The Little Sister (23 page)

33

A shave and a second breakfast made me feel a little less like the box of shavings the cat had had kittens in. I went up to the office and unlocked the door and sniffed in the twice-breathed air and the smell of dust. I opened a window and inhaled the fry-cook smell from the coffee shop next door. I sat down at my desk and felt the grit on it with my fingertips. I filled a pipe and lit it and leaned back and looked around.

“Hello,” I said.

I was just talking to the office equipment, the three green filing cases, the threadbare piece of carpet, the customer’s chair across from me, and the light fixture in the ceiling with three dead moths in it that had been there for at least six months. I was talking to the pebbled glass panel and the grimy woodwork and the pen set on the desk and the tired, tired telephone. I was talking to the scales on an alligator, the name of the alligator being Marlowe, a private detective in our thriving little community. Not the brainiest guy in the world, but cheap. He started out cheap and he ended cheaper still.

I reached down and put the bottle of Old Forester up on the desk. It was about a third full. Old Forester. Now who gave you that, pal? That’s green-label stuff. Out of your class entirely. Must have been a client. I had a client once.

And that got me thinking about her, and maybe I have stronger thoughts than I know. The telephone rang, and the funny little precise voice sounded just as it had the first time she called me up.

“I’m in that telephone booth,” she said. “If you’re alone, I’m coming up.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I suppose you’re mad at me,” she said.

“I’m not mad at anybody. Just tired.”

“Oh yes you are,” her tight little voice said. “But I’m coming up anyway. I don’t care if you are mad at me.”

She hung up. I took the cork out of the bottle of Old Forester and gave a sniff at it. I shuddered. That settled it. Any time I couldn’t smell whiskey without shuddering I was through.

I put the bottle away and got up to unlock the communicating door. Then I heard her tripping along the hall. I’d know those tight little footsteps anywhere. I opened the door and she came up to me and looked at me shyly.

It was all gone. The slanted cheaters, and the new hair-do and the smart little hat and the perfume and the prettied-up touch. The costume jewelry, the rouge, the everything. All gone. She was right back where she started that first morning. Same brown tailor-made, same square bag, same rimless glasses, same prim little narrow-minded smile.

“It’s me,” she said. “I’m going home.”

She followed me into my private thinking parlor and sat down primly and I sat down just any old way and stared at her.

“Back to Manhattan,” I said. “I’m surprised they let you.”

“I may have to come back.”

“Can you afford it?”

She gave a quick little half-embarrassed laugh. “It won’t cost me anything,” she said. She reached up and touched the rimless glasses. “These feel all wrong now,” she said. “I liked the others. But Dr. Zugsmith wouldn’t like them at all.” She put her bag on the desk and drew a line along the desk with her fingertip. That was just like the first time too.

“I can’t remember whether I gave you back your twenty dollars or not,” I said. “We kept passing it back and forth until I lost count.”

“Oh, you gave it to me,” she said. “Thank you.”

“Sure?”

“I never make mistakes about money. Are you all right? Did they hurt you?”

“The police? No. And it was as tough a job as they ever didn’t do.”

She looked innocently surprised. Then her eyes glowed. “You must be awfully brave,” she said.

“Just luck,” I said. I picked up a pencil and felt the point. It was a good sharp point, if anybody wanted to write anything. I didn’t. I reached across and slipped the pencil through the strap of her bag and pulled it towards me.

“Don’t touch my bag,” she said quickly and reached for it.

I grinned and drew it out of her reach. “All right. But it’s such a cute little bag. It’s so like you.”

She leaned back. There was a vague worry behind her eyes, but she smiled. “You think I’m cute—Philip? I’m so ordinary.”

“I wouldn’t say so.”

“You wouldn’t?”

“Hell no, I think you’re one of the most unusual girls I ever met.” I swung the bag by its strap and set it down on the corner of the desk. Her eyes fastened on it quickly, but she licked her lip and kept on smiling at me.

“And I bet you’ve known an awful lot of girls,” she said. “Why—” she looked down and did that with her fingertip on the desk again—”why didn’t you ever get married?”

I thought of all the ways you answer that. I thought of all the women I had liked that much. No, not all. But some of them.

“I suppose I know the answer,” I said. “But it would just sound corny. The ones I’d maybe like to marry—well, I haven’t what they need. The others you don’t have to marry. You just seduce them—if they don’t beat you to it.”

She flushed to the roots of her mousy hair.

“You’re horrid when you talk like that.”

“That goes for some of the nice ones too,” I said. “Not what you said. What I said. You wouldn’t have been so hard to take yourself.”

“Don’t talk like that, please!”

“Well, would you?”

She looked down at the desk. “I wish you’d tell me,” she said slowly, “what happened to Orrin. I’m all confused.”

“I told you he probably went off the rails. The first time you came in. Remember?” She nodded slowly, still blushing.

“Abnormal sort of home life,” I said. “Very inhibited sort of guy and with a very highly developed sense of his own importance. It looked at you out of the picture you gave me. I don’t want to go psychological on you, but I figure he was just the type to go very completely haywire, if he went haywire at all. Then there’s that awful money hunger that runs in your family—all except one.”

She smiled at me now. If she thought I meant her, that was jake with me. “There’s one question I want to ask you,” I said. “Was your father married before?”

She nodded, yes.

“That helps. Leila had another mother. That suits me fine. Tell me some more. After all I did a lot of work for you, for a very low fee of no dollars net.”

“You got paid,” she said sharply. “Well paid. By Leila. And don’t expect me to call her Mavis Weld. I won’t do it.”

“You didn’t know I was going to get paid.”

