Red Wind: A Collection of Short Stories Page 5

  “Five hundred might do,” the blond man said. “What do I get for it?”

  “If I swing it—you get left out of the story. If I don’t—you don’t pay.”

  He thought it over. His face looked lined and tired now. The small beads of sweat twinkled in his short blond hair.

  “This murder will make you talk,” he grumbled. “The second one, I mean. And I don’t have what I was going to buy. And if it’s a hush, I’d rather buy it direct.”

  “Who was the little brown man?” I asked.

  “Name’s Leon Valesanos, a Uruguayan. Another of my importations. I’m in a business that takes me a lot of places. He was working in the Spezzia Club in Chiseltown—you know, the strip of Sunset next to Beverly Hills. Working on roulette, I think. I gave him the five hundred to go down to this—this Waldo—and buy back some bills for stuff Miss Kolchenko had charged to my account and delivered here. That wasn’t bright, was it? I had them in my brief case and this Waldo got a chance to steal them. What’s your hunch about what happened?”

  I sipped my drink and looked at him down my nose. “Your Uruguayan pal probably talked cut and Waldo didn’t listen good. Then the little guy thought maybe that Mauser might help his argument—and Waldo was too quick for him. I wouldn’t say Waldo was a killer—not by intention. A blackmailer seldom is. Maybe he lost his temper and maybe he just held on to the little guy’s neck too long. Then he had to take it on the lam. But he had another date, with more money coming up. And he worked the neighborhood looking for the party. And accidentally he ran into a pal who was hostile enough and drunk enough to blow him down.”

  “There’s a hell of a lot of coincidence in all this business,” the big man said.

  “It’s the hot wind,” I grinned. “Everybody’s screwy tonight.”

  “For the five hundred you guarantee nothing? If I don’t get my cover-up, you don’t get your dough. Is that it?”

  “That’s it,” I said, smiling at him.

  “Screwy is right,” he said, and drained his highball. “I’m taking you up on it.”

  “There are just two things,” I said softly, leaning forward in my chair. “Waldo had a getaway car parked outside the cocktail bar where he was killed, unlocked with the motor running. The killer took it. There’s always the chance of a kickback from that direction. You see, all Waldo’s stuff must have been in that car.”

  “Including my bills and your letters.”

  “Yeah. But the police are reasonable about things like that—unless you’re good for a lot of publicity. If you’re not, I think I can eat some stale dog downtown and get by. If you are—that’s the second thing. What did you say your name was?”

  The answer was a long time coming. When it came I didn’t get as much kick out of it as I thought I would. All at once it was too logical.

  “Frank C. Barsaly,” he said.

  After a while the Russian girl called me a taxi. When I left the party across the street was still doing all that a party could do. I noticed the walls of the house were still standing. That seemed a pity.

  VI

  WHEN I unlocked the glass entrance door of the Berglund I smelled policeman. I looked at my wrist watch. It was nearly 3 A.M. In the dark corner of the lobby a man dozed in a chair with a newspaper over his face. Large feet stretched out before him. A corner of the paper lifted an inch, dropped again. The man made no other movement.

  I went on along the hall to the elevator and rode up to my floor. I soft-footed along the hallway, unlocked my door, pushed it wide and reached in for the light-switch.

  A chain-switch tinkled and light glared from a standing-lamp by the easy chair, beyond the card table on which my chessmen were still scattered.

  Copernik sat there with a stiff unpleasant grin on his face. The short dark man, Ybarra, sat across the room from him, on my left, silent, half-smiling as usual.

  Copernik showed more of his big yellow horse teeth and said: “Hi. Long time no see. Been out with the girls?”

  I shut the door and took my hat off and wiped the back of my neck slowly, over and over again. Copernik went on grinning. Ybarra looked at nothing with his soft dark eyes.

  “Take a seat, pal,” Copernik drawled. “Make yourself to home. We got pow-wow to make. Boy, do I hate this night sleuthing. Did you know you were all out of hooch?”

  “I could have guessed it,” I said. I leaned against the wall.

  Copernik kept on grinning. “I always did hate private dicks,” he said, “but I never had a chance to twist one like I got tonight.”

