She hung in my arms as limp as a wet tea towel and not as heavy as Orrin Quest, being less dead, but heavy enough to make the tendons in my knee joints ache. Her eyes were closed when I pushed her head away from my chest. Her breath was inaudible and she had that bluish look on the parted lips.
I got my right hand under her knees and carried her over to a gold couch and spread her out on it. I straightened up and went along to the bar. There was a telephone on the corner of it but I couldn’t find the way through to the bottles. So I had to swing over the top. I got a likely looking bottle with a blue and silver label and five stars on it. The cork had been loosened. I poured dark and pungent brandy into the wrong kind of glass and went back over the bar top, taking the bottle with me.
She was lying as I had left her, but her eyes were open.
“Can you hold a glass?”
She could, with a little help. She drank the brandy and pressed the edge of the glass hard against her lips as if she wanted to hold them still. I watched her breathe into the glass and cloud it. A slow smile formed itself on her mouth.
“It’s cold tonight,” she said.
She swung her legs over the edge of the couch and put her feet on the floor.
“More,” she said, holding the glass out. I poured into it. “Where’s yours?”
“Not drinking. My emotions are being worked on enough without that.”
The second drink made her shudder. But the blue look had gone away from her mouth and her lips didn’t glare like stop lights and the little etched lines at the corners of her eyes were not in relief any more.
“Who’s working on your emotions?”
“Oh, a lot of women that keep throwing their arms around my neck and fainting on me and getting kissed and so forth. Quite a full couple of days for a beat-up gumshoe with no yacht.”
“No yacht,” she said. “I’d hate that. I was brought up rich.”
“Yeah,” I said. “You were born with a Cadillac in your mouth. And I could guess where.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Could you?”
“Didn’t think it was a very tight secret, did you?”
“I—I—” She broke off and made a helpless gesture. “I can’t think of any lines tonight.”
“It’s the Technicolor dialogue,” I said. “It freezes up on you.”
“Aren’t we talking like a couple of nuts?”
“We could get sensible. Where’s Steelgrave?”
She just looked at me. She held the empty glass out and I took it and put it somewhere or other without taking my eyes off her. Nor she hers off me. It seemed as if a long long minute went by.
“He was here,” she said at last, as slowly as if she had to invent the words one at a time. “May I have a cigarette?”
“The old cigarette stall,” I said. I got a couple out and put them in my mouth and lit them. I leaned across and tucked one between her ruby lips.
“Nothing’s cornier than that,” she said. “Except maybe butterfly kisses.”
“Sex is a wonderful thing,” I said. “When you don’t want to answer questions.”
She puffed loosely and blinked, then put her hand up to adjust the cigarette. After all these years I can never put a cigarette in a girl’s mouth where she wants it.
She gave her head a toss and swung the soft loose hair around her cheeks and watched me to see how hard that hit me. All the whiteness had gone now. Her cheeks were a little flushed. But behind her eyes things watched and waited.
“You’re rather nice,” she said, when I didn’t do anything sensational. “For the kind of guy you are.”
I stood that well too.
“But I don’t really know what kind of guy you are, do I?” She laughed suddenly and a tear came from nowhere and slid down her cheek.
“For all I know you might be nice for any kind of guy.”
She snatched the cigarette loose and put her hand to her mouth and bit on it. “What’s the matter with me? Am I drunk?”
“You’re stalling for time,” I said. “But I can’t make up my mind whether it’s to give someone time to get here—or to give somebody time to get far away from here. And again it could just be brandy on top of shock. You’re a little girl and you want to cry into your mother’s apron.”
“Not my mother,” she said. “I could get as far crying into a rain barrel.”
“Dealt and passed. So where is Steelgrave?”
“You ought to be glad wherever he is. He had to kill you. Or thought he had.”
“You wanted me here, didn’t you? Were you that fond of him?”
She blew cigarette ash off the back of her hand. A flake of it went into my eye and made me blink.
“I must have been,” she said, “once.” She put a hand down on her knee and spread the fingers out, studying the nails. She brought her eyes up slowly without moving her head. “It seems like about a thousand years ago I met a nice quiet little guy who knew how to behave in public and didn’t shoot his charm around every bistro in town. Yes, I liked him. I liked him a lot.”
She put her hand up to her mouth and bit a knuckle. Then she put the same hand into the pocket of the fur coat and brought out a white-handled automatic, the brother of the one I had myself.
“And in the end I liked him with this,” she said.
I went over and took it out of her hand. I sniffed the muzzle. Yes. That made two of them fired around.
“Aren’t you going to wrap it up in a handkerchief, the way they do in the movies?”
I just dropped it into my other pocket, where it could pick up a few interesting crumbs of tobacco and some seeds that grow only on the southeast slope of the Beverly Hills City Hall. It might amuse a police chemist for a while.
28
I watched her for a minute, biting at the end of my lip. She watched me. I saw no change of expression. Then I started prowling the room with my eyes. I lifted up the dust cover on one of the long tables. Under it was a roulette layout but no wheel. Under the table was nothing.
“Try that chair with the magnolias on it,” she said.
She didn’t look towards it so I had to find it myself. Surprising how long it took me. It was a high-backed wing chair, covered in flowered chintz, the kind of chair that a long time ago was intended to keep the draft off while you sat crouched over a fire of cannel coal.
It was turned away from me. I went over there walking softly, in low gear. It almost faced the wall. Even at that it seemed ridiculous that I hadn’t spotted him on my way back from the bar. He leaned in the corner of the chair with his head tilted back. His carnation was red and white and looked as fresh as though the flower girl had just pinned it into his lapel. His eyes were half open as such eyes usually are. They stared at a point in the corner of the ceiling. The bullet had gone through the outside pocket of his double-breasted jacket. It had been fired by someone who knew where the heart was.
I touched his cheek and it was still warm. I lifted his hand and let it fall. It was quite limp. It felt like the back of somebody’s hand. I reached for the big artery in his neck. No blood moved in him and very little had stained his jacket. I wiped my hands off on my handkerchief and stood for a little longer looking down at his quiet little face. Everything I had done or not done, everything wrong and everything right—all wasted.
I went back and sat down near her and squeezed my kneecaps.
“What did you expect me to do?” she asked. “He killed my brother.”
“Your brother was no angel.”
“He didn’t have to kill him.”
“Somebody had to—and quick.” Her eyes widened suddenly.
I said: “Didn’t you ever wonder why Steelgrave never went after me and why he let you go to the Van Nuys yesterday instead of going himself? Didn’t you ever wonder why a fellow with his resources and experience never tried to get hold of those photographs, no matter what he had to do to get them?”