10
“Shot in the throat with a medium caliber gun and a softnosed bullet,” Detective-Lieutenant Jesse Breeze said. “A gun like this and bullets like is in here.” He danced the gun on his hand, the gun Hench had said was not his gun. “Bullet ranged upwards and probably hit the back of the skull. Still inside his head. The man’s dead about two hours. Hands and face cold, but body still warm. No rigor. Was sapped with something hard before being shot. Likely with a gun butt. All that mean anything to you boys and girls?”
The newspaper he was sitting on rustled. He took his hat off and mopped his face and the top of his almost bald head. A fringe of light colored hair around the crown was damp and dark with sweat. He put his hat back on, a flat-crowned panama, burned dark by the sun. Not this year’s hat, and probably not last year’s.
He was a big man, rather paunchy, wearing brown and white shoes and sloppy socks and white trousers with thin black stripes, an open neck shirt showing some ginger-colored hair at the top of his chest, and a rough sky-blue sports coat not wider at the shoulders than a two-car garage. He would be about fifty years old and the only thing about him that very much suggested cop was the calm, unwinking unwavering stare of his prominent pale blue eyes, a stare that had no thought of being rude, but that anybody but a cop would feel to be rude. Below his eyes across the top of his cheeks and the bridge of his nose there was a wide path of freckles, like a mine field on a war map.
We were sitting in Hench’s apartment and the door was shut. Hench had his shirt on and he was absently tying a tie with thick blunt fingers that trembled. The girl was lying on the bed. She had a green wrap-around thing twisted about her head, a purse by her side and a short squirrel coat across her feet. Her mouth was a little open and her face was drained and shocked.
Hench said thickly: “If the idea is the guy was shot with the gun under the pillow, okay. Seems like he might have been. It ain’t my gun and nothing you boys can think up is going to make me say it’s my gun.”
“Assuming that to be so,” Breeze said, “how come? Somebody swiped your gun and left this one. When, how, what kind of gun was yours?”
“We went out about three-thirty or so to get something to eat at the hashhouse around the corner,” Hench said. “You can check that. We must have left the door unlocked. We were kind of hitting the bottle a little. I guess we were pretty noisy. We had the ball game going on the radio. I guess we shut it off when we went out. I’m not sure. You remember?” He looked at the girl lying white-faced and silent on the bed. “You remember, sweet?”
The girl didn’t look at him or answer him.
“She’s pooped,” Hench said. “I had a gun, a Colt .32, same caliber as that, but a belly gun. A revolver, not an automatic. There’s a piece broken off the rubber grip. A Jew named Morris gave it to me three four years ago. We worked together in a bar. I don’t have no permit, but I don’t carry the gun neither.”
Breeze said: “Hitting the hooch like you birds been and having a gun under the pillow sooner or later somebody was going to get shot. You ought to know that.”
“Hell, we didn’t even know the guy,” Hench said. His tie was tied now, very badly. He was cold sober and very shaky. He stood up and picked a coat off the end of the bed and put it on and sat down again. I watched his fingers tremble lighting a cigarette. “We don’t know his name. We don’t know anything about him. I see him maybe two three times in the hall, but he don’t even speak to me. It’s the same guy, I guess. I ain’t even sure of that.”
“It’s the fellow that lived there,” Breeze said. “Let me see now, this ball game is a studio re-broadcast, huh?”
“Goes on at three,” Hench said. “Three to say four-thirty, or sometimes later. We went out about the last half the third. We was gone about an inning and a half, maybe two. Twenty minutes to half an hour. Not more.”
“I guess he was shot just before you went out,” Breeze said. “The radio would kill the noise of the gun near enough. You must of left your door unlocked. Or even open.”
“Could be,” Hench said wearily. “You remember, honey?” Again the girl on the bed refused to answer him or even look at him.
Breeze said: “You left your door open or unlocked. The killer heard you go out. He got into your apartment, wanting to ditch his gun, saw the bed down, walked across and slipped his gun under the pillow, and then imagine his surprise. He found another gun there waiting for him. So he took it along. Now if he meant to ditch his gun, why not do it where he did his killing? Why take the risk of going into another apartment to do it? Why the fancy pants?”
I was sitting in the corner of the davenport by the window. I put in my nickel’s worth, saying: “Suppose he had locked himself out of Phillips’ apartment before he thought of ditching the gun? Suppose, coming out of the shock of his murder, he found himself in the hall still holding the murder gun. He would want to ditch it fast. Then if Hench’s door was open and he had heard them go out along the hall—”
Breeze looked at me briefly and grunted: “I’m not saying it isn’t so. I’m just considering.” He turned his attention back to Hench. “So now, if this turns out to be the gun that killed Anson, we got to try and trace your gun. While we do that we got to have you and the young lady handy. You understand that, of course?”
