40
“You ought to have given a dinner party,” Anne Riordan said, looking at me across her tan figured rug. “Gleaming silver and crystal, bright crisp linen—if they’re still using linen in the places where they give dinner parties—candlelight, the women in their best jewels and the men in white ties, the servants hovering discreetly with the wrapped bottles of wine, the cops looking a little uncomfortable in their hired evening clothes, as who the hell wouldn’t, the suspects with their brittle smiles and restless hands, and you at the head of the long table telling all about it, little by little, with your charming light smile and a phony English accent like Philo Vance.”
“Yeah,” I said. “How about a little something to be holding in my hand while you go on being clever?”
She went out to her kitchen and rattled ice and came back with a couple of tall ones and sat down again.
“The liquor bills of your lady friends must be something fierce,” she said and sipped.
“And suddenly the butler fainted,” I said. “Only it wasn’t the butler who did the murder. He just fainted to be cute.”
I inhaled some of my drink. “It’s not that kind of story,” I said. “It’s not lithe and clever. It’s just dark and full of blood.”
“So she got away?”
I nodded. “So far. She never went home. She must have had a little hideout where she could change her clothes and appearance. After all she lived in peril, like the sailors. She was alone when she came to see me. No chauffeur. She came in a small car and she left it a few dozen blocks away.”
“They’ll catch her—if they really try.”
“Don’t be like that. Wilde, the D.A. is on the level. I worked for him once. But if they catch her, what then? They’re up against twenty million dollars and a lovely face and either Lee Farrell or Rennenkamp. It’s going to be awfully hard to prove she killed Marriott. All they have is what looks like a heavy motive and her past life, if they can trace it. She probably has no record, or she wouldn’t have played it this way.”
“What about Malloy? If you had told me about him before, I’d have known who she was right away. By the way, how did you know? These two photos are not of the same woman.”
“No. I doubt if even old lady Florian knew they had been switched on her. She looked kind of surprised when I showed the photo of Velma—the one that had Velma Valento written on it—in front of her nose. But she may have known. She may have just hid it with the idea of selling it to me later on. Knowing it was harmless, a photo of some other girl Marriott substituted.”
“That’s just guessing.”
“It had to be that way. Just as when Marriott called me up and gave me a song and dance about a jewel ransom payoff it had to be because I had been to see Mrs. Florian about Velma. And when Marriott was killed, it had to be because he was the weak link in the chain. Mrs. Florian didn’t even know Vehna had become Mrs. Lewin Lockridge Grayle. She couldn’t have. They bought her too cheap. Grayle says they went to Europe to be married and she was married under her real name. He won’t tell where or when. He won’t tell what her real name was. He won’t tell where she is. I don’t think he knows, but the cops don’t believe that.”
“Why won’t he tell?” Anne Riordan cupped her chin on the backs of her laced fingers and stared at me with shadowed eyes.
“He’s so crazy about her he doesn’t care whose lap she sat in.”
“I hope she enjoyed sitting in yours,” Anne Riordan said, acidly.
“She was playing me. She was a little afraid of me. She didn’t want to kill me because it’s bad business killing a man who is a sort of cop. But she probably would have tried in the end, just as she would have killed Jessie Florian, if Malloy hadn’t saved her the trouble.”
“I bet it’s fun to be played by handsome blondes,” Anna Riordan said. “Even if there is a little risk. As, I suppose, there usually is.”
I didn’t say anything.
“I suppose they can’t do anything to her for killing Malloy, because he had a gun.”
“No. Not with her pull.”
The goldflecked eyes studied me solemnly. “Do think she meant to kill Malloy?”
“She was afraid of him,” I said. “She had turned him in eight years ago. He seemed to know that. But he wouldn’t have hurt her. He was in love with her too. Yes, I think she meant to kill anybody she had to kill. She had a lot to fight for. But you can’t keep that sort of thing up indefinitely. She took a shot at me in my apartment—but the gun was empty then. She ought to have killed me out on the bluff when she killed Marriott.”
