When I woke up the moon had gone from the front windows and a car had stopped somewhere. Light, delicate, careful steps separated themselves from the night. They were outside the front door. A key fumbled in the lock.
In the opening door the dim sky showed a head without a hat. The slope of the hill was too dark to outline any more. The door clicked shut.
Steps rustled on the rug. I already had the lamp cord in my fingers. I yanked it and there was light.
The girl didn’t make a sound, not a whisper of sound. She just pointed the gun at me.
I said, “Hello, Beulah.”
She was worth waiting for.
Not too tall, not too short; that girl. She had the long legs that can walk and dance. Her hair even by the light of the one lamp was like a brush fire at night. Her face had laughter wrinkles at the corner of the eyes. Her mouth could laugh.
The features were shadowed and had that drawn look that makes some faces more beautiful because it makes them more delicate. I couldn’t see her eyes. They might have been blue enough to make you jump, but I couldn’t see.
The gun looked about a .32, but had the extreme right-angled grip of a Mauser.
After a while she said very softly, “Police, I suppose.”
She had a nice voice, too. I still think of it, at times.
I said, “Let’s sit down and talk. We’re all alone here. Ever drink out of the bottle?”
She didn’t answer. She looked down at the gun she was holding, half smiled, shook her head.
“You wouldn’t make two mistakes,” I said. “Not a girl as smart as you are.”
She tucked the gun into the side pocket of a long ulster-like coat with a military collar.
“Who are you?”
“Just a shamus. Private detective to you. Carmady is the name. Need a lift?”
I held my bottle out. It hadn’t grown to my hand yet. I still had to hold it.
“I don’t drink, Who hired you?”
“KLBL. To protect you from Steve Skalla.”
“So they know,” she said. “So they know about him.”
I digested that and said nothing.
“Who’s been here?” she went on sharply. She was still standing in the middle of the room, with her hands in her coat pockets now, and no hat.
“Everybody but the plumber,” I said. “He’s a little late, as usual.”
“You’re one of those men.” Her nose seemed to curl a little. “Drugstore comics.”
“No,” I said. “Not really. It’s just a way I get talking to the people I have to talk to. Skalla came back again and ran into trouble and got shot up and arrested. He’s in the hospital. Pretty bad.”
She didn’t move. “How bad?”
“He might live if he’d have surgery. Doubtful, even with that. Hopeless without. He has three in the intestines and one in the liver.”
She moved at last and started to sit down. “Not in that chair,” I said quickly. “Over here.”
She came over and sat near me, on one of the davenports. Lights twisted in her eyes. I could see them now. Little twisting lights like Catherine wheels spinning brightly.
She said, “Why did he come back?”
“He thought he ought to tidy up. Remove the body and so on. A nice guy, Skalla.”
“Do you think so?”
“Lady, if nobody else in the world thinks so, I do.”
“I’ll take that drink,” she said.
I handed her the bottle. I grabbed it away in a hurry. “Gosh,” I said. “You have to break in on this stuff.”
She looked towards the side door that led to the bedroom back of me.
“Gone to the morgue,” I said. “You can go in there.”
She stood up at once and went out of the room. She came back almost at once.
“What have they got on Steve?” she asked. “If he recovers.”
“He killed a nigger over on Central this morning. It was more or less self-defense on both sides. I don’t know. Except for Marineau he might get a break.”
“Marineau?” she said.
“Yeah. You knew he killed Marineau.”
“Don’t be silly,” she said. “I killed Dave Marineau.”
“Okay,” I said. “But that’s not the way Steve wants it.”
She stared at me. “You mean Steve came back here deliberately to take the blame?”
“If he had to, I guess. I think he really meant to cart Marineau off to the desert and lose him. Only a woman showed up here—Mrs. Marineau.”
“Yes,” the girl said tonelessly. “She thinks I was his mistress. That greasy spoon.”
“Were you?” I asked.
