I spotted an empty table and went and sat behind it, against the cushioned wall. The light grew still brighter for me. I could even see the buckeroo singer now. He had wavy red hair that looked hennaed. The girl at the table next to me had red hair too. It was parted in the middle and strained back as if she hated it. She had large, dark, hungry eyes, awkward features and no make-up except a mouth that glared like a neon sign. Her street suit had too-wide shoulders, too-flaring lapels. An orange undersweater snuggled her neck and there was a black-and-orange quill in her Robin Hood hat, crooked on the back of her head. She smiled at me and her teeth were as thin and sharp as a pauper’s Christmas. I didn’t smile back.
She emptied her glass and rattled it on the tabletop. A waiter in a neat mess jacket slipped out of nowhere and stood in front of me.
“Scotch and soda,” the girl snapped. She had a hard, angular voice with a liquor slur in it.
The waiter looked at her, barely moved his chin and looked back at me. I said: “Bacardi and grenadine.”
He went away. The girl said: “That’ll make you sicky, big boy.”
I didn’t look at her. “So you don’t want to play,” she said loosely. I lit a cigarette and blew a ring in the soft purplish air. “Go chase yourself,” the girl said. “I could pick up a dozen gorillas like you on every block on Hollywood Boulevard. Hollywood Boulevard, my foot. A lot of bit players out of work and fish-faced blondes trying to shake a hangover out of their teeth.”
“Who said anything about Hollywood Boulevard?” I asked.
“You did. Nobody but a guy from Hollywood Boulevard wouldn’t talk back to a girl that insulted him civilly.”
A man and a girl at a nearby table turned their heads and stared. The man gave me a short, sympathetic grin. “That goes for you, too,” the girl said to him.
“You didn’t insult me yet,” he said.
“Nature beat me to it, handsome.”
The waiter came back with the drinks. He gave me mine first. The girl said loudly: “I guess you’re not used to waiting on ladies.”
The waiter gave her her Scotch and soda. “I beg your pardon, madam,” he said in an icy tone.
“Sure. Come around sometime and I’ll give you a manicure, if I can borrow a hoe. Boy friend’s paying the ticket on this.”
The waiter looked at me. I gave him a bill and a lift of my right shoulder. He made change, took his tip, and faded off among the tables.
The girl picked her drink up and came over to my table. She put her elbows on the table and cupped her chin in her hands. “Well, well, a spender,” she said. “I didn’t know they made them any more. How do you like me?”
“I’m thinking it over,” I said. “Keep your voice down or they’ll throw you out.”
“I doubt it,” she said, “As long as I don’t break any mirrors. Besides, me and their boss are like that.” She held up two fingers close together. “That is we would be if I could meet him.” She laughed tinnily, drank a little of her drink. “Where’ve I seen you around?”
“Most anywhere.”
“Where’ve you seen me?”
“Hundreds of places.”
“Yes,” she said. “Just like that. A girl can’t hang on to her individuality any more.”
“She can’t get it back out of a bottle,” I said.
“The heck you say. I could name you plenty of big names that go to sleep with a bottle in each hand. And have to get pushed in the arm so they won’t wake up yelling.”
“Yeah?” I said. “Movie soaks, huh?”
“Yeah. I work for a guy that pushes them in the arm—at ten bucks a push. Sometimes twenty-five or fifty.”
“Sounds like a nice racket,” I said.
“If it lasts. You think it’ll last?”
“You can always go to Palm Springs when they run you out of here.”
“Who’s going to run who out of where?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “What were we talking about?”
She had red hair. She was not good-looking, but she had curves. And she worked for a man who pushed people in the arm. I licked my lips.
A big dark man came through the entrance door and stood just inside it, waiting for his eyes to get used to the light. Then he started to look the place over without haste. His glance traveled to the table where I was sitting. He leaned his big body forward and started to walk our way.
“Oh, oh,” the girl said. “The bouncer. Can you take it?”
