6
I drove along the block looking for a place to park so that I could run up to the office for a moment before going on downtown.
A chauffeur-driven Packard edged out from the curb in front of a cigar store about thirty feet from the entrance to my building. I slid into the space, locked the car and stepped out. It was only then that I noticed the car in front of which I had parked was a familiar-looking sand-colored coup�. It didn’t have to be the same one. There were thousands of them. Nobody was in it. Nobody was near it that wore a cocoa straw hat with a brown and yellow band.
I went around to the street side and looked at the steering post. No license holder. I wrote the license plate number down on the back of an envelope, just in case, and went on into my building. He wasn’t in the lobby, or in the corridor upstairs.
I went into the office, looked on the floor for mail, didn’t find any, bought myself a short drink out of the office bottle and left. I didn’t have any time to spare to get downtown before three o’clock.
The sand-colored coup� was still parked, still empty. I got into mine and started up and moved out into the traffic stream.
I was below Sunset on Vine before he picked me up. I kept on going, grinning, and wondering where he had hid. Perhaps in the car parked behind his own. I hadn’t thought of that.
I drove south to Third and all the way downtown on Third. The sand-colored coup� kept half a block behind me all the way. I moved over to Seventh and Grand, parked near Seventh and Olive, stopped to buy cigarettes I didn’t need, and then walked east along Seventh without looking behind me. At Spring I went into the Hotel Metropole, strolled over to the big horseshoe cigar counter to light one of my cigarettes and then sat down in one of the old brown leather chairs in the lobby.
A blond man in a brown suit, dark glasses and the now familiar hat came into the lobby and moved unobtrusively among the potted palms and the stucco arches to the cigar counter. He bought a package of cigarettes and broke it open standing there, using the time to lean his back against the counter and give the lobby the benefit of his eagle eye.
He picked up his change and went over and sat down with his back to a pillar. He tipped his hat down over his dark glasses and seemed to go to sleep with an unlighted cigarette between his lips.
I got up and wandered over and dropped into the chair beside him. I looked at him sideways. He didn’t move. Seen at close quarters his face seemed young and pink and plump and the blond beard on his chin was very carelessly shaved. Behind the dark glasses his eyelashes flicked up and down rapidly. A hand on his knee tightened and pulled the cloth into wrinkles. There was a wart on his cheek just below the right eyelid.
I struck a match and held the flame to his cigarette. “Light?”
“Oh—thanks,” he said, very surprised. He drew breath in until the cigarette tip glowed. I shook the match out, tossed it into the sand jar at my elbow and waited. He looked at me sideways several times before he spoke.
“Haven’t I seen you somewhere before?”
“Over on Dresden Avenue in Pasadena. This morning.”
I could see his cheeks get pinker than they had been. He sighed.
“I must be lousy,” he said.
“Boy, you stink,” I agreed.
“Maybe it’s the hat,” he said.
“The hat helps,” I said. “But you don’t really need it.”
“It’s a pretty tough dollar in this town,” he said sadly. “You can’t do it on foot, you ruin yourself with taxi fares if you use taxis, and if you use your own car, it’s always where you can’t get to it fast enough. You have to stay too close.”
“But you don’t have to climb in a guy’s pocket,” I said. “Did you want something with me or are you just practising?”
“I figured I’d find out if you were smart enough to be worth talking to.”
“I’m very smart,” I said. “It would be a shame not to talk to me.”
He looked carefully around back of his chair and on both sides of where we were sitting and then drew a small, pigskin wallet out. He handed me a nice fresh card from it. It read: George Anson Phillips. Confidential Investigations. 212 Senger Building, 1924 North Wilcox Avenue, Hollywood. A Glenview telephone number. In the upper left hand corner there was an open eye with an eyebrow arched in surprise and very long eyelashes.
“You can’t do that,” I said, pointing to the eye. “That’s the Pinkerton’s. You’ll be stealing their business.”
“Oh hell,” he said, “what little I get wouldn’t bother them.” I snapped the card on my fingernail and bit down hard on my teeth and slipped the card into my pocket.
“You want one of mine—or have you completed your file on me?”
“Oh, I know all about you,” he said. “I was a deputy at Ventura the time you were working on the Gregson case.”
