The Little Sister (11 page)

17

On the terrace at The Dancers a few early birds were getting ready to drink their lunch. The glass-fronted upstairs room had the awning let down in front of it. I drove on past the curve that goes down into the Strip and stopped across the street from a square building of two stories of rose-red brick with small white leaded bay windows and a Greek porch over the front door and what looked, from across the street, like an antique pewter doorknob. Over the door was a fanlight and the name Sheridan Ballou, Inc., in black wooden letters severely stylized. I locked my car and crossed to the front door. It was white and tall and wide and had a keyhole big enough for a mouse to crawl through. Inside this keyhole was the real lock. I went for the knocker, but they had thought of that too. It was all in one piece and didn’t knock.

So I patted one of the slim fluted white pillars and opened the door and walked directly into the reception room which filled the entire front of the building. It was furnished in dark antique-looking furniture and many chairs and settees of quilted chintz-like material. There were lace curtains at the windows and chintz boxes around them that matched the chintz of the furniture. There was a flowered carpet and a lot of people waiting to see Mr. Sheridan Ballou.

Some of them were bright and cheerful and full of hope. Some looked as if they had been there for days. One small dark girl was sniffling into her handkerchief in the corner. Nobody paid any attention to her. I got a couple of profiles at nice angles before the company decided I wasn’t buying anything and didn’t work there.

A dangerous-looking redhead sat languidly at an Adam desk talking into a pure-white telephone. I went over there and she put a couple of cold blue bullets into me with her eyes and then stared at the cornice that ran around the room.

“No,” she said into the phone. “No. So sorry. I’m afraid it’s no use. Far, far too busy.” She hung up and ticked off something on a list and gave me some more of her steely glance.

“Good morning. I’d like to see Mr. Ballou,” I said. I put my plain card on her desk. She lifted it by one corner, smiled at it amusedly.

“Today?” she inquired amiably. “This week?”

“How long does it usually take?”

“It has taken six months,” she said cheerfully. “Can’t somebody else help you?”

“No.”

“So sorry. Not a chance. Drop in again won’t you? Somewhere about Thanksgiving.” She was wearing a white wool skirt, a burgundy silk blouse and a black velvet over-jacket with short sleeves. Her hair was a hot sunset. She wore a golden topaz bracelet and topaz earrings and a topaz dinner ring in the shape of a shield. Her fingernails matched her blouse exactly. She looked as if it would take a couple of weeks to get her dressed.

“I’ve got to see him,” I said.

She read my card again. She smiled beautifully. “Everyone has,” she said. “Why—er—Mr. Marlowe. Look at all these lovely people. Every one of them has been here since the office opened two hours ago.”

“This is important.”

“No doubt. In what way if I may ask?”

“I want to peddle a little dirt.”

She picked a cigarette out of a crystal box and lit it with a crystal lighter. “Peddle? You mean for money—in Hollywood?”

“Could be.”

“What kind of dirt? Don’t be afraid to shock me.”

“It’s a bit obscene, Miss—Miss—” I screwed my head around to read the plaque on her desk.

“Helen Grady,” she said. “Well, a little well-bred obscenity never did any harm, did it?”

“I didn’t say it was well-bred.”

She leaned back carefully and puffed smoke in my face.

“Blackmail in short.” She sighed. “Why the hell don’t you lam out of here, bud? Before I throw a handful of fat coppers in your lap?”

I sat on the corner of her desk, grabbed a double handful of her cigarette smoke and blew it into her hair. She dodged angrily. “Beat it, lug,” she said in a voice that could have been used for paint remover.

“Oh oh. What happened to the Bryn Mawr accent?”

Without turning her head she said sharply: “Miss Vane.”

A tall slim elegant dark girl with supercilious eyebrows looked up. She had just come through an inner door camouflaged as a stained-glass window. The dark girl came over. Miss Grady handed her my card: “Spink.”

Miss Vane went back through the stained-glass window with the card.

“Sit down and rest your ankles, big stuff,” Miss Grady informed me. “You may be here all week.”

I sat down in a chintz winged chair, the back of which came eight inches above my head. It made me feel shrunken. Miss Grady gave me her smile again, the one with the hand-honed edge, and bent to the telephone once more.

