“All right,” I yelled. “I’ll go up with you. Just lay off carrying me. Let me walk. I’m fine. I’m all grown up. I go to the bathroom alone and everything. Just don’t carry me.”
“Little Velma used to work here,” he said gently. He wasn’t listening to me.
We went on up the stairs. He let me walk. My shoulder ached. The back of my neck was wet.
CHAPTER 2
Two more swing doors closed off the head of the stairs from whatever was beyond. The big man pushed them open lightly with his thumbs and we went into the room. It was a long narrow room, not very clean, not very bright, not very cheerful. In the corner a group of Negroes chanted and chattered in the cone of light over a crap table. There was a bar against the right hand wall. The rest of the room was mostly small round tables. There were a few customers, men and women, all Negroes.
The chanting at the crap table stopped dead and the light over it jerked out. There was a sudden silence as heavy as a water-logged boat. Eyes looked at us, chestnut colored eyes, set in faces that ranged from gray to deep black. Heads turned slowly and the eyes in them glistened and stared in the dead alien silence of another race.
A large, thick-necked Negro was leaning against the end of the bar with pink garters on his shirt sleeves and pink and white suspenders crossing his broad back. He had bouncer written all over him. He put his lifted foot down slowly and turned slowly and stared at us, spreading his feet gently and moving a broad tongue along his lips. He had a battered face that looked as if it had been hit by everything but the bucket of a dragline. It was scarred, flattened, thickened, checkered, and welted. It was a face that had nothing to fear. Everything had been done to it that anybody could think of.
The short crinkled hair had a touch of gray. One ear had lost the lobe.
The Negro was heavy and wide. He had big heavy legs and they looked a little bowed, which is unusual in a Negro. He moved his tongue some more and smiled and moved his body. He came towards us in a loose fighter’s crouch. The big man waited for him silently.
The Negro with the pink garters on his arms put a massive brown hand against the big man’s chest. Large as it was, the hand looked like a stud. The big man didn’t move. The bouncer smiled gently.
“No white folks, brother. Jes’ fo’ the colored people. I’se sorry.”
The big man moved his small sad gray eyes and looked around the room. His cheeks flushed a little. “Shine box,” he said angrily, under his breath. He raised his voice. “Where’s Velma at?” he asked the bouncer.
The bouncer didn’t quite laugh. He studied the big man’s clothes, his brown shirt and yellow tie, his rough gray coat and the white golf balls on it. He moved his thick head around delicately and studied all this from various angles. He looked down at the alligator shoes. He chuckled lightly. He seemed amused. I felt a little sorry for him. He spoke softly again.
“Velma, you says? No Velma heah, brother. No hooch, no gals, no nothing. Jes’ the scram, white boy, jes’ the scram.”
“Velma used to work here,” the big man said. He spoke almost dreamily, as if he was all by himself, out in the woods, picking johnny-jump-ups. I got my handkerchief out and wiped the back of my neck again.
The bouncer laughed suddenly. “Shuah,” he said, throwing a quick look back over his shoulder at his public. “Velma used to work heah. But Velma don’t work heah no mo’. She done reti’ed. Haw, haw.”
“Kind of take your goddamned mitt off my shirt,” the big man said.
The bouncer frowned. He was not used to being talked to like that. He took his hand off the shirt and doubled it into a fist about the size and color of a large eggplant. He had his job, his reputation for toughness, his public esteem to consider. He considered them for a second and made a mistake. He swung the fist very hard and short with a sudden outward jerk of the elbow and hit the big man on the side of the jaw. A soft sigh went around the room.
It was a good punch. The shoulder dropped and the body swung behind it. There was a lot of weight in that punch and the man who landed it had had plenty of practice. The big man didn’t move his head more than an inch. He didn’t try to block the punch. He took it, shook himself lightly, made a quiet sound in his throat and took hold of the bouncer by the throat.
