by Paul Cain
He was silent a little while, listening, and then he laughed heartily, said: “Well you know those old Brennan hunches, Johnnie—they never miss … Okay—I’ll be seeing you.” He hung up, grinned complacently at Joice Colt. “That sheet is gradually getting on to what a valuable man I am,” he said.
She was staring at him with wide hard eyes: one eyebrow was arched to a thin skeptical line, her red mouth curved humorously upward at the corners. She said with broad, biting sarcasm: “The old Brennan hunches—they never miss… .”
Brennan laughed. “Well, practically never.” He shook his finger at her emphatically. “I have a hunch right now that you’d like a drink.”
She looked thoughtful a moment, nodded very seriously.
Brennan got up and poured two drinks. He went to the dresser and studied his bruised, discolored face in the mirror a little while and then he went back to the bed table and picked up his glass, gulped down the whiskey.
He blinked, put the glass back on the table and smiled wanly down at Joice Colt.
“That’s over,” he said. “I’m a sick man. I need a rest.”
Trouble-Chaser
Mae lived at the Mara Apartments on Rossmore. It was about nine o’clock when I got there and the party hadn’t got going. I mean by that that nobody was falling down and nobody had been smacked over the skull with a bottle. There were six or seven people there besides Mae and Tony—I didn’t know any of them, which was just as well. Tony opened the door, and made a pass at introducing me, and Mae came in from the kitchen and we went into a big clinch. She was demonstrative that way when she had two or three fifths of gin under her belt, whoever it might be.
Tony fixed me a drink. I took it because I knew better than to argue about a thing like that; I carried it around with me most of the time I was there and when anybody would ask me if I wanted a drink I’d show them the full glass.
Tony was Italian—from Genoa I think. He was very dark and slim, with shiny blue-black hair, bright black eyes, a swell smile. I’d known him for five or six years—I knew him back in New York when he was trying to build up a bottle business around the Grant Hotel. We’d never been particularly friendly but we always liked each other well enough. When he came to California he looked me up and I got him a job running case-stuff for Eddie Garda. I introduced Tony to Mae Jackman when she was a class C extra girl and not doing so well at it. They’d been living together for about a year. Tony was in business for himself and doing well enough to live at the Mara. Mae still worked in pictures occasionally and that helped.
Mae jockeyed me out into the kitchen as soon as she could. She leaned against the sink and sucked up most of a glass of gin and ginger ale and whispered dramatically: “We’ve got to get rid of Tony.”
I am not the most patient person in the world, with drunks. I looked at her with what I hoped would penetrate her gin haze as an extremely disgusted expression.
She went on hurriedly in the stage whisper: “I mean for a minute. I’ve got something I want to show you an’ I don’t want him busting in.” She finished her drink and then with a very wise and meaning look, said, “Wait,” and coasted back into the living room.
I poured the gin in my glass into the sink and filled the glass with ginger ale and ice.
She came back in a minute. “I sent him up to Cora’s to get some ice,” she said. Cora was Mae’s sidekick; she lived upstairs.
Mae steered me through the short corridor into the bedroom and closed the door behind us. She went to the dresser and dug around in the bottom drawer for a minute and came up with a folded piece of yellow paper and handed it to me. I unfolded it and held it under the light at the head of the bed; it was Louis L. Steinlen’s personal check for twenty-five hundred dollars. Steinlen was the executive head of the Astra Motion Picture Company.
I said: “That’s swell, Mae.” I handed the check back to her and she held it with the light shining down on it and looked at it and then looked up at me.
“It’s swell,” she said, “an’ it’s going to be a lot sweller.”
She smiled and her face lost its set drunken look for a moment. She was a very pretty girl and when she smiled she was almost beautiful.
I said: “So what?” I wasn’t very enthusiastic about staying in the bedroom with her because Tony might come back sooner than she expected and he was a long way from being stone sober—I didn’t want him to get any trick ideas.
Mae kept on smiling at me. She said: “So this is the amount”—she bobbed her head at the check—“of your cut for helping me make a deal with Steinlen.”
I had a faint idea of what she was getting at, but not enough to help much. I said: “What the hell are you talking about?”
She sat down on the edge of the bed. “We’re going to sell Steinlen his two-bit check for twenty-five grand,” she said.
I didn’t say anything. I felt like laughing but I didn’t—I waited.
“This little piece of paper,” she went on, “is worth its weight in radium.” She glanced down fondly at the check, then back up at me. She was not smiling any more. “Steinlen has been chasing me for months. Last weekend Tony went up to Frisco on business—I went to Arrowhead with Steinlen—on business.” She smiled again, slowly. She held the check in one hand and whipped the index finger of her other hand with it. “This is a little token of the deal.”
I said: “That’s quite a token.” I liked Mae at that moment about ninety percent less than I’d ever liked her, and she’d never been the kind of girl I’d want to take home and introduce to the folks. I didn’t tell her I thought she’d been extravagantly overpaid—that was pretty obvious. I waited for her to go on and let me in on what I had to do with it all.
