The Little Sister pm-5 Page 20

  I said: “Uh-huh.” I got up and walked around the high-backed chair again. Her eyes traveled slowly to watch me. I leaned over the dead Steelgrave and felt under his arm on the left side. There was a gun there in the holster. I didn’t touch it. I went back and sat down opposite her again.

  “It’s going to cost a lot of money to fix this,” I said.

  For the first time she smiled. It was a very small smile, but it was a smile. “I don’t have a lot of money,” she said. “So that’s out.”

  “Oppenheimer has. You’re worth millions to him by now.”

  “He wouldn’t chance it. Too many people have their knives into the picture business these days. He’ll take his loss and forget it in six months.”

  “You said you’d go to him.”

  “I said if I got into a jam and hadn’t really done anything, I’d go to him. But I have done something now.”

  “How about Ballou? You’re worth a lot to him too.”

  “I’m not worth a plugged nickel to anybody. Forget it, Marlowe. You mean well, but I know these people.”

  “That puts it up to me,” I said. “That would be why you sent for me.”

  “Wonderful,” she said. “You fix it, darling. For free.” Her voice was brittle and shallow again.

  I went and sat beside her on the davenport. I took hold of her arm and pulled her hand out of the fur pocket and took hold of that. It was almost ice cold, in spite of the fur.

  She turned her head and looked at me squarely. She shook her head a little. “Believe me, darling, I’m not worth it—even to sleep with.”

  I turned the hand over and opened the fingers out. They were stiff and resisted. I opened them out one by one. I smoothed the palm of her hand.

  “Tell me why you had the gun with you.”

  “The gun?”

  “Don’t take time to think. Just tell me. Did you mean to kill him?”

  “Why not, darling? I thought I meant something to him. I guess I’m a little vain. He fooled me. Nobody means anything to the Steelgraves of this world. And nobody means anything to the Mavis Welds of this world any more.”

  She pulled away from me and smiled thinly. “I oughtn’t to have given you that gun. If I killed you I might get clear yet.”

  I took it out and held it towards her. She took it and stood up quickly. The gun pointed at me. The small tired smile moved her lips again. Her finger was very firm on the trigger.

  “Shoot high,” I said. “I’m wearing my bullet-proof underwear.”

  She dropped the gun to her side and for a moment she just stood staring at me. Then she tossed the gun down on the davenport.

  “I guess I don’t like the script,” she said. “I don’t like the lines. It just isn’t me, if you know what I mean.”

  She laughed and looked down at the floor. The point of her shoe moved back and forth on the carpeting. “We’ve had a nice chat, darling. The phone’s over there at the end of the bar.”

  “Thanks, do you remember Dolores’s number?”

  “Why Dolores?”

  When I didn’t answer she told me. I went along the room to the corner of the bar and dialed. The same routine as before. Good evening, the Chateau Bercy, who is calling Miss Gonzales please. One moment, please, buzz, buzz, and then a sultry voice saying: “Hello?”

  “This is Marlowe. Did you really mean to put me on a spot?”

  I could almost hear her breath catch. Not quite. You can’t really hear it over the phone. Sometimes you think you can.

  “Amigo, but I am glad to hear your voice,” she said, “I am so very very glad.”

  “Did you or didn’t you?”

  “I—I don’t know. I am very sad to think that I might have. I like you very much.”

  “I’m in a little trouble here.”

  “Is he—” Long pause. Apartment house phone. Careful. “Is he there?”

  “Well—in a way. He is and yet he isn’t.”

  I really did hear her breath this time. A long indrawn sigh that was almost a whistle.

  “Who else is there?”

  “Nobody. Just me and my homework. I want to ask you something. It is deadly important. Tell me the truth. Where did you get that thing you gave me tonight?”

  “Why, from him. He gave it to me.”

  “When?”

  “Early this evening. Why?”

  “How early?”

  “About six o’clock, I think.”

  “Why did he give it to you?”

