Chapter 1
Tuesday, June 24th, 1947, 10:00 p.m.
Summer. Ten o’clock at night. I don’t know why I was still at the office. Probably because the options were either going home—to Greenstreet the cat, who was probably doing exactly what I’d do: lying in front of the fan half-listening to the radio—or going to a bar and sitting in front of a fan half-listening to a jukebox. Either way I’d end up drinking more than the Doc said was good for my stomach. The bar would have more interesting things to look at, but it would also have a lot more smoke to tempt me: I might light up the cigarette I’d been keeping around, just in case, for the last year. Right now, it was where it usually was when I stayed late. In my mouth. Unlit. The pack I kept it in was on my desk.
And, either way, some disc jockey or some other souse would end up playing “Laura.” I was trying to quit. Both.
So I was here. It was hot as Hades in Los Angeles. I was working on creating a cross-draft with the fan next to my desk and the bigger one I’d brought in from the outer office, but the only things that were crossing were the beads of sweat dripping down my face. The radio was playing it again. For the fifth or sixth time that day. I’d tried the classical station—that was what I usually listened to at home, at night anyway—but the reception here was lousy. Probably something to do with the weather: There’d been heat lightning three or four nights running, and the weatherman said we’d have the real thing sometime soon.
I could have shut it off, but I didn’t feel like reaching all the way across my desk, and besides, I’d built up a rhythm I didn’t want to break: I’d tossed thirty-eight Bicycles in a row into my hat. Nine more and I’d break my record. I was good at it. I should have been; I’d been practicing for a year.
At least it was just Freddie Martin and his orchestra, and I didn’t have to hear the name. But the music was bad enough. Freddie was soloing, and it mingled with the heat and the noise of the fans and the flash of a neon sign that splattered through the open window like a pair of headlights with hiccups, and dripped like scalding wax onto my heart, one blue note at a time. Well, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. I’ll get over it, I told myself for the umpteenth time. Right. It was almost a year. Next Thursday.
I was thinking in clichés. I always do when business is slow.
I needed a distraction.
There was a little light spilling from the hallway through the frosted-glass outer door, just enough so I could see the silhouette walking toward it—a slim, languid silhouette that swayed with every step, and not the kind of sway you get from having taken a wee drop more than you should. I was a private eye—it says so on my door: “Robert Grahame, Private Investigator”—and I’d been one for sixteen years, if you counted the year I’d spent in the Marines, most of that recovering from a couple of pieces of lead in my belly courtesy of a Jap rifleman at Midway two weeks after I’d shipped out. If I’d learned anything, it was that slim silhouettes that swayed that way could only mean one thing: trouble.
The silhouette stopped at my door and knocked. I turned the radio off. She knocked again, a little more urgently. I called, “It’s open.”
The door opened, and the girl swayed through it. She could have been twenty, or twenty-five, or even thirty: I kept the lights off in the outer office after Gloria went home—saved me a dime, and it stayed cooler that way—but it was kind of hard to see the details. One thing was clear as the Pacific on a summer day: Framed by the faint white hall light, she looked like an angel about to descend.
I’d had it with angels.
She stopped and stood there. Trouble herself.
“Mr. Gray-hame?” she said, a little anxiously, a lot throaty.
“That’s me. Only it’s pronounced ‘Graham.’ Like the cracker.”
“I see. May I come in?”
I put down the Bicycles. A new record would have to wait. “Looks to me like you’re in already.”
“I meant into your office.”
“. . . Sure.” I rubbed my face. I have a heavy five o’clock shadow and, being that it was ten, it was five hours darker than usual. Well, nobody expects a private eye to look like a guy out of a Jane Austen novel, least of all after working hours. I straightened my tie and dropped the cigarette into the crystal ashtray with the swan standing in it. It was a gift from an ex-client; I’d photographed his wife in flagrante delicto. Very in flagrante. And pretty delicto, too. The photos had saved him a couple grand in legal fees, and a lot more in alimony.
The girl closed the outside door and walked through the outer office. It’s really the waiting room: I don’t have that many clients that I need four chairs and a love seat, but all the furniture makes those I do have think I’m busy, and it look nice. And Gloria liked it. She said she could sit at her desk and imagine she was somewhere posh.
