Lou didn’t look at me. “He gets a nice crowd down there,” he said. “He has a small dance floor and a five-piece Mexican band to help the customers relax. They dance a bit and then go back for another trimming, instead of going away disgusted.”
I said: “What do you do?”
“I guess you might call it a system,” he said softly, and looked at me under his long lashes.
I looked away from him, looked around the room. It had a rust-red carpet, five green filing cases in a row under an advertising calendar, an old costumer in the corner, a few walnut chairs, net curtains over the windows. The fringe of the curtains was dirty from blowing about in the draft. There was a bar of late sunlight across my desk and it showed up the dust.
“I get it like this,” I said. “You think you have that roulette wheel tamed and you expect to win enough money so that Canales will be mad at you. You’d like to have some protection along—me. I think it’s screwy.”
“It’s not screwy at all,” Lou said. “Any roulette wheel has a tendency to work in a certain rhythm. If you know the wheel very well indeed—”
I smiled and shrugged. “Okey, I wouldn’t know about that. I don’t know enough roulette. It sounds to me like you’re being a sucker for your own racket, but I could be wrong. And that’s not the point anyway.”
“What is?” Lou asked thinly.
“I’m not much stuck on bodyguarding—but maybe that’s not the point either. I take it I’m supposed to think this play is on the level. Suppose I don’t, and walk out on you, and you get in a box? Or suppose I think everything is aces, but Canales don’t agree with me and gets nasty.”
“That’s why I need a guy with a rod,” Lou said, without moving a muscle except to speak.
I said evenly: “If I’m tough enough for the job—and I didn’t know I was—that still isn’t what worries me.”
“Forget it,” Lou said. “It breaks me up enough to know you’re worried.”
I smiled a little more and watched his yellow gloves moving around on top of the desk, moving too much. I said slowly: “You’re the last guy in the world to be getting expense money that way just now. I’m the last guy to be standing behind you while you do it. That’s all.”
Lou said: “Yeah.” He knocked some ash off his cigarette down on the glass top, bent his head to blow it off. He went on, as if it was a new subject: “Miss Glenn is going with me. She’s a tall redhead, a swell looker. She used to model. She’s nice people in any kind of a spot and she’ll keep Canales from breathing on my neck. So we’ll make out. I just thought I’d tell you.”
I was silent for a minute, then I said: “You know damn well I just got through telling the Grand Jury it was Manny Tinnen I saw lean out of that car and cut the ropes on Art Shannon’s wrists after they pushed him on the roadway, filled with lead.”
Lou smiled faintly at me. “That’ll make it easier for the grafters on the big time; the fellows who take the contracts and don’t appear in the business. They say Shannon was square and kept the Board in line. It was a nasty bump-off.”
I shook my head. I didn’t want to talk about that. I said: “Canales has a noseful of junk a lot of the time. And maybe he doesn’t go for redheads.”
Lou stood up slowly and lifted his cane off the desk. He stared at the tip of one yellow finger. He had an almost sleepy expression. Then he moved towards the door, swinging his cane.
“Well, I’ll be seem’ you some time,” he drawled.
I let him get his hand on the knob before I said: “Don’t go away sore, Lou. I’ll drop down to Las Olindas, if you have to have me. But I don’t want any money for it, and for Pete’s sake don’t pay any more attention to me than you have to.”
He licked his lips softly and didn’t quite look at me. “Thanks, keed. I’ll be careful as hell.”
He went out then and his yellow glove disappeared around the edge of the door.
I sat still for about five minutes and then my pipe got too hot. I put it down, looked at my strap watch, and got up to switch on a small radio in the corner beyond the end of the desk. When the A.C. Hum died down the last tinkle of a chime came out of the horn, then a voice was saying: “KLI now brings you its regular early evening broadcast of local news releases. An event of importance this afternoon was the indictment returned late today against Maynard J. Tinnen by the Grand Jury. Tinnen is a well-known City Hall lobbyist and man about town. The indictment, a shock to his many friends, was based almost entirely on the testimony—”
My telephone rang sharply and a girl’s cool voice said in my ear: “One moment, please. Mr. Fenweather is calling you.”
