She smiled. “And who was he about to murder, do you suppose?”
“Me.”
“That must be very difficult to believe—that anyone would hate you that much. And you said my jade necklace was never stolen at all. Have you any proof of all this?”
“I didn’t say I had. I said I thought these things.”
“Then why be such a fool as to talk about them?”
“Proof,” I said, “is always a relative thing. It’s an overwhelming balance of probabilities. And that’s a matter of how they strike you. There was a rather weak motive for murdering me—merely that I was trying to trace a former Central Avenue dive singer at the same time that a convict named Moose Malloy got out of jail and started to look for her too. Perhaps I was helping him find her. Obviously, it was possible to find her, or it wouldn’t have been worth while to pretend to Marriott that I had to be killed and killed quickly. And obviously he wouldn’t have believed it, if it wasn’t so. But there was a much stronger motive for murdering Marriott, which he, out of vanity or love or greed or a mixture of all three, didn’t evaluate. He was afraid, but not for himself. He was afraid of violence to which he was a part and for which he could be convicted. But on the other hand he was fighting for his meal ticket. So he took the chance.”
I stopped. She nodded and said: “Very interesting. If one knows what you are talking about.”
“And one does,” I said.
We stared at each other. She had her right hand in her bag again now. I had a good idea what it held. But it hadn’t started to come out yet. Every event takes time.
“Let’s quit kidding,” I said. “We’re all alone here. Nothing either of us says has the slightest standing against what the other says. We cancel each other out. A girl who started in the gutter became the wife of a multimillionaire. On the way up a shabby old woman recognized her-probably heard her singing at the radio station and recognized the voice and went to see-and this old woman had to be kept quiet. But she was cheap, therefore she only knew a little. But the man who dealt with her and made her monthly payments and owned a trust deed on her home and could throw her into the gutter any time she got funny—that man knew it all. He was expensive. But that didn’t matter either, as long as nobody else knew. But some day a tough guy named Moose Malloy was going to get out of jail and start finding things out about his former sweetie. Because the big sap loved her—and still does. That’s what makes it funny, tragic-funny. And about that time a private dick starts nosing in also. So the weak link in the chain, Marriott, is no longer a luxury. He has become a menace. They’ll get to him and they’ll take him apart. He’s that kind of lad. He melts under heat. So he was murdered before he could melt. With a blackjack. By you.”
All she did was take her hand out of her bag, with a gun in it. All she did was point it at me and smile. All I did was nothing.
But that wasn’t all that was done. Moose Malloy stepped out of the dressing room with the Colt .45 still looking like a toy in his big hairy paw.
He didn’t look at me at all. He looked at Mrs. Lewin Lockridge Grayle. He leaned forward and his mouth smiled at her and he spoke to her softly.
“I thought I knew the voice,” he said. “I listened to that voice for eight years—all I could remember of it. I kind of liked your hair red, though. Hiya, babe. Long time no see.”
She turned the gun.
“Get away from me, you son of a bitch,” she said.
He stopped dead and dropped the gun to his side. He was still a couple of feet from her. His breath labored.
“I never thought,“ he said quietly. “It just came to me out of the blue. You turned me in to the cops. You. Little Velma.”
I threw a pillow, but it was too slow. She shot him five times in the stomach. The bullets made no more sound than fingers going into a glove.
Then she turned the gun and shot at me but it was empty. She dived for Malloy’s gun on the floor. I didn’t miss with the second pillow. I was around the bed and knocked her away before she got the pillow off her face. I picked the Colt up and went away around the bed again with it.
He was still standing, but he was swaying. His mouth was slack and his hands were fumbling at his body. He went slack at the knees and fell sideways on the bed, with his face down. His gasping breath filled the room.
I had the phone in my hand before she moved. Her eyes were a dead gray, like half-frozen water. She rushed for the door and I didn’t try to stop her. She left the door wide, so when I had done phoning I went over and shut it. I turned his head a little on the bed, so he wouldn’t smother. He was still alive, but after five in the stomach even a Moose Malloy doesn’t live very long.
