Free The Little Sister by Raymond Chandler Page B

remember what it was.”
    I looked down at the envelope. There was a scrawled license number on it all right. Ill-written and faint and oblique, the way it would be written hastily on a paper held in a man’s hand on the street. 6N 333. California 1947.
    “Satisfied?” This was Flack’s voice. Or it came out of his mouth. I tore the number off and tossed the envelope back to him.
    “4P 327,” I said, watching his eyes. Nothing flicked in them. No trace of derision or concealment. “But how do I know this isn’t just some license number you had already?”
    “You just got to take my word for it.”
    “Describe the car,” I said.
    “Caddy convertible, not new, top up. About 1942 model. Sort of dusty blue color.”
    “Describe the woman.”
    “Want a lot for your dough, don’t you, peeper?”
    “Dr. Hambleton’s dough.”
    He winced. “All right. Blonde. White coat with some colored stitching on it. Wide blue straw hat. Dark glasses. Height about five two. Built like a Conover model.”
    “Would you know her again—without the glasses?” I asked carefully.
    He pretended to think. Then shook his head, no.
    “What was that license number again, Flackie?” I caught him off guard.
    “Which one?” he said.
    I leaned across the desk and dropped some cigarette ash on his gun. I did some more staring into his eyes. But I knew he was licked now. He seemed to know too. He reached for his gun, blew off the ash and put it back in the drawer of his desk.
    “Go on. Beat it,” he said between his teeth. “Tell the cops I frisked the stiff. So what? Maybe I lose a job. Maybe I get tossed in the fishbowl. So what? When I come out I’m solid. Little Flackie don’t have to worry about coffee and crullers. Don’t think for a minute those dark cheaters fool little Flackie. I’ve seen too many movies to miss that lovely puss. And if you ask me that babe’ll be around for a long time. She’s a comer—and who knows—” he leered at me triumphantly—”she’d need a bodyguard one of these days. A guy to have around, watch things, keep her out of jams. Somebody that knows the ropes and ain’t unreasonable about dough. . . What’s the matter?”
    I had put my head on one side and was leaning forward. I was listening. “I thought I heard a church bell,” I said.
    “There ain’t any church around here,” he said contemptuously. “It’s that platinum brain of yours getting cracks in it.”
    “Just one bell,” I said. “Very slow. Tolling is the word, I believe.”
    Flack listened with me. “I don’t hear anything,” he said sharply.
    “Oh you wouldn’t hear it,” I said. “You’d be the one guy in the whole world who wouldn’t hear it.”
    He just sat there and stared at me with his nasty little eyes half closed and his nasty little mustache shining. One of his hands twitched on the desk, an aimless movement.
    I left him to his thoughts, which were probably as small, ugly and frightened as the man himself.

12
     
    The apartment house was over on Doheny Drive, just down the hill from the Strip. It was really two buildings, one behind the other, loosely connected by a floored patio with a fountain, and a room built over the arch. There were mailboxes and bells in the imitation marble foyer. Three out of the sixteen had no names over them. The names that I read meant nothing to me. The job needed a little more work. I tried the front door, found it unlocked, and the job still needed more work.
    Outside stood two Cadillacs, a Lincoln Continental and a Packard Clipper. Neither of the Cadillacs had the right color or license. Across the way a guy in riding breeches was sprawled with his legs over the door of a low-cut Lancia. He was smoking and looking up at the pale stars which know enough to keep their distance from Hollywood. I walked up the steep hill to the boulevard and a block east and smothered myself in an outdoor sweat-box phone booth. I dialed a man named Peoria Smith, who was so-called because