I didn’t speak or move. The big front sight raked my cheek lightly almost caressingly. The man smiled.
“It’s kind of good business too,” he said. “Just in case. An old con like me don’t make good prints, all I got against me is two witnesses. The hell with it.”
“What did Waldo do to you?” I tried to make it sound as if I wanted to know, instead of just not wanting to shake too hard.
“Stooled on a bank job in Michigan and got me four years. Got himself a nolle prosse. Four years in Michigan ain’t no summer cruise. They make you be good in them lifer states.”
“How’d you know he’d come in there?” I croaked.
“I didn’t. Oh yeah, I was lookin’ for him. I was wanting to see him all right. I got a flash of him on the street night before last but I lost him. Up to then I wasn’t lookin’ for him. Then I was. A cute guy, Waldo. How is he?”
“Dead,” I said.
“I’m still good,” he chuckled. “Drunk or sober. Well, that don’t make no doughnuts for me now. They make me downtown yet?”
I didn’t answer him quick enough. He jabbed the gun into my throat and I choked and almost grabbed for it by instinct.
“Naw,” he cautioned me softly. “Naw. You ain’t that dumb.”
I put my hands back, down at my sides, open, the palms towards him. He would want them that way. He hadn’t touched me, except with the gun. He didn’t seem to care whether I might have one too. He wouldn’t—if he just meant the one thing.
He didn’t seem to care very much about anything, coming back on that block. Perhaps the hot wind did something to him. It was booming against my shut windows like the surf under a pier.
“They got prints,” I said. “I don’t know how good.”
“They’ll be good enough—but not for teletype work. Take ‘em airmail time to Washington and back to check ‘em right. Tell me why I came here, pal.”
“You heard the kid and me talking in the bar. I told him my name, where I lived.”
“That’s how, pal. I said why.” He smiled at me. It was a lousy smile to be the last one you might see.
“Skip it,” I said. “The hangman won’t ask you to guess why he’s there.”
“Say, you’re tough at that. After you, I visit that kid. I tailed him home from Headquarters, but I figure you’re the guy to put the bee on first. I tail him home from the city hall, in the rent car Waldo had. From Headquarters, pal. Them funny dicks. You can sit in their laps and they don’t know you. Start runnin’ for a streetcar and they open up with machine guns and bump two pedestrians, a hacker asleep in his cab, and an old scrubwoman on the second floor workin’ a mop. And they miss the guy they’re after. Them funny lousy dicks.”
He twisted the gun muzzle in my neck. His eyes looked madder than before.
“I got time,” he said. “Waldo’s rent car don’t get a report right away. And they don’t make Waldo very soon. I know Waldo. Smart he was. A smooth boy, Waldo.”
“I’m going to vomit,” I said, “if you don’t take that gun out of my throat.”
He smiled and moved the gun down to my heart. “This about right? Say when.”
I must have spoken louder than I meant to. The door of the dressing-room by the wall bed showed a crack of darkness. Then an inch. Then four inches. I saw eyes, but didn’t look at them. I stared hard into the bald-headed man’s eyes. Very hard. I didn’t want him to take his eyes off mine.
“Scared?” he asked softly.
I leaned against his gun and began to shake. I thought he would enjoy seeing me shake. The girl came out through the door. She had her gun in her hand again. I was sorry as hell for her. She’d try to make the door—or scream. Either way it would be curtains—for both of us.
“Well, don’t take all night about it,” I bleated. My voice sounded far away, like a voice on a radio on the other side of a street.
“I like this, pal,” he smiled. “I’m like that.”
The girl floated in the air, somewhere behind him. Nothing was ever more soundless than the way she moved. It wouldn’t do any good though. He wouldn’t fool around with her at all. I had known him all my life but I had been looking into his eyes for only five minutes.
“Suppose I yell,” I said.
“Yeah, suppose you yell. Go ahead and yell,” he said with his killer’s smile.
She didn’t go near the door. She was right behind him.
“Well—here’s where I yell,” I said.
