by Roy Huggins
“I'm looking for a girl,” I said. “She used to work for you.” I stopped and waited.
He nodded heavily and blinked. He was a man who might have been fifty and living too well, or seventy and well-preserved. His white hair was soft and flowing like a senator's, and his face was round and puffy, and as smooth as an inner tube. His eyes were just wet dark gleams deep in soft cushions of fat. They didn't tell me a thing.
“She may have taken a cozier name for your show,” I went on. “She was born Margaret Bleeker.”
There may have been a change, a subtle release of tension in the room. Or maybe I just thought there was, because I was looking hard for a reaction. The man behind me moved audibly for the first time, and Keller's shoulders and face seemed to relax almost imperceptibly. He chuckled softly and said, “What's that high-nosed little bitch got herself into?”
“She's just missing.”
Keller squirmed slightly and glanced at a clock on the corner of his desk. He was bored. “I'm afraid I can't help you, Mr. Bailey. She left here in 1938 when I sold the Hofbrau. Went to L.A. with a two-bit comic named Buffin.”
“That's a long time ago. Sure of the date?”
He stood up slowly, painfully, and came around the desk. “I'm afraid so,” he rumbled. “Do you know her, Mr. Bailey?”
I shook my head.
“Private operator?”
“Uh-huh.”
He chuckled again. “She was quite a young lady. Luscious as a pomegranate, and twice as acid. I don't think anyone ever got to her. Buffin was just a sleeper ticket to L.A.”
I stood up. “Would you know anyone who might have kept in touch with her in Los Angeles?”
He patted me on the shoulder with a hand like a pink pincushion and said, “Sorry I can't help you. But six years is a lot of years, sir.”
“Yeah. You wouldn't have any pictures around, would you?”
“I might. I have a room full of relics I trucked over from the Hofbrau. Want to go through it?”
“I'd like to.”
He walked over to a bar set in a blond-wood cabinet and began to mix a drink. His hands seemed to shake just a little.
“You know the room, George. Take him down and let him go through it.”
I walked to the door and turned around. Keller was taking a long, businesslike drink.
“Thanks for your time, Mr. Keller,” I said. “Sorry I had to disappoint you.”
He lowered the glass and looked at me blankly over it. He belched majestically. He didn't say anything.
The room was large and cold and had a sour smell to it. There was a 100-watt bulb burning fiercely in the high ceiling and throwing a begrudging light on a collection of junk stacked against the far wall. I could make out a few sandwich boards, some broken flood lights, and a collection of cheap, silvered shields, the kind a five-man orchestra sits behind.
I left George standing at the door and started through the junk. It was probably forty-five hot and dusty minutes later that I turned over the large rectangle of black cardboard. It was the kind of board that fits into a glass-enclosed box, like those outside some of the Hollywood spots on Vine.
There were nine eight-by-ten photographs glued on the board at meaningless angles. And in the center in fancy gold-leaf that was flaking badly now it said, “Gala show tonight with these popular stars,” and then it listed the names. The fourth name was Peggy Bleeker, the seventh name was Buster Buffin.
Three of the faces were male, so I only had to look at six. It was easy to find. The hair was blonde, but the eyes in their seeming shadows and the wide smile were the same. It was a full-length picture, and the figure was slender as a boy's, with long trim legs. But there wasn't any doubt about it. It was Mrs. Ralph Johnston of U.C.L.A. and the Hofbrau.
I had to use a knife to get it off. George had come over from the door and was watching me carefully while I folded it and put it away in an inside pocket.
“Which one of them is Buffin, George?”
He indicated one of the photographs with his foot and said, “Cute, ain't he?”
It was a studio photograph of a hatchet-faced man with a hungry grin, a cocky straw hat, and a bow tie that might have been somebody's horse-blanket. I cut it off and put it away with the one of Mrs. Johnston.
George said, “How ja know the other one was Peg Bleeker? I thought you said you didn't know her.”
“You don't miss anything, do you? But you ought to carry a smaller gun. I saw a photograph of her in Los Angeles.”
