“Who smacked your jaw?” he asked, staring at me.
“Oh, a fellow with a roll of nickels in his hand.”
“Nickels?”
“Yeah. That’s as good as brass knuckles. Try it sometime, but not on me,” I grinned.
“You won’t find him,” he said bitterly, staring at my jaw. “Him, I mean. My mother’s husband.”
“I bet I do.”
“How much you bet?”
“More money than even you’ve got in your pants.”
He kicked viciously at the edge of a red brick in the walk. His voice was still sulky, but more smooth. His eyes speculated.
“Want to bet on something else? C’mon over to the range. I bet you a dollar I can knock down eight out of ten pipes in ten shots.”
I looked back towards the house. Nobody seemed impatient to receive me.
“Well,” I said, “we’ll have to make it snappy. Let’s go.”
We went along the side of the house under the windows. The orchid green-house showed over the tops of some bushy trees far back. A man in neat whipcord was polishing the chromium on a big car in front of the garages. We went past there to the low white building against the bank.
The boy took a key out and unlocked the door and we went into close air that still held traces of cordite fumes. The boy clicked a spring lock on the door.
“Me first,” he snapped.
The place looked something like a small beach shooting gallery. There was a counter with a .22 repeating rifle on it and a long, slim target pistol. Both well oiled but dusty. About thirty feet beyond the counter was a waist-high, solid-looking partition across the building, and behind that a simple layout of clay pipes and ducks and two round white targets marked off with black rings and stained by lead bullets.
The clay pipes ran in an even line across the middle, and there was a big skylight, and a row of hooded overhead lights.
The boy pulled a cord on the wall and a thick canvas blind slid across the skylight. He turned on the hooded lights and then the place really looked like a beach shooting gallery.
He picked up the .22 rifle and loaded it quickly from a cardboard box of shells, .22 shorts.
“A dollar I get eight out of ten pipes?”
“Blast away,” I said, and put my money on the counter.
He took aim almost casually, fired too fast, showing off. He missed three pipes. It was pretty fancy shooting at that. He threw the rifle down on the counter.
“Gee, go set up some more. Let’s not count that one. I wasn’t set.”
“You don’t aim to lose any money, do you, son? Go set ‘em up yourself. It’s your range.”
His narrow face got angry and his voice got shrill. “You do it! I’ve got to relax, see. I’ve got to relax.”
I shrugged at him, lifted a flap in the counter and went along the whitewashed side wall, squeezed past the end of the low partition. The boy clicked his reloaded rifle shut behind me.
“Put that down,” I growled back at him. “Never touch a gun when there’s anyone in front of you.”
He put it down, looking hurt.
I bent down and grabbed a handful of clay pipes out of the sawdust in a big wooden box on the floor. I shook the yellow grains of wood off them and started to straighten up.
I stopped with my hat above the barrier, just the top of my hat. I never knew why I stopped. Blind instinct.
The .22 cracked and the lead bullet bonged into the target in front of my head. My hat stirred lazily on my head, as though a blackbird had swooped at it during the nesting season.
A nice kid. He was full of tricks, like Red-eyes. I dropped the pipes and took hold of my hat by the brim, lifted it straight up off my head a few inches. The gun cracked again. Another metallic bong on the target.
I let myself fall heavily to the wooden flooring, among the pipes.
A door opened and shut. That was all. Nothing else. The hard glare from the hooded lights beat down on me. The sun peeked in at the edges of the skylight blind. There were two bright new splashes on the nearest target, and there were four small round holes in my hat, two and two, on each side.
I crawled to the end of the barrier and peeked around it. The boy was gone. I could see the small muzzles of the two guns on the counter.
I stood up and went back along the wall, switched the lights off, turned the knob of the spring lock and went out. The Winslow chauffeur whistled at his polish job around in front of the garages.
I crushed my hat in my hand and went back along the side of the house, looking for the kid. I didn’t see him. I rang the front door bell.
