The Little Sister (6 page)

10

Over the telephone the Bay City Camera Shop man said: “Yes, Mr. Hicks. We have them for you. Six enlarged prints on glossy from your negative.”

“What time do you close?” I asked.

“Oh in about five minutes. We open at nine in the morning.”

“I’ll pick them up in the morning. Thanks.”

I hung up, reached mechanically into the slot and found somebody else’s nickel. I walked over to the lunch counter and bought myself a cup of coffee with it, and sat there sipping and listening to the auto horns complaining on the street outside. It was time to go home. Whistles blew. Motors raced. Old brake linings squeaked. There was a dull steady mutter of feet on the sidewalk outside. It was just after five-thirty. I finished the coffee, stuffed a pipe, and strolled a half-block back to the Van Nuys Hotel. In the writing room I folded the orange camera-shop check into a sheet of hotel stationery and addressed an envelope to myself. I put a special-delivery stamp on it and dropped it in the mail chute by the elevator bank. Then I went along to Flack’s office again.

Again I closed his door and sat down across from him. Flack didn’t seem to have moved an inch. He was chewing morosely on the same cigar butt and his eyes were still full of nothing. I relit my pipe by striking a match on the side of his desk. He frowned.

“Dr. Hambleton doesn’t answer his door,” I said.

“Huh?” Flack looked at me vacantly.

“Party in 332. Remember? He doesn’t answer his door.”

“What should I do—bust my girdle?” Flack asked.

“I knocked several times,” I said. “No answer. Thought he might be taking a bath or something, although I couldn’t hear anything. Went away for a while, then tried again. Same no answer again.”

Flack looked at a turnip watch he got from his vest. “I’m off at seven,” he said. “Jesus. A whole hour to go, and more. Boy, am I hungry.”

“Working the way you do,” I said, “you must be. You have to keep your strength up. Do I interest you at all in Room 332?”

“You said he wasn’t in,” Flack said irritably. “So what? He wasn’t in.”

“I didn’t say he wasn’t in. I said he didn’t answer his door.”

Flack leaned forward. Very slowly he removed the debris of the cigar from his mouth and put it in the glass tray. “Go on. Make me like it,” he said, carefully.

“Maybe you’d like to run up and look,” I said. “Maybe you didn’t see a first-class ice-pick job lately.”

Flack put his hands on the arms of his chair and squeezed the wood hard. “Aw,” he said painfully, “aw.” He got to his feet and opened the desk drawer. He took out a large black gun, flicked the gate open, studied the cartridges, squinted down the barrel, snapped the cylinder back into place. He unbuttoned his vest and tucked the gun down inside his waistband. In an emergency he could probably have got to it in less than a minute. He put his hat on firmly and jerked a thumb at the door.

We went up to the third floor in silence. We went down the corridor. Nothing had changed. No sound had increased or diminished. Flack hurried along to 332 and knocked from force of habit. Then tried the door. He looked back at me with a twisted mouth.

“You said the door wasn’t locked,” he complained.

“I didn’t exactly say that. It
was
unlocked, though.”

“It ain’t now,” Flack said, and unshipped a key on a long chain. He unlocked the door and glanced up and down the hall. He twisted the knob slowly without sound and eased the door a couple of inches. He listened. No sounds came from within. Flack stepped back, took the black gun out of his waistband. He removed the key from the door, kicked it wide open, and brought the gun up hard and straight, like the wicked foreman of the Lazy Q. “Let’s go,” he said out of the corner of his mouth.

Over his shoulder I could see that Dr. Hambleton lay exactly as before, but the ice-pick handle didn’t show from the entrance. Flack leaned forward and edged cautiously into the room. He reached the bathroom door and put his eye to the crack, then pushed the door open until it bounced against the tub. He went in and came out, stepped down into the room, a tense and wary man who was taking no chances.

He tried the closet door, leveled his gun and jerked it wide open. No suspects in the closet.

“Look under the bed,” I said.

Flack bent swiftly and looked under the bed.

“Look under the carpet,” I said.

