A car tore by down the street going twice as fast as it should. A thin bitter cloud of dust lifted in the streetlights and whirled and vanished. The girl ran the window up quickly against it.
“All right,” I said. “Tell me about the pearls. We have had a murder and a mystery woman and a mad killer and a heroic rescue and a police detective framed into making a false report. Now we will have pearls. All right—feed it to me.”
“I was to buy them for five thousand dollars. From the man you call Waldo and I call Joseph Coates. He should have had them.”
“No pearls,” I said. “I saw what came out of his pockets. A lot of money, but no pearls.”
“Could they be hidden in his apartment?”
“Yes,” I said. “So far as I know he could have had them hidden anywhere in California except in his pockets. How’s Mr. Barsaly this hot night?”
“He’s still downtown at his meeting. Otherwise I couldn’t have come.”
“Well, you could have brought him,” I said. “He could have sat in the rumble seat.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “Frank weighs two hundred pounds and he’s pretty solid. I don’t think he would like to sit in the rumble seat, Mr. Marlowe.”
“What the hell are we talking about anyway?”
She didn’t answer. Her gloved hands tapped lightly, provokingly on the rim of the slender wheel. I threw the unlit cigarette out the window, turned a little and took hold of her.
When I let go of her, she pulled as far away from me as she could against the side of the car and rubbed the back of her glove against her mouth. I sat quite still.
We didn’t speak for some time. Then she said very slowly: “I meant you to do that. But I wasn’t always that way. It’s only been since Stan Phillips was killed in his plane. If it hadn’t been for that, I’d be Mrs. Phillips now. Stan gave me the pearls. They cost fifteen thousand dollars, he said once. White pearls, forty-one of them, the largest about a third of an inch across. I don’t know how many grains. I never had them appraised or showed them to a jeweler, so I don’t know those things. But I loved them on Stan’s account. I loved Stan. The way you do just the one time. Can you understand?”
“What’s your first name?” I asked.
“Lola.”
“Go on talking, Lola.” I got another dry cigarette out of my pocket and fumbled it between my fingers just to give them something to do.
“They had a simple silver clasp in the shape of a two-bladed propeller. There was one small diamond where the boss would be. I told Frank they were store pearls I had bought myself. He didn’t know the difference. It’s not so easy to tell, I dare say. You see—Frank is pretty jealous.”
In the darkness she came closer to me and her side touched my side. But I didn’t move this time. The wind howled and the trees shook. I kept on rolling the cigarette around in my fingers.
“I suppose you’ve read that story,” she said. “About the wife and the real pearls and her telling her husband they were false?”
“I’ve read it,” I said, “Maugham.”
“I hired Joseph. My husband was in Argentina at the time. I was pretty lonely.”
“You should be lonely,” I said.
“Joseph and I went driving a good deal. Sometimes we had a drink or two together. But that’s all. I don’t go around—”
“You told him about the pearls,” I said. “And when your two hundred pounds of beef came back from Argentina and kicked him out—he took the pearls, because he knew they were real. And then offered them back to you for five grand.”
“Yes,” she said simply. “Of course I didn’t want to go to the police. And of course in the circumstance Joseph wasn’t afraid of my knowing where he lived.”
“Poor Waldo,” I said. “I feel kind of sorry for him. It was a hell of a time to run into an old friend that had a down on you.”
I struck a match on my shoe sole and lit the cigarette. The tobacco was so dry from the hot wind that it burned like grass. The girl sat quietly beside me, her hands on the wheel again.
“Hell with women—these fliers,” I said. “And you’re still in love with him, or think you are. Where did you keep the pearls?”
“In a Russian malachite jewelry box on my dressing table. With some other costume jewelry. I had to, if I ever wanted to wear them.”
“And they were worth fifteen grand. And you think Joseph might have hidden them in his apartment. Thirty-one, wasn’t it?”
“Yes,” she said. “I guess it’s a lot to ask.”
