She leaned forward and cupped her chin in her hand. She looked serious without looking silly-serious.
“We went to a party in Brentwood Heights. Then Lin suggested we run over to the Troc for a few drinks and a few dances. So we did. They were doing some work on Sunset and it was very dusty. So coming back Lin dropped down to Santa Monica. That took us past a shabby looking hotel called the Hotel Indio, which I happened to notice for some silly meaningless reason. Across the street from it was a beer joint and a car was parked in front of that.”
“Only one car — in front of a beer joint?”
“Yes. Only one. It was a very dingy place. Well, this car started up and followed us and of course I thought nothing of that either. There was no reason to. Then before we got to where Santa Monica turns into Arguello Boulevard, Lin said, ‘Let’s go over the other road’ and turned up some curving residential street. Then all of a sudden a car rushed by us and grazed the fender and then pulled over to stop. A man in an overcoat and scarf and hat low on his face came back to apologize. It was a white scarf bunched out and it drew my eyes. It was about all I really saw of him except that he was tall and thin. As soon as he got close — and I remembered afterwards that he didn’t walk in our headlights at all — “
“That’s natural. Nobody likes to look into headlights. Have a drink. My treat this time.”
She was leaning forward, her fine eyebrows — not daubs of paint — drawn together in a frown of thought. I made two drinks. She went on:
“As soon as he got close to the side where Lin was sitting he jerked the scarf up over his nose and a gun was shining at us. ‘Stick-up,’ he said. ‘Be very quiet and everything will be jake.’ Then another man came over on the other side.”
“In Beverly Hills,” I said, “the best policed four square miles in California.”
She shrugged. “It happened just the same. They asked for my jewelry and bag. The man with the scarf did. The one on my side never spoke at all. I passed the things across Lin and the man gave me back my bag and one ring. He said to hold off calling the police and insurance people for a while. They would make us a nice smooth easy deal. He said they found it easier to work on a straight percentage. He seemed to have all the time in the world. He said they could work through the insurance people, if they had to, but that meant cutting in a shyster, and they preferred not to. He sounded like a man with some education.”
“It might have been Dressed-Up Eddie,” I said. “Only he got bumped off in Chicago.”
She shrugged. We had a drink. She went on.
“Then they left and we went home and I told Lin to keep quiet about it. The next day I got a call. We have two phones, one with extensions and one in my bedroom with no extensions. The call was on this. It’s not listed, of course.”
I nodded. “They can buy the number for a few dollars. It’s done all the time. Some movie people have to change their numbers every month.”
We had a drink.
“I told the man calling to take it up with Lin and he would represent me and if they were not too unreasonable, we might deal. He said okey, and from then on I guess they just stalled long enough to watch us a little. Finally, as you know, we agreed on eight thousand dollars and so forth.”
“Could you recognize any of them?”
“Of course not”
“Randall know all this?”
“Of course. Do we have to talk about it any more? It bores me.” She gave me the lovely smile.
“Did he make any comment?”
She yawned. “Probably. I forget.”
I sat with my empty glass in my hand and thought. She took it away from me and started to fill it again.
I took the refilled glass out of her hand and transferred it to my left and took hold of her left hand with my right. It felt smooth and soft and warm and comforting. It squeezed mine. The muscles in it were strong. She was a well built woman, and no paper flower.
“I think he had an idea, she said. “But he didn’t say what it was.”
“Anybody would have an idea out of all that,” I said.
She turned her head slowly and looked at me. Then she nodded. “You can’t miss it, can you?”
“How long have you known him?”
“Oh, years. He used to be an announcer at the station my husband owned. KFDK. That’s where I met him. That’s where I met my husband too.”
“I knew that. But Marriott lived as if he had money. Not riches, but comfortable money.”
“He came into some and quit radio business.”
“Do you know for a fact he came into money — or was that just something he said?”
She shrugged. She squeezed my hand.
“Or it may not have been very much money and he may have gone through it pretty fast.” I squeezed her hand back. “Did he borrow from you?”
“You’re a little old-fashioned, aren’t you?” She looked down at the hand I was holding.
“I’m still working. And your Scotch is so good it keeps me half-sober. Not that I’d have to be drunk — “
“Yes.” She drew her hand out of mine and rubbed it. “You must have quite a clutch — in your spare time. Lin Marriott was a high-class blackmailer, of course. That’s obvious. He lived on women.”
“He had something on you?”
“Should I tell you?”
“It probably wouldn’t be wise.”
She laughed. “I will, anyhow. I got a little tight at his house once and passed out. I seldom do. He took some photos of me — with my clothes up to my neck.”
