The Little Sister (18 page)

French looked at Maglashan. “That make any sense to you?”

“It could happen,” Maglashan said grudgingly.

French said: “Suppose it was so, what’s it got to do with this Orrin Quest?”

“Anybody can smoke reefers,” I said. “If you’re dull and lonely and depressed and out of a job, they might be very attractive. But when you smoke them you get warped ideas and calloused emotions. And marijuana affects different people different ways. Some it makes very tough and some it just makes never-no-mind. Suppose Quest tried to put the bite on somebody and threatened to go to the police. Quite possibly all three murders are connected with the reefer gang.”

“That don’t jibe with Quest having a filed-down ice pick,” Beifus said.

I said: “According to the lieutenant here he didn’t have one. So I must have imagined that. Anyhow, he might just have picked it up. They might be standard equipment around Dr. Lagardie’s house. Get anything on him?”

He shook his head. “Not so far.”

“He didn’t kill me, probably he didn’t kill anybody,” I said. “Quest told his sister—according to her—that he was working for Dr. Lagardie, but that some gangsters were after him.”

“This Lagardie,” French said, prodding at his blotter with a pen point, “what do you make of him?”

“He used to practice in Cleveland. Downtown in a large way. He must have had his reasons for hiding out in Bay City.”

“Cleveland, huh?” French drawled and looked at a corner of the ceiling. Beifus looked down at his papers. Maglashan said:

“Probably an abortionist. I’ve had my eye on him for some time.”

“Which eye?” Beifus asked him mildly.

Maglashan flushed.

French said: “Probably the one he didn’t have on Idaho Street.”

Maglashan stood up violently. “You boys think you’re so goddamn smart it might interest you to know that we’re just a small town police force. We got to double in brass once in a while. Just the same I like that reefer angle. It might cut down my work considerable. I’m looking into it right now.”

He marched solidly to the door and left. French looked after him. Beifus did the same. When the door closed they looked at each other.

“I betcha they pull that raid again tonight,” Beifus said.

French nodded.

Beifus said: “In a flat over a laundry. They’ll go down on the beach and pull in three or four vagrants and stash them in the flat and then they’ll line them up for the camera boys after they pull the raid.”

French said: “You’re talking too much, Fred.”

Beifus grinned and was silent. French said to me: “If you were guessing, what would you guess they were looking for in that room at the Van Nuys?”

“A claim check for a suitcase full of weed.”

“Not bad,” French said. “And still guessing where would it have been?”

“I thought about that. When I talked to Hicks down at Bay City he wasn’t wearing his muff. A man doesn’t around the house. But he was wearing it on the bed at the Van Nuys. Maybe he didn’t put it on himself.”

French said: “So?”

I said, “Wouldn’t be a bad place to stash a claim check.”

French said: “You could pin it down with a piece of scotch tape. Quite an idea.”

There was a silence. The orange queen went back to her typing. I looked at my nails. They weren’t as clean as they might be. After the pause French said slowly: “Don’t think for a minute you’re in the clear, Marlowe. Still guessing, how come Dr. Lagardie to mention Cleveland to you?”

“I took the trouble to look him up. A doctor can’t change his name if he wants to go on practicing. The ice pick made you think of Weepy Moyer. Weepy Moyer operated in Cleveland. Sunny Moe Stein operated in Cleveland. It’s true the ice-pick technique was different, but it was an ice pick. You said yourself the boys might have learned. And always with these gangs there’s a doctor somewhere in the background.”

“Pretty wild,” French said. “Pretty loose connection.”

“Would I do myself any good if I tightened it up?”

“Can you?”

“I can try.”

French sighed. “The little Quest girl is okay,” he said. “I talked to her mother back in Kansas. She really did come out here to look for her brother. And she really did hire you to do it. She gives you a good write-up. Up to a point. She really did suspect her brother was mixed up in something wrong. You make any money on the deal?”

“Not much,” I said. “I gave her back the fee. She didn’t have much.”

