Killer in the Rain.

by RAYMOND CHANDLER.

1

We were sitting in a room at the Berglund. I was on the side of the bed, and Dravec was in the easy chair. It was my room.

Rain beat very hard against the windows. They were shut tight and it was hot in the room and I had a little fan going on the table. The breeze from it hit Dravec's face high up, lifted his heavy black hair, moved the longer bristles in the fat path of eyebrow that went across his face in a solid line. He looked like a bouncer who had come into money.

He showed me some of his gold teeth and said: 'What you got on me?'

He said it importantly, as if anyone who knew anything would know quite a lot about him.

'Nothing,' I said. 'You're clean, as far as I know.'

He lifted a large hairy hand and stared at it solidly for a minute.

'You don't get me. A feller named M'Gee sent me here. Violets M'Gee.'

'Fine. How is Violets these days?' Violets M'Gee was a homicide d.i.c.k in the sheriff's office.

He looked at his large hand and frowned. 'No you still don't get it. I got a job for you.'

'I don't go out much any more,' I said. 'I'm getting kind of frail.'

He looked around the room carefully, bluffing a bit, like a man not naturally observant.

'Maybe it's money,' he said.

'Maybe it is,' I said.

He had a belted suede raincoat on. He tore it open carelessly and got out a wallet that was not quite as big as a bale of hay. Currency stuck out of it at careless angles. When he slapped it down on his knee it made a fat sound that was pleasant to the ear. He shook money out of it, selected a few bills from the bunch, stuffed the rest back, dropped the wallet on the floor and let it lie, arranged five century notes like a tight poker hand and put them under the base of the fan on the table.

That was a lot of work. It made him grunt.

'I got lots of sugar,' he said.

'So I see. What do I do for that, if I get it?'

'You know me now, huh?'

'A little better.'

I got an envelope out of an inside pocket and read to him aloud from some scribbling on the back.

'Dravec, Anton or Tony. Former Pittsburgh steel worker, truck guard, all-round muscle stiff. Made a wrong pa.s.s and got shut up. Left town, came West. Worked on an avocado ranch at El Seguro. Came up with a ranch of his own. Sat right on the dome when the El Seguro oil boom burst. Got rich. Lost a lot of it buying into other people's dusters. Still has enough. Serbian by birth, six feet, two hundred and forty, one daughter, never known to have had a wife. No police record of any consequence. None at all since Pittsburgh.'

I lit a pipe.

'Jeeze,' he said. 'Where you promote all that?'

'Connexions. What's the angle?'

He picked the wallet off the floor and moused around inside it with a couple of square fingers for a while, with his tongue sticking out between his thick lips. He finally got out a slim brown card and some crumpled slips of paper. He pushed them at me.

The card was in gold type, very delicately done. It said: 'Mr Harold Hardwicke Steiner', and very small in the corner, 'Rare Books and De Luxe Editions'. No address or phone number.

The white slips, three in number, were simple IOUs for a thousand dollars each, signed: 'Carmen Dravec' in a sprawling, moronic handwriting.

I gave it back to him and said: 'Blackmail?'

He shook his head slowly and something gentle came into his face that hadn't been there before.

'It's my little girl Carmen. This Steiner, he bothers her. She goes to his joint all the time, makes whoopee. He makes love to her, I guess. I don't like it.'

I nodded. 'How about the notes?'

'I don't care nothin' about the dough. She plays games with him. The h.e.l.l with that. She's what you call man-crazy. You go tell this Steiner to lay off Carmen. I break his neck with my hands. See?'

All this in a rush, with deep breathing. His eyes got small and round, and furious. His teeth almost chattered.

I said: 'Why have me tell him? Why not tell him yourself?'

'Maybe I get mad and kill the -!' he yelled.

I picked a match out of my pocket and prodded the loose ash in the bowl of my pipe. I looked at him carefully for a moment, getting hold of an idea.

'Nerts, you're scared to,' I told him.

Both big fists came up. He held them shoulderhigh and shook them, great knots of bone and muscle. He lowered them slowly, heaved a deep honest sigh, and said: 'Yeah. I'm scared to. I dunno how to handle her. All the time some new guy and all the time a punk. A while back I gave a guy called Joe Marty five grand to lay off her. She's still mad at me.'

I stared at the window, watched the rain hit it, flatten out, and slide down in a thick wave, like melted gelatine. It was too early in the fall for that kind of rain.

'Giving them sugar doesn't get you anywhere,' I said. 'You could be doing that all your life. So you figure you'd like to have me get rough with this one, Steiner.'

'Tell him I break his neck!'

'I wouldn't bother,' I said. 'I know Steiner. I'd break his neck for you myself, if it would do any good.'

He leaned forward and grabbed my hand. His eyes got childish. A grey tear floated in each of them.

'Listen, M'Gee says you're a good guy. I tell you something I ain't told n.o.body ever. Carmen she's not my kid at all. I just picked her up in Smoky, a little baby in the street. She didn't have n.o.body. I guess maybe I steal her, huh?'

'Sounds like it,' I said, and had to fight to get my hand loose. I rubbed feeling back into it with the other one. The man had a grip that would crack a telephone pole.

'I go straight then,' he said grimly, and yet tenderly. 'I come out here and make good. She grows up. I love her.'

I said: 'Uh-huh. That's natural.'

'You don't get me. I wanta marry her.'

I stared at him.

'She gets older, get some sense. Maybe she marry me, huh?'

His voice implored me, as if I had the settling of that.

'Ever ask her?'

'I'm scared to,' he said humbly.

'She soft on Steiner, do you think?'

He nodded. 'But that don't mean nothin'.'

