The taximan hooked to the stage and a sloe-eyed lad in a blue mess jacket with bright buttons, a bright smile and a gangster mouth, handed the girls up from the taxi. I was last. The casual neat way he looked me over told me something about him. The casual neat way he bumped my shoulder clip told me more.
“Nix,” he said softly. “Nix.”
He had a smoothly husky voice, a hard Harry straining himself through a silk handkerchief. He jerked his chin at the taximan. The taximan dropped a short loop over a bitt, turned his wheel a little, and climbed out on the stage. He stepped behind me.
“No gats on the boat, laddy. Sorry and all that rot,” Mess-jacket purred.
“I could check it. It’s just part of my clothes. I’m a fellow who wants to see Brunette, on business.”
He seemed mildly amused. “Never heard of him,” he smiled. “On your way, bo.”
The taximan hooked a wrist through my right arm.
“I want to see Brunette,” I said. My voice sounded weak and frail, like an old lady’s voice.
“Let’s not argue,” the sloe-eyed lad said. “We’re not in Bay City now, not even in California, and by some good opinions not even in the U.S.A. Beat it.”
“Back in the boat,” the taximan growled behind me. “I owe you a quarter. Let’s go.”
I got back into the boat. Mess-jacket looked at me with his silent sleek smile. I watched it until it was no longer a smile, no longer a face, no longer anything but a dark figure against the landing lights. I watched it and hungered. The way back seemed longer. I didn’t speak to the taximan and he didn’t speak to me. As I got off at the wharf he handed me a quarter.
“Some other night,” he said wearily, “when we got more room to bounce you.”
Half a dozen customers waiting to get in stared at me, hearing him. I went past them, past the door of the little waiting room on the float, towards the shallow steps at the landward end.
A big redheaded roughneck in dirty sneakers and tarry pants and what was left of a torn blue sailor’s jersey and a streak of black down the side of his face straightened from the railing and bumped into me casually.
I stopped. He looked too big. He had three inches on me and thirty pounds. But it was getting to be time for me to put my fist into somebody’s teeth even if all I got for it was a wooden arm.
The light was dim and mostly behind him. “What’s the matter, pardner?” he drawled. “No soap on the hell ship?”
“Go darn your shirt,” I told him. “Your belly is sticking out.”
“Could be worse,” he said. “The gat’s kind of bulgy under the light suit at that.”
“What pulls your nose into it?”
“Jesus, nothing at all. Just curiosity. No offense, pal.”
“Well, get the hell out of my way then.”
“Sure. I’m just resting here.”
He smiled a slow tired smile. His voice was soft, dreamy, so delicate for a big man that it was startling. It made me think of another soft-voiced big man I had strangely liked.
“You got the wrong approach,” he said sadly. “Just call me Red.”
“Step aside, Red. The best people make mistakes. I feel one crawling up my back.”
He looked thoughtfully this way and that. He had me angled into a corner of the shelter on the float. We seemed to be more or less alone.
“You want on the Monty? Can be done. If you got a reason.”
People in gay clothes and gay faces went past us and got into the taxi. I waited for them to pass.
“How much is the reason?”
“Fifty bucks. Ten more if you bleed in my boat.”
I started around him.
“Twenty-five,” he said softly. “Fifteen if you come back with friends.”
“I don’t have any friends,” I said, and walked away. He didn’t try to stop me.
I turned right along the cement walk down which the little electric cars come and go, trundling like baby carriages and blowing little horns that wouldn’t startle an expectant mother. At the foot of the first pier there was a flaring bingo parlor, jammed full of people already. I went into it and stood against the wall behind the players, where a lot of other people stood and waited for a place to sit down.
I watched a few numbers go up on the electric indicator, listened to the table men call them off, tried to spot the house players and couldn’t, and turned to leave.
A large blueness that smelled of tar took shape beside me. “No got the dough—or just tight with it?” the gentle voice asked in my ear.
