Copernik sat up very suddenly and he began to lick his lips. His face had a stony look now. A look like wet gray stone. He didn’t make a sound.
“Waldo had been her chauffeur,” I went on. “His name was then Joseph Coates. Her name is Mrs. Frank C. Barsaly. Her husband is a big hydroelectric engineer. Some guy gave her the pearls once and she told her husband they were just store pearls. Waldo got wise somehow there was a romance behind them and when Barsaly came home from South America and fired him, because he was too good-looking, he lifted the pearls.”
Ybarra lifted his head suddenly and his teeth flashed. “You mean he didn’t know they were phony?”
“I thought he fenced the real ones and had imitations fixed up,” I said.
Ybarra nodded. “It’s possible.”
“He lifted something else,” I said. “Some stuff from Barsaly’s briefcase that showed he was keeping a woman—out in Brentwood. He was blackmailing wife and husband both, without either knowing about the other. Get it so far?”
“I get it,” Copernik said harshly, between his tight lips. His face was still wet gray stone. “Get the hell on with it.”
“Waldo wasn’t afraid of them,” I said. “He didn’t conceal where he lived. That was foolish, but it saved a lot of finagling, if he was willing to risk it. The girl came down here tonight with five grand to buy back her pearls. She didn’t find Waldo. She came here to look for him and walked up a floor before she went back down. A woman’s idea of being cagey. So I met her. So I brought her in here. So she was in that dressing room when Al Tessilore visited me to rub out a witness.” I pointed to the dressing-room door. “So she came out with her little gun and stuck it in his back and saved my life,” I said.
Copernik didn’t move. There was something horrible in his face now. Ybarra slipped his nail file into a small leather case and slowly tucked it into his pocket.
“Is that all?” he said gently.
I nodded. “Except that she told me where Waldo’s apartment was and I went in there and looked for the pearls. I found the dead man. In his pocket I found new car keys in a case from a Packard agency. And down on the street I found the Packard and took it to where it came from. Barsaly’s kept woman. Barsaly had sent a friend from the Spezzia Club down to buy something and he had tried to buy it with his gun instead of the money Barsaly gave him. And Waldo beat him to the punch.”
“Is that all?” Ybarra said softly.
“That’s all,” I said licking the torn place on the inside of my cheek.
Ybarra said slowly: “What do you want?”
Copernik’s face convulsed and he slapped his long hard thigh. “This guy’s good,” he jeered. “He falls for a stray broad and breaks every law in the book and you ask him what does he want? I’ll give him what he wants, guinea!”
Ybarra turned his head slowly and looked at him. “I don’t think you will,” he said. “I think you’ll give him a clean bill of health and anything else he wants. He’s giving you a lesson in police work.”
Copernik didn’t move or make a sound for a long minute. None of us moved. Then Copernik leaned forward and his coat fell open. The butt of his service gun looked out of his underarm holster.
“So what do you want?” he asked me.
“What’s on the card table there. The jacket and hat and the phony pearls. And some names kept away from the papers. Is that too much?”
“Yeah—it’s too much,” Copernik said almost gently. He swayed sideways and his gun jumped neatly into his hand. He rested his forearm on his thigh and pointed the gun at my stomach.
“I like better that you get a slug in the guts resisting arrest,” he said. “I like that better, because of a report I made out on Al Tessilore’s arrest and how I made the pinch. Because of some photos of me that are in the morning sheets going out about now. I like it better that you don’t live long enough to laugh about that baby.”
My mouth felt suddenly hot and dry. Far off I heard the wind booming. It seemed like the sound of guns.
Ybarra moved his feet on the floor and said coldly: “You’ve got a couple of cases all solved, policeman. All you do for it is leave some junk here and keep some names from the papers. Which means from the D.A. If he gets them anyway, too bad for you.”
Copernik said: “I like the other way.” The blue gun in his hand was like a rock. “And God help you, if you don’t back me up on it.”
