“Perhaps it isn’t.”
I didn’t see him move his foot, but he must have touched a floor button. The black velvet drapes parted .and the Indian came into the room. He didn’t look dirty or funny any more.
He was dressed in loose white trousers and a white tunic embroidered in black. There was a black sash around his waist and a black fillet around his forehead. His black eyes were sleepy. He shuffled over to the stool beside the drapes and sat down and folded his arms and leaned his head on his chest. He looked bulkier than ever, as if these clothes were over his other clothes.
Soukesian held his hands above the milky globe that was between us on the white table. The light on the remote black ceiling was broken and began to weave into odd shapes and patterns, very faint because the ceiling was black. The Indian kept his head low and his chin on his chest but his eyes turned up slowly and stared at the weaving hands.
The hands moved in a swift, graceful, intricate pattern that meant anything or nothing, that was like Junior Leaguers doing Greek dances, or coils of Christmas ribbon tossed on the floor–whatever you liked.
The Indian’s solid jaw rested on his solid chest and slowly, like a toad’s eyes, his eyes shut.
“I could have hypnotized him without all that,” Soukesian said softly. “It’s merely part of the show.”
“Yeah.” I watched his lean, firm throat.
“Now, something Lindley Paul touched,” he said. “This card will do.”
He stood up noiselessly and went across to the Indian and pushed the card inside the fillet against the Indian’s forehead, left it there. He sat down again.
He began to mutter softly in a guttural language I didn’t know. I watched his throat.
The Indian began to speak. He spoke very slowly and heavily, between motionless lips, as though the words were heavy stones he had to drag up hill in a blazing hot sun.
“Lindley Paul bad man. Make love to squaw of chief. Chief very angry. Chief have necklace stolen, Lindley Paul have to get urn back. Bad man kill. GmT.”
The Indian’s head jerked as Soukesian clapped his hands. The little lidless black eyes snapped open again. Soukesian looked at me with no expression at all on his handsome face.
“Neat,” I said. “And not a darn bit gaudy.” I jerked a thumb at the Indian. “He’s a bit heavy to sit on your knee, isn’t he? I haven’t seen a good ventriloquist act since the chorus girls quit wearing tights.”
Soukesian smiled very faintly.
“I watched your throat muscles,” I said. “No matter. I guess I get the idea. Paul had been cutting corners with somebody’s wife. The somebody was jealous enough to have him put away. It has points, as a theory. Because this jade necklace she was wearing wouldn’t be worn often and somebody had to know she was wearing it that particular night when the stick-up was pulled off. A husband would know that.”
“It is quite possible,” Soukesian said. “And since you were not killed perhaps it was not the intent to kill Lindley Paul. Merely to beat him up.”
“Yeah,” I said. “And here’s another idea. I ought to have had it before. If Lindley Paul really did fear somebody and wanted to leave a message, then there might still be something written on those cards–in invisible ink.”
That got to him. His smile hung on but it had a little more wrinkle at the corners than at first. The time was short for me to judge that.
The light inside the milky globe suddenly went out. Instantly the room was pitch dark. You couldn’t see your own hand. I kicked my stool back and jerked my gun free and started to back away.
A rush of air brought a strong earthy smell with it. It was uncanny. Without the slightest error of timing or space, even in that complete blackness, the Indian hit me from behind and pinned my arms. He started to lift me. I could have jerked a hand up and fanned the room in front of me with blind shots. I didn’t try. There wasn’t any point in it.
The Indian lifted me with his two hands holding my arms against my sides as though a steam crane was lifting me. He set me down again, hard, and he had my wrists. He had them behind me, twisting them. A knee like the corner of a foundation stone went into my back. I tried to yell. Breath panted in my throat and couldn’t get out.
The Indian threw me sideways, wrapped my legs with his legs as we fell, and had me in a barrel. I hit the floor hard, with part of his weight on me.
I still had the gun. The Indian didn’t know I had it. At least he didn’t act as if he knew. It was jammed down between us. I started to turn it.
The light flicked on again.
Soukesian was standing beyond the white table, leaning on it. He looked older. There was something on his face I didn’t like. He looked like a man who had something to do he didn’t relish, but was going to do it all the same.
“So,” he said softly. “Invisible writing.”
Then the curtains swished apart and the thin dark woman rushed into the room with a reeking white cloth in her hands and slapped it around my face, leaning down to glare at me with hot black eyes.
The Indian grunted a little behind me, straining at my arms.
I had to breathe the chloroform. There was too much weight dragging my throat tight. The thick, sweetish reek of it ate into me.
I went away from there.
Just before I went somebody fired a gun twice. The sound didn’t seem to have anything to do with me.
I was lying out in the open again, just like the night before. This time it was daylight and the sun was burning a hole in my right leg. I could see the hot blue sky, the lines of a ridge, scrub oak, yuccas in bloom spouting from the side of a hill, more hot blue sky.
I sat up. Then my left leg began to tingle with tiny needle points. I rubbed it. I rubbed the pit of my stomach. The chloroform stank in my nose. I was as hollow and rank as an old oil drum.
I got up on my feet, but didn’t stay there. The vomiting was worse than last night. More shakes to it, more chills, and my stomach hurt worse. I got back up on my feet.
The breeze off the ocean lifted up the slope and put a little frail life into me. I staggered around dopily and looked at some tire marks on red clay, then at a big galvanized-iron cross, once white but with the paint flaked off badly. It was studded with empty sockets for light bulbs, and its base was of cracked concrete with an open door, inside which a verdigris-coated copper switch showed.
Beyond this concrete base I saw the feet.
They stuck out casually from under a bush. They were in hard-toed shoes, the kind college boys used to wear about the year before the war. I hadn’t seen shoes like that for years, except once.
I went over there and parted the bushes and looked down at the Indian.
His broad, blunt hands lay at his sides, large and empty and limp. There were bits of clay and dead leaf and wild oysterplant seeds in his greasy black hair. A tracery of sunlight skimmed along his brown cheek. On his stomach the flies had found a sodden patch of blood. His eyes were like other eyes I had seen–too many of them–half open, clear, but the play behind them was over.
He had his comic street clothes on again and his greasy hat lay near him, with the sweatband still wrong side out. He wasn’t funny any more, or tough, or nasty. He was just a poor simple dead guy who had never known what it was all about.
I had killed him, of course. Those were my shots I had heard, from my gun.
I didn’t find the gun. I went through my clothes. The other two Soukesian cards were missing. Nothing else. I followed the tire tracks to a deeply rutted road and followed that down the hill. Cars glittered by far below as the sunlight caught their windshields or the curve of a headlight. There was a service station and a few houses down there too. Farther off still the blue of water, piers, the long curve of the shore line towards Point Firmin. It was a little hazy. I couldn’t see Catalina Island.
The people I was dealing with seemed to like operating in that part of the country.
It took me half an hour to reach the service station. I phoned for a taxi and it had to come from Santa Monica. I drove all the way home to my place in the Berglund, three blocks above the office, changed clothes, put my last gun in the holster and sat down to the phone.
Soukesian wasn’t home. Nobody answered that number. Carol Pride didn’t answer her number. I didn’t expect her to. She was probably having tea with Mrs. Philip Courtney Prendergast. But police headquarters answered their number, and Reavis was still on the job. He didn’t sound pleased to hear from me.
“Anything new on the Lindley Paul killing?” I asked him.
“I thought I told you to forget it. I meant to.” His voice was nasty.
“You told me all right, but it keeps worrying at me. I like a clean job. I think her husband had it done.”
He was silent for a moment. Then, “Whose husband, smart boy?”
“The husband of the frail that lost the jade beads, naturally.”
“And of course you’ve had to poke your face into who she is.
“It sort of drifted to me,” I said. “I just had to reach out.” He was silent again. This time so long that I could hear the loudspeaker on his wall put out a police bulletin on a stolen car.
Then he said very smoothly and distinctly: “I’d like to sell you an idea, shamus. Maybe I can. There’s a lot of peace of mind in it. The Police Board gave you a licence once and the sheriff gave you a special badge. Any acting captain with a peeve can get both of them taken away from you overnight. Maybe even just a lieuteuant–like me. Now what did you have when you got that licence and that badge? Don’t answer, I’m telling you. You had the social standing of a cockroach. You were a snooper for hire. All in the world you had to do then was to spend your last hundred bucks on a down payment on some rent and office furniture and sit on your tail until somebody brought a lion in–so you could put your head in the lion’s mouth to see if he would bite. If he bit your ear off, you got sued for mayhem. Are you beginning to get it?”
