Trouble Is My Business (7 page)

I rang a bell the size of a silver dollar. The door opened and a tall narrow cold-eyed bird in dark clothes looked out at me.

“Mr. Jeeter home? Mr. Jeeter, Senior?”

“May I arsk who is calling?” The accent was a little too thick, like cut Scotch.

“Philip Marlowe. I’m working for him. Maybe I had ought to of gone to the servant’s entrance.”

He hitched a finger at a wing collar and looked at me without pleasure. “Aw, possibly. You may step in. I shall inform Mr. Jeeter. I believe he is engaged at the moment. Kindly wait ’ere in the ’all.”

“The act stinks,” I said. “English butlers aren’t dropping their h’s this year.”

“Smart guy, huh?” he snarled, in a voice from not any farther across the Atlantic than Hoboken. “Wait here.” He slid away.

I sat down in a carved chair and felt thirsty. After a while the butler came cat-footing back along the hall and jerked his chin at me unpleasantly.

We went along a mile of hallway. At the end it broadened without any doors into a huge sunroom. On the far side of the sunroom the butler opened a wide door and I stepped past him into an oval room with a black-and-silver oval rug, a black marble table in the middle of the rug, stiff high-backed carved chairs against the walls, a huge oval mirror with a rounded surface that made me look like a pygmy with water on the brain, and in the room three people.

By the door opposite where I came in, George the chauffeur stood stiffly in his neat dark uniform, with his peaked cap in his hand. In the least uncomfortable of the chairs sat Miss Harriet Huntress holding a glass in which there was half a drink. And around the silver margin of the oval rug, Mr. Jeeter, Senior, was trying his legs out in a brisk canter, still under wraps, but mad inside. His face was red and the veins on his nose were distended. His hands were in the pockets of a velvet smoking jacket. He wore a pleated shirt with a black pearl in the bosom, a batwing black tie and one of his patent-leather oxfords was unlaced.

He whirled and yelled at the butler behind me: “Get out and keep those doors shut! And I’m not at home to anybody, understand? Nobody!”

The butler closed the doors. Presumably, he went away. I didn’t hear him go.

George gave me a cool one-sided smile and Miss Huntress gave me a bland stare over her glass. “You made a nice come-back,” she said demurely.

“You took a chance leaving me alone in your apartment,” I told her. “I might have sneaked some of your perfume.”

“Well, what do you want?” Jeeter yelled at me. “A nice sort of detective you turned out to be. I put you on a confidential job and you walk right in on Miss Huntress and explain the whole thing to her.”

“It worked, didn’t it?”

He stared. They all stared. “How do you know that?” he barked.

“I know a nice girl when I see one. She’s here telling you she had an idea she got not to like, and for you to quit worrying about it. Where’s Mister Gerald?”

Old man Jeeter stopped and gave me a hard level stare. “I still regard you as incompetent,” he said. “My son is missing.”

“I’m not working for you. I’m working for Anna Halsey. Any complaints you have to make should be addressed to her. Do I pour my own drink or do you have a flunky in a purple suit to do it? And what do you mean, your son is missing?”

“Should I give him the heave, sir?” George asked quietly.

Jeeter waved his hand at a decanter and siphon and glasses on the black marble table and started around the rug again. “Don’t be silly,” he snapped at George.

George flushed a little, high on his cheekbones. His mouth looked tough.

I mixed myself a drink and sat down with it and tasted it and asked again: “What do you mean your son is missing, Mr. Jeeter?”

“I’m paying you good money,” he started to yell at me, still mad.

“When?”

He stopped dead in his canter and looked at me again. Miss Huntress laughed lightly. George scowled.

“What do you suppose I mean—my son is missing?” he snapped. “I should have thought that would be clear enough even to you. Nobody knows where he is. Miss Huntress doesn’t know. I don’t know. No one at any of the places where he might be known.”

“But I’m smarter than they are,” I said. “
I
know.”

Nobody moved for a long minute. Jeeter stared at me fish-eyed. George stared at me. The girl stared at me. She looked puzzled. The other two just stared.

I looked at her. “Where did you go when you went out, if you’re telling?”

