A friend in the sheriff’s office gave me your name as a man I could trust. I have been a heel and am in a jam and all I want now is to get clear. Please come after dark to 524 Tennyson Arms Apartments, Harvard near Sixth, and use key to enter if I am out. Look out for Pat Reel, the manager, as I don’t trust him. Please put the slipper in a safe place and keep it clean. P.S. They call him Violets, I never knew why.
I knew why. It was because he chewed violet-scented breath purifiers. The note was unsigned. It sounded a little jittery to me. I unwound the tissue paper. It contained a green velvet pump, size about 4A lined with white kid. The name Verschoyle was stamped in flowing gold script on the white kid insole. On the side a number was written very small in indelible ink—S465—where a size number would be, but I knew it wasn’t a size number because Verschoyle, Inc., on Cherokee Street in Hollywood made only custom shoes from individual lasts, and theatrical footwear and riding boots.
I leaned back and lit a cigarette and thought about it for a while. Finally I reached for the phone book and looked up the number of Verschoyle, Inc., and dialed it. The phone rang several times before a chirpy voice said: “Hello? Yes?”
“Verschoyle—in person,” I said. “This is Peters, Identification Bureau.” I didn’t say what identification bureau.
“Oh, Mr. Verschoyle has gone home. We’re closed, you know. We close at five-thirty. I’m Mr. Pringle, the bookkeeper. Is there anything—”
“Yeah. We got a couple of your shoes in some stolen goods. The mark is S-Four-Six-Five. That mean anything to you?”
“Oh yes, of course. That’s a last number. Shall I look it up for you?”
“By all means,” I said.
He was back in no time at all. “Oh yes, indeed, that is Mrs. Leland Austrian’s number. Seven-thirty-six Altair Street, Bay City. We made all her shoes. Very sad. Yes. About two months ago we made her two pairs of emerald velvet pumps.”
“What do you mean, sad?”
“Oh, she’s dead, you know. Committed suicide.”
“The hell you say. Two pairs of pumps, huh?”
“Oh yes, both the same you know. People often order delicate colors in pairs like that. You know a spot or stain of any kind—and they might be made to match a certain dress—”
“Well, thanks a lot and take care of yourself,” I said, and gave the phone back to him.
I picked up the slipper again and looked it over carefully. It hadn’t been worn. There was no sign of rubbing on the buffed leather of the thin sole. I wondered what Harry Matson was doing with it. I put it in my office safe and went out to dinner.
Two—Murder On The Cuff
The Tennyson Arms was an old-fashioned dump, about eight stories high, faced with dark red brick. It had a wide center court with palm trees and a concrete fountain and some prissy-looking flower beds. Lanterns hung beside the Gothic door and the lobby inside was paved with red plush. It was large and empty except for a bored canary in a gilt cage the size of a barrel. It looked like the sort of apartment house where widows would live on the life insurance—not very young widows. The elevator was the self-operating kind that opens both doors automatically when it stops.
I walked along the narrow maroon carpet of the fifth-floor hallway and didn’t see anybody, hear anybody, or smell anybody’s cooking. The place was as quiet as a minister’s study. Apartment 524 must have opened on the center court because a stained-glass window was right beside its door. I knocked, not loud, and nobody came to the door so I used the flat key and went in, and shut the door behind me.
A mirror glistened in a wall bed across the room. Two windows in the same wall as the entrance door were shut and dark drapes were drawn half across them, but enough light from some apartment across the court drifted in to show the dark bulk of heavy, overstuffed furniture, ten years out of date, and the shine of two brass doorknobs. I went over to the windows and pulled the drapes closed, then used my pocket flash to find my way back to the door. The light switch there set off a big cluster of flame-colored candles in the ceiling fixture. They made the room look like a funeral-chapel annex. I put the light on in a red standing lamp, doused the ceiling light and started to give the place the camera eye.