“He was in love with her,” Anne said softly. “I mean Malloy. It didn’t matter to him that she hadn’t written to him in six years or ever gone to see him while he was in jail. It didn’t matter to him that she had turned him in for a reward. He just bought some fine clothes and started to look for her the first thing when he got out. So she pumped five bullets into him, by way of saying hello. He had killed two people himself, but he was in love with her. What a world.”
I finished my drink and got the thirsty look on my face again. She ignored it. She said:
“And she had to tell Grayle where she came from and he didn’t care. He went away to marry her under another name and sold his radio station to break contact with anybody who might know her and he gave her everything that money can buy and she gave him—what?”
“That’s hard to say.” I shook the ice cubes at the bottom of my glass. That didn’t get me anything either. “I suppose she gave him a sort of pride that he, a rather old man, could have a young and beautiful and dashing wife. He loved her. What the hell are we talking about it for? These things happen all the time. It didn’t make any difference what she did or who she played around with or what she had once been. He loved her.”
“Like Moose Malloy,” Anne said quietly.
“Let’s go riding along the water.”
“You didn’t tell me about Brunette or the cards that were in those reefers or Amthor or Dr. Sonderborg or that little clue that set you on the path of the great solution.”
“I gave Mrs. Florian one of my cards. She put a wet glass on it. Such a card was in Marriott’s pockets, wet glass mark and all. Marriott was not a messy man. That was a clue, of sorts. Once you suspected anything it was easy to find out other connections, such as that Marriott owned a trust deed on Mrs. Florian’s home, just to keep her in line. As for Amthor, he’s a bad hat. They picked him up in a New York hotel and they say he’s an international con man. Scotland Yard has his prints, also Paris. How the hell they got all that since yesterday or the day before I don’t know. These boys work fast when they feel like it. I think Randall has had this thing taped for days and was afraid I’d step on the tapes. But Amthor had nothing to do with killing anybody. Or with Sonderborg. They haven’t found Sonderborg yet. They think he has a record too, but they’re not sure until they get him. As for Brunette, you can’t get anything on a guy like Brunette. They’ll have him before the Grand Jury and he’ll refuse to say anything, on his constitutional rights. He doesn’t have to bother about his reputation. But there’s a nice shakeup here in Bay City. Chief has been canned and half the detectives have been reduced to acting patrolmen, and a very nice guy named Red Norgaard, who helped me get on the Montecito, has got his job back. The mayor is doing all this, changing his pants hourly while the crisis lasts.”
“Do you have to say things like that?”
“The Shakespearean touch. Let’s go riding. After we’ve had another drink.”
“You can have mine,” Anne Riordan said, and got up and brought her untouched drink over to me. She stood in front of me holding it, her eyes wide and a little frightened.
“You’re so marvelous,” she said. “So brave, so determined and you work for so little money. Everybody bats you over the head and chokes you and smacks your jaw and fills you with morphine, but you just keep right on hitting between tackle and end until they’re all worn out. What makes you so wonderful?”
“Go on,” I growled. “Spill it.”
Anne Riordan said thoughtfully: “I’d like to be kissed, damn you!”
41
It took over three months to find Velma. They wouldn’t believe Grayle didn’t know where she was and hadn’t helped her get away. So every cop and newshawk in the country looked in all the places where money might be hidng her. And money wasn’t hiding her at all. Although the way she hid was pretty obvious once it was found out.
One night a Baltimore detective with a camera eye as rare as a pink zebra wandered into a night club and listened to the band and looked at a handsome black-haired, black browed torcher who could sing as if she meant it. Something in her face struck a chord and the chord went on vibrating.
He went back to Headquarters and got out the Wanted file and started through the pile of readers. When he came to the one he wanted he looked at it a long time. Then he straightened his straw hat on his head and went back to the night club and got hold of the manager. They went back to the dressing rooms behind the shell and the manager knocked on one of the doors. It wasn’t locked. The dick pushed the manager aside and went in and locked it.
He must have smelled marihuana because she was smoking it, but he didn’t pay any attention then. She was sitting in front of a triple mirror, studying the roots of her hair and eyebrows. They were her own eyebrows. The dick stepped across the room smiling and handed her the reader.
