The Oxford Book of American Det (50 page)

By this time the redhead had recognised me, of course. “You and your pearls,” she sneered, but the sneer was only a camouflage for the growing fright in her eyes.

“Now,” I went on, “you’re in Bass’ way. Bass can’t have the police knowing he was behind the blackmail business, and you can show he was. He’ll have to try to get rid of both of us.”

“Arthur would never do anything like that,” she cried.

The closet door was in front of me. The bathroom door was behind me. But a mirror in the closet door enabled me to see the bathroom one. I kept my eyes on these doors.

“He will, though,” I told her, “and you know it. He’s already killed once. Otherwise why did he come here tonight to tell you that under no circumstances were you to admit you’d talked with him over the telephone?”

She moistened her lips with her tongue. “How do you know all these things?” she asked.

“I know them,” I told her, “because I know that persons who have ever worked as forest rangers in the dry country make it an invariable habit to break their matches in two before they throw them away. I know that he was here the other night because there were broken matches in your ash-tray. He’d sent you up to put the screws on Harvey Pemberton. I know that he’s here tonight. I know he was in the office last night. Just before you came in he’d been talking with Harvey Pemberton. I didn’t hear him take the elevator, so I know he went in to his private office after he’d finished that talk. He was still there when I left. I’m Wennick.”

“But he wouldn’t have done anything like that,” she said. “Arthur couldn’t.”

“But you did telephone right after those letters had been stolen, and told him about it, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” she said, “I—“

The door behind me opened a half inch. I saw the muzzle of the gun slowly creep out, but it wasn’t until I had my fingers on the butt of my own gun that I realised the barrel wasn’t pointing at me, but at her.

“Duck!” I yelled.

I think it was the sudden yell which frightened her half out of her wits. She didn’t duck, but she recoiled from me as though I’d thrown a brick at her instead of my voice. The gun went off. The bullet whizzed through the air right where her head had been, and buried itself in the plaster. I whirled and shot, through the door. I saw the gun barrel waver. I shot again, and then an arm came into sight, drooping toward the floor. The gun fell from nerveless fingers, and Arthur Bass crashed full length into the room.

Old E. B. glowered at me with little, malevolent eyes which glittered from above the bluish-white pouches which puffed out from under his eyeballs. “Wennick,” he said,

“you look like the devil!”

“I’m sorry,” I told him.

“You look dissipated.”

“I haven’t shaved yet.”

“From all reports,” he said, “you cleaned up this Pemberton murder case and were released by the police at Culverton with a vote of thanks, some time before ten o’clock yesterday evening. Cedric Boniface was in the law library, briefing the question of premeditation in connection with murder. He didn’t know what had happened until after the police had obtained Bass’ dying statement and you had left.” I nodded.

“Now then,” E. B. said, “why the hell is it that you didn’t report to me?”

“I’m sorry,” I told him, “but, after all, I have social engagements.”

“Social engagements!” he stormed. “You were out with some woman!” I nodded. “I was out with a young lady,” I admitted, “celebrating her birthday.” He started cracking his knuckles. “Out with a young lady!” he snorted. “I had your apartment watched so I could be notified the minute you got in. You didn’t get in until six o’clock this morning.”

I listened to the dull cracking of his knuckles, then grinned at him. “The young lady,” I said, “happens to have been born at five o’clock in the morning, so I had to wait until then to help her celebrate her birthday. If you doubt me, you might ask Mae Devers.” RAYMOND CHANDLER (1888-1959)

Raymond Chandler, the writer who proved that private-eye fiction can be high art, was born in Chicago but educated in England, where his mother moved after his father faded from the scene. He worked in the English civil service, wrote newspaper articles and poetry, and moved to California in 1912. With the outbreak of World War I, he enlisted in the Canadian army, fought in France, was injured, and returned to California. By 1919, he had become a vice president of an oil company. He didn’t begin publishing hard-boiled private-eye short stories in the pulps until 1933—the year after the oil company fired him for drunkenness.

Chandler wrote slowly and struggled with plots. He disdained the puzzle-oriented detective story in the British tradition, referring to it as “an exhausting concatenation of insignificant clues.” In his landmark essay,
The Simple Art of Murder,
he stated his belief that it is better to “give characters their heads and let them make their own mystery.”

