“Not even last night,” Brody said sharply. “So she says I gunned him, eh?”
“With the photos in hand I might be able to convince her she was wrong. There was a little drinking being done.”
Brody sighed. “She hates my guts. I bounced her out. I got paid, sure, but I’d of had to do it anyway. She’s too screwy for a simple guy like me.” He cleared his throat. “How about a little dough? I’m down to nickels. Agnes and me gotta move on.”
“Not from my client.”
“Listen—”
“Get the pictures, Brody.”
“Oh, hell,” he said. “You win.” He stood up and slipped the Colt into his side pocket. His left hand went up inside his coat. He was holding it there, his face twisted with disgust, when the door buzzer rang and kept on ringing.
FIFTEEN
He didn’t like that. His lower lip went in under his teeth, and his eyebrows drew down sharply at the corners. His whole face became sharp and foxy and mean.
The buzzer kept up its song. I didn’t like it either. If the visitors should happen to be Eddie Mars and his boys, I might get chilled off just for being there. If it was the police, I was caught with nothing to give them but a smile and a promise. And if it was some of Brody’s friends—supposing he had any—they might turn out to be tougher than he was.
The blonde didn’t like it. She stood up in a surge and chipped at the air with one hand. Nerve tension made her face old and ugly.
Watching me, Brody jerked a small drawer in the desk and picked a bone-handled automatic out of it. He held it at the blonde. She slid over to him and took it, shaking.
“Sit down next to him,” Brody snapped. “Hold it on him low down, away from the door. If he gets funny use your own judgment. We ain’t licked yet, baby.”
“Oh, Joe,” the blonde wailed. She came over and sat next to me on the davenport and pointed the gun at my leg artery. I didn’t like the jerky look in her eyes.
The door buzzer stopped humming and a quick impatient rapping on the wood followed it. Brody put his hand in his pocket, on his gun, and walked over to the door and opened it with his left hand. Carmen Sternwood pushed him back into the room by putting a little revolver against his lean brown lips.
Brody backed away from her with his mouth working and an expression of panic on his face. Carmen shut the door behind her and looked neither at me nor at Agnes. She stalked Brody carefully, her tongue sticking out a little between her teeth. Brody took both hands out of his pockets and gestured placatingly at her. His eyebrows designed themselves into an odd assortment of curves and angles. Agnes turned the gun away from me and swung it at Carmen. I shot my hand out and closed my fingers down hard over her hand and jammed my thumb on the safety catch. It was already on. I kept it on. There was a short silent tussle, to which neither Brody nor Carmen paid any attention whatever. I had the gun. Agnes breathed deeply and shivered the whole length of her body. Carmen’s face had a bony scraped look and her breath hissed. Her voice said without tone:
“I want my pictures, Joe.”
Brody swallowed and tried to grin. “Sure, kid, sure.” He said it in a small flat voice that was as much like the voice he had used to me as a scooter is like a ten-ton truck.
Carmen said: “You shot Arthur Geiger. I saw you. I want my pictures.” Brody turned green.
“Hey, wait a minute, Carmen,” I yelped.
Blonde Agnes came to life with a rush. She ducked her head and sank her teeth in my right hand. I made more noises and shook her off.
“Listen, kid,” Brody whined. “Listen a minute—”
The blonde spat at me and threw herself on my leg and tried to bite that. I cracked her on the head with the gun, not very hard, and tried to stand up. She rolled down my legs and wrapped her arms around them. I fell back on the davenport. The blonde was strong with the madness of love or fear, or a mixture of both, or maybe she was just strong.
Brody grabbed for the little revolver that was so close to his face. He missed. The gun made a sharp rapping noise that was not very loud. The bullet broke glass in a folded-back French window. Brody groaned horribly and fell down on the floor and jerked Carmen’s feet from under her. She landed in a heap and the little revolver went skidding off into a corner. Brody jumped up on his knees and reached for his pocket.
I hit Agnes on the head with less delicacy than before, kicked her off my feet, and stood up. Brody flicked his eyes at me. I showed him the automatic. He stopped trying to get his hand into his pocket.