The girl kept coming. She moved like the Tilt-A-Whirl at Santa Monica Pier: every way at once. I smelled her before I saw her face. She was wearing Shalimar, and a generous amount of it, too. The light gradually revealed her face. She was a kid—twenty-five tops. Probably not even that. And she was gorgeous: perfect burnt-caramel skin; eyes that were peculiarly almond-shaped, almost feline, deep blue with gold-tinged irises; a mouth that quivered like the bow on a silk peignoir when the girl wearing it was slipping between the sheets. Her hair fell like black satin straight down the back of the one thing that made everything else look odd: her fully buttoned, ankle-length black wool coat. She wore matching black satin gloves.
“Thank you,” she said. She spoke with the slightest tint of an accent. I couldn’t place it. Her voice was dark, husky. And smooth. Altogether, she looked like melted petrified wood remolded into a walking, talking, five-and-half-foot-tall pussy willow that never got cold in the dark and would want expensive scotch with her water.
“Uh-huh.”
“You’re here late.” She stood between the side chairs, directly in front of my desk. The Shalimar floated across it.
“So are you. My office hours end at six.”
“Yes, they’re on the door. But your light was on.”
I pointed. “Can’t see the hat in the dark.”
“I see.” She glanced slowly around the office. There wasn’t much to look at: The walls were wood-paneled, serviceable but neither fancy nor showy. My license to practice was up there, in a mock walnut frame. So were a handful of framed newspaper photos of me with minor film-world celebrities who’d been clients, most of them before the war. I hadn’t much cared for the celebrities—they were too fond of being recognized—but the pictures were good for business. There were some in the waiting room, too.
The one other decoration was a wall calendar. It had a picture of Paris above the tear-off monthly pages. The girl gazed at it a little longer than people usually gaze at calendar pictures. Even of Paris. She furrowed her brow. “Paris,” I said.
“Paris?”
“It’s a city in Europe. France.”
“Oh. I’ve never been there.”
“Neither have I,” I told her. But Paris had always sparked my imagination. When I enlisted, I’d hoped to fight in Europe and be in Paris for the liberation. I’d missed that, but I still wanted to go there one day. I even had a red beret in my closet waiting for that day to come.
I waited while the girl’s eyes finished their expedition and landed, safe and sound, back on me. “What can I do for you, Miss . . . Miss what?”
She reached into her oversize purse. “Do you min’ if I smoke?” she asked. She took out a package of gold-tipped Sobranie Black Russians and dropped it.
“Yeah, I do,” I said. “I’m trying to quit. Doc says it’s bad for my stomach.” The conventional wisdom—and every other commercial on the radio—said smoking was good for you. At least, it was relaxing. Even a lot of doctors said so. Mine didn’t, and since he seemed to know his stuff and kept me pretty healthy, I followed his advice. Except when it came to bourbon. “Makes it harder for me when I’m around people who do it.”
“I see.” The girl picked up the cigarettes, dropped them back into the purse, looked at me as though she’d just figured out something, and walked to the window. The view from the back was as impressive as the one from the front. Maybe more. In spite of the coat. Anyway, it certainly inspired my curiosity. “It’s a nice view,” she said.
I blurted, “Huh?” Then I realized she was talking about the view from the window. “Oh. Yeah.” Suddenly, I really wanted that cigarette, but I told myself no. I could hold out. I stuck it back in the package and put the package back in the desk drawer. Maybe not out of mind but at least out of sight. “It ain’t Times Square,” I said, “but they don’t charge Times Square rent, either.”
She turned to me. “Times Square?”
“It’s in New York.”
“Oh. I’ve never been there, either.”
“Yeah, I figured. Everybody who has knows Times Square. New Yorkers think it’s the center of the known universe.”
The girl laughed. “I thought that was the sun.” She looked out the window again.
I’d been to New York once, for a PI convention. I liked the Statue of Liberty and Radio City Music Hall and feeding the squirrels in Central Park. The rest of it was too tall. And New Yorkers were like the Germans. They believed there was a race of supermen, and they were it. Angelinos weren’t exactly shy, but at least they wore their self-importance instead of constantly talking about it.
“You can see the Evening Star,” the girl said. “Very clearly.”
“Now it’s my turn to be confused. The Evening Star?”
“Venus. It’s particularly lovely this time of year.”
“I’m sure. I’ve never been there.”
She laughed again. She had a small, delighted, and delightful laugh, the kind you especially like hearing when you wake up in the morning and look over at the other pillow. It had the ring of silver tapping crystal: clear, with lots of vibration. “I’m not surprise’,” she said. “It’s one hundre’ seventy-two thousan’, five hundre’ thirty-eight million miles away.”
Well. You learn something every day. “Give or take,” I said.