“You kidding me?” Flack asked nastily.

“I just like to watch you work.”

He bent over the dead man and studied the ice pick.

“Somebody locked that door,” he sneered. “Unless you’re lying about its being unlocked.”

I said nothing.

“Well I guess it’s the cops,” he said slowly. “No chance to cover up on this one.”

“It’s not your fault,” I told him. “It happens even in good hotels.”

11

The redheaded intern filled out a DOA form and clipped his stylus to the outside pocket of his white jacket. He snapped the book shut with a faint grin on his face.

“Punctured spinal cord just below the occipital bulge, I’d say,” he said carelessly. “A very vulnerable spot. If you know how to find it. And I suppose you do.”

Detective Lieutenant Christy French growled. “Think it’s the first time I’ve seen one?”

“No, I guess not,” the intern said. He gave a last quick look at the dead man, turned and walked out of the room. “I’ll call the coroner,” he said over his shoulder. The door closed behind him.

“What a stiff means to those birds is what a plate of warmed-up cabbage means to me,” Christy French said sourly to the closed door. His partner, a cop named Fred Beifus, was down on one knee by the telephone box. He had dusted it for fingerprints and blown off the loose powder. He was looking at the smudge through a small magnifying glass. He shook his head, then picked some thing off the screw with which the box had been fastened shut.

“Gray cotton undertaker’s gloves,” he said disgustedly. “Cost about four cents a pair wholesale. Fat lot of good printing this joint. They were looking for something in the telephone box, huh?”

“Evidently something that could be there,” French said. “I didn’t expect prints. These ice-pick jobs are a specialty. We’ll get the experts after a while. This is just a quickover.”

He was stripping the dead man’s pockets and laying what had been in them out on the bed beside the quiet and already waxy corpse. Flack was sitting in a chair by the window, looking out morosely. The assistant manager had been up, said nothing with a worried expression, and gone away. I was leaning against the bathroom wall and sorting out my fingers.

Flack said suddenly: “I figure an ice-pick job’s a dame’s work. You can buy them anywhere. Ten cents. If you want one fast, you can slip it down inside a garter and let it hang there.”

Christy French gave him a brief glance which had a kind of wonder in it. Beifus said: “What kind of dames you been running around with, honey? The way stockings cost nowadays a dame would as soon stick a saw down her sock.”

“I never thought of that,” Flack said.

Beifus said: “Leave us do the thinking sweetheart. It takes equipment.”

“No need to get tough,” Flack said.

Beifus took his hat off and bowed. “You mustn’t deny us our little pleasures, Mr. Flack.”

Christy French said: “Besides, a woman would keep on jabbing. She wouldn’t even know how much was enough. Lots of the punks don’t. Whoever did this one was a performer. He got the spinal cord the first try. And another thing—you have to have the guy quiet to do it. That means more than one guy, unless he was doped, or the killer was a friend of his.”

I said: “I don’t see how he could have been doped, if he’s the party that called me on the phone.”

French and Beifus both looked at me with the same expression of patient boredom. “If,” French said, “and since you didn’t know the guy—according to you—there’s always the faint possibility that you wouldn’t know his voice. Or am I being too subtle?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I haven’t read your fan mail.”

French grinned.

“Don’t waste it on him,” Beifus told French. “Save it for when you talk to the Friday Morning Club. Some of them old ladies in the shiny-nose league go big for the nicer angles of murder.”

French rolled himself a cigarette and lit it with a kitchen match he struck on the back of a chair. He sighed.

“They worked the technique out in Brooklyn,” he explained. “Sunny Moe Stein’s boys specialized in it, but they run it into the ground. It got so you couldn’t walk across a vacant lot without finding some of their work. Then they came out here, what was left of them. I wonder why did they do that.”

“Maybe we just got more vacant lots,” Bell us said.

“Funny thing, though,” French said, almost dreamily. “When Weepy Moyer had the chill put on Sunny Moe Stein over on Franklin Avenue last February, the killer used a gun. Moe wouldn’t have liked that at all.”

