She stood up and glared at me. «Oh, the Prendergast woman,» she said nastily. «The one with the hollow wooden legs.»
«They may be hollow,» I said.
She flushed and tore out of the room and came back in what seemed about three seconds with a funny little octagonal hat that had a red button on it, and a plaid overcoat with a suede collar and cuffs. «Let’s go,» she said breathlessly.
The Philip Courtney Prendergasts lived on one of those wide, curving streets where the houses seem to be too close together for their size and the amount of money they represent. A Jap gardener was manicuring a few acres of soft green lawn with the usual contemptuous expression Jap gardeners have. The house had an English slate roof and a porte-cochere, some nice imported trees, a trellis with bougainvillaea. It was a nice place and not loud. But Beverly Hills is Beverly Hills, so the butler had a wing collar and an accent like Alan Mowbray.
He ushered us through zones of silence into a room that was empty at the moment. It had large chesterfields and lounging chairs done in pale yellow leather and arranged around a fireplace, in front of which, on the glossy but not slippery floor, lay a rug as thin as silk and as old as Aesop’s aunt. A jet of flowers in the corner, another jet on a low table, walls of dully painted parchment, silence, comfort, space, coziness, a dash of the very modern and a dash of the very old. A very swell room.
Carol Pride sniffed at it.
The butler swung half of a leather-covered door and Mrs. Prendergast came in. Pale blue, with a hat and bag to match, all ready to go out. Pale blue gloves slapping lightly at a pale blue thigh. A smile, hints of depths in the black eyes, a high color, and even before she spoke a nice edge.
She flung both her hands out at us. Carol Pride managed to miss her share. I squeezed mine.
«Gorgeous of you to come,» she cried. «How nice to see you both again. I can still taste that whisky you had in your office. Terrible, wasn’t it?»
We all sat down.
I said: «I didn’t really need to take up your time by coming in person, Mrs. Prendergast. Everything turned out all right and you got your beads back.»
«Yes. That strange man. How curious of him to be what he was. I knew him too. Did you know that?»
«Soukesian? I thought perhaps you knew him,» I said.
«Oh, yes. Quite well. I must owe you a lot of money. And your poor head. How is it?»
Carol Pride was sitting close to me.
She said tinnily, between her teeth, almost to herself, but not quite: «Sawdust and creosote. Even at that the termites are getting her.»
I smiled at Mrs. Prendergast and she returned my smile with an angel on its back.
«You don’t owe me a nickel,» I said. «There was just one thing —»
«Impossible. I must. But let’s have a little Scotch, shall we?» She held her bag on her knees, pressed something under the chair, said: «A little Scotch and soda, Vernon.» She beamed. «Cute, eh? You can’t even see the mike. This house is just full of little things like that. Mr. Prendergast loves them. This one talks in the butler’s pantry.»
Carol Pride said: «I bet the one that talks by the chauffeur’s bed is cute too.»
Mrs. Prendergast didn’t hear her. The butler came in with a tray and mixed drinks, handed them around and went out.
Over the rim of her glass Mrs. Prendergast said: «You were nice not to tell the police I suspected Lin Paul of being — well, you know. Or that I had anything to do with your going to that awful beer parlor. By the way, how did you explain that?»
«Easy. I told them Paul told me himself. He was with you, remember?»
«But he didn’t, of course?» I thought her eyes were a little sly now.
«He told me practically nothing. That was the whole truth. And of course he didn’t tell me he’d been blackmailing you.»
I seemed to be aware that Carol Pride had stopped breathing. Mrs. Prendergast went on looking at me over the rim of her glass. Her face had, for a brief moment, a sort of half-silly, nymph-surprised-while-bathing expression. Then she put her glass down slowly and opened her bag in her lap and got a handkerchief out and bit it. There was silence.
«That,» she said in a low voice, «is rather fantastic, isn’t it?»
I grinned at her coldly. «The police are a lot like the newspapers, Mrs. Prendergast. For one reason and another they can’t use everything they get. But that doesn’t make them dumb. Reavis isn’t dumb. He doesn’t really think, any more than I do, that this Soukesian person was really running a tough jewel-heist gang. He couldn’t have handled people like Moose Magoon for five minutes. They’d have walked all over his face just for exercise. Yet Soukesian did have the necklace. That needs explaining. I think he bought it — from Moose Magoon. For the ten-grand pay-off supplied by you — and for some other little consideration likely paid in advance to get Moose to pull the job.»
Mrs. Prendergast lowered her lids until her eyes were almost shut, then she lifted them again and smiled. It was a rather ghastly smile. Carol Pride didn’t move beside me.
«Somebody wanted Lindley Paul killed,» I said. ’That’s obvious. You might kill a man accidentally with a blackjack, by not knowing how hard to hit with it. But you won’t put his brains all over his face. And if you beat him up just to teach him to be good, you wouldn’t beat him about the head at all. Because that way he wouldn’t know how badly you were hurting him. And you’d want him to know that — if you were just teaching him a lesson.»
«Wha — what,» the blonde woman asked huskily, «has all this to do with me?»
Her face was a mask. Her eyes held a warm bitterness like poisoned honey. One of her hands was roving around inside her bag. It became quiet, inside the bag.
«Moose Magoon would pull a job like that,» I bored on, «if he was paid for it. He’d pull any kind of a job. And Moose was an Armenian, so Soukesian might have known how to reach him. And Soukesian was just the type to go skirt-simple over a roto queen and be willing to do anything she wanted him to do, even have a man killed, especially if that man was a rival, especially if he was the kind of man who rolled around on floor cushions and maybe even took candid camera photos of his lady friends when they got a little too close to the Garden of Eden. That wouldn’t be too hard to understand, would it, Mrs. Prendergast?»
«Take a drink,» Carol Pride said icily. «You’re drooling. You don’t have to tell this baby she’s a tramp. She knows it. But how the hell could anybody blackmail her? You’ve got to have a reputation to be blackmailed.»
«Shut up!» I snapped. «The less you’ve got the more you’ll pay to keep it.» I watched the blond woman’s hand move suddenly inside her bag. «Don’t bother to pull the gun,» I told her. «I know they won’t hang you. I just wanted you to know you’re not kidding anybody and that that trap in the beer parlor was rigged to finish me off when Soukesian lost his nerve and that you were the one that sent me in there to get what they had for me. The rest of it’s dead wood now.»
But she pulled the gun out just the same and held it on her pale blue knee and smiled at me.
Carol Pride threw a glass at her. She dodged and the gun went off. A slug went softly and politely into the parchment-covered wall, high up, making no more sound than a finger going into a glove.
The door opened and an enormously tall, thin man strolled into the room.
«Shoot me,» he said. «I’m only your husband.»
The blonde looked at him. For just a short moment I thought she might be going to take him up on it.
Then she just smiled a little more and put the gun back into her bag and reached for her glass. «Listening in again?» she said dully. «Someday you’ll hear something you won’t like.»
The tall, thin man took a leather checkbook out of his pocket and cocked an eyebrow at me and said: «How much will keep you quiet — permanently?»