Trouble Is My Business Read online

  “Silencer,” he said. “They’re the bunk, I guess you smart guys think. This one ain’t the bunk—not for three shots. I oughta know. I made it myself.”

  I moistened my lips again. “It’ll work for one shot,” I said. “Then it jams your action. That one looks like cast-iron. It will probably blow your hand off.”

  He smiled his waxy smile, screwed it on, slowly, lovingly, gave it a last hard turn and sat back relaxed. “Not this baby. She’s packed with steel wool and that’s good for three shots, like I said. Then you got to repack it. And there ain’t enough back pressure to jam the action on this gun. You feel good? I’d like you to feel good.”

  “I feel swell, you sadistic son of a bitch,” I said.

  “I’m having you lie down on the bed after a while. You won’t feel nothing. I’m kind of fussy about my killings. Frisky didn’t feel nothing, I guess. You got him neat.”

  “You don’t see good,” I sneered. “The chauffeur got him with a Smith & Wesson forty-four. I didn’t even fire.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “O.K., you don’t believe me,” I said. “What did you kill Arbogast for? There was nothing fussy about that killing. He was just shot at his desk, three times with a twenty-two and he fell down on the floor. What did he ever do to your filthy little brother?”

  He jerked the gun up, but his smile held. “You got guts,” he said. “Who is this here Arbogast?”

  I told him. I told him slowly and carefully, in detail. I told him a lot of things. And he began in some vague way to look worried. His eyes flickered at me, away, back again, restlessly, like a hummingbird.

  “I don’t know any party named Arbogast, pal,” he said slowly. “Never heard of him. And I ain’t shot any fat guys today.”

  “You killed him,” I said. “And you killed young Jeeter—in the girl’s apartment at the El Milano. He’s lying there dead right now. You’re working for Marty Estel. He’s going to be awfully damn sorry about that kill. Go ahead and make it three in a row.”

  His face froze. The smile went away at last. His whole face looked waxy now. He opened his mouth and breathed through it, and his breath made a restless worrying sound. I could see the faint glitter of sweat on his forehead, and I could feel the cold from the evaporation of sweat on mine.

  Waxnose said very gently: “I ain’t killed anybody at all, friend. Not anybody. I wasn’t hired to kill people. Until Frisky stopped that slug I didn’t have no such ideas. That’s straight.”

  I tried not to stare at the metal tube on the end of the Woodsman.

  A flame flickered at the back of his eyes, a small, weak, smoky flame. It seemed to grow larger and clearer. He looked down at the floor between his feet. I looked around at the light switch, but it was too far away. He looked up again. Very slowly he began to unscrew the silencer. He had it loose in his hand. He dropped it back into his pocket, stood up, holding the two guns, one in each hand. Then he had another idea. He sat down again, took all the shells out of the Luger quickly and threw it on the floor after them.

  He came towards me softly across the room. “I guess this is your lucky day,” he said. “I got to go a place and see a guy.”

  “I knew all along it was my lucky day. I’ve been feeling so good.”

  He moved delicately around me to the door and opened it a foot and started through the narrow opening, smiling again.

  “I gotta see a guy,” he said very gently, and his tongue moved along his lips.

  “Not yet,” I said, and jumped.

  His gun hand was at the edge of the door, almost beyond the edge. I hit the door hard and he couldn’t bring it in quickly enough. He couldn’t get out of the way. I pinned him in the doorway, and used all the strength I had. It was a crazy thing. He had given me a break and all I had to do was to stand still and let him go. But I had a guy to see too—and I wanted to see him first.

  Waxnose leered at me. He grunted. He fought with his hand beyond the door edge. I shifted and hit his jaw with all I had. It was enough. He went limp. I hit him again. His head bounced against the wood. I heard a light thud beyond the door edge. I hit him a third time. I never hit anything any harder.

  I took my weight back from the door then and he slid towards me, blank-eyed, rubber-kneed and I caught him and twisted his empty hands behind him and let him fall. I stood over him panting. I went to the door. His Woodsman lay almost on the sill. I picked it up, dropped it into my pocket—not the pocket that held Miss Huntress’ gun. He hadn’t even found that.

