The Little Sister pm-5 Read online

  He stopped and drew in his breath. His face glistened a little as if with sweat. He leaned forward from his hips.

  “We got to have you,” he repeated. “We got to have sharpers with private licenses hiding information and dodging around corners and stirring up dust for us to breathe in. We got to have you suppressing evidence and framing set-ups that wouldn’t fool a sick baby. You wouldn’t mind me calling you a goddamn cheap double-crossing keyhole peeper, would you, baby?”

  “You want me to mind?” I asked him.

  He straightened up. “I’d love it,” he said. “In spades redoubled.”

  “Some of what you say is true,” I said. “Not all. Any private eye wants to play ball with the police. Sometimes it’s a little hard to find out who’s making the rules of the ball game. Sometimes he doesn’t trust the police, and with cause. Sometimes he just gets in a jam without meaning to and has to play his hand out the way it’s dealt. He’d usually rather have a new deal. He’d like to keep on earning a living.”

  “Your license is dead,” French said. “As of now. That problem won’t bother you any more.”

  “It’s dead when the commission that gave it to me says so. Not before.”

  Beifus said quietly, “Let’s get on with it, Christy. This could wait.”

  “I’m getting on with it,” French said. “My way. This bird hasn’t cracked wise yet. I’m waiting for him to crack wise. The bright repartee. Don’t tell me you’re all out of the quick stuff, Marlowe.”

  “Just what is it you want me to say?” I asked him.

  “Guess,” he said.

  “You’re a man eater tonight,” I said. “You want to break me in half. But you want an excuse. And you want me to give it to you?”

  “That might help,” he said between his teeth.

  “What would you have done in my place?” I asked him.

  “I couldn’t imagine myself getting that low.”

  He licked at the point of his upper lip. His right hand was hanging loose at his side. He was clenching and unclenching the fingers without knowing it.

  “Take it easy, Christy,” Beifus said. “Lay off.”

  French didn’t move. Beifus came over and stepped between us. French said, “Get out of there, Fred.”

  French doubled his fist and slugged him hard on the point of the jaw. Beifus stumbled back and knocked me out of the way. His knees wobbled. He bent forward and coughed. He shook his head slowly in a bent-over position. After a while he straightened up with a grunt. He turned and looked at me. He grinned.

  “It’s a new kind of third degree,” he said. “The cops beat hell out of each other and the suspect cracks up from the agony of watching.”

  His hand went up and felt the angle of his jaw. It already showed swelling. His mouth grinned but his eyes were still a little vague. French stood rooted and silent.

  Beifus got out a pack of cigarettes and shook one loose and held the pack out to French. French looked at the cigarette, looked at Beifus.

  “Seventeen years of it,” he said. “Even my wife hates me.”

  He lifted his open hand and slapped Beifus across the cheek with it lightly. Beifus kept on grinning.

  French said: “Was it you I hit, Fred?”

  Beifus said: “Nobody hit me, Christy. Nobody that I can remember.”

  French said: “Take the cuffs off him and take him out to the car. He’s under arrest. Cuff him to the rail if you think it’s necessary.”

  “Okay.” Beifus went around behind me. The cuffs came loose. “Come along, baby,” Beifus said.

  I stared hard at French. He looked at me as if I was the wallpaper. His eyes didn’t seem to see me at all.

  I went out under the archway and out of the house.

  30

  I never knew his name, but he was rather short and thin for a cop, which was what he must have been, partly because he was there, and partly because when he leaned across the table to reach a card I could see the leather underarm holster and the butt end of a police .38.

  He didn’t speak much, but when he did he had a nice voice, a soft-water voice. And he had a smile that warmed the whole room.

  “Wonderful casting,” I said, looking at him across the cards.

  We were playing double Canfield. Or he was. I was just there, watching him, watching his small and very neat and very clean hands go out across the table and touch a card and lift it delicately and put it somewhere else. When he did this he pursed his lips a little and whistled without tune, a low soft whistle, like a very young engine that is not yet sure of itself.

  He smiled and put a red nine on a black ten.

  “What do you do in your spare time?” I asked him.

  “I play the piano a good deal,” he said. “I have a seven-foot Steinway. Mozart and Bach mostly. I’m a bit old-fashioned. Most people find it dull stuff. I don’t.”

  “Perfect casting,” I said, and put a card somewhere.

  “You’d be surprised how difficult some of that Mozart is,” he said. “It sounds so simple when you hear it played well.”

  “Who can play it well?” I asked.

  “Schnabel.”

  “Rubinstein?”

  He shook his head. “Too heavy. Too emotional. Mozart is just music. No comment needed from the performer.”

  “I bet you get a lot of them in the confession mood,” I said. “Like the job?”

  He moved another card and flexed his fingers lightly. His nails were bright but short. You could see he was a man who loved to move his hands, to make little neat inconspicuous motions with them, motions without any special meaning, but smooth and flowing and light as swans down. They gave him a feel of delicate things delicately done, but not weak. Mozart, all right. I could see that.

