What Price Murder

Chapter 1 McCLOUD was coming out of the Hall of Justice, and Sheila Mayo was on her way in, and while he hadn’t been thinking about her particularly, having plenty other troubles on his mind, the sight of her through the glass of the big revolving door did something to his throat. All at once it became imperative that he speak to her, if only for a moment. He followed his segment of the door around and caught her just as she was about to enter an elevator. “Hello, Sheila.” She swung about, fine gray eyes lighting with pleasure. “Stephen, how nice!” She was very smart in tweeds and topcoat; smart, but quite business-like too. She was carrying a brown pigskin briefcase, one McCloud himself had given her when she had first opened her own office. Copper-brown hair curled down from beneath a jaunty little hat that was swagger without being silly. McCloud had always liked Sheila’s taste in clothes. She shifted the briefcase, put out a slim gloved hand. “How’s the great detective? I’ve been seeing your name a lot in the papers recently.” “I’ll bet,” he said. One of his rare smiles enveloped her. He was a big man; bigger than usual today, in a new hundred-dollar camel’s hair overcoat he had just bought. He took off his hat, pretending to be greatly interested in the label inside it. “How’s the law business?” “The law business?” She shrugged. “Oh, not so bad.” Her face looked thinner, more tired than when he had seen her last. McCloud wondered whether it was the press of work or her husband again. Never much of a diplomat, he asked her, and then watched her mouth get that independent, stubborn look about it, and all the pleasure die out of her eyes. She said she was working pretty hard. McCloud’s own mouth tightened. “Maybe I’d better have another talk with the guy,” he said. She caught his arm, flushing. “Oh no, Stephen, you mustn’t. Kenneth is all right, really he is. He’s been doing a lot better lately.” “I saw him less than an hour ago,” McCloud said in a flat voice. “He was drunker than seven hundred dollars.” He didn’t say that Ken Mayo was also with a lush blonde, but Sheila must have guessed something of the kind for she flinched as though he had struck her. Small white teeth left their imprint on her. nether lip, but she was quite composed again when she said, “I must forbid your seeing Kenneth about what is, after all, none of your business.” She took a step toward the elevator bank, paused to say over her shoulder, “Goodbye, Stephen.” Then bronze doors closed on her and the uniformed starter was staring at McCloud with a knowing leer. McCloud pushed out through the throng of home-going clerks and one thing and another. The clock in City Hall tower chimed the half hour. It was just five-thirty. As if it had been waiting for this precise moment the rain which had been threatening all day cut loose. Umbrellas sprouted like mushrooms on the crowded sidewalks and the taxi business rocketed into boom proportions. Nowhere except in Los Angeles or the tropics could it rain so much in so short a time. McCloud sloshed across an already inch-deep street and climbed puffing into his big coupe. There was a note twisted around one of the spokes of the steering wheel. With wet fingers he removed it and spread it on a knee and switched on the dash lights. The message was nothing if not informal. It said: “Hi, baby! Would you be buying any ice today? On account of if you would, and I do mean lots and lots of ice, you might drop around and see me some time.” There was no signature. None was necessary. McCloud would have known the writer, and where to find him, even without the scrawled address of a Turkish bath on Spring Street. Van Felix was the drunken wag of the rialto. Fired from every private agency in Los Angeles, warned off half the lots in Hollywood, apparently sowing not, he nevertheless managed to reap enough to keep him perpetually drunk. Strangely enough, he and McCloud were friends, even though McCloud himself had had to fire him from West Coast Indemnity’s staff. And in the matter of diamonds McCloud was indeed interested. He was interested to the tune of a quarter million dollars. Three whole days had elapsed since the Kahn & Company heist, and in those three days this was the first lead that looked legitimate. He sat there a moment, watching the rain bounce against the windshield, wondering if Van Felix really had something, or if the note were a product of acute alcoholism. Presently he decided that the only way to find out was to look up Felix. He thought, a very little, about Sheila Mayo, and about her husband Kenneth, the man she had chosen instead of a very nice guy named Stephen McCloud. He became quite angry with himself for thinking of things like that when he should be concentrating on the Kahn diamonds. Cloud dodged under a newsstand awning and went down marble steps to the- basement of the Granger Building. There was a pool and billiard hall on one side, and the heavy rumble of the bowling alleys was like thunder in the narrow confines of the corridor. McCloud turned left, through the swing doors of the Hammet Baths. Hammet himself came out, wiping his hands on the towel draped around his neck. Hammet was a Greek made up to resemble a Turk. This hurt him because, politically, he hated the Turks, but business was business. He felt that running a Turkish bath entailed looking like a Turk. He even wore a fez, one that a visiting Shriner had forgotten. His walrus mustaches lifted in a fiendish grin of delight as he recognized McCloud. “Waal, Meesta McCloud, sheesa really you!” McCloud said it was indeed he. He said, “Is that sot Felix around?” Hammet made disparaging sounds. “Sheesa here,” he admitted, adding sadly that he didn’t know why, though. “Why heesa wanting to get sober so he can get dronk again, so he can get sober again, so he can—” McCloud put an end to that. “Never mind. Just forget I ever mentioned it.” He shook water from