I went back to the phone and called Randall at his home. “Malloy,” I said. “In my apartment. Shot five times in the stomach by Mrs. Grayle. I called the Receiving Hospital. She got away.”
“So you had to play clever,” was all he said and hung up quickly.
I went back to the bed. Malloy was on his knees beside the bed now, trying to get up, a great wad of bedclothes in one hand. His face poured sweat. His eyelids flickered slowly and the lobes of his ears were dark.
He was still on his knees and still trying to get up when the fast wagon got there. It took four men to get him on the stretcher.
“He has a slight chance—if they’re .25’s,” the fast wagon doctor said just before he went out. “All depends what they hit inside. But he has a chance.”
“He wouldn’t want it,” I said.
He didn’t. He died in the night.
FORTY
“You ought to have given a dinner party,” Anne Riordan said looking at me across her tan figured rug. “Gleaming silver and crystal, bright crisp linen—if they’re still using linen in the places where they give dinner parties—candlelight, the women in their best jewels and the men in white ties, the servants hovering discreetly with the wrapped bottles of wine, the cops looking a little uncomfortable in their hired evening clothes, as who the hell wouldn’t, the suspects with their brittle smiles and restless hands, and you at the head of the long table telling all about it, little by little, with your charming light smile and a phony English accent like Philo Vance.”
“Yeah,” I said. “How about a little something to be holding in my hand while you go on being clever?”
She went out to her kitchen and rattled ice and came back with a couple of tall ones and sat down again.
“The liquor bills of your lady friends must be something fierce,” she said and sipped.
“And suddenly the butler fainted,” I said. “Only it wasn’t the butler who did the murder. He just fainted to be cute.”
I inhaled some of my drink. “It’s not that kind of story,” I said. “It’s not lithe and clever. It’s just dark and full of blood.”
“So she got away?”
I nodded. “So far. She never went home. She must have had a little hideout where she could change her clothes and appearance. After all she lived in peril, like the sailors. She was alone when she came to see me. No chauffeur. She came in a small car and she left it a few dozen blocks away.”
“They’ll catch her—if they really try.”
“Don’t be like that. Wilde, the D.A., is on the level. I worked for him once. But if they catch her, what then? They’re up against twenty million dollars and a lovely face and either Lee Farrell or Rennenkamp. It’s going to be awfully hard to prove she killed Marriott. All they have is what looks like a heavy motive and her past life, if they can trace it. She probably has no record, or she wouldn’t have played it this way.”
“What about Malloy? If you had told me about him before, I’d have known who she was right away. By the way, how did you know? These two photos are not of the same woman.”
“No. I doubt if even old lady Florian knew they had been switched on her. She looked kind of surprised when I showed the photo of Velma—the one that had Velma Valento written on it—in front of her nose. But she may have known. She may
have just hid it with the idea of selling it to me later on. Knowing it was harmless, a photo of some other girl Marriott substituted.”
“That’s just guessing.”
“It had to be that way. Just as when Marriott called me up and gave me a song and dance about a jewel ransom payoff it had to be because I had been to see Mrs. Florian asking about Velma. And when Marriott was killed, it had to be because he was the weak link in the chain. Mrs. Florian didn’t even know Velma had become Mrs. Lewin Lockridge Grayle. She couldn’t have. They bought her too cheap. Grayle says they went to Europe to be married and she was married under her real name. He won’t tell where or when. He won’t tell what her real name was. He won’t tell where she is. I don’t think he knows, but the cops don’t believe that.”
“Why won’t he tell?” Anne Riordan cupped her chin on the backs of her laced fingers and stared at me with shadowed eyes.
“He’s so crazy about her he doesn’t care whose lap she sat in.”
“I hope she enjoyed sitting in yours,” Anne Riordan said acidly.