I looked around. The little girl in the corner had stopped crying and was making up her face with calm unconcern. A very tall distinguished-looking party swung up a graceful arm to stare at his elegant wrist watch and oozed gently to his feet. He set a pearl-gray homburg at a rakish angle on the side of his head, checked his yellow chamois gloves and his silver-knobbed cane, and strolled languidly over to the red-headed receptionist.

“I have been waiting two hours to see Mr. Ballou,” he said icily in a rich sweet voice that had been modulated by a lot of training. “I’m not accustomed to waiting two hours to see anybody.”

“So sorry, Mr. Fortescue. Mr. Ballou is just too busy for words this A.M.”

“I’m sorry I cannot leave him a check,” the elegant tall party remarked with a weary contempt. “Probably the only thing that would interest him. But in default of that—”

“Just a minute, kid.” The redhead picked up a phone and said into it: “Yes?. . . Who says so besides Goldwyn? Can’t you reach somebody that’s not crazy?. . . Well try again.” She slammed the telephone down. The tall party had not moved.

“In default of that,” he resumed as if he had never stopped speaking, “I should like to leave a short personal message.”

“Please do,” Miss Grady told him. “I’ll get it to him somehow.”

“Tell him with my love that he is a dirty polecat.”

“Make it skunk, darling,” she said. “He doesn’t know any English words.”

“Make it skunk and double skunk,” Fortescue told her. “With a slight added nuance of sulphurated hydrogen and a very cheap grade of whore-house perfume.” He adjusted his hat and gave his profile the once over in a mirror. “I now bid you good morning and to hell with Sheridan Ballou, Incorporated.”

The tall actor stalked out elegantly, using his cane to open the door.

“What’s the matter with him?” I asked.

She looked at me pityingly. “Billy Fortescue? Nothing’s the matter with him. He isn’t getting any parts so he comes in every day and goes through that routine. He figures somebody might see him and like it.”

I shut my mouth slowly. You can live a long time in Hollywood and never see the part they use in pictures.

Miss Vane appeared through the inner door and made a chin-jerk at me. I went in past her. “This way. Second on the right.” She watched me while I went down the corridor to the second door which was open. I went in and closed the door.

A plump white-haired Jew sat at the desk smiling at me tenderly. “Greetings,” he said. “I’m Moss Spink. What’s on the thinker, pal? Park the body. Cigarette?” He opened a thing that looked like a trunk and presented me with a cigarette which was not more than a foot long. It was in an individual glass tube.

“No thanks,” I said. “I smoke tobacco.”

He sighed. “All right. Give. Let’s see. Your name’s Marlowe. Huh? Marlowe. Marlowe. Have I ever heard of anybody named Marlowe?”

“Probably not,” I said. “I’ve never heard of anybody named Spink. I asked to see a man named Ballou. Does that sound like Spink? I’m not looking for anybody named Spink. And just between you and me, the hell with people named Spink.”

“Anti-Semitic huh?” Spink said. He waved a generous hand on which a canary-yellow diamond looked like an amber traffic light. “Don’t be like that,” he said. “Sit down and dust off the brains. You don’t know me. You don’t want to know me. O.K. I ain’t offended. In a business like this you got to have somebody around that don’t get offended.”

“Ballou,” I said.

“Now be reasonable, pal. Sherry Ballou’s a very busy guy. He works twenty hours a day and even then he’s way behind schedule. Sit down and talk it out with little Spinky.”

“You’re what around here?” I asked him.

“I’m his protection, pal. I gotta protect him. A guy like Sherry can’t see everybody. I see people for him. I’m the same as him—up to a point you understand.”

“Could be I’m past the point you’re up to,” I said.

“Could be,” Spink agreed pleasantly. He peeled a thick tape off an aluminum individual cigar container, reached the cigar out tenderly and looked it over for birthmarks. “I don’t say not. Why not demonstrate a little? Then we’ll know. Up to now all you’re doing is throwing a line. We get so much of that in here it don’t mean a thing to us.”

I watched him clip and light the expensive-looking cigar. “How do I know you wouldn’t double-cross him?” I asked cunningly.

Spink’s small tight eyes blinked and I wasn’t sure but that there were tears in them. “Me cross Sherry Ballou?” he asked brokenly in a hushed voice, like a six-hundred-dollar funeral. “Me? I’d sooner double-cross my own mother.”

“That doesn’t mean anything to me either,” I said. “I never met your mother.”

