The Little Sister pm-5 Read online

  But I found the switch to this one. It was an oblong movable plate set into the doorframe. Too many dusty hands had touched it. I pressed it and the door clicked and fell back off the latch. I pushed it open, with the tenderness of a young intern delivering his first baby.

  Inside was a hallway. Through shuttered windows moonlight caught the white corner of a stove and the chromed griddle on top of it. The kitchen was big enough for a dancing class. An open arch led to a butler’s pantry filled to the ceiling. A sink, a huge icebox set into the wall, a lot of electrical stuff for making drinks without trying. You pick your poison, press a button, and four days later you wake up on the rubbing table in a reconditioning parlor.

  Beyond the butler’s pantry a swing door. Beyond the swing door a dark dining room with an open end to a glassed-in lounge into which the moonlight poured like water through the floodgates of a dam.

  A carpeted hall led off somewhere. From another flat arch a flying buttress of a staircase went up into more darkness, but shimmered as it went in what might have been glass brick and stainless steel.

  At last I came to what should be the living room. It was curtained and quite dark, but it had the feel of great size. The darkness was heavy in it and my nose twitched at a lingering odor that said somebody had been there not too long ago. I stopped breathing and listened. Tigers could be in the darkness watching me. Or guys with large guns, standing flat-footed, breathing softly with their mouths open. Or nothing and nobody and too much imagination in the wrong place.

  I edged back to the wall and felt around for a light switch. There’s always a light switch. Everybody has light switches. Usually on the right side as you go in. You go into a dark room and you want light. Okay, you have a light switch in a natural place at a natural height. This room hadn’t. This was a different kind of house. They had odd ways of handling doors and lights. The gadget this time might be something fancy like having to sing A above high C, or stepping on a flat button under the carpet, or maybe you just spoke and said: “Let there be light,” and a mike picked it up and turned the voice vibration into a low-power electrical impulse and a transformer built that up to enough voltage to throw a silent mercury switch.

  I was psychic that night. I was a fellow who wanted company in a dark place and was willing to pay a high price for it. The Luger under my arm and the .32 in my hand made me tough. Two-gun Marlowe, the kid from Cyanide Gulch.

  I took the wrinkles out of my lips and said aloud:

  “Hello again. Anybody here needing a detective?”

  Nothing answered me, not even a stand-in for an echo. The sound of my voice fell on silence like a tired head on a swans-down pillow.

  And then amber light began to grow high up behind the cornice that circumnavigated the huge room. It brightened very slowly, as if controlled by a rheostat panel in a theater. Heavy apricot-colored curtains covered the windows.

  The walls were apricot too. At the far end was a bar off to one side, a little catty-corner, reaching back into the space by the butler’s pantry. There was an alcove with small tables and padded seats. There were floor lamps and soft chairs and love seats and the usual paraphernalia of a living room, and there were long shrouded tables in the middle of the floor space.

  The boys back at the roadblock had something after all. But the joint was dead. The room was empty of life. It was almost empty. Not quite empty.

  A blonde in a pale cocoa fur coat stood leaning against the side of a grandfather’s chair. Her hands were in the pockets of the coat. Her hair was fluffed out carelessly and her face was not chalk-white because the light was not white.

  “Hello again yourself,” she said in a dead voice. “I still think you came too late.”

  “Too late for what?”

  I walked towards her, a movement which was always a pleasure. Even then, even in that too silent house.

  “You’re kind of cute,” she said. “I didn’t think you were cute. You found a way in. You—” Her voice clicked off and strangled itself in her throat.

  “I need a drink,” she said after a thick pause. “Or maybe I’ll fall down.”

  “That’s a lovely coat,” I said. I was up to her now. I reached out and touched it. She didn’t move. Her mouth moved in and out, trembling.

  “Stone marten,” she whispered. “Forty thousand dollars. Rented. For the picture.”

  “Is this part of the picture?” I gestured around the room.

