THREE
LOU LID
I didn’t tell it well. It tasted worse all the time. Reavis, the man who came out from the downtown homicide bureau, listened to me with his eyes on the floor, and two plainclothes men lounged behind him like a bodyguard. A prowl-car unit had gone out long before to guard the body.
Reavis was a thin, narrow-faced, quiet man about fifty, with smooth gray skin and immaculate clothes. His trousers had a knife-edge crease and he pulled them up carefully after he sat down. His shirt and tie looked as if he had put them on new ten minutes ago and his hat looked as if he had bought it on the way over.
We were in the day captain’s room at the West Los Angeles Police Station, just off Santa Monica Boulevard, near Sawtelle. There were just the four of us in it. Some drunk in a cell, waiting to go down to the city drunk tank for sunrise court, kept giving the Australian bush call all the time we were talking.
“So I was his bodyguard for the evening,” I said at the end. “And a sweet job I made of it.”
“I wouldn’t give any thought to that,” Reavis said carelessly. “It could happen to anybody. Seems to me they took you for this Lindley Paul, slugged you to save argument and to get plenty of time, perhaps didn’t have the stuff with them at all and didn’t mean to give it up so cheap. When they found you were not Paul they got sore and took it out on him.”
“He had a gun,” I said. “A swell Luger, but two shotguns staring at you don’t make you warlike.”
“About this darktown brother,” Reavis said. He reached for a phone on the desk.
“Just a voice in the dark. I couldn’t be sure.”
“Yeah, but we’ll find what he was doing about that time. Lou Lid. A name that would linger.”
He lifted the phone off its cradle and told the PBX man: “Desk at headquarters, Joe . . . This is Reavis out in West L.A. on that stick-up murder. I want a Negro or half-Negro gunman name of Lou Lid. About twenty-two to twenty-four, a lightish brown, neat-appearing, small, say one hundred thirty, cast in one eye, I forget which. There’s something on him, but not much, and he’s been in and out plenty times. The boys at Seventy-seventh will know him. I want to check his movements for this evening. Give the colored squad an hour, then put him on the air.”
He cradled the phone and winked at me. “We got the best shine dicks west of Chicago. If he’s in town, they’ll pick him off without even looking. Will we move out there now?”
We went downstairs and got into a squad car and went back through Santa Monica to the Palisades.
Hours later, in the cold gray dawn, I got home. I was guzzling aspirin and whisky and bathing the back of my head with very hot water when my phone jangled. It was Reavis.
“Well, we got Lou Lid,” he said. “Pasadena got him and a Mex named Fuente. Picked them up on Arroyo Seco Boulevard–not exactly with shovels, but kind of careful.”
“Go on,” I said, holding the phone tight enough to crack it, “give me the punch line.”
“You guessed it already. They found them under the Colorado Street Bridge. Gagged, trussed fore and aft with old wire. And smashed like ripe oranges. Like it?”
I breathed hard. “It’s just what I needed to make me sleep like a baby,” I said.
The hard concrete pavement of Arroyo Seco Boulevard is some seventy-five feet directly below Colorado Street Bridge– sometimes also known as Suicide Bridge.
“Well,” Reavis said after a pause, “it looks like you bit into something rotten. What do you say now?”
“Just for a quick guess I’d say an attempted hijack of the pay-off money by a couple of smart-alecks that got a lead to it somehow, picked their own spot and got smeared with the cash.”
“That would riced inside help,” Reavis said. “You mean guys that knew the beads were taken, but didn’t have them. I like better that they tried to leave town with the whole take instead of passing it to the boss. Or even that the boss thought he had too many mouths to feed.”
He said good night and wished me pleasant dreams. I drank enough whisky to kill the pain in my head, Which was more than was good for me.
I got down to the office late enough to be elegant, but not feeling that way. Two stitches in the back of my scalp had begun to draw and the tape over the shaved place felt as hot as a bartender’s bunion.
My office was two rooms hard by the coffee-shop smell of the Mansion House Hotel. The little one was a reception room I always left unlocked for a client to go in and wait, in case I had a client and he wanted to wait.
Carol Pride was in there, sniffing at the faded red davenport, the two odd chairs, the small square of carpet and the boy’ssize library table with the pre-Repeal magazines on it.
