About that time there was a thin but very sharp crack from the corner of the nearest house. Glass broke in the gray car. The gun behind it roared and plaster jumped out of the corner of the house wall, above the bushes. Then I saw the upper part of a man’s body in the bushes. He was lying downhill on his stomach and he had a light rifle to his shoulder.
He was Tom Sneyd, the taxi driver.
Ohls grunted and charged the gray car. He fired twice more into the door, then dodged down behind the hood. More explosions occurred behind the car. I kicked the wounded man’s gun out of his way, slid past him and sneaked a look over the gas tank. But the man behind had had too many angles to figure.
He was a big man in a brown suit and he made a clatter running hard for the lip of the hill between the two bungalows. Ohls’ gun roared. The man whirled and snapped a shot without stopping. Ohls was in the open now. I saw his hat jerk off his head. I saw him stand squarely on well-spread feet, steady his pistol as if he was on the police range.
But the big man was already sagging. My bullet had drilled through his neck. Ohls fired at him very carefully and he fell and the sixth and last slug from his gun caught the man in the chest and twisted him around. The side of his head slapped the curb with a sickening crunch.
We walked towards him from opposite ends of the car. Ohls leaned down, heaved the man over on his back. His face in death had a loose, amiable expression, in spite of the blood all over his neck. Ohls began to go through his pockets.
I looked back to see what the other one was doing. He wasn’t doing anything but sitting on the running board holding his right arm against his side and grimacing with pain.
Tom Sneyd scrambled up the bank and came towards us.
Ohls said: “It’s a guy named Poke Andrews. I’ve seen him around the poolrooms.” He stood up and brushed off his knee. He had some odds and ends in his left hand. “Yeah, Poke Andrews. Gun work by the day, hour or week. I guess there was a livin’ in it–for a while.”
“It’s not the guy that sapped me,” I said. “But it’s the guy I was looking at when I got sapped. And if the redhead was giving out any truth at all this morning, it’s likely the guy that shot Lou Harger.”
Ohls nodded, went over and got his hat. There was a hole in the brim. “I wouldn’t be surprised at all,” he said, putting his hat on calmly.
Tom Sneyd stood in front of us with his little rifle held rigidly across his chest. He was hatless and coatless, and had sneakers on his feet. His eyes were bright and mad, and he was beginning to shake.
“I knew I’d get them babies!” he crowed. “I knew I’d fix them lousy bastards!” Then he stopped talking and his face began to change color. It got green. He leaned down slowly, dropped his rifle, put both his hands on his bent knees.
Ohls said: “You better go lay down somewhere, buddy. If I’m any judge of color, you’re goin’ to shoot your cookies,”
TEN
Tom Sneyd was lying on his back on a day bed in the front room of his little bungalow. There was a wet towel across his forehead. A little girl with honey-colored hair was sitting beside him, holding his hand. A young woman with hair a couple of shades darker than the little girl’s sat in the corner and looked at Tom Sneyd with tired ecstasy.
It was very hot when we came in. All the windows were shut and all the blinds down. Ohis opened a couple of front windows and sat down beside them, looked out towards the gray car. The dark Mexican was anchored to its steering wheel by his good wrist.
“It was what they said about my little girl,” Tom Sneyd said from under the towel. “That’s what sent me screwy. They said they’d come back and get her, if I didn’t play with them.”
Ohls said: “Okey, Tom. Let’s have it from the start.” He put one of his little cigars in his mouth, looked at Tom Sneyd doubtfully, and didn’t light it.
I sat in a very hard Windsor chair and looked down at the cheap, new carpet.
“I was readin’ a mag, waiting for time to eat and go to work,” Tom Sneyd said carefully. “The little girl opened the door. They come in with guns on us, got us all in here and shut the windows. They pulled down all the blinds but one and the Mex sat by that and kept looking out. He never said a word. The big guy sat on the bed here and made me tell him all about last night–twice. Then he said I was to forget I’d met anybody or come into town with anybody. The rest was okey.”
Ohls nodded and said: “What time did you first see this man here?”
“I didn’t notice,” Tom Sneyd said. “Say eleven-thirty, quarter of twelve. I checked in to the office at one-fifteen, right after I got my hack at the Carillon. It took us a good hour to make town from the beach. We was in the drugstore talkin’ say fifteen minutes, maybe longer.”
“That figures back to around midnight when you met him,” Ohls said.
Tom Sneyd shook his head and the towel fell down over his face. He pushed it back up again.
“Well, no,” Tom Sneyd said. “The guy in the drugstore told me he closed up at twelve. He wasn’t closing up when we left.”
Ohls turned his head and looked at me without expression. He looked back at Tom Sneyd. “Tell us the rest about the two gunnies,” he said.
“The big guy said most likely I wouldn’t have to talk to anybody about it. If I did and talked right, they’d be back with some dough. If I talked wrong, they’d be back for my little girl.”
“Go on,” Ohls said. “They’re full of crap.”
“They went away. When I saw them go on up the street I got screwy. Renfrew is just a pocket–one of them graft jobs. It goes on around the hill half a mile, then stops. There’s no way to get off it. So they had to come back this way . . . I got my twenty-two, which is all the gun I have, and hid in the bushes. I got the tire with the second shot. I guess they thought it was a blowout. I missed with the next and that put ’em wise. They got guns loose. I got the Mex then, and the big guy ducked behind the car . . . That’s all there was to it. Then you come along.”
Ohls flexed his thick, hard fingers and smiled grimly at the girl in the corner. “Who lives in the next house, Tom?”
“A man named Grandy, a motorman on the interurban. He lives all alone. He’s at work now.”
“I didn’t guess he was home,” Ohls grinned. He got up and went over and patted the little girl on the head, “You’ll have to come down and make a statement, Tom.”
“Sure.” Tom Sneyd’s voice was tired, listless. “I guess I lose my job, too, for rentin’ out the hack last night.”
“I ain’t so sure about that,” Ohls said softly. “Not if your boss likes guys with a few guts to run his hacks.”
He patted the little girl on the head again, went towards the door and opened it. I nodded at Tom Sneyd and followed Ohls out of the house. Ohls said quietly: “He don’t know about the kill yet. No need to spring it in front of the kid.”
We went over to the gray car. We had got some sacks out of the basement and spread them over the late Andrews, weighted them down with stones. Ohis glanced that way and said absently: “I got to get to where there’s a phone pretty quick.”
He leaned on the door of the car and looked in at the Mexican. The Mexican sat with his head back and his eyes half-closed and a drawn expression on his brown face. His left wrist was shackled to the spider of the wheel.
“What’s your name?” Ohls snapped at him.
“Luis Cadena,” the Mexican said it in a soft voice without’ opening his eyes any wider.
“Which one of you heels scratched the guy at West Cimarron last night?”
“No understand, seńor,” the Mexican said purringly.
“Don’t go dumb on me, spig,” Ohls said dispassionately. “It gets me sore.” He leaned on the window and rolled his little cigar around in his mouth.
