He stood up with the end of the broken chain and the dog came up on his feet obediently, went out through the swing door into the back part of the house, at the man’s side.
I moved a little, out of line with the swing door. Jerry might have more shotguns. There was something about Jerry’s face that worried me. As if I had seen him before, but not very lately, or in a newspaper photo.
I looked at the woman. She was a handsome brunette in her early thirties. Her print house dress didn’t seem to belong with her finely arched eyebrows and her long soft hands.
“How did it happen?” I asked casually, as if it didn’t matter very much.
Her voice snapped at me, as if she was aching to turn it loose. “We’ve been in the house about a week. Rented it furnished, I was in the kitchen, Jerry in the yard. The car stopped out front and the little guy marched in just as if he lived here. The door didn’t happen to be locked, I guess. I opened the swing door a crack and saw him pushing the dog into the closet. Then I smelled the chloroform. Then things began to happen all at once and I went for a gun and called Jerry out of the window. I got back in here about the time you crashed in. Who are you?”
“It was all over then?” I said. “He had Sharp chewed up on the floor?”
“Yes—if Sharp is his name.”
“You and Jerry didn’t know him?”
“Never saw him before. Or the dog. But Jerry loves dogs.”
“Better change a little of that,” I said. “Jerry knew the dog’s name. Voss.”
Her eyes got tight and her mouth got stubborn. “I think you must be mistaken,” she said in a sultry voice. “I asked you who you were, mister.”
“Who’s Jerry?” I asked. “I’ve seen him somewhere. Maybe on a reader. Where’d he get the sawed-off? You going to let the cops see that?”
She bit her lip, then stood up suddenly, went towards the fallen shotgun. I let her pick it up, saw she kept her hand away from the triggers. She went back to the window seat and pushed it under the pile of newspapers.
She faced me. “Okay, what’s the pay-off?” she asked grimly.
I said slowly: “The dog is stolen. His owner, a girl, happens to be missing. I’m hired to find her. The people Sharp said he got the dog from sounded like you and Jerry. Their name was Voss. They moved East. Ever heard of a lady called Isobel Snare?”
The woman said “No,” tonelessly, and stared at the end of my chin.
The man in overalls came back through the swing door wiping his face on the sleeve of his blue work shirt. He didn’t have any fresh guns with him. He looked me over without much concern.
I said: “I could do you a lot of good with the law, if you had any ideas about this Snare girl.”
The woman stared at me, curled her lips. The man smiled, rather softly, as if he held all the cards. Tires squealed, taking a distant corner in a hurry.
“Aw, loosen up,” I said quickly. “Sharp was scared. He brought the dog back to where he got him. He must have thought the house was empty. The chloroform idea wasn’t so good, but the little guy was all rattled.”
They didn’t make a sound, either of them. They just stared at me.
“Okay,” I said, and stepped over to the corner of the room. “I think you’re a couple of lamsters. If whoever’s coming isn’t law, I’ll start shooting. Don’t ever think I won’t.”
The woman said very calmly: “Suit yourself, kibitzer.” Then a car rushed along the block and ground to a harsh stop before the house. I sneaked a quick glance out, saw the red spotlight on the windshield, the P.D. On the side. Two big bruisers in plain clothes tumbled out and slammed through the gate, up the steps.
A fist pounded the door. “It’s open,” I shouted.
The door swung wide and the two dicks charged in, with drawn guns.
They stopped dead, stared at what lay on the floor. Their guns jerked at Jerry and me. The one who covered me was a big red-faced man in a baggy gray suit.
“Reach—and reach empty!” he yelled in a large tough voice.
I reached, but held on to my Luger. “Easy,” I said. “A dog killed him, not a gun. I’m a private dick from San Angelo. I’m on a case here.”
“Yeah?” He closed in on me heavily, bored his gun into my stomach. “Maybe so, bud. We’ll know all that later on.”
He reached up and jerked my gun loose from my hand, sniffed at it, leaning his gun into me.