She must have looked at the face on the reader almost as long as the dick had down at Headquarters. There was a lot to think about while she was looking at it. The dick sat down and crossed his legs and lit a cigarette. He had a good eye, but he had over-specialized. He didn’t know enough about women.
Finally she laughed a little and said: “You’re a smart lad, copper. I thought I had a voice that would be remembered. A friend recognized me by it once, just hearing it on the radio. But I’ve been singing with this band for a month—twice a week on a network—and nobody gave it a thought.”
“I never heard the voice,” the dick said and went on smiling.
She said: “I suppose we can’t make a deal on this. You know, there’s a lot in it, if it’s handled right.”
“Not with me,” the dick said. “Sorry.”
“Let’s go then,” she said and stood up and grabbed up her bag and got her coat from a hanger. She went over to him holding the coat out so he could help her into it. He stood up and held it for her like a gentleman.
She turned and slipped a gun out of her bag and shot him three times through the coat he was holding.
She had two bullets left in the gun when they crashed the door. They got halfway across the room before she used them. She used them both, but the second shot must have been pure reflex. They caught her before she hit the floor, but her head was already hanging by a rag.
“The dick lived until the next day,” Randall said, telling me about it. “He talked when he could. That’s how we have the dope. I can’t understand him being so careless, unless he really was thinking of letting her talk him into a deal of some kind. That would clutter up his mind. But I don’t like to think that, of course.”
I said I supposed that was so.
“Shot herself clean through the heart—twice,” Randall said. “And I’ve heard experts on the stand say that’s impossible, knowing all the time myself that it was. And you know something else?”
“What?”
“She was stupid to shoot that dick. We’d never have convicted her, not with her looks and money and the persecution story these high-priced guys would build up. Poor little girl from a dive climbs to be wife of rich man and the vultures that used to know her won’t let her alone. That sort of thing. Hell, Rennenkamp would have half a dozen crummy old burlesque dames in court to sob that they’d gone blackmailed her for years, and in a way that you pin anything on them but the jury would go for it. She did a smart thing to run off on her own and leave Grayle out of it, but it would have been smarter to have come home when she was caught.”
“Oh you believe now that she left Grayle out of it,” I said.
He nodded. I said: “Do you think she had any particular reason for that?”
He stared at me. “I’ll go for it, whatever it is.”
“She was a killer,” I said. “But so was Malloy. And he was a long way from being all rat. Maybe that Baltimore dick wasn’t so pure as the record shows. Maybe she saw a chance—not to get away—she was tired of dodging by that time—but to give a break to the only man who had ever really given her one.”
Randall stared at me with his mouth open and his eyes unconvinced.
“Hell, she didn’t have to shoot a cop to do that,” he said.
“I’m not saying she was a saint or even a halfway nice girl. Not ever. She wouldn’t kill herself until she was cornered. But what she did and the way she did it, kept her from coming back here for trial. Think that over. And who would that trial hurt most? Who would be least able to bear it? And win, lose or draw, who would pay the biggest price for the show? An old man who had loved not wisely, but too well.”
Randall said sharply: “That’s just sentimental.”
“Sure. It sounded like that when I said it. Probably all a mistake anyway. So long. Did my pink bug ever get back up here?”
He didn’t know what I was talking about.
I rode down to the street floor and went out on the steps of the City Hall. It was a cool day and very clear. You could see a long way—but not as far as Velma had gone.
About the Author
RAYMOND CHANDLER was born in Chicago, Illinois, on July 23, 1888, but spent most of his boyhood and youth in England, where he attended Dulwich College and later worked as a freelance journalist for The Westminster Gazette and The Spectator. During World War I, he served in France with the First Division of the Canadian Expeditionary Force, transferring later to the Royal Flying Corps (R.A.F.). In 1919 he returned to the United States, settling in California, where he eventually became director of a number of independent oil companies. The Depression put an end to his business career, and in 1933, at the age of forty-five, he turned to writing, publishing his first stories in Black Mask. His first novel, The Big Sleep, was published in 1939. Never a prolific writer, he published only one collection of stories and seven novels in his lifetime. In the last year of his life he was elected president of the Mystery Writers of America. He died in La Jolla, California, on March 26, 1959.