The Collected Raymond Chandler

by Raymond Chandler

  He smiled, softly, his third smile. “Like it?”

  “I’m listening.”

  “This was only this morning, understand. So I looked at the name of the man making the report and I knew him, Nulty. So I knew the case was a flop. Nulty is the kind of guy—well, were you ever up at Crestline?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, up near Crestline there’s a place where a bunch of old box cars have been made into cabins. I have a cabin up there myself, but not a box car. These box cars were brought up on trucks, believe it or not, and there they stand without any wheels. Now Nulty is the kind of guy who would make a swell brakeman on one of those box cars.”

  “That’s not nice,” I said. “A fellow officer.”

  “So I called Nulty up and he hemmed and hawed around and spit a few times and then he said you had an idea about some girl called Velma something or other that Malloy was sweet on a long time ago and you went to see the widow of the guy that used to own the dive where the killing happened when it was a white joint, and where Malloy and the girl both worked at that time. And her address was 1644 West Fifty-fourth Place, the place Marriott had the trust deed on.”

  “Yes?”

  “So I just thought that was enough coincidence for one morning,” Randall said. “And here I am. And so far I’ve been pretty nice about it.”

  “The trouble is,” I said, “it looks like more than it is. This Velma girl is dead, according to Mrs. Florian. I have her photo.”

  I went into the living room and reached into my suit-coat and my hand was in midair when it began to feel funny and empty. But they hadn’t even taken the photos. I got them out and took them to the kitchen and tossed the Pierrot girl down in front of Randall. He studied it carefully.

  “Nobody I ever saw,” he said. “That another one?”

  “No, this is a newspaper still of Mrs. Grayle. Anne Riordan got it.”

  He looked at it and nodded. “For twenty million, I’d marry her myself.”

  “There’s something I ought to tell you,” I said. “Last night I was so damn mad I had crazy ideas about going down there and trying to bust it alone. This hospital is at Twenty-third and Descanso in Bay City. It’s run by a man named Sonderborg who says he’s a doctor. He’s running a crook hideout on the side. I saw Moose Malloy there last night. In a room.”

  Randall sat very still, looking at me. “Sure?”

  “You couldn’t mistake him. He’s a big guy, enormous. He doesn’t look like anybody you ever saw.”

  He sat looking at me, without moving. Then very slowly he moved out from under the table and stood up.

  “Let’s go see this Florian woman.”

  “How about Malloy?”

  He sat down again. “Tell me the whole thing, carefully.”

  I told him. He listened without taking his eyes off my face. I don’t think he even winked. He breathed with his mouth slightly open. His body didn’t move. His fingers tapped gently on the edge of the table. When I had finished he said:

  “This Dr. Sonderborg—what did he look like?”

  “Like a doper, and probably a dope peddler.” I described him to Randall as well as I could.

  He went quietly into the other room and sat down at the telephone. He dialed his number and spoke quietly for a long time. Then he came back. I had just finished making more coffee and boiling a couple of eggs and making two slices of toast and buttering them. I sat down to eat.

  Randall sat down opposite me and leaned his chin in his hand. “I’m having a state narcotics man go down there with a fake complaint and ask to look around. He may get some ideas. He won’t get Malloy. Malloy was out of there ten minutes after you left last night. That’s one thing you can bet on.”

  “Why not the Bay City cops?” I put salt on my eggs.

  Randall said nothing. When I looked up at him his face was red and uncomfortable.

  “For a cop,” I said, “you’re the most sensitive guy I ever met.”

  “Hurry up with that eating. We have to go.”

  “I have to shower and shave and dress after this.”

  “Couldn’t you just go in your pajamas?” he asked acidly.

  “So the town is as crooked as all that?” I said.

  “It’s Laird Brunette’s town. They say he put up thirty grand to elect a mayor.”

  “The fellow that owns the Belvedere Club?”

  “And the two gambling boats.”

  “But it’s in our county,” I said.

  He looked down at his clean, shiny fingernails.

