“It was the wrong guy,” Nulty said savagely. “This bird is named Stoyanoffsky and he lives in Hemet and he just got through working as a sandhog on the San Jack tunnel. Got a wife and four kids. Boy, is she sore. What you doing on Malloy?”
“Nothing. I have a headache.”
“Any time you get a little free time—”
“I don’t think so,” I said. “Thanks just the same. When is the inquest on the nigger coming up?”
“Why bother?” Nulty sneered, and hung up.
I drove down to Hollywood Boulevard and put my car in the parking space beside the building and rode up to my floor. I opened the door of the little reception room which I always left unlocked, in case I had a client and the client wanted to wait.
Miss Anne Riordan looked up from a magazine and smiled at me.
She was wearing a tobacco brown suit with a highnecked white sweater inside it. Her hair by daylight was pure auburn and on it she wore a hat with a crown the size of a whiskey glass and a brim you could have wrapped the week’s laundry in. She wore it at an angle of approximately forty-five degrees, so that the edge of the brim just missed her shoulder. In spite of that it looked smart. Perhaps because of that.
She was about twenty-eight years old. She had a rather narrow forehead of more height than is considered elegant. Her nose was small and inquisitive, her upper lip a shade too long and her mouth more than a shade too wide. Her eyes were gray-blue with flecks of gold in them. She had a nice smile. She looked as if she had slept well. It was a nice face, a face you get to like. Pretty, but not so pretty that you would have to wear brass knuckles every time you took it out.
“I didn’t know just what your office hours were,” she said. “So I waited. I gather that your secretary is not here today.”
“I don’t have a secretary.”
I went across and unlocked the inner door, then switched on the buzzer that rang on the outer door. “Let’s go into my private thinking parlor.”
She passed in front of me with a vague scent of very dry sandalwood and stood looking at the five green filing cases, the shabby rust-red rug, the half-dusted furniture, and the not too clean net curtains.
“I should think you would want somebody to answer the phone,” she said. “And once in a while to send your curtains to the cleaners.”
“I’ll send them out come St. Swithin’s Day. Have a chair. I might miss a few unimportant jobs. And a lot of leg art. I save money.”
“I see,” she said demurely, and placed a large suede bag carefully on the corner of the glass-topped desk. She leaned back and took one of my cigarettes. I burned my finger with a paper match lighting it for her.
She blew a fan of smoke and smiled through it. Nice teeth, rather large. “You probably didn’t expect to see me again so soon. How is your head?”
“Poorly. No, I didn’t.”
“Were the police nice to you?”
“About the way they always are.”
“I’m not keeping you from anything important, am I?”
“No.”
“All the same I don’t think you’re very pleased to see me.”
I filled a pipe and reached for the packet of paper matches. I lit the pipe carefully. She watched that with approval. Pipe smokers were solid men. She was going to be disappointed in me.
“I tried to leave you out of it,” I said. “I don’t know why exactly. It’s no business of mine any more anyhow. I ate my dirt last night and banged myself to sleep with a bottle and now it’s a police case: I’ve been warned to leave it alone.”
“The reason you left me out of it,” she said calmly, “was that you didn’t think the police would believe just mere idle curiosity took me down into that hollow last night. They would suspect some guilty reason and hammer at me until I was a wreck.”
“How do you know I didn’t think the same thing?”
“Cops are just people,” she said irrelevantly.
“They start out that way, I’ve heard.”
“Oh—cynical this morning.” She looked around the office with an idle but raking glance. “Do you do pretty well in here? I mean financially? I mean, do you make a lot of money—with this kind of furniture?”
I grunted.
“Or should I try minding my own business and not asking impertinent questions?”
“Would it work, if you tried it?”
“Now we’re both doing it. Tell me, why did you cover up for me last night? Was it on account of I have reddish hair and a beautiful figure?”
I didn’t say anything.
“Let’s try this one,” she said cheerfully. “Would you like to know who that jade necklace belonged to?”
