Mrs. Prendergast lowered her lids until her eyes were almost shut, then she lifted them again and smiled. It was a rather ghastly smile. Carol Pride didn’t move beside me.
“Somebody wanted Lindley Paul killed,” I said. “That’s obvious. You might kill a man accidentally with a blackjack, by not knowing how hard to hit with it. But you won’t put his brains all over his face. And if you beat him up just to teach him to be good, you wouldn’t beat him about the head at all. Because that way he wouldn’t know how badly you were hurting him. And you’d want him to know that—if you were just teaching him a lesson.”
“Wha—what,” the blonde woman asked huskily, “has all this to do with me?”
Her face was a mask. Her eyes held a warm bitterness like poisoned honey. One of her hands was roving around inside her bag. It became quiet, inside the bag.
“Moose Magoon would pull a job like that,” I bored on, “if he was paid for it. He’d pull any kind of a job. And Moose was an Armenian, so Soukesian might have known how to reach him. And Soukesian was just the type to go skirt-simple over a roto queen and be willing to do anything she wanted him to do, even have a man killed, especially if that man was a rival, especially if he was the kind of man who rolled around on floor cushions and maybe even took candid camera photos of his lady friends when they got a little too close to the Garden of Eden. That wouldn’t be too hard to understand, would it, Mrs. Prendergast?”
“Take a drink,” Carol Pride said icily. “You’re drooling. You don’t have to tell this baby she’s a tramp. She knows it. But how the hell could anybody blackmail her? You’ve got to have a reputation to be blackmailed.”
“Shut up!” I snapped. “The less you’ve got the more you’ll pay to keep it.” I watched the blond woman’s hand move suddenly inside her bag. “Don’t bother to pull the gun,” I told her. “I know they won’t hang you. I just wanted you to know you’re not kidding anybody and that that trap in the beer parlor was rigged to finish me off when Soukesian lost his nerve and that you were the one that sent me in there to get what they had for me. The rest of it’s dead wood now.”
But she pulled the gun out just the same and held it on her pale blue knee and smiled at me.
Carol Pride threw a glass at her. She dodged and the gun went off. A slug went softly and politely into the parchment covered wall, high up, making no more sound than a finger going into a glove.
The door opened and an enormously tall, thin man strolled into the room.
“Shoot me,” he said. “I’m only your husband.”
The blonde looked at him. For just a short moment I thought she might be going to take him up on it.
Then she just smiled a little more and put the gun back into her bag and reached for her glass. “Listening in again?” she said dully. “Someday you’ll hear something you won’t like.”
The tall, thin man took a leather checkbook out of his pocket and cocked an eyebrow at me and said: “How much will keep you quiet—permanently?”
I gawked at him. “You heard what I said in here?”
“I think so. The pickup’s pretty good this weather. I believe you were accusing my wife of having something to do with somebody’s death, was it not?”
I kept on gawking at him.
“Well—how much do you want?” he snapped. “I won’t argue with you. I’m used to blackmailers.”
“Make it a million,” I said. “And she just took a shot at us. That will be four bits extra.”
The blonde laughed crazily and the laugh turned into a screech and then into a yell. The next thing she was rolling on the floor screaming and kicking her legs around.
The tall man went over to her quickly and bent down and hit her in the face with his open hand. You could have heard that smack a mile. When he straightened up again his face was a dusky red and the blonde was lying there sobbing.
“I’ll show you to the door,” he said. “You can call at my office tomorrow.”
“What for?” I asked, and took my hat. “You’ll still be a sap, even at your office.”
I took Carol Pride’s arm and steered her out of the room. We left the house silently. The Jap gardener had just pulled a bit of weed root out of the lawn and was holding it up and sneering at it.
We drove away from there, towards the foothills. A red spotlight near the old Beverly Hills Hotel stopped me after a while. I just sat there holding the wheel. The girl beside me didn’t move either. She didn’t say anything. She just looked straight ahead.
“I didn’t get the big warm feeling,” I said. “I didn’t get to smack anybody down. I didn’t make it stick.”
“She probably didn’t plan it in cold blood,” she whispered. “She just got mad and resentful and somebody sold her an idea. A woman like that takes men and gets tired of them and throws them away and they go crazy trying to get her back. It might have been just between the two lovers—Paul and Soukesian. But Mr. Magoon played rough.”