As if that was the cue, she jabbed the little gun hard into his short ribs, without a single sound.
He had to react. It was like a knee reflex. His mouth snapped open and both his arms jumped out from his sides and he arched his back just a little. The gun was pointing at my right eye.
I sank and kneed him with all my strength, in the groin.
His chin came down and I hit it. I hit it as if I was driving the last spike on the first transcontinental railroad. I can still feel it when I flex my knuckles.
His gun raked the side of my face but it didn’t go off. He was already limp. He writhed down gasping, his left side against the floor. I kicked his right shoulder—hard. The gun jumped away from him, skidded on the carpet, under a chair. I heard the chessmen tinkling on the floor behind me somewhere.
The girl stood over him, looking down. Then her wide dark horrified eyes came up and fastened on mine.
“That buys me,” I said. “Anything I have is yours—now and forever.”
She didn’t hear me. Her eyes were strained open so hard that the whites showed under the vivid blue iris. She backed quickly to the door with her little gun up, felt behind her for the knob and twisted it. She pulled the door open and slipped out.
The door shut.
She was bareheaded and without her bolero jacket.
She had only the gun, and the safety catch on that was still set so that she couldn’t fire it.
It was silent in the room then, in spite of the wind. Then I heard him gasping on the floor. His face had a greenish pallor. I moved behind him and pawed him for more guns, and didn’t find any. I got a pair of store cuffs out of my desk and pulled his arms in front of him and snapped them on his wrists. They would hold if he didn’t shake them too hard.
His eyes measured me for a coffin, in spite of their suffering. He lay in the middle of the floor, still on his left side, a twisted, wizened, bald-headed little guy with drawn-back lips and teeth spotted with cheap silver fillings. His mouth looked like a black pit and his breath came in little waves, choked, stopped, came on again, limping.
I went into the dressing room and opened the drawer of the chest. Her hat and jacket lay there on my shirts. I put them underneath, at the back, and smoothed the shirts over them. Then I went out to the kitchenette and poured a stiff jolt of whiskey and put it down and stood a moment listening to the hot wind howl against the window glass. A garage door banged, and a power-line wire with too much play between the insulators thumped the side of the building with a sound like somebody beating a carpet.
The drink worked on me. I went back into the living room and opened a window. The guy on the floor hadn’t smelled her sandalwood, but somebody else might.
I shut the window again, wiped the palms of my hands and used the phone to dial Headquarters.
Copernik was still there. His smart-aleck voice said: “Yeah? Marlowe? Don’t tell me. I bet you got an idea.”
“Make that killer yet?”
“We’re not saying, Marlowe. Sorry as all hell and so on. You know how it is.”
“O.K., I don’t care who he is. Just come and get him off the floor of my apartment.”
“Holy Christ!” Then his voice hushed and went down low. “Wait a minute, now. Wait a minute.” A long way off I seemed to hear a door shut. Then his voice again. “Shoot,” he said softly.
“Handcuffed,” I said. “All yours. I had to knee him, but he’ll be all right. He came here to eliminate a witness.”
Another pause. The voice w
as full of honey. “Now listen, boy, who else is in this with you?”
“Who else? Nobody. Just me.”
“Keep it that way, boy. All quiet. O.K.?”
“Think I want all the bums in the neighborhood in here sightseeing?”
“Take it easy, boy. Easy. Just sit tight and sit still. I’m practically there. No touch nothing. Get me?”
“Yeah.” I gave him the address and apartment number again to save him time.
I could see his big bony face glisten. I got the .22 target gun from under the chair and sat holding it until feet hit the hallway outside my door and knuckles did a quiet tattoo on the door panel.
Copernik was alone. He filled the doorway quickly, pushed me back into the room with a tight grin and shut the door. He stood with his back to it, his hand under the left side of his coat. A big hard bony man with flat cruel eyes.
He lowered them slowly and looked at the man on the floor. The man’s neck was twitching a little. His eyes moved in short stabs—sick eyes.