She walked back to the desk and stood there, not exactly staring but not just looking at me, either. “I’m something of an amateur cosmotologist, Mr. . . . ‘Graham’?” She raised her eyebrows in search of confirmation. I gave it to her with a nod. “I’m sure you can see the Morning Star from there, too.”
I not exactly stared back. “Couldn’t say. I’m rarely here before ten. I like to sleep in.”
“I see,” she said, directly into my eyes.
“You ‘see’ a lot, don’t you.”
“Yes. I do.” Her very wet lips, covered with very red lipstick, shone.
Clients—potential clients—don’t make me uncomfortable. Even this one. Maybe she was a mix of sugar and spice and lace and brass, but she was just a client. A potential client. Here on business. People who come to a private eye’s office always have business; a lot of it is unsavory, but that goes with the territory.
So I didn’t get uneasy. I’d learned from Sam Spade during the year I’d spent working for him in San Francisco: If anything about being a PI makes you nervous, take up pumping gas and wiping windshields. You get to go home at five o’clock, put your feet up, and have the wife cook you a nice dinner. Then you kiss her and the kids and go to bed and sleep the same easy sleep they do, and you wake up with a smile and somebody who loves you giving you a kiss and a cup of hot coffee. I usually woke up with a scowl and Greenstreet’s tail swishing in my face. I think he probably loves me anyway.
I looked, just as directly, at her. “You got good vision.”
“Anything wrong with yours?”
“Not as I know. I’ve got the twenty-twenty I need for this job.”
She cocked her head without looking away. It was a neat trick. “This job?” she said.
“Looking out for trouble. I can always see it when it’s standing in front of me.”
She nodded slowly and turned her face toward the window. The neon blinked into the night. “Oh,” she said. “Am I trouble?”
“With a capital T; that rhymes with D and that stands for dame.”
“And dames are—always—trouble.” She turned back to me, looking troubled herself.
Maybe it was a just good act. I didn’t feel sorry for her, but—maybe—I was being a little too hard. She looked contrite, too, however contrite looks. “Not always,” I said. “I guess I’ve known one or two that were okay.”
“Your mother?” she asked.
“Yeah. But my mother died when I was nineteen.” She nodded. “And so y’ don’t have to ask, the other one’s my ex- . . . secretary. . . . She moved to Chicago. A year ago, next Thursday.”
“Oh.” The girl thought a moment, then said, “And your secretary now?”
“Gloria? She’s new.” I chuckled and leaned back in my chair. Gloria was maybe too good. “She shows up on time every day with a smile on her face and knows exactly how much sugar I like in my coffee. Makes me think she’s lookin’ for something other than her salary.”
“Maybe she is. Every girl wants a . . .” She wrinkled her brow and searched the ceiling for the word. “Hobby?” she said finally.
I snickered to myself. I’d never thought of myself as being some girl’s hobby, though I suppose there had been one or two who thought of me that way—one, for sure, anyway. “I’d make a lousy hubby, if that’s what you mean,” I said. “I like my cat way too much.”
The girl narrowed those feline eyes. Made me wonder if maybe there were claws beneath the long satin gloves. And then I wondered whether I really wanted to find out.
“What does your cat like?” she purred.
“He likes to be petted and have a soft place to sleep.”
She sidled a step closer to the desk. “So do I,” she said.
“So do most people.” I sat up. “Now why don’t you sit down and tell me what else you’d like?”
“Why, thank you, Mr. Grahame.”
“You’re welcome, Miss . . . Miss . . . ?”
The girl settled into a chair. “Duryea,” she said. “Lizabeth Duryea.”
“Miss Duryea. You can take off your coat if you like; there’s a rack out there. By the front door.” I pointed to the waiting room. “It’s kind of hot for it. Even with the fans.”
Miss Duryea smiled and said, “I like it . . . hot. And I get . . . chilly easily.” The smoke in her voice said she enjoyed creating heat, too. And sharing it with others. Particularly men. “But thank you.” She stood again and slowly undid the ten black bone buttons. Watching her made my mind sweat. Beneath the wool was an ankle-length dress. It was both slinky and gaudy—a silver lamé sheath with a high collar and half-sleeves that crossed paths with the black satin evening gloves just below her elbows. It was the kind of outfit I’d seen Ruby Keeler and Bebe Daniels wear in the movies but not the kind I’d seen anyone wear in real life. Not since the end of Prohibition, anyway. The dress was slit all the way up one side, to her thigh and beyond. No wonder she got cold: There were no stockings or garters underneath, just a bronze leg that looked like it got plenty of exercise.
