There was no fear in the scream. It held the note of a halfpleasurable shock, an accent of drunkenness, and a touch of pure idiocy.
The Steiner mansion was perfectly silent when I hit the gap in the hedge, dodged around the elbow that masked the front door, and put my hand up to bang on the door.
At that exact moment, as if somebody had been waiting for it, three shots racketed close together behind the door. After that there was a long, harsh sigh, a soft thump, rapid steps, going away into the back of the house.
I wasted time hitting the door with my shoulder, without enough start. It threw me back like a kick from an army mule.
The door fronted on a narrow runway, like a small bridge that led from the banked road. There was no side porch, no way to get at the windows in a hurry. There was no way around to the back except through the house or up a long flight of wooden steps that went up to the back door from the alleylike street below. On these steps I now heard a clatter of feet.
That gave me the impulse and I hit the door again, from the feet up. It gave at the lock and I pitched down two steps into a big, dim, cluttered room. I didn’t see much of what was in the room then. I wandered through to the back of the house.
I was pretty sure there was death in it.
A car throbbed in the street below as I reached the back porch. The car went away fast, without lights. That was that. I went back to the living room.
THREE
That room reached all the way across the front of the house and had a low, beamed ceiling, walls painted brown. Strips of tapestry hung all around the walls. Books filled low shelves. There was a thick, pinkish rug on which some light fell from two standing lamps with pale green shades. In the middle of the rug there was a big, low desk and a black chair with a yellow satin cushion at it. There were books all over the desk.
On a sort of dais near one end wall there was a teakwood chair with arms and a high back. A dark-haired girl was sitting in the chair, on a fringed red shawl.
She sat very straight, with her hands on the arms of the chair, her knees close together, her body stiffly erect, her chin level. Her eyes were wide open and mad and had no pupils.
She looked unconscious of what was going on, but she didn’t have the pose of unconsciousness. She had a pose as if she was doing something very important and making a lot of it.
Out of her mouth came a tinny chuckling noise, which didn’t change her expression or move her lips. She didn’t seem to see me at all.
She was wearing a pair of long jade earrings, and apart from those she was stark naked.
I looked away from her to the other end of the room.
Steiner was on his back on the floor, just beyond the edge of the pink rug, and in front of a thing that looked like a small totem pole. It had a round open mouth in which the lens of a camera showed. The lens seemed to be aimed at the girl in the teakwood chair.
There was a flashbulb apparatus on the floor beside Steiner’s outfiung hand in a loose silk sleeve. The cord of the flashbulb went behind the totem pole thing.
Steiner was wearing Chinese slippers with thick white felt soles. His legs were in black satin pajamas and the upper part of him in an embroidered Chinese coat. The front of it was mostly blood. His glass eye shone brightly and was the most lifelike thing about him. At a glance none of the three shots had missed.
The flashbulb was the sheet lightning I had seen leak out of the house and the half-giggling scream was the doped and naked girl’s reaction to that. The three shots had been somebody else’s idea of how the proceedings ought to be punctuated. Presumably the idea of the lad who had gone very fast down the back steps.
I could see something in his point of view. At that stage I thought it was a good idea to shut the front door and fasten it with the short chain that was on it. The lock had been spoiled by my violent entrance.
A couple of thin purple glasses stood on a red lacquer tray on one end of the desk. Also a potbellied flagon of something brown. The glasses smelled of ether and laudanum, a mixture I had never tried, but it seemed to fit the scene pretty well.
I found the girl’s clothes on a divan in the corner, picked up a brown sleeved dress to begin with, and went over to her. She smelled of ether also, at a distance of several feet.
The tinny chuckling was still going on and a little froth was oozing down her chin. I slapped her face, not very hard. I didn’t want to bring her out of whatever kind of trance she was in, into a screaming fit.
“Come on,” I said brightly. “Let’s be nice. Let’s get dressed.”
She said: “G-g-go–ta–hell,” without any emotion that I could notice.
I slapped her a little more. She didn’t mind the slaps, so I went to work getting the dress on her.