Gregson was a con man from Oklahoma City who was followed all over the United States for two years by one of his victims until he got so jittery that he shot up a service station attendant who mistook him for an acquaintance. It seemed a long time ago to me.
I said: “Go on from there.”
“I remembered your name when I saw it on your registration this a.m. So when I lost you on the way into town I just looked you up. I was going to come in and talk, but it would have been a violation of confidence. This way I kind of can’t help myself.”
Another screwball. That made three in one day, not counting Mrs. Murdock, who might turn out to be a screwball too.
I waited while he took his dark glasses off and polished them and put them on again and gave the neighborhood the once over again. Then he said:
“I figured we could maybe make a deal. Pool our resources, as they say. I saw the guy go into your office, so I figured he had hired you.”
“You knew who he was?”
“I’m working on him,” he said, and his voice sounded flat and discouraged. “And where I am getting is no place at all.”
“What did he do to you?”
“Well, I’m working for his wife.”
“Divorce?”
He looked all around him carefully and said in a small voice: “So she says. But I wonder.”
“They both want one,” I said. “Each trying to get something on the other. Comical, isn’t it?”
“My end I don’t like so well. A guy is tailing me around some of the time. A very tall guy with a funny eye. I shake him but after a while I see him again. A very tall guy. Like a lamppost.”
A very tall man with a funny eye. I smoked thoughtfully. “Anything to do with you?” the blond man asked me a little anxiously.
I shook my head and threw my cigarette into the sand jar. “Never saw him that I know of.” I looked at my strap watch. “We better get together and talk this thing over properly, but I can’t do it now. I have an appointment.”
“I’d like to,” he said. “Very much.”
“Let’s then. My office, my apartment, or your office, or where?”
He scratched his badly shaved chin with a well-chewed thumbnail.
“My apartment,” he said at last. “It’s not in the phone book. Give me that card a minute.”
He turned it over on his palm when I gave it to him and wrote slowly with a small metal pencil, moving his tongue along his lips. He was getting younger every minute. He didn’t seem much more than twenty by now, but he had to be, because the Gregson case had been six years back.
He put his pencil away and handed me back the card. The address he had written on it was 204 Florence Apartments, 128 Court Street.
I looked at him curiously. “Court Street on Bunker Hill?”
He nodded, flushing all over his blond skin. “Not too good,” he said quickly. “I haven’t been in the chips lately. Do you mind?”
“No, why would I?”
I stood up and held a hand out. He shook it and dropped it and I pushed it down into my hip pocket and rubbed the palm against the handkerchief I had there. Looking at his face more closely I saw that there was a line of moisture across his upper lip and more of it along the side of his nose. It was not as hot as all that.
I started to move off and then I turned back to lean down close to his face and say: “Almost anybody can pull my leg, but just to make sure, she’s a tall blond with careless eyes, huh?”
“I wouldn’t call them careless,” he said.
I held my face together while I said: “And just between the two of us this divorce stuff is a lot of hooey. It’s something else entirely, isn’t it?”
“Yes,” he said softly, “and something I don’t like more every minute I think about it. Here.”
He pulled something out of his pocket and dropped it into my hand. It was a flat key.
“No need for you to wait around in the hall, if I happen to be out. I have two of them. What time would you think you would come?”
“About four-thirty, the way it looks now. You sure you want to give me this key?”
“Why, we’re in the same racket,” he said, looking up at me innocently, or as innocently as he could look through a pair of dark glasses.
At the edge of the lobby I looked back. He sat there peacefully, with the half-smoked cigarette dead between his lips and the gaudy brown and yellow band on his hat looking as quiet as a cigarette ad on the back page of the Saturday Evening Post.
We were in the same racket. So I wouldn’t chisel him. Just like that. I could have the key to his apartment and go in and make myself at home. I could wear his slippers and drink his liquor and lift up his carpet and count the thousand dollar bills under it. We were in the same racket.
7
The Belfont Building was eight stories of nothing in particular that had got itself pinched off between a large green and chromium cut rate suit emporium and a three-story and basement garage that made a noise like lion cages at feeding time. The small dark narrow lobby was as dirty as a chicken yard. The building directory had a lot of vacant space on it. Only one of the names meant anything to me and I knew that one already. Opposite the directory a large sign tilted against the fake marble wall said: Space for Renting Suitable for Cigar Stand. Apply Room 316.
