It was my turn to crack the cardamom seeds.
He put his drink down in one piece and lunged for a mahogany call box on his desk. I caught the name Galbraith. I went over and unlocked the door.
We didn’t wait very long, but long enough for the chief to have two more drinks. His face got a better color.
Then the door opened and the big red-faced dick who had sapped me loafed through it, with a bulldog pipe clamped in his teeth and his hands in his pockets. He shouldered the door shut, leaned against it casually.
I said: “Hello, Sarge.”
He looked at me as if he would like to kick me in the face and not have to hurry about it.
“Badge!” the fat chief yelled. “Badge! Put it on the desk. You’re fired!”
Gaibraith went over to the desk slowly and put an elbow down on it, put his face about a foot from the chief’s nose, “What was that crack?” he asked thickly.
“You had Farmer Saint under your hand and let him go,” the chief yelled. “You and that saphead Duncan. You let him stick a shotgun in your belly and get away. You’re through. Fired. You ain’t got no more job than a canned oyster. Gimme your badge!”
“Who the hell is Farmer Saint?” Galbraith asked, unimpressed, and blew pipe smoke in the chief’s face.
“He don’t know,” the chief whined at me. “He don’t know. That’s the kind of material I got to work with.”
“What do you mean, work?” Galbraith inquired loosely.
The fat chief jumped as though a bee had stung the end of his nose. Then he doubled a meaty fist and hit Galbraith’s jaw with what looked like a lot of power. Galbraith’s head moved about half an inch.
“Don’t do that,” he said. “You’ll bust a gut and then where would the department be?” He shot a look at me, looked back at Fulwider. “Should I tell him?”
Fulwider looked at me, to see how the show was going over. I had my mouth open and a blank expression on my face, like a farm boy at a Latin lesson.
“Yeah, tell him,” he growled, shaking his knuckles back and forth.
Gaibraith stuck a thick leg over a corner of the desk and knocked his pipe out, reached for the whisky and poured himself a drink in the chief’s glass. He wiped his lips, grinned. When he grinned he opened his mouth wide, and he had a mouth a dentist could have got both hands in, up to the elbows.
He said calmly: “When me and Dunc crash the joint you was cold on the floor and the lanky guy was over you with a sap. The broad was on a window seat, with a lot of newspapers around her, okay. The lanky guy starts to tell us some yarn when a dog begins to howl out back and we look that way and the broad slips a sawed-off 12-gauge out of the newspapers and shows it to us. Well, what could we do except be nice? She couldn’t have missed and we could. So the guy gets more guns out of his pants and they tie knots around us and stick us in a closet that has enough chloroform in it to make us quiet, without the ropes. After a while we hear ‘em leave, in two cars. When we get loose the stiff has the place to hisself. So we fudge it a bit for the papers. We don’t get no new line yet. How’s it tie to yours?”
“Not bad,” I told him. “As I remember the woman phoned for some law herself. But I could be mistaken. The rest of it ties in with me being sapped on the floor and not knowing anything about it.”
Galbraith gave me a nasty look. The chief looked at his thumb.
“When I came to,” I said, “I was in a private dope and hooch cure out on Twenty-ninth. Run by a man named Sundstrand. I was shot so full of hop myself I could have been Rockefeller’s pet dime trying to spin myself.”
“That Sundstrand,” Galbraith said heavily. “That guy’s been a flea in our pants for a long time. Should we go out and push him in the face, Chief?”
“It’s a cinch Farmer Saint put Carmady in there,” Fulwider said solemnly. “So there must be some tie-up. I’d say yes, and take Carmady with you. Want to go?” he asked me.
“Do I?” I said heartily.
Gaibraith looked at the whisky bottle. He said carefully: “There’s a grand each on this Saint and his sister. If we gather them in, how do we cut it?”
“You cut me out,” I said. “I’m on a straight salary and expenses.”
Gaibraith grinned again. He teetered on his heels, grinning with thick amiability.
“Okydoke. We got your car in the garage downstairs. Some Jap phoned in about it. We’ll use that to go in—just you and me.”