She didn’t mind the dress either. She let me hold her arms up but she spread her fingers wide, as if that was very cute. It made me do a lot of finagling with the sleeves. I finally got the dress on. I got her stockings on, and her shoes, and then got her up on her feet.
“Let’s take a little walk,” I said. “Let’s take a nice little walk.”
We walked. Part of the time her earrings banged against my chest and part of the time we looked like a couple of adagio dancers doing the splits. We walked over to Steiner’s body and back. She didn’t pay any attention to Steiner and his bright glass eye.
She found it amusing that she couldn’t walk and tried to tell me about it, but only bubbled. I put her arm on the divan while I wadded her underclothes up and shoved them into a deep pocket of my raincoat, put her handbag in my other deep pocket. I went through Steiner’s desk and found a little blue notebook written in code that looked interesting. I put that in my pocket, too.
Then I tried to get at the back of the camera in the totem pole, to get the plate, but couldn’t find the catch right away. I was getting nervous, and I figured I could build up a better excuse if I ran into the law when I came back later to look for it than for any reason I could give if caught there now.
I went back to the girl and got her slicker on her, nosed around to see if anything else of hers was there, wiped away a lot of fingerprints I probably hadn’t made, and at least some of those Miss Dravec must have made. I opened the door and put out both the lamps.
I got my left arm around her again and we struggled out into the rain and piled into her Packard. I didn’t like leaving my own bus there very well, but that had to be. Her keys were in her car. We drifted off down the hill.
Nothing happened on the way to Lucerne Avenue except that Carmen stopped bubbling and giggling and went to snoring. I couldn’t keep her head off my shoulder. It was all I could do to keep it out of my lap. I had to drive rather slowly and it was a long way anyhow, clear over to the west edge of the city.
The Dravec home was a large old-fashioned brick house in large grounds with a wall around them. A gray composition driveway went through iron gates and up a slope past flower beds and lawns to a big front door with narrow leaded panels on each side of it. There was dim light behind the panels as if nobody much was home.
I pushed Carmen’s head into the corner and shed her belongings in the seat, and got out.
A maid opened the door. She said Mr. Dravec wasn’t in and she didn’t know where he was. Downtown somewhere. She had a long, yellowish, gentle face, a long nose, no chin and large wet eyes. She looked like a nice old horse that had been turned out to pasture after long service, and as if she would do the right thing by Carmen.
I pointed into the Packard and growled: “Better get her to bed. She’s lucky we don’t throw her in the can–drivin’ around with a tool like that on her.”
She smiled sadly and I went away.
I had to walk five blocks in the rain before a narrow apartment house let me into its lobby to use a phone. Then I had to wait another twenty-five minutes for a taxi. While I waited I began to worry about what I hadn’t completed.
I had yet to get the used plate out of Steiner’s camera.
FOUR
I paid the taxi off on Pepper Drive, in front of a house where there was company, and walked back up the curving hill of La Verne Terrace to Steiner’s house behind its shrubbery.
Nothing looked any different. I went in through the gap in the hedge, pushed the door open gently, and smelled cigarette smoke.
It hadn’t been there before. There had been a complicated set of smells, including the sharp memory of smokeless powder. But cigarette smoke hadn’t stood out from the mixture.
I closed the door and slipped down on one knee and listened, holding my breath. I didn’t hear anything but the sound of the rain on the roof. I tried throwing the beam of my pencil flash along the floor. Nobody shot at me.
I straightened up, found the dangling tassel of one of the lamps and made light in the room.
The first thing I noticed was that a couple of strips of tapestry were gone from the wall. I hadn’t counted them, but the spaces where they had hung caught my eye.
Then I saw Steiner’s body was gone from in front of the totem pole thing with the camera eye in its mouth. On the floor below, beyond the margin of the pink rug, somebody had spread down a rug over the place where Steiner’s body had been. I didn’t have to lift the rug to know why it had been put there.
I lit a cigarette and stood there in the middle of the dimly lighted room and thought about it. After a while I went to the camera in the totem pole. I found the catch this time. There wasn’t any plate-holder in the camera.
