«Seems to be dead,» he said, and rolled him around a little more. «Oh yeah, I see where they went in. Nice clean work. You two see him get it?»
I said yes. The kid behind the bar said nothing. I told them about it, that the killer seemed to have left in Waldo’s car.
The cop yanked Waldo’s wallet out, went through it rapidly and whistled. «Plenty jack and no driver’s license.» He put the wallet away. «O.K., we didn’t touch him, see? Just a chance we could find did he have a car and put it on the air.»
«The hell you didn’t touch him,» Lew Patrolle said.
The cop gave him one of those looks. «O.K., pal,» he said softly. «We touched him.»
The kid picked up a clean highball glass and began to polish it. He polished it all the rest of the time we were there.
In another minute a homicide fast-wagon sirened up and screeched to a stop outside the door and four men came in, two dicks, a photographer and a laboratory man. I didn’t know either of the dicks. You can be in the detecting business a long time and not know all the men on a big city force.
One of them was a short, smooth, dark, quiet, smiling man, with curly black hair and soft intelligent eyes. The other was big, raw-boned, long-jawed, with a veined nose and glassy eyes. He looked like a heavy drinker. He looked tough, but he looked as if he thought he was a little tougher than he was. He shooed me into the last booth against the wall and his partner got the kid up front and the bluecoats went out. The fingerprint man and photographer set about their work.
A medical examiner came, stayed just long enough to get sore because there was no phone for him to call the morgue wagon.
The short dick emptied Waldo’s pockets and then emptied his wallet and dumped everything into a large handkerchief on a booth table. I saw a lot of currency, keys, cigarettes, another handkerchief, very little else.
The big dick pushed me back into the end of the half-booth. «Give,» he said. «I’m Copernik, Detective Lieutenant.»
I put my wallet in front of him. He looked at it, went through it, tossed it back, made a note in a book.
«Philip Marlowe, huh? A shamus. You here on business?»
«Drinking business,» I said. «I live just across the street in the Berglund.»
«Know this kid up front?»
«I’ve been in here once since he opened up.»
«See anything funny about him now?»
«No.»
«Takes it too light for a young fellow, don’t he? Never mind answering. Just tell the story.»
I told it — three times. Once for him to get the outline, once for him to get the details and once for him to see if I had it too pat. At the end he said: «This dame interests me. And the killer called the guy Waldo, yet didn’t seem to be anyways sure he would be in. I mean, if Waldo wasn’t sure the dame would be here, nobody could be sure Waldo would be here.»
«That’s pretty deep,» I said.
He studied me. I wasn’t smiling. «Sounds like a grudge job, don’t it? Don’t sound planned. No getaway except by accident. A guy don’t leave his car unlocked much in this town. And the killer works in front of two good witnesses. I don’t like that.»
«I don’t like being a witness,» I said. «The pay’s too low.»
He grinned. His teeth had a freckled look. «Was the killer drunk really?»
«With that shooting? No.»
«Me too. Well, it’s a simple job. The guy will have a record and he’s left plenty prints. Even if we don’t have his mug here we’ll make him in hours. He had something on Waldo, but he wasn’t meeting Waldo tonight. Waldo just dropped in to ask about a dame he had a date with and had missed connections on. It’s a hot night and this wind would kill a girl’s face. She’d be apt to drop in somewhere to wait. So the killer feeds Waldo two in the right place and scrams and don’t worry about you boys at all. It’s that simple.»
«Yeah,» I said.
«It’s so simple it stinks,» Copernik said.
He took his felt hat off and tousled up his ratty blond hair and leaned his head on his hands. He had a long mean horse face. He got a handkerchief out and mopped it, and the back of his neck and the back of his hands. He got a comb out and combed his hair — he looked worse with it combed — and put his hat back on.
«I was just thinking,» I said.
«Yeah? What?»
«This Waldo knew just how the girl was dressed. So he must already have been with her tonight.»
«So, what? Maybe he had to go to the can. And when he came back she’s gone. Maybe she changed her mind about him.»
«That’s right,» I said.
But that wasn’t what I was thinking at all. I was thinking that Waldo had described the girl’s clothes in a way the ordinary man wouldn’t know how to describe them. Printed bolero jacket over blue crêpe silk dress. I didn’t even know what a bolero jacket was, And I might have said blue dress or even blue silk dress, but never blue crêpe silk dress.
After a while two men came with a basket. Lew Petrolle was still polishing his glass and talking to the short dark dick.
We all went down to Headquarters.
Lew Petrolle was all right when they checked on him. His father had a grape ranch near Antioch in Contra Costa County. He had given Lew a thousand dollars to go into business and Lew had opened the cocktail bar, neon sign and all, on eight hundred flat.
They let him go and told him to keep the bar closed until they were sure they didn’t want to do any more printing. He shook hands all around and grinned and said he guessed the killing would be good for business after all, because nobody believed a newspaper account of anything and people would come to him for the story and buy drinks while he was telling it.
«There’s a guy won’t ever do any worrying,» Copernik said, when he was gone. «Over anybody else.»
«Poor Waldo,» I said. «The prints any good?»
«Kind of smudged,» Copernik said sourly. «But we’ll get a classification and teletype it to Washington some time tonight. If it don’t click, you’ll be in for a day on the steel picture racks downstairs.»
I shook hands with him and his partner, whose name was Ybarra, and left. They didn’t know who Waldo was yet either. Nothing in his pockets told.
TWO
I got back to my street about 9 P.M. I looked up and down the block before I went into the Berglund. The cocktail bar was farther down on the other side, dark, with a nose or two against the glass, but no real crowd. People had seen the law and the morgue wagon, but they didn’t know what had happened. Except the boys playing pinball games in the drugstore on the corner. They know everything, except how to hold a job.
The wind was still blowing, oven-hot, swirling dust and torn paper up against the walls.
I went into the lobby of the apartment house and rode the automatic elevator up to the fourth floor. I unwound the doors and stepped out and there was a tall girl standing there waiting for the car.
She had brown wavy hair under a wide-brimmed straw hat with a velvet band and loose bow. She had wide blue eyes and eyelashes that didn’t quite reach her chin. She wore a blue dress that might have been crêpe silk, simple in lines but not missing any curves. Over it she wore what might have been a print bolero jacket.
I said: «Is that a bolero jacket?»
She gave me a distant glance and made a motion as if to brush a cobweb out of the way.
«Yes. Would you mind — I’m rather in a hurry. I’d like —»
I didn’t move. I blocked her off from the elevator. We stared at each other and she flushed very slowly.