“The dirty dog,” I said. “Have you got any of them handy?”
She slapped my wrist. She said softly:
“What’s your name?”
“Phil. What’s yours?”
“Helen. Kiss me.”
She fell softly across my lap and I bent down over her face and began to browse on it. She worked her eyelashes and made butterfly kisses on my cheeks. When I got to her mouth it was half open and burning and her tongue was a darting snake between her teeth.
The door opened and Mr. Grayle stepped quietly into the room. I was holding her and didn’t have a chance to let go. I lifted my face and looked at him. I felt as cold as Finnegan’s feet, the day they buried him.
The blonde in my arms didn’t move, didn’t even close her lips. She had a half-dreamy, half-sarcastic expression on her face.
Mr. Grayle cleared his throat slightly and said: “I beg your pardon, I’m sure,” and went quietly out of the room. There was an infinite sadness in his eyes.
I pushed her away and stood up and got my handkerchief out and mopped my face.
She lay as I had left her, half sideways along the davenport, the skin showing in a generous sweep above one stocking.
“Who was that?” she asked thickly.
“Mr. Grayle.”
“Forget him.”
I went away from her and sat down in the chair I had sat in when I first came into the room.
After a moment she straightened herself out and sat up and looked at me steadily.
“It’s all right. He understands. What the hell can he expect?”
“I guess he knows.”
“Well, I tell you it’s all right. Isn’t that enough? He’s a sick man. What the hell — “
“Don’t go shrill on me. I don’t like shrill women.”
She opened a bag lying beside her and took out a small handkerchief and wiped her lips, then looked at her face in a mirror. “I guess you’re right,” she said. “Just too much Scotch. Tonight at the Belvedere Club. Ten o’clock.” She wasn’t looking at me. Her breath was fast.
“Is that a good place?”
“Laird Brunette owns it I know him pretty well.”
“Right,” I said. I was still cold. I felt nasty, as if I had picked a poor man’s pocket.
She got a lipstick out and touched her lips very lightly and then looked at me along her eyes. She tossed the mirror. I caught it and looked at my face. I worked at it with my handkerchief and stood up to give her back the mirror.
She was leaning back, showing all her throat, looking at me lazily down her eyes.
“What’s the matter?”
“Nothing. Ten o’clock at the Belvedere Club. Don’t be too magnificent. All I have is a dinner suit. In the bar?”
She nodded, her eyes still lazy.
I went across the room and out, without looking back. The footman met me in the hall and gave me my hat, looking like the Great Stone Face.
19
I walked down the curving driveway and lost myself in the shadow of the tall trimmed hedges and came to the gates. Another man was holding the fort now, a husky in plainclothes, an obvious bodyguard. He let me out with a nod.
A horn tooted. Miss Riordan’s coupe was drawn up behind my car. I went over there and looked in at her. She looked cool and sarcastic.
She sat there with her hands on the wheel, gloved and slim. She smiled.
“I waited. I suppose it was none of my business. What did you think of her?”
“I bet she snaps a mean garter.”
“Do you always have to say things like that?” She flushed bitterly. “Sometimes I hate men. Old men, young men, football players, opera tenors, smart millionaires, beautiful men who are gigolos and almost-heels who are — private detectives.”
I grinned at her sadly. “I know I talk too smart. It’s in the air nowadays. Who told you he was a gigolo?”
“Who?”
“Don’t be obtuse. Marriott.”
“Oh, it was a cinch guess. I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be nasty. I guess you can snap her garter any time you want to, without much of a struggle. But there’s one thing you can be sure of — you’re a late comer to the show.”
The wide curving street dozed peacefully in the sun. A beautifully painted panel truck slid noiselessly to a stop before a house across the street, then backed a little and went up the driveway to a side entrance. On the side of the panel truck was painted the legend. “Bay City Infant Service.”
Anne Riordan leaned towards me, her gray-blue eyes hurt and clouded. Her slightly too long upper lip pouted and then pressed back against her teeth. She made a sharp little sound with her breath.
“Probably you’d like me to mind my own business, is that it? And not have ideas you don’t have first. I thought I was helping a little.”
“I don’t need any help. The police don’t want any from me. There’s nothing I can do for Mrs. Grayle. She has a yarn about a beer parlor where a car started from and followed them, but what does that amount to? It was a crummy dive on Santa Monica. This was a high-class mob. There was somebody in it that could even tell Fei Tsui jade when he saw it.”
“If he wasn’t tipped off.”
