“Should I tell you?”
“It probably wouldn’t be wise.”
She laughed. “I will, anyhow. I got a little tight at his house once and passed out. I seldom do. He took some photos of me—with my clothes up to my neck.”
“The dirty dog,” I said. “Have you got any of them handy?”
She slapped my wrist. She said softly:
“What’s your name?”
“Phil. What’s yours?”
“Helen. Kiss me.”
She fell softly across my lap and I bent down over her face and began to browse on it. She worked her eyelashes and made butterfly kisses on my cheeks. When I got to her mouth it was half-open and burning and her tongue was a darting snake between her teeth.
The door opened and Mr. Grayle stepped quietly into the room. I was holding her and didn’t have a chance to let go. I lifted my face and looked at him. I felt as cold as Finnegan’s feet, the day they buried him.
The blonde in my arms didn’t move, didn’t even close her lips. She had a half-dreamy, half-sarcastic expression on her face.
Mr. Grayle cleared his throat slightly and said: “I beg your pardon, I’m sure,” and went quietly out of the room. There was an infinite sadness in his eyes.
I pushed her away and stood up and got my handkerchief out and mopped my face.
She lay as I had left her, half sideways along the davenport, the skin showing in a generous sweep above one stocking.
“Who was that?” she asked thickly.
“Mr. Grayle.”
“Forget him.”
I went away from her and sat down in the chair I had sat in when I first came into the room.
After a moment she straightened herself out and sat up and looked at me steadily.
“It’s all right. He understands. What the hell can he expect ?”
“I guess he knows.”
“Well, I tell you it’s all right. Isn’t that enough? He’s a sick man. What the hell—”
“Don’t go shrill on me. I don’t like shrill women.”
She opened a bag lying beside her and took out a small handkerchief and wiped her lips, then looked at her face in the mirror.
“I guess you’re right,” she said. “Just too much Scotch. Tonight at the Belvedere Club. Ten o’clock.” She wasn’t looking at me. Her breath was fast.
“Is that a good place?”
“Laird Brunette owns it. I know him pretty well.”
“Right,” I said. I was still cold. I felt nasty, as if I had picked a poor man’s pocket.
She got a lipstick out and touched her lips very lightly and then looked at me along her eyes. She tossed the mirror. I caught it and looked at my face. I worked at it with my handkerchief and stood up to give her back the mirror.
She was leaning back, showing all her throat, looking at me lazily down her eyes.
“What’s the matter?”
“Nothing. Ten o’clock at the Belvedere Club. Don’t be too magnificent. All I have is a dinner suit. In the bar?”
She nodded, her eyes still lazy.
I went across the room and out, without looking back. The footman met me in the hall and gave me my hat, looking like the Great Stone Face.
NINETEEN
I walked down the curving driveway and lost myself in the shadow of the tall trimmed hedges and came to the gates. Another man was holding the fort now, a husky in plainclothes, an obvious bodyguard. He let me out with a nod.
A horn tooted. Miss Riordan’s coupe was drawn up behind my car. I went over there and looked in at her. She looked cool and sarcastic.
She sat there with her hands on the wheel, gloved and slim. She smiled.
“I waited. I suppose it was none of my business. What did you think of her?”
“I bet she snaps a mean garter.”
“Do you always have to say things like that?” She flushed bitterly. “Sometimes I hate men. Old men, young men, football players, opera tenors, smart millionaires, beautiful men who are gigolos and almost-heels who are—private detectives.”
I grinned at her sadly. “I know I talk too smart. It’s in the air nowadays. Who told you he was a gigolo?”
“Who?”
“Don’t be obtuse. Marriott.”
“Oh, it was a cinch guess. I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be nasty. I guess you can snap her garter any time you want to, without much of a struggle. But there’s one thing you can be sure of—you’re a late comer to the show.”
The wide curving street dozed peacefully in the sun. A beautifully painted panel truck slid noiselessly to a stop before a house across the street, then backed a little and went up the driveway to a side entrance. On the side of the panel truck was painted the legend: “Bay City Infant Service.”
