I looked down at the street. A man was getting into a car. He didn’t even look up at me. No light had gone on in the apartment I was breaking into. I got the window down and climbed in. There was a lot of broken glass in the bathtub. I got down to the floor and switched the light on and picked the glass out of the bathtub and wrapped it in my towel and hid it. I used somebody else’s towel to wipe off the sill and the edge of the bathtub where I’d stood. Then I took my gun out and opened the bathroom door.
This was a larger apartment. The room I was looking at had twin beds with pink dust covers. They were made up nicely and they were empty. Beyond the bedroom there was a living room. All the windows were shut and the place had a close, dusty smell. I lit a floor lamp, then I ran a finger along the arm of a chain and looked at dust on it. There was an armchair radio, a book rack built like a hod, a big bookcase full of novels with the jackets still on them, a dank wood highboy with a siphon and a decanter of liquor on it, and four striped glasses upside down. I sniffed the liquor, which was Scotch, and used a little of it. It made my head feel worse but it made me feel better.
I left the light on and went back to the bedroom and poked into bureau and closets. There were male clothes in one closet, tailor-made, and the name written on the label by the tailor was George Talbot. George’s clothes looked a little small for me. I tried the bureau and found a pair of pajamas I thought would do. The closet gave me a bathrobe and slippers. I stripped to the skin.
When I came out of the shower I smelled only faintly of gin. There was no noise or pounding going on anywhere now, so I knew they were in Helen Matson’s apartment with their little pieces of chalk and string. I put Mr. Talbot’s pajamas and slippers and bathrobe on, used some of Mr. Talbot’s tonic on my hair and his brush and comb to tidy up. I hoped Mr. and Mrs. Talbot were having a good time wherever they were and that they would not have to hurry home.
I went back to the living room, used some more Talbot Scotch and lit one of his cigarettes. Then I unlocked the entrance door. A man coughed close by in the hall. I opened the door and leaned against the jamb and looked out. A uniformed man was leaning against the opposite wall—a smallish, blond, sharp-eyed man. His blue trousers were edged like a knife and he looked neat, clean, competent and nosy.
I yawned and said: “What goes on, officer?”
He stared at me with sharp reddish-brown eyes flecked with gold, a colon you seldom see with blond hair. “A little trouble next door to you. Hear anything?” His voice was mildly sarcastic.
“The carrot-top?” I said. “Haw, haw. Just the usual big-game hunt. Drink?”
The cop went on with his careful stare. Then he called down the hallway: “Hey, Al!”
A man stepped out of an open door. He was about six feet, weighed around two hundred, and he had coarse black hair and deep-set expressionless eyes. It was Al De Spain whom I had met that evening at Bay City headquarters.
He came down the hall without haste. The uniformed cop said: “Here’s the guy lives next door.”
De Spain came close to me and looked into my eyes. His own held no more expression than pieces of black slate. He spoke almost softly.
“Name?”
“George Talbot,” I said. I didn’t quite squeak.
“Hear any noises? I mean, before we got here?”
“Oh, a brawl, I guess. Around midnight. That’s nothing new in there.” I jerked a thumb towards the dead girl’s apartment.
“That so? Acquainted with the dame?”
“No. Doubt if I’d want to know her.”
“You won’t have to,” De Spain said. “She’s croaked.”
He put a big, hard hand against my chest and pushed me back very gently through the door into the apartment. He kept his hand against my chest and his eyes flicked down sharply to the side pockets of the bathrobe, then back to my face again. When he had me eight feet from the door he said over his shoulder: “Come in and shut the door, Shorty.”
Shorty came and shut the door, small, sharp eyes gleaming. “Quite a gag,” De Spain said, very casually. “Put a gun on him, Shorty.”
Shorty flicked his black belt holster open and had a police gun in his hand like lightning. He licked his lips. “Oh boy,” he said softly. “Oh boy.” He snapped his handcuff holder open and half drew the cuffs out. “How’d you know, Al?”