The Mexican looked faintly amused and at the same time very tired. The blood on his right hand had dried black.
Ohls said: “Andrews scratched the guy in a taxi at West Cimarron. There was a girl along. We got the girl. You have a lousy chance to prove you weren’t in on it.”
Light flickered and died behind the Mexican’s half-open eyes. He smiled with a glint of small white teeth.
Ohls said: “What did he do with the gun?”
“No understand, seńor.”
Ohls said: “He’s tough. When they get tough it scares me.”
He walked away from the car and scuffed some loose dirt from the sidewalk beside the sacks that draped the dead man. His toe gradually uncovered the contractor’s stencil in the cement. He read it out loud: “Dorr Paving and Construction Company, San Angelo. It’s a wonder the fat louse wouldn’t stay in his own racket.”
I stood beside Ohls and looked down the hill between the two houses. Sudden flashes of light darted from the windshields of cars going along the boulevard that fringed Gray Lake, far below.
Ohls said: “Well?”
I said: “The killers knew about the taxi–maybe–and the girl friend reached town with the swag. So it wasn’t Canales’ job. Canales isn’t the boy to let anybody play around with twenty-two grand of his money. The redhead was in on the kill, and it was done for a reason.”
Ohls grinned. “Sure. It was done so you could be framed for it.”
I said: “It’s a shame how little account some folks take of human life–or twenty-two grand. Harger was knocked off so I could be framed and the dough was passed to me to make the frame tighter.”
“Maybe they thought you’d highball,” Ohls grunted. “That would sew you up right.”
I rolled a cigarette around in my fingers. “That would have been a little too dumb, even for me. What do we do now? Wait till the moon comes up so we can sing–or go down the hill and tell some more little white lies?”
Ohls spat on one of Poke Andrews’ sacks. He said gruffly: “This is county land here. I could take all this mess over to the sub-station at Solano and keep it hush-hush for a while. The hack driver would be tickled to death to keep it under the hat. And I’ve gone far enough so I’d like to get the Mex in the goldfish room with me personal.”
“I’d like it that way too,” I said. “I guess you can’t hold it down there for long, but you might hold it down long enough for me to see a fat boy about a cat.”
ELEVEN
It was late afternoon when I got back to the hotel. The clerk handed me a slip which read: “Please phone F. D. as soon as possible.”
I went upstairs and drank some liquor that was in the bottom of a bottle. Then I phoned down for another pint, scraped my chin, changed clothes and looked up Frank Dorr’s number in the book. He lived in a beautiful old house on Greenview Park Crescent.
I made myself a tall smooth one with a tinkle and sat down in an easy chair with the phone at my elbow. I got a maid first. Then I got a man who spoke Mister Dorr’s name as though he thought it might blow up in his mouth. After him I got a voice with a lot of silk in it. Then I got a long silence and at the end of the silence I got Frank Dorr himself. He sounded glad to hear from me.
He said: “I’ve been thinking about our talk this morning, and I have a better idea. Drop out and see me . . . And you might bring that money along. You just have time to get it out of the bank.”
I said: “Yeah. The safe-deposit closes at six. But it’s not your money.”
I heard him chuckle. “Don’t be foolish. It’s all marked, and I wouldn’t want to have to accuse you of stealing it.”
I thought that over, and didn’t believe it–about the currency being marked. I took a drink out of my glass and said: “I might be willing to turn it over to the party I got it from–in your presence.”
He said: “Well–I told you that party left town. But I’ll see what I can do. No tricks, please.”
I said of course no tricks, and hung up. I finished my drink, called Von Ballin of the Telegram. He said the sheriffs people didn’t seem to have any ideas about Lou Harger–or give a damn. He was a little sore that I still wouldn’t let him use my story. I could tell from the way he talked that he hadn’t got the doings over near Gray Lake.
I called Ohls, couldn’t reach him.
I mixed myself another drink, swallowed half of it and began to feel it too much. I put my hat on, changed my mind about the other half of my drink, went down to my car. The early evening traffic was thick with householders riding home to dinner. I wasn’t sure whether two cars tailed me or just one. At any rate nobody tried to catch up and throw a pineapple in my lap.
The house was a square two-storied place of old red brick, with beautiful grounds and a red brick wall with a white stone coping around them. A shiny black limousine was parked under the porte-cochere at the side. I followed a red-flagged walk up over two terraces, and a pale wisp of a man in a cutaway coat let me into a wide, silent hall with dark old furniture and a glimpse of garden at the end. He led me along that and along another hall at right angles and ushered me softly into a paneled study that was dimly lit against the gathering dusk. He went away, leaving me alone.
The end of the room was mostly open french windows, through which a brass-colored sky showed behind a line of quiet trees. In front of the trees a sprinkler swung slowly on a patch of velvety lawn that was already dark. There were large dim oils on the walls, a huge black desk with books across one end, a lot of deep lounging chairs, a heavy soft rug that went from wall to wall. There was a faint smell of good cigars and beyond that somewhere a smell of garden flowers and moist earth. The door opened and a youngish man in nose-glasses came in, gave me a slight formal nod, looked around vaguely, and said that Mr. Dorr would be there in a moment. He went out again, and I lit a cigarette.
In a little while the door opened again and Beasley came in, walked past me with a grin and sat down just inside the windows. Then Dorr came in and behind him Miss Glenn.
Dorr had his black cat in his arms and two lovely red scratches, shiny with collodion, down his right cheek. Miss Glenn had on the same clothes I had seen on her in the morning. She looked dark and drawn and spiritless, and she went past me as though she had never seen me before.
Dorr squeezed himself into the high-backed chair behind the desk and put the cat down in front of him. The cat strolled over to one corner of the desk and began to lick its chest with a long, sweeping, businesslike motion.
Dorr said: “Well, well. Here we are,” and chuckled pleasantly.
The man in the cutaway came in with a tray of cocktails, passed them around, put the tray with the shaker down on a low table beside Miss Glenn. He went out again, closing the door as if he was afraid he might crack it.
We all drank and looked very solemn.
I said: “We’re all here but two. I guess we have a quorum.”
Dorr said: “What’s that?” sharply and put his head to one side.
I said: “Lou Harger’s in the morgue and Canales is dodging cops. Otherwise we’re all here. All the interested parties.”
Miss Glenn made an abrupt movement, then relaxed suddenly and picked at the arm of her chair.
Dorr took two swallows of his cocktail, put the glass aside and folded his small neat hands on the desk. His face looked a little sinister.
“The money,” he said coldly. “I’ll take charge of it now.”
I said: “Not now or any other time. I didn’t bring it.”
Dorr stared at me and his face got a little red. I looked at Beasley. Beasley had a cigarette in his mouth and his hands in his pockets and the back of his head against the back of his chair. He looked half asleep.
Dorr said softly, meditatively: “Holding out, huh?”
“Yes,” I said grimly. “While I have it I’m fairly safe. You overplayed your hand when you let me get my paws on it. I’d be a fool not to hold what advantage it gives me.”
