The people I was dealing with seemed to like operating in that part of the country.
It took me half an hour to reach the service station. I phoned for a taxi and it had to come from Santa Monica. I drove all the way home to my place in the Berglund, three blocks above the office, changed clothes, put my last gun in the holster and sat down to the phone.
Soukesian wasn’t home. Nobody answered that number. Carol Pride didn’t answer her number. I didn’t expect her to. She was probably having tea with Mrs. Philip Courtney Prendergast. But police headquarters answered their number, and Reavis was still on the job. He didn’t sound pleased to hear from me.
“Anything new on the Lindley Paul killing?” I asked him.
“I thought I told you to forget it. I meant to.” His voice was nasty.
“You told me all right, but it keeps worrying at me. I like a clean job. I think her husband had it done.”
He was silent for a moment. Then, “Whose husband, smart boy?”
“The husband of the frail that lost the jade beads, naturally.”
“And of course you’ve had to poke your face into who she is.”
“It sort of drifted to me,” I said. “I just had to reach out.” He was silent again. This time so long that I could hear the loudspeaker on his wall put out a police bulletin on a stolen car.
Then he said very smoothly and distinctly: “I’d like to sell you an idea, shamus. Maybe I can. There’s a lot of peace of mind in it. The Police Board gave you a licence once and the sheriff gave you a special badge. Any acting captain with a peeve can get both of them taken away from you overnight. Maybe even just a lieutenant—like me. Now what did you have when you got that licence and that badge? Don’t answer, I’m telling you. You had the social standing of a cockroach. You were a snooper for hire. All in the world you had to do then was to spend your last hundred bucks on a down payment on some rent and office furniture and sit on your tail until somebody brought a lion in—so you could put your head in the lion’s mouth to see if he would bite. If he bit your ear off, you got sued for mayhem. Are you beginning to get it?”
“It’s a good line,” I said,. “I used it years ago. So you don’t want to break the case?”
“If I could trust you, I’d tell you we want to break up a very smart jewel gang. But I can’t trust you. Where are you—in a poolroom?”
“I’m in bed,” I said. “I’ve got a telephone jag.”
“Well, you just fill yourself a nice hot-water bottle and put it on your face and go to sleep like a good little boy, will you please?”
“Naw. I’d rather go out and shoot an Indian, just for practice.”
“Well, just one Indian, Junior.”
“Don’t forget that bite,” I yelled, and hung the phone in his face.
Six—Lady In Liquor
I had a drink on the way down to the boulevard, black coffee laced with brandy, in a place where they knew me, It made my stomach feel like new, but I still had the same shopworn head. And I could still smell chloroform in my whiskers.
I went up to the office and into the little reception room. There were two of them this time, Carol Pride and a blonde. A blonde with black eyes. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained-glass window.
Carol Pride stood up and scowled at me and said: “This is Mrs. Philip Courtney Prendergast. She has been waiting quite some time. And she’s not used to being kept waiting. She wants to employ you.”
The blonde smiled at me and put a gloved hand out, I touched the hand. She was perhaps thirty-five and she had that wide-eyed, dreamy expression, as far as black eyes can have it. Whatever you need, whatever you are—she had it. I didn’t pay much attention to her clothes. They were black and white. They were what the guy had put on her and he would know or she wouldn’t have gone to him.
I unlocked the door of my private thinking-parlor and ushered them in.
There was a half-empty quart of hooch standing on the corner of my desk.
“Excuse me for keeping you waiting, Mrs. Prendergast,” I said. “I had to go out on a little business.”
“I don’t see why you had to go out,” Carol Pride said icily. “There seems to be all you can use right in front of you.”
I placed chairs for them and sat down and reached for the bottle and the phone rang at my left elbow.
A strange voice took its time saying: “Dalmas? Okay. We have the gat. I guess you’ll want it back, won’t you?”
“Both of them. I’m a poor man.”
“We only got one,” the voice said smoothly. “The one the johns would like to have. I’ll be calling you later. Think things over.”