“That way you don’t have to pay income tax on it,” Beifus said.

French said, “Let’s break this off. The next move is up to the D.A. And if I know Endicott, it will be a week from Tuesday before he decides how to play it.” He made a gesture towards the door.

I stood up. “Will it be all right if I don’t leave town?” I asked.

They didn’t bother to answer that one.

I just stood there and looked at them. The ice-pick wound between my shoulders had a dry sting, and the flesh around the place was stiff. The side of my face and mouth smarted where Maglashan had sideswiped me with his well-used pigskin glove. I was in the deep water. It was dark and unclear and the taste of the salt was in my mouth.

They just sat there and looked back at me. The orange queen was clacking her typewriter. Cop talk was no more treat to her than legs to a dance director. They had the calm weathered faces of healthy men in hard condition. They had the eyes they always have, cloudy and gray like freezing water. The firm set mouth, the hard little wrinkles at the corners of the eyes, the hard hollow meaningless stare, not quite cruel and a thousand miles from kind. The dull ready-made clothes, worn without style, with a sort of contempt; the look of men who are poor and yet proud of their power, watching always for ways to make it felt, to shove it into you and twist it and grin and watch you squirm, ruthless without malice, cruel and yet not always unkind. What would you expect them to be? Civilization had no meaning for them. All they saw of it was the failures, the dirt, the dregs, the aberrations and the disgust.

“What you standing there for?” Beifus asked sharply. “You want us to give you a great big spitty kiss? No snappy comeback, huh? Too bad.” His voice fell away to a dull drone. He frowned and reached a pencil off the desk. With a quick motion of his fingers he snapped it in half and held the two halves out on his palm.

“We’re giving you that much break,” he said thinly, the smile all gone. “Go on out and square things up. What the hell you think we’re turning you loose for? Maglashan bought you a rain check. Use it.”

I put my hand up and rubbed my lip. My mouth had too many teeth in it.

Beifus lowered his eyes to the table, picked up a paper and began to read it. Christy French swung around in his chair and put his feet on the desk and stared out of the open window at the parking lot. The orange queen stopped typing. The room was suddenly full of heavy silence, like a fallen cake.

I went on out, parting the silence as if I was pushing my way through water.

25

The office was empty again. No leggy brunettes, no little girls with slanted glasses, no neat dark men with gangster’s eyes.

I sat down at the desk and watched the light fade. The going-home sounds had died away. Outside the neon signs began to glare at one another across the boulevard. There was something to be done, but I didn’t know what. Whatever it was it would be useless. I tidied up my desk, listening to the scrape of a bucket on the tiling of the corridor. I put my papers away in the drawer, straightened the pen stand, got out a duster and wiped off the glass and then the telephone. It was dark and sleek in the fading light. It wouldn’t ring tonight. Nobody would call me again. Not now, not this time. Perhaps not ever.

I put the duster away folded with the dust in it, leaned back and just sat, not smoking, not even thinking. I was a blank man. I had no face, no meaning, no personality, hardly a name. I didn’t want to eat. I didn’t even want a drink. I was the page from yesterday’s calendar crumpled at the bottom of the wastebasket.

I pulled the phone towards me and dialed Mavis Weld’s number. It rang and rang and rang. Nine times. That’s a lot of ringing, Marlowe. I guess there’s nobody home. Nobody home to you. I hung up. Who would you like to call now? You got a friend somewhere that might like to hear your voice? No. Nobody.

Let the telephone ring, please. Let there be somebody to call up and plug me into the human race again. Even a cop. Even a Maglashan. Nobody has to like me. I just want to get off this frozen star.

The telephone rang.

“Amigo,” her voice said. “There is trouble. Bad trouble. She wants to see you. She likes you. She thinks you are an honest man.”

“Where?” I asked. It wasn’t really a question, just a sound I made. I sucked on a cold pipe and leaned my head on my hand, brooding at the telephone. It was a voice to talk to anyway.

“You will come?”

