“The Torrence brothers ain’t ringers. They’re real hard boys. They proved it—even if they did make a mistake.”
“Mistake nothing. They got Ikky Rossen. You’re just a singing commercial in this deal. And as of now you’re under arrest for murder. You’re worse off than that. The Outfit will habeas corpus you out of the clink and blow you down. You’ve served your purpose and you failed to finger me into a patsy.”
His finger tightened on the trigger. I shot the gun out of his hand. The gun in my coat pocket was small, but at that distance accurate. And it was one of my days to be accurate.
He made a faint moaning sound and sucked at his hand. I went over and kicked him hard in the chest. Being nice to killers is not part of my repertoire. He went over backward and stumbled four or five steps. I picked up his gun and held it on him while I tapped all the places—not just pockets or holsters—where a man could stash a second gun. He was clean—that way anyhow.
“What are you trying to do to me?” he whined. “I paid you. You’re clear. I paid you damn well.”
“We both have problems there. Your’s is to stay alive.” I took a pair of cuffs out of my pocket and wrestled his hands behind him and snapped them on. His hand was bleeding. I tied his show handkerchief around it and then went to the telephone and called the police.
I had to stick around for a few days, but I didn’t mind that as long as I could have trout caught eight or nine thousand feet up. I called Anne and Bernie Ohls. I called my answering service. The Arizona D.A. was a young keen-eyed man and the chief of police was one of the biggest men I ever saw.
I got back to L.A. in time and took Anne to Romanoff’s for dinner and champagne.
“What I can’t see,” she said over a third glass of bubbly, “is why they dragged you into it, why they set up the fake Ikky Rossen. Why didn’t they just let the two lifetakers do their job?”
“I couldn’t really say. Unless the big boys feel so safe they’re developing a sense of humor. And unless this Larsen guy who went to the gas chamber was bigger than he seemed to be. Only three or four important mobsters have made the electric chair or the rope or the gas chamber. None that I know of in the life-imprisonment states like Michigan. If Larsen was bigger than anyone thought, they might have had my name on a waiting list.”
“But why wait?” she asked me. “They’d go after you quickly.”
“They can afford to wait. Who’s going to bother them? Except when they make a mistake.”
“Income tax rap?”
“Yeah, like Capone. Capone may have had several hundred men killed, and killed a few of them himself, personally. But it took the Internal Revenue boys to get him. But the Outfit won’t make that mistake often.”
“What I like about you, apart from your enormous personal charm, is that when you don’t know an answer you make one up.”
“The money worries me,” I said. “Five grand of their dirty money. What do I do with it?”
“Don’t be a jerk all your life. You earned the money and you risked your life for it. You can buy Series E Bonds—they’ll make the money clean. And to me that would be part of the joke.”
“You tell me one good sound reason why they pulled the switch.”
“You have more of a reputation than you realize. And suppose it was the false Ikky who pulled the switch? He sounds like one of these over-clever types that can’t do anything simple.”
“The Outfit will get him for making his own plans—if you’re right.”
“If the D.A. doesn’t. And I couldn’t care less about what happens to him. More champagne, please.”
They extradited “Ikky” and he broke under pressure and named the two gunmen—after I had already named them, the Torrence brothers. But nobody could find them. They never went home. And you can’t prove conspiracy on one man. The law couldn’t even get him for accessory after the fact. They couldn’t prove he knew the real Ikky had been gunned.
They could have got him for some trifle, but they had a better idea. They left him to his friends. They just turned him loose.
Where is he now? My hunch says nowhere.
Anne Riordan was glad it was all over and I was safe. Safe—that isn’t a word you use in my trade.
SIXTY-FOUR SQUARES
* * *
* * *
J. MADISON DAVIS
IT WAS A hot evening, and a couple of cottages down somebody switched his radio from one crummy song to another. I poured myself a fresh Scotch, set the bottle on the opposite side of the chess board, and leaned over my spine-broken book. I was replaying the seventh game of the 1927 championship, trying to figure out why Alexander Alekhine didn’t see it. He’d spent years preparing for José Raoul Capablanca and was about to rip away the title, but in this game the Cuban moved B-Q5! and it must have felt like a slap from a woman who’s been squeezing your thigh. You know you’re finished, but you don’t know why you didn’t see it. There are only sixty-four squares and sixteen pieces.
