George moved then. His movement was once more as smooth as a ripple of water. The Smith & Wesson gleamed dully in his hand, but he didn’t fire it. The small automatic in the girl’s hand cracked. Blood spurted from George’s brown hard hand. The Smith & Wesson dropped to the floor. He cursed. She didn’t know much about guns—not very much.
“Of course!” she said grimly. “George could get into the apartment without any trouble, if Gerald was there. He would go in through the garage, a chauffeur in uniform, ride up in the elevator and knock at the door. And when Gerald opened it, George would back him in with that Smith & Wesson. But how did he know Gerald was there?”
I said: “He must have followed your taxi. We don’t know where he has been all evening since he left me. He had a car with him. The cops will find out. How much was in it for you, George?”
George held his right wrist with his left hand, held it tightly, and his face was twisted, savage. He said nothing.
“George would back him in with the Smith & Wesson,” the girl said wearily. “Then he would see my gun on the mantelpiece. That would be better. He would use that. He would back Gerald into the bedroom, away from the corridor, into the closet, and there, quietly, calmly, he would kill him and drop the gun on the floor.”
“George killed Arbogast, too. He killed him with a twenty-two because he knew that Frisky Lavon’s brother had a twenty-two, and he knew that because he had hired Frisky and his brother to put over a big scare on Gerald—so that when he was murdered it would look as if Marty Estel had had it done. That was why I was brought out here tonight in the Jeeter car—so that the two thugs who had been warned and planted could pull their act and maybe knock me off, if I got too tough. Only George likes to kill people. He made a neat shot at Frisky. He hit him in the face. It was so good a shot I think he meant it to be a miss. How about it, George?”
Silence.
I looked at old Jeeter at last. I had been expecting him to pull a gun himself, but he hadn’t. He just stood there, openmouthed, appalled, leaning against the black marble table, shaking.
“My God!” he whispered. “My God!”
“You don’t have one—except money.”
A door squeaked behind me. I whirled, but I needn’t have bothered. A hard voice, about as English as Amos and Andy, said: “Put ‘em up, bud.”
The butler, the very English butler, stood there in the doorway, a gun in his hand, tight-lipped. The girl turned her wrist and shot him just kind of casually, in the shoulder or something. He squealed like a stuck pig.
“Go away, you’re intruding,” she said coldly.
He ran. We heard his steps running.
“He’s going to fall,” she said.
I was wearing my Luger in my right hand now, a little late in the season, as usual. I came around with it. Old man Jeeter was holding on to the table, his face gray as a paving block. His knees were giving. George stood cynically, holding a handkerchief around his bleeding wrist, watching him.
“Let him fall,” I said. “Down is where he belongs.”
He fell. His head twisted. His mouth went slack. He hit the carpet on his side and rolled a little and his knees came up. His mouth drooled a little. His skin turned violet.
“Go call the law, angel,” I said. “I’ll watch them now.”
“All right,” she said standing up. “But you certainly need a lot of help in your private-detecting business, Mr. Marlowe.”
8
I had been in there for a solid hour, alone. There was the scarred desk in the middle, another against the wall, a brass spittoon on a mat, a police loudspeaker box on the wall, three squashed flies, a smell of cold cigars and old clothes. There were two hard armchairs with felt pads and two hard straight chairs without pads. The electric-light fixture had been dusted about Coolidge’s first term.
The door opened with a jerk and Finlayson and Sebold came in. Sebold looked as spruce and nasty as ever, but Finlayson looked older, more worn, mousier. He held a sheaf of papers in his hand. He sat down across the desk from me and gave me a hard bleak stare.
“Guys like you get in a lot of trouble,” Finlayson said sourly. Sebold sat down against the wall and tilted his hat over his eyes and yawned and looked at his new stainless-steel wrist watch.
“Trouble is my business,” I said. “How else would I make a nickel?”
“We oughta throw you in the can for all this cover-up stuff. How much you making on this one?”
