Steve said harshly: “Yeah—and what were you doing all that time—manicuring your nails?”
“We weren’t around when it happened. It took us a little time to find out the why of it.”
Steve said: “So that was worth killing four people for, was it? And as for Dolores Chiozza, she wouldn’t have wiped her feet on Leopardi—then, or any time since. But you had to put her in the middle too, with your rotten little revenge murder. You make me sick, George. Tell your big tough brother to get on with his murder party.”
The big man grinned and said: “Nuff talk, George. See has he a gat—and don’t get behind him or in front of him. This bean-shooter goes on through.”
Steve stared at the big man’s .45. His face was hard as white bone. There was a thin cold sneer on his lips and his eyes were cold and dark.
Millar moved softly in his fleece-lined slippers. He came around the end of the table and went close to Steve’s side and reached out a hand to tap his pockets. He stepped back and pointed: “In there.”
Steve said softly: “I must be nuts. I could have taken you then, George.”
Gaff Talley barked: “Stand away from him.”
He walked solidly across the room and put the big Colt against Steve’s stomach hard. He reached up with his left hand and worked the Detective Special from the inside breast pocket. His eyes were sharp on Steve’s eyes. He held Steve’s gun out behind him. “Take this, George.”
Millar took the gun and went over beyond the big table again and stood at the far corner of it. Gaff Talley backed away from Steve.
“You’re through, wise guy,” he said. “You got to know that. There’s only two ways outa these mountains and we gotta have time. And maybe you didn’t tell nobody. See?”
Steve stood like a rock, his face white, a twisted half-smile working at the corners of his lips. He stared hard at the big man’s gun and his stare was faintly puzzled.
Millar said: “Does it have to be that way, Gaff?” His voice was a croak now, without tone, without its usual pleasant huskiness.
Steve turned his head a little and looked at Millar. “Sure it has, George. You’re just a couple of cheap hoodlums after all. A couple of nasty-minded sadists playing at being revengers of wronged girlhood. Hillbilly stuff. And right this minute you’re practically cold meat—cold, rotten meat.”
Gaff Talley laughed and cocked the big revolver with his thumb. “Say your prayers, guy,” he jeered.
Steve said grimly: “What makes you think you’re going to bump me off with that thing? No shells in it, strangler. Better try to take me the way you handle women—with your hands.”
The big man’s eyes flicked down, clouded. Then he roared with laughter. “Geez, the dust on that one must be a foot thick,” he chuckled. “Watch.”
He pointed the big gun at the floor and squeezed the trigger. The firing pin clicked dryly—on an empty chamber. The big man’s face convulsed.
For a short moment nobody moved. Then Gaff turned slowly on the balls of his feet and looked at his brother. He said almost gently: “You, George?”
Millar licked his lips and gulped. He had to move his mouth in and out before he could speak.
“Me. Gaff. I was standing by the window when Steve got out of his car down the road, I saw him go into the garage. I knew the car would still be warm. There’s been enough killing, Gaff. Too much. So I took the shells out of your gun.”
Millar’s thumb moved back the hammer on the Detective Special. Gaff’s eyes bulged. He stared fascinated at the snubnosed gun. Then he lunged violently towards it, flailing with the empty Colt. Millar braced himself and stood very still and said dimly, like an old man: “Goodbye, Gaff.”
The gun jumped three times in his small neat hand. Smoke curled lazily from its muzzle. A piece of burned log fell over in the fireplace.
Gaff Talley smiled queerly and stooped and stood perfectly still. The gun dropped at his feet. He put his big heavy hands against his stomach, said slowly, thickly: “ ‘S all right, kid. ‘S all right, I guess…I guess I…”
His voice trailed off and his legs began to twist under him. Steve took three long quick silent steps, and slammed Millar hard on the angle of the jaw. The big man was still falling—as slowly as a tree falls.
Millar spun across the room and crashed against the end wall and a blue-and-white plate fell off the plate-molding and broke. The gun sailed from his fingers. Steve dived for it and came up with it. Millar crouched and watched his brother.
