She moved at last and started to sit down. «Not in that chair,» I said quickly. «Over here.»
She came over and sat near me, on one of the davenports. Lights twisted in her eyes. I could see them now. Little twisting lights like Catherine wheels spinning brightly.
She said, «Why did he come back?»
«He thought he ought to tidy up. Remove the body and so on. A nice guy, Skalla.»
«Do you think so?»
«Lady, if nobody else in the world thinks so, I do.»
«I’ll take that drink,» she said.
I handed her the bottle. I grabbed it away in a hurry. «Gosh,» I said. «You have to break in on this stuff.»
She looked towards the side door that led to the bedroom back of me.
«Gone to the morgue,» I said. «You can go in there.»
She stood up at once and went out of the room. She came back almost at once.
«What have they got on Steve?» she asked. «If he recovers.»
«He killed a nigger over on Central this morning. It was more or less self-defense on both sides. I don’t know. Except for Marineau he might get a break.»
«Marineau?» she said.
«Yeah. You knew he killed Marineau.»
«Don’t be silly,» she said. «I killed Dave Marineau.»
«Okay,» I said. «But that’s not the way Steve wants it.»
She stared at me. «You mean Steve came back here deliberately to take the blame?»
«If he had to, I guess. I think he really meant to cart Marineau off to the desert and lose him. Only a woman showed up here — Mrs. Marineau.»
«Yes,» the girl said tonelessly. «She thinks I was his mistress. That greasy spoon.»
«Were you?» I asked.
«Don’t try that again,» she said. «Even if I did work on Central Avenue once.» She went out of the room again.
Sounds of a suitcase being yanked about came into the living room. I went in after her. She was packing pieces of cobweb and packing them as if she liked nice things nicely packed.
«You don’t wear that stuff down in the tank,» I told her, leaning in the door.
She ignored me some more. «I was going to make a break for Mexico,» she said. «Then South America. I didn’t mean to shoot him. He roughed me up and tried to blackmail me into something and I went and got the gun. Then we struggled again and it went off. Then I ran away.»
«Just what Skalla said he did,» I said. «Hell, couldn’t you just have shot the — on purpose?»
«Not for your benefit,» she said. «Or any cop. Not when I did eight months in Dalhart, Texas, once for rolling a drunk. Not with that Marineau woman yelling her head off that I seduced him and then got sick of him.»
«A lot she’ll say,» I grunted. «After I tell how she spat in Skalla’s face when he had four slugs in him.»
She shivered. Her face whitened. She went on taking the things out of the suitcase and putting them in again.
«Did you roll the drunk really?»
She looked up at me, then down. «Yes,» she whispered.
I went over nearer to her. «Got any bruises or torn clothes to show?» I asked.
«No.»
«Too bad,» I said, and took hold of her.
Her eyes flamed at first and then turned to black stone, I tore her coat off, tore her up plenty, put hard fingers into her arms and neck and used my knuckles on her mouth. I let her go, panting. She reeled away from me, but didn’t quite fall.
«We’ll have to wait for the bruises to set and darken,» I said. «Then we’ll go downtown.»
She began to laugh. Then she went over to the mirror and looked at herself. She began to cry.
«Get out of here while I change my clothes!» she yelled. «I’ll give it a tumble. But if it makes any difference to Steve — I’m going to tell it right.»
«Aw, shut up and change your clothes,» I said.
I went out and banged the door.
I hadn’t even kissed her. I could have done that, at least. She wouldn’t have minded any more than the rest of the knocking about I gave her.
We rode the rest of the night, first in separate cars to hide hers in my garage, then in mine. We rode up the coast and had coffee and sandwiches at Malibu, then on up and over. We had breakfast at the bottom of the Ridge Route, just north of San Fernando.
Her face looked like a catcher’s mitt after a tough season. She had a lower lip the size of a banana and you could have cooked steaks on the bruises on her arms and neck, they were so hot.
With the first strong daylight we went to the City Hall.
They didn’t even think of holding her or checking her up. They practically wrote the statement themselves. She signed it blank-eyed, thinking of something else. Then a man from KLBL and his wife came down to get her.
So I didn’t get to ride her to a hotel. She didn’t get to see Skalla either, not then. He was under morphine.
He died at two-thirty the same afternoon. She was holding one of his huge, limp fingers, but he didn’t know her from the Queen of Siam.
MANDARIN’S JADE
ONE
300 CARATS OF FEI TSUI
I was smoking my pipe and making faces at the back of my name on the glass part of the office door when Violets M’Gee called me up. There hadn’t been any business in a week.
«How’s the sleuth racket, huh?» Violets asked. He’s a homicide dick in the sheriffs office, «Take a little flutter down at the beach? Body guarding or something, it is.’,
«Anything that goes with a dollar,» I said. «Except murder. I get three-fifty for that.»
«I bet you do nice neat work too. Here’s the lay, John.»
He gave me the name, address and telephone number of a man named Lindley Paul who lived at Castellamare, was a socialite and went everywhere except to work, lived alone with a Jap servant, and drove a very large car. The sheriffs office had nothing against him except that he had too much fun.
Castellamare was in the city limits, but didn’t look it, being a couple of dozen houses of various sizes hanging by their eyebrows to the side of a mountain, and looking as if a good sneeze would drop them down among the box lunches on the beach. There was a sidewalk café up on the highway, and beside that a cement arch which was really a pedestrian bridge. From the inner end of this a flight of white concrete steps went straight as a ruler up the side of the mountain.
Quinonal Avenue, Mr. Lindley Paul had told me over the phone, was the third street up, if I cared to walk. It was, he said, the easiest way to find his place the first time, the streets being designed in a pattern of interesting but rather intricate curves. People had been known to wander about in them for several hours without making any more yardage than an angleworm in a bait can.
So I parked my old blue Chrysler down below and walked up. It was a fine evening and there was still some sparkle on the water when I started. It had all gone when I reached the top. I sat down on the top step and rubbed my leg muscles and waited for my pulse to come down into the low hundreds. After that I shook my shirt loose from my back and went along to the house, which was the only one in the foreground.
It was a nice enough house, but it didn’t look like really important money. There was a salt-tarnished iron staircase going up to the front door and the garage was underneath the house. A long black battleship of a car was backed into it, an immense streamlined boat with enough hood for three cars and a coyote tail tied to the radiator cap. It looked as if it had cost more than the house.
The man who opened the door at the top of the iron stairs wore a white flannel suit with a violet satin scarf arranged loosely inside the collar. He had a soft brown neck, like the neck of a very strong woman. He had pale blue-green eyes, about the color of an aquamarine, features on the heavy side but very handsome, three precise ledges of thick blond hair rising from a smooth brown forehead, an inch more of height than I had — which made him six feet one — and the general look of a guy who would wear a white flannel suit with a violet satin scarf inside the collar.