  “He asked me to keep it. He always carried one.”

  “Asked you to keep it why?”

  “He did not say, amigo. He was a man that did things like that. He did not often explain himself.”

  “Notice anything unusual about it? About what he gave you?”

  “Why—no, I did not.”

  “Yes, you did. You noticed that it had been fired and that it smelled of burned powder.”

  “But I did not—”

  “Yes, you did. Just like that. You wondered about it. You didn’t like to keep it. You didn’t keep it. You gave it back to him. You don’t like them around anyhow.”

  There was a long silence. She said at last, “But of course. But why did he want me to have it? I mean, if that was what happened.”

  “He didn’t tell you why. He just tried to ditch a gun on you and you weren’t having any. Remember?”

  “That is something I have to tell?”

  “Si.”

  “Will it be safe for me to do that?”

  “When did you ever try to be safe?”

  She laughed softly. “Amigo, you understand me very well.”

  “Goodnight,” I said.

  “One moment, you have not told me what happened.”

  “I haven’t even telephoned you.”

  I hung up and turned.

  Mavis Weld was standing in the middle of the floor watching me.

  “You have your car here?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Get going.”

  “And do what?”

  “Just go home. That’s all.”

  “You can’t get away with it,” she said softly.

  “You’re my client.”

  “I can’t let you. I killed him. Why should you be dragged into it?”

  “Don’t stall. And when you leave go the back way. Not the way Dolores brought me.”

  She stared me straight in the eyes and repeated in a tense voice, “But I killed him.”

  “I can’t hear a word you say.”

  Her teeth took hold of her lower lip and held it cruelly. She seemed hardly to breathe. She stood rigid. I went over close to her and touched her cheek with a fingertip. I pressed it hard and watched the white spot turn red.

  “If you want to know my motive,” I said, “it has nothing to do with you. I owe it to the johns. I haven’t played clean cards in this game. They know. I know. I’m just giving them a chance to use the loud pedal.”

  “As if anyone ever had to give them that,” she said, and turned abruptly and walked away. I watched her to the arch and waited for her to look back. She went on through without turning. After a long time I heard a whirring noise. Then the bump of something heavy—the garage door going up. A car started a long way off. It idled down and after another pause the whirring noise again.

  When that stopped the motor faded off into the distance. I heard nothing now. The silence of the house hung around me in thick loose folds like that fur coat around the shoulders of Mavis Weld.

  I carried the glass and bottle of brandy over to the bar and climbed over it. I rinsed the glass in a little sink and set the bottle back on the shelf. I found the trick catch this time and swung the door open at the end opposite the telephone. I went back to Steelgrave.

  I took out the gun Dolores had given me and wiped it off and put his small limp hand around the butt, held it there and let go. The gun thudded to the carpet. The position looked natural. I wasn’t thinking about fingerprints. He would have le
arned long ago not to leave them on any gun.

  That left me with three guns. The weapon in his holster I took out and went and put it on the bar shelf under the counter, wrapped in a towel. The Luger I didn’t touch. The other white-handled automatic was left. I tried to decide about how far away from him it had been fired. Beyond scorching distance, but probably very close beyond. I stood about three feet from him and fired two shots past him. They nicked peacefully into the wall. I dragged the chair around until it faced into the room. I laid the small automatic down on the dust cover of one of the roulette tables. I touched the big muscle in the side of his neck, usually the first to harden. I couldn’t tell whether it had begun to set or not. But his skin was colder than it had been.

  There was not a hell of a lot of time to play around with.

  I went to the telephone and dialed the number of the Los Angeles Police Department. I asked the police operator for Christy French. A voice from homicide came on, said he had gone home and what was it. I said it was a personal call he was expecting. They gave me his phone number at home, reluctantly, not because they cared, but because they hate to give anybody anything any time.

  I dialed and a woman answered and screamed his name. He sounded rested and calm.

  “This is Marlowe. What were you doing?”

