The Little Sister pm-5 Page 22

  Endicott leaned back and tapped the arm of his chair with his long fingers. He turned with polite deference to Mavis Weld.

  “And how well did you know Steelgrave, Miss Weld?”

  “Intimately. He was very charming in some ways. I can hardly believe—” She broke off and shrugged.

  “And you are prepared to take the stand and swear as to the time and place when this photograph was taken?” He turned the photograph over and showed it to her.

  Farrell said indifferently, “Just a moment. Is that that the evidence Mr. Marlowe is supposed to have suppressed?

  “I ask the questions,” Endicott said sharply.

  Farrell smiled. “Well, in case the answer is yes, that photo isn’t evidence of anything.”

  Endicott said softly: “Will you answer my question, Miss Weld?”

  She said quietly and easily: “No, Mr. Endicott, I couldn’t swear when that picture was taken or where. I didn’t know it was being taken.”

  “All you have to do is look at it,” Endicott suggested.

  “And all I know is what I get from looking at it,” she told him.

  I grinned. Farrell looked at me with a twinkle. Endicott caught the grin out of the corner of his eye. “Something you find amusing?” he snapped at me.

  “I’ve been up all night. My face keeps slipping,” I said.

  He gave me a stern look and turned to Mavis Weld again.

  “Will you amplify that, Miss Weld?”

  “I’ve had a lot of photos taken of me, Mr. Endicott. In a lot of different places and with a lot of different people. I have had lunch and dinner at The Dancers with Mr. Steelgrave and with various other men. I don’t know what you want me to say.”

  Farrell put in smoothly, “If I understand your point, you would like Miss Weld to be your witness to connect this photo up. In what kind of proceeding?”

  “That’s my business,” Endicott said shortly. “Somebody shot Steelgrave to death last night. It could have been a woman. It could even have been Miss Weld. I’m sorry to say that, but it seems to be in the cards.”

  Mavis Weld looked down at her hands. She twisted a white glove between her fingers.

  “Well, let’s assume a proceeding,” Farrell said. “One in which that photo is part of your evidence—if you can get it in. But you can’t get it in. Miss Weld won’t get it in for you. All she knows about the photo is what she sees by looking at it. What anybody can see. You’d have to connect it up with a witness who could swear as to when, how and where it was taken. Otherwise I’d object—if I happened to be on the other side. I could even introduce experts to swear the photo was faked.”

  “I’m sure you could,” Endicott said dryly.

  “The only man who could connect it up for you is the man who took it,” Farrell went on without haste or heat. “I understand he’s dead. I suspect that was why he was killed.”

  Endicott said: “This photo is clear evidence of itself that at a certain time and place Steelgrave was not in jail and therefore had no alibi for the killing of Stein.”

  Farrell said: “It’s evidence when and if you get it introduced in evidence, Endicott. For Pete’s sake, I’m not trying to tell you the law. You know it. Forget that picture. It proves nothing whatsoever. No paper would dare print it. No judge would admit it in evidence, because no competent witness can connect it up. And if that’s the evidence Marlowe suppressed, then he didn’t in a legal sense suppress evidence at all.”

  “I wasn’t thinking of trying Steelgrave for murder,” Endicott said dryly. “But I am a little interested in who killed him. The police department, fantastically enough, also has an interest in that. I hope our interest doesn’t offend you.”

  Farrell said: “Nothing offends me. That’s why I’m where I am. Are you sure Steelgrave was murdered?”

  Endicott just stared at him. Farrell said easily: “I understand two guns were found, both the property of Steelgrave.”

  “Who told you?” Endicott asked sharply. He leaned forward frowning.

  Farrell dropped his cigarette into the smoking stand and shrugged. “Hell, these things come out. One of these guns had killed Quest and also Stein. The other had killed Steelgrave. Fired at close quarters too. I admit those boys don’t as a rule take that way out. But it could happen.”

  Endicott said gravely: “No doubt. Thanks for the suggestion. It happens to be wrong.”