She wore brownish speckled tweeds with wide lapels and a mannish shirt and tie, nice shoes, a black hat that might have cost twenty dollars for all I knew, and looked as if you could have made it with one hand out of an old desk blotter.
“Well, you do get up,” she said. “That’s nice to know. I was beginning to think perhaps you did all your work in bed.”
“Tut, tut,” I said. “Come into my boudoir.”
I unlocked the communicating door, which looked better than just kicking the lock lightly–which had the same effect–and we went into the rest of the suite, which was a rust-red carpet with plenty of ink on it, five green filing cases, three of them full of California climate, an advertising calendar showing the Dionne quintuplets rolling around on a sky-blue floor, a few near walnut chairs, and the usual desk with the usual heel marks on it and the usual squeaky swivel chair behind it. I sat down in that and put my hat on the telephone.
I hadn’t really seen her before, even by the lights down at Castellamare. She looked about twenty-six and as if she hadn’t slept very well. She had a tired, pretty little face under fluffedout brown hair, a rather narrow forehead with more height than is considered elegant, a small inquisitive nose, an upper lip a shade too long and a mouth more than a shade too wide. Her eyes could be very blue if they tried. She looked quiet, but not mousy-quiet. She looked smart, but not Hollywood-smart.
“I read it in the evening paper that comes out in the morning,” she said. “What there was of it.”
“And that means the law won’t break it as a big story. They’d have held it for the morning sheets.”
“Well, anyhow, I’ve been doing a little work on it for you,” she said.
I stared hard at her, poked a flat box of cigarettes across the desk, and filled my pipe. “You’re making a mistake,” I said. “I’m not on this case. I ate my dirt last night and banged myself to sleep with a bottle. This is a police job.”
“I don’t think it is,” she said. “Not all of it. And anyway you have to earn your fee. Or didn’t you get a fee?”
“Fifty bucks,” I said. “I’ll return it when I know who to return it to. Even my mother wouldn’t think I earned it.”
“I like you,” she said. “You look like a guy who was almost a heel and then something stopped him–just at the last minute. Do you know who that jade necklace belonged to?”
I sat up with ajerk that hurt. “What jade necklace?” I almost yelled. I hadn’t told her anything about a jade necklace. There hadn’t been anything in the paper about a jade necklace.
“You don’t have to be clever. I’ve been talking to the man on the case–Lieutenant Reavis. I told him about last night. I get along with policemen. He thought I knew more than I did. So he told me things.”
“Well–who does it belong to?” I asked, after a heavy silence.
“A Mrs. Philip Courtney Prendergast, a lady who lives in Beverly Hills–part of the year at least. Her husband has a million or so and a bad liver. Mrs. Prendergast is a black-eyed blonde who goes places while Mr. Prendergast stays home and takes calomel.”
“Blondes don’t like blonds,” I said. “Lindley Paul was as blond as a Swiss yodeler.”
“Don’t be silly. That comes of reading movie magazines. This blonde liked that blond. I know. The society editor of the Chronicle told me. He weighs two hundred pounds and has a mustache and they call him Giddy Gertie.”
“He tell you about the necklace?”
“No. The manager of Blocks Jewelry Company told me about that. I told him I was doing an article on rare jade–for the Police Gazette. Now you’ve got me doing the wisecracks.”
I lit my pipe for the third time and squeaked my chair back and nearly fell over backwards.
“Reavis knows all this?” I asked, trying to stare at her without seeming to.
“He didn’t tell me he did. He can find out easily enough. I’ve no doubt he will. He’s nobody’s fool.”
“Except yours,” I said. “Did he tell you about Lou Lid and Fuente the Mex?”
“No. Who are they?”
I told her about them. “Why, that’s terrible,” she said, and smiled.
“Your old man wasn’t a cop by any chance, was he?” I asked suspiciously.
“Police Chief of Pomona for almost fifteen years.”
I didn’t say anything. I remembered that Police Chief John Pride of Pomona had been shot dead by two kid bandits about four years before.
After a while I said: “I should have thought of that. All right, what next?”