She went into a fast song and dance about what a cinch it was going to be to take Steinlen for the twenty-five grand, about how it wasn’t technically blackmail because she was simply exchanging his check—a check that he’d have a hell of a hard time explaining to his wife—for the cash—ten times as much cash. She said the reason she wanted me to come in on it was because she thought I could make the deal better than she could and because we’d have to be careful not to let the twenty-five-hundred-dollar check get out of our hands before we got the cash.
When she finished I grinned at her without any particular warmth and said: “Why don’t you have Tony work with you on this?”
She said: “Don’t be a sap, Red—if Tony knew about this, or found out about it, he’d cut my throat.” Then she went on to cuss Tony out and explain that she was all washed up with him, and had been for a long time—and that she was going to scram to Europe as soon as she got her big dough.
When she got all that out of her system I lit into her and told her that in the first place she was crazy as a bedbug to figure on beating Steinlen out of anything, and in the second place I wouldn’t show in a deal of that kind if it was for a million, and a natural—I was getting along too well legitimately—and in the third place she was an awful sucker to finagle around with something that Tony might find out about before she could get away; I finally wound up by explaining to her, with gestures, that my job was keeping people out of trouble, not getting them into it.
She took it fairly easy. She said she was sorry I couldn’t see it her way, and that she’d have to find somebody else or do it herself. She said that however she worked it, it would have to be done quickly because Steinlen’s wife, who was Sheila Dale the Astra star, was due back from location the next morning—and Steinlen would be psychologically ripe for the touch with his wife coming in. Mae was a bright girl in some ways. It’s too bad she was so full of larceny—bad company I guess.
We went back out into the kitchen and she fixed a drink for herself and started fixing one for me and I showed her my full glass.
She said: “I know I don’t have to tell you to keep this under your hat… .”
I smiled and shook my
head and drank some of the ginger ale in a kind of silent toast to her success. Then I tried to talk her out of it again in a roundabout way but it was no go—she’d made up her mind. A couple drunks weaved out into the kitchen and Mae mixed drinks for them.
Tony came in while they were there, which was just as well because it didn’t look like Mae and I had been doing our double act all the time he’d been out.
He said: “Cora made me stay an’ have a couple drinks with her. She is very sad and won’t come down.” He went on to explain to me that Cora’s boyfriend had walked out on her, and what a heel he was, and what he, Tony, would do to him if he saw him. Tony’s voice was very soft and he spoke each word very quietly, very distinctly, with just a trace of accent.
I glanced at Mae while Tony was telling me in detail what he would do to Cora’s boyfriend; she was gargling another drink.
I shoved off pretty soon and went down and got into a cab and went back to the Derby. In a little while the fight crowd started drifting in and Franey and Broun and a bookmaker named Connie Hartley came in and we had a few drinks and sat around and told lies. I’d been on the wagon for a couple weeks and I was getting pretty sick of it—I had quite a few drinks. Hartley had some racing forms and Franey and I picked a few losers for Saturday.
After a while Franey and Hartley and I went out to the Colony Club and there was a friend of mine there who was a swell piano player. We listened to him and had a lot more drinks. I got home about four.
I woke sometime around eleven I guess, but I didn’t get up right away. I made a couple phone calls and then tried to get back to sleep but that was out. Finally I rolled over to the edge of the bed and looked down at the extra which had been shoved under the door. By twisting my head around I could read the headline:
actress strangled in hollywood apartment
I got up then, and sat on the bed and read the story. Mae Jackman had been murdered at around three-thirty in the morning, as near as the police could figure, in her apartment at the Mara. The body had been discovered at eight-thirty by the maid. The dragnet was out for Tony Aricci.
I had breakfast at a little joint down the street a few doors from the hotel. When I went back up to my room there was a man standing in the dim elbow of the corridor just outside my door. It was Tony. He stepped close to me and jabbed an automatic into my belly. I unlocked the door and we went into my room and closed the door.
I said: “What’s it all about?”
Tony’s face was something I still dream about when I have too much lobster and cherry brandy. His usually dark swarthy skin was gray; his mouth was a dark gray slit across the lower part of his face, and his eyes were stark crazy.
When he spoke it sounded like the words were coming up out of a well. He said: “You killed Mae.” There was no intonation—the words were of exactly the same pitch.
I didn’t feel especially good. I edged away from him slowly, sat down very slowly in the chair by the window. While I was doing that I was saying: “For the love of Christ, Tony—where did you get such a dumb idea?”
He said: “If you didn’t kill her you know who did. She’s been calling you for three days. You talked to her alone last night while I was at Cora’s—all the time I was away. There is something I do not know. I have known there was something I did not know for a long time. You must tell me what it is. If you do not tell me what it is I am going to kill you.”
If I have any gift for figuring whether people mean what they say, he meant it. I stalled, lit a cigarette.
I said: “Sit down, Tony.”
He shook his head very sharply.
I went on. “You’re on the wrong track, Tony. If that gang of drunks officed you that Mae and I were in the bedroom while you were upstairs—she took me in to show me the stills on her last picture. We talked about old times… .” I leaned forward, shook my head slowly. “I thought you had killed her when I read it in the paper just now. I thought you’d had one of your battles and you’d gone a little too far.”
