by Roy Huggins
I decided this was an occasion that called for using the little conference room. I got up and shook Mr. Cabrillo's hand and invited him into the private office.
It was a small room, with an east window, a desk, and two chairs. I got behind the desk and Cabrillo took the conference chair, laid his hat on the desk and clasped his hands together beside it. They were small hands, and looked fresh-scrubbed. The veins stood out on the backs of them like knotted ropes. I tried to guess why he was there while he made up his mind how to get started.
Finally he said, “Have you been able to discover Martin's connections, Mr. Bailey? Or any explanation for his unusual behavior?”
“I'm just representing a client, Mr. Cabrillo. I'm afraid I can't answer that.”
His fingers tightened and one of the veins moved suddenly under the skin like something alive. “I should be willing to pay you a considerable sum, Mr. Bailey, for your agreement to bring anything of concern to me directly to me before taking any other action.” He raised one hand and added, “I'm not asking that you do anything unethical, but I'm not just sure I understand the ethics of your profession.” Coming from anyone else that last would have sounded like slick sarcasm. Mr. Cabrillo was just being himself.
“In this profession ethics are where you find them, if you're lucky.” I thought that might be obscure enough to bring out whatever was on his mind.
He thought it over for a while and said, “Mrs. Cabrillo has decided not to discharge Martin. She feels that you are... mistaken....”
“There wasn't any mistake.”
“I hope you'll forgive me, Mr. Bailey. I had my lawyer look up your record. I am inclined to believe you.” He looked at his hands, and the lines around his mouth tensed and deepened. “Mrs. Cabrillo is passionately, almost childishly, enthusiastic about us here in the States. She is ready to accept and to like almost anyone because he is an American.” His eyes came up again and met mine. “I'm afraid it makes her a prey to the viciousness and cupidity that are always around people like me.” Then he added gently, “Like wolves around a fire...” as if he were just a little sorry the wolves wouldn't learn to behave so they could share the fire.
“You feel that Mrs. Cabrillo may be involved in something I am working on?”
“It is only apprehension, Mr. Bailey. But I feel I could forget the whole matter if I had your assurance that anything that may develop—that I would be interested in— will be brought to me first.”
“Don't you mean brought to you and to no one else?”
He closed his eyes and then opened them again. “Yes,” he said.
“I don't believe I could promise that, Mr. Cabrillo, but we may be able to do business.”
He looked at me again and waited.
“I want to have a look at Mrs. Cabrillo's and Martin's rooms. For that privilege, I'll agree to give you first call on anything I find that concerns you. I can't promise to stop there, but if it's something that isn't anybody else's business, we'll keep it that way.”
It took him no time at all to say, “I'm afraid that's out of the question.” A frail little frown tugged at his eyebrows for a moment and then gave up. He stood up.
I said, “You came in here offering to buy me off with a lot of dollars and a few appropriate lines about ethics. That makes my proposition sound like an invitation to a Christian Endeavor wienie roast.” I stood up with him. “If your wife isn't involved it won't matter. If she is I might be able to help by finding out how she's involved.”
He picked up the Borsalino and mashed it out of shape. “There seems to be no point in it; that is, looking at my wife's rooms. I shall be glad to let you look at Martin's.”
I shook my head. “You may be right. But I want to look anyway.”
He stared at the hard brown of the linoleum for a long moment. I thought I could feel the little room shake under the struggle between crude circumstances and some ancient Cabrillo code. Crude circumstances won, as they always do.
“I have your assurance then? Anything that may develop that does not have to be passed on will go no further. And in any case, you bring me the information first?”
I nodded.
He put the hat on his head, backwards. The white hair edged up from around the brim like smoke from a banked fire.
“Don't tell your wife about this,” I said, and smiled. “But of course you wouldn't do that—unless you just came here to find out how much I know and to size me up a little.”
He lifted his head, and his eyes were twin corridors of sadness. Not the hat, nor the tendrils of hair, nor the necktie hanging two inches from the collar made any inroads on his gentle dignity. He said, “I shall not tell my wife, Mr. Bailey.”
He turned and opened the door. Then he stopped and said, “I shall call you when...” He turned his head and gave me a melancholy smile. ”... when the coast is clear.”
He went on out and I followed him. Except for Hazel, typing now, the large room was empty. Mr. Cabrillo went to the door. Hazel looked up at him. He opened it, tipped his hat to Hazel, and went away.
She looked over at me, and her eyes were large. “He was a beautiful little man,” she said, simply. “Is he in trouble?”
I looked at the door. “I don't know,” I said. “I think he is.”
Chapter Thirteen
I WENT OVER TO MY desk and sat down. A breeze had come up from the desert, putting a dry sharpness in the air and softly blurring and hiding the mountains off to the east. I could see them dimly through the open window, maybe only because I knew they were there.
I counted the lights in the building across the way and listened to Hazel's steady clacking, and to the warm impatient sounds of homeward traffic on Olympic Boulevard. And I tried to think my way into the shifting intangible problem of Gloria Gay. Lights went off and more came on and pretty soon Hazel was standing at the door telling me the night line was on my phone. I said good night and went on chasing my thoughts around. I came out with a disjointed pattern of blind alleys, of contradictions and irrelevancies, that left me staring into the sudden darkness, a blank uneasy feeling crawling slowly over me. But the pattern was real enough. There were people in it, and movement, and goals with the strength of murder.
