The Little Sister (21 page)

When that stopped the motor faded off into the distance. I heard nothing now. The silence of the house hung around me in thick loose folds like that fur coat around the shoulders of Mavis Weld.

I carried the glass and bottle of brandy over to the bar and climbed over it. I rinsed the glass in a little sink and set the bottle back on the shelf. I found the trick catch this time and swung the door open at the end opposite the telephone. I went back to Steelgrave.

I took out the gun Dolores had given me and wiped it off and put his small limp hand around the butt, held it there and let go. The gun thudded to the carpet. The position looked natural. I wasn’t thinking about fingerprints. He would have learned long ago not to leave them on any gun.

That left me with three guns. The weapon in his holster I took out and went and put it on the bar shelf under the counter, wrapped in a towel. The Luger I didn’t touch. The other white-handled automatic was left. I tried to decide about how far away from him it had been fired. Beyond scorching distance, but probably very close beyond. I stood about three feet from him and fired two shots past him. They nicked peacefully into the wall. I dragged the chair around until it faced into the room. I laid the small automatic down on the dust cover of one of the roulette tables. I touched the big muscle in the side of his neck, usually the first to harden. I couldn’t tell whether it had begun to set or not. But his skin was colder than it had been.

There was not a hell of a lot of time to play around with.

I went to the telephone and dialed the number of the Los Angeles Police Department. I asked the police operator for Christy French. A voice from homicide came on, said he had gone home and what was it. I said it was a personal call he was expecting. They gave me his phone number at home, reluctantly, not because they cared, but because they hate to give anybody anything any time.

I dialed and a woman answered and screamed his name. He sounded rested and calm.

“This is Marlowe. What were you doing?”

“Reading the funnies to my kid. He ought to be in bed. What’s doing?”

“Remember over at the Van Nuys yesterday you said a man could make a friend if he got you something on Weepy Moyer?”

“Yeah.”

“I need a friend.”

He didn’t sound very interested. “What you got on him?”

“I’m assuming it’s the same guy. Steelgrave.”

“Too much assuming, kid. We had him in the fishbowl because we thought the same. It didn’t pan any gold.”

“You got a tip. He set that tip up himself. So the night Stein was squibbed off he would be where you knew.”

“You just making this up—or got evidence?” He sounded a little less relaxed.

“If a man got out of jail on a pass from the jail doctor, could you prove that?”

There was a silence. I heard a child’s voice complaining and a woman’s voice speaking to the child.

“It’s happened,” French said heavily. “I dunno. That a tough order to fill. They’d send him under guard. Did he get to the guard?”

“That’s my theory.”

“Better sleep on it. Anything else?”

“I’m out at Stillwood Heights. In a big house where they were setting up for gambling and the local residents didn’t like it.”

“Read about it. Steelgrave there?”

“He’s here. I’m here alone with him.”

Another silence. The kid yelled and I thought I heard a slap. The kid yelled louder. French yelled at some body.

“Put him on the phone,” French said at last.

“You’re not bright tonight, Christy. Why would I call you?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Stupid of me. What’s the address there?”

“I don’t know. But it’s up at the end of Tower Road in Stillwood Heights and the phone number is Halldale 9-5033. I’ll be waiting for you.”

He repeated the number and said slowly: “This time you wait, huh?”

“It had to come sometime.”

The phone clicked and I hung up.

I went back through the house putting on lights as I found them and came out at the back door at the top of the stairs. There was a floodlight for the motor yard. I put that on. I went down the steps and walked along to the oleander bush. The private gate stood open as before. I swung it shut, hooked up the chain and clicked the padlock. I went back, walking slowly, looking up at the moon, sniffing the night air, listening to the tree frogs and the crickets. I went into the house and found the front door and put the light on over that. There was a big parking space in front and a circular lawn with roses. But you had to slide back around the house to the rear to get away.

The place was a dead end except for the driveway through the neighboring grounds. I wondered who lived there. A long way off through trees I could see the lights of a big house. Some Hollywood big shot, probably, some wizard of the slobbery kiss, and the pornographic dissolve.

I went back in and felt the gun I had just fired. It was cold enough. And Mr. Steelgrave was beginning to look as if he meant to stay dead.