Gaff Talley bent his head to the floor and braced his hands and then lay down quietly, on his stomach, like a man who was very tired. He made no sound of any kind.
Daylight showed at the windows, around the red glass-curtains. The piece of broken log smoked against the side of the hearth and the rest of the fire was a heap of soft gray ash with a glow at its heart.
Steve said dully: “You saved my life, George—or at least you saved a lot of shooting. I took the chance because what I wanted was evidence. Step over there to the desk and write it all out and sign it.”
Millar said: “Is he dead?”
“He’s dead, George. You killed him. Write that too.”
Millar said quietly: “It’s funny. I wanted to finish Leopardi myself, with my own hands, when he was at the top, when he had the farthest to fall. Just finish him and then take what came. But Gaff was the guy who wanted it done cute. Gaff, the tough mug who never had any education and never dodged a punch in his life, wanted to do it smart and figure angles. Well, maybe that’s why he owned property, like that apartment house on Court Street that Jake Stoyanoff managed for him. I don’t know how he got to Dolores Chiozza’s maid. It doesn’t matter much, does it?”
Steve said: “Go and write it. You were the one called Leopardi up and pretended to be the girl, huh?”
Millar said: “Yes. I’ll write it all down, Steve. I’ll sign it and then you’ll let me go—just for an hour. Won’t you, Steve? Just an hour’s start. That’s not much to ask of an old friend, is it, Steve?”
Millar smiled. It was a small, frail, ghostly smile. Steve bent beside the big sprawled man and felt his neck artery. He looked up, said: “Quite dead…Yes, you get an hour’s start, George—if you write it all out.”
Millar walked softly over to a tall oak highboy desk, studded with tarnished brass nails. He opened the flap and sat down and reached for a pen. He unscrewed the top from a bottle of ink and began to write in his neat, clear accountant’s handwriting.
Steve Grayce sat down in front of the fire and lit a cigarette and stared at the ashes. He held the gun with his left hand on his knee. Outside the cabin, birds began to sing. Inside there was no sound but the scratching pen.
9
The sun was well up when Steve left the cabin, locked it up, walked down the steep path and along the narrow gravel road to his car. The garage was empty now. The gray sedan was gone. Smoke from another cabin floated lazily above the pines and oaks half a mile away. He started his car, drove it around a bend, past two old boxcars that had been converted into cabins, then on to a main road with a stripe down the middle and so up the hill to Crestline.
He parked on the main street before the Rim-of-the-World Inn, had a cup of coffee at the counter, then shut himself in a phone booth at the back of the empty lounge. He had the long distance operator get Jumbo Walters’ number in Los Angeles, then called the owner of the Club Shalotte.
A voice said silkily: “This is Mr. Walters’ residence.”
“Steve Grayce. Put him on, if you please.”
“One moment, please.” A click, another voice, not so smooth and much harder. “Yeah?”
“Steve Grayce. I want to speak to Mr. Walters.”
“Sorry. I don’t seem to know you. It’s a little early, amigo. What’s your business?”
“Did he go to Miss Chiozza’s place?”
“Oh.” A pause. “The shamus. I get it. Hold the line, pal.”
Another voice now—lazy, with the faintest
color of Irish in it. “You can talk, son. This is Walters.”
“I’m Steve Grayce. I’m the man—”
“I know all about that, son. The lady is O.K., by the way. I think she’s asleep upstairs. Go on.”
“I’m at Crestline—top of the Arrowhead grade. Two men murdered Leopardi. One was George Millar, night auditor at the Carlton Hotel. The other his brother, an ex-fighter named Gaff Talley. Talley’s dead—shot by his brother. Millar got away—but he left me a full confession signed, detailed, complete.”
Walters said slowly: “You’re a fast worker, son—unless you’re just plain crazy. Better come in here fast. Why did they do it?”
“They had a sister.”
