Trouble Is My Business (16 page)

His smile was slow, a little bored. “I’m not likely to forget them. They cost this company one hundred and fifty thousand dollars. I was a cocky young adjuster then.”

I said: “I’ve got an idea. It may be all haywire. It very likely is. But I’d like to try it out. Is your twenty-five grand reward still good?”

He chuckled. “Twenty grand, Marlowe. We spent the difference ourselves. You’re wasting time.”

“It’s my time. Twenty it is then. How much co-operation can I get?”

“What kind of co-operation?”

“Can I have a letter identifying me to your other branches? In case I have to go out of the state. In case I need kind words from some local law.”

“Which way out of the state?”

I smiled at him. He tapped his cigar on the edge of a tray and smiled back. Neither of our smiles was honest.

“No letter,” he said. “New York wouldn’t stand for it. We have our own tie-up. But all the co-operation you can use, under the hat. And the twenty grand, if you click. Of course you won’t.”

I lit my cigarette and leaned back, puffed smoke at the ceiling.

“No? Why not? You never got those marbles. They existed, didn’t they?”

“Darn right they existed. And if they still do, they belong to us. But two hundred grand doesn’t get buried for twenty years—and then get dug up.”

“All right. It’s still my own time.”

He knocked a little ash off his cigar and looked down his eyes at me. “I like your front,” he said, “even if you are crazy. But we’re a large organization. Suppose I have you covered from now on. What then?”

“I lose. I’ll know I’m covered. I’m too long in the game to miss that. I’ll quit, give up what I know to the law, and go home.”

“Why would you do that?”

I leaned forward over the desk again. “Because,” I said slowly, “the guy that had the lead got bumped off today.”

“Oh—oh,” Lutin rubbed his nose.

“I didn’t bump him off,” I added.

We didn’t talk any more for a little while. Then Lutin said:

“You don’t want any letter. You wouldn’t even carry it. And after your telling me that you know damn well I won’t dare give it you.”

I stood up, grinned, started for the door. He got up himself, very fast, ran around the desk and put his small neat hand on my arm.

“Listen, I know you’re crazy, but if you do get anything, bring it in through our boys. We need the advertising.”

“What the hell do you think I live on?” I growled.

“Twenty-five grand.”

“I thought it was twenty.”

“Twenty-five. And you’re still crazy. Sype never had those pearls. If he had, he’d have made some kind of terms with us many years ago.”

“Okey,” I said. “You’ve had plenty of time to make up your mind.”

We shook hands, grinned at each other like a couple of wise boys who know they’re not kidding anybody, but won’t give up trying.

It was a quarter to five when I got back to the office. I had a couple of short drinks and stuffed a pipe and sat down to interview my brains. The phone rang.

A woman’s voice said: “Marlowe?” It was a small, tight, cold voice. I didn’t know it.

“Yeah.”

“Better see Rush Madder. Know him?”

“No,” I lied. “Why should I see him?”

There was a sudden tinkling, icy cold laugh on the wire. “On account of a guy had some feet,” the voice said.

The phone clicked. I put my end of it aside, struck a match and stared at the wall until the flame burned my fingers.

Rush Madder was a shyster in the Quorn Building. An ambulance chaser, a small-time fixer, an alibi builder-upper, anything that smelled a little and paid a little more. I hadn’t heard of him in connection with any big operations like burning people’s feet.

FOUR

It was getting toward quitting time on lower Spring Street. Taxis were dawdling close to the curb, stenographers were getting an early start home, streetcars were clogging up, and traffic cops were preventing people from making perfectly legal right turns.

The Quorn Building was a narrow front, the color of dried mustard, with a large case of false teeth in the entrance. The directory held the names of painless dentists, people who teach you how to become a letter carrier, just names, and numbers without any names. Rush Madder, Attorney-at-Law, was in Room 619.

I got out of a jolting open-cage elevator, looked at a dirty spittoon on a dirty rubber mat, walked down a corridor that smelled of butts, and tried the knob below the frosted glass panel of 619. The door was locked. I knocked.

A shadow came against the glass and the door was pulled back with a squeak. I was looking at a thick-set man with a soft round chin, heavy black eyebrows, an oily complexion and a Charlie Chan mustache that made his face look fatter than it was.