I looked at him again. He had the eyes you never see, that you only read about. Violet eyes. Almost purple. Eyes like a girl, a lovely girl. His skin was as soft as silk. Lightly reddened, but it would never tan. It was too delicate. He was bigger than Hemingway and younger, by many years. He was not as big as Moose Malloy, but he looked very fast on his feet. His hair was that shade of red that glints with gold. But except for the eyes he had a plain farmer face, with no stagy kind of handsomeness.
“What’s your racket?” he asked. “Private eye?”
“Why do I have to tell you?” I snarled.
“I kind of thought that was it,” he said. “Twenty-five too high? No expense account?”
“No.”
He sighed. “It was a bum idea I had anyway,” he said. “They’ll tear you to pieces out there.”
“I wouldn’t be surprised. What’s your racket?”
“A dollar here, a dollar there. I was on the cops once. They broke me.”
“Why tell me?”
He looked surprised. “It’s true.”
“You must have been leveling.”
He smiled faintly.
“Know a man named Brunette?”
The faint smile stayed on his face. Three bingoes were made in a row. They worked fast in there. A tall beakfaced man with sallow sunken cheeks and a wrinkled suit stepped close to us and leaned against the wall and didn’t look at us. Red leaned gently towards him and asked: “Is there something we could tell you, pardner?”
The tall beak-faced man grinned and moved away. Red grinned and shook the building leaning against the wall again.
“I’ve met a man who could take you,” I said.
“I wish there was more,” he said gravely. “A big guy costs money. Things ain’t scaled for him. He costs to feed, to put clothes on, and he can’t sleep with his feet in the bed. Here’s how it works. You might not think this is a good place to talk, but it is. Any finks drift along I’ll know them and the rest of the crowd is watching those numbers and nothing else. I got a boat with an under-water by-pass. That is, I can borrow one. There’s a pier down the line without lights. I know a loading port on the Monty I can open. I take a load out there once in a while. There ain’t many guys below decks.”
“They have a searchlight and lookouts,” I said.
“We can make it.”
I got my wallet out and slipped a twenty and a five against my stomach and folded them small. The purple eyes watched me without seeming to.
“One way?”
“Fifteen was the word.”
“The market took a spurt.”
A tarry hand swallowed the bills. He moved silently away. He faded into the hot darkness outside the doors. The beak-nosed man materialized at my left side and said quietly:
“I think I know that fellow in sailor clothes. Friend of yours? I think I seen him before.”
I straightened away from the wall and walked away from him without speaking, out of the doors, then left, watching a high head that moved along from electrolier to electrolier a hundred feet ahead of me. After a couple of minutes I turned into a space between two concession shacks. The beak-nosed man appeared, strolling with his eyes on the ground. I stepped out to his side.
“Good evening,” I said. “May I guess your weight for a quarter?” I leaned against him. There was a gun under the wrinkled coat.
His eyes looked at me without emotion. “Am I goin’ to have to
pinch you, son? I’m posted along this stretch to maintain law and order.”
“Who’s dismaintaining it right now?”
“Your friend had a familiar look to me.”
“He ought to. He’s a cop.”
“Aw hell,” the beak-nosed man said patiently. “That’s where I seen him. Good night to you.”
He turned and strolled back the way he had come. The tall head was out of sight now. It didn’t worry me. Nothing about that lad would ever worry me.
I walked on slowly.
THIRTY-SIX
Beyond the electroliers, beyond the beat and toot of the small sidewalk cars, beyond the smell of hot fat and popcorn and the shrill children and the barkers in the peep shows, beyond everything but the smell of the ocean and the suddenly clear line of the shore and the creaming fall of the waves into the pebbled spume. I walked almost alone now. The noises died behind me, the hot dishonest light became a fumbling glare. Then the lightless finger of a black pier jutted seaward into the dark. This would be the one. I turned to go out on it.
Red stood up from a box against the beginning of the piles and spoke upwards to me. “Right,” he said. “You go on out to the seasteps. I gotta go and get her and warm her up.”