Ybarra said: “If the woman is brought out into the open, you’ll be a liar on a police report and a chisler on your own partner. In a week they won’t even speak your name at Headquarters. The taste of it would make them sick.”
The hammer clicked back on Copernik’s gun and I watched his big finger slide in farther around the trigger.
Ybarra stood up. The gun jumped at him. He said: “We’ll see how yellow a guinea is. I’m telling you to put that gun up, Sam.”
He started to move. He moved four even steps. Copernik was a man without a breath of movement, a stone man.
Ybarra took one more step and quite suddenly the gun began to shake.
Ybarra spoke evenly: “Put it up, Sam. If you keep your head everything lies the way it is. If you don’t—you’re gone.”
He took one more step. Copernik’s mouth opened wide and made a gasping sound and then he sagged in the chair as if he had been hit on the head. His eyelids dropped.
Ybarra jerked the gun out of his hand with a movement so quick it was no movement at all. He stepped back quickly, held the gun low at his side.
“It’s the hot wind, Sam. Let’s forget it,” he said in the same even, almost dainty voice.
Copernik’s shoulders sagged lower and he put his face in his hands. “O.K.,” he said between his fingers.
Ybarra went softly across the room and opened the door. He looked at me with lazy, half-closed eyes. “I’d do a lot for a woman who saved my life, too,” he said. “I’m eating this dish, but as a cop you can’t expect me to like it.”
I said: “The little man in the bed is called Leon Valesanos. He was a croupier at the Spezzia Club.”
“Thanks,” Ybarra said. “Let’s go, Sam.”
Copernik got up heavily and walked across the room and out of the open door and out of my sight. Ybarra stepped through the door after him and started to close it.
I said: “Wait a minute.”
He turned his head slowly, his left hand on the door, the blue gun hanging down close to his right side.
“I’m not in this for money,” I said. “The Barsalys live at Two-twelve Fremont Place. You can take the pearls to her. If Barsaly’s name stays out of the paper, I get five C’s. It goes to the Police Fund. I’m not so damn smart as you think. It just happened that way—and you had a heel for a partner.”
Ybarra looked across the room at the pearls on the card table. His eyes glistened. “You take them,” he said. “The five hundred’s O.K. I think the fund has it coming.”
He shut the door quietly and in a moment I heard the elevator doors clang.
7
I opened a window and stuck my head out into the wind and watched the squad car tool off down the block. The wind blew in hard and I let it blow. A picture fell off the wall and two chessmen rolled off the card table. The material of Lola Barsaly’s bolero jacket lifted and shook.
I went out to the kitchenette and drank some Scotch and went back into the living room and called her—late as it was.
She answered the phone herself, very quickly, with no sleep in her voice.
“Marlowe,” I said. “O.K. Your end?”
“Yes…yes,” she said. “I’m alone.”
“I found something,” I said. “Or rather the police did. But your dark boy gypped you. I have a string of pearls. They’re not real. He sold the real ones, I guess, and made you up a string of ringers, with your clasp.”
She was silent for a long time. Then, a little faintly: “The police found them?”
“In Waldo’s car. But they’re not telling. We
have a deal. Look at the papers in the morning and you’ll be able to figure out why.”
“There doesn’t seem to be anything more to say,” she said. “Can I have the clasp?”
“Yes. Can you meet me tomorrow at four in the Club Esquire bar?”
“You’re really rather sweet,” she said in a dragged out voice. “I can. Frank is still at his meeting.”
“Those meetings—they take it out of a guy,” I said. We said goodbye.
I called a West Los Angeles number. He was still there, with the Russian girl.
“You can send me a check for five hundred in the morning,” I told him. “Made out to the Police Relief Fund, if you want to. Because that’s where it’s going.”
Copernik made the third page of the morning papers with two photos and a nice half-column. The little brown man in Apartment 31 didn’t make the paper at all. The Apartment House Association has a good lobby too.
