He went on smiling. “Same old story.” He shrugged. “Police work. Phooey. She started with facts, as she knew facts. But they didn’t come fast enough or seem exciting enough. So she tried a little lily-gilding.”
He turned and we went out into the hall. A faint noise of sobbing came from the back of the house. For some patient man, long dead, that had been the weapon of final defeat, probably. Tome it was just an old woman sobbing, but nothing to be pleased about.
We went quietly out of the house, shut the front door quietly and made sure that the screen door didn’t bang. Randall put his hat on and sighed. Then he shrugged, spreading his cool well-kept hands out far from his body. There was a thin sound of sobbing still audible, back in the house.
The mailman’s back was two houses down the street.
“Police work,” Randall said quietly, under his breath, and twisted his mouth.
We walked across the space to the next house. Mrs. Florian hadn’t even taken the wash in. It still jittered, stiff and yellowish on the wire line in the side yard. We went up on the steps and rang the bell. No answer. We knocked. No answer.
“It was unlocked last time,” I said.
He tried the door, carefully screening the movement with his body. It was locked this time. We went down off the porch and walked around the house on the side away from Old Nosey. The back porch had a hooked screen. Randall knocked on that. Nothing happened. He came back off the two almost paintless wooden steps and went along the disused and overgrown driveway and opened up a wooden garage. The doors creaked. The garage was full of nothing. There were a few battered old-fashioned trunks not worth breaking up for firewood. Rusted gardening tools, old cans, plenty of those, in cartons. On each side of the doors, in the angle of the wall a nice fat black widow spider sat in its casual untidy web. Randall picked up a piece of wood and killed them absently. He shut the garage up again, walked back along the weedy drive to the front and up the steps of the house on the other side from Old Nosey. Nobody answered his ring or knock.
He came back slowly, looking across the street over his shoulder.
“Back door’s easiest,” he said. “The old hen next door won’t do anything about it now. She’s done too much lying.”
He went up the two back steps and slid a knife blade neatly into the crack of the door and lifted the hook. That put us in the screen porch. It was full of cans and some of the cans were full of flies.
“Jesus, what a way to live!” he said.
The back door was easy. A five-cent skeleton key turned the lock. But there was a bolt.
“This jars me,” I said. “I guess she’s beat it. She wouldn’t lock up like this. She’s too sloppy.”
“Your hat’s older than mine,” Randall said. He looked at the glass panel in the back door. “Lend it to me to push the glass in. Or shall we do a neat job?”
“Kick it in. Who cares around here?”
“Here goes.”
He stepped back and lunged at the lock with his leg parallel to the floor. Something cracked idly and the door gave a few inches. We heaved it open and picked a piece of jagged cast metal off the linoleum and laid it politely on the woodstone drainboard, beside about nine empty gin bottles.
Flies buzzed against the closed windows of the kitchen. The place reeked. Randall stood in the middle of the floor, giving it the careful eye.
Then he walked softly through the swing door without touching it except low down with his toe and using that to push it far enough back so that it stayed open. The living room was much as I had remembered it. The radio was off.
“That’s a nice radio,” Randall said. “Cost money. If it’s paid for. Here’s something.”
He went down on one knee and looked along the carpet. Then he went to the side of the radio and moved a loose cord with his foot. The plug came into view. He bent and studied the knobs on the radio front.
“Yeah,” he said. “Smooth and rather large. Pretty smart, that. You don’t get prints on a light cord, do you?”
“Shove it in and see if it’s turned on.”
He reached around and shoved it into the plug in the baseboard. The light went on at once. We waited. The thing hummed for a while and then suddenly a heavy volume of sound began to pour out of the speaker. Randall jumped at the cord and yanked it loose again. The sound was snapped off sharp.
When he straightened his eyes were full of light.
We went swiftly into the bedroom. Mrs. Jessie Pierce Florian lay diagonally across the bed, in a rumpled cotton house dress, with her head close to one end of the footboard. The corner post of the bed was smeared darkly with something the flies liked.
