14
I had a reason for going back to the office. A special delivery letter with an orange claim check ought to have arrived there by now. Most of the windows were dark in the building, but not all. People work nights in other businesses than mine. The elevator man said “Howdy” from the depths of his throat and trundled me up. The corridor had lighted open doors where the scrubwomen were still cleaning up the debris of the wasted hours. I turned a corner past the slobbery hum of a vacuum cleaner, let myself into my dark office and opened the windows. I sat there at the desk doing nothing, not even thinking. No special-delivery letter. All the noise of the building, except the vacuum cleaner, seemed to have flowed out into the street and lost itself among the turning wheels of innumerable cars. Then somewhere along the hall outside a man started whistling “Lili Marlene” with elegance and virtuosity. I knew who that was. The night man checking office doors. I switched the desk lamp on and he passed without trying mine. His steps went away, then came back with a different sound, more of a shuffle. The buzzer sounded in the other office which was still unlocked. That would be special delivery. I went out to get it, only it wasn’t.
A fat man in sky-blue pants was closing the door with that beautiful leisure only fat men ever achieve. He wasn’t alone, but I looked at him first. He was a large man and wide. Not young nor handsome, but he looked durable. Above the sky-blue gabardine slacks he wore a two-tone leisure jacket which would have been revolting on a zebra. The neck of his canary-yellow shirt was open wide, which it had to be if his neck was going to get out. He was hatless and his large head was decorated with a reasonable amount of pale salmon-colored hair. His nose had been broken but well set and it hadn’t been a collector’s item in the first place.
The creature with him was a weedy number with red eyes and sniffles. Age about twenty, five feet nine, thin as a broom straw. His nose twitched and his mouth twitched and his hands twitched and he looked very unhappy.
The big man smiled genially. “Mr. Marlowe, no doubt?”
I said: “Who else?”
“It’s a little late for a business call,” the big man said and hid half the office by spreading out his hands. “I hope you don’t mind. Or do you already have all the business you can handle?”
“Don’t kid me. My nerves are frayed,” I said. “Who’s the junky?”
“Come along, Alfred,” the big man said to his companion. “And stop acting girlish.”
“In a pig’s valise,” Alfred told him.
The big man turned to me placidly. “Why do all these punks keep saying that? It isn’t funny. It isn’t witty. It doesn’t mean anything. Quite a problem, this Alfred. I got him off the stuff, you know, temporarily at least. Say ‘how do you do’ to Mr. Marlowe, Alfred.”
“Screw him,” Alfred said.
The big man sighed. “My name’s Toad,” he said. “Joseph P. Toad.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Go ahead and laugh,” the big man said. “I’m used to it. Had the name all my life.” He came towards me with his hand out. I took it. The big man smiled pleasantly into my eyes. “O.K. Alfred,” he said without looking back.
Alfred made what seemed to be a very slight and unimportant movement at the end of which a heavy automatic was pointing at me.
“Careful, Alfred,” the big man said, holding my hand with a grip that would have bent a girder. “Not yet.”
“In a pig’s valise,” Alfred said. The gun pointed at my chest. His finger tightened around the trigger. I watched it tighten. I knew at precisely what moment that tightening would release the hammer. It didn’t seem to make any difference. This was happening somewhere else in a cheesy program picture. It wasn’t happening to me.
The hammer of the automatic clicked dryly on nothing. Alfred lowered the gun with a grunt of annoyance and it disappeared whence it had come. He started to twitch again. There was nothing nervous about his movements with the gun. I wondered just what junk he was off of.
The big man let go of my hand, the genial smile still over his large healthy face.
He patted a pocket. “I got the magazine,” he said. “Alfred ain’t reliable lately. The little bastard might have shot you.”
Alfred sat down in a chair and tilted it against the wall and breathed through his mouth.
I let my heels down on the floor again.
“I bet he scared you,” Joseph P. Toad said.
I tasted salt on my tongue.
