The Collected Raymond Chandler

by Raymond Chandler

  “That could be it,” Joseph said. “Why not? Anything you touch fades out just the same as you do.”

  “But I touched the door,” Joe said. “And I don’t think that faded out. And I don’t touch—I mean actually touch—all of my clothes. My feet touch my socks and my socks touch my shoes. I touch my shirt and I don’t touch my jacket. And what about the things in pockets?”

  “Maybe it’s your aura,” Joseph said. “Or your magnetic field or just your personality—what there is of it—anything that falls in that field goes with you. Cigarettes, money, anything that’s properly yours, but not things like doors and walls and floors.”

  “I don’t think that’s very logical,” Joe Pettigrew said severely.

  “Would a logical guy be where you are?” Joseph inquired coldly. “Would that screwy Professor want to do business with a logical guy? What’s logical about any part of this deal? He picks a complete stranger, a guy he never saw or heard of before, and gives him a batch of that stuff for free, and the guy he gives it to is maybe the one guy in the whole block that has a good quick use for it. Is any of that logical? In a pig’s eye it’s logical.”

  “So that,” Joe Pettigrew said slowly, “brings me to what I’ll be taking downstairs with me. They won’t see that either. Chances are they won’t even hear it.”

  “Of course you could try out with a highball glass,” Joseph said. “You could pick one up just as somebody started to reach for it. You’d know quick enough whether it disappeared when you touched it.”

  “I could do that,” Joe Pettigrew said. He paused and looked very thoughtful. “I wonder if you come back gradually,” he added, “or all of a sudden. Bang.”

  “I vote for bang,” Joseph said. “The old gentleman doesn’t call himself Bingo for nothing. I say it’s fast both ways—out and in. The thing you have to find out is when.”

  “I’ll do that,” Joe Pettigrew said. “I’ll be very careful about it. It’s important.” He nodded at his reflection and Joseph nodded back. As he moved to turn away he added:

  “I’m just a little sorry for Porter Green. All the time and money he’s spent on her. And if I know a club chair from a catcher’s mitt, all he’s got out of it is a tease.”

  “That’s something you can’t be sure about,” Joseph said. “He looks to me like a type that gets what he pays for or else.”

  That ended that. Joe Pettigrew went into the bedroom and got an old suitcase off a closet shelf. Inside was a scuffed briefcase with a broken strap. He unlocked it with a small key. There was a hard bundle in the briefcase, wrapped in a flannel duster. Inside the duster was an old woolen sock. And inside the sock, well oiled and clean, was a loaded .32 caliber automatic. Joe Pettigrew put this in his right hip pocket, where it felt heavier than sin. He replaced the briefcase in the closet and went downstairs, walking softly and stepping on the treads towards the side. Then he thought that was silly because if they creaked nobody could hear such a small sound with the radio going.

  He reached the bottom of the stairs and moved across to the door of the living-room. He tried the knob gently. The door was locked. It was a spring lock which had been put on when most of the lower floor had been converted into a bachelor apartment for renting purposes. Joe got his keyholder out and pushed a key slowly into the lock. He turned it. He could feel the bolt coming back. The deadlatch wasn’t on. Why should it be? You only do that at night, when you’re the nervous type. He held the doorknob with his left hand and gently eased the door open enough for the lock to clear. This was the tricky bit—one of the tricky bits. When the bolt was clear he let the knob return to its original position and withdrew the key. Holding the knob tightly he pushed the door open until he could look around it. There was no sound from inside except the booming radio. Nobody yelled. Therefore nobody was looking at the door. So far, so good.

  Joe Pettigrew put his head around the door and looked in. The room was warm and smelled of cigarette smoke and humanity and ever so lightly of liquor. But there was nobody in it. Joe pushed the door wide open and stepped inside, a frown of disappointment on his face. Then the frown of disappointment changed to a grimace of disgust.

