Red Wind: A Collection of Short Stories Page 6

  He started to move. He moved four even steps. Copernik was a man without a breath of movement, a stone man.

  Ybarra took one more step and quite suddenly the gun began to shake.

  Ybarra said evenly: “Put it up, Sam. If you keep your head everything lies the way it is. If you don’t—you’re gone.”

  He took one more step. Copernik’s mouth opened wide and made a gasping sound and then he sagged in the chair as if he had been hit on the head. His eyelids drooped.

  Ybarra jerked the gun out of his hand with a movement so quick it was no movement at all. He stepped back quickly, held the gun low at his side.

  “It’s the hot wind, Sam. Let’s forget it,” he said in the same even, almost dainty voice.

  Copernik’s shoulders sagged lower and he put his face in his hands. “O.K.,” he said between his fingers.

  Ybarra went softly across the room and opened the door. He looked at me with lazy, half-closed eyes. “I’d do a lot for a woman who saved my life, too,” he said. “I’m eating this dish, but as a cop you can’t expect me to like it.”

  I said: “The little man in the bed is called Leon Valesanos. He was a croupier at the Spezzia Club.”

  “Thanks,” Ybarra said. “Let’s go, Sam.”

  Copernik got up heavily and walked across the room and out of the open door and out of my sight. Ybarra stepped through the door after him and started to close it.

  I said: “Wait a minute.”

  He turned his head slowly, his left hand on the door, the blue gun hanging down close to his right side.

  “I’m not in this for money,” I said. “The Barsalys live at Two-twelve Fremont Place. You can take the pearls to her. If Barsaly’s name stays out of the paper, I get five C’s. It goes to the Police Fund. I’m not so damn smart as you think. It just happened that way—and you had a heel for a partner.”

  Ybarra looked across the room at the pearls on the card table. His eyes glistened. “You take them,” he said. “The five hundred’s O.K. I think the fund has it coming.”

  He shut the door quietly and in a moment I heard the elevator doors clang.

  VII

  I OPENED a window and stuck my head out into the wind and watched the squad car tool off down the block. The wind blew in hard and I let it blow. A picture fell off the wall and two chessmen rolled off the card table. The material of Lola Barsaly’s bolero jacket lifted and shook.

  I went out to the kitchenette and drank some Scotch and went back into the living-room and called her—late as it was.

  She answered the phone herself, very quickly, with no sleep in her voice.

  “Dalmas,” I said. “O.K. your end?”

  “Yes… yes,” she said. “I’m alone.”

  “I found something,” I said. “Or rather the police did. But your dark boy gypped you. I have a string of pearls. They’re not real. He sold the real ones, I guess, and made you up a string of ringers, with your clasp.”

  She was silent for a long time. Then, a little faintly: “The police found them?”

  “In Waldo’s car. But they’re not telling. We have a deal. Look at the papers in the morning and you’ll be able to figure out why.”

  “There doesn’t seem to be anything more to say,” she said. “Can I have the clasp?”

  “Yes. Can you meet me tomorrow at four in the Club Esquire bar?”

  “You’re rather sweet,” she said in a dragged out voice. “I can. Frank is still at his meeting.”

  “Those meetings—they take it out of a guy,” I said. We said goodbye.

  I called a West Los Angeles number. He was still there, with the Russian girl.

  “You can send me a check for five hundred in the morning,” I told him. “Made out to the Police Fund, if you want to. Because that’s where it’s going.”

  Copernik made the third page of the morning papers with two photos and a nice half-column. The little brown man in Apartment 31 didn’t make the paper at all. The Apartment House Association has a good lobby too.

  I went out after breakfast and the wind was all gone. It was soft, cool, a little foggy. The sky was close and comfortable and gray. I rode down to the boulevard and picked out the best jewelry store on it and laid a string of pearls on a black velvet mat under a daylight-blue lamp. A man in a wing collar and striped trousers looked down at them languidly.

  “How good?” I asked.

  “I’m sorry, sir. We don’t make appraisals. I can give you the name of an appraiser.”

