12
He nodded slowly, looked down at the floor between his feet. The girl stopped crying long enough to mop at her cheeks, then started in again.
“Fulwider know I’m here?” Saint asked me slowly.
“Yeah.”
“You give him the office?”
“Yeah.”
He shrugged. “That’s okay from your end. Sure. Only I’ll never get to talk, if Fulwider pinches me. If I could get to talk to a D.A. I could maybe convince him she’s not hep to my stuff.”
“You could have thought of that, too,” I said heavily. “You didn’t have to go back to Sundstrand’s and cut loose with your stutter gun.”
He threw his head back and laughed. “No? Suppose you paid a guy ten grand for protection and he crossed you up by grabbing your wife and sticking her in a crooked dope hospital and telling you to run along far away and be good, or the tide would wash her up on the beach? What would you do—smile, or trot over with some heavy iron to talk to the guy?”
“She wasn’t there then,” I said. “You were just kill-screwy. And if you hadn’t hung on to that dog until he killed a man, the protection wouldn’t have been scared into selling you out.”
“I like dogs,” Saint said quietly. “I’m a nice guy when I’m not workin’, but I can get shoved around just so much.”
I listened. Still no noises on deck outside.
“Listen,” I said quickly. “If you want to play ball with me, I’ve got a boat at the back door and I’ll try to get the girl home before they want her. What happens to you is past me. I wouldn’t lift a finger for you, even if you do like dogs.”
The girl said suddenly, in a shrill, little-girl voice: “I don’t want to go home! I won’t go home!”
“A year from now you’ll thank me,” I snapped at her.
“He’s right, sugar,” Saint said. “Better beat it with him.”
“I won’t,” the girl shrilled angrily. “I just won’t. That’s all.”
Out of the silence on the deck something hard slammed the outside of the door. A grim voice shouted: “Open up! It’s the law!”
I backed swiftly to the door, keeping my eyes on Saint. I spoke back over my shoulder: “Fulwider there?”
“Yeah,” the chiefs fat voice growled. “Carmady?”
“Listen, Chief. Saint’s in here and he’s ready to surrender. There’s a girl here with him, the one I told you about. So come in easy, will you?”
“Right,” the chief said. “Open the door.”
I twisted the key, jumped across the cabin and put my back against the inner partition, beside the door behind which the dog was moving around now, growling a little.
The outer door whipped open. Two men I hadn’t seen before charged in with drawn guns. The fat chief was behind them. Briefly, before he shut the door, I caught a glimpse of ship’s uniforms.
The two dicks jumped on Saint, slammed him around, put cuffs on him. Then they stepped back beside the chief. Saint grinned at them, with blood trickling down his lower lip.
Fulwider looked at me reprovingly and moved a cigar around in his mouth. Nobody seemed to take an interest in the girl.
“You’re a hell of a guy, Carmady. You didn’t give me no idea where to come,” he growled.
“I didn’t know,” I said. “I thought it was outside your jurisdiction, too.”
“Hell with that. We tipped the Feds. They’ll be out.”
One of the dicks laughed. “But not too soon,” he said roughly. “Put the heater away, shamus.”
“Try and make me,” I told him.
He started forward, but the chief waved him back. The other dick watched Saint, looked at nothing else.
“How’d you find him then?” Fulwider wanted to know.
“Not by taking his money to hide him out,” I said.
Nothing changed in Fulwider’s face. His voice became almost lazy. “Oh, oh, you’ve been peekin’,” he said very gently.
I said disgustedly. “Just what kind of a sap did you and your gang take me for? Your clean little town stinks. It’s the well-known whited sepulcher. A crook sanctuary where the hot rods can lie low—if they pay off nice and don’t pull any local capers—and where they can jump off for Mexico in a fast boat, if the finger waves towards them.”
The chief said very carefully: “Any more?”
“Yeah,” I shouted. “I’ve saved it for you too damn long. You had me doped until I was half goofy and stuck me in a private jail. When that didn’t hold me you worked a plant up with Galbraith and Duncan to have my gun kill Sundstrand, your helper, and then have me killed resisting some arrest. Saint spoiled that party for you and saved my life. Not intending to, perhaps, but he did it. You knew all along where the little Snare girl was. She was Saint’s wife and you were holding her yourself to make him stay in line. Hell, why do you suppose I tipped you he was out here? That was something you didn’t know!”