  There he lay on the floor. He was thin, he had no weight, but I panted just the same. In a little while his eyes flickered open and looked up at me.

  “Greedy guy,” he whispered wearily. “Why did I ever leave Saint Looey?”

  I snapped handcuffs on his wrists and pulled him by the shoulders into the dressing room and tied his ankles with a piece of rope. I left him laying on his back, a little sideways, his nose as white as ever, his eyes empty now, his lips moving a little as if he were talking to himself. A funny lad, not all bad, but not so pure I had to weep over him either.

  I put my Luger together and left with my three guns. There was nobody outside the apartment house.

  SEVEN

  The Jeeter mansion was on a nine- or ten-acre knoll, a big colonial pile with fat white columns and dormer windows and magnolias and a four-car garage. There was a circular parking space at the top of the driveway with two cars parked in it—one was the big dreadnaught in which I’d ridden and the other a canary-yellow sports convertible I had seen before.

  I rang a bell the size of a silver dollar. The door opened and a tall narrow cold-eyed bird in dark clothes looked out at me.

  “Mr. Jeeter home? Mr. Jeeter, Senior?”

  “May I arsk who is calling?” The accent was a little too thick, like cut Scotch.

  “Philip Marlowe. I’m working for him. Maybe I had ought to of gone to the servant’s entrance.”

  He hitched a finger at a wing collar and looked at me without pleasure. “Aw, possibly. You may step in. I shall inform Mr. Jeeter. I believe he is engaged at the moment. Kindly wait ’ere in the ’all.”

  “The act stinks,” I said. “English butlers aren’t dropping their h’s this year.”

  “Smart guy, huh?” he snarled, in a voice from not any farther across the Atlantic than Hoboken. “Wait here.” He slid away.

  I sat down in a carved chair and felt thirsty. After a while the butler came cat-footing back along the hall and jerked his chin at me unpleasantly.

  We went along a mile of hallway. At the end it broadened without any doors into a huge sunroom. On the far side of the sunroom the butler opened a wide door and I stepped past him into an oval room with a black-and-silver oval rug, a black marble table in the middle of the rug, stiff high-backed carved chairs against the walls, a huge oval mirror with a rounded surface that made me look like a pygmy with water on the brain, and in the room three people.

  By the door opposite where I came in, George the chauffeur stood stiffly in his neat dark uniform, with his peaked cap in his hand. In the least uncomfortable of the chairs sat Miss Harriet Huntress holding a glass in which there was half a drink. And around the silver margin of the oval rug, Mr. Jeeter, Senior, was trying his legs out in a brisk canter, still under wraps, but mad inside. His face was red and the veins on his nose were distended. His hands were in the pockets of a velvet smoking jacket. He wore a pleated shirt with a black pearl in the bosom, a batwing black tie and one of his patent-leather oxfords was unlaced.

  He whirled and yelled at the butler behind me: “Get out and keep those doors shut! And I’m not at home to anybody, understand? Nobody!”

  The butler closed the doors. Presumably, he went away. I didn’t hear him go.

  George gave me a cool one-sided smile and Miss Huntress gave me a bland stare over her glass. “You made a nice come-back,” she said demurely.

  “You took a chance leaving me alone in your apartment,” I told her. “I might have s
neaked some of your perfume.”

  “Well, what do you want?” Jeeter yelled at me. “A nice sort of detective you turned out to be. I put you on a confidential job and you walk right in on Miss Huntress and explain the whole thing to her.”

  “It worked, didn’t it?”

  He stared. They all stared. “How do you know that?” he barked.

  “I know a nice girl when I see one. She’s here telling you she had an idea she got not to like, and for you to quit worrying about it. Where’s Mister Gerald?”

  Old man Jeeter stopped and gave me a hard level stare. “I still regard you as incompetent,” he said. “My son is missing.”

  “I’m not working for you. I’m working for Anna Halsey. Any complaints you have to make should be addressed to her. Do I pour my own drink or do you have a flunky in a purple suit to do it? And what do you mean, your son is missing?”

  “Should I give him the heave, sir?” George asked quietly.

