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It wasn’t any of my business. I was just curious. It wasn’t any of my business that she had a small Colt automatic in the drawer. I shut it and sat down again.
“My asthma,” she said carelessly. “I drink this wine as medicine. That’s why I’m not offering you any.” I swung a leg over my knee. I hoped that wouldn’t hurt her asthma.
There were steps and the little copper-blond came tripping into the room with her chin low, as if somebody might be going to take a swing at her.
“Make this man a check for two hundred and fifty dollars,” the old dragon snarled at her. “And keep your mouth shut about it.”
The face looked too wise and too guarded for its age. Too many passes had been made at it and it had grown a little too smart in dodging them. And behind this expression of wiseness there was the look of simplicity of the little girl who still believes in Santa Claus.
I nodded over the photo and slipped it into my pocket, thinking I was getting too much out of it to get out of a mere photo, and in a very poor light at that.
And I hope you are even half as rough as you like to act, because these night club girls are apt to have some very nasty friends.”
She let me get to the door before she growled at my back: “You don’t like me very well, do you?” I turned to grin back at her with my hand on the knob. “Does anybody?” She threw her head back and opened her mouth wide and roared with laughter. In the middle of the laughter I opened the door and went out and shut the door on the rough mannish sound. I went back along the hall and knocked on the secretary’s half open door, then pushed it open and looked in.
She thinks she’s tough and she’s breaking her back trying to live up to it.”
“Well—” she blushed furiously, “in a nice well-bred sort of way, if you know what I mean.” “I know what you mean,” I said, “but I never got anywhere with it.” “I can believe that,” she said tartly.
He fussed around in the chair, trying to get comfortable. A lot of people had tried to get comfortable in that chair. I ought to try it myself sometime. Maybe it was losing business for me.
He eyed me over. “You ain’t working for him, are you?” “Sure.” “You’re a liar.” “Sure.” “Gimme the two bucks,” he snapped. I gave him two dollars.
From thirty feet away she looked like a lot of class. From ten feet away she looked like something made up to be seen from thirty feet away.
“I think you could tell me yourself, if you wanted to.” “How are you going to make me want to?” Her eyes were inviting. “With all these people around,” I said, “how can I?” “That’s a thought,” she said, and sipped from her glass, watching me over it. Vannier stood up very slowly. His face was white. He put his hand inside his shirt and said slowly, between his teeth: “Get out, mugg. While you can still walk.” I looked at him in surprise. “Where’s your refinement?” I asked him. “And don’t tell me you wear a gun with your garden clothes.”
“So long,” I said. “The name?” “They call me Shifty. I never knew why.” “So long, Shifty.”
“I figured I’d find out if you were smart enough to be worth talking to.” “I’m very smart,” I said. “It would be a shame not to talk to me.”
We were in the same racket. So I wouldn’t chisel him. Just like that. I could have the key to his apartment and go in and make myself at home. I could wear his slippers and drink his liquor and lift up his carpet and count the thousand dollar bills under it. We were in the same racket.
“You won’t want this now,” I said. “Since we started talking in thousands.”
I hadn’t made much noise coming on crepe rubber soles. I hoped he would remember that.
Out of the apartment houses come women who should be young but have faces like stale beer; men with pulled-down hats and quick eyes that look the street over behind the cupped hand that shields the match flame; worn intellectuals with cigarette coughs and no money in the bank; fly cops with granite faces and unwavering eyes; cokies and coke peddlers; people who look like nothing in particular and know it, and once in a while even men that actually go to work. But they come out early, when the wide cracked sidewalks are empty and still have dew on them.
I smeared the doorknob opening the door and the outside knob closing the door. The Dodgers were ahead seven to three, the first half of the eighth. A lady who sounded well on with her drinking was singing Frankie and Johnny, the roundhouse version, in a voice that even whiskey had failed to improve. A deep man’s voice growled at her to shut up and she kept on singing and there was a hard quick movement across the floor and a smack and a yelp and she stopped singing and the baseball game went right on.
He had a long nose that would be into things. The whole face was a trained face, a face that would know how to keep a secret, a face that held the effortless composure of a corpse in the morgue.
“I ain’t interested in your five bucks,” he said. “That’s fine,” I said. “I wasn’t really thinking of giving it to you.”
His smile was wide, about three quarters of an inch. “I don’t amuse easy,” he said. “Just like Queen Victoria,” I said. “I don’t get it.” “I don’t expect miracles,” I said.
“You said something about five,” he shrugged. “That was hours ago,” I said. “I thought better of it. Let’s go up and frisk the apartment.” “Say that just once more—” his right hand slid towards his hip. “If you’re thinking of pulling a gun, Mr. Palermo wouldn’t like it,” I said. “To hell with Mr. Palermo,” he snarled, in a voice suddenly furious, out of a face suddenly charged with dark blood. “Mr. Palermo will be glad to know that’s how you feel about him,” I said. “Look,” the carroty man said very slowly, dropping his hand to his side and leaning forward from the hips and pushing his face at
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Then the door was jerked open and a sharp-faced blond in scarlet slacks and a green pullover stared out with sultry eyes, one of which was puffed and the other had been socked several days ago. She also had a bruise on her throat and her hand held a tall cool glass of amber fluid.
