The Big Sleep (5 page)

TEN

The lean black-eyed credit jeweler was standing in his entrance in the same position as the afternoon before. He gave me the same knowing look as I turned in. The store looked just the same. The same lamp glowed on the small desk in the corner and the same ash blonde in the same black suede-like dress got up from behind it and came towards me with the same tentative smile on her face.

“Was it—?” she said and stopped. Her silver nails twitched at her side. There was an overtone of strain in her smile. It wasn’t a smile at all. It was a grimace. She just thought it was a smile.

“Back again,” I chirped airily, and waved a cigarette. “Mr. Geiger in today?”

“I’m—I’m afraid not. No—I’m afraid not. Let me see—you wanted . . . ?”

I took my dark glasses off and tapped them delicately on the inside of my left wrist. If you can weigh a hundred and ninety pounds and look like a fairy, I was doing my best.

“That was just a stall about those first editions,” I whispered. “I have to be careful. I’ve got something he’ll want. Something he’s wanted for a long time.”

The silver fingernails touched the blond hair over one small jet-buttoned ear. “Oh, a salesman,” she said. “Well—you might come in tomorrow. I think he’ll be here tomorrow.”

“Drop the veil,” I said. “I’m in the business too.”

Her eyes narrowed until they were a faint greenish glitter, like a forest pool far back in the shadow of trees. Her fingers clawed at her palm. She stared at me and chopped off a breath.

“Is he sick? I could go up to the house,” I said impatiently. “I haven’t got forever.”

“You—a—you—a—” her throat jammed. I thought she was going to fall on her nose. Her whole body shivered and her face fell apart like a bride’s pie crust. She put it together again slowly, as if lifting a great weight, by sheer will power. The smile came back, with a couple of corners badly bent.

“No,” she breathed. “No. He’s out of town. That—wouldn’t be any use. Can’t you—come in—tomorrow?”

I had my mouth open to say something when the partition door opened a foot. The tall dark handsome boy in the jerkin looked out, pale-faced and tight-lipped, saw me, shut the door quickly again, but not before I had seen on the floor behind him a lot of wooden boxes lined with newspapers and packed loosely with books. A man in very new overalls was fussing with them. Some of Geiger’s stock was being moved out.

When the door shut I put my dark glasses on again and touched my hat. “Tomorrow, then. I’d like to give you a card, but you know how it is.”

“Ye-es. I know how it is.” She shivered a little more and made a faint sucking noise between her bright lips. I went out of the store and west on the boulevard to the corner and north on the street to the alley which ran behind the stores. A small black truck with wire sides and no lettering on it was backed up to Geiger’s place. The man in the very new overalls was just heaving a box up on the tailboard. I went back to the boulevard and along the block next to Geiger’s and found a taxi standing at a fireplug. A fresh-faced kid was reading a horror magazine behind the wheel. I leaned in and showed him a dollar: “Tail job?”

He looked me over. “Cop?”

“Private.”

He grinned. “My meat, Jack.” He tucked the magazine over his rear view mirror and I got into the cab. We went around the block and pulled up across from Geiger’s alley, beside another fireplug.

There were about a dozen boxes on the truck when the man in overalls closed the screened doors and hooked the tailboard up and got in behind the wheel.

“Take him,” I told my driver.

The man in overalls gunned his motor, shot a glance up and down the alley and ran away fast in the other direction. He turned left out of the alley. We did the same. I caught a glimpse of the truck turning east on Franklin and told my driver to close in a little. He didn’t or couldn’t do it. I saw the truck two blocks away when we got to Franklin. We had it in sight to Vine and across Vine and all the way to Western. We saw it twice after Western. There was a lot of traffic and the fresh-faced kid tailed from too far back. I was telling him about that without mincing words when the truck, now far ahead, turned north again. The street at which it turned was called Brittany Place. When we got to Brittany Place the truck had vanished.

The fresh-faced kid made comforting sounds at me through the panel and we went up the hill at four miles an hour looking for the truck behind bushes. Two blocks up, Brittany Place swung to the east and met Randall Place in a tongue of land on which there was a white apartment house with its front on Randall Place and its basement garage opening on Brittany. We were going past that and the fresh-faced kid was telling me the truck couldn’t be far away when I looked through the arched entrance of the garage and saw it back in the dimness with its rear doors open again.

We went around to the front of the apartment house and I got out. There was nobody in the lobby, no switchboard. A wooden desk was pushed back against the wall beside a panel of gilt mailboxes. I looked the names over. A man named Joseph Brody had Apartment 405. A man named Joe Brody had received five thousand dollars from General Sternwood to stop playing with Carmen and find some other little girl to play with. It could be the same Joe Brody. I felt like giving odds on it.

I went around an elbow of wall to the foot of tiled stairs and the shaft of the automatic elevator. The top of the elevator was level with the floor. There was a door beside the shaft lettered “Garage.” I opened it and went down narrow steps to the basement. The automatic elevator was propped open and the man in new overalls was grunting hard as he stacked heavy boxes in it. I stood beside him and lit a cigarette and watched him. He didn’t like my watching him.

