The High Window (16 page)

THIRTY

The front door opened and then quietly closed.

There was a silence, hanging in the air like a man’s breath in frosty air, and then a thick scream, ending in a wail of despair.

Then a man’s voice, tight with fury, saying: “Not bad, not good. Try again.”

The woman’s voice said: “My God, it’s Louis! He’s dead!”

The man’s voice said: “I may be wrong, but I still think it stinks.”

“My God! He’s dead, Alex. Do something—for God’s sake—
do
something!”

“Yeah,” the hard tight voice of Alex Morny said. “I ought to. I ought to make you look just like him. With blood and everything. I ought to make you just as dead, just as cold, just as rotten. No, I don’t have to do that. You’re that already. Just as rotten. Eight months married and cheating on me with a piece of merchandise like that. My God! What did I ever think of to put in with a chippy like you?”

He was almost yelling at the end of it.

The woman made another wailing noise.

“Quit stalling,” Morny said bitterly. “What do you think I brought you over here for? You’re not kidding anybody. You’ve been watched for weeks. You were here last night. I’ve been here already today. I’ve seen what there is to see. Your lipstick on cigarettes, your glass that you drank out of. I can see you now, sitting on the arm of his chair, rubbing his greasy hair, and then feeding him a slug while he was still purring. Why?”

“Oh, Alex—darling—don’t say such awful things.”

“Early Lillian Gish,” Morny said. “Very early Lillian Gish. Skip the agony, toots. I have to know how to handle this. What the hell you think I’m here for? I don’t give one little flash in hell about you any more. Not any more, toots, not any more, my precious darling angel blond man-killer. But I do care about myself and my reputation and my business. For instance, did you wipe the gun off?”

Silence. Then the sound of a blow. The woman wailed. She was hurt, terribly hurt. Hurt in the depths of her soul. She made it rather good.

“Look, angel,” Morny snarled. “Don’t feed me the ham. I’ve been in pictures. I’m a connoisseur of ham. Skip it. You’re going to tell me how this was done if I have to drag you around the room by your hair. Now—did you wipe off the gun?”

Suddenly she laughed. An unnatural laugh, but clear and with a nice tinkle to it. Then she stopped laughing, just as suddenly.

Her voice said: “Yes.”

“And the glass you were using?”

“Yes.” Very quiet now, very cool.

“And you put his prints on the gun?”

“Yes.”

He thought in the silence. “Probably won’t fool them,” he said. “It’s almost impossible to get a dead man’s prints on a gun in a convincing way. However. What else did you wipe off.”

“N-nothing. Oh Alex. Please don’t be so brutal.”

“Stop it.
Stop it!
Show me how you did it, how you were standing, how you held the gun.”

She didn’t move.

“Never mind about the prints,” Morny said. “I’ll put better ones on. Much better ones.”

She moved slowly across the opening of the curtains and I saw her. She was wearing pale green gabardine slacks, a fawn-colored leisure jacket with stitching on it, a scarlet turban with a gold snake in it. Her face was smeared with tears.

“Pick it up,” Morny yelled at her. “Show me!”

She bent beside the chair and came up with the gun in her hand and her teeth bared. She pointed the gun across the opening in the curtains, towards the space of room where the door was.

Morny didn’t move, didn’t make a sound.

The blond’s hand began to shake and the gun did a queer up and down dance in the air. Her mouth trembled and her arm fell.

“I can’t do it,” she breathed. “I ought to shoot you, but I can’t.”

The hand opened and the gun thudded to the floor.

Morny went swiftly past the break in the curtains, pushed her out of the way and with his foot pushed the gun back to about where it had been.

“You couldn’t do it,” he said thickly. “You couldn’t do it. Now watch.”

He whipped a handkerchief out and bent to pick the gun up again. He pressed something and the gate fell open. He reached his right hand into his pocket and rolled a cartridge in his fingers, moving his fingertips on the metal, pushed the cartridge into a cylinder. He repeated the performance four times more, snapped the gate shut, then opened it and spun it a little to set it in a certain spot. He placed the gun down on the floor, withdrew his hand and handkerchief and straightened up.

“You couldn’t shoot me,” he sneered, “because there was nothing in the gun but one empty shell. Now it’s loaded again. The cylinders are in the right place. One shot has been fired. And your fingerprints are on the gun.”

The blond was very still, looking at him with haggard eyes.

