I didn’t say anything. Canales looked back at Dorr. He said very precisely: “I have been bled by your organization for a long time. But this is something else again. Last night I was cheated out of some money. But this is trivial too. I am wanted for the murder of this Harger. A man named Cadena has been made to confess that I hired him…That is just a little too much fix.”
Dorr swayed gently over his desk, put his elbows down hard on it, held his face in his small hands and began to shake. His cigar was smoking on the floor.
Canales said: “I would like to get my money back, and I would like to get clear of this rap—but most of all I would like you to say something—so I can shoot you with your mouth open and see blood come out of it.”
Beasley’s body stirred on the carpet. His hands groped a little. Dorr’s eyes were agony trying not to look at him. Canales was rapt and blind in his act by this time. I moved my fingers a little more on the arm of my chair. But I had a long way to go.
Canales said: “Pina has talked to me. I saw to that. You killed Harger. Because he was a secret witness against Manny Tinnen. The D.A. Kept the secret, and the dick here kept it. But Harger could not keep it himself. He told his broad—and the broad told you…So the killing was arranged, in a way to throw suspicion with a motive on me. First on this dick, and if that wouldn’t hold, on me.”
There was silence. I wanted to say something, but I couldn’t get anything out. I didn’t think anybody but Canales would ever again say anything.
Canales said: “You fixed Pina to let Harger and his girl win my money. It was not hard—because I don’t play my wheels crooked.”
Dorr had stopped shaking. His face lifted, stone-white, and turned towards Canales, slowly, like the face of a man about to have an epileptic fit. Beasley was up on one elbow. His eyes were almost shut but a gun was laboring upwards in his hand.
Canales leaned forward and began to smile. His trigger finger whitened at the exact moment Beasley’s gun began to pulse and roar.
Canales arched his back until his body was a rigid curve. He fell stiffly forward, hit the edge of the desk and slid along it to the floor, without lifting his hands.
Beasley dropped his gun and fell down on his face again. His body got soft and his fingers moved fitfully, then were still.
I got motion into my legs, stood up and went to kick Canales’ gun under the desk—senselessly. Doing this I saw that Canales had fired at least once, because Frank Dorr had no right eye.
He sat still and quiet with his chin on his chest and a nice touch of melancholy on the good side of his face.
The door of the room came open and the secretary with the nose-glasses slid in pop-eyed. He staggered back against the door, closing it again. I could hear his rapid breathing across the room.
He gasped: “Is—is anything wrong?”
I thought that very funny, even then. Then I realized that he might be short-sighted and from where he stood Frank Dorr looked natural enough. The rest of it could have been just routine to Dorr’s help.
I said: “Yes—but we’ll take care of it. Stay out of here.”
He said: “Yes, sir,” and went out again. That surprised me so much that my mouth fell open. I went down the room and bent over the gray-haired Beasley. He was unconscious, but had a fair pulse. He was bleeding from the side, slowly.
Miss Glenn was standing up and looked almost as dopy as Canales had looked. She was talking to me quickly, in a brittle, very distinct voice: “I didn’t know Lou was to be killed, but I couldn’t have done anything about it anyway. They burned me with a branding iron—just for a sample of what I’d get. Look!”
I looked. She tore her dress down in front and there was a hideous burn on her chest almost between her two breasts.
I said: “Okey, sister. That’s nasty medicine. But we’ve got to have some law here now and an ambulance for Beasley.”
I pushed past her towards the telephone, shook her hand off my arm when she grabbed at me. She went on talking to my back in a thin, desperate voice.
“I thought they’d just hold Lou out of the way until after the trial. But they dragged him out of the cab and shot him without a word. Then the little one drove the taxi into town and the big one brought me up into the hills to a shack. Dorr was there. He told me how you had to be framed. He promised me the money, if I went through with it, and torture till I died, if I let them down.”
It occurred to me that I was turning my back too much to people. I swung around, got the telephone in my hands, still on the hook, and put my gun down on the desk.
