“We don’t like interference.” He stood up. He put the grand note casually back in his pocket. While he was doing it I let go of the .45 and jerked out my Smith &Wesson five-inch .38.
He looked at it contemptuously. “I’ll be in Vegas, Marlowe. In fact I never left Vegas. You can catch me at the Esperanza. No, we don’t give a damn about Larsen personally. Just another gun handler. They come in gross lots. We do give a damn that some punk private eye fingered him.”
He nodded and went out by my office door.
I did some pondering. I knew Ikky wouldn’t go back to the Outfit. He wouldn’t trust them enough if he got the chance. But there was another reason now. I called Anne Riordan again.
“I’m going to look for Ikky. I have to. If I don’t call you in three days, get hold of Bernie Ohls. I’m going to Flagstaff, Arizona. Ikky says he will be there.”
“You’re a fool,” she wailed. “It’s some sort of trap.”
“A Mr. Grimes of Vegas visited me with a silenced gun. I beat him to the punch, but I won’t always be that lucky. If I find Ikky and report to Grimes, the mob will let me alone.”
“You’d condemn a man to death?” Her voice was sharp and incredulous.
“No. He won’t be there when I report. He’ll have to hop a plane to Montreal, buy forged papers—Montreal is almost as crooked as we are—and plane to Europe. He may be fairly safe there. But the Outfit has long arms and Ikky will have a damned dull life staying alive. He hasn’t any choice. For him it’s either hide or get the pencil.”
“So clever of you, darling. What about your own pencil?”
“If they meant it, they wouldn’t have sent it. Just a bit of scare technique.”
“And you don’t scare, you wonderful handsome brute.”
“I scare. But it doesn’t paralyze me. So long. Don’t take any lovers until I get back.”
“Damn you, Marlowe!”
She hung up on me. I hung up on myself.
Saying the wrong thing is one of my specialties.
I beat it out of town before the homicide boys could hear about me. It would take them quite a while to get a lead. And Bernie Ohls wouldn’t give a city dick a used paper bag. The Sheriff’s men and the City Police co-operate about as much as two tomcats on a fence.
9
I made Phoenix by evening and parked myself in a motor court on the outskirts. Phoenix was damned hot. The motor court had a dining room, so I had dinner. I collected some quarters and dimes from the cashier and shut myself in a phone booth and started to call the Mirador in Flagstaff. How silly could I get? Ikky might be registered under any name from Cohen to Cordileone, from Watson to Woichehovski. I called anyway and got nothing but as much of a smile as you can get on the phone. So I asked for a room the following night. Not a chance unless someone checked out, but they would put me down for a cancellation or something. Flagstaff is too near the Grand Canyon. Ikky must have arranged in advance. That was something to ponder too.
I bought a paperback and read it. I set my alarm watch for 6.30. The paperback scared me so badly that I put two guns under my pillow It was about a guy who bucked the hoodlum boss of Milwaukee and got beaten up every fifteen minutes. I figured that his head and face would be nothing but a piece of bone with a strip of skin hanging from it. But in the next chapter he was as gay as a meadow lark. Then I asked myself why I was reading this drivel when I could have been memorizing The Brothers Karamazov. Not knowing any good answers, I turned the light out and went to sleep. At 6.30 I shaved and showered and had breakfast and took off for Flagstaff. I got there by lunchtime, and there was Ikky in the restaurant eating mountain trout. I sat down across from him. He looked surprised to see me.
I ordered mountain trout and ate it from the outside in, which is the proper way. Boning spoils it a little.
“What gives?” he asked me with his mouth full. A delicate eater.
“You read the papers?”
“Just the sporting section.”
“Let’s go to your room and talk about it. There’s more than that.”
We paid for our lunches and went along to a nice double. The motor courts are getting so good that they make a lot of hotels look cheap. We sat down and lit cigarettes.
“The two hoods got up too early and went over to Poynter Street. They parked outside your apartment house. They hadn’t been briefed carefully enough. They shot a guy who looked a little like you.”
