I sipped my beer and held my glass with my left hand. After a while I said: “Seen Lou Lid lately?” This seemed to be in order. There had been nothing in any paper I had seen about Lou Lid and Fuente the Mex.
The barkeep looked at me blankly. The skin over his eyes was grained like lizard skin. Finally he spoke in a husky whisper. “Don’t know him.”
There was a thick white scar on his throat. A knife had gone in there once which accounted for the husky whisper.
The man who was reading the letter guffawed suddenly and slapped his thigh. “I gotta tell this to Moose,” he roared. “This is right from the bottom of the bucket.”
He got down off his stool and ambled over to a door in the rear wall and went through it. He was a husky dark man who looked like anybody. The door shut behind him.
The barkeep said in his husky whisper: “Lou Lid, huh? Funny moniker. Lots a guys come in here. I dunno their names. Copper?”
“Private,” I said. “Don’t let it bother you. I’m just drinking beer. This Lou Lid was a shine. Light brown. Young.”
“Well, maybe I seen him sometime. I don’t recall.”
“Who’s Moose?”
“Him? That’s the boss. Moose Magoon.”
He dipped a thick towel down in a bucket and folded it and wrung it out and pushed it along the bar holding it by the ends. That made a club about two inches thick and eighteen inches long. You can knock a man into the next county with a club like that if you know how.
The man with the pink letter came back through the rear door, still chuckling, shoved the letter into his side pocket and strolled to the pin game. That put him behind me. I began to get a little worried.
I finished my beer quickly and stood down off the stool. The barkeep hadn’t rung up my dime yet. He held his twisted towel and moved it back and forth slowly.
“Nice beer,” I said. “Thanks all the same.”
“Come again,” he whispered, and knocked my glass over.
That took my eyes for a second. When I looked up again the door at the back was open and a big man stood in it with a big gun in his hand.
He didn’t say anything. He just stood there. The gun looked at me. It looked like a tunnel. The man was very broad, very swarthy. He had a build like a wrestler. He looked plenty tough. He didn’t look as if his real name was Magoon.
Nobody said anything. The barkeep and the man with the big gun just stared at me fixedly. Then I heard a train coming on the interurban tracks. Coming fast and coming noisy. That would be the time. The shade was down all across the front window and nobody could see into the place. The train would make a lot of noise as it went by. A couple of shots would be lost in it.
The noise of the approaching train got louder. I had to move before it got quite loud enough.
I went head first over the bar in a rolling dive.
Something banged faintly against the roar of the train and something rattled overhead, seemingly on the wall. I never knew what it was. The train went on by in a booming crescendo.
I hit the barkeep’s legs and the dirty floor about the same moment. He sat down on my neck.
That put my nose in a puddle of stale beer and one of my ears into some very hard concrete floor. My head began to howl with pain. I was low down along a sort of duckboard behind the bar and half turned on my left side. I jerked the gun loose from my waistband. For a wonder it hadn’t slipped and jammed itself down my trouser leg.
The barkeep made a kind of annoyed sound and something hot stung me and I didn’t hear any more shots just at the moment. I didn’t shoot the barkeep. I rammed the gun muzzle into a part of him where some people are sensitive. He was one of them.
He went up off me like a foul fly. If he didn’t yell it was not for want of trying. I rolled a little more and put the gun in the seat of his pants. “Hold it!” I snarled at him. “I don’t want to get vulgar with you.”
Two more shots roared. The train was off in the distance, but somebody didn’t care. These cut through wood. The bar was old and solid but not solid enough to stop .45 slugs. The barkeep sighed above me. Something hot and wet fell on my face. “You’ve shot me, boys,” he whispered, and started to fall down on top of me.
I wriggled away just in time, got to the end of the bar nearest the front of the beer parlor and looked around it. A face with a brown hat over it was about nine inches from my own face, on the same level.
We looked at each other for a fraction of a second that seemed long enough for a tree to grow to maturity in, but was actually so short a time that the barkeep was still foundering in the air behind me.
