by Ellery Queen
He didn’t hear her. All his bright black attention was fixed on me. “Seven hundred dollars?”
“No sale. The higher you raise it, the guiltier you look. Were you here last night?”
“You are being absurd,” he said. “I spent the entire evening with my wife. We drove up to Los Angeles to attend the ballet.” By way of supporting evidence, he hummed a couple of bars from Tchaikovsky. “We didn’t arrive back here in Emerald Bay until nearly two o’clock.”
“Alibis can be fixed.”
“By criminals, yes,” he said. “I am not a criminal.”
The girl put a hand on his shoulder. He cringed, his face creased by monkey fury, but his face was hidden from her.
“Daddy,” she said. “Was he murdered, do you think?”
“How do I know?” His voice was wild and high, as if she had touched the spring of his emotion. “I wasn’t here. I only know what Donny told me.”
The girl was examining me with narrowed eyes, as if I were a new kind of animal she had discovered and was trying to think of a use for.
“This gentleman is a detective,” she said, “or claims to be.”
I pulled out my photostat and slapped it down on the desk. The little man picked it up and looked from it to my face. “Will you go to work for me?”
“Doing what, telling little white lies?”
The girl answered for him. “See what you can find out about this—this death. On my word of honor, father had nothing to do with it.”
I made a snap decision, the kind you live to regret. “All right. I’ll take a fifty-dollar advance. Which is a good deal less than five hundred. My first advice to you is to tell the police everything you know. Provided that you’re innocent.”
“You insult me,” he said.
But he flicked a fifty-dollar bill from the cash drawer and pressed it into my hand fervently, like a love token. I had a queasy feeling that I had been conned into taking his money, not much of it but enough. The feeling deepened when he still refused to talk. I had to use all the arts of persuasion even to get Donny’s address out of him.
The keyboy lived in a shack on the edge of a desolate stretch of dunes. I guessed that it had once been somebody’s beach house, before sand had drifted like unthawing snow in the angles of the walls and winter storms had broken the tiles and cracked the concrete foundations. Huge chunks of concrete were piled haphazardly on what had been a terrace overlooking the sea.
On one of the tilted slabs Donny was stretched like a long albino lizard in the sun. The onshore wind carried the sound of my motor to his ears. He sat up blinking, recognized me when I stopped the car, and ran into the house.
I descended flagstone steps and knocked on the warped door. “Open up, Donny.”
“Go away,” he answered huskily. His eye gleamed like a snail through a crack in the wood.
“I’m working for Mr. Salanda. He wants us to have a talk.”
“You can go and take a running jump for yourself, you and Mr. Salanda both.”
“Open it or I’ll break it down.”
I waited for a while. He shot back the bolt. The door creaked reluctantly open. He leaned against the doorpost, searching my face with his eyes, his hairless body shivering from an internal chill. I pushed past him, through a kitchenette that was indescribably filthy, littered with the remnants of old meals, and gaseous with their odors. He followed me silently on bare soles into a larger room whose sprung floorboards undulated under my feet. The picture window had been broken and patched with cardboard. The stone fireplace was choked with garbage. The only furniture was an army cot in one corner where Donny apparently slept.
“Nice homey place you have here. It has that lived-in quality.”
He seemed to take it as a compliment, and I wondered if I was dealing with a moron. “It suits me. I never was much of a one for fancy quarters. I like it here, where I can hear the ocean at night.”
“What else do you hear at night, Donny?”
He missed the point of the question, or pretended to. “All different things. Big trucks going past on the highway. I like to hear those night sounds. Now I guess I can’t go on living here. Mr. Salanda owns it, he lets me live here for nothing. Now he’ll be kicking me out of here, I guess.”
“On account of what happened last night?”
“Uh-huh.” He subsided onto the cot, his doleful head supported by his hands.
I stood over him. “Just what did happen last night, Donny?”
