The Little Sister

Beyond this desk there is a row of glassed-in cubicles stretching along one side of a very long room. On the other side is the waiting room, a row of hard chairs all facing one way, towards the cubicles.

About half of the chairs were filled with people waiting and the look of long waiting on their faces and the expectation of still longer waiting to come. Most of them were shabby. One was from the jail, in denim, with a guard. A white-faced kid built like a tackle, with sick, empty eyes.

At the back of the line of cubicles a door was lettered SEWELL ENDICOTT DISTRICT ATTORNEY. I knocked and went on into a big airy corner room. A nice enough room, old-fashioned with padded black leather chairs and pictures of former D.A.’s and governors on the walls. Breeze fluttered the net curtains at four windows. A fan on a high shelf purred and swung slowly in a languid arc.

Sewell Endicott sat behind a flat dark desk and watched me come. He pointed to a chair across from him. I sat down. He was tall, thin and dark with loose black hair and long delicate fingers.

“You’re Marlowe?” he said in a voice that had a touch of the soft South.

I didn’t think he really needed an answer to that. I just waited.

“You’re in a bad spot, Marlowe. You don’t look good at all. You’ve been caught suppressing evidence helpful to the solution of a murder. That is obstructing justice. You could go up for it.”

“Suppressing what evidence?” I asked.

He picked a photo off his desk and frowned at it. I looked across at the other two people in the room. They sat in chairs side by side. One of them was Mavis Weld. She wore the dark glasses with the wide white bows. I couldn’t see her eyes, but I thought she was looking at me. She didn’t smile. She sat very still.

By her side sat a man in an angelic pale-gray flannel suit with a carnation the size of a dahlia in his lapel. He was smoking a monogrammed cigarette and flicking the ashes on the floor, ignoring the smoking stand at his elbow. I knew him by pictures I had seen in the papers. Lee Farrell, one of the hottest trouble-shooting lawyers in the country. His hair was white but his eyes were bright and young. He had a deep outdoor tan. He looked as if it would cost a thousand dollars to shake hands with him.

Endicott leaned back and tapped the arm of his chair with his long fingers. He turned with polite deference to Mavis Weld.

“And how well did you know Steelgrave, Miss Weld?”

“Intimately. He was very charming in some ways. I can hardly believe—” She broke off and shrugged.

“And you are prepared to take the stand and swear as to the time and place when this photograph was taken?” He turned the photograph over and showed it to her.

Farrell said indifferently, “Just a moment. Is that that the evidence Mr. Marlowe is supposed to have suppressed?

“I ask the questions,” Endicott said sharply.

Farrell smiled. “Well, in case the answer is yes, that photo isn’t evidence of anything.”

Endicott said softly: “Will you answer my question, Miss Weld?”

She said quietly and easily: “No, Mr. Endicott, I couldn’t swear when that picture was taken or where. I didn’t know it was being taken.”

“All you have to do is look at it,” Endicott suggested.

“And all I know is what I get from looking at it,” she told him.

I grinned. Farrell looked at me with a twinkle. Endicott caught the grin out of the corner of his eye. “Something you find amusing?” he snapped at me.

“I’ve been up all night. My face keeps slipping,” I said.

He gave me a stern look and turned to Mavis Weld again.

“Will you amplify that, Miss Weld?”

“I’ve had a lot of photos taken of me, Mr. Endicott. In a lot of different places and with a lot of different people. I have had lunch and dinner at The Dancers with Mr. Steelgrave and with various other men. I don’t know what you want me to say.”

Farrell put in smoothly, “If I understand your point, you would like Miss Weld to be your witness to connect this photo up. In what kind of proceeding?”

“That’s my business,” Endicott said shortly. “Somebody shot Steelgrave to death last night. It could have been a woman. It could even have been Miss Weld. I’m sorry to say that, but it seems to be in the cards.”

Mavis Weld looked down at her hands. She twisted a white glove between her fingers.

“Well, let’s assume a proceeding,” Farrell said. “One in which that photo is part of your evidence—if you can get it in. But you can’t get it in. Miss Weld won’t get it in for you. All she knows about the photo is what she sees by looking at it. What anybody can see. You’d have to connect it up with a witness who could swear as to when, how and where it was taken. Otherwise I’d object—if I happened to be on the other side. I could even introduce experts to swear the photo was faked.”

“I’m sure you could,” Endicott said dryly.

“The only man who could connect it up for you is the man who took it,” Farrell went on without haste or heat. “I understand he’s dead. I suspect that was why he was killed.”

Endicott said: “This photo is clear evidence of itself that at a certain time and place Steelgrave was not in jail and therefore had no alibi for the killing of Stein.”

Farrell said: “It’s evidence when and if you get it introduced in evidence, Endicott. For Pete’s sake, I’m not trying to tell you the law. You know it. Forget that picture. It proves nothing whatsoever. No paper would dare print it. No judge would admit it in evidence, because no competent witness can connect it up. And if that’s the evidence Marlowe suppressed, then he didn’t in a legal sense suppress evidence at all.”

“I wasn’t thinking of trying Steelgrave for murder,” Endicott said dryly. “But I am a little interested in who killed him. The police department, fantastically enough, also has an interest in that. I hope our interest doesn’t offend you.”

Farrell said: “Nothing offends me. That’s why I’m where I am. Are you sure Steelgrave was murdered?”

Endicott just stared at him. Farrell said easily: “I understand two guns were found, both the property of Steelgrave.”