“She sent me to that beer parlor,” I said. “That’s enough for me. And Paul had ideas about Soukesian. I knew she’d miss. With the gun, I mean.”
I grabbed her. She was shivering.
A car came up behind us and the driver stood on his horn. I listened to it for a little while, then I let go of Carol Pride and got out of the roadster and walked back. He was a big man, behind the wheel of a sedan.
“That’s a boulevard stop,” he said sharply. “Lover’s Lane is farther up in the hills. Get out of there before I push you out.”
“Blow your horn just once more,” I begged him. “Just once. Then tell me which side you want the shiner on.”
He took a police captain’s badge out of his vest pocket. Then he grinned. Then we both grinned. It wasn’t my day.
I got back into the roadster and turned it around and started back towards Santa Monica. “Let’s go home and drink some more Scotch,” I said. “Your Scotch.”
RED WIND
1
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 clouds 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 h
e 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.
He looked at the drunk’s back. The drunk was playing checkers with his empty glasses. The new customer looked at me, then he looked along the line of half-booths at the other side of the place. They were all empty. He came on in—down past where the drunk sat swaying and muttering to himself—and spoke to the bar kid.
“Seen a lady in here, buddy? Tall, pretty, brown hair, in a print bolero jacket over a blue crÍpe silk dress. Wearing a widebrimmed straw hat with a velvet band.” He had a tight voice I didn’t like.
“No, sir. Nobody like that’s been in,” the bar kid said.
“Thanks. Straight Scotch. Make it fast, will you?”
The kid gave it to him and the fellow paid and put the drink down in a gulp and started to go out. He took three or four steps and stopped, facing the drunk. The drunk was grinning. He swept a gun from somewhere so fast that it was just a blur coming out. He held it steady and he didn’t look any drunker than I was. The tall dark guy stood quite still and then his head jerked back a little and then he was still again.
A car tore by outside. The drunk’s gun was a .22 target automatic, with a large front sight. It made a couple of hard snaps and a little smoke curled—very little.
“So long, Waldo,” the drunk said.
Then he put the gun on the barman and me.
The dark guy took a week to fall down. He stumbled, caught himself, waved one arm, stumbled again. His hat fell off, and then he hit the floor with his face. After he hit it he might have been poured concrete for all the fuss he made.
The drunk slid down off the stool and scooped his dimes into a pocket and slid towards the door. He turned sideways, holding the gun across his body. I didn’t have a gun. I hadn’t thought I needed one to buy a glass of beer. The kid behind the bar didn’t move or make the slightest sound.
The drunk felt the door lightly with his shoulder, keeping his eyes on us, then pushed through it backwards. When it was wide a hard gust of air slammed in and lifted the hair of the man on the floor. The drunk said: “Poor Waldo. I bet I made his nose bleed.”
The door swung shut. I started to rush it—from long practice in doing the wrong thing. In this case it didn’t matter. The car outside let out a roar and when I got onto the pavement it was flicking a red smear of taillight around the nearby corner. I got its license number the way I got my first million.
There were people and cars up and down the block as usual. Nobody acted as if a gun had gone off. The wind was making enough noise to make the hard quick rap of .22 ammunition sound like a slammed door, even if anyone heard it. I went back into the cocktail bar.
The kid hadn’t moved, even yet. He just stood with his hands flat on the bar, leaning over a little and looking down at the dark guy’s back. The dark guy hadn’t moved either. I bent down and felt his neck artery. He wouldn’t move—ever.
The kid’s face had as much expression as a cut of round steak and was about the same color. His eyes were more angry than shocked.
I lit a cigarette and blew smoke at the ceiling and said shortly: “Get on the phone.”
“Maybe he’s not dead,” the kid said.
“When they use a twenty-two that means they don’t make mistakes. Where’s the phone?”
“I don’t have one. I got enough expenses without that. Boy, can I kick eight hundred bucks in the face!”
“You own this place?”
“I did till this happened.”
He pulled his white coat off and his apron and came around the inner end of the bar. “I’m locking this door,” he said, taking keys out.
He went out, swung the door to and jiggled the lock from the outside until the bolt clicked into place. I bent down and rolled Waldo over. At first I couldn’t even see where the shots went in. Then I could. A couple of tiny holes in his coat, over his heart. There was a little blood on his shirt.
The drunk was everything you could ask—as a killer.