No siren. But the sound of a car coming up the hill at last. I went out to meet it, me and my beautiful dream.

29

They came in as they should, big, tough and quiet their eyes flickering with watchfulness and cautious with disbelief.

“Nice place,” French said. “Where’s the customer?”

“In there,” Beifus said, without waiting for me to answer.

They went along the room without haste and stood in front of him looking down solemnly.

“Dead, wouldn’t you say?” Beifus remarked, opening up the act.

French leaned down and took the gun that lay on the floor with thumb and finger on the trigger guard. His eyes flicked sideways and he jerked his chin. Beifus took the other white-handled gun by sliding a pencil into the end of the barrel.

“Fingerprints all in the right places, I hope,” Beifus said. He sniffed. “Oh yeah, this baby’s been working. How’s yours, Christy?”

“Fired,” French said. He sniffed again. “But not recently.” He took a clip flash from his pocket and shone it into the barrel of the black gun. “Hours ago.”

“Down at Bay City, in a house on Wyoming Street,” I said.

Their heads swung around to me in unison. “Guessing?” French asked slowly.

“Yes.”

He walked over to the covered table and laid the gun down some distance from the other. “Better tag them right away, Fred. They’re twins. We’ll both sign the tags.”

Beifus nodded and rooted around in his pockets. He came up with a couple of tie-on tags. The things cops carry around with them.

French moved back to me. “Let’s stop guessing and get to the part you know.”

“A girl I know called me this evening and said a client of mine was in danger up here—from him.” I pointed with my chin at the dead man in the chair. “This girl rode me up here. We passed the road block. A number of people saw us both. She left me in back of the house and went home.”

“Somebody with a name?” French asked.

“Dolores Gonzales, Chateau Bercy Apartments. On Franklin. She’s in pictures.”

“Oh-ho,” Beifus said and rolled his eyes.

“Who’s your client? Same one?” French asked. “No. This is another party altogether.”

“She have a name?”

“Not yet.”

They stared at me with hard bright faces. French’s jaw moved almost with a jerk. Knots of muscles showed at the sides of his jawbone.

“New rules, huh?” he said softly.

I said, “There has to be some agreement about publicity. The D.A. ought to be willing.”

Beifus said, “You don’t know the D.A. good, Marlowe. He eats publicity like I eat tender young garden peas.”

French said, “We don’t give you any undertaking whatsoever.”

“She hasn’t any name,” I said.

“There’s a dozen ways we can find out, kid,” Beifus said. “Why go into this routine that makes it tough for all of us?”

“No publicity,” I said, “unless charges are actually filed.”

“You can’t get away with it, Marlowe.”

“God damn it,” I said, “this man killed Orrin Quest. You take that gun downtown and check it against the bullets in Quest. Give me that much at least, before you force me into an impossible position.”

“I wouldn’t give you the dirty end of a burnt match,” French said.

I didn’t say anything. He stared at me with cold hate in his eyes. His lips moved slowly and his voice was thick saying, “You here when he got it?”

“No.”

“Who was?”

“He was,” I said looking across at the dead Steelgrave.

“Who else?”

“I won’t lie to you,” I said. “And I won’t tell you anything I don’t want to tell—except on the terms I stated. I don’t know who was here when he got it.”

“Who was here when you got here?”

I didn’t answer. He turned his head slowly and said to Beifus: “Put the cuffs on him. Behind.”

Beifus hesitated. Then he took a pair of steel handcuffs out of his left hip pocket and came over to me. “Put your hands behind you,” he said in an uncomfortable voice.

I did. He clicked the cuffs on. French walked over slowly and stood in front of me. His eyes were half closed. The skin around them was grayish with fatigue.

“I’m going to make a little speech,” he said. “You’re not going to like it.”

I didn’t say anything.

