like Malloy.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Malloy all right. He probably didn’t mean to kill her, though. He’s just too strong.”
“That won’t help him any,” Randall said grimly.
“I suppose not. I just make the point that Malloy does not appear to me to be a killer type. Kill if cornered — but not for pleasure or money — and not women.”
“Is that an important point?” he asked dryly.
“Maybe you know enough to know what’s important. And what isn’t. I don’t.”
He stared at me long enough for a police announcer to have time to put out another bulletin about the holdup of the Greek restaurant on South San Pedro. The suspect was now in custody. It turned out later that he was a fourteen-year-old Mexican armed with a water-pistol. So much for eye-witnesses.
Randall waited until the announcer stopped and went on:
“We got friendly this morning. Let’s stay that way. Go home and lie down and have a good rest. You look pretty peaked. Just let me and the police department handle the Marriott killing and find Moose Malloy and so on.”
“I got paid on the Marriott business,” I said. “I fell down on the job. Mrs. Grayle has hired me. What do you want me to do — retire and live on my fat?”
He stared at me again. “I know. I’m human. They give you guys licenses, which must mean they expect you to do something with them besides hang them on the wall in your office. On the other hand any acting-captain with a grouch can break you.”
“Not with the Grayles behind me.”
He studied it. He hated to admit I could be even half right. So he frowned and tapped his desk.
“Just so we understand each other,” he said after a pause. “If you crab this case, you’ll be in a jam. It may be a jam you can wriggle out of this time. I don’t know. But little by little you will build up a body of hostility in this department that will make it damn hard for you to do any work.”
“Every private dick faces that every day of his life — unless he’s just a divorce man.”
“You can’t work on murders.”
“You’ve said your piece. I heard you say it. I don’t expect to go out and accomplish things a big police department can’t accomplish. If I have any small private notions, they are just that — small and private.”
He leaned slowly across the desk. His thin restless fingers tap-tapped, like the poinsettia shoots tapping against Mrs. Jessie Florian’s front wail. His creamy gray hair shone. His cool steady eyes were on mine.
“Let’s go on,” he said. “With what there is to tell. Amthor’s away on a trip. His wife — and secretary — doesn’t know or won’t say where. The Indian has also disappeared. Will you sign a complaint against these people?”
“No. I couldn’t make it stick.”
He looked relieved. “The wife says she never heard of you. As to these two Bay City cops, if that’s what they were — that’s out of my hands. I’d rather not have the thing any more complicated than it is. One thing I feel pretty sure of — Amthor had nothing to do with Marriott’s death. The cigarettes with his card in them were just a plant.”
“Doc Sonderborg?”
He spread his hands. “The whole shebang skipped. Men from the D.A.’s office went down there on the quiet. No contact with Bay City at all. The house is locked up and empty. They got in, of course. Some hasty attempt had been made to clean up, but there are prints — plenty of them. It will take a week to work out what we have. There’s a wall safe they’re working on now. Probably had dope in it — and other things. My guess is that Sonderborg will have a record, not local, somewhere else, for abortion, or treating gunshot wounds or altering finger tips or for illegal use of dope. If it comes under Federal statutes, we’ll get a lot of help.”
“He said he was a medical doctor,” I said.
Randall shrugged. “May have been once. May never have been convicted. There’s a guy practicing medicine near Palm Springs right now who was indicted as a dope peddler in Hollywood five years ago. He was as guilty as hell — but the protection worked. He got off. Anything else worrying you?”
“What do you know about Brunette — for telling?”
“Brunette’s a gambler. He’s making plenty. He’s making it an easy way.”
“All right,” I said, and started to get up. “That sounds reasonable. But it doesn’t bring us any nearer to this jewel heist gang that killed Marriott.”
“I can’t tell you everything, Marlowe.”
“I don’t expect it,” I said. “By the way, Jessie Florian told me — the second time I saw her — that she had been a servant in Marriott’s family once. That was why he was sending her money. Anything to support that?”
“Yes. Letters in his safety-deposit box from her thanking him and saying the same thing.” He looked as if he was going to lose his temper. “Now will you for God’s sake go home and mind your own business?”
“Nice of him to take such care of the letters, wasn’t it?”
He lifted his eyes until their glance rested on the top of my head. Then he lowered the lids until half the iris was covered. He looked at me like that for a long ten seconds. Then he smiled. He was doing an awful lot of smiling that day. Using up a whole week’s supply.
“I have a theory about that,” he said. “It’s crazy, but it’s human nature. Marriott was by the circumstances of his life a threatened man. All crooks are gamblers, more or less, and all gamblers are superstitious — more or less. I think Jessie Florian was Marriott’s lucky piece. As long as he took care of her, nothing would happen to him.”
I turned my head and looked for the pink-headed bug. He had tried two corners of the room now and was moving off disconsolately towards a third. I went over and picked him up in my handkerchief and carried him back to the desk.
“Look,” I said. “This room is eighteen floors above ground. And this little bug climbs all the way up here just to make a friend. Me. My luck piece.” I folded the bug carefully into the soft part of the handkerchief and tucked the handkerchief into my pocket. Randall was pie-eyed. His mouth moved, but nothing came out of it.
“I wonder whose lucky piece Marriott was,” I said.
“Not yours, pal.” His voice was acid — cold acid.
“Perhaps not yours either.” My voice was just a voice. I went out of the room and shut the door.
I rode the express elevator down to the Spring Street entrance and walked out on the front porch of City Hall and down some steps and over to the flower beds. I put the pink bug down carefully behind a bush.
I wondered, in the taxi going home, how long it would take him to make the Homicide Bureau again.
I got my car out of the garage at the back of the apartment house and ate some lunch in Hollywood before I started down to Bay City. It was a beautiful cool sunny afternoon down at the beach. I left Arguello Boulevard at Third Street and drove over to the City Hall.
32
It was a cheap looking building for so prosperous a town. It looked more like something out of the Bible belt. Bums sat unmolested in a long row on the retaining wall that kept the front lawn — now mostly Bermuda grass — from falling into the street. The building was of three stories and had an old belfry at the top, and the bell still hanging in the belfry. They had probably rung it for the volunteer fire brigade back in the good old chaw-and-spit days.
The cracked walk and the front steps let to open double doors in which a knot of obvious city hall fixers hung around waiting for something to happen so they could make something else out of it. They all had the well-fed stomachs, the careful eyes, the nice clothes and the reach-me-down manners. They gave me about four inches to get in.
Inside was a long dark hallway that had been mopped the day McKinley was inaugurated. A wooden sign pointed out the police department Information Desk. A uniformed man dozed behind a pint-sized PBX set into the end of a scarred wooden counter. A plainclothesman with his coat off and his hog’s leg looking like a fire plug against his ribs took one eye off his evening paper, bonged a spittoon ten feet away from him, yawned, and said the