She laid the coat on the other side chair (“In case I get . . . chilly,” she explained), sat, reopened her bag, and took out the Sobranies and a book of matches. She dropped the matches.
“I said no smoking.”
She looked at me blankly for a moment. Then she said, “Oh, of course. I— Arual.”
“Huh?”
“I— Oh, I— Excuse me.” She bent down and retrieved the matchbook. It looked difficult to bend that way, in that dress, but her body bowed like a sapling in a spring storm. She returned the matchbook and the cigarettes to her bag.
“It’s all right,” I said. I put my elbows on the blotter and leaned forward. “What’s on your mind, Miss Duryea?”
She sighed deeply. “I nee’ help, Mr. Grahame.”
“People who show up here usually do. Why from me?”
She crossed her legs. That wasn’t an easy task either. The sheath parted, revealing the second member of the set. It matched the first. She left it revealed. If we’d been anywhere but my office, I would have appreciated that. “You have the reputation of being . . . helpful,” she said. “And trustful. Dan says so.”
“I do my best. Who’s Dan?”
She smiled again. “Dan Scott. My—brother. My twin brother. I’m here about—him.” She stopped and looked at me, eyes wide.
I felt like I was trying to peel a recalcitrant orange: all that delicious moist fruit lurking beneath that impenetrable, brightly colored outer layer. “Um, what about him, Miss Duryea,” I asked finally.
She sniffed and shifted her hands nervously. “He . . . disappear’, Mr. Grahame.” She sounded worried. “Three days ago, and I haven’t hear’ from him since. He was in Seattle. He’s in”—she hesitated and stared at her hands—“insurance, industrial insurance. There was some big meeting there, something to do with . . . Boeing’s new airplanes. Anyway, he was due back here at five thirty Saturday—and we were suppose’ to meet some . . . acquaintances for cocktails, to celebrate. Our”—she looked again to the ceiling for help—“birthday. I was getting dress’ when . . .”
* * *
I took notes. The way she described it, it went something like this:
She heard the ring, she told me, when she was in the bathroom trying to fix the clasp of a bracelet onto her wrist.
She gave up on the clip, put the bracelet in her pocket, and ran into the living room to answer it.
“Hello?” she said, a little out of breath.
Her brother was on the other end. “Hi, sweetheart, it’s me.”
“Dan! You got in early!”
“It was just past four,” she said. “I was happy, because we woul’ have time for a cocktail together before we went out.”
I nodded. “Go on.”
Dan sighed. “Actually, I’m still here. I’m sorry, this is taking much—”
Then there were noises in the background, loud noises she couldn’t identify.
Dan yelled to someone: “Hey! Keep it down, will ya? I’m tryin’ to talk to my sister.” The noises stopped and he said, “Sorry, sweetheart.”
“You’re still in Seattle?”
“Uh—yeah. Something came up; I have to stay another day or two.”
“Oh, Dan! What about our plans?”
He sighed again.
“I’m sorry, Lizabeth; give everyone my regrets. It’s important or I might—”
Her voice got higher, and she bounced in the chair like a restless three-year-old.
“Then there was more noise,” she went on, “and he start’ to talk more higher—”
“—or I might leave right now,” he said.
“I talk’ higher, too,” she told me.
“Uh-huh.” I nodded.
“Dan, I can’t hear you. What’s going on?”
“What?”
“I can’t hear you!”
“I can’t hear you, Lizabeth,” he shouted. “I’ll try to call you tomorrow.”
“What?”
“I’ll try to call tomorrow.”
“Okay.”
“I have to—”
Then there was a click.
“Dan? Dan?”
* * *
“Then I hear’ a dial tone.”
I nodded.
“I hung up and just stoo’ there,” she finished. She played with her hands in her lap.
“Mm.” I tapped the pencil against my pad. “Your brother usually call you sweetheart?”
She looked nervously innocent. “We’re very . . . close.”
“Yeah,” I said, “it sounds like it.”
It didn’t sound like the truth, not the whole truth, anyway, but I was used to that: A lot of clients had more to hide than the people I investigated for them. Their secrets were none of my business, unless they got in the way of my investigation. When that happened, and it had more than once, they ended up telling me the whole truth or I took my retainer and sent them on their merry way. I was hired—usually—to uncover the truth, not to cover it up. I didn’t like people who tried to cover up. I didn’t even like myself when I had to do it, to protect my client’s confidentiality. Like Sir Walter Scott said: Oh, what a tangled web we weave . . .