After a while I said: “Watch the weight, bud. She’s only tested for half a ton. Where’s the stuff going?”

“Brody, four-o-five,” he grunted. “Manager?”

“Yeah. Looks like a nice lot of loot.”

He glared at me with pale white-rimmed eyes. “Books,” he snarled. “A hundred pounds a box, easy, and me with a seventy-five pound back.”

“Well, watch the weight,” I said.

He got into the elevator with six boxes and shut the doors. I went back up the steps to the lobby and out to the street and the cab took me downtown again to my office building. I gave the fresh-faced kid too much money and he gave me a dog-eared business card which for once I didn’t drop into the majolica jar of sand beside the elevator bank.

I had a room and a half on the seventh floor at the back. The half-room was an office split in two to make reception rooms. Mine had my name on it and nothing else, and that only on the reception room. I always left this unlocked, in case I had a client, and the client cared to sit down and wait.

I had a client.

ELEVEN

She wore brownish speckled tweeds, a mannish shirt and tie, hand-carved walking shoes. Her stockings were just as sheer as the day before, but she wasn’t showing as much of her legs. Her black hair was glossy under a brown Robin Hood hat that might have cost fifty dollars and looked as if you could have made it with one hand out of a desk blotter.

“Well, you
do
get up,” she said, wrinkling her nose at the faded red settee, the two odd semi-easy chairs, the net curtains that needed laundering and the boy’s size library table with the venerable magazines on it to give the place a professional touch. “I was beginning to think perhaps you worked in bed, like Marcel Proust.”

“Who’s he?” I put a cigarette in my mouth and stared at her. She looked a little pale and strained, but she looked like a girl who could function under a strain.

“A French writer, a connoisseur in degenerates. You wouldn’t know him.”

“Tut, tut,” I said. “Come into my boudoir.”

She stood up and said: “We didn’t get along very well yesterday. Perhaps I was rude.”

“We were both rude,” I said. I unlocked the communicating door and held it for her. We went into the rest of my suite, which contained a rust-red carpet, not very young, five green filing cases, three of them full of California climate, an advertising calendar showing the Quints rolling around on a sky-blue floor, in pink dresses, with seal-brown hair and sharp black eyes as large as mammoth prunes. There were three near-walnut chairs, the usual desk with the usual blotter, pen set, ashtray and telephone, and the usual squeaky swivel chair behind it.

“You don’t put on much of a front,” she said, sitting down at the customer’s side of the desk.

I went over to the mail slot and picked up six envelopes, two letters and four pieces of advertising matter. I hung my hat on the telephone and sat down.

“Neither do the Pinkertons,” I said. “You can’t make much money at this trade, if you’re honest. If you have a front, you’re making money—or expect to.”

“Oh—are you honest?” she asked and opened her bag. She picked a cigarette out of a French enamel case, lit it with a pocket lighter, dropped case and lighter back into the bag and left the bag open.

“Painfully.”

“How did you get into this slimy kind of business then?”

“How did you come to marry a bootlegger?”

“My God, let’s not start quarreling again. I’ve been trying to get you on the phone all morning. Here and at your apartment.”

“About Owen?”

Her face tightened sharply. Her voice was soft. “Poor Owen,” she said. “So you know about that.”

“A.D.A.’s man took me down to Lido. He thought I might know something about it. But he knew much more than I did. He knew Owen wanted to marry your sister—once.”

She puffed silently at her cigarette and considered me with steady black eyes. “Perhaps it wouldn’t have been a bad idea,” she said quietly. “He was in love with her. We don’t find much of that in our circle.”

“He had a police record.”

She shrugged. She said negligently: “He didn’t know the right people. That’s all a police record means in this rotten crime-ridden country.”

“I wouldn’t go that far.”

She peeled her right glove off and bit her index finger at the first joint, looking at me with steady eyes. “I didn’t come to see you about Owen. Do you feel yet that you can tell me what my father wanted to see you about?”

“Not without his permission.”

“Was it about Carmen?”

“I can’t even say that.” I finished filling a pipe and put a match to it. She watched the smoke for a moment. Then her hand went into her open bag and came out with a thick white envelope. She tossed it across the desk.

“You’d better look at it anyway,” she said.

I picked it up. The address was typewritten to Mrs. Vivian Regan, 3765 Alta Brea Crescent, West Hollywood. Delivery had been by messenger service and the office stamp showed 8:35 a.m. as the time out. I opened the envelope and drew out the shiny 4¼ by 3¼ photo that was all there was inside.

It was Carmen sitting in Geiger’s high-backed teak-wood chair on the dais, in her earrings and her birthday suit. Her eyes looked even a little crazier than I remembered them. The back of the photo was blank. I put it back in the envelope.

“How much do they want?” I asked.

“Five thousand—for the negative and the rest of the prints. The deal has to be closed tonight, or they give the stuff to some scandal sheet.”

“The demand came how?”

“A woman telephoned me, about half an hour after this thing was delivered.”

“There’s nothing in the scandal sheet angle. Juries convict without leaving the box on that stuff nowadays. What else is there?”

“Does there have to be something else?”

