Trouble Is My Business (26 page)

Ybarra turned his head slowly and looked at him. “I don’t think you will,” he said. “I think you’ll give him a clean bill of health and anything else he wants. He’s giving you a lesson in police work.”

Copernik didn’t move or make a sound for a long minute. None of us moved. Then Copernik leaned forward and his coat fell open. The butt of his service gun looked out of his underarm holster.

“So what do you want?” he asked me.

“What’s on the card table there. The jacket and hat and the phony pearls. And some names kept away from the papers. Is that too much?”

“Yeah—it’s too much,” Copernik said almost gently. He swayed sideways and his gun jumped neatly into his hand. He rested his forearm on his thigh and pointed the gun at my stomach.

“I like better that you get a slug in the guts resisting arrest,” he said. “I like that better, because of a report I made out on Al Tessilore’s arrest and how I made the pinch. Because of some photos of me that are in the morning sheets going out about now. I like it better that you don’t live long enough to laugh about that baby.”

My mouth felt suddenly hot and dry. Far off I heard the wind booming. It seemed like the sound of guns.

Ybarra moved his feet on the floor and said coldly: “You’ve got a couple of cases all solved, policeman. All you do for it is leave some junk here and keep some names from the papers. Which means from the D.A. If he gets them anyway, too bad for you.”

Copernik said: “I like the other way.” The blue gun in his hand was like a rock. “And God help you, if you don’t back me up on it.”

Ybarra said: “If the woman is brought out into the open, you’ll be a liar on a police report and a chisler on your own partner. In a week they won’t even speak your name at Headquarters. The taste of it would make them sick.”

The hammer clicked back on Copernik’s gun and I watched his big finger slide in farther around the trigger.

Ybarra stood up. The gun jumped at him. He said: “We’ll see how yellow a guinea is. I’m telling you to put that gun up, Sam.”

He started to move. He moved four even steps. Copernik was a man without a breath of movement, a stone man.

Ybarra took one more step and quite suddenly the gun began to shake.

Ybarra spoke evenly: “Put it up, Sam. If you keep your head everything lies the way it is. If you don’t—you’re gone.”

He took one more step. Copernik’s mouth opened wide and made a gasping sound and then he sagged in the chair as if he had been hit on the head. His eyelids dropped.

Ybarra jerked the gun out of his hand with a movement so quick it was no movement at all. He stepped back quickly, held the gun low at his side.

“It’s the hot wind, Sam. Let’s forget it,” he said in the same even, almost dainty voice.

Copernik’s shoulders sagged lower and he put his face in his hands. “O.K.,” he said between his fingers.

Ybarra went softly across the room and opened the door. He looked at me with lazy, half-closed eyes. “I’d do a lot for a woman who saved my life, too,” he said. “I’m eating this dish, but as a cop you can’t expect me to like it.”

I said: “The little man in the bed is called Leon Valesanos. He was a croupier at the Spezzia Club.”

“Thanks,” Ybarra said. “Let’s go, Sam.”

Copernik got up heavily and walked across the room and out of the open door and out of my sight. Ybarra stepped through the door after him and started to close it.

I said: “Wait a minute.”

He turned his head slowly, his left hand on the door, the blue gun hanging down close to his right side.

“I’m not in this for money,” I said. “The Barsalys live at Two-twelve Fremont Place. You can take the pearls to her. If Barsaly’s name stays out of the paper, I get five C’s. It goes to the Police Fund. I’m not so damn smart as you think. It just happened that way—and you had a heel for a partner.”

Ybarra looked across the room at the pearls on the card table. His eyes glistened. “You take them,” he said. “The five hundred’s O.K. I think the fund has it coming.”

He shut the door quietly and in a moment I heard the elevator doors clang.

SEVEN

I opened a window and stuck my head out into the wind and watched the squad car tool off down the block. The wind blew in hard and I let it blow. A picture fell off the wall and two chessmen rolled off the card table. The material of Lola Barsaly’s bolero jacket lifted and shook.

I went out to the kitchenette and drank some Scotch and went back into the living room and called her—late as it was.