Walters repeated quietly: “They had a sister…What about this fellow that got away? We don’t want some hick sheriff or publicity-hungry county attorney to get ideas—”
Steve broke in quietly: “I don’t think you’ll have to worry about that, Mr. Walters. I think I know where he’s gone.”
He ate breakfast at the inn, not because he was hungry, but because he was weak. He got into his car again and started down the long smooth grade from Crestline to San Bernardino, a broad paved boulevard skirting the edge of a sheer drop into the deep valley. There were places where the road went close to the edge, white guard-fences alongside.
Two miles below Crestline was the place. The road made a sharp turn around a shoulder of the mountain. Cars were parked on the gravel off the pavement—several private cars, an official car, and a wrecking car. The white fence was broken through and men stood around the broken place looking down.
Eight hundred feet below, what was left of a gray sedan lay silent and crumpled in the morning sunshine.
BAY CITY BLUES
One—Cinderella Suicide
It must have been Friday because the fish smell from the Mansion House coffee-shop next door was strong enough to build a garage on. Apart from that it was a nice warm day in spring, the tail of the afternoon, and there hadn’t been any business in a week. I had my heels in the groove on my desk and was sunning my ankles in a wedge of sunlight when the phone rang. I took my hat off it and made a yawning sound into the mouthpiece.
A voice said: “I heard that. You oughta be ashamed of yourself, Johnny Dalmas. Ever hear of the Austrian case?”
It was Violets M’Gee, a homicide dick in the sheriff’s office and a very nice guy except for one bad habit—passing me cases where I got tossed around and didn’t make enough money to buy a secondhand corset.
“No.”
“One of those things down at the beach—Bay City. I hear the little burg went sour again the last time they elected themselves a mayor, but the sheriff lives down there and we like to be nice. We ain’t tramped on it. They say the gambling boys put up thirty grand campaign money, so now you get a racing form with the bill of fare in the hash houses.”
I yawned again.
“I heard that, too,” M’Gee barked, “If you ain’t interested I’ll just bite my other thumbnail and let the whole thing go. The guy’s got a little dough to spend, he says.”
“What guy?”
“This Matson, the guy that found the stiff.”
“What stiff?”
“You don’t know nothing about the Austrian case, huh?”
“Didn’t I say I didn’t?”
“You ainít done nothing but yawn and say ‘What.’ Okay. We’ll just let the poor guy get bumped off and City Homicide can worry about that one, now he’s up here in town.”
“This Matson? Who’s going to bump him off?”
“Well, if he knew that, he wouldn’t want to hire no shamus to find out, would he? And him in your own racket until they bust him a while back and now he can’t go out hardly, on account of these guys with guns are bothering him.”
“Come on over,” I said. “My left arm is getting tired.”
“I’m on duty.”
“I was just going down to the drugstore for a quart of V.O. Scotch.”
“That’s me you hear knocking on the door,” M’Gee said.
He arrived in less than half an hour—a large, pleasant-faced man with silvery hair and a dimpled chin and a tiny little mouth made to kiss babies with. He wore a well-pressed blue suit, polished square-toed shoes, and an elk’s tooth on a gold chain hung across his stomach.
He sat down carefully, the way a fat man sits down, and unscrewed the top of the whisky bottle and sniffed it carefully, to make sure I hadn’t refilled a good bottle with ninety-eight cent hooch, the way they do in the bars. Then he poured himself a big drink and rolled some of it around on his tongue and pawed my office with his eyes.
“No wonder you sit around waiting for jobs,” he said. “You gotta have front these days.”
“You could spare me a little,” I said. “What about this Matson and this Austrian case?”
M’Gee finished his drink and poured another, not so large. He watched me play with a cigarette.
“A monoxide Dutch,” he said. “A blond bim named Austrian, wife of a doctor down at Bay City. A guy that runs around all night keeping movie hams from having pink elephants for breakfast. So the frill went around on her own. The night she croaked herself she was over to Vance Conried’s club on the bluff north of there. Know it?”
“Yeah. It used to be a beach club, with a nice private beach down below and the swellest legs in Hollywood in front of the cabanas. She went there to play roulette, huh?”