“Thanks.” I hung up and put the bottle down on the floor and smiled at Mrs. Prendergast.
“I’ll do the talking,” Carol Pride said. “Mrs. Prendergast has a slight cold. She has to save her voice.”
She gave the blonde one of those sidelong looks that women think men don’t understand, the kind that feel like a dentist’s drill.
“Well—” Mrs. Prendergast said, and moved a little so that she could see along the end of the desk, where I had put the whisky bottle down on the carpet.
“Mrs. Prendergast has taken me into her confidence,” Carol Pride said. “I don’t know why, unless it is that I have shown her where a lot of unpleasant notoriety can be avoided.”
I frowned at her. “There isn’t going to be any of that. I talked to Reavis a while ago. He has a hush on it that would make a dynamite explosion sound like a pawnbroker looking at a dollar watch.”
“Very funny,” Carol Pride said, “for people who dabble in that sort of wit. But it just happens Mrs. Prendergast would like to get her jade necklace back—without Mr. Prendergast knowing it was stolen. It seems he doesn’t know yet.”
“That’s different,” I said. (The hell he didn’t know!)
Mrs. Prendergast gave me a smile I could feel in my hip pocket. “I just love straight rye,” she cooed. “Could we—just a little one?”
I got out a couple of pony glasses and put the bottle up on the desk again. Carol Pride leaned back and lit a cigarette contemptuously and looked at the ceiling. She wasn’t so hard to look at herself. You could look at her longer without getting dizzy. But Mrs. Prendergast had it all over her for a quick smash.
I poured a couple of drinks for the ladies. Carol Pride didn’t touch hers at all.
“In case you don’t know,” she said distantly, “Beverly Hills, where Mrs. Prendergast lives, is peculiar in some ways. They have two-way radio cars and only a small territory to cover and they cover it like a blanket, because there’s plenty of money for police protection in Beverly Hills. In the better homes they even have direct communication with headquarters, over wires that can’t be cut.”
Mrs. Prendergast put her drink to sleep with one punch and looked at the bottle. I milked it again.
“That’s nothing,” she glowed. “We even have photo-cell connections on our safes and fur closets. We can fix the house so that even the servants can’t go near certain places without police knocking at the door in about thirty seconds. Marvelous, isn’t it?”
“Yes, marvelous,” Carol Pride said. “But that’s only in Beverly Hills. Once outside—and you can’t spend your entire life in Beverly Hills—that is, unless you’re an ant—your jewels are not so safe. So Mrs. Prendergast had a duplicate of her jade necklace—in soapstone.”
I sat up straighter. Lindley Paul had let something drop about it taking a lifetime to duplicate the workmanship on Fei Tsui beads—even if material were available.
Mrs. Prendergast fiddled with her second drink, but not for long. Her smile got warmer and warmer.
“So when she went to a party outside Beverly Hills, Mrs. Prendergast was supposed to wear the imitation. That is, when she wanted to wear jade at all. Mr. Prendergast was very particular about that.”
“And he has a lousy temper,” Mrs. Prendergast said.
I put some more rye under her hand. Carol Prid
e watched me do it and almost snarled at me: “But on the night of the holdup she made a mistake and was wearing the real one.”
I leered at her.
“I know what you’re thinking,” she snapped. “Who knew she had made that mistake? It happened that Mr. Paul knew it, soon after they left the house. He was her escort.”
“He—er—touched the necklace a little,” Mrs. Prendergast sighed. “He could tell real jade by the feel of it. I’ve heard some people can. He knew a lot about jewels.”
I leaned back again in my squeaky chair, “Hell,” I said disgustedly, “I ought to have suspected that guy long ago. The gang had to have a society finger. How else could they tell when the good things were out of the icebox? He must have pulled a cross on them and they used this chance to put him away.”
“Rather wasteful of such a talent, don’t you think?” Carol Pride said sweetly. She pushed her little glass along the desk top with one finger. “I don’t really care for this, Mrs. Prendergast—if you’d like another—”
“Moths in your ermine,” Mrs. Prendergast said, and threw it down the hatch.
