SEVEN
We went up to my room and sat down and looked at each other over a couple of glasses of Scotch and ice water. Sunset studied me with his close-set expressionless eyes, a little at a time, but very thoroughly in the end, adding it all up.
I sipped my drink and waited. At last he said in his lipless “stir” voice: “How come Peeler didn’t come hisself?”
“For the same reason he didn’t stay when he was here.”
“Meaning which?”
“Figure it out for yourself,” I said.
He nodded, just as though I had said something with a meaning. Then: “What’s the top price?”
“Twenty-five grand.”
“Nuts.” Sunset was emphatic, even rude.
I leaned back and lit a cigarette, puffed smoke at the open window and watched the breeze pick it up and tear it to pieces.
“Listen,” Sunset complained. “I don’t know you from last Sunday’s sports section. You may be all to the silk. I just don’t know.”
“Why’d you brace me?” I asked.
“You had the word, didn’t you?”
This was where I took the dive. I grinned at him. “Yeah. Goldfish was the password. The Smoke Shop was the place.”
His lack of expression told me I was right. It was one of those breaks you dream of, but don’t handle right even in dreams.
“Well, what’s the next angle?” Sunset inquired, sucking a piece of ice out of his glass and chewing on it.
I laughed. “Okey, Sunset, l’m satisfied you’re cagey. We could go on like this for weeks. Let’s put our cards on the table. Where is the old guy?”
Sunset tightened his lips, moistened them, tightened them again. He set his glass down very slowly and his right hand hung lax on his thigh. I knew I had made a mistake, that Peeler knew where the old guy was, exactly. Therefore I should know.
Nothing in Sunset’s voice showed I had made a mistake. He said crossly: “You mean why don’t I put my cards on the table and you just sit back and look ’em over. Nix.”
“Then how do you like this?” I growled. “Peeler’s dead.”
One eyebrow twitched, and one corner of his mouth. His eyes got a little blanker than before, if possible. His voice rasped lightly, like a finger on dry leather.
“How come?”
“Competition you two didn’t know about.” I leaned back, smiled.
The gun made a soft metallic blue in the sunshine. I hardly saw where it came from. Then the muzzle was round and dark and empty looking at me.
“You’re kidding the wrong guy,” Sunset said lifelessly. “I ain’t no soft spot for chiselers to lie on.”
I folded my arms, taking care that my right hand was outside, in view.
“I would be–if I was kidding. I’m not. Peeler played with a girl and she milked him–up to a point. He didn’t tell her where to find the old fellow. So she and her top man went to see Peeler where he lived. They used a hot iron on his feet. He died of the shock.”
Sunset looked unimpressed. “I got a lot of room in my ears yet,” he said.
“So have I,” I snarled, suddenly pretending anger. “Just what the hell have you said that means anything–except that you know Peeler?”
He spun his gun on his trigger finger, watched it spin. “Old man Sype’s at Westport,” he said casually. “That mean anything to you?”
“Yeah. Has he got the marbles?”
“How the hell would I know?” He steadied the gun again, dropped it to his thigh. It wasn’t pointing at me now. “Where’s this competish you mentioned?”
“I hope I ditched them,” I said. “I’m not too sure. Can I put my hands down and take a drink?”
“Yeah, go ahead. How did you cut in?”
“Peeler roomed with the wife of a friend of mine who’s in stir. A straight girl, one you can trust. He let her in and she passed it to me–afterwards.”
“After the bump? How many cuts your side? My half is set.”
I took my drink, shoved the empty glass away. “The hell it is.”
The gun lifted an inch, dropped again. “How many altogether?” he snapped.
“Three, now Peeler’s out. If we can hold off the competition.”
“The feet-toasters? No trouble about that. What they look like?”
“Man named Rush Madder, a shyster down south, fifty, fat, thin down-curving mustache, dark hair thin on top, five-nine, a hundred and eighty, not much guts. The girl, Carol Donovan, black hair, long bob, gray eyes, pretty, small features, twentyfive to -eight, five-two, hundred-twenty, last seen wearing blue, hard as they come. The real iron in the combination.”
Sunset nodded indifferently and put his gun away. “We’ll soften her, if she pokes her snoot in,” he said. “I’ve got a heap at the house. Let’s take the air Westport way and look it over. You might be able to ease in on the goldfish angle. They say he’s nuts about them. I’ll stay under cover. He’s too stir-wise for me. I smell of the bucket.”
“Swell,” I said heartily. “I’m an old goldfish fancier myself.”
Sunset reached for the bottle, poured two fingers of Scotch and put it down. He stood up, twitched his collar straight, then shot his chinless jaw forward as far as it would go.
“But don’t make no error, bo. It’s goin’ to take pressure. It’s goin’ to mean a run out in the deep woods and some thumbtwisting. Snatch stuff, likely.”
“That’s okey,” I said. “The insurance people are behind us.”
Sunset jerked down the points of his vest and rubbed the back of this thin neck. I put my hat on, locked the Scotch in the bag by the chair I’d been sitting in, went over and shut the window.
We started towards the door. Knuckles rattled on it just as I reached for the knob. I gestured Sunset back along the wall. I stared at the door for a moment and then I opened it up.
The two guns came forward almost on the same level, one small–a .32, one a big Smith & Wesson. They couldn’t come into the room abreast, so the girl came in first.
“Okey, hot shot,” she said dryly. Ceiling zero. See if you can reach it.”
EIGHT
I backed slowly into the room. The two visitors bored in on me, either side. I tripped over my bag and fell backwards, hit the floor and rolled on my side groaning.
Sunset said casually: “H’ist ’em folks. Pretty now!”
Two heads jerked away from looking down at me and then I had my gun loose, down at my side. I kept on groaning.
There was a silence. I didn’t hear any guns fall. The door of the room was still wide open and Sunset was flattened against the wall more or less behind it.
The girl said between her teeth: “Cover the shamus, Rush–and shut the door. Skinny can’t shoot here. Nobody can.” Then, in a whisper I barely caught, she added: “Slam it!”
Rush Madder waddled backwards across the room keeping the Smith & Wesson pointed my way. His back was to Sunset and the thought of that made his eyes roll. I could have shot him easily enough, but it wasn’t the play. Sunset stood with his feet spread and his tongue showing. Something that could have been a smile wrinkled his flat eyes.
He stared at the girl and she stared at him. Their guns stared at each other.
Rush Madder reached the door, grabbed the edge of it and gave it a hard swing. I knew exactly what was going to happen. As the door slammed the .32 was going to go off. It wouldn’t be heard if it went off at the right instant. The explosion would be lost in the slamming of the door.
I reached out and took hold of Carol Donovan’s ankle and jerked it hard.
The door slammed. Her gun went off and chipped the ceiling.
She whirled on me kicking. Sunset said in his tight but somewhat penetrating drawl: “If this is it, this is it. Let’s go!” The hammer clicked back on his Colt.
Something in his voice steadied Carol Donovan. She relaxed, let her automatic fall to her side and stepped away from me with a vicious look back.
Madder turned the key in the door and leaned against the wood, breathing noisily. His hat had tipped over one ear and the ends of two strips of adhesive showed under the brim.
Nobody moved while I had these thoughts. There was no sound of feet outside in the hall, no alarm. I got up on my knees, slid my gun out of sight, rose on my feet and went over to the window. Nobody down on the sidewalk was staring up at the upper floors of the Snoqualmie Hotel.
I sat on the broad old-fashioned sill and looked faintly embarrassed, as though the minister had said a bad word.
The girl snapped at me: “Is this lug your partner?”
I didn’t answer. Her face flushed slowly and her eyes burned. Madder put a hand out and fussed: “Now listen, Carol, now listen here. This sort of act ain’t the way–”
“Shut up!”
“Yeah,” Madder said in a clogged voice. “Sure.”
Sunset looked the girl over lazily for the third or fourth time. His gun hand rested easily against his hipbone and his whole attitude was of complete relaxation. Having seen him pull his gun once I hoped the girl wasn’t fooled.
He said slowly: “We’ve heard about you two. What’s your offer? I wouldn’t listen even, only I can’t stand a shooting rap.”
The girl said: “There’s enough in it for four.” Madder nodded his big head vigorously, almost managed a smile.
