by Sam Roskoe
“Tarquin Meriwether”
“What was that?”
“You know the name, obviously,” I said, “he was at the party with you. He’s the one taking the heat for Marla’s murder. He’s the one who hired me.”
“You’re lying.”
“What would I gain from lying?”
“My trust, for one. I’d say any grifter worth his salt would look to gain that in the first instance.”
I pulled the phone towards me.
“I can reach an outside line on this, can I?”
“Yes, of course, but…why would you want to?”
“I assume you know Tarquin Meriwether, or at least you’ve met him on occasion?”
“I have, but I don’t see—“
“Would you recognize his voice? Would that be enough proof for you, Miss Martin? If I was to get Tarquin on the phone right now, you couldn’t deny that as proof, could you?”
She couldn’t, but she was trying her best to think of a way that she could.
“A voice is just a voice,” she said, after a few nervous drags on her cigarette, “you might have hired some impersonator to mimic Meriwether’s voice.”
“How well do you know him?” I asked.
“Well enough.”
“Then I assume there is something, a small detail that only he would know that no impersonator could ever replicate? All you need do is ask him about that detail and I believe you’ll have your proof.”
If Tarquin wasn’t fall-down drunk that was. It had only been a few days since I’d left him in the upstairs room above the Mermaid Cafe, though, and Lucy was checking in on the old lush. He couldn’t have gotten so drunk that he would forget this woman, could he? How drunk would you have to be to forget a woman like Kay Martin?
The same kind of drunk you’d have to be to forget if you brutally murdered a woman or not.
My stomach knotted a little as I picked up the phone and placed my finger on the rotary wheel.
“Should I place the call, Miss Martin? Would Tarquin’s confirmation be enough for you to believe I am who I say I am?”
She held onto her elbow, the cigarette placed at her lips with her other hand. She nodded. Her eyes darted nervously from the phone to me and back again.
I dialed, and with every ticka-tick-tick as the rotary returned home, I wondered if I hadn’t made a huge mistake gambling everything on this one call.
What I knew about the wrap party was nothing at all. Just a list of names and a hazy recollection of a lush who thought he’d seen a moon the color of blood. Something had happened there, something that would force a movie studio boss like Elsnick to kidnap my dog and make threats, something that would have Kay Martin buy clothes for a stranger just because he mentioned the name of a murdered girl.
But what was it? What had happened at the wrap party that had led to Marla Donovan stabbed to death a few hours later? Would I blow my chance to find out if Tarquin Meriwether was too drunk at the other end of the line? I was wishing I hadn’t read the papers in the previous few weeks. I was wishing the Mermaid Café was already up and running so I didn’t have to run around playing detective.
I was doing a lot of wishing when the call went through and Lucy’s worried voice said;
“It’s about time you called. What kind of man skips town and doesn’t leave a number where he can be contacted in case of emergencies?”
I smiled at Kay Martin, then turned a little to hide what I was saying from her.
“Emergency, what emergency?” I said.
“The lush is gone, Finch. Skedaddled.”
“What?” I tried not to raise my voice, but it was a battle I was losing.
Kay Martin gave me a dirty look.
“Gone. He left a note.”
“Read it please,” I said, in my best not-concerned-at-all voice.
“‘Dear Mr. Finch, I’m feeling quite dry and the water is wet. I need to take a dip. If you need me I’ll be I the last place they’d look for me. At home. Good night and good luck, Tarquin Meriwether’”
Chapter 8
I wasn’t as concerned about Tarquin Meriwether taking it on the lam from the Mermaid Café as I was about Kay Martin’s reaction.
When it came it was a doozy.
I managed fifteen minutes of top quality stalling, the kind of performance that would have won me an Oscar if someone had bothered to film it. I flimmed and I flammed and I held a conversation with thin air for a good five minutes of the total running time of my one-man show before Kay Martin finally had enough of me. With a click of her fingers she summoned two of the biggest, meanest and well-dressed thugs I’d ever seen in my life who picked me up from the table and carried me outside. There, Kay Martin gave me something to carry back with me to Hollywood.
A warning.
“You’re a lucky man, Mr. Finch, a very lucky man indeed,” she said.
“Strange, I don’t feel so lucky standing out here.”
“I could have called the cops on you. I could have called them and they would have come and you’d be somewhere not so pleasant right about now.”
I gave my surroundings a cursory glance.
“If I had to give it a star rating, I’d go with a two out of five. Good, but the service leaves something to desire,” I said.
She looked through me and to some place where I really didn’t want to be.
“The next time you won’t have time to make with the funny.”
“So there will be a next time? When will that be exactly? I can pencil you in for having me beaten to a pulp sometime next Thursday if you and your trained apes are free.”
She laughed, but there was nothing but pity in that sound. I was something under her foot she’d thought was bigger than it turned out to be. A bug that made a lot of noise but died just as quickly as any other insect.
“You got a nice, expensive suit out of your little misadventure and you didn’t end up as a punching bag for my two friends back there. You tried to put the grift on me and you failed. Now take your dog and walk, Mr. Finch.”
