Steve slapped the counter open-handed. “Well, I’m canned, for not letting a drunken heel make a parlor house and a shooting gallery out of the eighth floor. Nuts! Well, I’ll miss the joint at that.”
“I’ll miss you too, Steve,” Millar said gently. “But not for a week. I take a week off starting tomorrow. My brother has a cabin at Crestline.”
“Didn’t know you had a brother,” Steve said absently. He opened and closed his fist on the marble desk top.
“He doesn’t come into town much. A big guy. Used to be a fighter.”
Steve nodded and straightened from the counter. “Well, I might as well finish out the night,” he said. “On my back. Put this gun away somewhere, George.”
He grinned coldly and walked away, down the steps into the dim main lobby and across to the room where the radio was. He punched the pillows into shape on the pale green davenport, then suddenly reached into his pocket and took out the scrap of white paper he had lifted from the black-haired girl’s purple handbag. It was a receipt for a week’s rent, to a Miss Marilyn Delorme, Apt. 211, Ridgeland Apartments, 118 Court Street.
He tucked it into his wallet and stood staring at the silent radio. “Steve, I think you got another job,” he said under his breath. “Something about this set-up smells.”
He slipped into a closet-like phone both in the corner of the room, dropped a nickel and dialed an all-night radio station. He had to dial four times before he got a clear line to the Owl Program announcer.
“How’s to play King Leopardi’s record of ‘Solitude’ again?” he asked him.
“Got a lot of requests piled up. Played it twice already. Who’s calling?”
“Steve Grayce, night man at the Carlton Hotel.”
“Oh, a sober guy on his job. For you, pal, anything.”
Steve went back to the davenport, snapped the radio on and lay down on his back, with his hands clasped behind his head.
Ten minutes later the high, piercingly sweet trumpet notes of King Leopardi came softly from the radio, muted almost to a whisper, and sustaining E above high C for an almost incredible period of time.
“Shucks,” Steve grumbled, when the record ended. “A guy that can play like that—maybe I was too tough with him.”
3
Court Street was old town, wop town, crook town, arty town. It lay across the top of Bunker Hill and you could find anything there from down-at-heels ex-Greenwich-villagers to crooks on the lam, from ladies of anybody’s evening to County Relief clients brawling with haggard landladies in grand old houses with scrolled porches, parquetry floors, and immense sweeping banisters of white oak, mahogany and Circassian walnut.
It had been a nice place once, had Bunker Hill, and from the days of its niceness there still remained the funny little funicular railway, called the Angel’s Flight, which crawled up and down a yellow clay bank from Hill Street. It was afternoon when Steve Grayce got off the car at the top, its only passenger. He walked along in the sun, a tall, wide-shouldered, rangy-looking man in a well-cut blue suit.
He turned west at Court and began to read the numbers. The one he wanted was two from the corner, across the street from a red brick funeral parlor with a sign in gold over it: Paolo Perrugini Funeral Home. A swarthy iron-gray Italian in a cutaway coat stood in front of the curtained door of the red brick building, smoking a cigar and waiting for somebody to die.
One-eighteen was a three-storied frame apartment house. It had a glass door, well masked by a dirty net curtain, a hall runner eighteen inches wide, dim doors with numbers painted on them with dim-paint, a staircase halfway back. Brass stair rods glittered in the dimness of the hallway.
Steve Grayce went up the stairs and prowled back to the front. Apartment 211, Miss Marilyn Delorme, was on the right, a front apartment. He tapped lightly on the wood, waited, tapped again. Nothing moved beyond the silent door, or in the hallway. Behind another door across the hall somebody coughed and kept on coughing.
Standing there in the half-light Steve Grayce wondered why he had come. Miss Delorme had carried a gun. Leopardi had received some kind of a threat letter and torn it up and thrown it away. Miss Delorme had checked out of the Carlton about an hour after Steve told her Leopardi was gone. Even at that—
He took out a leather keyholder and studied the lock of the door. It looked as if it would listen to reason. He tried a pick on it, snicked the bolt back and stepped softly into the room. He shut the door, but the pick wouldn’t lock it.
