Carl Moss might be willing to protect Merle with the mantle of Aesculapius, up to a point. Or he might think it would do her more good in the long run to get it all off her chest, whatever it was.
I wandered back to the jacquard chair and set my teeth and grabbed enough of his hair to pull the head away from the chair back. The bullet had gone in at the temple. The set-up could be for suicide. But people like Louis Vannier do not commit suicide. A blackmailer, even a scared blackmailer, has a sense of power, and loves it.
I let the head go back where it wanted to go and leaned down to scrub my hand on the nap of the rug. Leaning down I saw the corner of a picture frame under the lower shelf of the table at Vannier’s elbow. I went around and reached for it with a handkerchief.
The glass was cracked across. It had fallen off the wall. I could see the small nail. I could make a guess how it had happened. Somebody standing at Vannier’s right, even leaning over him, somebody he knew and had no fear of, had suddenly pulled a gun and shot him in the right temple. And then, startled by the blood or the recoil of the shot, the killer had jumped back against the wall and knocked the picture down. It had landed on a corner and jumped under the table. And the killer had been too careful to touch it, or too scared.
I looked at it. It was a small picture, not interesting at all. A guy in doublet and hose, with lace at his sleeve ends, and one of those round puffy velvet hats with a feather, leaning far out of a window and apparently calling out to somebody downstairs. Downstairs not being in the picture. It was a color reproduction of something that had never been needed in the first place.
I looked around the room. There were other pictures, a couple of rather nice water colors, some engravings—very old-fashioned this year, engravings, or are they? Half a dozen in all. Well, perhaps the guy liked the picture, so what? A man leaning out of a high window. A long time ago.
I looked at Vannier. He wouldn’t help me at all. A man leaning out of a high window, a long time ago.
The touch of the idea at first was so light that I almost missed it and passed on. A touch of a feather, hardly that. The touch of a snowflake. A high window, a man leaning out—a long time ago.
It snapped in place. It was so hot it sizzled. Out of a high window a long time ago—eight years ago—a man leaning—too far—a man falling—to his death. A man named Horace Bright.
“Mr. Vannier,” I said with a little touch of admiration, “you played that rather neatly.”
I turned the picture over. On the back dates and amounts of money were written. Dates over almost eight years, amounts mostly of $500, a few $750’s, two for $1000. There was a running total in small figures. It was $11,100. Mr. Vannier had not received the latest payment. He had been dead when it arrived. It was not a lot of money, spread over eight years. Mr. Vannier’s customer had bargained hard.
The cardboard back was fastened into the frame with steel victrola needles. Two of them had fallen out. I worked the cardboard loose and tore it a little getting it loose. There was a white envelope between the back and the picture. Sealed, blank. I tore it open. It contained two square photographs and a negative. The photos were just the same. They showed a man leaning far out of a window with his mouth open yelling. His hands were on the brick edges of the window frame. There was a woman’s face behind his shoulder.
He was a thinnish dark-haired man. His face was not very clear, nor the face of the woman behind him. He was leaning out of a window and yelling or calling out.
There I was holding the photograph and looking at it. And so far as I could see it didn’t mean a thing. I knew it had to. I just didn’t know why. But I kept on looking at it. And in a little while something was wrong. It was a very small thing, but it was vital. The position of the man’s hands, lined against the corner of the wall where it was cut out to make the window frame. The hands were not holding anything, they were not touching anything. It was the inside of his wrists that lined against the angle of the bricks. The hands were in air.
The man was not leaning. He was falling.
I put the stuff back in the envelope and folded the cardboard back and stuffed that into my pocket also. I hid frame, glass and picture in the linen closet under towels.
All this had taken too long. A car stopped outside the house. Feet came up the walk.
I dodged behind the curtains in the archway.
THIRTY
The front door opened and then quietly closed.
There was a silence, hanging in the air like a man’s breath in frosty air, and then a thick scream, ending in a wail of despair.