The dick who had tried to make me put up my gun said: “Now, Chief. We better make it fast. Those Feds—”
Fulwider’s jaw shook. His face was gray and his ears were far back in his head. The cigar twitched in his fat mouth.
“Wait a minute,” he said thickly, to the man beside. Then to me: “Well—why did you tip me?”
“To get you where you’re no more law than Billy the Kid,” I said, “and see if you have the guts to go through with murder on the high seas.”
Saint laughed. He shot a low, snarling whistle between his teeth. A tearing animal growl answered him. The door beside me crashed open as though a mule had kicked it. The big police dog came through the opening in a looping spring that carried him clear across the cabin. The gray body twisted in mid-air. A gun banged harmlessly.
“Eat ‘em up, Voss!” Saint yelled. “Eat ‘em alive, boy!”
The cabin filled with gunfire. The snarling of the dog blended with a thick, choked scream. Fulwider and one of the dicks were down on the floor and the dog was at Fulwider’s throat.
The girl screamed and plunged her face into a pillow. Saint slid softly down from the bunk and lay on the floor with blood running slowly down his neck in a thick wave.
The dick who hadn’t gone down jumped to one side, almost fell headlong on the girl’s berth, then caught his balance and pumped bullets into the dog’s long gray body—wildly without pretense of aim.
The dick on the floor pushed at the dog. The dog almost bit his hand off. The man yelled. Feet pounded on the deck. Yelling outside, Something was running down my face that tickled. My head felt funny, but I didn’t know what had hit me.
The gun in my hand felt large and hot. I shot the dog, hating to do it. The dog rolled off Fulwider and I saw where a stray bullet had drilled the chiefs forehead between the eyes, with the delicate exactness of pure chance.
The standing dick’s gun hammer clicked on a discharged shell. He cursed, started to reload frantically.
I touched the blood on my face and looked at it. It seemed very black. The light in the cabin seemed to be failing.
The bright corner of an axe blade suddenly split the cabin door, which was wedged shut by the chiefs body, and that of the groaning man beside him. I stared at the bright metal, watched it go away and reappear in another place.
Then all the lights went out very slowly, as in a theater just as the curtain goes up. Just as it got quite dark my head hurt me, but I didn’t know then that a bullet had fractured my skull.
I woke up two days later in the hospital. I was there three weeks. Saint didn’t live long enough to hang, but he lived long enough to tell his story. He must have told it well, because they let Mrs. Jerry (Farmer) Saint go home to her aunt.
By that time the County Grand Jury had indicted half the police force of the little beach city. There were a lot of new faces around the City Hall, I heard. One of them was a big redheaded detective-sergeant named Norgard who said he owed me twenty-five dollars but had had to use it to buy a new suit when he got his job back. He said he woul
d pay me out of his first check. I said I would try to wait.
PICKUP ON NOON STREET
1
The man and the girl walked slowly, close together, past a dim stencil sign that said: Surprise Hotel. The man wore a purple suit, a Panama hat over his shiny, slicked-down hair. He walked splay-footed, soundlessly.
The girl wore a green hat and a short skirt and sheer stockings, four-and-a-half inch French heels. She smelled of Midnight Narcissus.
At the corner the man leaned close, said something in the girl’s ear. She jerked away from him, giggled.
“You gotta buy liquor if you take me home, Smiler.”
“Next time, baby. I’m fresh outa dough.”
The girl’s voice got hard. “Then I tells you goodbye in the next block, handsome.”
“Like hell, baby,” the man answered.
The arc at the intersection threw light on them. They walked across the street far apart. At the other side the man caught the girl’s arm. She twisted away from him.
“Listen, you cheap grifter!” she shrilled. “Keep your paws down, see! Tinhorns are dust to me. Dangle!”
“How much liquor you gotta have, baby?”
“Plenty.”
“Me bein’ on the nut, where do I collect it?”
