“Would that do?” she asked him softly.
He stepped forward and swung a fist. It caught her on the side of the face and she went down and sat on the floor, a long leg straight out in front of her, one hand to her jaw, her very blue eyes looking up at him.
“Maybe you oughtn’t to have done that,” she said. “Maybe I won’t go through with it, now.”
“You’ll go through with it, all right. You won’t have any choice. You’ll get off easy enough. Christ, I know that. With your looks. But you’ll go through with it, angel. Your fingerprints are on that gun.”
She got to her feet slowly, still with the hand to her jaw. Then she smiled. “I knew he was dead,” she said. “That is my key in the door. I’m quite willing to go downtown and say I shot him. But don’t lay your smooth white paw on me again—if you want my story. Yes. I’m quite willing to go to the cops. I’ll feel a lot safer with them than I feel with you.”
Morny turned and I saw the hard white leer of his face and the scar dimple in his cheek twitching. He walked past the opening in the curtains. The front door opened again. The blond stood still a moment, looked back over her shoulder at the corpse, shuddered slightly, and passed out of my line of vision.
The door closed. Steps on the walk. Then car doors opening and closing. The motor throbbed, and the car went away.
31
After a long time I moved out from my hiding place and stood looking around the living room again. I went over and picked the gun up and wiped it off very carefully and put it down again. I picked the three rouge-stained cigarette stubs out of the tray on the table and carried them into the bathroom and flushed them down the toilet. Then I looked around for the second glass with her fingerprints on it. There wasn’t any second glass. The one that was half full of a dead drink I took to the kitchen and rinsed out and wiped on a dishtowel.
Then the nasty part. I kneeled on the rug by his chair and picked up the gun and reached for the trailing bone- stiff hand. The prints would not be good, but they would be prints and they would not be Lois Morny’s. The gun had a checked rubber grip, with a piece broken off on the left side below the screw. No prints on that. An index print on the right side of the barrel, two fingers on the trigger guard, a thumbprint on the flat piece on the left side, behind the chambers. Good enough.
I took one more look around the living room.
I put the lamp down to a lower light. It still glared too much on the dead yellow face. I opened the front door, pulled the key out and wiped it off and pushed it back into the lock. I shut the door and wiped the thumb latch off and went my way down the block to the Mercury.
I drove back to Hollywood and locked the car up and started along the sidewalk past the other parked cars to the entrance of the Bristol.
A harsh whisper spoke to me out of darkness, out of a car. It spoke my name. Eddie Prue’s long blank face hung somewhere up near the roof of a small Packard, behind its wheel. He was alone in it. I leaned on the door of the car and looked in at him.
“How you making out, shamus?”
I tossed a match down and blew smoke at his face. I said: “Who dropped that dental supply company’s bill you gave me last night? Vannier, or somebody else?”
“Vannier.”
“What was I supposed to do with it—guess the life history of a man named Teager?”
“I don’t go for dumb guys,” Eddie Prue said.
I said: “Why would he have it in his pocket to drop? And if he did drop it, why wouldn’t you just hand it back to him? In other words, seeing that I’m a dumb guy, explain to me why a bill for dental supplies should get anybody all excited and start trying to hire private detectives. Especially gents like Alex Morny, who don’t like private detectives.”
“Morny’s a good head,” Eddie Prue said coldly.
“He’s the fellow for whom they coined the phrase, ‘as ignorant as an actor.’”
“Skip that. Don’t you know what they use that dental stuff for?”
“Yeah. I found out. They use albastone for making molds of teeth and cavities. It’s very hard, very fine grain and retains any amount of fine detail. The other stuff, crystobolite, is used to cook out the wax in an invested wax model. It’s used because it stands a great deal of heat without distortion. Tell me you don’t know what I’m talking about.”
“I guess you know how they make gold inlays,” Eddie Prue said. “I guess you do, huh?”
“I spent two of my hours learning today. I’m an expert. What does it get me?”
He was silent for a little while, and then he said: “You ever read the paper?”
“Once in a while.”
“It couldn’t be you read where an old guy named Morningstar was bumped off in the Belfont Building on Ninth Street, just two floors above where this H. R. Teager had his office. It couldn’t be you read that, could it?”
I didn’t answer him. He looked at me for a moment longer, then he put his hand forward to the dash and pushed the starter button. The motor of his car caught and he started to ease in the clutch.
“Nobody could be as dumb as you act,” he said softly. “Nobody ain’t. Good night to you.”
The car moved away from the curb and drifted down the hill towards Franklin. I was grinning into the distance as it disappeared.
I went up to the apartment and unlocked the door and pushed it open a few inches and then knocked gently. There was movement in the room. The door was pulled open by a strong-looking girl with a black stripe on the cap of her white nurse’s uniform.