Sunset glanced at me. I nodded. “Four it is,” he sighed.
“But that’s the top. We’ll go to my place and gargle. I don’t like it here.”
“We must look simple,” the girl said nastily.
“Kill-simple,” Sunset drawled. “I’ve met lots of them. That’s why we’re going to talk it over. It’s not a shooting play.”
Carol Donovan slipped a suede bag from under her left arm and tucked her .32 into it. She smiled. She was pretty when she smiled.
“My ante is in,” she said quietly. “I’ll play. Where is the place?”
“Out Water Street. We’ll go in a hack.”
“Lead on, sport.”
We went out of the room and down in the elevator, four friendly people walking out through a lobby full of antlers and stuffed birds and pressed wildflowers in glass frames. The taxi went out Capitol Way, past the square, past a big red apartment house that was too big for the town except when the Legislature was sitting. Along car tracks past the distant Capitol buildings and the high closed gates of the governor’s mansion.
Oak trees bordered the sidewalks. A few largish residences showed behind garden walls. The taxi shot past them and veered on to a road that led towards the tip of the Sound. In a short while a house showed in a narrow clearing between tall trees. Water glistened far back behind the tree trunks. The house had a roofed porch, a small lawn rotten with weeds and overgrown bushes. There was a shed at the end of a dirt driveway and an antique touring car squatted under the shed.
We got out and I paid the taxi. All four of us carefully watched it out of sight. Then Sunset said: “My place is upstairs. There’s a schoolteacher lives down below. She ain’t home. Let’s go up and gargle.”
We crossed the lawn to the porch and Sunset threw a door open, pointed up narrow steps.
“Ladies first. Lead on, beautiful. Nobody locks a door in this town.”
The girl gave him a cool glance and passed him to go up the stairs. I went next, then Madder, Sunset last.
The single room that made up most of the second floor was dark from the trees, had a dormer window, a wide daybed pushed back under the slope of the roof, a table, some wicker chairs, a small radio and a round black stove in the middle of the floor.
Sunset drifted into a kitchenette and came back with a square bottle and some glasses. He poured drinks, lifted one and left the others on the table.
We helped ourselves and sat down.
Sunset put his drink down in a lump, leaned over to put his glass on the floor and came up with his Colt out.
I heard Madder’s gulp in the sudden cold silence. The girl’s mouth twitched as if she were going to laugh. Then she leaned forward, holding her glass on top of her bag with her left hand.
Sunset slowly drew his lips into a thin straight line. He said slowly and carefully: “Feet-burners, huh?”
Madder choked, started to spread his fat hands. The Colt flicked at him. He put his hands on his knees and clutched his kneecaps.
“And suckers at that,” Sunset went on tiredly. “Burn a guy’s feet to make him sing and then walk right into the parlor of one of his pals. You couldn’t tie that with Christmas ribbon.”
Madder said jerkily: “All r-right. W-what’s the p-pay-off?” The girl smiled slightly but she didn’t say anything.
Sunset grinned. “Rope,” he said softly. “A lot of rope tied in hard knots, with water on it. Then me and my pal trundle off to catch fire-flies–pearls to you–and when we come back–” he stopped, drew his left hand across the front of his throat. “Like the idea?” he glanced at me.
“Yeah, but don’t make a song about it,” I said. “Where’s the rope?”
“Bureau,” Sunset answered, and pointed with one ear at the corner.
I started in that direction, by way of the walls. Madder made a sudden thin whimpering noise and his eyes turned up in his head and he fell straight forward off the chair on his face, in a dead faint.
That jarred Sunset. He hadn’t expected anything so foolish. His right hand jerked around until the Colt was pointing down at Madder’s back.
The girl slipped her hand under her bag. The bag lifted an inch. The gun that was caught there in a trick clip–the gun that Sunset thought was inside the bag–spat and flamed briefly.
Sunset coughed. His Colt boomed and a piece of wood detached itself from the back of the chair Madder had been sitting in. Sunset dropped the Colt and put his chin down on his chest and tried to look at the ceiling. His long legs slid out in front of him and his heels made a rasping sound on the floor. He sat like that limp, his chin on his chest, his eyes looking upward. Dead as a pickled walnut.
I kicked Miss Donovan’s chair out from under her and she banged down on her side in a swirl of silken legs. Her hat went crooked on her head. She yelped. I stood on her hand and then shifted suddenly and kicked her gun clear across the attic.
“Get up.”
She got up slowly, backed away from me biting her lip, savage-eyed, suddenly a nasty-faced little brat at bay. She kept on backing until the wall stopped her. Her eyes glittered in a ghastly face.
I glanced down at Madder, went over to a closed door. A bathroom was behind it. 1 reversed a key and gestured at the girl.
“In.”
She walked stiff-legged across the floor and passed in front of me, almost touching me.
“Listen a minute, shamus–”
I pushed her through the door and slammed it and turned the key. It was all right with me if she wanted to jump out of the window. I had seen the windows from below.
I went across to Sunset, felt him, felt the small hard lump of keys on a ring in his pocket, and got them out without quite knocking him off his chair. I didn’t look for anything else.
There were car keys on the ring.
I looked at Madder again, noticed that his fingers were as white as snow. I went down the narrow dark stairs to the porch, around to the side of the house and got into the old touring car under the shed. One of the keys on the ring fitted its ignition lock.
The car took a beating before it started up and let me back it down the dirt driveway to the curb. Nothing moved in the house that I saw or heard. The tall pines behind and beside the house stirred their upper branches listlessly and a cold heartless sunlight sneaked through them intermittently as they moved.
I drove back to Capitol Way and downtown again as fast as I dared, past the square and the Snoqualmie Hotel and over the bridge towards the Pacific Ocean and Westport.
NINE
An hour’s fast driving through thinned-out timberland, interrupted by three stops for water and punctuated by the cough of a head gasket leak, brought me within sound of surf. The broad white road, striped with yellow down the center, swept around the flank of a hill, a distant cluster of buildings loomed up in front of the shine of the ocean, and the road forked. The left fork was signposted: “Westport–9 Miles,” and didn’t go towards the buildings. It crossed a rusty cantilever bridge and plunged into a region of wind-distorted apple orchards.
Twenty minutes more and I chugged into Westport, a sandy spit of land with scattered frame houses dotted over rising ground behind it. The end of the spit a long narrow pier, and the end of the pier a cluster of sailing boats with half-lowered sails flapping against their single masts. And beyond them a buoyed channel and a long irregular line where the water creamed on a hidden sandbar.
Beyond the sandbar the Pacific rolled over to Japan. This was the last outpost of the coast, the farthest west a man could go and still be on the mainland of the United States. A swell place for an ex-convict to hide out with a couple of somebody else’s pearls the size of new potatoes–if he didn’t have any enemies.
I pulled up in front of a cottage that had a sign in the front yard: “Luncheons, Teas, Dinners.” A small rabbit-faced man with freckles was waving a garden rake at two black chickens. The chickens appeared to be sassing him back. He turned when the engine of Sunset’s car coughed itself still.
I got out, went through a wicket gate, pointed to the sign.
“Luncheon ready?”
He threw the rake at the chickens, wiped his hands on his trousers and leered. “The wife put that up,” he confided to me in a thin, impish voice. “Ham and eggs is what it means.”
“Ham and eggs get along with me,” I said.
We went into the house. There were three tables covered with patterned oilcloth, some chromos on the walls, a fullrigged ship in a bottle on the mantel. I sat down. The host went away through a swing door and somebody yelled at him and a sizzling noise was heard from the kitchen. He came back and leaned over my shoulder, put some cutlery and a paper napkin on the oilcloth.
“Too early for apple brandy, ain’t it?” he whispered.
I told him how wrong he was. He went away again and came back with glasses and a quart of clear amber fluid. He sat down with me and poured. A rich baritone voice in the kitchen was singing “Chloe,” over the sizzling.
We clinked glasses and drank and waited for the heat to crawl up our spines.
“Stranger, ain’t you?” the little man asked.
I said I was.
“From Seattle maybe? That’s a nice piece of goods you got on.”
“Seattle,” I agreed.
“We don’t git many strangers,” he said, looking at my left ear. “Ain’t on the way to nowheres. Now before repeal–” he stopped, shifted his sharp woodpecker gaze to my other ear.