  Farrell smiled a little and was silent. Endicott turned slowly to Mavis Weld.

  “Miss Weld, this office—or the present incumbent of it at least—doesn’t believe in seeking publicity at the expense of people to whom a certain kind of publicity might be fatal. It is my duty to determine whether any one should be brought to trial for any of these murders and to prosecute them, if the evidence warrants it. It is not my duty to ruin your career by exploiting the fact that you had the bad luck or bad judgment to be the friend of a man who, although never convicted or even indicted for any crime, was undoubtedly a member of a criminal mob at one time. I don’t think you have been quite candid with me about this photograph, but I won’t press the matter now. There is not much point in my asking you whether you shot Steelgrave. But I do ask you whether you have any knowledge that would point to who may have or might have killed him.”

  Farrell said quickly: “Knowledge, Miss Weld—not mere suspicion.”

  She faced Endicott squarely. “No.”

  He stood up and bowed. “That will be all for now then. Thanks for coming in.”

  Farrell and Mavis Weld stood up. I didn’t move. Farrell said: “Are you calling a press conference?”

  “I think I’ll leave that to you, Mr. Farrell. You have always been very skillful in handling the press.”

  Farrell nodded and went to open the door. They went out. She didn’t seem to look at me when she went out, but something touched the back of my neck lightly. Probably accidental. Her sleeve.

  Endicott watched the door close. He looked across the desk at me. “Is Farrell representing you? I forgot to ask him.”

  “I can’t afford him. So I’m vulnerable.”

  He smiled thinly. “I let them take all the tricks and then salve my dignity by working out on you, eh?”

  “I couldn’t stop you.”

  “You’re not exactly proud of the way you have handled things, are you, Marlowe?”

  “I got off on the wrong foot. After that I just had to take my lumps.”

  “Don’t you think you owe a certain obligation to the law?”

  “I would—if the law was like you.”

  He ran his long pale fingers through his tousled black hair.

  “I could make a lot of answers to that,” he said. They’d all sound about the same. The citizen is the law. In this country we haven’t got around to understanding that. We think of the law as an enemy. We’re a nation of cop-haters.”

  “It’ll take a lot to change that,” I said. “On both sides.

  He leaned forward and pressed a buzzer. “Yes,” he said quietly. “It will. But somebody has to make a beginning. Thanks for coming in.”

  As I went out a secretary came in at another door with a fat file in her hand.

  33

  A shave and a second breakfast made me feel a little less like the box of shavings the cat had had kittens in. I went up to the office and unlocked the door and sniffed in the twice-breathed air and the smell of dust. I opened a window and inhaled the fry-cook smell from the coffee shop next door. I sat down at my desk and felt the grit on it with my fingertips. I filled a pipe and lit it and leaned back and looked around.

  “Hello,” I said.

  I was just talking to the office equipment, the three green filing cases, the threadbare piece of carpet, the customer’s chair across from me, and the light fixture in the ceiling with three dead moths in it that had been there for at least six months. I was talking to the pebbled glass panel and the grimy woodwork and the pen set on the desk and the tired, tired telephone. I was talking to the scal
es on an alligator, the name of the alligator being Marlowe, a private detective in our thriving little community. Not the brainiest guy in the world, but cheap. He started out cheap and he ended cheaper still.

  I reached down and put the bottle of Old Forester up on the desk. It was about a third full. Old Forester. Now who gave you that, pal? That’s green-label stuff. Out of your class entirely. Must have been a client. I had a client once.

  And that got me thinking about her, and maybe I have stronger thoughts than I know. The telephone rang, and the funny little precise voice sounded just as it had the first time she called me up.

  “I’m in that telephone booth,” she said. “If you’re alone, I’m coming up.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I suppose you’re mad at me,” she said.

  “I’m not mad at anybody. Just tired.”

  “Oh yes you are,” her tight little voice said. “But I’m coming up anyway. I don’t care if you are mad at me.”