“I betcha that was why his face had that disappointed look, after they washed the blood off,” Beifus remarked.

“Who’s Weepy Moyer?” Flack asked.

“He was next to Moe in the organization,” French told him. “This could easily be his work. Not that he’d have done it personal.”

“Why not?” Flack asked sourly.

“Don’t you guys ever read a paper? Moyer’s a gentleman now. He knows the nicest people. Even has another name. And as for the Sunny Moe Stein job, it just happened we had him in jail on a gambling rap. We didn’t get anywhere. But we did make him a very sweet alibi. Anyhow he’s a gentleman like I said, and gentlemen don’t go around sticking ice picks into people. They hire it done.”

“Did you ever have anything on Moyer?” I asked.

French looked at me sharply. “Why?”

“I just had an idea. But it’s very fragile,” I said.

French eyed me slowly. “Just between us girls in the powder room,” he said, “we never even proved the guy we had was Moyer. But don’t broadcast it. Nobody’s supposed to know but him and his lawyer and the D.A. and the police beat and the city hall and maybe two or three hundred other people.”

He slapped the dead man’s empty wallet against his thigh and sat down on the bed. He leaned casually against the corpse’s leg, lit a cigarette and pointed with it.

“That’s enough time on the vaudeville circuit. Here’s what we got, Fred. First off, the customer here was not too bright. He was going by the name of Dr. G. W. Hambleton and had the cards printed with an El Centro address and a phone number. It took just two minutes to find out there ain’t any such address or any such phone number. A bright boy doesn’t lay open that easy. Next, the guy is definitely not in the chips. He has fourteen smackeroos folding in here and about two bucks loose change. On his key ring he don’t have any car key or any safe-deposit key or any house key. All he’s got is a suitcase key and seven filed Yale master keys. Filed fairly recently at that. I figure he was planning to sneak the hotel a little. Do you think these keys would work in your dump, Flack?”

Flack went over and stared at the keys. “Two of them are the right size,” be said. “I couldn’t tell if they’d work by just looking. If I want a master key I have to get it from the office. All I carry is a passkey. I can only use that if the guest is out.” He took a key out of his pocket, a key on a long chain, and compared it. He shook his head. “They’re no good without more work,” he said. “Far too much metal on them.”

French flicked ash into the palm of his hand and blew it off as dust. Flack went back to his chair by the window.

“Next point,” Christy French announced. “He don’t have a driver’s license or any identification. None of his outside clothes were bought in El Centro. He had some kind of a grift, but he don’t have the looks or personality to bounce checks.”

“You didn’t really see him at his best,” Beifus put in.

“And this hotel is the wrong dump for that anyway,” French went on. “It’s got a crummy reputation.”

“Now wait a minute!” Flack began.

French cut him short with a gesture. “I know every hotel in the metropolitan district, Flack. It’s my business to know. For fifty bucks I could organize a double-strip act with French trimmings inside of an hour in any room in this hotel. Don’t kid me. You earn your living and I’ll earn mine. Just don’t kid me. All right. The customer had something he was afraid to keep around. That means he knew somebody was after him and getting close. So he offers Marlowe a hundred bucks to keep it for him. But he doesn’t have that much money on him. So what he must have been planning on was getting Marlowe to gamble with him. It couldn’t have been hot jewelry then. It had to be something semi-legitimate. That right, Marlowe?”

“You could leave out the semi,” I said.

French grinned faintly. “So what he had was something that could be kept flat or rolled up—in a phone box, a hatband, a Bible, a can of talcum. We don’t know whether it was found or not. But we do know there was very little time. Not much more than half an hour.”

“If Dr. Hambleton did the phoning,” I said. “You opened that can of beans yourself.”

“It’s kind of pointless any other way. The killers wouldn’t be in a hurry to have him found. Why should they ask anybody to come over to his room?” He turned to Flack. “Any chance to check his visitors?”

Flack shook his head gloomily. “You don’t even have to pass the desk to get to the elevators.”

Beifus said: “Maybe that was one reason be came here. That, and the homey atmosphere.”

