by Otto Penzler
She answered the phone herself, very quickly, with no sleep in her voice.
“Marlowe,” I said. “O.K. your end?”
“Yes … yes,” she said. “I’m alone.”
“I found something,” I said. “Or rather the police did. But your dark boy gypped you. I have a string of pearls. They’re not real. He sold the real ones, I guess, and made you up a string of ringers, with your clasp.”
She was silent for a long time. Then, a little faintly: “The police found them?”
“In Waldo’s car. But they’re not telling. We have a deal. Look at the papers in the morning and you’ll be able to figure out why.”
“There doesn’t seem to be anything more to say,” she said. “Can I have the clasp?”
“Yes. Can you meet me tomorrow at four in the Club Esquire bar?”
“You’re really rather sweet,” she said in a dragged out voice. “I can. Frank is still at his meeting.”
“Those meetings—they take it out of a guy,” I said. We said goodbye.
I called a West Los Angeles number. He was still there, with the Russian girl.
“You can send me a check for five hundred in the morning,” I told him. “Made out to the Police Relief Fund, if you want to. Because that’s where it’s going.”
Copernik made the third page of the morning papers with two photos and a nice half-column. The little brown man in Apartment 31 didn’t make the paper at all. The Apartment House Association has a good lobby too.
I went out after breakfast and the wind was all gone. It was soft, cool, a little foggy. The sky was close and comfortable and gray. I rode down to the boulevard and picked out the best jewelry store on it and laid a string of pearls on a black velvet mat under a daylight-blue lamp. A man in a wing collar and striped trousers looked down at them languidly.
“How good?” I asked.
“I’m sorry, sir. We don’t make appraisals. I can give you the name of an appraiser.”
“Don’t kid me,” I said. “They’re Dutch.”
He focused the light a little and leaned down and toyed with a few inches of the string.
“I want a string just like them, fitted to that clasp, and in a hurry,” I added.
“How, like them?” He didn’t look up. “And they’re not Dutch. They’re Bohemian.”
“O.K., can you duplicate them?”
He shook his head and pushed the velvet pad away as if it soiled him. “In three months, perhaps. We don’t blow glass like that in this country. If you wanted them matched—three months at least. And this house would not do that sort of thing at all.”
“It must be swell to be that snooty,” I said. I put a card under his black sleeve. “Give me a name that will—and not in three months—and maybe not exactly like them.”
He shrugged, went away with the card, came back in five minutes and handed it back to me. There was something written on the back.
The old Levantine had a shop on Melrose, a junk shop with everything in the window from a folding baby carriage to a French horn, from a mother-of-pearl lorgnette in a faded plush case to one of those .44 Special Single Action six-shooters they still make for Western peace officers whose grandfathers were tough.
The old Levantine wore a skull cap and two pairs of glasses and a full beard. He studied my pearls, shook his head sadly, and said: “For twenty dollars, almost so good. Not so good, you understand. Not so good glass.”
“How alike will they look?”
He spread his firm strong hands. “I am telling you the truth,” he said. “They would not fool a baby.”
“Make them up,” I said. “With this clasp. And I want the others back, too, of course.”
“Yah. Two o’clock,” he said.
Leon Valesanos, the little brown man from Uruguay, made the afternoon papers. He had been found hanging in an un-named apartment. The police were investigating.
At four o’clock I walked into the long cool bar of the Club Esquire and prowled along the row of booths until I found one where a woman sat alone. She wore a hat like a shallow soup plate with a very wide edge, a brown tailor-made suit with a severe mannish shirt and tie.
I sat down beside her and slipped a parcel along the seat.
“You don’t open that,” I said. “In fact you can slip it into the incinerator as is, if you want to.”
She looked at me with dark tired eyes. Her fingers twisted a thin glass that smelled of peppermint. “Thanks.” Her face was very pale.
I ordered a highball and the waiter went away. “Read the papers?”
“Yes.”
“You understand now about this fellow Copernik who stole your act? That’s why they won’t change the story or bring you into it.”