My hand went towards the mulberry-colored phone on Steiner’s low desk, but didn’t take hold of it.
I crossed into the little hallway beyond the living room and poked into a fussy-looking bedroom that looked like a woman’s room more than a man’s. The bed had a long cover with a flounced edge. I lifted that and shot my flash under the bed.
Steiner wasn’t under the bed. He wasn’t anywhere in the house. Somebody had taken him away. He couldn’t very well have gone by himself.
It wasn’t the law, or somebody would have been there still. It was only an hour and a half since Carmen and I left the place. And there was none of the mess police photographers and fingerprint men would have made.
I went back to the living room, pushed the flashbulb apparatus around the back of the totem pole with my foot, switched off the lamp, left the house, got into my rain-soaked car and choked it to life.
It was all right with me if somebody wanted to keep the Steiner kill hush-hush for a while. It gave me a chance to find out whether I could tell it leaving Carmen Dravec and the nude photo angle out.
It was after ten when I got back to the Berglund and put my heap away and went upstairs to the apartment. I stood under a shower, then put pajamas on and mixed up a batch of hot grog. I looked at the phone a couple of times, thought about calling to see if Dravec was home yet, thought it might be a good idea to let him alone until the next day.
I filled a pipe and sat down with my hot grog and Steiner’s little blue notebook. It was in code, but the arrangement of the entries and the indented leaves made it a list of names and addresses. There were over four hundred and fifty of them. If this was Steiner’s sucker list, he had a gold mine–quite apart from the blackmail angles.
Any name on the list might be a prospect as the killer. I didn’t envy the cops their job when it was handed to them.
I drank too much whisky trying to crack the code. About midnight I went to bed, and dreamed about a man in a Chinese coat with blood all over the front who chased a naked girl with long jade earrings while I tried to photograph the scene with a camera that didn’t have any plate in it.
FIVE
Violets M’Gee called me up in the morning, before I was dressed, but after I had seen the paper and not found anything about Steiner in it. His voice had the cheerful sound of a man who had slept well and didn’t owe too much money.
“Well, how’s the boy?” he began.
I said I was all right except that I was having a little trouble with my Third Reader. He laughed a little absently, and then his voice got too casual.
“This guy Dravec that I sent over to see you–done anything for him yet?”
“Too much rain,” I answered, if that was an answer.
“Uh-huh. He seems to be a guy that things happen to. A car belongin’ to him is washin’ about in the surf off Lido fish pier.”
I didn’t say anything. I held the telephone very tightly.
“Yeah,” M’Gee went on cheerfully. “A nice new Cad all messed up with sand and sea water. . . . Oh, I forgot. There’s a guy inside it.”
I let my breath out slowly, very slowly. “Dravec?” I whispered.
“Naw. A young kid. I ain’t told Dravec yet. It’s under the fedora. Wanta run down and look at it with me?”
I said I would like to do that.
“Snap it up. I’ll be in my hutch,” M’Gee told me and hung up.
Shaved, dressed and lightly breakfasted I was at the County Building in half an hour or so. I found M’Gee staring at a yellow wall and sitting at a little yellow desk on which there was nothing but M’Gee’s hat and one of the M’Gee feet. He took both of them off the desk and we went down to the official parking lot and got into a small black sedan.
The rain had stopped during the night and the morning was all blue and gold. There was enough snap in the air to make life simple and sweet, if you didn’t have too much on your mind. I had.
It was thirty miles to Lido, the first ten of them through city traffic. M’Gee made it in three-quarters of an hour. At the end of that time we skidded to a stop in front of a stucco arch beyond which a long black pier extended. I took my feet out of the floorboards and we got out.
There were a few cars and people in front of the arch. A motorcycle officer was keeping the people off the pier. M’Gee showed him a bronze star and we went out along the pier, into a loud smell that even two days’ rain had failed to wash away.
“There she is–on the tug,” M’Gee said.
A low black tug crouched off the end of the pier. Something large and green and nickeled was on its deck in front of the wheelhouse. Men stood around it.