“Well, if we had any gambling joints in this county,” M’Gee said, “I’d say the Club Conried would be one of them and there would be roulette. Say she played roulette. They tell me she had more personal games she played with Conried, but say she played roulette on the side. She loses, which is what roulette is for. That night she loses her shirt and she gets sore and throws a wingding all over the house. Conried gets her into his private room and pages the doc, her husband, through the Physicians’ Exchange. So then the doe—”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “Don’t tell me all this was in evidence—not with the gambling syndicate we would have in this county, if we had a gambling syndicate.”
M’Gee looked at me pityingly. “My wife’s got a kid brother works on a throw-away paper down there. They didn’t have no inquest. Well, the doc steams over to Conried’s joint and pokes his wife in the arm with a needle to quiet her down. But he can’t take her home on account of he has a babe case in Brentwood Heights. So Vance Conried gets his personal car out and takes her home and meantime the doc has called up his office nurse and asked her to go over to the house and see that his wife is all right. Which is all done, and Conried goes back to his chips and the nurse sees her in bed and leaves, and the maid goes back to bed. This is maybe midnight, or just a little after.
“Well, along about 2 A.M. This Harry Matson happens by. He’s running a night-watchman service down there and that night he’s out making rounds himself. On the street where Austrian lives he hears a car engine running in a dark garage, and he goes in to investigate. He finds the blond frail on the floor on her back, in peekaboo pajamas and slippers, with soot from the exhaust all over her hair.”
M’Gee paused to sip a little more whisky and stare around my office again. I watched the last of the sunlight sneak over my windowsill and drop into the dark slit of the alley.
“So what does the chump do?” M’Gee said, wiping his lips on a silk handkerchief. “He decides the bim is dead, which maybe she is, but you can’t always be sure in a gas case, what with this new methylene-blue treatment—”
“For God’s sake,” I said. “What does he do?”
“He don’t call no law,” M’Gee said sternly. “He kills the car motor and douses his flash and beats it home to where he lives a few blocks away. He pages the doc from there and after a while they’re both back at the garage. The doc says she’s dead. He sends Matson in at a side door to call the local chief of police personal, at his home. Which Matson does, and after a while the chief buzzes over with a couple of
stooges, and a little while after them the body snatcher from the undertaker, whose turn it is to be deputy coroner that week. They cart the stiff away and some lab man takes a blood sample and says it’s full of monoxide. The coroner gives a release and the dame is cremated and the case is closed.”
“Well, what’s the matter with it?” I asked.
M’Gee finished his second drink and thought about having a third. He decided to have a cigar first. I didn’t have any cigars and that annoyed him slightly, but he lit one of his own.
“I’m just a cop,” he said, blinking at me calmly through the smoke. “I wouldn’t know. All I know is, this Matson got bust loose from his licence and run out of town and he’s scared.”
“The hell with it,” I said. “The last time I muscled into a small-town setup I got a fractured skull. How do I contact Matson?”
“I give him your number. He’ll contact you.”
“How well do you know him?”
“Well enough to give him your name,” M’Gee said. “Of course, if anything comes up I should look into—”
“Sure,” I said. “I’ll put it on your desk. Bourbon or rye?”
“Go to hell,” M’Gee said. “Scotch.”
“What does Matson look like?”
“He’s medium heavy, five-seven, one-seventy, gray hair.”
He had another short, quick drink and left.
I sat there for an hour and smoked too many cigarettes. It got dark and my throat felt dry. Nobody called me up. I went over and switched the lights on, washed my hands, tucked away a small drink and locked the bottle up. It was time to eat.
I had my hat on and was going through the door when the Green Feather messenger boy came along the hallway looking at numbers. He wanted mine. I signed for a small irregular shaped parcel done up in the kind of flimsy yellowish paper laundries use. I put the parcel on my desk and cut the string. Inside there was tissue paper and an envelope with a sheet of paper and a flat key in it. The note began abruptly:
Collected Stories (Everyman's Library) Page 77