“Christ!” he whined. “Don’t let her kill me!”
I began to laugh. I laughed like an idiot, without control. Blonde Agnes was sitting up on the floor with her hands flat on the carpet and her mouth wide open and a wick of metallic blond hair down over her right eye. Carmen was crawling on her hands and knees, still hissing. The metal of her little revolver glistened against the baseboard over in the corner. She crawled towards it relentlessly.
I waved my share of the guns at Brody and said: “Stay put. You’re all right.”
I stepped past the crawling girl and picked the gun up. She looked up at me and began to giggle. I put her gun in my pocket and patted her on the back. “Get up, angel. You look like a Pekinese.”
I went over to Brody and put the automatic against his midriff and reached his Colt out of his side pocket. I now had all the guns that had been exposed to view. I stuffed them into my pockets and held my hand out to him.
“Give.”
He nodded, licking his lips, his eyes still scared. He took a fat envelope out of his breast pocket and gave it to me. There was a developed plate in the envelope and five glossy prints.
“Sure these are all?”
He nodded again. I put the envelope in my own breast pocket and turned away. Agnes was back on the davenport, straightening her hair. Her eyes ate Carmen with a green distillation of hate. Carmen was up on her feet too, coming towards me with her hand out, still giggling and hissing. There was a little froth at the corners of her mouth. Her small white teeth glinted close to her lips.
“Can I have them now?” she asked me with a coy smile.
“I’ll take care of them for you. Go on home.”
“Home?”
I went to the door and looked out. The cool night breeze was blowing peacefully down the hall. No excited neighbors hung out of doorways. A small gun had gone off and broken a pane of glass, but noises like that don’t mean much any more. I held the door open and jerked my head at Carmen. She came towards me, smiling uncertainly.
“Go on home and wait for me,” I said soothingly.
She put her thumb up. Then she nodded and slipped past me into the hall. She touched my cheek with her fingers as she went by. “You’ll take care of Carmen, won’t you?” she cooed.
“Check.”
“You’re cute.”
“What you see is nothing,” I said. “I’ve got a Bali dancing girl tattooed on my right thigh.”
Her eyes rounded. She said: “Naughty,” and wagged a finger at me. Then she whispered: “Can I have my gun?”
“Not now. Later. I’ll bring it to you.”
She grabbed me suddenly around the neck and kissed me on the mouth. “I like you,” she said. “Carmen likes you a lot.” She ran off down the hall as gay as a thrush, waved at me from the stairs and ran down the stairs out of my sight.
I went back into Brody’s apartment.
SIXTEEN
I went over to the folded-back French window and looked at the small broken pane in the upper part of it. The bullet from Carmen’s gun had smashed the glass like a blow. It had not made a hole. There was a small hole in the plaster which a keen eye would find quickly enough. I pulled the drapes over the broken pane and took Carmen’s gun out of my pocket. It was a Banker’s Special, .22 caliber, hollow point cartridges. It had a pearl grip, and a small round silver plate set into the butt was engraved: “Carmen from Owen.” She made saps of all of them.
I put the gun back in my
pocket and sat down close to Brody and stared into his bleak brown eyes. A minute passed. The blonde adjusted her face by the aid of a pocket mirror. Brody fumbled around with a cigarette and jerked: “Satisfied?”
“So far. Why did you put the bite on Mrs. Regan instead of the old man?”
“Tapped the old man once. About six, seven months ago. I figure maybe he gets sore enough to call in some law.”
“What made you think Mrs. Regan wouldn’t tell him about it?”
He considered that with some care, smoking his cigarette and keeping his eyes on my face. Finally he said: “How well you know her?”
“I’ve met her twice. You must know her a lot better to take a chance on that squeeze with the photo.”
“She skates around plenty. I figure maybe she has a couple of soft spots she don’t want the old man to know about. I figure she can raise five grand easy.”
“A little weak,” I said. “But pass it. You’re broke, eh?”
“I been shaking two nickels together for a month, trying to get them to mate.”
“What you do for a living?”
“Insurance. I got desk room in Puss Walgreen’s office, Fulwider Building, Western and Santa Monica.”