I didn’t answer. She stroked her colorless cheek with a strong pale hand and leered at me. The man at the piano struck some chords and began to whine about “We Can Still Dream, Can’t We?”
The big, dark man stopped with his hand on the chair across the table from me. He pulled his eyes off the girl and smiled at me. She was the one he had been looking at. She was the one he had come down the room to get near. But I was the one he looked at from now on. His hair was smooth and dark and shiny above cold gray eyes and eyebrows that looked as if they were penciled, and a handsome actorish mouth and a nose that had been broken but well set. He spoke liplessly.
“Haven’t seen you around for some time—or is my memory bad?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “What are you trying to remember?”
“Your name, doc.”
I said: “Quit trying. We never met.” I fished the metal tag out of my breast pocket and tossed it down. “Here’s my ticket in from the drum major on the wicket.” I got a card out of my wallet and tossed that down. “Here’s my name, age, height, weight, scars if any, and how many times convicted. And my business is to see Conried.”
He ignored the tag and read the card twice, turned it over and looked at the back, then looked at the front again, hooked an arm over the chair-back and gave me a mealy smile. He didn’t look at the girl then or ever. He racked the card edge across the tabletop and made a faint squeak, like a very young mouse. The girl stared at the ceiling and pretended to yawn.
He said dryly: “So you’re one of those guys. So sorry. Mr. Conried had to go north on a little business trip. Caught an early plane.”
The girl said: “That must have been his stand-in I saw this afternoon at Sunset and Vine, in a gray Cord sedan.”
He didn’t look at her. He smiled faintly. “Mr. Conried doesn’t have a gray Cord sedan.”
The girl said: “Don’t let him kid you. I bet he’s upstairs crooking a roulette wheel right this minute.”
The dark man didn’t look at her. His not looking at her was more emphatic than if he had slapped her face. I saw her whiten a little, very slowly, and stay white.
I said: “He’s not here, he’s not here. Thanks for listening. Maybe some other time.”
“Oh sure. But we don’t use any private eyes in here. So sorry.”
“Say that ‘so sorry’ again and I’ll scream. So help me,” the red-haired girl said.
The black-haired man put my card in the casual outer pocket of his dinner jacket. He pushed his chair back and stood up.
“You know how it is,” he said. “So—”
The girl cackled and threw her drink in his face.
The dark man stepped back jarringly and swept a crisp white handkerchief from his pocket. He mopped his face swiftly, shaking his head. When he lowered the handkerchief there was a big soaked spot on his shirt, limp above the black pearl stud. His collar was a ruin.
“So sorry,” the girl said. “Thought you were a spittoon.”
He dropped his hand and his teeth glinted edgily. “Get her out,” he purred. “Get her out fast.”
He turned and walked off very quickly among the tables, holding his handkerchief against his mouth. Two waiters in mess jackets came up close and stood looking at us. Everybody in the place was looking at us.
“Round one,” the girl said. “A little slow. Both fighters were cautious.”
“I’d hate to be with you when you’d take a chance,” I said.
Her head jerked. In that queer purple light the extreme
whiteness of her face seemed to leap at me. Even her rouged lips had a drained look. Her hand went up to her mouth, stiff and clawlike. She coughed dryly like a consumptive and reached for my glass. She gulped the bacardi and grenadine down in bubbling swallows. Then she began to shake. She reached for her bag and pushed it over the edge of the table to the floor. It fell open and some stuff came out. A gilt-metal cigarette case slid under my chair. I had to get up and move the chair to reach it. One of the waiters was behind me.
“Can I help?” he asked suavely.
I was stooped over when the glass the girl had drunk from rolled over the edge of the table and hit the floor beside my hand. I picked up the cigarette case, looked at it casually, and saw that a hand-tinted photo of a big-boned, dark man decorated the front of it. I put it back in her bag and took hold of the girl’s arm and the waiter who had spoken to me slid around and took her other arm. She looked at us blankly, moving her head from side to side as if trying to limber up a stiff neck.