There were two open-grill elevators but only one seemed to be running and that not busy. An old man sat inside it slack-jawed and watery-eyed on a piece of folded burlap on top of a wooden stool. He looked as if he had been sitting there since the Civil War and had come out of that badly.
I got in with him and said eight, and he wrestled the doors shut and cranked his buggy and we dragged upwards lurching. The old man breathed hard, as if he was carrying the elevator on his back.
I got out at my floor and started along the hallway and behind me the old man leaned out of the car and blew his nose with his fingers into a carton full of floor sweepings.
Elisha Morningstar’s office was at the back, opposite the firedoor. Two rooms, both lettered in flaked black paint on pebbled glass. Elisha Morningstar. Numismatist. The one farthest back said: Entrance.
I turned the knob and went into a small narrow room with two windows, a shabby little typewriter desk, closed, a number of wall cases of tarnished coins in tilted slots with yellowed typewritten labels under them, two brown filing cases at the back against the wall, no curtains at the windows, and a dust gray floor carpet so threadbare that you wouldn’t notice the rips in it unless you tripped over one.
An inner wooden door was open at the back across from the filing cases, behind the little typewriter desk. Through the door came the small sounds a man makes when he isn’t doing anything at all. Then the dry voice of Elisha Morningstar called out:
“Come in, please. Come in.”
I went along and in. The inner office was just as small but had a lot more stuff in it. A green safe almost blocked off the front half. Beyond this a heavy old mahogany table against the entrance door held some dark books, some flabby old magazines, and a lot of dust. In the back wall a window was open a few inches, without effect on the musty smell. There was a hatrack with a greasy black felt hat on it. There were three long-legged tables with glass tops and more coins under the glass tops. There was a heavy dark leather-topped desk midway of the room. It had the usual desk stuff on it, and in addition a pair of jeweller’s scales under a glass dome and two large nickel-framed magnifying glasses and a jeweller’s eyepiece lying on a buff scratch pad, beside a cracked yellow silk handkerchief spotted with ink.
In the swivel chair at the desk sat an elderly party in a dark gray suit with high lapels and too many buttons down the front. He had some stringy white hair that grew long enough to tickle his ears. A pale gray bald patch loomed high up in the middle of it, like a rock above timberline. Fuzz grew out of his ears, far enough to catch a moth.
He had sharp black eyes with a pair of pouches under each eye, brownish purple in color and traced with a network of wrinkles and veins. His cheeks were shiny and his short sharp nose looked as if it had hung over a lot of quick ones in its time. A Hoover collar which no decent laundry would have allowed on the premises nudged his Adam’s apple and a black string tie poked a small hard knot out at the bottom of the collar, like a mouse getting ready to come out of a mousehole.
He said: “My young lady had to go to the dentist. You are Mr. Marlowe?”
I nodded.
“Pray, be seated.” He waved a thin hand at the chair across the desk. I sat down. “You have some identification, I presume?”
I showed it to him. While he read it I smelled him from across the desk. He had a sort of dry musty smell, like a fairly clean Chinaman.
He placed my card face down on top of his desk and folded his hands on it. His sharp black eyes didn’t miss anything in my face.
“Well, Mr. Marlowe, what can I do for you?”
“Tell me about the Brasher Doubloon.”
“Ah, yes,” he said. “The Brasher Doubloon. An interesting coin.” He lifted his hands off the desk and made a steeple of the fingers, like an old time family lawyer getting set for a little tangled grammar. “In some ways the most interesting and valuable of all early American coins. As no doubt you know.”
“What I don’t know about early American coins you could almost crowd into the Rose Bowl.”
“Is that so?” he said. “Is that so? Do you want me to tell you?”
“What I’m here for, Mr. Morningstar.”
“It is a gold coin, roughly equivalent to a twenty-dollar gold piece, and about the size of a half dollar. Almost exactly. It was made for the State of New York in the year 1787. It was not minted. There were no mints until 1793, when the first mint was opened in Philadelphia. The Brasher Doubloon was coined probably by the pressure molding process and its maker was a private goldsmith named Ephraim Brasher, or Brashear. Where the name survives it is usually spelled Brashear, but not on the coin. I don’t know why.”
I got a cigarette into my mouth and lit it. I thought it might do something to the musty smell. “What’s the pressure molding process?”