“Ah, before repeal,” I said with a large gesture, and drank knowingly.
He leaned over and breathed on my chin. “Hell, you could load up in any fish stall on the pier. The stuff come in under catches of crabs and oysters. Hell, Westport was lousy with it. They give the kids cases of Scotch to play with. There wasn’t a car in this town that slept in a garage, mister. The garages was full to the roof of Canadian hooch. Hell, they had a coastguard cutter off the pier watchin’ the boats unload one day every week. Friday. Always the same day.” He winked.
I puffed a cigarette and the sizzling noise and the baritone rendering of “Chloe” went on in the kitchen.
“But hell, you wouldn’t be in the liquor business,” he said.
“Hell, no. I’m a goldfish buyer,” I said.
“Okey,” he said sulkily.
I poured us another round of the apple brandy. “This bottle is on me,” I said. “And I’m taking a couple more with me.”
He brightened up. “What did you say the name was?”
“Marlowe. You think I’m kidding you about the goldfish. I’m not.”
“Hell, there ain’t a livin’ in them little fellers, is there?”
I held my sleeve out. “You said it was a nice piece of goods. Sure there’s a living out of the fancy brands. New brands, new types all the time. My information is there’s an old guy down here somewhere that has a real collection. Maybe would sell it. Some he’d bred himself.”
A large woman with a mustache kicked the swing door open a foot and yelled: “Pick up the ham and eggs!”
My host scuttled across and came back with my food. I ate. He watched me minutely. After a time he suddenly smacked his skinny leg under the table.
“Old Wallace,” he chuckled. “Sure, you come to see old Wallace. Hell, we don’t know him right well. He don’t act neighborly.”
He turned around in his chair and pointed out through the sleazy curtains at a distant hill. On top of the hill was a yellow and white house that shone in the sun.
“Hell, that’s where he lives. He’s got a mess of them. Goldfish, huh? Hell, you could bend me with an eye dropper.”
That ended my interest in the little man. I gobbled my food, paid off for it and for three quarts of apple brandy at a dollar a quart, shook hands and went back out to the touring car.
There didn’t seem to be any hurry. Rush Madder would come out of his faint, and he would turn the girl loose. But they didn’t know anything about Westport. Sunset hadn’t mentioned the name in their presence. They didn’t know it when they reached Olympia or they would have gone there at once. And if they had listened outside my room at the hotel, they would have known I wasn’t alone. They hadn’t acted as if they knew that when they charged in.
I had lots of time. I drove down to the pier and looked it over. It looked tough. There were fish stalls, drinking dives, a tiny honkytonk for the fishermen, a pool room, an arcade of slot machines and smutty peep shows. Bait fish squirmed and darted in big wooden tanks down in the water along the piles. There were loungers and they looked like trouble for anyone that tried to interfere with them. I didn’t see any law enforcement around.
I drove back up the hill to the yellow and white house. It stood very much alone, four blocks from the next nearest dwelling. There were flowers in front, a trimmed green lawn, a rock garden. A woman in a brown and white print dress was popping at aphids with a spray gun.
I let my heap stall itself, got out and took my hat off.
“Mister Wallace live here?”
She had a handsome face, quiet, firm-looking. She nodded.
“Would you like to see him?” She had a quiet firm voice, a good accent.
It didn’t sound like the voice of a train robber’s wife.
I gave her my name, said I’d been hearing about his fish down in the town. I was interested in fancy goldfish.
She put the spray gun down and went into the house. Bees buzzed around my head, large fuzzy bees that wouldn’t mind the cold wind off the sea. Far off like background music the surf pounded on the sandbars. The northern sunshine seemed bleak to me, had no heat in the core of it.
The woman came out of the house and held the door open.
“He’s at the top of the stairs,” she said, “if you’d like to go up.”
I went past a couple of rustic rockers and into the house of the man who had stolen the Leander pearls.
TEN
Fish tanks were all around the big room, two tiers of them on braced shelves, big oblong tanks with metal frames, some with lights over them and some with lights down in them. Water grasses were festooned in careless patterns behind the algaecoated glass and the water held a ghostly greenish light and through the greenish light moved fish of all the colors of rainbow.
There were long slim fish like golden darts and Japanese Veiltails with fantastic trailing tails, and X-ray fish as transparent as colored glass, tiny guppies half an inch long, calico popeyes spotted like a bride’s apron, and big lumbering Chinese Moors with telescope eyes, froglike faces and unnecessary fins, waddling through the green water like fat men going to lunch.
Most of the light came from a big sloping skylight. Under the skylight at a bare wooden table a tall gaunt man stood with a squirming red fish in his left hand, and in his right hand a safety-razor blade backed with adhesive tape.
He looked at me from under wide gray eyebrows. His eyes were sunken, colorless, opaque. I went over beside him and looked down at the fish he was holding.
“Fungus?” I asked.
He nodded slowly. “White fungus.” He put the fish down on the table and carefully spread its dorsal fin. The fin was ragged and split and the ragged edges had a mossy white color.
“White fungus,” he said, “ain’t so bad. I’ll trim this feller up and he’ll be right as rain. What can I do for you, mister?”
I rolled a cigarette around in my fingers and smiled at him.
“Like people,” I said. “The fish, I mean. They get things wrong with them.”
He held the fish against the wood and trimmed off the ragged part of the fin. He spread the tail and trimmed that. The fish had stopped squirming.
“Some you can cure,” he said, “and some you can’t. You can’t cure swimming-bladder disease, for instance.” He glanced up at me. “This don’t hurt him, ‘case you think it does,” he said. “You can shock a fish to death but you can’t hurt it like a person.”
He put the razor blade down and dipped a cotton swab in some purplish liquid, painted the cut places. Then he dipped a finger in a jar of white vaseline and smeared that over. He dropped the fish in a small tank off to one side of the room. The fish swam around peacefully, quite content.
The gaunt man wiped his hands, sat down at the edge of a bench and stared at me with lifeless eyes. He had been goodlooking once, a long time ago.
“You interested in fish?” he asked. His voice had the quiet careful murmur of the cell block and the exercise yard.
I shook my head. “Not particularly. That was just an excuse. I came a long way to see you, Mister Sype.”
He moistened his lips and went on staring at me. When his voice came again it was tired and soft.
“Wallace is the name, mister.”
I puffed a smoke ring and poked my finger through it. “For my job it’s got to be Sype.”
He leaned forward and dropped his hands between his spread bony knees, clasped them together. Big gnarled hands that had done a lot of hard work in their time. His head tipped up at me and his dead eyes were cold under the shaggy brows. But his voice stayed soft.
“Haven’t seen a dick in a year. To talk to. What’s your lay?”
“Guess,” I said.
His voice got still softer. “Listen, dick. I’ve got a nice home here, quiet. Nobody bothers me any more. Nobody’s got a right to. I got a pardon straight from the White House. I’ve got the fish to play with and a man gets fond of anything he takes care of. I don’t owe the world a nickel. I paid up. My wife’s got enough dough for us to live on. All I want is to be let alone, dick.” He stopped talking, shook his head once. “You can’t burn me up–not any more.”
I didn’t say anything. I smiled a little and watched him.
“Nobody can touch me,” he said. “I got a pardon straight from the President’s study. I just want to be let alone.”
I shook my head and kept on smiling at him. “That’s the one thing you can never have–until you give in.”
“Listen,” he said softly. “You may be new on this case. It’s kind of fresh to you. You want to make a rep for yourself. But me, I’ve had almost twenty years of it, and so have a lot of other people, some of ’em pretty smart people too. They know I don’t have nothing that don’t belong to me. Never did have. Somebody else got it.”
“The mail clerk,” I said. “Sure.”
“Listen,” he said, still softly. “I did my time. I know all the angles. I know they ain’t going to stop wondering–long as anybody’s alive that remembers. I know they’re going to send some punk out once in a while to kind of stir it up. That’s okey. No hard feelings. Now what do I do to get you to go home again?”
I shook my head and stared past his shoulder at the fish drifting in their big silent tanks. I felt tired. The quiet of the house made ghosts in my brain, ghosts of a lot of years ago. A train pounding through the darkness, a stick-up hidden in a mail car, a gun flash, a dead clerk on the floor, a silent drop off at some water tank, a man who had kept a secret for nineteen years–almost kept it.