“Waterfront cop followed me. That guy in the bingo parlor. I had to stop and speak to him.”
“Olson. Pickpocket detail. He’s good too. Except once in a while he will lift a leather and plant it, to keep up his arrest record. That’s being a shade too good, or isn’t it?”
“For Bay City I’d say just about right. Let’s get going. I’m getting the wind up. I don’t want to blow this fog away. It doesn’t look much but it would help a lot.”
“It’ll last enough to fool a searchlight,” Red said. “They got Tommy guns on that boat deck. You go on out the pier. I’ll be along.”
He melted into the dark and I went out the dark boards, slipping on fish-slimed planking. There was a low dirty railing at the far end. A couple leaned in a corner. They went away, the man swearing.
For ten minutes I listened to the water slapping the piles. A night bird whirred in the dark, the faint grayness of a wing cut across my vision and disappeared. A plane droned high in the ceiling. Then far off a motor barked and roared and kept on roaring like half a dozen truck engines. After a while the sound eased and dropped, then suddenly there was no sound at all.
More minutes passed. I went back to the seasteps and moved down them as cautiously as a cat on a wet floor. A dark shape slid out of the night and something thudded. A voice said: “All set. Get in.”
I got into the boat and sat beside him under the screen. The boat slid out over the water. There was no sound from its exhaust now but an angry bubbling along both sides of the shell. Once more the lights of Bay City became something distantly luminous beyond the rise and fall of alien waves. Once more the garish lights of the Royal Crown slid off to one side, the ship seeming to preen itself like a fashion model on a revolving platform. And once again the ports of the good ship Montecito grew out of the black Pacific and the slow steady sweep of the searchlight turned around it like the beam of a lighthouse.
“I’m scared,” I said suddenly. “I’m scared stiff.”
Red throttled down the boat and let it slide up and down the swell as though the water moved underneath and the boat stayed in the same place. He turned his face and stared at me.
“I’m afraid of death and despair,” I said. “Of dark water and drowned men’s faces and skulls with empty eyesockets. I’m afraid of dying, of being nothing, of not finding a man named Brunette.”
He chuckled. “You had me going for a minute. You sure give yourself a pep talk. Brunette might be any place. On either of the boats, at the club he owns, back east, Reno, in his slippers at home. That all you want?”
“I want a man named Malloy, a huge brute who got out of the Oregon State pen a while back after an eight-year stretch for bank robbery. He was hiding out in Bay City.” I told him about it. I told him a great deal more than I intended to. It must have been his eyes.
At the end he thought and then spoke slowly and what he said had wisps of fog clinging to it, like the beads on a mustache. Maybe that made it seem wiser than it was, maybe not.
“Some of it makes sense,” he said. “Some not. Some I wouldn’t know about, some I would. If this Sonderborg was running a hideout and peddling reefers and sending boys out to heist jewels off rich ladies with a wild look in their eyes, it stands to reason that he had an in with the city government, but that don’t mean they knew everything he did or that every cop on the force knew he had an in. Could be Blane did and Hemingway, as you call him, didn’t. Blane’s bad, the other guy is just tough cop, neither bad nor good, neither crooked nor honest, full of guts and just dumb enough, like me, to think being on the cops is a sensible way to make a living. This psychic fellow doesn’t figure either way. He bought himself a line of protection in the best market, Bay City, and he used it when he had to. You never know what a guy like that is up to and so you never know what he has on his conscience or is afraid of. Could be he’s human and fell for a customer once in a while. Them rich dames are easier to make than paper dolls. So my hunch about your stay in Sonderborg’s place is simply that Blane knew Sonderborg would be scared when he found out who you were—and the story they told Sonderborg is probably what he told you, that they found you wandering with your head dizzy—and Sonderborg wouldn’t know what to do with you and he would be afraid either to let you go or to knock you off, and after long enough Blane would drop around and raise the ante on him. That’s all there was to that. It just happened they could use you and they did it. Blane might know about Malloy too. I wouldn’t put it past him.”
