The Double Take

by Roy Huggins

  But I wasn't doing any businesslike drinking. I was staring at the glossy wall with the Mexican poster on it. It was a nice poster, with warm earthy colors and dark-skinned people built like blocks of granite.

  But I wasn't seeing the poster. I was seeing Mrs. Ralph Johnston, nee Peg Bleeker, alias Gloria Gay. I was seeing the gentle eyes and the warm smile and trying to put them behind the smoking muzzle of a gun. I was trying to see her ferreting out defeated little Buster Buffin with his fifty-dollar deals and putting two slugs in his heart. I wasn't doing very well. I couldn't see her leaving the picture in the drawer. But she didn't have all the time in the world. I took a drink and thought about Keller, and the man on the phone, and finally about nothing at all...

  I lifted the glass for another drink but the fly was at the bottom. He had come to no good end. I heard the door open and Hazel was standing in it, looking crisp and attractive in her new caracul coat. She was trying to give me a long, cool stare, but the softness in her eyes defeated her. She said:

  “When I close this door you'll be sitting there drinking all by yourself like any Fifth Street wino.” Then she closed it, with a sharp clap and rattle of glass. I could hear her little heels clicking grimly away toward the elevator.

  I got up and put the bottle in the bottom drawer of my combination bar and filing cabinet, went over to the sink, rinsed out the glass, sent the fly down the drain where he belonged, put the glass in with the bottle and locked up the cabinet. Hazel was a girl of parts. She would probably ring the night line about midnight, just in case I was still there and didn't know about it.

  I sat down again and wondered what it was that was poking at me from deep inside. Oh, yes. Murder. And I was in it now, up to the last polka dot on my tie. The one who shot Buffin knew about me. That's why Buffin had to die. And tomorrow the papers would lay a pall of words over Buster's grubby exit, and the boys in the wrinkled suits and the tobacco breaths would begin turning the leaves. I wondered how long it would be, and what I would have to do before I could be sure I was clear of the thing.

  There was a soft noise at the door. My desk was eight or ten feet over to the left of it, so I couldn't see the shadow on the translucent glass—if there was one. Then the door opened slowly, inward toward me, and I could see a shadow now. It was motionless, undecided and without menace. It looked as if it might be an old woman.

  I told the shadow to come in.

  It wasn't an old woman. She stepped beyond the door and half-closed it behind her. She was young, with wide eyes that had a question to ask, and a mouth that turned up for an eighth of an inch at both ends after the lips had given up. It kept her from being beautiful and gave her the kind of face that makes you assume she's honest before you have any right to. Her nose was short and there were a couple of timid freckles on it. She was a little on the tall side and she wore a tailored gabardine suit under the wide-shouldered tweed coat with pockets the size of pup tents. Her hands and half her arms were lost somewhere in the pockets.

  I stood up. She walked toward me and said, “Are you Mr. Bailey?”

  I said yes, I was Mr. Bailey, and stepped around and held the client's chair for her. It was a good chair, with arms on it. I sat down across the desk from her and put on my businesslike-sleuth smile. I thought I could probably use a job.

  I said, “What can I do for you, Miss—?”

  She looked around and said, “Do you need all this office in the detective business?” She had a warm, husky voice.

  “I share it with a couple of casket salesmen.”

  She smiled. It was an ungainly smile, but it wouldn't be too hard to like. It would be a little like getting fond of a moppet with a heart of gold and a habit of throwing rocks at your cat.

  “So you're a sleuth? You don't look like one. You don't even dress like one.”

  “I'm sorry. I left my detective kit at home—everything but the truss.”

  “Do you like it?”

  “The truss? No, it's too tight.”

  “I mean the detective business. Or is it a profession?”

  “Are you just up here after some local color, or can I help you—or something?”

  “I think I may be able to do something for you,” she said sweetly.

  I was a door-to-door salesman once myself. I leaned back and said, “Pitch it. I'll let you know if it goes sour.”