I asked for Mrs. O’Mara. I didn’t let the butler take my hat.
11
She was in an oyster-white something, with white fur at the cuffs and collar and around the bottom. A breakfast table on wheels was pushed to one side of her chair and she was flicking ashes among the silver.
The coy-looking maid with the nice legs came and took the table out and shut the tall white door. I sat down.
Mrs. O’Mara leaned her head back against a cushion and looked tired. The line of her throat was distant, cold. She stared at me with a cool, hard look, in which there was plenty of dislike.
“You seemed rather human yesterday,” she said. “But I see you are just a brute like the rest of them. Just a brutal cop.”
“I came to ask you about Lash Yeager,” I said.
She didn’t even pretend to be amused. “And why should you think of asking me?”
“Well—if you lived a week at the Dardanella Club—” I waved my crunched-together hat.
She looked at her cigarette fixedly. “Well, I did meet him, I believe. I remember the rather unusual name.”
“They all have names like that, those animals,” I said. “It seems that Larry Batzel—I guess you read in your paper about him too—was a friend of Dud O’Mara’s once. I didn’t tell you about him yesterday. Maybe that was a mistake.”
A pulse began to throb in her throat. She said softly: “I have a suspicion you are about to become very insolent, that I may even have to have you thrown out.”
“Not before I’ve said my piece,” I said. “It seems that Mr. Yeager’s driver—they have drivers as well as unusual names, those animals—told Larry Batzel that Mr. Yeager was out this way the night O’Mara disappeared.”
The old army blood had to be good for something in her. She didn’t move a muscle. She just froze solid.
I got up and took the cigarette from between her frozen fingers and killed it in a white jade ashtray. I laid my hat carefully on her white satin knee. I sat down again.
Her eyes moved after a while. They moved down and looked at the hat. Her face flushed very slowly, in two vivid patches over the cheekbones. She fought around with her tongue and lips.
“I know,” I said. “It’s not much of a hat. I’m not making you a present of it. But just look at the bullet holes in it once.”
Her hand became alive and snatched at the hat. Her eyes became flames.
She spread the crown out, looked at the holes, and shuddered.
“Yeager?” she asked, very faintly. It was a wisp of a voice, an old voice.
I said very slowly: “Yeager wouldn’t use a .22 target rifle, Mrs. O’Mara.”
The flame died in her eyes. They were pools of darkness much emptier than darkness.
“You’re his mother,” I said. “What do you want to do about it?”
“Merciful God! Dade! He…shot at you!”
“Twice,” I said.
“But why? Oh, why?”
“You think I’m a wise guy, Mrs. O’Mara. Just another hard-eyed boy from the other side of the tracks. It would be easy in this spot, if I was. But I’m not that at all, really. Do I have to tell why he shot at me!”
She didn’t speak. She nodded slowly. Her face was a mask now.
“I’d say he probably can’t help it,” I said. “He didn’t want me to find his stepfather, for one thing. Then he’s a little lad that likes
money. That seems small, but it’s part of the picture. He almost lost a dollar to me on his shooting. It seems small, but he lives in a small world. Most of all, of course, he’s a crazy little sadist with an itchy trigger finger.”
“How dare you!” she flared. It didn’t mean anything. She forgot it herself instantly.
“How dare I? I do dare. Let’s not bother figuring why he shot at me. I’m not the first, am I? You wouldn’t have known what I was talking about, you wouldn’t have assumed he did it on purpose.”
She didn’t move or speak. I took a deep breath.
“So let’s talk about why he shot Dud O’Mara,” I said. If I thought she would yell even this time, I fooled myself. The old man in the orchid house had put more into her than her tallness and her dark hair and her reckless eyes.
She pulled her lips back and tried to lick them, and it made her look like a scared little girl, for a second. The lines of her cheeks sharpened and her hand went up like an artificial hand moved by wires and took hold of the white fur at her throat and pulled it tight and squeezed it until her knuckles looked like bleached bone. Then she just stared at me.