“I’ll lay you five to one Mrs. Prendergast didn’t get her necklace back and that her bilious husband has enough drag to keep that part of the story and their name out of the papers, and that she needs a nice detective to help her get straightened out–without any scandal.”
“What scandal?”
“Oh, I don’t know. She’s the type that would have a basket of it in her dressing room.”
“I suppose you had breakfast with her,” I said. “What time did you get up?”
“No, I can’t see her till two o’clock. I got up at six.”
“My God,” I said, and got a bottle out of the deep drawer of my desk. “My head hurts me something terrible.”
“Just one,” Carol Pride said sharply. “And only because you were beaten up. But I daresay that happens quite often.”
I put the drink inside me, corked the bottle but not too tightly, and drew a deep breath.
The girl groped in her brown bag and said: “There’s something else. But maybe you ought to handle this part of it yourself.”
“It’s nice to know I’m still working here,” I said.
She rolled three long Russian cigarettes across the desk. She didn’t smile.
“Look inside the mouthpieces,” she said, “and draw your own conclusions. I swiped them out of that Chinese case last night. They all have that something to make you wonder.”
“And you a cop’s daughter,” I said.
She stood up, wiped a little pipe ash off the edge of my desk with her bag and went towards the door.
“I’m a woman to. Now I’ve got to go see another society editor and find out more about Mrs. Philip Courtney Prendergast and her love life. Fun, isn’t it?”
The office door and my mouth shut at about the same moment.
I picked up one of the Russian cigarettes. I pinched it between my fingers and peeped into the hollow mouthpiece. There seemed to be something rolled up in there, like a piece of paper or card, something that wouldn’t have improved the drawing of the cigarette. I finally managed to dig it out with the nailfile blade of my pocketknife.
It was a card all right, a thin ivory calling card, man’s size. Three words were engraved on it, nothing else.
SOUKESIAN THE PSYCHIC
I looked into the other mouthpieces, found identical cards in each of them. It didn’t mean a thing to me. I had never heard of Soukesian the Psychic. After a while I looked him up in the phone book. There was a man named Soukesian on West Seventh. It sounded Armenian so I looked him up again under Oriental Rugs in the classified section. He was there all right, but that didn’t prove anything. You don’t have to be a psychic to sell oriental rugs. You only have to be a psychic to buy them. And something told me this Soukesian on the card didn’t have anything to do with oriental rugs.
I had a rough idea what his racket would be and what kind of people would be his customers. And the bigger he was the less he would advertise. If you gave him enough time and paid him enough, he would cure anything from a tired husband to a grasshopper plague. He would be an expert in frustrated women, in tricky, tangled, love affairs, in wandering boys who hadn’t written home, in whether to sell the property now or hold it another year, in whether this part will hurt my type with my public or improve it. Even men would go to him– guys who bellowed like bulls around their own offices and were all cold mush inside just the same. But most of all, women– women with money, women with jewels, women who could be twisted like silk thread around a lean Asiatic finger.
I refilled my pipe and shook my thoughts around without moving my head too much, and fished for a reason why a man would carry a spare cigarette case, with three cigarettes in it not meant for smoking, and in each of those three cigarettes the name of another man concealed. Who would find that name?
I pushed the bottle to one side and grinned. Anyone would find those cards who went through Lindley Paul’s pockets with a fine-tooth comb–carefully and taking time. Who would do that? A cop. And when? If Mr. Lindley Paul died or was badly hurt in mysterious circumstances.
I took my hat off the telephone and called a man named Willy Peters who was in the insurance business, so he said, and did a sideline selling unlisted telephone numbers bribed from maids and chauffeurs. His fee was five bucks. I figured Lindley Paul could afford it out of his fifty.
Willy Peters had what I wanted. It was a Brentwood Heights number.
I called Reavis down at headquarters. He said everything was fine except his sleeping time and for me just to keep my mouth shut and not worry, but I ought really to have told him about the girl. I said that was right but maybe he had a daughter himself and wouldn’t be so keen to have a lot of camera hounds jumping out at her. He said he had and the case didn’t make me look very good but it could happen to anyone and so long.
I called Violets M’Gee to ask him to lunch some day when he had just had his teeth cleaned and his mouth was sore. But he was up in Ventura returning a prisoner. Then I called the Brentwood Heights number of Soukesian the Psychic.