  He reached down lazily beside his chair and picked up a printed bolero jacket, tossed it on the card table. He reached down again and put a wide-brimmed hat beside it.

  “I bet you look cuter than all hell with these on,” he said.

  I took hold of a straight chair, twisted it around and straddled it, leaned my folded arms on the chair and looked at Copernik.

  He got up very slowly—with an elaborate slowness, walked across the room and stood in front of me smoothing his coat down. Then he lifted his open right hand and hit me across the face with it—hard. It stung but I didn’t move.

  Ybarra looked at the wall, looked at the floor, looked at nothing.

  “Shame on you, pal,” Copernik said lazily. “The way you was taking care of this nice exclusive merchandise. Wadded down behind your old shirts. You punk peepers always did make me sick.”

  He stood there over me for a moment. I didn’t move or speak. I looked into his glazed drinker’s eyes. He doubled a fist at his side, then shrugged and turned and went back to the chair.

  “O.K.,” he said. “The rest will keep. Where did you get these things?”

  “They belong to a lady.”

  “Do tell. They belong to a lady. Ain’t you the light-hearted —! I’ll tell you what lady they belong to. They belong to the lady a guy named Waldo asked about in a bar across the street—about two minutes before he got shot kind of dead. Or would that have slipped your mind?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “You was curious about her yourself,” Copernik sneered on. “But you were smart, pal. You fooled me.”

  “That wouldn’t make me smart,” I said.

  His face twisted suddenly and he started to get up. Ybarra laughed, suddenly and softly, almost under his breath. Copernik’s eyes swung on him, hung there. Then he faced me again, blank-eyed.

  “The guinea likes you,” he said. “He thinks you’re good.”

  The smile left Ybarra’s face, but no expression took its place. No expression at all.

  Copernik said: “You knew who the dame was all the time. You knew who Waldo was and where he lived. Right across the hall a floor below you. You knew this Waldo person had bumped a guy off and started to lam, only this broad came into his plans somewhere and he was anxious to meet up with her before he went away. Only he never got the chance. A heist guy from back East named Al Tessilore took care of that by taking care of Waldo. So you met the gal and hid her clothes and sent her on her way and kept your trap glued. That’s the way guys like you make your beans. Am I right?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Except that I only knew these things very recently. Who was Waldo?”

  Copernik bared his teeth at me. Red spots burned high on his sallow cheeks. Ybarra, looking down at the floor, said very softly: “Waldo Ratigan. We got him from Washington by teletype. He was a two-bit porch-climber with a few small terms on him. He drove a car in a bank stickup job in Detroit. He turned the gang in later and got a nolle prosse. One of the gang was this Al Tessilore. He hasn’t talked a word, but we think the meeting across the street was purely accidental.”

  Ybarra spoke in the soft quiet modulated voice of a man for whom sounds have a meaning. I said: “Thanks, Ybarra. Can I smoke—or would Copernik kick it out of my mouth?”

  Ybarra smiled suddenly. “You may smoke, sure,” he said.

  “The guinea likes you all right,” Copernik jeered. “You never know what a guinea w
ill like, do you?”

  I lit a cigarette. Ybarra looked at Copernik and said very softly.

  “The word guinea—you overwork it. I don’t like it so well applied to me.”

  “The hell with what you like, guinea.”

  Ybarra smiled a little more. “You are making a mistake,” he said. He took a pocket nailfile out and began to use it, looking down.

  Copernik blared: “I smelled something rotten on you from the start, Dalmas. So when we make these two mugs, Ybarra and me think we’ll drift over and dabble a few more words with you. I bring one of Waldo’s morgue photos—nice work, the light just right in his eyes, his tie all straight and a white handkerchief showing just right in his pocket. Nice work. So on the way up, just as a matter of routine, we rout out the manager here and let him lamp it. And he knows the guy. He’s here as A. B. Hummel, Apartment Thirty-one. So we go in there and find a stiff. Then we go round and round with that. Nobody knows him yet, but he’s got some swell finger bruises under that strap and I hear they fit Waldo’s fingers very nicely.”

