This one, of course, is a pastiche and parody of one of the really fine mysteries of the twentieth century. Writing pastiche is tremendously enjoyable; it lets a writer put on a mask and pretend to be someone else for a while, with a different style, different strengths, different weaknesses. There really were elephants on Malta like the one described, but they didn’t survive down to historic times. Too bad. Making up the Greek and Latin quotes was fun to do, too.
* * *
Miles Bowman was a man built of rectangular blocks. His head was one, squared off with short-cut graying hair at the top and a sharp jaw at the bottom. His chest and shoulders made a thick brick, his belly below them a slightly smaller one. His arms and legs were thick, muscular pillars. He trimmed his nails straight across at the ends of his fingers.
His partner Tom Trencher, that smiling devil, was dead. In the hallway outside the office, a sign painter was using a razor blade to scrape bowman & trencher off the frosted glass. When he was done, he would paint Bowman’s name there by itself in gilt. Centered.
The phone rang. His secretary answered it. Hester Prine was a tall, skinny, brown-haired girl. She wore good clothes as if they were sacks. But when she talked, any man who heard her had hungry dreams for days.
She covered the mouthpiece with her hand. “It’s your wife.”
Bowman shook his head. “I don’t want to talk to Eva.”
“She wants to talk to you about Tom.”
“I figured she did. What else would she call me about here? I don’t want to talk to her, I told you. Tell her I’m out on a case. I’ll see her tonight. She can talk to me then.”
His secretary’s mouth twisted, but she took her hand away and said what Bowman had told her to say. She had to say it three times before she could hang up. Then she rose and walked over to Bowman’s desk in the inner office. She looked down at him. “You’re a louse, Miles.”
“Yeah, I know,” he said comfortably. His arm slid around her waist. He pulled her closer to him.
“Louse,” she said again, in a different tone of voice. She hesitated. “Miles, she wants to talk to you because—” She ran down like a phonograph that needs winding.
“Because she thinks I killed Tom.” His hand tightened on her hip. He smiled. His teeth were not very good. “Why would she think a thing like that?”
“Because you know she and—” Hester Prine ran down again. “You’re hurting me.”
“Am I?” He did not let go. “I know lots of things. But I didn’t kill Tom. Eva won’t pin that one on me. The cops won’t, either.”
Soft footsteps came down the hall. They paused in front of the office. The sign painter stopped scraping. Hester Prine twisted away from Bowman. This time he did not try to stop her.
The door opened. By then, Bowman’s secretary was back at her desk. A woman walked into the office. The sign painter stared at her until the door closed and cut off his view. Then, with reluctant razor, he went back to work.
The woman was small and swarthy and perfect, with a heart-shaped face and enormous black eyes that could smile or sob or blaze or do all three at once in the space of a couple of heartbeats. Her crow’s-wing hair fell almost to her shoulders in a straight bob. It was not what they were wearing this year, but on her it was right. So was her orange crêpe silk frock with a flared peplum skirt.
She strode past Hester Prine as if the secretary did not exist and went into Bowman’s inner office. He got up from in back of his desk. “Miss Lenoir,” he said. He shut the door behind her.
“Your partner,” Claire Lenoir said in a broken voice. “It’s my fault.” Tears glistened in her eyes, but did not fall.
“Not all of it,” he answered. “Tom knew what he was doing, and you told him the guy he was tailing—the guy who’s been tailing you—was one rough customer. You don’t get into this business if you think everything is going to be easy all the time. Or you better not.”
Her hands fluttered. She wore two rings, of gold and emeralds. They glowed against her dark skin. “But—” she said.
Bowman waved dismissively. “You mean that story you told us before? That didn’t have anything to do with anything. If Tom and I had believed it, it might have, but we didn’t. So don’t worry about that. But you’re going to have to level sooner or later, if you want me to do whatever you really want me to do.”
The outer door opened. Hester Prine talked with someone—a man—for a few seconds. The phone on Bowman’s desk jangled. He picked it up. “A Mr. Nicholas Alexandria wants to see you right now,” his secretary said. “He says it’s worth two hundred dollars.”
“Have you seen the money?” Bowman asked.
“He’s got it,” she answered.