  “Don’t kid me,” I said. “They’re Dutch.”

  He focussed the light a little and leaned down and toyed with a few inches of the string.

  “I want a string just like them, fitted to that clasp, and in a hurry,” I added.

  “How, like them?” He didn’t look up. “And they’re not Dutch. They’re Bohemian.”

  “O.K., can you duplicate them?”

  He shook his head and pushed the velvet pad away as if it soiled him. “In three months, perhaps. We don’t blow glass like that in this country. If you wanted them matched—three months at least. And this house would not do that sort of thing at all.”

  “It must be swell to be that snooty,” I said. I put a card under his black sleeve. “Give me a name that will—and not in three months—and maybe not exactly like them.”

  He shrugged, went away with the card, came back in five minutes and handed it back to me. There was something written on the back.

  The old Levantine had a shop on Melrose, a junk shop with everything in the window from a folding baby carriage to a French horn, from a mother-of-pearl lorgnette in a faded plush case to one of those .44 Special Single Action Six-shooters they still make for Western peace officers whose grandfathers were tough.

  The old Levantine wore a skull cap and two pairs of glasses and a full beard. He studied my pearls, shook his head sadly, and said: “For twenty dollars, almost so good. Not so good, you understand. Not so good glass.”

  “How like will they look?”

  He spread his firm strong hands. “I am telling you the truth,” he said. “They would not fool a baby.”

  “Make them up,” I said. “With this clasp. And I want the others back too, of course.”

  “Yah. Two o’clock,” he said.

  Leon Valesanos, the little brown man from Uruguay, made the afternoon papers. He had been found hanging in an unnamed apartment. The police were investigating.

  At four o’clock I walked into the long cool bar of the Club Esquire and prowled along the row of booths until I found one where a woman sat alone. She wore a hat like a shallow soup plate with a very wide edge, a brown tailor-made suit with a severe mannish shirt and tie.

  I sat down beside her and slipped a parcel along the seat.

  “You don’t open that,” I said. “In fact you can slip it into the incinerator as is, if you want to.”

  She looked at me with dark tired eyes. Her fingers twisted a thin glass that smelled of peppermint. “Thanks.” Her face was very pale.

  I ordered a highball and the waiter went away. “Read the papers?”

  “Yes.”

  “You understand now about this fellow Copernik who stole your act? That’s why they won’t change the story or bring you into it.”

  “It doesn’t matter now,” she said. “Thank you, all the same. Please—please, show them to me.”

  I pulled a string of pearls out of the loosely wrapped tissue paper in my pocket and slid them across to her. The silver propeller clasp winked in the light of the wall bracket. The little diamond winked. The pearls were as dull as white soap. They didn’t even match in size.

  “You were right,” she said tonelessly. “They are not my pearls.”

  The waiter came with my drink and she put her bag on them deftly. When he was gone she fingered them slowly once more, dropped them into the bag and gave me a dry mirthless smile.

  “As you said—I’ll keep the clasp.”

  I said slowly: “You don’t know a
nything about me. You saved my life last night and we had a moment, but it was just a moment. You still don’t know anything about me. There’s a detective downtown named Ybarra, a Mexican of the nice sort, who was on the job when the pearls were found in Waldo’s suitcase. That’s in case you would like to make sure—”

  She said: “Don’t be silly. It’s all finished. It was a memory. I’m too young to nurse memories. It may be all for the best. I loved Stan Phillips—but he’s gone—long gone.”

  I stared at her, didn’t say anything.

  She added quietly: “This morning my husband told me something I hadn’t known. We are to separate. So I have very little to laugh about today.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said lamely. “There’s nothing to say. I may see you sometime. Maybe not. I don’t move much in your circle. Good luck.”

  I stood up. We looked at each other for a moment. “You haven’t touched your drink,” she said.

  “You drink it. That peppermint stuff will just make you sick.”

  I stood there a moment with a hand hard on the table.

  “If anybody ever bothers you,” I said, “let me know.”

