We trooped in, Riggs shutting the damaged door behind us. A movie script would have provided some snappy dialogue at that point, but we did without. Truax patted down the Mexican and took his gun. Only then did Sebastian ask what we wanted.
“That,” Truax said, aiming his snub-nose at the necklace. “And you two.”
“The gentleman told me he found this outside,” Sebastian said. “If that isn’t what happened, it’s news to me.”
I said, “Your silent partner here says different. He says that jade was going to remodel this dump.”
Sebastian picked Beeler out of the crowd. “You four-eyed sponge. I should have known better than to trust you.”
It was a great spot for one of Beeler’s retroactive shut-ups. Instead, he took us all by surprise. Riggs still held him by the arm, but only loosely. Beeler pulled the kid into a headlock and, reaching around him, drew the gun from Riggs’s holster.
“Drop yours,” he told Truax. “Both of them.”
The detective couldn’t hope to shoot without hitting his partner, so he dropped his revolver and the Mexican’s glittering automatic. When its previous owner stepped to retrieve it, Beeler waved his gun at him.
“No you don’t, Pedro. I’m flying solo from here on.”
He pushed Riggs aside, crossed to the desk, and took the jade from Sebastian. “Enjoy prison food, Nick.”
As he backed toward the door, he noticed Hale. The look he gave her made me step between them.
Then the door behind Beeler flew open, hitting him a whack that sent his glasses flying and shoved him my way.
I grabbed his gun arm and raised it to the ceiling just as the revolver went off. Then I landed a right cross, a solid one this time.
Beeler sank to the floor, revealing the figure in the doorway. It was a little guy with a beak of a nose and a nonstop blink. Claude Dabney. He was huffing and puffing like the Big Bad Wolf.
“I want my hat, you chaps,” he announced. “And I want it now.”
8.
Just shy of last call, Marion Hale and I found ourselves in the tiny, book-lined bar of the Arbor Supper Club. We’d gone back there — after a preliminary interview with the cops — to collect my LaSalle. The club had let us in despite the early hour and even though I no longer had a tie. I’d used mine to bind the hands of Claude Dabney, king of the jungle. He was now asleep in the backseat of my car, wearing his beloved hat, which I’d been carrying around for him since the Troc. But not wearing his shoes. I’d locked those in the trunk as an added precaution. Marion had tossed in her phony wedding ring for good measure.
We’d earned our nightcaps, and they sat on the hardwood before us, a Gibson for me and a Gimlet for Marion. She was ignoring hers to gaze into my steely blue eyes, which gave me a dilemma. Not concerning what her gaze meant or where we were heading. I wasn’t that wet behind the ears. I was wondering how I’d break the news to Paddy that I’d won an in at MGM and would be returning to my old profession.
I’d already turned down one job offer since they’d put the cuffs on Beeler and Sebastian. That had come from Sam Truax on behalf of the Transcontinental Detective Agency, and it had been easy to refuse. If I had to be a babysitter for the Dabneys and Lantrips of this world, I preferred to work for a firm with Hollywood in its title, not one whose name threatened a transfer to Tacoma or Topeka or Trenton.
A chance to crash MGM was another matter entirely. So I was wording my resignation and feeling a little regret over it, now that I’d glimpsed my job’s more exciting possibilities. Then Marion rendered the question moot in the extreme.
Her exact words were: “Want to help me say goodbye to Hollywood, Scotty?”
“Goodbye?”
“Yes. I’m heading east, maybe after I have a farewell toot, like that little friend of yours.”
“What about your job?”
“Gone. Guy fired me, the goat. I called Malibu from the ladies’ room back at Nick’s. I wanted to let Evelyn know she needed a good divorce lawyer. Guy canned me before my first nickel ran out. Said I’d never work in this town again, the plagiarist.”
“He’ll apologize,” I said.
“He’ll have to do it long distance. I’ve got a standing offer from a typewriter company in Ohio. My old man runs it. Someday I will. You’re looking at the first female president of the Dayton Chamber of Commerce.”
I controlled an impulse to down my Gibson and raised it to her instead. “Good luck with that,” I said.
“You should think about getting out, too, Scotty. Guy and all the other vest-pocket Napoleons in this burg are living on borrowed time. They think things are going to go back to the way they were before the war, but those days are gone forever. The future’s waiting to do to Hollywood what the flood did to Johnstown.”
She was just blowing off steam, but her prediction still gave me a chill. Not that I let on. I knew that much about playing a gumshoe.
In my best offhand delivery, I said, “Sounds like I’d better hang around and make sure everything turns out okay.”
Marion raised her drink to me. “Good luck with that,” she said, and we clinked our glasses on it.
©2009 by Terence Faherty
L’Etang du Diable
by Caroline Benton
Caroline Benton’s novel The Path of the Dead was published by Constable, in the U.K., in 2006. She is currently at work on a follow-up novel, which she expects to complete early in 2009. She has also been producing a lot of short stories, mostly in the crime genre, but also some tales of the supernatural and women’s fiction, which she has sold in the U.K. and Scandinavia. She previously appeared in EQMM in 1/09.
I laughed when Gabrielle told me Le Coisel was haunted. Ghouls and ghosts are not part of our modern vocabulary, except as ingredients of a particular genre of movie intended to scare, and more recently of emotive love stories intended to cause weeping. I expected Gabrielle to laugh with me, but her face remained solemn.
“I know what I know,” she said cryptically.
I smiled. “And what do you know, Gabrielle?”
But she was not to be drawn. She snatched up her duster and told me she was too busy to talk.
Gabrielle is Le Coisel’s femme de menage, the daily help. It was she who held the keys to the house after the death of the previous owner, and she who, when we first discovered it, silently showed us around. She lives with her farm-labourer husband, Jacques Prudence, in a one-storey maison rustique a kilometer from here, where the track from Le Coisel meets the small country road. They are the nearest neighbours.
Like most of the farming community in this quiet area of Normandy, Gabrielle speaks not a word of English. Never a problem for my wife, a fluent speaker of French, but frequently one for me, though on this occasion I was sure I had not misunderstood her. Back in my study I checked the dictionary to make sure. No, no mistake. Hante — haunted. I smiled at the credulity of countryfolk.
Her revelation had come as a result of my request for help the following Friday evening when we were to give our first small dinner party. We had met an English couple the previous weekend in the paint section of the local brico, and had pounced on each other as only expats can. Already we were missing our native tongue.
Neil and Penny Morgan had a house twenty kilometers to the northeast in the area of Calvados known as the Bessin, and had been permanent residents for two years. The countryside around them was flat, they told us, but coming from Norfolk, they were used to that. They were a little vague as to how they were surviving. He mentioned doing building work for other Brits — of which, it seems, there are many — and she enthused wildly about “running chambres d’hotes” when their own renovation was completed, which I gathered was a long way into the future. They seemed envious of my writing, though more for my ability to generate income in a foreign country than from any literary kudos I might have acquired. They had not (apologies all round) read any of my books.