I went over and got the magnifying glass off his desk “You’re used to a lot of service, aren’t you, Mr. Ballou?”
“I pay for it.” He studied the photograph through the glass and sighed. “Seems to me I saw that fight. They ought to take more care of these boys.”
“Like you do of your clients,” I said.
He laid down the magnifying glass and leaned back to stare at me with cool untroubled eyes.
“That’s the chap that owns The Dancers. Name’s Steelgrave. The girl is a client of mine, of course.” He made vague gesture towards a chair. I sat down in it. “What were you thinking of asking, Mr. Marlowe?”
“For what?”
“All the prints and the negative. The works.”
“Ten grand,” I said, and watched his mouth. The mouth smiled, rather pleasantly.
“It needs a little more explanation, doesn’t it? All I see is two people having lunch in a public place. Hardly disastrous to the reputation of my client. I assume that was what you had in mind.”
I grinned. “You can’t buy anything, Mr. Ballou. I could have had a positive made from the negative and another negative from the positive. If that snap is evidence of something, you could never know you had suppressed it.”
“Not much of a sales talk for a blackmailer,” he said, still smiling.
“I always wonder why people pay blackmailers. They can’t buy anything. Yet they do pay them, sometimes over and over and over again. And in the end are just where they started.”
“The fear of today,” he said, “always overrides the fear of tomorrow. It’s a basic fact of the dramatic emotions that the part is greater than the whole. If you see a glamour star on the screen in a position of great danger, you fear for her with one part of your mind, the emotional part. Notwithstanding that your reasoning mind knows that she is the star of the picture and nothing very bad is going to happen to her. If suspense and menace didn’t defeat reason, there would be very little drama.”
I said: “Very true, I guess,” and puffed some of my Camel smoke around.
His eyes narrowed a little. “As to really being able to buy anything, if I paid you a substantial price and didn’t get what I bought, I’d have you taken care of. Beaten to a pulp. And when you got out of the hospital, if you felt aggressive enough, you could try to get me arrested.”
“It’s happened to me,” I said. “I’m a private eye. I know what you mean. Why are you talking to me?”
He laughed. He had a deep pleasant effortless laugh. “I’m an agent, sonny. I always tend to think traders have a little something in reserve. But we won’t talk about any ten grand. She hasn’t got it. She only makes a grand a week so far. I admit she’s very close to the big money, though.”
“That would stop her cold,” I said, pointing to the photo. “No big money, no swimming pool with underwater lights, no platinum mink, no name in neons, no nothing. All blown away like dust.”
He laughed contemptuously.
“Okay if I show this to the johns down town, then?” I said.
He stopped laughing. His eyes narrowed. Very quietly he asked:
“Why would they be interested?”
I stood up. “I don’t think we’re going to do any business, Mr. Ballou. And you’re a busy man. I’ll take myself off.”
He got up off the couch and stretched, all six feet two of him. He was a very fine hunk of man. He came over and stood close to me. His seal-brown eyes had little gold flecks in them. “Let’s see who you are, sonny.”
He put his hand out. I dropped my open wallet into it. He read the photostat of my license, poked a few more things out of the wallet and glanced at them. He handed it back.
“What would happen, if you did show your little picture to the cops?”
“I’d first of all have to connect it up with something they’re working on—something that happened in the Van Nuys Hotel yesterday afternoon. I’d connect it up through the girl—who won’t talk to me—that’s why I’m talking to you.”
“She told me about it last night,” he sighed.
“Told you how much?” I asked.
“That a private detective named Marlowe had tried to force her to hire him, on the ground that she was seen in a downtown hotel inconveniently close to where a murder was committed.”
“How close?” I asked.
“She didn’t say.”
“Nuts she didn’t.”
He walked away from me to a tall cylindrical jar in the corner. From this he took one of a number of short thin Malacca canes. He began to walk up and down the carpet, swinging the cane deftly past his right shoe.
I sat down again and killed my cigarette and took a deep breath. “It could only happen in Hollywood,” I grunted.
He made a neat about turn and glanced at me. “I beg your pardon.”
“That an apparently sane man could walk up and down inside the house with a Piccadilly stroll and a monkey stick in his hand.”