Dorr said: “Safe?” with a gently sinister intonation.
I laughed. “Not safe from a frame,” I said. “But the last one didn’t click so well . . . Not safe from being gun-walked again. But that’s going to be harder next time too . . . But fairly safe from being shot in the back and having you sue my estate for the dough.”
Dorr stroked the cat and looked at me under his eyebrows.
“Let’s get a couple of more important things straightened out,” I said. “Who takes the rap for Lou Harger?”
“What makes you so sure you don’t?” Dorr asked nastily.
“My alibi’s been polished up. I didn’t know how good it was until I knew how close Lou’s death could be timed. I’m clear now . . . regardless of who turns in what gun with what fairy tale . . . And the lads that were sent to scotch my alibi ran into some trouble.”
Dorr said: “That so?” without any apparent emotion.
“A thug named Andrews and a Mexican calling himself Luis Cadena. I daresay you’ve heard of them.”
“I don’t know such people,” Dorr said sharply.
“Then it won’t upset you to hear Andrews got very dead, and the law has Cadena.”
“Certainly not,” Dorr said. “They were from Canales. Canales had Harger killed.”
I said: “So that’s your new idea. I think it’s lousy.”
I leaned over and slipped my empty glass under my chair. Miss Glenn turned her head towards me and spoke very gravely, as if it was very important to the future of the race for me to believe what she said: “Of course–of course Canales had Lou killed . . . At least, the men he sent after us killed Lou.”
I nodded politely. “What for? A packet of money they didn’t get? They wouldn’t have killed him. They’d have brought him in, brought both of you in. You arranged for that kill, and the taxi stunt was to sidetrack me, not to fool Canales’ boys.”
She put her hand out quickly. Her eyes were shimmering. I went ahead.
“I wasn’t very bright, but I didn’t figure on anything so flossy. Who the hell would? Canales had no motive to gun Lou, unless it got back the money he had been gypped out of. Supposing he could know that quick he had been gypped.”
Dorr was licking his lips and quivering his chins and looking from one of us to the other with his small tight eyes. Miss Glenn said drearily: “Lou knew all about the play. He planned it with the croupier, Pina. Pina wanted some getaway money, wanted to move on to Havana. Of course Canales would have got wise, but not too soon, if I hadn’t got noisy and tough. I got Lou killed–but not the way you mean.”
I dropped an inch of ash off a cigarette I had forgotten all about. “All right,” I said grimly. “Canales takes the rap . . . And I suppose you two chiselers think that’s all I care about . . . Where was Lou going to be when Canales was supposed to find out he’d been gypped?”
“He was going to be gone,” Miss Glenn said tonelessly. “A damn long way off. And I was going to be gone with him.”
I said: “Nerts! You seem to forget I know why Lou was killed.”
Beasley sat up in his chair and moved his right hand rather delicately towards his left shoulder. “This wise guy bother you, chief?”
Dorr said: “Not yet. Let him rant.”
I moved so that I faced a little more towards Beasley. The sky had gone dark outside and the sprinkler had been turned off. A damp feeling came slowly into the room. Dorr opened a cedarwood box and put a long brown cigar in his mouth, bit the end off with a dry snap of his false teeth. There was the harsh noise of a match striking, then the slow, rather labored puffing of his breath in the cigar.
He said slowly, through a cloud of smoke: “Let’s forget all this and make a deal about that money . . . Manny Tinnen hung himself in his cell this afternoon.”
Miss Glenn stood up suddenly, pushing her arms straight down at her sides. Then she sank slowly down into the chair again, sat motionless. I said: “Did he have any help?” Then I made a sudden, sharp movement–and stopped.
Beasley jerked a swift glance at me, but I wasn’t looking at Beasley. There was a shadow outside one of the windows–a lighter shadow than the dark lawn and darker trees. There was a hollow, bitter, coughing plop; a thin spray of whitish smoke in the window.
Beasley jerked, rose halfway to his feet, then fell on his face with one arm doubled under him.
Canales stepped through the windows, past Beasley’s body, came three steps further, and stood silent, with a long, black, small-calibered gun in his hand, the larger tube of a silencer flaring from the end of it.
“Be very still,” he said. “I am a fair shot–even with this elephant gun.”
His face was so white that it was almost luminous. His dark eyes were all smoke-gray iris, without pupils.
“Sound carries well at night, out of open windows,” he said tonelessly.
Dorr put both his hands down on the desk and began to pat it. The black cat put its body very low, drifted down over the end of the desk and went under a chair. Miss Glenn turned her head towards Canales very slowly, as if some kind of mechanism moved it.
Canales said: “Perhaps you have a buzzer on that desk. If the door of the room opens, I shoot. It will give me a lot of pleasure to see blood come out of your fat neck.”
I moved the fingers of my right hand two inches on the arm of my chair. The silenced gun swayed towards me and I stopped moving my fingers. Canales smiled very briefly under his angular mustache.
“You are a smart dick,” he said. “I thought I had you right. But there are things about you I like.”
I didn’t say anything. Canales looked back at Dorr. He said very precisely: “I have been bled by your organization for a long time. But this is something else again. Last night I was cheated out of some money. But this is trivial too. I am wanted for the murder of this Harger. A man named Cadena has been made to confess that I hired him . . . That is just a little too much fix.”
Dorr swayed gently over his desk, put his elbows down hard on it, held his face in his small hands and began to shake. His cigar was smoking on the floor.
Canales said: “I would like to get my money back, and I would like to get clear of this rap–but most of all I would like you to say something–so I can shoot you with your mouth open and see blood come out of it.”
Beasley’s body stirred on the carpet. His hands groped a little. Dorr’s eyes were agony trying not to look at him. Canales was rapt and blind in his act by this time. I moved my fingers a little more on the arm of my chair. But I had a long way to go.
Canales said: “Pina has talked to me. I saw to that. You killed Harger. Because he was a secret witness against Manny Tinnen. The D.A. kept the secret, and the dick here kept it. But Harger could not keep it himself. He told his broad–and the broad told you . . So the killing was arranged, in a way to throw suspicion with a motive on me. First on this dick, and if that wouldn’t hold, on me.”
There was silence. I wanted to say something, but I couldn’t get anything out. I didn’t think anybody but Canales would ever again say anything.
Canales said: “You fixed Pina to let Harger and his girl win my money. It was not hard–because I don’t play my wheels crooked.”
Dorr had stopped shaking. His face lifted, stone-white, and turned towards Canales, slowly, like the face of a man about to have an epileptic fit. Beasley was up on one elbow. His eyes were almost shut but a gun was laboring upwards in his hand.
Canales leaned forward and began to smile. His trigger finger whitened at the exact moment Beasley’s gun began to pulse and roar.
Canales arched his back until his body was a rigid curve. He fell stiffly forward, hit the edge of the desk and slid along it to the floor, without lifting his hands.
Beasley dropped his gun and fell down on his face again. His body got soft and his fingers moved fitfully, then were still.