  “We’ll stop by your office and get those other two reefers,” he said. “If they’re still there.” He snapped his fingers. “If you’ll lend me your keys, I’ll do it while you get shaved and dressed.”

  “We’ll go together,” I said. “I might have some mail.”

  He nodded and after a moment sat down and lit another cigarette. I shaved and dressed and we left in Randall’s car.

  I had some mail, but it wasn’t worth reading. The two cut up cigarettes in the desk drawer had not been touched. The office had no look of having been searched.

  Randall took the two Russian cigarettes and sniffed at the tobacco and put them away in his pocket.

  “He got one card from you,” he mused. “There couldn’t have been anything on the back of that, so he didn’t bother about the others. I guess Amthor is not very much afraid—just thought you were trying to pull something. Let’s go.”

  CHAPTER 30

  Old Nosey poked her nose an inch outside the front door, sniffed carefully as if there might be an early violet blooming, looked up and down the street with a raking glance, and nodded her white head. Randall and I took our hats off. In that neighborhood that probably ranked you with Valentino. She seemed to remember me.

  “Good morning, Mrs. Morrison,” I said. “Can we step inside a minute? This is Lieutenant Randall from Headquarters.”

  “Land’s sakes, I’m all flustered. I got a big ironing to do,” she said.

  “We won’t keep you a minute.”

  She stood back from the door and we slipped past her into her hallway with the side piece from Mason City or wherever it was and from that into the neat living room with the lace curtains at the windows. A smell of ironing came from the back of the house. She shut the door in between as carefully as if it was made of short pie crust.

  She had a blue and white apron on this morning. Her eyes were just as sharp and her chin hadn’t grown any.

  She parked herself about a foot from me and pushed her face forward and looked into my eyes.

  “She didn’t get it.”

  I looked wise. I nodded my head and looked at Randall and Randall nodded his head. He went to a window and looked at the side of Mrs. Florian’s house. He came back softly, holding his pork pie under his arm, debonair as a French count in a college play.

  “She didn’t get it,” I said.

  “Nope, she didn’t. Saturday was the first. April Fool’s Day. He! He!” She stopped and was about to wipe her eyes with her apron when she remembered it was a rubber apron. That soured her a little. Her mouth got the pruny look.

  “When the mailman come by and he didn’t go up her walk she run out and called to him. He shook his head and went on. She went back in. She slammed the door so hard I figured a window’d break. Like she was mad.”

  “I swan,” I said.

  Old Nosey said to Randall sharply: “Let me see your badge, young man. This young man had a whiskey breath on him t’other day. I ain’t never rightly trusted him.”

  Randall took a gold and blue enamel badge out of his pocket and showed it to her.

  “Looks like real police all right,” she admitted. “Well, ain’t nothing happened over Sunday. She went out for liquor. Come back with two square bottles.”

  “Gin,” I said. “That just gives you an idea. Nice folks don’t drink gin.”

  “Nice folks don’t drink no liquor at all,” Old Nosey said pointedly.

  �
��Yeah,” I said. “Come Monday, that being today, and the mailman went by again. This time she was really sore.”

  “Kind of smart guesser, ain’t you, young man? Can’t wait for folks to get their mouth open hardly.”

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Morrison. This is an important matter to us—”

  “This here young man don’t seem to have no trouble keepin’ his mouth in place.”

  “He’s married,” I said. “He’s had practice.”

  Her face turned a shade of violet that reminded me, unpleasantly, of cyanosis. “Get out of my house afore I call the police!” she shouted.

  “There is a police officer standing before you, madam,” Randall said shortly. “You are in no danger.”

  “That’s right there is,” she admitted. The violet tint began to fade from her face. “I don’t take to this man.”

  “You have company, madam. Mrs. Florian didn’t get her registered letter today either—is that it?”