“All right,” French said. “Whoever knocked him off could come and go without any questions asked. All he had to know was his room number. And that’s about all we know. Okay, Fred?”

Beifus nodded.

I said: “Not quite all. It’s a nice toupee, but it’s still a toupee.”

French and Beifus both swung around quickly. French reached, carefully removed the dead man’s hair, and whistled. “I wondered what that damn intern was grinning at,” he said. “The bastard didn’t even mention it. See what I see, Fred?”

“All I see is a guy without no hair,” Beifus answered.

“Maybe you never knew him at that. Mileaway Marston. Used to be a runner for Ace Devore.”

“Why sure enough,” Beifus chuckled. He leaned over and patted the dead bald head gently. “How you been all this time, Mileaway? I didn’t see you in so long I forgot. But you know me, pal. Once a softy always a softy.”

The man on the bed looked old and hard and shrunken without his toupee. The yellow mask of death was beginning to set his face into rigid lines.

French said calmly: “Well, that takes a load off my mind. This punk ain’t going to be no twenty-four-hour-a-day job. The hell with him.” He replaced the toupee over one eye and stood up off the bed. “That’s all for you two,” he said to Flack and me.

Flack stood up.

“Thanks for the murder, honey,” Beifus told him. “You get any more in your nice hotel, don’t forget our service. Even when it ain’t good, it’s quick.”

Flack went down the short hall and yanked the door open. I followed him out. On the way to the elevator we didn’t speak. Nor on the way down. I walked with him along to his little office, followed him in and shut the door. He seemed surprised.

He sat down at his desk and reached for his telephone. “I got to make a report to the Assistant Manager,” he said. “Something you want?”

I rolled a cigarette around on my fingers, put a match to it and blew smoke softly across the desk. “One hundred and fifty dollars,” I said.

Flack’s small, intent eyes became round holes in a face washed clean of expression. “Don’t get funny in the wrong place,” he said.

“After those two comedians upstairs, you could hardly blame me if I did. But I’m not being funny.” I beat a tattoo on the edge of the desk and waited.

Tiny beads of sweat showed on Flack’s lip above his little mustache. “I got business to attend to,” he said, more throatily this time. “Beat it and keep going.”

“Such a tough little man,” I said. “Dr. Hambleton had $164 currency in his wallet when I searched him. He promised me a hundred as retainer, remember? Now, in the same wallet, he has fourteen dollars. And I did leave the door of his room unlocked. And somebody else locked it. You locked it, Flack.”

Flack took hold of the arms of his chair and squeezed. His voice came from the bottom of a well saying: “You can’t prove a damn thing.”

“Do I have to try?”

He took the gun out of his waistband and laid it on the desk in front of him. He stared down at it. It didn’t have any message for him. He looked up at me again. “Fifty-fifty, huh?” he said brokenly.

There was a moment of silence between us. He got his old shabby wallet out and rooted in it. He came up with a handful of currency and spread bills out on the desk, sorted them into two piles and pushed one pile my way.

I said: “I want the whole hundred and fifty.”

He hunched down in his chair and stared at a corner of the desk. After a long time, he sighed. He put the two piles together and pushed them over—to my side of the desk.

“It wasn’t doing him any good,” Flack said. “Take the dough and breeze. I’ll remember you, buddy. All you guys make me sick to my stomach. How do I know you didn’t take half a grand off him.”

“I’d take it all. So would the killer. Why leave fourteen dollars?”

“So why did I leave fourteen dollars?” Flack asked, in a tired voice, making vague movements along the desk edge with his fingers. I picked up the money, counted it and threw it back at him.

“Because you’re in the business and could size him up. You knew he’d at least have room rent, and a few dollars for loose change. The cops would expect the same thing. Here, I don’t want the money. I want something else.”

He stared at me with his mouth open.

“Put that dough out of sight,” I said.

He reached for it and crammed it back in his wallet. “What something else?” His eyes were small and thoughtful. His tongue pushed out his lower lip “It don’t seem to me
you’re
in a very hot trading position either.”