  She raised one eyebrow slightly and said, “I think you're trying to find someone I used to know—Gloria Gay.”

  That shook me. I wasn't prepared for it. I hadn't dropped many cards west of Main, and she didn't look much over nineteen anyway. I looked again and decided the freckles and the mouth were deceptive. I could believe it if she turned out to be thirty.

  I said, “Yes, I was making some inquiries about her for a client.”

  She brought her hands out of her pockets and folded them in her lap. They were rather small hands and the nails were painted, but without the raw harshness of most painted hands.

  She said, “What's it all about? Has something happened to her?”

  I looked into her wide cobalt eyes and didn't say anything. That was supposed to confuse her.

  She looked back at me with all the confusion of an aging St. Bernard and said, “My information is pretty ancient, I'm afraid. I saw her last in 1939.”

  “When you were all of thirteen,” I put in.

  She brought up her chin and smiled faintly through her teeth. “I was sixteen.”

  I counted the fingers on my left hand and got twenty-one. “Go on,” I said.

  She took a large white cigarette case out of a long slender bag and put a Parliament between her red lips. I lit it for her.

  “Thanks,” she said, and smiled. She blew a gray jet of smoke at the ceiling and said, “I met Gloria at a fly-by-night school in Long Beach. It was supposed to teach you how to walk and how to sit down like a lady of the haut monde.” She dropped her eyes and then raised them again. “I was as tall then as I am now and I'd already decided I was going to be a model. That's why I was there.”

  From down the long corridor came the lone, defeated sound of a scrub pail against the floor and the traffic sounds had moved uptown and settled down to a muted thrumming.

  “Well,” she went on, “to make it brief. The teacher was a man, Carlos Something-or-other. When I showed up for the fifth or sixth lesson, the studio was locked up. It never opened again—and I had paid tuition for six months, too.” She knocked off some ash, carefully, in the desk tray. “Then, about six weeks later, I got a letter from Gloria in Mexico City. She'd gone off with Carlos. It had a money order in it for my tuition—all of it. The letter said she didn't mind Carlos' swindling the others, but she had liked me.”

  We both sat. It took me a little while to realize that she was through, that she had told her story. Then I had to start readjusting myself to her. This took a little time, too, and she was getting up and losing her hands in her pockets again.

  “Sit down,” I said.

  She sat down.

  “You didn't tell me your name.”

  “Norma Shannon.”

  “Did you answer the letter?”

  “Of course, but I never heard from her again.”

  “But she got the letter?”

  “Well, someone did.”

  “How do you account for her writing you particularly?”

  She didn't answer right away. She looked at me and her full dark brows pulled together for a moment as if she didn't like the way things were going. She said, “We were very friendly. I was the only one in the group she ever spoke to. I thought she was something rather special and she liked that.”

  “Do you know where I might get hold of some of the other people in that group?”

  She said, slowly, “No-o. I don't remember their names, hardly any of their faces. There were about twelve in the group.”

  I sat back and looked her over, starting from scratch.

  The blue eyes still looked like the very cradle of truth
, and the wide mouth still turned upward at the corners like a Botticelli cherub. I shook my head at her.

  “Baby, you're good. So good, I'm surprised they didn't have you consign her to Afghanistan, or the Belgian Congo.”

  She had been half-smiling, like someone who really enjoys her work. The smile dropped like a ballast sack and her teeth came together in a sharp little click and gleamed through half-parted lips. She didn't say anything.

  I went on. “But they gave you some really corny lines, angel. People just don't give information like that away. If you'd come in with one shy little 'What's-in-it-for-me,' I'd probably have drooled, and bought the whole bill of goods.”

  Her cobalt eyes had widened, and she was looking at me distantly and impersonally as you might look at a blind man. Then her eyebrows raised and she took on a look of earnest sympathy. “Tsk, tsk. Acute cynicism.” She shook her head at me slowly. “I suppose it's an occupational disease, isn't it?”