Then my hat slid off her knee on to the floor, without her moving. The sound it made falling was one of the loudest sounds I had ever heard.
“Money,” she said in a dry croak. “Of course you want money.”
“How much money do I want?”
“Fifteen thousand dollars.”
I nodded, stiff-necked as a floorwalker trying to see with his back.
“That would be about right. That would be the established retainer. That would be about what he had in his pockets and what Yeager got for getting rid of him.”
“You’re too—damned smart,” she said horribly. “I could kill you myself and like it.”
I tried to grin. “That’s right. Smart and without a feeling in the world. It happened something like this. The boy got O’Mara where he got me, by the same simple ruse. I don’t think it was a plan. He hated his stepfather, but he wouldn’t exactly plan to kill him.”
“He hated him,” she said.
“So they’re in the little shooting gallery and O’Mara is dead on the floor, behind the barrier, out of sight. The shots, of course, meant nothing there. And very little blood, with a head shot, small caliber. So the boy goes out and locks the door and hides. But after a while he has to tell somebody. He has to. He tells you. You’re his mother. You’re the one to tell.”
“Yes,” she breathed. “He did just that.” Her eyes had stopped hating me.
“You think about calling it an accident, which is okay, except for one thing. The boy’s not a normal boy, and you know it. The general knows it, the servants know. There must be other people that know it. And the law, dumb as you think they are, are pretty smart with subnormal types. They get to handle so many of them. And I think he would have talked. I think, after a while, he would even have bragged.”
“Go on,” she said.
“You wouldn’t risk that,” I said. “Not for your son and not for the sick old man in the orchid house. You’d do any awful criminal callous thing rather than risk that. You did it. You knew Yeager and you hired him to get rid of the body. That’s all—except that hiding the girl, Mona Mesarvey, helped to make it look like a deliberate disappearance.”
“He took him away after dark, in Dud’s own car,” she said hollowly.
I reached down and picked my hat off the floor. “How about the servants?”
“Norris knows. The butler. He’d die on the rack before he told.”
“Yeah. Now you know why Larry Batzel was knocked off and why I was taken for a ride, don’t you?”
“Blackmail,” she said. “It hadn’t come yet, but I was waiting for it. I would have paid anything, and he would know that.”
“Bit by bit, year by year, there was a quarter of a million in it for him, easy. I don’t think Joe Mesarvey was in it at all. I know the girl wasn’t.”
She didn’t say anything. She just kept her eyes on my face.
“Why in hell,” I groaned, “didn’t you take the guns away from him?”
“He’s worse than you think. That would have started something worse. I’m—I’m almost afraid of him myself.”
“Take him away,” I said. From here. From the old man. He’s young enough to be cured, by the right handling. Take him to Europe. Far away. Take him now. It would kill the general out of hand to know his blood was in that.”
She got up draggingly and dragged herself across to the windows. She stood motionless, almost blending into the heavy white drapes. Her hands hung at her sides, very motionless also. After a while she turned and walked past me. When she was behind me she caught her breath and sobbed just once.
“It was very vile. It was the vilest thing I ever heard of. Yet I would do it again. Father would not have done it. He would have spoken right out. It would, as you say, have killed him.”
“Take him away,” I pounded on. “He’s hiding out there now. He thinks he got me. He’s hiding somewhere like an animal. Get him. He can’t help it.”
“I offered you money,” she said, still behind me. “That’s nasty. I wasn’t in love with Dudley O’Mara. That’s nasty too. I can’t thank you. I don’t know what to say.”
“Forget it,” I said. “I’m just an old workhorse. Put your work on the boy.”
“I promise. Goodbye, Mr. Carmady.”
We didn’t shake hands. I went back down the stairs and the butler was at the front door as usual. Nothing in his face but politeness.
“You will not want to see the general today, sir?”
“Not today, Norris.”
I didn’t see the boy outside. I went through the postern and got into my rented Ford and drove on down the hill, past where the old oil wells were.