“I’d sit up with a sick parrot tonight. Where do I go?”

“I will come for you. I will be before your building in fifteen minutes. It is not easy to get where we go.”

“How is it coming back,” I asked, “or don’t we care?”

But she had already hung up.

Down at the drugstore lunch counter I had time to inhale two cups of coffee and a melted-cheese sandwich with two slivers of ersatz bacon imbedded in it, like dead fish in the silt at the bottom of a drained pool.

I was crazy. I liked it.

26

It was a black Mercury convertible with a light top. The top was up. When I leaned in at the door Dolores Gonzales slid over towards me along the leather seat.

“You drive please, amigo. I do not really ever like to drive.”

The light from the drugstore caught her face. She had changed her clothes again, but it was still all black, save for a flame-colored shirt. Slacks and a kind of loose coat like a man’s leisure jacket.

I leaned on the door of the car. “Why didn’t she call me?”

“She couldn’t. She did not have the number and she had very little time.”

“Why?”

“It seemed to be while someone was out of the room for just a moment.”

“And where is this place she called from?”

“I do not know the name of the street. But I can find the house. That is why I come. Please get into the car and let us hurry.”

“Maybe,” I said. “And again maybe I am not getting into the car. Old age and arthritis have made me cautious.”

“Always the wisecrack,” she said. “It is a very strange man.”

“Always the wisecrack where possible,” I said, “and it is a very ordinary guy with only one head—which has been rather harshly used at times. The times usually started out like this.”

“Will you make love to me tonight?” she asked softly.

“That again is an open question. Probably not.”

“You would not waste your time. I am not one of these synthetic blondes with a skin you could strike matches on. These ex-laundresses with large bony hands and sharp knees and unsuccessful breasts.”

“Just for half an hour,” I said, “let’s leave the sex to the side. It’s great stuff, like chocolate sundaes. But there comes a time you would rather cut your throat. I guess maybe I’d better cut mine.”

I went around the car and slid under the wheel and started the motor.

“We go west,” she said, “through the Beverly Hills and then farther on.”

I let the clutch in and drifted around the corner to go south to Sunset. Dolores got one of her long brown cigarettes out.

“Did you bring a gun?” she asked.

“No. What would I want a gun for?” The inside of my left arm pressed against the Luger in the shoulder harness.

“It is better not perhaps.” She fitted the cigarette into the little golden tweezer thing and lit it with the golden lighter. The light flaring in her face seemed to be swallowed up by her depthless black eyes.

I turned west on Sunset and swallowed myself up in three lanes of racetrack drivers who were pushing their mounts hard to get nowhere and do nothing.

“What kind of trouble is Miss Weld in?”

“I do not know. She just said that it was trouble and she was much afraid and she needed you.”

“You ought to be able to think up a better story than that.”

She didn’t answer. I stopped for a traffic signal and turned to look at her. She was crying softly in the dark.

“I would not hurt a hair of Mavis Weld’s head,” she said. “I do not quite expect that you would believe me.”

“On the other hand,” I said, “maybe the fact that you don’t have a story helps.”

She started to slide along the seat towards me.

“Keep to your own side of the car,” I said. “I’ve got to drive this heap.”

“You do not want my head on your shoulder?”

“Not in this traffic.”

I stopped at Fairfax with the green light to let a man make a left turn. Horns blew violently behind. When I started again the car that had been right behind swung out and pulled level and a fat guy in a sweatshirt yelled: “Aw go get yourself a hammock!”

He went on, cutting in so hard that I had to brake.

“I used to like this town,” I said, just to be saying something and not to be thinking too hard. “A long time ago. There were trees along Wilshire Boulevard. Beverly Hills was a country town. Westwood was bare hills and lots offering at eleven hundred dollars and no takers. Hollywood was a bunch of frame houses on the interurban line. Los Angeles was just a big dry sunny place with ugly homes and no style, but goodhearted and peaceful. It had the climate they just yap about now. People used to sleep out on porches. Little groups who thought they were intellectual used to call it the Athens of America. It wasn’t that, but it wasn’t a neon-lighted slum either.”