“Who told you?” Endicott asked sharply. He leaned forward frowning.

Farrell dropped his cigarette into the smoking stand and shrugged. “Hell, these things come out. One of these guns had killed Quest and also Stein. The other had killed Steelgrave. Fired at close quarters too. I admit those boys don’t as a rule take that way out. But it could happen.”

Endicott said gravely: “No doubt. Thanks for the suggestion. It happens to be wrong.”

Farrell smiled a little and was silent. Endicott turned slowly to Mavis Weld.

“Miss Weld, this office—or the present incumbent of it at least—doesn’t believe in seeking publicity at the expense of people to whom a certain kind of publicity might be fatal. It is my duty to determine whether any one should be brought to trial for any of these murders and to prosecute them, if the evidence warrants it. It is not my duty to ruin your career by exploiting the fact that you had the bad luck or bad judgment to be the friend of a man who, although never convicted or even indicted for any crime, was undoubtedly a member of a criminal mob at one time. I don’t think you have been quite candid with me about this photograph, but I won’t press the matter now. There is not much point in my asking you whether you shot Steelgrave. But I do ask you whether you have any knowledge that would point to who may have or might have killed him.”

Farrell said quickly: “Knowledge, Miss Weld—not mere suspicion.”

She faced Endicott squarely. “No.”

He stood up and bowed. “That will be all for now then. Thanks for coming in.”

Farrell and Mavis Weld stood up. I didn’t move. Farrell said: “Are you calling a press conference?”

“I think I’ll leave that to you, Mr. Farrell. You have always been very skillful in handling the press.”

Farrell nodded and went to open the door. They went out. She didn’t seem to look at me when she went out, but something touched the back of my neck lightly. Probably accidental. Her sleeve.

Endicott watched the door close. He looked across the desk at me. “Is Farrell representing you? I forgot to ask him.”

“I can’t afford him. So I’m vulnerable.”

He smiled thinly. “I let them take all the tricks and then salve my dignity by working out on you, eh?”

“I couldn’t stop you.”

“You’re not exactly proud of the way you have handled things, are you, Marlowe?”

“I got off on the wrong foot. After that I just had to take my lumps.”

“Don’t you think you owe a certain obligation to the law?”

“I would—if the law was like you.”

He ran his long pale fingers through his tousled black hair.

“I could make a lot of answers to that,” he said. They’d all sound about the same. The citizen is the law. In this country we haven’t got around to understanding that. We think of the law as an enemy. We’re a nation of cop-haters.”

“It’ll take a lot to change that,” I said. “On both sides.

He leaned forward and pressed a buzzer. “Yes,” he said quietly. “It will. But somebody has to make a beginning. Thanks for coming in.”

As I went out a secretary came in at another door with a fat file in her hand.

33

A shave and a second breakfast made me feel a little less like the box of shavings the cat had had kittens in. I went up to the office and unlocked the door and sniffed in the twice-breathed air and the smell of dust. I opened a window and inhaled the fry-cook smell from the coffee shop next door. I sat down at my desk and felt the grit on it with my fingertips. I filled a pipe and lit it and leaned back and looked around.

“Hello,” I said.

I was just talking to the office equipment, the three green filing cases, the threadbare piece of carpet, the customer’s chair across from me, and the light fixture in the ceiling with three dead moths in it that had been there for at least six months. I was talking to the pebbled glass panel and the grimy woodwork and the pen set on the desk and the tired, tired telephone. I was talking to the scales on an alligator, the name of the alligator being Marlowe, a private detective in our thriving little community. Not the brainiest guy in the world, but cheap. He started out cheap and he ended cheaper still.

I reached down and put the bottle of Old Forester up on the desk. It was about a third full. Old Forester. Now who gave you that, pal? That’s green-label stuff. Out of your class entirely. Must have been a client. I had a client once.

And that got me thinking about her, and maybe I have stronger thoughts than I know. The telephone rang, and the funny little precise voice sounded just as it had the first time she called me up.

“I’m in that telephone booth,” she said. “If you’re alone, I’m coming up.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I suppose you’re mad at me,” she said.

“I’m not mad at anybody. Just tired.”

“Oh yes you are,” her tight little voice said. “But I’m coming up anyway. I don’t care if you are mad at me.”

She hung up. I took the cork out of the bottle of Old Forester and gave a sniff at it. I shuddered. That settled it. Any time I couldn’t smell whiskey without shuddering I was through.

I put the bottle away and got up to unlock the communicating door. Then I heard her tripping along the hall. I’d know those tight little footsteps anywhere. I opened the door and she came up to me and looked at me shyly.

It was all gone. The slanted cheaters, and the new hair-do and the smart little hat and the perfume and the prettied-up touch. The costume jewelry, the rouge, the everything. All gone. She was right back where she started that first morning. Same brown tailor-made, same square bag, same rimless glasses, same prim little narrow-minded smile.

“It’s me,” she said. “I’m going home.”

She followed me into my private thinking parlor and sat down primly and I sat down just any old way and stared at her.

“Back to Manhattan,” I said. “I’m surprised they let you.”

“I may have to come back.”

“Can you afford it?”

She gave a quick little half-embarrassed laugh. “It won’t cost me anything,” she said. She reached up and touched the rimless glasses. “These feel all wrong now,” she said. “I liked the others. But Dr. Zugsmith wouldn’t like them at all.” She put her bag on the desk and drew a line along the desk with her fingertip. That was just like the first time too.