“Oh.” He ushered me down to the elevator, left me without saying anything and knocked at Keller's door. It clicked, and he slipped in quickly with a kind of cloak-and-dagger stealth.
Outside the mist was heavy and the street had the echoing darkness of a deserted alley. Strands of fog wandered aimlessly. I had thought I would find a cab or a place to call one. In ten blocks I didn't find either. A car passed me, appearing from nowhere out of the night and going nowhere into it. I lost it in the drifting mist and stopped and listened to the night silence. A ship moaned distantly. I put a cigarette in my mouth and lit it. I didn't really want a smoke, but the bright warmth of the match was pleasant.
Then I heard it. The quiet shush of leather on the wet walk, growing suddenly hurried and confused as I turned. Something glinted brightly and came down across my head. I went down on my hands and knees. Nausea pulsed upward and pounded at my throat, and I pulled myself up and my feet slipped on the wet pavement. I heard a gentle, sighing sound and light suddenly broke into bright fragments behind my eyes. Then there was only darkness stretching away endlessly.
Chapter Four
THE SIDEWALK had a clean wet smell. I came to know that smell. I smelled it for a long time before I moved my face and decided I didn't like it down there. I dragged myself up slowly and reached out and steadied the darkness while my stomach did a bass-fiddle throb and sent sour tones hammering against my skull.
At my feet several of my cards were scattered, with my wallet and the pictures of Mrs. Johnston and Buster gleaming in the midst of them. I picked them up and put the pictures and the cards away. They were soft and wet. I opened the wallet with clumsy, palsied fingers and looked into it. It was empty.
It didn't have to mean anything. Just a man with a donnegan; someone who liked to crack a head now and then in a friendly way for whatever it was worth... A nickel here, a nickel there. Heads are hard and I was a stranger in town...
I didn't believe a word of it.
I found a cab a few blocks away and went back to the hotel. The elevator girl clicked her tongue at me impersonally and asked me what floor I wanted, if any. I leered at her and held up four fingers. She cracked her gum and said, “Mister, it's a good thing you don't live on the first floor.” She showed me her teeth.
I got out on four and wandered down the dim hall to my room. I let myself in, turned on the light, and stood looking the place over. I couldn't see anything different about it. It still looked like a cave man's idea of a home away from home. I went through the drawers, the unlocked suitcase in the closet, the pockets of my extra suit where I had about sixty dollars. The money was still there. If the place had been searched, it had been done with a nice professional touch. The bottle looked a little emptier, but that might have been on account of my consummate thirst. I didn't take a drink. It wouldn't have helped.
I went in and washed my face, examined my head, decided it would do for a while, and went to bed. I lay down and thought it over, if Keller, just for example, had wanted to know a little more about me, or to see what I carried around, he'd have had a go at my room. And how would he know where that was? Not from the cab driver who took me down there, because I picked him up two blocks from the hotel. But, easily enough, from the little girl with the shaven legs. I liked those legs. I wanted to see more of them. I rolled over and sat up slowly and picked up the phone.
I got the bell captain, tried to get the proper tone of oily obscenity and said, “This is four-eighteen
. I've got a little time now. How about sending up that little number with the taffy hair—what was her name?”
“You kiddin', Jack?”
“You're the one who sent up the liquor, aren't you?”
“Yeah, why?”
“If she's busy I can wait. Mind giving me her name? I'll see that you're taken care of.”
“You didn't ask for no girl.”
“No, but I must have looked lonely. You sent one up anyway. Remember?”
“Sorry, Jack. I didn't send nobody up. But I can get you a nice redhead...”
I didn't say anything.
“Okay... you don't like redheads. Don't get sore about it. I can get you a brunette, a friendly type.”
“Never mind,” I said. “I'll go out and take a run around the block.” I put the receiver back and forgot to take my hand away. It had grown suddenly cold. I stood up and had a drink. I looked around the room, at the bare walls, the blank windows.... The rain that night was slow and endless.
The next morning I checked on the woman at Jefferson and, sadly enough, she was just what she had seemed. She got me Margaret Bleeker's last known address and I went out there. The block where Margaret Bleeker had lived was taken up now by a machine tool manufacturing company. There weren't any houses for two blocks around. None of the merchants remembered any Bleekers.