The girl looked back over her shoulder and screamed against the noise of the radio: “Hey, Del! The guy says to pipe down! You wanna sock him?”
the girl screamed again and threw a glass of liquor in her boy friend’s face. Whether because it was safe to do it now or because she made an honest mistake, I couldn’t tell.
I sniffed the gun. It had been fired. I sprang the magazine out and counted the bullets through the small holes in the side. There were six. With one in the magazine, that made seven. The gun was a Colt .32, automatic, eight shot. It had been fired. If it had not been reloaded, one shot had been fired from it.
The blond sobbed in a rather theatrical manner and showed me an open mouth twisted with misery and ham acting.
He put his hat back on, a flat-crowned panama, burned dark by the sun. Not this year’s hat, and probably not last year’s.
and a rough sky-blue sports coat not wider at the shoulders than a two-car garage.
Breeze said: “Hitting the hooch like you birds been and having a gun under the pillow sooner or later somebody was going to get shot. You ought to know that.”
“In a neighborhood like this it’s bad form to use your own name,” I said. “Anson didn’t either.” “What’s the matter with the neighborhood?” “Practically everything,” I said.
He smiled bleakly. “You got a lawyer?” “I know several lawyers. I don’t have a lawyer on a retainer basis.” “How many of the commissioners do you know personally?” “None. That is, I’ve spoken to three of them, but they might not remember me.” “But you have good contacts, in the mayor’s office and so on?” “Tell me about them,” I said. “I’d like to know.” “Look, buddy,” he said earnestly, “you must got some friends somewhere. Surely.” “I’ve got a good friend in the Sheriffs office, but I’d rather leave him out of it.” He lifted his eyebrows. “Why? Maybe you’re going to need friends. A good word
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He put a big freckled hand over the whole lower part of his face and squeezed. When he took the hand away there were round red marks on his cheeks from the pressure of thumb and fingers. I watched the marks fade.
There was an ambulance pulling away from the curb. A knot of people hung around on both sides of the street, not as many as would accumulate in some neighborhoods.
It was getting dark outside now. The rushing sound of the traffic had died a little and the air from the open window, not yet cool from the night, had that tired end-of-the-day smell of dust, automobile exhaust, sunlight rising from hot walls and sidewalks, the remote smell of food in a thousand restaurants, and perhaps, drifting down from the residential hills above Hollywood—if you had a nose like a hunting dog—a touch of that peculiar tomcat smell that eucalyptus trees give off in warm weather.
So we were there silent, both of us, miles apart maybe, each one holding a telephone and breathing and listening and hearing nothing, not even the breathing. Then after what seemed a very long time there was the quiet remote whisper of a voice saying dimly, without any tone: “Too bad for you, Marlowe.” Then the click again and the droning on the wire and I hung up and went back across the office and out.
The hock shop was on Santa Monica, near Wilcox, a quiet old-fashioned little place, washed gently by the lapping waves of time. In the front window there was everything you could think of, from a set of trout flies in a thin wooden box to a portable organ, from a folding baby carriage to a portrait camera with a four-inch lens, from a mother-of-pearl lorgnette in a faded plush case to a Single Action Frontier Colt, .44 caliber, the model they still make for Western peace officers whose grandfathers taught them how to file the trigger and shoot by fanning the hammer back.
“You always have a gun lying around on your desk?” “Except when it’s under my pillow,” I said. “Or under my arm. Or in the drawer of the desk. Or somewhere I can’t just remember where I happened to put it. That help you any?”
“He says you make good coffee and you get up kind of late in the mornings and are apt to run to a very bright line of chatter and that we should believe anything you say, provided we can check it by five independent witnesses.”
“Randall says we should look out for you. He says you are not as smart as you think you are, but that you are a guy things happen to, and a guy like that could be a lot more trouble than a very smart guy.
Breeze looked at me very steadily. Then he sighed. Then he picked the glass up and tasted it and sighed again and shook his head sideways with a half smile; the way a man does when you give him a drink and he needs it very badly and it is just right and the first swallow is like a peek into a cleaner, sunnier, brighter world.
Every motion had been exactly as it had been when he lit a cigar in Hench’s apartment, and exactly as it always would be whenever he lit a cigar. He was that kind of man, and that made him dangerous. Not as dangerous as a brilliant man, but much more dangerous than a quick excitable one like Spangler.
“Kind of a mean voice. She said she didn’t like it.” “I guess that’s what made you think of me,” I said.
He was the sort of cop who would be likely to hang a pinch on a chicken thief, if he saw the guy steal the chicken and the guy fell down running away and hit his head on a post or something and knocked himself out. Otherwise it might get a little tough
I looked at the gun strapped to his hip, the special badge pinned to his shirt. “And they call this a democracy,” I said.
“The trouble with revolutions,” he said, “is that they get in the hands of the wrong people.”