After a while a slightly foreign woman’s voice said: ” ‘Allo.”
“May I speak to Mr. Soukesian?”
“I am ver-ry sor-ry. Soukesian he weel never speak upon the telephone. I am bees secretar-ry. Weel I take the message?”
“Yeah. Got a pencil?”
“But of course I ‘ave the pencil. The message, eef you please?” I gave her my name and address and occupation and telephone number first. I made sure she had them spelled right.
Then I said: “It’s about the murder of a man named Lindley Paul. It happened last night down on the Palisades near Santa Monica. I’d like to consult Mr. Soukesian.”
“He weel be ver-ry pleased.” Her voice was as calm as an oyster. “But of course I cannot give you the appointment today. Soukesian he ees always ver-ry busy. Per’aps tomorrow–”
“Next week will be fine,” I said heartily.’ “There’s never any hurry about a murder investigation. Just tell him I’ll give him two hours before I go to the police with what I know.”
There was a silence. Maybe a breath caught sharply and maybe it was just wire noise. Then the slow foreign voice said: “I weel tell him. I do not understand–”
“Give it the rush, angel. I’ll be waiting in my office.”
I hung up, fingered the back of my head, put the three cards away in my wallet and felt as if I could eat some hot food. I went out to get it.
FOUR
SECOND HARVEST
The Indian smelled. He smelled clear across my little reception room when I heard the outer door open and got up to see who it was. He stood just inside the door looking as if he had been cast in bronze. He was a big man from the waist up and had a big chest.
Apart from that he looked like a bum. He wore a brown suit, too small for him. His hat was at least two sizes too small, and had been perspired in freely by someone it fitted better than it fitted him. He wore it about where a house wears a weathercock. His collar had the snug fit of a horse collar and was about the same shade of dirty brown. A tie dangled from it, outside his buttoned coat, and had apparently been tied with a pair of pliers in a knot the size of a pea. Around his bare throat above the collar he wore what looked like a piece of black ribbon.
He had a big, flat face, a big, high-bridged, fleshy nose that looked as hard as the prow of a cruiser, He had lidless eyes, drooping jowls, the shoulders of a blacksmith. If he had been cleaned up a little and dressed in a white nightgown, he would have looked like a very wicked Roman senator.
His smell was the earthy smell of the primitive man; dirty, but not the dirt of cities. “Huh,” he said. “Come quick. Come now.”
I jerked my thumb at the inner office and went back into it. He followed me ponderously and made as much noise walking as a fly makes. I sat down behind my desk, pointed at the chair opposite, but he didn’t sit down. His small black eyes were hostile.
“Come where?” I wanted to know.
“Huh. Me Second Harvest. Me Hollywood Indian.”
“Take a chair, Mr. Harvest.”
He snorted and his nostrils got very wide. They had been wide enough for mouseholes in the first place.
“Name Second Harvest, No Mr. Harvest. Nuts.”
“What do you want?”
“He say come quick. Big white father say come now. He say–”
“Don’t give me any more of that pig Latin,” I said. “I’m no schoolmarm at the snake dances.”
“Nuts,” he said.
He removed his hat with slow disgust and turned it upside down. He rolled a finger around under the sweatband. That turned the sweatband up into view. He removed a paper clip from the edge of the leather and moved near enough to throw a dirty fold of tissue paper on the desk. He pointed at it angrily. His lank, greasy black hair had a shelf all around it, high up, from the too-tight hat.
I unfolded the bit of tissue paper and found a card which read: Soukesian the Psychic. It was in thin script, nicely engraved. I had three just like it in my wallet.
I played with my empty pipe, stared at the Indian, tried to ride him with my stare. “Okay. What does he want?”
“He want you come now. Quick.”
“Nuts,” I said. The Indian liked that. That was the fraternity grip. He almost grinned. “It will cost him a hundred bucks as a retainer,” I added.
“Huh?”
“Hundred dollars. Iron men. Bucks to the number one hundred. Me no money, me no come. Savvy?” I began to count by opening and closing both fists.
The Indian tossed another fold of tissue paper on the desk. I unfolded it. It contained a brand-new hundred-dollar bill.