This was my last gun. Nobody was going to get it. I got it up before the man I was facing had even reacted to the situation. He didn’t do anything. He just slid off to one side and as he slid a thick gulp of red came out of his mouth.
I heard this shot. It was so loud it was like the end of the world, so loud that I almost didn’t hear the door slam towards the back. I crawled farther around the end of the bar, knocked somebody’s gun along the floor peevishly, stuck my hat around the corner of the wood. Nobody shot at it. I stuck one eye and part of my face out.
The door at the back was shut and the space in front of it was empty. I got up on my knees and listened. Another door slammed, and a car motor roared.
I went crazy. I tore across the room, threw the door open and plunged through it. It was a phony. They had slammed the door and started the car just for a come-on, I saw that the flailing arm held a bottle.
For the third time in twenty-four hours I took the count.
I came out of this one yelling, with the harsh bite of ammonia in my nose. I swung at a face. But I didn’t have anything to swing with. My arms were a couple of four-ton anchors. I threshed around and groaned.
The face in front of me materialized into the bored yet attentive pan of a man with a white coat, a fast-wagon medico.
“Like it?” he grinned. “Some people used to drink it—with a wine-tonic chaser.”
He pulled at me and something nipped at my shoulder and a needle stung me. -
“Light shot,” he said. “That head of yours is pretty bad. You won’t go out.”
His face went away. I prowled my eyes. Beyond there was a vagueness. Then I saw a girl’s face, hushed, sharp, attentive. Carol Pride.
“Yeah,” I said. “You followed me. You would.”
She smiled and moved. Then her fingers were stroking my cheek and I couldn’t see her.
“The prowl-car boys just made it,” she said. “The crooks had you all wrapped up in a carpet—for shipment in a truck out back.”
I couldn’t see very well. A big red-faced man in blue slid in front of me. He had a gun in his hand with the gate open. Somebody groaned somewhere in the background.
She said: “They had two others wrapped up. But they were dead. Ugh!”
“Go on home,” I grumbled woozily. “Go write yourself a feature story.”
“You used that one before, sap.” She went on stroking my cheek. “I thought you made them up as you went along. Drowsy?”
“That’s all taken care of,” a voice said sharply. “Get this shot guy down to where you can work on him. I want him to live.”
Reavis came towards me as out of a mist. His face formed itself slowly, gray, attentive, rather stern. It lowered, as if he sat down in front of me, close to me.
“So you had to play it smart,” he said in a sharp, edgy voice. “All right, talk. The hell with how your head feels. You asked for it and you got it.”
“Gimme a drink.”
Vague motion, a flicker of bright light, the lip of a flask touched my mouth. Hot strength ran down my throat. Some of it ran cold on my chin and I moved my head away from the flask.
“Thanks. Get Magoon—the biggest one?”
“He’s full of lead, but still turning over. On his way down town now.”
“Get the Indian?”
“Huh?” he gulped.
“In some bushes und
er Peace Cross down on the Palisades. I shot him. I didn’t mean to.”
“Holy——”
Reavis went away again and the fingers moved slowly and rhythmically on my cheek.
Reavis came back and sat down again. “Who’s the Indian?” he snapped.
“Soukesian’s strong-arm man. Soukesian the Psychic. He—”
“We know about him,” Reavis interrupted bitterly. “You’ve been out a whole hour, shamus. The lady told us about those cards. She says it’s her fault but I don’t believe it. Screwy anyhow. But a couple of the boys have gone out there.”
“I was there,” I said. “At his house. He knows something. I don’t know what. He was afraid of me—yet he didn’t knock me off. Funny.”
“Amateur,” Reavis said dryly. “He left that for Moose Magoon. Moose Magoon was tough—up till lately. A record from here to Pittsburgh…Here. But take it easy. This is ante mortem confession liquor. Too damn good for you.”
The flask touched my lips again.
“Listen,” I said thickly. “This was the stick-up squad. Soukesian was the brains. Lindley Paul was the finger. He must have crossed them on something—”
Reavis said, “Nuts,” and just then a phone rang distantly and a voice said: “You, Lieutenant.”