“Listen! Give me a break,” she said wildly. “Dorr framed it all with Pina, the croupier. Pina was one of the gang that got Shannon where they could fix him. I didn’t—”
I said: “Sure—that’s all right. Take it easy.”
The room, the whole house seemed very still, as if a lot of people were hunched outside the door, listening.
“It wasn’t a bad idea,” I said, as if I had all the time in the world. “Lou was just a white chip to Frank Dorr. The play he figured put us both out as witnesses. But it was too elaborate, took in too many people. That sort always blows up in your face.”
“Lou was getting out of the state,” she said, clutching at her dress. “He was scared. He thought the roulette trick was some kind of a pay-off to him.”
I said: “Yeah,” lifted the phone and asked for police headquarters.
The room door came open again then and the secretary barged in with a gun. A uniformed chauffeur was behind him with another gun.
I said very loudly into the phone: “This is Frank Dorr’s house. There’s been a killing .
The secretary and the chauffeur dodged out again. I heard running in the hall. I clicked the phone, called the Telegram office and got Von Ballin. When I got through giving him the flash Miss Glenn was gone out of the window into the dark garden.
I didn’t go after her. I didn’t mind very much if she got away.
I tried to get Ohls, but they said he was still down at Solano. And by that time the night was full of sirens.
I had a little trouble but not too much. Fenweather pulled too much weight. Not all of the story came out, but enough so that the City Hall boys in the two-hundred-dollar suits had their left elbows in front of their faces for some time.
Pina was picked up in Salt Lake City. He broke and implicated four others of Manny Tinnen’s gang. Two of them were killed resisting arrest, the other two got life without parole.
Miss Glenn made a clean getaway and was never heard of again. I think that’s about all, except that I had to turn the twenty-two grand over to the Public Administrator. He allowed me two hundred dollars fee and nine dollars and twenty cents mileage. Sometimes I wonder what he did with the rest of it.
KILLER IN THE RAIN
1
We were sitting in a room at the Berglund. I was on the side of the bed, and Dravec was in the easy chair. It was my room.
Rain beat very hard against the windows. They were shut tight and it was hot in the room and I had a little fan going on the table. The breeze from it hit Dravec’s face high up, lifted his heavy black hair, moved the longer bristles in the fat path of eyebrow that went across his face in a solid line. He looked like a bouncer who had come into money.
He showed me some of his gold teeth and said: “What you got on me?”
He said it importantly, as if anyone who knew anything would know quite a lot about him.
“Nothing,” I said, “You’re clean, as far as I know.”
He lifted a large hairy hand and stared at it solidly for a minute.
“You don’t get me. A feller named M’Gee sent me here. Violets M’Gee.”
“Fine. How is Violets these days?” Violets M’Gee was a homicide dick in the sheriff’s office.
He looked at his large hand and frowned. “No—you still don’t get it. I got a job for you.”
“I don’t go out much any more,” I said. “I’m getting kind of frail
.”
He looked around the room carefully, bluffing a bit, like a man not naturally observant.
“Maybe it’s money,” he said.
“Maybe it is,” I said.
He had a belted suede raincoat on. He tore it open carelessly and got out a wallet that was not quite as big as a bale of hay. Currency stuck out of it at careless angles. When he slapped it down on his knee it made a fat sound that was pleasant to the ear. He shook money out of it, selected a few bills from the bunch, stuffed the rest back, dropped the wallet on the floor and let it lie, arranged five century notes like a light poker hand and put them under the base of the fan on the table.
That was a lot of work. It made him grunt.
“I got lots of sugar,” he said.
“So I see. What do I do for that, if I get it?”
“You know me now, huh?”
“A little better.”
I got an envelope out of an inside pocket and read to him aloud from some scribbling on the back.
