The man who had been toweling his head went over to the rail and cleared his throat in a loud hawk that made everybody look at him. “Got some sand,” he said, and spat. “Not as much as the boy friend got—but some.”
The uniformed man said: “Could have been drunk. Showing off all alone in the rain. Drunks will do anything.”
“Drunk, hell,” the plainclothesman said. “The hand throttle’s set halfway down and the guy’s been sapped on the side of the head. Ask me and I’ll call it murder.”
Ohls looked at the man with the towel. “What do you think, buddy?”
The man with the towel looked flattered. He grinned. “I say suicide, Mac. None of my business, but you ask me, I say suicide. First off the guy plowed an awful straight furrow down that pier. You can read his tread marks all the way nearly. That puts it after the rain like the Sheriff said. Then he hit the pier hard and clean or he don’t go through and land right side up. More likely turned over a couple of times. So he had plenty of speed and hit the rail square. That’s more than half-throttle. He could have done that with his hand falling and he could have hurt his head falling too.”
Ohls said: “You got eyes, buddy. Frisked him?” he asked the deputy. The deputy looked at me, then at the crew against the wheelhouse. “Okey, save that,” Ohls said.
A small man with glasses and a tired face and a black bag came down the steps from the pier. He picked out a fairly clean spot on the deck and put the bag down. Then he took his hat off and rubbed the back of his neck and stared out to sea, as if he didn’t know where he was or what he had come for.
Ohls said: “There’s your customer, Doc. Dove off the pier last night. Around nine to ten. That’s all we know.”
The small man looked in at the dead man morosely. He fingered the head, peered at the bruise on the temple, moved the head around with both hands, felt the man’s ribs. He lifted a lax dead hand and stared at the fingernails. He let it fall and watched it fall. He stepped back and opened his bag and took out a printed pad of D.O.A. forms and began to write over a carbon.
“Broken neck’s the apparent cause of death,” he said, writing. “Which means there won’t be much water in him. Which means he’s due to start getting stiff pretty quick now he’s out in the air. Better get him out of the car before he does. You won’t like doing it after.”
Ohls nodded. “How long dead, Doc?”
“I wouldn’t know.”
Ohls looked at him sharply and took the little cigar out of his mouth and looked at that sharply. “Pleased to know you, Doc. A coroner’s man that can’t guess within five minutes has me beat.”
The little man grinned sourly and put his pad in his bag and clipped his pencil back on his vest. “If he ate dinner last night, I’ll tell you—if I know what time he ate it. But not within five minutes.”
“How would he get that bruise—falling?”
The little man looked at the bruise again. “I don’t think so. That blow came from something covered. And it had already bled subcutaneously while he was alive.”
“Blackjack, huh?”
“Very likely.”
The little M.E.’s man nodded, picked his bag off deck and went back up the steps to the pier. An ambulance was backing into position outside the stucco arch. Ohls looked at me and said: “Let’s go. Hardly worth the ride, was it?”
We went back along the pier and got into Ohls’ sedan again. He wrestled it around on the highway and drove back towards town along a three-lane highway washed clean by the rain, past low rolling hills of yellow-white sand terraced with pink moss. Seaward a few gulls wheeled and swooped over something in the surf and far out a white yacht looked as if it was hanging in the sky.
Ohls cocked his chin at me and said: “Know him?”
“Sure. The Sternwood chauffeur. I saw him dusting that very car out there yesterday.”
“I don’t want to crowd you, Marlowe. Just tell me, did the job have anything to do with him?”
“No. I don’t even know his name.”
“Owen Taylor. How do I know? Funny about that. About a year or so back we had him in the cooler on a Mann Act rap. It seems he run Sternwood’s hotcha daughter, the young one, off to Yuma. The sister ran after them and brought them back and had Owen heaved into the icebox. Then next day she comes down to the D.A. and gets him to beg the kid off with the U. S. ‘cutor. She says the kid meant to marry her sister and wanted to, only the sister can’t see it. All she wanted was to kick a few high ones off the bar and have herself a party. So we let the kid go and then darned if they don’t have him come back to work. And a little later we get the routine report on his prints from Washington, and he’s got a prior back in Indiana, attempted hold-up six years ago. He got off with a six months in the county jail, the very one Dillinger bust out of. We hand that to the Sternwoods and they keep him on just the same. What do you think of that?”
“They seem to be a screwy family,” I said. “Do they know about last night?”
“No. I gotta go up against them now.”
“Leave the old man out of it, if you can.”
“Why?”
“He has enough troubles and he’s sick.”
“You mean Regan?”
I scowled. “I don’t know anything about Regan, I told you. I’m not looking for Regan. Regan hasn’t bothered anybody that I know of.”
Ohls said: “Oh,” and stared thoughtfully out to sea and the sedan nearly went off the road. For the rest of the drive back to town he hardly spoke. He dropped me off in Hollywood near the Chinese Theater and turned back west to Alta Brea Crescent. I ate lunch at a counter and looked at an afternoon paper and couldn’t find anything about Geiger in it.
After lunch I walked east on the boulevard to have another look at Geiger’s store.