  I went out of the bar without looking back at her, got into my car and drove west on Sunset and down all the way to the Coast Highway. Everywhere along the way gardens were full of withered and blackened leaves and flowers which the hot wind had burned.

  But the ocean looked cool and languid and just the same as ever. I drove on almost to Malibu and then parked and went and sat on a big rock that was inside somebody’s wire fence. It was about half-tide and coming in. The air smelled of kelp. I watched the water for a while and then I pulled a string of Bohemian glass imitation pearls out of my pocket and cut the knot at one end and slipped the pearls off one by one.

  When I had them all loose in my left hand I held them like that for a while and thought. There wasn’t really anything to think about. I was sure.

  “To the memory of Mr. Stan Phillips,” I said loud. “Just another four-flusher.”

  I flipped her pearls out into the water one by one, at the floating seagulls.

  They made little splashes and the seagulls rose off the water and swooped at the splashes.

  BLACKMAILERS DON’T SHOOT

  I

  THE man in the powder-blue suit—which wasn’t powder-blue under the lights of the Club Bolivar—was tall, with wide-set gray eyes, a thin nose, a jaw of stone. He had a rather sensitive mouth. His hair was crisp and black, ever so faintly touched with gray, as by an almost diffident hand. His clothes fitted him as though they had a soul of their own, not just a doubtful past. His name happened to be Mallory.

  He held a cigarette between the strong, precise fingers of one hand. He put the other hand flat on the white tablecloth, and said:

  “The letters will cost you ten grand, Miss Fair. That’s not too much.”

  He looked at the girl opposite him very briefly; then he looked across empty tables towards the heart-shaped space of floor where the dancers prowled under shifting colored lights.

  They crowded the customers around the dance-floor, so closely that the perspiring waiters had to balance themselves like tightrope walkers to get between the tables. But near where Mallory sat were only four people.

  A slim, dark woman was drinking a highball across the table from a man whose fat red neck glistened with damp bristles. The woman stared into her glass morosely, and fiddled with a big silver flask in her lap. Farther along two bored, frowning men smoked long thin cigars, without speaking to each other.

  Mallory said thoughtfully: “Ten grand does it nicely, Miss Farr.”

  Rhonda Fair was very beautiful. She was wearing, for this occasion, all black, except a collar of white fur, light as thistledown, on her evening wrap. Except also a white wig which, meant to disguise her, made her look very girlish. Her eyes were cornflower blue, and she had the sort of skin an old rake dreams of.

  She said nastily, without raising her head: “That’s ridiculous.”

  “Why is it ridiculous?” Mallory asked, looking mildly surprised and rather annoyed.

  Rhonda Farr lifted her face and gave him a look as hard as marble. Then she picked a cigarette out of a silver case that lay open on the table, and fitted it into a long slim holder, also black. She went on:

  “The love letters of a screen star? Not so much any more. The public has stopped being a sweet old lady in long lace panties.”

  A light danced contemptuously in her purplish-blue eyes. Mallory gave her a hard look.

  “But you came here to talk about them quick enough,” he said, “with a man you never heard of.”

  She waved the cigarette holder, and said: “I must have been nuts.”

  Mallory smiled with his eyes, without moving his lips. “No, Miss Farr. You had a damn’ good reason. Want me to tell you what it is?”

  Rhonda Farr looked at him angrily. Then she looked away, almost appeared to forget him. She held up her hand, the one with the cigarette holder, looked at it, posing. It was a beautiful hand, without a ring. Beautiful hands are as rare as jacaranda trees in bloom, in a city where pretty faces are as common as runs in dollar stockings.

  She turned her head and glanced at the stiff-eyed woman, beyond her towards the mob around the dance-floor. The orchestra went on being saccharine and monotonous.

  “I loathe these dives,” she said thinly. “They look as if they only existed after dark, like ghouls. The people are dissipated without grace, sinful without irony.” She lowered her hand to the white cloth. “Oh yes, the letters, what makes them so dangerous, blackmailer?”