The phone shrilled in the dry darkness. I got up and walked over and turned on the light. I could hear better that way, maybe. It rang again and I picked it up and grunted into it.
“Your phone's ringing.” The voice had the round bright fullness of a summer's day. It was Norma Shannon.
“I'm wondering why,” I mumbled.
“My. We're grumpy again.”
“I'm hungry,” I said. “I haven't had my four pounds of raw beef today.”
“That's what I called about. Beef. I owe you a dinner. Do you like onions with your sirloin?”
“No.”
“Neither do I.”
“Then leave out the onions. And I don't like nutmeg in my drinks. I'm funny that way.”
“Then you will come? Tonight?” There was a plaintive anxiety in her voice, as if having me out for dinner was what made life worth living.
“Can I have tapioca pudding?”
“No!”
“Well, I'll come anyway.”
I counted the stairs this time, and she was worth all one-hundred-and-sixty of them. She opened the door before I had a chance to catch my wind, straighten my tie, or think up an appropriate wise crack. Her face looked small and firm and white against her auburn hair. And her cobalt eyes smiled at me gently as if they were glad to see me.
She said, “Hello, Gus,” and took my hat out of my hand as I went in.
She had what looked like two rooms and a kitchen and bath. But it wasn't what she had, it was what she did with it. There was a large oval hooked rug on the living-room floor full of bright colors. There was a little fireplace with a few copper pieces around it that looked as if they were actually used for something. And there was a fire, lapping around two little eucalyptus logs. Two wing chairs upholste
red in a deep comfortable red were on either side of the fireplace, with a little Victorian sofa facing it.
She put my hat on a table with a phone on it and said, “Everything's ready. Give the fire a poke and I'll be right out with the martinis. You do drink gin—without nutmeg?”
“Uh-huh,” I said and looked at her slim-hipped figure. She had on a white silk blouse gathered in a lot of loose string low at her throat, and the skirt was the deep red of the wing chairs and had two pockets in it large enough to hold the week's laundry. She liked big pockets. I wondered if anything could be made of it. She waited until I was through looking and then walked to the kitchen with a clean slender stride.
The room was lighted half-heartedly by student lamps on two little pine tables. By a twelve-foot window that looked out over the county bistros on the Strip there was a linen-covered table set for two. And there were sprigs of ivy and philodendron growing in odd places on the walls and tables. It was a cozy room, a room that wouldn't mind the odor of a pipe, a place where you could catch up on your back-scratching and listen to the gas company's evening hour.
I poked the fire and tried to see Norma Shannon being briefed for her trip to my office. I tried to see her folding the money for the job and putting it into one of her enormous pockets. I could see it, but it was two-dimensional and her face was blank, like something cut out of cardboard.
She came in and we drank the martinis sitting by the fire in the two red chairs. It was a good martini, and we talked about gin and Hollywood and how I got to be a detective. It was a scintillating conversation. We were both thinking about something else.
Then she disappeared again into the kitchen and came back rolling a little pine tea-wagon. She put everything in its place on the table without any wasted motion.
“You sit over here, Stu,” she said and pulled out a chair for me. “I may call you Stu, mayn't I?”
I went over and pulled out her chair and crooked a finger at her. She came over and sat down.
“Except when you want to be formal,” I said. “Then you can call me Gus.”
I sat down and we ate silently for several minutes. I was as hungry as a crow in December.
After a while she looked up and said, “You know, it was two hours past my dinner time. I'm just beginning to feel human again.” She smiled her too-wide smile, and her eyes, black now in the dim light, sparkled at me. “In fact,” she said, “I'm feeling normal enough to ask you why in hell you're having me followed.”
I looked up. The little sounds and movements in the room hung suspended. No matter what evil might dog her footsteps and make her peer over her shoulder as she walked, it would take a special kind of girl to spot Lee Martinez while he was on a job.
I said, “Don't swear. It doesn't suit you at all.”
She gave me a level stare that had more of hurt, or even fear, in it than anger. “I seldom swear,” she said, “except for emphasis, or when I'm mad. I'm mad.”
She lowered her chin a little. “At first I had the girlish idea you might be protecting me or something. Then I got a good look at your stooge. Ugh!”
I grimaced. “He's not that bad. And he's a darned good man. How'd you happen to spot him so close?”
She smiled. “Believe me, he's not a good man. I haven't even seen him today.”
That picked me up a little. Lee wouldn't have left the job voluntarily without calling me. I looked at her and tried to find something more in her face—or perhaps something less—than there appeared to be. The fear and hurt in it had deepened a little, that was all I saw. She leaned toward me across the table.
“Please,” she said. “You didn't believe me when I told you what I know about Gloria. Then I thought you changed your mind. You didn't. And you think that I'm up to something. What is it? What's the mystery?”
I said, “If you told me a straight story, why don't you just forget it and let me go snafu in my own way. Why let it worry you?”
