The Double Take

by Roy Huggins

  He said, “Good morning, sir,” cheerfully, and then turned back to his work. He was polishing a large roulette wheel. It was an enormous room with more roulette wheels and other assorted equipment for separating money from people whose chief problem is finding new and more exciting ways of getting rid of it.

  I said, “Good morning,” and turned and went out the front door and down a wide paved walk to a drive. There was a man there trimming a hedge that ran along the drive down to a street about fifty yards away.

  He looked at me and said, “Good morning,” and went on trimming the hedge.

  I said, “Good morning,” and walked on down the drive to the road, where there were two concrete pillars with a number hanging on one of them. I glanced at the number and then hit off to the right at a brisk trot. I was beginning to feel normal again, and that made me want to get away from there and back to where there were people I didn't mind knowing.

  It was a canyon road with only private drives going off from it. It looked like Stone Canyon, but the houses seemed a little older and more solid than in the Bel-Air, Brentwood district. I decided it was Cheviot Drive in Glenview. It was. I walked about a mile before I found a road going off up the hill to the left. There was a post there with the names of the two streets on it. I stopped and wrote the number of the house down on the envelope I had used at Cabrillo's. Then it suddenly occurred to me that the boys should have taken that envelope. I shrugged it off. There were a lot of things I had to think about. It could wait.

  I heard a car purring softly down the grade behind me. I stepped back and waited. It was a convertible with a chubby blond man at the wheel. I stepped out and flagged him and he pulled up and opened the door for me.

  He said, “Jump in, neighbor,” and smiled at me.

  I got in and he looked at my face, and the smile sagged and became a bitter thing. He drove very fast into Glenview and pulled up at the first street in the business area.

  “I stop here, neigh... uh...” he said.

  I got out and thanked him and he drove off. He was halfway to Los Angeles before he got out of second gear.

  I looked in a sidewalk mirror and decided I didn't blame him. My left eye was set in a swollen socket of corpse-blue flesh. Half my upper lip was turned inside out and there was dried blood covering my right cheek. I went into a drugstore, called a cab and went home.

  When I walked into the lobby I was already feeling the warm water pouring across my shoulders and smelling the coffee building up its strength in the black and battered percolator. Mrs. Hechtlinger, the manager, was sitting in a soft chair by the desk, and I waved at her cheerfully.

  She jumped up and said, “Oh yes, you're here to look at that room. I'm sorry, but the tenant hasn't gone out yet.” She had stepped in front of me and was looking at me blankly and moving the right side of her mouth like someone with a tic. I knew Mrs. Hechtlinger didn't have a tic.

  “You told me I could look at the room at nine o'clock,” I said, hurt. “It's almost ten.” I glanced to my left. There were two men sitting on the couch against the lobby wall. One of them was getting up.

  “Well,” I said, and turned back toward the door, “there are other rooms.”

  “Hey, wait a minute, you.”

  He was tall, young, and lean with a prairie stride and a steely glint in his eye.

  “Yes?”

  “What's your name?”

  “Why?”

  “Other rooms!” he said. “What other rooms?” He spread his hands in a burlesque gesture. He looked at Mrs. Hechtlinger. “Are you willing to swear this guy isn't the man we're after?”

  She looked at him and then at me to find out what to say.

  I smiled at her and said, “Never mind.” Then I looked at the tall man. “My name's Bailey.”

  “Lieutenant Quint wants to talk to ya.” The other man stood up and came over. He was about five feet nine, as short as cops come in Los Angeles.

  “Any charges?”

  “No. We'd just like you to come down for a little chat.”

  “To the yes-room, huh?”

  The tall man turned and looked at his companion. A grin played on his face as fleeting as a humming bird's shadow. “Coming?” he said to me.

  Then suddenly I saw it for the fine opportunity it was and almost laughed. “Sure,” I said. “Let's go.”

  The “yes-room” is on the Temple Street floor of the City Hall. They took me in and sat me down in a straight-backed battered chair by an old walnut table. The table had an empty wire wastebasket on it. There were four walls with an orange-varnish sheen and no windows. There were no low-slung bright lights, just the table, four or five solid armless chairs, and a single light burning in an inverted bowl close to the ceiling.

  The short man stayed with me. He leaned a chair back against the wall near the door and sat in it and looked at me vacantly. After fifteen minutes I began to want to know what he'd do if I got up and tried to walk out. But I didn't try to find out. I wanted to stay right there, the longer the better. More time passed and I began to get worried. I thought back over everything. I'd done during and after the time I found Buster Buffin's body. I began to think of the places where I'd left prints. On the floor when I leaned down looking at the pictures. No. That was on a rug. They couldn't get them off that rug. On the door at the head of the stairs! No. No, I wiped those off. A drop of sweat fell on my hand lying on the table in front of me. I wiped my forehead and then I laughed. That's what I was supposed to do— get worried, sweat.

  I stopped sweating and started to think about Red and the house on Cheviot Drive. The short man pushed forward with the back of his head against the wall and his chair came down with a sharp sound that echoed and thundered in the empty room. He got up and went out the door.