The room was dim with drawn shades across two front windows. The air smelled of face powder. There was light-painted furniture, a pull-down double bed which was pulled down but had been made up. There was a magazine on it, a glass tray full of cigarette butts, a pint bottle half full of whiskey, and a glass on a chair beside the bed. Two pillows had been used for a back rest and were still crushed in the middle.
On the dresser there was a composition toilet set, neither cheap nor expensive, a comb with black hair in it, a tray of manicuring stuff, plenty of spilled powder—in the bathroom, nothing. In a closet behind the bed a lot of clothes and two suitcases. The shoes were all one size.
Steve stood beside the bed and pinched his chin. “Blossom, the spitting blonde, doesn’t live here,” he said under his breath. “Just Marilyn the torn-pants brunette.”
He went back to the dresser and pulled drawers out. In the bottom drawer, under the piece of wall paper that lined it, he found a box of .25 copper-nickel automatic shells. He poked at the butts in the ash tray. All had lipstick on them. He pinched his chin again, then feathered the air with the palm of his hand, like an oarsman with a scull.
“Bunk,” he said softly. “Wasting your time, Stevie.”
He walked over to the door and reached for the knob, then turned back to the bed and lifted it by the footrail.
Miss Marilyn Delorme was in.
She lay on her side on the floor under the bed, long legs scissored out as if in running. One mule was on, one off. Garters and skin showed at the tops of her stockings, and a blue rose on something pink. She wore a square-necked, short-sleeved dress that was not too clean. Her neck above the dress was blotched with purple bruises.
Her face was a dark plum color, her eyes had the faint stale glitter of death, and her mouth was open so far that it foreshortened her face. She was colder than ice, and still quite limp. She had been dead two or three hours at least, six hours at most.
The purple bag was beside her, gaping like her mouth. Steve didn’t touch any of the stuff that had been emptied out on the floor. There was no gun and there were no papers.
He let the bed down over her again, then made the rounds of the apartment, wiping everything he had touched and a lot of things he couldn’t remember whether he had touched or not.
He listened at the door and stepped out. The hall was still empty. The man behind the opposite door still coughed. Steve went down the stairs, looked at the mailboxes and went back along the lower hall to a door.
Behind this door a chair creaked monotonously. He knocked and a woman’s sharp voice called out. Steve opened the door with his handkerchief and stepped in.
In the middle of the room a woman rocked in an old Boston rocker, her body in the slack boneless attitude of exhaustion. She had a mud-colored face, stringy hair, gray cotton stockings—everything a Bunker Hill landlady should have. She looked at Steve with the interested eye of a dead goldfish.
“Are you the manager?”
The woman stopped rocking, screamed, “Hi, Jake! Company!” at the top of her voice, and started rocking again.
An icebox door thudded shut behind a partly open inner door and a very big man came into the room carrying a can of beer. He had a doughy mooncalf face, a tuft of fuzz on top of an otherwise bald head, a thick brutal neck and chin, and brown pig eyes about as expressionless as the woman’s. He needed a shave—had needed one the day before—and his collarless shirt gaped over a big hard hairy chest. He wore scarlet suspenders with large gilt buckles
on them.
He held the can of beer out to the woman. She clawed it out of his hand and said bitterly: “I’m so tired I ain’t got no sense.”
The man said: “Yah. You ain’t done the halls so good at that.”
The woman snarled: “I done ‘em as good as I aim to.” She sucked the beer thirstily.
Steve looked at the man and said: “Manager?”
“Yah. ‘S me. Jake Stoyanoff. Two hun’erd eighty-six stripped, and still plenty tough.”
Steve said: “Who lives in Two-eleven?”
The big man leaned forward a little from the waist and snapped his suspenders. Nothing changed in his eyes. The skin along his big jaw may have tightened a little. “A dame,” he said.
“Alone?”
“Go on—ask me,” the big man said. He stuck his hand out and lifted a cigar off the edge of a stained-wood table. The cigar was burning unevenly and it smelled as if somebody had set fire to the doormat. He pushed it into his mouth with a hard, thrusting motion, as if he expected his mouth wouldn’t want it to go in.
