“However, Henry,” I said, “there is another element in the situation. If this thief is very stupid, it will not, of course, have much weight. But if he is even moderately intelligent, it will. Mrs. Penruddock is a very proud woman and lives in a very exclusive section of the city. If it should become known that she wore imitation pearls, and above all, if it should be even hinted in the public press that these were the very pearls her own husband had given her for her golden wedding present— well, I am sure you see the point, Henry.”
“Box guys ain’t too bright,” he said and rubbed his stony chin. Then he lifted his right thumb and bit it thoughtfully. He looked at the windows, at the corner of the room, at the floor. He looked at me from the corners of his eyes.
“Blackmail, huh?” he said. “Maybe. But crooks don’t mix their rackets much. Still, the guy might pass the word along. There’s a chance, Walter. I wouldn’t care to hock my gold fillings to buy me a piece of it, but there’s a chance. How much you figure to put out?”
“A hundred dollars should be ample, but I am willing to go as high as two hundred, which is the actual cost of the imitations.”
Henry shook his head and patronized the bottle. “Nope. The guy wouldn’t uncover hisself for that kind of money. Wouldn’t be worth the chance he takes. He’d dump the marbles and keep his nose clean.”
“We can at least try, Henry.”
“Yeah, but where? And we’re getting low on liquor. Maybe I better put my shoes on and run out, huh?”
At that very moment, as if in answer to my unspoken prayer, a soft dull thump sounded on the door of my apartment. I opened it and picked up the final edition of the evening paper. I closed the door again and carried the paper back across the room, opening it up as I went. I touched it with my right forefinger and smiled confidently at Henry Eichelberger.
“Here. I will wager you a full quart of Old Plantation that the answer will be on the crime page of this paper.”
“There ain’t any crime page,” Henry chortled. “This is Los Angeles. I’ll fade you.”
I opened the paper to page three with some trepidation, for, although I had already seen the item I was looking for in an early edition of the paper while waiting in Ada Twomey’s Domestic Employment Agency, I was not certain it would appear intact in the later editions. But my faith was rewarded. It had not been removed, but appeared midway of column three exactly as before. The paragraph, which was quite short, was headed: LOU GANDESI QUESTIONED IN GEM THEFTS. “Listen to this, Henry,” I said, and began to read.
Acting on an anonymous tip police late last night picked up Louis C. (Lou) Gandesi, proprietor of a well-known Spring Street tavern, and quizzed him intensively concerning the recent wave of dinnerparty holdups in an exclusive western section of this city, holdups during which, it is alleged, more than two hundred thousand dollars’ worth of valuable jewels have been torn at gun’s point from women guests in fashionable homes. Gandesi was released at a late hour and refused to make any statement to reporters. “I never kibitz the cops,” he said modestly. Captain William Norgaard, of the General Robbery Detail, announced himself as satisfied that Gandesi had no connection with the robberies, and that tiw tip was merely an act of personal spite.
I folded the paper and threw it on the bed.
“You win, ho,” Henry said, and handed me the bottle. I took a long drink and returned it to him. “Now what? Brace this Gandesi and take him through the hoops?”
“He may be a dangerous man, Henry. Do you think we are equal to it?”
Henry snorted contemptuously. “Yah, a Spring Street punk. Some fat slob with a phony ruby on his mitt. Lead me to him. We’ll turn the slob inside out and drain his liver. But we’re just about fresh out of liquor. All we got is maybe a pint.” He examined the bottle against the light.
“We have had enough for the moment, Henry.”
“We ain’t drunk, are we? I only had seven drinks since I got here, maybe nine.”
“Certainly we are not drunk, Henry, but you take very large drinks, and we have a difficult evening before us. I think we should now get shaved and dressed, and I further think that we should wear dinner clothes. I have an extra suit which will fit you admirably, as we are almost exactly the same size. It is certainly a remarkable omen that two such large men should be associated in the same enterprise. Evening clothes impress these low characters, Henry.”
“Swell,” Henry said. “They’ll think we’re mugs workin’ for some big shot. This Gandesi will be scared enough to swallow his necktie.”
We decided to do as I had suggested and I laid out clothes for Henry, and while he was bathing and shaving I telephoned to Ellen Macintosh.
“Oh, Walter, I am so glad you called up,” she cried. “Have you found anything?”
“Not yet, darling,” I said. “But we have an idea. Henry and I are just about to put it into execution.”
“Henry, Walter? Henry who?”
“Why, Henry Eichelberger, of course, darling. Have you forgotten him so soon? Henry and I are warm friends and we—”
She interrupted me coldly. “Are you drinking, Walter?” she demanded in a very distant voice.
“Certainly not, darling. Henry is a teetotaler.”
She sniffed sharply. I could hear the sound distinctly over the telephone. “But didn’t Henry take the pearls?” she asked, after quite a long pause.