Hench said: “You don’t have any boys that can bounce me hard enough to make me tell it different.”
“We can always try,” Breeze said mildly. “And we might just as well get started.”
He stood up, turned and swept the crumpled newspapers off the chair on to the floor. He went over to the door, then turned and stood looking at the girl on the bed. “You all right, sister, or should I call for a matron?”
The girl on the bed didn’t answer him.
Hench said: “I need a drink. I need a drink bad.”
“Not while I’m watching you,” Breeze said and went out of the door.
Hench moved across the room and put the neck of a bottle into his mouth and gurgled liquor. He lowered the bottle, looked at what was left in it and went over to the girl. He pushed her shoulder.
“Wake up and have a drink,” he growled at her.
The girl stared at the ceiling. She didn’t answer him or show that she had heard him.
“Let her alone,” I said. “Shock.”
Hench finished what was in the bottle, put the empty bottle down carefully and looked at the girl again, then turned his back on her and stood frowning at the floor. “Jeeze, I wish I could remember better,” he said under his breath.
Breeze came back into the room with a young freshfaced plainclothes detective. “This is Lieutenant Spangler,” he said. “He’ll take you down. Get going, huh?”
Hench went back to the bed and shook the girl’s shoulder. “Get on up, babe. We gotta take a ride.”
The girl turned her eyes without turning her head, and looked at him slowly. She lifted her shoulders off the bed and put a hand under her and swung her legs over the side and stood up, stamping her right foot, as if it was numb.
“Tough, kid—but you know how it is,” Hench said. The girl put a hand to her mouth and bit the knuckle of her little finger, looking at him blankly. Then she swung the hand suddenly and hit him in the face as hard as she could. Then she half ran out of the door.
Hench didn’t move a muscle for a long moment. There was a confused noise of men talking outside, a confused noise of cars down below in the street. Hench shrugged and cocked his heavy shoulders back and swept a slow look around the room, as if he didn’t expect to see it again very soon, or at all. Then he went out past the young freshfaced detective.
The detective went out. The door closed. The confused noise outside was dimmed a little and Breeze and I sat looking at each other heavily.
11
After a while Breeze got tired of looking at me and dug a cigar out of his pocket. He slit the cellophane band with a knife and trimmed the end of the cigar and lit it carefully, turning it around in the flame, and holding the burning match away from it while he stared thoughtfully at nothing and drew on the cigar and made sure it was burning the way he wanted it to burn.
Then he shook the match out very slowly and reached over to lay it on the sill of the open window. Then he looked at me some more.
“You and me,” he said, “are going to get along.”
“That’s fine,” I said.
“You don’t think so,” he said. “But we are. But not because I took any sudden fancy to you. It’s the way I work. Everything in the clear. Everything sensible. Everything quiet. Not like that dame. That’s the kind of dame that spends her life looking for trouble and when she finds it, it’s the fault of the first guy she can get her fingernails into.”
“He gave her a couple of shiners,” I said. “That wouldn’t make her love him too much.”
“I can see,” Breeze said, “that you know a lot about dames.”
“Not knowing a lot about them has helped me in my business,” I said. “I’m open-minded.”
He nodded and examined the end of his cigar. He took a piece of paper out of his pocket and read from it. “Delmar B. Hench, 45, bartender, unemployed. Maybelle Masters, 26, dancer. That’s all I know about them. I’ve got a hunch there ain’t a lot more to know.”
“You don’t think he shot Anson?” I asked.
Breeze looked at me without pleasure. “Brother, I just got here.” He took a card out of his pocket and read from that. “James B. Pollock, Reliance Indemnity Company, Field Agent. What’s the idea?”
“In a neighborhood like this it’s bad form to use your own name,” I said. “Anson didn’t either.”
“What’s the matter with the neighborhood?”
“Practically everything,” I said.
“What I would like to know,” Breeze said, “is what you know about the dead guy?”
“I told you already.”
“Tell me again. People tell me so much stuff I get it all mixed up.”
“I know what it says on his card, that his name is George Anson Phillips, that he claimed to be a private detective. He was outside my office when I went to lunch. He followed me downtown, into the lobby of the Hotel Metropole. I led him there. I spoke to him and he admitted he had been following me and said it was because he wanted to find out if I was smart enough to do business with. That’s a lot of baloney, of course. He probably hadn’t quite made up his mind what to do and was waiting for something to decide him. He was on a job—he said—he had got leery of and he wanted to join up with somebody, perhaps somebody with a little more experience than he had, if he had any at all. He didn’t act as if he had.”
