“You’ve been following me around for a couple, of days,” I said. “Like a fellow trying to pick up a girl and lacking the last inch of nerve. Maybe you’re selling insurance. Maybe you knew a fellow called Joe Brody. That’s a lot of maybes, but I have a lot on hand in my business.”
His eyes bulged and his lower lip almost fell in his lap. “Christ, how’d you know that?” he snapped.
“I’m psychic. Shake your business up and pour it. I haven’t got all day.”
The brightness of his eyes almost disappeared between the suddenly narrowed lids. There was silence. The rain pounded down on the flat tarred roof over the Mansion House lobby below my windows. His eyes opened a little, shined again, and his voice was full of thought.
“I was trying to get a line on you, sure,” he said. “I’ve got something to sell—cheap, for a couple of C notes. How’d you tie me to Joe?”
I opened a letter and read it. It offered me a six months’ correspondence course in fingerprinting at a special professional discount. I chopped it into the waste basket and looked at the little man again. “Don’t mind me. I was just guessing. You’re not a cop. You don’t belong to Eddie Mars’ outfit. I asked him last night. I couldn’t think of anybody else but Joe Brody’s friends who would be that much interested in me.”
“Jesus,” he said and licked his lower lip. His face had turned white as paper when I mentioned Eddie Mars. His mouth drooped open and his cigarette hung to the corner of it by some magic, as if it had grown there. “Aw, you’re kidding me,” he said at last, with the sort of smile the operating room sees.
“All right. I’m kidding you.” I opened another letter. This one wanted to send me a daily newsletter from Washington, all inside stuff, straight from the cookhouse. “I suppose Agnes is loose,” I added.
“Yeah. She sent me. You interested?”
“Well—she’s a blonde.”
“Nuts. You made a crack when you were up there that night—the night Joe got squibbed off. Something about Brody must have known something good about the Sternwoods or he wouldn’t have taken the chance on that picture he sent them.”
“Uh-huh. So he had? What was it?”
“That’s what the two hundred bucks pays for.”
I dropped some more fan mail into the basket and lit myself a fresh cigarette.
“We gotta get out of town,” he said. “Agnes is a nice girl. You can’t hold that stuff on her. It’s not so easy for a dame to get by these days.”
“She’s too big for you,” I said. “She’ll roll on you and smother you.”
“That’s kind of a dirty crack, brother,” he said with something that was near enough to dignity to make me stare at him.
I said: “You’re right. I’ve been meeting the wrong kind of people lately. Let’s cut out the gabble and get down to cases. What have you got for the money?”
“Would you pay for it?”
“If it does what?”
“If it helps you find Rusty Regan.”
“I’m not looking for Rusty Regan.”
“Says you. Want to hear it or not?”
“Go ahead and chirp. I’ll pay for anything I use. Two C notes buys a lot of information in my circle.”
“Eddie Mars had Regan bumped off,” he said calmly, and leaned back as if he had just been made a vice-president.
I waved a hand in the direction of the door. “I wouldn’t even argue with you,” I said. “I wouldn’t waste the oxygen. On your way, small size.”
He leaned across the desk, white lines at the corners of his mouth. He snubbed his cigarette out carefully, over and over again, without looking at it. From behind a communicating door came the sound of a typewriter clacking monotonously to the bell, to the shift, line after line.
“I’m not kidding,” he said.
“Beat it. Don’t bother me. I have work to do.”
“No you don’t,” he said sharply. “I ain’t that easy. I came here to speak my piece and I’m speaking it. I knew Rusty myself. Not well, well enough to say ‘How’s a boy?’ and he’d answer me or he wouldn’t, according to how he felt. A nice guy though. I always liked him. He was sweet on a singer named Mona Grant. Then she changed her name to Mars. Rusty got sore and married a rich dame that hung around the joints like she couldn’t sleep well at home. You know all about her, tall, dark, enough looks for a Derby winner, but the type would put a lot of pressure on a guy. High-strung. Rusty wouldn’t get along with her. But Jesus, he’d get along with her old man’s dough, wouldn’t he? That’s what you think. This Regan was a cockeyed sort of buzzard. He had long-range eyes. He was looking over into the next valley all the time. He wasn’t scarcely around where he was. I don’t think he gave a damn about dough. And coming from me, brother, that’s a compliment.”