“A bad thing,” he said. “This fella checked in about ten o’clock—”
“The man with the dark curly hair?”
“That’s the one. He checked in about ten, and I gave him Room Thirteen. Around about midnight I thought I heard a gun go off from there. It took me a little while to get my nerve up, then I went back to see what was going on. This fella came out of the room, without no clothes on. Just some kind of a bandage around his waist. He looked like some kind of a crazy Indian or something. He had a gun in his hand, and he was staggering, and I could see that he was bleeding some. He come right up to me and pushed the gun in my gut and told me to keep my trap shut. He said I wasn’t to tell anybody I saw him, now or later. He said if I opened my mouth about it to anybody he would come back and kill me. But now he’s dead, isn’t he?”
“He’s dead.”
I could smell the fear in Donny: there’s an unexplained trace of canine in my chromosomes. The hairs were prickling on the back of my neck, and I wondered if Donny’s fear was of the past or for the future. The pimples stood out in bas-relief against his pale lugubrious face.
“I think he was murdered, Donny. You’re lying, aren’t you?”
“Me lying?” But his reaction was slow and feeble.
“The dead man didn’t check in alone. He had a woman with him.”
“What woman?” he said in elaborate surprise.
“You tell me. Her name was Fern. I think she did the shooting, and you caught her red-handed. The wounded man got out of the room and into his car and away. The woman stayed behind to talk to you. She probably paid you to dispose of his clothes and fake a new registration card for the room. But you both overlooked the blood on the floor of the bathroom. Am I right?”
“You couldn’t be wronger, mister. Are you a cop?”
“A private detective. You’re in deep trouble, Donny. You’d better talk yourself out of it before the cops start on you.”
“I didn’t do anything.” His voice broke like a boy’s. It went strangely with the glints of gray in his hair.
“Faking the register is a serious rap, even if they don’t hang accessory to murder on you.”
He began to expostulate in formless sentences that ran together. At the same time his hand was moving across the dirty gray blanket. It burrowed under the pillow and came out holding a crumpled card.
He tried to stuff it into his mouth and chew it. I tore it away from between his discolored teeth.
It was a registration card from the motel, signed in a boyish scrawl: Mr. and Mrs. Richard Rowe, Detroit, Mich.
Donny was trembling violently. Below his cheap cotton shorts his bony knees vibrated like tuning forks. “It wasn’t my fault,” he cried. “She held a gun on me.”
“What did you do with the man’s clothes?”
“Nothing. She didn’t even let me into the room. She bundled them up and took them away herself.”
“Where did she go?”
“Down the highway towards town. She walked away on the shoulder of the road and that was the last I saw of her.”
“How much did she pay you, Donny?”
“Nothing, not a cent. I already told you, she held a gun on me.”
“And you were so scared you kept quiet until this morning?”
“That’s right. I was scared. Who wouldn’t be scared?”
“She’s gone now,” I said. “You can give me a description of her.”
“Yeah.” He made a visible effort to pull his vague thoug
hts together. One of his eyes was a little off center, lending his face a stunned, amorphous appearance. “She was a big tall dame with blondey hair.”
“Dyed?”
“I guess so, I dunno. She wore it in a braid like, on top of her head. She was kind of fat, built like a lady wrestler, great big watermelons on her. Big legs.”
“How was she dressed?”
“I didn’t hardly notice, I was so scared. I think she had some kind of a purple coat on, with black fur around the neck. Plenty of rings on her fingers and stuff.”
“How old?”
“Pretty old, I’d say. Older than me, and I’m going on thirty-nine.”
“And she did the shooting?”
“I guess so. She told me to say if anybody asked me, I was to say that Mr. Rowe shot himself.”
“You’re very suggestible, aren’t you, Donny? It’s a dangerous way to be, with people pushing each other around the way they do.”
“I didn’t get that, mister. Come again.” He batted his pale blue eyes at me, smiling expectantly.
“Skip it,” I said and left him.