I went out after breakfast and the wind was all gone. It was soft, cool, a little foggy. The sky was close and comfortable and gray. I rode down to the boulevard and picked out the best jewelry store on it and laid a string of pearls on a black velvet mat under a daylight-blue lamp. A man in a wing collar and striped trousers looked down at them languidly.
“How good?” I asked.
“I’m sorry, sir. We don’t make appraisals. I can give you the name of an appraiser.”
“Don’t kid me,” I said. “They’re Dutch.”
He focused the light a little and leaned down and toyed with a few inches of the string.
“I want a string just like them, fitted to that clasp, and in a hurry,” I added.
“How, like them?” He didn’t look up. “And they’re not Dutch. They’re Bohemian.”
“O.K., can you duplicate them?”
He shook his head and pushed the velvet pad away as if it soiled him. “In three months, perhaps. We don’t blow glass like that in this country. If you wanted them matched—three months at least. And this house would not do that sort of thing at all.”
“It must be swell to be that snooty,” I said. I put a card under his black sleeve. “Give me a name that will—and not in three months—and maybe not exactly like them.”
He shrugged, went away with the card, came back in five minutes and handed it back to me. There was something written on the back.
The old Levantine had a shop on Melrose, a junk shop with everything in the window from a folding baby carriage to a French horn, from a mother-of-pearl lorgnette in a faded plush case to one of those .44 Special Single Action six-shooters they still make for Western peace officers whose grandfathers were tough.
The old Levantine wore a skull cap and two pairs of glasses and a full beard. He studied my pearls, shook his head sadly, and said: “For twenty dollars, almost so good. Not so good, you understand. Not so good glass.”
“How alike will they look?”
He spread his firm strong hands. “I am telling you the truth,” he said. “They would not fool a baby.”
“Make them up,” I said. “With this clasp. And I want the others back, too, of course.”
“Yah. Two o’clock,” he said.
Leon Valesanos, the little brown man from Uruguay, made the afternoon papers. He had been found hanging in an unnamed apartment. The police were investigating.
At four o’clock I walked into the long cool bar of the Club Esquire and prowled along the row of booths until I found one where a woman sat alone. She wore a hat like a shallow soup plate with a very wide edge, a brown tailor-made suit with a severe mannish shirt and tie.
I sat down beside her and slipped a parcel along the seat. “You don’t open that,” I said. “In fact you can slip it into the incinerator as is, if you want to.”
She looked at me with dark tired eyes. Her fingers twisted a thin glass that smelled of peppermint. “Thanks.” Her face was very pale.
I ordered a highball and the waiter went away. “Read the papers?”
“Yes.”
“You understand now about this fellow Copernik who stole your act? That’s why they won’t change the story or bring you into it.”
“It doesn’t matter now,” she said. “Thank you, all the same. Please—please show them to me.”
I pulled the string of pearls out of the loosely wrapped tissue paper in my pocket and slid them across to her. The silver propeller clasp winked in the light of the wall bracket. The little diamond winked. The pearls were as dull as white soap. They didn’t even match in size.
“You were right,” she said tonelessly. “They are not my pearls.”
The waiter came with my drink and she put her bag on them deftly. When he was gone she fingered them slowly once more, dropped them into the bag and gave me a dry mirthless smile.
I stood there a moment with a hand hard on the table.
“As you said—I’ll keep the clasp.”
I said slowly: “You don’t know anything about me. You saved my life last night and we had a moment, but it was just a moment. You still don’t know anything about me. There’s a detective downtown named Ybarra, a Mexican of the nice sort, who was on the job when the pearls were found in Waldo’s suitcase. That is in case you would like to make sure—”
She said: “Don’t be silly. It’s all finished. It was a memory. I’m too young to nurse memories. It may be for the best. I loved Stan Phillips—but he’s gone—long gone.”
I stared at her, didn’t say anything.
She added quietly: “This morning my husband told me something I hadn’t known. We are to separate. So I have very little to laugh about today.”
“I’m sorry,” I said lamely. “There’s nothing to say. I may see you sometime. Maybe not. I don’t move much in your circle. Good luck.”