  “That’s something,” I said. “I thought maybe I murdered him.”

  Copernik stared at me for a long time. His face had stopped grinning and was just a hard brutal face now. “Yeah. We got something else even,” he said. “We got Waldo’s getaway car—and what Waldo had in it to take with him.”

  I blew cigarette smoke jerkily. The wind pounded the shut windows. The air in the room was foul.

  “Oh we’re bright boys,” Copernik sneered. “We never figured you with that much guts. Take a look at this.”

  He plunged his bony hand into his coat pocket and drew something up slowly over the edge of the card table, drew it along the green top and left it there stretched out, gleaming. A string of white pearls with a clasp like a two-bladed propeller. They shimmered softly in the thick smoky air.

  Lola Barsaly’s pearls. The pearls the flier had given her. The guy who was dead, the guy she still loved.

  I stared at them, but I didn’t move. After a long moment Copernik said almost gravely: “Nice, ain’t they? Would you feel like telling us a story about now, Mister Dalmas?”

  I stood up and pushed the chair from under me, walked slowly across the room and stood looking down at the pearls. The largest was perhaps a third of an inch across. They were pure white, iridescent, with a mellow softness. I lifted them slowly off the card table from beside her clothes. They felt heavy, smooth, fine.

  “Nice,” I said. “A lot of the trouble was about these. Yeah, I’ll talk now. They must be worth a lot of money.”

  Ybarra laughed behind me. It was a very gentle laugh. “About a hundred dollars,” he said. “They’re good phonies—but they’re phoney.”

  I lifted the pearls again. Copernik’s glassy eyes gloated at me. “How do you tell?” I asked.

  “I know pearls,” Ybarra said. “These are good stuff, the kind women very often have made on purpose, as a kind of insurance. But they are slick like glass. Real pearls are gritty between the edges of the teeth. Try.”

  I put two or three of them between my teeth and moved my teeth back and forth, then sideways. Not quite biting them. The beads were hard and slick.

  “Yes. They are very good,” Ybarra said. “Several even have little waves and flat spots, as real pearls might have.”

  “Would they cost fifteen grand—if they were real?” I asked.

  “Si. Probably. That’s hard to say. It depends on a lot of things.”

  “This Waldo wasn’t so bad,” I said.

  Copernik stood up quickly, but I didn’t see him swing. I was still looking down at the pearls. His fist caught me on the side of the face, against the molars. I tasted blood at once. I staggered back and made it look like a worse blow than it was.

  “Sit down and talk, you —!” Copernik almost whispered.

  I sat down and used a handkerchief to pat my cheek. I licked at the cut inside my mouth. Then I got up again and went over and picked up the cigarette he had knocked out of my mouth. I crushed it out in a tray and sat down again.

  Ybarra filed at his nails and held one up against the lamp. There were beads of sweat on Copernik’s eyebrows, at the inner ends.

  “You found the beads in Waldo’s car,” I said, looking at Ybarra. “Find any papers?”

  He shook his head without looking up.

  “I’d believe you,” I said. “Here it is. I never saw Waldo until he stepped into the cocktail bar tonight and asked about the girl. I knew nothing I didn’t tell. When I got home and stepped out of the elevator this girl, in the printed bolero jacket and the wide hat and the blue silk crêpe dress—all as he had described them—was waiting for the elevator, here, on my floor. And she looked like a nice girl.”

  Copernik laughed jeeringly. It didn’t make any difference to me. I had him cold. All he had to do was know that. He was going to know it now, very soon.

  “I knew what she was up against as a police witness,” I said. “And I suspected there was something else to it. But I didn’t suspect for a minute that there was anything wrong with her. She was just a nice girl in a jam—and she didn’t even know she was in a jam. I got her in here. She pulled a gun on me. But she didn’t mean to use it.”

  Copernik sat up very suddenly and he began to lick his lips. His face had a stony look now. A look like wet gray stone. He didn’t make a sound.

  “Waldo had been her chauffeur,” I went on. “His name then was Joseph Choate. Her name is Mrs. Frank C. Barsaly. Her husband is a big hydro-electric engineer. Some guy gave her the pearls once and she told her husband they were just store pearls. Waldo got wise somehow there was a romance behind them and when Barsaly come home from South America and fired him, because he was too good-looking, he lifted the pearls.”