“Sure it’s the guy?” Copernik’s voice was hoarse.
“Positive. Where’s Ybarra?”
“Oh, he was busy.” He didn’t look at me when he said that. “Those your cuffs?”
“Yeah.”
“Key.”
I tossed it to him. He went down swiftly on one knee beside the killer and took my cuffs off his wrists, tossed them to one side. He got his own off his hip, twisted the bald man’s hands behind him and snapped the cuffs on.
“All right, you bastard,” the killer said tonelessly.
Copernik grinned and balled his fist and hit the handcuffed man in the mouth a terrific blow. His head snapped back almost enough to break his neck. Blood dribbled from the lower corner of his mouth.
“Get a towel,” Copernik ordered.
I got a hand towel and gave it to him. He stuffed it between the handcuffed man’s teeth, viciously, stood up and rubbed his bony fingers through his ratty blond hair.
“All right. Tell it.”
I told it—leaving the girl out completely. It sounded a little funny. Copernik watched me, said nothing. He rubbed the side of his veined nose. Then he got his comb out and worked on his hair just as he had done earlier in the evening, in the cocktail bar.
I went over and gave him the gun. He looked at it casually, dropped it into his side pocket. His eyes had something in them and his face moved in a hard bright grin.
I bent down and began picking up my chessmen and dropping them into the box. I put the box on the mantel, straightened out a leg of the card table, played around for a while. All the time Copernik watched me. I wanted him to think something out.
At last he came out with it. “This guy uses a twenty-two,” he said. “He uses it because he’s good enough to get by with that much gun. That means he’s good. He knocks at your door, pokes that gat in your belly, walks you back into the room, says he’s here to close your mouth for keeps—and yet you take him. You not having any gun. You take him alone. You’re kind of good yourself, pal.”
“Listen,” I said, and looked at the floor. I picked up another chessman and twisted it between my fingers. “I was doing a chess problem,” I said “Trying to forget things.”
“You got something on your mind, pal,” Copernik said softly. “You wouldn’t try to fool an old copper, would you, boy?”
“It’s a swell pinch and I’m giving it to you,” I said. “What the hell more do you want?”
The man on the floor made a vague sound behind the towel. His bald head glistened with sweat.
“What’s the matter, pal? You been up to something?” Copernik almost whispered.
I looked at him quickly, looked away again. “All right,” I said. “You know damn well I couldn’t take him alone. He had the gun on me and he shoots where he looks.”
Copernik closed one eye and squinted at me amiably with the other. “Go on, pal. I kind of thought of that too.”
I shuffled around a little more, to make it look good. I said, slowly: “There was a kid here who pulled a job over in Boyle Heights, a heist job. It didn’t take. A two-bit service station stick-up. I know his family. He’s not really bad. He was here trying to beg train money off me. When the knock came he sneaked in—there.”
I pointed at the wall bed and the door beside. Copernik’s head swiveled slowly, swiveled back. His eyes winked again. “And this kid had a gun,” he said.
I nodded. “And he got behind him. That takes guts, Copernik. You’ve got to give the kid a break. You’ve got to let him stay out of it.”
“Tag out for this kid?” Copernik asked softly.
“Not yet, he says. He’s scared there will be.”
Copernik smiled. “I’m a homicide man,” he said. “I wouldn’t know—or care.”
I pointed down at the gagged and handcuffed man on the floor. “You took him, didn’t you?” I said gently.
Copernik kept on smiling. A big whitish tongue came out and massaged his thick lower lip. “How’d I do it?” he whispered.
“Get the slugs out of Waldo?”
“Sure. Long twenty-two’s. One smashed a rib, one good.”
“You’re a careful guy. You don’t miss any angles. You know anything about me? You dropped in on me to see what guns I had.”
Copernik got up and went down on one knee again beside the killer. “Can you hear me, guy?” he asked with his face close to the face of the man on the floor.
The man made some vague sound. Copernik stood up and yawned. “Who the hell cares what he says? Go on, pal.”