The bouncer tried to knee him in the groin. The big man turned him in the air and slid his gaudy shoes apart on the scaly linoleum that covered the floor. He bent the bouncer backwards and shifted his right hand to the bouncer’s belt. The belt broke like a piece of butcher’s string. The big man put his enormous hands flat against the bouncer’s spine and heaved. He threw him clear across the room, spinning and staggering and flailing with his arms. Three men jumped out of the way. The bouncer went over with a table and smacked into the baseboard with a crash that must have been heard in Denver. His legs twitched. Then he lay still.
“Some guys,” the big man said, “has got wrong ideas about when to get tough.” He turned to me. “Yeah,” he said. “Let’s you and me nibble one.”
We went over to the bar. The customers, by ones and twos and threes, became quiet shadows that drifted soundless across the floor, soundless through the doors at the head of the stairs. Soundless as shadows on the grass. They didn’t even let the doors swing.
We leaned against the bar. “Whiskey sour,” the big man said. “Call yours.”
“Whiskey sour,” I said.
We had whiskey sours.
The big man licked his whiskey sour impassively down the side of the thick squat glass. He stared solemnly at the barman, a thin, worried-looking Negro in a white coat who moved as if his feet hurt him.
“You know where Velma is?”
“Velma, you says?” the barman whined. “I ain’t seen her ’round heah lately. Not right lately, nossuh.”
“How long you been here?”
“Let’s see,” the barman put his towel down and wrinkled his forehead and started to count on his fingers. “ ’Bout ten months, I reckon. ’Bout a yeah. ’Bout—”
“Make your mind up,” the big man said.
The barman goggled and his Adam’s apple flopped around like a headless chicken.
“How long’s this coop been a dinge joint?” the big man demanded gruffly.
“Says which?”
The big man made a fist into which his whiskey sour glass melted almost out of sight.
“Five years anyway,” I said. “This fellow wouldn’t know anything about a white girl named Velma. Nobody here would.”
The big man looked at me as if I had just hatched out. His whiskey sour hadn’t seemed to improve his temper.
“Who the hell asked you to stick your face in?” he asked me.
I smiled. I made it a big warm friendly smile. “I’m the fellow that came in with you. Remember?”
He grinned back then, a flat white grin without meaning. “Whiskey sour,” he told the barman. “Shake them fleas outs your pants. Service.”
The barman scuttled around, rolling the whites of his eyes. I put my back against the bar and looked at the room. It was now empty, save for the barman, the big man and myself, and the bouncer crushed over against the wall. The bouncer was moving. He was moving slowly as if with great pain and effort. He was crawling softly along the baseboard like a By with one wing. He was moving behind the tables, wearily, a man suddenly old, suddenly disillusioned. I watched him move. The barman put down two more whiskey sours. I turned to the bar. The big man glanced casually over at the crawling bouncer and then paid no further attention to him.
“There ain’t nothing left of the joint,” he complained. “They was a little stage and band and cute little rooms where a guy could have fun. Velma did some warbling. A redhead she was. Cute as lace pants. We was to of been married when they hung the frame on me.”
I took my second whiskey sour. I was beginning to have enough of the adventure. “What frame?” I asked.
“Where you figure I been them eight years I said about?”
“Ca
tching butterflies.”
He prodded his chest with a forefinger like a banana. “In the caboose. Malloy is the name. They call me Moose Malloy, on account of I’m large. The Great Bend bank job. Forty grand. Solo job. Ain’t that something?”
“You going to spend it now?”
He gave me a sharp look. There was a noise behind us. The bouncer was on his feet again, weaving a little. He had his hand on the knob of a dark door over behind the crap table. He got the door open, half fell through. The door clattered shut. A lock clicked.
“Where’s that go?” Moose Malloy demanded.
The barman’s eyes floated in his head, focused with difficulty on the door through which the bouncer had stumbled.
“Tha—tha’s Mistah Montgomery’s office, suh. He’s the boss. He’s got his office back there.”
“He might know,” the big man said. He drank his drink at a gulp. “He better not crack wise neither. Two more of the same.”
He crossed the room slowly, lightfooted, without a care in the world. His enormous back hid the door. It was locked. He shook it and a piece of the panel flew off to one side. He went through and shut the door behind him.
