The carroty man withdrew the key and bared his teeth at me. He walked across the narrow hallway and banged on the opposite door. He had to knock hard and long before any attention was paid. Then the door was jerked open and a sharp-faced blond in scarlet slacks and a green pullover stared out with sultry eyes, one of which was puffed and the other had been socked several days ago. She also had a bruise on her throat and her hand held a tall cool glass of amber fluid.
“Pipe down, but soon,” the carroty man said. “Too much racket. I don’t aim to ask you again. Next time I call some law.”
The girl looked back over her shoulder and screamed against the noise of the radio: “Hey, Del! The guy says to pipe down! You wanna sock him?”
A chair squeaked, the radio noise died abruptly and a thick bitter-eyed dark man appeared behind the blond, yanked her out of the way with one hand and pushed his face at us. He needed a shave. He was wearing pants, street shoes and an undershirt.
He settled his feet in the doorway, whistled a little breath in through his nose and said:
“Buzz off. I just come in from lunch. I had a lousy lunch. I wouldn’t want nobody to push muscle at me.” He was very drunk, but in a hard practised sort of way.
The carroty man said: “You heard me, Mr. Hench. Dim that radio and stop the roughhouse in here. And make it sudden.”
The man addressed as Hench said: “Listen, picklepuss—” and heaved forward with his right foot in a hard stamp.
The carroty man’s left foot didn’t wait to be stamped on. The lean body moved back quickly and the thrown bunch of keys hit the floor behind, and clanked against the door of Apartment 204. The carroty man’s right hand made a sweeping movement and came up with a woven leather blackjack.
Hench said: “Yah!” and took two big handfuls of air in his two hairy hands, closed the hands into fists and swung hard at nothing.
The carroty man hit him on the top of his head and the girl screamed again and threw a glass of liquor in her boy friend’s face. Whether because it was safe to do it now or because she made an honest mistake, I couldn’t tell.
Hench turned blindly with his face dripping, stumbled and ran across the floor in a lurch that threatened to land him on his nose at every step. The bed was down and tumbled. Hench made the bed on one knee and plunged a hand under the pillow.
I said: “Look out—gun.”
“I can fade that too,” the carroty man said between his teeth and slid his right hand, empty now, under his open vest.
Hench was down on both knees. He came up on one and turned and there was a short black gun in his right hand and he was staring down at it, not holding it by the grip at all, holding it flat on his palm.
“Drop it!” the carroty man’s voice said tightly and he went on into the room.
The blond promptly jumped on his back and wound her long green arms around his neck, yelling lustily. The carroty man staggered and swore and waved his gun around.
“Get him, Del!” the blond screamed. “Get him good!”
Hench, one hand on the bed and one foot on the floor, both knees doubled, right hand holding the black gun flat on his palm, eyes staring down at it, pushed himself slowly to his feet and growled deep in his throat:
“This ain’t my gun.”
I relieved the carroty man of the gun that was not doing him any good and stepped around him, leaving him to shake the blond off his back as best he could. A door banged down the hallway and steps came along toward us.
I said: “Drop it, Hench.”
He looked up at me, puzzled dark eyes suddenly sober.
“It ain’t my gun,” he said and held it out flat. “Mine’s a Colt .32—belly gun.”
I took the gun off his hand. He made no effort to stop me. He sat down on the bed, rubbed the top of his head slowly, and screwed his face up in difficult thought. “Where the hell—” his voice trailed off and he shook his head and winced.
I sniffed the gun. It had been fired. I sprang the magazine out and counted the bullets through the small holes in the side. There were six. With one in the magazine, that made seven. The gun was a Colt .32, automatic, eight shot. It had been fired. If it had not been reloaded, one shot had been fired from it.
The carroty man had the blond off his back now. He had thrown her into a chair and was wiping a scratch on his cheek. His green eyes were baleful.
“Better get some law,” I said. “A shot has been fired from this gun and it’s about time you found out there’s a dead man in the apartment across the hall.”