I got motion into my legs, stood up and went to kick Canales’ gun under the desk–senselessly. Doing this I saw that Canales had fired at least once, because Frank Dorr had no right eye.
He sat still and quiet with his chin on his chest and a nice touch of melancholy on the good side of his face.
The door of the room came open and the secretary with the nose-glasses slid in pop-eyed. He staggered back against the door, closing it again. I could hear his rapid breathing across the room.
He gasped: “Is–is anything wrong?”
I thought that very funny, even then. Then I realized that he might be short-sighted and from where he stood Frank Dorr looked natural enough. The rest of it could have been just routine to Dorr’s help.
I said: “Yes–but we’ll take care of it. Stay out of here.”
He said: “Yes, sir,” and went out again. That surprised me so much that my mouth fell open. I went down the room and bent over the gray-haired Beasley. He was unconscious, but had a fair pulse. He was bleeding from the side, slowly.
Miss Glenn was standing up and looked almost as dopy as Canales had looked. She was talking to me quickly, in a brittle, very distinct voice: “I didn’t know Lou was to be killed, but I couldn’t have done anything about it anyway. They burned me with a branding iron–just for a sample of what I’d get. Look!”
I looked. She tore her dress down in front and there was a hideous burn on her chest almost between her two breasts.
I said: “Okey, sister. That’s nasty medicine. But we’ve got to have some law here now and an ambulance for Beasley.”
I pushed past her towards the telephone, shook her hand off my arm when she grabbed at me. She went on talking to my back in a thin, desperate voice.
“I thought they’d just hold Lou out of the way until after the trial. But they dragged him out of the cab and shot him without a word. Then the little one drove the taxi into town and the big one brought me up into the hills to a shack. Dorr was there. He told me how you had to be framed. He promised me the money, if I went through with it, and torture till I died, if I let them down.”
It occurred to me that I was turning my back too much to people. I swung around, got the telephone in my hands, still on the hook, and put my gun down on the desk.
“Listen! Give me a break,” she said wildly. “Dorr framed it all with Pina, the croupier. Pina was one of the gang that got Shannon where they could fix him. I didn’t–”
I said: “Sure–that’s all right. Take it easy.”
The room, the whole house seemed very still, as if a lot of people were hunched outside the door, listening.
“It wasn’t a bad idea,” I said, as if I had all the time in the world. “Lou was just a white chip to Frank Dorr. The play he figured put us both out as witnesses. But it was too elaborate, took in too many people. That sort always blows up in your face.”
“Lou was getting out of the state,” she said, clutching at her dress. “He was scared. He thought the roulette trick was some kind of a pay-off to him.”
I said: “Yeah,” lifted the phone and asked for police headquarters.
The room door came open again then and the secretary barged in with a gun. A uniformed chauffeur was behind him with another gun.
I said very loudly into the phone: “This is Frank Dorr’s house. There’s been a killing .
The secretary and the chauffeur dodged out again. I heard running in the hail. I clicked the phone, called the Telegram office and got Von Ballin. When I got through giving him the flash Miss Glenn was gone out of the window into the dark garden.
I didn’t go after her. I didn’t mind very much if she got away.
I tried to get Ohls, but they said he was still down at Solano. And by that time the night was full of sirens.
I had a little trouble but not too much. Fenweather pulled too much weight. Not all of the story came out, but enough so that the City Hall boys in the two-hundred-dollar suits had their left elbows in front of their faces for some time.
Pina was picked up in Salt Lake City. He broke and implicated four others of Manny Tinnen’s gang. Two of them were killed resisting arrest, the other two got life without parole.
Miss Glenn made a clean getaway and was never heard of again. I think that’s about all, except that I had to turn the twenty-two grand over to the Public Administrator. He allowed me two hundred dollars fee and nine dollars and twenty cents mileage. Sometimes I wonder what he did with the rest of it.
* * *
GOLDFISH
* * *
ONE
I wasn’t doing any work that day, just catching up on my footdangling. A warm gusty breeze was blowing in at the office window and the soot from the Mansion House Hotel oil burners across the alley was rolling across the glass top of my desk in tiny particles, like pollen drifting over a vacant lot.
I was just thinking about going to lunch when Kathy Home came in.
She was a tall, seedy, sad-eyed blonde who had once been a policewoman and had lost her job when she married a cheap little check bouncer named Johnny Home, to reform him. She hadn’t reformed him, but she was waiting for him to come out so she could try again. In the meantime she ran the cigar counter at the Mansion House, and watched the grifters go by in a haze of nickel cigar smoke. And once in a while lent one of them ten dollars to get out of town. She was just that soft. She sat down and opened her big shiny bag and got out a package of cigarettes and lit one with my desk lighter. She blew a plume of smoke, wrinkled her nose at it.
“Did you ever hear of the Leander pearls?” she asked. “Gosh, that blue serge shines. You must have money in the bank, the clothes you wear.”
“No,” I said, “to both your ideas. I never heard of the Leander pearls and don’t have any money in the bank.”
“Then you’d like to make yourself a cut of twenty-five grand maybe.”
I lit one of her cigarettes. She got up and shut the window, saying: “I get enough of that hotel smell on the job.”
She sat down again, went on: “It’s nineteen years ago. They had the guy in Leavenworth fifteen and it’s four since they let him out. A big lumberman from up north named Sol Leander bought them for his wife–the pearls, I mean–just two of them. They cost two hundred grand.”
“It must have taken a hand truck to move them,” I said.
“I see you don’t know a lot about pearls,” Kathy Home said. “It’s not just size. Anyhow they’re worth more today and the twenty-five-grand reward the Reliance people put out is still good.”
“I get it,” I said. “Somebody copped them off.”
“Now you’re getting yourself some oxygen.” She dropped her cigarette into a tray and let it smoke, as ladies will. I put it out for her. “That’s what the guy was in Leavenworth for, only they never proved he got the pearls. It was a mail-car job. He got himself hidden in the car somehow and up in Wyoming he shot the clerk, cleaned out the registered mail and dropped off. He got to B.C. before he was nailed. But they didn’t get any of the stuff–not then. All they got was him. He got life.”
“If it’s going to be a long story, let’s have a drink.”
“I never drink until sundown. That way you don’t get to be a heel.”
“Tough on the Eskimos,” I said. “In the summertime anyway.”
She watched me get my little flat bottle out. Then she went on: “His name was Sype–Wally Sype. He did it alone. And he wouldn’t squawk about the stuff, not a peep. Then after fifteen long years they offered him a pardon, if he would loosen up with the loot. He gave up everything but the pearls.”
“Where did he have it?” I asked. “In his hat?”
“Listen, this ain’t just a bunch of gag lines, I’ve had a lead to those marbles.”
I shut my mouth with my hand and looked solemn.
“He said he never had the pearls and they must have halfway believed him because they gave him the pardon. Yet the pearls were in the load, registered mail, and they were never seen again.”
My throat began to feel a little thick. I didn’t say anything.