“You got hands, ain’t you?” the girl sneered. Her voice dropped the shrillness. She leaned close to him again. “Maybe you got a gun, big boy. Got a gun?”
“Yeah. And no shells for it.”
“The goldbricks over on Central don’t know that.”
“Don’t be that way,” the man in the purple suit snarled. Then he snapped his fingers and stiffened. “Wait a minute. I got me a idea.”
He stopped and looked back along the street toward the dim stencil hotel sign. The girl slapped a glove across his chin caressingly. The glove smelled to him of the perfume, Midnight Narcissus.
The man snapped his fingers again, grinned widely in the dim light. “If that drunk is still holed up in Doc’s place—I collect. Wait for me, huh?”
“Maybe, at home. If you ain’t gone too long.”
“Where’s home, baby?”
The girl stared at him. A half-smile moved along her full lips, died at the corners of them. The breeze picked a sheet of newspaper out of the gutter and tossed it against the man’s leg. He kicked at it savagely.
“Calliope Apartments. Four-B, Two-Forty-Six East Forty-Eight. How soon you be there?”
The man stepped very close to her, reached back and tapped his hip. His voice was low, chilling.
“You wait for me, baby.”
She caught her breath, nodded. “Okey, handsome. I’ll wait.”
The man went back along the cracked pavement, across the intersection, along to where the stencil sign hung out over the street. He went through a glass door into a narrow lobby with a row of brown wooden chairs pushed against the plaster wall. There was just space to walk past them to the desk. A baldheaded colored man lounged behind the desk, fingering a large green pin in his tie.
The Negro in the purple suit leaned across the counter and his teeth flashed in a quick, hard smile. He was very young, with a thin, sharp jaw, a narrow bony forehead, the flat brilliant eyes of the gangster. He said softly: “That pug with the husky voice still here? The guy that banked the crap game last night.”
The bald-headed clerk looked at the flies on the ceiling fixture. “Didn’t see him go out, Smiler.”
“Ain’t what I asked you, Doc.”
“Yeah. He still here.”
“Still drunk?”
“Guess so. Hasn’t been out.”
“Three-forty-nine, ain’t it?”
“You been there, ain’t you? What you wanta know for?”
“He cleaned me down to my lucky piece. I gotta make a touch.”
The bald-headed man looked nervous. The Smiler stared softly at the green stone in the man’s tie pin.
“Get rolling, Smiler. Nobody gets bent around here. We ain’t no Central Avenue flop.”
The Smiler said very softly: “He’s my pal, Doe. He’ll lend me twenty. You touch half.”
He put his hand out palm up. The clerk stared at the hand for a long moment. Then he nodded sourly, went behind a ground-glass screen, came back slowly, looking toward the street door.
His hand went out and hovered over the palm. The palm closed over a passkey, dropped inside the cheap purple suit.
The sudden flashing grin on the Smiler’s face had an icy edge to it.
“Careful, Doe—while I’m up above.”
The clerk said: “Step on it. Some of the customers get home early.” He glanced at the green electric clock on the wall. It was seven-fifteen. “And the walls ain’t any too thick,” he added.
The thin youth gave him another flashing grin, nodded, went delicately back along the lobby to the shadowy staircase. There was no elevator in the Surprise Hotel.
At one minute past seven Pete Anglich, narcotic squad under-cover man, rolled over on the hard bed and looked at the cheap strap watch on his left wrist. There were heavy shadows under his eyes, a thick dark stubble on his broad chin. He swung his bare feet to the floor and stood up in cheap cotton pajamas, flexed his muscles, stretched, bent over stiff-kneed and touched the floor in front of his toes with a grunt.
He walked across to a chipped bureau, drank from a quart bottle of cheap rye whiskey, grimaced, pushed the cork into the neck of the bottle, and rammed it down hard with the heel of his hand.
“Boy, have I got a hangover,” he grumbled huskily.
He stared at his face in the bureau mirror, at the stubble on his chin, the thick white scar on his throat close to the windpipe. His voice was husky because the bullet that had made the scar had done something to his vocal chords. It was a smooth huskiness, like the voice of a blues singer.
