Collected Stories of Raymond Chandler

by Raymond Chandler

  I came up on my feet and looked across the desk. Dr. Austrian sat there perfectly still, holding his night hand with his left, shaking it gently. There was no gun in his hand. I looked along the floor and saw it at the corner of the desk.

  “Geez, I didn’t even hit him,” De Spain said. “All I hit was the gun.”

  “That’s perfectly lovely,” I said. “Suppose all he had hit was my head?”

  De Spain looked at me levelly and the grin left his face. “You put him through it, I will say that for you,” he growled. “But what was the idea of holding out on me on that green-slipper angle?”

  “I got tired of being your stooge,” I said. “I wanted a little play out of my own hand.”

  “How much of it was true?”

  “Matson had the slipper. It must have meant something. Now that I’ve made it up I think it’s all true.”

  Dr. Austrian got up slowly out of his chair and De Spain swung the gun on him. The thin, haggard man shook his head slowly and walked over to the wall and leaned against it.

  “I killed her,” he said in a dead voice to nobody at all. “Not Helen. I killed hen. Call the police.”

  De Spain’s face twisted and he stooped down and picked up the gun with the bone handle and dropped it into his pocket. He put his police gun back under his arm and sat down at the desk and pulled the phone towards him.

  “Watch me get Chief of Homicide out of this,” he drawled.

  Nine—A Guy With Guts

  The little chief of police came in springily, with his hat on the back of his head and his hands in the pockets of a thin dank overcoat. There was something in the right-hand overcoat pocket that he was holding on to, something large and heavy. There were two plainclothes men behind him and one of them was Weems, the chunky fat-faced man who had followed me over to Altair Street. Shorty, the uniformed cop we had ditched on Arguello Boulevard, brought up the rear.

  Chief Anders stopped a little way inside the door and smiled at me unpleasantly. “So you’ve had a lot of fun in our town, I hear. Put the cuffs on him, Weems.”

  The fat-faced man stepped around him and pulled handcuffs out of his left hip pocket. “Nice to meet you again—with your pants down,” he told me in an oily voice.

  De Spain leaned against the wall beyond the door of the examination room. He rolled a match across his lips and stared silently. Dr. Austrian was in his desk chain again, holding his head in his hands, staring at the polished black top of the desk and the towel of hypodermic needles and the small black perpetual calendar and the pen set and the hero doodads that were on the desk. His face was stone pale and he sat without moving, without even seeming to breathe.

  De Spain said: “Don’t be in too much of a hurry, Chief. This lad has friends in L.A. Who are working on the Matson kill night now. And that kid reporter has a brother-in-law who is a cop. You didn’t know that.”

  The chief made a vague motion with his chin. “Wait a minute, Weems.” He turned to De Spain. “You mean they know in town that Helen Matson has been murdered?”

  Dr. Austrian’s face jerked up, haggard and drawn. Then he dropped it into his hands and covered his whole face with his long fingers.

  De Spain said: “I meant Harry Matson, Chief. He was bumped off in L.A. Tonight—last night—now—by Moss Lorenz.”

  The chief seemed to pull his thin lips back into his mouth, almost out of sight. He spoke with them like that. “How do you know that?”

  “The shamus and me picked off Moss. He was hiding out in the house of a man named Greb, the lab man who did a job on the Austrian death. He was hiding there because it looked like somebody was going to open up the Austrian case wide enough for the mayor to think it was a new boulevard and come out with a bunch of flowers and make a speech. That is, if Greb and the Matsons didn’t get took care of. It seems the Matsons were workin’ together, in spite of being divorced, shaking Conried down, and Conried put the pencil on them.”

  The chief turned his head and snarled at his stooges. “Get out in the hall and wait.”

  The plainclothes man I didn’t know opened the door and went out, and after a slight hesitation Weems followed him. Shorty had his hand on the door when De Spain said: “I want Shorty to stay. Shorty’s a decent cop—not like them two vice squad grafters you been sleepin’ with lately.”

  Shorty let go of the door and went and leaned against the wall and smiled behind his hand. The chief’s face colored. “Who detailed you to the Brayton Avenue death?” he barked.

