“Turn around and put your hands behind you,” she said through the towel. The voice muffled by the towel meant as little to me as the dark glasses. It was not the voice which had talked to me on the telephone. I didn’t move.
“Don’t ever think I’m fooling,” she said. “I’ll give you exactly three seconds to do what I say.”
“Couldn’t you make it a minute? I like looking at you.”
She made a threatening gesture with the little gun. “Turn around,” she snapped. “But fast.”
“I like the sound of your voice too.”
“All right,” she said, in a tight dangerous tone. “If that’s the way you want it, that’s the way you want it.”
“Don’t forget you’re a lady,” I said, and turned around and put my hands up to my shoulders. A gun muzzle poked into the back of my neck. Breath almost tickled my skin. The perfume was an elegant something or other, not strong, not decisive. The gun against my neck went away and a white flame burned for an instant behind my eyes. I grunted and fell forward on my hands and knees and reached back quickly. My hand touched a leg in a nylon stocking but slipped off, which seemed a pity. It felt like a nice leg. The jar of another blow on the head took the pleasure out of this and I made the hoarse sound of a man in desperate shape. I collapsed on the floor. The door opened. A key rattled. The door closed. The key turned. Silence.
I climbed up to my feet and went into the bathroom. I bathed my head with a towel from the rack soaked with cold water. It felt as if the heel of a shoe had hit me. Certainly it was not a gun butt. There was a little blood, not much. I rinsed the towel out and stood there patting the bruise and wondering why I didn’t run after her screaming. But what I was doing was staring into the open medicine cabinet over the basin. The upper part of a can of talcum had been pried off the shoulder. There was talcum all over the shelf. A toothpaste tube had been cut open. Someone had been looking for something.
I went back to the little hallway and tried the room door. Locked from the outside. I bent down and looked through the keyhole. But it was an up-and-down lock, with the outer and inner keyholes on different levels. The girl in the dark glasses with the white rims didn’t know much about hotels. I twisted the night latch, which opened the outside lock, opened the door, looked along the empty corridor, and closed the door again.
Then I went towards the man on the bed. He had not moved during all this time, for a somewhat obvious reason.
Beyond the little hallway the room widened towards a pair of windows through which the evening sun slanted in a shaft that reached almost across the bed and came to a stop under the neck of the man that lay there. What it stopped on was blue and white and shining and round. He lay quite comfortably half on his face with his hands down at his sides and his shoes off. The side of his face was on the pillow and he seemed relaxed. He was wearing a toupee. The last time I had talked to him his name had been George W. Hicks. Now it was Dr. G. W. Hambleton. Same initials. Not that it mattered any more. I wasn’t going to be talking to him again. There was no blood. None at all, which is one of the few nice things about an expert ice-pick job.
I touched his neck. It was still warm. While I was doing it the shaft of sunlight moved away from the knob of the ice pick toward his left ear. I turned away and looked the room over. The telephone bell box had been opened and left open. The Gideon Bible was thrown in the corner. The desk had been searched. I went to a closet and looked into that. There were clothes in it and a suitcase I had seen before. I found nothing that seemed important. I picked a snap-brim hat off the floor and put it on the desk and went back to the bathroom. The point of interest now was whether the people who had icepicked Dr. Hambleton had found what they came for. They had had very little time.
I searched the bathroom carefully. I moved the top of the toilet tank and drained it. There was nothing in it. I peered down the overflow pipe. No thread hung there with a small object at the end of it. I searched the bureau. It was empty except for an old envelope. I unhooked the window screens and felt under the sills outside. I picked the Gideon Bible off the floor and leafed through it again. I examined the backs of three pictures and studied the edge of the carpet. It was tacked close to the wall and there were little pockets of dust in the depressions made by the tacks. I got down on the floor and examined the part under the bed. Just the same. I stood on a chair, looked into the bowl of the light fixture. It contained dust and dead moths. I looked the bed over. It had been made up by a professional and not touched since. I felt the pillow under the dead man’s head, then got the extra pillow out of the closet and examined its edges. Nothing.