“The two halves of the mold were engraved in steel, in intaglio, of course. These halves were then mounted in lead. Gold blanks were pressed between them in a coin press. Then the edges were trimmed for weight and smoothed. The coin was not milled. There were no milling machines in 1787.”
“Kind of a slow process,” I said.
He nodded his peaked white head. “Quite. And, since the surface-hardening of steel without distortion could not be accomplished at that time, the dies wore and had to be remade from time to time. With consequent slight variations in design which would be visible under strong magnification. In fact it would be safe to say no two of the coins would be identical, judged by modern methods of microscopic examination. Am I clear?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Up to a point. How many of these coins are there and what are they worth?”
He undid the steeple of fingers and put his hands back on the desk top and patted them gently up and down.
“I don’t know how many there are. Nobody knows. A few hundred, a thousand, perhaps more. But of these very few indeed are uncirculated specimens in what is called mint condition. The value varies from a couple of thousand on up. I should say that at the present time, since the devaluation of the dollar, an uncirculated specimen, carefully handled by a reputable dealer, might easily bring ten thousand dollars, or even more. It would have to have a history, of course.”
I said: “Ah,” and let smoke out of my lungs slowly and waved it away with the flat of my hand, away from the old party across the desk from me. He looked like a non-smoker. “And without a history and not so carefully handled—how much?”
He shrugged. “There would be the implication that the coin was illegally acquired. Stolen, or obtained by fraud. Of course it might not be so. Rare coins do turn up in odd places at odd times. In old strong boxes, in the secret drawers of desks in old New England houses. Not often, I grant you. But it happens. I know of a very valuable coin that fell out of the stuffing of a horsehair sofa which was being restored by an antique dealer. The sofa had been in the same room in the same house in Fall River, Massachusetts, for ninety years. Nobody knew how the coin got there. But generally speaking, the implication of theft would be strong. Particularly in this part of the country.”
He looked at the corner of the ceiling with an absent stare. I looked at him with a not so absent stare. He looked like a man who could be trusted with a secret—if it was his own secret.
He brought his eyes down to my level slowly and said: “Five dollars, please.”
I said: “Huh?”
“Five dollars, please.”
“What for?”
“Don’t be absurd, Mr. Marlowe. Everything I have told you is available in the public library. In Fosdyke’s Register, in particular. You choose to come here and take up my time relating it to you. For this my charge is five dollars.”
“And suppose I don’t pay it,” I said.
He leaned back and closed his eyes. A very faint smile twitched at the corners of his lips. “You will pay it,” he said.
I paid it. I took the five out of my wallet and got up to lean over the desk and spread it out right in front of him, carefully. I stroked the bill with my fingertips, as if it was a kitten.
“Five dollars, Mr. Morningstar,” I said.
He opened his eyes and looked at the bill. He smiled.
“And now,” I said, “let’s talk about the Brasher Doubloon that somebody tried to sell you.”
He opened his eyes a little wider. “Oh, did somebody try to sell me a Brasher Doubloon? Now why would they do that?”
“They needed the money,” I said. “And they didn’t want too many questions asked. They knew or found out that you were in the business and that the building where you had your office was a shabby dump where anything could happen. They knew your office was at the end of a corridor and that you were an elderly man who would probably not make any false moves—out of regard for your health.”
“They seem to have known a great deal,” Elisha Morningstar said dryly.
“They knew what they had to know in order to transact their business. Just like you and me. And none of it was hard to find out.”
He stuck his little finger in his ear and worked it around and brought it out with a little dark wax on it. He wiped it off casually on his coat.
“And you assume all this from the mere fact that I called up Mrs. Murdock and asked if her Brasher Doubloon was for sale?”
“Sure. She had the same idea herself. It’s reasonable. Like I said over the phone to you, you would know that coin was not for sale. If you knew anything about the business at all. And I can see that you do.”
He bowed, about one inch. He didn’t quite smile but he looked about as pleased as a man in a Hoover collar ever looks.
“You would be offered this coin for sale,” I said, “in suspicious circumstances. You would want to buy it, if you could get it cheap and had the money to handle it. But you would want to know where it came from. And even if you were quite sure it was stolen, you could still buy it, if you could get it cheap enough.”
“Oh, I could, could I?” He looked amused, but not in a large way.