“I can’t remember whether I gave you back your twenty dollars or not,” I said. “We kept passing it back and forth until I lost count.”

“Oh, you gave it to me,” she said. “Thank you.”

“Sure?”

“I never make mistakes about money. Are you all right? Did they hurt you?”

“The police? No. And it was as tough a job as they ever didn’t do.”

She looked innocently surprised. Then her eyes glowed. “You must be awfully brave,” she said.

“Just luck,” I said. I picked up a pencil and felt the point. It was a good sharp point, if anybody wanted to write anything. I didn’t. I reached across and slipped the pencil through the strap of her bag and pulled it towards me.

“Don’t touch my bag,” she said quickly and reached for it.

I grinned and drew it out of her reach. “All right. But it’s such a cute little bag. It’s so like you.”

She leaned back. There was a vague worry behind her eyes, but she smiled. “You think I’m cute—Philip? I’m so ordinary.”

“I wouldn’t say so.”

“You wouldn’t?”

“Hell no, I think you’re one of the most unusual girls I ever met.” I swung the bag by its strap and set it down on the corner of the desk. Her eyes fastened on it quickly, but she licked her lip and kept on smiling at me.

“And I bet you’ve known an awful lot of girls,” she said. “Why—” she looked down and did that with her fingertip on the desk again—”why didn’t you ever get married?”

I thought of all the ways you answer that. I thought of all the women I had liked that much. No, not all. But some of them.

“I suppose I know the answer,” I said. “But it would just sound corny. The ones I’d maybe like to marry—well, I haven’t what they need. The others you don’t have to marry. You just seduce them—if they don’t beat you to it.”

She flushed to the roots of her mousy hair.

“You’re horrid when you talk like that.”

“That goes for some of the nice ones too,” I said. “Not what you said. What I said. You wouldn’t have been so hard to take yourself.”

“Don’t talk like that, please!”

“Well, would you?”

She looked down at the desk. “I wish you’d tell me,” she said slowly, “what happened to Orrin. I’m all confused.”

“I told you he probably went off the rails. The first time you came in. Remember?” She nodded slowly, still blushing.

“Abnormal sort of home life,” I said. “Very inhibited sort of guy and with a very highly developed sense of his own importance. It looked at you out of the picture you gave me. I don’t want to go psychological on you, but I figure he was just the type to go very completely haywire, if he went haywire at all. Then there’s that awful money hunger that runs in your family—all except one.”

She smiled at me now. If she thought I meant her, that was jake with me. “There’s one question I want to ask you,” I said. “Was your father married before?”

She nodded, yes.

“That helps. Leila had another mother. That suits me fine. Tell me some more. After all I did a lot of work for you, for a very low fee of no dollars net.”

“You got paid,” she said sharply. “Well paid. By Leila. And don’t expect me to call her Mavis Weld. I won’t do it.”

“You didn’t know I was going to get paid.”

“Well—” there was a long pause, during which her eyes went to her bag again—”you did get paid.”

“Okay, pass that. Why wouldn’t you tell me who she was?”

“I was ashamed. Mother and I were both ashamed.”

“Orrin wasn’t. He loved it.”

“Orrin?” There was a tidy little silence while she looked at her bag again. I was beginning to get curious about that bag. “But he had been out here and I suppose he’d got used to it.”

“Being in pictures isn’t that bad, surely.”

“It wasn’t just that,” she said swiftly, and her tooth came down on the outer edge of her lower lip and something flared in her eyes and very slowly died away. I just put another match to my pipe. I was too tired to show emotions, even if I felt any.

“I know. Or anyway I kind of guessed. How did Orrin find out something about Steelgrave that the cops didn’t know?”

“I—I don’t know,” she said slowly, picking her way among her words like a cat on a fence. “Could it have been that doctor?”

“Oh sure,” I said, with a big warm smile. “He and Orrin got to be friends somehow. A common interest in sharp tools maybe.”

She leaned back in her chair. Her little face was thin and angular now. Her eyes had a watchful look.

“Now you’re just being nasty,” she said. “Every so often you have to be that way.”

“Such a pity,” I said. “I’d be a lovable character if I’d let myself alone. Nice bag.” I reached for it and pulled it in front of me and snapped it open.

She came up out of her chair and lunged.

“You let my bag alone!”

I looked her straight in the rimless glasses. “You want to go home to Manhattan, Kansas, don’t you? Today? You got your ticket and everything?”

She worked her lips and slowly sat down again.

“Okay,” I said. “I’m not stopping you. I just wondered how much dough you squeezed out of the deal.”

She began to cry. I opened the bag and went through it. Nothing until I came to the zipper pocket at the back. I unzipped and reached in. There was a flat packet of new bills in there. I took them out and riffled them. Ten centuries. All new. All nice. An even thousand dollars. Nice traveling money.

I leaned back and tapped the edge of the packet on my desk. She sat silent now, staring at me with wet eyes. I got a handkerchief out of her bag and tossed it across to her. She dabbed at her eyes. She watched me around the handkerchief. Once in a while she made a nice little appealing sob in her throat.

“Leila gave the money to me,” she said softly.

“What size chisel did you use?” She just opened her mouth and a tear ran down her cheek into it.

“Skip it,” I said. I dropped the pack of money back to the bag, snapped the bag shut and pushed it across the desk to her. “I guess you and Orrin belong to that class of people that can convince themselves that everything they do is right. He can blackmail his sister and then when a couple of small-time crooks get wise to his racket and take it away from him, he can sneak up on them and knock them off with an ice pick in the back of the neck. Probably didn’t even keep him awake that night. You can do much the same. Leila didn’t give you that money. Steelgrave gave it to you. For what?”

