clinking at me?'
'For doing what?'
'What did you want done?'
He slammed the desk hard. 'Listen, soldier. I ask you a question and you ask me another. We're not getting anywhere. I want to know where Geiger is, for my own personal reasons. I didn't like his racket and I didn't protect him. I happen to own this house. I'm not so crazy about that right now. I can believe that whatever you know about all this is under glass, or there would be a flock of johns squeaking sole leather around this dump. You haven't got anything to sell. My guess is you need a little protection yourself. So cough up.'
It was a good guess, but I wasn't going to let him know it. I lit a cigarette and blew the match out and flicked it at the glass eye of the totem pole. 'You're right,' I said. 'If anything has happened to Geiger, I'll have to give what I have to the law. Which puts it in the public domain and doesn't leave me anything to sell. So with your permission I'll just drift.'
His face whitened under the tan. He looked mean, fast and tough for a moment. He made a movement to lift the gun. I added casually: 'By the way, how is Mrs. Mars these days?'
I thought for a moment I had kidded him a little too far. His hand jerked at the gun, shaking. His face was stretched out by hard muscles. 'Beat it,' he said quite softly. 'I don't give a damn where you go or what you do when you get there. Only take a word of advice, soldier. Leave me out of your plans or you'll wish your name was Murphy and you lived in Limerick.'
'Well, that's not so far from Clonmel,' I said. 'I hear you had a pal came from there.'
He leaned down on the desk, frozen-eyed, unmoving. I went over to the door and opened it and looked back at him. His eyes had followed me, but his lean gray body had not moved. There was hate in his eyes. I went out and through the hedge and up the hill to my car and got into it. I turned it around and drove up over the crest. Nobody shot at me. After a few blocks I turned off, cut the motor and sat for a few moments. Nobody followed me either. I drove back into Hollywood.
14
It was ten minutes to five when I parked near the lobby entrance of the apartment house on Randall Place. A few windows were lit and radios were bleating at the dusk. I rode the automatic elevator up to the fourth floor and went along a wide hail carpeted in green and paneled in ivory. A cool breeze blew down the hail from the open screened door to the fire escape.
There was a small ivory pushbutton beside the door marked '405.' I pushed it and waited what seemed a long time. Then the door opened noiselessly about a foot. There was a steady, furtive air in the way it opened. The man was long-legged, long-waisted, high-shouldered and he had dark brown eyes in a brown expressionless face that had learned to control its expressions long ago. Hair like steel wool grew far back on his head and gave him a great deal of domed brown forehead that might at a careless glance have seemed a dwelling place for brains. His somber eyes probed at me impersonally. His long thin brown fingers held the edge of the door. He said nothing.
I said: 'Geiger?'
Nothing in the man's face changed that I could see. He brought a cigarette from behind the door and tucked it between his lips and drew a little smoke from it. The smoke came towards me in a lazy, contemptuous puff and behind it words in a cool, unhurried voice that had no more inflection than the voice of a faro dealer.
'You said what?'
'Geiger. Arthur Gwynn Geiger. The guy that has the books.'
The man considered that without any haste. He glanced down at the tip of his cigarette. His other hand, the one that had been holding the door, dropped out of sight. His shoulder had a look as though his hidden hand might be making motions.
'Don't know anybody by that name,' he said. 'Does he live around here?'
I smiled. He didn't like the smile. His eyes got nasty. I said: 'You're Joe Brody?'
The brown face hardened. 'So what? Got a grift, brother — or just amusing yourself?'
'So you're Joe Brody,' I said. 'And you don't know anybody named Geiger. That's very funny.'
'Yeah? You got a funny sense of humor maybe. Take it away and play on it somewhere else.'
I leaned against the door and gave him a dreamy smile. 'You got the books, Joe. I got the sucker list. We ought to talk things over.'
He didn't shift his eyes from my face. There was a faint sound in the room behind him, as though a metal curtain ring clicked lightly on a metal rod. He glanced sideways into the room. He opened the door wider.
'Why not — if you think you've got something?' he said coolly. He stood aside from the door. I went past him into the room.
It was a cheerful room with good furniture and not too much of it. French windows in the end wall opened on a stone porch and looked across the dusk at the foothills. Near the windows a closed door in the west wall and near the entrance door another door in the same wall. This last had a plush curtain drawn across it on a thin brass rod below the lintel.
That left the east wail, in which there were no doors. There was a davenport backed against the middle of it, so I sat down on the davenport. Brody shut the door and walked crab-fashion to a tall oak desk studded with square nails. A cedarwood box with gilt hinges lay on the lowered leaf of the desk. He carried the box to an easy chair midway between the other two doors and sat down. I dropped my hat on the davenport and waited.
'Well, I'm listening,' Brody said. He opened the cigar box and dropped his cigarette stub into a dish at his side. He put a long thin cigar in his mouth. 'Cigar?' He tossed one at me through the air.
I reached for it. Brody took a gun out of the cigar box and pointed it at my nose. I looked at the gun. It was a black Police .39. I had no argument against it at the moment.
'Neat, huh?' Brody said. 'Just kind of stand up a minute. Come forward just about two yards. You might grab a little air while you're doing that.' His voice was the elaborately casual voice of the tough guy in pictures. Pictures have made them all like that.
'Tsk, tsk,' I said, not moving at all. 'Such a lot of guns around town and so few brains. You're the second guy I've met within hours who seems to think a gat in the hand means a world by the tail. Put it down and don't be silly, Joe.'
His eyebrows came together and he pushed his chin at me. His eyes were mean.
'The other guy's name is Eddie Mars,' I said. 'Ever hear of him?'
'No.' Brody kept the gun pointed at me.
'If he ever gets wise to where you were last night in the rain, he'll wipe you off the way a check raiser wipes a check.'
'What would I be to Eddie Mars?' Brody asked coldly. But he lowered the gun to his knee.
'Not even a memory,' I said.
We stared at each other. I didn't look at the pointed black slipper that showed under the plush curtain on the doorway to my left.
Brody said quietly: 'Don't get me wrong. I'm not a tough guy — just careful. I don't know hell's first whisper about you. You might be a lifetaker for all I know.'
'You're not careful enough,' I said. 'That play with Geiger's books was terrible.'
He drew a long slow breath and let it out silently. Then he leaned back and crossed his long legs and held the Colt on his knee.
'Don't kid yourself I won't use this heat, if I have to,' he said. 'What's your story?'
'Have your friend with the pointed slippers come on in. She gets tired holding her breath.'
Brody called out without moving his eyes off my stomach. 'Come on in, Agnes.'
The curtain swung aside and the green-eyed, thigh-swinging ash blonde from Geiger's store joined us in the room. She looked at me with a kind of mangled hatred. Her nostrils were pinched and her eyes had darkened a couple of shades. She looked very unhappy.
'I knew damn well you were trouble,' she snapped at me. 'I told Joe to watch his step.'