“Maybe you ought to have more help, Gal,” the chief said doubtfully.
“Uh-uh. Just me and him’s plenty. He’s a tough baby or he wouldn’t be walkin’ around.”
“Well, all right,” the chief said brightly. “And we’ll just have a little drink on it.”
But he was still rattled. He forgot the cardamom seeds.
7
It was a cheerful spot by daylight. Tea-rose begonias made a solid mass under the front windows and pansies were a round carpet about the base of an acacia. A scarlet climbing rose covered a trellis to one side of the house, and a bronze-green hummingbird was prodding delicately in a mass of sweet peas that grew up the garage wall.
It looked like the home of a well-fixed elderly couple who had come to the ocean to get as much sun as possible in their old age.
Galbraith spat on my running-board and shook his pipe out and tickled the gate open, stamped up the path and flattened his thumb against a neat copper bell.
We waited. A grill opened in the door and a long sallow-face looked out at us under a starched nurse’s cap.
“Open up. It’s the law,” the big cop growled.
A chain rattled and a bolt slid back. The door opened. The nurse was a six-footer with long arms and big hands, an ideal torturer’s assistant. Something happened to her face and I saw she was smiling.
“Why, it’s Mr. Galbraith,” she chirped, in a voice that was high-pitched and throaty at the same time. “How are you, Mr. Galbraith? Did you want to see Doctor?”
“Yeah, and sudden,” Galbraith growled, pushing past her.
We went along the hall. The door of the office was shut. Galbraith kicked it open, with me at his heels and the big nurse chirping at mine.
Dr. Sundstrand, the total abstainer, was having a morning bracer out of a fresh quart bottle. His thin hair was stuck in wicks with perspiration and his bony mask of a face seemed to have a lot of lines in it that hadn’t been there the night before.
He took his hand off the bottle hurriedly and gave us his frozen-fish smile. He said fussily: “What’s this? What’s this? I thought I gave orders—”
“Aw, pull your belly in,” Galbraith said, and yanked a chair near the desk. “Dangle, sister.”
The nurse chirped something more and went back through the door. The door was shut. Dr. Sundstrand worked his eyes up and down my face and looked unhappy.
Galbraith put both his elbows on the desk and took hold of his bulging jowls with his fists. He stared fixedly, venomously, at the squirming doctor.
After what seemed a very long time he said, almost softly: “Where’s Farmer Saint?”
The doctor’s eyes popped wide. His Adam’s apple bobbled above the neck of his smock. His greenish eyes began to look bilious.
“Don’t stall!” Galbraith roared. “We know all about your private hospital racket, the crook hideout you’re runnin’, the dope and women on the side. You made one slip too many when you hung a snatch on this shamus from the big town. Your big city protection ain’t going to do you no good on this one. Come on, where is Saint? And where’s that girl?”
I remembered, quite casually, that I had not said anything about Isobel Snare in front of Galbraith—if that was the girl he meant.
Dr. Sundstrand’s hand flopped about on his desk. Sheer astonishment seemed to be adding a final touch of paralysis to his uneasiness.
“Where are they?” Galbraith yelled again.
The big door opened and the big nurse fussed in again. “Now, Mr. Galbraith, the patients. Please remember th
e patients, Mr. Galbraith.”
“Go climb up your thumb,” Galbraith told her, over his shoulder.
She hovered by the door. Sundstrand found his voice at last. It was a mere wisp of a voice. It said wearily: “As if you didn’t know.”
Then his darting hand swept into his smock, and out again, with a gun glistening in it. Galbraith threw himself sideways, clean out of the chair. The doctor shot at him twice, missed twice. My hand touched a gun, but didn’t draw it. Galbraith laughed on the floor and his big right hand snatched at his armpit, came up with a Lugar. It looked like my Lugar. It went off, just once.
Nothing changed in the doctor’s long face. I didn’t see where the bullet hit him. His head came down and hit the desk and his gun made thud on the floor. He lay with his face on the desk, motionless.
Galbraith pointed his gun at me, and got up off the floor. I looked at the gun again. I was sure it was my gun.