  It was about five-thirty, and the sky behind the screened window was getting light. The roll top desk in the corner was rolled shut. The room was the same room I had been in the afternoon before. Down at the end of the table the square carpenter’s pencil was lying where somebody had picked it up and put it back after Lieutenant Maglashan of Bay City threw it against the wall. The flat desk at which Christy French had sat was littered with ash. An old cigar butt clung to the extreme edge of a glass ashtray. A moth circled around the overhead light on a drop cord that had one of those green and white glass shades they still have in country hotels.

  “Tired?” he asked.

  “Pooped.”

  “You oughtn’t to get yourself involved in these elaborate messes. No point in it that I can see.”

  “No point in shooting a man?”

  He smiled the warm smile. “You never shot anybody.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Common sense—and a lot of experience sitting here with people.”

  “I guess you do like the job,” I said.

  “It’s night work. Gives me the days to practice. I’ve had it for twelve years now. Seen a lot of funny ones come and go.”

  He got another ace out, just in time. We were almost blocked.

  “Get many confessions?”

  “I don’t take confessions,” he said. “I just establish a mood.”

  “Why give it all away?”

  He leaned back and tapped lightly with the edge of a card on the edge of the table. The smile came again. “I’m not giving anything away. We got you figured long ago.”

  “Then what are they holding me for?”

  He wouldn’t answer that. He looked around at the clock on the wall. “I think we could get some food now.” He got up and went to the door. He half opened it and spoke softly to someone outside. Then he came back and sat down again and looked at what we had in the way of cards.

  “No use,” he said. “Three more up and we’re blocked. Okay with you to start over?”

  “Okay with me if we never started at all. I don’t play cards. Chess.”

  He looked up at me quickly. “Why didn’t you say so? I’d rather have played chess too.”

  “I�
��d rather drink some hot black coffee as bitter as sin.”

  “Any minute now. But I won’t promise the coffee’s what you’re used to.”

  “Hell, I eat anywhere. . . Well, if I didn’t shoot him, who did?”

  “Guess that’s what is annoying them.”

  “They ought to be glad to have him shot.”

  “They probably are,” he said. “But they don’t like the way it was done.”

  “Personally I thought it was as neat a job as you could find.”

  He looked at me in silence. He had the cards between his hands, all in a lump. He smoothed them out and flicked them over on their faces and dealt them rapidly into the two decks. The cards seemed to pour from his hands in a stream, in a blur.

  “If you were that fast with a gun,” I began.

  The stream of cards stopped. Without apparent motion a gun took their place. He held it lightly in his right hand pointed at a distant corner of the room. It went away and the cards started flowing again.

  “You’re wasted in here,” I said. “You ought to be in Las Vegas.”

  He picked up one of the packs and shuffled it slightly and quickly, cut it, and dealt me a king high flush in spades.

  “I’m safer with a Steinway,” he said.

  The door opened and a uniformed man came in with a tray.

  We ate canned cornbeef hash and drank hot but weak coffee. By that time it was full morning.

  At eight-fifteen Christy French came in and stood with his hat on the back of his head and dark smudges under his eyes.

  I looked from him to the little man across the table. But he wasn’t there any more. The cards weren’t there either. Nothing was there but a chair pushed in neatly to the table and the dishes we had eaten off gathered on a tray. For a moment I had that creepy feeling.

  Then Christy French walked around the table and jerked the chair out and sat down and leaned his chin on his hand. He took his hat off and rumpled his hair. He stared at me with hard morose eyes. I was back in coptown again.

  31

  “The D.A. wants to see you at nine o’clock,” he said. “After that I guess you can go on home. That is, if he doesn’t hang a pinch on you. I’m sorry you had to sit up in that chair all night.”

  “It’s all right,” I said. “I needed the exercise.”

  “Yeah, back in the groove again,” he said. He stared moodily at the dishes on the tray.

  “Got Lagardie?” I asked him.

  “No. He’s a doctor all right, though.” His eyes moved to mine. “He practiced in Cleveland.”

  I said: “I hate it to be that tidy.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Young Quest wants to put the bite on Steelgrave. So he just by pure accident runs into the one guy in Bay City that could prove who Steelgrave was. That’s too tidy.”

  “Aren’t you forgetting something?”

  “I’m tired enough to forget my name. What?”

  “Me too,” French said. “Somebody had to tell him who Steelgrave was. When that photo was taken Moe Stein hadn’t been squibbed off. So what good was the photo unless somebody knew who Steelgrave was?”

  “I guess Miss Weld knew,” I said. “And Quest was her brother.”

  “You’re not making much sense, chum.” He grinned a tired grin. “Would she help her brother put the bite on her boy friend and on her too?”

  “I give up. Maybe the photo was just a fluke. His other sister—my client that was—said he liked to take candid camera shots. The candider the better. If he’d lived long enough you’d have had him up for mopery.”

  “For murder,” French said indifferently.

  “Oh?”

  “Maglashan found that ice pick all right. He just wouldn’t give out to you.”

  “There’d have to be more than that.”

  “There is, but it’s a dead issue. Clausen and Mileaway Marston both had records. The kid’s dead. His family’s respectable. He had an off streak in him and he got in with the wrong people. No point in smearing his family just to prove the police can solve a case.”