“Henry, angel? Of course not. Henry left because he was in love with you.”
“Oh, Walter. That ape? I’m sure you’re drinking terribly. I don’t ever want to speak to you again. Goodbye.” And she hung the phone up very sharply so that a painful sensation made itself felt in my ear.
I sat down in a chair with a bottle of Old Plantation in my hand wondering what I had said that could be construed as offensive or indiscreet. As I was unable to think of anything, I consoled myself with the bottle until Henry came out of the bathroom looking extremely personable in one of my pleated shirts and a wing collar and black bow tie.
It was dark when we left the apartment and I, at least, was full of hope and confidence, although a little depressed by the way Ellen Macintosh had spoken to me over the telephone.
FOUR
Mr. Gandesi’s establishment was not difficult to find, inasmuch as the first taxicab driver Henry yelled at on Spring Street directed us to it. It was called the Blue Lagoon and its interior was bathed in an unpleasant blue light. Henry and I entered it steadily, since we had consumed a partly solid meal at Mandy’s Caribbean Grotto before starting out to find Mr. Gandesi. Henry looked almost handsome in my second-best dinner suit, with a fringed white scarf hanging over his shoulder, a lightweight black felt hat on the back of his head (which was only a little larger than mine), and a bottle of whiskey in each of the side pockets of the summer overcoat he was wearing.
The bar of the Blue Lagoon was crowded, but Henry and I went on back to the small dim dining room behind it. A man in a dirty dinner suit came up to us and Henry asked him for Gandesi, and he pointed out a fat man who sat alone at a small table in the far corner of the room. We went that way.
The man sat with a small glass of red wine in front of him and slowly twisted a large green stone on his finger. He did not look up. There were no other chairs at the table, so Henry leaned on it with both elbows.
“You Gandesi?” he said.
The man did not look up even then. He moved his thick black eyebrows together and said in an absent voice: “Si. Yes.”
“We got to talk to you in private,” Henry told him. Where we won’t be disturbed.”
Gandesi looked up now and there was extreme boredom in his flat black almond-shaped eyes. “So?” he asked and shrugged. “Eet ees about what?”
“About some pearls,” Henry said. “Forty-nine on the string, matched and pink.”
“You sell—or you buy?” Gandesi inquired and his chin began to shake up and down as if with amusement.
“Buy,” Henry said.
The man at the table crooked his finger quietly and a very large waiter appeared at his side. “Ees dronk,” he said lifelessly. “Put dees men out.”
The waiter took hold of Henry’s shoulder. Henry reached up carelessly and took hold of the waiter’s hand and twisted it. The waiter’s face in that bluish light turned some color I could not describe, but which was not at all healthy. He let out a low moan. Henry dropped the hand and said to me: “Put a C-note on the table.”
I took my wallet out and extracted from it one of the two hundred-dollar bills I had taken the precaution to obtain from the cashier at the Chateau Moraine. Gandesi stared at the bill and made a gesture to the large waiter, who went away rubbing his hand and holding it tight against his chest.
“What for?” Gandesi asked.
“Five minutes of your time alone.”
“Ees very fonny. O.K., I bite.” Gandesi took the bill and folded it neatly and put it in his vest pocket. Then he put both hands on the table and pushed himself heavily to his feet. He started to waddle away without looking at us.
Henry and I followed him among the crowded tables to the far side of the dining room and through a door in the wainscoting and then down a narrow dim hallway. At the end of this Gandesi opened a door into a lighted room and stood holding it for us, with a grave smile on his olive face. I went in first.
As Henry passed in front of Gandesi into the room the latter, with surprising agility, took a small shiny black leather club from his clothes and hit Henry on the head with it very hard. Henry sprawled forward on his hands and knees. Gandesi shut the door of the room very quickly for a man of his build and leaned against it with the small club in his left hand. Now, very suddenly, in his right hand appeared a short but heavy black revolver.
“Ees very fonny,” he said politely, and chuckled to himself.
Exactly what happened then I did not see clearly. Henry was at one instant on his hands and knees with his back to Gandesi. In the next, or possibly even in the same instant, something swirled like a big fish in water and Gandesi grunted. I then saw that Henry’s hard blond head was buried in Gandesi’s stomach and that Henry’s large hands held both of Gandesi’s hairy wrists. Then Henry straightened his body to its full height and Gandesi was high up in the air balanced on top of Henry’s head, his mouth strained wide open and his face a dark purple color. Then Henry shook himself, as it seemed, quite lightly, and Gandesi landed on his back on the floor with a terrible thud and lay gasping. Then a key turned in the door and Henry stood with his back to it, holding both the club and the revolver in his left hand, and solicitously feeling the pockets which contained our supply of whiskey. All this happened with such rapidity that I leaned against the side wall and felt a little sick at my stomach.