“You ain’t so tough,” Toad said, poking me in the stomach with a fat finger.
I stepped away from the finger and watched his eyes.
“What does it cost?” he asked almost gently.
“Let’s go into my parlor,” I said.
I turned my back on him and walked through the door into the other office. It was hard work but I made it. I sweated all the way. I went around behind the desk and stood there waiting. Mr. Toad followed me in placidly. The junky came twitching in behind him.
“You don’t have a comic book around, do you?” Toad asked. “Keeps him quiet.”
“Sit down,” I said. “I’ll look.”
He reached for the chair arms. I jerked a drawer open and got my hand around the butt of a Luger. I brought it up slowly, looking at Alfred. Alfred didn’t even look at me. He was studying the corner of the ceiling and trying to keep his mouth out of his eye.
“This is as comic as I get,” I said.
“You won’t need that,” the big man said, genially.
“That’s fine,” I said, like somebody else talking, far away behind a wall. I could just barely hear the words. “But if I do, here it is. And this one’s loaded. Want me to prove it to you?”
The big man looked as near worried as he would ever look. “I’m sorry you take it like that,” he said. “I’m so used to Alfred I hardly notice him. Maybe you’re right. Maybe I ought to do something about him.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Do it this afternoon before you come up here. It’s too late now.”
“Now wait a minute, Mr. Marlowe.” He put his hand out. I slashed at it with the Luger. He was fast, but not fast enough. I cut the back of his hand open with the sight on the gun. He grabbed at it and sucked at the cut. “Hey, please! Alfred’s my nephew. My sister’s kid. I kind of look after him. He wouldn’t hurt a fly, really.”
“Next time you come up I’ll have one for him not to hurt,” I said.
“Now don’t be like that, mister. Please don’t be like that. I’ve got quite a nice little proposition—”
“Shut up,” I said. I sat down very slowly. My face burned. I had difficulty speaking clearly at all. I felt a little drunk. I said, slowly and thickly: “A friend of mine told me about a fellow that had something like this pulled on him. He was at a desk the way I am. He had a gun, just the way I have. There were two men on the other side of the desk, like you and Alfred. The man on my side began to get mad. He couldn’t help himself. He began to shake. He couldn’t speak a word. He just had this gun in his hand. So without a word he shot twice under the desk, right where your belly is.”
The big man turned a sallow green color and started to get up. But he changed his mind. He got a violent-looking handkerchief out of his pocket and mopped his face. “You seen that in a picture,” he said.
“That’s right,” I said. “But the man who made the picture told me where he got the idea. That wasn’t in any picture.” I put the Luger down on the desk in front of me and said in a more natural voice: “You’ve got to be careful about firearms, Mr. Toad. You never know but what it may upset a man to have an Army .45 snapped in his face—especially when he doesn’t know it’s not loaded. It made me kind of nervous for a minute. I haven’t had a shot of morphine since lunch time.”
Toad studied me carefully with narrow eyes. The junky got up and went to another chair and kicked it around and sat down and tilted his greasy head against the wall. But his nose and hands kept on twitching.
“I heard you were kind of hard-boiled,” Toad said slowly, his eyes cool and watchful.
“You heard wrong. I’m a very sensitive guy. I go all to pieces over nothing.”
“Yeah. I understand.” He stared at me a long time without speaking. “Maybe we played this wrong. Mind if I put my hand in my pocket? I don’t wear a gun.”
“Go ahead,” I said. “It would give me the greatest possible pleasure to see you try to pull a gun.”
He frowned, then very slowly got out a flat pigskin wallet and drew out a crisp new one-hundred-dollar bill. He laid it on the edge of the glass top, drew out another just like it, then one by one three more. He laid them carefully in a row along the desk, end to end. Alfred let his chair settle to the floor and stared at the money with his mouth quivering.
“Five C’s,” the big man said. He folded his wallet and put it away. I watched every movement he made. “For nothing at all but keeping the nose clean. Check?”
I just looked at him.