Her dark blue eyes were water-clear. “There’s no secret about it. We went out together—in a taxi. Gerald had had his driving license suspended for a month. Too many tickets. We went down towards the beach and I had a change of heart, as you guessed. I decided I was just being a chiseler after all. I didn’t want Gerald’s money really. What I wanted was revenge. On Mr. Jeeter here for ruining my father. Done all legally of course, but done just the same. But I got myself in a spot where I couldn’t have my revenge and not look like a cheap chiseler. So I told George to find some other girl to play with. He was sore and we quarreled. I stopped the taxi and got out in Beverly Hills. He went on. I don’t know where. Later I went back to the El Milano and got my car out of the garage and came here. To tell Mr. Jeeter to forget the whole thing and not bother to sick sleuths on to me.”

“You say you went with him in a taxi,” I said. “Why wasn’t George driving him, if he couldn’t drive himself?”

I stared at her, but I wasn’t talking to her. Jeeter answered me, frostily. “George drove me home from the office, of course. At that time Gerald had already gone out. Is there anything important about that?”

I turned to him. “Yeah. There’s going to be. Mister Gerald is at the El Milano. Hawkins the house dick told me. He went back there to wait for Miss Huntress and Hawkins let him into her apartment. Hawkins will do you those little favors—for ten bucks. He may be there still and he may not.”

I kept on watching them. It was hard to watch all three of them. But they didn’t move. They just looked at me.

“Well—I’m glad to hear it,” old man Jeeter said. “I was afraid he was off somewhere getting drunk.”

“No. He’s not off anywhere getting drunk,” I said. “By the way, among these places you called to see if he was there, you didn’t call the El Milano?”

George nodded. “Yes, I did. They said he wasn’t there. Looks like this house peeper tipped the phone girl off not to say anything.”

“He wouldn’t have to do that. She’d just ring the apartment and he wouldn’t answer—naturally.” I watched old man Jeeter hard then, with a lot of interest. It was going to be hard for him to take that up, but he was going to have to do it.

He did. He licked his lips first. “Why—naturally, if I may ask?” he said coldly.

I put my glass down on the marble table and stood against the wall, with my hands hanging free. I still tried to watch them—all three of them.

“Let’s go back over this thing a little,” I said. “We’re all wise to the situation. I know George is, although he shouldn’t be, being just a servant. I know Miss Huntress is. And of course
you
are, Mr. Jeeter. So let’s see what we have got. We have a lot of things that don’t add up, but I’m smart. I’m going to add them up anyhow. First-off a handful of photostats of notes from Marty Estel. Gerald denies having given these and Mr. Jeeter won’t pay them, but he has a handwriting man named Arbogast check the signatures, to see if they look genuine. They do. They are. This Arbogast may have done other things. I don’t know. I couldn’t ask him. When I went to see him, he was dead—shot three times—as I’ve since heard—with a twenty-two. No, I didn’t tell the police, Mr. Jeeter.”

The tall silver-haired man looked horribly shocked. His lean body shook like a bullrush. “Dead?” he whispered. “Murdered?”

I looked at George. George didn’t move a muscle. I looked at the girl. She sat quietly, waiting, tight-lipped.

I said: “There’s only one reason to suppose his killing had anything to do with Mr. Jeeter’s affairs. He was shot with a twenty-two—and there is a man in this case who wears a twenty-two.”

I still had their attention. And their silence.

“Why he was shot I haven’t the faintest idea. He was not a dangerous man to Miss Huntress or Marty Estel. He was too fat to get around much. My guess is he was a little too smart. He got a simple case of signature identification and he went on from there to find out more than he should. And after he had found out more than he should—he guessed more than he ought—and maybe he even tried a little blackmail. And somebody rubbed him out this afternoon with a twenty-two. O.K., I can stand it. I never knew him.

“So I went over to see Miss Huntress and after a lot of finagling around with this itchy-handed house dick I got to see her and we had a chat, and then Mister Gerald stepped neatly out of hiding and bopped me a nice one on the chin and over I went and hit my head on a chair leg. And when I came out of that the joint was empty. So I went on home.

“And home I found the man with the twenty-two and with him a dimwit called Frisky Lavon, with a bad breath and a very large gun, neither of which matters now as he was shot dead in front of your house tonight, Mr. Jeeter—shot trying to stick up your car. The cops know about that one—they came to see me about it—because the other guy, the one that packs the twenty-two, is the little dimwit’s brother and he thought I shot Dimwit and tried to put the bee on me. But it didn’t work. That’s two killings.

“We now come to the third and most important. I went back to the El Milano because it no longer seemed a good idea for Mister Gerald to be running around casually. He seemed to have a few enemies. It even seemed that he was supposed to be in the car this evening when Frisky Lavon shot at it—but of course that was just a plant.”