“When you open up, you open up. The books here in your apartment?”
He snapped his teeth and waved a brown hand. Confidence was oozing back into his manner. “Hell, no. In storage.”
“You had a man bring them here and then you had a storage outfit come and take them away again right afterwards?”
“Sure. I don’t want them moved direct from Geiger’s place, do I?”
“You’re smart, ” I said admiringly. “Anything incriminating in the joint right now?”
He looked worried again. He shook his head sharply.
“That’s fine,” I told him. I looked across at Agnes. She had finished fixing her face and was staring at the wall, blank-eyed, hardly listening. Her face had the drowsiness which strain and shock induce, after their first incidence.
Brody flicked his eyes warily. “Well?”
“How’d you come by the photo?”
He scowled. “Listen, you got what you came after, got it plenty cheap. You done a nice neat job. Now go peddle it to your top man. I’m clean. I don’t know nothing about any photo, do I, Agnes?”
The blonde opened her eyes and looked at him with vague but uncomplimentary speculation. “A half smart guy,” she said with a tired sniff. “That’s all I ever draw. Never once a guy that’s smart all the way around the course. Never once.”
I grinned at her. “Did I hurt your head much?”
“You and every other man I ever met.”
I looked back at Brody. He was pinching his cigarette between his fingers, with a sort of twitch. His hand seemed to be shaking a little. His brown poker face was still smooth.
“We’ve got to agree on a story,” I said. “For instance, Carmen wasn’t here. That’s very important. She wasn’t here. That was a vision you saw.”
“Huh!” Brody sneered. “If you say so, pal, and if—” he put his hand out palm up and cupped the fingers and rolled the thumb gently against the index and middle fingers.
I nodded. “We’ll see. There might be a small contribution. You won’t count it in grands, though. Now where did you get the picture?”
“A guy slipped it to me.”
“Uh-huh. A guy you just passed in the street. You wouldn’t know him again. You never saw him before.”
Brody yawned. “It dropped out of his pocket,” he leered.
“Uh-huh. Got an alibi for last night, poker pan?”
“Sure. I was right here. Agnes was with me. Okey, Agnes?”
“I’m beginning to feel sorry for you again,” I said.
His eyes flicked wide and his mouth hung loose, the cigarette balanced on his lower lip.
“You think you’re smart and you’re so goddamned dumb,” I told him. “Even if you don’t dance off up in Quentin, you have such a bleak long lonely time ahead of you.”
His cigarette jerked and dropped ash on his vest.
“Thinking about how smart you are,” I said.
“Take the air,” he growled suddenly. “Dust. I got enough chinning with you. Beat it.”
“Okey.” I stood up and went over to the tall oak desk and took his two guns out of my pockets, laid them side by side on the blotter so that the barrels were exactly parallel. I reached my hat off the floor beside the davenport and started for the door.
Brody yelped: “Hey!”
I turned and waited. His cigarette was jiggling like a doll on a coiled spring. “Everything’s smooth, ain’t it?” he asked.
“Why, sure. This is a free country. You don’t have to stay out of jail, if you don’t want to. That is, if you’re a citizen. Are you a citizen?”
He just stared at me, jiggling the cigarette. The blonde Agnes turned her head slowly and stared at me along the same level. Their glances contained almost the exact same blend of foxiness, doubt and frustrated anger. Agnes reached her silvery nails up abruptly and yanked a hair out of her head and broke it between her fingers, with a bitter jerk.
Brody said tightly: “You’re not going to any cops, brother. Not if it’s the Sternwoods you’re working for. I’ve got too much stuff on that family. You got your pictures and you got your hush. Go and peddle your papers.”
“Make your mind up,” I said. “You told me to dust, I was on my way out, you hollered at me and I stopped, and now I’m on my way out again. Is that what you want?”
“You ain’t got anything on me,” Brody said.
“Just a couple of murders. Small change in your circle.”
He didn’t jump more than an inch, but it looked like a foot. The white cornea showed all around the tobacco-colored iris of his eyes. The brown skin of his face took on a greenish tinge in the lamplight.