  Ybarra lifted his head suddenly and his teeth flashed. “You mean he didn’t know they were phony?”

  “I thought he fenced the real ones and had imitations fixed up,” I said.

  Ybarra nodded. “It’s possible.”

  “He lifted something else,” I said. “Some stuff from Barsaly’s briefcase that showed he was keeping a woman—out in Brentwood. He was blackmailing wife and husband both, without either knowing about the other. Get it so far?”

  “I get it,” Copernik said harshly, between his tight lips. His face was still wet gray stone. “Get the hell on with it.”

  “Waldo wasn’t afraid of them,” I said. “He didn’t conceal where he lived. That was foolish, but it saved a lot of finagling, if he was willing to risk it. The girl came down here tonight with five grand to buy back her pearls. She never met Waldo. She came up here to look for him and walked up a floor before she went back down. A woman’s idea of being cagey. So I met her. So I brought her in here. So she was in that dressing-room when Al Tessilore visited me to rub out a witness.” I pointed to the dressing-room door. “So she came out with her little gun and stuck it in his back and saved my life,” I said.

  Copernik didn’t move. There was something horrible in his face now. Ybarra slipped his nailfile into a small leather case and slowly tucked it into his pocket.

  “Is that all?” he asked gently.

  I nodded. “Except that she told me where Waldo’s apartment was and I went in there and looked for the pearls. I found the dead man. In his pocket I found new car keys in a case from a Packard agency. And down on the street I found the Packard and took it to where it came from. Barsaly’s kept woman. Barsaly had sent a friend from the Spezzia Club down to buy something and he had tried to buy it with his gun instead of the money Barsaly gave him. And Waldo beat him to the punch.”

  “Is that all?” Ybarra asked softly.

  “That’s all,” I said, licking the torn place on the inside of my cheek.

  Ybarra said slowly: “What do you want?”

  Copernik’s face convulsed and he slapped his long hard thigh. “This guy is good,” he jeered. “He falls for a stray broad and breaks every law in the book and you ask him what does he wa
nt? I’ll give him what he wants, guinea!”

  Ybarra turned his head slowly and looked at him. “I don’t think you will,” he said. “I think you’ll give him a clean bill of health and anything else he wants. He’s giving you a lesson in police work.”

  Copernik didn’t move or make a sound for a long minute. None of us moved. Then Copernik leaned forward and his coat fell open. The butt of his service gun looked out of its underarm holster.

  “So what do you want?” he asked me.

  “What’s on the card table there. The jacket and hat and the phony pearls. And some names kept away from the papers. Is that too much?”

  “Yeah—it’s too much,” Copernik said almost gently. He swayed sideways and his gun jumped neatly into his hand. He rested his forearm on his thigh and pointed the gun at my stomach.

  “I like better that you get a slug in the guts resisting arrest,” he said. “I like that better, because of a report I made out on Al Tessilore’s arrest and how I made the pinch. Because of some photos of me that are in the morning sheets going out about now. I like it better that you don’t live long enough to laugh about that, baby.”

  My mouth felt suddenly hot and dry. Far off I heard the wind booming. It seemed like the sound of guns.

  Ybarra moved his feet on the floor and said coldly: “You’ve got a couple of cases all solved, policeman. All you do for it is leave some junk here and keep some names from the papers. Which means from the D.A. If he gets them anyway, too bad for you.”

  Copernik said: “I like the other way.” The blue gun in his hand was like a rock. “And God help you, if you don’t back me up on it.”

  Ybarra said: “If the woman is brought out into the open, you’ll be a liar on a police report and a chiseler on your own partner. In a week they won’t even speak your name at headquarters. The taste of it would make them sick.”

  The hammer clicked back on Copernik’s gun and I watched his big bony finger slide in farther around the trigger. The back of my neck was as wet as a dog’s nose.

  Ybarra stood up. The gun jumped at him. He said: “We’ll see how yellow a guinea is. I’m telling you to put that gun up, Sam.”