Black Mask (Vol. 29, No. 3 — January 1947)

I climbed back to the house, let myself in and called the police. Then I lit a cigarette and started looking for myself. Ever since I met this dame I had been building up to this. Nobody had twisted my arm and said I had to answer for her. It hadn’t been love, either. Then what was I doing there, tangled in the mess that a neurotic, dipsomaniac ex-movie queen had made of her life?

That was where the doorbell caught me.

Sammy Hillman was the inspector in charge of the homicide detail. He and I had chewed over several bones together. For a cop, he wasn’t a bad guy. He came in smiling and looking around as though he thought I might have a drink waiting for him. “Hello, Fowler,” he said. “Can’t you let us drum up our own business?”

“You’d go broke in a week, Sammy, and you know it.”

Hillman took in what he could see of the house from where he was standing. “Nice creepy little cave this is,” he commented. “What’ve you got?”

I took him out back and showed him.

His gang spread out and went to work, while I told him what I knew. After I finished my recitation, we went down to view the remains. He didn’t say so, but I gathered he was satisfied it was just a case of too much grog and too little guts.

We were standing by the table in the back yard. I looked at the empty gin bottle Maxine had left behind. It hadn’t given anything to the fingerprint boys. It was just standing there like a tombstone.

Suddenly I wanted that bottle. “Look, Sammy,” I said, “don’t think I’ve gone completely nuts, but if it’s O.K. with you, I’d like to take this bottle — for a souvenir.”

He snorted. “Help yourself. One bottle more or less around this place can’t make any difference.”

I tucked the prize under my arm and said goodbye.

Sammy nodded. “This’ll last us a couple of weeks,” he said, “so take it easy.”

Chapter Two Husbands and Homicide

I’d forgotten about eating. I went home and gave Maxine’s bottle the place of honor in the center of my cocktail table while I hustled a drink for myself in the kitchen. I brought it back and toasted my final link with Maxine.

I had another drink and started to get poetic about Maxine, life, and empty bottles. You don’t have to be boiled to get the connection, but it helps.

I remembered Maxine’s diary, still in the pocket of the coat I was wearing the night I met her. I got it, and another drink.

I spent the next couple of hours getting stewed and wondering at the junk a woman will immortalize in her diary. I could follow the general outline of her life, but mostly it was devoted to personalities and sounded pretty shallow. It made a good companion-piece for the empty gin bottle.

I killed the fifth and made a pass at going to bed. I got one shoe off before I went under. The bed pitched a couple of times when I shut my eyes, and I felt I was being shot through space. It was broad daylight again before anything bothered me.

The little men woke me up. I sat up on the edge of my bed and wondered what would ever become of me. I managed to totter out to the kitchen and try some ice water. It felt good in my mouth, but raised hell in my stomach. I made some hangover soup with tomato juice, Worcestershire, and a shot of bitters. With that rumbling around in my guts, I went in and took a hot shower, brushed my teeth and got into some clean clothes. I decided against risking a shave right then.

While I was waiting for the coffee to run through the silex, I cleared away some of the debris from my contest with the demon rum, emptied the ash trays, threw out the dead fifth my hangover had come in, and picked up my heritage from Maxine.

In the cold light of morning, keeping that gin bottle lost some of its enchantment. Maybe some relatives would turn up for her diary. But I was certain that nobody, including me, had any use for that bottle.

I was in the act of tossing it in the trash can with the other dead one, when it happened. Nothing lethal, just an idea. I noticed for the first time that the bottle wasn’t just empty. There was a fine layer of dust in it!

I’ve had a lot of experience with emptying bottles. Nobody could sell me the story that this one had only been standing around some forty hours. The label was still fresh, which ruled coincidence out of its being at the scene of the suicide. But why would Maxine set the stage with a prop bottle?

Something smelled.

Until now I had taken it for granted that her bum publicity break in the papers put the fritz on her comeback chance, she got boozed up and jumped. This dead gin bottle said it didn’t happen that way.

I had my coffee and set out to prove he was a liar.

The Screen Actors’ Guild informed me that Maxine had been represented by an agent named Mitchell Kasch. He was in one of those colonial cheese-cakes that line the strip section of Sunset Boulevard. It was upstairs, a cute little joint The outer office was done in knotty pine and a nyloned secretary with a stagy accent and a peek-a-boo blouse that was more peek than boo.