“Don’t try that again,” she said. “Even if I did work on Central Avenue once.” She went out of the room again.
Sounds of a suitcase being yanked about came into the living room. I went in after her. She was packing pieces of cobweb and packing them as if she liked nice things nicely packed.
“You don’t wear that stuff down in the tank,” I told her, leaning in the door.
She ignored me some more. “I was going to make a break for Mexico,” she said. “Then South America. I didn’t mean to shoot him. He roughed me up and tried to blackmail me into something and I went and got the gun. Then we struggled again and it went off. Then I ran away.”
“Just what Skalla said he did,” I said. “Hell, couldn’t you just have shot the——on purpose?”
“Not for your benefit,” she said. “Or any cop. Not when I did eight months in Dalhart, Texas, once for rolling a drunk. Not with that Marineau woman yelling her head off that I seduced him and then got sick of him.”
“A lot she’ll say,” I grunted. “After I tell how she spat in Skalla’s face when he had four slugs in him.”
She shivered. Her face whitened. She went on taking the things out of the suitcase and putting them in again.
“Did you roll the drunk really?”
She looked up at me, then down. “Yes,” she whispered.
I went over nearer to her. “Got any bruises or torn clothes to show?” I asked.
“No.”
“Too bad,” I said, and took hold of her.
Her eyes flamed at first and then turned to black stone, I tore her coat off, tore her up plenty, put hard fingers into her arms and neck and used my knuckles on her mouth. I let her go, panting. She reeled away from me, but didn’t quite fall.
“We’ll have to wait for the bruises to set and darken,” I said. “Then we’ll go downtown.”
She began to laugh. Then she went over to the mirror and looked at herself. She began to cry.
“Get out of here while I change my clothes!” she yelled. “I’ll give it a tumble. But if it makes any difference to Steve—I’m going to tell it right.”
“Aw, shut up and change your clothes,” I said.
I went out and banged the door.
I hadn’t even kissed her. I could have done that, at least. She wouldn’t have minded any more than the rest of the knocking about I gave her.
We rode the rest of the night, first in separate cars to hide hers in my garage, then in mine. We rode up the coast and had coffee and sandwiches at Malibu, then on up and over. We had breakfast at the bottom of the Ridge Route, just north of San Fernando.
Her face looked like a catcher’s mitt after a tough season. She had a lower lip the size of a banana and you could have cooked steaks on the bruises on her arms and neck, they were so hot.
With the first strong daylight we went to the City Hall.
They didn’t even think of holding her or checking her up. They practically wrote the statement themselves. She signed it blank-eyed, thinking of something else. Then a man from KLBL and his wife came down to get her.
So I didn’t get to ride her to a hotel. She didn’t get to see Skalla either, not then. He was under morphine.
He died at two-thirty the same afternoon. She was holding one of his huge, limp fingers, but he didn’t know her from the Queen of Siam.
<
br /> MANDARIN’S JADE
One—300 Carats Of Fei Tsui
I was smoking my pipe and making faces at the back of my name on the glass part of the office door when Violets M’Gee called me up. There hadn’t been any business in a week.
“How’s the sleuth racket, huh?” Violets asked. He’s a homicide dick in the sheriff’s office, “Take a little flutter down at the beach? Body guarding or something, it is.”
“Anything that goes with a dollar,” I said. “Except murder. I get three-fifty for that.”
“I bet you do nice neat work too. Here’s the lay, John.”
He gave me the name, address and telephone number of a man named Lindley Paul who lived at Castellamare, was a socialite and went everywhere except to work, lived alone with a Jap servant, and drove a very large car. The sheriff’s office had nothing against him except that he had too much fun.
Castellamare was in the city limits, but didn’t look it, being a couple of dozen houses of various sizes hanging by their eyebrows to the side of a mountain, and looking as if a good sneeze would drop them down among the box lunches on the beach. There was a pavement cafÈ up on the highway, and beside that a cement arch which was really a pedestrian bridge. From the inner end of this a flight of white concrete steps went straight as a ruler up the side of the mountain.