“I’m asking you,” Steve said.
“Ask me out in the kitchen,” the big man drawled.
He turned and held the door open. Steve went past him.
The big man kicked the door shut against the squeak of the rocking chair, opened up the icebox and got out two cans of beer. He opened them and handed one to Steve.
“Dick?”
Steve drank some of the beer, put the can down on the sink, got a brand-new card out of his wallet—a business card printed that morning. He handed it to the man.
The man read it, put it down on the sink, picked it up and read it again. “One of them guys,” he growled over his beer. “What’s she pulled this time?”
Steve shrugged and said: “I guess it’s the usual. The torn pajama act. Only there’s a kickback this time.”
“How come? You handling it, huh? Must be a nice cozy one.”
Steve nodded. The big man blew smoke from his mouth. “Go ahead and handle it,” he said.
“You don’t mind a pinch here?”
The big man laughed heartily. “Nuts to you, brother,” he said pleasantly enough. “You’re a private dick. So it’s a hush. O.K. Go out and hush it. And if it was a pinch—that bothers me like a quart of milk. Go into your act. Take all the room you want. Cops don’t bother Jake Stoyanoff.”
Steve stared at the man. He didn’t say anything. The big man talked it up some more, seemed to get more interested. “Besides,” he went on, making motions with the cigar, “I’m softhearted. I never turn up a dame. I never put a frill in the middle.” He finished his beer and threw the can in a basket under the sink, and pushed his hand out in front of him, revolving the large thumb slowly against the next two fingers. “Unless there’s some of that,” he added.
Steve said softly: “You’ve got big hands. You could have done it.”
“Huh?” His small brown leathery eyes got silent and stared. Steve said: “Yeah. You might be clean. But with those hands the cops’d go round and round with you just the same.”
The big man moved a little to his left, away from the sink. He let his right hand hang down at his side, loosely. His mouth got so tight that the cigar almost touched his nose.
“What’s the beef, huh?” he barked. “What you shovin’ at me, guy? What—”
“Cut it,” Steve drawled. “She’s been croaked. Strangled. Upstairs, on the floor under her bed. About midmorning, I’d say. Big hands did it—hands like yours.”
The big man did a nice job of getting the gun off his hip. It arrived so suddenly that it seemed to have grown in his hand and been there all the time.
Steve frowned at the gun and didn’t move. The big man looked him over. “You’re tough,” he said. “I been in the ring long enough to size up a guy’s meat. You’re plenty hard, boy. But you ain’t as hard as lead. Talk it up fast.”
“I knocked at her door. No answer. The lock was a pushover. I went in. I almost missed her because the bed was pulled down and she had been sitting on it, reading a magazine. There was no sign of struggle. I lifted the bed just before I left—and there she was. Very dead, Mr. Stoyanoff. Put the gat away. Cops don’t bother you, you said a minute ago.”
The big man whispered: “Yes and no. They don’t make me happy neither. I get a bump once’n a while. Mostly a Dutch. You said something about my hands, mister.”
Steve shook his head. “That was a gag,” he said. “Her neck has nail marks. You bite your nails down close. You’re clean.”
The big man didn’t look at his fingers. He was very pale. There was sweat on his lower lips, in the black stubble of his beard. He was still leaning forward, still motionless, when there was a knocking beyond the kitchen door, the door from the living room to the hallway. The creaking chair stopped and the woman’s sharp voice screamed: “Hi, Jake! Company!”
The big man cocked his head. “That old slut wouldn’t climb off’n her fanny if the house caught fire,” he said thickly.
He stepped to the door and slipped through it, locking it behind him.
Steve ranged the kitchen swiftly with his eyes. There was a small high window beyond the sink, a trap low down for a garbage pail and parcels, but no other door. He reached for his card Stoyanoff had left lying on the drainboard and slipped it back into his pocket. Then he took a short-barreled Detective Special out of his left breast pocket where he wore it nose down, as in a holster.