Then a man’s voice, tight with fury, saying: “Not bad, not good. Try again.”
The woman’s voice said: “My God, it’s Louis! He’s dead!”
The man’s voice said: “I may be wrong, but I still think it stinks.”
“My God! He’s dead, Alex. Do something—for God’s sake—do something!”
“Yeah,” the hard tight voice of Alex Morny said. “I ought to. I ought to make you look just like him. With blood and everything. I ought to make you just as dead, just as cold, just as rotten. No, I don’t have to do that. You’re that already. Just as rotten. Eight months married and cheating on me with a piece of merchandise like that. My God! What did I ever think of to put in with a chippy like you?”
He was almost yelling at the end of it.
The woman made another wailing noise.
“Quit stalling,” Morny said bitterly. “What do you think I brought you over here for? You’re not kidding anybody. You’ve been watched for weeks. You were here last night. I’ve been here already today. I’ve seen what there is to see. Your lipstick on cigarettes, your glass that you drank out of. I can see you now, sitting on the arm of his chair, rubbing his greasy hair, and then feeding him a slug while he was still purring. Why?”
“Oh, Alex—darling—don’t say such awful things.”
“Early Lillian Gish,” Morny said. “Very early Lillian Gish. Skip the agony, toots. I have to know how to handle this. What the hell you think I’m here for? I don’t give one little flash in hell about you any more. Not any more, toots, not any more, my precious darling angel blond man-killer. But I do care about myself and my reputation and my business. For instance, did you wipe the gun off?”
Silence. Then the sound of a blow. The woman wailed. She was hurt, terribly hurt. Hurt in the depths of her soul. She made it rather good.
“Look, angel,” Morny snarled. “Don’t feed me the ham. I’ve been in pictures. I’m a connoisseur of ham. Skip it. You’re going to tell me how this was done if I have to drag you around the room by your hair. Now—did you wipe off the gun?”
Suddenly she laughed. An unnatural laugh, but clear and with a nice tinkle to it. Then she stopped laughing, just as suddenly.
Her voice said: “Yes.”
“And the glass you were using?”
“Yes.” Very quiet now, very cool.
“And you put his prints on the gun?”
“Yes.”
He thought in the silence. “Probably won’t fool them,” he said. “It’s almost impossible to get a dead man’s prints on a gun in a convincing way. However. What else did you wipe off.”
“N-nothing. Oh Alex. Please don’t be so brutal.”
“Stop it. Stop it! Show me how you did it, how you were standing, how you held the gun.”
She didn’t move.
“Never mind about the prints,” Morny said. “I’ll put better ones on. Much better ones.”
She moved slowly across the opening of the curtains and I saw her. She was wearing pale green gabardine slacks, a fawn-colored leisure jacket with stitching on it, a scarlet turban with a gold snake in it. Her face was smeared with tears.
“Pick it up,” Morny yelled at her. “Show me!”
She bent beside the chair and came up with the gun in her hand and her teeth bared. She pointed the gun across the opening in the curtains, towards the space of room where the door was.
&nbs
p; Morny didn’t move, didn’t make a sound.
The blond’s hand began to shake and the gun did a queer up and down dance in the air. Her mouth trembled and her arm fell.
“I can’t do it,” she breathed. “I ought to shoot you, but I can’t.”
The hand opened and the gun thudded to the floor.
Morny went swiftly past the break in the curtains, pushed her out of the way and with his foot pushed the gun back to about where it had been.
“You couldn’t do it,” he said thickly. “You couldn’t do it. Now watch.”
He whipped a handkerchief out and bent to pick the gun up again. He pressed something and the gate fell open. He reached his right hand into his pocket and rolled a cartridge in his fingers, moving his fingertips on the metal, pushed the cartridge into a cylinder. He repeated the performance four times more, snapped the gate shut, then opened it and spun it a little to set it in a certain spot. He placed the gun down on the floor, withdrew his hand and handkerchief and straightened up.