That evening I saw Keller again. I went down there early and George let me go up to the plush office on the third floor. I told Keller about being dry-gulched ten blocks away from his place.
He laughed deep in his big barrel belly and said, “Anybody who wanders around down in that neighborhood at night deserves what he gets.”
I said, “I thought maybe you might have been looking for something.”
Keller was surprised first, and it looked genuine enough. Then he was hurt, rather elaborately. He said:
“I'm sorry to have given you that kind of impression, sir. I don't employ sand-lot tactics. If I were at all interested in you, which I am not, I'd have used more effective methods. Good day, sir.”
I got up. I had just sat down but I got up. I went halfway to the door and turned and said, “How about asking George to tell me where to find the girl—the one who told him I was coming down here last night.”
Keller looked at George and nodded. George said, “Hell, she's just a little hustler that comes in now and then. Calls herself Candy. I don't think I've ever heard her last name, and I don't know where she lives...”
There didn't seem to be anything more for me there. I walked out. Outside, the mist and the narrow darkness of the street were waiting for me. I hadn't called a cab. I wanted to walk. I tried to find the street I had taken the night before, but the slow drizzle and the drifting fog made the world a kind of eyeless gray infinity. I walked with fists lying free in my pockets and the muscles crawling restlessly across my back. It was a long walk. Sounds from the river and from the city off to the south came to me with a lost and distant lowing. Now and then small and fleeting noises sounded close by, behind me, across the street, at my side where alleys split the darkness. But nothing happened. On Fourth Street I found a two-by-four cigar store and called a cab and went back to the hotel.
The next day, before my train left, I tried to find Candy. I never found her.
I stepped out of Los Angeles' Union Depot into thick rain. The lights from the burlesque houses cut deep orange chasms across Main Street, and the little dark people hugged the building walls and hurried through the downpour with an air of incipient panic. I went home and called Johnston. He wasn't in, so I sat down and typed up a report on the trip and went to bed.
The next morning the sun was warm and friendly and the mountains off behind Burbank were cutting the washed sky with a hard bright edge.
I was driving east on Sunset. I turned at Virgil just as the signal flashed red. I drove south about a quarter-block and something in the rear-view mirror caught my eye and held it. It was a car wheeling into Virgil from the direction I had come. After the wild turn it slowed and stayed a comfortable half-block behind me. It was a green Dodge coupe. I pulled up and went into a drugstore and got some filters for my pipe. I drove off again. He wasn't doing a bad job. I was over a block away before the Dodge pulled out from the curb and rolled along after me.
I didn't have time to play with him. If it was important, he'd be around again. I turned onto Beverly. At the intersection where Second runs into the Boulevard there is some tricky six-way traffic. I timed the signal to catch him. It did, and I cut over to Wilshire and downtown to the Security Building.
Johnston gave me a warm greeting, shoved a highball into my hand, settled me on his tan leather casting couch, got behind his desk and said, “Well? Let's have it. You weren't gone long enough for the news to be bad.” His eyes were smiling, but there was a strained, guarded expression behind their brightness that said he didn't expect the news to be good at all.
I took the report out of a pocket and handed it to him. He opened it, looked at me briefly, and settled back to read. When he had finished he stood up and walked over to a wastebasket and began tearing the report into small pieces, dropping them slowly. “Don't write any more reports,” he murmured. “Let's just keep it oral.”
He sat down and regarded me quizzically. “I don't think they were talking about Margaret at all,” he said simply. “You didn't show the picture around, did you?”
“No. But they showed me one.” I got out the 1938 version of Peg Bleeker and gave it to him. “Keller gave me that one.”
He studied it for a long time, while a slow flush came and went away again under the heavy tan of his face. “It's Margaret all right. She's beautiful.” There was a kind of mournful wonder in his tone.
I played with my drink. It was too early for us to get really friendly. He stood up and clinked the ice around in his glass. The slow drone of the air conditioner and the ice clinking against thin glass were the only sounds in the quiet room.