“So what about that next time you promised?”
“There will be no next time, Mr. Finch, only a last time. Have a good life.”
“What about my suit?” I said.
“I’ll do the world a favor and have it burned.”
“Wait!” I said but it was no good.
I was going to ask her another question. I was going to come up with something quick and sure that would reveal everything like a magician pulling a rabbit out of a hat.
What I did was stand there silent, the cat running off with my tongue and dog nestled under my arm.
Steinbeck barked, but it wasn’t enough to make Kay Martin hang around and listen to any more of my stabs in the dark. She crushed her cigarette out with a heel, turned on that same heel and headed back inside the Blue Palm.
“Well then?” I asked Steinbeck.
He didn’t have an answer. He kicked his legs in the air and whined in the direction of the club. Whatever the helium-voiced coat-check girl had done to him, he wanted more of it.
“No chance,” I told him, “it’s time for walkies.”
He gave me a puzzled look.
I gave him one in return.
“There’s no way we’re getting a cab out here, and I don’t fancy my chances back inside with those two gorillas. Unless you want me to call around a mouthful of broken teeth? Is that what you want?”
Steinbeck wanted back inside the Blue Palm and whatever pampering he’d received.
I turned to the long road that led away from the Blue Palm and into that dark, unknown land between Malibu and the motel room I called my temporary home.
It was a long walk, whichever way you cut it. Not so long for a dog, I supposed, but for a stranger in a strange land it might seem like forever. I had no choice in the matter.
But there were other choices that I could make.
Plenty of choices.
As I walked those unknown roads bac
k to Hollywood with Steinbeck trotting beside me, I thought of the Mermaid Café and how much I wanted to return to the known streets of San Francisco. Sure, I might lose out on the money Tarquin Meriwether had offered me, but there were no guarantees that I’d ever see a dime of that money in any place. Money that was as far away in that moment as the Mermaid Café.
I mean, how was I supposed to make headway if the lush had returned to Hollywood? You couldn’t poke around on the edges of a murder when the number one suspect was wheeling around town on a fresh bender.
If he’d returned to town, that was.
The message he’d left behind was the kind of poetry that all drunks knew. Water being wet, taking a dip, it all amounted to the same thing in my book. Tarquin Meriwether was sick of the wagon and wanted off. He wanted to be in that warm place that only a bottle of strong liquor could provide. A place where there was no worry, no fears, no death and no tomorrow, only the now. Home.
Was that home in Hollywood? Was it in the empty rooms of a Beverly Hills mansion, or some other place I didn’t know? Jesus, home could have been the soft barstool in the corner of some unknown dive that he frequented for all I knew.
And what exactly did I know? About him, about anybody on the list for that matter? About the dead starlet, Marla Donovan?
What I knew you could have written on the back of a folded postage stamp and still had room for a paragraph or two.
She was a creation of the studio. Pampered, practiced and groomed for her stardom. Just another starlet who nobody really knew but everybody had shed a tear for when she was gone. I didn’t even know what film she’d been working on that was wrapped that night she died, and Tarquin Meriwether had been no help in that direction either.
He didn’t have a clue about anything, especially not the death of Marla Donovan.
The rest weren’t any better.
The green scriptwriter, Charlie Jones was only at the party because he shared a name with someone else a lot more important. Kay Martin was walking on glass, but who wouldn’t be with their cash-cow client dead. And then there was Elsnick. The Captain of a boat he didn’t want anybody rocking.
None of them had a reason to kill Donovan that I could see.
Except Tarquin Meriwether
Jesus, it was something when the only person on your suspect list worth fingering as a killer was your one and only client.
A drunk, a lush who couldn’t remember much but a bunch of names and a…blood red moon.
That image stuck in my head as I walked the lonely roads back to Hollywood
Could Tarquin Meriwether have somehow conjured up that blood moon from his own drunken actions? Was he the real killer, drunk enough to do the deed and then forget it all too soon afterwards?
The thought poured cold ice down my spine.
I was never one to put money down on a nag, but maybe I’d backed a lame horse this time? Sure, I’d know writers in the past, more than a few and they were always sniffing around Private Eyes to pick up stories that they could sell to the dimes and maybe, just maybe put into a script. They were daydreamers and drunks never killers and thieves. It was enough for them to put all the nasty and the horror they could imagine down on the page and then call it a day.
And that’s what I thought of as the sun came up and I saw the beige haze of a Hollywood sunrise.
I could call it a day. Pack up my bags and take the next bus back home.
There would be other cases, other ways to make enough money and see the Mermaid Café turn from a part-time dream into a full-time reality.
Yeah, just walk away.
Simple.
But not simple enough.
I couldn’t get Meriwether out of my head. No matter how much doubt I had floating about, I just couldn’t picture him as the killing type. And if it turned out I was wrong, if all my instincts about him were nothing more than gossamer, then I had one last question that would keep me in Hollywood until I knew the answer.
Why?