  “This is the picture to end all pictures—for me. I—I do need that drink. If I try to walk—” the clear voice whispered away into nothing. Her eyelids fluttered up and down.

  “Go ahead and faint,” I said. “I’ll catch you on the first bounce.”

  A smile struggled to arrange her face for smiling. She pressed her lips together, fighting hard to stay on her feet.

  “Why did I come too late?” I asked. “Too late for what?”

  “Too late to be shot.”

  “Shucks, I’ve been looking forward to it all evening. Miss Gonzales brought me.”

  “I know.”

  I reached out and touched the fur again. Forty thousand dollars is nice to touch, even rented.

  “Dolores will be disappointed as hell,” she said, her mouth edged with white.

  “No.”

  “She put you on the spot—just as she did Stein.”

  “She may have started out to. But she changed her mind.”

  She laughed. It was a silly pooped-out little laugh like a child trying to be supercilious at a playroom tea party.

  “What a way you have with the girls,” she whispered. “How the hell do you do it, wonderful? With doped cigarettes? It can’t be your clothes or your money or your personality. You don’t have any. You’re not too young, nor too beautiful. You’ve seen your best days and—”

  Her voice had been coming faster and faster, like a motor with a broken governor. At the end she was chattering. When she stopped a spent sigh drifted along the silence and she caved at the knees and fell straight forward into my arms.

  If it was an act it worked perfectly. I might have had guns in all nine pockets and they would have been as much use to me as nine little pink candles on a birthday cake.

  But nothing happened. No hard characters peeked at me with automatics in their hands. No Steelgrave smiled at me with the faint dry remote killer’s smile. No stealthy footsteps crept up behind me.

  She hung in my arms as limp as a wet tea towel and not as heavy as Orrin Quest, being less dead, but heavy enough to make the tendons in my knee joints ache. Her eyes were closed when I pushed her head away from my chest. Her breath was inaudible and she had that bluish look on the parted lips.

  I got my right hand under her knees and carried her over to a gold couch and spread her out on it. I straightened up and went along to the bar. There was a telephone on the corner of it but I couldn’t find the way through to the bottles. So I had to swing over the top. I got a likely looking bottle with a blue and silver label and five stars on it. The cork had been loosened. I poured dark and pungent brandy into the wrong kind of glass and went back over the bar top, taking the bottle with me.

  She was lying as I had left her, but her eyes were open.

  “Can you hold a glass?”

  She could, with a little help. She drank the brandy and pressed the edge of the glass hard against her lips as if she wanted to hold them still. I watched her breathe into the glass and cloud it. A slow smile formed itself on her mouth.

  “It’s cold tonight,” she said.

  She swung her legs over the edge of the couch and put her feet on the floor.

  “More,” she said, holding the glass out. I poured into it. “Where’s yours?”

  “Not drinking. My emotions are being worked on enough without that.”

  The second drink made her shudder. But the blue look had gone away from her mouth and her lips didn’t glare like stop lights and the little etched lines at the corners of her eyes were not in relief any more.
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br />   “Who’s working on your emotions?”

  “Oh, a lot of women that keep throwing their arms around my neck and fainting on me and getting kissed and so forth. Quite a full couple of days for a beat-up gumshoe with no yacht.”

  “No yacht,” she said. “I’d hate that. I was brought up rich.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “You were born with a Cadillac in your mouth. And I could guess where.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “Could you?”

  “Didn’t think it was a very tight secret, did you?”

  “I—I—” She broke off and made a helpless gesture. “I can’t think of any lines tonight.”

  “It’s the Technicolor dialogue,” I said. “It freezes up on you.”

  “Aren’t we talking like a couple of nuts?”

  “We could get sensible. Where’s Steelgrave?”

  She just looked at me. She held the empty glass out and I took it and put it somewhere or other without taking my eyes off her. Nor she hers off me. It seemed as if a long long minute went by.

  “He was here,” she said at last, as slowly as if she had to invent the words one at a time. “May I have a cigarette?”

