference any more. You didn’t mean to kill her—did you?”
His eyes were restless. His head was cocked in a listening attitude.
“It’s about time you learned your own strength,” I said.
“It’s too late,” he said.
“You wanted her to tell you something,” I said. “You took hold of her neck and shook her. She was already dead when you were banging her head against the bedpost.”
He stared at me.
“I know what you wanted her to tell you,” I said.
“Go ahead.”
“There was a cop with me when she was found. I had to break clean.”
“How clean?”
“Fairly clean,” I said. “But not about tonight.”
He stared at me. “Okey, how did you know I was on the Monty?” He had asked me that before. He seemed to have forgotten.
“I didn’t. But the easiest way to get away would be by water. With the set-up they have in Bay City you could get out to one of the gambling boats. From there you could get clean away. With the right help.”
“Laird Brunette is a nice guy,” he said emptily. “So I’ve heard. I never even spoke to him.”
“He got the message to you.”
“Hell, there’s a dozen grapevines that might help him to do that, pal. When do we do what you said on the card? I had a hunch you were leveling. I wouldn’t take the chance to come here otherwise. Where do we go?”
He killed his cigarette and watched me. His shadow loomed against the wall, the shadow of a giant. He was so big he seemed unreal.
“What made you think I bumped Jessie Florian?” he asked suddenly.
“The spacing of the finger marks on her neck. The fact that you had something to get out of her, and that you are strong enough to kill people without meaning to.”
“The johns tied me to it?”
“I don’t know.”
“What did I want out of her?”
“You thought she might know where Velma was.”
He nodded silently and went on staring at me.
“But she didn’t,” I said. “Velma was too smart for her.”
There was a light knocking at the door.
Malloy leaned forward a little and smiled and picked up his gun. Somebody tried the doorknob. Malloy stood up slowly and leaned forward in a crouch and listened. Then he looked back at me from looking at the door.
I sat up on the bed and put my feet on the floor and stood up. Malloy watched me silently, without a motion. I went over to the door.
“Who is it?” I asked with my lips to the panel.
It was her voice all right. “Open up, silly. It’s the Duchess of Windsor.”
“Just a second.”
I looked back at Malloy. He was frowning. I went over close to him and said in a very low voice: “There’s no other way out. Go in the dressing room behind the bed and wait. I’ll get rid of her.”
He listened and thought. His expression was unreadable. He was a man who had now very little to lose. He was a man who would never know fear. It was not built into even that giant frame. He nodded at last and picked up his hat and coat and moved silently around the bed and into the dressing room. The door closed, but did not shut tight.
I looked around for signs of him. Nothing but a cigarette butt that anybody might have smoked. I went to the room door and opened it. Malloy had set the catch again when he came in.
She stood there half smiling, in the highnecked white fox evening cloak she had told me about. Emerald pendants hung from her ears and almost buried themselves in the soft white fur. Her fingers were curled and soft on the small evening bag she carried.
The smile died off her face when she saw me. She looked me up and down. Her eyes were cold now.
“So it’s like that,” she said grimly. “Pajamas and dressing gown. To show me his lovely little etching. What a fool I am.”
I stood aside and held the door. “It’s not like that at all. I was getting dressed and a cop dropped in on me. He just left.”
“Randall?”
I nodded. A lie with a nod is still a lie, but it’s an easy lie. She hesitated a moment, then moved past me with a swirl of scented fur.
I shut the door. She walked slowly across the room, stared blankly at the wall, then turned quickly.
“Let’s understand each other,” she said. “I’m not this much of a pushover. I don’t go for hall bedroom romance. There was a time in my life when I had too much of it. I like things done with an air.”
“Will you have a drink before you go?” I was still leaning against the door, across the room from her.
“Am I going?”
“You gave me the impression you didn’t like it here.”
“I wanted to make a point. I have to be a little vulgar to make it. I’m not one of these promiscuous bitches. I can be had—but not just by reaching. Yes, I’ll take a drink.”
I went out into the kitchenette and mixed a couple of drinks with hands that were not too steady. I carried them in and handed her one.
There was no sound from the dressing-room, not even a sound of breathing.
She took the glass and tasted it and looked across it at the far wall. “I don’t like men to receive me in their pajamas,” she said. “It’s a funny thing. I liked you. I liked you a lot. But I could get over it. I have often got over such things.”
I nodded and drank.
“Most men are just lousy animals,” she said. “In fact it’s a pretty lousy world, if you ask me.”
“Money must help.”
“You think it’s going to when you haven’t always had money. As a matter of fact it just makes new problems.” She smiled curiously. “And you forget how hard the old problems were.”
She got out a gold cigarette case from her bag and I went over and held a match for her. She blew a vague plume of smoke and watched it with half-shut eyes.
“Sit close to me,” she said suddenly.
“Let’s talk a little first.”
“About what? Oh—my jade?”
“About murder.”
Nothing changed in her face. She blew another plume of smoke, this time more carefully, more slowly. “It’s a nasty subject. Do we have to?”
I shrugged.
“Lin Marriott was no saint,” she said. “But I still don’t want to talk about it.”
She stared at me coolly for a long moment and then dipped her hand into her open bag for a handkerchief.
“Personally I don’t think he was a finger man for a jewel mob, either,” I said. “The police pretend that they think that, but they do a lot of pretending. I don’t even think he was a blackmailer, in any real sense. Funny, isn’t it?”
“Is it?” The voice was very, very cold now.