“It’s a good line,” I said,. “I used it years ago. So you don’t want to break the case?”
“If I could trust you, I’d tell you we want to break up a very smart jewel gang. But I can’t trust you. Where are you–in a poolroom?”
“I’m in bed,” I said. “I’ve got a telephone jag.”
“Well, you just fill yourself a nice hot-water bottle and put it on your face and go to sleep like a good little boy, will you please?”
“Naw. I’d rather go out and shoot an Indian, just for practice.”
“Well, just one Indian, Junior.”
“Don’t forget that bite,” I yelled, and hung the phone in his face.
SIX
LADY IN LIQUOR
I had a drink on the way down to the boulevard, black coffee laced with brandy, in a place where they knew me, It made my stomach feel like new, but I still had the same shopworn head. And I could still smell chloroform in my whiskers.
I went up to the office and into the little reception room. There were two of them this time, Carol Pride and a blonde. A blonde with black eyes. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window.
Carol Pride stood up and scowled at me and said: “This is Mrs. Philip Courtney Prendergast. She has been waiting quite some time. And she’s not used to being kept waiting. She wants to employ you.”
The blonde smiled at me and put a gloved hand out, I touched the hand. She was perhaps thirty-five and she had that wideeyed, dreamy expression, as far as black eyes can have it. Whatever you need, whatever you are–she had it. I didn’t pay much attention to her clothes. They were black and white. They were what the guy had put on her and he would know or she wouldn’t have gone to him.
I unlocked the door of my private thinking-parlor and ushered them in.
There was a half-empty quart of hooch standing on the corner of my desk.
“Excuse me for keeping you waiting, Mrs. Prendergast,” I said. “I had to go out on a little business.”
“I don’t see why you had to go out,” Carol Pride said icily. “There seems to be all you can use right in front of you.”
I placed chairs for them and sat down and reached for the bottle and the phone rang at my left elbow.
A strange voice took its time saying: “Dalmas? Okay. We have the gat. I guess you’ll want it back, won’t you?”
“Both of them. I’m a poor man.”
“We only got one,” the voice said smoothly. “The one the johns would like to have. I’ll be calling you later. Think things over.”
“Thanks.” I hung up and put the bottle down on the floor and smiled at Mrs. Prendergast.
“I’ll do the talking,” Carol Pride said. “Mrs. Prendergast has a slight cold. She has to save her voice.”
She gave the blonde one of those sidelong looks that women think men don’t understand, the kind that feel like a dentist’s drill.
“Well–” Mrs. Prendergast said, and moved a little so that she could see along the end of the desk, where I had put the whisky bottle down on the carpet.
“Mrs. Prendergast has taken me into her confidence,” Carol Pride said. “I don’t know why, unless it is that I have shown her where a lot of unpleasant notoriety can be avoided.”
I frowned at her. “There isn’t going to be any of that. I talked to Reavis a while ago. He has a hush on it that would make a dynamite explosion sound like a pawnbroker looking at a dollar watch.”
“Very funny,” Carol Pride said, “for people who dabble in that sort of wit. But it just happens Mrs. Prendergast would like to get her jade necklace back–without Mr. Prendergast knowing it was stolen. It seems he doesn’t know yet.”
“That’s different,” I said. (The hell he didn’t know!)
Mrs. Prendergast gave me a smile I could feel in my hip pocket. “I just love straight rye,” she cooed. “Could we–just a little one?”
I got out a couple of pony glasses and put the bottle up on the desk again. Carol Pride leaned back and lit a cigarette contemptuously and looked at the ceiling. She wasn’t so hard to look at herself. You could look at her longer without getting dizzy. But Mrs. Prendergast had it all over her for a quick smash.
I poured a couple of drinks for the ladies. Carol Pride didn’t touch hers at all.
“In case you don’t know,” she said distantly, “Beverly Hills, where Mrs. Prendergast lives, is peculiar in some ways. They have two-way radio cars and only a small territory to cover and they cover it like a blanket, because there’s plenty of money for police protection in Beverly Hills. In the better homes they even have direct communication with headquarters, over wires that can’t be cut.”
Mrs. Prendergast put her drink to sleep with one punch and looked at the bottle. I milked it again.
“That’s nothing,” she glowed. “We even have photo-cell connections on our safes and fur closets. We can fix the house so that even the servants can’t go near certain places without police knocking at the door in about thirty seconds. Marvelous, isn’t it?”
“Yes, marvelous,” Carol Pride said. “But that’s only in Beverly Hills. Once outside–and you can’t spend your entire life in Beverly Hills–that is, unless you’re an ant–your jewels are not so safe. So Mrs. Prendergast had a duplicate of her jade necklace–in soapstone.”
I sat up straighter. Lindley Paul had let something drop about it taking a lifetime to duplicate the workmanship on Fei Tsui beads–even if material were available.
Mrs. Prendergast fiddled with her second drink, but not for long. Her smile got warmer and warmer.
“So when she went to a party outside Beverly Hills, Mrs. Prendergast was supposed to wear the imitation. That is, when she wanted to wear jade at all. Mr. Prendergast was very particular about that.”
“And he has a lousy temper,” Mrs. Prendergast said.
I put some more rye under her hand. Carol Pride watched me do it and almost snarled at me: “But on the night of the holdup she made a mistake and was wearing the real one.”
I leered at her.
“I know what you’re thinking,” she snapped. “Who knew she had made that mistake? It happened that Mr. Paul knew it, soon after they left the house. He was her escort.”
“He–er–touched the necklace a little,” Mrs. Prendergast sighed. “He could tell real jade by the feel of it. I’ve heard some people can. He knew a lot about jewels.”
I leaned back again in my squeaky chair, “Hell,” I said disgustedly, “I ought to have suspected that guy long ago. The gang had to have a society finger. How else could they tell when the good things were out of the icebox? He must have pulled a cross on them and they used this chance to put him away.”
“Rather wasteful of such a talent, don’t you think?” Carol Pride said sweetly. She pushed her little glass along the desk top with one finger. “I don’t really care for this, Mrs. Prendergast–if you’d like another–”
“Moths in your ermine,” Mrs. Prendergast said, and threw it down the hatch.
“Where and how was the stick-up?” I rapped.
“Well, that seems a little funny too,” Carol Pride said, beating Mrs. Prendergast by half a word. “After the party, which was in Brentwood Heights, Mr. Paul wanted to drop in at the Trocadero. They were in his car. At that time they were widening Sunset Boulevard all through the County Strip, if you remember. After they had killed a little time at the Troc–”
“And a few snifters,” Mrs. Prendergast giggled, reaching for the bottle. She refilled one of her glasses. That is, some of the whisky went into the glass.
“–Mr. Paul drove her home by way of Santa Monica Boulevard.”
“That was the natural way to go,” I said. “Almost the only way to go unless you wanted a lot of dust.”
“Yes, but it also took them past a certain down-at-the-heels hotel called the Tremaine and a beer parlor across the street from it. Mrs. Prendergast noticed a car pull away from in front of the beer parlor and follow them. She’s pretty sure it was that same car that crowded them to the curb a little later– and the holdup men knew just what they wanted. Mrs. Prendergast remembers all this very well.”
“Well, naturally,” Mrs. Prendergast said. “You don’t mean I was drunk, I hope. This baby carries her hooch. You don’t lose a string of beads like that every night.”
She put her fifth drink down her throat.
“I wouldn’t know a darn thing about wha–what those men looked like,” she told me a little thickly. “Lin–tha’s Mr. Paul–I called him Lin, y’know, felt kinda bad about it. That’s why he stuck his neck out.”
“It was your money–the ten thousand for the pay-off?” I asked her.
“It wasn’t the butler’s, honey. And I want those beads back before Court gets wise. How about lookin’ over that beer parlor?”
She grabbled around in her black and white bag and pushed some bills across the desk in a lump. I straightened them out and counted them. They added to four hundred and sixty-seven dollars. Nice money. I let them lie.
“Mr. Prendergast,” Carol Pride ploughed on sweetly, “whom Mrs. Prendergast calls ‘Court,’ thinks the imitation necklace was taken. He can’t tell one from the other, it seems. He doesn’t know anything about last night except that Lindley Paul was killed by some bandits.”
“The hell he doesn’t.” I said it out loud this time, and sourly. I pushed the money back across the desk. “I believe you think you’re being blackmailed, Mrs. Prendergast. You’re wrong. I think the reason this story hasn’t broken in the press the way it happened is because pressure has been brought on the police. They’d be willing anyhow, because what they want is the jewel gang. The punks that killed Paul are dead already.”