I could feel my face getting stiff. I thought hard but I couldn’t remember for sure. And then suddenly I could. I hadn’t said a word to her about a jade necklace.
I reached for the matches and relit my pipe. “Not very much,” I said. “Why?”
“Because I know.”
“Uh-huh.”
“What do you do when you get real talkative—wiggle your toes?”
“All right,” I growled. “You came here to tell me. Go ahead and tell me.”
Her blue eyes widened and for a moment I thought they looked a little moist. She took her lower lip between her teeth and held it that way while she stared down at the desk. Then she shrugged and let go of her lip and smiled at me candidly.
“Oh I know I’m just a damned inquisitive wench. But there’s a strain of bloodhound in me. My father was a cop. His name was Cliff Riordan and he was police chief of Bay City for seven years. I suppose that’s what’s the matter.”
“I seem to remember. What happened to him?”
“He was fired. It broke his heart. A mob of gamblers headed by a man named Laird Brunette elected themselves a mayor. So they put Dad in charge of the Bureau of Records and Identification, which in Bay City is about the size of a tea-bag. So Dad quit and pottered around for a couple of years and then died. And Mother died soon after him. So I’ve been alone for two years.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
She ground out her cigarette. It had no lipstick on it. “The only reason I’m boring you with this is that it makes it easy for me to get along with policemen. I suppose I ought to have told you last night. So this morning I found out who had charge of the case and went to see him. He was a little sore at you at first.”
“That’s all right,” I said. “If I had told him the truth on all points, he still wouldn’t have believed me. All he will do is chew one of my ears off.”
She looked hurt. I got up and opened the other window. The noise of the traffic from the boulevard came in in waves, like nausea. I felt lousy. I opened the deep drawer of the desk and got the office bottle out and poured myself a drink.
Miss Riordan watched me with disapproval. I was no longer a solid man. She didn’t say anything. I drank the drink and put the bottle away again and sat down.
“You didn’t offer me one,” she said coolly.
“Sorry. It’s only eleven o’clock or less. I didn’t think you looked the type.”
Her eyes crinkled at the corners. “Is that a compliment?”
“In my circle, yes.”
She thought that over. It didn’t mean anything to her. It didn’t mean anything to me either when I thought it over. But the drink made me feel a lot better.
She leaned forward and scraped her gloves slowly across the glass of the desk. “You wouldn’t want to hire an assistant, would you? Not if it only cost you a kind word now and then?”
“No.”
She nodded. “I thought probably you wouldn’t. I’d better just give you my information and go on home.”
I didn’t say anything. I lit my pipe again. It makes you look thoughtful when you are not thinking.
“First of all, it occurred to me that a jade necklace like that would be a museum piece and would be well known,” she said.
I held the match in the air, still burning a
nd watching the flame crawl close to my fingers. Then I blew it out softly and dropped it in the tray and said:
“I didn’t say anything to you about a jade necklace.”
“No, but Lieutenant Randall did.”
“Somebody ought to sew buttons on his face.”
“He knew my father. I promised not to tell.”
“You’re telling me.”
“You knew already, silly.”
Her hand suddenly flew up as if it was going to fly to her mouth, but it only rose halfway and then fell back slowly and her eyes widened. It was a good act, but I knew something else about her that spoiled it.
“You did know, didn’t you?’ She breathed the words, hushedly.
“I thought it was diamonds. A bracelet, a pair of earrings, a pendant, three rings, one of the rings with emeralds too.”
“Not funny,” she said. “Not even fast.”
“Fei Tsui jade. Very rare. Carved beads about six carats apiece, sixty of them. Worth eighty thousand dollars.”
“You have such nice brown eyes,” she said. “And you think you’re tough.”
“Well, who does it belong to and how did you find out?”
“I found out very simply. I thought the best jeweler in town would probably know, so I went and asked the manager of Block’s. I told him I was a writer and wanted to do an article on rare jade—you know the line.”