“There’s that too,” I said, and fumbled a cigarette out of a package. “Either way there’s nothing for me in it.”
“Not even about psychics?”
I stared rather blankly. “Psychics?”
“My God,” she said softly. “And I thought you were a detective.”
“There’s a hush on part of this,” I said. “I’ve got to watch my step. This Grayle packs a lot of dough in his pants. And law is where you buy it in this town. Look at the funny way the cops are acting. No build-up, no newspaper handout, no chance for the innocent stranger to step in with the trifling clue that turns out to be all important. Nothing but silence and warnings to me to lay off. I don’t like it at all.”
“You got most of the lipstick off,” Anne Riordan said. “I mentioned psychics. Well, good-by. It was nice to know you — in a way.”
She pressed her starter button and jammed her gears in and was gone in a swirl of dust.
I watched her go. When she was gone I looked across the street. The man from the panel truck that said Bay City Infant Service came out of the side door of the house dressed in a uniform so white and stiff and gleaming that it made me feel clean just to look at it. He was carrying a carton of some sort. He got into his panel truck and drove away.
I figured he had just changed a diaper.
I got into my own car and looked at my watch before starting up. It was almost five.
The Scotch, as good enough Scotch will, stayed with me all the way back to Hollywood. I took the red lights as they came.
“There’s a nice little girl,” I told myself out loud, in the car, “for a guy that’s interested in a nice little girl.” Nobody said anything. “But I’m not,” I said. Nobody said anything to that either. “Ten o’clock at the Belvedere Club,” I said. Somebody said: “Phooey.”
It sounded like my voice.
It was a quarter to six when I reached my office again. The building was very quiet. The typewriter beyond the party wall was still. I lit a pipe and sat down to wait.
20
The Indian smelled. He smelled clear across the little reception room when the buzzer sounded and I opened the door between to see who it was. Ho stood just inside the corridor door looking as if he had been cast in bronze. He was a big man from the waist up and he had a big chest. He looked like a bum.
He wore a brown suit of which the coat was too small for his shoulders and his trousers were probably a little tight at the waist. His hat was at least two sizes too small and had been perspired in freely by somebody it fitted better than it fitted him. He wore it about where a house wears a wind vane. His collar had the snug fit of a horse-collar and was of about the same shade of dirty brown. A tie dangled outside his buttoned jacket, a black tie which had been tied with a pair of pliers in a knot the size of a pea. Around his bare and magnificent throat, above the dirty collar, he wore a wide piece of black ribbon, like an old woman trying to freshen up her neck.
He had a big flat face and a highbridged fleshy nose that looked as hard as the prow of a cruiser. He had lidless eyes, drooping jowls, the shoulders of a blacksmith and the short and apparent awkward legs of a chimpanzee. I found out later that they were only short.
If he had been cleaned up a little and dressed in a white nightgown, he would have looked like a very wicked Roman senator.
His smell was the earthy smell of primitive man, and not the slimy dirt of cities.
“Huh,” he said. “Come quick. Come now.”
I backed into my office and wiggled my finger at him and he followed me making as much noise as a fly makes walking on the wall. I sat down behind my desk and squeaked my swivel chair professionally and pointed to the customer’s chair on the other side. He didn’t sit down. His small black eyes were hostile.
“Come where?” I said.
“Huh. Me Second Planting. Me Hollywood Indian.”
“Have a chair, Mr. Planting.”
He snorted and his nostrils got very wide. They had been wide enough for mouseholes to start with.
“Name Second Planting. Name no Mister Planting.”
“What can I do for you?”
He lifted his voice and began to intone in a deep-chested sonorous boom. “He say come quick. Great white father say come quick. He say me bring you in fiery chariot. He say — “
“Yeah. Cut out the pig Latin,” I said. “I’m no schoolmarm at the snake dances.”
“Nuts,” the Indian said.
We sneered at each other across the desk for a moment. He sneered better than I did. Then he removed his hat with massive disgust and turned it upside down. He rolled a finger around under the sweatband. That turned the sweatband up into view, and it had not been misnamed. He removed a paper clip from the edge and threw a fold of tissue paper on the desk. He pointed at it angrily, with a well-chewed fingernail. His lank hair had a shelf around it, high up, from the too-tight hat.
I unfolded the piece of tissue paper and found a card inside. The card was no news to me. There had been three exactly like it in the mouth-pieces of three Russian-appearing cigarettes.
I played with my pipe, stared at the Indian and tried to ride him with my stare. He looked as nervous as a brick wall.
“Okey, what does he want?”
“He want you come quick. Come now. Come in fiery — “