Mrs. Prendergast stared at me with a hard, bright, alcoholic stare. “I hadn’t the slightest idea of bein’ blackmailed,” she said. She was having trouble with her s’s now. “I want my beads and I want them quick. It’s not a question of money. Not ‘tall. Gimme a drink.”
“It’s in front of you,” I said. She could drink herself under the desk for all I cared.
Carol Pride said: “Don’t you think you ought to go out to that beer parlor and see what you can pick up?”
“A piece of chewed pretzel,” I said. “Nuts to that idea.”
The blonde was waving the bottle over her two glasses. She got herself a drink poured finally, drank it, and pushed the handful of currency around on the desk with a free and easy gesture, like a kid playing with sand.
I took it away from her, put it together again and went around the desk to put it back into her bag.
“If I do anything, I’ll let you know,” I told her. “I don’t need a retainer from you, Mrs. Prendergast.”
She liked that. She almost took another drink, thought better of it with what she still had to think with, got to her feet and started for the door.
I got to her in time to keep her from opening it with her nose. I held her arm and opened the door for her and there was a uniformed chauffeur leaning against the wall outside.
“Oke,” he said listlessly, snapped a cigarette into the distance and took hold of her. “Let’s go, baby. I ought to paddle your behind. Damned if I oughtn’t.”
She giggled and held on to him and they went down the corridor and turned a corner out of sight. I went back into the office and sat down behind my desk and looked at Carol Pride. She was mopping the desk with a dustcloth she had found somewhere.
“You and your office bottle,” she said bitterly. Her eyes hated me.
“To hell with her,” I said angrily. “I wouldn’t trust her with my old socks. I hope she gets raped on the way home. To hell with her beer-parlor angle too.”
“Her morals are neither here nor there, Mr. John Dalmas. She has pots of money and she’s not tight with it. I’ve seen her husband and he’s nothing but a beanstalk with a checkbook that never runs dry. If any fixing has been done, she has done it herself. She told me she’s suspected for some time that Paul was a Raffles. She didn’t care as long as he let her alone.”
“This Prendergast is a prune, huh? He would be, of course.”
“Tall, thin, yellow. Looks as if his first drink of milk soured on his stomach and he could still taste it.”
“Paul didn’t steal her necklace.”
“No?”
“No. And she didn’t have any duplicate of it.”
Her eyes got narrower and darker. “I suppose Soukesian the Psychic told you all this.”
“Who’s he?”
She leaned forward a moment and then leaned back and pulled her bag tight against her side.
“I see,” she said slowly. “You don’t like my work. Excuse me for butting in. I thought I was helping you a little.”
“I told you it was none of my business. Go on home and write yourself a feature article. I don’t need any help.”
“I thought we were friends,” she said. “I thought you liked me.” She stared at me for a minute with bleak, tired eyes.
“I’ve got a living to make. I don’t make it bucking the police department.”
She stood up and looked at me a moment longer without speaking. Then she went to the door and went out. I heard her steps die along the mosaic floor of the corridor.
I sat there for ten or fifteen minutes almost without moving. I tried to guess why Soukesian hadn’t killed me. None of it made any sense. I went down to the parking lot and got into my car.
SEVEN
I CROSS THE BAR
The Hotel Tremaine was far out of Santa Monica, near the junk yards. An interurban right-of-way split the street in half, and just as I got to the block that would have the number I had looked up, a two-car train came racketing by at forty-five miles an hour, making almost as much noise as a transport plane taking off. I speeded up beside it and passed the block, pulled into the cement space in front of a market that had gone out of business. I got out and looked back from the corner of the wall.
I could see the Hotel Tremaine’s sign over a narrow door between two store fronts, both empty–an old two-story walkup. Its woodwork would smell of kerosene, its shades would be cracked, its curtains would be a sleazy cotton lace and its bedsprings would stick into your back. I knew all about places like the Hotel Tremaine, I had slept in them, staked out in them, fought with bitter, scrawny landladies in them, got shot at in them, and might yet get carried out of one of them to the morgue wagon. They are flops where you find the cheap ones, the sniffers and pin-jabbers, the gowed-up runts who shoot you before you can say hello.
The beer parlor was on my side of the street. I went back to the Chrysler and got inside it while I moved my gun to my waistband, then I went along the sidewalk.
There was a red neon sign–BEER–over it. A wide pulleddown shade masked the front window, contrary to the law. The place was just a made-over store, half-frontage. I openedthe door and went in.
The barman was playing the pin game on the house’s money and a man sat on a stool with a brown hat on the back of his head reading a letter. Prices were scrawled in white on the mirror back of the bar.
The bar was just a plain, heavy wooden counter, and at each end of it hung an old frontier .44 in a flimsy cheap holster no gunfighter would ever have worn. There were printed cards on the walls, about not asking for credit and what to take for a hangover and a liquor breath, and there were some nice legs in photographs.
The place didn’t look as if it even paid expenses.
The barkeep left the pin game and went behind the bar. He was fiftyish, sour. The bottoms of his trousers were frayed and he moved as if he had corns. The man on the stool kept right on chuckling over his letter, which was written in green ink on pink paper.
The barkeep put both his blotched hands on the bar and looked at me with the expression of a dead-pan comedian, and I said: “Beer.”
He drew it slowly, raking the glass with an old dinner knife.
I sipped my beer and held my glass with my left hand. After a while I said: “Seen Lou Lid lately?” This seemed to be in order. There had been nothing in any paper I had seen about Lou Lid and Fuente the Mex.
The barkeep looked at me blankly. The skin over his eyes was grained like lizard skin. Finally he spoke in a husky whisper. “Don’t know him.”
There was a thick white scar on his throat. A knife had gone in there once which accounted for the husky whisper.
The man who was reading the letter guffawed suddenly and slapped his thigh. “I gotta tell this to Moose,” he roared. “This is right from the bottom of the bucket.”
He got down off his stool and ambled over to a door in the rear wall and went through it. He was a husky dark man who looked like anybody. The door shut behind him.
The barkeep said in his husky whisper: “Lou Lid, huh? Funny moniker. Lots a guys come in here. I dunno their names. Copper?”
“Private,” I said. “Don’t let it bother you. I’m just drinking beer. This Lou Lid was a shine. Light brown. Young.”
“Well, maybe I seen him sometime. I don’t recall.”
“Who’s Moose?”
“Him? That’s the boss. Moose Magoon.”
He dipped a thick towel down in a bucket and folded it and wrung it out and pushed it along the bar holding it by the ends. That made a club about two inches thick and eighteen inches long. You can knock a man into the next county with a club like that if you know how.
The man with the pink letter came back through the rear door, still chuckling, shoved the letter into his side pocket and strolled to the pin game. That put him behind me. I began to get a little worried.
I finished my beer quickly and stood down off the stool. The barkeep hadn’t rung up my dime yet. He held his twisted towel and moved it back and forth slowly.
“Nice beer,” I said. “Thanks all the same.”
“Come again,” he whispered, and knocked my glass over.
That took my eyes for a second. When I looked up again the door at the back was open and a big man stood in it with a big gun in his hand.
He didn’t say anything. He just stood there. The gun looked at me. It looked like a tunnel. The man was very broad, very swarthy. He had a build like a wrestler. He looked plenty tough. He didn’t look as if his real name was Magoon.
Nobody said anything. The barkeep and the man with the big gun just stared at me fixedly. Then I heard a train coming on the interurban tracks. Coming fast and coming noisy. That would be the time. The shade was down all across the front window and nobody could see into the place. The train would make a lot of noise as it went by. A couple of shots would be lost in it.
The noise of the approaching train got louder. I had to move before it got quite loud enough.
I went head first over the bar in a rolling dive.
Something banged faintly against the roar of the train and something rattled overhead, seemingly on the wall. I never knew what it was. The train went on by in a booming crescendo.
I hit the barkeep’s legs and the dirty floor about the same moment. He sat down on my neck.
That put my nose in a puddle of stale beer and one of my ears into some very hard concrete floor. My head began to howl with pain. I was low down along a sort of duckboard behind the bar and half turned on my left side. I jerked the gun loose from my waistband. For a wonder it hadn’t slipped and jammed itself down my trouser leg.
The barkeep made a kind of annoyed sound and something hot stung me and I didn’t hear any more shots just at the moment. I didn’t shoot the barkeep. I rammed the gun muzzle into a part of him where some people are sensitive. He was one of them.