A few hundred yards up the highway I passed an HP car with two uniformed men in the front seat looking grim. Donny was in for it now. I pushed him out of my mind and drove across country to Palm Springs.
Palm Springs is still a one-horse town, but the horse is a Palomino with silver trappings. Most of the girls are Palomino too. The main street was a cross-section of Hollywood and Vine transported across the desert by some unnatural force and disguised in western costumes which fooled nobody. Not even me.
I found Gretchen’s lingerie shop in an expensive-looking arcade built around an imitation flagstone patio. In the patio’s center a little fountain gurgled pleasantly, flinging small lariats of spray against the heat. It was late in March, and the season was ending. Most of the shops, including the one I entered, were deserted except for the hired help.
It was a small shop, faintly perfumed by a legion of vanished dolls. Stockings and robes and other garments were coiled on the glass counters or hung like brilliant treesnakes on display stands along the narrow walls. A henna-headed woman emerged from rustling recesses at the rear and came tripping toward me on her toes.
“You are looking for a gift, sir?” she cried with a wilted kind of gaiety. Behind her painted mask she was tired and aging and it was Saturday afternoon and the lucky ones were dunking themselves in kidney-shaped swimming pools behind walls she couldn’t climb.
“Not exactly. In fact, not at all. A peculiar thing happened to me last night. I’d like to tell you about it, but it’s kind of a complicated story.”
She looked me over quizzically and decided that I worked for a living too. The phony smile faded away. Another smile took its place, which I liked better. “You look as if you’d had a fairly rough night. And you could do with a shave.”
“I met a girl,” I said. “Actually she was a mature woman, a statuesque blonde to be exact. I picked her up on the beach at Laguna, if you want me to be brutally frank.”
“I couldn’t bear it if you weren’t. What kind of a pitch is this, brother?”
“Wait. You’re spoiling my story. Something clicked when we met, in that sunset light, on the edge of the warm summer sea.”
“It’s always bloody cold when I go in.”
“It wasn’t last night. We swam in the moonlight and had a gay time and all. Then she went away. I didn’t realize until she was gone that I didn’t know her telephone number, or even her last name.”
“Married woman, eh? What do you think I am, a lonely hearts club?” Still, she was interested, though she probably didn’t believe me. “She mentioned me, is that it? What was her first name?”
“Fern.”
“Unusual name. You say she was a big blonde?”
“Magnificently proportioned,” I said. “If I had a classical education I’d call her Junoesque.”
“You’re kidding me, aren’t you?”
“A little.”
“I thought so. Personally I don’t mind a little kidding. What did she say about me?”
“Nothing but good. As a matter of fact, I was complimenting her on her—er—garments.”
“I see.” She was long past blushing. “We had a customer last fall some time by the name of Fern. Fern Dee. She had some kind of a job at the Joshua Club, I think. But she doesn’t fit the description at all. This one was a brunette, a middle-sized brunette, quite young. I remember the name Fern because she wanted it embroidered on all the things she bought. A corny idea if you ask me, but that was her girlish desire and who am I to argue with girlish desires.”
“Is she still in town?”
“I haven’t seen her lately, not for months. But it couldn’t be the woman you’re looking for. Or could it?”
“How long ago was she in here?”
She pondered. “Early last fall, around the start of the season. She only came in that once, and made a big purchase, stockings and nightwear and underthings. The works. I remember thinking at the time, here was a girlie who suddenly hit the chips but heavily.”
“She might have put on weight since then, and dyed her hair. Strange things can happen to the female form.”
“You’re telling me,” she said. “How old was—your friend?”
“About forty, I’d say, give or take a little.”
“It couldn’t be the same one then. The girl I’m talking about was twenty-five at the outside, and I don’t make mistakes about women’s ages. I’ve seen too many of them in all stages, from Quentin quail to hags, and I certainly do mean hags.”
“I bet you have.”
She studied me with eyes shadowed by mascara and experience. “You a policeman?”