“Mama’s about to pass out,” she croaked, and we started down the room with her. She put her feet out crazily, threw her weight from one side to the other as if trying to upset us. The waiter swore steadily to himself in a monotonous whisper. We came out of the purple light into the bright lobby.
“Ladies’ Room,” the waiter grunted, and pointed with his chin at a door which looked like the side entrance to the Taj Mahal. “There’s a colored heavyweight in there can handle anything.”
“Nuts to the Ladies’ Room,” the girl said nastily. “And leggo of my arm, steward. Boy friend’s all the transportation I need.”
“He’s not your boy friend, madam. He don’t even know you.”
“Beat it, wop. You’re either too polite or not polite enough. Beat it before I lose my culture and bong you.”
“Okay,” I told him. “I’ll set her out to cool. She come in alone?”
“I couldn’t think of any reason why not,” he said, and stepped away. The captain of waiters came halfway down his gangplank and stood glowering, and the vision at the checkroom looked as bored as the referee of a four-round opener.
I pushed my new friend out into the cold, misty air, walked her along the colonnade and felt her body come controlled and steady on my arm.
“You’re a nice guy,” she said dully. “I played that about as smooth as a handful of tacks. You’re a nice guy, mister. I didn’t think I’d ever get out of there alive.”
“Why?”
“I had a wrong idea about making some money. Forget it. Let it lay with all the other wrong ideas I’ve been having all my life. Do I get a ride? I came in a cab.”
“Sure. Do I get told your name?”
“Helen Matson,” she said.
I didn’t get any kick out of that now. I had guessed it long ago.
She still leaned on me a little as we walked down the strip of paved road past the parked cans. When we came to mine I unlocked it and held the door for her and she climbed in and fell back in the corner with her head on the cushion.
I shut the door and then I opened it again and said: “Would you tell me something else? Who’s that mug on the cigarette case you carry? Seems to me I’ve seen him somewhere.”
She opened her eyes. “An old sweet,” she said, “that wore out. He—” Her eyes widened and her mouth snapped open and I barely heard the faint rustle behind me as something hard dug into my back and a muffled voice said: “Hold it, buddy. This is a heist.”
Then a naval gun went off in my ear and my head was a large pink firework exploding into the vault of the sky and scattering and falling slow and pale, and then dank, into the waves. Blackness ate me up.
Five—My Dead Neighbor
I smelled of gin. Not just casually, as if I had taken a few drinks, but as if the Pacific Ocean was pure gin and I had been swimming in it with my clothes on. The gin was on my hair, on my eyebrows, on my face and under my chin on my shirt. My coat was off and I was lying flat on somebody’s carpet and I was looking up at a framed photograph on the end of a plaster mantel. The frame was some kind of grained wood and the photo was intended to be arty, with a highlight on a long, thin, unhappy face, but all the highlight did was make the face look just that—long and thin and unhappy under some kind of flat, pale hair that might have been paint on a dried skull. There was writing across the corner of the photo behind the glass, but I couldn’t read that.
I reached up and pressed the side of my head and I could feel a shoot of pain clear to the soles of my feet. I groaned and made a grunt out of the groan, from professional pride, and then I rolled over slowly and carefully and looked at the foot of a pulled-down twin wall bed. The other twin was still up in the wall with a flourish of design painted on the enameled wood. When I rolled, a gin bottle rolled off my chest and hit the floor. It was water-white, empty. I thought there couldn’t have been that much gin in just one bottle.
I got my knees under me and stayed on all fours for a while, sniffing like a dog who can’t finish his dinner and yet hates to leave it. I moved my head around on my neck. It hurt. I moved it some more and it still hurt, so I got up on my feet and discovered that I didn’t have any shoes on.
