11
Halfway up the slope I looked off to the right and saw his foot. She swung the light. Then I saw all of him. I ought to have seen him as I came down, but I had been bent over, peering at the ground with the fountain pen flash, trying to read tire marks by a light the size of a quarter.
“Give me the flash,” I said and reached back.
She put it into my hand, without a word. I went down on a knee. The ground felt cold and damp through the cloth.
He lay smeared to the ground, on his back, at the base of a bush, in that bag-of-clothes position that always means the same thing. His face was a face I had never seen before. His hair was dark with blood, the beautiful blond ledges were tangled-with blood and some thick grayish ooze, like primeval slime.
The girl behind me breathed hard, but she didn’t speak. I held the light on his face. He had been beaten to a pulp. One of his hands was flung out in a frozen gesture, the fingers curled. His overcoat was half twisted under him, as though he had rolled as he fell. His legs were crossed. There was a trickle as black as dirty oil at the corner of his mouth.
“Hold the flash on him,” I said, passing it back to her. “If it doesn’t make you sick.”
She took it and held it without a word, as steady as an old homicide veteran. I got my fountain pen flash out again and started to go through his pockets, trying not to move him.
“You shouldn’t do that,” she said tensely. “You shouldn’t touch him until the police come.”
“That’s right,” I said. “And the prowl car boys are not supposed to touch him until the K-car men come and they’re not supposed to touch him until the coroner’s examiner sees him and the photographers have photographed him and the fingerprint man has taken his prints. And do you know how long all that is liable to take out here? A couple of hours.”
“All right,” she said. “I suppose you’re always right. I guess you must be that kind of person. Somebody must have hated him to smash his head in like that.”
“I don’t suppose it was personal,” I growled. “Some people just like to smash heads.”
“Seeing that I don’t know what it’s all about, I couldn’t guess,” she said tartly.
I went through his clothes. He had loose silver and bills in one trouser pocket, a tooled leather keycase in the other, also a small knife. His left hip pocket yielded a small billfold with more currency, insurance cards, a driver’s license, a couple of receipts. In his coat loose match folders, a gold pencil clipped to a pocket, two thin cambric handerchiefs as fine and white as dry powdered snow. Then the enamel cigarette case from which I had seen him take his brown gold-tipped cigarettes. They were South American, from Montevideo. And in the other inside pocket a second cigarette case I hadn’t seen before. It was made of embroidered silk, a dragon on each side, a frame of imitation tortoiseshell so thin it was hardly there at all. I tickled the catch open and looked in at three oversized Russian cigarettes under the band of elastic. I pinched one. They felt old and dry and loose. They had hollow mouthpieces.
“He smoked the others,” I said over my shoulder. “These must have been for a lady friend. He would be a lad who would have a lot of lady friends.”
The girl was bent over, breathing on my neck now. “Didn’t you know him?”
“I only met him tonight. He hired me for a bodyguasd.”
“Some bodyguard.”
I didn’t say anything to that.
“I’m sorry,” she almost whispered. “Of course I don’t know the circumstances. Do you suppose those could be jujus? Can I look?”
I passed the embroidered case back to her.
“I knew a guy once who smoked jujus,” she said. “Three highballs and three sticks of tea and it took a pipe wrench to get him off the chandelier.”
“Hold the light steady.”
There was a rustling pause. Then she spoke again.
“I’m sorry.” She handed the case down again and I slipped it back in his pocket. That seemed to be all. All it proved was that he hadn’t been cleaned out.
I stood up and took my wallet out. The five twenties were still in it.
“High class boys,” I said. “They only took the large money.”
The flash was drooping to the ground. I put my wallet away again, clipped my own small flash to my pocket and reached suddenly for the little gun she was still holding in the same hand with the flashlight. She dropped the flashlight, but I got the gun. She stepped back quickly and I reached down for the light. I put it on her face for a moment, then snapped it off.
“You didn’t have to be rough,” she said, putting her hands down into the pockets of a long rough coat with flaring shoulders. “I didn’t think you killed him.”
I liked the cool quiet of her voice. I liked her nerve. We stood in the darkness, face to face, not saying anything for a moment. I could see the brush and light in the sky.
I put the light on her face and she blinked. It was a small neat vibrant face with large eyes. A face with bone under the skin, fine drawn like a Cremona violin. A very nice face.
“Your hair’s red,” I said. “You look Irish.”
“And my name’s Riordan. So what? Put that light out. It’s not red, it’s auburn.”
I put it out. “What’s your first name?”
“Anne. And don’t call me Annie.”