  Mallory laughed. He had a ringing laugh with a hard quality in it, a grating sound. “You’re good,” he said. “The letters are not so much perhaps. Just sexy tripe. The memoirs of a schoolgirl who’s been seduced and can’t stop talking about it.”

  “That’s lousy,” Rhonda Farr said in a voice like iced velvet.

  “It’s the man they’re written to that makes them important,” Mallory said coldly. “A racketeer, a gambler, a fast money boy. And all that goes with it. A guy you couldn’t be seen talking to—and stay in the cream.”

  “I don’t talk to him, blackmailer. I haven’t talked to him in years. Landrey was a pretty nice boy when I knew him. Most of us have something behind us we’d rather not go into. In my case it is behind.”

  “Oh yes? Make mine strawberry,” Mallory said with a sudden sneer. “You just got through asking him to help you get your letters back.”

  Her head jerked. Her face seemed to come apart, to become merely a set of features without control. Her eyes looked like the prelude to a scream—but only for a second.

  Almost instantly she got her self-control back. Her eyes were drained of color, almost as gray as his own. She put the black cigarette holder down with exaggerated care, laced her fingers together. The knuckles looked white.

  “You know Landrey that well?” she said bitterly.

  “Maybe I just get around, find things out… Do we deal, or do we just go on snarling at each other?”

  “Where did you get the letters?” Her voice was still rough and bitter.

  Mallory shrugged. “We don’t tell things like that in our business.”

  “I had a reason for asking. Some other people have been trying to sell me these same damned letters. That’s why I’m here. It made me curious. But I guess you’re just one of them trying to scare me into action by stepping the price.”

  Mallory said: “No; I’m on my own.”

  She nodded. Her voice was scarcely more than a whisper. “That makes it nice. Perhaps some bright mind thought of having a private edition of my letters made. Photostats… Well, I’m not paying. It wouldn’t get me anywhere. I don’t deal, blackmailer. So far as I’m concerned you can go out some dark night and jump off the dock with your lousy letters!”

  Mallory wrinkled his nose, squinted down it with an air of deep concentration. “Nicely put, Miss Farr. But it doesn’t get us anywhere.” />
  She said deliberately: “It wasn’t meant to. I could put it better. And if I’d thought to bring my little pearl-handled gun I could say it with slugs and get away with it! But I’m not looking for that kind of publicity.”

  Mallory held up two lean fingers and examined them critically. He looked amused, almost pleased. Rhonda Farr put her slim hand up to her white wig, held it there a moment, and dropped it.

  A man sitting at a table some way off got up at once and came towards them.

  He came quickly, walking with a light, lithe step and swinging a soft black hat against his thigh. He was sleek in dinner clothes.

  While he was coming Rhonda Farr said: “You didn’t expect me to walk in here alone, did you? Me, I don’t go to night-clubs alone.”

  Mallory grinned. “You shouldn’t ought to have to, baby,” he said dryly.

  The man came up to the table. He was small, neatly put together, dark. He had a little black mustache, shiny like satin, and the clear pallor that Latins prize above rubies.

  With a smooth gesture, a hint of drama, he leaned across the table and took one of Mallory’s cigarettes out of the silver case. He lit it with a flourish.

  Rhonda Farr put her hand to her lips and yawned. She said, “This is Erno, my bodyguard. He takes care of me. Nice, isn’t it?”

  She stood up slowly. Erno helped her with her wrap. Then he spread his lips in a mirthless smile, looked at Mallory, said:

  “Hello, baby.”

  He had dark, almost opaque eyes with hot lights in them.

  Rhonda Farr gathered her wrap about her, nodded slightly, sketched a brief sarcastic smile with her delicate lips, and turned off along the aisle between the tables. She went with her head up and proud, her face a little tense and wary, like a queen in jeopardy. Not fearless, but disdaining to show fear. It was nicely done.

  The two bored men gave her an interested eye. The dark woman brooded glumly over the task of mixing herself a highball that would have floored a horse. The man with the fat sweaty neck seemed to have gone to sleep.