“That’s a swell way to get information,” I said aimlessly.
“Hands down, shamus. You don’t want to play.”
I put my hands down. “Cute,” I said. “I suppose this whole scene was framed just to put the chill on Doc.”
“He shot first, didn’t he?”
“Yeah,” I said thinly. “He shot first.”
The nurse was sidling along the wall towards me. No sound had come from her since Sundstrand pulled his act. She was almost at my side. Suddenly, much too late, I saw the flash of knuckles on her good right hand, and hair on the back of the hand.
I dodged, but not enough. A crunching blow seemed to split my head wide open. I brought up against the wall, my knees full of water and my brain working hard to keep my right hand from snatching at a gun.
I straightened. Galbraith leered at me.
“Not so very smart,” I said. “You’re still holding my Luger. That sort of spoils the plan, doesn’t it?”
“I see you get the idea, shamus.”
The chirpy-voiced nurse said, in a blank pause: “Jeeze, the guy’s got a jaw like a elephant’s foot. Damn if I didn’t split a knuck on him.”
Galbraith’s little eyes had death in them. “How about upstairs?” he asked the nurse.
“All out last night. Should I try one more swing?”
“What for? He didn’t go for his gat, and he’s too tough for you, baby. Lead is his meat.”
I said: “You ought to shave baby twice a day on this job.”
The nurse grinned, pushed the starched cap and the stringy blond wig askew on a bullet head. She—or more properly he—reached a gun from under the white nurse’s uniform.
Galbraith said: “It was self-defense, see? You tangled with Doe, but he shot first. Be nice and me and Dune will try to remember it that way.”
I rubbed my jaw with my left hand. “Listen, Sarge. I can take a joke as well as the next fellow. You sapped me in that house on Carolina Street and didn’t tell about it. Neither did I. I figured you had reasons and you’d let me in on them at the right time. Maybe I can guess what the reasons are. I think you know where Saint is, or can find out. Saint knows where the Snare girl is, because he had her dog. Let’s put a little more into this deal, something for both of us.”
“We’ve got ours, sappo. I promised Doc I’d bring you back and let him play with you. I put Dune in here in the nurse’s rig to handle you for him. But he was the one we really wanted to handle.”
“All right,” I said. “What do I get out of it?”
“Maybe a little more living.”
I said: “Yeah. Don’t think I’m kidding you—but look at that little window in the wall behind you.”
Galbraith didn’t move, didn’t take his eyes off me. A thick sneer curved his lips.
Duncan, the female impersonator, looked—and yelled.
A small, square, tinted glass window high up in the corner of the back wall had swung open quite silently. I was looking straight at it, past Galbraith’s ear, straight at the black snout of a tommy gun, on the sill, at the two hard black eyes behind the gun.
A voice I had last heard soothing a dog said: “How’s to drop the rod, sister? And you at the desk—grab a cloud.”
8
The big cop’s mouth sucked for air. Then his whole face lightened and he jerked around and the Luger gave one hard, sharp cough.
I dropped to the floor as the tommy gun cut loose in a short burst. Galbraith crumpled beside the desk, fell on his back with his legs twisted. Blood came out of his nose and mouth.
The cop in nurse’s uniform turned as white as the starched cap. His gun bounced. His hands tried to claw at the ceiling.
There was a queer, stunned silence. Powder smoke reeked. Farmer Saint spoke downward from his perch at the window, to somebody outside the house.
A door opened and shut distinctly and running steps came along the hall. The door of our room was pushed wide. Diana Saint came in with a brace of automatics in her hands. A tall, handsome woman, neat and dark, with a rakish black hat, and two gloved hands holding guns.
I got up off the floor, keeping my hands in sight. She tossed her voice calmly at the window, without looking towards it.
“Okay, Jerry. I can hold them.”
Saint’s head and shoulders and his submachine gun went away from the frame of the window, leaving blue sky and the thin, distant branches of a tall tree.
There was a thud, as if feet dropped off a ladder to a wooden porch. In the room we were five statues, two fallen.
Somebody had to move. The situation called for two more killings. From Saint’s angle I couldn’t see it any other way. There had to be a cleanup.