He went up off me like a foul fly. If he didn’t yell it was not for want of trying. I rolled a little more and put the gun in the seat of his pants. “Hold it!” I snarled at him. “I don’t want to get vulgar with you.”
Two more shots roared. The train was off in the distance, but somebody didn’t care. These cut through wood. The bar was old and solid but not solid enough to stop .45 slugs. The barkeep sighed above me. Something hot and wet fell on my face. “You’ve shot me, boys,” he whispered, and started to fall down on top of me.
I wriggled away just in time, got to the end of the bar nearest the front of the beer parlor and looked around it. A face with a brown hat over it was about nine inches from my own face, on the same level.
We looked at each other for a fraction of a second that seemed long enough for a tree to grow to maturity in, but was actually so short a time that the barkeep was still foundering in the air behind me.
This was my last gun. Nobody was going to get it. I got it up before the man I was facing had even reacted to the situation. He didn’t do anything. He just slid off to one side and as he slid a thick gulp of red came out of his mouth.
I heard this shot. It was so loud it was like the end of the world, so loud that I almost didn’t hear the door slam towards the back. I crawled farther around the end of the bar, knocked somebody’s gun along the floor peevishly, stuck my hat around the corner of the wood. Nobody shot at it. I stuck one eye and part of my face out.
The door at the back was shut and the space in front of it was empty. I got up on my knees and listened. Another door slammed, and a car motor roared.
I went crazy. I tore across the room, threw the door open and plunged through it. It was a phony. They had slammed the door and started the car just for a come-on, I saw that the flailing arm held a bottle.
For the third time in twenty-four hours I took the count.
I came out of this one yelling, with the harsh bite of ammonia in my nose. I swung at a face. But I didn’t have anything to swing with. My arms were a couple of four-ton anchors. I threshed around and groaned.
The face in front of me materialized into the bored yet attentive pan of a man with a white coat, a fast-wagon medico.
“Like it?” he grinned. “Some people used to drink it–with a wine-tonic chaser.”
He pulled at me and something nipped at my shoulder and a needle stung me. –
“Light shot,” he said. “That head of yours is pretty bad. You won’t go out.”
His face went away. I prowled my eyes. Beyond there was a vagueness. Then I saw a girl’s face, hushed, sharp, attentive. Carol Pride.
“Yeah,” I said. “You followed me. You would.”
She smiled and moved. Then her fingers were stroking my cheek and I couldn’t see her.
“The prowl-car boys just made it,” she said. “The crooks had you all wrapped up in a carpet–for shipment in a truck out back.”
I couldn’t see very well. A big red-faced man in blue slid in front of me. He had a gun in his hand with the gate open. Somebody groaned somewhere in the background.
She said: “They had two others wrapped up. But they were dead. Ugh!”
“Go on home,” I grumbled woozily. “Go write yourself a feature story.”
“You used that one before, sap.” She went on stroking my cheek. “I thought you made them up as you went along. Drowsy?”
“That’s all taken care of,” a voice said sharply. “Get this shot guy down to where you can work on him. I want him to live.”
Reavis came towards me as out of a mist. His face formed itself slowly, gray, attentive, rather stern. It lowered, as if he sat down in front of me, close to me.
“So you had to play it smart,” he said in a sharp, edgy voice. “All right, talk. The hell with how your head feels. You asked for it and you got it.”
“Gimme a drink.”
Vague motion, a flicker of bright light, the lip of a flask touched my mouth. Hot strength ran down my throat. Some of it ran cold on my chin and I moved my head away from the flask.
“Thanks. Get Magoon–the biggest one?”
“He’s full of lead, but still turning over. On his way down town now.”
“Get the Indian?”
“Huh?” he gulped.
“In some bushes under Peace Cross down on the Palisades. I shot him. I didn’t mean to.”
“Holy–”
Reavis went away again and the fingers moved slowly and rhythmically on my cheek.
Reavis came back and sat down again. “Who’s the Indian?” he snapped.
“Soukesian’s strong-arm man. Soukesian the Psychic. He–”
“We know about him,” Reavis interrupted bitterly. “You’ve been out a whole hour, shamus. The lady told us about those cards. She says it’s her fault but I don’t believe it. Screwy anyhow. But a couple of the boys have gone out there.”
“I was there,” I said. “At his house. He knows something. I don’t know what. He was afraid of me–yet he didn’t knock me off. Funny.”
“Amateur,” Reavis said dryly. “He left that for Moose Magoon. Moose Magoon was tough–up till lately. A record from here to Pittsburgh. . . . Here. But take it easy. This is ante mortem confession liquor. Too damn good for you.”
The flask touched my lips again.
“Listen,” I said thickly. “This was the stick-up squad. Soukesian was the brains. Lindley Paul was the finger. He must have crossed them on something–”
Reavis said, “Nuts,” and just then a phone rang distantly and a voice said: “You, Lieutenant.”
Reavis went away. When he came back again he didn’t sit down.
“Maybe you’re right,” he said softly. “Maybe you are, at that. In a house on top of a hill in Brentwood Heights there’s a golden-haired guy dead in a chair with a woman crying over him. Dutch act. There’s a jade necklace on a table beside him.”
“Too much death,” I said, and fainted.
I woke up in an ambulance. At first I thought I was alone in it. Then I felt her hand and knew I wasn’t. I was stone blind now. I couldn’t even see light. It was just bandages.
“The doctor’s up front with the driver,” she said. “You can hold my hand. Would you like me to kiss you?”
“If it doesn’t obligate me to anything.”
She laughed softly. “I guess you’ll live,” she said. She kissed me. “Your hair smells of Scotch. Do you take baths in it? The doctor said you weren’t to talk.”
“They beaned me with a full bottle. Did I tell Reavis about the Indian?”
“Yes.”
“Did I tell him Mrs. Prendergast thought Paul was mixed up–”
“You didn’t even mention Mrs. Prendergast,” she said quickly.
I didn’t say anything to that. After a while she said: “This Soukesian, did he look like a lady’s man?”
“The doctor said I wasn’t to talk,” I said.
EIGHT
POISON BLONDE
It was a couple of weeks later that I drove down to Santa Monica. Ten days of the time I had spent in the hospital, at my own expense, getting over a bad concussion. Moose Magoon was in the prison ward at the County Hospital about the same time, while they picked seven or eight police slugs out of him. At the end of that time they buried him.
The case was pretty well buried by this time, too. The papers had had their play with it and other things had come along and after all it was just a jewel racket that went sour from too much double-crossing. So the police said, and they ought to know. They didn’t find any more jewels, but they didn’t expect to. They figured the gang pulled just one job at a time, with coolie labor mostly, and sent them on their way with their cut. That way only three people really knew what it was all about: Moose Magoon, who turned out to be an Armenian; Soukesian, who used his connections to find out who had the right kind of jewels; and Lindley Paul, who fingered the jobs and tipped the gang off when to strike. Or so the police said, and they ought to know.
It was a nice warm afternoon. Carol Pride lived on Twentyfifth Street, in a neat little red brick house trimmed with white with a hedge in front of it.
Her living room had a tan figured rug, white-and-rose chairs, a black marble fireplace with tall brass andirons, very high bookcases built back into the walls, rough cream-colored drapes against shades of the same color.
There was nothing womanish in it except a full-length mirror with a clear sweep of floor in front.
I sat down in a nice soft chair and rested what was left of my head and sipped Scotch and soda while I looked at her fluffed-out brown hair above a high-collar dress that made her face look small, almost childish.
“I bet you didn’t get all this writing,” I said.
“And my dad didn’t get it grafting on the cops either,” she snapped. “We had a few lots at Playa Del Rey, if you have to know.”
“A little oil,” I said. “Nice. I didn’t have to know. Don’t start snapping at me.”
“Have you still got your licence?”
“Oh, yes,” I said. “Well, this is nice Scotch. You wouldn’t like to go riding in an old car, would you?”
“Who am Ito sneer at an old car?” she asked. “The laundry must have put too much starch in your neck.”
I grinned at the thin line between her eyebrows.
“I kissed you in that ambulance,” she said. “If you remember, don’t take it too big. I was just sorry for the way you got your head bashed in.”
“I’m a career man,” I said. “I wouldn’t build on anything like that. Let’s go riding. I have to see a blonde in Beverly Hills. I owe her a report.”
She stood up and glared at me. “Oh, the Prendergast woman,” she said nastily. “The one with the hollow wooden legs.”
“They may be hollow,” I said.
She flushed and tore out of the room and came back in what seemed about three seconds with a funny little octagonal hat that had a red button on it, and a plaid overcoat with a suede collar and cuffs. “Let’s go,” she said breathlessly.