“That’s a hot one.” He grinned. “But the cops will find out, and the Outfit will find out. So the tag for me stays on.”
“You must think I’m dumb,” I said. “I am.”
“I thought you did a first-class job, Marlowe. What’s dumb about that?”
“What job did I do?”
“You got me out of there pretty slick.”
“Anything about it you couldn’t have done yourself ?”
“With luck—no. But it’s nice to have a helper.”
“You mean sucker.”
His face tightened. And his rusty voice growled. “I don’t catch. And give me back some of that five grand, will you? I’m shorter than I thought.”
“I’ll give it back to you when you find a hummingbird in a salt shaker.”
“Don’t be like that,” he almost sighed, and flicked a gun into his hand. I didn’t have to flick. I was holding one in my side pocket.
“I oughtn’t to have boobed off,” I said. “Put the heater away. It doesn’t pay any more than a Vegas slot machine.”
“Wrong. Them machines pay the jackpot every so often. Otherwise—no customers.”
“Every so seldom, you mean. Listen, and listen good.”
He grinned. His dentist was tired waiting for him.
“The set-up intrigued me,” I went on, debonair as Milo Vance in a Van Dyne story and a lot brighter in the head. “First off, could it be done? Second, if it could be done, where would I be? But gradually I saw the little touches that flaw the picture. Why would you come to me at all? The Outfit isn’t that naïve. Why would they send a little punk like this Charles Hickon or whatever name he uses on Thursdays? Why would an old hand like you let anybody trail you to a dangerous connection?”
“You slay me, Marlowe. You’re so bright I could find you in the dark. You’re so dumb you couldn’t see a red white and blue giraffe. I bet you were back there in your unbrain emporium playing with that five grand like a cat with a bag of catnip. I bet you were kissing the notes.”
“Not after you handled them. Then why the pencil that was sent to me? Big dangerous threat. It reinforced the rest. But like I told your choir boy from Vegas, they don’t send them when they mean them. By the way, he had a gun too. A Woodsman .22 with a silencer. I had to make him put it away. He was nice about that. He started waving grands at me to find out where you were and tell him. A well-dressed, nice-looking front man for a pack of dirty rats. The Women’s Christian Temperance Association and some bootlicking politicians gave them the money to be big, and they learned how to use it and make it grow. Now they’re pretty well unstoppable. But they’re still a pack of dirty rats. And they’re always where they can’t make a mistake. That’s inhuman. Any man has a right to a few mistakes. Not the rats. They have to be perfect all the time. Or else they get stuck with you.”
“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. I just know it’s too long.”
“Well, allow me to put it in English. Some poor jerk from the East Side gets involved with the lower echelons of a mob. You know what an echelon is, Ikky?”
“I been in the Army,” he sneered.
“He grows up in the mob, but he’s not all rotten. He’s not rotten enough. So he tries to break loose. He comes out here and gets himself a cheap job of some sort and changes his name or names and lives quietly in a cheap apartment house. But the mob by now has agents in many places. Somebody spots him and recognizes him. It might be a pusher, a front man for a bookie joint, a night girl, even a cop that’s on the take. So the mob, or call
them the Outfit, say through their cigar smoke: ‘Ikky can’t do this to us. It’s a small operation because he’s small. But it annoys us. Bad for discipline. Call a couple of boys and have them pencil him.’ But what boys do they call? A couple they’re tired of. Been around too long. Might make a mistake or get chilly toes. Perhaps they like killing. That’s bad too. That makes recklessness. The best boys are the ones that don’t care either way. So although they don’t know it, the boys they call are on their way out. But it would be kind of cute to frame a guy they already don’t like, for fingering a hood named Larsen. One of these puny little jokes the Outfit takes big. Look guys, we even got time to play footies with a private eye. Jesus, we can do anything. We could even suck our thumbs.’ So they send a ringer.”