Spink laid his cigar aside in an ashtray the size of a bird bath. He waved both his arms. Sorrow was eating into him. “Oh pal. What a way to talk,” he wailed. “I love Sherry Ballou like he was my own father. Better. My father—well, skip it. Come on, pal. Be human. Give with a little of the old trust and friendliness. Spill the dirt to little Spinky, huh?”

I drew an envelope from my pocket and tossed it across the desk to him. He pulled the single photograph from it and stared at it solemnly. He laid it down on the desk. He looked up at me, down at the photo, up at me. “Well,” he said woodenly, in a voice suddenly empty of the old trust and friendliness he had been talking about. “What’s it got that’s so wonderful?”

“Do I have to tell you who the girl is?”

“Who’s the guy?” Spink snapped.

I said nothing.

“I said who’s the guy?” Spink almost yelled at me. “Cough up, mug. Cough up.”

I still didn’t say anything. Spink reached slowly for his telephone, keeping his hard bright eyes on my face.

“Go on. Call them,” I said. “Call downtown and ask for Lieutenant Christy French in the homicide bureau. There’s another boy that’s hard to convince.”

Spink took his hand off the phone. He got up slowly and went out with the photograph. I waited. Outside on Sunset Boulevard traffic went by distantly, monotonously. The minutes dropped silently down a well. The smoke of Spink’s freshly lit cigar played in the air for a moment, then was sucked through the vent of the air-conditioning apparatus. I looked at the innumerable inscribed photos on the walls, all inscribed to Sherry Ballou with somebody’s eternal love. I figured they were back numbers if they were in Spink’s office.

18

After a while Spink came back and gestured to me. I followed him along the corridor through double doors into an anteroom with two secretaries. Past them towards more double doors of heavy black glass with silver peacocks etched into the panels. As we neared the doors they opened of themselves.

We went down three carpeted steps into an office that had everything in it but a swimming pool. It was two stories high, surrounded by a balcony loaded with book shelves. There was a concert grand Steinway in the corner and a lot of glass and bleached-wood furniture and a desk about the size of a badminton court and chairs and couches and tables and a man lying on one of the couches with his coat off and his shirt open over a Charvet scarf you could have found in the dark by listening to it purr. A white cloth was over his eyes and forehead and a lissome blond girl was wringing out another in a silver bowl of ice water at a table beside him.

The man was a big shapely guy with wavy dark hair and a strong brown face below the white cloth. An arm dropped to the carpet and a cigarette hung between fingers, wisping a tiny thread of smoke.

The blond girl changed the cloth deftly. The man on the couch groaned. Spink said: “This is the boy, Sherry. Name of Marlowe.”

The man on the couch groaned. “What does he want?”

Spink said: “Won’t spill.”

The man on the couch said: “What did you bring him in for then? I’m tired.”

Spink said: “Well you know how it is, Sherry. Sometimes you kind of got to.”

The man on the couch said: “What did you say his beautiful name was?”

Spink turned to me. “You can tell us what you want now. And make it snappy, Marlowe.”

I said nothing.

After a moment the man on the couch slowly raised the arm with the cigarette at the end of it. He got the cigarette wearily into his mouth and drew on it with the infinite languor of a decadent aristocrat moldering in a ruined chateau.

“I’m talking to you, pal,” Spink said harshly. The blonde changed the cloth again, looking at nobody. The silence hung in the room as acrid as the smoke of the cigarette. “Come on, lug. Snap it up.”

I got one of my Camels out and lit it and picked out a chair and sat down. I stretched my hand out and looked at it. The thumb twitched up and down slowly every few seconds.

Spink’s voice cut into this furiously: “Sherry don’t have all day, you.”

“What would he do with the rest of the day?” I heard myself asking. “Sit on a white satin couch and have his toenails gilded?”

The blonde turned suddenly and stared at me. Spink’s mouth fell open. He blinked. The man on the couch lifted a slow hand to the corner of the towel over his eyes. He removed enough so that one seal-brown eye looked at me. The towel fell softly back into place.

“You can’t talk like that in here,” Spink said in a tough voice.

I stood up. I said: “I forgot to bring my prayer book. This is the first time I knew God worked on commission.”

Nobody said anything for a minute. The blonde changed the towel again.

From under it the man on the couch said calmly: “Get the Jesus out of here, darlings. All but the new chum.”

Spink gave me a narrow glare of hate. The blonde left silently.

