Dan Rolff was in the dining room. A water glass and a brown bottle with no label stood on the table in front of him. He sat straight up in his chair, staring at the bottle. The room smelled of laudanum.
Dinah Brand slid her fur coat off, letting it fall half on a chair and half on the floor, and snapped her fingers at the lunger, saying impatiently:
“Did you collect?”
Without looking up from the bottle, he took a pad of paper money out of his inside pocket and dropped it on the table. The girl grabbed it, counted the bills twice, smacked her lips, and stuffed the money in her bag.
She went out to the kitchen and began chopping ice. I sat down and lit a cigarette. Rolff stared at his bottle. He and I never seemed to have much to say to one another. Presently the girl brought in some gin, lemon juice, seltzer and ice.
We drank and she told Rolff:
“Max is sore as hell. He heard you’d been running around putting last-minute money on Bush, and the little monkey thinks I double-crossed him. What did I have to do with it? All I did was what any sensible person would have done—get in on the win. I didn’t have any more to do with it than a baby, did I?” she asked me.
“No.”
“Of course not. What’s the matter with Max is he’s afraid the others will think he was in on it too, that Dan was putting his dough down as well as mine. Well, that’s his hard luck. He can go climb trees for all I care, the lousy little runt. Another drink would go good.”
She poured another for herself and for me. Rolff hadn’t touched his first one. He said, still staring at the brown bottle:
“You can hardly expect him to be hilarious about it.”
The girl scowled and said disagreeably:
“I can expect anything I want. And he’s got no right to talk to me that way. He doesn’t own me. Maybe he thinks he does, but I’ll show him different.” She emptied her glass, banged it on the table, and twisted around in her chair to face me. “Is that on the level about your having ten thousand dollars of Elihu Willsson’s money to use cleaning up the city?”
“Yeah.”
Her bloodshot eyes glistened hungrily.
“And if I help you will I get some of the ten—?”
“You can’t do that, Dinah.” Rolff’s voice was thick, but gently firm, as if he were talking to a child. “That would be utterly filthy.”
The girl turned her face slowly toward him. Her mouth took on the look it had worn while talking to Thaler.
“I am going to do it,” she said. “That makes me utterly filthy, does it?”
He didn’t say anything, didn’t look up from the bottle. Her face got red, hard, cruel. Her voice was soft, cooing:
“It’s just too bad that a gentleman of your purity, even if he is a bit consumptive, has to associate with a filthy bum like me.”
“That can be remedied,” he said slowly, getting up. He was laudanumed to the scalp.
Dinah Brand jumped out of her chair and ran around the table to him. He looked at her with blank dopey eyes. She put her face close to his and demanded:
“So I’m too utterly filthy for you now, am I?”
He said evenly:
“I said to betray your friends to this chap would be utterly filthy, and it would.”
She caught one of his thin wrists and twisted it until he was on his knees. Her other hand, open, beat his hollow-cheeked face, half a dozen times on each side, rocking his head from side to side. He could have put his free arm up to protect his face, but didn’t.
She let go his wrist, turned her back to him, and reached for gin and seltzer. She was smiling. I didn’t like the smile.
He got up, blinking. His wrist was red where she had held it, his face bruised. He steadied himself upright and looked at me with dull eyes.
With no change in the blankness of his face and eyes, he put a hand under his coat, brought out a black automatic pistol, and fired at me.
But he was too shaky for either speed or accuracy. I had time to toss a glass at him. The glass hit his shoulder. His bullet went somewhere overhead.
I jumped before he got the next one out—jumped at him—was close enough to knock the gun down. The second slug went into the floor.
I socked his jaw. He fell away from me and lay where he fell.
I turned around.
Dinah Brand was getting ready to bat me over the head with the seltzer bottle, a heavy glass siphon that would have made pulp of my skull.
“Don’t,” I yelped.
“You didn’t have to bust him like that,” she snarled.
“Well, it’s done. You’d better get him straightened out.”
