Trouble Is My Business

  “Bureau,” Sunset answered, and pointed with one ear at the corner.

  I started in that direction, by way of the walls. Madder made a sudden thin whimpering noise and his eyes turned up in his head and he fell straight forward off the chair on his face, in a dead faint.

  That jarred Sunset. He hadn’t expected anything so foolish. His right hand jerked around until the Colt was pointing down at Madder’s back.

  The girl slipped her hand under her bag. The bag lifted an inch. The gun that was caught there in a trick clip—the gun that Sunset thought was inside the bag—spat and flamed briefly.

  Sunset coughed. His Colt boomed and a piece of wood detached itself from the back of the chair Madder had been sitting in. Sunset dropped the Colt and put his chin down on his chest and tried to look at the ceiling. His long legs slid out in front of him and his heels made a rasping sound on the floor. He sat like that limp, his chin on his chest, his eyes looking upward. Dead as a pickled walnut.

  I kicked Miss Donovan’s chair out from under her and she banged down on her side in a swirl of silken legs. Her hat went crooked on her head. She yelped. I stood on her hand and then shifted suddenly and kicked her gun clear across the attic.

  “Get up.”

  She got up slowly, backed away from me biting her lip, savage-eyed, suddenly a nasty-faced little brat at bay. She kept on backing until the wall stopped her. Her eyes glittered in a ghastly face.

  I glanced down at Madder, went over to a closed door. A bathroom was behind it. I reversed a key and gestured at the girl.

  “In.”

  She walked stiff-legged across the floor and passed in front of me, almost touching me.

  “Listen a minute, shamus—”

  I pushed her through the door and slammed it and turned the key. It was all right with me if she wanted to jump out of the window. I had seen the windows from below.

  I went across to Sunset, felt him, felt the small hard lump of keys on a ring in his pocket, and got them out without quite knocking him off his chair. I didn’t look for anything else.

  There were car keys on the ring.

  I looked at Madder again, noticed that his fingers were as white as snow. I went down the narrow dark stairs to the porch, around to the side of the house and got into the old touring car under the shed. One of the keys on the ring fitted its ignition lock.

  The car took a beating before it started up and let me back it down the dirt driveway to the curb. Nothing moved in the house that I saw or heard. The tall pines behind and beside the house stirred their upper branches listlessly and a cold heartless sunlight sneaked through them intermittently as they moved.

  I drove back to Capitol Way and downtown again as fast as I dared, past the square and the Snoqualmie Hotel and over the bridge towards the Pacific Ocean and Westport.

  NINE

  An hour’s fast driving through thinned-out timberland, interrupted by three stops for water and punctuated by the cough of a head gasket leak, brought me within sound of surf. The broad white road, striped with yellow down the center, swept around the flank of a hill, a distant cluster of buildings loomed up in front of the shine of the ocean, and the road forked. The left fork was signposted: “Westport—9 Miles,” and didn’t go towards the buildings. It crossed a rusty cantilever bridge and plunged into a region of wind-distorted apple orchards.

  Twenty minutes more and I chugged into Westport, a sandy spit of land with scattered frame houses dotted over rising ground behind it. The end of the spit a long narrow pier, and the end of the pier a cluster of sailing boats with half-lowered sails flapping against their single masts. And beyond them a buoyed channel and a long irregular line where the water creamed on a hidden sandbar.

  Beyond the sandbar the Pacific rolled over to Japan. This was the last outpost of the coast, the farthest west a man could go and still be on the mainland of the United States. A swell place for an ex-convict to hide out with a couple of somebody else’s pearls the size of new potatoes—if he didn’t have any enemies.

  I pulled up in front of a cottage that had a sign in the front yard: “Luncheons, Teas, Dinners.” A small rabbit-faced man with freckles was waving a garden rake at two black chickens. The chickens appeared to be sassing him back. He turned when the engine of Sunset’s car coughed itself still.

  I got out, went through a wicket gate, pointed to the sign.

  “Luncheon ready?”

  He threw the rake at the chickens, wiped his hands on his trousers and leered. “The wife put that up,” he confided to me in a thin, impish voice. “Ham and eggs is what it means.”