10
The lean black-eyed credit jeweler was standing in his entrance in the same position as the afternoon before. He gave me the same knowing look as I turned in. The store looked just the same. The same lamp glowed on the small desk in the corner and the same ash blonde in the same black suede-like dress got up from behind it and came towards me with the same tentative smile on her face.
“Was it–?” she said and stopped. Her silver nails twitched at her side. There was an overtone of strain in her smile. It wasn’t a smile at all. It was a grimace. She just thought it was a smile.
“Back again,” I chirped airily, and waved a cigarette. “Mr. Geiger in today?”
“I’m—I’m afraid not. No—I’m afraid not. Let me see—you wanted. . .”
I took my dark glasses off and tapped them delicately on the inside of my left wrist. If you can weigh a hundred and ninety pounds and look like a fairy, I was doing my best.
“That was just a stall about those first editions,” I whispered. “I have to be careful. I’ve got something he’ll want. Something he’s wanted for a long time.”
The silver fingernails touched the blond hair over one small jet-buttoned ear. “Oh, a salesman,” she said. “Well—you might come in tomorrow. I think he’ll be here tomorrow.”
“Drop the veil,” I said. “I’m in the business too.”
Her eyes narrowed until they were a faint greenish glitter, like a forest pool far back in the shadow of trees. Her fingers clawed at her palm. She stared at me and chopped off a breath.
“Is he sick? I could go up to the house,” I said impatiently, “I haven’t got forever.”
“You—a—you—a—” her throat jammed. I thought she was going to fall on her nose. Her whole body shivered and her face fell apart like a bride’s pie crust. She put it together again slowly, as if lifting a great weight, by sheer will power. The smile came back, with a couple of corners badly bent.
“No,” she breathed. “No. He’s out of town. That—wouldn’t be any use. Can’t you—come in—tomorrow?”
I had my mouth open to say something when the partition door opened a foot. The tall dark handsome boy in the jerkin looked out, pale-faced and tightlipped, saw me, shut the door quickly again, but not before I had seen on the floor behind him a lot of wooden boxes lined with newspapers and packed loosely with books. A man in very new overalls was fussing with them. Some of Geiger’s stock was being moved out.
When the door shut I put my dark glasses on again and touched my hat. “Tomorrow, then. I’d like to give you a card, but you know how it is.”
“Ye-es. I know how it is.” She shivered a little more and made a faint sucking noise between her bright lips. I went out of the store and west on the boulevard to the corner and north on the street to the alley which ran behind the stores. A small black truck with wire sides and no lettering on it was backed up to Geiger’s place. The man in the very new overalls was just heaving a box up on the tailboard. I went back to the boulevard and along the block next to Geiger’s and found a taxi standing at a fireplug. A fresh-faced kid was reading a horror magazine behind the wheel. I leaned in and showed him a dollar: “Tail job?”
He looked me over. “Cop?”
“Private.”
He grinned. “My meat, Jack.” He tucked the magazine over his rear view mirror and I got into the cab. We went around the block and pulled up across from Geiger’s alley, beside another fireplug.
There were about a dozen boxes on the truck when the man in overalls closed the screened doors and hooked the tailboard up and got in behind the wheel.
“Take him,” I told my driver.
The man in overalls gunned his motor, shot a glance up and down the alley and ran away fast in the other direction. He turned left out of the alley. We did the same. I caught a glimpse of the truck turning east on Franklin and told my driver to close in a little. He didn’t or couldn’t do it. I saw the truck two blocks away when we got to Franklin. We had it in sight to Vine and across Vine and all the way to Western. We saw it twice after Western. There was a lot of traffic and the freshfaced kid tailed from too far back. I was telling him about that without mincing words when the truck, now far ahead, turned north again. The street at which it turned was called Brittany Place. When we got to Brittany Place the truck had vanished.
The fresh-faced kid made comforting sounds at me through the panel and we went up the hill at four miles an hour looking for the truck behind bushes. Two blocks up, Brittany Place swung to the east and met Randall Place in a tongue of land on which there was a white apartment house with its front on Randall Place and its basement garage opening on Brittany. We were going past that and the fresh-faced kid was telling me the truck couldn’t be far away when I looked through the arched entrance of the garage and saw it back in the dimness with its rear doors open again.
We went around to the front of the apartment house and I got out. There was nobody in the lobby, no switchboard. A wooden desk was pushed back against the wail beside a panel of gilt mailboxes. I looked the names over. A man named Joseph Brody had Apartment 405. A man named Joe Brody had received five thousand dollars from General Sternwood to stop playing with Carmen and find some other little girl to play with. It could be the same Joe Brody. I felt like giving odds on it.
I went around an elbow of wall to the foot of tiled stairs and the shaft of the automatic elevator. The top of the elevator was level with the floor. There was a door beside the shaft lettered “Garage.” I opened it and went down narrow steps to the basement. The automatic elevator was propped open and the man in new overalls was grunting hard as he stacked heavy boxes in it. I stood beside him and lit a cigarette and watched him. He didn’t like my watching him.
After a while I said: “Watch the weight, bud. She’s only tested for half a ton. Where’s the stuff going?”
“Brody, four-o-five,” he grunted. “Manager?”
“Yeah. Looks like a nice lot of loot.”