Anne Riordan leaned towards me, her gray-blue eyes hurt and clouded. Her slightly too long upper lip pouted and then pressed back against her teeth. She made a sharp little sound with her breath.
“Probably you’d like me to mind my own business, is that it? And not have ideas you don’t have first. I thought I was helping a little.”
“I don’t need any help. The police don’t want any from me. There’s nothing I can do for Mrs. Grayle. She has a yarn about a beer parlor where a car started from and followed them, but what does that amount to? It was a crummy dive on Santa Monica. This was a high-class mob. There was somebody in it that could even tell Fei Tsui jade when he saw it.”
“If he wasn’t tipped off.”
“There’s that too,” I said, and fumbled a cigarette out of a package. “Either way there’s nothing for me in it.”
“Not even about psychics?”
I stared rather blankly. “Psychics?”
“My God,” she said softly. “And I thought you were a detective.”
“There’s a hush on part of this,” I said. “I’ve got to watch my step. This Grayle packs a lot of dough in his pants. And law is where you buy it in this town. Look at the funny way the cops are acting. No build-up, no newspaper handout, no chance for the innocent stranger to step in with the trifling clue that turns out to be all important. Nothing but silence and warnings to me to lay off. I don’t like it at all.”
“You got most of the lipstick off,” Anne Riordan said. “I mentioned psychics. Well, good-by. It was nice to know you—in a way.”
She pressed her starter button and jammed her gears in and was gone in a swirl of dust.
I watched her go. When she was gone I looked across the street. The man from the panel truck that said Bay City Infant Service came out of the side door of the house dressed in a uniform so white and stiff and gleaming that it made me feel clean just to look at it. He was carrying a carton of some sort. He got into his panel truck and drove away.
I figured he had just changed a diaper.
I got into my own car and looked at my watch before starting up. It was almost five.
The Scotch, as good enough Scotch will, stayed with me all the way back to Hollywood. I took the red lights as they came.
“There’s a nice little girl,” I told myself out loud, in the car, “for a guy that’s interested in a nice little girl.” Nobody said anything. “But I’m not,” I said. Nobody said anything to that either. “Ten o’clock at the Belvedere Club,” I said. Somebody said: “Phooey.”
It sounded like my voice.
It was a quarter to six when I reached my office again. The building was very quiet. The typewriter beyond the party wall was stilled. I lit a pipe and sat down to wait.
TWENTY
The Indian smelled. He smelled clear across the little reception room when the buzzer sounded and I opened the door between to see who it was. He stood just inside the corridor door looking as if he had been cast in bronze. He was a big man from the waist up and he had a big chest. He looked like a bum.
He wore a brown suit of which the coat was too small for his shoulders and his trousers were probably a little tight at the waist. His hat was at least two sizes too small and had been perspired in
freely by somebody it fitted better than it fitted him. He wore it about where a house wears a wind vane. His collar had the snug fit of a horse-collar and was of about the same shade of dirty brown. A tie dangled outside his buttoned jacket, a black tie which had been tied with a pair of pliers in a knot the size of a pea. Around his bare and magnificent throat, above the dirty collar, he wore a wide piece of black ribbon, like an old woman trying to freshen up her neck.
He had a big flat face and a highbridged fleshy nose that looked as hard as the prow of a cruiser. He had lidless eyes, drooping jowls, the shoulders of a blacksmith and the short and apparently awkward legs of a chimpanzee. I found out later that they were only short.
If he had been cleaned up a little and dressed in a white nightgown, he would have looked like a very wicked Roman senator.
His smell was the earthy smell of primitive man, and not the slimy dirt of cities.
“Huh,” he said. “Come quick. Come now.”
I backed into my office and wiggled my finger at him and he followed me making as much noise as a fly makes walking on the wall. I sat down behind my desk and squeaked my swivel chair professionally and pointed to the customer’s chair on the other side. He didn’t sit down. His small black eyes were hostile.