“You made one mistake,” I said slowly. “Remember a fellow named Peeler Mardo?”
He lifted his head. I could see him searching in his memory. The name didn’t seem to mean anything to him.
“A fellow you knew in Leavenworth,” I said. “A little runt that was in there for splitting fwenty-dollar bills and putting phony backs on them.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I remember.”
“You told him you had the pearls,” I said.
I could see he didn’t believe me. “I must have been kidding him,” he said slowly, emptily.
“Maybe. But here’s the point. He didn’t think so. He was up in this country a while ago with a pal, a guy who called himself Sunset. They saw you somewhere and Peeler recognized you. He got to thinking how he could make himself some jack. But he was a coke hound and he talked in his sleep. A girl got wise and then another girl and a shyster. Peeler got his feet burned and he’s dead.”
Sype stared at me unblinkingly. The lines at the corners of his mouth deepened.
I waved my cigarette and went On: “We don’t know how much he told, but the shyster and a girl are in Olympia. Sunset’s in Olympia, only he’s dead. They killed him. I wouldn’t know if they know where you are or not. But they will sometime, or others like them. You can wear the cops down, if they can’t find the pearls and you don’t try to sell them. You can wear the insurance company down and even the postal men.”
Sype didn’t move a muscle. His big knotty hands clenched between his knees didn’t move. His dead eyes just stared.
“But you can’t wear the chiselers down,” I said. “They’ll never lay off. There’ll always be a couple or three with time enough and money enough and meanness enough to bear down. They’ll find out what they want to know some way. They’ll snatch your wife or take you out in the woods and give you the works. And you’ll have to come through . . . Now I’ve got a decent, square proposition.”
“Which bunch are you?” Sype asked suddenly. “I thought you smelled of dick, but I ain’t so sure now.”
“Insurance,” I said. “Here’s the deal. Twenty-five grand reward in all. Five grand to the girl that passed me the info. She got it on the square and she’s entitled to that cut. Ten grand to me. I’ve done all the work and looked into all the guns. Ten grand to you, through me. You couldn’t get a nickel direct. Is there anything in it? How does it look?”
“It looks fine,” he said gently. “Except for one thing, I don’t have no pearls, dick.”
I scowled at him. That was my wad. I didn’t have any more. I straightened away from the wall and dropped a cigarette end on the wood floor, crushed it out. I turned to go.
He stood up and put a hand out. “Wait a minute,” he said gravely, “and I’ll prove it to you.”
He went across the floor in front of me and out of the room. I stared at the fish and chewed my lip. I heard the sound of a car engine somewhere, not very close. I heard a drawer open and shut, apparently in a nearby room.
Sype came back into the fish room. He had a shiny Colt .45 in his gaunt fist. It looked as long as a man’s forearm.
He pointed it at me and said: “I got pearls in this, six of them. Lead pearls. I can comb a fly’s whiskers at sixty yards. You ain’t no dick. Now get up and blow–and tell your redhot friends I’m ready to shoot their teeth out any day of the week and twice on Sunday.”
I didn’t move. There was a madness in the man’s dead eyes. I didn’t dare move.
“That’s grandstand stuff,” I said slowly. “I can prove I’m a dick. You’re an ex-con and it’s a felony just having that rod. Put it down and talk sense.”
The car I had heard seemed to be stopping outside the house. Brakes whined on drums. Feet clattered, up a walk, up steps. Sudden sharp voices, a caught exclamation.
Sype backed across the room until he was between the table and a big twenty- or thirty-gallon tank. He grinned at me, the wide clear grin of a fighter at bay.
“I see your friends kind of caught up with you,” he drawled. “Take your gat out and drop it on the floor while you still got time–and breath.”
I didn’t move. I looked at the wiry hair above his eyes. I looked into his eyes. I knew if I moved–even to do what he told me–he would shoot.
Steps came up the stairs. They were clogged, shuffling steps, with a hint of struggle in them.
Three people came into the room.
ELEVEN
Mrs. Sype came in first, stiff-legged, her eyes glazed, her arms bent rigidly at the elbows and the hands clawing straight forward at nothing, feeling for something that wasn’t there. There was a gun in her back, Carol Donovan’s small .32, held efficiently in Carol Donovan’s small ruthless hand.
Madder came last. He was drunk, brave from the bottle, flushed and savage. He threw the Smith & Wesson down on me and leered.
Carol Donovan pushed Mrs. Sype aside. The older woman stumbled into the corner and sank down on her knees, blankeyed.
Sype stared at the Donovan girl. He was rattled because she was a girl and young and pretty. He hadn’t been used to the type. Seeing her took the fire out of him. If men had come in he would have shot them to pieces.
The small dark white-faced girl faced him coldly, said in her tight chilled voice: “All right, Dad. Shed the heater. Make it smooth now.”
Sype leaned down slowly, not taking his eyes off her. He put his enormous frontier Colt on the floor.
“Kick it away from you, Dad.”
Sype kicked it. The gun skidded across the bare boards, over towards the center of the room.
“That’s the way, old-timer. You hold on him, Rush, while I unrod the dick.”
The two guns swiveled and the hard gray eyes were looking at me now. Madder went a little way towards Sype and pointed his Smith & Wesson at Sype’s chest.
The girl smiled, not a nice smile. “Bright boy, eh? You sure stick your neck out all the time, don’t you? Made a beef, shamus. Didn’t frisk your skinny pal. He had a little map in one shoe.”
“I didn’t need one,” I said smoothly, and grinned at her.
I tried to make the grin appealing, because Mrs. Sype was moving her knees on the floor, and every move took her nearer to Sype’s Colt.
“But you’re all washed up now, you and your big smile. Hoist the mitts while I get your iron. Up, mister.”
She was a girl, about five feet two inches tall, and weighed around a hundred and twenty. Just a girl. I was six feet and a half-inch, weighed one-ninety-five. I put my hands up and hit her on the jaw.
That was crazy, but I had all I could stand of the DonovanMadder act, the Donovan-Madder guns, the Donovan-Madder tough talk. I hit her on the jaw.
She went back a yard and her popgun went off. A slug burned my ribs. She started to fall. Slowly, like a slow motion picture, she fell. There was something silly about it.
Mrs. Sype got the Colt and shot her in the back.
Madder whirled and the instant he turned Sype rushed him. Madder jumped back and yelled and covered Sype again. Sype stopped cold and the wide crazy grin came back on his gaunt face.
The slug from the Colt knocked the girl forward as though a door had whipped in a high wind. A flurry of blue cloth, something thumped my chest–her head. I saw her face for a moment as she bounced back, a strange face that I had never seen before.
Then she was a huddled thing on the floor at my feet, small, deadly, extinct, with redness coming out from under her, and the tall quiet woman behind her with the smoking Colt held in both hands.
Madder shot Sype twice. Sype plunged forward still grinning and hit the end of the table. The purplish liquid he had used on the sick fish sprayed up over him. Madder shot him again as he was falling.
I jerked my Luger out and shot Madder in the most painful place I could think of that wasn’t likely to be fatal–the back of the knee. He went down exactly as if he had tripped over a hidden wire. I had cuffs on him before he even started to groan.
I kicked guns here and there and went over to Mrs. Sype and took the big Colt out of her hands.
It was very still in the room for a little while. Eddies of smoke drifted towards the skylight, filmy gray, pale in the afternoon sun. I heard the surf booming in the distance. Then I heard a whistling sound close at hand.
It was Sype trying to say something. His wife crawled across to him, still on her knees, huddled beside him. There was blood on his lips and bubbles. He blinked hard, trying to clear his head. He smiled up at her. His whistling voice said very faintly: “The Moors, Hattie–the Moors.”
Then his neck went loose and the smile melted off his face. His head rolled to one side on the bare floor.
Mrs. Sype touched him, then got very slowly to her feet and looked at me, calm, dry-eyed.
She said in a low clear voice: “Will you help me carry him to the bed? I don’t like him here with these people.”
I said: “Sure. What was that he said?”
“I don’t know. Some nonsense about his fish, I think.”
I lifted Sype’s shoulders and she took his feet and we carried him into the bedroom and put him on the bed. She folded his hands on his chest and shut his eyes. She went over and pulled the blinds down.
