Trouble Is My Business (24 page)

“Well, thanks for trying,” she said in a low, soft vibrant voice. “I guess I can stand it. Shall I . . . Do we.  . . Or. . . ?”

“You go on home now,” I said. “And whatever happens you never saw me before. Whatever happens. Just as you may never see me again.”

“I’d hate that.”

“Good luck, Lola.” I shut the car door and stepped back.

The lights blazed on, the motor turned over. Against the wind at the corner the big coupe made a slow contemptuous turn and was gone. I stood there by the vacant space at the curb where it had been.

It was quite dark there now. Windows, had become blanks in the apartment where the radio sounded. I stood looking at the back of a Packard cabriolet which seemed to be brand new. I had seen it before—before I went upstairs, in the same place, in front of Lola’s car. Parked, dark, silent, with a blue sticker pasted to the right-hand corner of the shiny windshield.

And in my mind I was looking at something else, a set of brand-new car keys in a keytainer stamped: “The Packard House,” upstairs, in a dead man’s pocket.

I went up to the front of the cabriolet and put a small pocket flash on the blue slip. It was the same dealer all right. Written in ink below his name and slogan was a name and address—Eugnie Kolchenko, 5315 Arvieda Street, West Los Angeles.

It was crazy. I went back up to Apartment 31, jimmied the door as I had done before, stepped in behind the wall bed and took the keytainer from the trousers pocket of the neat brown dangling corpse. I was back down on the street beside the cabriolet in five minutes. The keys fitted.

FIVE

It was a small house, near a canyon rim out beyond Sawtelle, with a circle of writhing eucalyptus trees in front of it. Beyond that, on the other side of the street, one of those parties was going on where they come out and smash bottles on the sidewalk with a whoop like Yale making a touchdown against Princeton.

There was a wire fence at my number and some rose trees, and a flagged walk and a garage that was wide open and had no car in it. There was no car in front of the house either. I rang the bell. There was a long wait, then the door opened rather suddenly.

I wasn’t the man she had been expecting. I could see it in her glittering kohl-rimmed eyes. Then I couldn’t see anything in them. She just stood and looked at me, a long, lean, hungry brunette, with rouged cheekbones, thick black hair parted in the middle, a mouth made for three-decker sandwiches, coral-and-gold pajamas, sandals—and gilded toenails. Under her ear lobes a couple of miniature temple bells gonged lightly in the breeze. She made a slow disdainful motion with a cigarette in a holder as long as a baseball bat.

“We-el, what ees it, little man? You want sometheeng? You are lost from the bee-ootiful party across the street, hein?”

“Ha-ha,” I said. “Quite a party, isn’t it? No, I just brought your car home. Lost it, didn’t you?”

Across the street somebody had delirium tremens in the front yard and a mixed quartet tore what was left of the night into small strips and did what they could to make the strips miserable. While this was going on the exotic brunette didn’t move more than one eyelash.

She wasn’t beautiful, she wasn’t even pretty, but she looked as if things would happen where she was.

“You have said what?” she got out, at last, in a voice as silky as a burnt crust of toast.

“Your car.” I pointed over my shoulder and kept my eyes on her. She was the type that uses a knife.

The long cigarette holder dropped very slowly to her side and the cigarette fell out of it. I stamped it out, and that put me in the hall. She backed away from me and I shut the door.

The hall was like the long hail of a railroad flat. Lamps glowed pinkly in iron brackets. There was a bead curtain at the end, a tiger skin on the floor. The place went with her.

“You’re Miss Kolchenko?” I asked, not getting any more action.

“Ye-es. I am Mees Kolchenko. What the ’ell you want?”

She was looking at me now as if I had come to wash the windows, but at an inconvenient time.

I got a card out with my left hand, held it out to her. She read it in my hand, moving her head just enough. “A detective?” she breathed.

“Yeah.”

She said something in a spitting language. Then in English: “Come in! Thees damn wind dry up my skeen like so much teesue paper.”

“We’re in,” I said. “I just shut the door. Snap out of it, Nazimova. Who was he? The little guy?”

Beyond the bead curtain a man coughed. She jumped as if she had been stuck with an oyster fork. Then she tried to smile. It wasn’t very successful.

“A reward,” she said softly. “You weel wait ’ere? Ten dollars it is fair to pay, no?”

“No,” I said.