“I have been.”
“You want to tell mother what it’s all about?”
“Another time. Where’s the Joshua Club?”
“It won’t be open yet.”
“I’ll try it anyway.”
She shrugged her thin shoulders and gave me directions. I thanked her.
It occupied a plain-faced one-story building half a block off the main street. The padded leather door swung inward when I pushed it. I passed through a lobby with a retractable roof, which contained a jungle growth of banana trees. The big main room was decorated with tinted desert photomurals. Behind a rattan bar with a fishnet canopy a white-coated Caribbean type was drying shot glasses with a dirty towel. His face looked uncommunicative.
On the orchestra dais beyond the piled chairs in the dining area a young man in shirt sleeves was playing bop piano. His fingers shadowed the tune, ran circles around it, played leap-frog with it, and managed never to hit it on the nose. I stood beside him for a while and listened to him work. He looked up finally, still strumming with his left hand in the bass. He had soft-centered eyes and frozen-looking nostrils and a whistling mouth.
“Nice piano,” I said.
“I think so.”
“Fifty-second Street?”
“It’s the street with the beat and I’m not effete.” His left hand struck the same chord three times and dropped away from the keys. “Looking for somebody, friend?”
“Fern Dee. She asked me to drop by sometime.”
“Too bad. Another wasted trip. She left here end of last year, the dear. She wasn’t a bad little nightingale but she was no pro, Joe, you know? She had it but she couldn’t project it. When she warbled the evening died, no matter how hard she tried, I don’t wanna be snide.”
“Where did she lam, Sam, or don’t you give a damn?”
He smiled like a corpse in a deft mortician’s hands. “I heard the boss retired her to private life. Took her home to live with him. That is what I heard. But I don’t mix with the big boy socially, so I couldn’t say for sure that she’s impure. Is it anything to you?”
“Something, but she’s over twenty-one.”
“Not more than a couple of years over twenty-one.” His eyes darkened, and his thin mouth twisted sidew
ays angrily. “I hate to see it happen to a pretty little girl like Fern. Not that I yearn—”
I broke in on his nonsense rhymes: “Who’s the big boss you mentioned, the one Fern went to live with?”
“Angel. Who else?”
“What heaven does he inhabit?”
“You must be new in these parts—” His eyes swiveled and focused on something over my shoulder. His mouth opened and closed.
A grating tenor said behind me, “Got a question you want answered, bud?”
The pianist went back to the piano as if the ugly tenor had wiped me out, annulled my very existence. I turned to its source. He was standing in a narrow doorway behind the drums, a man in his thirties with thick black curly hair and a heavy jaw blue-shadowed by closely shaven beard. He was almost the living image of the dead man in the Cadillac. The likeness gave me a jolt. The heavy black gun in his hand gave me another.
He came around the drums and approached me, bull-shouldered in a fuzzy tweed jacket, holding the gun in front of him like a dangerous gift. The pianist was doing wry things in quickened tempo with the dead march from Saul. A wit.
The dead man’s almost-double waved his cruel chin and the crueler gun in unison. “Come inside, unless you’re a government man. If you are, I’ll have a look at your credentials.”
“I’m a freelance.”
“Inside then.”
The muzzle of the automatic came into my solar plexus like a pointing iron finger. Obeying its injunction, I made my way between empty music stands and through the narrow door behind the drums. The iron finger, probing my back, directed me down a lightless corridor to a small square office containing a metal desk, a safe, a filing cabinet. It was windowless, lit by fluorescent tubes in the ceiling. Under their pitiless glare, the face above the gun looked more than ever like the dead man’s face. I wondered if I had been mistaken about his deadness, or if the desert heat had addled my brain.
“I’m the manager here,” he said, standing so close that I could smell the piney stuff he used on his crisp dark hair. “You got anything to ask about the members of the staff, you ask me.”
“Will I get an answer?”
“Try me, bud.”