“I forgot to tell you,” he said softly, “
I
wiped the gun off. I thought it would be so much nicer to be sure your prints were on it. I was pretty sure they were—but I felt as if I would like to be
quite
sure. Get it?”

The girl said quietly: “You’re going to turn me in?”

His back was towards me. Dark clothes. Felt hat pulled low. So I couldn’t see his face. But I could just about see the leer with which he said:

“Yes, angel, I am going to turn you in.”

“I see,” she said, and looked at him levelly. There was a sudden grave dignity in her over-emphasized chorus girl’s face.

“I’m going to turn you in, angel,” he said slowly, spacing his words as if he enjoyed his act. “Some people are going to be sorry for me and some people are going to laugh at me. But it’s not going to do my business any harm. Not a bit of harm. That’s one nice thing about a business like mine. A little notoriety won’t hurt it at all.”

“So I’m just publicity value to you, now,” she said. “Apart, of course, from the danger that you might have been suspected yourself.”

“Just so,” he said. “Just so.”

“How about my motive?” she asked, still calm, still level-eyed and so gravely contemptuous that he didn’t get the expression at all.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t care. You were up to something with him. Eddie tailed you downtown to a street on Bunker Hill where you met a blond guy in a brown suit. You gave him something. Eddie dropped you and tailed the guy to an apartment house near there. He tried to tail him some more, but he had a hunch the guy spotted him, and he had to drop it. I don’t know what it was all about. I know one thing, though. In that apartment house a young guy named Phillips was shot yesterday. Would you know anything about that, my sweet?”

The blond said: “I wouldn’t know anything about it. I don’t know anybody named Phillips and strangely enough I didn’t just run up and shoot anybody out of sheer girlish fun.”

“But you shot Vannier, my dear,” Morny said almost gently.

“Oh yes,” she drawled. “Of course. We were wondering what my motive was. You get it figured out yet?”

“You can work that out with the johns,” he snapped. “Call it a lover’s quarrel. Call it anything you like.”

“Perhaps,” she said, “when he was drunk he looked just a little like you. Perhaps that was the motive.”

He said: “Ah,” and sucked his breath in.

“Better looking,” she said. “Younger, with less belly. But with the same goddamned self-satisfied smirk.”

“Ah,” Morny said, and he was suffering.

“Would that do?” she asked him softly.

He stepped forward and swung a fist. It caught her on the side of the face and she went down and sat on the floor, a long leg straight out in front of her, one hand to her jaw, her very blue eyes looking up at him.

“Maybe you oughtn’t to have done that,” she said. “Maybe I won’t go through with it, now.”

“You’ll go through with it, all right. You won’t have any choice. You’ll get off easy enough. Christ, I know that. With your looks. But you’ll go through with it, angel. Your fingerprints are on that gun.”

She got to her feet slowly, still with the hand to her jaw.

Then she smiled. “I knew he was dead,” she said. “That is my key in the door. I’m quite willing to go downtown and say I shot him. But don’t lay your smooth white paw on me again—if you want my story. Yes. I’m quite willing to go to the cops. I’ll feel a lot safer with them than I feel with you.”

Morny turned and I saw the hard white leer of his face and the scar dimple in his cheek twitching. He walked past the opening in the curtains. The front door opened again. The blond stood still a moment, looked back over her shoulder at the corpse, shuddered slightly, and passed out of my line of vision.

The door closed. Steps on the walk. Then car doors opening and closing. The motor throbbed, and the car went away.

THIRTY-ONE

After a long time I moved out from my hiding place and stood looking around the living room again. I went over and picked the gun up and wiped it off very carefully and put it down again. I picked the three rouge-stained cigarette stubs out of the tray on the table and carried them into the bathroom and flushed them down the toilet. Then I looked around for the second glass with her fingerprints on it. There wasn’t any second glass. The one that was half full of a dead drink I took to the kitchen and rinsed out and wiped on a dish towel.

Then the nasty part. I kneeled on the rug by his chair and picked up the gun and reached for the trailing bone-stiff hand. The prints would not be good, but they would be prints and they would not be Lois Morny’s. The gun had a checked rubber grip, with a piece broken off on the left side below the screw. No prints on that. An index print on the right side of the barrel, two fingers on the trigger guard, a thumb print on the flat piece on the left side, behind the chambers. Good enough.

I took one more look around the living room.

I put the lamp down to a lower light. It still glared too much on the dead yellow face. I opened the front door, pulled the key out and wiped it off and pushed it back into the lock. I shut the door and wiped the thumblatch off and went my way down the block to the Mercury.