He wilted suddenly. He fell down on his knees beside the bed and the automatic clattered to the floor and he put his head in his arms on the bed and sobbed in a terrible dry way like a sick animal. He said brokenly and his voice was muffled by his arms, seemed to come from very faraway: “My dear God. My dear God! I kill her!—I kill her who I loved more than anything! Why, my dear God, do they say I killed her? …”
It was embarrassing to see a guy like Tony break down like that. I got up and picked up the automatic and dropped it into the pocket of my topcoat and patted Tony’s shoulder. I didn’t know what else to do and I didn’t know what to say, so I went back and sat down and looked out the window.
Pretty soon Tony got up. He said: “I had to go to Long Beach last night. I left Mae about one-thirty. All the gang had gone home. I did not get back until a little while ago. I stopped at Sardis for breakfast because I did not want to wake Mae up—and I saw the paper.” He cleared his throat. “I am going to Cora. Cora will know something—she will tell me what it is… .”
I said: “No. You are not going to do anything like that. You can’t stay here because if the Law finds out I came to your place last night they’ll come here to ask me a lot of questions, but I’m going to take you to a friend of mine upstairs and I want you to stay with her until I come back. I’m going to see what I can do about getting you in the clear and if I can’t do that we will see what we can do about getting you out of town.”
He smiled in a way that was not pleasant to see. He said: “I do not care about the clear, and I do not care about getting away. I care about finding the man who killed Mae and cutting his heart out of his body.”
I nodded and tried to look as if I felt like doing the same thing. I steered him out of the room and we went up the back stairs to the eighth floor and I knocked at Opal Crane’s door. Opal was still in bed; she yelled, “Who is it?” and I told her and in a minute she came to the door and opened it. She was rubbing her eyes and yawning and when I introduced Tony to her and told her I wanted her to let him stay there a little while she didn’t look very enthusiastic.
She jerked her head at Tony, who had sat down and was staring out the window, and said: “Hot?”
I nodded.
She looked a little less enthusiastic and I asked her if she thought I’d ask her to do it if I wasn’t sure it was all right. She shook her head and yawned some more and went into the bathroom.
I said to Tony: “I’ll be back or call you as soon as I can.”
He bobbed his head up and down vacantly and then he said: “Give me my gun.”
I said: “No. You won’t need it, and I might.”
I left him sitting by the window staring out into the gray morning and went out softly and closed the door.
Back in my room I called up Danny Scheyer who is a police reporter on the Post. I asked him to find out all he could about the inside on the Jackman murder, whether the police were satisfied that it was Tony or were working on any other angles, I asked him particularly to find out if a check that might have some bearing on the case had been found on Mae or in the apartment. Scheyer had a swell in at headquarters and I knew he’d get all the dope there was to get. I told him I’d call him again in a little while.
It was almost twelve-thirty and I figured Steinlen would be at lunch but I called up anyway. He was at lunch and I talked to his secretary. I told her I wanted to make an appointment with Steinlen for around one-thirty and she asked what I wanted to see him about. I told her to tell him that Mister Black, from Arrowhead, would be over at one-thirty and that his business was very personal. Then I went over to the Derby and had some more coffee.
I called Scheyer again from the Derby and he said they hadn’t found anything on Mae or in the apartment that meant anything and that it looked like a cinch for Tony Aricci.
I said: “Maybe not.” I told Scheyer he’d get first
call on anything turned up and thanked him.
Steinlen was younger than I’d figured him to be—somewhere between thirty-five and forty. He was a thin, nervous man with a long, bony face, deep-set brown eyes. His hands were always moving.
He said: “What can I do for you, Mister Black?”
I leaned forward and put my cigarette out in a tray on his desk and then leaned back and made myself comfortable. I said: “You can’t do anything for me but I can do an awful lot for you.”
He smiled a little and moved his head up and down. “People are doing things for me all the time,” he said, “That’s the reason I’m getting so gray.” He scratched his long nose and then put his hand down on the desk and drummed with his fingers. “What are you selling?”
“I sell peace of mind,” I said. “They used to call me the Trouble-Chaser back East; I kept people out of jams—and when they got into jams I got them out. I worked at it then—now it’s more or less of a hobby.”
He was still smiling. He said: “Go on.”
The way he kept moving his hands made me jumpy. I still had my topcoat on and I was practically lying down in the chair; I had my hand on Tony’s gun in my coat pocket.
I said: “You murdered Mae Jackman.”
His face didn’t change. He stopped drumming on the desk with his fingers and he was entirely still for maybe ten or fifteen seconds. He was looking straight at me and he was still smiling. Then he shook his head very slowly and said: “No.”
I said something a little while ago about a gift for figuring whether people mean what they say. Something like fifteen years of intensive study and research into the intricacies of draw and stud poker are pretty fair training for that sort of thing. I mean I’m not exactly a sucker for a liar, and so help me I believed Steinlen.
