by Roy Huggins
At the end of the walk lay a bright-lit lunch-room where there were people and warmth and a smell of hot buttered popcorn. I could see the dark gleam of the lake through the open doors of the place and the moving lights of the little rent boats, moving slowly, staying discreetly apart. The people were young and in couples, waiting in a state of suspended ecstasy for their turn at the boats. I didn't think they'd like to be bothered with questions about swan ponds, and I didn't want to ask the girl behind the counter. I took the broad walk that wound to the left among tall palms and weary pepper trees. Just outside the bright rim of light an old man was sitting on one of the gray benches that lined the walk. He was eating popcorn and gazing off across the lake. I sat down a couple of feet from him and got out my pipe. He stayed lost in the things he saw in the dimpled water or in the lights beyond. He was all alone and he liked it that way.
I said, “Excuse me, Pop, can you tell me where I'll find the swan pond?”
“They're all asleep.” It was an Iowa voice. He didn't look at me.
“That might be fun to see. Know where I can find them?”
He ate some popcorn. “You couldn't see nothin'. Don't sleep on the water. Got a nest or somep'n on the island.”
I took a firm grip on the bench and said, “Just in case I was crazy about swans and wanted to be waiting for them with some breakfast, where would I find them?”
He turned, his head a few inches and looked at me out of the corners of his eyes. He pushed the popcorn sack at me and said, “Asked ye ta meet her at the swan pond, hey? Have some corn.”
“Don't mind if I do.” I took some corn.
“It's that part of the lake yonder with the planks across it. See the little island? The planks are ta keep the boats out.” He was pointing to where the round lake nippled out briefly about fifty yards on toward Seventh Street.
I stood up and he looked up at me out of one eye. “Yer gonna be disappointed, son. She invited 'nother guy, too. He ast me the same fool question you did. Better lookin' ner you—more matoore.” He put some popcorn in his mouth and went back across the lake—to Iowa. I thanked him but he didn't seem to hear me.
There were two walks now. The one I was on and one about ten feet below, skirting the lake. At the swan pond there were benches along the lower walk, set close to the edge of the water facing the lake. I stayed in the shadowed darkness of the upper walk. There was no one there and no one on the benches below. I walked quietly and in the deeper shadows, hearing the dark little mallards quarreling on the water, the trolleys clamoring by on Seventh, and an unbroken, shrill, keening sound in my ears which I wanted to believe was the far-off plaintive piping of the night. But it wasn't. I'd been hearing it all day.
The walk turned slowly and was leading westward now. On the last bench, where the pond broadened and became a part of the lake, there was someone sitting. He was alone, his cigarette tracing a repeated, impatient arc against the dark water beyond. His silver hair gleamed like pampas grass in the moonlight. I couldn't be sure, but I thought, it was a safe bet it was Northwick. I went up on the grassy bank beyond the walk and sat down under a magnolia tree. The grass was damp, but I didn't expect to be there long. It was only a few minutes till ten. The distant sound of music danced across the water. It came from one of the boats on the lake. I wanted to smoke. I wanted to lie down and sleep. I wanted to go back and let Pop tell me about the things he saw across the water. Instead I sat and waited and counted my pulse as it hammered against my skull.
I heard her before I saw her, because she was coming down from the Seventh Street entrance where the trees were thick with shadow. Then she stepped out of the shadows into the misty moonlight and walked toward the man on the bench. He stood up and she came close to him and put out a hand. He reached out and took hold of it for a moment.
I could tell now that it was Northwick, but the woman was wearing a heavy fur and a brimmed hat that threw her face in shadow. I couldn't hear their voices but the woman was doing the talking. Northwick nodded from time to time and finally his teeth gleamed in a broad smile as he put his hand on the woman's arm. She shook her head. They talked some more, Northwick now. Then he picked up a hat from the bench and abruptly walked away. The woman stood and watched him go. Then she turned and started back the way she came.
The walk she was on made a long arc and came out on Seventh Street. I got up and ran across the dark lawn, jumped the low hedge and walked up the sidewalk to the place where she would come out. The moon and a single electrolier with a rainbow of mist around it lit the broad walk for about ten feet into the park. I stood in the shadow of a wide holly bush that marked the entrance and waited.
For a long moment a chilled and empty feeling settled over me. Something had gone wrong. She had gone out some other way.... And then I heard the quiet, unhurried shush of her feet on the untidy walk. She came up out of the shadow into the light and walked toward me slowly. She stopped. The hat still shrouded the face, but she seemed to be staring into the shadow where I stood. I stepped out into the walk.
“Keep coming, baby. For a minute I thought I'd lost you.”
She said, “Who... who is it?” and one hand moved up slowly and disappeared into a dark bag she held in front of her.
“Don't take it out, angel. I've got one that's bigger than yours.”
She caught her breath and said, “It's you!” with a kind of strangled relief, and ran toward me and lifted her face. The moonlight fell across it, across the wide mouth and the midnight eyes, eyes that were cobalt by daylight. Norma Shannon's eyes.