“Know what?” De Spain kept his eyes on my eyes. He spoke to me gently. “What was you goin’ to do—go down and buy a paper?”
“Yah,” Shorty said. “He’s the killer, sure. He come in through the bathroom window and put on clothes belonging to the guy that lives here. The folks are away. Look at the dust. No windows open. Dead air in the place.”
De Spain said softly: “Shorty’s a scientific cop. Don’t let him get you down. He’s got to be wrong some day.”
I said: “What for is he in uniform, if he’s so hot?”
Shorty reddened, De Spain said: “Find his clothes, Shorty. And his gun. And make it fast. This is our pinch, if we make it fast.”
“You ain’t detailed on the case even,” Shorty said.
“What can I lose?”
”I can lose this here uniform.”
“Take a chance, boy. That lug Reed next door couldn’t catch a moth in a shoe box.”
Shorty scuttled into the bedroom. De Spain and I stood motionless, except that he took his hand off my chest and dropped it to his side. “Don’t tell me,” he drawled. “Just let me guess.”
We heard Shorty fussing around opening doors. Then we heard a yelp like a terrier’s yelp when he smells a rathole. Shorty came back into the room with my gun in his right hand and my wallet in his left. He held the gun by the fore sight, with a handkerchief. “The gat’s been fired,” he said. “And this guy ain’t called Talbot.”
De Spain didn’t turn his head on change expression. He smiled at me thinly, moving only the extreme corners of his wide, rather brutal mouth.
“You don’t say,” he said. “You don’t say.” He pushed me away from him with a hand as hard as a piece of tool steel. “Get dressed, sweetheart—and don’t fuss with your necktie. Places want us to go to them.”
Six—I Get My Gun Back
We went out of the apartment and along the hall. Light still came from the open door of Helen Matson’s apartment. Two men with a basket stood outside it smoking. There was a sound of wrangling voices inside the dead woman’s place.
We went around a bend of the hall and started down the stairs, floor after floor, until we came out in the lobby. Half a dozen people stood around bug-eyed—three women in bathrobes, a bald-headed man with a green eyeshade, like a city editor, two more who hung back in the shadows. Another uniformed man walked up and down just inside the front door, whistling under his breath. We went out past him. He looked completely uninterested. A knot of people clustered on the pavement outside.
De Spain said: “This is a big night in our little town.”
We walked along to a black sedan that had no police insignia on it and De Spain slid in behind the wheel and motioned me to get in beside him. Shorty got in the back. He’d had his gun back in his holster long since, but he left the flap unbuttoned, and kept his hand close to it.
De Spain put the car into motion with a jerk that threw me back against the cushions. We made the nearest corner on two wheels, going east. A big black car with twin red spotlights was only half a block away and coming fast as we made the turn.
De Spain spat out of the window and drawled: “That’s the chief. He’ll be late for his own funeral. Boy, did we skin his nose on this one.”
Shorty said disgustedly from the back seat: “Yeah—for a thirty-day lay-off.”
De Spain said: “Keep that mush of yours in low and you might get back on Homicide.”
“I’d rather wear buttons and eat,” Shorty said.
De Spain drove the car hard for ten blocks, then slowed a little. Shorty said: “This ain’t the way to headquarters.”
De Spain said: “D
on’t be an ass.”
He let the car slow to a crawl, turned it left into a quiet, dank, residential street lined with coniferous trees and small exact houses set back from small exact lawns. He braked the car gently, coasted it oven to the curb and switched the motor off. Then he threw an arm over the back of the seat and turned to look at the small “sharp-eyed” uniformed man.
“You think this guy plugged her, Shorty?”
“His gun went off.”
“Get that big flash outa the pocket and look at the back of his head.”
Shorty snorted, fussed around in the back of the car, and then metal clicked and the blinding white beam of a large bell-topped flashlight sprayed over my head. I heard the little man’s close breathing. He reached out and pressed the sore place on the back of my head. I yelped. The light went off and the blackness of the dark Street jumped at us again.