“It doesn’t matter now,” she said. “Thank you, all the same. Please—please show them to me.”
I pulled the string of pearls out of the loosely wrapped tissue paper in my pocket and slid them across to her. The silver propeller clasp winked in the light of the wall bracket. The little diamond winked. The pearls were as dull as white soap. They didn’t even match in size.
“You were right,” she said tonelessly. “They are not my pearls.”
The waiter came with my drink and she put her bag on them deftly. When he was gone she fingered them slowly once more, dropped them into the bag and gave me a dry mirthless smile.
I stood there a moment with a hand hard on the table.
“As you said—I’ll keep the clasp.”
I said slowly: “You don’t know anything about me. You saved my life last night and we had a moment, but it was just a moment. You still don’t know anything about me. There’s a detective downtown named Ybarra, a Mexican of the nice sort, who was on the job when the pearls were found in Waldo’s suitcase. That is in case you would like to make sure—”
She said: “Don’t be silly. It’s all finished. It was a memory. I’m too young to nurse memories. It may be for the best. I loved Stan Phillips—but he’s gone—long gone.”
I stared at her, didn’t say anything.
She added quietly: “This morning my husband told me something I hadn’t known. We are to separate. So I have very little to laugh about today.”
“I’m sorry,” I said lamely. “There’s nothing to say. I may see you sometime. Maybe not. I don’t move much in your circle. Good luck.”
I stood up. We looked at each other for a moment. “You haven’t touched your drink,” she said.
“You drink it. That peppermint stuff will just make you sick.”
I stood there a moment with a hand on the table.
“If anybody ever bothers you,” I said, “let me know.”
I went out of the bar without looking back at her, got into my car and drove west on Sunset and down all the way to the Coast Highway. Everywhere along the way gardens were full of withered and blackened leaves and flowers which the hot wind had burned.
But the ocean looked cool and languid and just the same as ever. I drove on almost to Mal-ibu and then parked and went and sat on a big rock that was inside somebody’s wire fence. It was about half-tide and coming in. The air smelled of kelp. I watched the water for a while and then I pulled a string of Bohemian glass imitation pearls out of my pocket and cut the knot at one end and slipped the pearls off one by one.
When I had them all loose in my left hand I held them like that for a while and thought. There wasn’t really anything to think about. I was sure.
“To the memory of Mr. Stan Phillips,” I said aloud. “Just another four-flusher.”
I flipped her pearls out into the water one by one at the floating seagulls.
They made little splashes and the seagulls rose off the water and swooped at the splashes.
Wise Guy
Frederick Nebel
FEW PULP WRITERS WERE as prolific as Frederick Nebel (1903-1967), who wrote several long-running series, mainly in Black Mask and its closest rival, Dime Detective, in a career that essentially ended after a sin
gle decade (1927-1937). His crimefighting heroes are tough and frequently violent, but they bring a strong moral code to their jobs, and a level of realism achieved by few other pulp writers.
Homicide Captain Steve MacBride, who is as tough as they come, and his ever-present sidekick, Free Press reporter Kennedy, who provides comic relief in most of the thirty-seven stories in which they appear, was a Black Mask fixture for nearly a decade.
Donny “Tough Dick” Donahue of the Interstate Agency, with twenty-one adventures, all in Black Mask, ran from 1930 to 1935; a half-dozen of the best were collected in Six Deadly Dames (1950).
The stories featuring Cardigan, an operative for the Cosmos Detective Agency, nearly fifty in all, ran from 1931 to 1937 in the pages of Dime Detective; the best of them were published in The Adventures of Cardigan (1988).
Both of Nebel’s novels were filmed: Sleepers East (1933) in 1934 and Fifty Roads to Town (1936) in 1937.
“Wise Guy,” a MacBride and Kennedy story, was first published in Black Mask in April 1930.