“I was working for Anna Halsey who was working for old man Jeeter. I guess I made a bad debt.”
Sebold smiled his blackjack smile at me. Finlayson lit a cigar and licked at a tear on the side of it and pasted it down, but it leaked smoke just the same when he drew on it. He pushed papers across the desk at me.
“Sign three copies.”
I signed three copies.
He took them back, yawned and rumpled his old gray head. “The old man’s had a stroke,” he said. “No dice there. Probably won’t know what time it is when he comes out. This George Hasterman, this chauffeur guy, he just laughs at us. Too bad he got pinked. I’d like to wrastle him a bit.”
“He’s tough,” I said.
“Yeah. O.K., you can beat it for now.”
I got up and nodded to them and went to the door. “Well, good night, boys.”
Neither of them spoke to me.
I went out, along the corridor and down in the night elevator to the City Hall lobby. I went out the Spring Street side and down the long flight of empty steps and the wind blew cold. I lit a cigarette at the bottom. My car was still out at the Jeeter place. I lifted a foot to start walking to a taxi half a block down across the street. A voice spoke sharply from a parked car.
“Come here a minute.”
It was a man’s voice, tight, hard. It was Marty Estel’s voice. It came from a big sedan with two men in the front seat. I went over there. The rear window was down and Marty Estel leaned a gloved hand on it.
“Get in.” He pushed the door open. I got in. I was too tired to argue. “Take it away, Skin.”
The car drove west through dark, almost quiet streets, almost clean streets. The night air was not pure but it was cool. We went up over a hill and began to pick up speed.
“What they get?” Estel asked coolly.
“They didn’t tell me. They didn’t break the chauffeur yet.”
“You can’t convict a couple million bucks of murder in this man’s town.” The driver called Skin laughed without turning his head. “Maybe I don’t even touch my fifty grand now…she likes you.”
“Uh-huh. So what?”
“Lay off her.”
“What will it get me?”
“It’s what it’ll get you if you don’t.”
“Yeah, sure,” I said. “Go to hell, will you please. I’m tired.” I shut my eyes and leaned in the corner of the car and just like that went to sleep. I can do that sometimes, after a strain.
A hand shaking my shoulder woke me. The car had stopped. I looked out at the front of my apartment house.
“Home,” Marty Estel said. “And remember. Lay off her.”
“Why the ride home? Just to tell me that?”
“She asked me to look out for you. That’s why you’re loose. She likes you. I like her. See? You don’t want any more trouble.”
“Trouble—” I started to say, and stopped. I was tired of that gag for that night. “Thanks for the ride, and apart from that, nuts to you.” I turned away and went into the apartment house and up.
The door lock was still loose but nobody waited for me this time. They had taken Waxnose away long since. I left the door open and threw the windows up and I was still sniffing at policemen’s cigar butts when the phone rang. It was her voice, cool, a little hard, not touched by anything, almost amused. Well, she’d been through enough to make her that way, probably.
“Hello, brown-eyes. Make it home all right?”
“Your pal Marty brought me home. He told me to lay off you. T
hanks with all my heart, if I have any, but don’t call me up any more.”
“A little scared, Mr. Marlowe?”
“No. Wait for me to call you,” I said. “Good night, angel.”
“Good night, brown-eyes.”
The phone clicked. I put it away and shut the door and pulled the bed down. I undressed and lay on it for a while in the cold air.
Then I got up and had a drink and a shower and went to sleep.
They broke George at last, but not enough. He said there had been a fight over the girl and young Jeeter had grabbed the gun off the mantel and George had fought with him and it had gone off. All of which, of course, looked possible—in the papers. They never pinned the Arbogast killing on him or on anybody. They never found the gun that did it, but it was not Waxnose’s gun. Waxnose disappeared—I never heard where. They didn’t touch old man Jeeter, because he never came out of his stroke, except to lie on his back and have nurses and tell people how he hadn’t lost a nickel in the depression.