  “Yes,” I said. “It's the people you meet. Chiselers, con-men, girls with Truth itself dawning in their big blue eyes....”

  Her teeth came together again and she stood up. She looked down at me for a while and her face relaxed visibly.

  She said, “You're a highly improbable character, Mr. Bailey. Did someone just dream you up?”

  I laughed and said, “This is an awful empty building around this time of night. Aren't you afraid I might get mean?”

  “It hadn't occurred to me. Might you?” She widened her eyes at me.

  “Speaking of improbabilities—listen to that story of yours for a minute. You come in here and hand me information about someone I want to find, information I would pay nicely for. You tell me—free of charge—that she's two thousand miles away in a foreign country and all the people who knew her when you did either went away with her, or you've forgotten them. Period. Do you like it?”

  She sat down again.

  “Hmm. It does sound a bit corny, doesn't it?”

  “Uh-huh. I think you'd better tell me all about it.”

  She stood up and said, “There he goes again!” and started for the door. She went about six inches.

  I said, “So you're still sitting on that mare's nest.”

  She leaned lightly on the desk and frowned at me. It was a nice frown. “I don't follow that metaphor, but I'm staying with my story, if that's what you mean. It's the truth. You know, I don't really care whether you believe it or not. I came up here because I thought you would probably know a lot more about Gloria than I do. I liked her very much. I wanted to know what had happened to her.” She turned and walked to the door.

  I jumped up and came around the desk. “Wait,” I croaked. “I'm beginning to believe you. How did you hear I was looking for her?”

  She stood with one hand tightly gripping the doorknob as if she were trying to make up her mind whether to tear it off and throw it at me or to let it stay there for a while.

  She said, “I went by the Gene Longacre agency yesterday—I do magazine modeling when I'm lucky—and I saw your card on one of the desks with Gloria's name written across it.” She gave me a grim look and added, “You can check on that tomorrow.”

  “I don't think I'll need to,” I said.

  She opened the door and gave me a wintry smile with just a hint of spring in it.

  I said, “You've helped me a lot, Miss Shannon, and I've sat over there playing Hard-nose Harry. Let me buy your supper for you.”

  She said no. Then we batted it around for the proper number of times and ended up with an arrangement to meet at the Biltmore at seven o'clock.

  As she left I sat and watched the dusk erase the gray mountains off to the east, and contemplated the inadequacies of human understanding.

  I had been planning to browse through my back copies of the Times for 1939, the bright-lights sections, and I had over an hour before I could take up where I left off with the Shannon. I brought January and February out of the files, untied January's rope, blew off the dust of the years, and started in.

  I was on page 10-B of the January 28 edition. It was quiet in the room. The traffic noises had subsided now, and I was hearing the little haphazard sounds a city makes when it has ceased to be day-town and hasn't yet become night-town.

  The office door opened with a sharp dry click and a tall man stepped into the room and nudged the door shut with a deft foot. It looked as if he'd done that trick a couple of times before. He stood and looked at me out of the deep shadow of a black felt hat with a turned-down brim. There was a dark kid glove on his left hand and his right hand was buried in the bulging pocket of a gabardine coat.

  It was too warm for gloves like that.

  Chapter Eight

  MY MOUTH WAS hanging open in the dry air. I licked my lips and said, “You made a mistake. The casting office is on the fifth floor.”

  He allowed the silence that followed to jell for a while, then he said, quietly, thick-tongued, “You're out of your class, chowderhead, you're way over that thick neck of yours.” He looked at me some more.

  After a while, I said, “You'd better give me the next line. I've forgotten my cue.”

  “Gloria Gay, chowderhead. There's nothing in it for you. Nothing but a Chicago overcoat.”

  “Like Buffin, huh?” I'm great for trial balloons. This one got about as far as Byrd-for-President. His mouth opened for a second and closed again. It was a lipless mouth set in a battered chin.

