Collected Stories (Everyman's Library)

by Raymond Chandler

  “I don’t need no tools to handle that bunch. The hell with it.” And with a sweep of his arm he hurled the pistol off among the bushes, where it fell to the ground with a muffled thud. He walked away from the car and stood with his arms akimbo, looking up at the sky.

  I moved over beside him and watched his averted face, insofar as I was able to see it in that dim light. A strange melancholy came over me. In the brief time I had known Henry I had grown very fond of him.

  “Well, Henry,” I said at last, “what is the next move?”

  “Beat it on home, I guess,” he said slowly and mournfully. “And get good and drunk.” He doubled his hands into fists and shook them slowly. Then he turned to face me. “Yeah,” he said. “Nothing else to do. Beat it on home, kid, is all that is left to us.”

  “Not quite yet, Henry,” I said softly.

  I took my right hand out of my pocket. I have large hands. In my right hand nestled the roll of wrapped quarters which I had obtained at the bank that morning. My hand made a large fist around them.

  “Good night, Henry,” I said quietly, and swung my fist with all the weight of my arm and body. “You had two strikes on me, Henry,” I said. “The big one is still left.”

  But Henry was not listening to me. My fist with the wrapped weight of metal inside it had caught him fairly and squarely on the point of his jaw. His legs became boneless and he pitched straight forward, brushing my sleeve as he fell. I stepped quickly out of his way.

  Henry Eichelberger lay motionless on the ground, as limp as a rubber glove.

  I looked down at him a little sadly, waiting for him to stir, but he did not move a muscle. He lay inert, completely unconscious. I dropped the roll of quarters back into my pocket, bent over him, searched him thoroughly, moving him around like a sack of meal, but it was a long time before I found the pearls. They were twined around his ankle inside his left sock.

  “Well, Henry,” I said, speaking to him for the last time, although he could not hear me, “you are a gentleman, even if you are a thief. You could have taken the money a dozen times this afternoon and given me nothing. You could have taken it a little while ago when you had the gun in your hand, but even that repelled you. You threw the gun away and we were man to man, far from help, far from interference. And even then you hesitated, Henry. In fact, Henry, I think for a successful thief you hesitated just a little too long. But as a man of sporting feelings I can only think the more highly of you. Goodbye, Henry, and good luck.”

  I took my wallet out and withdrew a one-hundred-dollar bill and placed it carefully in the pocket where I had seen Henry put his money. Then I went back to the car and took a drink out of the whiskey bottle and corked it firmly and laid it beside him, convenient to his right hand.

  I felt sure that when he awakened he would need it.

  8

  It was past ten o’clock when I returned home to my apartment, but I at once went to the telephone and called Ellen Macintosh. “Darling!” I cried. “I have the pearls.”

  I caught the sound of her indrawn breath over the wire. “Oh darling,” she said tensely and excitedly, “and you are not hurt? They did not hurt you, darling? They just took the money and let you go?”

  “There were no ‘they,’ darling,” I said proudly. “I still have Mr. Gallemore’s money intact. There was only Henry.”

  “Henry!” she cried in a very strange voice. “But I thought—Come over here at once, Walter Gage, and tell me—”

  “I have whiskey on my breath, Ellen.”

  “Darling! I’m sure you needed it. Come at once.”

  So once more I went down to the street and hurried to Carondelet Park and in no time at all was at the Penruddock residence. Ellen came out on the porch to meet me and we talked there quietly in the dark, holding hands, for the household had gone to bed. As simple as I could I told her my story.

  “But darling,” she said at last, “how did you know it was Henry? I thought Henry was your friend. And this other voice on the telephone—”

  “Henry was my friend,” I said a little sadly, “and that is what destroyed him. As to the voice on the telephone, that was a small matter and easily arranged. Henry was away from me a number of times to arrange it. There was just one small point that gave me thought. After I gave Gandesi my private card with the name of my apartment house scribbled upon it, it was necessary for Henry to communicate to his confederate that we had seen Gandesi and given him my name and address. For of course when I had this foolish, or perhaps not so very foolish idea of visiting some well-known underworld character in order to send a message that we would buy back the pearls, this was Henry’s opportunity to make me think the telephone message came as a result of our talking to Gandesi, and telling him our difficulty. But since the first call came to me at my apartment before Henry had had a chance to inform his confederate of our meeting with Gandesi, it was obvious that a trick had been employed.

