THE SIMPLE ART OF MURDER by Raymond Chandler Copyright ...

Steve scratched at his cheek with a handkerchief. The thin thread of blood had dried. "I got the girls tucked away in their room," he
said. "The two stooges took the hint and holed up, but Leopardi still thought the guests wanted to hear trombone music. I threatened to
wrap it around his neck and he beaned me with it. I slapped him open-handed and he pulled a gun and took a shot at me. Here's the
gun."
He took the .32 automatic out of his pocket and laid it on the desk. He put the used shell beside it. "So I beat some sense into him
and threw him out," he added.
Peters tapped on the marble. "Your usual tact seems to have been well in evidence."
Steve stared at him. "He shot at me," he repeated quietly. "With a gun. This gun. I'm tender to bullets. He missed, but suppose he
hadn't? I like my stomach the way it is, with just one way in and one way out."
Peters narrowed his tawny eyebrows. He said very politely: "We have you down on the payroll here as a nightclerk, because we don't
like the name house detective. But neither night clerks nor house detectives put guests out of the hotel without consulting me. Not ever,
Mr. Grayce."
Steve said: "The guy shot at me, pal. With a gun. Catch on? I don't have to take that without a kickback, do I?" His face was a little
white.
Peters said: "Another point for your consideration. The controlling interest in this hotel is owned by Mr. Halsey G. Walters. Mr.
Walters also owns the Club Shalotte, where King Leopardi is opening on Wednesday night. And that, Mr. Grayce, is why Leopardi was
good enough to give us his business. Can you think of anything else I should like to say to you?"
"Yeah. I'm canned," Steve said mirthlessly.
"Very correct, Mr. Grayce. Good-night, Mr. Grayce."
The thin blond man moved to the elevator and the night porter took him up.
Steve looked at Millar.
"Jumbo Walters, huh?" he said softly. "A tough, smart guy. Much too smart to think this dump and the Club Shalotte belong to the
same sort of customers. Did Peters write Leopardi to come here?"
"I guess he did, Steve." Millar's voice was low and gloomy.
"Then why wasn't he put in a tower suite with a private balcony to dance on, at twenty-eight bucks a day? Why was he put on a
medium-priced transient floor? And why did Quillan let those girls get so close to him?"
Millar pulled at his black mustache. "Tight with money-- as well as with Scotch, I suppose. As to the girls, I don't know."
Steve slapped the counter open-handed. "Well, I'm canned, for not letting a drunken heel make a parlor house and a shooting
gallery out of the eighth floor. Nuts! Well, I'll miss the joint at that."
"I'll miss you too, Steve," Millar said gently. "But not for a week. I take a week off starting tomorrow. My brother has a cabin at
Crestline."
"Didn't know you had a brother," Steve said absently. He opened and closed his fist on the marble desk top.
"He doesn't come into town much. A big guy. Used to be a fighter."
Steve nodded and straightened from the counter. "Well, I might as well finish out the night," he said. "On my back. Put this gun away
somewhere, George."
He grinned coldly and walked away, down the steps into the dim main lobby and across to the room where the radio was. He
punched the pillows into shape on the pale green davenport, then suddenly reached into his pocket and took out the scrap of white
paper he had lifted from the black-haired girl's purple handbag. It was a receipt for a week's rent, to a Miss Marilyn Delorme, Apt. 211,
Ridgeland Apartments, 118 Court Street.
He tucked it into his wallet and stood staring at the silent radio. "Steve, I think you got another job," he said under his breath.
"Something about this set-up smells."
He slipped into a closetlike phone both in the corner of the room, dropped a nickel and dialed an all-night radio station. He had to
dial four times before he got a clear line to the Owl Program announcer.
"How's to play King Leopardi's record of 'Solitude' again?" he asked him.
"Got a lot of requests piled up. Played it twice already. Who's calling?"
"Steve Grayce, night man at the Carlton Hotel."
"Oh, a sober guy on his job. For you, pal, anything."
Steve went back to the davenport, snapped the radio on and lay down on his back, with his hands clasped behind his head.
Ten minutes later the high, piercingly sweet trumpet notes of King Leopardi came softly from the radio, muted almost to a whisper,
and sustaining E above high C for an almost incredible period of time.
"Shucks," Steve grumbled, when the record ended. "A guy that can play like that--maybe I was too tough with him."
THREE
Court Street was old town, wop town, crook town, arty town. It lay across the top of Bunker Hill and you could find anything there from
down-at-heels ex-Greenwich-villagers to crooks on the lam, from ladies of anybody's evening to County Relief clients brawling with
haggard landladies in grand old houses with scrolled porches, parquetry floors, and immense sweeping banisters of white oak,
mahogany and Circassian walnut.
It had been a nice place once, had Bunker Hill, and from the days of its niceness there still remained the funny little funicular
railway, called the Angel's Flight, which crawled up and down a yellow clay bank from Hill Street. It was afternoon when Steve Grayce got
off the car at the top, its only passenger. He walked along in the sun, a tall, wide-shouldered, rangylooking man in a well-cut blue suit.
He turned west at Court and began to read the numbers. The one he wanted was two from the corner, across the street from a red
brick funeral parlor with a sign in gold over it: Paolo Perrugini Funeral Home. A swarthy iron-gray Italian in a cutaway coat stood in front of
the curtained door of the red brick building, smoking a cigar and waiting for somebody to die.
One-eighteen was a three-storied frame apartment house. It had a glass door, well masked by a dirty net curtain, a hall runner
eighteen inches wide, dim doors with numbers painted on them with dim-paint, a staircase halfway back. Brass stair rods glittered in
the dimness of the hallway.
Steve Grayce went up the stairs and prowled back to the front. Apartment 211, Miss Marilyn Delorme, was on the right, a front
apartment. He tapped lightly on the wood, waited, tapped again. Nothing moved beyond the silent door, or in the hallway. Behind another
door across the hall somebody coughed and kept on coughing.
Standing there in the half-light Steve Grayce wondered why he had come. Miss Delorme had carried a gun. Leopardi had received
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