Spink said: “Why don’t I just toss him out on his can?” The tired voice under the towel said: “I’ve been wondering about that so long I’ve lost interest in the problem. Beat it.”

“Okay, boss,” Spink said. He withdrew reluctantly. He paused at the door, gave me one more silent snarl and disappeared.

The man on the couch listened to the door close and then said: “How much?”

“You don’t want to buy anything.”

He pushed the towel off his head, tossed it to one side and sat up slowly. He put his bench-made pebble-grain brogues on the carpet and passed a hand across his forehead. He looked tired but not dissipated. He fumbled another cigarette from somewhere, lit it and stared morosely through the smoke at the floor.

“Go on,” he said.

“I don’t know why you wasted all the build-up on me,” I said. “But I credit you with enough brains to know you couldn’t buy anything, and know it would stay bought.”

Ballou picked up the photo that Spink had put down near him on a long low table. He reached out a languid hand. “The piece that’s cut out would be the punch line no doubt,” he said.

I got the envelope out of my pocket and gave him the cut out corner, watched him fit the two pieces together.

“With a glass you can read the headline,” I said.

“There’s one on my desk. Please.”

I went over and got the magnifying glass off his desk “You’re used to a lot of service, aren’t you, Mr. Ballou?”

“I pay for it.” He studied the photograph through the glass and sighed. “Seems to me I saw that fight. They ought to take more care of these boys.”

“Like you do of your clients,” I said.

He laid down the magnifying glass and leaned back to stare at me with cool untroubled eyes.

“That’s the chap that owns The Dancers. Name’s Steelgrave. The girl is a client of mine, of course.” He made vague gesture towards a chair. I sat down in it. “What were you thinking of asking, Mr. Marlowe?”

“For what?”

“All the prints and the negative. The works.”

“Ten grand,” I said, and watched his mouth. The mouth smiled, rather pleasantly.

“It needs a little more explanation, doesn’t it? All I see is two people having lunch in a public place. Hardly disastrous to the reputation of my client. I assume that was what you had in mind.”

I grinned. “You can’t buy anything, Mr. Ballou. I could have had a positive made from the negative and another negative from the positive. If that snap is evidence of something, you could never know you had suppressed it.”

“Not much of a sales talk for a blackmailer,” he said, still smiling.

“I always wonder why people pay blackmailers. They can’t buy anything. Yet they do pay them, sometimes over and over and over again. And in the end are just where they started.”

“The fear of today,” he said, “always overrides the fear of tomorrow. It’s a basic fact of the dramatic emotions that the part is greater than the whole. If you see a glamour star on the screen in a position of great danger, you fear for her with one part of your mind, the emotional part. Notwithstanding that your reasoning mind knows that she is the star of the picture and nothing very bad is going to happen to her. If suspense and menace didn’t defeat reason, there would be very little drama.”

I said: “Very true, I guess,” and puffed some of my Camel smoke around.

His eyes narrowed a little. “As to really being able to buy anything, if I paid you a substantial price and didn’t get what I bought, I’d have you taken care of. Beaten to a pulp. And when you got out of the hospital, if you felt aggressive enough, you could try to get me arrested.”

“It’s happened to me,” I said. “I’m a private eye. I know what you mean. Why are you talking to me?”

He laughed. He had a deep pleasant effortless laugh. “I’m an agent, sonny. I always tend to think traders have a little something in reserve. But we won’t talk about any ten grand. She hasn’t got it. She only makes a grand a week so far. I admit she’s very close to the big money, though.”

“That would stop her cold,” I said, pointing to the photo. “No big money, no swimming pool with underwater lights, no platinum mink, no name in neons, no nothing. All blown away like dust.”

He laughed contemptuously.

“Okay if I show this to the johns down town, then?” I said.

He stopped laughing. His eyes narrowed. Very quietly he asked:

“Why would they be interested?”

I stood up. “I don’t think we’re going to do any business, Mr. Ballou. And you’re a busy man. I’ll take myself off.”

He got up off the couch and stretched, all six feet two of him. He was a very fine hunk of man. He came over and stood close to me. His seal-brown eyes had little gold flecks in them. “Let’s see who you are, sonny.”

He put his hand out. I dropped my open wallet into it. He read the photostat of my license, poked a few more things out of the wallet and glanced at them. He handed it back.

“What would happen, if you did show your little picture to the cops?”