Johnston murmured, “That puts her in Los Angeles six years ago instead of only two as she says. What in the devil does it mean?”
“Not much,” I said. “A lot of show girls, the ones who don't yearn to marry millionaires, have complexes about education. I've known a couple. They used to get drunk and tell me about how they were really just doing this to get a college degree. I've heard of one or two that actually did it.”
Johnston looked at me with the rapt expression of a county sheriff listening to a side-show grinder.
I went on, “After all, she used her own name. So she can't be hiding from anything serious. She's probably just getting the grease paint out of her blood.”
Johnston went on looking skeptical. I didn't blame him. I didn't believe it myself. Why had she put on weight and made herself up to look like an apple strudel? Why the blackout at U.C.L.A.? Using her real name didn't impress me at all. Even in Portland it had been “Peggy” Bleeker. When she got to Los Angeles it probably became Clare deLune, or maybe something even prettier. And I couldn't think of a better place for a second-rate show girl to hide than in bobby socks and glasses on Sorority Row. But that kind of a hide-out needs a real name, one with a high school record.
And she wasn't running from her imagination. It was something that counted. A bell captain was bought off, a little blonde apprentice in the most ancient of professions had been made to disappear—probably to keep me from finding out who asked her for my room number. The wires had hummed and some marginal workers in the torpedo trade were on my tail. Blackmail slips in a tentative hand... Something was in motion. How big, how dark, I didn't know.
That's how it added up to me, but I hadn't put it to Johnston that way.
He frowned and said, “I can't agree with you. There's something wrong some place. I don't believe you got that clout on the head just because you walked down the wrong street....” He drew his lips back in a tight and mirthless grin and his voice became a taut purr if he were having difficulty restraining himself. “We've started s
omething, Bailey. I'm not sure we did the right thing now—maybe this is just what the bastard on the phone wanted. But we're going to finish it.... So help me, I'll never forgive myself if I don't.”
I didn't say anything.
After a while he said almost cheerfully, “What'll I hand this fellow when he calls again?”
“Tell him you're interested. You'd like to know what he's got to sell—but don't sound too interested. I've got a hunch he's just taking a flyer. He might only know one thing, that your wife was a show girl once.”
Johnston nodded.
“Let him carry the conversation,” I went on. “If you get stuck tell him you're letting me handle it, give him my number and hang up.” A shaft of morning sunlight streamed through the window and glared at me like the spirit of Carrie Nation. I got up and put the whisky on the bar.
I said, “I'm being tailed.”
“Since when?”
“Since I got back. Since this morning, rather.”
“So I'm being watched?”
“Probably not. It could be from the Portland end. I shook him off down on Beverly.”
“Better not come up here any more. Contact me by phone—here, not at home.”
I went to the door and stepped out and glanced back at him. He was looking toward me, but he didn't seem to be seeing anything. I left him sitting there, the sun shimmering in his blond hair, shoulders hunched, looking like an old and tired man....
Chapter Five
THE SWITCHBOARD was silent and Hazel was harassing her ancient typewriter and smoking a cigarette. There wasn't anyone else in the place. I went over to my desk and sat down.
Hazel stopped hammering and smiled. “Hi! Where ya been?” She was thirty-one, and looked it in a nice lean way.
I said, “if I didn't know your first love was that P.B.X. board, I'd swear you missed me.”
“I did, lug. Did you get the job?” That was the nice thing about Hazel. Her heart was roomy enough for all fifty of her clients. Hazel had been a government stenographer with imagination and a few pennies in the bank. She rented two offices in the Pacific Building, knocked out the partitions, moved in five desks, six phones, a P.B.X. board, and a rack of pigeon holes, and she was in business. For ten dollars a month I and about fifty other gentlemen from various walks of life—all legitimate, Hazel insisted—got a mailing address, a telephone, with a competent voice to answer it, and the use of the office whenever we needed it. There was a small room in one corner for private conferences and for five dollars a month extra Hazel had let me bring in my broad-gauge files, two Mexican posters, and my own desk, set down by the east window overlooking Broadway and the distant, dusty hills of San Bernardino.