Breeze said: “And the only reason he picked on you is that six years ago you worked on a case in Ventura while he was a deputy up there.”
I said, “That’s my story.”
“But you don’t have to get stuck with it,” Breeze said calmly. “You can always give us a better one.”
“It’s good enough,” I said. “I mean it’s good enough in the sense that it’s bad enough to be true.”
He nodded his big slow head.
“What’s your idea of all this?” he asked.
“Have you investigated Phillips’ office address?”
He shook his head, no.
“My idea is you will find out he was hired because he was simple. He was hired to take this apartment here under a wrong name, and to do something that turned out to be not what he liked. He was scared. He wanted a friend, he wanted help. The fact that he picked me after so long a time and such little knowledge of me showed he didn’t know many people in the detective business.”
Breeze got his handkerchief out and mopped his head and face again. “But it don’t begin to show why he had to follow you around like a lost pup instead of walking right up to your office door and in.”
“No,” I said, “it doesn’t.”
“Can you explain that?”
“No. Not really.”
“Well, how would you try to explain it?”
“I’ve already explained it in the only way I know how. He was undecided whether to speak to me or not. He was waiting for something to decide him. I decided by speaking to him.”
Breeze said: “That is a very simple explanation. It is so simple it stinks.”
“You may be right,” I said.
“And as the result of this little hotel lobby conversation this guy, a total stranger to you, asks you to his apartment and hands you his key. Because he wants to talk to you.”
I said, “Yes.”
“Why couldn’t he talk to you then?”
“I had an appointment,” I said.
“Business?”
I nodded.
“I see. What you working on?”
I shook my head and didn’t answer.
“This is murder,” Breeze said. “You’re going to have to tell me.”
I shook my head again. He flushed a little.
“Look,” he said tightly, “you got to.”
“I’m sorry, Breeze,” I said. “But so far as things have gone, I’m not convinced of that.”
“Of course you know I can throw you in the can as a material witness,” he said casually.
“On what grounds?”
“On the grounds that you are the one who found the body, that you gave a false name to the manager here, and that you don’t give a satisfactory acccount of your relations with the dead guy.”
I said: “Are you going to do it?”
He smiled bleakly. “You got a lawyer?”
“I know several lawyers. I don’t have a lawyer on a retainer basis.”
“How many of the commissioners do you know personally?”
“None. That is, I’ve spoken to three of them, but they might not remember me.”
“But you have good contacts, in the mayor’s office and so on?”
“Tell me about them,” I said. “I’d like to know.”
“Look, buddy,” he said earnestly, “you must got some friends somewhere. Surely.”
“I’ve got a good friend in the Sheriff’s office, but I’d rather leave him out of it.”
He lifted his eyebrows. “Why? Maybe you’re going to need friends. A good word from a cop we know to be right might go a long way.”
“He’s just a personal friend,” I said. “I don’t ride around on his back. If I get in trouble, it won’t do him any good.”
“How about the homicide bureau?”
“There’s Randall,” I said. “If he’s still working out of Central Homicide. I had a little time with him on a case once. But he doesn’t like me too well.”
Breeze sighed and moved his feet on the floor, rustling the newspapers he had pushed down out of the chair.
“Is all this on the level—or are you just being smart? I mean about all the important guys you don’t know?”
“It’s on the level,” I said. “But the way I am using it is smart.”
“It ain’t smart to say so right out.”
“I think it is.”
He put a big freckled hand over the whole lower part of his face and squeezed. When he took the hand away there were round red marks on his cheeks from the pressure of thumb and fingers. I watched the marks fade.
“Why don’t you go on home and let a man work?” he asked crossly.
I got up and nodded and went towards the door. Breeze said to my back: “Gimme your home address.”
I gave it to him. He wrote it down. “So long,” he said drearily: “Don’t leave town. We’ll want a statement—maybe tonight.”
I went out. There were two uniformed cops outside on the landing. The door across the way was open and a fingerprint man was still working inside. Downstairs I met two more cops in the hallway, one at each end of it. I didn’t see the carroty manager. I went out the front door. There was an ambulance pulling away from the curb. A knot of people hung around on both sides of the street, not as many as would accumulate in some neighborhoods.
I pushed along the sidewalk. A man grabbed me by the arm and said: “What’s the damage, Jack?”