  “I detailed myself, Chief. I was in the dicks’ room a minute or so after the call come in and I went over with Reed. He picked Shorty up too. Shorty and me was both off duty.”

  De Spain grinned, a hard, lazy grin that was neither amused nor triumphant. It was just a grin.

  The chief jerked a gun out of his overcoat pocket. It was a foot long, a regular hogleg, but he seemed to know how to hold it. He said tightly: “Where’s Lorenz?”

  “He’s hid. We got him all ready for you. I had to bruise him a little, but he talked. That right, shamus?”

  I said: “He says something that might be yes or no, but he makes the sounds in the right places.”

  “That’s the way I like to hear a guy talk,” De Spain said. “You oughtn’t to be wasting your strength on that homicide stuff, Chief. And them toy dicks you run around with don’t know nothing about police work except to go through apartment houses and shake down all the women that live alone. Now, you give me back my job and eight men and I’ll show you some homicide work.”

  The chief looked down at his big gun and then he looked at Dr. Austrian’s bowed head. “So he killed his wife,” he said softly. “I knew there was a chance of it, but I didn’t believe it.”

  “Don’t believe it now,” I said. “Helen Matson killed her. Dr. Austrian knows that. He covered up for her, and you covered up for him, and he’s still willing to cover up for her. Love is like that with some people. And this is some town, Chief, where a gal can commit a murder, get her friends and the police to cover it, and then start out to blackmail the very people that kept her out of trouble.”

  The chief bit his lip. His eyes were nasty, but he was thinking—thinking hand. “No wonder she got rubbed out,” he said quietly. “Lorenz—”

  I said: “Take a minute to think. Lorenz didn’t kill Helen Matson. He said he did, but De Spain beat him up to the point where he would have confessed shooting McKinley.”

  De Spain straightened from the wall. He had both hands lazily in the pockets of his suit coat. He kept them there. He stood straight on wide-planted feet, a wick of black hair showing under the side of his hat.

  “Huh?” he said almost gently. “What was that?”

  I said: “Lorenz didn’t kill Helen Matson for several reasons. It was too fussy a job for his type of mind. He’d have knocked her off and let her lay. Second, he didn’t know Greb was leaving town, tipped off by Dr. Austrian who was tipped off, in turn, by Vance Conried, who is now up north providing himself with all the necessary alibis. And if Lorenz didn’t know that much, he didn’t know anything about Helen Matson. Especially as Helen Matson had never really got to Conried at all. She had just tried to. She told me that and she was drunk enough to be telling the truth. So Conried wouldn’t have taken the silly risk of having her knocked off in her own apartment by the sort of man anybody would remember seeing if they saw him anywhere near that apartment. Knocking off Matson up in L.A. Was something else again. That was way off the home grounds.”

  The chief said tightly: “The Club Conried is in L.A.”

  “Legally,” I admitted. “But by position and clientele it’s just outside Bay City. It’s part of Bay City—and it helps to run Bay City.”

  Shorty said: “That ain’t no way to talk to the chief.”

  “Let him alone,” the chief said. “It’s so long since I heard a guy think I didn’t know they did it any more.”

  I said: “Ask De Spain who killed Helen Matson.”

  D
e Spain laughed harshly. He said: “Sure. I killed her.”

  Dr. Austrian lifted his face off his hands and turned his head slowly and looked at De Spain. His face was as dead, as expressionless as the big dead-pan copper’s. Then he reached over and opened the night-hand drawer of his desk. Shorty flipped his gun out and said: “Hold it, Doe.”

  Dr. Austrian shrugged and quietly took a wide-mouthed bottle with a glass stopper out of the drawer. He loosened the stopper and held the bottle close to his nose. “Just smelling salts,” he said dully.

  Shorty relaxed and dropped the gun to his side. The chief stared at me and chewed his lip. De Spain stared at nothing, at nobody. He grinned loosely, kept on grinning.