I listened and watched the slow sweep of the searchlight and the coming and going of the water taxi far over to the right.
“I know how these boys figure,” Red said. “The trouble with cops is not that they’re dumb or crooked or tough, but that they think just being a cop gives them a little something they didn’t have before. Maybe it did once, but not any more. They’re topped by too many smart minds. That brings us to Brunette. He don’t run the town. He couldn’t be bothered. He put up big money to elect a mayor so his water taxis wouldn’t be bothered. If there was anything in particular he wanted, they would give it to him. Like a while ago one of his friends, a lawyer, was pinched for drunk driving felony and Brunette got the charge reduced to reckless driving. They changed the blotter to do it, and that’s a felony too. Which gives you an idea. His racket is gambling and all rackets tie together these days. So he might handle reefers, or touch a percentage from some one of his workers he gave the business to. He might know Sonderborg and he might not. But the jewel heist is out. Figure the work these boys done for eight grand. It’s a laugh to think Brunette would have anything to do with that.”
“Yeah,” I said. “There was a man murdered too—remember?”
“He didn’t do that either, nor have it done. If Brunette had that done, you wouldn’t have found any body. You never know what might be stitched into a guy’s clothes. Why chance it? Look what I’m doing for you for twenty-five bucks. What would Brunette get done with the money he has to spend?”
“Would he have a man killed?”
Red thought for a moment. “He might. He probably has. But he’s not a tough guy. These racketeers are a new type. We think about them the way we think about old time yeggs or needled-up punks. Big-mouthed police commissioners on the radio yell that they’re all yellow rats, that they’ll kill women and babies and howl for mercy if they see a police uniform. They ought to know better than to try to sell the public that stuff. There’s yellow cops and there’s yellow torpedoes—but damn few of either. And as for the top men, like Brunette—they didn’t get there by murdering people. They got there by guts and brains—and they don’t have the group courage the cops have either. But above all they’re business men. What they do is for money. Just like other business men. Sometimes a guy
gets badly in the way. Okey. Out. But they think plenty before they do it. What the hell am I giving a lecture for?”
“A man like Brunette wouldn’t hide Malloy,” I said. “After he had killed two people.”
“No. Not unless there was some other reason than money. Want to go back?”
“No.”
Red moved his hands on the wheel. The boat picked up speed. “Don’t think I like these bastards,” he said. “I hate their guts.”
THIRTY-SEVEN
The revolving searchlight was a pale mist-ridden finger that barely skimmed the waves a hundred feet or so beyond the ship. It was probably more for show than anything else. Especially at this time in the evening. Anyone who had plans for hijacking the take on one of these gambling boats would need plenty of help and would pull the job about four in the morning, when the crowd was thinned down to a few bitter gamblers, and the crew were all dull with fatigue. Even then it would be a poor way to make money. It had been tried once.
A taxi curved to the landing stage, unloaded, went back shorewards. Red held his speedboat idling just beyond the sweep of the searchlight. If they lifted it a few feet, just for fun—but they didn’t. It passed languidly and the dull water glowed with it and the speedboat slid across the line and closed in fast under the overhang, past the two huge scummy stern hawsers. We sidled up to the greasy plates of the hull as coyly as a hotel dick getting set to ease a hustler out of his lobby.
Double iron doors loomed high above us, and they looked too high to reach and too heavy to open even if we could reach them. The speedboat scuffed the Montecito’s ancient sides and the swell slapped loosely at the shell under our feet. A big shadow rose in the gloom at my side and a coiled rope slipped upwards through the air, slapped, caught, and the end ran down and splashed in water. Red fished it out with a boathook, pulled it tight and fastened the end to something on the engine cowling. There was just enough fog to make everything seem unreal. The wet air was as cold as the ashes of love.
Red leaned close to me and his breath tickled my ear. “She rides too high. Come a good blow and she’d wave her screws in the air. We got to climb those plates just the same.”