“Fired, huh? Sweet! Turn around.”
“Listen—”
“Turn around, bud.”
I turned slowly. Even as I turned he was dropping his gun into a side pocket and reaching for his hip.
That should have warned me, but it didn’t. I may have heard the swish of the blackjack. Certainly I must have felt it. There was a sudden pool of darkness at my feet. I dived into it and dropped…and dropped…and dropped.
4
When I came to the room was full of smoke. The smoke hung in the air, in thin lines straight up and down, like a bead curtain. Two windows seemed to be open in an end wall, but the smoke didn’t move. I had never seen the room before.
I lay a little while thinking, then I opened my mouth and yelled: “Fire!” at the top of my lungs.
Then I fell back on the bed and started laughing. I didn’t like the sound I made laughing. It had a goofy ring, even to me.
Steps ran along somewhere and a key turned in the door and the door opened. A man in a short white coat looked in at me, hard-eyed. I turned my head a little and said: “Don’t count that one, Jack. It slipped out.”
He scowled sharply. He had a hard small face, beady eyes. I didn’t know him.
“Maybe you want some more strait jacket,” he sneered.
“I’m fine, Jack,” I said. “Just fine, I’m going to have me a short nap now.”
“Better be just that,” he snarled.
The door shut, the key turned, the steps went away.
I lay still and looked at the smoke. I knew now that there wasn’t any smoke there really. It must have been night because a porcelain bowl hanging from the ceiling on three chains had light behind it. It had little colored lumps around the edge, orange and blue alternating. While I watched them they opened like tiny portholes and heads stuck out of them, tiny heads like the heads on dolls, but alive heads. There was a man in a yachting cap and a large fluffy blonde and a thin man with a crooked bow tie who kept saying: “Would you like your steak rare or medium, sir?”
I took hold of the corner of the rough sheet and wiped the sweat off my face. I sat up, put my feet down on the floor. They were bare. I was wearing canton flannel pajamas. There was no feeling in my feet when I put them down. After a while they began to tingle and then got full of pins and needles.
Then I could feel the floor. I took hold of the side of the bed and stood up and walked.
A voice that was probably my own was saying to me: “You have the D.T.s…you have the D.T.s…you have the D.T.s…”
I saw a bottle of whisky on a small white table between the two windows. I started towards it. It was a Johnnie Walker bottle, half full. I got it up, took a long drink from the neck. I put the bottle down again.
The whisky had a funny taste. While I was realizing that it had a funny taste I saw a washbowl in the corner. I just made it to the washbowl before I vomited.
I got back to the bed and lay there, The vomiting had made me very weak, but the room seemed a little more real, a little less fantastic. I could see bars on the two windows, a heavy wooden chair, no other furniture but the white table with the doped whisky on it. There was a closet door, shut, probably locked.
The bed was a hospital bed and there were two leather straps attached to the sides, about where a man’s wrists would be. I knew I was in some kind of prison ward.
My left arm suddenly began to feel sore. I rolled up the loose sleeve, looked at half a dozen pinpricks on the upper arm, and a black and blue circle around each one.
I had been shot so full of dope to keep me
quiet that I was having the French fits coming out of it. That accounted for the smoke and the little heads on the ceiling light. The doped whisky was probably part of somebody else’s cure.
I got up again and walked, kept on walking. After a while I drank a little water from the tap, kept it down, drank more. Half an hour or more of that and I was ready to talk to somebody.
The closet door was locked and the chair was too heavy for me. I stripped the bed, slid the mattress to one side. There was a mesh spring underneath, fastened at the top and bottom by heavy coil springs about nine inches long. It took me half an hour and much misery to work one of these loose.
I rested a little and drank a little more cold water and went over to the hinge side of the door.
I yelled “Fire!” at the top of my voice, several times.
I waited, but not long. Steps ran along the hallway outside. The key jabbed into the door, the lock clicked. The hard-eyed little man in the short white coat dodged in furiously, his eyes on the bed.