  “Then I recalled that a car had bumped into us from behind and Henry had gone back to abuse the driver. And of course the bumping was deliberate, and Henry had made the opportunity for it on purpose, and his confederate was in the car. So Henry, while pretending to shout at him, was able to convey the necessary information.”

  “But, Walter,” Ellen said, having listened to this explanation a little impatiently, “that is a very small matter. What I really want to know is how you decided that Henry had the pearls at all.”

  “But you told me he had them,” I said. “You were quite sure of it. Henry is a very durable character. It would be just like him to hide the pearls somewhere, having no fear of what the police might do to him, and get another position and then after perhaps quite a long time, retrieve the pearls and quietly leave this part of the country.”

  Ellen shook her head impatiently in the darkness of the porch. “Walter,” she said sharply, “you are hiding something. You could not have been sure and you would not have hit Henry in that brutal way, unless you had been sure. I know you well enough to know that.”

  “Well, darling,” I said modestly, “there was indeed another small indication, one of those foolish trifles which the cleverest men overlook. As you know, I do not use the regular apartment house telephone, not wishing to be annoyed by solicitors and such people. The phone which I use is a private line and its number is unlisted. But the calls I received from Henry’s confederate came over that phone, and Henry had been in my apartment a great deal, and I had been careful not to give Mr. Gandesi that number, because of course I did not expect anything from Mr. Gandesi, as I was perfectly sure from the beginning that Henry had the pearls, if only I could get him to bring them out of hiding.”

  “Oh, darling,” Ellen cried, and threw her arms around me. “How brave you are, and I really think that you are actually clever in your own peculiar way. Do you believe that Henry was in love with me?”

  But that was a subject in which I had no interest whatever. I left the pearls in Ellen’s keeping and late as the hour now was I drove at once to the residence of Mr. Lansing Gallemore and told him my story and gave him back his money.

  A few months later I was happy to receive a letter postmarked in Honolulu and written on a very inferior brand of paper.

  Well, pal, that Sunday punch of yours was the money and I did not think you had it in you, altho of course I was not set for it. But it was a pip and made me think of you for a week every time I brushed my teeth. It was too bad I had to scram because you are a sweet guy altho a little on the goofy side and I’d like to be getting plastered with you right now instead of wiping oil valves where I am at which is not where this letter is mailed by several thousand miles. There is just two things I would like you to know and they are both kosher. I did fall hard for that tall blonde and this was the main reason I took my time from the old lady. Glomming the pearls was just one of those screwy ideas a guy can get when he is dizzy with a dame. It was a crime the way they left them marbles lying around in that bread box and I worked for a Frenchy
once in Djibouty and got to know pearls enough to tell them from snowballs. But when it came to the clinch down there in that brush with us two alone and no holds barred I just was too soft to go through with the deal. Tell that blonde you got a loop on I was asking for her.

  YRS. As ever,

  HENRY EICHELBERGER (Alias)

  P. S. What do you know, that punk that did the phone work on you tried to take me for a fifty cut on that C note you tucked in my vest. I had to twist the sucker plenty.

  Yrs. H. E. (Alias)

  TROUBLE IS MY BUSINESS

  1

  Anna Halsey was about two hundred and forty pounds of middle-aged putty-faced woman in a black tailor-made suit. Her eyes were shiny black shoe buttons, her cheeks were as soft as suet and about the same color. She was sitting behind a black glass desk that looked like Napoleon’s tomb and she was smoking a cigarette in a black holder that was not quite as long as a rolled umbrella. She said: “I need a man.”

  I watched her shake ash from the cigarette to the shiny top of the desk where flakes of it curled and crawled in the draft from an open window.