Reavis went away. When he came back again he didn’t sit down.
“Maybe you’re right,” he said softly. “Maybe you are, at that. In a house on top of a hill in Brentwood Heights there’s a golden-haired guy dead in a chair with a woman crying over him. Dutch act. There’s a jade necklace on a table beside him.”
“Too much death,” I said, and fainted.
I woke up in an ambulance. At first I thought I was alone in it. Then I felt her hand and knew I wasn’t. I was stone blind now. I couldn’t even see light. It was just bandages.
“The doctor’s up front with the driver,” she said. “You can hold my hand. Would you like me to kiss you?”
“If it doesn’t obligate me to anything.”
She laughed softly. “I guess you’ll live,” she said. She kissed me. “Your hair smells of Scotch. Do you take baths in it? The doctor said you weren’t to talk.”
“They beaned me with a full bottle. Did I tell Reavis about the Indian?”
“Yes.”
“Did I tell him Mrs. Prendergast thought Paul was mixed up—”
“You didn’t even mention Mrs. Prendergast,” she said quickly.
I didn’t say anything to that. After a while she said: “This Soukesian, did he look like a lady’s man?”
“The doctor said I wasn’t to talk,” I said.
Eight—Poison Blonde
It was a couple of weeks later that I drove down to Santa Monica. Ten days of the time I had spent in the hospital, at my own expense, getting over a bad concussion. Moose Magoon was in the prison ward at the County Hospital about the same time, while they picked seven or eight police slugs out of him. At the end of that time they buried him.
The case was pretty well buried by this time, too. The papers had had their play with it and other things had come along and after all it was just a jewel racket that went sour from too much double-crossing. So the police said, and they ought to know. They didn’t find any more jewels, but they didn’t expect to. They figured the gang pulled just one job at a time, with coolie labor mostly, and sent them on their way with their cut. That way only three people really knew what it was all about: Moose Magoon, who turned out to be an Armenian; Soukesian, who used his connections to find out who had the right kind of jewels; and Lindley Paul, who fingered the jobs and tipped the gang off when to strike. Or so the police said, and they ought to know.
It was a nice warm afternoon. Carol Pride lived on Twenty-fifth Street, in a neat little red brick house trimmed with white with a hedge in front of it.
Her living room had a tan figured rug, white-and-rose chairs, a black marble fireplace with tall brass andirons, very high bookcases built back into the walls, rough cream-colored drapes against shades of the same color.
There was nothing womanish in it except a full-length mirror with a clear sweep of floor in front.
I sat down in a nice soft chair and rested what was left of my head and sipped Scotch and soda while I looked at her fluffed-out brown hair above a high-collar dress that made her face look small, almost childish.
“I bet you didn’t get all this writing,” I said.
“And my dad didn’t get it grafting on the cops either,” she snapped. “We had a few lots at Playa Del Rey, if you have to know.”
“A little oil,” I said. “Nice. I didn’t have to know. Don’t start snapping at me.”
“Have you still got your licence?”
“Oh, yes,” I said. “Well, this is nice Scotch. You wouldn’t like to go riding in an old car, would you?”
“Who am I to sneer at an old car?” she asked. “The laundry must have put too much starch in your neck.”
I grinned at the thin line between her eyebrows.
“I kissed you in that ambulance,” she said. “If you remember, don’t take it too big. I was just sorry for the way you got your head bashed in.”
“I’m a career man,” I said. “I wouldn’t build on anything like that. Let’s go riding. I have to see a blonde in Beverly Hills. I owe her a report.”
She stood up and glared at me. “Oh, the Prendergast woman,” she said nastily. “The one with the hollow wooden legs.”
“They may be hollow,” I said.
She flushed and tore out of the room and came back in what seemed about three seconds with a funny little octagonal hat that had a red button on it, and a plaid overcoat with a suede collar and cuffs. “Let’s go,” she said breathlessly.