  “That’s white of you. How about Steelgrave?”

  “That’s out of my hands.” He started to get up. “When a gangster gets his how long does the investigation last?”

  “Just as long as it’s front-page stuff,” I said. “But there’s a question of identity involved here.”

  “No.”

  I stared at him. “How do you mean, no?”

  “Just no. We’re sure.” He was on his feet now. He combed his hair with his fingers and rearranged his tie and hat. Out of the corner of his mouth he said in a low voice: “Off the record—we were always sure. We just didn’t have a thing on him.”

  “Thanks,” I said, “I’ll keep it to myself. How about the guns?”

  He stopped and stared down at the table. His eyes came up to mine rather slowly. “They both belonged to Steelgrave. What’s more he had a permit to carry a gun. From the sheriff’s office in another county. Don’t ask me why. One of them—” he paused and looked up at the wall over my head—“one of them killed Quest… The same gun killed Stein.”

  “Which one?”

  He smiled faintly. “It would be hell if the ballistics man got them mixed up and we didn’t know,” he said.

  He waited for me to say something. I didn’t have anything to say. He made a gesture with his hand.

  “Well, so long. Nothing personal you know, but I hope the D.A. takes your hide off—in long thin strips.”

  He turned and went out.

  I could have done the same, but I just sat there and stared across the table at the wall, as if I had forgotten how to get up. After a while the door opened and the orange queen came in. She unlocked her roll top desk and took her hat off of her impossible hair and hung her jacket on a bare hook in the bare wall. She opened the window near her and uncovered her typewriter and put paper in it. Then she looked across at me. “Waiting for somebody?”

  “I room here,” I said. “Been here all night.”

  She looked at me steadily for a moment. “You were here yesterday afternoon. I remember.”

  She turned to her typewriter and her fingers began to fly. From the open window behind her came the growl of cars filling up the parking lot. The sky had a white glare and there was not much smog. It was going to be a hot day.

  The telephone rang on the orange queen’s desk. She talked into it inaudibly, and hung up. She looked across at me again.

  “Mr. Endicott’s in his office,” she said. “Know the way?”

  “I worked there once. Not for him, though. I got fired.”

  She looked at me with that City Hall look they have. A voice that seemed to come from anywhere but her mouth said: “Hit him in the face with a wet glove.”

  I went over near her and stood looking down at the orange hair. There was plenty of gray at the roots.

  “Who said that?”

  “It’s the wall,” she said. “It talks. The voices of the dead men who have passed through on the way to hell.”

  I went out of the room walking softly and shut the door against the closer so that it wouldn’t make any noise.

  32

  You go in through double swing doors. Inside the double doors there is a combination PBX and information desk at which sits one of those ageless women you see around municipal offices everywhere in the world. They were never young and will never be old. They have no beauty, no charm, no style. They don’t have to please anybody. They are safe. They are civil without ever quite being polite and intelligent and knowledgeable without any real interest in anything. They are what human beings turn into when they trade life for existence and ambition for security.

  Beyond this desk there is a row of glassed-in cubicles stretching along one side of a very long room. On the other side is the waiting room, a row of hard chairs all facing one way, towards the cubicles.

  About half of the chairs were filled with people waiting and the look of long waiting on
their faces and the expectation of still longer waiting to come. Most of them were shabby. One was from the jail, in denim, with a guard. A white-faced kid built like a tackle, with sick, empty eyes.

  At the back of the line of cubicles a door was lettered SEWELL ENDICOTT DISTRICT ATTORNEY. I knocked and went on into a big airy corner room. A nice enough room, old-fashioned with padded black leather chairs and pictures of former D.A.’s and governors on the walls. Breeze fluttered the net curtains at four windows. A fan on a high shelf purred and swung slowly in a languid arc.

  Sewell Endicott sat behind a flat dark desk and watched me come. He pointed to a chair across from him. I sat down. He was tall, thin and dark with loose black hair and long delicate fingers.

  “You’re Marlowe?” he said in a voice that had a touch of the soft South.

  I didn’t think he really needed an answer to that. I just waited.

  “You’re in a bad spot, Marlowe. You don’t look good at all. You’ve been caught suppressing evidence helpful to the solution of a murder. That is obstructing justice. You could go up for it.”

  “Suppressing what evidence?” I asked.

  He picked a photo off his desk and frowned at it. I looked across at the other two people in the room. They sat in chairs side by side. One of them was Mavis Weld. She wore the dark glasses with the wide white bows. I couldn’t see her eyes, but I thought she was looking at me. She didn’t smile. She sat very still.

  By her side sat a man in an angelic pale-gray flannel suit with a carnation the size of a dahlia in his lapel. He was smoking a monogrammed cigarette and flicking the ashes on the floor, ignoring the smoking stand at his elbow. I knew him by pictures I had seen in the papers. Lee Farrell, one of the hottest trouble-shooting lawyers in the country. His hair was white but his eyes were bright and young. He had a deep outdoor tan. He looked as if it would cost a thousand dollars to shake hands with him.