Quinonal Avenue, Mr. Lindley Paul had told me over the phone, was the third street up, if I cared to walk. It was, he said, the easiest way to find his place the first time, the streets being designed in a pattern of interesting but rather intricate curves. People had been known to wander about in them for several hours without making any more yardage than an angleworm in a bait can.
So I parked my old blue Chrysler down below and walked up. It was a fine evening and there was still some sparkle on the water when I started. It had all gone when I reached the top. I sat down on the top step and rubbed my leg muscles and waited for my pulse to come down into the low hundreds. After that I shook my shirt loose from my back and went along to the house, which was the only one in the foreground.
It was a nice enough house, but it didn’t look like really important money. There was a salt-tarnished iron staircase going up to the front door and the garage was underneath the house. A long black battleship of a car was backed into it, an immense streamlined boat with enough hood for three cars and a coyote tail tied to the radiator cap. It looked as if it had cost more than the house.
The man who opened the door at the top of the iron stairs wore a white flannel suit with a violet satin scarf arranged loosely inside the collar. He had a soft brown neck, like the neck of a very strong woman. He had pale blue-green eyes, about the color of an aquamarine, features on the heavy side but very handsome, three precise ledges of thick blond hair rising from a smooth brown forehead, an inch more of height than I had—which made him six feet one—and the general look of a guy who would wear a white flannel suit with a violet satin scarf inside the collar.
He cleared his throat, looked over my left shoulder, and said: “Yes?”
“I’m the man you sent for. The one Violets M’Gee recommended.”
“Violets? Gracious, what a peculiar nickname. Let me see, your name is—”
He hesitated and I let him work at it until he cleared his throat again and moved his blue-green eyes to a spot several miles beyond my other shoulder.
“Dalmas,” I said. “The same as it was this afternoon.”
“Oh, come in, Mr. Dalmas. You’ll excuse me, I’m sure. My houseboy is away this evening. So I—” He smiled deprecatingly at the closing door, as though opening and closing it himself sort of dirtied him.
The door put us on a balcony that ran around three sides of a big living room, only three steps above it in level. We went down the steps and Lindley Paul pointed with his eyebrows at a pink chair, and I sat down on it and hoped I wouldn’t leave a mark.
It was the kind of room where people sit on floor cushions with their feet in their laps and sip absinthe through lumps of sugar and talk from the backs of their throats, and some of them just squeak. There were bookshelves all around the balcony and bits of angular sculpture in glazed clay on pedestals. There were cozy little divans and bits of embroidered silk tossed here and there against the bases of lamps and so on. There was a big rosewood grand piano and on it a very tall vase with just one yellow rose in it, and under its leg there was a peach-colored Chinese rug a gopher could have spent a week in without showing his nose above the nap.
Lindley Paul leaned in the curve of the piano and lit a cigarette without offering me one. He put his head back to blow smoke at the tall ceiling and that made his throat look more than ever like the throat of a woman.
“It’s a very slight matter,” he said negligently. “Really hardly worth bothering you about. But I thought I might as well have an escort. You must promise not to flash any guns or anything like that. I suppose you do carry a gun.”
“Oh, yes,” I said. “Yes.” I looked at the dimple in his chin. You could have lost a marble in it.
“Well, I won’t want you to use it, you know, or anything like that. I’m just meeting a couple of men and buying something from them. I shall be carrying a little money in cash.”
“How much money and what for?” I asked, putting one of my own matches to one of my own cigarettes.
“Well, really—” It was a nice smile, but I could have put the heel of my hand in it without feeling bad. I just didn’t like the man.
“It’s rather a confidential mission I’m undertaking for a friend. I’d hardly care to go into the details,” he said.
“You just want me to go along to hold your hat,” I suggested.