“Come where?” I said.
“Huh. Me Second Planting. Me Hollywood Indian.”
“Have a chair, Mr. Planting.”
He snorted and his nostrils got very wide. They had been wide enough for mouseholes to start with.
“Name Second Planting. Name no Mister Planting.”
“What can I do for you?”
He lifted his voice and began to intone in a deep-chested sonorous boom. “He say come quick. Great white father say come quick. He say me bring you in fiery chariot. He say—”
“Yeah. Cut out the pig Latin,” I said. “I’m no school-marm at the snake dances.”
“Nuts,” the Indian said.
We sneered at each other across the desk for a moment. He sneered better than I did. Then he removed his hat with massive disgust and turned it upside down. He rolled a finger around under the sweatband. That turned the sweatband up into view, and it had not been misnamed. He removed a paper clip from the edge and threw a fold of tissue paper on the desk. He pointed at it angrily, with a well-chewed fingernail. His lank hair had a shelf around it, high up, from the too-tight hat.
I unfolded the piece of tissue paper and found a card inside. The card was no news to me. There had been three exactly like it in the mouthpieces of three Russian-appearing cigarettes.
I played with my pipe, stared at the Indian and tried to ride him with my stare. He looked as nervous as a brick wall.
“Okey, what does he want?”
“He want you come quick. Come now. Come in fiery—”
“Nuts,” I said.
The Indian liked that. He closed his mouth slowly and winked an eye solemnly and then almost grinned.
“Also it will cost him a hundred bucks as a retainer,” I added, trying to look as if that was a nickel.
“Huh?” Suspicious again. Stick to basic English.
“Hundred dollars,” I said. “Iron men. Fish. Bucks to the number of one hundred. Me no money, me no come. Savvy?” I began to count a hundred with both hands.
“Huh. Big shot,” the Indian sneered.
He worked under his greasy hatband and threw another fold of tissue paper on the desk. I took it and unwound it. It contained a brand new hundred dollar bill.
The Indian put his hat back on his head without bothering to tuck the hatband back in place. It looked only slightly more comic that way. I sat staring at the hundred dollar bill, with my mouth open.
“Psychic is right,” I said at last. “A guy that smart I’m afraid of.”
“Not got all day,” the Indian remarked, conversationally.
I opened my desk and took out a Colt .38 automatic of the type known as Super Match. I hadn’t worn it to visit Mrs. Lewin Lockridge Grayle. I stripped my coat off and strapped the leather harness on and tucked the automatic down inside it and strapped the lower strap and put my coat back on again.
This meant as much to the Indian as if I had scratched my neck.
“Gottum car,” he said. “Big car.”
“I don’t like big cars any more,” I said. “I gottum own car.”
“You come my car,” the Indian said threateningly.
“I come your car,” I said.
I locked the desk and office up, switched the buzzer off and went out, leaving the reception room door unlocked as usual.
We went along the hall and down in the elevator. The Indian smelled. Even the elevator operator noticed it.
TWENTY-ONE
The car was a dark bIue seven-passenger sedan, a Packard of the latest model, custom-built. It was the kind of car you wear your rope pearls in. It was parked by a fire-hydrant and a dark foreign-looking chauffeur with a face of carved wood was behind the wheel. The interior was upholstered in quilted gray chenille. The Indian put me in the back. Sitting there alone I felt like a high-class corpse, laid out by an undertaker with a lot of good taste.
The Indian got in beside the chauffeur and the car turned in the middle of the block and a cop across the street said: “Hey,” weakly, as if he didn’t mean it, and then bent down quickly to tie his shoe.
We went west, dropped over to Sunset and slid fast and noiseless along that. The Indian sat motionless beside the chauffeur. An occasional whiff of his personality drifted back to me. The driver looked as if he was half asleep but he passed the fast boys in the convertible sedans as though they were being towed. They turned on all the green lights for him. Some drivers are like that. He never missed one.
