“Yeah, but you were just before.”
“She didn’t send for you.” His eyes lifted and had the stony look still. And the flush still dyed his sharp cheekbones. “You forced yourself on her and talked about scandal and practically blackmailed yourself into a job.”
“Funny. As I remember it, we didn’t even talk job. I didn’t think there was anything in her story. I mean, anything to get my teeth into. Nowhere to start. And of course I suppose she had already told it to you.”
“She had. That beer joint on Santa Monica is a crook hideout. But that doesn’t mean anything. I couldn’t get a thing there. The hotel across the street smells too. Nobody we want. Cheap punks.”
“She tell you I forced myself on her?”
He dropped his eyes a little. “No.”
I grinned. “Have some coffee?”
“No.”
I went back into the kitchenette and made the coffee and waited for it to drip. Randall followed me out this time and stood in the doorway himself.
“This jewel gang has been working in Hollywood and around for a good ten years to my knowledge,” he said. “They went too far this time. They killed a man. I think I know why.”
“Well, if it’s a gang job and you break it, that will be the first gang murder solved since I lived in the town. And I could name and describe at least a dozen.”
“It’s nice of you to say that, Marlowe.”
“Correct me if I’m wrong.”
“Damn it,” he said irritably. “You’re not wrong. There were a couple solved for the record, but they were just rappers. Some punk took it for the high pillow.”
“Yeah. Coffee?”
“If I drink some, will you talk to me decently, man to man, without wise-cracking?”
“I’ll try. I don’t promise to spill all my ideas.”
“I can do without those,” he said acidly.
“That’s a nice suit you’re wearing.”
The flush dyed his face again. “This suit cost twenty seven-fifty,” he snapped.
“Oh Christ, a sensitive cop,” I said, and went back to the stove.
“That smells good. How do you make it?”
I poured. “French drip. Coarse ground coffee. No filter papers.” I got the sugar from the closet and the cream from the refrigerator. We sat down on opposite sides of the nook.
“Was that a gag, about your being sick, in a hospital?”
“No gag. I ran into a little trouble — down in Bay City. They took me in. Not the cooler, a private dope and liquor cure.”
His eyes got distant. “Bay City, eh? You like it the hard way, don’t you, Marlowe?”
“It’s not that I like it the hard way. It’s that I get it that way. But nothing like this before. I’ve been sapped twice, the second time by a police officer or a man who looked like one and claimed to be one. I’ve been beaten with my own gun and choked by a tough Indian. I’ve been thrown unconscious into this dope hospital and kept there locked up and part of the time probably strapped down. And I couldn’t prove any of it, except that I actually do have quite a nice collection of bruises and my left arm has been needled plenty.”
He stared hard at the corner of the table. “In Bay City,” he said slowly.
“The name’s like a song. A song in a dirty bathtub.”
“What were you doing down there?”
“I didn’t go down there. These cops took me over the line. I went to see a guy in Stillwood Heights. That’s in LA.”
“A man named Jules Amthor,” he said quietly. “Why did you swipe those cigarettes?”
I looked into my cup. The damned little fool. “It looked funny, him — Marriott — having that extra case. With reefers in it. It seems they make them up like Russian cigarettes down in Bay City with hollow mouthpieces and the Romanoff arms and everything.”
He pushed his empty cup at me and I refilled it. His eyes were going over my face line by line, corpuscle by corpuscle, like Sherlock Holmes with his magnifying glass or Thorndyke with his pocket lens.
“You ought to have told me,” he said bitterly. He sipped and wiped his lips with one of those fringed things they give you in apartment houses for napkins. “But you didn’t swipe them. The girl told me.”
“Aw well, hell,” I said. “A guy never gets to do anything in this country any more. Always women.”
“She likes you,” Randall said, like a polite FBI man in a movie, a little sad, but very manly. “Her old man was as straight a cop as ever lost a job. She had no business taking those things. She likes you.”
“She’s a nice girl. Not my type.”
“You don’t like them nice?” He had another cigarette going. The smoke was being fanned away from his face by his hand.
“I like smooth shiny girls, hardboiled and loaded with sin.”
“They take you to the cleaners,” Randall said indifferently.
“Sure. Where else have I ever been? What do you call this session?”
He smiled his first smile of the day. He probably allowed himself four.
“I’m not getting much out of you,” he said.
“I’ll give you a theory, but you are probably way ahead of me on it. This Marriott was a blackmailer of women, because Mrs. Grayle just about told me so. But he was something else. He was the finger man for the jewel mob. The society finger, the boy who would cultivate the victim and set the stage. He would cultivate women he could take out, get to know them pretty well. Take this holdup a week from Thursday. It smells. If Marriott hadn’t been driving the car, or hadn’t taken Mrs. Grayle to the Troc or hadn’t gone home the way he did, past that beer parlor, the holdup couldn’t have been brought off.”
“The chauffeur could have been driving,” Randall said reasonably. “But that wouldn’t have changed things much. Chauffeurs are not getting themselves pushed in the face with lead bullets by holdup men — for ninety a month. But there couldn’t be many stick-ups with Marriott alone with women or things would get talked about.”
“The whole point of this kind of racket is that things are not talked about,” I said. “In consideration for that the stuff is sold back cheap.”
Randall leaned back and shook his head. “You’ll have to do better than that to interest me. Women talk about anything. It would get around that this Marriott was a kind of tricky guy to go out with.”
“It probably did. That’s why they knocked him off.”
Randall stared at me woodenly. His spoon was stirring air in an empty cup. I reached over and he waved the pot aside. “Go on with that one,” he said.
“They used him up. His usefulness was exhausted. It was about time for him to get talked about a little, as you suggest. But you don’t quit in those rackets and you don’t get your time. So this last holdup was just that for him — the last. Look, they really asked very little for the jade considering its value. And Marriott handled the contact. But all the same Marriott was scared. At the last moment he thought he had better not go alone. And he figured a little trick that if anything did happen to him, something on him would point to a man, a man quite ruthless and clever enough to be the brains of that sort of mob, and a man in an unusual position to get information about rich women. It was a childish sort of trick but it did actually work.”
Randall shook his head. “A gang would have stripped him, perhaps even have taken the body out to sea and dumped it.”
“No. They wanted the job to look amateurish. They wanted to stay in business. They probably have another finger lined up,” I said.
Randall still shook his head. “The man these cigarettes pointed to is not the type. He has a good racket of his own. I’ve inquired. What did you think of him?”
His eyes were too blank, much too blank. I said: “He looked pretty damned deadly to me. And there’s no such thing as too much money, is there? And after all his psychic racket is a temporary racket for any one place. He has a vogue and everybody goes to him and after a while the vogue dies down and the business is licking its shoes. That is, if he’s a psychic and nothing else. Just like movie stars. Give him five years. He could work it that long. But