There was silence. I looked at the barman. The barman looked at me. His eyes became thoughtful. He polished the counter and sighed and leaned down with his right arm.
I reached across the counter and took hold of the arm. It was thin, brittle. I held it and smiled at him.
“What you got down there, bo?”
He licked his lips. He leaned on my arm, and said nothing. Grayness invaded his shining face.
“This guy is tough,” I said. “And he’s liable to go mean. Drinks do that to him. He’s looking for a girl he used to know. This place used to be a white establishment. Get the idea?”
The barman licked his lips.
“He’s been away a long time,” I said. “Eight years. He doesn’t seem to realize how long that is, although I’d expect him to think it a life time. He thinks the people here should know where his girl is. Get the idea?”
The barman said slowly: “I thought you was with him.”
“I couldn’t help myself. He asked me a question down below and then dragged me up. I never saw him before. But I didn’t feel like being thrown over any houses. What you got down there?”
“Got me a sawed-off,” the barman said.
“Tsk. That’s illegal,” I whispered. “Listen, you and I are together. Got anything else?”
“Got me a gat,” the barman said. “In a cigar box. Leggo my arm.”
“That’s fine,” I said. “Now move along a bit. Easy now. Sideways. This isn’t the time to pull the artillery.”
“Says you,” the barman sneered, putting his tired weight against my arm. “Says—”
He stopped. His eyes rolled. His head jerked.
There was a dull flat sound at the back of the place, behind the closed door beyond the crap table. It might have been a slammed door. I didn’t think it was. The barman didn’t think so either.
The barman froze. His mouth drooled. I listened. No other sound. I started quickly for the end of the counter. I had listened too long.
The door at the back opened with a bang and Moose Malloy came through it with a smooth heavy lunge and stopped dead, his feet planted and a wide pale grin on his face.
A Colt Army .45 looked like a toy pistol in his hand.
“Don’t nobody try to fancy pants,” he said cozily. “Freeze the mitts on the bar.”
The barman and I put our hands on the bar.
Moose Malloy looked the room over with a raking glance. His grin was taut, nailed on. He shifted his feet and moved silently across the room. He looked like a man who could take a bank single-handed—even in those clothes.
He came to the bar. “Rise up, nigger,” he said softly. The barman put his hands high in the air. The big man stepped to my back and prowled me over carefully with his left hand. His breath was hot on my neck. It went away.
“Mister Montgomery didn’t know where Velma was neither,” he said. “He tried to tell me—with this.” His hard hand patted the gun. I turned slowly and looked at him. “Yeah,” he said. “You’ll know me. You ain’t forgetting me, pal. Just tell them johns not to get careless is all.” He waggled the gun. “Well so long, punks. I gotta catch a street car.”
He started towards the head of the stairs.
“You didn’t pay for the drinks,” I said.
He stopped and looked at me carefully.
“Maybe you got something there,” he said, “but I wouldn’t squeeze it too hard.”
He moved on, slipped through the double doors, and his steps sounded remotely going down the stairs.
The barman stooped. I jumped around behind the counter and jostled him out of the way. A sawed-off shotgun lay under a towel on a shelf under the bar. Beside it was a cigar box. In the cigar box was a .38 automatic. I took both of them. The barman pressed back against the tier of glasses behind the bar.
I went back around the end of the bar and across the room to the gaping door behind the crap table. There was a hallway behind it, L-shaped, almost lightless. The bouncer lay sprawled on its floor unconscious, with a knife in his hand. I leaned down and pulled the knife loose and threw it down a back stairway. The bouncer breathed stertorously and his hand was limp.
I stepped over him and opened a door marked “Office” in flaked black paint.
There was a small scarred desk close to a partly boarded-up window. The torso of a man was bolt upright in the chair. The chair had a high back which just reached to the nape of the man’s neck. His head was folded back over the high back of the chair so that his nose pointed at the boarded-up window. Just folded, like a handkerchief or a hinge.
A drawer of the desk was open at the man’s right. Inside it was a newspaper with a smear of oil in the middle. The gun would have come from there. It had probably seemed like a good idea at the time, but the position of Mr. Montgomery’s head proved that the idea had been wrong.