“A gut-buster,” Henry drawled. “A comedian. Wait’ll I loosen my belt.”
Gandesi rolled over and got to his feet very slowly and painfully and stood swaying and passing his hand up and down his face. His clothes were covered with dust.
“This here’s a sap,” Henry said, showing me the small black club. “He hit me with it, didn’t he?”
“Why, Henry, don’t you know?” I inquired.
“I just wanted to be sure,” Henry said. “You don’t do that to the Eichelbergers.”
“O.K., what you boys want?” GandeSi asked abruptly, with no trace whatever of his Italian accent.
“I told you what we wanted, dough-face.”
“I don’t think I know you boys,” Gandesi said and lowered his body with care into a wooden chair beside a shabby office desk. He mopped his face and neck and felt himself in various places.
“You got the wrong idea, Gandesi. A lady living in Carondelet Park lost a forty-nine bead pearl necklace a couple of days back. A box job, but a pushover. Our outfit’s carrying a little insurance on those marbles. And I’ll take that C note.”
He walked over to Gandesi and Gandesi quickly reached the folded bill from his pocket and handed it to him. Henry gave me the bill and I put it back in my wallet.
“I don’t think I hear about it,” Gandesi said carefully.
“You hit me with a sap,” Henry said. “Listen kind of hard.”
Gandesi shook his head and then winced. “I don’t back no petermen,” he said, “nor no heist guys. You got me wrong.”
“Listen hard,” Henry said in a low voice. “You might hear something.” He swung the small black club lightly in front of his body with two fingers of his right hand. The slightly toosmall hat was still on the back of his head, although a little crumpled.
“Henry,” I said, “you seem to be doing all the work this evening. Do you think that is quite fair?”
“O.K., work him over,” Henry said. “These fat guys bruise something lovely.”
By this time Gandesi had become a more natural color and was gazing at us steadily. “Insurance guys, huh?” he inquired dubiously.
“You said it, dough-face.”
“You try Melachrino?” Gandesi asked.
“Haw,” Henry began raucously, “a gut-buster. A—” but I interrupted him sharply.
“One moment, Henry,” I said. Then turning to Gandesi, “Is this Melachrino a person?” I asked him.
Gandesi’s eyes rounded in surprise. “Sure—a guy. You don’t know him, huh?” A look of dark suspicion was born in his sloeblack eyes, but vanished almost as soon as it appeared.
“Phone him,” Henry said, pointing to the instrument which stood on the shabby office desk.
“Phone is bad,” Gandesi objected thoughtfully.
“So is sap poison,” Henry said.
Gandesi sighed and turned his thick body in the chair and drew the telephone towards him. He dialed a number with an inky nail and listened. After an interval he said: “Joe? … Lou. Couple insurance guys tryin’ to deal on a Carondelet Park job … Yeah … No, marbles … You ain’t heard a whisper, huh?… O.K., Joe.”
Gandesi replaced the phone and swung around in the chair again. He studied us with sleepy eyes. “No soap. What insurance outfit you boys work for?”
“Give him a card,” Henry said to me.
I took my wallet out once more and withdrew one of my cards from it. It was an engraved calling card and contained nothing but my name. So I used my pocket pencil to write, Chateau Moraine Apartments, Franklin near Ivar, below the name. I showed the card to Henry and then gave it to Gandesi.
Gandesi read the card and quietly bit his finger. His face brightened suddenly. “You boys better see Jack Lawler,” he said.
Henry stared at him closely. Gandesi’s eyes were now bright and unblinking and guileless.
“Who’s he?” Henry asked.
“Runs the Penguin Club. Out on the Strip—Eighty-six Fortyfour Sunset or some number like that. He can find out, if any guy can.”
“Thanks,” Henry said quietly. He glanced at me. “You believe him?”
“Well, Henry,” I said, “I don’t really think he would be above telling us an untruth.”
“Haw!” Gandesi began suddenly. “A gut-buster! A—”
“Can it!” Henry snarled. “That’s my line. Straight goods, is it, Gandesi? About this Jack Lawler?”
Gandesi nodded vigorously. “Straight goods, absolute. Jack Lawler got a finger in everything high class that’s touched. But he ain’t easy to see.”
“Don’t worry none about that. Thanks, Gandesi.”
Henry tossed the black club into the corner of the room and broke open the breech of the revolver he had been holding all this time in his left hand. He ejected the shells and then bent down and slid the gun along the floor until it disappeared under the desk. He tossed the cartridges idly in his hand for a moment and then let them spill on the floor.
So long, Gandesi,” he said coldly. “And keep that schnozzle of yours clean, if you don’t want to be looking for it under the bed.”
He opened the door then and we both went out quickly and left the Blue Lagoon without interference from any of the employees.