Shorty said: “I guess he was sapped.”
De Spain said without emotion: “So was the girl. It didn’t show much but it’s there. She was sapped so she could have her clothes pulled off and be clawed up before she was shot, so the scratches would bleed and look like you know what. Then she was shot with a bath towel around the gun. Nobody heard the shot. Who reported it, Shorty?”
“How the hell would I know? A guy called up two-three minutes before you came into the Hall, while Reed was still looking for a cameraman. A guy with a thick voice, the operator said.”
“Okay. If you done it, Shorty, how would you get out of there?”
“I’d walk out,” Shorty said. “Why not? Hey,” he banked at me, “why didn’t you?”
I said: “I have to have my little secrets.”
De Spain said tonelessly: “You wouldn’t climb across no air shaft, would you, Shorty? You wouldn’t crash into the next apartment and pretend to be the guy that lived there, would you? And you wouldn’t call no law and tell them to take it up there in high and they’d catch the killer, would you?”
“Hell,” Shorty said, “this guy call up? No, I wouldn’t do any of them things.”
“Neither did the killer,” De Spain said, “except the last one, He called up.”
“Them sex fiends do funny things,” Shorty said. “This guy could have had help and the other guy tried to put him in the middle after knocking him out with a sap.”
De Spain laughed harshly. “Hello, sex fiend,” he said, and poked me in the ribs with a finger as hard as a gun barrel. “Look at us saps, just sitting here and throwing our jobs away—that is, the one of us that has a job—and arguing it out when you, the guy that knows all the answers, ain’t told us a damn thing. We don’t even know who the dame was.”
“A redhead I picked up in the bar of the Club Conried,” I said. “No, she picked me up.”
“No name or anything?”
“No. She was tight, I helped her out into the air and she asked me to take her away from there and while I was putting her into my car somebody sapped mc. I came to on the floor of the apartment and the girl was dead.”
De Spain said: “What was you doing in the bar of the Club Conried?”
“Getting my hair cut,” I said. “What do you do in a bar? This redhead was tight and seemed scared about something and she threw a drink in the floor boss’s face. I felt a little sorry for her.”
“I always feel sorry for a redhead, too,” De Spain said. “This guy that sapped you must have been an elephant, if he carried you up to that apartment.”
I said: “Have you ever been sapped?”
“No,” De Spain said. “Have you, Shorty?”
Shorty said he had never been sapped either. He said it unpleasantly.
“All right,” I said. “It’s like an alcohol drunk. I probably came to in the car and the fellow would have a gun and that would keep me quiet. He would walk me up to the apartment with the girl. The girl may have known him. And when he had me up there he would sap me again and I wouldn’t remember anything that happened in between the two sappings.”
“I’ve heard of it,” De Spain said. “But I never believed it.”
“Well, it’s true,” I said. “It’s got to be true. Because I don’t remember and the guy couldn’t have carried me up there without help.”
“I could,” De Spain said. “I’ve carried heavier guys than you.”
“All right,” I said. “He carried me up. Now what do we do?”
Shorty said: “I don’t get why he went to all that trouble.”
“Sapping a guy ain’t trouble,” De Spain said. “Pass oven that heater and wallet.”
Shorty hesitated, then passed them over. De Spain smelled the gun and dropped it carelessly into his side pocket, the one next to mc. He flipped the wallet open and held it down under the dashlight and then put it away. He started the car, turned it in the middle of the block, and shot back up Arguello Boulevard, turned east on that and pulled up in front of a liquor store with a red neon sign. The place was wide open, even at that hour of the night.
De Spain said over his shoulder: “Run inside and phone the desk, Shorty. Tell the sarge we got a hot lead and we’re on our way to pick up a suspect in the Brayton Avenue killing. Tell him to tell the chief his shirt is out.”
Shorty got out of the car, slammed the rear door, started to say something, then walked fast across the pavement into the store.