We went down slimy steps to the deck of the tug.
M’Gee said hello to a deputy in green khaki and another man in plain clothes. The tug crew of three moved over to the wheelhouse, and set their backs against it, watching us.
We looked at the car. The front bumper was bent, and one headlight and the radiator shell. The paint and the nickel were scratched up by sand and the upholstery was sodden and black. Otherwise the car wasn’t much the worse for wear. It was a big job in two tones of green, with a wine-colored stripe and trimming.
M’Gee and I looked into the front part of it. A slim, darkhaired kid who had been good-looking was draped around the steering post, with his head at a peculiar angle to the rest of his body. His face was bluish white. His eyes were a faint dull gleam under the lowered lids. His open mouth had sand in it. There were traces of blood on the side of his head which the sea water hadn’t quite washed away.
M’Gee backed away slowly, made a noise in his throat and began to chew on a couple of the violet-scented breath purifiers that gave him his nickname.
“What’s the story?” he asked quietly.
The uniformed deputy pointed up to the end of the pier. Dirty white railings made of two-by-fours had been broken through in a wide space and the broken wood showed up yellow and bright.
“Went through there. Must have hit pretty hard, too. The rain stopped early down here, about nine, and the broken wood is dry inside. That puts it after the rain stopped. That’s all we know except she fell in plenty of water not to be banged up worse: at least half-tide, I’d say. That would be right after the rain stopped. She showed under the water when the boys came down to fish this morning. We got the tug to lift her out. Then we find the dead guy.”
The other deputy scuffed at the deck with the toe of his shoe. M’Gee looked sideways at me with foxy little eyes. I looked blank and didn’t say anything.
“Pretty drunk that lad,” M’Gee said gently. “Showin’ off all alone in the rain. I guess he must have been fond of driving. Yeah–pretty drunk.”
“Drunk, hell,” the plainclothes deputy said. “The hand throttle’s set halfway down and the guy’s been sapped on the side of the head. Ask me and I’ll call it murder.”
M’Gee looked at him politely, then at the uniformed man. “What you think?”
“It could be suicide, I guess. His neck’s broke and he could have hurt his head in the fall. And his hand could have knocked the throttle down. I kind of like murder myself, though.”
M’Gee nodded, said: “Frisked him? Know who he is?”
The two deputies looked at me, then at the tug crew.
“Okay. Save that part,” M’Gee said. “I know who he is.”
A small man with glasses and a tired face and a black bag came slowly along the pier and down the slimy steps. He picked out a fairly clean place on the deck and put his bag down. He took his hat off and rubbed the back of his neck and smiled wearily.
‘Lo, Doc. There’s your patient,” M’Gee told him. “Took a dive off the pier last night. That’s all we know now.”
The medical examiner looked in at the dead man morosely. He fingered the head, moved it around a little, felt the man’s ribs. He lifted one lax hand and stared at the fingernails. He let it fall, stepped back and picked his bag up again.
“About twelve hours,” he said. “Broken neck, of course. I doubt if there’s any water in him. Better get him out of there before he starts to get stiff on us. I’ll tell you the rest when I get him on a table.”
He nodded around, went back up the steps and along the pier. An ambulance was backing into position beside the stucco arch at the pier head.
The two deputies grunted and tugged to get the dead man out of the car and lay him down on the deck, on the side of the car away from the beach.
“Let’s go,” M’Gee told me. “That ends this part of the show.” We said goodbye and M’Gee told the deputies to keep their chins buttoned until they heard from him. We went back along the pier and got into the small black sedan and drove back towards the city along a white highway washed clean by the rain, past low rolling hills of yellow-white sand terraced with moss. A few gulls wheeled and swooped over something in the surf. Far out to sea a couple of white yachts on the horizon looked as if they were suspended in the sky.
We laid a few miles behind us without saying anything to each other. Then M’Gee cocked his chin at me and said: “Got ideas?”
“Loosen up,” I said. “I never saw the guy before. Who is he?”
“Hell, I thought you were going to tell me about it.”
“Loosen up, Violets,” I said.