“You’re filthy,” she said. “You’re vile. How dare you say such things to me?”

“Who tipped off the law that Dr. Lagardie knew Clausen? Lagardie thought I did. I didn’t. So you did. Why? To smoke out your brother who was not cutting you in—because right then he had lost his deck of cards and was hiding out. I’d like to see some of those letters he wrote home. I bet they’re meaty. I can see him working at it, watching his sister, trying to get her lined up for his Leica, with the good Doctor Lagardie waiting quietly in the background for his share of the take. What did you hire me for?”

“I didn’t know,” she said evenly. She wiped her eyes again and put the handkerchief away in the bag and got herself all collected and ready to leave. “Orrin never mentioned any names. I didn’t even know Orrin had lost his pictures. But I knew he had taken them and that they were very valuable. I came out to make sure.”

“Sure of what?”

“That Orrin treated me right. He could be awfully mean sometimes. He might have kept all the money himself.”

“Why did he call you up night before last?”

“He was scared. Dr. Lagardie wasn’t pleased with him any more. He didn’t have the pictures. Somebody else had them. Orrin didn’t know who. But he was scared.

“I had them. I still have,” I said. “They’re in that safe.”

She turned her head very slowly to look at the safe. She ran a fingertip questioningly along her lip. She turned back.

“I don’t believe you,” she said, and her eyes watched me like a cat watching a mouse hole.

“How’s to split that grand with me. You get the pictures.”

She thought about it. “I could hardly give you that money for something that doesn’t belong to you,” she said, and smiled. “Please give them to me. Please, Philip. Leila ought to have them back.”

“For how much dough?”

She frowned and looked hurt.

“She’s my client now,” I said. “But double-crossing her wouldn’t be bad business—at the right price.”

“I don’t believe you have them.”

“Okay.” I got up and went to the safe. In a moment I was back with the envelope. I poured the prints and the negative out on the desk—my side of the desk. She looked down at them and started to reach.

I picked them up and shuffled them together and held one so that she could look at it. When she reached for it I moved it back.

“But I can’t see it so far away,” she complained.

“It costs money to get closer.”

“I never thought you were a crook,” she said with dignity.

I didn’t say anything. I relit my pipe.

“I could make you give them to the police,” she said.

“You could try.”

Suddenly she spoke rapidly. “I couldn’t give you this money I have, really I couldn’t. We—well mother and I owe money still on account of father and the house isn’t clear and—”

“What did you sell Steelgrave for the grand?”

Her mouth fell open and she looked ugly. She closed her lips and pressed them together. It was a tight hard little face that I was looking at.

“You had one thing to sell,” I said. “You knew where Orrin was. To Steelgrave that information was worth a grand. Easy. It’s a question of connecting up evidence. You wouldn’t understand. Steelgrave went down there and killed him. He paid you the money for the address.”

“Leila told him,” she said in a faraway voice.

“Leila told me she told him,” I said. “If necessary Leila would tell the world she told him. Just as she would tell the world she killed Steelgrave—if that was the only way out. Leila is a sort of free-and-easy Hollywood babe that doesn’t have very good morals. But when it comes to bedrock guts—she has what it takes. She’s not the ice pick type. And she’s not the blood-money type.”

The color flowed away from her face and left her as pale as ice. Her mouth quivered, then tightened up hard into a little knot. She pushed her chair back and leaned forward to get up.

“Blood money,” I said quietly. “Your own brother. And you set him up so they could kill him. A thousand dollars blood money. I hope you’ll be happy with it.”

She stood away from the chair and took a couple of steps backward. Then suddenly she giggled.

“Who could prove it?” she half squealed. “Who’s alive to prove it? You? Who are you? A cheap shyster, a nobody.” She went off into a shrill peal of laughter. “Why even twenty dollars buys you.”

I was still holding the packet of photos. I struck a match and dropped the negative into the ashtray and watched it flare up.

She stopped dead, frozen in a kind of horror. I started to tear the pictures up into strips. I grinned at her.

“A cheap shyster,” I said. “Well, what would you expect. I don’t have any brothers or sisters to sell out. So I sell out my clients.”

She stood rigid and glaring. I finished my tearing-up job and lit the scraps of paper in the tray.

“One thing I regret,” I said. “Not seeing your meeting back in Manhattan, Kansas, with dear old Mom. Not seeing the fight over how to split that grand. I bet that would be something to watch.”

I poked at the paper with a pencil to keep it burning. She came slowly, step by step, to the desk and her eyes were fixed on the little smoldering heap of torn prints.

“I could tell the police,” she whispered. “I could tell them a lot of things. They’d believe me.”

“I could tell them who shot Steelgrave,” I said. “Because I know who didn’t. They might believe me.”

The small head jerked up. The light glinted on the glasses. There were no eyes behind them.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “I’m not going to. It wouldn’t cost me enough. And it would cost somebody else too much.”

The telephone rang and she jumped a foot. I turned and reached for it and put my face against it and said, “Hello.”

“Amigo, are you all right?”

There was a sound in the background. I swung around and saw the door click shut. I was alone in the room.

“Are you all right, amigo?”

“I’m tired. I’ve been up all night. Apart from—”

“Has the little one called you up?”

“The little sister? She was just in here. She’s on her way back to Manhattan with the swag.”