  “Ham and eggs get along with me,” I said.

  We went into the house. There were three tables covered with patterned oilcloth, some chromos on the walls, a full-rigged ship in a bottle on the mantel. I sat down. The host went away through a swing door and somebody yelled at him and a sizzling noise was heard from the kitchen. He came back and leaned over my shoulder, put some cutlery and a paper napkin on the oilcloth.

  “Too early for apple brandy, ain’t it?” he whispered.

  I told him how wrong he was. He went away again and came back with glasses and a quart of clear amber fluid. He sat down with me and poured. A rich baritone voice in the kitchen was singing “Chloe,” over the sizzling.

  We clinked glasses and drank and waited for the heat to crawl up our spines.

  “Stranger, ain’t you?” the little man asked.

  I said I was.

  “From Seattle maybe? That’s a nice piece of goods you got on.”

  “Seattle,” I agreed.

  “We don’t git many strangers,” he said, looking at my left ear. “Ain’t on the way to nowheres. Now before repeal—” he stopped, shifted his sharp woodpecker gaze to my other ear.

  “Ah, before repeal,” I said with a large gesture, and drank knowingly.

  He leaned over and breathed on my chin. “Hell, you could load up in any fish stall on the pier. The stuff come in under catches of crabs and oysters. Hell, Westport was lousy with it. They give the kids cases of Scotch to play with. There wasn’t a car in this town that slept in a garage, mister. The garages was full to the roof of Canadian hooch. Hell, they had a coastguard cutter off the pier watchin’ the boats unload one day every week. Friday. Always the same day.” He winked.

  I puffed a cigarette and the sizzling noise and the baritone rendering of “Chloe” went on in the kitchen.

  “But hell, you wouldn’t be in the liquor business,” he said.

  “Hell, no. I’m a goldfish buyer,” I said.

  “Okey,” he said sulkily.

  I poured us another round of the apple brandy. “This bottle is on me,” I said. “And I’m taking a couple more with me.”

  He brightened up. “What did you say the name was?”

  “Marlowe. You think I’m kidding you about the goldfish. I’m not.”

  “Hell, there ain’t a livin’ in them little fellers, is there?”

  I held my sleeve out. “You said it was a nice piece of goods. Sure there’s a living out of the fancy brands. New brands, new types all the time. My information is there’s an old guy down here somewhere that has a real collection. Maybe would sell it. Some he’d bred himself.”

  A large woman with a mustache kicked the swing door open a foot and yelled: “Pick up the ham and eggs!”

  My host scuttled across and came back with my food. I ate. He watched me minutely. After a time he suddenly smacked his skinny leg under the table.

  “Old Wallace,” he chuckled. “Sure, you come to see old Wallace. Hell, we don’t know him right well. He don’t act neighborly.”

  He turned around in his chair and pointed out through the sleazy curtains at a distant hill. On top of the hill was a yellow and white house that shone in the sun.

  “Hell, that’s where he lives. He’s got a mess of them. Goldfish, huh? Hell, you could bend me with an eye dropper.”

  That ended my interest in the little man. I gobbled my
food, paid off for it and for three quarts of apple brandy at a dollar a quart, shook hands and went back out to the touring car.

  There didn’t seem to be any hurry. Rush Madder would come out of his faint, and he would turn the girl loose. But they didn’t know anything about Westport. Sunset hadn’t mentioned the name in their presence. They didn’t know it when they reached Olympia or they would have gone there at once. And if they had listened outside my room at the hotel, they would have known I wasn’t alone. They hadn’t acted as if they knew that when they charged in.

  I had lots of time. I drove down to the pier and looked it over. It looked tough. There were fish stalls, drinking dives, a tiny honkytonk for the fishermen, a pool room, an arcade of slot machines and smutty peep shows. Bait fish squirmed and darted in big wooden tanks down in the water along the piles. There were loungers and they looked like trouble for anyone that tried to interfere with them. I didn’t see any law enforcement around.

  I drove back up the hill to the yellow and white house. It stood very much alone, four blocks from the next nearest dwelling. There were flowers in front, a trimmed green lawn, a rock garden. A woman in a brown and white print dress was popping at aphids with a spray gun.

