She gave her head a toss and swung the soft loose hair around her cheeks and watched me to see how hard that hit me. All the whiteness had gone now. Her cheeks were a little flushed. But behind her eyes things watched and waited.
“You’re rather nice,” she said, when I didn’t do anything sensational. “For the kind of guy you are.”
I stood that well too.
“But I don’t really know what kind of guy you are, do I?” She laughed suddenly and a tear came from nowhere and slid down her cheek.
“For all I know you might be nice for any kind of guy.”
She snatched the cigarette loose and put her hand to her mouth and bit on it. “What’s the matter with me? Am I drunk?”
“You’re stalling for time,” I said. “But I can’t make up my mind whether it’s to give someone time to get here —or to give somebody time to get far away from here. And again it could just be brandy on top of shock. You’re a little girl and you want to cry into your mother’s apron.”
“Not my mother,” she said. “I could get as far crying into a rain barrel.”
“Dealt and passed. So where is Steelgrave?”
“You ought to be glad wherever he is. He had to kill you. Or thought he had.”
“You wanted me here, didn’t you? Were you that fond of him?”
She blew cigarette ash off the back of her hand. A flake of it went into my eye and made me blink.
“I must have been,” she said, “once.” She put a hand down on her knee and spread the fingers out, studying the nails. She brought her eyes up slowly without moving her head. “It seems like about a thousand years ago I met a nice quiet little guy who knew how to behave in public and didn’t shoot his charm around every bistro in town. Yes, I liked him. I liked him a lot.”
She put her hand up to her mouth and bit a knuckle. Then she put the same hand into the pocket of the fur coat and brought out a white-handled automatic, the brother of the one I had myself.
“And in the end I liked him with this,” she said.
I went over and took it out of her hand. I sniffed the muzzle. Yes. That made two of them fired around.
“Aren’t you going to wrap it up in a handkerchief, the way they do in the movies?”
I just dropped it into my other pocket, where it could pick up a few interesting crumbs of tobacco and some seeds that grow only on the southeast slope of the Beverly Hills City Hall. It might amuse a police chemist for a while.
28
I watched her for a minute, biting at the end of my lip. She watched me. I saw no change of expression. Then I started prowling the room with my eyes. I lifted up the dust cover on one of the long tables. Under it was a roulette layout but no wheel. Under the table was nothing.
“Try that chair with the magnolias on it,” she said.
She didn’t look towards it so I had to find it myself. Surprising how long it took me. It was a high-backed wing chair, covered in flowered chintz, the kind of chair that a long time ago was intended to keep the draft off while you sat crouched over a fire of cannel coal.
It was turned away from me. I went over there walking softly, in low gear. It almost faced the wall. Even at that it seemed ridiculous that I hadn’t spotted him on my way back from the bar. He leaned in the corner of the chair with his head tilted back. His carnation was red and white and looked as fresh as though the flower girl had just pinned it into his lapel. His eyes were half open as such eyes usually are. They stared at a point in the corner of the ceiling. The bullet had gone through the outside pocket of his double-breasted jacket. It had been fired by someone who knew where the heart was.
I touched his cheek and it was still warm. I lifted his hand and let it fall. It was quite limp. It felt like the back of somebody’s hand. I reached for the big artery in his neck. No blood moved in him and very little had stained his jacket. I wiped my hands off on my handkerchief and stood for a little longer looking down at his quiet little face. Everything I had done or not done, everything wrong and everything right—all wasted.
I went back and sat down near her and squeezed my kneecaps.
“What did you expect me to do?” she asked. “He killed my brother.”
“Your brother was no angel.”
“He didn’t have to kill him.”
“Somebody had to—and quick.” Her eyes widened suddenly.
I said: “Didn’t you ever wonder why Steelgrave never went after me and why he let you go to the Van Nuys yesterday instead of going himself? Didn’t you ever wonder why a fellow with his resources and experience never tried to get hold of those photographs, no matter what he had to do to get them?”
She didn’t answer.
“How long have you known the photographs existed?” I asked.
“Weeks, nearly two months. I got one in the mail a couple of days after—after that time we had lunch together.”
“After Stein was killed.”
“Yes, of course.”
“Did you think Steelgrave had killed Stein?”