I stood up. We looked at each other for a moment. “You haven’t touched your drink,” she said.
“You drink it. That peppermint stuff will just make you sick.”
I stood there a moment with a hand on the table.
“If anybody ever bothers you,” I said, “let me know.”
I went out of the bar without looking back at her, got into my car and drove west on Sunset and down all the way to the Coast Highway. Everywhere along the way gardens were full of withered and blackened leaves and flowers which the hot wind had burned.
But the ocean looked cool and languid and just the same as ever. I drove on almost to Malibu and then parked and went and sat on a big rock that was inside somebody’s wire fence. It was about half-tide and coming in. The air smelled of kelp. I watched the water for a while and then I pulled a string of Bohemian glass imitation pearls out of my pocket and cut the knot at one end and slipped the pearls off one by one.
When I had them all loose in my left hand I held them like that for a while and thought. There wasn’t really anything to think about. I was sure.
“To the memory of Mr. Stan Phillips,” I said aloud. “Just another four-flusher.”
I flipped her pearls out into the water one by one at the floating seagulls They made little splashes and the seagulls rose off the water and swooped at the splashes.
THE KING IN YELLOW
1
George Millar, night auditor at the Carlton Hotel, was a dapper wiry little man, with a soft deep voice like a torch singer’s. He kept it low, but his eyes were sharp and angry, as he said into the PBX mouthpiece: “I’m very sorry. It won’t happen again. I’ll send up at once.”
He tore off the headpiece, dropped it on the keys of the switchboard and marched swiftly from behind the pebbled screen and out into the entrance lobby. It was past one and the Carlton was two thirds residential. In the main lobby, down three shallow steps, lamps were dimmed and the night porter had finished tidying up. The place was deserted—a wide space of dim furniture, rich carpet. Faintly in the distance a radio sounded. Millar went down the steps and walked quickly towards the sound, turned through an archway and looked at a man stretched out on a pale green davenport and what l
ooked like all the loose cushions in the hotel. He lay on his side dreamy-eyed and listened to the radio two yards away from him.
Millar barked: “Hey, you! Are you the house dick here or the house cat?”
Steve Grayce turned his head slowly and looked at Millar. He was a long black-haired man, about twenty-eight, with deep-set silent eyes and a rather gentle mouth. He jerked a thumb at the radio and smiled. “King Leopardi, George. Hear that trumpet tone. Smooth as an angel’s wing, boy.”
“Swell! Goon back upstairs and get him out of the corridor!”
Steve Grayce looked shocked. “What—again? I thought I had those birds put to bed long ago.” He swung his feet to the floor and stood up. He was at least a foot taller than Millar.
“Well, Eight-sixteen says no. Eight-sixteen says he’s out in the hall with two of his stooges. He’s dressed in yellow satin shorts and a trombone and he and his pals are putting on a jam session. And one of those hustlers Quillan registered in Eight-eleven is out there truckin’ for them. Now get on to it, Steve—and this time make it stick.”
Steve Grayce smiled wryly. He said: “Leopardi doesn’t belong here anyway. Can I use chloroform or just my blackjack?”
He stepped long legs over the pale-green carpet, through the arch and across the main lobby to the single elevator that was open and lighted. He slid the doors shut and ran it up to Eight, stopped it roughly and stepped out into the corridor.
The noise hit him like a sudden wind. The walls echoed with it. Half a dozen doors were open and angry guests in night robes stood in them peering.
“It’s O.K. Folks,” Steve Grayce said rapidly. “This is absolutely the last act. Just relax.”
He rounded a corner and the hot music almost took him off his feet. Three men were lined up against the wall, near an open door from which light streamed. The middle one, the one with the trombone, was six feet tall, powerful and graceful, with a hairline mustache. His face was flushed and his eyes had an alcoholic glitter. He wore yellow satin shorts with large initials embroidered in black on the left leg—nothing more. His torso was tanned and naked.
Collected Stories (Everyman's Library) Page 71