We crossed La Cienega and went into the curve of the Strip. The Dancers was a blaze of light. The terrace was packed. The parking lot was like ants on a piece of overripe fruit.

“Now we get characters like this Steelgrave owning restaurants. We get guys like that fat boy that bawled me out back there. We’ve got the big money, the sharp shooters, the percentage workers, the fast-dollar boys, the hoodlums out of New York and Chicago and Detroit—and Cleveland. We’ve got the flash restaurants and night clubs they run, and the hotels and apartment houses they own, and the grifters and con men and female bandits that live in them. The luxury trades, the pansy decorators, the lesbian dress designers, the riffraff of a big hard-boiled city with no more personality than a paper cup. Out in the fancy suburbs dear old Dad is reading the sports page in front of a picture window, with his shoes off, thinking he is high class because he has a three-car garage. Mom is in front of her princess dresser trying to paint the suitcases out from under her eyes. And Junior is clamped onto the telephone calling up a succession of high school girls that talk pigeon English and carry contraceptives in their make-up kit.”

“It is the same in all big cities, amigo.”

“Real cities have something else, some individual bony structure under the muck. Los Angeles has Hollywood—and hates it. It ought to consider itself damn lucky. Without Hollywood it would be a mail-order city. Everything in the catalogue you could get better somewhere else.”

“You are bitter tonight, amigo.”

“I’ve got a few troubles. The only reason I’m driving this car with you beside me is that I’ve got so much trouble a little more will seem like icing.”

“You have done something wrong?” she asked and came close to me along the seat.

“Well, just collecting a few bodies,” I said. “Depends on the point of view. The cops don’t like the work done by us amateurs. They have their own service.”

“What will they do to you?”

“They might run me out of town and I couldn’t care less. Don’t push me so hard. I need this arm to shift gears with.”

She pulled away in a huff. “I think you are very nasty to get along with,” she said. “Turn right at the Lost Canyon Road.”

After a while we passed the University. All the lights of the city were on now, a vast carpet of them stretching down the slope to the south and on into the almost infinite distance. A plane droned overhead losing altitude, its two signal lights winking on and off alternately. At Lost Canyon I swung right skirting the big gates that led into Bel-Air. The road began to twist and climb. There were too many cars; the headlights glared angrily down the twisting white concrete. A little breeze blew down over the pass. There was the odor of wild sage, the acrid tang of eucalyptus, and the quiet smell of dust. Windows glowed on the hillside. We passed a big white two storied Monterey house that must have cost $70,000 and had a cut-out illuminated sign in front: “Cairn Terriers.”

“The next to the right,” Dolores said.

I made the turn. The road got steeper and narrower. There were houses behind walls and masses of shrubbery but you couldn’t see anything. Then we came to the fork and there was a police car with a red spotlight parked at it and across the right side of the fork two cars parked at right angles. A torch waved up and down. I slowed the car and stopped level with the police car. Two cops sat in it smoking. They didn’t move.

“What goes on?”

“Amigo, I have no idea at all.” Her voice had a hushed withdrawn sound. She might have been a little scared. I didn’t know what of.

A tall man, the one with the torch, came around the side of the car and poked the flash at me, then lowered it.

“We’re not using this road tonight,” he said. “Going anywhere in particular?”

I set the brake, reached for a flash which Dolores got out of the glove compartment. I snapped the light on to the tall man. He wore expensive-looking slacks, a sport shirt with initials on the pocket and a polka-dot scarf knotted around his neck. He had horn-rimmed glasses and glossy wavy black hair. He looked as Hollywood as all hell.

I said: “Any explanation—or are you just making law?”

“The law is over there, if you want to talk to them.” His voice held a tone of contempt. “We are merely private citizens. We live around here. This is a residential neighborhood. We mean to keep it that way.”

