I gawked at him. «You heard what I said in here?»
«I think so. The pickup’s pretty good this weather. I believe you were accusing my wife of having something to do with somebody’s death, was it not?»
I kept on gawking at him.
«Well — how much do you want?» he snapped. «I won’t argue with you. I’m used to blackmailers.»
«Make it a million,» I said. «And she just took a shot at us. That will be four bits extra.»
The blonde laughed crazily and the laugh turned into a screech and then into a yell. The next thing she was rolling on the floor screaming and kicking her legs around.
The tall man went over to her quickly and bent down and hit her in the face with his open hand. You could have heard that smack a mile. When he straightened up again his face was a dusky red and the blonde was lying there sobbing.
«I’ll show you to the door,» he said. «You can call at my office tomorrow.»
«What for?» I asked, and took my hat. «You’ll still be a sap, even at your office.»
I took Carol Pride’s arm and steered her out of the room. We left the house silently. The Jap gardener had just pulled a bit of weed root out of the lawn and was holding it up and sneering at it.
We drove away from there, towards the foothills. A red spotlight near the old Beverly Hills Hotel stopped me after a while. I just sat there holding the wheel. The girl beside me didn’t move either. She didn’t say anything. She just looked straight ahead.
«I didn’t get the big warm feeling,» I said. «I didn’t get to smack anybody down. I didn’t make it stick.»
«She probably didn’t plan it in cold blood,» she whispered. «She just got mad and resentful and somebody sold her an idea. A woman like that takes men and gets tired of them and throws them away and they go crazy trying to get her back. It might have been just between the two lovers — Paul and Soukesian. But Mr. Magoon played rough.»
«She sent me to that beer parlor,» I said. «That’s enough for me. And Paul had ideas about Soukesian. I knew she’d miss. With the gun, I mean.»
I grabbed her. She was shivering.
A car came up behind us and the driver stood on his horn. I listened to it for a little while, then I let go of Carol Pride and got out of the roadster and walked back. He was a big man, behind the wheel of a sedan.
«That’s a boulevard stop,» he said sharply. «Lover’s Lane is farther up in the hills. Get out of there before I push you out.»
«Blow your horn just once more,» I begged him. «Just once. Then tell me which side you want the shiner on.»
He took a police captain’s badge out of his vest pocket. Then he grinned. Then we both grinned. It wasn’t my day.
I got back into the roadster and turned it around and started back towards Santa Monica. «Let’s go home and drink some more Scotch,» I said. «Your Scotch.»
BAY CITY BLUES
ONE
CINDERELLA SUICIDE
It must have been Friday because the fish smell from the Mansion House coffee-shop next door was strong enough to build a garage on. Apart from that it was a nice warm day in spring, the tail of the afternoon, and there hadn’t been any business in a week. I had my heels in the groove on my desk and was sunning my ankles in a wedge of sunlight when the phone rang. I took my hat off it and made a yawning sound into the mouthpiece.
A voice said: «I heard that. You oughta be ashamed of yourself, Johnny Dalmas. Ever hear of the Austrian case?»
It was Violets M’Gee, a homicide dick in the sheriff’s office and a very nice guy except for one bad habit — passing me cases where I got tossed around and didn’t make enough money to buy a secondhand corset.
«No.»
«One of those things down at the beach — Bay City. I hear the little burg went sour again the last time they elected themselves a mayor, but the sheriff lives down there and we like to be nice. We ain’t tramped on it. They say the gambling boys put up thirty grand campaign money, so now you get a racing form with the bill of fare in the hash houses.»
I yawned again.
«I heard that, too,» M’Gee barked, «If you ain’t interested I’ll just bite my other thumbnail and let the whole thing go. The guy’s got a little dough to spend, he says.»
«What guy?»
«This Matson, the guy that found the stiff.»
«What stiff?»
«You don’t know nothing about the Austrian case, huh?»
«Didn’t I say I didn’t?»
«You air t done nothing but yawn and say ’What.’ Okay. We’ll just iet the poor guy get bumped off and City Homicide can worry about that one, now he’s up here in town.»
«This Matson? Who’s going to bump him off?»
«Well, if he knew that, he wouldn’t want to hire no shamus to find out, would he? And him in your own racket until they bust him a while back and now he can’t go out hardly, on account of these guys with guns are bothering him.»
«Come on over,» I said. «My left arm is getting tired.»
«I’m on duty.»
«I was just going down to the drugstore for a quart of V.0. Scotch.»
«That’s me you hear knocking on the door,» M’Gee said.
He arrived in less than half an hour — a large, pleasant-faced man with silvery hair and a dimpled chin and a tiny little mouth made to kiss babies with. He wore a well-pressed blue suit, polished square-toed shoes, and an elk’s tooth on a gold chain hung across his stomach.
He sat down carefully, the way a fat man sits down, and unscrewed the top of the whisky bottle and sniffed it carefully, to make sure I hadn’t refilled a good bottle with ninety-eight cent hooch, the way they do in the bars. Then he poured himself a big drink and rolled some of it around on his tongue and pawed my office with his eyes.
«No wonder you sit around waiting for jobs,» he said. «You gotta have front these days.»
«You could spare me a little,» I said. «What about this Matson and this Austrian case?»
M’Gee finished his drink and poured another, not so large. He watched me play with a cigarette.
«A monoxide Dutch,» he said. «A blond him named Austrian, wife of a doctor down at Bay City. A guy that runs around all night keeping movie hams from having pink elephants for breakfast. So the frill went around on her own. The night she croaked herself she was over to Vance Conned’s club on the bluff north of there. Know it?»
«Yeah. It used to be a beach club, with a nice private beach down below and the swellest legs in Hollywood in front of the cabanas. She went there to play roulette, huh?»
«Well, if we had any gambling joints in this county,» M’Gee said, «I’d say the Club Conned would be one of them and there would be roulette. Say she played roulette. They tell me she had more personal games she played with Conned, but say she played roulette on the side. She loses, which is what roulette is for. That night she loses her shirt and she gets sore and throws a wingding all over the house. Conned gets her into his private room and pages the doc, her husband, through the Physicians’ Exchange. So then the doe —»
«Wait a minute,» I said. «Don’t tell me all this was in evidence — not with the gambling syndicate we would have in this county, if we had a gambling syndicate.»
M’Gee looked at me pityingly. «My wife’s got a kid brother works on a throw-away paper down there. They didn’t have no inquest. Well, the doe steams over to Conned’s joint and pokes his wife in the arm with a needle to quiet her down. But he can’t take her home on account of he has a babe case in Brentwood Heights. So Vance Conned gets his personal car out and takes her home and meantime the doe has called up his office nurse and asked her to go over to the house and see that his wifeis all right. Which is all done, and Conned goes back to his chips and the nurse sees her in bed and leaves, and the maid goes back to bed. This is maybe midnight, or just a little after.