  She hung up. I took the cork out of the bottle of Old Forester and gave a sniff at it. I shuddered. That settled it. Any time I couldn’t smell whiskey without shuddering I was through.

  I put the bottle away and got up to unlock the communicating door. Then I heard her tripping along the hall. I’d know those tight little footsteps anywhere. I opened the door and she came up to me and looked at me shyly.

  It was all gone. The slanted cheaters, and the new hair-do and the smart little hat and the perfume and the prettied-up touch. The costume jewelry, the rouge, the everything. All gone. She was right back where she started that first morning. Same brown tailor-made, same square bag, same rimless glasses, same prim little narrow-minded smile.

  “It’s me,” she said. “I’m going home.”

  She followed me into my private thinking parlor and sat down primly and I sat down just any old way and stared at her.

  “Back to Manhattan,” I said. “I’m surprised they let you.”

  “I may have to come back.”

  “Can you afford it?”

  She gave a quick little half-embarrassed laugh. “It won’t cost me anything,” she said. She reached up and touched the rimless glasses. “These feel all wrong now,” she said. “I liked the others. But Dr. Zugsmith wouldn’t like them at all.” She put her bag on the desk and drew a line along the desk with her fingertip. That was just like the first time too.

  “I can’t remember whether I gave you back your twenty dollars or not,” I said. “We kept passing it back and forth until I lost count.”

  “Oh, you gave it to me,” she said. “Thank you.”

  “Sure?”

  “I never make mistakes about money. Are you all right? Did they hurt you?”

  “The police? No. And it was as tough a job as they ever didn’t do.”

  She looked innocently surprised. Then her eyes glowed. “You must be awfully brave,” she said.

  “Just luck,” I said. I picked up a pencil and felt the point. It was a good sharp point, if anybody wanted to write anything. I didn’t. I reached across and slipped the pencil through the strap of her bag and pulled it towards me.

  “Don’t touch my bag,” she said quickly and reached for it.

  I grinned and drew it out of her reach. “All right. But it’s such a cute little bag. It’s so like you.”

  She leaned back. There was a vague worry behind her eyes, but she smiled. “You think I’m cute—Philip? I’m so ordinary.”

  “I wouldn’t say so.”

  “You wouldn’t?”

  “Hell no, I think you’re one of the most unusual girls I ever met.” I swung the bag by its strap and set it down on the corner of the desk. Her eyes fastened on it quickly, but she licked her lip and kept on smiling at me.

  “And I bet you’ve known an awful lot of girls,” she said. “Why—” she looked down and did that with her fingertip on the desk again—”why didn’t you ever get married?”

  I thought of all the ways you answer that. I thought of all the women I had liked that much. No, not all. But some of them.

  “I suppose I know the answer,” I said. “But it would just sound corny. The ones I’d maybe like to marry—well, I haven’t what they need. The others you don’t have to marry. You just seduce them—if they don’t beat you to it.”

  She flushed to the roots of her mousy hair.

  “You’re horrid when you talk like that.”

  “That goes for some of the nice ones too,” I said. “Not what you said. What I said. You wouldn’t have been so hard to take yourself.”

  “Don’t talk like that, please!”

  “Well, would you?”

  She looked down at the desk. “I wish you’d tell me,” she said slowly, “what happened to Orrin. I’m all confused.”

  “I told you he probably went off the rails. The first time you came in. Remember?” She nodded slowly, still blushing.

  “Abnormal sort of home life,” I said. “Very inhibited sort of guy and with a very highly developed sense of his own importance. It looked at you out of the picture you gave me. I don’t want to go psychological on you, but I figure he was just the type to go very completely haywire, if he went haywire at all. Then there’s that awful money hunger that runs in your family—all except one.”

  She smiled at me now. If she thought I meant her, that was jake with me. “There’s one question I want to ask you,” I said. “Was your father married before?”

  She nodded, yes.

  “That helps. Leila had another mother. That suits me fine. Tell me some more. After all I did a lot of work for you, for a very low fee of no dollars net.”