“Well—” there was a long pause, during which her eyes went to her bag again—”you did get paid.”

“Okay, pass that. Why wouldn’t you tell me who she was?”

“I was ashamed. Mother and I were both ashamed.”

“Orrin wasn’t. He loved it.”

“Orrin?” There was a tidy little silence while she looked at her bag again. I was beginning to get curious about that bag. “But he had been out here and I suppose he’d got used to it.”

“Being in pictures isn’t that bad, surely.”

“It wasn’t just that,” she said swiftly, and her tooth came down on the outer edge of her lower lip and something flared in her eyes and very slowly died away. I just put another match to my pipe. I was too tired to show emotions, even if I felt any.

“I know. Or anyway I kind of guessed. How did Orrin find out something about Steelgrave that the cops didn’t know?”

“I—I don’t know,” she said slowly, picking her way among her words like a cat on a fence. “Could it have been that doctor?”

“Oh sure,” I said, with a big warm smile. “He and Orrin got to be friends somehow. A common interest in sharp tools maybe.”

She leaned back in her chair. Her little face was thin and angular now. Her eyes had a watchful look.

“Now you’re just being nasty,” she said. “Every so often you have to be that way.”

“Such a pity,” I said. “I’d be a lovable character if I’d let myself alone. Nice bag.” I reached for it and pulled it in front of me and snapped it open.

She came up out of her chair and lunged.

“You let my bag alone!”

I looked her straight in the rimless glasses. “You want to go home to Manhattan, Kansas, don’t you? Today? You got your ticket and everything?”

She worked her lips and slowly sat down again.

“Okay,” I said. “I’m not stopping you. I just wondered how much dough you squeezed out of the deal.”

She began to cry. I opened the bag and went through it. Nothing until I came to the zipper pocket at the back. I unzipped and reached in. There was a flat packet of new bills in there. I took them out and riffled them. Ten centuries. All new. All nice. An even thousand dollars. Nice traveling money.

I leaned back and tapped the edge of the packet on my desk. She sat silent now, staring at me with wet eyes. I got a handkerchief out of her bag and tossed it across to her. She dabbed at her eyes. She watched me around the handkerchief. Once in a while she made a nice little appealing sob in her throat.

“Leila gave the money to me,” she said softly.

“What size chisel did you use?” She just opened her mouth and a tear ran down her cheek into it.

“Skip it,” I said. I dropped the pack of money back to the bag, snapped the bag shut and pushed it across the desk to her. “I guess you and Orrin belong to that class of people that can convince themselves that everything they do is right. He can blackmail his sister and then when a couple of small-time crooks get wise to his racket and take it away from him, he can sneak up on them and knock them off with an ice pick in the back of the neck. Probably didn’t even keep him awake that night. You can do much the same. Leila didn’t give you that money. Steelgrave gave it to you. For what?”

“You’re filthy,” she said. “You’re vile. How dare you say such things to me?”

“Who tipped off the law that Dr. Lagardie knew Clausen? Lagardie thought I did. I didn’t. So you did. Why? To smoke out your brother who was not cutting you in—because right then he had lost his deck of cards and was hiding out. I’d like to see some of those letters he wrote home. I bet they’re meaty. I can see him working at it, watching his sister, trying to get her lined up for his Leica, with the good Doctor Lagardie waiting quietly in the background for his share of the take. What did you hire me for?”

“I didn’t know,” she said evenly. She wiped her eyes again and put the handkerchief away in the bag and got herself all collected and ready to leave. “Orrin never mentioned any names. I didn’t even know Orrin had lost his pictures. But I knew he had taken them and that they were very valuable. I came out to make sure.”

“Sure of what?”

“That Orrin treated me right. He could be awfully mean sometimes. He might have kept all the money himself.”

“Why did he call you up night before last?”

“He was scared. Dr. Lagardie wasn’t pleased with him any more. He didn’t have the pictures. Somebody else had them. Orrin didn’t know who. But he was scared.

“I had them. I still have,” I said. “They’re in that safe.”

She turned her head very slowly to look at the safe. She ran a fingertip questioningly along her lip. She turned back.

“I don’t believe you,” she said, and her eyes watched me like a cat watching a mouse hole.

“How’s to split that grand with me. You get the pictures.”

She thought about it. “I could hardly give you that money for something that doesn’t belong to you,” she said, and smiled. “Please give them to me. Please, Philip. Leila ought to have them back.”

“For how much dough?”

She frowned and looked hurt.

“She’s my client now,” I said. “But double-crossing her wouldn’t be bad business—at the right price.”

“I don’t believe you have them.”

“Okay.” I got up and went to the safe. In a moment I was back with the envelope. I poured the prints and the negative out on the desk—my side of the desk. She looked down at them and started to reach.

I picked them up and shuffled them together and held one so that she could look at it. When she reached for it I moved it back.

“But I can’t see it so far away,” she complained.

“It costs money to get closer.”

“I never thought you were a crook,” she said with dignity.

I didn’t say anything. I relit my pipe.

“I could make you give them to the police,” she said.

“You could try.”

Suddenly she spoke rapidly. “I couldn’t give you this money I have, really I couldn’t. We—well mother and I owe money still on account of father and the house isn’t clear and—”

“What did you sell Steelgrave for the grand?”

Her mouth fell open and she looked ugly. She closed her lips and pressed them together. It was a tight hard little face that I was looking at.

“You had one thing to sell,” I said. “You knew where Orrin was. To Steelgrave that information was worth a grand. Easy. It’s a question of connecting up evidence. You wouldn’t understand. Steelgrave went down there and killed him. He paid you the money for the address.”

“Leila told him,” she said in a faraway voice.