Hench looked up at me stupidly and said in a quiet, reasonable voice: “Brother, that simply ain’t my gun.”
The blond sobbed in a rather theatrical manner and showed me an open mouth twisted with misery and ham acting. The carroty man went softly out of the door.
CHAPTER 10
“Shot in the throat with a medium caliber gun and a soft-nosed bullet,” Detective-Lieutenant Jesse Breeze said. “A gun like this and bullets like is in here.” He danced the gun on his hand, the gun Hence had said was not his gun. “Bullet ranged upwards and probably hit the back of the skull. Still inside his head. The man’s dead about two hours. Hands and face cold, but body still warm. No rigor. Was sapped with something hard before being shot. Likely with a gun butt. All that mean anything to you boys and girls?”
The newspaper he was sitting on rustled. He took his hat off and mopped his face and the top of his almost bald head. A fringe of light colored hair around the crown was damp and dark with sweat. He put his hat back on, a flat-crowned panama, burned dark by the sun. Not this year’s hat, and probably not last year’s.
He was a big man, rather paunchy, wearing brown and white shoes and sloppy socks and white trousers with thin black stripes, an open neck shirt showing some ginger-colored hair at the top of his chest, and a rough sky-blue sports coat not wider at the shoulders than a two-car garage. He would be about fifty years old and the only thing about him that very much suggested cop was the calm, unwinking unwavering stare of his prominent pale blue eyes, a stare that had no thought of being rude, but that anybody but a cop would feel to be rude. Below his eyes across the top of his cheeks and the bridge of his nose there was a wide path of freckles, like a mine field on a war map.
We were sitting in Hench’s apartment and the door was shut. Hench had his shirt on and he was absently tying a tie with thick blunt fingers that trembled. The girl was lying on the bed. She had a green wraparound thing twisted about her head, a purse by her side and a short squirrel coat across her feet. Her mouth was a little open and her face was drained and shocked.
Hench said thickly: “If the idea is the guy was shot with the gun under the pillow, okay. Seems like he might have been. It ain’t my gun and nothing you boys can think up is going to make me say it’s my gun.”
“Assuming that to be so,” Breeze said, “how come? Somebody swiped your gun and left this one. When, how, what kind of gun was yours?”
“We went out about three-thirty or so to get something to eat at the hashhouse around the corner,” Hench said. “You can check that. We must have left the door unlocked. We were kind of hitting the bottle a little. I guess we were pretty noisy. We had the ball game going on the radio. I guess we shut it off when we went out. I’m not sure. You remember?” He looked at the girl lying white-faced and silent on the bed. “You remember, sweet?”
The girl didn’t look at him or answer him.
“She’s pooped,” Hench said. “I had a gun, a Colt .32, same caliber as that, but a belly gun. A revolver, not an automatic. There’s a piece broken off the rubber grip. A Jew named Morris gave it to me three four years ago. We worked together in a bar. I don’t have no permit, but I don’t carry the gun neither.”
Breeze said: “Hitting the hooch like you birds been and having a gun under the pillow sooner or later somebody was going to get shot. You ought to know that.”
“Hell, we didn’t even know the guy,” Hench said. His tie was tied now, very badly.
He was cold sober and very shaky. He stood up and picked a coat off the end of the bed and put it on and sat down again. I watched his fingers tremble lighting a cigarette. “We don’t know his name. We don’t know anything about him. I see him maybe two three times in the hall, but he don’t even speak to me. It’s the same guy, I guess. I ain’t even sure of that.”
“It’s the fellow that lived there,” Breeze said. “Let me see now, this ball game is a studio re-broadcast, huh?”
“Goes on at three,” Hench said. “Three to say four-thirty, or sometimes later. We went out about the last half the third. We was gone about an inning and a half, maybe two. Twenty minutes to half an hour. Not more.”
