“How good?” I asked.
“I’m sorry, sir. We don’t make appraisals. I can give you the name of an appraiser.”
“Don’t kid me,” I said. “They’re Dutch.”
He focused the light a little and leaned down and toyed with a few inches of the string.
“I want a string just like them, fitted to that clasp, and in a hurry,” I added.
“How, like them?” He didn’t look up. “And they’re not Dutch. They’re Bohemian.”
“O.K., can you duplicate them?”
He shook his head and pushed the velvet pad away as it it soiled him. “In three months, perhaps. We don’t blow glass like that in this country. If you wanted them matched—three months at least. And this house would not do that sort of thing at all.”
“It must be swell to be that snooty,” I said. I put a card under his black sleeve. “Give me a name that will—and not in three months—and maybe not exactly like them.”
He shrugged, went away with the card, came back in five minutes and handed it back to me. There was something written on the back.
The old Levantine had a shop on Melrose, a junk shop with everything in the window from a folding baby carriage to a French horn, from a mother-of-pearl lorgnette in a faded plush case to one of those .44 Special Single Action six-shooters they still make for Western peace officers whose grandfathers were tough.
The old Levantine wore a skull cap and two pairs of glasses and a full beard. He studied my pearls, shook his head sadly, and said: “For twenty dollars, almost so good. Not so good, you understand. Not so good glass.”
“How alike will they look?”
He spread his firm strong hands. “I am telling you the truth,” he said. “They would not fool a baby.”
“Make them up,” I said. “With this clasp. And I want the others back, too, of course.”
“Yah. Two o’clock,” he said.
Leon Valesanos, the little brown man from Uruguay, made the afternoon papers. He had been found hanging in an unnamed apartment. The police were investigating.
At four o’clock I walked into the long cool bar of the Club Esquire and prowled along the row of booths until I found one where a woman sat alone. She wore a hat like a shallow soup plate with a very wide edge, a brown tailor-made suit with a severe mannish shirt and tie.
I sat down beside her and slipped a parcel along the seat. “You don’t open that,” I said. “In fact you can slip it into the incinerator as is, if you want to.”
She looked at me with dark tired eyes. Her fingers twisted a thin glass that smelled of peppermint. “Thanks.” Her face was very pale.
I ordered a highball and the waiter went away. “Read the papers?”
“Yes.”
“You understand now about this fellow Copernik who stole your act? That’s why they won’t change the story or bring you into it.”
“It doesn’t matter now,” she said. “Thank you, all the same. Please—please show them to me.”
I pulled the string of pearls out of the loosely wrapped tissue paper in my pocket and slid them across to her. The silver propeller clasp winked in the light of the wall bracket. The little diamond winked. The pearls were as dull as white soap. They didn’t even match in size.
“You were right,” she said tonelessly. “They are not my pearls.”
The waiter came with my drink and she put her bag on them deftly. When he was gone she fingered them slowly once more, dropped them into the bag and gave me a dry mirthless smile.
I stood there a moment with a hand hard on the table.
“As you said—I’ll keep the clasp.”
I said slowly: “You don’t know anything about me. You saved my life last night and we had a moment, but it was just a moment. You still don’t know anything about me. There’s a detective downtown named Ybarra, a Mexican of the nice sort, who was on the job when the pearls were found in Waldo’s suitcase. That is in case you would like to make sure—”
She said: “Don’t be silly. It’s all finished. It was a memory. I’m too young to nurse memories. It may be for the best. I loved Stan Phillips—but he’s gone—long gone.”
I stared at her, didn’t say anything.
She added quietly: “This morning my husband told me something I hadn’t known. We are to separate. So I have very little to laugh about today.”
“I’m sorry,” I said lamely. “There’s nothing to say. I may see you sometime. Maybe not. I don’t move much in your circle. Good luck.”
I stood up. We looked at each other for a moment. “You haven’t touched your drink,” she said.
“You drink it. That peppermint stuff will just make you sick.”
I stood there a moment with a hand on the table.
“If anybody ever bothers you,” I said, “let me know.”
I went out of the bar without looking back at her, got into my car and drove west on Sunset and down all the way to the Coast Highway. Everywhere along the way gardens were full of withered and blackened leaves and flowers which the hot wind had burned.
But the ocean looked cool and languid and just the same as ever. I drove on almost to Malibu and then parked and went and sat on a big rock that was inside somebody’s wire fence. It was about half-tide and coming in. The air smelled of kelp. I watched the water for a while and then I pulled a string of Bohemian glass imitation pearls out of my pocket and cut the knot at one end and slipped the pearls off one by one.
When I had them all loose in my left hand I held them like that for a while and thought. There wasn’t really anything to think about. I was sure.
“To the memory of Mr. Stan Phillips,” I said aloud. “Just another four-flusher.”
I flipped her pearls out into the water one by one at the floating seagulls.
They made little splashes and the seagulls rose off the water and swooped at the splashes.
Raymond Chandler
Raymond Chandler was born in 1888 and published his first story in 1933 in the pulp magazine Black Mask. By the time he published his first novel, The Big Sleep (1939), featuring, as did all his major works, the iconic private eye Philip Marlowe, it was clear that he had not only mastered a genre but had set a standard to which others could only aspire. Chandler created a body of work that ranks with the best of twentieth-century literature. He died in 1959.
OTHER BOOKS BY
RAYMOND CHANDLER
AVAILABLE AS VINTAGE eBOOKS
The Big Sleep
The High Window
Farewell, My Lovely
The Lady in the Lake
The Little Sister
The Simple Art of Murder
The Long Goodbye
Playback
Trouble Is My Business (1950)
In the four long stories in this collection, Philip Marlowe is hired to protect a rich old guy from a gold digger, runs afoul of crooked politicos, gets a line on some stolen jewels with a reward attached, and stumbles across a murder victim who may be an extortionist.
Trouble Is My Business copyright 1934, 1935, 1936, 1938, 1939, 1944, 1950 by Raymond Chandler
Trouble Is My Business copyright 1939 by the Curtis Publishing Company
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Chandler, Raymond, 1888-1959.
Trouble is my business.
I. Title.
PS3505.H3224T76 1988 813’.52 91-50914
The stories in Trouble Is My Business appeared in The Simple Art of Murder, Houghton Mifflin, 1950. The material in that edition originally appeared in the following magazines: Black Mask, Dime Detective, Detective Fiction Weekly, The Saturday Evening Post, Atlantic Monthly, and The Saturday Review of Literature.
This book is available in a print edition from Vintage Books:
; ISBN 0-394-75764-5.
eISBN: 978-1-4000-3023-1
v3.0
Raymond Chandler, Trouble Is My Business
(Series: # )
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