“Dravec, Anton or Tony. Former Pittsburgh steelworker, truck guard, all-round muscle stiff. Made a wrong pass and got shut up. Left town, came West. Worked on an avocado ranch at El Seguro. Came up with a ranch of his own. Sat right on the dome when the El Seguro oil boom burst. Got rich. Lost a lot of it buying into other people’s dusters. Still has enough. Serbian by birth, six feet, two hundred and forty, one daughter, never known to have had a wife. No police record of any consequence. None at all since Pittsburgh.”
I lit a pipe.
“Jeeze,” he said. “Where you promote all that?”
“Connections. What’s the angle?”
He picked the wallet off the floor and moused around inside it with a couple of square fingers for a while, with his tongue sticking out between his thick lips. He finally got out a slim brown card and some crumpled slips of paper. He pushed them at me.
The card was in golf type, very delicately done. It said: “Mr. Harold Hardwicke Steiner,” and very small in the corner, “Rare Books and De Luxe Editions.” No address or phone number.
The white slips, three in number, were simple IOU’s for a thousand dollars each, signed: “Carmen Dravec” in a sprawling, moronic handwriting.
I gave it all back to him and said: “Blackmail?”
He shook his head slowly and something gentle came into his face that hadn’t been there before.
“It’s my little girl—Carmen. This Steiner, he bothers her. She goes to his joint all the time, makes whoopee. He makes love to her, I guess. I don’t like it.”
I nodded. “How about the notes?”
“I don’t care nothin’ about the dough. She plays-games with him. The hell with that. She’s what you call man-crazy. You go tell this Steiner to lay off Carmen. I break his neck with my hands. See?”
All this in a rush, with deep breathing. His eyes got small and round, and furious. His teeth almost chattered.
I said: “Why have me tell him? Why not tell him yourself?”
“Maybe I get mad and kill the——!” he yelled.
I picked a match out of my pocket and prodded the loose ash in the bowl of my pipe. I looked at him carefully for a moment, getting hold of an idea.
“Nerts, you’re scared to,” I told him.
Both fists came up. He held them shoulder high and shook them, great knots of bone and muscle. He lowered them slowly, heaved a deep honest sigh, and said: “Yeah. I’m scared to. I dunno how to handle her. All the time some new guy and all the time a punk. A while back I gave a guy called Joe Marty five grand to lay off her. She’s still mad at me.”
I stared at the window, watched the rain hit it, flatten out, and slide down in a thick wave, liked melted gelatin. It was too early in the fall for that kind of rain.
“Giving them sugar doesn’t get you anywhere,” I said. “You could be doing that all your life. So you figure you’d like to have me get rough with this one, Steiner.”
“Tell him I break his neck!”
“I wouldn’t bother,” I said. “I know Steiner. I’d break his neck for you myself, if it would do any good.”
He leaned forward and grabbed my hand. His eyes got childish. A gray tear floated in each of them.
“Listen, M’Gee says you’re a good guy. I tell you something I ain’t told nobody—ever. Carmen—she’s not my kid at all. I just picked her up in Smoky, a little baby in the street. She didn’t have nobody. I guess maybe I steal her, huh?”
“Sounds like it,” I said, and had to fight to get my hand loose. I rubbed feeling back into it with the other one. The man had a grip that would crack a telephone pole.
“I go straight then,” he said grimly, and yet tenderly. “I come out here and make good, She grows up. I love her.”
I said: “Uh-huh. That’s natural.”
“You don’t get me. I wanta marry her.”
I stared at him.
“She gets older, get some sense. Maybe she marry me, huh?” His voice implored me, as if I had the settling of that.
“Ever ask her?”
“I’m scared to,” he said humbly.
“She soft on Steiner, do you think?”
He nodded. “But that don’t mean nothin’.”
I could believe that. I got off the bed, threw a window up and let the rain hit my face for a minute.
“Let’s get this straight,” I said, lowering the window again and going back to the bed. “I can take Steiner off your back. That’s easy. I just don’t see what it buys you.”
He grabbed for my hand again, but I was a little too quick for him this time.
“You came in here a little tough, flashing your wad,” I said. “You’re going out soft. Not from anything I’ve said. You knew it already. I’m not Dorothy Dix, and I’m only partly a prune. But I’ll take Steiner off you, if you really want that.”
