The man in the chair laughed. That staggered me. Then he stood up and the gun in his hand came up with him.
“Don’t kill him,” he said mildly. “We want to use him for live bait.”
Then there was movement in the shadows of the hall and Ohls came through the door, blank-eyed, expressionless and utterly calm. He looked down at Menendez. Menendez was kneeling with his head on the floor.
“Soft,” Ohls said. “Soft as mush.”
“He’s not soft,” I said. “He’s hurt. Any man can be hurt. Was Big Willie Magoon soft?”
Ohls looked at me. The other man looked at me. The tough Mex at the door hadn’t made a sound.
“Take that goddam cigarette out of your fate,” I snarled at Ohls. “Either smoke it or leave it alone. I’m sick of watching you. I’m sick of you, period. I’m sick of cops.”
He looked surprised. Then he grinned.
“That was a plant, kiddo,” he said cheerfully. “You hurt bad? Did the nasty mans hit your facey-wacey? Well for my money you had it coming and it was damn useful that you had.” He looked down at Mendy. Mendy had his knees under him. He was climbing out of a well, a few inches at a time. He breathed gaspingly.
“What a talkative lad he is,” Ohls said, “when he doesn’t bave.three shysters with him to button his lip.”
He jerked Menendez to his feet. Mendy’s nose was bleeding. He fumbled the handkerchief out of his white dinner jacket and held it to his nose. He said no word.
“You got crossed up, sweetheart,” Ohls told him carefully. “I ain’t grieving a whole lot over Magoon. He had it coming. But he was a cop and punks like you lay off cops—always and forever.”
Menendez lowered the handkerchief and looked at Ohls. He looked at me. He looked at the man who had been sitting in the chair. He turned slowly and looked at the tough Mex by the door. They all looked at him. There was nothing in their faces. Then a knife shot into view from nowhere and Mendy lunged for Ohls. Ohls side-stepped and took him by the throat with one hand and chopped the knife out of his hand with ease, almost indifferently. Ohls spread his feet and straightened his back and bent his legs slightly and lifted Menendez dear off the floor with one hand holding his neck. He walked him across the floor and pinned him against the wall. He let him down, but didn’t let go of his throat.
“Touch me with one finger and I’ll kill you,” Ohls said. “One finger.” Then he dropped his hands.
Mendy smiled at him scornfully, looked at his handkerchief, and refolded it to hide the blood. He held it to his nose again. He looked down at the gun he had used to hit me. -The man from the chair said loosely: “Not loaded, even if you could grab it.”
“A cross,” Mendy said to Ohls. “I heard you the first time.”
“You ordered three muscles,” t)hls said. “What you got was three deputies from Nevada. Somebody in Vegas don’t like the way you forget to dear with them. The somebody wants to talk to you. You can go along with the deputies or you can go downtown with me and get hung on the back of the door by a pair of handcuffs. There’s a couple of boys down there would like to see you dose up.”
“God help Nevada,” Mendy said quietly, looking around again at the tough Mex by the door. Then he crossed himself quickly and walked out of the front door. The tough Mex followed him. Then the other one, the dried out desert type, picked up the gun and the knife and went out too. He shut the door. Ohls waited motionless. There was a sound of doors banging shut, then a car wnet off into the night.
“You sure those mugs were deputies?” I asked Ohls.
He turned as if surprised to see me there. “They had stars,” he said shortly.
“Nice work, Bernie. Very nice. Think he’ll get to Vegas alive, you coldhearted son of a bitch?”
I went to the bathroom and ran cold water and held a soaked towel against my throbbing cheek. I looked at myself in the glass. The cheek was puffed out of shape and bluish and there were jagged wounds on it from the force of the gun barrel hitting against the cheekbone. There was a discoloration under my left eye too. I wasn’t going to be beautiful for a few days.
Then Ohls’ reflection showed behind me in the mirror. He wasrolling his damn unlighted cigarette along his lips, like a cat teasing a half-dead mouse, trying to get it to run away just once more.
“Next time don’t try to outguess the cops,” he said gruffly. “You think we let you steal that photostat just for laughs? We had a hunch Mendy would come gunning for you. We put it up to Starr cold. We told him we couldn’t stop gambling in the county, but we could make it tough enough to cut way into the take. No mobster beats up a cop, not even a bad cop, and gets away with it in our territory. Starr convinced us he had nothing to do with it, that the outfit was sore about it and Menendez was going to get told. So when Mendy called for a squad of out-oftown hard boys to come and give you the treatment, Starr sent him three guys he knew, in one of his own cars, at his own expense. Starr is a police commissioner in Vegas.”
I turned around and looked at Ohls. “The coyotes out in the desert will get fed tonight. Congratulations. Cop business is wonderful uplifting idealistic work, Bernie. The only thing wrong with cop business is the cops that are in it.”