  “The old cigarette stall,” I said. I got a couple out and put them in my mouth and lit them. I leaned across and tucked one between her ruby lips.

  “Nothing’s cornier than that,” she said. “Except maybe butterfly kisses.”

  “Sex is a wonderful thing,” I said. “When you don’t want to answer questions.”

  She puffed loosely and blinked, then put her hand up to adjust the cigarette. After all these years I can never put a cigarette in a girl’s mouth where she wants it.

  She gave her head a toss and swung the soft loose hair around her cheeks and watched me to see how hard that hit me. All the whiteness had gone now. Her cheeks were a little flushed. But behind her eyes things watched and waited.

  “You’re rather nice,” she said, when I didn’t do anything sensational. “For the kind of guy you are.”

  I stood that well too.

  “But I don’t really know what kind of guy you are, do I?” She laughed suddenly and a tear came from nowhere and slid down her cheek.

  “For all I know you might be nice for any kind of guy.”

  She snatched the cigarette loose and put her hand to her mouth and bit on it. “What’s the matter with me? Am I drunk?”

  “You’re stalling for time,” I said. “But I can’t make up my mind whether it’s to give someone time to get here—or to give somebody time to get far away from here. And again it could just be brandy on top of shock. You’re a little girl and you want to cry into your mother’s apron.”

  “Not my mother,” she said. “I could get as far crying into a rain barrel.”

  “Dealt and passed. So where is Steelgrave?”

  “You ought to be glad wherever he is. He had to kill you. Or thought he had.”

  “You wanted me here, didn’t you? Were you that fond of him?”

  She blew cigarette ash off the back of her hand. A flake of it went into my eye and made me blink.

  “I must have been,” she said, “once.” She put a hand down on her knee and spread the fingers out, studying the nails. She brought her eyes up slowly without moving her head. “It seems like about a thousand years ago I met a nice quiet little guy who knew how to behave in public and didn’t shoot his charm around every bistro in town. Yes, I liked him. I liked him a lot.”

  She put her hand up to her mouth and bit a knuckle. Then she put the same hand into the pocket of the fur coat and brought out a white-handled automatic, the brother of the one I had myself.

  “And in the end I liked him with this,” she said.

  I went over and took it out of her hand. I sniffed the muzzle. Yes. That made two of them fired around.

  “Aren’t you going to wrap it up in a handkerchief, the way they do in the movies?”

  I just dropped it into my other pocket, where it could pick up a few interesting crumbs of tobacco and some seeds that grow only on the southeast slope of the Beverly Hills City Hall. It might amuse a police chemist for a while.

  28

  I watched her for a minute, biting at the end of my lip. She watched me. I saw no change of expression. Then I started prowling the room with my eyes. I lifted up the dust cover on one of the long tables. Under it was a roulette layout but no wheel. Under the table was nothing.

  “Try that chair with the magnolias on it,” she said.

  She didn’t look towards it so I had to find it myself. Surprising how long it took me. It was a high-backed wing chair, covered in flowered chintz, the kind of chair that a long time ago was intended to keep the draft off while you sat crouched over a fire of cannel coal.

  It was turned away from me. I went over there walking softly, in low gear. It almost faced the wall. Even at that it seemed ridiculous that I hadn’t spotted him on my way back from the bar. He leaned in the corner of the chair with his head tilted back. His carnation was red and white and looked as fresh as though the flower girl had just pinned it into his lapel. His eyes were half open as such eyes usually are. They stared at a point in the corner of the ceiling. The bullet had gone through the outside pocket of his double-breasted jacket. It had been fired by someone who knew where the heart was.

  I touched his cheek and it was still warm. I lifted his hand and let it fall. It was quite limp. It felt like the back of somebody’s hand. I reached for the big artery in his neck. No blood moved in him and very little had stained his jacket. I wiped my hands off on my handkerchief and stood for a little longer looking down at his quiet little face. Everything I had done or not done, everything wrong and everything right—all wasted.