Marty Estel called me up four times to tell me to lay off Harriet Huntress. I felt kind of sorry for the poor guy. He had it bad. I went out with her twice and sat with her twice more at home, drinking her Scotch. It was nice, but I didn’t have the money, the clothes, the time or the manners. Then she stopped being at the El Milano and I heard she had gone to New York.
I was glad when she left—even though she didn’t bother to tell me goodbye.
I’LL BE WAITING
At one o’clock in the morning, Carl, the night porter, turned down the last of three table lamps in the main lobby of the Windermere Hotel. The blue carpet darkened a shade or two and the walls drew back into remoteness. The chairs filled with shadowy loungers. In the corners were memories like cobwebs.
Tony Reseck yawned. He put his head on one side and listened to the frail, twittery music from the radio room beyond a dim arch at the far side of the lobby. He frowned. That should be his radio room after one A.M. Nobody should be in it. That red-haired girl was spoiling his nights.
The frown passed and a miniature of a smile quirked at the corners of his lips. He sat relaxed, a short, pale, paunchy, middle-aged man with long, delicate fingers clasped on the elk’s tooth on his watch chain; the long delicate fingers of a sleight-of-hand artist, fingers with shiny, molded nails and tapering first joints, fingers a little spatulate at the ends. Handsome fingers. Tony Reseck rubbed them gently together and there was peace in his quiet sea-gray eyes.
The frown came back on his face. The music annoyed him. He got up with a curious litheness, all in one piece, without moving his clasped hands from the watch chain. At one moment he was leaning back relaxed, and the next he was standing balanced on his feet, perfectly still, so that the movement of rising seemed to be a thing perfectly perceived, an error of vision.
He walked with small, polished shoes delicately across the blue carpet and under the arch. The music was louder. It contained the hot, acid blare, the frenetic, jittering runs of a jam session. It was too loud. The red-haired girl sat there and stared silently at the fretted part of the big radio cabinet as though she could see the band with its fixed professional grin and the sweat running down its back. She was curled up with her feet under her on a davenport which seemed to contain most of the cushions in the room. She was tucked among them carefully, like a corsage in the florist’s tissue paper.
She didn’t turn her head. She leaned there, one hand in a small fist on her peach-colored knee. She was wearing lounging pajamas of heavy ribbed silk embroidered with black lotus buds.
“You like Goodman, Miss Cressy?” Tony Reseck asked.
The girl moved her eyes slowly. The light in there was dim, but the violet of her eyes almost hurt. They were large, deep eyes without a trace of thought in them. Her face was classical and without expression.
She said nothing.
Tony smiled and moved his fingers at his sides, one by one, feeling them move. “You like Goodman, Miss Cressy?” he repeated gently.
“Not to cry over,” the girl said tonelessly.
Tony rocked back on his heels and looked at her eyes. Large, deep, empty eyes. Or were they? He reached down and muted the radio.
“Don’t get me wrong,” the girl said. “Goodman makes money, and a lad that makes legitimate money these days is a lad you have to respect. But this jitterbug music gives me the backdrop of a beer flat. I like something with roses in it.”
“Maybe you like Mozart,” Tony said.
“Go on, kid me,” the girl said.
“I wasn’t kidding you, Miss Cressy. I think Mozart was the greatest man that ever lived—and Toscanini is his prophet.”
“I thought you were the house dick.” She put her head back on a pillow and stared at him through her lashes. “Make me some of that Mozart,” she added.
“It’s too late,” Tony sighed. “You can’t get it now.”
She gave him another long lucid glance. “Got the eye on me, haven’t you, flatfoot?” She laughed a little, almost under her breath. “What did I do wrong?”
Tony smiled his toy smile. “Nothing, Miss Cressy. Nothing at all. But you need some fresh air. You’ve been five days in this hotel and you haven’t been outdoors. And you have a tower room.”
She laughed again. “Make me a story about it. I’m bored.”
“There was a girl here once had your suite. She stayed in the hotel a whole week, like you. Without going out at all, I mean. She didn’t speak to anybody hardly. What do you think she did then?”