I reached a finger towards her slowly and added: “He’s dead.”

She jumped about three feet and let out a yell.

A chair creaked harshly. Feet pounded beyond the bead curtain, a large hand plunged into view and snatched it aside, and a big hard-looking blond man was with us. He had a purple robe over his pajamas, his right hand held something in his robe pocket. He stood quite still as soon as he was through the curtain, his feet planted solidly, his jaw out, his colorless eyes like gray ice. He looked like a man who would be hard to take out on an off-tackle play.

“What’s the matter, honey?” He had a solid, burring voice, with just the right sappy tone to belong to a guy who would go for a woman with gilded toenails.

“I came about Miss Kolchenko’s car,” I said.

“Well, you could take your hat off,” he said. “Just for a light workout.”

I took it off and apologized.

“O.K.,” he said, and kept his right hand shoved down hard in the purple pocket. “So you came about Miss Kolchenko’s car. Take it from there.”

I pushed past the woman and went closer to him. She shrank back against the wail and flattened her palms against it. Camille in a high-school play. The long holder lay empty at her toes.

When I was six feet from the big man he said easily: “I can hear you from there. Just take it easy. I’ve got a gun in this pocket and I’ve had to learn to use one. Now about the car?”

“The man who borrowed it couldn’t bring it,” I said, and pushed the card I was still holding towards his face. He barely glanced at it. He looked back at me.

“So what?” he said.

“Are you always this tough?” I asked. “Or only when you have your pajamas on?”

“So why couldn’t he bring it himself?” he asked. “And skip the mushy talk.”

The dark woman made a stuffed sound at my elbow.

“It’s all right, honeybunch,” the man said. “I’ll handle this. Go on.”

She slid past both of us and flicked through the bead curtain.

I waited a little while. The big man didn’t move a muscle. He didn’t look any more bothered than a toad in the sun.

“He couldn’t bring it because somebody bumped him off,” I said. “Let’s see you handle that.”

“Yeah?” he said. “Did you bring him with you to prove it?”

“No,” I said. “But if you put your tie and crush hat on, I’ll take you down and show you.”

“Who the hell did you say you were, now?”

“I didn’t say. I thought maybe you could read.” I held the card at him some more.

“Oh, that’s right,” he said. “Philip Marlowe, Private Investigator. Well, well. So I should go with you to look at who, why?”

“Maybe he stole the car,” I said.

The big man nodded. “That’s a thought. Maybe he did. Who?”

“The little brown guy who had the keys to it in his pocket, and had it parked around the corner from the Berglund Apartments.”

He thought that over, without any apparent embarrassment. “You’ve got something there,” he said. “Not much. But a little. I guess this must be the night of the Police Smoker. So you’re doing all their work for them.”

“Huh?”

“The card says private detective to me,” he said. “Have you got some cops outside that were too shy to come in?”

“No, I’m alone.”

He grinned. The grin showed white ridges in his tanned skin. “So you find somebody dead and take some keys and find a car and come riding out here—all alone. No cops. Am I right?”

“Correct.”

He sighed. “Let’s go inside,” he said. He yanked the bead curtain aside and made an opening for me to go through. “It might be you have an idea I ought to hear.”

I went past him and he turned, keeping his heavy pocket towards me. I hadn’t noticed until I got quite close that there were beads of sweat on his face. It might have been the hot wind but I didn’t think so.

We were in the living room of the house.

We sat down and looked at each other across a dark floor, on which a few Navajo rugs and a few dark Turkish rugs made a decorating combination with some well-used overstuffed furniture. There was a fireplace, a small baby grand, a Chinese screen, a tall Chinese lantern on a teakwood pedestal, and gold net curtains against lattice windows. The windows to the south were open. A fruit tree with a whitewashed trunk whipped about outside the screen, adding its bit to the noise from across the street.

The big man eased back into a brocaded chair and put his slippered feet on a footstool. He kept his right hand where it had been since I met him—on his gun.

The brunette hung around in the shadows and a bottle gurgled and her temple bells gonged in her ears.

“It’s all right, honeybunch,” the man said. “It’s all under control. Somebody bumped somebody off and this lad thinks we’re interested. Just sit down and relax.”

The girl tilted her head and poured half a tumbler of whiskey down her throat. She sighed, said, “Goddam,” in a casual voice, and curled up on a davenport. It took all of the davenport. She had plenty of legs. Her gilded toenails winked at me from the shadowy corner where she kept herself quiet from then on.