She looked at me and didn't say anything. I took a bite of steak and listened to the logs smoldering in the fireplace and smelled the clean fragrance of the place.
Then she said, “For one thing, you had me followed. Am I supposed to ignore it if you choose to hire scrawny little men to trail me around?” She paused.
“And for another thing, I liked you. You're probably a heel like most men. But you managed to give the impression the other night that there was something rather decent about you.” Then she said quickly, “But it was probably just the reaction of an impatient maiden to those shoulders of yours.”
A slow flush ebbed upward in her face and she picked up a tall silver shaker and grasped it as if she were going to throw it at me.
“That was a silly thing to say,” she whispered bleakly, and managed a smile, most of it on one side of her face.
If it was just an impromptu script she was writing, it had me whipped. I didn't want to be tough any more. Taking that room, with its reflection of long fond hours given to making it the kind of room it was, and taking Norma Shannon's flushed face, and adding them all up to a cold and simple plan to throw me off the trail of Gloria Gay took more steel and more imagination than I had to give to it. I looked at her, and opened my mouth, and the phone rang.
She got up and ran to it as if she were welcoming an old friend. She answered it and put it down. “It's for you,” she said.
I picked up the phone and Norma went into the kitchen.
The voice at the other end said, “When you didn't come out in half an hour I went home. Will you put her to bed or shall I?”
“I will,” I said tonelessly. “What's the dope on the case?”
“Practically nothing. Models clothes at one of the conspicuous consumption emporiums on Wilshire. Goes out almost every night, usually with the same guy. Sleeps alone. The guy is a director at Fox, name of Howland Bachman.”
“That's a lot to learn in a couple of days.”
“The manager's apartment is at the bottom. I'm a guy looking for a place to live. The manager, she enjoys a drink, and she likes to talk.”
“Any other people?”
“She either contacted or just ran into some gigolo at the Zero Room last night. Tall, dark, and handsome— not the director.”
“What time did she get together with him?”
“Should I know? Sometime between 9:30 and 10:30.”
“Before or after she made the phone call?”
“What the...! Chum, you don't need me... After.”
“Leave with him?”
“Yeah. They made the rounds. She still slept alone.”
“Anything else?”
“Jus' a little thing. She's being tailed. Some skinny little gunsel that ought to be selling pencils on Main Street.”
“Thanks, Lee. You can pull off. There'll be a bonus for you.”
“What the hell for?”
“I'm damned if I know. So long.”
Norma was putting coffee and some little cakes on a table in front of the fireplace. It was good coffee.
I said, “Did you happen to notice what kind of car this fellow was driving?”
She thought for a moment and said, “It was a green coupe of some kind.”
“Dodge?”
“Yes, it was. Why?”
“It wasn't my man,” I said slowly. “It was a clumsy little fellow who's put in a little time trailing me in the past week or so. He must have picked you up when you left my office.”
Her eyes widened and asked for help.
I said, “If you've told me a straight story, I don't think you have anything to worry about.”
Her mouth drew tight at the long corners and her lower lip curled in under her teeth. “Do you enjoy slapping people around? Women, maybe?”
“I haven't slapped any for almost a week now. Why?”
“Every time you make with that 'if I told a straight story' and look at me as if you know damned well I didn't, you slap me across the face.”
She took a deep breath. It shi
vered a little on the way down. “I don't lie, Bailey. I don't have to. It's one of the few things I have to warm myself by on the long winter nights.”
I waited until her eyes came up from my chin and met mine. Then I said, “Remember the picture you saw on my desk?”
“Yes,” she breathed.
“That was a picture of Peggy Bleeker, Gloria Gay.”
She went on looking at me for a while as if I hadn't said anything at all. Then a tight little line creased over her nose and she said, putting a lot of breath into it, “But it couldn't...!”
I kept on giving her the beady eye. “But it was,” I said. “I happen to know that.”
Her eyes fell to the fire. It was just a warm red bed of coals now. Her full brows pulled together. She was thinking again. Then she looked up.
“That girl was a bleached-out blonde. Gloria had dark red hair. Beautiful hair.”
“She changed the color of her hair like you would change your lipstick. She was a blonde when that picture was taken.”
She was still frowning. “I remember looking at the face, and then at the legs. The hair must have thrown me off....” Then, slowly, the tensions unwound in Norma Shannon's face, and she looked at me almost gently again. “So that's it. That's what made you think I was a fraud.”
I didn't say anything.
“And the jaunt to your apartment was a set-up to have me see the photograph?”
“Something like that.”
“My,” she said, and tipped her head at me. “I thought you were going up to see how far you could get with me.
I looked at her, at the soft wide mouth and the freckled nose. I said, “I know how far I could get with you.” I just said it. I didn't let it mean anything.
She flushed again, and brought her eyes up. They made it as far as my chin and stopped there. “I think you do,” she whispered.
I stood up. “Let's go to my place and look at pictures.”
She looked around at the dishes on the table and made a little face. “We'll come back,” I said.
She went into the bedroom. She came out with a silver fox jacket and went over to the little table and picked up my hat.