“I’d first of all have to connect it up with something they’re working on—something that happened in the Van Nuys Hotel yesterday afternoon. I’d connect it up through the girl—who won’t talk to me—that’s why I’m talking to you.”

“She told me about it last night,” he sighed.

“Told you how much?” I asked.

“That a private detective named Marlowe had tried to force her to hire him, on the ground that she was seen in a downtown hotel inconveniently close to where a murder was committed.”

“How close?” I asked.

“She didn’t say.”

“Nuts she didn’t.”

He walked away from me to a tall cylindrical jar in the corner. From this he took one of a number of short thin Malacca canes. He began to walk up and down the carpet, swinging the cane deftly past his right shoe.

I sat down again and killed my cigarette and took a deep breath. “It could only happen in Hollywood,” I grunted.

He made a neat about turn and glanced at me. “I beg your pardon.”

“That an apparently sane man could walk up and down inside the house with a Piccadilly stroll and a monkey stick in his hand.”

He nodded. “I caught the disease from a producer at MGM. Charming fellow. Or so I’ve been told.” He stopped and pointed the cane at me. “You amuse the hell out of me, Marlowe. Really you do. You’re so transparent. You’re trying to use me for a shovel to dig yourself out of a jam.”

“There’s some truth in that. But the jam I’m in is nothing to the jam your client would be in if I hadn’t done the thing that put me in the jam.”

He stood quite still for a moment. Then he threw the cane away from him and walked over to a liquor cabinet and swung the two halves of it open. He poured something into a couple of pot-bellied glasses. He carried one of them over to me. Then went back and got his own. He sat down with it on the couch.

“Armagnac,” he said. “If you knew me, you’d appreciate the compliment. This stuff is pretty scarce. The Krauts cleaned most of it out. Our brass got the rest. Here’s to you.”

He lifted the glass, sniffed and sipped a tiny sip. I put mine down in a lump. It tasted like good French brandy.

Ballou looked shocked. “My God, you sip that stuff, you don’t swallow it whole.”

“I swallow it whole,” I said. “Sorry. She also told you that if somebody didn’t shut my mouth, she would be in a lot of trouble.”

He nodded.

“Did she suggest how to go about shutting my mouth?”

“I got the impression she was in favor of doing it with some kind of heavy blunt instrument. So I tried out a mixture of threat and bribery. We have an outfit down the street that specializes in protecting picture people. Apparently they didn’t scare you and the bribe wasn’t big enough.”

“They scared me plenty,” I said. “I damn near fanned a Luger at them. That junky with the .45 puts on a terrific act. And as for the money not being big enough, it’s all a question of how it’s offered to me.”

He sipped a little more of his Armagnac. He pointed at the photograph lying in front of him with the two pieces fitted together.

“We got to where you were taking that to the cops. What then?”

“I don’t think we got that far. We got to why she took this up with you instead of with her boy friend. He arrived just as I left. He has his own key.”

“Apparently she just didn’t.” He frowned and looked down into his Armagnac.

“I like that fine,” I said. “I’d like it still better if the guy didn’t have her door key.”

He looked up rather sadly. “So would I. So would we all. But show business has always been like that—any kind of show business. If these people didn’t live intense and rather disordered lives, if their emotions didn’t ride them too hard—well, they wouldn’t be able to catch those emotions in flight and imprint them on a few feet of celluloid or project them across the footlights.”

“I’m not talking about her love life,” I said. “She doesn’t have to shack up with a red-hot.”

“There’s no proof of that, Marlowe.”

I pointed to the photograph. “The man that took that is missing and can’t be found. He’s probably dead. Two other men who lived at the same address are dead. One of them was trying to peddle those pictures just before he got dead. She went to his hotel in person to take delivery. So did whoever killed him. She didn’t get delivery and neither did the killer. They didn’t know where to look.”

“And you did?”

“I was lucky. I’d seen him without his toupee. None of this is what I call proof, maybe. You could build an argument against it. Why bother? Two men have been killed, perhaps three. She took an awful chance. Why? She wanted that picture. Getting it was worth an awful chance. Why again? It’s just two people having lunch on a certain day. The day Moe Stein was shot to death on Franklin Avenue. The day a character named Steelgrave was in because the cops got a tip he was a Cleveland red-hot named Weepy Moyer. That’s what the record shows. But the photo says he was out of jail. And by saying that about him on that particular day it says who is he. And she knows it. And he still has her door key.”