The Philip Courtney Prendergasts lived on one of those wide, curving streets where the houses seem to be too close together for their size and the amount of money they represent. A Jap gardener was manicuring a few acres of soft green lawn with the usual contemptuous expression Jap gardeners have. The house had an English slate roof and a porte-cochere, some nice imported trees, a trellis with bougainvillaea. It was a nice place and not loud. But Beverly Hills is Beverly Hills, so the butler had a wing collar and an accent like Alan Mowbray.
He ushered us through zones of silence into a room that was empty at the moment. It had large chesterfields and lounging chairs done in pale yellow leather and arranged around a fireplace, in front of which, on the glossy but not slippery floor, lay a rug as thin as silk and as old as Aesop’s aunt. A jet of flowers in the corner, another jet on a low table, walls of dully painted parchment, silence, comfort, space, coziness, a dash of the very modern and a dash of the very old. A very swell room.
Carol Pride sniffed at it.
The butler swung half of a leather-covered door and Mrs. Prendergast came in. Pale blue, with a hat and bag to match, all ready to go out. Pale blue gloves slapping lightly at a pale blue thigh. A smile, hints of depths in the black eyes, a high color, and even before she spoke a nice edge.
She flung both her hands out at us. Carol Pride managed to miss her share. I squeezed mine.
“Gorgeous of you to come,” she cried. “How nice to see you both again. I can still taste that whisky you had in your office. Terrible, wasn’t it?”
We all sat down.
I said: “I didn’t really need to take up your time by coming in person, Mrs. Prendergast. Everything turned out all right and you got your beads back.”
“Yes. That strange man. How curious of him to be what he was. I knew him too. Did you know that?”
“Soukesian? I thought perhaps you knew him,” I said.
“Oh, yes. Quite well. I must owe you a lot of money. And your poor head. How is it?”
Carol Pride was sitting close to me.
She said tinnily, between her teeth, almost to herself, but not quite: “Sawdust and creosote. Even at that the termites are getting her.”
I smiled at Mrs. Prendergast and she returned my smile with an angel on its back.
“You don’t owe me a nickel,” I said. “There was just one thing–”
“Impossible. I must. But let’s have a little Scotch, shall we?” She held her bag on her knees, pressed something under the chair, said: “A little Scotch and soda, Vernon.” She beamed. “Cute, eh? You can’t even see the mike. This house is just full of little things like that. Mr. Prendergast loves them. This one talks in the butler’s pantry.”
Carol Pride said: “I bet the one that talks by the chauffeur’s bed is cute too.”
Mrs. Prendergast didn’t hear her. The butler came in with a tray and mixed drinks, handed them around and went out.
Over the rim of her glass Mrs. Prendergast said: “You were nice not to tell the police I suspected Lin Paul of being–well, you know. Or that I had anything to do with your going to that awful beer parlor. By the way, how did you explain that?”
“Easy. I told them Paul told me himself. He was with you, remember?”
“But he didn’t, of course?” I thought her eyes were a little sly now.
“He told me practically nothing. That was the whole truth. And of course he didn’t tell me he’d been blackmailing you.”
I seemed to be aware that Carol Pride had stopped breathing. Mrs. Prendergast went on looking at me over the rim of her glass. Her face had, for a brief moment, a sort of half-silly, nymph-surprised-while-bathing expression. Then she put her glass down slowly and opened her bag in her lap and got a handkerchief out and bit it. There was silence.
“That,” she said in a low voice, “is rather fantastic, isn’t it?”
I grinned at her coldly. “The police are a lot like the newspapers, Mrs. Prendergast. For one reason and another they can’t use everything they get. But that doesn’t make them dumb. Reavis isn’t dumb. He doesn’t really think, any more than I do, that this Soukesian person was really running a tough jewel-heist gang. He couldn’t have handled people like Moose Magoon for five minutes. They’d have walked all over his face just for exercise. Yet Soukesian did have the necklace. That needs explaining. I think he bought it–from Moose Magoon. For the ten-grand pay-off supplied by you–and for some other little consideration likely paid in advance to get Moose to pull the job.”
Mrs. Prendergast lowered her lids until her eyes were almost shut, then she lifted them again and smiled. It was a rather ghastly smile. Carol Pride didn’t move beside me.
“Somebody wanted Lindley Paul killed,” I said. ‘That’s obvious. You might kill a man accidentally with a blackjack, by not knowing how hard to hit with it. But you won’t put his brains all over his face. And if you beat him up just to teach him to be good, you wouldn’t beat him about the head at all. Because that way he wouldn’t know how badly you were hurting him. And you’d want him to know that–if you were just teaching him a lesson.”
“Wha–what,” the blonde woman asked huskily, “has all this to do with me?”
Her face was a mask. Her eyes held a warm bitterness like poisoned honey. One of her hands was roving around inside her bag. It became quiet, inside the bag.
“Moose Magoon would pull a job like that,” I bored on, “if he was paid for it. He’d pull any kind of a job. And Moose was an Armenian, so Soukesian might have known how to reach him. And Soukesian was just the type to go skirt-simple over a roto queen and be willing to do anything she wanted him to do, even have a man killed, especially if that man was a rival, especially if he was the kind of man who rolled around on floor cushions and maybe even took candid camera photos of his lady friends when they got a little too close to the Garden of Eden. That wouldn’t be too hard to understand, would it, Mrs. Prendergast?”
“Take a drink,” Carol Pride said icily. “You’re drooling. You don’t have to tell this baby she’s a tramp. She knows it. But how the hell could anybody blackmail her? You’ve got to have a reputation to be blackmailed.”
“Shut up!” I snapped. “The less you’ve got the more you’ll pay to keep it.” I watched the blond woman’s hand move suddenly inside her bag. “Don’t bother to pull the gun,” I told her. “I know they won’t hang you. I just wanted you to know you’re not kidding anybody and that that trap in the beer parlor was rigged to finish me off when Soukesian lost his nerve and that you were the one that sent me in there to get what they had for me. The rest of it’s dead wood now.”
But she pulled the gun out just the same and held it on her pale blue knee and smiled at me.
Carol Pride threw a glass at her. She dodged and the gun went off. A slug went softly and politely into the parchmentcovered wall, high up, making no more sound than a finger going into a glove.
The door opened and an enormously tall, thin man strolled into the room.
“Shoot me,” he said. “I’m only your husband.”
The blonde looked at him. For just a short moment I thought she might be going to take him up on it.
Then she just smiled a little more and put the gun back into her bag and reached for her glass. “Listening in again?” she said dully. “Someday you’ll hear something you won’t like.”
The tall, thin man took a leather checkbook out of his pocket and cocked an eyebrow at me and said: “How much will keep you quiet–permanently?”
I gawked at him. “You heard what I said in here?”
“I think so. The pickup’s pretty good this weather. I believe you were accusing my wife of having something to do with somebody’s death, was it not?”
I kept on gawking at him.
“Well–how much do you want?” he snapped. “I won’t argue with you. I’m used to blackmailers.”
“Make it a million,” I said. “And she just took a shot at us. That will be four bits extra.”
The blonde laughed crazily and the laugh turned into a screech and then into a yell. The next thing she was rolling on the floor screaming and kicking her legs around.
The tall man went over to her quickly and bent down and hit her in the face with his open hand. You could have heard that smack a mile. When he straightened up again his face was a dusky red and the blonde was lying there sobbing.
“I’ll show you to the door,” he said. “You can call at my office tomorrow.”
“What for?” I asked, and took my hat. “You’ll still be a sap, even at your office.”
I took Carol Pride’s arm and steered her out of the room. We left the house silently. The Jap gardener had just pulled a bit of weed root out of the lawn and was holding it up and sneering at it.
We drove away from there, towards the foothills. A red spotlight near the old Beverly Hills Hotel stopped me after a while. I just sat there holding the wheel. The girl beside me didn’t move either. She didn’t say anything. She just looked straight ahead.
“I didn’t get the big warm feeling,” I said. “I didn’t get to smack anybody down. I didn’t make it stick.”
“She probably didn’t plan it in cold blood,” she whispered. “She just got mad and resentful and somebody sold her an idea. A woman like that takes men and gets tired of them and throws them away and they go crazy trying to get her back. It might have been just between the two lovers–Paul and Soukesian. But Mr. Magoon played rough.”
“She sent me to that beer parlor,” I said. “That’s enough for me. And Paul had ideas about Soukesian. I knew she’d miss. With the gun, I mean.”
