He nodded. “I caught the disease from a producer at MGM. Charming fellow. Or so I’ve been told.” He stopped and pointed the cane at me. “You amuse the hell out of me, Marlowe. Really you do. You’re so transparent. You’re trying to use me for a shovel to dig yourself out of a jam.”
“There’s some truth in that. But the jam I’m in is nothing to the jam your client would be in if I hadn’t done the thing that put me in the jam.”
He stood quite still for a moment. Then he threw the cane away from him and walked over to a liquor cabinet and swung the two halves of it open. He poured something into a couple of pot-bellied glasses. He carried one of them over to me. Then went back and got his own. He sat down with it on the couch.
“Armagnac,” he said. “If you knew me, you’d appreciate the compliment. This stuff is pretty scarce. The Krauts cleaned most of it out. Our brass got the rest. Here’s to you.”
He lifted the glass, sniffed and sipped a tiny sip. I put mine down in a lump. It tasted like good French brandy.
Ballou looked shocked. “My God, you sip that stuff, you don’t swallow it whole.”
“I swallow it whole,” I said. “Sorry. She also told you that if somebody didn’t shut my mouth, she would be in a lot of trouble.”
He nodded.
“Did she suggest how to go about shutting my mouth?”
“I got the impression she was in favor of doing it with some kind of heavy blunt instrument. So I tried out a mixture of threat and bribery. We have an outfit down the street that specializes in protecting picture people. Apparently they didn’t scare you and the bribe wasn’t big enough.”
“They scared me plenty,” I said. “I damn near fanned a Luger at them. That junky with the .45 puts on a terrific act. And as for the money not being big enough, it’s all a question of how it’s offered to me.”
He sipped a little more of his Armagnac. He pointed at the photograph lying in front of him with the two pieces fitted together.
“We got to where you were taking that to the cops. What then?”
“I don’t think we got that far. We got to why she took this up with you instead of with her boy friend. He arrived just as I left. He has his own key.”
“Apparently she just didn’t.” He frowned and looked down into his Armagnac.
“I like that fine,” I said. “I’d like it still better if the guy didn’t have her door key.”
He looked up rather sadly. “So would I. So would we all. But show business has always been like that—any kind of show business. If these people didn’t live intense and rather disordered lives, if their emotions didn’t ride them too hard—well, they wouldn’t be able to catch those emotions in flight and imprint them on a few feet of celluloid or project them across the footlights.”
“I’m not talking about her love life,” I said. “She doesn’t have to shack up with a red-hot.”
“There’s no proof of that, Marlowe.”
I pointed to the photograph. “The man that took that is missing and can’t be found. He’s probably dead. Two other men who lived at the same address are dead. One of them was trying to peddle those pictures just before he got dead. She went to his hotel in person to take delivery. So did whoever killed him. She didn’t get delivery and neither did the killer. They didn’t know where to look.”
“And you did?”
“I was lucky. I’d seen him without his toupee. None of this is what I call proof, maybe. You could build an argument against it. Why bother? Two men have been killed, perhaps three. She took an awful chance. Why? She wanted that picture. Getting it was worth an awful chance. Why again? It’s just two people having lunch on a certain day. The day Moe Stein was shot to death on Franklin Avenue. The day a character named Steelgrave was in because the cops got a tip he was a Cleveland red-hot named Weepy Moyer. That’s what the record shows. But the photo says he was out of jail. And by saying that about him on that particular day it says who is he. And she knows it. And he still has her door key.”
I paused and we eyed each other solidly for a while. I said: “You don’t really want the cops to have that picture, do you? Win, lose or draw, they’d crucify her. And when it was all over it wouldn’t make a damn bit of difference whether Steelgrave was Moyer or whether Moyer killed Stein or had him killed or just happened to be out on a jail pass the day he was killed. If he got away with it, there’d always be enough people to think it was a fix. She wouldn’t get away with anything. She’s a gangster’s girl in the public mind. And as far as your business is concerned, she’s definitely and completely through.”
Ballou was silent for a moment, staring at me without expression. “And where are you all this time?” he asked softly.
“That depends a good deal on you, Mr. Ballou.”
“What do you really want?” His voice was thin and bitter now.
“What I wanted from her and couldn’t get. Something that gives me a colorable right to act in her interests up to the point where I decided I can’t go any farther.”
“By suppressing evidence?” he asked tightly.
“If it
“Why?”
“Let’s say it’s the way I earn my living. I might have other motives, but that one’s enough.”
“What’s your price?”
“You sent it to me last night. I wouldn’t take it then. I’ll take it now. With a signed letter employing my services