“She was playing me. She was a little afraid of me. She didn’t want to kill me because it’s bad business killing a man who is a sort of cop. But she probably would have tried in the end, just as she would have killed Jessie Florian, if Malloy hadn’t saved her the trouble.”
“I bet it’s fun to be played by handsome blondes,” Anne Riordan said. “Even if there is a little risk. As, I suppose, there usually is.”
I didn’t say anything.
“I suppose they can’t do anything to her for killing Malloy, because he had a gun.”
“No. Not with her pull.”
The goldflecked eyes studied me solemnly. “Do you think she meant to kill Malloy?”
“She was afraid of him,” I said. “She had turned him in eight years ago. He seemed to know that. But he wouldn’t have hurt her. He was in love with her too. Yes, I think she meant to kill anybody she had to kill. She had a lot to fight for. But you can’t keep that sort of thing up indefinitely. She took a shot at me in my apartment—but the gun was empty then. She ought to have killed me out on the bluff when she killed Marriott.”
“He was in love with her,” Anne said softly. “I mean Malloy. It didn’t matter to him that she hadn’t written to him in six years or ever gone to see him while he was in jail. It didn’t matter to him that she had turned him in for a reward. He just bought some fine clothes and started to look for her the first thing when he got out. So she pumped five bullets into him, by way of saying hello. He had killed two people himself, but he was in love with her. What a world.”
I finished my drink and got the thirsty look on my face again. She ignored it. She said:
“And she had to tell Grayle where she came from and he didn’t care. He went away to marry her under another name and sold his radio station to break contact with anybody who might know her and he gave her everything that money can buy and she gave him—what?”
“That’s hard to say.” I shook the ice cubes at the bottom of my glass. That didn’t get me anything either. “I suppose she gave him a sort of pride that he, a rather old man, could have a young and beautiful and dashing wife. He loved her. What the hell are we talking about it for? These things happen all the time. It didn’t make any difference what she did or who she played around with or what she had once been. He loved her.”
“Like Moose Malloy,” Anne said quietly.
“Let’s go riding along the water.”
“You didn’t tell me about Brunette or the cards that were in those reefers or Amthor or Dr. Sonderborg or that little clue that set you on the path of the great solution.”
“I gave Mrs. Florian one of my cards. She put a wet glass on it. Such a card was in Marriott’s pockets, wet glass mark and all. Marriott was not a messy man. That was a clue, of sorts. Once you suspected anything it was easy to find out other connections, such as that Marriott owned a trust deed on Mrs. Florian’s home, just to keep her in line. As for Amthor, he’s a bad hat. They picked him up in a New York hotel and they say he’s an international con man. Scotland Yard has his prints, also Paris. How the hell they got all that since yesterday or the day before I don’t know. These boys work fast when they feel like it. I think Randall has had this thing taped for days and was afraid I’d step on the tapes. But Amthor had nothing to do with killing anybody. Or with Sonderborg. They haven’t found Sonderborg yet. They think he has a record too, but they’re not sure until they get him. As for Brunette, you can’t get anything on a guy like Brunette. They’ll have him before the Grand Jury and he’ll refuse to say anything, on his constitutional rights. He doesn’t have to bother about his reputation. But there’s a nice shakeup here in Bay City. The Chief has been canned and half the detectives have been reduced to acting patrolmen, and a very nice guy named Red Norgaard, who helped me get on the Montecito, has got his job back. The Mayor is doing all this, changing his pants hourly while the crisis lasts.”
“Do you have to say things like that?”
“The Shakespearean touch. Let’s go riding. After we’ve had another drink.”
“You can have mine,” Anne Riordan said, and got up and brought her untouched drink over to me. She stood in front of me holding it, her eyes wide and a little frightened.
“You’re so marvelous,” she said. “So brave, so determined and you work for so little money. Everybody bats you over the head and chokes you and smacks your jaw and fills you with morphine, but you just keep right on hitting between tackle and end until they’re all worn out. What makes you so wonderful?”