“Psychic is right,” I said. “A guy that smart I’m scared of, but I’ll go nevertheless.”
The Indian put his hat back on his head without bothering to fold the sweatband under. It looked only very slightly more comical that way.
I took a gun from under my arm, not the one I had had the night before unfortunately–I hate to lose a gun–dropped the magazine into the heel of my hand, rammed it home again, fiddled with the safety and put the gun back in its holster.
This meant no more to the Indian than if I had scratched my neck.
“I gottum car,” he said. “Big car. Nuts.”
“Too bad,” I said. “I don’t like big cars any more. However, let’s go.”
I locked up and we went out. In the elevator the Indian smelled very strong indeed. Even the elevator operator noticed it.
The car was a tan Lincoln touring, not new but in good shape, with glass gypsy curtains in the back. It dipped down past a shining green polo field, zoomed up the far side, and the dark, foreign-looking driver swung it into a narrow paved ribbon of white concrete that climbed almost as steeply as Lindley Paul’s steps, but not as straight. This was well out of town, beyond Westwood, in Brentwood Heights.
We climbed past two orange groves, rich man’s pets, as that is not orange country, past houses molded flat to the side of the foothills, like bas-reliefs.
Then there were no more houses, just the burnt foothills and the cement ribbon and a sheer drop on the left into the coolness of a nameless canyon, and on the right heat bouncing off the seared clay bank at whose edge a few unbeatable wild flowers clawed and hung on like naughty children who won’t go to bed.
And in front of me two backs, a slim, whipcord back with a brown neck, black hair, a vizored cap on the black hair, and a wide, untidy back in an old brown suit with the Indian’s thick neck and heavy head above that, and on his head the ancient greasy hat with the sweatband still showing.
Then the ribbon of road twisted into a hairpin, the big tires skidded on loose stones, and the tan Lincoln tore through an open gate and up a steep drive lined with pink geraniums growing wild. At the top of the drive there was an eyrie, an eagle’s nest, a hilltop house of white plaster and glass and chromium, as modernistic as a fluoroscope and as remote as a lighthouse.
The car reached the top of the driveway, turned, stopped before a blank white wall in which there was a black door. The Indian got out, glared at me. I got out, nudging the gun against my side with the inside of my left arm.
The black door in the white wall opened slowly, untouched from outside, and showed a narrow passage ending far back. A bulb glowed in the ceiling.
The Indian said: “Huh. Go in, big shot.”
“After you, Mr. Harvest.”
He went in scowling and I followed him and the black door closed noiselessly of itself behind us. A bit of mumbo-jumbo for the customers, At the end of the narrow passage there was an elevator, I had to get into it with the Indian. We went up slowly, with a gentle purring sound, the faint hum of a small motor. The elevator stopped, its door opened without a whisper and there was daylight.
I got out of the elevator. It dropped down again behind me with the Indian still in it. I was in a turret room that was almost all windows, some of them close-draped against the afternoon glare. The rugs on the floor had the soft colors of old Persians, and there was a desk made of carved panels that probably came out of a church. And behind the desk there was a woman smiling at me, a dry, tight, withered smile that would turn to powder if you touched it.
She had sleek, black, coiled hair, a dark Asiatic face. There were pearls in her ears and rings on her fingers, large, rather cheap rings, including a moonstone and a square-cut emerald that looked as phony as a ten-cent-store slave bracelet. Her hands were little and dark and not young and not fit for rings.
“Ah, Meester Dalmas, so ver-ry good of you to come. Soukesian he weel be so pleased.”
“Thanks,” I said. I took the new hundred-dollar bill out of my wallet and laid it on her desk, in front of her dark, glittering hands. She didn’t touch it or look at it. “My party,” I said. “But thanks for the thought.”
She got up slowly, without moving the smile, swished around the desk in a tight dress that fitted her like a mermaid’s skin, and showed that she had a good figure, if you liked them four sizes bigger below the waist than above it.
“I weel conduct you,” she said.
She moved before me to a narrow panelled wall, all there was of the room besides the windows and the tiny elevator shaft. She opened a narrow door beyond which there was a silky glow that didn’t seem to be daylight. Her smile was older than Egypt now. I nudged my gun holster again and went in.