  I went on thinking about Red. His boys had had their finger on me from the day I got back from Portland. Before I saw Buffin. Before I went hunting for Gloria Gay.

  I counted on one hand the people who knew then, or could have guessed, who I was looking for; Johnston, Mrs. Johnston, Keller, the man on the telephone. Then I remembered where I had found the picture, and added another; the short man, Keller's boy with the bulge. If Red had been hired by either Johnston or his wife it was too subtle for me, and Keller's boy was just a hired hand. I could think about him along with Keller. And Johnston's gentle blackmailer was still as meaningless to me as on the day I first heard about him.

  The door opened and another cop came in. He was in uniform. He turned the chair next to the door around and straddled it, facing me and resting his heavy arms on the back of it. He watched me with his lips compressed, his neck stiff, and a set, glassy look in his eyes. The eyes were set close to a long nose. He didn't look quite bright.

  I went back to my fingers. I had two of them sticking out in the air. Who were they? Oh yes, Keller and the man on the phone. Between the two Keller won hands down. Red had wanted to know who I was working for.

  The man on the phone knew Johnston, could make a good guess who I was working for. And Red knew without thinking about it which one I meant when I had said I got the picture in Portland...

  It spelled Keller and yet Keller didn't make sense. Peg Bleeker had left Portland six years ago. Keller knew who she left with and where she went. I had questioned fifty people about Gloria Gay, and all of them said that no one else had ever asked about her before. Why would Keller have to find her through me? Why would he wait six years?

  The blank uneasy feeling began to crawl over me again and I decided to stop thinking about it. I would think about Irene Neher's long brown legs and her hard round breasts instead. There was no confusion there, the pattern was clear, the vectors straight and true.

  “Nice day today, isn't it?” The words echoed hollowly in the room like a voice in a radio nightmare. He was smiling at me with his mouth, the eyes still glassy, still close to his nose.

  I didn't say anything.

  He compressed his lips, blinked, and settled his eyes on
me again.

  After about five minutes of that I said, “I confess...” and stopped. His mouth came open and he started to get up, slowly. I went on, “Yes, I confess I really don't know what kind of a day it is.”

  He settled back, blinked a couple of times and went right on looking at me. I looked back at him then and we sat that way for a while, staring at each other like a couple of bored game cocks. He blinked again after several minutes of that and his eyes began to water. He licked his lips. He blinked some more, and a tear dropped down onto his cheek. He got up and went out. He knocked the chair over on his way.

  I was alone for another twenty minutes before the door opened and four of them came in, the two plain-clothes men who brought me down and two men in uniform I hadn't seen before. They found chairs and started having a little conversation about baseball, the fights, what Captain Bowling said at the rape trial, as if they had just happened to wander into an empty room.

  Then the door opened suddenly and Quint walked in and came over to the table and leaned on it and shoved his big red face at me.

  He said, “All right, Bai...” and then his mouth closed slowly and he came around and looked at me. He touched the caked blood on my head.

  “Who did it?” he said. His voice was small, choked and chilled.

  The tall man stood up. The glint was all gone from his eyes. They looked like a couple of butter balls.

  “He was like that, Lieutenant.”

  Quint rounded the table and stalked back to the door. His face was pale and stiff. “And you brought him in like that. Devlin you're...”

  I was grinning a broad and loutish grin.

  Devlin said, “But you told me to...”

  “Get him out of here. And then come in and see me.” Quint walked out. He had got through the scene without frowning, without raising his voice. But I noticed his hair was gray around his ears.

  I got up. The four of them stayed right where they were, looking at me. I opened the door and went out and shut it behind me. I waited a minute, then I opened it again. Devlin was staring at the short man in plain clothes, who was cleaning his fingernails with a large knife. I closed the door again and walked away, down the broad marble stairs and out onto Main Street.

  Chapter Eighteen

  I WALKED FOUR blocks to a clinic where there was a doctor I knew. He looked me over, cleaned me up a bit, and told me to go home and go to bed; I might have a slight concussion. I asked him to give me a report in duplicate describing my various contusions and complaints.

  He gave it to me with the date and the exact time on it without asking any questions, and I went by the post office and dropped a copy of it to Quint with a note stating that my landlady, Mrs. E. Hechtlinger, saw me arrested and noticed nothing unusual about my condition at that time. That would get Quint off my neck for a while. Probably not for long.

  Then I took a street car on Broadway and went up to where my car was. It didn't have a ticket on it. It was parked in a forty-five minute zone. I drove it into the parking lot, and then went over to the little lunchroom in the Hart Building where I had seen Mrs. Johnston watching the entrance of the Pacific Building. A long, long time ago.

  I sat down and ordered hash and eggs. The place was packed with girls with ink on their fingers. They ate hurriedly, seldom taking their eyes from the clock over the door; and when they were through they sat back and smoked, and looked as relaxed as the pictures in the Weight Lifter's Journal.

  In a half-hour the place was empty. I was smoking my pipe and drinking the last of my second cup of coffee and the manager was behind the counter poking and smelling at things with an expression on his face that said the place would never get through another lunch hour.

  I said, “Have you got a minute?”

