“Worse. He’s dead. And like I said—you come back here.”
Professor Bingo took a hand out from under his cloak. There was no weapon in it. Rehder had made a motion towards his hip. He relaxed and let his hand drop.
“Dead, eh?” Professor Bingo smiled almost gaily. “Well you mustn’t let that disturb you, officer. I presume someone shot him as he tried to escape?”
“Come here, you!” Rehder started down the steps.
Professor Bingo waved a long white left hand. “Poor Mr. Pettigrew, he has really been dead for all often years. He just didn’t know it, officer.”
Rehder was at the bottom of the steps now. His hand was itching to go for his gun again. Something in Professor Bingo’s eyes made him feel cold all over.
“I imagine you had quite a problem in there,” Professor Bingo said politely. “Quite a problem. But it’s very simple really.”
His right hand came delicately out from under his cloak. His thumb and forefinger were pressed together. They went up towards his face.
Professor Bingo took a pinch of snuff.
THE PENCIL
INTRODUCTORY NOTE
This is the first Marlowe short story in twenty years and was written especially for England. I have persistently refused to write short stories, because I think books are my natural element, but was persuaded to do this because people for whom I have a high regard seemed to want me to do it, and I have always wanted to write a story about the technique of the Syndicate’s murders.
1959.
Raymond Chandler
CHAPTER 1
He was a slightly fat man with a dishonest smile that pulled the corners of his mouth out half an inch leaving the thick lips tight and his eyes bleak. For a fattish man he had a slow walk. Most fat men are brisk and light on their feet. He wore a grey herringbone suit and a hand-painted tie with part of a diving girl visible on it. His shirt was clean, which comforted me, and his brown loafers, as wrong as the tie for his suit, shone from a recent polishing.
He sidled past me as I held the door between the waiting room and my thinking parlor. Once inside, he took a quick look around. I’d have placed him as a mobster, second grade, if I had been asked. For once I was right. If he carried a gun, it was inside his pants. His coat was too tight to hide the bulge of an under-arm holster.
He sat down carefully and I sat opposite and we looked at each other. His face had a sort of foxy eagerness. He was sweating a little. The expression on my face was meant to be interested but not clubby. I reached for a pipe and the leather humidor in which I kept my Pearce’s tobacco. I pushed cigarettes at him.
“I don’t smoke.” He had a rusty voice. I didn’t like it any more than I liked his clothes, or his face. While I filled the pipe he reached inside his coat, prowled in a pocket, came out with a bill, glanced at it and dropped it across the desk in front of me. It was a nice bill and clean and new. One thousand dollars.
“Ever save a guy’s life?”
“Once in a while, maybe.”
“Save mine.”
“What goes?”
“I heard you leveled with the customers, Marlowe.”
“That’s why I stay poor.”
“I still got two friends. You make it three and you’ll be out of the red. You got five grand coming if you pry me loose.”
“From what?”
“You’re talkative as hell this morning. Don’t you pipe who I am?”
“Nope.”
“Never been east, huh?”
“Sure—but I wasn’t in your set.”
“What set would that be?”
I was getting tired of it. “Stop being so goddam cagey or pick up your grand and be missing.”
“I’m Ikky Rosenstein. I’ll be missing but good unless you can figure some out. Guess.”
“I’ve already guessed. You tell me and tell me quick. I don’t have all day to watch you feeding me with an eye-dropper.”
“I ran out on the Outfit. The high boys don’t go for that. To them it means you got info you figure you can peddle, or you got independent ideas, or you lost your moxie. Me, I lost my moxie. I had it up to here.” He touched his Adam’s apple with the forefinger of a stretched hand. “I done bad things. I scared and hurt guys. I never killed nobody. That’s nothing to the Outfit. I’m out of line. So they pick up the pencil and they draw a line. I got the word. The operators are on the way. I made a bad mistake. I tried to hole up in Vegas. I figured they’d never expect me to lie up in their own joint. They out-figured me. What I did’s been done before, but I didn’t know it. When I took the plane to L.A. there must have been somebody on it. They know where I live.”
