36
I was gone ten days. Merle’s parents were vague kind patient people living in an old frame house in a quiet shady street. They cried when I told them as much of the story as I thought they should know. They said they were glad to have her back and they would take good care of her and they blamed themselves a lot, and I let them do it.
When I left Merle was wearing a bungalow apron and rolling pie crust. She came to the door wiping her hands on the apron and kissed me on the mouth and began to cry and ran back into the house, leaving the doorway empty until her mother came into the space with a broad homey smile on her face to watch me drive away.
I had a funny feeling as I saw the house disappear, as though I had written a poem and it was very good and I had lost it and would never remember it again.
I called Lieutenant Breeze when I got back and went down to ask him how the Phillips case was coming. They had cracked it very neatly, with the right mixture of brains and luck you always have to have. The Mornys never went to the police after all, but somebody called and told about a shot in Vannier’s house and hung up quickly. The fingerprint man didn’t like the prints on the gun too well, so they checked Vannier’s hand for powder nitrates. When they found them they decided it was suicide after all. Then a dick named Lackey working out of Central Homicide thought to work on the gun a little and he found that a description of it had been distributed, and a gun like it was wanted in connection with the Phillips killing. Hench identified it, but better than that they found a half print of his thumb on the side of the trigger, which, not ordinarily being pulled back, had not been wiped off completely.
With that much in hand and a better set of Vannier’s prints than I could make they went over Phillips’ apartment again and also over Hench’s. They found Vannier’s left hand on Hench’s bed and one of his fingers on the underside of the toilet flush lever in Phillips’ place. Then they got to work in the neighborhood with photographs of Vannier and proved he had been along the alley twice and on a side street at least three times. Curiously, nobody in the apartment house had seen him, or would admit it.
All they lacked now was a motive. Teager obligingly gave them that by getting himself pinched in Salt Lake City trying to peddle a Brasher Doubloon to a coin dealer who thought it was genuine but stolen. He had a dozen of them at his hotel, and one of them turned out to be genuine. He told them the whole story and showed a minute mark that he had used to identify the genuine coin. He didn’t know where Vannier got it and they never found out because there was enough in the papers to make the owner come forward, if it had been stolen. And the owner never did. And the police didn’t care any more about Vannier once they were convinced he had done murder. They left it at suicide, although they had a few doubts.
They let Teager go after a while, because they didn’t think he had any idea of murder being done and all they had on him was attempted fraud: He had bought the gold legally and counterfeiting an obsolete New York State coin didn’t come under the federal counterfeiting laws. Utah refused to bother with him.
They never believed Hench’s confession. Breeze said he just used it for a squeeze on me, in case I was holding out. He knew I couldn’t keep quiet if I had proof that Hench was innocent. It didn’t do Hench any good either. They put him in the lineup and pinned five liquor store holdups on him and a wop named Gaetano Prisco, in one of which a man was shot dead. I never heard whether Prisco was a relative of Palermo’s, but they never caught him anyway.
“Like it?” Breeze asked me, when he had told me all this, or all that had then happened.
“Two points not clear,” I said. “Why did Teager run away and why did Phillips live on Court Street under a phony name?”
“Teager ran away because the elevator man told him old Morningstar had been murdered and he smelled a hookup. Phillips was using the name of Anson because the finance company was after his car and he was practically broke and getting desperate. That explains why a nice young boob like him could get roped in to something that must have looked shady from the start.”
I nodded and agreed that could be so.
Breeze walked to his door with me. He put a hard hand on my shoulder and squeezed.
“Remember that Cassidy case you were howling about to Spangler and me that night in your apartment?”
“Yes.”
“You told Spangler there wasn’t any Cassidy case. There was—under another name. I worked on it.”
He took his hand off my shoulder and opened the door for me and grinned straight into my eyes.
“On account of the Cassidy case,” he said, “and the way it made me feel, I sometimes give a guy a break he could perhaps not really deserve. A little something paid back out of the dirty millions to a working stiff—like me—or like you. Be good.”
It was night. I went home and put my old house clothes on and set the chessmen out and mixed a drink and played over another Capablanca. It went fifty-nine moves. Beautiful cold remorseless chess, almost creepy in its silent implacability.
When it was done I listened at the open window for a while and smelled the night. Then I carried my glass out to the kitchen and rinsed it and filled it with ice water and stood at the sink sipping it and looking at my face in the mirror.
“You and Capablanca,” I said.
About the Author
RAYMOND CHANDLER was born in Chicago, Illinois, on July 23, 1888, but spent most of his boyhood and youth in England, where he attended Dulwich College and later worked as a free-lance journalist for The Westminster Gazette and The Spectator. During World War I, he served in France with the First Division of the Canadian Expeditionary Force, transferring later to the Royal Flying Corps (R.A.F.). In 1919 he returned to the United States, settling in California, where he eventually became director of a number of independent oil companies. The Depression put an end to his business career, and in 1933, at the age of forty-five, he turned to writing, publishing his first stories in Black Mask. His first novel, The Big Sleep, was published in 1939. Never a prolific writer, he published only one collection of stories and seven novels in his lifetime. In the last year of his life he was elected president of the Mystery Writers of America. He died in La Jolla, California, on March 26, 1959.