Bowman mouthed the name “Nicholas Alexandria” to Claire Lenoir. She started violently. The blood drained from her face, leaving her skin the color of old newspaper. She shook her head so her hair for a moment flew across her face. One strand stuck at the corner of her red-painted mouth. She brushed it away with an angry gesture.
“Send him in, sweetheart,” Bowman said placidly. He hung up the telephone.
The man who came through the door might have been born in the city that gave him his name. He was darker than Claire Lenoir. His nose curved like a saber blade. His mouth, a Cupid’s bow, was red but not painted. He stank of patchouli.
His eyes, hard and shiny and black as obsidian, flicked to Claire Lenoir and widened slightly. Then they returned to Bowman. “Your secretary did not say you had—this woman here,” he said in a fussy, precise voice.
“Did you ask her?” Bowman asked. Nicholas Alexandria’s eyes widened again. He shook his head, a single, tightly controlled gesture. Bowman said, “Then you’ve got no cause for complaint. I hear you’re two hundred dollars interested in talking to me.” He held out his hand, palm up.
Nicholas Alexandria’s finely manicured hand drew from the pocket of his velvet jacket a wallet of tanned snakeskin. He removed from it four bills bearing the image of Ulysses S. Grant, held them out to Miles Bowman.
Bowman took them, studied them, put them into his own wallet, and stuck it back in his hip pocket. “All right,” he said. He waved to a chair. “Sit. Talk.”
Alexandria sat. His red mouth contracted petulantly. “I might have known Miss Tellini would be here, when I wished to discuss with you matters pertaining to the Maltese Elephant.”
Bowman’s head turned on its thick neck. “Miss Tellini?” he asked Claire Lenoir.
“Gina Tellini,” Nicholas Alexandria said with a certain cold relish. “Why? Under what name do you know her?”
“It’s not important,” Bowman answered. He smiled at the girl. “Got any others?”
Her skin darkened. She looked away from him. Nicholas Alexandria said, “That is the appellation with which she was born in the district of New York known as, I believe, Hell’s Kitchen, any representations to the contrary notwithstanding.” Gina Tellini spat something in Italian. Nicholas Alexandria answered in the same language, his diction precise. Her mouth fell open. His smile was frigid. In English, he said, “You see, I can get down in the gutter, too.”
Miles Bowman held up a meaty hand. “Enough, already,” he said. He waved to Alexandria. “You wanted to talk about the Maltese Elephant. Go ahead and talk.”
“You are already familiar with this famous and fabulous creature?” Nicholas Alexandria inquired.
“Never heard of it,” Bowman said politely.
Nicholas Alexandria gave another of his tightly machined headshakes. “I am afraid I cannot believe you, Mr. Bowman,” he said. He reached inside his jacket once more. His hand returned to sight with a snub-nosed chromed automatic. He pointed it at Miles Bowman’s chest. “Place both your hands wide apart on the desk immediately.”
“You stinking little pansy,” Bowman said.
Nicholas Alexandria’s red, full lips narrowed into a thin pink slash. His tongue darted out like a snake’s. The hand holding the automatic did not waver.
Bowman lowered a shoulder, twisted his body a little to one side. Then he spoke with savage satisfaction: “All right, Alexandria, now you’ve got a gun and I’ve got a gun. But you’ve got that cheap .22 and I’m holding a .45. You shoot me, I spend some time in the hospital getting patched up. I shoot you, pal, you’re not just history, you’re archaeology.” He laughed loudly at his own wit. “Now put your little toy away and we’ll talk.”
“I do not believe you have a weapon,” Nicholas Alexandria said.
“The more fool you,” Bowman answered. “My partner didn’t believe in packing a gun, and now the fool is dead. I’m a lot of things, but I’m no fool.”
“He has it,” Gina Tellini said. “I can see his hand on it.”
“You would say the same in any case.” Nicholas Alexandria’s eyes did not move toward her. To Bowman, he said: “Shooting through the front of your desk does not strike me as like to produce the results you would desire.”