He came on at once. “Indictment returned. Take care of the boy.”
I said I was just getting it over the radio. We talked a short moment and then he hung up, after saying he had to leave at once to catch a plane.
I leaned back in my chair again and listened to the radio without exactly hearing it. I was thinking what a damn fool Lou Harger was and that there wasn’t anything I could do to change that.
2
It was a good crowd for a Tuesday but nobody was dancing. Around ten o’clock the little five-piece band got tired of messing around with a rhumba that nobody was paying any attention to. The marimba player dropped his sticks and reached under his chair for a glass. The rest of the boys lit cigarettes and just sat there looking bored.
I leaned sidewise against the bar, which was on the same side of the room as the orchestra stand. I was turning a small glass of tequila around on the top of the bar. All the business was at the center one of the three roulette tables.
The bartender leaned beside me, on his side of the bar.
“The flame-top gal must be pickin’ them,” he said.
I nodded without looking at him. “She’s playing with fistfuls now,” I said. “Not even counting it.”
The red-haired girl was tall. I could see the burnished copper of her hair between the heads of the people behind her. I could see Lou Harger’s sleek head beside hers. Everybody seemed to be playing standing up.
“You don’t play?” the bartender asked me.
“Not on Tuesdays. I had some trouble on a Tuesday once.”
“Yeah? Do you like that stuff straight, or could I smooth it out for you?”
“Smooth it out with what?” I said. “You got a wood rasp handy?”
He grinned. I drank a little more of the tequila and made a face.
“Did anybody invent this stuff on purpose?”
“I wouldn’t know, mister.”
“What’s the limit over there?”
“I wouldn’t know that either. How the boss feels, I guess.”
The roulette tables were in a row near the far wall. A low railing of gilt metal joined their ends and the players were outside the railing.
Some kind of a confused wrangle started at the center table. Half a dozen people at the two end tables grabbed their chips up and moved across.
Then a clear, very polite voice, with a slightly foreign accent, spoke out: “If you will just be patient, madame…Mr. Canales will be here in a minute.”
I went across, squeezed near the railing. Two croupiers stood near me with their heads together and their eyes looking sidewise. One moved a rake slowly back and forth beside the idle wheel. They were staring at the red-haired girl.
She wore a high-cut black evening gown. She had fine white shoulders, was something less than beautiful and more than pretty. She was leaning on the edge of the table, in front of the wheel. Her long eyelashes were twitching. There was a big pile of money and chips in front of her.
She spoke monotonously, as if she had said the same thing several times already.
“Get busy and spin that wheel! You take it away fast enough, but you don’t like to dish it out.”
The croupier in charge smiled a cold, even smile. He was tall, dark, disinterested: “The table can’t cover your bet,” he said with calm precision. “Mr. Canales, perhaps—” He shrugged ne
at shoulders.
The girl said: “It’s your money, highpockets. Don’t you want it back?”
Lou Harger licked his lips beside her, put a hand on her arm, stared at the pile of money with hot eyes. He said gently: “Wait for Canales…”
“To hell with Canales! I’m hot—and I want to stay that way.”
A door opened at the end of the tables and a very slight, very pale man came into the room. He had straight, lusterless black hair, a high bony forehead, flat, impenetrable eyes. He had a thin mustache that was trimmed in two sharp lines almost at right angles to each other. They came down below the corners of his mouth a full inch. The effect was Oriental. His skin had a thick, glistening pallor.
He slid behind the croupiers, stopped at a corner of the center table, glanced at the red-haired girl and touched the ends of his mustache with two fingers, the nails of which had a purplish tint.