She had been dead long enough.
Randall didn’t touch her. He stared down at her for a long time and then looked at me with a wolfish baring of his teeth.
“Brains on her face,” he said. “That seems to be the theme song of this case. Only this was done with just a pair of hands. But Jesus what a pair of hands. Look at the neck bruises, the spacing of the finger marks.”
“You look at them,” I said. I turned away. “Poor old Nulty. It’s not just a shine killing any more.”
THRITY-ONE
A shiny black bug with a pink head and pink spots on it crawled slowly along the polished top of Randall’s desk and waved a couple of feelers around, as if testing the breeze for a takeoff. It wobbled a little as it crawled, like an old woman carrying too many parcels. A nameless dick sat at another desk and kept talking into an old-fashioned hushaphone telephone mouthpiece, so that his voice sounded like someone whispering in a tunnel. He talked with his eyes half closed, a big scarred hand on the desk in front of him holding a burning cigarette between the knuckles of the first and second fingers.
The bug reached the end of Randall’s desk and marched straight off into the air. It fell on its back on the floor, waved a few thin worn legs in the air feebly and then played dead. Nobody cared, so it began waving the legs again and finally struggled over on its face. It trundled slowly off into a corner towards nothing, going nowhere.
The police loudspeaker box on the wall put out a bulletin about a holdup on San Pedro south of Forty-fourth. The holdup was a middle-aged man wearing a dark gray suit and gray felt hat. He was last seen running east on Forty-fourth and then dodging between two houses. “Approach carefully,” the announcer said. “This suspect is armed with a .32 caliber revolver and has just held up the proprietor of a Greek restaurant at Number 3966 South San Pedro.”
A flat click and the announcer went off the air and another one came on and started to read a hot car list, in a slow monotonous voice that repeated everything twice.
The door opened and Randall came in with a sheaf of letter size typewritten sheets. He walked briskly across the room and sat down across the desk from me and pushed some papers at me.
“Sign four copies,” he said.
I signed four copies.
The pink bug reached a corner of the room and put feelers out for a good spot to take off from. It seemed a little discouraged. It went along the baseboard towards another corner. I lit a cigarette and the dick at the hushaphone abruptly got up and went out of the office.
Randall leaned back in his chair, looking just the same as ever, just as cool, just as smooth, just as ready to be nasty or nice as the occasion required.
“I’m telling you a few things,” he said, “just so you won’t go having any more brainstorms. Just so you won’t go master-minding all over the landscape any more. Just so maybe for Christ’s sake you will let this one lay.”
I waited.
“No prints in the dump,” he said. “You know which dump I mean. The cord was jerked to turn the radio off, but she turned it up herself probably. That’s pretty obvious. Drunks like loud radios. If you have gloves on to do a killing and you turn up the radio to drown shots or something, you can turn it off the same way. But that wasn’t the way it was done. And that woman’s neck is broken. She was dead before the guy started to smack
her head around. Now why did he start to smack her head around?”
“I’m just listening.”
Randall frowned. “He probably didn’t know he’d broken her neck. He was sore at her,” he said. “Deduction.” He smiled sourly.
I blew some smoke and waved it away from my face.
“Well, why was he sore at her? There was a grand reward paid the time he was picked up at Florian’s for the bank job in Oregon. It was paid to a shyster who is dead since, but the Florians likely got some of it. Malloy may have suspected that. Maybe he actually knew it. And maybe he was just trying to shake it out of her.”
I nodded. It sounded worth a nod. Randall went on:
“He took hold of her neck just once and his fingers didn’t slip. If we get him, we might be able to prove by the spacing of the marks that his hands did it. Maybe not. The doc figures it happened last night, fairly early. Motion picture time, anyway. So far we don’t tie Malloy to the house last night, not by any neighbors. But it certainly looks like Malloy.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Malloy all right. He probably didn’t mean to kill her, though. He’s just too strong.”