“That’s all, thank you,” she said, not looking at me. “The telephone is downstairs.”
She sat down in a chair beside the bed and put her head down on the coverlet near Sype’s arm.
I went out of the room and shut the door.
TWELVE
Madder’s leg was bleeding slowly, not dangerously. He stared at me with fear-crazed eyes while I tied a tight handkerchief above his knee. I figured he had a cut tendon and maybe a chipped kneecap. He might walk a little lame when they came to hang him.
I went downstairs and stood on the porch looking at the two cars in front, then down the hill towards the pier. Nobody could have told where the shots came from, unless he happened to be passing. Quite likely nobody had even noticed them. There was probably shooting in the woods around there a good deal.
I went back into the house and looked at the crank telephone on the living-room wall, but didn’t touch it yet. Something was bothering me. I lit a cigarette and stared out of the window and a ghost voice said in my ears: “The Moors, Hattie. The Moors.”
I went back up to the fish room. Madder was groaning now, thick panting groans. What did I care about a torturer like Madder?
The girl was quite dead. None of the tanks was hit. The fish swam peacefully in their green water, slow and peaceful and easy. They didn’t care about Madder either.
The tank with the black Chinese Moors in it was over in the corner, about ten-gallon size. There were just four of them, big fellows, about four inches body length, coal black all over. Two of them were sucking oxygen on top of the water and two were waddling sluggishly on the bottom. They had thick deep bodies with a lot of spreading tail and high dorsal fins and their bulging telescope eyes that made them look like frogs when they were head towards you.
I watched them fumbling around in the green stuff that was growing in the tank. A couple of red pond snails were windowcleaning. The two on the bottom looked thicker and more sluggish than the two on the top. I wondered why.
There was a long-handled strainer made of woven string lying between two of the tanks. I got it and fished down in the tank, trapped one of the big Moors and lifted it out. I turned it over in the net, looked at its faintly silver belly. I saw something that looked like a suture. I felt the place. There was a hard lump under it.
I pulled the other one off the bottom. Same suture, same hard round lump. I got one of the two that had been sucking air on top. No suture, no hard round lump. It was harder to catch too.
I put it back in the tank. My business was with the other two. I like goldfish as well as the next man, but business is business and crime is crime. I took my coat off and rolled my sleeves up and picked the razor blade backed with adhesive tape off the table.
It was a very messy job. It took about five minutes. Then they lay in the palm of my hand, three-quarters of an inch in diameter, heavy, perfectly round, milky white and shimmering with that inner light no other jewel has. The Leander pearls.
I washed them off, wrapped them in my handkerchief, rolled down my sleeves and put my coat back on. I looked at Madder, at his little pain and fear-tortured eyes, the sweat on his face. I didn’t care anything about Madder. He was a killer, a torturer.
I went out of the fish room. The bedroom door was still shut. I went down below and cranked the wall telephone.
“This is the Wallace place at Westport,” I said. “There’s been an accident. We need a doctor and we’ll have to have the police. What can you do?”
The girl said: “I’ll try and get you a doctor, Mr. Wallace. It may take a little time though. There’s a town marshal at Westport. Will he do?”
“I suppose so,” I said and thanked her and hung up. There were points about a country telephone after all.
I lit another cigarette and sat down in one of the rustic rockers on the porch. In a little while there were steps and Mrs. Sype came out of the house. She stood a moment looking off down the hills, then she sat down in the other rocker beside me. Her dry eyes looked at me steadily.
“You’re a detective, I suppose,” she said slowly, diffidently.
“Yes, I represent the company that insured the Leander pearls.”
She looked off into the distance. “I thought he would have peace here,” she said. “That nobody would bother him any more. That this place would be a sort of sanctuary.”
“He ought not to have tried to keep the pearls.”
She turned her head, quickly this time. She looked blank now, then she looked scared.
I reached down in my pocket and got out the wadded handkerchief, opened it up on the palm of my hand. They lay there together on the white linen, two hundred grand worth of murder.
“He could have had his sanctuary,” I said. “Nobody wanted to take it away from him. But he wasn’t satisfied with that.”
She looked slowly, lingeringly at the pearls. Then her lips twitched: Her voice got hoarse.
“Poor Wally,” she said. “So you did find them. You’re pretty clever, you know. He killed dozens of fish before he learned how to do that trick.” She looked up into my face. A little wonder showed at the back of her eyes.
She said: “I always hated the idea. Do you remember the old Bible theory of the scapegoat?”
I shook my head, no.
“The animal on which the sins of a man were laid and then it was driven off into the wilderness. The fish were his scapegoat.”
She smiled at me. I didn’t smile back.
She said, still smiling faintly: “You see, he once had the pearls, the real ones, and suffering seemed to him to make them his. But he couldn’t have had any profit from them, even if he had found them again. It seems some landmark changed, while he was in prison, and he never could find the spot in Idaho where they were buried.”
An icy finger was moving slowly up and down my spine. I opened my mouth and something I supposed might be my voice said: “Huh?”
She reached a finger out and touched one of the pearls. I was still holding them out, as if my hand was a shelf nailed to the wall.
“So he got these,” she said. “In Seattle. They’re hollow, filled with white wax. I forget what they call the process. They look very fine. Of course I never saw any really valuable pearls.”
“What did he get them for?” I croaked.
“Don’t you see? They were his sin. He had to hide them in the wilderness, this wilderness. He hid them in the fish. And do you know–” she leaned towards me again and her eyes shone. She said very slowly, very earnestly: “Sometimes I think that in the very end, just the last year or so, he actually believed they were the real pearls he was hiding. Does all this mean anything to you?”
I looked down at my pearls. My hand and the handkerchief closed over them slowly.
I said: “I’m a plain man, Mrs. Sype. I guess the scapegoat idea is a bit over my head. I’d say he was just trying to kid himself a bit–like any healthy loser.”
She smiled again. She was handsome when she smiled. Then she shrugged quite lightly.
“Of course, you would see it that way. But me–” she spread her hands. “Oh, well, it doesn’t matter much now. May I have them for a keepsake?”
“Have them?”
“The–the phony pearls. Surely you don’t–”
I stood up. An old Ford roadster without a top was chugging up the hill. A man in it had a big star on his vest. The chatter of the motor was like the chatter of some old angry bald-headed ape in the zoo.
Mrs. Sype was standing beside me, with her hand half out, a thin, beseeching look on her face.
I grinned at her with sudden ferocity.
“Yeah, you were pretty good in there for a while,” I said. “I damn near fell for it. And was I cold down the back, lady! But you helped. ‘Phony’ was a shade out of character for you. Your work with the Colt was fast and kind of ruthless. Most of all Sype’s last words queered it. ‘The Moors, Hattie–the Moors.’ He wouldn’t have bothered with that if the stones had been ringers. And he wasn’t sappy enough to kid himself all the way.”
For a moment her face didn’t change at all. Then it did. Something horrible showed in her eyes. She put her lips out and spit at me. Then she slammed into the house.
I tucked twenty-five thousand dollars into my vest pocket. Twelve thousand five hundred for me and twelve thousand five hundred for Kathy Home. I could see her eyes when I brought her the check, and when she put it in the bank, to wait for Johnny to get paroled from Quentin.
The Ford had pulled up behind the other cars. The man driving spit over the side, yanked his emergency brake on, got out without using the door. He was a big fellow in shirt sleeves.
I went down the steps to meet him.
* * *
RED WIND
* * *
ONE
There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands’ necks. Anything can happen. You can even get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge.
I was getting one in a flossy new place across the street from the apartment house where I lived. It had been open about a week and it wasn’t doing any business. The kid behind the bar was in his early twenties and looked as if he had never had a drink in his life.
There was only one other customer, a souse on a bar stool with his back to the door. He had a pile of dimes stacked neatly in front of him, about two dollars’ worth. He was drinking straight rye in small glasses and he was all by himself in a world of his own.
I sat farther along the bar and got my glass of beer and said: “You sure cut the clouds off them, buddy. I will say that for you.”
“We just opened up,” the kid said. “We got to build up trade. Been in before, haven’t you, mister?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Live around here?”
“In the Berglund Apartments across the street,” I said. “And the name is Philip Marlowe.”
“Thanks, mister. Mine’s Lew Petrolle.” He leaned close to me across the polished dark bar. “Know that guy?”