In the narrow dressing room behind the wall bed there was a built-in bureau with a black brush and comb on it and gray hairs in the comb. There was a can of talcum, a flashlight, a crumpled man’s handkerchief, a pad of writing paper, a bank pen and a bottle of ink on a blotter—about what one suitcase would hold in the drawers. The shirts had been bought in a Bay City men’s furnishing store. There was a dark gray suit on a hanger and a pair of black brogues on the floor. In the bathroom there was a safety razor, a tube of brushless cream, some blades, three bamboo toothbrushes in a glass, a few other odds and ends. On the porcelain toilet tank there was a book bound in red cloth—Dorsey’s Why We Behave Like Human Beings. It was marked at page 116 by a rubber band. I had it open and was reading about the Evolution of Earth, Life and Sex when the phone started to ring in the living room.
I snicked off the bathroom light and padded across the carpet to the davenport. The phone was on a stand at one end. It kept on ringing and a horn tooted outside in the street, as if answering it. When it had rung eight times I shrugged and reached for it.
“Pat? Pat Reel?” the voice said.
I didn’t know how Pat Reel would talk. I grunted. The voice at the other end was hard and hoarse at the same time. It sounded like a tough-guy voice.
“Pat?”
“Sure,” I said.
There was silence. It hadn’t gone over. Then the voice said: “This is Harry Matson. Sorry as all hell I can’t make it back tonight. Just one of those things. That bother you much?”
“Sure,” I said.
“What’s that?”
“Sure.”
“Is ‘sure’ all the words you know, for God’s sake?”
“I’m a Greek.”
The voice laughed. It seemed pleased with itself.
I said: “What kind of toothbrushes do you use, Harry?”
“Huh?”
This was a startled explosion of breath—not so pleased now.
“Toothbrushes—the little dinguses some people brush their teeth with. What kind do you use?”
“Aw, go to hell.”
“Meet you on the step,” I said.
The voice got mad now. “Listen, smart monkey! You ain’t pulling nothin’, see? We got your name, we got your number, and we got a place to put you if you don’t keep your nose clean, see? And Harry don’t live there any more, ha, ha.”
“You picked him off, huh?”
“I’ll say we picked him off. What do you think we done, took him to a picture show?”
“That’s bad,” I said. “The boss won’t like that.”
I hung up in his face and put the phone down on the table at the end of the davenport and rubbed the back of my neck. I took the door key out of my pocket and polished it on my handkerchief and laid it down carefully on the table. I got up and walked across to one of the windows and pulled the drapes aside far enough to look out into the court. Across its palm dotted oblong, on the same floor level I was on, a bald-headed man sat in the middle of a room under a hard, bright light, and didn’t move a muscle. He didn’t look like a spy.
I let the drapes fall together again and settled my hat on my head and went over and put the lamp out. I put my pocket flash down on the floor and palmed my handkerchief on the doorknob and quietly opened the door.
Braced to the door frame by eight hooked fingers, all but one of which were white as wax, there hung what was left of a man.
He had eyes an eighth of an inch deep, china-blue, wide open. They looked at me but they didn’t see me. He had coarse gray hair on which the smeared blood looked purple. One of his temples was a pulp, and the tracery of blood from it reached clear to the point of his chin. The one straining finger that wasn’t white had been pounded to shreds as far as the second joint. Sharp splinters o
f bone stuck out of the mangled flesh. Something that might once have been a fingernail looked now like a ragged splinter of glass.
The man wore a brown suit with patch pockets, three of them. They had been torn off and hung at odd angles showing the dark alpaca lining beneath.
He breathed with a faraway unimportant sound, like distant footfalls on dead leaves. His mouth was strained open like a fish’s mouth, and blood bubbled from it. Behind him the hallway was empty as a new-dug grave.
Rubber heels squeaked suddenly on the bare space of wood beside the hall runner. The man’s straining fingers slipped from the door frame and his body started to wind up on his legs. The legs couldn’t hold it. They scissored and the body turned in mid-air, like a swimmer in a wave, and then jumped at me.
I clamped my teeth hard and spread my feet and caught him from behind, after his torso had made a half turn. He weighed enough for two men. I took a step back and nearly went down, took two more and then I had his dragging heels clear of the doorway. I let him down on his side as slowly as I could, crouched over him panting. After a second I straightened, went over to the door and shut and locked it. Then I switched the ceiling light on and started for the telephone.