“The swag?”

“The pocket money she got from Steelgrave for fingering her brother.”

There was a silence, then she said gravely, “You cannot know that, amigo.”

“Like I know I’m sitting leaning on this desk holding on to this telephone. Like I know I hear your voice. And not quite so certainly, but certainly enough like I know who shot Steelgrave.”

“You are somewhat foolish to say that to me, amigo. I am not above reproach. You should not trust me too much.”

“I make mistakes, but this won’t be one. I’ve burned all the photographs. I tried to sell them to Orfamay. She wouldn’t bid high enough.”

“Surely you are making fun, amigo.”

“Am I? Who of?”

She tinkled her laugh over the wire. “Would you like to take me to lunch?”

“I might. Are you home?”

“I’ll come over in a little while.”

“But I shall be delighted.” I hung up.

The play was over. I was sitting in the empty theater. The curtain was down and projected on it dimly I could see the action. But already some of the actors were getting vague and unreal. The little sister above all. In a couple of days I would forget what she looked like. Because in a way she was so unreal. I thought of her tripping back to Manhattan, Kansas, and dear old Mom, with that fat little new little thousand dollars in her purse. A few people had been killed so she could get it, but I didn’t think that would bother her for long. I thought of her getting down to the office in the morning—what was the man’s name? Oh yes. Dr. Zugsmith—and dusting off his desk before he arrived and arranging the magazines in the waiting room. She’d have her rimless cheaters on and a plain dress and her face would be without make-up and her manners to the patients would be most correct.

“Dr. Zugsmith will see you now, Mrs. Whoosis.”

She would hold the door open with a little smile and Mrs. Whoosis would go in past her and Dr. Zugsmith would be sitting behind his desk as professional as hell with a white coat on and his stethoscope hanging around his neck. A case file would be in front of him and his note pad and prescription pad would be neatly squared off. Nothing that Dr. Zugsmith didn’t know. You couldn’t fool him. He had it all at his fingertips. When he looked at a patient he knew the answers to all the questions he was going to ask just as a matter of form.

When he looked at his receptionist, Miss Orfamay Quest, he saw a nice quiet young lady, properly dressed for a doctor’s office, no red nails, no loud make-up, nothing to offend the old-fashioned type of customer. An ideal receptionist, Miss Quest.

Dr. Zugsmith, when he thought about her at all thought of her with self-satisfaction. He had made her what she was. She was just what the doctor ordered.

Most probably he hadn’t made a pass at her yet. Maybe they don’t in those small towns. Ha, ha! I grew up in one.

I changed position and looked at my watch and got that bottle of Old Forester up out of the drawer after all. I sniffed it. It smelled good. I poured myself a good stiff jolt and held it up against the light.

“Well, Dr. Zugsmith,” I said out loud, just as if he was sitting there on the other side of the desk with a drink in his hand, “I don’t know you very well and you don’t know me at all. Ordinarily I don’t believe in giving advice to strangers, but I’ve had a short intensive course of Miss Orfamay Quest and I’m breaking my rule. If ever that little girl wants anything from you, give it to her quick. Don’t stall around or gobble about your income tax and your overhead. Just wrap yourself in a smile and shell out. Don’t get involved in any discussions about what belongs to who. Keep the little girl happy, that’s the main thing. Good luck to you, Doctor, and don’t leave any harpoons lying around the office.”

I drank off half of my drink and waited for it to warm me up. When it did that I drank the rest and put the bottle away.

I knocked the cold ashes out of my pipe and refilled it from the leather humidor an admirer had given me for Christmas, the admirer by an odd coincidence having the same name as mine.

When I had the pipe filled I lit it carefully, without haste, and went on out and down the hall, as breezy as a Britisher coming in from a tiger hunt.

34

The Chateau Bercy was old but made over. It had the sort of lobby that asks for plush and india-rubber plants, but gets glass brick, cornice lighting, three-cornered glass tables, and a general air of having been redecorated by a parolee from a nut hatch. Its color scheme was bile green, linseed-poultice brown, sidewalk gray and monkey-bottom blue. It was as restful as a split lip.

The small desk was empty but the mirror behind it could be diaphanous, so I didn’t try to sneak up the stairs. I rang a bell and a large soft man oozed out from behind a wall and smiled at me with moist soft lips and bluish-white teeth and unnaturally bright eyes.

“Miss Gonzales,” I said. “Name’s Marlowe. She’s expecting me.”

“Why, yes of course,” he said, fluttering his hands. “Yes, of course. I’ll telephone up at once.” He had a voice that fluttered too. He picked up the telephone and gurgled into it and put it down.

“Yes, Mr. Marlowe. Miss Gonzales says to come right up. Apartment 412.” He giggled. “But I suppose you know.”

“I know now,” I said. “By the way were you here last February?”

“Last February? Last February? Oh yes, I was here last February.” He pronounced it exactly as spelled.

“Remember the night Stein got chilled out front?”

The smile went away from the fat face in a hurry. “Are you a police officer?” His voice was now thin and reedy.

“No. But your pants are unzipped, if you care.”

He looked down with horror and zipped them up with hands that almost trembled.

“Why thank you,” he said. “Thank you.” He leaned across the low desk. “It was not exactly out front,” he said. “That is not exactly. It was almost to the next corner.

“Living here, wasn’t he?”

“I’d really rather not talk about it. Really I’d rather not talk about it.” He paused and ran his pinkie along his lower lip. “Why do you ask?”