She put down the siphon and I helped her carry him up to his bedroom. When he began moving his eyes, I left her to finish the work and went down to the dining room again. She joined me there fifteen minutes later.
“He’s all right,” she said. “But you could have handled him without that.”
“Yeah, but I did that for him. Know why he took the shot at me?”
“So I’d have nobody to sell Max out to?”
“No. Because I’d seen you maul him around.”
“That doesn’t make sense to me,” she said. “I was the one who did it.”
“He’s in love with you, and this isn’t the first time you’ve done it. He acted like he had learned there was no use matching muscle with you. But you can’t expect him to enjoy having another man see you slap his face.”
“I used to think I knew men,” she complained, “but, by God! I don’t. They’re lunatics, all of them.”
“So I poked him to give him back some of his self-respect. You know, treated him as I would a man instead of a down-and-outer who could be slapped around by girls.”
“Anything you say,” she sighed. “I give up. We ought to have a drink.”
We had the drink, and I said:
“You were saying you’d work with me if there was a cut of the Willsson money in it for you. There is.”
“How much?”
“Whatever you earn. Whatever what you do is worth.”
“That’s uncertain.”
“So’s your help, so far as I know.”
“Is it? I can give you the stuff, brother, loads of it, and don’t think I can’t. I’m a girl who knows her Poisonville.” She looked down at her gray-stockinged knees, waved one leg at me, and exclaimed indignantly: “Look at that. Another run. Did you ever see anything to beat it? Honest to God! I’m going barefoot.”
“Your legs are too big,” I told her. “They put too much strain on the material.”
“That’ll do out of you. What’s your idea of how to go about purifying our village?”
“If I haven’t been lied to, Thaler, Pete the Finn, Lew Yard and Noonan are the men who’ve made Poisonville the sweet-smelling mess it is. Old Elihu comes in for his share of the blame, too, but it’s not all his fault, maybe. Besides, he’s my client, even if he doesn’t want to be, so I’d like to go easy on him.
“The closest I’ve got to an idea is to dig up any and all the dirty work I can that might implicate the others, and run it out. Maybe I’ll advertise—Crime Wanted—Male or Female. If they’re as crooked as I think they are I shouldn’t have a lot of trouble finding a job or two that I can hang on them.”
“Is that what you were up to when you uncooked the fight?”
“That was only an experiment—just to see what would happen.”
“So that’s the way you scientific detectives work. My God! For a fat, middle-aged, hard-boiled, pig-headed guy, you’ve got the vaguest way of doing things I ever heard of.”
“Plans are all right sometimes,” I said. “And sometimes just stirring things up is all right—if you’re tough enough to survive, and keep your eyes open so you’ll see what you want when it comes to the top.”
“That ought to be good for another drink,” she said.
11
THE SWELL SPOON
We had another drink.
Sh
e put her glass down, licked her lips, and said:
“If stirring things up is your system, I’ve got a swell spoon for you. Did you ever hear of Noonan’s brother Tim, the one who committed suicide out at Mock Lake a couple of years ago?”
“No.”
“You wouldn’t have heard much good. Anyway, he didn’t commit suicide. Max killed him.”
“Yeah?”
“For God’s sake wake up. This I’m giving you is real. Noonan was like a father to Tim. Take the proof to him and he’ll be after Max like nobody’s business. That’s what you want, isn’t it?”
“We’ve got proof?”
“Two people got to Tim before he died, and he told them Max had done it. They’re both still in town, though one won’t live a lot longer. How’s that?”
She looked as if she were telling the truth, though with women, especially blue-eyed women, that doesn’t always mean anything.
“Let’s listen to the rest of it,” I said. “I like details and things.”
“You’ll get them. You ever been out to Mock Lake? Well, it’s our summer resort, thirty miles up the canyon road. It’s a dump, but it’s cool in summer, so it gets a good play. This was summer a year ago, the last week-end in August. I was out there with a fellow named Holly. He’s back in England now, but you don’t care anything about that, because he’s got nothing to do with it. He was a funny sort of old woman—used to wear white silk socks turned inside out so the loose threads wouldn’t hurt his feet. I got a letter from him last week. It’s around here somewhere, but that doesn’t make any difference.