“I guess he was shot just before you went out,” Breeze said. “The radio would kill the noise of the gun near enough. You must of left your door unlocked. Or even open.”
“Could be,” Hench said wearily. “You remember, honey?”
Again the girl on the bed refused to answer him or even look at him.
Breeze said: “You left your door open or unlocked. The killer heard you go out. He got into your apartment, wanting to ditch his gun, saw the bed down, walked across and slipped his gun under the pillow, and then imagine his surprise. He found another gun there waiting for him. So he took it along. Now if he meant to ditch his gun, why not do it where he did his killing? Why take the risk of going into another apartment to do it? Why the fancy pants?”
I was sitting in the corner of the davenport by the window. I put in my nickel’s worth, saying: “Suppose he had locked himself out of Phillips’ apartment before he thought of ditching the gun? Suppose, coming out of the shock of his murder, he found himself in the hall still holding the murder gun. He would want to ditch it fast. Then if Hench’s door was open and he had heard them go out along the hall—”
Breeze looked at me briefly and grunted: “I’m not saying it isn’t so. I’m just considering.” He turned his attention back to Hench. “So now, if this turns out to be the gun that killed Anson, we got to try and trace your gun. While we do that we got to have you and the young lady handy. You understand that, of course?”
Hench said: “You don’t have any boys that can bounce me hard enough to make me tell it different.”
“We can always try,” Breeze said mildly. “And we might just as well get started.”
He stood up, turned and swept the crumpled newspapers off the chair on to the floor. He went over to the door, then turned and stood looking at the girl on the bed. “You all right, sister, or should I call for a matron?”
The girl on the bed didn’t answer him.
Hench said: “I need a drink. I need a drink bad.”
“Not while I’m watching you,” Breeze said and went out of the door.
Hench moved across the room and put the neck of a bottle into his mouth and gurgled liquor. He lowered the bottle, looked at what was left in it and went over to the girl. He pushed her shoulder.
“Wake up and have a drink,” he growled at her.
The girl stared at the ceiling. She didn’t answer him or show that she had heard him.
“Let her alone,” I said. “Shock.”
Hench finished what was in the bottle, put the empty bottle down carefully and looked at the girl again, then turned his back on her and stood frowning at the floor. “Jeeze, I wish I could remember better,” he said under his breath.
Breeze came back into the room with a young fresh-faced plainclothes detective. “This is Lieutenant Spangler,” he said. “Hell take you down. Get going, huh?”
Hench went back to the bed and shook the girl’s shoulder. “Get on up, babe. We gotta take a ride.”
The girl turned her eyes without turning her head, and looked at him slowly. She lifted her shoulders off the bed and put a hand under her and swung her legs over the side and stood up, stamping her right foot, as if it was numb.
“Tough, kid—but you know how it is,” Hench said.
The girl put a hand to her mouth and bit the knuckle of her little finger, looking at him blankly. Then she swung the hand suddenly and hit him in the face as hard as she could. Then she half ran out of the door.
Hench didn’t move a muscle for a long moment. There was a confused noise of men talking outside, a confused noise of cars down below in the street. Hench shrugged and cocked his heavy shoulders back and swept a slow look around the room, as if he didn’t expect to see it again very soon, or at all. Then he went out past the young fresh-faced detective.
The detective went out. The door closed. The confused noise outside was dimmed a little and Breeze and I sat looking at each other heavily.
CHAPTER 11
After a while Breeze got tired of looking at me and dug a cigar out of his pocket. He slit the cellophane band with a knife and trimmed the end of the cigar and lit it carefully, turning it around in the flame, and holding the burning match away from it while he stared thoughtfully at nothing and drew on the cigar and made sure it was burning the way he wanted it to burn.
Then he shook the match out very slowly and reached over to lay it on the sill of the open window. Then he looked at me some more.
“You and me,” he said, “are going to get along.”
“That’s fine,” I said.