“You ain’t looking for nobody,” the big man said. “You couldn’t find nobody. You don’t have time to work for nobody. You didn’t hear a thing or see a thing. You’re clean. Five C’s clean. Okay?”
There was no sound in the office but Alfred’s sniffling. The big man half turned his head. “Quiet, Alfred. I’ll give you a shot when we leave,” the big man told him. “Try to act nice.” He sucked again at the cut on the back of his hand.
“With you for a model that ought to be easy,” I said.
“Screw you,” Alfred said.
“Limited vocabulary,” the big man told me. “Very limited. Get the idea, chum?” He indicated the money. I fingered the butt of the Luger. He leaned forward a little. “Relax, can’t you. It’s simple. This is a retainer. You don’t do a thing for it. Nothing is what you do. If you keep on doing nothing for a reasonable length of time you get the same amount later on. That’s simple, isn’t it?”
“And who am I doing this nothing for?” I asked.
“Me. Joseph P. Toad.”
“What’s your racket?”
“Business representative, you might call me.”
“What else could I call you? Besides what I could think up myself?”
“You could call me a guy that wants to help out a guy that don’t want to make trouble for a guy.”
“And what could I call that lovable character?” I asked.
Joseph P. Toad gathered the five hundred-dollar bills together, lined up the edges neatly and pushed the packet across the desk. “You can call him a guy that would rather spill money than blood,” he said. “But he don’t mind spilling blood if it looks like that’s what he’s got to do.”
“How is he with an ice pick?” I asked. “I can see how lousy he is with a .45.”
The big man chewed his lower lip, then pulled it out with a blunt forefinger and thumb and nibbled on the inside of it softly, like a milk cow chewing her cud. “We’re not talking about ice picks,” he said at length. “All we’re talking about is how you might get off on the wrong foot and do yourself a lot of harm. Whereas if you don’t get off on no foot at all, you’re sitting pretty and money coming in.”
“Who is the blonde?” I asked.
He thought about that and nodded. “Maybe you’re into this too far already,” he sighed. “Maybe it’s too late to do business.”
After a moment he leaned forward and said gently: “Okay. I’ll check back with my principal and see how far out he wants to come. Maybe we can still do business. Everything stands as it is until you hear from me. Check?”
I let him have that one. He put his hands on the desk and very slowly stood up, watching the gun I was pushing around on the blotter.
“You can keep the dough,” he said. “Come on, Alfred.” He turned and walked solidly out of the office.
Alfred’s eyes crawled sideways watching him, then jerked to the money on the desk. The big automatic appeared with the same magic in his thin right hand. Dartingly as an eel he moved over to the desk. He kept the gun on me and reached for the money with his left hand. It disappeared into his pocket. He gave me a smooth cool empty grin, nodded and moved away, apparently not realizing for a moment that I was holding a gun too.
“Come on, Alfred,” the big man called sharply from outside the door. Alfred slipped through the door and was gone.
The outer door opened and closed. Steps went along the hail. Then silence. I sat there thinking back over it, trying to make up my mind whether it was pure idiocy or just a new way to toss a scare.
Five minutes later the telephone rang.
A thick pleasant voice said: “Oh by the way, Mr. Marlowe, I guess you know Sherry Ballou, don’t you?”
“Nope.”
“Sheridan Ballou, Incorporated. The big agent? You ought to look him up sometime.”
I held the phone silently for a moment. Then I said: “Is he her agent?”
“He might be,” Joseph P. Toad said, and paused a moment. “I suppose you realize we’re just a couple of bit players, Mr. Marlowe. That’s all. Just a couple of bit players. Somebody wanted to find out a little something about you. It seemed the simplest way to do it. Now, I’m not so sure.”
I didn’t answer. He hung up. Almost at once the phone rang again.
A seductive voice said: “You do not like me so well, do you, amigo?”
“Sure I do. Just don’t keep biting me.”
“I am at home at the Chateau Bercy. I am lonely.”