“The Torri brothers ain’t ringers. They’re real hard boys. They proved it—even if they did make a mistake.”
“Mistake nothing. They got Ikky Rosenstein. You’re just a singing commercial in this deal. And as of now you’re under arrest for murder. You’re worse off than that. The Outfit will habeas corpus you out of the clink and blow you down. You’ve served your purpose and you failed to finger me into a patsy.”
His finger tightened on the trigger. I shot the gun out of his hand. My gun in my coat pocket was small, but at that distance accurate. And it was one of my days to be accurate myself.
He made a faint moaning sound and sucked at his hand. I went over and kicked him hard in the chest. Being nice to killers is not part of my repertoire. He went over backwards and sidewise and stumbled four or five steps. I picked up his gun and held it on him while I tapped all the places—not just pockets or holsters—where a man could stash a second gun. He was clean—that way anyhow.
“What are you trying to do to me?” he said whiningly. “I paid you. You’re clear. I paid you damn well.”
“We both have problems there. Yours is to stay alive.” I took a pair of cuffs out of my pocket and wrestled his hands behind him and snapped them on. His hand was bleeding. I tied his show handkerchief around it. I went to the telephone.
Flagstaff was big enough to have a police force. The D.A. Might even have his office there. This was Arizona, a poor state, relatively. The cops might even be honest.
10
I had to stick around for a few days, but I didn’t mind that as long as I could have trout caught eight or nine thousand feet up. I called Anne and Bernie Ohls. I called my answering service. The Arizona D.A. Was a young keen-eyed man and the Chief of Police was one of the biggest men I ever saw.
I got back to L.A. In time and took Anne to Romanoff’s for dinner and champagne.
“What I can’t see,” she said over a third glass of bubbly, “is why they dragged you into it, why they set up the fake Ikky Rosenstein. Why didn’t they just let the two life-takers do their job?”
“I couldn’t really say. Unless the big boys feel so safe they’re developing a sense of humor. And unless this Larsen guy that went to the gas chamber was bigger than he seemed to be. Only three or four important mobsters have made the electric chair or the rope or the gas chamber. None that I know of in the life-imprisonment states like Michigan. If Larsen was bigger than anyone thought, they might have had my name on a waiting list.”
“But why wait?” she asked me. “They’d go after you quickly.”
“They can afford to wait. Who’s going to bother them—Kefauver? He did his best, but do you notice any change in the set-up—except when they make one themselves?”
“Costello?”
“Income tax rap—like Capone. Capone may have had several hundred men killed, and killed a few of them himself, personally. But it took the Internal Revenue boys to get him. The Outfit won’t make that mistake often.”
“What I like about you, apart from your enormous personal charm, is that when you don’t know an answer you make one up.”
“The money worries me,” I said. “Five grand of their dirty money. What do I do with it?”
“Don’t be a jerk all your life. You earned the money and you risked your life for it. You can buy Series E Bonds. They’ll make the money clean. And to me that would be part of the joke.”
”You tell me one good reason why they pulled the switch.” “You have more of a reputation than you realize. And how would it be if the false Ikky pulled the switch? He sounds like one of these over-clever types that can’t do anything simple.”
“The Outfit will get him for making his own plans—if you’re right.”
“If the D.A. doesn’t. And I couldn’t care less about what happens to him. More champagne, please.”
ENGLISH SUMMER
—A Gothic Romance
Bury me where the soldiers of retreat
Are buried, underneath the faded star.
—Stephen Vincent BenÈt
1
It was one of those old, old cottages in the country which are supposed to be picturesque, which the English go to for weekends or for a month in the summer in a year when they can’t afford the high Alps or Venice or Sicily or Greece or the Riviera, a year when they don’t want to see their infernal gray ocean.
In the winter who lives in such places? Who would slog through the long, dreadful wet silence to find out? But probably some peaceful old woman with apple cheeks and two earthen hot-water bottles in her bed and not a care in the world, not even for death.