  “I need a man good-looking enough to pick up a dame who has a sense of class, but he’s got to be tough enough to swap punches with a power shovel. I need a guy who can act like a bar lizard and backchat like Fred Allen, only better, and get hit on the head with a beer truck and think some cutie in the leg-line topped him with a breadstick.”

  “It’s a cinch,” I said. “You need the New York Yankees, Robert Donat, and the Yacht Club Boys.”

  “You might do,” Anna said, “cleaned up a little. Twenty bucks a day and ex’s. I haven’t brokered a job in years, but this one is out of my line. I’m in the smooth-angles of the detecting business and I make money without getting my can knocked off. Let’s see how Gladys likes you.”

  She reversed the cigarette holder and tipped a key on a large black-and-chromium annunciator box. “Come in and empty Anna’s ash tray, honey.”

  We waited.

  The door opened and a tall blonde dressed better than the Duchess of Windsor strolled in.

  She swayed elegantly across the room, emptied Anna’s ash tray, patted her fat cheek, gave me a smooth rippling glance and went out again.

  “I think she blushed,” Anna said when the door closed. “I guess you still have it.”

  “She blushed—and I have a dinner date with Darryl Zanuck,” I said. “Quit horsing around. What’s the story?”

  “It’s to smear a girl. A redheaded number with bedroom eyes. She’s shill for a gambler and she’s got her hooks into a rich man’s pup.”

  “What do I do to her?”

  Anna sighed. “It’s kind of a mean job, Philip, I guess. If she’s got a record of any sort, you dig it up and toss it in her face. If she hasn’t, which is more likely as she comes from good people, it’s kind of up to you. You get an idea once in a while, don’t you?”

  “I can’t remember the last one I had. What gambler and what rich man?”

  “Marty Estel.”

  I started to get up from my chair, then remembered that business had been bad for a month and that I needed the money.

  I sat down again.

  “You might get into trouble, of course,” Anna said. “I never heard of Marty bumping anybody off in the public square at high noon, but he don’t play with cigar coupons.”

  “Trouble is my business,” I said. “Twenty-five a day and guarantee of two-fifty, if I pull the job.”

  “I gotta make a little something for myself,” Anna whined.

  “O.K. There’s plenty of coolie labor around town. Nice to have seen you looking so well. So long, Anna.”

  I stood up this time. My life wasn’t worth much, but it was worth that much. Marty Estel was supposed to be pretty tough people, with the right helpers and the right protection behind him. His place was out in West Hollywood, on the Strip. He wouldn’t pull anything crude, but if he pulled at all, something would pop.

  “Sit down, it’s a deal,” Anna sneered. “I’m a poor old broken-down woman trying to run a high-class detective agency on nothing but fat and bad health, so take my last nickel and laugh at me.”

  “Who’s the girl?” I had sat down again.

  “Her name is Harriet Huntress—a swell name for the part too. She lives in the El Milano, nineteen-hundred block on North Sycamore, very high-class. Father went broke back in thirty-one and jumped out of his office window. Mother dead. Kid sister in boarding school back in Connecticut. That might make an angle.”

  “Who dug up all this?”

  “The client got a bunch of photostats of notes the pup had given to Marty. Fifty grand worth. The pup—he’s an adopted son to the old man—denied the notes, as kids will. So the client had the photostats experted by a guy named Arbogast, who pretends to be good at that sort of thing. He said O.K. And dug around a bit, but he’s too fat to do legwork, like me, and he’s off the case now.”

  “But I could talk to him?”

  “I don’t know why not.” Anna nodded several of her chins.

  “This client—does he have a name?”

  “Son, you have a treat coming. You can meet him in person—right now.”

  She tipped the key of her call box again. “Have Mr. Jeeter come in, honey.”

  “That Gladys,” I said, “does she have a steady?”

  “You lay off Gladys!” Anna almost screamed at me. “She’s worth eighteen grand a year in divorce business to me. Any guy that lays a finger on her, Philip Marlowe, is practically cremated.”

  “She’s got to fall some day,” I said. “Why couldn’t I catch her?”