“No.”
“He ought to go home, kind of. I ought to call a taxi and send him home. He’s doing his next week’s drinking too soon.”
“A night like this,” I said. “Let him alone.”
“It’s not good for him,” the kid said, scowling at me.
“Rye!” the drunk croaked, without looking up. He snapped his fingers so as not to disturb his piles of dimes by banging on the bar.
The kid looked at me and shrugged. “Should I?”
“Whose stomach is it? Not mine.”
The kid poured him another straight rye and I think he doctored it with water down behind the bar because when he came up with it he looked as guilty as if he’d kicked his grandmother. The drunk paid no attention. He lifted coins off his pile with the exact care of a crack surgeon operating on a brain tumor.
The kid came back and put more beer in my glass. Outside the wind howled. Every once in a while it blew the stainedglass door open a few inches. It was a heavy door.
The kid said: “I don’t like drunks in the first place and in the second place I don’t like them getting drunk in here, and in the third place I don’t like them in the first place.”
“Warner Brothers could use that,” I said.
“They did.”
Just then we had another customer. A car squeaked to a stop outside and the swinging door came open. A fellow came in who looked a little in a hurry. He held the door and ranged the place quickly with flat, shiny, dark eyes. He was well set up, dark, good-looking in a narrow-faced, tight-lipped way. His clothes were dark and a white handkerchief peeped coyly from his pocket and he looked cool as well as under a tension of some sort. I guessed it was the hot wind. I felt a bit the same myself only not cool.
He looked at the drunk’s back. The drunk was playing checkers with his empty glasses. The new customer looked at me, then he looked along the line of half-booths at the other side of the place. They were all empty. He came on in–down past where the drunk sat swaying and muttering to himself–and spoke to the bar kid.
“Seen a lady in here, buddy? Tall, pretty, brown hair, in a print bolero jacket over a blue crępe silk dress. Wearing a widebrimmed straw hat with a velvet band.” He had a tight voice I didn’t like.
“No, sir. Nobody like that’s been in,” the bar kid said.
“Thanks. Straight Scotch. Make it fast, will you?”
The kid gave it to him and the fellow paid and put the drink down in a gulp and started to go out. He took three or four steps and stopped, facing the drunk. The drunk was grinning. He swept a gun from somewhere so fast that it was just a blur coming out. He held it steady and he didn’t look any drunker than I was. The tall dark guy stood quite still and then his head jerked back a little and then he was still again.
A car tore by outside. The drunk’s gun was a .22 target automatic, with a large front sight. It made a couple of hard snaps and a little smoke curled–very little.
“So long, Waldo,” the drunk said.
Then he put the gun on the barman and me.
The dark guy took a week to fall down. He stumbled, caught himself, waved one arm, stumbled again. His hat fell off, and then he hit the floor with his face. After he hit it he might have been poured concrete for all the fuss he made.
The drunk slid down off the stool and scooped his dimes into a pocket and slid towards the door. He turned sideways, holding the gun across his body. I didn’t have a gun. I hadn’t thought I needed one to buy a glass of beer. The kid behind the bar didn’t move or make the slightest sound.
The drunk felt the door lightly with his shoulder, keeping his eyes on us, then pushed through it backwards. When it was wide a hard gust of air slammed in and lifted the hair of the man on the floor. The drunk said: “Poor Waldo. I bet I made his nose bleed.”
The door swung shut. I started to rush it–from long practice in doing the wrong thing. In this case it didn’t matter. The car outside let out a roar and when I got onto the sidewalk it was flicking a red smear of taillight around the nearby corner. I got its license number the way I got my first million.
There were people and cars up and down the block as usual. Nobody acted as if a gun had gone off. The wind was making enough noise to make the hard quick rap of .22 ammunition sound like a slammed door, even if anyone heard it. I went back into the cocktail bar.
The kid hadn’t moved, even yet. He just stood with his hands flat on the bar, leaning over a little and looking down at the dark guy’s back. The dark guy hadn’t moved either. I bent down and felt his neck artery. He wouldn’t move–ever.
The kid’s face had as much expression as a cut of round steak and was about the same color. His eyes were more angry than shocked.
I lit a cigarette and blew smoke at the ceiling and said shortly: “Get on the phone.”
“Maybe he’s not dead,” the kid said.
“When they use a twenty-two that means they don’t make mistakes. Where’s the phone?”
“I don’t have one. I got enough expenses without that. Boy, can I kick eight hundred bucks in the face!”
“You own this place?”
“I did till this happened.”
He pulled his white coat off and his apron and came around the inner end of the bar. “I’m locking this door,” he said, taking keys out.
He went out, swung the door to and jiggled the lock from the outside until the bolt clicked into place. I bent down and rolled Waldo over. At first I couldn’t even see where the shots went in. Then I could. A couple of tiny holes in his coat, over his heart. There was a little blood on his shirt.
The drunk was everything you could ask–as a killer.
The prowl-car boys came in about eight minutes. The kid, Lew Petrolle, was back behind the bar by then. He had his white coat on again and he was counting his money in the register and putting it in his pocket and making notes in a little book.
I sat at the edge of one of the half-booths and smoked cigarettes and watched Waldo’s face get deader and deader. I wondered who the girl in the print coat was, why Waldo had left the engine of his car running outside, why he was in a hurry, whether the drunk had been waiting for him or just happened to be there.
The prowl-car boys came in perspiring. They were the usual large size and one of them had a flower stuck under his cap and his cap on a bit crooked. When he saw the dead man he got rid of the flower and leaned down to feel Waldo’s pulse.
“Seems to be dead,” he said, and rolled him around a little more. “Oh yeah, I see where they went in. Nice clean work. You two see him get it?”
I said yes. The kid behind the bar said nothing. I told them about it, that the killer seemed to have left in Waldo’s car.
The cop yanked Waldo’s wallet out, went through it rapidly and whistled. “Plenty jack and no driver’s license.” He put the wallet away. “O.K., we didn’t touch him, see? Just a chance we could find did he have a car and put it on the air.”
“The hell you didn’t touch him,” Lew Patrolle said.
The cop gave him one of those looks. “O.K., pal,” he said softly. “We touched him.”
The kid picked up a clean highball glass and began to polish it. He polished it all the rest of the time we were there.
In another minute a homicide fast-wagon sirened up and screeched to a stop outside the door and four men came in, two dicks, a photographer and a laboratory man. I didn’t know either of the dicks. You can be in the detecting business a long time and not know all the men on a big city force.
One of them was a short, smooth, dark, quiet, smiling man, with curly black hair and soft intelligent eyes. The other was big, raw-boned, long-jawed, with a veined nose and glassy eyes. He looked like a heavy drinker. He looked tough, but he looked as if he thought he was a little tougher than he was. He shooed me into the last booth against the wall and his partner got the kid up front and the bluecoats went out. The fingerprint man and photographer set about their work.
A medical examiner came, stayed just long enough to get sore because there was no phone for him to call the morgue wagon.
The short dick emptied Waldo’s pockets and then emptied his wallet and dumped everything into a large handkerchief on a booth table. I saw a lot of currency, keys, cigarettes, another handkerchief, very little else.
The big dick pushed me back into the end of the half-booth. “Give,” he said. “I’m Copernik, Detective Lieutenant.”
I put my wallet in front of him. He looked at it, went through it, tossed it back, made a note in a book.
“Philip Marlowe, huh? A shamus. You here on business?”
“Drinking business,” I said. “I live just across the street in the Berglund.”
“Know this kid up front?”
“I’ve been in here once since he opened up.”
“See anything funny about him now?”
“No.”
“Takes it too light for a young fellow, don’t he? Never mind answering. Just tell the story.”
I told it–three times. Once for him to get the outline, once for him to get the details and once for him to see if I had it too pat. At the end he said: “This dame interests me. And the killer called the guy Waldo, yet didn’t seem to be anyways sure he would be in. I mean, if Waldo wasn’t sure the dame would be here, nobody could be sure Waldo would be here.”
“That’s pretty deep,” I said.
He studied me. I wasn’t smiling. “Sounds like a grudge job, don’t it? Don’t sound planned. No getaway except by accident. A guy don’t leave his car unlocked much in this town. And the killer works in front of two good witnesses. I don’t like that.”