I had just picked up the bishop when a jarhead, about six foot three hundred and the weight of a rush hour bus, ripped open my screen door. “You move and I’ll hurt you,” he said.
“It’s Alekhine’s turn,” I said. “Not mine.”
He tried to digest this while a smaller man flashed a badge. “You Marlowe?” I set down the bishop. “I heard of you,” he said. “And I thought meeting Mae West was a letdown!”
“She stole my make-up when I tossed her over,” I said. “Yours, too, from the look of it.”
“They said you was a smart-ass,” said the big cop. “Slicker’n Pennzoil. Maybe your time’s run out.”
“Could be,” I said.
The little man held out a glassine envelope. One of my cards was in it. “Yours?”
“It was when I got it printed,” I said. “How’d it get to be evidence?”
“I think you know.”
“Over the past twenty years I’ve probably given out, oh, lemme see. . . .Two of them. How would I know which one this is?”
The little man bowed his back. “We figure you wanted it found. Kind of like an advertisement, isn’t it?”
“More like a business card.”
He slipped the envelope into his coat pocket. “How much did you get for it?”
“The card?”
“For icing Vanderjack,” growled the big man. He bumped the coffee table, leveling Capablanca’s elegant attack.
“Hey!” I said.
“Stay put!”
I settled back in, raising my palms. “I haven’t seen Vanderjack since yesterday. You do mean Jimmy Vanderjack?”
The cop scanned my Scotch’s label, then made a face like it was battery acid. “The late Jimmy Vanderjack. His wife said he got threats. You were supposed to help him. You didn’t.”
I wanted to deck the bastard, because it was true. I’d worn my feet to the ankles trying to help Jimmy, but got nowhere. And now he was dead.
Vanderjack was a bulldog, squat and slobbery, wiping the corner of his mouth with the back of his hand. He made an appointment for after his shift, but he got caught in traffic and arrived late. He looked so green I didn’t say anything about the time. Instead, I asked if he needed a belt. It was a rhetorical question, given the cast of his skin.
“I’ll get fired,” he said. “I drive for Great Wall.” I’d seen the trucks. They had a squiggle of the Great Wall of China on the side, with a slogan promising they could move the Wall itself brick by brick.
“I could give you a belt and a mint.” I took the peppermint tin out of my drawer. It felt empty. Luckily, he didn’t change his mind. “So what’s the story?”
He offered me a photograph, damp from his wallet. “This is my wife,” he said. “And my girls.”
“Divorce isn’t—.”
“They’re going to kill them, and I don’t know why.” His lip quivered. I thought he might throw up. I told him to pull himself together.
A week ago he had arrived at work, and the di
spatcher handed him a letter. He’d never gotten any mail at work, and the manila envelope had no address. Inside was a piece of canary yellow paper that said, “IF YOU TALK YOU WILL DIE.”
He thought it was a gag. None of the drivers owned up to it, but he figured maybe they had second thoughts about how funny it was. He’d almost forgotten it when the phone rang as he watched Perry Como the next night. “You didn’t see nothing,” said a calm voice. “Understand? We know where you live.”
Vanderjack didn’t sleep too soundly, but he was a tough guy and still made it for a sick joke. By dawn he was more angry than afraid. He told the other drivers he’d break them in half. That afternoon, he delivered two desks and a bookshelf to the Los Angeles Times. When he came outside, the truck’s tires were flat, stabbed with something like an ice pick.
Finally, when he got home, his toughness melted like Vaseline on a bodybuilder’s chest. A man had stopped his ten-year-old and handed her an envelope for her daddy. With shaking hands Vanderjack offered it to me.
“IT ISN’T JUST YOU WILL GET HURT.” The same canary paper. No watermark. Nothing on the back. The envelope the kind you mail checks in had blue hatching inside.