  I let my heap stall itself, got out and took my hat off.

  “Mister Wallace live here?”

  She had a handsome face, quiet, firm-looking. She nodded.

  “Would you like to see him?” She had a quiet firm voice, a good accent.

  It didn’t sound like the voice of a train robber’s wife.

  I gave her my name, said I’d been hearing about his fish down in the town. I was interested in fancy goldfish.

  She put the spray gun down and went into the house. Bees buzzed around my head, large fuzzy bees that wouldn’t mind the cold wind off the sea. Far off like background music the surf pounded on the sandbars. The northern sunshine seemed bleak to me, had no heat in the core of it.

  The woman came out of the house and held the door open.

  “He’s at the top of the stairs,” she said, “if you’d like to go up.

  I went past a couple of rustic rockers and into the house of the man who had stolen the Leander pearls.

  TEN

  Fish tanks were all around the big room, two tiers of them on braced shelves, big oblong tanks with metal frames, some with lights over them and some with lights down in them. Water grasses were festooned in careless patterns behind the algae-coated glass and the water held a ghostly greenish light and through the greenish light moved fish of all the colors of rainbow.

  There were long slim fish like golden darts and Japanese Veiltails with fantastic trailing tails, and X-ray fish as transparent as colored glass, tiny guppies half an inch long, calico popeyes spotted like a bride’s apron, and big lumbering Chinese Moors with telescope eyes, froglike faces and unnecessary fins, waddling through the green water like fat men going to lunch.

  Most of the light came from a big sloping skylight. Under the skylight at a bare wooden table a tall gaunt man stood with a squirming red fish in his left hand, and in his right hand a safety-razor blade backed with adhesive tape.

  He looked at me from under wide gray eyebrows. His eyes were sunken, colorless, opaque. I went over beside him and looked down at the fish he was holding.

  “Fungus?” I asked.

  He nodded slowly. “White fungus.” He put the fish down on the table and carefully spread its dorsal fin. The fin was ragged and split and the ragged edges had a mossy white color.

  “White fungus,” he said, “ain’t so bad. I’ll trim this feller up and he’ll be right as rain. What can I do for you, mister?”

  I rolled a cigarette around in my fingers and smiled at him.

  “Like people,” I said. “The fish, I mean. They get things wrong with them.”

  He held the fish against the wood and trimmed off the ragged part of the fin. He spread the tail and trimmed that. The fish had stopped squirming.

  “Some you can cure,” he said, “and some you can’t. You can’t cure swimming-bladder disease, for instance.” He glanced up at me. “This don’t hurt him, ’case you think it does,” he said. “You can shock a fish to death but you can’t hurt it like a person.”

  He put the razor blade down and dipped a cotton swab in some purplish liquid, painted the cut places. Then he dipped a finger in a jar of white vaseline and smeared that over. He dropped the fish in a small tank off to one side of the room. The fish swam around peacefully, quite content.

  The gaunt man wiped his hands, sat down at the edge of a bench and stared at me with lifeless eyes. He had been good-looking once, a long time ago.

  “You interested in fish?” he asked. His voice had the quiet careful murmur of the cell block and the exercise yard.

  I shook my head. “Not particularly. That was just an excuse. I came a long way to see you, Mister Sype.”

  He moistened his lips and went on staring at me. When his voice came again it was tired and soft.

  “Wallace is the name, mister.”

  I puffed a smoke ring and poked my finger through it. “For my job it’s got to be Sype.”

  He leaned forward and dropped his hands between his spread bony knees, clasped them together. Big gnarled hands that had done a lot of hard work in their time. His head tipped up at me and his dead eyes were cold under the shaggy brows. But his voice stayed soft.

  “Haven’t seen a dick in a year. To talk to. What’s your lay?”

  “Guess,” I said.

  His voice got still softer. “Listen, dick. I’ve got a nice home here, quiet. Nobody bothers me any more. Nobody’s got a right to. I got a pardon straight from the White House. I’ve got the fish to play with and a man gets fond of anything he takes care of. I don’t owe the world a nickel. I paid up. My wife’s got enough dough for us to live on. All I want is to be let alone, dick.” He stopped talking, shook his head once. “You can’t burn me up—not any more.”