In the same essay, Chandler articulated the grace that takes fiction to the level of art and moulds the raw stuff of an ordinary protagonist into a hero. “In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption,” Chandler wrote. “It may be pure tragedy, if it is high tragedy, and it may be pity and irony, and it may be the raucous laughter of the strong man. But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero; he is everything.” Chandler’s work gained the immense admiration of readers the world over. More significantly, his work is admired by other writers. It has been said that Chandler’s work has done more to influence American writers who followed him than did the oeuvre of an author like F. Scott Fitzgerald, who was a darling of the literary and academic establishment. And his influence is not confined to those writing genre fiction.

The private eye in Chandler’s novels is Philip Marlowe, a self-declared romantic who thinks of himself, with a trace of self-contempt, as a sort of knight in a corrupt, decadent society where chivalry is an aberration. Chandler admired Dashiell Hammett’s work, and Marlowe can be described as Sam Spade with morals and introspection added.

While
I’ll Be Waiting
doesn’t include Marlowe, it does display Chandler’s genius in choosing the telling detail to establish mood and create a scene that lingers in the mind, and in using the genre for powerful social commentary. It also reveals his ambivalence toward his women characters and his tendency to leave things not quite resolved. In a sense,
I’ll Be Waiting
is as much a love story as it is a crime tale.

I’ll Be Waiting

At one o’clock in the morning, Carl, the night porter, turned down the last of three table lamps in the main lobby of the Windermere Hotel. The blue carpet darkened a shade or two and the walls drew back into remoteness. The chairs filled with shadowy loungers. In the corners were memories like cobwebs.

Tony Reseck yawned. He put his head on one side and listened to the frail, twittery music from the radio room beyond a dim arch at the far side of the lobby. He frowned.

That should be his radio room after one A.M. Nobody should be in it. That red-haired girl was spoiling his nights.

The frown passed and a miniature of a smile quirked at the corners of his lips. He sat relaxed, a short, pale, paunchy, middle-aged man with long, delicate fingers clasped on the elk’s tooth on his watch chain; the long delicate fingers of a sleight-of-hand artist, fingers with shiny, moulded nails and tapering first joints, fingers a little spatulate at the ends. Handsome fingers. Tony Reseck rubbed them gently together and there was peace in his quiet sea-gray eyes.

The frown came back on his face. The music annoyed him. He got up with a curious litheness, all in one piece, without moving his clasped hands from the watch-chain. At one moment he was leaning back relaxed, and the next he was standing balanced on his feet, perfectly still, so that the movement of rising seemed to be a thing perfectly perceived, an error of vision...

He walked with small, polished shoes delicately across the blue carpet and under the arch. The music was louder. It contained the hot, acid blare, the frenetic, jittering runs of a jam session. It was too loud. The red-haired girl sat there and stared silently at the fretted part of the big radio cabinet as though she could see the band with its fixed professional grin and the sweat running down its back. She was curled up with her feet under her on a davenport which seemed to contain most of the cushions in the room.

She was tucked among them carefully, like a corsage in the florist’s tissue paper.

She didn’t turn her head. She leaned there, one hand in a small fist on her peach-coloured knee. She was wearing lounging pyjamas of heavy ribbed silk embroidered with black lotus buds.

“You like Goodman, Miss Cressy?” Tony Reseck asked.

The girl moved her eyes slowly. The light in there was dim, but the violet of her eyes almost hurt. They were large, deep eyes without a trace of thought in them. Her face was classical and without expression.

She said nothing.

Tony smiled and moved his fingers at his sides, one by one, feeling them move. “You like Goodman, Miss Cressy?” he repeated gently.

“Not to cry over,” the girl said tonelessly.

Tony rocked back on his heels and looked at her eyes. Large, deep, empty eyes. Or were they? He reached down and muted the radio.

“Don’t get me wrong,” the girl said. “Goodman makes money, and a lad that makes legitimate money these days is a lad you have to respect. But this jitterbug music gives me the backdrop of a beer flat. I like something with roses in it.”

“Maybe you like Mozart,” Tony said.

“Go on, kid me,” the girl said.