I swallowed my whiskey and filled my pipe. “No drink?” He shook his head. “Don’t you think you’d better tell me what you saw?”
“I don’t know!” he said, suddenly angry.
“Look, fella, if you don’t speak up me, you can haul your carcass out of here. I can’t protect you or your family if you don’t trust me.”
“That’s just it, mister! I don’t know what I’m supposed to shut up about. What if I deliver to another newspaper? To a police station? They’ll hurt my girls!” He smacked his fist into his palm. “Hell, I don’t know why I’m here. I haven’t got the money for this. It’s gotta be a bad joke. I’ll kill the man who—.”
Maybe I didn’t want to spend the next couple of work days with Capablanca. “I’ll ask around,” I interrupted. “If I don’t find anything, you buy me a case of these peppermints. Otherwise, I get my full fee.”
He didn’t ask me how much. That told me he was scared to the middle of his guts. It was probably nothing, I told him, but we’d get his wife and kids out of harm’s way. He dropped off his truck at Great Wall, then I drove him home. His wife had freckles and pale skin. She was the kind of overworked woman who made casseroles out of day-old noodles and meat from a can. I did a half-dozen dodges to break any tail, then set them up at a motel near Disneyland. There was a swimming pool. The youngest girl, with a hole where her front teeth ought to be, couldn’t stop jabbering about it.
While his kids played in the shallow end with their mother, Jimmy went over every delivery on the day previous to receiving the first note, and then places he asked for directions or stopped for lunch. I had him go through the day before that, too, then repeat it all. He was hazy on addresses, but they were on the delivery forms. On the weekends he didn’t wander further than the Dairy Queen two blocks away and then only for his girls.
The only thing unusual was a delivery to a bumper plating shed at the edge of the desert: drums of chemicals labeled “corrosive.” He got lost and drove onto a movie set, ruining some kind of battle scene with his dust. A lot of guys were dressed like in the movie Desert Fox, he said. The director raged at him, but his assistant drew Vanderjack a map. The bumper place smelled awful, he said. It made him glad to be driving truck for a living.
“You unload the shipments?” I asked him. But no dice. The customers saved a lot by unloading it themselves. He just pulled up and unlocked the back. He had been alone. The guy riding with him the day before hadn’t gotten any threats.
The next morning I pressured his dispatcher for the work orders. Great Wall would deliver anything quick, but not cheap. It was the deliverer of last resort, when you didn’t have time to wait. A piano, crates from the train station, the chemical drums, a couple dozen file boxes for an insurance company. Jimmy had made about a dozen deliveries in two days. I followed his route, going to each address around the same time he had been there. I had lunch in the same Woolworth’s. I read building directories, made conversation with doormen, watched businesses from across the street, and drove out to the bumper place at the edge of the desert.
It smelled like they were dissolving maiden aunts in the vats, but if they were, they weren’t making a lot on the inheritances. Re-plated fenders gleamed on a rack like starlets’ new teeth. The owner wasn’t particularly friendly but seemed too eager to sell a coat of chrome for my peeling fenders to be up to anything like running horse over the border. He’d heard the crackling of the gunfire several miles “thatta way” and had seen dust from the movie company’s trucks. On a dozen different dirt roads, I found shell casings, beer cans, a sock, and, as the sun lowered, a rattler big enough to swallow a Buick. I got the hell out of there.
I made a few more inquiries. The lawyer who had his piano moved was an eminent sleaze. A dummy corporation owned one of the buildings Jimmy’d delivered to, but this meant nothing. A secretary I knew at Universal said she’d heard something about a war movie, but didn’t think it was shooting yet. A screenwriter who was once a client told me tv people sometimes sneaked out to the desert and illegally filmed on the cheap.
After three days I had nothing but sore joints. I took a run at Vanderjack again, but he remembered nothing new. No new threats had shown up, so I told him he was probably okay. He was real happy at the idea of bringing his wife and kids home.
“I didn’t marry her so’s I could sleep alone,” he said. It was the last thing I remember him saying to me. I told him to forget about the mints, to buy his girls some candy instead.
“That was yesterday,” I told the little cop.
