I went over to the barricade and shone the little light on the brush. Fresh-broken twigs. I went through the gap, on down the curving road. The ground was still softer here. More marks of the heavy tires. I went on down, rounded the curve and was at the edge of the hollow closed in by brush.
It was there all right, the chromium and glossy paint shining a little even in the dark, and the red reflector glass of the tail-lights shining back at the pencil flash. It was there, silent, lightless, all the doors shut. I went towards it slowly, gritting my teeth at every step. I opened one of the rear doors and put the beam of the flash inside. Empty. The front was empty too. The ignition was off. The key hung in the lock on a thin chain. No torn upholstery, no scarred glass, no blood, no bodies. Everything neat and orderly. I shut the doors and circled the car slowly, looking for a sign and not finding any.
A sound froze me.
A motor throbbed above the rim of the brush. I didn’t jump more than a foot. The flash in my hand went out. A gun slid into my hand all by itself. Then headlight beams tilted up towards the sky, then tilted down again. The motor sounded like a small car. It had that contented sound that comes with moisture in the air.
The lights tilted down still more and got brighter. A car was coming down the curve of the dirt road. It came two-thirds of the way and then stopped. A spotlight clicked on and swung out to the side, held there for a long moment, went out again. The car came on down the hill. I slipped the gun out of my pocket and crouched behind the motor of Marriott’s car.
A small coupe of no particular shape or color slid into the hollow and turned so that its headlights raked the sedan from one end to the other. I got my head down in a hurry. The lights swept above me like a sword. The coupe stopped. The motor died. The headlights died. Silence. Then a door opened and a light foot touched the ground. More silence. Even the crickets were silent. Then a beam of light cut the darkness low down, parallel to the ground and only a few inches above it. The beam swept, and there was no way I could get my ankles out of it quickly enough. The beam stopped on my feet. Silence. The beam came up and raked the top of the hood again.
Then a laugh. It was a girl’s laugh. Strained, taut as a mandolin wire. A strange sound in that place. The white beam shot under the car again and settled on my feet.
The voice said, not quite shrilly: “All right, you. Come out of there with your hands up and very damned empty. You’re covered.”
I didn’t move.
The light wavered a little, as though the hand that held it wavered. It swept slowly along the hood once more. The voice stabbed at me again.
“Listen, stranger. I’m holding a ten shot automatic. I can shoot straight. Both your feet are vulnerable. What do you bid?”
“Put it up — or I’ll blow it out of your hand!” I snarled. My voice sounded like somebody tearing slats off a chicken coop.
“Oh — a hardboiled gentleman.” There was a quaver in the voice, a nice little quaver. Then it hardened again. “Coming out? I’ll count three. Look at the odds I’m giving you — twelve fat cylinders, maybe sixteen. But your feet will hurt. And ankle bones take years and years to get well and sometimes they never do really — “
I straightened up slowly and looked into the beam of the flashlight.
“I talk too much when I’m scared too,” I said.
“Don’t — don’t move another inch! Who are you?”
I moved around the front of the car towards her. When I was six feet from the slim dark figure behind the flash I stopped. The flash glared at me steadily.
“You stay right there,” the girl snapped angrily, after I had stopped. “Who are you?”
“Let’s see your gun.”
She held it forward into the light. It was pointed at my stomach. It was a little gun, it looked like a small Colt vest pocket automatic.
“Oh, that,” I said. “That toy. It doesn’t either hold ten shots. It holds six. It’s just a little gun, a butterfly gun. They shoot butterflies with them. Shame on you for telling a deliberate lie like that.”
“Are you crazy?”
“Me? I’ve been sapped by a holdup man. I might be a little goofy.”
“Is that — is that your car?”
“Who are you?”
“What were you looking at back there with your spotlight?”
“I get it. You ask the answers. He-man stuff. I was looking at a man.”
“Does he have blond hair in waves?”
“Not now,” she said quietly. “He might have had — once.”
That jarred me. Somehow I hadn’t expected it. “I didn’t see him,” I said lamely. “I was following the tire marks with a flashlight down the hill. Is he badly hurt?” I went another step towards her. The little gun jumped at me and the flash held steady.
“Take it easy,” she said quietly. “Very easy. Your friend is dead.”
I didn’t say anything for a moment. Then I said: “All right, let’s go look at him.”
“Let’s stand right here and not move and you tell me who you are and what happened.” The voice was crisp. It was not afraid. It meant what it said.
“Marlowe. Philip Marlowe. An investigator. Private.”