“I don’t like being a witness,” I said. “The pay’s too low.”
He grinned. His teeth had a freckled look. “Was the killer drunk really?”
“With that shooting? No.”
“Me too. Well, it’s a simple job. The guy will have a record and he’s left plenty prints. Even if we don’t have his mug here we’ll make him in hours. He had something on Waldo, but he wasn’t meeting Waldo tonight. Waldo just dropped in to ask about a dame he had a date with and had missed connections on. It’s a hot night and this wind would kill a girl’s face. She’d be apt to drop in somewhere to wait. So the killer feeds Waldo two in the right place and scrams and don’t worry about you boys at all. It’s that simple.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“It’s so simple it stinks,” Copernik said.
He took his felt hat off and tousled up his ratty blond hair and leaned his head on his hands. He had a long mean horse face. He got a handkerchief out and mopped it, and the back of his neck and the back of his hands. He got a comb out and combed his hair–he looked worse with it combed–and put his hat back on.
“I was just thinking,” I said.
“Yeah? What?”
“This Waldo knew just how the girl was dressed. So he must already have been with her tonight.”
“So, what? Maybe he had to go to the can. And when he came back she’s gone. Maybe she changed her mind about him.”
“That’s right,” I said.
But that wasn’t what I was thinking at all. I was thinking that Waldo had described the girl’s clothes in a way the ordinary man wouldn’t know how to describe them. Printed bolero jacket over blue crępe silk dress. I didn’t even know what a bolero jacket was, And I might have said blue dress or even blue silk dress, but never blue crępe silk dress.
After a while two men came with a basket. Lew Petrolle was still polishing his glass and talking to the short dark dick.
We all went down to Headquarters.
Lew Petrolle was all right when they checked on him. His father had a grape ranch near Antioch in Contra Costa County. He had given Lew a thousand dollars to go into business and Lew had opened the cocktail bar, neon sign and all, on eight hundred flat.
They let him go and told him to keep the bar closed until they were sure they didn’t want to do any more printing. He shook hands all around and grinned and said he guessed the killing would be good for business after all, because nobody believed a newspaper account of anything and people would come to him for the story and buy drinks while he was telling it.
“There’s a guy won’t ever do any worrying,” Copernik said, when he was gone. “Over anybody else.”
“Poor Waldo,” I said. “The prints any good?”
“Kind of smudged,” Copernik said sourly. “But we’ll get a classification and teletype it to Washington some time tonight. If it don’t click, you’ll be in for a day on the steel picture racks downstairs.”
I shook hands with him and his partner, whose name was Ybarra, and left. They didn’t know who Waldo was yet either. Nothing in his pockets told.
TWO
I got back to my street about 9 P.M. I looked up and down the block before I went into the Berglund. The cocktail bar was farther down on the other side, dark, with a nose or two against the glass, but no real crowd. People had seen the law and the morgue wagon, but they didn’t know what had happened. Except the boys playing pinball games in the drugstore on the corner. They know everything, except how to hold a job.
The wind was still blowing, oven-hot, swirling dust and torn paper up against the walls.
I went into the lobby of the apartment house and rode the automatic elevator up to the fourth floor. I unwound the doors and stepped out and there was a tall girl standing there waiting for the car.
She had brown wavy hair under a wide-brimmed straw hat with a velvet band and loose bow. She had wide blue eyes and eyelashes that didn’t quite reach her chin. She wore a blue dress that might have been crępe silk, simple in lines but not missing any curves. Over it she wore what might have been a print bolero jacket.
I said: “Is that a bolero jacket?”
She gave me a distant glance and made a motion as if to brush a cobweb out of the way.
“Yes. Would you mind–I’m rather in a hurry. I’d like–”
I didn’t move. I blocked her off from the elevator. We stared at each other and she flushed very slowly.
“Better not go out on the street in those clothes,” I said.
“Why, how dare you–”
The elevator clanked and started down again. I didn’t know what she was going to say. Her voice lacked the edgy twang of a beer-parlor frill. It had a soft light sound, like spring rain.
“It’s not a make,” I said. “You’re in trouble. If they come to this floor in the elevator, you have just that much time to get off the hall. First take off the hat and jacket–and snap it up!”
She didn’t move. Her face seemed to whiten a little behind the not-too-heavy make-up.
“Cops,” I said, “are looking for you. In those clothes. Give me the chance and I’ll tell you why.”
She turned her head swiftly and looked back along the corridor. With her looks I didn’t blame her for trying one more bluff.
“You’re impertinent, whoever you are. I’m Mrs. Leroy in Apartment Thirty-one. I can assure–”
“That you’re on the wrong floor,” I said. “This is the fourth.” The elevator had stopped down below. The sound of doors being wrenched open came up the shaft.
“Off!” I rapped. “Now!”
She switched her hat off and slipped out of the bolero jacket, fast. I grabbed them and wadded them into a mess under my arm. I took her elbow and turned her and we were going down the hall.
“I live in Forty-two. The front one across from yours, just a floor up. Take your choice. Once again–I’m not on the make.”
She smoothed her hair with that quick gesture, like a bird preening itself. Ten thousand years of practice behind it.
“Mine,” she said, and tucked her bag under her arm and strode down the hall fast. The elevator stopped at the floor below. She stopped when it stopped. She turned and faced me.
“The stairs are back by the elevator shaft,” I said gently.
“I don’t have an apartment,” she said.
“I didn’t think you had.”
“Are they searching for me?”
“Yes, but they won’t start gouging the block stone by stone before tomorrow. And then only if they don’t make Waldo.”
She stared at me. “Waldo?”
“Oh, you don’t know Waldo,” I said.
She shook her head slowly. The elevator started down in the shaft again. Panic flicked in her blue eyes like a ripple on water.
“No,” she said breathlessly, “but take me out of this hall.”
We were almost at my door. I jammed the key in and shook the lock around and heaved the door inward. I reached in far enough to switch lights on. She went in past me like a wave. Sandalwood floated on the air, very faint.
I shut the door, threw my hat into a chair and watched her stroll over to a card table on which I had a chess problem set out that I couldn’t solve. Once inside, with the door locked, her panic had left her.
“So you’re a chess player,” she said, in that guarded tone, as if she had come to look at my etchings. I wished she had.
We both stood still then and listened to the distant clang of elevator doors and then steps–going the other way.
I grinned, but with strain, not pleasure, went out into the kitchenette and started to fumble with a couple of glasses and then realized I still had her hat and bolero jacket under my arm. I went into the dressing room behind the wall bed and stuffed them into a drawer, went back out to the kitchenette, dug out some extra-fine Scotch and made a couple of highballs.
When I went in with the drinks she had a gun in her hand. It was a small automatic with a pearl grip. It jumped up at me and her eyes were full of horror.
I stopped, with a glass in each hand, and said: “Maybe this hot wind has got you crazy too. I’m a private detective. I’ll prove it if you let me.”
She nodded slightly and her face was white. I went over slowly and put a glass down beside her, and went back and set mine down and got a card out that had no bent corners. She was sitting down, smoothing one blue knee with her left hand, and holding the gun on the other. I put the card down beside her drink and sat with mine.
“Never let a guy get that close to you,” I said. “Not if you mean business. And your safety catch is on.”
She flashed her eyes down, shivered, and put the gun back in her bag. She drank half the drink without stopping, put the glass down hard and picked the card up.
“I don’t give many people that liquor,” I said. “I can’t afford to.”
Her lips curled. “I supposed you would want money.”
“Huh?”
She didn’t say anything. Her hand was close to her bag again.
“Don’t forget the safety catch,” I said. Her hand stopped. I went on: “This fellow I called Waldo is quite tall, say fiveeleven, slim, dark, brown eyes with a lot of glitter. Nose and mouth too thin. Dark suit, white handkerchief showing, and in a hurry to find you. Am I getting anywhere?”
She took her glass again. “So that’s Waldo,” she said. “Well, what about him?” Her voice seemed to have a slight liquor edge now.
“Well, a funny thing. There’s a cocktail bar across the street . . . Say, where have you been all evening?”
“Sitting in my car,” she said coldly, “most of the time.”
“Didn’t you see a fuss across the street up the block?”