He smiled suddenly, and the instant after it was as though he had never smiled in his life. He spoke in a dull, ironic voice.
“Good evening, Miss Glenn. You must let me send somebody with you when you go home. I’d hate to see any of that money get in the wrong pockets.”
The red-haired girl looked at him, not very pleasantly.
“I’m not leaving—unless you’re throwing me out.”
Canales said: “No? What would you like to do?”
“Bet the wad—dark meat!”
The crowd noise became a deathly silence. There wasn’t a whisper of any kind of sound. Harger’s face slowly got ivory-white.
Canales’ face was without expression. He lifted a hand, delicately, gravely, slipped a large wallet from his dinner jacket and tossed it in front of the tall croupier.
“Ten grand,” he said in a voice that was a dull rustle of sound. “That’s my limit—always.”
The tall croupier picked the wallet up, spread it, drew out two flat packets of crisp bills, riffled them, refolded the wallet and passed it along the edge of the table to Canales.
Canales did not move to take it. Nobody moved, except the croupier.
The girl said: “Put it on the red.”
The croupier leaned across the table and very carefully stacked her money and chips. He placed her bet for her on the red diamond. He placed his hand along the curve of the wheel.
“If no one objects,” Canales said, without looking at anyone, “this is just the two of us.”
Heads moved. Nobody spoke. The croupier spun the wheel and sent the ball skimming in the groove with a light flirt of his left wrist. Then he drew his hands back and placed them in full view on the edge of the table, on top of it.
The red-haired girl’s eyes shone and her lips slowly parted.
The ball drifted along the groove, dipped past one of the bright metal diamonds, slid down the flank of the wheel and chattered along the tines beside the numbers. Movement went out of it suddenly, with a dry click. It fell next the double zero, in red twenty-seven. The wheel was motionless.
The croupier took up his rake and slowly pushed the two packets of bills across, added them to the stake, pushed the whole thing off the field of play.
Canales put his wallet back in his breast pocket, turned and walked slowly back to the door, went through it.
I took my cramped fingers off the top of the railing, and a lot of people broke for the bar.
3
When Lou came up I was sitting at a little tile-top table in a corner, fooling with some more of the tequila. The little orchestra was playing a thin, brittle tango and one couple was maneuvering self-consciously on the dance floor.
Lou had a cream-colored overcoat on, with the collar turned up around a lot of white silk scarf. He had a fine-drawn glistening expression. He had white pigskin gloves this time and he put one of them down on the table and leaned at me.
“Over twenty-two thousand,” he said softly. “Boy, what a take!”
I said: “Very nice money, Lou. What kind of car are you driving?”
“See anything wrong with it?”
“The play?” I shrugged, fiddled with my glass. “I’m not wised up on roulette, Lou…I saw plenty wrong with your broad’s manners.”
“She’s not a broad,” Lou said. His voice got a little worried.
“Okey. She made Canales look like a million. What kind of car?”
“Buick sedan. Nile green, with two spotlights and those little fender lights on rods.” His voice was still worried.
I said: “Take it kind of slow through town. Give me a chance to get in the parade.”
He moved his glove and went away. The red-haired girl was not in sight anywhere. I looked down at the watch on my wrist. When I looked up again Canales was standing across the table. His eyes looked at me lifelessly above his trick mustache.
“You don’t like my place,” he said.
“On the contrary.”
“You don’t come here to play.” He was telling me, not asking me.
“Is it compulsory?” I asked dryly.
A very faint smile drifted across his face. He leaned a little down and said: “I think you are a dick. A smart dick.”
“Just a shamus,” I said. “And not so smart. Don’t let my long upper lip fool you. It runs in the family.”
Canales wrapped his fingers around the top of a chair, squeezed on it. “Don’t come here again—for anything.” He spoke very softly, almost dreamily. “I don’t like pigeons.”
I took the cigarette out of my mouth and looked it over before I looked at him. I said: “I heard you insulted a while back. You took it nicely…So we won’t count this one.”