“Just to keep you talking. You want to be more careful, bud. I can smell it on your breath.”

The pink flowed all over him right down to his neck. “If you suggest I have been drinking—”

“Only tea,” I said. “And not from a cup.”

I turned away. He was silent. As I reached the elevator I looked back. He stood with his hands flat on the desk and his head strained around to watch me. Even from a distance he seemed to be trembling.

The elevator was self-service. The fourth floor was cool gray, the carpet thick. There was a small bell push beside Apartment 412. It chimed softly inside. The door was swung open instantly. The beautiful deep dark eyes looked at me and the red red mouth smiled at me. Black slacks and the flame-colored shirt, just like last night.

“Amigo,” she said softly. She put her arms out. I took hold of her wrists and brought them together and made her palms touch. I played pat-a-cake with her for a moment. The expression in her eyes was languorous and fiery at the same time.

I let go of her wrists, closed the door with my elbow and slid past her. It was like the first time.

“You ought to carry insurance on those,” I said touching one. It was real enough. The nipple was as hard as a ruby.

She went into her joyous laugh. I went on in and looked the place over. It was French gray and dusty blue. Not her colors, but very nice. There was a false fireplace with gas logs, and enough chairs and tables and lamps, but not too many. There was a neat little cellarette in the corner.

“You like my little apartment, amigo?”

“Don’t say little apartment. That sounds like a whore too.”

I didn’t look at her. I didn’t want to look at her. I sat down on a davenport and rubbed a hand across my forehead.

“Four hours sleep and a couple of drinks,” I said. “And I’d be able to talk nonsense to you again. Right now I’ve barely strength to talk sense. But I’ve got to.”

She came to sit close to me. I shook my head. “Over there. I really do have to talk sense.”

She sat down opposite and looked at me with grave dark eyes. “But yes, amigo, whatever you wish. I am your girl—at least I would gladly be your girl.”

“Where did you live in Cleveland?”

“In Cleveland?” Her voice was very soft, almost cooing. “Did I say I had lived in Cleveland?”

“You said you knew him there.”

She thought back and then nodded. “I was married then, amigo. What is the matter?”

“You did live in Cleveland then?”

“Yes,” she said softly.

“You got to know Steelgrave how?”

“It was just that in those days it was fun to know a gangster. A form of inverted snobbery, I suppose. One went to the places where they were said to go and if one was lucky, perhaps some evening—”

“You let him pick you up.”

She nodded brightly. “Let us say I picked him up. He was a very nice little man. Really, he was.”

“What about the husband? Your husband. Or don’t you remember?”

She smiled. “The streets of the world are paved with discarded husbands,” she said.

“Isn’t it the truth? You find them everywhere. Even in Bay City.”

That bought me nothing. She shrugged politely. “I would not doubt it.”

“Might even be a graduate of the Sorbonne. Might even be mooning away in a measly small-town practice. Waiting and hoping. That’s one coincidence I’d like to eat. It has a touch of poetry.”

The polite smile stayed in place on her lovely face.

“We’ve slipped far apart,” I said. “Ever so far. And we got to be pretty clubby there for a while.”

I looked down at my fingers. My head ached. I wasn’t even forty per cent of what I ought to be. She reached me a crystal cigarette box and I took one. She fitted one for herself into the golden tweezers. She took it from a different box.

“I’d like to try one of yours,” I said.

“But Mexican tobacco is so harsh to most people.”

“As long as it’s tobacco,” I said, watching her. I made up my mind. “No, you’re right. I wouldn’t like it.”

“What,” she asked carefully, “is the meaning of this by-play?”

“Desk clerk’s a muggle-smoker.”

She nodded slowly. “I have warned him,” she said. “Several times.”

“Amigo,” I said.

“What?”

“You don’t use much Spanish do you? Perhaps you don’t know much Spanish. Amigo gets worn to shreds.”

“We are not going to be like yesterday afternoon, I hope,” she said slowly.

“We’re not. The only thing Mexican about you is a few words and a careful way of talking that’s supposed to give the impression of a person speaking a language they had to learn. Like saying ‘do not’ instead of ‘don’t.’ That sort of thing.”

She didn’t answer. She puffed gently on her cigarette and smiled.

“I’m in bad trouble downtown,” I went on. “Apparently Miss Weld had the good sense to tell it to her boss—Julius Oppenheimer—and he came through. Got Lee Farrell for her. I don’t think they think she shot Steelgrave. But they think I know who did, and they don’t love me any more.”

“And do you know, amigo?”

“Told you over the phone I did.”

She looked at me steadily for a longish moment. “I was there.” Her voice had a dry serious sound for once.

“It was very curious, really. The little girl wanted to see the gambling house. She had never seen anything like that and there had been in the papers—”

“She was staying here—with you?”

“Not in my apartment, amigo. In a room I got for her here.”

“No wonder she wouldn’t tell me,” I said. “But I guess you didn’t have time to teach her the business.”

She frowned very slightly and made a motion in the air with the brown cigarette. I watched its smoke write something unreadable in the still air.

“Please. As I was saying she wanted to go to that house. So I called him up and he said to come along. When we got there he was drunk. I have never seen him drunk before. He laughed and put his arm around little Orfamay and told her she had earned her money well. He said he had something for her, then he took from his pocket a billfold wrapped in a cloth of some kind and gave it to her. When she unwrapped it there was a hole in the middle of it and the hole was stained with blood.”