“You don’t think so,” he said. “But we are. But not because I took any sudden fancy to you. It’s the way I work. Everything in the clear. Everything sensible. Everything quiet. Not like that dame. That’s the kind of dame that spends her life looking for trouble and when she finds it, it’s the fault of the first guy she can get her fingernails into.”
“He gave her a couple of shiners,” I said. “That wouldn’t make her love him too much.”
“I can see,” Breeze said, “that you know a lot about dames.”
“Not knowing a lot about them has helped me in my business,” I said. “I’m open-minded.”
He nodded and examined the end of his cigar. He took a piece of paper out of his pocket and read from it. “Delmar B. Hench, 45, bartender, unemployed. Maybelle Masters, 26, dancer. That’s all I know about them. I’ve got a hunch there ain’t a lot more to know.”
“You don’t think he shot Anson?” I asked.
Breeze looked at me without pleasure. “Brother, I just got here.” He took a card out of his pocket and read from that. “James B. Pollock, Reliance Indemnity Company, Field Agent. What’s the idea?”
“In a neighborhood like this it’s bad form to use your own name,” I said. “Anson didn’t either.”
“What’s the matter with the neighborhood?”
“Practically everything,” I said.
“What I would like to know,” Breeze said, “is what you know about the dead guy?”
“I told you already.”
“Tell me again. People tell me so much stuff I get it all mixed up.”
“I know what it says on his card, that his name is George Anson Phillips, that he claimed to be a private detective. He was outside my office when I went to lunch. He followed me downtown, into the lobby of the Hotel Metropole. I led him there. I spoke to him and he admitted he had been following me and said it was because he wanted to find out if I was smart enough to do business with. That’s a lot of baloney, of course. He probably hadn’t quite made up his mind what to do and was waiting for something to decide him. He was on a job—he said—he had got leery of and he wanted to join up with somebody, perhaps somebody with a little more experience than he had, if he had any at all. He didn’t act as if he had.”
Breeze said: “And the only reason he picked on you is that six years ago you worked on a case in Ventura while he was a deputy up there.”
I said, “That’s my story.”
“But you don’t have to get stuck with it,” Breeze said calmly. “You can always give us a better one.”
“It’s good enough,” I said. “I mean it’s good enough in the sense that it’s bad enough to be true.”
He nodded his big slow head.
“
What’s your idea of all this?” he asked.
“Have you investigated Phillips’ office address?”
He shook his head, no.
“My idea is you will find out he was hired because he was simple. He was hired to take this apartment here under a wrong name, and to do something that turned out to be not what he liked. He was scared. He wanted a friend, he wanted help. The fact that he picked me after so long a time and such little knowledge of me showed he didn’t know many people in the detective business.”
Breeze got his handkerchief out and mopped his head and face again. “But it don’t begin to show why he had to follow you around like a lost pup instead of walking right up to your office door and in.”
“No,” I said, “it doesn’t.”
“Can you explain that?”
“No. Not really.”
“Well, how would you try to explain it?”
“I’ve already explained it in the only way I know how. He was undecided whether to speak to me or not. He was waiting for something to decide him. I decided by speaking to him.”
Breeze said: “That is a very simple explanation. It is so simple it stinks.”
“You may be right,” I said.
“And as the result of this little hotel lobby conversation this guy, a total stranger to you, asks you to his apartment and hands you his key. Because he wants to talk to you.”
I said, “Yes.”
“Why couldn’t he talk to you then?”
“I had an appointment,” I said.
“Business?”
I nodded.
“I see. What you working on?”
I shook my head and didn’t answer.
“This is murder,” Breeze said. “You’re going to have to tell me.”
I shook my head again. He flushed a little.
“Look,” he said tightly, “you got to.”
“I’m sorry, Breeze,” I said. “But so far as things have gone, I’m not convinced of that.”
“Of course you know I can throw you in the can as a material witness,” he said casually.
“On what grounds?”
The Collected Raymond Chandler Page 52