It was summer now, however, and the Crandalls were there for a month, I, as a guest for a vague few days. Edward Crandall had invited me himself, and I had gone, a little to be near her, a little because his asking me was a sort of insult, and I like insults, from some people.
I don’t think he hoped to catch me making love to her. I don’t think he would have cared. He was too busy on the tiles of the roofs, on the walls of the barnyards, in the shadows of the hayricks. He wouldn’t have paid either of us that compliment anyhow.
But I never had made love to her, so he couldn’t have caught us—not in the three years, off and on, I had known them. It was a curious, a very naïve, a very decrepit delicacy on my part. In the circumstances, while she continued to endure him in utter silence, I thought it would have been too callous a gesture. Perhaps I was wrong. Probably I was wrong. She was very lovely.
It was a small cottage, at the extreme edge of a village called Buddenham, but in spite of its natural seclusion it had those unnecessary walls that some English gardens have, as though the flowers might be caught in embarrassing postures. The part in the back, nearest the house, they liked to call the “close.” It had that almost unbearable fragrance of English flowers in summer. On the sunny side nectarines grew in espaliers, and there was a table put there on the firm, ancient lawn, and rustic chairs for tea, if it was warm enough for tea outdoors. It never was while I was there.
In front there was more garden, another walled-in space smelling of roses and mignonettes, drowsy with striped bumblebees. There was a walk and a hedge and a fence and a gate. That was outside. I liked all of that. Inside I hated one thing, the stairs. They had a sort of deadly cold ingenuity of wrongness, as though designed for your six months’ bride to fall down and break her neck, and make one of those sudden tragedies that people used to gloat over, licking their tear-wet lips.
I didn’t even mind there being only one bathroom and no shower. After ten years of visiting in England, for long periods at a time, I knew there were few houses, even large ones, with more. And you get used to being wakened in the morning by a discreet tapping, then the door opening softly without your having answered, then the curtains being rasped back, and then by the dull thud of a copper utensil of quaint shape, full of hot water, being deposited in a wide shallow try, in which you can just manage to sit—if you put your wet feet out on the floor. This is old-fashioned now, but it persists in some places.
That was all right, but not the stairs. In the first place there was a sort of very vague half-turn at the top, in complete darkness, and a totally unnecessary half-step there, at exactly the worst pos
sible angle. I always stumbled over it.
Then at the straight upper reach of the main flight, before the half-turn, there was a newel post as hard and sharp as a steel girder and about the size of a well-grown oak. It was carved, the story went, from the rudder stem of some Spanish galleon which a very English storm had cast upon a very English lee shore. After the usual few centuries, part of the rudder-stem had got to Buddenham and got itself made into a newel post.
One more thing—the two steel engravings. They hung out at an absurd angle from the wall right on the straight part of the stairs—and the stairs were already cramped. They hung side by side, framed in that very monumental manner steel engravings used to love. One corner would lay your skull open like an axe. They were the Stag Drinking and the Stag at Bay. They seemed to be exactly the same, except for the position of the stag’s head. But I never really saw them. I just crawled past them. The only place from which you could really see them was the passage to the kitchen and the scullery. From there, if you had any business there, and if you liked steel engravings after Landseer, you could look up through the banisters and gaze your fill. It may have been a lot of fun, but not to me.
This particular afternoon I came down these stairs stumbling and dodging about as usual, swinging my cherry-wood stick in a brisk and British manner, getting it caught in the banisters, and inhaling the faint sour aroma of the paste behind the wallpaper.
The house seemed unusually still. I missed the cracked monotone of old Bessie’s humming in the kitchen. Old Bessie went with the cottage and looked very much as though she had come ashore with the Spanish galleon, through a lot of rocks.
I peeped into the drawing room, and that was empty, so I went on back through the French doors to the “close.” Millicent was sitting there, in a garden chair. Just sitting. It seems that I must describe her, and I shall probably overdo it, like the rest.