Bowman leaned back in his chair. One of his feet left the nubby, mustard-colored wool rug for a moment. It slammed against the inside of the center panel of the desk. The panel bowed outward. At the sudden crash, Nicholas Alexandria’s finger tightened on the trigger. Then it eased again. Bowman’s voice was complacent: “Cheap plywood, varnished to look like mahogany. A slug won’t even know it’s there.”
Alexandria’s mouth screwed tight, as if he were about to kiss someone he did not like. He slid the revolver back into the inner pocket of his jacket. As if he had never taken it out, he said, “Perhaps Miss Tellini did not see fit to tell you the Maltese Elephant—a Maltese elephant, I should say—is in San Francisco now.”
“No, she didn’t tell me that,” Miles Bowman said. He looked Gina Tellini up and down. Now her eyes were as flat and opaque as Nicholas Alexandria’s. Bowman turned back to the man in the velvet jacket. “So what do you want me to do about it? Find this elephant and sell it to the circus?”
Nicholas Alexandria rose and bowed. “I see I am being mocked. I shall return another time, in the hope of finding you alone and serious.”
“Sorry you feel that way.” Bowman also got up. He came around the desk and stood towering over Nicholas Alexandria as he opened the door to let the slighter man out of the inner office.
Alexandria raised one finger. “A moment. Did you truly have a pistol?”
Bowman reached under his jacket. The motion exposed a battered leather holster on his right hip. He pulled out the Colt Model 1911A and let it lie, heavy and ugly and black, in his palm. It bore no frill, no ornament, no chromium. It was a killing machine, nothing else. Nicholas Alexandria stared at it. He let out a small, gasping sigh.
“I never bluff,” Bowman said. “No percentage to it.” He shifted the pistol in his hand. His fingers closed on the checkered grip. With a motion astonishingly fast from such a heavyset man, he slammed the Colt’s hard steel barrel against the side of Alexandria’s face. “Remember that.”
The blow knocked Alexandria back two paces. He staggered but did not fall. The raised foresight had cut his cheek. Blood dripped onto his jacket. Slowly he removed the silk handkerchief from his breast pocket. He dabbed at the jacket, then raised the handkerchief to his face. “I shall remember, Mr. Bowman,” he whispered hoarsely. “Rely on it.”
He walked past Hester Prine without looking at her, and out of the office.
Gina Tellini brought her hands together several times, clapping without sound. “Now I know you will be able to protect me—Miles.” She lingered half a heartbeat over his Christian name.
He shrugged. “All in a day’s work. You have anything you want to tell me about this Maltese Elephant?”
Those quicksilver eyes betrayed an instant’s alarm. Then they were her servants again. She shook her head. “I can’t, not yet,” she said huskily.
“Have it your way.” Bowman’s thick shoulders moved up and down once more. “You’re going to, or Alexandria will, or somebody.” He watched her. She stood very still, like a small, hunted animal. He shrugged a third time, motioned for her to precede him out of the inner office. “See you later.”
When her footsteps could no longer be heard in the hall, he turned to Hester Prine. “I’m going home.” He checked his wristwatch. “Quarter past seven already. Jesus, where does the time get to?” He set his hand on her shoulder. “Go on back to your place, too. To hell with all this.”
She did not look at him. “I have some more typing to do,” she said tonelessly.
“Have it your way,” Bowman said, as he had to Gina Tellini. He closed the outer door—now it read BOWMAN, in letters bigger than bowman & trencher had been painted—and strolled down the hall to the elevator.
As he walked, he whistled “Look for the Silver Lining.” He whistled out of tune, and flat. The elevator boy looked at him as he got into the cage. He looked back. The elevator boy suddenly got busy with the buttons and took him to the ground floor.
He walked across the street to the garage where he kept his Chevrolet. He threw the kid on the corner a nickel. The kid handed him a copy of the San Francisco News. He tossed it into the front seat of the car. The starter whined when he turned the key. Coughing, the motor finally caught. He put the Chevrolet in gear and drove home.
The house on Thirty-third Avenue in the Sunset district needed a coat of paint. The houses to which it was joined on either side had been painted recently, one blue, the other a sort of rose pink. That made the faded, blotchy yellow surface look all the shabbier.
Bowman bounded up the steps two at a time. He turned the key in the Yale lock, mashed his thumb down on the latch. With a click like a bad knee, the door opened.