But whatever else she might be, Lizabeth Duryea was worried. Her face had tightened; she looked drawn and tired. The gold in her eyes had stopped sparkling. This way, she looked like an ordinary beautiful woman. The kind, like Ruth Wonderly, ordinary PIs like Sam Spade and me always find it tough to walk past without wondering. And sometimes wishing.
“He’s always been there for me,” she explained. “Especially since my divorce. I miss him, an’, an’ I nee’ to know he’s all right. I’m sure he woul’ tell me if he coul’.”
“So you want me to find him and ask him to get in touch with you?”
“No!” she said, a little more sharply than I thought was necessary. “I mean, he may . . . nee’ to be alone for a while. He an’ his girlfrien’ are . . .” She looked at me, the plea in her eyes.
“I see.”
“That’s why I don’t understan’ why he hasn’t call’. But I just want you to fin’ out where he is. An’ make sure he is . . . safe.”
“Uh-huh.”
“You understan’?”
“I think so.” I twirled the pencil between my fingers. “Do you think your husband—ex-husband?”—she nodded—“might have anything to do with Dan’s disappearance? I gather he and Dan weren’t exactly Rip Murdock and Johnny Drake.”
“Who?”
“A couple of guys who got sort of famous for being close buddies during the war.”
“Oh. No.”
“I see. . . . Your husband?”
“He was very rich. I was very young.”
“But not for very long, I gather.”
She looked down at her lap. “No,” she murmured. I couldn’t see if her eyes were wet, but there was a trace of sob inside her voice.
“Mm. And when was this call . . . ?”
“Saturday night.”
“Saturday?” She nodded. “This is Tuesday.”
“I keep telephonicking his home,” she said earnestly. “That’s where he has his office, but there’s no answer. And his hotel in Seattle—it’s the Greer—six or seven times. The last time, just before I de— chose to come to see you. He’s still . . . register’, but they sai’ he hasn’t pick’ up any of the messages.” She dabbed at one eye with a satin-gloved knuckle.
“Here.” I handed her the package of tissues I kept in my desk. She took one and thanked me.
I turned the pencil like a baton between my fingers. “Telephonicking.” The word went along with my theory: She’d spent a lot of her life somewhere that wasn’t America. I still couldn’t place just where that was, and she didn’t seem particularly interested in telling me. Well, it didn’t matter. Everybody had problems; I knew that before I went into the Marines. Heck, anybody who’s lived eighteen years on this planet knows that. I’d met a lot of kids even younger than that who knew it even better than I did, and I’d lived here thirty-nine years so far.
“Why’d you come now?” I asked.
She opened her purse. “I got this. About an hour ago,” she said, and took out a normal-looking envelope. She dropped it.
“Y’ know, it might be a lot easier if you took those off.” I pointed to the gloves.
“Yes, it—might be.” She left them on and made several tries at picking up the envelope. She finally succeeded and handed it to me. “Someone put it beneath my door,” she said.
The envelope was the usual business size—I had a boxful just like it in the supply cabinet—white and clean. I figured the floors in her building were polished every day or the carpets were all carefully vacuumed; there wasn’t a trace of dust or dirt on it anywhere. It was blank except for her name and an address beneath it that I recognized as being a mile or so from my office, all written with a pen with a fine-tipped nib, in dark-blue ink, in neat handwriting that looked vaguely familiar. My handwriting was terrible—the bank complained they couldn’t even read the numbers on my checks, so I bought a check-writing machine—so I paid attention to pretty penmanship.
The glue on the flap was unused: The envelope had been delivered unsealed. “No stamp,” I noted. “The post office is gonna be upset. I hear they need the money.” I opened it and read the short, unsigned letter inside. It was written on plain white watermarked paper—I had a boxful of that, too, with the same watermark—and the handwriting matched the envelope’s. When I finished, I laid them both on my desk.
“How come you didn’t call the police?”
She shrugged uneasily. “I was—fearful.”
The police had their problems, too, but they were most people’s first line of defense. Unless the people were rich. Or had something they didn’t want the police to find out. Then they came to guys like me first. “Finding missing persons is what the police do, Miss Duryea. We pay them to do it, you and me.”
“But it says if I do, they’ll—”
“Hurt Dan?” She nodded. “I don’t think so. Dan’s their bargaining chip. No Dan, no bargain.” She nodded again, this time with a worried frown. I sat back and reread the letter. “They don’t say anything about a ransom.”
“No.” Her voice was trembling.
“And you haven’t tried to find them, either.”
She shook her head. “It says I’m to wait till—”
“Yeah. I see that.”