He had a queer expression for a moment. Then he turned and slid away with a little sway of the shoulders. He put his feet down flat and turned them out a good deal as he walked. His walk, like his face, was a little negroid.
I got up and went out through the big white double doors into a dim lobby, got my hat and coat and put them on. I went out through another pair of double doors onto a wide veranda with scrollwork along the edge of its roof. There was sea fog in the air and the windblown Monterey cypresses in front of the house dripped with it. The grounds sloped gently into the dark for a long distance. Fog hid the ocean.
I had parked the car out on the street, on the other side of the house. I drew my hat down and walked soundlessly on the damp moss that covered the driveway, rounded a corner of the porch, and stopped rigidly.
A man just in front of me was holding a gun—but he didn’t see me. He was holding the gun down at his side, pressed against the material of his overcoat, and his big hand made it look quite small. The dim light that reflected from the barrel seemed to come out of the fog, to be part of the fog. He was a big man, and he stood very still, poised on the balls of his feet.
I lifted my right hand very slowly and opened the top two buttons of my coat, reached inside and drew out a long .38 with a six-inch barrel. I eased it into my overcoat pocket.
The man in front of me moved, reached his left hand up to his face. He drew on a cigarette cupped inside his hand and the glow put brief light on a heavy chin, wide, dark nostrils, and a square, aggressive nose, the nose of a fighting man.
Then he dropped the cigarette and stepped on it and a quick, light step made faint noise behind me. I was far too late turning.
Something swished and I went out like a light.
4
When I came to I was cold and wet and had a headache a yard wide. There was a soft bruise behind my right ear that wasn’t bleeding. I had been put down with a sap.
I got up off my back and saw that I was a few yards from the driveway, between two trees that were wet with fog. There was some mud on the backs of my shoes. I had been dragged off the path, but not very far.
I went through my pockets. My gun was gone, of course, but that was all—that and the idea that this excursion was all fun.
I nosed around through the fog, didn’t find anything or see anyone, gave up bothering about that, and went along the blank side of t
he house to a curving line of palm trees and an old type arc light that hissed and flickered over the entrance to a sort of lane where I had stuck the 1925 Marmon touring car I still used for transportation. I got into it after wiping the seat off with a towel, teased the motor alive, and choked it along to a big empty street with disused car tracks in the middle.
I went from there to De Cazens Boulevard, which was the main drag of Las Olindas and was called after the man who built Canales’ place long ago. After a while there was town, buildings, dead-looking stores, a service station with a nightbell, and at last a drugstore which was still open.
A dolled-up sedan was parked in front of the drugstore and I parked behind that, got out, and saw that a hatless man was sitting at the counter, talking to a clerk in a blue smock. They seemed to have the world to themselves. I started to go in, then I stopped and took another look at the dolled-up sedan.
It was a Buick and of a color that could have been Nile-green in daylight. It had two spotlights and two little egg-shaped amber lights stuck up on thin nickel rods clamped to the front fenders. The window by the driver’s seat was down. I went back to the Marmon and got a flash, reached in and twisted the license holder of the Buick around, put the light on it quickly, then off again.
It was registered to Louis N. Harger.
I got rid of the flash and went into the drugstore. There was a liquor display at one side, and the clerk in the blue smock sold me a pint of Canadian Club, which I took over to the counter and opened. There were ten seats at the counter, but I sat down on the one next to the hatless man. He began to look me over, in the mirror, very carefully.
I got a cup of black coffee two-thirds full and added plenty of the rye. I drank it down and waited for a minute, to let it warm me up. Then I looked the hatless man over.
He was about twenty-eight, a little thin on top, had a healthy red face, fairly honest eyes, dirty hands and looked as if he wasn’t making much money. He wore a gray whipcord jacket with metal buttons on it, pants that didn’t match.
I said carelessly, in a low voice: “Your bus outside?”