  “No.” Her voice was sharp and short. Her eyes were furtive. She began to talk rapidly, too rapidly. “People was there last night. I didn’t even see them. Folks took me to the picture show. Just as we got back—no, just after they driven off—a car went away from next door. Fast without any lights. I didn’t see the number.”

  She gave me a sharp sidelong look from her furtive eyes. I wondered why they were furtive. I wandered to the window and lifted the lace curtain. An official blue-gray uniform was nearing the house. The man wearing it wore a heavy leather bag over his shoulder and had a vizored cap.

  I turned away from the window, grinning.

  “You’re slipping,” I told her rudely. “You’ll be playing shortstop in a Class C league next year.”

  “That’s not smart,” Randall said coldly.

  “Take a look out of the window.”

  He did and his face hardened. He stood quite still looking at Mrs. Morrison. He was waiting for something, a sound like nothing else on earth. It came in a moment.

  It was the sound of something being pushed into the front door mail slot. It might have been a handbill, but it wasn’t. There were steps going back down the walk, then along the street, and Randall went to the window again. The mailman didn’t stop at Mrs. Florian’s house. He went on, his blue-gray back even and calm under the heavy leather pouch.

  Randall turned his head and asked with deadly politeness: “How many mail deliveries a morning are there in this district, Mrs. Morrison?”

  She tried to face it out. “Just the one,” she said sharply—“one mornings and one afternoons.”

  Her eyes darted this way and that. The rabbit chin was trembling on the edge of something. Her hands clutched at the rubber frill that bordered the blue and white apron.

  “The morning delivery just went by,” Randall said dreamily. “Registered mail comes by the regular mailman?”

  “She always got it Special Delivery,” the old voice cracked.

  “Oh. But on Saturday she ran out and spoke to the mailman when he didn’t stop at her house. And you said nothing about Special Delivery.”

  It was nice to watch him working—on somebody else.

  Her mouth opened wide and her teeth had the nice shiny look that comes from standing all night in a glass of solution. Then suddenly she made a squawking noise and threw the apron over her head and ran out of the room.

  He watched the door through which she had gone. It was beyond the arch. He smiled. It was a rather tired smile.

  “Neat, and not a bit gaudy,” I said. “Next time you play the tough part. I don’t like being rough with old ladies—even if they are lying gossips.”

  He went on smiling. “Same old story.” He shrugged. “Police work. Phooey. She started with facts, as she knew facts. But they didn’t come fast enough or seem exciting enough. So she tried a little lily-gilding.”

  He turned and we went out into the hall. A faint noise of sobbing came from the back of the house. For some patient man, long dead, that had been the weapon of final defeat, probably. Tome it was just an old woman sobbing, but nothing to be pleased about.

  We went quietly out of the house, shut the front door quietly and made sure that the screen door didn’t bang. Randall put his hat on and sighed. Then he shrugged, spreading his cool well-kept hands out far from his body. There was a thin sound of sobbing still audible, back in the house.

  The mailman’s back was two houses down the street.

  “Police work,” Randall said quietly, under his breath, and twisted his mouth.

  We walked across the space to the next house. Mrs. Florian hadn’t even taken the wash in. It still jittered, stiff and yellowish on the wire line in the side yard. We went up on the steps and rang the bell. No answer. We knocked. No answer.

  “It was unlocked last time,” I said.

  He tried the door, carefully screening the movement with his body. It was locked this time. We went down off the porch and walked around the house on the side away from Old Nosey. The back porch had a hooked screen. Randall knocked on that. Nothing happened. He came back off the two almost paintless wooden steps and went along the disused and overgrown driveway and opened up a wooden garage. The doors creaked. The garage was full of nothing. There were a few battered old-fashioned trunks not worth breaking up for firewood. Rusted gardening tools, old cans, plenty of those, in cartons. On each side of the doors, in the angle of the wall a nice fat black widow spider sat in its casual untidy web. Randall picked up a piece of wood and killed them absently. He shut the garage up again, walked back along the weedy drive to the front and up the steps of the house on the other side from Old Nosey. Nobody answered his ring or knock.