“What are you doing around here?”
“Sometimes at night I go riding. Just restless. I live alone. I’m an orphan. I know all this neighborhood like a book. I just happened to be riding along and noticed a light flickering down in the hollow. It seemed a little cold for love. And they don’t use lights, do they?”
“I never did. You take some awful chances, Miss Riordan.”
“I think I said the same about you. I had a gun. I wasn’t afraid. There’s no law against going down there.”
“Uh-huh. Only the law of self preservation. Here. It’s not my night to be clever. I suppose you have a permit for the gun.” I held it out to her, butt first.
She took it and tucked it down into her pocket. “Strange how curious people can be, isn’t it? I write a little. Feature articles.”
“Any money in it?”
“Very damned little. What were you looking for—in his pockets?”
“Nothing in particular. I’m a great guy to snoop around. We had eight thousand dollars to buy back some stolen jewelry for a lady. We got hijacked. Why they killed him I don’t know. He didn’t strike me as a fellow who would put up much of a fight. And I didn’t hear a fight. I was down in the hollow when he was jumped. He was in the car, up above. We were supposed to drive down into the hollow but there didn’t seem to be room for the car without scratching it up. So I went down there on foot and while I was down there they must have stuck him up. Then one of them got into the car and dry-guiched me. I thought he was still in the car, of course.”
“That doesn’t make you so terribly dumb,” she said.
“There was something wrong with the job from the start. I could feel it. But I needed the money. Now I have to go to the cops and eat dirt. Will you drive me to Montemar Vista? I left my car there. He lived there.”
“Sure. But shouldn’t somebody stay with him? You could take my car—or I could go call the cops.”
I looked at the dial of my watch. The faintly glowing hands said that it was getting towards midnight.
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know why not. I just feel it that way. I’ll play it alone.”
She said nothing. We went back down the hill and got into her little car and she started it and jockeyed it around without lights and drove it back up the hill and eased it past the barrier. A block away she sprang the lights on.
My head ached. We didn’t speak until we came level with the first house on the paved part of the street. Then she said:
“You need a drink. Why not go back to my house and have one? You can phone the law from there. They have to come from West Los Angeles anyway. There’s nothing up here but a fire station.”
“Just keep on going down to the coast. I’ll play it solo.”
“But why? I’m not afraid of them. My story might help you.”
“I don’t want any help. I’ve got to think. I want to be by myself for a while.”
“I—okey,” she said.
She made a vague sound in her throat and turned on to the boulevard. We came to the service station at the coast highway and turned north to Montemar Vista and the sidewalk cafe there. It was lit up like a luxury liner. The girl pulled over on to the shoulder and I got out and stood holding the door.
I fumbled a card out of my wallet and passed it in to her. “Some day you may need a strong back,” I said. “Let me know. But don’t call me if it’s brain work.”
She tapped the card on the wheel and said slowly: “You’ll find me in the Bay City phone book. 819 Twenty-fifth Street. Come around and pin a putty medal on me for minding my own business. I think you’re still woozy from that crack on the head.”
She swung her car swiftly around on the highway and I watched its twin tail-lights fade into the dark.
I walked past the arch and the sidewalk cafe into the parking space and got into my car. A bar was right in front of me and I was shaking again. But it seemed smarter to walk into the West Los Angeles police station the way I did twenty minutes later, as cold as a frog and as green as the back of a new dollar bill.
12
It was an hour and a half later. The body had been taken away, the ground gone over, and I had told my story three or four times. We sat, four of us, in the day captain’s room at the West Los Angeles station. The building was quiet except for a drunk in a cell who kept giving the Australian bush call while he waited to go downtown for sunrise court.
A hard white light inside a glass reflector shone down on the flat topped table on which were spread the things that had come from Lindsay Marriott’s pockets, things now that seemed as dead and homeless as their owner. The man across the table from me was named Randall and he was from Central Homicide in Los Angeles. He was a thin quiet man of fifty with smooth creamy gray hair, cold eyes, a distant manner. He wore a dark red tie with black spots on it and the spots kept dancing in front of my eyes. Behind him, beyond the cone of light, two beefy men lounged like bodyguards, each of them watching one of my ears.
I fumbled a cigarette around in my fingers and lit it and didn’t like the taste of it. I sat watching it burn between my fingers. I felt about eighty years old and slipping fast.
Randall said coldly: “The oftener you tell this story the sillier it sounds. This man Marriott had been negotiating for days, no doubt, about this pay-off and then just a few hours before the final meeting he calls up a perfect stranger and hires him to go with him as a bodyguard.”