Blonde Agnes let out a low animal wail and buried her head in a cushion on the end of the davenport. I stood there and admired the long line of her thighs.
Brody moistened his lips slowly and said: “Sit down, pal. Maybe I have a little more for you. What’s that crack about two murders mean?”
I leaned against the door. “Where were you last night about seven-thirty, Joe?”
His mouth drooped sulkily and he stared down at the floor. “I was watching a guy, a guy who had a nice racket I figured he needed a partner in. Geiger. I was watching him now and then to see had he any tough connections. I figure he has friends or he don’t work the racket as open as he does. But they don’t go to his house. Only dames.”
“You didn’t watch hard enough,” I said. “Go on.”
“I’m there last night on the street below Geiger’s house. It’s raining hard and I’m buttoned up in my coupe and I don’t see anything. There’s a car in front of Geiger’s and another car a little way up the hill. That’s why I stay down below. There’s a big Buick parked down where I am and after a while I go over and take a gander into it. It’s registered to Vivian Regan. Nothing happens, so I scram. That’s all.” He waved his cigarette. His eyes crawled up and down my face.
“Could be,” I said. “Know where that Buick is now?”
“Why would I?”
“In the Sheriff’s garage. It was lifted out of twelve feet of water off Lido fish pier this a.m. There was a dead man in it. He had been sapped and the car pointed out the pier and the hand throttle pulled down.”
Brody was breathing hard. One of his feet tapped restlessly. “Jesus, guy, you can’t pin that one on me,” he said thickly.
“Why not? This Buick was down back of Geiger’s according to you. Well, Mrs. Regan didn’t have it out. Her chauffeur, a lad named Owen Taylor, had it out. He went over to Geiger’s place to have words with him, because Owen Taylor was sweet on Carmen, and he didn’t like the kind of games Geiger was playing with her. He let himself in the back way with a jimmy and a gun and he caught Geiger taking a photo of Carmen without any clothes on. So his gun went of
f, as guns will, and Geiger fell down dead and Owen ran away, but not without the photo negative Geiger had just taken. So you ran after him and took the photo from him. How else would you have got hold of it?”
Brody licked his lips. “Yeah,” he said. “But that don’t make me knock him off. Sure, I heard the shots and saw this killer come slamming down the back steps into the Buick and off. I took out after him. He hit the bottom of the canyon and went west on Sunset. Beyond Beverly Hills he skidded off the road and had to stop and I came up and played copper. He had a gun but his nerve was bad and I sapped him down. So I went through his clothes and found out who he was and I lifted the plateholder, just out of curiosity. I was wondering what it was all about and getting my neck wet when he came out of it all of a sudden and knocked me off the car. He was out of sight when I picked myself up. That’s the last I saw of him.”
“How did you know it was Geiger he shot?” I asked gruffly.
Brody shrugged. “I figure it was, but I can be wrong. When I had the plate developed and saw what was on it, I was pretty damn sure. And when Geiger didn’t come down to the store this morning and didn’t answer his phone I was plenty sure. So I figure it’s a good time to move his books out and make a quick touch on the Sternwoods for travel money and blow for a while.”
I nodded. “That seems reasonable. Maybe you didn’t murder anybody at that. Where did you hide Geiger’s body?”
He jumped his eyebrows. Then he grinned. “Nix, nix. Skip it. You think I’d go back there and handle him, not knowing when a couple carloads of law would come tearing around the corner? Nix.”
“Somebody hid the body,” I said.
Brody shrugged. The grin stayed on his face. He didn’t believe me. While he was still not believing me the door buzzer started to ring again. Brody stood up sharply, hard-eyed. He glanced over at his guns on the desk.
“So she’s back again,” he growled.
“If she is, she doesn’t have her gun,” I comforted him. “Don’t you have any other friends?”
“Just about one,” he growled. “I got enough of this puss in the corner game.” He marched to the desk and took the Colt. He held it down at his side and went to the door. He put his left hand to the knob and twisted it and opened the door a foot and leaned into the opening, holding the gun tight against his thigh.