The girl eyed him gravely. “She jumped her bill.”
He put his long delicate hand out and turned it slowly, fluttering the fingers, with an effect almost like a lazy wave breaking. ‘Unh-uh. She sent down for her bill and paid it. Then she told the hop to be back in half an hour for her suitcases. Then she went out on her balcony.”
The girl leaned forward a little, her eyes still grave, one hand capping her peach-colored knee. “What did you say your name was?”
“Tony Reseck.”
“Sounds like a flunky.”
“Yeah,” Tony said. “Polish.”
“Go on, Tony.”
“All the tower suites have private balconies, Miss Cressy. The walls of them are too low for fourteen stories above the street. It was a dark night, that night, high clouds.” He dropped his hand with a final gesture, a farewell gesture. “Nobody saw her jump. But when she hit, it was like a big gun going off.”
“You’re making it up, Tony.” Her voice was a clean dry whisper of sound.
He smiled his toy smile. His quiet sea-gray eyes seemed almost to be smoothing the long waves of her hair. “Eve Cressy,” he said musingly. “A name waiting for lights to be in.”
“Waiting for a tall dark guy that’s no good, Tony. You wouldn’t care why. I was married to him once. I might be married to him again. You can make a lot of mistakes in just one lifetime.” The hand on her knee opened slowly until the fingers were strained back as far as they would go. Then they closed quickly and tightly, and even in that dim light the knuckles shone like the little polished bones. “I played him a low trick once. I put him in a bad place—without meaning to. You wouldn’t care about that either. It’s just that I owe him something.”
He leaned over softly and turned the knob on the radio. A waltz formed itself dimly on the warm air. A tinsel waltz, but a waltz. He turned the volume up. The music gushed from the loudspeaker in a swirl of shadowed melody. Since Vienna died, all waltzes are shadowed.
The girl put her hand on one side and hummed three or four bars and stopped with a sudden tightening of her mouth.
“Eve Cressy,” she said. “It was in lights once. At a bum night club. A dive. They raided it and the lights went out.”
He smiled at her almost mockingly. “It was no dive while you were there, Miss Cressy…That’s the waltz the orchestra always played when the old porter walked up and down in front of the hotel entrance, all swelled up with his medals on his chest. The Last Laugh. Emil
Jannings. You wouldn’t remember that one, Miss Cressy.”
“’Spring, Beautiful Spring,’” she said. “No, I never saw it.”
He walked three steps away from her and turned. “I have to go upstairs and palm doorknobs. I hope I didn’t bother you. You ought to go to bed now. It’s pretty late.”
The tinsel waltz stopped and a voice began to talk. The girl spoke through the voice. “You really thought something like that—about the balcony?”
He nodded. “I might have,” he said softly. “I don’t any more.”
“No chance, Tony.” Her smile was a dim lost leaf. “Come and talk to me some more. Redheads don’t jump, Tony. They hang on—and wither.”
He looked at her gravely for a moment and then moved away over the carpet. The porter was standing in the archway that led to the main lobby. Tony hadn’t looked that way yet, but he knew somebody was there. He always knew if anybody was close to him. He could hear the grass grow, like the donkey in The Blue Bird.
The porter jerked his chin at him urgently. His broad face above the uniform collar looked sweaty and excited. Tony stepped up close to him and they went together through the arch and out to the middle of the dim lobby.
“Trouble?” Tony asked wearily.
“There’s a guy outside to see you, Tony. He won’t come in. I’m doing a wipe—off on the plate glass of the doors and he comes up beside me, a tall guy. ‘Get Tony,’ he says, out of the side of his mouth.”
Tony said: “Uh-huh,” and looked at the porter’s pale blue eyes. “Who was it?”
“Al, he said to say he was.”
Tony’s face became as expressionless as dough. “Okey.” He started to move off.
The porter caught his sleeve. “Listen, Tony. You got any enemies?”