TWO
It rained all the next day. Late in the afternoon I sat parked in a blue Chrysler roadster, diagonally across the Boulevard from a narrow store front, over which a green neon sign in script letters said: «H. H. Steiner.»
The rain splashed knee-high off the sidewalks, filled the gutters, and big cops in slickers that shone like gun barrels had a lot of fun carrying little girls in silk stockings and cute little rubber boots across the bad places, with a lot of squeezing.
The rain drummed on the hood of the Chrysler, beat and tore at the taut material of the top, leaked in at the buttoned places, and made a pool on the floorboards for me to keep my feet in.
I had a big flask of Scotch with me. I used it often enough to keep interested.
Steiner did business, even in that weather; perhaps especially in that weather. Very nice cars stopped in front of his store, and very nice people dodged in, then dodged out again with wrapped parcels under their arms. Of course they could have been buying rare books and de luxe editions.
At five-thirty a pimply-faced kid in a leather windbreaker came out of the store and sloped up the side street at a fast trot. He came back with a neat cream-and-gray coupé. Steiner came out and got into the coupé. He wore a dark green leather raincoat, a cigarette in an amber holder, no hat. I couldn’t see his glass eye at that distance but I knew he had one. The kid in the windbreaker held an umbrella over him across the sidewalk, then shut it up and handed it into the coupé.
Steiner drove west on the Boulevard. I drove west on the Boulevard. Past the business district, at Pepper Canyon, he turned north, and I tailed him easily from a block back. I was pretty sure he was going home, which was natural.
He left Pepper Drive and took a curving ribbon of wet cement called La Verne Terrace, climbed up it almost to the top. It was a narrow road with a high bank on one side and a few well-spaced cabinlike houses built down the steep slope on the other side. Their roofs were not much above road level. The front of them were masked by shrubs. Sodden trees dripped all over the landscape.
Steiner’s hideaway had a square box hedge in front of it, more than window-high. The entrance was a sort of maze, and the house door was not visible from the road. Steiner put his gray-and-cream coupé in a small garage, locked up, went through the maze with his umbrella up, and light went on in the house.
While he was doing this I had passed him and gone to the top of the hill. I turned around there and went back and parked in front of the next house above his. It seemed to be closed up or empty, but had no signs on it. I went into a conference with my flask of Scotch, and then just sat.
At six-fifteen lights bobbed up the hill. It was quite dark by then. A car stopped in front of Steiner’s hedge. A slim, tall girl in a slicker got out of it. Enough light filtered out through the hedge for me to see that she was dark-haired and possibly pretty. Voices drifted on the rain and a door shut. I got out of the Chrysler and strolled down the hill, put a pencil flash into the car. It was a dark maroon or brown Packard convertible. Its licence read to Carmen Dravec, 3596 Lucerne Avenue. I went back to my heap. A solid, slow-moving hour crawled by. No more cars came up or down the hill. It seemed to be a very quiet neighborhood. Then a single flash of hard white light leaked out of Steiner’s house, like a flash of summer lightning. As the darkness fell again a thin tinkling scream trickled down the darkness and echoed faintly among the wet trees. I was out of the Chrysler and on my way before the last echo of it died.
There was no fear in the scream. It held the note of a half-pleasurable shock, an accent of drunkenness, and a touch of pure idiocy.
The Steiner mansion was perfectly silent when I hit the gap in the hedge, dodged around the elbow that masked the front door, and put my hand up to bang on the door.
At that exact moment, as if somebody had been waiting for it, three shots racketed close together behind the door. After that there was a long, harsh sigh, a soft thump, rapid steps, going away into the back of the house.
I wasted time hitting the door with my shoulder, without enough start. It threw me back like a kick from an army mule.
The door fronted on a narrow runway, like a small bridge that led from the banked road. There was no side porch, no way to get at the windows in a hurry. There was no way around to the back except through the house or up a long flight of wooden steps that went up to the back door from the alleylike street below. On these steps I now heard a clatter of feet.
That gave me the impulse and I hit the door again, from the feet up. It gave at the lock and I pitched down two steps into a big, dim, cluttered room. I didn’t see much of what was in the room then. I wandered through to the back of the house.
I was pretty sure there was death in it.
A car throbbed in the street below as I reached the back porch. The car went away fast, without lights. That was that. I went back to the living room.
THREE
That room reached all the way across the front of the house and had a low, beamed ceiling, walls painted brown. Strips of tapestry hung all around the walls. Books filled low shelves. There was a thick, pinkish rug on which some light fell from two standing lamps with pale green shades. In the middle of the rug there was a big, low desk and a black chair with a yellow satin cushion at it. There were books all over the desk.
On a sort of dais near one end wall there was a teakwood chair with arms and a high back. A dark-haired girl was sitting in the chair, on a fringed red shawl.
She sat very straight, with her hands on the arms of the chair, her knees close together, her body stiffly erect, her chin level. Her eyes were wide open and mad and had no pupils.
She looked unconscious of what was going on, but she didn’t have the pose of unconsciousness. She had a pose as if she was doing something very important and making a lot of it.
Out of her mouth came a tinny chuckling noise, which didn’t change her expression or move her lips. She didn’t seem to see me at all.
She was wearing a pair of long jade earrings, and apart from those she was stark naked.
I looked away from her to the other end of the room.
Steiner was on his back on the floor, just beyond the edge of the pink rug, and in front of a thing that looked like a small totem pole. It had a round open mouth in which the lens of a camera showed. The lens seemed to be aimed at the girl in the teakwood chair.
There was a flashbulb apparatus on the floor beside Steiner’s outflung hand in a loose silk sleeve. The cord of the flashbulb went behind the totem pole thing.
Steiner was wearing Chinese slippers with thick white felt soles. His legs were in black satin pajamas and the upper part of him in an embroidered Chinese coat. The front of it was mostly blood. His glass eye shone brightly and was the most lifelike thing about him. At a glance none of the three shots had missed.
The flashbulb was the sheet lightning I had seen leak out of the house and the half-giggling scream was the doped and naked girl’s reaction to that. The three shots had been somebody else’s idea of how the proceedings ought to be punctuated. Presumably the idea of the lad who had gone very fast down the back steps.
I could see something in his point of view. At that stage I thought it was a good idea to shut the front door and fasten it with the short chain that was on it. The lock had been spoiled by my violent entrance.
A couple of thin purple glasses stood on a red lacquer tray on one end of the desk. Also a potbellied flagon of something brown. The glasses smelled of ether and laudanum, a mixture I had never tried, but it seemed to fit the scene pretty well.