  At the back of the living-room sliding doors had once given on to the dining room. The dining room was now a bedroom, but the sliding doors had been left much as they had always been. Now they were closed tight together. Joe Pettigrew stood quite motionless staring at the sliding doors. His hand went up aimlessly and smoothed his thinning hair back. His face was completely expressionless for a long moment, then a faint smile that might have meant anything lifted the corners of his mouth. He turned back and closed the door. He moved across to the davenport and looked down at half-melted ice in the bottoms of two tall striped glasses, and the ice cubes swimming in water in a glass bowl beside the uncorked whiskey bottle, at the smeared cigarette stubs in a tray, one of them still wisping a tiny thread of smoke into the still air.

  Joe sat down quietly on the corner of the davenport and looked at his watch. It seemed like a long, long time since he had made the acquaintance of Professor Bingo. A long, long time and a world away. Now if he could only remember at exactly what time he had taken the pinch of snuff. It would be about ten-twenty, he thought. It would be better to be sure, better to wait, better to experiment. Much better. But when had he ever done the better thing?

  Not ever that he could recall. And certainly not since he had met Gladys.

  He took the automatic out of his hip pocket and laid it down on the cocktail table in front of him. He sat looking at it absently, listening to the growl of the radio. Then he reached down and almost daintily he released the safety catch. That done he leaned back again and waited. And as he waited, with no particular emotion his mind remembered. It was the sort of thing many minds have to remember. Behind the closed double doors he half heard a series of noises which never quite registered on his mind, partly because of the radio and partly because of the intensity of his remembering.

  When the sliding doors began to open Joe Pettigrew reached his hand out and took the gun off the cocktail table. He rested it on his knee. That was the only movement he made. He didn’t even look at the doors.

  When the doors were open enough for a man’s body to pass through Porter Green’s body appeared in the opening. His hands held on to the doors high up, the fingers glistening with strain. He swayed a little holding on to the doors like a man very drunk. But he was not drunk. His eyes were wide open in a fixed stare and his mouth had the beginnings of a silly grin on it. Sweat glistened on his face and on his puffy white belly. He was naked except for a pair of slacks. His feet were bare, his head was dank with sweat and tousled. On his face was something else that Joe Pettigrew didn’t see because Joe Pettigrew kept on staring at the carpet between his feet, holding the gun on his knee, sideways, pointing at nothing.

  Porter Green took a deep hard breath and let it out in a long sigh. He let go of the doors and took a couple of ragged steps forward into the room. His eyes came around to the whiskey bottle on the table in front of the davenport, in front of Joe Pettigrew. They focused on the bottle and his body turned a little and he leaned towards it even before he was near enough to reach it. The bottle rattled on the glass top of the cocktail table. Even then Joe Pettigrew didn’t look up. He smelled the man so near him, so unaware of him and his gaunt face twisted suddenly with pain.

  The bottle went up, the hand with the fine black hairs on the back of it disappeared from Joe Pettigrew’s field of vision. The gurgling of the liquid was audible even against the radio.

  “Bitch!” Porter Green said harshly between his teeth. “God damn rotten lousy filthy bitch.” There was a puking horror and disgust in his voice.

  Joe Pettigrew moved his head slightly and tensed. There was just room for him to stand up between the davenport and the cocktail table without squirming around. He stood up. The gun came up in his hand. As it came up his eyes came with it slowly, slowly. He saw the naked soft flesh above the waistband
of Porter Green’s slacks. He saw the sweat glistening on the bulge above his navel. His eyes moved to the right and crawled up the ribs. His hand steadied. The heart is higher up than most people think it is. Joe Pettigrew knew that. The muzzle of the automatic knew it also. The muzzle pointed straight at that heart and with a steady squeeze that was almost indifferent Joe Pettigrew pulled the trigger.

  It was louder than the radio and a different kind of sound. There was a feeling of concussion about it, a hint of power. If you haven’t fired a gun for a long time that always takes you by surprise—the sudden pulsing life in the instrument of death, the swift way it moves in your hand like a lizard on a rock.