He died before I reached it. I heard the rattle, the spent sigh, then silence. An out flung hand, the good one, twitched once and the fingers spread out slowly into a loose curve and stayed like that. I went back and felt his carotid artery, digging my fingers in hard. Not a flicker of a pulse. I got a small steel mirror out of my wallet and held it against his open mouth for a long minute. There was no trace of mist on it when I took it away. Harry Matson had come home from his ride.
A key tickled at the outside of the door lock and I moved fast. I was in the bathroom when the door opened, with a gun in my hand and my eyes to the crack of the bathroom door.
This one came in quickly, the way a wise cat goes through a swing door. His eyes flicked up at the ceiling lights, then down at the floor. After that they didn’t move at all. All his big body didn’t move a muscle. He just stood and looked.
He was a big man in an unbuttoned overcoat, as if he had just come in or was just going out. He had a gray felt hat on the back of a thick creamy-white head. He had the heavy black eyebrows and broad pink face of a boss politician, and his mouth looked as if it usually had the smile—but not now. His face was all bone and his mouth jiggled a half-smoked cigar along his lips with a sucking noise.
He put a bunch of keys back in his pocket and said “God!” very softly, over and over again. Then he took a step forward and went down beside the dead man with a slow, clumsy motion. He put large fingers into the man’s neck, took them away again, shook his head, looked slowly around the room. He looked at the bathroom door behind which I was hiding, but nothing changed in his eyes.
“Fresh dead,” he said, a little louder. “Beat to a pulp.”
He straightened up slowly and rocked on his heels. He didn’t like the ceiling light any better than I had. He put the standing lamp on and switched the ceiling light off, rocked on his heels some more. His shadow crawled up the end wall, started across the ceiling, paused and dropped back again. He worked the cigar around in his mouth, dug a match out of his pocket and relit the butt carefully, turning it around and around in the flame. When he blew the match out he put it in his pocket. He did all this without once taking his eyes off the dead man on the floor.
He moved sideways over to the davenport and let himself down on the end of it. The springs squeaked dismally. He reached for the phone without looking at it, eyes still on the dead man.
He had the phone in his hand when it started to ring again. That jarred him. His eyes rolled and his elbows jerked against the sides of his thick over-coated body. Then he grinned very carefully and lifted the phone off the cradle and said in a rich, fruity voice: “Hello. Yeah, this is Pat.”
I heard a dry, inarticulate croaking noise on the wire, and I saw Pat Reel’s face slowly congest with blood until it was the color of fresh beef liver. His big hand shook the phone savagely.
“So it’s Mister Big Chin!” he blared. “Well, listen here, saphead, you know something? Your stiff is right here on my carpet, that’s where he is…How did he get here? How the hell would I know? Ask me, you croaked him here, and lemme tell you something. It’s costing you plenty, see, plenty. No murder on the cuff in my house. I spot a guy for you and you knock him off in my lap, damn you! I’ll take a grand and not a cent less, and you come and get what’s here and I mean get it, see?”
There was more croaking on the wire. Pat Reel listened. His eyes got almost sleepy and the purple died out of his face. He said more steadily: “Okay. Okay. I was only kidding…Call me in half an hour downstairs.”
He put down the phone and stood up. He didn’t look towards the bathroom door, he didn’t look anywhere. He began to whistle. Then he scratched his chin and took a step towards the door, stopped to scratch his chin again. He didn’t know there was anybody in the apartment, he didn’t know there wasn’t anybody in the apartment—and he didn’t have a gun. He took another step towards the door. Big Chin had told him something and the idea was to get out. He took a third step, then he changed his mind.
“Aw hell,” he said out loud. “That screwy mug.” Then his eyes ranged round the apartment swiftly. “Tryin’ to kid me, huh?”
