«Maybe you better talk, bright boy. Now would be a hell of a good time. Jim and me ain’t tough to get on with, but we got friends who ain’t so dainty.»
Mallory said: «What would I talk about, Lieutenant?»
The big man shook with silent laughter, made no answer. The car went past the oil well that stands in the middle of La Cienega Boulevard, then turned off on to a quiet street fringed with palm trees. It stopped half way down the block, in front of an empty lot. Jim cut the motor and the lights. Then he got a flat bottle out of the door-pocket and held it to his mouth, sighed deeply, passed the bottle over his shoulder.
The big man took a drink, waved the bottle, said:
«We got to wait here for a friend. Let’s talk. My name’s Macdonald—detective bureau. You was tryin’ to shake the Fair girl down. Then her protection stepped in front of her. You bopped him. That was nice routine and we liked it. But we didn’t like the other part.»
Jim reached back for the whiskey bottle, took another drink, sniffed at the neck, said: «This liquor is lousy.»
Macdonald went on: «We was stashed out for you. But we don’t figure your play out in the open like that. It don’t listen.»
Mallory leaned an arm on the side of the car, and looked out and up at the calm, blue, star-spattered sky. He said:
«You know too much, copper. And you didn’t get your dope from Miss Farr. No screen star would go to the police on a matter of blackmail.»
Macdonald jerked his big head around. His eyes gleamed faintly in the dark interior of the car.
«We didn’t say how we got our dope, bright boy. So you was tryin’ to shake her down, huh?»
Mallory said gravely: «Miss Farr is an old friend of mine. Somebody is trying to blackmail her, but not me. I just have a hunch.»
Macdonald said swiftly: «What the wop pull a gun on you for?»
«He didn’t like me,» Mallory said in a bored voice. «I was mean to him.»
Macdonald said: «Horse-feathers!» He rumbled angrily. The man in the front seat said: «Smack him in the kisser, Mac. Make the — like it!»
Mallory stretched his arms downward, twisting his shoulders like a man cramped from sitting. He felt the bulge of his Luger under his left arm. He said slowly, wearily:
«You said I was trying to peddle some phony letters. What makes you think the letters would be phony?»
Macdonald said softly: «Maybe we know where the right ones are.»
Mallory drawled: «That’s what I thought, copper,» and laughed.
Macdonald moved suddenly, jerked his balled fist up, hit him in the face, but not very hard. Mallory laughed again, then he touched the bruised place behind his ear with careful fingers.
«That went home, didn’t it?» he said.
Macdonald swore dully. «Maybe you’re just a bit too damn’ smart, bright boy. I guess we’ll find out after a while.»
He fell silent. The man in the front seat took off his hat and scratched at a mat of gray hair. Staccato horn blasts came from the boulevard a half block away. Headlights streamed past the end of the street. After a time a pair of them swung around in a wide curve, speared white beams along below the palm trees. A dark bulk drifted down the half block, slid to the curb in front of the touring car. The lights went off.
A man got out and walked back. Macdonald said: «Hi, Slippy. How’d it go?»
The man was a tall thin figure with a shadowy face under a pulled-down cap. He lisped a little when he spoke. He said:
«Nothin’ to it. Nobody got mad.»
«Okey,» Macdonald grunted. «Ditch the hot one and drive this heap.»
Jim got into the back of the touring car and sat on Mallory’s left, digging a hard elbow into him. The lanky man slid under the wheel, started the motor, and drove back to La Cienega, then south to Wilshire, then west again. He drove fast and roughly.
They went casually through a red light, passed a big movie palace with most of its lights out and its glass cashier’s cage empty; then through Beverly Hills, over interurban tracks. The exhaust got louder on a long hill with high banks paralleling the road. Macdonald spoke suddenly:
«Hell, Jim, I forgot to frisk this baby. Hold the gun a minute.»
He leaned in front of Mallory, close to him, blowing whiskey breath in his face. A big hand went over his pockets, down inside his coat around the hips, up under his left arm. It stopped there a moment, against the Luger in the shoulder-holster. It went on to the other side, went away altogether.
«Okey, Jim. No gun on bright boy.»
A sharp light of wonder winked into being deep in Mallory’s brain. His eyebrows drew together. His mouth felt dry.
«Mind if I light up a cigarette?» he asked, after a pause.
Macdonald said with mock politeness: «Now why would we mind a little thing like that, sweetheart?»
THREE
THE apartment house stood on a hill above Westward Village, and was new and rather cheap-looking. Macdonald and Mallory and Jim got out in front of it, and the touring car went on around the corner, disappeared.
The three men went through a quiet lobby past a switchboard where no one sat at the moment, up to the seventh floor in the automatic elevator. They went along a corridor, stopped before a door. Macdonald took a loose key out of his pocket, unlocked the door. They went in.
It was a very new room, very bright, very foul with cigarette smoke. The furniture was upholstered in loud colors, the carpet was a mess of fat green and yellow lozenges. There was a mantel with bottles on it.
Two men sat at an octagonal table with tall glasses at their elbows. One had red hair, very dark eyebrows, and a dead white face with deep-set dark eyes. The other one had a ludicrous big bulbous nose, no eyebrows at all, hair the color of the inside of a sardine can. This one put some cards down slowly and came across the room with a wide smile. He had a loose, good-natured mouth, an amiable expression.
«Have any trouble, Mac?» he said.
Macdonald rubbed his chin, shook his head sourly. He looked at the man with the nose as if he hated him. The man with the nose went on smiling. He said:
«Frisk him?»
Macdonald twisted his mouth to a thick sneer and stalked across the room to the mantel and the bottles. He said in a nasty tone:
«Bright boy don’t pack a gun. He works with his head. He’s smart.»
He re-crossed the room suddenly and smacked the back of his rough hand across Mallory’s mouth. Mallory smiled thinly, did not stir. He stood in front of a big bile-colored davenport spotted with angry-looking red squares. His hands hung down at his sides, and cigarette smoke drifted up from between his fingers to join the haze that already blanketed the rough, arched ceiling.
«Keep your pants on, Mac,» the man with the nose said. «You’ve done your act. You and Jim check out now. Oil the wheels and check out.»
Macdonald snarled: «Who you givin’ orders to, big shot? I’m stickin’ around till this chiseler gets what’s coming to him, Costello.»
The man called Costello shrugged his shoulders briefly. The red-haired man at the table turned a little in his chair and looked at Mallory with the impersonal air of a collector studying an impaled beetle. Then he took a cigarette out of a neat black case and lit it carefully with a gold lighter.
Macdonald went back to the mantel, poured some whiskey out of a square bottle into a glass, and drank it raw. He leaned, scowling, with his back to the mantel.
Costello stood in front of Mallory, cracking the joints of long, bony fingers.
He said: «Where do you come from?»
Mallory looked at him dreamily and put his cigarette in his mouth. «McNeil’s Island,» he said with vague amusement.
«How long since?»