Dr. Hambleton’s coat hung over a chair back. I went through that, knowing it was the least likely place to find anything. Somebody with a knife had worked on the lining and the shoulder padding. There were matches, a couple of cigars, a pair of dark glasses, a cheap handkerchief not used, a Bay City movie theater ticket stub, a small comb, an unopened package of cigarettes. I looked at it in the light. It showed no sign of having been disturbed. I disturbed it. I tore off the cover, went through it, found nothing but cigarettes.
That left Dr. Hambleton himself. I eased him over and got into his trouser pockets. Loose change, another handkerchief, a small tube of dental floss, more matches, a bunch of keys, a folder of bus schedules. In a pigskin wallet was a book of stamps, a second comb (here was a man who really took care of his toupee), three flat packages of white powder, seven printed cards reading Dr. G. W. Hambleton, O. D. Tustin Building, El Centro, California, Hours 9–12 and 2–4, and by Appointment. Telephone El Centro 50406. There was no driver’s license, no social-security card, no insurance cards, no real identification at all. There was $164 in currency in the wallet. I put the wallet back where I found it.
I lifted Dr. Hambleton’s hat off the desk and examined the sweatband and the ribbon. The ribbon bow had been picked loose with a knife point, leaving hanging threads. There was nothing hidden inside the bow. No evidence of any previous ripping and restitching.
This was the take. If the killers knew what they were looking for, it was something that could be hidden in a book, a telephone box, a tube of toothpaste, or a hatband. I went back into the bathroom and looked at my head again. It was still oozing a tiny trickle of blood. I gave it more cold water and dried the cut with toilet paper and flushed that down the bowl. I went back and stood a moment looking down on Dr. Hambleton, wondering what his mistake had been. He had seemed a fairly wise bird. The sunlight had moved over to the far edge of the room now, off the bed and down into a sad dusty corner.
I grinned suddenly, bent over and quickly and with the grin still on my face, out of place as it was, pulled off Dr. Hambleton’s toupee and turned it inside out. As simple as all that. To the lining of the toupee a piece of orange-colored paper was fastened by Scotch tape, protected by a square of cellophane. I pulled it loose, turned it over, and saw that it was a numbered claim check belonging to the Bay City Camera Shop. I put it in my wallet and put the toupee carefully back on the dead egg-bald head.
I left the room unlocked because I had no way to lock it.
Down the hall the radio still blared through the transom and the exaggerated alcoholic laughter accompanied it from across the corridor.
CHAPTER 10
Over the telephone the Bay City Camera Shop man said: “Yes, Mr. Hicks. We have them for you. Six enlarged prints on glossy from your negative.”
“What time do you close?” I asked.
“Oh in about five minutes. We open at nine in the morning.”
“I’ll pick them up in the morning. Thanks.”
I hung up, reached mechanically into the slot and found somebody else’s nickel. I walked over to the lunch counter and bought myself a cup of coffee with it, and sat there sipping and listening to the auto horns complaining on the street outside. It was time to go home. Whistles blew. Motors raced. Old brake linings squeaked. There was a dull steady mutter of feet on the sidewalk outside. It was just after
five-thirty. I finished the coffee, stuffed a pipe, and strolled a half-block back to the Van Nuys Hotel. In the writing room I folded the orange camera-shop check into a sheet of hotel stationery and addressed an envelope to myself. I put a special-delivery stamp on it and dropped it in the mail chute by the elevator bank. Then I went along to Flack’s office again.
Again I closed his door and sat down across from him. Flack didn’t seem to have moved an inch. He was chewing morosely on the same cigar butt and his eyes were still full of nothing. I relit my pipe by striking a match on the side of his desk. He frowned.
“Dr. Hambleton doesn’t answer his door,” I said.
“Huh?” Flack looked at me vacantly.
