Doug Allyn: Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 131, No. 3 & 4. Whole No. 799 & 800, March/April 2008

Corporal. She addressed him by his rank...

“You... You’re not Michelle, are you?” The floor was spinning. He could barely gasp the words out.

“Yes, dear, I’m Mrs. Mitchell.” She nodded supportively. “The hospital administrator, but if you’re absolutely certain that you don’t need a nurse, I’ll be about my duties.” Her smile was sad. “I simply wanted to offer my condolences, I know what good friends you were, and perhaps when you get home you wouldn’t mind telling Ron’s family how proud we were to have him with us.” She ruffled Wilfie’s hair affectionately. “Well, I don’t need to tell you how it was, do I?”

With that she was gone, her long grey skirt swishing round her ankles, the lace at her collar ruffling in the air. At the end of the corridor, she turned to glance over her shoulder. Not a quick glance, either. A direct and lingering look. Exactly like the one Wilfie watched her giving Ron.

How many hours did he remain, slumped at the top of the marble staircase? Sunshine turned to night. The hospital went quiet. Quiet, Wilfie decided, as the grave.

This wasn’t true. Michelle was real. She’d come to see him, hadn’t she? Every bloody day she’d come to see him, and even if it was the fat one with ginger hair and Ron was too kind to say, so what? She’d come to visit, that’s the bloody point.

But a little voice kept whispering. Whispering at him through the silence—

I made it up, Wilf. I only said those things to cheer you up. To give you something to focus on, when you were feeling so depressed.

No, no, she’s real, Wilfie shouted inside his head. She came to feed the sparrows on the lawn outside my window.

And that’s when he remembered. When they’d stretchered him away to get his leg seen to, he’d been so preoccupied with the pain searing through his ribs that he hadn’t paid much attention as they bumped him down the stairs. The stairs , you see. Not one flight, not even two. Which meant there could not have been a lawn outside the window—

Bollocks. Get a grip. Ron could still have seen her down below, and who cares if he lied about her looks? Michelle was real and the proof was here, right here in Wilfie’s pocket. Look! In the letter she had written him herself. He shuffled to the light beneath the mirror. Smelled the disinfectant on the page. The page that was blank, whichever side he turned—

In the mirror, Wilfie saw an old, old man, and the old man’s face wasn’t ravaged by either scars or burns, it was disfigured by loneliness and spite. And in the silence that would follow him forever, he could hear the sound of an ungreased wheel spinning slowly at the bottom of the stairs. No matter how loudly Wilfie screamed to drown it out.

© 2008 by Marilyn Todd

We opened the Black Mask series with a Hammett reprint. We follow up here with Raymond Chandler, who is inextricably associated with his creation Philip Marlowe. Marlowe never appeared in any of Chandler’s Black Mask stories, though when several of them were reprinted in paperback, the P.I.’s name was changed to Marlowe. In this story it’s Johnny Dalmas, but he’s clearly a proto-Marlowe!

The doorman of the Kilmarnock was six foot two. He wore a pale blue uniform, and white gloves made his hands look enormous. He opened the door of the Yellow taxi as gently as an old maid stroking a cat.

Johnny Dalmas got out and turned to the red-haired driver. He said: “Better wait for me around the corner, Joey.”

The driver nodded, tucked a toothpick a little farther back in the corner of his mouth, and swung his cab expertly away from the white-marked loading zone. Dalmas crossed the sunny sidewalk and went into the enormous cool lobby of the Kilmarnock. The carpets were thick, soundless. Bellboys stood with folded arms and the two clerks behind the marble desk looked austere.

Dalmas went across to the elevator lobby. He got into a paneled car and said: “End of the line, please.”

The penthouse floor had a small quiet lobby with three doors opening off it, one to each wall. Dalmas crossed to one of them and rang the bell.

Derek Walden opened the door. He was about forty-five, possibly a little more, and had a lot of powdery gray hair and a handsome, dissipated face that was beginning to go pouchy.

He had on a monogrammed lounging robe and a glass full of whiskey in his hand. He was a little drunk.

He said thickly, morosely: “Oh, it’s you. C’mon in, Dalmas.”

He went back into the apartment, leaving the door open. Dalmas shut it and followed him into a long, high-ceilinged room with a balcony at one end and a line of French windows along the left side. There was a terrace outside.

Derek Walden sat down in a brown and gold chair against the wall and stretched his legs across a footstool. He swirled the whiskey around in his glass, looking down at it.

“What’s on your mind?” he asked.

Dalmas stared at him a little grimly. After a moment he said: “I dropped in to tell you I’m giving you back your job.”

Walden drank the whiskey out of his glass and put it down on the corner of a table. He fumbled around for a cigarette, stuck it in his mouth, and forgot to light it.

“Tha’ so?” His voice was blurred but indifferent.

Dalmas turned away from him and walked over to one of the windows. It was open and an awning flapped outside. The traffic noise from the boulevard was faint.

He spoke over his shoulder: “The investigation isn’t getting anywhere — because you don’t want it to get anywhere. You know why you’re being blackmailed. I don’t. Eclipse Films is interested because they have a lot of sugar tied up in films you have made.”

“To hell with Eclipse Films,” Walden said, almost quietly.

Dalmas shook his head and turned around. “Not from my angle. They stand to lose if you get in a jam the publicity hounds can’t handle. You took me on because you were asked to. It was a waste of time. You haven’t cooperated worth a cent.”

Walden said in an unpleasant tone: “I’m handling this my own way and I’m not gettin’ into any jam. I’ll make my own deal — when I can buy something that’ll stay bought... And all you have to do is make the Eclipse people think the situation’s bein’ taken care of. That clear?”

Dalmas came partway back across the room. He stood with one hand on top of a table, beside an ashtray littered with cigarette stubs that had very dark lip rouge on them. He looked down at these absently.

“That wasn’t explained to me, Walden,” he said coldly.

“I thought you were smart enough to figure it out,” Walden sneered. He leaned sidewise and slopped some more whiskey into his glass. “Have a drink?”

Dalmas said: “No, thanks.”

Walden found the cigarette in his mouth and threw it on the floor. He drank. “What the hell!” he snorted. “You’re a private detective and you’re being paid to make a few motions that don’t mean anything. It’s a clean job — as your racket goes.”

Dalmas said: “That’s another crack I could do without hearing,”

Walden made an abrupt, angry motion. His eyes glittered. The corners of his mouth drew down and his face got sulky. He avoided Dalmas’s stare.

Dalmas said: “I’m not against you, but I never was for you. You’re not the kind of guy I could go for, ever. If you had played with me, I’d have done what I could. I still will — but not for your sake. I don’t want your money — and you can pull your shadows off my tail any time you like.”

Walden put his feet on the floor. He laid his glass down very carefully on the table at his elbow. The whole expression of his face changed.