“That won’t help him any,” Randall said grimly.
“I suppose not. I just make the point that Malloy does not appear to me to be a killer type. Kill if cornered—but not for pleasure or money—and not women.”
“Is that an important point?” he asked dryly.
“Maybe you know enough to know what’s important. And what isn’t. I don’t.”
He stared at me long enough for a police announcer to have time to put out another bulletin about the holdup of the Greek restaurant on South San Pedro. The suspect was now in custody. It turned out later that he was a fourteen-year-old Mexican armed with a water-pistol. So much for eye-witnesses.
Randall waited until the announcer stopped and went on:
“We got friendly this morning. Let’s stay that way. Go home and lie down and have a good rest. You look pretty peaked. Just let me and the police department handle the Marriott killing and find Moose Malloy and so on.”
“I got paid on the Marriott business,” I said. “I fell down on the job. Mrs. Grayle has hired me. What do you want me to do—retire and live on my fat?”
He stared at me again. “I know. I’m human. They give you guys licenses, which must mean they expect you to do something with them besides hang them on the wall in your office. On the other hand any acting-captain with a grouch can break you.”
“Not with the Grayles behind me.”
He studied it. He hated to admit I could be even half right. So he frowned and tapped his desk.
“Just so we understand each other,” he said after a pause. “If you crab this case, you’ll be in a jam. It may be a jam you can wriggle out of this time. I don’t know. But little by little you will build up a body of hostility in this department that will make it damn hard for you to do any work.”
“Every private dick faces that every day of his life—unless he’s just a divorce man.”
“You can’t work on murders.”
“You’ve said your piece. I heard you say it. I don’t expect to go out and accomplish things a big police department can’t accomplish. If I have any small private notions, they are just that—small and private.”
He leaned slowly across the desk. His thin restless fingers tap-tapped, like the poinsettia shoots tapping against Mrs. Jessie Florian’s front wall. His creamy gray hair shone. His cool steady eyes were on mine.
“Let’s go on,” he said. “With what there is to tell. Amthor’s away on a trip. His wife—and secretary—doesn’t know or won’t say where. The Indian has also disappeared. Will you sign a complaint against these people?”
“No. I couldn’t make it stick.”
He looked relieved. “The wife says she never heard of you. As to these two Bay City cops, if that’s what they were—that’s out of my hands. I’d rather not have the thing any more complicated than it is. One thing I feel pretty sure of—Amthor had nothing to do with Marriott’s death. The cigarettes with his card in them were just a plant.”
“Doc Sonderborg?”
He spread his hands. “The whole shebang skipped. Men from the D.A.’s office went down there on the quiet. No contact with Bay City at all. The house is locked up and empty. They got in, of course. Some hasty attempt had been made to clean up, but there are prints—plenty of them. It will take a week to work out what we have. There’s a wall safe they’re working on now. Probably had dope in it—and other things. My guess is that Sonderborg will have a record, not local, somewhere else, for abortion, or treating gunshot wounds or altering finger tips or for illegal use of dope. If it comes under Federal statutes, we’ll get a lot of help.”
“He said he was a medical doctor,” I said.
Randall shrugged. “May have been once. May never have been convicted. There’s a guy practicing medicine near Palm Springs right now who was indicted as a dope peddler in Hollywood five years ago. He was as guilty as hell—but the protection worked. He got off. Anything else worrying you?”
“What do you know about Brunette—for telling?”
“Brunette’s a gambler. He’s making plenty. He’s making it an easy way.”
“All right,” I said, and started to get up. “That sounds reasonable. But it doesn’t bring us any nearer to this jewel heist gang that killed Marriott.”
“I can’t tell you everything, Marlowe.”
“I don’t expect it,” I said. “By the way, Jessie Florian told me—the second time I saw her—that she had been a servant in Marriott’s family once. That was why he was sending her money. Anything to support that?”