She answered the phone herself, very quickly, with no sleep in her voice.

“Marlowe,” I said. “O.K. your end?”

“Yes . . . yes,” she said. “I’m alone.”

“I found something,” I said. “Or rather the police did. But your dark boy gypped you. I have a string of pearls. They’re not real. He sold the real ones, I guess, and made you up a string of ringers, with your clasp.”

She was silent for a long time. Then, a little faintly: “The police found them?”

“In Waldo’s car. But they’re not telling. We have a deal. Look at the papers in the morning and you’ll be able to figure out why.”

“There doesn’t seem to be anything more to say,” she said. “Can I have the clasp?”

“Yes. Can you meet me tomorrow at four in the Club Esquire bar?”

“You’re really rather sweet,” she said in a dragged out voice. “I can. Frank is still at his meeting.”

“Those meetings—they take it out of a guy,” I said. We said goodbye.

I called a West Los Angeles number. He was still there, with the Russian girl.

“You can send me a check for five hundred in the morning,” I told him. “Made out to the Police Relief Fund, if you want to. Because that’s where it’s going.”

Copernik made the third page of the morning papers with two photos and a nice half-column. The little brown man in Apartment 31 didn’t make the paper at all. The Apartment House Association has a good lobby too.

I went out after breakfast and the wind was all gone. It was soft, cool, a little foggy. The sky was close and comfortable and gray. I rode down to the boulevard and picked out the best jewelry store on it and laid a string of pearls on a black velvet mat under a daylight-blue lamp. A man in a wing collar and striped trousers looked down at them languidly.

“How good?” I asked.

“I’m sorry, sir. We don’t make appraisals. I can give you the name of an appraiser.”

“Don’t kid me,” I said. “They’re Dutch.”

He focused the light a little and leaned down and toyed with a few inches of the string.

“I want a string just like them, fitted to that clasp, and in a hurry,” I added.

“How, like them?” He didn’t look up. “And they’re not Dutch. They’re Bohemian.”

“O.K., can you duplicate them?”

He shook his head and pushed the velvet pad away as it it soiled him. “In three months, perhaps. We don’t blow glass like that in this country. If you wanted them matched—three months at least. And this house would not do that sort of thing at all.”

“It must be swell to be that snooty,” I said. I put a card under his black sleeve. “Give me a name that will—and not in three months—and maybe not exactly like them.”

He shrugged, went away with the card, came back in five minutes and handed it back to me. There was something written on the back.

The old Levantine had a shop on Melrose, a junk shop with everything in the window from a folding baby carriage to a French horn, from a mother-of-pearl lorgnette in a faded plush case to one of those .44 Special Single Action six-shooters they still make for Western peace officers whose grandfathers were tough.

The old Levantine wore a skull cap and two pairs of glasses and a full beard. He studied my pearls, shook his head sadly, and said: “For twenty dollars, almost so good. Not so good, you understand. Not so good glass.”

“How alike will they look?”

He spread his firm strong hands. “I am telling you the truth,” he said. “They would not fool a baby.”

“Make them up,” I said. “With this clasp. And I want the others back, too, of course.”

“Yah. Two o’clock,” he said.

Leon Valesanos, the little brown man from Uruguay, made the afternoon papers. He had been found hanging in an unnamed apartment. The police were investigating.

At four o’clock I walked into the long cool bar of the Club Esquire and prowled along the row of booths until I found one where a woman sat alone. She wore a hat like a shallow soup plate with a very wide edge, a brown tailor-made suit with a severe mannish shirt and tie.

I sat down beside her and slipped a parcel along the seat. “You don’t open that,” I said. “In fact you can slip it into the incinerator as is, if you want to.”

She looked at me with dark tired eyes. Her fingers twisted a thin glass that smelled of peppermint. “Thanks.” Her face was very pale.

I ordered a highball and the waiter went away. “Read the papers?”

“Yes.”

“You understand now about this fellow Copernik who stole your act? That’s why they won’t change the story or bring you into it.”

“It doesn’t matter now,” she said. “Thank you, all the same. Please—please show them to me.”

