I thought of going to my house on Yucca Avenue. Too lonely. I thought of going to Anne’s place in Bay City. Worse. If they got wise to her, real hoods would think nothing of raping her and then beating her up.
It was the Poynter Street flop for me. Easily the safest place now. I went down to the waiting taxi and had him drive me to within three blocks of the so-called apartment house. I went upstairs, undressed and slept raw. Nothing bothered me but a broken spring. That bothered my back. I lay until 3.30 pondering the situation with my massive brain. I went to sleep with a gun under the pillow, which is a bad place to keep a gun when you have one pillow as thick and soft as a typewriter pad. It bothered me, so I transferred it to my right hand. Practice had taught me to keep it there even in sleep.
I woke up with the sun shining. I felt like a piece of spoiled meat. I struggled into the bathroom and doused myself with cold water and wiped off with a towel you couldn’t have seen if you held it sideways. This was a really gorgeous apartment. All it needed was a set of Chippendale furniture to graduate it into the slum class.
There was nothing to eat and if I went out, Miss-Nothing Marlowe might miss something. I had a pint of whiskey. I looked at it and smelled it, but I couldn’t take it for breakfast, on an empty stomach, even if I could reach my stomach, which was floating around near the ceiling. I looked into the closets in case a previous tenant might have left a crust of bread in a hasty departure. Nope. I wouldn’t have liked it anyhow, not even with whiskey on it. So I sat in the window. An hour of that and I was ready to bite a piece off a bellhop.
I dressed and went around the corner to the rent car and drove to an eatery. The waitress was sore too. She swept a cloth over the counter in front of me and let me have the last customer’s crumbs in my lap.
“Look, sweetness,” I said, “don’t be so generous. Save the crumbs for a rainy day. All I want is two eggs three minutes—no more—a slice of your famous concrete toast, a tall glass tomato juice with a dash of Lea and Perrins, a big happy smile, and don’t give anybody else any coffee. I might need it all.”
“I got a cold,” she said. “Don’t push me around. I might crack you one on the kisser.”
“Let’s be pals. I had a rough night too.”
She gave me a half-smile and went through the swing door sidewise. It showed more of her curves, which were ample, even excessive. But I got the eggs the way I liked them. The toast had been painted with melted butter past its bloom.
“No Lea and Perrins,” she said, putting down the tomato juice. “How about a little Tabasco? We’re fresh out of arsenic too.”
I used two drops of Tabasco, swallowed the eggs, drank two cups of coffee and was about to leave the toast for a tip, but I went soft and left a quarter instead. That really brightened her. It was a joint where you left a dime or nothing. Mostly nothing.
Back on Poynter nothing had changed. I got to my window again and sat. At about. 8.30 the man I had seen go into the apartment house across the way—the one with the same sort of height and build as Ikky—came out with a small briefcase and turned east. Two men got out of a dark blue sedan. They were of the same height and very quietly dressed and had soft hats pulled low over their foreheads. Each jerked out a revolver.
“Hey, Ikky!” one of them called out.
The man turned. “So long, Ikky,” the other man said. Gunfire racketed between the houses. The man crumpled and lay motionless. The two men rushed for their car and were off, going west. Halfway down the block I saw a Caddy pull out and start ahead of them.
In no time at all they were completely gone.
It was a nice swift clean job. The only thing wrong with it was that they hadn’t given it enough time for preparation.
They had shot the wrong man.
7
I got out of there fast, almost as fast as the two killers. There was a smallish crowd grouped around the dead man. I didn’t have to look at him to know he was dead—the boys were pros. Where he lay on the pavement on the other side of the street I couldn’t see him; people were in the way. But I knew just how he would look and I already heard sirens in the distance. It could have been just the routine shrieking from Sunset, but it wasn’t. So somebody had telephoned. It was too early for the cops to be going to lunch.
I strolled around the corner with my suitcase and jammed into the rent car and went away from there. The neighborhood was not my piece of shortcake any more. I could imagine the questions.