“I wasn’t kidding you, Miss Cressy. I think Mozart was the greatest man that ever lived—and Toscanini is his prophet.”

“I thought you were the house dick.” She put her head back on a pillow and stared at him through her lashes.

“Make me some of that Mozart,” she added.

“It’s too late,” Tony sighed. “You can’t get it now.” She gave him another long lucid glance. “Got the eye on me, haven’t you, flatfoot?” She laughed a little, almost under her breath. “What did I do wrong?” Tony smiled his toy smile. “Nothing, Miss Cressy. Nothing at all. But you need some fresh air. You’ve been five days in this hotel and you haven’t been outdoors. And you have a tower room.”

She laughed again. “Make me a story about it. I’m bored.”

“There was a girl here once had your suite. She stayed in the hotel a whole week, like you. Without going out at all, I mean. She didn’t speak to anybody hardly. What do you think she did then?”

The girl eyed him gravely. “She jumped her bill.”

He put his long delicate hand out and turned it slowly, fluttering the fingers, with an effect almost like a lazy wave breaking. “Unh - uh. She sent down for her bill and paid it. Then she told the hop to be back in half an hour for her suitcases. Then she went out on her balcony.”

The girl leaned forward a little, her eyes still grave, one hand capping her peach-coloured knee. “What did you say your name was?”

“Tony Reseck.”

“Sounds like a hunky.”

“Yeah,” Tony said. “Polish.”

“Go on, Tony.”

“All the tower suites have private balconies, Miss Cressy. The walls of them are too low for fourteen stories above the street. It was a dark night, that night, high clouds.” He dropped his hand with a final gesture, a farewell gesture. “Nobody saw her jump.

But when she hit, it was like a big gun going off.”

“You’re making it up, Tony.” Her voice was a clean dry whisper of sound.

He smiled his toy smile. His quiet sea-gray eyes seemed almost to be smoothing the long waves of her hair. “Eve Cressy,” he said musingly. “A name waiting for lights to be in.”

“Waiting for a tall dark guy that’s no good, Tony. You wouldn’t care why. I was married to him once. I might be married to him again. You can make a lot of mistakes in just one lifetime.” The hand on her knee opened slowly until the fingers were strained back as far as they would go. Then they closed quickly and tightly, and even in that dim light the knuckles shone like the little polished bones. “I played him a low trick once. I put him in a bad place—without meaning to. You wouldn’t care about that either. It’s just that I owe him something.”

He leaned over softly and turned the knob on the radio. A waltz formed itself dimly on the warm air. A tinsel waltz, but a waltz. He turned the volume up. The music gushed from the loudspeaker in a swirl of shadowed melody. Since Vienna died, all waltzes are shadowed.

The girl put her hand on one side and hummed three or four bars and stopped with a sudden tightening of her mouth.

“Eve Cressy,” she said. “It was in lights once. At a bum night club. A dive. They raided it and the lights went out.”

He smiled at her almost mockingly. “It was no dive while you were there, Miss Cressy... That’s the waltz the orchestra always played when the old porter walked up and down in front of the hotel entrance, all swelled up with his medals on his chest.

The Last Laugh. Emil Jannings. You wouldn’t remember that one, Miss Cressy.”

“’Spring, Beautiful Spring,” she said. “No, I never saw it.” He walked three steps away from her and turned. “I have to go upstairs and palm doorknobs. I hope I didn’t bother you. You ought to go to bed now. It’s pretty late.” The tinsel waltz stopped and a voice began to talk. The girl spoke through the voice.

“You really thought something like that—about the balcony?” He nodded. “I might have,” he said softly. “I don’t any more.”

“No chance, Tony.” Her smile was a dim lost leaf. “Come and talk to me some more.

Redheads don’t jump, Tony. They hang on—and wither.” He looked at her gravely for a moment and then moved away over the carpet. The porter was standing in the archway that led to the main lobby. Tony hadn’t looked that way yet, but he knew somebody was there. He always knew if anybody was close to him. He could hear the grass grow, like the donkey in
The Blue Bird.

The porter jerked his chin at him urgently. His broad face above the uniform collar looked sweaty and excited. Tony stepped up close to him and they went together through the arch and out to the middle of the dim lobby.