  “You got paid,” she said sharply. “Well paid. By Leila. And don’t expect me to call her Mavis Weld. I won’t do it.”

  “You didn’t know I was going to get paid.”

  “Well—” there was a long pause, during which her eyes went to her bag again—”you did get paid.”

  “Okay, pass that. Why wouldn’t you tell me who she was?”

  “I was ashamed. Mother and I were both ashamed.”

  “Orrin wasn’t. He loved it.”

  “Orrin?” There was a tidy little silence while she looked at her bag again. I was beginning to get curious about that bag. “But he had been out here and I suppose he’d got used to it.”

  “Being in pictures isn’t that bad, surely.”

  “It wasn’t just that,” she said swiftly, and her tooth came down on the outer edge of her lower lip and something flared in her eyes and very slowly died away. I just put another match to my pipe. I was too tired to show emotions, even if I felt any.

  “I know. Or anyway I kind of guessed. How did Orrin find out something about Steelgrave that the cops didn’t know?”

  “I—I don’t know,” she said slowly, picking her way among her words like a cat on a fence. “Could it have been that doctor?”

  “Oh sure,” I said, with a big warm smile. “He and Orrin got to be friends somehow. A common interest in sharp tools maybe.”

  She leaned back in her chair. Her little face was thin and angular now. Her eyes had a watchful look.

  “Now you’re just being nasty,” she said. “Every so often you have to be that way.”

  “Such a pity,” I said. “I’d be a lovable character if I’d let myself alone. Nice bag.” I reached for it and pulled it in front of me and snapped it open.

  She came up out of her chair and lunged.

  “You let my bag alone!”

  I looked her straight in the rimless glasses. “You want to go home to Manhattan, Kansas, don’t you? Today? You got your ticket and everything?”

  She worked her lips and slowly sat down again.

  “Okay,” I said. “I’m not stopping you. I just wondered how much dough you squeezed out of the deal.”

  She began to cry. I opened the bag and went through it. Nothing until I came to the zipper pocket at the back. I unzipped and reached in. There was a flat packet of new bills in there. I took them out and rif
fled them. Ten centuries. All new. All nice. An even thousand dollars. Nice traveling money.

  I leaned back and tapped the edge of the packet on my desk. She sat silent now, staring at me with wet eyes. I got a handkerchief out of her bag and tossed it across to her. She dabbed at her eyes. She watched me around the handkerchief. Once in a while she made a nice little appealing sob in her throat.

  “Leila gave the money to me,” she said softly.

  “What size chisel did you use?” She just opened her mouth and a tear ran down her cheek into it.

  “Skip it,” I said. I dropped the pack of money back to the bag, snapped the bag shut and pushed it across the desk to her. “I guess you and Orrin belong to that class of people that can convince themselves that everything they do is right. He can blackmail his sister and then when a couple of small-time crooks get wise to his racket and take it away from him, he can sneak up on them and knock them off with an ice pick in the back of the neck. Probably didn’t even keep him awake that night. You can do much the same. Leila didn’t give you that money. Steelgrave gave it to you. For what?”

  “You’re filthy,” she said. “You’re vile. How dare you say such things to me?”

  “Who tipped off the law that Dr. Lagardie knew Clausen? Lagardie thought I did. I didn’t. So you did. Why? To smoke out your brother who was not cutting you in—because right then he had lost his deck of cards and was hiding out. I’d like to see some of those letters he wrote home. I bet they’re meaty. I can see him working at it, watching his sister, trying to get her lined up for his Leica, with the good Doctor Lagardie waiting quietly in the background for his share of the take. What did you hire me for?”

  “I didn’t know,” she said evenly. She wiped her eyes again and put the handkerchief away in the bag and got herself all collected and ready to leave. “Orrin never mentioned any names. I didn’t even know Orrin had lost his pictures. But I knew he had taken them and that they were very valuable. I came out to make sure.”

  “Sure of what?”

  “That Orrin treated me right. He could be awfully mean sometimes. He might have kept all the money himself.”

  “Why did he call you up night before last?”