“Yes.”

She stared at me, a little puzzled. “There is. The woman said there was a police jam connected with it and I’d better lay it on the line fast, or I’d be talking to my little sister through a wire screen.”

“Better,” I said. “What kind of jam?”

“I don’t know.”

“Where is Carmen now?”

“She’s at home. She was sick last night. She’s still in bed, I think.”

“Did she go out last night?”

“No. I was out, but the servants say she wasn’t. I was down at Las Olindas, playing roulette at Eddie Mars’ Cypress Club. I lost my shirt.”

“So you like roulette. You would.”

She crossed her legs and lit another cigarette. “Yes. I like roulette. All the Sternwoods like losing games, like roulette and marrying men that walk out on them and riding steeplechases at fifty-eight years old and being rolled on by a jumper and crippled for life. The Sternwoods have money. All it has bought them is a rain check.”

“What was Owen doing last night with your car?”

“Nobody knows. He took it without permission. We always let him take a car on his night off, but last night wasn’t his night off.” She made a wry mouth. “Do you think—?”

“He knew about this nude photo? How would I be able to say? I don’t rule him out. Can you get five thousand in cash right away?”

“Not unless I tell Dad—or borrow it. I could probably borrow it from Eddie Mars. He ought to be generous with me, heaven knows.”

“Better try that. You may need it in a hurry.”

She leaned back and hung an arm over the back of the chair. “How about telling the police?”

“It’s a good idea. But you won’t do it.”

“Won’t I?”

“No. You have to protect your father and your sister. You don’t know what the police might turn up. It might be something they couldn’t sit on. Though they usually try in blackmail cases.”

“Can you do anything?”

“I think I can. But I can’t tell you why or how.”

“I like you,” she said suddenly. “You believe in miracles. Would you have a drink in the office?”

I unlocked my deep drawer and got out my office bottle and two pony glasses. I filled them and we drank. She snapped her bag shut and pushed her chair back.

“I’ll get the five grand,” she said. “I’ve been a good customer of Eddie Mars. There’s another reason why he should be nice to me, which you may not know.” She gave me one of those smiles the lips have forgotten before they reach the eyes. “Eddie’s blonde wife is the lady Rusty ran away with.”

I didn’t say anything. She stared tightly at me and added: “That doesn’t interest you?”

“It ought to make it easier to find him—if I was looking for him. You don’t think he’s in this mess, do you?”

She pushed her empty glass at me. “Give me another drink. You’re the hardest guy to get anything out of. You don’t even move your ears.”

I filled the little glass. “You’ve got all you wanted out of me—a pretty good idea I’m not looking for your husband.”

She put the drink down very quickly. It made her gasp—or gave her an opportunity to gasp. She let a breath out slowly.

“Rusty was no crook. If he had been, it wouldn’t have been for nickels. He carried fifteen thousand dollars, in bills. He called it his mad money. He had it when I married him and he had it when he left me. No—Rusty’s not in on any cheap blackmail racket.”

She reached for the envelope and stood up. “I’ll keep in touch with you,” I said. “If you want to leave me a message, the phone girl at my apartment house will take care of it.”

We walked over to the door. Tapping the white envelope against her knuckles, she said: “You still feel you can’t tell me what Dad—”

“I’d have to see him first.”

She took the photo out and stood looking at it, just inside the door. “She has a beautiful little body, hasn’t she?”

“Uh-huh.”

She leaned a little towards me. “You ought to see mine,” she said gravely.

“Can it be arranged?”

She laughed suddenly and sharply and went halfway through the door, then turned her head to say coolly: “You’re as cold-blooded a beast as I ever met, Marlowe. Or can I call you Phil?”

“Sure.”

“You can call me Vivian.”

“Thanks, Mrs. Regan.”

“Oh, go to hell, Marlowe.” She went on out and didn’t look back.

I let the door shut and stood with my hand on it, staring at the hand. My face felt a little hot. I went back to the desk and put the whiskey away and rinsed out the two pony glasses and put them away.

I took my hat off the phone and called the D.A.’s office and asked for Bernie Ohls.

He was back in his cubbyhole. “Well, I let the old man alone,” he said. “The butler said he or one of the girls would tell him. This Owen Taylor lived over the garage and I went through his stuff. Parents at Dubuque, Iowa. I wired the Chief of Police there to find out what they want done. The Sternwood family will pay for it.”

“Suicide?” I asked.

“No can tell. He didn’t leave any notes. He had no leave to take the car. Everybody was home last night but Mrs. Regan. She was down at Las Olindas with a playboy named Larry Cobb. I checked on that. I know a lad on one of the tables.”

“You ought to stop some of that flash gambling,” I said.

“With the syndicate we got in this county? Be your age, Marlowe. That sap mark on the boy’s head bothers me. Sure you can’t help me on this?”

I liked his putting it that way. It let me say no without actually lying. We said good-bye and I left the office, bought all three afternoon papers and rode a taxi down to the Hall of Justice to get my car out of the lot. There was nothing in any of the papers about Geiger. I took another look at his blue notebook, but the code was just as stubborn as it had been the night before.