“Too bad for you, hero,” he said with a sudden cold savagery. “I could hardly help laughing when you walked into your own parlor to take your beating. I got a rise out of that, kiddo. It was a dirty job and it had to be done dirty. To make these characters talk you got to give them a sense of power. You ain’t hurt bad, but we had to let them hurt you some.”
“So sorry,” I said. “So very sorry you had to suffer like that.”
He shoved his taut face at me. “I hate gamblers,” he said in a rough voice. “I hate them the way I hate dope pushers. They pander to a disease that is every bit as corrupting as. dope. You think those palaces in Reno and Vegas are just for harmless fun? Nuts, they’re there for the little guy, the something-for-nothing sucker, the lad that stops off with his pay envelope in his pocket and loses the weekend grocery money. The rich gambler loses forty grand and laughs it off and comes back for more. But the rich gambler don’t make the big racket, pal. The big steal is in dimes and quarters and half dollars and once in a while a buck or even a five-spot. The big racket money comes in like water from the pipe in your bathroom, a steady stream that never stops flowing. Any time anybody wants to knock off a professional gambler, that’s for me. I like it. And any time a state government takes money from gambling and calls it taxes, that government is helping to keep the mobs in business. The barber or the beauty parlor girl puts two bucks on the nose. That’s for the Syndicate, that’s what really makes the profits. The people want an honest police force, do they? What for? To protect the guys with courtesy cards? We got legal horse tracks in this state, we got them all year round. They operate honest and the state gets its cut, and for every dollar laid at the track there’s fifty laid with the bookies. There’s eight or nine races on a card and in half of them, the little ones nobody notices, the fix can be in any time somebody says so. There’s only one way a jock can win a race, but there’s twenty ways he can lose one, with a steward at every eighth pole watching, and not able to do a damn thing about it if the jock knows his stuff. That’s legal gambling, pal, clean honest business, state approved. So it’s right, is it? Not by my book, it ain’t. Because it’s gambling and it breeds gamblers and when you add it up there’s one kind of gambling—the wrong kind.”
“Feel better?” I asked him, putting some white iodine on my wounds.
“I’m an old tired beat-up cop. All I feel is sore.”
I turned around and stared at him. “You’re a damp good cop, Bernie, but just the same you’re all wet. In one way cops are all the same. They all blame the wrong things. If a guy loses his pay check at a crap table, stop gambling. If he gets drunk, stop liquor. If he kills somebody in a car crash, stop making automobiles. If he gets pinched with a girl in a hotel room, stop sexual intercourse. If he falls downstairs, stop building houses.”
“Aw shut up!”
“Sure, shut me up. I’m just a private citizen. Get off it, Bernie. We don’t have mobs and crime syndicates and goon squads because we have crooked politicians and their stooges in the City Hall and the legislatures. Crime isn’t a disease, it’s a symptom. Cops are like a doctor that gives you aspirin for a brain tumor, except that the cop would rather cure it with a blackjack. We’re a big rough rich wild people and crime is the price we pay for it, and organized crime is the price we pay for organization. We’ll have it with us a long time. Organized crime is just the dirty side of the sharp dollar.”
“What’s the clean side?”
“I never saw it. Maybe Harlan Potter could tell you. Let’s have a drink.”
“You looked pretty good walking in that door,” Ohls said.
“You looked better when Mendy pulled the knife on you.”
“Shake,” he said, and put his hand out.
We had the drink and he left by the back door, which he had jimmied to get in, having dropped by the night before for scouting purposes. Back doors are a soft touch if they open out and are old enough for the wood to have dried and shrunk. You knock the pins out of the hinges and the rest is easy. Ohls showed me a dent in the frame when he left to go back over the hill to where he had left his car on the next street. He could have opened. the front door almost as easily but that would have broken the lock. It would have showed up too much.
I watched him climb through the trees with the beam of a torch in front of him and disappear over the-rise. I locked the door and mixed another mild drink and went back to the living room and sat down. I looked at my watch. It was still early. It only seemed a long time since I had come home.
I went to the phone and dialed the operator and gave her the Lorings’ phone number. The butler asked who was calling, then went to see if Mrs. Loring was in. She was.
“I was the goat all right,” I said, “but they caught the tiger alive. I’m bruised up a little.”
“You must tell me about it sometime.” She sounded about as far away as if she had got to Paris already.
“I could tell you over a drink—if you had time.”
“Tonight? Oh, I’m packing my things to move out. I’m afraid that would be impossible.”
“Yes, I can see that. Well, I just thought you might like to know. It was kind of you to warn me. It had nothing at all to do with your old man.”
“Are you sure?”
“Positive.”