“That wasn’t nice,” I said. “I wouldn’t even call it characteristic.”

“You did not know him very well.”

“True. Go on.”

“Little Orfamay took the billfold and stared at it and then stared at him and her white little face was very still. Then she thanked him and opened her bag to put the billfold in it, as I thought—it was all very curious—”

“A scream,” I said. “It would have had me gasping on the floor.”

“—but instead she took a gun out of her bag. It was a gun he had given Mavis, I think. It was like the one—”

“I know exactly what it was like,” I said. “I played with it some.”

“She turned around and shot him dead with one shot. It was very dramatic.”

She put the brown cigarette back in her mouth and smiled at me. A curious, rather distant smile, as if she was thinking of something far away.

“You made her confess to Mavis Weld,” I said. She nodded.

“Mavis wouldn’t have believed you, I guess.”

“I did not care to risk it.”

“It wasn’t you gave Orfamay the thousand bucks, was it, darling? To make her tell? She’s a little girl who would go a long way for a thousand bucks.”

“I do not care to answer that,” she said with dignity.

“No. So last night when you rushed me out there, you already knew he was dead and there wasn’t anything to be afraid of and all that act with the gun was just an act.”

“I do not like to play God,” she said softly. “There was a situation and I knew that somehow or other you would get Mavis out of it. There was no one else who would. Mavis was determined to take the blame.”

“I better have a drink,” I said. “I’m sunk.”

She jumped up and went to the little cellarette. She came back with a couple of huge glasses of Scotch and water. She handed me one and watched me over her glass as I tried it out. It was wonderful. I drank some more. She sank down into her chair again, and reached for the golden tweezers.

“I chased her out,” I said, finally. “Mavis, I’m talking about. She told me she had shot him. She had the gun. The twin of the one you gave me. You didn’t probably notice that yours had been fired.”

“I know very little about guns,” she said softly.

“Sure. I counted the shells in it, and assuming it had been full to start with, two had been fired. Quest was killed with two shots from a .32 automatic. Same caliber. I picked up the empty shells in the den down there.”

“Down where, amigo?”

It was beginning to grate. Too much amigo, far too much.

“Of course I couldn’t know it was the same gun, but it seemed worth trying out. Only confuse things up a little anyhow, and give Mavis that much break. So I switched guns on him, and put his behind the bar. His was a black .38. More like what he would carry, if he carried one at all. Even with a checked grip you can leave prints, but with an ivory grip you’re apt to leave a fair set of finger marks on the left side. Steelgrave wouldn’t carry that kind of gun.”

Her eyes were round and empty and puzzled. “I am afraid I am not following you too well.”

“And if he killed a man he would kill him dead, and be sure of it. This guy got up and walked a bit.”

A flash of something showed in her eyes and was gone.

“I’d like to say he talked a bit,” I went on. “But he didn’t. His lungs were full of blood. He died at my feet. Down there.”

“But down where? You have not told me where it was that this—”

“Do I have to?”

She sipped from her glass. She smiled. She put the glass down. I said: “You were present when little Orfamay told him where to go.”

“Oh yes, of course.” Nice recovery. Fast and clean. But her smile looked a little more tired.

“Only he didn’t go,” I said.

Her cigarette stopped in midair. That was all. Nothing else. It went on slowly to her lips. She puffed elegantly.

“That’s what’s been the matter all along,” I said. “I just wouldn’t buy what was staring me in the face. Steelgrave is Weepy Moyer. That’s solid, isn’t it?”

“Most certainly. And it can be proved.”

“Steelgrave is a reformed character and doing fine. Then this Stein comes out bothering him, wanting to cut in. I’m guessing, but that’s about how it would happen. Okay, Stein has to go. Steelgrave doesn’t want to kill anybody—and he has never been accused of killing anybody. The Cleveland cops wouldn’t come out and get him. No charges pending. No mystery—except that he had been connected with a mob in some capacity. But he has to get rid of Stein. So he gets himself pinched. And then he gets out of jail by bribing the jail doctor, and he kills Stein and goes back into jail at once. When the killing shows up whoever let him out of jail is going to run like hell and destroy any records there might be of his going out. Because the cops will come over and ask questions.”

“Very naturally, amigo.”

I looked her over for cracks, but there weren’t any yet.

“So far so good. But we’ve got to give this lad credit for a few brains. Why did he let them hold him in jail for ten days? Answer One, to make himself an alibi. Answer Two, because he knew that sooner or later this question of him being Moyer was going to get aired, so why not give them the time and get it over with? That way any time a racket boy gets blown down around here they’re not going to keep pulling Steelgrave in and trying to hang the rap on him.”

“You like that idea, amigo?”

“Yes. Look at it this way. Why would he have lunch in a public place the very day he was out of the cooler to knock Stein off? And if he did, why would young Quest happen around to snap that picture? Stein hadn’t been killed, so the picture wasn’t evidence of anything. I like people to be lucky, but that’s too lucky. Again, even if Steelgrave didn’t know his picture had been taken, he knew who Quest was. Must have. Quest had been tapping his sister for eating money since he lost his job, maybe before. Steelgrave had a key to her apartment. He must have known something about this brother of hers. Which simply adds up to the result, that that night of all nights Steelgrave would not have shot Stein—even if he had planned to.”

“It is now for me to ask you who did,” she said politely.