“Party in 332. Remember? He doesn’t answer his door.”
“What should I do—bust my girdle?” Flack asked.
“I knocked several times,” I said. “No answer. Thought he might be taking a bath or something, although I couldn’t hear anything. Went away for a while, then tried again. Same no answer again.”
Flack looked at a turnip watch he got from his vest. “I’m off at seven,” he said. “Jesus. A whole hour to go, and more. Boy, am I hungry.”
“Working the way you do,” I said, “you must be. You have to keep your strength up. Do I interest you at all in Room 332?”
“You said he wasn’t in,” Flack said irritably. “So what? He wasn’t in.”
“I didn’t say he wasn’t in. I said he didn’t answer his door.”
Flack leaned forward. Very slowly he removed the débris of the cigar from his mouth and put it in the glass tray. “Go on. Make me like it,” he said, carefully.
“Maybe you’d like to run up and look,” I said. “Maybe you didn’t see a first-class ice-pick job lately.”
Flack put his hands on the arms of his chair and squeezed the wood hard. “Aw,” he said painfully, “aw.” He got to his feet and opened the desk drawer. He took out a large black gun, flicked the gate open, studied the cartridges, squinted down the barrel, snapped the cylinder back into place. He unbuttoned his vest and tucked the gun down inside his waistband. In an emergency he could probably have got to it in less than a minute. He put his hat on firmly and jerked a thumb at the door.
We went up to the third floor in silence. We went down the corridor. Nothing had changed. No sound had increased or diminished. Flack hurried along to 332 and knocked from force of habit. Then tried the door. He looked back at me with a twisted mouth.
“You said the door wasn’t locked,” he complained.
“I didn’t exactly say that. It was unlocked, though.”
“It ain’t now,” Flack said, and unshipped a key on a long chain. He unlocked the door and glanced up and down the hall. He twisted the knob slowly without sound and eased the door a couple of inches. He listened. No sounds came from within. Flack stepped back, took the black gun out of his waistband. He removed the key from the door, kicked it wide open, and brought the gun up hard and straight, like the wicked foreman of the Lazy Q. “Let’s go,” he said out of the corner of his mouth.
Over his shoulder I could see that Dr. Hambleton lay exactly as before, but the ice-pick handle didn’t show from the entrance. Flack leaned forward and edged cautiously into the room. He reached the bathroom door and put his eye to the crack, then pushed the door open until it bounded against the tub. He went in and came out, stepped down into the room, a tense and wary man who was taking no chances.
He tried the closet door, leveled his gun and jerked it wide open. No suspects in the closet.
“Look under the bed,” I said.
Flack bent swiftly and looked under the bed.
“Look under the carpet,” I said.
“You kidding me?” Flack asked nastily.
“I just like to watch you work.”
He bent over the dead man and studied the ice pick.
“Somebody locked that door,” he sneered. “Unless you’re lying about its being unlocked.”
I said nothing.
“Well I guess it’s the cops,” he said slowly. “No chance to cover up on this one.”
“It’s not your fault,” I told him. “It happens even in good hotels.”
CHAPTER 11
The redheaded intern filled out a DOA form and clipped his stylus to the outside pocket of his white jacket. He snapped the book shut with a faint grin on his face.
“Punctured spinal cord just below the occipital bulge, I’d say,” he said carelessly. “A very vulnerable spot. If you know how to find it. And I suppose you do.”
Detective Lieutenant Christy French growled. “Think it’s the first time I’ve seen one?”
“No, I guess not,” the intern said. He gave a last quick look at the dead man, turned and walked out of the room. “I’ll call the coroner,” he said over his shoulder. The door closed behind him.
“What a stiff means to those birds is what a plate of warmed-up cabbage means to me,” Christy French said sourly to the closed door. His partner, a cop named Fred Beifus, was down on one knee by the telephone box. He had dusted it for fingerprints and blown off the loose powder. He was looking at the smudge through a small magnifying glass. He shook his head, then picked something off the screw with which the box had been fastened shut.