Kathy Horne went on: “One time in Leavenworth, just one time in all those years, Wally Sype wrapped himself around a can of white shellac and got as tight as a fat lady’s girdle. His cell mate was a little man they called Peeler Mardo. He was doing twenty-seven months for splitting twenty-dollar bills. Sype told him he had the pearls buried somewhere in Idaho.”
I leaned forward a little.
“Beginning to get to you, eh?” she said. “Well, get this. Peeler Mardo is rooming at my house and he’s a coke hound and he talks in his sleep.”
I leaned back again. “Good grief,” I said. “And I was practically spending the reward money.”
She stared at me coldly. Then her face softened. “All right,” she said a little hopelessly. “I know it sounds screwy. All those years gone by and all the smart heads that must have worked on the case, postal men and private agencies and all. And then a cokehead to turn it up. But he’s a nice little runt and somehow I believe him. He knows where Sype is.”
I said: “Did he talk all this in his sleep?”
“Of course not. But you know me. An old policewoman’s got ears. Maybe I was nosy, but I guessed he was an ex-con and I worried about him using the stuff so much. He’s the only roomer I’ve got now and I’d kind of go in by his door and listen to him talking to himself. That way I got enough to brace him. He told me the rest. He wants help to collect.”
I leaned forward again. “Where’s Sype?”
Kathy Home smiled, and shook her head. “That’s the one thing he wouldn’t tell, that and the name Sype is using now. But it’s somewhere up north, in or near Olympia, Washington. Peeler saw him up there and found out about him and he says Sype didn’t see him.”
“What’s Peeler doing down here?” I asked.
“Here’s where they put the Leavenworth rap on him. You know an old con always goes back to look at the piece of sidewalk he slipped on. But he doesn’t have any friends here now.”
I lit another cigarette and had another little drink.
“Sype has been out four years, you say. Peeler did twentyseven months. What’s he been doing with all the time since?”
Kathy Home widened hem china-blue eyes pityingly. “Maybe you think there’s only one jailhouse he could get into.”
“Okey,” I said. “Will he talk to me? I guess he wants help to deal with the insurance people, in case there are any pearls and Sype will put them right in Peeler’s hand and so on. Is that it?”
Kathy Home sighed. “Yes, he’ll talk to you. He’s aching to. He’s scared about something. Will you go out now, before he gets junked up for the evening?”
“Sure–if that’s what you want.”
She took a flat key out of her bag and wrote an address on my pad. She stood up slowly.
“It’s a double house. My side’s separate. There’s a door in between, with the key on my side. That’s just in case he won’t come to the door.”
“Okey,” I said. I blew smoke at the ceiling and stared at her.
She went towards the door, stopped, came back. She looked down at the floor.
“I don’t rate much in it,” she said. “Maybe not anything. But if I could have a grand or two waiting for Johnny when he came out, maybe–”
“Maybe you could hold him straight,” I said. “It’s a dream, Kathy. It’s all a dream, But if it isn’t, you cut an even third.”
She caught her breath and glared at me to keep from crying. She went towards the door, stopped and came back again.
“That isn’t all,” she said. “It’s the old guy–Sype. He did fifteen years. He paid. Paid hard. Doesn’t it make you feel kind of mean?”
I shook my head. “He stole them, didn’t he? He killed a man. What does he do for a living?”
“His wife has money,” Kathy Horne said. “He just plays around with goldfish.”
“Goldfish?” I said. “To hell with him.”
She went on out.
TWO
The last time I had been in the Gray Lake district I had helped a D.A. ‘s man named Bernie Ohls shoot a gunman named Poke Andrews. But that was higher up the hill, farther away from the lake. This house was on the second level, in a loop the street made rounding a spur of the hill. It stood on a terrace, with a cracked retaining wall in front and several vacant lots behind.
Being originally a double house it had two front doors and two sets of front steps. One of the doors had a sign tacked over the grating that masked the peep window: Ring 1432.
I parked my car and went up right-angle steps, passed between two lines of pinks, went up more steps to the side with the sign. That should be the roomer’s side. I rang the bell. Nobody answered it, so I went across to the other door. Nobody answered that one either.
While I was waiting a gray Dodge coupe whished around the curve and a small neat girl in blue looked up at me for a second. I didn’t see who else was in the car. I didn’t pay much attention. I didn’t know it was important.
I took out Kathy Home’s key and let myself into a closed living room that smelled of cedar oil. There was just enough furniture to get by, net curtains, a quiet shaft of sunlight under the drapes in front. There was a tiny breakfast room, a kitchen, a bedroom in the back that was obviously Kathy’s, a bathroom, another bedroom in front that seemed to be used as a sewing room. It was this room that had the door cut through to the other side of the house.
I unlocked it and stepped, as it were, through a mirror. Everything was backwards, except the furniture. The living room on that side had twin beds, didn’t have the look of being lived in.
I went towards the back of the house, past the second bathroom, knocked at the shut door that corresponded to Kathy’s bedroom.
No answer. I tried the knob and went in. The little man on the bed was probably Peeler Mardo. I noticed his feet first, because although he had on trousers and a shirt, his feet were bare and hung over the end of the bed. They were tied there by a rope around the ankles.
They had been burned raw on the soles. There was a smell of scorched flesh in spite of the open window. Also a smell of scorched wood. An electric iron on a desk was still connected. I went over and shut it off.
I went back to Kathy Home’s kitchen and found a pint of Brooklyn Scotch in the cooler. I used some of it and breathed deeply for a little while and looked out over the vacant lots. There was a narrow cement walk behind the house and green wooden steps down to the street.
I went back to Peeler Mardo’s room. The coat of a brown suit with a red pin stripe hung over a chair with the pockets turned out and what had been in them on the floor.
He was wearing the trousers of the suit, and their pockets were turned out also. Some keys and change and a handkerchief lay on the bed beside him, and a metal box like a woman’s compact, from which some glistening white powder had spilled. Cocaine.
He was a little man, not more than five feet four, with thin brown hair and large ears. His eyes had no particular color. They were just eyes, and very wide open and quite dead. His arms were pulled out from him and tied at the wrists by a rope that went under the bed.
I looked him over for bullet or knife wounds, didn’t find any. There wasn’t a mark on him except his feet. Shock or heart failure or a combination of the two must have done the trick. He was still warm. The gag in his mouth was both warm and wet.
I wiped off everything I had touched, looked out of Kathy’s front window for a while before I left the house.
It was three-thirty when I walked into the lobby of the Mansion House, over to the cigar counter in the corner. I leaned on the glass and asked for Camels.
Kathy Horne flicked the pack at me, dropped the change into my outside breast pocket, and gave me her customer’s smile.
“Well? You didn’t take long,” she said, and looked sidewise along her eyes at a drunk who was trying to light a cigar with the old-fashioned flint and steel lighter.
“It’s heavy,” I told her. “Get set.”
She turned away quickly and flipped a pack of paper matches along the glass to the drunk. He fumbled for them, dropped both matches and cigar, scooped them angrily off the floor and went off looking back over his shoulder, as if he expected a kick.