  I went back and sat down near her and squeezed my kneecaps.

  “What did you expect me to do?” she asked. “He killed my brother.”

  “Your brother was no angel.”

  “He didn’t have to kill him.”

  “Somebody had to—and quick.” Her eyes widened suddenly.

  I said: “Didn’t you ever wonder why Steelgrave never went after me and why he let you go to the Van Nuys yesterday instead of going himself? Didn’t you ever wonder why a fellow with his resources and experience never tried to get hold of those photographs, no matter what he had to do to get them?”

  She didn’t answer.

  “How long have you known the photographs existed?” I asked.

  “Weeks, nearly two months. I got one in the mail a couple of days after—after that time we had lunch together.”

  “After Stein was killed.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “Did you think Steelgrave had killed Stein?”

  “No. Why should I? Until tonight, that is.”

  “What happened after you got the photo?”

  “My brother Orrin called me up and said he had lost his job and was broke. He wanted money. He didn’t say anything about the photo. He didn’t have to. There was only one time it could have been taken.”

  “How did he get your number?”

  “Telephone? How did you?”

  “Bought it.”

  “Well—” She made a vague movement with her hand. “Why not call the police and get it over with.”

  “Wait a minute. Then what? More prints of the photo?”

  “One every week. I showed them to him.” She gestured toward the chintzy chair. “He didn’t like it. I didn’t tell him about Orrin.”

  “He must have known. His kind find things out.”

  “I suppose so.”

  “But not where Orrin was hiding out,” I said. “Or he wouldn’t have waited this long. When did you tell Steelgrave?”

  She looked away from me. Her fingers kneaded her arm. “Today,” she said in a distant voice.

  “Why today?”

  Her breath caught in her throat. “Please,” she said. “Don’t ask me a lot of useless questions. Don’t torment me. There’s nothing you can do. I thought there was—when I call
ed Dolores. There isn’t now.”

  I said: “All right. There’s something you don’t seem to understand. Steelgrave knew that whoever was behind that photograph wanted money—a lot of money. He knew that sooner or later the blackmailer would have to show himself. That was what Steelgrave was waiting for. He didn’t care anything about the photo itself, except for your sake.”

  “He certainly proved that,” she said wearily.

  “In his own way,” I said.

  Her voice came to me with glacial calm. “He killed my brother. He told me so himself. The gangster showed through then all right. Funny people you meet in Hollywood, don’t you—including me.”

  “You were fond of him once,” I said brutally.

  Red spots flared on her cheeks.

  “I’m not fond of anybody,” she said. “I’m all through being fond of people.” She glanced briefly towards the high-backed chair. “I stopped being fond of him last night. He asked me about you, who you were and so on. I told him. I told him that I would have to admit that I was at the Van Nuys Hotel when that man was lying there dead.”

  “You were going to tell the police that?”

  “I was going to tell Julius Oppenheimer. He would know how to handle it.”

  “If he didn’t one of his dogs would,” I said.

  She didn’t smile. I didn’t either.

  “If Oppenheimer couldn’t handle it, I’d be through in pictures,” she added without interest “Now I’m through everywhere else as well.”

  I got a cigarette out and lit it. I offered her one. She didn’t want one. I wasn’t in any hurry. Time seemed to have lost its grip on me. And almost everything else. I was flat out.

  “You’re going too fast for me,” I said, after a moment. “You didn’t know when you went to the Van Nuys that Steelgrave was Weepy Moyer.”

  “No.”

  “Then what did you go there for?”

  “To buy back those photographs.”

  “That doesn’t check. The photographs didn’t mean anything to you then. They were just you and him having lunch.”

  She stared at me and winked her eyes tight, then opened them wide. “I’m not going to cry,” she said. “I said I didn’t know. But when he was in jail that time, I had to know there was something about him that he didn’t care to have known. I knew he had been in some kind of racket, I guess. But not killing people.”