“Where and how was the stick-up?” I rapped.
“Well, that seems a little funny too,” Carol Pride said, beating Mrs. Prendergast by half a word. “After the party, which was in Brentwood Heights, Mr. Paul wanted to drop in at the Trocadero. They were in his car. At that time they were widening Sunset Boulevard all through the County Strip, if you remember. After they had killed a little time at the Troc—”
“And a few snifters,” Mrs. Prendergast giggled, reaching for the bottle. She refilled one of her glasses. That is, some of the whisky went into the glass.
“—Mr. Paul drove her home by way of Santa Monica Boulevard.”
“That was the natural way to go,” I said. “Almost the only way to go unless you wanted a lot of dust.”
“Yes, but it also took them past a certain down-at-the-heels hotel called the Tremaine and a beer parlor across the street from it. Mrs. Prendergast noticed a car pull away from in front of the beer parlor and follow them. She’s pretty sure it was that same car that crowded them to the curb a little later— and the holdup men knew just what they wanted. Mrs. Prendergast remembers all this very well.”
“Well, naturally,” Mrs. Prendergast said. “You don’t mean I was drunk, I hope. This baby carries her hooch. You don’t lose a string of beads like that every night.”
She put her fifth drink down her throat.
“I wouldn’t know a darn thing about wha—what those men looked like,” she told me a little thickly. “Lin—tha’s Mr. Paul—I called him Lin, y’know, felt kinda bad about it. That’s why he stuck his neck out.”
“It was your money—the ten thousand for the pay-off?” I asked her.
“It wasn’t the butler’s, honey. And I want those beads back before Court gets wise. How about lookin’ over that beer parlor?”
She grabbled around in her black and white bag and pushed some bills across the desk in a lump. I straightened them out and counted them. They added to four hundred and sixty-seven dollars. Nice money. I let them lie.
“Mr. Prendergast,” Carol Pride ploughed on sweetly, “whom Mrs. Prendergast calls ‘Court,’ thinks the imitation necklace was taken. He can’t tell one from the other, it seems. He doesn’t know anything about last night except that Lindley Paul was killed by some bandits.”
“The hell he doesn’t.” I said it out loud this time, and sourly. I pushed the money back across the desk. “I believe you think you’re being blackmailed, Mrs. Prendergast. You’re wrong. I think the reason this story hasn’t broken in the press the way it happened is because pressure has been brought on the police. They’d be willing anyhow, because what they want is the jewel gang. The punks that killed Paul are dead already.”
Mrs. Prendergast stared at me with a hard, bright, alcoholic stare. “I hadn’t the slightest idea of bein’ blackmailed,” she said. She was having trouble with her s’s now. “I want my beads and I want them quick. It’s not a question of money. Not ‘tall. Gimme a drink.”
“It’s in front of you,” I said. She could drink herself under the desk for all I cared.
Carol Pride said: “Don’t you think you ought to go out to that beer parlor and see what you can pick up?”
“A piece of chewed pretzel,” I said. “Nuts to that idea.”
The blonde was waving the bottle over her two glasses. She got herself a drink poured finally, drank it, and pushed the handful of currency around on the desk with a free and easy gesture, like a kid playing with sand.
I took it away from her, put it together again and went around the desk to put it back into her bag.
“If I do anything, I’ll let you know,” I told her. “I don’t need a retainer from you, Mrs. Prendergast.”
She liked that. She almost took another drink, thought better of it with what she still had to think with, got to her feet and started for the door.
I got to her in time to keep her from opening it with her nose. I held her arm and opened the door for her and there was a uniformed chauffeur leaning against the wall outside.
“Oke,” he said listlessly, snapped a cigarette into the distance and took hold of her. “Let’s go, baby. I ought to paddle your behind. Damned if I oughtn’t.”
She giggled and held on to him and they went down the corridor and turned a corner out of sight. I went back into the office and sat down behind my desk and looked at Carol Pride. She was mopping the desk with a dustcloth she had found somewhere.