I pulled the string of pearls out of the loosely wrapped tissue paper in my pocket and slid them across to her. The silver propeller clasp winked in the light of the wall bracket. The little diamond winked. The pearls were as dull as white soap. They didn’t even match in size.

“You were right,” she said tonelessly. “They are not my pearls.”

The waiter came with my drink and she put her bag on them deftly. When he was gone she fingered them slowly once more, dropped them into the bag and gave me a dry mirthless smile.

I stood there a moment with a hand hard on the table.

“As you said—I’ll keep the clasp.”

I said slowly: “You don’t know anything about me. You saved my life last night and we had a moment, but it was just a moment. You still don’t know anything about me. There’s a detective downtown named Ybarra, a Mexican of the nice sort, who was on the job when the pearls were found in Waldo’s suitcase. That is in case you would like to make sure—”

She said: “Don’t be silly. It’s all finished. It was a memory. I’m too young to nurse memories. It may be for the best. I loved Stan Phillips—but he’s gone—long gone.”

I stared at her, didn’t say anything.

She added quietly: “This morning my husband told me something I hadn’t known. We are to separate. So I have very little to laugh about today.”

“I’m sorry,” I said lamely. “There’s nothing to say. I may see you sometime. Maybe not. I don’t move much in your circle. Good luck.”

I stood up. We looked at each other for a moment. “You haven’t touched your drink,” she said.

“You drink it. That peppermint stuff will just make you sick.”

I stood there a moment with a hand on the table.

“If anybody ever bothers you,” I said, “let me know.”

I went out of the bar without looking back at her, got into my car and drove west on Sunset and down all the way to the Coast Highway. Everywhere along the way gardens were full of withered and blackened leaves and flowers which the hot wind had burned.

But the ocean looked cool and languid and just the same as ever. I drove on almost to Malibu and then parked and went and sat on a big rock that was inside somebody’s wire fence. It was about half-tide and coming in. The air smelled of kelp. I watched the water for a while and then I pulled a string of Bohemian glass imitation pearls out of my pocket and cut the knot at one end and slipped the pearls off one by one.

When I had them all loose in my left hand I held them like that for a while and thought. There wasn’t really anything to think about. I was sure.

“To the memory of Mr. Stan Phillips,” I said aloud. “Just another four-flusher.”

I flipped her pearls out into the water one by one at the floating seagulls.

They made little splashes and the seagulls rose off the water and swooped at the splashes.

Raymond Chandler

Raymond Chandler was born in 1888 and published his first story in 1933 in the pulp magazine
Black Mask
. By the time he published his first novel,
The Big Sleep
(1939), featuring, as did all his major works, the iconic private eye Philip Marlowe, it was clear that he had not only mastered a genre but had set a standard to which others could only aspire. Chandler created a body of work that ranks with the best of twentieth-century literature. He died in 1959.

AVAILABLE AS VINTAGE eBOOKS

The Big Sleep

The High Window

Farewell, My Lovely

The Lady in the Lake

The Little Sister

The Simple Art of Murder

The Long Goodbye

Playback

Trouble Is My Business (1950)

In the four long stories in this collection, Philip Marlowe is hired to protect a rich old guy from a gold digger, runs afoul of crooked politicos, gets a line on some stolen jewels with a reward attached, and stumbles across a murder victim who may be an extortionist.

Trouble Is My Business
copyright 1934, 1935, 1936, 1938, 1939, 1944, 1950 by Raymond Chandler

Trouble Is My Business
copyright 1939 by the Curtis Publishing Company

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Chandler, Raymond, 1888-1959.

Trouble is my business.

I. Title.

PS3505.H3224T76   1988      813’.52       91-50914

The stories in
Trouble Is My Business
appeared in
The Simple Art of Murder,
Houghton Mifflin, 1950. The material in that edition originally appeared in the following magazines:
Black Mask, Dime Detective, Detective Fiction Weekly, The Saturday Evening Post, Atlantic Monthly,
and
The Saturday Review of Literature.

This book is available in a print edition from Vintage Books:
ISBN 0-394-75764-5.

eISBN: 978-1-4000-3023-1

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