Kathy looked past my head, her eyes cool and empty.
“I’m set,” she whispered.
“You cut a full half,” I said. “Peeler’s out. He’s been bumped off–in his bed.”
Her eyes twitched. Two fingers curled on the glass near my elbow. A white line showed around her mouth. That was all.
“Listen,” I said. “Don’t say anything until I’m through. He died of shock. Somebody burned his feet with a cheap electric iron. Not yours, I looked. I’d say he died rather quickly and couldn’t have said much. The gag was still in his mouth. When I went out there, frankly, I thought it was all hooey. Now I’m not so sure. If he opened up, we’re through, and so is Sype, unless I can find him first. Those workers didn’t have any inhibitions at all. If he didn’t give up, there’s still time.”
Her head turned, her set eyes looked towards the revolving door at the lobby entrance. White patches glared in her cheeks.
“What do I do?” she breathed.
I poked at a box of wrapped cigars, dropped her key into it. Her long fingers got it out smoothly, hid it.
“When you get home you find him. You don’t know a thing. Leave the pearls out, leave me out. When they check his prints they’ll know he had a record and they’ll just figure it was something caught up with him.”
I broke my cigarettes open and lit one, watched her for a moment. She didn’t move an inch.
“Can you face it down?” I asked. “If you can’t, now’s the time to speak.”
“Of course.” Her eyebrows arched. “Do I look like a torturer?”
“You married a crook,” I said grimly.
She flushed, which was what I wanted. “He isn’t! He’s just a damn fool! Nobody thinks any the worse of me, not even the boys down at Headquarters.”
“All right. I like it that way. It’s not our murder, after all. And if we talk now, you can say goodbye to any share in any reward–even if one is ever paid.”
“Darn tootin’,” Kathy Home said pertly. “Oh, the poor little runt,” she almost sobbed.
I patted her arm, grinned as heartily as I could and left the Mansion House.
THREE
The Reliance Indemnity Company had offices in the Graas Building, three small rooms that looked like nothing at all. They were a big enough outfit to be as shabby as they liked.
The resident manager was named Lutin, a middle-aged baldheaded man with quiet eyes, dainty fingers that caressed a dappled cigar. He sat behind a large, well-dusted desk and stared peacefully at my chin.
“Marlowe, eh? I’ve heard of you.” He touched my card with a shiny little finger. “What’s on your mind?”
I rolled a cigarette around in my fingers and lowered my voice. “Remember the Leander pearls?”
His smile was slow, a little bored. “I’m not likely to forget them. They cost this company one hundred and fifty thousand dollars. I was a cocky young adjuster then.”
I said: “I’ve got an idea. It may be all haywire. It very likely is. But I’d like to try it out. Is your twenty-five grand reward still good?”
He chuckled. “Twenty grand, Marlowe. We spent the difference ourselves. You’re wasting time.”
“It’s my time. Twenty it is then. How much cooperation can I get?”
“What kind of co-operation?”
“Can I have a letter identifying me to your other branches? In case I have to go out of the state. In case I need kind words from some local law.”
“Which way out of the state?”
I smiled at him. He tapped his cigar on the edge of a tray and smiled back. Neither of our smiles was honest.
“No letter,” he said. “New York wouldn’t stand for it. We have our own tie-up. But all the co-operation you can use, under the hat. And the twenty grand, if you click. Of course you won’t.”
I lit my cigarette and leaned back, puffed smoke at the ceiling.
“No? Why not? You never got those marbles. They existed, didn’t they?”
“Darn right they existed. And if they still do, they belong to us. But two hundred grand doesn’t get buried for twenty years–and then get dug up.”
“All right. It’s still my own time.”
He knocked a little ash off his cigar and looked down his eyes at me. “I like your front,” he said, “even if you are crazy. But we’re a large organization. Suppose I have you covered from now on. What then?”
“I lose. I’ll know I’m covered. I’m too long in the game to miss that. I’ll quit, give up what I know to the law, and go home.”
“Why would you do that?”
I leaned forward over the desk again. “Because,” I said slowly, “the guy that had the lead got bumped off today.”
“Oh–oh,” Lutin rubbed his nose.
“I didn’t bump him off,” I added.
We didn’t talk any more for a little while. Then Lutin said: “You don’t want any letter. You wouldn’t even carry it. And after your telling me that you know damn well I won’t dare give it you.”
I stood up, grinned, started for the door. He got up himself, very fast, ran around the desk and put his small neat hand on my arm.
“Listen, I know you’re crazy, but if you do get anything, bring it in through our boys. We need the advertising.”
“What the hell do you think I live on?” I growled.
“Twenty-five grand.”
“I thought it was twenty.”
“Twenty-five. And you’re still crazy. Sype never had those pearls. If he had, he’d have made some kind of terms with us many years ago.”
“Okey,” I said. “You’ve had plenty of time to make up your mind.”
We shook hands, grinned at each other like a couple of wise boys who know they’re not kidding anybody, but won’t give up trying.
It was a quarter to five when I got back to the office. I had a couple of short drinks and stuffed a pipe and sat down to interview my brains. The phone rang.
A woman’s voice said: “Marlowe?” It was a small, tight, cold voice. I didn’t know it.
“Yeah.”
“Better see Rush Madder. Know him?”
“No,” I lied. “Why should I see him?”
There was a sudden tinkling, icy-cold laugh on the wire. “On account of a guy had sore feet,” the voice said.
The phone clicked. I put my end of it aside, struck a match and stared at the wall until the flame burned my fingers.
Rush Madder was a shyster in the Quorn Building. An ambulance chaser, a small-time fixer, an alibi builder-upper, anything that smelled a little and paid a little more. I hadn’t heard of him in connection with any big operations like burning people’s feet.
FOUR
It was getting toward quitting time on lower Spring Street. Taxis were dawdling close to the curb, stenographers were getting an early start home, streetcars were clogging up, and traffic cops were preventing people from making perfectly legal right turns.
The Quorn Building was a narrow front, the color of dried mustard, with a large case of false teeth in the entrance. The directory held the names of painless dentists, people who teach you how to become a letter carrier, just names, and numbers without any names, Rush Madder, Attorney-at-Law, was in Room 619.
I got out of a jolting open-cage elevator, looked at a dirty spittoon on a dirty rubber mat, walked down a corridor that smelled of butts, and tried the knob below the frosted glass panel of 619. The door was locked, I knocked.
A shadow came against the glass and the door was pulled back with a squeak. I was looking at a thick-set man with a soft round chin, heavy black eyebrows, an oily complexion and a Charlie Chan mustache that made his face look fatter than it was.
He put out a couple of nicotined fingers. “Well, well, the old dog catcher himself. The eye that never forgets. Marlowe is the name, I believe?”
I stepped inside and waited for the door to squeak shut. A bare carpetless room paved in brown linoleum, a flat desk and a rolltop at right angles to it, a big green safe that looked as fireproof as a delicatessen bag, two filing cases, three chairs, a built-in closet and washbowl in the corner by the door.