“Move.”
“No good now. I’m covered.” I knew he was right.
“Why haven’t they taken care of you already?”
“They don’t do it that way. Always specialists. Don’t you know how it works?”
“More or less. A guy with a nice hardware store in Buffalo. A guy with a small dairy in K.C. Always a good front. They report back to New York or somewhere. When they mount the plane west or wherever they’re going, they have guns in their briefcases. They’re quiet and well-dressed and they don’t sit together. They could be a couple of lawyers or income tax sharpies—anything at all that’s well-mannered and inconspicuous. All sorts of people carry briefcases. Including women.”
“Correct as hell. And when they land they’ll be steered to me, but not from the airfield. They got ways. If I go to the cops, somebody will know about me. They could have a couple Mafia boys right on the City Council for all I know. It’s been done. The cops will give me twenty-four hours to leave town. No use. Mexico? Worse than here. Canada? Better but still no good. Connections there too.”
“Australia?”
“Can’t get a passport. I been here twenty-five years—illegal. They can’t deport me unless they can prove a crime on me. The Outfit would see they didn’t. Suppose I got tossed into the freezer. I’m out on a writ in twenty-four hours. And my nice friends got a car waiting to take me home—only not home.”
I had my pipe lit and going well. I frowned down at the grand note. I could use it very nicely. My checking account could kiss the sidewalk without stooping.
“Let’s stop horsing,” I said. “Suppose—just suppose—I could figure an out for you. What’s your next move?”
“I know a place—if I could get there without bein’ tailed. I’d leave my car here and take a rent car. I’d turn it in just short of the county line and buy a secondhand job. Halfway to where I’m going I trade it on a new last’s model, a leftover. This is just the right time of year. Good discount, new models out soon. Not to save money—less show off. Where I’d go is a good-sized place but still pretty clean.”
“Uh-huh,” I said. “Wichita, last I heard. But it may have changed.”
He scowled at me. “Get smart, Marlowe, but not too damn smart.”
“I’ll get as smart as I want to. Don’t try to make rules for me. If I take this on, there aren’t any rules. I take it for this grand and the rest if I bring it off. Don’t cross me. I might leak information. If I get knocked off, put just one red rose on my grave. I don’t like cut flowers. I like to see them growing. But I could take one, because you’re such a sweet character. When’s the plane in?”
“Sometime today. It’s nine hours from New York. Probably come in about 5.30 P.M.”
“Might come by San Diego and switch or by San Francisco and switch. A lot of planes from Dago and Frisco. I need a helper.”
“Goddam you, Marlowe—”
“Hold it. I know a girl. Daughter of a chief of police who got broken for honesty. She wouldn’t leak under torture.”
“You got no right to risk her,” Ikky said angrily.
I was so astonished my jaw hung halfway to my waist. I closed it slowly and swallowed.
“Good God, the man’s got a heart.”
“Women ain’t built for the rough stuff,” he said grudgingl
y.
I picked up the thousand-dollar note and snapped it. “Sorry. No receipt,” I said. “I can’t have my name in your pocket. And there won’t be any rough stuff if I’m lucky. They’d have me outclassed. There’s only one way to work it. Now give me your address and all the dope you can think of, names, descriptions of any operators you have ever seen in the flesh.”
He did. He was a pretty good observer. Trouble was the Outfit would know what he had seen. The operators would be strangers to him.
He got up silently and put his hand out. I had to shake it, but what he had said about women made it easier. His hand was moist. Mine would have been in his spot. He nodded and went out silently.
CHAPTER 2
It was a quiet street in Bay City, if there are any quiet streets in this beatnik generation when you can’t get through a meal without some male or female stomach singer belching out a kind of love that is as old-fashioned as a bustle or some Hammond organ jazzing it up in the customer’s soup.
