Read Online Trouble Is My Business by Raymond Chandler - Free Book Online Page B

left him laying on his back, a little sideways, his nose as white as ever, his eyes empty now, his lips moving a little as if he were talking to himself. A funny lad, not all bad, but not so pure I had to weep over him either.
    I put my Luger together and left with my three guns. There was nobody outside the apartment house.
    SEVEN
    The Jeeter mansion was on a nine- or ten-acre knoll, a big colonial pile with fat white columns and dormer windows and magnolias and a four-car garage. There was a circular parking space at the top of the driveway with two cars parked in it—one was the big dreadnaught in which I’d ridden and the other a canary-yellow sports convertible I had seen before.
    I rang a bell the size of a silver dollar. The door opened and a tall narrow cold-eyed bird in dark clothes looked out at me.
    “Mr. Jeeter home? Mr. Jeeter, Senior?”
    “May I arsk who is calling?” The accent was a little too thick, like cut Scotch.
    “Philip Marlowe. I’m working for him. Maybe I had ought to of gone to the servant’s entrance.”
    He hitched a finger at a wing collar and looked at me without pleasure. “Aw, possibly. You may step in. I shall inform Mr. Jeeter. I believe he is engaged at the moment. Kindly wait ’ere in the ’all.”
    “The act stinks,” I said. “English butlers aren’t dropping their h’s this year.”
    “Smart guy, huh?” he snarled, in a voice from not any farther across the Atlantic than Hoboken. “Wait here.” He slid away.
    I sat down in a carved chair and felt thirsty. After a while the butler came cat-footing back along the hall and jerked his chin at me unpleasantly.
    We went along a mile of hallway. At the end it broadened without any doors into a huge sunroom. On the far side of the sunroom the butler opened a wide door and I stepped past him into an oval room with a black-and-silver oval rug, a black marble table in the middle of the rug, stiff high-backed carved chairs against the walls, a huge oval mirror with a rounded surface that made me look like a pygmy with water on the brain, and in the room three people.
    By the door opposite where I came in, George the chauffeur stood stiffly in his neat dark uniform, with his peaked cap in his hand. In the least uncomfortable of the chairs sat Miss Harriet Huntress holding a glass in which there was half a drink. And around the silver margin of the oval rug, Mr. Jeeter, Senior, was trying his legs out in a brisk canter, still under wraps, but mad inside. His face was red and the veins on his nose were distended. His hands were in the pockets of a velvet smoking jacket. He wore a pleated shirt with a black pearl in the bosom, a batwing black tie and one of his patent-leather oxfords was unlaced.
    He whirled and yelled at the butler behind me: “Get out and keep those doors shut! And I’m not at home to anybody, understand? Nobody!”
    The butler closed the doors. Presumably, he went away. I didn’t hear him go.
    George gave me a cool one-sided smile and Miss Huntress gave me a bland stare over her glass. “You made a nice come-back,” she said demurely.
    “You took a chance leaving me alone in your apartment,” I told her. “I might have sneaked some of your perfume.”
    “Well, what do you want?” Jeeter yelled at me. “A nice sort of detective you turned out to be. I put you on a confidential job and you walk right in on Miss Huntress and explain the whole thing to her.”
    “It worked, didn’t it?”
    He stared. They all stared. “How do you know that?” he barked.
    “I know a nice girl when I see one. She’s here telling you she had an idea she got not to like, and for you to quit worrying about it. Where’s Mister Gerald?”
    Old man Jeeter stopped and gave me a hard level stare. “I still regard you as incompetent,” he said. “My son is missing.”
    “I’m not working for you. I’m working for Anna Halsey. Any complaints you have to make should be addressed to her. Do I pour my own drink or do you