his rain-spotted Borsalino. “I want to talk to him.” “Hah!” Hammet said scornfully. McCloud looked at him. “What’s wrong with that?” Hammet’s fat belly shook with sudden mirth. “You can talking yourself blue in the face and those guy Felix ain’t going hear wan word. Heesa dronk like anything. Heesa w’at you are calling fried. Heesa steenking.” McCloud sighed. “Is that new?” He shrugged out of his overcoat and tossed it and his hat to a chair. “Well, send out for some coffee and stuff and let’s get to work.” He pushed through the swing doors and went along the row of tiled booths till he found Felix in Number Seven. Felix did not know he had been found. He did not know anything for quite a while. Hammet had not exaggerated. The man on the couch was painfully thin, almost emaciated, but the indirect light from the ceiling fixture was kind to him. In sleep, some of the lines were smoothed from his young-old face, and the pale touseled hair that clung damply to his forehead made him look somehow like a little boy who has been sick for a long, long time. McCloud’s rather sombre dark eyes softened and his big hands were strangely gentle as he helped undress the limp body. Fat Hammet, juggling his fez with one hand and a trayful of cups and saucers and coffee and one thing and another, waddled in and deposited them on a table. McCloud sent the Swede handler out after ice bags. He was afraid to throw Felix in the plunge all at once. The guy looked as though he might shatter. After a while, under the somewhat heroic ministrations of all three men, he was able to stiffen his neck sufficiently to raise his head all by himself, and his eyes came open and settled blearily on McCloud. He said, quite distinctly and as though he had never had a drink in his life, “Oh, so there you are, my buxom fraan.” He then went back to sleep again. Sighing, McCloud waved Hammet and the Swede out of the room. He lifted Felix and propped him against the wall and started slapping him, not hard, but methodically. Felix said sadly, “All right, if you want to play rough,” and suddenly kicked McCloud in the stomach. McCloud slapped him again, harder this time. Felix opened his eyes briefly. “Oh, it’s you again!” “Not again,” McCloud said through clenched teeth. His stomach hurt. “Still. This is the same day.” He put his hands under Felix’s armpits, stood him up in a corner, leaned close to the flaccid face. “Look, you dope, you left a note in my car. About some ice, remember?” Felix’ mouth twisted in a cunning leer. “Sure I ’member. Elephants never forget. Felix never forgets.” He thought this was very funny. He giggled. He shook himself free of McCloud’s grip and sat down suddenly and put his head in his hands. His eyes watched McCloud through slitted fingers. “How much am I bid for a quarter million dollars in diamonds?” McCloud licked his lips. He was a long way from being convinced that the whole thing wasn’t a stall on Felix’ part, but in this racket you had to play every possible angle. “The company is offering five grand,” he said. Felix shook his head, cautiously, lest it become detached from his shoulders. “Not enough.” McCloud pretended to be very busy lighting a cigarette. After awhile he said, “Ten?” “Make it fifty.” McCloud cursed him. “Christ, you must think we’re the mint. I couldn’t offer that kind of money until I got an okay from Jessup and the company.” He considered that for a moment. “And anyway I’d have to know what you’re holding, wouldn’t I?” Quite suddenly he bent and pulled Felix’ hands away from his face and pushed him violently back against the wall. “Look, Van, you know I play square. Give me what you’ve got, or what you think you’ve got, and I’ll check it. Then, if there’s anything to it, I’ll pay you whatever the traffic will bear. Fair enough?” Felix appeared to think this over. “All right, you Shylock, I’ll take that.” He blew out his breath. “There’s a girl named Margie Garland. She was pretty swacked when I saw her this afternoon; swacked and a little boastful. She finally slopped over about all the things she was going to be able to buy shortly, and I got the idea she was mixed up in the Kahn & Company heist.” He wrinkled his forehead in puzzled thought. “Say, you know something? She’s Duke D’Arcy’s gal, that’s who she is. I just remembered.” McCloud frowned. “That simply doesn’t make sense, Felix. D’Arcy’s a gambler. He wouldn’t be mixed up in a heist.” Felix clung stubbornly to the thought. “Can I help it what he is or isn’t? This dame is his gal. I’ve seen ’em together.” McCloud shook him desperately. “All right, all right, where did you say I could find her?” Felix made a valiant effort to get his eyes open, failed, sighed heavily and fell back on the couch. McCloud leaned over him, prodding, nagging, striving to impose his will on the foggy mind. “Come on, Van, just the address, then I’ll let you go to sleep.” And finally the flaccid lips parted and the name of an apartment house in the Westlake district came out. McCloud, breathing angrily through his nose, yanked a blanket over the somnolent Felix and went out and left fifty dollars with Hammet the Greek. Hammet was gratified. He said, “Why, hanh, t’ank you too moch, Meesta McCloud.” He smiled wolfishly. “For those moch monies I am making those Felix like wan new guy.” “For twenty of it,” McCloud said. He scowled as Hammet attempted to give him an argument. “The other thirty goes to Felix, understand?” He shrugged into the camel’s-hair, yanked on his hat. “And no tricks, either.” Hammet was cut to the quick. “Whoosa make tricks, me?” Eyes like a disillusioned hound dog’s watched McCloud to the door. “I’ma your fraan, ain’t I?” “Sure,” McCloud said. “You’re my friend just like all the others.” He sneered. “Just as long as you think you can get anything out of me.” He did not really believe this. He was quite fond of Hammet, though he would not have admitted this to anybody, least of all to Hammet himself.