“You and your office bottle,” she said bitterly. Her eyes hated me.
“To hell with her,” I said angrily. “I wouldn’t trust her with my old socks. I hope she gets raped on the way home. To hell with her beer-parlor angle too.”
“Her morals are neither here nor there, Mr. John Dalmas. She has pots of money and she’s not tight with it. I’ve seen her husband and he’s nothing but a beanstalk with a checkbook that never runs dry. If any fixing has been done, she has done it herself. She told me she’s suspected for some time that Paul was a Raffles. She didn’t care as long as he let her alone.”
“This Prendergast is a prune, huh? He would be, of course.”
“Tall, thin, yellow. Looks as if his first drink of milk soured on his stomach and he could still taste it.”
“Paul didn’t steal her necklace.”
“No?”
“No. And she didn’t have any duplicate of it.”
Her eyes got narrower and darker. “I suppose Soukesian the Psychic told you all this.”
“Who’s he?”
She leaned forward a moment and then leaned back and pulled her bag tight against her side.
“I see,” she said slowly. “You don’t like my work. Excuse me for butting in. I thought I was helping you a little.”
“I told you it was none of my business. Go on home and write yourself a feature article. I don’t need any help.”
“I thought we were friends,” she said. “I thought you liked me.” She stared at me for a minute with bleak, tired eyes.
“I’ve got a living to make. I don’t make it bucking the police department.”
She stood up and looked at me a moment longer without speaking. Then she went to the door and went out. I heard her steps die along the mosaic floor of the corridor.
I sat there for ten or fifteen minutes almost without moving. I tried to guess why Soukesian hadn’t killed me. None of it made any sense. I went down to the parking lot and got into my car.
Seven—I Cross The Bar
The Hotel Tremaine was far out of Santa Monica, near the junk yards. An interurban right-of-way split the street in half, and just as I got to the block that would have the number I had looked up, a two-car train came racketing by at forty-five miles an hour, making almost as much noise as a transport plane taking off. I speeded up beside it and passed the block, pulled into the cement space in front of a market that had gone out of business. I got out and looked ba
ck from the corner of the wall.
I could see the Hotel Tremaine’s sign over a narrow door between two store fronts, both empty—an old two-story walkup. Its woodwork would smell of kerosene, its shades would be cracked, its curtains would be a sleazy cotton lace and its bedsprings would stick into your back. I knew all about places like the Hotel Tremaine, I had slept in them, staked out in them, fought with bitter, scrawny landladies in them, got shot at in them, and might yet get carried out of one of them to the morgue wagon. They are flops where you find the cheap ones, the sniffers and pin-jabbers, the gowed-up runts who shoot you before you can say hello.
The beer parlor was on my side of the street. I went back to the Chrysler and got inside it while I moved my gun to my waistband, then I went along the pavement.
There was a red neon sign—BEER—over it. A wide pulled down shade masked the front window, contrary to the law. The place was just a made-over store, half-frontage. I opened the door and went in.
The barman was playing the pin game on the house’s money and a man sat on a stool with a brown hat on the back of his head reading a letter. Prices were scrawled in white on the mirror back of the bar.
The bar was just a plain, heavy wooden counter, and at each end of it hung an old frontier .44 in a flimsy cheap holster no gunfighter would ever have worn. There were printed cards on the walls, about not asking for credit and what to take for a hangover and a liquor breath, and there were some nice legs in photographs.
The place didn’t look as if it even paid expenses.
The barkeep left the pin game and went behind the bar. He was fiftyish, sour. The bottoms of his trousers were frayed and he moved as if he had corns. The man on the stool kept right on chuckling over his letter, which was written in green ink on pink paper.
The barkeep put both his blotched hands on the bar and looked at me with the expression of a dead-pan comedian, and I said: “Beer.”
He drew it slowly, raking the glass with an old dinner knife.
Collected Stories of Raymond Chandler Page 64