He put out a couple of nicotined fingers. “Well, well, the old dog catcher himself. The eye that never forgets. Marlowe is the name, I believe?”

I stepped inside and waited for the door to squeak shut. A bare carpetless room paved in brown linoleum, a flat desk and a rolltop at right angles to it, a big green safe that looked as fireproof as a delicatessen bag, two filing cases, three chairs, a built-in closet and washbowl in the corner by the doom.

“Well, well, sit down,” Madder said. “Glad to see you.” He fussed around behind his desk and adjusted a burst-out seat cushion, sat on it. “Nice of you to drop around. Business?”

I sat down and put a cigarette between my teeth and looked at him. I didn’t say a word. I watched him start to sweat. It started up in his hair. Then he grabbed a pencil and made marks on his blotter. Then he looked at me with a quick darting glance, down at his blotter again. He talked—to the blotter.

“Any ideas?” he asked softly.

“About what?”

He didn’t look at me. “About how we could do a little business together. Say, in stones.”

“Who was the wren?” I asked.

“Huh? What wren?” He still didn’t look at me.

“The one that phoned me.”

“Did somebody phone you?”

I reached for his telephone, which was the old-fashioned gallows type. I lifted off the receiver and started to dial the number of Police Headquarters, very slowly. I knew he would know that number about as well as he knew his hat.

He reached over and pushed the hook down. “Now, listen,” he complained. “You’re too fast. What you calling copper for?”

I said slowly: “They want to talk to you. On account of you know a broad that knows a man had sore feet.”

“Does it have to be that way?” His collar was too tight now. He yanked at it.

“Not from my side. But if you think I’m going to sit here and let you play with my reflexes, it does.”

Madder opened a flat tin of cigarettes and pushed one past his lips with a sound like somebody gutting a fish. His hand shook.

“All right,” he said thickly. “All right. Don’t get sore.”

“Just stop trying to count clouds with me,” I growled. “Talk sense. If you’ve got a job for me, it’s probably too dirty for me to touch. But I’ll at least listen.”

He nodded. He was comfortable now. He knew I was bluffing. He puffed a pale swirl of smoke and watched it float up.

“That’s all might,” he said evenly. “I play dumb myself once in a while. The thing is we’re wise. Carol saw you go to the house and leave it again. No law came.”

“Carol?”

“Carol Donovan. Friend of mine. She called you up.”

I nodded. “Go ahead.”

He didn’t say anything. He just sat there and looked at me owlishly.

I grinned and leaned across the desk a little and said: “Here’s what’s bothering you. You don’t know why I went to the house or why, having gone, I didn’t yell police. That’s easy. I thought it was a secret.”

“We’re just kidding each other,” Madder said sourly.

“All right,” I said. “Let’s talk about pearls. Does that make it any easier?”

His eyes shone. He wanted to let himself get excited, but he didn’t. He kept his voice down, said coolly: “Carol picked him up one night, the little guy. A crazy little number, full of snow, but way back in his noodle an idea. He’d talk about pearls, about an old guy up in the northwest or Canada that swiped them a long time ago and still had them. Only he wouldn’t say who the old guy was or where he was. Foxy about that. Holding out. I wouldn’t know why.”

“He wanted to get his feet burned,” I said.

Madder’s lips shook and another fine sweat showed in his hair.

“I didn’t do that,” he said thickly.

“You or Carol, what’s the odds? The little guy died. They can make murder out of it. You didn’t find out what you wanted to know. That’s why I’m here. You think I have information you didn’t get. Forget it. If I knew enough, I wouldn’t be here, and if you knew enough, you wouldn’t want me here. Check?”

He grinned, very slowly, as if it hurt him. He struggled up in his chair and dragged a deeper drawer out from the side of his desk, put a nicely molded brown bottle up on the desk, and two striped glasses. He whispered: “Two-way split. You and me. I’m cutting Carol out. She’s too damn rough, Marlowe. I’ve seen hard women, but she’s the bluing on armor plate. And you’d never think it to look at her, would you?”

“Have I seen her?”

“I guess so. She says you did.”

“Oh, the girl in the Dodge.”

He nodded, and poured two good-sized drinks, put the bottle down and stood up. “Water? I like it in mine.”