Wise Guy
Frederick Nebel
An Alderman who does not want to play
Gangland’s racket calls for the help of
Capt. Steve Mac Bride
I
LDERMAN TONY MARATELLI walked up and down the living-room of his house in Riddle Street. Riddle was the name of a one-time tax commissioner. Maratelli was a fat man, with fat dark eyes and two generous chins. His fingers were fat, too, and the fingers of one hand were splayed around a glass of Chianti, from which at frequent intervals he took quick, sibilant draughts. Now an Italian does not drink Chianti that way. But Maratelli looked worried. He was.
The winter night wind keened in the street outside and shook the windows in a sort of brusque, sharp fury. Riddle Street is a dark street. Also a windy one. That is because one end of it disembogues into River Road, where the piers are. One upon a time Riddle Street was aristocratic. Then it became smugly middle-class and grudgingly democratic. Then proletariat. Other streets around it went in for stores and warehouses and shipping offices. But Riddle Street clung to its brownstone fronts and its three-step stoops. It was rated a decent street.
Maratelli stopped short as his five-year-old daughter bowled into the room wearing a variety of night attire known as teddy bears.
‘ ”Night, poppa.”
Maratelli put down the glass of Chianti, picked up the baby and bounced her playfully up and down on the palms of his fat hands.
“Good-night, angel,” he said.
His wife, who was taller than he, and heavier, came in and smiled and held out her arms.
“Give her to me, Tony,” she said.
“Yes, mama,” said Maratelli. “Put her to bed and then close that door. Captain MacBride will be here maybe any minute.”
“You want to be alone, Tony, don’t you?”
“Yes, mama.”
She looked at him. “It’s about …”
“Yes, mama. Please take angel to bed and then you, too, leave me alone.”
“All right, Tony.” She looked a little sad.
He laughed, and his ragtag mustache fanned over his mouth. He pinched the baby’s cheeks, then his wife’s, then marched with her to the inner door. They went out, and he closed the door and sighed.
He went over to the table, picked up the glass of Chianti and marched up and down the room. His broad, heavy shoes thumped on the carpet. He wore a henna-colored shirt, a green tie, red suspenders and tobacco-brown pants. His shoes creaked.
When the bell rang, he fairly leaped into the hallway. He snapped back the lock and opened the door.
“Ah, Cap! Good you come!”
MacBride strolled in. He wore a neat gray Cheviot overcoat, a flap-brimmed hat of lighter gray. His hands were in his pockets and he smoked a cigar.
“Slow at Headquarters, so I thought I’d come down.”
“Yes—yes—yes.”
Maratelli closed the hall door. The lock snapped automatically. He bustled into the living-room, eyed a Morris chair, then took a couple of pillows from the lounge, placed them in the Morris chair and patted hollows into them. He spread his hands towards the chair.
“Have a nice seat, Cap.”
“Thanks.”
“Give me the overcoat and the hat.”
“That’s all right, Tony.”
MacBride merely unbuttoned his coat, sat down and laid his hat on the table. He was freshly shaven, neatly combed, and his long, lean face had the hard, ruddy glint of a face that knows the weather. He leaned back comfortably, crossing one leg over the other. The pants had a fine crease, the shoes were well polished, and the laces neatly tied.
“Chianti, Cap?”
“A shot of Scotch’d go better.”
“Yes—yes—yes!”
Maratelli brought a bottle from the sideboard, along with a bottle of Canada Dry.
“Straight,” said MacBride.
Maratelli took one with him, said, “Here’s how,” and they drank.
MacBride looked at the end of his cigar.
“Well, Tony, what’s the trouble?”
The wind kept clutching at the windows. Maratelli went over and tightened a latch. Then he pulled up a rocker to face MacBride, sat down on the edge of it, lit a twisted cheroot and took a couple of quick, nervous puffs. He stared vacantly at MacBride’s polished shoe.
Finally— ”About my boy Dominick.”
“H’m.”
“You know?”
“Go on, Tony.”
“Yes—yes. Look, Cap, I’m a good guy. I’m a good wop. I got a wife and kids and business and I been elected alderman and—well, I’m a pretty good guy. I don’t want to be on no racket, and I don’t want any kind of help from any rough guys in the neighborhood. I been pestered a lot, Cap, but I ain’t gonna give in. I got a wife and kids and a good reputation and I want to keep the slate what you call pretty damn clean. Cap, I ask you to come along here tonight after I been thinking a lotta things over in my head. I need help, Cap. What’s a wop gonna do when he needs help? I dunno. But I ask you, and maybe you be my friend.”