“Just what took you over there, Marlowe? You got a flop of your own, ain’t you?”
“I was hired by an ex-mobster in trouble with the Outfit. They’d sent killers after him.”
“Don’t tell us he was trying to go straight.”
“I don’t know. But I liked his money.”
“Didn’t do much to earn it, did you?”
“I got him away last night. I don’t know where he is now. I don’t want to know”
“You got him away?”
“That’s what I said.”
“Yeah—only he’s in the morgue with multiple bullet wounds. Try something better. Or somebody’s in the morgue.”
And on and on. Policeman’s dialogue. It comes out of an old shoe box. What they say doesn’t mean anything, what they ask doesn’t mean anything. They just keep boring in until you are so exhausted you flip on some detail. Then they smile happily and rub their hands, and say: “Kind of careless there, weren’t you? Let’s start all over again.”
The less I had of that, the better. I parked in my usual parking slot and went up to the office. It was full of nothing but stale air. Every time I went into the dump it felt more and more tired. Why the hell hadn’t I got myself a government job ten years ago? Make it fifteen years. I had brains enough to get a mail-order law degree. The country’s full of lawyers that couldn’t write a complaint without the book.
So I sat in my office chair and disadmired myself. After a while I remembered the pencil. I made certain arrangements with a forty-five gun, more gun than I ever carry—too much weight. I dialed the Sheriff’s Office and asked for Bernie Ohls. I got him. His voice was sour.
“Marlowe. I’m in trouble—real trouble.”
“Why tell me?” he growled. “You must be used to it by now.”
“This kind of trouble you don’t get used to. I’d like to come over and tell you.”
“You in the same office?”
“The same.”
“Have to go over that way. I’ll drop in.”
He hung up. I opened two windows. The gentle breeze wafted a smell of coffee and stale fat to me from Joe’s Eats next door. I hated it, I hated myself, I hated everything.
Ohls didn’t bother with my elegant waiting room. He rapped on my own door and I let him in. He scowled his way to the customer’s chair.
“Okay. Give.”
“Ever hear of a character named Ikky Rosenstein?”
“Why would I? Record?”
“An ex-mobster who got disliked by the mob. They put a pencil through his name and sent the usual two tough boys on a plane. He got tipped and hired me to help him get away.”
“Nice clean work.”
“Cut it out, Bernie.” I lit a cigarette and blew smoke in his face. In retaliation he began to chew a cigarette. He never lit one, but he certainly mangled them.
“Look,” I went on. “Suppose the man wants to go straight and suppose he doesn’t. He’s entitled to his life as long as he hasn’t killed anyone. He told me he hadn’t.”
“And you believed the hood, huh? When do you start teaching Sunday School?”
“I neither believed him nor disbelieved him. I took him on. There was no reason not to. A girl I know and I watched the planes yesterday. She spotted the boys and tailed them to a hotel. She was sure of what they were. They looked it right down to their black shoes. They got off the plane separately and then pretended to know each other and not to have noticed on the plane. This girl—”
“Would she have a name?”
>
“Only for you.”
“I’ll buy, if she hasn’t cracked any laws.”
“Her name is Anne Riordan. She lives in Bay City. Her father was once Chief of Police there. And don’t say that makes him a crook, because he wasn’t.”
“Uh-huh. Let’s have the rest. Make a little time too.”
“I took an apartment opposite Ikky. The killers were still at the hotel. At midnight I got Ikky out and drove with him as far as Pomona. He went on in his rent car and I came back by Greyhound. I moved into the apartment on Poynter Street, right across from his dump.”
“Why—if he was already gone?”
I opened the middle desk drawer and took out the nice sharp pencil. I wrote my name on a piece of paper and ran the pencil through it.
“Because someone sent me this. I didn’t think they’d kill me, but I thought they planned to give me enough of a beating to warn me off any more pranks.”
“They knew you were in on it?”