“Oh. Just a minute.” She was gone for a time, then she came back and sounded warmer. “Perhaps I could fit a drink in. Where?”
“Anywhere you say. I haven’t a car tonight, but I can get a cab.”
“Nonsense, I’ll pick you up, but it will be an hour or longer. What is the address there?”
I told her and she hung up and I put the porch light on and then stood in the open door inhaling the night. It had got much cooler.
I went back in and tried to phone Lonnie Morgan but couldn’t reach him. Then just for the hell of it I put a call in to the Terrapin Club at Las Vegas, Mr. Randy Starr.- He probably wouldn’t take it. But he did. He had a quiet, competent, man-of-affairs voice.
“Nice to hear from you, Marlowe. Any friend of Terry’s is a friend of mine. What can I do for you?”
“Mendy is on his way.”
“On his way where?”
“To Vegas, with the three goons you sent after him in a big black Caddy with a red spotlight and siren. Yours, I presume?”
He laughed. “In Vegas, as some newspaper guy said, we use Cadillacs for trailers. What’s this all about?”
“Mendy staked out here in my house with a couple of hard boys. His idea was to beat me up—putting it low—for a piece in the paper he seemed to think was my fault.”
“Was it your fault?”
“I don’t own any newspapers, Mr. Starr.”
“I don’t own any hard boys in Cadillacs, Mr. Marlowe.”
“They were deputies maybe.”
“I couldn’t say. Anything else?”
“He pistol-whipped me. I kicked him in the stomach and used my knee on his nose. He seemed dissatisfied. All the same I hope he gets to Vegas alive.”
“I’m sure he will, if he started this way. I’m afraid I’ll have to cut this conversation short now.”
“Just a second, Starr. Were you in on that caper at Otatocl�n—or did Mendy work it alone?”
“Come again?”
“Don’t kid, Starr. Mendy wasn’t sore at me for why he said—not to the point of staking out in my house and giving me the treatment he gave Big Willie Magoon. Not enough motive. He warned me to keep my nose clean and not to dig into the Lennox case. But I did, because it just happened to work out that way. So he did what I’ve just told you. So there was a better reason.”
“I see,” he said slowly and still mildly and quietly. “You think there was something not quite kosher about how Terry got dead? That he didn’t shoot himself, for instance, but someone else did?”
“I think the details would help. He wrote a confession which was false. He wrote a letter to me which got mailed. A waiter or hop in the hotel was going to sneak it out and mail it for him. He was holed up in the hotel and couldn’t-get out. There was a big bill in the letter and the letter was finished just as a knock came .at his door. I’d like to know who came into the room.”
“Why?”
“If it had been a bellhop or a waiter, Terry would have added a line to the letter and said so. If it was a cop, the letter wouldn’t have been mailed. So who was it—and why did Terry write that confession?”
“No idea, Marlowe. No idea at all.”
“Sorry I bothered you, Mr. Starr.”
“No bother, glad to hear from you. I’ll ask Mendy if he has any ideas.”
“Yeah—if you ever see him again—alive. If you don’t — find out anyway. Or somebody else will.”
“You?” His voice hardened now, but it was still quiet.
“No, Mr. Starr. Not me. Somebody that could blow you out of Vegas without taking a long breath. Believe me, Mr. Starr. Just believe me. This is strictly on the level.”
“I’ll see Mendy alive. Don’t worry about that, Marlowe.”
“I figured you knew all about that. Goodnight, Mr. Starr.”
49
When the car stopped out front and the door opened I went out and stood at the top of the steps to call down. But the middleaged colored driver was holding the door for her to get out. Then he followed her up the steps carrying a small overnight case. So I just waited.
She reached the top and turned to the driver: “Mr. Marlowe will drive me to my hotel, Amos. Thank you for everything. I’ll call you in the morning.”
“Yes, Mrs. Loring. May I ask Mr. Marlowe a question?”
“Certainly, Amos.”
He put the overnight case down inside the door and she went in past me and left us.
“‘I grow old… I grow old. . I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.’ What does that mean, Mr. Marlowe?”
“Not a bloody thing. It just sounds good.”
He smiled. “That is from the ‘Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.’ Here’s another one. ‘In the room the women come and go/Talking of Michael Angelo.’ Does that suggest anything to you, s-fr?”
“Yeah—it suggests to me that the guy didn’t know very much about women.”
“My sentiments exactly, sir. Nonetheless I admire T. S. Eliot Very much.”
“Did you say ‘nonetheless’?”
“Why, yes I did. Mr. Marlowe. Is that incorrect?”
“No, but don’t say it in front of a millionaire. He might think you were giving him the hotfoot.”
He smiled sadly. “I shouldn’t dream of it. Have you had an accident, sir?”
“Nope. It was planned that way. Goodnight, Amos.”