He had got that far when the shots roared beyond the wall—muffled a little, but still loud—four of them blended in a blast of sound.
Steve stepped back and hit the kitchen door with his leg out straight. It held and jarred him to the top of his head and in his hip joint. He swore, took the whole width of the kitchen and slammed into it with his left shoulder. It gave this time. He pitched into the living room. The mud-faced woman sat leaning forward in her rocker, her head to one side and a lock of mousy hair smeared down over her bony forehead.
“Backfire, huh?” she said stupidly. “Sounded kinda close. Musta been in the alley.”
Steve jumped across the room, yanked the outer door open and plunged out into the hall.
The big man was still on his feet, a dozen feet down the hallway, in the direction of a screen door that opened flush on an alley. He was clawing at the wall. His gun lay at his feet. His left knee buckled and he went down on it.
A door was flung open and a hard-looking woman peered out, and instantly slammed her door shut again. A radio suddenly gained in volume beyond her door.
The big man got up off his left knee and the leg shook violently inside his trousers. He went down on both knees and got the gun into his hand and began to crawl towards the screen door. Then, suddenly he went down flat on his face and tried to crawl that way, grinding his face into the narrow hail runner.
Then he stopped crawling and stopped moving altogether. His body went limp and the hand holding the gun opened and the gun rolled out of it.
Steve hit the screen door and was out in the alley. A gray sedan was speeding towards the far end of it. He stopped, steadied himself and brought his gun up level, and the sedan whisked out of sight around the corner.
A man boiled out of another apartment house across the alley. Steve ran on, gesticulating back at him and pointing ahead. As he ran he slipped the gun back into his pocket. When he reached the end of the alley, the gray sedan was out of sight. Steve skidded around the wall onto the pavement, slowed to a walk and then stopped.
Half a block down a man finished parking a car, got out and went across the pavement to a lunchroom. Steve watched him go in, then straightened his hat and walked along the wall to the lunchroom.
He went in, sat at the counter and ordered coffee. In a little while there were sirens.
Steve drank his coffee, asked for another cup and drank that. He lit a cigarette and walked down the long hill to Fifth, across to Hill, back to the foot of the Angel’s Flight, and got his convertible out of a parki
ng lot.
He drove out west, beyond Vermont, to the small hotel where he had taken a room that morning.
4
Bill Dockery, floor manager of the Club Shalotte, teetered on his heels and yawned in the unlighted entrance to the dining room. It was a dead hour for business, late cocktail time, too early for dinner, and much too early for the real business of the club, which was high-class gambling.
Dockery was a handsome mug in a midnight-blue dinner jacket and a maroon carnation. He had a two-inch forehead under black lacquer hair, good features a little on the heavy side, alert brown eyes and very long curly eyelashes which he liked to let down over his eyes, to fool troublesome drunks into taking a swing at him.
The entrance door of the foyer was opened by the uniformed doorman and Steve Grayce came in.
Dockery said, “Ho, hum,” tapped his teeth and leaned his weight forward. He walked across the lobby slowly to meet the guest. Steve stood just inside the doors and ranged his eyes over the high foyer walled with milky glass, lighted softly from behind. Molded in the glass were etchings of sailing ships, beasts of the jungle, Siamese pagodas, temples of Yucatan. The doors were square frames of chromium, like photo frames. The Club Shalotte had all the class there was, and the mutter of voices from the bar lounge on the left was not noisy. The faint Spanish music behind the voices was delicate as a carved fan.
Dockery came up and leaned his sleek head forward an inch. “May I help you?”
“King Leopardi around?”
Dockery leaned back again. He looked less interested. “The bandleader? He opens tomorrow night.”
“I thought he might be around—rehearsing or something.”
“Friend of his?”
“I know him. I’m not job-hunting, and I’m not a song plugger if that’s what you mean.”
Dockery teetered on his heels. He was tone-deaf and Leopardi meant no more to him than a bag of peanuts. He half smiled. “He was in the bar lounge a while ago.” He pointed with his square rock-like chin. Steve Grayce went into the bar lounge.
Collected Stories of Raymond Chandler Page 73
