The Little Sister (16 page)

23

I stopped at the office door with the key in my hand. Then I went noiselessly along to the other door, the one that was always unlocked, and stood there and listened. She might be in there already, waiting, with her eyes shining behind the slanted cheaters and the small moist mouth willing to be kissed. I would have to tell her a harder thing than she dreamed of, and then after a while she would go and I would never see her again.

I didn’t hear anything. I went back and unlocked the other door and picked the mail up and carried it over and dumped it on the desk. Nothing in it made me feel any taller. I left it and crossed to turn the latch in the other door and after a long slow moment I opened it and looked out. Silence and emptiness. A folded piece of paper lay at my feet. It had been pushed under the door. I picked it up and unfolded it.

“Please call me at the apartment house. Most urgent. I must see you.” It was signed D.

I dialed the number of the Chateau Bercy and asked for Miss Gonzales. Who was calling, please? One moment please, Mr. Marlowe. Buzz, buzz. Buzz, buzz.

“’Allo?”

“The accent’s a bit thick this afternoon.”

“Ah, it is you, amigo. I waited so long in your funny little office. Can you come over here and talk to me?”

“Impossible. I’m waiting for a call.”

“Well, may I come there?”

“What’s it all about?”

“Nothing I could discuss on the telephone, amigo.”

“Come ahead.”

I sat there and waited for the telephone to ring. It didn’t ring. I looked out of the window. The crowd was seething on the boulevard, the kitchen of the coffee shop next door was pouring the smell of Blue Plate Specials out of its ventilator shaft. Time passed and I sat there hunched over the desk, my chin in a hand, staring at the mustard-yellow plaster of the end wall, seeing on it the vague figure of a dying man with a short ice pick in his hand, and feeling the sting of its point between my shoulder blades. Wonderful what Hollywood will do to anybody. It will make a radiant glamour queen out of a drab little wench who ought to be ironing a truck driver’s shirts, a he-man hero with shining eyes and brilliant smile reeking of sexual charm out of some overgrown kid who was meant to go to work with a lunchbox. Out of a Texas car hop with the literacy of a character in a comic strip it will make an international courtesan, married six times to six millionaires and so blasé and decadent at the end of it that her idea of a thrill is to seduce a furniture mover in a sweaty undershirt.

And by remote control it might even take a small-town prig like Orrin Quest and make an ice-pick murderer out of him in a matter of months, elevating his simple meanness into the classic sadism of the multiple killer.

It took her a little over ten minutes to get there. I heard the door open and close and I went through to the waiting room and there she was, the All-American Gardenia. She hit me right between the eyes. Her own were deep and dark and unsmiling.

She was all in black, like the night before, but a tailor-made outfit this time, a wide black straw hat set at a rakish angle, the collar of a white silk shirt folded out over the collar of her jacket, and her throat brown and supple and her mouth as red as a new fire engine.

“I waited a long time,” she said. “I have not had any lunch.”

“I had mine,” I said. “Cyanide. Very satisfying. I’ve only just stopped looking blue.”

“I am not in an amusing mood this morning, amigo.”

“You don’t have to amuse me,” I said. “I amuse myself. I do a brother act that has me rolling in the aisle. Let’s go inside.”

We went into my private thinking parlor and sat down.

“You always wear black?” I asked.

“But yes. It is more exciting when I take my clothes off.”

“Do you have to talk like a whore?”

“You do not know much about whores, amigo. They are always most respectable. Except of course the very cheap ones.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Thanks for telling me. What is the urgent matter we have to talk about? Going to bed with you is not urgent. It can be done any day.”

“You are in a nasty mood.”

“Okay. I’m in a nasty mood.”

She got one of her long brown cigarettes out of her bag and fitted it carefully into the golden tweezers. She waited for me to light it for her. I didn’t so she lit it herself with a golden lighter.

She held this doohickey in a black gauntleted glove and stared at me out of depthless black eyes that had no laughter in them now.