I opened the door and got out of the car. “I’ve been paid,” I said. “I’ll go look. The doors in my apartment are not very obstinate. The cops will find out where Waldo lived when they publish his photo, but not tonight, I guess.”
“It’s awfully sweet of you,” she said. “Shall I wait here?”
I stood with a foot on the running board, leaning in, looking at her. I didn’t answer her question. I just stood there looking in at the shine of her eyes. Then I shut the car door and walked up the street towards Franklin.
Even with the wind shriveling my face I could still smell the sandalwood in her hair. And feel her lips.
I unlocked the Berglund door, walked through the silent lobby to the elevator, and rode up to Three. Then I soft-footed along the silent corridor and peered down at the sill of Apartment 31. No light. I rapped—the old light, confidential tattoo of the bootlegger with the big smile and the extra-deep hip pockets. No answer. I took the piece of thick hard celluloid that pretended to be a window over the driver’s license in my wallet, and eased it between the lock and the jamb, leaning hard on the knob, pushing it toward the hinges. The edge of the celluloid caught the slope of the spring lock and snapped it back with a small brittle sound, like an icicle breaking. The door yielded and I went into near darkness. Street light filtered in and touched a high spot here and there.
I shut the door and snapped the light on and just stood. There was a queer smell in the air. I made it in a moment— the smell of dark-cured tobacco. I prowled over to a smoking stand by the window and looked down at four brown butts— Mexican or South American cigarettes.
Upstairs, on my floor, feet hit the carpet and somebody went into a bathroom. I heard the toilet flush. I went into the bathroom of Apartment 31. A little rubbish, nothing, no place to hide anything. The kitchenette was a longer job, but I only half searched. I knew there were no pearls in that apartment. I knew Waldo had been on his way out and that he was in a hurry and that something was riding him when he turned and took two bullets from an old friend.
I went back to the living room and swung the wall bed and looked past its mirror side into the dressing room for signs of still current occupancy. Swinging the bed farther I was no longer looking for pearls. I was looking at a man.
He was small, middle-aged, iron-gray at the temples, with a very dark skin, dressed in a fawn-colored suit with a wine-colored tie. His neat little brown hands hung limply by his sides. His small feet, in pointed polished shoes, pointed almost at the floor.
He was hanging by a belt around his neck from the metal top of the bed. His tongue stuck out farther than I thought it possible for a tongue to stick out.
He swung a little and I didn’t like that, so I pulled the bed shut and he nestled quietly between the two clamped pillows. I didn’t touch him yet. I didn’t have to touch him to know that he would be cold as ice.
I went around him into the dressing room and used my handkerchief on drawer knobs. The place was stripped clean except for the light litter of a man living alone.
I came out of there and began on the man. No wallet. Waldo would have taken that and ditched it. A flat box of cigarettes, half full, stamped in gold: “Louis Tapia y Cia, Calle de Paysand¸, 19, Montevideo.” Matches from the Spezia Club. An under-arm holster of dark-grained leather and in it a 9-millimeter Mauser.
The Mauser made him a professional, so I didn’t feel so badly. But not a very good professional, or bare hands
would not have finished him, with the Mauser—a gun you can blast through a wall with—undrawn in his shoulder holster.
I made a little sense of it, not much. Four of the brown cigarettes had been smoked, so there had been either waiting or discussion. Somewhere along the line Waldo had got the little man by the throat and held him in just the right way to make him pass out in a matter of seconds. The Mauser had been less useful to him than a toothpick. Then Waldo had hung him up by the strap, probably dead already. That would account for haste, cleaning out the apartment, for Waldo’s anxiety about the girl. It would account for the car left unlocked outside the cocktail bar.
That is, it would account for these things if Waldo had killed him, if this was really Waldo’s apartment—if I wasn’t just being kidded.
I examined some more pockets. In the left trouser one I found a gold penknife, some silver. In the left hip pocket a handkerchief, folded, scented. On the right hip another, unfolded but clean. In the right leg pocket four or five tissue handkerchiefs. A clean little guy. He didn’t like to blow his nose on his handkerchief. Under these there was a small new keytainer holding four new keys—car keys. Stamped in gold on the keytainer was: Compliments of R. K. Vogelsang, Inc. “The Packard House.”