Chapter Twenty-Four
I SMILED A PARCHMENT-STIFF smile and didn't say anything. She still had the hand inside the bag. I reached in around the fingers and down across cold metal. I took it out. It was a .25 caliber automatic. She looked down at it as if she'd never seen it before. I put it in my pocket and stopped sweating.
Slowly words choked up from Norma Shannon's throat. Tight little words. “What... what is it? Why did you take my gun? What are you doing here..:? Quit staring at me!”
“Sorry, it's probably shock. I'd like to play it like the bored detective who knows everything before it happens. But I wasn't expecting you... I was expecting someone else.”
Her eyes widened and she tried to put her fist in her mouth. She shook her head slowly and said, “This is getting ghastly. You... you were right. I came for her.” She took her hand away and bit her lip. “You won't believe me, though,” she groaned, “I know it.”
“There's a bright moon and I'm a little crazy tonight anyway. Tell your story. I bet I'll eat it up.”
She gave me a sharp look and let go of her lip. Then she turned and walked back into the park. She went back down to the first bench on the upper walk and put her fists on her knees and glared at the orange and blue lights of the swank hotels across Wilshire. I sat down beside her and got out my pipe.
She spoke slowly like a witness repeating a story. “She called me up tonight. After all these years, she calls me and asks me to do her a favor... as if... it was queer.” She shuddered a little.
“And you said you'd be glad to do her a little favor,” I put in. “And she says will you deliver a little message to a guy in the park.”
“That's right,” she said and the sharp line of her jaw grew sharper. “She told me she had this meeting arranged and she wasn't going to be able to make it. I was to ask the man to come back here every night at ten for the next week until she could get here.”
“This fellow didn't have a phone, huh?”
“I asked her the same question. She said it was too late to get him. And someone had listened in the last time she called and she was afraid to talk to him by phone.”
“What time did you get this call?”
“Five-thirty.”
“That's interesting.”
“What is?”
“You know the exact time she called. Do you always know what time it is when people call you?”
She looked at me bl
eakly and didn't say anything for a while. Then, irrelevantly, “So you smoke a pipe? All the men I've known who smoked pipes were stuffy.” She shuddered slightly.
“So she just called you up,” I went on. “Let's see. According to your story, she saw you about five times when you were sixteen. But when she needs an errand run five years later, she gives you a buzz.”
Norma Shannon stood up. The wide mouth was taut and grim and almost black against the cold camellia whiteness of her face.
She said, “I asked her that too. She needed a friend who had known her, as she said, 'from before.' And she had seen me dozens of times modeling clothes. She said I looked right at her once and didn't recognize her.... Now give me my gun.” She pushed her hand at me.
I stood up with her and tried to stare her down. I'd have done as well with the statue of Lincoln in Washington. I laid the gun on the stiff little palm and started to sweat again. She took hold of it carelessly.
“Why the gun?”
She looked down at it, put it into the bag, gave me a black glare, and turned and strode up the walk toward Seventh. “You know the answer to that,” she threw back at me. She was in the shadows now.
I stood and listened until I couldn't hear her footsteps any more. I walked back through the park toward Alvarado. I lit my pipe and let it go out again. It tasted like sour peat moss. Pop was gone from the bench and Prometheus was still cold and still getting nowhere with his firebrand.
I took Rodeo Road out from Crenshaw. It was a new road, oiled and smooth, cutting a straight, bright path past half-built houses and great empty fields planted with soybeans that lay along the broad slope of the Baldwin Hills. Rodeo Road ended where Jefferson jogged south and went along the foothills. Here there were nothing but charred and empty fields. A hundred yards up Jefferson a narrow nameless road cut off toward Culver City, crossing Bellona Creek over a sturdy concrete bridge. White-sided police cars were parked along the way here, lighting up the gray and dusty brush.
I parked in the low grass at the side of the road and walked down to the bridge. The fog was heavy and motionless and there was a faint odor of wild licorice in the damp air. A patrolman flashed a light on me and wanted to know what the hell I thought I was doing. I told him Quint had asked me to come down. Any friend of Quint's was a friend of his, so he let me look over the rail at the things below.
It was probably a fifty-foot drop to the broad concrete invert of the drain, and the black slime trickling slowly down the center of it looked only a few inches deep. On the right bank a dark huddle of men held light on something lying on the hard clay, lying in the sprawled, deflated aspect of sudden death.
“I like them kind of legs,” the patrolman said, and whistled between his teeth.
I turned and went to the corner of the bridge and half-walked, half-slid down the brush-covered bank to where the lights were.
Someone said, “We can all go home now, boys, Mr. Vance has arrived.” The voice was Quint's. He got quite a laugh from the boys around the circle of light.
One of the men in uniform made room for me beside Quint and I stepped in and looked down at the thing on the ground. She wasn't crushed or bleeding or visibly broken. She was just flat and heavy and very, very dead.
Chapter Twenty-Five
QUINT STARED AT ME WITH an owlish I-know-everything look and said: “Know her?”
“Yeah. It's the right party.”
“Mrs. Johnston, huh?”
“Uh-huh. How long ago'd you find her?”
“Not long. The photographers and surveyors haven't managed to get here yet.”
“Then she wasn't in the water?”
“She hasn't been touched.”