His hand jerked and some ash fell on his white suit cuff. That annoyed him. He frowned down at it, then he said softly, in the manner of a sultan suggesting a silk noose for a harem lady whose tricks have gone stale: “You are not being impertinent, I hope.”
“Hope is what keeps us alive,” I said.
He stared at me for a while. “I’ve a damned good mind to give you a sock on the nose,” he said.
“That’s more like it,” I said. “You couldn’t do it without hardening up a bit, but I like the spirit. Now let’s talk business.”
He was still a bit sore. “I ordered a bodyguard,” he said coldly. “If I employed a private secretary I shouldn’t tell him all my personal business.”
“He’d know it if he worked for you steady. He’d know it upside down and backwards. But I’m just day labor. You’ve got to tell me. What is it—blackmail?”
After a long time he said: “No. It’s a necklace of Fei Tsui jade worth at least seventy-five thousand dollars. Did you ever hear of Fei Tsui jade?”
“No.”
“We’ll have a little brandy and I’ll tell you about it. Yes, we’ll have a little brandy.”
He leaned away from the piano and went off like a dancer, without moving his body above the waist. I put my cigarette out and sniffed at the air and thought I smelled sandalwood, and then Lindley Paul came back with a nice-looking bottle and a couple of sniffing glasses. He poured a tablespoonful in each and handed me a glass.
I put mine down in one piece and waited for him to get through rolling his spoonful under his nose and talk. He got around to it after a while.
He said in a pleasant enough tone: “Fei Tsui jade is the only really valuable kind. The others are valuable for the workmanship put on them, chiefly. Fei Tsui is valuable in itself. There are no known unworked deposits, very little of it in existence, all the known deposits having been exhausted hundreds of years ago. A friend of mine had a necklace of this jade. Fifty-one carved mandarin beads, perfectly matched, about six carats each. It was taken in a holdup some time ago. It was the only thing taken, and we were warned—I happened to be with this lady, which is one reason why I’m taking the risk of making the pay-off—not to tell the police or any insurance company, but wait for a phone call. The call came in a couple of days, the price was set at ten
thousand dollars, and the time is tonight at eleven. I haven’t heard the place yet. But it’s to be somewhere fairly near here, somewhere along the Palisades.”
I looked into my empty sniffing glass and shook it. He put a little more brandy in it for me. I sent that after the first dose and lit another cigarette, one of his this time, a nice Virginia Straight Cut with his monogram on the paper.
“Jewel ransom racket,” I said. “Well organized, or they wouldn’t know where and when to pull the job. People don’t wear valuable jewels out very much, and half of the time, when they do, they’re phonies. Is jade hard to imitate?”
“As to material, no,” Lindley Paul said. “As to workmanship—that would take a lifetime.”
“So the stuff can’t be cut,” I said. “Which means it can’t be fenced except for a small fraction of the value. So the ransom money is the gang’s only pay-off. I’d say they’ll play ball, You left your bodyguard problem pretty late, Mr. Paul. How do you know they’ll stand for a bodyguard?”
“I don’t,” he said rather wearily. “But I’m no hero. I like company in the dark. If the thing misses—it misses. I thought of going it alone and then I thought, why not have a man hidden in the back of my car, just in case?”
“In case they take your money and give you a dummy package? How could I prevent that? If I start shooting and come out on top and it is a dummy package, you’ll never see your jade again. The contact men won’t know who’s behind the gang. And if I don’t open up, they’ll be gone before you can see what they’ve left you. They may not even give you anything. They may tell you your stuff will come to you through the mail after the money has been checked for markings. Is it marked?”
“My God, no!”
“It ought to be,” I growled. “It can be marked these days so that only a microscope and black light could show the markings up. But that takes equipment, which means cops. Okay. I’ll take a flutter at it. My part will cost you fifty bucks. Better give it to me now, in case we don’t come back. I like to feel money.”
His broad, handsome face seemed to turn a little white and glistening. He said swiftly: “Let’s have some more brandy.”
Collected Stories (Everyman's Library) Page 60