French said: “It’s like this with us, baby. We’re coppers and everybody hates our guts. And as if we didn’t have enough trouble, we have to have you. As if we didn’t get pushed around enough by the guys in the corner offices, the City Hall gang, the day chief, the night chief, the Chamber of Commerce, His Honor the Mayor in his paneled office four times as big as the three lousy rooms the whole homicide staff has to work out of. As if we didn’t have to handle one hundred and fourteen homicides last year out of three rooms that don’t have enough chairs for the whole duty squad to sit down in at once. We spend our lives turning over dirty underwear and sniffing rotten teeth. We go up dark stairways to get a gun punk with a skinful of hop and sometimes we don’t get all the way up, and our wives wait dinner that night and all the other nights. We don’t come home any more. And nights we do come home, we come home so goddamn tired we can’t eat or sleep or even read the lies the papers print about us. So we lie awake in the dark in a cheap house on a cheap street and listen to the drunks down the block having fun. And just about the time we drop off the phone rings and we get up and start all over again. Nothing we do is right, not ever. Not once. If we get a confession, we beat it out of the guy, they say, and some shyster calls us Gestapo in court and sneers at us when we muddle our grammar. If we make a mistake they put us back in uniform on Skid Row and we spend the nice cool summer evenings picking drunks out of the gutter and being yelled at by whores and taking knives away from greaseballs in zoot suits. But all that ain’t enough to make us entirely happy. We got to have you.”

He stopped and drew in his breath. His face glistened a little as if with sweat. He leaned forward from his hips.

“We got to have you,” he repeated. “We got to have sharpers with private licenses hiding information and dodging around corners and stirring up dust for us to breathe in. We got to have you suppressing evidence and framing set-ups that wouldn’t fool a sick baby. You wouldn’t mind me calling you a goddamn cheap double-crossing keyhole peeper, would you, baby?”

“You want me to mind?” I asked him.

He straightened up. “I’d love it,” he said. “In spades redoubled.”

“Some of what you say is true,” I said. “Not all. Any private eye wants to play ball with the police. Sometimes it’s a little hard to find out who’s making the rules of the ball game. Sometimes he doesn’t trust the police, and with cause. Sometimes he just gets in a jam without meaning to and has to play his hand out the way it’s dealt. He’d usually rather have a new deal. He’d like to keep on earning a living.”

“Your license is dead,” French said. “As of now. That problem won’t bother you any more.”

“It’s dead when the commission that gave it to me says so. Not before.”

Beifus said quietly, “Let’s get on with it, Christy. This could wait.”

“I’m getting on with it,” French said. “My way. This bird hasn’t cracked wise yet. I’m waiting for him to crack wise. The bright repartee. Don’t tell me you’re all out of the quick stuff, Marlowe.”

“Just what is it you want me to say?” I asked him.

“Guess,” he said.

“You’re a man eater tonight,” I said. “You want to break me in half. But you want an excuse. And you want me to give it to you?”

“That might help,” he said between his teeth.

“What would you have done in my place?” I asked him.

“I couldn’t imagine myself getting that low.”

He licked at the point of his upper lip. His right hand was hanging loose at his side. He was clenching and unclenching the fingers without knowing it.

“Take it easy, Christy,” Beifus said. “Lay off.”

French didn’t move. Beifus came over and stepped between us. French said, “Get out of there, Fred.”

French doubled his fist and slugged him hard on the point of the jaw. Beifus stumbled back and knocked me out of the way. His knees wobbled. He bent forward and coughed. He shook his head slowly in a bent-over position. After a while he straightened up with a grunt. He turned and looked at me. He grinned.

“It’s a new kind of third degree,” he said. “The cops beat hell out of each other and the suspect cracks up from the agony of watching.”

His hand went up and felt the angle of his jaw. It already showed swelling. His mouth grinned but his eyes were still a little vague. French stood rooted and silent.

Beifus got out a pack of cigarettes and shook one loose and held the pack out to French. French looked at the cigarette, looked at Beifus.

“Seventeen years of it,” he said. “Even my wife hates me.”

He lifted his open hand and slapped Beifus across the cheek with it lightly. Beifus kept on grinning.

French said: “Was it you I hit, Fred?”

Beifus said: “Nobody hit me, Christy. Nobody that I can remember.”

French said: “Take the cuffs off him and take him out to the car. He’s under arrest. Cuff him to the rail if you think it’s necessary.”

“Okay.” Beifus went around behind me. The cuffs came loose. “Come along, baby,” Beifus said.

I stared hard at French. He looked at me as if I was the wallpaper. His eyes didn’t seem to see me at all.

I went out under the archway and out of the house.