Old Jeeter drew his white eyebrows together in an expression of puzzlement. George didn’t look puzzled. He didn’t look anything. He was as wooden-faced as a cigar-store Indian. The girl looked a little white now, a little tense. I plowed on.

“Back at the El Milano I found that Hawkins had let Marty Estel and his bodyguard into Miss Huntress’ apartment to wait for her. Marty had something to tell her—that Arbogast had been killed. That made it a good idea for her to lay off young Jeeter for a while—until the cops quieted down anyhow. A thoughtful guy, Marty. A much more thoughtful guy than you would suppose. For instance, he knew about Arbogast and he knew Mr. Jeeter went to Anna Halsey’s office this morning and he knew somehow—Anna might have told him herself, I wouldn’t put it past her—that I was working on the case now. So he had me tailed to Arbogast’s place and away, and he found out later from his cop friends that Arbogast had been murdered, and he knew I hadn’t given it out. So he had me there and that made us pals. He went away after telling me this and once more I was left alone in Miss Huntress’ apartment. But this time for no reason at all I poked around. And I found young Mister Gerald, in the bedroom, in a closet.”

I stepped quickly over to the girl and reached into my pocket and took out the small fancy .25 automatic and laid it down on her knee.

“Ever see this before?”

Her voice had a curious tight sound, but her dark blue eyes looked at me levelly.

“Yes. It’s mine.”

“You kept it where?”

“In the drawer of a small table beside the bed.”

“Sure about that?”

She thought. Neither of the two men stirred.

George began to twitch the corner of his mouth. She shook her head suddenly, sideways.

“No. I have an idea now I took it out to show somebody—because I don’t know much about guns—and left it lying on the mantel in the living room. In fact, I’m almost sure I did. It was Gerald I showed it to.”

“So he might have reached for it there, if anybody tried to make a wrong play at him?”

She nodded, troubled. “What do you mean—he’s in the closet?” she asked in a small quick voice.

“You know. Everybody in this room knows what I mean. They know that I showed you that gun for a purpose.” I stepped away from her and faced George and his boss. “He’s dead, of course. Shot through the heart—probably with this gun. It was left there with him. That’s why it would be left.”

The old man took a step and stopped and braced himself against the table. I wasn’t sure whether he had turned white or whether he had been white already. He stared stonily at the girl. He said very slowly, between his teeth: “You damned murderess!”

“Couldn’t it have been suicide?” I sneered.

He turned his head enough to look at me. I could see that the idea interested him. He half nodded.

“No,” I said. “It couldn’t have been suicide.”

He didn’t like that so well. His face congested with blood and the veins on his nose thickened. The girl touched the gun lying on her knee, then put her hand loosely around the butt. I saw her thumb slide very gently towards the safety catch. She didn’t know much about guns, but she knew that much.

“It couldn’t be suicide,” I said again, very slowly. “As an isolated event—maybe. But not with all the other stuff that’s been happening. Arbogast, the stick-up down on Calvello Drive outside this house, the thugs planted in my apartment, the job with the twenty-two.”

I reached into my pocket again and pulled out Waxnose’s Woodsman. I held it carelessly on the flat of my left hand. “And curiously enough, I don’t think it was
this
twenty-two—although this happens to be the gunman’s twenty-two. Yeah, I have the gunman, too. He’s tied up in my apartment. He came back to knock me off, but I talked him out of it. I’m a swell talker.”

“Except that you overdo it,” the girl said coolly, and lifted the gun a little.

“It’s obvious who killed him, Miss Huntress,” I said. “It’s simply a matter of motive and opportunity. Marty Estel didn’t, and didn’t have it done. That would spoil his chances to get his fifty grand. Frisky Lavon’s pal didn’t, regardless of who he was working for, and I don’t think he was working for Marty Estel. He couldn’t have got into the El Milano to do the job, and certainly not into Miss Huntress’ apartment. Whoever did it had something to gain by it and an opportunity to get to the place where it was done. Well, who had something to gain? Gerald had five million coming to him in two years out of a trust fund. He couldn’t will it until he got it. So if he died, his natural heir got it. Who’s his natural heir? You’d be surprised. Did you know that in the state of California and some others, but not in all, a man can by his own act become a natural heir? Just by adopting somebody who has money and no heirs!”