Gaslight Grimoire_ Fantastic Tales of Sherlock Holmes - Barbara Hambly [116]
“You kept the whole pack,” I said.
He took another drag and gave me a dirty look. It was a thin smile that could curdle milk. He clawed at his chest for a satin ribbon and pulled an old fashioned pince-nez from the folds of his robe. He held these up to his eyes, which magnified like big, gray headlights.
“Very well. You,” he said, “are a dick.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“That is, I believe, the American vernacular for a consulting detective. You’re an operative for one of the larger firms, Chandler or Continental, perhaps. You have smoked cigarettes for some thirty years. You are from the American mid-West, Nebraska or some other wild territory. You are unmarried and not engaged or in any other permanent arrangement with a woman. You never eat at home and your diet is appalling. It is quite some time since you’ve bought a new suit of clothes. You write your reports with a typewriter on which the ‘A’ key is loose. You own a motor car, a rather gaudy one, I should think. You carry a revolver and have recently been in an altercation that has occasioned the use of fisticuffs.”
I looked at him.
“You’ve been in a fight.”
“Yeah.”
That curdled smile again, then another drag. “Hauntingly concise. Thank you and good-bye.” He wheeled around, his back to me.
“I’ve come here for help.”
“I’m not interested. I’m retired. I’m too old. I don’t care. Go away.”
“I shot a man yesterday.”
“I understand from the cinema that your type often does.”
“I shot him three times.”
“Once I could shoot my Sovereign’s initials in my parlor wall. Do better.”
“I shot him twice in the chest and once in the head. Then he got up and walked away.”
Silence. Then he slowly wheeled around again to face me. His eyes had caught the red light outside. He pursed his lips, thinking of what to say next. “You have another package of cigarettes in your left breast pocket, I perceive. Give them to me.”
I handed them over and he squirreled that pack away with the other. “Pray take a seat.”
I pulled up the only other chair in the room — a wooden straight-back that was once part of a kitchen set. I took the violin off of it and placed it gently on the desk before sitting. “Do you have a smoke?” I asked.
He smiled thinly, giving one of my cigarettes back to me. He kept the pack. I struck a light on my shoe and puffed. “About five days ago a dame comes into my office. She’s just what you want, you know? Long and slinky, blonde, but probably not natural, her eyes were puffy and she had that haunted look, but not enough that it would put her on the shelf. I sit her in the chair across from my desk and offer her a drink. The light played on her rings when she moved her hands, and—”
He cut me off. “Do you talk like this all the time? Could you please dispense with the poetry? I’m over one hundred years old and I don’t have much time.”
I made it short. “She says that her husband’s vanished. He’s an importer. His business was mostly through Europe, but with the war business has dried up. They were doing OK — better than most, I’d say. But times have been tough for the past few years.”
“Does this dame have a name? Or her husband, for that matter?”
“Landau. Monica Landau. Husband is Miles Landau. He started the business, Landau Consignments, in the early ‘30s. Business did well and he made enough for a big spread in Marina Del Rey. He and his wife moved there in ’38. Aside from the problems with business because of the war, she thought they were happy.”
“What were the circumstances of his disappearance?”
“There were no circumstances. He just never came home.”
“You searched his office, naturally.”
“Yeah. Landau Consignments is down by the Vivica Docks. It’s the swankiest building there — he didn’t do things on the cheap. He’s got only one full-time employee, an old dame named Theresa Vincenzo. Everyone else he uses is freelance or part of the importation crew. Vincenzo has to be a hundred. No