“We were up there, and Max was up there with a girl he used to play around with—Myrtle Jennison. She’s in the hospital now—City—dying of Bright’s disease or something. She was a classy looking kid then, a slender blonde. I always liked her, except that a few drinks made her too noisy. Tim Noonan was crazy about her, but she couldn’t see anybody but Max that summer.
“Tim wouldn’t let her alone. He was a big good-looking Irishman, but a sap and a cheap crook who only got by because his brother was chief of police. Wherever Myrtle went, he’d pop up sooner or later. She didn’t like to say anything to Max about it, not wanting Max to do anything to put him in wrong with Tim’s brother, the chief.
“So of course Tim showed up at Mock Lake this Saturday. Myrtle and Max were just by themselves. Holly and I were with a bunch, but I saw Myrtle to talk to and she told me she had got a note from Tim, asking her to meet him for a few minutes that night, in one of the little arbor things on the hotel grounds. He said if she didn’t he would kill himself. That was a laugh for us—the big false alarm. I tried to talk Myrtle out of going, but she had just enough booze in her to feel gay and she said she was going to give him an earful.
“We were all dancing in the hotel that night. Max was there for a while, and then I didn’t see him any more. Myrtle was dancing with a fellow named Rutgers, a lawyer here in town. After a while she left him and went out one of the side doors. She winked at me when she passed, so I knew she was going down to see Tim. She had just got out when I heard the shot. Nobody else paid any attention to it. I suppose I wouldn’t have noticed it either if I hadn’t known about Myrtle and Tim.
“I told Holly I wanted to see Myrtle, and went out after her, by myself. I must have been about five minutes behind her in getting out. When I got outside I saw lights down by one of the summer houses, and people. I went down there, and—This talking is thirsty work.”
I poured out a couple of hookers of gin. She went into the kitchen for another siphon and more ice. We mixed them up, drank, and she settled down to her tale again:
“There was Tim Noonan, dead, with a hole in his temple and his gun lying beside him. Perhaps a dozen people were standing around, hotel people, visitors, one of Noonan’s men, a dick named MacSwain. As soon as Myrtle saw me she took me away from the crowd, back in the shade of some trees.
“‘Max killed him,’ she said. ‘What’ll I do?’
“I asked her about it. She told me she had seen the flash of the gun and at first she thought Tim had killed himself after all. She was too far away and it was too dark for her to see anything else. When she ran down to him, he was rolling around, moaning, ‘He didn’t have to kill me over her. I’d have—’ She couldn’t make out the rest of it. He was rolling around, bleeding from the hole in his temple.
“Myrtle was afraid Max had done it, but she had to be sure, so she knelt down and tried to pick up Tim’s head, asking: ‘Who did it, Tim?’
“He was almost gone, but before he passed out he got enough strength to tell her, ‘Max!’
“She kept asking me, ‘What’ll I do?’ I asked her if anybody else had heard Tim, and she said the dick had. He came running up while she was trying to lift Tim’s head. She didn’t think anybody else had been near enough to hear, but the dick had.
“I didn’t want Max to get in a jam over killing a mutt like Tim Noonan. Max didn’t mean anything to me then, except that I liked him, and I didn’t like any of the Noonans. I knew the dick—MacSwain. I used to know his wife. He had been a pretty good guy, straight as ace-deuce-trey-four-five, till he got on the force. Then he went the way of the rest of them. His wife stood as much of it as she could and then left him.
“Knowing this dick, I told Myrtle I thought we could fix things. A little jack would ruin MacSwain’s memory, or, if he didn’t like that, Max could have him knocked off. She had Tim’s note threatening suicide. If the dick would play along, the hole in Tim’s head from his own gun and the note would smooth everything over pretty.