I got a cigarette out without being shot at, lit it and went into my story. It wasn’t all true, but some of it was. I told them about the Berglund Apartments and that I had lived there and that Waldo was living there in Apartment 31 on the floor below mine and that I had been keeping an eye on him for business reasons.

“Waldo what?” the blond man put in. “And what business reasons?”

“Mister,” I said, “have you no secrets?” He reddened slightly.

I told him about the cocktail lounge across the street from the Berglund and what had happened there. I didn’t tell him about the printed bolero jacket or the girl who had worn it. I left her out of the story altogether.

“It was an undercover job—from my angle,” I said. “If you know what I mean.” He reddened again, bit his teeth. I went on: “I got back from the city hall without telling anybody I knew Waldo. In due time, when I decided they couldn’t find out where he lived that night, I took the liberty of examining his apartment.”

“Looking for what?” the big man said thickly.

“For some letters. I might mention in passing there was nothing there at all—except a dead man. Strangled and hanging by a belt to the top of the wall bed—well out of sight. A small man, about forty-five, Mexican or South American, well-dressed in a fawn-colored—”

“That’s enough,” the big man said. “I’ll bite, Marlowe. Was it a blackmail job you were on?”

“Yeah. The funny part was this little brown man had plenty of gun under his arm.”

“He wouldn’t have five hundred bucks in twenties in his pocket, of course? Or are you saying?”

“He wouldn’t. But Waldo had over seven hundred in currency when he was killed in the cocktail bar.”

“Looks like I underrated this Waldo,” the big man said calmly. “He took my guy and his pay-off money, gun and all. Waldo have a gun?”

“Not on him.”

“Get us a drink, honeybunch,” the big man said. “Yes, I certainly did sell this Waldo person shorter than a bargain-counter shirt.”

The brunette unwound her legs and made two drinks with soda and ice. She took herself another gill without trimmings, wound herself back on the davenport. Her big glittering black eyes watched me solemnly.

“Well, here’s how,” the big man said, lifting his glass in salute. “I haven’t murdered anybody, but I’ve got a divorce suit on my hands from now on. You haven’t murdered anybody, the way you tell it, but you laid an egg down at police Headquarters. What the hell! Life’s a lot of trouble, anyway you look at it. I’ve still got honeybunch here. She’s a white Russian I met in Shanghai. She’s safe as a vault and she looks as if she could cut your throat for a nickel. That’s what I like about her. You get the glamor without the risk.”

“You talk damn foolish,” the girl spat him.

“You look O.K. to me,” the big man went on ignoring her. “That is, for a keyhole peeper. Is there an out?”

“Yeah. But it will cost a little money.”

“I expected that. How much?”

“Say another five hundred.”

“Goddam, thees hot wind make me dry like the ashes of love,” the Russian girl said bitterly.

“Five hundred might do,” the blond man said. “What do I get for it?”

“If I swing it—you get left out of the story. If I don’t—you don’t pay.”

He thought it over. His face looked lined and tired now. The small beads of sweat twinkled in his short blond hair.

“This murder will make you talk,” he grumbled. “The second one, I mean. And I don’t have what I was going to buy. And if it’s a hush, I’d rather buy it direct.”

“Who was the little brown man?” I asked.

“Name’s Leon Valesanos, a Uruguayan. Another of my importations. I’m in a business that takes me a lot of places. He was working in the Spezzia Club in Chiseltown—you know, the strip of Sunset next to Beverly Hills. Working on roulette, I think. I gave him the five hundred to go down to this—this Waldo—and buy back some bills for stuff Miss Kolchenko had charged to my account and delivered here. That wasn’t bright, was it? I had them in my briefcase and this Waldo got a chance to steal them. What’s your hunch about what happened?”

I sipped my drink and looked at him down my nose. “Your Uruguayan pal probably talked curt and Waldo didn’t listen good. Then the little guy thought maybe that Mauser might help his argument—and Waldo was too quick for him. I wouldn’t say Waldo was a killer—not by intention. A blackmailer seldom is. Maybe he lost his temper and maybe he just held on to the little guy’s neck too long. Then he had to take it on the lam. But he had another date, with more money coming up. And he worked the neighborhood looking for the party. And accidentally he ran into a pal who was hostile enough and drunk enough to blow him down.”