“Well, well, sit down,” Madder said. “Glad to see you.” He fussed around behind his desk and adjusted a burst-out seat cushion, sat on it. “Nice of you to drop around. Business?”
I sat down and put a cigarette between my teeth and looked at him. I didn’t say a word. I watched him start to sweat. It started up in his hair. Then he grabbed a pencil and made marks on his blotter. Then he looked at mc with a quick darting glance, down at his blotter again. He talked–to the blotter.
“Any ideas?” he asked softly.
“About what?”
He didn’t look at me. “About how we could do a little business together. Say, in stones.”
“Who was the wren?” I asked.
“Huh? What wren?” He still didnt look at me.
“The one that phoned me.”
“Did somebody phone you?”
I reached for his telephone, which was the old-fashioned gallows type. I lifted off the receiver and started to dial the number of Police Headquarters, very slowly. I knew he would know that number about as well as he knew his hat.
He reached over and pushed the hook down. “Now, listen,” he complained. “You’re too fast. What you calling copper for?”
I said slowly: “They want to talk to you. On account of you know a broad that knows a man had sore feet.”
“Does it have to be that way?” His collar was too tight now. He yanked at it.
“Not from my side. But if you think I’m going to sit here and let you play with my reflexes, it does.”
Madder opened a flat tin of cigarettes and pushed one past his lips with a sound like somebody gutting a fish. His hand shook.
“All right,” he said thickly. “All right. Don’t get sore.”
“Just stop trying to count clouds with me,” I growled. “Talk sense. If you’ve’ got a job for me, it’s probably too dirty for me to touch. But I’ll at least listen.”
He nodded. He was comfortable now. He knew I was bluffing. He puffed a pale swirl of smoke and watched it float up.
“That’s all right,” he said evenly. “I play dumb myself once in a while. The thing is we’re wise. Carol saw you go to the house and leave it again. No law came.”
“Carol?”
“Carol Donovan. Friend of mine. She called you up.”
I nodded. “Go ahead.”
He didn’t say anything. He just sat there and looked at me owlishly.
I grinned and leaned across the desk a little and said: “Here’s what’s bothering you. You don’t know why 1 went to the house or why, having gone, I didn’t yell police. That’s easy. I thought it was a secret.”
“We’re just kidding each other,” Madder said sourly.
“All right,” I said. “Let’s talk about pearls. Does that make it any easier?”
His eyes shone. He wanted to let himself get excited, but he didn’t. He kept his voice down, said coolly: “Carol picked him up one night, the little guy. A crazy little number, full of snow, but way back in his noodle an idea. He’d talk about pearls, about an old guy up in the northwest or Canada that swiped them a long time ago and still had them. Only he wouldn’t say who the old guy was or where he was. Foxy about that. Holding out. I wouldn’t know why.”
“He wanted to get his feet burned,” I said.
Madder’s lips shook and another fine sweat showed in his hair.
“I didn’t do that,” he said thickly.
“You or Carol, what’s the odds? The little guy died. They can make murder out of it. You didn’t find out what you wanted to know. That’s why I’m here. You think I have information you didn’t get. Forget it. If I knew enough, I wouldn’t be here, and if you knew enough, you wouldn’t want me here. Check?”
He grinned, very slowly, as if it hurt him. He struggled up in his chair and dragged a deeper drawer out from the side of his desk, put a nicely molded brown bottle up on the desk, and two striped glasses. He whispered: “Two-way split. You and me. I’m cutting Carol out. She’s too damn rough, Marlowe. I’ve seen hard women, but she’s the bluing on armor plate. And you’d never think it to look at her, would you?”
“Have I seen her?”
“I guess so. She says you did.”
“Oh, the girl in the Dodge.”
He nodded, and poured two good-sized drinks, put the bottle down and stood up. “Water? I like it in mine.”
“No,” I said, “but why cut me in? I don’t know any more than you mentioned. Or very little. Certainly not as much as you must know to go that far.”
He leered across the glasses. “I know where I can get fifty grand for the Leander pearls, twice what you could get. I can give you yours and still have mine. You’ve got the front I need to work in the open. How about the water?”
“No water,” I said.
He went across to the built-in wash place and ran the water and came back with his glass half full. He sat down again, grinned, lifted it.
We drank.
FIVE
So far I had only made four mistakes. The first was mixing in at all, even for Kathy Home’s sake. The second was staying mixed after I found Peeler Mardo dead. The third was letting Rush Madder see I knew what he was talking about. The fourth, the whiskey, was the worst.
It tasted funny even on the way down. Then there was that sudden moment of sharp lucidity when I knew, exactly as though I had seen it, that he had switched his drink for a harmless one cached in the closet.
I sat still for a moment, with the empty glass at my fingers’ ends, gathering my strength. Madder’s face began to get large and moony and vague. A fat smile jerked in and out under his Charlie Chan mustache as he watched me.
I reached back into my hip pocket and pulled out a loosely wadded handkerchief. The small sap inside it didn’t seem to show. At least Madder didn’t move, after his first grab under the coat.
I stood up and swayed forward drunkenly and smacked him square on the top of the head.
He gagged. He started to get up. I tapped him on the jaw. He became limp and his hand sweeping down from under his coat knocked his glass over on the desk top. I straightened it, stood silent, listening, struggling with a rising wave of nauseous stupor.
I went over to a communicating door and tried the knob. It was locked. I was staggering by now. I dragged an office chair to the entrance door and propped the back of it under the knob. I leaned against the door panting, gritting my teeth, cursing myself. I got handcuffs out and started back towards Madder.
A very pretty black-haired, gray-eyed girl stepped out of the clothes closet and poked a .32 at me.
She wore a blue suit cut with a lot of snap. An inverted saucer of a hat came down in a hard line across her forehead. Shiny black hair showed at the sides. Her eyes were slate-gray, cold, and yet lighthearted. Her face was fresh and young and delicate, and as hard as a chisel.
“All right, Marlowe. Lie down and sleep it off. You’re through.”
I stumbled towards her waving my sap. She shook her head. When her face moved it got large before my eyes. Its outlines changed and wobbled. The gun in her hand looked like anything from a tunnel to a toothpick.
“Don’t be a goof, Marlowe,” she said. “A few hours sleep for you, a few hours start for us. Don’t make me shoot. I would.”
“Damn you,” I mumbled. “I believe you would.”
“Right as rain, toots. I’m a lady that wants her own way. That’s fine. Sit down.”
The floor rose up and bumped me. I sat on it as on a raft in a rough sea. I braced myself on flat hands. I could hardly feel the floor. My hands were numb. My whole body was numb.
I tried to stare her down. “Ha-a! L-lady K-killer!” I giggled.
She threw a chilly laugh at me which I only just barely heard. Drums were beating in my head now, war drums from a far-off jungle. Waves of light were moving, and dark shadows and a rustle as of a wind in treetops. I didn’t want to lie down. I lay down.