I could believe that. I got off the bed, threw a window up and let the rain hit my face for a minute.

'Let's get this straight,' I said, lowering the window again and going back to the bed. 'I can take Steiner off your back. That's easy. I just don't see what it buys you.'

He grabbed for my hand again, but I was a little too quick for him this time.

'You came in here a little tough, flas.h.i.+ng your wad,' I said. 'You're going out soft. Not from anything I've said. You knew it already. I'm not Dorothy Dix, and I'm only partly a prune. But I'll take Steiner off you, if you really want that.'

He stood up clumsily, swung his hat and stared down at my feet.

'You take him off my back, like you said. He ain't her sort, anyway.'

'It might hurt your back a little.'

'That's okay. That's what it's for,' he said.

He b.u.t.toned himself up, dumped his hat on his big s.h.a.ggy head, and rolled on out. He shut the door carefully, as if he was going out of a sick-room.

I thought he was as crazy as a pair of waltzing mice, but I liked him.

I put his goldbacks in a safe place, mixed myself a long drink, and sat down in the chair that was still warm from him.

While I played with the drink I wondered if he had any idea what Steiner's racket was.

Steiner had a collection of rare and half-rare s.m.u.t books which he loaned out as high as ten dollars a day to the right people.

2.

It rained all the next day. Late in the afternoon I sat parked in a blue Chrysler roadster, diagonally across the Boulevard from a narrow store front, over which a green neon sign in script letters said: 'H. H. Steiner'.

The rain splashed knee-high off the sidewalks, filled the gutters, and big cops in slickers that shone like gun barrels had a lot of fun carrying little girls in silk stockings and cute little rubber boots across the bad places, with a lot of squeezing.

The rain drummed on the hood of the Chrysler, beat and tore at the taut material of the top, leaked in at the b.u.t.toned places, and made a pool on the floorboards for me to keep my feet in.

I had a big flask of Scotch with me. I used it often enough to keep interested.

Steiner did business, even in that weather; perhaps especially in that weather. Very nice cars stopped in front of his store, and very nice people dodged in, then dodged out again with wrapped parcels under their arms. Of course they could have been buying rare books and de luxe editions.

At five-thirty a pimply-faced kid in a leather windbreaker came out of the store and sloped up the side street at a fast trot. He came back with a neat cream-and-grey coupe. Steiner came out and got into the coupe. He wore a dark-green leather raincoat, a cigarette in an amber holder, no hat. I couldn't see his gla.s.s eye at that distance but I knew he had one. The kid in the windbreaker held an umbrella over him across the sidewalk, then shut it up and handed it into the coupe.

Steiner drove west on the Boulevard. I drove west on the Boulevard. Past the business district, at Pepper Canyon, he turned north, and I tailed him easily from a block back. I was pretty sure he was going home, which was natural.

He left Pepper Drive and took a curving ribbon of wet cement called La Verne Terrace, climbed up it almost to the top. It was a narrow road with a high bank on one side and a few well-s.p.a.ced cabin-like houses built down the steep slope on the other side. Their roofs were not much above road level. The fronts of them were masked by shrubs. Sodden trees dripped all over the landscape.

Steiner's hideaway had a square box hedge in front of it, more than window-high. The entrance was a sort of maze, and the house door was not visible from the road. Steiner put his grey-and-cream coupe in a small garage, locked up, went through the maze with his umbrella up, and light went on in the house.

While he was doing this I had pa.s.sed him and gone to the top of the hill. I turned around there and went back and parked in front of the next house above his. It seemed to be closed up or empty, but had no signs on it. I went into a conference with my flask of Scotch, and then just sat.

At six-fifteen lights bobbed up the hill. It was quite dark by then. A car stopped in front of Steiner's hedge. A slim, tall girl in a slicker got out of it. Enough light filtered out through the hedge for me to see that she was dark-haired and possibly pretty.

Voices drifted on the rain and a door shut. I got out of the Chrysler and strolled down the hill, put a pencil flash into the car. It was a dark maroon or brown Packard convertible. Its licence read to Carmen Dravec, 3596 Lucerne Avenue. I went back to my heap.

A solid, slow-moving hour crawled by. No more cars came up or down the hill. It seemed to be a very quiet neighbourhood.

Then a single flash of hard white light leaked out of Steiner's house, like a flash of summer lightning. As the darkness fell again a thin, tinkling scream trickled down the darkness and echoed faintly among the wet trees. I was out of the Chrysler and on my way before the last echo of it died.

There was no fear in the scream. It held the note of a half-pleasurable shock, an accent of drunkenness, and a touch of pure idiocy.

The Steiner mansion was perfectly silent when I hit the gap in the hedge, dodged around the elbow that masked the front door, and put my hand up to bang on the door.

At that exact moment, as if somebody had been waiting for it, three shots racketed close together behind the door. After that there was a long, harsh sigh, a soft thump, rapid steps going away into the back of the house.

I wasted time hitting the door with my shoulder, without enough start. It threw me back like a kick from an army mule.

The door fronted on a narrow runway, like a small bridge, that led from the banked road. There was no side porch, no way to get at the windows in a hurry. There was no way around to the back except through the house or up a long flight of wooden steps that went up to the back door from the alley-like street below. On these steps I now heard a clatter of feet.

That gave me the impulse and I hit the door again, from the feet up. It gave at the lock and I pitched down two steps into a big, dim, cluttered room. I didn't see much of what was in the room then. I wandered through to the back of the house.

I was pretty sure there was death in it.

A car throbbed in the street below as I reached the back porch. The car went away fast, without lights. That was that. I went back to the living-room.