She leaned forward and folded her arms on the desk. She laid her head on them and looked up at me, the way a kitten looks up at you when it’s hungry. “Will you help me?”
I took a breath and let the air out slowly. Yeah, I wanted a distraction, and Lizabeth Duryea certainly was one. The case might be: It had been a while since I’d looked for a missing person, and I was getting tired of taking pictures of men and women frolicking in their birthday suits in cheap motels or the back seats of Chevys parked in what they thought was the middle of nowhere. But there was something about it, about her. Maybe it was the handwriting, the accent, the eyes, the coat and dress, that just didn’t—fit. Or maybe I wasn’t sure just how much of what she’d told me was the truth. And even if everything she’d told me was true, there were still the parts she’d left out. I was pretty sure that was enough to fill most of the pages of the pad I was writing on.
Well: Money talks; dames without it—even gorgeous ones—walk. “Depends,” I said. “I’m expensive.”
“I have some money,” she said tentatively, and sat up and opened her purse.
“I get thirty dollars a day, plus expenses. A hundred up front. Cash.”
She extracted a handful of bills and handed them to me. I did a quick count. “I said a hundred. This is five.”
“I—just want to make sure you’ll . . .”
Well: Money does talk. “Lady, you’ve just made very sure. Thanks.” I stuffed the money into the Bicycle box. Later, I’d put it in an envelope, put the envelope into a desk drawer, and lock the drawer. It would be safe overnight, and Gloria could take it to the bank first thing tomorrow. “I’ll have Gloria type you a receipt in the morning.”
She nodded.
I picked up my pencil. “Tell me about Dan.”
“All right.” She clasped her hands demurely in front of her, and began.
“Well . . .”
There wasn’t much to tell about Dan, she began.
* * *
He’d been selling companies insurance for five or six years—which, I noted, meant he hadn’t done any soldiering; he had a bad back, she said. He owned a house in Westwood, off Pico Boulevard. It wasn’t Beverly Hills, but Westwood was one of the nicer upper-middle-class parts of L.A., and that meant he was selling a lot of it. He liked the high life, and he could afford it. Dan Scott seemed like a pretty normal guy, with one peculiarity: He was an amateur “cosmotologist,” too. They went planet-gazing together.
Lizabeth Duryea, on the other hand, was as strange a dame as I’d ever met: She looked like she’d just walked out of an Ivory Soap ad, but her outfit looked like she’d just stepped out of a movie whose costumer wrote mash notes to Busby Berkeley. Plus, there were those gloves. And the five hundred she’d given me—that wasn’t even the tip of the iceberg.
She dabbed her eyes again, then opened the bag and reached to put the tissue into it.
“. . . and that’s really all I—” She was interrupted by the bag tumbling to the floor, spilling its contents. Among them was cash. A lot of cash—loose bills and banded stacks of them and rolls of them. “Oh,” she said. “Excuse me.” She laughed apologetically. “I seem to have drop-it disease tonight.” She knelt and, one handful at a time, gathered the money and started stuffing it back into the bag. She looked like a mother duck who was in no great hurry to retrieve her wandering ducklings.
I watched her, and her cash, casually. Uh-huh. The dame had some money, all right. If all that counted as “some.” “Yeah, well,” I said, “it’s probably just as well you have it in here. On the street there’d be all kinds of people looking to cure you.” Los Angeles is filled with helpful people, especially men who like to help single women who are out alone late at night. “Just how much dough are you carrying in there?”
She continued to stuff. “I’m not sure. Ten or twenty thousan’ dollars, maybe?”
“Ten or . . .” I’d seen a lot of things in sixteen years as a private dick, but I’d never seen that much money in one place. In fact, I’d never imagined I would see that much money in one place. I did all right: I had a steady stream of clients, these days mostly men whose wives were being indiscreet and the occasional wife whose husband was. Now and then something came up that was a little more interesting and a little less distasteful: looking into a phony insurance claim, helping clear somebody who’d been falsely accused, finding a guy or a gal who wasn’t particularly anxious to be found. Once, tracking down a stolen racehorse—a red-maned filly named Scarlet Street—a case I’d taken eight or nine years ago without realizing just who I was really working for. My client, I found out afterward, had been a mob guy: one of Bugsy Siegel’s buddies. That hadn’t made me happy, and for a long while after, I’d stuck to taking pictures of husbands’ and wives’ illicit rendezvous. It was boring, maybe, but I slept better at night, and I suffered no morning-after recriminations.