  “Reading the funnies to my kid. He ought to be in bed. What’s doing?”

  “Remember over at the Van Nuys yesterday you said a man could make a friend if he got you something on Weepy Moyer?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I need a friend.”

  He didn’t sound very interested. “What you got on him?”

  “I’m assuming it’s the same guy. Steelgrave.”

  “Too much assuming, kid. We had him in the fishbowl because we thought the same. It didn’t pan any gold.”

  “You got a tip. He set that tip up himself. So the night Stein was squibbed off he would be where you knew.”

  “You just making this up—or got evidence?” He sounded a little less relaxed.

  “If a man got out of jail on a pass from the jail doctor, could you prove that?”

  There was a silence. I heard a child’s voice complaining and a woman’s voice speaking to the child.

  “It’s happened,” French said heavily. “I dunno. That a tough order to fill. They’d send him under guard. Did he get to the guard?”

  “That’s my theory.”

  “Better sleep on it. Anything else?”

  “I’m out at Stillwood Heights. In a big house where they were setting up for gambling and the local residents didn’t like it.”

  “Read about it. Steelgrave there?”

  “He’s here. I’m here alone with him.”

  Another silence. The kid yelled and I thought I heard a slap. The kid yelled louder. French yelled at some body.

  “Put him on the phone,” French said at last.

  “You’re not bright tonight, Christy. Why would I call you?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Stupid of me. What’s the address there?”

  “I don’t know. But it’s up at the end of Tower Road in Stillwood Heights and the phone number is Halldale 9-5033. I’ll be waiting for you.”

  He repeated the number and said slowly: “This time you wait, huh?”

  “It had to come sometime.”

  The phone clicked and I hung up.

  I went back through the house putting on lights as I found them and came out at the back door at the top of the stairs. There was a floodlight for the motor yard. I put that on. I went down the steps and walked along to the oleander bush. The private gate stood open as before. I swung it shut, hooked up the chain and clicked the padlock. I went back, walking slowly, looking up at the moon, sniffing the night air, listening to the tree frogs and the crickets. I went into the house and found the front door and put the light on over that. There was a big parking space in front and a circular lawn with roses. But you had to slide back around the house to the rear to get away.

  The place was a dead end except for the driveway through the neighboring grounds. I wondered who lived there. A long way off through trees I could see the lights of a big house. Some Hollywood big shot, probably, some wizard of the slobbery kiss, and the pornographic dissolve.

  I went back in and felt the gun I had just fired. It was cold enough. And Mr. Steelgrave was beginning to look as if he meant to stay dead.

  No siren. But the sound of a car coming up the hill at last. I went out to meet it, me and my beautiful dream.

  29

  They came in as they should, big, tough and quiet their eyes flickering with watchfulness and cautious with disbelief.

  “Nice place,” French said. “Where’s the customer?”

  “In there,” Beifus said, without waiting for me to answer.

  They went along the room without haste and stood in front of him looking down solemnly.

  “Dead, wouldn’t you say?” Beifus remarked, opening up the act.

  French leaned down and took the gun that lay on the floor with thumb and finger on the trigger guard. His eyes flicked sideways and he jerked his chin. Beifus took the other white-handled gun by sliding a pencil into the end of the barrel.

  “Fingerprints all in the right places, I hope,” Beifus said. He sniffed. “Oh yeah, this baby’s been working. How’s yours, Christy?”

  “Fired,” French said. He sniffed again. “But not recently.” He took a clip flash from his pocket and shone it into the barrel of the black gun. “Hours ago.”

  “Down at Bay City, in a house on Wyoming Street,” I said.

  Their heads swung around to me in unison. “Guessing?” French asked slowly.

  “Yes.”

  He walked over to the covered table and laid the gun down some distance from the other. “Better tag them right away, Fred. They’re twins. We’ll both sign the tags.”

  Beifus nodded and rooted around in his pockets. He came up with a couple of tie-on tags. The things cops carry around with them.