“I left Myrtle under the trees and went out to hunt for Max. He wasn’t around. There weren’t many people there, and I could hear the hotel orchestra still playing dance music. I couldn’t find Max, so I went back to Myrtle. She was all worked up over another idea. She didn’t want Max to know that she had found out that he had killed Tim. She was afraid of him.
“See what I mean? She was afraid that if she and Max ever broke off he’d put her out of the way if he knew she had enough on him to swing him. I know how she felt. I got the same notion later, and kept just as quiet as she did. So we figured that if it could be fixed up without his knowing about it, so much the better. I didn’t want to show in it either.
“Myrtle went back alone to the group around Tim and got hold of MacSwain. She took him off a little way and made the deal with him. She had some dough on her. She gave him two hundred and a diamond ring that had cost a fellow named Boyle a thousand. I thought he’d be back for more later, but he wasn’t. He shot square with her. With the help of the letter he put over the suicide story.
“Noonan knew there was something fishy about the layout, but he could never peg it. I think he suspected Max of having something to do with it. But Max had an air-tight alibi—trust him for that—and I think even Noonan finally counted him out. But Noonan never believed it happened the way it was made to look. He broke MacSwain—kicked him off the force.
“Max and Myrtle slid apart a little while after that. No row or anything—they just slid apart. I don’t think she ever felt easy around him again, though so far as I know he never suspected her of knowing anything. She’s sick now, as I told you, and hasn’t got long to live. I think she’d not so much mind telling the truth if she were asked. MacSwain’s still hanging around town. He’d talk if there was something in it for him. Those two have got the stuff on Max—and wouldn’t Noonan eat it up! Is that good enough to give your stirring-up a start?”
“Couldn’t it have been suicide?” I asked. “With Tim Noonan getting a last-minute bright idea to stick it on Max?”
“That four-flusher shoot himself? Not a chance.”
“Could Myrtle have shot him?”
“Noonan didn’t overlook that one. But she couldn’t have been a third of the distance down the slope when the shot was fired. Tim had powder-marks on his head, and hadn’t been shot and rolled down the slope. Myrtle’s out.”
“But Max had an alibi
?”
“Yes, indeed. He always has. He was in the hotel bar, on the other side of the building, all the time. Four men said so. As I remember it, they said it openly and often, long before anybody asked them. There were other men in the bar who didn’t remember whether Max had been there or not, but those four remembered. They’d remember anything Max wanted remembered.”
Her eyes got large and then narrowed to black-fringed slits. She leaned toward me, upsetting her glass with an elbow.
“Peak Murry was one of the four. He and Max are on the outs now. Peak might tell it straight now. He’s got a pool room on Broadway.”
“This MacSwain, does he happen to be named Bob?” I asked. “A bow-legged man with a long jaw like a hog’s?”
“Yes. You know him?”
“By sight. What does he do now?”
“A small-time grifter. What do you think of the stack-up?”
“Not bad. Maybe I can use it.”
“Then let’s talk scratch.”
I grinned at the greed in her eyes and said:
“Not just yet, sister. We’ll have to see how it works out before we start scattering pennies around.”
She called me a damned nickel-nurser and reached for the gin.
“No more for me, thanks,” I told her, looking at my watch. “It’s getting along toward five a.m. and I’ve got a busy day ahead.”
She decided she was hungry again. That reminded me that I was. It took a half an hour or more to get waffles, ham and coffee off the stove. It took some more time to get them into our stomachs and to smoke some cigarettes over extra cups of coffee. It was quite a bit after six when I got ready to leave.
I went back to my hotel and got into a tub of cold water. It braced me a lot, and I needed bracing. At forty I could get along on gin as a substitute for sleep, but not comfortably.
When I had dressed I sat down and composed a document:
Just before he died, Tim Noonan told me he had been shot by Max Thaler. Detective Bob MacSwain heard him tell me. I gave Detective MacSwain $200 and a diamond ring worth $1,000 to keep quiet and make it look like suicide.