I wasn’t famous, but I did good work and the word had gotten around: I could find things and people and answers, and take pictures through motel windows. I got enough cases to make my two or three hundred dollars a week, plus expenses. It paid the rent on my apartment and the office, and my secretary’s salary, and kept Greenstreet and his leonine appetite off the street. Now and again I made a little more, but the only other times I’d had a five-hundred-dollar retainer were the racehorse case and the job for the benefactor of my crystal ashtray. I doubted I’d had many other clients who could afford one. Those folks went to the high-profile PIs: Marlowe and Mike Shayne here, Nero Wolfe and Philo Vance in New York, Spade in Frisco. They wore hundred-dollar Palm Beach suits and drove Chryslers or Cadillacs. My four suits cost about a hundred bucks between them. I had a car, a persnickety 1936 Buick with seventy thousand miles on it I’d bought second-hand during the war, but I didn’t use it unless I had to—and I had to more than I liked: Los Angeles is a big city.
Lizabeth Duryea stuffed the last roll of bills into her purse. “Maybe twenty thousan’,” she said. “Shoul’ I try to count it?”
I shook my head. “I’ll take your word.” Kitten-eyed again, she nodded and smiled. Her mouth had a natural pout. It looked edible as the pick-it-yourself strawberries I used to gorge on when I was a kid. “Anything else you want to tell me?”
“I think that’s all.”
“I need to know what he looks like. A photo would help,” I mentioned.
“I don’t have one with me. He’s—big.”
“Big?”
She nodded. “Big.” She spread her hands most of the length of my five-foot-long desktop, then stood up and stretched an arm all the way up—seven or eight feet from the floor up—and sat down again. She was as good a judge of size as she was of clothes: The Jolly Green Giant wasn’t that big.
“Mm. Well, you can drop one off tomorrow. If I’m out, leave it with my secretary.”
“That’s Loria?” she asked.
I corrected her. “Gloria.”
“Gloria. All right.” She reached for her coat, then stopped. “Oh, there is one other thing I nee’ you to do.”
“Oh?”
She opened the purse again and, very carefully, withdrew a small package, about the size of a tiny round snuffbox and maybe twice as thick as the monocle my grandfather wore. It was wrapped in brown paper and covered, almost everywhere, with brown shipping tape. She did not drop it. “Keep this for me.”
I looked at it skeptically. Another “something else.” “What is it?”
She shrugged and smiled again, that lovely, full-lipped, strawberry-red smile that reminded me of a vampire movie I’d seen once. Vampire movies were her favorites. Something else she could sink her teeth into, she said, “besides you.” She’d grinned slyly when she said that.
“I don’t know,” Lizabeth Duryea said. “Dan gave it to me. He tol’ me to keep it for him, that it’s very important. If anything shoul’ . . . happen, he’ll come here.”
I continued to look at the packet. Like most people, I was curious. Unlike most people, I knew pretty well the consequences of curiosity. It didn’t kill just cats. That’s the first thing they teach you in PI 101. If you don’t learn it then, you will the first time you take a case and put your whiskers into something that smells too sweet. I was usually pretty careful not to let my curiosity trump my common sense. “What d’ you think might . . . happen?”
“I don’t know. I’m surprise’ how things just . . . happen all the time in Los Angeles.”
“Yeah. They do.” Which is why I was careful: There were things you needed to be careful about. Lots of things. “You have no idea what this is.”
She giggled. “No. I hope it’s a gift.”
“Why the big secret?”
“He wants me to be surprise’, I think, but I think he wants to give it to me himself.” She leaned toward me and intimated: “I think it’s very expensive.” Her breath was faintly scented, something curious and slightly metallic that clashed with the perfume. She giggled again. “Here.”
I didn’t take it. “Generous guy, your brother. You said he sells insurance?”
“Yes.”
“I guess a very expensive gift could be important enough to an insurance salesman that his sister would pay a private eye five hundred bucks to watch over it for a few days.” I looked into her eyes; they were still smiling. “But buying an insurance policy would be cheaper.” I tapped the Bicycle box.
The smile vanished. “I . . . I’ll pay you extra.”
Getting involved in something I shouldn’t be involved in could cost me: my PI license, for one thing. And I still had misgivings about the Scarlet Street case. On the other hand, business had been slow, my bank account was dwindling, and five hundred bucks would cover a lot of what I had to pay for over the next month. Yeah, there probably was more to it than Lizabeth Duryea was telling me, but I’d keep my eyes and ears wide open. And if I could find Dan Scott fast, the package would be history, just like the case.