“Not exactly as a bodyguard,” I said. “I didn’t even tell him I had a gun. Just for company.”
“Where did he hear of you?”
“First he said a mutual friend. Then that he just picked my name out of the book.”
Randall poked gently among the stuff on the table and detached a white card with an air of touching something not quite clean. He pushed it along the wood.
“He had your card. Your business card.”
I glanced at the card. It had come out of his billfold, together with a number of other cards I hadn’t bothered to examine back there in the hollow of Purissima Canyon. It was one of my cards all right. It looked rather dirty at that, for a man like Marriott. There was a round smear across one corner.
“Sure,” I said. “I hand those out whenever I get a chance. Naturally.”
“Marriott let you carry the money,” Randall said. “Eight thousand dollars. He was rather a trusting soul.”
I drew on my cigarette and blew the smoke towards the ceiling. The light hurt my eyes. The back of my head ached.
“I don’t have the eight thousand dollars,” I said. “Sorry.”
“No. You wouldn’t be here, if you had the money. Or would you?” There was a cold sneer on his face now, but it looked artificial.
“I’d do a lot for eight thousand dollars,” I said. “But if I wanted to kill a man with a sap, I’d only hit him twice at the most—on the back of the head.”
He nodded slightly. One of the dicks behind him spit into the wastebasket.
“That’s one of the puzzling features. It looks like an amateur job, but of course it might be meant to look like an amateur job. The money was not Marriott’s, was it?”
“I don’t know. I got the impression not, but that was just an impression. He wouldn’t tell me who the lady in the case was.”
“We don’t know anything about Marriott—yet,” Randall said slowly. “I suppose it’s at least possible he meant to steal the eight thousand himself.”
“Huh?” I felt surprised. I probably looked surprised. Nothing changed in Randall’s smooth face.
“Did you count the money?”
“Of course not. He just gave me a package. There was money in it and it looked like a lot. He said it was eight grand. Why would he want to steal it from me when he already had it before I came on the scene?”
Randall looked at a corner of the ceiling and drew his mouth down at the corners. He shrugged.
“Go back a bit,” he said. “Somebody had stuck up Marriott and a lady and taken this jade necklace and stuff and had later offered to sell it back for what seems like a pretty small amount, in view of its supposed value. Marriott was to handle the payoff. He thought of handling it alone and we don’t know whether the other parties made a point of that or whether it was mentioned. Usually in cases like that they are rather fussy. But Marriott evidently decided it was all right to have you along. Both of you figured you were dealing with an organized gang and that they would play ball within the limits of their trade. Marriott was scared. That would be natural enough. He wanted company. You were the company. But you are a complete stranger to him, just a name on a card handed to him by some unknown party, said by him to be a mutual friend. Then at the last minute Marriott decides to have you carry the money and do the talking while he hides in the car. You say that was your idea, but he may have been hoping you would suggest it, and if you didn’t suggest it, he would have had the idea himself.”
“He didn’t like the idea at first,” I said.
Randall shrugged again. “He pretended not to like the idea—but he gave in. So finally he gets a call and off you go to the place he describes. All this is coming from Marriott. None of it is known to you independently. When you get there, there seems to be nobody about. You are supposed to drive down into that hollow, but it doesn’t look to be room enough for the big car. It wasn’t, as a matter of fact, because the car was pretty badly scratched on the left side. So you get out and walk down into the hollow, see and hear nothing, wait a few minutes, come back to the car and then somebody in the car socks you on the back of the head. Now suppose Marriott wanted that money and wanted to make you the fall guy—wouldn’t he have acted just the way he did?”
“It’s a swell theory,” I said. “Marriott socked me, took the money, then he got sorry and beat his brains out, after first burying the money under a bush.”
Randall looked at me woodenly. “He had an accomplice of course. Both of you were supposed to be knocked out, and the accomplice would beat it with the money. Only the accomplice double-crossed Marriott by killing him. He didn’t have to kill you because you didn’t know him.”
I looked at him with admiration and ground out my cigarette stub in a wooden tray that had once had a glass lining in it but hadn’t any more.
“It fits the facts—so far as we know them,” Randall said calmly. “It’s no sillier than any other theory we could think up at the moment.”
“It doesn’t fit one fact—that I was socked from the car, does it? That would make me suspect Marriott of having socked me—other things being equal. Although I didn’t suspect him after he was killed.”
