“Go on,” he said.
“I don’t know why you wasted all the build-up on me,” I said. “But I credit you with enough brains to know you couldn’t buy anything, and know it would stay bought.”
Ballou picked up the photo that Spink had put down near him on a long low table. He reached out a languid hand. “The piece that’s cut out would be the punch line no doubt,” he said.
I got the envelope out of my pocket and gave him the cut out corner, watched him fit the two pieces together.
“With a glass you can read the headline,” I said.
“There’s one on my desk. Please.”
I went over and got the magnifying glass off his desk “You’re used to a lot of service, aren’t you, Mr. Ballou?”
“I pay for it.” He studied the photograph through the glass and sighed. “Seems to me I saw that fight. They ought to take more care of these boys.”
“Like you do of your clients,” I said.
He laid down the magnifying glass and leaned back to stare at me with cool untroubled eyes.
“That’s the chap that owns The Dancers. Name’s Steelgrave. The girl is a client of mine, of course.” He made vague gesture towards a chair. I sat down in it. “What were you thinking of asking, Mr. Marlowe?”
“For what?”
“All the prints and the negative. The works.”
“Ten grand,” I said, and watched his mouth. Thc mouth smiled, rather pleasantly.
“It needs a little more explanation, doesn’t it? All I see is two people having lunch in a public place. Hardly disastrous to the reputation of my client. I assume that was what you had in mnd.”
I grinned. “You can’t buy anything, Mr. BaIlou. I could have had a positive made from the negative and another negative from the positive. If that snap is evidence of something, you could never know you had suppressed it.”
“Not much of a sales talk for a blackmailer,” he said, still smiling.
“I always wonder why people pay blackmailers. They can’t buy anything. Yet they do pay them, sometimes over and over and over again. And in the end are just where they started.”
“The fear of today,” he said, “always overrides the fear of tomorrow. It’s a basic fact of the dramatic emotions that the part is greater than the whole. If you see a glamour star on the screen in a position of great danger, you fear for her with one part of your mind, the emotional part. Notwithstanding that your reasoning mind knows that she is the star of the picture and nothing very bad is going to happen to her. If suspense and menace didn’t defeat reason, there would be very little drama.”
I said: “Very true, I guess,” and puffed some of my Camel smoke around.
His eyes narrowed a little. “As to really being able to buy anything, if I paid you a substantial price and didn’t get what I bought, I’d have you taken care of. Beaten to a pulp. And when you got out of the hospital, if you felt aggressive enough, you could try to get me arrested.”
“It’s happened to me,” I said. “I’m a private eye. I know what you mean. Why are you talking to me?”
He laughed. He had a deep pleasant effortless laugh. “I’m an agent, sonny. I always tend to think traders have a little something in reserve. But we won’t talk about any ten grand. She hasn’t got it. She only makes a grand a week so far. I admit she’s very close to the big money, though.”
“That would stop her cold,” I said, pointing to the photo. “No big money, no swimming pool with underwater lights, no platinum mink, no name in neons, no nothing. All blown away like dust.”
He laughed contemptuously.
“Okay if I show this to the johns down town, then?” I said.
He stopped laughing. His eyes narrowed. Very quietly he asked:
“Why would they be interested?”
I stood up. “I don’t think we’re going to do any business, Mr. Ballou. And you’re a busy man. I’ll take myself off.”
He got up off the couch and stretched, all six feet two of him. He was a very fine hunk of man. He came over and stood close to me. His seal-brown eyes had little gold flecks in them. “Let’s see who you are, sonny.”
He put his hand out. I dropped my open wallet into it. He read the photostat of my license, poked a few more things out of the wallet and glanced at them. He handed it back.
“What would happen, if you did show your little picture to the cops?”
“I’d first of all have to connect it up with something they’re working on—something that happened in the Van Nuys Hotel yesterday afternoon. I’d connect it up through the girl—who won’t talk to me—that’s why I’m talking to you.”