The little one-story house was as neat as a fresh pinafore. The front lawn was cut lovingly and very green. The smooth composition driveway was free of grease spots from standing cars, and the hedge that bordered it looked as though the barber came every day.
The white door had a knocker with a tiger’s head, a go-to-hell window and a dingus that let someone inside talk to someone outside without even opening the little window.
I’d have given a mortgage on my left leg to live in a house like that. I didn’t think I ever would.
The bell chimed inside and after a while she opened the door in a pale blue sports shirt and white shorts that were short enough to be friendly. She had gray-blue eyes, dark red hair and fine bones in her face. There was usually a trace of bitterness in the gray-blue eyes. She couldn’t forget that her father’s life had been destroyed by the crooked power of a gambling ship mobster, that her mother had died too. She was able to suppress the bitterness when she wrote nonsense about young love for the shiny magazines, but this wasn’t her life. She didn’t really have a life. She had an existence without much pain and enough oil money to make it safe. But in a tight spot she was as cool and resourceful as a good cop. Her name was Anne Riordan.
She stood to one side and I passed her pretty close. But I have rules too. She shut the door and parked herself on a davenport and went through the cigarette routine, and here was one doll who had the strength to light her own cigarette.
I stood looking around. There were a few changes, not many.
“I need your help,” I said.
“That’s the only time I ever see you.”
“I’ve got a client who is an ex-hood; used to be a trouble-shooter for the Outfit, the Syndicate, the big mob, or whatever name you want to use for it. You know damn well it exists and is as rich as Rockefeller. You can’t beat it because not enough people want to, especially the million-a-year lawyers that work for it, and the bar associations that seem more anxious to protect other lawyers than their own country.”
“My God, are you running for office somewhere? I never knew you to sound so pure.”
She moved her legs around, not provocatively—she wasn’t the type—but it made it difficult for me to think straight just the same.
“Stop moving your legs around,” I said. “Or else put a pair of slacks on.”
“Damn you, Marlowe. Can’t you think of anything else?”
“I’ll try. I like to think that I know at least one pretty and charming female who doesn’t have round heels.” I swallowed and went on. “The man’s name is Ikky Rosenstein. He’s not beautiful and he’s not anything that I like—except one. He got mad when I said I needed a girl helper. He said women were not made for the rough stuff. That’s why I took the job. To a real mobster, a woman means no more than a sack of flour. They use women in the usual way, but if it’s advisable to get rid of them, they do it without a second thought.”
“So far you’ve told me a whole lot of nothing. Perhaps you need a cup of coffee or a drink.”
“You’re sweet but I don’t in the morning—except sometimes and this isn’t one of them. Coffee later. Ikky has been penciled.”
“Now what’s that?”
“You have a list. You draw a line through a name with a pencil. The guy is as good as dead. The Outfit has reasons. They don’t do it just for kicks any more. They don’t get any kick. It’s bookkeeping to them.”
“What on earth can I do? I might even have said, what can you do?”
“I can try. What you can do is help me spot their plane and see where they go—the operators assigned to the job.”
“Yes, but how can you do anything?”
“I said I could try. If they took a night plane they are already here. If they took a morning plane they can’t be here before five or so. Plenty of time to get set. You know what they look like.”
“Oh, sure. I meet killers every day. I have them in for whiskey sours and caviare on hot toast.” She grinned. While she was grinning I took four long steps across the tan figured rug and lifted her and put a kiss on her mouth. She didn’t fight me but she didn’t go all trembly either. I went back and sat down.