“Sure you could—if you are a reputable dealer. I’ll assume you are. By buying the coin—cheap—you would be protecting the owner or his insurance carrier from complete loss. They’d be glad to pay you back your outlay. It’s done all the time.”
“Then the Murdock Brasher has been stolen,” he said abruptly. “Don’t quote me,” I said. “It’s a secret.”
He almost picked his nose this time. He just caught himself. He picked a hair out of one nostril instead, with a quick jerk and a wince. He held it up and looked at it. Looking at me past it he said:
“And how much will your principal pay for the return of the coin?”
I leaned over the desk and gave him my shady leer. “One grand. What did you pay?”
“I think you are a very smart young man,” he said. Then he screwed his face up and his chin wobbled and his chest began to bounce in and out and a sound came out of him like a convalescent rooster learning to crow again after a long illness.
He was laughing.
It stopped after a while. His face came all smooth again and his eyes, opened, black and sharp and shrewd.
“Eight hundred dollars,” he said. “Eight hundred dollars for an uncirculated specimen of the Brasher Doubloon.” He chortled.
“Fine. Got it with you? That leaves you two hundred. Fair enough. A quick turnover, a reasonable profit and no trouble for anybody.”
“It is not in my office,” he said. “Do you take me for a fool?” He reached an ancient silver watch out of his vest on a black fob. He screwed up his eyes to look at it. “Let us say eleven in the morning,” he said. “Come back with your money. The coin may or may not be here, but if I am satisfied with your behavior, I will arrange matters.”
“That is satisfactory,” I said, and stood up. “I have to get the money anyhow.”
“Have it in used bills,” he said almost dreamily. “Used twenties will do. An occasional fifty will do no harm.”
I grinned and started for the door. Halfway there I turned around and went back to lean both hands on the desk and push my face over it.
“What did she look like?”
He looked blank.
“The girl that sold you the coin.”
He looked blanker.
“Okay,” I said. “It wasn’t a girl. She had help. It was a man. What did the man look like?”
He pursed his lips and made another steeple with his fingers. “He was a middle-aged man, heavy set, about five feet seven inches tall and weighing around one hundred and seventy pounds. He said his name was Smith. He wore a blue suit, black shoes, a green tie and shirt, no hat. There was a brown bordered handkerchief in his outer pocket. His hair was dark brown sprinkled with gray. There was a bald patch about the size of a dollar on the crown of his head and a scar about two inches long running down the side of his jaw. On the left side, I think. Yes, on the left side.”
“Not bad,” I said. “What about the hole in his right sock?”
“I omitted to take his shoes off.”
“Darn careless of you,” I said.
He didn’t say anything. We just stared at each other, half curious, half hostile, like new neighbors. Then suddenly he went into his laugh again.
The five dollar bill I had given him was still lying on his side of the desk. I flicked a hand across and took it.
“You won’t want this now,” I said. “Since we started talking in thousands.”
He stopped laughing very suddenly. Then he shrugged.
“At eleven a.m.,” he said. “And no tricks, Mr. Marlowe. Don’t think I don’t know how to protect myself.”
“I hope you do,” I said, “because what you are handling is dynamite.”
I left him and tramped across the empty outer office and opened the door and let it shut, staying inside. There ought to be footsteps outside in the corridor, but his transom was closed and I hadn’t made much noise coming on crepe rubber soles. I hoped he would remember that. I sneaked back across the threadbare carpet and edged in behind the door, between the door and the little closed typewriter desk. A kid trick, but once in a while it will work, especially after a lot of smart conversation, full of worldliness and sly wit. Like a sucker play in football. And if it didn’t work this time, we would just be there sneering at each other again.
It worked. Nothing happened for a while except that a nose was blown. Then all by himself in there he went into his sick rooster laugh again. Then a throat was cleared. Then a swivel chair squeaked, and feet walked.
A dingy white head poked into the room, about two inches past the end of the door. It hung there suspended and I went into a state of suspended animation. Then the head was drawn back and four unclean fingernails came around the edge of the door and pulled. The door closed, clicked, was shut. I started breathing again and put my ear to the wooden panel.
The swivel chair squeaked once more. The threshing sound of a telephone being dialed. I lunged across to the instrument on the little typewriter desk and lifted it. At the other end of the line the bell had started to ring. It rang six times. Then a man’s voice said: “Yeah?”
“The Florence Aparments?”