“Would you like to go to bed with me?”

“Most anyone would. But let’s leave sex out of it for now.”

“I do not draw a very sharp line between business and sex,” she said evenly. “And you cannot humiliate me. Sex is a net with which I catch fools. Some of these fools are useful and generous. Occasionally one is dangerous.” She paused thoughtfully.

I said: “If you’re waiting for me to say something that lets on I know who a certain party is—okay, I know who he is.”

“Can you prove it?”

“Probably not. The cops couldn’t.”

“The cops,” she said contemptuously, “do not always tell all they know. They do not always prove everything they could prove. I suppose you know he was in jail for ten days last February.”

“Yes.”

“Did it not occur to you as strange that he did not get bail?”

“I don’t know what charge they had him on. If it was as a material witness—”

“Do you not think he could get the charge changed to something bailable—if he really wanted to?”

“I haven’t thought much about it,” I lied. “I don’t know the man.”

“You have never spoken to him?” she asked idly, a little too idly.

I didn’t answer.

She laughed shortly. “Last night, amigo. Outside Mavis Weld’s apartment. I was sitting in a car across the street.”

“I may have bumped into him accidentally. Was that the guy?”

“You do not fool me at all.”

“Okay. Miss Weld was pretty rough with me. I went away sore. Then I meet this ginzo with her door key in his hand. I yank it out of his hand and toss it behind some bushes. Then I apologize and go get it for him. He seemed like a nice little guy too.”

“Ver-ry nice,” she drawled. “He was my boy friend also.”

I grunted.

“Strange as it may seem I’m not a hell of a lot interested in your love life, Miss Gonzales. I assume it covers a wide field—all the way from Stein to Steelgrave.”

“Stein?” she asked softly. “Who is Stein?”

“A Cleveland hot shot that got himself gunned in front of your apartment house last February. He had an apartment there. I thought perhaps you might have met him.”

She let out a silvery little laugh. “Amigo, there are men I do not know. Even at the Chateau Bercy.”

“Reports say he was gunned two blocks away,” I said. “I like it better that it happened right in front. And you were looking out of the window and saw it happen. And saw the killer run away and just under a street light he turned back and the light caught his face and darned if it wasn’t old man Steelgrave. You recognized him by his rubber nose and the fact that he was wearing his tall hat with the pigeons on it.”

She didn’t laugh.

“You like it better that way,” she purred.

“We could make more money that way.”

“But Steelgrave was in jail,” she smiled. “And even if he was not in jail—even if, for example, I happened to be friendly with a certain Dr. Chalmers who was county jail physician at the time and he told me, in an intimate moment, that he had given Steelgrave a pass to go to the dentist—with a guard of course, but the guard was a reasonable man—on the very day Stein was shot—even if this happened to be true, would it not be a very poor way to use the information by blackmailing Steelgrave?”

“I hate to talk big,” I said, “but I’m not afraid of Steelgrave—or a dozen like him in one package.”

“But I am, amigo. A witness to a gang murder is not a very safe position in this country. No, we will not blackmail Steelgrave. And we will not say anything about Mr. Stein, whom I may or may not have known. It is enough that Mavis Weld is a close friend of a known gangster and is seen in public with him.”

“We’d have to prove he was a known gangster,” I said.

“Can we not do that?”

“How?”

She made a disappointed mouth. “But I felt sure that was what you had been doing these last couple of days.”

“Why?”

“I have private reasons.”

“They mean nothing to me while you keep them private.”

She got rid of the brown cigarette stub in my ashtray. I leaned over and squashed it out with the stub of a pencil. She touched my hand lightly with a gauntleted finger. Her smile was the reverse of anesthetic. She leaned back and crossed her legs. The little lights began to dance in her eyes. It was a long time between passes—for her.

“Love is such a dull word,” she mused. “It amazes me that the English language so rich in the poetry of love can accept such a feeble word for it. It has no life, no resonance. It suggests to me little girls in ruffled summer dresses, with little pink smiles, and little shy voices, and probably the most unbecoming underwear.”