A man with a sporting gun came out of the shadows and stood beside the tall man. He held the gun in the crook of his left arm, pointed muzzle down. But he didn’t look as if he just had it for ballast.

“That’s jake with me,” I said. “I didn’t have any other plans. We just want to go to a place.”

“What place?” the tall man asked coolly.

I turned to Dolores. “What place?”

“It is a white house on the hill, high up,” she said.

“And what did you plan to do up there?” the tall man asked.

“The man who lives there is my friend,” she said tartly.

He shone the flash in her face for a moment. “You look swell,” he said. “But we don’t like your friend. We don’t like characters that try to run gambling joints in this kind of neighborhood.”

“I know nothing about a gambling joint,” Dolores told him sharply.

“Neither do the cops,” the tall man said. “They don’t even want to find out. What’s your friend’s name, darling?”

“That is not of your business,” Dolores spit at him.

“Go on home and knit socks, darling,” the tall man said. He turned to me.

“The road’s not in use tonight,” he said. “Now you know why.”

“Think you can make it stick?” I asked him.

“It will take more than you to change our plans. You ought to see our tax assessments. And those monkeys in the prowl car—and a lot more like them down at the City Hall—just sit on their hands when we ask for the law to be enforced.”

I unlatched the car door and swung it open. He stepped back and let me get out. I walked over to the prowl car. The two cops in it were leaning back lazily. Their loudspeaker was turned low, just audibly muttering. One of them was chewing gum rhythmically.

“How’s to break up this road block and let the citizens through?” I asked him.

“No orders, buddy. We’re just here to keep the peace. Anybody starts anything, we finish it.”

“They say there’s a gambling house up the line.”

“They say,” the cop said.

“You don’t believe them?”

“I don’t even try, buddy,” he said, and spat past my shoulder.

“Suppose I have urgent business up there.”

He looked at me without expression and yawned.

“Thanks a lot, buddy,” I said.

I went back to the Mercury, got my wallet out and handed the tall man a card. He put his flash on it, and said: “Well?”

He snapped the flash off and stood silent. His face began to take form palely in the darkness.

“I’m on business. To me it’s important business. Let me through and perhaps you won’t need this block tomorrow.”

“You talk large, friend.”

“Would I have the kind of money it takes to patronize a private gambling club?”

“
She
might,” he flicked an eye at Dolores. “She might have brought you along for protection.”

He turned to the shotgun man. “What do you think?”

“Chance it. Just two of them and both sober.”

The tall one snapped his flash on again and made a side sweep with it back and forth. A car motor started. One of the block cars backed around on to the shoulder. I got in and started the Mercury, went on through the gap and watched the block car in the mirror as it took up position again, then cut its high beam lights.

“Is this the only way in and out of here?”

“They think it is, amigo. There is another way, but it is private road through an estate. We would have had to go around by the valley side.”

“We nearly didn’t get through,” I told her. “This can’t be very bad trouble anybody is in.”

“I knew you would find a way, amigo.”

“Something stinks,” I said nastily. “And it isn’t wild lilac.”

“Such a suspicious man. Do you not even want to kiss me?”

“You ought to have used a little of that back at the road block. That tall guy looked lonely. You could have taken him off in the bushes.”

She hit me across the mouth with the back of her hand. “You son of a bitch,” she said casually. “The next driveway on the left, if you please.”

We topped a rise and the road ended suddenly in a wide black circle edged with whitewashed stones. Directly ahead was a wire fence with a wide gate in it, and a sign on-the gate: Private Road. No Trespassing. The gate was open and a padlock hung from one end of a loose chain on the posts. I turned the car around a white oleander bush: and was in the motor yard of a long low white house with a tile roof and a four-car garage in the corner, under a walled balcony. Both the wide garage doors were closed. There was no light in the house. A high moon made a bluish radiance on the white stucco walls. Some of the lower windows were shuttered. Four packing cases full of trash stood in a row at the foot of the steps. There was a big garbage can upended and empty. There were two steel drums with papers in them.