The Little Sister (19 page)

There was no sound from the house, no sign of life. I stopped the Mercury, cut the lights and the motor, and just sat. Dolores moved in the corner. The seat seemed to be shaking. I reached across and touched her. She was shivering.

“What’s the matter?”

“Get—get out, please,” she said as if her teeth chattered.

“How about you?”

She opened the door on her side and jumped out. I got out my side and left the door hanging open, the keys in the lock. She came around the back of the car and as she got close to me I could almost feel her shaking before she touched me. Then she leaned up against me hard, thigh to thigh and breast to breast. Her arms went around my neck.

“I am being very foolish,” she said softly. “He will kill me for this—just as he killed Stein. Kiss me.”

I kissed her. Her lips were hot and dry. “Is he in there?”

“Yes.”

“Who else?”

“Nobody else—except Mavis. He will kill her too.”

“Listen—”

“Kiss me again. I have not very long to live, amigo. When you are the finger for a man like that—you die young.”

I pushed her away from me, but gently.

She stepped back and lifted her right hand quickly. There was a gun in it now.

I looked at the gun. There was a dull shine on it from high moon. She held it level and her hand wasn’t shaking now.

“What a friend I would make if I pulled this trigger,” she said.

“They’d hear the shot down the road.”

She shook her head. “No, there is a little hill between. I do not think they would hear, amigo.”

I thought the gun would jump when she pulled the trigger. If I dropped just at the right moment—

I wasn’t that good. I didn’t say anything. My tongue felt large in my mouth.

She went on slowly, in a soft tired voice: “With Stein it did not matter. I would have killed him myself, gladly. That filth. To die is not much, to kill is not much. But to entice people to their deaths—” She broke off with what might have been a sob. “Amigo, I liked you for some strange reason. I should be far beyond such nonsense. Mavis took him away from me, but I did not want him to kill her. The world is full of men who have enough money.”

“He seems like a nice little guy,” I said, still watching the hand that held the gun. Not a quiver in it now.

She laughed contemptuously. “Of course he does. That is why he is what he is. You think you are tough, amigo. You are a very soft peach compared with Steelgrave.” She lowered the gun and now it was my time to jump. I still wasn’t good enough.

“He has killed a dozen men,” she said. “With a smile for each one. I have known him for a long time. I knew him Cleveland.”

“With ice picks?” I asked.

“If I give you the gun, will you kill him for me?”

“Would you believe me if I promised?”

“Yes.” Somewhere down the hill there was the sound of a car. But it seemed as remote as Mars, as meaningless as the chattering of monkeys in the Brazilian jungle. It had nothing to do with me.

“I’d kill him if I had to,” I said licking along my lips.

I was leaning a little, knees bent, all set for a jump again.

“Good night, amigo. I wear black because I am beautiful and wicked—and lost.”

She held the gun out to me. I took it. I just stood there holding it. For another silent moment neither of us moved. Then she smiled and tossed her head and jumped into the car. She started the motor and slammed the door shut. She idled the motor down and sat looking out at me. There was a smile on her face now.

“I was pretty good in there, no?” she said softly.

Then the car backed violently with a harsh tearing of the tires on the asphalt paving. The lights jumped on. The car curved away and was gone past the oleander bush. The lights turned left, into the private toad. The lights drifted off among trees and the sound faded into the long-drawn whee of tree frogs. Then that stopped and for a moment there was no sound at all. And no light except the tired old moon.

I broke the magazine from the gun. It had seven shells in it. There was another in the breach. Two less than a full load. I sniffed at the muzzle. It had been fired since it was cleaned. Fired twice, perhaps.

I pushed the magazine into place again and held the gun on the flat of my hand. It had a white bone grip. .32 caliber.

Orrin Quest had been shot twice. The two exploded shells I picked up on the floor of the room were .32 caliber.

And yesterday afternoon, in Room 332 of the Hotel Van Nuys, a blonde girl with a towel in front of her face had pointed a .32-caliber automatic with a white bone grip at me.

You can get too fancy about these things. You can also not get fancy enough.

27

I walked on rubber heels across to the garage and tried to open one of the two wide doors. There were no handles, so it must have been operated by a switch. I played a tiny pencil flash on the frame, but no switch looked at me.

I left that and prowled over to the trash barrels. Wooden steps went up to a service entrance. I didn’t think the door would be unlocked for my convenience. Under the porch was another door. This was unlocked and gave on darkness and the smell of corded eucalyptus wood. I closed the door behind me and put the little flash on again. In the corner there was another staircase, with a thing like a dumb-waiter beside it. It wasn’t dumb enough to let me work it. I started up the steps.

Somewhere remotely something buzzed. I stopped. The buzzing stopped. I started again. The buzzing didn’t. I went on up to a door with no knob, set flush. Another gadget.

But I found the switch to this one. It was an oblong movable plate set into the doorframe. Too many dusty hands had touched it. I pressed it and the door clicked and fell back off the latch. I pushed it open, with the tenderness of a young intern delivering his first baby.