“Yes. Letters in his safety-deposit box from her thanking him and saying the same thing.” He looked as if he was going to lose his temper. “Now will you for God’s sake go home and mind your own business?”
“Nice of him to take such care of the letters, wasn’t it?”
He lifted his eyes until their glance rested on the top of my head. Then he lowered the lids until half the iris was covered. He looked at me like that for a long ten seconds. Then he smiled. He was doing an awful lot of smiling that day. Using up a whole week’s supply.
“I have a theory about that,” he said. “It’s crazy, but it’s human nature. Marriott was by the circumstances of his life a threatened man. All crooks are gamblers, more or less, and all gamblers are superstitious—more or less. I think Jessie Florian was Marriott’s lucky piece. As long as he took care of her, nothing would happen to him.”
I turned my head and looked for the pink-headed bug. He had tried two corners of the room now and was moving off disconsolately towards a third. I went over and picked him up in my handkerchief and carried him back to the desk.
“Look,” I said. “This room is eighteen floors above ground. And this little bug climbs all the way up here just to make a friend. Me. My lucky piece.” I folded the bug carefully into the soft part of the handkerchief and tucked the handkerchief into my pocket. Randall was pie-eyed. His mouth moved, but nothing came out of it.
“I wonder whose lucky piece Marriott was,” I said.
“Not yours, pal.” His voice was acid—cold acid.
“Perhaps not yours either.” My voice was just a voice. I went out of the room and shut the door.
I rode the express elevator down to the Spring Street entrance and walked out on the front porch of City Hall and down some steps and over to the flower beds. I put the pink bug down carefully behind a bush.
I wondered, in the taxi going home, how long it would take him to make the Homicide Bureau again.
I got my car out of the garage at the back of the apartment house and ate some lunch in Hollywood before I started down to Bay City. It was a beautiful cool sunny afternoon down at the beach. I left Arguello Boulevard at Third Street and drove over to the City Hall.
THIRTY-TWO
It was a cheap looking building for so prosperous a town. It looked more lik
e something out of the Bible belt. Bums sat unmolested in a long row on the retaining wall that kept the front lawn—now mostly Bermuda grass—from falling into the street. The building was of three stories and had an old belfry at the top, and the bell still hanging in the belfry. They had probably rung it for the volunteer fire brigade back in the good old chaw-and-spit days.
The cracked walk and the front steps led to open double doors in which a knot of obvious city hall fixers hung around waiting for something to happen so they could make something else out of it. They all had the well-fed stomachs, the careful eyes, the nice clothes and the reach-me-down manners. They gave me about four inches to get in.
Inside was a long dark hallway that had been mopped the day McKinley was inaugurated. A wooden sign pointed out the police department Information Desk. A uniformed man dozed behind a pint-sized PBX set into the end of a scarred wooden counter. A plainclothesman with his coat off and his hog’s leg looking like a fire plug against his ribs took one eye off his evening paper, bonged a spittoon ten feet away from him, yawned, and said the Chiefs office was upstairs at the back.
The second floor was lighter and cleaner, but that didn’t mean that it was clean and light. A door on the ocean side, almost at the end of the hall, was lettered: John Wax, Chief of Police. Enter.
Inside there was a low wooden railing and a uniformed man behind it working a typewriter with two fingers and one thumb. He took my card, yawned, said he would see, and managed to drag himself through a mahogany door marked John Wax, Chief of Police. Private. He came back and held the door in the railing for me.
I went on in and shut the door of the inner office. It was cool and large and had windows on three sides. A stained wood desk was set far back like Mussolini’s, so that you had to walk across an expanse of blue carpet to get to it, and while you were doing that you would be getting the beady eye.
I walked to the desk. A tilted embossed sign on it read: John Wax, Chief of Police. I figured I might be able to remember the name. I looked at the man behind the desk. No straw was sticking to his hair.