“She told me about it last night,” he sighed.
“Told you how much?” I asked.
“That a private detective named Marlowe had tried to force her to hire him, on the ground that she was seen in a downtown hotel inconveniently close to where a murder was committed.”
“How close?” I asked.
“She didn’t say.”
“Nuts she didn’t.”
He walked away from me to a tall cylindrical jar in the corner. From this he took one of a number of short thin malacca canes. He began to walk up and down the carpet, swinging the cane deftly past his right shoe.
I sat down again and killed my cigarette and took a deep breath. “It could only happen in Hollywood,” I grunted.
He made a neat about turn and glanced at me. “I beg your pardon.”
“That an apparently sane man could walk up and down inside the house with a Piccadilly stroll and a monkey stick in his hand.”
He nodded. “I caught the disease from a producer at MGM. Charming fellow. Or so I’ve been told.” He stopped and pointed the cane at me. “You amuse the hell out of me, Marlowe. Really you do. You’re so transparent. You’re trying to use me for a shovel to dig yourself out of a jam.”
“There’s some truth in that. But the jam I’m in is nothing to the jam your client would be in if I hadn’t done the thing that put me in the jam.”
He stood quite still for a moment. Then he threw the cane away from him and walked over to a liquor cabinet and swung the two halves of it open. He poured something into a couple of pot-bellied glasses. He carried one of them over to me. Then went back and got his own. He sat down with it on the couch.
“Armagnac,” he said. “If you knew me, you’d appreciate the compliment. This stuff is pretty scarce. The Krauts cleaned most of it out. Our brass got the rest. Here’s to you.”
He lifted the glass, sniffed and sipped a tiny sip. I put mine down in a lump. It tasted like good French brandy.
Ballou looked shocked. “My God, you sip that stuff, you don’t swallow it whole.”
“I swallow it whole,” I said. “Sorry. She also told you that if somebody didn’t shut my mouth, she would be in a lot of trouble.”
He nodded.
“Did she suggest how to go about shutting my mouth?”
“I got the impression she was in favor of doing it with some kind of heavy blunt instrument. So I tried out a mixlure of threat and bribery. We have an outfit down the street that specializes in protecting picture people. Apparently they didn’t scare you and the bribe wasn’t big enough.”
“They scared me plenty,” I said. “I damn near fanned a Luger at them. That junky with the .45 puts on a terrific act. And as for the money not being big enough, it’s all a question of how it’s offered to me.”
He sipped a little more of his Armagnac. He pointed at the photograph lying in front of him with the two pieces fitted together.
“We got to where you were taking that to the cops. What then?”
“I don’t think we got that far. We got to why she took this up with you instead of with her boy friend. He arrived just as I left. He has his own key.”
“Apparently she just didn’t.” He frowned and looked down into his Armagnac.
“I like that fine,” I said. “I’d like it still better if the guy didn’t have her doorkey.”
He looked up rather sadly. “So would I. So would we all. But show business has always been like that—any kind of show business. If these people didn’t live intense and rather disordered lives, if their emotions didn’t ride them too hard—well, they wouldn’t be able to catch those emotions in flight and imprint them on a few feet of celluloid or project them across the footlights.”
“I’m not talking about her love life,” I said. “She doesn’t have to shack up with a redhot.”
“There’s no proof of that, Marlowe.”
I pointed to the photograph. “The man that took that is missing and can’t be found. He’s probably dead. Two other men who lived at the same address are dead. One of them was trying to peddle those pictures just before he got dead. She went to his hotel in person to take delivery. So did whoever killed him. She didn’t get delivery and neither did the killer. They didn’t know where to look.”
“And you did?”