I drove back to Hollywood and locked the car up and started along the sidewalk past the other parked cars to the entrance of the Bristol.

A harsh whisper spoke to me out of darkness, out of a car. It spoke my name. Eddie Prue’s long blank face hung somewhere up near the roof of a small Packard, behind its wheel. He was alone in it. I leaned on the door of the car and looked in at him.

“How you making out, shamus?”

I tossed a match down and blew smoke at his face. I said: “Who dropped that dental supply company’s bill you gave me last night? Vannier, or somebody else?”

“Vannier.”

“What was I supposed to do with it—guess the life history of a man named Teager?”

“I don’t go for dumb guys,” Eddie Prue said.

I said: “Why would he have it in his pocket to drop? And if he did drop it, why wouldn’t you just hand it back to him? In other words, seeing that I’m a dumb guy, explain to me why a bill for dental supplies should get anybody all excited and start trying to hire private detectives. Especially gents like Alex Morny, who don’t like private detectives.”

“Morny’s a good head,” Eddie Prue said coldly.

“He’s the fellow for whom they coined the phrase, ‘as ignorant as an actor.’ ”

“Skip that. Don’t you know what they use that dental stuff for?”

“Yeah. I found out. They use albastone for making molds of teeth and cavities. It’s very hard, very fine grain and retains any amount of fine detail. The other stuff, crystobolite, is used to cook out the wax in an invested wax model. It’s used because it stands a great deal of heat without distortion. Tell me you don’t know what I’m talking about.”

“I guess you know how they make gold inlays,” Eddie Prue said. “I guess you do, huh?”

“I spent two of my hours learning today. I’m an expert. What does it get me?”

He was silent for a little while, and then he said: “You ever read the paper?”

“Once in a while.”

“It couldn’t be you read where an old guy named Morningstar was bumped off in the Belfont Building on Ninth Street, just two floors above where this H. R. Teager had his office. It couldn’t be you read that, could it?”

I didn’t answer him. He looked at me for a moment longer, then he put his hand forward to the dash and pushed the starter button. The motor of his car caught and he started to ease in the clutch.

“Nobody could be as dumb as you act,” he said softly. “Nobody ain’t. Good night to you.”

The car moved away from the curb and drifted down the hill towards Franklin. I was grinning into the distance as it disappeared.

I went up to the apartment and unlocked the door and pushed it open a few inches and then knocked gently. There was movement in the room. The door was pulled open by a strong-looking girl with a black stripe on the cap of her white nurse’s uniform.

“I’m Marlowe. I live here.”

“Come in, Mr. Marlowe. Dr. Moss told me.”

I shut the door quietly and we spoke in low voices. “How is she?” I asked.

“She’s asleep. She was already drowsy when I got here. I’m Miss Lymington. I don’t know very much about her except that her temperature is normal and her pulse still rather fast, but going down. A mental disturbance, I gather.”

“She found a man murdered,” I said. “It shot her full of holes. Is she hard enough asleep so that I could go in and get a few things to take to the hotel?”

“Oh, yes. If you’re quiet. She probably won’t wake. If she does, it won’t matter.”

I went over and put some money on the desk. “There’s coffee and bacon and eggs and bread and tomato juice and oranges and liquor here,” I said. “Anything else you’ll have to phone for.”

“I’ve already investigated your supplies,” she said, smiling. “We have all we need until after breakfast tomorrow. Is she going to stay here?”

“That’s up to Dr. Moss. I think she’ll be going home as soon as she is fit for it. Home being quite a long way off, in Wichita.”

“I’m only a nurse,” she said. “But I don’t think there is anything the matter with her that a good night’s sleep won’t cure.”

“A good night’s sleep and a change of company,” I said, but that didn’t mean anything to Miss Lymington.

I went along the hallway and peeked into the bedroom. They had put a pair of my pajamas on her. She lay almost on her back with one arm outside the bedclothes. The sleeve of the pajama coat was turned up six inches or more. The small hand below the end of the sleeve was in a tight fist. Her face looked drawn and white and quite peaceful. I poked about in the closet and got a suitcase and put some junk in it. As I started back out I looked at Merle again. Her eyes opened and looked straight up at the ceiling. Then they moved just enough to see me and a faint little smile tugged at the corners of her lips.

“Hello.” It was a weak spent little voice, a voice that knew its owner was in bed and had a nurse and everything.