I shook his arm off without speaking or looking at his face and went on down the street to where my car was.
12
It was a quarter to seven when I let myself into the office and clicked the light on and picked a piece of paper off the floor. It was a notice from the Green Feather Messenger Service saying that a package was held awaiting my call and would be delivered upon request at any hour of the day or night. I put it on the desk, peeled my coat off and opened the windows. I got a half bottle of Old Taylor out of the deep drawer of the desk and drank a short drink, rolling it around on my tongue. Then I sat there holding the neck of the cool bottle and wondering how it would feel to be a homicide dick and find bodies lying around and not mind at all, not have to sneak out wiping doorknobs, not have to ponder how much I could tell without hurting a client and how little I could tell without too badly hurting myself. I decided I wouldn’t like it.
I pulled the phone over and looked at the number on the slip and called it. They said my package could be sent right over. I said I would wait for it.
It was getting dark outside now. The rushing sound of the traffic had died a little and the air from the open window, not yet cool from the night, had that tired end-of-the-day smell of dust, automobile exhaust, sunlight rising from hot walls and sidewalks, the remote smell of food in a thousand restaurants, and perhaps, drifting down from the residential hills above Hollywood—if you had a nose like a hunting dog—a touch of that peculiar tomcat smell that eucalyptus trees give off in warm weather.
I sat there smoking. Ten minutes later the door was knocked on and I opened it to a boy in a uniform cap who took my signature and gave me a small square package, not more than two and a half inches wide, if that. I gave the boy a dime and listened to him whistling his way back to the elevators.
The label had my name and address printed on it in ink, in a quite fair imitation of typed letters, larger and thinner than pica. I cut the string that tied the label to the box and unwound the thin brown paper. Inside was a thin cheap cardboard box pasted over with brown paper and stamped Made in Japan with a rubber stamp. It would be the kind of box you would get in a Jap store to hold some small carved animal or a small piece of jade. The lid fitted down all the way and tightly. I pulled it off and saw tissue paper and cotton wool.
Separating these I was looking at a gold coin about the size of a half dollar, bright and shining as if it had just come from the mint.
The side facing me showed a spread eagle with a shield for a breast and the initials E.B. punched into the left wing. Around these was a circle of beading, between the beading and the smooth unmilled edge of the coin, the legend E PLURIBUS UNUM. At the bottom was the date 1787.
I turned the coin over on my palm. It was heavy and cold and my palm felt moist under it. The other side showed a sun rising or setting behind a sharp peak of mountain, then a double circle of what looked like oak leaves, then more Latin, NOVA EBOBACA COLUMBIA EXCELSIOR. At the bottom of this side, in smaller capitals, the name BRASHER.
I was looking at the Brasher Doubloon.
There was nothing else in the box or in the paper, nothing on the paper. The handwritten printing meant nothing to me. I didn’t know anybody who used it.
I filled an empty tobacco pouch half full, wrapped the coin up in tissue paper, snapped a rubber band around it and tucked it into the tobacco in the pouch and put more in on top. I closed the zipper and put the pouch in my pocket. I locked the paper and string and box and label up in a filing cabinet, sat down again and dialed Elisha Morningstar’s number on the phone. The bell rang eight times at the other end of the line. It was not answered. I hardly expected that. I hung up again, looked Elisha Morningstar up in the book and saw that he had no listing for a residence phone in Los Angeles or the outlying towns that were in the phone book.
I got a shoulder holster out of the desk and strapped it on and slipped a Colt .38 automatic into it, put on hat and coat, shut the windows again, put the whiskey away, clicked the lights off and had the office door unlatched when the phone rang.
The ringing bell had a sinister sound, for no reason of itself, but because of the ears to which it rang. I stood there braced and tense, lips tightly drawn back in a half grin. Beyond the closed window the neon lights glowed. The dead air didn’t move. Outside the corridor was still. The bell rang in darkness, steady and strong.
I went back and leaned on the desk and answered. There was a click and a droning on the wire and beyond that nothing. I depressed the connection and stood there in the dark, leaning over, holding the phone with one hand and holding the flat riser on the pedestal down with the other. I didn’t know what I was waiting for.
The phone rang again. I made a sound in my throat and put it to my ear again, not saying anything at all.
So we were there silent, both of us, miles apart maybe, each one holding a telephone and breathing and listening and hearing nothing, not even the breathing.
Then after what seemed a very long time there was the quiet remote whisper of a voice saying dimly, without any tone:
“Too bad for you, Marlowe.”
Then the click again and the droning on the wire and I hung up and went back across the office and out.