“I was lucky. I’d seen him without his toupee. None of this is what I call proof, maybe. You could build an argument against it. Why bother? Two men have been killed, perhaps three. She took an awful chance. Why? She wanted that picture. Getting it was worth an awful chance. Why again? It’s just two people having lunch on a certain day. The day Moe Stein was shot to death on Franklin Avenue. The day a character named Steelgrave was in because the cops got a tip he was a Cleveland redhot named Weepy Moyer. That’s what the record shows. But the photo says he was out of jail. And by saying that about him on that particular day it says who is he. And she knows it. And he still has her doorkey.”
I paused and we eyed each other solidly for a while. I said:
“You don’t really want the cops to have that picture, do you? Win, lose or draw, they’d crucify her. And when it was all over it wouldn’t make a damn bit of difference whether Steelgrave was Moyer or whether Moyer killed Stein or had him killed or just happened to be out on a jail pass the day he was killed. If he got away with it, there’d always be enough people to think it was a fix. She wouldn’t get away with anything. She’s a gangster’s girl in the public mind. And as far as your business is concerned, she’s definitely and completely through.”
Ballou was silent for a moment, staring at me without expression. “And where are you all this time?” he asked softly.
“That depends a good deal on you, Mr. Ballou.”
“What do you really want?” His voice was thin and bitter now.
“What I wanted from her and couldn’t get. Something that gives me a colorable right to act in her interests up to the point where I decided I can’t go any farther.”
“By suppressing evidence?” he asked tightly.
“If it is evidence. The cops couldn’t find out without smearing Miss Weld. Maybe I can. They wouldn’t be bothered to try; they don’t care enough. I do.”
“Why?”
“Let’s say it’s the way I earn my living. I might have other motives, but that one’s enough.”
“What’s your price?”
“You sent it to me last night. I wouldn’t take it then. I’ll take it now. With a signed letter employing my services to investigate an attempt to blackmail one of your clients.”
I got up with my empty glass and went over and put it down on the desk. As I bent down I heard a soft whirring noise. I went around behind the desk and yanked upon a drawer. A wire recorder slid out on a hinged shelf. The motor was running and the fine steel wire was moving steadily from one spool to the other. I looked across at Ballou.
“You can shut it off and take the record with you,” he said. “You can’t blame me for using it.”
I moved the switch over to rewind and the wire reversed direction and picked up speed until the wire was winding so fast I couldn’t see it. It made a sort of high keening noise, like a couple of pansies fighting for a piece of silk. The wire came loose and the machine stopped. I took the spool off and dropped it into my pocket.
“You might have another one,” I said. “I’ll have to chance that.”
“Pretty sure of yourself, aren’t you, Marlowe?”
“I only wish I was.”
“Press that button on the end of the desk, will you?” I pressed it. The black glass doors opened and a dark girl came in with a stenographer’s notebook.
Without looking at her Ballou began to dictate. “Letter to Mr. Philip Marlowe, with his address. Dear Mr. Marlowe: This agency herewith employs you to investigate an attempt to blackmail one of its clients, particulars of which have been given to you verbally. Your fee is to be one hundred dollars a day with a retainer of five hundred dollars, receipt of which you acknowledge on the copy of this letter. Blah, blah, blah. That’s all, Eileen. Right away please.”
I gave the girl my address and she went out.
I took the wire spool out of my pocket and put it back in the drawer.
Ballou crossed his knees and danced the shiny tip of his shoe up and down staring at it. He ran his hand through crisp dark hair.
“One of these days,” he said, “I’m going to make the mistake which a man in my business dreads above all other mistakes. I’m going to find myself doing business with a man I can trust and I’m going to be just too damn smart to trust him. Here you’d better keep this.” He held out the two pieces of the photograph.
Five minutes later I left. The glass doors opened when I was three feet from them. I went past the two secretaries and down the corridor past the open door of Spink’s Office. There was no sound in there, but I could smell his cigar smoke. In the reception room exactly the same people seemed to be sitting around in the chintzy chairs. Miss Helen Grady gave me her Saturday-night smile. Miss Vane beamed at me.
I had been forty minutes with the boss. That made me as gaudy as a chiropractor’s chart.