“You couldn’t shoot me,” he sneered, “because there was nothing in the gun but one empty shell. Now it’s loaded again. The cylinders are in the right place. One shot has been fired. And your fingerprints are on the gun.”
The blond was very still, looking at him with haggard eyes.
“I forgot to tell you,” he said softly, “I wiped the gun off. I thought it would be so much nicer to be sure your prints were on it. I was pretty sure they were—but I felt as if I would like to be quite sure. Get it?”
The girl said quietly: “You’re going to turn me in?”
His back was towards me. Dark clothes. Felt hat pulled low. So I couldn’t see his face. But I could just about see the leer with which he said:
“Yes, angel, I am going to turn you in.”
“I see,” she said, and looked at him levelly. There was a sudden grave dignity in her over-emphasized chorus girl’s face.
“I’m going to turn you in, angel,” he said slowly, spacing his words as if he enjoyed his act. “Some people are going to be sorry for me and some people are going to laugh at me. But it’s not going to do my business any harm. Not a bit of harm. That’s one nice thing about a business like mine. A little notoriety won’t hurt it at all.”
“So I’m just publicity value to you, now,” she said. “Apart, of course, from the danger that you might have been suspected yourself.”
“Just so,” he said. “Just so.”
“How about my motive?” she asked, still calm, still level-eyed and so gravely contemptuous that he didn’t get the expression at all.
“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t care. You were up to something with him. Eddie tailed you downtown to a street on Bunker Hill where you met a blond guy in a brown suit. You gave him something. Eddie dropped you and tailed the guy to an apartment house near there. He tried to tail him some more, but he had a hunch the guy spotted him, and he had to drop it. I don’t know what it was all about. I know one thing, though. In that apartment house a young guy named Phillips was shot yesterday. Would you know anything about that, my sweet?”
The blond said: “I wouldn’t know anything about it. I don’t know anybody named Phillips and strangely enough I didn’t just run up and shoot anybody out of sheer girlish fun.”
“But you shot Vannier, my dear,” Morny said almost gently.
“Oh yes,” she drawled. “Of course. We were wondering what my motive was. You get it figured out yet?”
“You can work that out with the johns,” he snapped. “Call it a lover’s quarrel. Call it anything you like.”
“Perhaps,” she said, “when he was drunk he looked just a little like you. Perhaps that was the motive.”
He said: “Ah,” and sucked his breath in.
“Better looking,” she said. “Younger, with less belly. But with the same goddamned self-satisfied smirk.”
“Ah,” Morny said, and he was suffering.
“Would that do?” she asked him softly.
He stepped forward and swung a fist. It caught her on the side of the face and she went down and sat on the floor, a long leg straight out in front of her, one hand to her jaw, her very blue eyes looking up at him.
“Maybe you oughtn’t to have done that,” she said. “Maybe I won’t go through with it, now.”
“You’ll go through with it, all right. You won’t have any choice. You’ll get off easy enough. Christ, I know that. With your looks. But you’ll go through with it, angel. Your fingerprints are on that gun.”
She got to her feet slowly, still with the hand to her jaw.
Then she smiled. “I knew he was dead,” she said. “That is my key in the door. I’m quite willing to go downtown and say I shot him. But don’t lay your smooth white paw on me again—if you want my story. Yes. I’m quite willing to go to the cops. I’ll feel a lot safer with them than I feel with you.”
Morny turned and I saw the hard white leer of his face and the scar dimple in his cheek twitching. He walked past the opening in the curtains. The front door opened again. The blond stood still a moment, looked back over her shoulder at the corpse, shuddered slightly, and passed out of my line of vision.
The door closed. Steps on the walk. Then car doors opening and closing. The motor throbbed, and the car went away.