  I said: “He thinks I’m kidding. You think I’m kidding. I’m not kidding. He knew Helen—well enough to give her a gilt cigarette case with his photo on it. I saw it. It was a small hand-tinted photo and not very good and I had only seen him once. She told me it was an old sweet that wore out. Afterwards it came back to me who that photo was. But he concealed the fact that he knew her and he didn’t act very much like a copper tonight, in a lot of ways. He didn’t get me out of a jam and run around with me in order to be nice. He did it to find out what I knew before I was put under the lamps down at headquarters. He didn’t beat Lorenz half to death just in order to make Lorenz tell the truth. He did it to make Lorenz tell anything De Spain wanted him to tell, including confessing to the murder of the Matson girl whom Lorenz probably didn’t even know.

  “Who called up headquarters and tipped the boys about the murder? De Spain. Who walked in there immediately afterwards and horned in on the investigation? De Spain. Who scratched the girl’s body up in a fit of jealous rage because she had ditched him for a better prospect? De Spain. Who still has blood and cuticle under the nails of his night hand which a good police chemist can do a lot with? De Spain. Take a look. I took several.”

  The chief turned his head very slowly, as if it were on a pivot. He whistled and the door opened and the other men came back into the room. De Spain didn’t move. The grin stayed on his face, carved there, a meaningless hollow grin that meant and looked as if it would never go away again.

  He said quietly: “And you the guy I thought was my pal. Well, you have some wild ideas, shamus. I will say that for you.”

  The chief said sharply: “It doesn’t make sense. If De Spain did kill her, then he was the one who tried to put you in a frame and the one that got you out of it. How come?”

  I said: “Listen. You can find out if De Spain knew the girl and how well. You can find out how much of his time tonight is not accounted for and make him account for it. You can find out if there is blood and cuticle under his nails and, within limits, whether it is or could be the girl’s blood and the girl’s skin. And whether it was there before De Spain hit Moss Lorenz, before he hit anybody. And he didn’t scratch Lorenz. That’s all you need and all you can use—except a confession. And I don’t think you’ll get that.

  “As to the frame, I would say De Spain followed the girl over to the Club Conried, or knew she had gone there and went oven himself. He saw her come out with me and he saw me put her in my car. That made him mad. He sapped me and the girl was too scared not to help him get me to her apartment and up into it. I don’t remember any of that. It would be nice if I did, but I don’t. They got me up there somehow, and they had a fight, and De Spain knocked her out and then he deliberately murdered her. He had some clumsy idea of making it look like a rape murder and making me the fall guy. Then he beat it, turned in an alarm, horned in on the investigation, and I got out of the apartment before I was caught there.

  “He realized by this time that he had done a foolish thing. He knew I was a private dick from L.A., that I had talked to Dolly Kincaid, and from the girl he probably knew that I had gone to see Conried. And he may easily have known I was interested in the Austrian case. Okay. He turned a foolish play into a smart one by stringing along with me on the investigation I was trying to make, helping me on it, getting my story, and then finding himself another and much better fall guy for the murder of the Matson girl.”

  De Spain said tonelessly: “I’m goin’ to start climbing on this guy in a minute, Chief. Okay?”

  The chief said: “Just a minute. What made you suspect De Spain at all?”

  “The blood and skin under his nails, and the brutal way he handled Lorenz, and the fact that the girl told me he had been her sweet and he pretended not to know who she was. What the hell more would I want?”

  De Spain said: “This.”

  He shot from his pocket with the white-handled gun he had taken from Dr. Austrian. Shooting from the pocket takes a lot of practice of a kind cops don’t get. The slug went a foot over my head and I sat down on the floor and Dr. Austrian stood up very quickly and swung his right hand into De Spain’s face, the hand that held the wide-mouthed brown bottle. A colorless liquid splashed into his eyes and smoked down his face. Any other man would have screamed. De Spain pawed the air with his left hand and the gun in his pocket banged three times more and Dr. Austrian fell sideways across the end of the desk and then collapsed to the floor, out of range. The gun went on banging.

  The other men in the room had all dropped to their knees. The chief jerked his hogleg up and shot De Spain twice in the body. Once would have been enough with that gun. De Spain’s body twisted in the air and hit the floor like a safe. The chief went over and knelt beside him and looked at him silently. He stood up and came back around the desk, then went back and stooped over Dr. Austrian.