We curved through the bright mile or two of the Strip, past the antique shops with famous screen names on them, past the windows full of point lace and ancient pewter, past the gleaming new nightclubs with famous chefs and equally famous gambling rooms, run by polished graduates of the Purple Gang, past the Georgian-Colonial vogue, now old hat, past the handsome modernistic buildings in which the Hollywood flesh-peddlers never stop talking money, past a drive-in lunch which somehow didn’t belong, even though the girls wore white silk blouses and drum majorettes’ shakos and nothing below the hips but glazed kid Hessian boots. Past all this and down a wide smooth curve to the bridle path of Beverly Hills and lights to the south, all colors of the spectrum and crystal clear in an evening without fog, past the shadowed mansions up on the hills to the north, past Beverly Hills altogether and up into the twisting foothill boulevard and the sudden cool dusk and the drift of wind from the sea.
It had been a warm afternoon, but the heat was gone. We whipped past a distant cluster of lighted buildings and an endless series of lighted mansions, not too close to the road. We dipped down to skirt a huge green polo field with another equally huge practice field beside it, soared again to the top of a hill and swung mountainward up a steep hillroad of clean concrete that passed orange groves, some rich man’s pet because this is not orange country, and then little by little the lighted windows of the millionaires’ homes were gone and the road narrowed and this was Stillwood Heights.
The smell of sage drifted up from a canyon and made me think of a dead man and a moonless sky. Straggly stucco houses were molded flat to the side of the hill, like bas-reliefs. Then there were no more houses, just the still dark foothills with an early star or two above them, and the concrete ribbon of road and a sheer drop on one side into a tangle of scrub oak and manzanita where sometimes you can hear the call of the quails if you stop and keep still and wait. On the other side of the road was a raw clay bank at the edge of which a few unbeatable wild flowers hung on like naughty children that won’t go to bed.
Then the road twisted into a hairpin turn and the big tires scratched over loose stones, and the car tore less soundlessly up a long driveway lined with the wild geraniums. At the top of this, faintly lighted, lonely as a lighthouse, stood an eyrie, an eagle’s nest
, an angular building of stucco and glass brick, raw and modernistic and yet not ugly and altogether a swell place for a psychic consultant to hang out his shingle. Nobody would be able to hear any screams.
The car turned beside the house and a light flicked on over a black door set into the heavy wall. The Indian climbed out grunting and opened the rear door of the car. The chauffeur lit a cigarette with an electric lighter and a harsh smell of tobacco came back to me softly in the evening. I got out.
We went over to the black door. It opened of itself, slowly, almost with menace. Beyond it a narrow hallway probed back into the house. Light glowed from the glass brick walls.
The Indian growled. “Huh. You go in, big shot.”
“After you, Mr. Planting.”
He scowled and went in and the door closed after us as silently and mysteriously as it had opened. At the end of the narrow hallway we squeezed into a little elevator and the Indian closed the door and pressed a button. We rose softly, without sound. Such smelling as the Indian had done before was a mooncast shadow to what he was doing now.
The elevator stopped, the door opened. There was light and I stepped out into a turret room where the day was still trying to be remembered. There were windows all around it. Far off the sea flickered. Darkness prowled slowly on the hills. There were paneled walls where there were no windows, and rugs on the floor with the soft colors of old Persians, and there was a reception desk that looked as if it had been made of carvings stolen from an ancient church. And behind the desk a woman sat and smiled at me, a dry tight withered smile that would turn to powder if you touched it.
She had sleek coiled hair and a dark, thin, wasted Asiatic face. There were heavy colored stones in her ears and heavy rings on her fingers, including a moonstone and an emerald in a silver setting that may have been a real emerald but somehow managed to look as phony as a dime store slave bracelet. And her hands were dry and dark and not young and not fit for rings.
She spoke. The voice was familiar. “Ah, Meester Marlowe, so verry good of you to come. Amthor he weel be so verry pleased.”
I laid the hundred dollar bill the Indian had given me down on the desk. I looked behind me. The Indian had gone down again in the elevator.
Farewell, My Lovely Page 12