  Jeeter waved his hand at a decanter and siphon and glasses on the black marble table and started around the rug again. “Don’t be silly,” he snapped at George.

  George flushed a little, high on his cheekbones. His mouth looked tough.

  I mixed myself a drink and sat down with it and tasted it and asked again: “What do you mean your son is missing, Mr. Jeeter?”

  “I’m paying you good money,” he started to yell at me, still mad.

  “When?”

  He stopped dead in his canter and looked at me again. Miss Huntress laughed lightly. George scowled.

  “What do you suppose I mean—my son is missing?” he snapped. “I should have thought that would be clear enough even to you. Nobody knows where he is. Miss Huntress doesn’t know. I don’t know. No one at any of the places where he might be known.”

  “But I’m smarter than they are,” I said. “I know.”

  Nobody moved for a long minute. Jeeter stared at me fish-eyed. George stared at me. The girl stared at me. She looked puzzled. The other two just stared.

  I looked at her. “Where did you go when you went out, if you’re telling?”

  Her dark blue eyes were water-clear. “There’s no secret about it. We went out together—in a taxi. Gerald had had his driving license suspended for a month. Too many tickets. We went down towards the beach and I had a change of heart, as you guessed. I decided I was just being a chiseler after all. I didn’t want Gerald’s money really. What I wanted was revenge. On Mr. Jeeter here for ruining my father. Done all legally of course, but done just the same. But I got myself in a spot where I couldn’t have my revenge and not look like a cheap chiseler. So I told George to find some other girl to play with. He was sore and we quarreled. I stopped the taxi and got out in Beverly Hills. He went on. I don’t know where. Later I went back to the El Milano and got my car out of the garage and came here. To tell Mr. Jeeter to forget the whole thing and not bother to sick sleuths on to me.”

  “You say you went with him in a taxi,” I said. “Why wasn’t George driving him, if he couldn’t drive himself?”

  I stared at her, but I wasn’t talking to her. Jeeter answered me, frostily. “George drove me home from the office, of course. At that time Gerald had already gone out. Is there anything important about that?”

  I turned to him. “Yeah. There’s going to be. Mister Gerald is at the El Milano. Hawkins the house dick told me. He went back there to wait for Miss Huntress and Hawkins let him into her apartment. Hawkins will do you those little favors—for ten bucks. He may be there still and he may not.”

  I kept on watching them. It was hard to watch all three of them. But they didn’t move. They just looked at me.

  “Well—I’m glad to hear it,” old man Jeeter said. “I was afraid he was off somewhere getting drunk.”

  “No. He’s not off anywhere getting drunk,” I said. “By the way, among these places you called to see if he was there, you didn’t call the El Milano?”

  George nodded. “Yes, I did. They said he wasn’t there. Looks like this house peeper tipped the phone girl off not to say anything.”

  “He wouldn’t have to do that. She’d just ring the apartment and he wouldn’t answer—naturally.” I watched old man Jeeter hard then, with a lot of interest. It was going to be hard for him to take that up, but he was going to have to do it.

  He did. He licked his lips first. “Why—naturally, if I may ask?” he said coldly.

  I put my glass down on the marble table and stood against the wall, with my hands hanging free. I still tried to watch them—all three of them.

  “Let’s go back over this thing a little,” I said. “We’re all wise to the situation. I know George is, although he shouldn’t be, being just a servant. I know Miss Huntress is. And of course you are, Mr. Jeeter. So let’s see what we have got. We have a lot of things that don’t add up, but I’m smart. I’m going to add them up anyhow. First-off a handful of photostats of notes from Marty Estel. Gerald denies having given these and Mr. Jeeter won’t pay them, but he has a handwriting man named Arbogast check the signatures, to see if they look genuine. They do. They are. This Arbogast may have done other things. I don’t know. I couldn’t ask him. When I went to see him, he was dead—shot three times—as I’ve since heard—with a twenty-two. No, I didn’t tell the police, Mr. Jeeter.”

  The tall silver-haired man looked horribly shocked. His lean body shook like a bullrush. “Dead?” he whispered. “Murdered?”