There was a telephone on the desk. I laid the sawed-off shotgun down and went over to lock the door before I called the police. I felt safer that way and Mr. Montgomery didn’t seem to mind.
When the prowl car boys stamped up the stairs, the bouncer and the barman had disappeared and I had the place to myself.
CHAPTER 3
A man named Nulty got the case, a lean-jawed sourpuss with long yellow hands which he kept folded over his kneecaps most of the time he talked to me. He was a detective-lieutenant attached to the 77th Street Division and we talked in a bare room with two small desks against opposite walls and room to move between them, if two people didn’t try it at once. Dirty brown linoleum covered the floor and the smell of old cigar butts hung in the air. Nulty’s shirt was frayed and his coat sleeves had been turned in at the cuffs. He looked poor enough to be honest, but he didn’t look like a man who could deal with Moose Malloy.
He lit half of a cigar and threw the match on the floor, where a lot of company was waiting for it. His voice said bitterly:
“Shines. Another shine killing. That’s what I rate after eighteen years in this man’s police department. No pix, no space, not even four lines in the want-ad section.”
I didn’t say anything. He picked my card up and read it again and threw it down.
“Philip Marlowe, Private Investigator. One of those guys, huh? Jesus, you look tough enough. What was you doing all that time?”
“All what time?”
“All the time this Malloy was twisting the neck of this smoke.”
“Oh, that happened in another room,” I said. “Malloy hadn’t promised me he was going to break anybody’s neck.”
“Ride me,” Nulty said bitterly. “Okey, go ahead and ride me. Everybody else does. What’s another one matter? Poor old Nulty. Let’s go on up and throw a couple of fifties at him. Always good for a laugh, Nulty is.”
“I’m not trying to ride anybody,” I said. “That’s the way it happene
d—in another room.”
“Oh, sure,” Nulty said through a fan of rank cigar smoke. “I was down there and saw, didn’t I? Don’t you pack no rod?”
“Not on that kind of a job.”
“What kind of a job?”
“I was looking for a barber who had run away from his wife. She thought he could be persuaded to come home.”
“You mean a dinge?”
“No, a Greek.”
“Okey,” Nulty said and spit into his wastebasket. “Okey. You met the big guy how?”
“I told you already. I just happened to be there. He threw a Negro out of the doors of Florian’s and I unwisely poked my head in to see what was happening. So he took me upstairs.”
“You mean he stuck you up?”
“No, he didn’t have the gun then. At least, he didn’t show one. He took the gun away from Montgomery, probably. He just picked me up. I’m kind of cute sometimes.”
“I wouldn’t know,” Nulty said. “You seem to pick up awful easy.”
“All right,” I said. “Why argue? I’ve seen the guy and you haven’t. He could wear you or me for a watch charm. I didn’t know he had killed anybody until after he left. I heard a shot, but I got the idea somebody had got scared and shot at Malloy and then Malloy took the gun away from whoever did it.”
“And why would you get an idea like that?” Nulty asked almost suavely. “He used a gun to take that bank, didn’t he?”
“Consider the kind of clothes he was wearing. He didn’t go there to kill anybody; not dressed like that. He went there to look for this girl named Velma that had been his girl before he was pinched for the bank job. She worked there at Florian’s or whatever place was there when it was still a white joint. He was pinched there. You’ll get him all right.”
“Sure,” Nulty said. “With that size and them clothes. Easy.”
“He might have another suit,” I said. “And a car and a hideout and money and friends. But you’ll get him.”
Nulty spit in the wastebasket again. “I’ll get him,” he said, “about the time I get my third set of teeth. How many guys is put on it? One. Listen, you know why? No space. One time there was five smokes carved Harlem sunsets on each other down on East Eighty-four. One of them was cold already. There was blood on the furniture, blood on the walls, blood even on the ceiling. I go down and outside the house a guy that works on the Chronicle, a newshawk, is coming off the porch and getting into his car. He makes a face at us and says, ‘Aw, hell, shines,’ and gets in his heap and goes away. Don’t even go in the house.”
The Collected Raymond Chandler Page 22