The girl’s voice came from very far off, an elfin voice.
“Two-way split, eh? He doesn’t like my method, eh? Bless his big soft heart. We’ll see about him.”
Vaguely as I floated off I seemed to feel a dull jar that might have been a shot. I hoped she had shot Madder, but she hadn’t. She had merely helped me on my way out–with my own sap.
When I came around again it was night. Something clacked overhead with a heavy sound. Through the open window beyond the desk yellow light splashed on the high side walls of a building. The thing clacked again and the light went off. An advertising sign on the roof.
I got up off the floor like a man climbing out of thick mud. I waded over to the washbowl, sloshed water on my face, felt the top of my head and winced, waded back to the door and found the light switch.
Strewn papers lay around the desk, broken pencils, envelopes, an empty brown whiskey bottle, cigarette ends and ashes. The debris of hastily emptied drawers. I didn’t bother going through any of it. I left the office, rode down to the street in the shuddering elevator, slid into a bar and had a brandy, then got my car and drove on home.
I changed clothes, packed a bag, had some whiskey and answered the telephone. It was about nine-thirty.
Kathy Home’s voice said: “So you’re not gone yet. I hoped you wouldn’t be.”
“Alone?” I asked, still thick in the voice.
“Yes, but I haven’t been. The house has been full of coppers for hours. They were very nice, considering. Old grudge of some kind, they figured.”
“And the line is likely bugged now,” I growled. “Where was I supposed to be going?”
“Well–you know. Your girl told me.”
“Little dark girl? Very cool? Name of Carol Donovan?”
“She had your card. Why, wasn’t it–”
“I don’t have any girl,” I said grimly. “And I bet that just very casually, without thinking at all, a name slipped past your lips–the name of a town up north. Did it?”
“Ye-es,” Kathy Home admitted weakly.
I caught the night plane north.
It was a nice trip except that I had a sore head and a raging thirst for ice water.
SIX
The Snoqualmie Hotel in Olympia was on Capitol Way, fronting on the usual square city block of park. I left by the coffeeshop door and walked down a hill to where the last, loneliest reach of Puget Sound died and decomposed against a line of disused wharves. Corded firewood filled the foreground and old men pottered about in the middle of the stacks, or sat on boxes with pipes in their mouths and signs behind their heads reading: “Firewood and Split Kindling. Free Delivery.”
Behind them a low cliff rose and the vast pines of the north loomed against a gray-blue sky.
Two of the old men sat on boxes about twenty feet apart, ignoring each other. I drifted near one of them. He wore corduroy pants and what had been a red and black Mackinaw. His felt hat showed the sweat of twenty summers. One of his hands clutched a short black pipe, and with the grimed fingers of the other he slowly, carefully, ecstatically jerked at a long curling hair that grew out of his nose.
I set a box on end, sat down, filled my own pipe, lit it, puffed a cloud of smoke. I waved a hand at the water and said: “Youd never think that ever met the Pacific Ocean.”
He looked at me.
I said: “Dead end–quiet, restful, like your town. I like a town like this.” He went on looking at me.
“I’ll bet,” I said, “that a man that’s been around a town like this knows everybody in it and in the country near it.”
He said: “How much you bet?”
I took a silver dollar out of my pocket. They still had a few up there. The old man looked it over, nodded, suddenly yanked the long hair out of his nose and held it up against the light.
“You’d lose,” he said.
I put the dollar down on my knee. “Know anybody around here that keeps a lot of goldfish?” I asked.
He stared at the dollar. The other old man near by was wearing overalls and shoes without any laces. He stared at the dollar. They both spat at the same instant. The first old man said: “Leetle deef.” He got up slowly and went over to a shack built of old boards of uneven lengths. He went into it, banged the door.
The second old man threw his axe down pettishly, spat in the direction of the closed door and went off among the stacks of cordwood.
The door of the shack opened, the man in the Mackinaw poked his head out of it.
“Sewer crabs is all,” he said, and slammed the door again.
I put my dollar in my pocket and went back up the hill. I figured it would take too long to learn their language.
Capitol Way ran north and south. A dull green streetcar shuttled past on the way to a place called Tumwater. In the distance I could see the government buildings. Northward the street passed two hotels and some stores and branched right and left. Right went to Tacoma and Seattle. Left went over a bridge and out to the Olympic Peninsula.
Beyond this right and left turn the street suddenly became old and shabby, with broken asphalt paving, a Chinese restaurant, a boarded-up movie house, a pawnbroker’s establishment. A sign jutting over the dirty sidewalk said “Smoke Shop,” and in small letters underneath, as if it hoped nobody was looking, “Pool.”
I went in past a rack of gaudy magazines and a cigar showcase that had flies inside it. There was a long wooden counter on the left, a few slot machines, a single pool table. Three kids fiddled with the slot machines and a tall thin man with a long nose and no chin played pool all by himself, with a dead cigar in his face.
I sat on a stool and a hard-eyed bald-headed man behind the counter got up from a chair, wiped his hands on a thick gray apron, showed me a gold tooth.
“A little rye,” I said. “Know anybody that keeps goldfish?”
“Yeah,” he said. “No.”
He poured something behind the counter and shoved a thick glass across.
“Two bits.”
I sniffed the stuff, wrinkled my nose. “Was it the rye the ‘yeah’ was for?”
The bald-headed man held up a large bottle with a label that said something about: “Cream of Dixie Straight Rye Whiskey Guaranteed at Least Four Months Old.”
“Okey,” I said. “I see it just moved in.”
I poured some water in it and drank it. It tasted like a cholera culture. I put a quarter on the counter. The barman showed me a gold tooth on the other side of his face and took hold of the counter with two hard hands and pushed his chin at me.
“What was that crack?” he asked, almost gently.
“I just moved in,” I said. “I’m looking for some goldfish for the front window. Goldfish.”
The barman said very slowly: “Do I look like a guy would know a guy would have goldfish?” His face was a little white.
The long-nosed man who had been playing himself a round of pool racked his cue and strolled over to the counter beside me and threw a nickel on it.
“Draw me a Coke before you wet yourself,” he told the barman.
The barman pried himself loose from the counter with a good deal of effort. I looked down to see if his fingers had made any dents in the wood. He drew a Coke, stirred it with a swizzlestick, dumped it on the bar top, took a deep breath and let it out through his nose, grunted and went away towards a door marked “Toilet.”
The long-nosed man lifted his Coke and looked into the smeared mirror behind the bar. The left side of his mouth twitched briefly. A dim voice came from it, saying: “How’s Peeler?”
I pressed my thumb and forefinger together, put them to my nose, sniffed, shook my head sadly.
“Hitting it high, huh?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I didn’t catch the name.”
“Call me Sunset. l’m always movin’ west. Think he’ll stay clammed?”
“He’ll stay clammed,” I said.
“What’s your handle?”
“Dodge Willis, El Paso,” I said.
“Cot a room somewhere?”
“Hotel.”
He put his glass down empty. “Let’s dangle.”