“Somebody who knew Stein and could get close to him. Somebody who already knew that photo had been taken, knew who Steelgrave was, knew that Mavis Weld was on the edge of becoming a big star, knew that her association with Steelgrave was dangerous, but would be a thousand times more dangerous if Steelgrave could be framed for the murder of Stein. Knew Quest, because he had been to Mavis Weld’s apartment, and had met him there and given him the works, and he was a boy that could be knocked clean out of his mind by that sort of treatment. Knew that those bone-handled .32’s were registered to Steelgrave, although he had only bought them to give to a couple of girls, and if he carried a gun himself, it would be one that was not registered and could not be traced to him. Knew—”

“Stop!” Her voice was a sharp stab of sound, but neither frightened nor even angry. “You will stop at once, please! I will not tolerate this another minute. You will now go!”

I stood up. She leaned back and a pulse beat in her throat. She was exquisite, she was dark, she was deadly. And nothing would ever touch her, not even the law.

“Why did you kill Quest?” I asked her.

She stood up and came close to me, smiling again.

“For two reasons, amigo. He was more than a little crazy and in the end he would have killed me. And the other reason is that none of this—absolutely none of it—was for money. It was for love.”

I started to laugh in her face. I didn’t. She was dead serious. It was out of this world.

“No matter how many lovers a woman may have,” she said softly, “there is always one she cannot bear to lose to another woman. Steelgrave was the one.”

I just stared into her lovely dark eyes. “I believe you,” I said at last.

“Kiss me, amigo.”

“Good God!”

“I must have men, amigo. But the man I loved is dead. I killed him. That man I would not share.”

“You waited a long time.”

“I can be patient—as long as there is hope.”

“Oh, nuts.”

She smiled a free, beautiful and perfectly natural smile. “And you cannot do a damn thing about all this, darling, unless you destroy Mavis Weld utterly and finally.”

“Last night she proved she was willing to destroy her self.”

“If she was not acting.” She looked at me sharply and laughed. “That hurt, did it not? You are in love with her.”

I said slowly, “That would be kind of silly. I could sit in the dark with her and hold hands, but for how long? In a little while she will drift off into a haze of glamour and expensive clothes and froth and unreality and muted sex. She won’t be a real person any more. Just a voice from a sound track, a face on a screen. I’d want more than that.”

I moved towards the door without putting my back to her. I didn’t really expect a slug. I thought she liked better having me the way I was—and not being able to do a damn thing about any of it.

I looked back as I opened the door. Slim, dark and lovely and smiling. Reeking with sex. Utterly beyond the moral laws of this or any world I could imagine.

She was one for the book all right. I went out quietly. Very softly her voice came to me as I closed the door.

“Querido—I have liked you very much. It is too bad.”

I shut the door.

35

As the elevator opened at the lobby a man stood there waiting for it. He was tall and thin and his hat was pulled low over his eyes. It was a warm day but he wore a thin topcoat with the collar up. He kept his chin low.

“Dr. Lagardie,” I said softly.

He glanced at me with no trace of recognition. He moved into the elevator. It started up.

I went across to the desk and banged the bell. The large fat soft man came out and stood with a pained smile on his loose mouth. His eyes were not quite so bright.

“Give me the phone.”

He reached down and put it on the desk. I dialed Madison 7911. The voice said: “Police.” This was the Emergency Board.

“Chateau Bercy Apartments, Franklin and Girard in Hollywood. A man named Dr. Vincent Lagardie wanted for questioning by homicide, Lieutenants French and Beifus, has just gone up to Apartment 412. This is Philip Marlowe, a private detective.”

“Franklin and Girard. Wait there please. Are you armed?”

“Yes.”

“Hold him if he tries to leave.”

I hung up and wiped my mouth off. The fat softy was leaning against the counter, white around the eyes.

They came fast—but not fast enough. Perhaps I ought to have stopped him. Perhaps I had a hunch what he would do, and deliberately let him do it. Sometimes when I’m low I try to reason it out. But it gets too complicated. The whole damn case was that way. There was never a point where I could do the natural obvious thing without stopping to rack my head dizzy with figuring how it would affect somebody I owed something to.

When they cracked the door he was sitting on the couch holding her pressed against his heart. His eyes were blind and there was bloody foam on his lips. He had bitten through his tongue.

Under her left breast and tight against the flame-colored shirt lay the silver handle of a knife I had seen before. The handle was in the shape of a naked woman. The eyes of Miss Dolores Gonzales were half open and on her lips there was the dim ghost of a provocative smile.

“The Hippocrates smile,” the ambulance intern said, and sighed. “On her it looks good.”

He glanced across at Dr. Lagardie who saw nothing and heard nothing, if you could judge by his face.

“I guess somebody lost a dream,” the intern said. He bent over and closed her eyes.

About the Author

RAYMOND CHANDLER was born in Chicago, Illinois, on July 23, 1888, but spent most of his boyhood and youth in England, where he attended Dulwich College and later worked as a free-lance journalist for The Westminster Gazette and The Spectator. During World War I, he served in France with the First Division of the Canadian Expeditionary Force, transferring later to the Royal Flying Corps (R.A.F.). In 1919 he returned to the United States, settling in California, where he eventually became director of a number of independent oil companies. The Depression put an end to his business career, and in 1933, at the age of forty-five, he turned to writing, publishing his first stories in Black Mask. His first novel, The Big Sleep, was published in 1939. Never a prolific writer, he published only one collection of stories and seven novels in his lifetime. In the last year of his life he was elected president of the Mystery Writers of America. He died in La Jolla, California, on March 26, 1959.