I grabbed her. She was shivering.
A car came up behind us and the driver stood on his horn. I listened to it for a little while, then I let go of Carol Pride and got out of the roadster and walked back. He was a big man, behind the wheel of a sedan.
“That’s a boulevard stop,” he said sharply. “Lover’s Lane is farther up in the hills. Get out of there before I push you out.”
“Blow your horn just once more,” I begged him. “Just once. Then tell me which side you want the shiner on.”
He took a police captain’s badge out of his vest pocket. Then he grinned. Then we both grinned. It wasn’t my day.
I got back into the roadster and turned it around and started back towards Santa Monica. “Let’s go home and drink some more Scotch,” I said. “Your Scotch.”
* * *
BAY CITY
BLUES
* * *
ONE
CINDERELLA SUICIDE
It must have been Friday because the fish smell from the Mansion House coffee-shop next door was strong enough to build a garage on. Apart from that it was a nice warm day in spring, the tail of the afternoon, and there hadn’t been any business in a week. I had my heels in the groove on my desk and was sunning my ankles in a wedge of sunlight when the phone rang. I took my hat off it and made a yawning sound into the mouthpiece.
A voice said: “I heard that. You oughta be ashamed of yourself, Johnny Dalmas. Ever hear of the Austrian case?”
It was Violets M’Gee, a homicide dick in the sheriff’s office and a very nice guy except for one bad habit–passing me cases where I got tossed around and didn’t make enough money to buy a secondhand corset.
“No.”
“One of those things down at the beach–Bay City. I hear the little burg went sour again the last time they elected themselves a mayor, but the sheriff lives down there and we like to be nice. We ain’t tramped on it. They say the gambling boys put up thirty grand campaign money, so now you get a racing form with the bill of fare in the hash houses.”
I yawned again.
“I heard that, too,” M’Gee barked, “If you ain’t interested I’ll just bite my other thumbnail and let the whole thing go. The guy’s got a little dough to spend, he says.”
“What guy?”
“This Matson, the guy that found the stiff.”
“What stiff?”
“You don’t know nothing about the Austrian case, huh?”
“Didn’t I say I didn’t?”
“You air t done nothing but yawn and say ‘What.’ Okay. We’ll just iet the poor guy get bumped off and City Homicide can worry about that one, now he’s up here in town.”
“This Matson? Who’s going to bump him off?”
“Well, if he knew that, he wouldn’t want to hire no shamus to find out, would he? And him in your own racket until they bust him a while back and now he can’t go out hardly, on account of these guys with guns are bothering him.”
“Come on over,” I said. “My left arm is getting tired.”
“I’m on duty.”
“I was just going down to the drugstore for a quart of V.0. Scotch.”
“That’s me you hear knocking on the door,” M’Gee said.
He arrived in less than half an hour–a large, pleasant-faced man with silvery hair and a dimpled chin and a tiny little mouth made to kiss babies with. He wore a well-pressed blue suit, polished square-toed shoes, and an elk’s tooth on a gold chain hung across his stomach.
He sat down carefully, the way a fat man sits down, and unscrewed the top of the whisky bottle and sniffed it carefully, to make sure I hadn’t refilled a good bottle with ninety-eight cent hooch, the way they do in the bars. Then he poured himself a big drink and rolled some of it around on his tongue and pawed my office with his eyes.
“No wonder you sit around waiting for jobs,” he said. “You gotta have front these days.”
“You could spare me a little,” I said. “What about this Matson and this Austrian case?”
M’Gee finished his drink and poured another, not so large. He watched me play with a cigarette.
“A monoxide Dutch,” he said. “A blond him named Austrian, wife of a doctor down at Bay City. A guy that runs around all night keeping movie hams from having pink elephants for breakfast. So the frill went around on her own. The night she croaked herself she was over to Vance Conned’s club on the bluff north of there. Know it?”
“Yeah. It used to be a beach club, with a nice private beach down below and the swellest legs in Hollywood in front of the cabanas. She went there to play roulette, huh?”
“Well, if we had any gambling joints in this county,” M’Gee said, “I’d say the Club Conned would be one of them and there would be roulette. Say she played roulette. They tell me she had more personal games she played with Conned, but say she played roulette on the side. She loses, which is what roulette is for. That night she loses her shirt and she gets sore and throws a wingding all over the house. Conned gets her into his private room and pages the doc, her husband, through the Physicians’ Exchange. So then the doe–”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “Don’t tell me all this was in evidence–not with the gambling syndicate we would have in this county, if we had a gambling syndicate.”
M’Gee looked at me pityingly. “My wife’s got a kid brother works on a throw-away paper down there. They didn’t have no inquest. Well, the doe steams over to Conned’s joint and pokes his wife in the arm with a needle to quiet her down. But he can’t take her home on account of he has a babe case in Brentwood Heights. So Vance Conned gets his personal car out and takes her home and meantime the doe has called up his office nurse and asked her to go over to the house and see that his wifeis all right. Which is all done, and Conned goes back to his chips and the nurse sees her in bed and leaves, and the maid goes back to bed. This is maybe midnight, or just a little after.
“Well, along about 2 A.M. this Harry Matson happens by. He’s running a night-watchman service down there and that night he’s out making rounds himself. On the street where Austrian lives he hears a car engine running in a dark garage, and he goes in to investigate. He finds the blond frail on the floor on her back, in peekaboo pajamas and slippers, with soot from the exhaust all over her hair.”
M’Gee paused to sip a little more whisky and stare around my office again. I watched the last of the sunlight sneak over my windowsill and drop into the dark slit of the alley.
“So what does the chump do?” M’Gee said, wiping his lips on a silk handkerchief. “He decides the bim is dead, which maybe she is, but you can’t always be sure in a gas case, what with this new methylene-blue treatment–”
“For God’s sake,” I said. “What does he do?”
“He don’t call no law,” M’Gee said sternly. “He kills the car motor and douses his flash and beats it home to where he lives a few blocks away. He pages the doe from there and after a while they’re both back at the garage. The doe says she’s dead. He sends Matson in at a side door to call the local chief of police personal, at his home. Which Matson does, and after a while the chief buzzes over with a couple of stooges, and a little while after them the body snatcher from the undertaker, whose turn it is to be deputy coroner that week. They cart the stiff away and some lab man takes a blood sample and says it’s full of monoxide. The coroner gives a release and the dame is cremated and the case is closed.”
“Well, what’s the matter with it?” I asked.
M’Gee finished his second drink and thought about having a third. He decided to have a cigar first. I didn’t have any cigars and that annoyed him slightly, but he lit one of his own.
“I’m just a cop,” he said, blinking at me calmly through the smoke. “I wouldn’t know. All I know is, this Matson got bust loose from his licence and run out of town and he’s scared.”
“The hell with it,” I said. “The last time I muscled into a small-town setup I got a fractured skull. How do I contact Matson?”
“I give him your number. He’ll contact you.”
“How well do you know him?”
“Well enough to give him your name,” M’Gee said. “Of course, if anything comes up I should look into–”
“Sure,” I said. “I’ll put it on your desk. Bourbon or rye?”
“Go to hell,” M’Gee said. “Scotch.”
“What does Matson look like?”
“He’s medium heavy, five-seven, one-seventy, gray hair.”
He had another short, quick drink and left.
I sat there for an hour and smoked too many cigarettes. It got dark and my throat felt dry. Nobody called me up. I went over and switched the lights on, washed my hands, tucked away a small drink and locked the bottle up. It was time to eat.
I had my hat on and was going through the door when the Green Feather messenger boy came along the hallway looking at numbers. He wanted mine. I signed for a small irregularshaped parcel done up in the kind of flimsy yellowish paper laundries use. I put the parcel on my desk and cut the string. Inside there was tissue paper and an envelope with a sheet of paper and a flat key in it. The note began abruptly:
A friend in the sheriff’s office gave me your name as a man I could trust. I have been a heel and am in a jam and all I want now is to get clear. Please come after dark to 524 Tennyson Arms Apartments, Harvard near Sixth, and use key to enter if I am out. Look out for Pat Reel, the manager, as I don’t trust him. Please put the slipper in a safe place and keep it clean. P.S. They call him Violets, I never knew why.
I knew why. It was because he chewed violet-scented breath purifiers. The note was unsigned. It sounded a little jittery to me. I unwound the tissue paper. It contained a green velvet pump, size about 4A lined with white kid. The name Verschoyle was stamped in flowing gold script on the white kid insole. On the side a number was written very small in indelible ink– S465–where a size number would be, but I knew it wasn’t a size number because Verschoyle, Inc., on Cherokee Street in Hollywood made only custom shoes from individual lasts, and theatrical footwear and riding boots.