  “I'm doin' you a favor, chowderhead. I figure a word to your kind is enough and we wanta keep you healthy, so if you're workin' for someone you can take him out with you.”

  I said, “What I earn doesn't cover lead insurance. If it's that kind of a deal, count me out.”

  He leered and showed a line of white teeth growing at an angle in his head. He said, “That's fine. We don't like to take a guy's bread away from him, chowderhead, and you seem to wanta play nice.” He reached into the pocket of the coat with a thumb and finger and drew out a green packet. He threw it onto the desk. It hit the glass top and slid off into my lap. I picked it up. It was a packet of quiet money with a ten on top. He went on, “There's two hundred and fifty berries for ya—for playin' it smart. And tell your boss—if you've got one— that we won't stop with his leg man next time. We'll just clean house.”

  Then he opened the door without looking at it, stepped out, and was gone. I gave him time to get to the first landing before I started out after him. I hit the lobby stairs just as the big glass door swung in and a bulky figure disappeared into the waning twilight. When I got outside he had jay-walked across Broadway and was going into a parking lot. He went through the parking lot and looked back over his shoulder. He didn't see me. I had stopped in the shadow of an ancient concrete pillar that used to help hold up a garage. He crossed Main Street and I started after him again. He went south a block and stopped at a long Packard limousine. I was surprised. I had expected a green Dodge coupe.

  He got in, pulled out from the curb, and shot up the street like a man leaving the scene of a crime. I stepped back against the dark building wall and got the license number as he went by.

  I walked back toward the Pacific Building, wondering if the thing hadn't been just a bit too easy, and got to my office in time to count the money—two hundred and fifty dollars all right—and find that I was already ten minutes late for my date with Norma Shannon.

  She was sitting on one of the enormous couches in the lobby looking around with a stiff little frown on her face. I sat down beside her.

  “Hungry?”

  She smiled and said, “Where have you been? Searching my apartment?”

  “I didn't have time,” I said. “Would I have found anything interesting?”

  “We'll try it together sometime and see....”

  “When you know me better,” I said, “you'll realize I'm too subtle to use this as a gag but I haven't been home yet. I haven't washed, changed my cuffs, or done any of the little chores I usually do before dining out with a lady. How
about you coming up and making us both a drink while I change?”

  “How far is 'up'?”

  “'Up' is by the Good Samaritan Hospital, and my car's just out back.”

  She got up and put her hands in her pockets. She smiled and said, “If you've got gin I'll make you a 'Shannon hypnotic' ”

  When we got in the car she said, “To answer your question—yes, I'm hungry.” We didn't say much after that until we'd got out of the little self-help elevator and I was fumbling with my keys.

  Then she said, “Bailey, you must be an honest man. And in your business, too!”

  I knew what she meant. It wasn't the nicest apartment building in town. I didn't say anything.

  Inside she didn't develop the I'm-in-your-apartment kittenishness. While I switched on the floor lamp by the mohair easy chair and pushed the folding bed up into the wall she stood and looked the place over. She took in the thin, graying carpet, the high unpainted bookcase full of worn volumes that had lived as full lives as I was capable of giving them, the faded Lawson sofa, the cabinet with the albums of folk songs and ballads, and the turn-table sitting on top of it.

  My desk was behind her, by the door to the three-by-six kitchen. She had walked over and was looking at the titles in the bookcase. I stepped over to the desk and opened the middle drawer and took out the Hofbrau version of Peg Bleeker and propped it up on the jutting desk-shelf. I turned around. Norma Shannon was taking off her coat, still looking at the ancient books.

  She was very much at ease. She laid the coat on the sofa and said, “Where's the scullery?”

  I waved in the direction of the kitchen, said, “The gin's in the bread bin,” and went into the little dressing room off the bathroom and turned on the light.

  It happened sooner than I expected. I heard her saying, “So you go in for pin-up girls, hum?”