The door shut silently behind me. The room was octagonal, draped in black velvet, windowless, with a remote black ceiling. In the middle of the black rug there stood a white octagonal table, and on either side of that a stool that was a smaller edition of the table. Over against the black drapes there was one more such stool. There was a large milky ball on a black stand on the white table. The light came from this. There was nothing else in the room.
I stood there for perhaps fifteen seconds, with that obscure feeling of being watched. Then the velvet drapes parted and a man came into the room and walked straight over to the other side of the table and sat down. Only then did he look at me.
He said: “Be seated opposite me, please. Do not smoke and do not move around or fidget, if you can avoid it. How may I serve you?”
FIVE
SOUKESIAN THE PSYCHIC
He was a tall man, straight as steel, with the blackest eyes I had ever seen and the palest and finest blond hair I had ever seen. He might have been thirty or sixty. He didn’t look any more like an Armenian than I did. His hair was brushed straight back from as good a profile as John Barrymore had at twentyeight. A matinee idol, and I expected something furtive and dark and greasy that rubbed its hands.
He wore a black double-breasted business suit cut like nobody’s business, a white shirt, a black tie. He was as neat as a gift book.
I gulped and said: “I don’t want a reading. I know all about this stuff.”
“Yes?” he said delicately. “And what do you know about it?”
“Let it pass,” I said. “I can figure the secretary because she’s a sweet buildup for the shock people get when they see you. The Indian stumps me a bit, but it’s none of my business anyhow. I’m not a bunko squad cop. What I came about is a murder.”
“The Indian happens to be a natural medium,” Soukesian said mildly. “They are much rarer than diamonds and, like diamonds, they are sometimes found in dirty places. That might not interest you either. As to the murder you may inform me. I never read the papers.”
“Come, come,” I said. “Not even to see who’s pulling the big checks at the front office? Oke, here it is.”
And I laid it in front of him, the whole damn story, and about his cards and where they had been found.
He didn’t move a muscle. I don’t mean that he didn’t scream or wave his arms or stamp on the floor or bite his nails. I mean he simply didn’t move at all, not even an eyelid, not even an eye. He just sat there and looked at me, like a stone lion outside the Public Library.
When I was all done he put his finger right down on the spot. “You kept those cards from the police? Why?”
“You tell me. I just did.”
“Obviously the hundred dollars I sent you was not nearly enough.”
“That’s an idea too,” I said. “But I hadn’t really got around to playing with it.”
He moved enough to fold his arms. His black eyes were as shallow as a cafeteria tray or as deep as a hole to China– whichever you like. They didn’t say anything, either way.
He said: “You wouldn’t believe me if I said I only knew this man in the most casual manner–professionally?”
“I’d take it under advisement,” I said.
“I take it you haven’t much faith in me. Perhaps Mr. Paul had. Was anything on those cards besides my name?”
“Yeah,” I said. “And you wouldn’t like it.” This was kindergarten stuff, the kind the cops pull on radio crime dramatizations. He let it go without even looking at it.
“I’m in a sensitive profession,” he said. “Even in this paradise of fakers. Let me see one of those cards.”
“I was kidding you,” I said. “There’s nothing on them but your name.” I got my wallet out and withdrew one card and laid it in front of him. I put the wallet away. He turned the card over with a fingernail.
“You know what I figure?” I said heartily. “I figure Lindley Paul thought you would be able to find out who did him in, even if the police couldn’t. Which means he was afraid of somebody.”
Soukesian unfolded his arms and folded them the other way. With him that was probably equivalent to climbing up the light fixture and biting off a bulb.
“You don’t think anything of the sort,” he said. “How much–quickly–for the three cards and a signed statement that you searched the body before you notified the police?”
“Not bad,” I said, “for a guy whose brother is a rug peddler.”
He smiled, very gently. There was something almost nice about his smile. “There are honest rug dealers,” he said. “But Arizmian Soukesian is not my brother. Ours is a common name in Armenia.”
I nodded.
“You think I’m just another faker, of course,” he added.
“Go ahead and prove you’re not.”
“Perhaps it is not money you want after all,” he said carefully.