  He looked up at me and said, “Huh?”

  “I'd like to ask you a question if you've got a minute.”

  “Shoot. Shoot.” He went on poking and smelling.

  “Remember a woman sitting at your window booth Monday before last? She probably sat there quite a while, until just before the noon rush, maybe a little longer.”

  He came over and leaned on the counter and looked at a me. A couple of Mexican boys slouched out of the kitchen and started stacking up dishes and making a lot of noise at it.

  “Who might you be?”

  “I'm a detective. Shall I get out my buzzer?”

  “Naw. S'all right, I just wanted to know. Sure. I remember her.”

  “I'm not questioning your memory,” I said, “but how do you happen to recall her? I just want to be sure.”

  “Sure. Sure. Kinda plump. Glasses. She came in eight, nine o'clock and had something, toast maybe. At 'leven o'clock I tells the girl to go shake her and the girl says she give her a buck tip an' she don' wanta tell her. So I go out an' explains the noon rush is comin'. She gives me a buck and says she'll order some lunch soon. So I left her be.”

  “Then,” I said, “about eleven-thirty someone came in and sat down with her.”

  He laughed, and showed a line of uneven, yellowed teeth. “But she wasn't expectin' him.”

  “Ha,” I said, meaninglessly.

  “Tried to act like she didn't know the guy. Then they got to talkin', an' pretty soon they gets up and goes out together. Without orderin' no lunch.”

  “Was he a big man?”

  “Hell! A pee wee.”

  “Pale skin.”

  He had to think about that. “No-o. Dark complected, or tanned maybe.”

  That was that. It wasn't one of Red's boys who followed me from Buffin's that first day. It was Buster himself. It didn't tell me much except who killed Buster Buffin.

  I don't remember whether I thanked him for his help or not. If I didn't it only strengthened his conviction that I was a cop. But pretty soon I found myself in the phone booth in the lobby of the Pacific Building. I was dialing the number of Johnston and Forbes. I asked for Johnston and gave the girl my name.

  “Just a moment, puleeeese.”

  There was a long silence, then, “Hello, Bailey.”

  “Can we talk on this line?”

  “Certainly, what's up?”

  “I'm sorry, but I'm afraid I've got to break this thing. I want to talk to you about it first.”

  “Why? I mean, why do you have to break it?”

  “Your wife killed a man—Buffin.”

  Silence.

  Then, “You can't know that, Bailey... What right have you got to...”

  “That's a long story to get over a phone.”

  “If you've got more than a bad guess, I want to hear it—now.”

  “Okay. That first day I saw Buffin he started off talking peanuts. For fifty bucks he gave me the only tangible lead I've had. Then a few days later he calls me up and throws out a lot of vague remarks that add up to his having something he thinks I'll pay for in three or four digits. I figured the same way you're probably figuring now, that he was going to tell me where I could find her. But—and this is probably the key to this whole problem—he laughed that off. He said he didn't know where she was.”

  “Did you believe it?”

  “He implied that what he had didn't have anything to do with finding her—if that makes sense.”

  “It doesn't.”

  “I think it does. But don't ask me why.” I shifted the receiver to my other ear. “Just a few minutes ago I learned that Buffin saw your wife between the first time I saw him, and the time he called me.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “He followed me after I left his place. If I'd known it was Buffin I wouldn't have done it, but I'd been followed down to the beach. I thought I'd got clear but when I saw the tail coming back I figured they'd had two of 'em on me and let it go at that.”

  “That was smart.”

  There wasn't anything for us down that alley. I went on, “On the way to my office I walked by a restaurant. Your wife was sitting in the window-booth with her eyes glued on the entrance of my building. Bus
ter was probably right behind me. He saw her too and went in to talk over old times.”

  “You're just guessing at that, aren't you?”

  “Yeah. I guessed at it. But I checked it, too. The manager of the place remembers both of them.”

  There was a distant, airy silence, and Johnston said, “That doesn't really prove anything, but...” He paused, and lowered his voice. “She's gone! I was supposed to drive over and take her to lunch today; it's the help's day off. I called her at ten to tell her I'd be a little late and she wasn't there. Then I drove over at noon and her car was gone. And... I'm not sure, but I think two of her bags are missing and some of her clothes.”

  “That does it,” I said.

  “God, Bailey, wait! At least give her time—if she did do it—to get away.”

  “She can't get away.”

  “Listen to me!” There was a sudden trembling urgency in Johnston's voice that held me, and I listened. “We both owe her more than we can ever make up to her now. I, because I was damned fool enough to think I could help her in spite of her not asking me to. You, because you handled this case like a two-bit skip-tracer. Give her twenty-four hours, Bailey. You owe me a good deal more than that.”

  “Sure,” I said softly, “I made mistakes on this assignment; it was that kind of a set-up. But it's out of our hands now. Sooner or later the law, or her shady past, will catch up with her. She's running again. She was running when she married you, Johnston. Something scared her and she left her hiding place on Sorority Row and took up a new one with you. Now she's running again. The trouble is... while she runs she kills... I'm calling Homicide. I'm sorry.”