His hand raised to the chain switch. Suddenly he let it fall and knelt beside the dead man again. He moved the body a little, rolling it without effort on the carpet, and put his face down close to squint at the spot where the head had lain. Pat Reel shook his head in displeasure, got to his feet and put his hands under the dead man’s armpits. He threw a glance over his shoulder at the dark bathroom and started to back towards me, dragging the body, grunting, the cigar butt still clamped in his mouth. His creamy-white hair glistened cleanly in the lamplight.
He was still bent over with his big legs spraddled when I stepped out behind him. He may have heard me at the last second but it didn’t matter. I had shifted the gun to my left hand and I had a small pocket sap in my right. I laid the sap against the side of his head, just behind his right ear, and I laid it as though I loved it.
Pat Reel collapsed forward across the sprawled body he was dragging, his head down between the dead man’s legs. His hat rolled gently off to the side. He didn’t move. I stepped past him to the door and left.
Three—Gentleman Of The Press
Over on Western Avenue I found a phone booth and called the sheriff’s office. Violets M’Gee was still there, just ready to go home.
I said: “What was the name of your kid brother-in-law that works on the throw-away paper down at Bay City?”
“Kincaid. They call him Dolly Kincaid. A little feller.”
“Where would he be about now?”
“He hangs around the city hall. Think he’s got a police beat. Why?”
“I saw Matson,” I said. “Do you know where he’s staying?”
“Naw. He just called me on the phone. What you think of him?”
“I’ll do what I can for him. Will you be home tonight?”
“I don’t know why not. Why?”
I didn’t tell him why. I got into my car and pointed it towards Bay City. I got down there about nine. The police department was half a dozen rooms in a city hall that belonged in the hookworm-and-Bible belt. I pushed past a knot of smoothies into an open doorway where there was light and a counter. There was a PBX board in the corner and a uniformed man behind it.
I put an arm on the counter and a plainclothes man with his coat off and an under-arm holster looking the size of a wooden leg against his ribs took one eye off his paper and said, “Yeah?” and bonged a spittoon without moving his head more than an inch.
I said: “I’m looking for a fellow named Dolly Kincaid.”
“Out to eat. I’m holdin’ down his beat,” he said in a solid, unemotional voice.
“Thanks. You got a pressroom here?”
“Yeah. Got a toilet,
too. Wanta see?”
“Take it easy,” I said. “I’m not trying to get fresh with your town.”
He bonged the spittoon again. “Pressroom’s down the hall. Nobody in it. Dolly’s due back, if he don’t get drowned in a pop bottle.”
A small-boned, delicate-faced young man with a pink complexion and innocent eyes strolled into the room with a half-eaten hamburger sandwich in his left hand. His hat, which looked like a reporters hat in a movie, was smashed on the back of his small blond head. His shirt collar was unbuttoned at the neck and his tie was pulled to one side. The ends of it hung out over his coat. The only thing the matter with him for a movie newshawk was that he wasn’t drunk. He said casually: “Anything stirring, boys?”
The big black-haired plainclothes man bonged his private spittoon again and said: “I hear the mayor changed his underpants, but it’s just a rumor.”
The small young man smiled mechanically and turned away. The cop said: “This guy wants to see you, Dolly.”
Kincaid munched his hamburger and looked at me hopefully. I said: “I’m a friend of Violets’. Where can we talk?”
“Let’s go into the pressroom,” he said. The black-haired cop studied me as we went out. He had a look in his eyes as if he wanted to pick a fight with somebody, and he thought I would do.
We went along the hall towards the back and turned into a room with a long, bare, scarred table, three or four wooden chairs and a lot of newspapers on the floor. There were two telephones on one end of the table, and a flyblown framed picture in the exact center of each wall—Washington, Lincoln, Horace Greeley, and the other one somebody I didn’t recognize. Kincaid shut the door and sat on one end of the table and swung his leg and bit into the last of his sandwich.
I said: “I’m John Dalmas, a private dick from L.A. How’s to take a ride over to Seven thirty-six Altair Street and tell me what you know about the Austrian case? Maybe you better call M’Gee up and get him to introduce us.” I pushed a card at him.
Collected Stories (Everyman's Library) Page 78