  I looked at George. George didn’t move a muscle. I looked at the girl. She sat quietly, waiting, tight-lipped.

  I said: “There’s only one reason to suppose his killing had anything to do with Mr. Jeeter’s affairs. He was shot with a twenty-two—and there is a man in this case who wears a twenty-two.”

  I still had their attention. And their silence.

  “Why he was shot I haven’t the faintest idea. He was not a dangerous man to Miss Huntress or Marty Estel. He was too fat to get around much. My guess is he was a little too smart. He got a simple case of signature identification and he went on from there to find out more than he should. And after he had found out more than he should—he guessed more than he ought—and maybe he even tried a little blackmail. And somebody rubbed him out this afternoon with a twenty-two. O.K., I can stand it. I never knew him.

  “So I went over to see Miss Huntress and after a lot of finagling around with this itchy-handed house dick I got to see her and we had a chat, and then Mister Gerald stepped neatly out of hiding and bopped me a nice one on the chin and over I went and hit my head on a chair leg. And when I came out of that the joint was empty. So I went on home.

  “And home I found the man with the twenty-two and with him a dimwit called Frisky Lavon, with a bad breath and a very large gun, neither of which matters now as he was shot dead in front of your house tonight, Mr. Jeeter—shot trying to stick up your car. The cops know about that one—they came to see me about it—because the other guy, the one that packs the twenty-two, is the little dimwit’s brother and he thought I shot Dimwit and tried to put the bee on me. But it didn’t work. That’s two killings.

  “We now come to the third and most important. I went back to the El Milano because it no longer seemed a good idea for Mister Gerald to be running around casually. He seemed to have a few enemies. It even seemed that he was supposed to be in the car this evening when Frisky Lavon shot at it—but of course that was just a plant.”

  Old Jeeter drew his white eyebrows together in an expression of puzzlement. George didn’t look puzzled. He didn’t look anything. He was as wooden-faced as a cigar-store Indian. The girl looked a little white now, a little tense. I plowed on.

  “Back at the El Milano I found that Hawkins had let Marty Estel and his bodyguard into Miss Huntress’ apartment to wait for her. Marty had something to tell her—that Arbogast had been killed. That made it a good idea for her to lay off young Jeeter for a while—until the cops quieted down anyhow. A thoughtful guy, Marty. A much more thoughtful guy than you would suppose. F
or instance, he knew about Arbogast and he knew Mr. Jeeter went to Anna Halsey’s office this morning and he knew somehow—Anna might have told him herself, I wouldn’t put it past her—that I was working on the case now. So he had me tailed to Arbogast’s place and away, and he found out later from his cop friends that Arbogast had been murdered, and he knew I hadn’t given it out. So he had me there and that made us pals. He went away after telling me this and once more I was left alone in Miss Huntress’ apartment. But this time for no reason at all I poked around. And I found young Mister Gerald, in the bedroom, in a closet.”

  I stepped quickly over to the girl and reached into my pocket and took out the small fancy .25 automatic and laid it down on her knee.

  “Ever see this before?”

  Her voice had a curious tight sound, but her dark blue eyes looked at me levelly.

  “Yes. It’s mine.”

  “You kept it where?”

  “In the drawer of a small table beside the bed.”

  “Sure about that?”

  She thought. Neither of the two men stirred.

  George began to twitch the corner of his mouth. She shook her head suddenly, sideways.

  “No. I have an idea now I took it out to show somebody—because I don’t know much about guns—and left it lying on the mantel in the living room. In fact, I’m almost sure I did. It was Gerald I showed it to.”

  “So he might have reached for it there, if anybody tried to make a wrong play at him?”

  She nodded, troubled. “What do you mean—he’s in the closet?” she asked in a small quick voice.

  “You know. Everybody in this room knows what I mean. They know that I showed you that gun for a purpose.” I stepped away from her and faced George and his boss. “He’s dead, of course. Shot through the heart—probably with this gun. It was left there with him. That’s why it would be left.”

  The old man took a step and stopped and braced himself against the table. I wasn’t sure whether he had turned white or whether he had been white already. He stared stonily at the girl. He said very slowly, between his teeth: “You damned murderess!”