I laid the coil spring on the angle of his jaw, then on the back of his head as he went down. I got him by the throat. He struggled a good deal. I used a knee on his face. It hurt my knee.
He didn’t say how his face felt. I got a blackjack out of his right hip pocket and reversed the key in the door and locked it from the inside. There were other keys on the ring. One of them unlocked my closet. I looked in at my clothes.
I put them on slowly, with fumbling fingers. I yawned a great deal. The man on the floor didn’t move.
I locked him in and left him.
5
From a wide silent hallway, with a parquetry floor and a narrow carpet down its middle, flat white oak banisters swept down in long curves to the entrance hall. There were closed doors, big, heavy, old-fashioned. No sounds behind them. I went down the carpet runner, walking on the balls of my feet.
There were stained glass inner doors to a vestibule from which the front door opened. A telephone rang as I got that far. A man’s voice answered it, from behind a half-open door through which light came out into the dim hall.
I went back, sneaked a glance around the edge of the open door, saw a man at a desk, talking into the phone. I waited until he hung up. Then I went in.
He had a pale, bony, high-crowned head, across which a thin wave of brown hair curled and was plastered to his skull. He had a long, pale, joyless face. His eyes jumped at me. His hand jumped towards a button on his desk.
I grinned, growled at him: “Don’t. I’m a desperate man, warden.” I showed him the blackjack.
His smile was as stiff as a frozen fish. His long pale hands made gestures like sick butterflies over the top of his desk. One of them began to drift towards a side drawer of the desk.
He worked his tongue loose—You’ve been a very sick man, sir. A very sick man. I wouldn’t advise—”
I flicked the blackjack at his wandering hand. It drew into itself like a slug on a hot stone. I said: “Not sick, warden, just doped within an inch of my reason. Out is what I want, and some clean whisky. Give.”
He made vague motions with his fingers. “I’m Dr. Sundstrand,” he said. “This is a private hospital—not a jail.”
“Whisky,” I croaked. “I get all the rest. Private funny house. A lovely racket. Whisky.”
“In the medicine cabinet,” he said with a drifting, spent breath.
“Put your hands behind your head.”
“I’m afraid you’ll regret this.” He put his hands behind his head.
I got to the far side of the desk, opened the drawer his hand had wanted to reach, took an automatic out of it. I put the blackjack away, went back round the desk to the medicine cabinet on the wall. There was a pint bottle of bond bourbon in it, three glasses. I took two of them.
I poured two drinks. “You first, warden.”
“I—I don’t drink. I’m a total abstainer,” he muttered, his hands still behind his head.
I took the blackjack out again. He put a hand down quickly, gulped from one of the glasses. I watched him. It didn’t seem to hurt him. I smelled my dose, then put it down my throat. It worked, and I had another, then slipped the bottle into my coat pocket.
“Okay,” I said. “Who put me in here? Shake it up. I’m in a hurry.”
“The—the police, of course.”
“What police?”
He hunched his shoulders down in the chair. He looked sick. “A man named Galbraith signed as complaining witness. Strictly legal, I assure you. He is an officer.”
I said: “Since when can a cop sign as complaining witness on a psycho case?”
He didn’t say anything.
“Who gave me the dope in the first place?”
“I wouldn’t know that. I presume it has been going on a long time.”
I felt my chin. “All of two days,” I said. “They ought to have gunned me. Less kickback in the long run. So long, warden.”
“If you go out of here,” he said thinly, “you will be arrested at once.”
“Not just for going out,” I said softly.
As I went out he still had his hands behind his head.
There was a chain and a bolt on the front door, beside the lock. But nobody tried to stop me from opening it. I crossed a big old-fashioned porch, went down a wide path fringed with flowers. A mockingbird sang in a dark tree. There was a white picket fence on the street. It was a corner house, on Twenty-ninth and Descanso.
I walked four blocks east to a bus line and waited for a bus. There was no alarm, no cruising car looking for me. The bus came and I rode downtown, went to a Turkish Bath establishment, had a steam bath, a needle shower, a rub-down, a shave, and the rest of the whisky.