I leaned back and lit a cigarette and thought about it for a while. Finally I reached for the phone book and looked up the number of Verschoyle, Inc., and dialed it. The phone rang several times before a chirpy voice said: “Hello? Yes?”
“Verschoyle–in person,” I said. “This is Peters, Identification Bureau.” I didn’t say what identification bureau.
“Oh, Mr. Verschoyle has gone home. We’re closed, you know. We close at five-thirty. I’m Mr. Pringle, the bookkeeper. Is there anything–”
“Yeah. We got a couple of your shoes in some stolen goods. The mark is S-Four-Six-Five. That mean anything to you?”
“Oh yes, of course. That’s a last number. Shall I look it up for you?”
“By all means,” I said.
He was back in no time at all. “Oh yes, indeed, that is Mrs. Leland Austrian’s number. Seven-thirty-six Altair Street, Bay City. We made all her shoes. Very sad. Yes. About two months ago we made her two pairs of emerald velvet pumps.”
“What do you mean, sad?”
“Oh, she’s dead, you know. Committed suicide.”
“The hell you say. Two pairs of pumps, huh?”
“Oh yes, both the same you know. People often order delicate colors in pairs like that. You know a spot or stain of any kind–and they might be made to match a certain dress–”
“Well, thanks a lot and take care of yourself,” I said, and gave the phone back to him.
I picked up the slipper again and looked it over carefully. It hadn’t been worn. There was no sign of rubbing on the buffed leather of the thin sole. I wondered what Harry Matson was doing with it. I put it in my office safe and went out to dinner.
TWO
MURDER ON THE CUFF
The Tennyson Arms was an old-fashioned dump, about eight stories high, faced with dark red brick. It had a wide center court with palm trees and a concrete fountain and some prissylooking flower beds. Lanterns hung beside the Gothic door and the lobby inside was paved with red plush. It was large and empty except for a bored canary in a gilt cage the size of a barrel. It looked like the sort of apartment house where widows would live on the life insurance–not very young widows. The elevator was the self-operating kind that opens both doors automatically when it stops.
I walked along the narrow maroon carpet of the fifth-floor hallway and didn’t see anybody, hear anybody, or smell anybody’s cooking. The place was as quiet as a minister’s study. Apartment 524 must have opened on the center court because a stained-glass window was right beside its door. I knocked, not loud, and nobody came to the door so I used the flat key and went in, and shut the door behind me.
A mirror glistened in a wall bed across the room. Two windows in the same wall as the entrance door were shut and dark drapes were drawn half across them, but enough light from some apartment across the court drifted in to show the dark bulk of heavy, overstuffed furniture, ten years out of date, and the shine of two brass doorknobs. I went over to the windows and pulled the drapes closed, then used my pocket flash to find my way back to the door. The light switch there set off a big cluster of flame-colored candles in the ceiling fixture. They made the room look like a funeral-chapel annex. I put the light on in a red standing lamp, doused the ceiling light and started to give the place the camera eye.
In the narrow dressing room behind the wall bed there was a built-in bureau with a black brush and comb on it and gray hairs in the comb. There was a can of talcum, a flashlight, a crumpled man’s handkerchief, a pad of writing paper, a bank pen and a bottle of ink on a blotter–about what one suitcase would hold in the drawers. The shirts had been bought in a Bay City men’s furnishing store. There was a dark gray suit on a hanger and a pair of black brogues on the floor. In the bathroom there was a safety razor, a tube of brushless cream, some blades, three bamboo toothbrushes in a glass, a few other odds and ends. On the porcelain toilet tank there was a book bound in red cloth–Dorsey’s Why We Behave Like Human Beings. It was marked at page 116 by a rubber band. I had it open and was reading about the Evolution of Earth, Life and Sex when the phone started to ring in the living room.
I snicked off the bathroom light and padded across the carpet to the davenport. The phone was on a stand at one end. It kept on ringing and a horn tooted outside in the street, as if answering it. When it had rung eight times I shrugged and reached for it.
“Pat? Pat Reel?” the voice said.
I didn’t know how Pat Reel would talk. I grunted. The voice at the other end was hard and hoarse at the same time. It sounded like a tough-guy voice.
“Pat?”
“Sure,” I said.
There was silence. It hadn’t gone over. Then the voice said: “This is Harry Matson. Sorry as all hell I can’t make it back tonight. Just one of those things. That bother you much?”
“Sure,” I said.
“What’s that?”
“Sure.”
“Is ‘sure’ all the words you know, for God’s sake?”
“I’m a Greek.”
The voice laughed. It seemed pleased with itself.
I said: “What kind of toothbrushes do you use, Harry?”
“Huh?”
This was a startled explosion of breath–not so pleased now.
“Toothbrushes–the little dinguses some people brush their teeth with. What kind do you use?”
“Aw, go to hell.”
“Meet you on the step,” I said.
The voice got mad now. “Listen, smart monkey! You ain’t pulling nothin’, see? We got your name, we got your number, and we got a place to put you if you don’t keep your nose clean, see? And Harry don’t live there any more, ha, ha.”
“You picked him off, huh?”
“I’ll say we picked him off. What do you think we done, took him to a picture show?”
“That’s bad,” I said. “The boss won’t like that.”
I hung up in his face and put the phone down on the table at the end of the davenport and rubbed the back of my neck. I took the door key out of my pocket and polished it on my handkerchief and laid it down carefully on the table. I got up and walked across to one of the windows and pulled the drapes aside far enough to look out into the court. Across its palmdotted oblong, on the same floor level I was on, a bald-headed man sat in the middle of a room under a hard, bright light, and didn’t move a muscle. He didn’t look like a spy.
I let the drapes fall together again and settled my hat on my head and went over and put the lamp out. I put my pocket flash down on the floor and palmed my handkerchief on the doorknob and quietly opened the door.
Braced to the door frame by eight hooked fingers, all but one of which were white as wax, there hung what was left of a man.
He had eyes an eighth of an inch deep, china-blue, wide open. They looked at me but they didn’t see me. He had coarse gray hair on which the smeared blood looked purple. One of his temples was a pulp, and the tracery of blood from it reached clear to the point of his chin. The one straining finger that wasn’t white had been pounded to shreds as far as the second joint. Sharp splinters of bone stuck out of the mangled flesh. Something that might once have been a fingernail looked now like a ragged splinter of glass.
The man wore a brown suit with patch pockets, three of them. They had been torn off and hung at odd angles showing the dark alpaca lining beneath.
He breathed with a faraway unimportant sound, like distant footfalls on dead leaves. His mouth was strained open like a fish’s mouth, and blood bubbled from it. Behind him the hallway was empty as a new-dug grave.
Rubber heels squeaked suddenly on the bare space of wood beside the hall runner. The man’s straining fingers slipped from the door frame and his body started to wind up on his legs. The legs couldn’t hold it. They scissored and the body turned in mid-air, like a swimmer in a wave, and then jumped at me.
I clamped my teeth hard and spread my feet and caught him from behind, after his torso had made a half turn. He weighed enough for two men. I took a step back and nearly went down, took two more and then I had his dragging heels clear of the doorway. I let him down on his side as slowly as I could, crouched over him panting. After a second I straightened, went over to the door and shut and locked it. Then I switched the ceiling light on and started for the telephone.
He’ died before I reached it. I heard the rattle, the spent sigh, then silence. An outfiung hand, the good one, twitched once and the fingers spread out slowly into a loose curve and stayed like that. I went back and felt his carotid artery, digging my fingers in hard. Not a flicker of a pulse. I got a small steel mirror out of my wallet and held it against his open mouth for a long minute. There was no trace of mist on it when I took it away. Harry Matson had come home from his ride.
A key tickled at the outside of the door lock and I moved fast. I was in the bathroom when the door opened, with a gun in my hand and my eyes to the crack of the bathroom door.
This one came in quickly, the way a wise cat goes through a swing door. His eyes flicked up at the ceiling lights, then down at the floor. After that they didn’t move at all. All his big body didn’t move a muscle. He just stood and looked.
He was a big man in an unbuttoned overcoat, as if he had just come in or was just going out. He had a gray felt hat on the back of a thick creamy-white head. He had the heavy black eyebrows and broad pink face of a boss politician, and his mouth looked as if it usually had the smile–but not now. His face was all bone and his mouth jiggled a half-smoked cigar along his lips with a sucking noise.