I said nothing. With an effortless change of pace she became businesslike again.

“Mavis will get $75,000 a picture from now on, and eventually $150,000. She has started to climb and nothing will stop her. Except possibly a bad scandal.”

“Then somebody ought to tell her who Steelgrave is,” I said. “Why don’t you? And incidentally, suppose we did have all this proof, what’s Steelgrave doing all the time we’re putting the bite on Weld?”

“Does he have to know? I hardly think she would tell him. In fact, I hardly think she would go on having anything to do with him. But that would not matter to us—if we had our proof. And if she knew we had it.”

Her black gauntleted hand moved towards her black bag, stopped, drummed lightly on the edge of the desk, and so got back to where she could drop it in her lap. She hadn’t looked at the bag. I hadn’t either.

I stood up. “I might happen to be under some obligation to Miss Weld. Ever think of that?”

She just smiled.

“And if that was so,” I said, “don’t you think it’s about time you got the hell out of my office?”

She put her hands on the arms of her chair and started to get up, still smiling. I scooped the bag before she could change direction. Her eyes filled with glare. She made a spitting sound.

I opened the bag and went through and found a white envelope that looked a little familiar. Out of it I shook the photo at The Dancers, the two pieces fitted together and pasted on another piece of paper.

I closed the bag and tossed it across to her.

She was on her feet now, her lips drawn back over her teeth. She was very silent.

“Interesting,” I said and snapped a digit at the glazed surface of the print. “If it’s not a fake. Is that Steelgrave?”

The silvery laugh bubbled up again. “You are a ridicules character, amigo. You really are. I did not know they made such people any more.”

“Prewar stock,” I said. “We’re getting scarcer every day. Where did you get this?”

“From Mavis Weld’s purse in Mavis Weld’s dressing room. While she was on the set.”

“She know?”

“She does not know.”

“I wonder where she got it?”

“From you.”

“Nonsense.” I raised my eyebrows a few inches. “Where would I get it?”

She reached the gauntleted hand across the desk. Her voice was cold. “Give it back to me, please.”

“I’ll give it back to Mavis Weld. And I hate to tell you this, Miss Gonzales, but I’d never get anywhere as a blackmailer. I just don’t have the engaging personality.”

“Give it back to me,” she said sharply. “If you do not—”

She cut herself off. I waited for her to finish. A look of contempt showed on her smooth features.

“Very well,” she said. “It is my mistake. I thought you were smart, I can see that you are just another dumb private eye. This shabby little office,” she waved a black gloved hand at it, “and the shabby little life that goes on here—they ought to tell me what sort of idiot you are.”

“They do,” I said.

She turned slowly and walked to the door. I got around the desk and she let me open it for her.

She went out slowly. The way she did it hadn’t been learned at business college.

She went on down the hail without looking back. She had a beautiful walk.

The door bumped against the pneumatic door-closer and very softly clicked shut. It seemed to take a long time to do that. I stood there watching it as if I had never seen it happen before. Then I turned and started back towards my desk and the phone rang.

I picked it up and answered it. It was Christy French. “Marlowe? We’d like to see you down at headquarters.”

“Right away?”

“If not sooner,” he said and hung up.

I slipped the pasted-together print from under the blotter and went over to put it in the safe with the others. I put my hat on and closed the window. There was nothing to wait for. I looked at the green tip on the sweep hand of my watch. It was a long time until five o’clock. The sweep hand went around and around the dial like a door-to-door salesman. The hands stood at four-ten. You’d think she’d have called up by now. I peeled my coat off and unstrapped the shoulder harness and locked it with the Luger in the desk drawer. The cops don’t like you to be wearing a gun in their territory. Even if you have the right to wear one. They like you to come in properly humble, with your hat in your hand, and your voice low and polite, and your eyes full of nothing.