Red Wind by Raymond Chandler Page A

Ratigan. We got him from Washington by teletype. He was a two-bit porch-climber with a few small terms on him. He drove a car in a bank stickup job in Detroit. He turned the gang in later and got a nolle prosse. One of the gang was this Al Tessilore. He hasn’t talked a word, but we think the meeting across the street was purely accidental.”
    Ybarra spoke in the soft quiet modulated voice of a man for whom sounds have a meaning. I said: “Thanks, Ybarra. Can I smoke—or would Copernik kick it out of my mouth?”
    Ybarra smiled suddenly. “You may smoke, sure,” he said.
    “The guinea likes you all right,” Copernik jeered. “You never know what a guinea will like, do you?”
    I lit a cigarette. Ybarra looked at Copernik and said very softly.
    “The word guinea—you overwork it. I don’t like it so well applied to me.”
    “The hell with what you like, guinea.”
    Ybarra smiled a little more. “You are making a mistake,” he said. He took a pocket nailfile out and began to use it, looking down.
    Copernik blared: “I smelled something rotten on you from the start, Dalmas. So when we make these two mugs, Ybarra and me think we’ll drift over and dabble a few more words with you. I bring one of Waldo’s morgue photos—nice work, the light just right in his eyes, his tie all straight and a white handkerchief showing just right in his pocket. Nice work. So on the way up, just as a matter of routine, we rout out the manager here and let him lamp it. And he knows the guy. He’s here as A. B. Hummel, Apartment Thirty-one. So we go in there and find a stiff. Then we go round and round with that. Nobody knows him yet, but he’s got some swell finger bruises under that strap and I hear they fit Waldo’s fingers very nicely.”
    “That’s something,” I said. “I thought maybe I murdered him.”
    Copernik stared at me for a long time. His face had stopped grinning and was just a hard brutal face now. “Yeah. We got something else even,” he said. “We got Waldo’s getaway car—and what Waldo had in it to take with him.”
    I blew cigarette smoke jerkily. The wind pounded the shut windows. The air in the room was foul.
    “Oh we’re bright boys,” Copernik sneered. “We never figured you with that much guts. Take a look at this.”
    He plunged his bony hand into his coat pocket and drew something up slowly over the edge of the card table, drew it along the green top and left it there stretched out, gleaming. A string of white pearls with a clasp like a two-bladed propeller. They shimmered softly in the thick smoky air.
    Lola Barsaly’s pearls. The pearls the flier had given her. The guy who was dead, the guy she still loved.
    I stared at them, but I didn’t move. After a long moment Copernik said almost gravely: “Nice, ain’t they? Would you feel like telling us a story about now, Mister Dalmas?”
    I stood up and pushed the chair from under me, walked slowly across the room and stood looking down at the pearls. The largest was perhaps a third of an inch across. They were pure white, iridescent, with a mellow softness. I lifted them slowly off the card table from beside her clothes. They felt heavy, smooth, fine.
    “Nice,” I said. “A lot of the trouble was about these. Yeah, I’ll talk now. They must be worth a lot of money.”
    Ybarra laughed behind me. It was a very gentle laugh. “About a hundred dollars,” he said. “They’re good phonies—but they’re phoney.”
    I lifted the pearls again. Copernik’s glassy eyes gloated at me. “How do you tell?” I asked.
    “I know pearls,” Ybarra said. “These are good stuff, the kind women very often have made on purpose, as a kind of insurance. But they are slick like glass. Real pearls are gritty between the edges of the teeth. Try.”
    I put two or three of them between my teeth and moved my teeth back and forth, then sideways. Not quite biting them. The beads were hard and slick.
    “Yes. They are very good,” Ybarra said. “Several