The little man wasn’t so dumb after all. A three for a quarter grifter wouldn’t even think such thoughts, much less know how to express them.
I said: “So he ran away.”
“He started to run away, maybe. With this girl Mona. She wasn’t living with Eddie Mars, didn’t like his rackets. Especially the side lines, like blackmail, bent cars, hideouts for hot boys from the east, and so on. The talk was Regan told Eddie one night, right out in the open, that if he ever messed Mona up in any criminal rap, he’d be around to see him.”
“Most of this is on the record, Harry,” I said. “You can’t expect money for that.”
“I’m coming to what isn’t. So Regan blew. I used to see him every afternoon in Vardi’s drinking Irish whiskey and staring at the wall. He don’t talk much any more. He’d give me a bet now and then, which was what I was there for, to pick up bets for Puss Walgreen.”
“I thought he was in the insurance business.”
“That’s what it says on the door. I guess he’d sell you insurance at that, if you tramped on him. Well, about the middle of September I don’t see Regan any more. I don’t notice it right away. You know how it is. A guy’s there and you see him and then he ain’t there and you don’t not see him until something makes you think of it. What makes me think about it is I hear a guy say laughing that Eddie Mars’ woman lammed out with Rusty Regan and Mars is acting like he was best man, instead of being sore. So I tell Joe Brody and Joe was smart.”
“Like hell he was,” I said.
“Not copper smart, but still smart. He’s out for the dough. He gets to figuring could he get a line somehow on the two lovebirds he could maybe collect twice—once from Eddie Mars and once from Regan’s wife. Joe knew the family a little.”
“Five grand worth,” I said. “He nicked them for that a while back.”
“Yeah?” Harry Jones looked mildly surprised. “Agnes ought to of told me that. There’s a frail for you. Always holding out. Well, Joe and me watch the papers and we don’t see anything, so we know old Sternwood has a blanket on it. Then one day I see Lash Canino in Vardi’s. Know him?”
I shook my head.
“There’s a boy that is tough like some guys think they are tough. He does a job for Eddie Mars when Mars needs him—trouble-shooting. He’d bump a guy off between drinks. When Mars don’t need him he don’t go near him. And he don’t stay in L.A. Well it might be something and it might not. Maybe they got a line on Regan and Mars has just been sitting back with a smile on his puss, waiting for the chance. Then again it might be something else entirely. Anyway I tell Joe and Joe gets on Casino’s tail. He can tail me, I’m no good at it. I’m giving that one away. No charge. And Joe tails Canino out to the Sternwood place and Canino parks outside the estate and a car come up beside him with a girl in it. They talk for a while and Joe thinks the girl passes something over, like maybe dough. The girl beats it. It’s Regan’s wife. Okey, she knows Canino and Canino knows Mars. So Joe figures Canino knows something about Regan and is trying to squeeze a little on the side for himself. Canino blows and Joe loses him. End of Act One.”
“What does this Canino look like?”
“Short, heavy set, brown hair, brown eyes, and always wears brown clothes and a brown hat. Even wears a brown suede raincoat. Drives a brown coupe. Everything brown for Mr. Canino.”
“Let’s have Act Two,” I said.
“Without some dough that’s all.”
“I don’t see two hundred bucks in it. Mrs. Regan married an ex-bootlegger out of the joints. She’d know other people of his sort. She knows Eddie Mars well. If she thought anything had happened to Regan, Eddie would be the very man she’d go to, and Canino might be the man Eddie would pick to handle the assignment. Is that all you have?”
“Would you give the two hundred to know where Eddie’s wife is?” the little man asked calmly.
He had all my attention now. I almost cracked the arms of my chair leaning on them.