“Sure,” said MacBride. “Get it off your chest.”
“This wop—uh—Chibbarro, you know him?”
“Sam Chibbarro?”
“Yes—yes—yes.”
“Uhuh.”
“Him.”
“What about him?”
Maratelli took a long breath. It was coming hard, and he wiped his face with his fat hand. He cleared his throat, took a drink of Chianti and cleared his throat again.
“Him. It’s about him. Him and my boy Dominick. You know my boy Dominick is only twenty-one. And—and—”
“Going around with Chibby?”
“Yes—yes. Look. This is it, and Holy Mother, if Chibby knows I talk to you—” He exhaled a vast breath and shook his head. “Look. I have lotsa trucks, Cap, being what I am a contractor. I have ten trucks, some big, some not that big. Chibby—uh—Chibby he wants my trucks for to run booze at night!”
MacBride uncrossed his legs and put both heels on the floor. He leaned forward and, putting the elbow of one arm on his knee, jack-knifed the other arm against his side. His eyes, which had a windy blue look, stared point-blank at Maratelli.
“And you?”
“Well—” Maratelli sat back and spread his hands palmwise and opened his eyes wide— “me, I say no!”
“How long has this been going on?”
“Maybe a month.”
“And Dominick. Where does he come in?”
Maratelli fell back in his chair like a deflated balloon. “That is what you call it, Cap. He is very good friends. He thinks Chibby is a great guy. He says I am the old fool.”
MacBride looked at the floor, and his eyelids came down thoughtfully; the ghost of a curl came to his wide mouth, slightly sardonic.
Maratelli was hurrying on— ”Look, Cap. My Dominick is a good boy, but if he keeps friends with that dirty wop Chibbarro it is gonna be no
good. I can’t stand for it, Cap. And what can I do with Dominick? He laughs at me. Puts the grease on his hair and wears the Tuxedo and goes around with Chibby like a millionaire. Dominick has done nothing bad yet, but if this Chibby— Look, Cap, whatcha think I’m gonna do?”
MacBride sat back. “Hell, Tony, I’ve had a lot of tough jobs in my day, but you hand me a lulu. It’s too bad. You’ve got my sympathy, and that’s no bologney. I’ll think it over. I’ll do the best I can.”
“Please, Cap, please. Every night Dominick goes out with Chibby. Dominick ain’t got the money, so Chibby he pays the bills. And where do they go? Ah—the Club Naples, and places like that, and women—Holy Mother, it ain’t good, Cap! My wife and my baby—I ask you, Cap, for my sake.”
“Sure, Tony.”
MacBride stood up.
Maratelli stood up, his breath whistling in his throat. “But if Chibby knows I speak to you—”
“He won’t,” clipped MacBride.
He buttoned his coat, put on his hat and shoved his hands into his pockets. “I’ll be going.”
“Have another drink.”
“Thanks—no.”
Maratelli let him out into the street and hung in the doorway.
“Night, Cap.”
“Night, Tony.”
MacBride was already swinging away, his cigar a red eye in the wind.
II
Jockey Street was never a good street. It was the wayward offspring of a wayward neighborhood. Six blocks of it made a bee line from the white-lights district to the no-lights district, and then petered off into the river.
The way was dark after the third block, except for a solitary electric sign that winked seductively in the middle of the fourth. It projected over the sidewalk, and the winking, beckoning letters were painted green:
MacBride did not come down from the bright lights. He came up from River Road, up from the bleak, unlovely waterfront. He still walked with his hands in his pockets, and the wind blew from behind, flapping his coat around his knees.
A man in a faded red uniform with tarnished gold braid stood in front of the double doors. As MacBride drew near, the man reached back and laid his hand on the knob. He opened the door as MacBride came up, and MacBride went inside.