“Ikky was tailed here by a little squirt who later came around and stuck a gun in my stomach. I knocked him around a bit, but I had to let him go. I thought Poynter Street was safer after that. I live lonely.”
“I get around,” Bernie Ohls said. “I hear reports. So they gunned the wrong guy.”
“Same height, same build, same general appearance. I saw them gun him. I couldn’t tell if it was the two guys from the Beverly-Western. I’d never seen them. It was just two guys in dark suits with hats pulled down. They jumped into a blue Pontiac sedan, about two years old, and lammed off, with a big Caddy running crash for them.”
Bernie stood up and stared at me for a long moment. “I don’t think they’ll bother with you now,” he said. “They’ve hit the wrong guy. The mob will be very quiet for a while. You know something? This town is getting to be almost as lousy as New York, Brooklyn and Chicago. We could end up real corrupt.”
“We’ve made a hell of a good start.”
“You haven’t told me anything that makes me take action, Phil. I’ll talk to the city homicide boys. I don’t guess you’re in any trouble. But you saw the shooting. They’ll want that.”
“I couldn’t identify anybody, Bernie. I didn’t know the man who was shot. How did you know it was the wrong man?”
“You told me, stupid.”
“I thought perhaps the city boys had a make on him.”
“They wouldn’t tell me, if they had. Besides, they ain’t hardly had time to go out for breakfast. He’s just a stiff in the morgue to them until the ID comes up with something. But they’ll want to talk to you, Phil. They just love their tape recorders.”
He went out and the door whooshed shut behind him. I sat there wondering whether I had been a dope to talk to him. Or to take Ikky’s troubles on. Five thousand green men said no. But they can be wrong too.
Somebody banged on my door. It was a uniform holding a telegram. I receipted for it and tore it loose.
It said: “On my way to Flagstaff. Mirador Motor Court. Think I’ve been spotted. Come fast.”
I tore the wire into small pieces and burned them in my big ashtray.
8
I called Anne Riordan.
“Funny thing happened,” I told her, and told her about the funny thing.
“I don’t like the pencil,” she said. “And I don’t like the wrong man being killed, probably some poor bookkeeper in a cheap business or he wouldn’t be living in that neighborhood. You should never have touched it, Phil.”
“Ikky had a life. Where he’s going he might make himself decent. He can change his name. He must be loaded or he wouldn’t have paid me so much.”
“I said I didn’t like the pencil. You’d better come down here for a while. You can have your mail readdressed—if you get any mail. You don’t have to work right away anyhow. And L.A. Is oozing with private eyes.”
“You don’t get the point. I’m not through with the job. The city dicks have to know where I am, and if they do, all the crime beat reporters will know too. The cops might even decide to make me a suspect. Nobody who saw the shooting is going to put out a description that means anything. The American people know better than to be witnesses to gang killings.”
“All right, loud brain. But my offer stands.”
The buzzer sounded in the outside room. I told Anne I had to hang up. I opened the communicating door and a well-dressed—I might say elegantly dressed—middle-aged man stood six feet inside the outer door. He had a pleasantly dishonest smile on his face. He wore a white Stetson and one of those narrow ties that go through an ornamental buckle. His cream-colored flannel suit was beautifully tailored.
He lit a cigarette with a gold lighter and looked at me over the first puff of smoke.
“Mr. Marlowe?”
I nodded.
“I’m Foster Grimes from Las Vegas. I run the Rancho Esperanza on South Fifth. I hear you got a little involved with a man named Ikky Rosenstein.”
“Won’t you come in?”
He strolled past me into my office. His appearance told me nothing. A prosperous man who liked or felt it good business to look a bit western. You see them by the dozen in the Palm Springs winter season. His accent told me he was an easterner, but not New England. New York or Baltimore, likely. Long Island, the Berkshires—no, too far from the city.
I showed him the customer’s chair with a flick of the wrist and sat down in my antique swivel-squeaker. I waited.
“Where is Ikky now, if you know?”
“I don’t know, Mr. Grimes.”
“How come you messed with him?”
