«Yeah. He fooled me on that, the little so-and-so. And I told you to lay off the Jeeter kid. That’s cold now. It’s Frisky I’m thinking about. Crazy, ain’t it? Me bothering about a dimwit like that, packin’ him around with me, and letting him get hisseif bumped off.» He sighed and added simply, «He was my kid brother.»
«I didn’t kill him,» I said.
He smiled a little more. He had never stopped smiling. The corners of his mouth just tucked in a little deeper.
«Yeah?»
He slid the safety catch off the Luger, laid it carefully on the arm of the chair at his right, and reached into his pocket. What he brought out made me as cold as an ice bucket.
It was a metal tube, dark and rough-looking, about four inches long and drilled with a lot of small holes. He held his Woodsman in his left hand and began to screw the tube casually on the end of it.
«Silencer,» he said. «They’re the bunk, I guess you smart guys think. This one ain’t the bunk — not for three shots. I oughta know. I made it myself.»
I moistened my lips again. «It’ll work for one shot,» I said. «Then it jams your action. That one looks like cast-iron. It will probably blow your hand off.»
He smiled his waxy smile, screwed it on, slowly, lovingly, gave it a last hard turn and sat back relaxed. «Not this baby. She’s packed with steel wool and that’s good for three shots, like I said. Then you got to repack it. And there ain’t enough back pressure to jam the action on this gun. You feel good? I’d like you to feel good.»
«I feel swell, you sadistic son of a bitch,» I said.
«I’m having you lie down on the bed after a while. You won’t feel nothing. I’m kind of fussy about my killings. Frisky didn’t feel nothing, I guess. You got him neat.»
«You don’t see good,» I sneered. «The chauffeur got him with a Smith & Wesson forty-four. I didn’t even fire.»
«Uh-huh.»
«O.K., you don’t believe me,» I said. «What did you kill Arbogast for? There was nothing fussy about that killing. He was just shot at his desk, three times with a twenty-two and he fell down on the floor. What did he ever do to your filthy little brother?»
He jerked the gun up, but his smile held. «You got guts,» he said. «Who is this here Arbogast?»
I told him. I told him slowly and carefully, in detail. I told him a lot of things. And he began in some vague way to look worried. His eyes flickered at me, away, back again, restlessly, like a hummingbird.
«I don’t know any party named Arbogast, pal,» he said slowly. «Never heard of him. And I ain’t shot any fat guys today.»
«You killed him,» I said. «And you killed young Jeeter — in the girl’s apartment at the El Milano. He’s lying there dead right now. You’re working for Marty Estel. He’s going to be awfully damn sorry about that kill. Go ahead and make it three in a row.»
His face froze. The smile went away at last. His whole face looked waxy now. He opened his mouth and breathed through it, and his breath made a restless worrying sound. I could see the faint glitter of sweat on his forehead, and I could feel the cold from the evaporation of sweat on mine.
Waxnose said very gently: «I ain’t killed anybody at all, friend. Not anybody. I wasn’t hired to kill people. Until Frisky stopped that slug I didn’t have no such ideas. That’s straight.»
I tried not to stare at the metal tube on the end of the Woodsman.
A flame flickered at the back of his eyes, a small, weak, smoky flame. It seemed to grow larger and clearer. He looked down at the floor between his feet. I looked around at the light switch, but it was too far away. He looked up again. Very slowly he began to unscrew the silencer. He had it loose in his hand. He dropped it back into his pocket, stood up, holding the two guns, one in each hand. Then he had another idea. He sat down again, took all the shells out of the Luger quickly and threw it on the floor after them.
He came towards me softly across the room. «I guess this is your lucky day,» he said. «I got to go a place and see a guy.»
«I knew all along it was my lucky day. I’ve been feeling so good.»
He moved delicately around me to the door and opened it a foot and started through the narrow opening, smiling again.
«I gotta see a guy,» he said very gently, and his tongue moved along his lips.
«Not yet,» I said, and jumped.
His gun hand was at the edge of the door, almost beyond the edge. I hit the door hard and he couldn’t bring it in quickly enough. He couldn’t get out of the way. I pinned him in the doorway, and used all the strength I had. It was a crazy thing. He had given me a break and all I had to do was to stand still and let him go. But I had a guy to see too — and I wanted to see him first.
Waxnose leered at me. He grunted. He fought with his hand beyond the door edge. I shifted and hit his jaw with all I had. It was enough. He went limp. I hit him again. His head bounced against the wood. I heard a light thud beyond the door edge. I hit him a third time. I never bit anything any harder.
I took my weight back from the door then and he slid towards me, blank-eyed, rubber-kneed and I caught him and twisted his empty hands behind him and let him fall. I stood over him panting. I went to the door. His Woodsman lay almost on the sill. I picked it up, dropped it into my pocket — not the pocket that held Miss Huntress’ gun. He hadn’t even found that.
There he lay on the floor. He was thin, he had no weight, but I panted just the same. In a little while his eyes flickered open and looked up at me.
«Greedy guy,» he whispered wearily. «Why did I ever leave Saint Looey?»
I snapped handcuffs on his wrists and pulled him by the shoulders into the dressing room and tied his ankles with a piece of rope. I left him laying on his back, a little sideways, his nose as white as ever, his eyes empty now, his lips moving a little as if he were talking to himself. A funny lad, not all bad, but not so pure I had to weep over him either.
I put my Luger together and left with my three guns. There was nobody outside the apartment house.
SEVEN
The Jeeter mansion was on a nine- or ten-acre knoll, a big colonial pile with fat white columns and dormer windows and magnolias and a four-car garage. There was a circular parking space at the top of the driveway with two cars parked in it — one was the big dreadnaught in which I’d ridden and the other a canary-yellow sports convertible I had seen before.
I rang a bell the size of a silver dollar. The door opened and a tall narrow cold-eyed bird in dark clothes looked out at me.
«Mr. Jeeter home? Mr. Jeeter, Senior?»
May I arsk who is calling?» The accent was a little too thick, like cut Scotch.
«Philip Marlowe. I’m working for him. Maybe I had ought to of gone to the servant’s entrance.»
He hitched a finger at a wing collar and looked at me without pleasure. «Aw, possibly. You may step in. I shall inform Mr. Jeeter. I believe he is engaged at the moment. Kindly wait ’ere in the ’all.»
«The act stinks,» I said. «English butlers aren’t dropping their h’s this year.»
«Smart guy, huh?» he snarled, in a voice from not any farther across the Atlantic than Hoboken. «Wait here.» He slid away.
I sat down in a carved chair and felt thirsty. After a while the butler came cat-footing back along the hall and jerked his chin at me unpleasantly.
We went along a mile of hallway. At the end it broadened without any doors into a huge sunroom. On the far side of the sunroom the butler opened a wide door and I stepped past him into an oval room with a black-and-silver oval rug, a black marble table in the middle of the rug, stiff high-backed carved chairs against the walls, a huge oval mirror with a rounded surface that made me look like a pygmy with water on the brain, and in the room three people.