“That’s who you are — if it’s true. Prove it.”
“I’m going to take my wallet out.”
“I don’t think so. Just leave your hands where they happen to be. We’ll skip the proof for the time being. What’s your story?”
“This man may not be dead.”
“He’s dead all right. With his brains on his face. The story, mister. Make it fast.”
“As I said — he may not be dead. We’ll go look at him.” I moved one foot forward.
“Move and I’ll drill you!” she snapped.
I moved the other foot forward. The flash jumped about a little. I think she took a step back.
“You take some awful chances, mister,” she said quietly. “All right, go on ahead and I’ll follow. You look like a sick man. If it hadn’t been for that — “
“You’d have shot me. I’ve been sapped. It always makes me a little dark under the eyes.”
“A nice sense of humor — like a morgue attendant,” she almost wailed.
I turned away from the light and immediately it shone on the ground in front of me. I walked past the little coup, an ordinary little car, clean and shiny under the misty starlight. I went on, up the dirt road, around the curve. The steps were close behind me and the flashlight guided me. There was no sound anywhere now except our steps and the girl’s breathing. I didn’t hear mine.
11
Halfway up the slope I looked off to the right and saw his foot. She swung the light. Then I saw all of him. I ought to have seen him as I came down, but I had been bent over, peering at the ground with the fountain pen flash, trying to read tire marks by a light the size of a quarter.
“Give me the flash,” I said and reached back.
She put it into my hand, without a word. I went down on a knee. The ground felt cold and damp through the cloth.
He lay smeared to the ground, on his back, at the base of a bush, in that bag-of-clothes position that always means the same thing. His face was a face I had never seen before. His hair was dark with blood, the beautiful blond ledges were tangled-with blood and some thick grayish ooze, like primeval slime.
The girl behind me breathed hard, but she didn’t speak. I held the light on his face. He had been beaten to a pulp. One of his hands was flung out in a frozen gesture, the fingers curled. His overcoat was half twisted under him, as though he had rolled as he fell. His legs were crossed. There was a trickle as black as dirty oil at the corner of his mouth.
“Hold the flash on him,” I said, passing it back to her. “If it doesn’t make you sick.”
She took it and held it without a word, as steady as an old homicide veteran. I got my fountain pen flash out again and started to go through his pockets, trying not to move him.
“You shouldn’t do that,” she said tensely. “You shouldn’t touch him until the police come.”
“That’s right,” I said. “And the prowl car boys are not supposed to touch him until the K-car men come and they’re not supposed to touch him until the coroner’s examiner sees him and the photographers have photographed him and the fingerprint man has taken his prints. And do you know how long all that is liable to take out here? A couple of hours.”
“All right,” she said. “I suppose you’re always right. I guess you must be that kind of person. Somebody must have hated him to smash his head in like that.”
“I don’t suppose it was personal,” I growled. “Some people just like to smash heads.”
“Seeing that I don’t know what it’s all about, I couldn’t guess,” she said tartly.
I went through his clothes. He had loose silver and bills in one trouser pocket, a tooled leather keycase in the other, also a small knife. His left hip pocket yielded a small billfold with more currency, insurance cards, a driver’s license, a couple of receipts. In his coat loose match folders, a gold pencil clipped to a pocket, two thin cambric handerchiefs as fine and white as dry powdered snow. Then the enamel cigarette case from which I had seen him take his brown gold-tipped cigarettes. They were South American, from Montevideo. And in the other inside pocket a second cigarette case I hadn’t seen before. It was made of embroidered silk, a dragon on each side, a frame of imitation tortoiseshell so thin it was hardly there at all. I tickled the catch open and looked in at three oversized Russian cigarettes under the band of elastic. I pinched one. They felt old and dry and loose. They had hollow mouthpieces.
“He smoked the others,” I said over my shoulder. “These must have been for a lady friend. He would be a lad who would have a lot of lady friends.”
The girl was bent over, breathing on my neck now. “Didn’t you know him?”
“I only met him tonight. He hired me for a bodyguasd.”
“Some bodyguard.”
I didn’t say anything to that.
“I’m sorry,” she almost whispered. “Of course I don’t know the circumstances. Do you suppose those could be jujus? Can I look?”
I passed the embroidered case back to her.
“I knew a guy once who smoked jujus,” she said. “Three highballs and three sticks of tea and it took a pipe wrench to get him off the chandelier.”
“Hold the light steady.”
There was a rustling pause. Then she spoke again.