He stood up clumsily, swung his hat and stared down at my feet.
“You take him off my back, like you said. He ain’t her sort, anyway.”
“It might hurt your back a little.”
“That’s okay. That’s what it’s for,” he said.
He buttoned himself up, dumped his hat on his big shaggy head, and rolled on out. He shut the door carefully, as if he was going out of a sickroom.
I thought he was as crazy as a pair of waltzing mice, but I liked him.
I put his goldbacks in a safe place, mixed myself a long drink, and sat down in the chair that was still warm from him.
While I played with the drink I wondered if he had any idea what Steiner’s racket was.
Steiner had a collection of rare and half-rare smut books which he loaned out as high as ten dollars a day—to the right people.
2
It rained all the next day. Late in the afternoon I sat parked in a blue Chrysler roadster, diagonally across the Boulevard from a narrow store front, over which a green neon sign in script letters said: “H. H. Steiner.”
The rain splashed knee-high off the sidewalks, filled the gutters, and big cops in slickers that shone like gun barrels had a lot of fun carrying little girls in silk stockings and cute little rubber boots across the bad places, with a lot of squeezing.
The rain drummed on the hood of the Chrysler, beat and tore at the taut material of the top, leaked in at the buttoned places, and made a pool on the floorboards for me to keep my feet in.
I had a big flask of Scotch with me. I used it often enough to keep interested.
Steiner did business, even in that weather; perhaps especially in that weather. Very nice cars stopped in front of his store, and very nice people dodged in, then dodged out again with wrapped parcels under their arms. Of course they could have been buying rare books and deluxe editions.
At five-thirty a pimply-faced kid in a leather windbreaker came out of the store and sloped up the side street at a fast trot. He came back with a neat cream-and-gray coupe. Steiner came out and got into the coupe. He wore a dark green leather raincoat, a cigarette in an amber holder, no hat. I
couldn’t see his glass eye at that distance but I knew he had one. The kid in the windbreaker held an umbrella over him across the pavement, then shut it up and handed it into the coupe.
Steiner drove west on the Boulevard. I drove west on the Boulevard. Past the business district, at Pepper Canyon, he turned north, and I tailed him easily from a block back. I was pretty sure he was going home, which was natural.
He left Pepper Drive and took a curving ribbon of wet cement called La Verne Terrace, climbed up it almost to the top. It was a narrow road with a high bank on one side and a few well-spaced cabin-like houses built down the steep slope on the other side. Their roofs were not much above road level. The front of them were masked by shrubs. Sodden trees dripped all over the landscape.
Steiner’s hideaway had a square box hedge in front of it, more than window-high. The entrance was a sort of maze, and the house door was not visible from the road. Steiner put his gray-and-cream coupe in a small garage, locked up, went through the maze with his umbrella up, and light went on in the house.
While he was doing this I had passed him and gone to the top of the hill. I turned around there and went back and parked in front of the next house above his. It seemed to be closed up or empty, but had no signs on it. I went into a conference with my flask of Scotch, and then just sat.
At six-fifteen lights bobbed up the hill. It was quite dark by then. A car stopped in front of Steiner’s hedge. A slim, tall girl in a slicker got out of it. Enough light filtered out through the hedge for me to see that she was dark-haired and possibly pretty. Voices drifted on the rain and a door shut. I got out of the Chrysler and strolled down the hill, put a pencil flash into the car. It was a dark maroon or brown Packard convertible. Its licence read to Carmen Dravec, 3596 Lucerne Avenue. I went back to my heap. A solid, slow-moving hour crawled by. No more cars came up or down the hill. It seemed to be a very quiet neighborhood. Then a single flash of hard white light leaked out of Steiner’s house, like a flash of summer lightning. As the darkness fell again a thin tinkling scream trickled down the darkness and echoed faintly among the wet trees. I was out of the Chrysler and on my way before the last echo of it died.