Farewell, My Lovely - Chandler Raymond (книги бесплатно TXT) 📗

“Aw well, hell,” I said. “A guy never gets to do anything in this country any more. Always women.”

“She likes you,” Randall said, like a polite FBI man in a movie, a little sad, but very manly. “Her old man was as straight a cop as ever lost a job. She had no business taking those things. She likes you.”

“She’s a nice girl. Not my type.”

“You don’t like them nice?” He had another cigarette going. The smoke was being fanned away from his face by his hand.

“I like smooth shiny girls, hardboiled and loaded with sin.”

“They take you to the cleaners,” Randall said indifferently.

“Sure. Where else have I ever been? What do you call this session?”

He smiled his first smile of the day. He probably allowed himself four.

“I’m not getting much out of you,” he said.

“I’ll give you a theory, but you are probably way ahead of me on it. This Marriott was a blackmailer of women, because Mrs. Grayle just about told me so. But he was something else. He was the finger man for the jewel mob. The society finger, the boy who would cultivate the victim and set the stage. He would cultivate women he could take out, get to know them pretty well. Take this holdup a week from Thursday. It smells. If Marriott hadn’t been driving the car, or hadn’t taken Mrs. Grayle to the Troc or hadn’t gone home the way he did, past that beer parlor, the holdup couldn’t have been brought off.”

“The chauffeur could have been driving,” Randall said reasonably. “But that wouldn’t have changed things much. Chauffeurs are not getting themselves pushed in the face with lead bullets by holdup men — for ninety a month. But there couldn’t be many stick-ups with Marriott alone with women or things would get talked about.”

“The whole point of this kind of racket is that things are not talked about,” I said. “In consideration for that the stuff is sold back cheap.”

Randall leaned back and shook his head. “You’ll have to do better than that to interest me. Women talk about anything. It would get around that this Marriott was a kind of tricky guy to go out with.”

“It probably did. That’s why they knocked him off.”

Randall stared at me woodenly. His spoon was stirring air in an empty cup. I reached over and he waved the pot aside. “Go on with that one,” he said.

“They used him up. His usefulness was exhausted. It was about time for him to get talked about a little, as you suggest. But you don’t quit in those rackets and you don’t get your time. So this last holdup was just that for him — the last. Look, they really asked very little for the jade considering its value. And Marriott handled the contact. But all the same Marriott was scared. At the last moment he thought he had better not go alone. And he figured a little trick that if anything did happen to him, something on him would point to a man, a man quite ruthless and clever enough to be the brains of that sort of mob, and a man in an unusual position to get information about rich women. It was a childish sort of trick but it did actually work.”

Randall shook his head. “A gang would have stripped him, perhaps even have taken the body out to sea and dumped it.”

“No. They wanted the job to look amateurish. They wanted to stay in business. They probably have another finger lined up,” I said.

Randall still shook his head. “The man these cigarettes pointed to is not the type. He has a good racket of his own. I’ve inquired. What did you think of him?”

His eyes were too blank, much too blank. I said: “He looked pretty damned deadly to me. And there’s no such thing as too much money, is there? And after all his psychic racket is a temporary racket for any one place. He has a vogue and everybody goes to him and after a while the vogue dies down and the business is licking its shoes. That is, if he’s a psychic and nothing else. Just like movie stars. Give him five years. He could work it that long. But give him a couple of ways to use the information he must get out of these women and he’s going to make a killing.”

“I’ll look him up more thoroughly,” Randall said with the blank look. “But right now I’m more interested in Marriott. Let’s go back farther — much farther. To how you got to know him.”

“He just called me up. Picked my name out of the phone book. He said so, at any rate.”

“He had your card.”

I looked surprised. “Sure. I’d forgotten that.”

“Did you ever wonder why he picked your name — ignoring that matter of your short memory?”

I stared at him across the top of my coffee cup. I was beginning to like him. He had a lot behind his vest besides his shirt.

“So that’s what you really came up for?” I said.

He nodded. “The rest, you know, is just talk.” He smiled politely at me and waited.

I poured some more coffee.

Randall leaned over sideways and looked along the cream-colored surface of the table. “A little dust,” he said absently, then straightened up and looked me in the eye.

“Perhaps I ought to go at this in a little different way,” he said. “For instance, I think your hunch about Marriott is probably right. There’s twenty-three grand in currency in his safe-deposit box — which we had a hell of a time to locate, by the way. There are also some pretty fair bonds and a trust deed to a property on West Fifty-fourth Place.”

He picked a spoon up and rapped it lightly on the edge of his saucer and smiled. “That interest you?” he asked mildly. “The number was 1644 West Fifty-fourth Place.”

“Yeah,” I said thickly.

“Oh, there was quite a bit of jewelry in Marriott’s box too — pretty good stuff. But I don’t think he stole it. I think it was very likely given to him. That’s one up for you. He was afraid to sell it — on account of the association of thought in his own mind.”

I nodded. “He’d feel as if it was stolen.”

“Yes. Now that trust deed didn’t interest me at all at first, but here’s how it works. It’s what you fellows are up against in police work. We get all the homicide and doubtful death reports from outlying districts. We’re supposed to read them the same day. That’s a rule, like you shouldn’t search without a warrant or frisk a guy for a gun without reasonable grounds. But we break rules. We have to. I didn’t get around to some of the reports until this morning. Then I read one about a killing of a Negro on Central, last Thursday. By a tough ex-con called Moose Malloy. And there was an identifying witness. And sink my putt, if you weren’t the witness.”

He smiled, softly, his third smile. “Like it?”

“I’m listening.”

“This was only this morning, understand. So I looked at the name of the man making the report and I knew him, Nulty. So I knew the case was a flop. Nulty is the kind of guy — well, were you ever up at Crestline?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, up near Crestline there’s a place where a bunch of old box cars have been made into cabins. I have a cabin up there myself, but not a box car. These box cars were brought up on trucks, believe it or not, and there they stand without any wheels. Now Nulty is the kind of guy who would make a swell brakeman on one of those box cars.”

“That’s not nice,” I said. “A fellow officer.”

“So I called Nulty up and he hemmed and hawed around and spit a few times and then he said you had an idea about some girl called Velma something or other that Malloy was sweet on a long time ago and you went to see the widow of the guy that used to own the dive where the killing happened when it was a white joint, and where Malloy and the girl both worked at that time. And her address was 1644 West Fifty-fourth Place, the place Marriott had the trust deed on.”

“Yes?”

“So I just thought that was enough coincidence for one morning,” Randall said. “And here I am. And so far I’ve been pretty nice about it.”

“The trouble is,” I said, “it looks like more than it is. This Velma girl is dead, according to Mrs. Florian. I have her photo.”