De Spain jerked the car into motion and hit forty in the first block. He laughed deep down in his chest. He made it fifty in the next block and then began to turn in and out of streets and finally he pulled to a stop again under a pepper tree outside a schoolhouse.
I got the gun when he reached forward for the parking brake. He laughed dryly and spat out of the open window.
“Okay,” he said. “That’s why I put it there. I talked to Violets M’Gee. That kid reporter called me up from L.A. They’ve found Matson. They’re sweating some apartment house guy right now.”
I slid away from him over to my corner of the car and held the gun loosely between my knees. “We’re outside the limits of Bay City, copper,” I told him. “What did M’Gee say?”
“He said he gave you a lead to Matson, but he didn’t know whether you had contacted him or not. This apartment house guy—I didn’t hear his name—was trying to dump a stiff in the alley when a couple of alcoholics jumped him. M’Gee said if you had contacted Matson and heard his story you would be down here getting in a jam, and would likely wake up sapped beside some stiff.”
“I didn’t contact Matson,” I said.
I could feel De Spain staring at me under his dark craggy brows. “But you’re down here in a jam,” he said.
I got a cigarette out of my pocket with my left hand and lit it with the dash lighten. I kept my right hand on the gun. I said: “I got the idea you were on the way out down here. That you weren’t even detailed on this killing. Now you’ve taken a prisoner across the city line. What does that make you?”
“A bucket of mud—unless I deliver something good.”
“That’s what I am,” I said. “I guess we ought to team up and break these three killings.”
“Three?”
“Yeah. Helen Matson, Harry Matson and Doc Austrian’s wife. They all go together.”
“I ditched Shorty,” De Spain said quietly, “because he’s a little guy and the chief likes little guys and Shorty can put the blame on me. Where do we start?”
“We might start by finding a man named Greb who runs a laboratory in the Physicians and Surgeons Building. I think he turned in a phony report on the Austrian death. Suppose they put out an alarm for you?”
“They use the L.A. Air. They won’t use that to pick up one of their own cops.”
He leaned forward and started the can again.
“You might give me my wallet,” I said. “So I can put this gun away.”
He laughed harshly and gave it to me.
Seven—Big Chin
The lab man lived on Ninth Street, on the wrong side of town. The house was a shapeless frame b
ungalow. A large dusty hydrangea bush and some small undernourished plants along the path looked like the work of a man who had spent his life trying to make something out of nothing.
De Spain doused the lights as we glided up front and said: “Whistle, if you need help. If any cops should crowd us, skin oven to Tenth and I’ll circle the block and pick you up. I don’t think they will, though. All they’re thinking of tonight is that dame on Brayton Avenue.”
I looked up and down the quiet block, walked across the street in foggy moonlight and up the walk to the house. The front door was set at night angles to the street in a front projection that looked like a room which had been added as an afterthought to the nest of the house. I pushed a bell and heard it ring somewhere in the back. No answer. I rang it twice more and tried the front door. It was locked.
I went down off the little porch and around the north side of the house towards a small garage on the back lot. Its doors were shut and locked with a padlock you could break with a strong breath. I bent over and shot my pocket flash under the loose doors. The wheels of a car showed. I went back to the front door of the house and knocked this time—plenty loud.
The window in the front room creaked and came down slowly from the top, about halfway. There was a shade pulled down behind the window and dankness behind the shade. A thick, hoarse voice said: “Yeah?”
“Mr. Greb?”
“Yeah.”
“I’d like to speak to you—on important business.”
“I gotta get my sleep, mister. Come back tomorrow.”
The voice didn’t sound like the voice of a laboratory technician. It sounded like a voice I had heard over the telephone once, a long time ago, early in the evening at the Tennyson Arms Apartments.
I said: “Well, I’ll come to your office then, Mr. Greb. What’s the address again?”
The voice didn’t speak for a moment. Then it said: “Aw, go on, beat it before I come out there and paste you one.”
“That’s no way to get business, Mr. Greb,” I said. “Are you sure you couldn’t give me just a few moments, now you’re up?”