The Little Sister

“No. Why should I? Until tonight, that is.”

“What happened after you got the photo?”

“My brother Orrin called me up and said he had lost his job and was broke. He wanted money. He didn’t say anything about the photo. He didn’t have to. There was only one time it could have been taken.”

“How did he get your number?”

“Telephone? How did you?”

“Bought it.”

“Well—” She made a vague movement with her hand. “Why not call the police and get it over with.”

“Wait a minute. Then what? More prints of the photo?”

“One every week. I showed them to him.” She gestured toward the chintzy chair. “He didn’t like it. I didn’t tell him about Orrin.”

“He must have known. His kind find things out.”

“I suppose so.”

“But not where Orrin was hiding out,” I said. “Or he wouldn’t have waited this long. When did you tell Steelgrave?”

She looked away from me. Her fingers kneaded her arm. “Today,” she said in a distant voice.

“Why today?”

Her breath caught in her throat. “Please,” she said. “Don’t ask me a lot of useless questions. Don’t torment me. There’s nothing you can do. I thought there was—when I called Dolores. There isn’t now.”

I said: “All right. There’s something you don’t seem to understand. Steelgrave knew that whoever was behind that photograph wanted money—a lot of money. He knew that sooner or later the blackmailer would have to show himself. That was what Steelgrave was waiting for. He didn’t care anything about the photo itself, except for your sake.”

“He certainly proved that,” she said wearily.

“In his own way,” I said.

Her voice came to me with glacial calm. “He killed my brother. He told me so himself. The gangster showed through then all right. Funny people you meet in Hollywood, don’t you—including me.”

“You were fond of him once,” I said brutally.

Red spots flared on her cheeks.

“I’m not fond of anybody,” she said. “I’m all through being fond of people.” She glanced briefly towards the high-backed chair. “I stopped being fond of him last night. He asked me about you, who you were and so on. I told him. I told him that I would have to admit that I was at the Van Nuys Hotel when that man was lying there dead.”

“You were going to tell the police that?”

“I was going to tell Julius Oppenheimer. He would know how to handle it.”

“If he didn’t one of his dogs would,” I said.

She didn’t smile. I didn’t either.

“If Oppenheimer couldn’t handle it, I’d be through in pictures,” she added without interest “Now I’m through everywhere else as well.”

I got a cigarette out and lit it. I offered her one. She didn’t want one. I wasn’t in any hurry. Time seemed to have lost its grip on me. And almost everything else. I was flat out.

“You’re going too fast for me,” I said, after a moment. “You didn’t know when you went to the Van Nuys that Steelgrave was Weepy Moyer.”

“No.”

“Then what did you go there for?”

“To buy back those photographs.”

“That doesn’t check. The photographs didn’t mean anything to you then. They were just you and him having lunch.”

She stared at me and winked her eyes tight, then opened them wide. “I’m not going to cry,” she said. “I said I didn’t know. But when he was in jail that time, I had to know there was something about him that he didn’t care to have known. I knew he had been in some kind of racket, I guess. But not killing people.”

I said: “Uh-huh.” I got up and walked around the high-backed chair again. Her eyes traveled slowly to watch me. I leaned over the dead Steelgrave and felt under his arm on the left side. There was a gun there in the holster. I didn’t touch it. I went back and sat down opposite her again.

“It’s going to cost a lot of money to fix this,” I said.

For the first time she smiled. It was a very small smile, but it was a smile. “I don’t have a lot of money,” she said. “So that’s out.”

“Oppenheimer has. You’re worth millions to him by now.”

“He wouldn’t chance it. Too many people have their knives into the picture business these days. He’ll take his loss and forget it in six months.”