Copernik said: «You knew who the dame was all the time. You knew who Waldo was and where he lived. Right across the hall a floor below you. You knew this Waldo person had bumped a guy off and started to lam, only this broad came into his plans somewhere and he was anxious to meet up with her before he went away. Only he never got the chance. A heist guy from back East named Al Tessilore took care of that by taking care of Waldo. So you met the gal and hid her clothes and sent her on her way and kept your trap glued. That’s the way guys like you make your beans. Am I right?»
«Yeah,» I said. «Except that I only knew these things very recently. Who was Waldo?»
Copernik bared his teeth at me. Red spots burned high on his sallow cheeks. Ybarra, looking down at the floor, said very softly: «Waldo Ratigan. We got him from Washington by Teletype. He was a two-bit porch climber with a few small terms on him. He drove a car in a bank stick-up job in Detroit. He turned the gang in later and got a nolle prosse. One of the gang was this Al Tessilore. He hasn’t talked a word, but we think the meeting across the street was purely accidental.»
Ybarra spoke in the soft quiet modulated voice of a man for whom sounds have a meaning. I said: «Thanks, Ybarra. Can I smoke — or would Copernik kick it out of my mouth?»
Ybarra smiled suddenly. «You may smoke, sure,» he said.
«The guinea likes you all right,» Copernik jeered. «You never know what a guinea will like, do you?»
I lit a cigarette. Ybarra looked at Copernik and said very softly: «The word guinea — you overwork it. I don’t like it so well applied to me.»
«The hell with what you like, guinea.»
Ybarra smiled a little more. «You are making a mistake,» he said. He took a pocket nail file out and began to use it, looking down.
Copernik blared: «I smelled something rotten on you from the start, Marlowe. So when we make these two mugs, Ybarra and me think we’ll drift over and dabble a few more words with you. I bring one of Waldo’s morgue photos — nice work, the light just right in his eyes, his tie all straight and a white handkerchief showing just right in his pocket. Nice work. So on the way up, just as a matter of routine, we rout out the manager here and let him lamp it. And he knows the guy. He’s here as A. B. Hummel, Apartment Thirty-one. So we go in there and find a stiff. Then we go round and round with that. Nobody knows him yet, but he’s got some swell finger bruises under that strap and I hear they fit Waldo’s fingers very nicely.»
«That’s something,» I said. «I thought maybe I murdered him.»
Copernik stared at me a long time. His face had stopped grinning and was just a hard brutal face now. «Yeah. We got something else even,» he said. «We got Waldo’s getaway car — and what Waldo had in it to take with him.»
I blew cigarette smoke jerkily. The wind pounded the shut windows. The air in the room was foul.
«Oh, we’re bright boys,» Copernik sneered. «We never figured you with that much guts. Take a look at this.»
He plunged his bony hand into his coat pocket and drew something up slowly over the edge of the card table, drew it along the green top and left it there stretched out, gleaming. A string of white pearls with a clasp like a two-bladed propeller. They shimmered softly in the thick smoky air.
Lola Barsaly’s pearls. The pearls the flier had given her. The guy who was dead, the guy she still loved.
I stared at them, but I didn’t move. After a long moment Copernik said almost gravely: «Nice, ain’t they? Would you feel like telling us a story about now, Mis-ter Marlowe?»
I stood up and pushed the chair from under me, walked slowly across the room and stood looking down at the pearls. The largest was perhaps a third of an inch across. They were pure white, iridescent, with a mellow softness. I lifted them slowly off the card table from beside her clothes. They felt heavy, smooth, fine.
«Nice,» I said. «A lot of the trouble was about these. Yeah, I’ll talk now. They must be worth a lot of money.»
Ybarra laughed behind me. It was a very gentle laugh. «About a hundred dollars,» he said. «They’re good phonies — but they’re phony.»
I lifted the pearls again. Copernik’s glassy eyes gloated at me. «How do you tell?» I asked.
«I know pearls,» Ybarra said. «These are good stuff, the kind women very often have made on purpose, as a kind of insurance. But they are slick like glass. Real pearls are gritty between the edges of the teeth. Try.»
I put two or three of them between my teeth and moved my teeth back and forth, then sideways. Not quite biting them. The beads were hard and slick.
«Yes. They are very good,» Ybarra said. «Several even have little waves and flat spots, as real pearls might have.»
«Would they cost fifteen grand — if they were real?» I asked.
«Si. Probably. That’s hard to say. It depends on a lot of things.»
«This Waldo wasn’t so bad,» I said.
Copernik stood up quickly, but I didn’t see him swing. I was still looking down at the pearls. His fist caught me on the side of the face, against the molars. I tasted blood at once. I staggered back and made it look like a worse blow than it was.
«Sit down and talk, you bastard!» Copernik almost whispered.
I sat down and used a handkerchief to pat my cheek. I licked at the cut inside my mouth. Then I got up again and went over and picked up the cigarette he had knocked out of my mouth. I crushed it out in a tray and sat down again.
Ybarra filed at his nails and held one up against the lamp. There were beads of sweat on Copernik’s eyebrows, at the inner ends.
«You found the beads in Waldo’s car,» I said, looking at Ybarra. «Find any papers?»
He shook his head without looking up.
«I’d believe you,» I said. «Here it is. I never saw Waldo until he stepped into the cocktail bar tonight and asked about the girl. I knew nothing I didn’t tell. When I got home and stepped out of the elevator this girl, in the printed bolero jacket and the wide hat and the blue silk crêpe dress — all as he had described them — was waiting for the elevator, here on my floor. And she looked like a nice girl.»
Copernik laughed jeeringly. It didn’t make any difference to me. I had him cold. All he had to do was know that. He was going to know it now, very soon.
«I knew what she was up against as a police witness,» I said. «And I suspected there was something else to it. But I didn’t suspect for a minute that there was anything wrong with her. She was just a nice girl in a jam — and she didn’t even know she was in a jam. I got her in here. She pulled a gun on me. But she didn’t mean to use it.»
Copernik sat up very suddenly and he began to lick his lips. His face had a stony look now. A look like wet gray stone. He didn’t make a sound.
«Waldo had been her chauffeur,» I went on. «His name was then Joseph Coates. Her name is Mrs. Frank C. Barsaly. Her husband is a big hydroelectric engineer. Some guy gave her the pearls once and she told her husband they were just store pearls. Waldo got wise somehow there was a romance behind them and when Barsaly came home from South America and fired him, because he was too good-looking, he lifted the pearls.»
Ybarra lifted his head suddenly and his teeth flashed. «You mean he didn’t know they were phony?»
«I thought he fenced the real ones and had imitations fixed up,» I said.
Ybarra nodded. «It’s possible.»
«He lifted something else,» I said. «Some stuff from Barsaly’s briefcase that showed he was keeping a woman — out in Brentwood. He was blackmailing wife and husband both, without either knowing about the other. Get it so far?»
«I get it,» Copernik said harshly, between his tight lips. His face was still wet gray stone. «Get the hell on with it.»