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, blank-eyed.
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 Donovan-Madder 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 window-cleaning. 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 Horne. 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 cloud
s 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 stained-glass 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.
Trouble Is My Business Page 17