  French moved back to me. “Let’s stop guessing and get to the part you know.”

  “A girl I know called me this evening and said a client of mine was in danger up here—from him.” I pointed with my chin at the dead man in the chair. “This girl rode me up here. We passed the road block. A number of people saw us both. She left me in back of the house and went home.”

  “Somebody with a name?” French asked.

  “Dolores Gonzales, Chateau Bercy Apartments. On Franklin. She’s in pictures.”

  “Oh-ho,” Beifus said and rolled his eyes.

  “Who’s your client? Same one?” French asked. “No. This is another party altogether.”

  “She have a name?”

  “Not yet.”

  They stared at me with hard bright faces. French’s jaw moved almost with a jerk. Knots of muscles showed at the sides of his jawbone.

  “New rules, huh?” he said softly.

  I said, “There has to be some agreement about publicity. The D.A. ought to be willing.”

  Beifus said, “You don’t know the D.A. good, Marlowe. He eats publicity like I eat tender young garden peas.”

  French said, “We don’t give you any undertaking whatsoever.”

  “She hasn’t any name,” I said.

  “There’s a dozen ways we can find out, kid,” Beifus said. “Why go into this routine that makes it tough for all of us?”

  “No publicity,” I said, “unless charges are actually filed.”

  “You can’t get away with it, Marlowe.”

  “God damn it,” I said, “this man killed Orrin Quest. You take that gun downtown and check it against the bullets in Quest. Give me that much at least, before you force me into an impossible position.”

  “I wouldn’t give you the dirty end of a burnt match,” French said.

  I didn’t say anything. He stared at me with cold hate in his eyes. His lips moved slowly and his voice was thick saying, “You here when he got it?”

 
; “No.”

  “Who was?”

  “He was,” I said looking across at the dead Steelgrave.

  “Who else?”

  “I won’t lie to you,” I said. “And I won’t tell you anything I don’t want to tell—except on the terms I stated. I don’t know who was here when he got it.”

  “Who was here when you got here?”

  I didn’t answer. He turned his head slowly and said to Beifus: “Put the cuffs on him. Behind.”

  Beifus hesitated. Then he took a pair of steel handcuffs out of his left hip pocket and came over to me. “Put your hands behind you,” he said in an uncomfortable voice.

  I did. He clicked the cuffs on. French walked over slowly and stood in front of me. His eyes were half closed. The skin around them was grayish with fatigue.

  “I’m going to make a little speech,” he said. “You’re not going to like it.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  French said: “It’s like this with us, baby. We’re coppers and everybody hates our guts. And as if we didn’t have enough trouble, we have to have you. As if we didn’t get pushed around enough by the guys in the corner offices, the City Hall gang, the day chief, the night chief, the Chamber of Commerce, His Honor the Mayor in his paneled office four times as big as the three lousy rooms the whole homicide staff has to work out of. As if we didn’t have to handle one hundred and fourteen homicides last year out of three rooms that don’t have enough chairs for the whole duty squad to sit down in at once. We spend our lives turning over dirty underwear and sniffing rotten teeth. We go up dark stairways to get a gun punk with a skinful of hop and sometimes we don’t get all the way up, and our wives wait dinner that night and all the other nights. We don’t come home any more. And nights we do come home, we come home so goddamn tired we can’t eat or sleep or even read the lies the papers print about us. So we lie awake in the dark in a cheap house on a cheap street and listen to the drunks down the block having fun. And just about the time we drop off the phone rings and we get up and start all over again. Nothing we do is right, not ever. Not once. If we get a confession, we beat it out of the guy, they say, and some shyster calls us Gestapo in court and sneers at us when we muddle our grammar. If we make a mistake they put us back in uniform on Skid Row and we spend the nice cool summer evenings picking drunks out of the gutter and being yelled at by whores and taking knives away from greaseballs in zoot suits. But all that ain’t enough to make us entirely happy. We got to have you.”