“We’ll see how my expenses run. Right now, the five hundred is enough.” I started to reach for the package, then stopped just short. “If you’re sure there’s nothing illegal in here.”
This time, she laughed. “I can’t imagine Dan woul’ ever have anything against the law.”
I laughed, too, mirthlessly, and took it from her. “Yeah. Insurance salesmen are the law-abiding salt of the earth. All right. I’ll keep it here.” I squeezed it. Whatever was inside was hard, but the packet itself had give. Cushioned. That meant it could be a ring or diamond stud earrings. Or it could be a tiny round snuffbox filled with cocaine. You could fit a lot of toot into a very small horn.
I had six file cabinets, all green, all Army surplus, all mostly empty. One of them had a built-in lock. That one was completely empty. I opened the top drawer and dropped the package into it, closed it, and pushed in the lock. “I have a key,” I told her. “Where the other one is is a secret.”
“Thank you,” she said.
“Mm.” I went back to my desk and made a note. “How do I get in touch with you?”
“I am at the place on Cregar Street, the one on the envelope the letter came in. It’s the Veronica Apartments. Number four-eleven. My telephonick is Lake-1114.”
This time the word just buzzed past. I jotted the number down, put my notes into a file folder, and laid that on my desk. “Okay. That’s enough for tonight. Go home. I’ll call a taxi.” I reached for the telephonick.
“That’s all right. It’s not far. I can walk.” Miss Duryea stood and pulled on the black coat. I shook my head. Watching her bundle into the wool was making more than my mind sweat. A mile in this heat, wearing a wool coat? I’d collapse, and I was in pretty good shape.
I pulled out my handkerchief; it was already too damp to do much good, but I wiped my face anyway. Well, maybe she had a physical condition. Some people just got cold easy. In this weather, I wished I were one of them.
I wondered for a moment what it was like now in Chicago. I hoped it was freezing.
She was still buttoning when I said, “Lady, this is Los Angeles. Like you said: Things . . . happen here, all the time. I don’t know where you’re from, but around here, girls take taxis at eleven at night. Especially girls who are carrying around ten or twenty thousand dollars. It’s better for their health.”
“Thank you. I’ll be fine. Walking is better for my health. Taxis have air-conditioning. Besides, I have this.” She reached into a coat pocket and took out a small, peculiar-looking gun. I couldn’t see the whole thing; it pretty much disappeared between her gloves, but she cocked it like she’d been doing it all her life, pointed it toward the window, then uncocked it, smiled, and returned it to her pocket.
All that glitters is not gold, I thought. Some of it is ice. “I see. It’s everybody else’s health that could be the problem.” I sat. “Okay, I’ll call you as soon as I learn anything. Get me that photo of Dan. And let me know if he calls. Or shows up. Or you get another one of these.” I held up the letter. “There should be a ransom note, or something like one. This doesn’t ask for anything. That bothers me.”
“Thank you, Mr. Grahame. It was nice meeting you.” She extended her right glove. I stood up, reached across my desk, and took it. She didn’t shake my hand. She just held it, and my eyes, longer than a good-bye and with a gentle grip that grew tighter and firmer. She withdrew her hand slowly and smiled. I hadn’t noticed her teeth before. They were small, pearly white, and slightly pointed. They looked razor sharp. There wasn’t a filling or a cap in sight.
She took a business card from the holder on my desk and, slowly, slipped it into a small pocket over her breast. She stroked the flap. “I hope I’ll see you again soon. Perhaps for something that . . . isn’t business?”
“Likewise,” I said. I watched the satin glove tap the pocket very gently.
Her eyes narrowed again. “I hope you enjoy petting your cat. Goo’ night, Mr. Grahame.”
“Uh-huh. Good night, Miss Duryea.”
She turned and left the office the same way she’d come in, a slow sway trailed by the scent of her Shalimar. I watched her. It was interesting to see, but it made me a little dizzy. I’d seen tidal waves that didn’t move that much.
The door clicked open; the light framed her; the door clicked closed. The silhouette moved casually away until it was out of sight.
“Uh-huh,” I said, and looked at the cash-filled card box.
I put the money into an envelope, sealed that, and locked it in the desk, picked up the phone, and made a call. It was answered on the first ring. I asked for Lieutenant Stanwyck. I was told to please wait, I was being connected. “Yeah,” I said, “I’ll wait.”
I tucked the phone between my chin and shoulder, picked up the cards, and tossed one toward my hat. The Queen of Hearts.
It hit the brim and landed on the floor.