“Gray cotton undertaker’s gloves,” he said disgustedly. “Cost about four cents a pair wholesale. Fat lot of good printing this joint. They were looking for something in the telephone box, huh?”
“Evidently something that could be there,” French said. “I didn’t expect prints. These ice-pick jobs are a specialty. We’ll get the experts after a while. This is just a quick-over.”
He was stripping the dead man’s pockets and laying what had been in them out on the bed beside the quiet and already waxy corpse. Flack was sitting in a chair by the window, looking out morosely. The assistant manager had been up, said nothing with a worried expression, and gone away. I was leaning against the bathroom wall and sorting out my fingers.
Flack said suddenly: “I figure an ice-pick job’s a dame’s work. You can buy them anywhere. Ten cents. If you want one fast, you can slip it down inside a garter and let it hang there.”
Christy French gave him a brief glance which had a kind of wonder in it. Beifus said: “What kind of dames you been running around with, honey? The way stockings cost nowadays a dame would as soon stick a saw down her sock.”
“I never thought of that,” Flack said.
Beifus said: “Leave us do the thinking sweetheart. It takes equipment.”
“No need to get tough,” Flack said.
Beifus took his hat off and bowed. “You mustn’t deny us our little pleasures, Mr. Flack.”
Christy French said: “Besides, a woman would keep on jabbing. She wouldn’t even know how much was enough. Lots of the punks don’t. Whoever did this one was a performer. He got the spinal cord the first try. And another thing—you have to have the guy quiet to do it. That means more than one guy, unless he was doped, or the killer was a friend of his.”
I said: “I don’t see how he could have been doped, if he’s the party that called me on the phone.”
French and Beifus both looked at me with the same expression of patient boredom. “If,” French said, “and since you didn’t know the guy—according to you—there’s always the faint possibility that you wouldn’t know his voice. Or am I being too subtle?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I haven’t read your fan mail.”
French grinned.
“Don’t waste it on him,” Beifus told French. “Save it for when you talk to the Friday Morning Club. Some of them old ladies in the shiny-nose league go big for the nicer angles of murder.”
French rolled himself a cigarette and lit it with a kitchen match he struck on the back of a chair. He sighed.
“They worked the technique out in Brooklyn,” he explained. “Sunny Moe Stein’s boys specialized in it, but they run it into the ground. It got so you couldn’t walk across a vacant lot
without finding some of their work. Then they came out here, what was left of them. I wonder why did they do that.”
“Maybe we just got more vacant lots,” Beifus said.
“Funny thing, though,” French said, almost dreamily. “When Weepy Moyer had the chill put on Sunny Moe Stein over on Franklin Avenue last February, the killer used a gun. Moe wouldn’t have liked that at all.”
“I betcha that was why his face had that disappointed look, after they washed the blood off,” Beifus remarked.
“Who’s Weepy Moyer?” Flack asked.
“He was next to Moe in the organization,” French told him. “This could easily be his work. Not that he’d have done it personal.”
“Why not?” Flack asked sourly.
“Don’t you guys ever read a paper? Moyer’s a gentleman now. He knows the nicest people. Even has another name. And as for the Sunny Moe Stein job, it just happened we had him in jail on a gambling rap. We didn’t get anywhere. But we did make him a very sweet alibi. Anyhow he’s a gentleman like I said, and gentlemen don’t go around sticking ice picks into people. They hire it done.”
“Did you ever have anything on Moyer?” I asked.
French looked at me sharply. “Why?”
“I just had an idea. But it’s very fragile,” I said.
French eyed me slowly. “Just between us girls in the powder room,” he said, “we never even proved the guy we had was Moyer. But don’t broadcast it. Nobody’s supposed to know but him and his lawyer and the D.A. and the police beat and the city hall and maybe two or three hundred other people.”
The Collected Raymond Chandler Page 93