“Medical examiner here?” I looked at the faces above the lights.
“You been reading detective stories, Bailey? The County just sends out a couple of boys with the dead wagon. We get our autopsy next week, if we're lucky. But she's dead all right.” The boys chuckled again. “Someone hung one on the side of her head and then shoved her over. I think her neck's busted.”
“We don't need an M.E. with you here,” I said. “How close to five-thirty do you think it was? That's about when I got the call.”
Quint looked down at her and scowled. “She's stiff as a nine-trey. Of course it's a cold night and that would help. But she's fat and that would make a difference the opposite way.... I can't see the guy doing it in broad daylight though.”
“It was daylight when I got the call,” I said. “But that doesn't mean anything; there isn't any foot traffic around here at all and not much of the other kind.”
Quint gave me a cold, hard stare and said, “It was too dark for me to be sure of that.”
“I've been here before,” I said. “But not today to throw any bodies off the bridge.”
“Uh-huh. Well, my guess is she's been dead more than eight hours. That would make it around three o'clock this afternoon.” He put his hands in his pockets and shuddered. “Kee-rist, it's cold. Don't make any bets on that time—I could be off by hours.” He jerked his head and said, “Come on over to my private office and straighten yourself out, Bailey. Let's see how you'll stack up when I toss you to the D.A.” He walked away, over to the shadows of one of the concrete piers that supported the bridge. I followed him and he sat down against a slanting bulkhead and fingered out a couple of cigars and pushed one at me.
I unwrapped it and lit it. It was probably a good cigar but it tasted like John Brown's beard. I let it smolder and waited for Quint to carry on.
He cocked his head up at me and said, “Two murders in the same week, Bailey. Both connected with a case you're working on. But the information you give out could be written up on a grain of rice. What happens between bodies?”
I sat down beside him on the bulkhead and said, “Wrong, Quint. I'm not working on a case. Her husband got worried about her. He didn't know anything about her and he knew she was afraid of something. He hired me to find out what it was. I never found out. After Buffin was killed I pulled out of the case. I knew you'd connect me with it.”
“Thanks,” he drawled. “But you were playing it kind of loose, weren't you? When I talked to you, Buffin was just a guy on a telephone. I thought you were too smart to pull a dumb trick like that. Your cigar's out.”
“Yeah, I'm saving it. I had a client yet when you talked to me. I wanted to let him know what I intended to do. After I talked to him I called you and told you who killed Buffin.”
“You had a client. Man, you talk as if you thought that meant something. Murder isn't for private eyes. I thought you knew that.” His cigar glowed brightly for a moment and he let the pale smoke drift out of his mouth while he talked. “And I think I could stand it if you'd just give me facts, and let me decide who killed who. You were right on it though. The gun had her fingerprints on it, and it checked with the slugs we got out of Buffin. Why?”
“I don't know. Were there any bags in her car?”
“Yeah, two. But I meant why did she kill the guy? Keep in mind that I don't know a damned thing about this case. Johnston was pretty broken up. I haven't questioned him yet. I wish to hell you'd either light that cigar or give it back to me.”
I put the cigar in my mouth and chewed on it. “It's a simple story as far as I know it,” I said. “After that it gets complicated. She's an ex-show girl. She came here from Portland in 1938 with Buffin and took the name Gloria Gay. In 1938 she disappeared. She appeared again two years ago. I got her name from Buffin and then Buffin found her by accident. He was tailing me and found her that way. She was afraid of something, and apparently Buffin knew what it was. He put the bite on her probably, and it was a bad time to do it. She was being crowded. She knew I was looking into her and she probably found out from Buffin that he hadn't told me anything yet. So she fogged him before he got a chance to.”
Quint was listening. I could tell because he let his cigar go out. He lit it again and said, “What were they after?”
“Who?”
/>
“Maybe you'd rather talk downtown under the bright lights.”
“You haven't got any bright lights. You're just showing off.”
“I'm trying hard to give you a break, Bailey. What were they after? From the way your dump looked I don't think they found it.” He stopped suddenly. He was thinking. “In fact, I know they didn't. That's why they put you through the meat grinder.”
I grinned. “They were trying to find out who hired me to investigate her. I didn't get a chance to tell 'em.”
“Know who they were or where they took you?”
“I can describe them—and will, with loving care. They took me to one of Bruno Des Noyers' niteries in Glenview.”
“Cheviot Drive. That's his one and only joint. We closed the ones in L.A. What'd these guys look like?”
I told him.
Quint sat and smoked. “Who killed her?” he said suddenly.
“I thought you called me off that end of it. But let me go home and sleep on it. Maybe I can tell you in the morning.”
“You're still holding out on me, aren't you shamus? You guys never learn.”
“It's nothing you can't get along without.”
“It's nothing personal, but I guess you know I'm going to get your license on this deal.”
“No, I didn't know that.”
“Now you know. The fast days are over. I know a guy has a peanut stand—I'll put in a good word for you.”
“I know you could make a case, Quint, but you don't have to. Where's Murdock? Doesn't he usually team up with you?”
“Yeah. He's home. Probably reading up on Police Administration—that's the way you get ahead in the Department these days.”