The prowl-car boys came in about eight minutes. The kid, Lew Petrolle, was back behind the bar by then. He had his white coat on again and he was counting his money in the register and putting it in his pocket and making notes in a little book.
I sat at the edge of one of the half-booths and smoked cigarettes and watched Waldo’s face get deader and deader. I wondered who the girl in the print coat was, why Waldo had left the engine of his car running outside, why he was in a hurry, whether the drunk had been waiting for him or just happened to be there.
The prowl-car boys came in perspiring. They were the usual large size and one of them had a flower stuck under his cap and his cap on a bit crooked. When he saw the dead man he got rid of the flower and leaned down to feel Waldo’s pulse.
“Seems to be dead,” he said, and rolled him around a little more. “Oh yeah, I see where they went in. Nice clean work. You two see him get it?”
I said yes. The kid behind the bar said nothing. I told them about it, that the killer seemed to have left in Waldo’s car.
The cop yanked Waldo’s wallet out, went through it rapidly and whistled. “Plenty jack and no driver’s license.” He put the wallet away. “O.K., we didn’t touch him, see? Just a chance we could find did he have a car and put it on the air.”
“The hell you didn’t touch him,” Lew Patrolle said.
The cop gave him one of those looks. “O.K., pal,” he said softly. “We touched him.”
The kid picked up a clean highball glass and began to polish it. He polished it all the rest of the time we were there.
In another minute a homicide fast-wagon sirened up and screeched to a stop outside the door and four men came in, two dicks, a photographer and a laboratory man. I didn’t know either of the dicks. You can be in the detecting business a long time and not know all the men on a big city force.
One of them was a short, smooth, dark, quiet, smiling man, with curly black hair and soft intelligent eyes. The other was big, raw-boned, long-jawed, with a veined nose and glassy eyes. He looked like a heavy drinker. He looked tough, but he looked as if he thought he was a little tougher than he was. He shooed me into the last booth against the wall and his partner got the kid up front and the bluecoats went out. The fingerprint man and photographer set about their work.
A medical examiner came, stayed just long enough to get sore because there was no phone for him to call the morgue wagon.
The short dick emptied Waldo’s pockets and then emptied his wallet and dumped everything into a large handkerchief on a booth table. I saw a lot of currency, keys, cigarettes, another handkerchief, very little else.
The big dick pushed me back into the end of the half-booth. “Give,” he said. “I’m Copernik, Detective Lieutenant.”
I put my wallet in front of him. He looked at it, went through it, tossed it back, made a note in a book.
“Philip Marlowe, huh? A shamus. You here on business?
”
“Drinking business,” I said. “I live just across the street in the Berglund.”
“Know this kid up front?”
“I’ve been in here once since he opened up.”
“See anything funny about him now?”
“No.”
“Takes it too light for a young fellow, don’t he? Never mind answering. Just tell the story.”
I told it—three times. Once for him to get the outline, once for him to get the details and once for him to see if I had it too pat. At the end he said: “This dame interests me. And the killer called the guy Waldo, yet didn’t seem to be anyways sure he would be in. I mean, if Waldo wasn’t sure the dame would be here, nobody could be sure Waldo would be here.”
“That’s pretty deep,” I said.
He studied me. I wasn’t smiling. “Sounds like a grudge job, don’t it? Don’t sound planned. No getaway except by accident. A guy don’t leave his car unlocked much in this town. And the killer works in front of two good witnesses. I don’t like that.”
“I don’t like being a witness,” I said. “The pay’s too low.”
He grinned. His teeth had a freckled look. “Was the killer drunk really?”
“With that shooting? No.”
“Me too. Well, it’s a simple job. The guy will have a record and he’s left plenty prints. Even if we don’t have his mug here we’ll make him in hours. He had something on Waldo, but he wasn’t meeting Waldo tonight. Waldo just dropped in to ask about a dame he had a date with and had missed connections on. It’s a hot night and this wind would kill a girl’s face. She’d be apt to drop in somewhere to wait. So the killer feeds Waldo two in the right place and scrams and don’t worry about you boys at all. It’s that simple.”
“Yeah,” I said.
“It’s so simple it stinks,” Copernik said.
He took his felt hat off and tousled up his ratty blond hair and leaned his head on his hands. He had a long mean horse face. He got a handkerchief out and mopped it, and the back of his neck and the back of his hands. He got a comb out and combed his hair—he looked worse with it combed—and put his hat back on.
Collected Stories of Raymond Chandler Page 66