Around some of them, not visible from the street, there were still sumps in which waste water lay and festered with a scum of oil on top. They would be ten or twelve feet deep, maybe more. There would be dark things in them. Perhaps in one of them—I was glad I had killed Yeager.
On the way back downtown I stopped at a bar and had a couple of drinks. They didn’t do me any good.
All they did was make me think of Silver-Wig, and I never saw her again.
TRY THE GIRL
The big guy wasn’t any of my business. He never was, then or later, least of all then.
I was over on Central, which is the Harlem of Los Angeles, on one of the “mixed” blocks, where there were still both white and colored establishments. I was looking for a little Greek barber named Tom Aleidis whose wife wanted him to come home and was willing to spend a little money to find him. It was a peaceful job. Tom Aleidis was not a crook.
I saw the big guy standing in front of Shamey’s, an all-colored drink and dice second-floor, not too savory. He was looking up at the broken stencils in the electric sign, with a sort of rapt expression, like a hunky immigrant looking at the Statue of Liberty, like a man who had waited a long time and come a long way.
He wasn’t just big. He was a giant. He looked seven feet high, and he wore the loudest clothes I ever saw on a really big man.
Pleated maroon pants, a rough grayish coat with white billiard balls for buttons, brown suede shoes with explosions in white kid on them, a brown shirt, a yellow tie, a large red carnation, and a front-door handkerchief the color of the Irish flag. It was neatly arranged in three points, under the red carnation. On Central Avenue, not the quietest dressed street in the world, with that size and that make-up he looked about as unobtrusive as a tarantula on a slice of angel food.
He went over and swung back the doors into Shamey’s. The doors didn’t stop swinging before they exploded outward again. What sailed out and landed in the gutter and made a high, keening noise, like a wounded rat, was a slick-haired colored youth in a pinchback suit. A “brown,” the color of coffee with rather thin cream in it. His face, I mean.
It still wasn’t any of my business. I watched the colored b
oy creep away along the walls. Nothing more happened. So I made my mistake.
I moved along the pavement until I could push the swing door myself. Just enough to look in. Just too much.
A hand I could have sat in took hold of my shoulder and hurt and lifted me through the doors and up three steps.
A deep, soft voice said in my ear easily, “Smokes in here, pal. Can you tie that?”
I tried for a little elbow room to get to my sap. I wasn’t wearing a gun. The little Greek barber business hadn’t seemed to be that sort of job.
He took hold of my shoulder again.
“It’s that kind of place,” I said quickly.
“Don’t say that, pal. Beulah used to work here. Little Beulah.”
“Go on up and see for yourself.”
He lifted me up three more steps.
“I’m feeling good,” he said. “I wouldn’t want anybody to bother me. Let’s you and me go on up and maybe nibble a drink.”
“They won’t serve you,” I said.
“I ain’t seen Beulah in eight years, pal,” he said softly, tearing my shoulder to pieces without noticing what he was doing. “She ain’t even wrote in six. But she’ll have a reason. She used to work here. Let’s you and me go on up.”
“All right,” I said. “I’ll go up with you. Just let me walk. Don’t carry me. I’m fine. Carmady’s the name. I’m all grown up. I go to the bathroom alone and everything. Just don’t carry me.”
“Little Beulah used to work here,” he said softly. He wasn’t listening to me.
We went on up. He let me walk.
A crap table was in the far corner beyond the bar, and scattered tables and a few customers were here and there. The whiny voices chanting around the crap table stopped instantly. Eyes looked at us in that dead, alien silence of another race.
A large Negro was leaning against the bar in shirt-sleeves with pink garters on his arms. An ex-pug who had been hit by everything but a concrete bridge. He pried himself loose from the bar edge and came towards us in a loose fighter’s crouch.
He put a large brown hand against the big man’s gaudy chest. It looked like a stud there.
“No white folks, brother. Jes’ fo’ the colored people. I’se sorry.”