“Well, not really,” I agreed and drank the rest of my drink. “It was awfully nice of you to come here, Mrs. Grayle. But we seem to have hit the wrong mood. I don’t even, for example, think Marriott was killed by a gang. I don’t think he was going to that canyon to buy a jade necklace. I don’t even think a jade necklace was ever stolen. I think he went to that canyon to be murdered, although he thought he went there to help commit a murder. But Marriott was a very bad murderer.”
She leaned forward a little and her smile became just a little glassy. Suddenly, without any real change in her, she ceased to be beautiful. She looked merely like a woman who would have been dangerous a hundred years ago, and twenty years ago daring, but who today was just Grade B Hollywood.
She said nothing, but her right hand was tapping the clasp of her bag.
“A very bad murderer,” I said. “Like Shakespeare’s Second Murderer in that scene in King Richard III. The fellow that had certain dregs of conscience, but still wanted the money, and in the end didn’t do the job at all because he couldn’t make up his mind. Such murderers are very dangerous. They have to be removed—sometimes with blackjacks.”
She smiled. “And who was he about to murder, do you suppose?”
“Me.”
“That must be very difficult to believe—that anyone would hate you that much. And you said my jade necklace was never stolen at all. Have you any proof of all this?”
“I didn’t say I had. I said I thought these things.”
“Then why be such a fool as to talk about them?”
“Proof,” I said, “is always a relative thing. It’s an overwhelining balance of probabilities. And that’s a matter of how they strike you. There was rather weak motive for murdering me—merely that I was trying to trace a former Central Avenue dive singer at the same time that a convict named Moose Malloy got out of jail and started to look for her too. Perhaps I was helping him find her. Obviously, it was possible to find her, or it wouldn’t have been worth while to pretend to Marriott that I had to be killed and killed quickly. And obviously he wouldn’t have believed it, if it wasn’t so. But there was a much stronger motive for murdering Marriott, which he, out of vanity or love or greed or a mixture of all three, didn’t evaluate. He was afraid, but not for himself. He was afraid of violence to which he was a part and for which be could be convicted. But on the other hand he was fighting for his meal ticket. So he took the chance.”
I stopped. She nodded and said: “Very interesting. If one knows what you are talking about.”
“And one does,” I said.
We stared at each other. She had her right hand in her bag again now. I had a good idea what it held. But it hadn’t started to come out yet. Every event takes time.
“Let’s quit kidding,” I said. “We’re all alone here. Nothing either of us says has the slightest standing against what the other says. We cancel each other out. A girl who started in the gutter became the wife of a multimillionaire. On the way up a shabby old woman recognized her—probably heard her singing at the radio station and recognized the voice and went to see—and this old woman had to be kept quiet. But she was cheap, therefore she only knew a little. But the man who dealt with her and made her monthly payments and owned a trust deed on her home and could throw her into the gutter any time she got funny—that man knew it all. He was expensive. But that didn’t matter either, as long as nobody else knew. But some day a tough guy named Moose Malloy was going to get out of jail and start finding things out about his former sweetie. Because the big sap loved her—and still does. That’s what makes it funny, tragic-funny. And about that time a private dick starts nosing in also. So the weak link in the chain, Marriott, is no longer a luxury. He has become a menace. They’ll get to him and they’ll take him apart. He’s that kind of lad. He melts under heat. So he was murdered before he could melt. With a blackjack. By you.”
All she did was take her hand out of her bag, with a gun in it. All she did was point it at me and smile. All I did was nothing.
But that wasn’t all that was done. Moose Malloy stepped out of the dressing room with the Colt .45 still looking like a toy in his big hairy paw.
He didn’t look at me at all. He looked at Mrs. Lewin Lockridge Grayle. He leaned forward and his mouth smiled at her and he spoke to her softly.
“I thought I knew that voice,” he said. “I listened to that voice for eight years—all I could remember of it. I kind of liked your hair red, though. Hiya, babe. Long time no see.”
She turned the gun.
“Get away from me, you son of a bitch,” she said.
He stopped dead and dropped the gun to his side. He was still a couple of feet from her. His breath labored.
“I never thought,” he said quietly. “It just came to me out of the blue. You turned me into the cops. You. Little Velma.”
I threw a pillow, but it was too slow. She shot him five times in the stomach. The bullets made no more sound than fingers going into a glove.
Then she turned the gun and shot at me but it was empty. She dived for Malloy’s gun on the floor. I didn’t miss with the second pillow. I was around the bed and knocked her away before she got the pillow off her face. I picked the Colt up and went away around the bed again with it.
He was still standing, but he was swaying. His mouth was slack and his hands were fumbling at his body. He went slack at the knees and fell sideways on the bed, with his face down. His gasping breath filled the room.
I had the phone in my hand before she moved. Her eyes were a dead gray, like half-frozen water. She rushed for the door and I didn’t try to stop her. She left the door wide, so when I had done phoning I went over and shut it. I turned his head a little on the bed, so he wouldn’t smother. He was still alive, but after five in the stomach even a Moose Malloy doesn’t live very long.
I went back to the phone and called Randall at his home. “Malloy.” I said. “In my apartment. Shot five times in the stomach by Mrs. Grayle. I called the Receiving Hospital. She got away.”
“So you had to play clever,” was all he said and hung up quickly.
I went back to the bed. Malloy was on his knees beside the bed now, trying to get up, a great wad of bedclothes in one hand. His face poured sweat. His eyelids ifickered slowly and the lobes of his ears were dark.
He was still on his knees and still trying to get up when the fast wagon got there. It took four men to get him on the stretcher.
“He has a slight chance—if they’re .25’s,” the fast wagon doctor said just before he went out. “All depends what they hit inside. But he has a chance.”
“He wouldn’t want it,” I said.
He didn’t. He died in the night.