I could eat then. I ate and went to a strange hotel, registered under a fake name. It was half past eleven. The local paper, which I read over more whisky and water, informed me that one Dr. Richard Sharp, who had been found dead in a vacant furnished house on Carolina Street, was still causing the police much headache. They had no clue to the murderer as yet.
The date on the paper informed me that over forty-eight hours had been abstracted from my life without my knowledge or consent.
I went to bed and to sleep, had nightmares and woke up out of them covered with cold sweat. That was the last of the withdrawal symptoms. In the morning I was a well man.
6
Chief of police Fulwider was a hammered down, fattish heavyweight, with restless eyes and that shade of red hair that is almost pink. It was cut very short and his pink scalp glistened among the pink hairs. He wore a fawn-colored flannel suit with patch pockets and lapped seams, cut as every tailor can’t cut flannel.
He shook hands with me and turned his chair sideways and crossed his legs. That showed me French lisle socks at three or four dollars a pair, and hand-made English walnut brogues at fifteen to eighteen, depression prices.
I figured that probably his wife had money.
“Ah, Carmady,” he said, chasing my card over the glass top of his desk, “with two a’s, eh? Down here on a job?”
“A little trouble,” I said. “You can straighten it out, if you will.”
He stuck his chest out, waved a pink hand and lowered his voice a couple of notches.
“Trouble,” he said, “is something our little town don’t have a lot of. Our little city is small, but very, very clean. I look out of my west window and I see the Pacific Ocean. Nothing cleaner than that. On the north Arguello Boulevard and the foothills. On the east the finest little business section you would want to see and beyond it a paradise of well-kept homes and gardens. On the south—if I had a south window, which I don’t have—I would see the finest little yacht harbor in the world, for a small yacht harbor.”
“I brought my trouble with me,” I said. “That is, some of it. The rest went on ahead. A girl named Isobel Snare ran off from home in the big city and her dog was seen here. I found the dog, but the people who had the dog went to a lot of trouble to sew me up.”
?
??Is that so?” the chief asked absently. His eyebrows crawled around on his forehead. I wasn’t sure whether I was kidding him or he was kidding me.
“Just turn the key in the door, will you?” he said. “You’re a younger man than I am.”
I got up and turned the key and sat down again and got a cigarette out. By that time the chief had a right-looking bottle and two pony glasses on the desk, and a handful of cardamom seeds.
We had a drink and he cracked three or four of the cardamom seeds and we chewed them and looked at one another.
“Just tell me about it,” he said then. “I can take it now.”
“Did you ever hear of a guy called Farmer Saint?”
”Did I?” He banged his desk and the cardamom seeds jumped. “Why there’s a thousand berries on that bimbo. A bank stickup, ain’t he?”
I nodded, trying to look behind his eyes without seeming to. “He and his sister work together. Diana is her name. They dress up like country folks and smack down small-town banks, state banks. That’s why he’s called Farmer Saint. There’s a grand on the sister too.”
“I would certainly like to put the sleeves on that pair,” the chief said firmly.
“Then why the hell didn’t you?” I asked him.
He didn’t quite hit the ceiling, but he opened his mouth so wide I was afraid his lower jaw was going to fall in his lap. His eyes stuck out like peeled eggs. A thin trickle of saliva showed in the fat crease at the corner. He shut his mouth with all the deliberation of a steam shovel.
It was a great act, if it was an act.
“Say that again,” he whispered.
I opened a folded newspaper I had with me and pointed to a column.
“Look at this Sharp killing. Your local paper didn’t do so good on it. It says some unknown rang the department and the boys ran out and found a dead man in an empty house. That’s a lot of noodles. I was there. Farmer Saint and his sister were there. Your cops were there when we were there.”
“Treachery!” he shouted suddenly. “Traitors in the department.” His face was now as gray as arsenic flypaper. He poured two more drinks, with a shaking hand.