I put everything as I had found it, swung the bed back, used my handkerchief on knobs and other projections, and flat surfaces, killed the light and poked my nose out the door. The hall was empty. I went down to the street and around the corner to Kingsley Drive. The Cadillac hadn’t moved.
I opened the car door and leaned on it. She didn’t seem to have moved, either. It was hard to see any expression on her face. Hard to see anything but her eyes and chin, but not hard to smell the sandalwood.
“That perfume,” I said, “would drive a deacon nuts…no pearls.”
“Well, thanks for trying,” she said in a low, soft vibrant voice. “I guess I can stand it. Shall I…Do we…Or…?”
“You go on home now,” I said. “And whatever happens you never saw me before. Whatever happens. Just as you may never see me again.”
“I’d hate that.”
“Good luck, Lola.” I shut the car door and stepped back.
The lights blazed on, the motor turned over. Against the wind at the corner the big coupe made a slow contemptuous turn and was gone. I stood there by the vacant space at the curb where it had been.
It was quite dark there now. Windows, had become blanks in the apartment where the radio sounded. I stood looking at the back of a Packard cabriolet which seemed to be brand new. I had seen it before—before I went upstairs, in the same place, in front of Lola’s car. Parked, dark, silent, with a blue sticker pasted to the right-hand corner of the shiny windshield.
And in my mind I was looking at something else, a set of brand-new car keys in a keytainer stamped: “The Packard House,” upstairs, in a dead man’s pocket.
I went up to the front of the cabriolet and put a small pocket flash on the blue slip. It was the same dealer all right. Written in ink below his name and slogan was a name and address— Eugenie Kolchenko, 5315 Arvieda Street, West Los Angeles.
It was crazy. I went back up to Apartment 31, jimmied the door as I had done before, stepped in behind the wall bed and took the keytainer from the trousers pocket of the neat brown dangling corpse. I was back down on the street beside the cabriolet in five minutes. The keys fitted.
5
It was a small house, near a canyon rim out beyond Sawtelle, with a circle of writhing eucalyptus trees in front of it. Beyond that, on the other side of the street, one of those parties was going on where they come out and smash bottles on the pavement with a whoop like Yale making a touchdown against Princeton.
There was a wire fence at my number and some rose trees, and a flagged walk and a garage that was wide open and had no car in it. There was no car in front of the house either. I rang the bell. There was a long wait, then the door opened rather suddenly.
I wasn’t the man she had been expecting. I could see it in her glittering kohl-rimmed eyes. Then I couldn’t see anything in them. She just stood and looked at me, a long, lean, hungry brunette, with rouged cheekbones, thick black hair parted in the middle, a mouth made for three-decker sandwiches, coral-and-gold pajamas, sandals—and gilded toenails. Under her ear lobes a couple of miniature temple bells gonged lightly in the breeze. She made a slow disdainful motion with a cigarette in a holder as long as a baseball bat.
“We-el, what ees it, little man? You want sometheeng? You are lost from the bee-ootiful party across the street, hem?”
“Ha-ha,” I said. “Quite a party, isn’t it? No, I just brought your car home. Lost it, didn’t you?”
Across the street somebody had delirium tremens in the front yard and a mixed quartet tore what was left of the night into small strips and did what they could to make the strips miserable. While this was going on the exotic brunette didn’t move more than one eyelash.
She wasn’t beautiful, she wasn’t even pretty, but she looked as if things would happen where she was.
“You have said what?” she got out, at last, in a voice as silky as a burnt crust of toast.
“Your car.” I pointed over my shoulder and kept my eyes on her. She was the type that uses a knife.
The long cigarette holder dropped very slowly to her side and the cigarette fell out of it. I stamped it out, and that put me in the hall. She backed away from me and I shut the door.