“You wouldn’t expect to find I had anything, but you wanted to look around my place. And while you were mousing around in there”—I pointed to the dressing room—”and me not saying anything, being a little sore, maybe, a knock came on the door. So he came in. So after a while you sneaked out and took him.”
“Ah,” Copernik grinned widely, with as many teeth as a horse. “You’re on, pal. I socked him and I kneed him and I took him. You didn’t have no gun and the guy swiveled on me pretty sharp and I left-hooked him down the backstairs. O.K.?”
“O.K.,” I said.
“You’ll tell it like that downtown?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“I’ll protect you, pal. Treat me right and I’ll always play ball. Forget about that kid. Let me know if he needs a break.”
He came over and held out his hand. I shook it. It was as clammy as a dead fish. Clammy hands and the people who own them make me sick.
“There’s just one thing,” I said. “This partner of yours— Ybarra. Won’t he be a bit sore you didn’t bring him along on this?”
Copernik tousled his hair and wiped his hatband with a large yellowish silk handkerchief.
“That guinea?” he sneered. “To hell with him!” He came close to me and breathed in my face. “No mistakes, pal—about that story of ours.”
His breath was bad. It would be.
4
There were just five of us in the chief-of-detective’s office when Copernik laid it before them. A stenographer, the chief, Copernik, myself, Ybarra. Ybarra sat on a chair tilted against the side wall. His hat was down over his eyes but their softness loomed underneath, and the small still smile hung at the corners of the clean-cut Latin lips. He didn’t look directly at Copernik. Copernik didn’t look at him at all.
Outside in the corridor there had been photos of Copernik shaking hands with me, Copernik with his hat on straight and his gun in his hand and a stern, purposeful look on his face.
They said they knew who Waldo was, but they wouldn’t tell me. I didn’t believe they knew, because the chief-of-detectives had a morgue photo of Waldo on his desk. A beautiful job, his hair combed, his tie straight, the light hitting his eyes just right to make them glisten. Nobody would have known it was a photo of a dead man with two bullet holes in his heart. He looked like a dance-hall sheik making up his mind whether to take the blonde or the redhead.
It was about midnight when I got h
ome. The apartment door was locked and while I was fumbling for my keys a low voice spoke to me out of the darkness.
All it said was: “Please!” but I knew it. I turned and looked at a dark Cadillac coupe parked just off the loading zone. It had no lights. Light from the street touched the brightness of a woman’s eyes.
I went over there. “You’re a darn fool,” I said.
She said: “Get in.”
I climbed in and she started the car and drove it a block and a half along Franklin and turned down Kingsley Drive. The hot wind still burned and blustered. A radio lilted from an open, sheltered side window of an apartment house. There were a lot of parked cars but she found a vacant space behind a small brand-new Packard cabriolet that had the dealer’s sticker on the windshield glass. After she’d jockeyed us up to the curb she leaned back in the corner with her gloved hands on the wheel.
She was all in black now, or dark brown, with a small foolish hat. I smelled the sandalwood in her perfume.
“I wasn’t very nice to you, was I?” she said.
“All you did was save my life.”
“What happened?”
“I called the law and fed a few lies to a cop I don’t like and gave him all the credit for the pinch and that was that. That guy you took away from me was the man who killed Waldo.”
“You mean—you didn’t tell them about me?”
“Lady,” I said again, “all you did was save my life. What else do you want done? I’m ready, willing, and I’ll try to be able.”
She didn’t say anything, or move.
“Nobody learned who you are from me,” I said. “Incidentally, I don’t know myself.”
“I’m Mrs. Frank C. Barsaly, Two-twelve Fremont Place, Olympia Two-four-five-nine-six. Is that what you wanted?”
“Thanks,” I mumbled, and rolled a dry unlit cigarette around in my fingers. “Why did you come back?” Then I snapped the fingers of my left hand. “The hat and jacket,” I said. “I’ll go up and get them.”
“It’s more than that,” she said. “I want my pearls.” I might have jumped a little. It seemed as if there had been enough without pearls.