  The opening door stopped that.

  I hadn’t seen him in the paneled reception room, so he must have been waiting in a private office. He hadn’t enjoyed it. He came in quickly, shut the door quickly, and yanked a thin octagonal platinum watch from his vest and glared at it. He was a tall white-blond type in pin-striped flannel of youthful cut. There was a small pink rosebud in his lapel. He had a keen frozen face, a little pouchy under the eyes, a little thick in the lips. He carried an ebony cane with a silver knob, wore spats and looked a smart sixty, but I gave him close to ten years more. I didn’t like him.

  “Twenty-six minutes, Miss Halsey,” he said icily. “My time happens to be valuable. By regarding it as valuable I have managed to make a great deal of money.”

  “Well, we’re trying to save you some of the money,” Anna drawled. She didn’t like him either. “Sorry to keep you waiting, Mr. Jeeter, but you wanted to see the operative I selected and I had to send for him.”

  “He doesn’t look the type to me,” Mr. Jeeter said, giving me a nasty glance. “I think more of a gentleman—”

  “You’re not the Jeeter of Tobacco Road, are you?” I asked him.

  He came slowly towards me and half lifted the stick. His icy eyes tore at me like claws. “So you insult me,” he said. “Me—a man in my position.”

  “Now wait a minute,” Anna began.

  “Wait a minute nothing,” I said. “This party said I was not a gentleman. Maybe that’s O.K. For a man in his position, whatever it is—but a man in my position doesn’t take a dirty crack from anybody. He can’t afford to. Unless, of course, it wasn’t intended.”

  Mr. Jeeter stiffened and glared at me. He took his watch out again and looked at it. “Twenty-eight minutes,” he said. “I apologize, young man. I had no desire to be rude.”

  “That’s swell,” I said. “I knew you weren’t the Jeeter in Tobacco Road all along.”

  That almost started him again, but he let it go. He wasn’t sure how I meant it.

  “A question or two while we are together,” I said. “Are you willing to give this Huntress girl a little money—for expenses?”

  “Not one cent,” he barked. “Why should I?”

  “It’s got to be a sort of custom. Suppose she married him. What would he have?”

  “At the moment a thousand dollars a month from a trust fund
established by his mother, my late wife.” He dipped his head. “When he is twenty-eight years old, far too much money.”

  “You can’t blame the girl for trying,” I said. “Not these days. How about Marty Estel? Any settlement there?”

  He crumpled his gray gloves with a purple-veined hand. “The debt is uncollectible. It is a gambling debt.”

  Anna sighed wearily and flicked ash around on her desk.

  “Sure,” I said. “But gamblers can’t afford to let people welsh on them. After all, if your son had won, Marty would have paid him.”

  “I’m not interested in that,” the tall thin man said coldly.

  “Yeah, but think of Marty sitting there with fifty grand in notes. Not worth a nickel. How will he sleep nights?”

  Mr. Jeeter looked thoughtful. “You mean there is danger of violence?” he suggested, almost suavely.

  “That’s hard to say. He runs an exclusive place, gets a good movie crowd. He has his own reputation to think of. But he’s in a racket and he knows people. Things can happen—a long way off from where Marty is. And Marty is no bathmat. He gets up and walks.”

  Mr. Jeeter looked at his watch again and it annoyed him. He slammed it back into his vest. “All that is your affair,” he snapped. “The district attorney is a personal friend of mine. If this matter seems to be beyond your powers—”

  “Yeah,” I told him. “But you came slumming down our street just the same. Even if the D.A. Is in your vest pocket—along with that watch.”

  He put his hat on, drew on one glove, tapped the edge of his shoe with his stick, walked to the door and opened it.

  “I ask results and I pay for them,” he said coldly. “I pay promptly. I even pay generously sometimes, although I am not considered a generous man. I think we all understand one another.”

  He almost winked then and went on out. The door closed softly against the cushion of air in the door-closer. I looked at Anna and grinned.

  “Sweet, isn’t he?” she said. “I’d like eight of him for my cocktail set.”