  Shot men fall in all sorts of ways. Porter Green fell sideways, one knee giving way before the other. He fell with a boneless leisure, as if his knees were hinged in all directions. In the second it took him to fall Joe Pettigrew remembered a vaudeville act he had seen long ago when he was in show business himself. An act with a tall thin boneless man and a girl. In the middle of their foolishness the tall man would start to fall sideways very slowly, his body curving like a hoop so that at no moment could you say he hit the floor of the stage. He seemed to melt into it without effort or shock. He did this six times. The first time it was just funny, the second time it was exciting to watch him do it and wonder how he did it. The fourth time women in the audience began to scream: “Don’t let him do it! Don’t let him do it!” He did it. And by the end of the act he had all the impressionable people in rags, dreading what he was going to do, because it was inhuman and unnatural, and no man built along the usual lines could possibly have done it.

  Joe Pettigrew stopped remembering this and came back to where he was and there was Porter Green lying on the floor with his head against the carpet and no blood at all, and for the first time Joe Pettigrew looked at his face and saw that it was ripped and torn with deep scratches from a woman’s long sharp frantic fingernails. That did it. Joe Pettigrew opened his mouth and screamed like a gored horse.

  In his own ears the scream sounded far off, like something in another house. A thin tearing sound that had nothing to do with him. Perhaps he hadn’t screamed at all. It might have been tires taking a corner too fast. Or a lost soul on its headlong rush down to hell. He had no physical sensation at all. He seemed to float around the end of the table and around the cadaver of Porter Green. But his floating or whatever it was had a purpose. He was at the door now. He turned the deadlatch. He was at the windows. They were closed but one was not locked; he locked it. He was at the radio. He twisted that off. No more boom boom. A silence like interstellar space swathed him in a long white shroud. He moved back across the room to the sliding doors.

  He moved through them into Porter Green’s bedroom, which had been the dining room of the house long ago, when Los Angeles was young and hot and dry and dusty and belonged still to the desert and the rustling lines of eucalyptus trees and the fat palm trees that lined its streets.

  All that remained of the dining room was a built-in china closet between the two north windows. There were books behind its fretted doors. Not many books. Porter Green wasn’t what you would call a reading man. The bed was against the east wall, beyond which was the breakfast room and kitchen. It was very untidy, the bed was, and there was something on it, but Joe Pettigrew wasn’t in the mood to look at what was on it. Beyond the bed was what had been a swing door but that had been changed for a solid door, that fitted tightly in its frame and had a turn bolt on it. The bolt was shot. Joe Pettigrew thought he could see dust in the cracks of the door. He knew it was seldom opened. But the bolt was shot, that was the important thing.

  He passed on into a short hall that passed across the main hall under the stairs. This had been necessary to give access to the bathroom, once a sewing room, on the other side of the house. There was a closet under the stairs. Joe Pettigrew opened the door and switched on the light. A couple of suitcases in the corners, suits on hangers, an overcoat and a raincoat. A pair of dingy white buck shoes tossed in the corner. He switched the light off again and closed the door. He went on into the bathroom. It was pretty large for a bathroom and the tub was old-fashioned. Joe Pettigrew passed the mirror over the washbasin without looking into it. He didn’t feel like talking to Joseph just now. Detail, that was the main thing, careful attention to detail. The bathroom windows were open and the gauze curtains fluttered. He shut them tight and turned the catches in the side of the frame. There was no door out of the bathroom except the one by which he had entered. There had been one towards the front of the house, but it had been filled in and papered over with waterproof paper, like the rest of the hall.

  The room in front was practically a junk room. It had some old furniture and stuff and a roll-top desk in that hideous light oak people used to like. Joe Pettigrew never used it, never went in there at all. So that was that.

  He turned back and stopped in front of the bathroom mirror. He didn’t want to at all. But Joseph might have thought of something he ought to know, so he looked at Joseph. Joseph looked back at him with an unpleasant fixed stare.

  “Radio,” Joseph said curtly. “You turned it off. Wrong. Turn it down, yes. Off, no.”

  “Oh,” Joe Pettigrew said to Joseph. “Yes, I guess you’re right. Then there’s the gun. But I hadn’t forgotten that.” He patted his pocket.

  “And the bedroom windows,” Joseph said, almost contemptuous. “And you’re going to have to look at Gladys.”

  “The bedroom windows, check,” Joe Pettigrew said and paused. “I don’t want to look at her. She’s dead. She’s got to be dead. All you had to do was see him.”