The Philip Courtney Prendergasts lived on one of those wide, curving streets where the houses seem to be too close together for their size and the amount of money they represent. A Jap gardener was manicuring a few acres of soft green lawn with the usual contemptuous expression Jap gardeners have. The house had an English slate roof and a porte-cochËre, some nice imported trees, a trellis with bougainvillaea. It was a nice place and not loud. But Beverly Hills is Beverly Hills, so the butler had a wing collar and an accent like Alan Mowbray.
He ushered us through zones of silence into a room that was empty at the moment. It had large chesterfields and lounging chairs done in pale yellow leather and arranged around a fireplace, in front of which, on the glossy but not slippery floor, lay a rug as thin as silk and as old as Aesop’s aunt. A jet of flowers in the corner, another jet on a low table, walls of dully painted parchment, silence, comfort, space, coziness, a dash of the very modern and a dash of the very old. A very swell room.
Carol Pride sniffed at it.
The butler swung half of a leather-covered door and Mrs. Prendergast came in. Pale blue, with a hat and bag to match, all ready to go out. Pale blue gloves slapping lightly at a pale blue thigh. A smile, hints of depths in the black eyes, a high color, and even before she spoke a nice edge.
She flung both her hands out at us. Carol Pride managed to miss her share. I squeezed mine.
“Gorgeous of you to come,” she cried. “How nice to see you both again. I can still taste that whisky you had in your office. Terrible, wasn’t it?”
We all sat down.
I said: “I didn’t really need to take up your time by coming in person, Mrs. Prendergast. Everything turned out all right and you got your beads back.”
“Yes. That strange man. How curious of him to be what he was. I knew him too. Did you know that?”
“Soukesian? I thought perhaps you knew him,” I said.
“Oh, yes. Quite well. I must owe you a lot of money. And your poor head. How is it?”
Carol Pride was sitting close to me.
She said tinnily, between her teeth, almost to herself, but not quite: “Sawdust and creosote. Even at that the termites are getting her.”
I smiled at Mrs. Prendergast and she returned my smile with an angel on its
back.
“You don’t owe me a nickel,” I said. “There was just one thing—”
“Impossible. I must. But let’s have a little Scotch, shall we?” She held her bag on her knees, pressed something under the chair, said: “A little Scotch and soda, Vernon.” She beamed. “Cute, eh? You can’t even see the mike. This house is just full of little things like that. Mr. Prendergast loves them. This one talks in the butler’s pantry.”
Carol Pride said: “I bet the one that talks by the chauffeur’s bed is cute too.”
Mrs. Prendergast didn’t hear her. The butler came in with a tray and mixed drinks, handed them around and went out.
Over the rim of her glass Mrs. Prendergast said: “You were nice not to tell the police I suspected Lin Paul of being—well, you know. Or that I had anything to do with your going to that awful beer parlor. By the way, how did you explain that?”
“Easy. I told them Paul told me himself. He was with you, remember?”
“But he didn’t, of course?” I thought her eyes were a little sly now.
“He told me practically nothing. That was the whole truth. And of course he didn’t tell me he’d been blackmailing you.”
I seemed to be aware that Carol Pride had stopped breathing. Mrs. Prendergast went on looking at me over the rim of her glass. Her face had, for a brief moment, a sort of half-silly, nymph-surprised-while-bathing expression. Then she put her glass down slowly and opened her bag in her lap and got a handkerchief out and bit it. There was silence.
“That,” she said in a low voice, “is rather fantastic, isn’t it?”
I grinned at her coldly. “The police are a lot like the newspapers, Mrs. Prendergast. For one reason and another they can’t use everything they get. But that doesn’t make them dumb. Reavis isn’t dumb. He doesn’t really think, any more than I do, that this Soukesian person was really running a tough jewel-heist gang. He couldn’t have handled people like Moose Magoon for five minutes. They’d have walked all over his face just for exercise. Yet Soukesian did have the necklace. That needs explaining. I think he bought it—from Moose Magoon. For the ten-grand pay-off supplied by you—and for some other little consideration likely paid in advance to get Moose to pull the job.”