Inside was a hallway. Through shuttered windows moonlight caught the white corner of a stove and the chromed griddle on top of it. The kitchen was big enough for a dancing class. An open arch led to a butler’s pantry filled to the ceiling. A sink, a huge icebox set into the wall, a lot of electrical stuff for making drinks without trying. You pick your poison, press a button, and four days later you wake up on the rubbing table in a reconditioning parlor.

Beyond the butler’s pantry a swing door. Beyond the swing door a dark dining room with an open end to a glassed-in lounge into which the moonlight poured like water through the floodgates of a dam.

A carpeted hall led off somewhere. From another flat arch a flying buttress of a staircase went up into more darkness, but shimmered as it went in what might have been glass brick and stainless steel.

At last I came to what should be the living room. It was curtained and quite dark, but it had the feel of great size. The darkness was heavy in it and my nose twitched at a lingering odor that said somebody had been there not too long ago. I stopped breathing and listened. Tigers could be in the darkness watching me. Or guys with large guns, standing flat-footed, breathing softly with their mouths open. Or nothing and nobody and too much imagination in the wrong place.

I edged back to the wall and felt around for a light switch. There’s always a light switch. Everybody has light switches. Usually on the right side as you go in. You go into a dark room and you want light. Okay, you have a light switch in a natural place at a natural height. This room hadn’t. This was a different kind of house. They had odd ways of handling doors and lights. The gadget this time might be something fancy like having to sing A above high C, or stepping on a flat button under the carpet, or maybe you just spoke and said: “Let there be light,” and a mike picked it up and turned the voice vibration into a low-power electrical impulse and a transformer built that up to enough voltage to throw a silent mercury switch.

I was psychic that night. I was a fellow who wanted company in a dark place and was willing to pay a high price for it. The Luger under my arm and the .32 in my hand made me tough. Two-gun Marlowe, the kid from Cyanide Gulch.

I took the wrinkles out of my lips and said aloud:

“Hello again. Anybody here needing a detective?”

Nothing answered me, not even a stand-in for an echo. The sound of my voice fell on silence like a tired head on a swans-down pillow.

And then amber light began to grow high up behind the cornice that circumnavigated the huge room. It brightened very slowly, as if controlled by a rheostat panel in a theater. Heavy apricot-colored curtains covered the windows.

The walls were apricot too. At the far end was a bar off to one side, a little catty-corner, reaching back into the space by the butler’s pantry. There was an alcove with small tables and padded seats. There were floor lamps and soft chairs and love seats and the usual paraphernalia of a living room, and there were long shrouded tables in the middle of the floor space.

The boys back at the roadblock had something after all. But the joint was dead. The room was empty of life. It was almost empty. Not quite empty.

A blonde in a pale cocoa fur coat stood leaning against the side of a grandfather’s chair. Her hands were in the pockets of the coat. Her hair was fluffed out carelessly and her face was not chalk-white because the light was not white.

“Hello again yourself,” she said in a dead voice. “I still think you came too late.”

“Too late for what?”

I walked towards her, a movement which was always a pleasure. Even then, even in that too silent house.

“You’re kind of cute,” she said. “I didn’t think you were cute. You found a way in. You—” Her voice clicked off and strangled itself in her throat.

“I need a drink,” she said after a thick pause. “Or maybe I’ll fall down.”

“That’s a lovely coat,” I said. I was up to her now. I reached out and touched it. She didn’t move. Her mouth moved in and out, trembling.

“Stone marten,” she whispered. “Forty thousand dollars. Rented. For the picture.”

“Is this part of the picture?” I gestured around the room.

“This is the picture to end all pictures—for me. I—I do need that drink. If I try to walk—” the clear voice whispered away into nothing. Her eyelids fluttered up and down.

“Go ahead and faint,” I said. “I’ll catch you on the first bounce.”

A smile struggled to arrange her face for smiling. She pressed her lips together, fighting hard to stay on her feet.

“Why did I come too late?” I asked. “Too late for what?”

“Too late to be shot.”

“Shucks, I’ve been looking forward to it all evening. Miss Gonzales brought me.”

“I know.”

I reached out and touched the fur again. Forty thousand dollars is nice to touch, even rented.

“Dolores will be disappointed as hell,” she said, her mouth edged with white.

“No.”

“She put you on the spot—just as she did Stein.”

“She may have started out to. But she changed her mind.”

She laughed. It was a silly pooped-out little laugh like a child trying to be supercilious at a playroom tea party.

“What a way you have with the girls,” she whispered. “How the hell do you do it, wonderful? With doped cigarettes? It can’t be your clothes or your money or your personality. You don’t have any. You’re not too young, nor too beautiful. You’ve seen your best days and—”

Her voice had been coming faster and faster, like a motor with a broken governor. At the end she was chattering. When she stopped a spent sigh drifted along the silence and she caved at the knees and fell straight forward into my arms.

If it was an act it worked perfectly. I might have had guns in all nine pockets and they would have been as much use to me as nine little pink candles on a birthday cake.