It seemed like a nice apartment, not too cheap and not too expensive—the usual furniture, the usual drum lamp, the usual durable carpet. On the bed, which was down, a girl was lying, clothed in a pair of tan silk stockings. There were deep scratches that had bled and there was a thick bath towel across her middle, wadded up almost into a roll. Her eyes were open. The red hair that had been parted and strained back as if she hated it was still that way. But she didn’t hate it any more.
She was dead.
Above and inside her left breast there was a scorched place the size of the palm of a man’s hand, and in the middle of that there was a thimbleful of blazed blood. Blood had run down her side, but it had dried now.
I saw clothes on a davenport, mostly hers, but including my coat. There were shoes on the floor—mine and hers. I went over, stepping on the balls of my feet as though on very thin ice, and picked up my coat and felt through the pockets. They still held everything I could remember having put in them. The holster that was still strapped around my body was empty, of course. I put my shoes and coat on, pushed the empty holster around under my arm and went over to the bed and lifted the heavy bath towel. A gun fell out of it—my gun. I wiped some blood off the barrel, sniffed the muzzle for no reason at all, and quietly put the gun back under my arm.
Heavy feet came along the corridor outside the apartment door and stopped. There was a mutter of voices, then somebody knocked, a quick, hard, impatient rapping. I looked at the door and wondered how long it would be before they tried it, and if the spring lock would be set so they could walk in, and if it wasn’t set how long it would take to get the manager up with a passkey if he wasn’t there already. I was still wondering when a hand tried the door. It was locked.
That was very funny. I almost laughed out loud.
I stepped over to another door and glanced into a bathroom. There were two wash rugs on the floor, a bath mat folded neatly over the edge of the tub, a pebbled glass window above it. I eased the bathroom door shut quietly and stood on the edge of the bathtub and pushed up the lower sash of the bathroom window. I put my head out and looked down about six floors to the darkness of a side street lined with trees. To do this I had to look out through a slot formed by two short blank walls, hardly more than an air shaft The windows were in pairs, all in the same end wall opposite the open end of the slot. I leaned farther out and decided I could make the next window if I tried. I wondered if it was unlocked, and if it would do me any good, and if I’d have time before they could get the door open.
Behind me, beyond the closed bathroom door, the pounding was a little louder and harder and a voice was growling out: “Open it up or we’ll bust it in.”
That didn’t mean anything. That was just routine cop stuff. They wouldn’t break it down because they could get a key, and kicking that kind
of door in without a fire axe is a lot of work and tough on the feet.
I shut the lower half of the window and pulled down the upper half and took a towel off the rack. Then I opened the bathroom door again and my eyes were looking straight at the face in the photo frame on the mantel. I had to read the inscription on that photo before I left. I went over and scanned it while the pounding on the door went on angrily. The inscription said—With all my love—Leland.
That made a sap out of Dr. Austrian, without anything else. I grabbed the photo and went back into the bathroom and shut the door again. Then I shoved the photo under the dirty towels and linen in the cupboard under the bathroom closet. It would take them a little while to find it, if they were good cops. If we were in Bay City, they probably wouldn’t find it at all. I didn’t know of any reason why we should be in Bay City, except that Helen Matson would very likely live there and the air outside the bathroom window seemed to be beach air.
I squeezed out through the upper half of the window with the towel in my hand and swung my body across to the next window, holding on to the sash of the one I had left. I could reach just far enough to push the next window up, if it was unlocked. It wasn’t unlocked. I swung my foot and kicked the glass in just over the catch. It made a noise that ought to have been heard a mile. The distant pounding went on monotonously.
I wrapped the towel around my left hand and stretched my arms for all they had in them and shoved my hand in through the broken place and turned the window catch. Then I swung over to the other sill and reached back to push up the window I had come out of. They could have the fingerprints. I didn’t expect to be able to prove I hadn’t been in Helen Matson’s apartment. All I wanted was a chance to prove how I had got there.