“I’m sorry.” She handed the case down again and I slipped it back in his pocket. That seemed to be all. All it proved was that he hadn’t been cleaned out.
I stood up and took my wallet out. The five twenties were still in it.
“High class boys,” I said. “They only took the large money.”
The flash was drooping to the ground. I put my wallet away again, clipped my own small flash to my pocket and reached suddenly for the little gun she was still holding in the same hand with the flashlight. She dropped the flashlight, but I got the gun. She stepped back quickly and I reached down for the light. I put it on her face for a moment, then snapped it off.
“You didn’t have to be rough,” she said, putting her hands down into the pockets of a long rough coat with flaring shoulders. “I didn’t think you killed him.”
I liked the cool quiet of her voice. I liked her nerve. We stood in the darkness, face to face, not saying anything for a moment. I could see the brush and light in the sky.
I put the light on her face and she blinked. It was a small neat vibrant face with large eyes. A face with bone under the skin, fine drawn like a Cremona violin. A very nice face.
“Your hair’s red,” I said. “You look Irish.”
“And my name’s Riordan. So what? Put that light out. It’s not red, it’s auburn.”
I put it out. “What’s your first name?”
“Anne. And don’t call me Annie.”
“What are you doing around here?”
“Sometimes at night I go riding. Just restless. I live alone. I’m an orphan. I know all this neighborhood like a book. I just happened to be riding along and noticed a light flickering down in the hollow. It seemed a little cold for love. And they don’t use lights, do they?”
“I never did. You take some awful chances, Miss Riordan.”
“I think I said the same about you. I had a gun. I wasn’t afraid. There’s no law against going down there.”
“Uh-huh. Only the law of self preservation. Here. It’s not my night to be clever. I suppose you have a permit for the gun.” I held it out to her, butt first.
She took it and tucked it down into her pocket. “Strange how curious people can be, isn’t it? I write a little. Feature articles.”
“Any money in it?”
“Very damned little. What were you looking for — in his pockets?”
“Nothing in particular. I’m a great guy to snoop around. We had eight thousand dollars to buy back some stolen jewelry for a lady. We got hijacked. Why they killed him I don’t know. He didn’t strike me as a fellow who would put up much of a fight. And I didn’t hear a fight. I was down in the hollow when he was jumped. He was in the car, up above. We were supposed to drive down into the hollow but there didn’t seem to be room for the car without scratching it up. So I went down there on foot and while I was down there they must have stuck him up. Then one of them got into the car and dry-guiched me. I thought he was still in the car, of course.”
“That doesn’t make you so terribly dumb,” she said.
“There was something wrong with the job from the start. I could feel it. But I needed the money. Now I have to go to the cops and eat dirt. Will you drive me to Montemar Vista? I left my car there. He lived there.”
“Sure. But shouldn’t somebody stay with him? You could take my car — or I could go call the cops.”
I looked at the dial of my watch. The faintly glowing hands said that it was getting towards midnight.
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know why not. I just feel it that way. I’ll play it alone.”
She said nothing. We went back down the hill and got into her little car and she started it and jockeyed it around without lights and drove it back up the hill and eased it past the barrier. A block away she sprang the lights on.
My head ached. We didn’t speak until we came level with the first house on the paved part of the street. Then she said:
“You need a drink. Why not go back to my house and have one? You can phone the law from there. They have to come from West Los Angeles anyway. There’s nothing up here but a fire station.”
“Just keep on going down to the coast. I’ll play it solo.”
“But why? I’m not afraid of them. My story might help you.”
“I don’t want any help. I’ve got to think. I want to be by myself for a while.”
“I — okey,” she said.
She made a vague sound in her throat and turned on to the boulevard. We came to the service station at the coast highway and turned north to Montemar Vista and the sidewalk cafe there. It was lit up like a luxury liner. The girl pulled over on to the shoulder and I got out and stood holding the door.
I fumbled a card out of my wallet and passed it in to her. “Some day you may need a strong back,” I said. “Let me know. But don’t call me if it’s brain work.”
She tapped the card on the wheel and said slowly: “You’ll find me in the Bay City phone book. 819 Twenty-fifth Street. Come around and pin a putty medal on me for minding my own business. I think you’re still woozy from that crack on the head.”
She swung her car swiftly around on the highway and I watched its twin tail-lights fade into the dark.
I walked past the arch and the sidewalk cafe into the parking space and got into my car. A bar was right in front of me and I was shaking again. But it seemed smarter to walk into the West Los Angeles police station the way I did twenty minutes later, as cold as a frog and as green as the back of a new dollar bill.