“No,” I said, “but why cut me in? I don’t know any more than you mentioned. Or very little. Certainly not as much as you must know to go that far.”

He leered across the glasses. “I know where I can get fifty grand for the Leander pearls, twice what you could get. I can give you yours and still have mine. You’ve got the front I need to work in the open. How about the water?”

“No water,” I said.

He went across to the built-in wash place and ran the water and came back with his glass half full. He sat down again, grinned, lifted it.

We drank.

FIVE

So far I had only made four mistakes. The first was mixing in at all, even for Kathy Horne’s sake. The second was staying mixed after I found Peeler Mardo dead. The third was letting Rush Madder see I knew what he was talking about. The fourth, the whiskey, was the worst.

It tasted funny even on the way down. Then there was that sudden moment of sharp lucidity when I knew, exactly as though I had seen it, that he had switched his drink for a harmless one cached in the closet.

I sat still for a moment, with the empty glass at my fingers’ ends, gathering my strength. Madder’s face began to get large and moony and vague. A fat smile jerked in and out under his Charlie Chan mustache as he watched me.

I reached back into my hip pocket and pulled out a loosely wadded handkerchief. The small sap inside it didn’t seem to show. At least Madder didn’t move, after his first grab under the coat.

I stood up and swayed forward drunkenly and smacked him square on the top of the head.

He gagged. He started to get up. I tapped him on the jaw. He became limp and his hand sweeping down from under his coat knocked his glass over on the desk top. I straightened it, stood silent, listening, struggling with a rising wave of nauseous stupor.

I went over to a communicating door and tried the knob. It was locked. I was staggering by now. I dragged an office chair to the entrance door and propped the back of it under the knob. I leaned against the doom panting, gritting my teeth, cursing myself. I got handcuffs out and started back towards Madder.

A very pretty black-haired, gray-eyed girl stepped out of the clothes closet and poked a .32 at me.

She wore a blue suit cut with a lot of snap. An inverted saucer of a hat came down in a hard line across her forehead. Shiny black hair showed at the sides. Her eyes were slate-gray, cold, and yet lighthearted. Her face was fresh and young and delicate, and as hard as a chisel.

“All right, Marlowe. Lie down and sleep it off. You’re through.”

I stumbled towards her waving my sap. She shook her head. When her face moved it got large before my eyes. Its outlines changed and wobbled. The gun in her hand looked like anything from a tunnel to a toothpick.

“Don’t be a goof, Marlowe,” she said. “A few hours sleep for you, a few hours start for us. Don’t make me shoot. I would.”

“Damn you,” I mumbled. “I believe you would.”

“Right as rain, toots. I’m a lady that wants her own way. That’s fine. Sit down.”

The floor rose up and bumped me. I sat on it as on a raft in a rough sea. I braced myself on flat hands. I could hardly feel the floor. My hands were numb. My whole body was numb.

I tried to stare her down. “Ha-a! L-lady K-killer!” I giggled.

She threw a chilly laugh at me which I only just barely heard. Drums were beating in my head now, war drums from a far-off jungle. Waves of light were moving, and dark shadows and a rustle as of a wind in treetops. I didn’t want to lie down. I lay down.

The girl’s voice came from very far off, an elfin voice.

“Two-way split, eh? He doesn’t like my method, eh? Bless his big soft heart. We’ll see about him.”

Vaguely as I floated off I seemed to feel a dull jar that might have been a shot. I hoped she had shot Madder, but she hadn’t. She had merely helped me on my way out—with my own sap.

When I came around again it was night. Something clacked overhead with a heavy sound. Through the open window beyond the desk yellow light splashed on the high side walls of a building. The thing clacked again and the light went off. An advertising sign on the roof.

I got up off the floor like a man climbing out of thick mud. I waded over to the washbowl, sloshed water on my face, felt the top of my head and winced, waded back to the door and found the light switch.

Strewn papers lay around the desk, broken pencils, envelopes, an empty brown whiskey bottle, cigarette ends and ashes. The debris of hastily emptied drawers. I didn’t bother going through any of it. I left the office, rode down to the street in the shuddering elevator, slid into a bar and had a brandy, then got my car and drove on home.

I changed clothes, packed a bag, had some whiskey and answered the telephone. It was about nine-thirty.