“Money.”
“A damned good reason,” he smiled. “How far did it go?”
“I helped him leave town. I’m telling you this, although I don’t know who the hell you are, because I’ve already told an old friend-enemy of mine, a top man in the Sheriff’s Office.”
“What’s a friend-enemy?”
“Law men don’t go around kissing me, but I’ve known him for years, and we are as much friends as a private star can be with a law man.”
“I told you who I was. We have a unique set-up in Vegas. We own the place except for one lousy newspaper editor who keeps climbing our backs and the backs of our friends. We let him live because letting him live makes us look better than knocking him off. Killings are not good business any more.”
“Like Ikky Rosenstein.”
“That’s not a killing. It’s an execution. Ikky got out of line.”
“So your gun boys had to rub the wrong guy. They could have hung around a little to make sure.”
“They would have, if you’d kept your nose where it belonged. They hurried. We don’t appreciate that. We want cool efficiency.”
“Who’s this great big fat ‘we’ you keep talking about?”
“Don’t go juvenile on me, Marlowe.”
“Okay. Let’s say I know”
“Here’s what we want.” He reached into his pocket and drew out a loose bill. He put it on the desk on his side. “Find Ikky and tell him to get back in line and everything is oke. With an innocent bystander gunned, we don’t want any trouble or any extra publicity. It’s that simple. You get this now” He nodded at the bill. It was a grand. Probably the smallest bill they had. “And another when you find Ikky and give him the message. If he holds out—curtains.”
“Suppose I say take your goddam grand and blow your nose with it?”
“That would be unwise.” He flipped out a Colt Woodsman with a short silencer on it. A Colt Woodsman will take one without jamming. He was fast too, fast and smooth. The genial expression on his face didn’t change.
“I never left Vegas,” he said calmly. “I can prove it. You’re dead in your office chair and nobody knows anything. Just another private eye that tried the wrong pitch. Put your hands on the desk and think a little. Incidentally, I’m a crack shot even with this damned silencer.”
“Just to sink a little lower in the social scale, Mr. Grimes, I ain’t putting no h
ands on no desk. But tell me about this.”
I flipped the nicely sharpened pencil across to him. He grabbed for it after a swift change of the gun to his left hand—very swift. He held the pencil up so that he could look at it without taking his eyes off me.
I said: “It came to me by Special Delivery mail. No message, no return address. Just the pencil. Think I’ve never heard about the pencil, Mr. Grimes?”
He frowned and tossed the pencil down. Before he could shift his long lithe gun back to his right hand I dropped mine under the desk and grabbed the butt of the .45 and put my finger hard on the trigger.
“Look under the desk, Mr. Grimes. You’ll see a .45 in an open-end holster. It’s fixed there and it’s pointing at your belly. Even if you could shoot me through the heart the .45 would still go off from a convulsive movement of my hand. And your belly would be hanging by a shred and you would be knocked out of that chair. A .45 slug can throw you back six feet. Even the movies learned that at last.”
“Looks like a Mexican stand-off,” he said quietly. He holstered his gun. He grinned. “Nice smooth work, Marlowe. We could use you. But it’s a long time for you and no time at all to us. Find Ikky and don’t be a drip. He’ll listen to reason. He doesn’t really want to be on the run for the rest of his life. We’d trace him eventually.”
“Tell me something, Mr. Grimes. Why pick on me? Apart from Ikky, what did I ever do to make you dislike me?”
Not moving, he thought a moment, or pretended to. “The Larsen case. You helped send one of our boys to the gas chamber. That we don’t forget. We had you in mind as a fall guy for Ikky. You’ll always be a fall guy, unless you play it our way. Something will hit you when you least expect it.”
“A man in my business is always a fall guy, Mr. Grimes. Pick up your grand and drift out quietly. I might decide to do it your way, but I have to think. As for the Larsen case, the cops did all the work. I just happened to know where he was. I don’t guess you miss him terribly.”
Collected Stories of Raymond Chandler Page 120