He put a bunch of keys back in his pocket and said “God!” very softly, over and over again. Then he took a step forward and went down beside the dead man with a slow, clumsy motion. He put large fingers into the man’s neck, took them away again, shook his head, looked slowly around the room. He looked at the bathroom door behind which I was hiding, but nothing changed in his eyes.
“Fresh dead,” he said, a little louder. “Beat to a pulp.”
He straightened up slowly and rocked on his heels. He didn’t like the ceiling light any better than I had. He put the standing lamp on and switched the ceiling light off, rocked on his heels some more. His shadow crawled up the end wall, started across the ceiling, paused and dropped back again. He worked the cigar around in his mouth, dug a match out of his pocket and relit the butt carefully, turning it around and around in the flame. When he blew the match out he put it in his pocket. He did all this without once taking his eyes off the dead man on the floor.
He moved sideways over to the davenport and let himself down on the end of it. The springs squeaked dismally. He reached for the phone without looking at it, eyes still on the dead man.
He had the phone in his hand when it started to ring again. That jarred him. His eyes rolled and his elbows jerked against the sides of his thick overcoated body. Then he grinned very carefully and lifted the phone off the cradle and said in a rich, fruity voice: “Hello Yeah, this is Pat.”
I heard a dry, inarticulate croaking noise on the wire, and I saw Pat Reel’s face slowly congest with blood until it was the color of fresh beef liver. His big hand shook the phone savagely.
“So it’s Mister Big Chin!” he blared. “Well, listen here, saphead, you know something? Your stiff is right here on my carpet, that’s where he is. . . . How did he get here? How the hell would I know? Ask me, you croaked him here, and lemme tell you something. It’s costing you plenty, see, plenty. No murder on the cuff in my house. I spot a guy for you and you knock him off in my lap, damn you! I’ll take a grand and not a cent less, and you come and get what’s here and I mean get it, see?”
There was more croaking on the wire. Pat Reel listened. His eyes got almost sleepy and the purple died out of his face. He said more steadily: “Okay. Okay. I was only kidding. . . . Call me in half an hour downstairs.”
He put down the phone and stood up. He didn’t look towards the bathroom door, he didn’t look anywhere. He began to whistle. Then he scratched his chin and took a step towards the door, stopped to scratch his chin again. He didn’t know there was anybody in the apartment, he didn’t know there wasn’t anybody in the apartment–an4 he didn’t have a gun. He took another step towards the door. Big Chin had told him something and the idea was to get out. He took a third step, then he changed his mind.
“Aw hell,” he said out loud. “That screwy mug.” Then his eyes ranged round the apartment swiftly. “Tryin’ to kid me, huh?”
His hand raised to the chain switch. Suddenly he let it fall and knelt beside the dead man again. He moved the body a little, rolling it without effort on the carpet, and put his face down close to squint at the spot where the head had lain. Pat Reel shook his head in displeasure, got to his feet and put his hands under the dead man’s armpits. He threw a glance over his shoulder at the dark bathroom and started to back towards me, dragging the body, grunting, the cigar butt still clamped in his mouth. His creamy-white hair glistened cleanly in the lamplight.
He was still bent over with his big legs spraddled when I stepped out behind him. He may have heard me at the last second but it didn’t matter. I had shifted the gun to my left hand and I had a small pocket sap in my right. I laid the sap against the side of his head, just behind his right ear, and I laid it as though I loved it.
Pat Reel collapsed forward across the sprawled body he was dragging, his head down between the dead man’s legs. His hat rolled gently off to the side. He didn’t move. I stepped past him to the door and left.
THREE
GENTLEMAN OF THE PRESS
Over on Western Avenue I found a phone booth and called the sheriff’s office. Violets M’Gee was still there, just ready to go home.
I said: “What was the name of your kid brother-in-law that works on the throw-away paper down at Bay City?”
“Kincaid. They call him Dolly Kincaid. A little feller.”
“Where would he be about now?”
“He hangs around the city hall. Think he’s got a police beat. Why?”
“I saw Matson,” I said. “Do you know where he’s staying?”
“Naw. He just called me on the phone. What you think of him?”
“I’ll do what I can for him. Will you be home tonight?”
“I don’t know why not. Why?”
I didn’t tell him why. I got into my car and pointed it towards Bay City. I got down there about nine. The police department was half a dozen rooms in a city hall that belonged in the hookworm-and-Bible belt. I pushed past a knot of smoothies into an open doorway where there was light and a counter. There was a PBX board in the corner and a uniformed man behind it.
I put an arm on the counter and a plainclothes man with his coat off and an under-arm holster looking the size of a wooden leg against his ribs took one eye off his paper and said, “Yeah?” and bonged a spittoon without moving his head more than an inch.
I said: “I’m looking for a fellow named Dolly Kincaid.”
“Out to eat. I’m holdin’ down his beat,” he said in a solid, unemotional voice.
“Thanks. You got a pressroom here?”
“Yeah. Got a toilet, too. %Vanta see?”
“Take it easy,” I said. “I’m not trying to get fresh with your town.”
He bonged the spittoon again. “Pressroom’s down the hall. Nobody in it. Dolly’s due back, if he don’t get drowned in a pop bottle.”
A small-boned, delicate-faced young man with a pink complexion and innocent eyes strolled into the room with a halfeaten hamburger sandwich in his left hand. His hat, which looked like a reporters hat in a movie, was smashed on the back of his small blond head. His shirt collar was unbuttoned at the neck and his tie was pulled to one side. The ends of it hung out over his coat. The only thing the matter with him for a movie newshawk was that he wasn’t drunk. He said casually: “Anything stirring, boys?”
The big black-haired plainclothes man bonged his private spittoon again and said: “I hear the mayor changed his underpants, but it’s just a rumor.”
The small young man smiled mechanically and turned away. The cop said: “This guy wants to see you, Dolly.”
Kincaid munched his hamburger and looked at me hopefully. I said: “I’m a friend of Violets’. Where can we talk?”
“Let’s go into the pressroom,” he said. The black-haired cop studied me as we went out. He had a look in his eyes as if he wanted to pick a fight with somebody, and he thought I would do.
We went along the hail towards the back and turned into a room with a long, bare, scarred table, three or four wooden chairs and a lot of newspapers on the floor. There were two telephones on one end of the table, and a flyblown framed picture in the exact center of each wall–Washington, Lincoln, Horace Greeley, and the other one somebody I didn’t recognize. Kincaid shut the door and sat on one end of the table and swung his leg and bit into the last of his sandwich.
I said: “I’m John Dalmas, a private dick from L.A. How’s to take a ride over to Seven thirty-six Altair Street and tell me what you know about the Austrian case? Maybe you better call M’Gee up and get him to introduce us.” I pushed a card at him.
The pink young man slid down off the table very rapidly and stuffed the card into his pocket without looking at it and spoke close to my ear. “Hold it.”
Then he walked softly over to the framed picture of Horace Greeley and lifted it off the wall and pressed on a square of paint behind it. The paint gave–it was painted over fabric. Kincaid looked at me and raised his eyebrows. I nodded. He hung the picture back on the wall and came back to me. “Mike,” he said under his breath. “Of course I don’t know who listens or when, or even whether the damn thing still works.”
“Horace Greeley would have loved it,” I said.
“Yeah. The beat’s pretty dead tonight. I guess I could go out. Al De Spain will cover for me anyway.” He was talking loud now.
“The big black-haired cop?”
“Yeah.”
“What makes him sore?”
“He’s been reduced to acting patrolman. He ain’t even working tonight. Just hangs around and he’s so tough it would take the whole damn police force to throw him out.”
I looked towards the microphone and raised my eyebrows.
“That’s okay,” Kincaid said. “I gotta feed ’em something to chew on.”
He went over to a dirty washbowl in the corner and washed his hands on a scrap of lava soap and dried them on his pocket handkerchief. He was just putting the handkerchief away when the door opened. A small, middle-aged, gray-haired man stood in it, looking at us expressionlessly.
Dolly Kincaid said: “Evening, Chief, anything I can do for you?”
The chief looked at me silently and without pleasure. He had sea-green eyes, a tight, stubborn mouth, a ferret-shaped nose, and an unhealthy skin. He didn’t look big enough to be a cop. He nodded very slightly and said: “Who’s your friend?”
“He’s a friend of my brother-in-law. He’s a private dick from L.A. Let’s see–” Kincaid gripped desperately in his pocket for my card. He didn’t even remember my name.
The chief said sharply: “What’s that? A private detective? What’s your business here?”