“They’ll look like anybody who’s in a quiet well-run business or profession. They’ll have quiet clothes and they’ll be polite—when they want to be. They’ll have briefcases with guns in them that have changed hands so often they can’t possibly be traced. When and if they do the job, they’ll drop the guns. They’ll probably use revolvers, but they could use automatics. They won’t use silencers because silencers can jam a gun and the weight makes it hard to shoot accurately. They won’t sit together on the plane, but once off of it they may pretend to know each other and simply not have noticed during the flight. They may shake hands with appropriate smiles and walk away and get in the same taxi. I think they’ll go to a hotel first. But very soon they will move into something from which they can watch Ikky’s movements and get used to his schedule. They won’t be in any hurry unless Ikky makes a move. That would tip them off that Ikky has been tipped off. He has a couple of friends left—he says.”
“Will they shoot him from this room or apartment across the street—assuming there is one?”
“No. They’ll shoot him from three feet away. They’ll walk up behind him and say, ‘Hello, Ikky.’ He’ll either freeze or turn. They’ll fill him with lead, drop the guns, and hop into the car they have waiting. Then they’ll follow the crash car off the scene.”
“Who’ll drive the crash car?”
“Some well-fixed and blameless citizen who hasn’t been rapped. He’ll drive his own car. He’ll clear the way, even if he has to accidentally on purpose crash somebody, even a police car. He’ll be so goddam sorry he’ll cry all the way down his monogrammed shirt. And the killers will be long gone.”
“Good heavens,” Anne said. “How can you stand your life? If you did bring it off, they’ll send operators to you.”
“I don’t think so. They don’t kill a legit. The blame will go to the operators. Remember, these top mobsters are businessmen. They want lots and lots of money. They only get really tough when they figure they have to get rid of somebody, and they don’t crave that. There’s always a chance of a slip-up. Not much of a chance. No gang killing has ever been solved here or anywhere else except two or three times. Lepke Buchalter fried. Remember Anastasia? He was awful big and awful tough. Too big, too tough. Pencil.”
She shuddered a little. “I think I need a drink myself.”
I grinned at her. “You’re right in the atmosphere, darling. I’ll weaken.”
She brought a couple of Scotch highballs. When we were drinking them I said: “If you spot them or think you spot them, follow to where they go—if you can do it safely. Not otherwise. If it’s a hotel—and ten to one it will be—check in and keep calling me until you get me.”
She knew my office number and I was still on Yucca Avenue. She knew that too.
“You’re the damnedest guy,” she said. “Wo
men do anything you want them to. How come I’m still a virgin at twenty-eight?”
“We need a few like you. Why don’t you get married?”
“To what? Some cynical chaser who has nothing left but technique? I don’t know any really nice men—except you. I’m no pushover for white teeth and a gaudy smile.”
I went over and pulled her to her feet. I kissed her long and hard. “I’m honest,” I almost whispered. “That’s something. But I’m too shop-soiled for a girl like you. I’ve thought of you, I’ve wanted you, but that sweet clear look in your eyes tells me to lay off.”
“Take me,” she said softly. “I have dreams too.”
“I couldn’t. It’s not the first time it’s happened to me. I’ve had too many women to deserve one like you. We have to save a man’s life. I’m going.”
She stood up and watched me leave with a grave face.
The women you get and the women you don’t get—they live in different worlds. I don’t sneer at either world. I live in both myself.
CHAPTER 3
At Los Angeles International Airport you can’t get close to the planes unless you’re leaving on one. You see them land, if you happen to be in the right place, but you have to wait at a barrier to get a look at the passengers. The airport buildings don’t make it any easier. They are strung out from here to breakfast time, and you can get calluses walking from TWA to American.
I copied an arrival schedule off the boards and prowled around like a dog that has forgotten where he put his bone. Planes came in, planes took off, porters carried luggage, passengers sweated and scurried, children whined, the loudspeaker overrode all the other noises.
I passed Anne a number of times. She took no notice of me.
At 5.45 they must have come. Anne disappeared. I gave it half an hour, just in case she had some other reason for fading. No. She was gone for good. I went out to my car and drove some long crowded miles to Hollywood and my office. I had a drink and sat. At 6.45 the phone rang.
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