THIRTY-ONE
After a long time I moved out from my hiding place and stood looking around the living room again. I went over and picked the gun up and wiped it off very carefully and put it down again. I picked the three rouge-stained cigarette stubs out of the tray on the table and carried them into the bathroom and flushed them down the toilet. Then I looked around for the second glass with her fingerprints on it. There wasn’t any second glass. The one that was half full of a dead drink I took to the kitchen and rinsed out and wiped on a dish towel.
Then the nasty part. I kneeled on the rug by his chair and picked up the gun and reached for the trailing bone-stiff hand. The prints would not be good, but they would be prints and they would not be Lois Morny’s. The gun had a checked rubber grip, with a piece broken off on the left side below the screw. No prints on that. An index print on the right side of the barrel, two fingers on the trigger guard, a thumb print on the flat piece on the left side, behind the chambers. Good enough.
I took one more look around the living room.
I put the lamp down to a lower light. It still glared too much on the dead yellow face. I opened the front door, pulled the key out and wiped it off and pushed it back into the lock. I shut the door and wiped the thumblatch off and went my way down the block to the Mercury.
I drove back to Hollywood and locked the car up and started along the sidewalk past the other parked cars to the entrance of the Bristol.
A harsh whisper spoke to me out of darkness, out of a car. It spoke my name. Eddie Prue’s long blank face hung somewhere up near the roof of a small Packard, behind its wheel. He was alone in it. I leaned on the door of the car and looked in at him.
“How you making out, shamus?”
I tossed a match down and blew smoke at his face. I said: “Who dropped that dental supply company’s bill you gave me last night? Vannier, or somebody else?”
“Vannier.”
“What was I supposed to do with it—guess the life history of a man named Teager?”
“I don’t go for dumb guys,” Eddie Prue said.
I said: “Why would he have it in his pocket to drop? And if he did drop it, why wouldn’t you just hand it back to him? In other words, seeing that I’m a dumb guy, explain to me why a bill for dental supplies should get anybody all excited and start trying to hire private detectives. Especially gents like Alex Morny, who don’t like private detectives.”
“Morny’s a good head,” Eddie Prue said coldly.
“He’s the fellow for whom they coined the phrase, ‘as ignorant as an actor.’ ”
“Skip that. Don’t you know what they use that dental stuff for?”
“Yeah. I found out. They
use albastone for making molds of teeth and cavities. It’s very hard, very fine grain and retains any amount of fine detail. The other stuff, crystobolite, is used to cook out the wax in an invested wax model. It’s used because it stands a great deal of heat without distortion. Tell me you don’t know what I’m talking about.”
“I guess you know how they make gold inlays,” Eddie Prue said. “I guess you do, huh?”
“I spent two of my hours learning today. I’m an expert. What does it get me?”
He was silent for a little while, and then he said: “You ever read the paper?”
“Once in a while.”
“It couldn’t be you read where an old guy named Morningstar was bumped off in the Belfont Building on Ninth Street, just two floors above where this H. R. Teager had his office. It couldn’t be you read that, could it?”
I didn’t answer him. He looked at me for a moment longer, then he put his hand forward to the dash and pushed the starter button. The motor of his car caught and he started to ease in the clutch.
“Nobody could be as dumb as you act,” he said softly. “Nobody ain’t. Good night to you.”
The car moved away from the curb and drifted down the hill towards Franklin. I was grinning into the distance as it disappeared.
I went up to the apartment and unlocked the door and pushed it open a few inches and then knocked gently. There was movement in the room. The door was pulled open by a strong-looking girl with a black stripe on the cap of her white nurse’s uniform.
“I’m Marlowe. I live here.”
“Come in, Mr. Marlowe. Dr. Moss told me.”
I shut the door quietly and we spoke in low voices. “How is she?” I asked.
“She’s asleep. She was already drowsy when I got here. I’m Miss Lymington. I don’t know very much about her except that her temperature is normal and her pulse still rather fast, but going down. A mental disturbance, I gather.”