“The way you were socked fits best of all,” Randall said. “You didn’t tell Marriott you had a gun, but he may have seen the bulge under your arm or at least suspected you had a gun. In that case he would want to hit you when you suspected nothing. And you wouldn’t suspect anything from the back of the car.”
“Okey,” I said. “You win. It’s a good theory, always supposing the money was not Marriott’s and that he wanted to steal it and that he had an accomplice. So his plan is that we both wake up with bumps on our heads and the money is gone and we say so sorry and I go home and forget all about it. Is that how it ends? I mean is that how he expected it to end? It had to look good to him too, didn’t it?”
Randall smiled wryly. “I don’t like it myself. I was just trying it out. It fits the facts—as far as I know them, which is not far.”
“We don’t know enough to even start theorizing,” I said. “Why not assume he was telling the truth and that he perhaps recognized one of the stickup men?”
“You say you heard no struggle, no cry?”
“No. But he could have been grabbed quickly, by the throat. Or he could have been too scared to cry out when they jumped him. Say they were watching from the bushes and saw me go down the hill. I went some distance, you know. A good hundred feet. They go over to look into the car and see Marriott. Somebody sticks a gun in his face and makes him get out—quietly. Then he’s sapped down. But something he says, or some way he looks, makes them think he has recognized somebody.”
“In the dark?”
“Yes,” I said. “It must have been something like that. Some voices stay in your mind. Even in the dark people are recognized.”
Randall shook his head. “If this was an organized gang of jewel thieves, they wouldn’t kill without a lot of provocation.” He stopped suddenly and his eyes got a glazed look. He closed his mouth very slowly, very tight. He had an idea. “Hijack,” he said.
I nodded. “I think that’s an idea.”
“There’s another thing,” he said. “How did you get here?”
“I drove my car.”
“Where was your car?”
“Down at Montemar Vista, in the parking lot by the sidewalk cafe.”
He looked at me very thoughtfully. The dicks behind him looked at me suspiciously. The drunk in the cells tried to yodel, but his voice cracked and that discouraged him. He began to cry.
“I walked back to the highway,” I said. “I flagged a car. A girl was driving it alone. She stopped and took me down.”.
“Some girl,” Randall said. “It was late at night, on a lonely road, and she stopped.”
“Yeah. Some of them will do that. I didn’t get to know her, but she seemed nice.” I stared at them, knowing they didn’t believe me and wondering why I was lying about it.
“It was a small car,” I said. “A Chevvy coupe. I didn’t get the license number.”
“Haw, he didn’t get the license number,” one of the dicks said and spat into the wastebasket again.
Randall leaned forward and stared at me carefully. “If you’re holding anything back with the idea of working on this case yourself to make yourself a little publicity, I’d forget it, Marlowe. I don’t like all the points in your story and I’m going to give you the night to think it over. Tomorrow I’ll probably ask you for a sworn statement. In the meantime let me give you a tip. This is a murder and a police job and we wouldn’t want your help, even if it was good. All we want from you is facts. Get me?”
“Sure. Can I go home now? I don’t feel any too well.”
“You can go home now.” His eyes were icy.
I got up and started towards the door in a dead silence. When I had gone four steps Randall cleared his throat and said carelessly:
“Oh, one small point. Did you notice what kind of cigarettes Marriott smoked?”
I turned. “Yes. Brown ones. South American, in a French enamel case.”
He leaned forward and pushed the embroidered silk case out of the pile of junk on the table and then pulled it towards him.
“Ever see this one before?”
“Sure. I was just looking at it.”
“I mean, earlier this evening.”
“I believe I did,” I said. “Lying around somewhere. Why?”
“You didn’t search the body?”
“Okey,” I said. “Yes, I looked through his pockets. That was in one of them. I’m sorry. Just professional curiosity. I didn’t disturb anything. After all he was my client.”
Randall took hold of the embroidered case with both hands and opened it. He sat looking into it. It was empty. The three cigarettes were gone.
I bit hard on my teeth and kept the tired look on my face. It was not easy.
“Did you see him smoke a cigarette out of this?”
“No.”
Randall nodded coolly. “It’s empty as you see. But it was in his pocket just the same. There’s a little dust in it. I’m going to have it examined under a microscope. I’m not sure, but I have an idea it’s marihuana.”
I said: “If he had any of those, I should think he would have smoked a couple tonight. He needed something to cheer him up.”
Randall closed the case carefully and pushed it away.
“That’s all,” he said. “And keep your nose clean.”
I went out.
The fog had cleared off outside and the stars were as bright as artificial stars of chromium on a sky of black velvet. I drove fast. I needed a drink badly and the bars were closed.