“Go on,” I growled.
“Spill it.” Anne Riordan said thoughtfully: “I’d like to be kissed, damn you!”
FORTY-ONE
It took over three months to find Velma. They wouldn’t believe Grayle didn’t know where she was and hadn’t helped her get away. So every cop and newshawk in the country looked in all the places where money might be hiding her. And money wasn’t hiding her at all. Although the way she hid was pretty obvious once it was found out.
One night a Baltimore detective with a camera eye as rare as a pink zebra wandered into a night club and listened to the band and looked at a handsome blackhaired, black-browed torcher who could sing as if she meant it. Something in her face struck a chord and the chord went on vibrating.
He went back to Headquarters and got out the Wanted file and started through the pile of readers. When he came to the one he wanted he looked at it a long time. Then he straightened his straw hat on his head and went back to the night club and got hold of the manager. They went back to the dressing rooms behind the shell and the manager knocked on one of the doors. It wasn’t locked. The dick pushed the manager aside and went in and locked it.
He must have smelled marihuana because she was smoking it, but he didn’t pay any attention then. She was sitting in front of a triple mirror, studying the roots of her hair and eyebrows. They were her own eyebrows. The dick stepped across the room smiling and handed her the reader.
She must have looked at the face on the reader almost as long as the dick had down at Headquarters. There was a lot to think about while she was looking at it. The dick sat down and crossed his legs and lit a cigarette. He had a good eye, but he had over-specialized. He didn’t know enough about women.
Finally she laughed a little and said: “You’re a smart lad, copper. I thought I had a voice that would be remembered. A friend recognized me by it once, just hearing it on the radio. But I’ve been singing with this band for a month—twice a week on a network—and nobody gave it a thought.”
“I never heard the voice,” the dick said and went on smiling.
She said: “I suppose we can’t make a deal on this. You know, there’s a lot in it, if it’s handled right.”
“Not with me,” the dick said. “Sorry.”
“Let’s go then,” she said and stood up and grabbed up her bag and got her coat from a hanger. She went over to him holding the coat out so he could hel
p her into it. He stood up and held it for her like a gentleman.
She turned and slipped a gun out of her bag and shot him three times through the coat he was holding.
She had two bullets left in the gun when they crashed the door. They got halfway across the room before she used them. She used them both, but the second shot must have been pure reflex. They caught her before she hit the floor, but her head was already hanging by a rag.
“The dick lived until the next day,” Randall said, telling me about it. “He talked when he could. That’s how we have the dope. I can’t understand him being so careless, unless he really was thinking of letting her talk him into a deal of some kind. That would clutter up his mind. But I don’t like to think that, of course.”
I said I supposed that was so.
“Shot herself clean through the heart—twice,” Randall said. “And I’ve heard experts on the stand say that’s impossible, knowing all the time myself that it was. And you know something else?”
“What?”
“She was stupid to shoot that dick. We’d never have convicted her, not with her looks and money and the persecution story these high-priced guys would build up. Poor little girl from a dive climbs to be wife of rich man and the vultures that used to know her won’t let her alone. That sort of thing. Hell, Rennenkamp would have half a dozen crummy old burlesque dames in court to sob that they’d blackmailed her for years, and in a way that you couldn’t pin anything on them but the jury would go for it. She did a smart thing to run off on her own and leave Grayle out of it, but it would have been smarter to have come home when she was caught.”
“Oh you believe now that she left Grayle out of it,” I said.
He nodded. I said: “Do you think she had any particular reason for that?”
He stared at me. “I’ll go for it, whatever it is.”
“She was a killer,” I said. “But so was Malloy. And he was a long way from being all rat. Maybe that Baltimore dick wasn’t so pure as the record shows. Maybe she saw a chance—not to get away—she was tired of dodging by that time—but to give a break to the only man who had ever really given her one.”