  “This one’s alive,” he snapped. “Get on the phone, Weems.” The chunky, fat-faced man went around the far side of the desk and scooped the telephone towards him and started to dial. There was a sharp smell of acid and scorched flesh in the air, a nasty smell. We were standing up again now, and the little police chief was looking at me bleakly.

  “He oughtn’t to have shot at you,” he said. “You couldn’t have proved a thing. We wouldn’t have let you.”

  I didn’t say anything. Weems put the phone down and looked at Dr. Austrian again.

  “I think he’s croaked,” he said, from behind the desk.

  The chief kept on looking at me. “You take some awful chances, Mr. Dalmas. I don’t know what your game is, but I hope you like your chips.”

  “I’m satisfied,” I said. “I’d like to have had a chance to talk to my client before he was bumped off, but I guess I’ve done all I could for him. The hell of it is I liked De Spain. He had all the guts they ever made.”

  The chief said: “If you want to know about guts, try being a small-town chief of police some day.”

  I said: “Yeah. Tell somebody to tie a handkerchief around De Spain’s night hand, Chief. You kind of need the evidence yourself now.”

  A siren wailed distantly on Arguello Boulevard. The sound came faintly through the closed windows, like a coyote howling in the hills.

  THE LADY IN THE LAKE

  One—Not For Missing Persons

  I was breaking a new pair of shoes in on my desk that morning when Violets M’Gee called me up. It was a dull, hot, damp August day and you couldn’t keep your neck dry with a bath towel.

  “How’s the boy?” Violets began, as usual. “No business in a week, huh? There’s a guy named Howard Melton over in the Avenant Building lost track of his wife. He’s district manager for the Doreme Cosmetic Company. He don’t want to give it to Missing Persons for some reason. The boss knows him a little. Better get over there, and take your shoes off before you go in. It’s a pretty snooty outfit.”

  Violets M’Gee is a homicide dick in the sheriff’s office, and if it wasn’t for all the charity jobs he gives mc, I might be able to make a living. This looked a little different, so I put my feet on the floor and swabbed the back of my neck again and went oven there.

  The Avenant Building is on Olive near Sixth and has a black-and-white rubber pavement out in front. The elevator girls wear gray silk Russian blouses and the kind
of flop-over berets artists used to wear to keep the paint out of their hair. The Doreme Cosmetic Company was on the seventh floor and had a good piece of it. There was a big glass-walled reception room with flowers and Persian rugs and bits of nutty sculpture in glazed wane. A neat little blonde sat in a built-in switchboard at a big desk with flowers on it and a tilted sign reading: MISS VAN DE GRAAF. She wore Harold Lloyd cheaters and her hair was dragged back to where her forehead looked high enough to have snow on it.

  She said Mr. Howard Melton was in conference, but she would take my card in to him when she had an opportunity, and what was my business, please? I said I didn’t have a card, but the name was John Dalmas, from Mr. West.

  “Who is Mr. West?” she inquired coldly. “Does Mr. Melton know him?”

  “That’s past me, sister. Not knowing Mr. Melton I would not know his friends.”

  “What is the nature of your business?”

  “Personal.”

  “I see.” She initialed three papers on her desk quickly, to keep from throwing her pen set at mc. I went and sat in a blue leather chair with chromium arms. It felt, looked and smelled very much like a barber’s chair.

  In about half an hour a door opened beyond a bronze railing and two men came out backwards laughing. A third man held the door and echoed their laughter. They shook hands and the two men went away and the third man wiped the grin off his face in nothing flat and looked at Miss Van De Graaf. “Any calls?” he asked in a bossy voice.

  She fluttered papers and said: “No, sir. A Mr. —Dalmas to see you—from a Mr—West. His business is personal.”

  “Don’t know him,” the man barked. “I’ve got more insurance than I can pay for.” He gave me a swift, hard look and went into his room and slammed the door. Miss Van De Graaf smiled at me with delicate regret. I lit a cigarette and crossed my legs the other way. In another five minutes the door beyond the railing opened again and he came out with his hat on and sneered that he was going out for half an hour.