“Hello.”

I went around near her and stood looking down, with my polished smile on my clear-cut features.

“I’m all right,” she whispered. “I’m fine. Amn’t I?”

“Sure.”

“Is this your bed I’m in?”

“That’s all right. It won’t bite you.”

“I’m not afraid,” she said. A hand came sliding towards me and lay palm up, waiting to be held. I held it. “I’m not afraid of you. No woman would ever be afraid of you, would she?”

“Coming from you,” I said, “I guess that’s meant to be a compliment.”

Her eyes smiled, then got grave again. “I lied to you,” she said softly. “I—I didn’t shoot anybody.”

“I know. I was over there. Forget it. Don’t think about it.”

“People are always telling you to forget unpleasant things. But you never do. It’s so kind of silly to tell you to, I mean.”

“Okay,” I said, pretending to be hurt. “I’m silly. How about making some more sleep?”

She turned her head until she was looking into my eyes. I sat on the edge of the bed, holding her hand.

“Will the police come here?” she asked.

“No. And try not to be disappointed.”

She frowned. “You must think I’m an awful fool.”

“Well—maybe.”

A couple of tears formed in her eyes and slid out at the corners and rolled gently down her cheeks.

“Does Mrs. Murdock know where I am?”

“Not yet. I’m going over and tell her.”

“Will you have to tell her—everything?”

“Yeah, why not?”

She turned the head away from me. “She’ll understand,” her voice said softly. “She knows the awful thing I did eight years ago. The frightful terrible thing.”

“Sure,” I said. “That’s why she’s been paying Vannier money all this time.”

“Oh dear,” she said, and brought her other hand out from under the bedclothes and pulled away the one I was holding so that she could squeeze them tightly together. “I wish you hadn’t had to know that. I wish you hadn’t. Nobody ever knew but Mrs. Murdock. My parents never knew. I wish you hadn’t.”

The nurse came in at the door and looked at me severely.

“I don’t think she ought to be talking like this, Mr. Marlowe. I think you should leave now.”

“Look, Miss Lymington, I’ve known this little girl two days. You’ve only known her two hours. This is doing her a lot of good.”

“It might bring on another—er—spasm,” she said severely, avoiding my eyes.

“Well, if she has to have it, isn’t it better for her to have it now, while you’re here, and get it over with? Go on out to the kitchen and buy yourself a drink.”

“I never drink on duty,” she said coldly. “Besides somebody might smell my breath.”

“You’re working for me now. All my employees are required to get liquored up from time to time. Besides, if you had a good dinner and were to eat a couple of the Chasers in the kitchen cabinet, nobody would smell your breath.”

She gave me a quick grin and went back out of the room. Merle had been listening to this as if it was a frivolous interruption to a very serious play. Rather annoyed.

“I want to tell you all about it,” she said breathlessly. “I—”

I reached over and put a paw over her two locked hands. “Skip it. I know. Marlowe knows everything—except how to make a decent living. It doesn’t amount to beans. Now you’re going back to sleep and tomorrow I’m going to take you on the way back to Wichita—to visit your parents. At Mrs. Murdock’s expense.”

“Why, that’s wonderful of her,” she cried, her eyes opening wide and shining. “But she’s always been wonderful to me.”

I got up off the bed. “She’s a wonderful woman,” I said, grinning down at her. “Wonderful. I’m going over there now and we’re going to have a perfectly lovely little talk over the teacups. And if you don’t go to sleep right now, I won’t let you confess to any more murders.”

“You’re horrid,” she said. “I don’t like you.” She turned her head away and put her arms back under the bedclothes and shut her eyes.

I went towards the door. At the door I swung around and looked back quickly. She had one eye open, watching me. I gave her a leer and it snapped shut in a hurry.

I went back to the living room, gave Miss Lymington what was left of my leer, and went out with my suitcase.

I drove over to Santa Monica Boulevard. The hockshop was still open. The old Jew in the tall black skullcap seemed surprised that I was able to redeem my pledge so soon. I told him that was the way it was in Hollywood.

He got the envelope out of the safe and tore it open and took my money and pawnticket and slipped the shining gold coin out on his palm.

“So valuable this is I am hating to give it back to you,” he said. “The workmanship, you understand, the workmanship, is beautiful.”

“And the gold in it must be worth all of twenty dollars,” I said.

He shrugged and smiled and I put the coin in my pocket and said goodnight to him.