  He came back slowly, looking across the street over his shoulder.

  “Back door’s easiest,” he said. “The old hen next door won’t do anything about it now. She’s done too much lying.”

  He went up the two back steps and slid a knife blade neatly into the crack of the door and lifted the hook. That put us in the screen porch. It was full of cans and some of the cans were full of flies.

  “Jesus, what a way to live!” he said.

  The back door was easy. A five-cent skeleton key turned the lock. But there was a bolt.

  “This jars me,” I said. “I guess she’s beat it. She wouldn’t lock up like this. She’s too sloppy.”

  “Your hat’s older than mine,” Randall said. He looked at the glass panel in the back door. “Lend it to me to push the glass in. Or shall we do a neat job?”

  “Kick it in. Who cares around here?”

  “Here goes.”

  He stepped back and lunged at the lock with his leg parallel to the floor. Something cracked idly and the door gave a few inches. We heaved it open and picked a piece of jagged cast metal off the linoleum and laid it politely on the woodstone drainboard, beside about nine empty gin bottles.

  Flies buzzed against the closed windows of the kitchen. The place reeked. Randall stood in the middle of the floor, giving it the careful eye.

  Then he walked softly through the swing door without touching it except low down with his toe and using that to push it far enough back so that it stayed open. The living room was much as I had remembered it. The radio was off.

  “That’s a nice radio,” Randall said. “Cost money. If it’s paid for. Here’s something.”

  He went down on one knee and looked along the carpet. Then he went to the side of the radio and moved a loose cord with his foot. The plug came into view. He bent and studied the knobs on the radio front.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Smooth and rather large. Pretty smart, that. You don’t get prints on a light cord, do you?”

  “Shove it in and see if it’s turned on.”

  He reached around and shoved it into the plug in the baseboard. The light went on at once. We waited. The thing hummed for a while and then suddenly a heavy volume of sound began to pour out of the speaker. Randall jumped at the cord and yanked it loose again. The sound was snapped off sharp.

  When h
e straightened his eyes were full of light.

  We went swiftly into the bedroom. Mrs. Jessie Pierce Florian lay diagonally across the bed, in a rumpled cotton house dress, with her head close to one end of the footboard. The corner post of the bed was smeared darkly with something the flies liked.

  She had been dead long enough.

  Randall didn’t touch her. He stared down at her for a long time and then looked at me with a wolfish baring of his teeth.

  “Brains on her face,” he said. “That seems to be the theme song of this case. Only this was done with just a pair of hands. But Jesus what a pair of hands. Look at the neck bruises, the spacing of the finger marks.”

  “You look at them,” I said. I turned away. “Poor old Nulty. It’s not just a shine killing any more.”

  CHAPTER 31

  A shiny black bug with a pink head and pink spots on it crawled slowly along the polished top of Randall’s desk and waved a couple of feelers around, as if testing the breeze for a takeoff. It wobbled a little as it crawled, like an old woman carrying too many parcels. A nameless dick sat at another desk and kept talking into an old-fashioned hushaphone telephone mouthpiece, so that his voice sounded like someone whispering in a tunnel. He talked with his eyes half closed, a big scarred hand on the desk in front of him holding a burning cigarette between the knuckles of the first and second fingers.

  The bug reached the end of Randall’s desk and marched straight off into the air. It fell on its back on the floor, waved a few thin worn legs in the air feebly and then played dead. Nobody cared, so it began waving the legs again and finally struggled over on its face. It trundled slowly off into a corner towards nothing, going nowhere.

  The police loudspeaker box on the wall put out a bulletin about a holdup on San Pedro south of Forty-fourth. The holdup was a middle-aged man wearing a dark gray suit and gray felt hat. He was last seen running east on Forty-fourth and then dodging between two houses. “Approach carefully,” the announcer said. “This suspect is armed with a .32 caliber revolver and has just held up the proprietor of a Greek restaurant at Number 3966 South San Pedro.”