“He was called to a pickup this afternoon.” He glanced at his partner. “Where was that again?”
“Why don’t you tell us, Marlowe?” said the big man.
“Because I wouldn’t know. Why are you dimwits trying to pin this on me?” ’
The big man kicked the chessboard. Pieces skittered over the floor.
“You pick those up,” I snarled, “or I’ll shove them up your nose.”
“Behave!” snorted the little cop. “How’s this? Vanderjack sees something. He tells you what it is. Or something he says tells you. My guess is it has to do with that mob guy Sonny Williams evaporating. You see a chance to acquire some coin. You talk to the mob. Vanderjack trusts you. It’s easy to ice him. You toss your card on his chest just to make sure the spaghetti boys know.”
“You’ve been sitting too close to your tv. The radiation’s burned your brain. Arrest me or get the hell out of my living room.”
“Not until we get your gun,” said the big guy. He was begging me to start something. He could see my .38 from where he stood, on the back of the end table.
“Take it,” I said, “but bring it back soon. I might want to whack another client.”
“Very funny,” said the little cop. “We will be back.”
The big cop bent to put my gun in his jacket pocket. I could have kicked him between the eyes. I must be getting genteel. “Don’t I get a receipt?”
Before he left, the big cop ground one of my pawns into the linoleum with his heel. I thought of Jimmy Vanderjack’s anemic wife. I remembered the way he’d looked at his girls in the swimming pool. I felt lower than the crushed pawn.
I didn’t wait for morning. I hit an all-night diner and stoked up on coffee while I ran it through my mind. Nothing clicked. Whatever Jimmy had seen was worth warning him and watching him and, finally, killing him. It had to be somewhere he could be noticed seeing whatever it was. Why didn’t he know what he had seen? Why couldn’t I tell what it was? A woman in the lawyer’s house? Jimmy took her for the wife, but she wasn’t? Maybe whatever he thought he was delivering wasn’t what was on the manifest, and they thought he knew. A corpse in the piano? Sonny Williams’ monogrammed smoking jacket? The fender from James Dean’s Porsche?
I got to the
loading dock as the morning edition came out. Jimmy had been shot in his truck behind a warehouse, at least eight times with a .45. The cops had taken my .38. They either were planting fish stories in the paper or were stupid. My guess was the latter.
I kept coming back to the movie in the desert. It would have sounded stranger in any other burg but L. A. This is the kind of town you can bump into Dracula, cadge a cigarette from Mickey Rooney, or stick your feet in what Jayne Mansfield’s poodle left on the sidewalk while Jayne presses her hands into wet cement. A bunch of grown men running around with Nazi uniforms is like a Sunday in church here. Still, Jimmy had been alone with the movie people. Or maybe he passed something along the road there. I called a reporter I knew at Variety. He didn’t like being awakened, but said there were at least three studio movies in production dealing with the second World War, and who knew how many independents, tv pilots, and porn flicks might use Afrika Korps uniforms?
Everything was a dead end. The pieces were all in front of me, but I couldn’t see a pattern. I’d missed something. Maybe it was time to get out of this racket, get marriage right and cultivate roses and nose hairs. For no particular reason I decided to drive back out to the desert. I had been up and down a lot of dirt but had no idea if I had been on the same roads Jimmy had. Maybe I’d get lucky. Everything on this case was a maybe. I hadn’t eaten since the cops crashed into my living room. I had a bad taste in my mouth, and when I stopped for gas, I bought a new tin box of peppermints.
I first suspected the shiny four-door on the main highway, but when I turned off, I was sure. I made them for cops. What would they be doing out here? I decided to give them a long time explaining how they got the city’s car so filthy, so I drove fast. We did five or six miles and a couple of turns. I pulled over, leaned against the wheel well, and popped a mint.
They braked about twenty feet from me, glanced around at the emptiness, then watched me for a minute. When they opened the doors, they were leveling .45’s. They might have been twins: twin haircuts, twin sunglasses. The only thing that didn’t match was their facial scars. Their suits, straining at the shoulders, were too stylish for cops and their shoes too conservative for mobsters.
Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe Page 44