  “Teased the wrong guy this time, didn’t she?” Joseph said coldly. “Or were you expecting something like that?”

  “I don’t know,” Joe said. “No, I don’t think I went that far. But I messed it up good. I didn’t have to shoot him at all.”

  Joseph looked at him with a peculiar expression. “And waste the Professor’s time and material? You don’t think he came by here just for the exercise, do you?”

  “Goodbye, Joseph,” Joe Pettigrew said.

  “What for are you saying goodbye?” Joseph snapped.

  “I have a feeling that way,” Joe Pettigrew replied. He went out of the bathroom.

  He went around the bed and closed and locked the windows. He did finally look at Gladys, although he didn’t want to. He needn’t have. His hunch had been right. If ever a bed looked like a battlefield this was it. If ever a face looked livid and twisted and dead, it was the face of Gladys. There were a few shreds of clothing on her, that’s all. Just a few shreds. She looked battered. She looked awful.

  Joe Pettigrew’s diaphragm convulsed and his mouth tasted bile. He went out of there quickly and leaned against the doors on the other side, but was careful not to touch them with his hands.

  “Radio on but not loud,” he said in the silence, when he had his stomach back in place. “Gun in his hand. I’m not going to like doing that.” His eyes went towards the outer door. “I’d better use the upstairs phone. Plenty of time to come back.”

  He let out a slow sigh and went about it. But when it came time to fix the gun in Porter Green’s hand he found he couldn’t look at Porter Green’s face. He had a feeling, a certainty that Porter Green’s eyes were open and looking at him, but he couldn’t meet them, even dead. He felt that Porter Green would forgive him and hadn’t really minded being shot. It was quick and probably much less unpleasant than what he had coming in the legal way.

  It wasn’t that which made him ashamed. And he wasn’t ashamed because Porter Green had taken Gladys from him, for that would be silly. Porter Green hadn’t done anything that hadn’t been done already, years ago. He guessed maybe it was the awful bloody-looking scratches that made him ashamed. Up to then Porter Green had at least looked like a man. The scratches somehow or other made a damn fool out of him. Even dead. A man who looked and acted like Porter Green, who had been around as much as he must have been, known wome
n too often and too well, and all the rest of it—a man like that ought to be above getting into a cat fight with a slut like Gladys, an empty paper bag of a woman who had nothing to give any man, not even herself.

  Joe Pettigrew didn’t think very highly of himself as a dominating male. But at least he had never had his face clawed.

  He arranged the gun very nearly in Porter Green’s hand, without once looking at his face. A shade too neatly, perhaps. With the same neatness and with no undue haste he arranged what other matters required to be arranged.

  The black and white white radio car turned the corner and coasted down the block. There was no fuss or urgency about it. It stopped quietly in front of the house and for a moment both the uniformed officers looked up at the deep porch and the closed door and windows without saying anything, hearing the steady stream of talk from the squawk box and sorting it out in their minds without consciously paying any attention to it.

  Then the one nearest the curb said: “I don’t hear anybody screaming and I don’t see any neighbors out front. Looks like somebody shot a blank.”

  The policeman behind the wheel nodded and said absently: “Better ring the bell anyway.” He made a note of the time on his report sheet, reported the car out of service to the dispatcher. The one next to the curb got out and went up the concrete walk and onto the porch. He rang the bell. He could hear it ring somewhere in the house. He could also hear a radio or record player going quietly but distinctly to his left in the room with the closed windows. He rang again. No answer. He walked along the porch and tapped on the window glass above the screen. Then harder. The music went on but that was all. He went down off the porch and around the side of the house to the back door. The screen was hooked, the door inside shut. There was another bell here. He rang that. It buzzed close to him, quite loud, but no one answered it. He banged hard on the screen and then gave it a yank. The hook held. He went around the house the other way. The windows on the north side were too high to look into from the ground. He reached the front lawn and walked diagonally back across the lawn to the radio car. It was a well-kept lawn and had been watered the night before. At one point he looked back to see if his heels had marked it. They hadn’t. He was glad they hadn’t. He was just a young policeman and not tough at all.