  I didn’t say anything. I smiled a little and watched him.

  “Nobody can touch me,” he said. “I got a pardon straight from the President’s study. I just want to be let alone.”

  I shook my head and kept on smiling at him. “That’s the one thing you can never have—until you give in.”

  “Listen,” he said softly. “You may be new on this case. It’s kind of fresh to you. You want to make a rep for yourself. But me, I’ve had almost twenty years of it, and so have a lot of other people, some of ’em pretty smart people too. They know I don’t have nothing that don’t belong to me. Never did have. Somebody else got it.”

  “The mail clerk,” I said. “Sure.”

  “Listen,” be said, still softly. “I did my time. I know all the angles. I know they ain’t going to stop wondering—long as anybody’s alive that remembers. I know they’re going to send some punk out once in a while to kind of stir it up. That’s okey. No hard feelings. Now what do I do to get you to go home again?”

  I shook my head and stared past his shoulder at the fish drifting in their big silent tanks. I felt tired. The quiet of the house made ghosts in my brain, ghosts of a lot of years ago. A train pounding through the darkness, a stick-up hidden in a mail car, a gun flash, a dead clerk on the floor, a silent drop off at some water tank, a man who had kept a secret for nineteen years—almost kept it.

  “You made one mistake,” I said slowly. “Remember a fellow named Peeler Mardo?”

  He lifted his head. I could see him searching in his memory. The name didn’t seem to mean anything to him.

  “A fellow you knew in Leavenworth,” I said. “A little runt that was in there for splitting twenty-dollar bills and putting phony backs on them.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I remember.”

  “You told him you had the pearls,” I said.

  I could see he didn’t believe me. “I must have been kidding him,” he said slowly, emptily.

  “Maybe. But here’s the point. He didn’t think so. He was up in this country a w
hile ago with a pal, a guy who called himself Sunset. They saw you somewhere and Peeler recognized you. He got to thinking how he could make himself some jack. But he was a coke hound and he talked in his sleep. A girl got wise and then another girl and a shyster. Peeler got his feet burned and he’s dead.”

  Sype stared at me unblinkingly. The lines at the corners of his mouth deepened.

  I waved my cigarette and went on: “We don’t know how much he told, but the shyster and a girl are in Olympia. Sunset’s in Olympia, only he’s dead. They killed him. I wouldn’t know if they know where you are or not. But they will sometime, or others like them. You can wear the cops down, if they can’t find the pearls and you don’t try to sell them. You can wear the insurance company down and even the postal men.”

  Sype didn’t move a muscle. His big knotty hands clenched between his knees didn’t move. His dead eyes just stared.

  “But you can’t wear the chiselers down,” I said. “They’ll never lay off. There’ll always be a couple or three with time enough and money enough and meanness enough to bear down. They’ll find out what they want to know some way. They’ll snatch your wife or take you out in the woods and give you the works. And you’ll have to come through . . . Now I’ve got a decent, square proposition.”

  “Which bunch are you?” Sype asked suddenly. “I thought you smelled of dick, but I ain’t so sure now.”

  “Insurance,” I said. “Here’s the deal. Twenty-five grand reward in all. Five grand to the girl that passed me the info. She got it on the square and she’s entitled to that cut. Ten grand to me. I’ve done all the work and looked into all the guns. Ten grand to you, through me. You couldn’t get a nickel direct. Is there anything in it? How does it look?”

  “It looks fine,” he said gently. “Except for one thing, I don’t have no pearls, dick.”

  I scowled at him. That was my wad. I didn’t have any more. I straightened away from the wall and dropped a cigarette end on the wood floor, crushed it out. I turned to go.

  He stood up and put a hand out. “Wait a minute,” he said gravely, “and I’ll prove it to you.”

  He went across the floor in front of me and out of the room. I stared at the fish and chewed my lip. I heard the sound of a car engine somewhere, not very close. I heard a drawer open and shut, apparently in a nearby room.