The hall was like the long hall of a railroad flat. Lamps glowed pinkly in iron brackets. There was a bead curtain at the end, a tiger skin on the floor. The place went with her.
“You’re Miss Kolchenko?” I asked, not getting any more action.
“Ye-es. I am Mees Kolchenko. What the ‘ell you want?”
She was looking at me now as if I had come to wash the windows, but at an inconvenient time.
I got a card out with my left hand, held it out to her. She read it in my hand, moving her head just enough. “A detective?” she breathed.
“Yeah.”
She said something in a spitting language. Then in English: “Come in! Thees damn wind dry up my skeen like so much teesue paper.”
“We’re in,” I said. “I just shut the door. Snap out of it, Nazimova. Who was he? The little guy?”
Beyond the bead curtain a man coughed. She jumped as if she had been stuck with an oyster fork. Then she tried to smile. It wasn’t very successful.
“A reward,” she said softly. “You weel wait ‘ere? Ten dollars it is fair to pay, no?”
“No,” I said.
I reached a finger towards her slowly and added: “He’s dead.”
She jumped about three feet and let out a yell.
A chair creaked harshly. Feet pounded beyond the bead curtain, a large hand plunged into view and snatched it aside, and a big hard-looking blond man was with us. He had a purple robe over his pajamas, his right hand held something in his robe pocket. He stood quite still as soon as he was through the curtain, his feet planted solidly, his jaw out, his colorless eyes like gray ice. He looked like a man who would be hard to take out on an off-tackle play.
“What’s the matter, honey?” He had a solid, burring voice, with just the right sappy tone to belong to a guy who would go for a woman with gilded toenails.
“I came about Miss Kolchenko’s car,” I said.
“Well, you could take your hat off,” he said. “Just for a light workout.”
I took it off and apologized.
“O.K. ,” he said, and kept his right hand shoved down hard in the purple pocket. “So you came about Miss Kolchenko’s car. Take it from there.”
I pushed past the woman and went closer to him. She shrank back against the wall and flattened her palms against it. Camille in a high-school play. The long holder lay empty at her toes.
When I was six feet from the big man he said easily: “I can hear you from there. Just take it easy. I’ve got a gun in this pocket and I’ve had to learn to use one. Now about the
car?”
“The man who borrowed it couldn’t bring it,” I said, and pushed the card I was still holding towards his face. He barely glanced at it. He looked back at me.
“So what?” he said.
“Are you always this tough?” I asked. “Or only when you have your pajamas on?”
“So why couldn’t he bring it himself?” he asked. “And skip the mushy talk.”
The dark woman made a stuffed sound at my elbow.
“It’s all right, honeybunch,” the man said. “I’ll handle this. Go on.”
She slid past both of us and flicked through the bead curtain.
I waited a little while. The big man didn’t move a muscle. He didn’t look any more bothered than a toad in the sun.
“He couldn’t bring it because somebody bumped him off,” I said. “Let’s see you handle that.”
“Yeah?” he said. “Did you bring him with you to prove it?”
“No,” I said. “But if you put your tie and crush hat on, I’ll take you down and show you.”
“Who the hell did you say you were, now?”
“I didn’t say. I thought maybe you could read.” I held the card at him some more.
“Oh, that’s right,” he said. “Philip Marlowe, Private Investigator. Well, well. So I should go with you to look at who, why?”
“Maybe he stole the car,” I said.
The big man nodded. “That’s a thought. Maybe he did. Who?”
“The little brown guy who had the keys to it in his pocket, and had it parked around the corner from the Berglund Apartments.”
He thought that over, without any apparent embarrassment. “You’ve got something there,” he said. “Not much. But a little. I guess this must be the night of the Police Smoker. So you’re doing all their work for them.”
“Huh?”
“The card says private detective to me,” he said. “Have you got some cops outside that were too shy to come in?”
“No, I’m alone.”
He grinned. The grin showed white ridges in his tanned skin. “So you find somebody dead and take some keys and find a car and come riding out here—all alone. No cops. Am I right?”