He stripped his pajamas off and stood naked in the middle of the room, his toes fumbling the rough edge of a big rip in the carpet. His body was very broad, and that made him look a little shorter than he was. His shoulders sloped, his nose was a little thick, the skin over his cheekbones looked like leather. He had short, curly, black hair, utterly steady eyes, the small set mouth of a quick thinker.
He went into a dim, dirty bathroom, stepped into the tub and turned the shower on. The water was warmish, but not hot. He stood under it and soaped himself, rubbed his whole body over, kneaded his muscles, rinsed off.
He jerked a dirty towel off the rack and started to rub a glow into his skin.
A faint noise behind the loosely closed bathroom door stopped him. He held his breath, listened, heard the noise again, a creak of boarding, a click, a rustle of cloth. Pete Anglich reached for the door and pulled it open slowly.
The Negro in the purple suit and Panama hat stood beside the bureau, with Pete Anglich’s coat in his hand. On the bureau in front of him were two guns. One of them was Pete Anglich’s old worn Colt. The room door was shut and a key with a tag lay on the carpet near it, as though it had fallen out of the door, or been pushed out from the other side.
The Smiler let the coat fall to the floor and held a wallet in his left hand. His right hand lifted the Colt. He grinned.
“Okey, white boy. Just go on dryin’ yourself off after your shower,” he said.
Pete Anglich toweled himself. He rubbed himself dry, stood naked with the wet towel in his left hand.
The Smiler had the billfold empty on the bureau, was counting the money with his left hand. His right still clutched the Colt.
“Eighty-seven bucks. Nice money. Some of it’s mine from the crap game, but I’m lifting it all, pal. Take it easy. I’m friends with the management here.”
“Gimme a break, Smiler,” Pete Anglich said hoarsely. “That’s every dollar I got in the world. Leave a few bucks, huh?” He made his voice thick, coarse, heavy as though with liquor.
The Smiler gleamed his teeth, shook his narrow head. “Can’t do it, pal. Got me a date and I need the kale.”
Pete Angl
ich took a loose step forward and stopped, grinning sheepishly. The muzzle of his own gun had jerked at him.
The Smiler sidled over to the bottle of rye and lifted it.
“I can use this, too. My baby’s got a throat for liquor. Sure has. What’s in your pants is yours, pal. Fair enough?”
Pete Anglich jumped sideways, about four feet. The Smiler’s face convulsed. The gun jerked around and the bottle of rye slid out of his left hand, slammed down on his foot. He yelped, kicked out savagely, and his toe caught in the torn place in the carpet.
Pete Anglich flipped the wet end of the bathtowel straight at the Smiler’s eyes.
The Smiler reeled and yelled with pain. Then Pete Anglich held the Smiler’s gun wrist in his hard left hand. He twisted up, around. His hand started to slide down over the Smiler’s hand, over the gun. The gun turned inward and touched the Smiler’s side.
A hard knee kicked viciously at Pete Anglich’s abdomen. He gagged, and his finger tightened convulsively on the Smiler’s trigger finger.
The shot was dull, muffled against the purple cloth of the suit. The Smiler’s eyes rolled whitely and his narrow jaw fell slack.
Pete Anglich let him down on the floor and stood panting, bent over, his face greenish. He groped for the fallen bottle of rye, got the cork out, got some of the fiery liquid down his throat.
The greenish look went away from his face. His breathing slowed. He wiped sweat off his forehead with the back of his hand.
He felt the Smiler’s pulse. The Smiler didn’t have any pulse. He was dead. Pete Anglich loosened the gun from his hand, went over to the door and glanced out into the hallway. Empty. There was a passkey in the outside of the lock. He removed it, locked the door from the inside.
He put his underclothes and socks and shoes on, his worn blue serge suit, knotted a black tie around the crumpled shirt collar, went back to the dead man and took a roll of bills from his pocket. He packed a few odds and ends of clothes and toilet articles in a cheap fiber suitcase, stood it by the door.
He pushed a torn scrap of sheet through his revolver barrel with a pencil, replaced the used cartridge, crushed the empty shell with his heel on the bathroom floor and then flushed it down the toilet.
Collected Stories of Raymond Chandler Page 42