“So he believed your red hair and your beautiful figure.”
She flushed clear to the temples. “Well, he told me anyway. It belongs to a rich lady who lives in Bay City, in an estate on the canyon. Mrs. Lewin Lockridge Grayle. Her husband is an investment banker or something, enormously rich, worth about twenty million. He used to own a radio station in Beverly Hills, Station KFDK, and Mrs. Grayle used to work there. He married her five years ago. She’s a ravishing blonde. Mr. Grayle is elderly, liverish, stays home and takes calomel while Mrs. Grayle goes places and has a good time.”
“This manager of Block’s,” I said. “He’s a fellow that gets around.”
“Oh, I didn’t get all that from him, silly. Just about the necklace. The rest I got from Giddy Gertie Arbogast.”
I reached into the deep drawer and brought the office bottle up again.
“You’re not going to turn out to be one of those drunken detectives, are you?” she asked anxiously.
“Why not? They always solve their cases and they never even sweat. Get on with the story.”
“Giddy Gertie is the society editor of the Chronicle. I’ve known him for years. He weighs two hundred and wears a Hitler mustache. He got out his morgue file on the Grayles. Look.”
She reached into her bag and slid a photograph across the desk, a five-by-three glazed still.
It was a blonde. A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained glass window. She was wearing street clothes that looked black and white, and a hat to match and she was a little haughty, but not too much. Whatever you needed, wherever you happened to be—she had it. About thirty years old.
I poured a fast drink and burned my throat getting it down. “Take it away,” I said. “I’ll start jumping.”
“Why, I got it for you. You’ll want to see her, won’t you?”
I looked at it again. Then I slid it under the blotter. “How about tonight at eleven?”
“Listen, this isn’t just a bunch of gag lines, Mr. Marlowe. I called her up. She’ll see you. On business.”
“It may start out that way.”
She made an impatient gesture, so I stopped fooling around and got my battle-scarred frown back on my face. “What will she see me about?”
“Her necklace, of course. It was like this. I called her up and had a lot of trouble getting to talk to her, of course, but finally I did. Then I gave her the song and dance I had given the nice man at Block’s and it didn’t take. She sounded as if she had a hangover. She said something about talking to her secretary, but I managed to keep her on the phone and ask her if it was true she had a Fei Tsui jade necklace. After a while she said, yes. I asked if I might see it. She said, what for? I said my piece over again and it didn’t take any better than the first time. I could hear her yawning and bawling somebody outside the mouthpiece for putting me on. Then I said I was working for Philip Marlowe. She said ‘So what?’ Just like that.”
“Incredible. But all the society dames talk like tramps nowadays.”
“I wouldn’t know,” Miss Riordan said sweetly. “Probably some of them are tramps. So I asked her if she had a phone with no extension and she said what business was it of mine. But the funny thing was she hadn’t hung up on me.”
“She had the jade on her mind and she didn’t know what you were leading up to. And she may have heard from Randall already.”
Miss Riordan shook her head. “No. I called him later and he didn’t know who owned the necklace until I told him. He was quite surprised that I had found out.”
“He’ll get used to you,” I said. “He’ll probably have to. What then?”
“So I said to Mrs. Grayle: ‘You’d still like it back, wouldn’t you?’ Just like that. I didn’t know any other way to say it. I had to say something that would jar her a bit. It did. She gave me another number in a hurry. And I called that and I said I’d like to see her. She seemed surprised. So I had to tell her the story. She didn’t like it. But she had been wondering why she hadn’t heard from Marriott. I guess she thought he had gone south with the money or something. So I’m to see her at two o’clock. Then I’ll tell her about you and how nice and discreet you are and how you would be a good man to help her get it back, if there’s any chance and so on. She’s already interested.”
I didn’t say anything. I just stared at her. She looked hurt. “What’s the matter? Did I do right?”
“Can’t you get it through your head that this is a police case now and that I’ve been warned to stay off it?”