Why would anybody want to kill Marla Donovan, especially a lush like Tarquin Meriwether? Jealousy was always a good reason, but a town like Hollywood ran on jealousy, it was the fuel that fanned the flames of the fame factory. If you weren’t jealous in Hollywood you weren’t playing the game. There were a thousand and more beautiful young things who’d rolled off the casting couch, used and ready to be where Marla Donovan had been only a few weeks earlier. A thousand and more with good enough reason to kill.
I hadn’t met one of them yet, at least, I didn’t think I had.
Maybe it was plain old love gone bad? Marla Donovan wore men on her arm like a Christmas tree wore candles. Playwrights and baseball stars, actors and royalty, they’d all shared the spotlight with Marla at one time or another. All except Tarquin Meriwether. He wasn’t romantically linked, not in the papers, not by any of the gossip hounds I’d read, and they liked to speculate on all the angles, no matter how flimsy. If he had dated her, it was the best kept secret in Hollywood.
If it wasn’t jealousy and it wasn’t love gone bad, then…I didn’t know what the hell it could be.
But I wanted to find out.
Just gone dawn I flopped down on the bed in my motel room with my mind whirling and a plan beginning to form in the wake of that blow. Steinbeck crawled under the bed and was sleeping before I could ask him what he thought of my plan. But I asked anyway.
“So here’s how I figure it. We move on down that list, partner, and we chase down each and every one of those suckers. Now I don’t know about you, buddy, but I figure one of them will let slip something sooner or later. How’s that sound?”
Steinbeck was too busy chasing rabbits, or maybe he was getting his tummy rubbed, in the dream he was having. So I answered myself.
“Sounds like a great idea. A real home run. Now all we have to do is…”
I dug inside my pocket to where the list should have been.
And where it wasn’t.
Somewhere between Hollywood and Malibu, my old suit was probably a new pile of ashes by now.
I closed my eyes and let out a heavy sigh that lasted far too long and was far too deep.
How could I have been so stupid? What was I thinking? I took my wallet with me when I changed suits, my .38, God damn I even—
I reached into the side pocket and there it was. The card Charlie Jones had given me. It said Johnny Jackson PRIVATE EYE on it.
I’d kept the damn card of some other Gumshoe but I’d left behind the only damn lead I had in all this mess. Maybe it was time to hang up my .38 and call it a day after all. If I couldn’t keep hold of something as simple as a list then what use would I be to Tarquin Meriwether?
None at all, it seemed. I couldn’t even keep the old lush holed up above my Café for more than a few days.
Tired, angry and wanting to return to the Mermaid Café more than ever, I sat at the edge of the bed with my head in my hands and my brain trying its best to perform a Fandango out the side of my skull.
I had to sleep.
I had to find a way through this mess.
But none of that could happen now unless…?
Unless I got the list back, or at least a copy of that list.
Only one thing left to do.
Find me a lush on the lam.
Chapter 9
I caught four hours of sleep in which I dreamed of a moon dripping with blood and a drowning starlet in much the same predicament. It wasn’t the kind of dream that left you feeling good about the day ahead.
Showered, shaved and just about able to focus, I caught a cab out to Century City, picked up my car and made a phone call.
“Where?” I said, for the third time since Aldous Duncan had picked up at the other end.
“So that’s it? Just a phone call and a question, you’re not going to invite me out to a drink after all these years, Elliot? And I’m still upset you didn’t call me as soon as you took the case on.”
“If I said I hate you right about now, would t
hat be a shock, Duncan?”
“You say that every time we meet up, but you love me really. Remember we fought in a war together. I saved your life.”
“You saved me from a falling typewriter in the store room, Duncan, neither of us left base during the war.”
“It was a heavy typewriter,” he said.
“The address, Duncan, where does he live?”
I could hear his smile across the line. Then I heard ice dropping into a tumbler and then I heard him taking a long sip.
“You should really come over to the office and I’ll pour us a few stiff ones. We can reminisce.”
“If I come there you’ll need an ambulance and possibly the riot squad. I’m still considering whether I should just shoot you for sending me that pain in the neck.”
“He’s not such a bad old sort, for a killer that is.”
“You think he killed her?”
Aldous Duncan laughed.
“Jesus, no. He couldn’t pull the wings of a fly, and he wouldn’t want to either. I figure it like this, Elliot, if he’d done it then he wouldn’t have come to me for help.”
“You’re a lawyer, why wouldn’t he?”
“This is Hollywood, Finch, not New York, not Boston or Chicago. If you get in trouble here you don’t look for a Shyster to do your dirty work for you.”
“So who do you look for?”
“An agent of course. One of those sharks that circle the waters over at ASSOCIATED TALENT, or any of the big hitters. There are plenty of unmarked graves in this town and you can bet that an agent filled in those graves, or at the very least threw a little dirt over the body.”
“So you tell me, why didn’t our drunken friend go to an agent?”
“Doesn’t have one.”
“What?”
“That’s what he told me, at least. He used to be with a real slice of ice over at Associated Talent, but the contract negotiations went south about six months back.”
