“I’m sorry I cannot leave him a check,” the elegant tall party remarked with a weary contempt. “Probably the only thing that would interest him. But in default of that—”
“Just a minute, kid.” The redhead picked up a phone and said into it: “Yes?. . . Who says so besides Goldwyn? Can’t you reach somebody that’s not crazy?. . . Well try again.” She slammed the telephone down. The tall party had not moved.
“In default of that,” he resumed as if he had never stopped speaking, “I should like to leave a short personal message.”
“Please do,” Miss Grady told him. “I’ll get it to him somehow.”
“Tell him with my love that he is a dirty polecat.”
“Make it skunk, darling,” she said. “He doesn’t know any English words.”
“Make it skunk and double skunk,” Fortescue told her. “With a slight added nuance of sulphurated hydrogen and a very cheap grade of whore-house perfume.” He adjusted his hat and gave his profile the once over in a mirror. “I now bid you good morning and to hell with Sheridan Ballou, Incorporated.”
The tall actor stalked out elegantly, using his cane to open the door.
“What’s the matter with him?” I asked.
She looked at me pityingly. “Billy Fortescue? Nothing’s the matter with him. He isn’t getting any parts so he comes in every day and goes through that routine. He figures somebody might see him and like it.”
I shut my mouth slowly. You can live a long time in Hollywood and never see the part they use in pictures.
Miss Vane appeared through the inner door and made a chin-jerk at me. I went in past her. “This way. Second on the right.” She watched me while I went down the corridor to the second door which was open. I went in and closed the door.
A plump white-haired Jew sat at the desk smiling at me tenderly. “Greetings,” he said. “I’m Moss Spink. What’s on the thinker, pal? Park the body. Cigarette?” He opened a thing that looked like a trunk and presented me with a cigarette which was not more than a foot long. It was in an individual glass tube.
“No thanks,” I said. “I smoke tobacco.”
He sighed. “All right. Give. Let’s see. Your name’s Marlowe. Huh? Marlowe. Marlowe. Have I ever heard of anybody named Marlowe?”
“Probably not,” I said. “I’ve never heard of anybody named Spink. I asked to see a man named Ballou. Does that sound like Spink? I’m not looking for anybody named Spink. And just between you and me, the hell with people named Spink.”
“Anti-Semitic huh?” Spink said. He waved a generous hand on which a canary-yellow diamond looked like an amber traffic light. “Don’t be like that,” he said. “Sit down and dust off the brains. You don’t know me. You don’t want to know me. O.K. I ain’t offended. In a business like this you got to have somebody around that don’t get offended.”
“Ballou,” I said.
“Now be reasonable, pal. Sherry Ballou’s a very busy guy. He works twenty hours a day and even then he’s way behind schedule. Sit down and talk it out with little Spinky.”
“You’re what around here?” I asked him.
“I’m his protection, pal. I gotta protect him. A guy like Sherry can’t see everybody. I see people for him. I’m the same as him—up to a point you understand.”
“Could be I’m past the point you’re up to,” I said.
“Could be,” Spink agreed pleasantly. He peeled a thick tape off an aluminum individual cigar container, reached the cigar out tenderly and looked it over for birthmarks. “I don’t say not. Why not demonstrate a little? Then we’ll know. Up to now all you’re doing is throwing a line. We get so much of that in here it don’t mean a thing to us.”
I watched him clip and light the expensive-looking cigar. “How do I know you wouldn’t double-cross him?” I asked cunningly.
Spink’s small tight eyes blinked and I wasn’t sure but that there were tears in them. “Me cross Sherry Ballou?” he asked brokenly in a hushed voice, like a six-hundred-dollar funeral. “Me? I’d sooner double-cross my own mother.”
“That doesn’t mean anything to me either,” I said. “I never met your mother.”
Spink laid his cigar aside in an ashtray the size of a bird bath. He waved both his arms. Sorrow was eating into him. “Oh pal. What a way to talk,” he wailed. “I love Sherry Ballou like he was my own father. Better. My father— well, skip it. Come on, pal. Be human. Give with a little of the old trust and friendliness. Spill the dirt to little Spinky, huh?”
I drew an envelope from my pocket and tossed it across the desk to him. He pulled the single photograph from it and stared at it solemnly. He laid it down on the desk. He looked up at me, down at the photo, up at me. “Well,” he said woodenly, in a voice suddenly empty of the old trust and friendliness he had been talking about. “What’s it got that’s so wonderful?”
“Do I have to tell you who the girl is?”
“Who’s the guy?” Spink snapped.
I said nothing.
“I said who’s the guy?” Spink almost yelled at me. “Cough up, mug. Cough up.”
I still didn’t say anything. Spink reached slowly for his telephone, keeping his hard bright eyes on my face.
“Go on. Call them,” I said. “Call downtown and ask for Lieutenant Christy French in the homicide bureau. There’s another boy that’s hard to convince.”