The gag hadn’t worked when it wasn’t a gag. I tried it again when it was. I looked past the woman’s shoulder, kicked a hard grin on to my face, said hoarsely:
“Hello, Mike. Just in time.”
It didn’t fool her, of course, but it made her mad. She stiffened her body and snapped a shot at me from the right-hand gun. It was a big gun for a woman and it jumped. The other gun jumped with it. I didn’t see where the shot went. I went in under the guns.
My shoulder hit her thigh and she tipped back and hit her head against the jamb of the door. I wasn’t too nice about knocking the guns out of her hands. I kicked the door shut, reached up and yanked the key around, then scrambled back from a high-heeled shoe that was doing its best to smash my nose for me.
Duncan said: Keeno,” and dived for his gun on the floor.
“Watch that little window, if you want to live,” I snarled at him.
Then I was behind the desk, dragging the phone away from Dr. Sundstrand’s dead body, dragging it as far from the line of the door as the cord would let me. I lay down on the floor with it and started to dial, on my stomach.
Diana’s eyes came alive on the phone. She screeched: “They’ve got me, Jerry! They’ve got me!”
The machine gun began to tear the door apart as I bawled into the ear of a bored desk sergeant.
Pieces of plaster and wood flew like fists at an Irish wedding. Slugs jerked the body of Dr. Sundstrand as though a chill was shaking him back to life. I threw the phone away from me and grabbed Diana’s guns and started in on the door for our side. Through a wide crack I could see cloth. I shot at that.
I couldn’t see what Duncan was doing. Then I knew. A shot that couldn’t have come through the door smacked Diana Saint square on the end of her chin. She went down again, stayed down.
Another shot that didn’t come through the door lifted my hat. I rolled and yelled at Duncan. His gun moved in a stiff arc, following me. His mouth was an animal snarl. I yelled again.
Four round patches of red appeared in a diagonal line across the nurse uniform, chest high. They spread even in the short time it took Duncan to fall.
There was a siren somewhere. It was my siren, coming my way, getting louder.
The tommy gun stopped and a foot kicked at the door. It shivered, but held at the lock. I put four more slugs into it, well away from the lock.
&n
bsp; The siren got louder. Saint had to go. I heard his step running away down the hall. A door slammed. A car started out back in an alley. The sound of its going got less as the approaching siren screeched into a crescendo.
I crawled over to the woman and looked at blood on her face and hair and soft soggy places on the front of her coat. I touched her face. She opened her eyes slowly, as if the lids were very heavy.
“Jerry—” she whispered.
“Dead,” I lied grimly. “Where’s Isobel Snare, Diana?”
The eyes closed. Tears glistened, the tears of the dying.
“Where’s Isobel, Diana?” I pleaded. “Be regular and tell me. I’m no cop. I’m her friend. Tell me, Diana.”
I put tenderness and wistfulness into it, everything I had.
The eyes half opened. The whisper came again:. “Jerry—” then it trailed off and the eyes shut. Then the lips moved once more, breathed a word that sounded like “Monty.”
That was all. She died.
I stood up slowly and listened to the sirens.
9
It was getting late and lights were going on here and there in a tall office building across the street. I had been in Fulwider’s office all the afternoon. I had told my story twenty times. It was all true—what I told.
Cops had been in and out, ballistics and print men, record men, reporters, half a dozen city officials, even an A.P. Correspondent. The correspondent didn’t like his handout and said so.
The fat chief was sweaty and suspicious. His coat was off and his armpits were black and his short red hair curled as if it had been singed. Not knowing how much or little I knew he didn’t dare lead me. All he could do was yell at me and whine at me by turns, and try to get me drunk in between.
I was getting drunk and liking it.
“Didn’t nobody say anything at all!” he wailed at me for the hundredth time.
I took another drink, flopped my hand around, looked silly. “Not a word, Chief,” I said owlishly. “I’m the boy that would tell you. They died too sudden.”
He took hold of his jaw and cranked it. “Damn funny,” he sneered. “Four dead ones on the floor and you not even nicked.”