The interior was all plush and cheap velvet and curlicued wood and overstuffed furniture. “Is that you, honey?” Eva’s voice wafted out of the kitchen with the smell of pot roast and onions. She sounded nervous.
“Who else do you know with a key?” Bowman asked. He scaled his hat toward the couch. It fell short and landed on the fringe of the throw rug under the coffee table. He dropped the News onto the table.
Eva came out and stood in the kitchen doorway. He walked over, kissed her perfunctorily. They had been married thirteen years. She was ten years the younger. She was about the age Tom Trencher had been. Trencher would not get any older.
Eva’s short red curls got their color from a bottle. They’d been the same color when he married her, and from the same source. They went well with her green eyes. She was twenty pounds heavier now than when they had walked down the aisle, but big-boned enough to wear the pounds well. She wore a ruffled apron over a middy blouse and a cotton skirt striped brightly in gold and blue.
Her smile was a little too wide. It showed too many teeth. “Do the police know anything more about—who killed Tom?” She looked at the point of his chin, not his eyes.
“If they do, they haven’t told me. I didn’t talk with ’em today.” He shrugged. “Get me a drink.”
“Sure, honey.” She hurried away. She opened the pantry, then the icebox, and came back with a tumbler of bourbon on the rocks. “Here.” That too-ingratiating smile still masked her face.
Bowman drank half the tumbler with two long swallows. He exhaled, long and reverently, and held up the glass to scrutinize its deep amber contents against the light bulb in the kitchen ceiling lamp. “This is the medicine,” he announced, and finished the bourbon. He handed Eva the glass. “Fix me another one of these with supper.”
“Sure, Miles,” she said. “We ought to be just about ready.” The pot lid clanked as she lifted it off to check the roast. She set it back on the big iron pot. The oven door hinge squeaked. “The meat is done, and so are the potatoes. I’ll set the table and get you your drink.”
Bowman buttered his baked potato, spread salt and pepper lavishly over the thick slab of red-brown beef Eva set before him. He ate steadily, methodically, without wasted motion, like a man shoveling coal into a locomotive firebox. Every so often, he sipped from the tall glass of bourb
on next to the chipped china plate that held his supper.
Eva dropped her knife on the flowered linoleum floor. Bowman looked up for the first time since he’d seated himself at the table. Eva flushed. She flung the knife into the sink. Then she got up and took a clean one from the silverware drawer.
Before Bowman could resume his assault on the pot roast, she said, “Miles, honey, who do you think murdered Tom?”
“Had to be that guy he was shadowing,” he answered. He speared another piece of meat with his fork, but did not raise it to his lips. “Thursday, that was his name. Evan Thursday.” He ate the piece of meat. With his mouth full, he went on, “Couldn’t have been anybody else.” He swallowed, and smiled at Eva. “Could it?”
“No, I don’t imagine it could,” she said quickly. She bent her head over her plate. A moment later, her fork clattered to the floor. Her lips twisted. “I’m as twitchy as a cat tonight.”
“Can’t imagine why,” Bowman said. He drank from the tumbler. Two ice cubes clinked against its side.
When supper was done, Bowman went out to the living room. He set what was left of his drink on the coffee table, then sat down on the sofa. The springs creaked under his weight. He bent over, grunting a little, untied his shoes, and tossed them under the table.
“Eva, get me my slippers,” he said.
“What?” she called over the noise of running water in the kitchen. He repeated himself, louder. The water stopped running. Drying her hands on a dish towel, Eva bustled past him into the bedroom. She came back with the towel draped over her arm and the slippers in her hands. “Here they are.” He slid them onto his feet. She returned to the dishes.
He smoked three cigarettes waiting for her to finish washing and drying them. When she came out, he handed her the tumbler. She washed it and dried it and put it away. He had opened the News by then, and was going through it front to back, as systematically as he ate.
Eva sighed softly and went over to a bookcase. She pulled out a sentimental novel and carried it into the bedroom. Bowman went on reading. When he came to the Ships in Port listing, he chewed thoughtfully on his underlip. He got up. In the clutter of papers and matchbooks in the top drawer of the hutch, he found a pencil. He underlined the names of four ships:
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