But nothing happened. No hard characters peeked at me with automatics in their hands. No Steelgrave smiled at me with the faint dry remote killer’s smile. No stealthy footsteps crept up behind me.

She hung in my arms as limp as a wet tea towel and not as heavy as Orrin Quest, being less dead, but heavy enough to make the tendons in my knee joints ache. Her eyes were closed when I pushed her head away from my chest. Her breath was inaudible and she had that bluish look on the parted lips.

I got my right hand under her knees and carried her over to a gold couch and spread her out on it. I straightened up and went along to the bar. There was a telephone on the corner of it but I couldn’t find the way through to the bottles. So I had to swing over the top. I got a likely looking bottle with a blue and silver label and five stars on it. The cork had been loosened. I poured dark and pungent brandy into the wrong kind of glass and went back over the bar top, taking the bottle with me.

She was lying as I had left her, but her eyes were open.

“Can you hold a glass?”

She could, with a little help. She drank the brandy and pressed the edge of the glass hard against her lips as if she wanted to hold them still. I watched her breathe into the glass and cloud it. A slow smile formed itself on her mouth.

“It’s cold tonight,” she said.

She swung her legs over the edge of the couch and put her feet on the floor.

“More,” she said, holding the glass out. I poured into it. “Where’s yours?”

“Not drinking. My emotions are being worked on enough without that.”

The second drink made her shudder. But the blue look had gone away from her mouth and her lips didn’t glare like stop lights and the little etched lines at the corners of her eyes were not in relief any more.

“Who’s working on your emotions?”

“Oh, a lot of women that keep throwing their arms around my neck and fainting on me and getting kissed and so forth. Quite a full couple of days for a beat-up gumshoe with no yacht.”

“No yacht,” she said. “I’d hate that. I was brought up rich.”

“Yeah,” I said. “You were born with a Cadillac in your mouth. And I could guess where.”

Her eyes narrowed. “Could you?”

“Didn’t think it was a very tight secret, did you?”

“I—I—” She broke off and made a helpless gesture. “I can’t think of any lines tonight.”

“It’s the Technicolor dialogue,” I said. “It freezes up on you.”

“Aren’t we talking like a couple of nuts?”

“We could get sensible. Where’s Steelgrave?”

She just looked at me. She held the empty glass out and I took it and put it somewhere or other without taking my eyes off her. Nor she hers off me. It seemed as if a long long minute went by.

“He was here,” she said at last, as slowly as if she had to invent the words one at a time. “May I have a cigarette?”

“The old cigarette stall,” I said. I got a couple out and put them in my mouth and lit them. I leaned across and tucked one between her ruby lips.

“Nothing’s cornier than that,” she said. “Except maybe butterfly kisses.”

“Sex is a wonderful thing,” I said. “When you don’t want to answer questions.”

She puffed loosely and blinked, then put her hand up to adjust the cigarette. After all these years I can never put a cigarette in a girl’s mouth where she wants it.

She gave her head a toss and swung the soft loose hair around her cheeks and watched me to see how hard that hit me. All the whiteness had gone now. Her cheeks were a little flushed. But behind her eyes things watched and waited.

“You’re rather nice,” she said, when I didn’t do anything sensational. “For the kind of guy you are.”

I stood that well too.

“But I don’t really know what kind of guy you are, do I?” She laughed suddenly and a tear came from nowhere and slid down her cheek.

“For all I know you might be nice for any kind of guy.”

She snatched the cigarette loose and put her hand to her mouth and bit on it. “What’s the matter with me? Am I drunk?”

“You’re stalling for time,” I said. “But I can’t make up my mind whether it’s to give someone time to get here—or to give somebody time to get far away from here. And again it could just be brandy on top of shock. You’re a little girl and you want to cry into your mother’s apron.”

“Not my mother,” she said. “I could get as far crying into a rain barrel.”

“Dealt and passed. So where is Steelgrave?”

“You ought to be glad wherever he is. He had to kill you. Or thought he had.”

“You wanted me here, didn’t you? Were you that fond of him?”

She blew cigarette ash off the back of her hand. A flake of it went into my eye and made me blink.

“I must have been,” she said, “once.” She put a hand down on her knee and spread the fingers out, studying the nails. She brought her eyes up slowly without moving her head. “It seems like about a thousand years ago I met a nice quiet little guy who knew how to behave in public and didn’t shoot his charm around every bistro in town. Yes, I liked him. I liked him a lot.”

She put her hand up to her mouth and bit a knuckle. Then she put the same hand into the pocket of the fur coat and brought out a white-handled automatic, the brother of the one I had myself.

“And in the end I liked him with this,” she said.

I went over and took it out of her hand. I sniffed the muzzle. Yes. That made two of them fired around.

“Aren’t you going to wrap it up in a handkerchief, the way they do in the movies?”

I just dropped it into my other pocket, where it could pick up a few interesting crumbs of tobacco and some seeds that grow only on the southeast slope of the Beverly Hills City Hall. It might amuse a police chemist for a while.