“Mrs. Grayle has a perfect right to employ you, if she wants to.”
“To do what?”
She snapped and unsnapped her bag impatiently. “Oh, my goodness—a woman like that—with her looks—can’t you see—” She stopped and bit her lip. “What kind of man was Marriott?”
“I hardly knew him. I thought he was a bit of a pansy. I didn’t like him very well.”
“Was he a man who would be attractive to women?”
“Some women. Others would want to spit.”
“Well, it looks as if he might have been attractive to Mrs. Grayle. She went out with him.”
“She probably goes out with a hundred men. There’s very little chance to get the necklace now.”
“Why?”
I got up and walked to the end of the office and slapped the wall with the flat of my hand, hard. The clacking typewriter on the other side stopped for a moment, and then went on. I looked down through the open window into the shaft between my building and the Mansion House Hotel. The coffee shop smell was strong enough to build a garage on. I went back to my desk, dropped the bottle of whiskey back into the drawer, shut the drawer and sat down again. I lit my pipe for the eighth or ninth time and looked carefully across the half-dusted glass to Miss Riordan’s grave and honest little face.
You could get to like that face a lot. Glamoured up blondes were a dime a dozen, but that was a face that would wear. I smiled at it.
“Listen, Anne. Killing Marriott was a dumb mistake. The gang behind this holdup would never pull anything like that. What must have happened was that some gowed-up run they took along for a gun-holder lost his head. Marriott made a false move and some punk beat him down and it was done so quickly nothing could be done to prevent it. Here is an organized mob with inside information on jewels and the movements of the women that wear them. They ask moderate returns and they would play ball. But here also is a back alley murder that doesn’t fit at all. My idea is that whoever did it is a dead man hours ago, with weights on his ankles, deep in the Pacific Ocean. And either the jade went down with him or else th
ey have some idea of its real value and they have cached it away in a place where it will stay for a long time—maybe for years before they dare bring it out again. Or, if the gang is big enough, it may show up on the other side of the world. The eight thousand they asked seems pretty low if they really know the value of the jade. But it would be hard to sell. I’m sure of one thing. They never meant to murder anybody.”
Anne Riordan was listening to me with her lips slightly parted and a rapt expression on her face, as if she was looking at the Dalai Lhama.
She closed her mouth slowly and nodded once. “You’re wonderful,” she said softly. “But you’re nuts.”
She stood up and gathered her bag to her. “Will you go to see her or won’t you?”
“Randall can’t stop me—if it comes from her.”
“All right. I’m going to see another society editor and get some more dope on the Grayles if I can. About her love life. She would have one, wouldn’t she?”
The face framed in auburn hair was wistful.
“Who hasn’t?“ I sneered.
“I never had. Not really.”
I reached up and shut my mouth with my hand. She gave me a sharp look and moved towards the door.
“You’ve forgotten something,” I said.
She stopped and turned. “What?” She looked all over the top of the desk.
“You know damn well what.”
She came back to the desk and leaned across it earnestly. “Why would they kill the man that killed Marriott, if they don’t go in for murder?”
“Because he would be the type that would get picked up sometime and would talk—when they took his dope away from him. I mean they wouldn’t kill a customer.”
“What makes you so sure the killer took dope?”
“I’m not sure. I just said that. Most punks do.”
“Oh.” She straightened up and nodded and smiled. “I guess you mean these,” she said and reached quickly into her bag and laid a small tissue bag package on the desk.
I reached for it, pulled a rubber band off it carefully and opened up the paper. On it lay three long thick Russian cigarettes with paper mouthpieces. I looked at her and didn’t say anything.
“I know I shouldn’t have taken them,” she said almost breathlessly. “But I knew they were jujus. They usually come in plain papers but lately around Bay City they have been putting them out like this. I’ve seen several. I thought it was kind of mean for the poor man to be found dead with marihuana cigarettes in his pocket.”