Chapter 7

Wednesday, June 25th, 1947, 11:45 p.m.

I didn’t see Brown Hat anywhere when I climbed out of the cab, which was just fine. I had other things on my mind, and I figured he’d be there when I left. Actually, I figured he’d be there all night: I planned on going down the fire escape steps in the back of the building.

I heard my phone ringing as I reached the eighth-floor landing—Mike Figlia had left at eleven as usual, so I’d climbed the stairs all the way up. Whoever it was, I wasn’t going to hurry: I was in pretty good shape, but I’d had a hard day and I was out of breath. This hour of the night it could only be bad news, anyway. Or a wrong number. Bad news could wait till morning.

The office was dark except for the faint spill from the lone forty-watt bulb in the hall—building management spared no expense when it came to tenants seeing their way after hours—and the neon sign flashing somewhere outside my window. Someday I intended to poke my head out there and see what it said. But not tonight. Tonight, all I planned on doing was tucking the money safely away, giving the place the once-over, going home, feeding Greenstreet his dinner, and having one more drink to relieve my stone-cold-sober state while I waited for Lizabeth Duryea’s call. And then going to sleep.

It was a good plan. Just one thing got in the way.

I unlocked the door and flicked on the light and, without paying much attention, reached my hat toward the coat tree beside the door. It wasn’t there. I looked around. Chaos reigned. Things were strewn everywhere, closets and desk and file drawers opened and their contents scattered. And on the floor in front of Gloria’s desk, there was a body. Gloria’s body.

I called her name. She stirred. I took the half dozen steps and knelt beside her.

Her eyes were closed. She was barely breathing. “Mr. Grah— . . .” she said weakly. “I, I was trying to . . .”

“Just lie here. Don’t talk. I’ll call an ambulance.” I grabbed the phone on her desk and dialed.

“Okeydokey,” Gloria struggled to say.

I gave the emergency operator the address. He said, “Fifteen minutes,” and I hung up. I knelt beside her again and lifted her head. “They’re on the way. Hang on, kid. Just keep breathin’.”

“I . . . was trying to, to . . .”

She was fading. I had to keep her awake. “What? To what, Gloria?”

“Miss . . . Miss . . .” She opened her eyes; they were blank. She wheezed once, twice. “Miss . . .” she whispered. Her voice trailed off. Her eyes closed.

I felt for her pulse. She didn’t have one.

“Gloria? Gloria!” She exhaled a small cough and did not breathe again.

I lowered her head gently. Sweet, silly little Gloria. I didn’t even know her next of kin.

I took a long, slow breath, then looked closely at her body. There were three holes in her charcoal-gray blouse. Bullet holes, made recently enough that red still leaked from them. Carefully—I didn’t want to make the cops’ job any tougher by messing up evidence—I lifted her just enough to reach under the body. There were three holes in her back, too. That meant a powerful gun fired at close range. She’d been standing near the shooter when the bullets hit; they’d passed all the way through her.

I laid her back down, wiped the blood off my hands with a dishrag, and checked the area around her desk, the floor, the walls. There were three deep indentations in the wall right behind the desk. They were empty. So was the floor beneath them—except for the chips of paint and plaster the bullets had scattered—and everywhere else a bullet might have lodged or fallen. I muttered, “Where’s the . . . ?” and thought a moment. Then I sat at Gloria’s desk, picked up the phone, and dialed.

The phone on the other end rang once, twice, and someone picked up. “Lieutenant Stanwyck, please,” I said. “Yeah, I’ll wait.”

I yawned. Somewhere a church clock chimed. Midnight. I yawned again. So much for being in bed by one. It would be another two or three hours before I got there. If then. I wondered how long Stanwyck had been on the job. The woman seemed not to need sleep. Or much of anything else, at least not when she had work to keep her occupied. In my experience, that was all the time.

I stretched. That made me realize my right foot was sore. I took off the shoe, put it on the desk, and took out the small, carefully wrapped package I’d put under my arch before I left for The Pickup. It looked identical to the one I’d given Scott. I held it up and stared at it. Plain brown paper, plain brown tape. It didn’t seem big enough for anyone to kill anyone else to get it, but a lot of people had been killed over things even smaller. Everybody was so worried about this, it behooved me to find out just what it was.

I took a pair of shears from the desk drawer and, carefully, cut the wrapping, then unrolled the paper.

Inside was another package: small, with aluminum foil around its contents. It had been carefully smoothed over the small, loose bumps inside. Whatever they were, there were a lot of them. I set the package on the desk, unpeeled the foil, and whistled. “Well,” I murmured. “Whattaya know.”

“This is Stanwyck,” said the voice on the other end of the phone. I sat up.

“Stanwyck, it’s me. I’m reporting a murder.”

“Hold on,” Stanwyck said. “Bacall!” she yelled. “Pick up the extension and take down every word Grahame says.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I heard Bacall say, and then a click. “I’m here, ma’am.”

“Hey, Lauren, you ever let him go home? He’s a growing boy, probably needs his sleep.”

“Just tell me what you gotta tell me so we can all go home. Eventually. Who’s the victim and who killed him?”

“Okay.” I nodded. “Except it’s a ‘her.’ My secretary. Gloria Mitchum.” Stanwyck whistled. “Yeah. I don’t know who killed her, but they did it at my office. That’s where I am now.”

“Don’t touch anything, Grahame.”

“Yeah, yeah, I know.”

“Can you tell how they did it?”

“Uh-huh. She was shot. Three times. And there are three big bullet holes.” I took a deep breath.

“You got that Bacall? Three times?”

“Yes, ma’am!” I could feel Bacall saluting as he wrote.

I let out the breath. “There’s just one thing, Lauren: There aren’t any bullets.”

“What?”

“They’re gone.” I looked at the crinkled foil. “But I do have some others. And there are nine of them.”

“Nine.”

“Yeah. All spent, all small, all a little peculiar looking, and probably all from the same gun.”

“I’ll be there in fifteen minutes. Bacall, get a car.”

“Yes, ma’am!” The extension clicked.

“Don’t touch anything. I mean it, Robert.”

“I know. I’ll be waiting.”

I hung up without waiting for a reply and recounted the bullets on the desk. There were still nine. I wanted a cigarette. I wanted a drink. I wanted a bed. I did not want to be sitting in my office at five minutes past midnight with my dead secretary’s body lying there in the middle of everything she’d so carefully put away earlier that afternoon.

I picked up the pillow I’d given her. It was sitting there on her desk, curiously pristine. Well, Greenstreet would be the beneficiary after all. I wondered whether Gloria had liked cats. Probably. She seemed to like everyone and everything. Poor, sweet, silly Gloria. That made two dead bodies in this case: hers and Bugsy Siegel. And the night was still young. I was beginning to feel like Marlowe.

I put the money in my desk, locked it, and sat there. I realized I was still wearing my hat. I dropped it on the desk, reached into a drawer, and found the pack of Bicycles. In the distance an ambulance siren whined. One by one, I tossed the cards into my hat. The siren’s whine grew closer. I’d made thirty-one in a row by the time it got there.