Her eyes tried to say no and missed. Her lips said: “I knew there was some kind of disturbance. I saw policemen and red searchlights. I supposed someone had been hurt.”
“Someone was. And this Waldo was looking for you before that. In the cocktail bar. He described you and your clothes.”
Her eyes were set like rivets now and had the same amount of expression. Her mouth began to tremble and kept on trembling.
“I was in there,” I said, “talking to the kid that runs it. There was nobody in there but a drunk on a stool and the kid and myself. The drunk wasn’t paying any attention to anything. Then Waldo came in and asked about you and we said no, we hadn’t seen you and he started to leave.”
I sipped my drink. I like an effect as well as the next fellow. Her eyes ate me.
“Just started to leave. Then this drunk that wasn’t paying any attention to anyone called him Waldo and took a gun out. He shot him twice–I snapped my fingers twice–‘ ‘like that. Dead.”
She fooled me. She laughed in my face. “So my husband hired you to spy on me,” she said. “I might have known the whole thing was an act. You and your Waldo.”
I gawked at her.
“I never thought of him as jealous,” she snapped. “Not of a man who had been our chauffeur anyhow. A little about Stan, of course–that’s natural. But Joseph Coates–”
I made motions in the air. “Lady, one of us has this book open at the wrong page,” I grunted. “I don’t know anybody named Stan or Joseph Coates. So help me, I didn’t even know you had a chauffeur. People around here don’t run to them. As for husbands–yeah, we do have a husband once in a while. Not often enough.”
She shook her head slowly and her hand stayed near her bag and her blue eyes had glitters in them.
“Not good enough, Mr. Marlowe. No, not nearly good enough. I know you private detectives. You’re all rotten. You tricked me into your apartment, if it is your apartment. More likely it’s the apartment of some horrible man who will swear anything for a few dollars. Now you’re trying to scare me. So you can blackmail me–as well as get money from my husband. All right,” she said breathlessly, “how much do I have to pay?”
I put my empty glass aside and leaned back. “Pardon me if I light a cigarette,” I said. “My nerves are frayed.”
I lit it while she watched me without enough fear for any real guilt to be under it. “So Joseph Coates is his name,” I said. “The guy that killed him in the cocktail bar called him Waldo.”
She smiled a bit disgustedly, but almost tolerantly. “Don’t stall. How much?”
“Why were you trying to meet this Joseph Coates?”
“I was going to buy something he stole from me, of course. Something that’s valuable in the ordinary way too. Almost fifteen thousand dollars. The man I loved gave it to me. He’s dead. There! He’s dead! He died in a burning plane. Now, go back and tell my husband that, you slimy little rat!”
“I’m not little and I’m not a rat,” I said.
“You’re still slimy. And don’t bother about telling my husband. I’ll tell him myself. He probably knows anyway.”
I grinned. “That’s smart. Just what was I supposed to find out?”
She grabbed her glass and finished what was left of her drink. “So he thinks I’m meeting Joseph. Well, perhaps I was. But not to make love. Not with a chauffeur. Not with a bum I picked off the front step and gave a job to. I don’t have to dig down that far, if I want to play around.”
“Lady,” I said, “you don’t indeed.”
“Now, I’m going,” she said. “You just try and stop me.” She snatched the pearl-handled gun out of her bag. I didn’t move.
“Why, you nasty little string of nothing,” she stormed. “How do I know you’re a private detective at all? You might be a crook. This card you gave me doesn’t mean anything. Anybody can have cards printed.”
“Sure,” I said. “And I suppose I’m smart enough to live here two years because you were going to move in today so I could blackmail you for not meeting a man named Joseph Coates who was bumped off across the street under the name of Waldo. Have you got the money to buy this something that cost fifteen grand?”
“Oh! You think you’ll hold me up, I suppose!”
“Oh!” I mimicked her, “I’m a stick-up artist now, am I? Lady, will you please either put that gun away or take the safety catch off? It hurts my professional feelings to see a nice gun made a monkey of that way.”
“You’re a full portion of what I don’t like,” she said. “Get out of my way.”
I didn’t move. She didn’t move. We were both sitting down–and not even close to each other.
“Let me in on one secret before you go,” I pleaded. “What in hell did you take the apartment down on the floor below for? Just to meet a guy down on the street?”
“Stop being silly,” she snapped. “I didn’t. I lied. It’s his apartment.”
“Joseph Coates’?”
She nodded sharply.
“Does my description of Waldo sound like Joseph Coates?”
She nodded sharply again.
“All right. That’s one fact learned at last. Don’t you realize Waldo described your clothes before he was shot–when he was looking for you–that the description was passed on to the police–that the police don’t know who Waldo is–and are looking for somebody in those clothes to help tell them? Don’t you get that much?”
The gun suddenly started to shake in her hand. She looked down at it, sort of vacantly, and slowly put it back in her bag.
“I’m a fool,” she whispered, “to be even talking to you.” She stared at me for a long time, then pulled in a deep breath. “He told me where he was staying. He didn’t seem afraid. I guess blackmailers are like that. He was to meet me on the street, but I was late. It was full of police when I got here. So I went back and sat in my car for a while. Then I came up to Joseph’s apartment and knocked. Then I went back to my car and waited again. I came up here three times in all. The last time I walked up a flight to take the elevator. I had already been seen twice on the third floor. I met you. That’s all.”
“You said something about a husband,” I grunted. “Where is he?”
“He’s at a meeting.”
“Oh, a meeting,” I said, nastily.
“My husband’s a very important man. He has lots of meetings. He’s a hydroelectric engineer. He’s been all over the world. I’d have you know–”
“Skip it,” I said. “I’ll take him to lunch some day and have him tell me himself. Whatever Joseph had on you is dead stock now. Like Joseph.”
“He’s really dead?” she whispered. “Really?”
“He’s dead,” I said. “Dead, dead, dead. Lady, he’s dead.”
She believed it at last. I hadn’t thought she ever would somehow. In the silence, the elevator stopped at my floor.
I heard steps coming down the hall. We all have hunches. I put my finger to my lips. She didn’t move now. Her face had a frozen look. Her big blue eyes were as black as the shadows below them. The hot wind boomed against the shut windows. Windows have to be shut when a Santa Ana blows, heat or no heat.
The steps that came down the hall were the casual ordinary steps of one man. But they stopped outside my door, and somebody knocked.
I pointed to the dressing room behind the wall bed. She stood up without a sound, her bag clenched against her side. I pointed again, to her glass. She lifted it swiftly, slid across the carpet, through the door, drew the door quietly shut after her.
I didn’t know just what I was going to all this trouble for.
The knocking sounded again. The backs of my hands were wet. I creaked my chair and stood up and made a loud yawning sound. Then I went over and opened the door–without a gun. That was a mistake.
THREE
I didn’t know him at first. Perhaps for the opposite reason Waldo hadn’t seemed to know him. He’d had a hat on all the time over at the cocktail bar and he didn’t have one on now. His hair ended completely and exactly where his hat would start. Above that line was hard white sweatless skin almost as glaring as scar tissue. He wasn’t just twenty years older. He was a different man.
But I knew the gun he was holding, the .22 target automatic with the big front sight. And I knew his eyes. Bright, brittle, shallow eyes like the eyes of a lizard.
He was alone. He put the gun against my face very lightly and said between his teeth: “Yeah, me. Let’s go on in.”
I backed in just far enough and stopped. Just the way he would want me to, so he could shut the door without moving much. I knew from his eyes that he would want me to do just that.
I wasn’t scared. I was paralyzed.
When he had the door shut he backed me some more, slowly, until there was something against the back of my legs. His eyes looked into mine.
“That’s a card table,” he said. “Some goon here plays chess. You?”
I swallowed. “I don’t exactly play it. I just fool around.”
“That means two,” he said with a kind of hoarse softness, as if some cop had hit him across the windpipe with a blackjack once, in a third-degree session.
“It’s a problem,” I said. “Not a game. Look at the pieces.”
“I wouldn’t know.”
“Well, I’m alone,” I said, and my voice shook just enough.
“It don’t make any difference,” he said. “I’m washed up anyway. Some nose puts the bulls on me tomorrow, next week, what the hell? I just didn’t like your map, pal. And that smugfaced pansy in the bar coat that played left tackle for Fordham or something. To hell with guys like you guys.”